Dozen Worthy Reads đ° (No. 147)
This week: Slack, Twitter, Intel, Conformism, More Jio, Hidden network effects, decentralization of the future internet, Warren Buffett.
Hi All,
Hope you are well! In case you missed all the drama from the antitrust hearing, here is a quick recap. Some great questions and lots of great documents that were available to scrutinize Big Tech. You can also see a quicker twitter recap from David Dayen
Last week I wrote about Slackâs EU complaint. Additionally I republished (to this blog) an article I wrote for the Bangalore chapter of the PMI. The article is called âProduct Management Demystifiedâ. So keeping track, this brings me to 11 articles of my 20 goal for 2020. I also dusted my twitter account and gonna give it another try. Thank you for reading and as always feel free to share this article out. Have a wonderful week!
As always if you like this please share :)
Since I have a shining new (old) twitter account, here are some fine tweets:
From Josh Elman on why people confuse social networks and media networks
From Ari Paparo on Googleâs Ad Tech Stack
Product this week from PH
NoCode Tool List by WeLoveNoCode: 200+ no code tools and a project cost calculator via @ProductHunt https://www.producthunt.com/posts/nocode-tool-list-by-welovenocode
COVID reads this weekÂ
How COVID will change our economy:
Virtualization, Forklifts, Microphones, Shipping Containers, Video Conferencing, StethoscopesâŚ
From the article:
We can extend the âmicrophone or forklift?â question from a 2007 Edward Leamer essay with a few more representative types â shipping container, video conferencing, stethoscope â to build a useful framework for thinking about the relative win/loss distributions of different kinds of new technology.
As virtualization increases global competition for service work and knowledge work, the effects will mirror those of globalization, driving wages down by allowing jobs to move to geos / countries where labor is cheaper.
As virtualization allows some local services to become âcontent,â the effects will mirror those of a âmicrophone technology,â resulting in superstar effects.
Virtualization will benefit capital (owners of tech) and relatively favor labor in lower GDP countries / lower cost geos.
One area where virtualization has the potential to create more jobs than it destroys is where it serves as a âstethoscope technologyâ that facilitates 1:1 listening.
Great infographic about The Disconnect Between Consumers and the Stock Market
Reads this week:Â Â
Impatience is a virtue : A case for being impatient and some great examples from email, web page load times that speak to this : Be impatient | benkuhn.net
From the article:
In other words, the main benefit of being fast is that you end up doing different things. Nelson Elhageâs pointââhaving faster tools changes how users use a toolââapplies across nearly every domain:
If you respond to your emails quickly instead of slowly, youâll get access to more new opportunities, and end up prioritizing them over whatever you would have done instead.
If you make it 10x faster to test your code, you donât just save time waiting on testsâyou can start doing test-driven development, discover your mistakes earlier, and save yourself from going down bad paths.
If you deploy your new app now instead of next week, youâll learn how users like the new features one week earlier, and youâll be able to feed that knowledge back into future product decisions.
I wrote an article a couple of weeks ago on why Twitter has a hard job with monetizing subs. Here are some possible premium options that they can use:Â
Twitter survey reveals the subscription options it's eyeing, including an 'Undo Send' button
Why Intel is faltering with 7nm : Murphy's Law vs Moore's Law: How Intel Lost its Dominance in the Computer Industry
Intelâs delay, strategy, inflection points, modularization and strategic decisions that led to Intel losing their way (permanently?)
So many parallels with MSFT and the old guard of Windows. If the company insists on being a manufacturing company the way MSFT insisted that everyone within the company be subservient to the needs of Windows, they likely will survive until the next generation of Arm chips replace Intel chips in server architecture.
