The UK does not lack talent. It does not lack good universities. It does not lack creative people, ambitious founders, world-class researchers, skilled designers, clever engineers or globally respected institutions. What it lacks is a coherent economic story.
Benedict Evans has a useful habit of standing slightly away from the noise. For years, his big strategy decks have acted as a kind of weather map for the technology industry: mobile, media, ecommerce, platforms, regulation, capital flows, and now AI. They are not predictions in the cheap sense. They are attempts to show the shape of the system: where the money is going, what assumptions people are making, which comparisons are lazy, and where the industry may be fooling itself.
Most software today is concieved by humans. Even when it contains variations like different checkout flows by country, onboarding paths by customer type, consent screens by regulation, or payment options by market, those variations are anticipated, designed, tested and maintained by people. Adaptive software changes that relationship.
The calls for Keir Starmer to resign are understandable. Labour has taken a serious beating in the local elections. The government looks exhausted less than two years after winning a landslide. Reform is pulling voters away on the right. The Greens are pulling voters away on the left. Starmer’s personal authority is badly damaged, and recent polling suggests the electorate has fragmented in a way that should terrify anybody hoping for a straightforward Labour recovery.
So the obvious response is to change the leader. I think that would be a mistake.
There’s a familiar libertarian story about Europe: too much bureaucracy, too many regulations, too many worker protections, too much privacy law, and too many rules about what companies can and can’t do. This, we’re told, is why Europe doesn’t produce as many world-beating technology companies as the US.
A friend recently sent me a post from "the bad place" that broke product designers down into four types.
The language was intentionally provocative. Some of it was needlessly mean-spirited. In places it was openly contemptuous. Certain designers were described as effectively worthless. Others were framed as self-important, disingenuous, or fundamentally unserious about the business.
And yet, beneath the aggression, I think there is a real, painful truth in there.