Linked List: June 12, 2017

Monday, 12 June 2017

Emil Michael, Second-in-Command at Uber, Leaves Company 

Mike Isaac, reporting for The New York Times:

SAN FRANCISCO — Emil Michael, Uber’s senior vice president for business and second in command at the ride-hailing company, left the company on Monday morning, according to an email sent to employees.

Mr. Michael’s departure comes after a series of scandals that have rocked the company over the past year, forcing the board of directors to call an investigation into Uber’s culture and business practices. […]

It is not clear whether Mr. Michael, a deputy to Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, resigned or was terminated. Uber confirmed his departure but declined to comment further.

It was not clear whether the rat jumped or was pushed from the sinking ship.

Here’s a fun story about Emil Michael from Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith back in 2014:

At the dinner, Emil Michael, the right hand of CEO Travis Kalanick, heatedly complained to me about the press. The company, he told me, could hire a team of opposition researchers to fight fire with fire and attack the media — specifically to smear a female journalist who has criticized the company.

I suggested to him that this plan wouldn’t really work because the story would immediately become a story about Uber behaving like maniacs.

“Nobody would know it was us,” Michael responded.

“But you just told me!” I replied.

When Uber realized it couldn’t kill the story, I got a statement from Michael saying his words “do not reflect my actual views.” Then a Kalanick tweetstorm called his comments “terrible” and said “we are up to the challenge to show that Uber is and will continue to be a positive member of the community.”

That was three years ago and it took until now for Uber to get rid of the guy.

Drag and Drop on iPhone in iOS 11 

Steven Troughton-Smith uncovered the hidden settings to enable inter-application drag-and-drop in the first iOS 11 developer beta. He even posted videos showing it in action.

Count me in with Troughton-Smith: Apple should enable this for the iPhone in addition to the iPad. It’s hard to move stuff between apps on the iPhone today, and this would help. It’s clear from Troughton-Smith’s video that Apple is testing this internally — it seems to work really well already. It’s just disabled in the developer beta by a few preferences.

Is it as useful on iPhone as it is on iPad? No, because iPhone doesn’t have side-by-side multitasking. But it’s certainly more useful than not having it at all, and importantly, I don’t think enabling it will add an unwanted complexity for typical users who don’t need it.

Steven Sinofsky’s WWDC 2017 Trip Report 

Steven Sinofsky has a terrific report summarizing last week’s WWDC:

Delivering on “Pro” with the iPad Pro and iMac Pro is significant. The iMac answers the need for a high end workstation and does so with arguably the most powerful device available, yet in a sleek all-in-one form factor. The iPad Pro finally (almost?!) puts the iPad in a position to be a laptop for the masses, especially those who grew up only on phones.

Sinofsky really gets this. I think he had an idea with Windows RT and the original Surface that – if Microsoft had had the gumption to fully commit to it – could have made the Surface a viable competitor to the iPad in this post-PC tablet space. They doomed themselves to failure by watering the strategy down by only going half-in, with the other half sticking with legacy compatibility with Windows for Intel. The iPad would have failed too if it was half a Mac. You can’t get anywhere with one foot in the new boat and the other foot in the old one.

The other thing about the iPad Pro with the upcoming iOS 11 is that it’s not just for kids who grew up on phones, but for anyone for whom the complexity of Windows and even the Mac was too much to ever get comfortable with. There are adults who’ve spent two decades doing their work on computers without ever being comfortable with them until they switched to an iPad.