Philippa Kaur

“HI, JUST CHECKING in. Can I put in some more?” The bosses of promising startups are bombarded by such texts these days. Big funds in particular are falling over themselves to grab a piece of the tech pie (see chart). Yet one founder seems to have received more than his fair share of pitches: Ali Ghodsi, the chief executive of Databricks. And he has said yes to many. On August 31st the company confirmed that, only six months after a $1bn financing deal, it had raised another $1.6bn, valuing it at $38bn—$10bn more than after the previous round. Among the Silicon Valley cognoscenti, these numbers cement Databricks’ status as the most hyped company of the hour.The software-maker is soon likely to be known farther afield. Later this year it is expected to stage the largest-ever initial public offering (IPO) of a software firm—larger than that in late 2020 of Snowflake, its most serious rival. Alternatively, some predict, it could be snapped up by Microsoft in the largest ever software takeover. Whatever the outcome, there is substance to the hype. Databricks could become, in the age of artificial intelligence (AI), what Oracle and its databases once were in the world of conventional corporate software: the dominant platform on top of which applications are built and run.Databricks was founded in 2013 to commercialise Spark, a piece of open-source software that processes reams of data from different sources to train algorithms which then become the engines of AI applications. The firm added features, including code that makes it easier for developers to program the system as well as manage their workflow, and offered the package as a cloud-based subscription service.Yet Databricks only really took off when it added another component called “lakehouse”. It is a combination of two sorts of databases, a “data warehouse” and a “data lake” (hence the portmanteau). Both have historically been separate because of technical constraints and because they serve different purposes. Data warehouses are filled with well-defined corporate data that allow a firm to look into its past, for instance at how its sales have evolved, something called “business intelligence” (BI). Data lakes are essentially a dumping ground for all sorts of data that can reveal a firm’s future, including whether sales are likely to go up or down. Yet this separation is increasingly inefficient and unnecessary, explains Max Schireson of Battery Ventures, an investor in Databricks. “Doing BI and AI in different systems today is kind of stupid,” he notes.Firms have jumped on what Databricks offers, in particular incumbents worried about being disrupted by an AI-driven startup. Comcast, an American broadband provider, uses it to allow its customers to use their voice to select movies; ABN Amro, a Dutch bank, to recommend services; and H&M, a fashion retailer, to optimise its supply chain. Databricks now claims more than 5,000 customers and annualised subscription revenue of $600m—75% more than at the end of last year.Throwing Databricks at SnowflakeMr Ghodsi has set his sights even higher. “Ultimately, everything data should be on Databricks,” he says. He is planning on investing the newly raised capital to keep growing and become the leader in lakehouse systems. Nobody should fault Mr Ghodsi, who once taught computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, for his ambitions. Yet realising them will not be easy. Other firms are already pushing into the territory. He will probably be able to fend off the three big cloud-computing providers: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure. Although they have more than enough resources to compete and provide integrated AI packages, they share one big problem. Firms increasingly prefer not to store all their data in a single cloud, fearing they will get stuck with one vendor. Instead, they opt for products, such as Databricks’, that run across several clouds.Snowflake is a different story. It, too, is building lakehouses. It is also taking a different approach. Whereas Databricks is adding BI to its AI platform, Snowflake, which has grown up in the data-warehouse world, is adding AI to its cloud-based BI package, meaning that their respective products will increasingly overlap. Whereas most of Databricks’ code is open-source, Snowflake’s is proprietary. And whereas Databricks has mostly stuck to a “land-and-expand” strategy, whereby small software deals grow into bigger ones, Snowflake practises a more conventional top-down sales model that focuses on big deals from the start.All this will make for a battle over the next few years. But it could be rudely interrupted if Microsoft snaps up Databricks. The software firm is already one of Databricks’ investors and co-operates closely with it. Among other things, Azure offers a version of Databricks’ platform and Microsoft uses its name in presentations about its strategy, something it rarely does with other firms. It would be a good fit. At its core, Microsoft is still a company selling tools for developers to write applications and platforms to run them on. And Databricks represents both a complement and a strategic threat: it lets data, rather than people, write the code.Databricks’ IPO is not meant to take the firm public, according to some analysts, but to put a price on it, so that negotiations can start somewhere. But the hype surrounding the company could thwart such plans. Snowflake is now worth about $90bn. If Databricks’ IPO outdoes Snowflake’s, its asking price may well be north of $100bn. And like Pinterest, a social-media firm which Microsoft considered buying earlier this year, it may become too pricey even for a company as loaded as world’s biggest software firm. ■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter.This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “The Oracle of AI” More

