It’s the holiday’s so the post is a bit light on commentary this week as I was traveling to spend time with family. That’s also why we’re a day later than normal. Interesting Reads with Commentary The State of Technology at the End of 2018 — Stratechery by Ben Thompson The State of Technology at the End of 2018 This article is a bit of an annual tradition: in mid-December I summarize the state of technology, and appropriately…stratechery.com

Interesting Reads with Commentary Quora Hacked: What Happened, What Data Was Stolen And What Do 100 Million Users Need To Do Next? Quora Hacked: What Happened, What Data Was Stolen And What Do 100 Million Users Need To Do Next? Question and Answer site Quora finds itself having to answer the questions after it admits that 100 million user…www.forbes.com Like 100 million other Quora users, I awoke this morning to find an ominous email waiting for me that began: “We are writing to let you know that we recently discovered that some user data was compromised as a result of unauthorized access to our systems by a malicious third…

xkcd: Alpha Centauri Interesting Reads with Commentary 2018 re:Invent Product Announcements 2018 re:Invent Product Announcements AWS Step Functions, a fully-managed workflow service, is now integrated with Amazon SageMaker and AWS Glue, making it…aws.amazon.com It’s re:Invent week Per usual, tons of announcements. This page has them all as it is impossible to discuss all of them. I posted some direct links below for the announcements I found interesting.

Happy Thanksgiving for those in the US! A little light this week due to me spending much more time eating and sleeping than normal. Interesting Reads with Commentary Instagram accidentally reveals plaintext passwords in URLs — Naked Security Instagram accidentally reveals plaintext passwords in URLs In April, with the GDPR deadline and its requirement for data portability looming, Instagram released the…nakedsecurity.sophos.com

Interesting Reads with Commentary ($$$) Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis — The New York Times Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook's Leaders Fought Through Crisis Sheryl Sandberg was seething. Inside Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, top executives gathered in the…www.nytimes.com Sheryl Sandberg was seething. Inside Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, top executives gathered in the glass-walled conference room of its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. It was September 2017, more than a year after Facebook engineers discovered suspicious Russia-linked activity on its site, an early warning of the Kremlin campaign to disrupt…

Interesting Reads with Commentary There are 3 public clouds left and we’ll use all of them There are 3 public clouds left and we’ll use all of them IBM was the 4th public cloud if you leave the Chinese market dominated by Alibaba out of the picture. Compared to the…medium.com IBM was the 4th public cloud if you leave the Chinese market dominated by Alibaba out of the picture. IBM Cloud was losing ground to the top 3 public clouds. They decided to acquire RedHat for 31% of their market cap. …

A light load of links and comments this week as we’re doing a company offsite in London this week. We’ll be back to normal for next week’s links. Empowered Product Teams | Silicon Valley Product Group Empowered Product Teams | Silicon Valley Product Group Note: This is the narrative article version of a talk I've started giving recently at conferences, product meetups and…svpg.com The main topic of my work, and the central topic in my book INSPIRED, is product discovery.

Did I Make a Mistake Selling Del.icio.us to Yahoo? Did I Make a Mistake Selling My Social-Media Darling to Yahoo? Joshua Schachter's groundbreaking social-bookmarking site Del.icio.us, founded in 2003, popularized the idea of "tags"…nymag.com Joshua Schachter’s groundbreaking social-bookmarking site Del.icio.us, founded in 2003, popularized the idea of “tags” — organizing bookmarks by appending just a word or two. At its height, Del.icio.us was the toast of budding social sites known as Web 2.0, had millions of users, and served as a direct inspiration for…

xkcd: Modified Bayes’ Theorem Ironies of Automation http://www.bainbrdg.demon.co.uk/Papers/Ironies.html Iron y : combination of circumstances, the result of which is the direct opposite of what might be expected. Paradox : seemingly absurd though perhaps really well-founded statement. The classic aim of automation is to replace human manual control, planning and problem solving by automatic…