The Death and Birth of Technological Revolutions

What was especially remarkable about Carlota Perez’s Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital was its timing: 2002 was the middle of the cold winter that followed the Dotcom Bubble, and here was Perez arguing that the IT revolution and the Internet were not in fact dead ideas, but in the middle of a natural transition to a new Golden Age. Note:...

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Facebook Political Problems

Stratechery provides analysis of the strategy and business side of technology and media, and the impact of technology on society. So begins my about page, and there is no company that expands to fill the space afforded by that description quite like Facebook. This does, on one hand, provide for endless amounts of content, much of which, frankly, I...

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Cloudflare’s Disruption

From Protocol: Cloudflare is ready to launch a new cloud object storage service that promises to be cheaper than the established alternatives, a step the company believes will catapult it into direct competition with AWS and other cloud providers. The service will be called R2 — “one less than S3,” quipped Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince in an interview...

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The Apple v. Epic Decision

The vast majority of Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers decision in Epic v. Apple is both straight-forward and predictable; I wrote that the iPhone company would likely win when the lawsuit was filed, and argued that the law was firmly on Apple’s side in App Store Arguments. That is indeed what happened: Apple won, and it wasn’t particularly close; Epic has...

Sep 2021

Tech Epochs and the App Store Trap

Matthew Brooker, writing for Bloomberg Opinion, is worried about Xi Jinping leading China into a trap: The middle-income trap describes how economies tend to stall and stagnate at a certain level of development, once wages have risen and productivity growth becomes harder. Relatively few make the transition to high-income status. The history of...

Sep 2021

Regulators and Reality

It is coming up on two weeks since the FTC refiled its case against Facebook;1 from the Wall Street Journal: The Federal Trade Commission filed a new version of its antitrust lawsuit against Facebook Inc. on Thursday, seeking to jump-start its case with bolstered allegations that the company is abusing a monopoly position in social media…The FTC’s...

Sep 2021

Apple’s Mistake

It was in August 2009, two months after the release of the iPhone 3GS, that the barbarians crashed the gates; from The Online Photographer: The leading photo sharing site, flickr.com, charts the popularity of the cameras used by its membership. Recently the Apple iPhone has jumped into a virtual tie for first place with the Canon XTi. Furthermore,...

Aug 2021

Metaverses

Satya Nadella, for the record, was first: on May 25, 2021, during the keynote for Microsoft’s Build developer conference, he characterized a collection of Azure offerings as a metaverse: Finally, as the virtual and physical worlds converge the metaverse made up of digital twins, simulated environments, and mixed reality, is emerging as a first-class...

Aug 2021

Instagram’s Evolution

Last week Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri posted a video on Instagram about Instagram: View this post on Instagram A post shared by Adam Mosseri (@mosseri) Hey everyone, I thought it would be good to start sharing more about what we’re currently working on at Instagram...

Jul 2021

The Lightness of Windows

From Ian Sherr, writing about last week’s Windows 11 announcement for CNET: When you choose a computer or smartphone to buy these days, you have to pick between several factions. There’s Apple world, which includes the Mac computer, iPhones and iPads, all designed to work together to help you share files, video chat and watch TV as easily as possible....

Jun 2021