How LinkedIn Drove a Wedge Between Microsoft and Salesforce - The New York Times

Insights from an overview of how Salesforce ended up near the top of Microsoft's strategic competitor list

"At one point, Mr. Benioff offered to buy the Dynamics business that Salesforce competed with, but Mr. Nadella turned him down, according to two people briefed on the discussions.

The two companies stayed close and by the spring of 2015 their conversations evolved into another deal: Microsoft would acquire Salesforce. In May 2015, CNBC reported that the talks had fallen apart because Salesforce was demanding around $70 billion, about $22 billion more than the company’s market value at the time.

Several people briefed on the talks said that account was accurate, though two of them said another factor was that Mr. Benioff thought Microsoft was not respectful enough of his accomplishments in building Salesforce. It was unclear whether Mr. Benioff would be happy in a subordinate role at Microsoft after building Salesforce from the ground up, and it was equally hard to imagine a successful Salesforce without him."

How LinkedIn Drove a Wedge Between Microsoft and Salesforce - The New York Times

Signals of Editorial Quality (Monday Note)

A quest for quality content

"Despite this, I remain confident that the news industry will eventually deploy a robust quality-scoring system.
Furthermore, I bet the lead will come from large players such as Medium or even Google. Medium is actually best positioned to build a quality-scoring apparatus as it is both a public CMS, and has yet to find a model to monetize its vast content. In a likely application of the Pareto principle, Medium’s only way to make money is to monetize the 20% or so of its content to which a quality label can be affixed. 
As for Google, we have rumors that it is working on a CMS aimed at small/medium size sites, and we know it controls both ends of the ecosystem, from production tools to advertising. In this case, both Google and the publishing industry have aligned interests in capitalizing on quality."

Signals of Editorial Quality

Google’s New Hardware Strategy: Actually Make Money (Technology Review)

Disruption time in the Android smartphone ecosystem

"Indeed, burgeoning consumer interest in virtual assistants and VR is one reason why Google is revamping its smartphone strategy. The maturation of the smartphone industry is another. Microsoft and BlackBerry’s slumping smartphone businesses have pitted Google and Apple against each other for market dominance. As a result, Google believes it needs a single Android phone that can truly take on the iPhone, and matching the Pixel’s price with the iPhone’s is the company’s way of telling consumers the devices are comparable.

The other relevant change in the smartphone market is that Samsung is the only company that currently manages to make money selling premium Android phones (in spite of its Galaxy Note 7 debacle). Several years ago, Google would have hesitated to release a pricy smartphone under its own brand for fear of alienating its many Android partners. But Samsung’s control of the high-end Android phone market has concerned Google for some time and it likely hopes that the Pixel will diminish this dominance."

Google’s New Hardware Strategy: Actually Make Money

Apple iPhone captures 103.6% of smartphone industry profits in Q3, according to analyst estimates | 9to5Mac

Evidently a lot of unprofitable (non-Apple) smartphones out there; also see Google Android hits market share record with nearly 9 in every 10 smartphones using it (CNBC)

"Apple has recorded an insane mobile phone profit share in the third quarter, according to analysts at BMO Capital Markets. They estimate Apple captured 103.6% of total smartphone industry profits, with Samsung trailing far behind at just 0.9%. The reason Apple can take more than 100% of profits is because the majority of vendors lost money and recorded losses on their smartphone division, such as LG and HTC.

On a units basis, Samsung led with 21.7% of smartphones sold with Apple placing second at 13.2% share. This is the first time Apple has recorded industry profits in excess of 100% thanks to Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 recall blunders and strong demand for iPhone 7."

Apple iPhone captures 103.6% of smartphone industry profits in Q3, according to analyst estimates | 9to5Mac

Google Attacks EU Case That ‘Doesn’t Fit the Reality’ - Bloomberg

For another Alphabet reality check, see Alphabet Reveals Hardware Inventory Numbers for the First Time (Bloomberg)

"Google said Thursday that the EU’s allegations lack evidence and would ultimately harm users in favor “of a small number of websites,” in a blog posting detailing its response to European Commission antitrust objections over its comparison-shopping and AdSense services.

“The commission’s revised case still rests on a theory that just doesn’t fit the reality of how most people shop online,” Kent Walker, Google’s senior vice president and general counsel said in the blog post. The EU’s “claims are wrong as a matter of fact, law, and economics.”"

