Google Culture War Escalates as Era of Transparency Wanes
The extent of Google’s employee rebellion is hard to measure—the company has tried to portray it as the work of a handful of malcontents from the company’s junior ranks. Nor are the company’s message boards unilaterally supportive of revolt. “We want to focus on our jobs when we come into the workplace rather than deal with a new cycle of outrage every few days or vote on petitions for or against Google’s latest project,” wrote one employee on an internal message board viewed by Bloomberg News.
Still, the company seems stuck in a cycle of escalation. Walker’s internal critics say his Nov. 14 email is part of a broader erosion of one of Google’s most distinctive traits—its extreme internal transparency. The fight also illustrates the lack of trust between Google’s leadership and some of its employees, according to interviews with over a dozen current and former employees, as well as internal messages shared with Bloomberg News on the condition it not publish the names of employees who participated.
Edison Research’s Infinite Dial study from early 2019 showed that 62% of U.S. 12–34 year-olds are Facebook users, down from 67% in 2018 and 79% in 2017. This decrease is particularly notable as 35–54 and 55+ age group usage has been constant or even increased.
There are many theories behind Facebook’s fall from grace among millennials and Gen Zers — an influx of older users that change the dynamics of the platform, competition from more mobile and visual-friendly platforms like Instagram and Snapchat, and the company’s privacy scandals are just a few.
She Argued Facebook Is a Monopoly. To Her Surprise, People Listened.
Ms. Srinivasan spent a few months in cafes around her Connecticut home reading economic history, and mulling over her own misgivings about the evolution of the digital advertising market. One mystery nagged at her, she said: How could a company with Facebook Inc. FB -1.34% ’s checkered privacy record have obtained so much of its users’ personal data?
Her conclusion was that rather than raising prices like an old-school monopolist, Facebook harmed consumers by charging them ever-increasing amounts of personal data to use its platform. Eventually she emailed an unsolicited article to the Berkeley Business Law Journal, which published it this year under the title, “The Antitrust Case Against Facebook.”
Her argument has had unexpected resonance. In the past year Ms. Srinivasan has presented at the American Antitrust Institute’s annual conference and appeared at a private gathering of state attorneys general investigating Facebook. Now based in northern California, she is presenting her work at an international antitrust conference in Brussels this week.
One aim of the Green Deal is to make the price of transport “reflect the impact it has on the environment.” Accordingly, Europe will review aviation’s tax exemptions — kerosene isn’t taxed — and consider cutting the free allowances allocated to airlines under Europe’s emissions trading system.
The airlines think they’re being unfairly maligned. They contribute about 2% of global emissions, a fraction of what cars and trucks produce. But unlike road transport, the aviation industry doesn’t have a convincing plan to decarbonize. Europe’s airlines are spending 170 billion euros ($189 billion) on new fuel-efficient aircraft, but these will still spew out carbon. Synthetic fuels are expensive and battery limitations mean emission-free commercial flights are years away.
Aviation is typical of the trade-offs we’ll have to make to get to net-zero emissions. So far we’ve only done the easy stuff that doesn’t force people to give up much or pay more for cheap products and services. The airlines are lobbying for better air traffic management in Europe’s crowded skies, which would cut the amount of fuel used. But there’s only a certain amount of carbon we can keep emitting before things go from bad to catastrophic.
Security was a big theme this week. Philadelphia-favorite Wawa discovered a security breach in their payment systems going back to last March. The breach was plugged on December 12th (better check your credit card statements).
Meanwhile Facebook has agreed (under duress) to stop using the phone number you give for Two Factor Authentication to mine for data and suggest friends.
And finally… Foxconn continues to be a disaster in Wisconsin. They still haven’t committed to what type of factory they are building and Wisconsin (rightfully) is starting to push back on their tax rebate commitments. Why has it taken this long?
Acquisitions/Investments
Google buys game developer Typhoon Studios
Google has been pretty vocal about its internal development efforts, including Stadia Studios led by former EA exec Jade Raymond. In an interview with Gamesindustry.biz, the exec detailed that Google was hoping to build out multiple first-party studios to release content on the platform.
“We have a plan that includes building out a few different first-party studios, and also building up the publishing org to ship exclusive content created by indie devs and other external partners,” Raymond told the publication.
