Cyberattack Disrupts Printing of Major Newspapers

The Los Angeles Times says an unusual cyberattack that disrupted its printing operations and those at newspapers in San Diego and Florida over the weekend came from outside the United States, but it stopped short of accusing a specific foreign government.

Computer malware attacks on infrastructure, while relatively rare, are hardly new: Russia has been credibly accused of shutting down power grids in Ukraine and a petrochemical plant in Saudi Arabia, Iran crippled a casino in Las Vegas, and the United States and Israel attacked a nuclear enrichment plant in Iran. But this would be the first known attack on major newspaper printing operations, and if politically motivated, it would define new territory in recent attacks on the media.

The malware was focused on the networks used by Tribune Publishing, which until recently owned The Los Angeles Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune. The two papers still share their former parent company’s printing networks.

The Los Angeles Times said the attack also affected the Saturday distribution of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, which share use of a large printing plant in Los Angeles for their West Coast editions. Both appear to have been collateral damage; there was no evidence that they were hit by the same malware aimed at the Tribune company.

The online editions of the news organizations were not affected, and Tribune Publishing said no data about its subscribers was compromised.

“Every market across the company was impacted,” Marisa Kollias, a spokeswoman for Tribune Publishing, told The Los Angeles Times. The Tribune’s remaining publications include its flagship, The Chicago Tribune, and newspapers in Florida, Hartford and Maryland. It also owns The Daily News in New York.

Missing from Tribune’s statements were any details about the nature of the malware or evidence for its assertion that the attack originated overseas. Anonymous sources cited by The Los Angeles Times suggested that the malware may have been a form of ransomware — a pernicious attack that scrambles computer programs and files before demanding that the victim pay a ransom to unscramble them.

Even if the attack was the work of foreign hackers, that does not necessarily mean it was backed by a government. Ransomware attacks are frequently the work of criminal groups, with three notable exceptions: a huge attack by hackers in North Korea in 2017, an attack months later against Ukraine by Russian hackers and, more recently, attacks against American hospitals and even the City of Atlanta by hackers in Iran. Those latest attacks were believed to be the work of individuals and not directed by Tehran.

Neither Tribune Publishing nor The Los Angeles Times said the attack was linked to a ransom demand.

But a news article in The Los Angeles Times, and one outside computer expert, said the attack shared characteristics with a form of ransomware called Ryuk, which was used to target a North Carolina water utility in October and other critical infrastructure. Some experts have linked that malware to a sophisticated North Korean group, but CrowdStrike, a security firm that has been tracking the group behind Ryuk, said it believed cybercriminals in Eastern Europe were responsible.

Adam Meyers, the head of threat intelligence at CrowdStrike, said cybercriminals appeared to have been infecting victims with Ryuk through a criminal tool called Trickbot. The tool was used in banking attacks and, more recently, attacks on major businesses and infrastructure in the United States, Canada and Britain.

Sophos, another security vendor, said Ryuk’s creators were selective about whom they targeted. They deploy the ransomware against victims that can pay large, often six-figure ransoms, particularly in the commodities, manufacturing and health care industries, Sophos said.

Whoever is behind the ransomware, the attacks appear to have paid off. This month, the group, which goes by the name Grim Spider, received a ransom payment of nearly 100 Bitcoin, the equivalent of more than $380,000.

It apparently took Tribune a while to understand the nature of the attack. The problem first appeared to be a malfunctioning computer server. The first evidence of the attack emerged Thursday night, The Los Angeles Times reported, and by Friday it appeared to have been contained. But it came back — a frequent occurrence with sophisticated attacks — and began to spread through the systems that govern the interface between the news content systems and the systems that control the printing of the newspapers.

By late Friday, The Los Angeles Times said, “the attack was hindering the transmission of pages from offices across Southern California to printing presses.” Among the hardest hit was the San Diego paper, whose production teams could not transmit the files that enable the making of page plates for the printing presses.

As a result, delays cascaded across the printing schedules for other newspapers. The South Florida Sun Sentinel was also hit, the newspaper reported on its website. It said distribution of The New York Times and The Palm Beach Post had also been affected, because they share the same presses.

On Sunday, Hillary Manning, vice president for communications at The Los Angeles Times, said, “The presses ran on schedule, and papers were being delivered as usual today.” She added, “The systems outage caused by a virus or malware has not been completely resolved yet.”

About 20,000 copies of The New York Times from the Los Angeles plant were delivered a day late, a spokeswoman for the paper, Eileen Murphy, said.

Colleen Schwartz, a spokeswoman for The Wall Street Journal, said she could confirm that The Journal “was impacted in certain regions,” though she did not have any details on which areas or the number of copies affected.

The Sound of Silence

How many crazy gizmos are needed to achieve your optimum sleep environment?

On winter nights, the white-noise app on my phone is tuned to Air Conditioner: a raspy, metallic whir that sounds like the mechanical noise that might echo deep inside the ductwork of a huge commercial building. (Among the app’s other offerings are Dishwasher Rinsing, Crowded Room and Vacuum Cleaner.)

It lulls me to sleep nonetheless, because it blankets the din in my apartment (the ragged snore of a roommate; the clanking of the steam radiator; the cat’s skidding pursuit of something only he can see).

It may also soothe because it replicates an early sound environment, probably that of a Manhattan childhood, though perhaps it suggests something much, much older. Some sleep experts note that babies, their ears accustomed to the whisper of the maternal circulatory system and the slosh of the womb, sleep better accompanied by a device that mimics those familiar whooshings.

My app is but one note in the mighty chorus of white-noise generators, an exploding industry of mechanical and digital devices; apps and websites, and Sonos and Spotify playlists that grows ever more refined, as if to block out the increased rate of speeding, the wrecks, on the information superhighway. 

Car Interior? Oil Tanker? Laundromat? These ballads are in the vast soundscape library created by Stéphane Pigeon, a Belgian electrical engineer, and ready to play on Mynoise.net, a sound generator he put online in 2013 that now has one million page views each month. It’s a nearly philanthropic enterprise, as it runs on donations. “I have enough stress,” Dr. Pigeon said.

Reddit, among other message boards, offers D.I.Y. white-noise hacks for light sleepers, shift workers and tinnitus sufferers. Rough up the blades of a box fan with a box cutter, suggested Christopher Suarez, a field service technician from Riverside, Calif., whose wife is an insomniac, on one captivating thread there.

The first so-called domestic white-noise machine may have been built in 1962, by a traveling salesman whose wife grew used to the air-conditioners in the motels they frequented and was unable to sleep at home.

