This week I got my first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Slight side effects of feeling a bit more tired than usual plus a low grade headache the following evening, but I’m sure that catching COVID-19 would have more serious consequences.
Salesforce
Adam Selipsky steps down as President and CEO of Tableau to return to Amazon and run AWS. While this is a surprise to the Salesforce ecosystem, in AWS circles he’d already been named as a possible successor to Andy Jassy, who has taken over as CEO of Amazon from Jeff Bezos. Marc Benioff talks quite a bit about the executive talent that they have at Salesforce, mostly garnered though acquisitions, but this is one of the downsides of having a stellar lineup - everyone else is after them!
Slack (now part of Salesforce as of December) introduced a new feature allowing anyone to DM anyone else regardless of which workspaces they were in, with a customisable message and very little in terms of control. They quickly softened it and admitted they hadn't done a good job.
Akamai builds Vaccine Edge on top of Salesforce Vaccine Cloud to try to overcome the problems of millions of signups when a new cohort is announced.
Sonar looks quite interesting - billed as a tool that shows “how your entire tech stack works together and automatically documents every change to your data”, it suggests the dream of detailed documentation on how all of your systems and data are integrated, but created in an automated fashion. They’ve raised $12 million so expect to see more news about them.
Writing
Facebook are launching a new platform for writers to self-publish. One of the items it will offer is “A free, self-publishing tool with robust styling options to create individual websites and an email newsletter”, which sounds a lot like Substack to me! They are starting out with local journalists, which is an interesting move as here in the UK local news was pretty much sidelined first by bloggers and then by social media. Not quite extinct, but a shell of it’s former self, and I’m not sure how easy it will be to put the genie back in the bottle. I’m also not sure what the appetite is for paying for content on Facebook, even if it isn’t really Facebook’s content.
Medium are making big changes to their editorial approach and team. Medium started out with a very different approach to traditional publishing - everyone could be a published writer and publications were loose associations of writers with common interests, or companies writing articles about their approach to business in a fast changing environment. Then a couple of years ago they seemed to lose track of all that and pivoted to behave like a traditional publisher - commissioning the kind of pieces for their publications from established writers that we can read anywhere, and pushing those publications above everything else on the platform. Hopefully we’ll get back to the old Medium where interesting and esoteric articles appear on my home page and pique my interest.
Substack has raised $65 million, so it sounds like I’ll be able to use this platform for a while yet!
Other
According to the BBC, Managers and their reports trust each other less after a year of remote working. One thing that is clear to me is that we’ll have to find a way to make this work. as the remote genie isn’t going back into the bottle, especially in the cloud computing world. A culture of needing people in the office to monitor their working day is going to be very difficult to sustain when the competition takes a more enlightened view that they employ adults and judge them on what they achieve. I’m sure a few will try to buck the trend, but they’ll go the way of the dinosaurs.
Deno, the node competitor/replacement from a couple of the developers of node, now has a company and seed money behind it. Deno is essentially a new implementation avoiding the perceived design flaws like using ES modules instead of the CommonJS standard.
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