Kanazawa's all right

Golden Week Rush

Ten Trips

I became familiar with Blue Ocean Strategy in the context of Nintendo's decision to forego the "console wars".

Instead of pushing to design consoles with the fastest chips and best graphics, they embarked on quirky industrial designs and user experiences with seeming tangents like the Nintendo DS, the Wii, the 3DS, the Wii U, and the Switch. The big idea (as it was baby-birded to me via amateur videogame journalism) was that competing with Sony and Microsoft to have the highest-performance machine or the best-looking version of multi-platform games was a losing proposition. It represented competing in a so-called "red ocean" (as in, there's blood in the water). Why? Because there were already two well-funded competitors vying to sell the exact same thing. The best Nintendo could hope to do was be marginally better, despite being in a far weaker capital position, with less access to the top chipmakers, and with a stable of IP that didn't necessarily benefit as directly from better graphics. So they pursued a blue ocean strategy by creating bold (and occassionally bizarre) products that couldn't be compared apples-to-apples with the competition.

The rapid, unscheduled disassembly of Twitter-dot-com over the last six months has resulted in an ocean of opportunity emerging. Tons of entrants are getting in. Mastodon was already there. Hive was there for a couple weeks, too. Journalists toyed with giving up the one thing they really care about—drip-feed dopamine from constant notifications—to join Post.news. Meta is apparently building a Twitter-like platform with ActivityPub support. Spoutible is a thing, I guess. And this week, everyone's talking about Bluesky, the open and federated but nevertheless locked-down and invite-only Twitter clone that started under Jack Dorsey Twitter and whose new app looks more like Twitter than Twitter does.

All these real-time, text-based activity streams are pouring chum straight into a deep red ocean.

And then what happened?…

Maybe it's because this came out of a reputable institution like Stanford, but this project feels wildly irresponsible. Not only because OpenAI's language models frequently hallucinate complete nonsense, but because the app uploads your entire aggregate health data to OpenAI.

Apple went to pretty absurd lengths to keep individuals' health data private and secure. While various apps that integrate with Apple Health access more data than they need and surely phone home too much of it back to their application servers, the idea of just blasting all your health data carte blanche at OpenAI seems… bad, maybe?

This disclaimer doesn't inspire much confidence:

HealthGPT is provided for general informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Large language models, such as those provided by OpenAI, are known to hallucinate and at times return false information. The use of HealthGPT is at your own risk. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider for personalized advice regarding your health and well-being. Aggregated HealthKit data for the past 14 days will be uploaded to OpenAI. Please refer to the OpenAI privacy policy for more information.

Hopefully the fact that you have to jump through a bunch of hoops to build and install this thing means few people will use it and nobody will end up hurting themselves, but if it was in the app store it's hard to imagine this not leading to a lot of really bad health outcomes. (And that's the best case scenario—imagine if OpenAI one day changes their privacy policy and starts selling a version of the language model to insurance underwriters that's tuned with user-submitted stuff like this.)

It's been a while since I've had an excuse to read a Detroit Free Press article, but this story warmed my heart a bit given that it's a certainty everyone who works at GM corporate will have seen it.

Car makes are simultaneously:

1. Terrified of becoming a commodity, since electric motors and batteries are much harder to differentiate than traditional ICE drivetrains

2. Aroused by the idea of becoming a software platform that can capture 30% of revenue as you sit around with nothing better to do than watch ads and play Candy Crush in your increasingly-autonomous vehicle

Normally, I'd be worried that this would lead to a domino effect over the next decade that effectively locks CarPlay out of all new car models, but Apple's brand power makes that unlikely. As soon as a few major manufacturers ditch Apple, enough competitors will smell blood and seize the opportunity to differentiate themselves by riding Apple's ecosystem coattails. Even if it comes at the cost of post-sale recurring revenue.

Also good to see Ford PR takes the easy layup. As a lifelong Ford customer, the only thing that'd make me ditch them now is if they dropped support for Apple stuff (in general their CarPlay implementations have been industry-leading):

We continue to offer Apple Carplay and Android Auto because customers love the capability that enables easy access and control of their smartphone apps, especially our EV customers.