An illuminating article about Jeff Bezos and the Amazon Fire Phone fiasco. Well worth a read. Will be interesting to see how this pans out over the next 5 years. If Amazon do get a future version of the phone right (and all indications are that they are continuing to invest heavily in R&D for it), then this period will be looked back on as being valuable learning, and a tribute to...
Hindsight is always easy, which makes the first part of this post pretty lame. But the forward-looking predictions are pretty spot on I think. The closing remarks about the impending crash are what resonate most though: And now the stock market is hitting all-time highs, and Facebook is trading at 72 times earnings, and Twitter has a $20 billion market cap even though it is losing huge amounts...
From Matt Mullenweg, responding to Paul Graham’s post: If 95% of great programmers aren’t in the US, and an even higher percentage not in the Bay Area, set up your company to take advantage of that fact as a strength, not a weakness. It’s always easy to oversimplify this issue, but there’s good points on both sides here, plus the Hacker News discussion is useful reading...
There’s no real surprises in the overall findings in PewResearch’s latest study on the impact of technology on workers: email and internet are very important, office landline phones are important, cell phones not so important. But in the remarks down the page there is a finding related to website access that I found surprising: Just under half of those surveyed say their employer...
From Fred Wilson’s post reflecting on 2014: 3/ the “sharing economy†was outed as the “rental economy.†nobody is sharing anything. people are making money, plain and simple. technology has made renting things (even in real time) as simple as it made buying things a decade ago. Uber and Airbnb are the big winners in this category but there are and will be others. See also Steve...
I’m fascinated that services like Instacart can command multi-billion dollar valuations. Sure, the sharing economy is in full swing, and making your pitch ‘the Uber of grocery deliveries’ is nice, but I’m intrigued how they are going to make much profit long term. Revenues might have increased 10X over the past year, but I’d love to know how much (if any) is profit...
Really cool to see that the Microsoft Office team are essentially making Office free for everyone to use on iOS (and soon Android). I really like this approach (as I’ve mentioned previously). And this on the back of the earlier announcement this week about adding Dropbox integration. Exciting times for any Microsoft watcher and user. My personal user experience so far is very positive...
When it comes to understanding innovation, it’s easy to fixate on the idea, and neglect the execution. It’s why for example when Apple announced that their new iPhone 6 devices had NFC chips to facilitate their Apple Pay offering they were criticised for not being innovative, and instead just copying something many Android devices have had for years. “That’s not innovation...
Satya Nadella’s staff memo is good reading. Joshua Topolsky’s brief interview on  The Verge is also good. And opinion pieces like this also raise some good questions. If (like me) you’ve been a little disillusioned with Microsoft over the past few years, then it’s heartening to read, since it gives confidence into how Microsoft is improving focus and internal processes...
Read this post by apenwarr on The Curse of Smart People. This resonates with what I’ve seen: Smart people have a problem, especially (although not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything. It’s timely for me, because one of the main things I’m looking for in my life at the moment is interaction with RSPs...