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Wednesday, December 2, 2020

December 2, 2020

Why your workplace software stinks

Scott Gelber

By Shira Ovide

I’m going to make an educated guess that you hate at least some of the technology you use for work.

Let me explain why, and how this big-ticket merger of two companies you may never have heard of relates to your fury. The bottom line: The most important quality of technology for businesses is whether a boss can be convinced to buy it, not whether you like it. It’s dreary but true.

Let me take you back to when technology was mostly something that companies used, not the rest of us. Then, technologies lived or died based on whether some dude in a suit and tie could be convinced that it was worth buying for his company.

An automaker bought software to track all the parts for its cars. An insurance company bought software to churn out bills to customers. Once email came along, your employer might have bought accounts for everyone. Probably no one asked the people using this technology whether it was useful and good. It mostly mattered whether the employer thought it was worthwhile.

That has changed — but only kind of.

One of the Big Ideas of technology in the last decade — a Big Idea that is only partly true — is that workers now have influence over the technology we use.

Software coders can use something called Airtable to manage a project without telling their bosses. A financial adviser might choose to trade documents over DocuSign with clients. A few colleagues could decide to use Zoom Video for team meetings or Slack to communicate by instant messages, and maybe later convince their employer to pay for versions with more features.

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When the workers rather than the bosses decide on the technology, it matters whether the technology is nice to use. So those newer workplace technologies mostly don’t stink, or they stink less than older stuff.

But. This ideal of the empowered worker is not exactly true. I’m guessing that your bosses didn’t ask if you like the corporate expense or billing software you might use. Restaurant cooks probably don’t have a say in the order input systems they use, and health care workers don’t usually pick the software that clocks their hours or maintains patient records.

Technology may have changed but one thing that has held over from the old days is that it still really matters whether a boss in a suit and tie believes the technology is useful or easy to buy. (He is also probably still a dude.)

That is one big reason Salesforce, a company that sells a zillion kinds of software mostly bought by bosses, has agreed to pay $27.7 billion to buy Slack, one of the young companies predicated on the half-truth of the empowered worker. Giants like Salesforce can more easily sell software to the suit-and-tie types, especially to the largest companies that spend the most on technology.

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In a way, this is a bummer. Slack, DocuSign, Airtable and other young companies can make nice software that you like, but someone at a company generally still pays for it. And it’s easier for Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Workday or other corporate software supermarkets to sell employers on a collection of technologies that maybe mesh well together or are cheaper to buy in a bundle.

Slack sold out in part because of the perception that it couldn’t withstand Microsoft, which offered similar workplace software included in a grab bag of technologies that many corporations already buy. (My colleague David Streitfeld wrote about Salesforce going head-to-head with Microsoft.)

Supermarkets like Microsoft and Salesforce can and sometimes do make nice software, but employers’ priorities often conflict with making technology that is easy to use.

A lot has changed about the technologies we encounter at work. But the person writing the checks is still the most important customer, and that probably means you’ll hate the software you use at work.

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Before we go …

A broom handle is not a gun: My colleague Davey Alba wrote in February about a school district in New York that became one of the nation’s first to adopt facial recognition technology. The aim was to spot unwanted visitors, and help prevent mass shootings and stop sexual predators. In a follow-up, Vice News wrote that the company behind the facial recognition software wasn’t upfront about the technology misidentifying Black students. At times, it also made serious errors, including identifying broom handles as guns.
The demanding, mobile-tracked lives of app workers: NPR followed couriers in Beijing working 12-hour days to deliver packages for China’s e-commerce delivery services. Their every movement is tracked by app and they live in fear of a mistake or bad customer review that would cut their pay. My colleague Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura also wrote about the challenges of workers for restaurant delivery apps in New York.
A warning for holiday shoppers: The Wall Street Journal reported that UPS ordered delivery couriers not to pick up some recent online shopping orders from a handful of big U.S. retailers like Macy’s, suggesting that delivery companies are having a tough time managing our zeal for online holiday shopping. I wrote a newsletter in October about these feared delays, dubbed “shipaggedon,” and how shoppers might navigate them.

Hugs to this

May I recommend the burnt sienna crayon for the pancreas? A hospital in New York made an anatomy coloring and activity book for kids.

We want to hear from you. Tell us what you think of this newsletter and what else you’d like us to explore. You can reach us at ontech@nytimes.com.

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Tuesday, December 1, 2020

Only hours left to join #Giving Tuesday

Hello Friend,

I hope you had a productive, joy-filled day. Before you wrap it up, I want to give you a little reminder that #GivingTuesday is almost over and that we still need help to reach our $200,000 goal.

Double your gift to strengthen families!

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Your generous gift to Focus on the Family as part of #GivingTuesday will share the hope of Jesus Christ in practical ways with families in crisis.

After the challenging year we’ve all been through, families will need our help more than ever in 2021. Your gift today will ensure that we can continue to GIVE FAMILIES HOPE through Bible-based teaching and resources.

If you’ve already given, thank you! I’m so grateful for friends like you who stepped up to GIVE FAMILIES HOPE. But if you haven’t yet participated in #GivingTuesday, please use this opportunity to bless a struggling family.

And through our year-end $6.5 million matching opportunity, your gift today will be DOUBLED to:

save marriages on the brink of divorce,
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Please help us meet our $200,000 goal by the end of the day! Together, we can GIVE FAMILIES HOPE!

If you want to GIVE FAMILIES HOPE this #GivingTuesday through Focus on the Family, click here.

