Technology
- I read a lot, I just didn’t read a lot that was actually on the syllabus. ↩︎
- As many people have noted, the ultimate platform for augmented reality is something that is both portable (can be worn all the time) and invisible (not a huge set of goggles which get in the way of your interactions with the world. We are so far away from this in terms of technology that I would be surprised if we even have it in my lifetime (see also: fully autonomous vehicles that you can drive in).
- The price of Apple Vision is not unreasonable given the technology in it. They are not selling this at a loss, and I would expect the margins on it are similar to other Apple products, but Apple Vision is not something that can currently be made at under $1000, which is probably the sweet spot for this kind of tech.
- As with the Apple Watch, the company has a set of use cases in mind. As with the Apple Watch, these will almost certainly not be the uses that customers actually find most compelling. Expect the marketing to shift in response to what actually resonates with people.
- This represents a minor potential issue for Apple. Apple Watch was priced low enough to have quite a wide spread of customers, especially once the cheaper hardware options appeared after a year or two. Apple Vision is priced too high to get a wide range of customer types. The danger is that it will skew too heavily towards highly-affluent customers, and they kinds of uses they make of devices, for Apple to get much insight into what the real uses of Apple Vision are. Apple doesn’t do much testing with real users (even under NDA) before products are released. That means real-world feedback is vital.
- The criticisms that people have made about the battery life are really not that relevant. No one is going to use this wandering around. You’re going to mostly have your behind in a chair. I’ve done a lot of VR demos when moving and nothing breaks the “reality” of the app you’re using than trying to do much in the physical world. Yes, the passthrough video means you can do this. But trust me, you won’t.
- It’s a shame that you can’t have multiple Mac “monitors” open at the same time. But you can have multiple apps, so I would guess quite a few of the things you want to keep open on multiple monitors will devolve to native apps.
- It’s a bigger shame Apple has chosen to only have an App Store model for software. The lack of hackability of the platform won’t matter to most people, but it does matter to me. This isn’t a market of customers who need the same level of “protection” as on a smartphone, so the justification that all apps need to be checked for malware doesn’t exist on this platform. This was a chance for Apple to break with the past. It’s chosen not to do so.
- I wonder if, strategically, Apple has ended up “skating to where the puck was” rather than where it’s going to be. It’s taken so long to get Apple Vision out – by some reports, perhaps ten years – that the interest in and relevance of VR and AR has died down. VR’s use cases have mostly boiled down to games. AR is still not really a possibility, at least not in its ultimate form.
Elon Musk knows nothing
Opinion | I ran Twitter’s civic integrity team. Elon Musk knows nothing about how elections are run.:
Musk also called it “weird” that Dominion voting machines were supposedly uncommon in much of the country, but used in key precincts like Philadelphia and Arizona’s Maricopa County. “Doesn’t that seem like a heck of a coincidence?” he asked.
The answer is “no,” because this “coincidence” is a myth. First, Musk’s implication that Dominion Voting Systems has technology only in strategically important locations is easily disprovable. The voting technology marketplace in the U.S. is in fact highly concentrated, and Dominion is one of the top two vendors in the U.S., with a market share of approximately 40%. There is no basis to suggest that Dominion has somehow cherry-picked only strategic jurisdictions.
I’m unsure whether Musk is so incredibly off the charts dense that he will believe anything he reads online, or he just doesn’t care even slightly about the truth as long as what he wants to happen – a government by Trump, which is pliable to his will - happens.
One of the things which makes me believe he’s incredibly stupid is that is he had any knowledge of history, he would know that when you elect an authoritarian demagogue – which is what Trump is – they very rarely fail to bite the hands of those who brought them to power.
Ten Blue Links "my god, what have I done?" edition
1. Well who could possibly have seen this coming?
I wrote a while ago that the era of major levels of affiliate revenue for publishers was going to come to an end within the next three to five years. Generative AI writing means both that Google is likely to become a sea of slop, and that anyone with a search engine – especially Google – is going to cream off the best quality search results for itself.Amazon is taking this a step further by using generative AI to do product recommendations on site. Given that a large number of searches for products begin on Amazon anyway, this is more bad news for anyone who makes money from sending traffic towards the Seattle company. And as users get more and more exposed to using conversation to hone down what they want, this is going to get worse for publishers who focus on “an article” as the canonical way of recommending products.
The truth is that articles have never been brilliant at recommending the right solution for any individual. For example, the answer to “what car is right for me” has always depended on your use of it. Conversational agents using good quality data will be a better solution in the long run.
2. Turkeys, meet Christmas
Yes, I know that advertising revenue is toast, but if you are a major publisher and you’re giving OpenAI the rights to mine your content, you are silly. The sum of money they’re paying is never going to go up: and when your licensing deal ends, they will have used everything you have ever done to train a model which can recreate your style of content in seconds. Golf, as they say, clap.3. Possible sign of the end times: I agree with DHH
David Heinemeier Hansson is not on my Christmas card list. He’s one of those techbros for whom the phrase “arrogant asshat” is entirely appropriate. But for once, I’m going to agree wholeheartedly with something he wrote: Automattic demanding a tithe from WP Engine is a violation of the ideals of open source software, reduces trust in it, and in my view shows that Matt Mullenweg’s “principles” begin and end at maintaining control over WordPress.4. Where all the Chief Metaverse Officers gone?
Good question. My bet is the B Ark.5. Oh boy, Roblox is toast
Where “toast” means “full of child grooming”. Ouch.6. Quote of the week
The truth is the news media is effectively in the tank for Trump, sanewashing his literal nonsense, outright lies, and violence-inspiring hate speech against even legal immigrants. But our major political news media remains so hyper-focused on appearing not to favor one political side over the other that it’s completely lost sight of what ought to be their north star: the truth. John Gruber, “Why Is Jack Smith’s Unsealed Motion, Outlining Trump’s Criminal Actions to Overturn the 2020 Election, Not the Top Story?”
7. Elon, phone home (from Mars)
I increasingly wonder why Elon Musk is bothering trying to establish himself on Mars, and not just because it looks like a complete dump up there. (Seriously, if you think that’s beautiful, I have around a hundred thousand disused quarries I’d love to show you right here on Earth.) The ever-wonderful Marina Hyde, wondering what reality Musk occupies.
8. I’m shocked, shocked I tell you that lovely Google would do this
Yeah no of course I’m not. Turns out that Google Pixel phones give it your location, email address and more every fifteen minutes, without consent. And no, before you say something, using an iPhone isn’t much a miracle cure.9. This stuff matters
I could have written a WordPress special edition this time out. But I wondered if that would be too “insider baseball” for most people.But a big chunk of the internet runs on WordPress. Publishers use it a lot. It’s become the IBM of web servers: “no one ever got fired for recommending WordPress”. And the hold-outs in the publishing space who have had their own bespoke software or used something else appear to be dwindling every year.
So WordPress matters, to a degree that few other software platforms do. It became popular in part because it was open source, so anyone could customize it and bend it to their will, and because so many people used it that it was easy to support and find developers for. It saw off semi-forgotten closed source rivals.
If you want a summary then Mathew Ingram’s article is a good place to go. Mathew has written something which encapsulates the feeling that I think many people have: profound disappointment in Mat Mullenweg’s behaviour, in his refusal to understand that being both the CEO of WordPress.com and the effective owner of WordPress.org places him in a position which needs to be handled sensitively. Using WordPress.org to attack a commercial rival of his company means it “now looks like the CEO of a multibillion-dollar corporation is using his control of a theoretically open-source foundation to extort money from a competitor.” That is unacceptable.
10. A hole is a hole
“There is no such thing as a magic hole that only good guys can use”. Wendy Grossman has spent a long time pointing out that if you build a backdoor in a system to let “good guys” in law enforcement use, you’re opening the same thing for people who you would really rather not let into systems. And so it goes.Ten Blue Links, literary salon Edition
1. Apple’s built in apps can do (almost) everything
One of the characteristics of hardcore nerdery is the tendency to over engineer your systems. People spend a lot of time creating systems, tinkering with them, making them as perfect as possible, only to abandon them a few years down the line when some new shiny hotness appears.I’m as guilty of this as the next nerd, but at least I’m aware of my addiction. It’s one of the reasons why I have spent time avoiding getting sucked into the word of Notion, because I can see myself losing days (weeks) to tinkering, all the while getting nothing done.
