Microsoft reported earnings for its fiscal fourth quarter and the full 2020 fiscal year earnings at market close on Wednesday, beating analyst expectations for overall results but missing estimates on a key business unit including its Office products.

Here's what the company reported for Q4 2020:

Here's what the company reported for its fiscal year 2020:

Shares are down more than 2% in after-hour trading to less than $206 per share following the release.

While the company beat on many of its most important metrics for the fourth quarter, it did notably miss expectations on the key business unit that includes Office 365 cloud productivity suite and its Microsoft Teams communications app.

The unit — which is called "Productivity and Business Processes" and includes Office products for businesses and customers, LinkedIn revenue and Dynamics products and cloud services — reached $11.75 billion in Q4, missing estimates of $11.9 billion. 

For the second quarter in a row, Microsoft said it experienced a slowdown in transactional licensing, especially for small and medium businesses. Microsoft said the slowdown contributed to a 34 percent decline in revenue for Office products used by businesses, "reflecting continued customer shift to cloud offerings from multi-year on-premises agreements." Transactional licensing refers to the traditional, one-time purchase model of buying software.

Microsoft's "Intelligent Cloud" business, which includes Azure, server products, enterprise and cloud services, brought in $13.37 billion in Q4 revenue, slightly beating analyst expectations. Microsoft doesn't report revenue figures for its Azure cloud computing business, but said revenue grew 47% from the same period of 2019 — a notable dropoff from the 59% growth rate it posted in the prior quarter, and 62% in the quarter before that.

Revenue for the business unit Microsoft calls the "More Personal Computing," unit which includes Windows, search, Xbox and Surface, was $12.9 billion in Q4, up 14% from this time last year.

Meanwhile, Microsoft said its commercial cloud business  – which includes Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and other cloud services – surpassed a $50 billion annualized run rate for the first time this year.

While the pandemic has created challenges for many companies, including the smaller partners Microsoft relies on to sell its software and services, the shift to remote work has been a considered boost to the overall company, as users turn to products like the Microsoft Teams chat app and the Microsoft Azure cloud.

Microsoft last week cut a small number of jobs as it transitioned to the new fiscal year. One person familiar with the situation told Business Insider the cuts affected less than 1,000 jobs. Microsoft's professional social network subsidiary LinkedIn on Tuesday announced plans to cut an additional 960 jobs.

Microsoft also made significant changes last month by announcing plans to shut down its video game streaming service would be shut down and plans to close of most of its retail stores. Those moves, analysts say, signal CEO Satya Nadella's strategy to ruthlessly prioritize Microsoft's strengths and cut its losses in other areas. 

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., message her on Twitter @ashannstew, or send her a secure message through Signal at 425-344-8242.

Amazon appears to be nearing the launch of a new marketplace in Sweden, a move that signals its commitment to international markets even amid slowing growth.

The new marketplace in Sweden would be Amazon's third overseas service to launch this year, following the ones in the Netherlands and Saudi Arabia. Amazon has 17 total marketplaces worldwide, but the bulk of its sales, or over 70%, comes from the US.

Amazon recently added the option to sign up for a marketplace in Sweden when sellers sign up for Brand Registry, Amazon's own trademark registration tool, according to a screenshot seen by Business Insider. The option appears in a section asking sellers to choose the "country-specific marketplace" they want to sign in to. Sellers use Brand Registry for each individual country marketplace they intend to sell in to prove ownership of their brands and prevent counterfeits.

Disney has slashed its advertising spend on Facebook and Instagram amid a boycott of the social-media platform led by civil-rights groups, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Sources familiar with the matter didn't say how much had been cut, or when the decision was taken.

The sources said Disney-owned streaming service Hulu had paused all advertising on Instagram, and one source said that ads for its cable network shows are unlikely to return to Facebook after the summer TV advertising lull, unless the social media giant changes its policies.

The Facebook boycott, "Stop Hate for Profit," was launched in June by a coalition of civil rights groups including the NAACP, Color of Change, and the Anti-Defamation League. It asks big companies to stop advertising on Facebook in an attempt to force the company to rethink its hate speech and misinformation policies.

A series of high-profile advertisers including Coca-Cola, Dunkin' Donuts, Verizon, and more than 500 others have announced they are suspending their ads on the social network.

Disney has not officially announced any decision to reduce advertising spend, and was not immediately available for comment when contacted by Business Insider.

Analysis provided to the Journal by research firm Pathmatics Inc suggests Disney was the top advertiser on Facebook for the first half of this year, spending an estimated $210 million. It was the number two spender in 2019, behind Home Depot.

Leaders from Stop Hate for Profit met with Facebook executives including Mark Zuckerberg on July 7, and came away unimpressed.

In a press call, the groups said the meeting had been a "disappointment," and that out of ten recommendations they had put forward to Facebook, it had only partially addressed one: That the company should hire a C-suite level civil rights exec. Facebook said it would hire a civil rights lead, but did not commit to make them a member of the C-suite.

NOW WATCH:

Let's say you want a Ferrari, but you hail from a strange region where nobody is taught the lore of Maranello sports cars. An SUV is just your style, you decide. So you swing by your friendly neighborhood prancing horse dealership one day and ask if you can look at a couple of utes. 

The dealer would thank you for your interest and slip you the business card of a colleague who represents Maserati, which since 2016 has been selling the Ferrari of SUVS, right down to the Maranello-sourced engine.

