interview with Asymco’s Horace Dediu

Business education is predicated on storytelling, also known as the case method. Business management is not a discipline that has “axioms” defining basic truths, or if it does, they change frequently. Therefore business education (i.e. the MBA) is the equivalent of people teaching each other by telling stories around a campfire. The best stories get repeated more often and are better ‘teaching tools’. So it is with Apple. It’s a great medium for story telling because people can see the stories unfolding in real time or at least within their lifetimes. They are not about a distant past or an abstract industry. There is also a lot of passion around the brand, both positive and negative and so it leads to more attention.

The Tech Block

That has become my main point of interest in technology. The way how I can see different ways of making business, strategic management of companies and the key point of leadership with a vision and their effect on the rise and fall of gigantic companies. And in much less than a decade.

When I got back my interest in technology in 2007, after the long stagnation years of Windows XP, Apple was still coming back, Linux on the desktop was on the route to slightly usable for a standard user, Nokia and Blackberry were still phone market kings, and Microsoft was floundering in confusion and dumb mistakes.

5 years, later, Apple is technological king (( at least in influence )), Blackberry and Nokia are a couple of quarters from bankruptcy, Linux is now a king in smartphones and much more usable on the desktop (( although still a bit more to go. But have you seen Ubuntu 12.04? )) and Microsoft is still floundering in confusion and dumb mistakes, one after the other and each one increasingly dumber and perfectly avoidable.

I could read most of the Strategic Management undergrad books and i would never get so much info and real-life perspective as i get from paying very close attention to the computer&technology market.

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