Linked List: January 10, 2023

Tuesday, 10 January 2023

Tom Brady Taking It on the Chin With FTX Holdings ★

Jeremy Hill, Bloomberg:

Billionaire New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and star NFL quarterback Tom Brady are among those sharing in the pain of FTX Group’s sudden implosion.

Brady, formerly a prominent FTX booster, owns more than 1.1 million common shares of FTX Trading, bankruptcy court documents show. His ex-wife, supermodel Gisele Bündchen, has more than 680,000 shares in the same entity.

He might have to play until he’s 50 to make up for this.

Eddy Cue on Apple’s Year in Services and Original Content ★

Eddy Cue, in a rare personally-signed post to Apple Newsroom (“Thoughts on Services”?):

At Apple, we have the privilege of partnering with creators of all kinds, while building products and services that enable even more creativity. Our mission has always been to enrich people’s lives and to leave the world better than we found it, and we know that takes more than technical skill. It requires leading with our values in everything we do. We believe that our products and services should be made for everyone. We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right, and that our highest obligation to our customers is security. We believe that a culture where everybody belongs can drive innovation, and that we must stand up for the change we want to see in the world.

When we started Apple TV+ a few years ago, we did so to tell stories that reflect our broader humanity. And whether it was CODA winning the Oscar for Best Picture or Ted Lasso winning back-to-back Emmys for Best Comedy, we have seen, in so many ways, the validation of this kind of storytelling and the strong desire for more of it.

Apple’s services initiatives are multivariate, but the overall quality of Apple TV+ content is an unsung story. Apple started on awkward footing with Planet of the Apps and Carpool Karaoke as their initial original content releases — but it makes sense that they started with low-stakes reality shows. At this point Apple has established a quality-over-quantity track record with their original shows and movies. The average Apple TV+ show/movie is good. I don’t think that’s true for any other streaming service except HBO, and even for HBO, the “Max” content has watered down their quality considerably. To my thinking, that’s exactly the right strategy and execution for Apple: quality and mainstream appeal above all else.

(Reading between the lines, I can’t help but wonder if this no-news-just-an-update post from Cue is related, timing-wise, to the weekend news that longtime Cue lieutenant and possible successor Peter Stern has left Apple. My read is that the point of this post is “Fuck you, I’m Eddy Cue, and I’m not going anywhere.”)

Was Salesforce’s Acquisition of Slack a Bust? ★

Angus Loten writing for The Wall Street Journal:

When Salesforce Inc. bought the messaging application Slack for $27.7 billion almost two years ago, it said the marriage would “transform the way everyone works in the all-digital, work-from-anywhere world.” Corporate technology buyers so far aren’t impressed, analysts said.

The acquisition sought to capture the fast-growing market for communications and collaboration software during the Covid-19 pandemic, as employers sent workers home and shifted to remote systems.

Today, companies in the market for customer-relationship management software — Salesforce’s signature product — don’t appear to be swayed one way or another by the addition of messaging and collaboration features, said Liz Herbert, a vice president and principal analyst at information-technology research firm Forrester Research Inc.

“We don’t really see, when it comes to Slack, any pent up demand from Salesforce’s base for a tool like that,” Ms. Herbert said. “It really hasn’t become something compelling,” she said.

I’ll go to the mat arguing that Slack is better-designed and better-implemented than Microsoft Teams. But to make a very broad analogy, I think Slack is to Teams today where Mac OS was to Windows in the mid-1990s: better designed, for sure, but not in a way that makes a difference to the corporate IT decision makers and bean counters who are making the call on which platform to use.

The key is not merely to be better, on some vectors. The key is to be better on the vectors that people with purchasing power care about. Missing this has been the death knell for many good products. One difference between the iPhone and Mac is that the iPhone came of age at the cusp of the “bring your own device to work era”, so factors that appealed to individuals (looks cool, fun to use) outweighed factors that might have swayed traditional corporate IT purchasers (low price, “standards”).

U.S. Supreme Court Lets Meta’s WhatsApp Pursue ‘Pegasus’ Spyware Suit ★

Reuters:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday let Meta Platforms Inc’s WhatsApp pursue a lawsuit accusing Israel’s NSO Group of exploiting a bug in the WhatsApp messaging app to install spy software allowing the surveillance of 1,400 people, including journalists, human rights activists and dissidents.

The justices turned away NSO’s appeal of a lower court’s decision that the lawsuit could move forward. NSO had argued that it is immune from being sued because it was acting as an agent for unidentified foreign governments when it installed the “Pegasus” spyware.

Strange times make for strange bedfellows. Very glad to be in agreement with the Supreme Court on this issue. I’m pretty pessimistic about how often I’ll be able to say that in 2023.