Marissa Mayer Wants To Clean Up Your Contacts, and That's Just For Starters (fastcompany.com) 73
An anonymous reader shares a report: Marissa Mayer shoves her iPhone toward her MacBook's webcam until it overwhelms the screen on the Google Meet video call we are sharing. "I admire Apple," she declares. "They are the best at what they do. But the fact that the biggest and most successful company on Earth by some measures -- and certainly the best at design, bar none -- thinks that when you meet someone new, that this is an ideal interface is mind-blowing. It's like bad nerd humor." What Mayer is critiquing is the New Contact feature in iOS's Contacts app -- an exceedingly generic screen with fields for you to type first and last names, phone numbers, and other information. It's not uniquely uninspired. Actually, it's comparable to Google's equivalent on an Android phone -- and reminiscent of nearly every other piece of software for managing contacts we've seen throughout the history of smartphones and PCs.
[...] Now Mayer is back in the product business -- and as you may have already guessed, she thinks she has a better way to wrangle contacts. That would be Sunshine Contacts, the new iPhone app (Android is in the works) from her latest company, Sunshine. If you've previously heard of the largely stealthy startup, it was under the name Lumi Labs, which Mayer, its CEO, says was a placeholder all along. The app is launching as an invite-only closed beta; you can download it from the App Store and sign up for an alert when it's ready to let you in. Joining Mayer as cofounder and president is Enrique Munoz Torres, whose entire career has been intertwined with hers. An MIT senior when Mayer hired him as a Google associate product manager in 2004, he left that company in 2013 to join her at Yahoo, where he eventually led the advertising and search businesses. Though both Mayer and Munoz Torres have copious experience creating and ramping up successful products, they are first-time founders. Their company currently has about 20 employees, making it the same size as Google was when Mayer joined it.
[...] Now Mayer is back in the product business -- and as you may have already guessed, she thinks she has a better way to wrangle contacts. That would be Sunshine Contacts, the new iPhone app (Android is in the works) from her latest company, Sunshine. If you've previously heard of the largely stealthy startup, it was under the name Lumi Labs, which Mayer, its CEO, says was a placeholder all along. The app is launching as an invite-only closed beta; you can download it from the App Store and sign up for an alert when it's ready to let you in. Joining Mayer as cofounder and president is Enrique Munoz Torres, whose entire career has been intertwined with hers. An MIT senior when Mayer hired him as a Google associate product manager in 2004, he left that company in 2013 to join her at Yahoo, where he eventually led the advertising and search businesses. Though both Mayer and Munoz Torres have copious experience creating and ramping up successful products, they are first-time founders. Their company currently has about 20 employees, making it the same size as Google was when Mayer joined it.
Will she fire my contacts? (Score:5, Insightful)
If she finds out they're working from home?
Re:Will she fire my contacts? (Score:5, Funny)
She's gonna rank them on a bell curve and delete the worst performing contacts.
Re:Will she fire my contacts? (Score:4, Insightful)
That's close. As best I can tell the software basically refactors contact lists, removing duplicates and deleting outdated ones. It's one of those myriad of clever little ideas overestimating market demand that uses the I-was-the-sixth-person-to-work-at-Google claim to fame to froth above the rest.
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Most delightfully flame-filled thread on SlashDot in quite a while.
vCard (Score:5, Insightful)
vCards have been around for, roughly, 20 years now. You can send them in an email, or a text message, or embed them in QR codes. They work really well. Nearly everything accepts them. I can send someone a vCard from my iPhone in about fifteen seconds.
There, problem solved, and I don't need to install and sign up for yet another app and service.
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Yeah. My Palm Pilot could exchange records with another one via IrDA. It still could, were it not for the fact that it's one of the few remaining units in use.
Re:vCard (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, just put together a "this is me" vCard for distribution and keep it in your own contacts list. Text it, send it over bluetooth, send it via email. Works with pretty much on any platform with any "contacts" app.
Heck, I bet this "Sunshine Contacts" will even import them... how much you wanna bet it won't export them though?
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" I can send someone a vCard from my iPhone in about fifteen seconds."
I have my vCard QR code on the inside of my phone cover too, so I can show it in under a second.
I guess the bitch wants to bring Bump back.
Re:vCard (Score:5, Funny)
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Because Apple. If you ask the kool-kid who designed that feature why he messed it up that way he'll tell you that everyone should use only Apple equipment.
Given her track record (Score:4, Insightful)
I wouldn't let her clean my trash or recycling bins.
Clean up my contacts (Score:5, Funny)
I just leave them to soak in the solution overnight, and put them back in my eyes in the morning.
Then I put fresh solution in the containers..
