Original link: https://pt.plus/06-04-2023-biology/

This week’s topic is Biology.

In fact, ecology is an overused metaphor: we use it to describe everything that we feel is huge and chaotic. There are often different components in it, they are entangled with each other, and perhaps some chemical reactions will occur; when it collapses, we often don’t know where the initial gangrene grew, and we can only watch it. Watch the rot from the inside out, impossible to contain.

Metaphors will eventually become everyday language, and no one will care about the original meaning of a word in the colorless and tasteless melting conversation. Ecology originally meant the scientific study of the interaction between organisms and their environment. Individual and whole, individual and individual, these complex relationships are difficult to figure out anyway, it is better to be vague.

Biology, on the other hand, is a less commonly used metaphor. It refers more to the individual. People generally tend to refer to individuals by more specific names. For example, we talk about companies, teams, and individuals, and we probably use names to refer to them, but we rarely use the metaphor of “biology”. And Charlie Munger put it this way:

Well, over the long term, the companies of America behave more like biology than they do anything else. And biology, all the individuals die and so do all the species, it’s just a question of time. And that’s pretty well what happens in the economy, too.

All the things that were really great when I were young have receded enormously, and new things have come up and some of them started to die. And that is what the long term investment climate is. And it does make it very interesting.

That translates to: It is a long-standing fact that corporate America behaves more like living things than anything else. In biology, all individuals will eventually die, and species will become extinct, it is only a matter of time. The same goes for the economy. The things that looked great to me when I was young, have dwindled considerably and new things have popped up, some of which have started to disappear. That’s the long-term investing climate. It’s really interesting.

The calm “this is very interesting” is actually used to see the ebb and flow. Biology is much more fragile than ecology. After all, it is only a single individual, and there are not many barriers that can resist risks. However, creatures are not so easy to die. During the long confrontational adjustment with the environment, every creature has become full of resilience-often not fighting head-on, but fighting to the death and procrastinating, and the final winner is often the one that survives.

It is the simplest basic fact that all living creatures face death. If you are in a hostile environment, the best survival strategy is not to be defeated by the environment.

Essays

Ultimate Guide to Platforms by Steven Sinofsky

This is a long post by Steven Sinofsky, a former Microsoft executive who was president of the Windows business unit from 2009-2012. The article summarizes his systematic thinking on technology platforms and platform economy. Interestingly, the title is similar to the subtitle of Platform Thinking +.

I made a lot of excerpts from this article, too many to put in the newsletter, so interested readers are advised to spend some time reading the original text by themselves. I will pick some more important parts to share.

First, the definition of “platform”:

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