Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon has shown interest in acquiring crisis-stricken competitor Intel, according to report by Reuters.

In recent days, representatives of both parties reportedly met to discuss a possible takeover, but any agreement will take time to iron out. Both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times also reported on the talks between Qualcomm and Intel.

Exactly how Qualcomm would be able to afford Intel is unclear; the company is said to be sitting on $13 billion in cash, but Intel’s market capitalization is $188 billion.

As recently as six years ago, Qualcomm, in turn, was on the verge of being acquired by Broadcom. That deal was stopped by the US government.

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) is set to wrap its case in the Google antitrust trial, after an eventful two weeks in the courtroom.

The tech giant is accused of engaging in monopolistic behavior by strategically acquiring certain companies and controlling the adtech industry’s most widely-used tools and exchanges. The lawsuit was filed in 2023 by the DoJ and a coalition of eight states seeking to “restore competition” on the web.

The trial began on September 9, and the DoJ has been laying out its case that Google has attempted to monopolize control of the ad network, server, and exchange, beginning with its acquisition of advertising company DoubleClick in 2008.

Lawyers for the government argued that the move made Google’s ad server the default choice and left publishers with few alternatives. By integrating its ad exchange and server, Google has an unfair edge in ad auctions, and it manipulates auction rules and drives up cost, the DoJ alleged. Advertisers taking the stand — including Gannett, NewsCorp, Index Exchange, The Trade Desk, Scope3 and others — have backed up these allegations, stating that they have felt trapped by Google’s tactics, and at the same time felt compelled to use the company’s products to remain competitive.

Notably, the DoJ obtained numerous seemingly damning internal Google emails and presentations suggesting that the company was fully aware of the advantage it would gain through the DoubleClick grab and how it would impact competitors.

For instance, in 2009, Google’s former president of global display advertising, David Rosenblatt, said in an email that Google’s control of the ad market would be akin to owning both Goldman Sachs and the New York Stock Exchange. “If we execute …we’ll be able to crush other networks, and that’s our goal,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, current and former Google executives and managers have been caught contradicting themselves when presented with such emails, brushing them off or attempting to talk their way around them.

For its part, Google argued that the government is focusing on just a narrow sliver of the advertising market (that is, banner ads at the top and sides of web pages). In an opening slide deck, it said that the ad technology industry is “intensely competitive, with new entrants all the time.” The company claimed that there is “no monopoly power,” and that its share in a “two-sided market” has decreased even as the company’s revenue has increased.

Further, Google is arguing that sellers and buyers are free to choose multiple ad tech tools (and do); that it makes its products interoperable with those of its rivals; and that it has sought to create value for advertisers, publishers and users. In 2024, “this is the commercial reality,” the company said.

Google, which will soon have to begin its defense, is said to have earned $200 billion in 2023 alone through ad placement and sales.

The case will ultimately be decided by a judge (what’s known as a “bench trial.”) Google avoided a jury trial by making a roughly $2.3 million payment to the DoJ. The $2,289,751 check covers a portion of the damages sought by the plaintiffs, and ensures that a judge will make the final decision in the case. Google’s team of lawyers described it as a strategic decision that will help ensure a quicker resolution.

This is the second antitrust trial faced by Google in the last two years. Earlier this year, the company lost a case centered around its search business; Judge Amit Mehta ruled that the company had engaged in anticompetitive behavior to maintain its dominance, calling Google a “monopolist.” The penalties attached to that ruling are as yet unannounced.

At the beginning of the summer, I saw a reaction video on Tiktok where two people who worked as product owners in IT talked about their jobs and what they do during the day. It would have been completely undramatic if it hadn’t been for the fact they were both working in the bright sun, in swimwear, in a pool, with their laptops on the edge of the pool. 

The person who reacted to the clip was insane. “It’s people like you who ruin it for the rest of us,” he growled. “It’s stuff like this that forces us back to the offices.”

Recently, the debate about remote work and office presence has gained new momentum.

The above-mentioned video was posted around the same time there was talk of “quiet vacationing” — a new trend where younger employees in particular take furtive vacations to protect remote work. It’s just one in a series of similar “trends” that should probably be considered more as urban legends, but which nevertheless say something about the spirit of the times. This issue is starting to get hot again.

