The Great Unbundling | Hacker News Reader

The Great Unbundling

ben-evans.com

246 pointsnotoriousarun131 comments

Former a16z partner and now independent analyst, Benedict Evans [1]:

> Every year, I produce a big presentation digging into macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. This year, ‘The great Unbundling’.

This is a 134 slide presentation:

> Covid brought shock and a lot of broken habits to tech, but mostly, it accelerates everything that was already changing. 20 trillion dollars of retail, brands, TV and advertising is being overturned, and software is remaking everything from cars to pharma. Meanwhile, China has more smartphone users than Europe and the USA combined, and India is close behind - technology and innovation will be much more widely spread. For that and lots of other reasons, tech is becoming a regulated industry, but if we step over the slogans, what does that actually mean? Tech is entering its second 50 years.

[1] https://www.ben-evans.com/

Can I recommend the "Another podcast" Ben Evans has recently started up with a friend of his. They have a pretty good dynamic and you get a sense of the nuance that slides just don't convey.

Also second the whole "you can do this in powerpoint / keynote" amazement :-)

link: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/another-podcast/id1535...

Thanks for recommending the podcast - we've actually got an episode coming out tomorrow around the topic of pulling such a presentation together. Hope you enjoy it. Toni (aka 'the friend':) )

(sheepish grin)

Although two things in my meagre defence -

- Toni "The Friend" Cowan-Brown does sound like someone out of the Sopranos.

- Actually finding an episode of yours in the Apple Podcast app was so frustrating (again just now) that it highlights how immature the "new" media still is - I spend waaay more time listening to podcasts than watching TV and yet newspapers carry TV schedules and the Radio Times publishes nothing on podcasts. Independant reviews I am sure exist somewhere on the internet but who knows where, and the main client seems to actively fight me whilst trying (like everything else) to sell me something sparkly and new.

Ok I am going to start my usual insomnia rant about software agents soon.

Looking forward to your next episode - keep up the good work I am loving it :-)

I'm adopting Toni "The friend" from now on. It has a good ring to it.

We certainly didn't make things easy by calling our podcast "Another Podcast" and yes I agree with you - although audio has been around for a long time, the podcast space still has a lot of maturing to do, and on many fronts.

Thanks for tuning in (is that what people say these days? I don't know anymore) - it's appreciated.

The presentation is amazingly detailed though some of the slides, its hard to tell the message.

I am also curious on how you are pulling so much data from different sources. Looking forward to the presentation talk!

Unless China solves for the skewed demographics in the next ten years, seems like sheep-behavior to include them in projections for the future. Has anyone seen these types of presentations but say 1980, except it says Japan instead?

I'd like to see some original thinking that stands away from the crowd for once.

Here's an original thought. The presentation asserts that Tesla has eaten the entire auto industry, and this is because of slipping battery costs. It does not, however, correctly credit China for this change.

What other changes has China recently led? Video conferencing, mass-adoption of mobile payment, death of the desktop, home food delivery (pre-COVID), online grocery, e-Health passports.

Wow, way to twist the history to your own narrative. Also, no, Tesla has not eaten the entire auto industry, stock market cap doesn't equal to product market share

> Video conferencing

Zoom (American company) launched in 2011. DingTalk started way late in 2014 and wasn't even that popular until 2017. and still playing catchup to Zoom.

> mass-adoption of mobile payment

Japan in the 90s. I believe Chinese citizens were still mostly riding bikes then.

> death of the desktop

Japan in the 90s

> home food delivery (pre-COVID)

Grubhub was founded in 2004. IPOed in 2014.

> online grocery

Tesco direct started in UK in 1997.

Needlessly snarky response. Write to the author about the Telsa claim. Yes, there are earlier examples in each case. I personally worked in digital video in 2000.

I was referring clearly to mass adoption (actual market penetration). Nothing matches China, period. Look at numbers for WeChat (video), WeChat/Alipay (mobile payment), Meituan/Eleme (delivery), etc.

Tesla hasn’t eaten the audio industry - that’s what investors are speculating. Battery prices are falling because of technology and (mostly) volume, not particularly because of ‘China’

Volume is China. The same for solar.

The middle class in China is currently smaller than the one in Europe. It is - and always will be - much smaller than the middle class of the western countries combined. China is large but other countries together are much larger.

That's the thing. In China, EVs and solar are not the domain of the middle class. They're used by everyone.

