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 75 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Evans: Zuckerberg's plan to resell excess AI capacity is flawed
“I saw a slightly strange quote from Mark Zuckerberg saying, well, if it turns out that we've over invested, we can just resell the capacity. And I thought, let me just like stop you there, Mark, because if it turns out that you can't use your capacity, everybo…”
Evans: OpenAI's huge user base is fragile without network effects
“You've got these eight or nine hundred million weekly active users, but you don't have, but that feels very fragile because all you've really got is the power of the default and the brand. You don't have a network effect. You don't really have feature lock-in.…”
Evans: PC innovation is being perfected because the PC era is over
“And you could kind of look at it the other way around, I think, that what's happening in the kind of the PC world is it's being perfected because it's kind of over.”
Evans: Facebook Has Not Created New User Behavior Since News Feed
“Well, they haven't actually created any new behavior since the newsfeed. What they'done is they bought Instagram, and they bought it very early at what at the time everyone said was a ludicrously high price. At the time, it was, actually, it was a very good pr…”
Evans: The Mac is irrelevant amid the global mobile transformation
“In the great wide world of the enormous transformation of the technology industry, and the media industry, and the whole, of industry in general, by mobile, the Mac is kind of irrelevant.”
Evans: China's internet ecosystem is more innovative than US tech
“They've kind of got their own internet, and it's just as good as ours, and actually, it's much more innovative in some ways.”
Evans: Chatbots and foundation models are not standalone products
“I don't think foundation models. A product. I don't think a chatbot is a product. I think the value will be further up.”
Evans: Coding is the only AI use case with clear product-market fit
“The place that's got product market fit right now is coding. Nothing else has equivalent product market fit right now.”
Evans: OpenAI's vision contradicts itself on human-level AI versus software tools
“I watched this, one of the OpenAI live streams a couple of weeks ago, and they spend the first 20 minutes talking about how they're going to have, like, human-level, PhD-level AI researchers, like, next year. And then the second half of the stream is, oh, and …”
Evans: Consumers trust Apple with health data over Google or Facebook
“That kind of piece of strategic positioning has worked out very well for them because you would trust it with this kind of information where you might not trust a product from Google or from Facebook.”
Evans: Expecting voice assistants to become universal platforms is a blind alley
“Each one of the things that Alexa can do, somebody had to build, and that doesn't scale, and so the idea this becomes like a universal platform, or it's like it's the next smartphone, is a complete blind alley.”
Evans: Machine learning strengthens tech incumbents rather than shifting market power
“Machine learning is like this new foundational technology that, in a sense, will enable a bunch of new stuff and new companies, but it makes Google better Google, and it makes Facebook stronger, Facebook and Amazon maybe stronger Amazon. It doesn't unlock, it …”
Evans: The MacBook is at the top of its S-curve
“The MacBook isn't changing what it is. The MacBook has been, is at the top of the S curve. This is better propellers on your Lockheed Constellation.”
Evans: Google's real innovation is in cloud services, not Android OS
“What's increasingly apparent from Google is that all the innovation really is happening in the Google services that get laid on top of Android, and in many cases, of course, are also available on iOS and indeed on the web.”
Evans: Cloud-based machine learning is in Google's DNA, not Apple's
“On the other hand, Google finds it really easy to do image recognition in the cloud of every photo you've ever taken, because that's what Google does, and Apple conversely would find it very difficult to do that. It's But theoretically they could, but it's jus…”
Evans: Samsung cannot replicate Apple's ability to sell a $10,000 watch
“It's impossible, effectively, for Samsung to copy that. You can argue about Apple's ability to sell a 10,000 dollar watch. I don't think anybody would argue about Samsung's ability to sell a 10,000 dollar watch.”
Evans: Android Hardware Manufacturing Is a Bad Business Without Commodity Scale
“Well, Android business of itself is a bad business unless you embrace being a commodity box shifter.”
Evans: Google is the new Microsoft in its universal computing platform ambition
“I think there's a macro point here that Google is the new Microsoft, and this is the thing that came out really strongly last year, and indeed this year, is the sort of self-confidence and the ambition to do absolutely everything to become the global computing…”
Evans: Google Views Apple as a Channel, Not an Existential Competitor
“Google is not in a one-to-one fight to the death with Apple. You could argue it's in a one-to-one fight to the death with Facebook. Or even potentially with Amazon. But Apple is a channel.”
Evans: The internet is moving beyond Google's PageRank and web pages
“As a consequence, we've also moved on from the single unified paradigm of Google, because Google is fundamentally about analyzing links and sending you to web pages, but if the internet is no longer just about web pages, then that PageRank model breaks down, j…”
Evans: Future structure of software engineering careers remains unpredictable
“I don't think anybody can possibly say they kind of know what the market structure is going to look like or what the career of a software engineer is going to be in three years time. I think it would be, you'd be insane to think that you could know that yet.”
Evans: AI is as big as the internet, but no bigger
“Well, you know, I'm a centrist, so I think this is as big a deal as the internet or smartphones, but only as big a deal as the internet or smartphones.”
Evans: TV manufacturers are building feature TVs, not true smart TVs
“TV people are feature phone makers. They're not smartphone. They're not smart TVs. They're feature TVs.”
