Maybe, like Schrodinger’s cat, we can all just avoid looking at Google Quantum AI and it will stay in a superposition of dead and alive.
81 karma · joined September 9, 2013
Edit: it's misleading because the article actually says 65% of smartphone users download zero apps in an average month. That doesn't mean most people never download apps. Just not every month.
So a PE of 60 means the market is expecting very approximately 60% year on year growth.
The debate hinges on this: is UX a special basis of competition that can't be disrupted? Will consumers pay a premium for better UX forever? Will the cheaper alternative never be "good enough"? Won't people put up with a few minor annoyances? What if it saves them money?
I think UX is a hygiene factor: when it's bad it annoys you to the point where you do something about it, but when UX is good enough, most people start worrying about other things.
That's different from design: I think some people will continue to pay a premium because they love Jony Ive designs and they can afford it. And some will pay for a status symbol. And some will need the performance. But none of that is the mass market.
Google might clean up with their pick of the best surviving startups and the best devs going cheap, because they have more diverse sources of advertising revenue, but they might also be under pressure to control costs if investors panic and flee tech.
That's what puts the incumbent in an "innovator's dilemma": do you chase the high end and high margins, and if so which high-end niches do you chase (gamers who want graphics performance, design-lovers who want a precision machined marvel of industrial design) or do you go lower cost and high volume? The latter is a race to the bottom, so the incumbents tend to pick the former and retreat up-market. It's not unusual for the incumbent's profits to increase temporarily when this happens because of their focus on the most profitable customers.
The problem is it doesn't last: the low-cost producers who are already good enough for the low end of the market continue to improve, until they become good enough for the middle of the market too, and grab more and more market share and more and more profit share. And then, looking for even more growth, they head for the top end of the market (or get disrupted themselves).
Ironically, if there wasn't an up-market to retreat to, there would be no dilemma. Android and iOS would have to compete head to head for the same customers with the same requirements (rather than one taking all the budget consumers and the other taking the gamers and others with higher requirements).
As it is, we could be seeing a low-end disruption, and the high-end consumers will be the last to notice.
But if anyone ever builds such a quantum computer it isn't necessarily the end for public key crypto because there is a workaround that will work on classical computers, and that is to avoid trapdoor functions that can be broken by Shor's algorithm. So if a quantum computer comes along that can break, say, 256 bit RSA, we can save public key crypto by everyone switching to a different algorithm. That's the idea of post-quantum cryptography. And although RSA might be broken by a future quantum computer we can still have some sort of public key cryptography.
From the looks of this blog post, though, one of the new post-quantum public key algorithms can be broken. At least it could be if anyone ever makes a big enough quantum computer. And there's still the possibility that someone will find a trapdoor function that will be quantum resistant, so it isn't the end for all public key crypto.
tl;dr One more public key scheme might have fallen to a quantum algorithm. But the quantum hardware isn't there yet, so it's OK for now.