Dozen Worthy Reads 📰 (No. 155)
This week : The Cicilline Report, MSFT's app store principles, bundling strategies, Substack v. Medium, Deep job platforms, Opendoor, The "stories" format, TikTok, Big Tech device strategies, Product
Hi All,
I hope you all are doing well and welcome (if you aren’t new then again) to Dozen Worthy Reads. A newsletter where I talk about the most interesting things about tech that I read the past couple of weeks or write about tech happenings. You can sign up here or just read on….
As some of you know I’ve been rethinking Dozen Worthy Reads and today’s edition is the first attempt at that. As a reminder I’m going to focus on tech and do my best to cover specific areas that are interesting in the moment but also help with determining the future.
Wish you all a great week!
Technology & Politics : The Cicilline Report
Starting off today with tech regulation. I’ve linked to multiple pieces below that cover the recent Cicilline Report. This 451 page report covers a lot of ground and is the starting point toward more legislation. I fear that the legislation will do more harm to users than good. The report targets 4 areas:
A break-up of big tech that would result in more competition
Funing the FTC and DOJ antitrust division (i consider this to be a training ground for big tech)
Allow the David’s to fight the Goliath’s (which is a lot harder to do today)
Fixing the law that deals with mergers and acquisitions
Key thoughts:
Today it feels like Big Tech is supremely powerful and there seems to be no end to that.
Breaking up the companies is honestly not the right thing to do but what might be the right thing to do is prevent the same kind of BigTech in the future
Breaking up network effects based tech this way (and it is definitely arguable that some examples are still feasible - WhatsApp, Instagram for example (and Facebook has just combined messaging recently make that harder, but not impossible)
The biggest issue is not really about BigTech it's about when regulation should step in. You see the same thing happening with bitcoin. Tomorrow there will be some other form of new, unknown big tech which regulation will not be ready for. What then? Scramble all over again?
Tech has changed in the sense that the learning curve is SO STEEP for any of us working in tech that it's hard to figure out how, even if the laws change, will prevent the same thing from happening again with new tech?
BigTech has been very good at poaching experts from the government. Maybe the government should really plan for a larger budget and prevent this from happening by poaching from tech? I mean who better to help you dig deeper
The problem is that BigTech has armies of lawyers
Congress Gets Ready to Smash Big Tech Monopolies (Matt Stoller)
Anti-monopoly vs. Antitrust – Stratechery by Ben Thompson (Ben Thompson)
Inside the House Report on Big Tech and Competition: Part II (Bryne Hobart)
Technology Giants : MSFT’s jibe at the stores …
The interesting thing this week was MSFT’s little jibe at Apple and Google (with the recent news that Google enforcing the existing 30% policy like Apple is doing). MSFT was already charging 5% as commission so my guess is the revenue was already super low (cant find a good estimate). Also didn’t they always allow you to install software from the internet? Nothing has really changed but they want to appear like goody two shoes. Has MSFT become a nicer company than it was back in the 90s? Possibly yes, especially under Nadella but that does not mean that this move is altruistic.
Technology Strategy : Bundling Strategies
First you unbundle then you bundle. I wrote a recent take on Apple One bundles and of course I am nowhere as good as Ben Thompson who also wrote a recent take on the state of bundles in 2020 and covers multiple different bundles and what the purpose of the bundle really is. It can be very tempting to look at a bundle and think about just generating more consumer surplus and that might be true but that is not the whole story. Ben has dug deeper into this. With Apple One (and the bundle play is not yet over) it truly is a hardware play. The key point to take away is that Apple’s bundle is not compelling enough without hardware. I’d expect it to look something like the below in future …
Technology Strategy : Deep Job Platforms
The jobs tech market has changed drastically as the below illustration shows. Earlier “platforms” only made the connections and the company/prospective employee did all the rest of the work. Little by little this market has been chipped at, both horizontally and vertically as well as with “services” wrapped around them. What can we expect?
More platforms that will continue to chip at a vertical offering (end-to-end platform for hiring nurses in US or temp teachers in India)
More platforms that will chip away at value added services across the funnel
For example companies such as Hirevue and TripleByte
A lot of them will find this scaling to be quite hard and it will take years but a few successful ones will emerge.
Remember, people will always need jobs!
Technology : Bizmodel/strategy : The Opendoor opportunity
This read from Packy M on Opendoor was very interesting. Buying and Selling homes is a huge pain point for anyone who has ever been through that process. There is so much crud in the mortgage engine market as well as inefficiencies that the market is ripe for tech. The real question is - will this lead to positive unit economics?
Technology : Bizmodel/Strategy/Unlocking Value : Substack vs Medium
A good read from Adam Keesling
If you had to choose which one would be successful and why? Which one would it be?
Medium aggregates articles from multiple authors and you pay for one big subscription (if the author chooses that the articles be paywalled)
On Substack you make a conscious choice to subscribe to a writer (or curator) and you pay that writer directly. You get the kind of relationship you don’t have with a large publication. How many of the NYT writers do you really know? How many of them do you follow? Thats key
The tweet below summarized it very well : An article is perceived as a commodity, a creator is not.
I read a lot as you all know, and I feel that I am subscribed to every single substack there is! But of course there are many more of them. The question in my mind is “How many Ben Thompson’s will you pay for?” One? Two? Four? Eight?
There are very interesting key points about monetization (for Substack) as a business as well.