The question, of course, is why anybody would want the Ferrari of SUVs? Well, that's a question provisionally addressed by Maserati (we won't tarry over the adjacent question of why anyone would want the Maserati of SUVs). But come 2022, Ferrari has promised an "FUV" to be called the Purosangue — its own version of the high-riding heresy.

Interested in what that vehicle might be like, and uninterested in waiting? Look no further than the Maserati Levante GTS, which I was lucky enough to enjoy for a week. Here's how it went:

Retailers need plenty of extra computing power to handle the huge spike in shopping traffic that comes on days like Black Friday or Cyber Monday. 

The problem is that even in the era of cloud computing — which lets companies rent fundamentally unlimited supercomputing power from the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — it's not really cost-effective to maintain the server infrastructure to handle those very temporary spikes year-round. 

You can see similar dynamics in the financial services industry, in the video game business, or even in sports: There are huge surges in usage at certain times, and huge dropoffs at others. It can make it difficult to know how much capacity is the right amount, meaning that companies often have plenty of cloud servers all set up and ready to go, but otherwise sitting idle.

This issue has led to the rise of so-called serverless computing. Despite the name, serverless computing still involves servers: It just means that rather than having servers sitting idle in the cloud indefinitely, an application can call the appropriate amount of computing capacity into existence for as long as it needs it, and vanish it when the task is done. Importantly, customers only pay in this case for how much computing time they use, down to the millisecond.

In a broader sense, serverless computing is lauded for allowing developers to write apps that can grow to the largest of scales, without their having to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure, too. The serverless technology does the heavy lifting, while coders can focus, well, on coding.

"Serverless comes in and says, you worry about writing the code you need and connecting to services that work at a higher level, we'll worry about scaling them up and down," Jeffrey Hammond, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, told Business Insider. "It lets developers work at a higher level."

Amazon Web Services was a pioneer in serverless, coming to the forefront when it introduced AWS Lambda in 2014. Soon, Microsoft, Google Cloud, IBM, Oracle, and a host of emerging serverless startups followed suit. 

And it's growing fast among large and small companies alike. According to a report from Spiceworks, a professional community for the IT industry, about one-third of companies are currently using or planning to adopt serverless computing this year. 

When used properly, serverless computing stands to save on cloud costs for many customers, which could make it even more popular as the pandemic puts the squeeze on IT budgets. 

"We have seen some solutions being developed as part of the COVID-19 relief efforts that are relying on serverless technology due to the productivity benefits it provides for rapid development," Gabe Monroy, director of product management at Microsoft, told Business Insider. "Moving forward we also anticipate economic factors may prompt even more organizations to begin adopting serverless for the benefits it provides around efficient computing."

What is serverless?

In many ways, serverless computing is an extension of the existing cloud computing model. Rather than run servers from a traditional data center, customers of platforms like AWS can get access to all the IT infrastructure they need by merely entering a credit card number.

Importantly, these platforms bill by actual usage, which often makes it cheaper than buying and building server farms that can sometimes sit idle, or at least below capacity. But even then, IT departments still have to buy cloud capacity beyond what they might necessarily need, just to be ready for usage spikes, and then put in the energy to maintain it.

Proponents say that serverless computing takes the best parts of that model, namely the pay-as-you-go aspect, and makes it more flexible.  For a serverless application, the infrastructure it needs doesn't even exist until it's needed. 

"Serverless is an example of a technology that was enabled by cloud computing in particular," Tony Iams, research vice president at Gartner, told Business Insider. "It would've been very difficult to deliver serverless-type capabilities without the infrastructure cloud providers have at their disposal."

This model is, in turn, is winning attention from developers. While cloud platforms made it easy to obtain the server capacity that a developer needed to power their next big thing, actually managing and maintaining those servers, even in the cloud, can be a headache. Serverless computing abstracts away that concern.

"That abstraction away from infrastructure is something that can be very appealing to developers. They can just write their code," KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, industry analyst at RedMonk, told Business Insider. "That is very attractive."

Today, serverless usage is even higher for certain industries that may need to scale up and down depending on customer needs, like IT services, with adoption rates of 42%, and financial services companies, with adoption rates of 46%, according to Spiceworks.

"They can manage the infrastructure themselves or they can have someone else manage it for them," Forrester's Hammond said. "As more and more developers get comfortable with what cloud providers are doing, it makes sense for them to spend less time solving the guts of an application and more on business."

AWS pioneered serverless, but Microsoft and Google have followed suit

All three major clouds offer their own serverless products, which are sometimes known as function-as-a-service features. AWS offers the pioneering Lambda, Microsoft has Azure Functions, and Google Cloud has Cloud Functions. Alibaba, Tencent, IBM, and Oracle offer similar services as well as well.

Analysts say AWS was the pioneer in serverless, and because it was the first to the market, it has a more mature product and a larger base of customers. Amazon is the most well-known serverless vendor by far, they say.

"If you look at which products and services it's associated with, I would have to say it's Amazon Lambda that has gotten the most visibility in this space," Iams, the Gartner analyst, said. "They took the lead in promoting the Lambda as a new way to do compute."

First launched in 2014, Lambda is now widely used at companies including T-Mobile, Netflix, Major League Baseball, Autodesk, and Square Enix. A report from cloud monitoring company Datadog shows that 80% of its customers who use AWS have now adopted Lambda, signalling broader uptake.

Ajay Nair, director of product management at AWS who has been part of the Lambda team since it first launched in 2014, calls Lambda "the most mature serverless out there," as other cloud providers followed suit after AWS came out with Lambda. 