That said, if you are going to create an entire workflow management system and you’re in the word of Apple, you could do a lot worse than take a leaf out of Joan Westenberg’s book and use all Apple’s first party apps. They have now got to the point where they are superficially simple, but contain a lot of power underneath.
The downside is it’s an almost certain way of trapping yourself in Apple’s ecosystem for the rest of time. Yes, Apple’s services – which lie behind the apps – use standards and have the ability to export, but not all of them, and for how long?
It’s a trade off, and from my perspective not one that really works for me right now. But if it does for you, then it’s a good option (and better than Notion).
2. Juno removed from the App Store
AKA “why I do not like any company, no matter how well intentioned, to have a monopoly on software distribution for a platform.” Christian Selig created a YouTube player for the Apple Vision Pro. It doesn’t block ads or do anything which could be regarded as dubious. But Google claimed it was using its trademarks, and Apple removed it.Why is this problematic? Because it’s setting Apple up as a judge in a legal case. YouTube could, and should, have gone to a judge if it believed it had a legal case for trademark violation. That’s what judges are for. Instead, probably because it knew that it wouldn’t win a case like that, it went to Apple. Apple (rightly) doesn’t want to get involved in trademark disputes, so it shrugged and removed the app.
This extra-legal application of law is one of the most nefarious impacts of App Store monopolies. And if it continues to be allowed, it will only get worse.
3. The horrible descent of Matt Mullenweg
You will be aware of the conflict between WordPress — by which we mean Matt Mullenweg, because according to Matt he is WordPress — and WPEngine. I have many opinions on this which I will, at some point, get down to writing. The most important one is simple: if you make an open source product under the GPL, you don’t get to dictate to anyone how they use it and don’t get to attempt to punish them for not contributing “enough”. Heck, you don’t get to decide what “enough” looks like.The whole thing has brought out the worst in Mullenweg, as evidenced in his attacks on Kellie Peterson. Peterson, who is a former Automattic employee, offered to help anyone leaving WordPress find opportunities. Mullenweg decided this was attacking him, and claimed this was illegal. I don’t know about you, but when a multi-millionaire starts to throw around words like “tortuous interference” I pay attention.
As with many of that generation of California ideologists Mullenweg appears to have decided that he knows best, now and always. Yes, private equity companies that use open source projects and contribute nothing back are douchebags, but they’re douchebags who are doing something that the principles of open source explicitly allow them to do. Mullenweg’s apparent desire to be the emperor of WordPress is worrying.
4. OpenAI raises money, still isn’t a business
Ed Zitron wrote an excellent piece this week on the crazy valuation and funding round which OpenAI just closed, pointing out that (1) ChatGPT loses money on every customer, and (2) there is no way to use scale to change this: the company is going to keep losing money on every customer as models get more compute-hungry. Neither Moore’s Law nor the economies of scale which made cloud services of the past profitable are going to come riding to the rescue.I think Ed’s right — and it’s important to note, as Satya Nadella did, that LLMs are moving into the “commodity” stage — but one other thing to note is that many of the more simple things which people use LLMs for are being pushed from cloud to edge. Apple’s “Apple Intelligence” is one example of this, but Microsoft is also pushing a lot of the compute down to the device level in the ARM-based Copilot PCs.
This trend should alleviate some of the growth issues that OpenAI has, but it’s a double-edged sword because it makes it less likely that someone will need to use ChatGPT, and so even less likely to need to pay OpenAI.
5. Why I love Angela Carter
I think I first read Angela Carter during my degree, one of the few books that I bothered to read for my literature modules1. This piece includes possibly my favourite quote from her: “Okay, I write overblown, purple, self-indulgent prose. So fucking what?”And the point is: sometimes it’s fine not to be subtle. Sometimes it’s fine to be overblown. Sometimes the story demands it, like a steak needs to be juicy.
6. And speaking of writers I love
I can’t tell you enough to just go and read M John Harrison. Climbers is sometimes regarded as his best novel, and this essay on why it’s the best book written about 21st century male loneliness despite being written in 1989 captures a lot of it. I like the line from Robert Macfarlane’s introduction: “To Harrison, all life is alien”. Amen to that.7. No really this week is all lit, all the time
Olivia Laing is another writer that makes me salivate when I read her. Like Harrison and Carter, her prose is as good as her fiction, and her recent book The Garden Against Time – an account of restoring a garden to glory – is one of the best yet. If you need any further persuading, you should read this piece in the New Yorker.8. Down in Brighton? Like books?
Next weekend is the best-named literary festival in the world down in Brighton. The Coast is Queer includes loads of brilliant sessions including queer fantastical reimaginings, the incredible Julia Armfield on world building, Juno Dawson’s trans literary salon, and the unmissable David Hoyle. I’m going, you should go.9. Harlan the terrible
Like Cory Doctorow, I grew up worshipping Harlan Ellison. And like Cory, as I’ve grown older I have see that Harlan was an incredibly complicated person. Cory has written a great piece (masquerading as just one part of a linkblog) which not only looks at Harlan, warts and all, but also talks about the genesis of the story he contributed to the – finally finished! – Last Dangerous Visions.10. Argh Mozilla wai u doo this?
No Mozilla, no, online advertising does not need “improving… through product and infrastructure”. Online advertising needs to understand that surveillance-based ads were always toxic and the whole thing needs to be torn up. I agree with Jamie Zawinski: Mozilla should be “building THE reference implementation web browser, and being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.”To be clear: I think Mozilla’s goals are laudable, in the sense that at the moment the choice for people is either accept being tracked to a horrendous degree or just block almost every ad and tracker. But you can’t engineer your way around the advertising industry’s rapacious desire for data. It’s that industry which needs to change, not the technology.
Ten Blue Links “reinventing drink ordering” Edition
1. Inventing the future
If there is a book about Apple, I have probably read it. On my first day working at the company in 1989 I was given the obligatory copy of then-CEO John Sculley’s Odyssey: From Pepsi to Apple. After that, I devoured as much as I could.
I don’t think I have read a book like John Buck’s Inventing the Future, though. It’s getting on for 500 pages of interviews, history and anecdotes about Apple’s Advanced Technology Group, and I highly recommend it if you want to hear stories which haven’t been told before about Apple. I really wish it had an index, but it’s still well worth the money.
2. Apple’s web video mojo
Durig a conversation about Apple QuickTime, Kevin Marks pointed me at this article he wrote back in 2006 on why the company was losing its web video mojo. Kevin was right then – Apple could have owned web video – and someone really needs to sit down and write the history of that part of the company’s story. How did they mess up? As Kevin puts it “they invented pop-up web ads, and put one in before playing any web QT movie to sell the 'Pro' version of the player. They crippled the QT Player to remove the editing features unless you paid - even for the Mac users who had had the benefit before.” A lesson for today’s Apple, too.
3. Future is cleaning house
IMore, the 16 year old site which was born in the wake of the iPhone, is to close down. It’s not the only one of Future’s tech brands to be shuttered: AnandTech, the technology brand which had one of the best reputations in the world, is also going although its archive will stay online for the foreseeable future. I’m not surprised – while both sites were well regarded, they were not a great fit for the affiliate-led strategy that Future has been pursuing for many years (where it was ahead of most publishers).
4. “Pray we don’t alter the deal further”
One of the reasons I loathe – and I really do mean that – the current generation of tech giants is their ability to lock down markets for software and pull the rug out from under existing application developers. The latest example is iA, which has effectively killed off the Android version of its wonderful writing app iA Writer after Google changed the rules regarding letting applications access Google Drive. “In order to get our users full access to their Google Drive on their devices, we now needed to pass a yearly CASA (Cloud Application Security Assessment) audit. This requires hiring a third-party vendor like KPMG.” Yes, that’s right: pay an auditor maybe a couple of months of revenue in order to access cloud storage. But it’s not just Google: Apple has the same control, as iA point out in a footnote.
