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Using Facebook Messenger instead of one of Google's chat apps is a "no-brainer," David Marcus, Facebook's VP of messaging products, said during a Q&A session at TechCrunch's Disrupt Conference on Monday.  

While Facebook's chat app, Messenger, has more than 1 billion monthly users, Google lacks a super-popular messaging app and Marcus highlighted that missed opportunity on stage:

"If you look at the SMS experience on Android for instance, it's kind of a no-brainer to want to use Messenger, because the experience is so much better than traditional SMS clients on Android — you can do so much more," Marcus said.

He has a point. If you buy an Android phone, there's a chance it comes with one or all of a handful different messaging apps for SMS messaging: your carrier's custom chat app, your phone maker's custom app, Google Hangouts for GChats and SMS, and Google Messenger. Because Android is an open-source platform, Google doesn't have the same control over the default SMS app like Apple does with iMessage.

Yet on top of that, neither the Android-only Messenger or the multi-platform Hangouts are showstoppers. Facebook Messenger has had a well-publicized stream of new features, but these Google products haven't had any significant updates recently.

Instead, Google decided to dedicate resources to launching two new messaging apps — Duo for video chatting and Allo, a "smart" chat app that should be hitting app stores soon.

Allo integrates in-line suggestions (like for recipes or places to eat) and could stop the existential threat of bots and other smart assistants pulling people off Google search. But even if Allo is as amazing as Google hyped it to be in May, it won't be able to integrate SMS messages like Hangouts, a spokesperson tells us, which could make its adoption curve steeper. And Duo has already seen sagging rankings in both the iOS and Play Stores. Although Google is ostensibly still working on another messaging initiative (a next-generation SMS standard that requires carrier cooperation) that's still a ways-away.

Meanwhile, Facebook Messenger has been trying to swoop in. Earlier this year, it started allowing Android users to get their SMS text messages through its app, in a bid to become the main way you text on Android phones. 

The most important thing a messaging app needs to be successful, Marcus points out, is reach. Ideally, you'll be able to communicate with everyone you want in one place. Marcus's larger point was that Messenger will only truly succeed when it's on every smartphone but by dragging Google's messaging apps, he got a good burn in in the meantime. Plus, unless Allo becomes wildly popular when it launches in the next few weeks, he has a point about Messenger being the best option for cross-OS communication on Android. 

 

SEE ALSO: Larry Page's grand plan for Google looks more like a mess than a success

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NOW WATCH: The iPhone 7 is hitting stores on September 23 — here's what you're getting

Twitter is about to make a big change to the way that tweets work, The Verge can independently confirm. Beginning September 19th, the company will cut down on exactly which types of content count toward the platform's 140-character limit. Media attachments (images, GIFs, videos, polls, etc.) and quoted tweets will no longer reduce the count. The extra room for text will give users more flexibility in composing their messages.

Twitter first announced plans to stop counting extras like photos, videos, and user polls toward the limit back in May, but gave no firm date on when the shift would occur. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment when contacted by The Verge. The date comes from two sources familiar with the company's business,...

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The introduction of bots to Facebook and other platforms has been overhyped — and the bots themselves often aren't very good, Facebook Messenger chief David Marcus said today. Speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Marcus made some of his first public comments about bots since Facebook launched the platform in April. "It got really overhyped really, really quickly," Marcus said. What's more, he said, many of the first bots to hit the platform weren't nearly as good as the native apps they were designed to replace.

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 In what has to be characterized as huge win for Microsoft, it announced this morning it had secured a 6-year deal with HP, Inc to run Microsoft Dynamics’ customer relationship management (CRM) and service software. What’s more, it grabbed this deal at the expense of its rivals. HP, Inc. had been a Salesforce CRM customer, while Oracle had been its service software provider.… Read More

In today's streaming age, initial airings of important TV episodes are no longer the cultural events they once were.

According to Nielsen's measurements of the top network telecasts of all time, the top 20 most-watched TV episodes ever all date back at least a decade.

For example, the "Seinfeld" series finale, in 1998 — which had a very mixed reaction — was the most recent episode to crack the top 100.

Decades-old miniseries like "Roots" and "The Thorn Birds" and finale episodes of the most popular shows in TV history dominate the list.

We compiled the data from Nielsen on the most-watched broadcasts ever to create this list of the top episodes of TV.

Note: We've excluded all live broadcasts, including Super Bowls and award shows, as well as movies broadcast on TV, all of which appear prominently in Nielsen's top 100.

Check out the top 20 most-watched episodes of TV ever:

SEE ALSO: Here are the best TV shows of the past year, according to critics

20. "All In The Family" — "Edith's Problem"

Ratings: 25.2 million viewers*

Date aired: January 8, 1972

Plot (from IMDb): "Edith's irritability as of late may be a sign of her going through menopause. Archie is frustrated when he finds out she can't possibly have her 'change of life' in 30 seconds."

*Nielsen's viewer ratings are determined by measuring the average audience in each minute of a program as a representation of the total number of people who watched the show.

19. "The Fugitive" — "The Judgment: Part 2" (Series Finale)

Ratings: 25.7 million viewers

Date aired: August 29, 1967

Plot: "Lt. Gerard agrees to work with Kimble for 24 hours to prove his innocence, because someone who may have been there when his wife was killed, posted bail for the one-armed man."

18. "Roots" — Part 1

Ratings: 28.8 million viewers

Date aired: January 23, 1977

Plot: "A dramatization of author Alex Haley's family line from ancestor Kunta Kinte's enslavement to his descendants' liberation."

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

“Dozens of employees” have reportedly left Apple’s secret car project.

Having mostly perfected computers of various shapes and sizes, it is compelling to imagine Apple’s head of design, Jony Ive, now crafting a minimalist dream car with a revolutionary user experience.

But according to several recent reports, Apple’s secret automotive project seems to have some issues.

“Dozens of employees” in Apple’s car project “have departed in recent weeks,” the FT reports. The company has had more than 1,000 people working on its so-called “Project Titan,” but “it has struggled to make progress,” according to the New York Times, noting that a series of layoffs was part of a “reboot.”

Under its new boss, returning veteran Apple executive Bob Mansfield, the project has shifted “from an emphasis on designing and producing an automobile to building out the underlying technology for an autonomous vehicle,” the NYT’s Daisuke Wakabayashi and Brian X. Chen report.

Apple is “not abandoning efforts to design its own vehicle,” Bloomberg had reported in late July. “That leaves options open should the company eventually decide to partner with or acquire an established carmaker, rather than build a car itself,” Mark Gurman and Alex Webb wrote.

To be sure, Apple has many skills that seem potentially useful here.

A self-driving electric car is basically a computer on wheels with a big battery and a bunch of digital eyes and data to analyze.

Meanwhile, Apple is one of the world’s top camera, chip-design and computer companies. Even if only loosely relevant here, the iPhone’s camera has been a particularly strong example of how Apple integrates hardware and software a level above its competition. The new iPhone 7 camera’s image processor performs more than 100 billion operations in 25 milliseconds, the company boasted this past week while unveiling it.

Apple is also expanding its mapping operations and has made progress in running large-scale cloud services. Its CarPlay software, a partnership with many top carmakers, is a good study into how people interact with in-car computers and user interfaces. And it is “sticking with its research into advanced batteries ... and continues to hire battery technicians,” Quartz’s Steve LeVine reports.

Plus, an Apple car would almost certainly look cool and be both fun to use and a status symbol — not insignificant selling points.

It’s probably too early to tell what all of this means, especially with limited visibility. This car-of-the-future stuff is hard, as Google’s struggles — and Tesla’s — confirm. And Apple is known for playing the long game when it’s serious about something.

Still, these reports don’t make it sound like the Apple/Jony Ive dream car is a certainty, if it ever was. And just making the “underlying technology” for someone else’s self-driving cars forever doesn’t seem like a particularly Apple-like project. So we’ll see.

An Apple rep did not respond to a request for comment.

The rumor mill about the Apple Car grinds on and on and on, and keep getting little clues about what "Project Titan" may or may not be all about.

But now it's starting to look like the "car" part may be disappearing from the picture. 

The New York Times reported dozens of layoffs on the project, as part of a "reboot."

This follows two earlier swerves on project Titan, covered by my colleague Steve Kovach. Tim Cook made some obscure statements that suggest a recent investment in a Chinese car-sharing service is going to provide support, somehow, for the Apple Car, alleged to arrive in 2021. That rumor now looks baseless.

Apple also put somebody with zero automotive experience in charge of the project, although he was reportedly close to Steve Jobs.

From my perspective, having followed the up-to-now completely inconsequential progress of the mysterious Project Titan, I'm ready to say that if you think Apple will be selling an actual car by 2021, you're going to be disappointed.

Here's why. That's five years down the road. The Apple Car project has been underway for about two years. So we're being asked to accept that it will take Apple seven years to create and market an automobile?

That's about two entire product cycles for a major automaker. Heck, Ford designed, engineered, and went racing in about a year and half with the new $400,000 Ford GT supercar — and won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in June.

