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News You Can Use: 3/25/2020


Photo by Robert Bye on Unsplash

  • Silicon Valley Was First to Send Workers Home. It’s Been Messy.

    In recent days, software developers sent home by Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook have complained of slow download speeds and mounting confusion over still-evolving new internal rules about what work they are allowed to perform, staffers say. Some workers can’t access crucial internal systems from home due to strict security policies meant to fend off outsiders—which now includes off-site employees.

    Alphabet Inc.’s Google was overrun with requests after it told its 119,000 employees to put in for “work from home” kits of monitors, cables and other technological must-haves, employees say. Facing a backlog and no certain date of delivery, many San Francisco employees came in over the weekend, despite requests from Google to avoid doing so, and hauled home desktop equipment and personal effects like family photos back with them.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/silicon-valley-was-first-to-send-workers-home-its-been-messy-11584190800

  • Farts, cats, naked bodies: People are failing hilariously at working from home

    Work culture will need to adjust to the new normal, in which toddlers and flatulent dogs are our coworkers. It inevitably will. But until then, here are some of the worst work-from-home fails we’ve seen in the past week. They prove that, however rough your work-from-home experience has been, it could have been a lot worse.

    https://www.fastcompany.com/90478967/farts-cats-naked-bodies-people-are-failing-hilariously-at-working-from-home

  • Your Company Culture Isn’t an Office, It’s the People
  • At Schools Closed for Coronavirus, Online Work Won’t Count

    Schools are expected to advance students to the next grade, come fall, even with all the months of missed coursework, though many administrators say they haven’t addressed it yet. Teachers already dread what they call “the summer slide,” or information children lose over summer vacation, and schools haven’t yet said how curricula in the fall may need to be adjusted to make up missed work.

    In Washington state, where schools are closed statewide until at least April 24, the Education Department has warned against using online learning that isn’t equitable. At least one district in Bothell, Wash., halted the online model it had rolled out to students to address equity issues. Now, the Northshore School District superintendent said, in a letter to families this week, the district has launched a resource page online for families to keep students moving forward. This week, students are being encouraged to create projects that could be useful in relation to the current health situation, such as building a hand-sanitizer dispenser. A petition to restore online learning had over 11,000 signatures on Thursday.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/schools-closed-for-coronavirus-online-work-wont-count-11584643049

Posted on

Supplier Report: 3/20/2020


Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Tired of reading about the Corona virus? Me too.

Unfortunately, the virus is causing major changes…everywhere. In the United States, workers are being sent home, the stock market is a complete roller-coaster, and infection rates are starting to climb.

The one bright spot of all this Corona virus talk is that Xerox seems to be backing off HP (too soon to be making jokes?)

Acquisitions/Investments

  • Unity acquires Dublin-based deep learning startup Artomatix

    The Dublin startup builds developer tools that allow game studios to more easily create deep learning-enhanced textures that scale more convincingly.

    Developers can use the startup’s ArtEngine platform to bring real-world materials to their game worlds, adapting the visual patterns to their 3D worlds more quickly than existing toolsets while eliminating seams and irregularities. ArtEngine uses AI to identify visual flaws in replications and saves developers from having to endlessly tweak environments.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/11/unity-acquires-dublin-based-deep-learning-startup-artomatix/

  • How the coronavirus outbreak will stress-test startups

    According to a Dun & Bradstreet whitepaper released this week, 94% of Fortune 1000 companies have key elements of their supply chain housed directly within the epicenter of the outbreak in China. Supply-side shocks are much more difficult for central banks to contain by moves such as interest-rate cuts or financial stimulus. These typically serve to catalyze demand (through increased cash or borrowing power), but do not directly alleviate the kind of production paralysis capable of hamstringing global commerce.

