Why We Hate Working for Big Companies - Capitalism knows the central planning committee is bad, so, logically, Capitalism runs on corporations that are central planning committees.
Everyone hates Workday - “Workday reveals what’s important to the people who run Fortune 500 companies: easily and conveniently distributing busy work across large workforces. This is done with the arbitrary and perfunctory performance of work tasks (like excessive reviews) and with the throttling of momentum by making finance and HR tasks difficult. If your expenses and reimbursements are difficult to file, that’s OK, because the people above you don’t actually care if you get reimbursed. If it takes applicants 128% longer to apply, the people who implemented Workday don’t really care. Throttling applicants is perhaps not intentional, but it’s good for the company.”
This gets close to something, but doesn’t have enough empathy (understanding?) of executive life to sound right. More like: the purpose of a large organization is to perpetuate itself as is. It only changes if there is a crisis or a huge improvement to be had (10x? 20x?). Workday is good enough: all the effort you would put into fixing it would just result in the same general outcomes. You would take on the risk of it failing, and get little improvement of things went well.
Using AI to generate web forms from PDFs - With Enterprise AI, the app is still the hard part: “What took longer was the other stuff: identifying the problem, designing and building the UI, setting up the templating, routes and data architecture. It reminded me that, in order to capitalise on the potential of AI technologies, we need to really invest in the other stuff too, especially data infrastructure.” And: “What really slows transformation is bureaucracy. It’s getting permission to use a tool like this, and to make improvements to the underlying service."
ChatGPT in 4o mode is not running the new features yet - “They also made the new 4o model available to paying ChatGPT Plus users, on the web and in their apps. But, crucially, those big new features were not part of that release.” // I guess vendors have always done this - releasing betas and previews - but it’s become more acceptable to pre-release features that aren’t actually available yet. I call them “spoilers."
With Selipsky Out, What’s Next For AWS? - “AWS’s differentiation historically has been in infrastructure. Rather than compete in areas like enterprise software suites, it can double down on custom silicon GPUs as an NVIDIA alternative. AWS could bring its “go build it” cloud strategy to genAI to help customers home in on use cases that matter most rather than pushing AI everywhere. Still, this approach risks ceding ground to Azure as Microsoft courts business users by embedding AI into souped-up versions of Microsoft 365 and Dynamics while rolling out OpenAI-based services more generally. Google Cloud, which climbed into many enterprise accounts as a second or third cloud focused on data, has its own powerful AI offerings as well as general-purpose cloud capabilities. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is now in the mix for enterprise cloud customers, putting pressure on AWS and others with its low egress charges and overall price competition, as well as its premium database services and growing AI offerings. Red Hat continues to have a strong play in multicloud and hybrid environments."
Internet use statistically associated with higher wellbeing, finds new global Oxford study - “The study analysed data from two million individuals aged 15 to 99 in 168 countries, including Latin America, Asia, and Africa and found internet access and use was consistently associated with positive wellbeing.” // At this point, who knows? Like everything else in life, it’s probably how you use it that matters.
The Presentation Mistake You Don’t Know You’re Making - ’If your very expensive luxury hotel rooms offer ocean views, silk sheets, and a Jacuzzi, don’t mention the ironing board in the closet or the coffeepot.’ // Seems a little too turns out… // This replication study show that it sort of works. Furthermore that if you include an expensive item for free on the bundle, people see the bundle as good. // I generally think this kind of BOGO stuff is a scam and pricing tricks. So when I see it, I get suspicious that I’m being tricked.
Notes on Spain – Matt Lakeman - “Not only is there a €1 coin, but a €2 coin too, in addition to 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, and 50 cent coins. So if you pay for a €2.65 bottle of wine with a €10 euro note, you had better prepare yourself for the hail of loose change coming your way."
AWS CISO: In AI gold rush, folks forget application security - “the places where we’re seeing the security gaps first are actually at the application layer”
Aligning with User Needs with Rod Johnson - ’Spring Source ended up not monetizing Spring at all — but rather worked on monetizing with products that were complementary to Spring. “We monetized Spring by not monetizing Spring, by using it to open the door”’ // Great interview if you’re into the whole open source business model thing.