by Gary Mintchell | Aug 1, 2025 | Business, Generative AI
No marketing person exists today who can write a news release without a mention of AI. I keep expecting an AI-enabled terminal block. “Now, your electrician will never put the wrong wire in our terminal block thanks to AI…”
No CEO can announce corporate strategy without somehow incorporating AI—or their particular branding of AI—into the memo/speech/announcement.
Take Mark Zuckerberg, please. Faced with yet another existential crisis for his “we capture your attention for cash” machine, he proclaims “personal superintelligence”. Unfortunately, Zuck did not invent that term. As Om Malik points out in Meta’s Favorite Product Isn’t AI, It’s the Copy Button, he lifted the term and his memo from another source. Not unusual for the guy who lifted the idea for Facebook from his employers at the time at Harvard.
I went to two of my long-time favorite writers about Silicon Valley, Om Malik and MG Siegler for insight into the latest corporate AI salvo. As usual, there is more smoke and mirrors than real products.
As Malik writes:
Facebook’s real innovation has been in perfecting and scaling existing concepts rather than creating entirely new behaviors. Their strategy appears to be: watch others innovate, then copy and execute better with their massive user base and resources. Out in Silicon Valley, we call this “Zucking.” As I pointed out yesterday, the biggest challenge for Meta is not that it doesn’t have the resources or the mettle. It is just that it still doesn’t know what to copy. Scale.AI might help, but the reality is that no one, including OpenAI and Anthropic, knows the how and why of AI and human behaviors around it. Chatbots are a start.
Zuck has moved quickly to stamp out, copy, or acquire competitive threats:
Zuck has competitive anxiety. By repeatedly talking about being “distinct from others in the industry” he is tipping his hand. He is worried that Meta is being seen as a follower rather than leader. Young people are flocking to ChatGPT. Programmers are flocking to Claude Code.
Malik concludes:
Most CEOs defend their existing moats. Zuckerberg systematically abandons them. He understands that Facebook’s real asset isn’t the blue app. Instead, it is the graph of human attention and relationships. Each pivot is about preserving that graph while migrating it to new interfaces.
And over almost two decades of following the company, I have come to a conclusion that Zuck is one of the best “chief executives” to come out of Silicon Valley. And this is coming from someone who has no qualms about viewing him with moral disdain. In the past, I have referred to the company as “amoral” for a reason. Not only is Zuckerberg paranoid and Machiavellian, he is also willing to go to any extreme to survive and thrive.
MG Siegler writes:
At the same time, while you’re throwing tens of millions, and sometimes hundreds of millions – and perhaps even billions – at people to try to join your new Superintelligence Labs, a number of folks are turning you down. You’re making them an offer they cannot refuse and… they’re refusing it. Why? In part, perhaps, because your messaging around AI is muddled at best. Further, many simply aren’t inspired about the prospects of going to work for what is still very much an advertising-driven company trying to build the future of AI. So what do you do if you’re Zuck? Try to change the conversation.
When you read reports of CEOs who have read a news item in Forbes or the Wall Street Journal and proclaim they’ll save all labor costs by using AI, understand that they really don’t have a clue. Part of the comments are directed at investors. Part to scare employees. Part to sound like they know the latest technology.
by Gary Mintchell | May 27, 2025 | Business, Generative AI
Cal Newport, computer science professor at Georgetown and prolific workflow and lifestyle wrier, discussed another aspect of GenerativeAI on his May 26 podcast. His currently thinks generative AI companies will start making money when people use it several times daily like they use Google search. Responding to reports that OpenAI sells $20,000 licenses to companies for specialty usages, he responds that ChatGPT and its competitors must become so usable that they reach a critical mass of daily users.
That’s not even close to happening right now—at least according to an analyst report I frequently receive purporting to show LLMs make little dent in Google search numbers..
Analyst Ben Evans recently released an essay with statistics from 2024 about daily average use (DAU) and weekly average use (WAU) of AI.
