Ged Carroll

Category: software | 軟件 | 소프트웨어 | ソフトウェア

Soon after I started writing this blog, web services came up as a serious challenger to software. The thing that swung the tide in software’s favour was the rise of the mobile app ecosystems.

Originally mobile apps solved a gnarly problem for smartphone companies. Web services took time to download and were awkward compared to native software.

Now we tend to have a hybrid model where the web holds authentication functionality and the underlying database for many applications to work. If you pick up a Nokia N900 today, while you can appreciate its beautiful design, the device is little more than a glowing brick. Such is the current symbiosis between between software apps and the web services that support them.

That symbiosis is very important, while on the one hand it makes my Yahoo! Finance and Accuweather apps very useful, it also presents security risks. Some of the trouble that dating app Grindr had with regards security was down to the programmers building on third party APIs and not understanding every part of the functionality.

This means that sometimes things that I have categorised as online services might fall into software and vice versa. In that respect what I put in this category takes on a largely arbitrary view of what is software.

The second thing about software is the individual choices as a decision making user, say a lot about us. I love to use Newsblur as an RSS reader as it fits my personal workflow. I know a lot of other people who prefer other readers that do largely the same job in a different way.

  • Google I/O 2016

    Google I/O 2016 happened on May, 18 – 20.  There had been a lot of pieces of coverage about the different products and services released. But I wanted to spend a bit of time reflecting on what Google I/O 2016 told us about their viewpoint on technology.

    Giving apps a second chance

    Google knows as well as anyone that the app moves towards a maturity model where consumers stick with the core apps that they want and then don’t go any further.
    apps
    Data shows that consumers use their top five apps 88 per cent of the time. So why would Google care when it knows that 60 percent of the top apps on the Android platform?

    The reasons for an expanded app usage include:

    • A proportion of Google’s advertising (like Facebook) is derived from the promotion of app downloads
    • Android devices are reaching market maturity in many markets, growth is likely to come from new uses – at least some of which will be derived from third party platforms
    • Google has staked its ambition in the PC sector on its Chrome operating system being able to run apps from the Android eco-system. In order for that to happen there needs to be a healthy community of developers
    • In the same way that DoubleClick’s ad network greatly expanded the inventory of Google’s advertising business, third party applications offer Google an additional source of usage for its own services. If you want to see the future of Google Apps look at the the way the likes of Baidu and Tencent allow third-party integration with their own tools

    Streaming or ‘instant’ apps is part of Google’s efforts to encourage consumer trial of new apps and enhance relationships with developers. Firebase, it’s new analytics platform for mobile developers helps them have a better relationship with their installed user base allowing them to use data to target notifications and campaigns.

    More faith in wider area networks (WANs) than personal area networks (PANs)

    Android Wear’s updates were interesting. Put simply Google has more faith in data being delivered in a timely manner over cellular or wi-fi networks than it does for inter device transfers over variants of Bluetooth. Both the Apple Watch and Android Wear products suffered from performance lags when the watch was a thin client of a phone. Having a cellular radio on board the phone presents challenges with battery life, but speeds up real world performance.

    The original design failure wasn’t down to network performance, but is likely to have implications for personal area network technology like Bluetooth in its different variants or ZigBee. These technologies are all about scale, lose a scale advantage and it poses a problem for future adoption by others. This can happen in a virtuous way. Apple’s adoption of USB benefited the standard greatly and drove interest in peripheral development for both Mac and PC. Apple’s abandonment of FireWire and the 3.5″ diskette marked their decline.

    Lots to be concerned about from a privacy point of view?

    Google Home moved yet another pair of Android powered ears into our environment. It was obvious from Google’s description of services that a paid marketing model to be the ‘car booking’ or equivalent service of Home could be very lucrative for the search giant. How this device could be used for market research, tracking brand mentions or government surveillance also poses some conundrums moving beyond smartphones to brown goods.

    Android N features file based encryption rather than treating the whole device as an encrypted disk. This raises questions around the comparative ease of access from a privacy perspective. Secondly, SafetyNet allows Google to reach into a phone to remove pre-existing applications without user permission. There is no explanation if they also have write privileges to the phone as well. If so, expect law enforcement and intellectual property owner interest. From the way it reads this would affect apps and content that have been side loaded as well as got from an app store.

    Android is giving the high ground to Apple on privacy presumably because it considers its own customers don’t care about it that much.

