Ged Carroll

Search results for: “Andy Grove”

  • Gordon Moore + more things

    Gordon Moore

    I was introduced to Gordon Moore and Moore’s Law through a college class on innovation taught by my friend Neil Keegan. I have also just read Michael Malone’s The Big Score; an account written in the early 1980s that Gordon Moore featured in as one of the co-founders of Intel.

    OnInnovation Interview: Gordon Moore
    Gordon Moore taken for an OnInnovation interview he was doing circa 2008 for the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation

    Gordon Moore was a San Franciscan by birth but educated at John Hopkins University, rather than Stanford University. He worked at Shockley and at Fairchild Semiconductor prior to co-founding Intel. In many respects Gordon Moore was more low-key than other Intel founders like Bob Noyce or Andy Grove – but the ideas behind Moore’s Law echoed around the world. The law has been interpreted and misinterpreted by technologists, economists, journalists and policy makers the world over.

    Moore’s Law

    Gordon Moore made an observation that was published in 1965 and became an immutable forecast for the rest of the 20th century that would guide the direction of the semiconductor industry and every industry that relied upon it.

    It started off with an article that Gordon Moore had published in Electronics magazine on April 19, 1965. He observed that the number of transistors were doubling every year over a 10-year period. This relationship was widely known by people working in the field. But the semiconductor field was a small community and the name Moore’s Law eventually stuck.

    The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years.

    Once, that had been proven correct in 1975, Gordon Moore went on to revise his model to assume a similar effect very two years. This was presented in a speech at the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting that year.

    All of this meant that technologists like those at the Computer Science Lab at Xerox PARC could spend large amounts of money building foundational technologies and know that the ability to commercially produce these items would catch up ten years hence. Robert X. Cringely posits that much of the dot com bust was down to an industry getting too ahead of itself in terms of what it estimated Moore’s Law could achieve in the mid-to-late 1990s.

    Integrated circuits started finding their way into everyday products and facilitating new product categories such as laptops, smartphones and the modern web.

    Gordon Moore left us on March 24, 2023.

    Beauty

    How millennial faces fell out of fashion | Financial Times 

    China

    The world according to Xi | The Economist 

    China detains staff, raids office of US due diligence firm Mintz Group | Reuters – “Red alerts should be going off in all boardrooms right now about risks in China,” the source, who did not wish to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the matter, said. China has said it welcomes foreign trade and investment but stressed that security comes before development. U.S. businesses operating in China are increasingly pessimistic about their prospects in the world’s second-largest economy, according to a survey released this month by the American Chamber of Commerce in China. Two-thirds of the respondents cited rising U.S.-China tensions as the top business challenge. Western due diligence companies have got into trouble with Chinese authorities before. British corporate investigator Peter Humphrey and his American wife Yu Yingzeng, who ran risk consultancy ChinaWhys, were detained in 2013 following work they did for British pharmaceuticals group GSK. Humphrey, who spent two years in jail for allegedly acquiring personal information by illegal means, which he denied, told Reuters that providing due diligence in China was even harder now because of a “massive tightening in access to information.” – Ok a bit of context. If Gordon Moore hadn’t died this post would have been Mintz Group + more things – this is how big this is. The Mintz Group is a respected due diligence research company. If you are looking to:

    • Buy a business and want to know if its real, or what the states of the assets are
    • Want to ensure that you are not doing business with legally sanctioned entities
    • If you are a finance firm and want to ensure that the people you are considering to invest in are who they say they are and the business actually exists and works in the way they claim
    • If you are trying to find out if your supplier is conducting themselves in an honest manner with you

    The more opaque China becomes, the less tenable it becomes to conduct work there, do business with Chinese companies or invest in Chinese companies and the Chinese economy. The timing is less likely to be intentionally symbolic than happenstance, but either way it isn’t good news.

    Energy

    Solar power: Europe attempts to get out of China’s shadow | Financial Times 

    Finance

    Marking US banks to Market | FT – interesting and a bit concerning

    Luxury

    How the effect of COVID-19 continues to ripple through markets: Fewer Engagements Bite Into Signet Jewelry Sales 03/20/2023 

    Marketing

    Inside Food: a new agency for a complex world | Creative Review co-founded by my friend Iain Tait

    Media

    Negativity drives online news consumption | Nature Human Behaviour – and that poses a problem for its advertising based funding model looking for brand safety as well as the move to ‘barbell’ political discourse

    Online

    Lessig for the Internet Archive. This is the transcript from a video I… | by Lessig | Mar, 2023 | Medium – Internet Archive under attack by commercial media

    TikTok’s CEO Isn’t The Boss – by Alex Kantrowitz – this pretty much sums up the outcomes from the Congress star chamber. While I feel sorry for the gentleman, he knew precious little about his business. More here: TikTok Hearing: The End of an Era. This Kevin Xu helps you understand a small part of the bigger picture here: RESTRICT China – by Kevin Xu – Interconnected

    Tax Heaven 3000 – a dating sim that does your taxes by MSCHF

    Software

    ChatGPT Gets Its “Wolfram Superpowers”!—Stephen Wolfram Writings 

    ongoing by Tim Bray · The LLM Problem – excellent essay by Tim Bray on large language model systems (ChatGPT, Bard etc). Tim knows what he is talking about having helped found OpenText and going on to hold senior roles at Sun Microsystems, Google and Amazon. Bill Gates as more techno-utopian take on machine learning (of which LLM is a subset) – The Age of AI has begun | Bill Gates 

