A running commentary of occasionally interesting things — from Mike Davidson.
A couple of weeks ago, one of the most unique people in our industry passed away. A quiet man of incredible volume, Om Malik was the person whose voice traveled only a few feet but always filled the room. He was the first national reporter to write about our little startup Newsvine in 2005, and [ ]
If you re in tech and you don t have at least a little career anxiety right now, you are either overly confident or you aren t paying attention. Engineers are jittery. PMs are jittery. Designers and Researchers are jittery. The simplest way to explain what s happening is: The assembly layer is going away. The assembly layer has [ ]
Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life A thick desire is one that changes you in the process of pursuing it. A thin desire is one that doesn t The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then deliver that reward [ ]
If you re a designer in the market for a job right now, you probably feel behind the AI wave already, and you re wondering if the skills you ve honed in your career are even useful anymore. One of the benefits of being an oldster in this field is that you begin to see patterns in everything, [ ]
I grew up on Iliff Street, right in the middle of the ashes that up until a few nights ago, was a sunkissed neighborhood known as Pacific Palisades. It was 1978, and I remember my dad climbing up on our roof with a garden hose. Every couple of hours, he would wet the house down, [ ]
Since reflecting on one year at Microsoft almost 12 months ago, a lot has changed. Most visibly to the outside world, we ve completely re-designed and re-engineered our Copilot consumer app from the ground up with a a craft- and quality-first mentality. The New Copilot mobile app Copilot Daily helps you catch up with world events [ ]
I tried some absolutely outstanding ice cream yesterday that reminded me of yet another reason I feel lucky to be part of Generation X: We are living in the golden age of ice cream. In the 1970s, we had a few basic flavors to choose from: vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, chocolate chip, mint chocolate chip, and [ ]
America’s Best Decade, According to Data The good old days when America was “great” aren’t the 1950s. They’re whatever decade you were 11, your parents knew the correct answer to any question, and you’d never heard of war crimes tribunals, microplastics or improvised explosive devices. Or when you were 15 and athletes and musicians still [ ]
The Rise of Dopamine Culture Here’s where the science gets really ugly. The more addicts rely on these stimuli, the less pleasure they receive. At a certain point, this cycle creates anhedonia — the complete absence of enjoyment in an experience supposedly pursued for pleasure. A spot-on analysis of where we are as a society [ ]
Last week marked one year at Microsoft for me, and what an unexpected adventure it s been! I thought I was coming in to lead a a stable of popular, but well-trodden web properties, and I ended up getting to work on a whole lot more, including Windows, Bing Chat, and the company s biggest bet in [ ]
It s been awhile since I ve written a post on Mike Industries, so I thought I would resume programming with an unorthodox product suggestion that I am pretty sure you will love: snail mucin. I recently got back from a trip to Korea where this stuff was all over the place. I had heard about people [ ]
Despite living in Seattle for almost all of my adult life, I haven t actually worked for a local company in almost ten years. Remote work is great in so many ways, but in-person collaboration is what gives me life. In confident pursuit of that feeling, I m thrilled to be joining Microsoft to run Design [ ]
Over the last several weeks, I ve gotten in the habit of trying to move all of my Twitter activity over to Mastodon instead. I signed up for Mastodon several years ago, but only now are there enough people using it for it to replace a lot of what you might use Twitter for. Some of [ ]
Jony Ive on Life After Apple One of our generation s greatest and most influential designers hasn t slowed down as much as he has simply shifted focus. A great example of splitting your life into chapters and knowing when it s time to explore the next one.
There is no shortage of opinions about today s news that Adobe will be acquiring Figma, so I ll try not to repeat any of what s already been said here. A lot of it boils down to designers and engineers being understandably concerned that the product they ve grown to love and put at the center of their [ ]