IN “READY PLAYER ONE”, a science-fiction novel set in 2045, people can escape a ghastly world of global warming and economic mayhem by teleporting themselves into the OASIS, a parallel universe where they can change identity, hang out and forget the miseries of everyday life. In the book, published in 2011, the OASIS is the brainchild of a gaming tycoon who has everyone’s best interests at heart. Lurking in the background, though, is Innovative Online Industries, an evil internet conglomerate that intends to take it all over and reap the rewards for itself.There are echoes of this “good v greedy” narrative in the way Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, creator of “Fortnite”, an online-gaming phenomenon, talks about the metaverse. The idea is in vogue in Silicon Valley and is considered the next big thing in the internet. No one quite knows what the term means; at its most futuristic, the OASIS is a pretty good analogy for what tech utopians have in mind. For now, suffice to say that if you think you have spent more than enough time online during the covid-19 pandemic, think again. Using virtual and augmented reality, avatars and lifelike computer imagery, the metaverse will further erase the boundaries between people’s online and physical lives. Unsurprisingly, big tech is salivating at the prospect of yet more realms of human existence open to data extraction.So is Mr Sweeney, who is creating a mini-metaverse for the 350m monthly users of “Fortnite”, immersing them not just in fantasy games, but virtual pop concerts and the like. However, he is determined to stop today’s Silicon Valley elite from creaming off all the rewards from this visionary future. His ambition is for vibrant competition, fair pay for creators and economic efficiency unlike anything on the web today. How realistic—or sincere—is it?Epic, a privately held company partly owned by Tencent, a Chinese tech goliath, already depicts the creation of the metaverse as a giant-slaying contest. It is part of the backdrop for its recent courtroom battles against Apple (a verdict is expected soon) and against Google (a trial has not yet started). Primarily, the antitrust cases are about the iPhone’s App Store and Google’s Android Play Store, which Epic portrays as price-gouging fiefs, in particular taking a cut of up to 30% on in-app purchases and refusing to let developers use alternative payment-processing platforms. But in court Mr Sweeney told the judge in the Apple case that the issue was also “existential” for the creation of the metaverse. Epic’s aim, he said, was to turn “Fortnite” into a platform on which independent developers could distribute their games and other forms of entertainment online and earn more of the profits themselves. “With Apple taking 30% off the top, they make it hard, very hard for Epic and creators to exist in this future world,” he said.Both Apple and Google deny the allegations. In court, Apple countered that its commissions were an industry standard, and that it invested in creating a user-friendly environment. But it is being forced to give ground elsewhere. In a recent partial settlement of a class-action case in America Apple agreed to make it easier for app developers to contact customers about other payment methods. Then, on August 31st, South Korea passed a law allowing smartphone users to pay developers directly. Google calls Epic’s allegations baseless. Where does this leave Mr Sweeney’s vision of the new web? And how likely is it to materialise?The vision certainly looks appealing. No “mega corporation” would be dominant. Instead, the metaverse will be built by millions of creators, programmers and designers, earning a bigger share of the rewards than the tech giants currently allow. Instead of the siloed state of today’s internet, he says there should be free movement of play between gaming networks, such as Microsoft’s Xbox and Sony’s PlayStation. The cutting-edge “engines” that the gaming industry uses to make real-world simulations should be based on common standards so that they, too, are interoperable. Adding to the economic efficiency could be decentralised tools such as the blockchain and cryptocurrencies.Mr Sweeney makes no bones about contrasting such open competition with the current situation. That won’t deter Silicon Valley giants from seeking a big future role. Gaming firms such as Epic, Roblox and Minecraft are furthest advanced in bringing metaverse-like aspects to their platforms; Minecraft has a virtual library of censored press articles to encourage freedom of thought in autocratic regimes. But the tech giants are hard on their heels. