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Millennials will form the largest share of the voting-age population for decades, beginning this year. They have the power to swing the presidential election by turning out to vote — or crush a candidate by staying home.

Check out our full interactive on bloombergview.com: http://bv.ms/1lqQTI9

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VW's nightmare: Scandal spreads to Europe

Just days after General Motors settled with federal prosecutors for its deadly negligence over faulty ignition switches, Volkswagen has admitted that it cheated for years on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency emissions tests. Having built its brand in the U.S. around diesel technology, VW faces severe damage to its reputation here, along with billions in EPA fines and now a federal criminal investigation. Worse for consumers, there's no guarantee that the fallout of this scandal will be limited to VW alone.

Clearly, shareholders are spooked: No amount of damage to VW's relatively weak U.S. market position could justify the huge declines in VW's stock price (near 23 percent on the day, for a market-value hit of $17.6 billion). The fear, almost certainly, is that this scandal could end up affecting VW's European market dominance, which is also highly dependent on diesel sales. Having to bring its entire EU fleet into compliance could cost orders of magnitude more than U.S. market repairs, as well as the firm's widely-respected chief executive officer, Martin Winterkorn, his job.

In the U.S., nearly a half-million vehicles equipped with VW's 2.0 liter TDI engine have been deemed out of compliance with EPA regulations after the International Council on Clean Transportation, a nonprofit watchdog group, discovered they emitted far more nitrogen oxide in normal driving than in testing environments. Faced with an EPA threat to decertify new diesel models, VW admitted that it had installed a "defeat device" to give artificially low emissions results in Audi A3, VW Jetta, Beetle, Golf and Passat models.

The EPA is raining righteous fury down on Volkswagen, but its record of clamping down on automakers' malfeasance shows it's on thin ice here. A 2012 scandal in which Hyundai and Kia goosed the numbers on fuel-efficiency tests provided ample evidence that the agency's protocol -- which allows automakers "broad latitude" to test their own vehicles and involves spot-checks on just 10 percent to 15 percent of all models -- is an invitation to corner-cutting and outright cheating. Until emissions tests are improved, or a consistent complimentary "real world" testing regime is put into place, regulators will lack the leverage to pressure automakers into admitting who is cheating and who is merely gaming the rules.  Nor will the agency know if the common discrepancies between test and real-world results reflect shortcomings in the test procedure itself.

This distinction between "engineering to the test" and outright cheating is critical to understanding the gravity of Volkswagen's predicament. Investigations by the ICCT and Transport & Environment, a European advocacy group, have shown that European-market diesels from a variety of automakers regularly fail to comply with the tough Euro 6 standard in real-world tests like the one that led to VW's U.S. scandal. The only clear difference between VW and the rest of the industry is that, in this case, the EPA forced it to admit that it actively cheated with purpose-built software.

(Read the full commentary at BloombergView.com)

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Google's 'self-driving toaster' finally rattles automakers

Before Google introduced the prototype of its autonomous car -- aka the "self-driving toaster" -- to the public last year, the search-engine giant made the rounds of the major automakers to explain the concept. At least one of the automakers was sufficiently impressed to express interest in collaborating, but was astounded to find that Google had no commercialization plans of any kind for its potentially game-changing technology.

Ever since, the auto industry has treated Google's vehicle like an uncomfortable joke: Though a source of real anxiety, the self-driving car seemed just unserious enough to laugh off. Now, however, the nervous laughter may turn to real fear. On Monday, Google has announced the hire of one of the most respected executives in the U.S. auto industry: John Krafcik, the former chief executive officer of Hyundai Motor America and president of the auto-pricing Web site TrueCar. With the auto world's eyes transfixed on the glitzy-yet-conservative new products being unveiled this week at the Frankfurt Auto Show, Google is sending the strongest sign yet that the real action in the industry is increasingly found in Silicon Valley.

The industry journal of record, Automotive News, is calling Krafcik's hire "the clearest sign yet of Google’s broad commercial aspirations for the project." Krafcik has deep experience in nearly every aspect of the auto industry, having studied lean manufacturing at MIT, worked in production engineering at the Toyota-GM joint Nummi plant in California, worked as a product planner at Ford, led Hyundai America's leap from budget brand to mainstream player, and focused on auto retail at TrueCar.

