What happens when rent, returns and advertising blur into one? What would it mean to do ecommerce that doesn’t scale? | Continue reading
Facebook has 2bn users posting 100bn times a day. The global SMS system had 20-25bn messages a day. So is this a publisher? A platform? A telco? No. We don’t really know what we think about speech online, nor how to think about it, nor who should decide. | Continue reading
In the early 1980s, if you installed a word processor or spreadsheet program, they wouldn’t come with word counts, footnotes or charts. You couldn’t put a comment in a cell. You couldn’t even print in landscape. Those were all separate products from separate companies that you’d … | Continue reading
Computing has always moved forwards in jumps of scale, but smartphones reach everyone on earth, so what’s the next jump? AV and VR? Cloud, machine learning and crypto? Or is that the wrong model to use? | Continue reading
Tech is becoming a regulated industry, and that means lawyers and civil servants taking decisions in some complex and interesting arguments. But from a regulator’s perspective, one of the problems to address is just how many problems there are. How do they move fast without break … | Continue reading
This year’s lockdowns triggered a huge spike in online sales of every kind, but where would that stabilise? Once things started to calm down, where would the new level be set? We’re now starting to see - over 20% of US retail sales are now online and in the UK, ecommerce is now 4 … | Continue reading
There’s a theory that when a shark bites a surfer, it’s because they look like a seal. The shark circles, comes close, and sometimes it takes a bite out of a leg, and sometimes it takes a bite out of the surfboard and gets a mouthful of fibreglass. I tell this story a lot when I … | Continue reading
One of the basic building blocks of any competition case is market definition. If you’re claiming that a company has market dominance, and that it’s abusing that dominance, what market are we talking about? Very obviously, the company being prosecuted tries to draw the definition … | Continue reading
What’s going to happen in ecommerce and retail? TV? TV ads? Retail? Brands? Online advertising? There are half a dozen different hundred billion dollar industries where all of the cards are being thrown up in the air, and no-one really knows where they’re going to land. | Continue reading
For its first two decades, the consumer internet was American - American companies, products, attitudes and laws set the agenda. That’s not so true anymore - there are more smartphones in China than in the USA and Western Europe combined. Software creation and company creation is … | Continue reading
The bigger Amazon gets, the more it’s worth reading the accounts. Does AWS subsidise the whole thing? Is the revenue $250bn - or $450bn? And is that ad business just a footnote, or is it bringing in more cash than AWS? | Continue reading
Both the UK and (today) the USA have given official statistics on how ecommerce and retail have changed during lockdown. The headline numbers are pretty dramatic. The UK went from 20% ecommerce penetration to over 30% in two months, and the USA from 17% to 22%. | Continue reading
The app store model has been a central part of the smartphone revolution, bringing safe, trusted software to billions of people for the first time. Breaking it would be insane. The trouble is, it also means Apple (and Google) aren’t the pirates anymore - they’re the navy, the por … | Continue reading
We’re clearly going to be arguing about the size, power and market share of large technology companies a great deal in the next couple of years. Many of the underlying concerns we have around technology are complicated, and involve deep-seated trade-offs where we actually have to … | Continue reading
We regulate lots of industries, from food to banking to airlines, and now, increasingly, we’re going to regulate tech. But that means global platforms collide with local regulators, with complexity, trade-offs and mutually incompatible demands. This will probably be expensive. | Continue reading
We had video calls in science fiction, and we had video conferencing in the 1990s, just as the web was taking off, as a very expensive and impractical tool for big companies. It was proposed as a use case for 3G, which didn’t happen at all, and with the growth of consumer broadba … | Continue reading
There are two ways you can talk about newspapers. You can talk about the ‘third estate’, and newspapers’ role in culture, politics, governance, the exchange of ideas and civil society. But you can also talk about newspapers as a specialised light manufacturing industry, that aggr … | Continue reading
Online events remind me a lot of ecommerce in about 1996. The software is raw and rough around the edges, and often doesn’t work very well, though that can get fixed. But more importantly, no-one quite knows what they should be building. A conference, or an ‘event’, is a bundle … | Continue reading
Social apps are pop culture, trying to grab some piece of the zeitgeist, and build a product around how people are feeling. But so too are a lot of the new wave of productivity apps. They’re not just utilities, but theories of how we might feel about work. | Continue reading
"That is not only not right; it is not even wrong" - Wolfgang Pauli A lot of really important technologies started out looking like expensive, impractical toys. The engineering wasn't finished, the building blocks didn’t fit together, the volumes were too low and the man … | Continue reading
“Our vision is that VR / AR will be the next major computing platform after mobile in about 10 years. It can be even more ubiquitous than mobile - especially once we reach AR - since you can have it always on… Once you have a good VR / AR system, you no longer need to buy phones … | Continue reading
I’ve been looking at this chart a lot over the past few weeks. | Continue reading
Mainframes replaced adding machine, PCs replaced mainframes, and now the web and mobile are replacing PCs. With each of these changes, we started by making the new thing fit into the old way of getting our work done. but over time, we change the work to fit the new tool. | Continue reading
