Top 40 Adam Lashinsky Quotes

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.

I stopped using AIM years ago – I can’t remember exactly when – and so its demise shouldn’t mean much to me.

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.

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.

Facebook can spend and talk endlessly to defend itself so long as it keeps printing money.

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.

The reliable way great conglomerates grew over time was by adding new products and buying new companies. IBM moved from mainframe to PCs.

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.

Chinese companies, in their well-capitalized, rapidly growing, and surprisingly lightly regulated markets, have become global innovation leaders.

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.

As the finish line for 2017 begins to come into focus, I’m beginning to wonder what an Uber turnaround would look like.

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.

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.

If one’s man‘s trash is another man‘s treasure, then one industry‘s potential failure is another’s opportunity.

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.

No matter your interpretation of Apple’s success with its Watch, it has become a leader – and it wasn’t first to market.

Amazon does online application hosting. So does Alibaba.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The creation of the ‘Goldie Scholars‘ program is an acknowledgment that knowledge isn’t enough.

Amazon led with online bookselling, web services, and drones.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The cloud, for a while more of a metaphor than a giant business, is re-ordering all sorts of industries.

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.

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.

Cannibalization is by far the most difficult feat any established, successful company can pull off.

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.

Sony‘s Walkman far predated the iPod. Nokia ruled smartphones before Apple.

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.

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.

I’ve written repeatedly about the quest by corporations everywhere to transform themselves digitally.

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.

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.

Uber has a lot of money, and they’ve hired a lot of good people, and they have the capacity to professionalize.