Read Write Own by Chris Dixon

These are my notes from Read Write Own by Chris Dixon. Each one contains a core idea from the book that stood out. The goal of writing my notes this way is that each could be it's own independent idea with the need for the specific context within the book.

Metcalfe's Law

Metcalfe's Law was created to measure the value of network effects. The law says the value of a network grows quadratically to the number of nodes squared. Robert Metcalfe created it in the early days of the internet. The co-creator of Ethernet meant for it to apply to hardware. However, it applies to all networks as a way to measure their value.

The Garage-to-Greatness Pipeline

Silicon Valley’s secret sauce isn’t just in corporate labs. As Chris Dixon points out, the most transformative technologies often emerge from the fringe. He calls these "outside-in" innovations, born in garages, dorm rooms, and hobbyist meetups. Unlike their “inside-out” counterparts from Big Tech, these ideas start scrappy and weird. The Homebrew Computer Club inspired Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Linus Torvalds coded Linux as a side project. These outsiders fueled by passion rather than paycheck create technology that invades trillion-dollar industries. Low history shows that today’s tinkering can become tomorrow’s trillion-dollar industry. The web itself started as a quirky project in a Swiss physics lab. A "useless" gadget or app might be the next big thing in networked adolescence.

Squeezing the Balloon

In the tech industry, profits shift like air in a squeezed balloon. Chris Dixon explains this phenomenon, drawing on Clayton Christensen's "law of conservation of attractive profits." When one layer of a tech stack becomes commoditized, another layer becomes profitable. Google’s strategy exemplifies this; by creating free or open-source products across various layers (Android, Chrome), they protect their lucrative search business. This “commoditize your complements” approach, coined by Joel Spolsky, allows tech giants to control their destiny. As Dixon notes, "Google doesn't even need to make money on Android. It just needs that part of the mobile market to be commoditized" to safeguard its search profits. In this high-stakes game, companies aren’t just competing within layers, but across the entire tech stack.

Why People Use Technology

There are two reasons why people use a new technology:

1. They can do something faster, cheaper, easier, or with better quality.
2. They can do something that wasn't previously possible.

There will always be a learning curve to new technology. When it fits with pre-existing activities, that's smaller. When it is about doing activities better to meet common ongoing needs, the possibilities are broad. Usually, it requires people to change (which we as a whole dread). Innovation that opens new possibilities has the longest lasting impact on the world.

The Power of Composability

In software development, composability is the secret sauce that turns code into a global collaborative masterpiece. Like Lego bricks, smaller pieces of software can be assembled into larger creations, enabling developers to build on each other's work. This principle, as Chris Dixon explains, unlocks exponential growth in software development. By encapsulating complex functions, allowing for reusability, and tapping into the wisdom of crowds, composability acts as compounding interest for code. It’s why a project on GitHub often contains more borrowed code than original, creating a vast interconnected tree of ideas.

The AI-Driven Media Revolution

Chris Dixon, a prominent tech investor, predicts a seismic shift in the media landscape. As generative AI rapidly improves, it’s poised to democratize content creation like social media democratized distribution. AI-generated content will challenge copyrights, and people will be less willing to pay for content they can easily replicate. However, Dixon argues that value doesn’t vanish; it simply migrates. He points to Tiktok as an example: despite AI dominance, human artistic expression will pivot from the media itself to the surrounding elements of curation, community, and culture.

Automation Happens Indirectly

The physical world is slowly merging into a digital one. The more things that come online, the more automation that can take place, but this happens indirectly. They're not replaced one to one. Substitutes arise that weren't previously possible. The digital solutions never fully replace the physical ones either. Robots or AI didn’t replace travel agents. Search engines and travel websites did. Mail rooms were replaced by email. Postboxes were replaced by that message, but both still exist today. They’re just used less frequently. We didn’t replace business travel with personal aircrafts. Instead, we created Zoom so people could be anywhere without needing to travel.

Skeuomorphic

A technology is skeuomorphic when it borrows from what came before it. Originally, a concept from design to describe art that was intentional unnecessary holdovers. This concept took over in technology around the 1980s. The first big proponent was Steve Jobs. The idea was computers would be more intuitive if they looked familiar to users. It made it easier for people to adapt to the interactions. Today, it's used to describe technology that mimics existing activities or experiences, copying what exists adds functionality.

Encapsulation: The Lego Bricks of Software

In the complex world of software, encapsulation acts as a powerful simplifier. It’s an electrical outlet for code—a well-defined interface that abstracts away the intricate details. We plug appliances into an outlet without understanding the electrical grid. Developers can use encapsulated code without knowing its inner workings. This concept allows for every reuse, like a Lego brick. Developers create base program pieces that others can snap together to build larger, more complex apps. The term “complexity encapsulation” enhances collaboration on a large scale because people can work together more efficiently without needing every detail of someone else's work.