    Reference designs in VR to drive adoption and commoditisation 

    Google’s Daydream project looks to provide standardisation in hardware. By going down this route, Google hopes to spur on the sensor market required for improved AR experience and drive uptake. These will likely be a very different experience to the computer workstation powered Occulus Rift. Driving this technology into the smartphone market may combat the current stagnation in phone sales growth.

    More information
    Google I/O 2016 event page
    A16hz on Google I/O 2016
    Everything Google just announced at its I/O conference
    Palm, Apple, Google and the whole mobile device thing
    The Limits of Google
    If Google’s right about AI, that’s a problem for Apple – Marco.org
    ISIS’s Mobile App Developers Are in Crisis Mode | Motherboard

  • June 2016 research slides

    Here is a copy of the slides that I pull together (when I have the time) of publicly available data that would be of use. This is the June 2016 research slides.

    Google search volumes

    This month I have some new data around search which came from disclosures at Google I/O in terms of search volumes. We talk about social as if search has gone out of style but its growth is still staggering. This is now driven by mobile device penetration and adoption as computing devices on the go. It also speaks to the wider number of questions that search now answers. It used to be that search answered with ‘facts’ found online. It then became more contextual with shortcuts that gave you the weather forecast or a foreign exchange rate. Mobile moved this on further to items like local recommendations.

    Partly through the search box, but also by more meta detail about the device doing the searching and its location to within a few metres due to GPS and cell tower triangulation. Voice interaction has also started to impact search volume. Image driven search still seems to be an area that could drive much more potential search volume, that would be valuable for commerce.
    Google global search volume
    Looking at global search revenue over time, Google’s monopoly position becomes immediately apparent. It is amazing how Bing and Yahoo! haven’t managed to grow market share but just transfer value from one to the other. In the Chinese market, Sohu has been obliterated with Baidu search. But one does have to wonder about the value of web search, when so much internet usage now happens in the WeChat eco-system.
    Global Search Revenues
    More details about me here.
    Slide20

    Full presentation

    Full presentation available for download as a PDF on Slideshare and you can find more research related posts here.

  • Yahoo’s downfall

    I’ve seen a lot written about Yahoo’s downfall.

    Most of it lacks insight. And at the most basic level lacks precision. Yahoo is an employee who works at Yahoo! or Y! (the Y-bang). It was the best culture I ever worked in; and the most dysfunctional company that I ever worked for. I got to work with amazing people at a company that managed to fumble the ball on opportunity after opportunity. Most analysis you see comes from outsiders who lack insight.

    So when I came across this question on Quora and decided to post my answer. I’ve shared my answer on this blog with additional data points and information on ‘Yahoo’s downfall’.
    Yahoo! star
    This is a big question. In the answers that it will receive you are likely to see:

    • Difference of opinions about the reasons of the decline
    • Differences of opinion  about when the decline actually set in. Which begs the question was the downfall that drastic?

    Before we get into the why, lets think about the nature of businesses.

    Public listed companies generally don’t last forever

    The AEI said that 88 per cent of the companies that made up the Fortune 500 in 1954 are gone. Yahoo! is between 21 and 22 years old depending which way you count its age.

    Yahoo! has outlasted many of its peers:

    • Excite – merged with @Home Network in 1999. It went bankrupt in October 2001. It was sold in December 2001. By 2007, the business was broken up by territory.
    • Lycos – was sold three times, each time for a fraction of the purchase price
    • Hotbot – bought by Lycos
    • AltaVista – minority stake sold to CMGI in 1999. Bought by Overture in February 2003. Yahoo! acquired Overture in July 2003

    Only MSN remains of the original brands that it competed against. If MSN wasn’t a Microsoft business, its survival would be questionable. Microsoft’s online services lost money from 2006 through 2010. By comparison, Yahoo! has kept making a profit – despite its issues.

    Macro-effects

    The technology sector has become a hunting ground for active investors. Back in the 1980s, American publicly listed brands were attacked by investors:

    • RJ Nabisco – leveraged buyout by KKR
    • Gulf Oil & Unocal – T. Boone Pickens had failed bids for both oil companies but made a large profit on his holdings
    •  TWA – leveraged buyout by Carl Icahn. Icahn’s business practices were responsible for its bankruptcy in 1992 and 1995
    • Revlon – acquired in a hostile takeover by Ron Perelman, much of the business was broken up to pay for the deal

    In the 1990s, factors changed:

    • Credit lines for deals dried up as some leveraged buyouts proved to be bad for investors
    • Businesses developed more effective defences including poison pills, golden parachutes and greater debt
    • Overall value of the stock market increased. This reduced the amount of opportunities to get companies on the cheap

    Moving forward 20 years, the technology sector became in a similar place

    Historic technology businesses have moved from being high growth to value businesses. This changed the nature of investors interest in them.

