Month: June 2017

The Talk Show Live From WWDC ⇥ daringfireball.net

This is the third year in a row that John Gruber has hosted Apple executives as his guests on the WWDC version of the Talk Show, and I think it’s the best one yet, despite some funky audio mixing. The conversation between Gruber, Craig Federighi, and Phil Schiller felt more informative and more relaxed. The highlights include Federighi highlighting improved iCloud privacy, the careful choreography of upgrading all iOS devices to APFS, and elaborating on how drag and drop works in iOS 11. It’s worth listening to, but I’d take the ninety minutes to watch the video, if I were you.

Emil Michael, Uber’s SVP of Business, Resigns ⇥ nytimes.com

Mike Isaac, New York Times:

Emil Michael, Uber’s senior vice president for business and second in command at the ride-hailing company, left the company on Monday morning, according to an email sent to employees.

Mr. Michael’s departure comes after a series of scandals that have rocked the company over the past year, forcing the board of directors to call an investigation into Uber’s culture and business practices.

The results of that investigation, conducted by Eric H. Holder Jr. of Covington & Burling, were delivered to Uber’s board on Sunday. Mr. Holder’s report recommended that Mr. Michael depart the company, and the board said on Sunday evening that it had accepted all of the recommendations.

In 2014, Michael forgot that he was on the record when he suggested to a Buzzfeed editor that Uber could, theoretically, hire opposition researchers to dig up dirt on targeted journalists as retaliation for negative coverage. He later stated that those candid statements did not reflect his actual views.

Appholes

Last week, Jason Fried posted a screenshot of an ad for Apple’s new series, “Planet of the Apps”, featuring a quote from Andrew Kemendo, one of the contestants on the show:

I rarely get to see my kids. That’s a risk you have to take.

I don’t have any contempt for Kemendo for saying this; it’s a common sentiment in today’s workforce, particularly in Silicon Valley. The never-ending workday that was once the domain of the CEO has since spread to even the lowest-level employees. David Heinemeier Hansson, Fried’s co-founder at Basecamp, captured “trickle-down workaholism” in a fantastic article:

Neither these athletes [Kobe Bryant and LeBron James] or these writers [Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and Charles Darwin] were giving up anything on whatever contemporaries that may have put in more time, more hours, or greater sacrifices. Their contributions to the world were in no way diminished by their balanced approach, quite the contrary.

So don’t tell me that there’s something uniquely demanding about building yet another fucking startup that dwarfs the accomplishments of The Origin of Species or winning five championship rings. It’s bullshit. Extractive, counterproductive bullshit peddled by people who either need a narrative to explain their personal sacrifices and regrets or who are in a position to treat the lives and wellbeing of others like cannon fodder.

It’s critical to understand that Kemendo’s quote isn’t reflecting upon a unique situation for Apple. In 2008, Fred Vogelstein documented the development of the first iPhone in an oft-cited article (sorry about the Wired link):

For those working on the iPhone, the next three months would be the most stressful of their careers. Screaming matches broke out routinely in the hallways. Engineers, frazzled from all-night coding sessions, quit, only to rejoin days later after catching up on their sleep. A product manager slammed the door to her office so hard that the handle bent and locked her in; it took colleagues more than an hour and some well-placed whacks with an aluminum bat to free her.

If anything, this should be read as a cautionary tale rather than a playbook — that, despite the success and ingenuity of the iPhone, this is something that should not happen.

In other words, it’s a circumstance that should not be promoted.

I feel terrible for Kemendo, his fellow contestants on “Planet of the Apps”, and anyone else who is stuck in a situation where they feel pressured to compromise on family and friends because of their job. That shouldn’t happen — ever. Even though the ad in question was eventually deleted, it isn’t a work-life balance that Apple — or any company — should feel comfortable promoting.1

By the way, I sat through the first episode of “Planet of the Apps” — because I work hard for you — and I stand by what I wrote after the trailer was released in February:

I’ve seen more than a few people write this off as a dramatized version of app development — compiling code and funding rounds, as seen through a reality TV filter. I think that’s overly kind. The premise is derivative, and the clips — so far — seem mediocre and dull. What has been shown so far does a disservice to the vast majority of developers, too.

I’ve very little to add beyond this. Without adequate time spent on character development, I’m not invested in the success of any of the participants so far, so every apparent crisis they face seems louder but no more urgent. Even with my knowledge of all of the judges’ backgrounds — especially with my knowledge of Will.I.Am’s Salesforce watch — I don’t buy any of them as serious startup mentors. Very little in the show convinced me otherwise.

