To be fair, even outside of this sexual misconduct the CTO of SAP has not actually earned a high salary. Do you hear anyone talking about SAP when it comes to technological innovation? They are followers, not leaders. Not in AI, not in cloud computing, not in mobile or any other technical domain really. Their ERP software stack sits on a technological foundation of ABAP (a COBOL derivative) and a home-built database system that relies on large main memory caches to process complex queries at a halfway acceptable performance.
You would not want to. After a high-profile scandal like that, there are too many people in the know. Not all of whom may be sympathetic to you for taking down a top executive. Your career is effectively finished.
Negotiate a decent severance payout in exchange for keeping quiet about the details. The bonus payout for the misbehaving former CTO may perversely help you here. Start with that figure in how much you want and let the company explain why the victim deserves less.
No, it is supply and demand. And a good deal of culture sprinkled on top. Americans are much more prepared to accept obscenely high salaries for exceptional talent. In Germany by contrast, even the greatest software engineering genius will not make that much more than some middling developer.
SAP has had its fair share of bad executives. Mostly incompetent people, but occasionally also flawed characters. Their problem is that Europe has no IT industry that is equally mature as the one in the US. Among other things, this leads to dysfunctional talent development where people end up in managerial roles (or outright make it to executive level) without the necessary character traits or personal development to support their responsibilities.
Bad leaver clauses are difficult to enforce. What this person has done may not be an undisputed breach of company policy. More like what observers would consider subjectively unethical conduct that is potentially damaging to the company’s reputation. But which a court may not see as something that voids early termination bonus payouts.
On the bottom line, the €7m cash payout is a rounding error on the company’s balance sheet. And now it is off the books and will not trouble them and create negative headlines for a protracted period of litigation in court.
Looks like the typical EU wannabe competition to US Big Tech to me. Like Europe’s Google competitor, Europe’s cloud service, Europe’s operating system and so on.
Like these projects, OpenEuroLLM will go nowhere.
It is always the same approach that never works: First they assemble the usual mix of organisations from all sorts of countries, making sure all the major EU member nations are represented. Then they give the project some moronic goals (they state “compliance” as the #1 objective - wtf?).
The EU commission will pour millions in taxpayer money into this, which is nevertheless not remotely enough to match with the funds raised by US AI companies. And half the money for OpenEuroLLM will be spent on extensive bureaucracy where they have to write lengthy progress reports, pass audits by EU bureaucrats, etc. Not to mention the sizeable travel budget for the people involved. And finally, they may end up with prototypes that (1) nobody asked for and for which there is no market, (2) which do not work well/at all and (3) which are abandoned once the project ends.
So, what you are saying is be part of the deliverable, get a good chunk of the budget but one that does not stand out, maybe have a second partner that does not share your last name, do minimal work, enjoy brunch wherever you land?
They should — like scrapping bureaucracy and regulation that is hostile to innovation and costly for businesses. The AI Act, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the EU Supply Chain Law, the GDPR etc. are all well intended. Albeit born out of anxiety and a false sense to be able to shield Europe from the bad consequences of modern technology. In effect, these regulations create a culture that is toxic for innovation. Resulting in venture capital avoiding Europe and founders leaving for better shores (ie. the US) to create the next billion dollar company.
By contrast, what the EU should absolutely, categorically NOT do is to create projects like this one. With an absurd number of participating organisations, dysfunctional project goals (like “compliance”) and the ballooning bureaucracy that ensues. What talent are they hoping to attract to this project? Any AI researcher with half a brain would avoid OpenEuroLLM, lest he (or she) drag down his (or her) career and waste precious lifetime for what is guaranteed to turn into another tombstone on Europe’s graveyard of ridiculous publicly funded technology projects.
The GDPR could have worked, though they chickened out in the last moment and designated the US as "safe"(the whole point was to keep the data local), they also allowed countries to interpret the GDPR in such an extreme way that it's now impossible to install security cameras in certain countries like Hungary.