Ratio researcher Jonas Grafström recently made an appearance in Dagens Nyheter where he argued that working from home is equal to a salary increase of 10%. That, of course, immediately started discussions about differentiated pay between remote workers and those who work in the office. In short: are you prepared to accept a lower salary to work at home? 

And just this past week, Amazon decided to call back employees five days a week — something eight out of 10 business leaders in KPMG’s global CEO survey believe will become the norm again within three years.

All this despite the fact that other surveys have shown that demands to return to the office do not bolster profitability, but instead create conflicts and risk scaring away workers with needed skills, especially women and younger people.

You don’t have to go to extreme cases to see where the conflict lies; they’re clearly laid out in the report on office work the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce released earlier this month. That report says, among other things, that a third of workers think managers want employees in the office more than they are. (Half of the employees say they agree with management on what applies, while fully 75% of the managers agree with the employees.)

Among the findings: 52% of employees say they are more productive when they work from home and 37% work more there than when they are in the office. At the same time, 39% of managers feel working in the office has “a positive impact on employees’ careers” compared to working at home. And 19%, i.e. one in five managers, say that salary is positively affected by office presence.

The effect is clear: an average employee wants to work three days a week in the office, while managers want them there four days. The managers win, of course: today half of all civil servants in Stockholm County work in the office four days a week, a clear increase.

There are different conclusions one can draw. Mine are these: 

Physical workplaces and physical interaction are better than digital workspaces and meetings when it comes to creative tasks and social/cultural togetherness. I think, depending on what you work with, employees and managers are quite in agreement.

Leadership in the hybrid work models has not developed in the ways and at the pace required. Managers still have an excessive need for control, with no way to deal with this without trying to return to what was previously comfortable (and technical monitoring solutions are hardly the answer either).

Employees have probably not managed to convey to their bosses the positive aspects of home work — for the employer. It’s great that your life puzzle is easier and you can take power walks and do laundry, but how does that help the company? It’s no wonder that whispering about sneaky vacations is taking off.

And there’s an elephant in the room we should talk about — people really hate open office spaces and activity-based workplaces. 

Forty-six percent of respondents in the Chamber of Commerce survey say permanent workplaces in the office have become more important to them in recent years, and 45% of those between the ages of 18 and 35 would come in more often if they had better opportunities for undisturbed work.

Researcher Christina Bodin Danielsson calls open office landscapes a “sea of ​​slaves.”

“There is 20 years of research on how bad it is,” she tells Fastighetsnytt. “The research has clearly shown that cognitive ability drops by 30%.”

On top of that, there’s another aspect gnawing at me (and you’ll have to excuse me for getting a little dark). I think there is a driving force here that is psychological, almost existential, and which is not really about remote work per se, but which is manifested in that issue. Namely it’s our fear, as a society, to think about the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic was only four years ago and it changed the world. And I’m not just talking about how “digitalization took enormous strides,” but about how we humans have changed. A whole generation has become adults in the shadow of the pandemic, and even those of us who were already adults were profoundly affected by changes that we now seem to prefer to ignore.

Increasingly, it feels like the pandemic didn’t happen, as if we’re actively erasing it from our collective memory. There is a kind of unprocessed trauma of a period that was so terrible and transformative that today we do our best to completely repress it all.

And the strong desire to go back to the way everything worked before, before the pandemic, is a symptom of this. 

Maybe that larger issue is also something it’s time we talk more about.

This column is taken from CS Veckobrev, a personal newsletter with reading tips, link tips and analysis sent directly from editor-in-chief Marcus Jerräng’s desk. Do you also want the newsletter on Fridays?  Sign up for a free subscription here.

The UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence has released its final report — “Governing AI for Humanity” — detailing how AI can best serve humanity, especially people who are often underrepresented and left out of such discussions.

The report builds on months of extensive global consultation with more than 2,000 participants and the publication of a provisional report last December. The group behind the report is described as the world’s first and most representative collection of experts capable of reflecting humanity’s aspirations for AI.

