Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 03/19 - This Is The Microsoft Teams Moment

Episode Date: March 19, 2020

Square wants to become a bank. Microsoft Teams might be rocketing ahead of Slack in terms of user numbers. The EU wants streaming companies to cut back on HD streams. Covid might be depressing music streaming, and some analysis of the iPad becoming a regular old computer. Sponsors: TinyCapital.com Blinkist.com/techmeme Links: Square gains FDIC conditional approval for a banking license (Silicon Angle) Microsoft Teams passes 44 million daily active users, thanks in part to coronavirus (VentureBeat) What worries Mark Zuckerberg (The Interface) EU warns of broadband strain as millions work from home (Financial Times) Improved iPhone, AirPods availability suggests Chinese production nearing normality (Apple Insider) Music streaming may actually be falling because of coronavirus (QZ) Apple's iPad Pro becomes more like a Surface, and that's a problem for Microsoft (Windows Central) Steven Sinofsky tweet thread about the iPad 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, March 19th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Square wants to become a bank. Microsoft Teams might be rocketing ahead of Slack in terms of user numbers. The EU wants streaming companies to cut back on HD streams. COVID might be depressing streaming music. And some analysis of the iPad becoming a regular old computer. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. We spoke some months ago about every company becoming a fintech company soon, but also about fintech companies becoming traditional banks. Well, Square says it has received conditional FDIC approval to operate a bank, which will be

known as Square Financial Services, and which will provide small business loans as soon as it launches in 2021, quoting Silicon Angle. Square was granted an industrial loan company license, a form of de novo banking license that the FDIC provides to newly chartered banks that are bound by supervision standards. In addition to gaining conditional approval from the FDIC, Square has also received charter approval from the Utah Department of Financial Institutions. Square Financial Services is headquartered in Salt Lake City. The FDIC approval gives Square FDIC insurance, meaning that depositor funds are insured up to $250,000. It's a safeguard for depositors in knowing that if something goes wrong with a given bank, their funds are covered up to the $250,000 limit.

Nonetheless, the move may prove controversial. Reuters reported that the decision is likely to attract criticism from consumer advocates, bank officials, and democratic lawmakers who claim that the special license is a loophole which poses risks to the banking system and consumers, end quote. Microsoft says its team's product, its Slack competitor, has passed 44 million daily active users. That is up from just 32 million DOWs earlier this month, and a huge jump from the 20 million Dow's that Microsoft announced just this past October. Work from home, anyone? Just anecdotally, I've seen it happen in real time. So many people I'm aware of have indicated that they're

living in teams now, much in the same way that some of us have been living in Slack for years. In fact, my wife's architecture office, when they began working remotely, there was basically no about it. They'd never been on any remote team system before, and they just went with teams without even thinking twice. Maybe nobody ever got fired for going with Microsoft is the new version of that old saw nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. Microsoft is also pre-announcing new features for teams coming soon, including real-time noise suppression, which would be useful if you're working from home, and there are noisy kids in the background. Quoting Venture Beat, Teams is the company's Office 365 chat-based collaboration tool that competes with Slack,

12 million Dow's as of October, and Microsoft's workplace, 3 million paid users as of October, as well as Google's Hangouts chat, no user number shared. It's also Microsoft's fastest growing business app ever, but the company has been criticized for how it calculates its Dow figure, so today it shared its methodology. We define daily active usage as the maximum daily users performing an intentional action in a 24-hour period across the desktop client, mobile client, and web client. Intentional actions include sending or replying to a chat, joining a meeting, or opening a file in teams. Passive actions, like auto boot, minimizing a screen, or closing

the app, are not included, end quote. In an advanced press briefing, Microsoft originally shared the 32 million figure. We naturally asked how the COVID-19 pandemic might have impacted the number, given that companies are increasingly asking their employees to work from home, and Microsoft Teams experienced an outage as a result of the increased usage. Quote, our customers have certainly turned to teams during this challenging time, and we've seen usage spikes in markets most impacted by COVID-19. Jared Spataro, Microsoft 365 Corporate Vice President told Venture Beat, we measured 32 million Dow's on March 11th,

before we began to see the full impact that COVID-19 is having on usage, end quote. And then late last night, Spataro sent over an update, quote, The last seven days, however, have shown the sheer unprecedented nature of the global demand we're seeing now for solutions that enable remote work and learning across chat, video, and file collaboration, which Teams, of course, provides in a single platform. As previously shared, as of March 11, 2020, we counted 32 million daily users of teams, which was mostly in line with our growth trajectory and projections.

