The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 309 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Nazarov: The tech industry overrates top-down innovation due to survivorship bias
“On the top-down approach, I think we give too much weight to the beauty of top-down. You know, we only see it when it works, that there's the genius iPod product, there's the genius iPhone product, but, you know, how many, what, how many hundreds of products d…”
Arthur: Traditional CEOs like John Sculley struggle with tech market dynamics
“The basic game in tech is not the same as the basic game in standard production, and every once in a while you see somebody taken from the standard production side of the economy, some CEO brought into a tech firm, and they don't quite get it. The classic case…”
Shankar: No major tech player will release consumer AR headsets before 2019
“Not to mention the consumer versions of these devices, whether Apple, Magic Leap, Hollins, none of the major AR players are releasing anything really until 2019 in terms of a consumer usable headset.”
Evans: Tech companies pursue voice platforms due to smartphone platform envy
“The second thing is that anyone who isn't Apple or Google has major platform envy, and they want to find a way of going around that, not being, worrying about Apple or Google cutting them off at the platform level on the smartphone.”
Sinofsky: Apple drives innovation by boldly cutting legacy ports from laptops
“You can actually be different, and this is something, of course, that Apple tends to do better than anyone, which is be minimal about things. Like, you know, if you're making a Windows laptop, it's, like, cool to continue to have all the legacy plugs and all o…”
Evans: Face ID from Google or Facebook would have triggered privacy backlash
“If Google or Facebook had announced that, we'd be having a different, completely different conversation.”
Sinofsky: Apple reuses 80% of its tech platform for new product categories
“And what Apple is able to do is the bet that they've made is that we have a platform that's made up of a set of APIs, a Unix operating system kernel, these ARM chips that have all of these sensors and capabilities. And it turns out the thing that they do uniqu…”
Evans: One tech giant's core strategy is another's supporting tactic
“Generally the stuff that you know, any of the stuff that's a strategy for one company is tactics for other companies. So, you know, Apple's strategy is to have an operating system, and for Apple, Google, that's just a tactic. Google's strategy is to do search.…”
Chen: Apple will spend unlimited money defending platform complements like Xcode
“So if you think, hey, I'm going to create a better development tool, I'm going to create a better Xcode, like, think again, because Apple is going to spend as much money as it needs to defend the complement universe.”
Rosenthal: Apple's pre-Jobs return products were all crap
“The company was on the verge of bankruptcy. They had a ton of products. They were all crap.”
Sinofsky: Apple's quarterly device sales match the entire global PC market
“And on a quarterly basis, Apple sells about the same number of, Apple sells the same number of devices as their RPCs sold.”
Dixon: Apple is actively working on a VR product
“Apple. And we know Apple's working on something around this. I mean, we know just from the companies they bought and the people they've hired, but of course it's all mysterious as to what they're actually doing.”
Sinofsky asserts Apple's key advantage is editorializing internal prototype ideas.
“The neat thing about being a giant company is that within the company, there is a million ideas floating around and a million prototypes, and the process by which they go through this funnel and come out, that's what makes a company unique and their proprietar…”
Evans argues Apple's full-stack integration creates superior user experiences over Android.
“It's something where it's easier for Apple to create a really great customer experience, because Apple knows what lens and what GPU and what image processing chip is in the phone. Whereas when you are at Android or at Samsung, you've got that kind of disconnec…”
Evans predicts Apple VR and cars are two to four years away.
“The two big things that are next for Apple are on the one hand VR, or potentially AR, and then on the other hand cars. But just from looking at the state of the technology, but those are both basically two, three, four years away.”
Alex Rampell: Apple threatens Amazon with App Store removal over in-app purchases
“And Apple is saying, hey, you want to go buy this streaming video from Amazon? Uh-uh. Can't do it on an Apple phone. The Amazon app will not let you buy certain types of things because otherwise Apple would remove it from the app store.”
Chen: Apple and Google have fundamentally opposing data monetization models
“Apple and Google couldn't be more different on this, and Apple wants to emphasize the difference, which is, Apple says, we make money when you buy iPhones, so we don't have to monetize you in any other ways. We don't have to look in your email. We don't have t…”
Evans: Apple views cloud as storage, Google views phones as dumb glass
“Apple thinks about the cloud as dumb storage and Google thinks about the phone as done of dumb glass.”
Chen: App discovery shifts from home screens to voice assistants like Siri
“If you think about how do you find applications and content, we've gone from, well, the start button on your desktop OS controls that, right? You hit the start button and applications show up. Then we went to mobile, which was your home screen controls that, r…”
Evans: Mobile innovation has permanently shattered the monolithic web browser paradigm
“We had 20 years of the web browser mouse keyboard, and that was like the monolith for how the internet worked. And now we've broken that apart, and we've got all these different shards all kind of floating around and landing in different places and being juggl…”
Evans: Smartphones act as non-neutral internet platforms unlike desktop Windows
“The smartphone itself is kind of, is a platform for the internet in a way that Windows was not. You targeted the browser, you didn't target Windows, but on the smartphone, you target the smartphone operating system, and it's not neutral. Apple and Google chang…”
Christensen: Steve Jobs innovated by solving his own unaddressed personal needs
“What I admire about Jobs and his legacy is that he did his research in front of a mirror, and if I have a need in my life, and there isn't something I could hire to get that job done, I betcha that job arises in lots of people's lives.”