If it's going to take Apple that long to bring a car to market, then you can only draw two conclusions: that Apple wants to develop a vehicle to use future technologies that aren't practical or accessible today; or that Apple is completely incompetent when it comes to this car project.

It's possible that the undertaking is just a sort of sideline experiment to keep pace with Google and Tesla. That would make sense. 

But the the Apple Car isn't a car. 

And based on Cook's comments and the recent "reboot" layoffs, I don't think it's trending in that direction, anyway. I think it's a comprehensive automotive interface of some sort, a CarPlay that takes over your entire vehicle and what systems are/will be outside the car.

So it's come to this: there will never be a true Apple Car — not one with wheels and an Apple badge on the front.

SEE ALSO: This is why Tesla and Google are the future of cars — and Apple isn't

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NOW WATCH: This motorised suitcase let's you ride through the airport at 8mph

"User-friendly" is not a word that's often used when describing marijuana edibles.

Whether you're biting into a pot brownie cooked up in a college dorm or nibbling on a fruit chew purchased from your local dispensary, you never really know how much marijuana you're ingesting. It can take hours to get high, and the effects can be intense and long-lasting.

That said, edibles offer a discreet way to get high in public or among disapproving company, and a single dose can power users through the worst bouts of illness-induced nausea or a marathon Netflix binge. It's often the consumption method of choice for people using marijuana for medicinal purposes (and those who just don't want to smoke).

Remember, it doesn't matter who you are or what size you are. Edibles will affect everyone differently. Enjoy with caution.

Here are three things to know before you try your first marijuana edible.

SEE ALSO: There are two main types of marijuana — here's the difference

1. Marijuana-infused foods are more potent than regular pot.

The body works in mysterious ways, as does marijuana.

Edibles offer a completely different experience than, say, a joint or a bong hit. When eaten, tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive ingredient in weed, undergoes a transformation in the liver that turns it into a different substance that's twice as strong and lasts twice as long as when inhaled.

It also takes our bodies much longer to process cannabis when we ingest rather than inhale.

"With smoking, the peak blood levels happen within 3-10 minutes, and with eating, it's 1-3 hours," Kari Franson, a clinical pharmacologist and an associate dean of the Department of Clinical Pharmacy at the University of Colorado Skaggs School of Pharmacy, told Forbes.

Because it takes so long to process, people often overdo it. If you don't feel high after ingesting an edible, wait at least two hours before consuming a second dose.

2. You should always, always, always read the label.

Not everyone has the great fortune of being able to pick out an individually packaged edible from a bona fide retailer, especially in states where the prohibition on pot persists (though that's starting to change). But if you do, paying attention to the label on the packaging can be the difference between a Grade A night-in and a paranoia-wracked nightmare of an evening.

Any reputable edible maker will lab test their products for potency and will include on the label two important ingredients: THC, the psychoactive chemical compound in marijuana, and CBD, or cannabidiol, the chemical compound that has pain relief benefits. The total THC or "maximum THC" is the most clear-cut indicator of how high the product will make you.

Research shows these labels can be inaccurate, but it beats total ignorance.

Five milligrams of THC is a good place to start for novice users, according to the Oregon Responsible Edibles Council. It's a conservative dose for adults who don't know their tolerance or are consuming for recreational, rather than medical, purposes.

3. It will be okay if you get too high.

If your heart starts to race, your hands tremble, and anxiety strikes, it's helpful to remember there are no recorded cases of people fatally overdosing on marijuana. Zero.

"The good thing about [consuming too much] weed is it can't kill you," Kim Geraghty, cofounder of Madame Munchie, whose gourmet cannabis macarons recently took the award for best dessert at Hempcon, told Business Insider. "But it can make you very uncomfortable."

There are things you can do to mitigate an "Oh, no, what I have done?" high. First, relax.

"Remind yourself that you're in no danger and the state you're in is temporary," writes David Schmader in his excellent book, "Weed: The User's Guide." "Surround yourself with stuff that makes you feel safe. (If this means pajamas in bed, so be it.)"

Drink some water to stay hydrated and eat a snack — preferably one that is ready-to-eat and does not require operating a stove— to boost your blood sugar. Call up a trusted friend, Schmader recommends, or Google search "Maureen Dowd Colorado" to feel less alone.

 

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Apple has laid off dozens of employees working on its self-driving car efforts, Daisuke Wakabayashi and Brian Chen report for The New York Times.

The company is apparently rethinking the strategy of its so-called Project Titan car initiative, with employees being told the layoff was part of a "reboot," according to the Times' sources.

While Apple has never publically acknowledged that it's working on a vehicle, The Wall Street Journal first reported in early 2015 that it had several hundred employees working on an Apple-branded electric car.

Since, it has made several high-profile hires and filed patents for technology often used in self-driving cars. 

Several unmarked vehicles laden with camera and sensor equipment have also been rumored to be owned by Apple. 

Bloomberg recently reported that Apple has shifted its focus from designing a full automobile to building out the technology for a self-driving car, and these new lay-offs look like a shift in that direction. 

Meanwhile, other tech companies like Google, Tesla, and Uber, as well as car companies like Ford and General Motors, working on their own autonomous vehicle efforts.

SEE ALSO: This unmarked van looks like it could be an Apple self-driving car or mapping vehicle

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NOW WATCH: Facebook has a feature that stalks you all over the internet — here’s how to turn it off

There's nothing quite like a shiny, jet-age Airstream trailer. Towing one behind your vehicle, or simply parking one in your driveway, says that you appreciate classic, 20th-century, cutting-edge design.

The original Airstream — a sleek, shimmering object of rolling art — was introduced in the 1930s. The lineup has grown over the decades, and the smallest trailer, the Sport Series, has now been outdone by the Basecamp Series.

Described by the company as "our most nimble Airstream yet," the Basecamp is the "very definition of get-up-and-go."

What Airstream is aiming for here is both the highly adventurous and outdoorsy crowd. These are the folks who want to suit up in head-to-toe Patagonia and head out with friends for a weekend of rock climbing, as well as the hardcore camping enthusiasts who don't need, or have room for, a full-on Airstream trailer.

The Basecamp, Airstream said in a statement, is "compact, light, and easy to tow, and the perfect place to land after a day of adventure."

The newest Airstream is quite full-featured for its size, with a bathroom and shower, a kitchen, and a built-in Bluetooth speaker.

“We designed Basecamp to rekindle the desire to explore nature and get outdoors,” said CEO Bob Wheeler in a statement.

“Whether it’s for the long-time camper who has a garage full of high-end gear that’s no longer used, or for the person who has always wanted to get out more but was hesitant, Basecamp is the passport to unimaginable new experiences.”

The new trailer weighs 2,585 lbs. and according to Airstream can be towed by smaller crossovers and SUV that are properly outfitted with a hitch.

Airstream is currently accepting reservations, and the Basecamp will start deliveries in October. The price is $34,900. Heck, I'm thinking about getting one and putting it in my back yard to use as a hipster guest cottage!

SEE ALSO: Ford is buying Y Combinator shuttle van startup Chariot in an all-cash deal

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NOW WATCH: 'Glamping' is camping with style

Smell ya later, friends! Don't need your dad's boat, Tanner, because I'm going dronesurfing.

We've seen cases of droneboarding before, where drones are used to drag people across snow with underwhelming results. (The verdict was that it needs bigger drones or smaller humans.) But with the help of the combined forces of wind and water (not to mention a full running start), dronesurfing actually looks pretty doable, and fun!

Keep in mind though, that the drone shown here is a Freefly Systems Alta 8— a $17,495 beast of a drone with eight propellers intended to carry heavy video equipment. So... maybe hang on to your fancy friend with the boat a little longer? Sigh, why was I so quick delete Tanner from my contacts?

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 Online tools like Office 365 have changed the way we work and collaborate with our colleagues, but often projects involve people outside of your organization, whether partners, consultants or vendors. Microsoft acknowledged that reality today when it announced the ability to invite guests to view or edit Office 365 content. It’s not going to all happen at once, but over time Office 365… Read More

Facebook just censored the Prime Minister of Norway.

The social network is caught in a rapidly escalating spat over censorship, freedom of expression, and editorial responsibilities. At the centre of it is a world-famous, Pullitzer Prize-winning photo taken during the Vietnam War of children fleeing in terror from a napalm strike — inclduing 9-year-old Kim Phuc, who is naked. (Facebook's "community standards" prohibit nudity.)

Facebook recently deleted a post from a Norweigian author who shared the photo (and suspended him!) — prompting Norway's biggest newspaper to write a scathing open letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday, accusing him of "abusing" his power and abdicating his editorial responsibilities.

"Listen, Mark, this is serious," newspaper editor Epsin Egil Hansen wrote in the open letter. "First you create rules that don’t distinguish between child pornography and famous war photographs. Then you practice these rules without allowing space for good judgment. Finally you even censor criticism against and a discussion about the decision — and you punish the person who dares to voice criticism."

Norweigan Prime Minister Erna Solberg also waded into the row, posting the photo to Facebook, as did multiple other government ministers, Aftenposten reports. "I appreciate the work of Facebook and other media to stop pictures and content showing abuse and violence," the PM wrote in an accompanying message. "But Facebook gets it wrong when it censors pictures like these. It contributes to restricting the freedom of speech."

