8 ms·

The Curse of Culture

• Animats 10y ago
  That's a great scene, with Jobs announcing that Internet Explorer would be the default browser on the Macintosh, and the crowd booing. Jobs has to stop speaking, twice.
  • justinh 10y ago
    I had somehow missed that gem in past viewings. I only focused on the "Bill Gates as BB" aspect. For the curious, it starts at 28:36.
    • r00fus 10y ago
      Probably because that aspect of the scene was so central to "Pirates of Silicon Valley"? It's etched in my memory too. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/
• L_Rahman 10y ago
  I'm a huge fan of Stratechery and Thompson. They've given me powerful ways of thinking about the world. Are there others out there? While Thompson does talk a lot about the intersection of technology with business strategy, he tends to focus on large, well-known technology companies that primarily have consumer facing offering. I'd pay to read something like Stratechery for biotechnology, or enterprise software but to the best of my knowledge none of these exist.
  • basch 10y ago
    I had the same thought while reading this I wish I could read an entire aggregator of different hybrid consulting+insight blogs.
  • macintux 10y ago
    Horace Dediu/Asymco, while covering similar turf to Stratechery, is well worth reading.
  • mikeyouse 10y ago
    Benedict Evans was like this and has since joined A16Z. His focus is mostly mobile, so you end up with a lot of overlap between the other people covering Google / Apple / MSFT, but he definitely has an interesting perspective (He formerly worked in research for an investment bank, so he knows the ins/outs of global telecom very well): http://ben-evans.com/ http://ben-evans.com/ His annual mobile deck is usually really good; http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/3/29/presentation-mobile-ate-the-world http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2016/3/29/presentation-mo...
  • siyer 10y ago
    Within pharma, Derek Lowe has been blogging for many years, with a mix of posts focusing on new developments as well as broader strategic questions. http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/ http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/ The comment section there is also typically informed.
    • eropple 10y ago
      Derek Lowe also has the tremendous "Things I Won't Work With", which is laugh-out-loud funny.
      • astrange 10y ago
        It hasn't updated in nearly two years. Wonder when people will stop recommending it.
        • eropple 10y ago
          Before I recommended it, I went back, read the most recent one (which I've read before), and snickered aloud. It's still enjoyable as heck.
  • snowwrestler 10y ago
    I don't get the love for Stratechery. Thompson is a good writer but the few articles I can recall from him were bad misses. For example he wrote a long piece about how the Nest acquisition heralded a major new consumer products business model for Google. How has that worked out?
    • tsycho 10y ago
      I don't think it's because of his prediction accuracy. What I love about his writing is that he brings in a fresh perspective and an alternative way to think about tech and its future, whereas most normal tech press just reports what's happening today and not even the why of that. FWIW, while I found this particular piece insightful in general, I think he ignored the huge importance of Android and iOS. Even if the future is voice, the medium for the voice is likely to continue to be the phone or other wearables connected to the phone for a long time (5 years or more). And hence Apple and Google are likely to remain dominant since they will be at the front of the funnel. Even if the actual intelligence is coming from other companies, they will still have to be packaged as "app/AI plugins" into Android/iOS, so the OS owners should be able to continue to extract their pound of flesh a.k.a. App store revenue cut.
• roymurdock 10y ago
  Summary Founders set the company culture, success ingrains that culture deep into a company's subconscious where it runs in the background regardless of whatever cultural reforms/artifacts are introduced - culture can only be changed when a new CEO (Jobs, Nadella) steps in and announces a huge change in culture, which usually stems from an otherwise unimaginable partnership (such as Apple/MSFT) that shows a concession to the realities of the market, which the company once thought it was above. --- Author singles out Apple and Google as companies he is worried about WRT current culture. Apple - threatened by "big data AI services": Author calls for Apple to partner with Microsoft to get access to cheap backend services (Azure) and/or frontend services (Siri + Cortana), ostensibly to play in Amazon AWS (compute as a service) and IBM Watson's (AI/marketing as a service) markets, respectively. Alternatively, Apple should open iOS to enable customers to muck around with the latest and greatest Android developments and set Google services as defaults on their iOS devices. Google - threatened by users spending time on social apps: Should partner with Facebook by building a bot for Facebook Messenger and a backend for Facebook Messenger developers. --- Questions/Comments - It is unclear what unique advantages Apple would bring to the table for either the frontend/backend services market. Why break the intense in-house hardware/software coupling focus by leaning on MS for services? What backend services does Apple need to bring in-house through a partnership? - What are the cool new Android services that iOS needs to integrate? I know the author says AI capabilities, but that is not a well-defined technology or use-case. - I don't know a single person that likes using Facebook Messenger. Additionally, messaging applications have much, much lower barriers to entry than web browsers. Messenger is not comparable to Chrome. This is why Fbook purchased Whatsapp. - Underlying premise: does Apple really need to play in the big data/AI space? Does Google really need to play in the social media space? Are these really going to be markets that drive future growth?
