Marketplace - Ultimately, the joke’s on Gmail rivals

Episode Date: April 1, 2024

Twenty years ago, Google launched Gmail. Users thought the promise of 1 gigabyte of free storage was an April Fools’ joke. It wasn’t. In this episode, how Gmail came to dominate the email space — and everything connected to it. Plus, legislators rush to help workers affected by the Baltimore bridge collapse, small businesses prep for next week’s eclipse, and some states might cut funding for parent caregivers of disabled kids.

We've got an update on jobs at the Port of Baltimore and jobs in the tech industry and also jobs fueled by the solar eclipse. Did I mention it's Jobs Week? From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In New York, I'm Kristen Schwab in for Kai Risdahl. It's Monday, April 1st. Good to have you with us. We start the show today in Baltimore, where governments and businesses and families are still navigating the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge. The accident last week claimed the lives of six bridge workers and snarled parts of the economy overnight. That includes international shipping, yes, but also the jobs of thousands of people who work at or near the port of Baltimore. The Maryland legislature is fast-tracking an emergency bill to help people whose jobs have

been affected. Marketplace's Nancy Marshall-Genzer has more on how the state government is trying to help. The Maryland legislature is scheduled to adjourn for the year a week from today. Not much time for state lawmakers to vote on the Protecting Opportunities and Regional Trade, or PORT, Act. You know, you'd love to have more time for a bill like this. Maryland delegate Luke Klippinger is the bill's lead sponsor in the House. He represents the south side of Baltimore's Inner Harbor. He's been hearing a lot from constituents whose jobs depend on the port. For people who, like longshoremen, they get paid if they work on a ship.

If they're not working on a ship, they don't get paid. According to estimates in the bill, more than 15,000 people work directly at the port in security and maintenance, driving trucks or cleaning ships. There are another 140,000 jobs linked to the port. Employees at dock workers' favorite lunch spots or hotels where cruise passengers spend the night. Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson says the bill would supplement their unemployment benefits. And so we are trying to use our rainy day funds to backfill what unemployment insurance may not cover. Small business owners say they need help too. Arnaz Harrison is co-owner of Howe Logistics. He says it's only been open since last July and hasn't

made a profit yet. He's worried the business might not survive. You know, an event such as this could have a devastating effect. The Port Act would provide temporary relief for small businesses so they can pay their workers and keep their doors open. Harrison will take what he can get. With the government stepping up and helping small businesses such as ours, it gives us the opportunity to stay afloat long enough to find other avenues of revenue. But right now, Harrison says, most of the company's business is tied to the port. I'm Nancy Marshall-Genzer for Marketplace. Wall Street today was not feeling the April Fool's spirit.

We'll have the details when we do the numbers. Let's stay on the topic of jobs for another moment, because as I mentioned, it's a big week for jobs data. We'll be getting February's JOLTS report tomorrow. That's the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, plus March unemployment numbers on Friday. One job market that's raised eyebrows over the last handful of years is tech. market that's raised eyebrows over the last handful of years is tech. In 2022, the IT sector added more than 260,000 jobs, according to data from the Labor Department. Last year, it added just 700 jobs, and that number is expected to drop again this year. So how has tech gone from a secure, high-salary industry to one that seems a little more uncertain. Belle Lin has been writing about what's happening with labor in the tech world at

The Wall Street Journal. Belle, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for having me. So, so much has happened with tech, I feel like, in the last handful of years. Can you zoom out and give us some perspective on just how much that job market has ebbed and flowed? Sure. So, the job market for technology workers grew immensely over the pandemic. So things like Zoom and the cloud, which enabled work from home. And so to compensate for all that additional growth in business, a lot of these tech companies hired many, many more workers and paid them really well. So for a while, the kind of conventional knowledge in the tech industry

was that if you had a job in the technology sector, you worked in IT, you were pretty much set and you were getting compensated pretty heavily for it. But a lot of that's changing now and very much driven by the fact that ChatGPT, which is the AI chatbot by OpenAI, was released in late 2022 to the public. And that really kind of like set off this AI firestorm and gold rush in which a lot of companies in the tech sector too kind of woke up to the fact that if they weren't investing in AI already, they should certainly be doing so. So that really led to this kind of like shifting of resources also from these traditional IT roles,

maybe they're in cloud and software to kind of all things AI. Yeah, well, I'm wondering if with all the layoffs and cuts happening right now, combined with sort of that extreme hiring earlier and an overcorrection, is this, do you see this as a blip in time or is something bigger happening in the industry? It's hard to say whether it's just a blip in terms of a shrinkage in IT and tech roles, because what we often see is that jobs in one area kind of end up shifting or morphing into another. So if maybe you are a data center operator and you're used to working in this kind of like windowless data center, Maybe now you're developing cloud applications.

