Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 03/11 - How TikTok Is Different

Episode Date: March 11, 2019

Nvidia buys Mellanox, Tesla reverses course, a handy primer on how TikTok is different, and we check in on the smart takes from last week’s big stories. Subscribe to the Premium, Ad-Free Podcast Feed! Sponsors: DataDogHQ.com/ridehome Tiny.website Links: Nvidia to Buy Mellanox for $6.9 Billion in Data Center Push (Bloomberg) Landlords to Tesla: You’re Still on the Hook for Your Store Leases (WSJ) How TikTok Is Rewriting the World (NYTimes) Facebook vs. Apple (Slate) Facebook has a big, terrifying dream to be the communication backbone for the Western world (Business Insider) ELIZABETH WARREN WANTS TO BREAK UP APPLE, TOO (The Verge) Elizabeth Warren Wants To Break Up Amazon, Google And Facebook; But Does Her Plan Make Any Sense? (TechDirt) How to Enable Dark Mode Nearly Everywhere It's Available Right Now (Gizmodo) 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, March 11th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Envideo buys Melanox, Tesla reverses course, a handy primer on how TikTok is different.

And we check in on the smart takes from last week's big stories. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Nvidia has agreed to buy Melanox technologies for $6.9 billion, offering Melanox shareholders $125 per share in an all-cash deal. This is Nvidia's biggest ever acquisition. If you've never heard of Melanox, don't worry. Neither had I. The American-Israeli company makes chips used to speed the flow of information across data center servers.

And apparently, the bidding for Melanox was, quote, very competitive. Nvidia beat out a slate of rivals, including Intel, to snap up the company. Why? Quoting from Bloomberg. For Nvidia, it's all. all about, quote, accelerating momentum for one of Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang's most successful initiatives. The company's founder built a multi-billion dollar business in under three years by persuading owners of data centers that his graphics chips are the right solution for

processing the increasingly large amounts of information needed for artificial intelligence work, such as image recognition. The data center is more important than ever, Huang said in an interview. This combination allows us to innovate faster and, quote. For even more on that, quoting again from Bloomberg from later in the piece, the growing reams of data generated means work on AI and large databases need to be split between multiple computers. Simply using a faster processor isn't enough, Huang said. To deal with this, data centers in future will be built as though they are single giant computers, quote, with tens of thousands of compute nodes, requiring interconnections that let them work in parallel.

Nvidia will use its newly acquired technology to make those giant warehouses full of machinery more efficient and effective, he said, end quote. Remember how I told you last week that Tesla was going to close all of its stores in an effort to cut costs so it could also cut prices across its entire lineup? Yeah, not so much. Late last night, Elon Musk sent out an email and a blog post completely reversing course. some Tesla stores will close, but plenty will stay open. Oh, and Tesla is going to raise vehicle prices instead of cutting them across the board by around 3% after March 18th. The one key model that will not see a price rise will be the $35,000 Model 3, which just arrived. Quote, over the past two weeks we have been closely evaluating every single Tesla retail location,

and we have decided to keep significantly more stores open than we previously announced as we continue to evaluate them over the course of several months, the blog post said. It went on to say that some previously closed stores will actually be reopened, and other locations are under review. Quote, depending on their effectiveness over the next few months, some will be closed and some will remain open, end quote. Tesla still wants you to buy your Tesla online. Apparently the workers in the stores that remain open will just be there to help

you order your Tesla on your smartphone. So why the abrupt about face? Well, when we're talking about Tesla, they never really need a reason, do they? But funny enough, I saw this flagged on Twitter this morning. On Friday, Esther Fung, who is the real estate reporter for the Wall Street Journal, had a piece up saying that landlords were going to court to prevent Tesla from closing stores that it had existing leases on. Apparently, recently, property owners have successfully blocked attempted lease breaks by the likes of Kenneth Cole and Starbucks. Quote, Tesla is a company with a viable balance sheet that is going to owe a lot of landlords, a lot of money, said Robert Taubman, the chief executive officer of Taubman Centers, Inc.

At the City 2019 Global Property CEO Conference in Hollywood, Florida this week, many mall owners, like Talbman, said that Tesla stores have produced strong sales numbers and that they were surprised by the carmaker's announcement. Only a month ago, Tesla signed a new lease at Santa Monica Place in California that goes through 2025. As recently as last month, Tesla was negotiating and signing leases, according to executives at Talbman. Retail tenants generally can't break their leases without penalty unless certain conditions are met, like a retailer files for bankruptcy protection, or the shopping center suffers from persistent vacancies that allows a tenant to leave before the lease expires. mall tenant leases typically run five to ten years, end quote.