Thank you,

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Focus on the Family President

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On Tech: Why WhatsApp matters

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December 1, 2020

Why WhatsApp matters

Sean Dong

By Shira Ovide

WhatsApp is being remodeled in front of our eyes. Watch what happens because even if you don’t use the messaging app, the changes could reshape the direction of the internet.

Perhaps never before has an online property been so popular and made such little money. More than two billion people worldwide use WhatsApp regularly to text or make phone calls, but it scarcely generates any money for Facebook, which has owned WhatsApp since 2014.

That’s because WhatsApp is mostly a personal communications app, and Facebook doesn’t make money from that group chat with your cousins. This looks set to change. Haltingly, including by agreeing to buy a customer service start-up on Monday, Facebook is trying to use its trademark playbook to remake WhatsApp into an inescapable way for businesses to interact with us.

If Facebook figures it out, WhatsApp could change how we shop and use the internet forever — as the company’s main social network and Instagram did. If not, Facebook will own a spectacularly popular failure. The outcome will set trends for our digital lives and determine which businesses thrive or don’t.

To understand WhatsApp, you need to know about Facebook’s three-step playbook and why it’s breaking down.

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First, Facebook makes a nice space for people to hang out with one another. That was the original Facebook social network, then it bought spots like Instagram and WhatsApp.

Once lots of people are there and comfy, Facebook lets businesses in to mingle with people and maybe try to sell running shoes or bedsheets. Step three, the company finds ways to make those businesses pay to reach people. That’s the ticket to riches.

With its main social network and Instagram, businesses pay Facebook by buying ads. Facebook’s other messaging app, Messenger, has started down this path, too. But Facebook has decided that advertisements probably aren’t the way to go for WhatsApp. And it doesn’t exactly know what else to do when it has to deviate from its three-step plan.

The first two steps have gone swimmingly with WhatsApp. The app isn’t widely used in the United States, but in many countries it’s the go-to way to stay in touch with friends and family. And businesses are using WhatsApp to take product orders or respond to customer questions.

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It’s just that Facebook hasn’t quite figured out how to hone these habits, refine them, spread them to more companies and make money from it. That third step is tricky. It’s heartening, really, to see the big and mighty Facebook fumbling in the dark a little.

With the planned purchase of Kustomer, a (ridiculously named) start-up that helps businesses do customer service by chat apps, you can see that Facebook wants WhatsApp to be a version of customer call centers. It’s also trying to make WhatsApp a 21st-century Sears catalog, or maybe a digital currency.

It all seems plausible. Sure, WhatsApp could be the best forum for airlines to rebook your flights and for you to check out Levi’s jeans and buy a pair in the chat app. WhatsApp could be the only online presence for many companies. Or maybe none of this will catch on widely. I don’t know, and maybe for the first time in its history, Facebook doesn’t know, either.

The direction of WhatsApp matters because it’s about us.

Think about how Facebook and Instagram changed how many of us interact with one another and find information, influenced how businesses get us interested in their products and maybe rewired our brains.

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WhatsApp is that all over again, but potentially more profound because the app is most popular in countries where internet habits are relatively new. WhatsApp in India could change the entire retail industry in ways we can’t imagine. It could influence how governments plan their currencies.

Or, again, WhatsApp could stay wildly popular but never fulfill the hopes Facebook has for it. I’m not sure which outcome we want, but I’ll be paying close attention either way.

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We didn’t get flying cars but …

One of the significant criticisms of the technology industry is that it’s focused on trivial things.

Peter Thiel, a prominent investor in young technology companies, encapsulated this criticism by saying, “We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters.” (That was a reference to the former length of tweets. Now they can be up to 280 characters.)

But what if there are profound outcomes from technology, and we just don’t see or understand them?

My colleague Cade Metz wrote about a computer system that can identify the precise shape of tiny proteins in the human body in minutes or hours, instead of years or decades. The breakthrough, Cade wrote, “could accelerate the ability to understand diseases, develop new medicines and unlock mysteries of the human body.”

This is technology most of us will never see or think about but could save lives. And there are more examples of technologies that are hardly trivial yet underappreciated by many of us.

Smartphones couldn’t exist without increasingly sophisticated computer chip designs and the factories to make them. I love to tell you about boring technology like buildings tightly packed with souped-up computers and metal poles in the ground that have drastically expanded internet access around the world.

I have been struck this year by both the limits of technology and our inability sometimes to appreciate the impact of technology if it’s not staring us in the face (or flying over our heads).

Yes, I want technology that can tackle the world’s thorniest problems in transportation, housing, health care and climate change. But we also need to recognize that technology doesn’t have to be as obvious or glamorous as flying cars to change the world.

Before we go …

Nothing makes sense: America is in the middle of a pandemic surge and millions of people are struggling. You wouldn’t know it from a new record price for the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, or from Airbnb’s plan to become a more richly valued business than almost every U.S. hotel chain.
Working harder but earning less: Driving for Uber had been a way for some people in Kenya to make a good living. But when the company cut fares, introduced new categories of cars and added more drivers, it ruined some of the Kenyans who had borrowed money to drive for the service, NBC News and the Pulitzer Center reported.
Five patterns in conspiracy theories: The Guardian writes about rhetorical devices common to many conspiracies and the best ways to respond to them. One example: a fallacy of claiming “some kind of causal connection from a random coincidence,” including the arrival of 5G cellular technology at roughly the same time as the coronavirus.