Reverse Polish
From one of the greatest inventors to one of the worst grifters in Tech - this one page says it all.
191 publicly visible posts • joined 6 May 2019
Great article! TIL "second sourcing". I've been selling IT for nearly 40 years and I'm aware that every other technology introduces some degree of vendor lockin. But I felt cloud raised vendor lockin to the next level since it's the only technology that can literally be turned off by the vendor unilaterally and without any back-and-forth with the customer. I wondered whether customers, including government agencies, who moved to the cloud didn't realize this risk. The first time I read that this is a risk worth taking was in a McKinsey article but it didn't say how it can be mitigated, just that it can. This is the second time I'm reading how the risk can be mitigated. While you yourself admit that the details are sketchy, I do believe that your idea of "second sourcing" sounds promising and worth exploring in futher detail.
Some form of AI has been around in networking for a long time. In my old company in ca. 1998, we had a software solution that would sniff enterprise networks and use a probabilistic model to detect intrusions and leakages based on anomalies in network behavior. More recently, in ca. 2010, a customer's Network Access Control solution did a similar job in a faster and better (but not cheaper) manner by using an ASIC chip to run the probabilistic model inside of itself instead of relying on the central server's computing power to do so. To be sure, neither of these solutions had machine learning. I'm guessing modern AI will do the same job faster, better and maybe cheaper, and use ML. While that's nothing to be sneezed at, it's unlikely to be transformational for the forseeable future.
That's always what customers say before they get a feature. Back in the day, many software products had exactly the kind of "technical license limit" that you mention. Customers hated it. They'd complain that, just when they desperately wanted the 31st user to use the software, it was a horrible practice for the software vendor to restrict the use. That's how software vendors progressively withdrew their realtime technical license limits and replaced that with commercial licensing limits, which are enforced only once a year, via audits.
Not really. PayTM has two operating modes: Wallet and UPI. Only Wallet mode requires topping up and that will not work after whatever date. However, UPI mode uses a bank account as funding source and that bank account can be some other bank than PayTM Payments Bank. Only problem is, PayTM's UPI license is held by PayTM Payments Bank. If that bank is shut down, then PayTM needs to get UPI permit for itself to continue to operate in UPI mode. Not sure whether that will happen or not by the D-Date.
"Apple is allowed to require that in-app purchases must use Apple's own payment method (through which the mega-corp takes a cut of the sales) but it can't stop apps from linking to outside payment systems through which people can also buy stuff (and from which Apple may not be able to take a cut.)".
From the app owner POV:
- First part of sentence means apps MUST use Apple's own payment method.
- Second part of sentence means apps CAN use non-Apple payment method.
Sounds contradictory unless app developers split their price into two parts, route Part A through Apple payment method and Part B through outside payment method.
I just had a quick glance at 10-Ks of a few American software companies. They show salary costs under either Cost of Revenues or R&D (or both). Most software companies deploy a vast majority of their engineers to develop and maintain their software and a small minority for futuristic R&D work. The new rule only impacts companies that show 100% of salary costs under R&D, which helps companies goose up their Operating Margin (which considers Cost of Revenues but not R&D). What's to stop companies from showing bulk of engineer salary costs under Cost of Revenues (where it rightly belongs in most cases), which can - and is - expensed 100% within the financial year?
Well said. Back in 2017, I made the same point in my blog post https://gtm360.com/blog/2017/05/26/can-chatbots-replace-humans/. With ChatGPT / Gen AI taking chatbot capabilities to the next level, AI will likely be better than human CSRs in many more areas. As for displacement of labor, virtually every technology has caused a certain amount of movement of workers from one field to another, I don't think AI will be drastically different. If anything, we might be able to use AI itself to suggest how to redeploy labor displaced by it!
Hard enough to get one company with 150 employees (Dunbar number) to agree to a common set of business processes. Good luck expecting three government agencies to do so. But, wait a sec, I remember reading "However, the necessary business transformation and associated change management are not within the scope of the contract.", so best wishes for a jackpot to whoever wins this contract.
