A few years ago, our team was preparing to launch a major update when we hit an unexpected snag. The accessibility team flagged that our new voice search featurewhile technically impressivewas failing users with speech impairments. Marketing was eager to highlight the cutting-edge AI capabilities. Engineering was proud of the breakthrough. But for a significant portion of our community, this “innovation” was actually a step backward.
This moment crystallized something I’d been thinking about for years: product development never happens in a vacuum. Every decision we make sits at the intersection of three powerful forces I call the three P’s: People (the communities we serve), Politics (the internal dynamics and external pressures that shape our work), and Product (the manifestation of our choices, trade-offs, and values).
Great product leadership isn’t about avoiding these tensionsit’s about navigating them without losing sight of our purpose or compromising our values. The companies that do this well don’t just build better products; they build products that genuinely improve lives and change society.
P1: PeopleThe Customer at the Center
When we talk about “users,” we often default to thinking about individual consumers. But every product decision ripples outward, affecting not just individual users but entire communities, families, and society at large.
Take something as seemingly simple as a default setting. When we design the TV home screen, we’re not just organizing appswe’re shaping how families spend their evening hours together. Do we prioritize the latest blockbuster movies, or do we surface educational content? Do we make it easy to discover local news, or do we default to global content? These choices affect real conversations happening in real living rooms.
The rise of inclusive design has taught us that accessibility isn’t just a moral imperativeit’s a business one. When we design voice controls with speech impairments in mind, we didn’t just serve users with disabilities; we created features that helped anyone using the TV in a noisy environment or trying to search quietly while others were sleeping. Designing for the margins often leads to innovations that benefit everyone.
But where it gets tricky is balancing individual desires with collective needs. Our data might show that users spend more time on certain types of content, but does that mean we should optimize for maximum engagement, or should we consider the broader implications of what we’re promoting and how do we balance these?
The biggest risk I see among product teams is designing for internal stakeholders instead of external users. It’s easy to fall into the trap of building what impresses investors, what satisfies regulatory requirements, or what looks good in quarterly reviews. But products built for boardrooms rarely succeed in living rooms.
P2: PoliticsThe Power Structures Around the Work
Let’s be honest about something most product leaders don’t like to discuss: every product decision is political, in the sense that it involves navigating competing interests, conflicting priorities, and power structures both inside and outside our organizations.
Internally, we’re constantly balancing conflicting roadmaps. The business development team wants partnerships that drive revenue. The engineering team wants to optimize for performance. The design team advocates for user experience. Legal wants to minimize risk. Each perspective is valid, but they often point in different directions.
I learned this lesson early in my career when we were deciding whether to optimize for channel placement. The partnership team saw revenue opportunities. The user experience team worried about bloatware. The content team wanted to ensure quality standards. The regulatory team flagged antitrust concerns. No single stakeholder was wrong, but finding a path forward required understanding how all these perspectives intersected.
External politics add another layer of complexity. We operate in an environment of increasing regulatory scrutiny, shifting cultural expectations, and evolving privacy norms. What was acceptable product behavior five years ago may be considered invasive today. What satisfies regulators in one market may be irrelevant or counterproductive in another.
The challenge isn’t to eliminate these political pressuresthat’s impossible. The challenge is to navigate them with transparency and integrity while staying true to our core mission. This means having difficult conversations about trade-offs, being clear about our decision-making criteria, and sometimes accepting that we can’t make everyone happy.
P3: ProductThe Expression of Everything
Here’s the reality that many product leaders struggle to accept: your product is never neutral. Every feature you build, every default you set, every interaction you design is an expression of your values and priorities. The product is where the rubber meets the roadwhere all the considerations about people and politics get translated into actual user experiences.
Consider the fundamental tensions that every product grapples with: privacy versus personalization, freedom of expression versus content moderation, centralized control versus decentralized empowerment. There’s no “right” answer to these trade-offs, but there are thoughtful approaches and thoughtless ones.
When we were designing product recommendation engines, we had to wrestle with this directly. More personalization meant better recommendations but also meant collecting more data about viewing habits. How much personalization was worth how much privacy? The answer wasn’t in our analyticsit was in our values and our understanding of what our users genuinely needed from the product.
The most important product decisions are often invisible to users. What you choose to default to, what you decide to hide, what you make easy versus what you make difficultthese are ethical and strategic choices that shape behavior in profound ways. Every “minor” UX decision is actually a statement about what you think is important.
This is especially true as we integrate AI into our products. The algorithms we build don’t just process datathey shape attention, influence decisions, and ultimately affect how people spend their time and mental energy. With that power comes responsibility.
The Two Questions That Cut Through Complexity
After years of navigating these tensions, I’ve come to rely on two core questions that can cut through almost any complexity:
“What do our customers really want?”
“What’s the best strategy for meeting our goals in a way that is in line with our values?”
These might sound simple, but they’re deceptively powerful. The magic happens when you ask both questions together. The first question forces us to look beyond surface-level data and really understand the deeper needs and contexts of the people we serve. The second question ensures that we’re not just chasing metrics or market pportunities, but building something we can be proud of.
The 3Pspeople, politics, and productwill always be in motion, and they’ll often be in tension with each other. But the tension is where the interesting work happens. It’s where we’re forced to think more deeply, design more thoughtfully, and lead more intentionally. True product leadership means being willing to have difficult conversations, to push back on stakeholders when necessary, and to make decisions that serve long-term value over short-term convenience.
The companies that navigate the 3Ps well don’t just build successful productsthey build products that make the world a little bit better. The choices we make in conference rooms and code reviews ultimately play out in living rooms and communities around the world. In a time when technology’s impact on society is under increasing scrutiny, that’s not just good business. It’s essential leadership.
The majority of e-cigarette sales now come in the form of disposable vapes, meaning that when someone has taken the last puff, that vapeand its lithium ion battery and plastic casinggo right into the trash. Americans now throw away an incredible number of these disposable vapes: nearly 500,000 every day, or about 5.7 vapes per second.
That number comes from the latest vape waste report from the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), which looked at 2023 data. And vape waste is increasing, the public advocacy group found. In 2022, U.S. PIRG documented that Americans threw out 4.5 disposable vapes per second.
