Slack, BitBucket and all that have the hipster startup market covered. LinkedIn is the contact management tool for regular businesses. Yammer is pretty much toast and Microsoft is folding its pieces into Skype and SharePoint. So, I'm not quite sure where Facebook expects to fit in this space.
I really don't know why most non-startup, non-tech businesses would want a platform like this. I know the BCG, Gartner, etc. studies are telling companies "You're all a bunch of stuffy old suit-wearing curmudgeons, the MILLENNIALS are coming and they want social tools! They want positive affirmation and badges! They have phones and tablets, BYOD baby! They want to work at cafeteria tables in a bright white shared workspace! CHANGE or DIE, you LUDDITES!!!!!" But I'm just not seeing that. Outside of a very small minority, younger people I'm working with have the same needs as older people - a job and a quiet place to do it in. Having to feed another social media platform just doesn't seem like a task most people want to take on regardless of age.
I'm just barely old enough to remember the time in the 80s when everyone was scared to death that Japan was going to take over the US. They had just come into their own as a high-tech manufacturing powerhouse -- even Back to the Future had a classic line where 1950s Doc Brown scoffed at an IC made in Japan and Marty corrected him saying "All the best stuff is made in Japan!" Towards the end of the 80s, Japanese companies started making some very high profile US acquisitions, including buying lots of expensive public real estate. Everyone in high tech at the time was concerned but as soon as that started, mainstream news articles appeared predicting the end of the US economy much the same way people are saying the Chinese are going to destroy us today.
The interesting thing is that a lot of the Japanese miracle turned out to be a currency bubble and Japan entered a very long deflationary period after that. So now the question is...China has way more control over their economy than Japan ever did, a huge population, and a limitless budget to spend on infrastructure and economic development. I wonder if it actually might happen this time. Basically all high-tech manufacturing is done in China (try finding components not made there) and now US companies are starting to move R&D closer to the factories, where they can get cheap labor on both sides of the table.
I think a lot of the hype might be overblown just like last time, but the scenario is just different enough to make me think twice. If you make it so young engineers can't get R&D jobs, and young factory workers can't get factory jobs, you're basically done as a country.
Not one organization I have ever worked for has seriously cared about IT security. The second anyone mentions security, the next question is how much it costs. So I don't think it's a Yahoo thing - I think it happens everywhere. Even banks and healthcare companies, who have some of the most regulated data in the world don't go beyond lip service and a few token defenses to protect it. Companies will continue to offshore vital functions to companies that don't care what happens to data. They'll also continue to ignore key parts of new product development relating to security. I think one of the problems is that IT security guys can't articulate this to executives. They're either from the physical security world, or they're so tech-focused that they can't give a coherent presentation to people who only understand what dollars are.
Companies have insurance, and it's always cheaper to say "oops" and give out free credit monitoring for a year than it is to build a serious defense against security breaches. Until it becomes too expensive to ignore, whether in the form of lost business, fines or lost intellectual property, nothing will change.
The main complaint I have is that the Pro version lacks certain key features that Enterprises might like. There's no way to disable some of the telemetry/tracking in the Pro version, you can't run the LTSB in Pro, and it's looking like all the interesting stuff is being locked behind that Enterprise edition/subscription. Pro used to be just fine for most enterprises, but now way more companies are going to have to pay monthly for the license to use an OS that the OEM shipped you with the computer. The only time my employer ever used Windows 7's Enterprise edition was for machines they wanted BitLocker on, or multi-language support.
I agree that something like this should _definitely_ be targeted at home users. They're more likely than corporate users to be browsing sites with dodgy JavaScript, etc. Edge doesn't use applets or plugins, but there are plenty of ways in if you can get an application to execute code on a machine. As we've seen in patch after patch, all it takes is people hammering on code for months on end looking for a hole. I still have no idea where/how they find people to actually do the exploit analysis.
The problem would be trying to explain behavior like this to end users. Any site that relies on the users' ability to upload files, for example, wouldn't work properly in a sandboxed environment.
Just like the dotcom bubble, there are entire companies whose fate hinges on massive uptake of the "big data" and "deep learning" revolutions. And just like the hype cycles from the last bubble, there's some truth to them but people really take it to an extreme to get headlines and clicks. I think when the bubble pops, there will be plenty of "real" big data problems for serious qualified people to solve, as well as legions of unemployed "data scientists" and "cognitive champions."
I think applying data analysis techniques to societal problems (emergency response, environmental issues, etc.) is a good thing. I don't think the current focus of ever more intrusive advertising and behavior analysis is going to add much value in the long run. This isn't a tinfoil-hat style rejection of tracking, it's my belief that even the dumbest of consumers are going to reach a point where they can't stand having ads shoved in their face anymore and demand that it stop. Ever notice how commerce sites email you when you put an item in your cart, then don't buy it? Lots of sites have at least buried a setting somewhere in their account configs that let people turn this off. No one ever went broke overestimating the stupidity of the average consumer, but pushing things on every channel (phone, computer, tablet, streaming ads, browser ads, etc.) will lead to consumer fatigue.
Basically, all businesses are going to have to subscribe to Windows 10 Enterprise if they want the features they were used to getting from Pro in the past. Microsoft should just merge Home and Pro into one edition and call it Consumer or Ad-and-Telemetry-Supported or something. A lot of places, including my workplace, have been used to getting the features we need from the OEM license of the Pro version of Windows shipped with the PC. This is how Microsoft is going to work around the claim they won't be charging subscriptions, 365-style, for Windows. They aren't, oh, except for enterprise customers.
It is a good business model -- companies will pay for Enterprise if they want any hope of managing their Windows client OS fleet. Adobe is a good example of how this works out - they know they have very little competition in the video editing, photo and publishing space, so they switched to a subscription model years ago. If you can force your customers to keep paying over and over again for the same product, why wouldn't you? Microsoft is going to be the next IBM - the main reason the company hasn't gone under is the recurring mainframe revenue...they get millions and millions of dollars monthly from customers just to retain the right to run a mainframe. IBM has been in the process of eating itself for 15+ years, and they will never completely die because they keep getting this revenue stream - - no matter how many businesses they sell off.
Having done the end user computing engineering thing for quite some time, I've had to deal with Windows Update in places as large as 40,000+ PCs. There's a conundrum in the cumulative patching model -- it's super-easy for IT, but could leave some places more vulnerable.
The problem is that the more diverse a company's IT needs are, and the more proprietary software they rely on, the less able they are to just roll out a bundle of fixes to everyone and call it a day. I think Microsoft is forgetting how much some companies are relying on desktop Windows for line of business applications...it's almost like everyone there has drunk deep of the Cloud/Surface/Phone/Tablet/Web Services kool aid, and just assumed those crappy 20 year old applications have disappeared along with desktop/laptop use cases. In their minds, the only thing they have to make sure works correctly on site is Internet Explorer/Edge and Office.
Admittedly, updates are a confusing mess of semi-circular dependencies and it is very difficult for Microsoft to test even common combinations. But, making them all cumulative means this...Assume you have 10 updates in a bundle, 6 work fine everywhere, 1 breaks 40 PCs in Department A, 1 breaks the LOB app running on all 18,000 PCs you run, 1 breaks a behavior in IE some junky internal web app running on 2,300 PCs and 1 breaks the CEO's computer. All those computers have to wait until the problem is solved to get the protection for the 6 vulnerabilities, and they will continue to be unpatched since the bundle is cumulative.
