A not-so-surprising New York Times piece recently reported on a program to convert blue collar workers to software engineers: They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia. Now They Say It Was a Fraud.. A couple years ago everyone was jumping on this bandwagon. Here’s an NPR story that was quite up-beat about a program that taught unemployed coal miners how to “ship code” instead of “shipping coal”. It sounded great in theory and I’m sure it resulted in a few successful career transformations.

We all know Amazon’s goal is to automate warehouses as much as possible. This means we can expect a gradual elimination of human jobs in Amazon fulfillment centers. Automated case packing is a key step toward eliminating a highly labor intensive job. Read the Full Article on Reuters

I just finished reading Hit Refresh by Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, and I couldn’t help drawing parallels between his stories and the challenges we face as logistics providers. If you’ve kept up with your technology news, you will know that a huge amount of corporate IT spending has been shifting to cloud services. Nadella has led Microsoft’s transformation from a software developer to a cloud provider. Microsoft is now generating about $20 billion in annual revenue from cloud.