Office Infrastructure Quotes

EHMs provide favors. These take the form of loans to develop infrastructure—electric generating plants, highways, ports, airports, or industrial parks. A condition of such loans is that engineering and construction companies from our own country must build all these projects. In essence, most of the money never leaves the United States; it is simply transferred from banking offices in Washington to engineering offices in New York, Houston, or San Francisco. Despite the fact that the money is returned almost immediately to corporations that are members of the corporatocracy (the creditor), the recipient country is required to pay it all back, principal plus interest.

Forcing everyone into the office every day is an organizational SPoF (Single Point of Failure). If the office loses power or Internet or air conditioning, it's no longer functional as a place to do work. If a company doesn't have any training or infrastructure to work around that, it means it's going to be unavailable to its customers.

Left-wing progressivism” and “managerialism” are synonymous since the solutions of the former always involve the expansion of the latter. To stay with the example of LGBT causes, these may seem remote from something as technical as “managerialism” but consider the armies of HR officer, diversity tsars, equality ministers, and so on that are supported today under the banner of “LGBT” and used to police and control enterprises. The “philanthropic” endeavours of the Ford Foundation in this regard laid the infrastructure and groundwork to setup new power centres for managerialism under the guise of this ostensibly unrelated cause. Similar case studies can be found in issues as diverse as racial equality, gender equality, Islamist terrorism, climate change, mental health, and the management of the COVID-19 pandemic. The LOGIC of managerialism is to create invisible “problems” which can, in effect, never truly be solved, but rather can permanently support managerial jobs that force some arbitrary compliance standard such as “unconscious bias training”, “net zero carbon”, the ratio of men and women on executive boards or whatever else.

corruption is defined in narrow terms to nail the poor deluded fool who slips a £20 note inside the cover of their passport before handing it to the Border Force officer who is checking travel documents with a CCTV camera looking over her shoulder. There’s nothing corrupt about the government minister who announces new and impossible performance targets for a hitherto just-about-coping agency that manages transport infrastructure, drives it into a smoking hole in the ground, and three years later retires and joins the board of the corporation that subsequently took over responsibility for maintaining all the bridges on behalf of the state—for a tidy annual fee, of course. After all, the minister is a demonstrable expert on the ownership and management of bridges, and there’s no provable link between their having set up the agency for failure and their subsequently being granted a nonexecutive directorship that gets them their share of the rental income from the privatized bridge, is there?

The Chinese Communist Party has seen fit to protect most property rights because it recognizes that it has a self-interest in doing so. But the party faces no legal constraints other than its own internal political controls if it decides to violate property rights. Many peasants find their land coveted by municipal authorities and developers who want to turn it into commercial real estate, high-density housing, shopping centers, and the like, or else into public infrastructure like roads, dams, or government offices. There are large incentives for developers to work together with corrupt local officials to illegally take land away from peasants or urban homeowners, and such takings have been perhaps the largest single source of social discontent in contemporary China.33

About five years ago, on our first day of office — Build, Build, Build Czar Mark Villar and I were talking — “What can we do to make the Philippines a better place?” His answer was simple —roads to the most rural areas so that children can go to school without risking their lives, bridges to connect farmers and fishermen to their markets and infrastructure that would open up opportunities in the countryside and allow Filipinos to dream and aspire for a better future.

That’s the socialist vision: abolishing private ownership of the things we all need and use—factories, banks, offices, natural resources, utilities, communication and transportation infrastructure—and replacing it with social ownership, thereby undercutting the power of elites to hoard wealth and power. And that’s also the ethical appeal of socialism: a world where people don’t try to control others for personal gain, but instead cooperate so that everyone can flourish.

You didn’t warn us about this, Readier,’ said Stowley resentfully. Gilt waved his hands. ‘We must speculate to accumulate!’ he said. ‘The Post Office? Trickery and sleight of hand. Oh, von Lipwig is an ideas man, but that’s all he is. He’s made a splash, but he’s not got the stamina for the long haul. Yet as it turns out he will do us a favour. Perhaps we have been . . . a little smug, a little lax, but we have learned our lesson! Spurred by the competition we are investing several hundred thousand dollars—’ ‘Several hundred?’ said Greenyham. Gilt waved him into silence, and continued: ‘—several hundred thousand dollars in a challenging, relevant and exciting systemic overhaul of our entire organization, focusing on our core competencies while maintaining full and listening co-operation with the communities we are proud to serve. We fully realize that our energetic attempts to mobilize the flawed infrastructure we inherited have been less than totally satisfactory, and hope and trust that our valued and loyal customers will bear with us in the coming months as we interact synergistically with change management in our striving for excellence. That is our mission.’ An awed silence followed.

