Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 06/28 - Jony Ive Leaves Apple

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 Techmeme ride home for Friday, June 28th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Johnny Ive is leaving Apple. Health Tech is having its first big IPO. Amazon looks like it's finally ready to kill UPS. I've got issues with Google's new recaptures and the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Well, no doubt you've heard the news by now. Shortly after I hit publish yesterday, word came down that Johnny Ive will officially leave Apple

Starting point is 00:01:09 later this year. Now he will be forming a creative consulting business called Love From with Apple as the first client, but make no mistake, the Johnny Ive era at Apple is over. There are several ways to cover this, beginning with the notion that this has been coming for a while. Around the whole Apple Watch launch, there were a slew of Johnny Ive profiles, especially the one in the New Yorker, that seemed to telegraph that Ive was stepping back from day to day work. Reportedly, he only came into the office twice a week at this point. You almost had the sense that Apple Watch was the last gadget design challenge that intrigued him. Then there was the Apple Spaceship HQ design,

Starting point is 00:01:55 which seemed to be either his last true passion project or his last gift to Steve Jobs, seeing that through. Some wondered if designing an Apple car might be something. something to make Ives stick around. But you do get the sense that this has been in the works for a while. And all we're seeing right now is a well-orchestrated PR campaign to make sure investors don't freak out about IVE leaving too much. Then, of course, we could justly do encomiums about Ives' impact on modern life. It's not just that he was the preeminent product designer of the last 30 years. It's also that he was the very archetype of the modern designer

Starting point is 00:02:37 full stop. It's not just that if the iPhone set the template for the modern smartphone, and as I said in my book, it's astonishing that Ive and Apple got the de facto design of the most influential item of modern life, so conceptually perfect in their very first iteration. It's not just that Johnny's influence on the design of that means that he very directly influenced the contours of modern life. It's also that his influence on his influence on his own. computing design, on gadgetry itself, on those little pocketable bricks of wonder. Beginning with the iPod mean that he has more than anyone else set the very aesthetic of modern life. Truly, Johnny is one of the most important people in technology over the last 50 years, perhaps

Starting point is 00:03:20 100 years. And by the way, he's not dead. He's still around. He'll still be working. He just won't be working at Apple anymore. And that leads me to another angle, the angle of maybe it's time? Several people have written hot takes about how over the last few years Apple's products have gone down a bit of a design cul-de-sac. In Vice, Jason Kobler wrote

Starting point is 00:03:44 about Ives' legacy in the last few years, pushing Apple's products towards designs that emphasize disposability, unreparability, and frankly, just user-unfriendliness, all in the aid of Ives' favorite aesthetic choices. Kobler mentions things like headphone jacks going,

Starting point is 00:04:02 away. Batteries glued, not screwed to devices, keyboards that don't work, also things could be made almost impossibly thinner and lighter, as if that was the only thing that really mattered. Seemingly, that's the only thing that seems to have mattered to Johnny over the last few years. Here's Ben Thompson speaking of how Ive essentially was allowed to pursue his aims unfettered at Apple after Steve Jobs's death. Quote, frankly, I'm not sure Ives' consolidation of power was entirely positive for Apple. iOS became more beautiful but also less usable. It is a subtle shift that happened with the company's other products, particularly the Mac Pro and the MacBook Pro as well. That, though, is the usual route revolutions take. What is inspired at the beginning, making computers desirable,

Starting point is 00:04:47 becomes tyrannical in the end, end quote. And then there is the very legitimate concern trolling going on with Ives move. Essentially, Ive will not be replaced. Apple's designed to, team leaders, Evans Hanky and Alan Dye will now report to COO Jeff Williams. Here's John Gruber, quote, It makes me queasy to see that Apple's chief designers are now reporting to operations. This makes no more sense to me than having them report to the LLVM compiler team in the Xcode group. Again, nothing against Jeff Williams, nothing against the LLVM team, but someone needs to be in charge of design for Apple to be Apple, and I can't see how that

Starting point is 00:05:24 comes from operations. I don't think that chief design officer should have. been a one-off title created just for Johnny Ive. Not just for Apple, but especially at Apple, it should be a permanent C-level title. I don't think I've ever should have been put in control of software design, but at least he is a designer. I don't worry that Apple is in trouble because Johnny Ive is leaving. I worry that Apple is in trouble because he's not being replaced, end quote. But in the end, I guess the best way to honor the man is to simply quote his own words about this move at this stage in his life. This is I've in the Financial Times, quote,

Starting point is 00:06:02 there was an employee meeting a number of years ago, and Steve was talking. He said that one of the fundamental motivations was that when you make something with love and with care, even though you will probably never meet the people that you're making it for, and you'll never shake their hand. By making something with care, you are expressing your gratitude to humanity, to the species. I so identified with that motivation, and was moved by his description. So my new company is called Love From. It succinctly speaks to why I do what I do, end quote.

