Microsoft might crush Slack like Facebook crushed Snapchat | Recode

Check the full post for some stark Slack snapshots

"Slack’s market share among the world’s largest companies is mostly flat, adoption rates are declining, and a bigger portion of these companies indicate they plan on leaving the service, according to a new survey by market research firm ETR, which asks chief information officers and other leaders at the world’s biggest organizations* where they plan to spend their company’s tech budget.

Meanwhile, Teams is seeing increased market share, relatively higher adoption rates, and low rates of defection, according to the data.

Aside from potentially upsetting Slack’s high-flying, newly public stock, the situation points to a larger issue of innovation in the tech industry, which is increasingly dominated by only a few juggernauts. Politicians, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), have criticized the companies for creating what’s known as “kill zones,” where they either acquire or kill all their competitors. The result is that the best ideas and products are concentrated within existing large tech companies, further entrenching their dominance and potentially stifling future innovation." 

Microsoft might crush Slack like Facebook crushed Snapchat | Recode

A Very Cold Take on IBM, Red Hat and Their Hybrid Cloud Hyperbole | Platformonomics

From an IBM reality check by Charles Fitzgerald; also see IBM Bets $34 Billion That Red Hat Can Help It Catch Amazon and Microsoft | NYT

"Beyond the financial outlay, acquisitions are hard. Most fail. Big acquisitions are really hard. Execution and integration risk go up with the size of the deal. This is the biggest acquisition ever in technology. IBM has done 182 acquisitions in the 21st century and have very little to show for their $52 billion. IBM’s CEO crows that her experience buying and integrating PWC for $3.5 billion mitigates the risk (she neglects to mention her experience buying and vaporizing SoftLayer for $2 billion). Conflating an order-of-magnitude smaller professional services acquisition with a product and technology acquisition might be the deepest insight into what IBM has become (not a product company).

But if the strategic logic is to “change everything” thereby “resetting the cloud landscape”, they’re really paying over $34 billion for OpenShift. Which is a vanilla container runtime. That is open source. That IBM already had at least one of (as does everyone else in the industry, including the hyper-scale clouds). And one that isn’t a dominant brand or implementation. IBM could have bought both Docker and Pivotal at a nice premium for a quarter the price of Red Hat and gotten better assets if that is the strategy."

A Very Cold Take on IBM, Red Hat and Their Hybrid Cloud Hyperbole | Platformonomics

Apple Revamps MacBook Lineup | Daring Fireball

See this Apple page for details

"I’m a little surprised to see the MacBook dropped completely, but the Air, though bigger, is a much more capable machine. Overall, it is a tremendous simplification of the entire MacBook lineup, and that’s a good thing. Retina Air and two sizes of MacBook Pro — hard to see how it could get any simpler. Other than the increase in size of the “smallest” MacBook, the only knock against today’s revamp is that the starting price (for those other than college students) has jumped from $1000 to $1100.

UPDATE: A few other observations:

• Apple isn’t making a point of it, but these new MacBooks both have the new third-generation butterfly keyboards.
• According to Student Monitor, MacBooks have 60 percent market share among college students. That’s impressive period, but downright bananas for those of us who remember where Macs were market-share-wise 20 years ago.
• Apple’s back-to-school promotion saves you up to $200 and includes a pair of Beats Studio 3 wireless headphones, which retail for $300. That’s a great deal."

Apple Revamps MacBook Lineup | Daring Fireball

Virgin Galactic to become the first space tourism company to go public | The Verge

In other space news, see Chasing SpaceX, Amazon seeks permission to launch 3,236 internet satellites | LA Times

"Virgin Galactic will soon become the first publicly traded space tourism company. A public shell company called Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings Corp will acquire 49 percent of Virgin Galactic which was founded by Richard Branson in 2004. The deal involves an investment of roughly $800 million, according to the Wall Street Journal, and should fund its spaceships until operations can begin turning a profit.

The investment comes as the nascent space tourism industry is still trying to work out its business models. Branson’s Virgin Galactic will eventually compete with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Virgin Galactic claims to have already sold hundreds of tickets at $250,000 per seat, but has yet to actually take any of these ticket holders on the planned 90-minute trip to space. Its passenger spaceplane, the VSS Unity, only made it to space for the first time in December last year with commercial flights still a few years away."

Virgin Galactic to become the first space tourism company to go public | The Verge

British Airways faces record £183m fine for data breach | BBC

Later in the article: "The message is clear - if you don't treat your customers' data with the utmost care expect severe punishment when things go wrong."

