Andy Kessler

WSJ: The Lost Era of Reliability

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lost-era-of-reliability-media-politicians-technology-0384b4e6

Photoshopping the then-missing princess of Wales. The press twisting Donald Trump’s “bloodbath” comment out of context. AT&T Wireless down for hours. And (gasp!) Instagram offline. Is anything reliable anymore?

Reliability is a lost art. Our electricity used to be so steady that plugged-in wall clocks rarely needed adjusting. That’s funny now because power outages are so commonplace. Heck, we now schedule rolling blackouts in California—forced failure.

Back then, the electric grid and phone system were designed for “five 9s” or 99.999% reliability—five minutes of unscheduled downtime a year. Last month, AT&T’s cellular network went down for around 11 hours. No TikTok? The horror. AT&T provided $5 credits to customers. Thanks for nothing. Today’s reality is that we’re preconditioned to accept failure.

When did things change? My guess is after the July 13-14, 1977, New York City blackout, which happened during a heat wave. The result was fires, looting and fear that the “Son of Sam” serial killer would kill again. After that, we became thankful for outages lasting only an hour.

Folks used to repair toasters. Now they’re disposable. For many items, when a piece of cheap plastic breaks, we chuck it and buy another one, including televisions and many appliances cheap enough to replace. Sadly, our trust in everyday things is now disposable as well.

Early Windows PCs would seemingly crash daily, with the infamous “blue screen of death.” My business partner would immediately yell, “Curse you, Bill Gates.”

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WSJ: See You on Zoom—or Not

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/see-you-on-zoom-or-not-ai-avatars-replacing-you-in-meetings-068fe5d3

I still hate meetings. Almost 10 years ago I wrote that “meetings are supposed to be about discovery and buy-in” but instead “end up being about preening and politicking, and devolve into productivity-robbing, mind-numbing monotony.” Since then, a poll by University of North Carolina researchers found that nearly two-thirds of managers agreed that meetings kept them from getting real work done, 71% thought meetings were “unproductive and inefficient,” and 64% said meetings blocked deep thinking. There has to be a better way.

Sadly, when lockdowns came along and the word “Zoom” joined the vernacular—along with the phrase “you’re on mute”—meetings got way worse. Sure, no one knows if you are wearing pants, but Zoom meetings lack social clues and such real-time feedback as glaring or grunting. I’m good at both. Worse, meetings multiplied. Zoom meetings peaked at 300 million a day in mid-2020. Yikes.

This included lots of online classrooms, where hints of the future were revealed. Bored-to-tears grade-schoolers, who are smarter than we think, figured out they could fake paying attention by changing their background to a video loop, maybe with a couple of head nods—a rudimentary avatar. All that was missing were class notes from the nerdy kid and, in case you’re called on, a realistic Ferris Bueller-like recorded answer, similar to when the principal, Ed Rooney, checked on him at home.

In related news, earlier this month at South by Southwest, a company appropriately named Soul Machines introduced Digital Marilyn: a pretty realistic artificial-intelligence-driven talking Marilyn Monroe avatar. Suddenly, all the pieces are in place. Can someone please adapt this for meetings?

Help is on the way. I use an app called Otter.ai to record interviews, and it quickly generates a Word document with almost perfect transcription. Otter can join Zoom calls and produce not only transcripts but pretty good meeting summaries. I spoke with the company’s CEO, Sam Liang, who told me, “I have eight to 10 meetings every day. So you see, this is a huge pain point.”

Mr. Liang says when he’s double-booked, he watches “live meeting notes for multiple meetings going on at the same time. So I can multitask.”

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WSJ: Beware the Frothy AI Frenzy

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/beware-the-frothy-ai-frenzy-artificial-intelligence-tech-business-dce9b093

Artificial intelligence continues both to astound and confound. Google’s recent launch of its new Gemini AI tools was a mess, producing images of Founding Fathers and Nazi soldiers as people of color. When asked if Elon Musk or Adolf Hitler had a more negative effect on society, Gemini responded that it was “difficult to say.” Google pulled the product over “inaccuracies.” AI is the next wave of computing and human interface but it’s definitely out over its skis.

