This week, a company I never thought of got another one I forgot existed. This is a reminder that we should not underestimate boring.
One of those companies is called Poly, and if you know what it does, gold star to you. It makes gadgets like phone headsets for corporate call centers and speaker gizmos for office conference calls.
These things aren’t exactly cool, but they can be worthwhile, and Poly is well-profitable and valuable enough to sell for $ 1.7 billion.
The buyer, HP Inc., makes a lot of money selling fleets of computers and large printers to businesses. It was a snooze that made HP worth close to $ 40 billion, or about eight times the value of WeWork, a company that was thrilling and also nearly ran out of money and died in 2019.
The products for cubicle dwellers may not be the magical miracles we imagine from Silicon Valley, but the world is running on the tedious technology that tedious organizations need to do tedious but important things. Many of the companies selling this technology are making rivers of money, even though only five people are capable of explaining what, for example, the software giant SAP did.
My mission is to take a few minutes to help us appreciate the purity that revolves around the world.
I don’t know what technology my employer uses to process my salaries. Most of us will never see Amazon’s computer servers that enable Netflix on our TVs. The U.S. health care system relies heavily on patient records from a software company called Epic. You may not know what Oracle is, but you probably won’t have direct contact with one of its databases if you buy anything online.
We’ll never write a valentine with that kind of tedious software, but we need it to work. Dull things can also make what we do better, like enable telemedicine calls or help us check for diapers before we drive to the store.
Many technologies designed for businesses stink or are stuck in the past, but these are the nuts and bolts of it all. Companies that make dull technology for organizations are likely to last longer than dozens of Doritos-on-demand start-ups. And this is gold mine. Businesses and governments are expected to spend approximately $ 4.5 trillion on technology this year. Some of the most important technology companies in the world, such as Microsoft, SAP, Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce and ServiceNow, are tedious.
Boring just doesn’t pay off. It can also be a political asset. Facebook can’t buy a package of chewing gum without government regulators who suspect the company intends to cause global tooth decay. And when it tries to buy any company, every antitrust alarm sounds.
In January, however, Microsoft announced its nearly $ 70 billion acquisition of video game titanium Activision Blizzard. Regulators can still block the acquisition, but Microsoft may try partly because of its identity as the less controversial tech superpowers. Microsoft has more revenue and greater value than Facebook’s core company, Meta. But most make products that businesses use to do things like crunch data and not, for example, communication tools that are abused to spread conspiracy theories.
Mark Gorenberg has dedicated his professional life to snooze technology. In the late 1980s, he worked at Sun Microsystems, whose technologies such as Unix and Java remain in almost every piece of current technology. Gorenberg described the Sun as “very boring but it energizes everyone.”
Since then, Gorenberg has worked for investment firms that specialize in supporting young companies that typically sell poor technology to businesses.
He told me that many of the so-called enterprise tech companies are not yet the most cutting-edge. But he speculates that the dull sector will be the hotbed of exciting inventions.
Gorenberg talks about innovations like Microsoft’s recently released technology that essentially helps software write itself. His investment firm, Zetta Venture Partners, supports a start-up that scans records of vehicle crashes to conduct assessments of insurance claims and another that sees potential network failures before they remove the internet.
He talks about a future where boring technology remains important but there is a bit of wonder as well.
If this technology can be pretty exciting and also help us all, great. But there will always be the basis of tedious technology that affects our lives and the world – even if we don’t know it exists.
Want a better cellphone call at home? Give it a try.
Brian X. Chenthe consumer technology columnist at The New York Times, suggests what to test if calls on your smartphone are ringing or falling when you’re at home.
Many of us experience spotty cell phone calls at home. Using Wi-Fi calling, which routes a phone call over your internet connection, can help. It often gives us more reliable and better quality phone calls than funneling them into our local phone networks, especially if we don’t live right next to a cell tower.
Usually, smartphones don’t use Wi-Fi automatically, so here’s how to turn on this feature.
On iPhones: Open the Settings app, select the Phone option, select Wi-Fi calling, tap the bar to turn on the feature, and fill in some details about where you live. (This helps law enforcement find you in case you dial 9-1-1.)
On Android phones, the settings for Wi-Fi calling may vary but try this: Open the Phone app, tap the option for more, then select Settings. Select the option labeled Calls and tap Wi-Fi calling.
One warning: This won’t be a good option if your home Wi-Fi is spotty. Here is my previous column on fixing Wi-Fi problems at home.
Before we leave…
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Of course: The hackers forged seemingly emergency requests from law enforcement officials for some internet companies to provide information about their users. Apple and Facebook were deceived by the requests last year, Bloomberg News reported, and provided information such as addresses and phone numbers previously used for harassment campaigns. (A subscription may be required.)
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You’ve probably noticed that almost all Facebook is Reels videos: Vox’s publication Recode reported that Facebook’s efforts to push videos as big as that bite into our feeds mean Reels represented 11 of 20 of the most -watched Facebook posts in the U.S. in the last three month of 2021. And the Reels group is anonymous, reposted videos from TikTok or kind of spammy, Vox wrote.
Related from On Tech: Facebook will make you love Reels.
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The long hangover when countries block websites: After Turkey banned Wikipedia in 2017, it took years of legal challenge to back up the online encyclopedia. The Washington Post reported that the struggles for Wikipedia could be a glimpse into the future for Facebook, Twitter and other sites banned in Russia. (A subscription may be required.)
Related: A young woman in Michigan, Annie Rawerda, compiles some of Wikipedia’s weird pages. An example: The entry for “The Most Unwanted Song,” a novelty tune from the 1990s.
Hugs here. (Not boring.)
A flamingo known for its leg tag, No. 492, fled from a Kansas zoo in 2005 (on Independence Day). My colleague Daniel Victor hilariously detailed the life of No. 492 in running over the past 17 years and people were surprised to see a flamingo in Texas.
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