    Apple ‘Porn’ Filter | Techrights – a disturbing development that opens a Pandora’s box of possible censorship and authoritarian measures in the wrong hands – which its likely to fall given the global ubquity of Apple’s technology

  • The Big Score by Michael Malone

    The author of The Big Score is a lifetime inhabitant of Silicon Valley, Michael Malone. Malone went to school with Steve Jobs and spent his entire working life as a journalist covering technology companies of the area. His own career sounds like a veritable history of technology sector business reporting. Malone had written and or edited for the San Jose Mercury News, Fast Company, Upside, Forbes (ASAP), The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Wired magazine. Now he co-hosts a weekly podcast on the goings on in Silicon Valley.

    The book was originally published in 1985 and has been finished prior to the launch of the Apple Macintosh. At the the time of writing, Malone had been an early to mid-career journalist.

    Silicon Valley time capsule

    His book is time capsule of how Silicon Valley would have likely seen itself. The people portrayed in it lack the kind of artifice that pioneering PR people like Pam Edstrom would later drum into a young Bill Gates with media interview training and briefing books. Companies have since gone a step further and seldom engage with the media at all; instead putting out news by blog post or staged video production a la Apple under Steve Jobs and Tim Cook.

    Steve Jobs on Apple’s future back in 1997

    When we come to understand modern-day Silicon Valley five decades into the future, we won’t have the same level of intellectual honesty that we have in The Big Score because the artefacts and interviews will be so vanilla.

    The book had become a largely forgotten business history book. Michael Malone revisited much of the history of covered in the book with a slightly longer term perspective in his 2002 work The Valley of Hearts Delight, which covered the history of the area from the 1960s to the dot com era. While The Big Score might have been forgotten, it was resurrected when Stripe through its publishing arm put it out again in 2021. They did this because while the book was forgotten by the general public, it has been read in libraries by university students and in their own collections by people like me who followed the technology sector.

    IMG_0008

    Getting things wrong

    In the introduction to the book, late career Malone freely admits the three things that he got wrong in The Big Score:

    • The impact of the internet. While it didn’t reach public consciousness until I was in college; as a high schooler in 1969 Michael Malone had got a chance to try the ARPAnet during a class visit to Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). Secondly, the San Jose Mercury News had been using email and bulletin boards as part of their business process and offering since the 1980s. Yet Malone’s past familiarity gave him little idea of what was likely to lie ahead. His elevated access as a journalist to the great and the good of the technology sector didn’t help either; in fact Bill Gates made a similar error to Malone in the first edition of his book The Road Ahead. Gates worked very quickly with the publishers to get out a second edition that corrected his mistake. But I think Malone’s inability to see and his intellectual honesty about that is instructive for all of us
    • While he had the chance to meet Doug Engelbart, Malone wrongly assumed that Engelbart was an eccentric inventor trying to get people to pay him his dues for technology that got bypassed. So, Engelbart doesn’t feature in The Big Score at all, despite The Mother of All Demos
    • Intel’s Andy Grove, who Malone now considers to be the most important business man in the history of Silicon Valley doesn’t get a prominent role in the book. That’s not so bad as Andy Grove managed to write a lot in his own right, notably Only The Paranoid Survive

    The Big Score on excess, greed and ethics

    Malone’s The Big Score like Robert X Cringely’s later work Accidental Empires wastes no time in showing Silicon Valley’s underbelly. At the time of writing there was a large amount of industrial espionage happening between hardware companies, many start-ups were being developed by greedy experienced executives and top performing workers were burning out by trying to keep up self medicating with drugs and stimulants and alcohol to take the edge off. Something you still see today with engineers using Adderall to help them focus.

    In this respect The Big Score is very different from other works that cover this era such as Chip War, Fire In The Valley and Where Wizards Stay Up Late.

    The Big Score by Michael Malone tells the tale of Silicon Valley before the Apple Macintosh and the large media companies of Yahoo!, Excite, Alphabet or Meta et al.

    While the counterculture did play a substantial role in the PC revolution, much of early Silicon Valley was about trying to accumulate wealth and while the successful are lionised for a while; most people did middling to ok at best. There was a work culture of hard working and hard drinking which meant that marriages didn’t last. The first barrier that Silicon Valley broke through was one of class, if you were bright and successful enough, class didn’t matter.

    Robert X. Cringely in his later book Accidental Empires talked about how Bob Noyce (a key player at Shockley Labs, Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel) was rejected from joining a local country club despite his business success. Class still existed, but not within these companies to the same extent. Michael Malone in The Big Score conveys how the culture clash over class between its workers and those who funded it, ripped apart Silicon Valley and created an explosion of semiconductor companies that dominated from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s and beyond.

    While Silicon Valley provided a greater egalitarian opportunity for the corporate man who worked there, women are seldom mentioned.