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s boss, believes its Oculus Quest headsets will be part of a virtual- and augmented-reality future that could supersede the smartphone. In August Facebook introduced Horizon Workrooms to its headsets, enabling workers to attend virtual meetings as avatars. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, talks of building an “enterprise metaverse”. Doubtless they want to make the metaverse more of a walled garden than Mr Sweeney does.Load of old Roblox?As for Mr Sweeney’s apparent altruism, it is probably wise not to take it at face value. Epic and other gaming firms could plausibly one day pursue dominance of a three-dimensional internet similar to that big tech has in the two-dimensional one. As Daniel Newman of Futurum Research, a consultancy, puts it, from Microsoft in the 1980s to Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon in the 2010s, all tech giants have started out offering unique services that consumers loved, and fought for more open competition against incumbents. Over time, as their leadership positions strengthened, their missionary zeal waned. It is hard to imagine a world, no matter how futuristic, in which this pattern does not persist.For now, the big gaming firms cannot conceive of themselves as cartoon villains. And the metaverse may indeed be too vast to be dominated by any one firm. But whatever parallel universes they build, the desire to create not just fantasy dystopias but also moats against competition is quintessentially the capitalist way. ■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter.This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Epic’s battle royale” More

IT IS HARD work being a capitalist in a communist dictatorship. In the past few months China’s authorities have gone after big technology firms for alleged abuse of monopolistic power and the misuse of data. In the name of social cohesion they have banned for-profit tutoring and hectored companies and billionaires about their wider social responsibilities. The crackdown is reckoned to have wiped more than $1trn off the value of China’s biggest tech firms.On August 30th, the country’s video-gaming industry—the world’s largest with annual sales of $46bn—became the latest target. New rules proclaimed that, in order to “effectively protect the physical and mental health of minors”, children under 18 would be allowed to play online games only between 8pm and 9pm on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays.The rules are the most restrictive in the world, and will affect tens of millions of people. Around two-thirds of Chinese children are thought to play online games regularly. But the idea is not new. China has worried about what it sees as the addictive and corrupting qualities of video games for more than a decade, says Daniel Ahmad, a senior analyst at Niko Partners, which follows Asian video-gaming markets. Censors frown on things like politics and gore, requiring changes to foreign games seeking a license for sale in China. The new regulations are an update to ones passed in 2019 that limited children to 90 minutes per day of gaming, and imposed a curfew between 10pm and 8am. (On August 27th South Korea, which implemented a similar curfew in 2011, announced it would scrap its rules.)Those previous rules had loopholes. China’s “anti-addiction system” requires gamers to use their real names, and a government-issued identity number, to play online, and boots them from the game when their allotted time has expired. But children could use adult credentials to log in, and play in internet cafes that turned a blind eye to long gaming sessions. This time, the authorities seem keen to block such workarounds. Alongside the new rules were promises of tougher policing and punishments for companies found to be dragging their feet. Tencent, China’s biggest video-gaming company, has been experimenting with facial-recognition software to ensure that crafty players cannot use other people’s credentials.Despite their draconian nature, the immediate impact of the new rules was muted. Shares in Tencent and NetEase, a rival firm, dipped slightly after the announcement. That is probably because the rules are unlikely to make much instant difference to the companies’ bottom lines. Although there are thought to be around 110m gamer kids in China, they have little money to splash on new characters or virtual items. In its most recent set of quarterly results, Tencent said that only 2.6% of gaming revenue came from players under 16.The long-term consequences could be more painful. The impecunious teenage gamers of today are the young adult gamers, complete with disposable income, of tomorrow. If the crackdown is effective, says one observer, Chinese gaming giants could see their flow of new customers dry up. Western firms could suffer as well. Jefferies, a bank, flags Roblox, an American gaming platform that allows users to create their own