Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 02/19 – UK Supreme Court Officially Smacks Down Uber

Starting point is 00:00:00 On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Friday, February 19th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Uber has lost one of its most significant independent contractor battles, in this case in the UK. The Android 12 developer preview is here. Office 2021 is coming. And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. In a major blow to Uber and other gig economy companies, the UK Supreme Court has ruled that Uber drivers should be classified as work. workers, not independent contractors, concluding what has been a five-year high-profile legal battle. Quoting CNBC, judges voted unanimously to dismiss Uber's appeal against the ruling.

Starting point is 00:01:19 The decision could have huge implications for Uber's UK business, as well as the wider gig economy. In 2016, an employment tribunal ruled in favor of drivers led by Yassin Aslam and James Ferrar, who claimed they were workers employed by Uber and therefore entitled to certain labor protections. The Supreme Court ruling could jeopardize Uber's business model in the U.K. resulting in higher costs for the firm. Though it only concerns drivers involved in the 2016 case, it sets an important precedent that could affect other Uber drivers and gig workers. Uber will now have to go back to the employment tribunal to determine compensation for the concerned drivers. There are around a thousand similar claims against the company that had been waiting in the wings until after this ruling, end quote. Chonogosh points out on Twitter that, quote,

Starting point is 00:02:04 Uber's very keen to point out that today's ruling only applies to the group of drivers about 25 who brought the original case. So we're not immediately looking at huge increases in payments slash costs here in Britain, end quote. Devs, rev, and start your engines. Google has released the Android 12 developer preview available for pixel devices with under the hood changes including added security, a whole bunch of design tweaks, and support for more media formats. Among those media format changes, because this sounds significant, quoting the verge, there will be a new transcoding layer that will automatically make HEVC video formats work in apps that don't natively support them. Currently choosing to shoot in

Starting point is 00:02:55 HEVC on an Android phone may mean that third-party apps won't be able to natively use that video. The new transcoding layer for those apps should let users make the switch with more confidence. Android 12 will support Spatial Audio, support MPEGH, and be optimized for up to 24 channels of audio up from 8 before. It will also make it easier for developers to tie Rumble Effects into audio. Google appears to be throwing its weight behind the AV1 image file format, otherwise known as AVIF, AVIF. AVIIF is meant to replace JPGs as the de facto image format, offering much better and cleaner compression with fewer artifacts. Netflix in particular has been a big proponent of the format. If AV1 sounds familiar, that's because it's an offshoot of the AV1 video format.

Starting point is 00:03:41 That major tech companies proposed some years back, and both Netflix and Google have partially adopted. AVIF also isn't to be confused with the similar HEIF, which Apple's cameras have been shooting for some time. Google says that it does not intend to make AVIF the default image format for the camera app, so this is still just a first step. And sticking with multimedia, Android 12 will simply do a better job of moving different kinds of media between apps. It's creating a new rich content insertion API that will let you cut and paste or drag and drop multiple kinds of content, including plain and styled text to mark up images, videos, audio files, and more, end quote. Mark German doing his thing once again. This time he says that Apple is working on a magnetically attached battery pack for iPhone 12s that would wirelessly charge. charge the handset once you just, you know, click it right on to the back. Quote,

Starting point is 00:04:39 the battery pack would attach to the back of an iPhone 12 using the MagSafe system, which all the new phones used for charging and pairing other accessories like cases and wallets. Some prototypes of the battery pack have a white rubber exterior, said one of the people who asked not to be identified because the product isn't yet public. The new accessory would differ from Apple battery add-ons for previous iPhones, in that it only provides additional battery life and doesn't serve as a full protective case. In internal testing, the magnetic attachment system has proved strong enough for the charging unit to stay in place, but the accessories development has been slowed by software issues, such as the iPhone erroneously indicating that the pack is overheating.

Starting point is 00:05:19 Apple also has been working to mend issues related to a customer switching between using the device on an iPhone, sometimes with and without a case. The Apple accessory of ultimately launch would rival similar offerings released by small makers in recent months. The company has also discussed other MagSafe accessories internally, including the potential for an in-car attachment. One of the people said, though, that product hadn't made its way into formal development. Apple has also internally discussed a goal of letting many of its mobile devices like Apple watches, AirPods, and iPhones charge each other. But that functionality is unlikely in the near future. For the 2019 iPhones, Apple planned but canceled a feature that would let users charge AirPods on the back of the phone, end quote.

Starting point is 00:06:00 which I had totally forgotten about that. Remember, I think we talked about the utility of being able to charge your AirPods in your pocket if you put the phone and AirPods in the same pocket. Although, as Joanna Stern snarked on Twitter, maybe Apple is thinking of more immediate use cases right now. Quote, headline revision. Apple is working on a magnetic battery pack to make the iPhone mini usable, end quote. Have users of the mini been frustrated by battery life? I had not heard that. has announced new standalone versions of Office. Office 2021 will be available for Windows and Mac OS later this year. This is what you buy if you don't want to do the whole Microsoft 365 subscription thing, quoting the verge. Microsoft is announcing two new versions of Office today,

Starting point is 00:06:52 a consumer Office 2021 version and Office LTSC for commercial customers. Microsoft isn't fully detailing all of the features and changes in Office 2021 just yet, but the Office LTS. which stands for a long-term servicing channel will include things like dark mode support, accessibility improvements, and features like dynamic arrays, and X lookup in Excel. Office 2021 will include similar features. Don't expect any major UI changes, though. Dark mode is the obvious change visually, but Microsoft will still focus most of its interface and cloud-powered features on the Microsoft 365 versions of Office First.

