November | 2016 | The Schottky Monkey

Some time ago I was watching the news and noticed trump using the phrase “politically correct”. I hand’t heard that phrase in quite a while and upon hearing it, I reflected on what, if anything it might or might not mean in today’s Silicon Valley.

The phrase “politically correct” showed in up in the late 80s. By my reckoning it became part of the the 90’s zeitgeist know as diversity. While there was some progress made in 90s around diversity and multiculturalism- another linguistic blast from the past -I’d argue that political correctness, especially that part of it which spent time policing language contributed to the slow withering on the vine of any meaningful progress the real diversity work attempted in the 90s might have secured.

Yet again, in 2016, here in Silicon Valley we find ourselves yet again in a similar situation.Words like retention, implicit bias, growth mindset, level playing field, are all terms that pop up in an around what is now called diversity work in the valley.

The sad thing is even with all of this work around linguistic precision we seem to be manufacturing, that same rigor has been lost in identifying and being specific about what the real challenges are in the valley, and who they affect.

Yes, language is important, however until we decide to come to terms with the underlying concepts and problems our linguistic gymnastics are trying to describe. We will always find ourselves left with nothing more than a collection of important sounding words. That is the failure of political correctness

First, resuming traditions established previously on this blog. The musical selection for this post is Beck’s Round The Bend

For some time now, the business model for Twitter has been falling short in providing a sustainable future for the company. Over the course of the last the last month or so, Twitter has found itself in the unenviable position of having to cut costs in the only way most companies know how to. The “axe”. Further evidence of Twitter’s new economy maturity can be seen in this comment from Dorsey during a conference call “our board is committed to maximizing long-term shareholder value”.

In the real world the laws of physics are a hard to violate, last I checked, you still can’t travel faster than the speed of light AND gravity still works. Similarly, in the business world, there are some fundamentals which cannot be ignored without consequence. The most fundamental is that a company HAS to produce revenue and profit.

I remember early on in the social media space how the most important objective was growth, not revenue growth, just growth. How to actually make money was always something to be determined afterwards. No one, myself included- a jaded HW -guy would dismiss the importance of cultivating market share. And yes, using the social media model of growth before revenue there have been some SIGNIFICANT successes. Unfortunately for the legions of entrepreneurs flooding our tech media and conscious those successes are relative far and few in between

What comes too mind for me in all of this are the Roadrunner cartoons I watched as a kid some 40 years ago. The coyote was always dreaming up all ploys intended to catch the roadrunner. Some were were marginally plausible, some were not. Always constant was the fact that the coyote NEVER caught the roadrunner. Usually, at the end of the show, there was one last grand attempt by the Coyote which as you might guess, also failed usually with much pain and some sort of long distance fall which ended up in a puff of dust at the base some canyon.

In unsuccessfully shopping itself around for a possible owner Twitter seems to have taken that final step and found it’s inner coyote. The question now is whether or not Twitter, like that coyote, will go over cliff and become that puff of dust.

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