5. Halide rejected from the App Store
No really, it’s not just Google. After seven years, and despite being featured in the iPhone 16 keynote, an update to Halide was rejected from Apple’s App Store because its permissions prompt wasn’t explicit enough that the app, which is a camera app and takes pictures, was in fact a camera app which takes pictures. Apple admitted this was a mistake, but how many “mistakes” never get corrected because the app isn’t high profile enough to get the right level of attention?
6. Why this blog will be moving soon
I’m not a massive fan of WP Engine as a company, and I wouldn’t recommend them as a WordPress host for a bunch of small reasons, but I have no doubt at all that Matt Mullenweg’s apparent crusade against them is one of the hollowest and most disingenuous set of complaints I have seen in a long time. Pulling the rug out from users getting security updates is an unforgiveable move.
This blog is hosted by WordPress.com, and I don’t particularly want to move back to self-hosting WordPress. Anyone got any recommendations?
7. Return to work and die
I mean, literally die. For four days. With no one noticing.
8. Remember the TouchPad?
This one is a definite trip down memory lane: The HP TouchPad was a WebOS tablet that had many of the attributes necessary to compete with the iPad, and yet was dumped by HP 49 days after its release. And I had completely forgotten that Russell Brand did an advert for it. Oh boy.
9. Cosmic Alpha 2
COSMIC DE has moved into alpha 2. If you don’t know about it, it’s a new Linux desktop environment which has been created as part of the next big upgrade to PopOS, the distribution created by computer maker System76 for its range of machine. I’m using it on my ThinkPad, and – so far at least – it's been stable and very usable considering its alpha status. I’ve seen release versions of open source products be less stable. I might write something longer about my experience of Cosmic DE as I use it more.
10. Douchebros want to ruin bars, now
Sometimes I really wish that the idea of “disruption” in business had never been invented, because it really does attract some of the worst ideas. Case in point: disrupting queuing for a drink in a bar. No. Just no.
"Ireland doesn't want the money"
John Gruber on the EU ruling that Apple owes 13bn euro in taxes to Ireland:
Ireland doesn’t want the money... What a great win for Margrethe Vestager, making clear to the world that the EU is hostile to successful companies. Good job.
Ireland has long had a reputation as, effectively, an in-EU tax haven -- one which walked very close to the line of EU and international law And the country has been especially "favourable" to large tech companies. As the Irish Independent notes:
The Government continues to claim there was no special treatment for Apple, and these were all merely legitimate tax exemptions. The ECJ says otherwise, with its final judgment: “Ireland granted Apple unlawful aid, which Ireland is required to recover.” The judges ruled that Apple’s two units incorporated in Ireland enjoyed favourable tax treatment compared with resident companies taxed in Ireland that were not capable of benefiting from such advance rulings by the tax authorities here. A rotten deal, indeed.
And the Irish government itself has long known that its sweetheart deals weren't up to international standards:
As finance minister from 2017, Paschal Donohoe wisely started a process of bringing Irish rules into line – including rolling back the IP reliefs – and eventually signed up to the new OECD corporate tax deal.
Ironically -- and counter to John's point -- the conversation in Ireland is already about how to use the windfall from Apple to invest in infrastructure which will help maintain its position as a hub in the EU for tech businesses:
And then there is what Ireland can – and cannot – offer. Promises – about clean energy, top-class education, abundant water and so on – count for little now. The State has the resources to address this, helped by another €14 billion which will soon be resting in our account. But the question investors are asking is whether Ireland can actually deliver.
It's not just tax, of course. Ireland has also been recognised as the most lax data protection regime in Europe, so much so that the EDPB was forced to step in and make the Irish DPA enforce its own rules against Meta. John's reaction to that case was a little different.
Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech
I could – and probably should – write an entire essay about the cult of the founder in Silicon Valley, how it developed and the damage it has done. This article from Dave Karpf, though, encapsulates some of my own thinking. Contrasting Aaron Swartz and Sam Altman – both members of the first Ycombinator cohort – is such an interesting approach.
But the other reason why the whole founder mode thing is a hot mess is that Paul Graham is entirely wrong about management and leadership. Yeah, I know: Graham has been involved with building more companies than I have. But he’s never actually run, or even been in a senior leadership role, in a large company.
There’s a key paragraph in his essay which I think shows this:
Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs. Sounds great when it's described that way, doesn't it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.If you are hiring "professional fakers" that means you are a poor manager. One of the most important thing that leaders focus on is hiring the right people, and that takes experience, or training, or both. Founders tend to lack all of these things, so of course they don't always hire great people. And even good leaders don't have a 100% hit rate (John Browett anybody?). As Allison Morrow puts it, founder mode is just another way of telling toxic bosses they are really great. And lord knows, that is not what Silicon Valley needs right now.
Another tell on Graham’s lack of experience in this area: his lack of knowledge that companies other than Steve Jobs' Apple run annual retreats for the 100 most influential people, regardless of level. As Karpf notes, many companies do this. Heck, I have been part of retreats like that even at old-school publishing companies.
But if you have never worked in large companies, and you have the kind of founder myopia that Graham has, you wouldn’t know that.
I think Dave gets it right when he connects founder mode with other Silicon Valley craziness:
This is all of a piece with Andreessen’s techno-optimist manifesto and Balaji Srinivasan’s bat shit bitcoin declarations. A small, cloistered elite of not-especially-bright billionaires have decided that they are very, exceptional, and that the problem with society these days is that people keep treating them like everyone else.I think all this also relates to a post on Threads by Neil Cybart:
One thing I have noticed is that some people in tech (writers, journalists, etc.) are becoming tired. Seems like it started around the pandemic. They have lost interest. However, they think the issue is Big Tech becoming boring instead of themselves. A good sign that it may be time for a re-shifting of voices in tech. I think we are going to see that play out in the coming years.I have been thinking about Neil's post a lot since I read it (always the sign of a good post!), in part because I too have felt bored by tech. Given that I have been fascinated by tech for almost the whole of my life, that has felt like a pretty odd place to be, mentally.
But I don’t think it’s that people themselves are getting boring: it’s that the landscape and characters in tech coverage have become more one dimensional. The hype cycle driven by characters like Graham often feels like you are being bludgeoned around the head if you’re not “all in” on crypto, or the metaverse, or LLMs, or whatever.
And the personalities – and tech is, and always has been, as much about people as things – are cartoon villains/heroic founders (delete as appropriate) who live in a bubble of their own. Musk, Graham, Altman… you name it.
Tech has become all Jobs and no Woz. As Dave Karpf rightly identifies, the hacker has vanished from the scene, to be replaced by an endless array of know-nothing hero founders whose main superpower is the ability to bully subordinates (and half of Twitter) into believing they are always right.
Where the hackers exist, they are either buried in the depths of big companies (does Johny Srouji ever leave that pristine basement?) or working on interesting but niche open source projects, often involving writing yet another text editor.
In allowing and encouraging the likes of Graham to define what tech looks like, we have made tech look boring, unless you are the kind of teenage who dreams of getting rich quick by starting a company, riding a hype cycle, and flipping it to some sucker for a few hundred million.
I doubt that commentators who love technology are bored with tech. But I do think we are bored with blow hards like Graham being the centre of attention, of hype cycles, and of huge corporations that are more interested in boosting revenues through digging moats and buying off potential competition.
Perhaps what Neil is detecting isn’t boredom, but dismay. If you lived through the excitement of the 80s and 90s, and the web optimism of the 00s, it’s difficult to look at people like Graham – people who aren’t as bright as they think they are – and get excited about the future of the industry.
DOJ, Nvidia, and why we restrict monopolies
A 1600, a group of English merchants were granted a royal charter, a legal document which allowed them to venture to foreign lands and seek trade. This was a big bet: not only were the territories they aimed to trade in a long way from England, dangerous to get to and occupied by people who didn't necessarily welcome English traders, but they had to invest £68,000 in the venture -- about £9m in today's money. For a period of 15 years, the royal charter granted them a monopoly on trade.1
The venture was the East India Company, later the British East India Company. By the mid-1700s, it accounted for half the entire world's trade. By 1858 it had a private army that was twice as big as Britain's, and ruled over the whole of what is now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. That £68,000 bought its investors -- and Britain -- the biggest ROI the world has ever seen. The company turned a fifteen-year monopoly into an empire. If you want to understand the obsession that the Brexit-wrangling mouth breathers have with "Buccaneering Britain", look no further than the folk memory of the British East India Company.
