Monday Note

It was a really beautiful, functional, svelte & fast OS. IMHO, Apple made the right decision with Next because of Jobs. I’d sure like to see the results of the alternate timeline! I still feel like Be could be great for phones/mobile, maybe VR. (Just as it was so foundationally low latency) (Note I am aware of Haiku, etc. I’m using “Be” to mean something from its linage) Side note - Jean-Louis Gassée, founder(?) of Be is very insightful. He writes some excellent short form tech world analysis at http://mondaynote.com/

Love this book. Reading this book's depiction of Jean-Louis Gassée was a major deflection point in my life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gassée Trying to emulate Gassée, my team and peers, knowing my true nature, thought I had gone insane. I continued to read his opinions. http://www.mondaynote.com Agree or disagree, I appreciate his heterodoxy, challenging my own assumptions and views. Guy Kawasaki, not so much.

Jean-Louis Gassée's Monday Notes about tech and Apple. He's been in the business since the 60's, worked at Apple in the 80's, founded BeOS: https://mondaynote.com/ Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing. He's an engineer at Microsoft that has been blogging about maintaining legacy systems, Windows and MS-DOS for over 2 decades. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ Hackaday is a good blog too, there's many authors so it can be hit or miss but it's full of curious folks. https://hackaday.com/

Or Tesla engineers do have engineering degrees, but Tesla management pared down the list of requirements. I'm not a close follower of Elon Musk, but apparently he believes in aggressively trimming requirements. According to this, at least: https://mondaynote.com/what-makes-elon-musk-move-so-fast-8e7c91820923

> Youtube Premium is only ~$10/month, does Google really make that much more with ads? Yes! Already their average per-user revenue was 21 USD per user per month in 2018 (couldn't find newer data) [0]. Furthermore, the first people to sign up would be the richest folks, those who are the most interesting to advertisers. Meaning: they are worth way more than 21 USD per month to Google. To compensate, the price would have to be even higher. If only 5% of Google's userbase signed up, and those 5% are, on average, worth to Google 5 times as people from the general population, then you'd have to pay 100 USD per month for getting rid of ads across all Google products. That number would also have to grow at least as quickly as the ad revenue for it to make sense for Google to do it. [0]: https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-everybody-else-…

Facebook isn't the kind of platform where everyone is equal. Facebook's main function is to decide what people see, and what they don't see. That's what happens in everyone's news feed, and with the ads. For example, prioritizing "group" content over news predictably leads to more consumption of fake news and extreme content (and it was predicted: https://mondaynote.com/facebook-is-done-with-quality-journalism-deal-w… ) The alternative is to accept that FB has this power, be accountable and transparent about it, and take responsibility for the type of content that gets promoted. There are more detailed suggestions along these lines here: https://www.wired.com/story/creating-ethical-recommendation-engines/

Agree, but would extend: company “value” as in market cap is also affected by other things, notably debt; given two identical companies but one with more debt, it will have lower market cap. There is a bit on this here: https://mondaynote.com/tesla-and-apple-valuation-questions-cdb95ffcf0a… apparently for Ford it’s pension liabilities are more than 2x it’s market cap; so if you were to exclude them, the company is worth 3x more. Tesla, as a young company (and born in a different era) doesn’t have such liabilities. Etc etc

It was started by a former apple executive Jean-Louis Gassee [1]. At apple he said he wanted a kernel on macOS[2]. When he started BE they did develop their own hardware (BE Box). They eventually decided to port it other hardware (hardware is expensive). Microsoft had a strangle hold on most PC manufacturers and the BEbox was power PC so it made sense to try to get Mac clones to use it (There was a brief period in the 90s where apple clones existed.). I got a disk and tried it on a "Power computing" mac clone. It was kinda amazing compared to macos8. But the lack of software made it hard day to day. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Louis_Gassée [2] https://mondaynote.com/50-years-in-tech-part-11-getting-the-mac-out-of… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox

