Thurrott Daily: October 20

Here’s what’s happening today.

10/20/2015 9:39:04 AM

I’m coming to the UK in November

Two items of note if you’re in the UK:

I’ll be joining Mary Jo Foley at Stacked 2015, a free one-day developer conference on Wednesday, November 18, 2015 in Manchester, UK. We will be recording the Windows Weekly podcast live from the show, and will be having a live Q&A with the audience.

Then, on Friday, November 20, 2015, Mary Jo and I will be having a meetup somewhere in London—exact location TBD—so if you’re in the area, please do come and visit.

See you in the UK!

Now available: The official trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens

I’ll be geeking out over this one for a while.

Satya Nadella has either been awarded for Microsoft’s turnaround or punished for its lack of progress

I’m always amused by the different ways in which one can cover the news. For example, the following headline suggests that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has engineered some kind of “turnaround,” despite the fact that the firm’s profits and revenues are actually declining.

Microsoft’s turnaround netted CEO Satya Nadella $18.3 million this year

Which sounds fine. Until a more credible business publication—the Wall Street Journal—describes this event like so.

Microsoft CEO Nadella’s Pay Falls on Stock Awards

So which is it? Well, Nadella’s compensation did fall, by 78 percent, a drop that was largely tied to stock awards. And Microsoft’s operating income and earnings per share did decline in fiscal 2015. But part of Nadella’s compensation was also based on performance, and there he earned 120 percent of his targeted annual cash award, a $4.3 million bonus. So I guess it just depends on how you view the world.

“Amazon says creating more than 100,000 jobs for holiday season”

Put another way, Amazon will be laying off more than 100,000 people after the holidays.

Cook: Apple Music has 15 million users, 6.5 million that pay for the service

During an appearance at a WSJ technology conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook provided some positive momentum for Apple Music, which he says has over 15 million users and 6.5 million paying users. (Apple offers a 90-day trial, not a free version of the service, so most of those people are just testing it.)

By comparison, the leading music service, Spotify, has 20 million paying users and 75 million total users. But it’s been around for years, where Apple Music just debuted this music (and is currently relegated mostly to Apple devices only). So this is pretty impressive, I think.

Apple Music has come under a lot of fire, deservedly, for its hard to navigate UI, but it does one thing I really like: It has great curated playlists, including especially “Intro to [artist name]” playlists that I find very useful.