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The Pandemic Tide Is Receding in Tech

After two years of pandemic-induced demand and supply shocks to the system, we are getting our first good look at the new normal. At the same time, the stock market’s bout of turbulence has impacted wide swaths of the tech sector. Many are now connecting the two developments and declaring the start of some kind of pandemic-induced tech recession. History is being rewritten, and current developments are being misdiagnosed.

The pandemic was…

Competition Is Intensifying in Tech


Based on regulators’ and lawmakers’ comments, the tech giants are unstoppable because they don’t have to worry about competition. Meanwhile, a long list of smaller competitors are said to face major growth hurdles due to built-in advantages that the giants have given themselves.

The past few months have shown such narratives about competition are crumbling apart. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like those tasked with ensuring proper competition is present in markets are…

Elon Musk Buys Twitter


Elon Musk Buys Twitter

It’s been quite the April for Elon Musk. Within just three weeks, Musk went from disclosing that he had spent months quietly amassing a 9% stake in Twitter, to accepting and then turning down a Twitter board seat, to finally having Twitter’s board accept his hostile takeover bid for $44 billion.

Musk buying Twitter is a big deal for a few reasons:
  1. Yet another digital town square is…

Twitter’s Awful Week


Twitter finds itself between a rock and a hard place. With Elon Musk now as its largest shareholder, Twitter’s CEO and its board are wholly unprepared for handling the accompanying unknown. This became visible this past week as Twitter made one questionable move after another. The uncomfortable truth now needs to be discussed: Twitter has a leadership problem.

In last week’s Inside Orchard essay, we discussed the two issues that Musk…

Elon Musk vs. the Twitter Algorithm


Earlier today, Elon Musk revealed that he had quietly amassed a 9% stake in Twitter valued at nearly $4 billion. The news kicked off a whirlwind of speculation as to Musk’s plans. While the investment was deemed passive, that distinction has already proved meaningless given some of Musk’s recent tweets.

It’s not likely that Musk bought a nearly 10% stake in Twitter because he thought it was a good investment. It is…

The Absurdity Known as the Digital Markets Act

For the past two years, the European Commission has been formulating a series of regulations aimed at curtailing the tech giants in its 27 member states. Last week, the Digital Markets Act reached a finalized draft stage. While additional steps are needed before the end is reached, we are at a point where the major points of contention have been determined with implementation set to begin later this year. We are seeing…

The Electric Car’s Moment Is Delayed (Again)

While much of Silicon Valley remains infatuated with crypto, NFTs, and the metaverse, Wall Street has been lusting over electric vehicles (EVs). In an industry that has experienced a major sales contraction due to supply issues, EV growth of nearly 90% in 2021 has been positioned as nirvana. Legacy auto makers look at EV as an answer to finding relevancy while EV startups are finding it easier than ever to raise new…

Tech’s Growing Ability to Wage Economic Warfare

In the weeks following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, two wars have been waged:
  • Military (missiles, air strikes, tanks, drones, deaths, injuries, POWs)
  • Economic (asset seizures, currency pressure, business/export/import bans)
The economic war against Russia is being conducted solely because of Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine. We have seen an unprecedented response from the corporate world in pausing / halting operations in Russia indefinitely. While most of the announcements have been publicly tied…

Why Amazon 4-Star Stores Failed


One of the clearest trends unfolding in tech has been the gradual shift from brick and mortar to e-commerce. However, there is one question associated with the shift that Amazon appears to be struggling to answer. What happens to brick and mortar in an e-commerce world? Some of the world’s largest retailers (Target, Walmart, and Costco) consider their web of physical stores to be an asset when competing with Amazon. Given its…

Live Tweeting a War

Ten years ago, the Arab Spring showed us the power found with digital town squares. Social media could be leveraged to organize both people and information like never before. A few years later, the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica scandal opened society’s eyes to how our data can be weaponized to alter how we interact and engage with digital town squares.

