Australian urban planning, public transport, politics, retrocomputing, and tech nerd. Recovering journo. Cat parent. Part-time miserable grump.

Cities for people, not cars! Tech for people, not investors!

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: November 5th, 2022

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  • @airwhale @technology The issue is that often the core principles of agile fly in the face of how many big companies and organisations work.

    Big orgs are often built around hierarchical command-and-control. They’re built on monofunctional teams, processes, and procedures. They’re built on KPIs and reports. They’re built around getting stakeholder approvals ahead of waterfall projects.

    So the bits of agile that tend to get picked up and implemented are the kanban boards and daily “scrum” meetings.

    And the bits that tend to get left on the cutting room floor are the bits about products being the most important output, the autonomy, the cross-functional teams, the ongoing customer input, etc.


  • @BarneyDellar @technology You’re right, it should, in truly autonomous cross-functional teams that have a high degree of delegated decision-making.

    But that’s not what tends to happen in many larger, hierarchical organisations.

    In those organisations, what can tend to happen is the daily scrum becomes where managers get to micromanage details and staff are expected to report back their progress.

    (I’m thinking about one past job in particular, where it was explained to me that: “The scrum is important because it allows our manager to keep track of our progress and set priorities.”)





















  • @HughJanus @cyrusg On the revenue front, it’s worth noting that all of Meta’s social media apps basically share the same ad platform.

    Every business that advertises on Facebook or Instagram (and there are many) already uses that ad platform.

    I think a lot of social media marketing managers are waking up one morning discovering there’s a new checkbox that’s suddenly appeared in their Meta for Business ad campaigns.

    Along with being able to select their ads appearing on Facebook or Insta, there’s now a checkbox that says “Threads”.

    And, knowing Meta, it’s on by default.

    If the ad manager doesn’t notice it, boom, their brand’s ads are now appearing on Threads.

    Given how much fashion brands love Instagram, my guess is that there’s a lot of shoes and handbags being offered on Threads.

    On the other side of the coin, given the number of brands that have abandoned Twitter, I can see how Threads could very quickly win the battle for ad dollars.









  • @darkkite @maegul From the outside, it also seems like there was some corporate politics involved.

    Apple was making its comeback thanks to Mac OSX, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad.

    Samsung was toying with its own OS (Tizen), apps, and online services (Bixby).

    Google responded by toying with hardware itself, including Glass, Nest, and at one point even buying Motorola.

    So it looked like all the big tech companies were going to try to copy Apple by trying to own the full tech stack.

    The then-CEO of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, responded by trying to reposition his firm as a “devices and services” company. So he ended up with the XBox, Zune, Kinect, Kin, and Surface.

    Then he went all-in with a takeover of Nokia.

    Soon afterwards, Ballmer stood aside, and Satya Nadella took over.

    Satya wanted to reposition Microsoft as a cloud-first company, competing against Google and AWS rather than Apple.

    He kept the XBox and Surface, let the rest bleed money for a couple of quarters, wrote off their value as a loss, and then killed it off.






  • @chucker @lispi314 @kkarhan @panamared27401 @technology @music@fedibb.ml @music@lemmy.ml @senficon The other factor with software copyrights is the issue of legacy software.

    There’s a lot of software out there in the world that’s still in use, still under copyright, but no longer sold or supported by a vendor. In some cases, it might not even be clear who actually owns the copyright.

    Sometimes it’s for specialist equipment that’s built using obsolete software. (Hello, OS/2 ATM machines.)

    Sometimes it’s for large enterprises that still use legacy VAX machines, token ring ethernet equipment, CP/M applications and Windows XP desktops.

    Sometimes it’s run by retro computing hobbyists who really loved the Atari ST or Speccy.

    There’s a good argument to be made that all abandonware should be released to the public domain. It would certainly make life a lot easier for many people.