The cookie law made me think that most people in the EU who make these laws need help turning on their computer.
I actually agree with parts of the Digital Markets Act, I should have the freedom to install whatever software I want on my iPad which is crippled by the App Store limitation, it makes my blood boil when I think about the fact that my iPad has a better CPU then my developer laptop, yet I can't run anything on it, because nanny Apple doesn't want me to. We'll see if it will work out though, I don't have high hopes.
I always say that the EU should look at parts of the US that are successful with an open mind and try to understand what's missing, because we have the talent that's not the issue, there is also money in Europe but for some reason I don't feel like I'm going to be building the next Google here. London got pretty close, but the UK decided to Brexit.
I agree that the EU should not try to create innovation, they should just create the conditions necessary for it.
The US also has bureaucracy issues, but it seems that there is so much investor money out there that you can just throw it at the problems to make them go away.
At the end of the day, legislators need to weigh the consequences of regulation like the GDPR. Has it really helped people retain control over their personal data? I doubt it. Sure, companies like Meta and Google are compliant, have added the necessary features to their products. But to what degree do people actually make use of these? And what harm (if any) is averted in this way.
On the flip side, consider the economic cost that was caused by the GDPR. There are compliance and reporting obligations that require time and personell. There are additional development and monitoring costs. There is an impact on business models that have made it more difficult to monetise a user base. And lastly, there is a huge legal risk. Courts are scrambling to interpret the GDPR and the EU commission is happy to dish out fines (albeit mostly against American Big Tech companies).
On the bottom line, even well-intended legislation like the GDPR may have huge economic costs with little tangible benefits. And that’s not to speak about later legislation like the DSA (censorship) law, the DMA, the AI Act. And worst of all, the supply chain law (even though that’s unlikely to be as much of an issue for the software industry).
Nah, the GDPR has pushed a lot of good principles directly into business decisions. It's not perfect , sure, but the mentality has changed also because of the GDPR. Compliance has zero cost, if you avoid certain decisions.
AI act? We'll see.
There are other regulations that are far more costly and designed for big companies with fat legal departments.
As for EU research projects, I agree with most that has been said, but there are some very good exceptions. The problem with EU research programmes is that they offer often too research and little businesses opportunities.
The uncomfortable truth is that pretty much any business can cut staff by 20% without impacting overall performance. Provided that you manage to weed out the tail end of the performance bell curve that is.
Most of the time, reducing staff is a healthy move for the business and the impacted employees. The company will not only save cost, but strengthen its culture of high performance. And under-achieving employees are often fundamentally unhappy in their role. While the short term impact of being made redundant can cause some distress, these people can still use the occasion to reset their careers.
They don't know which 20% needs to be cut. That's why they wait until something unrelated to their business internals (market downturn, other companies are cutting) happens to try.
I remember seeing somewhere an analysis that layoffs do not improve medium or long-term stock performance for companies performing layoffs. But if layoffs are coordinated sector-wide they can have a big impact on employee compensation in the sector by creating a reserve army of unemployed.
I was originally a huge fan of dropbox, and still a customer, though reluctantly these days.
Dropbox has fallen so far behind many other companies. Google photos search is amazing, it merges people even if they don't have contacts, it has really good image recognition, it has some sorting/ordering amongst many various dimensions.
Why can't I make small edits to text files in dropbox? Why haven't they added any useful apps?
Why are they not the best photo organizer/searching system?
Du you have sources for this? Now I'm not much better but I actually think there are several studies that show correlation between layoffs and worse than average performance.
It absolutely affects morale for the "suvivors". you don't just cull a fifth of your company like cattle and expect the remainers to be blissfully ignorant. Also, top performers seeing this, even if they survive, will definitely start shopping around. It's an awful move for companies in the middle-long term. T
The titanic was warned over a day in advance. It then took 3 hours to sink. You can absolutely be sinking but look to be productive for a while. Especially if the company just wants to tread water instead of grow. And I hope they have enough lifeboats ready when that time comes.