This often comes to mind when I'm thinking about our modern technology monopolies. Like them, the East India Company founders took big risks – in fact, bigger risks than the likes of Mark Zuckerberg can ever conceive (no Facebook employee has, to my knowledge, been killed by cannon fire, even if, like the East India Company, their products have helped enable genocide).
Unlike those 17th century investors, the founders of modern monopolies are constrained by law rather than explicitly encouraged by it. We have, collectively, decided that there should be limits on the amount of wealth accumulated which monopolists are allowed to enjoy, and there should be limits to the power of corporations. Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Google will, it's safe to bet, never be allowed a private army and the rulership of a big chunk of a continent.
In modern capitalism, taking risks brings rewards -- but only so far. And a dominant position, no matter how well-deserved, does not allow you the leeway to eradicate competition itself.
All this came to mind when reading Ben Thompson on the DOJ Investigating Nvidia:
Nvidia under Huang did everything we hope our greatest companies will do: they had a long-term vision, they innovated relentlessly to find new markets and applications for industry-leading technology, and when a world-changing opportunity presented itself with large language models, they were ready to take advantage of it, for a long-term benefit that may forever be unmeasurable. This is the behaviour our government apparently wants to punish?
Earlier this week, I listened to a great interview with Ben about on how he writes, which I highly recommend. In it, he noted his dislike of writing about antitrust:
“The one time I did almost burnout is like 2019, 2020. I was writing about regulation and antitrust and congressional hearings. And I'm like, oh, this is actually horrible. Like it's burning me out. I work a lot. That's not what's burning me out. It's writing about stuff that is kind of soul sucking for me from my perspective.”
I can tell Ben doesn't like writing about this stuff2, in part because I think he keeps missing a foundational point about antitrust: What's perfectly acceptable behaviour when you are a relatively small company becomes outright illegal (and rightly so) when you become dominant in an industry.
I'm not going to attempt to evaluate the merits of the DOJ case, in part because at present there is no case. Per Bloomberg:
"The US Justice Department sent subpoenas to Nvidia Corp. and other companies as it seeks evidence that the chipmaker violated antitrust laws, an escalation of its investigation into the dominant provider of AI processors. The DOJ, which had previously delivered questionnaires to companies, is now sending legally binding requests that oblige recipients to provide information, according to people familiar with the investigation. That takes the government a step closer to launching a formal complaint."
Seeking information about a company's conduct is precisely what the DoJ should be doing in any area where a dominant player is emerging, and the earlier it does that, the easier it becomes to make a case which has an actual impact. No one seriously doubts that Nvidia is now dominant in the market for AI processors. Is "AI processors" a market? Has Nvidia's conduct stepped over the line from tough competition to abuse of a market position? These are elements that an investigation should try to find out.
What the DOJ is clearly signalling, here, is it won't allow dominance to be abused even when companies have only recently crossed the line from being a competitor to dominance. Given the speed at which technology companies can distort markets and crush competition when they achieve dominance (who remembers DR-DOS?) this feels like a sensible approach. The other option -- giving businesses 10–20 years of the ability to destroy competitors not through making the best products but by sheer force of accumulated power -- has demonstrably stifled competition. And competition drives innovation (at least in theory).
Ben's best argument is that Nvidia has done nothing wrong, and in fact has done what we want companies to do: make long-term, industry - changing and fundamentally risky bets to achieve huge returns. And I agree! There is no doubt that Nvidia deserves the billions of dollars in profits it will make from being the biggest and best player in AI processors. The lead it has created from the investments it made will last for a long time, and generate a lot of money. Jensen Huang deserves all the credit he gets, and as many sharp black leather jackets as he cares to wear.
For anyone who has grown up in the era of the hero/founder and "startup in a garage" vision of Silicon Valley, I think it's a compelling view. Apple is another example. Under Steve Jobs, they made a series of "bet the company" product launches, culminating in the iPhone. They created a platform which over a billion people use globally, spending tens of billions of dollars a year on apps. Don't they deserve 30% of that, forever?
But one of the principles of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship was that success has to be continually earned. Andy Grove, who knew a thing or two about it, warned against "the inertia of success" because, even if you are at the top, you don't deserve anything unless you keep innovating, keep creating the best products. "Only the paranoid survive" because somewhere out there, a smaller, more nimble competitor is coming to eat you – and all your past success will not save you from that fate.
A company getting it right does not give it some kind of permanent licence to coast while printing money. The question that all antitrust seeks to answer is simple: how much is enough? When do the well-deserved riches and power that accumulate to companies that make big bets, execute well, and invest wisely start to be toxic for society or humanity as a whole, and for competition itself? Are the riches that the largest companies make earned, or are they simply the product of being large? If it's the former, great! But if it's the latter…
The founders of the British East India company also did everything we hope our greatest companies will do: they had a long-term vision, they innovated relentlessly to find new markets, and when a world-changing opportunity presented itself, they were ready to take advantage of it, for a long-term detriment that may forever be unmeasurable. Sometimes, enough just is enough.
Taboola targeting
Regarding Taboola’s partnership with Apple: I’ve seen people claim that this is somehow hypocritical from a privacy perspective, assuming that Taboola’s somewhat obnoxious, clickbait-style ads must invasively target user profiles and browsing histories.They don’t. They are targeted entirely contextually. That’s the point.
This is absolutely, 100% wrong. Taboola doesn't just target on context – ie based on the topic of the page a user is looking at.
Taboola's not hiding this – in fact it's one of their selling points. They call this feature "Marketplace Audiences" and it allows you to target by a whole range of demographic and intent-based audience factors, using both Taboola first-party and third party data.
You can see this in Taboola's Marketplace Audiences dashboard:
If you think it's basing membership of an audience of "Israelis in the US" or "Education: Graduate school" just on the context of the page, I have a bridge to sell to you.
So why has Eric got this wrong? I suspect because he has a little bit of an agenda. Take a look at the last sentence in his post:
Want brash, garish advertising plastered all over the web? Reject ads personalization. Want relevant, informed advertising? Embrace ads personalization.
I have absolutely no idea why a venture capitalist who "invests in the future of mobile" would want to promote the idea that only personlised ads, which require extensive profiling, tracking and targeting, are the only way to get "quality" advertising. Maybe someone out there can help me out with this?
(Via Daring Fireball)
Block, block and block again
There’s a kind of person who is the reason that blocks and bans exist. They’re also the ones who argue loudest that blocking is evil, and you’ll be stuck in a filter bubble or an echo chamber if you deprive yourself of their sparkling wit. You should block these guys faster than anyone.
I recently had an encounter with one of these guys – and they are always guys – myself. They see you blocking them as some kind of cowardice, and they see tools which let you control your own information environment (filters) as a refusal to engage with whatever views they believe to be correct and important.
Bluesky's moderation service is optional – you can turn it off, and be exposed all the hate speech you want. But people like Dorsey and my random guy don't want you to be able to block or filter views you disagree with. What they want is a form of coercive control, the ability to override what you desire to make it what they think is good for you. Think Elon Musk, putting himself into every single timeline and proposing to make people (i.e. him) unblockable.
Filtering is another kind of user agent, a representation of my control over what I want to see and do online, and that's a good thing. Similarly, genuinely federated services like Mastodon (but not Bluesky, yet) allow you to devolve moderation to a trusted administrator (for your instance) and add your own personal blocks and filters too. In this way, Mastodon allows the creation of genuine communities, which share values and also decide to what degree they want to connect to the rest of the world. They can be as isolated or federated as they wish.
Why do people try and forbid linking?
Websites That Forbid Other Websites From Linking to Them – Pixel Envy:
Some of these are even more bizarre than a blanket link ban, like Which? limiting people to a maximum of ten links to their site per webpage. Why would anyone want to prevent links?
I can actually answer this one: it’s an attempt (albeit pointless) to prevent sites linking in a way which Google will define as spammy. Low-quality backlinks used to be a bit of an SEO nightmare, and you used to have to disavow them as toxic in Google Search Console. More than ten links to the same site from a single page is classic link spam, hence Which?’s attempt to stop it.
