Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 01/23 – Moar Tech Layoffs (And Moar To Come?)

Episode Date: January 23, 2023

More tech layoffs, and why I’m suggesting we might only be in the early innings of this tech retrenchment. Big Wall Street banks are coming for PayPal and Apple Pay. TikTok might be putting it’s thumb on the scales to favor certain content. Would you pay $42 a month for a ChatGPT Pro plan? And how far has Apple Silicon come, exactly. Sponsors: Radial.llc/ride (Listener!) MeetFabric.com/ride Links: Spotify to trim 6% of workforce in latest tech layoffs (Reuters) Elliott Management Takes Big Stake in Salesforce (WSJ) Banks Plan Payment Wallet to Compete With PayPal, Apple Pay (WSJ) TikTok’s Secret ‘Heating’ Button Can Make Anyone Go Viral (Forbes) ChatGPT users report $42 a month pricing for ‘pro’ access but no official announcement yet (The Verge) Apple MacBook Pro 16 (2023) review: the core count grows (The Verge) Buy tickets for the comedy show! 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 Monday, January 23rd, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today.

More tech layoffs and why I'm suggesting we might only be in the early innings of this tech retrenchment. Big Wall Street banks are coming for PayPal and Apple Pay. TikTok might be putting its thumb on the scales to favor certain content. Would you pay $42 a month for a chat GPT Pro plan? And how far has Apple Silicon come exactly? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. More tech layoffs. Reuters is reporting that Spotify plans to lay off around 6% of its workforce or roughly 600 people.

Also, content head Don Ostroff will be leaving Spotify, which is interesting since she was the force behind all of their podcasting initiatives these last few years. Also, Spotify is going to reorganize the engineering and product groups. Quote, over the last few months, we've made a considerable effort to rein in costs, but it simply hasn't been enough. Chief Executive Daniel X said in a blog post announcing the roughly 600 job cuts, I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth, he added, echoing a statement voiced by other tech bosses in recent months. Spotify's operating expenditure grew at twice the speed of its revenue last year as the audio streaming company aggressively poured money into its podcast business, which is more

attractive for advertisers due to higher engagement levels, end quote. Yeah, have you noticed that all of the announced layoffs these last two weeks use almost exactly the same language, almost as if the CEOs doing the laying off, have been just cutting and pasting from the same document. I've said this on Twitter, but I'm willing to bet that half or more of the layoffs we've been seeing these last two weeks are opportunistic, are coming because if you're a major tech platform and you've even casually thought of cutting costs in the past, now is the time to do it. Since everyone else is laying people off, you now have covered to do layoffs yourself. Plus, you're probably getting pressure from

shareholders, more on that in a second. I thought it might be worth looking at where some of the recent layoffs have been targeted, especially at the bigger platforms in terms of reading the T-leaves as to where their priorities might be going forward. I just suggested, you know, is Spotify going to continue going full speed ahead with podcasting or no? But consider this as well. Microsoft apparently laid off the entire teams behind its virtual reality platform, Alt-Space VR, which will shut down in March, and its mixed-reality toolkit frameworks. So are they seating the AR, VR, VR, territory to Apple and meta? Also over at Alphabet, according to emails and sources, Google fired 16% of its roughly 400-person

Fuchsia OS team. The research unit cut jobs in low traction areas, and the Google Cloud team cut mainly operational and other roles. Google also cut most of the Area 120 team and will graduate three of that incubators projects in 2023. Sources say staff not involved in those. three graduating projects were laid off, quoting Bloomberg. Launched in 2016, Area 120 offers select employees the opportunity to work on small startups

that live inside Google. Quote, many of Google's best ideas begin as passion projects, the Area 120 website explains. Among the incubator's biggest hits was Game Snacks, a gaming platform launched in 2020 that caters to people using low-memory devices on slow cellular networks. Google made another round of cuts to Area 120 in September, when some teams at the incubator were notified that their projects had been reorganized or canceled. A company spokesperson said at the time that Area 120 would be, quote, shifting its focus to projects that build on Google's deep investment in AI and have the potential to solve

important user problems, end quote. Sources are telling the journal that activist investor Elliott Management acquired a multi-billion dollar stake in Salesforce. A partner at Elliott says the firm has, quote, a deep respect for Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff. And yet, quote, it has. It has been a turbulent stretch for Salesforce. Earlier this month, the company said it was laying off 10% of its workforce and reducing its office space in certain markets. Mr. Benioff said many customers are taking a more cautious approach to spending something more software companies are facing amid fears of an economic slowdown.

