We talk a lot about levels of autonomy, and ask when the first ‘fully autonomous’ cars will appear. That might be the wrong way to look at it - there will be lots of different kinds of ‘autonomy’, and the ‘where’ and ‘what’ may matter as much as the ‘when’.
Read MoreA bridge product says 'of course x is the right way to do this, but the technology or market environment to deliver x is not available yet, or is too expensive, and so here is something that gives some of the same benefits but works now.' Sometimes that’s a great business, and sometimes it’s doomed.
Read MoreHow many smart things will we have in our homes? What will make sense? How much room is there here for startups? Will all these devices be connected to Alexa, and if they are, will it matter?
Read MoreHow do fundamental, structural changes in TV, in retail and in advertising interlock and accelerate each other, and what cascading effects might there be?
Read MoreAmazon is a machine to make a machine, and the machine it makes is more Amazon.
Read MoreThis autumn I gave the keynote at Andreessen Horowitz's annual 'Tech Summit' conference, talking about the state of tech and what's likely to happen in the next decade: mobile, Google / Apple / Facebook / Amazon, innovation, machine learning, autonomous cars, mixed reality and crypto-currencies.
Read MoreThe fashion industry does not set fashions - it proposes them. It tries to work out the mood and the zeitgeist and looks for ideas that might express that. The same, increasingly, for Facebook - it cannot really decide how people use its products or what they see, only propose.
Read MoreWe all know, I think, that there are now far more smartphones than PCs, and we all know that there are far more people online now than there used to be, and we also, I think, mostly know that big tech companies today are much bigger than the big tech companies of the past. It’s useful, though, to put some real numbers on that, and to get a sense of use how much the scale has changed, and what that means.
Read MoreWhat winner-take-all effects could there be in autonomous cars? Are there network effects that would allow the top one or two companies to squeeze the rest out, as happened in smartphone or PC operating systems? Or might there be room for five or ten companies to compete indefinitely? And for what layers in the stack does victory give power in other layers?
Read MoreEarlier this week I did a podcast with my colleague Steven Sinofsky talking about the management structures of Google, Apple. Facebook and Amazon ('GAFA'). These companies now have around 10 times more employees than they did a decade ago, yet they still manage to function, and function extremely well, producing a stream of great work. The interesting thing is that the management structures that they've used to achieve that are actually very different.
Read More