Jean-Louis Gassée has a good write up. He tried using the technology and got very odd results. His use of the test in 2015: https://mondaynote.com/theranos-trouble-a-first-person-account-1690b82… Follow up from May 2018: https://mondaynote.com/theranos-could-have-been-stopped-9670793e3431

Historian Walter McDougall has written about the duality of the American term "hustle", which means both "being a go-getter" and "scam". He's writing a whole three-volume history of America from this perspective that I keep wanting to find time to read: https://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/books/free-to-be-you-and-me.html That's always had resonance for me, especially here in startup culture, where the line between the two is at best hazy, and is often willfully erased. Just today in Jean-Louis Gassée's article on Theranos, he quotes an old Silicon Valley joke about a pitch that shows both kinds of hustle: "It’ll work because it’d be cool if it did." https://mondaynote.com/theranos-could-have-been-stopped-9670793e3431

> What seriously worried me was a July 2016 visit to Tesla’s manufacturing plant... In an exchange with a trusted industry observer, I found out that he had had exactly the same experience only weeks ago, but he couldn’t write about it by “virtue” of the NDA he’d signed. Did Gassée's NDA expire or what? He's certainly divulging details about the factory. He previously wrote that he couldn't write about his visit due to an NDA.[1] [1] https://mondaynote.com/chairman-elons-great-leap-forward-68f49ffde372

Google is an example of an ad-supported site that would be rather hard to replace. And, apparently, they make a ridiculous amount of money per user, so replacing advertising revenue with user payments is going to be expensive -- they'd have to charge you $277 per month, if you believe this: https://mondaynote.com/the-nytimes-could-be-worth-19bn-instead-of-2bn-…

The article is a bad summary of the original BW article[1]: > Gogo can provide a plane with as much as 10 megabits per second of connectivity, which is about half the average download speed on Verizon’s 4G network. Only one-third of Gogo-equipped planes, however, have the hardware to reach even that speed. The rest top out at 3 Mbps. If only 10 people are on it, then you're getting ~5x dial-up, which would be great if the internet was the same as it was in 1999. I would guess that webpages have grown more than 5x in size since then, making effective speeds much slower than dial-up (estimates range from 2-10MB for an average news article [2]). 1: http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-gogo-airplane-wireless-internet… 2: http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/08/03/what-the-ad-blocker-debate-reveal…

I'm pretty skeptical about the Apple Car rumor (Jean-Louis Gassee wrote a nice debunking piece http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/02/15/the-fantastic-apple-car/), but when the NY Times suggests that Apple specializes in mobility and electronics it seems to make the car seem more likely. In "Being Digital" Negroponte made the insightful assertion that the wired / wireless world was flipping -- TVs were becoming wired while phones and computers were becoming wireless (TVs have kind of flipped again since then). The next shift is that we may ourselves become unshackled from our homes. In City, Clifford Simak has people living in flying houses and they simply park where-ever they want to live for a given period. Well, flying is impractical, but mobile seems to be coming.

Some interesting observations about Amazon's P/E ratio here http://www.mondaynote.com/2012/05/27/decoding-share-prices-amazon-appl… on Jean-Louis Gassée's "Monday Note". Basically, Amazon forgoes profit to get market share, will push out all competitors, build a huge barrier to entry with excellent execution and logistics, and then raise prices to increase profit. Traders are buying now and holding until that happens.

The best thing in this article is the linked Jean-Louis Gassée piece: http://www.mondaynote.com/2012/03/11/carriers-whine-we-wuz-robbed/ It has a breakdown of how much carriers are getting per smartphone customer. In summary, they don't have much reason to complain.