Peter Principle Picked a Pepper (Score:5, Insightful)
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Rose through the ranks of Larry's bedsheets.
Well she did.
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Rose through the ranks of Larry's bedsheets.
Well she did.
This is widely known. [quora.com] What's with the censorship, is there something wrong with this? (Trick question: you don't think so, because you are are a camp follower. Probably. But yes, there is something very wrong with this. Allowing this kind of relationship to fester into a large corporation is basically a crime. That's why HR does what they do in similar cases with lower level employees.l)
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Marissa is still on very good terms with Google. Maybe she just did what she was intended to do.
Help put the final nails in the coffin of a "competitor" while getting paid millions to do it?
If society happily accepts promoting psychopaths to run companies, I guess we should also accept the twisted results of psychopaths colluding...
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If society happily accepts promoting psychopaths to run companies
Some of them run countries...
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If society happily accepts promoting psychopaths to run companies
Some of them run countries...
Yeah, I know that some countries are ran by companies.
The Donor Class, isn't imaginary. Neither is their Control.
Yeah, sure... (Score:1)
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Who would trust a former Google exec with any personal info?
Probably the same idiots who would trust a former Yahoo! exec with any personal info
Sorry, not even with a condom (Score:2)
This one will stay out of my things, permanently. Some things are far too expensive at "free".
I'm in the wrong line of work (Score:5, Interesting)
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Tell me more about this green putty that you found?
Fixed headline (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fixed headline (Score:4, Interesting)
It's the smell of past contact with large sums of money. It has a peculiar anodyne effect on a certain segment of the population.
This creates a kind of perverse form of Social Darwinism in which managers who repeatedly lose investors fortunes can thrive.
Re:Fixed headline (Score:5, Interesting)
One of my buddies is currently writing a book about this phenomenon (because he enjoys self torture). He's done tons of research and essentially, his conclusion parsed down to a single sentence is, "Once you've reached that level of management, it doesn't matter how you perform; you'll always be that level of management."
In fact, he believes there are those in the sociopathic sphere that have figured out they can amass a far larger personal fortune by doing a terrible job as they golden parachute their way out of the failing companies they've destroyed while jumping into another lucrative or potentially lucrative company only to do the same thing. Watching some of these folks from afar it's tough to deny he may be on to something.
On a smaller scale I knew a guy that was VP at a five different companies, all of which were operating perfectly fine until he joined them, then within five years they were either being bought out for a song by a larger corporation to be stripped bare, or were simply going bankrupt. He works in government now.
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I've had the same experience.
It all boils down to what W.C. Fields said in one of his movies -- you can't cheat an honest man. People hire these guys because they want a ruthless sociopath they can use, but in the end they're just another sucker.
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I think a lot of the time it's about hiring someone who will take a shitty job at a failing, but not failed, company and has the ability to create the mirage that they are keeping it from getting worse. Usually these companies have a lot of stakeholders with something to lose and want literally anyone who appears competent and well connected to take over and lead so that the stakeholders can get on with their own exit strategy.
The more shitty companies and bad situations you work in, the more you look like
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Leader who in the span of a few years destroyed one of the web's most prominent websites
I wouldn't hire her either, but the above is horseshit. I won't contradict anything else you said, but Yahoo was a dead company walking before Mayer ever joined it.
Just when you think... (Score:2)
that these tech "luminaries" can't go much further up their own asses, they find deeper and darker crevasses to crawl into.
Ain't all Sunshine and Contacts. (Score:5, Insightful)
We needed a new contact manager like we needed another dozen fonts in MS Word. I don't even use half the features available to me now in any contact manager. It's fine for what it does, which for 99.999% of people, is nothing more than DNS for phone numbers. Office line? Fax number? Hell, these days I'm removing the need for excess features in my contact manager. If she considers other contact managers uninspiring, maybe someone should have pointed her browser at yahoo.com at least once.
Lil Miss Sunshine better get a hold of someone famous in Hollywood, or maybe one of those otherwise-useless content creator types to pimp such an interesting product. You're not exactly leaning on consumer addiction here with a Contact app, unless you're planning on screwing in some sort of corporate Tinder feature. (Highly unlikely when the Woke Generation considers extended eye contact harassment.)
Besides, who needs electronic contacts at Sunshine? I'm sure every employee has to report in daily to the Mayer Building for the Advancement of Fuck Your Remote Workforce, COVID be damned.
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Re:Ain't all Sunshine and Contacts. (Score:5, Funny)
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The horror. The horror.
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I really have to wonder if the real point of this is just to slurp contact info and sell it to anyone that wants it much like Facebook. She'll use flowery words to describe an "upgraded experience" while under the hood it's just gonna be another data conduit to the advertisers.