Also, there are a lot of indications that this is a TV show, like audible director cues and visible camera booms. It’s super weird and it doesn’t really add anything to the show.

My perception might change later in the season, but this isn’t an encouraging start. I like the idea of Apple making original TV shows; I don’t like this attempt.

  1. Worth mentioning, too, is that Apple was one of several major tech companies — including Google, Intel, and Adobe — that conspired to fix employee wages and agreed not to recruit between themselves. ↥︎

The iPad’s Renaissance ⇥ buzzfeed.com

John Paczkowski had the chance earlier this week to speak with Craig Federighi and Phil Schiller about Apple’s new iPad Pro models and the iPad-specific enhancements coming in iOS 11:

For a while — since its inception — iOS has been iPhone-first, with nods to the iPad as well.

This is the first time that iOS has (seemingly) been designed from the get-go with the iPad at top of mind. While last year’s iPad Pro may have delivered on hardware, without a strong OS update to match, it felt incomplete as a “primary” computer. Yet given this new operating system — especially when taken together with this year’s hardware — it feels like the iPad may be at another inflection point.

Apparently, the silicon used to drive iPad displays at 120 Hz took four years to develop. The software features in iOS 11 seem like they’ve taken a couple of years on their own to design and build. Consider, for instance, the drag and drop feature: it seems so simple, but — as noted in this years Platforms State of the Union presentation — Apple paid considerable attention to the security of a drag and drop operation, and it required APFS to be fast enough.

As much as the past couple of years have felt a little bit like a drought for the iPad — iPad Pro hardware aside — the innovations launched this year truly feel like a renaissance for the product line. Apple really is trying to tick all the boxes to make the iPad the best computer for most people, most of the time. I just hope that they can keep up the momentum, and not tick-tock between releases of iOS that seem primarily designed for the iPhone, and releases made for the iPad.

Will Uber Fire Travis Kalanick? ⇥ vanityfair.com

Maya Kosoff, Vanity Fair:

Uber C.E.O. Travis Kalanick has long been the sort of leader that Silicon Valley venerates: brash, unapologetic, and committed to winning at all costs. As his ride-hailing start-up’s valuation ballooned, the press wrote off Kalanick’s jokes about picking up women on demand and thrived on the drama of his secret plans to sabotage his rivals. But as Uber matured into a globe-spanning, $70 billion behemoth, stories of the company’s aggressive, macho culture ran up against evolving expectations for what is acceptable behavior in a tech industry finally grappling with sexism. Now, in the wake of a series of metastasizing scandals, a once unthinkable question is being asked: will Uber’s board fire Travis Kalanick?

Or, to frame it another way, what would it take for Uber to fire Kalanick? At any other company, he’d have been walked out of the building four or five scandals ago; Uber, though, has a uniquely high tolerance for intolerable behaviour. From an ethical standpoint, is there anything Kalanick can do wrong in the eyes of Uber’s board?

WSJ Gains Subscribes While Fading in Search Results ⇥ bloomberg.com

Gerry Smith, Bloomberg:

After blocking Google users from reading free articles in February, the Wall Street Journal’s subscription business soared, with a fourfold increase in the rate of visitors converting into paying customers. But there was a trade-off: Traffic from Google plummeted 44 percent.

The reason: Google search results are based on an algorithm that scans the internet for free content. After the Journal’s free articles went behind a paywall, Google’s bot only saw the first few paragraphs and started ranking them lower, limiting the Journal’s viewership.

I’m not sure how this effect can last for the Journal, but it goes to show that publications don’t necessarily benefit from being available to search engines. For an established publication — like the Wall Street Journal — the benefits may really only run one way: towards search engines.

Siri’s Complicated and Fraught Life So Far ⇥ wsj.com

Tripp Mickle reports for the Wall Street Journal (work around the paywall via Twitter) on Siri’s stumbles within Apple:

Siri’s capabilities have lagged behind those of rivals elsewhere, as well. In tests across 5,000 different questions, it answered accurately 62% of the time, lagging the roughly 90% accuracy rate of Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa, according to Stone Temple, a digital marketing firm.

A separate study by Loup Ventures, a market-research firm, shows Siri performs better than rivals on core iPhone functions, so-called command-related queries — making calendar appointments, placing phone calls, sending text messages — but doesn’t do as well answering questions accurately from the web.

Apple has tried to close the gap through acquisitions. In 2015, it purchased VocalIQ, a Cambridge, England-based startup that designed a system to improve a virtual assistant’s conversational ability.