    (Aside: At the start of my career in agency life I had LSI Logic as a client. LSI Logic was founded by Wilf Corrigan a veteran of Fairchild Semiconductor. Even then at the height of the dot com bubble; ‘real men’ were engineers or salesmen and women worked as secretaries or in public relations. As the company had grown their female corporate marketing manager had been pushed out of the headquarters and to the far flung European office, which was the smallest part of the business were she could do the least damage. I still remember how awkward it was to see her treated with distain by her main colleagues. She had many faults, but the treatment lacked decorum and discretion. This kind of culture is fostered from the top of an organisation down. Despite all this she had still been granted shares in the business and a good deal of share options meaning she could be comfortably well off and fund various American christian endeavours.

    I even got to meet Corrigan, the son of a Liverpool docker came across as a Silicon Valley analogue of Michael Gambon’s character in The Layer Cake – rich but not sophisticated. Someone who mistook his mix of hard work and good fortune as a divine right.)

    While much is said about the egalitarian nature of David Packard, William Hewlett and Bob Noyce, they still had the social conservatism of Leave It To Beaver. Malone eulogised Hewlett and Packard in his later award winning business history Bill and Dave. The Big Score portrays them with a clearer eye. But Bill and Dave came out later on when Silicon Valley was starting to lose its moral compass. H-P under Carly Fiorina had ruptured the H-P way and was an indicator of what was to come – so Malone recast them as mythical heroes.

    Silicon Valley soap opera

    Malone’s description in The Big Score of the break away of talent from Shockley Labs and Fairchild Semiconductor is accurate. But the story itself is engaging in the same way that the family drama of the soap operas that my Mam used to follow.

    Stripe Press

    Stripe Press have given The Big Score a much needed needed design refresh. They typography makes it easy to read and the book is immensely well read. The hardback cover, binding and paper are high quality for a book of this nature. It is the kind of book that will be an heirloom that can be handed on down to the next generation. If not for the value, for the historical knowledge. Beyond the self penned introduction at the front, the contents of the book itself were left alone.

    Recommendation?

    If you are student of Silicon Valley history or have read Malone’s other books The Big Score is a great complementary read. The republishing of the book by Stripe Press is timely given the fads of the metaverse and NFTs that have swept through the technology sector recently.

    However if you wanted one book to start you off on your Silicon Valley journey, I wouldn’t recommend it. I would suggest that you read the following books before getting to The Big Score. Its not because these books are better, but that they provide a better initial entry point into the world of Silicon Valley and its history. Malone’s book was written relatively early one and other books can provide a better basic knowledge framework because of The Big Score‘s age:

    • Accidental Empires by Robert X Cringely was something so different to what I’d been used to. I’d worked in industry, but hadn’t experienced anything like this. There are similarly great books to read like Fire In The Valley and Where Wizards Stay Up Late – but they aren’t as entertaining to read as Accidental Empires and pull their punches in order to be seen as ‘serious’ business books
    • Architects Of The Web by Robert H. Reid. He wrote up the profiles of many of the pioneer web companies including Netscape, Real Networks, Marimba, Yahoo! and Silicon Graphics. It’s helpful to revisit the future the way it was envisaged during the late 1990s and see how the future has changed. 
    • Bill and Dave by Michael Malone tells the story of Silicon Valley pioneers Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Nowadays people think of them as just a brand of laptops or printers. But Hewlett Packard was much more. They pioneered the Silicon Valley start-up, their successor businesses Agilient, HPE and HP. Bill and Dave’s biggest impact was in Silicon Valley culture and lore. They built the company in a garage and started the egalitarian culture with The HP Way.
    • Chip War by Chris Miller. Miller is a think tank wonk and history professor who tells the story of the semiconductor industry specifically through its relationship with the military industrial complex and its relationship with national security. Chip War deservedly was recommended as one of the FT’s business book’s of the year 2022.
    • Dogfight by Fred Vogelstein. Fred Vogelstein is an experienced journalist who most notably covered the technology sector for Wired magazine. If your familiarity with the tech industry starts with Google and Apple. Dogfight is a great entry point.
    • The New, New Thing by Michael Lewis. Pretty much every book that Lewis writes will compare unfavourably to his first book Liar’s Poker, but that book doesn’t mean that The New, New Thing shouldn’t be read. The book profiles Jim Clark, who founded Netscape and Silicon Graphics and aimed at the time to turn the healthcare industry with a new project. Lewis is capturing Clark when he is past his prime from a creative point of view. What Lewis does capture is the optimism and hubris in Silicon Valley that it can change anything.
    • What The Dormouse Said by John Markoff. John Markoff is one of the titans of reporting on the business of technology alongside Steve Lohr and Walt Mossberg. In this book Markoff draws a line between the counterculture of the 1960s and the personal computing revolution through to Web 2.0

    More on The Big Score here.

  • ChatGPT + more things

    ChatGPT

    The buzz in part of our office about Midjourney has subsided to be replaced by buzz about ChatGPT, rather than Christmas. ChatGPT is is a software application used to conduct an on-line chat conversation via text. ChatGPT was considered to be a superior example of a chatbot down to the power of machine learning used in creating the content.

    I was curious about how good ChatGPT actually was given the following commentary from The Verge:

    The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good and the answers are very easy to produce

    Vincent, J. (2 December, 2022) AI-generated answers temporarily banned on coding Q&A site Stack Overflow | The Verge

    The Verge article was interesting. Most of the places where chatbots might be needed: providing customer services, regulated industries like finance would suffer from confident, but incorrect answers being provided to customers.

