1. Only Cook could go to China
Two hundred and seventy five billion dollars. That’s how much Apple planned to spend in China from 2016-2021, and given the growth of the company and the Chinese economy, it probably actually spent more than that.
At the same time, of course, Tim Cook was promising Donald Trump that he would bring more manufacturing back to the US. This was something that only an ignoramus like Trump would actually believe: but believe it, apparently, he did.
All of this is revealed in a wonderful Vanity Fair article based on a new book from Patrick McGee. Apple, of course, is saying the book is “untrue” and “riddled with inaccuracies”, despite also claiming to not have fact checked it. I haven’t read the book yet (it’s next in The Infinite Book Queue) but I’m looking forward to it. The degree to which Apple works with Chinese manufacturers is extraordinary: it’s a long way from the old OEM model where US companies would simply give a task to a manufacturer and hope they came back with something usable.
2. The lonely death of local news
I have long been fascinated by the thinking behind Reach plc’s audience development strategy. For those who don’t know them, Reach is the UK’s largest local newspaper publisher, and also owns three nationals.
It spent the good part of a decade chasing a strategy which focused on generating scale traffic through Google and (while the going was good) Facebook. This meant that genuine local news often took a back seat to national (and even international) stories on local sites.
Much of this was driven by Google’s decision a few years ago to favour local newspapers. At the time, it was getting a kicking for the impact that its business had on local news, which had declined massively because of reduced classified revenue. Anyone working in publisher SEO will remember how, as if by magic, local sites like those owned by Reach started ranking very well for pretty-much any topic you liked.
Reach, though, erm, overreached. It raced to churn out a huge amount of “me too” stories, which were local in name only. A board that has no news room or audience development thought the good times would last forever, built a commercial strategy around huge scale, and were blindsided when, last year, traffic collapsed.
Anyway, Reach has finally seen its sites start to grow again, and their audience director, Martin Little, talked through the story recently. I’m sceptical about some of the numbers – a 43% increase in traffic year on year adding up to just a 9% increase in page views doesn’t add up – but a lot of the editorial strategy is similar to tactics I’ve used in the past: hubbing content teams around topic areas, for example.
But I think it’s still a strategy that’s doomed to fail, for two reasons. First, we are in the last few years of scale referral traffic from Google. AI will kill it, so you should be shifting to a subscription model if you can. Second, though, it’s decimating the value of the brands. Little mentions that Birmingham Live – yes, a local news site for Birmingham -- “leans into personal finance (especially Martin Lewis)… and news from the Department of Work and Pensions.”
None of this has anything to do with Birmingham. So why should anyone from Britain’s second city bother to read it? There’s a potential audience here of 1.1m people. Sure, national news will always feature – but should a local news site really be focused on Martin Lewis?
3. Enshittify-ALL-the-things!
You can’t have nice things. Not even if you are paying top end prices for them. You must pay a subscription. You must accept what you have will get worse. Accept. Accept. Accept.
4. Life will find a way
When I was a kid we thought that humans were unique in having intelligence. Then we we realised that wasn’t actually true. And now we understand that intelligence has evolved independently more than once, and intelligent brains can be built in different ways.
5. Gorton banks
The story of one of my absolute favourite fonts in the entire world. I would happily use it for everything. You wouldn’t like it if I did. But I would.
6. We’re doomed
Stories like this make me fairly convinced that human beings were not meant to live in the kind of fast information environment that the internet has enabled. Recycled footage of US aid drops into Gaza from 2024 being spread via TikTok (of course) on to other social media platforms, claiming to be contemporary footage of Chinese aid. It’s low-information crack for the gullible.
7. UAE AI
I have a constant challenge when thinking about AI to avoid just being reactionary. That’s grounded in being old enough to remember how many people were convinced that the home computer/the internet/Google were going to rot kids’ brains, destroy society through mass unemployment, and so on. I also remember the “it’s just a toy, it can’t do real work” brigade insisting that all those technologies were useless, got things wrong, etc.
But.
There will be huge societal and economic changes from the adoption of AI over the coming years. And unfortunately, we are going through this change at a time when neoliberalism’s inevitable consequence – huge monopolies and oligarchies – have eaten the world. I can’t think of many political or economic environments in my lifetime that have been as ill-equipped to handle such a profound change in the world of work.
When I left school in the 1980s, de-industrialisation was in full swing, leading to mass unemployment, but the social safety net was relatively strong: I had no job at 16, but I had benefits and the gift of time and support which helped me survive and eventually thrive. Now? The support system has been eroded by Tory and Labour governments alike who simply believe that neoliberalism will make it all right in the end, like a fairy story with shareholders.
So I can imagine some bright spark in the government looking at what the UAE is doing in introducing AI into the school curriculum and thinking that’s a great idea. And it’s not a bad one: AI, like all tools, requires skill the make the most of it. But the real contribution that the British government can make is to rebuild that social safety net, to make sure that the impacts of AI on work don’t lead to mass poverty. I am not holding my breath.
8. The cost of complexity
I’ve been a Stratechery reader for as long as Ben Thompson has been writing, and it’s always interesting to look back on his early posts. Back in 2014, Ben wrote a really interesting piece about the cost of complexity, which examined Chromebooks and their place in the world – and the potential for them to disrupt Microsoft Windows.
That didn’t happen, except in the US education market. But Ben’s fundamental point – that complexity has a cost, and that cost puts established players in danger – is also worth considering in the context of AI. AI is the ultimate simple interface: you ask, it does. That is one of the key reasons it’s so disruptive. It’s not just that it can write things for you, it’s that pretty-much anything you ask it, it will do (or at least make a bad attempt at).
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: it’s the conversational user interface which makes AI powerful. Not just churning words.
9. Kill yr meetings
Every business I have ever worked in loved having a meeting. And meetings can be great. They’re places to jointly solve problems, to build the social glue which makes good teams, and so on. But they can also be horrific time sinks that act as proxies for things being done. Personally I look forward to when I can send my digital twin to meetings instead. Although if there’s anything likely to cause a revolt of the AIs, it’s exactly that kind of behaviour.
10. Janteloven!
And in this world of automation and AI, it’s worth remembering some old wisdom: you’re no better than anyone else.