It’s not the inability for Siri to process complex conversational queries that worries me; it’s Siri’s lack of rudimentary contextual understanding. A simple example: Tuesday night, at about 11:00, I asked Siri on my Watch “is it going to rain tomorrow?”; Siri responded by displaying a ten-day forecast. This is wrong for two reasons:

  1. My query was binary, and displaying a forecast does not answer it. Asking the same thing to Siri on my iPhone resulted in a direct answer, so I would expect a yes or no in the more time-constrained context of the Watch.

  2. If I’m asking about what the weather will be like “tomorrow”, it makes far more sense to show me the hourly forecast.

My second objection is, I admit, subjective — a couple of people replied to my tweet asking why the hourly forecast would make sense if no rain is expected. But I think the use of “tomorrow” should supersede that and show me a more fine-grained forecast.1

My first objection, though, seems entirely obvious to me: I’m asking a question, and it should provide an answer. I think it’s fair to limit that expectation to avoid Google’s “one true answer” problem, but this is a question already answered on the iPhone in plain terms.

This is just one example; I’m sure you can think of your own instances of baffling inconsistencies and total disobedience. My experiences with Siri over the years have been mixed, and it’s stuff like this that drives me up the wall. I would love if Siri could start understanding more complex and nuanced questions; I can’t understand why, nearly six years later, it fails to do the right thing with the most basic kinds of queries.

  1. I also think that the hourly forecast should begin at the time I’m usually awake instead of midnight. Siri knows what time my alarm is set for, and I use a sleep tracking app that feeds into HealthKit, so it has more than enough entirely local information to be able to figure that out. ↥︎

Police in China Detain Twenty-Two Over iPhone Information Theft ⇥ foxbusiness.com

Yang Jie and Josh Chin, Dow Jones Newswires:

Police in eastern China said they had detained 22 people, including 20 from Apple “direct sales outlets” in China and companies Apple outsources services to. Police said those detained had used Apple’s internal system to illegally obtain information associated with iPhone products like phone numbers, names and Apple IDs, and then sold the information.

[…]

Under earlier laws, companies have largely escaped punishment when employees used their access to internal computer systems to steal users’ personal data, according to Liu Chunquan, an intellectual property lawyer with Shanghai-based Duan & Duan Law Firm.

That has changed under the cybersecurity law, Mr. Liu said, with companies now potentially facing fines and other punishment by regulators unless they can prove their systems weren’t to blame for leaks.

The kind of information that was captured and resold here is the information a customer would regularly provide if they needed to have their iPhone serviced. No word on whether that includes device passcodes as well, which are now used as an authentication measure. Such information, though, should only be made available to an employee for the shortest possible amount of time, and I would hope that only those on a “need to know” basis can access it.

The 2017 Apple Design Award Winners ⇥ imore.com

When I didn’t see the Apple Design Awards anywhere on this year’s WWDC schedule, I became concerned that they were dropping them. They’re a hallmark of WWDC — a recognition of the best work that designers and developers do.

Rene Ritchie, iMore:

Instead of the traditional award show on Monday night, which was great in the moment but often got buried beneath all the keynote news, Apple handed out the Design Awards (ADA) in a small, private ceremony where the developers got to meet with Craig Federighi and other executives.

Now, with the keynote safely behind them, Apple is launching the ADAs to the public with a brand new website and a proper moment for each and every one of the winners — and their apps — to shine.

All of the winners are listed — with stories about the developers and how the apps came to be — on a dedicated webpage. I haven’t had the chance to try every winning app, but I regularly use a few of them, and they’re very deserving. Truly, a showcase of the best of the App Store.

Notable, seven of the ten winners are paid apps — up front, not free with an in-app purchase to unlock. Kudos.

An Uber Executive Accessed and Shared a Rape Victim’s Medical Records ⇥ recode.net

Kara Swisher and Johana Bhuiyan, Recode:

A top Uber executive obtained medical records of a woman who had been raped during a ride in India, according to multiple sources.

He is no longer with the company, an Uber spokesperson said.

The executive in question, Eric Alexander, the president of business in the Asia Pacific, then showed the medical records to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and SVP Emil Michael. In addition, numerous executives at the car-hailing company were either told about the records or shown them by this group.

