Back in the 1990s I wrote about how PCs were like fruit on a wharf, their value declining every hour they spent waiting for a buyer. This was the heyday of Dell Computer, which solved the problem by building computers to order. The machines were customized, assembled as parts, and never saw a store shelf, […]
The best thing you can do for your health and the planet today is get an electric bike. There are many reasons. It takes less work, thus less food, and the load from recharging the bike isn’t as great as that. You wind up riding more, thus substituting more car miles, with an e-bike than […]
One hallmark of the chip sales market over the last years has been an emphasis on the Cloud. Throughout my 40 year career covering this industry, sales have regularly tipped, from client to server and back again. The 1980s were a client decade, the 1990s a server decade. During this century, the Cloud changed much […]
The Internet reflects the world. The world is getting its war on. Netizens whom I’ve always taken to be serious analysts of important events have been taken in by the ineluctable logic of war. Timnit Gebru, who last year was warning about the risks of large language models at Google, is now a pro-Palestinian activist, […]
A month ago, right after the first Nobel Prize awards my personal Web site went dark. This was deliberate. After 17 years on Movable Type, I have switched it to WordPress. WordPress is the world’s most popular Web design system, and one of this century’s least-told great stories. Developed as open source for bloggers 20 […]
I’m no foreign policy expert. Nor am I willing to foist my prejudices about the Middle East on you. They’re worth no more than the bits they’re printed on. Instead, I want to focus on what I know, technology and economics. There’s an assumption right now that the current conflicts are good for the markets. […]
Simple. By its nature, an electric vehicle (EV) is a simple machine. It’s a battery on wheels. The motor driving the wheels is a generator running in reverse. There’s no need for a transmission since the motor can spin to the top speed of the car. Battery, motor, drive train, wheels, and a steering […]
Elon Musk sold a dream. It made him the richest man in the world. But the dream has become a nightmare, and the dreamer a monster. In response to this failure, many in the media are selling a big lie. Hertz is the latest to sound the alarm about Tesla. The rental car company committed […]
Almost 15 years ago, I published a piece here called The Obama Thesis of Consensus. I believed the 2008 election represented a generational transformation. The 1968 election of Richard Nixon had turned America from a nation based on manufacturing to one based on resources, from a politics of print to one of TV, and from […]
Four years ago, when I first wrote about tech trends for the 2020s, it was clear that more than the logos of tech leaders would have to change. You can’t have a Machine Internet, covering cities, supply chains, or medical systems, without cooperation from government, including on issues of antitrust. In addition, you can’t treat DNA […]
