"Blockchain 2020: though many will deny it, 2019 was a year of relatively small progress for blockchain in the enterprise. Yes, progress occurred. But it was not of an earth-shattering form.

As a mild antidote as well as precursor to 2020 Enterprise Times offers up a selection of statements made about blockchain for next year. Take them as you will…"

"Finally, in a Silicon Valley where failure is supposedly a red badge of courage, but one only worn after your next big success, Fishkin has an unique take on vulnerability (chapter 15) and his battles with depression, both in this long, painful blog post which was written the night before this story about a Foundry CEO summit from the book"

"The war on facts and expertise will continue to escalate. Read The Death of Expertise for more. This will extend to a war on college. While an attempted opening salvo on graduate student tuition waivers didn’t fire, in an environment where the President’s son says, “we’ll take $200,000 of your money; in exchange we’ll train your children to hate our country,” you can expect ongoing attacks on post-secondary education. This spells trouble for Silicon Valley, where a large number of founders and entrepreneurs are former grad students as well as immigrants (which is a whole different area of potential trouble)."

"The darlings of the new media sector such as Buzzfeed, Gawker, and Mashable attained massive amounts of traffic yet even they were unable to run fast enough to stem the race to the bottom on declining advertising revenues.

Google is also racing to the bottom. Every quarter it reports less money per click than the same period in the prior year. In it's most recent quarter it reported 18% less -- a larger than expected decline. But it beat Wall Street estimates because it found more places to show more ads."

"Facebook (and Google) is finding it harder and harder to avoid being seen as a media company. I’ve called Facebook, Google, Yahoo and many others — high-tech enabled media companies for more than a decade. I’m glad others are seeing that: publishing pages of content with advertising around it is a media company."

"If you view strategy as the plan to win, then successful strategies include only those strategies that your organization can realistically execute from both a resources and skills perspective. Instead of doing a single-pass process that moves from strategic objectives to budgets, use an iterative approach with a strategy compiler to ensure your strategic code compiles before you try to execute it."

"Fine lines exist here, no doubt. Sometimes reasons are reasons and sometimes they are actually excuses. The question isn’t about any one case. It’s about, deep down, are you judging yourself by intentions or results?

You’d be surprised how many otherwise very solid people get this one thing wrong — and end up career-limited as a result."

"The difference is in responsibility:

- Media companies are legally responsible for the nature of the content that they publish.

- Facebook has no legal responsibility for the content it publishes because it is a technology platform - it doesn't create the content.

However, Facebook does choose what to put into people's news feeds and it deletes content that violates the editorial policy of its terms of service. Some of this is done by automated tools but a lot of it is done by people."

"For enterprise infrastructure software, “The purchasing cycle has collapsed and the deployment cycle has collapsed,” Cockcroft agreed. The old ways of upgrading enterprise software, such as an SAP system, was by having a dedicated team come in and spend months doing the upgrade, and then moving on to the next project. This approach was centered around the model of large periodic updates of the software, which may come out about ever 18 – 24 months. But the move to CI/CD means the updates come in smaller chunks, and arrive more frequently."

"In the end, because it (metaphorically) sells more newspapers. “Wow, some guy just quit as CEO of a billion-dollar company to actually spend more time with his family” just sounds a whole lot better than the same line with a comparatively paltry $50M instead. Man Bites Dog beats Dog Bites Man every time."

"And yet for now, the $15 minimum wage and the movement it represents will likely have as much of a disruptive effect on the future of work as anything Silicon Valley might create. Silicon Valley may be rethinking the future of labor, but so far the fruits of those ideas have yet to meaningfully trickle down to the bottom of the wage spectrum. In the meantime, raising that floor for everyone will mean a more substantive change for workers than anything a startup has come up with."

"Silicon Valley won't go away -- it'll be where startups will go to scale their business. But don't expect many original startup ideas from this self-segregated business park monoculture."

"The Internet of Things (IoT) starts its descent into what Gartner calls the Trough of Disillusionment. This is not to say that IoT is a bad thing in any way — it will transform many industries including agriculture, manufacturing, energy, healthcare, and transportation. It is simply to say that Silicon Valley follows a predictable hype cycle and that IoT hit the peak in 2015 and will move from the over-hyped yet very real phase and slide down to the trough of disillusionment. Drones are following along right behind."

Bingo.... "Overcoming this isn’t easy. Hard as it may be to believe, I used to be “nice” myself. But then I realized that being nice wasn’t actually being nice, it was being conflict averse, avoiding tough situations to the detriment of both parties until things come to a typically explosive ending."

On Ford in Silicon Valley... "If Ford really wants to embrace the innovation and disruption of Silicon Valley, it should mimic the way these older Valley giants try to constantly kick start their cultures."