"The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force last year and was the biggest shake-up to data privacy in 20 years.
The penalty imposed on BA is the first one to be made public since those rules were introduced, which make it mandatory to report data security breaches to the information commissioner.
It also increased the maximum penalty to 4% of turnover. The BA penalty amounts to 1.5% of its worldwide turnover in 2017, less than the possible maximum.
Until now, the biggest penalty was £500,000, imposed on Facebook for its role in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. That was the maximum allowed under the old data protection rules that applied before GDPR."

British Airways faces record £183m fine for data breach | BBC

Bill Gates equates Steve Jobs' talent to 'casting spells' | AppleInsider

Maybe it also had something to do with creating products that actually work well...

"According to Bloomberg, Bill Gates was impressed by Steve Jobs' ability to take a firm that was "on a path to die" and turn it into one of the most valuable companies to date. He claimed that this was largely because Steve Jobs possessed an almost magical ability to mesmerize people.

"I was like a minor wizard because he would be casting spells, and I would see people mesmerized, but because I'm a minor wizard, the spells don't work on me," said Gates.

Gates also went on to discuss Jobs' ability to innately understand what made both people and products a worthwhile investment."

Bill Gates equates Steve Jobs' talent to 'casting spells' | AppleInsider

Florida, the Sunshine State, Is Slow to Adopt Rooftop Solar Power | NYT

Later in the article: "“I’ve had electric utility executives say with a straight face that we can’t have solar power in Florida because we have so many cloudy days,” said Representative Kathy Castor, a Democrat from the Tampa area."

"Florida calls itself the Sunshine State. But when it comes to the use of solar power, it trails 19 states, including not-so-sunny Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Maryland.

Solar experts and environmentalists blame the state’s utilities.

The utilities have hindered potential rivals seeking to offer residential solar power. They have spent tens of millions of dollars on lobbying, ad campaigns and political contributions. And when homeowners purchase solar equipment, the utilities have delayed connecting the systems for months."

Florida, the Sunshine State, Is Slow to Adopt Rooftop Solar Power | NYT

FBI, ICE find state driver’s license photos are a gold mine for facial-recognition searches | Washington Post

Get the picture?

"Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have turned state driver’s license databases into a facial-recognition gold mine, scanning through millions of Americans’ photos without their knowledge or consent, newly released documents show.

Thousands of facial-recognition requests, internal documents and emails over the past five years, obtained through public-records requests by Georgetown Law researchers and provided to The Washington Post, reveal that federal investigators have turned state departments of motor vehicles databases into the bedrock of an unprecedented surveillance infrastructure."

FBI, ICE find state driver’s license photos are a gold mine for facial-recognition searches | Washington Post

UK regulator proposes ban on crypto-based derivatives | FT

Crypto-based derivatives -- what could possibly go wrong?...

"The UK financial watchdog has proposed a ban on the sale of crypto-based derivatives amid a resurgence in the price of bitcoin, the most high-profile cryptocurrency.

Under the proposals, trading platforms would be banned from selling, marketing or distributing all derivatives linked to “unregulated transferable cryptoassets” such as bitcoin and ethereum to retail customers, which are still subject to consultation. Contracts for difference (CFDs), options and futures would all be caught up in the regulations."

UK regulator proposes ban on crypto-based derivatives | FT

Inside the conflict at Walmart that’s threatening its high-stakes race with Amazon | Recode

Earlier in the article: "Amazon now accounts for nearly 38 percent of online retail in the US, up from 32 percent in 2016, according to an estimate from eMarketer. Walmart, on the other hand, accounts for just 4.7 percent, up from 2.6 percent three years ago."

"The problem is that building the online version of the Everything Store requires millions more products, and that means two things that Walmart’s current infrastructure does not support: dozens more e-commerce warehouses and a lot more merchants and brands selling through Walmart.com.

The former is mainly a cash problem. As in, you need to spend a lot of cash to build a warehouse network to rival Amazon’s. But Walmart has not secured the same trust — and long leash — from Wall Street investors that Amazon has.

Amazon, on the other hand, has literally been building out its warehouse infrastructure for two whole decades, and it can offset its losses from expensive investments via high-profit businesses like Amazon Web Services and its fast-growing advertising business."

Inside the conflict at Walmart that’s threatening its high-stakes race with Amazon | Recode

Corel, recent buyer of virtualization software firm Parallels, acquired by private equity firm KKR | AppleInsider

I'm guessing the Parallels price is going up sometime soon...

"According to the memo, KKR is "very optimistic" about Corel and will grant the company an "infusion of capital" to expand its current business, the TechCrunch report said. The investment will also go toward new acquisitions like the Parallels buy accomplished in December.