Disposable vapes are a particularly insidious form of pollution for a few reasons, says Lucas Gutterman, the Designed to Last campaign director with PIRG. For one, these devices contain nicotine, a toxic chemical that can leach into water and soil, harming wildlife and ecosystems. Theyre also made of plastic that isnt recyclable, and which also spreads toxins and microplastics into the environment.
Increasingly, disposable vapes double as digital gadgets, with screens that show animations or include built-in games or speakers to play music. That means all this trash is a type of electronic waste, so each disposable vape tossed is like throwing away miniature computers after a few days of use, Gutterman says.
Those lithium ion batteries in disposable vapes are made using critical minerals that require mining. Laptops, cellphones, and electric vehicles all use lithium ion batteries too. The amount of lithium used in the batteries of disposable vapes sold every year weighs nearly 30 tons, according to U.S. PIRGequivalent to the amount of lithium needed to create 3,350 EV batteries. Mining is also tied to human rights abuses, and in 2023, a TikToker explained in a viral video that she was quitting vaping as a way to help people in Congo, which currently supplies 70% of the worlds mined cobalt.
When disposable vapes are tossed into the trash and make their way to recycling and waste facilities, those lithium ion batteries can also cause fires because the devices get caught and crushed in machinery. The report estimates that disposable vapes cause $95 million of damage from waste facility fires each year.
When disposal vapes dont go into these facilities, they can pollute the environment directly. If a disposable vape is tossed on the street, it can be swept into a storm drain, travel through streams and rivers, and end up in the ocean or along the coast. Predictably, disposable vapes are becoming a dominant source of beach pollution: According to the Surfrider Foundation, from 2021 to 2024 volunteers have seen a 150% increase in vapes among litter collected during beach cleanups.
Disposable vapes are a serious threat, says Kelsey Lamp, oceans campaign director with the Environment America Research & Policy Center, because they include three types of waste in one: They’re hazardous waste, since they contain nicotine and heavy metals; they’re electronic waste with batteries and circuits; and theyre plastic waste that never biodegrades, she says.
Studies have found that vape liquids decrease the hatching success of fish embryos and cause DNA damage, among other effects, plus the plastic casings can both carry toxins and break down into microplastics.
Some states are taking action against disposable vapes. California banned flavored tobacco products, which led to a 52% decrease in disposable vape sales. Massachusetts also banned flavored e-cigarettes, resulting in a 74% drop in disposable vape sales. But Lamp and U.S. PIRG urge legislators to take more action and ban disposable vapes across the country.
We wouldn’t dump 30 tons of lithium directly into our ocean. We wouldn’t pour thousands of pounds of nicotine into our waterways. Yet that’s exactly what we’re doing by allowing disposable vapes to pollute our waterways, Lamp says. Our oceans are already under pressure from rising temperatures, overfishing, and land-based pollution. We cannot afford to add this entirely preventable source of toxic waste to the mix.
Deadly and destructive flash flooding in Texas and several other states in July 2025 is raising questions about the nations flood maps and their ability to ensure that communities and homeowners can prepare for rising risks.
The same region of Texas Hill Country where a flash flood on July 4 killed more than 130 people was hit again with downpours a week later, forcing searchers to temporarily pause their efforts to find missing victims. Other states, including New Mexico, Oklahoma, Vermont, and Iowa, also saw flash flood damage in July.
The U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agencys flood maps are intended to be the nations primary tool for identifying flood risks. Originally developed in the 1970s to support the National Flood Insurance Program, these maps, known as Flood Insurance Rate Maps, or FIRMs, are used to determine where flood insurance is required for federally backed mortgages, to inform local building codes and land-use decisions, and to guide flood plain management strategies.
In theory, the maps enable homeowners, businesses, and local officials to understand their flood risk and take appropriate steps to prepare and mitigate potential losses.
A federal flood map of Kerrville, Texas, with the Guadalupe River winding through the middle in purple, shows areas considered to have a 1% annual chance of flooding in blue and a 0.2% annual chance of flooding in tan. During a flash flood on July 4, 2025, the river rose more than 30 feet at Kerrville. [Image: FEMA]
But while FEMA has improved the accuracy and accessibility of the maps over time with better data, digital tools, and community input, the maps still dont capture everythingincluding the changing climate. There are areas of the country that flood, some regularly, that dont show up on the maps as at risk.
I study flood-risk mapping as a university-based researcher and at First Street, an organization created to quantify and communicate climate risk. In a 2023 assessment using newly modeled flood zones with climate-adjusted precipitation records, we found that more than twice as many properties across the country were at risk of a 100-year flood than the FEMA maps identified.
Even in places where the FEMA maps identified a flood risk, we found that the federal mapping process, its overreliance on historical data, and political influence over the updating of maps can lead to maps that dont fully represent an areas risk.
What FEMA flood maps miss
FEMAs maps are essential tools for identifying flood risks, but they have significant gaps that limit their effectiveness.
One major limitation is that they dont consider flooding driven by intense bursts of rain. The maps primarily focus on river channels and coastal flooding, largely excluding the risk of flash flooding, particularly along smaller waterways such as streams, creeks, and tributaries.
This limitation has become more important in recent years due to climate change. Rising global temperatures can result in more frequent extreme downpours, leaving more areas vulnerable to flooding, yet unmapped by FEMA.
A map of a section of Kerr County, Texas, where a deadly flood struck on July 4, 2025, compares the FEMA flood maps 100-year flood zone (red) to First Streets more detailed 100-yea flood zone (blue). The more detailed map includes flash flood risks along smaller creeks and streams. [Image: Jeremy Porter]
For example, when flooding from Hurricane Helene hit unmapped areas around Asheville, North Carolina, in 2024, it caused a huge amount of uninsured damage to properties.
Even in areas that are mapped, like the Camp Mystic site in Kerr County, Texas, that was hit by a deadly flash flood on July 4, 2025, the maps may underestimate their risk because of a reliance on historic data and outdated risk assessments.