    • Microsoft gave a seat on its board to an activist shareholder ValueAct Capital
    • Apple started paying dividends and raising the debt on its balance sheet to fend off Carl Icahn

    Google’s unique two-tier shareholding structure has proved to be an effective defence so far.

    A business like Yahoo! looks like a classic corporate raid target as its value is less than the sum of its parts. It has a regular cashflow that could service a lot more debt at current interest rates. It has assets that can be quickly sold.

    Capital has become much cheaper. This is partly a result of low interest rates set to keep the economy out of trouble in 2008. But there is also a lot of foreign capital and pension fund money looking for a home.

    Missed opportunities

    Given that we have the perfect vision of hindsight, Yahoo! missed key opportunities. Here are some of them.

    Yahoo! failed to buy Google

    Yes, Yahoo! did fail to buy Google. And their competitors failed to buy Google as well. Excite rejected the opportunity to buy Google for $750,000 in a deal arranged by Vinod Khosla. By comparison Terry Semel, then CEO of Yahoo! failed to buy Google for $5 billion. At the time Yahoo!’s entire market value was roughly $5 billion.

    Yahoo! failed to buy DoubleClick

    While Yahoo! was playing catch-up with Google on search. Google outbid the online industry to pay $3.1 billion for DoubleClick. DoubleClick provided advertisers with more opportunities to place banner ads than Yahoo! did.

    Yahoo! failed to buy Facebook

    Terry Semel offered $1 billion for Facebook in 2006. Semel wouldn’t go to $1.1 billion Facebook’s board wanted.

    Yahoo! failed to sell to Microsoft

    I don’t think that the Microsoft deal was a serious offer. There are  reasons to be suspicious:

    • Microsoft couldn’t make its own online business profitable at the time. The deal was unpopular with shareholders
    • Yahoo!’s contribution to the open source community would have been an antitrust issue
    • It would have to get through approval by Japanese competition authorities
    • It would likely have to get through Chinese antitrust authorities

    Yahoo! didn’t communicate these risk factors to shareholders. Which then left the door open for the Microsoft-funded Carl Icahn coup later on.

    Yahoo!’s board has failed the company

    I think that there is a stronger argument for this when you look at their selection of CEOs over the years

    • Tim Koogle – led Yahoo! on the upcycle of the dot.com boom. He resigned and replaced by Terry Semel during the bust that followed.
    • Terry Semel – was a senior media industry executive who bought the business out of the bust. He never got the product and never used email. He never managed to build a media company despite his Hollywood heritage.
    • Jerry Yang – history will look with more favour on Jerry Yang in the future. He did the Yahoo! Japan  and Alibaba deals which are the most interesting parts of Yahoo! today. As a CEO, his time was consumed by  Microsoft’s hostile bid
    • Carol Bartz – Bartz was a Microsoft approved appointee. Her deal on Facebook Connect saw the social network build its business on the back of Yahoo!’s user database. Bartz does the Microsoft search deal badly. She also launched mobile apps that were bad. The one thing she needs respect for is her approach to marketing. Bartz realised that she needed to promote the entire Yahoo! brand. Although there was a buzz marketing team in the US, most marketing was based around products. Unfortunately the execution of the brand campaign was poor. This was partly because it was led from the US with little engagement of regional and national marketing teams.
    • Scott Thompson – stayed for five months. Allegations were made about his education, better due diligence on his recruitment required.
    • Ross Levinsohn – Ross served as interim CEO after Thompson left. It is hard to know what CEO he would have made. But his successor seems to have borrowed his strategy.
    • Marissa Mayer – Despite the goodwill Mayer had going into the job she hasn’t managed to change Yahoo!’s current business. That the company’s strategy is being driven by activist shareholders says a lot.

    Problems in execution

    Yahoo! had its fortune hitched to brand display advertising. Growth has dropped in this for the past ten years. Yahoo!’s declining advertisng revenues started in Q2 of 2006. Part of the problem was that Yahoo! had been too successful to begin with. Yahoo! sold its display advertising for way more than it was worth.

