Smartphones are still evolving, but we're on the upper slopes of the S-Curve. This means innovation is slowing, but also that iOS and Android are now unassailable. It's time to focus on what's next - voice, machine learning and, especially, augmented reality. | Continue reading
People in tech and media have been saying that ‘content is king’ for a long time - perhaps since the VHS/Betamax battle of the early 1980s, and perhaps longer. Content and access to content was a strategic lever for technology. I’m not sure how much this is still true. Musi … | Continue reading
Machine learning is probably the most important fundamental trend in technology today. Since the foundation of machine learning is data - lots and lots of data - it’s quite common to hear that the concern that companies that already have lots of data will get even stronger. There … | Continue reading
Machine learning is probably the most important fundamental trend in technology today. Since the foundation of machine learning is data - lots and lots of data - it’s quite common to hear that the concern that companies that already have lots of data will get even stronger. There … | Continue reading
The future of personal computing is mobile, and Microsoft has lost mobile. That means the end of Windows Everywhere, and undermines Office too. Now that Microsoft's admitted this, what does it do next? | Continue reading
I gave this presentation at a16z’s annual tech conference last week. | Continue reading
When Nokia people looked at the first iPhone, they saw a not-great phone with some cool features that they were going to build too, being produced at a small fraction of the volumes they were selling. They shrugged. “No 3G, and just look at the camera!” When many car company pe … | Continue reading
We talk a lot about levels of autonomy, and ask when the first ‘fully autonomous’ cars will appear. That might be the wrong way to look at it - there will be lots of different kinds of ‘autonomy’, and the ‘where’ and ‘what’ may matter as much as the ‘when’. | Continue reading
We're now four or five years into the current explosion of machine learning, and pretty much everyone has heard of it, and every big company is working on projects around ‘AI’. We know this is a Next Big Thing. I don't think, though, that we yet have a settled sense of quite what … | Continue reading
What do we do now that there’s more in the newsfeed than we can possibly read? Can the algorithmic sample ever actually work, or do we swing back to 1:1 messaging? How do Stories rebundle that? And what happens to all the traffic that the newsfeed provides? | Continue reading
A bridge product says 'of course x is the right way to do this, but the technology or market environment to deliver x is not available yet, or is too expensive, and so here is something that gives some of the same benefits but works now.' Sometimes that’s a great business, … | Continue reading
How many smart things will we have in our homes? What will make sense? How much room is there here for startups? Will all these devices be connected to Alexa, and if they are, will it matter? | Continue reading
How do fundamental, structural changes in TV, in retail and in advertising interlock and accelerate each other, and what cascading effects might there be? | Continue reading
Amazon is a machine to make a machine, and the machine it makes is more Amazon. | Continue reading
This autumn I gave the keynote at Andreessen Horowitz's annual 'Tech Summit' conference, talking about the state of tech and what's likely to happen in the next decade: mobile, Google / Apple / Facebook / Amazon, innovation, machine learning, autonomous cars, mixed reality and cr … | Continue reading
The fashion industry does not set fashions - it proposes them. It tries to work out the mood and the zeitgeist and looks for ideas that might express that. The same, increasingly, for Facebook - it cannot really decide how people use its products or what they see, only propose.&n … | Continue reading
We all know, I think, that there are now far more smartphones than PCs, and we all know that there are far more people online now than there used to be, and we also, I think, mostly know that big tech companies today are much bigger than the big tech companies of the past. It’s u … | Continue reading
What winner-take-all effects could there be in autonomous cars? Are there network effects that would allow the top one or two companies to squeeze the rest out, as happened in smartphone or PC operating systems? Or might there be room for five or ten companies to compete ind … | Continue reading
Earlier this week I did a podcast with my colleague Steven Sinofsky talking about the management structures of Google, Apple. Facebook and Amazon ('GAFA'). These companies now have around 10 times more employees than they did a decade ago, yet they still manage to function, and f … | Continue reading
It's common to say that PCs are for creation and mobile only for consumption, but both parts of this are wrong: most people never created on PCs, and far more is created on mobile. | Continue reading