Category: Uncategorized

In late 2011, I wrote a piece arguing that Google operated as an applied research lab, with employees encouraged to pursue interesting ideas as ends-in-themselves. Over the past decade, Google’s search engine has basically functioned as a cash cow, allowing the company to develop two freely-distributed operating systems, self-driving cars, augmented reality glasses, and a…

Over the past few years, it’s become clear that many web services have been built atop unsustainable business models. We’ve lost Google Reader, Posterous, and dozens of others. These are services that users have spent a lot of their time painstakingly filling with content, expecting that they’ll be around for the long-haul. I’m growing tired…

We’ve always been afraid of the robots. Afraid that one day, somebody will invent the algorithm that will turn our particular life’s work into a machine-readable, endlessly repeatable process. It’s inevitable. The robots always catch up. If your job is to follow a set of rules, you’re doing a robot’s job, and they want what’s…

It’s about a month too late to be making New Year’s Resolutions, but here goes. From now on, I only want to work on big stuff. Important stuff. Stuff that takes guts and daring to get finished. Stuff that could fail badly, but just as likely could (hopefully, hopefully!) succeed beyond my wildest imaginings. The…

Today, I realised something curious. The way I consume content on computers has shifted significantly over the last decade, but the way I create content has barely changed at all. On the consumption side, I now have my iPad and my iPhone and my Kindle. I can carry the web in my pocket, I can pinch and…