Mobile Forward

Satya Nadella Demonstrates Microsoft’s New Attitude

Julie Bort, for Business Insider, reports on Satya Nadella’s demo, where he used an iPhone. Three quick things:

1. A CEO doing a product demo. We need more of that.

2. A CEO using a competitor’s product. (Admittedly, he doesn’t own that iPhone.) In my experience, the more secure a CEO felt about his/her ideas and market reality, the more comfortable they felt mentioning or using a competitor’s product.

3. Microsoft apps for iOS. Pretty amazing how many productivity apps they’ve done, and many are well received. I know it’s not a new story, but it’s still cool. Take a look at the screenshot from Nadella’s phone to see the extent. Julie Bort offers a nice summary of each.

So, again: here we had a CEO using a competitor’s product and developing for it. Did the world come to an end? Did this, in itself, cause that CEO’s company any issues? No; quite the opposite. Refreshing to see Nadella’s attitude. More broadly, note that the Mac Office team in Redmond have essentially been loyal Apple supporters (in deeds) for years. All good stuff.

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Wednesday Assorted Links

1. A simple primer for understanding China’s downturn

2. There is no simple way to switch to a “consumption-driven” economy without the growth rate both falling and staying permanently lower. Structural reforms are absolutely called for, but in this context they represent a surrender to a lower rate of growth and thus they are especially difficult to pull off in a politically sustainable manner.

3. The Chinese have been growing at ten percent or nearly ten percent for about thirty-five years. More than a generation of Chinese is used to treating the risk premium as if they don’t have to worry about it. I shudder to think what economic and also political decisions have been made on that basis

2. Documents reveal Apple’s secretive next-generation retail store design I’ve always liked the organic and simple materials in Apple stores (wood, stone, glass), along with the almost ancient notion of simple street market tables as the primary presentation aid. And plenty of natural light. More to come, apparently.

The new store features floor-to-ceiling glass panels and a roof that appears to be intended, at least in part, to allow natural light to filter in from above. It also includes a lighter natural granite facade and a simplified interior layout designed to show off the product tables from the street.

3. This chart shows the best cities to work in if you are a woman in the tech industry

4. Google revamps Docs with voice typing, search functionality and data analysis Nice.

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Saturday Assorted Links

I’m digging out after being on a great vacation in Maui, Hawaii with extended family. It’s also good to be back, though. Below are some interesting articles or sentences that caught my eye recently.

1. Xiaomi rumored to launch a Windows 10 tablet in the upcoming months. I believe it’s possible. Largely because of this.

2. With Some Work, Cortana Could Be Windows 10’s Killer Application.

I have some travel coming up, and within seconds—literally—of asking Cortana some questions, I was able to check the weather forecast for my destination, find a handful of restaurants around my hotel, and find out what kind of facilities are offered there. I also quickly found a couple of specific recipes online, search for some images, launched some applications, and added a handful of reminders to my calendar. I even had Cortana remind me to get up and walk around every couple of hours, so I wasn’t glued to my office chair for too long each day.

I’m looking forward to trying it out. The first system-wide assistant on a large-scale OS.

3. Tiny sensor tells you when your favorite places are crowded.

The tiny infrared detector is effectively a smarter, more connected pedestrian traffic sensor: it tells apps how many people are entering or leaving a building at any moment, giving you a good sense of whether that restaurant is packed or blissfully empty.

It’s going to be a sensor-filled world. It’s just a question of when.

4. Why the ‘ruthlessly efficient’ editor-in-chief of The New Yorker never tweets.

“I don’t tweet, mainly because I’ve noticed that some of the other people with jobs like mine have either ended up doing all promotional tweets, which is boring, or writing something half-thought-out that would be better used in a more considered piece of writing,” he told Business Insider.

Words to ponder.

5. You Need More than ‘Natural Talent’ to Make it as a Photographer.

Mr. Turlington: Any dips**t can take pictures […] Art, that’s special. What can you bring to it that nobody else can?

Applies to many things in work and life.

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Why Facebook Automates Work

Julia Kirby, for Harvard Business Review, interviewed Facebook’s Vice President of Engineering, Jay Parikh. I added the bold emphasis.

So this notion of augmenting your people and enabling them up to take on more interesting work – that is really what drives the automation agenda?

The reason why the automation is so important is that it does free up these teams to go think about and do things for the future. If you think about it, most tech companies in the world today are spending an incredible amount of time competing for the best of the best in the world. For a smart person in tech, there are just a lot of fun companies with fun problems to go work on. So once you’ve worked so hard to get people into the company and to ramp them up and to understand your environment, you want to keep them. You want to have them be engaged. You want them to grow and develop their careers and stay with you for this ride that is scale over a really long period of time.

Hat tip to Marginal Revolution, where I first ran across this.

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The Messaging Shockwave, by Ray Ozzie

Good piece by Ray Ozzie, probably best known for being the chief software architect at Microsoft (until 2010). While it turns into a (classy) promotion of Talko, the app that Ray’s company made, it’s a good piece to scan thru. At the moment, I don’t use Slack or Talko, but if this article helps you learn about either, it’s a good thing.

“How will our productivity toolset adapt to a world where every information worker has a mobile computing and communications platform continuously within their reach?”

The future of productivity is centered on team messaging. In ways not unrelated to what’s happening in consumer messaging, the productivity platform of the future will be the platform of messaging. […]

You’ve almost certainly heard of Slack. For many teams (including ours!), it’s almost completely displaced email. You’ve likely also used or read about tools such as Quip and Dropbox’s Composer. The important aspect of these tools isn’t so much how they’re redefining the document per se, but rather that they’re centered from birth on team communications directly in the context of your work.

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