Apparently, Tesla has lease obligations of $1.6 billion, with $1.1 billion of that due between now and 2023, according to securities filings. Is this just another instance of Elon decided to do a thing, and there was no one around to say, actually, Elon, you can't do that thing? I've been waiting for a simple catch-all explainer of TikTok, that new social app slash platform that really is on the up and coming tip at the moment. And the New York Times has delivered it for me. As the Times piece notes, it's been a while since we had something new that came along that had people saying, what is that? Do I need to be on this new thing? Is this the new new thing?

The last one like that, I think, was probably Snapchat, right? But also, what is super interesting about TikTok is how different it is than other platforms that we've become accustomed to. In many ways, TikTok straight up discards many of the assumptions that other rival platforms have operated under and has been doing things in a genuinely new way. This Times piece is a good explainer for what TikTok even is.

It's for making and sharing short videos, but you navigate by scrolling up and down like a feed, not by tapping or swiping. There are filters like on Snapchat for making your video look the way you want, but also a whole array of tools for adding sounds as well as images, text and graphics. There are hashtags, but they're more for memes

and TikTok-centric jokes and challenges. And that's the thing. TikTok super encourages engagement with your fellow TikTokers through things like response videos or by means of what are called duets. Quote, TikTok assertively answers anyone's

What Should I Watch with a flood. In the same way, the app provides plenty of answers for the paralyzing what should I post question. The result is an endless unspooling of material that people, many very young, might be too self-conscious to post on Instagram or that they never would have come up with in the first place without a nudge.

It can be hard to watch. It can be charming. It can be very, very funny. It is frequently, in the language widely applied outside the platform from people on other platforms, extremely cringe, end quote. But also, even if TikTok feels like something we've seen before, you can have friends, you can follow people, there are TikTok stars. In a way, under the hood, TikTok is fundamentally different. Quote, on most social networks, the first step to showing your content to a lot of people is

grinding to build an audience or having lots of friends or being incredibly beautiful or wealthy or idle and willing to display that, or getting lucky and striking viral gold. TikTok instead encourages users to jump from audience to audience, trend to trend, creating something like simulated temporary friend groups who get together to do friend group things, to share an inside joke, to riff on a song, to talk idly and aimlessly about whatever is in front of you. Feedback is instant and frequently abundant. Virality has a stiff tailwind.

Stimulation is constant. there is an unmistakable sense that you're using something that's expanding in every direction. The pool of content is enormous. Most of it is meaningless. Some of it becomes popular and some is great and some gets to be both. As the Atlantic's Taylor Lawrence put it, quote, watching too many in a row can feel like you're about to have a brain freeze. They're incredibly addictive, end quote.

So maybe the analogy for olds is TikTok is like channel surfing from the old days. but if every channel was a public access channel. And it's like participating in Twitter, maybe, or joining subreddits on the ebb and flow of the meme of the moment. It's the ephemerality of attention as a product model. Anyway, if you, like me, needed a TikTok primer, there you go. Over the weekend, there were several pieces that chewed into the big news from last week, which was Facebook's pivot to privacy,

and Senator Warren's proposals to break up big tech. I'm just going to point you to five of these pieces and then you can read them for yourself. First, in Slate, Willa Ramos says, forget about emulating Snapchat by shifting focus to private messaging. Facebook is actually emulating WeChat, the big messaging platform in China.

And by trying to be like WeChat, Facebook's actual strategic target with this move is Apple, because WeChat makes EyeEGAT, makes iOS largely irrelevant in China. Quote, when people pull out their phone to text their mother or plan a party with a group of friends, Zuckerberg wants them to do that on WhatsApp, Messenger, or Instagram Direct, all of which will work with each other,

and eventually with standard SMS systems too. And in the long run, he wants them to use those platforms for much more than texting and chatting. The ultimate vision is something akin to WeChat, the Chinese super app that people use for everything from messaging to sharing videos to making appointments, reviewing restaurants and hailing rides, end quote. Aramis says that Zuckerberg wants to supplant SMS broadly, but iMessage in particular.

He notes something that got little notice, but this past October on an earnings call, Zuckerberg specifically called out iMessage as, quote, our biggest competitor by far. Also saying, quote, in important countries like the U.S. where the iPhone is strong, Apple Bundles iMessage as a default texting app, and its. still ahead, end quote. But Aramis writes, quote, near global dominance of messaging is not as far fetched a dream for Facebook as it might seem to the average American. WhatsApp is already the most popular messaging app in many countries outside the U.S. and China, including Brazil, India, Mexico, Germany, and Turkey. Messenger is close behind and has become the default messaging app for many