Evidence, please. From what I've seen in person, it doesn't work this way at all. Companies don't have a great fix on whom to cut, and it usually just makes the other employees feel stressed (and start looking at other jobs), while the unemployed suffer very significant life stress.
Perhaps the better lesson is that tying your self-worth to your corporate employment is a really, really bad idea.
I realize that's difficult in today's performative world, where an quick perusal of LinkedIn shows loads of people that are "passionate" about banking compliance or insurance claims or whatever. Many companies have also have fostered this false idea that companies are a "family". That is always false. The best companies are more like a team, and when things start to go south, sometimes people on that team are cut.
Ironically, I think the professions where people really are passionate and see it as a "dream job" (think professional sports teams, actors, musicians, artists, etc.) generally have a much healthier view of their employment in the first place because they realize how tenuous it is to begin with. Point being, if you're considering suicide if you lose your job, you should be in therapy long, long before it gets to that point.
One final note: before I get the pushback of "that's all nice to say until you have no income and are living on the streets!", let's get real for a moment. First, I have a ton of sympathy for people who are laid off - it sucks and can be very destabilizing. But lets also get real - people were laid off from Dropbox with a very generous severance package and they are in a highly paid industry to begin with. None of these people are going to starve, and nearly all of them will be able to eventually find employment (if perhaps not at the same exact high salary as Dropbox). Any mental health issues folks have after getting laid off is nearly always the result of tying one's self-worth to one's job, and that's the link that should be broken.
The only thing we would agree on is that disconnecting self worth from a job is, in general, a good idea.
I have spoken with professionals in ballet and they actually feel mental strain from having to file for unemployment when off season. Even though it’s considered normal practice it doesn’t mean it’s right to treat people like that.
Dropbox gave a generous severance? Maybe, but is that is the case everywhere? I can tell you, the start up I worked for before, Aurora Innovation, only gave people one week for every year worked and they were doing silent layoffs in groups of five. One of those people was a young father on H1B who had been there less than a year.
Saying you should be in therapy long before it happens is rather callous. How was that father, or any of the other people, know they would need therapy beforehand for something they have no control over? It’s like saying you need therapy before an earthquake destroys your home.
>tying your self-worth to your corporate employment is a really, really bad idea.
We can talk philosophy all day long. I just want to pay rent, respecfully. People telling me to "upskill" seem tonedeaf to this.
And this isn't some thing unique to tech. All jobs dried up. I wouldn't be worried otherwise if I could find ANY work right now.
>But lets also get real - people were laid off from Dropbox with a very generous severance package and they are in a highly paid industry to begin with.
okay. Other companies don't. I got a month of severance and saved up 6 months.
It's been 13 months. What now? I'm not starving but only by dumb luck.
>Any mental health issues folks have after getting laid off is nearly always the result of tying one's self-worth to one's job, and that's the link that should be broken.
No it results from peopel stresse on how to survive. Maybe be real and look outside the FAANG bubble every once in a while. I'm not worried about Dropbox, but everything else in this BS economy that pretends to be soaring.
I don't belive you have any sympathy given this comment. You just want blame anything except the environment and people not magically being prepared for 6, 12, 18+ months of unemployment in what was very recently a "hot market".
You think that people who are doing nothing all day are unhappy?
Protestant work ethic got you by the gizzards.
We call it "rest and vest" here in the tech retirement homes of companies known for being "chill" like Microsoft, Linkedin, Salesforce, Oracle, IBM, Intel (historically), etc
So that they can release a successor model with thinner bezels.
In reality this may be to (1) to keep costs down and (2) to distance the iPad mini from the more premium iPhone Pro Max.
All in all, this device leaves me wondering who this is for? iPads are mostly used for media consumption, no matter how Apple wants to position them. Not sure why this necessitates AI hardware, but perhaps people really start using iPads for productivity/creativity workloads that can make use of “Apple Intelligence” (the silliest moniker since “Spatial Computing” and “Retina Display”).
