“A little company in Cupertino,” he says, “showed up with a different strategy”
There is plenty of food for thought — and plenty to take issue with — in the breakfast talk Elevation Partners co-founder Roger McNamee gave at the Paley Center for Media late last month. SplatF‘s Dan Frommer and Business Insider‘s Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry have already linked to it. Mark Stephens has extracted one I, Cringely column — on the decline and fall of Facebook — and says he could have done a half-dozen more.
If you have 57 minutes to spare, there are worse ways to spend them than to watch McNamee’s speech in its entirety. It’s available on FORA.tv here (Flash required).
What interested me (and what we extracted below as a brief iOS-friendly YouTube video) was what McNamee had to say about Apple (AAPL), especially vis a vis Google (GOOG).
McNamee has changed his tune about the iPhone since he famously predicted on its two-year anniversary that nobody who bought the original model would be using any iPhone one month later. (See here.)
In his Paley presentation, which is mostly about HTML5 and why publishers should dive into it, Apple is the entrenched power that, in his view, dominates the Internet landscape. (If you don’t own an iPad, he told his audience, buy one today. It’s “the most important device since the IBM PC.”)
Google, in McNamee’s colorful analogy, is a Confederate general trying to defend Atlanta while William Tecumseh Sherman (presumably played by Steve Jobs) is pushing the company into the sea. (McNamee, it must be said, is a venture capitalist who has a lot of sticks in this fire.)
Still, this is good stuff.
Below: McNamee on Google’s “dirty little secret” and how Apple has outflanked it. Just over 3 minutes on YouTube.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn1inv91VtI]