I'm Drew Breunig, an anthropologist/advertiser/developer/geek. These are things I think are interesting. Here are some things I read. Questions? Comments?
Brutal: Garmin and TomTom stock after Google’s announcement of free navigation.
I hate the stock market herd mentality.
This has been a long time coming. The herd mentality in play here is the joint realization that building your business around single-use, consumer, networked devices is not a good idea. Moore’s Law will obliterate you. The big winners will be the people that create multi-use platforms where unitasker products can be built upon. Apple. Google.
BTW, what was the long term strategy for TomTom and Garmin? Both must have realized that mobile was their end-game, hence their forays into the space: Garmin with an actual device and TomTom with software. The thing is, mobile is a cut-throat space where established businesses with hoards of data and capital have been staking claims within for the last decade.
And we’ve seen this time and time again. Apple developers always feared the kiss of death from Apple: that Cupertino would incorporate their function into their OS. (It’s telling no one really had those fears regarding Redmond.) Google has the data behind it to casually turn on features that kill entire verticals, especially around the maps product.