mini-games and share them with friends, as particularly at risk. The game, which has more than 40m daily users around the world, is aimed explicitly at younger players. It launched in China in July.Another question is how far the crackdown will spread. For now, a thriving grey market links Chinese gamers to foreign firms that are unable, or unwilling, to seek an official license to sell their products in the country’s vast market. “PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds”, an online shooter, is reckoned to have sold around 20m copies in China despite lacking official approval. Around 50m Chinese gamers are thought to use Steam, an online shop for PC games run by Valve, an American firm, that has remained curiously unblocked by China’s Great Firewall (indeed, Chinese is the service’s most popular language). That gives them access to tens of thousands of unlicensed games, free from official nannying.The signs are ominous. In February Apple removed tens of thousands unlicensed games from the Chinese version of its app store. A stripped-down, censorship-compliant Chinese version of Steam launched in February. For now, it offers few games and has hardly any users. But if the crackdown continues, Chinese gamers may soon find the local version is all that is available.For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter. More

A CROWD of reporters and Hollywood types, drawn by the drama and glamour of the event, are likely to jostle to find a seat in a courtroom in San Jose on August 31st for what may be the next, perilous act for a woman once touted as the next Steve Jobs and the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire. Jury selection will begin for the fraud trial of Elizabeth Holmes, the former chief executive of Theranos, a startup which attempted to revolutionise the process of blood testing but failed spectacularly in 2016 after the press and regulators probed the company’s inflated claims. These sorts of cases usually hinge on subtle distinctions between exaggeration and outright deceit and whether such deceit was intentional. But the legal intricacies may take second place to theatrics. Will Ms Holmes take the stand in her own defence, a move fraught with risk under the spotlight of cross-examination? Will she claim “coercive control” by her second-in-command at Theranos, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, with whom she had an “abusive intimate-partner relationship”, according to a filing by Ms Holmes’s lawyer ordered for release by a judge on August 26th? Mr Balwani will be tried separately in January; he has denied Ms Holmes’s claims.But first will come the question of whether any juror can be found in Silicon Valley without preconceptions of guilt. Around half of the potential pool has acknowledged exposure to press coverage of the case. That is hardly a surprise. The story of Ms Holmes, who founded the company in 2003 as a 19-year-old university dropout, is an epic of Valley hubris. She brought glamour and charisma to the corporate world, adorning magazine covers as the subject of flattering features within. Her relentless promotion of her firm’s potential led to a valuation of $9bn in 2015 before its spectacular demise. The firms’ investors ignored its flawed financial performance and the dubious quality of the device it was developing, and were drawn instead by the company’s idealistic goal of making testing cheap, easy and ubiquitous.The attention lavished on Theranos seemed justified for a time. In 2015, Joe Biden, then America’s vice-president, called Theranos, “the laboratory of the future”. The company’s board included two former secretaries of state (George Schultz and Henry Kissinger), two of defence (James Mattis and William Perry), a former head of the Centres for Disease Control and David Boies, perhaps the country’s most famous lawyer. Two huge American companies, Safeway and Walgreens, agreed to distribute Ms Holmes’s products. The awareness grew with the company’s abrupt failure in 2016. Multiple books and television documentaries shone more light on Ms Holmes. A TV mini-series and a film is now reportedly in the works. ABC News will bring back a popular podcast about Ms Holmes that will focus on the trial. In many ways, such coverage is not justified by the facts of the case. Ms Holmes and Mr Balwani are accused of lying to investors, patients and doctors about the effectiveness of Theranos’s tests. But Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists are well used to over-hyped plans, though most never see the light of day. Failure rates among tech startups are high, though most do not lose as much as the $700m or so that had been invested in Theranos. The buzz over Theranos stems from more than money. Because it was involved in health care rather than, say, enterprise software or co-working facilities, any mistake could have had catastrophic consequences for a patient. The inability of Theranos to deliver on its promises was also a disappointment to those who had seen it as a way for science to improve lives. Most controversially, the case resonates because Ms Holmes looked like a woman succeeding in a male-dominated world. Her failure, say some female company founders in Silicon Valley, has made life tougher. The issue will become more prominent if Ms Holmes is convicted and sentenced to jail as in July she gave birth to her first child. That could make for a mini-series with a heart-rending finale. More

