When Marc Andreessen famously wrote that software is eating the world, it was seen as both a love letter to the tech industry and an alarm of the consequences of a fundamental shift in the way the world will work. I’m not writing about the latter part here, I’ll leave that to those better placed and more inclined. But the first part I find fascinating.

I’m looking to replace an ageing iMac from 2014 that neither has a fast processor or an integrated SSD, making my computing experience less than optimal compared to today’s offerings. The promise of a radically faster next iMac around the corner, and something that the release of Apple’s in-house designed M1 means that I’m unlikely to replace my computer until the iMac line is replaced by this new line. For the moment, only the low-end has been introduced by Apple. The fact that this low-end is promising to be faster than the current high-end is absolutely unprecedented.

But this is hardware, and whilst hardware has the possibility to enhance your computing experience —and to be fair, enable new computing experiences—, it is software that affords the complete reinvention.

My old iMac has been completely transformed by the installation of a new operating system. Big Sur, released last Thursday the 12th November 2020, has converted by computer into a completely new computing affair. I’m spending more time at the computer because I like it more. I’m spending more time at the computer because it is more conducive to work. And I'm spending more time at my computer because I can’t wait to see what the M1 will bring to this equation.

Without diminishing the thousands and thousands of man-hours, innovation and inventiveness that goes into developing an operating system, we’re talking about a (long) string of 1s and 0s. A string that changes everything about the way one interacts and uses the technology in front of us.

There is nothing like this in the world. It's akin to removing all the acquired knowledge, feelings, experiences and genetic information stored in your brain, re-writing it to be arguably better, and then re-injecting it to produce a completely new human.

I’ll let that sink in for a few moments.

15 November 2020 — French West Indies

This article from John Dario resonates with me when I read it this morning. It's not that comments are unwanted by or in itself. Internet assumptions in hand, we can understand that Internet comments are just too frequent, too prevalent and too divisive to be of any use to anyone wishing to cling on to what is left of their sanity.

I’ve never got into that situation for several reasons. Perhaps if comments were active, you’d tell me why; useless articles, unknown, loser etc.

The day to day cognitive workload for us in this interconnected world is big enough without having to deal with everyone else’s idiosyncrasies. I’ve not, and will not activate comments on this blog, and I will not make it easier for anyone to hurtfully spew garbage in the face of others.

The rage-economics of the social networks are showing their limits and fragility. It is only a matter of time before they will change their business models. To what, I don’t know. Maybe it’ll be even worse. But the fact that, according to a recent study, Facebook now only commands 51% of surveyed users feeling it is a net positive, speaks volumes to the direction we are heading.

Read, watch, slag off and whinge as much as you like. Just keep it to yourself and the yes-people around you. When you’ve gone through the process of distilling and formulating a cognitive and interesting point of view, then by all means, share it. On your blog.

4 November 2020 — French West Indies

Never have I had any misgivings about the authenticity and verity of an election.

For more than forty years I have been nothing but a believer of the fact that the USA elections were nothing but fair and a true representation of the will of the people. That they were conducted with the utmost honesty. And whilst there were contentions and questions surrounding counts, it was done with dignity and a genuine will to serve the American people. Yes, even the famous hanging chads incident in Florida in 2000.

It’s 2020, and that has all come crashing down. All because of one single sociopath that knows no limits, has no self-control or decency, to get what “he” wants. Be damned with anyone else.

This will end badly for you, my friends in the USA. Either way this election will be seen as the starting point of America's second civil war. A war that will not take the form of the first, but a war nonetheless.

3 November 2020 — French West Indies

A truly breathtaking season that thankfully resulted in few storms directly hitting us here in the Caribbean. The US, particularly Louisiana, didn’t have such fortune, with Laura, Marco, Sally and Delta all affecting the state. An overly busy season appeared as predicted, with (so far) 29 depressions, 28 named storms, 12 hurricanes (Category 1 and 2) and 4 major hurricanes (Categories 3+).

Each year the NOAA and other meteorological institutions around the world predict the season ahead using a scale called the ACE or Accumulated Cyclone Energy index. After studying reliable data from 1981 to 2010, a team in Colorado State University, and independently the NOAA, derived a scale to measure and help predict tropical cyclone intensities for each season. They arrived at an average of 12.1 storms with 6.4 hurricanes and 2.7 major hurricanes. This is enabled the development of the indicator, the ACE, and set a value of 106 for an average season.

