In light of the recent conflicts, India has made a move to ban TikTok and Wechat and 57 other apps, made by firms that are all based in China. This ban is a big loss for ByteDance, as TikTok had surprisingly “cracked” the challenging mobile market in India. I explain the appeal of Tiktok in India. The issue with the Indian market typifies that challenges that face Chinese Internet firms that seek to go global.
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Every one is worried that monopolies are getting large. FTC is worried too.
This is not a post on Facebook and Instagram, or another commonly directed invective at the Amazon, YouTube and other platforms that are pervading our lives. After a long lull, FTC has decided that they need to step in and prevent the most pernicious monopoly that has cut many people: Razor Blades. Also, not in the way you think.
I write about things FTC got right, and what they got wrong, in their unanimous decision to sue to block the Edgewell-Harry’s merger.
While brick and mortar retail is facing the biggest challenge in years, retail stores as a channel are not going away. The key to running a successful brick and mortar store lies in executing a careful trade-off between high efficiency and high customer experience. An excellent work by an operations colleague Kesavan shows that “treating your employees with stable schedules” does not have to be a trade-off.
Leave a CommentThis is third (and final) in the series of posts thinking aloud about the Facebook Kerfuffle. See the first post on the nature of Information Leakage, and the second post on FOMO and how networks fall. In this post, I spend some time mulling about societal, not social, aspects of the network, the compliance, and the complicity of everyone including researchers. I suggest some operational changes that could be helpful. This is a complicated platform problem; There is no magic bullet, but a hodgepodge of contextual solutions, but I try to frame them in an over-arching narrative. — Thinking about Facebook, I recollect a conversation that I had with a researcher on networks, and a good friend (in real life), …
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This is the second article in a series of posts on thinking about Facebook Kerfuffle. You can read the first article (on Leaky Platforms) here. In this post, I focus on how networks can fall. To illustrate the tentativeness in the growth and decay of platforms, bear with me, as I start with a Romantic Comedy from the 80s. In the under-rated classic Say Anything (above picture), John Cusack’s underachieving and kickboxing Lloyd woos Ione Skye’s accomplished and resplendent Diane, by playing Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes”, on a boombox held over his shoulders, loudly beseeching her to come back. It is an iconic pop-culture scene, freezing the eighties — before the advent of the late nineties of Windows and the aughts…
Leave a CommentIn the light of Guardian’s investigative reporting sourced on the whistleblower at Cambridge Analytica, it appears that almost all of the internet has been upset with Facebook. After an extended silence of several days, Zuckerberg was finally on a semi-apology tour of “exclusive” interviews about the “breach” of trust or data (or both or neither). In many ways, we are witnessing a perfect storm of confusion involving politics, modern notions of privacy, the role of tech in our lives, the ethics of data-sharing/micro-targeting, and organizational leadership. Instead of ruminating on the above issues, I focus on three specific aspects of Facebook kerfuffle over a set of three blog posts. (This post is entirely focusing on the first issue.) Platform Designs…
Leave a CommentIn late December 2017, continuing its string of legal setbacks, Uber lost a case in the European Court of Justice which ruled that Uber is a taxi company. Specifically, the courts rule that a company whose service is “to connect, by means of a smartphone application and for remuneration, non-professional drivers using their own vehicle with persons who wish to make urban journeys” must be considered “a service in the field of transport.” The news coverage of the case indicate that the ruling only impacts four markets (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Romania), where Uber is yet to be regulated under the local or national laws. In fact, Uber is already regulated like a taxi company in many European nations. Proponents of…
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