A LOBBY CAN shape the first impressions of a business. Guests at the building housing the New York headquarters of Jefferies, an investment bank, were once greeted by a section of the Berlin Wall purchased from the East German government. In the London office of Slaughter and May, a law firm, water trickles down an atrium wall into a shallow pool made of natural stone. The San Francisco home of Salesforce, a software giant, greets visitors with a 106-foot (32-metre) video wall displaying anything from soothing waterfalls to Pac-Man clips.As covid-19 shut offices around the world, those crucial first impressions were mediated by video calls. With workers stuck at home, corporate meetings—with underlings, fellow workers, clients and investors—turned almost entirely virtual. Anything that used to involve people crowding into spaces, from performance reviews to shareholder jamborees, roadshows and initial public offerings, moved to cyberspace.Since March 2020 the Nasdaq exchange in New York has held more than 150 virtual bell ceremonies. The Hong Kong Stock Exchange has conducted at least 140. The aggregate amount of time people spent on Microsoft’s Teams video-conferencing platform tripled to 45m hours a day. Zoom went from being a moderately successful startup to a verb (and, for some, a four-letter word).Now that many companies are reopening their offices and reconfiguring their work arrangements into something hybrid, they are also rethinking their approach to meetings. Love them or (more often) loathe them, powwows are an integral part of modern commerce. Managers must therefore decide which parts of remote experience, if any, they want to keep. A poll of more than 7,000 people in ten countries by Zoom found that two-thirds would prefer a mix of virtual and in-person meetings in future. As with all work that is part remote and part not, in other words, meetings’ future looks messy.Fully virtual meetings are not going anywhere. Lumi, a service which helps organise shareholder meetings, says that 90% of this year’s gatherings will be fully remote, compared with 11% in 2019. OpenExchange, a firm that provides virtual and hybrid events for companies and investors, expects to run 200,000 of them in 2021, up from 4,000 in 2019.The rampant Delta variant of covid-19, which is forcing firms to postpone their fuller return to the conference room, is one reason. But not the only one: virtual meetings allow more people to attend than if participants had to travel to distant locations. Online gatherings can also be more flexible. During the pandemic British workers scheduled meetings at times they would normally be commuting to and from work, according to research by Doodle, a scheduling service.Video conferences also seem to work just fine for many purposes. Deloitte, a consultancy, surveyed 1,000 executives in America involved in private-equity transactions and mergers and acquisitions. It found that 87% of respondents said their firms were able to close deals in a purely virtual environment. More than half would prefer to maintain this after the pandemic.But virtual get-togethers have drawbacks, too. More can be packed into a day, leading to Zoom fatigue (another phrase that has entered common parlance). They are also less likely to end on time. A study by Microsoft showed that the average meeting in Microsoft Teams lengthened from 35 to 45 minutes, compared with a year earlier (probably because they lack physical prompts such as people getting up to leave or the next group barging into the conference room for their own conclave).Hybrid meetings where some people are present in person and others dial in present a particular challenge. Most organisations have underinvested in the audiovisual technology that ensures that those dialling in are seen, heard, and do not feel like second-class citizens. In most pre-pandemic meeting rooms such considerations were an afterthought. Poor lighting and ill-placed microphones are common.Such technical niggles can be fixed with better technology and cleverer design of office space. Companies are experimenting with larger, higher-quality screens, voice-tracking cameras that follow the speaker and tools that limit background noise. Software that transcribes or records meetings is becoming standard, easing pressure on employees to attend every session. Silicon Valley giants such as Microsoft and Facebook want to take things a step further, developing an augmented-reality “metaverse”, where users anywhere can interact with one another in real time.Not everyone is convinced. Some firms are pushing back against the virtual culture. Many Wall Street bosses have taken a hardline position against remote work, including meetings. JPMorgan Chase called employees back to offices earlier than most. It is now urging its bankers to get back on planes to meet clients in