Now imagine if, instead of accidentally leaving open a loophole, the hackers behind WannaCry had designed the program to systematically learn about its own vulnerabilities and repeatedly patch them. Imagine if, as it attacked, the program evolved to exploit further weaknesses. Imagine that it then started moving through every hospital, every office, every home, constantly mutating, learning. It could hit life-support systems, military infrastructure, transport signaling, the energy grid, financial databases. As it spread, imagine the program learning to detect and stop further attempts to shut it down. A weapon like this is on the

The obvious costs of such a policy became apparent to me as I sat along the back wall of vault V22 at NSA headquarters with two of the more talented infrastructure analysts, whose workspace was decorated with a seven-foot-tall picture of Star Wars’ famous wookie, Chewbacca. I realized, as one of them was explaining to me the details of his targets’ security routines, that intercepted nudes were a kind of informal office currency, because his buddy kept spinning in his chair to interrupt us with a smile, saying, “Check her out,” to which my instructor would invariably reply “Bonus!” or “Nice!” The unspoken transactional rule seemed to be that if you found a naked photo or video of an attractive target—or someone in communication with a target—you had to show the rest of the boys, at least as long as there weren’t any women around. That was how you knew you could trust each other: you had shared in one another’s crimes.

Unprecedented,” blared Foreign Policy and a host of other publications on what was being described as the Trump administration’s “assault” or “war” on the State Department. But for all the ways in which the developments were shocking, to describe them as unprecedented was simply not true. The Trump administration brought to a new extreme a trend that had, in fact, been gathering force since September 11, 2001. From Mogadishu to Damascus to Islamabad, the United States cast civilian dialogue to the side, replacing the tools of diplomacy with direct, tactical deals between our military and foreign forces. At home, White Houses filled with generals. The last of the diplomats, keepers of a fading discipline that has saved American lives and created structures that stabilized the world, often never made it into the room. Around the world, uniformed officers increasingly handled the negotiation, economic reconstruction, and infrastructure development for which we once had a devoted body of trained specialists. As a result, a different set of relationships has come to form the bedrock of American foreign policy. Where civilians are not empowered to negotiate, military-to-military dealings still flourish. America has changed whom it brings to the table, and, by extension, it has changed who sits at the other side. Foreign ministries are still there. But foreign militaries and militias often have the better seats.

The Republic of Foo, our high-investment, intangible economy of the future, has significantly overhauled its land-use rules, particularly in major cities, making it easier to build housing and workplaces; at the same time, it invests significantly in the kind of infrastructure needed to make cities livable and convivial, in particular, effective transport and civic and cultural amenities, from museums to nightlife. In some cases, this involves rejecting big development plans that destroy existing places. It has faced political costs in making this change, especially from vested interests opposed to new development or gentrification, but the increased economic benefits of vibrant urban centers have provided enough incentive to tip the balance of power in favor of development. The cities of the Kingdom of Bar have chosen one of two unfortunate paths: in some cases, they have privileged continuity over dynamism in its towns—creating places like Oxford in the UK, which are beautiful and full of convivial public spaces, but where it is very hard to build anything, meaning few people can take advantage of the economic potential the place creates. Other cities resemble Houston, Texas, in the 1990s—a low-regulation paradise where an absence of planning laws keeps home and office prices low, but where the lack of walkable centers and convivial places makes it harder for intangibles to multiply. (To Houston’s credit, it has changed for the better in the last twenty years.) The worst of Bar’s cities fail in both regards, underinvesting in urban amenities and making it hard to build. In all three cases, the economic disadvantage of not having vibrant cities that can grow have become larger and larger as the importance of intangibles has increased.

