Retail
- As Target seeks to expand its neighborhood store concept, Target and CVS enter into a joint agreement with Target taking over the convenience store side of operations (and its real estate) with CVS handing the pharmacy side of things.
- Wal*Mart and T-Mobile strengthen their ties, partnering on a joint-venture in the customer banking space.
Content
- Verizon, writing off its Oath/Verizon Media Group as a loss, sells the inboxes (AOL and Yahoo) to Comcast, allowing it to consolidate its consumer base, but only after a bidding war with Salesforce and Microsoft. Its web properties are shopped to AT&T but ultimately purchased by Meredith Corp., with Condé Nast and Discovery cherry-picking a few items. Time was interested, but shut out of the bidding.
- Disney launches its video on demand service. It costs $24.95. It suffers technical difficulties from the large number of people all trying to sign up at once. (Wrong, it'll be $6.99)
- Apple considers purchasing Netflix but can't come to terms on creative autonomy. Verizon also explores acquiring Netflix but strong disagreement between parties stops that pretty quickly.
- Netflix acquires a majority of the TV/movie production capacity in Vancouver.
- Discovery launches its video-on-demand service. Apple, Netflix, CBS and Amazon fight a fierce battle to purchase it. Amazon wins.
- AT&T wins the Justice Department lawsuit and continues its integration of WarnerMedia. WarnerMedia stumbles with a few bad quarters but that changes at AT&T give it more autonomy. There is talk of a spin-off.
- Google adds an ESP (probably through acquisition, possibly Epsilon) to its Marketing Cloud but deliverability to Gmail remains a black box and infighting ensues. Customers initially flock to the Google offering hoping for better Gmail insights and are disappointed even Google can't help them.
- Microsoft adds an ESP to its Marketing Cloud offering. It begins to craft its own competitor to Gmail's AMP with immediate integration into its web and iPhone/Android apps and some of the more recent versions of Outlook. It convinces Salesforce (ExactTarget and Pardot) and Comcast (Comcast/AOL/Yahoo) to support it.
- Microsoft, Salesforce and Oracle are still lacking in a good web analytics/tracking offering for their Marketing Clouds.
- Adobe rebrands Marketo as Campaign, demoting the current Campaign (Neolane) product to Campaign Express. The Neolane-based product is no longer available for purchase and the upgrade path for customers is to New Campaign aka Marketo.
- Salesforce makes a large purchase in the HR and payroll space, but struggles to integrate the full-service nature of the purchase with the hands-off DIY nature of its core products.
- Within a month, an HRaaS arms-race is underway and Microsoft, Google, SAP and Oracle begin making oversized purchases in the space. ADP and HR Block are rumored to be takeover targets.
- Microsoft buys Roku, integrates it into Xbox. Doesn't name it "UltimateTV"
- Intel and Vodaphone Global Enterprises enter into a joint-venture as a precursor to an eventual merger.
- Tesla's next generation of automatic driving software begins to develop a 3D memory of hills, curves, potholes and speed bumps allowing it to optimize acceleration and braking, resulting in a 15% improvement in range without any hardware changes while delivering a smoother ride.
- Apple doubles-down on its "context-less instant awareness" efforts with additional imaging and cognitive purchases. It struggles without a new category-killer but makes progress on its car, but it's still slow going and rumors persist that they're going to stop work on it. Services continue to make them heaps of money.
- Microsoft makes great progress on its AI-based ribbon in the office products - a new "home" tab that changes automatically based on what it thinks you're going to do. It doesn't come out until Office 2021 but it's awesome.
- Dell EMC partners with Silver Lake in an attempt to acquire Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and Hewlett-Packard Consumer Products, but is only successful in acquiring HPE after outbidding IBM. Lexmark outbids Intel and Dell EMC for HPCP.
- Steam announces it's open to strategic offers. Microsoft enters exploratory talks, abruptly exits talks, announces its intent to create a Steam competitor, but nothing ever comes of it.
- GM attempts a hostile takeover of Tesla. Fails but drives the stock price much higher in the process.
- Ford becomes majority-owned by Chinese-interests sparking anger, protests and idiots burning their cars.
- Twitter loses money.
- Snap loses money, enters talks with Twitter, but nothing comes of it.
- Specs leak for the Samsung Galaxy S11. It has a lot of cameras, and unfortunately, Bixby.
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