Google Attacks EU Case That ‘Doesn’t Fit the Reality’ - Bloomberg

GoPro Reports Another Loss, 40% Revenue Drop - WSJ

Tangentially, see After sagging sales numbers, Fitbit’s stock price collapses by over 33% (Ars Technica) and GoPro Is Betting This Slick Drone Will Save the Day (Bloomberg)

"GoPro Inc. on Thursday swung to a deep quarterly loss and said it expects to remain in the red next year, as its new products failed to provide a panacea to its profitability woes.

GoPro also lowered its sales target for the year, reflecting a weak holiday season when the company is expected to log nearly half of its revenue for the year.

Shares of GoPro, which have fallen 88% from their 2014 high, were down more than 20% in after-hours trading."

GoPro Reports Another Loss, 40% Revenue Drop - WSJ

Google Home vs. Amazon Echo: A Face-Off of Smart Speakers - The New York Times

Also see OK, Alexa: A Google Home Versus Amazon Echo IQ Test (Wired) and Mossberg: Google Home shows promise, but needs work (Recode)

"Echo and Home are largely the same in the basic tasks they can perform. The capabilities that Home currently lacks, like movie showtimes or support for other smart home accessories, will probably show up in software updates or future partnerships.

So what really distinguishes one from the other? Right now, Echo’s major advantage is its ability to order items from Amazon.com and its broader smart home capabilities. If you like the idea of using a speaker to quickly reorder diapers or toilet paper, or if you are eager to get a speaker to control home accessories like lights and thermostats, Echo is a better product for you.

But if you aren’t big on Amazon shopping and can wait a few months to see how Home evolves, Google’s speaker may be your long-term bet because of its smarter artificial intelligence and superior audio player. Home, priced at about $130, is also cheaper than Amazon’s $180 Echo."

Google Home vs. Amazon Echo: A Face-Off of Smart Speakers - The New York Times

LinkedIn launches Salary, a tool that taps into user data to chart earnings across the globe | ZDNet

See Introducing “LinkedIn Salary”: Unlock Your Earning Potential (LinkedIn blog) for more details

"LinkedIn's Economic Graph initiative took another step forward November 2 with the launch of LinkedIn Salary, a new portal that collects and analyzes salaries across jobs globally, which people can then use to better understand the compensation landscape of their given field.

Effectively, the Economic Graph concept is LinkedIn's goal to digitally map the global workforce. This includes creating a profile for every working person, a profile for every company in the world, and a digital representation of every job and every skill set required to obtain those jobs."

LinkedIn launches Salary, a tool that taps into user data to chart earnings across the globe | ZDNet

Chicago Cubs fans can buy championship gear on the Uber app and have it delivered in minutes - Recode

Wait, no drone delivery option?...

"Chicago Cubs fans waited 108 years for a World Series victory. They’ll only have to wait a few minutes for the championship gear to commemorate it.

Starting at 10 am local time on Friday, Cubs fans in Chicago can purchase championship hats and t-shirts through the Uber ride-hailing app. Dedicated Uber drivers will be on the road to deliver the gear to customers within minutes."

Chicago Cubs fans can buy championship gear on the Uber app and have it delivered in minutes - Recode

Want to Know What Virtual Reality Might Become? Look to the Past - The New York Times

Final paragraph from a Steven Johnson VR reality check

"It’s possible, of course, that the next generation — acclimated to these merely stereoscopic explorations — will agitate for the medium to take on the kinetic qualities of the cinema: not just the intricacies of plot but the rapid cuts, the action sequences. But think of all those countless thousands of spectators who thrilled to the “natural magic” of Barker’s Panorama, standing in silent contemplation, traveling to a distant place for a few minutes before venturing back out into the chaos and smog of the great city. A similar sense of quiet contemplation may well be what differentiates V.R. from its immediate predecessors. In an age when action movies have acclimated our eyes to multiple cuts per second, and in which video games bombard us with nonstop carnage, there turns out to a surprisingly meditative quality to the world we inhabit with V.R. goggles on. This could well turn out to be the most magical trick of all: harnessing all this advanced technology to slow us down and make us wonder again."