Corel is a storied Canadian software company with a number of well established titles under its belt including CorelDRAW, WordPerfect and WinZip. While its flagship products have largely been usurped by offerings from competitors Microsoft and Adobe, the company continues to market its core line as it branches out with more modern solutions like CorelCAD.

As for Parallels, the acquisition last year was the latest in a long line of industry moves to build out Corel's stable of subsidiaries. The Canadian company has collected a number of notable software standouts since its founding in 1985, from developers like Bibble and JASC Software to products like WordPerfect."

Corel, recent buyer of virtualization software firm Parallels, acquired by private equity firm KKR | AppleInsider

China has been secretly installing spyware on some tourists’ Android phones | The Verge

Probably redundant, if you've installed TikTok or WeChat...

"Chinese border agents have been installing spyware on phones from tourists who enter the country through certain crossings in the Xinjiang region, an area where China is known to be conducting intensive surveillance of the largely Muslim ethnic minority groups who live there. The spyware was reported today by a group of publications, including The Guardian, Motherboard, The New York Times, and more.

Border agents in the region have been requiring tourists to hand over their phones and passcodes before entering, according to the reports. The agents will then disappear with the phones in order to snoop through them. For iPhones, that reportedly includes plugging them into a machine that scans through the phone’s contents. For Android phones, it goes further, with border agents installing a spyware app that scans the phone and collects data."

China has been secretly installing spyware on some tourists’ Android phones | The Verge

Most 20th Century Books Unavailable to Internet Users – We Can Fix That | Internet Archive Blogs

Check the full post for links and additional details

"The way to make 20th Century books available to library patrons is to digitize those books and let every library who owns a physical copy lend that book in digital form. This type of service has come to be known as controlled digital lending (CDL).  The Internet Archive has been doing this for years. We lend out-of-copyright and in-copyright volumes that we physically own. We’ve reformatted the physical volume, produced a digital version and lend only that digital version to one user at a time. Our experience shows that this responds to a real demand, fills a genuine need satisfactorily, gives new life to older books, and brings important knowledge to a new audience. Check out this case study for CDL involving the book Wasted which figured prominently in the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination hearings. 

Our experience has been replicated by other early adopters and providers of a CDL service. Here’s a list of some of them. We believe every library can transform itself into a digital library. If you own the physical book, you can choose to circulate a digital version instead.

We urge more libraries to join Open Libraries and lend digitized versions of their print collections, making more copies of books available for loan and getting more books into the hands of digital  readers everywhere."

Most 20th Century Books Unavailable to Internet Users – We Can Fix That | Internet Archive Blogs

Electric cars grab almost half of sales in oil-producing Norway | Reuters

Have you driven a fjord lately?...

"In total, 48.4% of all new cars sold from January to June were electric, surpassing the 31.2% seen for the full year 2018, and making oil-producing Norway the global leader in per-capita electric car sales by a wide margin.

Seeking to end the sale of diesel and petrol engines by the middle of the next decade, Norway exempts battery-driven cars from the heavy taxes imposed on vehicles powered by fossil fuel. It also offers benefits such as discounts on road tolls.

The policy has boosted brands such as Tesla, Nissan (7201.T), Hyundai (005380.KS) and BMW (BMWG.DE), which all offer fully electric vehicles, rather than hybrids that use electric motors to drive the car but also have a combustion engine."

Electric cars grab almost half of sales in oil-producing Norway | Reuters

Tim Cook disputes 'absurd' reports about Jony Ive's departure from Apple | NBC

Rebut different

"Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook on Monday fiercely disputed a report about the departure of design chief Jony Ive and the company's ability to uphold its commitment to innovative design.

In a rare, scathing statement sent exclusively to NBC News, Cook took issue with a report published Sunday night by The Wall Street Journal that said Ive had grown frustrated with Cook’s leadership and alleged lack of interest in the design production process. Cook said the report does not match reality and fails to understand how Apple's design team actually works.

"The story is absurd," Cook said in an email. "A lot of the reporting, and certainly the conclusions, just don’t match with reality.”"

Tim Cook disputes 'absurd' reports about Jony Ive's departure from Apple | NBC

R.J. Scaringe, Founder of Rivian, Quietly Builds a Tesla for Trucks and S.U.V.s | NYT

From an extensive Rivian profile; tangentially, see Amazon, the new king of shipping | Axios

"Mr. Bezos got a preview of Rivian’s electric pickup truck and sport-utility vehicle and liked what he saw. Not long after his visit, Amazon led a $700 million investment in Rivian. Two months later, in April, Ford Motor invested $500 million. All told, Rivian has raised $1.7 billion without selling a single truck or S.U.V.

