Your commentary on the dangers of silicon valley coming under the spell of wokeness and cancel culture is spot on. I know this to be true because in Bitcoin we have already lived through a similar culture war against crypto anarchists.

So, today, for the first time in 25 (!) years of Apple, I downgraded. From the 2016 MacBook Pro to my 2013, which I had kept in a drawer...

It was pretty simple to do—Apple Time Machine backups let me do it with one click.

That first tweet captures, in two pictures, how badly Apple has “lost the plot” (to quote @wylieprof). On the right is the Apple MagSafe adapter, from 2013. On the left, what I had “upgraded” to.

Thanks, Apple! I really was nostalgic for worrying about yanking my computer off the table.

Oh and I really appreciated not knowing if my computer was charging. What was great was the little whoop sound you used, so that the speaker before me could be informed I was charging my laptop.

~8yrs ago (Dec’12) I got a job @Google. Those were still early days of cloud. I joined GCP @<150M ARR & left @~4B (excld GSuite). Learned from some of the smartest ppl in tech. But we also got a LOT wrong that took yrs to fix. Much of it now public, but here’s my ring-side view👇

By 2008, Google had everything going for it w.r.t. Cloud and we should’ve been the market leaders, but we were either too early to market or too late. What did we do wrong? (1) bad timing (2) worse productization & (3) worst GTM.

We were 1st to “containers” (lxc) & container management (Borg) - since '03/04. But Docker took LXC, added cluster management, & launched 1st. Mesosphere launched DCOS. A lot of chairs were thrown around re: google losing this early battle, though K8 won the war, eventually 👏

We were 1st to “serverless” (AppEngine). GAE was our beachhead -- it was the biggest revenue source early on but the world wasn’t ready for serverless primitives. We also didn’t build auxiliary products fast enough. Clients that outgrew GAE wanted “building block” IaaS offerings.

1st to hadoop (map-reduce ‘04) but our hosted Hadoop launched in ‘15. AWS EMR was ~200M ARR by then. 1st to cloud storage (GFS ’03), but didn’t offer a filestore till ‘18! Customers were asking for it since 2014. Didn’t launch archival storage or direct interconnect till v. late.

For decades, Jeff Bezos shunned ads.

But now, Amazon’s ad business is huge: it’s on a $30B+ annual run rate (more than 2x the combined sales of Twitter, Snap and Pinterest).

Here’s how it happened 🧵

1/ Amazon doesn’t break out its ad business separately in financial filings. However, most analyst believe ads make up the majority of its “Other” revenue segment.

This figure has exploded from $1B in 2015 to a current annual run rate of ~$32B.

2/ In 2009, Bezos said “ads are the price you pay for a crappy product”.

But the business is so lucrative that Amazon’s interface has been swamped with ads:

◻️ First 3-7 search results (left in red)
◻️ Most of the product page (right in blue)

3/ Prior to the rise of ads, Amazon set out to build the ultimate organic customer recommendations engine.

The approach was codified in a famed 2003 research paper: “Amazon Recommendations: Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering.”

4/ In recent years, Amazon organic recommendations:

◻️"Customers who bought this also bought this"
◻️"Customers who viewed also viewed"

Have been replaced w/ ads:

◻️ "Sponsored products related to"
◻️ "Brands related to this category"

Incumbents almost always prevail with sustaining innovation

In disruptive circumstances, the entrants are likely to beat the incumbents

H/t Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Solution