LinkedIn SNAFU

I’ll be posting a column shortly about today’s announcements from Apple, but first an apology.  If you received a connection request from me through LinkedIn, I probably didn’t send it.  LinkedIn sent it all by itself.

Twice now I’ve been faced with a dialog on the LinkedIn network where it proposes to blanket the world with link requests on my behalf. Twice now I’ve selected NO! and from the responses I’m getting in my e-mail twice now LinkedIn has gone ahead in and sent the requests defying my express orders.

Am I the only person experiencing this?

I’m a native English speaker and pretty good at reading the language, too, so I don’t think I’m sending the requests by mistake.

Of […]

Windows 8, Users 0?

Windows 8 is just over a month from hitting the market and my sense is that this initial release, at least, will be at best controversial and at worst a failure. Microsoft is simply trying to change too many things at once.

What we have here is the Microsoft Bob effect, where change runs amuck simply because it can, compounded in this case by a sense of panic in Redmond. Microsoft so desperately need Windows 8 to be a huge success that they’ve fiddled it into a likely failure.

Microsoft Bob, if you don’t remember its fleeting passage in 1995, was a so-called social interface for Windows intended to be used by novices. The idea was that Bob should be so intuitive as to […]

Apple and Samsung: brands at war

I was supposed to be on CNN last night to comment on the Apple v. Samsung  patent infringement trial that just started in San Jose, but then Mitt Romney insulted the Palestinians and I was bumped.  The way these things work is CNN calls the day before so I have time to think up something pithy to say. The question now is what to do with all that pith? So I’m dumping it on you. Consider this the long distance view of this legal battle in the context of what it really is — brands at war.

As a practical matter, I think it is very unlikely that Apple can win based on its accusation of […]

Are Indian high schoolers manning your IBM help desk?

The theory of outsourcing and offshoring IT as it is practiced in the second decade of the 21st century comes down to combining two fundamental ideas: 1) that specialist firms, whether here or overseas, can provide quality IT services at lower cost by leveraging economies of scale, and; 2) that offshore labor markets can multiply that price advantage through labor arbitrage using cheaper yet just as talented foreign labor to supplant more expensive domestic workers who are in extremely short supply. While this may be true in the odd case, for the most part I believe it is a lie.

This lie is hurting both American workers and the ability of American enterprise to compete in […]

How Marissa Mayer can still save Yahoo

E-mail readers of this column don’t have an easy way to leave comments so of course they send them straight to me, which is easily done simply by hitting reply. Other bloggers are smarter than I am and don’t use their actual e-mail address for the feed. The trend this morning among my e-mailers is to see the hiring of Marissa Mayer at Yahoo as some kind of trick by Google. Ms. Mayer is Google to the core, readers say, and she’s going to Yahoo simply as a commando to pick and choose future Google acquisitions.

No, she isn’t.

But I can’t write just a two paragraph column so I’ll go on to suggest what I think Ms. […]