Last week news broke that Microsoft bought LinkedIn for $26.1 billion:

For Microsoft, a big part of the deal is about being at the center of the business worker’s world.

While it has ceded the personal social graph to Facebook and others, it sees being at the center of the worker’s world as too important to miss. Microsoft had hoped its SharePoint would be the social hub for business, but has seen a lot of momentum in that area shift to Slack. Microsoft also bought Yammer, an enterprise social collaboration company, for $1.2 billion in 2012, but that acquisition has essentially gone nowhere.

LinkedIn’s know-how is also important for Cortana and its broader artificial intelligence aspirations. With this purchase, Microsoft is basically buying the company org chart for the whole world, which on its face seems a pretty good layer of data to build into any business-focused cloud product, from email to enhancing a customer relationship software to recruiting new employees.

“Microsoft wanted to get into human resources without having to get into payrolls,” said Ray Wang, an analyst with Constellation Research.

As I’ve mentioned many times on this site, Microsoft does not understand—nor do I think they will ever understand—consumers, so it’s good to see them refocusing on the business side of software and computing.

L2 Founder Scott Galloway keenly points out in this YouTube video “there’s only one B2B game in town and that’s LinkedIn.” Great point. So why don’t we have any other competitors in B2B social media space? Seems a great area to disrupt.

A software giant buying a B2B social network is like a cable company buying content producers. It just doesn’t sit right with me.

It’s be interesting to see how long I keep my LinkedIn account open before Microsoft does something to make me want to close it.

I came across a new Microsoft ad campaign aimed at developers. The main copy is “Any Developer. Any App. Any Platform.”

Here’s their campaign homepage:

What I don’t like about this campaign is it’s misleading. When you tell a developer they can build an app for “any platform”, the assumption is they can build for iOS, Android, or Windows Phone. If you scroll down the page you’ll see they’re referring to the various Microsoft platforms ‘any’ developer can build for.

The problem is, there’s no point developing an app for Windows. In 2015, Windows Phone had a minuscule marketshare of 2.5%. This year they dropped to 0.7%. Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android have left no room for Windows Phone as a third option.

Some might look at this campaign as Microsoft changing with the times, adapting to the world of mobile computing. I don’t see this. I see a company trying anything, any app, any platform, anything at all as they struggle to stay relevant.

Side note: I find Microsoft’s page interesting is in light of Apple’s new version of macOS ‘Sierra‘, they announced this past week at WWDC 2016:

Not cool.

That’s the smell of money being printed.

Bryan says San Andreas was a gloriously stupid movie.

Now that I think about it, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Dwayne Johnson through from start to finish.

I need to watch the Keynote from this morning.

The mass killing in Orlando this weekend fits a grim pattern: Every lethal terrorist attack in the United States in the past decade and a half has been carried out by American citizens or legal permanent residents, operating either as lone wolves or in pairs, who have no formal connections or training from terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda or ISIS.

Because 9/11 was carried out by 19 Arab foreign-born terrorists, many Americans may think that terrorist attacks in the United States are carried out by foreigners, rather than by U.S. citizens.

But Omar Mateen, who on Sunday carried out the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11, is an American citizen who was born in New York to parents who immigrated to the United States from Afghanistan.

—Peter Bergen, CNN

Today my Instagram account hit 500 followers. Thank you to everyone!

If you dig cars, you should follow me.

Foxconn replaces ‘60,000 factory workers with robots’:

One factory has “reduced employee strength from 110,000 to 50,000 thanks to the introduction of robots”, a government official told the South China Morning Post.

Xu Yulian, head of publicity for the Kunshan region, added: “More companies are likely to follow suit.” China is investing heavily in a robot workforce.

In a statement to the BBC, Foxconn Technology Group confirmed that it was automating “many of the manufacturing tasks associated with our operations” but denied that it meant long-term job losses.

