Om Malik

"Large companies are somewhat like me - once they get used to a certain behavior, they develop a certain culture and a set of procedures, processes and a work environment that defines them and their future. These define their corporate DNA. It is hard to change. You can't buy new DNA, and companies can't acquire their way into new corporate cultures. Furthermore, companies that lack that self-awareness of their DNA and behaviors, in the end, find themselves extinct.

The Corporate DNA

DNA contains the genetic instructions used to build out the cells that make up an organism. I have often argued that companies are very much like living organisms, comprised of the people who work there. What companies make, how they sell and how they invent are merely an outcome of the people who work there. They define the company."

source: https://om.co/2011/02/11/change-is-good-but-its-also-really-hard/

"You can't buy new DNA and companies can't acquire their way into new corporate cultures." - Om Malik

Is there any other way a company could acquire "new DNA"?

151 "virus" wn "WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006)"

virus

n 1: (virology) ultramicroscopic infectious agent that replicates itself only within cells of living hosts; many are pathogenic; a piece of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) wrapped in a thin coat of protein

diff -q googledna.2018 googledna.1998 || cat googledna.1998

"Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives

Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search…

It might help to expand your horizons a bit. I see a lot of dudes on there I easily spotted for having limited range from the start. The trouble is people like this float too far off the ground and never come down to catch up. They usually lose their touch long before they gain the limelight, but are able to cruise a bit.

The big tell: is "being a public intellectual" all they have? Do they have no experiences with the real world to temper flighty, assumption-based beliefs? Bad news. Even Zeno of Citium saw the world as a merchant while Stoicism was cooking in his head. You can't create or benefit from philosophy isolated from people who challenge your assumptions.

Here's some people to get you started:

On Malik (some interesting photography too): https://om.co/

Anil Dash (appreciates a good Prince pun): https://www.anildash.com/

Judith Butler, just about anything they put out in public.

bell hooks (deceased, but has a lot worth reading)

Adam Savage (lots of good life advice in Q&As): https://www.youtube.com/@tested

Wil Wheaton (yeah I know, but he hit a new gear once he got past alcohol and started really dealing with his childhood trauma): https://wilwheaton.net/

Michael Rosenbaum (played a solid Lex Luthor and now does great interviews): https://www.youtube.com/@InsideOfYouPodcast

Connor Trinneer and Dominic Keating (from Enterprise to interview show): https://www.youtube.com/@ShuttlepodShow/

25% of the top 1000 websites are blocking OpenAI from crawling: https://originality.ai/ai-bot-blocking

I am betting hundreds of thousands, rising to millions more little sites, will start blocking/gating this year. AI companies might license from big sources (you can see the blocking percentage went down), but they will be missing the long tail, where a lot of great novel training data lives. And then the big sites will realize the money they got was trivial as agents start to crush their businesses.

Bill Gross correctly calls this phase of AI shoplifting. I call it the Napster-of-Everything (because I am old). I am also betting that the courts won't buy the "fair use" interpretation of scraping, given the revenues AI companies generate. That means a potential stalling of new models until some mechanism is worked out to pay knowledge creators. (And maybe nothing we know of now will work for media: https://om.co/2024/12/21/dark-musings-on-media-ai/)

Oh, and yes, I love generative AI and would be willing to pay 100x to access it...

P.S. Hope is not a strategy, but hoping something like ProRata.ai and/or TollBits can help make this self-sustainable for everyone in the chain

I wonder if the author (Om Malik) has revised his thinking on a related matter:

http://om.co/2016/04/25/should-you-publish-on-facebook-first/

> My parting comment (which he included in the final piece) was that if I were to start a publication, it would be on Facebook (perhaps as a Facebook page). Today I learned that Vox Media is going to launch Circuit Breaker, a gadget blog, as a Facebook-only publication. (It will also have it as a section of The Verge on the web. I call this a web-based backup/archive.)

> Despite hand-wringing by traditonalists, I believe Vox’s decision is bold and the right one: In the post-browser-only world, it makes perfect sense to go where the audience lives. I am not clear how well it will monetize this effort. After all, Facebook is a selfish partner when it comes to monetization.

At least The Verge/Vox is savvy enough to manage a workflow that pushes to both Facebook and the Web...but I imagine prioritizing FB means doing much less A/B testing and other optimizations that are needed to create a refined Web product.

I paused to read whenever a new Om’s essay popped up in the RSS feed; for me, Om was an uniquely observant voice of tech, who never compromised and always looked at the world from a human perspective.

This has been one of my favorite ones, reminding us to simply remain human in the face of incentive systems pushing us away from that goal: https://om.co/2026/04/08/banksy-satoshi-the-unmasking-impulse/

Om was attentive to details and generous to share - when he discovered my weather app (https://x.com/om/status/1579948290745176064), he was so kind as to write a whole article about it, without me asking for it in any way: https://om.co/2022/10/11/weathergraph/

I was so proud to be able to send Om a lifetime license.
I wish he had gotten several more decades of use out of it.

Thank you, Om!

A week ago we discussed Om Malik's article "Camera sales are falling sharply". I am one of those people who now does not upgrade his camera, nor use it any more, as much as I like it. I use my smartphone, albeit with some aftermarket Moment wide- and fish-eye lenses on it.

This phone makes total sense to me. The money I used to spend on cameras and lenses will be captured by the smartphone companies.

https://om.co/2019/09/03/camera-sales-are-falling-sharply/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20875544