person. JPMorgan’s boss, Jamie Dimon, has made its fleet of private jets available to managing directors. This summer an informal contest kicked off at the bank, with employees awarded points for face-to-face client meetings. The reward was reportedly a meal with JPMorgan’s top brass. Mr Dimon may be on to something: seven in ten respondents in Zoom’s study thought that it was important to meet clients physically.Fearful of forsaking good ideas that emerge from spur-of-the-moment meetings, many companies are reshaping their spaces to facilitate such serendipity whenever workers do deign to show up at the office. A poll of 400 international firms by Knight Frank, a property consultancy, found that more than half expect the share of collaborative spaces in their portfolios to increase over the next three years. Nokia, a Finnish maker of telecoms equipment, says that from next year around 70% of its office space will be dedicated to collaboration and teamwork. Dropbox, a cloud-storage firm, has sold its headquarters in San Francisco. Its new sites, known internally as studios, will feature larger conference rooms with versatile layouts.And whereas big majorities of people tell surveys they favour hybrid work, they clash over what this means for meetings specifically. With respect to large gatherings the clear preference seems to be for virtual settings, which 61% of Zoom’s respondents favoured, compared with 31% opting for the physical conference room. But the preferences differed by gender, with around 44% of men preferring to attend large group meetings in person, compared with just 33% of women (whom studies show to be less likely to speak up in meetings and likelier to be interrupted by men). With respect to smaller team meetings, remote workers were split evenly between wanting to join in person and preferring to do so virtually. And some countries’ work cultures look particularly averse to virtualisation: 41% of French workers insisted they would only meet in person (see chart).Some decisions will be straightforward enough. Meetings where crucial calls are made or new clients introduced will almost certainly lean in-person. When it comes to less consequential yet still important confabs, the calculation will be more complicated. One thing is certain. Many meetings will remain a pain for managers to schedule and, for many of their subordinates, a pain to attend. More

IN FEBRUARY THE administration of Narendra Modi trumpeted a sweeping plan to privatise India’s corporate jewels. Past governments have made such promises with little to show for it. Yet this time investors’ ears perked up. Covid-19 had drained public coffers by crushing the private economy while piling costly burdens on the public sector. In India’s business circles hope flickered of an economic reset that might complete the fitful liberalising project that began 30 years ago in response to another economic crisis.Listen to this storyYour browser does not support the element..css-1jkoieb{margin-bottom:1rem;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;gap:1rem;background-color:var(–ds-color-london-95);-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}@media (min-width: 37.5rem){.css-1jkoieb{-webkit-flex-direction:row;-ms-flex-direction:row;flex-direction:row;padding:1.5rem;}}@media (max-width: 37.4375rem){.css-1jkoieb{-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;text-align:center;padding:1rem;}}.css-1ff36h2{-webkit-box-flex:1;-webkit-flex-grow:1;-ms-flex-positive:1;flex-grow:1;}.css-11gb3fw{font-weight:500;line-height:var(–ds-type-leading-upper);font-size:var(–ds-type-scale-3);}Listen on the go.css-1xitiib{margin-top:0.25rem;font-size:var(–ds-type-scale-0);font-family:var(–ds-type-system-sans);}Get .css-1jwcxx3{font-style:italic;}The Economist app and play articles, wherever you are@media (max-width: 37.4375rem){.css-1xv8s2u{display:none;}}Play in app@media (min-width: 37.5rem){.css-16pctwk{display:none;}}Play in appAfter months of silence, on August 23rd the finance minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, finally spoke up. The goal, she said, was to raise $81bn, or 3% of GDP, over four years. But rather than doing so through outright sales, the transactions will be more complex—and less transformative as a result. The Indian state will liquidate small minority stakes in a few airports. Other big assets are expected to be leased to investors for up to 25 years. “Monetisation of core infrastructure assets”, Ms Sitharaman intoned, “does not mean selling the assets.”The assets not being sold include 42,300km of power lines, 26,700km of highways, 8,200km of natural-gas pipelines, 400 railway stations, 150 trains, 160 coal-mining projects, 25 airports and stakes in nine ports. In this half-hearted divestment strategy Mr Modi seems to emulate India’s biggest private conglomerate, Reliance Industries, which has sold minority stakes in various bits of its empire such as mobile telecoms and refining while retaining ultimate control over them.This approach has its advantages. Investors get a stable, bond-like return in entities that are already up and running (which removes the headache of dealing