Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 04/02 - Zoom Apologizes And Wow's On DAUs

Episode Date: April 2, 2020

Zoom apologizes, but also reveals some INSANE growth numbers. Facebook Messenger comes to desktop. YouTube wants to clone TikTok. Apple let’s some people avoid the App Store tax. More gross firings by teleconference and a timely interesting raise. Sponsors: TinyCapital.com No Parking Podcast Links: A Message to Our Users (Zoom Blog) Facebook debuts standalone Messenger app on Mac and PC (Engadget) 'Content network effect' makes TikTok tough to copy (TechCrunch) YouTube Plans ‘Shorts’ to Rival TikTok (The Information) Apple Lets Some Video Apps Sell Shows Without Taking 30% Cut (Bloomberg) 'It Felt Like a Black Mirror Episode' The Inside Account of How Bird Laid off 406 People in Two Minutes via a Zoom Webinar (dot.LA) Notion, Maker of Collaboration Software, Raises $50 Million (NYTimes) 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 ride home for Thursday, April 2nd, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Zoom apologizes but also reveals some insane growth numbers. Facebook Messenger comes to the desktop. YouTube wants to clone TikTok. Apple lets some people avoid the App Store tax. More gross firings by teleconference and a timely interesting raise. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

So the Zoom controversies rage on. For example, Zoom says it has now disabled a feature which allowed users to covertly access data from some people's LinkedIn profiles without their knowledge of permission, even if those people were in a given Zoom meeting anonymously. And SpaceX says it has banned the use of Zoom internally because it was concerned about privacy and security issues. But this morning, Zoom came out with a big blog post apologizing for its security failures and said that it plans to freeze all development of new features across its products in order to direct all engineering focus to improving its security and privacy broadly. This is quoting from CEO Eric Yuan's blog post,

quote, for the past several weeks supporting the influx of new users has been a tremendous undertaking and our sole focus. We have strived to provide you with uninterrupted service and the same user-friendly experience that has made Zoom the video conferencing platform of choice for enterprises around the world, while also ensuring platform safety, privacy, and security. However, we recognize that we have fallen short of the communities and our own privacy and security expectations. For that, I am deeply sorry and I want to share what we are doing about it. Over the next 90 days, we are committed to dedicating the resources needed to better identify, address, and fix issues proactively. We are also committed to being transparent throughout this process.

We want to do what it takes to maintain your trust. This includes enacting a feature freeze, effective immediately, and shifting all our engineering resources to focus on our biggest trust, safety, and privacy issues, conducting a comprehensive review with third-party experts and representative users to understand and ensure the security of all our new consumer use cases. preparing a transparency report that details information related to requests for data, records, or content, enhancing our current bug bounty program, launching a CISO Council in partnership with leading CISOs from across the industry to facilitate an ongoing dialogue regarding security and privacy best practices and engaging a series of simultaneous white box penetration test to further identify and address issues, end quote.

So this move, and Mayacalpa has drawn praise from a lot of folks, quoting Peter Bodding on Twitter. Pretty cool, clear, transparent, and fast communication here from Eric Yuan about security at Zoom and managing its recent phenomenal growth, hand clap emojis, end quote. Evan Greer tweeted, this is pretty good, to be honest. They've addressed a number of key concerns. Committing to a transparency report and ending the sketchy attention tracking thing is big. but they need to implement end-to-end encryption for all meetings. Without that, the service will never truly be safe, end quote. And one more very interesting detail from the blog post, quote,

As of the end of December last year, the maximum number of daily meeting participants both free and paid conducted on Zoom was approximately 10 million. In March this year, we reached more than 200 million daily meeting participants, both free and paid, end quote. So in basically three months, Zoom says it went from 10 million daily active users to more than 200 million. That's insane.

That is some serious Dow growth. Enkitt Agarwal tweeted, quote, just when I thought it would be very difficult for any company to beat the hockey stick growth of Uber, this is just bonkers. And from an enterprise company at that, end quote. Though Nicholas Magand tweeted, quote, pretty sure that if they were still at 10 million Dow's, their repeated security failures would have made a lot of people switch to something else. Now with 200 million plus, it becomes harder to switch, as most of your contacts need to switch to. Security failures probably won't hurt them now, end quote. Speaking of telecommunications in this new era, Facebook today launched a Facebook Messenger app for macOS and Windows with unlimited free group video calls.