I use Feedly / NetNewsFire for feeds, rather than newsletters, but in reality they're the same, just different consumption methods. Just interesting to see NNW was in HN recently. These are the most interesting things I keep in Feedly. acoup.blog - A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry - frequently linked to HN already. He's a great history writer, covering everything from Roman logistics, to analysis of current games and movies - eg. LotR battles. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC364qOwWXAzgRruHhhFMhVg - Croker vs Rover. A New Zealand guy restoring a 70s Land Rover. It's a Youtube channel, but both hilarious and informative. Infrequent too, so easy to cruise through at leisure. Atlas Obscura - https://www.atlasobscura.com/ - interesting history/geography mix. https://www.numberphile.com/ - Mathy easy-access but complex topics - mostly videos on Youtube. Very accessible, but interesting for a mostly non-math person to see real math at work. https://waynehale.wordpress.com/ - Wayne Hale - NASA flight controller. Interesting views and analysis of current space / incident management topics vs how it was done for the shuttle, along with some other commentary. Infrequent and interesting. https://computer.rip/ - Deeply geekly telco / 50s-70s computer history with some cold-war fun. Pretty in-depth, and a fun read. https://www.cringely.com/ - Cringley - weekly-monthly tech posts on bigger tech strategy with an Appleish focus. He's been around SV for years. Was early at…

This feels cynical to say, but I don't know whether to listen to Gassee wholeheartedly or to take his perspective with a grain of salt. On the one hand, he has deep experience with Apple and great knowledge of the computing industry, but on the other, he is an elderly technologist who was pushed out of Apple decades ago [1] and is no more relevant to M1 than anyone else in the industry. In either case, I tend to disagree with Gassee's attack on the Morehead review, and I don't believe that there is any need to connect Morehead's M1 opinion with his 64-bit iPhone opinion. M1 should indeed be judged on its instruction set limitations because that is one of its major differences versus x86. It would be careless to consider personal computing hardware while forcibly ignoring the sofware ecosystem that it supports. I also think it's a cheap shot to accuse Morehead of choosing his opinions based on a financial interest in the supremacy of x86. [1] https://mondaynote.com/50-years-in-tech-part-13-firing-frankness-3d17e…

The irony is that this was built so Facebook can be more compliant with GDPR. They hinted this January that they would release this soon: > “We’re rolling out a new privacy center globally that will put the core privacy settings for Facebook in one place and make it much easier for people to manage their data,” Sandberg said at a Facebook event in Brussels on Tuesday. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-sandberg-privacy/facebook-… So I guess the takeaway here is that privacy regulation works? I also just love how they put it in their post: > People have also told us that information about privacy, security, and ads should be much easier to find. Really, Facebook? People have just told you that? Are you freaking kidding me? People have been telling you that for a god damn decade. But you chose to ignore it, because you didn't care - until this major scandal was created that forced you to do this. It wasn't because "people told you" and as a company that "always listens to its users" (ha! good one), you decided to actually do that. Come on. Facebook's tone throughout this entire scandal has been nothing but condescending. And yes, they really do think we're all idiots (as proven by how they responded on every other past screw-up and how they typically come out and lie about it): https://mondaynote.com/mark-zuckerberg-thinks-were-idiots-638c64dfab12 Remember how they outright lied about the datr…

He still blogs about Apple at http://www.mondaynote.com/

Related, this[0] Monday Note is interesting as well: Last November, in a rather blunt way, I expressed my reservations regarding Blendle’s model (see The New York Times and Springer Are Wrong About Blendle[1]). My concerns ranged from the abundance of free content available on the web (especially in English), to the damage inflicted on the “cross-subsidy model” in which baseball coverage pays for the Kabul bureau, to the risk associated with the “unbundling” of news (and its impact of publishers’ ARPU). To their credit, Blendle’s co-founders Alexander Klöpping and Marten Blankesteijn seized on my questioning and engaged me in an ongoing discussion focusing on business models that could ensure the survival of quality journalism. This could be a crucial factor in Blendle’s fate: this company has been created by journalists who fervently defend quality journalism and believe that great editorial must be paid for. In spite of my initial reluctance, the more I explored its model, the more I came to believe it should be tested and carefully analyzed, essentially because it is much more sophisticated and carries more potential that a first look might lead one to believe. [0]: http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/10/05/blendle-is-up-to-something-big/ [1]: http://www.mondaynote.com/2014/11/02/the-new-york-times-and-springer-a…