But what we know for sure is that AI is here. It's not going away. Every company from the kind of like small mom and pop, two or three person shop to the big enterprises are really trying to figure out how they can harness it. Because if they don't, there's a big fear that they'll be left behind. So how reasonable is it then for companies to ask employees to adapt?

I mean, how many new skills can these people learn? You know, it's a great question because what I've been hearing recently from some companies is that while companies do want that high-level AI talent, they're also thinking that they can upskill or help reskill their existing staff. So there is a lot of pressure on existing technology workers to learn how to, you know, train a large language model if that's what the necessary skill is, or how to prompt it or ask questions of chat GPT. So I think that is the new reality. Not just that they need to learn these skills, but if they don't, you know, maybe companies will hire someone else who already does.

Yeah, there was a line I found striking in your piece. It said, quote, learn AI and don't expect the same pay packages you were getting a few years ago. Are these jobs just fundamentally changing and how? Yeah, that's a big question in terms of the fundamental change that I don't think the final verdict has been reached. Because even when we have AI-based tools for coding for software developers, for example, there's a large swath of people who think that software developers will always be around, but that it'll be less of that kind of like grunt work of coding and typing away in the computer late into the night and more of kind of high-level strategy of what should the software? And then the machines can do the coding for them. Have you talked to tech workers about how they're feeling right now?

Have they sort of caught up with the reality of what's happening in their job market? There is very much a sense of skepticism from one camp and also from another camp, a sense of cautious optimism. So when I talk about skepticism, that's the group of even software engineers who kind of felt like they had job security on lock, do feel threatened by the rise of like AI coding assistance, because they can actually spit out lines of code that can be put into production and used into products. On the other hand, the cautious optimism is this kind of idea that this is just the latest kind of change that the industry is going through,

and people will be fine as long as they adapt and learn new skills. Bell Lin wrote a piece about the tech job market downturn for The Wall Street Journal. Bell, thanks for chatting. Thanks for having me. It turns out Google has a weird habit of making news on April 1st. Real news, not April Fool's joke kind of news. Today's headline is that Google's parent company, Alphabet, has agreed to delete billions of data records it's collected from people using Chrome's incognito mode. It's part of a settlement from a lawsuit in 2020 alleging the company misled consumers about how private incognito mode was.

Maybe we should take a moment to acknowledge that nothing you do on internet is really very private. Anyways, the news 20 years ago today was probably more exciting for the company. On April 1st, 2004, Google announced it would launch its own email service called Gmail. People originally thought the company's promise of one gigabyte of free email storage was an actual April Fool's joke. But it turns out the joke was on Yahoo, Hotmail, and all the other email services that trailed the three billion Google Workspace users. Marketplace's Matt Levin has more. Technology design consultant Jared Spool has 119,000 emails in his Gmail inbox.

I asked him to look up the oldest. It's a joke email from my father dated 9-22-10. from my father dated 9-22-10. It was one of those chain emails that maybe was funnier 14 years ago. Spool says the big reason Gmail attracted early adopters was the promise of never having to delete an email you didn't really want to delete. And now Gmail is basically Spool's external memory. I use it as much as a archive of history, the history of my relationship with a person as much as anything else. Users don't want to part with that archive or go through the hassle of migrating it to another service. Jason Freed with the email company Hay says users are also reluctant to update all those accounts connected to Gmail. Streaming, banking, dad joke newsletters. It's the keys to your entire digital kingdom.

That doesn't necessarily mean we love Gmail, though, or email in general. Gloria Mark researches tech in the workplace at UC Irvine. What we find consistently is that email is associated with stress. Which might be a problem because Mark says we check it an average of 77 times a day. I'm Matt Levin for Marketplace. Coming up... We're excited to show off our town and our community. Local tourism is about to get cosmic. But first, let's do the numbers.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average sank 240 points, six-tenths percent, to close at 39,566. The Nasdaq picked up 17 points, one-tenth of a percent, to finish at 16,396. And the S&P 500 slid 10 points, two-tenths percent, to end at 52.43. Malin and I were talking about the shifting job market in the tech industry, thanks to AI. She reported on some of the companies making job cuts lately, which include Cisco Systems Inc. Its stock was up three-tenths percent today. DocuSign shed two and two-tenths percent. Expedia Group slipped three and three-tenths percent.