    Yahoo! failed to monetise search as well as Google. And then handed its search business over to Microsoft, who failed to do as good as job as Yahoo! managed on its own.

    Yahoo! failed to execute in mobile, despite some smart early efforts. Photo community Flickr was the default photo app on Nokia’s N73 blockbuster smartphone. The N73 launched at the end of April 2006. It was was one of the last things I worked on before leaving. Given that headstart Flickr could have been Instagram. Instead its a more specialist community of ‘proper’ photography enthusiasts. Yahoo! Messenger and Mail both worked on Nokia handsets from the mid-2000s. Yahoo! Go was an app which provided access to services including:

    • Flickr
    • Address book
    • Calendar
    • Email
    • Maps
    • Search
    • Content: news, weather, finance, sports, entertainment

    It could have provided the same function that Android provides for Google, but Yahoo! considered as ‘beta software’ right up to it’s demise in January 2010. Yahoo! has been providing Apple with weather information and stock data for the iPhone. Yet it hasn’t managed to build a successful iPhone app.

    One way of illustrating the decline of Yahoo! in mobile is to look at the user numbers of Yahoo! mail, which seems to have peaked around September 2011.
    Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail and Gmail users over time
    Hotmail shows a linear increase over time, likely due to organisation changes as it has moved to the cloud and Gmail takes off, presumably on the back of Android – though iOS users also have Gmail accounts.

    Yahoo!’s acquisition process was broken. Ever since Yahoo! wasted 1 billion dollars buying Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com the business slowed down. Broadcast.com was a scare on the collective memory. Capital decisions took longer, acqusitions took longer. The cheque book was harder to open. Under Marissa Mayer, it was finally let loose, but the purchases seem to have made little difference.

    Yahoo! failed to become a media company. Back when I was at Yahoo! we launched Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone – a sort of proto Vice News in 2005. Despite Semel’s Hollywood background, he and following CEOs never made it work. Despite the fact Yahoo! had joint ventures with TV networks in Australia and Canada. When Marissa Mayer finally managed to get talent in the door, audiences had moved to other sites:

    • Gawker Media
    • Buzzfeed
    • Daily Beast
    • Aol’s blog network
    • Huffington Post

    Yahoo’s downfall in social is spectacular. Yahoo! owned pioneer social brands, any of which could have been the Instagram, Facebook or WhatsApp:

    • Yahoo! Chat – chatrooms were the Facebook Groups of yesteryear. Yahoo! was doing social before it was a thing
    • Delicious – neglect, internal politics and corporate interference meant that Yahoo! never capitalised on Delicious. Despite its tribulations there are some people who still use it, though I am not sure why
    • Flickr – corporate interference and neglect destroyed the potential growth of photo sharing site Flickr. The site is kept going as a photographic enthusiasts community. It could have been Instagram. Thankfully, Yahoo! only spent $30 million on it
    • Yahoo! Messenger – Yahoo!’s Messenger had a poor mobile client, but could have been WhatsApp. Facebook dominates the sector along with Tencents WeChat, NHN’s LINE and Daum Kakao’s KakaoTalk
    • Tumblr – Yahoo! was forced to writedown the value of Tumblr to nothing. The company failed to monetise the popular blogging and curation platform. Tumblr is one of Yahoo!’s few products that attracts a millennial audience

    Yahoo! products had a poor experience. I launched over 14 products at Yahoo! in just over a year. I only ever used 2 of them on a regular ongoing basis – Delicious and Flickr. Other products like Yahoo! 360, Yahoo! Answers or Yahoo! MyWeb 2 – fell into three categories:

    • Dogs to use – particularly in the set-up part of the process
    • Not particularly useful – Yahoo! Answers, great idea in prinicple but poor cultural fit. That poor fit meant that it filled up with noise, Yahoo! Answers isn’t as useful as Quora
    • Strangled soon after birth – so it became frustrating to commit your time to them as a user

    Politics paid a part in this process. The Communications group (responsible for Messenger and Mail) had a lot of duplicate products. Yahoo! Photos was a bad version of Flickr. For storing your bookmarks there was:

    • Yahoo! Bookmarks
    • Yahoo! MyWeb
    • Yahoo! MyWeb 2
    • Delicious

    This all bogs management down and sucks away resources. There were also so many projects that never saw the light, due to constant changes in priority. More Yahoo!-related posts here. What do you think brought about Yahoo’s downfall?

