Turn off broken stuff

Infosec is still on fire, but there are new acronyms to help put it out.

Downsizing at Nutanix, but SKHynix is expanding, and Broadcom isn’t a tech company.

I explain why we need to turn more stuff off, and parts of Amazon might be good candidates.

Things to note

Twilio got breached via social engineering of its employees. Both employee and customer data was accessed by whoever got in. The attack was both sophisticated and broad-based, apparently, but “Twilio believes that the security of our customers’ data is of paramount importance” so there’s nothing to worry about.

Nutanix chief revenue officer Dom Delfino has quit after just 8 months in the job. Lots of people have been jumping off that particular ship lately, though some have been pushed.

A bunch of big names in infosec (Splunk, AWS, Okta, Crowdstrike, and more) are agreeing on an interoperability standard called the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF) project. While it looks useful, I think infosec needs an Acronym Non-Proliferation Treaty.

SKHynix reckons it’ll start building a (silicon) chip packaging plant in the US next year. Intel will have competition for all that sweet CHIPS Act government handouts. Ah, capitalism!

Broadcom isn’t a tech company, it’s a private equity fund according to this piece. The irony of the ‘good bit’ of the HP/Agilent split turning into this is delicious.

I wrote an article on turning off systems that hurt people and designing defensively. It was published as part of The Innovation Papers.

Longer reads

This week’s long read is Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox, a Yale Law Journal article by Lina Khan. Khan is the newly appointed chair of the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

It is outstanding writing, and worth reading for that reason alone. The argument put forward, and the history lesson in competition and antitrust doctrine is compelling and worth your time.

I hope to write this well one day.

Weekly tip: You have one job

Every piece of marketing communications has one job. If it does that one job, it was a success. It doesn’t need to do anything else.

That’s why the communications brief template we discussed back in The Crux #5 has a kind of before/after structure. We’re changing things, but big changes are harder than small changes. It’s easier to sequence lots of smaller changes to achieve the overall big change.

You probably won’t close a $5 million sale from someone seeing your press release. Nor will you close the deal on the first phonecall. But you can move someone along your sales pipeline a bit further.

Packing too much material into a single piece of communications tends to make it less effective. It tends to be confusing, because the reader has to keep track of too many different ideas at once. Or the communications becomes too vague because it’s trying to cover too much ground and doesn’t have enough time to provide concrete details about any one thing, let alone all of them.

I still suffer from this problem myself. What helps is if I find myself trying to cover too much ground, I add some headings to summarise the ideas. If there are too many ideas and they’re not really tightly coupled together or sequenced in support of a single, bigger idea, it signals that I need to break it up into multiple pieces.

This approach is also freeing. Your slide deck doesn’t have to double sales all by itself. The choice of colour and font isn’t that critical any more. You can relax, and concentrate on just the job at hand.

Ignore everything else. Just do the one job. And then stop.

Job done.