No time like the present, right? Quoting in Gadget, the desktop app will sync across mobile, offer notifications for new messages, and support dark mode and gifts. In the past month, Facebook says it has seen more than 100% increase in people using their desktop browser for audio and video calls via Messenger. The new desktop app could make it easier to stay in touch. You no longer have to juggle browser tabs and windows. You can download the Messenger desktop app through the Microsoft Store or Mac App Store, or Mac App Store, beginning today, end quote. Sources are telling the information that YouTube is planning to release shorts, which the

information describes as a TikTok rival by the end of the year. Shorts is designed to operate inside YouTube's main app, but, quote, shorts will include a feed of brief videos posted by users inside the Google-owned app and will take advantage of the video services catalog of licensed music, songs from which will be available to use as soundtracks for the videos created by users, said the people. The move represents the most serious effort yet by a Silicon Valley tech company to combat the rise of TikTok, a rare example of a Chinese-owned social media app that has become a global hit, end quote. This got a ton of concern trolling going online. Daria Obasanjo tweeted, the problem with everyone trying to

copy TikTok is that you can copy the features, but you can't copy the community. We keep relearning this lesson every three to five years in social apps, end quote. And Hunter Horsley tweeted, how many times do we have to watch this play out? Big tech company realizes it's late, too late, then assumes creating lookalike functionality and shoving it into consumers' hands will work, end quote. And I actually tweeted yesterday, what does it say about Google's track record for product that my first reaction to this was just to laugh out loud, end quote. But Josh Constine tweeted this. TikTok clones fail because they start with no content to remix. With content network effects, each piece of content in a network makes the other content more valuable. On TikTok,

each dance, song, and joke lowers the bar to creating more. Cloning Snapchat stories was easy, just copy its camera to a new graph. YouTube stories still failed, but cloning TikTok requires a base of remix fodder. Content Facebook and Instagram don't have, but YouTube's upcoming clone Shorts does. When Instagram's TikTok clone Reels launches in English, it will start flat-footed. That's why YouTube's version, Shorts, has potential, but only if Google allows remixes of its whole database of videos, end quote. And he wrote this in TechCrunch, quote, other social networks should consider how the concept of media remixing, what he calls content network effects, applies to them. Could Facebook turn your friends' photos into collage materials? Could Instagram let you share

themed collections of your favorite posts? Remix culture isn't going away, so neither will the value of fostering content network effects. With video consumption outpacing professional production, remixes are how the world will stay entertained and how amateurs can contribute creations worthy of going viral, end quote. It'll be big if this bears out in a wider way, but Mark German and others noticed yesterday that Apple is now letting some video streaming apps, like, for example, Amazon Prime Video, use their own payment methods for in-app purchases on Apple devices.

The big advantage to doing that would be avoiding Apple's 30% cut. Amazon started taking advantage of the change on Wednesday, selling and renting movies via its Prime Video Service on Apple devices without needing to give Apple a share of the money. Quote, Apple has an established program for premium subscription video entertainment providers to offer a variety of customer benefits, the Cooperino-California-based technology giant said in an emailed statement. The program applies to multiple services, including Amazon Prime Video. Canal Pluse, a unit of Vivendi, started participating in 2018. Altis I, a cloud-based video service from Altis USA, signed up in February.

Apple said the program also provides a number of other benefits, including, quote, integration with the Apple TV app, Airplay 2 support, TVOS apps, Universal Search, Siri support, and, where applicable, single or zero sign-on, end quote. Apparently, if you already have a credit card on file with Amazon, that is what will now be charged if you sign up for Prime Video. As Savage tweeted, quote, more strategic than it appears on the surface, Apple breaks precedent and gives up App Store revenue for a chance to drive Apple TV platform dominance, end quote. But then again, my first question is exactly what a lot of other people were asking.

How can Apple do this for some partners, but not all? As Alex Heath tweeted, quote, paging Netflix, HBO, and everyone else, apparently you're not considered premium yet. But more importantly, here's Dieter Bone. Must be nice to be a premium subscription video entertainment provider and be allowed to use your own payment system instead of apples. I'm sure that distinction makes total sense

to all the developers and other app. makers who offer services and other categories like music or apps, end quote. And DHH tweeted, quote, Apple, how about extending this privilege to the rest of us? Not just some special class of huge corporations, end quote. Another sort of gross blow-by-blow of layoffs made via Zoom, this time from e-scooter startup Bird. Dot.L.A. says that Byrd laid off 406 employees in just two minutes via a Zoom webinar. and that employees were locked out of their computers during the webinar.

