Substrate

this is the appeal of Zoom, to me, almost as an anti-silicon valley company: they took a bad product and just made it good.

Switching off of Google in 2018 is easy because you’ve probably abandoned most of their products anyway, and the ones you’re still using are stagnating.

When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions. But I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.

The fact that I have allowed the illusion of the internet’s regard for me to seep so deeply into my unconscious mind makes me nervous. Like any belief system, it only becomes visible when it breaks down.

“it’s precisely because such fervent competition exists that these companies and so many others have been pushed to build their best-in-breed products: Kindle is better because of iBooks, Spotify is better because of Apple Music, and iOS is better because of Android. This list goes on and on and on”