Horace Dediu on the potential to disrupt the automotive industry:

Executives at car companies have suddenly had to answer questions about potential entrants into their business. This is a big change. I don’t recall a time when this was necessary for over 30 years. For decades the questions have been about labor relations, health care costs, regulation, recalls and competition from other car makers. To ask questions about facing challengers posing existential questions must seem terribly impertinent.

For this reason, Bob Lutz, in his dismissal of Apple’s entry is not alone. The industry, with a century of history and has seen little disruption in the classic sense. I wrote a long piece on the fundamentals of the industry titled “The Entrant’s Guide to the Automobile Industry” which explained why this industry has been so resistant to disruptive change. At best a massive effort over multiple decades usually leads in a small shift in market share.

However, one should read that post as a thinly veiled threat. Just because disruption seems hard does not mean it isn’t possible. Indeed, the better you understand the industry the more easily you can observe its vulnerability and the more rigid the industry seems the more vulnerable it may be to dramatic change.

The formula for successful entry is the same for all industries: compete asymmetrically. This means introduce products which change the basis of competition and deter competitive responses by making your goals dissimilar from those of the incumbents. This is classic “ju-jitsu” of disruptive competition.

Here’s how it would work.

Apple has succeeded in disrupting:

• the music industry
• the (smart)phone industry
• the PC (and post-PC) industry

And while the Apple Watch is still very young they’re beginning to chip away at the watch industry.

Why would anyone think it’s not possible they eat up the automotive industry too?

Apple’s success in any new industry is far from guaranteed but to count them out seems extremely short-sighted.

News today from Kickstarter:

Benefit Corporations are for-profit companies that are obligated to consider the impact of their decisions on society, not only shareholders. Radically, positive impact on society becomes part of a Benefit Corporation’s legally defined goals. When a company becomes a Benefit Corporation, it can choose to make further commitments. In our new charter (shown below) we spell out our mission, our values, and the commitments we have made to pursue them.

Pretty cool.

Gizmodo: Physicists Discover “Hidden Chaos” Lurking Everywhere:

It appears that the standard tools used to identify chaotic signatures might be missing lots of hidden chaos — especially in systems that seem like they’re not chaotic at all.

Chaos theory is famously associated with so-called “strange attractors,” marked by a telltale butterfly-wing shape (see above). But according to a new paper by two University of Maryland mathematicians, sometimes chaos looks more like “a strange repeller,” or something else entirely.

I’ve been saying this forever.

Vlad Savov on Apple, Google, and Microsoft all solving the same problems:

Consider all the overlaps that have developed in recent times between the strategies of America’s three foremost tech corporations. Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are getting into the connected car business that Microsoft has been in for years, while the latter’s Cortana personal assistant echoes the voice-activated Google Now and Siri software of its competitors. Where Apple has Continuity to keep people working across various devices, Microsoft has Continuum, and Google has the universality of the Chrome browser and its range of web apps. Besides the connected car and the connected you, all three are also connecting the TV — through AirPlay, Chromecast, and the Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter — and developing app and gaming platforms such as the Xbox One, Android consoles, and the new Apple TV.

Savov is right, but what’s the alternative? Not built a product or service your competitor has and risk ceding ground to them now or in the future?

It seems better for the three top dogs to build redundant solutions to the same problems than not build them.

Dave Pell on Trump:

Even if you find him contemptible, Trump is doing what no presidential candidate has ever dared to do. He’s being himself. While it’s undeniable that Himself is a total dick, at least he’s presenting the same himself in presidential debates as he does in business and entertainment.

I hate Trump’s politics. And I hate most things he says. But I love that he’s saying it, and even how he’s saying it. He is doing to our absurd political races and the equally absurd way we cover them exactly what needs to be done.

He is making a complete mockery of the complete mockery.

Trump acts like a bratty teenager: He makes fun of peoples’ looks and tweets whatever is in his head, sans filter. This is why I feel like Trump is going to get bored running for president. A mind as petty and immature as his can hold interest in one thing for so long before he moves on to his next thing.