Want to Know What Virtual Reality Might Become? Look to the Past - The New York Times

Social media ‘influencers’: A marketing experiment grows into a mini-economy - The Washington Post

On a related note, see Review: ‘The Attention Merchants’ Dissects the Battle for Clicks and Eyeballs (NYT)

"What was an experimental marketing practice only a short time ago has morphed into a mini-economy with dizzying financial stakes. The social-media analytics firm Captiv8 estimates that big brands are spending a collective $255 million per month for sponsored posts on Instagram alone. Captiv8 says Instagram influencers who have more than 7 million followers command an average rate of more than $150,000 per sponsored post.

Some have even signed with agents, who help them get connected for a cut of the earnings. Others have banded into informal syndicates to help promote one another’s posts, making them attractive to more brands."

Social media ‘influencers’: A marketing experiment grows into a mini-economy - The Washington Post

Microsoft Puts Slack in Cross Hairs With New Office Chat App - The New York Times

Also see Microsoft launches Teams, takes on Slack on its home turf (Ars Technica)

"Microsoft began working on Microsoft Teams about 18 months ago, after Mr. Gates encouraged Brian MacDonald, a respected Microsoft engineer credited with creating Outlook, the company’s flagship email application, to come up with a new take on productivity applications.

“We’d have pretty frequent conversations, sometimes group reviews, sometimes one-on-ones,” Mr. MacDonald said. “He’d send me big, long memos to consume. I’d send him a few ideas back. It was great.”

Microsoft does not always build a new product when it wants to expand the range of Office. About four years ago, it paid $1.2 billion to acquire Yammer, a social networking app that had found a following in the tech industry. So did Microsoft consider buying Slack?

“It’s not something that I looked at,” Mr. Nadella said, adding that he did not know if others who work for him seriously considered it."

Microsoft Puts Slack in Cross Hairs With New Office Chat App - The New York Times

Facebook Defies Social Media Gravity With User and Profit Growth - The New York Times

Also see Facebook says ad revenue growth will start slowing down next year (Recode)

"The social network on Wednesday reached the latest milestones in its quest to dominate the world, topping 1.79 billion monthly visitors as of the end of September, up 16 percent from a year ago. Facebook also added a record number of new daily users and said for the first time that more than one billion people regularly used its network exclusively on their mobile device every month.

And those numbers do not even include Facebook’s other properties, such as the photo-sharing service Instagram and the messaging service WhatsApp."

Facebook Defies Social Media Gravity With User and Profit Growth - The New York Times

Introducing Microsoft Teams—the chat-based workspace in Office 365 - Office Blogs

Check the full post for details and an FAQ; also see the Teams press release and Announcing the Microsoft Teams Developer Preview (Office Dev Center)

"Today, at an event in New York City, we announced Microsoft Teams—the new chat-based workspace in Office 365. Microsoft Teams is an entirely new experience that brings together people, conversations and content—along with the tools that teams need—so they can easily collaborate to achieve more. It’s naturally integrated with the familiar Office applications and is built from the ground up on the Office 365 global, secure cloud. Starting today, Microsoft Teams is available in preview in 181 countries and in 18 languages to commercial customers with Office 365 Enterprise or Business plans, with general availability expected in the first quarter of 2017.

At Microsoft, we are deeply committed to the mission of helping people and organizations achieve more—and reinventing productivity for the cloud and mobile world is core to our ambition. We built Microsoft Teams because we see both tremendous opportunity and tremendous change in how people and teams get work done. Teams are now more agile and organizational structures more flat to keep communications and information flowing. With Microsoft Teams, we aspire to create a more open, digital environment that makes work visible, integrated and accessible—across the team—so everyone can stay in the know."

Introducing Microsoft Teams—the chat-based workspace in Office 365 - Office Blogs

Slack shows it’s worried about Microsoft Teams with a full-page newspaper ad - The Verge

Business just got a lot more challenging for Slack, which was already contending with the launch of Workplace by Facebook

"Microsoft is just minutes away from unveiling its Slack competitor, Microsoft Teams, at an event in New York City today. The software giant is expected to position its Teams software with tight integration into Microsoft Office, Skype, and the company's Office 365 services, and as a direct competitor to Slack. Microsoft hasn't even officially unveiled its Teams service, but that's not stopping Slack from getting some words out before the software maker's event.

In a full back page ad in the New York Times, Slack welcomes Microsoft's competition into the messaging market with some "friendly advice." In a long note, that's also published on Slack's blog, the company warns Microsoft that it's not the features that matter, it's the craftsmanship and human aspects of the software. "We've spent tens of thousands of hours talking to customers and adapting Slack to find the grooves that match all those human quirks," says the Slack team. "The internal transparency and sense of shared purpose that Slack-using teams discover is not an accident. Tiny details make big differences.""

