Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 01/02 - A Grand Unified Theory of the Google Civil War

Episode Date: January 2, 2020

Dell kicks off CES season with two new laptops, Imagination Technologies is back in Apple’s good graces, the IRS is finally sticking it to tax prep software firms, and a grand unified theory of the Google Civil War. Sponsors: WeWorkRemotely MintMobile.com/ride Links: Dell’s latest XPS 13 has a new design with a bigger display and Ice Lake chips (The Verge) Dell debuts 5G-ready Latitude 9510 laptop, adds iOS mirroring to PCs (VentureBeat) Apple restores Imagination GPU chip agreement after public dispute and employee poaching (9to5Mac) IRS Reforms Free File Program, Drops Agreement Not to Compete With TurboTax (ProPublica) I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left. (Ross LaJeunesse/Medium) Google veterans: The company has become ‘unrecognizable’ (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 Thursday, January 2nd, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Dell kicks off CES season with two new laptops.

Imagination Technologies is back in Apple's good graces. The IRS is finally sticking it to tax prep software firms and a grand unified theory of the Google Civil War. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Huh. What's that smell? Checking the calendar. Oh, yeah. It's the beginning of January, so that means CES is right around the corner.

I'll be there all next week, in fact. If any of you are going to be in Las Vegas next week, let me know, and maybe we'll put together a listener meetup on Wednesday night or something. Anyway, the timing would explain headlines like this. Dell Today debuted an updated XPS 13 laptop with Intel 10th-gen processors, Intel's Iris Plus graphics, a 16 by 10 screen ratio, and a larger touchpad, all available starting January 7th, starting at $999.99. Quoting the Verge,

Dell's XPX 13 has long been one of the best Windows laptops around, and at CES 2020, the company is updating it yet again with a bigger 13.4-inch display that also shifts to a 16 by 10 aspect ratio. By adding the taller display, Dell has also completely cut out the bottom bezel to make the new XPS 13 look better than ever, too. Despite the larger display, the new XPS 13 is actually 2% smaller overall than its predecessor. As part of the redesign, the 2020 model also has a larger keyboard, which now stretches across the entire device, and a larger trackpad. It's effectively all of the changes that Dell made with the XPS 13211 last year, but they're available on the non-211 model now.

Those changes may not sound too impressive, but compared to the old XPS 13 design, it's like night and day. The new models look smaller, sleeker, and better than the old model by a huge margin. The taller display is also a welcome trend that will hopefully start to crop up in future laptops, too, end quote. And Dell has also taken the wrapping off of a new latitude 9510 laptop with, and expect to hear a lot more of this in the coming months, built in 5G, quoting Venture Beat. Made from aluminum, Dell's new latitude 9510 includes a 15,000. point six inch 1080p screen, until UHD graphics, Wi-Fi 6 support, and an integrated fingerprint scanner, as well as what the company describes as built-in AI to manage battery life and improve application loading performance using machine learning.

One version of the 9510 will be a traditional clamshell design, while another will have a hinge that converts to a tablet form factor with active pen support. Some of the optional upgrades include a core I-7 class 10th generation Intel CPU. you, Comet Lake, a 1-terabyte SSD, and a smart card reader. If you forego the reader, the machine can include an 87-watt battery with promised 30 hours of battery life. But with the reader, it drops to a 52-watt cell with 17 promise hours of runtime. Using antennas integrated into its speakers of the latitude 95-10 promises to connect to sub-6 gigahertz 5G networks. But not the high-band millimeter wave towers deployed by top U.S.

As of now, Sprint operates a mid-band 5G network with 500 to 700 MbPS peak speeds in a handful of U.S. states, while T-Mobile and AT&T are offering slower, low-band 5G networks with 200 to 300 MbPS peak in some areas. Verizon is not yet offering sub-6 gigahertz 5G service. We'll have to see how much appeal Dell's approach has when the machine launches on March 26. Pricing has not yet been announced. Super good news for one Apple supplier today. Imagination Technologies says it has inked a new multi-year IP licensing agreement with Apple, replacing an old agreement, the lapsing of which almost killed imagination technologies dead, quoting 9 to 5 Mac.

Apple warned imagination in 2017 that it would stop relying on its graphics processing units used in iPhones and iPads within two years. Apple later delivered its first custom GPU as part of its A. 11 chip inside the iPhone 8 and iPhone 10 in 2018. Payments from Apple 2 imagination dramatically decreased after the shift. The arrangement before the two companies ending was also the source of much public drama. Imagination later filed a formal complaint against Apple over its deal ending, blaming Apple for its performance in an annual report. Apple described Imagination's characterizations as misleading,

while hiring Imagination employees to work for Apple's GPU team in the same. community. Imagination was forced to put itself up for sale after losing Apple's business. Canyon Bridge, a Silicon Valley-based firm reportedly funded by Chinese authorities later bought imagination, end quote. So why the about-face from Apple? It's kind of unclear at this point, but several outlets noted that Imagination recently announced their new IMG A-Series GPU platform, which it claims is the fastest GPU IP anywhere in the world. So might this be a long-term sign of how the much-rumored augmented reality Apple headset will shake out with Apple licensing imagination technology's IP at least in the near term.