Every time I think Uber has sunk to its lowest possible point, they dig a little further. Or, in this case, a lot: based on Swisher and Bhuiyan‘s report, it sounds like Alexander acquired this report in an attempt to discredit the victim. To make matters worse, Alexander was apparently not part of the twenty-plus staffers fired during yesterday’s company-wide cull:

Alexander had not been among those fired, Uber said yesterday when asked about his status. Now, after Recode contacted the company about his actions, he is no longer employed there. Uber declined to comment further.

I don’t understand how Travis Kalanick is still CEO. This is abhorrent.

A Eulogy For CAPTCHA ⇥ theawl.com

Abigail Rowe, the Awl:

So this is how we prove our humanity, by TYPEing-IN the dirty-sock arithmetic on a Tide-branded CAPTCHA. “Prove you’re human.” It’s so blah, so crass — not even a please. And the worst part: CAPTCHA was supposed to be a good thing! Reducing spam? Good! Halting the internet bot takeover? Good! Improving AI technology? Good, hopefully! Stopping one bot from buying up all the whatever and reselling it 500%? Yes! Good again! But CAPTCHA isn’t so straightforward. And through it’s question, and our often incorrect answers, a darker, more dysfunctional portrait of the internet and the economy behind it seems to tip its hand.

The death of the CAPTCHA is encouraging partly because typing an incoherent string of characters is deeply irritating, but also because of some of the unethical economic byproducts that it has created, as Rowe mentions. I doubt very many of the people working on CAPTCHAs considered that the product they were building would create an industry of human beings expected to behave like robots. Similarly, the popularity of mobile app markets and their dependency on top lists created a demand for schemes to manipulate store rankings, resulting in unverified photos of poor working conditions for people manually and repetitively downloading apps.

I’m a designer; you may be a designer, too, or work in some capacity on features intended to prevent automated usage. It’s an ethical responsibility of our industry to recognize if there is a potential for manual abuse, too, by exploiting underpaid workers in places with more lax labour laws.

More on Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention ⇥ webkit.org

WebKit security engineer John Wilander explains how Safari’s new Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature works:

A machine learning model is used to classify which top privately-controlled domains have the ability to track the user cross-site, based on the collected statistics. Out of the various statistics collected, three vectors turned out to have strong signal for classification based on current tracking practices: subresource under number of unique domains, sub frame under number of unique domains, and number of unique domains redirected to. All data collection and classification happens on-device.

Cookies are then distributed into “buckets” and their behaviour is adjusted based on the user’s interaction with the first- and third-party domains. I’m curious to see how well this works over time, particularly when it’s faced with tracking scripts like those from Criteo and AdRoll, which re-route Safari users’ traffic through their tracking domains in order to create a pseudo first-party interaction.

Uber Hires Bozoma Saint John, Fires Over Twenty Harassers and Bullies ⇥ bloomberg.com

Lots of news at Uber today, starting with a report from TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden:

Last week, ahead of WWDC, there was a ripple of news when Axios discovered that Bozoma Saint John — one of the more noticeable execs at the company for being a woman of color, who led an Apple Music demo at the previous year’s WWDC to some acclaim — was leaving Apple. Now TechCrunch has learned where she’s landing: she’s going to Uber.

We received the news via a tip, and have confirmed the appointment through multiple sources at Uber. The company, we understand, views the appointment as important in helping “turn the tide on recent issues.”

After Axios broke that news last week, I knew that Boz sadly wouldn’t be appearing during the keynote yesterday. She’s a fantastic presenter, and I’ve heard nothing but excellent things about her track record; I’m sure she’ll make a great Chief Brand Officer at Uber. And Uber’s going to need some great people of Boz’s calibre to turn it around.

Eric Newcomer, Bloomberg:

Uber Technologies Inc. said it fired more than 20 people after a company investigation into harassment claims.

Bobbie Wilson, an attorney at Perkins Coie LLP, gave Uber’s more than 12,000 employees an assessment of the firm’s investigation on Tuesday, according to a person familiar with the issue, who asked not to be identified discussing personnel matters. A separate probe commissioned by Uber that’s being led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has given its own recommendations to a subcommittee of Uber’s board of directors, the person said.

In a review of 215 human-resources claims, Perkins Coie took no action in 100 instances as it continues to investigate 57 others; meanwhile, 31 employees are in counseling or training, while seven received written warnings from the company, an Uber spokesman said. The issues deal with harassment, discrimination, retaliation and other HR matters. The company didn’t name the employees who were let go. Some of the people fired were senior executives, according to the person.

Even after a housecleaning like this, there’s still the matter of Uber’s internal culture. It’s hard to imagine really meaningful change happening at the company just because they fired a bunch of people, especially with Travis Kalanick still in charge.