    Startups are especially vulnerable to such supply-side disruptions, each of which is worth considering independently. Operating through lean organizational structures in which personnel often occupy cross-functional roles, decreases in staff productivity can create significant issues for interdependent activities at startups. The diversion of attention — due alternatively to the need to attend to personal needs (such as family caregiving, healthcare issues, or household concerns) or societal requirements (such as monitoring the development of the virus and state or federal reactions to it) — can make a cumulative impact over the days, weeks, and months of the outbreak.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/10/how-the-coronavirus-outbreak-will-stress-test-startups/

  • Xerox Pauses Campaign to Take Over HP as Coronavirus Pandemic Escalates

    The company said Friday it is postponing additional presentations, interviews with the press and meetings with HP shareholders.

    “In light of the escalating Covid-19 pandemic, Xerox needs to prioritize health and safety of its employees, customers, partners and affiliates over and above all considerations, including its proposal to acquire HP,” Xerox Vice Chairman and Chief Executive John Visentin said.

    The company said it doesn’t consider the market decline since it put out its bid or the temporary suspensions of HP shares in recent days as a result of marketwide circuit breakers as a failure of any condition to acquire HP. Xerox said it would take the same view in future trading halts.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/xerox-pauses-campaign-to-take-over-hp-as-coronavirus-pandemic-escalates-11584105335

  • Oracle Tees Up Another $15 Billion In Buybacks

    The company reported revenue for its quarter that ended Feb. 29 of $9.79 billion, up from $9.61 billion in the comparable period a year earlier. That surpassed forecasts from analysts polled by FactSet.

    Oracle also reported a profit of $2.57 billion, or 79 cents a share, compared with earnings of $2.75 billion, or 76 cents a share, for the same quarter a year ago. Excluding stock-based compensation and certain other expenses, Oracle reported earnings of 97 cents a share, a penny more than forecasts from analysts.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/oracle-tees-up-another-15-billion-in-buybacks-11584047813
    JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup and other major banks suspend stock buybacks due to pandemic

    Bank stocks have been pummeled so far this year as the virus has spread around the world. Shares of JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley are both down more than 25% since the start of 2020, while shares of Citi have fallen more than 36%.

    As the pandemic has sharply slowed down economic activity in certain industries, such as travel, major companies like Boeing have announced that they will draw down their major credit lines from banks.

    “The decision on buybacks is consistent with our collective objective to use our significant capital and liquidity to provide maximum support to individuals, small businesses, and the broader economy through lending and other important services,” the Forum said.

    https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/03/15/jpmorgan-bank-of-america-citigroup-suspend-stock-buybacks-due-to-pandemic.html

Software/SaaS

  • Oracle-SAP Showdown: Will Larry Ellison Rip Huge ERP Customer from SAP as Promised?

    Oracle announces its fiscal-Q3 earnings tomorrow afternoon. That would be the ideal time for it to disclose this cutover customer whose defection from SAP will trigger, according to Ellison, a mass move of other big SAP ERP customers to Oracle.

    Adding to the drama is SAP’s complete dismissal of these claims, which I wrote about several weeks ago in Oracle-SAP Showdown: SAP Calls BS on Larry Ellison Claim of Snatching Huge SAP Customer.

    While the public wrangling between these two head-on competitors still run by founders with very healthy egos and little love for the other has been going on for years, it’s never taken a twist quite like this one about an imminent Pied-Piper wave of defections.

    Ellison’s predictions about trouble brewing for SAP came in Oracle’s mid-December earnings call, during which Ellison claimed that “SAP’s customer base is up for grabs.” And before a quick recap of Ellison’s promise about a showcase customer defection, bear in mind that SAP co-CEO Christian Klein totally dismissed such a possibility, saying “And actually we double-checked and honestly, I couldn’t find any customer who moved away from SAP ERP.”

    https://cloudwars.co/will-oracle-steal-huge-erp-customer-from-sap-larry-ellison/

  • Microsoft Teams goes down — just as everyone starts working from home

    The technology giant left a cryptic message — which at least is more than its users can do right now — on Twitter, stating that it’s “received reports that impact associated with TM206544 is ongoing.”