From the I never expected this to ever actually happen file, apparently the IRS has amended its deal with tax preparation software firms so that no longer can those firms hide their free tax prep products from being easily found on their websites. If you'll recall, these companies have had to offer a free version of their product all along. It's just that, you know, they made them kind of impossible to find. Also, the IRS is taking the gloves off, now allowing itself to make its own online filing system for the very first time, quoting ProPublica. Under the nearly two-decade-old free-file deal, the industry agreed to make free versions of tax filing software available to lower and middle-income Americans. In exchange,

the IRS promised not to compete with the industry by creating its own online filing system. Many developed countries have such systems allowing most citizens to file their taxes for free. The prohibition on the IRS creating its own system was the focus of years of lobbying by Intuit. The industry has seen such a system as an existential threat. Now, with the changes to the deal, the prohibition has been dropped. Under the new rules, participating companies also have to standardize the naming convention of their free file version as IRS free file program delivered by, insert company name here. In the past, many tax filers reported being confused by the difference between, for example, TurboTax Free and TurboTax Free File. In a blog post on the Intuit website, the company said, quote,

Intuit strongly supports these changes to the free file program and associated free file offerings because they increase the focus on the taxpayer experience, end quote. Intuit faces multiple ongoing lawsuits and investigations into whether the company deceived customers. The company has said such accusations are baseless. End quote. Ross Lejeuness was a long time Google executive who rose to the position of global head of international relations. In a medium post this morning, La Junesse alleged that he was pushed out of Google in April after he lobbied for a human rights program to formalize Google's free speech and privacy principles. Now, I know we've been talking about the Civil War going on inside Google for a while now, but I highly encourage you to read the entire Medium Post linked in the show notes

because it lines up with a lot of the things that I've been hearing, and I think it allows us to finally make an educated guess as to what is actually going on behind the scenes at Google. First, I think this is important to understand for the reasons that LaGinesse outlines in his piece. In short, Google was a company that defined the culture of Silicon Valley in the 21st century. And it has changed. It is not the company it once was, seemingly, quote, I think the important question is, what does it mean when one of America's marquee companies changes so dramatically? Is it the inevitable outcome of a corporate culture that rewards growth and profits over social impact and responsibility? Is it in some way related to the corruption that has gripped our federal

government? Is this part of the global trend towards strong man leaders who are coming to power around the globe where questions of right and wrong are ignored in favor of self-interest and self-dealing. Finally, what are the implications for all of us when that once-great American company controls so much data about billions of users across the globe, end quote? So as you can see, there's a lot of threads tied up in all of this, but let's tick off some of the things that Lejeuness outlines. He says that when he started at Google, there were less than 10,000 Googlers, and today there are more than 100,000. which, okay, companies get big, they change, seldom for the better, these things happen.

There was actually also this CNBC piece making the rounds over the weekend that interviewed several ex-googlers who had similar sentiments. The piece had this little nugget in it, quote, bureaucracy was the reason for a former engineering director who left the company in August after seven years. This engineer, who asked to remain anonymous because he's not authorized to talk about his time there, said upper management began placing extra emphasis on headcount in recent years. Because of that, the company has become reluctant to eliminate weaker team members, which affected his and others' organizations, he said, end quote. And also, quote, when Larry Page became CEO in 2011, he became obsessed with reading

about why companies fail from being too big and sluggish. Claire Stapleton, a 12-year veteran said, quote, it's sort of sad that a lot of the things he was afraid of would happen. actually happened, end quote. So, all right, we've talked about that, too. In both pieces, both La Jinesse and other insiders discuss how the founders of Google checked out, quote, disengaged and left management in the hands of new senior executives is how La Jinesse puts it. And I've heard that from lots of Google Insiders as well. There was a power vacuum for many years at the company, which has been filled now, and the tenor and folks,

from the C-suite, from the people that filled that vacuum, is radically different than it was, say, in 2006. Again, perfectly fine. These things are probably inevitable when you're as successful and as big as Google. But also, as we've discussed many times, the rap on Google has always been that it was a one-trick pony. The greatest advertising money printing machine ever devised by humans for sure. But that also meant from very early days, Google has always been obsessed with trying to to find a second trick or a third to supplement the first. Thus the other bets, thus the moonshot programs, thus alphabet. And for the last few years, as we've discussed very recently, with this new executive regime, the seemingly obvious solution was cloud computing. As head of international

relations, La Junice outlines Google's confrontations and past history with China, tying it into the current desire to go back into business in that country and other cloud contracts and the like, the contours of which he was very involved in. Some will say that Google was always a bad corporate actor with less than transparent privacy practices, but there is a significant difference between serving ads based on a Google search and working with the Chinese government on artificial intelligence, or hosting the applications of the Saudi government, including Absure, an application that allows men to track and control the movement of their female family members.

