Benjamin Edelman, writing at the Harvard Business Review:
I suggest that the problem at Uber goes beyond a culture created by toxic leadership. The company’s cultural dysfunction, it seems to me, stems from the very nature of the company’s competitive advantage: Uber’s business model is predicated on lawbreaking. And having grown through intentional illegality, Uber can’t easily pivot toward following the rules.
When Garrett Camp first proposed the idea for an on-demand black-car service in late 2008 — so the story goes — it’s unlikely that he could have predicted the meteoric rise of Uber, or that the very thing that helped it grow would also practically undo it close to 10 years later.
But Uber has come up against the limits of the grow-at-all-costs attitude that Camp’s co-founder Travis Kalanick embodied and embedded in the fabric of the company, and which recently led to his temporary leave of absence.
Camp, who doesn’t play a big role in the day to day of running Uber, finally surfaced as the company purports to be embarking on its next chapter to say: We screwed up because we didn’t listen.
“In a highly competitive market it is easy to become obsessed with growth, instead of taking the time to ensure you’re on the right path,” Camp wrote in a Medium post. “Now is that time … to pause for a moment and think about what really matters here: providing 65 million riders transportation when they need it, giving 2 million drivers flexible work options, and creating a company culture we are proud of.”
Camp’s reemergence is significant in the wake of Kalanick’s absence and the current jockeying for leadership that’s taking place at the troubled startup. There has been a public relations push as well as an actual reworking of the company culture. It’s not always easy to see which is which.
Amazon.com sent a shock wave through the grocery industry Friday when it announced plans to buy Whole Foods Market and formally enter the world of bricks-and-mortar retail.
I hadn’t previously given too much attention to the Apple Pencil, largely because Apple’s initial messaging around the product had really pushed it towards artists—and if there’s one thing that’s pretty clear, it’s that I am not much of an artist.
In recent months, though, I’d started to cave a bit. People showing off note-taking apps and PDF annotations made me wonder if maybe there weren’t use cases even for the artistically-challenged among us. But it was Apple’s demo at WWDC of the new Pencil-related features in iOS 11 that tipped me over the edge. So when I ordered a new 10.5-inch iPad Pro just hours after the keynote, I thought “what the hell?” and threw an Apple Pencil into my cart as well.
I may be a johnny-come-lately to Pencil fandom, but now that I’ve been using it for a few days, I’ve really been digging it. It hasn’t magically turned me into an artist or even really improved my atrocious handwriting, but there is something delightful about putting it to the iPad screen and seeing lines appear with all the fidelity of a physical pen and paper. There’s something very natural about holding the Pencil, perhaps because I’m of a generation that came to computing only part way through my youth, so all those habits with writing implements are still ingrained in me. It’s also just a pleasing piece of hardware in the hand, and I’ve taken to just twiddling it in idle moments.
If anything, my limited time with the Pencil has left me wanting even more from it. So I’ve compiled a quick list of three things that I think would make the Pencil even better.
I do some graphic work, but mostly I use the Pencil for much of what Dan has written about here.
Emily Chang, interviewing Tim Cook for Bloomberg:
“We’re focusing on autonomous systems,” Cook said in a June 5 interview on Bloomberg Television that amounted to his most detailed comments yet on Apple’s automotive plans. “It’s a core technology that we view as very important.” He likened the effort to “the mother of all AI projects,” saying it’s “probably one of the most difficult AI projects to work on.”
[…]
In the interview on Bloomberg Television, Cook was hesitant to disclose whether Apple will ultimately manufacture its own car. “We’ll see where it takes us,” Cook said. “We’re not really saying from a product point of view what we will do.”
Marissa Mayer, writing on the Verizon-owned Tumblr:
It’s been my great honor and privilege to be a part of this team for the last 5 years. Together, we have rebuilt, reinvented, strengthened, and modernized our products, our business, and our company.
Looking back on my time at Yahoo, we have confronted seemingly insurmountable business challenges, along with many surprise twists and turns. I’ve seen our teams navigate these hurdles and mountains in ways that have not only made Yahoo a better company, but also made all of us far stronger.
During these past 5 years, we’ve built products that delight our users, focused on our clients’ businesses, driven substantial value for our shareholders, and endeavored to make Yahoo the absolute best place to work. I want to take a moment to remind you of some of our many achievements together. They are remarkable, and we should all be very proud.
