“Amazon is pursuing something called Amazon Key, which lets its couriers unlock Prime customers’ doors and deliver packages. It’s pairing the service, which it plans to make available in 37 cities next month, with a camera so users will have intelligence inside and outside their homes, presumably boosting trust and lowering creepiness.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“What makes Samsung so mysterious is that it’s not altogether clear who leads the company or what its leaders do. The company follows an avowedly Confucian model of consensus-driven decision-making, values bone-crushingly hard work, and shows tremendous deference to the founding Lee family, despite its lack of a controlling interest in its shares.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Silicon Valley tends to fall in love with the new new thing.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“The rap against Tesla has always been of the ‘yes, but’ variety. Yes, it’s a fine artisanal designer and manufacturer of electric cars, and its CEO is one of the few business leaders alive for whom the label ‘visionary’ isn’t hyperbolic.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“AIM started in 1997, and I remember when I started using it in earnest, in 1999, when I joined TheStreet.com from ‘The San Jose Mercury News’. We digital journalism pioneers communicated obsessively by AIM, and as a newbie, I recall being amazed that the whole newsroom was ‘chatting’ this way.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“The creation of the ‘Goldie Scholars’ program is an acknowledgment that knowledge isn’t enough.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Uber has a lot of money, and they’ve hired a lot of good people, and they have the capacity to professionalize.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“One of the world’s most successful and yet mysterious companies in the world, Samsung Electronics, has been operating without its leader for months and likely will continue to do so for some time to come.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“If one’s man’s trash is another man’s treasure, then one industry’s potential failure is another’s opportunity.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“As a new Googler, Porat spent some time learning the words that describe the Googley people who work in those buildings.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Alphabet would be a holding company to house its wackier or noncore efforts – like its Verily life sciences, Waymo self-driving cars, and Loon Internet balloon projects – while Google’s advertising-oriented business would stand apart and continue to drive the company’s finances.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Porat is among a handful of top people who work for both Alphabet and Google. As such, there’s a regular cadence to her week.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Sony’s Walkman far predated the iPod. Nokia ruled smartphones before Apple.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“No matter your interpretation of Apple’s success with its Watch, it has become a leader – and it wasn’t first to market.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“When I published a book earlier this year about Uber, the most common question I got about it was how many of the tumultuous events of 2017 I was able to include. My gag-line response: I managed to cover the first 17 scandals of the year, but not Nos. 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and so on.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“As the finish line for 2017 begins to come into focus, I’m beginning to wonder what an Uber turnaround would look like.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Before its immature ways caught up with it, Uber got bigger and went further than Webvan ever did. But it bleeds money, courts controversy, and makes enemies like no company Ive ever seen.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“If SoftBank can complete the tender offer it contemplates to buy a large stake in Uber, the company’s bizarre governance war will be over for the time being, putting Uber back on par with other normal companies whose boards of directors dont fight publicly with each other.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“People tend to wonder when Alibaba will enter the U.S. market. But those people are asking the wrong question. Alibaba reckons that, in 2010, China and the U.S. had an equal number of online shoppers, about 140 million.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Amazon does online application hosting. So does Alibaba.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“As China’s retailing champion, Alibaba makes Amazon look like a company that carefully picks its spots. Sure, Amazon does e-tailing. So does Alibaba.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Cannibalization is by far the most difficult feat any established, successful company can pull off.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“What to do with a leading business that’s challenged by a new technology wave without hurting an existing profit stream? The single greatest example of recent memory is Apple’s willingness to decimate iPod sales by incorporating all the category-defining product’s features into a new gizmo, the iPhone.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“The iPod was once so important to Apple that the estimable journalist Steven Levy wrote an entire book about it. And then, poof! The iPod was nearly gone.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“The reliable way great conglomerates grew over time was by adding new products and buying new companies. IBM moved from mainframe to PCs.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Broadcom is the descendent of a nearly 60-year-old unit of the original Hewlett-Packard. Semiconductor companies are like enterprise software companies: they don’t die easily.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“The cloud, for a while more of a metaphor than a giant business, is re-ordering all sorts of industries.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“A ‘free and open’ Internet has been an article of faith in and around Mountain View, Menlo Park, and its environs for two decades.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Tesla has humiliated established carmakers with its brilliant vision. But Detroit, Turin, Stuttgart, and so on have understood scale as well as capital allocation for decades. Such gargantuan tasks could yet humiliate Tesla.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Amazon has suffered quarters-long profit droughts. Alphabet has given its investors agita over profligate spending on non-core products. Microsoft’s growth – if not its profit engine – stalled for years, causing its stock to idle, too.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Amazon has a good record with customers, who are confident the retailer will give them the lowest price. Entering their home will be another thing altogether.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Amazon led with online bookselling, web services, and drones.