Finland is making its online AI crash course free to the world
There are already quite a few sites for people looking to learn the basics of AI, but Finland’s offering seems worth your time if you’re interested in such a thing. It’s nicely designed, offers short tests at the end of each section, and covers a range of topics from the philosophical implications of AI to technical subjects like Bayesian probability. It’s supposed to take about six weeks to finish, with each section taking between five and 10 hours.
Wawa hit with massive data breach, potentially affecting more than 850 locations, CEO says
In a letter to customers Friday, chief executive Chris Gheysens said the company discovered malware capable of exposing card numbers, expiration dates and cardholder names at “potentially all Wawa in-store payment terminals and fuel dispensers” since March 4. Debit card PINs, credit card security codes and driver’s license information for verifying age-restricted purchases were not affected, he said.
Gheysens said the convenience store chain is unaware of any unauthorized card use as a result of the breach, which was contained Dec. 12, two days after it was discovered. Wawa declined to tell The Washington Post how many customers or transactions were affected.
“I want to reassure anyone impacted they will not be responsible for fraudulent charges related to this incident,” Gheysens said in a news release. “To all our friends and neighbors, I apologize deeply for this incident.”
Facebook will stop using 2FA tool to harvest phone numbers for friend suggestions
Facebook says it will soon stop its practice of using phone numbers provided to the company as part of its two-factor authentication (2FA) security tool to power a friend suggestion feature, Reuters reported on Thursday. According to the report, Facebook was using phone numbers users gave it specifically to protect their accounts from unauthorized access to try and encourage them to add members of their address book to their friends list.
The company says the change is part of its broader privacy overhaul in response to a $5 billion Federal Trade Commission settlement reached in July over Facebook’s privacy practices. As part of that settlement, Facebook was barred from using phone numbers gathered from 2FA requests for advertising. Today’s change is an extension of that. Although not explicitly demanded by the FTC, Facebook’s use of phone numbers has come under scrutiny by the company’s internal privacy review team, led by chief privacy officer Michel Protti.
U.S. Navy bans TikTok from government-issued mobile devices
A bulletin issued by the Navy on Tuesday showed up on a Facebook page serving military members, saying users of government issued mobile devices who had TikTok and did not remove the app would be blocked from the Navy Marine Corps Intranet.
The Navy would not describe in detail what dangers the app presents, but Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Uriah Orland said in a statement the order was part of an effort to “address existing and emerging threats”.
Facebook is building an operating system so it can ditch Android
Facebook doesn’t want its hardware like Oculus or its augmented reality glasses to be at the mercy of Google because they rely on its Android operating system. That’s why Facebook has tasked Mark Lucovsky, a co-author of Microsoft’s Windows NT, with building the social network an operating system from scratch, according to The Information’s Alex Heath. To be clear, Facebook’s smartphone apps will remain available on Android.
“We really want to make sure the next generation has space for us,” says Facebook’s VP of Hardware, Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth. “We don’t think we can trust the marketplace or competitors to ensure that’s the case. And so we’re gonna do it ourselves.”
IBM aims to replace lithium batteries with batteries made from seawater
Traditional lithium-ion batteries need heavy metals such as cobalt, manganese, and nickel to be produced. These materials pose a sizeable risk to the environment as they need to be mined. Not only is the sourcing of these materials a danger to the environment, but they also pose risk to the workers mining them. Heavy metals such as these are also limited and with the rise of battery-powered devices, it may be soon that these materials eventually run out.
It was due to all of these circumstances that IBM Research scientists looked for other alternatives to Lithium-ion batteries. They were soon able to create a battery that runs on three new completely different materials that can be extracted from seawater. As such, sourcing of these materials are less invasive and pose a much smaller risk to the destruction of the environment.
This new battery uses a “cobalt and nickel-free cathode material, as well as a safe liquid electrolyte with a high flash point”. The combination of these two materials was found to reduce the battery’s flammability which is a present issue for lithium-ion batteries. It was also found to charge much faster than regular lithium-ion batteries with the ability to charge up to 80% in a mere 5 minutes. These two new benefits from IBM’s batteries could prove to be very significant in the creation of low cost, fast-charging, less flammable batteries for electric vehicles.
The Bezos ‘relentless’ strategy at Amazon has been on full display this week
Amazon has been steadily building out its own delivery network as it seeks to wean itself off of third parties like FedEx, UPS or the U.S. Postal Service. Bloomberg reported Tuesday that Dave Clark, the Amazon executive in charge of logistics, decided to cut out FedEx Ground because it wasn’t performing up to Amazon’s standards. And even though the block on FedEx Ground is temporary during the holiday rush, the decision was made at the height of the shopping season.