Starting point is 00:06:40 It looks like health tech is going to have perhaps its first high-profile IPO of the modern era. Livongo, which sells connected devices to monitor diabetes, has filed for an IPO saying it had 32.06 million in revenue in Q1 of 2019 with a net loss of $14.96 million. Quoting CNBC. The company also said it had 164,168 enrolled diabetes members for the glucose monitors and test strips it provides as of March 31st, 2019. That's up from the 68,536 enrolled diabetes members it had in the year ago quarter. The company got its start in 2012 with an offering that included glucose monitors and test strips for people with diabetes.

Starting point is 00:07:25 It has subsequently expanded its scope to other medical conditions, including behavioral tech and weight loss. It has previously said that it has more than 600 self-insured employers and health plans signed up as customers who cover the cost of the service for their members, end quote. We knew this was coming, but it is nonetheless striking to realize we are nearing the point where Amazon could soon be delivering the majority of packages in the U.S. by itself. The majority of its own packages, I should clarify. According to Rakuten intelligence, around 48% of Amazon packages in the U.S. are delivered by Amazon itself. not by third parties like UPS, FedEx, or the Post Office. As recently as Q1 of 2017, Amazon delivered less than 20% of packages itself. The biggest loser since then has been the USPS, which used to deliver more than 60% of Amazon packages and now only delivers 33.3%.

Starting point is 00:08:26 UPS's share of Amazon deliveries has held roughly steady at around the 15 to 20% range and FedEx at less than 3%. This is a big deal because, as Axios notes, the U.S. domestic package market was worth about $106 billion last year, and of that $35 to $40 billion or about a third could be credited to e-commerce. And of course, Amazon is about 40% of all e-commerce, so what large percentage of the shipping market is just Amazon shipments? If they're about to take their toys and go home, that's a pretty big hit to a pretty big market. And that's just the beginning of it, quoting Axios. Amazon, which has started offering its shipping capabilities as a service to others, will be able to ship products for about two-thirds of the rates of UPS and FedEx. Pellas Projects.

Starting point is 00:09:15 Its trucks and planes are out-delivering Amazon packages anyway so it can offer shipping at cost instead of collecting a margin. We're now talking about a retailer that will control the entire process from manufacturing to delivery, says Mark Rosenbaum, a professor at the University of South Carolina. But, but, but, while Amazon's suddenly large profile might look menacing, it won't necessarily move as it did in books to knock out its rivals, says Yossi Sheffey, director of MIT's Center for Transportation and Logistics.

Starting point is 00:09:43 Quote, they just want to take all the profitable routes and operations and leave the carriers with all the dogs, end quote. You might not have noticed this because it's hard to notice the absence of something, but there are fewer recaptias out there in the wider web. No, it's not that Recapture is going away, it's just that the latest version of that famous bot detector, version 3, already on 650,000 websites, is completely invisible to users. You don't have to do anything, no parsing pictures or letters,

Starting point is 00:10:19 not clicking on an I Am Not a Robot box. The new version of Recapsia can tell you're human just by the way you navigate the site. So that's a good thing, right? less hassle to worry about, except, of course, here comes the downside. Google is now using a risk score-based system with Recapture version 3, and basically it comes down to if you're signed in with a Google account, the new Recapture tends to think you're less likely to be a bot almost every time. If you're not signed in to Google, the Recapsia will tend to like you a lot less and be more suspicious of you. And by the way, Google is asking website administrators to embed

Starting point is 00:11:00 Recapture version 3 code on all the pages of their websites. The better to learn how a website's users typically act and thus learn their normal behavior over time. So to sum up, Google has a clever new tool to gather more data on user behavior, though they swear up and down that it won't be used for advertising purposes. But yeah, looked at in a certain light, this could be thought of as yet another example of Google essentially homesteading the entire open web for its own purposes. If you can't be found on Google search, you basically don't exist on the web. We've long made our piece with that. But now, if you don't play ball with Google's recapture system to identify legitimate web users, is your site no longer going to be considered part of the legitimate web?