The final report sets out a plan to manage AI-related risks and share the technology’s potential globally. Among other things, it calls for the foundation to be laid for the first globally inclusive and distributed architecture for AI governance based on international cooperation. It also proposes seven recommendations to address shortcomings in current AI governance and calls on all governments and stakeholders to cooperate in overseeing AI to promote the development and protection of all human rights.

Beginning with the new year, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wants his employees back in the office five days a week, returning to an office routine that was common before the COVID-19 pandemic upended the workplace.

The backlash from employees was nearly instantaneous, as they berated Jassy — and the return-to-work policy — and vowed to quit. Others demanded raises in exchange for in-office work requirements.

Industry analysts were not surprised by the reaction, and said back-to-office mandates more often than not have the exact opposite effect as intended.

According to the employee memo released this week, Jassy believes being back in the office will help boost employee training, bolster collaboration, and strengthen culture.

“If anything, the last 15 months we’ve been back in the office at least three days a week has strengthened our conviction about the benefits,” Jassy wrote. “We understand that some of our teammates may have set up their personal lives in such a way that returning to the office consistently five days per week will require some adjustments. To help ensure a smooth transition, we’re going to make this new expectation active on January 2, 2025.”

In fact, a study performed in May indicated mandatory return-to-office (RTO) policies could lead to higher quit rates compared with companies that allow remote or hybrid work. The study by the University of Michigan and University of Chicago found that three large US tech companies — Microsoft, Apple and SpaceX — saw substantially increased attrition, particularly among more senior personnel, when they implemented strict return-to-work policies in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Forcing employees to quit, however, might be exactly what Amazon wants, according to J. P. Gownder, a vice president analyst with Forrester Research. “There is a chance that Amazon is hoping to induce a level of voluntary attrition with this move in lieu of layoffs. Unfortunately, the best talent often has choices, and most don’t want to work in an office five days a week,” Gownder said.

In his memo, Jassy also outlined a plan to reduce managers, saying that “will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today. If we do this work well, it will increase our teammates’ ability to move fast, clarify and invigorate their sense of ownership,” he wrote.

Amazon’s mandate puts the company in the minority, according to recent research. Among employees with jobs that can be done remotely, 43% work hybrid, 22% work fully remote, and 35% work in the office full time.

“Amazon’s decision may just compromise its promise to be ‘Earth’s best employer,’” said Gownder. “The macro data shows that pre-pandemic nostalgia is not a post-pandemic reality. Other companies should not follow suit.”

Abandoning hybrid work policies will negatively affect employee experience — particularly recruiting, retention, and diversity — impacting productivity and, potentially, the bottom line, according to Gownder.

A Gartner Research study released this month showed 47% of HR leaders are concerned about employee resentment toward their organization. They see change fatigue (70%), return to office mandates (62%), and lack of career growth opportunities (58%) as the biggest drivers of employee unhappiness. Two other Gartner studies this year showed high-performing employees, women and millennials would be the greatest flight risks when strict RTO policies are implemented. (One in three executives handed a RTO mandate would quit, one of those studies showed.)

“Mandated on-site requirements can carry very steep costs for talent attraction and retention. This is especially true for high-performers, women and millennials — three employee segments who greatly value flexibility,” said Caitlin Duffy, a director in the Gartner HR practice. “Often, these costs far outweigh the moderate benefits to employee engagement and effort.”

Instead of office mandates, flexible hybrid work policies are the gold standard, research has shown. According to a Stanford University study, only 17.6% of employees who can work from home say they want to work in an office five days a week.

A June study by McKinsey & Co. showed organizations where employees work in multiple locations (at home, in the office, or at client sites) are more likely to see 10% or greater revenue growth than companies where employees work from a single location.

Another McKinsey study revealed that employees consistently point to greater productivity and reduced burnout as primary benefits of flexible work policies. Flexibility is especially important to women, who report having more focused time to work when working remotely, the study showed.

William Hatcher, a professor of public administration and chair of social sciences at Augusta University in Georgia, said research is clear that “individuals are more productive at their jobs when they have more control over their schedules.”