But it seems Facebook doesn't care what Solberg thinks: It has now deleted her post, along with the ones posted by ministers.

"It is very regrettable that Facebook removed a post from my Facebook page," the Norweigian Prime Minister told Aftenposten.

A Facebook spokesperson provided Business Insider with the following statement: "While we recognize that this photo is iconic, it’s difficult to create a distinction between allowing a photograph of a nude child in one instance and not others. We try to find the right balance between enabling people to express themselves while maintaining a safe and respectful experience for our global community. Our solutions won’t always be perfect, but we will continue to try to improve our policies and the ways in which we apply them."

It's also worth noting that Facebook does have an "graphic content" warning it can place over potentially offensive photos or videos. It's not clear why it wasn't used in this instance.

"You are restricting my room for exercising my editorial responsibility. This is what you and your subordinates are doing in this case,"Aftenposten editor Epsin Egil Hansen wrote to Mark Zuckerberg. "I think you are abusing your power, and I find it hard to believe that you have thought it through thoroughly."

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This incredibly simple trick fixes your iPhone if it's acting slow — and it takes less than 30 seconds

Apple removed the headphone jack on the newest iPhone, a decision that is already causing concern among users.

Apple's reasoning, in one word? "Courage," Apple SVP Phil Schiller said on Wednesday — a line that has been widely mocked.

It turns out Apple has used the "courage" reasoning in the past. Specifically, former CEO Steve Jobs brought courage up when defending his decision that the iPhone wouldn't run Adobe Flash, 9to5Mac points out.

"We're trying to make great products for people, and we have at least the courage of our convictions to say we don't think this is part of what makes a great product," Jobs said at a tech conference in 2010.

The "courage" line starts at 2:45, but the entire clip is worth watching.

"We're going to take the heat, instead focus our energy on these technologies which we think are in their ascendancy and we think are going to be the right technologies for customers. And you know what? They're paying us to make those choices," Jobs said.

"The way we've succeeded is by choosing what horses to ride very carefully, technically," Jobs said. "We have a history of doing that. As an example, we went from the 5-inch floppy disk to the 3.5-inch floppy disk on the Mac ... We got rid of the floppy disk altogether in 1998 with the first iMac. We also got rid of these things called serial and parallel ports."

If Apple succeeds, Jobs said, people will buy iPhones. "If we don't, they won't," Jobs said.

We'll see in Apple's quarterly earnings if customers like the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. Apple advised on Thursday that it would not release first-weekend preorder sales numbers.

Regardless of whether you believe a product decision could ever be described as courageous, at least Apple is consistent. It is extremely likely that Schiller knew about this clip when he revealed Apple's new jackless iPhone on Wednesday.

SEE ALSO: Apple's one-word explanation for why it killed the headphone jack

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NOW WATCH: It's going to be a bad year for the iPhone — here's why

Here's an idea: Instead of waking up the regular way, why not let an orgasm rouse you from peaceful slumber?

That's the premise behind the Little Rooster S, the inexplicable vibrator-alarm clock hybrid for women.

Image: little rooster

Basically, a user wears the device inside a pair of underwear, but outside the body. At the specified time, the device will begin to vibrate, first on a low setting before it gradually increases to the wearer's selected level of intensity. There are 30 levels to choose from, and a spokesperson from the company claims the device is virtually silent through 27.

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“It's what you see in a lot of the great Australian tech companies ... It was either become profitable and grow, or die.”

On a recent episode of Recode Decode, Atlassian co-CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes told Recode’s Kara Swisher that Australian tech companies such as his should build bridges to Silicon Valley, rather than try to outdo it.

You can read some of the highlights from their discussion at that link, or listen to it in the audio player above. Below, we’ve posted a lightly edited complete transcript of their conversation.

If you like this, be sure to subscribe to Recode Decode on iTunes, Google Play Music, TuneIn and Stitcher.

Transcript by Celia Fogel.

---

Kara Swisher: Today in the red chair is Mike Cannon-Brookes, the co-CEO of Atlassian. He co-founded the company with Scott Farquhar in 2002. Atlassian is an enterprise software company best known for its team collaboration tools and is headquartered right here in Sydney, where we are recording this podcast. Mike, I traveled all the way here to see you, so it better be good! Are you ready?

Mike Cannon-Brookes: [laughs] Thanks for having me.

Welcome to the show. So let's talk a little bit about Atlassian. You're one of the more successful IPOs, and we'll talk about that later, where tech is right now. But why don't you explain what Atlassian does and some of its more popular products.

Sure, Kara. We make, broadly said, team collaboration tools for teams of people to be more effective in organizations all over the world. We started in the software team, building project management and collaboration tools for software developers, and over the last decade we've expanded into IT teams, sort of in adjacency. And then in the last four or five years into broader business teams, so finance, marketing, HR, legal, etc.

So talk about that idea. Because right now enterprise is very hot in that way, and kind of hip even. What has happened? Because usually enterprise software has not been the most exciting place in the world to work. How did you get started in it? And obviously Slack gets a lot of the attention in Silicon Valley. But there's a lot of other companies in the genre that are changing the way enterprise is done.

Sure. I mean I think there's a few things changing at the moment. Both mobile, the internet and the sort of rise of people making IT choices at different levels of the organization is really changing how enterprise software is bought and sold. Atlassian for more than a decade kind of pioneered a new model. We tend to like to say our software is bought and not sold. And we sell on a team by team basis; we don't try to sell to an entire company at a single time, which has been one of our successes, if you like.

So why did that change? What happened in enterprise software to allow companies like you and Slack to have inroads into this area that was sort of protected by CIOs?

Sure. I think part of it is people's general awareness throughout the business that software technology is a competitive advantage, so you have marketing teams making, you know, small but significant purchasing choices about how their team's going to operate. Part of that is also the rise of SAS or software as a service. So before, you used to go to IT, sort of the gatekeepers, to get them to install a piece of software for you or set up a server or something, and now you can generally go on a whole lot of enterprise software websites, you know effectively sign up for a trial or swipe a credit card, get your colleagues online, and then if it works, IT says, "It's working for you, so we'll keep supporting it or paying for it."

What happened? Was it people were used to consumer tools, or mobile tools? Talk a little deeper about that.

I think it's a combination of all of those things. Certainly millennials, as people like to say, coming through, being used to higher quality tools and then getting to the workplace and saying, "Wait, I have to use this stuff to collaborate? If I can use Facebook Messenger at home, why do I have this crummy messaging tool at work?" So that's certainly been one angle that I think has changed things. Second is, obviously software as a service and the internet generally, you know, our ability, so we sell into 170 different countries now, so we never could have done that in a traditional enterprise model. We would have needed sales people all over the world, etc. So we can spread out the revenue generation, if you like, much more around the globe, much more quickly. And at the same time, the cost of producing that service or creating that software has gone down rapidly with open source, and cloud computing in terms of AWS, things like that. So we can effectively deliver a better product for cheaper and kind of instantly get it around the world and just let it bubble up.

So talk about the founding of this. This is 2002 you started this? What were you doing?

2002. We were both sort of finishing university. I had a prior startup that was an interesting journey.

What was it?

It was an online book marking startup.

Okay, there were a lot of those.

There were a lot of those, yeah. We sold it to a company called Blink.com in New York. We had a little exit, it was a one-year journey; we learned a lot. And then I went and was a bit of a journalist for a while — wrote about tech and various other things. And then we started at Atlassian in 2002. Scott was just finishing university, and famously we didn't have one of those ambitious starting stories.

Right. You need one, just so you know. You can buy them in Silicon Valley.

Fifteen years, I should come up with one. A lot of our colleagues …

There was this Pez dispenser and …

That's right. We were selling Pez dispensers to enterprises. A lot of our colleagues went to work for big consulting companies — IBM, PWC — and our only goal was actually to pay ourselves as much as they were getting paid, which was $48,000 a year. So that was the goal of starting.

Right, so why did you not do that? Why did you want to do this?

We didn't want to get a real job.

And why enterprise? Because you were in a more consumer space.

We were a little bit more in a consumer space. We certainly thought enterprises would probably purchase software more. We had had a fair bit of work experience at university, a series of six-month placements, and it was just a horrible experience with the software we were made to use. So I guess we wanted to change that and thought there was an opportunity. We had a hunch that maybe that would change.

And what's the name from?

Atlas was a Greek Titan.

I'm aware of that.

So he theoretically held the sky up, and we started as a company with a "high commitment to legendary service," one of our tag lines in the early days. And so we thought that was kind of the original service to the world. And we turned it into an adjective. Sort of an Atlassian effort.

How much funding did you get originally? Because this was not an area people were funding. Everything was consumer.

We didn't get any. So we actually haven't raised any institutional funding at all.

That's right. So why was that, by choice or because you just couldn't get any?

Well, I mean, as I like to say, in 2002, A) it was nuclear winter for tech, B) we were two knuckleheads with no experience, and C) we were in Australia. We didn't even bother, to be honest, to try to get funding in the early days. Which is part of where our model came from actually. The disruptive model that we have, we had to be profitable. It's what you see in a lot of the great Australian tech companies. It's, "We didn't really have a choice." So it was either become profitable and grow, or die. And so the ones that made it through that gauntlet have been very, very successful.

