Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 11/18 - Google Stadia and the Mustang Mach-E

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 Monday, November 18th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. The Mustang Mach-E wants to out Tesla Tesla. John Leger is stepping down from T-Mobile. Dot org domain names might be getting a lot more expensive soon, and the reviews on Google Stadia are decidedly mixed, but at least it works.

Starting point is 00:00:54 Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Ford is taking a run at Tesla and taking a run at attempting to create the first truly mass market electric vehicle in the U.S. Last night in L.A., the company unveiled the Mustang Mock E, an electric SUV with up to 300 miles of range. The Mock E has a starting sticker price of $43,895, and it's coming in late 2020, quoting The Verge. Unlike a lot of the electric competition from automakers like Audi, Mercedes-Benz, or Jaguar,

Starting point is 00:01:33 the Mustang Mock-E will be offered in a slew of variants and trims. to an almost dizzying degree. Ford will sell versions of the five-seater SUV that can travel 210 miles on a full battery, and also ones that go to 300 miles. One of the Mustang Mach-E options will beat most sports cars from zero to 60 miles per hour, while others will just barely edge out a Chevy bolt. Some ship in late 2020 and some in spring 2021. None are exactly cheap. The most Affordable One starts at $43,895, which is a few thousand dollars more than the current average selling price of a vehicle in the U.S. But buyers of Ford's electric and hybrid vehicles are still eligible for the full $7,500 federal tax credit, something Ford was quick to point

Starting point is 00:02:19 out Sunday night. Depending on the state people live in, government incentives could help reduce the ultimate cost by around $10,000 in the U.S. For people who can afford it, there's a lot on offer. For those who can't, Ford hopes the Mustang Mach-E is something to aspire to as the company rolls out more electric vehicles in the coming years, end quote. Indeed, as I think I recently mentioned, this is all part of Ford's multi-year, $11 billion pivot to electric vehicles. Obviously, by leveraging the legendary Mustang brand with this first foray, Ford is looking to make a statement, and by offering five different versions eventually, Ford hopes there is a little something for everybody. Some details and bells and whistles about the car and its design.

Starting point is 00:03:05 There is 29 cubic feet of storage in the back trunk, but also 4.8 cubic feet of storage in the front trunk that literally doubles as a cooler. Since EVs don't need as much direct air cooling, the Mustang Maki doesn't have a grill so much as it has a nose. The interior dash is mostly touchscreen and digital, including a 15 and a half inch vertical touchscreen display. Obviously, journalists only got to gawk at the model on the stage and take pictures, but here was Sean O'Kane's take in the verge. Comparisons to Tesla are hard to avoid when it comes to electric cars, and the Mustang Machi is no exception. It's hard not to immediately size Ford's EV up against the forthcoming Model Y, which has similar specs and will be released on a similar schedule. I also couldn't help but spend part of the night thinking about how Ford revealed the Mustang Machi at the same municipal airport hangars where Tesla unveiled the

Starting point is 00:03:57 the semi and second-generation roadster just two years and one day before, and how we were right next to SpaceX headquarters, where Elon Musk will unveil Tesla's cyber truck pickup truck in just a few days. By the way, shortly after the event ended, Musk tweeted, quote, congratulations to Ford for the new electric Mustang SUV. Sustainable slash electric cars are the future. Excited to see this announcement from Ford as it will encourage other carmakers to go electric two, he wrote. But no matter what, Ford's Mustang Mock-E winds up being benchmarked. against or what fights people want to pick about its looks or name, I'm very glad this is the direction the company went as opposed to a slightly better electric focus. That were already knee-deep

Starting point is 00:04:38 in these conversations and arguments feels like progress of a sort as opposed to a few years ago when getting people to talk about electric cars, let alone feel something about them, felt like pulling teeth or just plain impossible, end quote. I mentioned British self-driving startup Wave recently, which came out of stealth with a new methodology for training autonomous vehicles using reinforcement learning, simulation, and computer vision, and which maintains that sensors like LiDAR are ultimately unnecessary. Well, today, Wave announced a $20 million series A round, to prove that out, led by Eclipse ventures and with participation by Uber's chief scientist and the UC Berkeley robotics professor who pioneered deep reinforcement learning.

