Quotes

Amazon has suffered quarters-long profit droughts. Alphabet has given its investors agita over profligate spending on non-core products. Microsoft's growth - if not its profit engine - stalled for years, causing its stock to idle, too.

Dynamic pricing - charging more when goods and services are in high demand and short supply and less when the opposite is true - isn't new. Gasoline retailers, hoteliers, and airlines have been deploying the technique for years.

Amazon is pursuing something called Amazon Key, which lets its couriers unlock Prime customers' doors and deliver packages. It's pairing the service, which it plans to make available in 37 cities next month, with a camera so users will have intelligence inside and outside their homes, presumably boosting trust and lowering creepiness.

Amazon has a good record with customers, who are confident the retailer will give them the lowest price. Entering their home will be another thing altogether.

Amazon led with online bookselling, web services, and drones.

Groceries, TV shows, and shoes are a few categories Amazon has been willing to hang onto for years.

ICG became a dot-com joke, a one-stock example of extreme hubris on the part of its management and the investment bankers and sell-side analysts who embarrassed themselves by pumping it up.

ICG wasn't an index fund so much as a collection of venture-capital investments focused on so-called business-to-business Internet companies.

Innovation, like creativity, is an amorphous concept. It's the holy grail of business, but achieving it - even merely explaining it - is lightning-in-a-bottle difficult.

Innovation has its limits, of course, and Salesforce has proved adept at supplementing its growth with acquisitions, a tool long available to older rivals like Oracle and SAP.

Salesforce acquires companies - it has snapped up 55 since 2006 - that are either more innovative or that have pioneered market segments that Salesforce hasn't yet cracked.

Salesforce employees are so immersed in the fervor over their offerings and their unique workplace that they are nearly incredulous to learn that few people beyond the legions of customers using Salesforce's product have the faintest idea what the company does.

Facebook can spend and talk endlessly to defend itself so long as it keeps printing money.

I stopped using AIM years ago - I can't remember exactly when - and so its demise shouldn't mean much to me.

I confess that, like public figures from bygone days or an entertainer that hadn't been heard from in eons, I didn't know AIM, as we all called it, still existed at all.

AIM was so quaint, it organized users around 'buddy lists.' In a time before smartphones, AIM was powerful and intoxicating, a way for a generation that once had called people on the phone to communicate in quick bursts from their computers.

AIM started in 1997, and I remember when I started using it in earnest, in 1999, when I joined TheStreet.com from 'The San Jose Mercury News'. We digital journalism pioneers communicated obsessively by AIM, and as a newbie, I recall being amazed that the whole newsroom was 'chatting' this way.

Americans fear losing control if they're forced to ride in autonomous vehicles. These same Americans fly in airplanes every day that largely are flown by computers, and impressively efficient ones at that.

Should Ford succeed in equipping all its cars with information that gets communicated back to its servers, it will become a 'big data' company, a beyond-vehicles opportunity that is as promising as it is murky.

Newfangled online sites like 'Business Insider' and 'Huffington Post' built businesses they later sold for hundreds of millions of dollars by ripping off the work of more talented journalists and then playing Google's digitally native games better than the old fogeys ever could.

The summer before my senior year in college, I talked my way into an unpaid internship on Capitol Hill. I was able to have this stimulating resume- and network- enhancing experience because my parents could afford to keep me clothed, housed, and fed in the nation's capital for 10 weeks.

The creation of the 'Goldie Scholars' program is an acknowledgment that knowledge isn't enough.

I've written repeatedly about the quest by corporations everywhere to transform themselves digitally.

Chinese companies, in their well-capitalized, rapidly growing, and surprisingly lightly regulated markets, have become global innovation leaders.

Apple does a very good job of not letting its competitors know what it is working on, and Apple does a very good job of not confusing customers by causing them to anticipate what the next new thing is going to be and then causing those customers not to buy the products that are on the shelves now.