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we are seeing the start of a…

Live Sports Is in a Weird Place Right Now


The Super Bowl serves as an annual reminder of what live sports used to be. While approximately 100 million people still tune into the Super Bowl, the motivation behind watching has changed. A declining number of watchers are even aware of which teams are playing each year. The Super Bowl is instead still able to grab interest by reminding people what it was like to have everyone watch the same live event…

TikTok Is Blowing up the Status Quo


Last week, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg sounded the alarm. TikTok was successfully taking engagement share away from his most-prized pieces of digital real estate: Facebook and Instagram. What had been theorized about for some time is now being discussed out in the open, and we may see others follow Zuckerberg in sending out SOS signals. Companies ranging from Spotify and Netflix to Roku are likely feeling TikTok pressure to some extent. Management teams…

Tribalism in Content Distribution Will Intensify

For the first time, Spotify may be discovering the limits of all press is good press. Some look at the current Spotify vs. Neil Young vs. Joe Rogan saga as a battle involving freedom of speech. Others think it’s more of a censorship dilemma. With Spotify choosing to platform Rogan despite Young’s ultimatum, a move that everyone saw coming, the company finds itself taking on a new kind of pushback - one…

Microsoft’s Growing Bet on Gaming


It may be tempting for an outsider to dismiss gaming as a hobby for Microsoft. Doing so would make it difficult to understand the company’s multi-decade bet on gaming. Reported within the same business segment as Windows and Surface, gaming is about twice as large of a business as Surface when looking at revenue. One can argue from a mindshare perspective that the difference is much larger. Prior to Microsoft correctly pulling…

The Spotify and Roku Squeeze

Spotify and Roku have a lot more in common than meets the eye (and ear). Both companies are fascinated with advertising-driven business models in which listener and viewer time and engagement is monetized via delivering ads. Roku is much further along in its advertising pursuit. Nearly 90% of Roku’s revenue is generated by ads while just 10% of Spotify revenue is from ads. However, both companies have signaled that advertising is where…

ESPN’s Staying Power



The new year started out with a bang in the digital media space. Last week, the New York Times announced that it was buying The Athletic, widely considered to be the most intriguing sports media start-up, for $550 million in cash.

The deal does not look to come at a time of strength for The Athletic. Rumors from just a few months ago pegged The Athletic as seeking $750 million in a…

Tech’s Day of Reckoning Is Being Oversold


Whenever a new calendar year begins, there is an urge to press reset on the news cycle and existing strategies and plans. This doesn’t make much sense considering how, excluding new laws and taxes that may go into effect on January 1, the new year doesn’t usher in changes in marketplace conditions. Nevertheless, there is a psychological benefit found with using the new year to remove oneself from all of the noise…

NFTs and Crypto Are a Backlash to Social Media Wrongs

It is too easy to get caught in the weeds of a topic and in the process lose sight of the big picture. That scenario is occurring with both NFTs and crypto.

At a very simple level, the promise found with NFTs and crypto is said to be about empowering people. Instead of figuring out if NFTs and crypto meet that promise, there is more value found in understanding why such a…

House Cameras as Trojan Horses

The more I think about smart homes, the more I’m convinced many of the concepts and ideas that have come to describe the phrase don’t make sense. Examining the smart home’s most publicized “chapters,” one is likely left more confused than anything else.

The late 2010s saw the smart speaker mirage play itself out in the home. Breathless press coverage for a new paradigm shift ushered in by voice computing in the…

The YouTube Algorithm’s Slippery Slope


YouTube’s history can be broken into eras symbolized by certain creators. Around 2010, creators like the Shaytards pushed the idea of vlogging. A few videos resembling something of a video diary were uploaded each week for the world to watch. The concept was an evolutionary offshoot of reality TV kicked off years earlier by shows like Survivor.

In 2015, Casey Neistat took the vlogging concept in a new direction by uploading a…

Measuring Tech’s Diffusion in Society


One of the main drivers behind starting Inside Orchard was analyzing how the lines that have traditionally defined technology are being erased. The “tech industry” is a term with a finite lifespan. We are heading to a point where tech will be so diffused in industry that it will be indistinguishable from society as a whole.

A question that has been raised is how to measure such diffusion. The answer can serve…

A Digital Content Overload


One topic that has fascinated me for the past 18 months has been societal changes arising from the pandemic. Most of the so called movements or shifts are showing signs of petering out. The Peloton movement, which pushed an anti-gym ideology, does not appear to be gaining much momentum. Meanwhile, the Work From Home movement, which took over tech-oriented blogs and news sites for the better part of the past year, is…

The Chip Shortage Was the Canary in the Coal Mine

The economy is in a strange place right now. One can confidently and accurately point to data suggesting the economy is in a good position in terms of customer demand, unemployment, wage gains, and household saving rates. At the same time, however, problems such as unfilled jobs and inflation suggest a perilous state.

