LAST NOVEMBER something strange happened in Mountain View. A thick fog enveloped the headquarters of Alphabet, the parent company of Google. Not the meteorological sort—this stretch of Silicon Valley is reliably sunny....
MOTORING’S SOUNDTRACK use to be generated by the petrol engine and car radio. Near-silent battery power and snazzy infotainment systems have provided an aural void—and a high-tech way to fill it. Carmakers...
Power is a fact of corporate life. It also affects behaviour. Research suggests power makes people less likely to take the advice of others, even if those others are experts in their...
IN THE EARLY 1980s AT&T Corporation, then America’s telecoms monopoly, was the darling of Wall Street. As big tech of the day, it was the mightiest company in the S&P 500, accounting...
MARK ZUCKERBERG dubbed 2023 as Meta’s “year of efficiency”, corporate-speak for admitting that his social-media empire was bloated. Since November Meta has cut 21,000 jobs, or about a quarter of its workforce....
When Amazon announced the $13.7bn acquisition of Whole Foods Market in 2017, it followed some oddball attempts to strengthen its grocery business, some conceived by Jeff Bezos himself. One was to develop...
IN 2019, AS China’s trade war with America was heating up, the People’s Daily predicted that China’s monopoly on rare earths, minerals crucial to the production of most modern hardware, would become...
IT LOOKS LIKE cheese. It smells like cheese. It tastes like cheese (specifically mature cheddar). And it is cheese—at least under the microscope. “Synthetic dairy” is made with the same ingredients as...
