The Decline and Fall of Facebook

Roger McNamee is a smart guy and a very successful investor as a co-founder of Elevation Partners. He made a breakfast presentation last month at the Paley Center for Media in Los Angeles that is well worth watching. I could probably get half a dozen columns out of this one speech, but the part I want to concentrate on here is McNamee’s claim that when it comes to social media, Facebook (in which he was an early investor) has already won. I’m not here to say Roger is wrong, just that I am not exactly sure what Facebook is winning.

The core of McNamee’s speech didn’t have to do so much with Facebook as with Microsoft, Apple, Google, and […]

No Flash in the Pad

Apple has been criticizing Adobe Systems lately for what Cupertino perceives as poor performance and design deficiencies in Adobe’s Flash web media technology, which it darned well wants to keep off the iPhone and iPad. Adobe, in turn, has been defending Flash, however gently, citing it as a great enabling technology that has got the web in large part to where it is today. Both companies are correct, and that’s the point that seems to be missed by most of the pundits standing around pointing at the fight. Flash has been vital to the success of the web, but Flash is old.

Apple’s preferred media architecture, HTML5, is the future of the […]