Business writing - on Mark Hurd, writing code, painting for fun, and high-priced medicine

Some really solid business stories over the past several months included a profile from Fortune Magazine and three different features from Bloomberg Businessweek.

The Fortune piece was by Adam Lashinsky with "The redemption of Oracle's Mark Hurd" and the Businessweek stories covered a lot of ground with one a magazine issue-length look at code, one a piece on painting and drinking for fun and one about an extremely expensive, and effective, treatment for hepatitis C.

The Businessweek pieces are "What is Code?" by Paul Ford, "How Paint Nite Is Saving the American Bar" by Joel Stein, and "Pharma Execs Don't Know Why Anyone Is Upset by a $94,500 Miracle Cure" by Paul Barrett and Robert Langreth. All are interesting and the Barrett and Langreth piece includes below...

"Gilead Sciences of Foster City, Calif., introduced Harvoni, which completely cures the vast majority of people with the most common type of hepatitis C and does it in just three months with few significant side effects. Gilead charges $94,500 for the 12-week treatment."

Interesting business writing - on Sirius & Howard Stern, Disney & MagicBands and Ikea & expansion

Three interesting pieces of recent business writing covered covered subjects across the corporate world with stories on Disney, SiriusXM, and Ikea.

Cliff Kuang for Wired wrote "Disney's $1 Billion Bet on a Magical Wristband" and this was probably the most fascinating to me of the three in that it was about a compelling new technology. MagicBands are wristbands that visitors to Walt Disney World in Orlando (the bands likely to make it to Disneyland by the end of 2016) can wear to help improve their experience at the park... with Disney of course benefiting from this as well.

For Fortune Magazine, Beth Kowitt wrote "How Ikea took over the world" on the home furnishings retailer and it's forays into new geographies being successful in large part to an attention to research on the markets and what consumers there want.

The last piece to note here was by Felix Gillette for Bloomberg Businessweek with "Can SiriusXM Survive Without Howard Stern?" on the satellite radio company. The piece covers how SiriusXM has been successful in recent years and contract renewal negotiations with Stern, it's most well-known on-air talent and likely the number one driver of subscribers for the company.

Interesting writing related to enterprise software & APIs

There's been a lot of interesting business related writing I've seen recently and four of the pieces definitely seem to group together with three covering enterprise software growth and future direction and the fourth about a fundamental building block of technology and software communication.

The first piece to note was written for the site SaaStr by venture capitalist Jason Lemkin with "All These Enterprise IPOs: Why It’s Just Getting Good. Why These are The Best of Times for SaaS." It of course stands to reason that a venture capitalist focused on SaaS companies would be bullish on the market, but there's definitely some interesting points made by Lemkin. He writes in the piece of how "it takes, in the Enterprise, 6-10 years to build something real, something ready to IPO" and notes and then elaborates on factors he sees as driving growth: that markets are rapidly growing, it's easier now more than ever for companies to scale and that competition is helping drive this aforementioned growth.

From Fortune Magazine was an interview with definitely one of the giants of enterprise software with Adam Lashinsky writing "Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on where big tech is headed," an interesting short read which covers Benioff's views on the importance now and in the future of data science and artificial intelligence.

Another obviously forward-looking piece was by venture capitalist Fred Wilson with "A Lens Into The Future Of Enterprise Software"for his blog AVC. It was also a pretty short piece and one thing I noted was Wilson's comment that he's "seeing a bunch of new SAAS companies get started whose entire value proposition is building on the open APIs that most enterprise SAAS products have released in the past few years."

With this quote as a segue into the final piece to note here, I recently came across a post to Medium with "APIs: How the Internet Works Behind the Scenes" by Michael Bock. It's a well-written essay that in the intro contains "APIs, or 'Application Programming Interfaces,' are the hidden backbone of our modern world which allow software programs to communicate with one another. Although most of us don’t know it, behind the scenes of every app and website we use is a mesh of computers 'talking' to each other through a series of APIs."

Interesting business writing - on Tesla & Google related topics

Some interesting business writing I've seen lately included two large features from Fortune along with several short pieces of note published elsewhere.

The Fortune stories were "Inside Elon Musk's $1.4 Billion Score" by Peter Elkind and "Google's Larry Page: The Most Ambitious CEO in the Universe" by  Miguel Helft. Both were interesting pieces of writing with the Elkind story having the particularly intriguing tale of how Tesla Motors went about deciding on Reno as the location for the forthcoming electric car battery gigafactory.

The first of the smaller pieces to mention here was also Tesla related with Ashlee Vance for the Businessweek site last week posting "Tesla Grabs a New (Old) Spokesman From Square" about Ricardo Reyes returning to head Communications at Tesla. The background that Reyes has is fascinating, particularly in relation to the idea of narrative and storytelling within business communication.

The last two pieces to cover are very much connected to one another with Jordan Shapiro for Forbes writing "Is Everything Good About 'Minecraft' Gone?" about "active vs. passive computer time" in relation to viewing Minecraft videos on YouTube and then James Hong posting "Introducing Cakey: A better way for your kids to watch YouTube" to the site Medium.