As of March 18th, that number has grown by 12 million to 44 million daily users around the world, end quote. Put another way, COVID-19 added one Slack to Microsoft Teams' daily active users in just a week, end quote. Facebook says it's rolling out a COVID-19 information center to be placed atop all user's feeds in order to help surface news and resources around the crisis. Also, CEO Mark Zuckerberg says Facebook is using Facebook. full-time staff now to help with content moderation, which is usually done by contractors, because Facebook knows it can't provide mental health support to those contractors if they've been forced to work remotely because of COVID-19. Quoting from Casey Newton's Interface Newsletter, Zuckerberg noted that one reason Facebook is

shifting to use full-time employees for moderation is that working on disturbing content such as posts dealing with self-harm or suicide threats take a significant mental health toll on the workers. outside their offices, Zuckerberg said, Facebook couldn't provide them with the mental health service programs. They are normally able to get through Accenture and the other vendors Facebook hires to run the programs. And that's when Zuckerberg shared what he described as one of his chief concerns during this time. Quote, I'm personally quite worried that the isolation from people being at home could potentially lead to more depression or mental health issues, and we want to make sure that we are ahead of that in supporting our community.

having more people during this time work on things that are on suicide and self-injury prevention, not less, end quote. So as I try to do, credit when do, kudos for that awareness, Facebook. According to the Financial Times, the EU is calling on streaming services like Netflix and YouTube to limit broadband use by offering programs only in standard rather than high definition. quote, until now, telecoms companies have been bullish that internet infrastructure can withstand the drastic change in online behavior brought about by the coronavirus outbreak. But on Wednesday evening, Tieri Breton, one of the European commissioners in charge of digital policy, said streaming platforms and telecoms companies had a, quote, joint responsibility to take steps to ensure the smooth functioning of the internet during the crisis. There are worries that domestic broadband connections, which were designed to cope only with evening surges in traffic may not be able to handle long days of adults engaging in video conferencing and children taking online classes or logging on to play games or watch movies. Even big technology groups have recognized that they are struggling with the shifts in

traffic. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive told reporters on Wednesday that the social media company was experiencing surges in the use of certain services, including a doubling in the use of calls over its WhatsApp and messenger apps. Usage is on a sustained basis. Usage is on a sustained basis. is well beyond its annual spike at New Year's, he said, adding that managing this was a challenge. He added, quote, we need to make sure we are on top of this from an infrastructure perspective, end quote. EU net neutrality laws forbid throttling of any entertainment services such as Netflix or the game's site Twitch, but a number of telecoms executives from across the continent said there was room

for cooperation to safeguard the system, end quote. Gene Munster says that improved availability times for shipments of iPhones and AirPods suggests that China might largely have returned to normal production after the COVID-19 shutdown, quoting Apple Insider. Specifically, iPhone availability is now in an average of two days, down from a peak of 6.7 days recorded on March 4th. Likewise, AirPods ship times are down to an average of 7.4 days compared to 10.6 days on March 4th. While Munster is unable to definitively link the improvements to increase supply,

he believes the lower lead times are in large part attributed to a restart to Chinese production. Softening demand likely accounts for a minority of the uptick in stock, the analyst says. Quote, in the case of the supply of Apple products over the past month, the key variable was the closure of manufacturing and assembly in China, Munster writes. In the days following Apple's announcement that the March quarter would be below expectations on February 17th, we saw lead times extend. In the day's following reports of the restart of manufacturing in China, we've seen lead times improve, end quote. Remember when I told you the other day that I can already see download numbers being off around 15% for this podcast? That makes

sense, of course. This show is very routine dependent, since you've all been so kind as to make it a part of your daily lives, especially your daily commutes. And now that routines are off and commutes are canceled, it's logical that listening patterns would be off as well. But further proof if you needed it that we're not alone in this, Quartz is reporting that music streaming might be falling as well. No commutes, no trips to the gym, not as much need for that power through playlist, I guess. Quote, in Italy, one of the country's hardest hit by coronavirus, the top 200 most stream songs on Spotify within the country, averaged 18.3 million total streams per day in February. Since Italy's Prime Minister announced a national quarantine on March 9th,

