Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 09/30 – Google Shutters Stadia

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, September 30th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Stop me if you've heard this one before, but Google is abandoning a major project, maybe its biggest cancellation ever. More cutbacks over at Meta, though one tech company is apparently going to test the IPO waters soon.

Starting point is 00:00:52 Be a fly on the wall as Elon talks to everyone in Silicon Valley about maybe buying Twitter. And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Well, it's the mother of all Google gonna do Google things stories. Google plans to shut down its cloud gaming service known as Stadia on January 18th, 2023, and will refund hardware, software, and DLC purchases by members. Members of the Stadia team will be reassigned internally at Google, quoting the verge. Google detailed some of the finer points of the shutdown in an FAQ. Refunds will automatically be made. through the Google and Stadia stores, and you won't have to return any hardware. Stadia Pro subscriptions will not be eligible for a refund, but you will not be charged during the shutdown period and can access games you might have redeemed as a pro user until everything is wound down. Google has closed the Stadia store so you can't buy games

Starting point is 00:01:52 or in-game transactions. The writing has been on the wall for Stadia for a while now, most recently when Logitech announced its new cloud gaming handheld last week, and Stadia was one of the few cloud gaming services not mentioned. But Stadia has been facing rumors of its demise practically from the start. Google has a habit of killing projects only a few years after they launch, and Stadia, a cloud gaming service from a company with few ties in the gaming industry, seemed like a prime candidate for an early demise. Last year, rumors abounded it would shut down after the number of games released on the platform slowed and the company shuttered its in-house game development studios. when those rumors popped up again this year, Google insisted that Stadia was not shutting down,

Starting point is 00:02:34 quote, rest assured. We're always working, bringing more great games to the platform and Stadia Pro, the company said in a tweet, which was true until today, end quote. So actually, we ended up talking about this at length on the Twitter space last night. So listen to that when it drops tomorrow, Saturday. If memory serves, our discussion on this comes about 45 minutes into the show. But yeah, look, good that they're refunding people who bought anything on the service, but I keep hearing that game developers who were actively developing for the platform have been left in the lurch here. Apparently, again, the online store has shut down entirely

Starting point is 00:03:13 with absolutely zero notice, so there's potentially a bunch of exclusive games, which are now inaccessible and potentially lost forever. I remember the debate when Stadio was announced. Can you trust that Google will stick with this project or any project? Are you willing to bet your company on it? I think this is going to be an important sort of historical move on Google's part, because this is very much the chickens coming home to roost for Google's reputation for flakingness. I can promise you no one in the vast gaming industry will want to work with them ever again. And frankly, could you, even outside of the gaming industry, trust anything with them? Want to build your operations on top of Google Docs? Really? Want to build your business on Google's

Starting point is 00:03:56 cloud services? Really? Can you be 100% sure those services will be there in five years' time? In two years' time? As David M.L. tweeted, quote, it is truly unfortunate that the I Give This X Years until Google shuts this down memes continue to be correct year after year, but here we are, end quote. And quoting Patrick McKenzie, it doesn't matter what a PM at Google tells you.

Starting point is 00:04:20 They'll rotate outwards after next Perth cycle, and it will be a new PM who will be utterly powerless to stop Google's mismanagement from shutting down the project you rely on. You have to treat all non-core products as ephemeral, end quote. Thought this was interesting, though, from Peter Kafka, quote, Google spent a gazillion dollars trying to crack video games, couldn't do it. Amazon is also flailing. Helps explain sort of why Microsoft wants to pay $70 billion for Activision, end quote.

Starting point is 00:04:54 Meanwhile, more interesting rumblings over here, Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg told meta staff at a weekly Q&A that meta will freeze hiring, restructure some teams, and cut budgets across most teams, citing the economy. Quoting Bloomberg, in what would be the first major budget cut since the founding of Facebook in 2004, Zuckerberg said the company will freeze hiring and restructure some teams to trim expenses and realign priorities. Meta will likely be smaller in 2023 than it was this year, he said. He announced the freeze during a weekly Q&A. with employees, according to a person in attendance. He added that the company would reduce

Starting point is 00:05:31 budgets across most teams, even those that are growing, and that individual teams will sort out how to handle headcount changes. That could mean not filling roles that employees depart, shifting people to other teams, or working to, quote, manage out people who aren't succeeding, according to remarks reviewed by Bloomberg. I had hoped the economy would have more clearly stabilized by now, Zuckerberg said, but from what we're seeing, it doesn't yet seem like it has. so we went to plan somewhat conservatively, end quote. A meta spokesperson declined to comment. Meta stock, which had already traded down at the start of the day, fell further on the news, down 3.7% from Wednesday's close. The shares have fallen 60% so far this year.