But white noise was identified by engineers as early as the 1920s, Dr. Pigeon said, and used as a test signal because, as he put it, “it’s the sum of all the audible frequencies in equal proportion in a single sound. It’s so named because of its analogy to light, which turns white when all visible frequencies are summed up into a single beam.”

Back home in his garage, Jim Buckwalter, the salesman, set a turntable and a fan blade into a dog bowl insulated by some foam, and invented the Marpac Sleep-Mate, now called the Dohm ($40 on Amazon), a gizmo whose popularity grew by word of mouth and became a favorite not just of light sleepers, but also of psychotherapists, the legal and medical community, and others seeking to mask confidential conversations. (Nothing says 1980s-era Upper West Side analysis like the whispery hiss of a mushroom-shaped Dohm.)

Sound purists adore it, because its mechanical whirring is closer to truly random and contains no loop, as many digital versions do.

Blocking the Bullfrogs

Fred Maher is a veteran music producer and drummer who works as an audio engineer and audio-quality tester. He has what are considered golden ears, meaning he is an expert listener who can spot audio errors in music, film and television content. He also suffers from tinnitus, a condition he soothed for years with machines like the Dohm. (That device is now in the bedroom of his 6-year-old daughter, Ruby.)

White noise, he wrote in an email, “is one of the first things we hear from our first moment of existence, in utero (not the Nirvana album). It’s what you hear in a seashell, kind of. The seashell is a mechanical filter that focuses and amplifies ambient noise.”

Sleep is inherently dangerous, said Rafael Pelayo, a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine. This is why we are wired to sort sounds as we sleep, he said, to differentiate the threats, or a baby’s cry, from more benign noises.

“How can a mother feed her baby if the ability to wake up is not wired into our brain?” Dr. Pelayo said. “The thalamus needs to decide if a noise is worth informing the cortex. There’s a concept in sleep called the arousal threshold — it’s the stimulus you need to go from a deep sleep to awake. It can be a loud noise, like a garbage truck, or something soft, like your partner saying, ‘Honey, I think there’s a burglar in the house.’ The idea of a noise generator is to raise the background noise so you don’t notice the sounds that aren’t worth your attention: a snoring partner or the hotel elevator.”

Dr. Pelayo is on the board of Adaptive Sound Technologies, which makes Lectrofan ($50 on Amazon), a digital, but nonlooping, version of the old analog noise machines, but he stressed that Stanford does not endorse products.

There is no data that suggests a white-noise machine alters the frequencies of the brain, said Param Dedhia, the director of sleep medicine at the Canyon Ranch in Tucson. “But we can show that if you make a loud sound, you can affect your response to that with a noise machine. It’s called auditory masking.”

Dr. Dedhia described its effects as a sound bubble, “a force field of sound such that a noise has to be much stronger to break through.” Dr. Dedhia has deployed Marpac Dohms in the bedrooms at Canyon Ranch, and also in his home, because the pool there draws an army of bullfrogs after dark. Their nightly chorus drives him bananas.

“Oh, my friend,” he said, “it sounds like someone dying. I used to get my hose and spray them off the sides of the pool, but they soon were on to me, and after a while just hopped back on. So now I have my humidifier running, and the white noise right next to the bed. It’s my sound bubble. We don’t have to have a bug or pill for every ill if we can soothe ourselves. It’s a skill, it really is. If we could all self-soothe, it would make it easier to handle other chaos.”

What is noise, anyway? Dr. Dedhia likes this definition, from the authors of a sleep study: “Noise is defined as unwanted sounds that could have negative psychological and physiological effects.”

Noise is terribly subjective. There are those who love the croak of a bullfrog, and are soothed by the snores of their partner because it means they are close. Dr. Pigeon allowed that snoring was particularly tough to mask, given its locality (next to your head) and unpredictability (your ears crane for the next growl or explosive sigh).

“You must convince yourself the sound of snoring is beautiful,” he said. “I have some people who asked me to put snoring on the website because they are used to sleeping with a partner snoring, and when that partner is gone — traveling or divorced or dead — they miss that sound.”

“I have some snoring hidden in one of the generators,” he said. “It’s called Berber Tent. It’s an attempt to take you on a nice story. You are in the desert on vacation and it has been a very warm day and you are all snoozing in the tent together while food is prepared. You can hear the breeze, and the tent flapping and the sound of a man snoring. I didn’t set out to do that, but I always am waiting for opportunities and I was on a trek and I heard it and I taped it. I think if you imagine a beautiful young Berber sleeping next to you, it will change your mind.”

Worth a try.

Is the World Noisier?

An insomniac himself, Dr. Pigeon is not soothed by his soundscapes because he knows them by heart and will fret over dissonances only he can perceive. “A particular wave on the Irish Coast that crashes too loudly, or a bird that sings in the wrong place,” he said.

“I have a brain that can’t stop working,” he added sadly. “I haven’t found a way to stop its chatter.”

Is the world noisier? New York City certainly is. In 2016, there were 420,000 complaints to 311, the city’s hotline for nonemergency services, more than twice as many as there were in 2011. An analysis of that noise data by The New York Times revealed that bad behavior — loud music and parties — made up the majority of the complaints, followed by banging and pounding sounds.

Alan Fierstein, an acoustic consultant and noise-abatement expert who has been measuring New York City’s clamor for over four decades, said that the city is empirically noisier because there’s just more of everything. More construction, more cars, more people and, most important, more attitude.

“One man’s castle is usually above another man’s castle,” Mr. Fierstein said. “You have this huge amount of real-estate appreciation, and people are paying a lot of money and as a result they feel like they can do what they want.” 

ith its media rooms and central air-conditioning, and apartment combinations that put his fancy new kitchen over your son’s bedroom,” will not produce any undue noises.

Mr. Fierstein can design noise programs that are perfectly tuned to block the pure tones, as he put it, of outside irritants, like bus noises or building mechanicals, that can be played on any speaker system. (He described a pure tone as any sound that has a specific and constant musical pitch, and then demonstrated by making a high beeping noise into the phone.)

“The way to block a noise is not to be as loud or louder” than the offending sound, he said. “You also have to produce sound that’s on the same frequency. One of the things that makes noise so unreasonable is the lack of control. You can’t stand your neighbor’s loud music even if it’s your favorite artist. One benefit of masking noise is that you can call it your own.”

Recently Mr. Fierstein was called in to mediate a dispute between two neighbors, one of whom was so irked by the sound of the other’s air-conditioner that he positioned eight white-noise machines throughout his studio apartment, the noise of which then annoyed the air-conditioner man.

It was the noise-machine man who sent for Mr. Fierstein. His report noted that the air-conditioner, a window unit, was emitting “audible pure tones,” he said, and may have been improperly mounted, shaking the framing of the building. That would be a win for noise-machine man, though the building’s management has yet to weigh in.