    “We’re investigating the issue,” said Microsoft.

    It’s Microsoft Team’s second outage in as many months after the software giant forgot to renew a TLS (HTTPS) certificate, forcing the service offline and users unable to communicate with colleagues for hours.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/16/microsoft-teams-down/

Other

  • France Fines Apple $1.2 Billion for Antitrust Issues

    France’s competition regulator, which had been examining wholesalers who sell Apple’s products in the country, said the company had unfairly divided products and customers between two wholesalers, Tech Data Corporation and Ingram Micro. The regulator accused Apple of making its wholesalers charge the same prices for products offered in Apple’s own retail stores and abusing its broad economic power over the firms.

    Isabelle de Silva, the president of the French Competition Authority, said in a statement that dividing duties among the wholesalers also had the effect of “sterilizing the wholesale market for Apple products.” Tech Data and Ingram Micro were each fined millions of euros.

    An Apple spokesman, Josh Rosenstock, said in a statement that the company plans to appeal the decision.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/technology/france-apple-antitrust-fine.html

  • Bill Gates to Leave Boards of Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway

    Most recently, Mr. Gates spent a lot of his time at Microsoft on devising tools that could make businesses more productive, said S. Somasegar, a former Microsoft corporate vice president who left in 2015 and is now a managing director at Seattle venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group. Microsoft has been one of several tech companies to promote so-called low-code tools to make it easier for regular employees to write software applications.

    Berkshire Hathaway Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett, who has a long-running friendship with Mr. Gates, said former American Express Co. CEO Kenneth Chenault would replace Mr. Gates on the conglomerate’s board. Mr. Chenault, who joined Facebook Inc.’s board in 2018, won’t seek re-election, the social-media company said Friday.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/bill-gates-to-leave-boards-of-microsoft-and-berkshire-hathaway-11584135172

Posted on

News You Can Use: 3/18/2020


Photo by Kai Pilger on Unsplash

  • The Gig Economy Is a Public Health Risk

    While most of Silicon Valley’s white-collar workers are working from home and the masses are being asked to self-isolate, Uber and Lyft drivers, Grubhub and Seamless delivery drivers, and Instacart shoppers continue to work. After weeks of silence and rolling out policies designed to convince customers to continue using their platforms (“contactless deliveries!”), several companies including Uber, have just rolled out two-weeks of paid sick leave, but even these policies feel dystopian, their subtext being: Keep working until you get the deadly pandemic with an unknown death rate. Then you can self-isolate (without health insurance) and hope you don’t die.

    It’s easy to focus on the gig economy’s lackluster response during the pandemic, but this problem has been years in the making.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v74qw9/the-gig-economy-is-a-public-health-risk-coronavirus-covid19

  • ‘Everyone is so worried about their job they’re not doing the work’: Confessions of an agency exec

    Do you think this will hurt agencies long-term?
    It is going to be another thing that will hurt them. My sense is that 2020 is going to be a really tough year for agencies. Everyone is nervous about their jobs. Working at an agency is like Lord of the Flies right now. Everyone is so worried about their job they’re not doing the work.

    So people were already scared about their jobs but they’re even more nervous now due to coronavirus?
    Yes. People [have been] so scared about their jobs that they’re willing to throw people under the bus to make sure they have a paycheck coming in every two weeks. It’s becoming a very caustic environment, which is affecting business as a whole because they are not performing at their best. Trust is lacking in leadership. People will want to defend themselves, their paycheck and their family. It’s a critical issue for the industry as a whole.

    https://digiday.com/marketing/everyone-worried-job-theyre-not-work-confessions-agency-exec/

  • Why fighting the coronavirus depends on you
  • Working Remotely Requires Cultural Change, Executives Say

    “The first step [to going remote] is understanding that not every physical process needs an equal virtual process. For example, not every in-person meeting translates to a virtual meeting,” he said.

    CIOs are primed to serve to lead the transition, he said.

