SourceCast: Episode 136: Google’s Harbinger
Supplier Report: 12/7/2018
FAANG companies continue to struggle with their employees’ perceptions of long-term business goals. Google once again is facing a public disagreement between employees over their plans for China – with some employees for and others against Project Dragonfly.
In the wake of Diane Greene’s departure at Google. insiders are saying that the company needs to start purchasing companies quickly (and that they already missed out on critical acquisitions that would better enable competition with AWS and Microsoft).
Acquisitions
- United Tech to Break Itself Into Three Companies
The company, which makes everything from Otis escalators to Pratt & Whitney jet engines, said Monday that it plans to spin off to shareholders its Otis division and Carrier building systems businesses. The Wall Street Journal had earlier reported on the plans to break apart.
The separation is expected to be completed in 2020 and leave UTC as a pure-play aerospace company, following its acquisition of airplane-parts maker Rockwell Collins Inc. That $23 billion cash-and-stock deal closed Monday after lengthy antitrust reviews in the U.S. and China.
- Logitech isn’t buying Plantronics after all
“Logitech approached Plantronics regarding a potential acquisition and, consistent with the Plantronics Board’s fiduciary duties, the Company entered into discussions with Logitech,” Plantronics’ own statement reads. “Those discussions have ended. Plantronics will not comment further on this matter.”
A $2.2 billion deal would have been Logitech’s biggest acquisition to date by far, although it wouldn’t necessarily have reflected a particularly high valuation of Plantronics’ consumer business. Earlier this year Plantronics itself bought out video-conferencing solutions maker Polycom for $2 billion, which had to have been the main factor in Logitech’s willingness to pay so much.
- Billion-dollar deal: Google pays $1 billion for huge Mountain View business park
Google’s Mountain View purchase means that in the two years since the search giant began to collect properties in downtown San Jose for a proposed transit village, the company has spent at least $2.83 billion in property acquisitions in Mountain View, Sunnyvale, downtown San Jose and north San Jose alone.
Adding to the eye-popping numbers: Google’s spending activity in those four markets reaches $3 billion when including the company’s pending purchase in downtown San Jose of several government-owned parcels, along with the minimum value of a big set of surface parking lots that Google intends to buy from Trammell Crow, also downtown near its proposed transit village.
Cloud
- Google Cloud Needs Acquisitions To Challenge Amazon, Analyst Says
“It’s time to tap Alphabet’s piggy bank to boost GCP (Google Cloud Platform),” Baird analyst Colin Sebastian said in a report Monday. “As Google seeks to carve out greater share in the expanding enterprise cloud services market, we believe the company should embark on a more aggressive shopping spree.”
The Google cloud unit should mull acquisitions of companies such as Workday(WDAY), ServiceNow (NOW), Atlassian (TEAM) and Salesforce.com (CRM), Sebastian said.
https://www.investors.com/news/technology/google-cloud-acquisitions-enterprise-market/
- It turns out some Google staff do believe in controversial plan to re-enter China
Excerpt from a letter written by a Google employee:
Dragonfly is well aligned with Google’s mission. China has the largest number of Internet users of all countries in the world, and yet, most of Google’s services are unavailable in China. This situation heavily contradicts our mission, “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. While there are some prior success, Google should keep the effort in finding out how to bring more of our products and services, including Search, to the Chinese users.https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/28/google-dragonfly-letter/
Except…
We are Google employees. Google must drop Dragonfly.Our opposition to Dragonfly is not about China: we object to technologies that aid the powerful in oppressing the vulnerable, wherever they may be. The Chinese government certainly isn’t alone in its readiness to stifle freedom of expression, and to use surveillance to repress dissent. Dragonfly in China would establish a dangerous precedent at a volatile political moment, one that would make it harder for Google to deny other countries similar concessions.
- IBM CEO Ginni Rometty Criticizes Big Internet Platforms for Mishandling Customers’ Data
“The genesis of the trust crisis is the irresponsible handling of personal data by a few dominant consumer-facing platforms,” Ms. Rometty said Monday. The websites “have more power to shape public opinion than newspapers or the television ever had, yet they face very little regulation or liability.”
“If there are specific companies that misbehave, steps need to be taken,” she said. “I would use a regulatory scalpel, not a sledgehammer” that affects the whole industry.
Security
- Marriott reveals massive database breach affecting up to 500 million hotel guests
Marriott is revealing a massive database breach today, affecting up to 500 million guests of its Starwood hotels the company first acquired in 2016. A security investigation has concluded that there was “unauthorized access” to a database holding hotel guest records. “Marriott learned during the investigation that there had been unauthorized access to the Starwood network since 2014,” says a statement from the company. The Starwood security breach affects a number of branded hotels owned by Marriott, including W Hotels, Sheraton, St. Regis, Westin, and more.
