One of the latest articles from the New York Times overviews a number of interesting stories about entrepreneurs and the decisions they have to make. The article reviews ten different entrepreneurs and refers to their decision making process of whether to sell the company they have created or not. The number of interesting examples conclude that there is never a right answer. Dan Porter, the creator of the popular app Draw Something explains that there are many personal decisions involved and sometimes the decision to sell or not to sell your business is not even based on the money received by the deal. In conclusion, the message conveyed by the entrepreneurs is that if it seems hard to start up a business, it is even harder to decide if and when to sell it on; handing over your creation, or hold on and continue fighting for it.

The following article reviews Sony’s new smart-watch and points out its major advantages and disadvantages. The new product released by Sony is aimed at competing in the new and very recent market for smart-watches, created as part of the major technological innovations in the previous years. The smart-watch incorporates the old fashion features of a watch and new integrations with smartphones, such as answering calls and replying to text messages. The new product released by Sony has little if no points of difference. According to the article it does not perform significantly better than its competitors, and has no new and innovative features other smart-watches don’t offer. However, as Sony is a large and experienced company their costs of producing this product are much lower than other firms, thus still allowing them to be competitive, not on innovation, but on price. Sony’s economies of scale allows it to sell the product 33% cheaper than their main competitor Samsung, thus compete on the market in spite of the fact that they entered relatively late. As of this moment, it seems as firms will start competing on prices in the market for smart-watches, until one of the competitors will manage to incorporate a new breakthrough in this market.

The article “HP CEO Apotheker fired, replaced by Meg Whitman” discusses the latest changes in HP’s management. HP has a significantly “tall Pyramid” style of management, it is structured into many different levels in between its base level and the top management. This business structure is proved to cause difficulties when aiming at strong communication between the different aspects of a firm and stimulating creativity. The recent rapid changes in HP’s management board caused many difficulties to the company in all of its aspects. Leo Apotheker was forced out of the organization and Meg Whitman, replacing him, decided to reverse all of the major steps he has decided to take. The lacking of good Performance Management and the absence of a strong culture and team connections within HP has affected the firm negatively. The new CEO Meg Whitman promised to restore HP’s strong culture and success from years ago, but it is known that changing a firm’s culture within a rapid changing environment such as technology, is a difficult task that takes a long term effort and investment.