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Don’t wanna say told ‘ya, but told ‘ya
The City has a way of repeating its own history, usually while insisting this time is different because the underlying mathematics are silicon rather than subprime. We are currently watching that cycle play out in San Francisco with a predictability that would be amusing if the sums involved weren’t so gargantuan. The latest dispatches from Continue reading
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When bubbles turn supernova
It’s like watching a plane crashing into a stricken ship in slow-motion: several tech and finance bubbles are about to pop and it’s only a matter of when. I’ve seen this film before, usually from a front-row seat at some overpriced trade show in Las Vegas or a smoky pub in Soho. I started covering Continue reading
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Valve’s Steam machine will run over Microsoft
For more than thirty years I’ve watched the personal-computing landscape shift under the feet of companies that once looked immovable. Monopolies rarely fall in dramatic battles; they erode quietly, grain by grain, usually because the incumbent stops paying attention to the constituency that mattered most. With Valve preparing to roll out its new generation of Continue reading
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Digital shovel sellers
Watching tech for a long amount of time teaches a humbling lesson: manias rhyme. Today’s AI trade smells like a circular economy of hype—vendors financing customers who finance vendors—while real, durable profits remain scarce. The one clear cash machine is Nvidia, the picks-and-shovels seller of compute. Its data-center juggernaut now throws off extraordinary revenue and Continue reading
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Elizabeth and Abraham leave the fellow ship
If you played Ultima VII, you remember the velvet-gloved menace of the Fellowship—and the two smiling fundraisers who always seemed to be one step ahead: Elizabeth and Abraham. Old-school lore hounds long read them as a wink (and a jab) at Electronic Arts—E. & A., “acquaintances of the Guardian,” woven into Britannia’s satire of corporate Continue reading
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HAL is not for profit
Silicon Valley is selling artificial intelligence as an economy-wide cure-all. Strip away the theatrics and you find a familiar cycle: when genuine breakthroughs slow, the marketing gets louder. The last half-century’s growth rode semiconductors and microelectronics; that engine is sputtering. We hit the power wall when Dennard scaling broke down in the mid-2000s, ending the Continue reading
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It’s a long way to the top if your thing is databases
The market delivered a striking headline this month: Larry Ellison, at least briefly, was the richest person in the world. A vertiginous rally in Oracle shares on September 10 pushed his paper wealth toward the $390–$400 billion range, momentarily eclipsing Elon Musk on several real-time leaderboards before prices cooled. It was a reminder of how Continue reading
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Of monsters and men
Nintendo has done it again. Not with a groundbreaking Mario game or a return of F-Zero, but with a fresh patent that looks less like innovation and more like a loaded legal weapon. Their newest filing outlines the ability to summon creatures and let them fight—yes, the very core mechanic of Pokémon, and by extension, Continue reading
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Color Porn
Somewhere along the road from composite cables to HDR banners, games forgot that color is a language and started treating it like confetti. Boot up the latest showcase and you’ll see it: a wall of neon sugar, UI drenched in hot gradients, a splash screen that screams “gamer purple” like it’s a birthright. Nobody can Continue reading
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Bots are Alphabet’s lifeline
For years now Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has been playing a dangerous balancing act with its golden goose, YouTube. What began in 2005 as a quirky video platform run by three guys out of a garage has mutated into the world’s largest stage for creators, entertainers, preachers, scam artists, and everything in between. Continue reading
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