    Secondly, media outlets decided that ChatGPT was a potential Google challenger, with outlets like CNBC comparing the two and equity analysts at Morgan Stanley feeling the need to come out and say that ChatGPT was not likely to replace Google.

    ChatGPT
    Sample of conversation

    Google’s innovators dilemma

    What became quickly apparent Google’s narrative about being an innovator full stop, has been threatened by ChatGPT. Google as an incumbent is now stymied by Clayton Christiansen’s Innovator’s Dilemma. Google is no longer cool, its conversation related products are seen to be behind the curve and the company is seen as being too big to out-innovate itself easily.

    So what’s ChatGPT like to use?

    I have shared a picture of some of the better responses I had from the service. I started off with a certain amount of ambition. I asked it about who it felt might win the current war in Ukraine. I found that the training set of data used to power it was finished in 2021. This was obviously done to filter out the worst of the internet from the content, getting around rather than solving problems that previous chatbots have suffered from like Microsoft’s Tay project.

    Eventually I managed to get on to safer ground for ChatGPT. It answered questions about what an AI winter was, whether fuzzy logic is a form of artificial intelligence (it is), whether Baye’s Theorem was a form of AI (it isn’t per se, but it is employed to solve some AI problems there similar to the kind of uncertainty challenges fuzzy logic solves.

    ChatGPT said that AI (like Bayes Theorem) could be used to provide a solution to buffer bloat – which massively increases the latency on data networks.

    I found out quantum computers could make an optimised AI more power efficient and the business expert systems popularised in large companies during the 1980s and 1990s were analogous to modern day AI systems.

    It reminded me a lot of content I had read on Summly, the mobile news app that mashed up an AI service API with news sources to summarise articles. This start-up was bought by Yahoo! a decade ago.

    In this respect, I do wonder whether ChatGPT is truly the quantum leap forward that many seem to think, or is it merely a reminder of how well understood technology can be applied in different ways?

    China

    Volkswagen’s Skoda considers withdrawing from China – media report | Reuters – Czech carmaker Skoda Auto, part of Volkswagen, is considering withdrawing from China and will make a final decision next year. The re-orientation towards India is interesting

    How China aims to avoid the curse of increased longevity & ill health – Financial Times – Partner Content by Ping An Insurance – Ping An Insurance has a health management model or concierge service as they like to position it

    Learning from the Soviet Collapse – by Jordan Schneider – China’s Marxist Leninist version of Andy Grove’s book Only The Paranoid Survive – all of which implies at weakness at the heart of the CCP; its own members…

    Defending democracy in an era of state threats – GOV.UK 

    Consumer behaviour

    Gen Z: progressive, illiberal or both? 

    Culture

    Why we’re doing this – Flickr Foundation – interesting on the future of Flickr Commons and good to see George Oates involved

    Economics

    Can India build a military strong enough to deter China? | Financial Times – I think that this is down to the lead China has in manufacturing capability and innovation as much as anything else. There is a substantial risk that India could lose many of its northern provinces in theory. In theory being the operative phrase here. Ukraine has show what’s possible with people fighting for their homes. It makes more sense for India to think about assymmetric and grey zone tactics at scale to bleed China’s financial and human lifeblood. From hacking well in advance of a conflict, to militias trained and equipped for guerrilla actions allowing for attack in depth once China crosses the threshold.

    China boosts military aid to Africa as concerns over Russia grow – Nikkei Asia – China has kept its forces from direct engagement in crises in Africa as part of its noninterference policy, it has also taken an increasingly high profile in United Nations peacekeeping missions. It has sent more than 1,000 troops, police and specialists to oil-rich South Sudan, for example. “When Chinese interests were threatened by insurgencies in Nigeria, China issued a statement, as it still lacks the military commitment. This can, however, change in the future,” Ali said. Experts say China is more focused on economic and national security interests than on peacebuilding. Beijing prefers strategies centered on development that help to alleviate poverty and provide stable governance, but do not necessarily advance protection of individual rights and free markets. But this growth-first attitude may be counterproductive over the long term. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, China has a very close relationship with the government, but attacks in the resource-rich east of the country by a number of rebel groups pose threats to its mining interests. “Insurgencies happen as the product of social exclusion,” Nte said. “There must be a stable political climate to address economic degradation caused by the wrong policies.”

    UK economy rebounds by more than expected in October | Financial Times – the second largest contributor to growth in October was performance of the health sector in administration of vaccine boosters and flu shots, the biggest sector was construction. But construction has started to slow since then with sites halting work in November

    Globalization is Dead and No One is Listening – by Kevin Xu 

    How Putin’s technocrats saved the economy to fight a war they opposed | Financial Times – tough moral questions to be asked. However, Central Bank governor Nabiullina’s moral calculus reminds me a good deal of convicted German war criminal Albert Speer, in particular the “Speer Myth”: the perception of him as an apolitical technocrat responsible for revolutionising the German war machine. The close alliance with Iran should allow both countries to pool expertise in sanctions busting.

    Meanwhile air travel is going great guns according to airlines like Lufthansa who are bringing back their Airbus A380 jumbo jet airliners.

