Facebook was down, Apple is down for a good lawsuit, TikTok is down bad
Apple plays 5D chess (and loses), every site goes down
Hello again.
I’m Chris Bakke, a Twitterer X-er, and I write about hiring, careers, investing, finance, web5, and tech.
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Okay, let’s dive into the good, the bad, and the ugly from the past few days. As always, we’ll flip it so we don’t end the newsletter on a bad note.
The ugly:
Apple plays 5D chess with Epic, still loses. Bear with me. The EU says Apple has to allow other companies like Epic to have an app store on the iPhone. Apple says fine, but only if you’re in the EU. Then they say actually, not fine, Epic can’t do that. The EU said “there is now a law that says you have to let them do that”, which Apple already knew about. So Apple caved, and learned the most important lesson; dealing with the government sucks.
The US government does something…about TikTok. The first part is news by itself. Now, stay with me through this really boring sentence. There’s bipartisan support for a bill moving through the house to ban TikTok. Great, we made it. It’s a matter of “national security” that ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company and obvious CCP asset, sells off TikTok to a US company. In an alarmed response, TikTok force-pushed a notification and splash screen to every phone with the app in the US begging them to call their local congressman. Users complained the notification was a nuisance and annoying. SAP Concur executives took notes on how to make their own app worse.
The bad:
Facebook, Instagram, Messenger outages. Mark Zuckerberg’s cyborg brain wasted 12,000 CPU cycles this week dealing with an outage across Meta apps. The outage lasted hours, primarily because all of their engineers were at a pool party in the Metaverse and had no idea what was going on. In my (completely unbiased) opinion, it’s a skill issue, because guess who didn’t face an outage? 💅
The worst day for thought leaders everywhere. LinkedIn was down earlier this week. Didn’t notice? I don’t blame you; most of the productive modern society we live in probably didn’t either. If you took a trip down to your local coffee shop, though, you’d be met with a sad sight. Dozens of vertical SaaS thought leaders, stunned, not sure what to do. Where could they post that they were “humbled and happy to announce” things? Who would read their “top ten productivity hacks” post?
The good:
OpenAI reappoints Sam Altman to the board. Now, you might be wondering, “what was the point of all that crazy stuff back in November?” Great question! Sam Altman is thinking the same thing. We’re back to basically square one (a few OpenAI executives and board members left) but there’s one big lesson here. Do not mess with Satya Nadella. His friendly demeanor hides pure rage at the mere thought of shareholder value destruction.
Rivian and Apple announce new things you don’t necessarily need, but really want. This week was full of temptation for thousands of senior product directors who already have an M2 Macbook Air and the first-generation Rivian. If you’re one of those poor souls who are stuck with a computer or car from 2023 (literally months ago), now might finally be the time to upgrade. Be proud you stuck it out this long! Now go forth and support the economy. Those stock options won’t sell themselves.
Okay, that’s all.