Month: July 2019

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Is an uptick in PC sales an economic indicator?

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PC sales are up, maybe

PC sales have been slowing as users rely on smartphones and tablets, but both IDC and Gartner analysts report an increase in PCs. IDC reports an increase of 4.7% and Gartner 1.5%. The firms have very different definitions of what is a PC. IDC counts Chromebooks but not Microsoft Surface Tablets. Gartner does not count Chromebooks, but does count Surface products. ArsTechnica

dis-rup-shun: Microsoft Surface has single-handedly brought a fringe of users who were Mac users but not in love with the MacOS back into the Windows fold. Surface is cool enough that a user can walk into a conference room in Silicon Valley and not receive the usual taunts from the Mac glitterati. Surface devices, except for the Go units, have keyboards and Chromebooks, which don’t run Microsoft software, have keyboards and are hinged. That said, PC growth is fueled by classroom success of Chromebooks and by the excellent design of Surface.

HeroLabs helps fight homeowners biggest enemy: water damage

HeroLabs, a UK startup, is developing Sonic – a water leak detector that attaches to pipes inside the house (underneath the kitchen sink) and “listens” for water movements throughout the home to identify leaks. TechCrunch

dis-rup-shun: As leaks are the biggest cause of insurance claims, cost effective, easy-to-install leak detection systems are theoretically more likely to gain a discount from insurance providers than a home security system. Even more, leak detectors that are connected to the cloud could be monitored by insurance providers, as those providers are the ones responsible for paying claims when water damage occurs. Expect property and casualty providers to be big players in smart home technologies.

Facebook attempts to explain Libra to Congress

The Libra Association has been summoned to Congress to explain the currency. The sophisticated crypto currency will be based in Switzerland and will conform to international monetary rules and will not compete or interfere with governments’ fiscal policies, the pre-released testimony states. TechCrunch

dis-rup-shun: Congress has a tough challenge in that it must understand the impact, risks, and benefits of Libra or rely on consultants that do in order to properly respond, regulate, limit or prohibit the new venture. Like the rise of Uber, Libra will move far more quickly than legislators and will continue to redefine the rules of the monetary system. World governments need to rapidly understand from what dangers it must protect its own monetary systems.

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Can Walmart.com catch Amazon.com?

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Walmart’s attempts at e-commerce are struggling

Walmart’s e-commerce unit is reportedly losing $1 billion this year.  The company invested $3.3 billion in Jet.com and has been struggling to keep up with Amazon.com. Reports state that while the company is investing in young lifestyle brands, others believe that deep online discounting is the better strategy. CNBC

dis-rup-shun: Given Amazon’s scale, Walmart must keep the long game in mind and be prepared to lose several billion more to catch up. While Walmart debates discount versus brand building strategy, Amazon is doubling down on warehouses, trucks, planes, drones, vendor networks, and machine learning algorithms. Amazon has built enormous scale not only in inventory, but in logistics, requiring an ever increasing investment to catch. Will Walmart shareholders and management decide that the cost of the race is too high a price to pay?

Facebook will pay a fine of $5 billion

After 87 million users’ personal information was improperly shared with political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica prior to the last Presidential election, the Federal Trade Commission has levied a fine of $5 billion, representing one month of revenue. Critics of the deal that does not penalize CEO Zuckerberg call it a slap on the wrist, and shares of the company were up almost 2% after announcement of the penalty.  ArsTechnica

dis-rup-shun: The FTC’s action will stand in contrast with the European Commission which is currently investigating several large corporations for similar mis-handling of consumer data. It is expected that the EU will provide proportionally much harsher penalties for similar failures and may be a much stronger driver for implementation of higher standards and better enforcement.