Between Krafcik, former Ford and Boeing CEO Alan Mulally (now a Google board member) and ex-GM research and development boss Lawrence Burns (now a Google Auto consultant), Google Auto is building a Dream Team to take on the century-old industry. Just as important, Krafcik, who drives a classic Lotus-designed Caterham Seven, brings some much-needed "car-guy" credibility to Google's program. This may help bring to bring the enthusiast-dominated auto media around on a project that -- gasp! -- seeks to create a permanent alternative to driving.

Meanwhile, Google seems deadly serious about doing exactly that, telling the California Public Utilities Commission that its vehicles will have no human controls beyond a "go button," a "please slow down and stop" button and a "stop pretty quickly" button. According to Sarah Hunter, head of policy at the GoogleX innovation lab, “the intention is that the passenger gets in the vehicle, says into microphone, take me to Safeway, and the car does the entire journey.”

By removing driver input almost entirely, Google is enabled to re-imagine the car from the ground-up, potentially yielding a final product that is dramatically lighter, more efficient and yet safer than anything on the road today. And with traffic deaths ticking upward for the first time in decades, likely due to increasing driver distraction, Google's goal cutting the more than 30,000 vehicle-related fatalities each year gives it a sense of social mission that could put the auto industry back on its heels.

(Read the full analysis at BloombergView.com)

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Of course the government wants to read your texts

Imagine, if you will, a law that said all doors had to be left unlocked so that the police could get in whenever they needed to. Or at the very least, a law mandating that the government have a master key.

That's essentially what some in the government want for your technology. As companies like Apple and Google have embraced stronger encryption, they're making it harder for the government to do the kind of easy instant collection that companies were forced into as the government chased terrorists after 9/11.

And how could you oppose that government access? After all, the government keeps us safe from criminals. Do you really want to make it easier for criminals to evade the law?

The analogy with your home doors suggests the flaw in this thinking: The U.S. government is not the only entity capable of using a master key. Criminals can use them too. If you create an easy way to bypass security, criminals -- or other governments -- are going to start looking for ways to reproduce the keys.

Or consider another case cited by the Times, in which the government is trying to get Microsoft to give up messages stored on a server in Ireland. With today's global networks, it's frustrating how easily criminals can move things out of reach of the law. On the other hand, do we want the law to have farther reach? It might be kind of frightening if other governments, with weaker civil liberties protections, could get access to any of our messages, just by getting an order from their local court.

It's not that the government is wrong about the frustrations. Law enforcement has always had to deal with the problem of criminals who flee the jurisdiction. Over time, things like extradition agreements have reduced that problem to a largely manageable level. But physically removing themselves from the area is very costly for the criminal, who loses the ability to travel freely, to see family and friends, to access assets left behind in the United States. Moving your messages to a foreign server, on the other hand, requires little in the way of strenuous effort. As the cost of moving evidence beyond an investigator's reach goes down, the cost of an investigation goes up -- even if the foreign courts are cooperative, and they often are, you still have to file a case under different laws that may not map particularly well onto yours.

That's a serious problem that law enforcement is trying to solve. But when law enforcement officials try to solve serious problems, they often end up creating some serious new ones for the citizens they are trying to protect.

Take laws against structuring transactions to get around bank reporting. Laws requiring banks to report transactions over a certain size were designed to solve serious problems, like tax evasion and money laundering by nasty criminal organizations that do terrible things. Unfortunately, they also created hassles for ordinary folks who were just running their 7-11 and minding their own business. People -- both criminals and ordinary citizens -- learned how to "structure" transactions to keep them below the reporting cutoff. So now you have to make a law against structuring transactions. And suddenly folks against whom no other crime can be proved are liable to have their bank accounts seized because they ... made too many small deposits.

That's crazy. But it's hypertrophic logic of law enforcement.

So too with these new issues. Law enforcement is going to pursue strategies that maximize the ability to catch criminals or terrorists. These are noble goals. But we have to take care that in the pursuit of these goals, the population they're trying to protect is not forgotten. Every time we open more doors for our own government, we're inviting other unwelcome guests to join them inside.

(Read Megan McArdle’s full analysis at BloombergView.com.)

