Just under a month ago, Samsung announced that it was recalling/replacing all Galaxy Note 7 phablets shipped prior to early September due to exploding batteries. Roughly two weeks later, news broke that Yahoo more than likely allowed US government agencies full access to the entire breadth of all email accounts hosted by Yahoo, while the fading tech giant was still reeling from a reported data breach and the pending sale to Verizon. Unfortunately both companies are back in the news this week and not for good reason. Samsung’s replacement Note 7s with the less explodey battery, has – you guessed it – started exploding again, even putting a customer in the hospital. This incident and at least 2 other reports of flaming phones has prompted Samsung to halt production on the Note 7, and all major US carriers will no longer sell the device. Yahoo’s troubles continue as well: the now infamous email service has suspiciously dropped the forwarding function from its service, making it more difficult for people to move to another provider. When you combine this mysterious change with the lawsuit against Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Meyer, Yahoo is looking less like a technology leader and more like a troubled company struggling to survive.
What this means for you:
Companies of this size typically have resources enough to pick themselves up and shake off these types of events. Heck, breaches are so commonplace now that most of the time consumers just shrug and carry on. Despite various widespread problems with iPhones (Antenna-gate, Bend-gate, Touch Rot) Apple still manages to sell lots of units every year. While Samsung will undoubtedly take a huge reputation hit in the mobile market, the Korean megacorp itself is so broad that it’s hard to image the Note 7 sinking the entire company. If anything the repeat failure just highlights the complex manufacturing chain that goes into producing our smartphones and will perhaps push Samsung and its competitors to look for safer, better battery solutions.
Yahoo is looking a lot less resilient than Samsung: it doesn’t have the broad product base to fall back on, and one might argue that its most valuable asset – the millions of people who still use Yahoo Mail – is in jeopardy at a time when the company can least afford it. Whether the disappearance of mail forwarding was ill-timed or carefully calculated, the long-term optics look worse than a smoking phablet. Last week’s news of Yahoo’s compromising relationship with US intelligence agencies should have been enough to encourage you to retire your Yahoo account, and their current strategy is not the Hail-Mary play they need to stay in the game.
In what is being the called the largest migration to cloud services so far, the Department of Veteran Affairs has just inked a deal with Microsoft and HP Enterprise Services to move its 600k users to Microsoft’s cloudbased office productivity suite Office 365. The move is seen by many as further evidence of a significant shift in corporate IT strategy away from costly infrastructure investments to cloud services for every aspect of technology. Over the past 10 years, enterprise IT departments have been gradually, but inexorably moving application platforms out of their own datacenters to providers like Oracle and SAP, but hesitated when it came to the garden-variety desktop applications that knowledge workers use daily. That reluctance may be disintegrating as services from Google and Microsoft make it hard to dismiss the tremendous efficiencies and savings that can be realized by getting rid of the real estate and overhead needed to maintain desktop-based applications.
What this means for you:
Many of you work in the cloud daily without giving it a thought. Perhaps you never thought of Gmail or Hotmail or Yahoo Mail as a productivity app, but what about Salesforce, or LinkedIn, or even Facebook? Both Google and Microsoft’s cloud-based office apps are full-featured and powerful enough for everyday business tasks, and the very nature of their delivery makes deployment, security and maintenance much simpler that software installed on desktops. It’s this same strength that also proves to be a weakness, as if you lose your internet connection, you also lose your ability to work. Well that’s easy to solve, I can hear you say. Why not just move to another location where the internet is working? What if it’s the cloud itself that is unavailable? Once again, the cardinal rule compartmentalization comes into play – never base the entirety of your critical business operations in the hands of a single, monolithic platform, even if that platform is largely reliable. And this goes doubly so for a platform around whose neck you can’t comfortably get your hands, as is the case with a provider like Microsoft or Google.