The other thing I'm not a fan of is the removal of any sort of information about what gets patched. There used to be comprehensive descriptions of what was patched, and companies who knew what they were doing could direct testing to the right application groups. That's the other thing that's going away this month. We're a big Microsoft shop so we're pretty much resigned to upgrading to Windows 10...I guess we'll see what happens. Microsoft's been trying to cremate Windows 7 ever since early this year, messing with support dates and not backporting features. We'll see if Microsoft's "update rings" strategy that they're recommending everyone migrate to is workable.
Remember back to 2000 when AOL and Time Warner merged. That obviously didn't go well, but it did kind of mark the top of the dotcom bubble. Yahoo and Twitter are smart to get bought out while the bubble is still going...Yahoo's pretty irrelevant now, and Twitter can't make enough money off its users. People will only pay so much for Big Data about 140-character tweets. It makes sense as a useful little service, but not really a business. I think everyone is finally realizing that it's not going to cause a communications revolution and trying to get their money out.
I'll bet Microsoft will buy it and add it to its LinkedIn acquisition. I could definitely see them trying to shoehorn both things into their business offerings -- Twitter as a customer service channel, LinkedIn as an automated recruiting department. I'm an old fart, but I don't even see younger people I know tweeting. I see businesses hiring 23-year-old marketing majors as social media managers and letting them say random things on the company's Twitter account, answer customer questions, etc. But does having that channel open actually produce anything valuable?
What is the root cause of most of these data breaches? I know in the Target and Home Depot cases, they hooked insecure embedded systems to their main network or enabled third party access for convenience that the hackers took advantage of. But what happens in cases like this? Does someone just exploit a security hole in a public facing service and go in from there? Or is it an inside job in most cases?
It'd be interesting to see what the actual technical reason for this is, but I know the business reason.
Microsoft's Signature program (described here, is essentially an agreement with manufacturers that they won't load crapware on the PC. It's doing for the consumer what the technical among us do whenever we buy a new Windows PC -- wipe the hard drive and do a clean install-from-media of Windows.
Manufacturers of low-margin consumer hardware make up some of the margin by bundling garbage software like firewalls, AV, "helper" programs, etc. Without that source of revenue, I'll bet they're relying on payments by Microsoft to cover what is lost. The interesting thing to see is whether or not all Signature PCs have clever restrictions that make it just difficult enough to install Linux that no one will bother.
I'm a dad of a new kindergartener. They're not solving differential equations at this level; it appears that they're trying to get them on a level playing field, accounting for differences in background, etc. If a kid has spent the last 5 years doing nothing but watch TV and has never been read to, they really have to catch them up quickly. First grade is apparently where the "rigorous academics" start. My kid already learned to read and has a pretty good background in the basics, so I imagine it's going to be a less than engaging first year.
I know everyone hates the common core stuff, but I do see the point. Teachers aren't given a class full of kids with attentive parents who care about what their kid does in school. Maybe some are like that, but others are too busy, don't have the educational background, or the family is poor and education takes a back seat to living. Absent the nice home life, the schools have to do everything they can to ensure they give a kid a fighting chance education-wise.
Also, having recess is almost optional in my mind. Chinese, Indian, Korean, Japanese and other countries' students spend way more time in school than our students do. Education is valued in those societies and they make sure they turn out well-educated students. Look at some of the university entrance exams from countries on this list and compare it to high school curriculum in the US. Compared to these countries, we're doing nothing near that level of work with students. Visiting faculty from other countries send their kids to private tutors to ensure they receive a level of education on par with their country's system so the kid won't be behind when they return home. I think the school day should be longer and the school year should be year-round. Only 2% of the population works in agriculture anymore, so there's no excuse for students to be out the whole summer anymore.
If anyone wants to see how well those gig economy workers are doing overall, here's a perfect example. Admittedly it's an optional service, but the fact that they can offer someone a fee-based service to access their pay immediately doesn't paint the picture of happy carefree workers.
Check cashing places and payday loan companies are other examples of companies making money off other peoples' bad situations. If your credit sucks so badly that you can't open a bank account, helpful businesses like this will happily cash that check for you...for a price. Low-wage employers are also doing stuff like putting employee pay on a debit card loaded with extra fees to access the funds. Most of the big retailers like supermarkets, Walmart, etc. don't write paper checks to employees anymore, and present this as the only option if you can't get a checking account. Even food stamp and welfare recipients, the people who are most likely to not be able to make good financial decisions, are having their benefits paid out electronically.
I think the gig economy cheerleaders will come around to championing stable employment when traditional employers figure out a way to treat their entire workforce like this.
Outside of cities, I can't see the economics of this working. Telephone service in rural areas had to be subsidized by a universal service fee. Why? Because the for-profit telephone company, even with a monopoly, didn't want to extend the network for a small number of customers unless there was an incentive. Imagine Uber/Lyft having to guarantee that one of their self-driving cars would be available to take you wherever you wanted to go, 24/7, with 30 minutes' notice regardless of where you live.
The other reason why I don't think personal cars are completely doomed is families. If you have kids, you know that the car becomes another room of the house if you live in the suburbs and have to drive everywhere. Imagine having to haul all your crap out of your self-driving Uber cab when you reach your destination, then put it back into another car when you want to go back.
I think some of this stuff is really cool, but the business model seems exactly like a myopic view of the entire world being a dense city filled with well-to-do hipster singles or married people who don't have kids. It's the same model as Blue Apron and all those other delivery services...Ironic mustache and goatee Swift developer and his marketing liaison coordinator wife arrive home from another 12-hour shift at the unicorn startups they work at. Rather than call an Uber to take them to the trendy new Ethiopian-Thai fusion place again, or hang out with the LUDDITES at the grocery store, Blue Apron has a box delivered to their front door with meals in it! It's brilliant! Everyone will love it! Give us $100 million!!!
OK, I admit I'm pretty old school, so I have a serious question. Things like the DNS standard are pretty old, yet extremely fundamental to how the Internet operates. By fundamental, I mean things in the Session layer or below that most web APIs never see...stuff like TCP/IP, BGP, DNS, etc. I'm not a network wizard (I'm a systems engineer) but I did have to learn enough about these things back in the day to get good at troubleshooting.
In the API driven world, you use a JavaScript or similar library to push a JSON, XML or similar file to a URL and wait for a response. If most programmers are working in environments like that, where the connection, name resolution, etc are totally abstracted, are people still learning a healthy dose of fundamentals? If not, I could definitely see this API-driven DNS interface as a response to that. Under the covers everyone knows DNS is required, which will send very specific messages following a standard, over a TCP or UDP connection on port 53. The details of that interaction are what is wrapped by this API, right? So the question is -- as fewer and fewer people know what's actually going on below the API layer, does anyone think this constitutes a problem? I can't argue with a way to make things easier and automate them - I'm just worried about people losing vital context knowledge as we keep wrapping it under millions of layers of code.
If society woke up one day and decided that something other than money would be used to determine relative value, this argument wouldn't exist. Until then, people are going to be driven by money -- for survival at a basic level, but then for lifestyle and status improvement as the levels rise. They're going to do what they think can make them the most money so they're not out on the street or eating macaroni and cheese for most dinners.
It's all the same problem: - During the last late 90s dotcom bubble, people complained that scientists weren't going into research and scientific jobs because the startups stole all the talent away by offering inflated VC-fueled salaries. - During the housing bubble of the early 2000s, all the math and CS guys were being stolen away by the banks to be "quants" - because the banks were paying top dollar to have a tiny edge in high-frequency trading or construction of new derivatives. - And during the current dotcom bubble (a repeat of the 90s except replacing the Internet and websites with social media, phones and data mining) all the talented people (and lots of non-talented ones) are back in the SV startup crowd again.