Generative AI chatbots might be a life-changing transformation in the nature of computing, that can replace all software, but so far, most of its users only pick it up every week or two, and far fewer have made it part of their lives. Is that a time problem or a product problem?
The proportion of daily users to weekly users is astonishingly small.
But another reaction is say that even with those advantages, if this is a life-changing transformation in the possibilities of computing, why is the DAU/WAU (daily average useage/weekly average usage) ratio so bad? Something between 5% and 15% of people are finding a use for this every day, but at least twice as many people are familiar with it, and know how it works, and know how to use it… and yet only find it useful once a week. Again, you didn’t have to buy a thousand dollar device, so you’re not committed – but if this is THE THING – why do most people shrug?
Media coverage and hype could lead one to believe that everyone uses these tools. But, no.
DAU is everything. Sam Altman knows this – he was trying to build a social media app at the time, and yet the traction number he always gives is, well, ‘weekly active users’. That’s a big number (the latest is 1bn globally)… but then, why is he giving us that number instead of DAUs? If you’re only using ChatGPT once a week, is it really working for you?
Evans asks, is it a people problem or a product problem? We just have not found a sufficient use case to integrate ChatGPT into our daily workflow. That’s a problem for those companies.
by Gary Mintchell | May 24, 2025 | Business
There must be a label for people who try to make the world conform to their mental modal. Insane? Blind? Overly optimistic? Ego maniacal?
I have many years of experience in manufacturing. Almost a decade of experience as the cost analyst of a mid-sized manufacturing company (along with other duties). Articles in national media pretending to explain manufacturing miss the target so far it’s good practice to set the target in front of a big hill to stop the shots.
Politicians are even worse. I cannot remember a single instance where a politician discussing manufacturing had anything better than a broad macroeconomic view.
I understand Trump wanting to boost manufacturing in the US. It’s a national security issue. He promised some of his constituency that he’d bring good paying jobs to the US for them. It boosts his ego. I’d love to see a resurgence of manufacturing in this country.
But telling Apple that they had better start assembling iPhones in the US or face penalties borders on Fantasy Island.
Check a similar strategic move. Does anyone remember way back when WalMart heavily advertised “Made in America?” Do you remember the sudden pivot to “Always Lowest Price?” I worked in product development for a couple of manufacturers of consumer products who depended on sales through WalMart. The cost pressures were brutal. You sought every edge.
Does anyone realize how long it takes to build a factory from scratch? And where would the manufacturing and tooling engineers come from? And the assembly line workers? Those would not be high-paying jobs. Apparently the work is seasonal. The work intense. Americans have shown a disdain for applying for that sort of work.
Perhaps the best piece I have read in national media looking at Americans view of working in manufacturing is this piece from NPR news (a totally unexpected outlet).
President Trump has been upending the global economy in the name of bringing manufacturing back. President Joe Biden signed into law massive investments aimed at doing something similar. The American manufacturing sector is reviving after decades of decay.
But there’s something a bit weird undercutting this movement to reshore factory jobs: American manufacturers say they are struggling to fill the jobs they already have.
According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are nearly half a million open manufacturing jobs right now.
The article continues to discuss pay. I lived in a manufacturing-intense area of the country in west-central Ohio. Pay for factory workers fell for decades until it hit minimum wage. The head of the local Chamber of Commerce and the head of the local United Way both had told me that factory workers simply could not survive on their pay.
If manufacturers raised wages, that would most likely offset any supply chain gains.
Before I could finish the above part of the essay, here came an article from The New York Times. What a bunch of unadulterated crap was in that article. They quote “analysts” about costs to make the iPhone in the US. How can an analyst outside a company do enough research and math to calculate that when internal cost analysts have a hard time deriving numbers. Then there was the Fox
Somewhere in my reading the reporter thought FoxConn had up to 500,000 engineers working in its assembly factories. I wonder what was the definition of engineer. Must be another case of sloppy reporting.