Android users in North America, end quote. So things make more sense now, right? Facebook's signaled that it's giving up on the China. Chinese market. But then we chat has China locked up, right? And hey, maybe becoming the dominant player in all of communication outside of China really is a bigger prize than just

some dumb social network, right? For most of the 20th century, Ma Bell had the communications market to itself, and it did pretty well. In business insider, Shona Ghosh echoes pretty much the same point, saying, quote, life in modern

China is essentially impossible without WeChat. Given the app compromises messaging, payments, and banking all in one place. Think of it like WhatsApp, PayPal, Apple Pay, Venmo, Uber, and elements of Amazon combined, end quote. So that also brings us back to that conversation with Andreessen Horowitz's Connie Chan about a fully balanced revenue pie. I guess Zuck sees that too, right? And why wouldn't he salivate over a platform everyone needed just to do basically anything in your daily life. Communications is the vector into that, maybe, and it has the added benefit of playing into Facebook's existing business model as well.

End-to-end encryption, and even the rumored cryptocurrency, all play together. Think about it, as Gosh writes, quote, If you decide to make secure payments through this new platform, Facebook may gain a better understanding of everything from who your utility provider is to how frequently you fly abroad. It will understand whether you buy something as a direct result of seeing it on Instagram. It doesn't need to see the actual content of your messages to slurp that data, end quote.

On to the other big story of last week, the breakup of big tech plan from Senator Warren, the verge got her to sit down and discuss this plan in greater detail. And yes, because some people notice this, Apple is in her crosshairs as well, even though she didn't mention it in her medium post last week. Quoting the senator, speaking to Nilai Patel, quote, Apple, you've got to break it apart from their app store. It's got to be one or the other. Either they run the platform or they play in the store. They don't get to do both at the same time, so it's the same notion, end quote.

Warren's specific targeting of the app store drew a response from Ben Lovejoy at 9 to 5 Mac, who said that Warren has a valid point, but not a winning one. One, quote, Apple is making a big move into subscription services, and that means that in some cases it will be making money from features it has copied from existing apps. And even when it doesn't do this, owning both the platform and the app does, as Warren argues, give Apple a massive advantage, end quote. He goes on to mention Apple Music as an example, the forthcoming Apple News app and the streaming video service. But he also notes, there is nothing that says, say, Kroger, can't offer its own directly sourced groceries in its own stores next to the goods of others. Quote, chain stores offer their own brand labels right alongside third-party ones,

and consumers make their choice. Far from harming consumers, the fact that the store is both a platform and a product maker gives shoppers more choice and lower prices, end quote. And in tech dirt, Mike Maznick dissects the Warren Plan and says it doesn't add up to him, at least when you get into the details. I'll let you read the whole thing to grasp his argument in total, but let me quote his conclusion. Quote, this entire plan gets headlines, duh,

because so many people are perhaps reasonably angry at the power of big tech companies. But very little in the actual plan makes much sense. The platform utility idea will lead to massive, wasteful, stupid lawsuits. The unwinding of old mergers will involve interfering with an independent agency and seem unlikely to do much to change the main concerns that Warren raises in the first place. And again, none of this is to say we shouldn't be concerned about big Internet companies with too much power. It is a perfectly reasonable concern, but just because you want to do something, and this is something, doesn't mean that it's the something we should do.

The way to attack the positions of these big Internet companies is to enable more competition, and you do that by encouraging alternatives in the marketplace. This is why I'm actually hopeful that some of these companies will actually start to explore an idea of moving to protocols rather than owning the whole platform themselves or that we'll see new protocols springing up. Meanwhile, if Warren were truly concerned about monopolies and a lack of competition, why isn't her plan looking at the lack of competition in the broadband and mobile markets, cases where we have legitimate competition problems due to bad regulatory policies going back decades, end quote. Finally today, a segment from the News You Can Use file. Basically, every OS and major platform app you can think of has recently rolled out some form of dark mode.

Why have a dark mode? Well, it's supposedly easier on your eyes. And I didn't know this, but it can even save battery life if you're using an OLED display. Feel like jumping on the dark mode bandwagon, or at least taking it for a spin? the final link in the show notes today goes to a piece in Gizmodo from David Neald

that will walk you through the steps to enabling dark mode in Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, which by the way does not have an official dark mode yet, but you can follow his steps to get close. Facebook Messenger, YouTube, Twitter, Google Chrome, Firefox, Slack, even Wikipedia. Check it out. Your eyes might thank you.

Thank you, of course, to those of you sign up for the premium feed over the weekend, although if you did, you wouldn't be hearing this message, would you? If you missed Friday's show, I'm going to replay my explanation of what the premium feed is in just a second. But before I do that, several of you got in touch to say, you want to support the show, but you don't want to lose the ads. The ads are actually useful for keeping you in the loop in terms of what products and stuff

is available, especially in the cloud. Hat-tip Data Dog Well, hey, as I pointed out on the subreddit, if you want to, there's no reason why you can't just keep the feed with the ads, even if you get the feed without the ads. I mean, no one says you have to delete the old feed anyway, just because you paid for the premium one.

