I woke up this morning at 8:30 am to the pitter patter of rain on the roof and according to the Metservice it appears that it’ll be on and off all day so as a result I’m going to have a lazy day at home before work. It feels kind of weird working in the office and then the next day working from home – that experience in the office I guess breaks the monotony which makes the day go a little better.
Ubiquiti has made available in the early release channel UniFi OS 6.0.12 for Dream Routers and along with that there was UniFi Network Application 11.0.83 made available on the same channel for testing. I’m happy that Ubiquiti are taking their time and making sure their software is well tested because in a world of ‘run fast and break things’ it is nice to know that there are still companies around who understand that breaking something can cause more than a mild inconvenience. If a featured doesn’t work on social media it isn’t the end of the world but if you ship a dodgy update for a router then that undermines the ability for someone to work from home then millions are impacted in a real way.
With all this AI investment hype, the hundreds of billions of dollars slushing around, am I the only one sitting here thinking “that is an awful lot of money….where did it come from and if we taxed the wealthy would this whole bubble have even taken place”. Imagine what could be achieved if as a society we actually taxed the top end of town and went after the top end of town when it came to the creative financial engineering they employ to avoid paying taxes. For example, the rich and powerful that borrow against their assets rather than selling them off – to me, that may not be a violation of the literal reading of the tax code but it is abundantly clear that it is a violation of the spirit of the law.
I also look at how businesses borrow to fund share buybacks but when they’re hit financial issues they’re the first to run to the government for a bailout – maybe share buybacks should be banned along with banning businesses borrowing money to fund dividends because they don”t want to repatriate funds from overseas and pay taxes on it. When American politicians complain about China and ‘unfair competition’ what they’re really complaining about (without admitting to it) is the short-termism that far too many western businesses have – focusing on the next quarter without any consideration about what happens in 5 years time. The culture of short-termism unfortunately is probably not going to be addressed until a crisis occurs and from that crisis the western view of running businesses is challenged not just on Wall Street but in the business faculties at universities.
Huawei has made a recent announcement regarding bringing HarmonyOS to the global market – one thing to keep in mind that in China the operating system HarmonyOS has 24% of the market. It’ll be interesting to see whether third party hardware vendors start adopting it for maybe entry level and medium range phones and then in the long term on their flagship models. The gradual roll out globally will also involve setting up relationships not only with OEMs but third party developers to bring their software to the platform and then there is building relationships with banking for payment solutions to complete with Samsung Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay or does Huawei decide to team up with an existing player like Google Pay or Samsung Pay to avoid the lengthy process of building a platform and then negotiating with banks? this is something I’ll be keeping my eye on.