  • wmeredith 10y ago
    - What are the cool new Android services that iOS needs to integrate? I know the author says AI capabilities, but that is not a well-defined technology or use-case. I'd much rather talk to Google than Siri. It works about 10x better. But I can't set a default assitant on my device. Nor can anything else interact with Siri, as it has no API. I'd love to see them open this stuff up more. I love Apple's hardware and I like their mobile OS. Their software/services? Not so much. I hate iTunes, I find Siri worthless, notes is a bag of hurt, Calendar has syncing issues, the iWork suite other than Keynote is a joke for professionals since it was gutted a couple years ago, and on and on... I use alternatives for all of these things. But they cannot be integrated well.
• bluedino 10y ago
  >> I’m worried for Apple…If the landscape shifts to prioritize those big-data AI services, Apple will find itself in a similar position as BlackBerry did almost a decade ago: Maybe Apple is betting that AI won't be achieved in the next 15-20 years.
  • wangii 10y ago
    I'd bet the same.
    • blister 10y ago
      Wow, I wouldn't. We are on the cusp of a major paradigm shift. Some of the smartest people in the world are tackling small edges of an impressive graph of capabilities. As more and more of these edges are solved, general purpose computing inches ever closer to our grasp. If I were a betting man, I'd put my money on 10 years or less.
      • nikdaheratik 10y ago
        AI is just like fusion in that we're always 10 years away or less from achieving it.
        • leadingthenet 10y ago
          With the notable difference that there are actual practical applications of AI on the market, which are out right now, with many, many more coming in the near-future.
      • wangii 10y ago
        I very much hope strong AI to be reality within my life span, it would bring singularity and other wonderful things. but the sad fact is, we have close to 0 idea what intelligence means. In this field, we are still in pre-Newton era where we might have all tools available but have 0 clue how to put them together. that's why the world now are busy tackling small edge cases. The next question is, can we put enough resources (money, smart people, computing power) to brute force? I bet no, because it's not an engineering problem but an ill defined one. historically, major paradigm shift happened where major vendors ignored. there is no reason to believe google folks are smarter than the old generations. if they were, we as consumers are doomed.
• Jerry2 10y ago
  I've come to a conclusion that Cook's reign at Apple will probably mirror Ballmer's reign at Microsoft. Both are biz guys who inherited companies from technology visionaries with massive revenue streams and yet they both lacked vision and tech expertise to create successful new products. Ballmer tried it numerous times and Cook has tried it with Watch, Music and so on. Neither of them have succeeded. Apple's now become a "me too" company as they keep on releasing products that other companies have released already. Apparently, Apple is now working on their Amazon Echo and Google Home clone. They'll be third to market once it's out. In 2014, when Apple bought an urban fashion brand that sells overpriced headphones, Google bought Deepmind for 1/6 of the price. That said it all about where both companies were headed. Steve Jobs is famous for quoting Gretzky's line about "skating where the puck is headed and not where it is" and it seems that Google's skating where the puck is going while Apple's skating backwards. Apple's headed for a decade of stagnation... just like Microsoft was under Ballmer. My only question is: how long before Apple gets its own Nadella and who will be their savior? I don't see anyone in their executive ranks who's as good as Nadella.
  • argonaut 10y ago
    DeepMind is probably losing Google tens of millions a year. Now, it may pay off financially in the future, but it's hard to disentagle its effects given that Google already had a deep learning research group, Google Brain.
    • niketdesai 10y ago
      I think having multiple approaches was the key here. Worse case scenario these teams converge, but the true best case scenario is discovery of different methods to solve Google's ambitions. In some ways, the depth of the search team needs to be replicated by their AI-research groups. As you stated, what is unclear is if the investments will be obviously lucrative (as search has been).
