1. Dell to employees: “screw you”. Employees to Dell: “you first”
Everyone enjoys seeing a few chickens coming home to roost, and especially when the chickens are landing on the roof of a huge corporate entity and crapping all over its well-manicured rooftop executive garden. The latest to find out the hard way is Dell, which ordered its employees to make a choice: become “hybrid” workers travelling to an office 39 times a year (monitored of course) to spend their time on Zoom calls from an empty office, or be “remote” workers. Oh, and if you’re remote, you’re not allowed to get promoted or apply for another role in the company, ever.
No doubt the conversation in the executive suite was about how remote workers weren’t “team players” and so weren’t the kind of people who “deserved” promotion, no matter how well they actually do their job. But it’s turned out that if you choose to wield the stick rather than the carrot, people don’t respond too well: in fact, nearly 50% of employees have chosen collectively to shrug their shoulders and stay at home.
That’s bad enough now, but it’s also really going to choke Dell as a business in the future. Retention is always an issue, and the retention of employees who have no prospects in a company is an almost impossible task. Any competent leader at Dell will be spending a lot of their time in the next year recruiting, while good employees go elsewhere to further their career in remote roles.
And failing to retain costs money: way back in my early career, a slightly drunk finance director told me that when you accounted for the time of managers recruiting, the effort to find someone good, and short-term costs of backfilling vacant roles, you were basically burning about £2000 every time you recruited a replacement. The cost to Dell of increasing employee churn, with around 120,000 employees, is a lot: if this move adds another 5% to its churn rate, it runs into hundreds of millions of dollars.
And for what? Because Michael Dell likes to see a “lively” office? Michael, the 1990s called, and they would like their ideas about business back.
2. It was 20 years ago today…
How can it be 20 years since Cory Doctorow travelled from London to Redmond and into the belly of the beast to deliver the good news that DRM doesn’t work? Cory was right: DRM doesn’t work, and it never has. But the tech companies have managed to use its spiritual successors likes parts pairing and app stores, enabled by exploiting the intersection between bad law and technology, to do things which would have sounded wild to them in 2004. Had Bill Gates thought about a software store on Windows that he got 30% of the cut from for no additional work, he would have probably drooled so much the hydration would have killed him.
3. And the bullshit machine goes marching on
I have to confess that I was pretty enthusiastic about Perplexity, which I’ve used as an example of how a large language model-based tool could actually improve on the existing state of the art. And I still believe that search, in the way we think of it now, is going away and will be replaced by conversational engines giving answers that tap into public data. You shouldn’t have to master how to use a search engine (or the frankly shitty experience that most SEO-led pages now deliver) to find what you want. And where you don’t quite know exactly what you want – such as when you’re buying a product – having a conversation with something that knows about products is a better way to do it.
But oh: it turns out that Perplexity not only just makes stuff up, it has been scraping data it shouldn’t have and trying to cover its tracks. Why are startup people, so often, utter shitheads about stuff like this? It’s just so unnecessary.
4. $325m worth of humans delivering pizza
I absolutely love Joan Westenberg’s writing, and this piece on Zume is a perfect example of how she cuts through the bullshit. Zume, in case you missed their flashy pitch, was going to revolutionise food delivery by cooking the food in ovens on route to you. It started with pizza, but, of course, had the stink of “disruption” about it, the kind of smell that always ends up spreading to a thousand other areas. It turned out, of course, that its magic robot roving ovens made pizza that was just bad – so they ended up having stationary “mobile” ovens and using human delivery drivers to actually take the product to the customer.
In other words, VC’s decided that a company of pizza vans was worth $2.25 billion.
Masters of the universe, my ass.
5. Here we go again
Governments really, really, really hate encrypted messaging. The “good” governments hate it because they think it aids criminals; the bad ones hate it because it aids dissidents. And just because we beat them once, doesn’t mean they’re not going to try it again. Meanwhile, you can find me on Signal.
6. But muh users!
I see that Apple is up to its bullshit again? A terrible shame that it’s not going to get its way.
7. AI is a feature, not a platform, not a product
I’ve seen a few articles floating around about how Apple’s “Apple Intelligence” announcements shows that AI is a feature, not a product or platform (Benedict Evans has written a good one) and there is definitely something to this. But it’s worth remembering that the canonical use of “feature not product” was Steve Jobs telling this to Dropbox. And somehow, Dropbox is not only still around, it’s a good product – and still better than anything Apple has developed. What Apple has done is great: but in terms of the future, general purpose intelligence will probably win out for many tasks. Just because automatic gearboxes exist doesn’t mean sometimes a manual shift isn’t the right option.
8. Developers? Before the app store? THIS CANNOT BE
Someone should tell Tim Cook that a reality distortion field only works if you have the charisma of Steve Jobs.
9. Meanwhile, in Keir Starmer’s inbox…
...will be the terrible state of the universities, several of whom are likely to go bust within the first year of a Labour administration. Lots to do, boss, lots to do.
10. Masters of the universe, Redux
Every day, there’s another piece of evidence suggesting that far from being the Übermensch of their dreams, masters of the universe, probably lords of time, venture capitalists are really quite dumb. You have to love it.
