The HP team responsible for Enyo — webOS's HTML5-based application framework that debuted on the TouchPad — will be leaving the company and starting at Google on Monday, The Verge has learned. What this means for the future of Open webOS is unclear; Enyo and the developers supporting it are central to HP's open source strategy for the operating system going forward, and it's hard to say whether this move will have any effect on the planned late 2012 release for version 1.0. Developing... Continue reading →
Andrew Rachleff Big tech offerings like Facebook’s always generate a lot of publicity for the top executives, who walk away with personal scores worth hundreds of millions, even billions, of dollars.Pay no attention to them. O.K., pay some, since there is a good chance that those lucky titans will buy something huge or make a potentially world-changing donation to charity. But the greater effect on the economy may well come from the riches that hit the rank and file.These are the early employees, star engineers and little-discussed sales people, who typically own 15 percent of a company, pre-I.P.O. When the company goes public, they walk away with $2 million, $5 million, $10 million.That sounds like, and is, a lot of money. In Silicon Valley, however, ... Continue reading →
HBS alumnus and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, graduated from the Harvard Business School in 1995. Today (May 23), she returned to campus to deliver the Class Day keynote address to graduating students as part of a student-led ceremony traditionally held the day before Harvard University’s Commencement exercises and the HBS diploma ceremony. She appeared with a red button with the initials NGB to honor the death of Harvard MBA Nathan G. Bihlmaier who accidentally drowned over the weekend. Her speech: It’s an honor to be here today to address HBs’s distinguished faculty, proud parents, patient guests, and most important the class of 2012. Today was supposed to be a day of unbridled celebration, and I ... Continue reading →
I established a Facebook account in 2008. My motivation was ignoble: I wanted to distribute my journalism more widely. I have acquired since then just over four thousand “friends”—in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, the Middle East, and of course, closer to home. I have discovered the appeal of Facebook’s community—for example, the extraordinary emotional support that swells in virtual space when people come together online around a friend’s illness or life celebrations. Through its bedrock appeals to friendship, community, public identity, and activism—and its commercial exploitation of these values—Facebook is an unprecedented synthesis of corporate and public spaces. The corporation’s social contract with users is ambitious, yet neither its governance system nor its young ruler seem trustworthy. Then came this month’s initial public offering of stock—a ... Continue reading →