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  The marketing moguls tell us all press is good press, but I never quite believe them. For instance, the recent dispatches on Amazon couldn't have been too good for the company's image, despite the sudden high volume of attention. In the news was the New York Times exposé, which described the company as a "bruising" environment, where management goes well beyond just asking employees to work hard. The report describes a culture of long hours and conflict, in which employees inform on one another anonymously and workers with health problems are summarily marginalized.

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• Welcome

  HP CEO Meg Whitman just announced that HP employees will no longer be able to telecommute because the company will need “all hands on deck” at the corporate offices. Few details emerged on who these telecommuters were or what they were doing from their homes. The announcement was strangely similar to another by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer a couple months ago. In both cases, the argument was that colocation would lead to increased productivity through teamwork and enhanced collaboration.

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  The past few years have seen some encouraging signs from Microsoft. For instance, they no longer propagate transparent and self-serving falsehoods about Linux at every opportunity. However, recent events indicate that maybe the new Microsoft might be all too much like the old Microsoft.

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  Walmart purchased Jet.com in 2016 with the usual fanfare that comes from a $3.3 billion corporate purchase. Jet.com was an up-and-coming online company, only a year old, that was trying to get an edge on the retail market by offering an innovative discount system and improving the distribution chain.

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  This column is about IT, not about politics. The names of politicians sometimes come up in this space – mostly because of something they did that is related to IT, but it is never my goal to descend into the political fray.

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