Did you think about that you needed it? Did you think about coming to Silicon Valley to get money? Or not?

We didn't, no. In 2002, I mean Silicon Valley seemed a mile away from us in Sydney as well, so it wasn't even a thought. And by the time VCs certainly started to come knocking, probably 2005 or 2006, we just always asked them the question, "Why would we take money? We're growing, we're profitable, what would change here?" And they'd have a whole host of reasons, and we wouldn't believe them and then we'd move on.

Right, right. How did you develop that skin to do that? Because most startups do that in Silicon Valley. Do you think that's a mistake?

I don't think it's a mistake, I think it's a mistake to have it as the default choice. It's a mistake to not think about why you're doing it and what change it's going to make to your business. There's a sort of "If we can get money, we should go get it" attitude sometimes, and we didn't need it. We were profitable. We raised a secondary round from Accel in 2010, about a $60 million round, which was our sort of Series A if you like, but we had $55 million in the bank when we raised that money.

Wow. So why bother?

Well, we needed to get them on board as a partner at that stage, so it was a very strategic choice.

Because? What was the thinking there?

You know, we were seven, eight years in, we'd been heads down for all that time and then decided, well, sort of looked up and thought, "We've really built something special here, there's a lot of runway to go ahead of us, and we need some help." We'd reached some pretty rarified air at that point too; we were certainly thinking about going public and looking ahead and thought we probably needed some partners to do that. We were trying to build a board, and it was strangely very hard to build at a board. People would look at us and say, "Oh, well how come you have no funding?" and "I'm not sure about this company ..." So there were a few things. We had a very interesting negotiation with the Accel guys, who we love, I would say.

Why is that?

Well, we were trying ... they originally wanted to put in quite a bit more money and we wanted them to put in less. We would have taken $5 million.

Right, because you wanted to give them less.

[laughs] We wanted to give them less, exactly. It was a very strange negotiation, in reverse.

"We don't want your money." "Yes, you do." You must have gone crazy.

Our whole funding process was quite unusual because we had a bunch of VCs chasing for many years. So it's not a typical process, and I tell all Australian startups, "Don't try and copy it." It was just a thing for the time.

So talk about the mentality of having to make money. Because it is an anathema in Silicon Valley. Though now it's starting to be very important. There's like, either you sell right now ... look at Jet.com or some others. People are selling. LinkedIn had to sell really, in a lot of ways. Talk about that discipline that it brings as you're moving towards your IPO.

I think it's been really important for us. Our DNA as a company has always been to be profitable, to be customer-funded, to make money by selling things. So I think we've gotten away from maybe some of the bad habits you develop if you can't always go and get more money, right? You can sort of say, "Well, we're going to get profitable. No, no, no, let's go raise some more money and invest more heavily and then get profitable." You know, you can always kind of push out that bow wave and from year two we were making more money. We didn't start with any, so we had to kind of get there to hire people. I think just the DNA of the company has always been about driving customer value, selling software with our disruptive model, and at the same time being quite lean about how we do it in terms of managing costs and all that sort of thing. People think it's funny that we fly economy or use UberX to get around and things like that. It's just part of the DNA of what we've done.

Sure. Talk about your products. Before you went public you had three products? Is that correct? Or three major products?

Yeah. Three or four major products. We have about 10 or 12 products overall.

Talk about each of them really briefly and then when we get back from the break we'll talk a little bit about being an Australian company and going public and what that was like.

So the Jira family of products is our biggest. So Jira, which is now Jira Software, is our largest software. It's project management and workflow tools for software developers. That is now spun off to other siblings …

Of which there are many in Silicon Valley.

Of which there are many. Many in the world. Millions and millions. It's a good market to be in. It's now spun off to other products: Jira Service Desk and Jira Core. Service Desk largely for IT teams running help desks, but increasingly for any service-based team in an organization, be it interactive marketing or legal or finance. Jira Core is strictly for business projects and running project management and workflow in an organization in a much more collaborative team-based sense.

Were you worried when a lot of other people jumped ... I'm trying to think … Asana … there's so many, there are so many of them. As if it was their idea to begin with. I mean …

Sure. We've been around a long time, we've seen competitors come and go. Some stick with us. We're in a huge market. There's a billion knowledge workers out there trying to do their jobs better, so we still think we're very early in that market, I suppose.

And then the one that's best known is HipChat, correct?

HipChat ... well Jira’s probably better known than HipChat, to be honest.

Yeah, yeah, I got that. But I mean from a consumer point of view.

HipChat is an enterprise team-based messaging and communication tool which we bought. It was three people when we bought it three, four years ago now. Which is obviously a hugely hot space and it's growing very strongly. It's a great product for us. And Confluence, which is sort of our textual collaboration, if you want to think about a content and collaboration and discussion tool. So HipChat and Confluence are kind of siblings. One obviously for the much more real- time messaging, video calls, communication aspect.

Call it Slack. It's like Slack.

Confluence more for the long form content discussion and images and files and those sorts of things.

Was it really important to have that many products? Because a lot of Silicon Valley is single products, like Slack, and it has not added to it, assuming it will but hasn't, one product essentially. Was it important to have those three legs to stand on to go public?

Not so much to go public. It's certainly been important for our business for a number of reasons. In the early days we used to say we wanted to put forward a theory on our side, not on the VC side. So, you know, having multiple products was a very controversial decision internally to start our second product, which was Confluence. Looking back, it's proven very probably sage. We had two rocket engines driving us along, not just one, and they helped each other out. So from that point of view, it's given us a lot more diversity of income, diversity of everything else as a company. But I think it's also something that the customers really value, right? If you think about knowledge workers, they have to do what? They have to complete tasks, they have to write a bunch of content and they have to communicate with their colleagues in some way, shape or form. Whether that's, you know, Word and email and Outlook and PowerPoint, whatever traditional tool set you have or a modern tool set, we kind of have one of each of the three fundamental pillars at the moment.

Right, it's sort of the Salesforce model, adding on things as you go. I think you're more profitable …

Yeah, we try to be very thoughtful about how we do it.

All right, when we get back we're going to talk about going public and what it's like to be a public company in Australia and pretty much the most famous one, I think, correct?

Probably that's listed in the U.S., maybe. There's lots of local companies.

That's all that matters, as you know.

Of course.

Everything centers around the U.S. of A! Which it doesn't. It's interesting, there aren't as many as you would think here. Talk about that journey, for an IPO. And you IPO'd in the U.S. correct? Talk about that, what happened there. So you were chugging along making money …

We were chugging along and making money and, look, we've always wanted to be an excellent company and play on the world stage. I use the analogy that I grew up playing basketball and shoot-around as a kid dreaming of playing for a high school — you should dream of playing for the NBA. And so we kind of at each point had been looking at "what is the big league for this company and how do we get to the next stage?" We went through high school, we went through college, etc., and so when we had a chance to play in the NBA, or go public in the U.S. as I like to think in tech company circles, that was certainly a goal. We were very thoughtful, we took a long time to do it, I think. We took about four years of planning and operating a couple years internally as if we were a public company to really get used to doing it. Didn't want to in any way screw up the magic of what we built.

So how many employees do you have now?

So we have about somewhere north of 1,700.

1,700 around the world, correct?

Around the world, that is correct.

Most of them or in Australia? Or not?

Mmmm, a little over half I think; call it 1,000.

So talk about that idea of coming from Australia. Was that hard to do? You really are the one. Was there a lot of pressure on you to prove things? I think that in terms of regional things in the U.S., too. I mean Myspace was Los Angeles and then it wasn't. Now it's Snapchat. But most of the companies are based in Silicon Valley, the Facebooks, the Googles, the Apples, and all the rest.

The Microsofts, the Amazons, there's a bunch of other places.

Yeah, there's two in Seattle, but still oddly geographically centered in an analog way that sometimes confuses me why that's the case.

Sure. I mean we've taken again a pragmatic attitude to it, so we have two large and very valuable offices ... three now actually in the U.S. We have an office in San Francisco, a couple hundred people. Another couple hundred people in Austin and about 100 people now in Mountain View. So we certainly see the value in the U.S. talent pool and in being there. We like to think that we straddle the Pacific as a company. We get the best of Silicon Valley in terms of just the amazing creativity, drive — you know nothing is too big to attempt and this kind of world that is over there, and just the depth of talent is incredible. And we like to combine that with some of the more pragmatic and real world problems, maybe, that exist in other places in the world and other big cities. Sydney's a big five-and-a-half-million-person city, so we get a lot of that practicality without maybe some of the froth and bubbles at the same time, and we try to balance between those two.

Was there pressure to move to Silicon Valley? Or did you ever think about it? Or never?

We've never thought about moving the entire company at all, no.

You just have offices there.

Yeah, we've had an office there for 10 years now in San Francisco, three years in Austin maybe. So you know, we have hundreds of people there and I'm there once a month basically, so we certainly spend a lot of time there, but at the same time we see a huge value in Australia; we think it's a huge strategic advantage for us.

