George Bilbrey

The Internet has made distribution (of digital goods) free, neutralizing the advantage that pre-Internet distributors leveraged to integrate with suppliers. Secondly, the Internet has made transaction costs zero, making it viable for a distributor to integrate forward with end users/consumers at scale.

This has fundamentally changed the plane of com

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The Internet, though, is a world of abundance, and there is a new power that matters: the ability to make sense of that abundance, to index it, to find needles in the proverbial haystack. And that power is held by Google. Thus, while the audiences advertisers crave are now hopelessly fractured amongst an effectively infinite number of publishers, t... See more

A similar type of partnership with OpenAI will probably not be as profitable as search was; my guess is that Apple will be paying OpenAI, instead of the other way around, [UPDATE: I know longer believe this, and explain why in this post-WWDC Update] but the most important takeaway in terms of Apple’s competitive position is that they will, once aga... See more

Platform-provided AI capabilities will not only be the easiest way for developers to incorporate these features, they will also likely be the best way, at least in terms of the overall user experience. Users will understand how to use them, because they will be “trained” by Apple’s own apps; they will likely be cheaper and more efficient, because t... See more

In short, this isn’t a case of Apple driving arbitrary differentiation; you really do need better hardware to run AI, which means there is the possibility of a meaningful upgrade cycle for the iPhone in particular (and higher ARPUs as well — might Apple actually start advertising RAM differences in iPhone models, since more RAM will always be bette... See more

In other words, any analysis of Apple’s prospects in an AI world should start with the assumption that AI is a complement to Apple’s business, not disruptive. That doesn’t mean that Apple is guaranteed to succeed, of course: AI is the only foreseeable technological advancement that could provide sufficient differentiation to actually drive switchin... See more

Finally , the commentariat exclaims! Apple is in danger of falling dangerously behind! The fact they are partnering with OpenAI is evidence of how desperate they are! In fact, I would argue the opposite: Apple is not too late, they are taking the correct approach up and down the stack, and are well-positioned to be one of AI’s big winners.

Here’s the problem with leading the world in regulation: you can only regulate what is built, and the E.U. doesn’t build anything pertinent to technology.

It’s easy enough to imagine this tale being told in a few year’s time:

The erstwhile center of civilization, long-since surpassed by the United States, leverages the fundamental nature of technolog... See more

If you have a business intelligence bot that you're using to check in on your company's performance, it won't matter whether the relevant numbers are in Excel or Google Sheets or a Pandas dataframe or a Postgres database; if the tool is smart enough, it will know how to convert your request into the appropriate query and get an answer. And that mea... See more

to the extent that there's a part of software that will still retain more of the economics of software, it will be integration tools that are end-product-agnostic.