Humor: Social clues

I guess we are all rusty! Courtesy, the New Yorker.

Humor: Mute

The phrase of the pandemic is not confined just to earth

Covid trends tracking via Yelp

While not perfect, data from Yelp can provide a good indication of how people are behaving in this time. The full report is here and sobering. ~55% of businesses closed were permanent. Restaurants lead the pack (with ~60% closing), and fitness centers doing the “best” (with ~40% closing permanently).

It will be heartening to see no doubt that along with sustained interest for bike rentals, guns lead the pack. Must be US centric. God help us.

YACS (Yet Another Covid Survey)

With apologies to YACC, another day, yet another Covid (inspired IT) survey, this time from Morgan Stanley (“CIO Survey — Is Wall Street Pulling Too Far Ahead of Main Street?”, July 2020).

Key highlights (for me):

• ~80% of CIOs see the potential for downward revisions of the IT budgets
• The apps layer (CRM, ERP, HR) seems pretty resilient, but it seems like ERP apps seem high on the list to potentially get cut in case of a further downturn
• Vendor discounting becomes more aggressive (~70% of CIOs see vendors this behavior)
• Azure usage high (~75%), and expected become even higher in 2 years (to ~92%). This seemed wicked high to me.
• Increasing desire to consolidating the number of apps in key areas (e.g. BI, marketing, data, security)

And the money exhibit…

Worth a look. (Sorry no public link available).

Parkinson’s law update for Covid

Funny article in the Economist about an update proposal to Parkinson’s law (“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”).

• For the unconcerned, when unobserved, work shrinks to fill the time required
• For anxious home workers, work expands to fill all their waking hours
• In lockdown, Zoom expands to fill all of the manager’s available time

So true!

Tech and the new normal

Nice presentation full of facts from Benedict Evans on the future of tech in the new normal. Some teasers:

• Ecommerce is ~25% of all retail in China and at a tipping point overall
• Shopify now has ~$60B (that’s a B) worth of sales (GMV) on its platform
• Quote from Lenin: “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen”. Very appropriate to the times.
• Shopping behavior is broadening from just Amazon and Google (see image below

Definitely worth a quick flip

 

CEO’s motivational speech for Covid

Pretty funny fictional email from a CEO to his employees in times of Covid. There’s enough here that should resonate with all of those enslaved in corporations. A few teasers to whet your appetite:

• “Seats in business class and premium economy have a bigger carbon footprint, so travel will be restricted to coach, or economy, class (except for board meetings and Davos, of course). “
• “Finally, please disregard those newspaper stories that suggest [that we] might be vulnerable to a takeover by a rival group. The board is confident that, once investors get a detailed look at our accounts, a takeover will be the last thing on their minds.”

Too close to home to call this purely fictional. Worth it for a laugh.

Home sweet office?

Nice (longish) article in the NYTimes this weekend on the whole work from home phenomena catalyzed by Covid. Specifically, the article does a good job of articulating the benefits, challenges and the long term implications of this. A few things that caught my eye:

• Productivity definitely rises (all the way from ~4 -20%)
• If co-workers can see more than just your face (i.e. part of your torso) in a video call, that helps people be more in sync.
• Workers satisfaction with remotely working grew in correlation to the # of hours up to about 15 hours per week, after which it plateaued
• There a number of startups trying to leverage this model to make it more “human / normal”. One is Pargli that allows one to “drop in” on conversations. Another is Loom.ai that has an avatar instead of a video, and doesn’t require one to be sitting in front of a camera for a meeting.

Definitely worth a read.

Sharing in the isolation economy

Nice article about what is happening / likely to happen to the sharing economy high fliers (think Airbnb, Uber, Lyft…) given the pandemic.

Most of these companies have already cut up to a third of their workforce (Bird laid off 400 about a 1/3, Airbnb laid of 1,900 about 1/4, and Uber let go ~6,700, again about a 1/4). Not surprising given the drop in consumption — Uber rides fell by ~80%.

Things seem to be coming back, but with differences. The average length of a Airbnb stay has doubled to nearly a week, the share of domestic (i.e. US) reservations have doubled to about 80%, and stays less than 200 miles from home have gone from ~33% to ~56%. Similarly, rides on Birds are now 50% longer than before the pandemic.

Worth a read.

Tech layoffs concentrated outside Silicon Valley

Interesting chart on where at least some of the tech companies are focusing their layoffs: it’s mostly outside Silicon Valley.

What this probably implies is that most are hanging on their “old / traditional” ideas about engineering talent being just in the Bay Area. It would be interesting to see this across the broader tech landscape, especially larger companies and ones that are more enterprise / B2B focused.