Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 09/24 - Office 2019 Is Here

Episode Date: September 24, 2018

Office 2019 is here, SiriusXM acquires Pandora, the Chrome browser login controversy, more missed revenue numbers in digital media and Eric Schmidt says there could someday be the regular internet and a separate, Chinese internet. Links: SiriusXM to buy Pandora in all-stock deal valued at $3.5 billion (CNBC) Why I’m done with Chrome (Matthew Green) Uber drivers and other gig economy workers are earning half what they did five years ago (Recode) Vox Media On Pace to Miss Revenue Target as Digital Advertising Disappoints (WSJ) Amazon: Retailers Gonna Retail (Steven Sinofsky) Former Google CEO predicts the internet will split in two — and one part will be led by China (CNBC) 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 TechMeme right home for Monday, September 24th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Office 2019 is here. Sirius XM acquires Pandora, the whole Chrome browser login controversy.

More missed revenue numbers in digital media. And Eric Schmidt says there could someday be a regular internet and a separate Chinese internet. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Microsoft's Ignite conference kicked off this morning in our local. Orlando, and a bunch of news has already been made. First up, Office 2019, the official successor to Office 2016, is available today for Windows and Mac. If you get it, you'll get some of the key features that Microsoft has been rolling out to Office 365 subscribers all along. And notice I said some.

If you want all the up-to-the-minute office features, Microsoft really, really wants you to be an Office 365 subscriber nowadays. this standalone version of Office won't get the sometimes monthly feature updates that subscribers get. It will only get security updates and fixes. And it should be noted. Office 2019 will only run on Windows 10, not Windows 7 or 8.1. Also, for many years now, there have been a whole slew of third-party virtual solutions that allow you to run Windows in a virtual machine. I actually have used parallels for the better part of a decade.

but until now Microsoft has basically stayed out of this particular ballgame. Well, no more. Microsoft has announced Windows Virtual Desktop, a new Azure-based service that provides a full virtual multi-user Windows 10 experience and Office 365 Pro Plus. Microsoft says that deploying Windows on any machine using Azure with Office will only take a few minutes to set up and will feature all the built-in security and compliance features of a natively running

Windows OS. And Microsoft also unveiled Microsoft Search, a unified smart search box for Windows, Office 365, the Edge browser, and basically everything Windows makes, using Bing as the background search, of course. Microsoft says it wants to put search wherever you are. No more popping out of your workflow to search for something. The search box will be, quote, in a consistent, prominent place across edge, Bing, Windows, and Office apps so that search is always one-click away, end quote. This will become available sometime in early 2019. Before the opening bell on the stock market this morning, satellite radio company Sirius XM announced it would be acquiring streaming radio company Pandora in a $3.5 billion all-stock deal. Sirius XM expects the deal to close in the first quarter of 2019.

Quoting from CNBC, acquiring Pandora would make Sirius XM the world's largest audio entertainment company with over $7 billion in combined revenue expected in 2018. The deal would bring together Sirius XM's 36 million subscribers in North America and Pandora's more than 70 million monthly active users. Pandora shares rose 8.3% to $9.85 a share in premarket trading, while Serious stock fell 5% to $6.63 a share. On Twitter, Peter Kafka tweeted that when Sirius XM invested $480 million in Pandora last year, they had, in essence, already done this deal in all but name. Parts of the terms of that deal were that Sirius couldn't buy more Pandora stock until 2019. When does this deal close again? Well, early 2019.

So this was basically a fait accompli. Kafka also noted, quote, giant satellite audio company buying giant internet audio company could be an antitrust problem, but this one seems to pass what economists call the Trump slash Murdoch test, end quote. Sean Griffey tweeted, quote, Sirius Exam buying Pandora for $3.5 billion. That's a lot of money for a music service I personally haven't seen a reason to use since getting a premium Spotify account.

Over the weekend, there was a bit of a kerfuffle in certain hacker news circles of the internet. over the news that, beginning with Chrome version 69 on the desktop, if you log in to a Google site or service, you are now automatically logged in to Chrome itself. This is now not optional. It's mandatory. Before, you always had the option of declining to log into Chrome, just using it as a sort of neutral web browser. So on the one hand, this was controversial because though Chrome is made by Google, it is based on an open source foundation. So by basically locking you into Google services, that sort of goes against the whole open source thing. But on the other hand, this is controversial because if you don't want your browsing habits and your activity logged on Google servers, well, I guess now basically you should think twice about using Chrome full stop. I've said many times on the show that Facebook has gotten all the headlines this year for privacy issues, but absolutely no one surveils everything you do in the aid of targeting adds to you more than Google does.