In the end, people will do what makes them the most money for the level of risk they're comfortable with. As a personal example, I work on the systems engineering side of IT. I have chosen the "stable" path of full-time large corporate work over the crazy freelance consulting world. Yes, corporate work has pitfalls, but the paychecks show up every month and you're not constantly hustling for more work, worried about who's going to pay you next. I know freelance guys who are extremely talented, so much so that they make multiples of an average salary. I've often been asked by those types why I don't go this route; I'm actually pretty decent at my job. The answer is safety - If I'm willing to put up with stupid rules and play some politics, I get paid regularly. My family is happy with me, and my home life is stable. The only freelancer I know who is still married has what's basically a mail order bride - everyone else is divorced mainly because they're never home.
Want to make people more altruistic? Give them a real safety net that ensures one wrong move doesn't ruin their lives. You're not going to kill consumerism overnight, so work around it by coming up with something better than US unemployment insurance.
I'm not defending HP on this one, but it's common knowledge that you get what you pay for when it comes to consumer hardware. When it comes to PCs and printers, you really have to step up into the business lines to get something that has a chance of lasting, or doesn't have artificial restrictions like this put in place.
I've seen HP printers at Best Buy, Costco, etc. for less than $100 in some cases, and certainly the majority are less than $300. At that price point, when you consider how much it costs to market, stock and sell that device, wouldn't you expect tricks like this? Same thing goes for PCs and laptops -- business laptops can still be over $1000 these days, and consumer ones are below $500. But, one comes with a 3 year warranty and a guarantee of a stable hardware configuration, and the other comes with a 90 day warranty and is assembled from the spare parts bin with whatever components they happen to have on hand that day. And it's not just HP -- all the PC manufacturers have a consolidated set of business-level SKUs, plus hundreds of consumer SKUs, all slightly different, to be sold at various levels of retailer (office supply stores, Costco, electronics chains, etc.) In the printer world, you need to buy at least the low end business models to have a chance of them lasting more than a few years. I bought a LaserJet P3015 years back and haven't had any complaints...but the printer retailed for about $900. Buying the office model for home is expensive but it does just work and still has echoes of the old tank-like build quality of LaserJets of yesteryear.
HP, Lenovo, etc. should all just jettison the crap consumer lines, cede the low end of the market to tablets or Chromebooks, and focus on making high-margin quality hardware for people who still need it. Their bottom lines would be much better off, and people wouldn't have to put up with stuff like this.
Lately, Apple computers have pretty much been Intel reference designs in nice cases, but they do have a history of taking leaps that others haven't -- the iMac was the first computer without a floppy drive in an era when floppies were what USB sticks are now, cheap disposable storage. Same thing with getting rid of the CD-ROM drive and later the DVD in their laptops.
I think the controversy stems from a couple of things: - Apple has been systematically turning their computers into throwaway appliances by removing expansion capability, then charging an arm and a leg for incredibly cheap RAM and storage capacity. - They have a huge lock on the media market with the iTunes store, all of which encourages them to implement playback methods that prevent copying and give them the power to revoke licenses to content in the future - They just happen to own a crappy overpriced line of headphones (Beats Audio) who just happens to sell wireless headphones guaranteed to work with their devices. So instead of picking up a cheap $5 throwaway pair of earbuds when you leave yours at home, you have to buy the $50 and up ones.
I'm all for technology marching on, but unless there's a major shift by all these companies away from monetizing the user rather than selling the hardware, people will assume it's for nefarious purposes.
Unless some sort of bridge system is brought out in parallel to this automation drive, you're going to have massive unemployment of a particularly vulnerable class of worker. In addition, automating things further up the education ladder is going to lead to a lot of moderately-educated people, who may have borrowed heavily to get that education, with nothing to do and no way to make enough money to see an ROI.
I just have trouble seeing what _most_ typical corporate workers might end up doing. I've said this before, but if you're in IT, take a look at the people you support. Most of them are doing a more automated version of jobs that existed 40 years ago -- collect work from input stack, perform process on it, place it on the output stack. The only difference is that the paper documents are usually emails and Word docs now. And all those corporate jobs now pretty much require a 4-year degree. There are so many generic business majors from random state universities filling these spots, getting good salaries, buying houses, buying cars, paying taxes and reproducing. What happens to the economy when all that economic activity gets severely curtailed? The free market devotees say that the supply and demand curves will adjust, but how happy do you think society will be on 10% of their former salary? Look at Trump, he says things that should really set off some alarm bells, but he does it for shock value because he knows his target audience is upset about their lot in life and scared for the future. When 80-90% of the population is like that, I wonder what will happen.
There can only be so many "International YouTube Celebrities" and I think it's dangerous to suggest that everyone has the entrepreneurial skills to go out and open up a random business. Look at all the wasted effort and money poured into failed businesses. I've seen lots of people forced into early retirement and tricked by a franchisor to blow what retirement savings they had on opening a Subway or whatever, then lose everything. I do think we have to find something for people to do that has a similar level of skill to what we're replacing -- I just don't know what it is yet.
I wonder if the other hardware switches are going away as well. If so, I also wonder whether there'll at least be a "paperclip hole" to reboot the thing if it locks up. As much as I'm not a fan of killing useful functionality just because Jony Ive says I don't need it anymore, how they implement this will be the interesting detail. If it were Google or Microsoft, I'd say this would be a good way to ensure the device is on in a low-power state perpetually broadcasting its location and usage data. So far Apple seems to have resisted a lot of this data mining stuff...we'll see.
As a lesson from another industry, Ford removed most of the physical knobs and switches from their cars when they first introduced MyFordTouch. Owners freaked out when the touch screen wasn't as responsive as they'd hoped, and some of the switches have come back over time. Altering consumer behavior can be very difficult even if your consumers are rabid fans who think you can do no wrong.:-)
One of the things I've noticed lately is the tendency for people to get so swept up in trends that they forget about the overall market. PC and printer manufacturers need to come to terms with contraction of a mature market, and I think HP is doing that in this case. Yes, of course, fewer people are buying PCs and even fewer are buying printers for home, but that does not mean the market is totally dead. All it means is that you're selling fewer of them, to people who actually need them for "real work." Paper documents are certainly less prevalent than they were before, but it's not at zero -- look at law firms, government agencies, banks, etc. as examples of the heaviest users. Same thing for PCs -- you're not going to have some call center guy bopping into work, placing his iPad on a dock and using that for his job. Thin clients and PCs are the norm for this environment, as it is for most lower-level bit pushers.
What the manufacturers need to do is get margin back up. Stop making 600 slightly different garbage consumer model PCs for Best Buy and Staples, and focus on the real business PCs with good construction and a warranty that you can still sell for $800+. Stop making $49 home printers that won't last through the first set of ink cartridges, and focus on building tanks like the LaserJet 4Si or 4000/8000 series of yesteryear. A really good example of this in action is the workstation market. Not everyone needs dual Xeon processors, 192GB of RAM and 4 video cards on their desktop, but for those who do, they pay a pretty penny for it. I'm old school and pay the premium for quality home equipment. There are fewer buyers like me, but we readily open our wallets when a compelling product is offered...for as often as I use it, I want to buy an expensive printer every 10 years, not a throwaway one every year.
