Board

After years of sharing stories and experiences, some of which were documented in the book I co-authored, One Strategy, I have found people appreciated ample context and rich details that help them relate to or see the nuance and subtlety of the challenges we faced.

Workflow portability is the start of going multi-cloud and it offers the biggest benefits. This ensures that compliance is easier, that you can use the unique capabilities that different clouds offer, that people can switch teams and be effective, and that you can host new applications with the cloud of your preference.After workflow portability comes application portability. This helps primarily with negotiations: if you don’t like the deal you can leave and if you like it you can move all applications to that cloud. And if a cloud vendor starts competing with your business you can pack your applications up and leave.

Software success stories can often be summed up as a relentless quest to eliminate friction:

All of these companies have created billions of dollars of market value by greasing assorted skids. And their user numbers and revenue demonstrate that this has been a rewarding activity. And yet, there are some compelling examples of companies who find better results when they create friction instead.

Businesses in decline: when they're growing, they compete on service, but when every company is shrinking, they compete on churn. And once a business is in decline, their brand stops looking like equity; it's more like a fixed annuity, whose value can be extracted but which will eventually go to zero.

Since this is the interface between "Designed by Apple in California" and "Made in [somewhere else]," it's an important stage, and being able to do this well is a competitive advantage; the point at which blueprints become a manufacturing process is also the point at which one particular manufacturer's process gets imprinted on the supply chain.

Nothing builds esprit de corps like shared suffering and a shared sense of excellence.

Early Google and PayPal both had this: in addition to having founders who came from good schools and had friends they already wanted to hire, both companies were well-funded at a time when competitors weren't.

But this also happens with user interfaces. Replit's CEO says that redesigning an unnamed feature to introduce more friction led to a "70% increase in conversions". And Ali Abouelatta has a very illuminating thread about a specific example of this with DuoLingo: when they asked users to pick a goal for how many days in a row they'd want to use the app, and when they were forced to pick one instead of having a predetermined selection, they chose more aggressive goals and had higher engagement.

The attrition rate for online courses is 96% according to one study ($, FT), and that makes it highly sensitive to small interventions: even if friction makes a course harder, if it increases the variance of users' commitment levels, that's more likely to flip someone who's in the supermajority of future-dropouts than the tiny minority of likely completers.

We predict that lots of people will just change the way they think about individual creativity. Just as some modern sculptors use machine tools, and some modern artists use 3d rendering software, we think that some of the creators of the future will learn to see generative AI as just another tool – something that enhances creativity by freeing up human beings to think about different aspects of the creation.

other

In this model trust is at the level of the verified individual: access (usually) depends on multi-factor authentication (such as a password and a trusted device, or temporary code), and even once authenticated an individual only has access to granularly-defined resources or applications…In short, zero trust computing starts with Internet assumptions: everyone and everything is connected, both good and bad, and leverages the power of zero transaction costs to make continuous access decisions at a far more distributed and granular level than would ever be possible when it comes to physical security, rendering the fundamental contradiction at the core of castle-and-moat security moot.

In the case of AI, don’t ban it for students — or anyone else for that matter; leverage it to create an educational model that starts with the assumption that content is free and the real skill is editing it into something true or beautiful; only then will it be valuable and reliable.

Would it not be better if the cloud infrastructure such as s3 buckets, ec2 instances, or RDS databases could be declared through easy-to-use YAML files, with the source of truth being stored in Git.

CDE is a packaging exercise. As I often say – the best packager in any tech wave wins and wins big. And I think what we’re currently looking at is packaging up how developers do their work and just trying to make that really, really easy.

Developers will begin to change their behaviours when it becomes truly convenient for them to do. So the Figma moment will be about convenience.

And I think that’s exactly right. Convenience is the killer application. We’ve seen that in so many areas that we will always choose what is easiest. Even if it’s a little bit more expensive, it’s if it’s convenient, we’re, we’re going to use it. We’re going to like it because it’s one of our jobs to be done.

But on the other hand, we have the phenomenon we’ve outlined in this post, where the cost of cloud “takes over” at some point, locking up hundreds of billions of market cap that are now stuck in this paradox: You’re crazy if you don’t start in the cloud; you’re crazy if you stay on it.

And so, with hundreds of billions of dollars in the balance, this paradox will likely resolve one way or the other: either the public clouds will start to give up margin, or, they’ll start to give up workloads. Whatever the scenario, perhaps the largest opportunity in infrastructure right now is sitting somewhere between cloud hardware and the unoptimized code running on it.