Amazon music growing faster than Apple and Spotify

Amazon’s service reported 70% growth in the past year.  Amazon reports 32 million subscribers to Apple’s 60 million and Spotify’s 100 million. Despite the strong growth, the other services have a strong lead. ArsTechnica

dis-rup-shun: Given that there are 126 million households in the U.S. and 221 in the European Union, combined, the services are reaching nearly 58% of households in both continents, suggesting that additional subscriber acquisition will be increasingly difficult and expensive. Amazon Prime members get a the basic music service, Prime Music for no additional charge, but may find that the limited catalog is a gateway to the Amazon Music Unlimited service which is available to Prime members at a negligible $2 premium.

Petcube incorporates Alexa into pet amusement device

Petcube’s Bite2 and Play 2 are smart devices that remotely dispense treats and provide a moving laser pointer, respectively. New versions of the devices now include Alexa voice capabilities. TechCrunch

dis-rup-shun: The Internet of Pet care has arrived, and now one can command their Petcube to command their dog or cat to perform tricks or sit for a treat. Amazon’s saturation of the smart speaker space in ever more types of devices is solidifying it as the industry standard for voice control. Why would a manufacturer choose anything but Amazon as its voice interface?

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Buffett offers success traits

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Buffett offers keys to business success

Speaking to a class of MBAs, Buffett advised the group that high IQs will not differentiate business leaders. Instead, he listed traits required to succeed:

  • Fulfill your promises
  • Be honest
  • Be trustworthy
  • Give credit where credit is due
  • Be mindful and emotionally intuitive
  • Manifest humility
  • Be willing to admit you’re wrong
  • Offer help when it’s needed
  • Treat others with respect
  • Be charitable
  • Be patient

CNBC

dis-rup-shun: While high IQs without integrity may lead to problems later in the journey, there is no quantitative score card available to rank workers on Buffett’s list of integrity traits. So for the foreseeable future, organizations will continue to use IQ as a unit of measure for recruiting and hope that their members possess, or will develop, Buffett’s leadership traits.

India going to the moon

India delayed, on Sunday, the launch of its lunar lander and rover project, called Chandrayaan-2 due to technical problems. The mission includes a lunar lander and rover that will explore the Moon’s south pole. Space.com

dis-rup-shun: Lunar landings are so 1960s — why bother? The moon is a convenient platform for a country to showcase its space travel capabilities. To be not only a global, but universal super power, a country now has to have a formidable space program, not so much to colonize the moon, but to operate a fleet of orbiting satellites that will provide future broadband and 5G services, as well as play important military roles including spying, weapons hosting, and communications. India will be the fourth country to land on the Moon (USA, China, Russia have landed, Israel missed).

Employee leaked recordings of Google Voice conversations

Google revealed that employees listen to conversations from Google Assistant that are not related to the watch phrase, “Okay Google,” or “Hey Google.” All of the smart speaker vendors have disclosed that real people listen to samplings of customer recordings to improve quality of speech recognition. ArsTecnica

dis-rup-shun: Listening to conversations for the purposes of development of the technology is not the big deal. The big deal is that 15% of the conversations listened to were not in response to the watch phrase, and therefore should not have been recorded. The fact that the recordings were leaked to a company in Europe, where the European Union is currently enforcing its new data privacy safeguarding law, GDPR, means that Google will certainly face additional investigations from the EU. The article provides instructions for settings that turn off voice recordings and delete conversation history.

Amazon building Sonos-killer 

Amazon continues to expand its line of Echo products. Bloomberg reports that the company will introduce a high fidelity version of the player that will seek to deliver a music experience akin to Sonos or Apple’s HomePod. eMarketer reports that the Echo family owns 63% of this year’s smart speaker market. Bloomberg

dis-rup-shun: Amazon will continue to flood the market with many shapes, sizes and variants of Echo devices as it seeks to establish critical mass as the voice control standard for all types of appliances, cars, players and even light switches. The smart speaker makers are buying market share, selling devices below cost, as sales of the devices are, more importantly, sales of a voice control network standard. The Network Effect states that the value of a network standard such as Echo increases with the number of nodes, making competition nearly impossible once one company grabs a high share of market. Building a high fidelity version of Echo puts Amazon in competition with Echo licensing customer Sonos, but alienation of a customer is a small price to pay when Amazon’s game is massive scale.

