« The education bullshit | Main | The next UI »

One-hit wonders

May 13, 2005

A couple of months ago, I tweaked Dell CEO Kevin Rollins for dismissing the iPod as a one-hit wonder. Yesterday, in a speech at Stanford, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer echoed Rollins, but this time the target was Google rather than Apple. The rapidly growing search company, said Ballmer, "may just be a one-hit wonder." Such talk from dominant industry players reveals a dangerous kind of complacency, an assumption of invulnerability that can get in the way of truly creative thinking about how traditional markets may be reshaped. I would guess that 25 years back IBM probably thought Microsoft was a one-hit wonder, too.

Advertisement: Coming this spring: Nicholas Carr's new book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. Preorder now from Amazon.

Comments

Post a comment

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?


 Subscribe to Rough Type

Nick's next book:
shallowscoverthumb2.jpg

Nick's latest book: bigswitchcover2thumb.jpg "Future Shock for the web-apps era" -Fast Company

"Ominously prescient" -Kirkus Reviews

"Riveting stuff" -New York Post

Order from Amazon

Visit Big Switch site

Read Q&A with Nick

Greatest hits

The amorality of Web 2.0

Twitter dot dash

The engine of serendipity

The editor and the crowd

Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians

The great unread

The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock's avatar

Flight of the wingless coffin fly

Sharecropping the long tail

The social graft

Steve's devices

MySpace's vacancy

The dingo stole my avatar

Excuse me while I blog

Other writing

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

The ignorance of crowds

The recorded life

The end of corporate computing

IT doesn't matter

The parasitic blogger

The sixth force

Hypermediation

More

Nick's first book: Order from Amazon

Visit book site

Rough Type is:

Written and published by
Nicholas Carr

Designed by

JavaScript must be enabled to display this email address.

What?