Author, Investor, Speaker, Mentor
Amazon recently agreed to purchase MGM for over $8 billion, and the reaction has been skeptical. Critics of the deal argue that Amazon overpaid for the MGM catalog, especially in comparison to Disney’s (admittedly brilliant) trio of acquisitions: Star Wars ($4 billion), Marvel ($4 billion), and Pixar ($7 billion). But this is allow hindsight to … Continue reading Why People Don’t Understand Amazon’s MGM Acquisition
“An atom-blaster is a good weapon, but it can point both ways.” Salvor Hardin, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Blitzscaling is a powerful tool, but even a successful blitzscaler cannot necessarily use it to overcome the power of winner-take-most market dynamics. This week, Microsoft announced that it was shutting down its Twitch rival, Mixer. Microsoft had acquired … Continue reading Even Successful Blitzscalers Can’t Overcome Winner-take-most Market Dynamics
Continuing my series on enterprise SaaS, the private cloud, and other hybrid strategies, I want to offer some hope for startups that are reluctant to abandon their 100% SaaS strategy. I understand your position, because I can clearly recall arguing in 2007 that SaaS was on the “right side of history.” I had been in … Continue reading Is AWS a lifeboat for enterprise SaaS?
I’ve already written about how “Enterprise SaaS” might be a misnomer: http://chrisyeh.blogspot.com/2013/06/why-enterprise-saas-may-soon-be-misnomer.html Now comes a major piece of news that reinforces my prior post. Amazon has just signed a $600 million contract with the CIA to construct a private version of Amazon’s cloud infrastructure inside the CIA’s datacenters: http://bit.ly/10Luqth If any company has the wherewithal … Continue reading The Hybrid Cloud is Here To Stay