Starting point is 00:11:45 And what about users? If we don't play ball with Google systems, to what degree will we be considered at-risk or possibly illegitimate internet users. Quoting the fast company piece, Technology consultant Marcus Perona views Google's use of Recapsia as an outright online land grab, his words, that strengthens Google's hold over the internet. He thinks Recapsia is similar in this way to other Google products like accelerated mobile pages, AMP, a program to make new sites pages load faster on mobile devices, but has caused some consternation from publishers over whether Google is taking

Starting point is 00:12:19 web traffic away from new sites. Same goes for Google Chrome, which the Washington Post recently called surveillance software. Quote, it's always a double-edged sword, Perona says. You gain something, but you're also giving Google a little more control over everything online, end quote. Evergreen quote, that one. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. First one comes from fortune. it's a look at the man who used clever algorithms to make a fortune in the wake of the housing crash and how he's extending his secret sauce now using AI. Sean Dobson is the CEO of Amherst Holdings, which uses AI to profit from properties most investors wouldn't touch. Quote, according to Yardini research, slightly more than one in three households that would have been buying first homes before the financial crisis,

Starting point is 00:13:13 is now either renting or still living with their parents. These trends translate into roughly 5 million households that are renting single-family homes rather than taking out mortgages and building equity, and that's Amherst's target market. Its specialty is grabbing rundown properties in nice middle-class subdivisions, guided by algorithms that help it avoid bidding wars and money pits, which it then spruces up for the new rental generation. Amherst's typical customers are couples in their early 40s with one or two kids and household incomes around $60,000. They're paying an average rent of $1,450 a month. Quote, that's almost exactly what they'd pay on a mortgage and other expenses if they owned the house, says Dobson. We're catering to a whole new class of Americans, the former buyers who are now either

Starting point is 00:13:57 forced renters or renters by choice, end quote. And Dobson is betting that this new class is a permanent one, end quote. Next, a piece from The Ringer continues my efforts to keep an eye on the rise of TikTok, and now especially how it seems to be impacting the music industry. We've spoken already about how many people credit the meme powers of TikTok for the initial breakthrough of the mega hit Old Town Road. And that might just be the beginning. Whereas YouTube, Vine, and Instagram are all platforms that lend themselves to music discovery.

Starting point is 00:14:29 TikTok demands it. Thanks to the machine learning that powers the app, formerly known as musically, TikTok needn't rely on a user's social circle to generate recommended content. in the same way a catchy pop song can momentarily meld together a handful of strangers on a dance floor, the right TikTok challenge will connect young people from Los Angeles to Moscow, end quote. Next, have you ever wondered why all of those fancy marketing emails you get in your inbox every day still rely on dumb old HTML tables? TDM takes a look at how HTML helped and then hindered the evolution of email.

Starting point is 00:15:06 And I'd love to talk more about sports tech on the, this show now and again. So from Geekwire, a look at how the Seattle Seahawks are using data to win on and off the field. And since they recently went public, I thought it was worth putting this piece here about the history of Slack, since I'm not sure many people know the story of Slack. Stuart Butterfield wanted to create an online adventure game called Glitch. He raised $11 million to do so, but, quote, once people had a chance to play it and Butterfield could track the numbers, The verdict was clear. Glitch was a flop. There was this night where I just lost faith, Butterfield said in a podcast interview.

Starting point is 00:15:47 He decided in 2012 that it was game over. Butterfield made plans to shut down the company and give the remaining money back to his investors. Andrew Brockia, a partner at Venture Capital Firm, Asell, wouldn't accept the refund. He and other investors urged Butterfield to keep the remaining $5 million and try something else. That turned in to Slack Technologies, the maker of corporate chat software. that went public on Thursday. At the close of trading, Slack's market value was $19 billion. Asell invested about $200 million in Slack over seven years, largely driven by Brockia's unwavering faith in Butterfield. As of the stock debut, a sell held 24% of the company, the biggest

Starting point is 00:16:28 VC stake in a newly public unicorn in recent history. Those shares are worth $4.6 billion today, end quote. And finally, this isn't tech, it's art, and it's not a long read, it's a YouTube video, but if you want a quick seven-minute video that explains how modern art progressed from the first inklings of impressionism and abstraction all the way to Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, do this recovering art history miner's heart good, and watch the video titled How Art Arrived at Jackson Pollock. That's all for today, and for this week. two weekend bonus episodes this week, and I'm cooking up something special for next weekend, which especially for the U.S. will basically be a long holiday weekend.

Starting point is 00:17:19 So I'm planning something good to listen to while you're traveling to get somewhere, or back from somewhere, I guess, or just to a barbecue or I don't know on a boat or something. Anyway, talk to you on Monday.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 06/28 - Jony Ive Leaves Apple

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