When it comes to the good news, people have disposable income and are willing to spend it on goods…

Facebook’s Meta Rebranding: Logical Decision, Bad Timing


Facebook is no more, at least as it pertains to the $900 billon market cap company. Mark Zuckerberg’s company is now called Meta. Reactions to the rebranding have not been positive with most convinced the name change is a not-so-clever way to distract from ongoing fallout from the Facebook whistleblower. Others think Zuckerberg is trying to distance both himself and his other brands (Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus being the big three) from…

Inside the Mind of a Pinterest Suitor

Last week, a number of publications reported that PayPal was in “late-stage talks” to acquire Pinterest for $39 billion. Such action would mean the digital payments company had finally acted on its long-held interest to get back in the e-commerce game. (PayPal was spun out of eBay in 2015.)

Pinterest is an intriguing company playing at the outskirts of the Amazon / Facebook / Google kingdoms. The company doesn’t view itself as…

Chronological Feeds Won’t “Fix” Social Media

The Facebook Files saga took an unexpected turn last week as Frances Haugen, the former Facebook product manager responsible for providing the WSJ a treasure trove of leaked internal documents, made her public unveiling as the Facebook whistleblower.

In what is still difficult to wrap my mind around, in the span of just two days, Haugen went from having her first public interview on 60 Minutes to sitting down for a three-hour…

Ozy’s Big Lie

Ozy Media had seemingly everything going for itself. The digital media company had raised $83 million from investors including Ron Conway, Axel Springer, and Laurene Powell Jobs. It’s charismatic co-founder and CEO was able to score big name after big name for his namesake video interview show. The company claimed to have big audiences in all of the digital content buzz words - video, newsletters, podcasts. It even had real-world festivals to…

The Pivot to Screens and Cameras

In the mid-2010s, the tech industry thought it was onto something. The maturing supply chain from the smartphone revolution had made it easier (and cheaper) than ever to produce small, stand-alone speakers that could be placed in the home. Instead of playing music or talk radio, these speakers would be transformational due to their delivery of digital voice assistants that was made possible by years of cloud and machine learning investments.

The…

The Facebook Files Won’t Change Much


Over the past week, the Wall Street Journal has published a series of articles that reveal Facebook is aware that “its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands.” The articles rely on a trove of internal Facebook documents, correspondence, and presentations. While the WSJ is right to position these articles as a big deal, unfortunately the revelations are not going to lead to…

Problems With Work From Home Are Beginning to Emerge



Last week, Microsoft changed its return to the office timeline to officially put off employees coming into the office indefinitely. COVID, and in the particular the Delta variant, was the stated reason for the change. I don’t think Microsoft, or any other company delaying return to the office indefinitely, is being entirely up front about all of the forces driving such announcements.

The work from home movement, which feels like the right…

Peloton’s Race to Build a Health Platform

The warning flags have begun to wave for Peloton. As one of the most high-profile beneficiaries from the pandemic, it should probably come as no surprise that the reopening of gyms has resulted in concerning business trends for the company. The average number of monthly workouts per user fell by nearly 25% last quarter. Google Trends data for Peloton is equally concerning with a steady decline in search interest for Peloton since…

Amazon’s Secret Weapon


The shift from brick and mortar to e-commerce has been one of the more pronounced tech developments to impact society. After years of on-again and off-again rumors, it increasingly looks like Amazon will expand its move into brick and mortar in a big way. It’s a move that traditional retailers need to monitor closely.

Amazon’s strategy for retail dominance hasn’t exactly been a secret. By not having a chain of physical stores…

The Lines Between Public and Private Infrastructure Investment Will Blur



One of the defining ideas behind starting Inside Orchard was chronicling how the technology industry would become hard to delineate as its influence on society expands nearly unchecked. Ten years ago, tech was a defined sector. Ten years from now, most of society including industry, education, and healthcare will fall under the “tech” umbrella.

In his essay, It’s Time To Build, published in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, VC…

Pushing Electric Cars


We were supposed to be in the electric car era right about now. Actually, we were supposed to be in the self-driving electric car era. Instead, we find ourselves in the era of car companies announcing electric car aspirations for the upcoming decade.

While there are pockets of electric car success and adoption, lofty adoption predictions circulating for years have failed to materialize. Tesla is the best example of consumers actively seeking…

The Live Events Industry Needs Mixed Reality

When we look back at the early 2020s, many will describe the period as transitory in nature. Wearables are increasingly grabbing the spotlight from mobile while new technologies such as mixed reality are still a little bit off in the distance. We are starting to see glimpses of what mixed reality, more commonly referred to as VR, will be about, including activities that stand to benefit from mixed reality. A great example…
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