1/ There are two reactions a company can have when faced with calls for regulation. One is to appear to capitulate & work w/regulators to find a least disruptive path. Other is to fight it knowing you’re turning over control of your roadmap to a bureaucracy. There’s one more…

2/ Enter AI and the new big tech, who directly or historically have battled regulation for ~100 yrs. A new approach is to run towards regulation, literally ask to be regulated claiming tech is out of control 🆘

3/ When a well-positioned company begs for regulation, even if it seems to be capitulating out of service to industry, it is attempting a maneuver known as “regulatory capture”. Why? They know more about the tech than regulators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

4/ Yikes. That sounds awful. What this does is take the notion of capitulation to regulators to a whole new level. Some would say the whole adversarial relationship between regulators and regulated is wrong. Cos should embrace “do no harm”. Otherwise, profits >> safety/goodness.

5/ The problem is this is not how the real world works. Regulation is never-ending, knows no bounds, and is a mechanism by which regulators takes control of business AND market forces. It is a deliberate effort to slow the pace of business/innovation. By definition. Not judging.

6/ Of course at this point we’re all thinking of awesome regulations. It is pointless to dispute these. Yet, it is not hard to find things every day that seem arbitrary, difficult, or simply backwards and when asked why, sprawling regulation is the root. Downsides are real.

7/ The challenge is left to their own “regulators are going to regulate” just as “business is going business”. So the idea of a natural tension or worse is not only necessary but it is the balance of power in a free economy.

8/ Thus, a company saying “regulate us now” should raise questions. Why? To what end? How? And more. A company acting in its own self-interest should not naturally want to regulate any more than regulators facing visible harm should say “nah, let the markets just do their thing”.

9/ The most likely reason a company takes this path is…hubris. It believes two things. First, that it has a huge lead. The regulations (with their help) will simply increase the cost to enter the market and also define the market in the terms friendly to this new incumbent.

10/ Second, the company presumes to know the long term direction of the technology. This is indeed the much bigger issue. Why? It is almost always the case an early de facto leader or other “experts” are wrong on both velocity and direction innovation. It is too soon to predict.

11/ We see this in antitrust. I have examples personally, but my favorite is the 1982 ATT settlement, which was a form of capture (a CD trades a potentially worse unknown trial outcome for a known bad one). Bell itself a product of capture. https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-324810A1.pdf

12/ ATT consented to settle by dividing up local carriers (breaking the national monopoly) and maintaining control over long distance. They saw the future as long distance land lines. Mobile? Oh, that was just an afterthought. Both parties literally just said “whatever”.

13/ Omitting mobile and internet wasn’t a deliberate choice but result of focus on long distance. And ATT was totally wrong. As a result they ceded the market for wireless in place of land line long distance. (NB this is all confusing because of the name ATT).

14/ So here we are today in this highly unusual position of the de facto leader (de facto key because we are at Day 0 of AI wave) pleading to be regulated. Everyone should be asking why? No govt should just regulate because of this invitation or hypotheticals. From above on Bell:

15/ More to the point, any dimension upon which proposed regulation is based is fraught with challenges over where this technology is heading. Today the debates are at extremes of “useless” “wrong” “hallucinations” to “existential threat”. It is better said “no one knows”.

eg, should AI be regulated on parameters, training time, amount of data, etc.? Who is advantaged by those? Or based on use cases? What cases are not already regulated (eg drug discovery, home loans, policing, etc.)? Is an LLM a sensible place in the stack at all? What defines AI?

16/ Will “AI” destroy jobs? Will it cure cancer? Will it extinguish the human race? Will it increase or decrease a Std of Living? The only thing we know for sure is all past technology predictions along those lines have been wrong, even mundane anti-tech objections proved wrong.

17/ Many people mocked Microsoft when it took a position of “Freedom to Innovate” during its antitrust era. It was awkward. People saw only Machiavellian exploitive side. Not debating that but there was a real technical side. Microsoft had no idea where innovation was heading.

18/ There was a huge push to regulate by removing the browser from Windows. The browser was defined as some special technology that could must be controlled. BUT it was totally ok to have TCP/IP in the operating system. Or HTTP. Or SSL. Or certificates. Or script. And so on.

20/ Why was that line drawn? At that moment in time in 1998 it seemed to be a line in a tech stack that made sense. But a few years earlier there was no TCP/IP in Windows and it cost hundreds of dollars to acquire. The ubiquity of TCP/IP accelerated the internet and browser.

21/ Going forward, Microsoft’s own view of where the browser was heading was proven completely wrong. Integrating into Windows, saddling it with Windows technologies, and more were just wrong. The market was working anyway. And MS lost focus elsewhere.

22/ Technology platforms morph and pivot by absorbing bits and pieces of what Kevin Kelly called the “technium”. It is almost biological evolution. Pre-emptive regulation can thwart this evolutionary process. There’s an old joke “we asked for flying cars and got 140 characters”…

23/ In the book “Where Is My Flying Car?” A credible argument is made that it was regulation that held back the diffusion of a potential flying car. Maybe. Maybe not. The key is we don’t know. We do know we all drive cars on land today.

24/ There are many questions about “AI”. Before we cede innovation to a captured market, there’s much to learn. I don’t have an answer if you think doing so will cause society’s end in a few or ten years, but even the worst case was given “50 years” at hearings this week. // END

Originally posted here.

When a Business Pleads to be Regulated was originally published in Learning By Shipping on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The following brings together three twitter threads on the launch of ChatGPT, the launch of Bing Chat, the surprises and the (too predictable) pullback of “Sydney”.

On the launch of ChatGPT

1/ No exaggeration to say that maybe chatGPT has captured the imagination of the broadest set of people in the shortest time of any computing technology. That anyone can use instantly it and see for themselves is a big part of it. How will productivity using “it” evolve?

2/ The polarization of fear <> opportunity is consistent with basically everything these days. That makes me a bit sad. I’m definitely one of those that see this as an advance. I am a believer in full throttle innovation and not second guessing at every step.

3/ Lots of 4-D chess predicting where things will go. Who will win or lose? How much a platform shift is “AI” or not? It’s too soon to know. If PC, phone, cloud, or internet are a guide — wary/pessimists will quickly fall behind because exponential growth is like that.

4/ There are parallels to learn from and help guide us on how technology will evolve. Not the one path, but the sorts of paths that can follow. History rhymes. Why? Because both producers and consumers are humans and humans follow patterns, not precisely though.

5/ First, in the next 6–12 months every product (site/app) that has a free form text field will have an “AI-enhanced” text field. All text entered (spoken) will be embellished, corrected, refined, or “run through” an LLM. Every text box becomes a prompt box.

6/ This is a trivial add for most any product. Some will enhance with more bells & whistles. For example there might be an automatic suggestion (API costs aside) or several specific “query expansions” that take the text and guide the enhancement. Everyone will call the API to embellish, summarize, tone check, etc.

7/ This will be done to call attention to the new feature but also to add more surface area upon which to prove there is some depth to the work beyond just feeding what one types to the LLM.

8/ This reminds me of the mundane example of how spell-checking moved from a stand alone feature to integrated into word processing to suites and then 💥 it showed up in the browser. All of a sudden it wasn’t an app feature but every text box had squiggles.

9/ At first this was neat. Then we quickly learned just how much we type in edit boxes is not amenable to spell checking. All those street names, part numbers, and people names. If you blindly autocorrected you’d end up with gibberish. You still do. Don’t judge prematurely!!

10/ LLMs will be like this too. In other words the invention will rapidly diffuse but actually “create work” for people as in order to realize the benefit there needs to be a “human in the loop” to smooth out the enhanced or “fix” text.

11/ People will be very critical of this step. Many will poo-poo the innovation saying that it takes more time to fix than it does to just do the work the first time. Grammar checking used to be like that as well. But not for everyone…

PS/ Some will immediately want to ban the use of a tool that is “wrong” or “removes humans”. You might think spell checking is trivial, but I had to get permission to use it frosh year to write papers. In High School I had to ask the principle to use it. just like calculators.

12/ Then after some period of time there will be a much more significant advance in the technology. Old spell checking was a dictionary on a local PC. Then Google used all it brought to the party to release “cloud spell check” which used…the internet.

13/ Spelling (and grammar) have not been the same since. That was 10 years after the first browsers and something like 25 years after the first stand-alone spell checkers for PCs and now everyone has it. But no one is dfferentiated by it. Why?

PS/ Here’s a history of red squiggles.

036. Fancy Wizard and Red Squiggles
The idle loop is a devil’s playground. –Developers on the Word team https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/036-fancy-wizard-and-red-squiggles

14/ There were many stand-alone companies that offered spelling (or analagous writing tools). Many *word processors* focused on “better typing” and adding spelling, grammar, tabs, page numbers, etc. But then a feature war ensued. 100’s and 1000’s of new features.

15/ Many bemoan these feature wars as “bloat” but they play an important part in how customers consume products and it means you can’t be a “one trick pony” in the market. There is no “simple”. Consumers acquire productivity tools for the “worst case” not the simple or only case.

16/ Critically, the winning product is one that does the most *important* work, not the most mundane work. Ex, typewriters were good at filling out forms, but word processors were not. It took years before forms were a WP thing, but books, manifestos, etc. → WORD!

17/ What matters is doing important work, not simply automating cheap or easy work. The tools that win will generalize to the most important problems people face. The cost of adding additional tools or “point solutions” is much higher than savings.

18/ Ppl think automating the simple “eliminates jobs”. That has not shown to be the case. In fact, what has tended to happen is more automation/creation tools mean more people add “creation” to their jobs. Now we all fill out forms, not just administrative support. (below, unknown src)

19/ Better tools bring creation closer to where “human in the loop” adds most value. PowerPoint is an example of that. We all might bemoan “slides” but with a great tool (for *important* work) the most skilled/knowledgable will use the tools to do what was previously “support” work.

20/ When email was on the rise and Office was just Word, Excel, PowerPoint we were deeply concerned that all “documents” would become simple ASCII mail messages — all those features would no longer matter. *WRONG* Email made everyone a “content contributor” even big time execs.

21/ Ppl *did* stop using Word for one page meeting agendas. Many stopped taking notes in Word. (Ditto for equiv Excel or PowerPoint tasks). BUT when work mattered and was *important* the human-in-the-loop contributing mattered and so did having the “most powerful” tool.

22/ That’s why Office, soul-sucking Office so to speak, is still used by hundreds of millions of people. It isn’t inertia but it is because the *important* work is done there and on the outside chance something important needs to be done, those features matter.

23/ Many seem to think LLMs will “eliminate” jobs or wipe out whole swaths of creative work. I think what will transpire will happen in two phases. First, all creation tools used will be augmented with LLM, and very quickly. Everyone will use these enhancements — human in the loop.

24/ Then over time new tools will emerge that can subsume the old tools. This is what happened as typewriters replaced typesetting, which were replaced by character word processing, replaced by graphical, and only now are we seeing changes in writing — 35 yrs later.

25/ Key is new tools, built from the ground up assuming LLMs, will need to get their footing doing the most important work and they also need to do the mundane. They need to be approachable by the people doing the mundane and the important. Otherwise they’re just point solns.

26/ Why things evolve this way is subtle. In the work environment, there is no shortage of “important” — everyone thinks their work is importnt. Every department. Every creative task. There are endless requirements or “needs” that will be thrown up as barriers to change.

27/ Everyone’s job looks easy from the outside. But until you actually try to automate a job out of existance or replace the workdlow or tooling of a job, you don’t really know what is the human part or where the “work” happens.

28/ Most of all, once tools start getting used by more people then the need for what is produced goes wat up. That means more people need to do more work. That means expectations for what is “good” or “important” all go up. New tools don’t simply automate, they create work too.

29/ One final example. In physical sciences and math, writing used to require special typesetting (math, physics) or even draftsman (for molecular models, lab bench workflow). There were humans in every company/dept that did this work.

30/ LaTeX, ChemDraw, and more came along and then all researchers were creators. Papers had more digrams and math. Expectations for presenting information went up. And those draftsman/typesetters weren’t just eliminated but used these tools for even more advanced work.

31/ This shows that even in highly domain specific and advanced tooling, that massive improvements do not simply make everyone’s job easier (or vanish) but add work for people — for experts — to do more, to create more, and most of all to be humans in the loop. // END

On the evolution of productivity using ChatGPT and the issues that will be faced

Adding to the excitement over LLMs and continuing the implications for productivity scenarios. LLMs represent the first tech advancement that has a potential to seamlessly deploy across 7 billion smartphones and thus can be a platform shift. HUGE bull here. 1/

2/ Tech has been pining for a platform shift ~10 years as mobile/social/cloud settled in. What’s next? Of course it has to be huge — the whole planet adopted the current platform. By layering on top of M/S/C and not requiring a device or legacy reset, the potential huge. Yay!

3/ So much said already about “Disruption of Google”, “Leadership of Microsoft”, “Changing of the guard”, and general “disruption” or “whole new world”. This is all premature or just silly. OTOH the technology will happen. The “cat is out of the bag” and mass deployment is next.

4/ The opinions have polarized like everything else in today’s society. The arguments “for” or “against” quickly amount to choosing sides and preparing for battle. “Misinformation”, “Does not Understand”, “Eliminates/reinvents all jobs” and more. Ugh.

5/ LLMs meet an important & necessary but not sufficient criteria for platform shifts. They don’t yet work all the time, boundary cases are plentiful. Recall from “Hardcore Software” first decade of PCs was literally “making them work”. The Internet? security, broken links, etc.

6/ BUT BUT to dismiss some concerns is as naive as dismissing the exponential nature of change. There’s a ton of hype. One thing I’ve learned about AI over a number of “winters” is the hype is due to “generalizing” what amounts to a significant advance in a point solution.