Mr. Suarez, the technician whose recipe for a roughed-up box fan appeared on Reddit, suggested that the increased racket we hear is more often living in our heads. The noises we use to “quiet” them are a kind of placebo, he said. Mr. Suarez noted the constant commotions of the news cycle and social media, and made the point that we don’t do enough physical activities during the day to dissipate our energies.

“Even if you turn off the pings on your phone and turn away from your devices,” he said, speaking from his van as he drove to a job, “you’re still thinking, ‘What’s happening with Facebook? With Congress?’ There is so much going on, and so little resolution. When was the last time you heard the end of a story?”

The Tech That Was Fixed in 2018 and the Tech That Still Needs Fixing

From Facebook to creepy online ads, the worst tech of the year made the internet feel like an unsafe place to hang out. Yet there were some products that were fixed, our personal tech critic writes.

Personal technology was so awful this year that nobody would think you were paranoid if you dug a hole and buried your computer, phone and smart speaker under six feet of earth.

Facebook made headlines week after week for failing to protect our privacy and for spreading misinformation. Juul, the e-cigarette company under investigation for marketing products to teenagers, emerged as the Joe Camel of the digital era. And don’t get me started on just how intrusive online advertising has become.

On the other hand, there was good technology this year that improved how we live, like parental controls to curb smartphone addiction and a web browser with built-in privacy protections.

For the last two years, I’ve reviewed the tech that needed the most fixing and the tech that was fixed for the first time. This year, I’m repeating the tradition in hopes that the list of lows gets shorter and the list of highs gets longer over time. 

Tech That Still Needs Fixing

Social media

Facebook this year was analogous to a cheating romantic partner who was caught betraying us and apologized — only to be caught again weeks later.

The social network admitted that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, had improperly gained access to the data of millions. Later, the company confessed that a security breach had exposed the data of 30 million accounts. This month, a New York Times investigation revealed that Facebook gave tech giants like Netflix and Spotify special access to user data, including private messages.

Other social media companies also stumbled. Twitter came under fire for being slow to react to Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who regularly spread misinformation, including that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax. Even after Facebook, Apple, YouTube and others took down Mr. Jones’s content in early August, Twitter said his posts had not violated the company’s policies. After several more weeks, Twitter barred Mr. Jones in response to reports of abusive behavior.

Google’s YouTube, long adored as a venue for people to share music videos, food recipes and D.I.Y. home improvement projects, also had a tough year. The video-sharing site said it had removed 39 channels that were linked to an Iranian disinformation campaign.

The bottom line: Social media companies demonstrated they could barely be trusted with our data and were still trying to get a handle on all of their issues. Unfortunately, there is no simple solution for problems like hate speech and misinformation. And keeping our information private is not really in the interest of many of these companies, which use our data to target us with digital advertising. 

Online advertising

Speaking of which: Online ads became so intrusive in 2018 that they increasingly ruined people’s web-browsing experiences and raised more hackles about privacy.

The online ads industry became so good at tracking our web browsing activities that it increasingly knew precisely what we were thinking about buying. If you did a web search for a blender, for example, you could be certain that a digital ad for that blender would follow you around. In addition, the autoplay videos embedded on many news sites were ruthless about shouting for our attention while draining our batteries and burning through data plans.

Fortunately, there are solutions for this, which I outlined in several articles this year about how the web is breaking. They included installing ad and tracker blockers, downloading add-ons that stop auto-play videos from loading and changing some browser settings.

These fixes are not ideal because they take a long time to put in place, and blocking ads hurts media businesses. That means there’s work to do on this yet.

Juul

E-cigarettes, or vape devices like Juul, have been a useful aid for adult smokers to give up cigarettes. But for teenagers, vapes have replaced cigarettes as a gateway to addictive substances. According to the 2018 National Youth Tobacco Survey, about 3.6 million middle and high school students currently vape, up from 280,000 in 2011.

The Food and Drug Administration this year announced restrictions that allowed stores to sell most flavored e-cigarettes only in areas where minors were not permitted. The agency also said it was investigating whether Juul, which accounts for more than 70 percent of e-cigarette sales, intentionally marketed its products to youths. Juul has since suspended its social media promotions.

But the damage has been done. While e-cigarettes don’t produce the carcinogenic smoke that cigarettes do, they deliver lots of nicotine and harmful chemicals. Parents are reeling over the effect on teenage brains.

Tech That Was Fixed

Smartphone parental controls

E-cigarettes notwithstanding, at least parents can worry less about their children’s addiction to smartphones. This year, Apple released Screen Time, a feature for people to set restrictions on the amount of time they spend on their iPhones. The software includes the ability for parents to remotely monitor and limit their children’s iPhone use.

I tested Screen Time for three weeks with a colleague’s daughter and was thrilled to see that the curbs helped the screenager cut iPhone use down to about three hours a day from roughly six hours. (The constraints I set on myself were not as effective because I could easily override them as a parent.)

There’s still room for smartphone parental controls to improve. Google offers Family Link, a comprehensive parental controls tool for Android phones. Yet the software has major limitations, as children can turn off the features once they turn 13 — which seems like precisely the time when you would want to be monitoring your child’s phone.

A browser for the people

Remember Firefox? Over the last decade, the once prominent web browser became irrelevant after Google released Chrome, a speedier and more secure web browser. Then late last year, Mozilla released a redesign of Firefox with thoughtful privacy features and much faster browsing speeds.

This year, Mozilla kept polishing and expanding on Firefox’s capabilities. It released a “container” that can be installed to prevent Facebook from tracking your activities across the web. In August, Mozilla also said that it would, by default, turn on anti-tracking features to prevent third parties, including advertisers, from snooping.

Firefox could still be better. Chrome, for instance, is still faster at loading some web pages. But after a harsh year when consumers lost faith in how companies like Facebook managed their data, it feels heartening to know that someone in the tech industry is making a browser for the people.

So did we get to a shorter list of personal tech lows and a longer list of highs? Not quite. I guess there’s always next year.

5 Tech Advances That Can Deepen Customer Engagement

Customers are crucial to a successful business. They can be one-off customers or repeat buyers. Ideally, a business wants a mix of both. Problems arise when marketing tactics fail to attract either type, which is why customer engagement is so critical in today's hypercompetitive e-commerce environment.

It should be no surprise that customers prefer companies that treat them as valued individuals. It is also no secret that engaged customers talk, shop and spend more. So, how do e-commerce brands stand out and tell customers that they (and not just their wallets) matter?

The answers:

• With personalized user experiences (UX) that capture attention and make shopping convenient.
• With a seamless flow of content, data and functionality across channels.
• With quality service that customers respond to with sales.
• With the integration of new technology that deepens relationships, boosts retention rates and increases revenues.