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Why streaming services are so secretive

Streaming is the future of entertainment. Everybody knows that, right? What we don’t know is how many people are actually watching or listening to what on which streaming service, how much money they’re spending and who is getting the money. This is a business that so far is characterized by extreme opacity.

As former Talking Heads singer David Byrne complained in a New York Times op-ed over the weekend:

Perhaps the biggest problem artists face today is … lack of transparency. I’ve asked basic questions of both the digital services and the music labels and been stonewalled.

Byrne laid most the blame for this at the feet of the music labels and their nondisclosure agreements. But there does seem to be something about streaming that discourages the release of actual numbers.

In explaining why the company doesn't divulge anything but anecdotal information about the audience for its shows, Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos had this to say to the TV critics:

The shows are built and designed and we test them based on the audience we believe the show can attract. And it’s successful when it attracts that audience segment. None of those shows are designed to attract the whole 65-million subscriber base.

Netflix doesn’t sell ads, so Sarandos is under no external pressure to report how many people are watching what. The company’s goal is to increase the number of people willing to pay for Netflix subscriptions. Releasing viewership numbers apparently doesn't help with that.

At Amazon the goal of streaming is to get more people to sign up for Prime memberships, after which they’ll buy more power tools. Really, that’s what Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos recently told the Hollywood Reporter:

When people join Prime, they buy more of everything we sell. They buy more shoes, they buy power tools and so on.

Bezos also said Amazon will probably never release viewership numbers because, “I don't want our team obsessing over ratings. I want them obsessing over quality.”

This is really interesting. And maybe it’s a good thing. After creating and starring in the brilliant but perennially ratings-challenged “30 Rock” for NBC, Tina Fey co-created “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” for Netflix. She said last week that she liked not knowing exactly how many people were watching. The Los Angeles Times reported:

“We know Ted is pleased,” she said, adding that it “feels” like more people are watching than they did with “30 Rock.�� “But we don't have any numbers. It's very freeing to be away from the ratings system.”

Not all streaming services are this opaque. Ad-supported YouTube tells everybody how many people have watched every last video on its network (although it’s not absolutely clear how long one has to watch to count). And the music streaming services have to provide an accounting at least to those who own the rights to the music they play.

But on the whole the streamers are in a very different position from past purveyors of entertainment. TV and radio stations couldn’t tell how many people were watching without viewer surveys, and thus needed services such as Nielsen and Arbitron. Book publishers and music labels eventually got paid for every copy sold, but relied on point-of-sale measurement services (most owned at this point by Nielsen) for timely information.

The streaming services, meanwhile, already know exactly who is watching or listening to what, and when. They start out with a huge informational advantage over everybody else -- advertisers, artists, music labels, movie and TV producers, potential competitors. So while in some cases it will make sense for them to share that information, especially when advertisers are involved, it will still be their information to share.

Right now there is an added reason for streaming services to be cagey about releasing numbers: they might disappoint. Nielsen is moving toward what it calls “total audience measurement” of time spent watching videos and listening to music. And in the first quarter of 2015, the time Americans spent with streaming services was still a small fraction of the hours devoted to conventional TV and radio.

It’s a growing fraction, though. Eventually, streaming probably will be the dominant way for entertainers to reach audiences. We may never know exactly how dominant, though.

(Read the full analysis at BloombergView.com)

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Why Apple is afraid to reveal watch numbers

Apple is sitting on $202.8 billion in cash. So no matter what analysts and the market think of the company's latest quarterly report (not much, judging by the steep drop in share price), the company is still a juggernaut that can absorb any imaginable shock. At the same time, it's also weak in a way it wasn't under Steve Jobs. Apple has grown afraid of its own long shadow.

Chief Executive Tim Cook has an explanation for why the company failed to report the sales of the Apple Watch -- its first new product since Jobs died in 2011 -- in its first quarter on the market: "That was not a matter of not being transparent, it was a matter of not giving our competition insight that's a product that we've worked really hard on."

This excuse is transparently weak. Jobs's Apple reported the sales of the first iPhone -- 270,000 units -- in its filing for the quarter ending on June 30, 2007, even though the revolutionary phone went on sale on June 29. And the iPhone had strong competition: Apple was a newcomer to the mobile handset market, and could have used the same stealth tactic, hiding iPhone sales in the "other" category. But it chose to be as in-your-face as possible about the demand for its weird buttonless gadget.

