What are Google and Apple afraid of?
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User and developer.
Peaks:
- For Google, the fear is around reach. Google is a data company, and a machine learning company, and everything it does is about reach — reach to get data in so that it can understand everything better, and then reach so that it can serve that understanding out to the users.
- Developers can leave. That’s Apple’s existential fear.
Peaks:
Why not share all of Facebook’s hardware designs?
“I wrote a short paper, circulated it to Zuck and the rest of team,” he remembers, referring to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Heiliger argued that the technology, particularly the hardware, “is not our competitive advantage.” and that “open source should be a core tenet at Facebook.”
There are some huge advantages to making hardware open source.
Hardware engineers, no matter who they work for, could collaborate. Ideas could flow. New tech could be invented more quickly. Difficult tech problems could be fixed faster. And everyone would be able to share equally in the results. Zuck was in.
#VC
Peaks:
- It’s pretty easy to point out that the current situation bears little resemblance to 1999 or 2000. This time it’s different.
- People are spending lots of money online. And there is more to come.
- IPOs used to be norm, but no more.
- More rounds, small rounds.
#Tech
Peaks:
- “Because of tech, I can speak the modern language. I’m an international resident, I’m already part of the new world.”
- “Jobs are passports to futures. Technology is the Swedish passport. It will take these kids anywhere.”
Peaks:
- “Whoever owns the capital will benefit as robots and artificial intelligence inevitably replace many jobs.”
Capitalism will have to be replaced, of course. It was never any good in the first place since it was created by thieves for thieves. Communism and socialism are just as inadequate since they are also based on human labor.
Peaks:
- I think it’s a bit premature to sound dire warnings about driverless cars destroying the economy. Although I don’t doubt that the general timelines indicated won’t occur (driverless cars being commonplace by 2025, for example), the very same warnings have been sounded for decades with regards to automation. We did lose thousands of jobs. We had to adapt. It won’t stop there. Automation will continue forever.
- Worrying about it is like worrying about dying. Sure…. it will happen, but worrying about it will do no good. Preparing for it… that will help. Automation will open up new frontiers in terms of careers. At this point, it would be good to start looking at ways of taking advantage of automation so that those of us at the floor of the economy (factory workers who no longer have jobs, etc) are able to make a living somehow. But in the year 2025, we will be here looking at this article in the wastebin of time and realize that things have changed… and they have stayed the same… in many ways.
#Tech in Euro
Peaks:
- Europe has produced 13 so-called “unicorns,” or tech startups valued by public or private market investors at $1 billion or more, in the last year. None of these firms, however, is the next Facebook, Uber or YouTube. Europe’s tech industry is still painfully modest and provincial compared with Silicon Valley.