"Lambda has hundreds of thousands of active customers. We process trillions of requests to execute code within Lambda that's unmatched to any provider out there," Nair told Business Insider. "We're a leader for serverless."

While AWS popularized serverless computing and brought it to early adopters, Microsoft's Monroy says that the tech titan's major contribution to the field has been in broadening this technology to suit large enterprise customers. Now, Monroy says, customers in all industries are putting serverless to work.

"Our customers were asking for it," Monroy said. "We wanted to start providing services that met the needs of our customers. We tend to be customer centric in everything we do. This is just another case of that."

Read more: A top Microsoft cloud exec says that the company wants more customers to try out serverless computing, the 'best way to do compute'

Similarly, Google Cloud says that serverless computing fits in well with the company's goal of enhancing developer productivity. 

"Serverless really enables the customer to do that, which is one of the strategic priorities in Google Cloud," Pali Bhat, vice president of product and design at Google Cloud, told Business Insider. 

Challenges of serverless

Often, there's an "initial shock" when customers start to use Lambda, says Datadog product manager Stephen Pinkerton, because it's simple to use and doesn't have a large learning curve. He's seeing more companies completely redo their infrastructure to adopt serverless.

"The implications there are that people who move workloads into the cloud are quickly moving into serverless," Pinkerton told Business Insider. "As soon as people get hooked on this way of writing code, they're very quick at adopting it."

While serverless itself may be easy to use, it can be difficult to completely redesign applications to work with serverless computing, Iams says. That kind of simplicity can be its own kind of challenge.

"The challenges are, again, you need to have applications that fit the architectural model required by serverless computing," Iams said. "You can't just take any old application you have and drop it in and make it serverless."

Arun Chandrasekaran, distinguished vice president and analyst at Gartner, predicts that more tools around monitoring, testing, and debugging serverless applications will soon emerge to help developers solve some of those problems.

"We're going to see more maturity in the tooling around serverless frameworks, how you secure it, monitor it, how you do application debugging," Chandrasekaran said. " We're definitely going to see more innovation around that in my opinion. There will be much more wider support that developers care about."

Got a tip? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., Signal at 646.376.6106, Telegram at @rosaliechan, or Twitter DM at @rosaliechan17. (PR pitches by email only, please.) Other types of secure messaging available upon request. 

The Library of Congress is doing the important work of memorializing some of the US' most oddly charming roadside attractions, from Googie-style motel signs to giant frog statues.

Photographer John Margolies spent 40 years taking photos during his travels around the country, documenting classic Americana like drive-in movie theaters, car washes, novelty signs, and more. The more than 11,000 photos create a picture of small-town America which Margolies' told The Washington Post was an effort to capture quirks and oddities before every town absorbed the same franchises and chains. He also told the Post that he doesn't take a photo unless he can get it in the sun, with no people or clouds in the frame. 

All 11,710 and photos are available on the Library of Congress website. Some of these attractions still exist and could be road trip inspiration for a summer drive. All of the images are now in the public domain and can be used by anyone. 

Here are some of the highlights. 

Microsoft once had a reputation for ill-preparing employees to create and run their own companies, a public image that haunted ex-employee founders. 

Former Microsoft employees on a panel in 2015 said that their past association with the tech giant made it hard to raise money, and that their adaptation to the company's pace, bureaucracy, and fierce internal politics felt a stumbling block when they entered startup life, according to a report from Seattle-based tech news site GeekWire. 

"For me, starting a startup and trying to raise money, I think it hurt," former Microsoft employee and location-sharing startup founder Bryan Trussell said at the time. "I was told it hurt." 

Since then, Satya Nadella, who became CEO in 2014, has introduced a more collaborative company culture. The perception of Microsoft has shifted from stodgy and combative to much more innovative and fast-paced. 

T.A. McCann, managing director of Seattle-based startup studio and VC fund Pioneer Square Labs, spent a few years at Microsoft and now advises entrepreneurs who build companies. As he's observed through personal experience and through his work, McCann said that Microsoft prepares entrepreneurs for startups by giving them an understanding of what it means to build a platform and a successful software organization. GeekWire more recently estimated that Microsoft veterans made up nearly 25% of the Seattle area's top technology startups as of last summer.

With that said, there are also some aspects of being an ex-Microsoft worker that would affect a founder coming from any behemoth of a corporation. "In my experience, Microsoft founders have underappreciated how strong the Microsoft brand is," McCann said.

If a Microsoft employee calls up a potential customer, they'll probably return the call, he said. That's not necessarily the case for a company without Microsoft's name recognition. Microsoft founders are also used to dealing with a much bigger scale. Instead of thinking about who their first customers will be, they're used to thinking about their first 500,000 customers. 

But, McCann said, many former Microsoft employees have started successful startups. Business Insider also recently rounded up 13 former employees that built unicorn companies, including Daniel Dines of UIPath and Rich Barton, who cofounded the trifecta Expedia, Zillow, and Glassdoor. "The proof is out there," he said.

We asked seven former Microsoft employees who have founded venture-backed startups about how the company prepared them for running a startup, and how they think it's changed under Nadella:

Project Loon started as one of Alphabet's moonshot projects, and now its providing internet service in Kenya. 

The company makes solar powered balloons that fly high up in the stratosphere and send internet access down to earth. These mobile, floating stations are more flexible than typical cell stations, as they're constantly moving. They also have much wider coverage areas; as much as a hundred times that of a cell tower.

