ben-evans.com

One of the paradoxes of today's internet platforms is they are vastly automated, and have no human control or interaction over what any given person sees, and yet they are also totally dependent on human behavior, because what they’re really doing is observing, extracting and inferring things from what hundreds of millions or billions of people do. The genesis of this was PageRank

The electrification of the home was enabled by cheap DC motors, heating elements and so on, and the current wave of ‘smart home’ devices is enabled by cheap and low power cameras, wifi chips, microphones and so on (mostly coming out of the smartphone supply chain). Meanwhile, these machine learning components are also themselves components for smart home (ML makes the connected camera or the smart thermostat useful) and vice versa (a smart speaker is often just an end-point for a voice assistant). I tend to think about this in terms of Venn Diagrams - it would be good to use voice to tell the oven to preheat to 350 degrees, and it would be good if the smart door lock can talk to the burglar alarm without my having to say anything, but the door lock doesn’t need to connect to the oven. The battery optimisation uses ML, and Google’s night mode uses ML, but those are clearly completely different pieces of code and the user never needs to hear ‘AI’ when they use this.

We expected a TV event and got a subscription event - news & magazines, games, a credit card and Oprah. But mostly this feels like solid incremental execution: product managers doing product managementThe obvious view: these subscription services are about cutting churn and driving incremental revenue - $10-$20-$30 per user for hundreds of millions of iPhones, plus more reasons (especially the Card) Everyone expected the event to be about TV, but the day actually turned out to be about launching a bunch of new things, with a subscription magazine and news service, a subscription games service and a credit card all on stage, as well as finally previewing that long-anticipated TV service. All of these products tend to reduce churn - they make it more likely that your next phone is another iPhone (especially the credit card) and of course add incremental revenue to the service line (maybe up to $50/month per user if you add it all up, and some of Apple’s 800m iPhone users will do this).Brand is actually the important part

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. For Microsoft’s malware problem, however, this was not the long-term answer: instead the industry changed what security looked like by moving to SaaS and the cloud and then to fundamentally different operating system models (ChromeOS, iOS) that make the malware threat close to irrelevant. Microsoft would try to think much more systematically about avoiding creating vulnerabilities and about how ‘bad actors’ might use the tools it chose to create, to try to reduce the number opportunities for abuse At the same time, there was a boom in security software (first from third parties and then from Microsoft as well) that tried to scan for known bad software, and scan the behavior of software already on the computer for things that might signal it’s a previously unknown bad actor. An application can’t steal your data if it’s sandboxed and can’t read other applications’ data.