Indian Express (Indian Express) - Clip This Article at Location 721 | Added on Sunday, 30 November 2014 20:28:42 Fifth column: Hope and audacity Ministers, high officials, clerks and peons now report for duty on time and are no longer to be seen taking long lunch breaks to soak in winter sunshine in Delhi’s parks. Reform is needed not just in economic matters but in every area of governance. Does the Prime Minister know how hard it is to get a passport? Tavleen Singh | 807 words At the end of six months of the Modi sarkar are we seeing signs that it is confusing efficiency with reform? I ask the question because so far there is no sign of real reform in any area of governance. And, because some of Narendra Modi’s most ardent supporters are now beginning to get worried. Last week I met a man who dedicated a whole year to helping Modi become Prime Minister and he seemed despondent. When I asked how he thought the government was doing, he said he would answer in the words of the management guru Peter Drucker, “There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.” We can certainly not fault this government on efficiency. Ministers, high officials, clerks and peons now report for duty on time and are no longer to be seen taking long lunch breaks to soak in winter sunshine in Delhi’s parks. The Prime Minister’s Office hums with more noise and activity than we have seen in a decade but, despite this, there are no signs of the policy changes that are vital if we are to see real reform. The Planning Commission has been abolished but there are many, many other leftovers from socialist times that must go. Do we need a Ministry of Information & Broadcasting in an age when the Internet has made propaganda futile? Do we need a meddlesome University Grants Commission? Do we need the government to continue wasting our money on a hopeless airline and badly run hotels? We do not. What we do need is for the government to make policies that will convince investors that India is a safe bet once more. We do not need a new government that simply implements more efficiently bad policies that it inherited from the last government. It was because of those policies that investors fled and the economy stopped growing. Unless this changes through better policies, the jobs that the Prime Minister promises young people at election rallies will not come. So far signals are so mixed that investors continue to shy away. The Finance Minister promises to end tax terrorism but in the next breath orders tax inspectors to go forth in search of black money. Vodafone has been given temporary relief by the courts but the retroactive tax remains valid. And, although we hear that the government has grandiose plans to improve the decrepit transport systems, power stations and ports it inherited, it continues to refuse to pay those who have to build them. The infrastructure industry is owed more than Rs 1.5 lakh continued... crore in government dues and this has crippled major companies. No amount of efficiency in announcing new projects will make a difference unless old dues are cleared. Reform is needed not just in economic matters but in every area of governance. Does the Prime Minister know how hard it is to get a passport? Does he know that a police check is required even if you just want to get a few pages added to your passport? Does he know how hard it is to do routine things like registering property? Does he know that no amount of efficiency will improve healthcare services that are broken? No amount of efficiency will improve educational services that have long been in terminal decline because of bad policies and interfering officials. At the same time, the licence raj that strangles private investment in schools and colleges remains in place. Modi’s popularity with ordinary people has increased since he became Prime Minister, as we saw from his rallies in Kashmir last week, but it will not la

shifts signal a slowing in momentum for the bill among Democrats, who have faced a full-court press from a number of top administration officials, including President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry. During Tuesday night’s State of the Union address, Obama vowed to veto the bill if it landed on his desk and urged Congress to let international talks play out. It’s already clear that Congress is reluctant to proceed on the issue. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has signaled an unwillingness to bring the sanctions bill to a vote, and in the House, party leaders have been meeting privately for weeks to figure out how to proceed. Talk in that chamber has centered on the possibility of voting on a non-binding resolution that would allow lawmakers to lay out their preferred endgame in Iran negotiations. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) already said earlier this month that a vote on the bill was not needed during the interim agreement. Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) punted the matter to Reid. "Senator Cardin wants to see negotiations with Iran succeed. As for timing of the bill, it is and has always been up to the Majority Leader," Cardin spokeswoman Sue Walitsky said. Both of the bill’s main sponsors, Sens. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), held their ground when asked for their reactions to Obama’s veto threat. “While the president promises to veto any new Iran sanctions legislation, the Iranians have already vetoed any dismantlement of their nuclear infrastructure,” Kirk said in a statement. On Tuesday night, just after the State of the Union had ended, Menendez said, "I’m not frustrated." He walked quickly into an elevator as he spoke, pushing the buttons and looking ready to be done with the conversation. "The president has every right to do what he wants." A spokesman for Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) said Wednesday that merely introducing the bill -- but not voting on it -- was helpful to negotiations. "Senator Bennet supports the President’s diplomatic efforts and would like them to succeed. The pertinent question isn't about when we vote on the bill, but whether its introduction is helpful to the negotiations. He believes it is," spokesman Adam Bozzi said. Not all senators agreed that a vote should be delayed. Offices for Sens. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Mike Johanns (R-Neb.) confirmed that the senators wanted to hold

Both in concept and infrastructure American democracy was majestic, but when one came down to the actual, individual men who worked behind those imposing marble facades, the people were as likely as not to elect seedy, shortsighted, self-serving jingoes who embarrassed their offices.