There was a slim chance that Windows Phone might have been able to overcome all this and establish itself in 2011, when Nokia’s partnership was announced. There was no chance at all by the time Microsoft bought Nokia in 2013. and so the write-down of that acquisition now comes as a matter of regret but not surprise. Windows Phone has failed to achieve enough scale to be attractive to developers: it is a third choice, or perhaps even fourth, after the greater appeal of just doing another iOS or Android project. There are fewer apps, and those that are there are later and have fewer features than those on iOS or Android. Consumers notice. Some people love their Windows Phones, but not nearly enough.

—Benedict Evans, Microsoft, Capitulation and The End of Windows Everywhere

Now you can take a month-long class on making animated GIFs.

The future is now, or something.

via Quipsologies

Website vintage everyday reposted NME’s list of 14 Old School Sacred Movies That Should Never be Rebooted.

Included in the list are some of my favorite movies: Goodfellas, The Godfather and Annie Hall. Saying you can never remake these is bullshit.

It’s like saying you can never cover a song by Led Zeppelin or The Beatles. You can do it, but there’s a good chance you’re going to fall short of the original. It’s great when an artist gives the world a whole new perspective on something we’re very familiar with.

My problem with Hollywood isn’t the reboots per say, but the laziness of the reboots. The goal of the Hollywood machine isn’t to offer a fresh perspective and reinterpretation of an existing piece of art but simply to make a new copy. Maximum profit with minimal effort.

Jacob Kastrenakes on the “reviews” of Apple’s ‘Move to iOS’ app for Android in the Google Play Store:

“I call on my fellow Android comrades to ensure this app gets drowned into oblivion with a 1-star rating never to be seen again on our cherished platform,” writes reviewer Segun Omojokun. And that’s basically what’s happening. The app primarily has 5-star and 1-star reviews right now, with the vast majority being the latter. There are currently a little over 800 reviews with a 5 star rating and over 3,300 reviews with a 1-star rating. The app’s overall rating currently sits at a 1.8.

We always hear about Apple fanbois, but shit, there are a lot of Android turds out there.

Horace Dediu on what Apple really sells:

The result is that the valuation of a consumer electronics vendor is based on the momentum of individual products. Apple has always been valued this way. Each hit product is considered to be a stroke of luck/genius and the chances of recurring are discounted to about zero. Regardless of the fact that it has a track record of “home runs”, Apple’s hit rate is not considered sustainable.1. Certainly Apple is not valued as being able to generate reliably recurring revenues.

But what if we were to value Apple on the basis of what people are buying rather than what it’s thought to be selling?

The model is simple enough: determine the number of users, estimate the lifespan of the products, the services attached to the products and given the price, obtain a price per product per day. You then can get a recurring revenue figure.

I did just that and the results are in the following table:

Just when I think we’ve hit “Peak Apple Naysayer” a whole new season of haters crops up, and Apple breaks its previous records.

Nick Fulton on people with phones out at concerts:

Sadly, memory-making as visual bootlegging is now wholly a part of the live music experience and it has been since the advent of smartphones. Watching people not watch, or watch through their screens, or simply hit record and clumsily loft the phone above them—what’s the purpose? To remember for all time? To share the experience? What friend is going to be impressed or even have the patience to watch a barely focused video shot from hundreds of feet away, the audio blown out, the shouted-along chorus of the superfan in seat 78JJ muting the band itself?

It’s time we stopped being so tolerant of these serial snappists.

Sometimes I take my phone out at concerts, but I try to be as quick about it as possible. In general, though, I try to keep my shit in my pocket.

If performers want people to not use phones, they need to tell them because people are idiots and need to be told what to do.

—Henry Miller

M.G. on Trump:

What fascinates me about Donald Trump is the psychology behind his presidential run. I’m not even sure he knows what he’s doing or tapping into, but I have to believe someone working with him does. Because there are some flashes of brilliance here. Again, not in message, but in execution.

We live in a United States that could not be less interesting, politically. In all likelihood, we’re about to see a Bush square off against a Clinton for their respective family’s right to be President for a third or second time, respectively. Think about that for a minute. It’s insane. Are we really to believe that the two best people to run this country happen to be directly related to those who ran it recently? What a coincidence! Again, insane.

Yes, insane.

—James Gleick