Palantir: Planning Ahead
September 4, 2020
I read “In Amended Filing, Palantir Admits It Won’t Have Independent Board Governance for Up to a Year.” The legal tap dancing is semi-interesting. Palantir wants money and control. I understand that motive. The company — despite its sudden interest in becoming a cowboy — has Silicon Valley roots.
What’s fascinating is that the company was founded in 2004, although I have seen references to 2003. No big deal. Just a detail. The key point is that the company has been talking about an initial public offering for years.
The write up explains that after submitting an S-1 form to the Securities & Exchange Commission, Palantir submitted a revised or amended S-1. For a firm which provides intelware and policeware to government agencies, planning and getting one’s ducks in a row seem to be important attributes.
Did Palantir just dash off the first S-1 at Philz Coffee? Then did some bright young stakeholder say, “Yo, dudes, we need to make sure we keep control. You know like the Zuck.”
After 16 years in business and burning through a couple of tractor trailers filled with cash, it seems untoward to submit a revision hard on the heels of an SEC S-1 filing.
Careless, disorganized, or what the French call l’esprit d’escalier strikes me as telling.
Observations:
- The resubmission suggests carelessness and flawed management processes
- The action raises the question, “Are these Silicon Valley cowboys getting desperate for an exist?”
- For a low profile outfit engaged in secret work for some of its clients, public actions increase the scrutiny on a company which after a decade and a half is not profitable.
Interesting behavior from from Palantirians. Did the seeing stone suffer a power outage?
Stephen E Arnold, September 4, 2020
Amazon: Employee Surveillance and the Bezos Bulldozer with DeepLens, Ring, and Alexa Upgrades
September 4, 2020
Editor’s Note: This link to Eyes Everywhere: Amazon’s Surveillance Infrastructure and Revitalizing Worker Power may go bad; that is, happy 404 to you. There’s not much DarkCyber can do. Just a heads up, gentle reader.
The information in a report by Open Markets called Amazon’s Surveillance Infrastructure and Revitalizing Worker Power may be difficult to verify and comprehend. People think of Amazon in terms of boxes with smiley faces and quick deliveries of dog food and Lightning cables.
Happy Amazon boxes.
The 34 page document paints a picture of sad Amazon boxes.
The main point is that the Bezos bulldozer drives over employees, not just local, regional, and national retail outlets:
A fundamental aspect of its power is the corporation’s ability to surveil every aspect of its workers’ behavior and use the surveillance to create a harsh and dehumanizing working environment that produces a constant state of fear, as well as physical and mental anguish. The corporation’s extensive and pervasive surveillance practices deter workers from collectively organizing and harm their physical and mental health. Amazon’s vast surveillance infrastructure constantly makes workers aware that every single movement they make is tracked and scrutinized. When workers make the slightest mistake, Amazon can use its surveillance infrastructure to terminate them.
Several observations:
- Amazon is doing what Amazon does. Just like beavers doing what beavers do. Changing behavior is not easy. Evidence: Ask the parents of a child addicted to opioids.
- Stakeholders are happy. Think of the the song with the line “money, money, money.”
- Amazon has the cash, clout, and commitment to pay for lobbying the US government. So far the President of the United States has been able to catch Amazon’s attention with a JEDI sword strike, but that’s not slowed down Darth Jeff.
Net net: After 20 plus years of zero meaningful regulation, the activities of the Bezos bulldozer should be viewed as a force (like “May the force be with you.”) DarkCyber wants to point out that Amazon is also in the policeware business. The write up may be viewed as validation of Amazon’s investments in this market sector.
Stephen E Arnold, September 4, 2020
Facebook Management: The High School Science Club Method Reveals Insights
September 3, 2020
An online publication called The Daily Beast published “Facebook’s Internal Black Lives Matter Debate Got So Bad Zuckerberg Had to Step In.” How accurate is the write up? DarkCyber does not know. It is not clear what the point of the “real news” story is.
The write up seems to suggest that there is dissention within Facebook over what employees can on the Facebook internal communication system. The write up makes clear that Mr. Zuckerberg, the Caesar of social media, involved himself in the online dust up. Plus the article describes actions that are just peculiar; for example, this quote:
“[L]et me be absolutely clear about our stance as a company: systemic racism is real. It disadvantages and endangers people of color in America and around the world,” Zuckerberg posted. Zuckerberg added that while it was “valuable for employees to be able to disagree with the company and each other,” he encouraged Facebook staffers to do so “respectfully, with empathy and understanding towards each other.”
What’s the dividing point between an opinion and a statement which is out of bounds? Does Mark Zuckerberg referee these in bounds and out of bounds events?