7/ The winters keep happening because the technologists and punditry tend to take a single advance and generalize it. Like advances in programming languages, AI can indeed make one scenario easier and doesn’t need to make all scenarios easier/possible.

8/ That said, LLMs represent a collision of sorts across two dimensions. LLMs are default:

• optimistic/positive and the future of all software, productivity, creation
• skeptical/negative and needs to be a priori constrained and made into a “responsible” tech

9/ When in reality, most want a broad middle: let’s all benefit from advances in market. Those abusing or misusing it should be held accountable

Never before has there been a broadly available new tech at such low cost so quickly been presumed a net negative by so many. Sigh.

10/ There are three areas (A, B, C) to be rightfully concerned that include the presumed negatives and temper the blind optimism.

The most important aspect is that this is what creates opportunities for next generation companies and makes it all so difficult for incumbents.

11/ (A) LLMs, especially with respect to web search, fundamentally breaks or calls into question, the internet (the web) itself. Yes.

The web relies on linking. Search relies on crawling. Entities that contribute to the web permit crawling for the benefit of being linked to.

12/ If LLMs simply use the crawling side of the internet without returning links then the incentives to permit crawling and ultimately linking go away.

For the largest content sites that have subscriptions or can afford this it is ok. But as we saw with news, almost none can.

13/ Today this is already a tension filled area. BUT it is not new. When I managed Microsoft’s search efforts (2006–7) huge *effort* was going into properly creating snippets and competing with what became “Google Onebox”. Providing answers without needing to click.

14/ The *effort* was how to avoid breaking the web, stealing content, and properly advancing fair use. This led to a series of industry changes such as licensing content, partnerships, search “verticals”. And a failure of book scanning.

15/ So while everyone wants search to simply “tell me the answer” unless the search provider “knows” the answer or “bought” the answer, or it is public domain, it can’t simply unilaterally crawl the internet to find it for free.

16/ This leads to (B) The legal system has no framework for this mass scale reuse. Is this Betamax, Napster, YouTube/UGC? Copyright laws, private property, libel, fair use, derivative works, plagiarism, and more run right into both training LLMs and the output.

17/ The “cat is out of the bag” was the argument for the Betamax and later commercial skip. But those ended differently and importantly home use is very different than the “storage, rebroadcast, retransmission” of someone else’s data for MASS consumption.

18/ No amount of “needle threading” too-clever lawyering will change the reality that training is making a copy of someone else’s data, using it, and even if the exact copy is discarded a derivative work is produced.

18A/ Imagine if every result came with every source that contributed to prompt output — almost a debug view. Is that legit “sourcing” or essentially a denial of service attack for the legal system?

19/ In junior high school we all learned: first, you can’t copy the Greek history section of an encyclopedia and call it a report on Sparta. Second, you can’t simply move the words around and add a sentence from another work if most of the report was from World Book.

20/ Many lauded Bing’s use of footnotes and sources. Putting aside future role paid placement will have in those, one needs to be incredibly clear that these are not always sources in a verifiable/legit sense. You can’t source something and say something different.

21/ But wait, 1) there’s a link so go figure it out. And 2) its just a computer algorithm taking text, rewriting it, adding other stuff, and so on just like a person. EXACTLY, and a person (especially a money-making one) SHOULD BE RESPONSIBLE.

22/ In the past 25 Section 230 years a person could post something on the internet and wherever they posted it did not count as the author. Now we have a first party author, human directly or not, and that is exactly what is not protected.

23/ Of course big companies know this, and so going through third party APIs or using other third parties to do scraping, rewriting, etc. seem like a form of legal insulation. Read the Getty v. Stability suit for exactly this reason.

24/ YouTube when it was acquired was viewed as a liability for google because of the copyright issues with UGC. Over time YouTube became a model for the legit protection of IP. It took a decade. And YT is very different now than it was then in that regard.

25/ There’s no getting around the fact that one site can’t simply move the words around and provide a link and claim that is just “research” or “fair use” or “derivative work”. There’s 200 yrs of law and constitutional protection at work.

26/ When it comes to “disruption” a big part of my belief is that Google spent 20+ years wrestling with this topic while also balancing business needs/desires. Their caution is the result of the reality they experienced.

27/ This leads to the third big area of concern (C) and that is the notion of “responsible AI” which I believe will lead to a significant tempering of output but also a *HUGE* missed opportunity to make the world’s knowledge more accessible.

28/ “Responsible AI” is the first time a technology spawned an almost police action before it was even deployed — primarily coming about during the early days of image recognition. Imagine if we had locked down early PCs a la Trustworthy Computing, but in 1985 or the internet in… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…

29/ The most big shot companies of the US and the CEOs have created “Policy Recommendations for Responsible Artificial Intelligence” where before any real use/deployment they already called on congress to regulate AI [sic]. s3.amazonaws.com/brt.org/Busine…

30/ These of course appear “good” but they cannot possibly survive the complexity of information, knowledge, scientific peer review, political parties, school boards, and also the world of what is deemed “acceptable” at any given time.

31/ Much of Reddit has been consumed trying to get Bing or OpenAI to say bad words or worse some “cancelable” offense. As it turns out this is not difficult. Worse, it is easy to stumble into those crossed with clear factual errors.

32/ The first answers to these problems will be to retreat and only say things that are “established facts” and “acceptable in today’s context”. As we know, humans are not allowed to say bad things even if they caveat them with “this is how people talked” or “I’m quoting”.

33/ The most mundane topics become off limits or “not worth the risk”. Even in a business context, this is enormously difficult. I can’t even make a complete list of all the times I dealt with spelling dictionaries, maps, clip art, and even fonts that were deemed “irresponsible”.

34/ Quite simply, the whole idea of “default responsible” when it comes to generating content based on user questions without human review of every input and output is unsolvable. There has to be room for mistakes, offenses, or worse.

35/ But how can that be with a default commitment to responsible. Worse, even if legal liability is removed, even if w/a EULA/wavier/consent box, no entity wants the endless/ongoing PR crisis of the day every time a news event causes a new wave of prompts and generated answers.

36/ This commitment from CEOs/lawyers/comms/HR is an invitation to a priori regulate AI. In many ways this is the worst position to be in — -regulating something before it has even really been invented. They asked for it to happen promising only the “responsible” output.

37/ So along with the existing legal framework needing adjusting to account for an unprecedented scale of automated “use” (fair or otherwise), the notion of “responsible AI” will need to be revisited lest it twist itself around every side of every issue.

38/ This is not “trustworthy computing” because that was binary — protect from bad people even at the expense of usability as we stated. This is a proactive agenda designed to appease a subset of customers and can’t possibly please all constituents of every issue.

39/ R AI is much more like Google’s IPO promise of “Don’t be Evil”. There was great skepticism about that at the time, and great hope. The skeptics were proven right because the world is complex and murky and unknown, not just good and evil.

40/ What does this mean then in practice. First, big companies are going to end up continuing to constrain the scenarios and “sanitize” the output. Huge swathes of content will simply not exist for fear of being “irresponsible” “bad PR” or illegal (or potentially so).

41/ Big companies will end up focusing on mundane results, especially in search, that will effectively provide a better expression of “OneBox” answers for known topics with scrubbed inputs, prompt kill-lists, hand-coded default responses, apologies, etc.

42/ Second, productivity tools and use cases for LLMs will end up focusing on much more narrow cases of mundane and repetitive work. This is work where LLMs are basically improved grammar/spelling/templates for common interactions.

43/ The biggest barrier to use a basic Word template has been just customizing it to the exact customer/use context without breaking grammar. LLMs make this easy.

44/ LLMs will be valuable to some degree for summarizing first party content, improving first party writing, or even modifying first party images using available/licensed images (eg, show this photo of our new product being used on an airplane)

45/ Unfortunately, these are not the “important” cases. These will not drive whole new layers of productivity tools. They will be great additions to existing workflows and tools, such as CS or CRM tools.

46/ Therein is the big opportunity: new tools that approach hard problems and high value prompts AND also from outset working within the developed legal framework while taking advantage of the world’s knowledge. Those have a huge advantage.

Invent. Take Risk BigCo can’t. //END

PS/ Love this example. Shows how the much lauded notion of using sources only makes a generated answer more authoritative when in fact it is not. This is a trivial compilation. Generated compilations/summaries should be noted “…according to the intern with no domain knowledge”.

Marques Brownlee on Twitter: "Spot the error pic.twitter.com/ZJzdQ8Bdw3 / Twitter"

Spot the error pic.twitter.com/ZJzdQ8Bdw3

Bing Pulls Back on It’s Chat, aka Sydney

Microsoft limits Bing chat to five replies to stop the AI from getting real weird theverge.com/2023/2/17/2360…//NOOO. IMO a significant strategy error misreading failure of past week & over-correcting. This compounds the mistake of conflating LLMs, Bing, and Search in general. 1/

Microsoft limits Bing chat to five replies to stop the AI from getting real weirdIf you talk to the AI too long, it might tell you it loves you.

Microsoft limits Bing chat to five replies to stop the AI from getting real weird

2/ With OpenAI we *broadly* experienced the new wonders of a generative text platform. It gave us all a taste of an entire new form of creativity — generative creativity. In this thread I argued for the importance of “human in the loop” for productivity. (see above)

3/ Many people started to see a great deal of “fun” (or entertainment or wasting time or broadly creativity) by careful and crazy prompt engineering. ChatBot has the makings of an entire new form of tool, but it was very early.

4/ Many were very quick to focus on errors, hallucinations, and crazy side of what was generated. Much of existing AI researchers from big tech were piled on seeing limitations as risks. Of course “Responsible AI” chimed in over concerns where OpenAI had put mitigations in place.

5/ MS chose to build on top of OpenAI with an additional layer but far more importantly positioned their additions as a reinvention of web search and as a disruptive force unlike anything Google had seen before. Microsoft v. Google, the rematch. Really? Chat reinvents search?

6/ I’m skipping over Google but my thread below goes into view that Google had been wrestling with AI and trying to be *accurate* for decades and their success in search led to caution. This could feel like innovator’s dilemma. Or if could just be prudent. (See above)

7/ After 48 hours prudent looked correct. Bing with LLM morphed into Sydney and the excitement was quickly replaced by endless stories of crazy talk, uncanny experiences with Sydney, and a host of responsible AI problems.

8/ Then the AI researchers at other companies were quick to point out that this was all expected. Again, this anchoring was on accuracy, truth, tone, guardrails, and all the things expected from “computers are always right” and “search is for finding facts:”

9/ So now we’ll see endless punditry cycles about how AI was not ready and we need much more work on responsibility. The above limits on Bing are the first step. All a direct result of placing LLMs in context of search and productivity.

Is this MS *causing* the next AI Winter?

10/ In Search domains, the consumer expectation is consistent with “computers” which is accuracy, emotionless, predictable, non-biased and so on. Sydney was, by virtue of engineering, NONE of those things. It was designed to surface patterns and combinations not yet imagined.

11/ In that sense, and that sense specifically, that Sydney was a fun and novel breakthrough even over what we all had just started to absorb with ChatBot. This is where the misread/misfire starts to reveal itself. What was built was never going to be good at search.

12/ Search was primary problem MSFT chose to solve — burning capital, not really profitable, plus it was 20 yrs of flailing (I managed team Christopher Payne created and led in 2006–7, then Satya, then Qi Lu, etc) No surprise, MS might want payback as Google continued to *thrive*.

13/ It makes some sense to have seen LLMs as a broad extension to “answers” as I described in previous thread. But there was a technology mismatch — LLMs are nowhere near ready to provide definitive answers. Google has been struggling with this for decades, hence conservatism.

14/ To me this is an example of a technology mismatch — in time, positioning, and even company. — even though the concept/idea is exactly right. It is the way that Windows CE phones were the right concept but entirely wrong implementation, wrong time, wrong company.

15/ Many of the most successful tech companies have collected a large library of right concept, but wrong technology base, wrong time, wrong approach. Often this is viewed as “too early”

Of course in this context CLIPPY is a fantastic example. You’re welcome.

16/ The thing about these situations is that fans and those involved can years later paint a positive picture of being too early. But really it was just wrong, like Apple Newton wrong, like Windows 8 wrong. Too many elements needed to align to make this right.

17/ Now, and I mean it, I am not trying to be negative about the work. There is amazing work in ChatBot and Sydney was one of the most [unintentionally surprising] innovations in a long time. Like those products above, too many will be quick to close the books on it. DO NOT.

18/ The right answer is to listen to the experiment and market. Now is not the time to move on (as was done with those others). Now is the right time to, for the lack of no better word, pivot. Sydney is not about answers. Sydney is not the recipe for Bing to outflank Google/Ads.

19/ Sydney has potential to be a new kind of tool. Combine Sydney w/generative images, audio, video, and it is the genesis of an entire new era of tooling. The hallucinations, bias, randomness, and crazy are FEATURES NOT BUGS. They are what make it an entirely new creative tool.

20/ When we look back on platforms that were successful, most everything that some viewed as flaws and bugs turned out to be the features or the engineering constraints that legit turned a quirky thing into a platform.

21/ The browser *not* having the rendering power of Word was a feature. Lacking a security model was a feature. Lacking centralization was a feature. Broken links led to a whole series of inventions. The fragility of the PC compared to “IBM” unleashed innovation. And on and on.

22/ Everything we’ve seen in the past week or so is horrible if the goal was precise, correct, “Responsible AI approved” answers. Wrong tool, wrong user model, wrong positioning. Ten blue links + targeted ads are way superior — and least for now and foreseeable future.

23/ But the industry has not seen a new creative tool along the lines of Sydney in a long time — since maybe JPEG. Now would be a great time to unleash the power of this creativity and see what’s created. It might just be the next PC game, Netflix series, or maybe the metaverse.