Jobs's Apple likewise reported unit sales for the iPad in its first quarter on the market: 3.27 million. That device created a new category, and there were strong reasons to keep competitors in the dark, but the company chose not to.

Cook claims that "the Apple Watch sell-through was higher than the comparable launch periods of the original iPhone or the original iPad." The first iPhone is not that hard to beat: Apple, a much smaller company eight years ago, sold 1.19 million units in the handset's first full quarter, all in the U.S. (the international rollout, very limited by today's standards, didn't start until months later).

The assertion about the iPad is harder to believe. That device went on sale on April 3, 2010, at the start of the company's first quarter. Apple Watch debuted at the end of April. That means it had to beat the iPad's two-month sales. Assuming they were equal to two-thirds of the quarterly number (almost certainly wrong, but OK as a benchmark), Apple would have had to sell more than 2.18 million watches to beat the first iPad.

There's more incomplete information from Apple against which to check that claim. In the last quarter, Apple's "other product" sales increased to $2.6 billion, from $1.7 billion the quarter before. But Cook said watch sales amounted to more than that increase: "The aggregate balance of that category, both sequentially and year over year, is shrinking. Obviously iPod is a part of that, but there are other things in there, accessories and so forth, that are shrinking." Assuming that the "other" revenue, minus that from the watch, shrank at the same rate as it did in the year-ago quarter -- that is, by about 7 percent -- the watch revenue would be about $1.1 billion. Assuming an average price of $400 -- close to the lower end of the range and probably too low given that many buyers order better-looking, more expensive bands to replace the cheap plastic ones that come standard -- that's 2.75 million units in the first two months of sales. (The borderline average price for Cook's iPad assertion is $500.)

The problem with releasing such numbers is not that it would help the competition. All competitors combined sold just 6.8 million smartwatches in 2014. Apple has undoubtedly conquered the product category. But has it met the market's expectations? Not by a wide margin.

Fortune magazine recently compiled a list of analysts' estimates of Apple Watch sales in the quarter to June 27. On July 19, the average estimate was 4.07 million units. Only one of the analysts, Turley Muller, who runs the Financial Alchemist blog, predicted sales under 3 million units (2.85 million, still higher than my estimate based on Apple's numbers and Cook's statements). Deutsche Bank said 3.9 million.

Apple won't release its unit sales number because it's afraid of falling short. In Jobs's day, the company only needed to beat the competition and satisfy customers. Today, given the expectations, Cook knows he can never do enough.

(Read the full analysis at BloombergView.com)

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Tesla just did something really big

Tesla has rocked the world of high-performance automobiles with the introduction of its new “Ludicrous mode” rapid acceleration feature. The internal-combustion engine business may never be the same.

Regular readers of mine usually know at least two things about me: First, I believe that all predictions are silly, more about marketing than actually trying to figure out what comes next. Second, I am a fan of sleek, go-fast machines, preferably beautiful ones from Italy,Germany or the U.K.

Thus, I am going to break with both of these traditions to make a forecast about the future of the automotive industry. Gasoline-powered cars are toast. They are over, finito, kaput, the walking dead who have not yet realized they are goners. It is highly likely that in your lifetime, you will no longer see the mass manufacturing of gasoline-powered automobiles. My guess is that by 2035, if not sooner, the majority of automobiles sold in the U.S. and Europe will no longer be gasoline-powered.

Tesla and Toyota have been the two companies driving much of the technology changes for clean alternatives to gas-powered drivetrains. What Tesla has done with its “Ludicrous mode” upgrade for the Model S is figure out how to put almost all of the power in its system to all four wheels at once without melting its engine-management components.

The Tesla P85D with the complete 90kWh “ludicrous” upgrade costs about $100,000. The upgrade gives it a 0 to 60 mph time of 2.8 seconds. To put that into context, to get that sort of acceleration from a car previously required a Porsche 918 Spyder (0 to 60 in 2.3 seconds) or a Bugatti Veyron (2.6 seconds) or a Koenigsegg One (2.5 seconds). They each cost $1.1 million, $2.9 million and $3.8 million, respectively.

