If you look at its history, Broadcom is a financial acquisition company that operates in technology. I think Tan's position is: these are (mostly) mature technologies and should be horse traded like financial assets.
Got lucky with the LSI Logic design team and Google TPU's. Presently $8 bln/yr I understand. Although such serendipity increases when you're able to buy everything you see. With the exception of Qualcomm.
They want 1 in 5 VMWare customers to jump. If they don't, they'll be forcibly pushed off of the edge. Broadcom's entire growth model is to take an established player that is entrenched in massive corporations, introduce that product to the existing portfolio Broadcom offers that customer, and then jack the price on the lot. If you're not in the Fortune 500, Broadcom doesn't want to talk to you and if they keep your business at all it'll be through digital sales or third party resellers.
I am not a fan of them and didn't like working for them, but their financial results speak for themselves. You can attack the ethics of Tan's leadership certainly, but to call him an idiot ignores the fact that he's doing exactly what his shareholders want. Growing the company at obscene returns.
People like to do business with people they like, and the Juniors of today are the future CFO, CEO and CTO's. Also IT people have a very, very long memory, and aiming to become the next Oracle is not an advisable strategy.
Being the optimizer of local minima, is bad business strategy, and smart shareholders should plug for a better optimizer.
Don't disagree. I regard Tan as a (powerful) local optimization where the counter argument to broader optimizations is that they're riskier. The latter are though more fundamental. New businesses, new processes, new products are one thing. Profit-taking is another. To get new industries you need far-ranging optimizations.
Fred Brooks wrote in The Mythical Man-Month that it's harder (more time-consuming) to produce the software that corresponds to a given hardware. In 1975.
Hardware was much simpler and less complex then than now. I wonder how or if that's changed by going from hundreds or thousands of transistors to billions.
I thought that ASML got its EUV light source, basically, by buying Cymer in San Diego. Read some of [0], and then searched it, but didn't find a single instance of 'Cymer.'
Watched about 20 minutes of Gringo before I got tired of it and turned it off.
Sounds like a textbook case of what can happen if you take a very bright person and then give them a sudden windfall of success. That is, derangement. He or she doesn't stop being smart and even charismatic and so on.
One question always is: what's the next act? No next act and the propensity to derangement goes up.
Very hard question to answer for those who got rich early, , lived fast, but now are out of the game and direction-less.
A lot of pro athletes suffer depression after retirement because of the absence of the daily routine. You have a lifetime of empty hours left to fill. Some are fortunate and have a network of friends and family to provide companionship and support. Others don't and try to fill the void with sex and drugs. But that just conceals the fundamental emptiness. It's still there, and will reveal itself the second you come down.
"It’s a well-established fact that a guitarist’s acumen can be accurately gauged by the size of their pedal board- the more stompboxes, the better the player."
As both a software engineer and a guitarist, I'd say the opposite is true. Or at least truer. You can't do math-rock without a lot of pedals but the hard part is to acquire the chops. A lot of pedals, and production effects generally, quickly become cliches and it's like dropping down a musical black hole. Someone like Hendrix could take a new effect (superset of pedals) and make it work musically brilliantly but most pedal users buy the pedal to get someone else's sound.
..but most pedal users buy the pedal to.. show off in-front of others who don't have that pedal. period.
GarageBand has 1000 of pedals, people don't need more pedals, they need to practice more, but they don't understand that.
That's why they are buying more pedals while keep dragging about how much they care about green/clean planet.
Big Tech got so big because digital technology is different from preceding industries in that increasing (not decreasing) returns to scale prevail. In particular, in software where marginal costs are near 0. It's a different ballgame. I think regulators have figured this out but for the most part it appears that they don't know how to act upon it.
Traditionally, you had _decreasing_ returns to scale. What's new with digital technologies is _increasing_ returns to scale. Very counter-intuitive for traditional economists - or even business people. People like Gates, Bezos, Brin & Page, Zuckerberg and so on have ridden this for all its worth. Let's out distance them as much as we can before they figure this out. Whether competitors or regulators.
That said, I like the story about someone observing Gates at, I think, a graduation ceremony where Gates had brought along a biography of Rockefeller (John D.). Did Gates know before or after the fact that MS had in fact used a competitive strategy comparable to Standard Oil?
Meaning, unlike increasing returns to scale that was something for which there was an historical precedent. The basic idea being: when my competitors revenues go up, my revenues also go up. A fatal long-term proposition for those competitors.
GP is talking about the marginal benefits of scale. In manufacturing, there is a floor at which increasing scale doesn't decrease the cost of making each additional unit. No matter how much a widget company automates their factories, they can't bring down the cost of a widget below the cost of the raw materials. At some point, investing into making widgets becomes a negative ROI.
That often never happens with software because network effects allow each unit of raw material (servers, data, etc.) to produce more value as part of the whole. It would be as if a widget factory could make 2 pounds of widgets out of 1 pound of raw material when it double its sales.
The article says ARHGAP11B promotes the growth of upper-layer neurons.
Jeff Hawkins has this intriguing idea that the transition is all about the runaway growth of, in particular, grid cells which is slightly confusing in that the major place grid cells have been found is in the entorhinal cortex. If they're responsible for a vast amplification of the neocortex I'd expect them to be all over the neocortex.
Whatever the case, I wonder if the two relate and, in particular, just what upper-layer neurons do that lends them to such a vast array of applications?
Clearly though there was runaway brain growth at a particular point in time and I wonder how that worked in terms of Darwinian development? It's a striking change for what one assumes is a relatively brief period of time. Punctuated equilibrium, right?
I've never spent a lot of time on FB and with the interface change, I avoid FB even more than I did before. Interfaces with fewer, larger elements always strike me as a dumbing down. Companies that offer (insist upon) that may have the numbers to justify it but they lose my engagement. Meaning, either I don't use them at all or as little as possible.
Got lucky with the LSI Logic design team and Google TPU's. Presently $8 bln/yr I understand. Although such serendipity increases when you're able to buy everything you see. With the exception of Qualcomm.