How Chipotle Pushed Out McDonald's CEO: Your Headlines for Thursday

1) McDonald's CEO Don Thompson is stepping down. Chief Brand Officer Steve Easterbrook will replace him, in the executive chair and on the board, starting March 1st. The fast-food chain's same-store sales have been declining for months, and the company last week posted disappointing fourth quarter earnings with a drop of 21% in earnings and 3.6% in global store traffic (4.1% in the US). The stock was up 3.4% in afterhours trading on the news.

Brand is precisely the problem here – brand as an expression of product. McDonald's, Mickey D's, Mackers, MacDo... we all know it in our own languages, once the emblem of American cool as much as of its "malbouffe" (French for "bad chow," the easy, fast and gross solution to our busy lives and the scarecrow of the Slow Food movement.) Now it's all "malbouffe" and little cool, as a new generation clamors for higher quality and more trustworthy "fast casual" chains like Chipotle, Panera and Shake Shack. Have you ever seen people stand in such a line for a Big Mac?

These competitors are also more nimble companies: McDonald's is 36,000 restaurants serving the exact same things the exact same way across the world. (Believe me: I worked there once and if there's one thing McDonald's does right, it's enforcing rules and processes.) Even Starbucks only has a little over half that. Changing one thing is actually changing one thing 36,000 times. You don't do that on a hunch and you don't do it fast. Hard ship to steer, for Thompson, Easterbrook or anyone.

2) For all its claims to the contrary, IBM has started cutting its workforce. The hundreds of individual stories coming in to this IBM union site require no commentary.

3) Facebook earnings beat earnings expectations. Once again. Advertising sales are booming and revenue nearly doubled from last year's fourth quarter. What's most interesting is expenses grew way faster: up 87 percent. Mark Zuckerberg is massively investing in R&D to remain relevant, and too bad if investors don't like it. That's the Amazon way.

4) Samsung's quarterly profits are its lowest in three years, down 27% year on year. As Apple announced record iPhone sales this week, Samsung finds itself third in China, where it once dominated. The South Korean giant has come back from the dead before. What product will do it this time?

5) Bill Gates has joined Elon Musk and others in the camp of tech leaders concerned about artificial intelligence. He wrote in a Reddit Ask Me Anything:

I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence. First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don't understand why some people are not concerned.

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