The comparatively small difference in screen real estate between an iPhone Pro Max and the iPad mini makes the latter rather pointless. Perhaps they are targeting people with a smaller iPhone who want another device to watch YouTube. What could have made a difference is a folding display. I think the iPad mini would have been the ideal candidate for that.
> Perhaps they are targeting people with a smaller iPhone who want another device to watch YouTube.
Hi, it me.
I have an iPhone 13 Mini that will have to be pried from my cold dead hands because it's about as big a phone as I'm willing to carry (I'd still rather have the 5s form factor.)
I also have an iPad Mini that supplements it perfectly.
Really don't want anything larger, because I like to handle it with one hand while walking or I'm propping it up in a tight space like when I'm watching a how-to video while doing a home-improvement project or working on my car.
There is absolutely no way I'd buy a phone as gigantic as a Max.
Honestly not sure how people walk around with those things.
I really dislike larger phones. I had tried out iOS with the iPhone X and it'd been a few years. Then Apple killed the Mini the year I was going to give them a go
> There is absolutely no way I'd buy a phone as gigantic as a Max.
It's not gigantic for everyone to be fair. I'm 6′1″ with largish hands I suppose and the Max is a single hand device for me. Small devices look comical in my hands. I was one of those very well served by Apple starting to make larger devices, and it's when I shifted over from Android full time to iOS devices. (I was very fond of the early generation Galaxy Note devices prior to that.)
> Honestly not sure how people walk around with those things.
The same way as I do anything of that size. It goes in my pocket or i'm holding it?
I get where you are coming from those because my partner has a much smaller 13 line device and we've done some basic testing and like you, shifting to a Max sized device...well, its just not very likely. My phone looks absolutely jumbo once you put it in her teeny hands.
For most people, preference likely plays a bigger role, but for me, it’s all about the size of my hands and fingers. I find smaller devices uncomfortable for anything beyond basic phone use. As a computing device where touch is the primary interaction, I prefer something larger, which is why I stuck with Android when Apple wasn’t making bigger phones. It’s also about being able to have it further from my face.
At the time, many Apple users claimed no one wanted larger phones and that Apple’s size was perfect. I disagreed and voted with my wallet. For me, there are no downsides to a larger device—I can still use it one-handed, it fits in my pockets, and going smaller wouldn’t make it any more portable or usable.
For others, it’s the opposite. A smaller phone may be easier to handle or fit better in pockets or everyday carry. So I agree there should be different sizes to meet different needs, including smaller options if the market supports them. Among my circle, smaller phones tend to be the preference for those who primarily use their device for calls and texts. Anything beyond that, like browsing, moves to a tablet. These people are generally in their mid-30s to mid-40s.
Interestingly, the ‘non-techy’ people I know with larger phones say it’s because they use a popsocket or view their phone more as a computer than a phone. They’re willing to trade off size for a bigger screen. Many of them don’t own another personal computing device, aside from maybe a tablet. They’re typically in their 20s to 30s.
I feel like I’m part of a shrinking group that still uses both a laptop and a desktop as my primary computing environments.
for me, my desktop and laptop are the main go-to. the mobile is an extra device with different, more specific use cases
and so I've been a little disappointed with how these devices keep getting bigger and bigger. I was pretty happy with the size of the Pixel 3
I think I like to be able to access the whole screen comfortably with one hand, not fumbling it about. easy to manipulate, easy to pocket.
the Pixel 8 shrunk a bit over its predecessors so I nabbed that, and it's probably at or just over the limit for me, size wise
I'm 5'8" and have no problem at all using a Max one-handed (provided it's not in a case). Is it difficult for you to shift the grip on your phone while you're holding it?
I mean yeah, of course I know how people hold and walk around with these devices. I was being silly.
Everything you said about large hands rings true for small hands and the mini form factor, but instead of just looking silly it's a hinderance.
We need both form factors. What I don't think we need is the weird middle size (current regular iPhone size), but I'm sure that's probably the one most people actually want if they could only pick one.
