Screaming in the Cloud - Speaking Truth to Power in Tech with Dai Wakabayashi

Episode Date: January 22, 2020

About Dai WakabayashiDai Wakabayashi is a tech reporter for the New York Times based in San Francisco whose primary focus is all things Google. Prior to joining the Times, Dai covered Apple and Japanese tech companies (e.g., Sony, Nintendo, Panasonic, and Sharp) for The Wall Street Journal for almost eight years. He also worked for Reuters for nine years, focusing on Microsoft during his time there.Links Referenced: Dai’s recent AWS articleNY Times hires Wakabayashi to cover techTwitter: @daiwakaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dwakabayashi/Personal site: https://www.nytimes.com/by/daisuke-wakabayashiCompany site: nytimes.com

Hello and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, cloud economist Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud. This episode is sponsored by Influx Data. Influx is most well known for InfluxDB, which is a time series database that you use if you need a time series database.

Think Amazon Timestream, except actually available for sale and has paying customers. To check out what they're doing, both with their SaaS offering as well as their on-premise offerings that you can use yourself because they're open source, visit influxdata.com. My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Last December, an article came out in the New York Times titled Prime Leverage, How Amazon Wields Power in the Technology World. Joining me today is Dai Wakabayashi,

the journalist who wrote that article. Dai, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. First, thanks for taking the time to speak with me. You are a journalist journalist, not a journalist in the sense of it's a polite term that we're going to appropriate for someone who works in corporate comms. You are a reporter. That is what you've done for your

entire career, as best I can tell. Yeah, that's definitely, ever since I left college, that's all I've been doing. It's, you know, it's a job that doesn't particularly pay well. It's not one that gets a ton of respect in the broader world these days. But I do think it's an awesome job in the sense that I get to be on the front lines of interesting things happening and get to talk to a lot of interesting people. And it's one of the few jobs where you can stick your finger in someone's eye and you're allowed to do it. And not only are you allowed to do it, you're sometimes encouraged to do it. It's refreshing to talk to someone who isn't trying to sell anything, which is, I guess, a depressing commentary

on the state of the world today. But so this article came out, I want to say about December 15th. In fact, yes, it was December 15th. And the general, it's a lengthy article. And the general thesis is that in the technology world, AWS more or less winds up having a product strategy that distills down to yes, and effectively strip mines open source projects and companies for a lot of their innovations and then rolls

it into first party services. Is that an effective summary? Have I missed some of the salient points? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think part of it is that, you know, what we saw as sort of one of the main ideas here is that Amazon has created this, you know, incredible platform, which has, is now essentially taking over the way people buy and spend and use technology. And now, instead of just being a platform and sort of being the thing that everyone just builds on top of, they're also now offering everything else that runs on top of it. And so all these companies and many software companies we spoke to who felt like, you know, maybe five,

six years ago thought, here's an opportunity for us to kind of, you know, a new frontier for us is now increasingly finding that, well, this frontier may not be as lucrative because we're competing with the very company that is sort of, you know, the platform. And so I think that notion of what the responsibilities of a platform is something that generally we have been kind of looking into at the times about big tech companies, whether it's Google or whether it's Facebook or whether it's Apple. And certainly this is our sort of look at what Amazon is doing in the cloud. And what's interesting to me is seeing, I guess, the community response to this in various corners.

There's, of course, the immediate knee-jerk response of, well, that isn't accurate. There was an agenda, yada, yada. It comes off as the people immediately saying, well, that article's great, but there's 40 years of nuance go into the whole open source world that was largely passed by in the article itself. My position on that is the nuances of the open source world are something I don't fully understand, despite having been actively involved with it for roughly 15 years. So the fact that some of those nuances and edge cases didn't make it into a front page story of the New York Times isn't the most surprising thing in the world to me. a front page story of the New York Times isn't the most surprising thing in the world to me. What is your perception of the feedback then since this article

