In An End to Parking? Clive Thompson writes about an aspect of self-driving cars that I haven’t seen before: the impact it will have on urban design. In particular, the amount of space we need for parking should change dramatically:

Robot cars could also drive much more closely to one another, packing far more vehicles onto a street. […]

What’s more, they’d never need to park. At the University of Texas-Austin, Kara Kockelman—a professor of transportation engineering—modeled the impact of autonomous ride-sharing vehicles and found that each one could replace up to a dozen regular cars. The robocars could drive all day long, stopping only to refuel or for maintenance; at night, when there was less demand, they could drive out to a remote parking spot on the outskirts of town. The upshot, Kockelman figures, is that if you shifted the entire city to autonomous cars, it would need a staggering 90 percent less parking than it needs today.

Cortney Harding makes some good points about the behaviors of different music buying personas in Is There a Streaming Ceiling?

The future is beginning to look like it will be a two tiered system — the top group of music fans will pay for streaming and everyone else will buy a handful of albums a year. Think of all the people you know who bought the Adele album, and I’ll bet that for many of them, it was the only album they bought this year. Many of these consumers aren’t all the interested in what streaming can offer them — they are content with hearing new music on the radio, buying one or two albums a year, and perhaps seeing one or two concerts.

It feels like the music industry has never been this complicated.

I’ve seen Anshu Sharma’s Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy come up in my feeds a bunch of times over the last couple of days. I personally found the writing quite confusing, and had to read it several times to figure out what he was trying to say. I even drew a picture to help me.

If I understand the argument correctly, Anshu is saying that wherever your core business is in the technology stack, it’s easier to expand your market by going down the stack than up. Like so:

This is obviously an oversimplification and leaves a lot of things out, but it was just a way for me to make sense of the article. That said, it’s this part in particular that stood out for me:

The bottleneck for success often is not knowledge of the tools, but lack of understanding of the customer needs. Database engineers know almost nothing about what supply chain software customers want or need. They can hire for that, but it is not a core competency.

The reason for this is that you are yourself a natural customer of the lower layers. Apple knew what it wanted from an ideal future microprocessor. It did not have the skills necessary to build it, but the customer needs were well understood. Technical skills can be bought/acquired, whereas it is very hard to buy a deep understanding of market needs.

In other words, it’s easier for Apple to take on Intel than it is for Apple to take on Facebook. Likewise, it’s easier for Amazon (AWS) to take on hardware manufacturers than it is for them to take on Salesforce. And the reason for this is that most companies understand the customer needs of the components their core business is built out of, but they don’t understand the customer needs of the businesses that other companies build using their components.

Update: This tweet from Peter Matthaei is a much better summary than the one I came up with:

.@RianVDM If your company uses something, it’s down the stack; anything that companies can build with your stuff is up the stack.

— Peter Matthaei (@mobivangelist) January 20, 2016

It’s an interesting theory, especially if you consider the logical conclusion that apps and services like Facebook and Salesforce (etc.) are at the top of the stack, and everyone not originally in the software business is going to have a really difficult time competing with them. I’d be curious to hear what others think of this…

Sarah Kessler sets out to treat an unproved disorder with an unproven form of therapy, and lived to tell the tale. From What I Learned In 12 Weeks Of Therapy For Social Media Addiction, about using online chat therapy provider Talkspace:

Though everyone says they’re addicted, [Roni Frank, co-founder of Talkspace] says, they aren’t necessarily motivated to solve the problem. She compares it to cigarettes. “In the early years, people were smoking like crazy,” she says, “and at some point, everybody started to be aware of how harmful it is. I think the same thing will happen with social media, and how it is basically promoting poor mental health.”

Social media therapy is not the only aspect of Talkspace that has yet to be fully embraced by the mainstream. The idea that therapeutic help can come from an app, in general, has been met with some skepticism. “Developing a relationship with your patients in online therapies can be a problem, because you can’t see emotional cues,” Madalina Sucala, a clinical psychologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who has researched how clinicians feel about e-therapy, told The Verge, “and sometimes you can’t convey empathy.”

