I’m a big fan of digital challengers to old technopolies — I’ve moved everything I can from big telco to MVNOs, big bank to neobank, cable TV to Netflix and its ilk, from big taxi to ride hailing. But there are plenty of challenges. One of them is this, highlighted by Chris Skinner on his … Read more
(Post updated 2020-07-15 07:37 to include postscript on JK Rowling’s planning technique.) Computers and the software that runs them have long denied us the basic right of dictating to them — not letters and grocery lists, but of what they should actually do for us – most importantly in the first step of thinking: the … Read more
My former employers used (I’m stressing used here ) to like my tech stories because they had never heard about the stuff I wrote about before, which was considered good. But in later years as the editors were replaced by other, saner heads, and there were grumbles. Write about what’s happening now, not what’s going … Read more
By Jeremy Wagstaff We didn’t really notice it but the past week or so has seen the passing of an era. We are no longer in a world where Microsoft wants to peer through our Windows, as it were. As Ben Thompson noted in his Stratechery newsletter, the company’s recent Ignite Conference passed largely unnoticed … Read more
easyJet seem to be taking an interesting, if not pioneering, approach to disruptive tech. While fintech has mostly absorbed the wave of startups that went after the financial industry from about 2011, travel startups initially went after the middlemen, creating a host of algorithm-based disintermediators, and put a lot of travel agents out of business. … Read more