Donald Trump likes to talk about how China is kicking our ass and taking our jobs. Hardly. Robots are taking our jobs and those jobs are never coming back.

How are people going to pay for iPhones without jobs?

We’re quickly approaching the point where we’re going to need to pay people to be unemployed.

Marco Arment worries that Apple isn’t skating to where the puck is going to be:

Today, Amazon, Facebook, and Google are placing large bets on advanced AI, ubiquitous assistants, and voice interfaces, hoping that these will become the next thing that our devices are for.

If they’re right — and that’s a big “if” — I’m worried for Apple.

Today, Apple’s being led properly day-to-day and doing very well overall. But if the landscape shifts to prioritize those big-data AI services, Apple will find itself in a similar position as BlackBerry did almost a decade ago: what they’re able to do, despite being very good at it, won’t be enough anymore, and they won’t be able to catch up.

It’s interesting that Google riffed off of Amazon’s Echo with their Google Home, rather than what they’ve usually done in the past: riff off of something Apple has made.

Jacob Kastrenakes at the Verge on Lenovo’s new ad:

Lenovo put out an ad this afternoon teasing the unveiling of Motorola’s next… something… that’s all about reliving the Razr’s incredible success in the mid-2000s. The phone really was everywhere. And as a former high school student who owned a Razr (which broke after like a year, by the way) and maybe had long hair, I gotta tell you, this ad is speaking to me in a very embarrassing way.

…

And after watching this, I have to say: Lenovo, please just make your next phone a Razr. Not a Razr smartphone. Just bring back the classic.

Let’s get something straight. The hardware design of the Razr might be a classic, but the software was shit. This applies not just to the Razr but every other mobile phone from 2005.

Mobile phones were horrible and frustrating to use.

The only exception to this could be the early smartphones (pre-iPhone) like the Palm Treo I relied on before I got my iPhone in 2008.

Vlad Savov at The Verge asks how many Apple engineers does it take to fix iTunes?:

In the ranking of unpleasant life experiences, using Apple’s iTunes lies somewhere between filing your taxes and having your wisdom teeth pulled out. It’s not good even at the best of times, but two weeks ago it was downright harmful to one James Pinkstone of Atlanta, who found 122GB of his own musical creations had been deleted by Apple’s renegade software. The response from Cupertino has been swift and decisive, with two engineers being sent out this weekend to diagnose the cause of Pinkstone’s agony and try to fix it.

Excellent fucking question!

The problem with iTunes is that iTunes does waaaaaay too many things now. It manages not just your tunes, but your movies, podcasts, apps, and, if you like, your iPhone/iPad syncing (I rarely use iTunes to sync my iPhone).

Originally, iTunes handled your music, and then syncing your music to your iPod. It’s actually doing the same thing now, only with many more different media types for multiple devices.

Something clearly has to change, whether it’s rebuilding iTunes from the ground up, like they did when they scrapped iPhoto for the new Photos app or breaking iTunes up into discreet applications for different tasks/media types.

Yoga Fire

A group of ex-Google engineers have just launched Otto, an autonomous trucking startup:

Otto’s first vehicle is twice as long and six times as heavy as Google’s cute prototype car, but has exactly the same number of drivers: zero.

Founded by four ex-Google engineers — including Anthony Levandowski, the man who built Google’s very first self-driving car — Otto is applying Google’s all-or-nothing approach to commercial big rigs: ditch human drivers, avoid thousands of road deaths, help the environment, and if all goes well, make a ton of money along the way.

I can tell you who won’t be getting ‘a ton of money’—the drivers that used to drive those big rigs.

Are technology companies putting enough thought into ramifications of phasing out entire sections of the workforce?

[Side thought: I wonder if they got the name of their startup from the idealized thermodynamic cycle that describes the functioning of a typical spark ignition piston engine]

This week Mike and Bryan talk politics. What?! They had to. The elephant in the room was too big. Next episode they’ll be back to their regular scheduled bitching about other topics.

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