> The comparatively small difference in screen real estate between an iPhone Pro Max and the iPad mini
Due to the aspect ratios, there are significant differences in viewable area. It is not a "small" difference at all. Once you add in the ability to deal with specific aspect ratio content, the difference becomes even larger.
> All in all, this device leaves me wondering who this is for?
Not for everyone I would suggest. But I have people in my circle who will be very pleased. As they use a Mini as their phone/portable machine out of the house. They have little keyboard cases and use VOIP services for communication.
> but perhaps people really start using iPads for productivity/creativity workloads
Part of the appeal for most people is the seamless usage of features and functionalities across their sweet of products. People expect to be able to pick up where they left of, and have access to the same functionality as they largely do on the rest of the devices.
It's nice even if something is not your primary productivity device, to be able to execute or perform things on them if that's what happens to be in front of you at the time.
“ The comparatively small difference in screen real estate between an iPhone Pro Max and the iPad mini makes the latter rather pointless.”
While the linear diagonal size of the screens are not so much different, the area of the iPad Mini is significantly larger. I ran the numbers a month or so on it when someone was making the same claim of equivalence. I don’t recall the specifics now but I think the iPad screen had at least 60% more area. That is significant.
“ Not sure why this necessitates AI hardware”
It would be hard for Apple to put in a chipset now that didn’t support AI. All of their SOCs for the past 10 years have had neural processors. This A17 Pro has 8GB of RAM. All of their recent SOCs have the 8GB of RAM needed to run AI. Why not?
> All in all, this device leaves me wondering who this is for?
Who is any iPad for? They’re nice screens attached to good processors.
I bring mine to work to either read or watch videos over my lunch break. Don’t want the full size of a regular iPad. Don’t want to use my work laptop with my personal service accounts like YouTube, Netflix, kindle, etc.
And while the Mini is small, it’s still a substantial screen size increase over using my regular sized iPhone for that purpose.
I plan on buying one for exactly that use-case. I have a mini 5 that's showing its age and doesn't have enough storage (downloading flying charts takes up a surprising amount of space) and I didn't want to upgrade to the mini 6 considering how long in the tooth it was getting. The mini 7 isn't some massive improvement, but it's improvement enough in a very good niche for flying.
Edit: For the non-pilots reading this, it's also worth noting that the most popular flying app by far for general aviation at least, ForeFlight, is iOS only. So your choices are generally small iPad or big iPad, and a lot of people don't like big iPad in a small airplane cockpit.
I hate that ForeFlight does not run on Android. It is is keeping me from getting rid of my last overpriced, closed, proprietary Apple device. Not that Jeppesen (Boeing) has a good record on any of that either.
> All in all, this device leaves me wondering who this is for?
I know children who study with their iPad minis and prefer them over notebooks. This isn’t necessarily a pro-Apple statement, but rather a reflection on how different user groups may engage with devices in ways that are cognitively distinct from what we discuss here on HN.
There are also comments here about specific use cases, like pilots using tools such as ForeFlight. While this kind of usage may not drive overall demand, it highlights how certain groups find unique value in the iPad mini for their specialized needs.
People like to spend 1 minute looking at a product and pretend they've done a market analysis by only looking at their own consumption patterns or those of their very close group of people around them combined with some stereotypes like "people use tablets for media consumption" (and never do anything else on them in between).
> for apple to want to ship an iPad with ai hardware.
You mean the dedicated neural chip they've been gushing over for half a decade saying how it's an amazing dedicated chip for exactly this kind of work?
I mean they’ve made a product decision that they’re going to limit new Siri to their new chips and 16GB of ram.
Regardless of how justified that decision is, or how truthful the marketing about their old chip was, they need an iPad mini that fits their stated requirements.
Typical leftist nonsense. I want to see the travellers living in The Hague who let themselves be harassed into forgoing their holidays.
Just a suggestion: perhaps a city council should busy itself with running the city, look after its infrastructure, grow the economy, provide great services.
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