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Amazon could fix one of corporations’ ugliest habits

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Amazon to refurbish, rather than dispense employees

Amazon, ever resourceful, announced that it would begin a program of retraining existing employees as its business and personnel needs change. At the cost of $7,000 per worker, it will train up to 100,000 employees who elect to participate, between now and 2025. CNBC

dis-rup-shun: At a time when Big Tech is increasingly under fire for monopolistic practices and personal information mismanagement, Amazon creates the ultimate loyalty program — potentially leading a cultural shift among global corporations to stop the long held practice of quick termination of employees who don’t fit changing needs, at a high cost of severance, unemployment, and bad public relations. This is a cultural change with very powerful benefits.

Connected hair straightener with poor security

U.K.’s Glamorizer makes the world’s first Bluetooth hair straightener. The app can be easily hacked, giving nefarious beauticians the ability to take over someone’s straightener and sustain high temperatures over sustained periods.

dis-rup-shun: Get ready for it –a wave of connected appliances that gain little value from being connected other than differentiating them on the store shelves or Amazon.com pages. Makers of inexpensive household appliances that do little by being connected have little incentive to secure them. For this reason the appliance industry needs to implement a security standard that is displayed on a sticker on the device, just as UL certification assures consumers that electronic products have undergone some inspection.

Luminar raises $100 million for next generation lidar

Increasing total funding to $250 million, Luminar is racing to be a heavyweight in the autonomous car industry. TechCrunch

dis-rup-shun: What is lidar? It is the radar-like technology used by autonomous vehicles to see what’s in front of them. Without really good lidar sensors, driver-less cars will run over things they shouldn’t. 79 million cars were sold globally last year. Think of the market value of being a leading provider of a component that will be in almost every new car in 2025.

Automation replaces part of umpire’s jobs

Baseball’s Atlantic League is using computerized TrackMan radar to call balls and strikes, dumbing down umpire’s jobs to watching for checked swings and keeping an eye on the technology. TechCrunch

dis-rup-shun: Point and counter-point: replacing the judgement of umpires with technology removes some of the human-element charm of the sport, or, finally, costly errors by umpires won’t skew outcomes of games in the future. TrackMan took over for tennis lines persons years ago, yet they still sit and stare down each line for every match. Pilots sip coffee while watching computers land large jets, but well-trained pilots remain a part of every flight. Let us conclude that AI will eliminate some jobs and will certainly eliminate the human factor of many jobs.

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The streaming wars are over (already)

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Streaming wars already over, says Diller

The big studios, AT&T’s Warner, Disney and NBCUniversal are launching Netflix-killer streaming services in the next few months. Netflix enjoys an advantage of 150 million subscribers and 22 years. The upstarts are trying to bring down the streaming giant by pulling their content, programs such as the Office and the Disney catalog, from Netflix. Media magnate Barry Diller says there is no way to catch Netflix.  CNBC

dis-rup-shun: Diller is a smart man, but if Netflix cannot keep producing original content hits and if the studios get on a hot streak of new content, which can be monetized by both streaming subscriptions and network TV (which Netflix cannot access), Netflix could lose its luster. In the Internet economy, the speed of change is faster than most expect, and Netflix has yet to make a profit, claiming that its deficit spending on original content will eventually pay off. It now has big competitors with multiple revenue sources and is locked into a spending battle with media conglomerates.

