Acquired

According to an episode of Acquired[0], none of Siri's original technology is present in Apple's current products. Siri originally licensed Nuance's (also an SRI spin-out company) voice recognition technology and built some pretty (comparatively) simple tech on top of it, never changing out the speech-to-text engine. All current players (Google, Amazon, etc) use neural nets, so Apple scooped up many Nuance employees to double down and compete[1]. Rosenthal and Gilbert agreed that Siri was a failure: "the only thing I use Siri for is setting alarms." I'd have to agree from personal experience. They chalked the failure up to the disadvantages of a UI where the full extent of the functionality is hidden and difficult to understand, leading to bad experiences. I imagine this technology will have many of the same struggles.

[0] http://www.acquired.fm/episodes/2015/12/14/episode-5-siri

[1] http://9to5mac.com/2014/06/30/why-is-apple-hiring-nuance-eng...

I don't have a direct answer, but the "Acquired" podcast did a two-part series on Nvidia in 2022Q1, it's a good/deep answer to why they are the way they are.

part 1: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-gpu-company-1993...

part 2: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-machine-learning...

In short, Jensen has an almost Elon-like appetite for "bet the company" tier risk. He's never been comfortable with a plateau, and is always looking for the next mountain to jump to, before the plate tectonics of the industry come around to form it.

There aren't a lot of CEOs and companies that oversee a company or industry-transforming shift more than once, he's definitely in that camp.

But that's a gross oversimplification, the story is more interesting. Check it out!

The SuperHuman webmail client claims to have a 100ms rule. https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/superhuman

It'd be nice to work for an org like that.

My entire career, any performance tweaking has had to be skunkworks, has never been rewarded.

At my very first tech dev job, my coworker and I speed up a novel workflow, as in brand new technology (think OCR for blueprints), about 4x faster. Made our new service practical. We were so thrilled. Boss man was unimpressed. "You should have thought of that before." I'm still angry about it. Clearly.

Ok. Wait. That's not entirely correct. A recent team did claim to have targets for P90, P99. So we measured. But it wasn't systematic, nor global. None of the other web services (teams) bothered, so our effort didn't actually matter. And even then my team wasn't willing to sacrifice our sacred cows to consistently attain the P90, P99 targets.

I know about it because I visited Nvidia several times in the nineties as I was a driver engineer implementing their chips on OEM cards.

I tried to find the information and the best I could find is this better than average discussion/podcast on the history of Nvidia.

They briefly touch on the chip emulation software that they felt they desperately needed to get back into the game after the NV1 was relegated.

The NV3 (Riva 128) was designed rapidly (six months) with the use of their what I called their super computer - a cluster of PCs or workstations most likely - running the proprietary chip emulation software. This advantage continued on further evolution of Nvidia hardware generations.

IIRC the chip emulation startup was started by a university friend of Jensen. The podcast says they failed later which is unfortunate.

https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nvidia-the-gpu-company-1993...

> Nintendo is extremely resistant to change and compromise

Are you sure? The company the brought us…

- Color TV-Game

- Game Boy

- Nintendo 64

- GameCube

- Nintendo DS

- Wii

- many, many others [0]

… is resistant to change? They have always been at the forefront of hardware innovation/experimentation, I'm sure they wouldn't be against it.

I'd suggest listening to the 2-part Acquired podcast episodes about Nintendo [1] if you haven't already.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_video_game_consoles

[1]: https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nintendo https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/nintendo-the-console-wars

I listen to quite a few podcasts, and I'm increasingly annoyed by ads being repeated word for word in each episode.

There are two podcasts that do things a bit differently, which I enjoy more:

* https://risky.biz/ has short-ish interviews with the sponsors that focus not only on the product, but often on the market, insights that the advertiser gained from analytics that their products gather etc.

* https://www.acquired.fm/ has 30s spots where they ask their advertiser one question, which gives the advertiser the option to show off some special knowledge in their area, but can also be interesting to the listener. And a different question each episode.

I'd love to get some metrics on how those approaches compare to the traditional 30s to 60s ad reads (in terms of conversion).