Linked List: May 15, 2023

Monday, 15 May 2023

Elon Musk Hires New Twitter CEO: NBCUniversal Ad Chief Linda Yaccarino 

Lillian Rizzo, reporting for CNBC:

NBCUniversal global advertising chief Linda Yaccarino has resigned to join Twitter as its next chief executive. Twitter owner Elon Musk confirmed the hire in a tweet Friday.

“I am excited to welcome Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter!” Musk tweeted. He said she “will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology.”

He added, “Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app.”

I wish Yaccarino luck, truly. But the CEO needs to run the company, and I find it unlikely that she’s going to have that authority with Musk running “product design and new technology”.

Tim Cook is an obvious example of a non-product person who is very successfully leading a product-first company. But while Cook is not a product designer or product visionary, there is zero question within Apple that Cook is the boss. The buck stops at Cook’s desk — including on product decisions.

Sidenote: I noticed about two weeks ago that Musk has largely stopped referring to Twitter by name and instead saying “this platform”. Months ago he changed the name of the holding company from “Twitter Inc.” to “X Corp.”. The fact that he largely refers to it now as “this platform” makes me think he’s going to rename it X sooner rather than later. Seems crazy to me to throw away the Twitter brand name though, so maybe “X” will just be to Twitter what “Meta” is to Facebook and “Alphabet” is to Google. But also: Musk does crazy things. Throwing away the entire Twitter brand would be less crazy than his buying it in the first place.

Ming-Chi Kuo: Apple ‘Well Prepared’ for Headset Announcement at WWDC 

Tim Hardwick, writing for MacRumors:

In a brief report posted to Medium on Monday, Kuo wrote that the headset’s announcement next month “bodes well” for the supply chain share price, with the analyst touching on five of the device’s components that — apart from assembly — represent its “most expensive material costs” in his view.

Those include the 4K micro-OLED displays, dual M2-based processors, the headset casing, 12 optical cameras for tracking hand movements, and the external power supply. These components are being supplied by Sony, TSMC, Everwin Precision, Cowell, and Goretek, respectively.

Pricing on the headset is expected to begin somewhere around $3,000. Perhaps with that in mind, Apple won’t aim it at general consumers to start with, but will instead position it as a device for developers, content creators, and professionals. Apple expects to sell just one headset per day per retail store, and it has told suppliers that it expects sales of seven to 10 million units during the first year of availability.

Kuo doesn’t mention the purported $3,000 price in his report, but a price like that would certainly jibe with an expectation that they might sell only one unit per day per store for this model. One part of me says that’s just crazy expensive for an entertainment gadget. Another part of me says that if it really is going to cost that much, it must be much more than an entertainment device — it must be useful for some forms of work too.

The original Macintosh in 1984 cost $2,500 — inflation-adjusted that’s about $7,500 today. If it’s amazing, $3,000 isn’t absurd.

But I also keep thinking back to rumors that the original iPad was going to start at $1,000, and it instead debuted with an entry price of $500.