with India’s baffling permitting process). The public gets a chance of better services, as new operators improve efficiency and increase investment. In the past moving assets into private management helped spruce up airports in Delhi and Mumbai.Missing from Ms Sitharaman’s announcement was an update on the fate of big companies. Three divestments are said to be in the works, involving the Shipping Corporation of India, Pawan Hans (a helicopter service) and Neelachal Ispat Nigam, a steelmaker. But progress appears glacial.Most disappointing of all was the government’s reluctance to follow up on its promise to sell the biggest prizes, such as Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC), Air India (the flag-carrier, also wholly owned by the state), Bharat Petroleum (an oil-and-gas giant that is listed but state-run), and even some state banks. The sale of such assets, which were nationalised after India’s independence in 1947, would carry symbolic, not just financial, weight.Observers blame the lost momentum on three causes. First, the government still has uses for some of the firms; LIC has served as a source of bail-out cash for struggling businesses. Second, the firms’ employees are a powerful constituency that resists change. Third, like bureaucrats everywhere, Indian ones worry that a completed sale would prompt endless inquiries into whether the price was too low. For everyone involved, safer to do nothing. ■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter.This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Gone today, here tomorrow” More

IT IS A truth universally acknowledged that women carry a heavier burden than men when it comes to child care and household chores. It became truer still during the pandemic home-working experiment, and is likely to hold in the likely hybrid future of part-remote work. It is tempting for some women never to set foot in the office again, if their firms allow it, so they can devote time otherwise wasted on commuting or office chit-chat to more pressing family matters. According to research by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University and colleagues, 32% of college-educated American women with children want to work remotely full-time, compared with 23% of comparable men.Such decisions are completely understandable—not least because besides more responsibilities at home, women’s lot at work can be no picnic, either. Female managers often end up playing the conventional male and female roles, leading the pack while also nurturing those left behind. It can be tiresome to be many things at the same time.Understandable, but still regrettable. Some reasons for that are mundane. Your columnist, a guest female Bartleby, finds that the office offers a welcome break from the never-ending duties of housekeeping and parenting. Other reasons are mercenary. One pre-pandemic study on work-life balance suggested that women were likelier than men to experience “flexibility stigma”.In the wake of covid-19 flexible work arrangements are less stigmatised (for now). A recent British government report warned that their uptake may be unequal between the genders. If more women work from home, and take on an even greater share of family responsibilities, the result may be an ever-bigger gender pay gap and an ever-harder glass ceiling.There is another, more elusive reason why women who do not return to the office are missing out. Not every workplace is as informal as The Economist’s (with its deadpan humour and discussions of muscle tone and QE, alcohol consumption and the equity risk premium). Yet even in duller corporate settings, walking down a corridor, washing hands in the bathroom or making yet another cup of coffee in the kitchen, you are only seconds away from a chat or a joke. That can—admittedly unreliably and in ways that are difficult to measure—spur spontaneity and lead to new ideas.Compared with that, virtual collaboration is like evaporated milk with 60% of its water removed: safer, mostly up to the job but a sterile version of face-to-face interaction that leaves an unsatisfying aftertaste. Physical proximity brings higher risks (once of death or injury by an enemy, today of a face-to-face snub, more painful than a mean tweet, or of a covid-19 infection). It also brings higher rewards, including emotional ones that are no less important than the pragmatic sort.Though times have changed, many female workers, including Bartleby, find themselves sympathising with Irina, one of the titular “Three Sisters” in Anton Chekhov’s play from 1900. Holed up with her two siblings in the countryside she longs for Moscow—not only its vibrancy and worldliness but the opportunity it affords for work. Her frantic desire to work reflects an attempt to escape the tedium of domesticity, and invest life with meaning by imposing a framework and a sense of accountability. Many modern executives, male and female, would recognise Chekhov’s belief that being guarded from work is a curse, not a blessing. The same goes for being shielded from the office, notwithstanding its myriad complications.There are downsides to being a clinically efficient