It’s funny how everyone keeps thinking about the technology industry in terms of cars. Steve Jobs talked a lot about cars and trucks. Just this week, Ben Thompson wrote about the technology industry in general and his theory that it is similar to the formative years of the car industry. 

The argument goes that while there were a lot of companies started with the idea of building cars at the inception of the automobile industry when the dust settled, there were only a few left. By that time, those companies had such an extreme advantage that there simply was no room for new start-up car manufacturers to get any traction. Thompson then applies this to technology, arguing that the platforms and integrations built by Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Amazon represent that same extreme advantage. How could someone that wants to make their own mobile phone platform (or whatever gizmo follows the mobile phone) get any traction without all the back end pieces the big four have spent ten years (and billions of dollars) creating? The more I think about it, the more I agree.

The reason this is important is because a lot of us (myself included) had always assumed that at some point, this phase of technology would come to an end by a brand new disrupter completely displacing the current leaders. Now I’m not so sure. Ben Thompson is one of the smartest people writing about the technology industry. If you don’t have Stratechery on your RSS feed, you should.

Benjamin Mayo did a fantastic job at 9to5 Mac of summarizing Apple’s run in the 2010s. Because Apple is such an iterative company, it is easy to forget how far they can move in 10 years.

I spent a good chunk of New Year’s Day looking back at 2019 and what went right (and wrong) for me in the critical areas of my life. For me, that includes how I did with my family and friends, the various elements of MacSparky, the legal practice, and taking care of myself. I usually do this navel-gazing on my birthday, but I didn’t want to wait until February this year.  The reason I did it on January 1 this year was partly because we just started a new month, year, and decade.

I’m sure a lot of people are thinking about things they’d like to change as we head into a new decade. We’ll be talking about this in next week’s episode of Focused. In the meantime, I recommend not worrying too much about resolutions but instead building some new habits.

One of the best pieces of advice I received when I left my firm job to start my own thing, was to be mindful of all the new defaults I’d get to pick with repotting myself. It was an opportunity to build new habits. 

Resolutions are always about the finish line. (“I want to lose weight.”) Habits are about process. (“I want to stock the fridge with spicy carrots every day instead of cookies.”) The only way to get to a finish line is with a process. Don’t make new resolutions this decade. Make new habits instead. If you’d like to learn more about this, one of the best books I read in 2019 was James Clear’s Atomic Habits.