> Unless China solves for the skewed demographics in the next ten years, seems like sheep-behavior to include them in projections for the future. Has anyone seen these types of presentations but say 1980, except it says Japan instead?

The presentation directly addresses this in slide 86.

Only superficially. Just because China's population is larger doesn't mean it won't get hit by the same forces as Japan back in the 80s. China had a demographic tailwind in the past few decades, which is reversing now as the population ages while birth rate remains low - its dependency ratio will spike and a huge amount of resources will have to be diverted to elderly care.

These analysts who tout China live in 2008 China. And they ignore Xi Jing Ping + demographics + middle income trap + total debt as if they doesn't exist.

For someone who only passed through a Chinese airport, what differentiates China in 2008 and 2020?

12 years and an optimistic future of constant growth.

Or even 2021, as insanely futuristic as it may sound? :)

Oh we recurred already!

If China suffers from the Middle Income Trap it will be the first East Asian country to do so. I believe in the CPC’s potential to mismanage the economy but I don’t believe that hard. More than likely we’re talking US levels of idiocy, stopping the high productivity cities from growing, not India or Argentina levels ever you just piss away entire decades with zero or negative growth.

Why do those demographics matter, though? I can't imagine China having a strong welfare state or super expensive healthcare for the elderly. So old people won't cost China much (though they'll probably have miserable lives if they didn't save enough).

Even the population going down isn't really an issue, they have more poor people to take out of poverty than the entire US population, so more than enough labor force. Plus if their population declined 50% (a super far fetched scenario that could happen over an entire century), they will still have 2x the US population.

For most individuals living in China will still be mediocre to bad, but that's still enough for them to create in aggregate an economy 2x the US one.

Japan just couldn't do this, they were always smaller than the US.

Those demographics don't matter nearly as much over the next 10 years as they do over the next 40. But I agree with you that most predictions of China taking over the world seem to completely ignore demographics - which is dumb because it's one of the most predictable parts of a country's future.

Exactly.

700M Chinese citizens who live on $140/month income.

500M 65 year olds by 2050 (money flows up in Chinese society. One grandkid pays 2 parents who pays 4 grandparents, since it's a one child society) Oh and no social safety net. you think CCP members care about the plebs?

> 700M Chinese citizens who live on $140/month income.

That's an incredible amount of space for internal economic growth.

True.

The most probable reality is that neither the bulls, nor the bears, have any clue what will come in China. They probably make less money if they admit that though. "There's too many variables to be certain." Probably sells less than, "The Secret to the Future of China!" So they have to go one way or the other to justify their paychecks maybe?

Nope, these people (farmers for life, migrant workers with no education, people living in abject poverty, etc) are stuck.

If there were actual growth in the economy, China would not outlaw hong kong citizens from leaving to go to England, creating a wall with myanmar to prevent citizens from escaping to there, having concentration camps to force uighurs to work for free, etc.

You could say the same about any undeveloped country, but in reality only a small number of countries have successfully transitioned into developed status - Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, HK. It's not as straightforward a process as it would seem at first glance.

And several Eastern European countries.

And China has taken 700 (800?) million people out of poverty and shows a trajectory similar to the East Asian tigers.

What countries do you know of that have China's educational levels, manufacturing capacity, natural resources and political stability that didn't make it into "developed status"?

I'm thinking about Italy: after WWII, the country was still mainly rural and much had to be rebuilt because of the war. And yet (with the help and blessing of the US, then much interested in keeping Italy on the side of the West) it experienced twenty years of rapid economic growth. It had a good education system, and it had manufacturing capacity (FIAT, Olivetti, Montedison, Ansaldo, Zanussi...) and especially, it had tens of millions who wanted to buy their first car, their first washing machine, their first tv, their first telephone, or wanted to rebuild their houses with modern techniques. It needed workers for the factories and sourced them from the poorest parts of the country, triggering an internal migration and further growth in the economic capitals of the country. China seems to have been in the same phase for the past 30 years, and it's so big it can keep up at the same pace for other 20 or 30.

Fearing both unemployment brought on by technological advancement and population graying is a hopeless contradiction. Either one, the other, or neither will dominate.

I bet on tech, especially because negative population growth will put upward pressure on wages.

> Has anyone seen these types of presentations but say 1980, except it says Japan instead?

I did read a lot of books which "Bright Heads" of US political scene wrote in nineties-eighties.

US royally f..king up its ally Japan is the biggest reason why Japan did not become a counterweight to China.