Starting point is 00:07:29 Office LTSC is a clear recognition from Microsoft that not all of its business customers are ready to move to the cloud. Quote, it's just a matter of trying to meet customers where they are, explains Jared Spirato, head of Microsoft 365, in an interview with The Verge. We certainly have a lot of customers that have moved to the cloud over the last 10 months. That's happened en masse, really. At the same time, we definitely have customers who have specific scenarios where they don't feel like they can move to the cloud, end quote. Those specific scenarios might include regulated industries where processes and apps can't change on a monthly basis or manufacturing plants that rely on office and want a locked-in time release. Microsoft is also committing to another

Starting point is 00:08:08 perpetual version of Office for the future, but it's changing up pricing and how these new versions will be supported. Office LTSC will now only be supported for five years instead of the seven that Microsoft has typically provided for Office. Pricing for Office Professional Plus, Office Standard, and individual apps is also increasing 10% for commercial customers, with Office 2021 consumer and small business pricing remaining the same. End quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. And first up, I've really been honest in my attempt to try to find an opinion to settle on vis-a-vis

Starting point is 00:08:49 this entire Australia thing, which we talked about yesterday with Facebook and Google and all that. And frankly, this essay that I read overnight from Mike Maznick and TechDirt is as close to the right take as I think I've seen so far. Basically, Maznick says that Facebook's refusal to pay the media tax pushed largely by Rupert Murdoch and News Corp is a defense of the open web, and criticizing Facebook for rejecting a link tax is kind of bizarre, quote. The government saying that you can't link to a new site unless you pay a tax should be seen as inherently problematic for a long list of reasons. At a most basic level, it's demanding payment for traffic. There are two entire industries out there

Starting point is 00:09:31 based entirely around trying to get more traffic from these companies, search engine optimization and social media management. The reasons there are those industries is because everyone else in the world has figured out that having prominent links on search engines and social media is valuable in its own right and that it's up to the sites that get those links and the corresponding traffic to make use of it. This is like saying that not only should NBC have to run an advertisement for tech dirt, but it should have to pay me for it. If that sounds totally nonsensical, that's because it is. The link tax makes no sense. And we haven't even gotten to the other problematic part of the law, which is that it requires Facebook and Google to give newspapers a heads

Starting point is 00:10:09 up to any algorithmic changes. This is completely disconnected from reality. Facebook and Google may make multiple algorithm changes every day just to keep their services running. Having to tell newspapers and them alone about those changes with a few weeks notice is basically giving those news organizations the keys to the kingdom. It's telling them how to game the algorithms. If you think bogus clickbait is a problem now, just imagine what it's like when all the Australian press get to know the secrets behind the algorithm and get to prepare for any changes. This fight was not Facebook v. Australia or Facebook v. Journalism, even though some ignorant or dishonest people are making it out to be the case, this was always Rupert Murdoch versus the

Starting point is 00:10:54 open web. We may not like Facebook in the role of the defender of the open web, and it's far from the best representative for the open web, but Facebook saying that it won't pay a link tax is a defense of the open web and against Rupert Murdoch. It's the right move, and whatever else you might think of Facebook, the company deserves credit for taking the right stand here, end quote. So officially put me down as against this law, as it has been written for those exact reasons. Next, the recently departed CEO of Ways has gotten a lot of attention this week for writing an essay basically discussing the warts in all reality of what happens when your startup gets absorbed into a larger corporate overlord. In this case, he was dishing on Waze's decade or so now inside of Google. If you

Starting point is 00:11:41 manage to catch it, Chris Messina and I spoke with the author of this piece on Clubhouse the other night, and it was amazing. If you haven't read the essay yet, please catch up, quote, I would recommend to the 2013 me to not try and innovate within Google, but rather focus on exiting the company as fast as possible and building the right team slash structure slash succession plan to make it happen instead of fighting the nature of the beast. This is easy to say, but extremely hard to do if you love your company and mission. When you decide to sell a company, you need to be honest with yourself that this is the end of your era and not pretend that you will be able to continue to build the company but with a different shareholder. This will make

Starting point is 00:12:24 the selling decision harder and looking back would have forced us to be more honest about what selling meant, end quote. I don't often share long reads from the Financial Times because they tend to have such a hard paywall. But if you can read this next piece, read it because I think it's really important. It looks into how and why the three biggest vaccine makers in the world, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, and Sanofi all failed to make COVID-19 vaccines successfully. It was up to other upstarts in the vaccine field to succeed. It's sort of a classic innovator's dilemma story, quote. It is the new messenger RNA technology, which instructs the body to make part of the virus to provoke an immune response, used by biotech, Pfizer, and Moderna that ripped up conventional timelines and allowed them to