The 2020 season is currently at 143 and it is not over yet.

Bear in mind that in 1954 Hurricane Alice formed on 30 December in the mid-Atlantic to the north-east of the Leeward Islands, traveling south-west directly impacting these islands with maximum winds reaching 90+ mph, around 150 kph.

Stay vigilant.

Image: [upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/timeline/1f4a7932cbee5dcb8c94b0df46fc7f48.png)

2 November 2020 — French West Indies

If you listened to the podcast version, you’d note I added some music. I broke out my skills in Garageband to make a quick accompanying jingle to spice up the podcast. Let me know what you think. 🎵

On to this week’s topics.

I’m astonished I didn’t get roasted for completely dissing Blockchain as a useless technology a couple of weeks ago. I thought I’d talk about an example where I’m actually quite bullish about the technology. But first I wanted to expand upon a thought I had following a conversation I’d had with someone, discussing why digital commerce is so different from brick and mortar commerce. Follow on for my thoughts.

The unique challenges of digital commerce for physical goods

The difficulty for online retailers selling physical goods in the digital economy is that the value of digital products is significantly reduced, and in some cases, is virtually zero. That inherently puts pressure on the value of physical goods that are commoditised. Fortunately, luxury goods are seeing less pressure on their perceived value, but that is more a function of time rather than real value.

Luxury goods houses and retailers are seeing these changes and are starting to act. Apple today has changed its retail sales processes to resemble more of a luxury brand one-to-one service rather than a Walmart get-it-off-the-shelf-yourself operation.

From Apple’s press release:

When iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro, and iPad Air are available Friday, October 23, customers can get their all-new products directly from Apple through tailored purchase experiences offered online, by phone, or in store. From a chat session with a Specialist that starts online and finishes with contactless delivery, to visiting select Apple Store locations for a one-on-one session with an Apple Specialist, customers can find the best way to get the products they’re looking for.

Source: Apple

So, the question is, how do businesses make money now that the products they sell are virtually worthless (economically speaking)?

Answers to some of that lie in the services surrounding the product. Be that sales (see above), installation/delivery, support, subscription, ongoing help and many other possibilities, the key lies in giving the customer an ‘experience’ rather than a sale. Deriving value comes from developing and innovating on several levels to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.

If we look at the above example from Apple, you’ll note they’re selling a phone. But that phone is so much more than a simple “… Widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough internet communicator.”. The iPhone has replaced by some estimates, over 50 products; mobile phone, point and shoot camera, a torch, calendar, SatNav, personal assistant, to name a few. But it is a product in a sea of other products that are designed to resemble each other closely. There is little material difference between the flagship Samsung and Google devices that are directly competing with the iPhone. And, Smartphones themselves are becoming commoditised, as is evidenced by the increasingly smaller and smaller gains made in hardware design and technologies deployed. The differentiator is the software and what that software can enable hardware to do for the overall end-user experience.

Two excellent examples are computational photography and health analytics.

In computational photography, we are nearing the phase whereby even specialist cameras of the past are being innovated out of existence. It is only a matter of time before the computational aspect will outperform pure optical limitations of smartphone camera modules. In health, simple movement sensors initially enabled step tracking, instantly killing a growing market segment, and eventually enabled detailed sleep tracking that has (itself) been out-innovated by smartwatches. It is no longer science fiction to imagine the doctor’s office on your wrist.

The overall experience of owning these products and their potential beyond the initial use-case is what I mean when I say ‘customer experience’. Apple has gone that step further and developed and Covid-friendly white-glove shopping experience previously reserved for the rich and famous. You book a 1 to 1 either in-store or directly on the Apple Retail site, and you are led through your purchase to contactless delivery or pick-up. It is a personal shopping service for the rest of us.

Who doesn’t want to be made to feel special when buying something?

Blockchain. Again

I’m surprised I didn’t get more of a roasting from my somewhat sceptical articles about Blockchain here and here:

According to a detailed academic-style “peer-reviewed” study by the Centre for Evidence-Based Blockchain and reported in the FT:

“… outside of cryptoland, where blockchain does actually have a purpose insofar as it allows people to pay each other in strings of 1s and 0s without an intermediary, we have never seen any evidence that it actually does anything, or makes anything better. Often, it seems to make things a whole lot worse.”