But Gemini’s problems say more about Google than they do about AI. A Google “AI Ethics & Compliance Advisor” is on video talking about “deliberate steps to ensure that the advanced technologies we develop and deploy lead to a positive impact on individuals and society.” This is DEI-speak. No wonder Gemini’s output is screwy.

AI finds patterns of patterns in data and then uses a technique called “reinforcement learning from human feedback.” Humans help train and fine-tune large language models. Some humans, like “ethics & compliance” folks, have a heavier hand than others in tuning models to their liking. Google, with 190,000 employees, controls 90% of search. So how did this flaw make it into the marketplace? A bloated bureaucracy. Alex Kantrowitz at the Wrap quotes a member of Google’s Trust and Safety Team: “Organizationally at this place, it’s impossible to navigate and understand who’s in rooms and who owns things. Maybe that’s by design so that nobody can ever get in trouble for failure.” Business 101: Hiding failure limits success.

There’s a long history of dominant players missing the next big market because of bloat and hubris. Xerox, IBM, Digital Equipment, Compaq, AT&T, AOL, Netscape, Yahoo. I can go on. The Federal Trade Commission should Sharpie this on employee foreheads: There’s no need to break up technology companies, as they will diminish or fail all by themselves.

In the 1990s, Cisco owned most of the router market. During the dot-com explosion, investors believed a long-run rebuild of telecom infrastructure was imminent to build out the internet. In 2000 the company’s stock peaked at a $555 billion value. The internet got built all right, but Cisco shares crashed almost 90%. It has taken the company 24 years to crawl back to its $200 billion value today.

Change takes a toll. Microsoft is now a data-center company, more utility than innovator.

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WSJ: Profit Can Be Your Purpose

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/profit-can-be-your-purpose-millenials-gen-zers-life-purpose-careers-29906eff

More than half of recent college graduates are in jobs that don’t require their degrees, the Journal reported recently. I think that’s on “purpose.” It isn’t about work anymore—work now requires meaning, purpose. Many under 35 seem to need their careers to provide psychic rewards for them to get out of bed every morning. Give me a break.

A McKinsey study shows that 70% of employees said “their sense of purpose is defined by their work” and that “employers need to help meet this need.” Really? Don’t employers provide paychecks? A McKinsey partner noted that “millennials, even more so, are likely to see their work as their life calling.” PwC even has a chief purpose and inclusion officer. We need a generational intervention.

Looking for work now is about finding your passion. My true passion was to bat cleanup for the St. Louis Cardinals. Oh well. Instead I found a job where I could learn something and eventually contribute. I know, so old-fashioned.

Companies today need to be “mission oriented.” That mission could be at cross-purposes with reality, no matter how good it sounds. Watch the Netflix docuseries “Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul.” Employees were gleeful to work for a company whose mission is to “improve the lives of the world’s one billion adult smokers by eliminating cigarettes.” Spoiler: It didn’t end well. Juul ended up introducing youngsters to nicotine and addicting many who never smoked. After the company blew up, an employee wrote, “Looking for new opportunities out there with companies that actually care about their employees and are truly mission focused. The work environment here is truly toxic.” Truly!

Then there’s the “authentic self” and “bring your whole self to work” thing. As opposed to half? Or someone else’s self? Mike Robbins, who wrote the book “Bring Your Whole Self to Work,” suggests we “allow ourselves to be truly seen.” Truly! In December 2021, Roz Brewer, CEO of Walgreens Boots Alliance, told Harvard Business Review that bringing her whole self to work was a key to her success. In August 2023, she stepped down as CEO of the debt-laden, overstretched firm.

Motivational speaker Tony Robbins suggests you develop “a life vision statement.” In a hurry? Copy someone else’s Pinterest vision board.

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