Right now, Loon stations are mostly used after disasters take out existing infrastructure, or in places where cell towers and connections are otherwise difficult, but Loon has much bigger plans. CEO Alastair Westgarth said " Loon is well positioned to play this role and serve as the operating system for the global connectivity ecosystem of the future." He hopes to create a global third layer of connectivity, on top of cell towers on earth and satellites in space.

Here's how the balloons work. 

Jeff Peters, a partner at the venture-capital firm Autotech Ventures, wants to see more than impressive technology and an exciting roadmap from companies that pitch him for an investment. It's just as important that a company's founders understand how the incumbents they'll be selling to or competing against think, Peters said in an interview with Business Insider, and the biggest mistake founders make when they pitch him for an investment is failing to demonstrate that they understand the ins and outs of their industry.

"What we prefer is to invest in founders that not only have great technology, not only have a grand vision, but understand the set of challenges that exist, that are unique to our space in transportation," Peters said.

Some founders don't recognize the philosophical differences between transportation companies with decades of experience and Silicon Valley software firms operating in relatively new sectors, Peters said. Adopting new technology can be a major risk for a transporation company with a mature manufacturing operation.

"You can claim that your software solution has a 10% or a 10x improvement, but for a lot of these folks, it is a huge risk to deploy a novel solution," Peters said. "In a lot of ways, they're risk averse and risk averse for very good reason."

Facebook's attempt to compete with TikTok — a new short-form video format on Instagram — is expected to roll out in early August to users in the US.

Reels, which will live inside of the app's Stories feature, allows users to record and edit short-form videos with audio and music soundtracks — akin to what users already do on TikTok. Facebook first started testing Reels with users in Brazil in November, before rolling out last month to France and Germany.

The debut of Instagram's Reels in the US — and in India in early July, as reported by Business Insider India — comes as concerns over TikTok's livelihood in both countries has created an opening in short-form video-sharing. The Indian government recently banned new user downloads of TikTok and other Chinese apps amid a bloody border dispute with China. In the US, the Trump administration is weighing a country-wide ban on TikTok due to its ties to China, where the app's parent company ByteDance is based. Nevertheless, TikTok is wildly popular: It has more than 2 billion global downloads and an estimated US userbase at as high as 80 million.

Several tech companies have come out with apps similar to TikTok, but no platform has yet to successfully rival TikTok's viral reach. But it looks like Facebook is putting its full weight behind Reels, and trying to capitalize on Instagram's popularity among a younger audience and success with copying other platform's big features — most notably, Snapchat Stories.

Instagram has been tight-lipped thus far about how Reels is being received in other countries, so there's not a lot we know about the new format ahead of its US launch. Here's everything we know so far about how Instagram Reels will work:

When nobody was looking, Ford CEO Jim Hackett quietly got on a roll.

Don't worry if you didn't notice. The drumbeat of negative news around Ford, centering on its stock price — down 33% of the past 12 months, and 42% since Hackett took over in 2017 — has been loud.

Adding to the din was a $11 billion restructuring effort, a credit-rating downgrade by both Moody's and S&P in March, the retirement of longtime product czar Joe Hinrichs in February, an awkward launch of the new Explorer SUV last year, and, of course, the complete shutdown of the carmaker's global operations during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Hackett had already spent a few years in the wringer, but it was starting to look like the wringer was getting worse. The ascension of Jim Farley to chief operating officer got the industry chattering about succession plans.

But this is the car business. And despite the cancellation of the Detroit auto show in June and the sacrifice of Ford's hometown showcase, despite much of the company laboring from home offices and simply trying to relax in Michigan backyards while the factories were idled, despite the 117-year-old automaker rapidly pivoting to manufacturing ventilators with GE Healthcare, despite a fairly grim financial outlook offered after first-quarter earnings hit, Hackett had product.

And when it comes to the car business, product conquers all.

A new F-150 pickup, and an all-new Bronco

And with Ford, the product speaks for itself. First up was the all-new F-150, the 14th generation of a pickup truck that's been America's bestselling vehicle since the first Reagan administration.

Remarkably, the new F-150 and the approximately 1 million in annual vehicle sales the broader F-Series should bring in for Ford was merely the stage-setting for the marquee event: the unveiling of the new Bronco SUV, a nameplate that lay dormant since 1996.

The all-online and all-broadcast Bronco reveal, undertaken last week in partnership with Disney, provided Ford with its first opportunity to break the internet. Customers rushed to secure $100 Bronco reservations and briefly crashed the website, an indication that Ford had hit a grand slam.

And Hackett knew it was coming. His guiding leadership philosophy has empowered him to be optimistic.

"I could say with extreme confidence that this was going to work," he said in an interview with Business Insider as the Bronco reservations were still rolling in, two days after the SUV's unveiling.

"To a fault," he added, suggesting that supporters and critics alike would think he was arrogant. "I feel a quiet sense of satisfaction that people hung in there with me," he said.

It wasn't easy. When Ford reported a solid annual profit for 2017, Hackett — then less than a year on the job after taking over from Mark Fields the previous spring — had to contend with aggressive questions from Wall Street.

"This is the time," Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas insisted on a conference call in January of 2018, before stressing that Hackett needed to provide more detail on what the CEO had termed a "redesign" of Ford's competitive fitness.

"That's a problem, Jim," Jonas said.