Office reformers are pulled in two directions. They either follow Frederick Taylor (the father of scientific management) and the successive waves of management scientists who thought that with enough overhead cameras, spreadsheets, computing power, and analysis, they could “solve” the organization and its problems. Or they follow the dreamers of the 1970s and ’80s, who, inspired by the cybernetic-counterculture movement, thought that by getting rid of that same organizational infrastructure, they could free workers to reach their full potential by embracing chaos, complexity, new technology, or all three.

Another salesman flew down to SpaceX to sell the company on some technology infrastructure equipment. He was doing the standard relationship-building exercise practiced by salespeople for centuries. Show up. Speak for a while. Feel each other out. Then, start doing business down the road. Musk was having none of it. “The guy comes in, and Elon asks him why they’re meeting,” Spikes said. “He said, ‘To develop a relationship.’ Elon replied, ‘Okay. Nice to meet you,’ which basically meant, ‘Get the fuck out of my office.’ This guy had spent four hours traveling for what ended up as a two-minute meeting. Elon just has no tolerance for that kind of stuff.

When Tony Abbott became prime minister in 2013, he announced that he would be a prime minister for indigenous affairs and that responsibility for this area would be moved into the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Yet PM&C had no substantial infrastructure for developing or delivering indigenous policy – one of the most difficult areas of public policy. PM&C is a department that specialises in coordinating the work of the rest of the public service, not in running a major area of spending in its own right. To start with the basics, PM&C doesn’t have offices around the country, let alone in remote locations. So it immediately had to assign the delivery of indigenous services to other parts of the bureaucracy.

one of the signature strategies for blitzscaling is rapid, parallel market development. When Airbnb made the decision to blitzscale, its chosen strategy was to rapidly expand from a single office in the United States to a score of offices around the world, especially in Europe. This kind of growth is highly inefficient—think of all the new knowledge and infrastructure and personnel an organization has to acquire to successfully open offices around the world—but it can allow a company to stand out from its competitors. It would have been more efficient for Airbnb to expand one country and one office at a time, refining its approach based on the lessons of each rollout, but that would have allowed its competitor Wimdu to be the faster mover. In other words, when it needed to grow from a forty-person company to a global company in a single year, Airbnb couldn’t afford to be cautious with its capital and focus on efficiency.

We should not confuse the rising costs of flooding with flooding itself (or indeed with climate change). It is entirely caused by more houses and more wealth; in fact, the cost compared to the US national income had declined almost tenfold. If we want to reduce this amount even more, the solution isn’t to be found in radically reducing carbon dioxide levels. The solution is to stop building lots of big, expensive houses in flood zones… “Any disaster today will cause more damage because there are more homes, factories, office buildings, and infrastructure to destroy.” -pp. 66, 74

New York City’s fiscal health was no better than the state of its subways. Lindsay and the city comptroller, Abe Beame, were engaging in a series of fiscal gimmicks to keep the city’s operating and capital budgets afloat. They were trying to satisfy too many constituents by undertaking ambitious capital projects, minimizing fare increases, and providing some of the most generous pension benefits in the nation to municipal employees. Government agencies have two types of budgets: operating budgets and capital budgets. The operating budget pays for day-to-day expenses such as salaries, pensions, and office supplies, as well as ongoing maintenance and basic repairs, such as cleaning buses and filling potholes. The capital budget funds the construction and rehabilitation of the city’s infrastructure and facilities.

All socioeconomic activity in cities involves the interaction between people. Employment, wealth creation, innovation and ideas, the spread of infectious diseases, health care, crime, policing, education, entertainment, and indeed, all of the pursuits that characterize modern Homo sapiens and are emblematic of urban life are sustained and generated by the continual exchange of information, goods, and money between people. The job of the city is to facilitate and enhance this process by providing the appropriate infrastructure such as parks, restaurants, cafés, sports stadiums, cinemas, theaters, public squares, plazas, office buildings, and meeting halls to encourage and increase social connectivity.

WorkSocial offers fully furnished coworking office space for rent on an hourly, daily, or monthly basis with high-quality customer service to turn your vision into reality. We serve clients by developing workspaces with best-in-class amenities and advanced infrastructure.

I want to be free of cities and sexual entanglements. Heat. This is what cities mean to me. You get off the train and walk out of the station and you are hit with the full blast. The heat of air, traffic and people. The heat of food and sex. The heat of tall buildings. The heat that floats out of the subways and the tunnels. It’s always fifteen degrees hotter in the cities. Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from the poisoned sky. The buses breathe heat. Heat emanates from crowds of shoppers and office workers. The entire infrastructure is based on heat, desperately uses up heat, breeds more heat. The eventual heat death of the universe that scientists love to talk about is already well underway and you can feel it happening all around you in any large or medium-sized city. Heat and wetness.