flexiworker. They include relinquishing the daily banter and sense of complicity among colleagues, many of whom double as friends. Women determined not to waste a single minute when they could be multitasking will give up more than just professional advancement, important though that is. They are also giving up a sense of connection to others. Hyper-efficiency and distance mean less opportunity for interpersonal tension but also less gratuitous joy, which is hard to replicate on Zoom.Those brief moments of joy are an important part of working life. It is nowhere and everywhere, like seeing the Virgin Mary in burnt toast. It is to be treasured precisely because it does not last. Bartleby recommends squandering precious minutes, here and there, on camaraderie and pointless glee. The cost, in the tedious aspects of office life, is tolerable. The returns, emotional as well as practical, can be immense.For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter.This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Why women need the office” More

“THE WORLD wants you to be typical …Don’t let it happen,” Jeff Bezos warned in April in his last annual shareholder letter as CEO of Amazon. Hence bewilderment that his e-empire is to adopt a retail format that is very typical indeed: the department store. Having helped drive many chains out of business, it is now eyeing the format to boost its own retail fortunes.As a company, Amazon is entering a more mature phase. Now with a new chief executive, Andy Jassy, it is being forced to recognise that pure e-commerce has limits. It is also facing fresh competition from conventional retailers like Walmart and Target that are belatedly showing that they, too, can do the internet well.Amazon’s high-street presence is small. Since 2015 it has opened 24 bookshops in America. Its 30 “4-star” shops, which stock items customers rate highly, function like a walk-in website. Whole Foods, an upmarket grocer it bought in 2017, contributes the bulk of its physical-store revenues, which accounted for just 4% of Amazon’s total sales in the most recent quarter. Its new Amazon Fresh grocery chain and Amazon Go cashierless stores barely chip in.So the new 30,000-square-foot (2,800-square-metre) retail spaces it is reportedly envisaging mark a departure. Amazon has neither confirmed nor denied its plans. But leaked details on the stores’ size and locations suggest substance behind the reports. The first are to open in California and Ohio. If they go well, Amazon is expected to roll out more.Why invest in the high street just as covid-19 has lifted e-commerce? The growth rate of sales on Amazon’s platforms, including third parties, had slowed before the crisis, from nearly 30% a year to below 20%. The trend reasserts itself as people return to shops. In the past quarter Amazon’s own online sales grew by only 16%, short of investors’ (muted) expectations.In future customers will want “omnichannel” retail that combines online and physical shopping, says Mark Shmulik of Bernstein, a broker. As for Amazon’s move into department stores, he has one question: “What took them so long?” The firm’s motive is also defensive. Walmart has made omnichannel work well during the pandemic by melding its formidable physical network with its website and offering a same-day “click-and-collect” service.Getting more physical may not be easy. Amazon’s bricks-and-mortar performance has been ho-hum. Whereas most other big American grocers’ sales have doubled or even tripled in the pandemic, those of Whole Foods have barely budged, notes Sucharita Kodali of Forrester, a research firm. Amazon’s total physical-store revenues last year were 6% lower than in 2018.Making Amazonmarts appeal to shoppers may be harder than Amazon anticipates. It reportedly wants them to sell its cheap private-label garments and gadgets, which is at odds with its aspirations for the stores to offer high-end fashion, where it has struggled online. It is unclear if the outlets will mimic existing examples of the department-store canon, as Amazon Fresh shops resemble conventional grocers, or if Amazon plans to shake things up.Another question is how the move will affect returns for shareholders. Amazon should be able to rent or buy locations cheaply—bankruptcies have left many department-store properties up for grabs. Yet investors may be disappointed that Amazon will devote ever more resources to retail. Many prefer its faster-growing, vastly more profitable and techier businesses: digital ads and cloud computing. “Why tackle a dying industry?” asks Ms Kodali, suggesting that Amazon could have another crack at making smartphones.Amazon’s share price is down by 8% since its latest results. As well as posting slower online sales for the second quarter it forecast slowing total sales in the next. It also warned that costs will rise sharply in the future as it ramps up investing. Physical retail would claim some of the dosh. The irony would not be lost on Sears and other defunct department stores. ■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter.This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Jeff and Andy’s” More