Ben Thompson о конце Windows (точнее, о реорганизации Microsoft, в которой все меньше места остается операционной системе).

...for the first time since 1980, [the reorg] left the company without a division devoted to personal computer operating systems (Windows was split, with the core engineering group placed under Azure, and the rest of the organization effectively under Office 365; there will still be Windows releases, but it is no longer a standalone business).

[...]What is striking about this articulation of “productivity and platforms” [when Nadella just came on board as CEO] is that it is exactly how Nadella reorganized the company last week; the “Experiences & Devices” team is focused on end-user productivity, while the “Cloud + AI” team is all about building the platform of the future. The reason it took so long is the point of this article — Nadella had a Windows problem.

stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/

The End of Windows

The Windows division no longer exists at Microsoft, marking the end to a four-year process of changing Microsoft’s culture.

Голосовые интерфейсы времен Стенли Кубрика, или каким мог бы быть HAL9000: www.nytimes.com/2018/03/30/movies/hal-2001-a-space-odyssey-voice-douglas-rain.html

The Story of a Voice: HAL in ‘2001’ Wasn’t Always So Eerily Calm (Published 2018)

The veteran Shakespearean actor Douglas Rain replaced the Oscar winner Martin Balsam, setting the standard for how artificial intelligence sounds.

Любопытная фигня, конечно: на волне последних событий с фейсбуком и прочими тек-компаниями, которые живут засчет продажи данных о пользователях рекламодателям, WIRED всерьез обсуждает о возвращении RSS-фидов. (Они просто не открыли для себя каналы в телеграмме). Вангую, что дальше будет ностальгия по email chains и персональным страничкам на Geocities.

www.wired.com/story/rss-readers-feedly-inoreader-old-reader/

It's Time for an RSS Revival

After years of letting algorithms make up our minds for us, the time is right to go back to basics.

Тим Кук говорит: мы продаем железки и софт, а не собираем данные о пользователях (показывает пальцем на Гугл и ФБ). Верить ли этому?

"The truth is, we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer—if our customer was our product," he added. "We’ve elected not to do that."

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/03/tim-cook-says-apples-customers-are-not-its-products-unlike-facebook/

Tim Cook says Apple’s customers are not its product, unlike Facebook

"The truth is, we could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer."

Figma запилила API - теперь можно писать плагины, как для Скетча, но в онлайне и с реальными данными

blog.figma.com/introducing-figmas-platform-ee681bf861e7

Introducing: Figma’s Platform

Today, we’re excited to launch the Figma Platform, a way to improve design workflows by connecting Figma to other tools, scripts and even web apps.

и еще немного размышлений про сошл медиа и роль фейсбука и других платформ, которые не то, чтобы добавляют много ценности:

"One of the most persistent arguments against social media is that it makes people unhappy. A 2017 paper entitled Association of Facebook Use with Compromised Well-Being: A Longitudinal Study found that Facebook interactions made people unhappier over time, while real-life interactions made them happier — but apart from that, the evidence for the psychological evils of social media isn’t that conclusive. Amy Orben, an experimental psychologist specialising in social media at Oxford University, believes fears are overplayed. ‘We’ve been researching this day-in, day-out for years and I think the striking thing is simply the lack of solid evidence we have at the moment,’ she says. ‘There seems to be a small negative effect on adolescent mental health — but it’s tiny. We can only actually predict about one per cent of someone’s wellbeing from social media. We need more nuanced evidence.’"

www.standard.co.uk/lifestyle/esmagazine/is-the-social-media-bubble-about-to-burst-a3799421.html

Is the social media bubble about to burst?

As the Cambridge Analytica scandal plunges Facebook into crisis and more revelations emerge about data harvesting online, is it time to quit social media, asks Richard Godwin

Досталось, конечно, фейсбуку...

"The stock has fallen 18 percent since the news was first revealed by the New York Times and The Observer of London earlier this month, wiping out almost $100 billion of market value. Facebook is no longer among the top five most valuable companies in the world and it delayed unveiling a new home speaker product to reevaluate how it uses data, according to people familiar with the matter. The stock dipped 0.2 percent early Wednesday to $151.94."