If unions can successfully sell themselves as the only lever people have against things like the summary, then they could definitely make a comeback. Everything has a way of coming back in cycles, slightly improved. Look at the industry most of us work in (IT) -- virtual machines, containers, remote hosting -- all that stuff is decades old, and has been brought back with a better supporting environment. Until about the 1970s, even low-level factory workers could raise a family on one income and have a secure retirement on top of that. Wind the clock forward, and we have those same jobs paying just above minimum wage with no benefits, or they don't exist here and former factory workers have to take minimum wage jobs in retail, etc. This is directly attributable to a loss of union membership and leverage. Now, people in the gig economy don't even have stable employment; they have to stitch together tons of part time gigs to even come close to a solid wage. I feel that with automation and algorithmic management, this is going to get even worse.
I think a lot of the union bashing is a misinformation campaign. I would love to work in a unionized workplace, just for the convenience of paying a collective bargaining unit to ensure I get a fair salary and have some leverage against employers. Almost all the arguments against unions involve one of these: - Corruption -- what political organization isn't corrupt? I'd deal with a low level of corruption if I were getting something that benefits me. - Mediocrity -- as in "I'm a super-genius and employers are lining up to hire me for a high six-figure salary...no way will I help my colleagues by stooping down to their level." All I can say is this -- even if you are a super-genius, there will come a time where management finds a way to not pay you that huge salary regardless of your talent. - Some anecdote -- the most common one is "I was at a trade show in a convention center, and the union electricians wouldn't let me plug my own things in." This one confuses me -- why wouldn't you want someone to do the job they are assigned to do while you do what you were there for?
Either the entire employment economy will collapse completely, or people are going to rediscover unions the same way they rediscovered VMs and ASPs. As employers slowly gain back all the leverage they lost, people are going to feel the squeeze and want something to restore the balance.
For whatever reasons they're doing this, it seems like a good idea. I'm in the systems integration world, so I don't write software per se. However, I do a lot of "glue scripting" and automation work, and work with lots of developers getting their creations to function in the real world. Our chosen field of work is _definitely_ suited for autism spectrum folks...doing it right requires intense focus and literal thinking. For Microsoft, it seems like they would win on a couple fronts...they get kudos for hiring the disabled [1] and they get a workforce who is happy to work untold hours that "normals" wouldn't be able to.
It does sound like a plan hatched by some evil HR VP though. A bunch of normal execs tour the back buildings at Microsoft, see the more autistic of the bunch basically living in their offices, and conclude that hiring more of these will keep productivity high. It could definitely devolve into a sweatshop quickly. I wouldn't classify myself as ASD, but I'm definitely introverted. i can deal with normal people, but don't like to, as in it doesn't give me pleasure but I'll avoid it if given the choice. Fortunately I've found workplaces that let me have a healthy mix of socialization and independent work. I wouldn't thrive in a startup "brogrammer" environment as an example. If Microsoft encourages an adaptive workplace, that's a good thing in my mind. All companies need a healthy mix of cocaine-fueled salesmen and caffeine-fueled worker bees. Giving those worker bees what they need to be productive (offices, privacy, etc) is key.
[1] Yes, I'm aware that ASD being classified as a disability is very controversial. But as the number of technical jobs dry up in the First World, I can see it becoming a fully protected disability. When the entire employed world is extroverted project managers and executives, us introverts are going to be in for a world of pain.
I wonder what's actually happening here. No one in a high-profile civil case pleads guilty unless they have a real reason to. Is VW paying his family an exorbitant sum of money through a back-channel?
There's no way an engineer comes up with a scheme like this on their own. I know for myself that I'd be too much of an honest guy to go along with that. Yes, I know that makes me an idiot. But management is always involved in things like this, or at the very least is willfully blind. German companies are very meticulous, so I'm sure they have the exact email, timestamped to the millisecond, showing the management team telling the engineers to put the defeat device in.
If I could wave a wand and make all the lobbyists, visa loopholes and bad politics go away, I'd do two things: 1. Make systems engineer/architect level people in IT part of the registered engineering profession with all the requirements and privileges afforded to it. 2. For the rest (help desk, sysadmin of existing systems, etc.) establish a hierarchical guild system where people actually learn the work from masters and there is a progression throughout one's career based on personal achievement of levels of mastery.
Why would anyone go along with this, you ask?
For #1, Professional Engineers are responsible for maintaining licensure through exams and continuing education, like medicine and law. This guarantees at least a minimum standard -- if you know you hired a PE, you can at least guarantee they got through engineering school, passed a licensing exam and have some relevant experience. The same can't be said for a random yahoo who just made it through Bob's AngularJS Coder Bootcamp. In addition, PEs are legally liable for mistakes. If you told a company the trade-off for higher salaries was a guarantee that their project would be delivered correctly or they could get compensated, I think they'd go for it. The model today seems to be to hire a random offshoring firm, get 1000 random new grads working on your project and hope it works...this is a definite improvement.
For #2, having the routine IT tasks (simple ticket-based sysadmin running known procedures, help desk) or development tasks (code CRUD application with these exact specs) broken out as trades also promotes quality. When I started a million years ago, I came from a science background in my education. Learning how to do various IT things required lots of self-study, but I also had an informal "apprenticeship" with my more senior colleagues who taught me a lot. Formalizing this has a huge benefit in my mind -- new grads get paid to learn things the right way, again, MCSE Bootcamp is not the right way. They also are given more responsible tasks over time, not thrown in the deep end where their mistakes will end up costing companies money and downtime. It's not a union, it's a merit-driven guild -- and that distinction would have to be very clear to appeal to the overwhelmingly libertarian crowd who populate IT jobs in large numbers.
Long term, I think this is the only way to go. Healthcare has it right -- doctors (through the AMA) pay Congress bucketloads of money to ensure that the supply of physicians stays low and quality (and compensation) is kept high. We in IT/dev don't get this and we get stepped on because of it. In addition, there is a clear delineation between the professionals (doctors, dentists, nurses, pharmacists, etc.) and the paraprofessionals (assistants, aides, etc.) Computers are part of our daily lives - it's time our profession grows up and becomes recognized as important. Until then, companies will continue to think of IT the same way they see the janitorial or landscaping service -- costs to be minimized.
Exactly. The large state university I live right next to is known for this. As I'm getting older, I'm valuing stability and the ability to do good work without looking over my shoulder all the time over raw salary. What I've found, knowing many people who work there, is that there is a definite trade-off. Pay is the low end of average, budgets are tight, and you have to deal with some state bureaucratic nonsense. On the flip side, the job is rock-stable, your retirement is pretty much guaranteed so you have to save less, you have free or reduced tuition for you and your family, you get a lot more freedom, and you actually get to work with a smarter bunch of people. Because of this, very few people leave; you basically have to wait for a retirement to open up a position, hope that position's budget item isn't removed -- and be in a position to take a reduced salary. Last time the opportunity came around I couldn't justify the salary cut -- I'm probably going to be thinking hard about this the next time something opens up.
Something like this throws that whole trade-off/balance into question though. Maybe it's because it's San Francisco and UCSF has to pay people more than they would traditional state employees...I don't know. When you think state university IT, you don't think of extravagant salaries and flashy Google-esque office spaces. One IT guy I know at the university is in a windowless cinderblock office in a basement, and he could definitely be making more money elsewhere. These aren't the typical people you target for offshoring. I've seen banks, airlines, insurance companies, etc. do this because they hate having to pay people "normal" salaries for something they see as a non-core service like cafeteria or janitorial service.
