Issue 2.2 – Twitter hits the stock market.
A look back, to learn what’s next. By Augur.
The tech world is naturally drawn to novelty. But too often, this makes it easy to lose perspective. How can we understand the importance of today’s events without considering those that came before?
Every seven days, we take a look at this week’s news in previous years to see what we can learn. Feedback to augur+lookback@augur.london
2015
Funny to think Google is a year late in taking an Apple-style product approach, behind *Microsoft*.
I’m a big believer in big M though. Still a nice hearty enterprise core and they seem to have managed to create value from acquisitions like Sunrise and Minecraft in a way Yahoo singularly failed to do.
Doesn’t mean they have an easy ride though, with redundancies becoming clear this week as people I knew there hit my inbox with their freelance addresses…
That went well. As I write this, the stock market is literally waiting to reopen and punish Twitter’s price now Google apparently is no longer interested.
While all the Twitter founders were arguably just right place/ right time, I maintain that Dorsey was an unfortunate Jobs wannabe vs Ev.
Ev has a consistent history and a consistent mission: take something people are currently trying to do online and provide a new way: blogger, twitter, medium (branch for comments too, before it died.)
Just went live for all users to make their own this week – but it’s hard to see how this is that different from Storify.
Feels like a hacked together version of “Custom Timelines” (est 2013) and another struggled attempt at something they even tried with Hashtag pages back in 2012 (!)
2013
Oops.
While this never surfaced quite as visibly as Siri, there’s a good chance much of the improved Spotlight Search functionality came from this. Especially important on iPad Pro.
2012
Got to say, still actually appreciate this ad. And it says a lot about Facebook that it went from claiming to be a “utility” to something more like a comforting entertainment device.
Has only become more true every since.
1889
Thomas Edison shows the first motion picture.
VR eat your hear out.
You have been reading The Lookback, by Max and Sam at Augur.
If you enjoyed it, think about recommending this post below or sharing it with the wider world. With your help, we can build something cool.