Надо брать!

www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-28/facebook-announces-new-security-settings-amid-privacy-concerns

Invision: "What powers great design? We studied design-forward companies and found one thing in common: they all do it differently. Organizational structure, design process, tool stacks, and more play a significant role in how they achieve competitive advantage through design."

www.invisionapp.com/enterprise/design-genome

Customer Stories

Discover how we help our customers solve real challenges.

Dropbox is public blog.ycombinator.com/congratsdropbox/

Congrats Dropbox!

I wrote Dropbox their first investment check, on June 26, 2007. Little did I know back then what a momentous check this one would be: that 11 years later, Dropbox would be the first Y Combinator company to go public.

Почему ваши друзья массово удаляются с фейсбука? Потому что не читают пользовательское соглашение и авторуют разные левые приложения.

"In June 2014, a researcher named Aleksandr Kogan developed a personality-quiz app for Facebook. It was heavily influenced by a similar personality-quiz app made by the Psychometrics Centre, a Cambridge University laboratory where Kogan worked. About 270,000 people installed Kogan’s app on their Facebook account. But as with any Facebook developer at the time, Kogan could access data about those users or their friends. And when Kogan’s app asked for that data, it saved that information into a private database instead of immediately deleting it. Kogan provided that private database, containing information about 50 million Facebook users, to the voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica used it to make 30 million “psychographic” profiles about voters."

www.google.com/amp/s/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/556046/

The Cambridge Analytica Scandal, in 3 Paragraphs

What it means for Facebook, for President Trump’s world, and for every American

tlgspace"And then I came across a paper about how personality traits could be a precursor to political behaviour, and it suddenly made sense. Liberalism is correlated with high openness and low conscientiousness, and when you think of Lib Dems they’re absent-minded professors and hippies. They’re the early adopters… they’re highly open to new ideas. And it just clicked all of a sudden."

tlgspace"Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL, had won contracts with the US State Department and was pitching to the Pentagon, and Wylie was genuinely freaked out. “It’s insane,” he told me one night. “The company has created psychological profiles of 230 million Americans. And now they want to work with the Pentagon? It’s like Nixon on steroids."

www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump

‘I made Steve Bannon’s psychological warfare tool’: meet the data war whistleblower

Christopher Wylie goes on the record to discuss his role in hijacking the profiles of millions of Facebook users in order to target the US electorate

«Find your next tech conference» - a list of design/ux conferences across the world that are worth visiting

confs.tech/ux

И про выборы

techcrunch.com/2018/03/14/sierra-leone-just-ran-the-first-blockchain-based-election/

Sierra Leone just ran the first blockchain-based election

The citizens of Sierra Leone went to the polls on March 7 but this time something was different: the country recorded votes at 70% of the polling to the blockchain using a technology that is the first of its kind in actual practice. The tech, created by Leonardo Gammar of Agora, anonymously stored votes in […]

Дима Барбанель и товарищи ежедневно тренируют в телеграмме дизайнеров, и даже запустили трехдневный триал, чтобы на это дело посмотреть

tlgspace"Today, Facebook is fighting its fellow technology powerhouses, Apple and Google — and still to some extent, Snap — in a high-stakes battle to rule as the platform of choice for AR developers. The technology itself, while still in its infancy, has exploded in popularity, confirming Zuckerberg’s more recent intuition that AR could sprint toward mass adoption even while VR remained an awkward technology whose appeal is largely limited to hardcore gamers. AR’s key advantage is that it doesn’t depend on a pricey, bulky headset that isolates its users. It works on a device already owned by more than one fourth of the world’s population."

www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/2018/03/08/inside-facebooks-bet-on-an-augmented-reality-future/#540f314a4d56

Inside Facebook's Bet On An Augmented Reality Future

Augmented reality face masks might seem frivolous, but the implications of getting AR right for Facebook are existential. The social network’s ongoing shift toward image-heavy features is as critical to the company’s future as was the transition from desktop to mobile.

techcrunch.com/2018/03/06/uber-self-driving-trucks-are-now-moving-cargo-for-uber-freight-customers/

"Uber’s autonomous trucks are now doing actual work for customers via Uber Freight, Uber’s commercial cargo shipping on-demand app. The first runs are being done in Arizona, with regular hauls operating with both human drivers and autonomous trucks working in tandem."