Slashdot Mirror
Slack, BitBucket and all that have the hipster startup market covered. LinkedIn is the contact management tool for regular businesses. Yammer is pretty much toast and Microsoft is folding its pieces into Skype and SharePoint. So, I'm not quite sure where Facebook expects to fit in this space.
I really don't know why most non-startup, non-tech businesses would want a platform like this. I know the BCG, Gartner, etc. studies are telling companies "You're all a bunch of stuffy old suit-wearing curmudgeons, the MILLENNIALS are coming and they want social tools! They want positive affirmation and badges! They have phones and tablets, BYOD baby! They want to work at cafeteria tables in a bright white shared workspace! CHANGE or DIE, you LUDDITES!!!!!" But I'm just not seeing that. Outside of a very small minority, younger people I'm working with have the same needs as older people - a job and a quiet place to do it in. Having to feed another social media platform just doesn't seem like a task most people want to take on regardless of age.
I'm just barely old enough to remember the time in the 80s when everyone was scared to death that Japan was going to take over the US. They had just come into their own as a high-tech manufacturing powerhouse -- even Back to the Future had a classic line where 1950s Doc Brown scoffed at an IC made in Japan and Marty corrected him saying "All the best stuff is made in Japan!" Towards the end of the 80s, Japanese companies started making some very high profile US acquisitions, including buying lots of expensive public real estate. Everyone in high tech at the time was concerned but as soon as that started, mainstream news articles appeared predicting the end of the US economy much the same way people are saying the Chinese are going to destroy us today.
The interesting thing is that a lot of the Japanese miracle turned out to be a currency bubble and Japan entered a very long deflationary period after that. So now the question is...China has way more control over their economy than Japan ever did, a huge population, and a limitless budget to spend on infrastructure and economic development. I wonder if it actually might happen this time. Basically all high-tech manufacturing is done in China (try finding components not made there) and now US companies are starting to move R&D closer to the factories, where they can get cheap labor on both sides of the table.
I think a lot of the hype might be overblown just like last time, but the scenario is just different enough to make me think twice. If you make it so young engineers can't get R&D jobs, and young factory workers can't get factory jobs, you're basically done as a country.
Not one organization I have ever worked for has seriously cared about IT security. The second anyone mentions security, the next question is how much it costs. So I don't think it's a Yahoo thing - I think it happens everywhere. Even banks and healthcare companies, who have some of the most regulated data in the world don't go beyond lip service and a few token defenses to protect it. Companies will continue to offshore vital functions to companies that don't care what happens to data. They'll also continue to ignore key parts of new product development relating to security. I think one of the problems is that IT security guys can't articulate this to executives. They're either from the physical security world, or they're so tech-focused that they can't give a coherent presentation to people who only understand what dollars are.
Companies have insurance, and it's always cheaper to say "oops" and give out free credit monitoring for a year than it is to build a serious defense against security breaches. Until it becomes too expensive to ignore, whether in the form of lost business, fines or lost intellectual property, nothing will change.
"What is wrong with the pro version?"
The main complaint I have is that the Pro version lacks certain key features that Enterprises might like. There's no way to disable some of the telemetry/tracking in the Pro version, you can't run the LTSB in Pro, and it's looking like all the interesting stuff is being locked behind that Enterprise edition/subscription. Pro used to be just fine for most enterprises, but now way more companies are going to have to pay monthly for the license to use an OS that the OEM shipped you with the computer. The only time my employer ever used Windows 7's Enterprise edition was for machines they wanted BitLocker on, or multi-language support.
I agree that something like this should _definitely_ be targeted at home users. They're more likely than corporate users to be browsing sites with dodgy JavaScript, etc. Edge doesn't use applets or plugins, but there are plenty of ways in if you can get an application to execute code on a machine. As we've seen in patch after patch, all it takes is people hammering on code for months on end looking for a hole. I still have no idea where/how they find people to actually do the exploit analysis.
The problem would be trying to explain behavior like this to end users. Any site that relies on the users' ability to upload files, for example, wouldn't work properly in a sandboxed environment.
Just like the dotcom bubble, there are entire companies whose fate hinges on massive uptake of the "big data" and "deep learning" revolutions. And just like the hype cycles from the last bubble, there's some truth to them but people really take it to an extreme to get headlines and clicks. I think when the bubble pops, there will be plenty of "real" big data problems for serious qualified people to solve, as well as legions of unemployed "data scientists" and "cognitive champions."
I think applying data analysis techniques to societal problems (emergency response, environmental issues, etc.) is a good thing. I don't think the current focus of ever more intrusive advertising and behavior analysis is going to add much value in the long run. This isn't a tinfoil-hat style rejection of tracking, it's my belief that even the dumbest of consumers are going to reach a point where they can't stand having ads shoved in their face anymore and demand that it stop. Ever notice how commerce sites email you when you put an item in your cart, then don't buy it? Lots of sites have at least buried a setting somewhere in their account configs that let people turn this off. No one ever went broke overestimating the stupidity of the average consumer, but pushing things on every channel (phone, computer, tablet, streaming ads, browser ads, etc.) will lead to consumer fatigue.
Basically, all businesses are going to have to subscribe to Windows 10 Enterprise if they want the features they were used to getting from Pro in the past. Microsoft should just merge Home and Pro into one edition and call it Consumer or Ad-and-Telemetry-Supported or something. A lot of places, including my workplace, have been used to getting the features we need from the OEM license of the Pro version of Windows shipped with the PC. This is how Microsoft is going to work around the claim they won't be charging subscriptions, 365-style, for Windows. They aren't, oh, except for enterprise customers.
It is a good business model -- companies will pay for Enterprise if they want any hope of managing their Windows client OS fleet. Adobe is a good example of how this works out - they know they have very little competition in the video editing, photo and publishing space, so they switched to a subscription model years ago. If you can force your customers to keep paying over and over again for the same product, why wouldn't you? Microsoft is going to be the next IBM - the main reason the company hasn't gone under is the recurring mainframe revenue...they get millions and millions of dollars monthly from customers just to retain the right to run a mainframe. IBM has been in the process of eating itself for 15+ years, and they will never completely die because they keep getting this revenue stream - - no matter how many businesses they sell off.
Having done the end user computing engineering thing for quite some time, I've had to deal with Windows Update in places as large as 40,000+ PCs. There's a conundrum in the cumulative patching model -- it's super-easy for IT, but could leave some places more vulnerable.
The problem is that the more diverse a company's IT needs are, and the more proprietary software they rely on, the less able they are to just roll out a bundle of fixes to everyone and call it a day. I think Microsoft is forgetting how much some companies are relying on desktop Windows for line of business applications...it's almost like everyone there has drunk deep of the Cloud/Surface/Phone/Tablet/Web Services kool aid, and just assumed those crappy 20 year old applications have disappeared along with desktop/laptop use cases. In their minds, the only thing they have to make sure works correctly on site is Internet Explorer/Edge and Office.
Admittedly, updates are a confusing mess of semi-circular dependencies and it is very difficult for Microsoft to test even common combinations. But, making them all cumulative means this...Assume you have 10 updates in a bundle, 6 work fine everywhere, 1 breaks 40 PCs in Department A, 1 breaks the LOB app running on all 18,000 PCs you run, 1 breaks a behavior in IE some junky internal web app running on 2,300 PCs and 1 breaks the CEO's computer. All those computers have to wait until the problem is solved to get the protection for the 6 vulnerabilities, and they will continue to be unpatched since the bundle is cumulative.