John Gruber, a respected journalist covering Apple writing at Daring Fireball (and not a manufacturing guy by any stretch), wrote a scathing review of the New York Times article. Really a good read.
Advisors in the Trump administration would do well to check the work of The Reshoring Initiative, an organization providing statistics and advice for the benefits to companies bringing manufacturing back to this country.
Naturally it is a complex subject. I only wish people could learn a bit more about manufacturing before going off half-cocked.
by Gary Mintchell | May 7, 2025 | Business
I jumped on Skype about as soon as it was launched. There were times I pushed its limits even for recording podcasts.
Then Microsoft acquired it. Skype quickly lost its utility. It has resided on my computer for years. I can’t think of a time when I’ve actually used it in the past 10 years.
This story of small, innovative company selling to a large corporation only for users to lose the utility of the product happens so often it’s almost trite. I bet you can think of a dozen examples just in the industrial technology arena. (I won’t list for the sake of brevity.)
But Skype was ground breaking. A great tool. Now Microsoft suggests that we should switch to Teams. I hate using Teams. I hate the interface. I hate the way it keeps asking for new logins. I hate the way it acts on a Mac. Good luck.
Om Malik, one of my favorite tech observers whom I’ve read for maybe 30 years, wrote a great obituary on Skype. It’s worthy of a read. Here’s the beginning.
On May 5, Microsoft retired Skype, the startup that sparked a communication revolution. I won’t repeat myself, as I’ve already published a postmortem analyzing Skype’s decline under Microsoft’s 14-year ownership of the platform, for which it paid $8.5 billion.
Just like Nokia, Skype created one of the most iconic internet ringtones, and it will likely exist in archives. At its peak in 2009, Skype had 405 million users. They all probably heard it. To me, it will always represent what the internet sounded like in the 2000s.
by Gary Mintchell | Apr 28, 2025 | Business, News
I have a couple of releases from Siemens. This company seems more active than its rivals this year. This one relates to a software acquisition. This brings to mind a couple of conversations I had with a Siemens executive many years ago. I told him my observation that Siemens had a terrible track record with acquisitions. He told me they had learned and would improve. Beginning with the UGS acquisition, they have integrated acquisitions much better. This should be good for them. And PLM seems to be a hot area currently.
In short:
- Acquisition of Dotmatics, a leader in Life Sciences R&D software for $5.1 billion
- Expands Siemens’ market-leading position in industrial software by extending AI-powered Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) portfolio into Life Sciences to seamlessly connect R&D through manufacturing
- Increases Siemens’ industrial software total addressable market by $11 billion; aligns with strategic goal to accelerate customer innovation across industries
- Acquisition is another milestone of Siemens’ ONE Tech Company program expanding the Siemens Xcelerator platform into Life Sciences software with stronger customers focus, faster innovations and higher growth
Siemens AG announces that it has signed an agreement to acquire Dotmatics, a leading provider of Life Sciences R&D software based in Boston, for $5.1 billion from Insight Partners. This acquisition represents a strategic milestone for Siemens, expanding its comprehensive Digital Twin technology and AI-powered software into this rapidly growing complementary market. The US company offers a market leading platform with a highly profitable portfolio of scientific applications and multi-modal data management for Life Sciences R&D. The company’s offering accelerates customers’ innovation, delivering next generation collaboration and contextualized data to enable AI-powered multi-modal drug development.
“By acquiring Dotmatics, we’re strategically strengthening our position in Life Sciences and creating a world-leading AI-powered PLM software portfolio as part of Siemens Xcelerator. Artificial Intelligence has emerged as a transformative force across various industries, and its application in Life Sciences is becoming increasingly important”, said Roland Busch, President and CEO of Siemens AG. “The Dotmatics acquisition is part of our ONE Tech Company growth program, enhancing our leading position in industrial software and helping our customers to innovate even faster.”
