“The Swedes responded because they could not accept that outcome. They had no special obligation to act; they did so because they believed it was right. They had behaved admirably; even the hypocrisy of political correctness — their opinion corridor — may have been an indispensable adjunct to national self-sacrifice. Then, as a consequence, they were inundated, forcing a step back from the moral precipice. Can we blame them? No more than an individual can be blamed for declining to act heroically.”

“In a surprising way, it is far easier to innovate down the stack than up the stack. The reason for this is that you are yourself a natural customer of the lower layers. Apple knew what it wanted from an ideal future microprocessor. It did not have the skills necessary to build it, but the customer needs were well understood. Technical skills can be bought/acquired, whereas it is very hard to buy a deep understanding of market needs. It is therefore no surprise that Apple had an easier time building semiconductor chips than building Apple Maps.”

“This is the way adaptation plays out: Person A comprehends some information about person B’s nature from what B says or does, and that changes how A approaches her afterward. It sounds simple, but I think it’s very difficult to write and nearly impossible to write well. Almost no one tries. Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte each did this over and over.”