And it doesn’t hurt that Amazon was able to stick it to its future shipping and logistics competitor, showing FedEx it can swing the stock whenever it wants.
Foxconn Plays Tax-Credit Poker With Wisconsin in Troubled Deal
It doesn’t matter why Foxconn changed its mind. Neither does the disagreement over whether 10.5G is a requirement for the tax credits that helped lure the company to the state. The point is that Wisconsin officials clearly believed a 10.5G plant was coming, and Foxconn did nothing to set them straight.
What’s important now is both sides’ willingness to patch things up. The documents reproduced by The Verge show that Wisconsin is trying as hard as possible to make it work by offering to let the Taiwanese company rewrite the contract. Foxconn has steadfastly refused, arguing that its new plans hew to the original deal. Some marriage counselling is sorely needed.
This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles and immersed ourselves in an alternate reality. If anything, the longer we ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions, the more of a problem they become. This, in turn, motivates even more withdrawal, more isolationism and apocalyptic fantasy — and more desperately concocted technologies and business plans. The cycle feeds itself.
The more committed we are to this view of the world, the more we come to see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution. The very essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than bug. No matter their embedded biases, technologies are declared neutral. Any bad behaviors they induce in us are just a reflection of our own corrupted core. It’s as if some innate human savagery is to blame for our troubles. Just as the inefficiency of a local taxi market can be “solved” with an app that bankrupts human drivers, the vexing inconsistencies of the human psyche can be corrected with a digital or genetic upgrade.
Alan Lacy: If there’s a significant strategic failure on the part of Sears over quite a long period of time, it was the inability to get off mall with a viable, important retail format.
In my era, we tried the Sears Grand format, basically a big-box store that was right across the highway from Walmart, Target, Home Depot and Lowe’s. Those first few stores that we did, they were doing $45 million and our mall-based stores were doing $25 million in annual sales.
We couldn’t build enough stores to really catch up to what was happening at that point with 1,000 new competitive outlets being opened every year by Home Depot, Lowe’s, et cetera.
The Secret to Writing Emails with Military Precision
A CTA, or call-to-action, is the last bit of an email where you encourage your reader to do something: shop now, learn more, sign up, etc. Sometimes, the CTA is a button, but it doesn’t have to be. It does have to be concise, attention-grabbing and easy to understand. For marketers, CTAs are non-negotiable because they help businesses get more customers.
In our everyday emails, this device can be just as useful for accomplishing the purpose of our message. Be it organizing a meeting, requesting feedback or assigning a project, a concise, final reminder of what we’re after can improve the utility of any email. In fact, it’s so important that I tend to start my emails with CTAs and work backwards.
To make your CTAs pop, separate them from the body of the text and play around with bold text and colors. If you have several action items, separate them with bullet points, and try to limit your action items to two per email. Another helpful practice: If you’re addressing multiple recipients, use “@” to assign action items to different people, e.g. “@Pam: review slides and send feedback by Tuesday EOD.” That way, there’s no ambiguity about what’s expected from whom.
Oracle has been having an interesting year. Between trying to sue the Government over the JEDI cloud contract procurement process and losing one of their CEOs, it is not the most stellar time for the company.
Normally Oracle has less press than their peers but this week they kept showing up in articles. From a financial perspective, the company published mixed Q2 results. Sole CEO Safra Catz stated she expects much better performance next quarter (but how?).
Oracle also made headlines due to a former employee saying the company is cheating their customers by selling software that does not do what it claims to do. This does link up with stories about Oracle’s early days in the book Softwar.
Finally Oracle is moving their big annual conference “OpenWorld” from San Francisco to Las Vegas. This move is costing San Fran over $60M annual, but that city is too damn expensive.
The database giant registered second-quarter earnings per share of 90 cents, up 12% year-over-year. Wall Street had projected earnings of 88 cents per share. Revenue during the same period stood at $9.61 billion. Revenue grew 1% year-over-year but did not live up to Wall Street’s expectation of $9.65 billion. Reflecting on the quarter’s performance, Oracle’s CEO Safra Catz commented:
“We had another strong quarter in our Fusion and NetSuite cloud applications businesses with Fusion ERP revenues growing 37% and NetSuite ERP revenues growing 29%. This consistent rapid growth in the now multibillion dollar ERP segment of our cloud applications business has enabled Oracle to deliver a double-digit EPS growth rate year-after-year. I fully expect we will do that again this year.”