  • partiallypro 10y ago
    It happens with all big companies. I don't think Cook is a bad CEO, he's just not a -great- CEO. He also had the unlucky chance to step into Steve Jobs' shoes, and also came in so late in the cycle that much of the market is already saturated. Similar happened to Balmer, he came in after the boom was over. But tried to push into new markets (and failed.) I don't honestly think Balmer was a bad CEO, he was just very bad at pushing into new markets...and they already had the FTC on their backs, so their strangle hold on the existing market was diminished. Doing walled gardens like Apple and Google did would draw FTC ire, so they couldn't really do it. In the end, Apple doesn't have the FTC on its back, basically controls the supply chain. They'll be fine, but they are in a saturated market and their explosive growth is over. Investors are much more interested in explosive growth in tech than slow steady cash flow. I'm more concerned about the Google model than the Apple model. Apple's margins will probably fall, but I think the Google PPC cashcow is soon going to hit a wall as millennials become the majority and their adblockers and immunity to online advertising drives down conversions.
• _yosefk 10y ago
  IMO what the article talks about is the business model, not the culture, they are two separate things - not entirely separate, but mostly. Business model is Apple shipping devices and Google providing ad-supported services over the Internet. Culture is how in one company you can't push changes to the central repository without a code review which might take a couple of days, while in another you can work whichever way you please but if things break you're expected to fix them on Sunday at 3 AM. Like the business model, culture is certainly influenced by the people at the top, though I think it's defined by a somewhat larger number of early employees, and it's harder to change once established, compared to the business model. Both affect performance in the market, but it's not as straightforward to analyze, even in hindsight, how exactly culture affects market performance relatively to the business model where in hindsight it's perfectly clear.
  • jdmichal 10y ago
    It's discussing and means to be discussing organizational culture. The business model, controls, and processes are artifacts of the underlying hidden culture. This is what the beginning of the article is discussing, when it talks about going three degrees down. Think of Conway's Law: An organization is constrained to design systems that mirror its structure. This is basically the same thing, but abstracted a level; the organizational structures themselves are constrained to be shaped by the business' underlying assumptions. ("Tech culture", such as your example of code reviews, is usually an example of controls and processes. What controls and processes exist for creation and deployment of software? If we were making widgets on the factory floor instead, the fact that these aren't "culture" as being discussed would be more immediately obvious.)
• amelius 10y ago
  > and the company (Apple) is almost certainly working on a car I'm wondering how that will turn out. It looks like cars will be seen more and more as a service rather than as a product. And Apple has more experience in making products that people want to own.
• PepeGomez 10y ago
  That's an interesting thought, but I'm afraid that the actual reason is far more trivial. Companies are typically founded by highly passionate and creative people, who care a lot about what they do and are both able and willing to steer their startup in the right direction. Once they grow, they start hiring new employees, many of those will inevitably be the kind of people who only want to do their job and go home. Over time, the management too gets filled by people who apply mainly because it's a high status and well paid position, and are not at all that interested in what the company does. Eventually, all the remaining creative people and even the founders themselves get bored with the routine and leave to do something else and the company becomes hollowed out. The remaining people may be highly skilled and competent in their respective positions, but they are generally unaware of the big picture and the reasons behind how things are done. As the result, the company slowly turns from succesful to dysfunctional as its ossified culture gets out of touch with the ever evolving reality, as there aren't any people left in the company who are able to notice practices that are no longer functional and care enough to change them.
  • visarga 10y ago
    A shorter version could be: startups are tempted to think radically different, to try new approaches, because they have nothing to lose. But a big, entrenched company has to protect the current cash flow first, then think about how to extend it. They have a lot to lose by cannibalizing the current business model in favor of a new, visionary model. They become victims of their own success.
    • PepeGomez 10y ago
      While that also could be the case, it's not what I meant.
• hanginghyena 10y ago
  Interesting - Google's control over organic search might actually come under threat sooner.... http://www.marginhound.com/siri-will-virtual-assistants-disrupt-googles-control-of-organic-search/ http://www.marginhound.com/siri-will-virtual-assistants-disr... Granted, Apple's recent market share numbers for mobile devices were down (and they are strong in US markets than globally; Android is doing better overseas). But they've got a legitimate shot at disruption as voice search grows.