The other thing I'm not a fan of is the removal of any sort of information about what gets patched. There used to be comprehensive descriptions of what was patched, and companies who knew what they were doing could direct testing to the right application groups. That's the other thing that's going away this month. We're a big Microsoft shop so we're pretty much resigned to upgrading to Windows 10...I guess we'll see what happens. Microsoft's been trying to cremate Windows 7 ever since early this year, messing with support dates and not backporting features. We'll see if Microsoft's "update rings" strategy that they're recommending everyone migrate to is workable.
Remember back to 2000 when AOL and Time Warner merged. That obviously didn't go well, but it did kind of mark the top of the dotcom bubble. Yahoo and Twitter are smart to get bought out while the bubble is still going...Yahoo's pretty irrelevant now, and Twitter can't make enough money off its users. People will only pay so much for Big Data about 140-character tweets. It makes sense as a useful little service, but not really a business. I think everyone is finally realizing that it's not going to cause a communications revolution and trying to get their money out.
I'll bet Microsoft will buy it and add it to its LinkedIn acquisition. I could definitely see them trying to shoehorn both things into their business offerings -- Twitter as a customer service channel, LinkedIn as an automated recruiting department. I'm an old fart, but I don't even see younger people I know tweeting. I see businesses hiring 23-year-old marketing majors as social media managers and letting them say random things on the company's Twitter account, answer customer questions, etc. But does having that channel open actually produce anything valuable?
What is the root cause of most of these data breaches? I know in the Target and Home Depot cases, they hooked insecure embedded systems to their main network or enabled third party access for convenience that the hackers took advantage of. But what happens in cases like this? Does someone just exploit a security hole in a public facing service and go in from there? Or is it an inside job in most cases?
It'd be interesting to see what the actual technical reason for this is, but I know the business reason.
Microsoft's Signature program (described here, is essentially an agreement with manufacturers that they won't load crapware on the PC. It's doing for the consumer what the technical among us do whenever we buy a new Windows PC -- wipe the hard drive and do a clean install-from-media of Windows.
Manufacturers of low-margin consumer hardware make up some of the margin by bundling garbage software like firewalls, AV, "helper" programs, etc. Without that source of revenue, I'll bet they're relying on payments by Microsoft to cover what is lost. The interesting thing to see is whether or not all Signature PCs have clever restrictions that make it just difficult enough to install Linux that no one will bother.
I'm a dad of a new kindergartener. They're not solving differential equations at this level; it appears that they're trying to get them on a level playing field, accounting for differences in background, etc. If a kid has spent the last 5 years doing nothing but watch TV and has never been read to, they really have to catch them up quickly. First grade is apparently where the "rigorous academics" start. My kid already learned to read and has a pretty good background in the basics, so I imagine it's going to be a less than engaging first year.
I know everyone hates the common core stuff, but I do see the point. Teachers aren't given a class full of kids with attentive parents who care about what their kid does in school. Maybe some are like that, but others are too busy, don't have the educational background, or the family is poor and education takes a back seat to living. Absent the nice home life, the schools have to do everything they can to ensure they give a kid a fighting chance education-wise.
Also, having recess is almost optional in my mind. Chinese, Indian, Korean, Japanese and other countries' students spend way more time in school than our students do. Education is valued in those societies and they make sure they turn out well-educated students. Look at some of the university entrance exams from countries on this list and compare it to high school curriculum in the US. Compared to these countries, we're doing nothing near that level of work with students. Visiting faculty from other countries send their kids to private tutors to ensure they receive a level of education on par with their country's system so the kid won't be behind when they return home. I think the school day should be longer and the school year should be year-round. Only 2% of the population works in agriculture anymore, so there's no excuse for students to be out the whole summer anymore.
If anyone wants to see how well those gig economy workers are doing overall, here's a perfect example. Admittedly it's an optional service, but the fact that they can offer someone a fee-based service to access their pay immediately doesn't paint the picture of happy carefree workers.
Check cashing places and payday loan companies are other examples of companies making money off other peoples' bad situations. If your credit sucks so badly that you can't open a bank account, helpful businesses like this will happily cash that check for you...for a price. Low-wage employers are also doing stuff like putting employee pay on a debit card loaded with extra fees to access the funds. Most of the big retailers like supermarkets, Walmart, etc. don't write paper checks to employees anymore, and present this as the only option if you can't get a checking account. Even food stamp and welfare recipients, the people who are most likely to not be able to make good financial decisions, are having their benefits paid out electronically.
I think the gig economy cheerleaders will come around to championing stable employment when traditional employers figure out a way to treat their entire workforce like this.
Outside of cities, I can't see the economics of this working. Telephone service in rural areas had to be subsidized by a universal service fee. Why? Because the for-profit telephone company, even with a monopoly, didn't want to extend the network for a small number of customers unless there was an incentive. Imagine Uber/Lyft having to guarantee that one of their self-driving cars would be available to take you wherever you wanted to go, 24/7, with 30 minutes' notice regardless of where you live.
The other reason why I don't think personal cars are completely doomed is families. If you have kids, you know that the car becomes another room of the house if you live in the suburbs and have to drive everywhere. Imagine having to haul all your crap out of your self-driving Uber cab when you reach your destination, then put it back into another car when you want to go back.
I think some of this stuff is really cool, but the business model seems exactly like a myopic view of the entire world being a dense city filled with well-to-do hipster singles or married people who don't have kids. It's the same model as Blue Apron and all those other delivery services...Ironic mustache and goatee Swift developer and his marketing liaison coordinator wife arrive home from another 12-hour shift at the unicorn startups they work at. Rather than call an Uber to take them to the trendy new Ethiopian-Thai fusion place again, or hang out with the LUDDITES at the grocery store, Blue Apron has a box delivered to their front door with meals in it! It's brilliant! Everyone will love it! Give us $100 million!!!
OK, I admit I'm pretty old school, so I have a serious question. Things like the DNS standard are pretty old, yet extremely fundamental to how the Internet operates. By fundamental, I mean things in the Session layer or below that most web APIs never see...stuff like TCP/IP, BGP, DNS, etc. I'm not a network wizard (I'm a systems engineer) but I did have to learn enough about these things back in the day to get good at troubleshooting.
In the API driven world, you use a JavaScript or similar library to push a JSON, XML or similar file to a URL and wait for a response. If most programmers are working in environments like that, where the connection, name resolution, etc are totally abstracted, are people still learning a healthy dose of fundamentals? If not, I could definitely see this API-driven DNS interface as a response to that. Under the covers everyone knows DNS is required, which will send very specific messages following a standard, over a TCP or UDP connection on port 53. The details of that interaction are what is wrapped by this API, right? So the question is -- as fewer and fewer people know what's actually going on below the API layer, does anyone think this constitutes a problem? I can't argue with a way to make things easier and automate them - I'm just worried about people losing vital context knowledge as we keep wrapping it under millions of layers of code.
If society woke up one day and decided that something other than money would be used to determine relative value, this argument wouldn't exist. Until then, people are going to be driven by money -- for survival at a basic level, but then for lifestyle and status improvement as the levels rise. They're going to do what they think can make them the most money so they're not out on the street or eating macaroni and cheese for most dinners.
It's all the same problem:
- During the last late 90s dotcom bubble, people complained that scientists weren't going into research and scientific jobs because the startups stole all the talent away by offering inflated VC-fueled salaries.
- During the housing bubble of the early 2000s, all the math and CS guys were being stolen away by the banks to be "quants" - because the banks were paying top dollar to have a tiny edge in high-frequency trading or construction of new derivatives.
