A friend of mine asked me today if there were tech companies I was excited about. The context was more “companies that will grow” not “companies that are doing something cool”. But, I was stumped because I had trouble thinking of anything in either category.

Looking at the MANA MANA (do dooo do do do) group:

• Microsoft: Always shitty assholes, but their stock price will probably keep going up until the AI bubble pops
• Apple: Nothing innovative since the iPhone, but their stock will probably keep doing well because of their duopoly status and the 30% rake on the App Store
• Nvidia: I used to like their video cards, but they haven’t done anything innovative for gamers since ray tracing, and even that is barely used. When the AI bubble pops they’re going to crash hard
• Amazon: Assholes who screw over anybody who sells things through them, abuses their employees, and the last “innovation” they had was their patent on one-click ordering. Since AWS is most of their revenue, when the AI bubble pops their revenue will crater.
• Meta: Renamed from Facebook because their thundercunt of a CEO thought the future was “the metaverse”, an obviously bad idea from the start. The company only continues to be relevant because network effects cause FOMO and they have an advertising duopoly with GOOG, heavily betting on AI now, and will crash when it crashes.
• Alphabet: Their flagship service is terrible now, but they don’t care because they have such an overwhelming monopoly on search. More importantly, they’re part of a massive ad duopoly with Meta, so as long as they can keep you coming back, they’ll keep making money. I can’t remember them having any innovative ideas since PageRank back when they were founded. They’re also all in on AI and will crash when it crashes.
• Netflix: It used to be that you only needed 1 streaming service, and it was Netflix. Now the Netflix catalogue is mediocre, and they’re getting rid of things that actually made people like them, like allowing a family to share a password, and a truly ad-free experience. I don’t see Netflix growing much in the future, and with how bad streaming is becoming, I expect more people to pirate instead.
• Adobe: You used to be able to own photoshop, and it was a good product. Now you have to rent it, and they’re not even fair and honest about how the rental works. Acrobat Reader used to be a useful free utility. Now they keep enshittifying it. Will they keep making money, probably. Probably won’t crash too hard in the future either, although they’re a tech stock so when the AI crash happens they’ll take some damage too.

It genuinely used to feel like many of the big tech companies were trying to solve problems for end users. Sure, they wanted to make money at the same time, but they actually did provide good services. Google search used to be unbelievably good. It would find the one page on the whole Internet that was the best one for your search. If what you wanted wasn’t in the first 10 links, it probably didn’t exist on the Internet… Even when it had ads, the ads were small, clearly marked, and didn’t crowd out the actual search results. Netflix had a great catalogue and a great UI and zero ads so it was worth paying a bit and not pirating. Paying a Netflix subscription used to feel like sending a message to the Old Media companies that they were dinosaurs who were on their way out. Apple’s iPod and iPhone were really game changers. These days it doesn’t seem like any of them really want to make your life better. Instead they want to act as a rent-seeking middleman between you and whatever you want.

After thinking about it for a few minutes, the only for-profit company I could think of that was doing innovative things that made life better for its end-users was Framework. I love that they’re trying to make modular laptop, and now an innovative desktop. But, there have got to be others out there I’m forgetting, I hope!

I really had to dig through my cynicism to the buried tech optimist in me. But here is some tech I think is really cool.

Framework: obviously

Cloudflare: the features like cloudflare workers and anti ai stuff is pretty cool. Ddos mitigation they do is impressive.

Nvidia: their GPU tech is insane. They are going full stack with their own networking and GPU on the motherboard like a CPU. Their dlss as much as I hate it is very impressive.

Perplexity browser is interesting to me I can’t wait to see what it turns out to be. The idea of having a new way to browse the web is cool.

Ar glasses are getting really good x real air 2s i want a pair so bad.

Self driving cars: waymo and Tesla self driving is incredible.

Boston dynamics robots are sick. Warehouse logistic robots are sick I really like what Amazon is doing on that front.

Bluesky is cool tech as much as I hate that it copied the fediverse and usurped it with vc funding

Yeah, Cloudflare is doing some interesting things. But, for the most part those aren’t consumer-focused services.

Perplexity is one of the worst of the AI offenders. Their crawlers don’t respect “robots.txt” or other things that say that LLM crawling isn’t allowed.

For self-driving cars, I’ll give Google credit there. Their Waymo division is really making progress in self-driving cars. They didn’t come up with the concept, but they’re pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.

OTOH, Tesla’s self-driving is a joke. In fact, by calling their bullshit “full self-driving”, they’ve forced the legitimate self driving car companies to use a different term. Tesla’s self driving is so bad that it’s hurting the rest of the industry and setting back the possibility of actual self-driving vehicles by years.

Boston Dynamics humanoid robots are cool, I’m not as impressed with their robodog though. But, from what I saw from Beijing last week, they’re already way ahead of Boston Dynamics. Even when some of their bots were failing, the kinds of movement they were making before they failed seemed more advanced (and natural) than the Boston Dynamics bots.

I disagree with some of your choices, but you’ve got some good ideas too.