The breach includes 327 million records of “some combination” of name, mailing address, phone number, email address, passport number, Starwood Preferred Guest (“SPG”) account information, date of birth, gender, arrival and departure information, reservation date, and communication preferences.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/30/18119403/marriott-database-breach-starwood-hotels
- Facebook might not sell user data, but internal documents suggest it certainly considered it
Back in April, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told congress unequivocally that, “We do not sell data.” But these documents suggest that it was something that the company internally considered doing between 2012 and 2014, while the company struggled to generate revenue after its IPO.
In one case, an employee suggested shutting down data access unless companies spent “$250k a year to maintain access.” In another email, a Facebook employee talked about having a “strategic” talk with Amazon to avoid a “disappointing conversation” about it getting less data in the future. Concerns raised by the Royal Bank of Canada about restricted data access prompted a Facebook employee to ask in an email about how much the bank had agreed to spend on advertising. It’s unclear whether these emails were sent by one or multiple staff members.
- Google accused of GDPR privacy violations by seven countries
The complaints, which each group has issued to their national data protection authorities in keeping with GDPR rules, come in the wake of the discovery that Google is able to track user’s location even when the “Location History” option is turned off. A second setting, “Web and App Activity,” which is enabled by default, must be turned off to fully prevent GPS tracking.
The BEUC claims that Google uses “deceptive practices” to get users to enable both these options, and does not fully inform users of what doing so entails. As such, consent is not freely given.
Software/SaaS
- Amazon will reportedly sell software that reads medical records
The program scans medical files to pick out relevant information such as the medical condition and patient’s procedures and prescriptions. While other algorithms that try to do the same thing have been stymied by doctors’ abbreviations, Amazon claims to have trained its system to recognize the idiosyncrasies in how doctors take notes, sources told the WSJ. The company had already developed and sold this same software to other businesses, including ones focused on travel booking and customer service. For Amazon, this is another move into the health care market on the heels of the retailer buying the online pharmacy PillPack in June.
Datacenter/Hardware
- Microsoft wins $480M military contract to outfit soldiers with HoloLens AR tech
The company just won a $480 million military contract with the U.S. government to bring AR headset tech into the weapon repertoires of American soldiers.
The two-year contract may result in follow-on orders of more than 100,000 headsets according to documentation describing the bidding process. One of the contract’s tag lines for the AR tech seems to be its ability to enable “25 bloodless battles before the 1st battle,” suggesting that actual combat training is going to be an essential aspect of the AR headset capabilities.
Other
- US charges ex-Autonomy boss Mike Lynch with fraud over $11bn sale to HP
Prosecutors have accused Lynch and former Autonomy vice president of finance Stephen Chamberlain of providing HP with false financial statements to make the company seem like a better deal to acquire than it actually was.
Lynch faces up to 20 years in prison if he is successfully convicted on the 14 charges of conspiracy and fraud in a case filed by prosecutors in a federal court on Thursday. The DoJ is also asking that Lynch forfeit $815m if he’s convicted.
- Microsoft Is Worth as Much as Apple. How Did That Happen?
But the more enduring and important answer is that Microsoft has become a case study of how a once-dominant company can build on its strengths and avoid being a prisoner of its past. It has fully embraced cloud computing, abandoned an errant foray into smartphones and returned to its roots as mainly a supplier of technology to business customers.
That strategy was outlined by Satya Nadella shortly after he became chief executive in 2014. Since then, Microsoft’s stock price has nearly tripled.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/technology/microsoft-apple-worth-how.html
Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
News You Can Use: 12/5/2018
- There’s definitely reason to worry about Brexit, says Accel’s London team
Though they reiterated that no one can know for certain what Brexit’s impact might be, Botteri raised a handful of things that have the firm worried, beginning with “immigration and hiring talent and the movement of talent,” which could be meaningfully hampered by Brexit. “Even companies that don’t move their headquarters to London will often at some point begin to build a team,” he noted, questioning whether that will continue to happen.
