/ Hot Takes

🤖 Artificial intelligence is a terrible shorthand

For decades Ted Chiang has been my favorite living science-fiction writer. Winners of numerous Hugo and Nebula prizes (Nobel and Pulitzer for SF writers), he's always been writing at the intersection of hard technology and philosophy. No dudes fighting with physics-defying lightsabers and spaceships going vroom in the void of

/ Newsletter

🔴 Small is Powerful

Ten years ago, I wrote an article that would end up being key to how Stéphanie and I would define our business. The article's title was Small is Beautiful, a Vision of Excellence with Fewer than 10 Employees. I was arguing at the time that micro-enterprises might be the most

/ Business models and Strategy

🤘 NVIDIA, a masterclass on focused directionality

I've been following NVIDIA for quite a few years as a company that initially pivoted from a hardware manufacturer for gaming PCs to a major player in computer graphic calculations and then a leading force in computational AI. And I initially thought that NVIDIA might become a trillion-dollar company with

/ Hot Takes

🍎 A credible tease of Apple VR?

In just a few days, we'll know if Apple mixed reality goggles is a dead or live Shrödinger's cat. My bet consistently was against such a launch as there is no content nor problem to solve, and Apple never enters a market first. Or when they did, it was a

/ Hot Takes

🥸 Advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable

In a seminal keynote from 2011, Robert Stephens, founder of Geek Squad, became instantaneously famous – or infamous, depending on your current job description – by stating that advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable. The keynote is all over the place and more a stream of consciousness rather than

Members only

/ Newsletter Featured

🔴 Eight reliable pitch strategies for innovators entering a market

I often state that for innovators, there's not much difference between strategy and marketing, if any at all.  Mostly, innovators don't have much time or bandwidth to get early adopters on board, so they must be practical about what they want to communicate. In my book, it should always be

/ Hot Takes

🔥 As predicted... Microsoft Fabric

Just a quick pat on the shoulder here as Microsoft just announced they would move from ChatGPT-like solutions in the browser to the real disruption: running private instances of their AI/LLM solution on industrial customers data lakes. And boy, are they full in on this!  They don't just dip

/ Hot Takes

🤯 After more than a decade, Internet 3.0 might be booting up in ways that are vastly unpredictable

I spent a decade listening to numerous prophets and gurus explaining how, after social (web 2.0), the web will reach its next paradigm: web 3.0. During this decade, what would redefine the web has been a wave of dead-on-arrival ideas and technologies. The Semantic Web, the Internet of

/ Hot Takes

👨‍💻 You don't beat Google with technology

Neeva is a search engine launched in 2019 that raised $77.5 million of funding from VCs such as Greylock and Sequoia Capital. The project was simple and effective: beat Google at its own game by implementing a better crawling and ranking algorithm (that allows you to find the best

/ Hot Takes

🥸 Apple glasses? Here we go again...

While the rumor mill is spinning like crazy about Apple AR, VR, or XR glasses that are supposedly soon-to-be-announced, it's worth remembering that no one knows anything about this launch. Or even if there will be a launch. Apple secrecy makes it so that tech journalists – and when I write

Members only

/ Newsletter

🔴 The weird case of dedigitalization innovation

There is a current trend that is the most post-2018 you can imagine. Pure players that disrupted a market by becoming cloud- or online-only suddenly rematerialize and invest in brick-and-mortar. In a seemingly non-sensical turn-around whole crop of digital natives seem to rediscover the wheel. I call this dedigitalization innovation.

/ Hot Takes Featured

🐥 So long, and thanks for all the chirps

I was on Twitter for 14 years and five months. I canceled my account yesterday. Is there anything to say that hasn't been said these last few months? Should I have waited for the new CEO (or the one that will come after her) to turn things around? Should I

Members only

/ Newsletter Featured

🔴 TRIZ as a cheat code for business model innovation

I had on hold for quite a few weeks an article on how I sometimes use some tools to help generate and challenge business ideas or formulate different business models around new technology. One of the tools I've been using for years is the TRIZ methodology. It's a problem-solving methodology

/ Tools and Frameworks

🧩 Playing the PESTEL bingo

I often used a simple trick when discussing turbulent zones in any market and trying to monitor as weak signals might become trends. I check how many events have been recently going on on a quick PESTEL checklist. If more than 3 or 4 of the letters have been checked

/ Hot Takes

💸 Andreessen Horowitz, or how the new economy got old

An excellent article from The Verge on Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and how the most influential venture capitalist firms in Silicon Valley and beyond shaped 'tech.' Andreessen Horowitz saw the future — but did the future leave it behind?Disruptors, disruptedThe VergeElizabeth Lopatto As the model of social networks seems to

/ Hot Takes

😱 We've been crawled!

This is the weakest flex ever, but our website has been crawled, and its public content scrapped by Google to train its large language mode AI. It also means we've been on the map for all ChatGPT versions and other competing models, trying to catch up on OpenAI. Why is

Members only

/ Hot Takes Featured

🔴 Innovation doesn't deal with risk; it invests in risks

One of my connections kindly pointed me to a Harvard Business Review article called 4 Steps to Creating a Strategy in an Uncertain World. I struggled with the simple idea of even sharing the link to it, but here it is. Every time I read something from HBR, I cringe,

/ Hot Takes

💀 Twitter, a clinical case study in social network death spiral

I've been on Twitter for years, probably since around the time they went out of beta. Like many of us, I enjoyed the social network quite a lot and made connections that soon became virtual friends and, for some, real friends. I learned things; I was outraged, and I got

/ Hot Takes

📺 Hardware is the new digital battlefield

Today, I simply want to share a fantastic video on how we are transitioning from Software eats the world to Hardware eats software – that ate the world. It points out how hardware is the new central battlefield for "digital" platforms and why, in that regard, Apple has been building a

/ Newsletter Featured

🔴 Should you be confident that customers know what they want?

I'm taking a few days off this week. Still, I wanted to share a simple reminder of how we often see innovation as a customer-driven process. And in so many cases, it's anything but.

/ Hot Takes

🏭 The winners and losers of the automotive industry paradigm change

I've been discussing the automotive market for years here as (a) it's a fascinating mix of economic pressure meets technology disruption meets consumer behavior change meets geopolitical turmoil, and (b) I do work for various operators of this market ranging from startups trying to disrupt par to it, to automakers

/ Culture and Leadership

📷 Fujifilm, a rare industrial pivot success story

Today, we're talking about the rise and fall of film technology and how one company, Fujifilm, managed to pivot and adapt to new businesses. Fujifilm was established in 1934 as a subsidiary of Daicel with the aim of producing photographic films. For decades, Fujifilm dominated the camera film market in

Members only

/ Business models and Strategy Featured

🔴 Are we past social media?

This week I wanted to discuss the looming menace of the disappearance of social media as we knew them since the early 2000s. And when I say menace, I really mean opportunity for us and yet, foreseeable risks for all the businesses that depend on them.

/ Hot Takes

🚢 How fast before Salesforce is out of business?

As foreseen and predicted, Microsoft is already moving in to offer private instances of ChatGPT working on your Azure backend. What it means is that if you authorize it, you can now run Microsoft AI to digest specific clusters of your company's data, make sense of them and allow your

/ Hot Takes

🤖 The death of self-driving has been vastly exaggerated

I know what you think. Self-driving and autonomous cars have been promised with such enthusiasm that we'd thought they'd be all around already in 2020. Then... it got complicated. As a fair disclosure, I was also adamant about their fast propagation... in China (and maybe Japan). Many skeptics at the