    Finance

    Microsoft to take 4% stake in London Stock Exchange Group | Financial Times – interesting series of cloud computing deals happening that include an equity purchase

    Health

    How docs deal with tricky situations with patients or billing | Fierce Healthcare

    Gary Jones of MediMusic says his ‘greatest ambition’ is to see music prescribed on the NHS | BW Magazine 

    Hong Kong

    Hong Kong media mogul Jimmy Lai’s sentence casts chill over relaunch, analysts say — Radio Free Asia – “If you can’t say anything anyway, then you might as well locate [your office] in mainland China,” Chow said. “Using Hong Kong as a jumping-off point to the mainland is a waste of money, because rents are much more expensive than in mainland China.” – there is also the tax aspect (expats pay much more tax in Mainland China) and a transferrable currency, but otherwise the point is pretty valid

    Hong Kong security chief accuses Google of ‘double standards’ for refusing to correct national anthem search results | South China Morning Post – Hong Kong upset that Google knows the national anthem of Hong Kong is ‘Glory to Hong Kong’ – I wonder how they will use the National Security Law in this fight?

    Ideas

    Techno-optimism for 2023 – by Noah Smith – Noahpinion 

    The great disruption has only just begun | Financial Times 

    A Vibe Shift Is Coming. Will Any of Us Survive It? – In the culture, sometimes things change, and a once-dominant social wavelength starts to feel dated. Monahan, who is 35, breaks down the three vibe shifts he has survived and observed: Hipster/Indie Music (ca. 2003–9), or peak Arcade Fire, Bloc Party, high-waisted Cheap Mondays, Williamsburg, bespoke-cocktail bars; Post-Internet/Techno Revival (ca. 2010–16), or the Blood Orange era, normcore, dressing like The Matrix, Kinfolk the club, not Kinfolk the magazine; and Hypebeast/Woke (ca. 2016–20), or Drake at his Drakest, the Nike SNKRS app, sneaker flipping, virtue signaling, Donald Trump, protests not brunch

    Innovation

    Tracking How the Event Camera Is Evolving – EE Times 

    IBM Reveals Its 433 Qubit Quantum Computer – EE Times 

    Innovative ASIC CPU Drives Record-Setting Server Performance – EE Times 

    The global microchip race: Europe’s bid to catch up | Financial Times 

    Robots set their sights on a new job: sewing blue jeans | Reuters – the economics of automation are very interesting. In markets with poor productivity i.e. the UK , people are replacing automation in warehouses and the car wash

    IBM partners with Japan’s Rapidus to make advanced chips as US recruits allies to its cause in China tech war | South China Morning Post – 2nm node process

    Canon prepares to ramp nano-imprint lithography | EE Times 

    Tracking How the Event Camera Is Evolving – EE Times 

    Ireland

    Do you recognise these iconic Irish Christmas ads? or the effect of nostalgia on Irish consumers perceptions of advertising campaigns

    Japan

    Japan scraps pacifist postwar defence strategy to counter China threat | Financial Times – this is much needed, but will be huge in terms of Japanese politics and how the country sees itself

    Legal

    China preps $143 billion chip support, goes to WTO | EE Times 

    Luxury

    5 Facts About Chanel Métiers d’Art Show in Dakar | Hypebae – apparently Chanel managed to amass an armada of Toyota Land Cruisers to put all this on.

    Luxury Watch Thefts of Rolex, Patek and Other Models Are on the Rise – Robb Report – which is why you have some UK watch collectors on YouTube talk about the ‘London watch check’ and rather than showing their timepiece have a bare wrist instead

    Luxury Daily: One-second wonder: Mr. Bags x Qeelin sells out immediately – I will never get how the HSN / QVC type format works so well in Chinese luxury sector

    You’ll own nothing (besides luxury goods) and be happy | Financial Times 

    Online

    Is Snapchat+ still being subscribed by users? / Digital Information World 

    Amazon’s heroic phase is over | Amazon Chronicles – My first theory is that capitalism doesn’t stop evolving. The evolution of the microprocessor, digital computing, the internet, the personal computer, the World Wide Web, and the tech giants that have emerged in their wake are all transforming capitalism as we experience it and the culture produced by it in ways we don’t even fully understand. These are the biggest companies in the world and the ones with the greatest impact on how we think, work, shop, and communicate. You can’t understand capitalism in the twenty-first century without understanding how technology is changing it. I think this theory is pretty uncontroversial. It’s certainly not new. My second theory is that the arc of capitalism traced by Marx and Lukács and others writing in their tradition can also be retraced on a smaller scale. Like those early modern bourgeoisie, big tech has moved from its initial chaotic and subterranean strivings, to a heroic universalist phase where it championed political and economic liberation. Now these companies are consolidating their dominance by reducing or eliminating their workforce, shifting away from consumer goods, and brokering compromises with state power.

