The last government antitrust breakup was AT&T back in 1984. It followed the model of Standard Oil back in 1911. Business and technology have changed a lot since the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was written and passed 130 years ago, in 1890. It’s time we update what we mean by trust-like behavior and how we remedy those consequences. Note that the breakups of Standard Oil and AT&T were...
Nine months ago this week I was recovering from what seemed to be a mild case of the newly named Covid-19. What have we learned since then, what we’ve failed to learn, and what does the end game of this pandemic hold in store? What we learned Exponential growth is not intuitive. The 70 national daily cases looked troublesome back on March 9th. Today, 70 cases in a single city would be...
What I glossed over in Selling the first telephone is the fact that AT&T didn’t actually sell any telephones. Until the breakup of the company in 1984, telephones were rented as part of the monthly service. Renting was a choice to seemingly maximize profits. The excuse AT&T gave the government disallowing customers from owning their own phones was that AT&T was protecting their...
I saw this on Twitter yesterday: These days I spend more time with entrepreneurs who have products in the market and paying customers, rather than the dreamers who are still struggling with their minimal viable productions and first sales. In either case, what I teach entrepreneurs is that they need to not only worry about that first initial design for customers, but every incremental design...