- And during the current dotcom bubble (a repeat of the 90s except replacing the Internet and websites with social media, phones and data mining) all the talented people (and lots of non-talented ones) are back in the SV startup crowd again.
In the end, people will do what makes them the most money for the level of risk they're comfortable with. As a personal example, I work on the systems engineering side of IT. I have chosen the "stable" path of full-time large corporate work over the crazy freelance consulting world. Yes, corporate work has pitfalls, but the paychecks show up every month and you're not constantly hustling for more work, worried about who's going to pay you next. I know freelance guys who are extremely talented, so much so that they make multiples of an average salary. I've often been asked by those types why I don't go this route; I'm actually pretty decent at my job. The answer is safety - If I'm willing to put up with stupid rules and play some politics, I get paid regularly. My family is happy with me, and my home life is stable. The only freelancer I know who is still married has what's basically a mail order bride - everyone else is divorced mainly because they're never home.
Want to make people more altruistic? Give them a real safety net that ensures one wrong move doesn't ruin their lives. You're not going to kill consumerism overnight, so work around it by coming up with something better than US unemployment insurance.
I'm not defending HP on this one, but it's common knowledge that you get what you pay for when it comes to consumer hardware. When it comes to PCs and printers, you really have to step up into the business lines to get something that has a chance of lasting, or doesn't have artificial restrictions like this put in place.
I've seen HP printers at Best Buy, Costco, etc. for less than $100 in some cases, and certainly the majority are less than $300. At that price point, when you consider how much it costs to market, stock and sell that device, wouldn't you expect tricks like this? Same thing goes for PCs and laptops -- business laptops can still be over $1000 these days, and consumer ones are below $500. But, one comes with a 3 year warranty and a guarantee of a stable hardware configuration, and the other comes with a 90 day warranty and is assembled from the spare parts bin with whatever components they happen to have on hand that day. And it's not just HP -- all the PC manufacturers have a consolidated set of business-level SKUs, plus hundreds of consumer SKUs, all slightly different, to be sold at various levels of retailer (office supply stores, Costco, electronics chains, etc.) In the printer world, you need to buy at least the low end business models to have a chance of them lasting more than a few years. I bought a LaserJet P3015 years back and haven't had any complaints...but the printer retailed for about $900. Buying the office model for home is expensive but it does just work and still has echoes of the old tank-like build quality of LaserJets of yesteryear.
HP, Lenovo, etc. should all just jettison the crap consumer lines, cede the low end of the market to tablets or Chromebooks, and focus on making high-margin quality hardware for people who still need it. Their bottom lines would be much better off, and people wouldn't have to put up with stuff like this.
Lately, Apple computers have pretty much been Intel reference designs in nice cases, but they do have a history of taking leaps that others haven't -- the iMac was the first computer without a floppy drive in an era when floppies were what USB sticks are now, cheap disposable storage. Same thing with getting rid of the CD-ROM drive and later the DVD in their laptops.
I think the controversy stems from a couple of things:
- Apple has been systematically turning their computers into throwaway appliances by removing expansion capability, then charging an arm and a leg for incredibly cheap RAM and storage capacity.
- They have a huge lock on the media market with the iTunes store, all of which encourages them to implement playback methods that prevent copying and give them the power to revoke licenses to content in the future
- They just happen to own a crappy overpriced line of headphones (Beats Audio) who just happens to sell wireless headphones guaranteed to work with their devices. So instead of picking up a cheap $5 throwaway pair of earbuds when you leave yours at home, you have to buy the $50 and up ones.
I'm all for technology marching on, but unless there's a major shift by all these companies away from monetizing the user rather than selling the hardware, people will assume it's for nefarious purposes.
Unless some sort of bridge system is brought out in parallel to this automation drive, you're going to have massive unemployment of a particularly vulnerable class of worker. In addition, automating things further up the education ladder is going to lead to a lot of moderately-educated people, who may have borrowed heavily to get that education, with nothing to do and no way to make enough money to see an ROI.
I just have trouble seeing what _most_ typical corporate workers might end up doing. I've said this before, but if you're in IT, take a look at the people you support. Most of them are doing a more automated version of jobs that existed 40 years ago -- collect work from input stack, perform process on it, place it on the output stack. The only difference is that the paper documents are usually emails and Word docs now. And all those corporate jobs now pretty much require a 4-year degree. There are so many generic business majors from random state universities filling these spots, getting good salaries, buying houses, buying cars, paying taxes and reproducing. What happens to the economy when all that economic activity gets severely curtailed? The free market devotees say that the supply and demand curves will adjust, but how happy do you think society will be on 10% of their former salary? Look at Trump, he says things that should really set off some alarm bells, but he does it for shock value because he knows his target audience is upset about their lot in life and scared for the future. When 80-90% of the population is like that, I wonder what will happen.
There can only be so many "International YouTube Celebrities" and I think it's dangerous to suggest that everyone has the entrepreneurial skills to go out and open up a random business. Look at all the wasted effort and money poured into failed businesses. I've seen lots of people forced into early retirement and tricked by a franchisor to blow what retirement savings they had on opening a Subway or whatever, then lose everything. I do think we have to find something for people to do that has a similar level of skill to what we're replacing -- I just don't know what it is yet.
I wonder if the other hardware switches are going away as well. If so, I also wonder whether there'll at least be a "paperclip hole" to reboot the thing if it locks up. As much as I'm not a fan of killing useful functionality just because Jony Ive says I don't need it anymore, how they implement this will be the interesting detail. If it were Google or Microsoft, I'd say this would be a good way to ensure the device is on in a low-power state perpetually broadcasting its location and usage data. So far Apple seems to have resisted a lot of this data mining stuff...we'll see.
As a lesson from another industry, Ford removed most of the physical knobs and switches from their cars when they first introduced MyFordTouch. Owners freaked out when the touch screen wasn't as responsive as they'd hoped, and some of the switches have come back over time. Altering consumer behavior can be very difficult even if your consumers are rabid fans who think you can do no wrong. :-)
One of the things I've noticed lately is the tendency for people to get so swept up in trends that they forget about the overall market. PC and printer manufacturers need to come to terms with contraction of a mature market, and I think HP is doing that in this case. Yes, of course, fewer people are buying PCs and even fewer are buying printers for home, but that does not mean the market is totally dead. All it means is that you're selling fewer of them, to people who actually need them for "real work." Paper documents are certainly less prevalent than they were before, but it's not at zero -- look at law firms, government agencies, banks, etc. as examples of the heaviest users. Same thing for PCs -- you're not going to have some call center guy bopping into work, placing his iPad on a dock and using that for his job. Thin clients and PCs are the norm for this environment, as it is for most lower-level bit pushers.
What the manufacturers need to do is get margin back up. Stop making 600 slightly different garbage consumer model PCs for Best Buy and Staples, and focus on the real business PCs with good construction and a warranty that you can still sell for $800+. Stop making $49 home printers that won't last through the first set of ink cartridges, and focus on building tanks like the LaserJet 4Si or 4000/8000 series of yesteryear. A really good example of this in action is the workstation market. Not everyone needs dual Xeon processors, 192GB of RAM and 4 video cards on their desktop, but for those who do, they pay a pretty penny for it. I'm old school and pay the premium for quality home equipment. There are fewer buyers like me, but we readily open our wallets when a compelling product is offered...for as often as I use it, I want to buy an expensive printer every 10 years, not a throwaway one every year.