Political influence can fuel long delays
Additionally, FEMAs mapping process is often shaped by political pressures.
Local governments and developers sometimes fight high-risk designations to avoid insurance mandates or restrictions on development, leading to maps that may understate actual risks and leave residents unaware of their true exposure.
An example is New York Citys appeal of a 2015 FEMA Flood Insurance Rate Maps update. The delay in resolving the citys concerns has left it with maps that are roughly 20 years old, and the current mapping project is tied up in legal red tape.
On average, it takes five to seven years to develop and implement a new FEMA Flood Insurance Rate Map. As a result, many maps across the U.S. are significantly out of date, often failing to reflect current land use, urban development, or evolving flood risks from extreme weather.
This delay directly affects building codes and infrastructure planning, as local governments rely on these maps to guide construction standards, development approvals, and flood mitigation projects. Ultimately, outdated maps can lead to underestimating flood risks and allowing vulnerable structures to be built in areas that face growing flood threats.
How technology advances can help
New advances in satellite imaging, rainfall modeling, and high-resolution lidar, which is similar to radar but uses light, make it possible to create faster, more accurate flood maps that capture risks from extreme rainfall and flash flooding.
However, fully integrating these tools requires significant federal investment. Congress controls FEMAs mapping budget and sets the legal framework for how maps are created. For years, updating the flood maps has been an unpopular topic among many publicly elected officials, because new flood designations can trigger stricter building codes, higher insurance costs, and development restrictions.
A map of Houston, produced for a 2022 study by researchers at universities and First Street, shows flood risk shifting over the next 30 years as climate change worsens. Blue areas are todays 100-year flood-risk zones. The red areas reflect the same zones in 2050. [Image: Oliver Wing et al., 2022]
In recent years, the rise of climate risk analytics models and private flood risk data have allowed the real estate, finance and insurance industries to rely less on FEMAs maps. These new models incorporate forward-looking climate data, including projections of extreme rainfall, sea-level rise and changing storm patternsfactors FEMAs maps generally exclude.
Real estate portals like Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com, and Homes.com now provide property-level flood risk scores that consider both historical flooding and future climate projections. The models they use identify risks for many properties that FEMA maps dont, highlighting hidden vulnerabilities in communities across the U.S.
Research shows that the availability, and accessibility, of climate data on these sites has started driving property-buying decisions that increasingly take climate change into account.
Implications for the future
As homebuyers understand more about a propertys flood risks, that may shift the desirability of some locations over time. Those shifts will have implications for property valuations, community tax-revenue assessments, population migration patterns, and a slew of other considerations.
However, while these may feel like changes being brought on by new data, the risk was already there. What is changing is peoples awareness.
The federal government has an important role to play in ensuring that accurate risk assessments are available to individuals and communities everywhere. As better tools and models evolve for assessing risk evolve, FEMAs risk maps need to evolve, too.
This article, originally published July 12, 2025, has been updated with another round of flooding in Texas on July 13.
Jeremy Porter is a professor of quantitative methods in the social sciences at the City University of New York.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The feeling that you’re not quite qualified enough for a job, yet somehow managed to slip through the cracks without anyone noticing, is known as imposter syndrome. The sneaky form of self-doubt can show up across occupations (and even outside of work). But while imposter syndrome was once thought to impact women at higher rates then men, a new study reveals work environments, not an individuals gender, may be what’s actually fueling the phenomenon.The research, which was published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, included six experimental studies on how competitive work environments can cause an employee to feel like an imposter. The researchers surveyed employees on how competitive their work environment was, while also collecting information on age, gender, educational level, experience level, and how competitive their personalities were.
The researchers found employees were more likely to admit to feeling like imposters when they worked for an organization that emphasized competition over cooperation. Likewise, those who expressed feelings of imposter syndrome were also more likely to compare themselves to colleagues that were performing better than them.
Previous research has suggested that women have higher rates of imposter syndrome. However, while women may still experience gender discrimination at work, the new research rejects the idea that imposter syndrome is inherently female. “Our findings nuance this gendered perspective as we find no evidence that women report higher levels of impostorism and/or that competitive work climates differently impact mens versus womens impostorism,” the researchers wrote.
Imposter syndrome is not just a minor annoyance for those who experience itit can seriously affect mental health. The feeling of not being capable, qualified, or good enough, can lead to upticks in anxiety, depression, burnout, as well as the inability to even enjoy hard-earned successes at work.
The report called for workplaces that are prone to fostering imposter syndrome in employees to examine their practices, choosing cooperation and inclusiveness over a competitive culture, rather than placing blame on employees who dont feel good enough.
Every so often, Microsoft design director Diego Baca boots up an old computer so he can play around with Windows 95 again.
Baca has made a hobby of assembling old PCs with new-in-box vintage parts, and so his office has become a kind of shrine to Windows history. Still, Windows 95 stands out, he says, because of how easy it made computing for everyone. Many of its foundational concepts, such as the Start menu and taskbar, are still core parts of Windows today.
This story is part of 1995 Week, where well revisit some of the most interesting, unexpected, and confounding developments in tech 30 years ago.
“Windows 95 introduced a lot of these really clear, really durable metaphors of how computing could be simpler for customers,” Baca says.
He’s not alone in finding ways to appreciate Windows 95 again. Almost 30 years after the operating systems release on August 24, 1995, you can run a fully functional version as an app on your computer (even if it’s a Mac), make Windows 11 look like Windows 95 with third-party software, or follow countless TikTok tutorials on giving your iPhone a Windows 95 aesthetic.
Diego Baca [Photo: Courtesy of Microsoft]
There are YouTube playlists with nothing but remixes of the Windows 95 startup soundfamously composed by Brian Enoand there’s an entire musical subgenre that uses Windows 95 aesthetics as a visual component.
Some of this is just cheap retro nostalgia. But the people who worked on Windows 95and those who still appreciate itoffer another explanation: It really was designed to be simpler, and it succeeded just as people were buying PCs for the first time. When we look back now, it’s a reminder of how computers primarily served their users, not the other way around.
