Matisyahu's Blog

Last night I got a chicken out before I went to bed, woke up this morning, had some yoghurt and iced coffee for breakfast and headed down the road to pick up some groceries. Quite a few people down at Woolworths – I assume people getting ready for Christmas along with family getting together for BBQs to celebrate the lovely weather. I’ve got the windows open around the house to get fresh air – it looks like my two weeks off which will be starting next week. I’m tempted to run down the food I have in my cupboard over this week and then do a decent grocery shopping next week and maybe I’ll be in luck with the specials they have over the silly season.

The buy out of Warner Bros. Discovery by Netflix will be interesting given the number of relationships that Warner Bros. Discovery have with pay television operators around the world. In the case of New Zealand, Sky TV is their exclusive partner however from what I understand that exclusivity ends in 2026 which will make for interesting watch – will Sky TV pay a premium to maintain that exclusivity or will Sky TV be all ok with Netflix offering the same Warner Bros. Discovery as what they offer. When it comes to their Linear television offerings such as CNN it appears that it isn’t part of the sale but personally if I was Netflix I’d buy the whole thing because CNN has potential to be a hard news channel like their international version and raise the bar rather than the current crop of shows that are little more than ‘he who has the loudest voice wins’.

Although I am not a big fan of the Liquid Glass interface it does appear that there were quite a few within Apple who were not overly fond of it either (link) which makes me wonder whether we’ll see further refinement in the 26.x series and then in the 27 we’ll see a revamp of Liquid Glass where the usability issues others have raised are addressed. As for the executive leaving to work for Meta – making your software and hardware pretty isn’t going to change the fact that it is still a product/service being sold by Meta and all the creepy surveillance capitalism that goes on regarding Meta. It is amazing when executives in charge of companies convince themselves that the problem is their products, services or their corporate culture but rather it is a branding issue.

It reminds me very much of the whole Metaverse hype and the refusal by Meta to accept that what they’re offering has very limited appeal. Second Life for example has existed since 2003 with very limited appeal – a few hundred thousand people using it at any one time pales in comparison to the hundreds of millions of people who use traditional social media. People want to use a service that has minimal friction – easy to use, doesn’t require them to do anything more than the bare minimum to use the service. This is something Microsoft learned when they tried to ram down the collective throats of Xbox end users when they force bundled Kinect while ignoring that their base were people who wanted to collapse in a bean bag with a bottle of beer, a head set and play a game shooting some bad guys online while chating with mates.