Tretakoff Musings

It is said that in any time in history, the winners and losers are determined when a unique set of circumstances arises the requires an unprecedented response. How a company responds to those conditions can often propel them to new heights, or sentence them to an ignominious end. This post is meant to be an ongoing and often updated list of those that may come out of the Great 2020 Covid19 Lockdown as champs...or chumps. Winners Zoom How is it that, with all of the video conferencing choices in the market, a relatively obscure one (and a freemium one, to boot!) ran away with the title? Think of it: you had entrenched competitors like Skype and Facebook, as well as work-focused like Microsoft Teams , Google Hangouts , and Amazon Chime , any one of which had far greater reach than Zoom . Yet Zoom won, to the point that they achieved the exalted state of having their product/platform become a verb ("I'll Zoom you later"). More amazingly, they even continued their gro...

It's been one heck of an offseason for the nation's most popular sport. The greatest quarterback of all time up and left the team he's been with for 2 decades for sunny Tampa (oh, and he inspired his Hall of Fame tight end to come out of retirement to join him). The NFL Draft will be in two days and, for the first time, entirely virtual and socially distant , thanks to the ravages of the 2019-2020 pandemic (I'm tired of typing "covid-19." "CV19," or "novel coronavirus;" looking for a substitute). We have two state of the art stadiums opening this year (in LA and Las Vegas ), as well as a team moving to a new city (say hello to the Las Vegas Raiders; I'm still not used to seeing those words together). But none of that matters. We need to talk about the important stuff here. The things that make football fans be fans.  The things that light up the hearts of those of us that follow the game, as well as those retailers that despera...