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.
Read MoreWe 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 useful, though, to put some real numbers on that, and to get a sense of use how much the scale has changed, and what that means.
Read MoreWhat 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 indefinitely? And for what layers in the stack does victory give power in other layers?
Read MoreEarlier 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 function extremely well, producing a stream of great work. The interesting thing is that the management structures that they've used to achieve that are actually very different.
Read MorePeople 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. Music and books don’t matter much to tech anymore, and TV probably won’t matter much either.
Read MoreIt'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.
Read MoreHow do we get beyond 'that's a toy!' and 'but everything looked like a toy!', and try actually to understand whether a new technology might matter? What are valid lines of reasoning, and what statements are 'not even wrong'?
Read MoreLooking forward 10 years, there are three primary technology that will change everything - cars, augmented reality and machine learning. But in the meantime, there ere huge changes around advertising, TV and retail that come from consumer behavior and industry dynamics, not tech, but will change just as much.
Read MoreIf augmented reality is the next multitouch - the next universal platform - what would that look like? What might we build?
Read MoreElectric and autonomy are rolling through the car industry, changing everything about it. But though they transform gasoline and car accidents, they could change a lot more besides - everything from cigarettes to parking. It's the second-order consequences that are hardest to see, but most interesting.
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