Basically, US assured China's victory when it both alienated, and weakened the Japan.

That both lead to Japan putting big money into China (Japan is China's biggest foreign investor,) and it becoming rather passive to US calls to do anything as about China after Washington finally got hit with understanding of its blunder.

>US royally f..king up its ally Japan is the biggest reason why Japan did not become a counterweight to China.

Can you elaborate on what the United States did?

If you did not read the books, Japan was for America a bigger boogeyman than the Union, and Ben Ladin combined by late eighties.

It lead to an incredible economic, and political pressure US put on Japan, which culminated in US forcing Japan into Plaza accords, and the three Japanese lost decades which followed.

The Plaza Accords were a complete failure at their twin objectives of increasing US exports to Japan and decreasing Japanese exports to the US, neither of which happened.

They did trigger a wave of Japanese overseas investment and Japan's own asset bubble, leading to the Lost Decade when it burst, but these were hardly planned effects.

Yeah the current issues with Japan are more intrinsic than anything else (inability to innovate, etc)

If I had to guess, American investments took over as #1 in FDI in 1992. Japan was still 4th in 1991. You can thank wall street, republican congress, and bill clinton for that.

https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/15/business/foreign-investor... "Last year (1991), the United States dropped to fifth, with less than a 5 percent share of foreign investment in China, behind Hong Kong, Germany, Taiwan and Japan." then the article talks about massive US investments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_direct_investment_in_C... FDI spiked in 1992

You need to keep in mind that Hong Kong is there mostly as a proxy, and mostly for China's neighbours.

> Unless China solves for the skewed demographics in the next ten years, seems like sheep-behavior to include them in projections for the future.

True, long term, China has sealed its future, but even if you half China's population, it will still be no. 1 in pretty much everything it is no. 1 today.

Pretty much nothing aside of war, civil war, or a second cultural revolution scale political crisis can stop it overtaking USA economically in coming 1-2 decades.

I’m genuinely curious why this comment is receiving downvotes. China becoming the world’s economic power by mid-century has been my set assumption for years. Has something changed with this expectation?

China population is 1398 Million, india is like 1366. China in half would be 700 million. Maybe it just don't add up? IME this site downvotes bad maths.

This. China may have more factories but its focus is on industry not spirituality. India will achieve Religious Victory by 2050.

Either that or Ghandi will nuke us all.

Plenty of black swans occur when dictatorship is the regime.

- assassination of dictator => internal turmoil

- early death of dictator => internal turmoil

- scuffle with neighboring country => economic sanctions by the free world

- dictator can't lose face, does something stupid => economic sanctions by the free world

- (Germany, Merkel, CDU) support for the dictator wanes and disappears => economic sanctions by the free world

- local governments cover up economic losses until its too great => hyperinflation, central government collapse

- triggering business defaults leading to dollar shortages leading to faster capital outflow => hyperinflation, central government collapse

- made up economic numbers are exposed => foreign businesses pull out

- nationalization of foreign companies assets => foreign businesses pull out

- natural disasters + lack of food supply => citizen riot

Many of those things apply to democracies, too, unfortunately.

The main thrust of thesis seems to be that emerging countries with improving human capita and large internal markets will probably emulate Chinese tech sovereignty model and debundle from US tech dominance. SV controlling global data is increasingly untenable, even less so with recent developments.

Also Chinese demographic crisis overplayed IMO, China is not Japan. Consider China as two countries segregated by massive income disparity, one is high HDI coastal country that forms a bloc that can compete with other big players like US / EU on PPP basis (with gap that is only widening), another is low HDI interior underclass comparable to poor developing country. The competitive country is drawing talent from total population pool comparable to OECD countries combined with sufficient replacement fertility to match countries with massive immigration flow. This disparity can be arbitraged in ways high income countries like Japan, US/west can't.

In terms of demographic bomb, 10% of Chinese GDP can essentially keep the bottom 50% of society running with boost in QoL. Or put it this way, 10% of US GDP is 80% of India's GDP. The Chinese demographic crisis is a manageable internal "foreign" aid / redistribution program between rich and poor. But unlike wealthy countries, the have nots do not have same expectations, they're less costly to please and simultaneously a massive source of cheap labour rich countries must import to manage aging societies, which China can also "outsource" to cheaply coordinate other sectors, i.e. infrastructure, military, healthcare. IMO rich countries with expectation of comprehensive safety nets is going to have a much more difficult time dealing with aging than China. There's a reason large segments of wealthy countries are disenfranchised and protesting even though they are and will remain significant richer per capita than China. Apart from CCP just having more tools at stability maintenance, it's basic psychology, a poor Chinese citizen life will improve compared to prior generations whereas a rich OECD citizen will not.