What a difference four years makes
John Gruber in 2020 on the tracking industry led by Facebook:
The entitlement of these fuckers is just off the charts. They have zero right, none, to the tracking they’ve been getting away with. We, as a society, have implicitly accepted it because we never really noticed it. You, the user, have no way of seeing it happen. Our brains are naturally attuned to detect and viscerally reject, with outrage and alarm, real-world intrusions into our privacy. Real-world marketers could never get away with tracking us like online marketers do… Just because there is now a multi-billion-dollar industry based on the abject betrayal of our privacy doesn’t mean the sociopaths who built it have any right whatsoever to continue getting away with it. They talk in circles but their argument boils down to entitlement: they think our privacy is theirs for the taking because they’ve been getting away with taking it without our knowledge, and it is valuable. No action Apple can take against the tracking industry is too strong.
John Gruber in 2024, on the EU's actions which limit Facebook's ability to track users:
What makes this all the more outrageous is that many major publishers in the EU use this exact same “pay or OK” model to achieve GDPR compliance — and none offer a free alternative with non-targeted ads. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Der Spiegel to offer free access without ads. Christ, they don’t even let you look at their homepage without paying or consenting to targeted ads. And Spotify quite literally brags about its ad targeting. But Spotify is an EU company, so of course it wasn’t designated as a “gatekeeper” by the protection racketeers running the European Commission… They’re not saying “pay or OK” is illegal. They’re saying it’s illegal only if you’re a big company from outside the EU with a very popular platform.
I wonder what happened to turn John's attitude from “no action Apple can take against the tracking industry is too strong” to defending Facebook's “right” to choose how it invades people's privacy? Or is he suggesting that a private company is entitled to defend people's privacy, but governments are not?
And John's second point about Spotify fundamentally misunderstands the nature of antitrust law in general and the EU gatekeeper system specifically. In competition, actions which are legal when you're not a monopoly become illegal when you are a monopoly.
In particular, Apple – and Facebook – are gatekeepers because they “are digital platforms that provide an important gateway between business users and consumers – whose position can grant them the power to act as a private rule maker, and thus creating a bottleneck in the digital economy”. Spotify is not in that position. Der Spiegel is not in that position. Different rules apply – as they do to Tidal (not an EU company), and of course to the New York Times.
This really is not difficult to understand.
But underneath this in part is John's feeling that EU antitrust law is all an EU conspiracy to attack American companies. That would be news to Daimler, fined over a billion euros for an illegal cartel. It would news to Scania, fined 880m euro. To DAF, fined 715m euro. To Phillips, fined 705m euro. And so on. The EU fines European companies big sums of money all the time for breaking competition law.
The entire point of the EU is to create single, competitive markets. It does not allow big companies to “own” markets because free markets (in the EU's eyes) are good, and privately owned ones that allow big companies to stop being capitalists and act like feudal lords are bad. Facebook, Apple, and the rest have been doing this in digital for a long time, and the EU has decided it's going to stop.
On the fine art of technology reviews
Nearly thirty years ago I reviewed my first product. It was a Lexmark solid ink inkjet printer, created for designers to do lower-cost but higher quality proofs than were possible on the regular inkjets, expensive colour laser printers, or super-expensive Chromalin machines of the time.
Its launch was also the first press conference I went to. I remember nothing of the event, but I do distinctly remember meeting some of the trade press journalists from the magazines about printing (trade press was VERY large) who promptly took me down the pub. I spent a happy couple of hours getting paid to drink in the middle of the day, and realised I had found my ideal job.
I have no idea how many products I have reviewed over the years, but it’s likely to be several hundred single reviews and even more if you count group tests. All of which makes me think that I know a bit about reviewing.
Unlike Daniel Vassallo:
“First, do no harm” is not a principle that can or should ever be applied to reviews. “First, tell the truth about the product”, on the other hand, is absolute the reviewer’s mantra. You owe nothing to the people who made the product. You owe everything to the people who might consider spending their hard-earned money on it.
Ben Thompson hits the nail squarely on the head:
“Who, though, is to blame, and who benefited? Surely, the responsibility for the Humane AI Pin lies with Humane; the people who benefited from Brownlee’s honesty were his viewers, the only people to whom Brownlee owes anything. To think of this review — or even just the title — as “distasteful” or “unethical” is to view Humane — a recognizable entity, to be sure — as of more worth than the 3.5 million individuals who watched Brownlee’s review.”
Vassallo has taken something of an online beating for this. The idea that telling the people who ultimately pay your wages – those who read your content or watch your videos – the truth about a product is “almost unethical” is indicative not just of Vassallo’s views, but those of the tech executives who have grown up in the last 20 years. The fact that the Humane AI Pin is a lemon is not MKBHD’s fault.
But Vassallo is really just expressing a view that’s part of the present Silicon Valley/venture capital paradigm. Why make a great product when you can make a so-so product and erect moats which turn into monopolies, locking customers in? The Rot Machine is real, and once you buy into it as a business model is not love of great products but a mastery of the mechanisms of stopping people going elsewhere. Customers become users, and who owes users anything? They just use what you supply, and should be grateful for it.
What technology companies hate is that good reviewers have power. And they wield that power not for the company’s investors and shareholders, but for the people who have to work hard and earn money to buy their products. Excellent reviewers can even end up helping improve the products, as Walt Mossberg often did:
“XM is only one of dozens of companies that have redesigned products in response to Mossberg's unsparing criticism. RealNetworks overhauled its RealJukebox player. Intuit revamped TurboTax. Mossberg even forced Microsoft to scrap Smart Tags, which would have hijacked millions of Web sites by inserting unwanted links to advertisers' sites. Few reviewers have held so much power to shape an industry's successes and failures.”
No wonder this generation of tech entrepreneurs would rather that reviewers shut up and gave them four stars.
A History of United States v. Microsoft – Pixel Envy
A History of United States v. Microsoft – Pixel Envy:
In other words, how much is it okay for a first party to advantage themselves over third parties? If there is a line, where should it be, and who should establish it? There is obviously deep resistance to government intervention among the industry and its commentators, but there is also little incentive for operating system vendors to restrain themselves from prioritizing their own products and services. Gates, at this time, could not articulate any reason why Microsoft should not follow any competitive path it chose, even if that meant doing things third-party developers could not.
And that, of course, is exactly where Apple is now. What limits would Apple set themselves? There are none, that I can see.
On Apple terminating Epic’s E.U. Developer Account
Daring Fireball: Apple Terminated Epic’s E.U. Developer Account:
I guess Epic is implying that the EU government, not Apple, should have that discretion? They don’t say so, but who else but Apple could have that discretion? But the European Commission isn’t set up for that sort of police work. That’s not how the EC works. The DMA doesn’t say that the EC now runs app marketplaces.
Actually, regulating markets is exactly the thing that the European Union is set up to do – the foundation of the EU as a whole is the Single Market, and anything which threatens to fragment the single market into something smaller, under private control, is to be resisted at all costs.
As Baldur Bjarnason put it in an excellent post recently:
Much like roaming, App Stores let private companies subdivide and control the single market to their own financial gain. When much of the digital economy is taking place on phones, tablets, and various other devices that are largely limited to App Stores, this is effectively ceding the single market to a fragmented market that’s entirely under corporate control. This is against the core operating theory behind the EU.
What Apple isn’t getting is this isn’t something that the EU is going to roll over for. As Baldur also notes, this is explicit in the naming and intention of the Digital Markets Act – whenever you see the word “market” in EU regulation it’s a tell that the intention is to bring an area into the scope of the single market, when the EU believes it has been out of alignment.
Regulating markets isn’t just a small thing for the EU. It’s existential. As Baldur puts it:
To Apple, the App Store is a side line. To the EU, the single market is the foundation of its existence. Any time you see two entities of similar size fight, bet on the one that thinks it’s fighting for its life.
Later on, John mentions that Spotify has been as publicly-critical of Apple as Epic, and it hasn’t had its developer account revoked.
Spotify, for example, is just as vociferous a corporate critic of the App Store as Epic is, and Apple hasn’t threatened them with revocation of Spotify’s developer program membership. The difference between Spotify and Epic isn’t in their rhetoric; it’s in their past behavior.
