technology

Tesla what s written in the numbers

current valuation might imply 30 to 50% market share in the future but let’s look at it like a tech and not a car company

sustainable advantage in batteries? It is claimed by Musk, is it real ?

Tesla is an operating system with around a car, car design turned upside down. Will it translate into a sustaiable advantage vs car producers?

Tesla first at autonomous drive with Autopilot, famously claimed in a keynote where Tusk promised your Tesla could work for you as a Taxi while you don’t use it

Imagine Tesla can pack all these unique features in a skateboard other producers can customize with fancy bodies. The skateboard is the operating system in a android-mobile phones analogy

There is a tech story that holds, but theere is also 3 checks to performs, answer the 3 questions, will Tesla really be able to be consistently ahead of all car makers in the world ? In the end, will it be economies of newtok and winner takeall like in software and social networks? Let’s see

New Cold War

TikTok wars, the tech perspective https://stratechery.com/2020/the-tiktok-war/

the political eye, a former S’pore Prime Minister https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/opinion/article/3091343/china-and-us-new-cold-war-or-not-new-cold-war

funny how the technologist can go fully ideological in its conclusion while the politician sees ample rooms for continuing relations, not really a cold war, wrong metaphors shan’t be used because they might be self-fulfilling

curves, innovation curves of all sorts

Gartner Hype cycle

jazzed up version of traditional Everett Rogers’ diffusion of innovations

this was the trigger https://twitter.com/NickPinkston/status/1278353201905823745

and this is Carlota Perez curve which puts together technology and finance in a play of coupling and decoupling in the installation and deployment phases

carlota perez cycle

I guess it owes something to Kondratiev, that originally was a theory of cycles in commodity prices over long periods (like 60-80 years)

and I wonder the relationships with Urchin Secular cycles more of 2 to 3 centuries due to demographic factors https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3bPH2az479gzxDMbf/book-review-ages-of-discord

Screenshot 2020-07-16 at 14.48.10

 

invention and implementation

are different, it’s like having an idea and selling it

Greeks had a steam engine, more a steam turbine, aelopyle. The stem engine arrived in 18th century England

Actually it wasn’t only the steam to do the work, the steam created the void and the air did the work in the Newcomen engine. And it was at some point economical only because coal mines flooded and so there was a lot of coal with non shipping costs.

The sumerian had the wheel, but only for toys. Maybe the economnics ewasn’t right. The middle east forgot the wheel in the middle age because four camels could be run by a man instead of a single chariot. The economics.

so, things look at us waiting to be discovered, we had gotten to the moon and still had not put wheels to luggages, implementation can be harder than invention

distilled of a chapter in Antifragile by Taleb and Anton Howes newsletter “Age of Invention: The Weight of Air” of July 3, 2020

Apple, Windows, strategy and product development

Steve Sinofsky, lead at MS dev team for Apple software, knows both worlds well

https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/apples-relentless-strategy-and-execution-7544a76aa26

commenting on Apple switch to own silicon in Macs, toos 2 years, it is at once a short time for such a deep change affecting the entire product ecosystem, very long one if you think indeed you are committing an entire ecosystem to it and for 2 years you keep going whatever will happen

“16/ To execute requires everything in the company to operate as though strategy matters most. It means communication. Performance reviews and rewards. It means management top down reinforces it and isn’t “random” or “inconsistent”. That is so difficult internally. Painful even.”

15/ It is incredibly clear that everyone at Apple puts strategy requirements above anything “local”. When you wonder why there isn’t more new in Notes or why Mail is missing stuff it’s because supporting a multi-year strategy trumps individual teams and that’s a good thing.

Covd-19 winners and losers (tech)

Artificial intelligence definitely loser, phisicians were faster to retrain than  neural networks, even in imaging AI was a pain in the ass trying to solve problems that did not exist while not properly trained

Blockchain big loser, tracing app need to track individual contacts in full respect of privacy, with decentralized protocols. Blockchain to the rescue ? Nah, Google and Apple provided it for Android and iPhone

3d Printing not the general technology people hoped for few years back but oncle an ICU runs out of cheap ventilator valves and the producer isn’t quick to restock, a bunch of hackers save live3d printing hackers save lives, and that happened all over the world

Genetics Moderna messenger RNA vaccine has started human trial first, ahead of all other vaccines developed with more traditional technologies. Let’s whether the mRNA approach works and genetics makes the difference in this crisis

Moats, gross margins and strategy sounding fluff

Moats Before (Gross) Margins

so you got to have gross margins, fat gross margins. But you end up doing only software

but you know Apple has not SW margins but it is a good company.

Gotta have moats moats moats, baby

so what are htese moats? Founders feeling the crisp air of the morning while standing on top of the tower and look beyond their moats. The fascination of military metaphors that is strategy 🙂

BTW of course a fixation on gross margin is ok if you have to win the startup race on the internet, everyone will have a go at the next tool, platform, aggregaotor and we know the rules of competition there. But then strategy does not stop there

Moats are just a beautiful, inspiring image

The season of our technologies

Crypto Winter A16z The Crypto Price-Innovation Cycle by Chris Dixon and Eddy Lazzarin Note how the technology winter is the environment where we  find the bear markets

Last week Ben Evans The VR Winter

In the origins it was the AI Winter, set off by Minsky’s comments in 1969 on perceptrons unable to reproduce the XOR operator

Now is the winter of our discontent

The suggestion of the original AI Winter in the 70’s came from the Nuclear Winter “The term was coined by analogy to the idea of a nuclear winter.[2] The field has experienced several hype cycles, followed by disappointment and criticism, followed by funding cuts, followed by renewed interest years or decades later.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

Nuggetized writing (Tooze)

“So sharing has become a key element in my reading, and the trying to figure out what the interesting thing is that I want to share is a very good way of focusing your mind on what the core — I read a piece, so what are the three sentences here I want to cut and paste? Which is the graph that is really telling? And how do I nuggetize that into whatever it is — 280 characters? I found that, at this stage of my life, I know this isn’t necessarily the best way to read complicated philosophy of history, which I also spent a lot of time doing at various points in my career.”

for me it’s 1300 charcter short essay format of Linkedin, pretty much same psychological lever

from the conversation with Tyler Cowen https://medium.com/conversations-with-tyler/adam-tooze-tyler-cowen-covid-19-economics-46a9b28a2f59