Several observations:
- Facebook may be able to deal with pesky regulators in Europe and remind the government of Australia that the company has its own views of news, but managing a large company is a different category of problem. Dissention within an organization may not be a positive when regulators are keeping their eyes peeled for witnesses
- Employees within Facebook are manifesting behaviors associated with views and reactions to those views on the Facebook system itself; Facebook is a microcosm of the corrosive effect of instant, unchecked messaging. Will these messages be constrained by humans or smart software or both?
- Mr. Zuckerberg himself is offering a path forward that seems to suggest that a certain homogeneity of thought amongst employees is desirable; that is, disagree within boundaries. But what are the boundaries? Is it possible to define what crosses a shades of gray line ?
Net net: The high school science club management method which has gained favor among a number of Silicon Valley-centric companies is being pushed and pulled in interesting ways. What happens if the fabric of governance is torn and emergency fixes are necessary? Expulsion, loss of market momentum, de facto control of discourse, or insider threats in the form of sabotage, leaks, and unionization? That puts a different spin on social, does it not?
Stephen E Arnold, September 3, 2020
Facebook: Trouble Within?
September 2, 2020
How did my Latin teacher explain this allegedly accurate management method? As I recall, a member of the Roman army who dropped the ball would be identified. Then his “unit” would be gathered. According to Mr. Buschman, every tenth person was killed. The point of the anecdote was to teach the “meaning” of decimate; that is, every tenth or in 1958 lingo, destroy. Was Mr. Buschman on the beam? I have no idea, nor do I care. My recollection of decimation emerged as I read “Facebook Employees Are Outraged At Mark Zuckerberg’s Explanations Of How It Handled The Kenosha Violence.” The Silicon Valley “real” news outfit reported this allegedly accurate quote:
“At what point do we take responsibility for enabling hate filled bile to spread across our services?” wrote one employee. “[A]nti Semitism, conspiracy, and white supremacy reeks across our services.”
To quell what seems to be some dissention in the ranks, is it time to revisit Rome’s method of focusing a cohort’s attention?
A modern day Caesar might find inspiration in the past. The present and immediate future may not be doing the job.
Stephen E Arnold, September 2, 2020
Google: High School Science Club Management Method Disclosed
August 28, 2020
Navigate to “Unredacted Suit Shows Google’s Own Engineers Confused by Privacy Settings.” I remember my high school science club in 1958. Quite a group of bright, entitled, arrogant, and clueless individuals. Of course, I was a member, and I had zero idea why the seniors wanted to set off stink bombs in the chemistry lab, splice into the loud speaker system to play rock and roll at 7:45 am, and rig the auditorium microphones to generate chuckle inducing feedback. Ho, ho, ho.
If the information in the referenced article is accurate, a similar approach is operative at the Google. I suppose one could view the statements about confusing interfaces, words that mean one thing to a normal human and something else to a wizard, and the panic which sets in when the Science Club is caught in a dark pattern.
I’m not amused. The article documents how running a company which controls information behaves… just like a high school science club. Ho ho ho. Isn’t this amusing? Actually. No. The Twitter clown car may be pulling into the drive in front of the Google dinosaur skeleton right now.
Stephen E Arnold, August 28, 2020
Apple Learns: There Can Be Knock Ons from Zoomified Congressional Hearings
August 21, 2020
What happens when high school science club “on the fly”, “we can do what we want” decision making is revealed in Zoomified Congressional hearings? “News Publishers Join Epic Games in Asking Apple for Lower App Store Fees” is an example of the strong reaction to special deals. Now Apple’s partners want the same “deal” extended to the Bezos bulldozer. Here’s the key statement from an online news service:
publishers including the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNET parent company ViacomCBS, want that 30% fee dropped to 15%.
Thus, it seems Apple and Amazon worked out a deal different from the one imposed on lesser Apple partners.
Digital Content Next offers this observation in a letter to Apple’s management:
Sometime in 2017, Apple and Amazon, two giant platform companies, struck a deal where Amazon Prime Video would be available on Apple TV and Apple products would be available on Amazon. As part of the terms of that deal, Apple would reduce its fee for consumers who subscribed to Prime Video from 30% to 15%. For existing Prime Video subscribers, Apple agreed to completely waive its normal 15% fee. The cherry on top for Amazon was that they could use other payment systems outside of Apple.
Apple now has to fancy dance its way around what looks like a problem.
Apple wants to do what it wants. Don’t like the changes in our operating systems? Well, that’s Apple doing its thing. Don’t like the fees? Well, that’s the way we operate. Take it or leave it. Don’t like the deal we worked out with Amazon? Well, too bad.