Matt Levin was just telling us about the birth of Gmail. Parent company Alphabetenths percent. Expedia Group slipped three and three-tenths percent. Matt Levin was just telling us about the birth of Gmail. Parent company Alphabet climbed three percent. Meanwhile, Microsoft, owner of Outlook and Hotmail, Microsoft added nine-tenths percent. Bonds fell. The yield on the 10-year T-note increased to 4.31 percent. You're listening to Marketplace. This is Marketplace. I'm Kristen Schwab. For families with children who have severe disabilities, getting the right care can be a struggle. Some need in-home care providers who are there 24 hours a day. It's why parents sometimes take on the role themselves. In certain cases, some states recognize this as work. They pay parents to be caregivers. But over the past year, at least 11 states have

considered getting rid of those programs. SideFX Public Media's Elizabeth Gabriel has more. In Noblesville, Indiana, Jennifer DeWitt gave up full-time work to take care of her 15-year-old twins who have cerebral palsy. Her son Jackson is the most severe. He's considered blind, unable to eat by mouth, has severe scoliosis, respiratory issues, and experiences seizures every day. You're always in a high-stress situation because it's always life or death. When is the next seizure coming? If I feed him this, is he going to choke on it? The family is one of roughly 20,000 in Indiana who receive funds through a state Medicaid

program called Attendant Care. It pays spouses and parents to provide hospital-level medical care for their disabled family members. DeWitt says there are great home health workers out there, but they're in short supply. Jackson needs around-the- clock care. I think almost every special needs family that I am connected to, all of us have stories of nurses just not showing up. DeWitt's husband is a truck driver, which means he isn't always home. As a parent-caregiver, DeWitt makes $15 an hour. And the pay from that program helped the DeWitts move into a new, more accessible home. DeWitt has to stay by Jackson all night to make sure he doesn't pull off his breathing machines. Their old house

didn't have much room. I was actually sleeping on the floor in his bedroom to make sure that I could hear him. When Indiana officials proposed cutting payments to parents to plug in an unexpected budget shortfall of nearly $1 billion, families like the DeWitts felt blindsided. She's scared they may lose their house. I would have never made the choice to move if I would have known that I was going to lose the biggest portion of my income. Indiana's Medicaid program will stop paying parents the same rate as any other registered in-home care provider. Parents could keep providing medical care for their kids, but their take-home pay would be less than half of what it was. That's because they'd have to work with an agency under a model called structured family caregiving.

Some of the caregiving pay would go to the agency. But Elizabeth Edwards, a senior attorney with the National Health Law Program, says the state is making a budget calculation here. the National Health Law Program, says the state is making a budget calculation here. If the state is saying that they are going to save money by not allowing families to be paid caregivers, that indicates to me at least an assumption that they don't think that individuals will get that service. Some families may have to put their child in a nursing home. And Kate Barrow with the Indiana Governor's Council for People with Disabilities says some parents have considered other drastic moves so they can keep their pay and keep taking care of their children. Because if they're still the legal parent,

with the proposed changes, they wouldn't be paid at the higher caregiver rate. I've heard of families who are considering signing over their parental rights for their children in order to remain the caregiver. Legislative efforts to quash these proposed changes or increase payments to families failed. Now, the changes could take effect in Indiana as soon as this July. Meanwhile, at least 13 other states have recently decided to allow parents and spouses to be paid caregivers, and 13 other states already sales. During the pandemic, demand ballooned. Then in 2023, motorhomes and towable trailers had their worst year in more than a decade. But there are signs the sales slump could be reversing. Marketplace's Megan McCarty Carino

reports. A lot of economists like to watch things like bond rates or household consumption trends. But Michael Hicks at Ball State University looks to the campground. RVs do extraordinarily well in predicting business cycles because there's such a big, volatile consumption piece for most American consumers. They often cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. So sales tend to drop at the slightest hint of bad economic news and pick up again when consumers are feeling better. But as with so many aspects of the economy, things got weird in the pandemic, says James Ashurst at the RV Industry Association.