Talk about that, because I don't believe you. It's interesting to me that there still haven't been as many ... China would be the country that's really minting some really big and significant companies. But it's still ... it's sort of like Hollywood. It's still dominates.

Absolutely.

Is that going to change? Or does it have to change?

I don't think it has to change. No, I'm a big believer that you don't try to change that. Australia has a very successful film industry and a part of that industry is about building pathways to Hollywood back and forth. We've obviously got a lot of big Hollywood stars now that started in the Australian film industry; we make some pretty good quality films down here as well. We make some big budget films, too. We want to build connections. I think what the Australian tech industry needs to do is exactly what the Israeli or a lot of other small geographic countries have tried to do, which is build as many pathways to and from Silicon Valley. We're not going to beat them. We're going to try and build a way to cooperate with them and build the best of both worlds.

Does it have to stay geographic like that? Could that change over the course of ... it seems to stick. It's really an odd thing.

It's just about talent magnetism, right? Silicon Valley attracts the best talent in the world that's interested in that space. It's the same thing as if you're in film from anywhere in the world. You'll probably end up gravitating towards Hollywood, and it's a self-perpetuating thing. But there’s a lot of other reasons, and I do think that a lot of that knowledge is being spread around the world as well.

So what's the benefit to being here? What is, from your perspective ... we just had Mel from Canva talk about loyalty, the ability to really hire and keep people. The relentless talent-hopping that goes on in Silicon Valley and things like that.

Sure. I think we have great loyalty in the San Francisco office, actually. Probably well above the normal American tech company. But yeah, it's certainly an issue. It's certainly an issue that we have much more churn of that kind in San Francisco than we do in Sydney. I actually think we have great technical talent in Sydney. I'm a computer science professor at one of the big local universities, one of the best technical universities in the country, University of New South Wales. And if you look at where our grads go, our top 10 grads last year went to Uber, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, in other places in the world. They left the country, right. We don't have great jobs for them. So at Atlassian obviously we're trying to heavily recruit from local universities. The quality of talent coming out is very very good. And we're a big fish in a small pond, so I do think it's a big strategic advantage for us.

So what's your responsibility as a big fish in a small pond? Do you feel you have to make it all work perfectly? How do you create other big fishes here?

I don't think about it as a responsibility ...

I'm only thinking because Google shed off people that then started companies. Everyone worked at Google or everyone worked at Facebook, and then they go on to do other things.

We certainly celebrate alumni. We have our first unicorn alumni in Mulesoft now, so people move into the tech industry and they go and start their own companies and we like to celebrate that as much as we can. Actually one of the Canva founders did some work for Atlassian way back when. He designed one of our early websites. So look, you’ve just got to celebrate that. You can't fight that. You celebrate people going to do that. I don't see it as a responsibility of ours to do that as much as our responsibility is to the customers to just keep making great products.

What about given you didn't take VC money but the VC market is always, you know, I don't want to say gasoline, they do set things on fire ... but I think there's an iron triangle, VCs, university and companies as they shed people and everything else. Do you think you need that here? A stronger …

We are certainly doing our bit to start that, so actually I was heavily instrumental in starting Blackbird Ventures.

Right, which Mel brought up.

So as as heavy investor in Blackbird, I'm by proxy a heavy investor in Canva. Blackbird's going fantastically.

What do you hope to do with that?

I think there's a big opportunity in Australia. I think what a lot of the U.S. VCs have seen is that it's very hard to come down here for sort of ... you know the line is supposedly sub-$10 million investment. It becomes complicated for them to manage. When you're doing your big rounds like 99Designs, or Atlassian’s was 4x, BigCommerce, etc., the $35-$40 million round, they can manage that remotely. The smaller ends get hard. So we thought there was a huge opportunity ... and we've got a great angel scene and a great seed funding accelerator scene. What Blackbird was trying to target is that gap in between. They've raised a couple hundred grand or a million dollars, but they really need that next $4-, $5-, $6 million round to get them to global proportions. We only target globally focused businesses, largely coming from Australia, Australian universities, and we now have the largest fund in the country. We just closed Fund Two, which is over $200 million.

Wow, that's a large one.

So we're readily deploying it at the moment. Yeah, there's a huge amount of opportunity there.

Only in Australia?

I mean we look at all sorts of businesses worldwide. Some of our businesses have moved out of Australia. We're not trying to keep them here or pen them in. But generally as our focus has been on Australian-started and funded businesses.

Well, Mark Andreessen for years didn't want to go anywhere he couldn't have lunch with. I mean he just wanted to stay within the boundaries. I think he still does that in a lot of ways compared to other ...

Sure, and there's lots of different ways to I guess invest. One of the things I've loved about the Accel guys the most is they're very happy to jump on a plane and see opportunities all around the world. They did Rovio over in Finland, they did Qualtrics in Utah, Lightspeed in Canada, us down in Sydney, so …

Well, you're a little bit a longer flight, having just done it. So we'll talk about where things are going and the enterprise market in the next section, but what's it like being a public company? Has it been a big change for you?

It's certainly meant on the PR/marketing side, things have certainly stepped up a lot, which is great for business generally. It can't hurt for people to know our name or our brand and discover our products. It has been a really good journey for us I think in terms of the constant discipline that being a public company entails.

What's been hard for you? What's been difficult?

To be honest, we had a lot of practice and we spent a lot of time getting ready …

Not saying things.

So nothing has been stupendously much harder than we've been used to the last few years. We were really hard on ourselves for the couple years before we went public to make sure we could compete and we could do what we were setting out to do.

It's interesting, a lot of Silicon Valley companies, Uber, Airbnb, don't want to go public that quickly. You obviously took a long time to do it, but they're very reticent. I think they'd like to stay private if they could and get endless sums of money if they could. Although they can, they probably can.

I guess it depends on your model as well. We obviously have a very predictable business model, being hundreds of thousands of smaller transactions to enterprises, which gives us less of a quarterly worry I suppose than traditional enterprise software businesses that can sometimes get a third or two-thirds of their revenue in the last two or three weeks of the quarter.

How do you split up the co-CEO? It's always a red flag to me ... I'm sorry, sometimes it is. But how do you split that up?

We've got 14 years of practice now. We have run different parts of the business at different times. We've both run the entire company at different times in the company's history and for the last probably four or five years basically we divided the exec team. We spend a lot of time with each other's halves of the business. Generally Scott's a little more back-end focused and runs some of the operational things and runs two of our product groups. And I run the other two product groups and sales and marketing and design.

What's the key to a happy marriage? This co-CEO marriage?

I think trust, obviously. Honesty. Being able to call bullshit on the other person — oh, can I say that?

Yes, please do. You can say "fuck," too. You can say whatever you want on a podcast.

Being able to say, "You did the wrong thing," and those sort of things. Being respectful of boundaries is something we've learned a lot over the last decade; it’s really, really important. As we grow we can create work really easily. If I talk to one of Scott's reports, I can spin off work without meaning to. So we're very mindful of each other's boundaries and constant communication.

That sounds good. Atlassian went public in the U.S., how many years ago was that?

December of last year.

So you've been the big success. Everyone is like dying in the U.S. because of no exits. But you had finally a great one.

Sure, we built a business that didn't need to time their markets, and we did it I think when it was right for us.

So talk a little bit about that and where the enterprise space is. Because there's been some troublesome signs in the enterprise space for some of the companies. Box, which went public, has had a rougher road, probably because they don't make money.

Sure. Look, they have a very different business model.

Yeah, I don't want to lump you all in together, but there is an enterprise space that has gotten hit in a lot of ways. How do you manage that and what's that like?

Well, I think a lot of them have been hit because again, their fundamental business model. So if you look at a lot of those companies, they spend a massive amount of money on sales and marketing, sometimes more than 100 percent — 60, 70, 80 percent of revenue on sales and marketing to get customers with a belief in a long-term payoff.

You run fast enough ...

Well, it may have worked in the older days, where you were selling someone a large piece of software for millions of dollars that was going to stick around for years. But nowadays you're selling small pieces of software, it becomes harder to do that in the sort of current climate.

And things pop up very quickly, too.

Things change a lot quicker nowadays. So our model is in reverse of that. We spend 20 percent of revenue on sales and marketing. We spend about 35-40 percent of revenue on R&D. So we've flipped that backwards; we've had it flipped backwards for more than a decade. And I think that's one of the reasons that we're really differentiating is that our model is truly disruptive to enterprise software. It can be quite scary if you're one of those companies to have a look at the economics. And it's part of the reason we're public and it's part of the reason we continue to stick to what we do well.

So talk about the enterprise space. You're still dominated by the Oracles, the … all kinds of companies, there's tons of them. What is happening now from your perspective? They sort of still have an iron grip on a lot of companies. How does that change? Is it a slow thing? Obviously there's been a ton of change, but where does it go next?

I think it's continually changing. I do think that the democratization of buying in the enterprise is quite an interesting phenomenon. It's changing the role of IT from a gatekeeper to more of a coach, if you like, in terms of how to buy software, which is changing. It helps SAS companies like us to get in the door a lot more easily than we could have done in the past. We don't need a salesforce …

People will try things.