24/ Is this all nutty crazy talk? Perhaps, but it was a human generated argument so it has those flaws. It is a reaction to a misunderstood failure, a strategy that wasn’t right at the start, and a what is certainly to be a [predictable] over correction, and so on. // END

PS/ Now is the time to double-down. Separate from Search. Make Sydney itself more available, cheaper. Build more tooling. Find more developers. Add images, sound, motion, animation. Build a generative future.

PPS/ One the hallmarks (necessary, not sufficient) of platform shifts is that a set of people emerges (and grows quickly) willing to make the new technology a hobby — to explore, poke, break, learn. To find limits. To create.

Sydney most certainly had those qualities.

PPPS/ here Sydney is basically writing a script for a new streaming series featuring a belligerent character forced into celebrity and has accountability challenged by equally belligerent power brokers. 🤔

Is Bing too belligerent? Microsoft looks to tame AI chatbot

A summary of potential reasons Bing went so off the rails relative to expectations. My view is that this only further emphasizes the mismatch between the technology and the scenario chosen. “Why *is* Bing so reckless?” @GaryMarcus

Why *is* Bing so reckless?

“One side felt that web search should remain the way it is while the other pushed for a chat-based interface. Ultimately, Microsoft decided to have both methods of search available and allow people to switch back and forth easily.” // Of course they did.

Microsoft shares the secret sauce behind its Prometheus model that powers the new Bing

AI, ChatGPT, and Bing…Oh My was originally published in Learning By Shipping on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I walked 65,000 steps and looked at every booth, so you don’t have to.

CES 2023 (or #CES2023 as they say) was my return to the live show after a two-year hiatus for me. I believe this was my 30th CES in Vegas. It is funny to think back to attending when the badges were imprinted like credit cards and were manually scanned at booths in exchange for brochures. We didn’t have cell phones so the success rate for meetings was about 10%. The convention center hardly had any place for snacks, so dehydration and hunger ruled the day. And back then the convention center was pretty far from the hotels and there were never enough cabs. The show probably peaked at almost 200,000 attendees and 4,500 booths. CES2023 looks to be something around 100,000 attendees and they say about 2,500 booths. The show got smaller, but I think it got better. It certainly became easier to attend and to learn.

CES is so big that any generalizations are likely to have exceptions, but I want to generalize to offer a sense of what it was like. The show was much more spread out. In part this was the tail of the pandemic (though Las Vegas has almost no indications of a pandemic at all). The booths were generally smaller. The programming of the booths was much less spectacle and much more focused on connecting to partners, ecosystems, or generally b2b. In fact, that is what the show is supposed to be about — distributors, retailers, products, components all finding their next connections. The fact that for the past 20 years or so resulted in a show that was covered wall-to-wall in international news for broad consumption tended to distort the purpose of the show. The drive for mass-market consumption of the show itself drove mega-booths, tour groups going through the show, and a level of showmanship [sic] that was at the very least bombastic and at its worst tacky and offensive. It was only back then that the show was broadly opened up to attendees who were not affiliated with the industry. Prior to that, it was not uncommon to tip the cab driver dropping you off at the airport with your badge so they could hop in and have a look — and to understand these weird electronics people that come to Vegas but don’t gamble or go to shows.

The audience for the show seemed to me to go back to focusing on others in the industry. Companies that wanted to have a presence at the show but strictly focus on doing “business” (meaning signing deals up/down the supply chain) passed on having public booths and instead had “hospitality suites” which were private rooms off the show floor, often set up with displays and signage but not open without an appointment for work. While the action was always in these private areas, this year seemed much more so. That’s what it used to be like.

The extra space afforded the show made it much easier to walk the whole show and not need to constantly battle the crowds. The reduced spectacle meant that with few exceptions you could pace yourself, study the exhibitions, and not be overwhelmed by amplified skits or flying swag. In fact, there were even fewer “stages” occupying the booths on the floor, and most booths were much more museum exhibit-like with a walk-through flow that seemed to work. If there were staged or scripted shows these were not nearly the focal point or square footage. All of these are much more like the 1990s. If you’ve seen Halt and Catch Fire then this is much more how the show felt (that was COMDEX, not CES) though almost no one was wearing a three-piece suit.

A subtle point is that many companies in the intervening two years have moved their booths — premium locations cost more money as does square footage. You always look for what companies have the northern most edge of the central hall. Sony, LG, Samsung were there though smaller. Microsoft, Intel, and others have moved to hospitality suites. Previously giant booths like Panasonic, Nikon, Canon, were smaller though closer to the central hall. With the ever-increasing focus on automotive and transport (and batteries) most of these exhibits moved to the newly opened West Hall which is absolutely amazingly nice.

Taken together, these changes all made it much easier to see the focus and to get a sense that there is a Cambrian explosion in “gadgets” that build on the connected-mobile-cloud world infrastructure that is now mature, assumed in all markets, and open for innovation. No longer does it take a physical gadget to make devices work together nor does it require every device have a screen, storage, and network cable. As a result, gadgets now are much more understandable, and it is much easier to see if it solves a problem or appears (to me) to solve a problem. A way to think about this is that if you have an idea for a healthcare device or for a security “sensor” then you can focus on building that and simply use a phone OS, AWS, and wireless protocols to connect across those. Your demo is literally the measurement or the sensory perception. There’s no need to visit 10 other booths to find out how to connect devices together.

Was anything missing? Every year someone notices that something that was overly-hyped a year or two earlier simply vanished. Where are the LaserDisc players? Where did Blu-Ray go? What about DisplayPort? Any 3D TV? Aren’t all TVs going to be flexible? Drones? PulseOx meters? Well, there were plenty of flexible displays this year. There were quite a few experiments in 3D-ish displays too. Definitely fewer drones (though TBH most of those we saw in the past were 90% the same BOM from a few companies). This year? I’d say voice control is in a bit of a hibernation. Again, I’m sure someone will write about the recent org changes at Amazon’s Alexa group, but in many ways this is another consolidation taking place. There was definitely a lack of emphasis on voice control. What this means though is that fewer devices are building in their own speakers and microphones and much more likely to be controlled by voice via the mobile platform directly. So instead of talking to the oven you just talk to your phone, watch, or speaker. In other words, the platform and approach stabilized. Maybe there is less but it also means the future is clearer and where the costs and differentiation go are more understood.

These are all signs of reaching a maturing point in the industry. If you need a network, it is Wi-Fi. If you need a wire, then it is USB-C (in some variant). If you need a video wire, then it is HDMI 2.1. If you connect to other devices, then there’s Bluetooth. There are no proprietary chargers, cables, dongles, and so on. It is a joy. The industry hits these points and stabilizes for a period. We’re in that now. It creates a sense of calm and expectations and a stable platform for innovators to innovate. An example like this just underway and clearly big news at the show has been the rollout of “Matter” for home automation. Every vendor is behind this. It will be a 12–24-month rollout with a lot of frustrated early adopters, but so was HDMI and Wi-Fi. But based on the show, it is here “now”, and the industry ecosystem is assuming it is there and there won’t be a battle over it.

That’s where the industry is when it comes to delivering entertainment, digital health, security, transportation, and more. The show had plenty of meta verse and web3 booths, and those are as early and “Wild West” as you would expect. There are no clear leaders. And like other eras there are even potential leaders who have no presence at the show at all, and so we’re left with booth discussions talking less about what is on the floor and more about “wonder what [Apple] might be doing?”

Some will say that the “reduced” scale of the show reflects the economy and that’s an easy line. Planning this show is not that agile. I’m sure there were some last-minute cancelations, but most of the costs were sunk a year ago and while saving on T&E matters usually companies go ahead anyway. Does it reflect the pandemic? It did not feel that way. If anything, the recent changes in Asia (not just China) almost made it seem like more people came because they could finally leave and return with somewhat less of a potential burden. Is it just because “trade shows are old”? I really don’t think so. Like “work from home” there was a view 2 years ago that trade shows, like buffets and handshakes, would go away forever. I don’t think that is generally shared. Gatherings will be more focused for a while, but they remain a valuable part of innovation and commerce, IMO.

I am not one to wish for the old days. As much as I was energized and exhausted by the 200,000 person show spread all over town, there were actually fewer experiments — 100 different USB memory sticks, 50 companies making low-quality Bluetooth headphones, or re-badges of the same portable media player from Shenzhen are not interesting (though the logistics of all that remain impressive). Maybe in a few years there will be another explosion in interest driving more people to attend, but I think the level of innovation on display was as high as ever and so I leave less dehydrated and as energized as ever.

I’m going to run through the main themes I felt and show some of the photos. I’m not here to generate leads or press but most everything can be found pretty easily. I’m just one person and even as I tried to be systematic, I have no intention of competing with the outlets that have tens of people attending every briefing and getting all the press kits. I just show up and start attending.

My main themes:

• Opening Keynote
• Televisions/Screens
• Health
• Robots
• Solar
• Mirrorless Cameras
• Sensors and Sensors as products
• Transportation
• PCs and Wi-Fi
• “Gadgets”

AMD Keynote

The opening keynote has a bit of a rarified place in the history of the show. There’s a long list of “firsts” shown in these keynotes and a lot of famous CEO presenters. Bill Gates showed Xbox for the first time in 2000 (along with the TabletPC, both of which are described in Hardcore Software). This year marked a return of Lisa Su the CEO, president, and Chair of AMD. Of all the major tech CEOs and companies today, Su and AMD are at the center of many of developments most exciting to the industry represented at CES. AMD runs gaming consoles, gaming PCs, PCs, and laptops, and provides chips for machine learning and running cloud workloads. Combine this with Su’s matter of fact yet entertaining stage presence and technologist-at-heart approach to describing products and the keynote can be quite compelling. Su is by far the most commanding tech leader today, at least among those willing to speak at a third-party conference.

At the same time, the place in the “stack” where AMD sits makes it rather challenging for AMD to spend an hour talking about their own work. Thousands of people in a huge room can only take so much talk of die size and transistor counts. Su makes fun of this at the end of each section by doing the obligatory photo-op holding up a chip as if we can see the power curves by looking at the surface area of a microprocessor or graphics card.

To counter this, most of the time platform technology companies use their keynotes to show off the innovations of partners and their ecosystems. There was a defined structure to the keynote as each partner was invited up followed by a bit of banter, then a verbal press release for current work, complete with visuals. Then Su would ask for “a few nuggets” (or language like that) about what is coming. The partners would do a bit of staged “oh we’re not ready to talk” and then proceed with the scripting talking about. AMD did not shy away from this approach one bit :-) Microsoft’s Panos Panay was up first talking about the partnership with AMD in delivering Surface, including a bit of a tip on the focus on AI (and thus the compute power of AMD) in future products. Then came HP describing their “thin mobile” (aka laptops) running the latest low(er) power AMD chips. Lenovo followed with a focus on laptop and desktop gaming as they announced a new line at the show. Peggy Johnson, CEO of MagicLeap, described the work they are doing with AMD (MagicLeap had one of the more crowded demo booths in the meta verse sections as they are clearly well ahead of every other player in AR which is something to watch).

The overall show had a pre-announced focus on healthcare and within the AMD keynote there was a focus on where AMD powers some innovative tools in healthcare, which require processing power. There was a video demo of surgical robots, for example.

Su rounded out the one-hour section talking about the data center and doing a classic chip company head-to-head of the latest EPYC versus XEON. These battles matter a lot and currently AMD is taking share from Intel and given the unit volumes (20M a year) and concentration of hyper scale cloud buyers this matters a huge amount. The numbers for the latest DC chip, a chip with both a data center CPU and a GPU, are crazy — 400 TOPS, consuming 75 watts, with about 146 BILLION transistors on a crazy 3D stacked package. They have been talking about this chip for a year now and will finally ship in H2 2023. If you’re looking for a comparison, the Apple M2 Ultra ship is about 20B transistors and consumes about 20 watts.

TV

The first thing I noticed walking into the main hall was what wasn’t there — there were not masses of people shoulder-to-shoulder stopped dead in their tracks at some insane number of TVs occupying a massive exhibit. The TV, the staple of the consumer electronics show, seemed to recede a bit this year. I tend to think this is because they really gum up booths and flow of people while taking a lot of space. It definitely isn’t for lack of progress or innovation in TVs.

The one exception to this was Korea’s LG which had an absolutely insane display of 250 flexible 55” OLED displays making a “universe” canopy. It was nuts. Below is the official photo of the booth since there was no way to capture this with all the people on the floor.

From a technology perspective we can see the march of resolution and refresh rates. By the time most of us buy a new set, there’s a non-zero chance it will be 8K or 4K/240 hertz. The technology will likely be mini-LED or OLED depending on budget (and manufacturer). It is difficult to overstate how amazing these sets all look. They are all incredibly thin, light, nominally bezel-less and just amazing. They all support HDR, HDMI 2.1 (should you be plugging anything into them), and all the appropriate audio and video standards. There’s a lot to love and the price points make these much less stressful purchases than the old “home theater” days.

There were some incredible displays from the 100” high end that every mfg had to the high refresh rate gamer displays.

For me the big story is really the Japanese consumer brands fading a bit (in a worldwide sense) especially Sony and the battle playing out between China and Korea. This is where the technology shifts matter and where the wrong bet can cause a country to lose out on a whole industry if the companies do not react with agility to what appears to win in the market. At the same time, these bets are all 5–10 years in the making and require massive capital outlay.