You can save some money by buying a Lamborghini Huracan ($237,250) or the Ferrari 458 Italia ($239,340), but both are slower than the Tesla. That makes the McLaren 570s a relative bargain at $184,900, but it, too, is slower than the Tesla.

Think about what this does to the high-end segment of the auto market. Tesla founder Elon Musk could put a sexier body on the Model S -- low-slung, fat tires, gull-wing doors -- and steal share from Ferrari, Lamborghini, McLaren, Porsche, Bentley and Bugatti. Or, he can sell entire drivetrains to those companies and let them clad the cars with their own bodies. Or both. Whatever happens, the sports-luxury market just had a huge shot fired across its bow.

These major shifts take time. To get an idea of how long a paradigm change takes in an entrenched industry like carmakers, consider these few facts about the Toyota Prius.

It first went on sale in Japan in 1997; it wasn’t until 2000 that it was introduced outside of that country. It was the first mass-produced hybrid vehicle in the world. Originally introduced as a compact sedan -- weight and power were always issues -- it has grown along with the underlying technology. Now it is a midsize hatchback, rated by the Environmental Protection Agency and California Air Resources Board as among the cleanest vehicles sold. Of the 7 million hybrids that Toyota has sold since 1997, almost 5 million have been Priuses. (Toyota now sells 27 different hybrid passenger car models but only one plug-in hybrid model -- also a Prius).

Toyota proved with the Prius that a reasonably priced hybrid electric could be a practical vehicle for the ordinary household. Tesla has taken the baton from Toyota, building a true, pure plug-in only electric car. The ramifications are far-reaching.

This issue is more than fodder for discussion at car shows and among enthusiasts; it is going to affect many of the world’s largest companies -- automakers such as GM, Ford, Fiat Chrysler, VW, BMW, Honda, Mercedes, Nissan and Hyundai; oil companies such Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, Shell and BP; and all of the many support businesses in exploration, drilling and shipping. There also are implications for tech companies such as Google and Apple, which have considered building autonomous, advanced-technology vehicles.

I won’t try to predict whether Apple or Google buys Tesla (Google has been more acquisitive than Apple). Or perhaps one of the automakers ponies up the $35 billion to buy Tesla. But someone should.

(Read the full analysis at BloombergView.com)

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Would Reddit be Reddit without chaos?

What is it with this place? Wong offered a tongue-in-cheek (right?) explanation during the weekend in answer to a Reddit question on “what’s the best ‘long con’ you ever pulled?” In 2006 Reddit was acquired by the Conde Nast magazine division of media giant Advance Publications. Since then, Wong proposed, founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian and their allies at Y-Combinator, the Silicon Valley seed-fund/accelerator where Reddit was hatched, have been plotting a restoration. Among other things, they have “manufacture[d] a series of otherwise-improbable leadership crises” that have had the end result of installing former University of Virginia roommates Huffman and Ohanian as chairman and CEO, respectively. “We all had our roles to play,” chimed in Huffman, also tongue-in-cheek (right?).

So that’s one theory. There are surely many others. But the one I keep coming back to is that the generally pretty admirable thing that Reddit is trying to do -- enable the bottom-up sharing and aggregation of information, ideas and photos of sculptures of mutant Marios -- turns out to be extremely hard to manage successfully.

People with horrible things to say or share inevitably intrude on the discussion, but banning them is problematic. The kind of forceful leadership that young companies often need to succeed is incompatible with an ethos that puts users in charge. There are constant conflicts between the need to grow and make money and the desires of existing heavy users. And while a not-for-profit information-sharing endeavor such as Wikipedia doesn’t have that last problem exactly, it has its own set of difficulties.

Facebook, with its personalized, algorithmically curated experience and lack of C-suite drama, has had the smoothest run of all the Internet entities in the sharing/aggregating space. It would be terrible if everything were like Facebook, though, wouldn’t it? So yeah, Reddit seems like a mess. But maybe it just wouldn't be Reddit without intermittent chaos.

(Read the full analysis at BloombergView.com).

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SpaceX won’t give up

From the ground, it didn't really look like an explosion. Standing at a press site about four miles from the launchpad, amid the rippling, crackling sound waves generated by the rocket's chemical propulsion -- a disturbance so great it sent fish leaping from the river in front of us -- all systems seemed to be go.

