Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 11/21 - Google's Culture Is Dead

Episode Date: November 21, 2019

Google is changing its rules around political ads, PayPal is acquiring Honey for a ton of money, why have a Dash Button when you can have a Dash Shelf? Route puts all your orders in one place and I’m afraid Google’s original culture is definitively dead. Sponsors: Castro.fm SVB.com/next Links: An update on our political ads policy (The Keyword/Google) Google to Limit Targeting of Political Ads (NYTimes) Facebook Weighs Steps to Curb Narrowly Targeted Political Ads (WSJ) PayPal to acquire shopping and rewards platform Honey for $4B (TechCrunch) Amazon unveils new Dash Smart Shelf that automatically reorders items when supplies run low (GeekWire) Route's app auto-tracks all your packages, raises $12M (TechCrunch) Inside Apple’s iPhone Software Shakeup After Buggy iOS 13 Debut (Bloomberg) Google Hires Firm Known for Anti-Union Efforts (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 tech meme ride home for Thursday, November 21st, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Google is changing its rules around political ads. PayPal is acquiring honey for a ton of money. Why have a dash button when you can have a dash shelf? Rout puts all of your orders in one place. And I'm afraid I'm calling it, Google's original culture is definitively over. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Google has announced new political ad rule. Rules. Limiting the micro-targeting political advertisers can use to only age, gender, and general location categories, quoting from their blog post on the topic, quote, given recent concerns and

debates about political advertising and the importance of shared trust in the democratic process, we want to improve voters' confidence in the political ads they may see on our ad platforms. While we've never offered granular micro-targeting of election ads, we believe there's more we can do to further promote increased visibility of election ads. That's why we're limiting election ads audience targeting to the following general categories, age, gender, and general location at the postal code level. Political advertisers can, of course, continue to do contextual targeting, such as serving ads to people reading or watching a story about, say, the economy. This will align our approach to election ads with long established practices in media such as TV, radio, and print, and result in election ads being more widely seen and available for public discussion, end quote. So I thought this section here was particularly noteworthy. We'll talk about this in a second.

Whether you're running for office or selling office furniture, we apply the same ads policies to everyone. There are no carve-outs. It's against our policies for any advertiser to make a false claim, whether it's a claim about the price of a chair or a claim that you can vote by text message, that election day is postponed, or that a candidate has died. To make this more explicit, it. We're clarifying our ads policies and adding examples to show how our policies prohibit things like deep fakes, doctored and manipulated media, misleading claims about the census process and ads or destinations making demonstrably false claims that could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process, end quote. Google says it will take some time to put

all of this into place, and it will begin enforcing the new approach in the UK within a week, because of their general election that is coming up quickly, and in the EU by the end of the year and the rest of the world beginning in January. This is from the New York Times, quote, The decision left political strategists stunned and scrambling to react. Modern political campaigns have relied on the tools and data offered by technology giants like Facebook and Google, which dominate the online ad industry. The campaigns have been able to cater different messages for potential voters based on signals such as political leanings, what articles they have read, what videos they have watched, and what things they have searched for.

Instead of blanketing an entire city with a costly TV spot, the so-called micro-targeting of political ads has become controversial because it allows advertisers to seek out specific voters and perhaps avoid broader scrutiny of their messages, end quote. Now, remember, I mentioned that one paragraph about disinformation as noteworthy, and I hope you caught that that was because it seems to be another shot across Facebook's bow from a competitor. Well, late this morning, the Wall Street Journal was reporting that Facebook is considering making its own changes to its political ads policy, including increasing the number of users who can be targeted from 100 to a few thousand. In essence, that would be cutting down on the

practice of micro-targeting by numbers, if not in name. Quote, Facebook has sought feedback on potential changes with large Republican and Democratic political ad, buyers about that possible change and other ideas in efforts to limit how misinformation is spread since ads with false or misleading information are often targeted towards specific audiences, one of the people said. The discussions which picked up around the time Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg testified on Capitol Hill about a month ago preceded a flurry of announcements from other tech giants over their political ad policies. Alphabet's Google announced Wednesday it plans to stop allowing highly targeted political ads on its platform in late