Check out some of Peter Zeihan's work for some original geopolitical thinking re: US/China https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyICg5OYXvM

It's easy to be original when you have a decade of being demonstrably wrong under your belt. Just say something out of the ordinary, poof, origionality.

His demographic data is correct. Any extrapolations he makes based on that data are usually completely off base. I used to give him credit around 2012, but not any more.

There are no projections about the future in this presentation. And it does very directly reference the panic about Japan and point out why China might be different.

I don't know about China but, yeah, in the late 80s or so there was this incredible panic about Japan buying everything up. And various Nobel Prize-winning economists telling anyone who would listen that we had to institute government-industry partnerships like MITI or the US was doomed. And we did create organizations like SEMATECH to counter a perceived gap in semiconductors.

Some of it was probably a useful kick in the pants, especially in manufacturing processes. But a lot of it was panic emulation of Japan that was neither needed nor especially useful.

Does anyone recognize which software is used to make these graphs and diagrams? (I love how everything is aligned very precisely, and the design is cohesive across slides with respect to colors and fonts.)

Looks like a normal PowerPoint to me

Could be, I'd love it if anyone else could confirm. For the record, I've tried to create graphs like these in Excel, and I've struggle getting them just right. So the question I have is whether it's just because I don't know Excel well enough, or whether I should be using other software.

Can confirm Excel can do very clean graphs

Both. PowerPoint + Excel can do some pretty good charts. You need to put time & effort into custom themes to really make it work. Using custom themes keeps colors and styles consistent across charts and slides, with smarter defaults so you don’t have to make as many manual changes.

I’ve found it quickly breaks down when you push beyond the canned styles or try to apply them to more complex data (e.g. more than 5 categories). Then you have to move to something like Plotly.

As always, your data graphics are only as good as your data. Make sure you’re working from clean tables to ensure you don’t start making errors.

Great tips here thanks. I haven’t looked at custom themes before that sounds like a promising direction.

Keynote. I used to use PowerPoint, producing identical slides.

Thanks!

(Note that this is from the creator of the presentation himself. It sounds like Keynote or PowerPoint should be viable for producing slides like this.)

A downloadable PDF would be appreciated.

As would be expansions of acronyms. GLV? GLA?

I'd especially challenge that regulation must be a regresive tax, though yes, it often is.

How do you make the colours, do you have some automation for that or is it all manual?

The slides on vehicle emission regulations (slides 121-122) made me think of needing to report how much energy your servers are consuming.

But don't worry! AWS will automatically keep track for you and add the tax to your monthly bill.

Is there a way to full screen the slides on iOS Safari! Text is too small for me to read. I tried clicking all the widgets but couldn’t find a way to blow it up. :(

> Is there a way to full screen the slides on iOS Safari!

In the controls bar just under the slides themselves, click the "Full screen" widget to the left of the "Options menu" widget (looks like a gear).

I don’t think I have that option? https://imgur.com/a/qx9f8XB

Turning off content blockers did not change anything.

> I don’t think I have that option?

Apologies for my poor reading comprehension! I was using Safari on macOS. I also don't have that option when using my iPhone, and couldn't find any tricks for getting around it.

I was able to zoom in and out with gestures, in case that's helpful.

Pinch/zoom it to go to an area you want bigger. Then it can be scrolled, not every time but most of the time. Unzoom to go to the next slide.

How much of a drag is the high mobile data cost in the US for the technology market ? Or does it even matter ?

Prices are high because demand is there. The US is cursed with being too rich. The exact same thing happens in healthcare, education, etc.

Sure, the rent seeking is enormous in all of these sectors, but to eliminate that faces the usual obstacles.

Prices of services produced in the USA is high because the USA exports dollars https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-class-politics-of-t...

But mobile networking should not be a service in the labor-cost-predominating sense. That said, I'm very glad to see others citing Phenomenal World :),

I acknowledge the high prices. I'm just wondering what kinds of opportunities this prevents.