Why billionaires are launching rockets as fast as possible

Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit is yet another billionaire’s rocket launch company, using a 747 to ferry rockets into high altitudes. Wired

dis-rup-shun: Branson joins Bezos, Musk, (late) Paul Allen in the battle for space travel. While certainly egos are involved, access to the stars is similar to building the ports for the first steamships to ply oceans and rivers. Two behemoth markets for space craft are telecommunications and defense. Companies that can secure spots in space for communications satellites can cost effectively provide broadband to any corner of the Earth without stringing wires. Companies that can launch defense equipment will have some large paying customers in world governments. Space entrepreneurship puts the U.S. in the lead over China and Russia as those nations’ space deployments are mostly government programs.

Mashup: YouTube on Amazon and Prime Video on Google Chrome

Further blurring the lines between all sources of TV, both streaming and broadcast, Google and Amazon have buried the hatchet and will make their TV sources available on one-another’s hardware platforms. TechCrunch

dis-rup-shun: Another data point confirming that new TV services will soon look like old TV services, one will soon be able to access most streaming services from a single provider as various services essentially become channels within an uber provider, such as AT&T or Comcast or Apple or Amazon. These super-streaming providers will also offer access to cable and broadcast channels and watching TV will be simpler again, and will become more expensive as a few storefronts consolidate the goods.

Europe sends a $350M warning to Facebook, Google and big tech

Europe took the lead on data privacy in 2018 with the implementation of privacy standards known as GDPR. The EU just fined British Airways $230 million and Marriott $123 million for fumbling the security of customer records. Facebook and Google are under investigation by the EU now. CNBC

dis-rup-shun: The EU is showing that, as designed, the government has the teeth to make big corporations respect the laws in place to protect citizens. Hey U.S. Congress, are you watching?

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Zoom flaw allows cameras to be hacked

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Zoom learns a few lessons in 24 hours

Zoom, by far the easiest-to-use web conferencing tool, learned over the weekend that its Mac desktop app can be hacked, giving others access to the Mac’s built-in camera. The company first said it would not completely remove the vulnerable feature, then, in an about face, promised to completely address the problem in a patch to be released Tuesday night. Wired

dis-rup-shun: A hands down favorite, Zoom has been riding high. This incident taught the company at least two lessons often learned by other technology companies: 1. You can’t tell the market that your conservative approach to a security problem will be just fine. Consumer outrage created a public relations crisis, and the company was reminded that the consumer is always right.  2. In consumer technologies, there is a trade off between ease of use and security. In Zoom’s case, making Macs seamlessly access web conferences in a manner easier than its competitors, introduced a security flaw. Better security, thus far, has meant more complexity for users. That’s a problem that few companies have successfully addressed.

Why traditional home security systems are not very effective

A survey by Cove research of 939 people who were robbed revealed that 47% did not have their alarm system on at the time of the robbery. ZDNet

Almost half of US home security system owners admit they systems are switched off before a break in zdnet

dis-rup-shun: The next generation of smart home devices relies on machine learning and integrated sensors to know when occupants are home, away or asleep and automatically arm the home at the right time. By using data from all sensors and connected devices, the intelligent home will make correct decisions about the state of occupants in or out of the home and will make sure it is armed even if owners don’t.

Facebook’s Instagram combats bullying

Adam Mosseri, the new head of Instagram, stated that the company will use AI to determine and inform users when their posts are defined as bullying. He did not say, however, that the feature would block someone from posting offensive remarks. NBC

dis-rup-shun: The free market works again. After significant consumer backlash against Facebook for a string of bad choices over the past two years, the company and its Instagram subsidiary have taken a strong stance against offensive, false and damaging content. Too bad it took several years.

Uber offers helicopters in NYC

While in New York City, Uber users can choose a helicopter to travel from SOHO locations to JFK airport for about $200 for the 8 minute ride. CNN

dis-rup-shun: The service is a precursor to autonomous, flying cars (are those passenger drones?) that will create traffic jams above the traffic jams on the streets, will create consumer backlash from noise pollution, and will begin a reverse migration from cities to more rural areas where people can telecommute.