Play golf with the CIO and those sorts of things.

Yeah, you don't do that. You don't look like a golf player. You look like a trucker! You look like a Southern trucker. I feel like I should be playing "Sweet Home Alabama." But go ahead.

[laughs] Look, I think that whole part of the space is really changing. I think businesses are always looking for a way to do things better. To collaborate better, to communicate with software. I think APIs are perhaps one of the secret ingredients here. It used to be in enterprise software that integration was a very expensive thing. You'd buy two huge packages and you'd have to get a bunch of consultants to put them together. When you move to SAS, people forget you get a fixed or relatively standard set of APIs that usually have a single URL, so it's easier for people to build integrations that are reusable across customers.

I think they made it harder on purpose is my guess.

They may well have.

I'm just spitballing that one.

To, you know, that just brings the time for implementation, for getting things running, down. One of our focuses as a company obviously is on teams. So we try to sell one team at a time. Prove value with a small team of people and then virally get to a second team or third team within the enterprise. So if you look, far more of our dollars come after the first sale than in the first sale. With traditional enterprise software you sell a hundred dollars on day one and then maybe ten dollars in year two, sort of a maintenance fee, we flipped that right around so we tend to get more in year two than in year one.

So where is the future of work going? I mean that is a big obvious question. Workplaces are different, commuting is different ... there's all kinds of physical things and then there's all kinds of sort of more non-physical ways it's changed. How do you see it; where does it go?

The nature of work, the nature of businesses is changing on a constant basis. So obviously one of the biggest changes I think now is the notion of distribution and remoteness. It used to be a thought about the New York office working with maybe the India office. Now it's your team in all sorts of locations. So certainly communication tools, VR conferencing tools are becoming way more important to getting work done productively. At the same time you need tools to manage distributed teams’ work. That's largely what Atlassian does in terms of you've got to write a document and get a bunch of people on the same page, you've got to run a project with people all over the place, and that distributed team on mobile devices or in different offices or working from home today or in another country, changes the way that software tools need to work.

Will we have offices? Do you imagine we'll have offices?

I think we'll still have offices. I think offices are very important. But I think the notion of a team being 10 people that sit in a single room for the entirety of a project is probably past, right?

Yeah, when we started AllThingsD, we had no office. Everybody was somewhere else.

But do you have an office today?

Sort of.

You need some office. People go in and out now much more; they work three days a week, they take care of the kids two days. So I think that notion of the traditional work breaking down and being distributed over time and space requires a very different set of tools to make things be effective.

So I want to finish up talking a little bit about one of the competitors, although you have much wider range of products, but Slack. What do you think of the Slack phenomena. It's probably good for you in that it makes the area sexy, and at the same time, ech, Slack.

We have lots of competitors in all spaces …

Yeah, but that's the one. That's the one in HipChat.

Umm …

Or not.

That's the one in one of the spaces we're in, certainly. Sure. If you look at both of us, we’re probably much more heavily competing against Link or Skype or any of the big traditional enterprise messaging tools that have tens if not hundreds of millions of users than each other. If you think of a billion knowledge workers, we're both very, very early and …

You guys have come in and made it exciting. I mean many people feel that Skype has been mismanaged by Microsoft. And they had a great opportunity there that they blew. Why have you all, both you and Slack and some others, been able to come in and do that?

One of the things we've done with HipChat that's very different to Skype or Link is focus on the team first, and it's part of our DNA as a business. It does do one-on-one messaging, but the focus is on team-based messaging. And then the second thing that's a big difference really is the integration of tools. Other applications, APIs, software, integrations into the messaging experience. So not just ... you can't really connect another application. If you have a software commit message or marketing campaign result or something, connecting that into Skype doesn't make any sense. Whereas with something like HipChat, it's a natural part of a room to have people but also machines or software programming sending messages.

Are you surprised that the big companies like Google and Microsoft, which has been trying to move into this area — I mean Microsoft is in this area, but Google has moved in — haven't been as successful.

Look, they're all trying very hard …

They're successful in other things.

They're all successful in terms of quantum, I'm sure they're all extremely successful, so we're not discounting anybody. The enterprise communication is a very, very wide open space.

I have two more questions. One is: Did you ever think of selling? I'm sure you got many offers. I know Slack has and some others. Did you think about it?

We've never really considered, no. We've always been very pragmatic asset managers I think, and still believe the future is definitely ahead of us, so I can't see anyone paying a logical price that would make sense to us.

[laughs] Oh, they don't pay logical prices. Did you see LinkedIn just sold for $26 billion?

Aw, that may be someone else's logic.

[laughs] So last question I ask everyone, especially entrepreneurs who were here, talk about one thing you think you've done really well, and something you wish you had done differently, I'll say a learning moment. But you don't have to say that, you can say it was just a friggin' disaster just the way it went. Entrepreneurs really want to understand.

I think the biggest thing we've done well is to build a fantastic company culture. I mean we have world-renowned now company culture and values, mission, but really believing deeply that technology's built by people and we want to build the best place for those people to work. And the best place doesn't mean we've got fancy ping-pong tables and some sort of five-star chef catered food …

You don't?!

We do have ping pong tables; we don't have five-star chef catered food.

Just a four-star.

[laughs] The best work place is somewhere where people feel valued, where people feel like they're doing the best work of their lives, where they feel like their work is making a difference in the world both in terms of their customers and then also in any sort of philanthropic sense, etc. So we have a fantastic culture. We've been the best place to work in Australia two years in a row. We were the No. 2 place to work in America of less than 1,000 employees across the whole country. So we keep it nice for that.

It sounds unusually healthy, because it's usually fear and loathing that spurs a lot of companies.

We believe in work-life balance and that people have other things to do as well, and we take our people and our culture very, very seriously and spend a lot of time in making sure it's healthy, I suppose is the best word for it. And I think that has a big long-term advantage for us. In the short term it's hard to see how it's an advantage, but over the decade I think it's been a huge advantage for us.

And one thing you've done that you've learned from, or a mistake you've made?

To flip that around, I suppose, not learning quickly enough when people didn't match the culture that we were trying to build has been a mistake that we've made probably too many times, and constantly tried to correct quicker, let's say. I think there's a place for everybody and sometimes you find square pegs that try to fit into round holes, that we're not the culture for them and that's fine. But it's a lesson that as an entrepreneur it's the hardest thing you have to do and you gotta learn it as early as possible.

Right, absolutely true. Thank you, Mike, for coming. I really appreciate it. I'm thrilled to be here in Sydney and it seems like a pretty exciting scene that's happening here.

It is, it's a very exciting place to be.

So it was great talking to you and thanks for coming by.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren thinks Apple should pay more taxes in the United States, especially in light of the record-breaking EU decision to force Apple to pay around $14 billion in taxes to Ireland. 

"Both Apple and Ireland are appealing the decision, but the commission’s announcement was the latest sign that multinational corporations are running out of places to hide from paying taxes," Warren wrote in a New York Times op-ed.

"The door is now open for Congress to fix our own corporate tax code, which has allowed the biggest multinationals to shirk their obligations for decades." 

An aspect of the controversy over the EU decision was that Europe was taking taxes from Apple that might have been eventually collected by the United States, if Congress ever passed corporate tax reform. The EU hit Apple because Ireland gave it a deal that allowed it to attribute its profits to offices in Ireland, a low-tax country.

Warren says Apple paid a tax rate of 1% or lower. 

Warren, who campaigns for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, argues for corporate tax reform, but warns against legislation that is supported by companies like Apple. 

"Now that they are feeling the sting from foreign tax crackdowns, giant corporations and their Washington lobbyists are pressing Congress to cut them a new sweetheart deal here at home," Warren wrote, warning Congress against "bailing out the tax dodgers under the guise of tax reform."

"Giant corporations are pushing corporate tax reform proposals that offer a lower permanent tax rate for earnings generated abroad than earnings generated at home. That is nuts," Warren wrote. 

Apple CEO Tim Cook said last month that Apple was not going to bring money back to the United States until there's a "fair rate." He also predicted corporate tax reform in 2017.

Ultimately, Warren wants big companies to pay more taxes. 

"First, Congress should increase the share of government revenue generated from taxes on big corporations — permanently. In the 1950s, corporations contributed about $3 out of every $10 in federal revenue. Today they contribute $1 out of every $10, despite their reliance on federal investments to start and expand their businesses," Warren wrote. 

President Barack Obama also recently weighed in on the Apple tax affair during the G-20 summit in China. “It’s in the interest of all countries, whether they’re developed countries or developing countries, to put a stop to this,” Obama said. 

SEE ALSO: APPLE TAX EXPLAINED

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Microsoft has been testing a variety of Surface all-in-one PCs, and the company is expected to unveil at least one model during a hardware event next month. ZDNet reports that Microsoft will unveil a Surface-branded device currently codenamed "Cardinal" at an event in New York City. Sources familiar with Microsoft's Surface plans tell The Verge that the company is currently targeting a late October hardware launch event.