Starting point is 00:06:10 The further cost cuts and hiring freeze are meta's starkest admission that advertising revenue growth is slowing amid mounting competition for users' attention. It's not an ideal time to be cutting. Besides economic pressures, the company's advertising business built, on precise consumer targeting has lost some of its edge due to new privacy restrictions from Apple on tracking iPhone users. TikTok is attracting younger users away from Instagram, and Zuckerberg is making an expensive bet on the Metaverse, an immersive virtual reality future where he imagines people will eventually communicate, an effort he has said will lose money for many years, end quote. But conversely, we have our candidate for the first one out the door to test the

Starting point is 00:06:56 IPO waters in this economy. According to a report, corporate expense management tool startup, trip actions, valued at $7.25 billion just a year ago in October 2021, has confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO in Q2 of 2023, seeking a $12 billion valuation, quoting TechCrunch. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, trip actions was primarily known for merging many aspects of corporate trip booking, flights, hotels, and rental cars with expense tracking. But the Palo Alto-based company was among the startups that was very hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, the global crisis resulted in its revenue dropping to $0, according to CEO and co-founder Ariel Cohen. In March 2020, the company made headlines for laying off nearly 300 employees in the face of a slowdown in business related to the pandemic.

Starting point is 00:07:45 It was at that point that Trip Actions made the decision to accelerate the timeline for its FinTech expense product, Trip Actions Liquid, which had launched only a month before the pandemic. As the pandemic led to increase digitization across the board, employees were suddenly making spend decisions from outside the office and more merchants were accepting digital payments. By leaning full force into the spend management space, Trip Actions has been competing with the likes of Brex, Ramp, and Air Base, among others. In April, Trip Actions shared with me some stats around its recent growth. At that time, the company told me that transaction volume processed via Trip Actions Liquid more than doubled by 107% from January 2020 through March, up 1,231% year over year, end quote. And look, this is maybe more gossipy than I usually share, but we did get to see a bunch of

Starting point is 00:08:43 emails and messages from the whole Twitter and Elon trial among the nuggets in these revealed messages. In March of 2022, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told Elon Musk that he tried to add Musk to Twitter's board of directors, but other members were against it. And Dorsey said they were, quote, super risk averse, quoting CNBC. In the court filing, which is partially redacted, Dorsey said he thought the board's approach was, quote, completely stupid and backwards, but he explained his power was limited because, quote, I only had one vote and three percent of the company and no dual class shares, hard setup, end quote. The two billionaire entrepreneurs

Starting point is 00:09:20 had been discussing Dorsey's idea that Twitter should be, end quote, open source protocol, funded by a foundation rather than a company. Musk responded that the idea was, quote, super interesting. Dorsey said he planned to, quote, do this work and fix our mistakes once he was off the Twitter board in mid-May, saying that becoming a company was Twitter's, quote, original sin. I'd like to help if I'm able to, Musk replied. Dorsey told Musk he'd wanted to talk with him about the idea, quote, after I was all clear, adding that he'd even tried to get Musk on the board, quote, back when we had the activists come in, end quote. Dorsey said that at that time, our board said no to the proposal, end quote. If you want to read a fascinating rundown of a lot of the emails and messages that have been

Starting point is 00:10:03 revealed in this doc dump, our friend Alex Cantowitz at Big Technology has you covered. Check the show notes because it's a fascinating look at how this all went down. Initially, Parag Agrawal is optimistic about a deal. He and Musk bond over coding, but then their relationship sours. Joe Rogan jumps into the convo at one point. Tim Urban tried to get Elon on his podcast. Gail King is a involved somehow. Then there are messages reaching out to Mark Benioff, to Larry Ellison, Mark Andresen, jumps in to offer money for the deal. No due diligence required, apparently. Sachin Adela, Steve Jervitson, Sean Parker, they're all in the mix here. At one point, Elon gets mad at Jason Calacanus for trying to organize that angel syndicate to get involved in the deal, quoting Musk.

Starting point is 00:10:51 Morgan Stanley and Jared think you are using our friendship not in a good way. This makes it seem like I'm desperate. Please stop. Calacanus returns this time for a Musk scolding after Calacanus marketed investment in the Twitter deal to his angel syndicate. Calacanus apologizes and tells Musk he's a ride or die friend who would jump on a grande for him and quote, I guess Jason mistyped the word grenade there. He says, among other things, quote, you have my sword and Twitter CEO is my dream job. And quote, anyway, if you want to get a fly on the wall sense of how the sausage gets made, on big deals like this. Check out big technologies blow by blow of the messages. I've also included a link to a verge piece that has more details like, quote, two days later, Agriwal makes a pivotal mistake.

Starting point is 00:11:36 He asks Musk to stop tweeting, quote, you are free to tweet is Twitter dying or anything else about Twitter, but it's my responsibility to tell you that it's not helping me make Twitter better in the current context, Agriwal texts on April 9th. I'd like the company to get to a place where we are more resilient and we don't get distracted, but we aren't there right now. now, end quote. Two minutes later, must declares joining the board, quote, a waste of time and says he'll offer to take Twitter private. Quote, fixing Twitter by chatting with Parag won't work, he tells Twitter board chair Brett Taylor Tursley, quote, drastic action is needed, end quote. If that wasn't enough of a long read suggestion, here are the actual long reads. Since Chris and I ended up going deep on what

