This dude just cannot tell the truth even for a second.
Obviously nobody needs a VPN to watch something on a national broadcast and he's clearly up to SOMETHING that he shouldn't be under the guise of accessing his NFL game pass account.
This is continual sociopath behavior from someone who can't possibly believe that they could ever do anything wrong, and they are simply misunderstood.
Funny enough - Satya Nadella introduced a new mission statement at Microsoft shortly after he became CEO[1].
It's pretty anodyne, but by design - it's a way to push the company towards different ways of operating by creating a pretext to say "X project is part of the new mission and here's why" from a top-down perspective.
The End of an Error for the world's most disappointing note-taking app.
I think part of the struggle here is that no two people can agree on what ailed them.
From lack of innovation for years, to an incomprehensibly bad rich text editor interface that broke all established conventions, to 0-60 from "zero monetization" to "monetize every time you even think about clicking a button", to a ground-up rewrite that put it on part with it's counterparts from 2012, etc.
It's almost like it's failure was overdetermined.
Fascinating case study in a journey from ubiquity to obscurity.
The dichotomy between "marketing tracks, 1-to-1 emails don't" is false. There are hundreds of millions if not a billion installs of people using tracking for 1-to-1 email.
Sales people use dozens prospecting tools like Outreach.io, Salesloft, etc for tracking.
Likewise, millions of individual consumers use tools like Gmelius, Mixmax, Streak, etc.
This feels like either manufactured outrage or willful ignorance by a community of supposedly technology-savvy people who should know better.
I wonder if that speaks to the general issue that Twitter has had in terms of being an effective advertising platform - either in terms of targeting capability or demographics of the userbase.
If even the candidates who are spending money like it's going out of style aren't even using it...
Except most people's natural reaction when they don't understand other people's value systems is not empathy - it's criticism.
It happens on a much lesser level with food, music, movies, etc - the reaction from a non-fan to a 15 year-old girl's declaration that she loves One Direction is not "ok I see why someone could like this music and why this tribal affiliation is both socially useful to a teenager" but rather
Snapchat is the technology version of One Direction for a lot of adults. But also remember many adults couldn't understand why teenage girls went crazy for The Beatles in 1964 either.
This is 100% a decision in line with much of the core premium Windows audience - corporate employees who use Excel and other programs with numerical data entry on a daily basis.
There has been massive encroachment of MBP and MBAs into the corporate world as BYOD policies have been adopted.
Exactly - the theory of course is that Zenefits will be able to eventually negotiate down the rates and match or beat Trinet, but right now it's basically doing "awareness arbitrage" - especially with something that people only think about once or twice a year, which is a lifetime in startup land.
I would argue that this is actually the fundamental innovation here - shifting of the cost from the employer to the employee.
With Trinet, you get negotiated rates that are pretty fantastic - but all the employee sees is an outdated interface, and all the employer sees is the monthly overhead cost per employee draining their bank account.
With Zenefits, the employee doesn't see that their health care actually costs more (the employer typically covers the same amount regardless), and the employer doesn't have that monthly fee.
It's as compelling as it is accidentally insidious.
Brilliant from a PR perspective though for your average NYT reader.
I would kill to get an article like that written - it's lengthy, detailed, has an accurate representation of the actual function of the app with tone a that's not breathless or sycophantic, and just the right level of skepticism thrown in so that readers believe a deep, detailed analysis has been done and that this is the future.
Exactly - given an average of 500+ friends and years of being active daily or weekly for a large chunk of that time, the probability that you've at least witnessed an embarrassing incident is many orders of magnitude greater than just having done it yourself.
I really believe there's a high level of wariness among the general FB user population that no amount of marketing or changes in authorization policy can fix. It's a level of trust that's irretrievable.
My sample-size-of-a-few take is that it's a combination of factors:
1) The probability that a Facebook users at somepoint has had a bad experience with rogue Facebook app publishing personal information (or even an accidental acceptance) or was witness to a friend's experience is non-trivial
2) The increasing awareness of the scope and scale of personal data that is taken from logins and shared with advertisers
3) The demographic shift in Facebook usage to older users
4) The large secular increase in awareness of ongoing privacy and financial information breaches that rightly or wrongly is associated with over-sharing of personal information
Not paid directly - it's a combination of 1) brands being top of mind 2) what people / robots will recognize and ever so likely potentially to share or what will have the tiniest bit of extra SEO juice.
#1 only comes from a lot of ongoing PR outreach, coffee chats, briefings, etc - which takes time and $$$$ usually via an agency working nonstop on developing relationships to keep a brand top of mind for side mentions like this and to be at the top of the rolodex when a reporter needs a quote or some help understanding an industry or technology space.
Openstack + spare capacity in a colo facility + a bunch of few years old servers offloaded in a facilities auction and you can build one pretty quickly.
Tech isn't the hard part - barriers to get a service up and running are dropping drastically.
Hard part is marketing & scaling, and as AWS expands services there are risks from pure-play vendors that do just one slice of the stack 2-3x better than Amazon does.