The basic outline of where to split the company seems straightforward to me.

AWS get split off first and foremost, that part is blatantly clear to me.
From there, the retail webstore (what we generally think of as “Amazon”) gets split off from its broad category of services: music and movie streaming and everything in that category.
After that, split anything that involves designing/repurposing other designs and selling a specific consumer product off. Kindle, Alexa, Roomba (if that purchase goes through), Amazon Basics, etc.

I think there’s a decent amount of room to get more granular with the process, but I think that covers it as a basic outline.

BRICS isn’t an alliance or a cohesive entity. It’s the equivalent of the G7 for major non-western economies. India and China hate each other. China and Russia only really get along in being anti-US. Brazil and South Africa have no real intersection with the geopolitical goals of the other. BRICS isn’t a geopolitical anything of any meaning.

I suspect India is doing this for the simple reason that they have zero control over Windows while they would have as much control as they want over internal-Linux use. They’re large enough that they can make it work, assuming they’re willing to dedicate the people and the money to it and put up with the non-insubstantial switching costs. Open question on what their follow through will look like, but it’s entirely within their capability.

It’s smart, I don’t know how people will feel about it but it’s smart.

The US and China are in an escalating economic cold war. It’s goes completely against US interests to invest finite resources into growing the economy of an economic rival — and ditto for the converse of China investing into growing the US economy. Especially in an aggressively competitive economic sector where relative technological advancement is king for competitive purposes.

It’s convenience and efficiency. At the end of the day a single cable can provide that functionality needed for 99.9% of such devices. Getting everything on a single cable format reduces waste, simplifies people’s lives, and even opens up competitive spaces. There’s no need for it to be two cables.

This is speculation based on the combination of physical constraints and changing usage.

Phone batteries today are in the 10-20 watt-hours range for capacity, or at least iphones are and that’s the data I found. Going from the typical ~20W fast charging rate to the full 240W capacity of USB-C EPR would allow a twelve times increase in battery capacity with no change to charge times. Are batteries going to increase in capacity by twelve times in the next 17 years? I’d be shocked if they did. The change from the iphone 1 to the iphone 14 pro max is 5.18Wh to 16.68Wh — a three times increase in 16 years.

Likewise, with data transfer, it’s a matter of how human-device interaction has shifted with time. People increasingly prefer (a) automated, and (b) cloud based data storage, and (c) if they do have to move data from device 1 to device 2, they would rather do it wirelessly than with a physical connection. USB4 on USB-C is meant for 80 Gbit/s = 9.6 GB/s transfers. That’s already faster than high end SSD storage can sustain today, and USB4 is a four year old standard. People on phones are going to be far more likely to be worried about their wifi transfer speeds than their physical cable transfer speeds, especially in 2040.

Then, on top of all of that… USB will continue to be updated. USB-C’s limitations in 2033 will not be USB-C’s limitations in 2023, just as USB-C’s limitations in 2023 are not the same as USB-C’s limitations at its inception in 2014. In 2014 USB’s best transfer rate was 10 Gbit/s, or 1/8 what it can do today.

I’d be surprised if USB-C was a limitation on phone technology even by 2040. The bandwidth and power delivery capacity are way beyond what are needed now. Data transfers from phones are going to increasingly move to wireless in that time frame too, I expect.

The limitation on the viability of USB-C with phones won’t be the actual technological viability of the standard with respect to phones. Instead, the problem for USB-C for phones will be if another standard comes out and starts being used by other devices that do need higher bandwidth or power delivery capability. Monitors, storage devices, laptops (etc.) will eventually need more than USB-C can provide, even with future updates to its capacity. When those switch over to something new, that will be when phones (and other devices) will need to consider a new standard too.

I cannot be 100% certain but I’m confident I was using it not long after the 1.0 release. That’d put me at 2004. 19 years!

Although I did briefly switch over to Chrome when it was new and fast. Then switched back when Firefox had a major optimization pass.