    ”This is a giant opportunity for CIOs to make companies more efficient. If you can get a company to the point where people are equally effective when they’re working from home, you give your team members a lot more freedom and you create a lot more opportunities,” Mr. Sijbrandij said.

    “Making the jump from the cube to the home or working off site—there are cultural accelerators that come into play. There needs to be some mentoring and modeling and acceptance,” said Wayne Kurtzman, research director at International Data Corp.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/working-remotely-requires-cultural-change-executives-say-11584053615

  • How to help your remote workers feel involved

    In meetings, make sure that all participants are, well, participating. Some people, especially those who are not used to working remotely, may at first be uncomfortable in video conferences, and so they may hang back.

    Don’t force people to appear on camera if they don’t want to. While video meetings tend to work better when you feel as though you are talking to a real person, if a participant feels awkward being on camera (or is worried about how messy their house is), then they’re going to spend the meeting too distracted to pay full attention to the matters at hand.

    If you or your employees decide to hold a virtual get-together, Twitch gaming session, video watch party, or other social event, make sure everyone in the company is aware of it and invited. Of course, you can have separate events for teams within the company, but it’s not a good idea to further isolate employees whose jobs may not usually involve working with others.

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/13/21178312/remote-work-worker-videoconference-slack-chat-connected

Posted on

Supplier Report: 3/13/2020


Photo by DDP on Unsplash

The Coronavirus continues to dominate the news feeds this week. Several companies are pulling out of or cancelling conferences and directing employees to stop traveling and work from home.

Articles from the New York Times and other respected news outlets are calling these preventative measures “unprecedented”. These actions beg the question, when will things go back to normal and how do firms plan around a global pandemic?

Acquisitions/Investments

  • BMC Software buys Compuware from Thoma Bravo

    By combining with Compuware, BMC said the companies will be better equipped to serve the enterprise technology stack. Together they plan to focus on mainframe operations, cybersecurity, application development, data, and storage as part of their enterprise DevOps strategies.

    “BMC continues to be focused on evolving and investing in our portfolio to address and even anticipate the needs of our customers, helping them to succeed today and into tomorrow,” said BMC chief executive Ayman Sayed. “It’s the ideal time to bring Compuware into our portfolio as the traditional mainframe AppDev market transitions to DevOps. We’re excited to welcome the Compuware team as we build best-of-breed modern mainframe solutions.”

    https://www.zdnet.com/article/bmc-software-buys-compuware-from-thoma-bravo/

  • Nvidia acquires data storage and management platform SwiftStack

    Nvidia today announced that it has acquired SwiftStack, a software-centric data storage and management platform that supports public cloud, on-premises and edge deployments.

    The company’s recent launches focused on improving its support for AI, high-performance computing and accelerated computing workloads, which is surely what Nvidia is most interested in here.

    The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition, but SwiftStack had previously raised about $23.6 million in Series A and B rounds led by Mayfield Fund and OpenView Venture Partners. Other investors include Storm Ventures and UMC Capital.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/05/nvidia-acquires-data-storage-and-management-platform-swiftstack/

  • HP Rejects Xerox’s Raised Takeover Offer

    Xerox this week launched an effort to acquire all HP shares outstanding, valuing HP at nearly $35 billion, or $24 a share in cash and stock. It had raised the offer from $22 a share. HP said the value of the offer’s equity component poses a risk to the company and would lead to uncertainties.

    The offer would leave Xerox “burdened with an irresponsible level of debt and which would subsequently require unrealistic, unachievable synergies that would jeopardize the entire company,” HP Chairman Chip Bergh said.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/hp-rejects-xerox-takeover-offer-11583408223

Cloud

  • Judge says Amazon is ‘likely to succeed’ on key argument in Pentagon cloud lawsuit

    The document provides the first indication of how Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims might rule in a high-stakes bid protest over the Pentagon’s JEDI cloud computing contract, which was awarded to Microsoft in October following intervention from the White House and members of Congress.