Taking design seriously
Windows 95 succeeded in part because it was the first Microsoft operating system that actually put designers in charge of the design. Under pressure to compete with the user interface of Apple’s Macs, Microsoft assembled a design team and made usability testing a big part of the development process.
Virginia Howlett [Photo: Courtesy of Virginia Howlett]
“It was the first time at Microsoft that the design of the product wasn’t completely driven by the engineers,” says Virginia Howlett, who led the Windows 95 design team. “It was a real team effort between research and design and engineering.”
A painter by training, Howlett had joined Microsoft as a print designer and consultant on computer-based training software. But she wanted to get involved with Windows after seeing version 1.0, which launched in 1985 as an add-on for MS-DOS and didn’t prove to be a hit. The smattering of colors in odd placesfor instance, bright red scroll bars that drew attention away from the actual contentleft her aghast.
“Windows 1.0 was this massive missed opportunity,” she says. “It just sort of hurt me so badly how poorly it was designed.”
Microsoft designer Diego Baca’s Windows installations. [Photo: Courtesy of Microsoft]
In 1990, Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0, the first version to catch on in a big way. Howlett and her team contributed to it and 1992s Windows 3.1, but in a limited role that basically involved designing icons and color schemes. In Windows 95, by contrast, the designers were directly involved with figuring out the best way to do things and how to present them to users.
“In Windows 3.1, we were helping with how it looked. In Windows 95, we were helping with how it worked, as well as how it looked,” Howlett says.
Meanwhile, improvements in PC hardware allowed Windows 95 to pull off some new tricks. It was designed with 800-by-600-pixel resolution screens in mindup from the earlier video graphics array (VGA) standard of 640 by 480and by default it supported a color palette of 256 colors, up from 16 in Windows 3.1. Those advancements helped Windows 95’s designers give the system a more three-dimensional look.
“We used shadows and edges to note all the boundaries,” says Chris Guzak, a Microsoft engineer who worked on integrating much of the design work into Windows 95. “When those show up in the interface today, you’re, like, ‘That’s old.’ But then, it was such a cool thing.”
Chris Guzak [Photo: Courtesy of Microsoft]
The limitations of mid-1990s computers had an impact as well. Windows 95’s default color schemeall royal blues, medium grays, and the occasional splash of tealstemmed from the restricted color palette available with graphics cards of the era, and the lack of animations relative to modern computers reinforced a sense of quickness and simplicity.
“I think because of this minimalism, and really minimal animation, it was a lot quieter of an interface compared to what we have today,” says Suzan Marashi, who worked on the Windows 95 user interface team.
Competing with Apple
The motivation to make Windows 95 more approachable came in large part from Apple, which had licensed parts of its own graphical user interface to Microsoft for Windows 1.0, but sued over additional elements that Microsoft added in later versions. Apple eventually lost the case, but Guzak recalls “a heightened sense of competitiveness” from Microsoft’s leadership at the time.
“There really was a sense that we needed something that people could use, that would be accepted, that people could figure out,” he says. Many people were still in the process of learning to use a computer: Even in October 1995, a Times Mirror Center study reported that only 36% of U.S. households owned personal computers.
Suzan Marashi [Photo: Courtesy of Microsoft]
This was also a time when Microsoft was approaching its peak as a consumer-centric company. It spent $300 million on marketing for Windows 95, encouraged retailers to hold launch parties, and had Jay Leno host its own enormous and well-publicized launch event on its Redmond, Washington, campus. Friends actors Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry even starred in a video guide to showcase the operating system’s new features. Consumers lined up at computer stores at midnight to get their hands on the new operating system, presaging the later day-one frenzies over early iPhones.
Paul Thurrott, an author and a longtime technology reporter who covered Microsoft, says all these factors came together at just the right time. Apple’s own software had started to stagnatethe Mac interface was still largely black and white at the timeand even Mac enthusiasts begrudgingly acknowledged that Microsoft’s designs were catching up.
“I think that was the version where they actually had something that made more sense than the Mac did from a UI perspective,” Thurrott says.
Reliving the old days
Re-experiencing Windows 95 today is easy. Just download the Windows 95 Electron app on any Windows, Mac, or Linux machine, and you can use a version of the classic operating system that runs entirely inside its own app window.
Felix Rieseberg, a software developer who currently works on the Claude AI desktop apps for Anthropic, first released the Windows 95 app in 2018, mostly to demonstrate what’s possible with web technologies. But over the years, he’s updated it with new features, including a way to transfer files to and from your actual computer and a version of Internet Explorer that loads old versions of websites from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
The Windows 95 Electron app lets you easily run the 30-year-old operating system on a modern computer. [Image: Jared Newman]
While Rieseberg says the app was originally supposed to prove a point about the power of JavaScript, it also winds up saying something about how modern software has devolved. The Windows 95 app’s Start button pops up instantly when you click on it instead of requiring a split second to appear, and the preloaded version of Excel loads faster than the one that runs on Windows 11.
“It’s remarkable how much you can do inside the JavaScript of [the Windows 95 app] in a way that feels very quick,” he says. “Especially with Word and Excel, it’s very powerful in there, and it covers so much of what people want to do in their life.”
Rieseberg has no way of tracking how many people use the Windows 95 Electron app, but notes that it has more than 22,000 stars on GitHub. That puts it in the top 1,000 GitHub projects of all time.
Elements such as the Start button remain with us, but Windows design has radically changed over the past three decades. [Image: Courtesy of Microsoft]
“I get a lot of emails from people saying thank you, which is, of course, funny because I’m full-time working on software, on big apps with millions of users,” he says. “And this little weekend side project has gotten more thank-you notes than anything else I’ve ever done.”
The software maker Stardock has noticed a similar response with its WindowBlinds and Start11 programs, which allow people to customize modern Windows menus and windowing systems. Both offer a “Classic” theme, which in tandem can approximate the feel of using Windows 95 on a modern PC.
Stardocks “Classic” theme for Start11 and WindowBlind let you give current Windows a Windows 95-like skin. [Image: Courtesy of Stardock]
Brad Sams, Stardock’s vice president and general manager, says that the announcement of its classic theme is a top driver of traffic to WindowBlinds’s product page and of subsequent sales.
