> According to the data, in May 2017, just 1 percent of workers were “gig economy workers whose tasks were electronically mediated,” or sourced through technology platforms like Uber, Upwork or TaskRabbit. > Moreover, in the workforce as a whole, 89.9 percent of people had a standard work arrangement as their main job, slightly up from 89.1 percent in 2005. Put another way, “nonstandard work arrangements," such as independent contractors, amounted to less than 11 percent of jobs in 2017, the analysis says.

> The new structure would include nine hundred applications, thirty thousand end-user devices, twenty-five thousand e-mail accounts, nineteen hundred vendor contracts, three new data centers, one of the largest enterprise data warehouses in the world, and the addition of five thousand new servers, with the recreation, cloning, or moving of another nine thousand across sixty global locations. This is a description of what IT had to manage when PayPal split from eBay.

> If you’re authentic and fully invested in making an impact while enhancing the experience of those around you, then you strengthen your case. Conversely, if you’re inauthentic or let yourself be silenced in the moments that matter, your case weakens every time you withdraw. www.strategy-business.com/blog/Good…

> my company is based in Oakland. This is like being based in San Francisco, but with fewer microclimates. Rolling up to work in a company hoodie, jeans, a t-shirt from your last company, and a pair of Tevas is A-OK. But the further east you go, the more formal everyone’s business wear gets. Jeans turn into chinos somewhere around the Mississippi, and then into actualfacts slacks. T-shirts become button-down plaid, and then long-sleeve with ties.

> There is also the cost of different people thinking about data differently because they are working with different platforms and not really speaking the same language as each other. I hear about this all the time from customers. They’ll have two people from their own organisation pitch up in a meeting with two different answers to the same questions, supposedly from the same data source. > But those data sources are being run through different platforms and end up getting corrupted or changed or amended.

“Lock-in” is about switching costs (a Simon Phipps put it long ago, “the freedom to leave”) and can thus be considered strategically, even financially, rather than numbing, stupefying FUD. aws.amazon.com/blogs/ent…

> The customer win is another example of retailers choosing cloud vendors that are not Amazon. Microsoft last week announced a retail-as-a-service (RaaS) partnership with Kroger, with the super market giant splitting its cloud investments between Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Walmart is also partnering with Microsoft, with the retailer and frequent Amazon foe signing up to use Microsoft 365, AI, IoT tools and Azure. Microsoft or Google is what you got in retail.

> Unfortunately, syndication on the modern web still only happens through one of a very small number of channels, meaning that none of us “retain control over our online personae” the way that Werbach imagined we would. One reason this happened is garden-variety corporate rapaciousness—RSS, an open format, didn’t give technology companies the control over data and eyeballs that they needed to sell ads, so they did not support it. But the more mundane reason is that centralized silos are just easier to design than common standards.

> Selling something for more than the cost is the only business model ever. Everything else is figuring out how to facilitate and optimize the transaction. Sell something people value has to be the foundational strategy. Community is had in any type of software, OSS, closed, aaS, or enterprise. Managing the sentiments of that community are what’s important. medium.com/@drewmusi…

You use an in-store device or you phone to scan items to buy: > The speed is most visible when a shopper calls up an item on her pre-determined shopping list and is guided to the exact aisle and shelf position of that item. As the shopper gets within range, of say, the jar of pasta sauce she’s shopping for, a food icon that she has selected as her “emoji” of choice appears on the EDGE shelf display — which is helpful when there are dozens of brands of pasta sauce on those shelves.