    Taiwan considers extending TikTok ban to private sector — Radio Free Asia 

    U.S. lawmakers unveil bipartisan bid to ban China’s TikTok | Reuters – first Taiwan, now the US…

    The METAmorphosis of behavioural economics and fast data. | Human Digital 

    Security

    Recruited for Navy SEALs, many sailors wind up scraping paint | The Japan Times – is this generation snow flake, or is there something broken on SEAL unit culture? What’s not talked about in the article is unit fit and mental resilience

    Ex-U.S. pilot held in Australia faces U.S. charges over export of defence services to China | Reuters 

    Dutch chip equipment maker ASML’s CEO questions U.S. export rules on China -newspaper | Reuters 

    Fall of the house of Sergei Leontiev | Financial Times 

    This won’t help consumers trust in politicians, but the strong legal reaction might

    Web of no web

    ChinAI #206: China’s Virtual Reality Push Gets Real 

  • Disruption crisis

    The idea of the disruption crisis came from a series of conversations that I have been having in recent times and recent online news.

    disrupt_4634
    TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 Day Two – May 23, 2012 (Photo: Devin Coldewey)

    What is the disruption crisis?

    The rise of big tech such as Meta, Twitter, Google, Amazon, Bytedance, Alibaba and Tencent drove a wave of digital disruption over the past quarter century. Now the disruptors are being disrupted themselves and I think that they may precipitate a disruption crisis.

    Continuing to look to these digital disruptors is the equivalent of Jimmy Swaggart or Jim Bakker being held up as an exemplar of a good husband and faithful spouse.

    Mass lay-offs

    Others have talked about the layoffs in more depth, so I have included a video explanation.

    I started my agency career during the dot com bubble. We had going for growth at all costs. They talked about trying to move at ‘internet speed’. This was down to the go for growth funding model that drove start-ups through their angel and VC funding rounds and beyond. Common sense was often set aside. if this sounds 180 degrees away from the lean start-up model you’re not wrong.

    Product lines are being shredded

    3 things you need to do now, before Revue gets shut down | AWeber – Revue is an email newsletter platform that was acquired by Twitter and will be shut down by the end of year.

    Amazon, in Broad Cost-Cutting Review, Weighs Changes at Alexa and Other Unprofitable Units – WSJ – Amazon is apparently getting rid of its Alexa speakers, Fire streaming devices and Kindle e-readers. This seems to be a short termist approach to improving profits, at the expense of the long term.

    …Amazon made big bets on long plays, willing to sacrifice immediate profitability to boost its overall position in blue ocean markets. When Amazon’s had to play catch-up, it largely hasn’t worked: the Kindle Phone is maybe the most high-profile mistake/missed opportunity, just to name one. It’s hard to deny that this loss-leader approach has been key to Amazon’s success, although it often made the company a mystery to Wall Street. This would signify a huge shift, totally aside from the 3% of employees who will likely leave the company.

    Hacking away at the Devices and R&D divisions is the most perplexing to me. These are the sources of Amazon’s most signature successes, with the Kindle, Alexa/Echo, and Fire TV. They’re what hook customers when they’re still kids, and that customers above all associate with the company, even as they help ensure loyalty and drive their share of media purchases and retail revenue. The Kindle, like the Echo and the Fire Stick, was always supposed to be a loss leader: you sell the razor at close to cost and make your money back selling the blades. How many books has Amazon sold because of the Kindle? How many Prime subscriptions? How many impulse purchases do people make on their Echos and Fires?

    Tim Carmody, Loss Leaders. (Issue #50) Amazon Chronicles

    Consultants have taken the idea of transformative technology and scrappy startup methodologies to try and reinvent business, or facilitate digital disruption. The problem is that the examples they use as exemplars are failing, casting doubt on their doctrine and fuelling a disruption crisis in boardrooms and the consultants that advise them.

    Unilever – a cautionary tale

    For instance, I contracted at Unilever. I worked rolling out digital brand assets for their Family Brands product line. This was a line of margarines, due to organic growth it has different names in different markets:

    • Blue Band
    • Country Crock
    • Flora
    • Fruit d’Or 
    • Margarina Primavera
    • Plantta
    • Rama

    While I was doing this work, I worked closely with the Becel functional foods and Bertorelli brands. Family Brands was being put into a separate business to develop a ‘startup mentality’. The thing was Family Brands hadn’t been a startup for decades. In fact, it hadn’t been a startup since the 1870s when Antoon Jurgens branched out from trading in butter and started to manufacture margarine. His company merged with rivals Van den Bergh’s, Centra, and Schicht’s to form Margarine Unie (Margarine Union) in 1927, by which time it had a dominant position in margarine manufacturing.

    Three years later, Margarine Unie merges with Lever Brothers Limited to create Unilever and the rest was history.

    Margarine as a substitute good

    Margarine historically was a substitute product for butter. My parents (both of whom came from farming families in Ireland) used to talk about how poor children in the towns would have eaten margarine rather than butter. As a child, we might use margarine to bake a cake, but if we wanted the cake to keep a while my Granny or my Mam would only use salted butter. Despite butter (which we kept in the fridge) being so hard that it might break up the surface of the bread, we used it on our sandwiches, toast or to fry with. Margarine just wasn’t the done thing.

    One of the most damning things that my Granny once said about a friend of hers was:

    She uses margarine to make the ham sandwiches when you’re invited around for a cup of tea.

    One of the first courses that I had at university was in economics, where they used margarine as an exemplar for a substitute good.

    Healthier option

    Margarine started to be considered a healthier option due to concerns about heart disease and cholesterol. Much of this was down to Flora, invented in 1964, which contained polyunsaturated fats derived from sunflower oil. At the same time wholemeal bread started to become preferable due to the requirement for fibre in the diet.

