There’s a single rule I’ve learned studying technology this last half century. Product must be in charge. The alternative to having product in charge is to put finance there. Lots of companies do this, maybe most of them. Google did it nearly a decade ago. It’s wrecking them. Finance in this case is Ruth Porat, […]
In some ways liberals are the most conservative of people. We seek to protect things that aren’t worthy of protection. Like newspapers. The First Amendment makes no mention of newspapers, just as it makes no mention of TV, radio, or the Internet. They didn’t exist in 1789. It refers to freedom “of the press.” This […]
In writing (and rewriting, and rewriting) my book on Moore’s Law, I’m fascinated by industries that fight it with some success. One way is by using the productivity of Moore’s Law to fuel a sort of arms race. That’s how the law does it. Lawyers are more productive, but they’re using the tools of infinite […]
Sports, especially football, and especially the NFL, have led the way out of the darkness of the pandemic. It left me wondering why. I think I figured it out. It’s not the sport itself, nor its coverage on TV. It’s less the fact that it’s an American lingua franca, games the only program you can […]
I wrote last month about the EV Revolution and there’s a further point I need to make. The car business, as we’ve known it, is doomed. Because an electric car is just a battery on wheels, 40% of the cost right now is in the battery. That percentage is going up, as self-driving software becomes a […]
One thing no one talks about regarding commercial real estate is that it’s a technology story. Reporters facilely talk about older commercial structures being “obsolete” but they don’t explain what that means. It means the cost of retrofitting the building for modern office work is prohibitive. If you see an RJ-11 phone plug at the hotel […]
Over the last year I’ve denigrated generalized AIs like ChatGPT. I think their promises, and threats, are both overdone, certainly in the near term. But in specialized fields, AIs can be incredibly useful. Take biochemistry, the field my son works in. The key is vetting the training data that goes into a Large Language Model […]
I love America. I love democracy. I love freedom and capitalism. The biggest lie conservatives tell is to deny this is true among their political opponents. There has never been a time, in my lifetime, when this lie wasn’t told. But democracies make mistakes. We take the easy way out of what seem intractable problems. […]
What the Internet did to words in the first decade of this century, it’s now doing to video. I have been writing about this since 2017. Video is subject to the same crushing economics as music and news stories. The gating factor is time. My family can afford every streamer out there – Netflix, Amazon, […]
As my new Christmas tradition, I re-watched The Apartment last night. It’s a love story, set in an insurance company’s head office in 1960, around Christmas time. Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Billy Wilder’s best film ever, winner of 5 Academy Awards. A great role for Edie Adams, whom history records as Mrs. Ernie […]