Mr. Benioff, who also serves as chairman, said Salesforce hired too many people as revenue surged earlier in the COVID-19 pandemic, echoing other tech executives as industry layoffs intensify. sales force's stock a stellar performer for years has taken a beating down by about half from a late 2021 high and giving the company a market capitalization of roughly 150 billion the shares closed Friday at 151.25 cents up 3.3% on a big day for technology stocks and quote now i normally don't report much on sales force but i wanted to mention them to make this point we might only be in the first phase of these tech layoffs because if you're one of these private equity or activist investor firms and you see major tech companies down 50% or more, they're still hugely profitable, so you're doing that rubbing your hands together meme. The market might be right for a lot more

activist agitation looking for more layoffs, more cost cutting at these tech behemists, and even maybe them divesting themselves of underperforming assets. Wells Faris. Wells Faris. Bank of America, J.P. Morgan, and four other big banks are working on a digital wallet managed by early warning systems, the owner of that payments platform Zell that the banks have been running for years. They're going to roll out this new payments platform in the second half of 2023, apparently, quoting the journal. One goal of the new service is to compete with third-party wallet operators such as PayPal and Apple's Apple Pay, according to people familiar with the matter. banks are worried about losing control of their customer relationships. Apple in particular poses a big threat.

The tech giant has moved further into financial services and is working on a savings account with Goldman Sachs Group and a buy-now pay-later offering. Zell's owner banks are also trying to cut down on fraud. Customers using their wallet wouldn't have to type in their card numbers, which can raise the risk of fraud and rejected payments that result in lost sales. The banks expect to enable 150 million debit and credit cards for you. use within the wallet when it rolls out. U.S. consumers who are up to date on payments have used their card online in recent years and have provided an email address and phone number will be eligible. The banks are still ironing out the details of the customer experience. It likely will involve consumers typing their email on a merchant's checkout page. The merchant would ping

EWS slash Zell, which would use its back-end connections to banks to identify which of the consumers' cards can be loaded onto the wallet. Customers would then choose which card to use or could opt out. EWS's owners last year debated a plan to allow shoppers to use Zell for online purchases, the Wall Street Journal previously reported. Concerns around fraud and the treatment of disputed transactions, which have caught the eye of lawmakers, contributed to the decision not to move forward. The wallet is being designed to roll out with cards, since that is how U.S. consumers are used to shopping. The banks figured it would increase the odds that more people would use the wallet. Should a sizable number of merchants enable the wallet and consumers adopt it, EWS banks could

explore adding other payment options, EWS said. That could include enabling payments directly from bank accounts, and quote. Real quick, it's official Open AI this morning announced a multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment from Microsoft, following on on their previous 2019 and 2021 investments, to build what they're calling, quote, safe, useful, and powerful AI. So, fair enough, but this is interesting to me, too, though at the time of this writing, no official announcement has been made. Some chat GPT users are reporting they have been granted access to a $42 a month pricing plan for what is being called chat GPT Pro, quoting the verge. OpenAI hasn't confirmed this is any official tests or made any announcements. We've contacted the company for more info,

but in the meantime, remember that features and pricing could change before chat GPT professional launches for real. As OpenAI said earlier this month, quote, please keep in mind that this is an early experimental program that is subject to change, and we are not making paid pro access generally available at this time, end quote. With that in mind, what does $42 a month get you? According to screenshots shared by users given early access, you get faster response speed, more reliable access, because chat GPT is down a lot, and priority access to new features, whatever they turn out to be. The thornyer question, though, is cost. On the official chat GPT Discord many users expressed anger and disappointment over the $42 price tag.

If it made me money, I could justify the $42 a month, but in my country, this is a good percentage of the minimum wage, said one user. I very much wanted to pay for a plan, but $42 is just too much, said another. $42 USD is not too much for peeps who are heavy users and wish to become superhuman. With the help of AI, it will be too much, though, for too many users, said another. As the last commenter notes, it's clear that users' judgment on any person, will depend on their need for the service. There have been plenty of anecdotal accounts of people using chat GPT to speed up their job. And for these individuals, $42 a month is likely a reasonable

outlay like any other software subscription. Casual users, though, will have to hope the free tier stays around and keeps feature parity, more or less, with the professional version. Ultimately, even a small fee will be an effective filter to see how useful chat GPT really is, and given the lack of comparable services, $42 is likely a speculative first attempt at pricing from OpenAI and a nerdy, in-joke, end quote. From the, of course they are, it would be a surprise if they didn't do this, but maybe they shouldn't do it, file, according to six employees and in an internal document, TikTok and BiteDance staff have allegedly engaged in heating or inflating video view counts to court influencers and brands. Quoting Forbes. These sources reveal that in addition to letting

the algorithm decide what goes viral, staff at TikTok and BytDance also secretly handpick specific videos and supercharged their distribution using a practice known internally as heating. Quote, the heating feature refers to boosting videos into the 4U feed through operational intervention to achieve a certain number of video views. An internal TikTok document titled Mint Heating Playbook explains, quote, the total video views of heated videos accounts for a large portion of the daily total video views around 1 to 2%, which can have a significant impact on overall core metrics, end quote. TikTok has never publicly disclosed that it engages in heating, and while all tech giants engage to some degree in efforts to amplify specific posts to their users, they usually clearly label when

they do so. Google, Meta, and TikTok itself, for example, have partnered with public health and elections groups to distribute accurate information about COVID-19 and help users find their polling place, making clear disclosures about how and why they chose to promote these messages. But sources told Forbes that TikTok has often used Heating to court influencers and brands, enticing them into partnerships by inflating their video's view count. This suggests that heating has potentially benefited some influencers and brands, those with whom TikTok has sought business relationships at the expense of others with whom it has not. We think of social media as being very democratizing and giving everyone the same opportunity to reach an audience, said Evelyn

