How Microsoft Catapulted Over IBM | Mexico’s Untrumpian Migrant Solution

Can President Obrador handle the influx of children along the southern Mexican border better than his American counterpart?

Mahikol’s appearance masks the weekslong journey he has undertaken to get to the border town of Tapachula in southern Mexico. The 12-year-old’s skin is clear and clean, and he is letting his Afro grow longer on top, with the back and sides shaved. He wears a checkered shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. Mahikol’s mouth smiles, but his eyes do not.

He’s one of the thousands of migrant children who are entering Mexico in unprecedented numbers from Central America. But his destination isn’t the U.S., where President Donald Trump has declared a state of emergency along the border with Mexico and has fought off allegations of mistreating children — many of whom were separated from their parents. Mahikol and many other children are in Mexico to stay. That’s forcing the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (aka AMLO) to quickly adapt to tackle a growing child migrant crisis in a way that allows him to present himself as the antidote to Trump on migration.

Iranian-born Nazak Nikakhtar is an under-the-radar hard-liner behind the tech cold war.

Before joining Donald Trump’s administration, one of Nazak Nikakhtar’s main jobs was to represent U.S. catfish farmers seeking punitive duties against Vietnamese importers.

The 45-year-old Iranian-born trade lawyer and economist has since moved from the relatively small pool of the transpacific seafood business to the rougher waters of Trump’s trade war with China — a little-known hard-liner playing a big role in implementing the administration’s combustible international economic agenda.

A single term in a single contract between two big-name companies in November 1980 changed the landscape of computing.

When Thomas Watson Jr. took over his father’s company in 1956, he began the process of modernizing and revitalizing International Business Machines, or IBM. Invoking Søren Kierkegaard’s parable about tame ducks who — rather than fly south — remain up north growing fat on the food that’s given them, Watson wanted to build a company filled with “wild ducks,” those willing to break formation or “think different,” as another computer manufacturer once put it. Despite its wild ducks ethos, IBM was still a slow-moving corporate behemoth, one that waited too long to enter the personal computer business in the late 1970s. It was a delay that provided a fateful opening for two true wild ducks, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Paul Allen, to fly down south in 1980 and pull off a contractual coup that would change the course of tech history … and help oust IBM as the world’s dominant computer company.