    Yellow fats category decline

    However Although 21st century sales declined as many consumers switched to butter. This was down to changes in consumers wanting a more natural product and heart health improvising. In the five years leading to 2014, sales of margarine fell 6%, while sales of butter rose 7%.

    It was in this atmosphere that the startup narrative was fired up for Family Brands.

    The other shoe dropped when Unilever narrowly managed to fight a hostile bid from 3G Capital a couple of years after I was there. Paul Polman got rid of business lower margin businesses as an attempt to increase earnings. These were still great businesses which is why KKR were happy to take the business off Unilever’s hands.

    Unilever didn’t spin out a startup. It wasn’t disruptive thinking, it was an act of desperation to fend off takeovers or possible greenmailing. The problem with with this is Unilever now has a lot less buying power on global supplies of oils and fats needed for its ice cream, mayonnaise, food additives and personal care businesses – which was the rationale for forming Unilever in the first place.

    Foundational technologies in crisis bringing crisis

    Foundational technologies were cited as new elements that would cause digital disruption. The fall of these technologies and the companies that have championed them have fuelled this disruption crisis.

    Cloud services

    Microsoft and Amazon both saw declining sales in SaaS and related services, as businesses has less employees and needed less seats. Amazon has been cutting deep in its R&D function and devices. This means that Alexa for the hospitality industry and health sectors are likely to be borrowed time.

    Web 3.0 (blockchain, NFTs, cryptocurrency)

    Here’s what my friend Nigel Scott had to say about FTX on LinkedIn:

    There has been a lot of commentary over the weekend on the #ftx #cryptocurrency #exchange collapse

    A lot of words have been typed and spoken but in the end I think the numbers probably sum it up best

    Back in 2018 there was an estimated 200 Crypto Exchanges scattered around the globe

    Over the past 3 years an estimated 200 Crypto Exchanges have either collapsed or disappeared

    This rate of attrition is nothing new. Back in 2014 – after the Mt Gox event – it was estimated 45% of all #Crypto Exchanges had either collapsed or disappeared

    The harsh truth is the risk of failure has always been central, rather than peripheral, to the Crypto Exchange model

    Today there are almost 600 Crypto Exchanges open for business

    The only question that needs to be asked is what fraction of them will still be in business in 2023, 2024, 2025 and beyond?

    and, more importantly, what is the probability of picking a survivor, never mind a winner, in such a volatile environment? 

    Which is to say, contrary to most of the commentary I have read over the weekend, the #ftxcrash isn’t the exception, it’s the rule – what makes it exceptional is the scale, not the probability of the failure 

    Blast radius

    Meteor Crater

    One edition of the Axios Login newsletter used the headline ‘blast radius‘ describe the impact that FTX and other crypto economy problems were having on the wider Web 3.0 ecosystem of decentralised services. Creating a disruption crisis.

    This has forced El Salvador to pursue a free trade deal with China, with the Chinese government buying $21 billion dollars of Salvadoran government debt: China circles El Salvador’s economy as country edges toward crypto plunge | The Guardian 

    Less than four years before disruptive technologies had become mainstream when IBM brought a ‘better way’ of managing supply chain for Walmart by putting their heads of lettuce on the blockchain. Just writing that last sentence made me like my IQ number was dropping; but just four years ago, this was a point of validation…

    Metaverse

    Prior to Meta’s recent financial results and job cuts you had the likes of McKinsey cheerleading for the metaverse.

    With its potential to generate up to $5 trillion in value by 2030, the metaverse is too big for companies to ignore.

    Value creation in the metaverse – McKinsey & Company.

    To give you an idea of how far we are from the much vaunted metaverse, have a look at my discussion paper.

    Social media marketing

    Alphabet has seen a decline in YouTube advertising and search advertising is down by about a fifth in October. Twitter is heading towards bankruptcy as brands stopped advertising on the platform. Meta has also shown a decline in advertising revenue. Snap is doing much worse. TikTok seems to be the outlier.

    Accenture and the disruption crisis

    A quick search of Accenture and disruption yields about 628,000 results. Accenture has latched itself onto disruption in the same way that IBM glommed on to e-business during the first dot com bomb, Sun Microsystems became the ‘dot in dot com’ and the whole of the entire enterprise IT industry latched on to the millennium bug.

    Better than ‘the dot in dot com’

    Some bright minds at Accenture came up with a concept that was ownable, not time-bounded like ‘e-business’ or ‘the dot in dot com’ – you’re kind of done when everyone has a website that can do transactions of some sort.

    Sun Microsystems advert circa 2000

    Accenture welded itself to disruption with the Disruptibility Index which looks at how disruption affects different vertical markets.

    Dark thoughts

    Disruption tapped into deep negative behavioural emotions. Fear, uncertainty and doubt. As tech executive Andy Grove had constantly repeated ‘Only the Paranoid Survive‘. Disruption didn’t necessarily promise a thriving business due to sustained competitive advantage, like earlier generations of technology companies and consultancies. Instead it promised, merely survival in a globalised hostile world, with constant waves of disruption coming at the c-suite. This is the business equivalent of Adam Curtis’ video essay Oh Dearism.

    This gives your internal champions on the client side a bit more political space if their digital transformation projects doesn’t hit all the goals that we would like it to hit.

    Of course all of this could come off the wheels if a great disruption crisis hit, wouldn’t it?

