Tag Platforms

India bans TikTok

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.

Razor Thin Monopolies

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.

Mind the Gap in Working Hours

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.

Facebook: 3. The Future is Small

This 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…

Facebook: 2. When FOMO Falls…

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…

Facebook: 1. Information Leakage on Platforms

In 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…

Sherlock Holmes and Uber

In 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…