Ah, remember the good old days, by which I mean November 2010, less than two years ago, when there was no bubble and all those crazy valuations in the secondary market made perfect sense because, as John Doerr pointed out here, Zynga was “the most profitable, the fastest growing and has the happiest customers” of any company KPCB had ever invested in. Yay! Back then Zynga was valued at $6 billion and it seemed like the sky was the limit. Cut to today: Zynga is valued at $2.5 billion. The stock is down 70 percent from the IPO. When you read about Zynga it’s stuff like this saying they should sell if they can find a buyer. And when you read about John Doerr, it’s stuff like this, talking about the “end of an era,” and how these days KPCB looks like a clown running across a minefield. For me the sign of the end times was captured in this photo of John Doerr trying to look hip by wearing a hoodie (a la Zuck) and announcing the social fund in Oct. 2010. Oh well. Just because Zynga is struggling doesn’t mean the whole investment thesis was wrong. I mean there’s still Groupon and Facebook. Oh...
Learn MoreI know the Great Man Himself once said that the iPad was the perfect size and that 7-inch tablets were “tweeners” (too big to be a phone, too small to be a tablet) and thus would be “DOA.” But I’ve been using the Google Nexus 7 for a few days and it has already become my go-to device. It’s small enough to toss in a bag, and small enough that you can sit with it in a cafe and not have this huge thing out on the table in front of you, small enough to keep on the table by your bed and just grab to take a quick look at email — and yet big enough that the screen and keyboard are comfortable. And the Nexus 7 costs only $200, versus the new iPad, which starts at $500 and goes up over $829. What’s not to love? Now Bloomberg and others are reporting that Apple is indeed defying the Great Man’s words and working on a smaller tablet. It’s a great idea, and a smaller iPad, priced to move, will be a huge hit. One thought: Apple as it exists today is so powerful and so successful in the mobile (post-PC) space that that the only tablets that...
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That’s the biggest takeaway from this interview that Larry Page gave to my old pal Brad Stone of Bloomberg-Businessweek. I think the Android differences were actually for show. … I think that served their interests. For a lot of companies, it’s useful for them to feel like they have an obvious competitor and to rally around that. I personally believe that it’s better to shoot higher. You don’t want to be looking at your competitors. You want to be looking at what’s possible and how to make the world better. Page also takes a shot at Facebook: I mean, our friends at Facebook have imported many, many, many Gmail addresses and exported zero addresses. And they claim that users don’t own that data, which is a totally specious claim. It’s completely unreasonable. One day you can import all of your Gmail contacts into Facebook and the next day try to export those out and they would not let you do that. It’s clearly for competitive reasons that they do...
Learn MoreRovio, maker of Angry Birds, tells Bloomberg it won’t create a version of Angry Birds Space for Windows Phone, because the platform is so tiny. “We want to be on all screens, but we have to consider the cost of supplying the smaller platforms,” a Rovio guy says. I don’t really give a crap about Angry Birds, but still:...
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As I reported in this week’s Newsweek, Apple’s “thermonuclear war” on Android smartphone makers has been fizzling out lately. Most of Apple’s legal claims have been tossed out, and the two minor victories Apple has scored were so trivial that opponents could work around the claim by making minor changes to their products. But a person close to the situation tells me there’s a rumor going around among the lawyers that Apple spent $100 million just on its first set of claims against HTC. Who knows if it’s true, but if so, Apple didn’t get a lot for its money. Apple brought the case against HTC with the International Trade Commission in February, 2010. Apple wanted the ITC to block HTC from importing products into the United States. Apple’s case against HTC started out with 84 claims based on 10 patents. But by the time the case got to a judge only four patents were involved. The final ruling was that one patent was totally invalid because of prior art, and should never have been issued to Apple. On two other patents, the ruling was that HTC was not infringing on the patents, and, worse yet, that Apple itself was not using those patents in its own product, which...
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