Worse, the report repeatedly highlights that the technology is a solution currently looking for a problem. The antithesis to the Jobs to be Done theory that helps us better design and provide solutions. With over 55% of projects showing no evidence of useful outcomes, over 45% showing “unfiltered evidence” (i.e., next to worthless), it would appear that Blockchain is a belief-system rather than a technological solution.

And …

…it is a huge energy consumer and hence by definition is inefficient. That, sadly, is not its only efficiency problem. Blockchain is actually extremely limited in its speed and quantity of transactions and scales poorly. So much so that in 2016 several banks exploring the possibility of using the technology in the personal and business banking sector abandoned the work as blockchain was just too slow.

Quite the downer if I’m honest. But whilst many projects show no use for Blockchain, some projects show promise. One such example is Dominica’s Economic Growth team at the Climate Resilience Execution Agency for Dominica (CREAD).

They are currently developing a parametric insurance product that uses blockchain technology to help small businesses and the typically underserved by traditional insurance products, manage their risk of natural disasters in an innovative way. It’s called BHP or Blockchain Hurricane Protection. From the article on LinkedIn:

BHP aims to extend coverage to those excluded from traditional indemnity insurance, and provide Dominicans with a flexible and affordable tool for managing climate risk. Total damage from Hurricane Maria which struck the island as a category 5 storm on September 18, 2017 was US$1.3 billion, representing 226% of GDP. Uninsured losses were US$1.1 billion, or 86% of total damages. Damages to the housing sector totalled US$520 million. MSMEs suffered US$73 million in damages, and agriculture also suffered US$73 million in damage. In the years since Hurricane Maria, premiums for traditional indemnity policies have increased by more than 80%.

This was the background to Dominica’s drive for innovation to better protect itself after multiple incidents that substantially affected citizens and businesses over the last decade.

So, what is a Parametric Insurance and why blockchain?

From Wikipedia:

Parametric insurance is a type of insurance that does not indemnify the pure loss, but ex ante agrees to make a payment upon the occurrence of a triggering event. The triggering event is often a catastrophic natural event which may ordinarily precipitate a loss or a series of losses. But parametric insurance principles are also applied to agricultural crop insurance and other normal risks not of the nature of disaster, if the outcome of the risk is correlated to a parameter or an index of parameters.

What’s great about this project is that it is intelligently using technology in the right places to fulfil the “Job to be Done”. Again, from that LinkedIn article:

Once customers have downloaded the mobile wallet to their smartphone, they simply indicate the level of coverage that they would like to purchase, tag the location where they want the policy to apply, enter some basic information, and pay the premium. The policy is then issued and stored in the blockchain. In the event of a triggering event that meets the criteria of the policy, the payout is generated automatically and delivered to the customer's mobile wallet within three days of the triggering event.

This product reduces friction at the critical stages of an insurance lifecycle; the signup and the payout.

You’d be right in asking why a “normal” insurance product couldn’t do the same. And there’s no reason traditional insurance can’t reduce friction when it comes to the signup and management of the product. Payout is where the difficulty lies. Frequently, insurance companies need to wait for a “Natural Disaster” to be declared or during a smaller indecent, assessors and inspectors to audit and report back to the insurer before the insurer can start the payout process, which itself can be lengthy and time-consuming.

In this product, they are disrupting traditional insurance at a particular level — this is not general insurance — and that disruption, like all disruptions, is to the benefit of customers in the way of simplification and increased speed in onboarding and payouts. Not to mention the pricing that makes it more accessible and hence more likely to be adopted, benefitting all in the process.

But the interesting aspect from a tech point of view is the use of blockchain. In this instance, it is playing to blockchain’s strengths and not trying to overcome its weaknesses (see above). And that’s the intelligent way to use it.

BHP is a product that doesn’t need to scale to hundreds if not thousands of transactions per millisecond like traditional banking systems deployed around the world. For one, Dominica (thankfully) doesn’t suffer a significant natural disaster every day, and secondly, its population is currently only around 73 000 people. Today’s blockchains are more than capable of sustaining the likely transaction requirements of this implementation. And suppose BHP is available to a broader audience throughout the Caribbean, it is still unlikely to overwhelm the system, as processor designs and energy efficiency gains are around the corner.

A cursory glance shows that the major chip designers and builders are all exploring the possibilities of tailoring their products for blockchain applications to overcome the shortcomings of the technology.

https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/blockchain

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/security/blockchain-overview.html

Interesting times.

You can find the archives of all my essays here:

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