CSotD: Issues of perspective
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Start with a bit of news that — thankfully — has nothing to do with Orlando or Muslims or Trump: Microsoft is acquiring LinkedIn for an astonishing amount of money that, as Alex points out, seems to have very little toehold in logic or reality.
As for "Many a truth is spoken in jest," I did set up a LinkedIn account a decade or so ago, and — as I recounted here before — had a cousin immediately email me to ask if I was quitting my job.
That post is worth clicking to, if only to keep me from repeating it all here. However, I'll share this much:
The difference between LinkedIn and Match.com is that LinkedIn has convinced people who don't need it that they need it. Match.com doesn't actively recruit married people, but LinkedIn sells a lot of balloon juice to the already-employed about the importance of "networking."
And, just as some people really do find love on Match.com, I guess there are people who find really do find work at LinkedIn. And I'll bet at just about the same rate.
My only forays into Match.com produced a couple of pretty funny disaster stories and not a scintilla of sweet romance. That came in the usual places — people I met through work or church or somewhere in three dimensions.
And, similarly, when I was well and truly out of work, the jobs I got came from people I had already worked with, and who knew I needed a new gig because word spreads fast. It was called "earning a reputation" long before it involved "creating a platform" or "networking."
However, there's something more sinister and disturbing in the LinkedIn acquisition, which is the predatory move towards the cloud-based subscription model, of which Microsoft is only one practitioner, albeit the 800-pound gorilla.
The Verge has a good takedown on the thinking behind the acquisition, and be sure to check out the memo from Microsoft's CEO on what they expect to get from it. I liked this passage — from the analysis, not the memo — particularly:
LinkedIn still has a reputation for being a spam machine, and recent password dumps have dented its security credentials. Microsoft will need to clear up both of these problems if it wants LinkedIn to be taken even more seriously by businesses.
It seems, however, that LinkedIn matters because a lot of people have been convinced that LinkedIn matters. And whether or not that's a good reason to have a LinkedIn account, it's a good reason to drop billions to gain access to a market of people who do things because they've been told those things should be done.
The classic analog version of this was the ads for nose-hair trimmers back in the Olden Days, which were run not to sell nose-hair trimmers but rather to identify people who would buy something as unnecessary as a nose-hair trimmer. The devices themselves didn't generate a lot of profit, but the resulting sucker list could be exploited by the collector and/or sold to other junk mail companies for big profits.
However, the difference is that, however many Klipettes were sold, you could still buy combs and razors (either electric or safety) and other more practical grooming tools that fit your particular needs.
The software companies, by contrast, are shifting from selling you tools to selling you subscriptions, and don't really give a damn about abandoning one market segment in order to capitalize on another.
This began, as best I recall, when Adobe moved its Creative Suite to the cloud, which set off a scramble of freelance artists and layout people to acquire Photoshop, InDesign and other programs on disk because they couldn't afford the high subscription fees demanded for the newer versions.
Now all sorts of productivity programs are becoming subscription-only.
And there will shortly come a time when those old programs you've got stored on your hard drive will no longer work with these newer versions.
Heck, there will likely come a time when the computer companies will stop selling you machines with hard drives anyway.
And Microsoft is betting $26.2 billion dollars that you won't be able to do a damn thing about it.
The Whole World Is Watching
Meanwhile, in other news about things that make you feel powerless, the March to Gehenna continues, and it's instructive to see the view from abroad, given that other countries are removed enough to have some perspective yet are still, as Trudeau père famously put it, sleeping with an elephant and aware of every twitch:
(Brandan Reynolds, South Africa)
Of course, Brandan Reynolds errs in suggesting a third term for Obama, since our Constitution does not allow it.
However, he's not the only person who isn't entirely clear on how the American electoral system works, and he has the excuse of not living here.
There is an alternative I'm seeing that people who do live here and should know better are putting forth on social media, which is to vote for a woman who has never won public office higher than a minor position on a town board, and whose party holds similarly obscure positions on city councils, school boards and in sanitation districts throughout the country, though it has, on a tiny handful of occasions, won a state legislative seat, but only once held it for a second term. And then not for a third.
The existence of the Greens is good — and I mean this sincerely — for local communities, but — and I also mean this sincerely — they could only matter on a national level if we were under a parliamentary system.
And if the Greens were then able to secure not just "any" seats in Congress, but a majority of seats in Congress so that they could put their party head in the White House.
At which point they could pass a law giving frogs wings, so that the poor little fellows wouldn't keep hitting their asses on the ground.
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