Russell: Apple and Google have hundreds working on VR
“It's clear that they have hundreds of people working on these”
The Mobile Device Management market is broken due to OS vendors
“The answer for you is that MDM, at least in my estimation, is a pretty broken market today, and the reason it's broken is the vendors of the platforms that provide, you know, Google, Microsoft, Apple, really Apple is kind of the real, real offender here. They …”
Evans: Apple will eventually release a $300 iPhone
“They could do a 300 dollar phone now that would be a great phone. It would, you would not feel, ah, Johnny, I wouldn't feel ashamed of it. I feel like that's a question of when rather than if”
Evans: Apple, Google, and Facebook Won Initial Mobile and Messaging Wars
“The smartphone wars are now over, or at least the first smartphone war is over, and Apple and Google both won in different ways, and the kind of the first messaging app wars are now mostly over, and Facebook mostly won in sort of various ways”
Evans: Apple is weak in building cloud and internet services
“They are weak in cloud services. They are weak in building internet services.”
Evans: Apple Has 700-750 Million Active Devices and 66% App Revenue
“The Apple ecosystem has 700 to seven hundred and fifty million active devices at the moment, and it has two thirds of app store revenue, and it has roughly half of web traffic, so it has sufficient scale to attract developers.”
Evans: Apple controls two-thirds to three-quarters of online tablet usage
“And then there is a market for like The post-PC replacement, which is what Apple and Samsung and everybody else is trying to play in, and Apple has like three-thirds, two-quarters has like two-quarters to two-thirds of that, and if you look at all the usage st…”
Evans: B2B fleet purchasing of autonomous cars neutralizes Apple's consumer advantage
“So and so that becomes interesting for Apple and potentially for Tesla, because it means that, you know, if the drivers, if the people riding around are not the people choosing these things, then maybe Apple's strengths don't really get to come into play becau…”
Evans: Emerging Chinese smartphone makers are hurting Samsung, not Apple
“In precisely the period that you have half a dozen Chinese manufacturers coming into market with really good design and strong brand, which show me is only the most obvious, and what's happening is those guys are killing Samsung, they're not touching Apple at …”
Evans: Apple outsold Microsoft-Nokia's total handset volume in Q4 2014
“Apple sold more phones than Nokia. I mean, the Nokia, you know, this is still Microsoft, because Nokia did, Nokia Microsoft did ten million numis and forty million feature phones. Right. Apple did seventy-five million smartphones.”
Evans: Apple faces no credible competitors in the high-end smartphone market
“Apple's got the high-end phones, and there's not anybody on the horizon that's mounting a credible attack on that.”
Evans: Apple iPad captures 80% to 90% of total tablet usage
“The iPad share of tablet use is 80 to 90% on any kind of, or to the extent that anybody who has metrics specifically For iPad use, that is to say e-commerce sites or websites or, you know, anybody who's doing video or anyone who's actually selling anything see…”
Bilimoria: Apple HomeKit is currently a complete head fake
“Apple's HomeKit, and that almost seems like a complete head fake. I mean, if you actually go to their website, it's actually just a developer landing page with a couple of coming soon notifications”
Evans: Apple operates like a club funded by biannual hardware upgrades
“You can describe Apple as a sort of club where the price of membership is buying a new box every two years, and the benefits of being a member of the club keep expanding in terms of all these sort of incremental services around the edges.”
Johnson: Apple Stores were designed for customer experience, not direct sales
“And so we designed a store that wasn't about selling things. It was about making an owner have a better experience.”
Mercando: Apple fails to manage mobile notifications effectively
“I don't think that Apple does a great job with managing them, and so we're building a platform where you can manage all those notifications, and you deem what's most important to you.”
Evans: iOS users spend four times more than Android users
“You have double the revenue on iOS for half the users, and so very roughly four times the spend.”
Evans: Apple generates double Android's developer revenue on half the devices
“And if you look at the revenue growth rate, the run rate growth rate, that means that Apple probably paid out ten billion in the last 12 months. And there are, as it might be, four hundred fifty million active iOS devices on Earth, so Apple is doing double the…”
Evans: Google sees hardware as dumb glass, Apple sees cloud as dumb storage
“For Google, all hardware is just kind of dumb glass that links back to their cloud. Whereas for Apple, the cloud is kind of dumb storage that supports their platform.”
Evans: Apple's iOS 8 extensions lagged behind Android by three years
“And so, you know, again, it's a bit like multitasking, that Apple is doing something that was on Android like three years earlier.”
Dixon: Startups should outsource supply chain layers that are API-mature
“The principle they use to decide which parts of the chain they have to own and which parts they can outsource is just ultimate product. What ultimate product experience we need to deliver and which of the You know, which of the layers, Tobology's point, are ma…”
Evans: Apple Could Build a High-Quality $300 iPhone
“And I think today it would absolutely be possible for Apple to make a 300 dollar phone that would, you know, to use Johnny Ives line, would be a phone that they could be proud of.”
Active Android devices will reach 2-3B; iOS will reach 700-900M
“And, you know, as things play out with the current dynamics, which aren't really going to change in the next two or three years, we will end up with seven, eight, nine hundred million iOS devices in use on Earth. It's probably about 500 now. And we'll end up w…”
Dixon: Tech power concentration is at its highest since peak Microsoft
“We live in a time where I think we have probably the greatest concentration of power in, on the internet that, that I mean, you know, or in the technology world since probably Microsoft at its peak in the nineties.”
Mars: AI assistant infrastructures are monopolized by major tech companies
“These kinds of infrastructures are monopolized essentially by companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and so forth.”
Rampell: Apple and Google will fully open their mobile wallet platforms
“Apple and Google need to open up their respective wallets, but I think they will, because Apple and Google, if they want to build a powerful position and actually truly have the mobile wallet not just be a payment type that has three credit cards in it, But ac…”