What I wrote last week
Book Review – After Steve: How Apple Became A Trillion-Dollar Company And Lost Its Soul
Business
Newest trend in delivery apps: move from cars to e-bikes. Micromobility is great for short-distance deliveries in a busy city like San Francisco. This is how Grab Food, Shopee Food and others manage deliveries in Ho Chi Minh City. Consumers order food within 3-4 kms most of the time. Traffic jam is a feature of the city. If couriers used cars for deliveries, there wouldn’t be any food delivery business! eBikes are also environmentally friendly. I hope to see more innovation and governmental subsidies in this space
John Gruber on the European Commission’s calling Apple Pay an illegal monopoly. I like John’s takes on Apple-related things. He is experienced and more importantly nuanced and fair. “This passage, as well as much of the rest of the E.C.’s “statement of objections”, seeks to dismiss the hard work Apple has done to make Apple Pay successful. Yes, NFC is an industry standard, and Apple Pay is, in part, built on top of that. But before Apple Pay, NFC was hardly used, even though Android had supported it since 2011. When Apple Pay launched in late 2014, its support for the existing NFC infrastructure was so good, it worked with many credit card terminals that had no explicit support for “Apple Pay” specifically. Apple Pay was so easy to use people were using it at retailers who weren’t even Apple Pay partners. That’s not a credit to NFC, which had been in place for years. That’s a credit to Apple. I honestly don’t understand where the E.C. sees anticompetitive behavior with Apple Pay. What I see is market share dominance stemming from the hard work of designing better integration into iOS and iPhones and educating users about the feature. How else could the iPhone’s share of NFC payments so far exceed the iPhone’s share of mobile phone sales? I’m not saying Samsung and Google suck at this, per se, but Jennifer Bailey’s team at Apple is really good, and perhaps just as importantly, really diligent about this sort of thing.”
Congress is ‘moving too slowly’ on semiconductor supply crunch, Commerce Secretary says. The dysfunction and ineffectiveness of Congress, especially in this matter, will cost America a lot both in the short and long term.
Buy Now, Pain Later? An interesting read on BNPL and specifically Affirm
Don’t forget Microsoft. Business schools around the world should teach students about Microsoft and its revival by Satya Nadella.
Business Travel Rebounds as Execs Choose (Real) Face Time Over Zoom. I, for one, am curious about whether business travel will come back to the pre-pandemic levels and how it will come back. During the pandemic, articles were written on how business travel would never be the same. Anecdotally, my colleagues at work traveled to Omaha, Nebraska for monthly meetings and quarterly department reviews as if nothing had happened in the past two years. China remains a question mark. Because they remain persistent on the zero-Covid strategy, they are not a viable destination at the moment. And I hope that the prolonged fight with Covid does not give other variants a chance to spring up. I think we have enough of a pandemic for, let’s say, the next few decades.
Inside the Collapse of CNN+, the News Channel’s ‘Apollo Mission’. The launch of CNN+ seems rushed and more like a political move by some executives than a savvy business initiative
How Gillette Embraced the Beard to Win Over Scruffy Millennials. Gillette went from demonizing beards to embracing them. After years of fruitless resistance and declining sales, they finally realized that their bread and butter product is no longer what men want. More than half of the men in the world don beard, including two-thirds of millennial men. Sensing that the tide they were going against was too strong, Gillette launched new beard-friendly products rolled into a line named King C. Gillette. A deviation from what the company is always known for, but a good strategic shift, I think.
Other stuff I found interesting
Could solar power solve Puerto Rico’s energy nightmare? I can’t imagine living in this day and age without electricity. Especially when that happens in a U.S territory.
Moon soil used to grow plants for first time in breakthrough test. This discovery inspires a lot of questions, possibilities and dreams
Cat Litter Could Be Antidote for Climate Change. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have “cat litter could absorb methane before it goes up in the air” in my 2022 bingo card. But it’s a nice surprise and discovery.
Stats
NYC subway ridership as of March 2022 is 60% of the pre-pandemic levels
Germany has 9% of all bitcoin nodes
“In 2021, U.S. podcast advertising revenues rose to $1.4 billion”
Only 50% of the time when a PayPayer user goes to a site that has PayPal does that user use PayPal
Minh Quang Duong 