was published? Yeah, you know, I knew that that was coming. Look, I don't think we ever thought we could fully capture all the nuance of something like open source. I mean, it is akin to like, you know, a religious war on some level, you know, that you'll never fully capture all the history and the back and forth of the industry. But we're trying to give a flavor of it, you know, and we're trying to give enough of a flavor of it that people can kind of get a sort of base level understanding of what's at stake and, you know, and then read the article for what it's worth. And, you know, I do understand that people feel like there was some nuance missing. But, you know, I think one of the things, one of the challenges with journalism is always writing for, you know, writing something very niche for a very general audience can be, you know, the challenge. And it's how far back do we pull back the lens? Do we pull it back so far

that it's, you know, it becomes almost impossible to distill what specific thing you're talking about? Or do we go too narrow and sort of alienate a broad part of the audience? And so, look, there's never a right answer to exactly how far back to pull back the lens. And we tried, you know, what we thought was the right, right level of sort of altitude from which to write about this. That's one of the more interesting parts of, I guess, seeing articles on things that I tend to be relatively well traveled in. And I see certain shortfalls or papering over of complex issues. And I guess that was, I guess, as I went through the maturation process insofar as I ever did, it really was an eye opener forener for me as far as realizing that, okay, if this is an area in which I have subject matter expertise, and well, there are

shades of nuance, and journalism aimed at the mainstream doesn't necessarily pick up on all of that nuance, the next logical step for me was, huh, I wonder with all these other things in which I don't have subject matter expertise, is this going on there as well? And the answer, of course, is obviously. Nothing is going to act as an in-depth primer to a field of study. Reading a newspaper does not make you a subject matter expert on anything other than reading that day's issue. I mean, I think, you know, one of the things that's really eye-opening about, you know, the process of writing a fairly long story like this is the collaborative nature of it. So I speak to, you know, a ton of people, right? 40, 50, 60 people for this. And I get, I get that sort of deep perspective. And when I go to write it, I feel like, well, this is very

important. I need to explain the nuance of the licensing deal and, you know, and why this licensing agreement is different than that licensing agreement. And then my editor sort of looks at it and says, I mean, she sort of looks at it and says, if we're talking about licensing, we've lost like the specific different licenses. We've lost people. And so, you know, that's the collaborative effort. Right. I go and I get really steeped in it. I get really, you know, I get really granular. But as I write it, I think, okay, I need to pull this back a little bit. And usually the editor pulls it back even more.

You know, it is my, we have a fantastic editor. Her name is Pui Wing Tam. And her job almost always is to make us be, we're looking at something at 5,000 feet. We need to be looking at it at, you know, 10,000, 15,000, 30,000 feet. Pull it all the way back and tell us what it is about the industry. And for us, this story was always about power and influence. Here's a company with enormous power and enormous influence now in the technology world. And how do they wield that power and influence? And so,

you know, she always sort of kept us on that sort of North Star, for lack of a better phrase. But, you know, that's part of the collaborative effort. And so that's always really interesting to me where I feel like sometimes I'm in there saying, well, this is losing nuance, too much nuance. And she says, well, what is the real nuance here that you're trying to make? And then we'll rephrase it. And, you know, it's a back and forth process. What's interesting to me as the response that I heard from this article from my friends at AWS was it mostly came back to the position of that's not accurate at all. And my argument in response to that is I agree with what they're getting at in that I do not personally believe that there's someone at AWS, or most people at AWS for that matter,

are sitting around figuring out, okay, how can we completely undercut various people that do business with and rely on us? I don't believe that is the starting point that anything reasonable or rational comes from. But when you're building that out, you don't have the luxury of understanding how actions get interpreted in the broader marketplace. At this point, Amazon is, give or take, a trillion dollar company. They deserve a increased level of scrutiny as a result. And while that isn't how we intended this to come across, well, then you should have done a better job of telling a story around it,

because people don't see the world the way that you see it internally at your company. The actions you take reverberate throughout all of society at your scale. And it's important that people are aware of the outweighed impact that their words carry. I was having this conversation recently when I turned to a peer and say, hey, I wonder what this line on the graph means. That's just an idle question. If I say that as someone's manager, it can very easily be interpreted as a, you should find out what that line on the graph means. The fact that there is that power disparity completely changes the context of the exact same statement. Totally. And, you know, one of the things that I thought

was interesting, I mean, you know, Amazon clearly, you know, they put out a blog post. If your listeners haven't gone and read it, they should. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. Yeah, in response to the article. And, you know, one of the things companies are very good at is if they find a story that they especially don't like and they find an error in it, they will, you know, gently prod you to correct that error in the story. And there were no requests for corrections. Granted, they did not like the way I interpreted a certain set of facts, you know, that I understand that they might think that we had a certain agenda that I understand. But the notion of accuracy is, you know, something that we take very seriously, obviously.