Despite the love many have for the Apple ecosystem, the time has arrived for those with different views to grouse out loud.
So what? This looks like another example of situational decision making. A deal with the Bezos bulldozer may grind slowly around and start rolling back to the digital orchard.
To sum up: High school science club are now playing Fortnite in real life or IRL. Battle royale? Yep. Those Zoomified hearings make it clear that the democratic processes generate useful information and cause an action-reaction demonstration. The game, however, is not a digital fantasy.
Stephen E Arnold, August 21, 2020
The Flywheel Thing
August 21, 2020
About a year ago, a marketing person asked me, “Why don’t you talk about the Amazon flywheel?” I replied, “Flywheel. What flywheel?” Sure, I knew about the Bezos buzzword, but that does not mean I have to use it when I write about the world’s largest online bookstore. I prefer jazzier words and phrases; for example, cat’s pajamas, wizards, and high school science club manager, etc.
“Question Everything or the Strange Loop Principle” seems to come down on my side of word choice. The essay asserts:
First, let’s see how Collins himself describes what he calls the Flywheel Concept. For that, I’m going to borrow from Collins’ own Turning the Flywheel: a Monograph to Accompany Good to Great. But first, we have to discuss Collins’ word choice and the mechanics of an actual flywheel. He picks “Flywheel” for a reason: he believes flywheels accurately describe the sort of dynamics he identifies in some very successful companies that go from being average – “good” – to being leaders – “great” –.
Now the flywheel in business:
So whatever Collins wants us to understand about great businesses, he thinks a flywheel is a good shortcut to get there.
The there is growth, maybe exponential growth. One problem:
Therefore, flywheels are great at describing something that holds a lot of momentum, but not something that behaves exponentially, or that self-reinforces itself.
Now Amazon:
I think Amazon is a great example of something I can’t quite point at but that seems to reinforce itself (I have no evidence that it’s exponential in any way. Just that it seems to go on and on forever without the need for more energy). As it sells more, it’s able to sell cheaper, which leads it to sell more, which leads it to be able to sell cheaper, and on and on. Businesses that find such self-reinforcing “mechanics” have something strong going for them.
The bottom line:
Here’s this guy who’s arguably the new Peter Drucker, revered by entrepreneurs, world leaders and executives alike, not only basing a huge part of his knowledge production on a shaky concept that’s named and explained with a shaky mix of words and examples applying it all in a very shaky way to his own life.
Yep, imagine that. Management thinking which is shaky. Nope, no flywheels for me.
Stephen E Arnold, August 20, 2020
A Former Science Club Member Critiques Google, THE Science Club
August 17, 2020
I truly enjoy posts from former insiders at giant technology monopolies. Each of them hires from the other. The meta-revolving door spin is fascinating to watch. Some get tossed out of the mechanism because of some career negative factor: Family, health, mental orientation, or some other exogenous, non-technical event. Others go through a Scientological reformation and realize that the world of the high-technology nation-states is a weird place: Language, food customs, expectations of non-conformist “norm” behavior, and other cultural suckerfish. What gives me a chuckle are revelations like Tim Bray’s or Steve Yegge’s “Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You.” In my opinion, Mr. Yegge’s thoughtful, calm, and “in the moment” essay about the GOOG is more intriguing than the Financial Times’ story that reports Google has predicted the end of the world as we know it in Australia. What? Australia? Yep, for those receiving this warning from the Oracle at Mountain View their life amidst the kangaroos will mean no “free search” and — gasp! — curtains for “a dramatically worse” YouTube. Search can’t get much worse, so the YouTube threat means angry kids. Yikes! YouTube. Will Australia, a mere country, at the wrong end of a Google phaser strike?
Back to Mr. Yegge: In his essay, the phrase “deprecation treadmill” appears. This is the key insight. Googlers have to have something to do it seems. The bright science club members interact via an acceptable online service and make decisions informed by data. As Mr. Yegge points out, the data fueling insights may not be comprehensive or processed by some master intelligence. He notes that a Bigtable storage technology had been running for many years before any smart science club member or smart Google software noticed. (So much for attention to detail.)
Mr. Yegge points out that
One is that running a Bigtable was so inconsequential to Google’s scale that it took 2 years before anyone even noticed it, and even then, only because the version was old. As a point of comparison, I considered using Google Cloud Bigtable for my online game, but it cost (at the time) an estimated $16,000/year for an empty Bigtable on GCP. I’m not saying they’re gouging you, but in my own personal opinion, that feels like a lot of money for an empty [censored] database.