Starting point is 00:05:27 Just a reminder about what makes Wave different from Venture Beat, quote, Founded out of Cambridge in 2017, Waves' core premise is that the big breakthrough in self-driving cars will come from better AI brains rather than more sensors or hand-coded rules. The company said that it trains its autonomous driving system using simulated environments and then transfers that knowledge into the real world where it emulates how humans adapt to conditions in real time. Waves systems learned from each safety driver intervention to understand why the driver had to intervene, bypassing HD maps, LIDAR, and other sensors that have become synonymous with the burgeoning autonomous vehicle movement. It is worth noting here that Waves' machine learning algorithms can work in tandem with any hardware or sensors, if that is how an automaker wants to use them. But Waves' central pitch is that autonomous cars should be able to learn new environments just like humans do. end quote. One of the most colorful executives in all of tech is leaving his post. John Leger

Starting point is 00:06:35 is stepping down as T-Mobile CEO on May 1st, 2020, with T-Mobile president and C-O-O Mike Sievert to succeed him. Liger's next move is not known, and it is also unknown what will happen to Liger's extensive wardrobe of magenta-colored clothing, quoting CNBC. CNBC in the Wall Street Journal reported last week, WeWork has spoken to LeGere about taking over as CEO following Adam Newman's ouster. But CNBC later reported that Legerer is not taking the job, according to people familiar with the matter. On a conference call Monday, Legerer denied he was ever in talks to be the WeWork CEO.

Starting point is 00:07:14 Leger was named T-Mobile CEO in 2012 and made a number of aggressive moves to grow the company's wireless subscribers as it faced steep competition from its larger rivals, AT&T, and Verizon. As other carriers pushed customers to sign up for wireless plans with data caps, Lagerre created unlimited wireless plans for T-Mobile and offered to pay termination fees for customers who switched over. Eventually, the rest of the industry followed suit and offered unlimited plans as well. LeGere was also responsible for bringing the iPhone to T-Mobile for the first time, and he went through multiple merger talks with Sprint over the years before finally locking the deal down in April 2018.

Starting point is 00:07:49 The company expects to complete the merger next year, end quote. A quick follow-up to a story from last week, H.P.'s board of directors has unanimously rejected Xerox's nearly $33 billion cash and stock offer to acquire HP. Quoting CNBC, Xerox had offered H.P. $22 per share in its takeover bid for the company. The bid consisted of 77% cash and 23% stock or $17 in cash and 0.137 Xerox shares for each HP share. Quote, in reaching this determination, the board also considered the highly conditional and uncertain nature of the proposal, including the potential impact of outsized debt levels on the combined company stock. The board wrote in a letter to John Vistian, Xerox's CEO, quote, we note the decline of Xerox's revenue from $10.2 billion to

Starting point is 00:08:43 $9.2 billion on a trailing 12-month basis since June 2018, which raises significant questions for us regarding the trajectory of your business and future prospects, the board wrote, end quote. This sucks. There's no other way to put it. A private equity company has acquired the public industry registry, the top-level domain operator responsible for the dot-org domain names. The seller was the supposedly non-profit internet society and the buyer was ethos capital, quoting the verge. This move will make the public industry registry, previously a nonprofit domain registry, officially part of a for-profit company, which certainly seems at odds with what dot org might represent to some. Originally, dot org was

Starting point is 00:09:34 an alternative to the dot com that was earmarked for commercial entities which lent itself to non-profit use. That's not all. On June 30th, Ican, the nonprofit that oversees all domain names on the internet, agreed to remove price caps on rates for dot org domain names, which were previously pretty cheap. Seems like something a for-profit company might want. Removing price caps wasn't exactly a popular idea when it first was proposed on March 18th. According to review signal, only six of the more than 3,000 public comments on the proposal were in favor of the change. In an open letter published on May 1st, just days after the comment period had closed, PIR said that it had, quote, no specific plans for any price increases for dot org. But that was then,

Starting point is 00:10:18 and if the rates for dot org domains do go up in the future, it could affect non-profits and institutions that rely on low domain name fees to maintain their websites, end quote. By the way, in case you didn't know, dot info and dot biz domain names had their price caps removed this year as well. As at Network Demonic tweeted, quote, yet another once public chunk of the internet is sold off to a commercial investment fund, end quote. This is eminently logical. dance, the owner of TikTok, is apparently in talks with record companies to launch a music streaming

Starting point is 00:10:57 service as early as next month. The plans are apparently to launch the service first in Brazil, India, and Indonesia, quoting the Financial Times. Bight dances and talks with the world's largest record companies, Universal Music, Sony Music, and Warner Music for global licensing deals to include their songs on its new music subscription service, according to people familiar with the matter. Music executives are keen to make money from TikTok, which is free to use. They view a new bite dance app as a welcome addition to the music streaming market, where a number of companies, including Apple, Spotify, and Amazon offer a similar catalog of songs.