Executives hell-bent on capturing cloud computing revenue from Microsoft, Oracle, and Amazon had little patience for those of us arguing for some form of principal debate before agreeing to host the applications and data of any client willing to pay, end quote. So I think our grand unifying theory of the Google Civil War can be this. As we've said, Google knows the ad machine has a natural limit, You can only stuff so many ads in there before the search engine itself starts to suffer. Arguably, they crossed that Rubicon long ago. And you can only invasively surveil people so much before people start to hate you.

Bottom line, you can really only squeeze blood from a stone for so long, if I really want to torture a metaphor here. But then when you add to that, Larry and Sergey have been transitioning off into the sunset for a while. A new generation is guiding the company now. The company is one of the behemes. of the world now. It's not cute little whimsical Google anymore and hasn't been for a long time. But that doesn't mean that everybody at Google got the memo. It's not just that there was a generation of Googlers, both older and younger, who heard the words, don't be evil and really drank the Kool-Aid, really believed that stuff. That's a big part of it, believe me. But if you want to

put this all together, I think what we have here is a company desperate to keep the growth going before the music stops. You have a company that can no longer tolerate pie in the sky corporate vision, a corporate leadership that doesn't care about that stuff anyway. It's all, at this point, make the cloud work or make AI work, or make big data work, or make something work, come hell or high water. And so now the old Google culture can no longer be tolerated inside Google. But you still have those true believers, and that is where the conflict is coming from. What is especially shocking, especially to the people inside Google that I've spoken to, especially the former Googlers, is to what degree management is coming down on all of this stuff? It's the aggressiveness of management that is making the Civil War inside of Google a hot one. I'm friendly with someone who works in the intersection of labor law and labor organizing, and when the news came out last month that Google had hired IRA consultants, a company that I had never heard of, but a company that is apparently known for its anti-union efforts, This person texted me out of the blue and said, essentially, some stuff is going to go down at Google, Brian.

You don't hire IRA unless you're looking to bash some heads. So let me leave you with this final quote from Lajuness's piece, which gives you a little bit of color about this sort of aggressiveness by management that I'm talking about. Lajnese also outlines in the piece what he saw as allegedly discriminatory and, shall we call it, messy, HR-related activities inside. of Google, quote, in each of these cases, I brought these issues to HR and senior executives and was assured the problems would be handled. Yet in each case, there was no follow-up to address the concerns until the day I was accidentally copied on an email from a senior HR director. In the email, the HR director told a colleague that I seemed to raise concerns like these a lot and instructed her to, quote, do some digging, end quote, on me instead.

Then, despite being rated and widely known as one of the best people managers in the company, despite 11 years of glowing performance reviews and near-perfect scores on Google's 360 performance evaluations, and despite being a member of the elite foundation program reserved for Google's, quote, most critical talent, who are, quote, key to Google's current and future success, I was told there was no longer a job for me as a result of a reorganization, despite 90 positions on the policy team being vacant at the time. When I hired counsel, Google assured me that there had been a misunderstanding, and I was offered a small role in exchange for my acquiescence and silence. But for me, the choice was as clear as the situation. I left. Standing up for women, for the LGBTQ community, for colleagues of color, and for human rights had cost me my career. To me, no additional evidence was needed that don't be evil was no longer a true reflection of the company's values. It was now nothing more than just another corporate marketing tool, end quote. Happy New Year, everybody. You know that old joke about still writing last year, last year.

date on your checks. Well, that's actually a serious concern for me vis-a-vis this podcast, because after saying 2019 at the top of the show, every show for maybe 250 or more episodes last year, I'm sure I'm more than likely to say 2019 at some point this month, especially today as I'm exhausted. I was up until 2 a.m. reading 7 Eaves by Neil Stevenson, could not put it down, was at a crucial pivot point in the plot, and I just kind of had to see what happened. So I got about four hours sleep. I've actually never been a New Year's resolution type of person, but I think I'm going to do that thing this year where I keep track of every single book I read in 2020. I'll do it on good reads, I guess. Been tracking most of the books I've been reading there for a while. Just

curious to see how many I get through in a year. I assume I approach 100, but how close I actually get to that number would be interesting to know. Anyway, rambling on long enough at this point. Talk to you tomorrow.