In the same vein Mario Gabriele has covered content and business models from a creator perspective here
He breaks down the value chain brilliantly
Discusses co-creators (how would you like to help me curate or write an article?)
He talks about the four currencies
Effort : Creator puts in effort
Attention : Audience pays with attention
Money : Who pays?
Ownership : Who earns
Well thought out options for creators in the passion economy
Consumer Tech : The stories format
A great read from Eric Feng on how to think about why the stories formats are successful. How simple is it to create content and how deep of a story can you tell are what matters. The story is an evolution of three forms of media (video, text, and images) all coming together in a simple, easy to create format.
Everyone is announcing stories
I am a bit skeptical of how LNKD stories will perform but we’ll see
Anyone else have thoughts on the LNKD story format?
Consumer Tech : TikTok
Two brilliant reads for why TikTok is killing it
One, Seeing Like an Algorithm, by Eugene Wei speaks to why the algorithm is much more attuned to user likes and dislikes and why Insta and Facebook can’t copy this easily. I really enjoyed this read on the signals (how long you watch, how many times you loop, like, follow, and a host of other signals go into the type of content but not the creator that you follow.
The second article from Ravi Mehta, The Entertainment Value Curve: Why TikTok is On Fire 🔥 and Quibi Isn't talks about the entertainment value curve and I think this is spot on. Quibi is neither social (not talked about much) and their production value is HIGH. This means that really even if they have the most fantastic content it really doesn't matter much. I wonder though:
If Quibi becomes more like Netflix (higher production value) does it have a chance? I would say probably tough given the streaming market ...
If Quibi becomes more Instagram like (lower production value) would it be able to compete at that spectrum?
An interesting question here is why is Instagram Reels failing? Same content as TikTok right? Even the same damned watermarked videos (I don’t have a great answer to this)
I had written up some options for Quibi in the past
Also a quick note on TikTok’s meritocratic algorithm:
Technology Strategy : Apples device strategy & Amazon Halo
Above Avalon wrote a very interesting article on the strategy that Apple is following. The key point being that each smaller device handles tasks that were done by another device prior to that. By design this means that the device is better at specific tasks or more suited to specific tasks and in each case it definitely is. This makes you wonder.. What next in terms of devices for Apple?
In similar vein, this article on Halo (image below in case you haven’t seen it yet) is from Amazon. Now you are probably thinking why Amazon?
I think there are several things to tease apart here …
This is tied to Amazon’s healthcare strategy (perhaps Haven?)
Haven if you dont know is a joint health-care venture between Amazon, J.P. Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway
I have no idea how Haven is progressing but given that they were looking for new CEO not too long ago after Atul Gawande left is not a good sign
Amazon also acquired PillPack
Amazon is perhaps looking at the success of Apple Watch and figuring that Haven was not the right place to start
Amazon has strong machine learning capabilities as well as cloud capabilities well suited to this
I do also think that while Alexa is a success as a lot of tech strategists have alluded to, it's not clear what the killer use case (device) is. This also might be one way to acknowledge that while successful Alexa was not a commercial success (Amazon does not lose money on Echo unless the device is on sale but we all know what that means!)
Can’t wait to see this evolve …
The Echo route - great but so what
The Kindle/Fire tablet route - brilliant
The Fire Phone route - WTF were we thinking
I do realize that they are all different use cases ...
Product : Why Analytics efforts fail
This article from Crystal Widjaja on Why most Analytics efforts fail was spot on. I found myself nodding as all these are problems that I have faced. Analytics has to be well documented. When I started writing out the analytics spec for the startup I was at, I was like lets track everything without considering HOW I want to use this data. Turns out, 99% of it was mostly useless. The key is to clearly articulate what funnel problem/business problem are you trying to solve?
Tech Design & Philosophy : User interfaces are killing progress
This was a great read from Dan Stern on how a user interface can abstract complexity.
Such example have been recreated in tech and non-tech
For example the article talks about wholefoods, large cities. I mean even a zoo for most of the part is kinda like an interface to the forest
A lot of the ugliness of the successful businesses has been abstracted away
These are the largest kind of businesses
As Product folks we always look to abstract complexity but at what cost? Can you or I go out and live in a forest without comforts? Would we be OK with it? How long can we do it for?
The author’s point is that we’ve lost the ability to adapt to a changing environment but my argument is so what? Is this about education? Survival? Something else? Either way great food for thought .. (though I don’t see myself un-abstracting myself from the complexity)
Tech : Career Growth
A good read from Nikhyl Singhal on the key differences between different stages of growth.
I think the point is actually great; as much as I’d like to think I am perfect (go ahead you can say that I am ;)) I am suited to a certain type of company; size; stage of evolution and there are certain types of companies that I would hate to be at.
Key is as Nikhyl suggested, experiment with all stages at least once.
I also think that just because you found you niche in your 20’s it stays the same in your 30’s or 40’s. Things change, needs change and as such it is important to know what matters the most to you at that stage
Tweet on why is it that battery pack’s have 5 batteries when most devices have 4 …
Lead Gen for the next 5? What is lead Gen for the 3rd set of 5 then?
Wasted “single” battery? Oh that poor loner battery must be bad
Lots of devices use single batteries
Adam Nash is over thinking this one (highly doubtful) …
Thank you for reading, have a great week. Stay safe, be well!