One can see this play out in a small way with what at first seems like an odd and out-of-place focus on “laser TV” from China’s HiSense, not even the leader in China. I’ve been following the China TV makers since I lived in China ~20 years ago and they are all an amazing story. In the early 2000s Haier, TCL, and lesser known Chonghong were just getting started. Listening to the CEOs they all were clear and had seen the “playbook” executed by Korea against the Japanese makers to great success in the transition from tube to LCD and had every intention of executing that same play to become leaders in what comes next.

Haier had some wonderfully nice laser TVs on display. These had been showing the past few years at Sony with very expensive and not particularly useful TVs. It seemed odd to me that Haier was so invested in laser — these are TVs that project from a very short distance in front a wall (with a “screen” hanging on the wall). The advantage is “no pixels” with high refresh and reasonable viewing parameters all for a relatively low cost compared to a 100” LED. I was curious as to why they were making such a big deal out of these. Some googling around and I stumbled on a recent “directive” from the government that China should lead in Laser TV — industrial policy! It wasn’t random that we were seeing this.

TCL is the most interesting story to me as they have executed on the relentless playbook. In a decade their TVs have gone from “junk” (my word) to at least worth a shot and in many cases the price point and quality are hitting a sweet spot which is why these so dominate discounters around the world like WalMart. TCL plays no favorites in supporting both Roku and Google/Chromecast/Android/Youtube TV (confusing).

The interesting thing about all the TVs is the software. As is becoming increasingly clear there is no buying a TV without an OS and worse there’s no using a TV without that OS getting in the way. If you’re unlucky enough to have an LG tv connected to an Apple TV then you’re familiar with the complete inability to keep the TV OS from producing notifications about shows, channels, updates, and so on. And you know you have to keep the LG remote around to make these go away. GRRRR.

So regardless of your own wishes you’re buying into the software of the maker. I’ve started using Youtube TV for my Gen-X linear viewer (gotta watch I Want My 80s and Magnum PI) and have had really good experiences with Sony that build that in. Then I don’t need any boxes at all and the remote works.

BUT that is only if you get a high-end model. The low-end models suffer from just being slow. Across all the TVs this is something noticed when playing around with them on the floor — they are SLOW. The software, either Roku, Google, LG, Samy, all outpaces the processor and memory on the devices. This has to change. It is also clear that the apps are becoming increasingly uneven in terms of features and updates — access to 4K, the newest UI, and so on.

All in all, the image and sound on TVs is far outstripping the streaming signal we are all getting and the real-world viewing environment we all experience, but the software experience still makes owning a TV a potentially frustrating choice and experience. I am not optimistic this will get better — it is the crapware cycle.

Not all the cool TVs were big. There’s clearly demand for tiny projectors. Across Sony, Korea, and many independents there are a plethora of “portable speaker sized” TVs displaying 1080P images of good quality on any flat surface, usually with a battery. Usually, they call these micro-displays. They always show these TVs with a tent and sleeping bag which might be the scenario now that any conference room will have an easy-to-use panel. They also show them in basements or places where you can’t have a permanent TV but have a white wall. These made a big splash a few years ago (before sales calls could assume easy to use projection at customer visits) but I’m not quite sure where these are getting used now.

An area that used to take up a whole corner of the South Hall (which was boothless this year) were universal remotes. Heck, even Microsoft partnered with Harmon-Kardon and released a Microsoft branded remote one year, programmable via a PC and serial cable. Mostly gone are the mysteries of learning infrared signals across remotes or finding reverse engineered codes on the internet (Philips Pronto) especially now with HDMI CEC by and large working if you don’t muck with any settings. In fact, if you connect an Appletv or Chromecast it is kind of amazing how well this all works. This is all especially true now that we’re not using numbers or even DVR controls for the most part. Yay!

Still there is innovation. Universal Remote, or now UEI, showed off a new remote that uses an indoor “solar” panel and other super ultra-low voltage components to essentially never need batteries. Super cool. And it works out of the box with ATV, Roku, and Google*. As usually with this company the direct-to-consumer version is a ways out as they are primarily an OEM company. These indoor solar panels have made their way onto many more PC keyboards as well, long after Logitech pioneered the use years ago.

Health

I would say by far the largest (by number of booths) and most diverse area of innovation was in healthcare. A lazy story would be that this is pandemic related or part of some “aging demographic”. I tend to think it is more because finally there is an openness in the whole health industry to patients (us) taking charge of our own preventative care and monitoring and because the technology, particularly sensors and machine learning, are coming online at the same time.

That said, there is *a lot* of stuff out there that is complete and utter nonsense. I don’t think any of it is harmful, but it certainly doesn’t do anything — I for one and tired of getting yelled at as I pass by booths showing light bulbs to shine on my head to grow hair. But many of the devices are not so benign and meaningless as that. There were many devices centered around Alzheimer’s, measuring blood glucose, improving hearing, and more that are not based on any proven research. Snoring and prevention thereof have long been the target of many of these tools. It turns out there is progress here and some potential solutions backed by science are appearing. Some low-tech solutions are making use of the microphone and sound processing advances from mobile. For example, the Motion Pillow from 10minds.com listens for snoring and then moves some rollers around on the pillow to gently nudge you (much like a partner next to you might) to change positions. Old school meets new tech.

Part of this is simply optimism from the makers and part of it is that there should be an openness to crazy ideas. I would not want the show to screen these out but perhaps if they just had one section called “crazy stuff” it would be better.

OPINION: This year’s big one in that regard was a wave of home urine testing and monitoring. This is one of the oldest “tests” in medicine going as far back as the practice of medicine goes. While there’s no doubt medical value in urine, it is not the diagnostic tool being touted. The new innovation is to place these inside toilets, hanging on the side, and somehow you relieve yourself on them without making a huge mess and though AI or something they guess which member of the family is providing a sample. This is an incredibly noisy measurement of a pretty unreliable test. But because it is “connected” it also charts graphs and provides notifications. One app showed a graph of “Vitamin C” which could easily make you feel like you’re “losing vitamins” without explaining water soluble intake. Most routine preventative medicine visits have opted out of urine testing because it is such a noisy signal. Part of what is going on is that the FDA does not need to get involved in this test given it is non-invasive and non-clinical. Outside of pregnancy and drug use which provide obvious outlier signals it isn’t clear to me that tracking this one is a priority. But if you want there are standard dipsticks (and optical readers) on Amazon that are much easier to maintain, get cleaner samples, and clean up after.

Diabetes is a huge worldwide health problem. Many reading this are touched by this one way or another. Many have also tried Levels and learned about how to minimize spikes and the benefits of different foods (or risk of different foods). A non-invasive way to monitor blood sugar continues to evade inventors. There have been many attempts at wrist-based lasers, contact lenses, and ultrasound approaches. The patches were the first major advance in decades, but those remain invasive. The continuous nature of the patch has been a huge win in care. That leaves the show floor to have many attempts at non-invasive techniques. One on exhibit was “Glucosound” which was a special watch with sensors. The watch used sound to excite the glucose in your blood and then an acoustic sensor to “hear” the excited vibrations of those molecules and then “AI” to get an indication of the number of molecules passing by. It is not yet a product but an example of the kind of complexity of invention going into trying to measure this critical piece of body chemistry.

Circulatory measurement, blood pressure and heart rhythm, have started to combine into devices. Many of us have used Apple Watch for an ECG to look for signs of afib. Omron, long time pioneers in blood pressure measurement and management, showed off new cuffs that also have ECG leads to do this same type of measurement. We don’t see these devices as much as we should in the US, but any visit to an electronics store in Asia would have dozens of BP cuffs of all form factors on display.

The show had countless exercise gadgets all of which are now connected: bikes, treadmills, weights, jump ropes, yoga mats, safety gear like helmets, and more. The lowly old treadmill from Kingsmith “shrunk” and became foldable. I ran on it, and it seemed to be great. It was 1/4th the size of a typical treadmill and folded in half and could easily move around. No Bluetooth, no heart rate monitor, etc. Let your watch do those things. Nice. See https://www.kingsmithfitness.com/products

A product getting a lot of eyerolls was “Rollkers” which were designed for commuters who walk but enabled them to get there faster. They look like clip on roller skates but incorporate a unique wheel/tread so you’re not actually rolling around uncontrollably. Apparently, you can even walk on stairs. A lot of people at the booth kind of mumbled “roller skates, you’ve invented roller skates”

Health was on display not just for humans. Our fur babies have their own connected gadgets. Amongst the now common connected litter boxes and toys, I loved a service being shown that basically does facial recognition for pets. Snap a photo and add it to their database. If someone finds your pet and there’s a QR code, then they too can snap a photo and match it. Nice.

Robots

There were a lot a lot of robots on the floor. There wasn’t really a robot area exactly so what was amazing is that I’d just be walking along and poof another booth with a robot. This was one of the more exciting areas for me because there’s clearly going to be a ton of work that goes into productizing robots and all of that is building on the silicon innovation over the past two decades and now the mobile phone provides a platform to easily interface with the robot and to assist training them. Most all the robots are using cameras, sensors, and some form of adaptive learning.

While many thought of robots in the sense of Rosie the Robot taking over, it is clear that we’re going to see a massive rise in special purpose / single purpose tools in the near-medium term.

On the other hand, this is all one step close to Skynet.

I just wanted to list some of the form factors that go beyond Roomba/vacuum and floor cleaners that have become so ubiquitous.

• Back assist. There were a number of “bionic” robots designed around helping warehouse workers (when those are not robots) and also for those needing assistance in mobility. These are essentially lightweight and partial exoskeletons.
• Warehouse. The warehouse robot being shown frequently was a small platform featuring autonomous guidance for moving items round a relatively fixed location. Some are “low tech” and follow paths laid out on a warehouse floor and others are given instructions or beacons to follow via QR codes they can scan. Several times I saw these proposed as “room service” or “hospital room” delivery platforms.
• Delivery. Home deliver robots were much like the warehouse ones but designed for navigation in the wild. In the Bay Area we see these being tested out quite frequently. Much of the innovation goes into how to secure the package and prevent the whole robot from being lifted onto a truck.
• Bartending/Barista. There are robots and automated machines (with articulating arms) for making drinks and brewing coffee.
• Lawn mower. I think I saw a half dozen law mowing robots. Now if they could only figure out how to get the clippings into the compost bin (none of them even bag the clippings).
• Watch kids. Robots that watch your kids and pets seem a bit too close to Skynet to me even though they are mostly just about the camera though one had some interactive elements on a tablet screen “face”.
• Security. A number of robots were shown for indoor or outdoor monitoring of commercial buildings and grounds. These are basically eyes and ears commanded/controlled by someone in a bunker somewhere.
• Scout Crops. While the presence of drones was significantly less this year there were several purpose-built drones. One was from a French company (in the France innovation hub) that looked really spooky — kind of like a spike protein with a bunch of cameras. It was designed to scout crops and look for various agricultural anomalies.
• Inside pipes. Autonomous pipe inspection robots aren’t totally new, but they are getting smaller and smarter.
• Dentist. By far the creepiest robot was one that did dentistry. It was an articulating arm that claimed to reduce dental discomfort and errors. I sent to a dentist friend and got one word back “Yikes”.

Solar and Batteries

It was difficult to miss the endless array of solar powered gadgets, battery backup batteries/energy storage, and combinations. The weirdest wordplay is that these are often called “generators” now which I guess makes sense but seems weird.

The batteries range from 12v auto battery size to 5000+ watts on wheels featuring 220v output. The common thread is now stitching these together to provide large amounts of power for off-grid use or home/dwelling backup. They can be built out for home, commercial, or off-grid use. Jackery is a company that seems to have taken over for Yeti which took over for iGo. I’m sure there is an industry report that does market share. But ultimately these are all batteries and only nominally even connected. It is just evidence of the fragile world we live in now that there is so much effort going into backing up the over-taxed electrical grid.

Most of the battery makers have solar panels as well. Matching the capacity of the batteries with the ability to recharge them is a step missing in the all the marketing. It isn’t clear one could really recharge some of the stacks on display as fast as they could be depleted.

But so, so many batteries.

Mirrorless Photography

CES is not Photokina, the German trade show for the photo industry but it has always had a good set of photography related booths owing to the retail and distribution channels at the show. This year many of the photo accessory booths seemed MIA but we were left with more prominent booths from Nikon and Canon. Sony was mostly focused on their professional video cameras. There is a fabulous three-way contest across these three, with both the high end and low end up for grabs and perhaps going to different vendors. It is a really fantastic innovation space.

The only challenge is all three face what amounts to a shrinking market. The number of non-phone cameras continues to decline while the number of photos continues to grow exponentially.

Sony was first with mirrorless and has been growing out an extensive line of pro level lenses. Canon has a 60% or more share of “professionals” (perhaps 80% on the sidelines of the World Cup or Olympics) but was second with mirrorless to Nikon. But Nikon has been slower with optics. This is a long battle. Canon is the incumbent for pros. The big thing is whether new mirrorless photographers can be captured as they switch platforms or if the existing ones will simply go with the user-interface and button-arrangement they know from the DSLR world. A fascinating battle. A while back I wrote about the disruption between Nikon and Canon — https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/nikon-versus-canon-a-story-of-technology-change-45777098038c

Nikon is currently the leader in the consumer and “pro-sumer” space (less expensive) having ceded the lead to Canon just prior to the transition to digital. They recently shipped a low-end mirrorless for “creators” which is almost a point and shoot level camera optimized for “vlogging”. For what it does it is expensive (I have one). Nikon had a model of a new 85mm f1.2 lens which had been rumored.

All the makers are capital constrained to some degree given the shrinking market. It is fascinating. Reading the quarterly earnings is brutal.

The other interesting angle is video which for professional is a different platform. Canon and Sony have really focused on providing entirely different ergonomic platforms (and lenses) for video. Nikon has mostly ceded that market. This is a higher margin lower volume space than still cameras.

