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 13 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
Sinofsky: Steve Jobs framed iPhone market share by manufacturer to undercut rivals
“Steve Jobs, like, put up a slide at the iPhone launch of mobile phone share, but he very deliberately chose to measure it by the manufacturer of phones so that it diminished the share of Windows Phone. But he also could have just done it by operating system, w…”
Sinofsky: Western automakers lost IP and capital in Chinese joint ventures
“And like, we met once with and so the car companies, if you just fast forward, they all are out of China now. These joint ventures, they could never get their money out. They lost all their IP, their manufacturer. It's just horrible to, like, Volkswagen, Ford,…”
Sinofsky: Graphical interfaces were on only 5–10% of computers pre-Windows 95
“And so the, you know, the graphical interface that we know is the desktop and stuff, Is, is only on the Mac. And it, so therefore, it's only on like five or 10% of people using a computer.”
Sinofsky: Office 95's Answer Wizard was Microsoft's first shipped AI feature
“And so Answer Wizard was this breakthrough AI. It was the first time we shipped any kind of AI thing.”
Sinofsky: Marketers selling against EVs coined the phrase 'range anxiety'
“The phrase range anxiety, Was not dreamed up by the physicists at GM. It was dreamed up by the marketing people selling against electric vehicles.”
Sinofsky: State-of-the-art machine translation still relies on 1970s NLP
“The best example for me of that is how everybody said machine learning was going to replace all of natural language processing. But if you dig into any of the work that's been going on, even the most state of the art translation, which, you know, goes any lang…”
Sinofsky: Late 2016 Apple and Microsoft PCs used year-old chips
“Well, in fact, all of the new devices that were announced this week are running components at least a year old, and in some cases, two years old. The graphics on, on the surface are the last generation of video, the CPUs on Intel, or the, I mean, on, on the Ma…”
Sinofsky: Legacy systems like BigFix take days for network inventories
“Like big fix is the state of the art and for a network that size, you're looking at three, four, five day turnarounds.”
Sinofsky: China has 18 cities with populations over 10 million
“And so here we are today, and I think there's 18 cities with ten million.”
Sinofsky: Software engineering never required state licensing or sales approval
“You never needed to be licensed to be a software engineer. There was never approval to sell software.”
Sinofsky: SharePoint originated as an internal repository for Office specs
“We were trying to build the specs for Office, and of course, we didn't quite know what to build, so we built like a spec place to put all the Word documents and spreadsheets, and that became SharePoint.”
Sinofsky: Telecom giants failed to predict the university-born internet
“WorldCom and AT&T did not predict the internet was going to come out of universities.”
Sinofsky: Neural network theory dates back to the 1956 Dartmouth AI Conference
“Neural networks aren't new. In fact, they're actually, if you go back and read the 1956 Dartmouth Summer AI Conference, they're actually mentioned in there as one of the first things that that group of people who basically invented the field. This is like Marv…”