This paragraph underscores the lack of internal controls which operate in real time, although every two years could be considered near real time if one worked in a data center at Dialog Information Services in the mid 1980s. Today? Two years means a number of TikToks can come and go along with IPOs, unicorns, and Congressional hearings live streamed.
Mr. Yegge also uses a phrase I find delicious: “Deprecation treadmill.” The Google science club members use data (some old, some new, and some selected to support a lateral arabesque to a hotter team) to make changes. Examples range from the Dodgeball wackiness to change in cloud APIs which Mr. Yegge mentions in his essay. He notes:
Google engineers pride themselves on their software engineering discipline, and that’s actually what gets them into trouble. Pride is a trap for the unwary, and it has ensnared many a Google team into thinking that their decisions are always right, and that correctness (by some vague fuzzy definition) is more important than customer focus.
I wish to point out that Mr. Yegge is overlooking the key tenet of high school science club management methods: The science club is ALWAYS right. Since Mr. Yegge no longer works at the Google, Mr. Yegge is WRONG. Anyone who is not a right-now Googler is WRONG. A failure to understand the core of this mindset cannot work at the Google. Therefore, that individual is mentally unable to understand that Mother Google’s right-now brood is RIGHT. Australia and the European Union, for example, do not understand the logic of the Google. And they are obviously WRONG.
How simple this is.
Mr. Yegge points out how some activities are supposed to be carrier out in the “real world” as opposed to the cultural norms of the techno-monopolies. He writes:
Successful long-lived open systems owe their success to building decades-long micro-communities around extensions/plugins, also known as a marketplace.
This is indeed amusing. Google delivers advertising, and that is a game within a casino hotel. I think the online advertising game run by the Google blends the best of a 1950s Las Vegas outfit on the Strip and the mythical Hotel California of the Eagles’ song. Compare my metaphor with Mr. Yegge’s. Which is more accurate?
Google’s pride in their software engineering hygiene is what gets them into trouble here. They don’t like it when there are lots of different ways to do the same thing, with older, less-desirable ways sitting alongside newer fancier ways. It increases the learning curve for newcomers to the system, it increases the burden of supporting the legacy APIs, it slows down new feature velocity, and the worst sin of all: it’s ugly. Google is like Lady Ascot in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland:
Lady Ascot: Alice, do you know what I fear most?
Alice Kingsley: The decline of the aristocracy?
Lady Ascot: Ugly grandchildren.
Mr. Yegge’s point is a brilliant one: The Google wants its customers to operate like “here and now” Googlers. But customers do not understand and they are WRONG.
The disconnect between the Google and mere customers is nailed in this statement by Mr. Yegge:
But after all these years, Google Cloud is still #3
Yes, Google does make decisions based on data. Those decisions are RIGHT. If this seems like a paradox, it is obvious that the customer is once again proving that he or she is not capable of working for Google. Achieving third prize in the cloud race is RIGHT, at least to some real Googlers. For Mr. Yegge, the crummy third place ranking is evidence of the mismatch between the techno-monopoly and cloud users and, I might add, Australia and the EU.
Mr. Yegge points out what may be a hint of the tension between the Google science club and its “wanna be” members. He writes about a Percona-centric, ready-to-use solution. He calmly points out:
Go ahead, I dare you. Follow the link and click the button. Choose “yes” to get all the default parameters and deploy the cluster to your Google Cloud project. Haha, joke’s on you; it doesn’t work. None of that [censored] works. It’s never tested, starts bit-rotting the minute they roll it out, and it wouldn’t surprise me if over half the click-to-deploy “solutions” (now we understand the air quotes) don’t work at all. It’s a completely embarrassing dark alley that you don’t want to wander down. But Google is straight-up encouraging you to use it. They want you to buy it. It’s transactional for them. They don’t want to support anything.
DarkCyber looks forward to Mr. Yegge’s next essay about the Google. Perhaps he will tackle the logic of reporting an offensive advertisement to the online monopoly. That process helps one understand a non-deprecation method in use at the A Number One science club. The management method is breathtaking.
As Eugène Ionesco noted:
“Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and estranged perspective. Truth is in our dreams, in the imagination.”
The “our” is Google’s reality. If you are not a “here and now” Googler, you cannot understand.
Stephen E Arnold, August 17, 2020
Thinking about Risk: No Clip On Bow Tie
August 15, 2020
I read “Risk Bow Tie Method.” I worked through the write up, which reminded me of a reading in one of those professor-assembled Kinko’s books students HAD to purchase. The focus is a management procedure for thinking about risk. Today, there are some interesting topics which MBA study groups can consider on a thrilling Zoom call. As I examined the increasingly detailed diagrams, the procedure seemed familiar. I ratted through my files and, yes, I had a paper (maybe I snagged it at a non-Zoom conference in England in the 1990s) called “Lessons Learned from Real World Application of Bow Tie Method.” There’s version of this document available at this link.