“The market has responded exactly how we would expect for that kind of nostalgia,” Sams says. “The simplicity of Windows 95, the basic color scheme, the very direct navigation modeling . . . people just enjoy a simpler experience, and I think that’s what’s driving some of this, right?”
The next 30 years
Three decades later, Microsoft has reasons to be thinking about Windows 95 again.
For one thing, Windows 11 was an attempt by Microsoft to bring some simplicity back. The company stripped down the Start menu with a new designalbeit one that longtime users bristled atand it continues to move more menu items out of its old control panel and into a more modern Settings menu.
“Windows 11 is in many ways as close as we’ve gotten to 95 from a simplicity perspective,” Thurrott says.
Windows 95s Start menus got major makeovers in Windows 10 and Windows 11. [Image: Courtesy of Microsoft]
But now, Microsoft also believes it’s building some new foundations for Windows around AI, not unlike how Windows 95’s designers established the patterns that we still use today. Marcus Ash, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of design and research for Windows and Devices, describes it as an effort that spans the entire company.
“We look at AI as Microsoft’s opportunity to talk to our customers, learn from them, and build a Microsoft-like model for how this is shaping upand Windows is the delivery vehicle,” Ash says.
Marcus Ash [Photo: Courtesy of Microsoft]
It’s a lofty goal, but in some way it underscores why people appreciate Windows 95. The modern Windows experienceand the experience of all major computing platformsis one in which you’re constantly on guard against the company that made it. If you’re not careful, Microsoft might replace your default browser and search engine with its own. If you don’t opt out of AI features in Office, you might wind up paying extra, whether you use them or not. Even just playing solitaireone of the original, simple joys of classic Windows versionsnow means getting constantly bombarded with ads. While the idea of Microsoft inventing a new foundation for computing was once exciting, now it’s also a bit unnerving.
Windows 95’s design reminds us that computers, even when they were less sophisticated, were at least unquestionably on your side. Those who design software now are likely familiar with the term “dark pattern,” which refers to all the ways that software can get you to act against your best interests. Howlett, the Windows 95 designer who’s since gone back to her roots in painting, says she’d never even heard of it.
“It was a kinder, gentler timebefore we were trying to manipulate people,” she says.
Building super-fandom isn’t an art, it’s a science with a proven formula that brands can learn and replicate. The most successful fandoms, like Taylor Swift’s Swifties, follow predictable patterns centered around building strong emotional architecture around a shared idea to generate a sense of belonging. Mastering this formula is integral for brands seeking lasting loyalty as it’s the only reliable path to transforming casual consumers into passionate advocates who drive real business impact.
The fandom formula
Fandoms operate on four fundamental principles:
1. Emotional resonance comes first. Swifties don’t just like Taylor Swift’s music because it sounds good; they see their own stories reflected in her lyrics. Every album becomes a shared emotional journey, not just a collection of songs. Because they see themselves and their values reflected in this artist, they are invested in her success, ensuring each album release goes No. 1 on the charts.
2. Shared rituals and language create insider status. It’s an unspoken code among Marvel fans that you stick around for the post-credit scenes of every single movie. Fandoms develop their own vocabularies, traditions, and ways of belonging that make outsiders want in.
3. A sense of belonging transforms individual consumers into collective identities. There are whole online and in-person communities dedicated to being a member of Beyoncé’s Beyhive. They travel to concerts together, buy music and merchandise together, and every other brand avenue released by Queen Bey.
4. Active participation and co-creation turns audiences into collaborators. Fandoms thrive because fans don’t just consume. They remix, theorize, create fan art, write fanfiction, and build upon the original work, offering another opportunity for direct fan-to-artist connection.
The future is fandom-driven brands
Most brands approach loyalty like a math problem. Spend $100, get 10 points. Visit five times, get a free coffee. Instead of a transactional approach to building brand loyalty, consider deploying the following:
Build emotional anchors in the brand experience: Every brand interaction is an opportunity to create lasting emotional connections beyond the initial point of sale. Red Bull exemplifies this approach by translating the energy and thrill customers experience from their drink into a lifestyle ecosystem. Through immersive experiences like virtual reality alpine climbing and extreme sports activations, Red Bull offers energy and the feeling of limitless possibility for their community of thrill-seekers.
Foster community, not an audience: The distinction between audiences and communities determines whether customers become advocates. Audiences consume, but communities create, connect, and discover together. Celebrities have become especially adept at leveraging fandom to create dedicated brand communities. Take Hailey Bieber’s recent success with cult beauty brand Rhode. From exclusive pop-up events and viral TikTok videos, Rhode created virtual and physical spaces where beauty enthusiasts could experiment and bond over their collective obsession. In turn, Rhode built a movement around beauty that turned skincare routines into shared experiences and enough cultural cache to drive a $1 billion valuation in just three years, leading to its acquisition by e.l.f. Beauty.
Make fans a part of the experience: Fandoms cultivate active participants and collaborators. Netflix’s upcoming “Netflix Houses” represent this principle at scale, transforming viewers into main characters of their favorite Netflix series. One second theyre a contestant of Squid Game and the next theyre wandering through Stranger Things Hawkins to solve the latest mystery. Netflix repurposed dying mall space to create these immersive experiences, curating a new way for younger generations to experience malls and TV shows. A win for Netflix, the teens, and the malls.
The most successful companies of the next decade won’t just have customers, they’ll have believers, which theyll build by making people feel something profound. Behind every transaction is a human being seeking connection, meaning, and belonging. In a world where fandoms power industries, the only thing standing between brands and that devotion is the courage to design experiences that honor this fundamental truth.
Andy Zimmerman is CEO of Journey.
For the past year, Ive had the opportunity to apply my experience in sector diversified financial services, sustainability, and operational leadership at RE Tech Advisors. I oversee a suite of solutions and services allowing real estate portfolio managers/owners a pathway to integrate and communicate their sustainability efforts.
What Ive seen in this sector aligns with many other sectors Ive worked with. ROI is the predominant motivation for actionshort-term ROI via operational cost efficiencies and revenue attraction, and long-term ROI setting up operational resilience in a changing environment.
