Last night Tesla (finally) unveiled the Model 3. Many immediately went to work dissecting the minutiae — the small design decisions Tesla made to build a car at such an attractive price. Things like "where are the gauges?" (they're on the ginormous, landscape, touchscreen). Others oohed and ahed over the multi-billion dollar factory that Tesla is building to make the battery packs. But it's not the design nor the admittedly impressive supply chain which is really transformative.

Tesla hinted at this on stage when they talked about their previous vehicles, and others nibbled at the edges on Twitter: the Model 3 will make electric cars acceptable. Not mainstream — the existing Teslas, VWs, BMWs, and Leafs have already done so (at least in the dense urban and suburban markets) — but accepted normal purchases. Thus far, the electric vehicle market has been aimed at two groups. The everyday electric cars, like the Prius before them, are targeted at people who want to make a statemen about their environmental friendliness. The Leaf, so far the largest selling full-electric, is weird and wacky looking even though it didn't really have to be. It shares its structure with much more conventional Nissan compact cars; cars that have more interior room and more familiar controls. Let's face it, people who buy these cars are sacrificing range, speed, comfort, roominess, style, and cost over comparable gasoline vehicles. Nobody buys one just as a car.

It seems that the return to a slightly irreverent tone in Apple's advertising (see Gigantic and Powerful) has continued. The latest ad, Stickers, features the return of the rainbow Apple logo for the first time in over fifteen years. It flickers in. The ad isn't perfect, it's even a little bit messy. But that's what the company feels like. A bit messy. A bit nostalgic.

People seem to insist that this is a 'new Apple' - but it's really just the internal culture of Apple showing up a bit.

On his excellent Stratechery site, Ben Thompson writes about Facebook's 'Social Conglomerate.' He makes a few excellent arguments about what distinguishes Facebook's spread into different portions of the social graph from previous efforts by other tech companies. The two that stuck out to me were that Facebook is focused on Attention, and that it is building a Conglomerate (of different brands).

This idea - that a company would expand, through different brands, to attempt to dominate the entire life of one consumer is not new. It's actually exactly parallel to a story that began over 100 years ago, with one William Durant. His corporation, General Motors, spent the last century trying to do to the automotive market what Facebook is doing to the social media market. While they carved out a huge portion of the market, this strategy ultimately led to overreach, downfall, and bankruptcy.

Recently, Netflix inked a deal with Comcast that many proclaimed as the harbinger of internet doom. This deal, especially such a prominent one from a staunch defender of Net Neutrality was going to ruin the internet's equality forever.

Except that it's not. Netflix wasn't paying for faster access or better treatment. It's still no faster than iTunes, HBO GO, Amazon Instant, or any other VOD business. Netflix is merely paying for the additional infrastructure Comcast needs because of the sheer volume of Netflix traffic. It's actually quite reasonable - Netflix wants Comcast to have more capacity from its CDN, so they purchased it for Comcast. Specifically, they bought Comcast a higher capacity connection to their CDN - meaning Netflix wouldn't cause itself to run slower under high demand.

As we move into late spring, Apple has shifted its advertising focus to the iPhone. This is a wise decision, sales traditionally slump in Q3 as consumers wait for the new phone. The message of the new campaign is that the iPhone 5S is already powerful enough - leaving unspoken the implication that you don't need to wait for what's next.

But that's not the message I noticed in the ad - there's a subtler message, in the background. In fact, it's the background music - The Pixies' 'Gigantic,' an alt rock track from the late '80s. It's a curious choice, even for Apple, a company that prefers rock tracks from the present (or just past) decade.

Apple loves ownership. Devices are always 'owned' never 'activated,' people are 'owners' not 'users.' The most basic form of customization on any iPhone is the wallpaper - background and lock screen. I'd wager that over 90% of iPhones have a custom lock screen of some sort, whether it be a personal photo or just a different image from the default. In iOS 6, your wallpaper was trapped - hemmed into a square by the semi-transparent time, and opaque unlock slider. The small square in the middle may have been yours, but the screen was still definitely Apple's - it belonged to the major UI elements taking over the screen.

It's telling that Satya Nadella comes from a background of non-traditional Microsoft strengths. When Steve Ballmer said Microsoft was becoming a devices and services company, he meant it. Nadella led the teams that built Microsoft's most successful consumer service of the past ten years, with Xbox Live, then went on to build Azure - the thing that powers many of the cloud services you've heard of.

He's definitely going to have both Gates and Ballmer weighing in on his problems, but it seems as if by involving them in the decision making process, he won't then have anything vetoed when he takes it to the board. It's hard to think of a candidate better poised to lead Microsoft into the future - there's other candidates to turn it around, but none to move it forward.

Yesterday was February 3rd. To great fanfare, Facebook launched Paper, a new way to experience the news feed on your iPhone. With a fancy website, a press blitz, and relatively rare interviews with Facebook designers & engineers, the launch is calculated to drive adoption of the new app. A fundamental redesign of the core way many users experience Facebook, Paper tries to drive mobile use by the youngest and most desired users. It's just the latest move in a very long line of attempts for Facebook to allow users to comprehend the massive amounts of data that stream in every second. And it's not the first time this same launch has happened.