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This week, a company I never thought of got another one I forgot its existence. It reminded us not to underestimate the boring.

One of these companies is called poly., and if you know what you’re doing, you get a gold star. Makes gadgets like phones headsets for corporate call centers and speaker gizmos for office conference calls.

These things aren’t exactly cool, but they can be useful, and Poly is pretty profitable and valuable enough to sell for $1.7 billion.

Buyer HP Inc. makes a lot of money by selling fleets of computers and massive printers to businesses. A snooze that puts HP at close to $40 billion, or nearly eight times the value of WeWork, a company that is exciting and also nearly out of money and died in 2019.

Products for cell dwellers may not be the miraculous miracles we imagined from Silicon Valley, but the world is run by the boring technology that boring organizations need to do boring but important things. Most companies selling this technology are making rivers of cash, even if only five people can explain what software giant SAP does, for example.

My job is to take a few moments to help us appreciate the boringness that makes the world go round.

I don’t know what technology my employer uses to process my paychecks. Most of us will never see Amazon computer servers firing Netflix onto our televisions. The US healthcare system is largely based on patient records from a software company called Epic. You may not know what Oracle is, but if you’ve ever purchased something online, you’ve probably interacted indirectly with one of their databases.

We will never write a valentine in such boring software, but we need it to work. Boring things can also make things better for what we do, like enabling telemedicine calls or helping us check if diapers are in stock before we go to the store.

Many Smells of technology designed for businesses or it’s stuck in the past, but that’s the bolt of everything. Companies that make boring technology for organizations will likely take longer. dozens of optional Doritos attempts. And this is a gold mine. About businesses and governments 4.5 trillion dollar technology this year. Some of the world’s most valuable tech companies like Microsoft, SAP, Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, and ServiceNow are boring.

Boring isn’t just profitable. It can also be a political entity. Facebook can’t buy a pack of gum without government regulators who suspect the company is planning to cause global tooth decay. And when he tries to buy any company, all antitrust alarm bells go off.

However, in January, Microsoft video game titan Activision has announced the nearly $70 billion acquisition of Blizzard. Regulators may still prevent inheritance, but Microsoft may try in part because identity as least contentious technology superpowers. Microsoft has more revenue and is much more valuable than Facebook’s parent company Meta. But for the most part, it’s the products businesses use to do things like critical data, not the misused communication tools to spread conspiracy theories.

Mark Gorenberg He has dedicated his professional life to procrastinating technology. In the late 1980s, he worked at Sun Microsystems, whose technologies such as Unix and Java are still present in almost every piece of technology available. Gorenberg described Sun as “so boring but overpowering.”

Since then, Gorenberg has worked for investment firms that specialize in supporting startups that sell basically understated technology to businesses.

He told me that most so-called enterprise tech companies are not cutting-edge. But he’s betting that the boring industry will be the home of exciting inventions.

Gorenberg talks about innovations like technology that Microsoft recently released. helps the software write itself. Investment firm Zetta Venture Partners is backing an initiative that scans records of car crashes. make insurance claim assessments and another that detects potential network errors before they shut down the internet.

He talks about a future where boring technology continues to be essential but also has a bit of wow.

If this technology can be a little exciting and can help us all, great. But there will always be a cornerstone of boring technology that touches our lives and the world – even if we never knew it existed.

Want better cell phone calls at home? Try this.

Brian X ChenThe consumer tech columnist at The New York Times suggests what to try if your smartphone calls are getting bad or dropping while you’re at home.

Many of us experience spotty cell phone calls at home. It can help if you use Wi-Fi calling, which routes a phone call over your internet connection. This allows us to make more reliable and higher quality phone calls than routing over our local phone networks, especially if we don’t live right next to a base station.

Typically, smartphones do not automatically use Wi-Fi calling, so here’s how to turn this feature on.

On iPhones: Open the Settings app, select Phone, select Wi-Fi calling, tap the bar to turn on the feature and enter some details about where you live. (This helps law enforcement find you if you call 9-1-1.)

on Android phones, Wi-Fi calling settings may vary, but try this: Open the Phone app, tap the option for more, then select Settings. Select the option labeled Calls and tap Wi-Fi calling.

One caveat: This won’t be a great option if your home Wi-Fi is spotty. here is my history column fix Wi-Fi problems at home.

Before you go …

• Yup: hackers fake what appears to be emergency requests from law enforcement Authorities of several internet companies to provide information about their users. Bloomberg News reported that Apple and Facebook fell for the requests last year and later provided information such as addresses and phone numbers that were used for harassment campaigns. (Subscription may be required.)

• Maybe you’ve noticed that almost all of Facebook is Reels videos: Vox’s Recode post reports that Facebook’s efforts to force these small-sized videos in our feeds means the Reels are represented. 11 of Facebook’s 20 most viewed posts In the US in the last three months of 2021. And a bunch of Makara anonymous, reposted videos from TikTok or some kind of spam, Vox wrote.

  Regarding On Tech: Facebook will make you love Reels.

• Long hangover when countries block websites: After Turkey banned Wikipedia in 2017, there were years of legal challenges to re-establish the online encyclopedia. The Washington Post, of the struggles for Wikipedia can be a glimpse into the future For Facebook, Twitter and other sites banned in Russia. (Subscription may be required.)

  Related: Annie Rauwerda, a young woman in Michigan, Compiling some of Wikipedia’s weirdest pages. An example: “Most Wanted Song” entry A novelty tune from the 1990s.

Hug it. (It’s not boring.)

A flamingo, known for its leg tag 492, escaped from the Kansas zoo in 2005 (on Independence Day). My colleague Daniel Victor very funny details 492’s life is on the run for the past 17 years and people in Texas who are surprised to see a flamingo.

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