On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
Microsoft have announced a retail store-within-a-store partnership with Best Buy. They will be opening 500 stores across the U.S and 100 stores in Canada. No news however on whether this will also move to other Best Buy locations in other countries. The concept announced is quite a strategic one. In addition to having separate space within Best Buy locations (up to 2,200 square feet), Windows devices will be featured prominently throughout the shop. Not content will growing this partnership offline, an online version of stores will also be available. The stores will features the whole range of Microsoft products from Windows 8 devices to phones, PCs, tablets, XBox and more. When consumers walk into any one of these stores they will be greeted with a full display, and the entire range of Microsoft products. The company wants consumers to get acquainted with the entire range of product offerings from Microsoft, a move that has been praised by analysts. This is not an entirely new concep...