Amazon’s Echo is great. It’s a speaker for music, a digital assistant with Amazon’s excellent Alexa voice control, and a useful smart home controller. But why buy an Echo from Amazon when you could build one yourself?
Interesting use of a Raspberry Pi and the Alexa Voice Service.
M.G Siegler:
Having now read over a bunch of the early walk-throughs of the first beta of iOS 11, I think there is one feature — amongst the many — that rises above the others for me: enhanced screenshots.
To be clear, the screenshots themselves aren’t enhanced. But the ease with which you can do useful things with such an image after you take one in iOS 11 is a massive, massive upgrade. And I suspect it may ignite the usage of mobile screenshots even further. Up until now, the screenshot has almost been a hidden functionality. Yes, anyone can do it, but it’s not exactly like Apple gives you a tutorial when you first get an iPhone. And it’s not exactly like the power-plus-home button combo is natural. But because this has been the standard with the iPhone from the beginning (even with the move of the power button to the side from the top), the knowledge has seemingly been passed down like an ancient ritual amongst a tribe. And now we see a lot of people taking screenshots of things within iOS and sharing them throughout the web.
For one prime example, just follow a few athletes on Twitter and see how they choose to share a statement to their followers… It’s seemingly almost always a picture of the iOS Notes app shared as a tweet payload. In other words, they’re sharing a screenshot.
With iOS 11, while the tactic to take a screenshot is seemingly the same (though you can now easily take a screen recording which you could not do before), the functionality after you take the shot is so much better.
Now, after the screenshot is taken, you immediately will see a thumbnail of the shot in the lower left portion of your screen. From here, you can tap to edit the shot and/or quickly share it. While such functionality was highlighted during the WWDC keynote for the iPad Pro, it works with an iPhone with iOS 11 too. And it looks perfect.
I don’t know about you, but I take screenshots left-and-right. And I do this both for archival purposes, but also to be able to share something quickly. The problem is that right now, “quickly” means taking the shot, quitting whatever you’re doing, opening the Photos app, opening the screenshot, editing it, and then finally sharing it. In bulk, over time, this is tedious. The new workflow is so much better.
Not only can you open the screenshot immediately now, but again, you can edit it right away. And not only can you do something like crop it, you can actually mark it up in a very simple way. This is not that easy to do right now, and requires several taps. And it’s far beyond what an average iPhone user would ever do.
I take a lot of screenshots so this can be a handy feature to have.
Steven Sinofsky:
Many of us have been using the dev builds of iOS 11 and MacOS High Sierra this week. I wanted to share some thoughts on what I think are some of the important advances.
I have attended WWDC for many years, sometimes as a partner (working on Office), sometimes as a competitors (working on Windows), and sometimes just as an interested developer (grad school). There are always a range of emotions coming out of the event. In this era of massively global Apple, every event is galactic in scale yet it is super important to keep in mind that this is still their developer conference.
My view is that iOS is the healthiest developer ecosystem right now. For sure a big part is because the most revenue is accruing directly to developers, but just as important is the reality that the most valued targets for advertising and commerce are also using Apple devices. Together these create a vibrant and lively community of developers actively working on updates and new apps. An even more important reason for me is the unprecedented scale of customers and ability for Apple to deliver new software APIs to developers that will make it to 100’s of millions of devices in short order.
While the ecosystem might be the most robust right now, we also know how quickly the landscape can change. That is why the importance of how Apple evolves software that takes advantage of their market position is so critical. I believe this WWDC had some incredibly interesting developments in this regard.
I won’t cover everything of course, but wanted to point out what I think are the most interesting innovations or opportunities for developers engaged in the platform. Think of this as the trip report I would bring back for the team, after using the software for a week.
Jason Snell:
Users will be able to download full seasons, and the Podcasts app will know if a podcast is intended to be listened to in chronological order — “start at the first episode!” — or if it’s more timely, where the most recent episode is the most important.
I’m excited by these changes because, yes, some of my podcasts are seasonal and are best consumed from the first episode onward. I’ll be adjusting my own podcast feeds to take advantage of Apple’s extensions as soon as it makes sense to do so.
The other big news out of today’s session is for podcasters (and presumably for podcast advertisers): Apple is opening up in-episode analytics of podcasts. For the most part, podcasters only really know when an episode’s MP3 file is downloaded. Beyond that, we can’t really tell if anyone listens to an episode, or how long they listen — only the apps know for sure.