Image Credits: Joel Shapiro / Dumpling

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.

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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:

Brooks the Wonder Dog passed away yesterday. Somehow, a long time ago, his vet started referring to him as Brooks Batchelor. Mail came to Brooks Batchelor. His pills, which he took a lot of lately, are labelled Brooks Batchelor. Amy and I giggled everytime we saw this.

Brooks was an awesome dog. He was dog number 3, following Denali and Kenai. Definitely the cuddliest of the three. Always happy. He loved bagels, salmon, and tissue boxes. We ran in Keystone together and did laps around my house at St. Vrain for years until he couldn’t run anymore. He loved chasing bunnies, even if he never caught any. When he was young he loved to swim, but decided that wasn’t for him after he walked straight into the deep end of our new pool on his introduction to our St. Vrain house (we laughed so hard it was challenging to fish him out …)

When Amy and I talk about “Golden Retriever eyes” we are thinking of Brooks. Deep, black, and full of love, especially if you were holding a bagel. Or a piece of salmon.

At some point, he decided he was going to sleep on the bed. Early on we tried to convince him the bed was just for the two of us. I traveled a lot, so when I was gone he slept on my side of the bed. When I was home, he slept at the foot of the bed. Eventually, we got a bigger bed.

When he was a puppy, Kenai took good care of him (Kenai is on the left, Brooks is on the right)

When we got Cooper, he was annoyed for a while. Apparently he forgot that Kenai helped him grow up. Cooper was inscrutable and the first difficult puppy we had. Brooks figured this out before us and, while he’d occasionally assert his dominance, he generally gave Cooper a wide berth. When we sent Cooper to doggie boarding school for a month, we could tell that Brooks didn’t miss him. But, when Cooper came back, enough had changed that they were suddenly (and finally) buddies.

Cooper was extremely patient with Brooks the past few years as Brooks aged. When they ran together with me, Cooper would do his thing for a while but eventually hang back with Brooks who trotted along next to me at my slow pace.

Several months ago Brooks had a seizure. It turned out that he had a significant brain tumor. After being at the vet for a few nights, he came back home and was basically non-responsive. Amy and I cried all weekend, just hung out with him, and were ready to let him go.

We decided to give it one try with the vet where they dialed back some of his meds to see if he could get a few more months. While he still slept most of the time, he was ambulatory, happy, and somewhat responsive when he was awake.

Last Monday he had a series of seizures. Back to the vet he went, where the seizures continued. He passed on Saturday.

I thought of him a lot of my 12 loop run today. I write this with tears in my eyes. Brooks Batchelor, you were a wonder dog. Thanks for being part of our lives.

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. 

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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.

Image Credits: Dani Padgett / StrictlyVC

(Photo by Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)