“Workplaces that empower employees with flexible scheduling policies and teleworking options are more productive, and these organizations are also less likely to have employees suffering from burnout,” Hatcher said. “However, many organizations still follow a dated view of management based on the idea that they must see employees to supervise their work. This view is focused on monitoring employees and not motivating them. Amazon is focusing more on monitoring by ending remote work. Successful workplace policies for creative professionals focus on motivation.”

Across industries, employees are also doing the bare minimum to meet in-office mandates. For example, some are simply showing up long enough to get credit for being there before returning home to work — a practice known as “coffee badging.

To determine what stops people from coming into the office, workplace management software maker Robin Powered surveyed nearly 600 full-time employees at companies that had flexible work policies. The survey revealed that while RTO mandates are everywhere, they aren’t sticking. Forty-five percent of those surveyed said their company’s mandates required them to be in the office at least four days a week, yet only 24% adhered to the policy.

In fact, 46% of respondents said that the reason they don’t come into the office is because they believe they are more productive with their at-home work setup. They frequently cited feeling more productive at home (71%) and not having the right resources at their desk (76%).

Amazon’s planned move to five days a week flies in the face of a positive employee experience, according to Gownder. “Consistently, studies show that hybrid [work] drives higher levels of employee productivity,” Gownder said. “Offices have their own distractions, plus onerous commutes. Employees do best at individual level work when they can customize their environments and schedules.

Employee experience, Gownder pointed out, is a central driver of productivity, employee retention, and business results. “And when employees feel valued, have purpose, possess a degree of autonomy, and feel trusted, they perform better,” he said.

“Offices, by comparison, are great for collaborative exercises that involve brainstorming, team bonding, and certain types of decision-making,” he said. “However, these collaborations can usually be accomplished in a couple of days per week.”

Now that Apple supports Rich Communication Services (RCS) messages on iPhones running iOS 18, the GSM Association (GSMA) has promised end-to-end encryption (E2EE) is coming to the standard, a move that should better protect communications between iPhone and Android devices.

The GSMA, which maintains the standard, is working to implement E2EE but hasn’t committed to a time scale. It announced the plans as it marked the launch of RCS support on the iPhone.

E2EE will be ‘next major milestone’ for RCS

“While this is a major milestone, it is just the beginning,” the GSMA said in a statement. “The next major milestone is for the RCS Universal Profile to add important user protections such as interoperable end-to-end encryption. This will be the first deployment of standardized, interoperable messaging encryption between different computing platforms, addressing significant technical challenges such as key federation and cryptographically-enforced group membership. Additionally, users will benefit from stronger protections from scam, fraud, and other security threats.”

RCS Universal Profile is an industry-agreed set of features and technologies the GSMA has standardized so RCS can be widely deployed in products and services. The most recent version, RCS Universal Profile 2.7, introduced support for more advanced messaging features, such as reactions, editing of sent messages, and improved message indicators.

Apple now supports RCS on iPhone

Apple has now adopted RCS within iOS 18, replacing the long-in-the-tooth SMS system for texts to Android devices. Messages between the platforms are much improved as a result — many users were annoyed that they couldn’t share high-resolution images, for example. 

However, the lack of E2EE is a glaring hole in messaging security; it means enterprise users will likely employ other messaging services for critical information. Apple’s own message system does support E2EE, but not when sharing with an Android device — hence, the colored bubbles to show you when a message is secure. You will know when you’re in an RCS chat with an Android user because you’ll see a small grey label that says RCS Message in the text field.

Other significant benefits

The GSMA promise of encryption in RCS is a welcome one. It will prevent carriers, messaging services, or other third parties with access to these communications from viewing the content of the texts you share or sharing that information for any reason.

Encryption on messages between platforms also promises other benefits, as noted last year by Caitlin Seeley George at Fight for the Future: “This move makes it possible for cross-platform messages to be end-to-end encrypted — a security feature that would protect a whole host of vulnerable groups, including pregnant people, LBGTQ+ people, activists, immigrants, and journalists.”

It is possible that Apple’s decision to introduce support for RCS might have helped it avoid its messaging service being declared a ‘Gatekeeper’ service under the EU’s DMA. 

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While we’ve already focused on how new features in Apple’s latest operating system upgrades can help you get work done on an iPhone and on a Mac, under-the-hood enhancements for enterprise IT also made the cut. Here’s a rundown on what was introduced.