Wyze adds person detection to $20 camera

Wyze makes an impressive quality IP camera for $20. Now the camera can detect humans from other objects entering the field of view. TheVerge

dis-rup-shun: The price curve for tech products continues to dip sharply, bringing cutting edge technologies to mass markets at a blistering pace. The takeaways: hardware will rarely be profitable, the gadgets surrounding our lives in two years will be different from the one’s we use today, and our identities will be stored in thousands of shared databases and used for safety, profit, and, on some occasions, exploitation.

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A roadmap to Amazon’s next conquests

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The seven industries Amazon will disrupt next

According to analyst firm CBInsights, the next targets for Amazon include the following:

The four industries certain to be disrupted by the Seattle giant:

  1. Pharmacies — Amazon has acquired Drugstore.com and PillPack. dis-rup-shun: Who is in trouble? Pharmacy middlemen (PBMs) and executives enjoying fat profits.
  2. Small business lending — Amazon knows the financial performance of thousands of small merchants that sell on Amazon.com. dis-rup-shun: Who is in trouble? Commercial and local banks.
  3. Online groceries — a notoriously difficult business, Amazon is now expert at both logistics and the retail grocery business from its Whole Foods acquisition. dis-rup-shun: Who is in trouble? Meal subscription services that charge a small premium for meal kits will find Amazon offering more choices for the same or less money.
  4. Payments — the company already owns Amazon Cash, Amazon Reload, Amazon Pay, and Amazon Prime Visa and will work hard to keep more deposits in Amazon accounts. dis-rup-shun: Who is in trouble? Visa, Mastercard and Paypal.

And the industries that may be disrupted by Amazon:

  1. Mortgages — getting approved for a mortgage is a cumbersome activity, therefore ripe for disruption, and Quicken Loans is the leader in fast, online mortgages. Amazon understands online selling. dis-rup-shun: Who is in trouble? Not only mortgage originators, but the archaic title companies.
  2. Home and Garden — several companies are shipping plants and garden kits to new home owners, and this is a supply chain business. dis-rup-shun: Who is in trouble? Amazon needs volume and the mail order plant business may not be very reliable, so Home Depot and Lowe’s will continue to be the go-to companies for lawn and garden.
  3. Insurance — Amazon has a great deal of information about its members, especially Prime members, and can use this data to determine who the better risks are. dis-rup-shun: Who is in trouble? Insurance providers who are not profiling subscribers based on available data and therefore are slow to target the best customers they wish to keep for many years

Ride hailing in China takes a step up

Alibaba (think Chinese Amazon) has created an aggregation service which enables ride hailers (330 million in China) to summon a ride from a single app, rather than compare ride availability across the four major rideshare providers’ apps. The aggregator takes a share of the fare and simplifies the process of both getting a ride and, if you are an emerging ride service, gaining scale. China is raising the required standards for accreditation of drivers and autos, creating a shortage of drivers. TechCrunch

dis-rup-shun: U.S. and European local governments will be wise to follow China with higher standards for drivers and autos, as the demand for more drivers has degraded the formerly consistently delightful Uber or Lyft experience. Taxis are now looking better than they have in five years as many yellow taxis are now cleaner and mechanically equal or better than the average ride share vehicle. Ride share vendors should offer a new class of premium ride, such as ‘Uber Certified,’ which ensures a clean, sound car and a preferred driver.

Waze data shortens emergence response time

It turns out that Waze users are so good about reporting accidents, that Waze learns about a crash 2 minutes and 41 seconds before emergency responders are notified. Wired

dis-rup-shun: Here is yet another example of crowd sourcing from private enterprise functioning better than a government entity’s best and most optimized emergency system. If a free app can provide more accurate emergency data than the tax-payer funded 911 emergency system, then should the public expect that Facebook’s proposed private currency, Libra, can provide better warnings of financial meltdown, fraud or theft than the Federal Reserve Bank? Makes you wonder.

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Have consumers lost excitement for smart home?