Consider the real-life, in-store experiences that influence customer behavior. People touch objects, try them on, and test them out. They discuss products with friends and other customers. They wander around the aisles, get answers from friendly staff members, and make returns or exchanges.

The goal for e-commerce brands is to blend brick-and-mortar immediacy with the convenience of digital shopping. It is time to leverage technology to transcend the transactional, and deepen customer engagement. The following five e-commerce technologies can help build sales strategy to win the interest, business and loyalty of online customers.

1. Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Technology

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are rising stars in e-commerce. The two technologies encourage deeper customer engagement by transforming in-store/in-person shopping activities into rewarding digital experiences.

For example, virtual try-on tools allow online customers to see how they look "wearing" a product rather than relying on mere photography. Customers can take a selfie, select the product they want to try, and the application "applies" it to their face or body.

Many virtual try-on tools also allow users to share on social media for feedback from friends and family. While fashion and beauty brands are rushing to integrate virtual try-on tools into their UX, AR and VR also have plenty to offer in other industries.

Furniture brand IKEA pioneered an AR technology called "home view" that allows users to place virtual furniture around their home with a smartphone camera. The virtual tours also provide similar value. When integrated with virtual try-on and sales functions, the technology allows users to explore and shop in a virtual store the same way they would at a brick-and-mortar location.

AR and VR technologies remove the barriers of digital platforms and allow for meaningful product interactions. They also decrease some of the uncertainty involved in buying a product without experiencing it first-hand. AR and VR offer customers convenient and personalized access to products and services regardless of time, location or device.

2. Conversational Commerce

Conversational commerce technology interacts with customers using clear, natural language. It replicates the one-on-one feel of a dedicated salesperson, and helps customers make the right purchase through personalized recommendations and support.

Brands can deliver outstanding service to customers through conversational commerce applications like chatbots, messaging apps, voice assistance, and other natural language interactions. Social media is conversational commerce, too.

As an example, chatbots are a form of artificial intelligence (more about AI soon) that connect with visitors based on event triggers and direct questions. The technology can function via messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, so that users can communicate the way they want to.

When a visitor lands on a website, the chatbot will connect and offer help. The user can ask for recommendations, answers and troubleshoot issues without having to browse through the website. After a purchase, the chatbot also can provide shipping updates, assist with returns, and collect customer surveys. Because a chatbot is not limited to the number of customers it can assist, the technology can provide excellent service at scale.

"App fatigue" is another reason to implement conversational commerce. People simply get tired of tapping, scrolling and typing. They do not want to read endless product descriptions or browse pages for answers. They just want to ask and receive an answer. This is where voice assistance technology and other conversational commerce tools, like Amazon Echo or Google Home, can turn an otherwise reluctant customer into a buyer.

Good conversation naturally deepens engagement with others, and it can drive them further down the conversion funnel. It is important for businesses to find ways to introduce conversation into UX. The conversions will follow.

3. Artificial Intelligence

Sales-focused AI provides real-time personalization of a customer's shopping experience. It can help businesses deliver more engaging UX by treating customers as individuals rather than parts of a general segment or demographic. Ever since Amazon's intelligent product recommendations, this feature has become a staple across the e-commerce industry.

AI helps businesses understand customers and market more effectively by gathering, sorting and analyzing behavioral data (e.g. user actions on a website or app, what they are interested in/searching for, etc.). Through intelligent algorithms, websites and apps can dynamically populate the user interface with targeted content to encourage greater interaction.

Simply put, AI helps businesses better understand customers and satisfy expectations. AI can also contribute to better UX by streamlining back-end functions, such as inventory management, instant customer service, and automated CRM (customer relationship management) systems.

Through the increase of operational efficiency on the business side, businesses can devote more time to nurturing customer relationships. When a brand offers an interaction that is natural and personal, a customer is more likely to be engaged and respond to its call-to-action.

4. The Internet of Things

In the Internet of Things (IoT), customer engagement is no longer restricted to a screen or store. This means that upsell opportunities are not restricted, either. Through the IoT, brands can maintain positive engagement, provide added convenience, and capitalize on new sales opportunities at any time and almost anywhere.

The IoT is the interconnection of technology that is embedded in everyday objects (think cars, kitchen appliances, suitcases, etc.) and enables the objects to send and receive data.

IoT items for disposable products also can allow for convenient, subscription-based sales related to product components. For example, the latest coffee makers have been updated to function in the IoT, meaning that the product not only makes coffee, but also alerts users when supplies are low -- and can even reorder supplies automatically.

Devices like Amazon's Echo products and Google Home offer new levels of control over the home environment and can act as hubs between other connected devices. The products also leverage the conversational commerce technology.

Brands interested in increased customer engagement also need to be looking into the IoT. While building smart e-commerce capabilities into products may be a big change/expensive, the cost of not getting involved in the IoT is greater.

5. API-Based E-Commerce

Running through and behind the aforementioned technologies are APIs, or application programming interfaces. These interfaces connect software, hardware, business platforms, third parties and customers to enable the seamless sharing of data. Due to API-based e-commerce, customers have complete freedom to continue their shopping journey whenever and wherever they want to.

For example, a customer might make a purchase online, consult with customer service via social media, and then exchange the product in-store -- all without hassle, because an API has shared the customer's information across all channels.

Thanks to APIs, businesses can engage intelligently with customers anywhere: from brick-and-mortar stores, online websites and social media, to digital apps and smart devices, wearables, vehicles, and much more. This saves customers hassle, and results in a more engaging shopping experience.

Interconnectivity leads to more engagement. Brand interactions can happen anywhere and at any time, and APIs can make them a seamless extension of the actual shopping experience.

Start Your Customer Engagement Strategy

New technology is driving deeper customer engagement every day by eliminating barriers to interaction and shopping. The customer experience is taking on new dimensions. Now, websites and apps show people exactly what they want (or help them find it), and then various technologies maintain and deepen that connection. The experience extends beyond the immediate interaction and becomes available at any time.

Separately, the technologies discussed here are valuable. Together, they support the kind of omnichannel e-commerce experience that nurtures long-term relationships with customers and drives significant increases in revenue.

In the competitive and ever-changing world of e-commerce, integrated technology across time, devices and locations is what drives (and capitalizes on) customer engagement. If businesses make it easy and convenient for people to do business, the conversions will follow.

The VR Experience: Challenges for a Growing Market

Virtual reality devices, including headsets and peripherals, offer consumers and businesses new ways to experience and share immersive content for entertainment, educational, social and other purposes.

