Google’s search is not ‘best’, because it is operated by Google, a company run by McKinsey consultants and bloodless advertising executives whose sole focus is keeping shareholders happy by driving engagement. Emails in the DoJ’s case detailed Google executives pushing for more ‘query growth’, corporate-speak for forcing people to do more searches by making results less helpful. Google’s search product is worse than its been in years, because the company’s primary concern is increasing the metrics that improve its share price, which runs counter to helping people find things quickly and easily.

Search Party - Google, Hotels, Social Media, and Regulations • Buttondown

Well, have you ever used a piece of software at a company you work for that sucks? Was it sold by Microsoft, Salesforce, Google, Atlassian or another big SaaS company? Well, it was probably bought by somebody who doesn't use the software, and it'll cost far more to remove than your annoyance matters. The burdensome presence of software like Microsoft Teams or Salesforce Platform in your life is a result of these organizations using brand recognition to sell into your organization, and once they're in there, their sales teams exist to continually find ways to increase the revenue of each user. The people making the decisions about the software you use — usually C-level executives — are doing so based on a sales pitch tailored to them and their preconceptions of what your job is rather than any firm experience, and thus they will sign year(s) long contracts based on a great sales pitch and the financials that "make sense."

The Other Bubble

Growing up in the Hunter Valley, a region of Australia renowned for its fine wine production, Mitchel Fowler never realized he might one day think of an idea that could revolutionize the wine industry. Now, after a long career in finance, he has returned to that heritage to launch a platform to solve the wine industry’s long-running procurement cycle and inventory management problems. 

This founder grew up in wine country — now he's built a platform for wine makers | TechCrunch

“Until the illegal ad or the contact to a potential victim on WhatsApp, Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram is stopped, and then a telecommunications provider and a bank or financial institution takes more actions to stop that criminality dead somewhere in that ecosystem, there will be victims.”

Tech giants are 'wilfully blind towards criminality on their sites' says Australia's former cybersecurity boss - Startup Daily

This all feels so distinctly cult-y. Think about it. You have a High Prophet (Satya Nadella) with a holy book (Hit Refresh). You have an original sin (a fixed mindset) and a path to redemption (embracing the growth mindset). You have confessions. You have a statement of faith (or close enough) for new members to the church. You have a priestly class (managers) with the power to expel the insufficiently-devout (those with a sinful fixed mindset). Members of the cult are urged to apply its teachings to all facets of their working life, and to proselytize to outsiders.

The Cult of Microsoft

At some point, we solidified the layout of a calculator. If we change it too much, we diminish value rather than add to it. It might be time to recognize that we have solved some software problems, and the reason why all this stuff gets redesigned repeatedly is simply because companies don’t know what to do if these things have been solved already. How many designers, engineers, product managers, and even executives are merely trying to justify their jobs?

Nothing Left to Solve

In my examples, the individuals were all doing from a young age as opposed to merely attending school. And while they may not have wanted to work, the work was nonetheless something that they, their families, and society felt was useful, purposeful, and appreciated. In a sense, they had useful childhoods.

School is Not Enough - by Simon Sarris

But this isn’t great advice for someone like me. For those of us with ADHD (or ADHD-like traits), the challenge isn't choosing the important over the urgent - our brains naturally gravitate toward novel, high-upside activities. The real challenge lies in managing the accumulating costs of neglected maintenance tasks and, more importantly, the reputational consequences of this pattern.

ADHD and Managing Your Reputation - by Vaishnav Sunil

If people can't recognize these basic stan tactics when they appear in pop culture contexts, such as a Twitter thread claiming "I'm 17 and AFRAID of Sabrina Carpenter," how will they ever recognize the same strategies when political actors use them to influence elections, policy debates, or global narratives? 

We need to start recognizing stan psyops - by Taylor Lorenz

One time I pitched the following idea to help manage the lifecycle of policies and procedures:

Create a git repository Write the policy in Markdown Changes to the policies are merge requests Policy approvers approve the merge requests That's it Writing Markdown doesn't require anything more elaborate than fucking Notepad. The GitLab instance was already there. It was just a matter of learning 3 git commands, if that. This was deemed too complicated, so they went with a Confluence add-on that was about $50,000 per year and did basically the equivalent of a Shields.io badge.

It's Who You Know