If you have not heard of Rivian before, well, that was intentional. Until recently, it was in stealth mode, operating out of unmarked buildings and making few public announcements. But no longer. By the end of 2020, Rivian intends to begin producing premium electric vehicles, with a greater range than anything on the road today.

Rivian is promising to do for trucks what Tesla did for luxury cars."

R.J. Scaringe, Founder of Rivian, Quietly Builds a Tesla for Trucks and S.U.V.s | NYT

Microsoft's Ebook Apocalypse Shows the Dark Side of DRM | Wired

Another domain in which Microsoft has avoided antitrust scrutiny by failing: content subscription services

"Microsoft made the announcement in April that it would shutter the Microsoft Store’s books section for good. The company had made its foray into ebooks in 2017, as part of a Windows 10 Creators Update that sought to round out the software available to its Surface line. Relegated to Microsoft’s Edge browser, the digital bookstore never took off. As of April 2, it halted all ebook sales. And starting as soon as this week, it’s going to remove all purchased books from the libraries of those who bought them.

Other companies have pulled a similar trick in smaller doses. Amazon, overcome by a fit of irony in 2009, memorably vanished copies of George Orwell’s 1984 from Kindles. The year before that, Walmart shut down its own ill-fated MP3 store, at first suggesting customers burn their purchases onto CDs to salvage them before offering a download solution. But this is not a tactical strike. There is no backup plan. This is The Langoliers. And because of digital rights management—the mechanism by which platforms retain control over the digital goods they sell—you have no recourse. Microsoft will refund customers in full for what they paid, plus an extra $25 if they made annotations or markups. But that provides only the coldest comfort."

Microsoft's Ebook Apocalypse Shows the Dark Side of DRM | Wired

Trustbusters are bypassing the biggest tech company of them all | Washington Post

Perhaps there should be a "yet" in the final sentence below...

"Trustbusters are targeting the biggest names in tech, bar one: Microsoft.

That’s because the software giant learned some key lessons during its epic battle with regulators two decades ago, notably working with partners rather than using its market power to prevent rivals from emerging. Tech companies rarely complain these days about Microsoft abusing its hegemonic products, such as its flagship Windows, which still dominates the personal computer operating system business, or newly acquired ones such as LinkedIn, which rules the professional social networking market.
[...]
Microsoft, the largest company in the world measured by market capitalization, has its own massive stash of consumer data, everything from information about how consumers use its Outlook email service to the job history and professional contacts of members on LinkedIn. But because online advertising isn’t the engine that drives its revenue, the company hasn’t pushed limits in its use of that data, Gavil said."

Trustbusters are bypassing the biggest tech company of them all | Washington Post

Apple is making changes to its subscription bundle, Apple News Plus, after a slow start, publishing execs say | Business Insider

Based on my News+ experience, if the WSJ goal is to make its News+ channel useless, it's doing a great job so far

"Other publishers said their subscription revenue from Plus was lower than or on a par with what they got on Texture, which was small as a subscription driver to begin with.

Journal execs weren't available for comment for this article but an exec there said in June that Plus had had minimal impact on the Journal's existing subscription business.

"We're very comfortable — it hasn't had much of an impact on the core business," Suzi Watford said at the time. "It is a very different experience reading The Wall Street Journal on Apple News versus reading it on our platform.""

Apple is making changes to its subscription bundle, Apple News Plus, after a slow start, publishing execs say | Business Insider

Microsoft developer reveals Linux is now more used on Azure than Windows Server | ZDNet

From a timely server/service OS reality check

"Three and a half years ago, Mark Russinovich, Azure CTO, Microsoft's cloud, said, "One in four [Azure] instances are Linux." Next, in 2017, Microsoft revealed that 40% of Azure virtual machines (VM) were Linux-based. Then in the fall of 2018, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's executive VP  of the cloud and enterprise group, told me in an exclusive interview, "About half Azure VMs are Linux". Now, Sasha Levin, Microsoft Linux kernel developer, in a request that Microsoft be allowed to join a Linux security list, revealed that "the Linux usage on our cloud has surpassed Windows".

Shocking you say? Not really.

Linux is largely what runs enterprise computing both on in-house servers and on the cloud. Windows Server has been declining for years. In the most recent IDC Worldwide Operating Systems and Subsystems Market Shares report covering 2017, Linux had 68% of the market. It's share has only increased since then."

Microsoft developer reveals Linux is now more used on Azure than Windows Server | ZDNet