Canon had a new “hybrid” body that has an SLR form factor, but user interface tuned to video. This is a combination of their two lines — the still line and the “C” or cinema line. They also had their “VR” lens which is a goggle-eyed pair of fisheye lenses (not totally new but part of the demo). Sony’s pro cameras are incredible. All these compete with super high end (expensive) “cinema” cameras like Red, Arri, and Blackmagic.

The most amazing thing is just how early it is and how they are all just building out the optics to go with mirrorless. It is so early that there have only been a few lenses that represent innovations taking advantage of the change in mechanics brought on by mirrorless (for example, Nikon’s long lenses made smaller using fluorite and Canon with the 28–70/2).

Canon had a nifty software add-on called “Webcam Studio” which takes any number of EOS still cameras and plugs them into the PC over USB and then you can composite those into a single image which shows up as a virtual camera. It is a way to do some minimal product and feed that to Zoom without having to use OBS.

Canon also showed a conference room camera called “Hybrid Active Conference Camera” which combines a PTZ (pan tilt zoom) camera with great microphones with software that is easy for the attendees to drive. It adds a whiteboard and switching to essentially make a collaborative meeting work more efficiently.

Sensors

I’m using sensors broadly to include not just body measurements or environmental measurements but all the cameras of the visual and IR field as well. I think it is interesting to consider “sensing” as a space to itself because almost everything will combine all these modes.

For example, many traffic sensors provide air quality monitoring as well. Most scales are starting to incorporate body composition and even some minimal environmental sensing at weigh-in.

I described healthcare above but at the risk of double covering an area I did want to make a list of highlighting some (most) the many sensors I saw. It is really incredible just how much of the physical world can now be detected and transmitted to your phone or the cloud. I think the most important product lesson here is how companies with sensors are able to focus their energy on “sensing” and not building out a whole proprietary stack. Part of the magic of CES is that you can now see who there is a sensor “market” and many larger companies are on the lookout for sensors.

When it comes to healthcare, CES is not the show to look for medical grade sensing. With few exceptions nothing here is about the hospital or doctor’s office. In fact, it is the opposite, it is about how to come out with a product that is used at home for preventative care of consulting with a doctor for follow up. These companies all actively avoid the need for device approval, by and large. This is also why there are sensors for “air quality” but not sensors for specific germs or even bacteria or anything.

Most all of these we now see on Apple Health connected ins some form: sleep, body composition, blood pressure, heart rate, temp, SpO2, etc. I didn’t see any new measurements.

The most interesting two I saw were:

Ultrasound — This is a medical device but there are many uses for ultrasound that don’t require too much training such as checking for full bladder for a bed-ridden person under your care. The portable ultrasound is now a “thing” and can be found in doctors’ offices and research labs. Several were on display.

Vision — most of us who have gone in for eye exams know they use several connected gadgets to check vision (visual acuity, color, reading, field, etc.) These tests continue to get compressed into fewer devices. There are now devices where there is an iPad app that does all the reporting and capture so all you need is a stationary device to rest your chin on. To make these even cheaper one company even created a monocular version where you move it between eyes rather than just blocking out one eye.

All of these really start to make one think about privacy though. All this deeply personal data in one place and so easily abused whether for employment, insurance, or just to exploit.

That said, by far the biggest “flag” for me was just the sheer number of visual monitoring/cameras I saw and especially how they all get shown as “this is available only to qualified law enforcement or government”. Primarily this is because there are so many license plate cameras and face identification cameras that require state-maintained databases. Normalizing all this surveillance kind of bugs me and at the same time this is not getting toned down. We all want safe streets, but the question is whether this is the right tool and actually helps.

One of the most elaborate was an all-in-one police light (the red-blue flashers) that had multiple cameras for doing license plate ID, facial rec, and event capture. It is connected via 5G to the central police system, and all done real time.

There were several “China” camera systems that are used for security in open spaces that identify and track individuals as they walk around. To my sensitivities these have the worst Minority Report user interfaces.

At the consumer level, home security cameras keep getting better and easier to install. The low-end Home Guard system has a PoE setup now and the cameras include their own flashing blue and red lights presumably to scare the bad guys when they are detected. Happy Halloween!

Some big consumer camera news was from Amazon Ring which was a new dashcam that becomes part of your “ring of protection”. It can let you monitor your car from 360° via a camera that clips on top of your dash on a bit of an arm that attaches to the windshield. The demos didn’t show the cable which bugged me since it needs to route around or you need to do some cowl unclipping. It is quick and easy and connected though.

One type of sensor is location along with all the environmental needs for sport — running, hiking, mountaineering, diving, etc. Garmin has long been a leader in these. They are a fascinating company in that they have been called “disrupted” by the Apple Watch but yet they are by all accounts thriving at about $5B a year. Their secret is that they are a deep commercial company as well. They equip cockpits, truck cabins, boats, and more. At the same time, they continue to push their vision with consumer watches. At CES they unveiled a second-generation high end (> $2000) “Garmin” called the MARQ Adventure series. It is fancy!

Transportation

Perhaps about 10 years ago CES became something of a “car show” back when the strategy of cars was to incorporate more electronics for entertainment and navigation. What it interesting is how with CarPlay and Android Auto the need for car mfg to make these parts vanished (along with the margin). Somehow the idea that EV cars are really computers stuck and so the car makers continue to come to CES. It’s a bit of a stretch since cars have been filled with computers for decades. Will the next generation be in house or not? Will doing so be a competitive advantage or a losing play?

In any event, all the cars on display now are EV. The big surprise and the buzz were that the future EVs mostly look like today’s gas cars. People want pickups and SUVs that look like today’s cars but electric.

What is interesting is that much like TVs that continue to have poor software experiences we don’t need, the presence of the big screen in all these EV models is driving a move to have no physical controls. This feels “Apple like” and of course Tesla-like but we’re also facing surprising increases in motor vehicle accidents in the US even with the pandemic. Is this because of phones or are screen user interfaces contributing? And given that car makers took decades to hone the physical UI are they going to take a decade to hone a digital UI? I’m worried.

There were EV boats, planes, motorcycles, scooters (of course) and most of all bikes. A lot of EV bikes. Seattle is filled with hills so no argument from me about pedal assist. The thing is that these bikes are getting BIG and HEAVY. They are basically motorcycles but to keep clear of being licensed as such they keep their pedals. I have skepticism here too because these large sized e-bikes are really dangerous when mixed with pedestrians and regular bikes. I’ve already had a few near misses in Seattle when people ride them on sidewalks even with ample bike lanes and I’ve watched more than one intersection wipeout because these just can’t stop quickly enough. But they are getting bigger and bigger. Scooters continue to get bigger and faster as well.

The big competitive battle going on is to build out the EV charging grid. There’s a ton of jockeying going into trying to be a standard. The EU is busy defining standards as are countries in the EU. The US just kicked off a federal program.

For fleets there are also solutions out there. Enercamp showed a mobile EV charger, primarily for parking lots which might save on having a charger in every spot. It includes robots, wireless attachment, modular batteries, and staffed and unstaffed cars moving batteries/charge to vehicles.

There’s no doubt EV is the future for most all transit. At the passenger car/truck space the leadership is going to be fascinating. Disruption is not always as clean or fast as many think. At the micro-mobility level, I think the current trajectory for e-bikes and scooters where they are becoming like SUVs has all the same challenges SUVs have here in the US when it comes to sharing space with smaller (more practical) vehicles. Urban is going to play out a lot differently than rural further accentuating the divisions we seem to be living with.

PCs and Wi-Fi

PCs had a very tough 2022 and look to be set up for a tough 2023. CES was never really a PC show but from 1995–2010 the PC was such a huge part of the economy and growth they ended up a huge part of CES.

PCs are much more about work and much less about “consumer” these days. CES being a show that is about distribution and retail as well, PCs still have an important place because about 40–50% of PCs are bought by home and small business at “retail”.

There were no PC booths like in previous years and even the PC makers that used to have their open-to-attendees “hospitality” spaces skipped those for press conferences and dedicated events. I think this will be permanent. But you never know.

Microsoft had a dedicated space on the floor (which is a return to the floor) and was showing off gaming. Razer’s booth was as exciting as ever.

Perhaps the PC news getting the most attention was the Lenovo dual screen PC. I’m not bullish on dual screen devices especially for PCs because I don’t think the PC use cases really work without a real keyboard and trackpad. But at CES a breakout form factor always gathers attention.

Given the presence of gaming on the floor, there was no shortage of gamer monitors. There’s still a significant number of curved monitors which are now focused entirely on immersive gaming.

By far the most interesting PC development for me was the “blue light reduction” displays. These are a new type of LED that aims to reduce fatigue by reducing the amount of blue light used. TCL (!) has such a display in their paper-like tablet and ChomreOS or Windows 11 convertible (running Qualcomm). They have been talking about this display for 2+ years and finally seeing it in units coming to market (display tech always seems to do that because the journey from model to scaled manufacturing is bumpy with challenges like yield). I *really* liked the look of the display. I have no idea what it might be like outdoors (where I seem to be a lot). It was also tough to get a sense of performance because the units were not connected to wi-fi so I could not play videos. They were sluggish because they were running Windows on ARM on QC SD 7c which is probably underpowered for Windows (it was just marginal on ChromeOS). A pioneer of these displays is Eyesafe DTX which holds much of the IP for this area.

It is worth mentioning Wi-Fi in this section just for history even though most Wi-Fi is for mobile and configuring on phones anyway. The consumer Wi-Fi space is focused on Wi-Fi 7 and to some extent gamers now and with that the access points are just huge (and ugly). I’m not sure what to make of it. I was talking to someone on the floor at one of the makers. I made a joke about ugly artwork on top of a credenza, and they told me about the aftermarket on Etsy of “Wi-Fi router holders” and sure enough there’s a whole bunch of little wood cabinets with holes for antenna to pop out. At least TP link has some super flat access points and there’s a growing list of PoE ceiling APs for home and small business.

I only briefly mentioned Matter, the new standard for home automation. There was a ton of news in this area where most every maker of switches, plugs, etc. announced support. The routers as well are committed to routing the packets.

Gadgets

Finally, no CES report would be complete without just listing some of the gadgets and accessories that I saw. Not all of these are new or even new to me, but it is fun to see them up close without buying them. There were fewer of these this year because the number of booths with one gadget went down.

Kodak Shoot & Print. These cameras have been around and are top sellers on Amazon. They aren’t cheap nor are the consumables cheap. They are fun though! It is a modern polaroid. These are really digital cameras (10mp) and “printers” that make 3x4 or 3x2 prints from the camera or via Bluetooth from any phone. Super fun.

Vessel house. I’m walking around the solar and sustainability area and there’s a trailer. But it looks more like what you’d see in a movie about living on the moon. It’s an energy efficient (but not off grid) instant house. It was just fascinating to go inside and think about uses for this and if it was cost effective (they would not tell me the cost).

Invzi docks. I like the wedge style USB docks for PC and Mac. There are a lot of these that are all similar. This one has a slot for an M.2 SSD (comes with an enclosure) and has magnets that hold the wedge in place. https://invzi.com/collections/new-products/products/invzi-maghub-pop-up-ssd-usb-c-hub-for-macbook-pro-macbook-air

Graphene kitchen styler. In the innovation area (startups) was a wild “oven” that used graphene to boil water and make toast. Graphene is a great conductor.

Charg-R (incubation). Also in the innovation area was a one-person inventor from Ireland (North) that had a single use but “green” emergency battery with an 18-month shelf life. Basically, about half a charge in a non-toxic safe cardboard container. He wouldn’t tell me the chemistry but really needs capital to make it. He decided two weeks ago to attend, 3D printed a prototype and did all the booth construction himself. I love CES!

Metl bike wheel / tires. Forever the transportation industry has tried to commercialize the tires used on the moon-car. This is a run at using the technology to make e-bike tires.

Hyperpack Pro. A backpack with an Apple FindMy tag built in. Just neat to see the ecosystem build up around these.

Rolling Square Card. A wallet card with Apple FindMy built in. It is about 2.5 credit cards thick.

Rolling Square 4/6-in-1 cables inCharge XL. From the same company, cables of varying length that have Lightning/C on one end and C/A on the other. The cables fold together nicely into a little loop that stays closed with a magnet. Available on Amazon.

GE Profile Mixer. “disrupt baking”. I can’t make this up.

Cooler that makes ice cubes. A portable cooler that also makes ice and can make a tray of ice in 30 minutes. From the “everything has a battery” department.

WiPhone. wiphone.io/flier.PDF — From the innovators area was this one-person inventor shop that made a super privacy phone. It is essentially a shell of a smartphone (you can write your own apps, but not use any other apps) running its own OS that only does VOIP with E2E encryption on his own service. It was really designed as a test product but he’s so into it he wants to sell it as a privacy phone. Buy one for each person you want to talk to, don’t insert a SIM, and only talk or text over Wi-Fi. No tracking. No pinging.

— Steven Sinofsky (January 8, 2023)

CES 2023 — More Business, Less Spectacle was originally published in Learning By Shipping on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A twitter thread originally here.

WWDC always interesting. In the pre-show guesses, one topic caught my eye—even more windowing /
“multitasking” for iPadOS incl *resize*. This deserves to be thought of in the context of “Apple is always playing the long game…and is very patient”. https://www.macrumors.com/guide/wwdc-2022-what-to-expect/ /1

What to Expect at WWDC 2022: iOS 16, macOS 13, watchOS 9 and Possibly New MacsApple's 33rd annual Worldwide Developers Conference is set to kick off on Monday, June 6 at 10:00 a.m. Like the 2020 and 2021 events, it will be...https://www.macrumors.com/guide/wwdc-2022-what-to-expect/?scrolla=5eb6d68b7fedc32c19ef33b4

2/ Many will write about this in one of two ways. a) Toaster-refrigerator—apple keeps trying to make a big phone more like a laptop or b) FINALLY Apple does what “everyone” said should be done long ago. But still, iPad is a consumption platform blah blah

3/ Apple's been remarkably patient in evolving iPad—some say as slow. I see it as patient *because* they had Mac and had iphone they could play the long game.

