26 dispatches
Despite all the speculation over why Amazon is laying off 14,000 workers, as of this writing, and with a few exceptions I’ll note below, I don’t personally worry a great deal about AI taking away jobs currently. The reason is that while new AI agent based services and products are becoming better at replacing humans at certain tasks: * Many tasks are not automatable —...
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated they can do many things well enough, it’s important to remember that these are not “thinking machines” so much as impressively competent “writing machines” (able to figure out what words are likely to follow). Case in point: both OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot lost to the chess playing engine of an old Atari game...
One of the most exciting areas of technology development, but that doesn’t get a ton of mainstream media coverage, is the race to build a working quantum computer that exhibits “below threshold quantum computing” — the ability to do calculations utilizing quantum mechanics accurately. One of the key limitations to achieving this has been the sensitivity of quantum computing...
The rise of Asia as a force to be reckoned with in large scale manufacturing of critical components like batteries, solar panels, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, and semiconductors has left US and European governments seeking to catch up with a bit of a dilemma. These activities largely moved to Asia because financially-motivated management teams in the West (correctly) recognized...
As a kid, I remember playing Microsoft Flight Simulator 5.0 — while I can’t say I really understood all the nuances of the several hundred page manual (which explained how ailerons and rudders and elevators worked), I remember being blown away with the idea that I could fly anywhere on the planet and see something reasonably representative there.
Until I read this Verge article, I had assumed that video codecs were a boring affair. In my mind, every few years, the industry would get together and come up with a new standard that promised better compression and better quality for the prevailing formats and screen types and, after some patent licensing back and forth, the industry would standardize around yet another MPEG...
Historically, Intel has (1) designed and (2) manufactured its chips that it sells (primarily into computer and server systems). It prided itself on having the most advanced (1) designs and (2) manufacturing technology, keeping both close to its chest. In the late 90s/00s, semiconductor companies increasingly embraced the “fabless model”, whereby they would only do the (1)...
On one level, this shouldn’t be a surprise. Globally always available satellite constellation = everyone and anyone will try to access this. This was, like many technologies, always going to have positive impacts — i.e. people accessing the internet where they otherwise couldn’t due to lack of telecommunications infrastructure or repression — and negative — i.e.
Once upon a time, the hottest thing in chip design was “system-on-a-chip” (SOC). The idea is that you’d get the best cost and performance out of a chip by combining more parts into one piece of silicon. This would result in smaller area (less silicon = less cost) and faster performance (closer parts = faster communication) and resulted in more and more chips integrating more...
An oldie but a goodie — the story of how the YouTube team, post-Google acquisition, put up a “we won’t support Internet Explorer 6 in the future” message without any permission from anyone. (HT: Eric S) ---
Very cool that we’re still finding new things we can control that can be applied to making the lives of people better. ---
Intel has been interested in entering the foundry (semiconductor contract manufacturing) space for a long time. For years, Intel proudly boasted of being at the forefront of semiconductor technology — being first to market with the FinFET and smaller and smaller process geometries. So it’s interesting how, with the exception of the RibbonFET (the successor to the FinFET),...
While much attention is (rightly) focused on the role of TSMC (and its rivals Samsung and Intel) in “leading edge” semiconductor technology, the opportunity at the so-called “lagging edge” — older semiconductor process technologies which continue to be used — is oftentimes completely ignored. The reality of the foundry model is that fab capacity is expensive to build and so...
Every standard products company (like NVIDIA) eventually gets lured by the prospect of gaining large volumes and high margins of a custom products business. And every custom products business wishes they could get into standard products to cut their dependency on a small handful of customers and pursue larger volumes.
As reported in The Information a few days ago, former design tool giant InVision, once valued at $2 billion, is shutting down at the end of this year. While much of the commentary has been about Figma’s rapid rise and InVision’s inability to respond, I saw this post on Twitter/X from one of InVision’s founders Clark Valberg about what happened.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before… Adoption of a technology is being impeded by too many standards. The solution? A new standard, of course, and before you know it, we now have another new standard to deal with. The smart home industry needs to figure out how to properly embrace Thread (and Matter).
(Note: this is part of my ongoing series on cheaply selfhosting) I spent a few days last week setting up a cheap home server which now serves my family as: * a media server — stores and streams media to phones, tablets, computers, and internet-connected TVs (even when I’m out of the house!) * network-attached storage (NAS) — lets computers connected to my home network store...
Source: Eric Hamilton Having been lucky enough to invest in both tech (cloud, mobile, software) and “deeptech” (materials, cleantech, energy, life science) startups (and having also ran product at a mobile app startup), it has been striking to see how fundamentally different the paradigms that drive success in each are.
In recent years, it’s been the opposite of controversial to say that the tech industry is in a bubble. The terrible recent stock market performance of once high-flying startups across virtually every industry (see table below) and the turmoil in the stock market stemming from low oil prices and concerns about the economies of countries like China and Brazil have raised fears...
When Steve Jobs first launched the iPhone in 2007, Apple’s perception of where the smartphone application market would move was in the direction of web applications. The reasons for this are obvious: people are familiar with how to build web pages and applications, and it simplifies application delivery.
Many forms of technology requires standards to work. As a result, it is in the best interest of all parties in the technology ecosystem to participate in standards bodies to ensure interoperability. The two main problem with getting standards working can be summed up, as all good things in technology can be, in the form of webcomics.
Genius? Source: Softpedia Regardless of how you feel about Microsoft’s products, you have to appreciate the brilliance of their strategic “playbook”: 1. Use the fact that Microsoft’s operating system/productivity software is used by almost everyone to identify key customer/partner needs 2. Build a product which is usually only a second/third-best follower product but make sure...
Source: the book Knowing my interest in tech strategy, a coworker recommended I pick up HBS professor Clayton Christensen’s “classic” book on disruptive innovation: The Innovator’s Dilemma. And, I have to say I was very impressed. The book tries to answer a very interesting question: why do otherwise successful companies sometimes fail to keep up on innovation? Christensen’s...
In my Introduction to Tech Strategy post, I mentioned that one of the most important aspects of the technology industry is the importance of ecosystem linkages. There are several ways to think about ecosystem linkages. The main linkages I mentioned in my previous post was influence over technology standards.
Working on tech strategy consulting case for 18 months ingrains a thing or two in your head about strategy for tech companies, so I thought I’d lay out, in one blog post the major lessons I’ve learned about how strategy in the technology sector works. To understand that, it’s important to first understand what makes technology special? From that perspective, there are three...
I’ve been on my current consulting case for about 3 months. It is a strategy case for a technology client. As a result, I’ve been able to do a great deal of work researching various technology markets and trends, ranging from the typical (Internet search) to the more esoteric (grid computing), as I help the client scope out possible expansion opportunities.