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Hot smart home products are cooling down

Smart home hero products losing their luster as sales drop, says Thinknum. The report states that top selling smart products such as Philips’ Hue lighting system, Nest thermostat, Samsung’s SmartThings, as tracked by Amazon.com sales volume, have all fallen off the top sellers list. Ring doorbells, however, remain among top sellers.

dis-rup-shun: Crossing the chasm — selling beyond early adopters to early majority and mass market is a challenge for new product categories. Smart home products that are new, cool and convenient will continue to titillate consumers, but building these technologies into everyday systems such as air conditioning, lighting, washing machines and intercoms, rather than expecting mass market consumers to add on do-it-yourself kits, will signal the arrival of smart home for the masses.

Samsung warns of reduced profits 

Samsung warned that Q2 profit was off as much as 56% due to slowing smartphone sales, a lower demand for memory chips, and U.S. led sanctions against China’s Huawei. The company’s flagship Galaxy S10 smartphone has sold slowly. CNN

dis-rup-shun: The consumer tech economy is driven in large part by smartphones. Top of the line smartphones are simply the best ever made, with large enough capacity for all your photos and apps, outstanding cameras, and amazing screens. Phones that serve needs longer and that are no longer heavily subsidized by carriers have life cycles of 3+ years, changing the entire demand model. Both carriers and handset makers have created their own dilemma — changing the product and buying experience but expecting the same replacement cycle.

Navigating the challenges of travel with the right apps

Wired offers some travel tips, aside from suggesting that you sign up for TSA Pre-check. Finding cheap flights: Skyscanner, Google Flights and Scott’s Travel Scanner are good discount finders. Downloading Google Maps of your destination before you leave helps you avoid data roaming fees. Google Translate will help with language issues and if you are heading to Southeast Asia, you will want to grab Grab, the Asian equivalent for Lyft and Uber. App in the Air provides updates on delays and gate changes, and Mobile Passport Control is similar to Global Entry, providing you with expedited customs processing in (hopefully) shorter lines.

dis-rup-shun: Over 2.7 million apps are currently listed on Google’s Play Store. Travel apps fall into two categories: ones that help you shop across all vendors for the cheapest, closest, or most available, and those that help you quickly shop your preferred provider (American Airlines, Bonvoy Hotels, Avis Rental Cars). The ultimate success of brand marketing is to keep you shopping within one brand, making all the other apps irrelevant. Expect to see more loyalty points awarded within a vendor’s own app to keep you “at home.”

Planes that can land themselves anywhere 

Researchers at Munich’s Technische Universität München (TUM) have developed technology that enables an autonomous plane to land without ground to plane radio communications. TechCrunch

dis-rup-shun: Commercial aircraft have employed autopilot features to assist with landings for many years. Unlike the system developed at TUM, today’s systems depend on a series of ground based radios, found only at larger airports, to guide the plane. The autonomous system enables a plane to land anywhere based on the “visual” capabilities of the onboard computer. This technology will be increasingly important to drones that will have to ‘spot’ good landing surfaces on your front porch, or to differentiate the sidewalk from the grass or planting bed.

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Is the magic gone at Apple?

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Apple is losing its luster

Forbes says that Apple is going the way of IBM — the once great technology leader that peaked and has slowly lost its market power. The evidence provided includes Apple’s rock star lead designer, Jony Ive’s departure last week. This follows Q1’s revenue decline of 5%. Apple did report a 16% increase in service revenue last quarter but its iPhone revenue, over 50% of its total revenues, fell over 17%. The company’s last megahit was the iPad, launched in 2010.

dis-rup-shun: Tech watchers will agree that a definitive mark of a company’s peak is the moment when it builds a lavish headquarters building. The completion of Apple’s ring campus was an indicator that the company was overly impressed with its own aura to the detriment of customer focus. Apple is the symbol of the post PC tech economy, and it is critical that the company continue to lead innovation, design and sales, despite the loss of key people including Jobs and Ive.

