FT: “The rise of a new generation of tech leaders this century had previously made it easy to write [Larry] Ellison off as part of the sector’s past. His company’s database might have an important place in the guts of government and business IT systems but it hardly seemed central to tech’s future. Until recently, he had shunned the heavy investments needed to make Oracle a player in cloud computing — a business dominated by Amazon, Microsoft and Google. But according to one person who worked closely with Ellison, he always paid attention to the technology transition. Other tech bosses may blaze a trail early in a new technology, but Ellison waits for a market to develop and “watches where the business is, where the money is flowing”. Being first isn’t what matters to him. “It’s about being the last man standing.” Now, with a late play that has caught a tailwind from AI, he may unexpectedly have put his company toe-to-toe with the giants of the cloud business.”
Andrew Robertson: “I distinguish between a continuous improvement and innovation process, and the creation of completely new solutions, as opposed to the improvement of existing ones. If PepsiCo introduces a new flavor of Pepsi or a new flavor of Mountain Dew, that’s what I would call an improvement or an innovation that will generate incremental business. That increment will be measured in percentages. By contrast, we can look at what Red Bull did when they introduced a high-energy drink that was packaged in a very small can and charged a very high premium for it. That was a creation, not an improvement of something that already exists. That was a completely new solution to an existing need. Likewise, every 18 months or every year, there’s a new iPhone, and the new iPhone has a better camera, a better lens—good, valuable improvements to an already great solution. But when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, it was a completely new creation. You measure the success of that not in percentages but in orders of magnitude. That’s the distinction between the creation of a really big idea and continuous improvement and optimization of the solutions that we already have to existing problems. They’re two slightly different things. Both are valuable, but different. You don’t need many big ideas, but you do need ideas.”
Shekhar Gupta: “Regimes collapse because of weak institutions, not leaders or ideologies…To be truly functional and durable, even eternal, a state doesn’t just need a leader, a party, or an ideology. It needs functional and robust institutions.”
Techmeme (celebrating 20 years): “Techmeme is the one essential news site for tech founders, execs, investors, innovators, writers, and assorted thought leaders. It achieves this the only way possible: by being an aggregator that links out to the best reports on the latest key events in tech, ranks them, and commingles them with the most notable posts from social media and beyond. It’s made possible through a unique approach to curation combining algorithms with a team of human editors. The result is a site industry leaders visit daily to update their priors (so to speak) before diving deeper at more specialized journalistic outlets, newsletters, forums like HN or Reddit, and networks like X/LinkedIn/Threads/Bluesky. Unlike an RSS reader, Techmeme is not something you customize. Rather, everyone sees the same Techmeme, so it is the industry’s shared context.” More: “Every morning nearly 100,000 geeks world wide, including some of the richest tech barons in the universe, fire up one of the most dated-looking websites online to find out what’s going on in their world. Techmeme looks and works exactly the same way as it always has. And it has never been more popular. Traffic is up 25 percent this year, likely driven by the explosion of interest in AI, [Gabe] Rivera says.”