There’s also the nontrivial issue of what happens to fintech companies, which have been thriving in London as a gateway between the U.S. and Europe and that have easily operated across all of Europe. Asked Botteri, “What about that?” post Brexit.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/30/yes-do-worry-about-brexit-says-accel/
- Confessions of a procurement director: ‘We don’t want to overpay our agencies’
It’s procurement’s fault to a degree that agencies have shifted their income model. That’s basically a result of forcing down margins. It shouldn’t be that way. The team I work in is more advertising and marketing-focused than others I’ve worked at, so we’re able to draw up contracts with partners that aren’t always trying to secure the cheapest price and are more about how we get value and better return on investment. We don’t want to overpay our agencies and ad tech vendors, but we really don’t want to do the opposite because we see them as partners and if those businesses aren’t profitable then they will not work with us.
https://digiday.com/marketing/confessions-procurement-director-dont-want-overpay-agencies/
- How super rich companies harm us all — and try to cover it up
- Empower the Employees Who Will Build an Amazing Culture
Empowerment is often interpreted as giving people control over daily details like what hours they work or what kinds of snacks they find in the break room. While those things certainly make day-to-day living more comfortable, they don’t give employees an overarching sense of ownership over the work they do.
Empowered employees are given the opportunity to do work they value or work that fuels their growth. Anything less feels like lip service, and companies that want to keep their employees genuinely empowered — and engaged — have to keep this mind. Empowerment isn’t necessarily about making work more enjoyable; it’s about making it more meaningful.
- How to Become the Best of the Best
You can be the best at something, but if no one knows, no one cares. Work on making friends in your field, especially with people more successful than you. That means having people skills, introducing yourself at parties, going to events, and throwing out favors.
It kind of sucks that just being extremely good isn’t enough, but a lot of skills don’t have a “best of” category. An athlete may consistently win, thus establishing themselves as the best, but most of us do stuff that is much harder to measure. That’s why who you know (and who likes you) matters so much.
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-become-the-best-of-the-best-1830571441
Photo by Mantas Hesthaven on Unsplash
Supplier Report: 11/30/2018
The haze of Thanksgiving and Black Friday is wearing off and several companies have found themselves with security issues.
Amazon, Venmo (Paypal) the United States Postal Service, and Microsoft have all been dealing with potential bugs and vulnerabilities (at various levels of severity).
Facebook continues to have exposure to social vulnerabilities – and things are getting tense: Sheryl Sandburg is rumored to be fearing for her job, but Mark Zuckerberg says she isn’t going anywhere (for now).
Artificial Intelligence
- Lab-Grown Mini-Brains Spontaneously Produced ‘Human-Like’ Brain Waves for the First Time
After the brain organoids had been growing in petri dishes for about six months, the researchers noticed that the electrical activity they were measuring was occuring at a higher rate than had ever been documented before in lab-grown organoids. Even more surprising, however, was that this electrical activity didn’t resemble the synchronized activity seen in mature human brains. Instead, the electrical patterns were chaotic, a hallmark of a developing brain.
When Muotri and his colleagues compared the organoids’ electrical activity to that seen in premature babies, they found that it was strikingly similar to the patterns seen in babies born 25-39 weeks after conception.
Cloud
- Google’s cloud business under Greene was plagued by internal clashes, missed acquisitions, insiders say
Google’s lack of big deals has puzzled analysts given how aggressive the major software vendors have been at opening their wallets to win in the cloud. In two of the year’s biggest deals — IBM’s $34 billion purchase of Red Hat and Microsoft’s $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub — Google was involved in talks but ultimately came up short, according to people familiar with the matter.
Greene wanted to buy GitHub but Pichai was less enthusiastic, unclear why Google would spend big money to get into the market for developer tools, said a person close to the business. Google’s bid for GitHub, whose cloud software lets programmers collaborate and share code, came in at just under $6 billion, and it declined to raise the price after being told of Microsoft’s offer, the person said.
Security
- Venmo Caught Off Guard by Fraudsters
In the first three months of 2018, the digital money-transfer service owned by PayPal Holdings Inc. PYPL -1.48% recorded an operating loss of about $40 million—nearly 40% larger than the loss for which the company had budgeted, according to internal documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Expenses related to fraudulent transactions were a big factor. The so-called transaction loss rate, which includes losses related to fraudulent charges, rose from about 0.25% of overall Venmo volume in January to 0.40% in March. The company had been shooting for a rate of roughly 0.24% in those periods, according to the documents.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/venmo-caught-off-guard-by-fraudsters-1543068120?ns=prod/accounts-wsj
- USPS took a year to fix a vulnerability that exposed all 60 million users’ data
The vulnerability included all 60 million user accounts on the website. It was caused by an authentication weakness in the site’s application programming interface (API) that allowed anyone to access a USPS database offered to businesses and advertisers to track user data and packages. The API should have verified whether an account had permissions to read user data but USPS didn’t have such controls in place.
