Prabhakar Raghavan is a business executive and former researcher of web information retrieval. He is a senior vice president at Google, where he is responsible for Google Search, Assistant, Geo, Ads, Commerce, and Payments products.[2] His research spans algorithms, web search and databases.[3] He is the co-author of the textbooks Randomized Algorithms[4] with Rajeev Motwani[5] and Introduction to Information Retrieval. After working 14 years at IBM, he became senior vice president and chief technology officer at enterprise search vendor Verity in 2004.[16][14][12] In July 2005, he was hired by Yahoo! to lead Yahoo! Research in Sunnyvale, California.[17] At Yahoo!, worked on research projects including search and advertising.[15][18] In 2011, he was appointed as Yahoo!'s chief strategy officer by CEO Carol Bartz, who replaced the co-founder Jerry Yang in 2009 and was fired in 2011 as the company declined.[19] In 2012, Prabhakar joined Google after severe funding cuts in Yahoo!'s research division. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prabhakar_Raghavan

Google Search Engine

Adam Mosseri (Arabic: آدم موسري; Hebrew: אדם מוסרי; born January 23, 1983) is an American businessman and the head of Instagram. He formerly was an executive at Facebook, which owns Instagram... Mosseri joined Facebook as a product designer in 2008.[3] In 2009, Mosseri became a product design manager, and in 2012 became the design director for the company's mobile apps.[8][9] From 2012 to 2016, Mosseri oversaw Facebook's News Feed section, and from 2016 to May 2018 was vice president of product for Facebook.[8][10][11] During his tenure at Facebook, he additionally oversaw Facebook Home, the company's unsuccessful attempt at bringing a mobile homescreen to Android devices.[12][13] After the 2016 presidential election, Mosseri took it upon himself to become the spokesperson for Facebook's stance on "fake news."[4] During the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, Mosseri was one of the few Facebook executives who was vocal about Facebook's role in providing security and trustworthy news.[14] In May 2018, Mosseri was named Instagram's vice president of product.[15] On October 1, 2018, Facebook announced that Mosseri would assume as the new head of Instagram. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Mosseri

Ed Zitron: The Rot-Com Bubble The noxious growth-at-all-costs mindset of the Rot Economy sits at the core of every issue that I've ever written about. It’s the force that drives businesses to grow bigger rather than better, making more products to conquer more markets rather than making products or services that people need or improving products they already like. ((2023-02-09) Zitron The Rot Economy) (more)

co-founder/CEO Salesforce.com

Ed Zitron: Disruption Killed Innovation. The reason that none of these products seem to ever have a firm connection to any real use case or product is that these announcements are not for customers. Marc Benioff’s 2019 announcement of “full blockchain” (for Salesforce.com) coincided with a brief bull run in cryptocurrency. (more)

writer, PR guy https://www.wheresyoured.at/

Tom Standage wrote about 6 drinks that changed Civilization: Beer, Wine, spirits, Coffee, tea, Coca-Cola.

author of The Unaccountability Machine

from the Republican Party to SDS to the Libertarian Party (more)

Mutualism guru http://mutualist.blogspot.com (more)

free ebook by Bob Marshall (PDF) https://flowchainsensei.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/product-aikido/ The essence of product development is an intense and ongoing struggle between organizing intent and entropy. Organizing intent is the will of the company, manifest in the actions of its product development people, bent on meeting the goals of the company through the creation and evolution of products and product features. (more)

Ed Zitron: The Man Who Killed Google Search. The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. (more)

Lu Wilson on Arroost: Unblocking creation with friends. Live Coding is uniquely suited to creative work. It can remove many of the creative blockers that individuals experience when trying to produce it. But we could place much more explicit emphasis on the removal of emotional blockers from the creative process, as opposed to only focusing on intellectual blockers. Arroost is a project that seeks to do that — an experimental live programming tool for making music. (more)

Ed Zitron: Managing Up. Over the last two newsletters (three, if you include my reply to Google’s “rebuttal” of the Prabhakar Raghavan newsletter), I’ve made the case that while rot economics are responsible for making technology products manifestly worse, this transformation was only possible thanks to the interventions of a managerial class. (more)

idea of a variation/subset of the World Wide Web which has fewer of the ugly bits (Small World) (more)

All Models Are Wrong, But Some Are Useful... sometimes (more)

Jason Kerwin: Nothing Scales. I recently posted a working paper where we argue that appointments can substitute for financial commitment devices. (more)

Theory Of Constraints, Agile Software Development writer... (more)

Michael Watkins on not getting tenure, and what's happening at MBA programs. I have been wondering for some time: To what extent are business schools producing insights of use to practicing managers? Is the investment that they are making in research justified in terms of results? Is the HBS (Harvard Business School) brand at risk? I believe that the answers to these questions are, respectively, little, no, and very much so. I further believe that this is the result of the "capture" of business schools (including unfortunately and increasingly HBS) by discipline-oriented academics who consume more value from their institutions than they create for them... Go too far in the direction of practice and you become a consulting/training company. Go too far in the direction of academic respectability and you become irrelevant. The latter has been the fate of many of the business schools at leading universities - they rarely produce cutting-edge thinking that impacts business practice (take a look at the top 250 books on management at Barnes and Noble and note how few are written by business school academics.) Jim Collins, the author of Good To Great, for example, was essentially fired by Stanford... In an HBS faculty meeting a year or so ago, the then Senior Associate Dean in charge of Executive Programs gave a sobering presentation on the state of HBS's open enrollment executive program offerings. The gist of the presentation, as I heard it, was that HBS was attracting fewer and fewer managers from leading US companies in growth industries and more from (1) non-leading companies in stagnant industries, and (2) international participants who continued to see the HBS brand as very attractive. To me, this was a clear warning sign of creeping erosion of the HBS brand...