In January, everyone was online, and probably willing to try anything online. Now we don’t have a choice - we’re shut indoors for weeks or months. What does that means for work? Ecommerce? Health and education? And the people left behind? | Continue reading
Presentations by Benedict Evans: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, The End of the Beginning and Mobile is Eating the world. | Continue reading
Presentations by Benedict Evans: Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, The End of the Beginning and Mobile is Eating the world. | Continue reading
A big rich company, a company that dominates the market for its product, and a company that dominates the broader tech industry are three quite different things. Market cap isn’t power. IBM ruled mainframes and Microsoft ruled PCs, and when those things were the centre of tec … | Continue reading
Amazon is a big company, but what does that mean? How big is ‘big’? What does ‘dominant’ or ‘scale’ or ‘huge’ mean when US retail is $6 trillion every year? Running the numbers, Amazon has about 35% of US ecommerce. But, it competes with physical retailers as well - it compete … | Continue reading
In 2012 or so, if you’d asked most people in tech about ’neural networks’, if they had any answer at all they might well have said that it was an obscure idea from the 1980s that had never really worked - rather like VR. Then, in 2013, Imagenet gave us an explosive realisation th … | Continue reading
We are in the middle of a wave of interesting new productivity software startups - there are dozens of companies that remix some combination of lists, tables, charts, tasks, notes, light-weight databases, forms, and some kind of collaboration, chat or information-sharing. All of … | Continue reading
Apple announced another phone, but pretty much all phones are great now, and most of the dramatic innovation is behind us as the market matures. The one place for really obvious improvement is in cameras, where Apple and Google are using computational photography to get more and … | Continue reading
We worry about face recognition just as we worried about databases - we worry what happens if they contain bad data and we worry what bad people might do with them | Continue reading
With fundamental technology change, we don't so much get our predictions wrong as make predictions about the wrong things. | Continue reading
Way back in 1992, just as the ‘Internet’ was starting to sound interesting, a company in the UK used technology to disrupt television. Rupert Murdoch’s Sky realised that you could buy football rights for far more than anyone had ever thought of paying before, and you could make … | Continue reading
I sometimes think that if you could look in the safe behind Jeff Bezos’s desk, instead of the sports almanac from Back to the Future you’d find an Encyclopedia of Retail, written in maybe 1985. There would be Post-It notes on every page, and every one of those notes has been turn … | Continue reading
Computer vision turns imaging into a universal input - it lets computer see. So what kinds of things will become vision problems, and how does that change Google or Instagram? | Continue reading
Smartphones are internet platforms in a way that PCs never really were, and they're not neutral - the platform owners keep reshaping them, and reshaping how user acquisition works. | Continue reading
5bn people have a mobile phone now, and 4bn have a smartphone. Time to stop making charts. | Continue reading
Machine learning is one of the most important fundamental trends in tech today, and it’s one of the main ways that tech will change things in the broader world in the next decade. As part of this, there are aspects to machine learning that cause concern - its potential impact on … | Continue reading
Internet platforms are vast mechanical Turks - they don’t know what we are or what content is, only what millions or billions of people have said or linked or liked about that content. How might machine learning change that? | Continue reading
We expected a TV event and got a subscription event - news & magazines, games, a credit card and Oprah. There are plenty of questions one could ask (especially on TV, where we still don’t know the scale of the ambition - is Apple taking on Netflix and spending $10bn, or spend … | Continue reading
‘Smart home’ today is in the same place as electric things in the home a generation or two ago: everyone will have some of these things, but we’re working out which makes sense. Everyone got a toaster or a blender, but no-one got an electric can opener, and smart home look the sa … | Continue reading
Facebook’s struggle with abusive behavior today looks a lot like Microsoft’s struggles with malware 20 years ago: people take advantage of an open platform, and you have to work out how far you can close the holes, how much you can scan for bad stuff, and whether you need to chan … | Continue reading
There are strong parallels between organised abuse of Facebook and FB’s attempts to respond, in the last 24 months, and malware on Windows and Office and Microsoft’s attempts to respond, 20 years ago. Initial responses in both cases have taken two paths: tactical changes to deve … | Continue reading
Machine learning means smartphones will (nearly) always take perfect pictures. But it also means they might understand what’s in the picture and why you took it. So what do they do with that? What does the discoverability and communication of AI look like, if you can answer lots … | Continue reading
Amazon’s Alexa has been a huge, impressive and unexpected achievement. Amazon created a category from scratch and left both the AI leader Google and the device leader Apple scrambling in its wake. It’s now sold 100m units. So far, though, this success is pretty contingent - we do … | Continue reading
What is 5G? Why do we care? How much faster does the pipe get? What can we do with a fatter pipe? How does this relate to VR? Cars? Broadband? What’s the killer app? | Continue reading