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“ICG became a dot-com joke, a one-stock example of extreme hubris on the part of its management and the investment bankers and sell-side analysts who embarrassed themselves by pumping it up.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“ICG wasn’t an index fund so much as a collection of venture-capital investments focused on so-called business-to-business Internet companies.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Innovation, like creativity, is an amorphous concept. It’s the holy grail of business, but achieving it – even merely explaining it – is lightning-in-a-bottle difficult.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Innovation has its limits, of course, and Salesforce has proved adept at supplementing its growth with acquisitions, a tool long available to older rivals like Oracle and SAP.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Salesforce acquires companies – it has snapped up 55 since 2006 – that are either more innovative or that have pioneered market segments that Salesforce hasn’t yet cracked.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Salesforce employees are so immersed in the fervor over their offerings and their unique workplace that they are nearly incredulous to learn that few people beyond the legions of customers using Salesforce’s product have the faintest idea what the company does.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Facebook can spend and talk endlessly to defend itself so long as it keeps printing money.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“I stopped using AIM years ago – I can’t remember exactly when – and so its demise shouldn’t mean much to me.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“I confess that, like public figures from bygone days or an entertainer that hadn’t been heard from in eons, I didn’t know AIM, as we all called it, still existed at all.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“AIM was so quaint, it organized users around ‘buddy lists.’ In a time before smartphones, AIM was powerful and intoxicating, a way for a generation that once had called people on the phone to communicate in quick bursts from their computers.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Americans fear losing control if they’re forced to ride in autonomous vehicles. These same Americans fly in airplanes every day that largely are flown by computers, and impressively efficient ones at that.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Global affairs consultant Ian Bremmer, founder of the Eurasia Group, has started a newsletter called ‘Signal,’ aimed at millennials. For years, Bremmer has written a maddeningly all-lowercase yet fascinating weekly newsletter on geopolitics.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Should Ford succeed in equipping all its cars with information that gets communicated back to its servers, it will become a ‘big data’ company, a beyond-vehicles opportunity that is as promising as it is murky.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Newfangled online sites like ‘Business Insider’ and ‘Huffington Post’ built businesses they later sold for hundreds of millions of dollars by ripping off the work of more talented journalists and then playing Google’s digitally native games better than the old fogeys ever could.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“The summer before my senior year in college, I talked my way into an unpaid internship on Capitol Hill. I was able to have this stimulating resume- and network- enhancing experience because my parents could afford to keep me clothed, housed, and fed in the nation’s capital for 10 weeks.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Bernard Tyson, CEO of Kaiser Permanente, sees technology as an augmentation to current healing tools – but not a replacement for human kindness, an integral part of healthcare.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“I’ve written repeatedly about the quest by corporations everywhere to transform themselves digitally.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Chinese companies, in their well-capitalized, rapidly growing, and surprisingly lightly regulated markets, have become global innovation leaders.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Apple does a very good job of not letting its competitors know what it is working on, and Apple does a very good job of not confusing customers by causing them to anticipate what the next new thing is going to be and then causing those customers not to buy the products that are on the shelves now.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Apple is so secretive internally, they keep secrets from each other.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“For years now, we’ve been hearing about how China is the great copycat nation, the manufacturer of designs drawn up in other countries, and then an imitator for its own products. That’s been true, as the developing country followed a path that Japan and then Korea plowed before it.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“With innovative companies and products like Tencent’s WeChat messaging service and novel approaches to artificial intelligence and various business models, China rapidly is becoming an innovator in its own right.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“If you crave further confirmation that Silicon Valley is a magical place where magical thinking reigns, consider the tale of Roku, the video streaming company that filed to go public Friday, when alert people everywhere were headed out for a long weekend.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Roku collects money two ways: by selling hardware, which it calls ‘players’; and by selling advertising and taking a cut of revenues from the video publishers on its platform.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Neither a success nor by any means a failure, Roku will nevertheless ask public investors for money because they, too, have a right to dream that magic will become reality one day.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“When I was a senior in college, I attended an inspiring conference at West Point called the Student Conference on U.S. Affairs, which paired political science majors with cadets in the hopes of building future civilian-military relationships.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Chip maker Nvidia is the new old thing, an overnight success story years in the making that is having its moment and then some.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Dynamic pricing – charging more when goods and services are in high demand and short supply and less when the opposite is true – isn’t new. Gasoline retailers, hoteliers, and airlines have been deploying the technique for years.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Groceries, TV shows, and shoes are a few categories Amazon has been willing to hang onto for years.”
― Adam Lashinsky
“Apple is a military-like command-and-control organization where people lower down in the organization manage up. They are constantly preparing their boss who may be preparing their boss and their boss for a presentation to the CEO or to the executive team.”
― Adam Lashinsky
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