Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 03/15 - Does Chris Cox’s departure from Facebook mean the pivot is real?

Episode Date: March 15, 2019

Does Chris Cox’s departure from Facebook mean the pivot is real, Apple responds to Spotify’s complaint, and of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: DataDogHQ.com/ridehome techmeme.robinhood.com Links: FACEBOOK’S HEAD OF PRODUCT LEAVES AFTER PRIVACY PIVOT (Wired) As Mark Zuckerberg Tightens Grip on Facebook, 2 Top Deputies Leave (NYTimes) Addressing Spotify’s claims (Apple Newsroom) The New Zealand Massacre Was Made to Go Viral (NYTimes) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: ‘We Know Them. We Trust Them.’ Uber and Airbnb Alumni Fuel Tech’s Next Wave. (NYTimes) DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence (1843) Foursquare’s first decade, from viral hit to real business and beyond (Fast Company) Meet The Billionaire Who Defied Amazon And Built Wish, The World’s Most-Downloaded E-Commerce App (Forbes) How to Stop Your Roommates From Messing With Your Amazon Echo (Lifehacker) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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, March 15th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, does Chris Cox's departure from Facebook meme the pivot is real?

Apple responds to Spotify's complaint and, of course, the weekend long-read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Facebook's chief product officer Chris Cox is leaving the company. Another Chris, VP of WhatsApp Chris Daniels, is leaving as well. But it's the departure of the first Chris. Chris Cox that caused Silicon Valley to do a collective double-take late yesterday. Chris Cox is Facebook's chief product officer. He's in charge of all the products.

He's one of Mark Zuckerberg's most trusted lieutenants and confidants. They vacation together. Chris has been integral at Facebook for so long. He was one of the first 15 software engineers hired at the company. He was instrumental in the very creation of the news feed. many, many people assumed that if Mark Zuckerberg ever stepped down from the CEO role, it would likely go to Chris Cox. Now, a lot of us had heard for many months now that Cox had wanted to move on to greener pastures a couple years ago. But then came the 2016 election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

And the rumor was Cox was taking one for the team, staying on to wait for a moment when it wouldn't look like he was abandoning a company in crisis. But now, if anything, his departure solidifies the realization of something else entirely. Count me as being among the skeptical about the whole pivot to privacy thing. On first glimpse, I thought it was a clever PR positioning move at best. But increasingly, over the last week or so, I'm coming to realize that, yes, this is indeed a completely fundamental structural shift when it comes to Mark Zuckerberg's thinking about Facebook. And I think that this news only solidifies, as Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein put it in Wired, quote, Zuckerberg's pivot is now officially a very big deal, end quote.

Of course, we can debate the reasons for the pivot. Tying all the platforms together makes for a unified business that makes it easier for ad sales, and also conveniently harder to break up. So Facebook gets ahead of the seeming antitrust tide. The emphasizing sharing and the newsfeed seemingly gets Facebook skating where Mark Zuckerberg thinks the puck is going when it comes to social media. Emphasizing privacy is good PR and also potentially a shield that protects Facebook from criticism about what people are actually doing on their platform. No need to go into the content moderation business officially if everything is encrypted end to end and no one can see what's happening. Facebook can throw their hands in the air and be like, look, we can't police this stuff because they won't be able to.

But what's undeniable at this point is all of these things point to a huge momentous shift. A decision has been made to redesign the good plane Facebook from the ground up while that plane is still in the air. And there are signs that not everyone is on board with that for whatever reason. Some people might not like the pivot to privacy for philosophical reasons. Some people might not like abandoning the Share Everything model for cultural reasons. This is what they signed up for, right? bringing the world together. Some people might not like Zuckerberg taking the chessboard and tossing all the pieces in the air. Let me quote from Cox's own statement. As Mark has outlined,

we are turning a new page in our product direction focused on an encrypted, interoperable messaging network. It's a product vision attuned to the subject matter of today, a modern communications platform that balances expression, safety, security, and privacy. This will be a big project, and we will need leaders who are excited to see the new direction through, end quote. The emphasis there was mine. In the New York Times, Mike Isaac was reporting that Cox was leaving after disagreements over Facebook's future direction. The differences stemmed from Mr. Zuckerberg's asserting control over his company and its apps, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger by rolling out a plan to integrate the services into a single privacy-focused platform,

according to six people involved in the situation, end quote. In a series of tweets, Andresen Horowitz's Ben Horowitz said, whatever strategy shift Zuckerberg has decided on, quote, it's quite clear that the decision was massively controversial. And, quote, he is genuinely committed to privacy in general and specifically end-to-end encryption, so much so that he is willing to lose outstanding executives who disagree with this decision, end quote. Casey Newton apparently has a podcast interview coming out with Alex Stamos, who told Casey that this is a true burn the boat's moment at Facebook.

