Edition 1

Jun 04, 2023

Welcome to my first weekly newsletter. Let’s hope you like it. All replies and comments are read by me and very welcome.

News

Big Triangular Planes?

JetZero put their blended wing passenger aircraft concept on display, a paradigm shift in plane design with a huge triangular floor-plan, allowing for radically improved fuel efficiency per passenger, boosted by the impressive but unhelpful line “we want to be the SpaceX of aviation,” which doesn’t bode well when SpaceX’s real success is moving on from catastrophic failure fast.

Commercial plane making is an interesting field, with Boeing, Airbus and even Embraer having order books filled for many years ahead and seeing little need to really innovate. China meanwhile is likely to invest massively to dominate the markets they can influence, with the first commercial flight of a large passenger jet made in China (sort of) this week, the C919.

At the same time we’ve been thrusting ambitious young companies like JetZero and Boom offering big promises, often without any real substance behind them. Almost anyone who knows about engines thinks Boom is at best a naïve dream, at worst a vaporware scam. And at some point we should talk about car makers moving into self flying vehicles.

Robots are not always the answer.

After burning through $450m of funding, mainly from Softbank, Robot Pizza-making company Zune shuts down. This always seemed like one of the world’s strangest (dumbest) ideas.

While claiming to use “predictive analytics and real-time food consumption data to predict customer demand, match it with production,” it turned out it was two ideas in one: a food van that came to you and really expensive, slow, human-aided robot (aka cobot) that made at best, rather unremarkable pizza. Alas, the company pivoted to award-winning packaging in 2020, apparently using the same robots to make pizza boxes, to no avail.

At some point it’s going to dawn on people that it shouldn’t be about the sophistication of a technology but the quality of the idea. We probably also need to be wary of founding teams’ experience. It’s likely harder to enter the food industry if you know tech, than if you know nothing about tech but everything about the industry. Sometimes tech people don’t know more, they just don’t know what they don’t know.

Do you want TV with that?

Verizon launched a new bundle of Netflix and Paramount+, with Showtime at a discount, which should obviously lead to me making smart points about: 1) how streaming is an unbundled and complex as ever, 2) how fascinating the industry is, and 3) how YouTube and TikTok and mobile consumption are the issue, not legacy TV makers. But I’m not going to talk about that.

Instead, I find the mobile operator landscape fascinatingly lacking in imagination and ambition.

After years of urging mobile carriers to focus on owning the customer interface and expanding their offerings, rather than operating as real estate companies that are collectively transfixed in a battle to be the cheapest dumb pipe, it's refreshing to see what they could become with the Plus homepage.

I’m also pleasantly surprised by legacy banks like Chase starting to wake up to how they can move to a service provider, in this case aiming to be the third largest travel provider.

AI will kill us through boring content.

I’m quite frankly more bored than ever by the way the AI conversation is advancing. Like all modern issues, it seems to be morphing into an entrenched extreme binary shouting match between one side thinking it will change everything faster than we ever imagined more than we could ever know, and others sayings it’s way more stupid than people think and we’ve seen it all before.

I find myself consistently in the middle thinking it’s profound, change will be slow, and we’ll need to rebuild companies and systems around it. It’s amazing at tasks, but companies are made of jobs. We probably need to change how we work around it, rather than using it to improve what we do already. I wrote about this for the World Economic Forum, see if you can guess when.

Pay to use something you own?

Ford faced a backlash this week when it quadrupled the price of BlueCruise technology from $200 to $800 a year, for something many people would be free on a $50,000 car.

BlueCruise it turns out isn’t an adult voyage but a vague form of self-driving cruise control where you can take your hands off the wheel and probably be OK, on some roads, for a bit. It now covers 130,000 of America’s 4,000,000 miles of road. Seeing the “coverage map” reminds me how phones and cars are following oddly similar paths. More on this another day.

In the same day I read about a person who’d hacked his toothbrush, which wasn’t interesting reading but it did show that Phillips are putting NFC chips into their own (expensive) brushes. Presumably this is to one day ensure people can’t use cheap ones.

There is a fascinating conversation ahead about how products and services are blurring. Hardware makers seem envious of software as a service companies who can make crazy high margins on code, and enjoy regular and predictable income. Why sell a Bike when you can sell a Bike plus an access plan? why sell a Watch if you can also sell a data plan?

Now some companies think it's reasonable to ask people to pay for something and then ask them to pay extra to continue to use, or get full use out of it.

Apple to announces AR headset.

I’m probably going to look stupid after writing this piece and saying the Apple launch won’t be what people expect. I still think this. Somehow I think the launch will be different in nature, showing off something to get developers working on apps, launching a developer toolkit, with simply demo units and nothing to buy.

I still struggle with any tech we look through. I still think people choose easier media and screens over better, more immersive ones.

Above all else, tech lives or dies ONLY on use cases. And all use cases look obvious in hindsight and impossible before. Few saw the iPhone and immediately envisaged Uber* or Venmo or Matterport or Dick picks. What will be the equivalent?

*I did try to invent something I called Digital Hitchhiking in 2003, but people said nobody ever wanted to pick up strangers.

Things I liked this week

Someone wrote this quite long piece, which slowly gets more boring, about how spreadsheets will change the world, in 1994.

Someone sent me this old piece which shows what we all know at heart, that Gartner hype cycles are nonsense.

I need to learn more about Synthetic fuels, seems like the next huge thing, or something open to greenwash style exploitation.

Maryland License Plates Now Advertise an Filipino Online Casino. Whoops! The tech world changes faster than the physical world.

Apple offers bank accounts and get 240,000 customers and $1bn in deposits in a single week, but it’s basically Goldman Sachs with Apple Branding. Banks are the new MVNO’s.

I love this person’s Twitter feed and the ideas they share, which are I think satire, but better than most real ones to get made.

This company offers the most Blackmirror style thing I’ve ever seen, 3D memories supplanted over where they happened. Can’t we just use photos? Signup and freakout.

What I’m doing

The next two weeks I’m recording a new digital transformation training program I’ve been developing. It’s coming out in September. I think it should be really good, but also helpful.

I’m speaking in Cannes as part of the Cannes Lions on June 21st. I’m not sure how open these events are to others, but let me know if you’d like to attend.

I’m consulting with a global Pharma company to help them in considering how to move from “drug discovery” to digital solutions.

All We Have Is Now is entering into a new and exciting phase of growth, so I’m bringing on new experts to help supply meet demand - especially in our consulting work. More to come soon!