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Hugs for boring – The New York Times

    This week, a company I never think about found another company I forgot existed. It was a reminder not to underestimate the boring.

    One of those companies is called Poly, and if you know what it does, gold star to you. It makes gadgets such as telephone headsets for business call centers and speaker gizmos for conference calls in the office.

    This stuff isn’t exactly cool, but it can be useful, and Poly is pretty profitable and valuable enough to sell for $1.7 billion.

    The buyer, HP Inc., makes a lot of money by selling computer fleets and colossal printers to companies. It’s a snooze that made HP worth nearly $40 billion, or about eight times the value of WeWork, a company that was exciting and also almost out of money and died in 2019.

    Cabind products may not be the miraculous wonders we imagine from Silicon Valley, but the world runs on boring technology that boring organizations need to do boring but important things. Many of the companies that sell this technology make money, even though only five people can explain what makes, say, the software giant SAP.

    My mission is to take a few minutes to help us appreciate the dullness that makes the world go round.

    I don’t know what technology my employer uses to process my paycheck. Most of us will never see the Amazon computer servers that send Netflix to our TVs. The US healthcare system relies largely on patient records from a software company called Epic. You may not know what Oracle is, but you have probably interacted indirectly with one of its databases if you bought something online.

    We’ll never write a valentine for that kind of boring software, but we need it to function. The boring stuff can also make what we do better, like enabling telemedicine calls or helping us check if diapers are in stock before driving to the store.

    A lot of technology designed for businesses stinks or is stuck in the past, but it’s the nuts and bolts of everything. Companies that make boring technology for organizations are likely to outlive the dozens of Doritos-on-demand start-ups. And it’s a gold mine. Businesses and governments are expected to spend about $4.5 trillion on technology this year. Some of the world’s most valuable technology companies, such as Microsoft, SAP, Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, and ServiceNow, are boring.

    Boredom isn’t just lucrative. It can also be a political asset. Facebook can’t buy a pack of chewing gum without government regulators suspecting the company is plotting to cause tooth decay worldwide. And when it tries to buy a company, every antitrust alarm goes off.

    But in January, Microsoft announced a nearly $70 billion acquisition of video game titan Activision Blizzard. Regulators can still block the acquisition, but Microsoft may try, partly because of its identity as the least controversial of the tech powerhouses. Microsoft has more revenue and is worth much more than Facebook’s parent company, Meta. But mostly it makes products that companies use to do things like crack data and not, say, communication tools that have been misused to spread conspiracy theories.

    Mark Gorenberg has devoted his professional life to snooze technology. In the late 1980s, he worked at Sun Microsystems, whose technology such as Unix and Java perpetuates almost every area of ​​today’s technology. Gorenberg described Sun as “very boring, but it powered everything.”

    Since then, Gorenberg has worked for investment firms that specialize in supporting fledgling companies that sell essentially unglamorous technology to companies.

    He told me that many of the so-called enterprise tech companies are not the most advanced. But he bets that the dull sector will become a hotbed of exciting inventions.

    Gorenberg talks about innovations like the technology Microsoft has recently released that essentially helps software write itself. His investment company, Zetta Venture Partners, is backing a start-up that scans car accident data to fulfill insurance claims and another that detects potential network outages before they turn off the internet.

    He talks about a future where boring technology remains essential, but also has a bit of wow.

    If this technology can be a little exciting and help us all, great. But there will always be a foundation of boring technology touching our lives and the world – even if we never know it exists.

    Brian X. Chenothe consumer technology columnist at The New York Times suggests what to try if calls on your smartphone sound awful or drop out when you’re at home.

    Many of us experience spotty cell phone calls at home. It may help to use Wi-Fi calling, which routes a phone call through your Internet connection. That often gives us more reliable and better phone calls than routing them over our local phone networks, especially if we don’t live right next to a cell tower.

    Normally, smartphones don’t use Wi-Fi calling automatically, so here’s how to enable this feature.

    On iPhones: Open the Settings app, choose the Phone option, select Wi-Fi Calling, tap the bar to enable the feature, and fill in some details about where you live. (This will help the police locate you if you call 9-1-1.)

    On Android phones, Wi-Fi calling settings may vary, but try this: Open the Phone app, tap the option for more, then select Settings. Choose the option labeled Calls and tap Wi-Fi Calling.

    One caveat: This is not a good option if your home WiFi is spotty. Here’s my previous column on home Wi-Fi troubleshooting.

    • Yes: Hackers forged what appeared to be emergency requests from law enforcement to various internet companies to hand over information about their users. Apple and Facebook were fooled by the demands last year, Bloomberg News reported, providing information such as addresses and phone numbers that were then used for harassment campaigns. (A subscription may be required.)

    • You may have noticed that almost all Facebook Reels videos are: Vox’s Recode publication reports that Facebook’s efforts to push those bite-sized videos in our feeds means Reels represented 11 of Facebook’s 20 most viewed posts in the US during the final three months of 2021. And a number of Reels is anonymous, reposted videos from TikTok or some sort of spam, Vox wrote.

      Related from OnTech: Facebook will make you love Reels.

    • The long hangover when countries block websites: After Turkey banned Wikipedia in 2017, it took years of legal challenges to get the online encyclopedia up to date again. The Washington Post reported that the battle over Wikipedia could be a glimpse of the future for Facebook, Twitter and other sites banned in Russia. (A subscription may be required.)

      Related: A young woman in Michigan, Annie Rauwerda, is putting together some of Wikipedia’s strangest pages. An example: the entry for ‘The Most Unwanted Song’, a new tune from the 1990s.

    A flamingo known by its paw tag, No. 492, escaped from a Kansas zoo in 2005 (on Independence Day). My colleague Daniel Victor hilariously describes the life of No. 492 on the run for the past 17 years and the people who were surprised to spot a flamingo in Texas.

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