Starting point is 00:11:31 In addition to on-demand music, the planned bite dance streaming app would include a library of short video clips that listeners could search through and sync to songs as they listen, according to music executives who receive demos of the service. Users could send these clips to their friends as the app aims to encourage sharing and virality and is designed for mobile phones with vertical sized videos, end quote. No word on pricing, though the speculation is that BytDance would probably want to come in under the $10 a month that Spotify and others charge. Finally today, an FYI that Google Stadia is launching tomorrow as a bit of surprise, the gaming streaming service. have 10 more games at launch than originally announced, or as Kataku headlined it, Google Panics adds 10 more games to Stadia's launch lineup.

Starting point is 00:12:30 Yes, as we've discussed, people were preparing to be underwhelmed by the initial service, what with originally only 12 games available, now 22, and a whole bunch of promised features not available, at least for a while. Sean Hollister has a first impressions review up, and his bottom line is, Yes, Stadia works. It's a minimum viable product. But, quote, there's no reason anyone should buy into Stadia right now. Google has made sure of that partly by under-delivering at launch and partly with a pricing scheme that sees you paying three times for hardware, for the service, for games, just to be an early adopter. But the nice thing is that no one's forcing you to either. Early adopters know who they are and they'll hopefully be subsidizing a better experience for the rest of us, while helping Google work out the kinks. The technology works reasonably well, and Google's gadgets can all be automatically updated over the air, end quote. He gives it a five out of ten rating and advice. Patrick Kleppek echoed Sean by saying, quote, I've spent the last week trying to judge Stadia

Starting point is 00:13:38 without worrying so much about what it doesn't have. Achievements, iOS support, family sharing, hell, more games. Those are all eminently solvable problems. Those will, in all all likelihood get fixed soon. But it doesn't go to the heart of what Stadia is trying to accomplish and what's increasingly becoming a race between a number of different companies betting the farm on being able to stream games. Again, Stadia's pitch is simple. Touch a button and start playing games on just about any device in your house. Judged on that, Stadia is a success. It's not perfect, but as a parent who values efficiency and convenience in a way I didn't use to, it was convincing enough. Should you sign up for Stadia today? No. Does it work? It does. It works, end quote.

Starting point is 00:14:25 And EroGamer called it the best game streaming yet, but far from ready. Quote, as a technological statement, Stadia impresses with the best image quality and latency I've seen from a streaming platform, but there's definitely scope for improvement from a stability perspective. And I'm not sure the question of what happens when someone else taps into your bandwidth has been adequately resolved. Audio stutter and wobbly connection and even a 200 MbPS hookup had very occasional slowdown. Games can't buffer to iron out these issues in the way that movies and TV can. There's the sense that many of the challenges in streaming games have been improved massively since the on-live days, but bandwidth is still very much a precious commodity for most users and Stadia

Starting point is 00:15:11 at its best requires 20 gigabytes of the stuff for an hour of play at its highest quality level. Perhaps more pressing is the value proposition. Netflix works because the subscription model is easy to understand. You pay extra for more screens and UHD, but that's it. Stadia is the same in terms of demanding a premium for UHD, even if key titles don't seem to be rendering at 4K, except that you're still paying top-end prices for your games on top of that.

Starting point is 00:15:42 Combined with the feeling that the platform and the ecosystem is still some way off completion, and I do feel that it's perhaps too early for Stadia to be rolling out as a full service, especially when games are limited and the all-important platform exclusives are very thin on the ground, end quote. That is all for today. As always, you can follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. The show subreddit is our slash right home, and actually we're a handful of folks away from hitting a thousand subscribers. there, so hit that up if you never have. And if you want to support the work that I do every day

Starting point is 00:16:19 directly, the bottom link in the show notes will allow you to subscribe to the ad-free feed right there in your podcast app. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 11/18 - Google Stadia and the Mustang Mach-E

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