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Welcome back to Forests Over Trees, your weekly tech strategy newsletter. It’s time to zoom-out, connect dots, and (try to) predict the future.

Here’s the plan:

• Tech News Takes — super-short analysis and commentary

• Strategy Tools — strategy nuggets (for business and life)

• F/T Shoutouts — sharing launches, tech events, and other reads

Comcast Wants to Split

Plus: Canada shutters TikTok, NYT goes on strike

⚡ Tech News Takes ⚡

 The Robot Operating System

• What’s up: Amid the arms race in AI models, there’s also increasing interest in robotics. This startup, Physical Intelligence, just raised $400 million from Jeff Bezos, etc. They focus on AI models and software for robotics, rather than marrying themselves to a single robot prototype.

• So what: It’s smart to zig when others are zagging. We’ve written about Figure AI and the robot craze before… But if you’re not sure which robot form factors will work best, or you’re sure that multiple different form factors will work better for different use cases… then it’s smart to bee-line for the operating system layer of this new hardware paradigm.

Newspaper on Strike

• What’s up: The Times Tech Guild (600+ people who build/support the digital side of the NYT) is going on strike. They want wage increases, protection from layoffs, and assurances about ongoing flexibility to work remotely.

• So what: Despite launching the strike amid a busy election cycle, there are a few things working against it. First, the tech labor market is tight. When replacements are plentiful and hungry for work, strikes aren’t a great idea. Second, just like any good store owner, you plan ahead (and build proactively) to support peak demand. So the effect of walking out for the NYT is small on a day-by-day basis, compared to the huge effect for longshoremen or other groups in more traditional industries.  

Comcast Wants to Split

• What’s up: Comcast is considering splitting off their cable business, to separate declining cable channels like MSNBC, USA, and CNBC from the popular Peacock streaming network and streaming assets like Bravo’s Real Housewives.

• So what: For years, tech analysts have been speculating about Google, Meta, etc. splitting-up their businesses. But any such move is unlikely to be voluntary, and very likely to be forced by anti-trust pressure. Interesting to see this example, where split-ups are only voluntary if one side of the split is doing badly.

Canada Shutdown of TikTok

• What’s up: Citing national security risks, Canada ordered TikTok to cease operations in the country. Canada won’t block citizens from accessing the app, but the dedicated offices and staff will be shuttered. The country had previously banned TikTok on government issued devices, due to privacy and security risks.

• So what: Building on the April 2024 US ban (to be enforced in January 2025), this is likely one in a series of dominoes that will fall for the company. But in comparison to the chip-related export restrictions (which involve multiple countries and affect multiple stages in China’s chips supply chain), individual country bans are less likely to catastrophically affect TikTok.

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🛠️ Strategy Tools 🛠️

Good Breakups

Today’s strategy toolkit is a recipe for good break-ups.

Specifically, I want to talk more about the Comcast plan to potentially split off their cable business. And we’ll use Michael Porter’s Corporate Strategy framework to explain why it makes sense.

So to set some context, let’s check out the framework.

Basically, Porter’s Corporate Strategy framework says that groups of businesses should only live under the same corporate umbrella if they have value-adding linkages. In today’s cliché business vernacular, we’d call those synergies.

And Porter focused on two specific types of synergies:

1. Transfer of Skills – can business units share knowledge and make each other stronger, more skilled, more productive?

2. Sharing of Activities – can business units share certain functions or processes to increase their economies of scale?