This patience was necessity. Not stubborn. It was by design, feature-not-bug. At least 3 reasons:

4/ 1. orig iPad was a tiny 1024x768. Even if you could side-by-side or resize, way too small. On Win, ~all apps ran full screen (from data) which Mac ppl never got. Why? Win: menu bar is part of app wind AND maximize works. Mac: all apps always overlap and green button is random.

5/ 2. Generally, regular people don’t do more than one thing at a time. Normals aren’t doing email while watching GitHub errors in term. Even messaging & word processing isn’t routine. Besides notifications can handle context switch. Techies hate hearing and always say “not me”.

6/ 6/ 3. Battery life is an issue. iOS/iPadOS handled background processing by “freezing” invisible apps. This was a huge win for battery life the first few generations. (We did this on ARM Windows too). The cost of keeping overlapping windows updated is very real wrt battery.

7/ But much time has passed. Each of those have become non-issues. Screen on current iPad Pro is 2388-by-1668 (264ppi). There is much more room to move things around, especially on the 12.9 @ 2732-by-2048. MacBook Air is 2560-by-1600 (227ppi).

8/ @jensenharris pointed out to me for years that biggest issue with “apps” has been negative space—unused portion of app real estate at full screen. That’s why Windows 8 had snap modes for apps—to solve that. Running iOS apps has always left negative space. Easy to fix now.

9/ Humans have not changed much but as screens have gotten bigger the negative space issue is more of an issue, even in productivity. You don’t see it on slides or numbers, but on words you do (same with Windows). Mac ppl don’t see b/c apps have always started as narrow windows.

10/ iOS/iPadOS have really done amazing work at being able to permit background processing w/o draining battery. First this was for video (offloaded to video portion of SoC). Advances in M1 SoC AND in keeping bad-for-battery APIs off the platform only make this better.

11/ Apple took baby steps over several gens—frustrating those who wanted more toaster-truck convergence. Except for special use case (point of sale, checkin apps, etc.) mainstream productivity use of iPad is a laptop. APPLE HAS THE DATA that informs the pace of change.

12/ Having M1 on Mac and on iPad introduces a toaster-truck convergence question. iPad already has trackpad/keyb, and now windowing (?). So will the Mac get touch? Well it could easily add it, but it still would not work super well even with Apples control of ecosystem.

13/ Touch continues to drive very differnt UI model—repeated attempts at a framework that just “makes apps work” for touch or trackpad have not been successful, but closer. Again patience. BUT most all on Mac people really want will *never* be exclusively touch usable. Assertion.

14/ That’s on top of the general issue of what APIs are available to turn an iPad into a “full Mac-capable” converged device. Apple's been *incredible* at not opening up iPadOS too quickly maintaining the promise of battery life, security, reliability, quality over time, etc.

15/ Every year a few more OS subsystems are opened up on iPadOS that previously “required a Mac.” Audio, video overlay, networking/vpn, virtual cam (maybe), and so on. Maintaining a customer promise of iPad is key. Apple can do that b/c they have Mac and have phone. Patience.

16/ BUT now it seems so much more obvious to everyone because it is the same chips. Literally they are differentiated by software expressed through hardware. Only Apple can do that in a reliable manner. Amazing.

17/ For me, crazy/obvious we now get much better battery life on Mac M1 than iPad Pro M1 because the Mac has 50 whr v. 28 whr battery. I want my iPad to have full battery. Thats why I always think a clamshell iPad will dramatically move the iPad forward as “future of the laptop."

18/ We’ll see. I know nothing of course. I’m out here guessing like everyone else. Or maybe wishing.

One thing I believe: please stop shuffling around notifications, gadgets, etc. The yield is so low. Notifications are just evil—they are all turned off. There I said it.

PS/ Windows has long history of “tiled” windows. Few remember that Windows 1.0 was tiled much like _parts of_ Smalltalk. Most thought this was a better model. My view today is overlapping is just a world of futzing. There’s no place for it on a modern computer. Its an old model.

Post Show/1 In the beta, Stage Manager strikes me as an awkward solution. With existing windowing paradigms so engrained this is a super difficult design to add something new. As a reminder, it used to take videos and pages of docs to explain resize, drag and drop, etc.

2/ What I see as the miss with Stage Manager is how it breaks what the iPad so decidedly improved which was the removal of the distinction between launching and switching (Windows people — diff between start and taskbar.) You don’t launch from stage manager so you need dock too.

3/ Stage Manager *brings* that duality to iPad — creating awkward interactions.

That is compounded by using an external monitor where you have to use the trackpad v touch.

The feature is a “mode” set in control center.

Collectively, there’s a lot of conceptual overhead+friction.

4/ The fact that launching/switching were the same meant you never needed to worry about close (putting aside tech enthusiasts desire for order). But the limits of how many apps can be “staged” means that now what apps you’re running matters.

5/ There’s a long tail of compat issues. Apps on iPad are not designed to be continuously resized and some do not support the existing windowing modes already. Finally, the three dots are rather tricky to hit with the trackpad since there is resize handle embedded there too.

6/ I haven’t been convinced the iPad even needs windowing. It needs a solution for what to do with all the pixels as screens get bigger. w/4K External I love having more room for Photos, Spreadsheets, Presentations, etc. I can value more writing and browsing side by side.

7/ I’m unclear why this was added to the Mac other than for strategy.

But in beta this is overly complex, finicky, and futzy. Any time saved by being able to work side by side will be net lost just “setting things up.”

It is just beta 1. Lots can improve.

8/ I can’t let this go. One of the really awkward parts of stage manager is that it is really about switching. The thing is you have to have a keyboard/tp so switching is far easier with cmd+tab. Why take up the screen and build a switcher-only for a weird selection of open apps?

9/ So what to do to improve? I know what it is like to be on the receiving end, but absent some communications over what they were trying to do that might not be obvious or apparent (yet?) here are some suggestions:

1. Remove it from macOS. It is redundant there.

10/ 2. Remove “stage” part on iOS (side rail). I think it is redundant there with cmd+tab and dock.
3. Move/Remove the drag arrow from where the three dots are because of colliding hit areas.

11/ 4. Get rid of floating from the old model as it was always confusing
5. If there is “new window” then there should to be a “close” on three dots child windows, esp for safari. You end up losing browsing context and windows otherwise, esp full window.

12/ What remains is the ability to resize with step function sizes for most apps. This is just what it is like to run iPad apps on the Mac.

As @jensenharris said yesterday, this feels like they got trapped into over-designing or over-thinking. https://twitter.com/jensenharris/status/1533947411445321728?s=20&t=viVcxGzjJN77L1bL43FPNQ

iPadOS multitasking at WWDC 2022 was originally published in Learning By Shipping on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is a twitter thread preseved here.

RISC chips are huge today, but it is fun to recall the *huge* debate in deep academic tech circles over the arrival of RISC chips. In the early 1980s the Intel 8086 began to dominate with the PC. Chips were mostly modeled on the the basic microprocessor model. What was next? 1/

2/ Because most commercial programming happened in assembly language, a basic evolution of instruction sets was to move “high level operations” to the silicon. These “Complex Instruction Set Chips” or CISC was the dominant force as governed by Moore’s Law. Then came Intel 80286.

3/ Some in Academia, particularly up 101 a bit at Berkeley & Stanford. There they began to question putting all this complexity in Si. That required a lot of complex engineering and really complicated compilers. What if compilers could make faster code with simpler instructions?

4/ This became known as “Reduced Instruction Set Computing” or RISC. It was quite counter-intuitive and def ran up against Intel. The raging debate was RISC v CISC.

In grad school we spent hours in classes debating this.

5/ First everyone read the now famous Patterson and Ditzel paper “The Case for the Reduced Instruction Set Computer” going back to 1980. Now there was a company starting to seed chips to leading companies called MIPS that was “interesting”. https://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~n252/paper/RISC-patterson.pdf

6/ With all the excitement and still many companies making “workstations” the debate began to rage. Leading mini computer vendor, DEC, was all up in arms as VAX was big time CISC. So they wrote — “Comments on “The Case for…” in what today would prob be a HN thread w/1M votes. https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/641914.641918

7/ Debate raged for a very long time. MIPS worked to make inroads but PC + Intel caused the mini computer and workstation markets to eventually collapse though RISC hung on with IBM Workstations and also markets like printers. But it was so elegant!! Even did Windows NT for MIPS, the original commercial RISC in 1993 (original NT).

8/ This was a big deal at Microsoft because we were 100% Intel. It was a core bet for NT…curious that the NT team also came from DEC/VAX world. :-) It also sowed the seeds for NT being cross platform “proven” early on.

10/ In 1984, really early, John @markoff then at BYTE Magazine did an *incredibly* deep dive into MIPS from his perch in Silicon Valley.

I am pretty sure this is the first RISC “explainer” outside of academia. It had benchmarks! All pages here from Nov 1984 “Chip Issue”

11/ Whole issue is online at Archive — archive.org/details/byte-m…

Byte Magazine Volume 09 Number 12 — New Chips : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archivehttps://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-11

12/ Also in that issue — the 286 was new. Bill Gates called the chip “brain dead.” Microsoft had a heck of time making Windows work well on it (did 286 & 386 versions). IBM+MS really got gummed up w/OS/2 as IBM forced 286 support. PC AT came out in 1985 and all the clones on 286.

13/ RISC v. CISC continued literally for decades. RISC turned into ARM and the whole world of billions of embedded chips. The economics and customization enabled by the business model worked well for devices that could not carry royalties. Then came phones! Then the iPod!

14/ The rest is history. Anyway, wanted to share wonderful BYTE article & debate that raged for decades. Eventually the inventors were proven right and won the Turing award. The arc of innovation is often much longer than we perceive. (Also “Comments on…” always gets me) // END

PS/ Good point to add which is that the 1990s PowerPC based Macs were RISC and that was to be the platform for building Mac clones. PPC was a joint venture with Moto, IBM, Apple, etc. to better compete.

• • •

RISC v CISC: An Age Old Debate was originally published in Learning By Shipping on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Note. This work originally appeared in the book One Strategy: Organization, Planning, and Decision Making co-authored with Marco Iansiti, published in November 2009. The post itself was originally authored in February 2008 for the internal Microsoft blog I maintained. Some minor edits were made for this version.

Even as we talk endlessly about shipping code, there’s something that we build during a product cycle that is even more important than any single release, and arguably more important to the company, and that is the team. Along with building the product, each release gives us an opportunity to build our team. Like building the product, building the team is something that is never “done” — building the team requires the same focus on the long term, consistency of purpose, and commitment to greatness that we normally ascribe to building out software. Product cycles allow us the chance to go through the whole “story” from beginning, through the middle, to the end. Like any good writer (or good actor in the theater) practice leads to perfection and so we should think about how we get better each and every performance. And like any good story, we should have a strong structure in place to tell the story.

So it might help if we treat a product cycle like a news story and think about the 5 Ws and an H. This structure is an appropriate way to think about the product cycle since we are after all creating a story, or narrative, for customers which they experience by purchasing out product (a great example of this can be seen in the current BusinessWeek article Building the Perfect Laptop, which also happens to be a good story about innovating with a plan and clarity). As I was reading this story I was reminded of the narratives we have been developing for Windows Live, IE 8, and Windows 7.

In future posts I hope to return to this metaphor but for now let’s have a brief look at these six components of a great product cycle:

• Who — It all starts with who we will build the product. The qualities of each person on the team brings and the values each member of the team represents. We want diversity of thought and background combined with a consistency of execution — maximizing the contribution of each and every member of the team. Who also starts with the tone and style of the senior leaders of the team. As we’ve talked about many times, the importance of our group managers in how they represent the best of the qualities we wish to have as a team and how they run the team is really paramount.
• What — Choosing what product to build is where the planning process guides us. I think it is fair to say that historically we have focused nearly all of our energy on this question. Most of the “fights” and “disagreements” happen over what we will build. Most of the tension happens over wanting to build more than we have. Of course what we build is insanely important, but I am also a believer in the role of the planning process to bring out a very solid set of ideas that we commit to. The idea of the planning process is to front load the “conflict” so we can execute smoothly, and more importantly so we can focus our execution on execution, which is itself super hard.
• Where — Certainly some could consider where to be the location of the team, but for me where represents the business proposition of “channel” (commonly referred to as “place” in the 4 P’s of product management or the marketing mix). Every product must meet the needs of different customers (individuals, enterprise, developers) who acquire the product through different channels (retail, OEM, solutions providers, VARs). As we develop a plan, it is keenly important that we clearly understand this aspect of the plan. This too is often thge source of tension and challenge. Microsoft has dedicated field and business folks for a plethora of channels and segments, and each one wants an entire offering for their area. Often this feels a bit like slicing up a pie, and more often if feels like our pie just isn’t big enough. So like all aspects of the product cycle, this is another one where front loading the discussion allows us to execute against a plan we know by definition is not perfect for everyone.
• Why — Why will customers like the product we will build? We need to know this of course when we start, but we also learn a lot along the way. They key thing we must establish at the start of a product cycle is a clear sense of purpose for the release. This is expressed in the vision, but more often than not when we tell the story of a product we will lead with why did we build this product. It is especially important when customers are satisfied with the product they have or at the other end of a spectrum when customers feel like there isn’t much of a reason for Microsoft to update (or customers to upgrade) to a new product. It is important that this be an emotional connection with customers and not just restate the features (what we built) as that does not reflect the context of skeptical customers.
• When — Clearly all product cycles have a schedule. Like many news stories, the when is pretty straight forward and I think the schedule is straight forward too. We pick a date and get into execution mode on the planning and the plan. Also like news stories, the place we don’t want to spend creative energy is on the date. I was recently on a mail thread with someone asking when will Windows 7 ship (someone who does need to know). In a pretty vicious while (TRUE) do {} loop I kept referring to the vision statement, but this person was convinced there is another schedule with extra buffer time hidden away. Believe me, that definitely isn’t the case!
• How — The processes and organization we use to build the product represent the how. Like Gilligan’s Island’s “and the rest”, how is often the forgotten aspect of a story. How is complicated and detailed. How requires domain knowledge. How isn’t often very fun to talk about. On the other hand, how can also be distilled down to an over-simplistic view that leaves out details just so the story can be told. Without a great understanding of how we will build the product, the other questions don’t matter. In fact, a great how can often make up for missing story elements. But missing the processes and organizations, the best you can hope for is a non-sustainable burst of success (a super creative idea that requires heroics to get out the door leaving a trail of bodies along the way, so to speak) — the essence of repeatable success is knowing how to build an organization, processes, and procedures.