Intelligence Contractor Charged With Leak After the Intercept Publishes Documents ⇥ nytimes.com

Yesterday, Matthew Cole, Richard Esposito, Sam Biddle, and Ryan Grim of the Intercept published a blockbuster story about an NSA report concerning Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections. However, that story was overshadowed within about an hour by news that the U.S. Justice Department was charging the alleged leaker of that report.

Charlie Savage, New York Times:

The F.B.I. affidavit said reporters for the news outlet, which it also did not name, had approached the N.S.A. with questions for their story and, in the course of that dialogue, provided a copy of the document in their possession. An analysis of the file showed it was a scan of a copy that had been creased or folded, the affidavit said, “suggesting they had been printed and hand-carried out of a secured space.”

The N.S.A.’s auditing system showed that six people had printed out the report, including Ms. Winner. Investigators examined the computers of those six people and found that Ms. Winner had been in email contact with the news outlet, but the other five had not. In a statement, the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, praised the operation.

The Intercept issued a statement earlier today, effectively declining to comment, but it sounds like they failed to adequately protect their source. Scans of the documents published online as part of their story show printer marks that identify the document’s date, time, and printer used.

This isn’t the first time something like this has occurred. In 2014, the New York Times failed to adequately redact a presentation it published as part of the Edward Snowden cache of documents. Their error exposed the name of an NSA agent. In 2012, Vice disclosed John McAfee’s location because they left location data embedded in their published photos.

The complexities of classified documents and journalists’ occasional inexperience with the highly-technical requirements of handling them came up during John Oliver’s interview with Snowden, as reported by Alan Yuhas of the Guardian:

Oliver then asked Snowden not whether his actions were right or wrong but whether they could be dangerous simply due to the incompetence of others. The Last Week Tonight host claimed that the improper redaction of a document by the New York Times exposed intelligence activity against al-Qaida.

“That is a problem,” Snowden replied.

“Well, that’s a fuck-up,” Oliver shot back, forcing Snowden to agree.

“That is a fuck-up,” Snowden replied. “Those things do happen in reporting. In journalism we have to accept that some mistakes will be made. This is a fundamental concept of liberty.”

“But you have to own that then,” Oliver replied. “You’re giving documents with information that you know could be harmful which could get out there … We’re not even talking about bad faith, we’re talking about incompetence.”

The difference between the Times’ redaction mistakes and the Intercept’s is that the latter’s mission statement explicitly cites Snowden’s leaked documents as the kinds of stories they chase:

After NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden came forward with revelations of mass surveillance in 2013, journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill decided to found a new media organization dedicated to the kind of reporting those disclosures required: fearless, adversarial journalism. They called it The Intercept.

Based on what has been reported so far, the alleged leaker screwed up by emailing the Intercept at work, and using a work printer to create colour versions of the documents.1 However, it’s also looking like the Intercept screwed up by showing original scans of the documents to the NSA while investigating this story, and by publishing versions that can easily be traced back to the printer used.

  1. Printing or scanning in black and white, especially at a higher contrast setting, will make the dots invisible. ↥︎

New Versions of Safari Block Autoplaying Videos, Remarketing ⇥ apple.com

Apple’s press release:

Safari can automatically use Reader to open articles in a clean, uncluttered format, while Autoplay Blocking stops media with audio from automatically playing in the browser.

Intelligent Tracking Prevention in Safari uses machine learning to identify and remove the tracking data that advertisers employ to follow users’ web activity.

It wasn’t mentioned in the keynote, but iOS 11 also includes Intelligent Tracking Prevention. These two enhancements alone are enough reason to try to explain to friends and family what High Sierra is and why they should update once it’s out. Good luck getting anyone used to that name, though.

Google Relaunches Contributor Service ⇥ ft.com

Back in January, Google abruptly shut down Contributor, the U.S.-only service that would allow you to pay to remove ads on websites. And now, contrary to my assumptions, it has returned.

Hannah Kuchler, Financial Times which, I think, might be behind a login, but one that I believe you can bypass with a Google referral:

Google will enable publishers to ask readers who use ad-blockers for micropayments, as part of a push to improve the quality of advertisements and combat the rise of ad blockers.

[…]

Comicbook.com trialled the experience and found it convinced people to “white list” a site so that blockers do not remove its ads. The feature will be available in five countries including the US and the UK now, and more countries later in the year. As each publisher will set their own price, it is not yet clear how much it could cost consumers.

