Quotes

What makes Samsung so mysterious is that it's not altogether clear who leads the company or what its leaders do. The company follows an avowedly Confucian model of consensus-driven decision-making, values bone-crushingly hard work, and shows tremendous deference to the founding Lee family, despite its lack of a controlling interest in its shares.

Uber has a lot of money, and they've hired a lot of good people, and they have the capacity to professionalize.

Cannibalization is by far the most difficult feat any established, successful company can pull off.

Global affairs consultant Ian Bremmer, founder of the Eurasia Group, has started a newsletter called 'Signal,' aimed at millennials. For years, Bremmer has written a maddeningly all-lowercase yet fascinating weekly newsletter on geopolitics.

One of the world's most successful and yet mysterious companies in the world, Samsung Electronics, has been operating without its leader for months and likely will continue to do so for some time to come.

As a new Googler, Porat spent some time learning the words that describe the Googley people who work in those buildings.

Alphabet would be a holding company to house its wackier or noncore efforts - like its Verily life sciences, Waymo self-driving cars, and Loon Internet balloon projects - while Google's advertising-oriented business would stand apart and continue to drive the company's finances.

Porat is among a handful of top people who work for both Alphabet and Google. As such, there's a regular cadence to her week.

Sony's Walkman far predated the iPod. Nokia ruled smartphones before Apple.

No matter your interpretation of Apple's success with its Watch, it has become a leader - and it wasn't first to market.

Silicon Valley tends to fall in love with the new new thing.

Chip maker Nvidia is the new old thing, an overnight success story years in the making that is having its moment and then some.

When I published a book earlier this year about Uber, the most common question I got about it was how many of the tumultuous events of 2017 I was able to include. My gag-line response: I managed to cover the first 17 scandals of the year, but not Nos. 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and so on.

As the finish line for 2017 begins to come into focus, I'm beginning to wonder what an Uber turnaround would look like.

If SoftBank can complete the tender offer it contemplates to buy a large stake in Uber, the company's bizarre governance war will be over for the time being, putting Uber back on par with other normal companies whose boards of directors dont fight publicly with each other.

People tend to wonder when Alibaba will enter the U.S. market. But those people are asking the wrong question. Alibaba reckons that, in 2010, China and the U.S. had an equal number of online shoppers, about 140 million.

Amazon does online application hosting. So does Alibaba.

As China's retailing champion, Alibaba makes Amazon look like a company that carefully picks its spots. Sure, Amazon does e-tailing. So does Alibaba.

What to do with a leading business that's challenged by a new technology wave without hurting an existing profit stream? The single greatest example of recent memory is Apple's willingness to decimate iPod sales by incorporating all the category-defining product's features into a new gizmo, the iPhone.

The iPod was once so important to Apple that the estimable journalist Steven Levy wrote an entire book about it. And then, poof! The iPod was nearly gone.

The reliable way great conglomerates grew over time was by adding new products and buying new companies. IBM moved from mainframe to PCs.

Broadcom is the descendent of a nearly 60-year-old unit of the original Hewlett-Packard. Semiconductor companies are like enterprise software companies: they don't die easily.

The cloud, for a while more of a metaphor than a giant business, is re-ordering all sorts of industries.

A 'free and open' Internet has been an article of faith in and around Mountain View, Menlo Park, and its environs for two decades.

Tesla has humiliated established carmakers with its brilliant vision. But Detroit, Turin, Stuttgart, and so on have understood scale as well as capital allocation for decades. Such gargantuan tasks could yet humiliate Tesla.