Ben Evans is annoyed with LinkedIn: LinkedIn fails to hit absolutely basic product features that should have been in there 5 years ago, both on mobile and desktop. Instead, the core features get buried under successive layers of mediocre non-core products, the latest being a flood of me-too news aggregation that’s creeping through the product […]
May 2013
Change for Change’s Sake
iPhone OS was, but for copy-and-paste, a perfect OS (bear with me here – assume this is true). It handled every function the iPhone was expected to do in an incredibly elegant and polished way, and it’s not an accident that much of the core functionality has gone unchanged for six years. The tech press […]
Adobe’s Subscription Model & Why Platform Owners Should Care
It’s difficult to overstate the significance of Adobe’s announcement that all of their products will be solely available through Creative Cloud. No longer can you buy packaged version of Photoshop, for example, that are yours forever. Instead you can subscribe to different individual apps or suites. What makes this so interesting is that while companies […]
The Humpty Dumpty PC
This has been making the rounds on Twitter (the picture was first posted on the Facebook page of W&CIE): It’s a powerful image, and accurate. Interestingly, though, the iPad and other appliance-like devices have actually had the opposite effect on non-mobile-phone computing. Many of the activities one used to do on a general-purpose personal computer […]
Jony Ive is not a Graphic Designer
Jony Ive, at a talk I was fortunate to attend a few years ago (sorry, no linkable write-up exists): One of the things that’s interesting about design [is that] there’s a danger, particularly in this industry, to focus on product attributes that are easy to talk about. You go back 10 years, and people wantedSubscribe […]
The Week in Review – April 28-May 4, 2013
The Week In Review is a weekly digest of what I found interesting in tech over the last week. It consists of the story of the week, a summary of stratechery articles and links, a huge collection of links that I found noteworthy (plus commentary), and my favorite tweets of the week. I post this […]
HTC Stalls
HTC’s 1Q earnings were, as expected, terrible. From The Next Web: The Taiwanese company reported net income after tax of $2.88 million (NT$85 million) on $1.45 billion (NT$42.8 billion) in total sales for the first quarter of 2013. That’s in line with the unaudited results for 1Q 2013 HTC announced in April. HTC’s gross margin […]
The Intel Opportunity
A new CEO has taken over Intel. Their core business, upon which the company has been built, is floundering. Does the new CEO, who is not really new at all (he’s the current COO), have the vision to ensure Intel’s continued success? I’m not talking about Brian Krzanich, who today was promoted from COO to […]
The Truth About Windows Versus the Mac
Ben Evans wrote the article I’ve been wanting to write about why the phone market is fundamentally different than the PC market. I’m glad he did; his version is even better that what I had outlined. A quick taste: In the 1990s, the PC market was mostly a corporate market (roughly 75% of volume). Corporate […]
Thorsten Heins Is Not an Idiot, But He May Be a Fool
Thorsten Heins, in an interview with Bloomberg: “In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore,” Heins said in an interview yesterday at the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles. “Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good […]