Dozen Worthy Reads đ° (No. 163)
This week : Amazon and Politicians, Content moderation stacks, Neeva, Excel (yes boring excel), The all new Twitter, Clubhouse, Global laws, Intel's awakening, App store payments and more!
Hi All,
I hope you all are doing well and welcome (if you arenât 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 âŚ
Quick Programming Note : There will be no DWR/article next week (7th) since I am taking a short break with some friends. See you all on the 14th!
Amazon attacks politicians publicly
Amazonâs Twitter (@amazonnews) has now started a more aggressive move defending themselves against the politicians! Very interesting political strategy. Lobbying will continue, no doubt but this might be a case of drumming up public support?
Who is responsible for content moderation?
This article on content moderation levels was great. The key point is that if the âapplicationsâ atop the infrastructure do not make a call then the companies down the stack will have to step in - they donât really want to but they are not going to shy away : Moderation in Infrastructure â Stratechery by Ben Thompson.
Neeva the paid search engine
Sridhar Ramaswamy spent 15 years at Google Search and turned around to found Neeva, which is a search engine with, uh get this, no data tracking and no ads. Several interesting things here. Is the world ready to pay for privacy? Some segment of the population? Will the results be good enough? Privacy talk sounds good on paper but the fact of the matter is that most people donât really care so much. So this search engine, if its good enough, will attract the dollars of people who can afford or pay for privacy but how will the search index becomes better? Unless more people search and click on things (or donât click on things) do we know how good these results are. I mean there are clear network effects in search results. Lastly, isnât there some kind of non-compete here? :) Good luck to Sridhar and I truly hope this gets traction
Excel never dies
Excel-lent article on how a generic tool such as excel survived for decades in a market that has had increasing levels of competition. By being generic enough to use most cases for most people and with a pricing that meets the generic use cases it was a blunt tool for larger operations but a SHARP tool for smaller operations/use cases. I mean think of investment banks or management consultants they would be willing to pay way more money for excel or ppt. MSFT of course knew/knows this but rather that limit usage to uh the overpaying âeliteâ they wanted these products to be widely used. While they cared about piracy, they decided it wasnât worth it. The other key thing here is that there will be a bunch of SaaS tools that will chip away at specific use cases (Airtable for example) and will do well but excel will continue to have a lot of use cases. No code tools such as Zapier in some ways enable excel as an input or output making this a patched up generic SaaS workflow:
The return of twitter.
Great interview between Nilay Patel and Kayvon Beykpour. Twitter has never had an intelligence problem but theyâve always had an execution problem/legacy code problem. This interview breaks down some of that and talks more about the new products, subs, superfollows, TweetDeck, including newsletters which I wrote about here in the context of Substack
Twitter is taking on Clubhouse, Substack and Patreon with new products
The bear case for Clubhouse
Very interesting plausible bear case for Clubhouse (and of course I donât want them to fail but my take was bearish too) The key point here is horizontal (serving all types of content) v/s vertical (Twitch, gaming focused video) and creator switching costs. âLiveâ is great for a subset of âcreatorsâ but a creator, who makes a living off of their content would rather not create ephemeral content. Of course if this is your âside businessâ then that would not be the case.
Investing as a Social activity
This is a really neat article on eToro and the social nature of the activity itself. #trading #socialnetworks #moneytalk
âBy hitting the copy button on another trader, his portfolio (yes, his: 90% of users are male) would be replicated inside your own; every time he makes a trade, you automate the same trade at the same price. Within the eToro platform, the copy function turns portfolios into user-generated content â the lynchpin of many social networksâ
Party Like It's 1999: From ETrade to eToro
Global companies & local laws/interference
Tech companies are starting to get impacted by governments in various countries and now have to support local needs/requirements/laws etc. Apple has done this is the past with maps but the difference now is that used to be an exception and now it seemingly is becoming a rule. The funny thing is growing up in India no one cared a hoot for Indian markets (or at the time probably Chinese markets) until liberalization in 1991. Now that story has changed; pissing off India (China is already kinda locked) will prevent these companies from accessing the largest country with acceptance for American tech. Is this changing however? Indian companies can now make phones and a lot of the apps so I really wonder if at some point the Indian government will place more and more restrictions. This partly explains why Apple is building manufacturing in India. Similar to China âyou let me sell and Iâll provide jobsâ.
