The Byteside Newsletter
Free as in anti-competitive
There's big questions in what it means for Google to offer free cloud photo storage and then take it away when the free service spoiled the market for paid competitors for so long.
The last Xbox
The demand for higher resolutions and faster refresh rates and more data throughput is cresting, creating the chance for smaller and smarter hardware in future, or even the potential for future mobile devices to bear the load instead of needing big boxes under our TVs.
Attention, distraction and Quibi
It will go down in history as one of the great failures of the digital age. Almost $2 billion spent on a Hollywood-backed, highly-polished, mobile-only, episodic streaming video service that will be long forgotten with no sense of loss whatsoever. We talked about Quibi on the Byteside podcast a lot
Prideful sharing
It’s been a crazy week and I’m genuinely sorry to say that I don’t have a column this week. I love writing these and your feedback is always thoughtful and insightful and helps me to keep building on the ideas I try to express here. It’s
Industry bit rot
More Australian media job losses in tech and gaming show a fading of local nuance as global dominance grows.
Arhythmia
Routines, rhythms and the systems we use to keep things moving at the right pace.
It's all about the Game Pass
Forcing exclusivity onto Bethesda, or iD, or Arkane, just isn’t Microsoft’s games strategy anymore. For Microsoft, owning games studios now serves its core long-term ambition of building out a dazzlingly good value subscription service through Game Pass.
Cat photos matter
The greatest cliche of the internet is too many cat photos. It partly made me want to be careful about overloading my own social media with cats. Until our beloved Sylvie suddenly died.
Xbox Series N(adella)
The focus on cloud services in the new generation Xbox Series X speaks to the focus of the whole of Microsoft in the Nadella era.
Dark and full of terrors
Too many parents react swiftly to a few scary headlines but don’t actually do much to educate their kids or have conversations about being a savvy digital citizen.
The value of uninformed consent
Everyone thought they were getting free services in exchange for ads. But if the depth of the tracking involved was truly known to make the ads so good, would we really have agreed at the start?
Digital culture is culture
The impacts of the digital world upon every day culture have never been greater. It's time to treat them that way.
The End Of Infinite
Like the infinite scroll, every media form keeps chasing the ability to keep us in neverending flow of content.
High stakes lawsuits
Epic v Apple is a very big deal.
Apps, clouds and platform control
Will we end up where Steve Jobs started the iPhone? With web-based apps that preserve control for those who make them beyond the borders of the App Store?
More than a business story
More tech stories in the culture pages, please.
Digital scarcity
Limitlessness always seems viable within a digital context. But how does it work when real people have to use it?
Some friction is good for you
the hunt for 'frictionless' interactions and interfaces misses an important fact: some friction is essential to making things that matter.
External motivations
This week school has gone back here in NSW and while the world is still in a very difficult place with the pandemic, our kids had a pretty ‘normal’ holidays. The first since October 2019. The summer was black. Kids couldn’t play outside because of the fires. They couldn’
Transparency is a vulnerability
Today I pulled the trigger on expanding the Byteside team, creating an opportunity to bring two paid writers on board to work with me across the site, the newsletter, the social presence, and the podcasts. I love working in a team. I’ve got a good track record of helping
