Scott McGregor

There are not many chief executives who would volunteer the results of their personal psychological tests. But Scott McGregor, the boss of chipmaker Broadcom, is clearly into brutal honesty. “My personality tests show my conflict-avoidance score is zero,” he confesses. “I have to be careful about it; I will upset people and I will cause unneeded friction.”

The comments say a lot about the 55-year-old as well as the company he heads. He relishes directness. While his manner comes across as amiable – perhaps partly a result of the effort he says he has made to pay more attention to “the human aspect of things” – there is a precise and carefully controlled edge to his delivery.

Zhao Jing recently suffered an unexpected parting of the ways with his alter ego. The Chinese political journalist and blogger is better known as Michael Anti, the name under which he writes. The pseudonymous character was deemed “real” enough for Harvard university to award Mr Zhao a fellowship in that name.But Facebook decided earlier this year that Michael Anti did not exist. Under rules that require the social network’s members to use their real names, he had to go. No matter that the fictitious Mr Anti had more than 1,000 Facebook “friends”, his account was suspended without notice.

Richard Waters

The collapse in solar panel prices has not been bad news for everyone: installers are having a field day. But how do you create a large-scale business quickly in an industry that has always favoured local operators?

US solar installer Sungevity has one answer – it is about to venture into Europe, making it the first to make the move.

Richard Waters

The latest analysis of Google+ traffic from Experian Hitwise provides some evidence as to why claims that the new social network is dead in the water are premature. Among the findings: Google+ users are coming back more often and staying longer.

Richard Waters

Yahoo just moved another step forward in its bid to control the end-game that has been taking shape around its future.

Silver Lake has agreed to enter into confidential discussions with the US internet company, making it the latest private equity firm to go this route – and potentially robbing Alibaba and Softbank of an ally as they consider making a play for Yahoo themselves. But it’s still far too early to call it “game over”.

Richard Waters

Steve Jobs was renowned for his willingness to speak the unvarnished truth, regardless of who he offended. He also had an obvious business interest in talking down competitors. But even with those caveats, some of his observations about other companies, from the authorised biography by Walter Isaacson that was published on Monday, make interesting reading.

Richard Waters

It seems that August’s stock market mayhem has done little to deflate the latest internet bubble – at least, when it comes to private companies with strong growth prospects and some traction in their business models. The latest case in point: Workday.

Richard Waters

After going to war with Twitter, serial entrepreneur Bill Gross has come up with a new idea: take it on at its own game. His UberMedia is launching a Twitter/Tumblr hybrid, called ChimeIn, that draws on some of the best ideas of both.

The obvious question this begs: how many social platforms does the world need?

Richard Waters

No great surprise here. Google is killing off Buzz, the ill-fated social updates service it launched early last year.

With Google+ now passing 40m members and all the company’s focus directed towards promoting that service, it’s time to throw Buzz onto a scrapheap that already includes notable casualties like Wave and Google Health.

Richard Waters

Internal rants can sometimes shed interesting light on the stresses inside big companies. One such leaked out on Wednesday from Google engineer Steve Yegge after he bungled his privacy settings on Google+ (oops).

With due allowance for the tone of a missive not intended for public consumption, the basic question he raises is an important one: has Google put its future at risk by failing to become a true platform company, rather than just the provider of a series of widely used products?

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Richard Waters, Chris Nuttall and April Dembosky in the FT's San Francisco bureau share their views - plus tech insights from Tim Bradshaw and Maija Palmer in London and Robin Kwong in Taipei.



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Contact the FT Tech Hub team: richard.waters@ft.com, chris.nuttall@ft.com, april.dembosky@ft.com, maija.palmer@ft.com, robin.kwong@ft.com and tim.bradshaw@ft.com.

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