Quote, Zuckerberg has more data than anyone else from which to gauge the health of newsfeed and Instagram, Stamos said. And so we should understand the pivot to privacy as a signal that both have already peaked or will soon, end quote. So yeah, however this ends up shaking out, color me officially convinced that on some very fundamental levels. Facebook will very soon be a very different company than the one that we currently know. Apple has responded to Spotify's recent antitrust complaint to the EU, saying Spotify is seeking to keep all of the benefits of the app store, quote, without making any contributions to that marketplace, end quote.

Quoting from Apple's official statement, 16 years ago, we launched the iTunes store with the idea that there should be a trusted place where users discover and purchase great music and every customer is treated fairly. The result revolutionized the music industry and our love of music and the people who make it are deeply ingrained in Apple. Eleven years ago, the App Store brought that same passion for creativity to mobile apps. In the decades since, the App Store has helped create many millions of jobs,

generated more than $120 billion for developers, and created new industries through businesses started and grown entirely in the App Store ecosystem. At its core, the App Store is a safe, secure platform where users can have faith in the Internet. apps they discover and the transactions they make. And developers from first-time engineers to larger companies can rest assured that everyone is playing by the same set of rules. That is how it should be. Apple's approach has always been to grow the pie. By creating new marketplaces, we can

create more opportunities not just for our business, but for artists, creators, entrepreneurs, and every crazy one with a big idea. That's in our DNA. It's the right model to grow the next big app ideas, and ultimately it's better for consumers, end quote. The piece goes on. to point-by-point refute all of Spotify's recent claims in Spotify's own official blog posts and statements. Now, the reactions to Apple's reaction have been interesting. In essence, everyone is seeing this in complete 180-degree opposite ways. The Apple stands have come off the sidelines to say, yes, Spotify's argument was full of hot air,

and Apple just shut them down completely. Neil Seibert, for example, wrote, quote, Apple just responded to Spotify. I think it was an effective statement. Apple's response also matches my expectations for what Apple would say, given the massive holes in Spotify's argument, end quote. While Owen Williams wrote that Apple, quote,

responded to Spotify's claims without really saying anything of substance, it addressed Spotify's claims, but not any of its actual problems. I find myself reading the long letter, which tries to rebuke each of Spotify's points, thinking that the PR double speak is incredibly eloquent. Apple avoids touching on any of the issues in the ecosystem while sometimes unintentionally reinforcing Spotify's point. It controls a broad swath of the ecosystem's destiny with little oversight, end quote.

And that's how it breaks down pretty much across the board. Either you see Apple's response is brilliant, or as curiously convoluted and muddled. It's weird. In literally just a few weeks, it feels like all of Silicon Valley is suddenly in that final showdown scene in reservoir dogs where everyone is pointing guns at everyone else, except in this case, making accusations of antitrust.

And I think Apple didn't expect to even be in the middle of this standoff, in this conversation, much less, I think, did it anticipate that one of the people pointing the guns at them would be Spotify. I, of course, really don't want to have to cover the horrific and heartbreaking news out of New Zealand, but I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't note the tech dimension to that terrible story. And that is that one of the alleged shooters appears to have live streamed the attack on Facebook.

The video ran live for 17 minutes. Facebook, of course, rushed to take the video down, but it has been popping up online, anywhere people can post videos, causing YouTube, Twitter, everyone to engage in a tragic game of whack-a-mole trying to take down the video wherever it pops up. Obviously, do not search for this video,

Don't post this video. Doing so only gives the perpetrators of this crime what they want. As Charlie Wurzel noted in an opinion piece in the New York Times this morning, quote, videos of attacks are designed to amplify the terror, of course. But what makes this atrocity, quote, an extraordinary and unprecedented act of violence, as Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described it, is both the methodical nature in which the massacre was conducted and how it was apparently engineered for maximum virality. As terrifying as the violence itself is, is how well the online community worked in the gunman's favor. This may be our new reality. Not only has conspiratorial hate spread from the Internet to real life, it's also weaponized to go viral, end quote.

