Benedict Evans

Former a16z partner and now independent analyst, Benedict Evans [1]:

> Every year, I produce a big presentation digging into macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. This year, ‘The great Unbundling’.

This is a 134 slide presentation:

> Covid brought shock and a lot of broken habits to tech, but mostly, it accelerates everything that was already changing. 20 trillion dollars of retail, brands, TV and advertising is being overturned, and software is remaking everything from cars to pharma. Meanwhile, China has more smartphone users than Europe and the USA combined, and India is close behind - technology and innovation will be much more widely spread. For that and lots of other reasons, tech is becoming a regulated industry, but if we step over the slogans, what does that actually mean? Tech is entering its second 50 years.

[1] https://www.ben-evans.com/

May be instead of arguing Apple is normalising Surveillance, they are normalising Data collection where only Apple can connect Data and everyone else who want Data will have to ask and pay Apple. Likely in the future for Ads on Apple user and Apple taking a 30% cut. This is not some sort of joke I wouldn't be surprised if there are internal plan somewhere. Which would also turn Apple into possibly the largest Ads platform.

I was actually expecting Apple to be doing something like this in 2018 timeframe the moment they dip their toe into App Store Ads. But then the whole privacy thing blow up.

Probably worth linking to Benedict Evans blog post again.

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/5/13/apples-ads-music

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/8/27/understanding-privacy

If you've been in SV long enough, you've seen multiple hype cycles. AI is the latest one. It doesn't mean AI is a con, there's just a tendency to exaggerate and make hyperbolic claims to sell.

AI is primarily used to write text and code. Actually integrating it into workflows across markets will take time.

A great article that is neither overly pessimistic or optimistic is Benedict Evan's The AI Summer [1]. He argues that there's a lot of excitement with big corporates but their actual adoption is low so far.

"an LLM by itself is not a product - it’s a technology that can enable a tool or a feature, and it needs to be unbundled or rebundled into new framings, UX and tools to be become useful. That takes even more time"

[1] https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2024/7/9/the-ai-summer

I find all these pretty great:

- Persuasion (liberal democracy, free society): https://www.persuasion.community/

- Money Stuff (finance, also sort-of comedy?): https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levine

- Stratechery (tech companies and strategy): https://stratechery.com/

- Stay Tuned with Preet & Cafe Insider (law and politics): https://cafe.com/stay-tuned-podcast/

- The Morning Paper (CS papers): https://blog.acolyer.org/about/

- Slate Star Codex (rationality, currently in a weird state): https://slatestarcodex.com/

Some new ones I subscribed to, but haven't read a lot of:

- Sam Harris: https://samharris.org/

- Andrew Sullivan: https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/coming-soon

- Benedict Evans: https://www.ben-evans.com/

I'm pretty sure that Wittgenstein, while agreeing with your point about meaning being defined by use, would still argue that there's a lot of unspoken confusion that comes from calling the smartphone a smartphone.

The first thing I did when opening this thread was Ctrl+F to see if anyone was suggesting it should be called a "personal computer", because that's what I've thought best described what the smartphone really has become.

Now, to suggest even trying to use that to refer to smartphones these days would be adding a much heavier does of confusion. But the insight seems fundamentally right to me.

Interesting article on the subject that brings up this point: http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/11/7/mobile-ecosystems-and-the-death-of-pcs

Accounting profits are too easy to manipulate. Valuation experts prefer to look at cash flows.

Here's a precocious '09 writeup on AMZN from an analyst at Andreeson-Horowitz.[1] He points out how Amazon's re-investing CF's to finance capacity, warehouses, real estate, etc. This is instead of realizing accounting profits.

[1]http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/9/4/why-amazon-has-no-profits-and-why-it-works

edit: it's worth pointing out that AMZN could be one of the most profitable companies (accounting profits) at the flick of a switch if it diverted its CF's away from capex and internal investment. Its CF's have been enormous for quite some time.