Posts tagged “tech industry”

My bet for 2026: companies chasing margins and hitting diminishing returns on frontier models will shift to fine-tuning small, domain-specific models. Fine-tuning is getting cheaper, open-weights models are catching up to frontier ones, and differentiation through your own data beats competing on prompt engineering alone.

AI won't kill programming jobs or leave them untouched. It's a new abstraction layer, like every one before it, that will create vastly more developers building vastly more software. Existing programmers keep their jobs; a long tail of cheaper new roles unlocks demand we couldn't previously afford to meet.

Google, Yahoo, and Facebook all released diversity reports using identical categories, making comparison easy. The gender gap is worst in engineering (averaging only 16% women). Racial diversity is also poor, though Yahoo's engineering staff is surprisingly majority Asian. Solid data confirming what we already knew.

Brendan Eich was wrong to donate to Prop 8, Mozilla's board was wrong to appoint him CEO, and the resulting mob rule was fine by me. We're still losing the broader culture war, so I'll take any wins I can get. Our freedom to be ourselves matters more than your comfort with that.

Integrating a bad product into a good one doesn't make the bad product good, it just ruins the good one. Microsoft, Yahoo, RealNetworks, and Apple all learned this. If Google bakes Google+ notifications into Chrome instead of fixing the actual product, users will just abandon Chrome.

The web industry hoards data like a magpie, but almost nobody knows how to make it mean anything. If you want job security for the next decade, learn statistics. We're paddling in the shallows while the ocean gets deeper every day.

Immigration is an economic force that moves labor from high supply to low demand areas, creating global prosperity. The fear that immigrants will cut your salary by 5% ignores the far greater gains from immigration-fueled growth. America's restrictive policies are self-defeating, economically and morally.

Microsoft.com renders poorly in every browser, including their own. After years and hundreds of millions in losses, Microsoft still doesn't get the web. They're a software company, not a web company. That's okay. Stick to operating systems, admit defeat on MSN/Live, and stop pretending otherwise.

2008 was dominated by Obama's election and the fight against Prop 8, with some tech commentary on Chrome, Android, Twitter, and the future of the web mixed in. Also: the global financial system collapsed, Sarah Palin imploded, and HTTP conversation codes became a surprise hit.

I'm bullish on iPhone and skeptical that Android will ever surpass it in market share. Apple's closed, integrated approach is a feature, not a bug, especially in resource-constrained mobile hardware. Android's openness means overhead, inconsistency, and fragmentation. Geeks will love it; consumers won't care.

Google Knol gives its own content unfair PageRank advantages over competitors, which is an abuse of monopoly power. Google has crossed the line from organizing the world's information to stealing traffic from better sources and monetizing the theft. This is evil, plain and simple.

Twitter's real competition isn't Friendfeed or Pownce. It's nobody, because nobody else does what Twitter actually does: SMS and XMPP. Twitter isn't a web service, it's a global mobile communications platform accessible to literally every person with a phone. That's not a niche. That's everything.

Fake Steve Jobs eviscerates a CNET columnist for lazy Dell analysis. Hilarious and mostly right, though CNET isn't doomed so much as permanently mediocre. Hard to blame their journalistic standards when they never really had any.

Dvorak's analogy is priceless: Microsoft could buy GM and Ford, name every car "Google Sucks," and still have $14 billion left over for a party. He's right. Yahoo isn't worth $44 billion.

Microsoft walked away from acquiring Yahoo, but it may not be over. Ballmer looks weak, Yahoo comes out bruised but okay, and Google is the real winner here, having watched its two biggest rivals spend months in chaos. Oh, and I'm relieved.

Working at Yahoo! and hearing Microsoft wants to buy us feels like waking up to an invasion. Microsoft may be capable, but their DNA is fundamentally at odds with the open, interconnected web culture Yahoo! embodies. I hope this deal falls apart, but I fear it won't.

Facebook's finances have been leaked and they're ugly: a projected $150m net loss in 2008, with revenue needing to double to $300m just to get there. That makes Microsoft's $15bn valuation look like 300x profit. Good luck selling ads in a recession.

Neither company will "win." Google and Yahoo are like Toyota and Honda, doing essentially the same thing with the same fundamentals. Google executes better on ads right now, but the market values us equally. Competition makes both better. That's good for everyone.

Microsoft's $240M Facebook investment isn't about what Facebook is worth. It's a blocking move, just like Google's AOL and MySpace deals. Microsoft didn't care about the stake percentage; they just wanted to keep Google and Yahoo out. Zuckerberg set the $15B valuation himself. Don't get excited.

I'm tracking bubble chatter: The Register says bubble, BusinessWeek says "frothy" with an "inevitable correction" while avoiding the b-word. Splitting hairs. A smaller bubble is still a bubble.