There’s another key difference: revoking Spotify would be a much bigger deal, both practically and politically. Spotify has around a third of all streaming music users, double its nearest competitor – which happens to be Apple. Spotify has 226 million paying subscribers, and a lot of them will use iPhones. Being told they can no longer use their Spotify account would undoubtedly mean that next upgrade cycle some of them would choose to move to Android.
The politics would also be terrible. Using your power over a market to ban the number one service where you are number two is exactly the kind of move which would land Apple in a world of legal pain. By comparison, banning Epic was nothing.
The level of bad behaviour that Spotify would have to get up to in order to Apple to ban them would have to be so egregious, obvious and public that ignoring it imposed a bigger cost than removing their developer status. I’m not sure what that might be. Given that Apple never ever blinked when Facebook was complicit in genocide, I can’t imagine what Spotify would need to do to get banned. Launch its own nuclear weapons? Despite Apple’s protestations, the rules of the App Store game are very different for developers that are strategically important to Apple.
Why is Apple, a company that’s not exactly composed of B-Ark players, getting this so wrong? I wonder about this a lot. In my professional life, I’ve known a lot of people at Apple. I worked there for a short time. I was in daily contact with them while working on MacUser. 99.99% of those I’ve met have been good, smart people. Some of them are still friends.
I’m certain the same is true for John, and I would, not that long ago, have posed a very similar question to him:
But why not take an opportunity to look magnanimous? Apple shouldn’t be expected to grovel, but this looks like they’re going out of their way to look vindictive. I really thought it would be a clever bit of public relations jujitsu to make nice with Epic, even if, in Cupertino, it was through gritted teeth.
I think the answer to this lies in a gradual change I’ve seen in the way the company behaves since (and I hate saying this) Steve Jobs died. In her recent Burn Book, Kara Swisher cites something that Jobs said to her:
By 2010, Apple’s market valuation would surpass Microsoft’s, a major milestone. A week later, Jobs was back on the ATD stage and I asked him if he had a thought or two about that. “For those of us who have been in the industry a long time, it’s surreal,” he responded. “But it’s not why any of our customers buy our product. Remember what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Sometimes you just have to pick the things that look like they’re going to be the right horses moving forward. We’re trying to make great products. Have courage of our convictions … Customers pay us to make those choices. If we succeed, they’ll buy them, and if we don’t, they won’t.”
Jobs loved making money as much as the next billionaire, but not for the usual reasons. He didn’t regard it as a measure of him, personally. It was a measure of how much people loved Apple products, because they chose to buy the best. And when making products, the question of what delivered the best for the customer was always at the heart of decisions.
Apple today sees the App Store, too, as a product. It regards its role as delivering the best experience for customers, by keeping out crap apps, setting standards, making sure customers aren’t ripped off, and so on.
Which leads me back, again, to the last line of that Jobs quote: “Customers pay us to make those choices. If we succeed, they’ll buy them, and if we don’t, they won’t.” Jobs knew that the pressure of competition was what kept Apple – and all companies – honest.
With the App Store, customers aren’t allowed to choose. Apple doesn’t compete by being the best. Apple succeeds by being the only option – and that is corrosive to any company culture. My fear that it’s corroded Apple’s culture, too.
What's the sound? A screeching u-turn, followed by excuses
Craig Grannell on Apple’s u-turn on web apps:
Apple has performed a screeching U-turn on killing web apps, perhaps because the European Commission publicly stated there was no need for Apple to scrap them in the first place. Oh dear. I look forward to certain (mostly US) commentators retracting their “the bad and evil EU is forcing our beloved Apple to do a bad thing” stance and replacing it with a “the bad and evil EU is making it impossible for Apple to know what it should do and that is a bad thing” stance. Fun!
The ability of US-based Apple commentators to both fail to understand how the EU works and make so many excuses for the company’s bad behaviour is really quite a thing.
Ten blue links, Folsom Prison Blues Edition
1. Oh, WordPress!
Not content with their CEO getting into a stupid public spat with a user and apparently revealing information about them which should have remained private, WordPress announced it was doing deals to give access to their customers' posts and content to train "selected AI partners" (although not, at all, people hosting their own version of WordPress, so please shut that rumour down). The most charitable interpretation of this is that the company messed up its comms. The least is that it's started into an enshittification spiral, which will ultimately lead to it becoming the same kind of terrible service as everyone else. Related: I'm pondering whether I should start self-hosting again.
2. Good bus services or a tunnel that sets your skin on fire? Who knows which one is best for America
The Boring Company was always a joke, producing precisely one usable tunnel with money that should have been spent improving public transport infrastructure. Now its one tunnel is causing maintenance workers to get chemical burns from toxic waste. Go Elon. Where's my pitchfork?
3. Apple gets stuck in traffic
Apple's car project was a legacy of the era when Jony Ive ruled the roost and had decided he could design better products than anyone else in the world. I'm actually quite surprised that it lasted as long as it did after he left the company. And now, apparently, it's finally dead. From a business perspective, it never made any sense: historically, car manufacturer margins have been far smaller than the 30-40% that Apple wants. Tesla had higher margins than everyone else mainly because it bilked the government of the US for massive subsidies, cut corners in its manufacturing, and did everything possible to avoid providing any kind of proper customer service. While I'm sure Apple would have loved some of those sweet, sweet corporate welfare cheques, the rest of the Tesla Method of Business™ is probably not where it wants to be.
4. How publishing is losing its soul
There have always been publishers whose relationship with advertisers was a little too cosy. Even back in the days when selling ads was like shooting fish in a barrel with a bazooka, ad sales people would try a little “friendly chat” with a journalist to "check in and see how product X is doing". Most journalists always told them, in a friendly way, where to get off. But as times get tougher and things get more desperate, it's natural that executives are going to lean on journalists to "do the right thing for the company" rather than for their audience. This piece, from a year ago, is about CNET, but I guarantee they are not the only ones doing the same. Private equity companies only care about getting a return on their investment as soon as possible. They aren't concerned about the long-term viability of a brand — and they definitely aren't concerned about the people reading the content. Of course, once they have fired all the journalists and replaced them with “prompt engineers” that will be problem solved because there will be no one left to complain.
5. Prison laptops are a thing?
I didn't know they were, until I read this Twitter thread. Amazing.
6. Desperate times make desperate publishers
It's not that long since publishers were wary of getting into a legal tangle with the likes of Google because they wanted to keep the provider of most of their traffic onside, but these days things are different. I don't know whether this will be successful or not — despite my 'O' level in law, I am not a lawyer — but I'm absolutely certain that Google's 50,000 gorilla-like presence in the adtech market distorts it in a variety of ways. Let's not even start on Facebook. Yet. The one caveat to all this is that $2.3bn is 1% of the amount the company made from advertising last year, so it's another case of what sounds like a high number to publishers actually being cost-of-business to Google.
7. At last, the worst use of AI (special government edition)
I'm not against the use of LLMs for summarisation. In fact, sometimes it's one of the best uses for it. LLMs can be really good at picking out the salient points of an email, for example, and if you have ever worked in a corporate environment you know quite how much long emails are used to hide important points. But using it for creating drafts of routine responses and to summarise reports for ministers is a recipe for worse government. Why? Because good ministers get into the details of this stuff. Yes, they have many decisions to make, but not getting into the details of your brief leads to awful, hand-waving, big-picture-details-are-for-losers government. Most ministers don't know enough about the topic area when they start — this will only encourage them not to be immersed in it.
8. How not to do layoff communications
One of the things I studied on my leadership masters was how to manage layoffs, and later on, I saw at first hand how excellent leaders and managers do it. I've seen the seriousness and discipline it takes to so redundancies in a way which is humane, deeply considers how the communications will work, and also looks hard at the effects of redundancies on the remaining part of the business. It's always horrible, but it doesn't have to be either deliberately cruel or handled ineptly. So, I wonder, what is it about tech companies that makes them so awful at it? My gut feeling is that it's partly down to the culture of the hero founder/CEO: basically, leaders who are not prepared to listen to anyone with actual experience of doing this stuff professionally.