There was a puff of white smoke overhead. A lengthy silence. And then a NASA rep on the PA, befuddlement in his voice, pronouncing what had happened a "non-nominal" event. For SpaceX, the aerospace startup that had been supplying the International Space Station without incident for some time, the explosion of its Falcon 9 rocket was surely a shock -- all the more worrisome because the company intends to start ferrying humans to space come 2017.

"It happens," said our bus driver, distilling the essence of the event. It does happen: Of all our scientific pursuits, perhaps none is more prone to spectacular failure than space travel. Yet the impulse to explore seems to endure. The occasional tragedy is the cost of the larger triumphs.

SpaceX embodies that grimly intrepid ethos. As Bloomberg's Ashlee Vance details in his new book on SpaceX founder Elon Musk, the company's short history brims with failure and redemption -- a microcosm of the longer history of spaceflight. Its efforts to build workable rocket engines ended in flames many times. Three iterations of its Falcon 1 rocket blew up between 2006 and 2008. Then, out of options and nearing bankruptcy, the company finally nailed a do-or-die launch from the Kwajalein atoll in September 2008. NASA contracts, public esteem and profitability soon followed.

Since then, SpaceX has had a nearly perfect record in its commercial launches. And it has made steady progress in modifying its Dragon capsule for passengers, with all the most sophisticated safety enhancements. If a crew had been sitting atop the rocket that expired Sunday, the company's president reassuringly said afterward, they would have escaped easily.

Yet history still advises caution.

After the launch, with a late-afternoon Florida thunderstorm gathering, I stopped at the Astronaut Memorial at Kennedy Space Center. It's dominated by a shimmering granite edifice divided into 90 panels, two dozen of them bearing the names of American astronauts who died in the line of duty. It's a pretty stark reminder that exploration has always been a death-haunted pursuit. But the monument's most arresting statement, the one that stuck with me long after leaving, was implicit. There are an awful lot of empty panels on that wall, awaiting more names.

(Read the full analysis at BloombergView.com)

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Uber is lobbying for all of us

The first natural reaction to reading about Uber’s lobbying efforts is to recoil. 

But the story is more complicated.

It seems like -- I don’t know of a lot of hard evidence that one can point to just yet -- Uber and other app-centric, easy-to-use car services are actually increasing the size of the available market, especially in cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles where taxi service wasn’t very good to begin with. In San Francisco, where Uber got its start and now claims to be bringing inmore than three times as much revenue as the local taxi industry, the company contends that it is changing life in the city to a point where “car ownership will become more of a luxury than an economic necessity.” That could well be true, and it would be great for San Franciscans.

There will come a day -- not all that long from now, one has to think -- when Uber will be the entrenched incumbent rather than the upstart changing how transportation works. At that point, its lobbyists will presumably devote their days to preserving privileges and fending off competitors. That won’t be great, and it’s worth looking now for ways to draft laws that encourage continued competition. The debate over whether Uber drivers are employees or independent contractors may actually be a help here. To be reliably classified as independent contractors, Uber drivers need lots of freedom to drive for other services, and that means rival startups would have fewer barriers to entry.

For now, though, it’s worth standing back and enjoying the moment. The biggest, scariest lobbying machine in the nation is hard at work lobbying to make most Americans’ lives a little bit better. How often is that going to happen?

(Read the full analysis at BloombergView.com)

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Is anyone in charge at Twitter?

The insidery, rapid-fire discussions that appeal to journalists, economists, soccer fans and all the other overlapping subgroups that populate Twitter are exactly what scares away casual users. Sacca’s epic essay was mostly a list of ways in which he thought Twitter could become more accessible to newcomers while keeping core users engaged.

Wall Street is another oft-cited factor. After the 2010 boardroom coup by Twitter’s venture capital backers that made Dick Costolo chief executive officer, Twitter raised so much money from private investors and then an initial public offering that it has since faced huge pressure to deliver gobs of revenue, quickly. Maybe too quickly.

Here’s another theory: Twitter’s main problem is that it is run by a committee -- an often dysfunctional committee. Most of the great tech successes have had a dominant founding leader or partnership: Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard at HP; Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore at Intel; Bill Gates at Microsoft; Larry Ellison at Oracle; Sergey Brin and Larry Page at Google; Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. Even at Cisco, where the founders left in a huff, outside-hire John Morgridge was able to establish himself as the undisputed boss.

