Salesforce employees are so immersed in the fervor over their offerings and their unique workplace that they are nearly incredulous to learn that few people beyond the legions of customers using Salesforce's product have the faintest idea what the company does.

If SoftBank can complete the tender offer it contemplates to buy a large stake in Uber, the company's bizarre governance war will be over for the time being, putting Uber back on par with other normal companies whose boards of directors dont fight publicly with each other.

Alphabet would be a holding company to house its wackier or noncore efforts - like its Verily life sciences, Waymo self-driving cars, and Loon Internet balloon projects - while Google's advertising-oriented business would stand apart and continue to drive the company's finances.

Newfangled online sites like 'Business Insider' and 'Huffington Post' built businesses they later sold for hundreds of millions of dollars by ripping off the work of more talented journalists and then playing Google's digitally native games better than the old fogeys ever could.

For years now, we've been hearing about how China is the great copycat nation, the manufacturer of designs drawn up in other countries, and then an imitator for its own products. That's been true, as the developing country followed a path that Japan and then Korea plowed before it.

When I published a book earlier this year about Uber, the most common question I got about it was how many of the tumultuous events of 2017 I was able to include. My gag-line response: I managed to cover the first 17 scandals of the year, but not Nos. 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and so on.

The summer before my senior year in college, I talked my way into an unpaid internship on Capitol Hill. I was able to have this stimulating resume- and network- enhancing experience because my parents could afford to keep me clothed, housed, and fed in the nation's capital for 10 weeks.

AIM started in 1997, and I remember when I started using it in earnest, in 1999, when I joined TheStreet.com from 'The San Jose Mercury News'. We digital journalism pioneers communicated obsessively by AIM, and as a newbie, I recall being amazed that the whole newsroom was 'chatting' this way.

Apple does a very good job of not letting its competitors know what it is working on, and Apple does a very good job of not confusing customers by causing them to anticipate what the next new thing is going to be and then causing those customers not to buy the products that are on the shelves now.

What to do with a leading business that's challenged by a new technology wave without hurting an existing profit stream? The single greatest example of recent memory is Apple's willingness to decimate iPod sales by incorporating all the category-defining product's features into a new gizmo, the iPhone.

Amazon is pursuing something called Amazon Key, which lets its couriers unlock Prime customers' doors and deliver packages. It's pairing the service, which it plans to make available in 37 cities next month, with a camera so users will have intelligence inside and outside their homes, presumably boosting trust and lowering creepiness.

What makes Samsung so mysterious is that it's not altogether clear who leads the company or what its leaders do. The company follows an avowedly Confucian model of consensus-driven decision-making, values bone-crushingly hard work, and shows tremendous deference to the founding Lee family, despite its lack of a controlling interest in its shares.

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