Rahul GaitondeA look at how Western tech companies customise their products for the Indian customer. Includes, among others, a battery-powered Echo speaker by Amazon, a USD 3 mobile-only subscription to Netflix, and Google Assistant made available via a toll free mobile number.
From this Wired article profile of the service:
It does not plaster itself with advertising, intrude on privacy, or provide a breeding ground for neo-Nazi trolling. Like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, it broadcasts user-generated content. Unlike them, it makes its product de-personified, collaborative, and for the general good. More than an encyclopedia, Wikipedia has become a community, a library, a constitution, an experiment, a political manifesto—the closest thing there is to an online public square. It is one of the few remaining places that retains the faintly utopian glow of the early World Wide Web. A free encyclopedia encompassing the whole of human knowledge, written almost entirely by unpaid volunteers: Can you believe that was the one that worked?
– Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet
It’s not just a question of aggressive moderation. Reddit, for instance, has communities that have used moderation to keep discussions clean but at the cost of neutrality. For instance the subreddit Last Stage Capitalism makes it clear and enforces that it is for communists and is limited to anti-capitalist discussions only.
Wikipedia is unique in that it has pages for all parts of content including highly divisive topics, for instance the Kashmir Conflict, without the page itself devolving into chaos (even though the discussion view behind the scenes is divisive).
Some time earlier we talked about how Google search results are now dominated by shallow mass-produced commoditised made-for-clicks content, that the lack of discoverability of truly relevant information in the ‘long tail’ was going to be a problem in the years to come.
Today I read a tweet that mirrored accurately how I myself search, in a bid to find content real humans with actual opinions have written:
The irony is that truly human content is now found on centralised hosted communities like reddit, not on the open web where you’d expect it to.
From this What I Use interview:
My ideal setup would be one where I rely a lot less on screens, and a lot more on natural interactions with the physical environment, and perhaps voice. Humans aren’t built for sitting down all day and staring at a dumb bright rectangle, and our big spatial brains, with our bodies designed to precisely navigate 3D space, are wasted on this tiny flat world we have created for ourselves.
– Rupert Parry.
I wonder if some of the first VR computing environments will mimic, even if for fun, old 1980s office environments with actual filing cabinets you walk up to and pull files from – except that these files can be from anywhere in the world. A drawer is a search results page.
This article on Forbes delivers a call for a decentralised web where people have control over their own data and run their own applications such as email. This is in contrast to dependence on the Big Few companies that have come to dominate several layers of the modern internet: Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba.
Over the last few days I moved my domain, my hosting and my WordPress installation from one host to another. The web hosting and configuration experience has not changed substantially in the last 18 years I have hosted my own domain and blog. It required a substantial amount of technical know-how even though it did not involve email (which runs separately on GSuite) and calendars/contacts/documents, which all live on iCloud. If I had self-hosted all of that, it would have been an even more arduous and technically challenging effort.
I have long thought that web hosts have a huge opportunity to make it really easy for people to privately host not just their site but also their data and personal applications.
All of these exist: Nextcloud for contacts, calendars, documents. Open-source XMPP servers for chat. Photo gallery applications. Personal wikis and note apps. Your web host already offers email; use the beautiful Rainloop for webmail. SpamAssassin or Mailcleaner for self-hosted spam filtering. Mattermost for Slack-like close-group messaging, just run our own IRC server – there are well-designed IRC mobile apps. WordPress for blogging and even micro-blogging.
Web hosts could take it further and offer hosted VPNs and DNS-based ad-blockers like Pi-hole as hosted services.
Services like Softaculous, built into self-hosted control panels like CPanel, are a great easy way to install these pieces of software, but cPanel itself needs to become much simpler.
It’s hard to overstate how much the relationship between today’s internet giants and ordinary people like you and me will change if decentralised identity, self-hosted applications and self-owned data become a reality. That alternate world though is becoming harder every passing year to even imagine, leave alone bring about.
From this WSJ article reprinted in the Mint, more on solar power in India: as a result of better tech and falling Chinese solar panel prices, India has become the only country in the world where the cost of solar power generation is lower than fossil fuel alternatives “even with subsidies removed and the cost of construction and financing figured in”. 14% below coal, in fact. According to the article the cost of solar capacity building dropped 84% in 8 years.