the total streams for the 200 most popular songs have not topped 14.4 million. There was a 23% drop in the top 200 streams on Tuesday, March 17th, compared to Tuesday, March 3rd. The trend is similar in the U.S. On March 17th, total Spotify streams of the top 200 songs fell to 77 million streams. This was the lowest number of top 200 streams in the U.S. for any Tuesday in 2020. and about 14 million streams fewer than just a week before. Total top 200 streams are also down in the UK, France, and Spain. The decline in streaming of popular songs may seem counterintuitive. It seems logical that people stuck at home would be likely to put on music to keep them company,

but that's not how people tend to listen. The most popular days for streaming are Friday and Saturday when people are most likely to go out. It appears listeners are more likely to stream songs when life is more normal, and they are looking to have some fun, end quote. Finally today, there's been all sorts of reverberations and think pieces about Apple's iPad announcement yesterday. Again, I framed it as, and I think I did this rightly, the iPad finally taking its self-imposed shackles off and making significant steps to just being a laptop replacement, a regular computer. Among other things, Apple has also confirmed that it will update its iWork suite of apps,

to add trackpad and mouse support, and it will bring iCloud folder sharing to iPadOS13.4. Lots of people are rightfully taking note of what is clearly a culmination of a years-long strategic shift on Apple's part vis-a-vis the iPad. Daniel Rubino at Windows Central says that while Windows 10 might be a more serious OS built for real work, Apple's belated embrace of a two-in-one form factor with the new magic keyboard might finally threaten the surfaces one, true differentiating trump card. Quote,

Will Magic keyboard be as good as the Surface Pro's type cover? It's unlikely. Microsoft's keyboard has angled typing, and Surface Pro's built-in kickstand and hinge still set the bar. But that doesn't matter as much as Apple's is likely good enough. And yes, it's backlit and even works with the latest Gen iPad Pro too. Putting aside how wrong Apple was about the two-and-one form factor, which it is now ironically fully embracing,

this move by Apple is likely to harm sales of the Surface Pro line. Apple's iPad has long bucked the trend of the failing tablet market because it has the best hardware and an OS that people relish, end quote. And the great Steven Sinovsky had a long Twitter thread saying that trackpad support for iPads is not Apple's capitulation so much as it's a part of a convergent evolution of PC hardware and software that has been going on for years. years. I'm going to quote quite liberally from this, link, of course, in the show notes.

Hardware evolves just like software, but we don't often see it the same way. We're used to talking about the cycle of software bundling and unbundling, but hardware does the same thing. Every new generation of hardware begins this cycle anew. Certainly, we're used to hardware adding ports or absorbing new technologies over time. Where things get really interesting with hardware is when a new form is introduced. Often the first step is just, jettisoning many features from the leader. With the introduction of a form, the debate immediately begins over whether the new form can take over, or whether it is a substitute for the old one. Tech dialogue is rather divisive over these questions. It can never work, or it will eventually

work. The first one of these transitions I remember is the introduction of portable computers. Out of the gate, these were way less powerful than PCs. The debate over whether a portable can replace APC was in full force. The evolution of new forms almost always follows the surprising pattern of adding back all of those things from the old form factor. So all those portables added more floppies, hard disks, then expansion through ports and docks, and then ultimately CPUs as powerful as the desktop. Then we woke up one day and looked at the new form factor and realized it seemed to have morphed into the old form, capabilities and all. All along the way, form is editing, innovating, and reimagining how those old things should be expressed in the new one.

These innovations can change software or hardware. But this is where hardware devices like USB come from. The needs of the new form dictate new types of hardware, even if it solves the same problems again. So here we are today with an iPad that has a trackpad. Many are chuckling at the capitulation that the iPad was never a real computer and finally Apple admitted it. laptop people are saying Apple has invented the laptop this was always going to happen from the earliest days there were keyboard cases that turned iPads into laptops without track pads and these could be thought of as experiments copying the past it took time to do this too much perhaps to invent the expression of the old and the new but it's the same in the PC server market the PC server everyone uses in the cloud today is no mainframe it is vastly cheaper more accessible more scalable, runs different software. Yes, people will fight me on these in some way, but the pedantic argument isn't the point. Adding a trackpad to iPad was done in a way that reimagined, not just the idea of a pointer,

but the entire package, hardware and software. That's what makes this interesting. To think of it as a capitulation would be to do so independent of how computing has evolved over decades, end quote. Nothing really for you today. just again be well be excellent to yourselves and each other talk to you tomorrow