    More information
    Fortune 500 firms in 1955 vs. 2014; 88% are gone, and we’re all better off because of that dynamic ‘creative destruction’ | AEI Ideas
    Microsoft’s Bing/MSN Results Truly Horrifying — Loss Rate Balloons To ~$3 Billion A Year | Business Insider
    Stupid Business Decisions: Excite Rejects Google’s Asking Price | Minyanville 
    A Microsoft First: Activist ValueAct Gets a Board Seat – WSJ
    How Yahoo! Blew It | Wired
    Yahoo! Could Have Bought Facebook For 2% Of Today’s Valuation | Business Insider
    Sorry Microsoft, Yahoo — Google Just Got Bigger | Ad Age

  • Hemingway + process

    I use a range of tools including Hemingway as part of my content creation process. This came out when I had a meeting with some junior marketing agency staff last week. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss content strategy across different clients. In the end an good part of the conversation went into process and content creation.

    Given that conversation I thought it might be fruitful to flag up some of the technologies that I use.

    Hemingway

    I use Hemingway ( a web application and a native OSX application) to write. Hemingway has two writing modes:
    Hemingway - editing mode
    Editing mode looks at your copy as you create it:

    • It looks at readability providing a reading age score. (Grade six is equates to 11-12 years old). The lower the reading age, the clearer the writing is. It has also aids in SEO
    • It examines sentence structure, the harder a sentence is to read, the more ambiguous it may be.
    • Hemingway suggests simpler alternatives to phases
    • It looks at adverbs and use of the passive voice

    Hemingway is like having a sub-editor sitting on your shoulder at the point of creation.
    Hemingway - writing mode
    Writing mode clears the real-time editing functions to the right of the screen. It allows me to get content down as a stream of consciousness. It allows me to get ideas down before I lose the train of thought.

    You can then switch to editing mode to go back and clean up your copy once you have it down.

    The OSX version allows you to save documents down as a HTML file, from which you can cut and paste into a destination. It just works whether its a presentation, document, WordPress or social platforms.

    Pinboard

    Pinboard is a social bookmarking service that now costs $11/year. It allows me to store links and notes about websites that I find of interest.
    Pinboard - home screen
    Pinboard is a web service so my bookmarks go where I can get a web connection.
    Pinboard - bookmark screen
    I use a bookmarklet that sits in the chrome of my browser. Every time I come across something that might be of interest, I click on the link and complete a simple form.

    • URL – I only change the link if it is a temporary link such as ‘feedproxy.google.com’. I expand the link or change it to any permalink that is on the page
    • Title – I edit this as necessary to reflect the article title and the website name
    • Description – this is a quick explanation of why I thought the page was significant. It might be an article quote or top statistics mentioned
    • Tags – categories or labels that I assign to an article which allows me to find it based on a relevance. Tags are used by other applications as well

    I use Pinner for iOS on my iPhone. It integrates into the system level sharing functionality. I can create bookmarks on the move as well as at my desk.

    Terminal

    The Terminal app in OSX allows direct access to the power of the operating system. It is also unforgiving. Getting a command wrong can have serious consequences.
    Terminal app - introduction
    There are a few things that I can do faster in terminal than via other methods. From checking  differences in documents, to batch processing file archiving. To get you started here are two examples that you can try: to see if a website is up to getting a weather forecast.
    Terminal app - check the weather forecast
    Terminal app - ping a website
    I have a copy of UNIX in a Nutshell from O’Reilly Media on my bookshelf. I use this as a back-up when I can’t remember the proper  syntax or a command. I can also recommend Learning Unix for OS X: Going Deep With the Terminal and Shell also from O’Reilly Media.

    IFTTT

    At the beginning of 2007 Yahoo! launched an experimental product called Yahoo! Pipes. It was flakey, it was unreliable but also revolutionary. Pipes was an easy way to stitch together services without programming expertise. After years of flakey service it was shutdown by Yahoo! in June 2015.
    IFTTT
    Pipes inspired another service IFTTT. IFTTT stands for ‘If then, then that’. It is a simple cause and effect framework that allows for the automation of actions over the web. These cause and effect formulas called recipes. It supports a range of web services and apps. Most of the discussion around this for Intenet of Things automation. I use it to automate my web content content.

