Twitter is laying off thousands of employees starting today. Its email to employees is horrific. Start with this: the letter did not come from Elon Musk or, apparently, anyone: it’s just from “Team” with the same text sent to every employee in the company. This is cowardly and an unnecessary; every knows who’s responsible. Breaking…
Rogers Communications is the dominant internet provider in Toronto and the rest of Ontario. When it failed on Friday, it crashed a quarter of Canada’s internet connections, disrupting everything from mobile service to work-at-home to financial transactions and emergency 9-1-1 service for parts of three days. Now that service appears to be back, Rogers has…
Elon Musk sent his staff two blunt emails requiring them to work in the office, not remotely. His tone was bold. His meaning was clear. But his policies aren’t going to get him what he wants — especially if he ends up applying them to his next acquisition, Twitter. What Musk Wrote Musk sent his…
Western Digital customers who had configured the company’s external hard drives to be remotely accessible are waking up to find all their data erased. WD has downplayed the problem, hiding its response in a support update. Should WD be addressing the problem more visibly, or is this a case of “buyer beware?” According to Krebs…
Of course your inbox is full of virus-driven emails. And of course they mostly suck. By now, most companies have sent their stupid email and then learned to shut up. But not all of them. If you have nothing to say in this difficult time, say nothing. It’s rare that I see an email that…
Anthony Prince placed a $110 bet on FanDuel that, according to posted odds, should have paid off $82,000. But FanDuel said the odds were posted in error and wouldn’t pay. Now it’s paying what it should . . . but its statement allows it to weasel out of future similar payments. I call bullshit. How…
Adobe announced yesterday that it would acquire commerce platform Magento for $1.68 billion. It’s clear that an army of lawyers and PR people spent days crafting the 1001-word announcement, with is laden with highly refined, state-of-the-art tech-vendor bullshit. So let’s take the announcement apart. I’ll highlight jargon in bold and meaningless weasel words in italic, and…
United Airlines attempted to replace its employee bonuses with a lottery. This is a “motivational” idea so stupid that, after the employee backlash, the company had to “press pause” on it. Ironically, the plan was an attempt to encourage employees to be more consistently caring — but a plan like that shouldn’t start with random…
KFC ran out of chicken in the UK. They had to close their restaurants, and then explain themselves. They decided to poke fun at themselves . . . which is great, so long as nobody gets hurt. KFC suffered a distribution problem, which meant, basically, no chicken. Their first decision — to close the restaurants…