The days when they merely had an ad auction against keywords in search are long over. They recently made a change just like this to force login on Android phones, which rightfully got a lot of pushback at the time. Google is tracking you. They want to track you more. This is absolutely their business model these days, and they're getting away with it over and over again because there has been no, as yet, Cambridge Analytica-style thing that has caught the public's fury. Yes, staying away from Congressional. hearings on the subject of user privacy looks like a wise move from Google's perspective.

One of those leading the charge of online outrage at this latest move was cryptographer and Johns Hopkins professor Matthew Green. He followed up a weekend tweet storm with a post on his blog titled Why I'm Done with Chrome. Let me quote from this piece fairly extensively beginning with, this change has enormous implications for user privacy and trust and Google seems unable to grapple with this. The change makes a hash out of Google's own privacy policies for Chrome. Google needs to stop treating customers trust like it's a renewable resource because they're screwing up badly, end quote. Now, the Chrome team has been claiming over the weekend that merely being logged into Chrome will not activate the so-called sync feature that automatically sends your browsing data to

Google. But as Green points out, with a lot of screenshots and detailed descriptions, quote, In short, Google has transformed the question of consenting to data upload from something affirmative that I actually had to put effort into, entering my Google credentials and signing into Chrome, into something I can now do with a single accidental click. This is a dark pattern. For all we know, the new approach has privacy implications, even if sync is off. The Chrome developers claim that with sync off, a Chrome has no privacy implications. This might be true. but when pressed on the actual details, nobody seems quite sure, end quote. Green then goes on to note that Chrome's privacy policy is relatively straightforward on this.

When you're using the so-called basic browsing mode, in quotes, your data is only stored locally on your computer, but in signed-in mode, your data gets sent to Google servers. Again, quoting Green, the problem is that you no longer get to decide which mode you're in. This makes a mockery out of whatever intentions the original drafters of the privacy policy had, end quote. Green concludes by saying this along the lines of what I was saying earlier. Where Facebook will routinely change privacy settings and apologize later, Google has upheld clear privacy policies that it doesn't routinely change. Sure, when it collects, it collects gobs of data. But in the cases where Google explicitly makes user security and privacy promises, it tends to keep it.

them. This seems to be changing. Google's reputation is hard-earned and it can be easily lost. Changes like this burn a lot of trust with users. If the change is solving an absolutely critical problem for users, then maybe a loss of trust is worth it. I wish Google could convince me that was the case, end quote. Roku today launched some new hardware, a $40 Roku Premiere Premiere and a $50 Roku Premiere Plus. Both streaming boxes come with 4K HDR streaming and

a remote with voice search for the Premiere Plus. These will be coming in October, but you can pre-order them today. Roku has always been about low-cost streaming hardware, but man, $40 for 4K streaming is very aggressive.

But wait, there's more because if you've got a Google Home speaker, you can launch specific apps, control playback, like pause, fast forward, whatever, and search for content by talking to a nearby Google Home Speaker or even the Google Assistant on your mobile phone. But if you're an echo household, Roku was mum today about whether or not it would ever someday support Alexa. A couple quick check-ins on long-time narratives here.

For years, there has been a push and pool about the so-called gig economy, big players like Uber, Lyft and Postmates claim that they are a great new economy that lets people earn good money on their own schedule. But a lot of research has claimed that when you actually crunch the numbers, the pay for the actual gig economy workers ain't so great. Many studies actually have made the claim that it turns out to barely be minimum wage when you account for all expenses. Well, J.P. Morgan took a look at Chase checking accounts from actual gig workers. and if the pay actually wasn't that great to begin with, that it's apparently not getting any better.

In fact, it's getting a lot worse. On average, drivers who transported either people or things through apps, thus Uber and Lyft drivers, Uber Eats and Postmates drivers, made 53% less in 2017 than they did in 2013. And that was happening even as gig work has actually exploded in popularity. People who participated in gig work through an app at any point over the course of a year, rose from less than 2% in 2013 to nearly 5% in 2018. That would work out to about the same amount of people that work in the public administration sector.

But, quote, the average monthly payments to those who worked for a transportation app in a given month declined to $783 from $1,469. Meanwhile, people working for leasing apps, so things like Airbnb, Toro, Parkley, and other apps that let you rent assets like your home, car, or parking space, those people saw income from these platforms rise 69% to $1,736 on average, end quote. So in the gig economy, as in the real world, owners of capital assets are the big winners, laborers not so much, paging Carl Marx.