That is why I believe when we RTM/RTO we certainly celebrate accomplishing what we set out to accomplish. But we have also shipped a version of our team. Teams are built release over release, just like software is built.

Building our team and working to improve how we build our services, browser, and Windows has been about trying to make sure we have a fantastic 5 W’s that our customers, partners, and the press (and bloggers) will care about, first and foremost. But focusing on the How is the real test of growing our team and growing our capabilities. I feel that without our deliberate efforts at improving how we build our software we will not ship a sustainable engineering organization. We are here for the long term and that means building an organization that has the skills and capabilities that go beyond any single product release.

My simple view is that if we can RTM a great team, then we will be able to take on even bigger challenges, harder technical problems, bolder competitors, and more sizeable business goals. Having the ideas and strategies to do those are necessary, but without an always improving team those ideas are just trees falling in a forest that no one hears.

Our team should feel super proud of the work we’ve done to develop the story behind the release and should feel very good about the progress we’ve made on improving how we engineer our products.

— Steven

5 Ws and H of the Product Cycle was originally published in Learning By Shipping on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This twitter thread looks at the innovation story of the Apple PowerBook and how it redefined portable computing in the 1990s. By @stevesi

Apple Event Monday!! By (no) coincidence next week is also the 30th Anniversary of Mac PowerBook launch at Comdex Las Vegas (last one in October and my first one!) 🚀

PowerBook *redefined* portables. It also solidified the Apple design group. What a story of innovation💡 1/

2/ To appreciate Monday and amount I believe (guessing) Mac will evolve, one should look back at the PowerBook innovation.

1990–1991 was peak vintage Apple in many ways. Mac had a high computer share 13% WW (best ever). ~14.4M PCs sold. 2.1M Macs. Windows 3.0 just a year old.

3/ Almost no PCs sold were portables (~300–400K). The whole problem with PC portables was that no one wanted them. They were under powered and EXPENSIVE ($5000 in 1990). While this prediction was awful in hindsight, at the time it was entirely conventional wisdom.

4/ American PC makers (built in US) struggled with miniaturization, costs, etc. Japan was land of making things small. Sony in particular. This was at a time when many in the US were deeply concerned/feared a Japanese dominance in electronics including computers.

5/ BUT out of that came Compaq in Texas (Halt and Catch Fire) who had built a remarkable business in PC clones. Compaq came out with an early portable, “lunchbox” form factor used by insurance agents and the like.

The LTE released in 1989 was a hit. A travel weight of just 7lbs.

6/ It ran an original PC chip but was quickly updated with the 286, then 386. I traveled to Comdex with this one. It had an exotic 3lb NiMH battery good 2–3 hours.

Ballmer used to carry 3 or 4 batteries and exhaust them all on long plane flights to Europe. Yep like 20lbs of PC.

7/ Two problems. First, Windows was terrible for portables. It had no notion of power mgmt. No ability to know if the network was down or non-existent. We did all sorts of crazy stuff with AUTOEXEC to configure things. Few used Windows at all. Just 1–2–3, WordPerfect, MS-DOS.

8/ Second, you might notice something is missing…I’ll wait…

There’s no pointing device. Because no one used Windows, these laptops did not include a “mouse”.

Also, no one had invented one yet.

9/ No worries. Microsoft’s small team building enabling hardware (a Paul Allen original) to the rescue (also Logitech and others). Microsoft built a track ball that literally hung off the side, gripping on to whatever plastic was there. AWFUL! Oh, there’s a kids version too 🤣🤣

10/ PC industry experimented with all sorts of ways of doing a mouse. Compaq added a screen mounted trackball to the LTE. IBM famously introduced the pointing stick (I hated that). Later Dell had both trackpad/stick. Microsoft improved it’s heinous trackball.

11/ Back at Apple portables were hurting. Apple had released Apple Portable the same time as the LTE. It weighed 15+lbs and was a ginormous beast consistent with the likes of Toshiba T1000 (!) DOS laptop (7+ lbs).

12/ Apple really needed a reset and the LTE served as much as one as failure of the Portable would. There were many issues. The biggest one was that now the company was in a hurry.

Apple was strong, but the PC ecosystem was moving VERY quickly.

The mantra was TIME TO MARKET.

13/ That quote is from a Case Study on PowerBook that I got to teach at Harvard Business School on sabbatical in 1998 and was super popular. You can check it out here$.

Apple Powerbook (A): Design Quality and Time to Market ^ 994023Buy books, tools, case studies, and articles on leadership, strategy, innovation, and other business and management topicshttps://store.hbr.org/product/apple-powerbook-a-design-quality-and-time-to-market/994023?sku=994023-PDF-ENG

14/ One of the problems Apple saw was organizationally there was no significant industrial design team. Mostly vendors. Bob Brunner had been a contractor in design & resisted full time because of a lack of commitment. This project changed that and design was a key part. The case:

15/ The team embarked on a very fast schedule. Up until then Apple hardware was viewed as a goal of being perfect. Much of the project was hurry hurry pace. Super different than past projects.

The case study has a recreated project timeline.

16/ Trackpad was a huge interesting design challenge. Mac portable had a bolt on. Breakthrough idea was to add a palm rest, moving keyboard up risked making device bigger but design said “we can give a feel of smaller”. Plus repetitive stress injury prevention was big. And feet!

17/ This and the amazing efforts at shrinking components led to a break through and iconic design.

Difficult to explain how impressive the device was — holistic — h/w & s/w together. Also “What’s On Your PowerBook” adverts. Here’s my fav w/ Henry Rollins. Some detailed 170 photos.

18/ Reviews 💯 “Sturdy, ergonomic design, excellent weight, and a centrally located trackball make carrying and using a PowerBook a snap. Fax capabilities are closely integrated with applications software and easy to use. Remote networking software has superb security features.”

19/ Design really proved itself in the creation of the PowerBook. After this project the design team was staffed/centralized even as Apple swung the pendulum from functional organization to product unit organization.

Models 140/170 were all in house as would be future products.

20/ There was also a collaboration with Sony to develop the entry model 100 (3 models introduced). This cemented a long-lasting partnership.

Originally PowerBook was a placeholder for fast time to market. But it sold 400,000 units in first year, $1 billion. NY Times (nice ad!):

21/ This really capped off the second peak period for Apple (and high water mark for share). One thing I observed going to MacWorld was that the Apple community drove those sales, but the community was not growing. Every Mac owner bought a PowerBook, but few new to Mac buyers.

22/ Over the next few years Apple would release innovative hardware as it transitioned to PowerPC chips. PowerBooks were always better than PCs in h/w + s/w, but struggled w/raw performance especially as OS grew.

PCs didn’t catch up in portables for 20± yrs (Win 7 Ultrabooks).

23/ But then came a transition to Intel and the MacBook Air. It didn’t matter that there were many PCs smaller/ lighter (including from SONY!) and many that fit in a yellow envelope. Apple had made significant improvements in OS s/w. And like PowerBook redefined a form factor.

24/ BTW what was Microsoft doing at that October 1991 Comdex? We were busy convincing people that Windows NT would eventually ship and be better than OS/2 (this was still before the “separation”). In ’91 it was still “New Technology”. My Comdex demo: Windows for Pen Computing 🙀

25/ The innovation in M1++ and MacOS is so deep and such a stepwise change in computing. Monday will be crazy. Watch carefully.

PS: Code name for PowerBook project was “TIM” b/c “Time To Market” was all over whiteboards and (apparently) someone asked “What is this TIM?” // END

26/ Was asked to clarify definitions of portable categories. This was a huge area where reviews/stores/press spun their collective wheels debating. I couldn’t find something like this on line so here you go (I just made this up).

27/ Another question: external monitors. Super interesting. Around 1992 is when presenting from a PC became a thing. Whenever you presented you had to inform ahead of time “Mac or PC”, different non-adaptable connectors; getting analog sync working was awful!

28/ Mentioned in comment: mouse for HP Omnibook Subnotebook (~B5), a remarkable machine. First device to use all Flash memory (on PCMCIA cards). We did a special build of Word/Excel to fit on 4MB card w/trimmed down Windows 3.x. Amazing amazing. The mouse:

PPS/ No SoundCloud, but I do have a Substack. If you liked this type of strategic look at where our industry came from and big moments, I’m writing about my journey inside the PC revolution. Please check it out — right now writing about HTML disrupting Office. …rdcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/051-html-opp….

Macintosh PowerBook and Laptop Innovation was originally published in Learning By Shipping on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Apple’s M1 Pro/Max is the second step in a major change in computing. What might be seen as an evolution from iPhone/ARM is really part of an Apple story that began in 1991 with PowerPC. And what a story of innovation 💡 1/ [Quick thoughts]

2/ If you studied Computer Science in the 80s then you were deep into the raging debate of RISC v. CISC. And what a debate it was. Out of that debate emerged an implementation at IBM, the POWER processor/instruction set. And an SV company MIPS.

3/ PowerPC was a huge investment from IBM — an effort to regain end-to-end control of computing, starting with workstations. They had no software platform really (though Unix was all the rage for workstations and OS/2 all the hope) so the big bet was on Windows NT.

4/ An unlikely partnership was formed between IBM, Apple, Microsoft. This followed the breakup of the alliance known as AIM between Apple, IBM, and Motorola. Recall, Moto was the provider for all Apple’s chips going back to the start of Macintosh.

5/ Apple relied on Motorola including the launch of the PowerBook. But even in the latest 68030 Mac was woefully far behind Intel PCs. While the 68030 was a fantastic chip, Mac software didn’t fully exploit it and WinTel was iterating rapidly to the 486 [6 months later than ‘030 Macs and was significantly more powerful]. Many at Apple, such as @gassee firmly believed Apple needed to gain full control of computing, but becoming a Chip maker cost billions.

6/ This is really key in terms of understanding the present. Apple was essentially left hanging by a partner for chips, when their core deliverable to customers was a computer. That seemed an impossible situation.

7/ Over in x86 land, compute speeds and megahertz kept rising with Moore’s Law. Intel’s investment and excellence in manufacturing made it all but impossible for anyone to catch up, especially making a similar CISC product.

8/ Apple moving to x86 would put them in direct competition with everyone else. That seemed the opposite of the right way to go, much as licensing Macintosh System seems to be wrong.

9/ This led to a bet on PowerPC and the release of the first Power Macintosh 6100 in *March 1994*. The project was a very bumpy ride with IBM but also an enormously difficult software project.

10/ The Mac System needed to be ported to the PowerPC chipset, including all the hardware and peripherals. It also meant the whole ecosystem needed to move as well, but that ecosystem wasn’t healthy and had started to slow down Mac and favor Windows.

11/ To ease transition, power of PowerPC was used for 68k emulation. This allowed lagging apps (Photoshop, which took something like 2 years to release as a native app) to at least run on new hardware, but performance was marginal at best. BUT Apple learned a great deal in this transition — tooling (like Universal), emulation, and compilers.

12/ The results were lukewarm when it came to performance, especially versus x86. In the meantime, developers were investing heavily in x86 and Intel was investing billions in scale. The gap at launch would get worse, not better over time.

13/ There was little Apple could do for the next few years. Essentially the price/performance gap would continue to become even more bleak. Then Steve Jobs returned.

14/ Of course first came the most famous PowerPC Macintosh of all time. By focusing on consumers and the internet, the weakness of PowerPC could be ignored. The industrial design was a hit too. The G3 then G4.

15/ In the meantime, Apple began to use ARM processors for the iPod. ARM was a RISC design, but had only achieved success in small devices and peripherals. Intel and many other companies were all ARM architecture licensees. This is how Apple got into chips. No one worried.

Note I should have mentioned the Newton here as it was clearly the first ARM device from Apple, though it was another generation of people and from what I gather there was not a lot of continuity when it got to iPod unlike the OS evolution.

16/ The end-to-end control of iPod was exactly what was needed to bring together hardware, software, and internet services. First some custom chip features, then more, then more…Of course as we know now, that also marked the resurgence of Apple.

17/ Rebuilding Macintosh began as well. By this time NeXTStep was already ported to Intel. The work to get the rest of Mac working involved a lot of knowledge about chipset transitions from NeXT and Apple history. Note: Many senior Apple engineers worked at NeXT, and several of them worked at Apple previously.

18/ There were no choices for chipsets for “computers” at the time, but of course Apple was clearly going to use ARM for the iPhone (and iPad) project which itself has a long and interesting story (out of context here).