The idea is that something happens like Covid, serial financial crashes, social unrest, private enterprise controlling information flows, etc. None of these is too serious. The idea is to make a diagram that looks like this one from the 1990s Risktec person’s write up:
If you want to be a consultant, you need a diagram without explanations. The idea is to bring discipline to a group of people who would rather check out TikTok videos, browse Facebook, or fiddle with their Robinhood account. But a job is a job, whether in person or on a Zoom call.
The advisor systematically works through the “logic” of figuring out the issues related to the minor risk an organization faces; for example, an enterprise search vendor failing to meet its financial goal for the quarter as cash burns and employees “work” from home. Yep, fill in that logical diagram.
Exercises like this are a gold mine to a consulting firm. Blue chip outfits focus on these “big picture” methods. Mid tier consulting firms and sol practitioners with a Wix Web site and Instaprint plastic stick on sign for their automobile may have trouble landing enough work to pay for working through the Bow Tie Method.
So blue chip consulting firms embrace these types of fill-in-the-blank exercises. The consultant gets to “know” the participants and can set the stage for recruiting an insider to function as a cheerleader absent pom poms. The “report” allows the consulting team to identify which options are better for the company with the data presented created by the … wait for it … the employees who participated in the Bow Tie Method process. To be fair, the consulting team has to create a PowerPoint or similar presentation. Some consulting firms just write an “Executive Memo” and move to selling follow on work.
I must admit I thought of the popular song by Stevie Wonder with these lyrics. Note: I modified the last line to match my reaction to the attempted rejuvenation of the Bow Tie Method:
His father works some days for fourteen hours
And you can bet he barely makes a dollar
His mother goes to scrub the floor for many
And you’d best believe she hardly gets a penny
Living just enough, just enough for the consulting.
Several observations:
- Is the Bow Tie Method the correct one for our interesting times? Plug in Covid, fill in the boxes, discuss options, and what do you end up with?
- Is the Bow Tie Method and other thought frameworks matched to today’s management climate? Twitter, Facebook Google, Amazon, and other FAANG outfits create risks, and I am not convinced that objective consideration of the risks to these organizations are top of mind for the top managers at this time. It seems as if the consulting frameworks have to be designed for thumbtypers and consumers of Instagram and Snap apps, not old-school frameworks from who knows where.
- The time and cost to work through a full Bow Tie Methods may increase risk for the company. Here’s how that works. The leadership of a company or country changes direction. Mixer from Microsoft. Hey, kill that dog. A Google API? No reason to provide that any more. A tweet from the White House changes the social media influencer landscape. As these here-and-now events blaze on digital devices, the time for the Bow Tie and the time for dealing with here-and-now is out of joint.
Net net: Traditional consulting methods, regardless of the fancy graphics and with-it explanations seem to be like exhibits in the British Museum. Who knew the Elgin marbles were sitting in a dark room?
Stephen E Arnold, August 15, 2020
Twitter: Another Almost Adult Moment
August 7, 2020
Indexing is useful. Twitter seems to be recognizing this fact. “Twitter to Label State-Controlled News Accounts” reports:
The company will also label the accounts of government-linked media, as well as “key government officials” from China, France, Russia, the UK and US. Russia’s RT and China’s Xinhua News will both be affected by the change. Twitter said it was acting to provide people with more context about what they see on the social network.
Long overdue, the idea of an explicit index term may allow some tweeters to get some help when trying to figure out where certain stories originate.
Twitter, a particularly corrosive social media system, has avoided adult actions. The firm’s security was characterized in a recent DarkCyber video as a clown car operation. No words were needed. The video showed a clown car.
Several questions from the DarkCyber team:
- When will Twitter verify user identities, thus eliminating sock puppet accounts? Developers of freeware manage this type of registration and verification process, not perfectly but certainly better than some other organizations’.
- When will Twitter recognize that a tiny percentage of its tweeters account for the majority of the messages and implement a Twitch-like system to generate revenue from these individuals? Pay-per-use can be implemented in many ways, so can begging for dollars. Either way, Twitter gets an identification point which may have other functions.
- When will Twitter innovate? The service is valuable because a user or sock puppet can automate content regardless of its accuracy. Twitter has been the same for a number of Internet years. Dogs do age.
Is Twitter, for whatever reason, stuck in the management mentality of a high school science club which attracts good students, just not the whiz kids who are starting companies and working for Google type outfits from their parents’ living room?
Stephen E Arnold, August 7, 2020
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