The Slack Social Network

Manage your Stratechery subscription. On November 2, 2016, Microsoft announced Teams at a special event in New York City. Slack decided to mark the occasion: That feeling when you think "we should buy a full page in the Times and publish an open letter," and then you do. pic.twitter.com/BQiEawRA6d — Stewart Butterfield (@stewart) November 2,...

2d

Apple and Facebook

Manage your Stratechery subscription. When it comes to the big four consumer tech companies — Microsoft’s decision to close its retail stores was the culmination of a step-back from the consumer space five years in the making — Google and Amazon have always had moats that were easier to understand. Google has a huge advantage in data and infrastructure,...

2w

The End of OS X

Manage your Stratechery subscription. On May 6, 2002, Steve Jobs opened WWDC with a funeral for Classic Mac OS: Steve Jobs Funeral for OS 9 Yesterday, 18 years later, OS X finally reached its own end of the road: the next version of macOS is not 10.16, but 11.0. There was no funeral. The OS X Family Tree OS X has one of the most fascinating...

3w

Apple, ARM, and Intel

Manage your Stratechery subscription. Mark Gurman at Bloomberg is reporting that Apple will finally announce that the Mac is transitioning to ARM chips at next week’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC): Apple Inc. is preparing to announce a shift to its own main processors in Mac computers, replacing chips from Intel Corp., as early as this...

4w

Never-ending Niches

Manage your Stratechery subscription. You have almost certainly seen this chart about newspaper advertising revenue since World War II: The obvious takeaway is that the Internet killed what had been a profitable and growing business; what is interesting, though, is that circulation numbers tell a somewhat different story: Time and Reach That...

5w

Exponent Podcast: Speech and Systems

On Exponent, the weekly podcast I host with James Allworth, we discuss Dust in the Light. Listen to it here.

Jun 2020

Dust in the Light

Everyone in Madison knew to avoid Badger Road. It was 1996, and the city was celebrating being christened the best place to live in America by Money Magazine: This year, Madison (and the rest of Dane County) earns the No. 1 position among the 300 biggest U.S. metropolitan areas in our 1996 Best Places to Live in America ranking. It snagged...

Jun 2020

Platforms in an Aggregator World

Manage your Stratechery subscription. In the month since I wrote The Anti-Amazon Alliance, there has been two significant announcements from two of the principals in that alliance: Shopify announced the Shop app Facebook announced Facebook Shops Many have argued that these announcements are related to each other: Shopify needs to build a customer-facing...

May 2020

Chips and Geopolitics

Manage your Stratechery subscription. The debate around who belongs on the Mount Rushmore of tech would be a long one; what is certain is that Morris Chang should be on the list. He certainly leads the way in terms of impact relative to name recognition. Integration and Modularization Clayton Christensen, in 2003’s The Innovator’s Solution, explained...

May 2020

Exponent Podcast: Open, Free, and Spotify

On Exponent, the weekly podcast I host with James Allworth, we discuss Dithering and Open Versus Free. Listen to it here.

May 2020