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  • Theranos’s Holmes VC Reverb | 5G C-Band Marches On | Mozilla Jumps Shark

    Theranos’s Holmes VC Reverb | 5G C-Band Marches On | Mozilla Jumps Shark

    Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

    This week: The conviction of Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes leads to greater scrutiny of startups, higher-frequency 5G NR is creeping towards reality, and Mozilla gets criticized for promoting climate-harming scams.

    1. Holmes Case Causes Valley Rethink?

    First up this week: Elizabeth Holmes has been found guilty of defrauding Theranos investors. But how will the affair change Silicon Valley’s startup-and-funding culture?

    Analysis: Don’t fake it—just make it.

    This could be a seminal moment, causing investors to look more closely at startup founders and their outlandish promises. On the other hand, key Theranos investors—e.g., Murdoch, Cox, DeVoss—hardly fit the mold of Silicon Valley VCs.

    David Streitfeld: The Epic Rise and Fall

    F. Scott Fitzgerald’s creation … Jay Gatsby … was a bootlegger [and] sold fake bonds. Ms. Holmes chose Silicon Valley, the last and greatest of all human dreams. [She] was a natural salesperson, as good at bending reality as Steve Jobs himself.
    …
    She and her deputy and boyfriend, Ramesh Balwani … thought they could brazen it out in the Silicon Valley tradition until they had something that actually worked. [But] the verdict signaled the end of an era. In Silicon Valley, where the line between talk and achievement is often vague, there is finally a limit. … It is an epic rise and fall that will be chewed over in the coffee shops and juice bars of Palo Alto, Calif., until the tech industry departs [for] off-world colonies.
    …
    So where does this conviction leave … her investors and former fans? Ripe for the next huckster that comes along, probably. Some Silicon Valley promises are so sweet we just can’t get enough of them. Immortality. Crypto. Flying cars. Mars. Digital harmony. Wealth beyond compare.


    Think different, thinks DeanonymizedCoward:

    [There’s a] fine line between bombastic marketing spam, “fake it ’til you make it” pitches, and outright fraud. … The first is repugnant and sometimes unethical, but generally legal.
    …
    [But] If your product requires bull**** to get funded—even if it ultimately works—you’re a fraud. … Regulatory reforms … and a sort of corporate death penalty … can fix a lot of this by making it less financially practical to engage in ****ty behavior.


    Who else is to blame? Ask DS999:

    I am sure some of her investors didn’t really care whether it worked. They just wanted to get in early, ride the hype train up, and sell before actual results mattered.

    2. FAA and 5G Carriers Kiss and Make Up

    Higher-frequency 5G NR is creeping towards reality in the U.S., thanks to the FAA backing down. After the aviation regulator had vetoed C-band deployment—based on precious little evidence—it looks like as much as 280 MHz of extra spectrum is now ready to switch on.

    Analysis: Nomadic DevOps gets more bandwidth

    While band 77 is nowhere near the much-vaunted “FR2” extremely high frequency bands, this is a useful chunk of extra spectrum for mobile and nomadic apps. Next stop: ubiquitous Ka-band.

    Jon Brodkin: FAA agrees not to seek any more 5G delays

    The Federal Aviation Administration tentatively agreed not to seek any more 5G delays from AT&T and Verizon, potentially ending a battle over the aviation industry’s unproven claim that 5G … will interfere with airplane altimeters. [Their] C-Band spectrum licenses are for the frequencies from 3.7 GHz to 3.98 GHz.
    …
    The deal incorporates voluntary commitments that AT&T and Verizon previously made, including “C-Band radio exclusion zones” around airports for six months. [They] modeled the exclusion zones after those used in France, which are 910×2100 meters.
    …
    Assuming there are no further problems, AT&T and Verizon would be able to use their spectrum licenses without extra restrictions after July 5. … President Biden applauded the agreement … calling it “a significant step in the right direction.”


    In summary? Here’s Dieter Bohn:

    The agency in charge of airplanes is mad about wireless things. But the agency in charge of wireless things and the companies that make them lost a game of chicken.
    …
    GREAT JOB AMERICA. … I always said I wanted Internet Service Providers to be Dumb Pipes, but I never expected them to be this dumb.


    Has anyone read the FAA’s detailed report? bburdge has:

    I can see why the FAA is backing down here now, it only makes sense when your key report could be paraphrased as: “We got a couple grad students to run some basic model comparisons … using altimeter data from the aviation industry (with a proven track record of lying to us) and then went golfing for eight months before publishing … but didn’t bother … to actually test anything.”

    3. Mozilla Forgets its Values

    Firefox custodian, the Mozilla Foundation, has angered many by promoting a “grossly irresponsible” “Ponzi scheme” that harms the environment. What is this awful thing? I hear you ask. It’s cryptocurrency.

    Analysis: Imaginary money is bad—is this the last straw for Mozilla?

    Less than a year ago, Mozilla said it wants to be carbon-neutral, but it’s already reneged on that promise: Distributed proof-of-work systems require … well, work. And that work uses ridiculous amounts of energy per DeFi transaction. Electricity production is a zero-sum game, so cryptocurrencies and NFTs cause climate change by emitting ridiculous amounts of CO₂e.

    Liam Proven: Mozilla founder blasts browser maker

    A few days ago, Mozilla Foundation invited netizens on Twitter to send in cryptocurrency donations. … This move by the Firefox browser maker rapidly drew criticism.
    …
    As recently as September, Moz’s web-standards lead Tantek Çelik slammed cryptocurrencies as being unsustainable, stating: “[They] are harmful for sustainability. … Their energy requirements grow without any discernible upper bound, which is grossly irresponsible given the global environmental crisis.”
    …
    Mozilla has accepted crypto-coin donations for years, perhaps as part of its long-ongoing efforts to alienate its own users: It’s only the payment provider that changed.