Quote, last Friday morning, 406 BIRD employees who had been working from home for two weeks because of the coronavirus, and bleary-eyed from putting in longer-than-usual days in an unprecedented effort to rapidly wind down global operations in cities around the world, received a generic-sounding Zoom webinar invitation entitled COVID-19 update. Travis van der Zanden, 41, a former top Uber executive who founded Byrd only three years ago, had abruptly cancelled the previous Thursday's regular bi-weekly all-hands meeting, referred to internally as Birdfams. He had not addressed Byrd's thousand-plus employees since they were forced to leave their offices, so most employees assumed he was giving an update on the company's response to the worsening global pandemic.

But some grew suspicious when they noticed that the guest list and host were hidden, and they learned only some colleagues were included. It was also unusual that they were being invited to a Zoom webinar, allowing no participation rather than the free-flowing meeting function the company normally uses. Over the next hour, employees traded frantic messages on Slack and searched co-workers' calendars to see who was unfortunate enough to be invited. It should go down as a poster child of how not to lay people off, especially at a time like this, said one employee. From later on in the piece describing the actual event itself, quote, for the next five minutes, employees stared at a sparse slide with a dark gray

background that said only COVID-19. It was not our brand color or font, which frankly was unsettling in a way I couldn't articulate, a bird worker said. Thinking there were technical difficulties, some employees logged off and were never able to return to the meeting. Then after five minutes of dead air that seemed like an eternity, a robotic sounding disembodied voice came on the line. The woman began by acknowledging, quote, this is a suboptimal way to deliver this message, end quote. Then she cut to the chase. Quote, COVID-19 has also had a massive impact on our business, one that has forced our leadership team and our board of directors to make extremely difficult and painful decisions.

One of those decisions is to eliminate a number of roles at the company. Unfortunately, your role is impacted by this decision, end quote. The meeting was scheduled to last half an hour, but ended up going for only two minutes. Towards the end of the monologue, as the woman started talking about the future of bird, she sounded like she was getting choked up and was trying to hold back tears. Quote, it felt like a black mirror episode, the bird worker said. This ominous voice came over and told us we were losing our jobs, end quote. Almost no one recognized the voice, and there remains disagreement about who had the

unfortunate job of delivering the message, but this much is clear. It was not van der Zanden or a top executive. Quote, it was a cowardly move, said a bird manager. Travis did not want to deliver the news, end quote. quote, it sounded like a recording and it was very strange and ominous, said an operations employee, end quote. And from still later in the piece, quoting for the final time, making it more surreal, some people were logged out while the brief speech was still underway. As the voice on the line was speaking, employees stared at their computer and began to take in the news that they were losing their jobs. Then their screens suddenly went dark and their company issued MacBooks restarted.

by 10.40 a.m., everyone was locked out, just as employees were frantically trying to exchange personal numbers and emails on Slack and take screenshots of their contacts. They wondered why they were being cut off then, since they had just been told that their last day was not until April 3rd. A month earlier, someone in Bird's IT department had been tasked by his superiors to write a script that would allow the company to instantly shut down all of a user's accounts, computer, email, Slack with the click of a single button, according to an employee. He was told the script would be used for general offboarding rather than the mass layoff that he ended up being included in. Last Friday, the script seems to have been activated early, end quote. And finally, an interesting

raise Thursday. All in One Productivity Tool Notion, which helps people organize and track their work, has raised $50 million from Index Ventures and others at a $2 billion valuation. According the New York Times. Before the most recent funding, Notion, which was founded in 2013, had raised $17 million. The company declined to disclose its revenue but said it had made money since 2018. Notion's stark black and white product offers templates of checklists and projects for, say, bringing on new hires, tracking product development, or managing editorial calendars for marketers. People use Notion in place of note-taking apps, collaboration services, or writing software, and they pay a monthly fee of $4 to $20 each for extra features like more security and storage.

Ram Sharam, a venture capitalist who invested in Notion in 2013, said that at many businesses, quote, a lot of the products we use were designed in the 1990s, end quote. Thus, there is room for new workplace tools that take advantage of the internet and other advances so people can collaborate and have the most up-to-date data while they work, he said. Notion has users in countries including Japan, Russia and Germany. Since last May, its users have organized more than 180 meetups in 21 countries and 52 cities. By early last year, Notion had nearly 1 million users. That has since quadrupled, Mr. Kotaari said.

The company has stayed small with 42 employees. People eager to work there have gone to surprising lengths for attention. One recently sent a package of cupcakes decorated with his own face and the words, Hire Me. The fundraising was completed in 36 hours last week after the coronavirus crisis, pushed Ivan Zhao, Notion's founder and chief executive, and Ashkha Katari, Notion's chief operating officer, to rethink their previous position of not relying too much on venture capital. In a moment of uncertainty, Mr. Kotari said, quote,

financing is a signal of stability, which is important for us, end quote. Ah, I've really got nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.