And so when a story goes out like that, the thing that I'm sitting there also very worried about is, well, I wonder if people are going to find, you know, a mistake in the story. And, you know, we did not get a request for a correction. The one thing we did get, which I thought was sort of interesting, and I guess I should make the disclosure now, I didn't even think to check to see if the New York Times is an AWS customer. And it turns out, yes, yes, we are an AWS customer, along with GCP. So that disclosure was not in the story. In hindsight, maybe we should have had it in there. But, you know, it was the farthest thing from my mind to even think about that, which probably is a shortcoming.

Well, the other side of it, too, whenever the Washington Post has any article that even touches on Amazon, they have to disclose, oh, by the way, the founder of Amazon owns the entire paper. That doesn't stop them from being overwhelmingly critical from time to time,

but those disclaimers in there from a journalistic integrity point of view are incredibly important. I would argue that I don't think anyone thinks that you took it easy on AWS because the New York Times

is an AWS customer, based upon the response I saw to that article. Yeah, I don't think that's the concern. You know, I do think that the disclosures are incredibly important. And I, look, you know, a lot of people talked about the reaction and everyone, part of the privilege of working for the New York Times and part of the responsibility is that we are, we have sort of a bullseye on our backs, you know, and that when we write something, everyone, a lot of people read it, we have a huge platform and that's really a privilege. And, but with that comes an incredible responsibility to, you know, that we have to be able to like weather the criticism of that story. And so for us, you know, I was not surprised that a lot of people had, you know, criticism for the story. And I think that's totally fine.

You know, and Amazon's response, I think, was, you know, it's totally within their right to do so. And I don't take it personally, you know, and, you know, I don't think Amazon took the story personally either. They realize, I think, at some level that as they get bigger there, you know, people are going to start looking at them a little closely. And certainly this year, we've seen a ton of great work, not only from the Times, but also from the Wall Street Journal and other publications that, and I think BuzzFeed also had a great story recently that looks at kind of the reverberations of the Amazon world that we live in, right? That goes beyond AWS and obviously on e-commerce and this notion that, you know, everything should be delivered to you the second you want it. And so we live in an Amazon world. And so, you know, I think it's only fair that reporters get more and more interested in sort of looking very closely

at that world. And Amazon is totally within their right to be very aggressive in responding back. I find their entire blog post that responded to your article to be a little on the interesting side. I mean, they, of course, have the trotting out the hostages of all of their large partners who are active in the open source world of, these people are great examples who love working with us. Well, yeah, I mean, what else are those companies going to say? You can't ever speak out against

one of your largest partners and expect to live. But what's, I guess, pushing back on this of, oh, companies aren't actually afraid that Amazon's gonna move into their space. No one has actually said that statement aloud because it's provably untrue. Whenever I talk to people, even on this podcast and occasionally in the pre-show discussion I'll have, it's, oh, are you worried about AWS releasing a product next week to put you out of business? And their response is, don't even joke about that. People are incredibly sensitive to that. There's a palpable sense of tension in partner meetings when people are preparing for large conferences

at reInvent, for example, when they have their big annual event and their giant keynote where Andy Jassy more or less gets on stage for three straight hours and recites new services, which is what it feels like sometimes. Everyone, there's a palpable sense of tension of, is this going to be the thing that more or less fundamentally drives our business in an unexpected

and unwelcome direction? I mean, I've covered technology now for almost 20 years. And, you know, I've covered Microsoft in the 2000s. I've covered Apple. I've covered now I'm covering Google as my main sort of beat. And I've never seen companies more scared to talk out about another company than I saw with Amazon and AWS. It was really fascinating. You know, there were a bunch of companies who off the record or, you know, on background would really just tee off on the company, on Amazon and AWS's practices. But if you tried to push any of them to talk either on the record or even the on the record things, you know, you ask them to sort of make that, you know, or, or, or when you do, when they were willing to talk on the record, it was a total whitewashing of,