    Chief among critics was Jamie “jwz” Zawinski:

    I founded Mozilla and I’m here to say **** you and **** this. Everyone involved in the project should be witheringly ashamed of this decision to partner with planet-incinerating Ponzi grifters.
    …
    Stop saying you were promised flying cars. Unless you were born in 1935, you weren’t promised flying cars, you were promised a cyberpunk corporate dystopia.


    It’s a shark-jump moment thinks Jeremy Keith:

    The most convincing argument I’ve heard yet for switching away from Firefox as my main browser comes from Mozilla. I wasn’t expecting that plot twist.

    The Moral of the Story: What is safety to one is not always safety to another.


    You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or tlv@richi.uk.

    Image: Benjamin Hayward (via Unsplash)

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  • Surviving Through the New Normal

    Surviving Through the New Normal

    As enterprises move from the first phase of the pandemic to the reopening phase, they’re going to have to determine what tech investments going forward will provide the most value in the their new normal.

    Emad Georgy, founder and CTO at consulting firm Georgy Technology Leadership, said that while overall tech spending will remain down, that pain won’t be evenly distributed. Georgy claimed that investments will continue to remain high in the obvious industries, of course, such as healthcare, retail and grocery chains.

    “However, multiple adjacent and dependent businesses investments will also remain high. Suppliers of materials required by these industries, companies involved in their supply chain, companies supporting remote collaboration tools will continue to thrive,” said Georgy.

    Coming off the heels of the economic shutdown, Alex Milowski, platforms researcher and evangelist at database management software provider Redis Labs, said that both people and systems have experienced significant disruptions, and this has hurt their productivity and strained technology platforms in some ways, while for other job functions platform and infrastructure are at over capacity.

    Milowski said organizations needed to strike a balance between the immediate needs of staff, so that they could adjust to the changes in their work and lives and still access critical work systems while also ensuring that customer needs are also met.

    However, now that enterprises are looking forward, how do they ensure that their digital transformation efforts remain in place?

    As enterprises get their footing as the new economic reality settles in, Milowski advised organizations to focus on small wins.

    “Prioritizing projects where one can increase the confidence of the team to function under uncertainty may be the best strategy. New projects may need to be created to address surges in demand via caching or acceleration systems,” said Milowski. “A team might use this time to address auto-scaling systems so they can scale-down as a cost-saving measure. The increased collaboration and creative problem solving will build team confidence in their ability to deliver. With each win, ensure readiness is improving.”

    Within those early successes, teams can then troubleshoot their processes with less disruption to their business.

    “As their confidence grows, they can ease into picking more business-critical and complex projects. In the end, they are more likely to succeed, with less disruption, as their team is now ready as they know how to deliver new digital initiatives in very different contexts. Successive small wins turn into big wins,” said Milowski.

    Georgy indicated that such uncertain times require a sharp focus and prioritization.

    “Financial insecurity often leads to sharpened discipline which one could argue we should have anyway in an organization. Unfortunately, many companies are plagued by ‘management by assumption.’ That is the practice of managing and deciding based on opinions or second-hand knowledge because they don’t have time to [dig into] the weeds,” he said.

    It’s time to prove concepts out. Georgy added that it’s more important than ever to make data-driven decisions based on experiential learning.

    “Opinions are no longer welcome. Every person at the decision table must justify their decisions with data, with real-world experience and with action,” he said.

    That can be done by CIOs as they track their changing customer base.

    “Customers are changing how they spend and re-evaluating what is important to them and this will be reflected in roadmaps as well. Now, more than ever, feedback loops, usability groups and touchpoints with customers to understand this changing dynamic is key to evaluate new approaches and priorities in the roadmap,” said Georgy.

    John Belden, project execution advisory services practice leader at UpperEdge, stated that now is the opportunity for CIOs to lead in a way that hasn’t been readily possible in more than 20 years.

    Belden advised CIOs to:

    • Take the lead: CIOs can win back the seat at the management table that they enjoyed during the Y2K era. By proactively reaching out to work with counterparts in HR, marketing and supply chain, CIOs can shift from order-taker to problem-solver, which will also help in prioritizing projects.
    • Determine an approach to road-mapping: There are likely to be three different strategies to road-mapping and navigating this time:
      1. Reinvent: This approach establishes a clean sheet of paper and takes a more traditional approach. Companies that could never get the cash or attention to build a roadmap, might have this work thrust upon them if corporate boards demand a pandemic risk mitigation plan.
      2. Revise: This would involve the shuffling of the existing portfolio, some reprioritization and confirmation of direction from the various vendor’s strategies.
      3. Accelerate: Some companies may have already charted a course that accounts for assumptions of a new world order. In these cases, it is likely that CIOs will be asked to accelerate to either leap-frog competitors or solidify their competitive position.
    • Transform vendor engagement strategy: The onslaught of vendor marketing initiatives and client targeting strategies could end up being like the wild west with cloud providers bypassing traditional IT channels to market their wares. CIOs need to work proactively with their business counterparts to set the ground rules for engagement and craft a strategy that motivates suppliers to assist clients in developing their own strategies that can be realized quickly and efficiently. Developing a long-term view in managing the short-term downtime will, in the end, pay dividends in executing during this economic downturn.

    Short-term survival with an eye on meeting long-term goals is key to survival, and in the months ahead those enterprises that successfully meet that balance will set themselves apart.