One of the guys at work told me about the PodCast “Business Wars”….dang if you are into this type thing it’s simply amazing….
The first I listened to was the battle between Netflix, Blockbuster and HBO. The back story is fantastic, Netscape which was the David in the video wars was saved by two event…first Steve Jobs called Reed Hastings, the CEO, and ask him if he would like Apple to feature Netscape on it’s new iPad devise…now a method for folks to steam video’s to a mobile devise that was worthy of watching…it was a turn around for the company. The second was the new CEO deciding to can the new streaming app. that Blockbuster had just developed…talk about a leader out of the 19th Century. This Podcast details the jockeying of all three companies for dominance…very interesting. The second was the battle between Adidas and Nike shoes…boy what an interesting story…it begs one to wonder why people are such lemmings to follow what others do…when Adidas signed the best European Soccer player to their brand they sold 500,000 shoes in the next few days, then a second run of 500,000 sold out immediately, then the third….why as humans are we this way? But, the heist of all was when Nike wanted to sign Jordan….he wants to go with Adidas but Nike flew he and his parent so their offices in Oregon….he was unimpressed and continued to say he wanted Adidas….he had just signed with the Bulls. They brought out a shoe just for him, he didn’t like the height of the sole of the shoe so they said they would custom design it to suit him…no other manufacture had offered to do this for him…then they played a video of some of his college highlight and at the end showed two Black Mercedes that were his, along with a $500,000 yearly contract for 5 years….that did it, he wanted no more meetings, he would sign with Nike..and this was the beginning of the Nike dominance. These stores are brilliant and give the back story of how companies fought their way to the top or failed. Possibly some of you would find this interesting… For we Apple users I can listen to this with the AirPods, or the PowerBeats Pro, change to the HomePod when in the office, control al of this with the Apple Watch…it’s simply amazing what Apple has done for us…I went to the Apple Store to order the AirPods Pro, on the 29th….could hardly get in the store, my wife stood outside, said she didn’t want to go in. I wanted to use the Apple Gift Cards to try the AirPod Pros, but they would not order them from the store, had to be done on line…just before Christmas there was a two week waiting period, now it’s month. The store, double the size of the old store, was so busy it was hard to walk through…I read this week that, Buffett, the largest shareholder of Apple Stock, has had his investment value double in just a couple short years. This is one amazing company. John _______________________________________________ MacGroup mailing list Posting address: MacGroup@erdos.math.louisville.edu Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/macgroup@erdos.math.louisville.edu/> Answers to questions: <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup/>