Tag: Microsoft

Photo by Trent Yarnell on Unsplash

Former Equifax CIO Jun Ying is going to prison for insider trading.  He sold off stock prior to the breach announcement (but he was well aware of) avoiding over $100K in loses… finally someone is getting held accountable.

Google’s peers are petitioning the US Government to hold the company accountable for anti-trust behavior. It is one thing for the government to investigate but I do find it troubling when other companies start pointing the government at one of their competitors. I certainly don’t think they have end user’s best interests at heart.

Finally the EU, who collectively are very sensitive to monopoly behavior, are allowing IBM to move forward with their acquisition of Red Hat.

Acquisitions/Investments

• EU Gives Unconditional Green Light to IBM’s $34B Purchase of Red Hat
  

  The Commission said the acquisition would not create any competition problems in relevant markets.

  In its investigation, the commission looked at the impact the transaction would have on the markets for middleware and system infrastructure software. Middleware is software used for making and operating enterprise application software, such as online payment processing. System infrastructure software allows companies to control hardware resources, such as servers, across enterprise application software.

  The commission found that the merged company would continue to face significant competition from other players in all potential markets.

  https://www.law.com/2019/06/27/eu-gives-unconditional-green-light-to-ibms-34b-purchase-of-red-hat-292-48931/?slreturn=20190530072301

Artificial Intelligence

• Google will now tell you how crowded your bus or train is likely to be
  

  Google is basing these details on past rides. For months, Google has been asking some people who use Google Maps to provide additional details about the level of crowdedness of their transit trips. After completing their trips, riders were given four options: many empty seats, few empty seats, standing room only, or cramped standing room only.

  Now, the company has collected enough data that it can begin offering predictions to customers who use Google Maps to plan their daily commute. The new feature is available starting today in 200 cities around the globe. (About one-quarter of cities are in the US, according to The Wall Street Journal.)

  https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/27/18761187/google-maps-transit-crowded-delays-predictions-train-bus-subway

• Amazon’s Facial Analysis Program Is Building A Dystopic Future For Trans And Nonbinary People
  

  As Os Keyes, a PhD student at the University of Washington, writes in their 2018 study of the subject:

  If systems are not designed to include trans people, inclusion becomes an active struggle: individuals must actively fight to be included in things as basic as medical systems, legal systems or even bathrooms. This creates space for widespread explicit discrimination, which has (in, for example, the United States) resulted in widespread employment, housing and criminal justice inequalities , increased vulnerability to intimate partner abuse and[35], particularly for trans people of colour, increased vulnerability to potentially fatal state violence.

  https://jezebel.com/amazons-facial-analysis-program-is-building-a-dystopic-1835075450

Cloud

• The Real Cloud Wars: The $6 Billion Battle Over The Future Of Weather Forecasting
  

  For decades, private weather forecasting has been a cozy industry, dominated in the U.S. by AccuWeather, The Weather Company (founded as The Weather Channel in 1982 and bought by IBM for $2.3 billion in 2016) and DTN, which focuses on industrial concerns and was purchased by a Swiss holding company for $900 million in 2017.

  But now a perfect storm of macro-trends—ever cheaper processing power, cloud computing, vastly improved AI and a proliferation of low-cost sensors—has opened up the field to a fresh crop of ambitious startups. In aggregate, they have raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, who think the incumbents look vulnerable to creative new business models.

  https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2019/06/24/the-real-cloud-wars-the-6-billion-battle-over-the-future-of-weather-forecasting/#1dcd097d298f

Security/Privacy

• U.S. May Outlaw Messaging Encryption Used By WhatsApp, iMessage And Others, Report
  

  Politico cited several unnamed sources in reporting that “the encryption challenge, which the government calls ‘going dark,’ was the focus of a National Security Council meeting Wednesday morning that included the No. 2 officials from several key agencies.” The discussion focused on the lockdown of messaging apps, billed as “a privacy and security feature,” which “frustrates authorities investigating terrorism, drug trafficking and child pornography.”