October, Twitter announced it would no longer accept political ads, and more recently, detailed its new policy to impose targeting restrictions on cause-related advertising. As we've said, we are looking at different ways we might refine our approach to political ads, a Facebook spokesperson said on Wednesday night and reiterated Thursday, end quote. PayPal has acquired Honey, the comparison shopping and rewards platform, which has 17 million monthly active users for around $4 billion. I describe Honey as a comparison shopping and rewards platform, but you probably know them best as that browser extension that claims to automatically apply promo and coupon codes

anytime you shop online, coding TechCrunch. Currently, Honey's 17 million monthly active users take advantage of its suite of money-saving tools to track prices, get alerts, make lists, browse offers, and participate in an eBay's like rewards program called Honey Gold. Its users tend to be younger, millennial shoppers, both male and female. Its browser extension now works across approximately 30,000 merchant websites, including fashion, technology, travel, and even pizza delivery. Last year, Honey publicly shared that its 10 million members had saved over $800 million using its tools. As of today, Honey's 17 million members have saved more than $2 billion to date, end quote. I have to say

this sale is a bit of a shocker for a couple of reasons. First, this is by far PayPal's biggest ever acquisition. PayPal's acquisition of Venmo slash Braintree was only $800 million. Also, while it is profitable and claiming to be growing at more than 100% year over year, honey only does $100 million a year in revenue. And it only raised $40 million in investment money. So I'm not sure how that math gets to a $4 billion acquisition price, but, you know, moves PayPal up the purchase funnel, I guess, and hey, if you're honey, it's probably hard to imagine a better home to end up with. So, congrats to all. If you're mourning the loss of those Amazon dash buttons, never fear because Amazon has unveiled a new dash smart shelf, which will automatically reorder items when supplies run low.

Yes, when even pushing a button is too much friction for you, Amazon's got you covered. Quote, the dash smart shelf is a Wi-Fi-enabled scale for office supplies. When common supplies like printer paper, pens, or coffee are running low, the shelf can automatically restock them or send a notification to put in a manual order. Amazon envisions offices replete with several of the thin black scales placed in break rooms, supply closets, and other locations. These scales are only an in. inch tall and come in three sizes, seven inches by seven, 12 inches by 10 inches, and 18 inches by

13 inches. The device will be available to customers of Amazon Business, the company's marketplace for business, government, health care, and educational organizations next year. Amazon did not say how much the shelves will cost, end quote. If nothing else, this is an interesting pivot towards business for the Dash program, away from consumer. But that probably makes a ton of sense in this case. I mean, I suppose the office manager will still have control over the thresholds for reordering, thus allowing them to control costs. Well, at the same time, you've got to figure workplace purchasing is more of an automated thing or at least something that's done on a schedule. So if you can just get management to stay on top of that schedule, taking away the decision

tree might actually lead to more sales over time for Amazon. Speaking of ordering for delivery, The Route is an app which auto-tracks all of your e-commerce orders in one single place and allows you to also buy insurance on the valuable items you order for just 1% of that item's cost. Route has apparently grown to $8.85 million in revenue, and it's just raised $12 million in a seed round, quoting TechCrunch. The Route iOS app for visually tracking orders officially launches today. purchases from partnered merchants instantly show up in the app and its website via API, but all your other buys from Amazon, etc., can be automatically ingested by authorizing the Route bot Gmail extension that scans the shipping labels. Route lays out all the orders on a map with immediate access to their latest status changes,

like when shipping info is received, an item goes out for last mile delivery, or there's a problem. There's no need to copy and paste tracking numbers across multiple websites. the Route Plus insurance program lets customers pay for peace of mind launching today as well. Customers get the option to add it from partnered merchants, file claims for lost damage or stolen packages in one tap, and get reimbursement from respected Lloyds of London, end quote. It's free for merchants to offer the Route Plus insurance program, which should help them increase conversions, though merchants could offer to kick in themselves to cover the insurance costs. Route works with 1,600 merchants already and 600 carriers and has already overseen 1.3 million shipments.

