Salesforce Reveals Permanent Remote Work Plan; TikTok’s Forced Sale Now On Hold; Apple Glasses Will Be micro-OLED; Twitter Gained New Users After Trump Ban

After a year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Salesforce is unveiling plans to let employees work remotely on a permanent basis. Zdnet.com reports that this will necessitate a revamp of its iconic office towers. Under the new plan, once its safe to return to offices, the majority of Salesforce’s employees will only go in to the office one to three days a week. Although employees surveyed indicated the desire to continue to work from home, some 80% did want to maintain at least some connection to the physical workspace of their employer. Besides the iconic Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, the tallest building West of the Mississippi, Salesforce has towers worldwide. The company intends to redesign its workplaces as ‘community hubs’ with collaboration and break out spaces. Additionally, the company plans to introduce new protocols like at-home wellness attestations, temperature screenings before entry (where applicable), face coverings, regular and frequent deep cleaning, and manual contact tracing. CEO Marc Benioff said at a Salesforce event in Singapore, ‘The past is gone.’

The forced sale of US TikTok operations to Oracle…mainly due to a temper tantrum by Ex-President Trump, has been put on hold, and looks to be ending entirely. According to TechCrunch.com, TikTok parent ByteDance had won several legal battles over the sale anyway. Discussions between TikTok and U.S. national security officials are continuing though… because there are valid concerns around TikTok’s data collection and the potential for manipulation and censorship of content on the app.

New information points to Apple Glasses going with micro OLED displays, not microLED. 9to5mac.com says the micro OLED tech is more advanced, in that the display tech is built directly on to chip wafers. This is considered ideal for small displays like in AR or VR glasses. The project with partner TSMC, and apparently it is being run with even tighter secrecy than most other Apple projects. TSMC is also working on microLED tech at the same campus…a display tech used in the Apple Watch. The reputed micro OLED displays will be less than an inch in size, and trial production has already started. 

Twitter continued to gain new users in January…even after banning Donald Trump.. The platform ended 2020 with 192 million daily users. Theverge.com quoted CEO Jack Dorsey as saying “We are a platform that is obviously much larger than any one topic or account.” The new information came out with Twitter’s release of their Q4 earnings data. Twitter did predict that their growth will likely slow as more people get back to offices. The platform said in the data release that they had benefited from “the significant pandemic-related surge” in usage last year.