New Year Monday Note

by Jean-Louis Gassée

Another year opens, rich with possibilities. Today, from occasional forays into politics to safer explorations of high-tech developments, we survey some of the more salient topics ahead of us.

From this Quiet Before The Storm weekend, as I look forward to a new year of Monday Notes, a long list of topics unfolds. First and foremost, I hope we’ll all get vaccinated as quickly as possible — and I can’t repress a perhaps impolitic thought involving vaccine logistics and Jeff Bezos… Hearing of the difficulties in distributing the two new vaccines, I fantasize about a mutually beneficial opportunity: Jeff Bezos marshals his money and his company to mount the kind of gigantic Vaccine Day operation that Amazon and its founder will forever be remembered for — and we all get to be vaccinated in a few short weeks. We would even beat Israël at this exercise:

(One imagines how I feel seeing France dead last, only leading in the percentage of the population that declines to be vaccinated…)

Of course, this fantasy ignores the bad blood between Bezos and Donald Trump.

As I’ve done on rare occasions, we could venture into politics. For example, one could think of a follow-up to Trump: Job One, a November 13, 2016 Note in which I saw the newly elected Trump manically focused on being reelected in 2020, on avoiding an ignominious firing, an unbearable blow to his self esteem. With this in mind, I wonder if I ought to write a Trump: Job Two addendum conjecturing what the former President will tweet and do to get himself back in the White House four years from now. Rich material.

Returning to the more familiar, safer Valley territory, possibilities range from the ludicrous to the serious, portentous perhaps. For example, we’ve recently experienced a rash of the evergreen Apple Car speculation, a clickbait topic that carnival barkers and self-appointed anal-ists eagerly jumped on when someone at Reuters noticed that their site was having a slow day.

More seriously, we’re likely to explore the situation at Intel in one or more Monday Notes. Rumor has it that Microsoft is designing its own ARM-based chips for its Azure Cloud servers and its Surface line of laptops. This caused Intel stock to lose about 6% in a single session.
In the final days of the year, Dan Loeb, the head of the activist hedge fund Third Point, published an open letter urging Intel’s Board of Directors to look for “strategic alternatives” as a way out of its current predicament of losing market share and shareholder value. The phrase “strategic alternatives” is a euphemism often used to announce dismemberments, executive changes, and layoffs. I can’t help but wonder if Intel will follow the IBM and HP trajectories, former grandees of the tech world now shorn of their influence. Loeb’s intervention quickly caused an 8% rebound in Intel shares. Sad.

Then we have one or more Tesla topics, such as Elon Musk’s exasperating insistence on Full Self Driving vehicles. As I wrote a few months back:

“One can’t help wonder when — not if — the NHTSA (National Highway Transportation Safety Authority) will intervene. Without a doubt, Tesla offers sophisticated driver assistance technology…but why not call it just that: Driving Assistance, or some hyperbolic but still truthful variation? It’s one thing to exaggerate a little or a lot about delivery schedules, it’s another to promise Full Self Driving that isn’t. Tesla’s brilliant performance doesn’t need that excess.”

On the other hand, Tesla missed its goal of delivering 500,000 vehicles in 2020 by a mere 450 vehicles (those are preliminary figures), an Herculean feat. With new manufacturing plants coming on line in Texas and Berlin sometime in 2021 to augment the Fremont and recently opened Shanghai plants, it’ll be interesting to see how quickly Musk will manage to ship a million vehicles in a 12 month period.

No less remarkable has been the rise of TSLA shares, +743% in 2020! This appears to have made Musk the second or third richest man in the world. More important, the high stock price gives the company an almost limitless fund-raising capability that it can use to finance whatever investments present themselves. There are rumors that Musk wants to “absorb” a competing car company. This would be the opposite of Musk revealing that he once thought of approaching Apple to buy Tesla — with Tim Cook not even taking the call. Here, I’ll tip my hand with a summary conclusion: Culture would inevitably kill whatever combination one could dream of. While Tesla’s $668B market cap dwarfs Ford ($35B), GM ($60B), Toyota ($250B), and the Volkswagen Group (VAG $93B) combined, the merging of people, engineering and manufacturing operations would be a costly, sorry nightmare. Unless, of course, Musk has thoughts that are unthinkable to us mere mortals, a new company that he might be entitled to call Genius Motors.

We won’t forget Apple, not just its unfolding of Macs running on Apple Silicon processors and the reactions of PC competitors, but also the evolution of wearable products and services, and the various antitrust discussions mostly centered on its prosperous (and still poorly curated) Apple Store. With the June WWDC (Developers Conference) we might see further entwining of macOS and iPadOS, a relationship that’s currently in need of better coherence.

As readers have noted, I don’t write much about Google. This isn’t for lack of rich topics but because a close family member works for the company. And there is Microsoft’s strange — and expensive — embrace of Android, right after closing its retail stores.

Finally, a special thanks to our readers. Since the first Monday Note on February 4th, 2008, I’ve enjoyed your stimulating comments and thank you for your readership. My thanks also go to my patient editor, Doug Fulton, and to my compadre of 25 years, Frédéric Filloux, who started publishing a column of mine in France’s Libération on March 4th 1995. As I wrote on February 11, 2018…

I view the Monday Note as a way to find out what I really think. I have what Buddhists call “Monkey Brains”. Picture a cage filled with monkeys shrieking and jumping from bar to bar. I don’t put much trust in what I think I think. In the shower, all ideas look good. But the trouble starts when you attempt to couch them on paper. (I would continue, but the French extension of this feeble joke isn’t suitable for a family publication.)

In writing, I find constants and surprises. The persistent part is the need for an emotion without which my pen won’t work. No obligatory writing. Surprises are the good component. As I attempt to string together a coherent set of thoughts, links appear that take me in unexpected directions, or that give rise to emotions I didn’t know were lying close to the surface.

… the feeling is alive and well.

Have a great 2021!

PS: As for the rhythm of Monday Notes, I will probably slow down a little bit, using the time thus freed for a long-delayed book project friends and family gently press me to work more diligently on.

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