Photo by Marten Bjork on Unsplash
Google’s founders are leaving the company at a time when employees are actively protesting leadership decisions and the US Government is building a monopoly case. Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai is going to be very busy.
Google is not the only IT firm with labor issues… The Labor Department’s case against Oracle for underpaying women and minorities is underway and Oracle isn’t looking very woke (is that still a thing?).
Finally… It seems that the e-Scooter fad is slowing down. Bird, one of the more popular companies is laying off staff after an acquisition and a knock-off company named Unicorn is closing their doors before they ever even ramped up (I hope this is a sign of things to come).
Acquisitions/Investments
- Adobe is buying the Oculus Medium VR sculpting app
Why is Oculus selling Medium? It could be Facebook scaling back its non-gaming VR efforts. But Medium is also slightly redundant for Oculus. The company also launched a professional-oriented art app called Quill, which was relaunched as Quill 2.0 in August with expanded animation capabilities. And where Quill is a 3D painting app in the style of Tilt Brush (which is owned by Google), Medium works a lot more like a traditional 3D modeling program, so it fits better with Adobe’s existing offerings. As for its impact on VR in general, it depends on where Adobe takes the product in 2020 — and how deeply it integrates Medium into its larger creative suite.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/6/20999185/adobe-facebook-oculus-medium-vr-sculpting-app
Cloud
- Google Co-Founders Page, Brin Give Up Management Roles
Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped down from active management of the internet giant’s parent, surrendering immediate control to a low-key company veteran who must navigate global regulatory threats as well as employee discontent.
Page and Brin, who had been chief executive and president, respectively, of Google parent Alphabet Inc., said Tuesday they would hand control immediately to Sundar Pichai, Google’s existing CEO. They remain on Alphabet’s board and will still together control a majority of voting power over company decisions under Alphabet’s dual-class share structure.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/sundar-pichai-to-replace-larry-page-as-ceo-of-alphabet-11575409229
Why Alphabet’s days could be numbered under its new CEOShielding Google from those “other bets” such as driverless cars no longer seems so urgent. Alphabet and other tech titans — particularly those effectively controlled by their founders — have a relatively long leash from investors to invest in both the projects that generate earnings now and on whatever comes next. Amazon, for example, spent $14 billion to buy a niche grocery store chain, and it’s investing in far-flung businesses such as health care and entertainment.
Amazon has always received a longer leash to tinker than most other companies, but I think Google’s cash firepower also lets it experiment without creating an artificial structure to shield Google from its less mature corporate cousins. There may be a reason that Alphabet never became a blueprint for other technology companies that wanted to keep up with the times.
https://www.theverge.com/interface/2019/12/5/20995520/alphabet-obsolete-sundar-pichai-ceo-page-brin
Security/Privacy
- How Ring Went From ‘Shark Tank’ Reject to America’s Scariest Surveillance Company
Although there’s no credible evidence that Ring actually deters or reduces crime, claiming that its products achieve these things is essential to its marketing model. These claims have helped Ring cultivate a surveillance network around the country with the help of dozens of taxpayer-funded camera discount programs and more than 600 police partnerships.
When police partner with Ring, they are required to promote its products, and to allow Ring to approve everything they say about the company. In exchange, they get access to Ring’s Law Enforcement Neighborhood Portal, an interactive map that allows police to request camera footage directly from residents without obtaining a warrant.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmjp53/how-ring-went-from-shark-tank-reject-to-americas-scariest-surveillance-company
A World With a Billion Cameras Watching You Is Just Around the CornerThe report, from industry researcher IHS Markit, to be released Thursday, said the number of cameras used for surveillance would climb above 1 billion by the end of 2021. That would represent an almost 30% increase from the 770 million cameras today. China would continue to account for a little over half the total.
Fast-growing, populous nations such as India, Brazil and Indonesia would also help drive growth in the sector, the report said. The number of surveillance cameras in the U.S. would grow to 85 million by 2021, from 70 million last year, as American schools, malls and offices seek to tighten security on their premises, IHS analyst Oliver Philippou said.
Software/SaaS
- SAP customers are revolting – here’s why
The problem for both customers and SAP can be summed up in the words of a retiring executive with close on 30 years SAP experience. He said that his greatest disappointment is that SAP has not really delivered what it promised in terms of end to end integrated business processes and that the addition of many new acquired technologies only makes the ability to create a seamlessly integrated landscape nigh on impossible. The R/3 days when integration was a reality are long gone. It should therefore be no surprise that even showcase customers like Jazz describe a business technology landscape that includes SAP, Workday and Salesforce.
Equally worrying for me was the degree of frustration across the SAP ecosystem at what one partner described as ‘appalling communication’ around what SAP is doing to help customers get across the S/4 line. Hillary Blinds, an early Suite for HANA customer for example shrugged at the prospect of moving to S/4, despite its commitment to SAP across departments other vendors could own.
https://diginomica.com/sap-customers-are-revolting-heres-why
- Oracle allegedly underpaid women and minorities by $400 million. Now the details are set to come out in court.
