Salesforce goes remote
Image: Adrian Trinkaus / Protocol

To give you the best possible experience, this site uses cookies. If you continue browsing. you accept our use of cookies. You can review our privacy policy to find out more about the cookies we use.
Good morning! This Wednesday, Salesforce is letting employees work from home forever, Apple may have lost its Apple Car partner and Twitter really wants to decentralize.
(Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here to get Source Code every day. And you can text with us, too, by signing up here or texting 415-475-1729.)
It's quite a symbol of the times: the company that owns the tallest building in San Francisco telling its employees they don't have to go to it anymore. "An immersive workspace is no longer limited to a desk in our Towers," Salesforce's Brent Hyder said yesterday. "The 9-to-5 workday is dead; and the employee experience is about more than ping-pong tables and snacks."
Salesforce's plan for the future sounds a lot like Dropbox's Virtual First strategy, and is starting to become something like the new hybrid normal:
There seem to be three schools of thought about the future of the office. There's the "hybrid forever" crowd, the "we're moving" crowd, and the "screw you, we're going back" crowd. (There's also technically the "all remote, all the time" crowd, but the only people I know who want that already worked for all-remote companies.) The hybrid answer is likely to be the most popular, and the trickiest to pull off, but we're starting to see what the first attempts will look like.
Apple is not famous for being the easiest company to work with. A new Businessweek cover story digs into the company's intense way of doing business, all the way down to the guy whose sole job "consisted of negotiating the cost of glue." The thrust of the story: As Apple has become more powerful, it has also become more exacting with partners, suppliers and everyone else.
One possible casualty of Apple's approach? Its deal with Hyundai, the company which once said it was in talks to build the Apple Car, but which now says it isn't any more.
Apple may have to tweak its approach when it comes to the auto industry, but don't feel bad for it. It may be tough to work with, but it has two big things going for it: gravity-defying piles of cash, and unmatched prestige. Everybody wants to build the iStuff, even if it's a hassle.
Twitter's ultimate goal is to decentralize, splitting into Twitter the Protocol (kind of like email) and Twitter the App (kind of like Gmail). Jack Dorsey made that vision clear on the company's earnings call yesterday, when asked about Project Bluesky:
What if all of social media was built on top of the same stuff? If Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube had access to all the same content, and differed only in what they showed and the experience they built around it? Companies would compete on privacy, on features, on user safety, and nobody would keep winning based on past success. It's a fascinating hypothetical, even if it'll almost certainly never happen that way.
One thing we have realized is that COVID-19 has accelerated three transformational trends that already existed before the pandemic, but are now dramatically reshaping healthcare: the concept of a networked healthcare system, the increasing adoption of telehealth, and the idea of virtual care and guidance. At the same time, we have seen consumers becoming much more engaged in their personal health and that of their families.
OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei outlined his vision for his new company, called Nothing:
On Protocol: Your organization should be thinking about video at every level, Vimeo's Anjali Sud said:
Tim Cook isn't Steve Jobs, and that's often a good thing, Warren Buffett said:
Huawei's Ren Zhengfei offered again to share 5G tech with the U.S. as a peace offering:
That's how many Bitcoins Chamath Palihapitiya paid for a 1.4-acre property in Lake Tahoe back in 2014. Back then, that was $1.6 million, a tidy sum for a nice property. Now? Well Palihapitiya did the math, and those Bitcoins are now worth just shy of $128 million. Here's some free advice: never do the math.
Hard to imagine a more 2021-era storyline than this one: A lawyer shows up to a virtual court hearing in Texas, discovers his kid was on his Zoom account earlier and was using the new cat-face filter, and can't figure out how to turn it off. Leading to one of the better sentences I suspect you'll ever find in a court record: "I'm here live. I'm not a cat."
Today's Source Code was written by David Pierce, with help from Anna Kramer and Shakeel Hashim. Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day; see you tomorrow.
To give you the best possible experience, this site uses cookies. If you continue browsing. you accept our use of cookies. You can review our privacy policy to find out more about the cookies we use.