of the things that they would say privately. And so that's what I thought was really eye-opening to me, is that a lot of companies are just deathly afraid of even saying the most innocuous thing about Amazon. And so the trotting out of the partners I found to be less useful. You know, obviously, Amazon tried to get us to talk to the partners who were happy. And certainly, I don't doubt that there are some partners who are genuinely happy about working with AWS. But I also doubt that even the happiest partners would voice their concerns, you know, to the New York Times in a sort of frank way. And so that was one thing that I thought was sort of interesting. The other sort of interesting thing that I, you know, I found about their response was this, you know, the way a large story like this works, Amazon is not blindsided by that story. You know, we worked with them for

a week before the story ran, going over every detail of the story. They voiced their concerns, which, you know, some of which we put in the story, their rebuttals and such. But, you know, companies also play games. And so there's a lot of well you know we you can talk to our executive here but you know it'll be on background and you can't use it you can use this you can use the things you got we talked about but you can't attribute it to that person or and and and then after the fact you know they have this very long and exhaustive blog post. But they're sort of, you know, the notion that somehow that we didn't give them a chance to really talk and rebut is sort of misleading, I think. You know, they have ample opportunity to sort of respond to the story. And their response was in the story. And so this notion

that somehow that they were sort of caught off guard is, if that was the intent, that's sort of, you know, I think misleading. I think that it's easy to fall into the trap for a lot of these companies as well. I mean, certainly I was in this when I was starting my business. And it's, well, what happens if I upset Amazon? And I have nothing even remotely resembling a survival instinct. So I started a newsletter called Last Week in AWS, giving them even trademark rounds

if they wanted to come after me on that perspective, and then more or less made fun of them every week in an email newsletter. And I expected that it was going to basically make me persona non grata as far as anything AWS was oriented. And what I learned from that, which was shocking, was that first, they love that. They have a bit of a corporate beat-the-crap-out-of-me fascination, so okay, we'll roll with that. But also, there is no one person who is, I guess, responsible for the viewpoint of an entire company at that scale.

I'm used to small business where a big company has 200 people. There's no Ted Amazon sitting there deciding whether they like someone or hate them. It's a bunch of very small teams that are largely independent, more so than at most other companies. And some of those folks love what I'm doing. Some of them despise everything about me. And it's one of those things where I've learned that you can't make people happy all a big fan of the newsletter. I think you have a very, I'm also a big fan of your Twitter account. You have a very good tone to it. And I think the reason why I imagine, the reason why people don't dismiss you is because you come from an incredibly informed place. You know what you're talking about, and it's obvious.

And so that makes it harder to dismiss you as some kind of kook or someone with an agenda, because I think it's obvious that you've done the homework. Now, I think when someone like us drops in and writes something critical, it's easier to dismiss us, and especially when we compare cloud computing to a coffee shop, I mean, sorry, open source to a coffee shop, I think people get a little, it gives them more fuel for the fire. But I don't think they take it personally. I mean, I think that this is part of the back and forth, and they'll become better for it. I think they'll, their message will become sharper and they'll be, they'll think about how, hopefully, how, you know, their partners will respond to certain decisions they make about products, hopefully. And I think that that's all part of becoming,

learning the responsibilities of being this kind of major tech platform. They're not, they're not up and coming anymore. I mean, I think it was very clear at reInvent this year that they are now the big dog. And I think this year, more than other reInvents that I watched on YouTube, it was clear to me that they sort of saw themselves as the big dog in a way that I don't think they did in the past. I still think internally they struggle with that. They tend to pride themselves in their two pizza teams. So you have a team of 20 people or so, give or take, that are launching an entire service. I'm not sure that they realize that this is something that millions upon millions of people are going to see. I also, I'm big enough to admit to more than a little professional jealousy of you

at this point. I have never had a same day blog post come out from AWS penned by a VP with a theme of screw this guy over something that I've written. So we all have bucket list items. That is definitely one of mine. As a reporter, nothing makes me more uncomfortable than when someone that you wrote a story about or a company that you wrote a story about comes back to you and tells you, oh, we love that story. That probably means I wasn't critical enough, that I wasn't analytical enough. And so getting a response like that, while like, look, it's not like the thing I was hoping for, it also doesn't bother me at all. It's kind of probably