VR's unique capability to promote user interaction through highly immersive content provides untapped potential in terms of storytelling, advertising, the practice of medicine, business, travel and much more. Virtual reality headsets are now available at increasingly attainable prices, and many consumers have computing hardware capable of supporting the demands of VR software.

Compared with other consumer technology products, VR headset adoption, purchase, and purchase intention rates remain extremely low.

Slow Start

Only 7 percent of U.S. broadband households surveyed owned at least one virtual reality headset as of Q3 2017. Three percent reported having purchased a headset in the year prior, and 14 percent reported their intent to purchase one in the coming year. Those rates reflect a very young market.

The rate of year-over-year increase was substantial, though. Both the adoption and purchase rates tripled between early 2016 and Q3 2017. The percentage of broadband households indicating their intention to buy one or more VR headsets in the year ahead nearly tripled in the same18-month period.

Many companies anticipate strong growth for the VR market as both headsets and content become increasingly available and accessible.

The major companies that drove the early push for consumer VR -- Facebook, Valve/HTC, Sony, Samsung and Google -- continue to lead the market today. Microsoft joined them with the release of its Windows Mixed Reality headsets at the end of 2017. The HTC Vive and Oculus Rift still dominate the premium PC-based space, while Samsung and Google continue to rule the mobile VR market.

Pricing remains a constraint, particularly for mid-tier and premium head-mounted displays. The industry must address several factors before VR will achieve a stronger mainstream presence.

Lack of Familiarity

Less than one-quarter (23 percent) of consumers surveyed were familiar or very familiar with virtual reality, and even fewer reported familiarity with specific VR headsets.

Because the value of VR is best understood when experienced, headset demos are key to VR adoption. As of Q1 2017, fewer than 13 percent of consumers had experienced VR -- a statistic that must change for VR to achieve mass market adoption.

Technology Fragmentation

VR market players have been experimenting with a variety of tracking, input and content technologies, with no common standards followed by the entire industry. As a result, much of the content produced remains constrained to particular headset hardware, and conversion to alternative hardware often is costly.

This fragmentation makes content development expensive and limits content distribution. With no dominant VR headset maker and little prospect of near-term consensus, the lack of standardization will remain an issue for the next few years.

User Experience Issues

The various VR technology approaches present unique user experience issues that current-generation VR headsets have yet to solve.

Feedback on the user experience from those who own or have tried VR headsets has been mixed, based on Parks Associates data. While the majority of survey respondents said they would like to be able to experience VR in their own homes, more than half also reported that they did not think the experience would be worth the extra expense of buying a headset. Most indicated that the experience exceeded their expectations, but one-fifth said it did not. One-third found the VR experience disorienting or uncomfortable.

Lack of a Concise Value Proposition

Virtual Reality describes a way of experiencing content rather than promoting the type, purpose, or value of the content itself. Potential use cases are wide-ranging, and this diversity of purposes makes the technology an attractive investment. It eventually could become so widespread as to be indispensable in some industries.

Yet fragmentation in uses cases may slow initial traction. While gaming, streaming 360-degree video, and virtual travel all provide compelling use cases, there are no ecosystems sufficiently developed to drive headset sales on their own.

Despite slow initial uptake, virtual reality has the potential to breathe life into a consumer electronics market at risk of languishing. Its last round of innovative, disruptive devices -- smartphones and tablets -- have been reaching maturity rapidly.

More than 77 million households will own VR devices by 2021, Parks Associates has forecast. That's 2.3 times more than the number that owned a device in 2017.

The VR market's growth will continue to be driven primarily by gamers and enthusiasts, though VR live broadcasts of Olympic games, sports, and other live events by companies such as NBC and NextVR have become increasingly popular over the past two years.

Market players and watchers should continue to pay close attention, as the VR market has the potential to change drastically over the next two to three years.

Linux Skills Most Wanted: Open Source Jobs Report

The 2018 Open Source Technology Jobs Report shows rapid growth in the demand for open source technical talent, with Linux skills a must-have requirement for entry-level positions.

The seventh annual report from The Linux Foundation and Dice, released Wednesday, identifies Linux coding as the most sought-after open source skill. Linux-based container technology is a close second.

The report provides an overview of open source career trends, factors motivating professionals in the industry, and ways employers attract and retain qualified talent. As with the last two open source jobs reports, the focus this year is on all aspects of open source software and is not limited to Linux.

This year's report features data from more than 750 hiring managers at corporations, small and medium businesses, and government organizations and staffing agencies across the globe. It is based on responses from more than 6,500 open source professionals worldwide.

Linux skills rank as the most sought-after skills in the 2018 report, with 80 percent of hiring managers looking for tech professionals with Linux expertise.

Linux is required knowledge for most entry-level open source careers, likely due to the strong popularity of cloud and container technologies, as well as DevOps practices, all of which typically are based on Linux, according to the report.

"Open source technology talent is in high demand, as Linux and other open source software dominates software development," said Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin.

"I am encouraged that companies are recognizing more and more each day that open source technology is the way to advance their businesses," he continued. "The Linux Foundation, our members and the open source ecosystem are focused on ensuring training and certification opportunities are highly accessible to everyone who wants to seek them out, and we are supporting the developer community and its growth in every possible way."

Heightened Recruitment Efforts

There has been an increase in recruitment activities among companies and organizations that want to bolster open source technology talent, the report reveals.

Slightly more than half (55 percent) of the responding companies said they were offering additional training and certification opportunities for existing staff in order to fill skills gaps. That total is up from 47 percent in 2017 and only 34 percent in 2016.

Eighty-seven percent of hiring managers reported difficulty finding open source talent. Nearly half (48 percent) reported their organizations had begun to support open source projects by contributing code or other resources for the explicit reason of recruiting individuals with those software skills.

"Hiring skilled technology professionals remains a real pain point for employers, and our report shows newer skills like containers are growing in popularity, putting more pressure on organizations to find good talent to carry out necessary projects," said Art Zeile, CEO of DHI Group, the parent company of Dice.

Key Takeaways

There appears to be a disparity between the views of hiring managers and open source pros over the effectiveness of ongoing efforts to improve diversity. Only 52 percent of employees saw those efforts as effective, compared to 70 percent of employers, the report found.

Other findings:

• Hiring open source talent was a priority for 83 percent of hiring managers, an increase from 76 percent in 2017.
• Containers have been growing rapidly in popularity and importance, with 57 percent of hiring managers seeking container expertise, up from only 27 percent last year.
• Hiring managers have been moving away from hiring outside consultants, increasingly opting to train existing employees on new open source technologies and help them gain certifications.
• Many organizations have been getting involved in open source with the express purpose of attracting developers.

Effective Business Strategy

Demand for open source talent is high because more companies have begun embracing open source technologies for next-generation workloads and applications, said Ian McClarty, CEO of Phoenix Data Center.

