Tag: analysis

Beachheads and Obstacles

Amazon, on the other hand, seems to have learned the right lessons from its mobile failures; what is notable about the company’s approach to Alexa is that it leverages and learns from the mobile era. Alexa benefits from Amazon’s investments in data centers and networking, interacts with both iOS and Android to the greatest extent possible, and is in line with Amazon’s overall business — making buying things that much more convenient. Alexa is an operating system for the home, and perhaps beyond.

What do executives do?

An executive with 8k indirect reports and 2000 hours of work in a year can afford to spend, at most, 15 minutes per year per person in their reporting hierarchy… even if they work on nothing else. That job seems impossible. How can anyone make any important decision in a company that large? They will always be the least informed person in the room, no matter what the topic. The job of an executive is: to define and enforce culture and values for their whole organization, and to ratify good decisions. That’s all. Not to decide. Not to break ties. Not to set strategy. Not to be the expert on every, or any topic. Just to sit in the room while the right people make good decisions in alignment with their values. And if they do, to endorse it. And if they don’t, to send them back to try again.

Rolling Stock Costs

Despite this conservatism, costs are very high, consistent with a factor somewhat higher than 2 on commuter rail and somewhat lower than 2 on the subway. But perhaps the conservatism is what increases costs in the first place? Perhaps the reason costs are high is that the world market has moved on and the MTA and some other American operators have not noticed. In Chicago, Metra found itself trying to order a type of gallery car that nobody makes any longer, using parts that are no longer available. Perhaps the same kind of outmoded thinking is present at the MTA, and this is why costs have exploded in the last 10 years.

Apple A13

Apple’s new chip contains 8.5b transistors. Also, there are 6 CPU cores: 2 high-performance cores running at 2.66 GHz, and 4 efficiency cores. It has a quad-core graphics processor, an LTE modem, an Apple-designed image processor, and an 8-core neural engine for machine intelligence functions that can run 1t operations per second.

This new chip is smarter, faster, and beefier, and yet it somehow manages to consume less power than its predecessor. It’s 30% more efficient than last year’s A12 chip, 1 of the factors that contributes to the extra 5 hours per day of battery life in the new iPhones.

Uber chaos

If this book creates an entire class of shitty founders, you’re welcome to call me up in a year and tell me that I failed. I hope that’s not the case. In general, I like to give young founders a little more credit. I have a lot of criticisms of the Valley, but I think people generally recognize what went wrong inside of Uber now, and have a sense of wariness around how they want their own company to grow. Uber is a case study in going totally off the rails. I hope folks learned from that and I think that’s already kind of happening. I don’t see folks holding up Uber as the ideal. There are some Kool-Aid drinkers that were early in Uber that still fiercely defend everything that they did, and I think it’s going to be harder for them to defend that as time goes on.

Privacy Fundamentalism

a takedown of (one of the many) nonsense NYT articles on privacy.

the privacy debate needs to be reset around these 3 assumptions:

  1. Accept that privacy online entails trade-offs; the corollary is that an absolutist approach to privacy is a surefire way to get policy wrong.
  2. Keep in mind that the widespread creation and spread of data is inherent to computers and the Internet, and that these qualities have positive as well as negative implications; be wary of what good ideas and positive outcomes are extinguished in the pursuit to stomp out the negative ones.
  3. Focus policy on the physical and digital divide. Our behavior online is one thing: we both benefit from the spread of data and should in turn be more wary of those implications. Making what is offline online is quite another.

Air Conditioning heating

The warmer it gets, the more we use air conditioning. The more we use air conditioning, the warmer it gets. Is there any way out of this trap? In the mid-1980s, Geneva, which has a warmer climate than much of the US, the local government banned the installation of air conditioning except by special permission. This approach is relatively common across Switzerland and, as a result, air conditioning accounts for less than 2% of all electricity used. The Swiss don’t appear to miss air conditioning too much – its absence is rarely discussed, and they have largely learned to do without.

Photo Query Matching

Google Local Photos Match the User Query

What does this mean for your business? Well given Google’s penchant for wanting to answer a users’ query and their belief that they can pick a photo better than you, it means the same thing that it always has. It means you need to upload lots of great photos so that no matter which one Google chooses it is a good one.

But now it also means that you really need to be thinking about photos that reflect the broad range of products and services that you deliver and that users might be searching on. If you carry wedding bands and engagement rings and earrings and necklaces you will want to be sure that you have great photos of each. And that they are easily identified in the image.

UBI Plans

most of them fail on basic math – they rely on funding schemes that wouldn’t come close to covering costs. The rest are too small to actually lift people out of poverty. None of them are at all credible. These plans fail even though they cheat and give themselves dictatorial power. “End corporate welfare, then redirect the money to UBI!” But if it was that easy to end corporate welfare, wouldn’t people have done it already, for non-UBI related reasons? “We’ll get a UBI by ending corporate welfare” is an outrageous claim. And even the plans that let themselves make it fail on basic math.