No one says you even have to set up the new feed. Think of the premium feed this way. If you find value in getting rid of the ads and getting all the bonus episodes, then great. There you go. But if you just want to show your appreciation for the show, think of the premium feed as a Patreon-style mechanism that also has a specific benefit built in should you want to take advantage of it.

Okay, talk to you tomorrow. In case you missed Friday's show, here's the explanation of the premium feed. From almost day one of this podcast, people have been asking me for an ad-free version of the show. Well, today we're going to launch one. It will cost $5 a month, and you can subscribe to it very simply. The very first link in the show notes today says subscribe to the premium ad-free podcast feed. If you tap on that, you can subscribe in like a couple super simple steps right inside your podcast app itself.

Super easy. You can even use Apple Pay or whatever. If you listen on a desktop, the link to subscribe is Kimberlite. slash ride home. Yes, we've partnered with a new company called Kimberlite.fm to set up this premium feed. They don't do anything other than work with podcasts to set up subscription feeds. They take a super small cut, so the vast majority of this subscription will go to us, and you'll get an email when you sign up that will allow you to manage your subscription super simply over time, and you can cancel at any time.

All right, so why pay $5 a month for a premium feed? Well, a few reasons. First, maybe you just appreciate this show being a part of your life every day. Maybe you just want to give me a tip of appreciation, and indeed, I would appreciate that. As you know, we haven't gotten to the point yet where we can afford to bring on Chris or someone like him to help me out full time. So every day, while I do lean on the tech meme editors to find and organize the most important stories of the day, it is all just me actually putting the show together. I read all the stories. I write the script. I record the show. I edit the show. And that's actually the

biggest time suck of the day. And I get that all done every single day, hopefully, by 5 p.m. So yeah, if you just wanted to say thanks for the hard work, if you get value out of this show every day, I would certainly thank you. But speaking of getting value, so I crunched the numbers like I did earlier this week. And each show is about 19 minutes long on average. So if you listen to me, faithfully every day, then you're spending 570 minutes with me every month, or nine and a half hours. Do you watch nine and a half hours of Netflix every single month? Do you listen to nine and a half hours of Spotify? Most times you do, I'm sure, but sometimes not. Well, $5 is less than what you pay to those guys, and I hope you get as much value out of this show or maybe even more. And I designed this show to be useful, right?

I hope this show keeps you informed, but I also designed it to be useful in a super efficient way. Like in and out, 15 to 20 minutes and you're caught up on what you missed. That's part of the value of the show, right? Sort of TLDR as a service so you can get on with your life. Well, crunch the numbers again. Each show has on average two and a half minutes of ads. So if you listen to every episode, every month, that's 75 minutes each month you're listening to ads. An hour and 15 minutes.

So if time is money, would it be worth $5 to save an hour and 15 minutes of your time every month? There are some other perks to the premium feed. I'll post the show there first every day. It's not like I'll delay the free version of the show any, but just functionally in my workflow. The way it'll work is I'll upload and compose the show first on the premium feed. Hit publish there and then upload and compose the show on the free feed second. So it won't be a super big deal, but you will be getting the show sooner if you subscribe to the premium feed. And we're going to add some other perks down the road, like a newsletter that collects the links to the long reads and maybe all the links from the whole week in one convenient email and a bunch of other stuff going forward to be announced.

And yes, some of the weekend bonus episodes will be on the premium subscriber feed only. Not all of them. And in fact, I'll start making exclusive episodes for subscribers very, very slowly. And I promise that there will always be some bonus episodes available on the free feed every month. But if you want to make sure you hear every single episode, you should consider becoming a subscriber. So, yeah, bottom line, this is us testing a hypothesis, and that hypothesis is that we're providing content so valuable that some of you might be willing to pay a little bit for that value. I would say the cliche thing about how you can spend more than $5 just going to get a latte at Starbucks. But seriously, if this show is a valuable part of your daily routine, do me a favor and at least give the subscription.

premium feed a try this month. You can always cancel it later, but if you find it streamlines the utility and entertainment that I try to serve up every day, even just a little bit, maybe you'll help support that effort. Again, link in the show notes to pay and subscribe with like three taps inside your podcast app itself. No need to write down an RSS feed and manually enter it. Your podcast app should auto-subscribe with a single tap from you. And if you listen on a desktop or outside of an app, the link is kimberlite.fm. ride home. Thank you to those of you that choose to show your support and run this experiment with us. If you do sign up, don't be shy about tweeting to me about it this weekend. Talk to you on Monday.