And it seems like every time we check in with the digital media space, there's news of layoffs, seemingly every single day. There have been rumors of Mike recently, possibly being in danger of running out of money. BuzzFeed, of course, famously missed revenue targets this year. And now sources tell the Wall Street Journal that Vox Media, owner of sites like Vox, The Verge, and SB Nation, will struggle to achieve the double-digit percentage revenue growth that it targeted this year, likely missing its stated goal of $200 million in revenue by as much as 15%. Joshua Benton tweeted about this news, saying the digital advertising carnage is moving up

market from the mics and mashables now to Vox Media. Digital advertising as a way to pay for expensive non-vertical, non-premium content is a dying, dying business, end quote. And Ben Malin tweeted, double-digit revenue growth would be the envy of most media companies. But VCs and strategic investors are expected. digital media firms to grow by at least 25% annually. It's really, really tough out there, end quote. And as the great Rafat Ali noted, the problem is that Vox raised $300 million at a $1 billion valuation. Quote, venture capital at high valuations in other sectors may be a scaling strategy.

In media right now, it's the Kiss of Judas with few exits available. V.C. money isn't evil. What is? High valuations for media. Finally, I also wanted to follow up on something from last week and flag something else that generated a lot of chatter over the weekend. First, remember how Steven Sinovsky reigned on my parade last week by arguing that Amazon's vaunted new advertising push was really nothing new. It was just getting brands to pay for better placement in the store, which is something merchants have done for time and memoriam. Well, Stephen has a lengthy blog post up outlining his argument, and it's pretty convincing. He has a long history of how retail has evolved over the decades and over the shifts in technology,

and how Amazon is simply rediscovering time-honored tricks of retailing itself. Quote, every generation has generally brought innovation or disruption to some bundling of the core elements of retail, even if from afar they look the same. Stories then written about how a new model or form factor, will come to dominate and end all others, a funny thing happens as the new model begins to show age the old lessons slash approaches of retail take over. What we're seeing in Amazon is innovation for sure, but it is on a trajectory that retail has seemingly followed every generation, end quote. So, Stephen, I do take your point. Amazon's current, in quotes,

advertising push is just spiffs. It's just getting brands to fork over more for better placement. But I do also think Amazon has woken up to the fact that it is sitting on more data on consumer spending than any merchant ever has in history. And it realizes that it can leverage that in a way that can actually offer a competitive advantage against the advertising duopoly of Facebook and Google. And so that's why, you know, hmm, free Amazon video streaming supported by ads, maybe free NFL games streamed on Prime Video. And then each ad tailored to the individual viewer based on their buying history, we might not be there yet, but I think we can see that that's coming and it could be pretty, pretty interesting. And second, Eric Schmidt spoke at a private event hosted by Village Global VC last week. And the comments that he made, which raised a lot of eyebrows, came when economist Tyler Cohen asked Schmidt about the possibility of the Internet someday fragmenting. Schmidt said, and I quote,

I think the most likely scenario now is not splintering, but rather a bifurcation into a Chinese-led Internet and a non-Chinese Internet led by America. If you think of China as like, oh, yeah, they're good with the Internet. You're missing the point. Globalization means that they get to play too. I think you're going to see fantastic leadership in products and services from China. There's a real danger that, along with those products and services,

comes a different leadership regime from government with censorship controls, etc., end quote. So, hmm, a Chinese internet alongside the existing internet, maybe it makes you think that that's so-called Project Dragonfly, that's so controversial inside Google, that plan to make a search product just for China, which plays ball with Chinese censorship policies, kind of makes you think that that's more real than Google wants to fess up to at this point. if there is going to be two internets, I guess Google thinks it can't afford to sit one of them out.

So if you follow me on Twitter, it's at Brian MCC, by the way, you might have seen this story. Casey Lau was in New York City for the first time, I think he said, in a decade. So I reached out to him so we could meet up, so I could meet him for the first time, and we could grab a quick drink. He graciously agreed. I picked his brain for about 45 minutes about Hong Kong. and China and the Asian startup scene in general. And then I got a text that I needed to rush home to take care of the kids. So I up and left and forgot to pay for my drink.

Casey was very gracious about it, of course, but I'm still completely embarrassed. So as partial recompense to Casey, I want to tell you about the excellent tech conference Casey is involved with called Rise, which takes place in Hong Kong in July 2019. It's one of the largest, maybe these. largest tech conference in Asia. If you're like me and you want to get more plugged into the tech scene that is taking over the world, check out the rise conference, risecomf.com. Sorry again, Casey, but next time you're in New York, believe me, drinks are on me.