Spyglass - Feature Creeps

I feel like the promise of a color Kindle has been out there for at least a decade, if not longer. It's sort of wild that it has taken this long, but Amazon says they finally feel confident in the e-ink technology – or their own tweaks on it – to make it a colorful reality. Now we can all start hoping for foldable Kindles. Not like foldable phones, but more like newspapers, perhaps. Or, you know, books. A crease is a feature!

Speaking of features. I don't know what Meta was thinking in rolling out status indicators to let others know when a Threads user is actively online, but I know there are at least 100 features that the community would have appreciated more. Like, you know, direct messages if you want to make this a chat service?

Some Thoughts...

🚩 Trump v. Google — In a rambling, meandering interview, Trump both said he didn’t think breaking up Google was the right action (because it would help China) but also that something must be done because the search engine has not been fair to him. The Verge wrote up some of the truly crazy quotes, including “How they became a power is really the discussion.” Which is telling because it’s the opposite of the discussion from the antitrust perspective, and just shows that he of course has no idea what he’s talking about in these rants. But hey, look at it from his perspective: vague authoritarian threats basically worked with Mark Zuckerberg and Meta, so why not take the same approach with all the tech giants and see if they’ll also kiss the ring? [NYT]

🇺🇸 Qualcomm Said to Wait for US Election to Decide Intel Move – Speaking of politics, Qualcomm taking a wait-and-see approach is hardly a surprise given the proximity to the election and given how different such a deal could look depending on the government in power. It's also hard to know which side Qualcomm would be "rooting for" here. A Harris administration may be okay with such a deal if it keeps Intel inside, as it were. But a Trump administration may ease the current M&A restrictions, making such a deal more feasible. Or they may make it harder. It's just a total wild card. Qualcomm is clearly doing all the prep work though – including pinging China for thoughts about such a deal (which also seems to be waiting to see how everything unfolds before answering). You reading all of this, Microsoft? [Bloomberg 🔒]

⚔️ AMD, Intel, and a Slew of Companies Team Up to Fend Off ARM – In tangential news... x86 Avengers: Assemble! How rough are things out there for the x86 architecture at the moment? So turbulent that even Intel and AMD are willing to work together to combat the CPU assault from Apple and yes, Qualcomm. Microsoft, naturally, is playing both sides. Lenovo and several other PC-makers obviously makes sense backing this given the state of the industry, but Google and Meta are also on board for reasons? Chromebooks, I guess. But Meta? Anyway, none of the software players are going to turn their backs on Qualcomm anytime soon. And if they were to acquire a certain x86 chip maker... [Verge]

🐴 ‘Slow Horses’ Reins in Season 6 Renewal at Apple – This is good news for me, as a huge fan of the show, but also for Apple, which has needed a bonafide hit post-Ted Lasso (at least until it inevitably comes back as well). Apple doesn't release numbers, but at least from a critical acclaim perspective, Slow Horses would seem to be the best thing they have going right now. And given that there are at least nine books in the series, there's some more room to run here – with Gary Oldman seemingly happy to do this for as long as they'll let him (there's some chatter about a spin-off movie and/or prequel series about his Jackson Lamb character as well). [THR]

Some Analysis...

The Color of Kindle

A ‘Colorsoft’ Kindle and an AI-ready Kindle Scribe leak out…

Spyglass •M.G. Siegler

Threads Is Not Chat

You want real-time? Shove a status indicator on that shit!

Spyglass •M.G. Siegler

Some Links...

• Kate Clark’s 5 key red flags for VC from PitchBook’s latest quarterly report all clearly point to an exit bottleneck. There are now 57,674 private companies, a record, per the data, and yet capital deployment has been slowing. Something’s gotta give. A crisis, you might say. [The Information 🔒]
• Amazon follows Microsoft and Google by diving into nuclear power with AWS investing $500M into three different projects... [CNBC]
• Great news for Xitter, they EU has ruled that they don't consider them to be "an important gateway for businesses to reach consumers" and as such they don't have to adhere to the DMA. This plus the ouster of Thierry Breton could be enough to make Elon Musk move the company to Europe. [TechCrunch]
• Android 15 is officially here for those with Pixel phones [Verge]
• It sounds like The Washington Post is on the hunt for content (and technology) acquisitions with the backing of Jeff Bezos. What will Will Lewis buy? NYT reports of talks with Punchbowl News, which obviously makes sense, but even easier may be simply picking off some popular newsletters from Substack and the like if subscription growth is really the goal... [NYT]
• It seems like Spotify is actually expanding the audiobook market, giving Amazon's Audible some competition. It's apparently already ahead of Apple! More importantly, it may be helping Spotify to continue their quest to diversify the business away from its crappy margin music roots. Did Spotify leak these numbers? [Axios]
• Warner Bros made Christopher Nolan whole from the money he gave up in order to ensure Tenet would be released in theaters during the pandemic in 2020. But the gesture of goodwill wasn't enough to woo him back from Universal, where he'll be making a movie with Matt Damon that apparently isn't sci-fi (boo, no Interstellar prequel) but may be a spy film (which may help scratch that James Bond itch without doing Bond itself). [Variety]

A Golden Oldie...

Without Real Time Information, Threads is Pointless

Unleash the feeds

Spyglass •M.G. Siegler

And I Quote...

"This isn’t some hack who happens to have delivered 'Look Who’s Talking No. 38' or 'Sharknado'. This is Christopher Nolan."

-- Stephen Galloway, the dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, talking about the power the director has over the industry at the moment. (And why Warner Bros would pay him back money they weren't legally obligated to in order to try to win him back, per the link above.)