Hackett wasn't flustered. Because he'd been there already. When he served as CEO of office-space designer Steelcase, starting in 1994 when he was just 39, he encountered similar skepticism. But he didn't just win over critics; by investing in California-based design firm IDEO in 1996, Hackett reinvented Steelcase to focus on innovative, "human-centric" design and a process known as "design thinking."

The undertaking brought Hackett into the orbit of Silicon Valley legends, including Steve Jobs, and made the modest Midwesterner an unlikely renegade in the business world: a successful CEO who wasn't afraid of out-there concepts.

In a simplified sense, design thinking is about considering opportunities to innovate with product or services in terms of the entire context in which the innovation could occur. For Ford designers, this meant getting away from slick, traditional rendering of the next vehicle and instead creating storyboards to develop narratives around how the SUV could actually be used. IDEO's application was noted for its embrace of empathy as a key aspect of the process — a consideration of the psychology of users. 

The design thinker takes over in Detroit

Hackett added an unusual personality type to the trio of "Big Three" Detroit automaker CEOs when Ford Chairman Bill Ford, the great-grandson of Henry, and the board tapped him for the role. General Motors' Mary Barra had achieved a reputation of steering the largest US car company into tough decisions it had avoided for decades, such as the sales of the historically profitless Opel/Vauxhall to France's PSA Group. At Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, the outspoken Sergio Marchionne (who died unexpectedly in 2018) presided over a masterpiece of post-financial-crisis financial engineering; a successful 2015 spinoff of Ferrari, creating a $30 billion market cap company, made the executive a bankers' banker.

Hackett, in his early sixties when he moved into the big chair at Ford headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, immediately struck observers as more avuncular than Fields, a hard-charging, veteran executive who had laid the groundwork for Ford's ability to avoid bailouts and bankruptcy in 2009, when both GM and Chrysler entered Chapter 11.

A one-time interim athletic director at the University of Michigan, his alma mater (Hackett played football as an undergrad), he had been overseeing Ford's mobility initiatives after a stint on the board of directors. Hackett was the opposite of hard-charging, and through his collaborations with IDEO founder David Kelley, he'd learned to carefully and deliberately consider opportunities and the challenges that came with them.

In the extroverted realm of the auto industry, his approach seemed odd. But it had been honed through hours of conversation with Bill Ford, who had made no secret of his desire to make sure Ford both stayed in business for another 100 years and reinvented itself as something more than a purveyor of pickup trucks and Mustangs.

'"My closest ally in this was Bill Ford," Hackett said. "I've gotten to test ideas with him constantly. He and I would talk three or four times a day."

Bill Ford's commitment to Hacket has been tested, but it hasn't wavered.

"The other day, he said, 'It's a better company since you've been here,'" Hackett recalled. "You could have knocked me over with a feather."

The impression inside Ford was very different from what had developed outside the company. And that was why Hackett had pushed back against Wall Street.

"I've got to get everybody in the company on board," Hackett explained, looking back on his reluctance to give analysts quick answers. "That's how you lead."

Starting with a new Mustang

The first glimmers of Hackett's vision intensified last year, when Ford revealed the new Mustang Mach-E, the company's first major foray into fully-electric vehicles and competition with Tesla, the market leader. Mach-E also expanded the Mustang brand, which has consisted of essentially one vehicle type since 1965. (It did likewise with Bronco, creating a separate brand.)

A four-door crossover SUV powered by batteries and wearing the Mustang badge was step one. Then came the F-150, revealed during a livestreamed event due to the pandemic, but crammed with "human-centric" thinking, notably its multifunction tailgate, stowable interior work surface, and portable generator.

It was all but a lead-up to the Bronco, however.

"This shift to embrace and to institutionalize design thinking has been clearly one of the gifts that Jim Hackett has brought to Ford," Hau Thai-Tang, Ford's chief product development and purchasing officer and a Ford employee since 1988, told Business Insider. "Products just hitting the market now are the first benefiting from his approach."

It would be fair to suggest that the Bronco is the Ford vehicle that truly wears Hackett's stamp. Throughout its introduction to the media, prior to its debut, designers and engineers frequently evoked design thinking and human-centric design.

That made sense because Hackett himself and the Bronco design team had conducted workshops devoted to bringing the highly anticipated new SUV to life.

Hackett's first meeting with the Bronco group involved a classic Hackett moment. As he recalled, the team had brought a vintage Bronco into the design studio and had outfitted the vehicle with an abundance of gear.

"OK man, we're ready to go," Hackett said, relaying the team's enthusiasm. "Let's do user-centered design."

Hackett's instinct, then, was to treat the Bronco and its gear in the same way an archaeologist or anthropologist would a piece of antiquity. There was a specific reason why all these objects were being used.

That process informed numerous aspects of how the new Bronco, intended to be a serious off-roading chariot, was reimagined.

Hackett shared what has now become a classic example, one echoed by several members of the Bronco team. For the two- and four-door versions of the SUV, it was essential that the doors be removeable; Ford's market research with potential customers had proven this, and the Bronco's main competitor, the Jeep Wrangler, famously has doors that can be taken off.

But the Jeep's doors can't be effectively stored in the vehicle. So owners commonly chain them to a tree at the trail head and have to return later to retrieve them. Design thinking identified this a pain point and led Ford to develop a frameless door, lightweight enough to be stored in special carrying packs that could be stashed in the Bronco.

