The great thing about a monopoly is that a company can do anything, because there is no competition; the bad thing is that when the monopoly is finished the company is still capable of doing anything at a mediocre level, but nothing at a high one because it has become fat and lazy. To put it another way, for a former monopoly “big” is the only truly differentiated asset ..read more

I don’t think the developers are wrong, but even if they are wrong, it’s not good for Apple that they’re so unhappy, and feel so aggrieved. It’s not good for Apple that developers don’t see the App Store as a platform that works in their interests. Like the Apple logo, “developer goodwill” has no price tag. becomes much more black-and-white. Yes, Apple created the iPhone and the App Store and, under current U.S. antitrust doctrine, almost certainly has the right to impose whatever taxes it wishes on third parties, including 30% on purchases and the first year of subscriptions, and completely c ..read more

And because these NIMs have been packaged up and ready to work on your system, so long as you have Nvidia GPUs in your datacenter or in the cloud, these NIMs will work together as a team and do amazing things. , though, is that there is a rhyme and reason to this volume ..read more

I’ve already mentioned Bing Chat and ChatGPT; on March 14 Anthropic released another AI assistant named Claude: while the announcement doesn’t say so explicitly, I assume the name is in honor of the aforementioned Claude Shannon. This is certainly a noble sentiment — Shannon’s contributions to information theory broadly extend far beyond what Dixon laid out above — but it also feels misplaced: while technically speaking everything an AI assistant is doing is ultimately composed of 1s and 0s, the manner in which they operate is emergent from their training, not proscribed, which leads to the ex ..read more

When we examine culture and leadership closely, we see that they are two sides of the same coin; neither can really be understood by itself. On the one hand, cultural norms define how a given nation or organizations will define leadership — who will get promoted, who will get the attention of followers. On the other hand, it can be argued that the only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture; that the unique talent of leaders is their ability to understand and work with culture; and that it is an ultimate act of leadership to destroy culture when it is viewed a ..read more

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame. My one small comfort in the cold Wisconsin winters, walking up and down Bascom Hill in the snow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was listening to music on my Diamond Rio. That Rio served me well all through college; Apple shipped the first iPod my senior year, but it was Mac only, and besides, my Rio was good enough. Sure, I could only fit 20 songs or so (of course I bought the proprietary expansion memory card), but if I wanted more I could just sync with my computer. I certainly wasn’t going to pay $2,000 or whatever it cost to get a Mac and ..read more

And yet, Apple’s most potent response to ecosystem intransigence may be to double down: Disney with a war chest (via an Apple partnership) would be a far more formidable competitor to Netflix, and ESPN with a VR camera at every game it televises would, in my estimation, make the Vision Pro an essential purchase for every sports fan. I once argued that the latest prediction from Apple supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo the last time the two companies were at odds, but the weakness in that argument is that simply having money another company needs isn’t a compelling enough case; when it comes to ..read more

Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist who led the charge in surfacing evidence of plagiarism against now-former President of Harvard University Claudine Gay, was born in 1984; he joined X in 2015. Harvard, meanwhile, is the oldest university in the United States — older the United States, in fact — having been founded in 1636. That mismatch is perhaps the most striking aspect of the Gay episode: a millenial on Twitter took down our most august institution’s president by employing the 4th of Saul Alinsky’s : “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” In this case the book of rules ..read more

I am so grateful to the subscribers that make it possible for me to do this as a job. I wish all of you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, and I’m looking forward to a great 2024! | Eric Seufert on digital advertising in | Deel founder and CEO | Ringer founder and CEO | Vercel founder and CEO | Michael Nathanson on Hollywood and streaming in | Anduril founder and CEO | Gregory C. Allen about the China and Chips in on the airline industry | about streaming and the metaverse | about Chip War | about social media ..read more

The full Stratechery posting schedule is will be on Monday, January 8, the next episode of will be on Tuesday, January 9. will also return the week of January 8 ..read more