digital living

In the Innovator's Solution, Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen argued that, during the early stages of an industry, firms with wholly proprietary products have the advantage. New technology is always glitchy, so engineering the entire architecture is the best way to ensure quality.

The world is becoming crazier and more exciting as Virtual Realities are becoming more real and the lines between our physical world and virtual word are fast becoming blurred. 

In his novel The Castle, Franz Kafka tells the story of a man named “K” who is summoned by mysterious authorities for unknown reasons. He finds himself at the mercy of their bureaucracy and endless paperwork, which is carried out for a purpose that nobody can fathom but everyone seems to accept.

It’s no secret that big corporations aren’t what they used to be. In recent years, we’ve seen paragons such as General Motors, Kodak and Blockbuster have go bankrupt even as upstarts like Tesla, Instagram and Netflix rocket forward. The average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 has fallen from more than 60 years to less than 20.

Mark Zuckerberg’s first selection for his book club, Moises Naím’s The End of Power was an apt one. The book, as the Facebook CEO put it, “explores how the world is shifting to give individual people more power that was traditionally only held by large governments, militaries and other organizations.”

Do you enjoy picking groceries up in your electric car? When you get to the store, do you prefer to pay with bitcoins? Do you have solar panels on your house? If the answer is “yes” to any of these questions, you’re in the distinct minority. So much so, that a lot of people probably think you’re weird.

Peter Thiel loves secrets. In his book, Zero to One, he makes a fervent case that unless you firmly believe that there are still things to discover, you will never achieve much. The most you will be able to accomplish is a small tweak on conventional wisdom and that’s no way to create value.

When Henry Ford started his company in 1903, he did more than just create a car or an assembly line (neither of which he actually invented). What he did was establish an entirely new form of organization, culminating in the vertically integrated River Rouge complex that was completed in 1928.

In 1905, a young Albert Einstein shocked the world. In one miracle year, he overturned the prevailing assumptions of his day and changed how we see the universe, transforming forever how we think of time, space, mass, energy and light. He paved the way for our modern world.

The CES is a good one this year. Everywhere is IoT. And honestly I am little tired of hearing IoT or “Internet of Things” which is estimated to become a $7 trillion industry where thermometers, clocks, garbage cans, toilets, washing machines, watches, smart phones, fridges, baby monitors, garage doors and coffee makers are all connected digitally, allowing seamless interactions and smart living for us. Sensors are cheap and can be deployed everywhere collecting data, unnoticed.