Business leaders see open source as a way to rein in licensing costs, and technologist are enamored with new ways to deploy code and systems in a scale-out fashion, he suggested.

"The big push into cloud services and virtualization has also helped to drive adoption of open source technologies," McClarty told LinuxInsider. "Developers want rapid systems to deploy in, and do not want to wait around for purchasing and logistics to take care of their needs."

IT has changed from driving the bottom line to driving the top line for enterprises. Most new applications are developed and built using the DevOps model, according to Brajesh Goyal, vice president of engineering at Cavirin.

This movement was driven by new-generation companies such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter, he noted.

"In addition to changing the business landscape, these companies also built the next set of tools for big data, cloud, AI/machine learning and containers," Goyal told LinuxInsider. "All of these technologies are mostly open source. [They] are now entering the scale of massive adoption across the business landscape and hence driving the need for open source talent."

High Demand Is Contagious

Two of the leading reasons for open source's growing popularity are its effectiveness in improving time to market and in developing base software.

"It is the way most new software is being built, particularly infrastructure software that is broadly applicable across many industries and use cases," said Howard Green, vice president of marketing at Azul Systems.

People who work on open source projects on their own time typically are willing to give their creativity and their work to the community. Almost any business that plans to survive wants motivated, creative people.

"That includes people who are excited enough about what they do to work on their own open source projects and make their skills and ideas directly visible to their peers," Green told LinuxInsider.

Demand for open source talent increases because open source has become the most relevant way of producing base software, noted Stefano Maffulli, director of community for Scality.

Open source powers everything, he pointed out.

"Software drives innovation, and the productivity of whole nations depends on it," Maffulli told LinuxInsider. "According to a Black Duck report, 57 percent of proprietary codebase includes open source code, up from 36 percent last year. I expect that percentage to keep on rising."

Hiring Insights

Companies and job candidates can take steps to benefit from the report findings. The key is to leverage their interest in open source.

"Companies can take advantage of this trend by being clear that they support open source technologies [and] use them," noted Azul's Green.

"Most newer open source technologies are not available via traditional certification means. The easiest way to get into the open source field is to get a virtual instance in one of the many public cloud companies that are out there -- it isn't just about the hyper scalers," he said.

"There are excellent documentation and videos readily available for beginners. Most open source software has toasters available that are step-by-step guides on how to configure, install and test," Green pointed out.

"Finding a small project to apply the knowledge gained is also critical," he continued. "The 'just do it' mentality married with a small project will give someone the necessary foundation to open up a new career field in their daily operations, and value people who also work on their own projects and/or contribute to larger-scale projects."

Very large enterprises and early-stage companies often hire people full-time, with their sole responsibility being to contribute to a high-value open source technology, Green said.

Job candidates can respond to this trend by walking the walk. They can do this by contributing to one or more open source projects they care about. Another strategy is to learn how to make the best use of today's powerful open source technologies.

"In the case of applications ranging from databases to development tools to messaging stacks, understand the tradeoffs between specific open source offerings and their closed-source analogues," advised Green.

Developers and engineers interested in working on open source projects and tools can enter the field by demonstrating value within an existing community. Or they can build open source products or tools of their own.

"The great thing about open source is that quality of the design and the code is visible," noted Green. "It is a living CV. Open source contributions and developers are by their nature visible, verifiable and stand on their own."

Schooling and Professionalism Count

Technical schools need to start teaching social skills to engineers, suggested Scality's Muffulli.

The old stereotype of the lone open source coder in the basement is not accurate anymore, he said. With so much code and documentation being developed in the open, across cultural boundaries, developers cannot avoid human interactions.

"In my job, a lot of effort is spent explaining how to craft comments to a pull request that is not offensive and can lead to actual progress. It should not be surprising, but candidates that are pleasant human beings have a better chance of being hired," Muffulli observed.

Presentation skills are important to new developers, he added. "Be ready to show equally good code, well-done documentation, and social interactions on platforms like mailing lists, GitHub, forums and the like. [Candidates] need to demonstrate that they can develop and solve issues in a collaborative environment."

No Ordinary Path

Most newer open source technologies are not available via traditional certification means, according to Phoenix Data Center's McClarty.

The easiest way to get into the open source field is to get a virtual instance in one of the many public cloud companies, he suggested.

For job candidates, it's a no-brainer: Learn open source software, said Kaj Arno, chief evangelist at MariaDB.

"Document your usage through certification -- and if you are into developing open source infrastructure software yourself, start by writing contributions to existing open source software," he advised.

"Almost all of our developers started out that way," Arno told LinuxInsider.

The key is to learn, certify and develop by contributing. Then decide whether a career in open source means a career in developing applications that are based on open source, or a career in developing open source software, he suggested. "Those are two different things, albeit related."

IT Resume Dos and Don'ts: Formatting for Readability

In my career as an IT resume writer, I've seen a lot of IT resumes cross my desk, and I'd like to share some common of the most common formatting problems that I see regularly. Of course, an IT resume requires more than great formatting. It requires well-written, targeted content, and a clear story of career progression. It needs to communicate your unique brand and value proposition.

Still, if the formatting is off, that can derail the rest of the document and prevent your story being read by the hiring authority.

I'll start with a few IT resume formatting "don'ts."

1. Don't Use Headers

This is an easy fix. Headers and footers made a lot of sense when an IT resume was likely to be read as a printed sheet of paper.

In 2018, how likely is it that a busy hiring authority is going to take the time or the effort to print out the hundreds of resumes that are submitted for every position?

Not terribly.

Your IT resume is going to be read online.

That's why using a header for your contact information is a bad idea.

It takes a few seconds to click on the header, copy and paste your email and phone number, and then click again in the body of the resume to read the text.

A few seconds doesn't seem like much, but for someone who is looking through a lot of resumes, every second really does count. A hiring authority who is REALLY busy may just decide it's too much trouble to get your contact information from the header.

That means your resume may well end up in the "read later" folder.

That's not a good outcome.

There's another problem with using the header, related to the one I just discussed.

Headers just look old fashioned. Out of date.

Old fashioned is not the brand you want to present if you're looking for a job in technology -- whether you're a CIO, an IT director, or a senior developer.

Again, this is an easy fix. Just put your name and contact information in the body of the resume. I suggest using a larger font in bold caps for your name. You want to be certain that your name will stick in the memory of the reader.

2. Don't Over-Bullet

This is probably the most common mistake I see in the IT resumes that cross my desk.

In my trade, we call it "death by bullets." The job seeker has bulleted everything.

Everything.

That's really hard to read. Beyond the fact that it's just not clear, there's another big problem with over-bulleting.