At Twitter it’s never been clear who’s in charge.

(Read the full analysis at BloombergView.com)

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Why Apple wants to let you block ads

Apple is about to give iPhone and iPad users the opportunity to block ads. This follows a recent German court decision affirming the legality of ad-blocking software and may point to a wider rejection of invasive advertising. Companies with ad-based business models may soon have no choice but to rethink their approach.

Apple's anti-ad innovation is buried in the update notes for the mobile version of Safari, its Web browser. This autumn, users will get a Safari extension that allows them to block cookies that gather browsing data, as well as images and pop-ups.

It's tempting to say that Apple is providing the capability because it doesn't depend on advertising revenue. Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook recently railed against tech companies that "have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information" and are "gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it." But if you instantly think "Google," think again. According to PageFair, an Irish company that helps advertisers beat ad blocking by making ads less intrusive, the use of blocking technology has been increasing mainly thanks to Google's Chrome browser, which already includes the features Apple has announced for Safari.

Many ad-financed businesses are unhappy.

The holy grail, however, is getting users  to pay for content. For now, few publishers are able to do this, but the ad allergy of millennials must eventually lead the industry back to to a focus on subscriptions -- and the survival of the fittest: that is, those publishers whose content is worth paying for.

(Read the full analysis at BloombergView.com)

Plus: If Apple blocked ads, who would notice? Yes, this makes it slightly harder to make money off of journalism. But it's just one more straw atop a load that was already too heavy for the camel's back. 

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Corporations have to pay taxes after all

That was fun while it lasted! The great multinational experiment -- led by such American innovators as Apple, Amazon, Starbucks and Google -- in shifting corporate income to a magical stateless place where it was never taxed seems to be coming to an end.

As the Financial Times reported:

Several leading multinational companies have come a long way towards dismantling structures they have used to minimise their tax bills, according to an official leading an international crackdown on avoidance.

The moves were a sign that the “very aggressive tax planning of the past is over”, said Pascal Saint-Amans, the top tax official at the Paris-based OECD.

That’s not to say multinational corporations won’t keep finding new ways to lower their taxes. This is an arms race, and they have greater resources at their disposal than the government agencies that police them. But it is an indication that, even in an age of globalization and great corporate power, you can’t act with total disdain of the governments of the countries where you operate and expect to get away with it forever.

(Read the full analysis at BloombergView.com)

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Why carmakers want people (not robots) to drive

Carlos Ghosn has seen the pictures of Google’s little self-driving car. He is not impressed. “It’s a box,” the chief executive officer of Renault and Nissan said during a visit to Bloomberg this morning. “It’s not about seduction or attractiveness.”

Sure, he understands the economic logic of utilitarian driverless vehicles that shuttle people around all day and night. It’s just that (1) he doesn’t think the driverless age will be upon us for at least another decade and probably longer, for regulatory reasons if nothing else, and (2) he and other auto industry executives would much rather work on other stuff.

“Do you see any CEO of a major automaker saying, ‘Wow, self-driving cars! It’s great!’?” No sir, Mr. Ghosn, I don’t.

Then again, of course the incumbents in what it is at the moment a quite profitable industry wouldn't be excited about a development that could disrupt the heck out of their business. This doesn’t mean they’re wrong. But it does show why there is an opportunity for an outsider such as Google.

(Read the full commentary at BloombergView.com)

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Google's Project Jacquard gets it right

At last a technology company has grasped the essential difference between wearable and portable, between clothing and accessories, between artifice that seems like second nature and artifice that seems like a clunky cyborg upgrade. Surprisingly, that company is the same behemoth (though a different team) that peddled the aggressively unnatural Google Glass.

At last week’s developers’ conference, Google Inc.’s Advanced Technology and Projects group announced what it calls Project Jacquard, named for the early 19th-century looms that first used digital punchcards to program complex patterns. The project’s central innovation is a conductive yarn tough enough for industrial weaving and mass-market apparel and upholstery production. The threads can connect to chips that react to gestures, monitor heart rate or body temperature, or do whatever else a designer might come up with. Google hasn’t talked publicly about pricing, but it’s definitely going for scale. Its first design partner is Levi Strauss & Co.