means, you know, that I was sufficiently critical or sufficiently analytical. I remember that you and I had spoken a couple of times when you were putting this article together, but that was the last we'd really communicated. And the next thing I knew is it's Sunday morning and I wake up leisurely. My toddler let me sleep in until 7.30 in the morning. And the next thing I knew is it's Sunday morning and I wake up leisurely. My toddler let me sleep in until 7.30 in the morning. And I wind up looking at my phone and it's exploded. And I have messages from a whole bunch of people of great quote in the New York Times, like, wait, wait, that was sarcastic. And oh, you're relatively high level executive at Amazon, what the hell did I get quoted on? And my only quote in the article was after the observation that reInvent was called AWS Red Wedding, my comment was,

nobody knows who's going to get killed next. First, of all the things I've ever said, that's the objectionable thing that you think is the problematic piece? Oh my God, don't ever look at my Twitter account. But more than that, it's fascinating just from my perspective, seeing the sheer reach that this has. The quote was near the end of the article. It refused to call me a cloud economist because the New York Times style guide and me, my God. The kerning was wrong on the AWS, the period after the A and the W and the S as well is just where you have gone. I cannot possibly understand it. But I still had hundreds of newsletter signups that day on a Sunday, which is okay. So lesson learned, if I ever want to pick some good place to do

some advertising, the front page of the New York Times is not the worst in the world. Initially, we went back and forth a little bit, if you recall, about your title. And, you know, in one of the drafts of the story, I had you quoted as cloud economist. And I believe my editor wrote, oh, really? And I said, he insists that's his title. And then I said, you sent me some links about how there was a PhD student who- Oh, full PhD. His name is Owen Rogers at 451 Research. He has a PhD in cloud economics.

There are entire cloud economics divisions at companies, including AWS. It's a real thing. I made it up when I first started my consulting company. And then I look around and I realized, wait, other people have used this term too. When I met Owen Rogers with his PhD in cloud economics, he was very excited to meet someone else who was in the space and wanted to talk about it. And I had two paths. I could either be honest and tell him I made it up, or I could bluff and probably wind

up with a book deal out of it. I picked the more noble path. And part of me always wonders if I'd gone down the other direction, how that would have played out. Right. And basically, it started with a, I did gently push back and I said, look, this is what he says his title is. And so, you know, but basically that was a line in the sand for my editor. And she was just like, nope, he's not – we're not calling – we're not giving someone the title of cloud economist.

So I think she wrote around it basically. Society is always one of those challenging things to, to wind up evolving. One of these days, I'm sure we'll get there. Now I would sooner fix the period after A, W, and S that, that, that is the hill I would choose to die on long before my ridiculous nonsense title. I am not a fan of the periods either. I had to go back and write each, like fix every AWS reference to include those periods. So it was laborious and time consuming. But, you know, like even when we do CEO, that's C period, E period, O period. And so, you know, for the lack, I mean, that's just our style guide. And, you know, at some point you just can't fight so many battles. fight so many battles. You've got to pick and choose. And that one is

not a hill I'm willing to die on. No, it's, it's, and it shouldn't be necessarily, but I've, I've done a lot of interesting writing, some of which has circled the internet three times, it feels like, but this was a whole nother level of attention and people being angry about it and if you go on twitter professional advice never go on twitter and take a look at any given day people are raging about the new york times i mean i'm a subscriber i have been for years and the argument is always this is a terrible egregious breach of public trust, journalism ethics, etc. I'm canceling my subscription. Well, isn't that the third time this month you've canceled it? If a paper only prints things that you like and agree with, that's propaganda.

