parislemon:

Cliff Kuang:

A few years ago, the CEO of Vertu was showing me the company’s newest $8,000 phone, bragging that the gadget was far more substantial and well-made that any $500 iPhone could hope to be. I stopped him short, pointing out that the iPhone isn’t a $500 gadget. It’s a $1 billion gadget. After all, how many billions has it cost in R&D, to develop all the gobsmacking manufacturing techniques, all the software tricks, the App Store, and all the battery tech inside? The reason it costs so much less than a Vertu isn’t because it’s less well made. It’s because 700 million people have helped amortize Apple’s investment in it.

Apple now seems hell bent on finding new ways to flex that muscle.

This is exactly right. Luxury brands look at Apple and see a low sticker price. What they miss is the billions in R&D spending behind the sticker — and the hundreds of millions of units shipped that feed this machine and allow for the sticker price to remain so low. 

They don’t think Apple is a competitor because people pay more for luxury. For some people, that’s sort of true — though it’s more paying for a brand or lifestyle. But most people are content to pay for quality. And Apple often tops the luxury brands in this regard. Which is problematic for them, to say the least.

Fascinating but also a rather one sided analysis by Zack Kanter on the implications of self driving cars:

“Industry experts think that consumers will be slow to purchase autonomous cars – while this may be true, it is a mistake to assume that this will impede the transition. Morgan Stanley’s research shows that cars are driven just 4% of the time,5 which is an astonishing waste considering that the average cost of car ownership is nearly $9,000 per year.6 Next to a house, an automobile is the second most expensive asset that most people will ever buy – it is no surprise that ride sharing services like Uber and car sharing services like Zipcar are quickly gaining popularity as an alternative to car ownership. It is now more economical to use a ride sharing service if you live in a city and drive less than 10,000 miles per year.”

And

“A Columbia University study suggested that with a fleet of just 9,000 autonomous cars, Uber could replace every taxi cab in New York City13 – passengers would wait an average of 36 seconds for a ride that costs about $0.50 per mile.14 Such convenience and low cost will make car ownership inconceivable, and autonomous, on-demand taxis – the ‘transportation cloud’ – will quickly become dominant form of transportation – displacing far more than just car ownership, it will take the majority of users away from public transportation as well. With their $41 billion valuation,15 replacing all 171,000 taxis16  in the United States is well within the realm of feasibility – at a cost of $25,000 per car, the rollout would cost a mere $4.3 billion.”

This will lead to less cars on the road:

“PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts that the number of vehicles on the road will be reduced by 99%, estimating that the fleet will fall from 245 million to just 2.4 million vehicles.”

..and to an immensely increased additional disposable income that can go elsewhere:

“despite the job loss and wholesale destruction of industries, eliminating the needs for car ownership will yield over $1 trillion in additional disposable income – and that is going to usher in an era of unprecedented efficiency, innovation, and job creation.”

Make sure to read his article on more of the implications that such a change in car usage would bring. (And don’t believe everything timing wise.)

Liam Boogar at The Rude Baguette:

“This week, France’s cultural minister and former digital minister Fleur Pellerin announced that Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited service, which provides a Spotify-like model for reading books, would be declared illegal, as it is seen as abusing the rights of authors. Inadvertently, of course, the model also puts a noose around the neck of local French startup Youboox, which raised €1.1 Million back in 2013 to push their ‘Spotify for Books’ model.”

Quartz about Benedict Evans, the analyst who is working for a16z and is being quoted by seemingly everyone for a while now:

“The presentation, “Mobile eats the world,” is succinct (13 minutes), and worth devoting a quarter hour to viewing. But to boil it down even further for you, Evans makes two big world-view shattering points: 1) the digital processing power—the number of chips multiplied by the number of transistors on those chips—abroad in the world today is several orders of magnitude greater than during the pre-Web era of computing. 2) The ubiquity of technology—robust processing power in the compact, individualized-but-always-connected form of a phone—has made technology no longer a separate industry but an integral element of every industry.

The first implication of Evans’s point of view—which he sometimes expresses as ‘time for new questions’—is that monster valuations of the so-called unicorns can no longer be seen as the sign of a bubble. If you were to simply swivel your point of view upon Evans’s axis—from computing’s past to mobile’s future—you would see the looming magnitude of inserting software (via smartphones, now, and wearable sensors and controls, later) into nearly every human endeavor.”

Tarun Pathak of Counterpoint Research:

“India, Indonesia and Bangladesh Mobile phone shipments approaching 100 Million units per quarter run rate as smartphone demand continue to climb in Asia beyond China.”

Benedict Evans:

“You can also see this in the Apple Watch. Like the iPhone and the Mac before it, it represents a step in the movement of technology from something you enjoy making (or changing, or configuring) to something you enjoy using, and from something where the technical specifications were all that mattered to one where the technology is in the background and exists only to deliver some other kind of experience. A watch that lets your partner touch you on the wrist from afar is not exactly a technology product – it’s ‘just’ enabled by technology.”

“Woolf’s famous line – “on or about December 1910 human character changed” – haunts the present. Sometime during the 2000s a combination of technology, broken economic life-chances and increased personal freedom changed human character all over again. From the demonstrations on Tahrir Square, to the small exam revision groups organised by women in hijabs in the coffee bars just off Tahrir Square, we are beginning to meet a new kind of person: the networked individual, with weak organisational loyalty, multiple personas and whose consciousness is produced by continual, multiplatform communication.”

(via Fusion newsletter)

As it turns out, organizing the world’s information isn’t always profitable. Projects that preserve the past for the public good aren’t really a big profit center. Old Google knew that, but didn’t seem to care.

The desire to preserve the past died along with 20% time, Google Labs, and the spirit of haphazard experimentation.

Google may have dropped the ball on the past, but fortunately, someone was there to pick it up

“Microsoft still sells a lot of Windows licenses, and businesses especially still rely on Office. Still, it’s striking how unimportant Microsoft’s defensive move into browsers ended up being, especially when you think about…

Google seems strong, but as I’ve written previously, there is a lot about the company that feels like Microsoft: just as Microsoft jumped into the next epoch at the OS level for defensive reasons, Google too jumped ahead, also at the OS level, and also for defensive reasons. “Free” figured prominently in both strategies, and in the long run, it’s worth considering the possibility that Google’s Android dominance will have as much long term value to the company as Microsoft’s dominance of browsers – i.e., not very much at all. Ultimately, I expect an increasing amount of Google’s energy to go towards taking away what Microsoft has left: Chromebooks versus Windows, and Google Apps versus Office

Facebook is in a unique position: while they were started as an Internet company, they were an exceptionally young one, and have clearly made a successful jump to mobile. Their position in mobile, though, while secure, is by no means dominant, and it’s interesting that they are in fact following the Microsoft/Google playbook: both the WhatsApp and Oculus acquisitions were about securing a stake in the OS for the next epoch”