Filing this in my ever-growing “what a time to be alive” category.

Leigh Alexander wrote a very interesting essay on how Facebook is getting a little… “intimate” with its users lately. She extrapolates that to a growing trend in The New Intimacy Economy:

Pretending at closeness is really the only way forward for anyone who wants to make money on the internet. As such, watch as organizations pretend, with increasing intensity, that they are individuals. Start counting how many times platforms, services and websites entreat you in human voices, with awkward humor, for money. Watch as the things we expect to be invisible, utilitarian, start oozing emojis and winky-smileys. Even Silicon Valley, global epicenter of whitewashed empathy voids and 1-percenter sci-fi wank fantasies, is going to pretend it cares about you.

Neil Cybart has a very interesting analysis of AAPL, the stock, and Apple, the company. From The Two Apples:

While AAPL investors look at changing revenue sources and Apple entering new industries as risk factors, for Apple such characteristics are normal business and according to plan. It is this divide that will likely continue indefinitely, suggesting it is unwise to expect AAPL to one day begin to follow Apple. Just as a declining AAPL stock price is no indication of a struggling Apple, there will likely come a time when AAPL outperforms peers even though Apple, the company, may be struggling.

The whole article is worth reading if you’re interested in the disconnect between a company that seems to be doing really well, and a stock price that doesn’t reflect that.

In Why Every Gadget You Own Suddenly Wants To Talk To You Mark Wilson imagines a scenario where every single thing in your home is always connected, always listening:

As consumers, we’re caught in the middle of the convenience. Do we choose to side with Siri, Alexa, or Cortana, and talk only to her, despite looming bias and the risk of growing dependent on a single voice—a voice that could take advantage of us? Or do we side with a free market that gives a voice to every stupid overzealous object in our lives, however confusing that may be, in a world where ordering milk becomes a bidding war on a commodities training floor?

Which future do you root for? They both sound horrible.

This is the current situation we are in—The Internet of Way Too Many Things. We’ll eventually figure it out and make useful connected products, but right now it’s just a race to be first, although no one really seems to know first at what.

I really enjoyed Clive Thompson’s history of How the Phonograph Changed Music Forever. I found a couple of observations particularly interesting. First, on the “new” phenomenon of listening to music alone:

A curious new behavior emerged: listening to music alone. Previously, music was most often highly social, with a family gathering together around a piano, or a group of people hearing a band in a bar. But now you could immerse yourself in isolation. In 1923, the writer Orlo Williams described how strange it would be to enter a room and find someone alone with a phonograph. “You would think it odd, would you not?” he noted. “You would endeavor to dissemble your surprise: you would look twice to see whether some other person were not hidden in some corner of the room.”

This is particularly interesting when you consider it in the context of the latest trend: headphones as the new walls for people in open-plan offices. We went from listening to music together, to listening to music alone, to using music to indicate we don’t want to be bothered. Also see How Headphones Changed the World as a great companion article to the phonograph one.

Second, this is something I hadn’t considered before1:

“In the age of the iPod, and the age of Pandora, and the age of Spotify, we’ve seen the average college student go from being a hard-core ‘rock fan’ or a hard-core ‘hip-hop fan’ to being a connoisseur of a lot of different genres, and a casual fan of dozens more,” he says. “It’s very rare to come across someone of college age or younger who’s only invested in one or two styles of music,” and they’re less likely to judge people on their musical taste.

I’ve written before on the tyranny of endless musical choice, and how much we lose in the age of streaming, but this is most certainly a positive thing. We used to be narrowly defined by the genres we liked, and now we’re able to dip in and out of interesting musical experiences we wouldn’t have been exposed to in the age of the phonograph and CDs.

1. These “man, I’m old” moments are happening with increasing and concerning frequency now. ↩