Great post! I've often thought about this topic myself. I've been using Windows, Word and Excel since ca. 1993. I haven't seen any sensational improvement in their functionality in the last 30 years. I once asked people on Twitter how many new features they could name in Excel during the last 30 years. Followers cited availability on mobile device and other areas of improvements that I wouldn't call functional enhancements. Then there were some people who pointed to live links to external data sources but I've used that feature to import inventory data from my company's mainframe in ca. 1994, so it's not new to me. If anything, I find it takes a few more steps to plot charts in Excel today than it did in 1993. For example, if there are two datasets, it's obvious that, in a vast majority of cases, one is X-axis data and the other is Y-axis data. The default line chart Excel 1993 plotted them that way but the default line chart in Excel 2023 does not have an X-axis at all and plots both datasets on the Y-axis, and I have to jump through a few hoops to change it to an X-Y chart.
Rightly so.
"Wall Street is betting big tech can amass power faster than antitrust regulators, judges and juries can chip away at it. The stock prices of Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms and Microsoft have seen more than twice the growth rate of the S&P 500 index this year - a time during which most of those five firms faced an onslaught of claims that they had abused monopoly power. Investors have had plenty of fuel for their confidence this year. Lina Khan's Federal Trade Commission, demonstrating more bark than bite, keeps losing important cases against tech giants like Meta and Microsoft." ~ @theinformation.
Besides, there's nothing stopping Google from scrapping free listing and charging listing fees on all apps in Play Store. Rake affected only 3% of big app developers, listing will kill most of the 97% of small app developers whose apps are free. This will end up favoring the big app developers and killing the small app developers, thereby shrinking the supplier base, which is exactly the opposite of what antitrust is supposed to do.
Please tell me this hook spy cam is the only product sold on Amazon that can be used for illegal purposes? The other day, I was watching a movie called THE K!LLERS on Netflix. At one point, the protagonist buys a FOB COPIER from Amazon to duplicate the keycard to the villain's home. If the villain sues Amazon... If everyone starts suing Amazon for such products, it would be the fastest way to bankrupt the world's fourth largest company. While on the subject, it would also be the fastest way to bankrupt the world's largest company WalMart, which also sells similar products.
It would be funny if marketing didn't craft different messages for different audiences.
I've been selling tech for 35+ years. Vendor lockin is an open secret of the IT industry. While vendors may not talk about it openly to customers, they have always been bragging about stickiness / loyalty and other manifestations of lockin to investors for ages.
I know I'm dating myself but, back in the days of 3.1, '95 and XP, Windows used to install drivers for HP, Epson and other popular models of printers, scanners and other peripherals by itself. I'm pleasantly surprised to learn that recent versions of Windows give a checkbox to let the user decide which drivers to install.
"Democratization... accompanied by robust governance" is a nice soundbite but one man's robust governance is another man's redtape. It was redtape that caused "non-democratization" of digital delivery in the first place. Not sure how it can accompany democratization of digital delivery.
With the growing use of virtualization, VDI, cloud storage and cloud computing over the last 10-15 years, virtually all programs and data of the PC user are increasingly resident on the cloud. As a result, a PC has virtually become a Dumb Terminal these days. I wonder what user-specific data is even there on the local hard disk of the PC anymore for AI PC to get trained on and work as a Personal Assistant.
Why just AI or Defence, public sector procurement is too slow for a lot of technologies. Woz a time when we quoted 386 based PC to a bank. By the time they placed the order, 486 was out and 386 was out of production. We offered free upgrade to 486. But, due to rigid tendering rules, bank refused.
I don't know what exactly but it says something that SAP gets away with this practice all the time. Not only did it win SAP v. Diageo but it pulled a similar one against Microsoft in ca. 1998. Microsoft built a VB-based indirect materials procurment portal with access to all of its 30K employees. Once the portal processed the Purchase Request, it handed over the approved PR to SAP MM to raise the PO. Microsoft had a 2K user license of SAP and SAP wanted Microsoft to buy up licenses for all the 30K employees who indirectly accessed SAP. IIRC, the case was settled out of court and Microsoft agreed to cough up for 5K more licenses of SAP.