Life Sciences presents an attractive complementary software market opportunity and expands Siemens’ industrial software total addressable market by $11 billion. This market is driven by structural shifts, such as increased medication need driven by aging societies and improved access to medicine, new treatment options from advancing science and the necessity for increased collaboration and visibility across complex value chains. These trends underscore the need for digital transformation, with software spending expected to double over the next five years.
Siemens’ expansion within Life Sciences aligns with its strategic goal to accelerate customer innovation across the top industries with the highest R&D spend. The acquisition is part of the investment track of Siemens’ ONE Tech Company program and following last week’s closing of Altair’s acquisition, yet another milestone. This growth program enables Siemens to further expand its market position and reach the next level of performance and value creation. Through acquisitions like this, as well as R&D investments into areas including software, AI-enabled products, connected hardware and sustainability, Siemens is clearly prioritizing capital allocation to strategic growth fields. The acquisition of Dotmatics enables Siemens to scale its technologies into Life Sciences and to fully address growth opportunities in this market. It will allow Siemens to combine its comprehensive manufacturing expertise, industrial simulation and AI capabilities with Dotmatics’ leading complementary applications, creating a first-of-its-kind end-to-end digital thread that connects data from research through to production in Life Sciences.
by Gary Mintchell | Mar 28, 2025 | Business, News, Software
The last of four news items this week from Siemens concerns a large software acquisition. A high level Siemens executive told me years ago that the company had learned from earlier mistakes in order to more successfully integrate acquisitions. Events have proved him correct. This acquisition should be very interesting for their customers.
- Siemens extends leadership in simulation and industrial AI as it closes acquisition of Altair Engineering Inc.
- Acquisition strengthens position of Siemens as a leading technology company and expands its industrial software portfolio
- Addition of Altair technology to the Siemens Xcelerator open digital business platform will create the world’s most complete AI-powered portfolio of industrial software and further enhance the most comprehensive Digital Twin
- Acquisition is a cornerstone of Siemens’ ONE Tech Company program Siemens announced today that it has completed the acquisition of Altair Engineering Inc., a leading provider of software in the industrial simulation and analysis market, for an enterprise value of approximately USD 10 billion. With this acquisition, Siemens extends its leadership in simulation and industrial artificial intelligence (AI) by adding new capabilities in mechanical and electromagnetic simulation, high-performance computing (HPC), data science and AI. The addition of the Altair team and technology to Siemens will further enhance the most comprehensive Digital Twin and make simulation more accessible, so companies of any size can bring complex products to market faster.
“We welcome the Altair community of customers, partners and colleagues to Siemens. Adding Altair’s groundbreaking innovations to the Siemens Xcelerator platform will create the world’s most complete AI-powered design, engineering and simulation portfolio. Together, we will help our customers to innovate at the scale and speed that today’s complexity-driven world demands,” said Roland Busch, President Siemens AG and CEO of Siemens AG. “Through the ONE Tech Company program, we will extend our leadership in industrial software. This enables all industries to benefit from the revolution driven by data and AI.”
Integrating Altair’s capabilities in the areas of simulation, HPC, data science, and AI enhances the ability of Siemens to drive more efficient and sustainable products and processes. Now, all Siemens customers, from engineers to generalists, will have access to new simulation expertise, can optimize their high-performance computing processes, create new AI tools and perform data analytics to help accelerate innovation and digital transformation for companies of all sizes.
The acquisition of Altair is part of Siemens’ ONE Tech Company program and will meaningfully increase Siemens’ digital revenue share. This growth program enables Siemens to further expand its strong market position and reach the next level of performance and value creation. Through acquisitions like this, as well as R&D investments into areas including software, AI-enabled products, connected hardware and sustainability, Siemens is clearly prioritizing capital allocation to strategic growth fields.
With the completion of the acquisition of Altair as well as the recent expansions of Siemens’ factories in California and Texas, Siemens has now invested over USD 100 billion into the United States in the past 20 years.
