Category: internet

Is OpenAI Today’s Netscape? Or Is It AOL?

As is his want, last week Fred Wilson wrote a provocative post I’ve been thinking about for the past few days. Titled “Netscape and Microsoft Redux?“, Fred notes the parallels between the browser wars of the late 1990s and the present-day battle for dominance in the consumer AI market. And he asks a prescient question: What new, world-defining product might we be missing by focusing on AI chatbots?

In the early days of the Web, everyone thought the most important new product to emerge from the Internet was the browser. Netscape, a startup with just a few months of operating history, defined the market for those browsers in 1994, then dominated it for several years thereafter. But by the late 1990s, the lumbering incumbent Microsoft had stolen Netscape’s lead by leveraging distribution and pricing advantages inherent to its massive Windows monopoly.

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Wired’s Backbone Stiffens

Wired’s current issue

We didn’t have much money when we launched Wired back in January of 1993, but we needed to get the word out somehow. We couldn’t spend our way into brand recognition, so we orchestrated a guerilla campaign: The week Wired hit newsstands, day-glo posters with just two words were plastered on construction sites, vacant wall space, and buses all over San Francisco, New York, and a few other tech-heavy cities. “GET WIRED!” the ads  proclaimed. Never mind that no one knew what Wired was. The point was to get people’s attention, and judging from the newsstand sales, it worked.

(If you want part of the history of that period, read my piece “Get Wired,” which I published earlier this year.)

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Nearly 30 % of All Bullsh*t Online Is Health Related

 

Every so often I have the chance to catch up with Gordon Crovitz and Steve Brill, the founders of NewsGuard. I was an advisor to their company for several years, and we keep in touch, as we share something of an obsession around the decline of journalism and the related erosion of fact-based information online. Both Crovitz and Brill have long and storied careers in “traditional” media – Brill started American Lawyer and CourtTV and authored countless pieces of long form reporting, and Crovitz was the former publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

NewsGuard launched as something of a bullshit detector during the ascendence of social media eight years ago. The company’s first product created “reliability ratings” of news and information-based websites. Not surprisingly, the company immediately became a target of the far right media ecosystem, and remains one today.

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AI Is Breaking The Internet. Can Bill Gross Fix It?

Bill Gross, ocean boiler.

Bill Gross has been here before. 

Back when the Internet was young, when the dot-com wave broke across the monied shoals of Wall Street opportunism, Gross built a world-changing company, took it public, then sold it for billions. 

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The Trouble With Bees

This is not a honey bee.

There’s this throwaway conceit in the current season of Black Mirror that keeps tugging at me, and it’s Friday, so I thought I’d think out loud about it.

In Episode 1, “Common People,” the protagonist, a school teacher, is lecturing her young pupils about pollination. She casually explains how robotic bees have taken over for their organic ancestors, buzzing from flower to flower and, one presumes, keeping the world’s agricultural ecosystem from crashing. The exchange is meant to contextualize the episode as happening sometime in the near future – most of us know that the bee population is crashing, and the concept of autonomous insect drones doesn’t feel that far off. It’s also an elegant reference consistent with one of tech’s most fundamental beliefs – don’t worry, kids, technology can and will save us from ourselves!

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A “White Collar Recession”? It Won’t Be AI’s Fault.

Image from “The White Collar Recession” – Salesforce

BULLSHIT!

That’s what I found myself yelling at a recent board meeting, unimpeded by my usual filters of propriety or self-restraint. But I couldn’t help myself. The board was debating whether AI was going to come for all of our jobs, and someone had just referenced an article which said it wouldn’t be long before AI was doing the work of most doctors, lawyers, and – this is where I broke – writers.

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How Google Can Win the Future

[Second in a series, first post here]

This past week, Wall Street caught up with the rest of us and realized that Google has lost its monopoly grip on search. The trigger wasn’t Google losing an anti-trust case – that happened last summer. Nor was it the first ten days of Google’s ongoing search remedies trial. Instead, it was a statement just two days ago by an Apple executive, Eddie Cue, which led to an almost instantaneous panic amongst investors.

Cue told the court that consumers’ preference for using AI agents had led to a decline in search traffic inside Apple’s Safari browser (Google pays Apple more than $20 billion a year to secure that traffic – a major focal point of the government’s case).

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Google (And all of Tech) to News: Shove It.

There’s an old maxim in the news business: Stories in which a dog bites a man are uninteresting. But a man biting a dog? Now that’s worth writing up!

Last week Google released a report on the value of news to its business. Its conclusions minced no words. Here’s the money quote: “…news content in Search has no measurable impact on ad revenue for Google.”

On first glance, Google’s experiment feels like a Dog Bites Man story – everyone knows news doesn’t drive advertising revenue – hell, I lived that truth most of my career, most recently with The Recount, which attempted to convince advertisers to support high-quality news coverage across video and social media (we couldn’t). But look a bit closer, and you might just see a Man Bites Dog story after all.

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Data Everywhere, But Not a Drop to Drink

This is not the network standard we’re looking for.

Three months ago I published my annual predictions, and while I rarely revisit them in the middle of the year, I do want to note an interesting development related to prediction #3, which states: “2025 will not be the year AI agents take off.”

Here’s what I said back in January:

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My Morning Paper

Nearly every conversation I’ve had over the past month has involved some variation of this question: What are you reading right now? The question isn’t about fiction, or even books – it’s about news. Most of my friends and colleagues are trying to avoid reading (or watching) too much of it – we all know the Trump playbook, and if he’s going to flood the zone with shit, well, best to stay out of the zone.

Yesterday I was having lunch with a fellow islander, a man whose built his career in marketing and communications. He asked the same question, and mentioned he’s been dissatisfied with the usual fare consumed by members of our tribe – the Times, the Post, the New Yorker et al – the “mainstream, liberal media” as defined by our current leaders. I agreed – and told him I’d recently cancelled my Post subscription (the whole Bezos thing is getting to be too much) and that I rarely read full Times pieces unless they’ve been forwarded to me, usually via email or text. I’ve been off Twitter for over two years, and BlueSky is better, but my feed has become a litany of complaint, which isn’t exactly helpful.

So what do you read, he asked again? I mean, really read? And that’s when it hit me: I read my inbox. Over the past decade or so, it’s become my morning (and afternoon, and evening) paper.  I want a filter between me and the media, and I wanted that filter to be made up of humans and brands that I trust. As a medium, email is tempered – I only get things I’ve opted into getting. There’s no algorithm or AI, spam gets deleted instantly, and I chose what I open, and when I open it. It’s pretty much the opposite of how our current media ecosystem works. When the newsletters from mainstream media come in, I’ll browse them, but I rarely click through. Instead, my diet consists of a lot of individuals, and a ton of niche newsletters.

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