The ROI focus applies to both traditional initiative and sustainability initiative decisions. The line begins to blur when key sustainability initiatives are considered as key operational efforts, the same way as traditional ROI.
This is how RE Tech Advisors helps real estate owners find key ROI initiatives with strategic action plans to manage risks and optimize performance.
Reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs)
Whether you are creating an action plan to reduce your GHG footprint to comply with building performance standards policies, or youre developing a proactive decarbonization action plan to reduce a buildings carbon footprint, these can significantly reduce costs:
Reduce energy consumption costs: Implementing high efficiency HVAC, better insulation, and smart system integrations such as smart lighting, can reduce energy cost estimates by 30% to 50% in new and existing buildings.
Identify operational inefficiencies: Through real-time data analysis and continuous performance monitoring, building managers can adjust or replace systems to improve efficiency based on actual usage energy and water usage patterns.
Reduce maintenance costs: Increase energy efficiency and conduct proactive maintenance to realize cost savings through reduced emergency repairs and extending building components lifespans.
Avoid noncompliance fines: Fine amounts varies by jurisdiction, but penalties for policy noncompliance can be a significant expense, based on location and building size.
Tax incentives and green financing: Decarbonization roadmaps can unlock millions in funding from programs such as NYSERDA and Fannie Mae and Freddie Macs Green Financing program.
Physical risk management
Physical risk management plans help mitigate potential physical building damage from sporadic weather events such as floods, hurricanes, and tsunamis, plus increasing temperature severity and climate pattern changes. Action plans can include installing flood barriers, storm shutters, upgraded drainage systems, impact-resistant windows, reinforced roofs, and elevated foundations. These investments can lead to short-term cost savings, better resilience, and longer-term ROI. Recognized benefits include:
Lower insurance premiums: Most insurance companies now integrate physical climate risk scenarios in stress test modelling to calculate premiums accounting for potential risk of future loss. This increasingly influences insurance premiums.
Lower costs from severe weather damage: According to Climate.gov, from 2020-2024, the cost of climate-related damage in the U.S. was $746.7 billion; the annual average exceeded $149 billion. This financial impact is more than double the annual average of $64.8 billion from 1980 to 2024.
Build to higher standards: A study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce showed that for every $1 invested in disaster preparation, communities save $13 in economic costs, damages, and cleanup. One example showed, $83 million of investments in resilience and preparedness for a serious tornado hitting Nashville would save more than 5,300 jobs. The amount of production and income saved would be more than $683 million and $464 million, respectively. An S&P Global Sustainable1 report found that companies could face physical climate costs of up to 28% of the asset value annually without mitigation efforts.
Supply chain risk mitigation: Building more resilient supply chain operations and avoiding disruptions from physical building damage and labor interruptions can lead to longer-term ROI. These risks pertain to both U.S. and off-shored supply chain facilities.
Transition risk management
Climate change and its associated risks continue leading to longer term economic changes. These bring transitionary risks that are important to consider to avoid higher resource and material costs. Through transition risk management, real estate owners can position themselves for:
Less exposure to energy supply volatility pricing: Through decreased energy consumption or using alternative sources.
Resource scarcity: Can lead to increasing costs and lack of availability of land, water, timber, and steel.
Improved capital and lending rates: Rates may consider transition climate risks in risk analysis, or provide green financing with lower rates.
Stranded assets: Avoid real estate assets that can be devalued by not appropriately mitigating transition risks. These stranded assets may not be aligned with building energy performance standards such as New Yorks Local Law 97. Noncompliant buildings could see value reductions of 1020% due to penalties and retrofit costs. Furthermore, a First Street study suggests that a $1.4 trillion devaluation will occur across real estate assets over 30 years if they fail to meet decarbonization pathways.
Communication is key
In creating strategies for cost efficiencies and resilience, the owners ultimate desire is to create a portfolio of attractive assets that are optimal operationally to gain short-term and long-term ROI.
It is vitally important to communicate how the company is pursuing these cost saving and resilience initiatives to appropriate stakeholders including investors, banks, employees, operators/tenants, and communities, to help each stakeholder understand the assets value. Key ways to drive this communication include:
Green building certifications: These include LEED, BREEAM, and IREM certifications, which provide stakeholders with independent validation of key energy and carbon management initiatives.
Investor reporting frameworks: GRESB and UNPRI provide investors a detailed look at initiatives being pursued, along with gaps, allowing them to benchmark and compare them to peers.
Corporate social responsibility reports: These tell stakeholders, such as employees and tenants, about the sustainabilityefforts being addressed, offering better transparency.
Last thoughts
Many are pursing the ultimate goal of creating an environment that allows us and future generations to prosper and thrive. Looking at initiatives under the return on investment lens offers a sustainable pathway to meet people where theyre at, speak a language they can connect to, and invite them to join the journey leading to a more sustainable economy and world.
I look forward to continuing the discourse on how sustainability initiatives can best help drive for cost efficiencies and resilience so that these initiatives move from being an overlay to being deeply integrated into operational excellence.
Shila Wattamwar is founder of Radiant Global Advisory, and VP of RE Tech Advisors.
Can you imagine your life without Google?
Google Search, Google Chrome, Google Maps, Google Wallet, Google Drive, the Google Pixel phoneyou could probably live your entire digital life within the Google ecosystem.
Many, including the Justice Department, say thats a problem. The department recently won antitrust cases against Googles search engine and ad placement businesses.
This may all feel abstract and perhaps invisible to most consumers. Google, Microsoft, Applethey constitute the digital water were all swimming in, and their monopoly raises prices, stifles innovation, and shapes our lives often to our detriment.
The landmark antitrust case against Google marks a big victory against this status quo. Heres why its so important.
Monopolies create higher advertising costs
Imagine promoting your business in a small town. You might buy an ad in the newspaper, put up a billboard, and run a spot on the local radio. Because these outlets are independent, you have lower prices and more advertising options.