Making a plan and sticking to it

Two years ago, few would have expected such a useful marriage of design, engineering, and prospective customer satisfaction to be traced back to Hackett. And with the halting launch of another critically important Ford vehicle in 2019, the new Explorer SUV, industry observers were pondering Hackett's competence.

"That idiot Hackett doesn't know how to launch a vehicle!" the CEO said, referring to the skepticism, but then explaining that Ford immediately "unpacked that process" to figure out what went wrong.

Hackett said that he knew he was going to face criticism for a while, and that he might even be viewed as tone deaf. He wasn't offering car talk. His message didn't rely on cubic inches of engine displacement.

"In living this — I knew the gestation period for the thinking was going to a minimum of three years," he added.

"And that gestation is hard to speed up. But I knew what my plan was. It's what you're witnessing. It was to remake our vehicles, to remake our design language, and to reinterpret Ford."

 

The CEO of Verizon Business says the coronavirus crisis wreaked havoc both personally, as it took the life of a close friend, and professionally, as it led to her toughest quarter at the telecom giant

The coronavirus pandemic forced Tami Erwin, the CEO of Verizon Business, to confront challenges that were both personal and professional.

She lost a close friend to the virus, which devastated her home state of Washington in the early days of the crisis. She watched her favorite shops near her New Jersey home shut down while, similarly, her organization scrambled for ways to help the Verizon clients hardest hit by the crisis: small businesses.

"This is the hardest quarter I've ever experienced as a leader and I've been in the business at Verizon 33 years," Erwin told Business Insider. The pandemic caused sudden, severe changes, she said: "We've moved from reacting and responding to reimagining and defining what success looks like."

Verizon Business is unveiling an initiative on Monday with new products aimed at helping businesses — including mom-and-pop shops — navigate the pandemic. 

The launch of the new program dubbed Verizon Business Comeback Coach includes a new dashboard that would give small businesses with limited or no online presence a way to reach customers. Verizon Business is also providing small business owners an online communications tool through BlueJeans, the video conferencing platform it bought in April.

Some of the products will be available for free, including limited use of BlueJeans and tools that small businesses can use to evaluate their online security risks.

It's a big undertaking for Erwin who was with one of the companies that merged to become Verizon in 2000 and rose steadily up the corporate ladder of the $233 billion telecom behemoth. 

In 2019, she was named CEO of Verizon Business, the division geared towards business customers, including big corporations, government agencies and small businesses. Erwin leads a 30,000-strong organization that rakes in $32 billion in annual revenue.

She was exposed early to the world of small business, growing up in Skagit County, an agricultural area in Washington state. Her father was a physician "who wanted to be a farmer," she said.

Erwin learned to pick produce as a young woman and also spent time in her father's clinic helping modernize his antiquated record-keeping system. "That's when I first got excited about technology," she said.

Technology will be key in helping small businesses navigate and survive the crisis, she said — even though she lamented that many of them won't make it. Erwin cited a company survey in which 68% of small business owners believed they can still bounce back: "That means 32% think they won't recoup," she said. "For me, that's pretty startling."

Erwin saw the devastation up-close in her community as small businesses that she and her family had patronized for years, including a yoga studio and an Italian restaurant, closed. 

"Businesses were shut down so quickly," she said. "That for me was the thing that caught me by surprise. I remember going to our little Italian place on a Friday night. The next Friday night, they were shut down. Whether it was my favorite Italian restaurant, whether it was where I got my haircut, whether it's a little boutique in town, all of a sudden what had been normal life shut down."

Many small businesses that could operate through online orders or pick-ups faced another dilemma: They had limited or no online presence to tell potential customers about their plans. 

"When they shut their front door, they were out of business because they didn't have a digital storefront," Erwin said. "No website, no ability to do any kind of commercial transaction via a website, and not even a website presence that showed their address, their hours of operation or any kind of communication. So completely out of business."

That's the kind of situation Verizon's new tools hope to address. 

The coronavirus crisis also hit Erwin hard on a personal level.

Washington became the pandemic's first major flashpoint in the US. As the crisis was unfolding in February, she found herself cut off from her adult children, her mother, and many people she cared for who live on the West Coast. 

One of them, a very close friend with whom she had just gone on a holiday strip in Portugal, died from the coronavirus. 

Erwin spoke of the many "grief cycles" people are going through as a result of graduations that got cancelled or the separation from family.

"There's the grief of losing somebody," she said. "For me that was when it went from being an academic exercise to emotionally impactful," she said. 

Got a tip about Verizon or another tech company? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., message him on Twitter @benpimentel or send him a secure message through Signal at (510) 731-8429. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

Claim your 20% discount on an annual subscription to BI Prime by clicking here. 

Although voters may still be struggling with the legitimacy of Kanye West's presidential bid, the rapper already sees his place in political history set in literal stone.

West tweeted out an image around 3:30 a.m. on Friday appearing to show Mount Rushmore, the monument in South Dakota engraved with four former US presidents. If you look a bit closer, you'll see a fifth face on the cliff: Kanye West.

West's presidential bid has been a source of speculation and scores of news headlines since the rapper announced in a July 4 tweet he was running for president in 2020. West immediately garnered the support of the eccentric Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and told Forbes in an interview he's "doing [the candidacy] to win."

A story from New York Magazine this week seemed to indicate West wouldn't actually go through with his presidential bid. However, West's campaign has since filed its initial forms with the Federal Election Commission that show he has a campaign committee and met the qualifications to declare his candidacy.

Even though he missed deadlines in several states to qualify to appear on voters' presidential ballots in November, West recently filed the necessary paperwork to appear on at least one state's ballot: Oklahoma.