I do like his blog. But I‘m not going to click through a presentation without him even teasing his core thesis. A tldr would be much appreciated otherwise I would prefer if he packaged his (without a doubt) great presentation into an article (he already has all the illustrations)

I'd agree in general, but there are a few people that are worth going though whatever presentation they put together. Ben is one of them

I'm not sure I quite get the retail unbundling argument. Chinese sellers selling through Amazon is not direct to the buyer. It's through Amazon.

But then he points out the growth of Shopify.

Right so you don't really have a bundling or unbundling. You have the same trend that happened in brick and mortar happening online. Speciality retailers are doing fine. Massive scale retailers are doing fine. And everyone in the middle gets squeezed.

Shopify needs a satisfaction guarantee like PayPal. I mean you can use PayPal but the biggest risk here is fraud.

The problem with un-bundling US retail is what we currently see via 3rd party Amazon sales. You end up with exploding hover boards, electrical fires caused by bad chargers, tainted or counterfit makeup etc... The appeal of Target or Walmart is that they have a duty to their customer to not sell them dangerous products and they have clout to get cheap prices. 10,000 eCommerce shops selling private label chargers exacerbates this problem. I can trace the product to a factory in China sure, but that doesn't solve my lawsuit problem. Do I sue shopify in this case?

Thanks Ben, I have fond memories of listening to your a16z discussions about the iPhone 8 (or so) while rocking my baby to sleep. We live in fun times.

Can somebody summarize this in 20 words or less?

Software eats the world, COVID made it even faster, companies need to sell direct to consumers to survive.

Perfect. Thanks

So many "trend" type presentations like this one take for granted that streaming will eat TV. Sure, cord-cutting is a trend. But Covid-19 isn't necessarily accelerating it. A huge contingent of the population, especially internationally and among US boomers will keep their cable bundle. Smart marketers will figure out how to leverage TV as digital advertising gets more competitive and streamers go on without ads.

A huge contingent of the population, especially internationally and among US boomers will keep their cable bundle.

Not just Boomers. I've seen numbers showing that Gen X is getting tired of jumping through hoops to watch TV, so they're going back to cable, or going * gasp * OTA.

The numbers also show that Gen Z seems to embrace "owned" physical media a lot more than Millennials, and that they're also more likely to go full OTA just because they see little value in paying for multiple streams or a cable subscription.

It seems that Millennials love streams and subscriptions, and everyone else is rethinking whether that's a good idea.

It took me a long time to get over the hump of canceling cable TV. But, then, I don't get any OTA. If I got good broadcast TV signals, I'd probably have taken the leap much sooner.

I'm also not sure it's useful to distinguish a cable bundle from streaming if that streaming includes YouTube TV or whatever. You're really just getting the bundle in a different form at that point--and not really saving a lot of money.

> I'm also not sure it's useful to distinguish a cable bundle from streaming if that streaming includes YouTube TV or whatever. You're really just getting the bundle in a different form at that point--and not really saving a lot of money.

Expect one you can cancel and purchase within seconds whenever you want or need to, and can watch on any device you want, and deal with fewer ad breaks.

Cable TV is on no way a comparable product to the streaming services. People complaining about the horror of clicking a few buttons to cancel and resubscribe on a website gave no idea of the type of horror that awaits when dealing with a cable company.

Fair enough, although that only applies if you want to dip in and out or watch on different devices. Had I actually watched cable TV latterly sufficient to justify what I was paying for it, I'd have had very little reason to switch to YouTube TV or whatever. The content is pretty comparable and the issue for me was that I just wasn't watching it nearly as much as other services that cost a lot less. I still wish I had live TV now and then but not enough to pay for it.

I was actually pleasantly surprised that when I canceled cable TV and my landline from Comcast they didn't even put up a mild fight. (I still have Internet from them.)

As a millennial, there was a "golden age" for video streaming that has now passed where Netflix was the biggest game in town and had most of the desirable content. Now that there are 6 or 7 streaming services each with their own exclusives (and regional differences) streaming is becoming much less appealing.

Netflix was never that great for movies but you could always subscribe to their DVDs. Unfortunately, more and more titles are becoming unavailable. (I resubscribed for a while during the pandemic but just canceled it again.) Of course, you can often just rent a la carte as well.

It is a very fragmented landscape. On the other hand, I find I can subscribe to a few services and get access to far more good content than I have time to watch. There's very little that I just have to see and, if there is, I can just spin up some service for a month.