Previous reports have suggested that Microsoft is working on three Surface-branded all-in-one PCs that will be available in stores later this year. Windows Central previously reported that Microsoft has tested 21-inch, 24-inch, and 27-inch models, but it's not clear if the software maker will launch all three screen...

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The cloud company has a new plan to lure developers at bigger businesses.

So far, cloud company Twilio has found a nice niche for itself as an invaluable resource for developers at other companies. After going public in June, it’s now aiming to be more indispensable.

On Thursday, Twilio rolled out a new “enterprise plan” that it hopes will let clients turn over more developer responsibilities to Twilio.

There are a host of messy IT necessities businesses must deal with — security, compliance, procurement and billing — for which Twilio says it will offer support with its new package. So a major client like Uber, which uses Twilio to facilitate anonymous calls between drivers and riders in the app, could now rely on Twilio for other things it needs.

As a seller of developer tools, Twilio has a host of smaller rivals. And with its new plan, it will face the prospect that big enterprise clients may just build the features themselves.

But Twilio is confident its newest feature is a desirable one. “What we’ve seen from our enterprise customers is that our building block approach is one that they really, really like,” said Patrick Malatack, VP of Product.

The Street has certainly liked Twilio. Its stock is up 97 percent since the IPO. For the second quarter, Twilio reported revenue of $64.5 million, a 70 percent annual uptick, on $10.9 million in losses.

Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson is one of the marquee speakers at the upcoming new Code Conference in November.

The deal for the recently public company comes at a 6.5 percent premium.

Here’s the big Google enterprise buy we’ve been telling you that’s coming.

On Thursday, Google said it is acquiring Apigee, an enterprise software company that went public last year, for $625 million.

The reason? Virtually every business is becoming more digital and more mobile. Apigee sits at the middle of this transition, providing tools for mobile APIs — i.e. reaching consumers through an app rather than a phone call — for companies like Walgreens, AT&T and Burberry.

Diane Greene, Google’s enterprise czar, described Apigee this way in a statement: “They're the hubs through which companies, partners and customers interact, whether it's a small business applying online for a loan or a point of sale system sending your warranty information to the manufacturer.”

Google wants to be this kind of hub, too. Despite its recent aggressive push around cloud storage and apps for companies, the search giant still lags behind Amazon and Microsoft in the field.

Greene’s team had been hunting for companies that could help round out her sales force and offerings. At $17.40 a share, the Apigee deal is a 6.5 premium on the smaller company’s stock price. Microsoft paid a 50 percent premium for its recent LinkedIn purchase.

We will speak with Greene later this morning about the deal.

It’s the biggest check her division has cut. It’s also the biggest buy Google has made in over two years, since its $500 million pick up of small satellite maker Skybox.

I've been on the Apple bandwagon since 2010's iPhone 4, and apart from a brief and extremely frustrating dalliance with a Samsung Galaxy Nexus in 2012, I haven't really ever regretted it.

Until today's entirely underwhelming iPhone 7 reveal, that is.

Even knowing pretty much every single detail of the new phone ahead of time, it was still a big disappointment. Stuff like the dual-lens camera and water resistance are nice, but not really crucial to why I would buy a new phone. Ditto for the battery life. 

And no matter what Apple said on stage today, removing the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 isn't "courage." It's annoying and hovers right on the border of being outright anti-consumer. As TechCrunch points out, it feels like nothing so much as a shameless play to take control of the headphone market — a market that Beats, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Apple, is already dominating.

Frankly, it's making me look at my inevitable next phone purchase with dread.

If I follow my own pattern and go to the iPhone 7, I'm losing the ability to use my favorite headphones, unless I use an annoying and unsightly dongle. And even if I use the dongle, I still can't charge the phone and listen to music at the same time. So long, battery life when I'm on a long flight. And I'm not paying $159 for Apple's wireless earbuds. Sorry.

I could maybe swallow all of this if the iPhone 7 had something, anything else that was compelling and game-changing. I'm not seeing anything past the usual incremental upgrades to performance. 

So now I'm thinking different. From Apple.

A big part of why I had loved the iPhone so much over the last few years was its integration with the Mac. Features like iMessage and Airdrop are absolutely brilliant, and make the iPhone and Mac an unbeatable team.

About a year ago, I switched from Mac to Microsoft's Windows 10. Now, Windows 10 and the iPhone don't really play nearly as nicely, but the iPhone itself was good enough that I didn't mind. 

Now, I'm thinking to myself: Windows 10 and Android work very well together, from sending texts to notifying you on a Windows 10 PC when an Android phone's battery is low. And a lot of Android phones do, and continue to, rock that headphone jack.

So, for right now, my iPhone 6s is going to serve me just fine. One day in the not-so-distant future, though, I'll be looking for my next upgrade. And the iPhone 7, as presented here today, will probably not be that. I sense I'm not alone, either. And with smartphone sales flattening out, it could be bad news for Apple.

SEE ALSO: After 9 years, the smartphone boom is finally over

NOW READ: I feel way less dumb now for buying an iPhone 6S

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NOW WATCH: Apple got rid of the headphone jack — here’s how you’ll listen to music on the iPhone 7

Generation Z and millennial employees love technology in the workplace, but the digital natives still crave human interaction at work.

Generation Z and millennial employees love technology in the workplace, but the digital natives still crave human interaction at work.

Though they were born and raised with cell phones, internet connectivity, and social media, both millennial and generation Z employees crave in-person communication in the workplace.

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 Announced at Apple’s event today, the company takes on Google Documents with real-time collaboration on iWork documents. The long-awaited feature makes it easier to cooperate on creating documents on the fly. Read More

Microsoft kicked off a battery life war with Chrome and Opera earlier this year, and Google is finally responding. Microsoft used a number of Surface Books side-by-side to compare battery life across Firefox, Edge, Chrome, and Opera, and it showed that using Chrome was really bad for your laptop battery life. Microsoft even generated notifications in Windows 10 encouraging Chrome users to switch to Edge.

Google has responded with a new comparison video that also uses Surface Books to show how its latest Chrome 53 release includes much better battery life improvements than Chrome a year ago. Chrome for Windows got updated with Google's Material Design and big battery improvements over the weekend, but neither Microsoft nor Google have...

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• Google has dozens of popular hardware and software products.
• But there are many Google innovations that have crashed and burned, or slowly petered out over time, like Google Glass and Google Plus.
• Google has killed off a few major products over the last few years, including Inbox by Gmail and Allo, yet another Google-made messaging app. 
• The latest casualty is Google Play Music, Google's music library and streaming service. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Google is known for its collection of wildly popular products, from Search to Maps to Android. But not everything the company touches turns to gold.

Google Glass was supposed to change the world, but it quickly became a punch line. And remember Google Buzz?

Now, Google has killed off yet another app, Google Play Music. The music service app never gained the popularity of its competitors, Spotify and Apple Music, and Google will shut it down for good this year. 

Of course, sometimes the best innovations are the ones that everybody thinks are doomed to fail early on but then eventually take off, so it makes sense that Google has had its fair share of misses over the years. Still, we highlighted some of the major products that have ended up in the Google graveyard.

(There are plenty more, however: an avid coder named Cody Ogden created a website listing all the products Google has ditched over the years. Ogden's site, Killed by Google, lists over 200 now-defunct products.)

Here's a look at 21 of Google's biggest misses.

Google Answers was the first project Google worked on and started as an idea from Larry Page. Answers lasted for more than four years but stopped accepting questions in 2006.

Source: Google

Lively, Google's virtual worlds, lasted a little over a year. Google said it created Lively because it "wanted users to be able to interact with their friends and express themselves online in new ways," but it just didn't catch on. Lively was shut down in 2008.

Source: Google

Google first unveiled Glass in dramatic fashion in 2012, but the device never made it to the masses. Glass came with a high price tag, software issues, potential privacy problems, and it generally looked too nerdy. Google ended consumer sales of Glass in January 2015, but it continues to sell the device to businesses and is working on a new version.

Source: Business Insider

Google Buzz was a social-networking service that was integrated into Gmail, but it was plagued with problematic privacy issues and never caught on. The company announced in October 2011 it would shut down the service to focus on Google+ instead.

Source: Google

The Google Play edition Android phone was introduced in the spring of 2014. But by January 2015, they were listed as "no longer available for sale" and a Galaxy S5 edition of the phone never materialized, despite leaked photos appearing online.

Source: Ars Technica

Google Wave was designed to let people message each other and edit documents together, but users were confused by it and it quickly flopped. Wave lasted about a year before it was killed in August 2010.

Source: Business Insider

Google Video was Google's own video-streaming service, launched before the company bought YouTube in 2006. Google Video stopped accepting new uploads in 2009, but Video and Youtube coexisted until August 2012 when Google shut down Video for good.

Source: TechCrunch

Google's Nexus Q, a streaming media player that was designed to connect all home devices, was unveiled with great fanfare at the company's 2012 developer conference. Reviews of the $299 Q in tech blogs were brutal, and Google shelved the product before it ever went for sale to the public.

Source: 9to5Google

Google X, an alternative interface for the search engine, lasted exactly one day before Google pulled the plug. A strange tribute to Mac OS X's dock, the site said: "Roses are red. Violets are blue. OS X rocks. Homage to you." Google X was quickly taken offline on March 16, 2005, and today the name has been repurposed as Google's research division.

