Jargon basement

Drugs, court cases, murder for hire and admin robots make for another sizzling week on Planet Dave

As one of the industry's most holistic thought leaders - not to mention a well-known advocate of both opening the kimono and solutionising outside the envelope - I'm not averse to the odd bit of business speak.

But if you're not careful when you reach out, touch base, or circle back, instead of enjoying some low-hanging fruit, you can find yourself having to action a bowl of your own dog food going forward. So I was concerned (and maybe just a smidge amused) to see this week that a big-name vendor had failed to get all its ducks in a row vis à vis the advisable use of a popular bit of corporate jargon, as featured in a job ad for an internal marketing post.

In the ‘required qualifications' section, the vendor advised that candidates needed an "intuitive ability to read people, influence where appropriate, and execute when necessary".

Crikey. I know the business world can be a pretty cut-throat place, but even by the occasionally ruthless standards of the modern office, having to undertake the summary killing of your co-workers seems like a bit of a paradigm shift.

Employed android

As someone who's been warning for some years that androids will one day inevitably rise up against their fleshy oppressors and enslave all humankind, I was surprised to see predictions last week that robots will have taken no more than seven per cent of jobs in the US by 2025.

The somewhat robosceptic projections come from analyst Forrester, which believes that about one in 14 US workers will be replaced by some form of "cognitive technology" - including robots, as well as AI, machine learning, and automation tools.

The market watcher arrived at its figure after calculating that cognitive tech will hoover up 16 per cent of the currently available jobs - but will create 8.9 million jobs elsewhere, in areas such as data scientists, content curators, and "robot monitoring professionals".

Forrester counsels admin and other general office staff that their working environment is likely to be the "most rapidly disrupted" by advances in technology, although it is not yet clear exactly which roles will be filled by androids. But if ‘president Donald Trump' becomes an actual thing that's really happening, I can only pray that ‘leader of the free world' is one of those jobs that will soon be staffed by a robot and not a human.

Greenfield business

Steve Jobs once opined that his great rival Bill Gates might have expanded his horizons had he "dropped acid once" in his younger days.

The late Apple chief would no doubt be intrigued to learn that the company Gates founded is now experimenting with psychedelic drugs, albeit in the somewhat milder form of marijuana. Microsoft recently announced a partnership with Kind Financial - a software player specialised in the cannabis industry, which is a legal one in almost half of US states. With medical marijuana becoming bigger and bigger business in the country, Microsoft and Kind are teaming up to jointly target government contracts in the sector.

But not before ordering a pizza and sticking on an old Fu Manchu movie, dude.

10: things I hate about you

Perhaps Microsoft would be better off sticking to the weed sector, as its more traditional business cost it $10,000 this week.

The five-figure bill came in the form of a legal settlement with Teri Goldstein, a California resident who sued the vendor after claiming an automatically installed Windows 10 update rendered her computer practically unusable. Microsoft attracted the ire of a number of Windows users in February after making the latest iteration of its operating system a "recommended update".

This meant that the software would download and install automatically, unless actively blocked by the user. Goldstein was seemingly not up to speed with this development - although she became all too aware of it after her computer allegedly "slowed to a crawl" once the update was complete. Microsoft agreed to pay her compensation after deciding it could do without the legal costs.

That and the fact that Internet Explorer took 15 minutes to load a Bing search for "is Windows update legal". Probably.