Unlike existing conductive threads, Project Jacquard’s yarn works with many different fibers -- wool, silk, polyester, cotton -- and comes in a full range of colors. The regular fibers braid around a conductive metal alloy core. “It looks like just normal yarn,” said Shiho Fukuhara, the project’s textile development and partnership lead, in a video. “The only thing that’s different is it’s conductive.”

The goal is to allow electronics to disappear into the fabric of daily life, “getting the technology out of the way and making interactions more natural and more seamless,” explained João Wilbert, the creative technologist for Google Creative Lab in London, in the video.

Metaphors like “fabric of daily life” and “seamless” demonstrate why this approach is so promising. Textile references are woven into our language because cloth is integral to human life. It’s our second skin. Not everyone wears jewelry, but in many climates human beings can’t survive without clothes. So if you want to develop wearable electronics, threads and buttons are a much more powerful way to go than bracelets, watches, or weirdly asymmetrical eyewear. 

(Read Virginia Postrel’s full analysis at BloombergView.com.)

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The auto industry looks beyond ownership

Bill Ford, heir to the family business and executive chairman of the automaker, told a TED conference in June 2011 that mobility, freedom and progress were the objectives of his great grandfather, not selling cars per se. The prospect of the global car fleet growing fivefold to 4 billion autos by the middle of the century risks creating "global gridlock," he said:

When you factor in population growth, it's clear that the mobility model that we have today simply will not work tomorrow. Frankly, 4 billion clean cars on the road are still 4 billion cars, and a traffic jam with no emissions is still a traffic jam. The solution is not going to be more cars, more roads or a new rail system; it can only be found, I believe, in a global network of interconnected solutions.

Last week, Ford's investment firm Fontinalis Partners took a stake in U.S. ride-hailing firm Lyft. Lyft's business model -- using technology to match drivers with riders for individual trips -- is almost the antithesis of how Ford has made money for a century.

Ford's GoDrive scheme isn't the only game in London. Trundle into any London recycling center -- as I have done far too frequently in recent weeks (don't ask how the house renovation is going) -- and you'll see eager spring-cleaning urbanites unloading Zipcars they've rented for a single day from the company's fleet of 1,500 vehicles. Other such ventures include City Car Club, DriveNow and E-Car. Ford, though, is the first major manufacturer to get into the game.

It seems pretty clear that auto ownership, at least in our crowded cities, is going the same way as music or software. Why own racks of compact discs or even MP3s when you can stream tunes into your ears? Why burden your computer hard-drive with programs and data that you can access and run off the cloud?

(Read the full analysis at BloombergView.com)

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Think big, Apple: the iLivingRoom

Apple almost certainly made a sound decision by giving up on the idea of developing a television set. There's not much it could have contributed that South Korean market leaders haven't already thought of. Nonetheless, Apple could still change the way the way we watch television and movies if it decided to create a smart projector. There is a market for these devices that Apple, with its gift for making user-friendly gadgets, could take by storm.

People buy projectors because they can produce an image of almost any size. A screen or a flat white wall turns the room into a cinema. Kids love it, and on big game days you can turn your apartment into a sports bar. There's a price to pay, however: Even the best of these devices is stuck in the past. If you're a connoisseur of 1970s interfaces, check out these Top 10 lists from CNet and PC Magazine.

These top machines are dumb devices that have to be connected to a computer or a cable or set-top box. There is a new generation of "smart" projectors, running the Android operating system, but it's almost impossible to find one that combines good image and sound quality with a clean interface, decent wireless connectivity and enough computing power to make it autonomous. I acquired a  "smart" projector after weeks of market research and ended up using it with a computer, an Apple TV, a Chromecast device and a cable box.

This is the kind of market that is ripe for Apple to work the same kind of magic as it did with music players and mobile handsets.

According to Bloomberg Intelligence, almost 229 million LCD TV sets were sold last year, compared with 8.3 million projectors. The opportunity for Apple is to turn projectors from a niche product for geeks into a mainstream alternative to TV sets. That could truly change the way we watch  at home, taking us from the 1970s into the 21st century. That's a far more realistic goal than, say, beating Toyota and Volkswagen at building cars.

(Read the full analysis at BloombergView.com)