9. Green trade rules are "biased"
When Piyush Goyal, India's trade minister, told the FT that rules inserted into trade agreements with his country designed to reduce carbon emissions were "biased" he got a lot of stick, and a lot of it was classic “greedy Indians” racist nonsense from people who should know better. The fact is that he's mostly right: the West is expecting India (17% of the world's population, 3% of its carbon emissions) to stop lifting people out of poverty while the US (4% of the world's population, 15% of its emissions) doesn't reduce its emissions anywhere near fast enough. As Goyal put it, "all the environmental damage that has been done in the past has still not been made up for. What about that? Before we add new environmental issues, let’s first sort out who is responsible for the environmental degradation. Certain promises were made in Paris. They have to be delivered upon.” Just as it would like everyone to forget quite how much of its wealth came from colonialism, the West would love people to ignore how much it has benefited from pumping vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere we all share. Climate colonialism is alive and well and living… well, here.
10. How the Tories radicalised me
I often note how the government's Prevent programme, designed to stop radicalisation, ought to look at the role of the Tory party. Recently, Tory party membership has been a bigger marker of someone being against traditional British values like free speech and the right to protest than anything else. Lewis Goodall wrote a very good piece about the radicalisation of the Tory party, and how it's now more or less in thrall to conspiracy theories. Certainly, 14 years of Tories has radicalised me: I've gone from soft left to full-on "end capitalism now", which is an unexpected return to my politics of 40 years ago. I should, at least, thank the Tories for opening my eyes again.
The end of the line for Google
“Personally, I don’t want the perception in a few years to be, ‘Those old school web ranking types just got steamrolled and somehow never saw it comin’…’”
Google engineer Eric Lehman, from an internal email in 2018, titled “AI is a serious risk to our business”
I should, of course, have put a question mark at the end of the title of this, but I very much do not want to fall foul of my own law. And, of course, talking about the end of the line for Google as a company is like talking about “the end of the line for IBM” in 2000, or “the end of the line for Microsoft” in 2008. Whatever happens, Google has so much impetus behind it, so much revenue, that a quick collapse is about as likely as my beloved Derby County winning League One, Championship and Premier League in three consecutive years. It isn’t happening, much as I might dream.
This is one of the reasons I quipped that Google could see the $2.3billion that Axel Springer and other European media groups want for its alleged monopolisation of digital advertising as “just the cost of doing business.” It’s the equivalent of someone having to pay a £250 fine for speeding: annoying, but not the end of the world, and not actually that likely to keep you down to under 70mph in the future.
Google’s problems, though, do run deep. Other than, as my friend Cory Doctorow has noted, the 1.5 good products it invented itself (“a search engine and a Hotmail clone”), the most successful Google products are acquisitions. Android? Acquired. YouTube? Acquired? Adtech? Acquired. Even Chrome, which dominates web browsing in a way which many people (including me) find more than a little scary, was based on Apple’s WebKit rendering engine – which was, in turn, based on the open source KHTML.
The fact is, Google is incredibly bad at successfully bringing products to market, to such a degree that no one trusts them to do it and stick with it for long. It continually enters markets with fanfare, only to exit not long after.
Take social networking. You probably remember Google+ (2011–2019). You may even remember Orkut (2004–2014). Perhaps you know about Google Buzz (2010–2011). But do you remember Jaiku, an early Twitter competitor which Google bought – and buried? The resources of Google could have been used to accelerate Jaiku’s development and – perhaps – win the battle against Twitter and the nascent Facebook. Instead, the company took two years rebuilding Jaiku on top of Google’s App Engine, with no new features or marketing spend to support the product. Two years later, they killed it.
What Google is pretty good at is producing research. Its 2017 paper on transformers directly led to many of the large language model breakthroughs which OpenAI used to create ChatGPT. Failing to spot the potential for its research isn’t unknown in technology history, but really great companies don’t allow others to turn themselves into competitors worth $80 billion on the back of it.
And particularly not when those other companies create technology which directly threatens core businesses, in this case, Google’s “one good product” – search. The bad news for Google is that even in the middle of last year, research showed people using ChatGPT for search tasks performed just as well as using a traditional search engine, with one exception — fact checking tasks. That, of course, is a big exception, but ordinary people use search engines for a lot more than just checking facts.
What’s also notable about the same research is that ChatGPT levelled the playing field between different educational levels, giving better access to information for those who have lower educational achievement. That strikes at the heart of Google’s mission statement, which promotes its goal of “organis[ing] the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful” (my italics). Search, as good as it is, has always required the user to adapt to it. Conversational interaction models, which ChatGPT follows (the clue is in the name), change that profoundly.
In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christiansen talks about the difficulties that successful companies have in sustaining innovation. Established businesses, he notes, are excellent at optimising their existing products and processes to serve current customers (this is called “sustaining innovation”). However, they often struggle when faced with a “disruptive innovation” – a new technology or business model that creates a whole new market and customer segment.
One of the potential solutions to this which Christiansen looks at is structural: Creating smaller, independent units or spin-offs tasked with exploring the disruptive technology can allow them to operate outside the constraints of the main company. This, of course, is probably what Google intended to do when it changed its structure to create Alphabet, a group of companies of which Google itself is just one part.
The biggest problem with this putative solution is that if you do it well, innovation doesn’t necessarily flow to where it is most needed. Google’s search products needed to seize on the research made in 2017 and integrate it. It didn’t, and – worse still – no one saw this as a potential disruption of the core business. The blinkers were too firmly on.
Perhaps that’s changing. Notably, last year that Google moved all its AI efforts into a single group, Google DeepMind. The “Google” in its name is significant: previously DeepMind was a separate business within Alphabet (and, in true Google style, it was acquired rather than built in-house). Now, on the surface, it looks likely to focus more on continuing Google’s mission, which means disrupting the traditional ten blue links.
Can it succeed? I’m not optimistic (publishers, take note). What we have here is a company which is good at research, but not at exploiting it; whose history is of one good product and a good Hotmail clone; that has a terrible record of announcing, releasing, and killing products, often multiple efforts in different categories all of which fail; and which has failed to keep its core product – search – up to date.
Perhaps the real question isn’t whether Google has reached the end of the line, but how exactly it made it this far?
Some thoughts on Apple Vision Pro (and VR/AR in general)
Some thoughts on Apple's response to the EU DMA
There is always a point in every Robin Hood film where Robin stops robbing the rich to feed the poor and doffs his hat to King Richard, stepping back and allowing the monarch to take his rightful place as “protector of the realm”. In a feudal system, the lord must prevail because the lord is the peasants' only true guarantee of peace.
I have had this in mind since Apple announced its response to the EU's Digital Markets Act. The rules Apple published are constructed precisely to make alternative methods of distributing apps both unattractive to customers and both toxic and unprofitable for developers. Tonally, it's also a big "fuck you I won't do what you tell me to" to the EU, one of the most bitter and resentful public statements I have seen. It reminds me of Bill Gates' sullen deposition to regulators when Microsoft was being investigated back in the 1990s – and we all know how that case ended up.
It amazes me how quickly successful, rich companies and people turn into sulky teenagers the moment even the most minor demand is made of them. Success, it seems, breeds little character of worth and encourages a kind of childishness which most people grow out of by the age of 21. Usually, I would expect that from Elon Musk or Donald Trump, but it seems Tim Cook has had a dose of it too.
Rich people gonna rich. But what amazes me more is how many cheerleaders they have. Now Apple has always had cheerleaders — lord knows, at times I've even been one of them — but the latest wave of online criticism of those of us who would very much like Apple to allow us to use the computers we bought in the way that suits us, rather than the way that suits Apple, strikes me as different. Louder. More vocal. More focused on the idea that not only is wanting this stupid, but that it's somehow a threat to other people's security.
And as we all know, when people feel their security is threatened, they act a little weird. Moral panics, and all that.
But then I remember another characteristic of feudalism: many people are most comfortable when there is a feudal lord to protect them and make decisions for them, and so vociferously attack when anyone suggests that, perhaps, the existing social order needs to change.
That's not simply because they long for the attention of the rich and powerful and see protecting them as a way to gain favour. Feudalism survived by ensuring that the peasants were always helpless, always in need of protection, and of course always threatened. The lord protected you from anarchy. Unable to imagine another world being possible, the peasant can only support the lords' right to rule because to do otherwise would mean either a more cruel lord, or dangerous lawlessness.