So I wanted to note that, and I also wanted to note this tweet from Daray Abasancho, quote, once the majority of social media communications is encrypted, WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram groups, You won't even be able to catalog all the places such a video was spread and posted. Hashtag privacy. Time for the weekend long reads, everybody. Once again this week, no podcast recommendation. Hopefully soon I'll have some time to do a new podcast walkabout and come back with some new recommendations.

Until then, let's start with the near near future. Lyft, Pinterest, Postmates, Slack, Uber. An entire generation of tech companies is about to go public. So that means a lot of lucky insiders are about to have their big liquidity moment. And if the past is any guide, that means a ton of money is about to hit the startup scene, ready to seed, fund, and finance whatever the next generation of tech companies will end up being. Quoting from the New York Times piece on this, it's part of Silicon Valley's often incestuous circle of life.

The startup world projects a meritocratic image, but in reality it is a small tight-knit club where success typically hinges on whom you know. In this model, employees of tech startups frequently leave the companies once they have been enriched by their firm's initial public offerings. Then networks of alumni from these companies, called Mafias, support their peers' new businesses with hiring advice and money, end quote. Yes, it all goes back to win the Traderus 8 left Shockley Semiconductor and basically created Silicon Valley itself. It harkens back to the PayPal Mafia, which basically funded the rebirth of technology after the dot-com crash. It's going to be like that, but with more deep pockets than ever before. As friend of the podcast, Howard Linson is quoted as saying in the piece,

it's going to trigger a massive explosion in entrepreneurship, end quote. Next, 1843 magazine has the whole history of Deep Mind and Google, and as the title goes, the battle to control artificial intelligence. Demos Hasabas founded a company to build the world's most powerful AI. Then Google bought him out. Hal Hudson asks who is in charge, end quote. Fast Company has a piece up about Foursquare, which just turned 10, and a long interview with founder Dennis Crowley,

asking him how he thinks about the company now, quote, Four Square has been a super challenging journey for me. I've never had a job that lasted 10 years. This job is the most rewarding thing and the most frustrating and crazy thing I've ever been a part of. But at the same time, you have these moments. We're having one of these moments now. We're building this thing called hyper-trending.

No one's ever done it. There's no other company that can do it. There's no other company that would even try to do something like this, end quote. And Forbes has a profile up of another founder. Peter Schulziewski, founder of Wish, the world's most downloaded e-commerce app used by 90 million people every month. Wish did $1.9 billion in revenue last year is valued at $8.7 billion, and will IPO in the next year or two. Wish is, of course, that rare e-commerce play that has so far successfully fended off Amazon to carve out its own niche in e-commerce, but also, as we've talked about recently,

has become that rare startup that has also fended off the advances of one of the big tech gorillas, hoping to hoover it up at an early stage. In 2011, Facebook got wind of Shuzleski's recommendation engine and offered $20 million to integrate context logic into its own ad system or potentially the software. that ranked stories and posts on Facebook's news feed. When Shuzleski didn't take the money, one of his investors stormed into the startup's new office on Pine Street to chew him out. Go work for someone that's good at business, the investor told him, end quote.

Usually take the money and run is the smartest idea, but it would be healthy if more startups didn't take the money and instead matured into the companies they were meant to be. And finally, David Murphy noticed something was wrong when he started getting iPhone reminders with subject lines like Check for herpes, and others that helpfully suggested he try some not safe for work, physical maneuvers with friends of his. What had happened? Had some prankster ghost infected his phone?

No, it turns out, Murphy had recently put an Amazon smart speaker in the living room of the house he shared with his roommates. And sure enough, since he had linked, his phone and calendars and to-do lists and whatnot to that smart speaker, his roommates realized they could mess with him. Adding things like sex toys to his shopping list and changing the language of the speaker to French, things like that. So read this article from Lifehacker to maybe get some ideas for some smart speaker shenanigans, but also, since this is primarily the point of the article,

read it to get some practical step-by-step things you can do to protect yourself from your own pranksters in case you have a communal smart speaker in your home. last link in the show notes to how to stop your roommates for messing with your Amazon Echo. For some reason, this was really a jam-packed and exhausting week. I'm looking forward to taking the kids to the park now that the weather is turning, diving into a great new book on my Kindle about William the Conqueror, 1066 and all that. And I might not even check tech news all weekend, which we all know is a promise I'm unlikely to be able to keep But anyway, talk to you on Monday.