Users’ personal data including emails, phone numbers, mailing campaign data were all exposed to anyone who was logged into the site. Additionally, any user could request account changes for another user, so they could potentially change another account’s email address and phone number, although USPS does at least send a confirmation email to confirm the changes.
- Amazon leaks users’ names and emails in ‘technical error’
When contacted for comment, Amazon said that neither its website nor any of its systems had been breached and that it has “fixed the issue and informed customers who may have been impacted.” It did not reveal the number of accounts affected or which countries the users are located in. Twitter users across Europe and the United States have reported receiving the email, and forum posts suggest that the error affected consumer rather than business accounts on the platform.
Characterizing this as a “technical error” means that the incident is unlikely to be related to reports of Amazon firing employees for sharing customer emails with third-party sellers, but the lack of information makes it difficult to establish exactly what happened. We have reached out to the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office, which Amazon would have needed to inform in the event of a breach, for comment.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/21/18106306/amazon-email-address-leak-technical-error-phishing
- Hackers May Exploit Microsoft PowerPoint For Malware Attacks
As explained, the malicious file involved in this attack method appears to have a blank page, but secretly connects to a malicious link. Ramilli analyzed the slide structure and noticed an external OLEobject. Upon further analysis, he found the target device already infected by the file downloaded on the system, that is, wraeop.sct. After this step, stage 3 of the attack begins that utilises an internal image to execute additional code leading to stage 4 – the payload execution.
The researcher suspects the malware to be AzoRult after performing traffic analysis and considering the C&C admin.
Software/SaaS
- Red Hat to be ‘Switzerland’ within IBM
According to Marco Bill-Peter, Red Hat senior vice president of customer experience and engagement, Red Hat will function as an independent, distinct unit within IBM’s Hybrid Cloud team and maintain its commitment to open source principles.
https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/649888/red-hat-switzerland-within-ibm/
Red Hat Says IBM Acquisition Won’t Change Its Culture — But Can It Change Theirs?“There is a commitment from them and a commitment from us as well: we stay true to open source. The other one is [Red Hat will] operate as an independent distinct unit and preserve our unique culture.”
Significantly changing its culture could cause many of Red Hat’s 13,000 employees to leave, Bill-Peter said. It could also scare off long time partners like Amazon and Google from collaborating on “the next open hybrid cloud”. But Bill-Peter has little doubt IBM is committed to their independence.
https://which-50.com/red-hat-says-ibm-acquisition-wont-change-its-culture-but-can-it-change-theirs/
Datacenter/Hardware
- America’s nuclear arsenal relies on this brand-new supercomputer
In an expansive white-tiled room in Livermore, California sits Sierra, the world’s second most powerful supercomputer. Sierra looks like an unassuming server farm, but is actually a massive connected hive of 190,000 processing cores. It was completed earlier this year, and has been on a shakedown cruise since then: researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ran astrophysics, climate, and precision medicine simulations on Sierra while ferreting out bad components and other technical hiccups.
But early next year, Sierra’s real work will begin. The system will be “air gapped,” meaning that it will be disconnected from any external network to prevent unauthorized access. Once that happens, it can begin the calculations it was purpose-built to carry out: simulations of nuclear weapons launches and detonations.
Other
- With Facebook at ‘War,’ Zuckerberg Adopts More Aggressive Style
Mr. Zuckerberg, who previously set annual goals such as to learn Mandarin and read 25 books, said this year he would focus on fixing Facebook. He believes this tougher management style is necessary to tackle challenges being raised both internally and externally, according to a person familiar with his thinking.
Mr. Zuckerberg’s new posture could trouble those who feel his “move fast, break things” mantra from Facebook’s early days contributed to many of the company’s current problems. It also has led to confrontations with some of his top reports, including Ms. Sandberg, who has long had considerable autonomy over the Facebook teams that control communications and policy.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/with-facebook-at-war-zuckerberg-adopts-more-aggressive-style-1542577980
Zuckerberg says stepping down at Facebook is ‘not the plan’Otherwise, he seemed unwilling to change his role or step down as leader of the company, and of COO Sandberg said “I hope we work together for decades more to come.” Separately, tonight TechCrunch reports that an internal memo showed outgoing policy head Eliot Schrager take responsibility for the company hiring Definers, a PR firm that spread negative publicity about competitors and pushed angles linking George Soros to critics. In the memo Schrage said Facebook did ask them to do work relating to Soros and that Definers reached out to members of the press showing that he funded some people who were critical of the company.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/11/20/zuckerberg-says-stepping-down-at-facebook-is-not-the-plan/
Photo: Almos Bechtold