I think a winding road is a great way to depict how the industry's been. He says RV sales took off as Americans looked outdoors for social distance safe activities, then decelerated, down almost 50 percent from their peak in 2021. Most of the product that we sell are financed. So higher interest rates have also cut into demand. But with the Fed signaling rate cuts later this year, buyers who've been waiting might make their moves, says analyst David Whiston at Morningstar. I'm not worried about permanent reset below pre-COVID levels, for example.

Manufacturers Winnebago and Thor both recently forecast a rosier end of the year, and overall RV shipments are already up 15% over last year. So the RV index is looking good. I'm Megan McCarty Carino for Marketplace. Speaking of things that travel across the United States, a total solar eclipse is going to be observable along a big swath of North America on April 8th. The path of totality, that's when the moon's shadow completely blocks out the sun, it enters the continent through Mexico and then crosses the United States from Texas to Maine. And those few minutes of darkness create economic opportunities for people along the way. My name is Maddie Coffin. I live in Poplar Bluff, Missouri. I'm 17 years old and I'm a singer-songwriter. I will be playing at Donovan, Missouri for this eclipse. It's a music and arts festival on Current River. A lot of, you know, bringing the community together through music and art.

I'm getting paid about $100 for my hour slot in the festival. My name is Lexi DeBaltzo. I live in Lakewood, Ohio. I am a local artist and designer and have been creating products out of my home studio since 2012. With us being in the path of totality for the eclipse, I decided that it would be a good time to design something that would impact a lot of people, not just in Northeast Ohio, but anyone who's experiencing the eclipse this year. It's just kind of a keepsake ornament.

I felt a lot of things out on the market that I saw were T-shirts and short-lived experiences,. I kind of wanted to create something people would take out every single year and say, oh yeah, I did that. I have sold about 40 of them so far. My sales for March, though, however, are up like 200 plus percent because this is a very off-season time of year for ornaments, needless to say. time of year for ornaments, needless to say. After the eclipse leaves the Cleveland area, we'll be heading north, going up through Erie, Pennsylvania, on to New York, and so on up to Maine.

Hi, my name is Johanna Dominguez. I am the owner of Put a Plan on It in Buffalo, New York. It was a challenge trying to come up with, well, since all these people are coming here and there's going to be eclipse here, what is a good way to take advantage of it? And how do I do that still staying true to our brand, which is houseplants and local artists? So I started creating a list of a bunch of different celestial themed plants that have star or moon or sun in their name. And that's it grew from there. We're open that day, but obviously we're kicking everyone out and being like, go watch this. I have family that's coming up for it. And so we've been trying to figure out where to go, what to do, but also

where to eat and what's going to be the best eclipse viewing spot. I want to have my dog with me. So I'm going to a park that is overlooking Erie, but I don't think everyone's going to be there. We've kind of termed it as a nor'easter of people. My name is Fred Grant, and I'm the owner of WHOU radio station here in Holton, Maine. We're throwing a giant party downtown. We looked at it from a marketing opportunity and making sure that our businesses take advantage, that our residents can take advantage of it through renting rooms within their homes, Airbnbs. Also working with our public police to help figure out how do we get these thousands of cars into our community. It's a lot.

But we're excited to show off our town and our community. Our region was impacted significantly by COVID. We lost so much. So the fact that we're going to be able to come together in a large population like this is really going to be something special. I am thinking about doing in the path of totality and feel some of the awe and amazement that I know I will feel experiencing something that is bigger than yourself and you're sharing that experience with other human beings. It's going to be part of the Holton lore for decades to come. to come. You can tell us about your economy, whether the eclipse passes it or not, at marketplace.org. This final note on the way out today, a game of who's going to pay for that?

Boeing woes edition. A couple weeks ago, we told you that United Airlines plans to pause pilot hiring this spring because it won't get all the planes it ordered. Well, now, read this on CNBC, the company is asking its pilots to take unpaid time off next month. So I guess the answer is workers. Workers will partly pay for that. So I guess the answer is workers. Workers will partly pay for that. Our daily production team includes Andy Corbin, Elise Hassan, Maria Hollenhorst, Sarah Leeson, Sean McHenry, and Sofia Terenzio.

I'm Kristen Schwab. We'll be back tomorrow. This is APM. A lot of people spend a lot of money on things like skincare, fast fashion, and even surgery, all in the name of self-improvement. But as the price of perfection rises, when is it time to call it quits? I'm Rima Kheir, host of This is Uncomfortable, a podcast from Marketplace. This season, we dig deep into the financial trappings of self-care and the real motivations behind our spending choices. Listen to This is Uncomfortable wherever you get your podcasts.