Around the world, uniformed officers increasingly handled the negotiation, economic reconstruction, and infrastructure development for which we once had a devoted body of trained specialists. As a result, a different set of relationships has come to form the bedrock of American foreign policy. Where civilians are not empowered to negotiate, military-to-military dealings still flourish. America has changed whom it brings to the table, and, by extension, it has changed who sits at the other side. Foreign ministries are still there. But foreign militaries and militias often have the better seats.

The acquisition is only really successful if you’re a better owner of the business than either the previous owner or the company as an independent company. That usually gets down to your capabilities, in our case, your consumer capabilities, your branding capabilities, your R&D capabilities, your go-to-market capabilities, your global infrastructure, your back office.

Most agents did the best they could under difficult circumstances; however, the limitations of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s infrastructure, lack of clear policies, and other structural matters within the agency guaranteed that their monthly reports, contrary to Democrats’ claims, understated the crimes in their jurisdictions. Southern whites also had a hand in limiting a fuller accounting of atrocities against Black people. White people used various forms of coercion to prevent African Americans from seeking justice with military authorities, including murder.7 Because of this, officers of the Freedmen’s Bureau believed that atrocities were underreported by at least half. Meanwhile, the half that the agents gathered told a shameful story of law enforcement officers in the South turning a blind eye to, and even encouraging, slayings, beatings, burglaries, and sexual assaults.

When the construction of Skyway Stage 3 started, I was a freshman at law school. Almost every day, I’d pass by the same alignment which, if completed, would cut travel time from North Luzon Expressway to South Luzon Expressway from 2.5 hours to only 30 minutes. At the time, I was still working for United Nations and our Manila Office was located at the RCBC Plaza on HV dela Costa on Ayala Avenue. There were many days I hoped they’d fast-track the construction. The promise of reduced travel time from Makati to QC meant more time to study, dine, shower, or sleep. Little did I know that I’d be part of the project about two years later.

Liberal antiracists [...] talk of "hate speech" and "hate crimes", on the assumption that oppresive cruelty is the behavioural expression of a hateful disposition - ignoring the corporate executives, asset managers, lawmakers, government officials, judges, police officers, prison guards, military personnel and immigration officers who, without attitudes of hatred, routinely and calmly operate infrastructures of racist violence, in the name of security and profit. By relocating racism to the unconscious mind, liberal antiracists end up absolving the institutions most responsible for racist practices.

Liberal antiracists [...] talk of "hate speech" and "hate crimes", on the assumption that oppresive cruelty is the behavioural expression of a hateful disposition - ignoring the corporate executives, asset managers, lawmakers, government officials, judges, police officers, prison guards, military personnel and immigration officers who, without attitudes of hatred, routinely and calmly operate infrastructures of racist violence, in the name of security and profit. By relocating racism to the unconscious mind, liberal antiracists end up absolving the institutions most responsible for racist practices.

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) has taken this relationship to new heights. It has contributed significantly to the development of port, roads, and energy infrastructure in Pakistan. CPEC has now entered into the second phase with a focus on industrial cooperation, trade, agriculture, and socio-economic development

SMART (social, mobile, aware, and real time) technologies and other advances, such as cloud computing infrastructure, will enable much of health care to be moved out of hospitals, clinics, and doctors’ offices and into our everyday lives.

You can keep the Office of Personnel Management records, I don't need Electronic Health Records, give me the metadata, big data analytics and a custom tailored algorithm and a budget and during election time, I can cut to the psychological core of any population, period!

The counter terrorist units received very little attention till terrorism in Punjab blew up on the face of its creators. The Operations Cells, specialised in combating indigenous terrorism, were put on the rails around 1986, after Operation Blue Star and the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Specialised cells to combat ISI operations in India and Pakistan sponsored Islamist terrorism had taken shape only after the Bombay serial bomb blasts in 1993. The political infrastructure and its intelligence edifices responded very slowly to the emerging geopolitical needs.