Most recently, in Russia, Apple is forced to add some pre-defined apps as part of the iPhone setup process (Steve jobs would have gone ballistic based on how Steve Jobs treated AT&T back in the day). This does not only impact Apple but other companies too. Uber for example has no choice but to take on the cost of treating its uhh well âpartnersâ as part-time drivers! (I for one am glad and wish more places would do the same!) This is not a choice. This is the cost of doing business in that country. Every single manufacturing conglomerate with a business in multiple countries KNOWS this. Tech is now finding out the cost; and they donât like it much âŚ
Intel is back? Maybe? I think so
Intel finally awakens the giant inside. Pat Gelsinger is making strides < 40 days after becoming the CEO. People like and trust Gelsinger and obviously he has not only the technical chops but also the guts to take Intel in a different direction. This is the push that Intel needed and more so, with chips becoming a "security" threat, who better than Intel, an American company, to step up to protect America - and their own business while they're playing chip superheroes. Excited for all my friends at Intel who've probably been hoping for this for a long while
Intel Unleashed, Gelsinger on Intel, IDM 2.0 â Stratechery by Ben Thompson
App store payments
It seems more and more likely that Appleâs payment spigot will stop as more and more states in the United States and across countries consider regulation. Apple and Google think that basically its their birthright to take this toll by controlling the road between a consumer and developer; and without good reason. Privacy? Really? Can you really make a case that, if Spotify, used their own payment service that it would lead to reduced privacy? Or that Spotify will use/sell that data? Why canât Spotify even give an instruction within their app that âhey here is how you pay usâ. Privacy indeed! This though is the only point at which I think antitrust will apply for Apple but I think the rest of what they say is on point. I, personally, DO NOT want a 3P app store on my phone. I however do not mind using a 3P payment method just so as long as its cheaper or more convenient, which it might not be.
The mess at Medium
Iâve written about Mediumâs âpaidâ plan before in DWR-152:
I have started posting on Medium again this week but I do hate the forced paywall (see below). I keep comparing Medium v/s Substack. I do like Substack way more because of the ease with which me (as a free publisher) can publish. There are LOTS of really good authors on Substack and the argument that Substack allows you to âbrandâ (semi-accurate) v/s Medium where you and everyone else are throw into a bundle. Medium has, per the article, âseveral hundred thousandâ members that pay $5/month. Letâs just say its a million members. That means about $5M a month * 12 = $60M. Per Glassdoor Medium has 200+ employees so maybe they are âcloseâ to profitability? : What's Around the Corner for Medium | by Ev Williams | Aug, 2020
However compared to Substack their push into Original Journalism was not quite successful. I think the key reason for is that every single author within the bundle. Will Oremus, for example, whom I LOVE, writes under the OneZero publication but his name gets lost in the entire bundle. Ultimately, while great for building an audience, OneZero is doing him a disservice. His brand should be front and center. Enter Substack. How successful would this be for him specifically, I do not know. But I think it is worth him trying! Casey Netwon with BRILLIANT coverage on this topic : đ¨ The mess at Medium
Disinter-mediating jobs, community, education
On Deck is an amazing example of the disintermediation that I wrote about in my Labor Markets post. An MBA as a bundle for example is the education, network, the sports teams, the career center, the camaraderie and all that good stuff. Well On Deck' with their flywheel is going to do all that and more! Super excited for the space overall and to see what OnDeck achieves! What's On Deck for On Deck?
Thank you for reading. Stay safe, be well! If you enjoyed reading this please consider sharing with a friend or two (or sign up here if you came across this or were forwarded this)