Viswanathan K's Thoughts

During my college days, there used to magazines like Voice & Data . Today, everything is Data. Thanks to the rise of the smartphone, the purpose of the phone has changed, as Thomas Ricker wrote in this awesome article : “With the invention of smartphones, the "phone" is just another communications app. One that is quickly being demoted from the favorites bar. Hell, most modern phone reviews don’t even bother discussing call reception.” Ian Bogost wrote this great article on why this transition happened: it’s not just a social phenomenon, it’s also technological! Mobile, being wireless, meant that “signal strength, traffic, and interference can make calls difficult or impossible”. We have come to accept that to a point where “phone calls (are) synonymous with unreliability”! In that unreliable world came all the messaging apps: being “asynchronous, a slow or failed message feels like less of a failure”, says Bogost. Then there’s the historical choice that tel

Balaji Srinivasan, from Stanford, gave this talk (I don’t know the word for it) , where he asked this provocative question: “Is the USA the Microsoft of nations?” That’s Microsoft as in obsolete, a dinosaur. Back in 1998, Bill Gates feared that Microsoft’s rule would end not due to the likes of Oracle but due to “some guys in a garage”. Those guys turned out to be Larry and Sergey (Google’s founders). And now, says Srinivasan, Silicon Valley is becoming the garage guys to the entire US! Pointing out that the post-war US was run by 4 cities (Boston: education; New York: Madison Avenue and Wall Street; Los Angeles: music and Hollywood; and Washington DC: laws), he next says that Silicon Valley is “putting a horse head in all of their beds”: that’s a declaration of war, Godfather style. If you’re wondering how, consider how the Valley’s outputs are taking on the traditional bastions of those 4 cities. Online courses, Khan Academy, and Udacity are the Valley’s assault on