To paraphrase The Incredibles, if everything is bulleted, nothing is.

The goal of using bullets -- sparingly -- is to draw the reader's eye and attention to your major accomplishments.

If you've bulleted everything, the reader doesn't know what's critical and what's not, which defeats the purpose of using bullets in your resume.

In my own work as an IT resume writer, I make a clear distinction between duties and responsibilities and hard, quantifiable accomplishments. I write the duties in paragraph format, and bullet only the accomplishments that demonstrate what my IT resume clients really have delivered.

It's a clear, straightforward approach that I recommend.

3. Don't Get Colorful

Happily, this particular problem doesn't seem as common as it was a few years ago, but every once in a while, I'll still see a resume with lots of color.

The idea behind that, of course, is to make the resume "eye-catching."

Rather than catching the reader's eye, however, a lot of color is just confusing.

"Why is this section blue? Is blue telling me it's really important? And yellow? Why is this person using yellow? Because it's mighty hard to read..."

I'm sure you see my point. The colors, rather than giving the reader a map of what to look at first -- what to prioritize -- just end up looking, well, busy.

That makes your resume harder to read. And if it's harder to read?

Yeah. As I mentioned above: It's likely to go into the "read later" folder.

You really don't want that to happen.

4. Don't Lead With Education

This is another easy fix, but it's important.

The only time you want to lead with education is when you're a new grad. If you're a professional -- whether senior, mid-career or junior -- you want to highlight your experience on page one, and not take up that valuable space with your degrees or certifications.

Of course, degrees, training and certifications are important, but they belong at the end of the resume, at the bottom of page two or three.

5. Don't Use Arial or Times New Roman

I'll end the "don'ts" with another simple one.

Arial and Times New Roman are, well, so 1990s. Yes, they're good, clear, readable fonts, which is why they've become so popular.

Probably 90 percent of all IT resumes are written in these two fonts. There's nothing negative in that, but it's a little boring.

Now, I'm not suggesting you use Comic Sans or Magneto, but there are some great, clean fonts that aren't as common in the IT resume world.

Personally? I like Calibri for body and Cambria for headings.

So, that gives you a number of things to avoid in formatting your IT resume. I'll now suggest a few "dos" to concentrate on to ensure that your document is as readable as possible.

1. Keep Things Simple

I'm a strong believer that an IT resume needs to tell a story. The formatting of the document should serve only to clarify that story, and not get in the way.

When the document is finished, take a look. Does the formatting lead your eye to the most important points? Is the formatting clear and clean? Or does it distract from the story you're trying to tell?

2. Think Mobile

This point gets more important with each passing year. These days, the odds are that the hiring authority will be reading your story on a phone, tablet, or other mobile device.

That's changed the way I've formatted the IT resumes I write for my clients.

I've never gone beyond minimal design, but I've scaled things back. For example, I used to use shading to draw attention to critical sections of the document.

But now? I think that can be hard to read on a mobile -- and readability, to repeat a theme, is the only goal of resume formatting.

3. Use Bold and Italics Sparingly

This point follows directly from the previous one. We don't want to bold or italicize everything. Bold and italics, used consistently and sparingly, can help signal to the reader what is most important in your IT resume, and provide a framework for a quick read-through.

That enables the hiring authority to get the gist of your career fast, without distracting from a deeper second read.

4. Use Hard Page Breaks

This is pretty simple, but it is important. I always insert hard page breaks in every finished IT resume I write. That helps ensure that the document is going to look consistent across devices and across platforms.

It's not 100 percent foolproof -- Word is a less-than-perfect tool. With hard page breaks, though, the odds are very good that your resume will look the same to each reader -- and to the same reader when reviewing the document on different devices. That consistency reinforces the sense of professionalism you're striving to convey.

5. Write First, Format Later

Professional IT resume writers disagree on this, but I'm going to suggest what I've found effective in my practice.

I always write the resume first. I personally use a plain text editor, to make certain that Microsoft Word doesn't add anything that I'll have to fight to remove later.

It's only when I've got the text completely finished that I copy and paste into Word, and then add the formatting that I think best supports the client story I'm trying to tell.

If I try to format as I'm writing, the formatting may take over. It's tempting to insist on keeping the formatting consistent, even when it's not best supporting the story.

So think about it. I'd strongly recommend writing first, and formatting later, when you're completely clear on the story you're trying to tell.

I know that many people struggle with formatting their IT resume, so I hope that these simple ideas will help make the process a little easier and less painful.

Stay tuned for future articles that will dig a bit deeper into the IT resume process, covering content structure, writing style, and branding.

Who's Winning the Latest Tech Industry Battles?

December has become consistent with the Chinese curse, "May You Be Born In Interesting Times." We are up to our armpits in wars, and each is very different. Qualcomm and Intel are fighting for 5G control, and Intel is tearing itself apart. Microsoft passed Apple in valuation, largely because it has not been focusing on Apple.

Canadian authorities just arrested the daughter of the Huawei founder, at the request of the United States, cratering the stock market again, and setting up a chain of events that could ensure that President Trump might lose not only the next election, but everything.

I'll share my thoughts about those things and close with my product of the week: the Always Connected Lenovo Yoga C630, the laptop that showcases our coming always-connected 5G future.

Qualcomm vs. Intel

One unpleasant aspect of my job is that I get really sick of watching companies repeat mistakes. I think I should publish a book of mistakes and number them, and then I could save myself a lot of words by just saying I'm going to talk about mistake No. 42, and then move on to something new and interesting.

I'm writing this from Hawaii, where Qualcomm held a brilliant December event, showcasing its 5G progress and launching its 855 5G platform, which easily overwhelms anything Intel is capable of in 2019 in mobile.

I can say this because we already know Intel is more than a year out with its competing solution and is showcasing benchmarks with its next solution, which is only marginally competitive with what Qualcomm is shipping today.

Even with this event, Qualcomm is out-executing Intel. By choosing Hawaii, the company attracted the folks it wants to influence, drawing them away from the other conferences going on this same week. At the end of the year, most of us are sick of travel, so another trip to New York or some other freeze-your-butt-off location doesn't appeal to us.

Further, Hawaii is between Asia and the U.S., making it convenient for both markets. Also, because we can bring our families (at our own cost), this becomes a forced vacation, allowing our significant others to escape the cold. This makes them appreciate Qualcomm and turns us into heroes.

This is something Intel just doesn't get, having killed IDF, its event designed to focus people on its products. At its event next week, a tiny subset of this group will show up already primed to be skeptical of anything the company showcases.