West's friendship with President Donald Trump, and his visits to the Trump White House, have been widely documented. West said in April he was likely to vote for Trump in 2020. However, West used his Forbes Q&A to distance himself from Trump, saying he was "taking the red hat off."

When asked about West's candidacy, Trump said in an interview with RealClearPolitics he thought West should use 2020 as "a trial run" for 2024.

Although West's platform isn't entirely clear, the rapper told Forbes he's running under the banner of the Birthday Party. He also said he's pro-life and thinks Planned Parenthood does "the Devil's work," and that he wants to model the White House after Wakanda, from Marvel's hit movie "Black Panther."

In a national presidential poll dated July 9 conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, West polled at 2%.

Hackers don't break in, they log in.

That mantra, often repeated by security experts, represents a rule of thumb: The vast majority of breaches are the result of stolen passwords, not high-tech hacking tools.

These break-ins are on the rise. Phishing scams — in which attackers pose as a trustworthy party to trick people into handing over personal details or account information — were the most common type of internet crime last year, according to a recent FBI report. People lost more than $57.8 million in 2019 as the result of phishing, according to the report, with over 114,000 victims targeted in the US.

And as phishing becomes more profitable, hackers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in the methods they use to steal passwords, according to Tanmay Ganacharya, a principal director in Microsoft's Security Research team.

"Most of the attackers have now moved to phishing because it's easy. If I can convince you to give me your credentials, it's done. There's nothing more that I need," Ganacharya told Business Insider.

Ganacharya monitors phishing tactics in order to build machine-learning systems that root out scams for people using Microsoft services, including Windows, Outlook, and Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing service.

Microsoft has led a crackdown on phishing scams that impersonate its products — it seized a group of sites in July that targeted millions of people after pursuing a civil action against the scammers and getting permission from a judge to secretly seize their domains.

Ganacharya spoke to Business Insider about the trends in phishing that his team has observed. Many of the tactics aren't new, but he said attackers are constantly finding new ways to work around defenses like Microsoft's threat protection. Here's what he described.

As Donald Trump considers banning TikTok, his political campaign has started running ads on Facebook and Instagram accusing the China-based platform of "spying" on its users.

More than 100 iterations of ads were launched Friday encouraging Facebook users to sign a petition banning TikTok in the US. The ads, first spotted by New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz, come as the US government threatens to instate a country-wide ban on the viral video-sharing app over its ties to China.

Facebook removed one version of the anti-TikTok ad on Friday evening. The ad in question includes a graphic with "yes" and "no" checkboxes, which appears to be a violation of Facebook's policy against ads with "nonexistent functionality." Facebook did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

Another anti-TikTok ad tells users: "Protect our kids from China." 

TikTok's roots in China — where the app's parent company, ByteDance, is located — have long raised questions from US lawmakers and security experts about how much access and influence the Chinese government is afforded over user data and content moderation. Concerns over the TikTok-China connection have skyrocketed in recent weeks after India decided to instate its own ban on the app earlier this month.

The campaign's political ads also claim that "TikTok has been caught red-handed by monitoring what is on your phone's clipboard." The accusation is based on research from March showing how apps are able to access content stored on the clipboard — the copy-and-paste feature — of users' iPhones and iPads. TikTok was only one of the dozens of the apps caught spying on iPhone clipboards, including LinkedIn and Fox News. ByteDance has since said it will stop accessing clipboard content.

In recent weeks, the Trump campaign has also taken out ads against Twitter and Snapchat, claiming they're "attempting to silence" the president.

In early July, both President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo publicly said they were considering a TikTok ban in the US: Trump said the ban would be a way to punish China over its role in the coronavirus pandemic, while Pompeo cited national security concerns. On Thursday, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told reporters he expected TikTok to "pull out of the holding company which is China-run and operate as an independent American company."

Since TikTok launched in the US in 2018, the app has successfully been able to brush off lawmakers' calls for investigations and national security experts' warnings. Most recently, TikTok launched a content advisory council to guide policy changes and appointed a US-based CEO in June to show it was distancing itself from its Chinese roots.

But TikTok has also run afoul of the Trump campaign for reasons beyond its ties to China. Swarms of TikTok teens and K-pop fans were credited last month with signing up en masse for tickets to a major Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Instead of the big comeback that the Trump campaign advertised, attendance at the rally was considerably lacking.

TikTok's reported influence on the Tulsa rally demonstrates how the app has grown into a social media powerhouse, establishing itself as a staple of internet culture and social interaction for Generation Z. The app has more than 2 billion global downloads, and an estimated US userbase at as high as 80 million. It outperforms US-based apps with younger audiences such as Snapchat and Instagram in both new downloads and time spent. 

The imminent threat of TikTok disappearing from the US has already signaled panic among users and creators, and has led attempts by tech companies to capitalize on the chaos to lure the app's loyal following to their competing platforms.

Let me tell you about my first pickup truck.

It was a 1980s-vintage Mazda B2200. It had a five-speed manual, a single plastic bench seat, crank windows, and an AM/FM radio.

High luxury it wasn't. But it was my truck, and I loved it. I used it for ... well, you name it. Hundreds of miles driving back and forth to college, cleanup jobs, camping trips, helping friends move. The I gave it to my brother and he drove the wheels off.

Fast-forward a few decades and the world has changed. Pickups were utilitarian vehicles when I was a youngster. You found them on farms and ranches, not in the driveways of homes in the well-heeled communities. 

