Business

Have You Caught The Irony in Criticizing Romney for Bain Capital?

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ January 31, 2012 / Leave a comment

I have a feeling it’s going to be a theme for the next 10 months or so to criticize Mitt Romney’s role at Bain Capital. This is just raw ignorance, it shows a lack of understanding about private equity, struggling companies or capitalism in general. Unfortunately, there’s a very sad,...
Why Would RIM License Blackberry 10?

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ January 10, 2012 / Leave a comment

There have been a few rumors that RIM may be licensing their new operating system to other hardware manufacturers. This is surprising because it would seem to undercut Blackberry’s hardware business. My first reaction to this news was that they are probably considering spinning off the hardware and becoming purely a software company....
Welcome to Facebank

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ January 5, 2012 / Leave a comment

I was scanning through my morning news and came across this interesting little prediction from Gartner (via RWW); Facebook and other social networks will begin to add banking and insurance services. The rest of the article is a snooze fest that mainly revolves around 3 points: Social Media sites need...
VMWare as the Amazon of PaaS

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ December 20, 2011 / Leave a comment

Note: This is an extremely geeky post… if you have no interest in Enterprise Infrastructure it will not only bore you, it probably won’t make much sense. I noticed this week that VMWare expanded their Cloud Foundary offering to include support for .NET. I had three seperate thoughts about this...
Netflix, Amazon, Facebook and Why to Keep a Big Startup Private

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ October 28, 2011 / Leave a comment

Eventhough Netflix is making the right business move for the long-term their stock price is reeling. Similarly Amazon is a retail giant, a content producer and quietly (at least as far as Wall Street is concerned) establishing a cloud position that will one day make it as big in the...
Applying Innovation to the Past Before the Future

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ October 21, 2011 / Leave a comment

My colleague, Sheppard Narkier wrote a great post on my company’s blog today. The overall concept is that when new innovations come around they often enable us to automate or get rid of deeply engrained tasks that may not be obvious. Once we’ve done that, we’re free to use the...
Netflix Hitting Cntrl Z

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ October 10, 2011 / 1 Comment

I am having a hard time processing the news this morning that Netflix is undoing their move to spin off the DVD rental business as Qwikster, explaining that they were moving too quickly. While I agree that they may have moved too quickly to split Qwikster and Netflix, I think...
A Note or Two on “Occupy Wall Street”

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ October 7, 2011 / Leave a comment

This whole “Occupy Wall Street” business is starting to upset me and I thought I’d offer a few opinions: I walked past the bull and the exchange as well as through the financial district more generally while I was in New York last Friday and didn’t see a single protester. ...
It’s Just a Phase

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ October 4, 2011 / Leave a comment

I had an interesting discussion with a couple friends last night and thought I’d pass it on here. First, a little background. The conversation was about the evolution from standard printed newspapers and magazines towards… well, I think we would agree that’s still being worked out. There’s a continuum between...
One Last Thought on Tech Startups and Failure

Posted by Burgher Jon
/ September 30, 2011 / Leave a comment

This week I’ve been talking a fair bit about how I no longer have a bunch of confidence in FourSquare and how their failure to become what I hoped/thought they could has changed how I look at Tech Startups. I had one last thought about this and it concerns how...