Making Some Changes

Discontinuing One Service to Free Up Time for Others

Tech Narratives Will No Longer be Updated

I’m announcing today that I’m ending my work on Tech Narratives, the daily tech commentary and analysis site which I launched earlier this year, and with it the Tech Narratives Podcast I’ve been doing daily for the past three months or so.

It’s been a fascinating experience to launch this site and go through the exercise of identifying and trying to find something smart to say about roughly ten of the day’s big tech news stories. It’s forced me to recognize some of my topical blind spots and dig deeper in areas I might previously have ignored. And it’s forced me to form opinions about things I perhaps hadn’t thought about in depth before.

But it’s also been very time consuming and hasn’t gained the traction I need it to in order to justify the time I spend on it and the opportunity cost associated with not using that time for something else. I’ve written over 2,000 posts and over 50 narrative essays since I started working on the site in December 2016, as well as publishing 77 episodes of the podcast. And the time that’s taken has meant I’ve had to push back other things and say no to projects and other opportunities I might otherwise have pursued.

I’m certainly grateful for those who did sign up for the subscription service and those who listened to the podcast — it was great to get your positive feedback throughout the process, and I’m sorry I won’t be able to keep providing the value you’ve got from those two things. However, if you read on below you’ll find some more ways to continue to get both analysis and podcast audio from me, among other things! As a practical matter, paid subscribers can read more about how the change and refunds will be implemented here.

My Other Work

Even though Tech Narratives is coming to an end, I’ll be continuing work on my other ongoing projects, including:

• The Jackdaw Research Quarterly Decks Service, a subscription service which offers quarterly slide decks and in some cases videos based on earnings reports from roughly a dozen key consumer tech companies, and which will be kicking back into action this week as earnings season begins
• Writing on this blog, hopefully more frequently now that I’ll have some more time again, as well as continuing my writing at Techpinions/Recode, Variety, and elsewhere
• The Beyond Devices Podcast, the podcast I co-host with Aaron Miller, in which we do a weekly News Roundup, usually on Fridays, as well as the occasional deeper dive or interview around a single topic in our Question of the Week episodes.

Most importantly, though, I will be continuing with my day job as a technology analyst and consultant with my firm Jackdaw Research, in which I work with large and small tech companies and others from outside the industry, providing data, analyzing market trends, and advising on strategy. If you’re interested in the services I provide there, which include one-off consultations, retainers, speaking engagements, data sets, and more, you can read more here, or simply get in touch.

Thanks again for your support and interest, and I hope I can continue to provide value in these other ways going forward!