Tom McCarthy: “Quantum computers will create good businesses in the next 5 – 15 years, but not before then. Many R&D breakthroughs are required to build useful machines. I doubt the first great quantum computing company has been founded yet.”
Mint: “India’s tech industry is investing in AI to stay competitive, but the payoff is proving elusive. The problem may not be the technology itself, but the way work is structured. Unless firms re-imagine value creation from first principles, the benefits of AI may fail to surface.”
From The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai: “There were no children at the dinner party … because there were no children in India any more in the homes of successful parents of a successful class. The children were in Geneva, Hong Kong, Sydney, London, New York and Vermont. They were at Harvard, Oxford, Siemens, the United Nations, Microsoft, Amnesty, Seagram, McKinsey, the World Bank, Sloan Kettering and Hewitt College.” [via LRB]
WSJ: “Over the past three decades, Arsenal supporters have been spoiled with some of the prettiest, most eye-catching soccer in Europe. They’ve delighted in speed and movement and creative players who stroke the ball around the field like golf shots. But lately, nothing has excited them more than the opposite of all that. Their club has charged into first place in the Premier League by studying, honing, and reinventing the moments when play comes to a complete standstill: free kicks, corner kicks, and penalties. While most teams have historically treated these set pieces as afterthoughts, Arsenal has turned them into a hack—and then turned that hack into its whole identity.”
Tim Wu: “If left unchecked, a platform’s “take” impedes growth, as we are seeing today. Last year, Amazon charged private sellers, on average, between 50 and 60 percent of their sales in fees, according to the research firm Marketplace Pulse. You don’t need a degree in economics to see how that can discourage investment and innovation. Nearly every business in nearly every sector of the economy must now confront how much of its returns it will have to share with one platform or another. It’s effectively a system of private taxation.”