    In a blow to Microsoft and the Defense Department, Campbell-Smith recently ordered the Pentagon to halt work on JEDI. In a lengthy opinion explaining her reasoning, she sided with Amazon’s contention that the Pentagon had made a mistake in how it evaluated prices for competing proposals from Amazon and Microsoft.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/03/06/judge-says-amazon-likely-succeed-key-argument-pentagon-cloud-lawsuit/

Security/Privacy

  • Halting $9.8 Billion in Theft Is Key to Crypto Growth, KPMG Says

    At least $9.8 billion in digital assets have been stolen by hackers since 2017 because of lax security or poorly written code, the accounting firm wrote in a report released Monday. Adoption of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether among institutional investors has led to competition for a place in portfolios, making safeguarding the tokens more important that ever, KPMG said.

    “Institutional investors especially will not risk owning crypto assets if their value cannot be safeguarded in the same way their cash, stocks and bonds are,” Sal Ternullo, co-leader of KPMG’s crypto-asset services and co-author of the report, said in a statement. Among the first companies to offer custody services for crypto are Fidelity Investments and units of the exchanges run by Intercontinental Exchange Inc., Coinbase Inc. and Gemini Trust Co.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-02/halting-9-8-billion-in-crypto-theft-key-to-growth-kpmg-says

Infrastructure/Hardware

  • Honeywell says it will soon launch the world’s most powerful quantum computer

    Honeywell has long built the kind of complex control systems that power many of the world’s largest industrial sites. It’s that kind of experience that has now allowed it to build an advanced ion trap that is at the core of its efforts.

    This ion trap, the company claims in a paper that accompanies today’s announcement, has allowed the team to achieve decoherence times that are significantly longer than those of its competitors.

    **

    The result of this is a quantum computer that promises to achieve a quantum Volume of 64. Quantum Volume (QV), it’s worth mentioning, is a metric that takes into account both the number of qubits in a system as well as decoherence times. IBM and others have championed this metric as a way to, at least for now, compare the power of various quantum computers.

    So far, IBM’s own machines have achieved QV 32, which would make Honeywell’s machine significantly more powerful.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/03/honeywell-says-it-will-soon-launch-the-worlds-most-powerful-quantum-computer/

  • HPE Reports Sales That Miss Estimates on Weak Server Demand

    HPE Chief Executive Officer Antonio Neri has sought to fuel growth at the hardware company by moving to a subscription business model and investing in more sophisticated server technologies. The strategy may take years to pay off. In the meantime, HPE is exposed to China, the origin of the coronavirus, through its supply chain and its H3C server joint venture in the country. The company opted not to give a profit forecast for the current period due to uncertainty over the effects of the outbreak.

    HPE’s server sales decreased 16% to $3.01 billion in the period ended Jan. 31 because of macro uncertainty, supply chain disruption and a factory consolidation, Neri said in an interview. Businesses have reduced the pace of purchases for major information technology products amid slowing global economic growth.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-03/hpe-reports-sales-that-miss-estimates-on-declining-server-demand

CoronaVirus (Breaking it out into its own section)

  • eBay bans face mask and hand sanitizer listings to halt coronavirus price gouging

    eBay is escalating its fight against online price gouging during the coronavirus outbreak with a new outright ban on all sales of face masks, hand sanitizer, and disinfectant wipes. The new policy, outlined in a notice to sellers posted Friday, applies both to new listings and existing ones. eBay says it is in the process of removing current listings for these items as well as listings that mention the coronavirus, COVID-19 (the illness it causes), and other popular variations of the phrases like 2019nCoV.