I think there's an understandable case to be made for the spending (when your future hinges on your digital properties, you can't really blame management for being scared and wanting outside advice - and lots of it.) But it's hard to see how the Times can work this out, and it's worth remembering that the paywall is a desperate attempt to do this. Desperate people tend to pay more for even the simple things. There aren't any models worth using - if the Times is to get this right, it has to invent one on its own dollar. Is there hope? Monday Note's Frédéric Filloux thinks that the NYT can be a digital-only enterprise: http://www.mondaynote.com/2011/03/27/the-nyts-melting-iceberg-syndrome… Let’s stop a moment and behold the printed New York Times’ true gem: its Sunday edition. It changes everything in our look at the paper’s digital equation: - Sunday circulation is 54% higher than on weekdays (1.35m vs. 877,000). - It’s an expensive package: $5.00 in New York, $6.00 elsewhere in the country. - Sunday copy sales bring five times more money than any weekday. - Advertising-wise, some analysts say the Sunday NYT accounts for about 50% of the paper’s entire advertising revenue. He suggests that it cuts out its daily paper, keeps the SundayEedition cashcow, and switch everything else to digital-only. But it takes a lot of courage to do something so drastic. Till then, $40 million seems regrettably understandable - the price of being scared and unsure of one's…

My brother-in-law has one of the first Porsche Taycans delivered in the UK. The software bugs were so dire they upgraded him to the next model year for free, but it's still bad. Like all the legacy dinosaurs with no clue about software, VW is so far behind it doesn't even know how far behind it is. https://mondaynote.com/code-on-wheels-a4715926b2a2

Actually, Google search has an ARPU of ~$256 per year [1] -- i.e. they're monetizing your eyeballs for about $20 a month. I applaud OpenAI: Please keep the service paid & ad-free. Thanks! [1] https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-everybody-else-…

This was suggested by Frederic at this blog post https://mondaynote.com/evs-the-manufacturing-revolution-40a7f246696 This is a blog by Frederic Filloux and Jean-Louis Gassee of Apple/BeOS fame.

Beyond stealing piles of money from investors, lying to people about medical treatments. Folks were making serious medical decisions with the results from their faked / half-assed tests. We should destroy her life for cavalierly playing around with other people's lives in that manner. Theranos intentionally destroyed the database of test results, but their clear goal was to yolo out medical tests. See eg [1] or [2] [1] https://mondaynote.com/theranos-trouble-a-first-person-account-1690b82… [2] https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/21/22687026/theranos-patient-bad-test-…

yeah thats the tricky thing. Google makes $256/user per year domestically in ad revenue. That's $21/month. https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-everybody-else-… it's really hard not to be the product.

What you really want to ask about is the ARPU metric, or Average Revenue Per User: https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-everybody-else-… Google gets revenues of about $256 per user per year, mostly from search ad impressions. That's the context for this $15 per user deal; their ROI is nearly 20x. For context, Apple makes about $30 on services like iCloud per user; if you factor in hardware sales every 2 years or so their revenue is $194/user/year. Facebook makes about $112 per US/Canadian user. Amazon is the big ARPU winner, making $752 per user per year based on $120/year Prime memberships plus sellers giving them their fee of approximately 15% fee + $5 shipping prices.

Jobs wanted a lower price for the original Mac but lost to others who wanted to take profits. After his departure he complained about the high Mac prices and their effect on Mac market share. Conversely there’s a reason that Gassée the father of the Macintosh II was smirking about the high prices of the current Mac Pro line: https://mondaynote.com/mac-pro-fooled-you-90d560fcca99

Google's ARPU for American users was reported at $256 in 2019 [1]. So for ~$25 a month, you might get them to consider switching business models. [1] https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-everybody-else-…