New Orleans declares state of emergency following cyberattack
Officials are running many services on pen and paper until it’s deemed safe for computers to come back online, although the Orleans Parish Communication District (which handles both 311 and 991 lines) and courts weren’t affected. The city added that emergency services’ communications were still active, and that it could still obtain footage from public safety cameras if there was an incident.
It’s unclear when computers will go back online, when the state of emergency will be lifted, or who the culprits were. City-scale ransomware attacks like those using SamSam have frequently been the work of extortionists hoping only for a windfall profit, although there are concerns hostile countries might use malware to bankroll programs. Louisiana’s government faced its own ransomware attack in November and had to shut its Office of Motor Vehicles for days, although the state got back online without caving in to the attackers’ demands.
Microsoft details the most clever phishing techniques it saw in 2019
Microsoft said that phishing attempts grew from under 0.2% in January 2018 to around 0.6% in October 2019, where 0.6% represented the percentage of phishing emails detected out of the total volume of emails the company analyzed.
While phishing attacks increased, the number of ransomware, crypto-mining, and other malware infections went down, the company said at the time.
FBI secretly demands a ton of consumer data from credit agencies. Now lawmakers want answers
The FBI regularly uses these legal powers — known as national security letters — to compel credit giants to turn over non-content information, such as records of purchases and locations, that the agency deems necessary in national security investigations. But these letters have no judicial oversight and are typically filed with a gag order, preventing the recipient from disclosing the demand to anyone else — including the target of the letter.
Only a few tech companies, including Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, have disclosed that they have ever received one or more national security letters. Since the law changed in 2015 in the wake of the Edward Snowden disclosures that revealed the scope of the U.S. government’s surveillance operations, recipients have been allowed to petition the FBI to be cut loose from the gag provisions and publish the letters with redactions.
A former employee is suing Oracle, alleging the company sold customers phantom products and forced him out when he complained
A former Oracle product manager has sued the tech giant, claiming it sold phantom or broken products as part of a cloud service geared to universities.
Tayo Daramola said the company retaliated against him “reporting what was in fact a pattern of criminal acts,” the suit said.
He said he resisted participating in what he described as “misrepresentation and likely fraud,” and subsequently filed a report with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the suit said.
How consulting companies like McKinsey optimized American inequality
Broadly speaking, management consulting firms advise other organizations how to do their jobs better. They are hired, as CNBC’s Abigail Hess notes, “to assess and address problems, such as downsizing, acquisition or restructuring.”
The key to management consulting firms’ function is in the word management. Management consultants work for a company’s executives, not its employees, and the hiring of one is often a sign that layoffs are imminent. Wendell Potter, a former vice president at a health insurer, says “it was clear that when [a management consulting firm] was brought in there would be layoffs. In my own department, there were times when I had to lay people off because off because of McKinsey’s work.”
As Duff McDonald, author of “The Firm: The Story of McKinsey and Its Secret Influence on American Business,” once put it: “McKinsey might be the single greatest legitimizer of mass layoffs in history.”
Oracle Corp. ORCL -3.47% said it won’t replace its late co-CEO, Mark Hurd, leaving Safra Catz as the sole top executive leading the software giant after years of operating with an unusual, two-chief structure.
In the company’s first earnings report since Mr. Hurd’s death in October, Oracle founder and Chairman Larry Ellison said it is working to strengthen its management team, to develop a group of executives who are “potential CEOs when both Safra and I retire, which is not anytime soon.” But he described the two-CEO setup as unusual and not something Oracle is looking to repeat.
Ms. Catz now leads Oracle as sole CEO. Mr. Ellison, who ceded the CEO post to Mr. Hurd and Ms. Catz in 2014, remains active as chairman and chief technology officer.
Salesforce promotes Bret Taylor to president and COO
Salesforce announced today that it has named Bret Taylor as president and chief operating officer of the company. Prior to today’s promotion, Taylor held the position of president and chief product officer.
In his new position, Taylor will be responsible for a number of activities, including leading Salesforce’s global product vision, engineering, security, marketing and communications. That’s a big job, and as such he will report directly to chairman Marc Benioff.