But as in many, many cases, the state threatens to derail the whole industry:
…companies have been hit by payment delays from India’s struggling power distributors, mainly state-owned companies that buy electricity from producers and sell it to households. India’s Central Electricity Authority estimated that as of Nov. 30, renewable-energy companies were owed some $1.3 billion in overdue bills…
Some Indian state agencies, hoping solar prices fall lower, have canceled solar auctions when they thought developers were offering to sell power at too high a price.
By early 2019, many developers were starting to pass on solar auctions, threatening the country’s aggressive development timetable. Many developers and analysts now say India is likely to fall behind in achieving its renewable-energy goals.
An environment where contracts can be unilaterally renegotiated and payments can be stopped is not conducive to business.
My website host of over fifteen years went out of business, leaving my account ‘suspended’ without notice. While they said they sent two notices, I have spent over a decade complaining that I do not receive notifications from them. Essentially, all my work from 2002 was taken down. Anyway. Their support team brought my hosting up for for 48 hours to move to a new host.
Except that during this period I was on a holiday with only my iPad. It held up splendidly for all sorts of maintenance actions, proving it’s a computer in every sense of the term. Migrating to a new host involved a terminal, FTP, downloading and uploading files, zipping and unzipping them locally and remotely. Finally, a web-based chat session to fix some final issues. The iPad handled all of this without any issues. In many ways, especially the endless logging in and out using FaceID and Keychain, and with battery life, it was faster than a Mac.
PS the only drawback is the complicated multi-tasking behaviour. There needs to be a faster way to view and switch between arbitrary open app windows, and neither Cmd-Tab nor the slow-drag-up gesture to reveal open windows is up to the task.
The wheel was developed awfully recently in human civilisation, given how critical it has proven to be since. Modern homo sapiens is about 130,000 years old, yet humans only invented the wheel in the Bronze Age, 5,500 years ago. That means 96% of human existence has been without the wheel.
It seems the wheel was so late in being invented because it was only useful in the context of a wheel and axle system, which while conceptually simple, is hard to get right:
To make a fixed axle with revolving wheels, Anthony explained, the ends of the axle had to be nearly perfectly smooth and round, as did the holes in the center of the wheels; otherwise, there would be too much friction for the wheels to turn. Furthermore, the axles had to fit snugly inside the wheels’ holes, but not too snugly — they had to be free to rotate.
And
The success of the whole structure was extremely sensitive to the size of the axle. While a narrow one would reduce the amount of friction, it would also be too weak to support a load. Meanwhile, a thick axle would hugely increase the amount of friction.
Interesting opinion piece by the VC firm Andreessen-Horowitz about how AI-heavy businesses resemble both SaaS and more traditional services businesses, and how founders of such companies should plan for potentially lower margins, more custom work for customers, and poorer defensibility.
In a nutshell, the article argues that
– Running AI software requires a lot more compute power and human oversight than traditional software, reducing margins
– Customer problems are diverse and data sets are very different even for similar businesses, so there are a lot of ‘edge cases’, sometimes as much as 40-50% of total cases
– AI models, however expensive they are to run, are becoming commoditized, bringing down barriers. There are also fewer – or no – network effects.
Regardless of how challenging it is, AI is making it possible to solve many new types of problems including those involving analysing and generating media – images, audio across all sorts of domains including health and medicine. I’m looking forward to this over the next decade.
This article on companies that are ‘feature factories’. I experienced a sense of discomfort reading the ‘signs’ the writer lists, having been guilty of some of them myself when I ran product management earlier, and then at other companies since. Examples:
No measurement. Teams do not measure the impact of their work. Or, if measurement happens, it is done in isolation by the product management team and selectively shared. You have no idea if your work worked…
No removed features. Primary measure of success is delivered features, not delivered outcomes. Work is rarely discarded in light of data and learning.
Prioritization rigor is designed exclusively to temper internal agendas so that people “feel confident”.
Roadmaps show a list of features, not areas of focus and/or outcomes…
Once work is shipped, team has little contact with support, customer success, and sales.
100% worth a read if you’re a business owner or a founder.