As we move into technofeudalism, where instead of owning technology we rent it, those old peasant instincts are resurfacing. There is a big, bad world out there of hackers, thieves, scammers, and other ne'er-do-wells, and only feudal lord Apple can protect us from it.
"But You have to protect people"
I have some sympathy for the argument that people require protecting. We still get, on a weekly basis, scam calls on our landline from people claiming to be from Microsoft, wanting to “sell” my now-departed in-laws protection for their PC. My father-in-law had dementia, used a computer, and managed to sign up to every kind of dubious data gathering exercise known to man. We are on many lists. I have become very used to calmly asking the person at the other end of the line whether their parents know they attempt to steal old, vulnerable peoples' savings for a living.
Having protections available is a good thing. Having them as the default on very widely used devices like smartphones is also a good thing. But having no ability to turn them off, no matter what? Not so good.
Having protections doesn't mean everyone has to use them. Those who want to opt-out should be able to do so. No one is suggesting that the App Store should be closed down, and anyone who wants to be protected by Apple should be able to carry on.
But then there's the protection argument again. If it can be turned off, the argument goes, then bad people will persuade the vulnerable to do just that.
All of which is a good argument for “parental control” systems, which allow the vulnerable to be protected by someone they know, but not a good argument unless you believe that everyone out there is stupid and needs feudal lord Apple to protect them.
Ah.
I'm not going to link to the original post or put a name on it because I know the person who wrote it means well, and they are by no means the only one making much the same argument:
I get what you’re saying and that’s fine for nerds, but the average punter isn’t able to decide that, is terrified of tech, and doesn’t even know what software is. They are the sorts of people who will tell you their password if you tell them it’s for a survey The result of them making such decisions is very predictably going to be like hyenas around a corpse
I fundamentally disagree with this view, which I find exceptionally patronising towards ordinary people, bordering on misanthropic. Back when the iPad was launched, Cory Doctorow wrote eloquently about why he wouldn't be buying one:
But with the iPad, it seems like Apple's model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of "that's too complicated for my mom" (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn't too complicated for their poor old mothers).
Unfortunately, it looks that Apple has been very successful in persuading people that not only is "your mom" too stupid to understand what software is, they've persuaded a lot of them that the non-existent "mom" is actually the majority of people.
But this is also a view of human relationships to technology which is self-perpetuating: if you never bother to teach people how to do something, such as protecting themselves against scams, unsurprisingly they never become particularly good at doing it. Likewise, if you never let your children play outside, guess what happens?
Learned helplessness is a thing, and it always benefits the most powerful.
And, as Dan Moren points out, Apple's dire warnings of terrible consequences should you be foolish enough to allow an application to be installed from any other source than the App Store are pretty hilarious when you consider that they are implementing the same system of notarisation which keeps Mac apps free of malware. Evidently, Apple believes that someone who spends £1000 on a computer is significantly more tech-savvy and able to look after themselves than someone who spends £1100 on a smartphone.
Unless, of course, ultimately Apple believes it's for the best if Macs are as locked down as iOS.
Hmm.
20/20 Hindsight is 20/20
In retrospect, Dan Gillmor was right:
A few months ago, when Apple introduced its iPad Pro, a large tablet with a keyboard, CEO Tim Cook called it the “clearest expression of our vision of the future of personal computing.” That was an uh-oh moment for me. Among other things, in the iOS ecosystem users are obliged to get all their software from Apple’s store, and developers are obliged to sell it in the company store. This may be Apple’s definition of personal computing, but it’s not mine.
At the time, I shrugged off Dan's arguments. Wasn't there room for a powerful computer, but incredibly easy to use? Where there was never going to be a worry about malware? I think I saw the iPad as just a tiny step on from the Mac: the real computer for the rest of us.
I was wrong. Dan was right. As was Cory Doctorow in 2006. As was Mark Pilgrim the same year.
Apple isn't a bunch of evil geniuses wanting to rule the world. Ultimately, Apple is driven by the same forces as every public company: the demand from “the market” for continual growth. As anyone with a passing interesting in compound growth will tell you, that becomes significantly harder as a company gets bigger. For Apple, 10% revenue growth in 2004 meant adding just $800 million. By 2014, that required an additional $18 billion. In 2024, that will require $38 billion.
There are no more devices as big as the iPhone to be launched, no more hardware markets worth tens of billions of dollars which Apple can magic into existence to keep their share price growing (and no, Apple Vision Pro is not it). So the only way of keeping that revenue growth rolling is to squeeze more from customers, and to ensure that not one cent of current revenue slips from the feudal lord's fingers. And that includes the tens of billions of dollars of revenue it makes from the App Store.
The only way for Apple to keep growing is to not only retain the control — and thus revenue — it has, but to tighten the screws and get more control. To ensure you can't buy an iPhone without also paying them a monthly tithe for storing photos. To ensure that no application gets sold without Apple getting a cut. The role of the feudal lord is one that Apple is choosing to play because it makes more money that way.
Turning points…
I have never been one to entirely excuse Apple its control-freakery, but I've also respected them and liked the products they make. I'm started writing this on an M2 MacBook Air, and it's the best laptop I have ever owned in many ways, not least the battery life. Without Apple's determination to do its own thing, to "own the whole widget" as Steve Jobs would have said, that battery life wouldn't be possible.
But: the Mac model of (relative) openness is not the one which Apple has chosen to pursue. Instead, its focus is on keeping things closed, reducing developers to digital serfs paying a tithe to the feudal lord whose land they are allowed to plough. And of course, ensuring that its customers, who pay a handsome margin to the company simply to buy its products, cannot choose what they do with those expensive devices.
Just as the release of the iPad Pro was a turning point for Dan Gillmor, Apple's response to the Digital Services Act feels like one for me.
I started writing this on the MacBook Air, but I'm finishing it on a ThinkPad X1 Carbon running Fedora 39 Linux. I'm using the same tools to write on both: Obsidian, configured just how I like it, even down to using LanguageTool to proof it.
The MacBook Air will almost certainly be the last Apple product I buy. When the time comes to replace my iPhone, maybe towards the back end of this year, I'll look for something I can install a de-Googled version of Android on.
I've been playing with a Pixel 6 running Graphene, which even lets you install Google's apps on it, but restricts them and prevents them from doing the full range of spying on you. I like that idea: taking a dangerous but handsome animal, and ensuring you can admire its beauty while stopping it biting you.
Perhaps one day Apple might let me do the same with the device I paid them a thousand pounds for. But I'm not going to hold my breath.
And no, I am not switching fealty from the Apple feudal lord to the Google one. I love this, from Dave Megginson:
When Apple fleeced and Google spied,
Where, then, should our loyalty lie?
The answer to that is simple: to people. Not to feudal lords, no matter what colour their flag.
John Scalzi has a new Mac
As he says, it is really weird going to a 16in laptop after using a 13in one – I dusted off my 16in 2019 MacBook Pro a couple of days ago to keep it updated and make sure I has all my files on it1 and it makes using the Air feel like you’re using a toy computer. It also reminds me how much better the keyboard on the Air is – the MBP was, I think, part of the last generation of Macs before Apple dropped their terrible switches.
Like John, I also find myself using USB-C to charge the Air rather than the MagSafe port. I don’t get the love for MagSafe. Sure, if you trip over the cable you have a chance with USB-C to remove your laptop from whatever surface it’s on, but on the few occasions I have kicked a cable the USB-C has come out anyway. Maybe other people’s tables are more slippery than mine? And anyway – with battery life like the M-series machines have, my Air mainly gets charged overnight. It’s really rare I bother plugging it in during the day2.
And I entirely agree with him about this, too:
If you’re using your laptop for word processing or spreadsheets, with web browsing and occasional light gaming, and you want a Mac, please for the love of God get a MacBook Air, which is so much cheaper, much lighter, and more than enough for what you’re doing with your computer.The time was when even non-pros really wanted/“needed” a MacBook Pro. Now, that’s not the case: if (like me) you spend most of your life in ordinary business applications and don’t do professional audio/video editing, an Air will be more than good enough. Even my puny little base model Air (8Gb RAM, 256Gb SSD) is faster than my much more beefy Intel MacBook Pro at video editing. Not that I do a lot, but on the odd occasions when I do, it works.