And I don't think that serves us well. I think that we almost have a subversion of journalism by, to be blunt, corporate comms people in some respects. But there are also larger societal challenges around that too. I mean, I think it is a very worrying time for journalism. I think there are, for us covering, for example, the tech sector, which is now, you know, where the most powerful and the richest companies and the most influential companies of the world exist, you know, it's not crazy for us to have, you know, us to have one beat reporter, like I have one beat reporter, I'm the one beat reporter covering Google. And there are, you know, hundreds of communications people on Google, right? It's impossible to sort of

match them in body count. And so, you know, it's, it's, it's important for us to kind of keep these powerful people to account. There's ways to do it that's fair. And, you know, a lot of these companies do incredible things. I don't discount that at all. You know, Google has made the internet usable, you know, and without AWS has launched, you know, hundreds of startups because it's allowed a whole new way of companies to buy and use technology. And I don't discount the importance of that. But that also doesn't give them the right, I think, not them as an AWS, but companies in general to do whatever they want. And I think that it's important for us as reporters and journalists to look at these companies with a critical eye, especially when they are so influential to society at large. You know, the things that they do make a huge difference in the day-to-day lives

of people who are really far removed from the seat of power. And, you know, we are, you know, we can do a service for a lot of readers and a lot of people who, you know, rely on these companies for many, many aspects of their lives. I think that that is one of the most impactful things that you could say at this point. You're right. Holding power to account is incredibly valuable. It is the entire purpose behind a free press. And I think that that is something that we protect at almost any cost. That said, I do have sympathy for some of the corporate comms folks and the rest. I mean, I am on this on the scale of Amazon tier companies.

I'm a nobody and I'm perfectly OK with that because I can shoot my mouth off about whatever I want. And worst case, I have to apologize. If you wind up saying something as a representative of Amazon that gets misconstrued and it moves the stock price 1%, that's about $10 billion. That is orders of magnitude more than it costs to have me killed. The higher you rise, the less you can say off the cuff, and the more everything has to be scripted and rehearsed. They have a challenge. I empathize with them. Truly, I do. But not at the expense of

the larger good of society. I mean, I think, you know, the thing that really bugs us a lot is, you know, for ages, we had a really hard time getting comms people to put their names on statements. You know, a lot of times companies will have statements that are very sort of innocuous. You know, just we believe that we believe in helping customers live a better life. And then when you go to the comms people and you say, oh, can we put your name on that? Then it's like, oh, well, uh, and it's like, well, you know, part of your job is to deal with the press. And if part of that is to, you know, kind of put yourself out there and I don't know, I just kind of sometimes feel like there's this whole group of comms people who see their job not necessarily as in informing the press, but more in sort of managing the press, you know, and wrangling the press.

And so I don't know. I guess I have less sympathy for corporate comms than you. But, you know, I recognize that I'm— It's the absolute opposite of a job that's appropriate for me. I mean, their entire role is to say no comment, and I have a comment for everything. Yes. And that's why I, as a reporter, enjoy talking to you. If nothing else, I certainly stonewall.

Do you have anything to say on this? Well, of course I do. I know nothing about it, but I'm thrilled to shoot my mouth off anyway. If people want to learn more about what you have to say, follow your exploits, where can they find you? I have a Twitter account, at Daiwaka, D-A-I-W-A-K-A. Obviously, I publish in the New York Times, but that's probably the two key ways. Excellent. I will put links to those things in the show notes. Here's what I will say. I appreciate the feedback. And if anyone wants to get in touch with me, wants to talk to me about the story and feels like

I misunderstood something or just kind of wants to help me be better, which I can always be and I'm always open to, they can email me. So that's daidai.wakabayashi, which is my last name, at nytimes.com. You are a braver person than I. You have enough reach that saying, oh yeah, anyone who wants to can wind up getting back to me. I can't imagine what that's like. I wind up telling people they can hit reply to my stupid newsletter and it hits my inbox. And the reason I can do that is because no one ever does. On a busy week, I'll get a dozen email responses. At your scale, I have to imagine that would be thousands. No, but I get, I mean, I get, I get my share of, um, enthusiastic, uh, people. Uh, that's a euphemism. You know, I think, I think it's great. I love, I love talking to

readers and I love, um, responding to people to people. I respond to people on Twitter sometimes. You know, that can be a dicey game, but often it usually ends up in a positive experience. So I always love the feedback. And even if it's negative, you know, I'm happy to have the conversation. Excellent. Thank you so much once again for your time my pleasure corey thanks dai wakabayashi new york times reporter focusing on technology i'm corey quinn this is screaming in the cloud if you've enjoyed this podcast please please leave an even better rating on Apple Podcasts. This has been this week's episode of Screaming in the Cloud. You can also find more Corey at screaminginthecloud.com

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