Writing this one with a heavy heart: the Orlando nightclub shooting was yesterday morning and the numbers are unbearable. Tech’s role this time was quiet and human: blood-drive coordination, safety check-ins, families refreshing feeds. Take care of your people. The rest of this entry is the ordinary world continuing, because it does, and that’s both the tragedy and the mercy of it.
E3 is on. The consoles blinked first on Moore’s Law: Microsoft announced “Project Scorpio,” a mid-generation more powerful Xbox, and Sony’s Neo is the open secret. The console cycle is becoming a phone cycle, incremental hardware with a shared library. Backward compatibility as a covenant, upgrades as a treadmill. Gaming discovered the annual release cadence right as gaming discovered it can’t finish games by launch day.
The F1 title fight has Rosberg leading Hamilton by 9 points as of tonight’s Canadian GP. Hamilton’s season, his covenant with Mercedes, is one crash away from over. Nothing suspicious about a 43-point lead evaporating in three races. Nothing at all. (The universe-authored test suite is foreshadowing, but I don’t know that yet, and I want this entry to preserve my innocence.)
TIL: crisis-communication runbooks exist for companies too. We wrote our first one this week, prompted by nothing and everything. Who speaks, who doesn’t, what we never say. Hope it stays a dead file.