Intelligence as an attribute of man’s evolution through the process of selection has become synonymous with his quest for knowledge. Intelligence infrastructure as a part of social evolution and statecraft has become synonymous with diplomacy, law and order, stability and welfare of the governed and governing people and a powerful bridge between war and peace. In internal context it is a perfect tool for repression and welfare, a supreme tool for ensuring law and order and maiming and silencing people’s voice. In external relations it plays complimentary roles to statecraft and diplomacy and takes the front seat when certain objectives are required to be achieved through means other than statecraft and diplomacy and war. Intelligence fraternity can carry out wars through peaceful means, it can wage wars through low intensity attrition and it can play havoc through sabotage and subversion. It can seek out the fault lines of the enemy and cause tectonic explosion under his feet. It is as powerful a weapon as a fusion bomb is. It depends how and in what fashion the intelligence infrastructure is used by the ruling clique against whom and at what point of political evolution of a nation state. It is the strongest defensive weapon that can defend the home front by denying intelligence to the enemy and by sniffing out his illegitimate and undiplomatic activities by using superior intelligence tools.

Another salesman flew down to SpaceX to sell the company on some technology infrastructure equipment. He was doing the standard relationship-building exercise practiced by salespeople for centuries. Show up. Speak for a while. Feel each other out. Then, start doing business down the road. Musk was having none of it. “The guy comes in, and Elon asks him why they’re meeting,” Spikes said. “He said, ‘To develop a relationship.’ Elon replied, ‘Okay. Nice to meet you,’ which basically meant, ‘Get the fuck out of my office.’ This guy had spent four hours traveling for what ended up as a two-minute meeting. Elon just has no tolerance for that kind of stuff.” Musk could be equally brisk with employees who were not hitting his standards. “He would often say, ‘The longer you wait to fire someone the longer it has been since you should have fired them,’” Spikes said.

institutions that shape our communities is the key to ending exploitation. That’s the socialist vision: abolishing private ownership of the things we all need and use—factories, banks, offices, natural resources, utilities, communication and transportation infrastructure—and replacing it with social ownership, thereby undercutting the power of elites to hoard wealth and power. And that’s also the ethical appeal of socialism: a world where people don’t try to control others for personal gain, but instead cooperate so that everyone can flourish. As for personal property, you can keep your Kenny Loggins records. In fact, in a society free from the destructive economic busts endemic to capitalism, with more employment security, and necessities removed from the sphere of the market, your record collection would be free from the danger zone because you wouldn’t have to pawn it for rent money. That’s socialism in a nutshell: less John Lennon, more Kenny Loggins. ▪

By 2008, storm clouds were gathering over Microsoft. PC shipments, the financial lifeblood of Microsoft, had leveled off. Meanwhile sales of Apple and Google smartphones and tablets were on the rise, producing growing revenues from search and online advertising that Microsoft hadn’t matched. Meanwhile, Amazon had quietly launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), establishing itself for years to come as a leader in the lucrative, rapidly growing cloud services business. The logic behind the advent of the cloud was simple and compelling. The PC Revolution of the 1980s, led by Microsoft, Intel, Apple, and others, had made computing accessible to homes and offices around the world. The 1990s had ushered in the client/server era to meet the needs of millions of users who wanted to share data over networks rather than on floppy disks. But the cost of maintaining servers in an ever-growing sea of data—and the advent of businesses like Amazon, Office 365, Google, and Facebook—simply outpaced the ability for servers to keep up. The emergence of cloud services fundamentally shifted the economics of computing. It standardized and pooled computing resources and automated maintenance tasks once done manually. It allowed for elastic scaling up or down on a self-service, pay-as-you-go basis. Cloud providers invested in enormous data ​centers around the world and then rented them out at a lower cost per user. This was the Cloud Revolution. Amazon was one of the first to cash in with AWS. They figured out early on that the same cloud infrastructure they used to sell books, movies, and other retail items could be rented, like a time-share, to other businesses and startups at a much lower price than it would take for each company to build its own cloud. By June 2008, Amazon already had 180,000 developers building applications and services for their cloud platform. Microsoft did not yet have a commercially viable cloud platform. All of this spelled trouble for Microsoft. Even before the Great Recession of 2008, our stock had begun a downward slide. In a long-planned move, Bill Gates left the company that year to focus on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But others were leaving, too. Among them, Kevin Johnson, president of the Windows and online services business, announced he would leave to become CEO of Juniper Networks. In their letter to shareholders that year, Bill and Steve Ballmer noted that Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, had been named the company’s new Chief Software Architect (Bill’s old title), reflecting the fact that a new generation of leaders was stepping up in areas like online advertising and search. There was no mention of the cloud in that year’s shareholder letter, but, to his credit, Steve had a game plan and a wider view of the playing field.