The five most successful product launches of all time
An old lemon and the birth of the spreadsheet.
Dear Reader,
I was listening to a podcast this week - in one ear because I’d suffered the modern-day Greek tragedy of losing one AirPod. But that’s a story for another day.
The podcast in question was Tetragrammaton where producer and God impersonator Rick Rubin interviews people from various fields. This particular episode was with the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri. As much as social media is a massive time drain and on the whole quite toxic, as seen through Mosseri’s eyes it is a mind-blowing platform.
Anyway, the conversation that interested me was about the difference between design and art. What is the thread that unites creating furniture, software and slides? How does it differ from writing a song or drawing a sandwich?
Utility is the golden thread of design. Art can just be but if design doesn’t effectively fulfil the purpose it's meant to, it’s poor design. This may be when work can begin to feel futile. If we spend our time crafting things that are meant to have an outcome, and they don’t achieve that outcome. Poems don’t need outcomes, mostly.
Wouldn’t it be nice,
Hugo
Chief Futility Officer
The Business of Stuff
The Stuff
Jägex being sold by Carlyle Group 🛡️ - the creator of Runescape (honestly the best thing about being 12 in the late noughties) is being bought by CVC Capital Partners and Haveli Investments for c.$1.1 billion. Runescape still has 2.4 million active subscribers.
The birth of the spreadsheet 🧮 - Tim Harford explores what we can learn from the arrival of the spreadsheet with regards to Generative AI. Far from replacing accountants and their calculators, we now have far more (accountants at least). Spreadsheets are also used for a lot of things they shouldn’t be which means much of the world’s computing infrastructure is held together by a few dodgy formulas.
Britain’s last executioner has a weird following ☠️ - a load of Albert Pierrepoint’s stuff has just been sold at auction, with his execution diary going for £12,400. He held the Guinness World Record for the most executions at 550. After retiring he described how the only thing execution achieved was revenge and was not a deterrent in any way. Despite this, around 50% of the UK would support capital punishment for certain crimes. Makes my head spin.
Soho House comes under attack from short-seller 🏠 - GlassHouse Research is a great name for a business that specialises in throwing stones at other ones. They’ve formalised what everyone’s been thinking for years and put together a report describing Soho House as overpriced and oversubscribed. This sent shares plummeting by c.20% which has led the group to consider going private.
285-year-old lemon sold at auction 🍋 - when life gives you lemons, put them in a drawer for a few hundred years and then sell them at auction. This particular was brought back from India in 1739 as a gift from Mr P Lu Franchini to Miss E Baxter.
Led Zeppelin's original contract has turned up 📄 - Jimmy Page was allowed to replace any of the members at any time and they would receive a royalty rate of 7.33% on record sales in the US. Here is an excellent clip of The Edge and Jack White turning into nine-year-olds as they watch Page play Whole Lotta Love.
Uber reports its first annual operating profit 🚕 - for years the business focused on expansion but it made $1.1bn in 2023. Dara Khosrowsahi has led the charge as CEO and replaced Travis Kalanick. Dara arrived as more of an operator, having run Expedia for 12 years. Unfortunately he has raised prices so that we pay for our Ubers rather than the vast sums of venture capital they had access to.
Bard is now Gemini and giving ChatGPT a run for its money ♊ - it is now integrated into Android, for all you Android users… so can read across your emails, calendars etc. The race is still very much on as Microsoft pushes to increase uptake of Copilot which has a similar set of features.
Jury still seems to be out on the Apple Vision Pro 🥽 - all the Black Mirror-esque stuff is happening as expected but it seems like whilst it’s an impressive bit of kit, it’s potentially still a dorky hammer looking for a nail. Would I like to spend my working day pretending I’m about to invade a planet? Yes. Do I need to? No.
The five most successful product launches of all time - ChatGPT is now famed for gaining 100 million active users in a matter of months. Other products that ‘changed everything’ include the iPhone, Tesla Model 3, Air Jordans and Netscape (the first web browser).
Quote of the week
'Design' is a word that's come to mean so much that it's also a word that has come to mean nothing. - Jonathan Ive