At the same time, Intel's board has been unable to select a new CEO, being torn between hiring an ex-Qualcomm executive and someone who actually knows something about the market the company is in, rather than the one it continues to fail to penetrate. (To be fair, Qualcomm doesn't get servers either, but it wisely backed away from that effort.)

I'm coming around to the idea that the "I" in Intel stands for "idiot." Apple's favor is the only reason Intel even has any presence in mobile, and we know Apple is both planning to move away from Intel's core x86 platform and hiring its own modem people, with the clear intent of separating from Intel entirely. Yes, the "I" in Intel stands for "idiots."

Microsoft vs. Apple

Microsoft passed Apple in valuation not by focusing on Apple, as it did so horribly with Zune, but by focusing on making customers happier. Yes, it did roll out the Surface hardware, but Surface isn't hurting the iPad Pro as much as Apple's inability to pick and support one platform.

Apple has signaled that it will kill off the Mac, but it seems unable to actually pull the trigger, which isn't exactly helping sales of either platform. It has doubled down on the lock-in strategy, which it believes will keep users from escaping increasingly inferior offerings. However, rather than focusing on making its users happy, it has focused on cutting costs while raising prices.

That never ends well. A similar strategy almost killed IBM in the 1980s and Microsoft in the 1990s. (It did effectively kill both AT&T and RCA.)

Microsoft last week announced that rather than lock customers into Edge or work to destroy Google Chrome, it would embrace Chromium. This strategy will allow Microsoft to focus on things like better security, performance, and user experience, rather than carrying on a pointless standards war with Google.

In effect, Microsoft is beating Apple by ignoring Apple and instead focusing on making its users happier. I'm pretty sure that is Business 101, and I remain shocked that it seems to be more an exception than a rule in the tech segment. Apple's latest "brilliant" move is to stop reporting unit sales, which conceals how badly it has been doing.

If you look at the annual performance of both firms, Microsoft has been kicking Apple's butt, and that is because it really don't care about Apple anymore. Microsoft has been focusing on doing the right thing for users.

There is a Zen aspect to this that I find elegant. I wish more companies would get that the path to winning doesn't come from effectively enslaving your customers and then mining them, or cheating to win, but from building the best product and focusing on making your users love it.

At the beginning of this decade Apple was ahead in this, thanks largely to Steve Jobs. Now Microsoft is ahead, thanks to Satya Nadella. Nadella and Jobs are/were right. Winning over the customer is the goal -- but you want to focus on making the best product from their perspective, not mining them for the most money. Ironically, if you do the former, you'll likely get the latter -- and rather than eventually hating you, they'll love you for it.

US vs. China

The U.S. government is seeking extradition of Meng Wanzhou, daughter of the founder of Huawei and the firm's CFO, arrested last week in Canada for violating U.S. sanctions. The Dow Jones, which was already nervous, dropped 400 points (it had dropped a whopping 800 points the day before). I'm pretty sure a lot of Republican supporters started thinking maybe it was time to support Democrats -- or, at least, politicians who actually understand math.

Now putting this in context, China isn't exactly known for promoting women's rights. However, the U.S. has entered a pro-woman #metoo era. Arresting someone's daughter, regardless of age, isn't going to play well, particularly given President Trump's reputation. To say the optics are bad with this would be a colossal understatement.

The timing -- coming right during a major Chinese renegotiation to eliminate tariffs -- couldn't be worse. I'm sure some wondered if the administration had pumped the stock market illegally to print wealth for the wealthy in-the-know. Were I in the SEC, I'd immediately look at the large trades of those close to the president -- and nobody likes that kind of attention.

Now China's obvious response would be to arrest Hillary Clinton. Yes, lock her up -- but there would be method behind that madness.

Were China to arrest one of Trump's kids, it could lead to war. Arresting one of the top U.S. CEOs would make China look petty. However, arresting Hillary Clinton would make Trump look weak (because mister "lock her up" didn't). China could use Trump's false statements as the basis for its action. Once released, Hillary would be a hero while appearing anti-China -- although she actually would be indebted to the Chinese for making her a viable presidential candidate again.

If the State Department argued for her release, it would have to argue that Trump either was dishonest or unhinged. If it didn't, her being incarcerated (likely in a luxury hotel) would serve to provide a "Remember the Alamo" type of slogan for both women and Democrats, ensuring not only the fall of Trump, but also the purge of many Republicans.

This has to be one of the most colossally stupid things I've seen a government do, and I doubt it will end well. One final comment: The CFO in a company is responsible for compliance, but arresting that official in a case of violating sanctions (when the decisions likely were made by sales or operations management) is like arresting a police officer who is under-resourced for not stopping a crime. In this case, the action is particularly inflammatory for targeting one of the few women in the job.

This administration has to get that attacking women isn't a viable course of action right now, particularly given the optics that surround the president, and failing to understand that most certainly will ensure that a re-election effort will fail -- and for very good reason.

Wrapping Up: Stupid Wars

I've come to the conclusion that even though the rank and file at Intel have been executing, the company's board has too many idiots. The person who should be chairman, and who is the most qualified, is Tzu-Jae King Liu. She should take over and reconstitute the board, involving people who understand Intel's business.

If Intel really wants to support women, then putting the most qualified person in charge -- who also happens to be a woman -- would be a critical first step. The company's war with Qualcomm, particularly given that Apple clearly plans to stab Intel in the back, is just incredibly stupid -- or "I" for idiotic.

Speaking of Apple, Microsoft has showcased an almost Zen-like strategy of ignoring Apple and focusing on the user as a way to compete. The Zen is "to win don't focus on your opponent, focus on the goal" (I think I may be channeling Bruce Lee in that statement).

Microsoft's moves to embrace open source further with Chromium (it also likes Linux now) and focus on doing what users/customers want is its best path to success, and the one we want the company on. Impressive work.

Finally, if you are being accused of being a massive misogynist, then taking steps to arrest the daughter of a Chinese government-connected CEO (particularly when your own daughter is active in government and business) is incredibly stupid. It opens the door to an orthogonal response from China. I suggested one that I would choose, which would ensure Trump's re-election loss.

Meng Wanzhou's arrest is certain to personally piss off the country that may soon be the most powerful in the world. Were positions reversed -- if Steve Jobs' daughter were arrested China, for example -- the Chinese certainly wouldn't enjoy the U.S. response.

This move will hurt efforts to resolve the tariff issues. It already cratered the stock market, and it sets up the potential for a devastating response on an issue (say, Iran sanctions) that doesn't have broad support in or out of the U.S.

In short, there are a lot of lessons here, but the core theme is that unnecessary conflict should be avoided. Microsoft is actually the best example of how to compete and thrive by focusing on doing the right thing. Doing what the customer wants, regardless of ego, generally ensures a better outcome than focusing on anything else.