The first witness, former employee Kirsten Hanson Garcia, who worked for Oracle for more than 16 years, most recently in human resources as senior director of talent development, testified that during a meeting in the mid-2000s with top executives, the head of human resources said, “Well, if you hire a woman, she will work harder for less money.”
Palantir, a data-mining company, settled the claims in 2017, while the department’s investigation into Google has been mired in a dispute over access to compensation data. That makes the Oracle hearing a rare airing of testimony from the employees who allegedly faced discrimination, as well as compensation data at a major tech company. Oracle and Google are also facing private pay, promotion, or hiring discrimination lawsuits filed by current and former employees.
Infrastructure/Hardware
- Bernie Sanders’ Broadband Plan Is Comcast’s Worst Nightmare
The plan would restore the FCC’s authority and net neutrality rules stripped away by the Ajit Pai FCC, subjecting ISPs to far greater oversight. It also proposes banning ISPs from imposing arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps and overage fees, which critics have long said are little more than punitive price hikes on captive customers.
But Sanders’ plan also spends a lot of time advocating for community broadband. First by proposing $150 billion in new funding to aid the growing roster of towns and cities that have begun building their own networks after years of industry neglect. Secondly by eliminating the 19 protectionist state laws big ISP lobbyists have used to try and crush those efforts.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/evjjmn/bernie-sanders-broadband-plan-is-comcasts-worst-nightmare
Love the idea Bernie – but where is the $150B coming from? How does this idea become reality? - Ericsson to pay over $1 billion to resolve U.S. corruption probes
The bribery took place over many years in countries including China, Vietnam and Djibouti, the department said. The total charges include a criminal penalty of more than $520 million, plus $540 million to be paid to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in a related matter.
The company admitted it had conspired with others to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) from at least 2000 to 2016 by engaging in a scheme to pay bribes and to falsify books and records and by failing to implement reasonable internal accounting controls, the Justice Department said in a statement.
Other
- Elon Musk Cleared by Jury in Defamation Case Over ‘Pedo’ Tweet
The legal battle stems from Mr. Musk’s involvement in a high-profile effort to rescue a youth soccer team trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand last year. British cave explorer Vernon Unsworth, who helped in the early days of the operation, criticized Mr. Musk’s effort to use a mini-sub to save the boys as a public-relations stunt. The device was never used, and Mr. Unsworth told CNN that Mr. Musk could “stick his submarine where it hurts.”
- Amazon Leases New Manhattan Office Space, Less Than a Year After HQ2 Pullout
The giant online retailer said it has signed a new lease for 335,000 square feet on Manhattan’s west side in the new Hudson Yards neighborhood, where it will have more than 1,500 employees. The new lease represents Amazon’s largest expansion in New York since the company stunned the city by abandoning plans to locate its second headquarters in the Queens neighborhood of Long Island City.
The deal comes the same day The Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook is in talks to lease 700,000 square feet in a neighborhood nearby. Combined with Facebook’s other recent deals in the city, such a move would catapult the social-media company into the top ranks of the city’s largest corporate tenants, alongside JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America Corp. , which have had a major presence in New York for many years.
- Bird lays off several Scoot employees
Bird has laid off less than two dozen employees, The San Francisco Chronicle first reported. The layoffs affect employees Bird brought on board as part of its ~$25 million acquisition of Scoot earlier this year.
Those affected were salaried employees and/or people with technical backgrounds, according to Bird.
“The integration of Bird and Scoot does not impact or change our previous or future commitments to San Francisco or to providing its residents and visitors access to the highest quality and most reliable shared micromobility vehicles and services,” a Bird spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We are planning to relocate a number of Scoot team members to our Santa Monica headquarters while also maintaining an office in San Francisco for our operations and maintenance teams as well as a number of regionally specific roles.”
https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/06/bird-lays-off-several-scoot-employees/
I was hoping this stupid scooter fad was dying down, but this is just corporate restructuring. Oh wait…
Unicorn, e-scooter startup from co-creator of Tile, shuts down with no money for refundsUnicorn, the electric scooter startup from the co-creator of gadget tracker Tile, is shutting down operations after blowing all its cash on Facebook and Google ads but only receiving 350 orders for its glossy white e-scooters, it claims. In an email to customers, the company says it lacks the resources to deliver any of its $699 two-wheelers, and won’t be issuing refunds “as we are completely out of funding.”
In a remorseful email, Unicorn CEO Nick Evans said the company had “totally failed as a business” and has also “spread the cost of this failure to you, the early customers that believed in us.”
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/7/21000094/unicorn-electric-scooter-shut-down-refund-tile