    More in part two.

    I pulled part one together in a companion presentation.

    More related content can be found here.

    More information

    Hemingway OSX application

    Pinboard

    Pinner app for iOS

    IFTTT – (If Then, Then That)

    Books

    Learning Unix for OS X: Going Deep With the Terminal and Shell by Dave Taylor

    UNIX in a Nutshell by Arnold Robbins

  • Lotte + more news

    Lotte

    Lotte shareholders reject bid to remove Chairman Shin Dong-bin as family feud continues | The Japan Times – particularly interesting Chaebol feud given the unique Japan-Korea structure of Lotte. Lotte in Korea is huge in FMCG, entertainment, hospitality and retailing. Lotte has been driven out of China by the government. More Korea related posts here

    Business

    Changing of the Guard – Edelman – nice bit of shade by Richard Edelman on group margins and independent versus publicly listed holding groups

    Consumer behaviour

    Which Generation is Most Distracted by Their Phones? | Priceonomics

    Economics

    Silicon Valley Has Not Saved Us From a Productivity Slowdown – The New York Times – In mature economies, higher productivity typically is required for sustained increases in living standards, but the productivity numbers in the United States have been mediocre. Labor productivity has been growing at an average of only 1.3 percent annually since the start of 2005, compared with 2.8 percent annually in the preceding 10 years – Silicon Valley failed

    How to

    Tracking story changes with NewsBlur – as if NewsBlur’s learning technology and mobile clients aren’t enough, being able to track changes on stories is a powerful online journalism tool

    Ideas

    The People’s Net – Douglas Rushkoff’s original article on the dot com crash for Yahoo! Internet Life revisited for the current age of unicorns – Time to channel my inner Dave Winer – Joi Ito’s Web and Joichi Ito on the same theme

    The rise of American authoritarianism – Vox – scientific explanation behind Trump but also the pervasive fear of terrorism that has gripped the west

    Korea

    As 4th trial nears, Samsung asks judge: Make Apple stop talking about Korea | Ars Technica – it because perhaps they’ve mentioned the dishonest involvement in political slush funds as background to explain relative brand honesty and trustworthiness?

    Media

    Maxus launches mood-based planning tool | Marketing Interactive – interesting, particularly with political campaigns

    Welcome to the Era of Programmable Marketing – The AppNexus Impressionist – great primer on programmatic

    China’s new television rules ban homosexuality, drinking, and vengeance – Quartz – so that leaves dramas about patriotic war against the Japanese sans Nanking massacre and dramas about Mao sans cultural revolution

    Online

    Apple is Running BitTorrent Trackers in Cupertino – TorrentFreak – Using the file-sharing protocol, we launched a side-project called Murder and after a few days (and especially nights) of nervous full-site tinkering, it turned a 40 minute deploy process into one that lasted just 12 seconds – interesting article that touches on the enterprise use of BitTorrent. I suspect Apple’s use of trackers is IP enforcement related

    Retailing

    It’s Discounted, but Is It a Deal? How List Prices Lost Their Meaning | NYTimes.com – interesting article. I remember being shocked when I was first guided through Shenzhen’s markets where products originally destined for UK markets were sold to local consumers – with price reduction tags already attached.

    No surprise with Powa | Steven Prowse – almost as good as The Kernel’s legendary dissection of SpinVox

    So how much was Powa Technologies really worth? | FT Alphaville – clear gap between claimed value and real value even before administration (paywall)

    Adidas to operate 12,000 shops in China by 2020 in bid to tap growth in leisure wear, sports participation – interesting that they are going to 3,000 additional real-world stores rather than focus on e-tailing (paywall)

    Security

    Swarm of Tiny Pirate Transmitters Gets the Message out in Syria – could also reinvigorate pirate radio…

    The FBI Might Be Apple’s Best Ally In iPhone Encryption Flap | Fast Company – the government messed up and its backfired

    Software

    Microsoft canceled $8 billion Slack bid due to Bill Gates and Satya Nadella pushback – Business Insider – Qi Lu would have known Butterfield from Yahoo! ,both worked in the search business at the some time

    Why I’m breaking up with Slack | Quartz – interesting perspective

    Wireless

    In Search of the Amazingly Elusive Non-Smartphone Owner | Recode – not really surprising. I imagine the privacy aspects might encourage a small set to follow them