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I really have to wonder if the real point of this is just to slurp contact info and sell it to anyone that wants it much like Facebook. She'll use flowery words to describe an "upgraded experience" while under the hood it's just gonna be another data conduit to the advertisers.
Zuck made himself a billionaire on nothing more than "They trust me — dumb fucks."
Instagram created a multi-billion dollar valuation and IPO, even when arrogantly stating they "may never achieve or maintain profitability.”
Why the hell would Mother Mayer, appointed corporate Yaaas-Qween of Fuck Your Remote Work, even need to use "flowery" words?
Yes. That is how bad Corruption actually is. No. Greed doesn't give a shit about any impact.
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Brown at the roots.
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This chick? (Score:1, Interesting)
Google Contacts Lacks Innovation Too (Score:3)
Google Contacts is pretty good, but it is brain dead when it comes to populating a new contact from an email.
I can see the person's name right in the email From: field, but contacts often omits bringing in anything but the actual email address. I still have to type in the name.
I usually just paste the person's contact info from the email signature footer into the notes section rather than fill in fields. They could have made it much easier to enter that info into all the address and company info fields. They don't even attempt to auto-populate anything.
Google: How about some drag and drop functionality?
It's like they don't even use their own product.
Tip: I put the person's company name in the name Suffix field in square brackets so it shows up in the displayed name. This helps a lot to find the right person when you have 20 John's in your contact list. (Click on Show More to see that field.)
Google Calendar is brain dead too. It doesn't even attempt to import a ICS event invite attachment received in an email.
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It's a slimy slagpile of the nastiest, most partisan so-called news on the web.
So, pretty much an exact copy of what the rest of the MSM is spewing. Go figure. That's by design.. To say the MSM is a clickbait bullshit generator that suffers from painfully obvious bias fueling massive corruption and collusion, is completely fucking undeniable now.
Those dismissing the danger of that fail to realize it takes little more than a lying tweet from anyone in a position of power to incite a war today, simply because the MSM will shoot clickbait out of a fucking 20-foot cannon for ratings tod
Another data harvesting app (Score:2)
This is just an advertisement (Score:1)
That's not what Apple expects, at all. (Score:3)
The iPhone will happily connect to directory services, like LDAP. My work phone has all of my work contacts automatically, because my business sets that up right.
The iPhone will AirDrop a contact to another iPhone. When you meet someone they can drop their contact info to you, just like handing you a business card, no typing anything in on your own.
The iPhone can share a card via e-mail or MMS, both import and export, using VCARD. Someone can text you their card, even from an Android phone, and it will happily import into contacts just fine.
The iPhone will share contact lists via iCloud with all your other Apple devices. For the ones that do need manual entry, edit on your Mac, or via their iCloud.com web interface. The lists can also be exported and shared as VCARD lists with anyone, anywhere.
The App Store has a dozen lightweight apps that will take a photo of a business card and create a contact entry for you based on OCR.
Apparently Marissa knows none of these options, and so she's manually typing them when she meets someone. That's not Apple didn't provide the functionality, that's Marissa didn't do basic investigation on what the product can do before launching off on a whole new company to duplicate existing functionality from Apple and others. No wonder Yahoo failed. Did none of the yes-men around her not point these things out when she had this crazy idea?
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Did none of the yes-men around her not point these things out when she had this crazy idea?
Well, no they didn't, otherwise they'd be lousy yes-men.
Like child rearing advice from Jerry Sandusky (Score:2)
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She insisted that Yahoo develop the best phone weather app, and on my iPhone it is still my go-to weather app!
That's something.
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Try windy.
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Bedwarmer.
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Bedwarmer.
Well, she is a fetchiing lassie.
reminiscent of nearly every other (Score:1)
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back in the flip phone days one could exchange contact info with another in an instant. Hilarious Google bought the company Bump that had similar for smart phone, but killed then killed app off to put the devs on other projects.
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How many billion $ do you have?
yahoo.. (Score:1)
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She drove yahoo into the toilet and made it nothing but a nick jonas and kardashian gossip site (except their finance page which is still decent). Would not listen to her for anything.
It was already toilet-bound. But she failed to execute a turn-around to some non-toilet destination.
Paragon of efficiency (Score:2)
Marissa Mayer, paragon of efficiency. Not at all a cupcake addict or the cause of Yahoo's ultimate demise.
Step 1 (Score:2)
Hire a designer, the UI is painful.
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I understand there's a former Google UI designer on staff somewhere in the company. Wonder if they've had her look at the actual product yet.
Wow (Score:1)