Apple’s talk about services got specific with a bunch of news subscription services. Most of them are sensible and worthy iteration, but the company still hasn’t explained exactly what it plans with its push into commissioning billions of dollars of premium TV (Spielberg! Oprah!). Maybe all of this is about trust: the old Apple promise was that you don't have to worry if the tech works, and the new promise is you don't have to worry if the tech is scamming you. 

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 still have to ask what Amazon actually gains from this. What do consumers do with these devices that helps Amazon? What fundamental strategic benefit does it get? Amazon has put an end-point into tens of millions of homes - what does it do with it?

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 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.

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 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.