Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Passing the Hogbutcher Edge





















Poem-Passing the Hogbutcher Edge

empty empty empty

brick foundries, metal shops
and drear depots on the rail out of chicago
adjustable clamp co. -  architectural steel
chicago mailing tubes  - mountains of tires and
empty empty emptiness

the secret health plan's no secret anymore
we are adjusting to the mean and making america great again
the prime minister of india is visiting and he's going to help
might send one of the man hole cover factories back to neenah
Make grates in America again


lights on dusty sandlot ballfield
empty empty empty now
the first ball ever is in a wobbly orbit
and  mr trump is alone on his podium
                                                                       - Jack Vaughan

Monday, June 05, 2017

Meeker comments

Mary Meeker's annual report for Kleiner Perkins on the status of Internet commerce is always interesting - chock full of data and packed with gleefully greedy West Coast VC perspective.  Let's look at some highpoints out of the 150-plus Power Point Slide opus.

Do you smell the fear in the Fortune 500? Smells like they could use some baby wipes. They can get them from Amazon, actually, which trails only Huggies and Pampers for online market share. For Duracell, it is deep doodoo, as Amazon surpasses the check out counter champ entirely  - on the Web. All that marketing and technology innovation - not too mention shelf shoving -- over many years seems for little or naught. (Off beat: I worked for 6 months at a drug store on 34th St in the 1970s and among the thing I learned was: "You cannot keep Pampers on the shelf" Translation: Shit happens.)




The sound of foot prints echoes double in network television where the biggies are flat or in decline, but Netflix is on a skyrocket up.



And disruptors (the Internet advertising vehicles  that disrupted convention media) can be disrupted too, especially if they face big hungry disruptors  such as Facebook and Google. They who grow ad revenue in double digits while Everybody Else flatly contests the small pie leftovers.





Maybe Facebook and Google are as much beneficiaries of an underlying sea change in Internet usage..as of anything else. While desktop and Laptop Internet use has been steady or in slight decline over the last eight years, Internet   time on the smartphone side has been vaulting forward stridently. What is different about mobile? The message might be real real concise, the ambiance more transactional, and the market more consumerish.




This hear is also posted on the It's the Data Talking blog.
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Related
http://www.kpcb.com/internet-trends