Banks will thank regulators for the opportunity to delay payments and thereby earn float income under the pretense that they need to "carry out extra due diligence on the authenticity of the payment". Once again regulators will have transformed a problem of 5% of culpable customers into a problem of 95% of blameless customers. Good job.
My daughter got a ChromeBook as prize when she won the national Doodle 4 Google contest in 2013. For the first time, it has gone to the repair shop today. Enough said about length of support and repairability of this product. In my 35 years experience of working in the IT industry, ChromeBook easily has the highest Value For Money.
Soundboxes like this have been supplied by PayTM, BharatPe, Walmart PhonePe and other PSPs in India for over a year. I'm told that they have been supplied by AliPay and other PSPs to stores in China for many years.
I've been to dozens of stores that have a soundbox. While playing music is not a bad idea, I haven't seen a single store doing so.
The key functionality of the soundbox is to announce completion of a payment. Before soundbox came along, the store attendant had to stop what he was doing and look up his mobile phone to track the SMS or PUSH notif announcing payment completion. With the soundbox, he is able to multitask. Also, the SMS and PUSH go only to the phone used to sign up with the PSP. Quite often, that phone is with the storeowner, who may not be in the store all the time. As a result, the store attendant would need to look up the notification on the payor's phone. Crooks have been known to show a fabricated screenshot on their phone and scoot with the goods without paying. It was too late by the time the store realized that it had been swindled. Whereas the soundbox is a standalone device that's always present in the store.
Soundbox solves a very tangible pain area for stores, especially small stores where there are only one or two employees, there's no checkout line and the store attendant attends to the next customer by the time the previous customer makes the payment. Literacy or accessibility have primarily nothing to do with soundbox although they could be useful secondary use cases for it.
Sneaky of W3W to use extremely convoluted numerals to buttress its claim that words are easier to remember than numbers. In practice, nobody quotes LATLONGs. They text it and the recipient just clicks the link. Ergo, there's no need to speak out, much less, remember numbers like 40.712772, -74.006058. Besides, there are alternative systems like LinCode, which use a sequence of pure numerals like mobile numbers or credit card numbers, without any decimals or plus / minus signs, and they're way easier to speak out than W3Ws like mine: bristle.slam.parsnip.
Yes. OpenAI recently announced the two lines that website owners can add to their robots.txt to tell its bot not to scrape their website's content. I already implemented on my company's website: www.gtm360.com/robots.txt.
User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /
As the article says, backups also got hit by ransomware when its servers were being moved from one datacenter to another: "Some of the machines were apparently infected before the move, and during the transfer servers that had been on separate networks were all connected to CloudNordic's internal network. This gave the intruders access to both the central administrative systems, storage, replication backup system and secondary backups, all of which they promptly encrypted for extortion."
We've been hearing that bots are better at cracking CAPTCHAs for at least four years - ever since Verge published this article in 2019: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/1/18205610/google-captcha-ai-robot-human-difficult-artificial-intelligence. Still a vast majority of the most popular websites in the world continue to use them, even at the cost of annoying their users. I'm somehow inclined to take these research findings with a barrel of salt.
This is tricky terrain. It could be argued that, had the software not provided protected classes in its filter options, the human user wouldn't be able to discriminate by protected class. It's somewhat like one's belief on whether guns kill or people kill using guns. IIRC there have been cases where software vendors have been ordered to modify their features to ensure compatibility with local law.
For at least the last 10 years, I've received, on an average, better quality of customer service from chatbots than Human CSRs. Six years ago, I wondered if chatbots can replace humans. I think it's clear now that the question is not whether but when. But there's no need to cry for CSRs - by relieving them from mundane tasks, chatbots will enable human CSRs to focus on more strategic things. https://gtm360.com/blog/2017/05/26/can-chatbots-replace-humans/
According to a study, when stripped of all the jargon, a 6-page credit card agreement ballooned to 24 pages. So there's a reason why jargon is there. ProTip: Make the onetime investment required to learn jargon. Otherwise, you'll find every meeting taking 4X the time and perpetually whine about lack of work-life balance.