Starting point is 00:13:15 produce trial vaccines for testing within weeks. But their success was far from assured. Before the pandemic, no mRNA vaccine had ever been approved. And in May, can, Fraser, Merck's chief executive, said the idea of producing a new vaccine in 12 to 18 months was very aggressive. Less than a year on, MRNA vaccines look likely to change the industry forever. The big three incumbents preferred to prioritize their tried and tested methods. Companies tend to rely on their proprietary technologies because they think they can trust them and they don't want to infringe on rival's intellectual property, said Mansour Amiji, professor of pharmaceutical sciences at Northwestern University. Until about 15 years ago,

Starting point is 00:13:55 vaccines had been a backwater, said Mahoney. New growth products such as Merck's Gardasil for HPV and Glaxo-SmithKline's shingricks for shingles broke the mold, he said. But they were not enough to entice companies to pour money into development. When pharma companies were retrenching 10 years ago, he suspects early stage vaccine programs were among those cut. Even a year ago, vaccines were still seen as stable good businesses, but unsexy, says Laura Sutcliffe, an analyst at UBS. Now that's all changed. Investors are paying more attention, she said, end quote. Next, have you heard about how Citibank is out $500 million all down to a simple UI decision that went awry? Citibank was trying to make $7.8 million in interest payments, and it sent $900 million instead,

Starting point is 00:14:50 quote, the subcontractor thought that checking the principal checkbox and entering the number of a Citibank wash account would ensure that the principal payment would stay at Citibank. He was wrong. To prevent payment of the principal, the subcontractor actually needed to set the front and fund fields to the wash account as well as principal. The subcontractor didn't do that, end quote. The details of this are actually fascinating, and there are screenshots of the UI confusion and the piece.

Starting point is 00:15:17 So valuable lesson to you designers out there. check it out. Next, it's a common thing to celebrate the anniversary of, you know, a great movie or a great album or song, right? But as we go further into the internet era, an era defined by memes, as much as works of art or historical events, we're going to have to start celebrating and looking back at and learning from, yes, the memes themselves. Like, it's now the 20th anniversary of the whole all your base are belong to us, memes. and The Verge looks back on that, and in a way looks back on the idea of memes being actual historical and cultural events of import now. To think of it another way, the Charlie Bit My Finger Baby is now

Starting point is 00:16:02 like a high school freshman. By the way, once the most viewed YouTube video of all time, that video now has 878 million lifetime views on YouTube. And finally, this is what I mean when I was just talking about anniversaries of art. It's now the 20th anniversary of the Lord of the Rings trilogy coming out. You could argue that those movies were maybe the most influential of the first two decades of this century in terms of technological advances, for sure, and also selling Hollywood on the concept of nerdy cinematic universes. Certainly there would have been no Game of Thrones TV show without the Lord of the Rings trilogy being a success. And so 20 years on, it's easy to forget what a big, bold, unbelievable risk

Starting point is 00:16:47 those movies were. And to forget that they were originally only supposed to be two movies, quoting from this polygon piece. The Bones for Jackson's version were already in place, and that two-film version understood that Samwise Gamgee was the hero of the entire story, the main character whose journey ultimately punctuates things. There was more singing in these drafts, road songs that felt directly lifted from Tolkien's text, but everything else was delivered at a clip. There was no time to actually get to enjoy the Shire. No room for Pippin and Mary to emerge his characters, and far less of the texture of Middle Earth. We met the elves in passing. There was an acknowledgement of Arwen and Aragorn, but no more. The main character, who benefited from

Starting point is 00:17:32 the expansion to three films was Gollum, who went from plot device to fully realized character. More than anything, the two-film version felt like every choice they made was about trying to turn these into more conventional blockbusters at the expense of the the dense history and the poetry that defines Tolkien's work, end quote. Only one weekend bonus episode this weekend. It's sort of my report on my learnings on having gotten and played around with an Oculus Quest 2 VR headset. I'd say that the TLDR is basically while VR tech is clearly ready for prime time now. It's just not quite over the threshold for mainstream adoption, at least in my opinion. Basically, I still wouldn't really dream

Starting point is 00:18:22 of, say, calling up my brother and telling him to get one. But anyway, two interviews in one episode will give you a sense of the current state of play in this consumer VR space, both from the perspective of looking at where the industry itself is at, but also giving you some real-world color on what it's like to have one of these if you're considering taking the plunge yourself. That episode will be available to everyone. No Ride Home Plus exclusive episode this weekend. We will have one for you next weekend, though. We're in the midst of working on that. And I'm in the midst of still writing the first case study episode, which I will reveal will not be on the Microsoft antitrust trial, but will instead be on the life and lessons of Elon Musk. So look forward to that and hope I

Starting point is 00:19:11 get a chance to write some of that this weekend so that we can get it to you sometime soon. Talk to you on Monday.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 02/19 – UK Supreme Court Officially Smacks Down Uber

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