Coté

At a large enterprise I recently worked with, the board asked the Chief Digital Transformation Officer to develop an AI adoption strategy to drive innovation, growth, and cost efficiency. His consultant of choice conducted stakeholder interviews and proposed a three-phase program scheduled to last 3.5 years: Phase 1: Fix digital basics and address the leftover gaps in people, processes, and technology from an incomplete digital transformation. Phase 2: Build the AI foundation, including governance, tools, platforms, and an AI office.

But how much was really done to unravel the Soviet Union by Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume narrative history of the Soviet Gulag between its publication and the end of Communism in the Soviet Union? Could the works of one author really dissolve a nation? Some might cite the election of the Polish Pope John Paul II in 1978 as making a greater difference. Others might point to U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) or to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika.

Betty Crocker, mid-1950s. I heard a reference the Betty Crocker “add an egg” cake-mix story recently. It is: originally, people didn’t buy the cake mix because it felt too easy and didn’t feel loving, or at least sufficiently Calvinistic; General Mills removed the egg, then people cracked one in themselves, and suddenly they felt like they were “baking” and sales took off. This is also known as the IKEA effect, apparently

Our cousins over in VMware announced the most recent version of VMware Cloud Foundation, 9.1, yesterday. We all call this “VCF.” It’s at the center of Broadcom’s strategy to be the private cloud stack for large enterprises. You know: banks, governments, large retailers, manufactures, et. al. Our layer, the Tanzu Platform, sits a-top VCF like any PaaS would sit a-top IaaS. Recently, the VCF people have been putting a lot of effort into private cloud AI.

The right mental model for working with an AI, according to my co-host David. If you’ve spent any real time with an AI, you know exactly what he means. The model can do impressive work in a tight scope. Step out of that scope, or feed it more than fits, and you’re suddenly explaining the same constraint for the third time that happened just a few minutes ago. In the most recent Tanzu Catsup episode, we also talk about copy.

Also: Bob picks the model, AI-BOMs, $37.5M DIY platforms, and AI slop on tap. From: AI Slop Me Related to your interests 🤖 The Venture-Capital Populist - Packer’s profile of David Sacks as architect of Silicon Valley’s MAGA alliance, who delivered crypto legitimisation and AI deregulation to the Trump administration while keeping his venture fund running and benefiting from the policies he wrote. don’t call it “social media,” call it “parasocial media” Most AI coding is “like taking your Ferrari to buy milk”: IBM’s Neel Sundaresan - Harness talk from IBM: “Bob doesn’t expose the underlying model to users.

In 2006, most people who logged into the large platforms posted content because they were co-constructing sociable spaces to enjoy the companionship of others. In 2026, posting has waned (John, 2024); most social media users prioritize scrolling ‘amateur’ content rather than posting their own haphazard updates for friends. The quality of the media on social media has become more strategically constructed, more intentionally curated, and more professional. Users are now lucky to see personal content that their friends are posting amid the slick content created by the advertisers and strategic creators who dominate most people’s feeds.

What it actually costs to build your own internal developer platform over five years, and why most “we’ll just build it” pitches are pricing the cheap version. Sixty people and $7.5 million a year, every year, is what it costs to build and operate your own internal developer platform if you do it the way DIY-minded enterprises end up doing it, and most of the executives signing off don’t see the number, because it’s spread across eight cost centers under “engineering.