    The disruption crisis doesn’t just toll for Accenture

    It would be remiss of me to just single out Accenture. They have been part of a much bigger movement across professional services, finance, the technology sector and academia. Here are some of the people across academia have had a similar idea to Accenture; they’ve written books like these over the past 10 years or so:

    It has been the fodder of countless conferences around the world. For example here’s a representative of Euromonitor International speaking at a conference of the International Homeware Association (IHA) on digital disruption.

    I am not putting this in here to make fun of the IHA – it is the professional association of a market worth 80 billion dollars a year globally and deserves our respect. Globalisation has centralised a lot of homeware production in the Far East due to globalisation over the past quarter of a century; but it still plays a central, if less visible part in our lives today.

    Instead I am using the IHA as an exemplar of how digital disruption has pervaded all parts of the economy as a central organising principle in modern business thinking.

    That central position in corporate thought means that the disruption crisis becomes much more alarming. Which makes the advice Judy Estrin‘s 2008 book Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy even more urgent

  • Measure What Matters by John Doerr

    I was recommended Measure What Matters by my friend and fellow ex-Yahoo Cathy Ma. Cathy found the book useful in her way through managing teams. In Measure What Matters, John Doerr explains the idea of objectives and key results or OKRs.

    Measure What Matters

    About John Doerr

    If you’ve worked in or around the Silicon Valley technology space from the PC age through to the 2010s Doerr’s name will have a passing familiarity to you. Doerr was a salesman at Intel in the 1970s, realised that there were too many good people ahead of him and took an over in venture capital instead. Doerr was involved in funding:

    • Compaq – Compaq kicked off the market for ‘IBM compatible’ PCs and made the first portable ‘IBM compatible’ PC. Soon after IBM was no longer the dominant player in personal computing leading to the Wintel duopoly. Compaq eventually offered a full range of large servers, workstations and PC when it acquired Digital Equipment Corporation and Tandem Computing. Compaq was in turn bought by H-P
    • Netscape – Netscape Communications mainstreamed the internet browser, email client, web servers and email servers. The server software lives on in Oracle’s product line via the Netscape – Sun Microsystems alliance. The browser indirectly carried on through an open source project Mozilla
    • Symantec – Symantec started off as a natural language processing company in the early 1980s, it became famous for its Mac antivirus software and then went into the DOS and Windows market after merging with Peter Norton Computing. It now has a consumer facing business called NortonLifeLock and the business focused software part of the business was sold to Broadcom
    • Sun Microsystems – Sun Microsystems started off as a UNIX workstation manufacturer. Over time they built up a healthy server and software business that supported much of the infrastructure of the web. They were instrumental in the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix – which influenced parts of the macOS that I am typing this post on, RISC processors in your smartphone, thin client computing like Google Docs, and virtualised computing that is instrumental for cloud computing. Sun Microsystems workstations were popular with investment banks, telecoms companies and internet startups bought their servers. The company’s decline can be marked by the dot com crash. Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and their technology lives on
    • drugstore.com – was a first generation e-tailer in health and beauty products. Walgreens bought the business in 2011, and shut down the website five years later.
    • Amazon.com – needs no introduction
    • Intuit – Intuit sells financial software in the US. TurboTax helps Americans do their tax returns, Mint provides a personal finance dashboard for consumers and QuickBooks is accounting software for small and medium sized businesses
    • Macromedia – Macromedia was a software company that developed tools for creatives and programmers. It was eventually acquired by Adobe. Macromedia products live on in the Adobe product range
    • Google – the search engine.

    About OKRs

    For all of the companies that Doerr has funded he has advocated OKRs. The idea of OKRs came from Doerr’s colleague at Intel Andy Grove. OKRs are a collaborative process. The idea is that it is used with teams and the individuals who make up the teams. Management seeks to set challenging, ambitious goals with measurable results. The key results in OKRs are how you track progress towards the objective, create alignment within the team, and encourage engagement around measurable goals. They are also supposed to flex with circumstance, which is one of the key points of separation from Peter Drucker’s management by objectives (MBO).

    The first part of the book Measure What Matters explains the origin and process behind OKRs.

    You can get everything that you need in the first two chapters covering 35 pages.

    The Cult of OKR

    The rest of the book is a series of self aggrandising endorsements of OK from senior executives who are OKR advocates:

    • Larry Page of Alphabet
    • Bill Davidow of Intel
    • Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook
    • Bill Gates on The Gates Foundation

    It crosses the line for me and almost reads like a high water mark for Silicon Valley hubris; Doerr’s book was published in 2018. Three years later and:

    • Bill Gates is in the most trouble he has been in since the Judge Jackson ruling
    • Alphabet and Facebook are being assailed by regulators around the world
    • Intel looks like a shadow of its former self. Its fabrication process are three years behind competitors. Customers are designing their own chips and AMD is eating their lunch in high performance processors

    Secondly, Doerr’s book, whilst acknowledging Andy Groves role of OKR creator; fails to acknowledge that Andy gave a good descriptor of OKRs in his 1983 book High Output Management.

    I think one of the reasons that I am not that keen on Measure What Matters, is that the book doesn’t work for culturally as a non-American. Instead I would recommend Andy Grove’s own book High Output Management. More books that might be of interest here.

More posts