SoftBank’s China strategy wobbles as key bets disappoint
In fairness to SoftBank, many China IPOs have stumbled, hurt by a sharp slowdown in economic growth and trade tensions with the United States.
But investors and some bankers looking at China-related deals say SoftBank’s involvement, once a sign of promising prospects, was now viewed as a red flag that a company was likely overvalued.
“SoftBank has become a signal that the market has peaked,” said one person involved in the OneConnect IPO.
The Money Men Who Enabled Adam Neumann and the WeWork Debacle
Little of WeWork’s trajectory would have been possible were it not for the collection of veteran executives and financiers from the upper echelons of Wall Street and Silicon Valley who enabled Mr. Neumann, a charismatic 40-year-old with little prior business experience.
Mr. Neumann mesmerized them with his pitch, which offered a vision for the property-leasing company as a tech startup with limitless potential to transform how people work and live.
Investors poured capital onto Mr. Neumann’s business bonfire and ceded control, rarely pushing back with any force despite mounting problems and year after year of missed projections.
Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank Group Corp., who helped inflate WeWork’s valuation to $47 billion, pushed an already wild-spending Mr. Neumann to act bigger and crazier. JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO James Dimon and other bankers, instead of injecting a dose of reality, spent years championing Mr. Neumann and the company as they battled for the coveted IPO assignment.
Researchers from the Brookings Institution and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a tech-industry-backed think tank, arrived at their conclusion by looking at a fairly narrow slice of jobs—13 industries that involve the highest rate of research and development spending and STEM degrees per worker. That includes much of the software industry, as well as jobs in areas like pharmaceuticals and aerospace. The researchers found that, between 2005 and 2017, five metro areas—San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, San Diego, and Boston— not only added lots of jobs, they were also becoming more dominant in those industries overall.
Oracle will move its annual OpenWorld conference to Las Vegas because San Francisco is too expensive
According to an email that the San Francisco Travel Association (SFTA) sent to its members on Monday, Oracle has signed a three-year agreement to bring its flagship event to the Caesars Forum in Las Vegas.
“Oracle stated that their attendee feedback was that San Francisco hotel rates are too high,” the email, which was viewed by CNBC, said. “Poor street conditions was another reason why they made this difficult decision.”
Administrative assistant jobs helped propel many women into the middle class. Now they’re disappearing.
The United States has shed more than 2.1 million administrative and office support jobs since 2000, Labor Department data shows, eroding what for decades had been a reliable path to the middle class for women without college degrees.
The job losses affecting administrative assistants, bookkeepers, clerks, data entry specialists, executive assistants and secretaries have largely continued even as the economy recovered from the Great Recession, suggesting these jobs aren’t coming back.
Tech recruiters were once welcomed on campus. Now they face protests
At universities across the country, including Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech, Duke, Carnegie Mellon and Brown, students have staged protests at recruiting events and demonstrated against tech companies that do business with ICE or U.S. Customs and Border Protection, including Microsoft, Palantir and Salesforce. They have called out Amazon for marketing its facial-recognition technology to immigration authorities and hosting Palantir on the Amazon Web Services cloud.
Some 3,000 students from 30 schools signed a document pledging they would not work at Palantir until it severs its contracts with ICE; roughly 800 people signed a petition calling on the dean of UC Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences department to drop its partnership with Palantir.
It’s not clear whether these tactics are having a significant impact on recruitment.
What skills will set you apart in the age of automation?
6 lies you probably tell yourself about giving feedback at work
You only need to begin documenting notes for legal purposes if you’ve given the person much face-to-face feedback for several months, and they show no sign of improvement. In my research as a performance coach, I’ve learned 95% of employees can (and will) improve any skill with your honest, frequent coaching. Just talk to people! Be open, be honest, and give them helpful examples and ideas. When they realize you’re on their side, they’ll ask for more feedback. Have confidence in yourself. If you provide feedback to everyone all the time, it will be much easier to prepare written documentation that you might need later.
The more creative you’re getting, the easier you can slip up. Years ago, I wrote a bad blog post, and commenters were roasting it. I retorted that they were misreading it. I didn’t want to tell them “learn to read” because it didn’t quite fit. So I came up with “Learn to parse.” That, of course, is lame as hell, something that kid from the “you frickin fricks!” video would say.
I’d just made things much worse for myself. If your insults become illegible, overwrought, or sloppy, you’ll lose. And that’s not the only way you can self-own here.