We're in Bubble 2.0. The signs are obvious: insane acquisition prices, startups with no business models getting VC, and Facebook thinking it's the new Google. One rule-breaking startup per year makes real money. Everyone else burns cash. I lived through the last crash, but this time I'm on the inside. Here we go again.

Microsoft's $6B acquisition of aQuantive is a desperate play to compete in the online ad space frenzy. I don't see it working. At best it keeps them treading water, at worst they end up an irrelevant OS supplier in a world that's moved on to server-side apps.

Dice's fake "rant room" campaign is a perfect example of how not to do user-generated content. Real IT workers wouldn't post their faces online trashing their employers, and they'd know better than to use some obscure video site instead of YouTube.

Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, inventors of the world's most obnoxious advertising, officially ends the "Don't Be Evil" era. It's sad to watch one of capitalism's rare ethical giants finally go the way of all the others. Goodbye, non-evil Google. It was nice knowing you.

The iPhone blew my mind. It's OS X in a phone, with multi-touch, wireless internet, camera, and widescreen iPod built in. It's going to crush Motorola, Samsung, and SonyEricsson, and possibly Blackberry too. Nokia is the only real contender. 2007 just got very interesting for mobile.

After being made redundant, I somehow ended up with four job offers from Yahoo's US office. I'm joining Yahoo! Widgets in San Francisco, leaving London and my beloved friends behind. It's a huge step, but I left Trinidad once and survived. Onwards and upwards.

Yahoo handles eBay's US ads; Google handles everywhere else. Also, I chewed on the right side of my mouth today. Big day all around.

Celebrating Mikey's new law job and two consecutive 6pm finishes after a month of crunch. We just launched Yahoo! Tones in the UK and Germany. Also: dentist tomorrow for the first stage of my bionic molar.

First day at Yahoo wasn't bad. The scale is staggering: patch PHP, build Apache modules, get machines just by asking. The resources make you feel like anything is possible. Also, find me on Yahoo Messenger.

Google's IPO is filed, jobs are back, and it smells like 2000. My brother just started a sports blog too. The boom is back, baby.

Vacation countdown to Trinidad sunshine, plus links: Hitler vs. Bob the Angry Flower, global dimming, gay romance comics, the gorgeous Sky Captain trailer, cheap web hosting, and IT graduates still royally screwed.

SCO is picking a fight it can't win by threatening IBM's AIX license. But the real issue is bigger: overzealous copyright and patent claims are strangling innovation. Copyrighting UNIX now is like copyrighting "car" in 1950. The system is broken, and it's killing the internet.

Good day so far: finished French homework, stayed awake through the lecture, and discovered that SQL Server developers may owe massive patent royalties to a company called Timeline because Microsoft botched their licensing deal. Time to switch to MySQL or PostgreSQL. Also, Libya chairing the UN Human Rights Commission? Totally nuts.

Microsoft's monopoly conviction is long overdue. The real crime isn't dominance itself, but using OS control to flood unrelated markets with inferior products. My prescription: restrict their expansion into media and content, open the Windows source code, and impose serious regulatory oversight.

Ralph Nader wrote a great letter roasting the DOJ's pathetic Microsoft settlement, which actually protects Microsoft from open-source competition. Also: Internet2 and Geant are doing amazing things with bandwidth. And there's a girl on the BBC who really should be a lesbian.

Adobe's press release quotes a fake customer praising their new product, but forgot to give the customer a name, leaving it as "Customer TBD." Classic.

The first DMCA arrest just happened: a guy exposed a flaw in Adobe's security and got arrested for it. Improve your security, don't criminalize people who point out weaknesses. If Microsoft follows Adobe's lead, I'm in serious trouble.

Microsoft's Windows XP locks out Kodak by defaulting to its own photo software and paid partner services, even when Kodak is installed. Looks like the same old monopoly muscle being flexed to crush competition. Hello, Judge? Anyone?

Microsoft's new three-year licensing plan means you no longer own Office. I hate Microsoft. On the bright side, FreeSQL wants to use FreeNet as a SQL storage backend, which is stunning. Maybe I can port this blog there to escape Bill Gates's wrath.

Ed's stick-man kung fu is hilarious. More seriously, the looming AOL vs. Microsoft war is terrifying because one of them will win, and both are evil. I'm done giving either my money. Time to switch to Linux before I end up a slave to Bill Gates or AOL.

The Economist profiles Cambridge's tech scene but seems baffled that companies there prioritize good products and lifestyle over IPOs. I find that attitude odd. Maybe not every tech hub needs to clone Silicon Valley, and maybe that's fine.

A management coup has been attempted at BrainSpark, incubator for my former dot-com employer EasyArt, by the former COO who was once my direct boss. Dot-coms are endlessly entertaining. I almost miss the silly money.