If unions can successfully sell themselves as the only lever people have against things like the summary, then they could definitely make a comeback. Everything has a way of coming back in cycles, slightly improved. Look at the industry most of us work in (IT) -- virtual machines, containers, remote hosting -- all that stuff is decades old, and has been brought back with a better supporting environment. Until about the 1970s, even low-level factory workers could raise a family on one income and have a secure retirement on top of that. Wind the clock forward, and we have those same jobs paying just above minimum wage with no benefits, or they don't exist here and former factory workers have to take minimum wage jobs in retail, etc. This is directly attributable to a loss of union membership and leverage. Now, people in the gig economy don't even have stable employment; they have to stitch together tons of part time gigs to even come close to a solid wage. I feel that with automation and algorithmic management, this is going to get even worse.
I think a lot of the union bashing is a misinformation campaign. I would love to work in a unionized workplace, just for the convenience of paying a collective bargaining unit to ensure I get a fair salary and have some leverage against employers. Almost all the arguments against unions involve one of these:
- Corruption -- what political organization isn't corrupt? I'd deal with a low level of corruption if I were getting something that benefits me.
- Mediocrity -- as in "I'm a super-genius and employers are lining up to hire me for a high six-figure salary...no way will I help my colleagues by stooping down to their level." All I can say is this -- even if you are a super-genius, there will come a time where management finds a way to not pay you that huge salary regardless of your talent.
- Some anecdote -- the most common one is "I was at a trade show in a convention center, and the union electricians wouldn't let me plug my own things in." This one confuses me -- why wouldn't you want someone to do the job they are assigned to do while you do what you were there for?
Either the entire employment economy will collapse completely, or people are going to rediscover unions the same way they rediscovered VMs and ASPs. As employers slowly gain back all the leverage they lost, people are going to feel the squeeze and want something to restore the balance.
For whatever reasons they're doing this, it seems like a good idea. I'm in the systems integration world, so I don't write software per se. However, I do a lot of "glue scripting" and automation work, and work with lots of developers getting their creations to function in the real world. Our chosen field of work is _definitely_ suited for autism spectrum folks...doing it right requires intense focus and literal thinking. For Microsoft, it seems like they would win on a couple fronts...they get kudos for hiring the disabled [1] and they get a workforce who is happy to work untold hours that "normals" wouldn't be able to.
It does sound like a plan hatched by some evil HR VP though. A bunch of normal execs tour the back buildings at Microsoft, see the more autistic of the bunch basically living in their offices, and conclude that hiring more of these will keep productivity high. It could definitely devolve into a sweatshop quickly. I wouldn't classify myself as ASD, but I'm definitely introverted. i can deal with normal people, but don't like to, as in it doesn't give me pleasure but I'll avoid it if given the choice. Fortunately I've found workplaces that let me have a healthy mix of socialization and independent work. I wouldn't thrive in a startup "brogrammer" environment as an example. If Microsoft encourages an adaptive workplace, that's a good thing in my mind. All companies need a healthy mix of cocaine-fueled salesmen and caffeine-fueled worker bees. Giving those worker bees what they need to be productive (offices, privacy, etc) is key.
[1] Yes, I'm aware that ASD being classified as a disability is very controversial. But as the number of technical jobs dry up in the First World, I can see it becoming a fully protected disability. When the entire employed world is extroverted project managers and executives, us introverts are going to be in for a world of pain.
I wonder what's actually happening here. No one in a high-profile civil case pleads guilty unless they have a real reason to. Is VW paying his family an exorbitant sum of money through a back-channel?
There's no way an engineer comes up with a scheme like this on their own. I know for myself that I'd be too much of an honest guy to go along with that. Yes, I know that makes me an idiot. But management is always involved in things like this, or at the very least is willfully blind. German companies are very meticulous, so I'm sure they have the exact email, timestamped to the millisecond, showing the management team telling the engineers to put the defeat device in.
If I could wave a wand and make all the lobbyists, visa loopholes and bad politics go away, I'd do two things:
1. Make systems engineer/architect level people in IT part of the registered engineering profession with all the requirements and privileges afforded to it.
2. For the rest (help desk, sysadmin of existing systems, etc.) establish a hierarchical guild system where people actually learn the work from masters and there is a progression throughout one's career based on personal achievement of levels of mastery.
Why would anyone go along with this, you ask?
For #1, Professional Engineers are responsible for maintaining licensure through exams and continuing education, like medicine and law. This guarantees at least a minimum standard -- if you know you hired a PE, you can at least guarantee they got through engineering school, passed a licensing exam and have some relevant experience. The same can't be said for a random yahoo who just made it through Bob's AngularJS Coder Bootcamp. In addition, PEs are legally liable for mistakes. If you told a company the trade-off for higher salaries was a guarantee that their project would be delivered correctly or they could get compensated, I think they'd go for it. The model today seems to be to hire a random offshoring firm, get 1000 random new grads working on your project and hope it works...this is a definite improvement.
For #2, having the routine IT tasks (simple ticket-based sysadmin running known procedures, help desk) or development tasks (code CRUD application with these exact specs) broken out as trades also promotes quality. When I started a million years ago, I came from a science background in my education. Learning how to do various IT things required lots of self-study, but I also had an informal "apprenticeship" with my more senior colleagues who taught me a lot. Formalizing this has a huge benefit in my mind -- new grads get paid to learn things the right way, again, MCSE Bootcamp is not the right way. They also are given more responsible tasks over time, not thrown in the deep end where their mistakes will end up costing companies money and downtime. It's not a union, it's a merit-driven guild -- and that distinction would have to be very clear to appeal to the overwhelmingly libertarian crowd who populate IT jobs in large numbers.
Long term, I think this is the only way to go. Healthcare has it right -- doctors (through the AMA) pay Congress bucketloads of money to ensure that the supply of physicians stays low and quality (and compensation) is kept high. We in IT/dev don't get this and we get stepped on because of it. In addition, there is a clear delineation between the professionals (doctors, dentists, nurses, pharmacists, etc.) and the paraprofessionals (assistants, aides, etc.) Computers are part of our daily lives - it's time our profession grows up and becomes recognized as important. Until then, companies will continue to think of IT the same way they see the janitorial or landscaping service -- costs to be minimized.
Exactly. The large state university I live right next to is known for this. As I'm getting older, I'm valuing stability and the ability to do good work without looking over my shoulder all the time over raw salary. What I've found, knowing many people who work there, is that there is a definite trade-off. Pay is the low end of average, budgets are tight, and you have to deal with some state bureaucratic nonsense. On the flip side, the job is rock-stable, your retirement is pretty much guaranteed so you have to save less, you have free or reduced tuition for you and your family, you get a lot more freedom, and you actually get to work with a smarter bunch of people. Because of this, very few people leave; you basically have to wait for a retirement to open up a position, hope that position's budget item isn't removed -- and be in a position to take a reduced salary. Last time the opportunity came around I couldn't justify the salary cut -- I'm probably going to be thinking hard about this the next time something opens up.
Something like this throws that whole trade-off/balance into question though. Maybe it's because it's San Francisco and UCSF has to pay people more than they would traditional state employees...I don't know. When you think state university IT, you don't think of extravagant salaries and flashy Google-esque office spaces. One IT guy I know at the university is in a windowless cinderblock office in a basement, and he could definitely be making more money elsewhere. These aren't the typical people you target for offshoring. I've seen banks, airlines, insurance companies, etc. do this because they hate having to pay people "normal" salaries for something they see as a non-core service like cafeteria or janitorial service.