Daybreak: The One-Year Update

Back at Mailbox, it was 8 a.m. on Thursday, February 7, 2013 when we popped the first bottle of champagne. There were 13 of us, and we were all wide-eyed, staring at our monitors, watching as nine months of work on the iPhone app was released into the world. As I looked around at the incredible people in that room, and watched the live ticker grow ... See more

But Google didn’t know that asking Paul Buchheit to tinker with email would end up producing Gmail or that hiring Krishna Bharat would ultimately lead to the invention and development of Google News. Hiring X more engineers and setting up Y more workstations would not necessarily increase the company’s revenue.

Microsoft is still capturing the majority of the value in productivity. Google is capturing almost zero right now in terms of the dollars being spent by enterprises and individuals on productivity. Amazon is just taking a tax on everybody else.