It’s not about what you’re building. It’s about who you’re building it with, and how it feels. It’s the hot summer of 1985 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I’ve left Software Arts, the company that created VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet. After Software Arts lost focus, a new competitor called Lotus 1-2-3 came along and crushed it. I’m still…
Television nearly killed me. Here’s how it happened. For several years in the 90s in Boston, I ran a group called the Multimedia Roundtable. It was a little developer group that eventually swelled to a lively 300 people. It met monthly at 6:00pm in a big room in Cambridge in the building of Course Technology, where…
Do you choose your path? Or are you making choices with consequences you can’t imagine? I was thinking about the choices that got me hired at Forrester, a 20-year job that determined my career and my future as an author. I’d like to tell you it was a deliberate and intelligent choice, but it’s way stranger than…
In the year 2000, when I was the top technology analyst in the television industry, I began to see the outlines of the transformation of television. TiVo had delivered a big shock to the television schedule. Video on-demand was another tremor. I could see the whole edifice shaking. I wrote a piece called “The End Of TV (As We…
For 20 years, I did the same thing, mostly. I was a technology analyst at Forrester Research from 1995 until last month. If you do one thing for a long time, you should learn from it. My job at Forrester molded my ways of thinking more than anything else I’ve done (save becoming a parent). Perhaps…