    “We will continue to monitor the evolving situation and quickly remove any listing that mentions COVID-19, coronavirus, 2019nCoV (except books) in the title or description,” the notice reads. “These listings may violate applicable US laws or regulations, eBay policies, and exhibit unfair pricing behavior for our buyers.”

    https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/6/21168211/ebay-coronavirus-sales-ban-face-masks-hand-sanitizer-price-gouging

  • SXSW cancels its 400K-person conference due to coronavirus

    SXSW has officially announced it will cancel its tech and music conference slated for March 13th to 22nd in Austin, Texas due to concerns around coronavirus, though it’s exploring rescheduling. “Based on the recommendation of our public health officer and our director of public health . . . I’ve gone ahead and declared a local disaster in the city and associated with that, have issued an order that effectively cancels SXSW,” said Austin Mayor Steve Adler at a press conference today.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/06/sxsw-cancelled/

  • SAP has cancelled all in-person events and says bookings on its Concur travel platform is down 20% due to coronavirus crisis

    SAP said the cancelled events include its Concur Fusion conference in Orlando which was supposed to take place next week and its SAP Ariba Live convention in Las Vegas scheduled later this month.

    SAP also will not participate in the upcoming SXSW gathering in Austin, Texas next week.

    SAP said its own data underscore “the impact of COVID-19,” the company said in a blog post: “We have seen travel transactions in our SAP Concur network down 20% year-over-year.”

    https://www.businessinsider.com/sap-cancelled-in-person-events-due-to-coronavirus-crisis-2020-3

  • As coronavirus pandemic spreads, demand for remote-work startups spikes

    Switching to a remote-work setup isn’t easy. Smartsheet’s Mark Mader told TechCrunch that the “challenge of remote work isn’t just about physical location,” continuing to say that it is “also about the need for people to feel connected and stay informed.” That means intelligent tooling, and smart workplaces norms and practices. (Mader also stressed low-code and no-code tooling as a possible way to empower remote workers).

    The remote-work boom was recently highlighted in Zoom’s earnings report. Its results bested expectations, and in its earnings call, the company said that it was seeing rising demand for its product in the wake of COVID-19, even if most of that rising usage was for its free service. Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said that in light of the spread of the coronavirus, many companies had quickly come to understand the need for a tool like Zoom. The CEO added that he expects more companies to deploy remote work tooling like his video service in the future.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/06/as-coronavirus-pandemic-spreads-demand-for-remote-work-startups-spikes/

  • Google recommends Washington State employees work from home, citing coronavirus risk

    The software giant has not closed the offices outright, nor is it planning to make an official statement regarding the recommendation, but the news certainly points to broader trend of serious precautions around the novel coronavirus outbreak. The move follows a similar decision by Lyft, which sent home employees in its San Francisco office.

    Google maintains a number of different offices throughout the state. Washington has become a major concentration for the spread of the virus in the U.S. Seventy cases have been reported, resulting in 10 deaths. The majority have been in King County, which includes both Seattle and Kirkland — both homes to Google offices.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/05/google-recommends-washington-state-employees-work-from-home-citing-coronavirus-risk/

Other

  • Elizabeth Warren, big tech’s sworn foe, drops out of 2020 race

    Warren’s campaign raised early red flags for tech’s giants, which are now recalibrating for the threat from Sanders.

    Through the 2020 race, the elite upper echelons of tech — executives, venture capitalists and the like — sought a moderate alternative to the economic upheaval they feared would be bad for business, even as their own workers aligned with the contest’s most progressive candidates.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/05/big-techs-sworn-foe-drops-out-of-2020-race/

  • Amazon Warehouse Workers Are Abandoning Their Jobs in Droves

    Between 2011—the year the first fulfillment center opened in California— and 2017, the turnover rate in five counties with Amazon warehouses leaped from 38 percent to 100 percent, according to the report. In other words, more warehouse workers departed from their jobs each year in counties with an Amazon presence than the total number of warehouse jobs.

    “What emerges is a troubling picture of Amazon’s business model—one in which the company views its workers as disposable and designs its operations to foster high turnover,” the report’s authors wrote. “The particularly high rate [of turnover for Amazon] workers as compared to the rate for similar workers suggests that Amazon’s presence has had a unique impact.”