Now, imagine that the newspaper, billboard, and radio station are all owned by the same company. That shifts the dynamic: Because there is no competition for your ad dollars, prices are higher. Thats essentially what the Google Ad business achieved, especially considering how critical digital advertising has become to businesses. People arent watching commercials anymore. Theyre browsing the web during a commercial break.
Googles monopoly on digital ads allows it to raise prices, making it harder for smaller businesses to compete and thrive.
Googles monopoly created a less user-friendly internet
Historically, about 90% of search traffic comes from Google, giving it a lot of power. For instance, Google uses an algorithm that examines web pages to score how relevant it is for search phrases, like pizza shop Minneapolis or leaking fridge how to fix.
Because Google search is so dominant, people and companies who build and run websites do so with Googles algorithm in mind. That means the user experience takes a back seat to Googles preferences. If youve been to any recipe website lately, you know what Im talking about.
In a recent episode of the podcast Stay Tuned with Preet Bharara, former FTC chair Lina Khan noted that a monopoly is when a company can offer worse products and/or raise costs without suffering any substantial consequences in the market.
You can understand this in some ways as a firm becoming too big to care, Khan said.
Many say the internet has become increasingly awful to use. The first page of search results are often dreck, in my opinion, written for Googles robots, not for humans. Its getting harder to find the information youre looking for, so a lot of people append their searches with tags for Reddit and YouTube, e.g. Hiking itinerary New Zealand Reddit or best salmon dip recipe YouTube, to cut through the SEO slop.
Googles search monopoly could be a chokepoint for information
Because of its dominance, Google can evolve in the direction of its own interests, rather than the interests of the user individually or collectively. Its not wild to imagine that Google can throttle searches for sensitive topics.
During COVID, a 2020 Senate Commerce Committee hearing called Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and then-Twitters then-CEO Jack Dorsey to question them about censoring conservative voices. Back in 2017, the World Socialist Web Site alleged that Google restricted access to 13 progressive and anti-war websites.
For users, the question is not whether Googles algorithmic policies line up with your political views but whether Google can put its thumb on the scale regarding your access to information, based on whats advantageous for Google .
It definitely can, and it definitely has.
Monopolies stifle innovation
Google can throw its weight around to thwart competition. In 2023, internet users noticed that YouTube (which Google owns) ran five seconds slower on the Mozilla Firefox browser than on Google Chrome. Ostensibly, Google tuned YouTube to purposely run slower on a competitors browser to encourage users to switch to Chrome.
Google, like many large companies, tends to acquire burgeoning competition rather than innovate in-house. Google has acquired hundreds of companies, from data analytics firms to rival search engines, from virtual reality developers to mapping products. When a company can buy out all the competition, consumers lose out on new ideas and better products, because the company has no incentive to pursue them.
The ruling
The ruling found that Googles default status with makers of smartphones, tablets, and laptops locked out rivals like Bing and DuckDuckGo, and that the integration of Googles adtech tools created a feedback loop that entrenched its monopoly. Googles ad business is facing its own antitrust lawsuit and may be broken up. The Department of Justice argues that Googles dominance in search (and its vast collection of user data) positions Google to achieve a similar feedback loop in AI-powered search and assistantswhich could create a new monopoly.
The DOJ has proposed forcing Google to sell Chrome and license some of its core search technologies to competitors, as well as ending default search agreements and allowing more visibility into how search results are ranked. The DOJ proposed Google give advance notice of AI-related acquisitions.
Both sides have given their closing arguments and now await the judges ruling, which is expected by August.
This case is a blow against Big Tech in general, which has monopolized almost the entire digital world. I can only hope the FTCs antitrust case against Meta plays out in a similar fashion, and facilitates a return to a freer, more innovative digital world.
Lindsey Witmer Collins is CEO of WLCM App Studio and Scribbly Books
Everyone in Washington knows the score: Americas rare earth supply chain runs straight through China. Its one of the few issues before Congress that enjoys bipartisan support. But most of the solutions on the table remain shortsighted, dominated by two false binaries: Mine more at home or buy more from allies abroad. And yet, the most immediate solution is one barely being discussed.
What is missing from the conversation in both Congress and the Trump administration is a faster, cleaner option: recovering rare earth elements from materials weve already used. If were serious about decoupling from China, recycling rare earth elements from end-of-life products is essential. However, current federal policy has yet to fully recognize this opportunity or support it at scale.
Rare earth elements power the permanent magnets that drive everything from consumer electronics and medical devices to data centers and defense systems. China controls over 90% of rare earth processing capacity and 70% of production. Billions of dollars have been invested in reshoring some of this value chain, but the pace is glacial, and opening new mines will take years, if not decades.
Recycling as an option
Meanwhile, the U.S. is sitting on an untapped domestic source of these very elements: smartphones, cars, appliances, hard drives, and other products we discard every year. Less than 1% of rare earth elements are recycled. Today, the vast majority end up in landfills or are shipped abroad for low-value scrap. With the right policy and technology support, we could be recycling a meaningful share of the rare earth elements we need, right here at home.
To be clear, recycling wont eliminate the need for new mining altogether, but it can dramatically reduce our dependence on an unstable supply chain. So why has Congress largely ignored this path? In part, its due to outdated thinking. For decades, rare earth elements were treated as byproducts, not priorities. But the world has changed, and the stakes have risen. As we transition to an electrified economy where everything from personal mobility to manufacturing depends on electrified systems, we need to treat these elements as the national security assets they are and plan for their full lifecycle.
Three steps to hasten recycling
Recent moves by the Trump administration to invoke the Defense Production Act to support the critical minerals supply chain show that wake-up calls are finally being heard at the highest levels. But waivers alone wont solve the issue. The administration and Congress can take three concrete steps now to accelerate domestic rare earth recycling.
