Bookmarks (141)

Facebook's political problems stem directly from its size and drive for growth; they are societal issues, not antitrust ones.

Centralized control is useful at the beginning of an economy, but limits innovation in the long run. That is as true for China as it is for the App Store.

The FTC's new Facebook case isn't any better than the old one, even as there are ever more questions about the potential harm of regulatory interference

While it's possible to understand Apple's motivations behind its decision to enable on-device scanning, the company had a better way to satisfy its societal obligations while preserving user privacy.

The Metaverse of Snow Crash is not a good analogy for the future, as the Internet breaks down into Stephenson's dystopia

Instagram's shift away from being a photo-sharing app is very much inline with the service's continuous evolution.

The Windows 11 announcement was fun and interesting, but there is a reason that Windows is no longer the center of Microsoft's business.

Marc Andreessen has changed his tone over the past year; there is a cynical interpretation, but I think the shift is justified.

A package of new proposed laws for regulating tech companies are in part a negotiating ploy, but also an indicator of change.

WWDC highlighted how Apple's differentiation is based on integration; the company ought not risk that differentiation for exploitive App Store policies.

Seven years ago, when I initially launched the paid Daily Update, there weren’t really any tools designed for independent subscription businesses; my solution has incorporated a number of disparate services tied together, and while new companies have been formed around both paid newsletters and paid podcasts, no one has created a service for a site […]

There are all kinds of arguments to make about the App Store, and nearly all of them are good ones; that's why the best solution can only come from Apple.

Distribution on the Internet is free; what matters is controlling demand. AT&T and Verizon didn't understand the distinction.

Cloudflare is uniquely positioned to become a major player in an Internet 3.0 world, where politics matter more than economics.

More and more opportunities on the web come from market marking, not for advertisers, but for real goods and services paid for with real money.

Apple's new Podcast Subscription service is what the App Store should be: a great Apple experience competing for customers.

In July 2014 Taylor Swift wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal entitled, For Taylor Swift, the Future of Music Is a Love Story: There are many (many) people who predict the downfall of music sales and the irrelevancy of the album as an economic entity. I am not one of them. In my opinion, the value of an al...

There has been a bit of controversy around Substack over the last week; I’m not going to get into the specifics of various accusations made about various individuals, or their responses; I do though, think that there are a few fundamental issues about the Substack model specifically, and the shift to sovereign write...

Truly unlocking competition in tech means increasing interoperability; an absolutist approach to privacy is doing the exact opposite.

Clubhouse will do for audio what Twitter, Instagram Stories, and TikTok did for text, images, and video.

Information on the Internet is conveyed by memes, which can be anything and everything. The real world impacts are only now being understood.

Jeff Bezos is retiring, and will go down as one of the great CEO's in tech history, in part because of how he transformed Amazon into a tech company in every respect.

Journalism cannot afford to be divorced from business realities; that applies to Australia, the New York Times, and even Andreessen Horowitz.

Intel is in much more danger than its profits suggest; the problems are a long time in the making, and the solution is to split up the company.

The actions taken by Big Tech have a resonance that goes beyond the context of domestic U.S. politics. Even if they were right, they will still push the world to Internet 3.0.

Twitter and Facebook face the gravest Trump crisis yet, and this time, I think it is time to act.

The pandemic and vaccine rollout have highlighted where the West has lost its way; we need new defaults about information, change, and speed.

Facebook and Twitter represent the v1 of Social Networking; it's a bad copy of the analog world, whereas v2 is something unique to digital, and a lot more promising.

Apple's position on privacy seems unimpeachable, but it ignores trade-offs, and risks a bad outcome for the Internet as a whole.

Dave Chappelle has a new special about his old show that includes fundamental lessons about how the Internet has changed the content business.

Mapping the technology adoption curve to ideas gives insights in which business models work on which parts of the addressable market.

Airbnb and DoorDash both created new markets where ones did not previously exist; they are startups played on "hard" mode.

Apple is about the integration of hardware and software, but the balance between the two has shifted over time.

A response to a critique of Aggregation Theory, and a defense of debate on an Internet devoid of gatekeepers.

The Justice Department's lawsuit against Google is appropriately narrow, and if it fails it gives a template for Congressional action.

Twitter went to far last week for reasons that go back to 2016 and the unfair blaming of tech for media's mistakes.

Disney's reorganization reinforces their integrated strategy; there is a lot to learn for anyone competing with Aggregators.

What matters about the Congressional report on tech and antitrust is that it exists, not the specific details.

The state of bundles in 2020: Netflix, Disney, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple. Plus, Microsoft's purchase of Zenimax.

Nvidia's acquisition of ARM only makes sense from a financial perspective, unless you buy Jensen Huang's datacenter dreams.

Assume that Apple is going to win versus Epic: what is a reasonable approach to the App Store that will gain more developer support?

The App Store is not one thing: it is installation, payments, and customer management; the further Apple gets from iOS, the worse its actions are for users and developers.