Platformonomics TGIF is a weekly roll-up of links, comments on those links, and perhaps a little too much tugging on my favorite threads.
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Every week is CAPEX week here, but this was really supposed to be CAPEX week. It turned into Cleveland week. The 2025 CAPEX retrospective is still in assembly.
My Writing
A Warning to Seattle: Don’t Become the Next Cleveland
I wrote a piece for GeekWire entitled “A Warning to Seattle: Don’t Become the Next Cleveland” (reposted here on this site). It struck a chord in both Seattle and Cleveland.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Seattle’s next act. The software era has been very good to the city, but that era is coming to a close. The next act is as yet unclear, so I looked to history.
There are a lot of parallels between Seattle today and Cleveland 75+ years ago. Cleveland was on top of the world when their world got rocked (the Rust Belt started to rust). They’re still dealing with the consequences today of both the shock itself and how they reacted to the shock. We can learn from their experience and must remind ourselves prosperity is not guaranteed, as Cleveland’s decline from its peak starkly shows.
This blog is blocked in China and I was a little worried after the post I’d be blocked by the Great Firewall of Northern Ohio. I should not have been concerned. The Mayor of Cleveland responded within 24 hours and we had a great phone discussion yesterday. It is both wild and deeply disconcerting that the Mayor of Cleveland is more engaged with the Seattle tech community than our own politicians.
We’re putting together a delegation to visit Cleveland and see what lessons it holds for Seattle. Hit me up if you’re interested in joining.
Note to Clevelanders who have been so vocal in defense of your city: I didn’t pick the title or the brooding photo, to which some objected. My title was “Seattle’s Next Act: Prosperity isn’t a Given”. But feel free to give me an earful when I visit.
News
All the Posts about the Washington Post
It seems every journalist was required to weigh in on the Washington Post’s downsizing. So many pieces taking Jeff Bezos to task, so few detailing what alternative paths to success might have looked like (send them along if you saw anything substantive).
The sentiment seems to be Bezos should have continued to subsidize a bygone way of life (newspapers) losing $100 million a year, while continuing to duck the question of how to bring journalism into the 21st century.
Journalism is vital, newspapers are an economic anachronism, and journalism must embrace new models to survive.
The Post got squeezed between The New York Times and Politico et al. The Times raced to be the biggest national provider of crossword puzzles and chocolate chip cookie recipes (which support a side hustle in journalism). The Times now calls itself a “digital product and tech” company, not a “newspaper”. And even as The Times denounces digital winner-take-all effects in editorials, they are ruthlessly pursuing those network effects nationally at the expense of their rivals who still think of themselves as “newspapers”. Meanwhile, the likes of Politico stole the coverage of the local industry (politics), which should have been the Post’s birthright.
Media Trust in the Toilet
Perhaps related to the previous item. Making Congress look good.
Reupping my suggested agenda for the meeting where “newspapers” ask themselves some hard questions. This meeting really needs to happen. Journalism is hampered today by nostalgia for a model that isn’t coming back.
Heroku RIP
It is kind of amazing Heroku lasted as long as it did under the Salesforce umbrella. Enterprise Amway was a terrible fit for Heroku’s long-tail developer focus.
But the platform will live on as the Heroku Ceiling, the challenge long-tail developer platforms face as their best customers leave as they grow up.
Previous:
Dreamforce Evacuation Alert, Salesforce “is not a company in crisis”, You Can’t Spell Metallica Without A and I, Benioff’s Blizzard of Bluster: FOOM Edition, Salesforce is (Still) Not a Technology Company, Salesforce Holds “Developer” Conference, Salesforce is Not a Technology Company: Nor an AI Company, 2025 Will Not be the Year of Agentic AI, The Agentic Abyss of Disillusionment, Salesforce is Not a Technology Company: Nor a Dogfood Company, What’s Bugging Marc Benioff – Continued, Benioff’s Blizzard of Bluster, Salesforce + Indian Mystic + AI = ???, “There’s an art to this kind of horseshit, and Benioff is its Michelangelo”, Bluster, Bombast and Bullshit: Just Another Day at Salesforce, Salesforce’s Shamelessness is Staggering, Salesforce Gonna Salesforce, The Spectacle that is Dreamforce, The Hard Thing About “Hard Pivots”, Thought Leadership (in Mascots), Salesforce Rallies Its Deep Bench of AI Experts (and Cartoon Characters)
Quick(er) Hits
Fractional CEO and renowned securities law stickler Elon Musk says “You can’t hype companies that might go public” to kick off an almost three hour podcast hyping Space Twitter and his plans to put terawatts of compute into orbit, compete with the chip design industry, compete with the semiconductor manufacturing industry, compete with the semiconductor equipment industry, compete with the solar cell manufacturing industry, and put a mass driver and satellite manufacturing plant on the moon (amongst other things). The first rule of predictions is never offer both an event and a date, but he’s on the clock: “In 36 months, but probably closer to 30 months, the most economically compelling place to put AI will be space.” If achieved, those aggressive timelines could beat Elon to delivering on his self-driving car promises. [Elon]
Fractional CEO and one-time great haver of AI safety concerns Elon Musk on Space Twitter: “I think AI with the right values… I think Grok would care about expanding human civilization. I’m going to certainly emphasize that: “Hey, Grok, that’s your daddy””. So the only way for AI to be safe is to have AI that embodies your own values…
Antitrust Incoherence: Donald Trump’s top antitrust enforcer Gail Slater pushed out as turf war deepens. Grifter Antitrust prevails over a more populist right-tinged Hipster Antitrust. [Antitrust Incoherence, Axios. Bloomberg].
Useful Idiots, Fellow Travelers and Unregistered Foreign Agents: Palo Alto Networks Edition
Dark Benioff: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff Made ICE Jokes. Some Staff Aren’t Happy.
Bronny gets his allowance raised [Bronny]
Not Available in Europe: Dolby 3D [Not Available in Europe]
Private Equity in Action: How private equity’s big bet on software was derailed by AI
I am calling for a moratorium on people who are calling for a moratorium on building new data centers from using existing data centers to call for their moratorium. It is only fair. (That reads better in Lisp).