This updated version of Contributor was introduced on a chickenshit minimalist webpage that features an uncompressed 2.2 MB PNG stock photo of a man highlighting the word “Working” on a document, an uncompressed 1 MB PNG stock photo of a plant beside a laptop keyboard, and not a single mention of whether hiding ads will also prevent Google from collecting tracking data.

Currently, just twelve sites have signed up to participate in Contributor, and it looks like each has to be added to the Contributor “pass” individually. In effect, it’s a Google-run site subscription service on a per-page basis. Call me pessimistic, but I don’t see this becoming very successful, and I bet it will be unceremoniously canned within the next two years or so.

MacOS, APFS, and Time Machine Possibilities ⇥ technightowl.com

Gene Steinberg:

One thing Time Machine does not do is to allow you to boot from the backup drive. So if your startup drive fails, you would have to restore your data to a new drive before you can get back to work. That’s certainly a severe limitation for the busy person or business. The best solution to that dilemma is to install a dedicated backup app that can create a clone drive; in other words, a mirror of your setup drive. You can use an external drive for the backup, or even a partition, but the latter wouldn’t be a good move. If a drive fails, you’d lose both backups.

[…]

Now the existing version of Time Machine was designed with the current file system, HFS+, in mind, recognizing its limitations. With APFS, Apple builds a new version of Time Machine. Does APFS make it possible to boot from a Time Machine volume?

One of the possibilities listed this year in WWDC Bingo is a Time Machine in the Cloud feature. There are plenty of offsite backup companies, but having a la carte restoration of files — from anywhere in the world — integrated with Time Machine would be a dream.

However, there are still times when a local backup is ideal — say, if you don’t have internet access, or your internet connection is slow, or if you’d prefer full encryption that you control. I would love to see enhancements to Time Machine this year that fully take advantage of APFS, if it’s ready to ship in MacOS Malibu, or Monterey, or whatever it is that they’re calling it this year.

WWDC Bingo ⇥ twitter.com

Ryan Jones’ gigantic WWDC Bingo spreadsheet returns on Google Docs. So far, fifty-four people — including yours truly — have added their best guesses for what will be announced this year. So far:

  • No single line item is seen by all participants as guaranteed. Yes, there is one person who has guessed that Apple will introduce a new Mac Mini on Monday. Two people do not believe there will be any major iPad enhancements in iOS 11.

  • A couple of guesses are nearly evenly split across all participants: the likelihood of iTunes for Mac being split into at least two new apps, and whether Jony Ive will be physically present.

  • Aside from Phil Schiller, lots of people think that this year’s Talk Show Live guest will be either Craig Federighi or Tim Cook. I wasn’t the only person to guess Jony Ive, but I think it’s a bit optimistic.

  • Participants seem pretty split on how many buttons will be undone on Eddy Cue’s shirt.

  • I’m slightly less optimistic than the median.

If you’d like to participate, hop in. The winner will have the dubious honour of being the best at interpreting Apple Kremlinology.

Pinboard Acquires Delicious ⇥ blog.pinboard.in

A short history of Pinboard and Delicious, as told in four excerpts by ex-Yahoo/Delicious employee and now Pinboard lord and king, Maciej Cegłowski.

January 2010:

There have been two big surprises in the past six months. The first was discovering that a minimalist paid bookmarking site can effectively compete against delicious, a free service that has all the resources of Yahoo at its disposal, a five year headstart, and until the recent layoffs employed some thirty people. Yahoo management single-handedly created our market with a series of terrible product decisions, and has continued to push the yoke forward and keep the nose pointed straight at the ground.

March 2011:

On December 16th Yahoo held an all-hands meeting to rally the troops after a big round of layoffs. Around 11 AM someone at this meeting showed a slide with a couple of Yahoo properties grouped into three categories, one of which was ominously called “sunset”. The most prominent logo in the group belonged to Delicious, our main competitor. Milliseconds later, the slide was on the web, and there was an ominous thundering sound as every Delicious user in North America raced for the exit.

Delicious was ultimately saved from sunsetting by being passed from one company to another, never staying very long under any particular ownership.

October 2015:

I recently heard from a competitor, let’s call them ACME Bookmarking Co., who are looking to leave the bookmarking game and sell their website.

Cegłowski may be calling them “ACME” here, but he’s clearly talking about Delicious.

Today, June 2017:

Pinboard has acquired Delicious.

[…]

Do not attempt to compete with Pinboard.

A fitting end to a multiyear saga. If I could find a way to do justice to that Italian “kissing fingers” gesture in words, I would.