Let them eat veggies: Obama has dinner with Steve

President Obama last night had dinner at John Doerr’s house in Silicon Valley and for some reason I wasn’t invited. I wish I had been. Can you imagine Obama making small talk with Steve Jobs? This is an instance where Steve’s lack of an internal censor probably served the event well, or at least I hope it did, because when it comes to the dinner’s goal of stimulating innovation in America every Administration from any political party needs all the help it can get. I should know, because I’ve been working a bit with those White House would-be innovators, trying to get them in the right groove.

Remember Startup America is the name of the TV […]

By |February 17th, 2011|2011|78 Comments

AOL Hell

Maybe it was that column I wrote recently about AOL buying the Huffington Post, but I swear AOL has turned on me. Share my pain.

Back in the early 1990s I got an AOL dial-up account to use while traveling. It was one of the few Internet services that had global dial-up, so I could get connected from England to India (and did). I kept the account out of sheer laziness, as I am sure do many of the 3.65 million remaining AOL paying dial-up customers, but eventually AOL-itself converted my e-mail to free and escaped from my credit card bill. So then I had a free AOL e-mail account to go with my Yahoo Mail […]

By |February 14th, 2011|2011|75 Comments

Burning the ships at Nokia

When John Sculley forced Steve Jobs out of Apple back in 1985, the former PepsiCo marketing executive very quickly produced dramatic improvements in Apple’s profitability.  Apple wasn’t losing money before, but Sculley improved the bottom line by about $200 million (a lot in those days) simply by cutting all of Steve Jobs’s pet projects that appeared to have poor prospects. Sculley raised profits by cutting expenses not by increasing sales. Expect the same thing at Nokia where, ignoring for the moment the “enormous payments” Microsoft will be making according to Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, the company can probably cut its software development budget to near-zero, saving $1 billion or more and increasing profits by that […]

By |February 14th, 2011|2011|86 Comments

Rushing the net: Nokia's coming fight to the Finnish

Nokia today announced that the Finnish cellphone company is choosing Windows 7 Phone as the operating system for its future smart phones. It’s not a surprising move given that Nokia CEO Stephen Elop came from Microsoft and it’s not even that risky a move given that the alternative was a slow but certain death for Nokia smart phones running Symbian and Meego. Sure Nokia could have gone with Android, but Google has less at risk than Microsoft so Redmond had much more to offer. The only real question here is whether Nokia can make the new strategy a success?  I think they can, but there is only one way to do it — by rushing […]

Ken Olsen and post-industrial computing

Digital Equipment Corporation founder and longtime CEO Ken Olsen died this week at 84. I never met Ken Olsen, but I have a sense of him through his products. The first computer I ever programmed was a PDP-1 accessed over an old TTY terminal from my junior high school. At one point in the 1980s I owned a PDP-8 I bought as salvage and installed in my California cellar. Not only did that old PDP-8 give me many hours of fun as I brought it back to life, it also heated my bungalow! So when I think of Ken Olsen, I think of industrial-strength computers.

Avram Miller did know Ken Olsen and has a recollection of […]