Why am I doing this?

Hi Guys

It's 2022, and I've spent the last year thinking about subscription services, and how the world seems to have adapted to them quite seamlessly. Microsoft, Adobe and Apple are some of the companies who have forged the way and warmed up most of the internet world to paying a monthly for some kind of value, be it a product, a service, or information.

Having run an ISP for the last (nearly) 9 years I've come to appreciate the model of recurring income. Being paid every single month for the service that you provide is an incredible privilege. I didn't know it at the time, but back in 2013 when I started converting everything I did to a monthly fee, paved the way to being able to survive the COVID disaster of 2020.

So having seen the benefits there, I've decided to start a weekly email newsletter. Why? Well let me explain.

I've been in tech for more than 2 decades. I've done everything from networks, to servers, to cloud services, to running an ISP. At one point I was the global head of IT for a private equity company. But one thing that keeps bugging me is how few people really understand tech.

Like it or not, tech is now part of your life. Everything you do relies on tech in one way or another. Your phone, your TV, your car, possibly your fridge. Everything is connected and everything is talking to everything else, and it's a bit of a mine field to naviagte.

So I wanted to create a place where I can explain in plain english, what's going on in the tech world. Things change at a rapid rate and sometimes it's just nice to have someone explain in plain english what's going on.

Further to that, I'm going to create a Discord platform where paying subscribers have a place to come and ask me questions and chat about things and hopefully I can explain and make sense of things more simply for everyone.

So each week I'll send an email, most likely on a Monday, but I have a crazy life so some weeks on a different day, and I'll take everything that's going on in the tech world and I'll break it down simply. Then if you need to, you can hop on over to Discord and come chat to me about it.

So let's get into it...

2022 has been off to a slowish start tech wise. Not even CES, which is typically held in early January has had much earth shattering news, besides maybe a colour changing BMW.

So for the first instance of this newsletter, I think I am going to focus rather on where I think tech is going to go over the next 12 months.

Fistly, 2021 was a breakout year for NFT's. If you don't know what an NFT is, I'll be writing a primer on that soon, so make sure you're subscribed. However, I think 2022 might see a near collapse of the NFT eco system, possibly a rebranding of it, and then we'll find our groove and be able to move on.

Cars are going to make massive strides this year too. The motor industry has been hit hard by the global chip shortage, which isn't surpising when you consider the amount of chips a modern car requuires, but this also points to the fact that cars are getting increasingly technological, and once the chip shortage has been solved, and chip costs are reduced, we'll see even entry level cars become far more advanced tecnhologically.

We won't see much breakthrough in phones or somputers, they've made massive gains over the last year, especially with Apple and their M1 chip, but we are likely to see that M1 chip in every incarnation of laptop that Apple makes.

Security is going to be interesting to watch. We're far more vulnerable than any of us care to acknowledge, but it's still pretty important to work at securing your life as attempts to gain access to networs is rising at break neck speeds.

I'm back at work this week, and I think so is the rest of the world. So we'll dive into tech, and from next week have a far more detailed breakdown of where tech is, and where tech is going and I'll do my best to explain it all in simple english, so even Dad can understand it.