1. Couldn’t happen to a nicer billionaire
What’s interesting about the European Commission’s charges against Twitter (which I refuse to call X because it’s a stupid name) is the focus on the blue checks' policy. Everyone knew this was a bad idea driven solely by Musk’s hatred of anyone more fascinating than him. The chickens have well and truly come home to roost – at a cost of up to 6% of the company’s global revenue.
2. The end of the cheap money era
If you’re a football fan, you might know the name Clearlake Capital for its ownership of Chelsea – and the fact that it’s spent getting on for £1bn on players. All that money has to come from somewhere and like all private equity companies, Clearlake has piled a lot of debt on to its companies. The era of cheap money is over, so it’s finding it harder to follow the same model.
3. The toxic nature of the OpenAI board seat
Not that long ago, Microsoft was proudly talking about its “observer” seat on the OpenAI board. Now it’s decided it’s “no longer necessary”. I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that both the EU and US authorities have been looking at the relationship between the two companies with interest. The tech pundits will be along to tell us how this is stifling innovation or some such real soon now.
4. And speaking of private equity
Charlie Mullins, who sold Pimlico Plumbers to a private equity company, now has regrets. I’m not surprised: the private equity model is based on “efficiencies”, which can be translated as “worse services”, and Pimlico became successful because of its customer service. Of course, it doesn’t matter to the PE companies: they can always flip the business to some other sucker further down the line, after they have drained it through special dividends.
5. Little tech (not to be confused with small tech)
Techno-optimism is so last week. Now, the odious Andreessen is promoting the idea of “little tech” which, of course, means the kind of startups that A16Z invests in. And of course, there’s no need for those companies to actually grow: the aim is to flip them to one of the big tech firms before the need to make a profit actually arrives. I’m actually glad that the thing which some smart analysts once told me didn’t happen – VC companies investing in businesses solely to flip them – is now a part of the business they’re happy to admit is the goal.
6. AI slop
Christina Warren noticed something odd: her byline was appearing against articles which she hadn’t written. It turns out that TUAW, which she used to write for a good decade and a bit ago, had been acquired by the kind of company which churns out AI-generated crap content, and they had been using the bylines of people who used to work there. Related: I have no idea who owns some of the domains I used to work on, including macuser.co.uk, which doesn’t appear to have moved to Future alongside the old print product.
7. Piracy is back, baby
Wendy Grossman – who has been writing a weekly column on the internet for longer than some of you have been alive – has written an excellent piece on the second coming of internet piracy. As Wendy notes, the emergence of piracy as a more mainstream activity comes at the same moment that streaming services have started to get pricier and worse. The removal of decades of Comedy Central clips is teaching a new generation that you can’t trust content will remain online. There is a reason I have a couple of 4Tb drives attached to a local machine, kids.
8. RIP Bruce
I missed that Bruce Bastien had died. Before Microsoft used tying, bundling and other illegal behaviour to destroy all its competitors in the 1990s, I used WordPerfect rather than Word, and it still offers features which you can’t get anywhere else. Technically, it still exists, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Related: I’m amazed to find you can still buy Quattro Pro too.
9. Switching
You can now easily transfer your images from iCloud to Google Photos. Why would you want to do that? Because if you have many images stored only in Apple’s cloud, downloading them all and then exporting using the Photos app is a horrible experience. Unless you like watching Photos’ memory usage balloon to more than 64Gb and then take down your whole system, of course. Google Photos, on the other hand, lets you download them all from the browser thanks to Google Takeout.
10. No politics allowed
When big tech platforms talk about not allowing political speech, what they almost always mean is “no political speech we don’t like”. And when Meta says it about Threads, what it means is “no marginalised people here, please.” Kudos to MacStories for publishing this.