Source: MacWorld

Originally intended to give people access to health and wellness information, Google Health was closed for good in January 2012 after Google observed the service was "not having the broad impact that we hoped it would."

Source: Google

Google Reader was a news-reading app that let users pull in stories from blogs or news sites. Google announced it was shutting down Reader in March 2013 — much to users' dismay and outrage — and it was officially killed in July 2013.

Source: Business Insider

Google Catalogs, an interactive shopping program that digitized catalogs, was shut down in 2015. Google shuttered the mobile version of Catalogs in 2013 and shut down the desktop version two years later.

Source: PMG

Google Hangouts On Air — Google's live-streaming service — is moving to YouTube Live beginning September 2016. The service was originally created in 2012 when live streaming was catching on and was once used by President Obama and Pope Francis.

Source: The Verge

Dodgeball, a service that let users check in at locations, was purchased by Google in 2005. Its founders, which included Dennis Crowley, left Google seemingly on bad terms in 2007 and Crowley went on to build a very similar service, Foursquare, two years later.

Source: Venture Beat

iGoogle, a personalized homepage, was shut down in 2013. Created in 2005, iGoogle allowed users to customize their homepage with widgets. Google said iGoogle wasn't needed as much anymore since apps could run on Chrome and Android.

Source: Google

Orkut was once a popular social-networking service that grew out of a Googler's "20% time" project. The site was more popular abroad than it was in the US and Google decided to kill it in September 2014.

Source: Business Insider

Google Notebook was a precursor to Google Docs and was a place to copy and paste URLs or write notes that could be shared or published. Google stopped development on Notebook in 2009 and officially shut it down in July 2012, transferring all data from Notebook to Google Docs.

Source: Google

Google Plus was intended to be Google's social-networking service. But Google decided to shutter it after a software glitch caused Google to expose the personal profile data of hundreds of thousands of Google Plus users.

The software glitch came to light this past spring, but managers there chose not to go public with the information, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal

Here's what Google had to say about the demise of Google Plus:

"[W]hile our engineering teams have put a lot of effort and dedication into building Google+ over the years, it has not achieved broad consumer or developer adoption, and has seen limited user interaction with apps. The consumer version of Google+ currently has low usage and engagement: 90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds."

Allo was Google's smart messaging app. But it never gained "the level of traction" Google was hoping for.

Allo was announced at the company's developer conference in May 2016. It was intended to be a smart messaging app that had Google Assistant built in for things like surfacing restaurant recommendations or supplying facts in real time. 

But after lackluster adoption, the company said in April 2018 it would be "pausing investment" on the app.

"The product as a whole has not achieved the level of traction that we'd hoped for," Anil Sabharwal, vice president of product at Google, told The Verge at the time.

Google shut down Allo for good in March 2019.

Inbox by Gmail was intended to be a new take on email, aimed at making it more efficient and organized.

The app bundled together emails about the same topic, highlighted the most important details from a message, and gave the user the option to set reminders or snooze a message.

But Google started adding many of those features to Gmail proper, and announced in 2018 it would shut Inbox down at the end of March 2019. 

Google Play Music was intended to compete with Spotify and came pre-installed on Android devices.

Google launched its music service in 2011 as a competitor to iTunes. Over time, Google added streaming and rebranded the service to Google Play Music. But it never took off in the way that Spotify and Apple Music did, and Google began to sunset the product in favor of YouTube Music. 

Beginning this September, Google Play Music will begin shutting down and will stop working for good in October. 

Not every metro station is as putrid as New York City's subway platforms.

Some public transportation stations are designed as stunning spaces, full of breathtaking murals and incredible light projections. 

We've put together a collection of the most awe-striking metro stations around the globe, from the Formosa Boulevard Station of Kaohsiung, Taiwan to the chandelier-filled Komsomolskaya in Moscow, Russia.

Keep scrolling to check out the stations, which make commuters journeys anything but boring.

Talia Avakian contributed to a previous version of this story.

SEE ALSO: The 10 best airports in the world

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Inside the Formosa Boulevard Station of Kaohsiung, Taiwan, is a 4,500-panel glass artwork by Narcissus Quangliata that is said to be the largest glasswork in the world. Thanks to the stunning kaleidoscope effects of the piece, the area has actually been proposed as a venue for weddings.

Source: CNN Travel

Nature continues inside the Central Park Station — also in Kaohsiung, Taiwan — designed by British architect Richard Rogers. Grass and artificial flowers line the stairs and escalators, which lead down to the platforms.

The Toledo station in Naples, Italy, also stands as a stunning wonderland thanks to the artwork of Robert Wilson, called “Light Panels,” that illuminates the station corridor. With a depth of 164 feet, it’s one of the deepest stations in Naples.

Source: CNN Travel

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Microsoft is taking Slack head on, and reportedly doing it under the Skype umbrella. According to MSPowerUser, the software giant is developing new messaging software that closely mirrors Slack functionality. The new effort is called Skype Teams, and it promises to cater to the the same large teams and newsrooms that already use Slack every day, while also leveraging Skype’s core feature set.

Skype Teams, per MSPowerUser, looks very much like Slack, in that it features both channels and private messaging for groups, as well as file-sharing and fun things like emojis and GIFs:

MSPoweruser

In addition, the new service will feature Threaded Conversations, where users can respond directly to a...

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Samsung's exploding smartphones might cost it a cool $1 billion (£749 million.)

That's according to Bloomberg, which surveyed estimates from Credit Suisse, Daishin Securities, and Pelham Smithers Associates.

Last week, Samsung announced it was halting sales of the Galaxy Note 7, its new flagship smartphone, and launching a global recall — because of dozens of reports of batteries in the phone exploding.

It's a colossal PR disaster for the South Korean electronics company, and it comes at a point when it was on the up. The new phone had been well-reviewed, and the company's revenue was finally growing again after years of decline.

Adding to this, there are only tepid expectations for the iPhone 7, the next big smartphone from Apple, due to launch later this week. The Note 7 had a real shot at being the phone of 2016, but will now be forever linked with backfiring batteries instead.

In short: Samsung had an open goal — and it kicked itself in the face.

Initial reports of the recall wiped billions off Samsung's market cap, and the recall seems certain to do long-term reputational damage, denting the company's future sales. Around 2.5 million of the Note 7 devices had been sold, and replacing them may cost an estimated $1 billion.

Samsung smartphone boss Koh Dong Jin told a press conference only that the cost was a "heartbreaking amount," Bloomberg reports.

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NOW WATCH: The iPhone 7 is hitting stores on September 23 — here's what you're getting

The Nexus 7 was always pretty close to the ideal Android tablet.

Working with an OS that’s never quite matched the app support and productivity bent of the iPad, the Asus-made slate instead focused on what Android does best: provide a nice enough, fast enough, and much more affordable alternative, one that was entirely geared toward entertainment.

If you just wanted to browse the web or watch a movie, it was better than average and still a good bargain.

The Nexus 7 also hasn’t been refreshed in three years. Now, though, a spiritual successor of sorts might be on the way.

According to tech reporter Evan Blass, who has a long history of accurately predicting upcoming gadgets, Google is set to launch a Huawei-made 7-inch tablet by the end of the year. There isn’t much word on the device’s feature set or cost, but Blass says it’ll come with a fairly robust 4GB of RAM.

Huawei and Google were not immediately available to comment.

This isn’t the first we’ve heard of a Huawei-made Google device arriving in 2016. Back in June, a rep from Huawei’s South African group reportedly confirmed that the company had another Nexus machine coming this year, but at the time it wasn’t clear if that’d be a phone or tablet. The Chinese firm previously partnered with Google on its Nexus 6P smartphone last year.

If the rumor is true, it’ll be interesting to see how Google decides to brand the device. Last week, a report from Android Central claimed that Google plans to drop the “Nexus” name from its two forthcoming smartphones, which are now widely expected to be made by HTC.

Soon after, Android Police reported that those devices would instead use the “Pixel” branding Google typically reserves for in-house hardware, such as its Chromebook Pixel laptop or Pixel C tablet. It’s also worth noting that Huawei filed a trademark for a “Huawei 7P” earlier this year.

Whatever it’s called, the device would enter a tablet market that’s in steady decline, and an Android tablet market that hasn’t seen much excitement over the past few years. Lenovo made waves last week with its new Yoga Book hybrid, but the fastest growing Android slate recently has been the ultra-cheap Amazon Fire.

A genuine Nexus 7 successor would fall somewhere between those two, but we’ll have to wait and see if Google and Huawei have actually taken that route. Google is expected to hold an event on October 4 to announce the new “Pixel” phones, among other things, so that’d seem to be the day to watch here.

SEE ALSO: It looks like Google is going to kill the Nexus brand for its smartphones

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A quick summary of three Internet of Things projects in the New Bedford (Mass.) area, in which sensors can help improve farming and fishing initiatives for the city and companies. Related story: http://www.networkworld.com/article/3115408/internet-of-things/iot-catches-on-in-new-england-fishing-town.html