Forever Together

Been thinking about what makes a successful merger recently, so what better way to look into it than consult one my favourite publications – BCG Perspectives. They have been my go-to resource on insights since 1998.

At the moment they have a rather good article on mergers that you can have a look at. It does use the word synergy, but regardless of that the insights are good.

However the economist, another go-to resource, paints a bleak picture of europe’s economic forecast. Perhaps now is the right time, or is it the wrong time? Decisions…

Thank You Amazon!

Today presented two reasons why Amazon continue to dominate eBusiness, for me at any rate.

Firstly, they promptly replaced my Kindle Fire HD with no fuss whatsoever. Furthermore, when the new one arrived, it was also pre-registered with my account and was up and running in less than five minutes. The return label and courier service were a breeze to use, and hey presto pain free customer service!

Secondly, I received an email telling me that some of my old CD purchases were now in my cloud. Awesome! Promptly downloaded into iTunes and onto the iPod in minutes. Another thoughtful customer experience realised with no fuss.

As far as eBusiness goes, customer service is paramount – Amazon lead IMHO.

Well done Jeff!

The trouble with Andriod…

…much like a hitchcock thriller, the case evolves…

A lot is said about the game changing nature of Android, but much doesn’t really make much sense when you start to examine how Android releases are built, released, maintained, and ultimately retired by Google. Some things to note: the tablet market is pretty much owned by iOS, and the Kindle is a touch removed from the Android tree; Gingerbread is the most popular Android release even though the latest versions are supposedly more feature rich and robust; Android is not really free – or at least may not be.

The most interesting debate is currently the Oracle vs Google case, Oracle posted its opening slideshow – here’s a link. Some key slides from it are below – have a look, make of them what you will.

What google copied, apparently quite a bit!

Oh that’s just lawyer talk…isn’t it?

Well, it certainly looks familiar, but hey, in the world where everything is either a zero or a one, some similarity or coincidence is allowed…right?

And of course, its all reusable and shareable, isn’t it?

So its copied, but you can’t share. So its copied to be closed off. Hrumph.

I’ll be interested in seeing what the retort is, but at the moment, none of this is convincing me that if you are an app developer you shouldn’t follow a strategy that is: iOS first, then Android if you must, then if you can be bothered, Windows.