Starting point is 00:12:26 Google's strategy is these days on the Twitter space, I'm sharing this piece from the verge that looks at how Google is trying to reinvent its search business for the more visual and interactive web as it exists today. And then since we've been discussing Twitter as well, Max Chaffkin in Bloomberg makes the case that once again, the mess at Twitter can probably be laid at Jack Dorsey's feet. Quote, it's easy to forget, but Musk isn't the first activist investor Dorsey struggled to handle. In early 2020, Elliott Management, the firm founded by Paul Singer, acquired more than $1 billion in Twitter stock and pushed the board to oust the CEO. As Bloomberg's Kurt Wagner reported earlier this year, Elliot's concern was Dorsey's lack of focus. Dorsey had two CEO jobs and his commitment to

Starting point is 00:13:12 either seemed questionable. This critique, which had been simmering for years, was understandable. Dorsey had responded to it by withdrawing further. In 2018, he went on a 10-day silent meditation retreat in Myanmar. In 2019, he took a month-long tour of Africa during which he met with crypto enthusiasts and went on another 10-day silent meditation retreat. Then he announced, apparently without alerting Twitter, that he planned to work remotely from Africa for at least three months of 2020. When Twitter banned Trump in 2021, Dorsey was in French Polynesia. Dorsey's friends and defenders have long explained his dilettantish lack of focus, which came up during his first tenure as CEO when he responded to the service's technical failures by

Starting point is 00:13:54 cultivating a passion for dressmaking. As more of a matter of optics, than a management deficiency, Dorsey was, according to this line of thinking sagely, allowing his deputies to make the best decisions. This seems a little harder to swallow lately, as Dorsey has stayed silent while Musk and his allies dogpile that same management team Dorsey once deferred to. His pose of wise passivity looks more and more like a way to mask his own limitations, end quote. Then returning to something we've discussed on the Long Reads last week, slash film has a piece explaining why movie dialogue has gotten more difficult to hear, thus the reason why we've all been leaving subtitles on all the time now.

Starting point is 00:14:35 Quote, there are a number of root causes, said Mark Maggini, the Academy Award-winning sound designer behind films like Mad Max Fury Road and Blade Runner 2049. It's really a gumbo, an accumulation of problems that have been exacerbated over the last 10 years. That's kind of this time span, where all of us in the filmmaking community are noticing that dialogue is harder and harder to understand, end quote. An anonymous sound pro also pointed to what they view as an increase in the amount of music in modern movies compared to older films, bemoaning directors over-reliance on music as pushing emotion on audiences and the way music and dialogue are forced to jostle for prominence

Starting point is 00:15:11 in the mix. The technology we have today is so vastly improved that there's no limit to what can be added, whatever the director wants for months on end. We literally have hundreds of tracks at our disposal. In a final mix, we therefore have to deal. with a lot. Unending score smashed up against hundreds of tracks with the client asking to hear every nuance above every other nuance, end quote. Curley sums it up beautifully, quote, it might fall into the realm of the Jurassic Park thing. They spend so much time realizing that they can do all these things,

Starting point is 00:15:41 but not thinking about if they should do all these things, end quote. And finally, just for fun, the story of a developer who realized someone was impersonating them applying for jobs all around Silicon Valley, again, pretending to be them. Quote, this imposter for the next two minutes proceeded to read the same document I had been leaked, saying things word for word, as well as saying his name was Connor Tumbles. This was a different person hired to impersonate me than the one who reached out to me. My guess was the original person declined, and this just got passed to a different person. I could not stand this anymore, listening to someone legitimately claimed they were me while using my photo, name, and hard-earned achievements. So I turned on my camera, renamed my

Starting point is 00:16:24 back and asked the individual what the hell they were doing. The fake Connor Tumbles immediately left the Zoom call, end quote. So you're going to love the Twitter space this weekend. We go deep on Google and Stadia, deep on the NFT crash, and my realization that maybe mobile computing and the app store are really what's holding back Web 3 development. And we even discuss my beloved Remarkable 2 and that new Kindle you can write on. Real quick though, I wanted to address something that some of you have been asking me about. Why all the sudden are some of you hearing ads not voiced or produced by me? Well, it's because for the first time in four and a half years of doing this show, our ad inventory is not sold out. In fact, next month, as of this moment,

Starting point is 00:17:20 our ad inventory is not even 50% sold out. So I've been filling the ad inventory with backfill ads, digitally inserted ads. I'm sharing this with you to explain why you're hearing the these new ads. I don't even know what ads are going to play because they're digitally inserted. And it's not great because I make less money from these backfill ads, but it's better than nothing. But also, I'm sharing because maybe this is a bit of a recession. Anecdotal evidence alert, warning sign, our ad inventory never collapsed even during the pandemic and even at the beginning of the summer when some long time advertisers pulled back. Even then, it wasn't quite as barren as it is now. But also, finally,

Starting point is 00:18:02 I'm sharing all this with you because, hey, if you've ever considered advertising on this show to reach your fellow members of the mutant podcast army, get in touch. Email me at podcast at techmeem.com. Happy to sell you an ad or two, at least through October. I'd be happy to generously discount any ads bought by listeners to this show. Get in touch, and I could be reading your copy as soon as next week. Talk to you on Monday.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 09/30 – Google Shutters Stadia

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