On Vivek Wadhwa’s Factor Daily piece titled “Why Apple is destined to fail in India”

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Earlier today, Factor Daily published this piece titled ‘Why Apple is destined to fail in India‘ written by Vivek Wadhwa. A similarly-worded article from the author also appeared on The Washington Post and VentureBeat a day earlier. I subscribed to Factor Daily via RSS a while ago, primarily for the people behind the site who have delivered some great content in the past. I, however, was definitely not ready for this hilariously bullshit stream of content heading my way.

Now, usually when I come across a title as bold as this one about Apple, and they’re dime a dozen these days, I usually either skip it completely or read it and then skip reacting to it. But this piece by Vivek Wadhwa has such ingenious crap filled inside, I couldn’t help fire up Ulysses. Vivek’s piece essentially says that Apple is destined to fail in India because the company fails to understand the Indian market and that “it is repeating the mistakes it made in China”. However, a lot of points that Vivek raises are just not true, plain wrong, or simply laughable.

[With inputs and corrections from Rohan “RN” Naravane, who was just as baffled upon reading the piece.]

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March 17, 2017 ✚ Permalink

Atlassian Buys Trello for $425 Million

Atlassian — the Sydney-based giant that owns products like JIRA, Confluence, HipChat, Bitbucket, SourceTree, etc. has today announced that it will be acquiring Trello — the beloved project management app. The deal is worth $425 Million according to Business Insider.

Mike Cannon-Brookes, Co-Founder and CEO of Atlassian, writes:

Trello’s pioneering use of an intuitive visual system has been embraced by all kinds of teams to do everything from managing marketing campaigns to tracking action items from team meetings. Organizations in nearly every country and as varied as the Red Cross and Google have adopted Trello to get work done.

We’re thrilled to welcome the talented Trello team to Atlassian and look forward to working with them to change the way teams work together. Deep investments in R&D have long been a cornerstone of Atlassian’s business and we will continue that tradition with Trello.

My immediate concern upon reading this was how would Trello change under the Atlassian culture. Mike clarifies:

If you currently use Trello as either a free or paid user, you can rest assured that we will continue to offer Trello as a standalone service. We’ll be working with their product team to help them accelerate development efforts.

Over on the Trello blog, Michael Pryor, the CEO of Trello writes:

We’re excited about partnering with Atlassian because we both share a philosophy of empowering teams everywhere to work in their own style. We envision a world where hundreds of millions of people collaborate in teams however they like, with their imaginations being the only constraint for what they can accomplish. As part of Atlassian, Trello will be able to leverage investments in R&D that will enhance the product in meaningful ways. Our team will be able to focus on improving the core experience of Trello for all users. We are certain that Atlassian understands the unique and novel reasons why Trello is so successful and well-loved.

Atlassian & Trello do sound like a great fit, but I’m still concerned.

January 9, 2017 ✚ Permalink

Facebook Alters News Feed Algorithm Against Clickbait Headlines

Alex Peysakhovich, Research Scientist and Kristin Hendrix, User Experience Researcher, writing on the Facebook Newsroom blog:

Our goal with News Feed is to show people the stories most relevant to them — ranking stories so that what’s most important to each person shows up highest in their News Feeds. When we rank and make improvements to News Feed, we rely on a set of core values.

We’ve heard from people that they specifically want to see fewer stories with clickbait headlines or link titles. These are headlines that intentionally leave out crucial information, or mislead people, forcing people to click to find out the answer. For example: “When She Looked Under Her Couch Cushions And Saw THIS… I Was SHOCKED!”; “He Put Garlic In His Shoes Before Going To Bed And What Happens Next Is Hard To Believe”; or “The Dog Barked At The Deliveryman And His Reaction Was Priceless.”

With this update, people will see fewer clickbait stories and more of the stories they want to see higher up in their feeds.

90% of my Facebook Newsfeed over the last 6 months has been filled with posts with clickbait headlines shared by friends, or videos stolen from Youtube with added meme-like text on the top and bottom.

While I’m glad Facebook is going against clickbait headlines, it’s the latter that needs far more attention.

August 5, 2016 ✚ Permalink