Uber self-driving trucks are now moving cargo for Uber Freight customers

Uber’s autonomous trucks are now doing actual work for customers via Uber Freight, Uber’s commercial cargo shipping on-demand app. The first runs are being done in Arizona, with regular hauls operating with both human drivers and autonomous trucks working in tandem. How it works is that Uber will load up the freight on a conventional, […]

tlgspace"Even the name “Walmart” was selected with customer prices in mind: it was cheaper to buy neon signs for 7 letters than the longer names Sam considered.)"

Замечательное: Тревор МакКендрик развенчивает мифы о том, как фаундеры начинали свои ныне знаменитые бизнесы. medium.com/@trevmckendrick/what-reed-hastings-sam-walton-can-teach-you-about-how-to-start-a-company-d38cfe0eafce

Why You Should Ignore Every Founder’s Story About How They Started Their Company

Founding Stories Ignore The Most Important Parts of Starting a Business

www.uber.com/newsroom/uber-health/ Uber Health: убер запартнерился с медицинскими всякими учреждениями и теперь возит пациентов от клиник до дома и обратно

Alexa в дверном звонке - теперь Амазон будет знать о нас ещё больше. Представляю как это ещё и с доставкой будет соединено- отличный ход: www.fastcompany.com/40537814/amazons-ring-buy-perfectly-demonstrates-alexa-funds-purpose

By Buying The Ring Doorbell, Amazon Is Expanding Alexa’s World Once Again

The $1.1 billion smart-home deal demonstrates how Amazon uses its investment arm to push Alexa into new parts of life.

Let me borrow your cloud

www.cnbc.com/2018/02/26/apple-confirms-it-uses-google-cloud-for-icloud.html

Apple confirms it uses Google's cloud for iCloud

A document contains Apple's first public acknowledgment that it is storing data for its iCloud services in Google's data centers.

эссе Google Design о user experience для систем искусственного интеллекта >

design.google/library/ux-ai/

The UX of AI - Library - Google Design

Using Google Clips to understand how a human-centered design process elevates artificial intelligence

tlgspace"Convenience has the ability to make other options unthinkable. Once you have used a washing machine, laundering clothes by hand seems irrational, even if it might be cheaper. After you have experienced streaming television, waiting to see a show at a prescribed hour seems silly, even a little undignified. To resist convenience — not to own a cellphone, not to use Google — has come to require a special kind of dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not fanaticism."

www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/opinion/sunday/tyranny-convenience.html

Opinion | The Tyranny of Convenience (Published 2018)

All the personal tasks in our lives are being made easier. But at what cost?

Изучаем волны: waveforms.surge.sh/waveforms-intro

Techpinions разбираются с тем, что происходит в мире вайфая (как технологии) и чего ждать в ближайшие пару лет

techpinions.com/the-modern-state-of-wifi/52240

www.futureof.design

Future of Design in Start-Ups: 2017

We launched the Future of Design in Start-Ups survey last year to set a baseline for how design operates in the tech ecosystem and also to begin to track what value is created by design in fast growing companies.

Матчсть — продуктовая стратегия и метрики

Как запустить и заскейлить приложение про моду на основе машинного обучения. Классные инсайты про алгоритмы и продуктовые решения из опыта Chicismo:

medium.com/@aldamiz/how-we-grew-from-0-to-4-million-women-on-our-fashion-app-with-a-vertical-machine-learning-approach-f8b7fc0a89d7

How we grew from 0 to 4 million women on our fashion app, with a vertical machine learning approach

Three years ago we launched Chicisimo, our goal was to offer automated outfit advice. Today, with over 4 million women on the app, we want…