Circa 2007-2011, before their deal with Starz expired, Netflix streaming usually had any movie, new or old, I ever wanted to see. The catalogue was massive. Now, around 3/4 of the time (my estimate) I'd be forced to rent or stream elsewhere.

https://latimesblogs.latimes.com/entertainmentnewsbuzz/2011/...

I guess we have different tastes. I actually canceled Netflix streaming when they started charging separately for it and only picked it up again when House of Cards came out. And I still remember telling a Netflix exec I knew that their streaming movie catalog wasn't very good. His response was that people come to Netflix for movies and stay for the TV shows.

I read people saying what you did but it just doesn't match my experience; I kept a DVD subscription the whole time until fairly recently.

But I don't think any of the streaming services are great for movies. I watch what they have and then either rent from RedBox, buy a disc if it's something I think I may want to rewatch, or pay for a streaming rental.

No, Netflix had a massive catalogue at one point. It was even much later than 2011. Probably up until 2015, was when they really started losing content.

Netflix had every movie when the production companies viewed streaming as a minor distraction.

Every movie.

Now that every corporate interest wants a streaming site of their own, bittorrent looks attractive again.

>Netflix had every movie when the production companies viewed streaming as a minor distraction.

That is simply wrong. Why would they even have maintained a DVD rental service under those circumstances? All my "movie buff" friends always maintained a DVD rental subscription.

Because broadband penetration at the time wasn't as large as it is today.

Those who are tired of paid streaming services can just go torrenting.

Either Gen Z has become absolutely technologically inept or these numbers are used to shape a narrative that pleases the news conglomerates.

Gen X and older Millenials are the most technologically adept age cohorts if we're talking about computers. Younger Millenials and Gen Z grew up with computers as appliances.

Sports alone are a huge reason that keeps many people on their cable bundle--and it tends to be something a lot of people want to watch on their TV rather than a computer.

>It seems that Millennials love streams and subscriptions, and everyone else is rethinking whether that's a good idea.

I'm a bit skeptical of a lot of generational stereotypes. I think many people are having some subscription fatigue especially with video. But I can't say that I've seen a lot of evidence that Gen Z is particularly addicted to accumulating "stuff" especially media in physical form.

e.g. https://www.rev.com/blog/how-gen-z-and-millennials-consume-v...

I think sport is the next thing the streaming services will look at. Amazon has started to do this, and now has some (a small percentage) of the England premier league soccer matches in the UK.

Amazon (and netflix, apple, etc) has way deeper pockets than the current rightsholders (Sky, which was owned by Murdoch until he sold to Comcast recently, and BT Sport, which is also completely dwafered by Big Tech).

It's difficult to see them not going big for this next time the rights are up for renegotiation. Amazon and Netflix have extremely high household penetration already, with their apps prebundled on so many TVs.

only a matter of time before all ESPN and Fox Sports are bundled into Disney+, since Disney owns both.

I would hope they keep it as an option. Sports make up a big chunk of an overall cable bill. So if Disney bundles it in, expect that to put big upward pressure on the price of a subscription.

Pretty sure Fox Sport is one of the Fox properties not included in the sale?

oh you're right. looks like Disney just owns Fox Sports Australia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fox_Sports

Cable operators already offer skinny bundles with only news/sport for lower cost, so you'll get a new leg down just from that + full cord cuts. But that's just delaying the inevitable I think - they'll abandon cable TV when margins turn negative (half a decade or so), and live off their broadband businesses.

A lot of sports streaming requires a cable subscription, to even be allowed to stream the content.

Except the games that are streaming only, and you can’t watch on cable.

It is very consumer hostile experience.

I guess I'm Gen X. Or a very young Boomer. I've just stopped watching TV altogether. "News" is a joke, and everything else seems like a waste of time.

This. And I refuse to watch serials anymore, just feature-length films. Why? Because I’m tired of being strung along. Here, watch this season now. But wait 12-18 months for the next season. Repeat. By the time that next season rolls around, I just don’t care about the characters anymore.

Fiction writers love to play this trick with book trilogies and book series. So I don’t start a book series unless all books are already in print.

They're just different forms. Films, multi-film series and connected series, miniseries, episodic TV, serialized TV, blends of episodic and serialized, anthologies, shorts, etc. are all different and have their own pluses and minuses.

It's obviously fine to prefer some and not others.

You can equally see TV seasons as giving the opportunity to take a break from something for a while.

So you loved True Detective then? Beginning, middle, end, all crystalized in the writer/producer's mind before they even began shooting?