    By comparison, overall turnover rates for warehouse workers in California are 20 percent lower than they are in counties without Amazon warehouses, at 83 percent.

    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkexdb/amazon-warehouse-workers-are-abandoning-their-jobs-in-droves

Posted on

News You Can Use: 3/11/2020

  • How to work during a pandemic

    If these events, or others like them, are seriously affecting your productivity or the ability of your company to function, maybe you should think about that a bit. What are you unable to do — specifically? What’s stopping you — specifically?

    Do you rely too much on face-to-face communications and find yourself unable to explain concepts in writing? Has your team abandoned Slack for anything productive? Are your press releases and email pitches limp? When you’re forced to fall back from your strengths, you necessarily encounter your own weaknesses.

    This is an opportunity to take a good look at what you and your company are and aren’t good at when it comes to communication and productivity. In fact, it’s more than an opportunity — you’re going to be slapped in the face with these shortcomings whether you like it or not. Whether you make something out of it or not is up to you.

    https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/01/how-to-work-during-a-pandemic/

  • How To Succeed At Working From Home

    Get organized. Maintaining balance is one of the most difficult aspects of working at home, because the work is always right there staring you in the face, Hanna says. “To keep you on track (and not working too much or too little), organization will be key. Get organized by creating filing systems, schedules and to-do lists.”

    Have a set work space. Kanarek suggests you designate a specific place for a home office–and store all work-related files, reference materials and supplies there. Try not to make it near a bed or a TV, Spence adds. Taylor says that you should ensure that your office space emulates that of a true work environment.

    Plan your day. This will help you minimize your distractions and maximize your true productive times, Spence says. “For example, many people eat a small breakfast on their way to the office, but when at home, you may be tempted to have a bigger breakfast which may slow you down for your early morning meeting. Or you may normally get off at 5 pm, but the kids come home at 4 pm, so you may need a shorter lunch so you can get all of your work done.”

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2012/08/16/how-to-succeed-at-working-from-home/#4e4e7cad281d

  • Stop Managing Your Remote Workers As If They Work Onsite
  • Personal Essay: Coronavirus Lockdown Is A ‘Living Hell’

    The younger generations, born after 1995 and in the 2000s, have good impressions about the Chinese system, putting the nation before all because they have been living in an era of prosperity and have yet to experience adversity.

    The things that happened during this outbreak have greatly surprised those kids. For example, a young man scolded others on Weibo in the early days of the outbreak. He accused them of spreading rumors and argued that if we don’t trust the government, there is nothing we can trust. Later, he said, when a member of his family was infected with the coronavirus but was unable to get treatment in the overcrowded hospital, he cursed and called for help.

    When Li Wenliang, one of the doctors who first reported a mysterious SARS-like illness, died of the disease himself, a student commented on the Internet: “It was just the virus that killed him, so we should focus on the epidemics.” But then the student’s dormitory was appropriated for quarantine patients — and he was shocked and dismayed.

    https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/03/809965742/personal-essay-from-wuhan-living-in-hell

  • Working From Home Because of Coronavirus? These Are Your Tech Fixes

    I cannot possibly be productive without my second, third or 53rd monitor.

    Obvious solution: Buy a monitor for home. Check out The Wirecutter’s suggestions. I bought a $150 Asus monitor nearly five years ago and we’re still very happy together. Dongle alert #2: You’ll likely need one to hook up to a newer USB-C laptop.

    Not-as-obvious solution: Use an iPad. Sure, it’s a smaller display, but I find it great for putting up a messaging window or an important website I frequently need—especially since it’s a wireless connection. If you have a Mac running the latest MacOS Catalina and an iPad with iOS 13 you have a feature called Sidecar. This allows you to wirelessly use your iPad as your Mac’s second monitor. Fire up the Sidecar app on your Mac and it’s real easy to set up. (Detailed instructions from Apple found here.)

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/working-from-home-because-of-coronavirus-these-are-your-tech-fixes-11583326423