  The challenge for governments, the U.S. included, is that the privacy of messaging has become a central theme in the ongoing debate around privacy, data security and information integrity. People around the world are shifting from public social media posting to closed groups, and messaging platforms have been a major driver of that. Even Facebook has put messaging security and privacy at the center of its new strategy.

  https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/06/29/u-s-may-outlaw-uncrackable-end-to-end-encrypted-messaging-report-claims/#2fb8053c6c87

Software/SaaS

• Oracle Hot Takes: Workday “Not Competitive,” SAP a Time Bomb, Microsoft Valued Partner
  

  Here’s Hurd’s reply about a competitor that’s growing faster than Oracle in the cloud:

  “I think Workday does – again, my sense of Workday is they do a decent job in upmarket HCM where they can divorce the HCM buyer from the ERP buyer. When the ERP buyer and the HCM buyer are aligned and combined, they’re really in a position with no chance because they don’t have much of a financials product,” Hurd said.

  **

  “What that means is, they have to roll up a big new build to move to this thing Larry called earlier, HANA. It’s a big damn build and so the poor CIO or CFO or whoever this guy is, has to show up to the board, and says to the board of directors, ‘We’ve got a $500-million build to move to HANA.’”

  Hurd continued: “So yeah, I mean, I think it’s an incredibly interesting strategy on their part to put all their customers at play. Do we get calls from customers that we haven’t been called or talked to in 20 years? The answer is yes, and is it because – and remember… that when we sold to customers 15 years ago, they never really talked to SAP after that and vice versa, because you’re expected to stay with these ERP systems forever.

  https://cloudwars.co/oracle-workday-not-competitive-sap-time-bomb/

• Bill Gates accidentally makes the case to regulate the hell out of platform companies
  

  The important thing to know is that it’s well-established that the network effect enables the winning platforms to achieve massive scale and preclude competition. It’s a devastating combination that Gates calls “complete doom.” There’s a reason so many tech markets tend toward monopoly or duopoly, like Android and iOS, or Google search, or Facebook, or Uber and Lyft — the network effect makes it basically impossible to build a competitor because you can’t populate the network. And you can’t buy your way out of this problem: Microsoft famously paid app developers to write Windows Phone apps when there weren’t enough users to otherwise draw developer attention, and… it didn’t work.

  Gates might be saying this to describe why Windows Phone didn’t succeed — it didn’t have the app ecosystem to compete with Apple and Android — but what he is describing is the exact reason regulating tech platforms is the subject of so much conversation around the world: you can’t count on competition to keep these companies in line, because it’s virtually impossible to build a competitor. Even Microsoft couldn’t do it!

  https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/24/18715702/bill-gates-regulate-platforms-network-effect-android-mistake-microsoft
  
  Don’t buy Bill Gates’ outrageous claim that Microsoft just missed out on dominating the smartphone market

  But his comments this week were a bit self-serving. And I almost choked when he said: “We knew the mobile phone would be very popular so we were doing what was called Windows Mobile. We missed being the dominant mobile operating system by a very tiny amount.”

  And things became laughable when he went on to claim: “We were distracted during our antitrust trial. We didn’t assign the best people to do the work. So it’s the biggest mistake I made in terms of something that was clearly within our skill set. We were clearly the company that should have achieved that – and we didn’t.”

  Utter rubbish.

  https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/opinion-analysis/113849252/dont-buy-bill-gates-outrageous-claim-that-microsoft-just-missed-out-on-dominating-the-smartphone-market

Infrastructure/Hardware

• Apple will reportedly manufacture its $6,000 Mac Pro in China
  

  According to Wall Street Journal sources, Apple will work with Quanta Computer Inc., out of a factory near Shanghai. That facility is close to other Apple suppliers, which could help the company lower its shipping costs, and manufacturing labor costs in China are still much lower than those in the US. Apple has a long-standing relationship with Quanta, which makes MacBooks and Apple smartwatches at its other facilities.