Slack shows it’s worried about Microsoft Teams with a full-page newspaper ad - The Verge

Microsoft’s IFTTT alternative is now open to everyone - The Verge

For an overview of some enterprise-oriented Flow features, see Announcing Microsoft Flow General Availability (Microsoft Flow blog)

"Microsoft Flow, the company’s own take on IFTTT, is officially available to the general public after being released in beta back in April. The tool lets you connect cloud services like Slack, G Suite, Twitter, Office 365, and Dynamics 365 to create action “Flows” for the workplace.

A Flow is an action that takes place after something else happens — like having a photo uploaded to Dropbox after emailing it to yourself. Unlike IFTTT, which lets you link two single actions with each other, Microsoft’s version can perform multiple actions in a single Flow. For example, you can choose to have a tweet containing a certain keyword trigger both a push notification and an email simultaneously instead of creating two separate recipes."

Microsoft’s IFTTT alternative is now open to everyone - The Verge

Instapaper drops monthly subscriptions - The Verge

Tangentially, see Instagram is finally going to make it easier to shop for the products you see in your feed (Recode)

"Instapaper is dropping its monthly subscription and will begin offering its service ad-free to all users. All of Instapaper’s Premium features, including full-text article searches and speed-reading, will also be opened up to everyone.

This is a big shift for Instapaper, and one that’s clearly driven by its recent acquisition by Pinterest. Before today, Instapaper offered a $2.99 per month (or $29.99 per year) subscription to support itself. But in doing so, it placed some of the service’s unique and helpful features behind a paywall, making it harder to stand out from its much-loved competitor, Pocket."

Instapaper drops monthly subscriptions - The Verge

Facebook Shares Optical Networking Technology Dubbed Voyager - WSJ

See An open approach for switching, routing, and transport (Facebook Code blog) for details

"Facebook Inc. has created a high-speed, long-distance networking system it plans to share with other companies, in the social network’s latest push to spur technological advances and drive down hardware prices.

The company, which has already shared designs for server systems and data switching gear, on Tuesday disclosed details of its first device designed to link geographically dispersed data centers using fiber-optic cables.

Facebook plans to encourage hardware companies to sell the device, dubbed Voyager, and other companies to write software to manage it."

Facebook Shares Optical Networking Technology Dubbed Voyager - WSJ

Microsoft Says Russian Hackers Exploited Flaw in Windows - WSJ

Also see Google Just Warned of an 'Actively Exploited' Microsoft Windows Bug (Fortune)

"The hackers believed responsible for breaking into computers at the Democratic National Committee have exploited previously undisclosed flaws in Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system and Adobe Systems Inc.’s Flash software, Microsoft said Tuesday.

It is unclear if those hackers, reportedly tied to Russia, used the newly disclosed vulnerabilities to hack into the DNC.

Microsoft Tuesday criticized Alphabet Inc’s Google for publicly identifying the Windows flaw on Monday, before Microsoft had had a chance to issue a patch."

Microsoft Says Russian Hackers Exploited Flaw in Windows - WSJ

How the Internet Is Loosening Our Grip on the Truth - The New York Times

For a couple timely case studies, see Inside the Trump Bunker, With Days to Go (Bloomberg) and Trolls for Trump (The New Yorker); also see On Twitter, Trump bots are out-tweeting Clinton bots 7 to 1 (Recode)

"One of the apparent advantages of online news is persistent fact-checking. Now when someone says something false, journalists can show they’re lying. And if the fact-checking sites do their jobs well, they’re likely to show up in online searches and social networks, providing a ready reference for people who want to correct the record.

But that hasn’t quite happened. Today dozens of news outlets routinely fact-check the candidates and much else online, but the endeavor has proved largely ineffective against a tide of fakery.

That’s because the lies have also become institutionalized. There are now entire sites whose only mission is to publish outrageous, completely fake news online (like real news, fake news has become a business). Partisan Facebook pages have gotten into the act; a recent BuzzFeed analysis of top political pages on Facebook showed that right-wing sites published false or misleading information 38 percent of the time, and lefty sites did so 20 percent of the time."

How the Internet Is Loosening Our Grip on the Truth - The New York Times