40th anniversary of the Walkman

Sony’s Walkman, released on July 1, 1979, created the first personal, portable music experience — enabling people to take their favorite music with them and experience it privately (the boom box had been around for nearly a decade). While Sony enjoys only a small share of the personal music player market today, the Walkman set the stage for the Discman and for personal music players, eventually perfected by the iPod. The Verge

T-Mobile joins the 5G fray

T-Mobile has now switched on its 5G network in 6 cities, joining Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint with some form of offering. The service results in speeds of 250 Mbps, or 5 to 10x the speeds of 4G. The service, however is not ready for prime time as it rides on spectrum not compatible with many phones. Gizmodo

dis-rup-shun: The 5G race is a reminder that competition is a great thing. 5G does not make economic sense at the moment, as great amounts of infrastructure, both handsets and network, must be upgraded and carriers simply wouldn’t do it if their competition wasn’t. 

Fireworks — one of the few things you cannot buy from Amazon

Few things are not available on Amazon.com, but fireworks and other explosive devices are prohibited from the online retail system. Amazon has constructed special warehouses for handling hazardous goods and is building its own delivery network, but so far fireworks are not in the plans. Wired

dis-rup-shun: Fireworks stands may be the only mom and pop enterprises not threatened by the Seattle behemoth. Happy 4th of July.

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The gadgets that most changed our lives this decade

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The devices that most altered our lifestyle in the 2010s

While the decade is not quite over, ZDNet provides a round up of consumer technologies that had the biggest impact on our lives. 

2010: Apple iPad. Other tablets existed but failed until Apple provide an easy to use interface and many, many available apps.

2011: Chromebook. The browser only computer-like device was a big hit for the educational sector.

2012 Raspberry Pi. This $25 development computer was the basic building block for people to invent connected devices.

2013: Playstation 4 and XBOX One. These consoles are responsible for an entire refresh of game console libraries.

2014: Satya Nadella and Windows 10. Nadella took over a flagging Microsoft from Steve Ballmer and put it back on track.

2015: Amazon Echo and Alexa. Amazon has made Alexa the defacto voice interface for the home and soon, car.

2016: Pokemon Go. This game taught the world what augmented reality is and how it works.

2017: Nintendo Switch. Nintendo showed that it could regain its former stature with a portable game console.

2018: Apple Watch Series 4. This watch includes EKG readings and fall detection.

2019: To be named.

dis-rup-shun: PCs were widely available in the 1980s. The Internet was mainstream after 1995. Smartphones became mainstream after 2007. Uber changed transportation starting in 2009. The pace of technology innovation is increasing each year, making the release cycle between game changers shorter and shorter. In five years we will be talking about how drones changed the delivery business starting in 2020.

Tablets get a new lease on life as second screens

Apple has released an application called Sidecar which turns an iPad into a second monitor for a Mac. Just put the iPad into a stand and the device is a slave to the computer. TechCrunch

dis-rup-shun: A brilliant move by Apple and a real advantage over PCs. PCs will be quick to emulate this functionality, and maybe even Apple will enable this functionality for PCs in order to sell more iPads, but iPads were falling out of favor to slim laptops and large smartphones. This will keep people buying iPads.

Apple’s serious production woes

Apple contracted with Samsung to build a massive OLED (higher quality display technology) manufacturing plant to handle higher volumes of iPhones. Problem is, iPhone sales are way down, meaning the plant is running at less than 50% of capacity. To address this shortfall and liability to Samsung, Apple has cancelled its 5.8 inch iPhone model and will be adding OLED screens to a larger number of its products (that weren’t originally intended to get the better screens). That means better iPhones are coming in 2020, providing less incentive to upgrade in 2019. Forbes

dis-rup-shun: The economic impact of slowing iPhone sales will hit Apple hard. Its other popular products don’t have nearly the volume of iPhones. A slowing Apple will have a significant impact on a global economy that is appearing fragile. Bumpy road ahead.