Dowek, a professor at Stanford Law School and Senior Research Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. But that's not always true, she cautioned, quote, to some degree the same old power structures are replicating in social media as well, where the platform can decide winners and losers to some degree, and commercial and other kinds of partnerships take advantage, end quote. Heating also reveals that at least sometimes videos on the for-you page aren't there because TikTok thinks you'll like them. Instead, they're there because TikTok wants a particular brand or creator to get more views. And without labels, like those used for ads and sponsored content, it's impossible to tell which is which. Employees have also abused

heating privileges. Three sources told Forbes they were aware of instances where heating was used improperly by employees. One said that employees have been known to heat their own or their spouse's accounts in violation of company policy. Documents reviewed by Forbes showed that employees have heated their own accounts as well as accounts of people with whom they have personal relationships. According to one document, a heating incident of this type led to an account receiving more than 3 million views, end quote. Finally today, the new MacBook Pro reviews broke embargo this morning, but I won't be doing a roundup like I do sometimes because there's basically only one improvement in these machines, right? It's the new chips. So, how far has Apple Silicon

progressed? Quoting from The Verges Review. The 2023 MacBook Pro 16 is almost exactly the same as the 2021 MacBook Pro 16, except that there's a new chip inside. And just to get one thing out of the way, no, there is not a good reason to buy the 20203 model if you already have the 2021 model. I don't assume many folks were thinking of doing that, but in case you were tempted, consider this a friendly finger wag in your direction. Your $2,500 plus 2021 model is still just fine. Anyway, what do the numbers show? I'm going to come right out and say that the most impactful difference, between the M1 Max and the M2 Max is the efficiency.

For my particular workload, which includes office work in 20-ish Chrome tabs at a time, with occasional streaming over top through Apple Music, Apple TV, and the like. That translates to several additional hours of work that I can get done to one charge. I usually got just around 10 hours out of the MacBook Pro 16 with M1 Max. I'm now averaging close to 14 out of the M2 Max model and have seen over, 18 hours from some trials. Everyone's workload is different, but I'm confident most people will see additional hours of battery life from the 2023 MacBook Pro. I expect to see an even longer lifespan from the M2 Pro machine based on the M1 Pro's impressive results. Those few hours are quite a big deal in

the current laptop landscape. The MacBook Pro 16 with M2 Max is now very competitive in terms of battery life with pretty much every other laptop on the market. Getting into benchmarks, we're looking at around a 20% CPU uplift in multi-core performance and a 10-to-15-ish percent increase in single-core performance in the test we ran. We also saw around a 20% increase in graphic performance on Geekbench and Tomb Raider. We did not see that large of an increase in Premier Pro performance where scores were much closer together, so take that for what you will if you're primarily looking to edit video on this machine. There's an elephant in the room, which may already be evident to some readers from the somewhat tepid tone of my summary here. If the differences between the M1 Max and M2 Max are so incremental, but the M1

Max is now being sold for clearance prices at places like Best Buy in Amazon, should one not just purchase, say, discounted or refurbished MacBook Pro 16 with M1 Max instead? Short answer? Maybe. Long answer, it depends on the discount. The M1 Max, despite having less raw power than its successor, was the obvious choice for shoppers trying to maximize their CPU power in 2021. The M2 Max, is no longer that. The core hungry shopper who never unplugs their laptop will have better options from Intel and AMD in 2023. What we don't expect those options to have in any capacity is battery life. That's where the M1 Max is the undeniable champion. And that's the calculus that does remain unchanged from 2021. The MacBook Pro 16 remains the best combination of performance and efficiency

that you can get. That's why the M2 Max, despite being more powerful than the M1 Max, may target less of a power user crowd this year. If I ran a Windows laptop company, I wouldn't be too scared of the MacBook Pro 16 with M2 Max. What I'd be terrified of is the backlog of M1 Macs and M1 Pro laptops that are about to go on big time sale. If even one of those 16-inch models, okay, maybe not one with 16 gigabytes of RAM, is regularly available for less than $2,000, I can imagine that tempting even some of the most loyal Windows users, end quote. Quick note on that listener meetup that's going to happen this Saturday night in San Francisco. A listener got in touch to suggest that Blackbird Bar would be a better venue for us than the previous bar I mentioned.

It's basically right across the street. The listener said the other options were louder and more crowded, so he says Blackbird would be more our vibe in terms of being able to, you know, actually talk to each other. So, and Chris Messina, please take note. The meetup will be at 7 p.m. Saturday night, this Saturday night, at 2124 Market Street. Again, the name of the bar is Blackbird Bar. I'll be reminding you of this again, and I think Chris is setting up an RSVP thing, so more on that tomorrow. In the meantime, no tickets necessary for the meetup, of course, but I wanted to remind you again if you want to come see me do the comedy show. It'll be happening at 9.30. Just steps from Blackbird Bar. The final link in the show notes is to order tickets ahead of time. Though apparently you can buy tickets at the door as well if it hasn't sold out that night. Talk to you tomorrow.