  The decision to move Mac Pro production to China comes even as trade tensions between the Trump administration and China escalate. The proposed 25 percent tariffs on imports from China would affect all of Apple’s major devices. The company has asked suppliers to study shifting assembly of some products out of China, and Foxconn said it could produce US-bound iPhones outside of China if necessary.

  https://www.engadget.com/2019/06/28/apple-manufacture-mac-pro-china/

• Huawei can buy from US suppliers again — but things will never be the same
  

  All told, Huawei founder and chief executive Ren Zhengfei said recently that the ban would cost the Chinese tech firm — the world’s third-larger seller of smartphones — some $30 billion in lost revenue of the next two years.

  Now, however, the Trump administration has provided a reprieve, at least based on the President’s comments following a meeting with Chinese premier Xi Jinping at the G20 summit this weekend.

  “US companies can sell their equipment to Huawei. We’re talking about equipment where there’s no great national security problem with it,” the U.S. President said.

  https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/29/huawei-us-supplier-ban-lifted/

Other

• Former Equifax executive sentenced to prison for insider trading prior to data breach
  

  The Justice Department announced this week that former Equifax CIO Jun Ying has been sentenced to four months in prison for insider trading. He pled guilty earlier this year for for selling his stock in the company prior to the announcement that it had been hit with a massive data breach in 2017.

  The Security and Exchanges Commission charged Ying with insider trading last year. The Department of Justice says that in August 2017, after learning about the breach, he began researching the impact that a similar breach had on another company’s stock price. Later that morning, he promptly exercised and sold all of his stock options, earning nearly a million dollars from the sale. In doing so, he avoided a loss of $117,000 that he otherwise would have incurred when the company’s stock price dropped after the disclosure. More than 150 million people had their personal information leaked in the incident.

  https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/29/20056655/jun-ying-equifax-breach-jail-time-insider-trading-department-of-justice
  

• Google’s Enemies Gear Up to Make Antitrust Case
  

  The stable of Google critics includes TripAdvisor Inc. and Yelp Inc., which accuse the search giant of unfairly favoring its own content.

  Oracle Corp. , which has a long-pending copyright case against Google, has briefed European antitrust regulators about Google’s use of data to target ads and was part of a successful coalition of plaintiffs against Google’s alleged anticompetitive behavior in its Android operating system for smartphones, which led to a record fine issued by the European Commission last year, of €4.3 billion.

  News Corp , which owns The Wall Street Journal, and other publishers say Google and other tech platforms siphon ad revenue from content creators.

  All these companies say they would welcome further antitrust scrutiny. They and others are expected to seek out Justice Department officials as they prepare a Google probe, according to industry executives and antitrust lawyers.

  https://www.wsj.com/articles/googles-enemies-gear-up-to-make-antitrust-case-11561368601

• Jony Ive leaving Apple after nearly 30 years to start new design firm
  

  Apple’s chief design officer Jonathan Ive will depart the company later this year, bringing an end to a tenure spent crafting some of technology’s most influential products, including the iPhone. Ive, who has led Apple’s design team since 1996, is leaving “to form an independent design company which will count Apple among its primary clients.” The company is called LoveFrom, and Ive will be joined by famed designer Marc Newson on the new venture. Despite stepping down from his executive position, Ive and Apple both claim he will still work “on a range of projects with Apple.”

  https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/27/18761736/jony-ive-apple-leave-iphone-chief-design-officer-lovefrom-company-quit
  History Will Not Be Kind to Jony Ive

  Ive’s Apple has been one in which consumers have been endlessly encouraged to buy new stuff and get rid of the old. The loser is the environment, and the winner is Apple’s bottom line. Apple has become famous for its design, and Ive has become famous, too. Let’s hope the next great consumer electronics designer is nothing like him.

  https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ywyjmw/history-will-not-be-kind-to-jony-ive