I also don't like the season-after-season thing you're referring to, but I am encouraged that over the last 3 or 4 years we've seen a small increase in the number of stories being told with a defined story arc, and no sequels.

Xer here. If by joke you mean it's brainwashing and propaganda, I'm with you. A joke, randomly oriented, I could take, the one sided preaching that news, TV and movie broadcast 24x7 is just infuriating.

OTA? With ads every 15 mins? I don't think so.

Netflix (and later amzn video and to a slightly lesser extent hulu) was the way out of that hellhole, and I don't see even boomers like me "going back".

See slide 53

streaming in inferior in a lot of ways. It used to be I could turn on the TV and it powered up instantly. Now it takes about 30 seconds to turn on my TV, open streaming app, and click play. There's a real benefit to some analog mediums.

There is a lot of content I have passed up on watching, because it required firing up an app on my phone, searching for the content, turning on the tv, finding the Apple Play icon. And some apps still don’t support AirPlay. And some work directly with my TV, and some only with Apple TV.

Vs just turning on the TV and flicking channels to see what’s on.

> Vs just turning on the TV and flicking channels to see what’s on.

Which is great until the answer is "nothing worth watching", which is pretty common in my personal experience with my personal tastes (i.e. take this as a valid datapoint, but only a single datapoint).

Sorry, I do this seldom, rather, never, but reading in the introduction, "Tech is entering its second 50 years.", I couldn't advance any further. Usurpatory taxonomy is even worse than pervasive superlatives. (Is it 160 BC? Are we going to see the Antikythera mechanism? Really?) This is very much stereotypical trend presentation wording.

But if he admitted τέχνη goes back more than 50 years then Ben would need to engage some actual STS instead of just projecting current investment trends! He might even need enough object permanence to understand things existed before he was born!

Pretty sure Ben read history at Cambridge and is aware of the past.

I even have some difficulties figuring out what might distinguish 1971 as a landmark. In computing, it was a mildly impressive year seeing the introduction of coin-op video games (Computer Space), the general availability of floppy disks (while 1960s tech), Niklaus Wirth gave us Pascal as the latest in Algol-like languages, but not really that much out of the ordinary. (Well, the intel 4004 was introduced, starting the age of cost-effective Japanese calculators. But the 8008 was sketched out before that, relying on the late 1960s design of the DP 2200 – and it would take a few years before anyone took serious interest in that one.)

Well as we all know, all of computing revolves around Unix, and therefore effectively begins at 1970-01-01. I'm... mostly joking, although that's actually basically true for the parts of computing that I personally work in so I actually do use 1970 as the beginning mark for the "modern era" in my head.

I forgot about this one! As to my defence, my first computers didn't sport a date (only TI and TI$) and then came classic Macs, which used the more Edwardian January 1, 1904 as the epoch. ;-)

I have never ever been impressed by the author of this piece. Faulty reasoning by mushy historical analogy in the extreme.

It’s very clever to say that ‘technology’ goes back to the ancient Greeks, or the invention of bronze, or maybe the first chipped piece of flint, so ‘there’s nothing new about technology’. But this is also desperately pedantic, and adds nothing at all to the conversation, when we all know perfectly well what the normal usage of the word technology is. Quibbling about terminology tells us nothing about ideas

I'd say, "tech" as in scientifically based engineering design arguably starts with Archimedes. (Mind that the Antikythera mechanism is generally thought to be an offspring of this revolution and that it is also considered by some as the first computer. The circumstances of the site, where it had been discovered, also suggest that mechanisms like this were carefully marketed goods. You might say, that by 90 BC, there had been an established tech business.) However, if you prefer to dismiss this as a lost tradition, then you might consider that there was certainly tech and a thriving tech business in the Victorian age. Even, if you wanted to dismiss any pre-electronics, I have a hard time figuring out what would mark 1971 as a starting point for current developments. (E.g., mind that Moores law was proposed in 1965 or that Kay's KiddiComp/Dynabook concept, which started the handheld revolution, was envisioned in 1968.) The idea that "tech" or technology started in 1971 is highly absurd.

Edit: Please compare a recent entry on the front page, which supported the idea that there hasn't been a key innovation since 1978. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25947901

> when we all know perfectly well what the normal usage of the word technology is

yes, exactly: technology goes back to the ancient Greeks, or the invention of bronze, or maybe the first chipped piece of flint.

Would you have kept reading if it said "Information technology is entering its second 50 years"?

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