So I enjoyed this paper very much, but it starts off with a claim that’s worth arguing about: “organic synthesis is still a rate-limiting factor in drug-discovery projects“. Is that true?
It depends on where you’re standing. All the synthetic limitations described above are real, and they keep us from being able to make a lot of molecules that we’d otherwise be cranking out. But (and this is a big point) it’s rarely the case that we medicinal chemists identify a tricky new structure that absolutely has to be made. That sounds odd, but it comes down to our predictive powers, which aren’t so great. We don’t generally draw some wild compound up on the hood sash and say “That’s the one, folks: find a way to make it or die trying”. We never know which is the one, so in the absence of knowing, we make the things that we can make in the ways that we can make them, and honestly, much of the time, we can manage to come up with something.
Month: April 2018
End of Windows
It’s important to note that Windows persisted as the linchpin of Microsoft’s strategy for over 30 years for a very good reason: it made everything the company did possible. Windows had the ecosystem and the lock-in, and provided the foundation for Office and Windows Server, both of which were built with the assumption of Windows at the center. Office 365 and Azure are comparatively weaker strategically: Office 365 has document lock-in, but the exact same forces that weakened Windows in the first place weaken the idea of documents as well. It’s not clear why new companies in particular would even care. Azure, meanwhile, is chasing AWS, with a huge amount of business coming from Linux VMs that could run anywhere. Unsurprisingly, both are still benefiting from Windows: Office 365 really does, as Nadella noted in his retreat, work better on Windows, and vice versa; it is seamless for organizations that have been using Office for years to move to Office 365. Azure’s biggest advantage, meanwhile, is that it allows for hybrid deployments, where workloads are split between legacy on-premise Windows servers and Azure’s public cloud; that legacy was built on Windows. This, then, is Nadella’s next challenge: to understand that Windows is not and will not drive future growth is one thing; identifying future drivers of growth is another. Even in its division Windows remains the best thing Microsoft has going — it had such a powerful hold on Microsoft’s culture precisely because it was so successful.
Many more hominins
It seems as if, every few weeks now, a new hominin fossil, genetic study, archaeological site, or re-dating of old sites is reported from the vast Asian continent, a continent that still has large swathes of areas yet to be intensively explored. If nothing else, the picture as it appears thus far is much more complicated than the old Out-of-Africa models: there were multiple earlier dispersals from Africa, and much more interbreeding between species than we once thought. The story of ourselves, it turns out, becomes richer the more we know about it.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 