October 2015 Articles

Every company that deploys PC’s should consider this:

Big Blue began offering employees the ability to use a Mac at work starting on June 1, and adoption has been a tremendous success.

[Fletcher] Previn [Vice President of Workplace-as-a-Service at IBM] revealed that IBM is now deploying 1,900 Macs per week, and there are currently 130,000 iOS and Mac devices at use within the company. All of these devices are supported by just 24 help desk staff members.

Further, Previn revealed that just 5 percent of Mac users call IBM’s internal help desk for assistance, compared to 40 percent of PC users.

…Macs require less management and setup effort than PCs, he said, saving IT personnel valuable time. And fewer employees are needed to support Macs than traditional PCs, he said.

“Every Mac that we buy is making and saving IBM money,” Previn said.

Sign me up.

Paul Graham, reminding startup founders the importance of understanding revenue and growth in relation to capital needed for success.

When I talk to a startup that’s been operating for more than 8 or 9 months, the first thing I want to know is almost always the same. Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it’s been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die?

Paul links to a simple calculator Trevor Blackwell has made to help you figure it out as well.

Michael Lopp in memoriam of Alex King:

…I do not understand how to write this post other than to tell that the world is full of brilliant people who are unfailingly kind and generous with their time. Each moment that you aren’t spending with these people is a moment wasted.

Ben Thompson in a great article covering the transition from venture capital to angels and incubators, as driven by the Internet and the corresponding changes in the investment scene across Silicon Valley.

Ben Thompson on new shots that have been fired between the New York Times and Amazon over the news organization’s coverage of working conditions. Interesting to note that Jay Carney now works for Amazon and the place both chose to post their stories; Medium.

The fact of the matter is that The New York Times almost certainly got various details of the Amazon story wrong. The mistake most critics made, though, was in assuming that any publication ever got everything completely correct. Baquet’s insistence that good journalism starts a debate may seem like a cop-out, but it’s actually a far healthier approach than the old assumption that any one publication or writer or editor was ever in a position to know “All the News That’s Fit to Print.”

I’d go further: I think we as a society are in a far stronger place when it comes to knowing the truth than we have ever been previously, and that is thanks to the Internet. It’s a good thing that Amazon can post to Medium, and it’s healthy that Baquet responded.

I continue to be impressed by the new Microsoft under Satya Nadella. Here Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer, discusses something I didn’t know too much about, the US-EU Safe Harbor. According to Wikipedia:

The US-EU Safe Harbour (now declared invalid) was a streamlined process which US companies could use to comply with the EU Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of personal data…

Intended for organizations within the European Union or United States which store customer data, the Safe Harbour Principles are designed to prevent accidental information disclosure or loss. US companies can opt into the program, as long as they adhere to seven principles and 15 frequently asked questions and answers (FAQs) outlined in the Directive.

With the October 6th decision by the Court of Justice of the European Union to strike down the agreement, a new agreement is needed. As discussed by Brad Smith:

We need to protect privacy as a fundamental human right. We need a global Internet. We need to keep the public safe. And we need to find a legal path that will work on both sides of the Atlantic. We need to do all four of these things together and simultaneously. This is the privacy version of a Rubik’s Cube.

If we’re going to find a long-term and sustainable approach, we need to think afresh. The leading privacy law in the United States was adopted in 1986. The laws in Europe come from the same era. The approaches that were developed 15 years before the 20th century ended are simply not adequate 15 years after the 21st century began. It’s not just technology that has changed. The world has changed.

A great summary of the state of responsive images. Read it if you’re a web designer.