Today marks the one-year anniversary of Bloomberg’s publication of a story about Chinese intelligence intercepting the supply chain of Supermicro, a company which has built and sold servers to Amazon, Apple, the U.S. Department of Defense, and dozens of other companies. Apparently, they developed a chip that looked…
Spotify is making a major move into podcasts, where it appears to have clear designs to be the sort of Aggregator it cannot be when it comes to music.
Dan Primack wrote in his friday newsletter: Public market investors have become less willing to leave their comfort zones, and it’s manifesting most obviously in the IPO market.Novel disruption has fallen out of favor, with many preferring more time-tested models like enterprise SaaS and biotech.Peloton yesterday…
Uber represents something new: a company that is different than incumbents because of technology, yet not itself a tech company — just like the Venture Fund is not a VC.
When I visited Singapore a few years ago, I kept noticing novel bits of social technology that managed to solve problems that I didn’t ev...
I don't like AMP. I think that Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages are a bad idea, poorly executed, and almost-certainly anti-competitive. So, I decided to join the AC (Advisory Committee) for AMP. I don't want them surrounded with sycophants and yes-men. A few weeks ago, a bunch of the AC met in London for our first…
Jony Ive is leaving Apple: how it happened, Ive’s legacy, and what it means for Apple going forward.
I’m not a big fan of stereotypes, but there’s no denying that a lot of leaders in tech are former engineers–a group no one would claim is known for being…
GraphQL Conf 2019 was happening on 20-21 June in Berlin & this is an example of Idea forming huge community. Here are some takeaways from GraphQL Conf 2019
As if the scourge of ransomware wasn’t bad enough already: Several prominent purveyors of ransomware have signaled they plan to start publishing data stolen from victims who refuse to pay up. To make matters worse, one ransomware gang has now created a public Web site identifying recent victim companies that have…
Some thoughts on Conway's Law and its effect on the software stack and open source ecosystem.
Above my mountain-top cottage in a beautiful Himalayan village, the road ends and the forest begins. After sunset, flying squirrels come out. Leopards
This is eventually about the public cloud and Open Source, but — apologies in advance — takes an indirect and long-ish path.
Despite dropping out, Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg were immensely successful because of the alignment of many factors: connections (for elite universities, attending can be as valuable as graduating, due to connections), high IQ (which allowed them to get into such universities and be so successful at tech ), access to…
You are also not Spotify, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook or one of several other big tech companies I could mention here. If I have excluded anybody reading this - I am sorry.Maybe you will still enjoy the read. For everyone else: This article is probably for you. To give you...
There may be times and places where it’s a good idea to talk back to a military officer — but Germany in 1906 wasn’t one of them. So the young corporal didn’t. The corporal — let’s call him Muller …
What exactly is Amazon? This is the question that has consumed me for the last ten years. I have sold to and bought from Amazon in about as many ways as one person can; I built an auto parts brand …
If you want to make a long-term bet one of your options is to register your bet with the Long Now Foundation as a Long Bet. They have some rules, which are roughly: Both parties put up the same amount, at least $200/each. Long Bets effectively runs a donor-advised fund (DAF). When the bet concludes the winner chooses…
The references to Gutenberg reminds me of a discussion in Simon Winchester's fascinating book "The Man Who Loved China". There the author points out that the first printed book occurred in China about 500 years before Gutenberg. The question posed by Winchester's "Man" (Joseph Needham) was why, with such a lead…
It’s Friday and I’m procrastinating, so here you go. Let’s talk about Joseph Schumpeter. Good old John Joseph Jingleheimer Schumpeter, as he wasn’t called. Schumpeter once w…
Twitter threads are a pain to read! So let's just steal them, right? Umm... Nope, probably wrong. I'm going to say very wrong. Think about it.
[Conflict of interest notice: I’ve volunteered for both private and public charities, but more often private. I received a small amount of money for work done for a private charity ten years …
A market timing strategy rarely outperforms dollar cost averaging even when that strategy knows exactly when to buy.
There are lots of à la carte software environments in this world. Places where in order to eat, you must first carefully look over the menu of options to order exactly what you want. I want this for my ORM, I want that for my template language, and let's finish it off with this routing library. Of course, you're going…
Intro Okay developers, time to have a serious talk. As you are probably already aware, this week React, Babel, and a bunch of other high-profile packages on NPM broke. The reason they broke is rather astounding: A simple NPM package called left-pad that was a dependency of their code. left-pad, at the time of writing…