From the article:
Intel is potentially facing as big of a strategic inflection point today as it was in 1984, but the major difference is that its core data center business is highly profitable and still growing due to the continued strength of cloud computing and Intel still dominates as a supplier CPUs used in cloud data centers. That sector requires very high-performance CPUs and power consumption, although a factor, is not as important as it is in a battery-powered mobile device. However, there are a growing number of fabless chip design groups, including Amazon, Google, Huawei, as well as startups such as Ampere that are working on ARM-based high-performance CPUs for data centers, and that market will get even bigger with the future growth of edge-computing in 5G networks. Since TSMC will be manufacturing these ARM server chips, and the new ARM-based chips in the Macbooks are rumored to be faster than Intelâs CPUs (and lower power), Intelâs advantage will erode even in its core data center business.
A great read from Paul Graham on why most people are conformists : The Four Quadrants of Conformism
From the article:
The kids in the upper left quadrant, the aggressively conventional-minded ones, are the tattletales. They believe not only that rules must be obeyed, but that those who disobey them must be punished.
The kids in the lower left quadrant, the passively conventional-minded, are the sheep. They're careful to obey the rules, but when other kids break them, their impulse is to worry that those kids will be punished, not to ensure that they will.
The kids in the lower right quadrant, the passively independent-minded, are the dreamy ones. They don't care much about rules and probably aren't 100% sure what the rules even are.
And the kids in the upper right quadrant, the aggressively independent-minded, are the naughty ones. When they see a rule, their first impulse is to question it. Merely being told what to do makes them inclined to do the opposite.
To Understand Jio, You Need To Understand Reliance
Another brilliant read on the history of Reliance and Jio. How the Ambaniâs straddled the political zeitgeist and reinvented themselves so many times around
A great read from Bryne Hobart about The Bullwhip Effect and why things donât play out this way in real life.
Growth+Sales: The New Era of Enterprise Go-to-Market
Growth+Sales - bottoms up and top down sales. Land and expand. Product led discovery initially (low friction to sign on and use) leading to enterprise sales to convince buyers plus ancillary stakeholders
Why some self-driving startups reject Googleâs âmoonshotâ approach
There are better ways to achieve non-moonshot goals with:Â
Smaller vehicles
Slower vehicles
More fixed routes
Trucking/Routes with less traffic
A great read from a16z on âhiddenâ network effects. I think Google to a great extent had âhiddenâ network effects until everyone saw what people could actually do with all that data. In fact I think some of these network effects were hidden from their own purview as well.
Hidden Networks: Network Effects That Don't Look Like Network Effects
A great read from Li Jin on Unbundling Work from Employment
From the article:
While past platforms largely focused on connecting consumers with workers and honed in on facilitating transactions, thereâs a lot more to work than just earning income. To legitimize independent workers and creators, there needs to be dedicated toolsâboth vertical and horizontalâto support managing and growing their businesses, forging new connections, learning new skills, and connecting to work opportunities.
A great read from Chris Dixon on decentralization
Why Decentralization Matters. We've forgotten there's a better way to⌠| by Chris Dixon
From the article:
Decentralized networks can win the third era of the internet for the same reason they won the first era: by winning the hearts and minds of entrepreneurs and developers.
An illustrative analogy is the rivalry in the 2000s between Wikipedia and its centralized competitors like Encarta. If you compared the two products in the early 2000s, Encarta was a far better product, with better topic coverage and higher accuracy. But Wikipedia improved at a much faster rate, because it had an active community of volunteer contributors who were attracted to its decentralized, community-governed ethos. By 2005, Wikipedia was the most popular reference site on the internet. Encarta was shut down in 2009.
The lesson is that when you compare centralized and decentralized systems you need to consider them dynamically, as processes, instead of statically, as rigid products. Centralized systems often start out fully baked, but only get better at the rate at which employees at the sponsoring company improve them. Decentralized systems start out half-baked but, under the right conditions, grow exponentially as they attract new contributors.
Long Read : An interview with Alice Schroeder about warren buffett. Just an overall interesting read on a legendary human being : Behind the Scenes With Buffettâs Biographer, Alice Schroeder
Thank you for reading. Stay Safe. Be Well!