1. Treat end-of-life rare earth elements as a strategic resource. Just as we stockpile oil, we should be inventorying our above-ground, urban minethe stream of magnets and motors already in circulation. This potential is huge: By 2035, the U.S. is expected to generate 43,000 metric tons of end-of-life magnets that could otherwise end up in overseas scrapyards. This untapped above-ground mine is a unique opportunity to secure our critical supply chains, and it should be protected with reinforced export controls.2. Empower federal agencies to take action. The Department of Defense (DOD) and Department of Energy are globally recognized as the most powerful accelerators of strategic industries, fueling Americas rise in defense, technology, and energy leadership. Their contribution has never been more needed. Without immediate action to recycle our retired defense systems, we risk losing critical ground. Congress and the administration now have a unique opportunity to empower these agencies and secure vital elements, strengthen our innovation ecosystem, and ignite a domestic industry, before its too late.
3. Direct federal budgets to scale domestic capacity. We now have the tools and technologies to reshape our critical elements supply chain. Traceability solutions are ready and aligned with DOD requirements to avoid entities of concern, yet the majority of rare earths are still processed in China. Agencies like the Export-Import Bank of the United States, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, and DOD form the powertrain to fast-track strategic projects and scale domestic capacity. Whats needed now is for the administration to seize the full potential of this moment and direct budget to turn readiness into resilience.
Invest in infrastructure and incentives now
The urgency is real. China has once again demonstrated it can rapidly snap export controls in and out of effect, perpetuating volatile market dynamics, serving as a not-so-subtle reminder of how fragile our current supply chain really is. To break the dependency, Congress should support all viable paths to resilience, including setting policies that will leverage the existing above-ground mine.
We dont need to wait a decade to build new mines or hope for more reliable trade partners. The materials we need are already here, in products weve already used. We can start recovering rare earth elements here and now. But unlocking that potential will take broader thinking.
Policymakers must expand their focus beyond extraction and invest in the infrastructure and incentives that will save this above-ground mine. By keeping critical elements within our borders and recovering them from end-of-life materials, we can strengthen national security, drive economic growth, support American jobs, and secure the future of U.S. innovation and technological leadership. The industry stands ready; it is now up to the administration to capitalize on this momentum.
Ahmad Ghahreman is CEO and cofounder of Cyclic Materials.
When Ricardo Dollero graduated from UCLA last May with great grades and a robust resume of extracurriculars, he wasnt expecting a particularly difficult job search. After majoring in anthropology, he looked for jobs at museums or nonprofits, but after months of scouring online job boards and applying for everything he felt qualified for, Dollero still hadnt found a job.
Thats when my partner and I decided, lets leave the United States and live an adventure and start our careers in another country where our degrees actually have value, he says.
By February, they had secured positions teaching English in a school in Thailand. Its a path recent graduates looking to experience a new culture have chosen for decades. The agency Dollero used, Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE), has been around since 1947. In recent years, though, grads from U.S. universities have increasingly been choosing to go abroad to escape the challenging job market at home.
Although June data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics paints a rosy picture of the current job market, with 147,000 jobs added and unemployment falling to 4.1%, entry-level jobs are becoming ever more elusive.
Starting in September 2018, the percentage of unemployed recent graduates has consistently been higher than the overall unemployment rate. As of March 2025, the percentage differed by nearly 2%, with 5.8% of recent grads unemployed compared to 4.0% of all workers. This means young college-educated workers have spent years facing an especially competitive and difficult job market. And these challenges are only growing as more companies remove entry-level jobs in favor of using AI. In fact, 40% of employers expect to reduce their workforce and automate tasks with AI.
With so few opportunities available, many recent graduates struggling in their job search are seeking alternatives to traditional nine-five office jobsincluding opportunities to work abroad.
We have indeed observed a notable increase in interest from recent college graduates seeking TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certification and opportunities to teach abroad, says Ian OSullivan, owner of the TEFL Institute. The appeal of gaining global experience, developing transferable skills, and making a meaningful impact has driven more young adults to consider TEFL as a viable and exciting option.
The TEFL Institute is one of hundreds of organizations providing certification courses that teach people how to teach English as a foreign language. Many of these courses require no prior teaching experience and many of the companies offering them also guide new teachers through the process of finding a job abroad. The extra support makes these programs ideal for recent graduates, many of whom have never traveled outside their home countries or worked a full-time job before.
For Dollero, having an organization help with the process of getting set up in his new home made it easier to jump into his role as a teacherone that he describes as very fulfilling.
One very specific thing that has marked my time here in Thailand is the respect that the students have for the teachers, Dollero says. Its just heartwarming that they want you there.
These positive experiences differ from teaching in the United States, where teacher shortages prevail not because there is a lack of passionate new teachers but because of low salaries, difficult working conditions, and a lack of support at work, according to a recent analysis from the Learning Policy Institute.
A typical contract for teaching English at a school or language center abroad lasts one academic year, typically 9 to 12 months. Many teachers choose to renew their contracts or find a new TEFL job in yet another country. Others choose to use their experience in education to find teaching jobs closer to home.
While he isnt yet sure what the rest of his career will bring, or whether he will choose to extend his time in Thailand, Dollero notes that his teaching experience has already helped him grow as a person. He’s learned to effectively manage people, organize his time, and become more adaptable.
While the need for technological skills in the labor market is expected to grow the fastest, many soft skills are also expected to rise in importance over the next five years, according to insights from the World Economic Forums 2025 Future of Jobs Report. Creative thinking, resilience, flexibility, agility, and curiosity have all become increasingly important as the workforce adapts after the COVID-19 pandemic and in the wake of innovations like AI.
These skills, and many others, are the type one can learn from taking on new experiences, such as navigating a new culture and managing a classroom. Regardless of whether recent graduates choose to remain teachers after their TEFL experience, the soft skills they develop can open doors.
Many of our graduates have shared inspiring stories about how TEFL has transformed their professional and personal lives, opening doors to international careers, remote work opportunities, and lifelong friendships, OSullivan says. The experience not only enhances employability but also fosters a global perspective that is highly valued in todays interconnected world.
Back at home, many graduates are pessimistic about the job market. Over half (56%) of the class of 2025 reports feeling somewhat or very pessimistic about starting their careers according to a recent report by the job board Handshake. For students having trouble finding a job after college, like he did, Dollero highly recommends a TEFL job.
Im 100% for others doing what I did, Dollero says. Just because youre being rejected from hundreds of jobs in the United States doesnt mean its going to be the same thing in another place.
