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
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