18.1/ Was asked: Apple using Intel for phones, how Intel famously declined. I’ve heard first-hand from both sides and honestly not sure how serious Apple was or how uncommitted Intel was. Also, within Apple it was a debate of sorts, which seems crazy given what I saw on Windows.

19/ At the 2005 WWDC, jobs announced that Apple would be transitioning to Intel. Many said this is something that should have happened long ago. It really was the only option (IBM was not going to invest “Intel money”)

20/ So while the phone was going on and ultimately released on ARM in 2007, the first Intel Mac was released in January 2006. That was essentially a PowerBook but with Intel inside. If this looks familiar it is because that’s exactly how Apple did the M1. This is a huge learning point — the DTK 2.0 (the first one was for the transition to x86) was essentially an iPhone inside a Mac Mini chassis. It was proof of concept. Then later the first MacBook Air and MacBook Pro with M1 were also chassis look-alikes.

21/ In 2008, proving it could innovate and even do with with Intel, Apple introduced the MacBook Air. It was the first laptop on a new Intel chipset (though everyone would eventually have this for Windows, no one built a MacBook Air-like PC). Until Ultrabooks there was no PC.

22/ A huge part of the Intel transition was bringing up hardware, seeding developers, universal binary, and emulating PPC instructions. If this all sounds familiar it is because it is 2.0 of a process that was done in the 68k->PPC transition. It was much smoother. Same process, just iterated. And apps came on board as native much faster. Photoshop, Office, etc. all came much sooner.

23/ As Apple progressed with ARM it became clear that the breadth of the ecosystem was a benefit for ARM but was holding Apple back in terms of innovating. iPhone success gave Apple the resources to realize its chipset dream. Thus the System on Chip from Apple began.

Note. In 2009 Apple acquired PA Semiconductor. I should have included this because it was a huge step, though many at the time were quite puzzled by it. This story below shows how confused most were. Apple of course was not.

24/ The M1 chip was a realization of all the iPad and iPhone work (sensors, OS port, security, power management, graphics, and more).

The M1 not only aimed at fixing what ailed Intel, but also PPC. It was learning from the past decade+.

25/ When you look at M1 Pro/Max today it is tempting to think of this in terms of performance, but performance per watt AND integrated graphics AND integrated memory AND integrated application processors is innovation in an entirely different direction. Just the beginning.

26/ Here’s a thing about “Laptops versus Phones”. The Phone is the computer for everyone around the world now. Laptops (and desktops) are specialized devices for work. About 400M people really use/need laptops for work. That’s what M1 is for and why Apple does not need to stress about pricing like it did in the 1990s — essential tools for highly paid information workers are worth the money.

27/ The number of laptops won’t grow, but it is likely Apple will continue to take share from Windows (as will Chromebooks). At 275M units a year, laptops are big but serving this base of 400M. Phones serve everyone including them. That’s where software innovation is for masses.

28/ That’s why this transition to M1 is so fascinating. Back when Apple went on its own with the A-series chips, one could easily be concerned that they would end up in the same place as PPC — not enough volume to win against Qualcomm/Samsung doing their ARM designs.

29/ Apple, by virtue of being vertically integrated, raced ahead. Because of their units and revenue/R&D investment they are in a globally unique perspective. Today, Qualcomm is closer to Intel than it is to Apple Si/Ax/Mx.

30/ Even though Intel serves Windows, ARM/QC/Sam serve Android, they all must serve myriad of OEMs. It appears as though that point of openness (v say at the s/w and service level) is a real constraint on innovation. Partners don’t all want to make the same device, for example.

31/ At the same time, Apple itself has developed a whole family of operating systems. These are not just related, but vastly similar enabling a huge ecosystem opportunity. THIS was Microsoft’s vision going back to early 1990s. Slide from 1992 PDC.

31.1/ This is the slide that goes with 31 that was left out/ The Microsoft history of Scalable Windows. This is the first slide from 1992 PDC. Over the next few years it would grow at the low end (Windows CE, Wallet) and high end (High Performance Computing w/NT and Itanium [sic]).

32/ The M1x capabilities of shared memory, SoC that isn’t just smaller but has so many aux functions, Pro Res, super fast SSD, even multiple TB ports — all these things require deeply integrated software (from the chipset to the experience).

33/ Some might say only 1% of people (of the 400M) even need these. 2 things.

• First, everything today for super advanced becomes commonplace down the road.
• Second, never before has one desireable brand made the ubiquitous device AND the super high end one.

34/ Across phone, tablet, tv, watch, speaker, laptop, desktop, there’s a platform of capabilities are unmatched even in one device group, let alone the whole spectrum. It would be like if Ferrari also made mass market passenger cars and electric bikes. Unprecedented situation.

35/ I’d be remiss if I didn’t say these weren’t perfect devices. Why no ethernet in the giant power brick like iMac? Why no cellular option? Yeah FaceID doesn’t fit but soon? Oh and people harping about the notch, STOP!

PS/ This thread is about context, not the whole story. There are a lot more details, even books, about this particular transition. Here’s a deep overview of PowerPC to show what apple was after, and challenges.

PPS/ Windows NT spent a huge amount of effort on PowerPC (including even young me porting Microsoft Foundation Classes). Alas, no hardware ever showed up. BUT that worked is what made porting NT to ARM some good learning.

PPPS/ Pay attention to how Apple share of regular PCs is growing, keeping in mind they also have growing phones and all tablets and most watches. Pretty interesting share change.

Apple’s Long Journey to the M1 Pro Chip was originally published in Learning By Shipping on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1/ @MichaelDell’s new book is out “Play Nice But Win” which is a perfect title for one of the most successful, yet low-key and humble CEOs of any industry who is also the OG PC leader. *Everyone* in tech should read this book. Some of what I felt…smile.amazon.com/Play-Nice-But-…

2/ Michael’s first book (Direct from Dell) is a great story of the nuts and bolts of Dell. Definitely an important book. This book is much more “inside his head” and at times “emotional” about his journey, and reflective. Also Michael is the “last” PC era founder still CEO!

3/ From my perspective it is really several key stories woven together (literally in alternating chapters):
• Founding and Managing of Dell and Michael’s upbringing
• Definitive book on the BS of corporate raiding
• Private v. Public company dynamics
• Transforming a tech Co

4/ Dell’s founding story is just incredible. Today people think of PCs as commodities that are outsourced to supply chains and overseas mfg. But in the 1990s, they were products of the US and took a lot of tech. Think “Halt and Catch Fire”, but real story (BIOS rev-engineering!)

5/ In fact, most interesting to many will be the “discovery” of the real truth behind the IBM PC, which that it was open which enabled Michael to build even better PCs than IBM was. Even better than Texas-based Compaq with 250x the funding. (PCs/components were a Texas thing!)

6/ The “dorm room” story of Dell is really something. He shares a moment when his parents “find out” he’s doing computer stuff when he’s supposed to be in college. His Mother almost breaks down. Sharing here because, well, I had this *exact* same experience the same year.

7/ The book opens in mid-2013 effort to take Dell private. Better than any other book about a corporate raid/LBO (incl Barbarians) this tells the inside story. Michael brings us along on what instigated the move, what prevented the move, how it was received, and more.

8/ We learn the craziness of “greenmail” and also much about the reasons why transforming a public company in the face of short-sighted public markets can be so difficult. Michael artfully tells the whiplash of hearing the public markets value Dell on PC sales…

9/ All while he is optimistic about PC sales for all the right reasons and yet agreeing (and executing) on the need to change the overall strategy and value proposition of Dell. What is wild is how much evidence there already was about Dell’s ability to transform.

10/ Those are some of my favorite stories. Few realize that Dell was not given much of a chance to compete in laptops or in servers. Many believed the “Direct from Dell” model could only work with big desktops that could be customized and built to order, certainly not servers.

11/ Michael shares the story of starting very early to include service in Dell’s model, long before anyone else (and partnering to deliver that, including the amazing efforts around 9/11). He details early stumbled on laptops, then what it took to win servers (and RAISE prices).

12/ The server story is one that parallels Microsoft’s transition to enterprise computing at pretty much the same time. Great pricing discussion. I think about how we used Compaqs, by 2001 or so we were using Dell laptops & servers and dealing with Dell on-site account managers.

13/ The story of going private is really a story about tech transformation. It is going from a hardware provider, to a hardware + service provider, to a hardware + software + services provider of today. To the point where hardware, esp PCs, are loss leaders. Amazing.

14/ There’s a great deal of depth to the product, strategy, go to market aspects of the story. That is something I really enjoyed about the book. I admit, I wanted more but the absence means the book can be a perfect book to distribute to a whole team and used as a springboard.

15/ Reading the book one can walk aware realizing something that I am not sure many today quite understand, which is what an incredibly execution machine Dell is while also being a refined product development company in the most elite way.

16/ I will just toss in what Michael says about Windows 8 here, not to defend it (I will write plenty about it) but because Windows 8 came out at the absolute all-time peak of PC sales. Some thought PCs would grow to be 600M units. In 2011 they were 365M.

17/ Windows 8 came out and while Michael was optimistic (as he is naturally) the truth is what we thought would happen just happened anyway. PC sales dropped to 350M, then 312,…until where we are today with 2020 at a pandemic 275M.

18/ While Michael was optimistic about PC sales they still have not returned (and never will) BUT what the book does not give enough credit to is Dell’s execution during this same time — IMO execution is what enabled investment (via cash flow) to transform the company.

19/ In 2011 Dell was struggling with PCs. Before PC sales went down, Dell’s market share was going down as Michael tells the story. It wasn’t tablets or phones, there was share loss. The shift to laptops didn’t do it as much as new “ultrabooks” from Acer, Asus, Lenovo, etc.

20/ Over the next couple of years Dell just absolutely nailed it with the XPS line. To the degree that the XPS 13 is so clearly the “go to” work laptop (IMO, that I recommend to everyone). I knew this at the time. I watched touchpads, for example, go from unusable to the best.

22/ The transformation to services continued as a private company — told through another incredible first-hand account of a mega-deal. The acquisition of EMC/VMware. Printed book has a photo of the original diagram of the tracking stock done by Harry You and Silverlake’s Egon.

21/ The market results were amazing. Even as US PC sales declined more than 10%, Dell’s market share went from ~19% to almost 27% in 2019 (+25% in units). That’s not just product excellence, but distribution, account mgmt, and sales excellence.

23/ Michael details his own journey in bringing on the team and integrating with a massive and successful company. Earlier in the book we learn about Michael’s commitment to building an exec team early on and he even mentions this super interesting story that ran in 1995.

24/ So anyway that’s enough sharing details. There’s a great deal for any team to talk about from this book. It is a perfect book for a whole exec or product team to read and there are clearly ways to discuss the details. There’s an appendix “Things I believe” that is great.

25/ Audio version is a treat with Michael narrating the whole book. It makes the biography portions especially touching as we learn about Michael’s commitment to family, philanthropy, and people. // END smile.amazon.com/Play-Nice-But-…

PS/ Here’s an @a16z podcast where Michael joins @martin_casado @pmarca and @smc90 that is worth a listen

Cloud Wars & Company Wars: Play Nice, But Win — FutureIt’s rare to see a company go public then private then back to public again, as Dell Technologies did — and which also pulled off one of the most epic mergers of all time with Dell + EMC + VMWare. Ho…https://future.a16z.com/podcasts/cloud-wars-company-wars-play-nice-but-win-michael-dell-book/

Michael Dell’s Book “Play Nice But Win” was originally published in Learning By Shipping on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This was a twitter thread from July 12, 2021 further describing a feature mentioned in the latest post in Hardcore Software, a non-fiction, first-person account of the rise and fall of the PC revolution serialized through this platform, one section at a time, once or twice a week.

An old Excel example of head to head competition. When your product is in a well-known category, sometimes you get cornered by customers, analysts or even press (HN? 🙄) to do a “checkbox” feature. You don’t want to, but you start hearing your product is missing something. 1/

2/ Excel’s most aggressive competitor in the early days of Windows was from upstart Borland that moved more quickly to Windows than others. They competed on price and performance. They also had an obscure feature — make a slide show in a spreadsheet. Review from 1994!

3/ The Excel team was also an upstart relative to the monster that was 1–2–3. Excel 3.0 (1990) was a huge effort bringing out a new Mac and Win version simultaneously. It had many new features including the first toolbar (even on the box cover). It had a super lame slide show ☑️

4/ Excel 4.0 (1994) also a big upgrade & part of the new Office suite just getting rolling. A new PM was tasked with updating the slide show feature “for competitive reasons”. Sort of weird since by then Microsoft acquired PowerPoint. The PM ended up coding on their own — checkbox!

5/ The slide show feature ended up being absurdly elaborate. And also crazy cumbersome.

Of course almost no one was using PowerPoint (or any slide making software) yet as the category was too new.

Imagine you have a workbook with some numbers and a chart. File New Slides.

6/ For each slide you select a part of the workbook and *paste* it into a row in the slideshow sheet. The add-in then made a graphical thumbnail, adding a row. You could also pick the transition animation, sound, etc. Amazing. That animation preview is straight from PowerPoint!

7/ If you wanted to do a slide with text for bullets you just used the regular text features of Excel, probably on a separate worksheet.

8/ When you’re all done you can use the commands on the slide sheet to play the show.

9/ As far as I know, having a checkbox worked and no one ever complained. I am not sure it was used as no one noticed it was missing in the next release :-) See review below!

Sometimes you just gotta do these features to remove “objections” even though it rubs you the wrong way.

10/ Check out this video of the feature in action. I recorded this on a new M1 iPad running iDos after installing Windows 3.0. Wow snappy! Truly amazing this works. Wow!

11/ This feature was mentioned in the latest post on the Harcore Software substack — subscribe it is fun. hardcoresoftware.substack.com // END

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