Apple’s changes for enterprise and education deployments lean toward declarative device management (DDM) as the company continues to navigate away from MDM profiles. They also include security tweaks to manage newly-introduced features such as iPhone Mirroring on Mac. 

The latter is interesting in its own right, as it means IT can prevent managed iPhones from being mirrored on any Mac, and any Mac can also be prevented from mirroring any iPhone. That makes sense, as it puts a barrier in place against abuse of that feature.

On the good ship DDM

Apple has flagged its move toward Declarative Device Management (DDM) since it first introduced support for this way of managing devices in 2021. This was originally only available to user-enrolled iOS devices, then Macs joined in. It is now supported across all the company’s products, including the Apple Watch and Apple TV. In 2022, Apple told us explicitly at WWDC that DDM will eventually supersede its own older MDM framework.

The beauty of DDM is that it allows IT to specify a desired state for devices. That means devices that do not occupy that “state” won’t get access, and the device doesn’t require continuous prompts from an MDM server.

Admins recognize that this makes for faster onboarding, better update management, improved device monitoring, better security and reduced network bandwidth usage. For most users, it just makes for a far nicer experience, bringing the convenience of consumer grade simplicity to managed enterprise devices. Everyone in the Apple MDM ecosystem I speak with has told me that DDM is the future for managed devices.

Michael Covington, Jamf vice president for portfolio strategy, last year noted the importance of this move. Pointing to DDM improvements at the time, he said: “Of course, the big announcement for those IT professionals responsible for managing devices is Apple’s improvements to Declarative Device Management. The new Software Update workflows demonstrate Apple’s commitment to iterating on the enhanced protocol….”

In this year’s biggest move toward that future, Apple’s new operating system software updates can now be managed entirely using DDM, replacing MDM profiles for software update restrictions, settings, and software update commands and queries.

A short summary of improvements for Apple admins

Of course, DDM is only one facet of device management, and while there are some unique differences between Mac and i-device platforms, Apple peppered the releases with new device management features:

• MDM can manage which Safari extensions are allowed, always on or always off, and what websites they can access.
• On supervised devices, organizations can disable a user’s ability to hide and lock apps.
• IT can prevent VPN settings from being modified by apps.
• A new MDM restriction can prevent the removal of an eSIM.
• New features in Calculator, such as Math Notes, Math Notes keyboard, scientific mode, and unit conversions can be managed in MDM. (This tool is aimed at education IT.)
• On a Mac, a new disk management configuration can be used to choose whether external or network storage is allowed or disallowed, or limit mounting to read-only volumes.
• Also on a Mac, MDM can configure hardware MAC address instead of a private MAC address on managed Wi-Fi networks. MDM can also prevent system extensions from being disabled in Settings.
• iPads gain an iPhone tool; IT can now use MDM to manage alternative marketplaces in regions in which those are supported.
• visionOS 2 now supports Automated Device Enrolment in MDM

For the most part, Apple’s enterprise improvements seem designed to give IT additional power to harden security across managed devices while also working to prevent data leaks. Companies in which security policy is attenuated also benefit from a small but noteworthy improvement in which users with complex passwords no longer need to lock and unlock the device to see the keyboard.

Apple’s complete lists

There are other features and tools listed across Apple’s documents detailing the enterprise-focused content in the latest OS upgrades. Apple’s pages detailing these improvements are here:

What’s new for enterprise in macOS Sequoia

What’s new for enterprise in iPadOS 18

What’s new for enterprise in iOS 18

What’s new for enterprise in visionOS 2

While many of the changes described above may be of less interest to most users, they will be of huge significance to the ever-growing cadre of Apple admins who are seizing seats across the enterprise as the company’s market share across that sector continues to grow. Apple is in business, from the world’s biggest firms to SMBs, and its continued focus on empowering MDM teams to support that proliferation now seems to run deep. Apple knows that, unlike the main enterprise tech incumbent, its products aren’t renowned for causing business disasters. It knows it has a story to tell, and for many in business in a world after the Crowdstrike mess, it also knows it offers a viable and robust alternative. 

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