These days, a full-size pickup from the Detroit Big Three can easily hang with a sedan from Audi, BMW, or Mercedes when it comes to luxury appointments. That's a good thing for pickup truck makers, as all those extras have led to historically high transaction prices for vehicles that already sell in the millions of units annually. A top-line Ford F-150 can go for more than $70,000, and the entire F-Series brings in over $40 billion in annual revenue for the Blue Oval.

That has translated into historic profits since the financial crisis, enabling General Motors, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles to fill their coffers with cash.

Let's take a closer look at the markets' current roster of full-size pickups and review some of their more luxurious features, from interiors to exteriors, from infotainment systems to cool extras:

Ten years ago this week, the scandal now known as "Antennagate" game to a head. 

Weeks earlier, Apple's latest iPhone, the iPhone 4, had gone on sale worldwide, leading to lines around the block and excited customers showing off their new purchase. But almost immediately, those same excited customers started noticing something strange: The phone seemed to lose its network connection and drop calls when you held it in your left hand. 

What seemed like an odd fluke quickly turned into one of the biggest scandals in Apple's history. 

Now, 10 years later, we look back on how the issue arose and how Apple responded.

Our successors 1,000 years into the future will be able to access data from what was the world's largest network of open-source software at the start of the 21st century.

The GitHub team just had a full archive of all current public repositories safely tucked into a decommissioned coal mine in the Norwegian town of Longyearbyen on the archipelago of Svalbard.

Named the GitHub Arctic Code Vault, the project was originally introduced in 2019 and was finally carried out in early July "to preserve open-source software for future generations by storing your code in an archive built to last a thousand years," according to a company blog post on Thursday. 

On February 2, GitHub took a snapshot of all active public repositories on the site. In computing speak, snapshot refers to a copy of a system captured at a particular point in time. So GitHub is archiving all of its code to-date, similar to how you'd back up a disk drive to ensure your files are more secure.

According to the blog post, GitHub teamed up with Piql, a Norway-based computer services company that specializes in data preservation, to write 21TB (terabytes) of repository data onto 186 reels of digital photosensitive archival film. The boxes of film reels, emblazoned with GitHub's Octocat logo, were then shipped to Longyearbyen, a town of more than 2,000 people.

The code was officially stashed not only inside the mine but even further inside a chamber "deep inside hundreds of meters of permafrost."

The stored data will be near the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a large storage facility of a wide variety of plant seeds that was installed in 2008.

Last year a controversial movement that advocates a toxic bleach — chlorine dioxide — as a miracle cure was finding its ability to promote the substance being cut off. 

After years of inaction, social media platforms were moving to remove and ban people advocating for and selling the substance, which many call "Miracle Mineral Solution."

The substance, the Food and Drugs Administration says, is dangerous to consume. The agency has received reports of "severe vomiting, severe diarrhea, life-threatening low blood pressure caused by dehydration and acute liver failure after drinking these products."

YouTube last summer changed its policies to explicitly ban material promoting it, after a Business Insider investigation. Facebook also removed some of the largest groups pushing MMS as a cure for cancer, HIV/AIDS, and other illnesses. 

But the COVID-19 pandemic has renewed the movement, with advocates of the bleach exploiting fears of the disease — and the absence of any proven cure — to push their substance to a massive new audience. 

Back in May, Business Insider exposed how advocates of MMS were regrouping around the pandemic.

On Telegram, the encrypted messaging app, advocates of the substance were selling to people worried about being infected by the coronavirus. Among them was Kerri Rivera, whose Facebook group had been banned but found a home on Telegram.

Google data on search trends, as Vice reported, points to a huge surge in searches for information about MMS around the time the coronavirus began to spread in early March. 

The movement got an unexpected boost in April, when President Donald Trump in a rambling series of remarks at a White House coronavirus task force briefing suggested that injecting disinfectant could cure the coronavirus.

Trump had not directly endorsed MMS, but its proponents seized on the comments, all the same, to claim vindication for their bogus cure from the White House.

Supporters of the far-right QAnon conspiracy theory, including conspiracy theorist Jordan Sather, have also promoted the substance to followers on Twitter. He has advanced the theory that pharmaceutical companies and "deep state" officials are working to discredit the substance, and suppress news of its effectiveness.

And in a shocking development in Bolivia on Tuesday, it became clear how successful advocates of the bleach there have been in exploiting the pandemic: Lawmakers in the national legislature ignored a warning from the country's own health ministry against taking MMS and legalized it as a treatment for COVID-19. 

Activists have told Business Insider that in Bolivia, where health services are struggling to cope with the pandemic and many people lack access to health care, the popularity of MMS has exploded in recent months. 

The substance has been pushed by local politicians and on social media, in a country where the government is widely regarded as powerless to contain the pandemic, and where suspicion of official sources of information is high. 

However, as well as giving the proponents of the substance a platform, the pandemic has also brought extra-legal pressure as authorities try to stop the spread of medical misinformation and fake cures. 

Last week, Mark Grenon, leader of US-based group Genesis II, was charged with federal crimes alongside three of his sons for allegedly producing and selling MMS as a COVID-19 cure.

According to court documents, Grenon's group had before the pandemic earned around $30,000 a month from selling the bleach, but the figure leaped to $120,000 as the pandemic took hold.

It remains unclear whether this kind of action will deter other MMS advocates as they pursue their biggest opportunity yet.