Evans: Electric Porsches will drive much better than Teslas
“That said, of course, a Porsche still drive, well, electric Porsche will drive an awful lot better than an electric Tesla, because just because it goes fast in a straight line, there's more to being a good car than that.”
Evans: Tesla competes in autonomy against Silicon Valley and China, not Detroit
“It's not Silicon Valley software company versus dumb Detroit guys. It's Silicon Valley software company versus 20 other Silicon Valley software companies plus China.”
Evans: Adding Android apps to Chromebooks undermines Chrome OS advantages
“Putting Android apps onto Chromebook is kind of paradoxical because you turn it back and suddenly you don't have the advantage that Chrome has over Android anymore.”
Evans: Nokia Windows phones felt more premium than any Android device
“I actually always felt that the Nokia Windows phones felt more premium than any premium Android phone”
Evans: Google's Allo App Is Housekeeping, Not Strategy
“And so you look at the Google messaging app, Allo, it's like, okay, Hangouts was a bit of a mess. And it was a bit fragmented and didn't do anything that kind of modern messaging apps do. Okay. So let's just kind of reset that and we'll make a new app and we'l…”
Evans: Sony has been failing in consumer electronics for 20 years
“Sony has, you know, been failing in this for 20 years.”
Evans: Apple is weak in building cloud and internet services
“They are weak in cloud services. They are weak in building internet services.”
Evans: Styluses lack mass consumer appeal because most people cannot draw
“I'm pretty skeptical about the kind of the broad value of styluses, styli, I think. I mean, people always show you drawing, and people creating beautiful illustrations, and I think, fine, what about the other Seven billion people on earth you can't draw.”
Evans: Self-driving buses will not be as transformative as self-driving cars
“I don't think a self-driving bus is, is, is kind of transformative in the way the self-driving car is, because there's always got to, you know, that's, you know, the space taken up by the driver isn't really the point.”
Evans: Microsoft and Intel No Longer Set Tech Industry Agenda
“And again, that doesn't mean that Microsoft or Intel have gone away, it just means that they're not setting the agenda anymore at all.”
Evans: Sovereign wealth funds ordered 3x IPO free float in dot-com bubble
“I remember floating a company for which a Middle Eastern sovereign wealth fund put in an order for the whole of the free float with us and each of the two other banks on the deal, so they ordered three times the entire number of shares on the offer, and I reme…”
Evans: Beats 1 radio is marketing, not a core feature
“That feels to me a bit like the gold Apple watch. It's like, that's not the thing to focus on. It's an interesting piece of marketing.”
Evans: Apple Watch won't fill a void like smartphones or PCs did
“And so asking, you know, what are the core use cases for this? Slightly misses the point, because it's not the one thing that you will own that fills this void in your life, the way a smartphone did, or a PC did.”
Evans: Twitter's watch notifications for trending terms are completely worthless
“Here are five new trending terms in Twitter, which is the thing that the Twitter app is sending me, which is completely worthless.”
Evans: Internet.org violates net neutrality but addresses real user needs
“A bit like internet.org, which clearly infringes on internet, on net neutrality in some ways, but is also actually a response to fundamental user needs.”
Evans: Apple Pay is more compelling inside apps than at retail checkout
“The way that I think about Apple Pay is it's not very interesting at point of sale. It's very interesting inside apps, because suddenly you don't have to enter your credit card and your billing address and your shipping address.”
Evans: Apple Watch at $1,000 beats traditional watchmakers on quality
“A thousand dollars for a polished stainless steel watch with a woven metal bracelet is, or a high quality leather bracelet is perfectly normal, perfectly part of the course for that kind of product. In fact, it's probably better quality than what you get if yo…”
Evans: Apple Pay is more transformative for in-app purchases than retail
“To me, I've always thought Apple Pay was more interesting in apps than at point of sale, because you go into a store, you pull something out of your pocket, you put it on a thing, and you do a thing, and whether it's a phone or a card, I mean, this is what peo…”
Evans: Google Maps and Play Store are Google's only crucial Android services
“Very briefly, it seems like the Maps and the App Store are crucial. None of the other services matter very much.”
Evans: Comparing iOS and Android to Mac vs Windows is useless
“And I'm kind of, again, I'm sort of exasperated by people who think that looking at Windows versus Mac tells you something about this, because both the iPhone business is in a fundamentally different position in the industry to where the Mac Corp position was,…”
Bezos manages Amazon on a 20-year horizon, ignoring quarterly earnings pressure
“Bezos has, he doesn't have a majority, but he has effective control of the company. He's got a large stake in it. He doesn't need to raise money from the stock market. He does need the share price to be stable, or at least not fall, because that's how he pays …”
Evans: Narrative that Amazon sells below cost is 'doubly nonsense'
“So this idea that Amazon thrives by selling at below cost is, is doubly nonsense, because half the stuff on Amazon, they don't even set the price, they're not even setting the price for.”
Evans: Google Glass was an experimental product test that failed
“Google's been incredibly quiet on glass for years. And, you know, the thing is really, you know, it's gone nowhere. You know, just, you know, we don't know. Maybe there'll be something will happen. Maybe it won't. But it feels like it was out there. It was a t…”
Evans: Smartwatch email notifications and tiny-screen reading offer zero value
“A device that tells you have new email has zero value, actually. A device that tells you who you've got new email from actually kind of has zero value. A device that lets you read that email two or two lines at a time or three lines at a time has zero value.”