You might be painfully aware that the rollout of iOS 13, especially, but also MacOS Catalina, has seen, shall we say, lots of bugs, at least more than usual. Well, Apple is aware of the problems, and according to Mark German, they are overhauling the way they test software as a result. quote, software chief Craig Federigi and lieutenants including Stacey Leesick announced the changes at a recent internal kickoff meeting with the company's software developers. The new approach calls for Apple's development teams to ensure that test versions, known as daily builds of future software updates, disable unfinished or buggy features by default. Testers will then have the option to selectively enable those features via a new internal process and settings menu dubbed flags, allowing them to isolate the impact of each

individual addition to the system. Prior to iOS 14's development, some teams would add features every day that weren't fully tested, while other teams would contribute changes weekly. Daily builds were like a recipe with a lot of cooks, adding ingredients, a person with knowledge of the process said. Test software got so crammed with changes at different stages of development that the devices often became difficult to use. Because of this, some, quote, testers would go days without a livable build, so they wouldn't really have a handle on what's working and not working, the person said. This defeated the main goal of the testing process as Apple engineers struggled to check how the operating system was reacting to many of the new features

leading to some of iOS 13's problems. The new strategy is already being applied to the development of iOS 14, code named Azul internally, ahead of its debut next year. Apple has also considered delaying some iOS 14 features until 2021 in an update called Azul plus one internally that will likely become known as iOS 15 externally to give the company more time to focus on performance. Still, iOS 14 is expected to rival iOS 13 in the breadth of its new capabilities, the people familiar with Apple's plans said, end quote. Finally today, Google has apparently hired IRI consultants, an anti-union consulting company, signaling that the feud between some activist employees and management has escalated.

I haven't been telling you about these because it's just been a steady drip, drip, drip of small news items, but there have been news items about unrest inside of Google seemingly every week. There was, for example, the news that Google had created new community guidelines for employees, placing restrictions on talking about politics on internal mailing lists and forums. There was the news that Google was scaling back its weekly all-hands TGIF meetings to only one a month. and that the meetings will now focus only on product and business strategy, not the freewheeling symposiums that they have been for years. Heck, just this week, apparently around 20 employees staged a protest at Google offices during the interrogation of two staffers by management, staffers who have now been placed on administrative leave surrounding retaliation complaints. I don't know to what degree cultural unrest like this is just what is happening all across

tech these days to one degree or another. or maybe this is just the way things are all across the country at the moment, no matter what your industry. But the fact that there appears to be a slow-burning civil war going on inside Google is worth noting. It's impossible to overstate how Google has set the template for the workplace culture of a modern Silicon Valley company. And it's hard to remember now how much workplace comedy and just good feelings was key to all of that. various times, one company or another is always the hot company that all the best and brightest want to work for. Google was that place for a long, long time, to a degree it still is. And of course, Google has always had the reputation for hiring the smartest. But they also had this

reputation for being fun, an exciting, rewarding place to work. And that should not be overlooked. It wasn't just the perks, which were, of course, a big deal in their own way. It was also the sense of fun in a broader way. Don't Be Evil was a way of signaling that Google didn't want to be Microsoft in a moral sense, but also in the sense that Google saw itself in opposition to the widely held belief that Microsoft, in the late 90s and early 2000s, had become a stodgy, bloated, middle management-heavy quagmire of a company. while Google saw itself as entirely different. There was that 20% time.

You could ask your manager anything at TGIF. And really, you and your boss, you were all on the same page anyway because you were all just looking to do cool stuff. And that whole freewheeling Silicon Valley ethos that is parodied on shows like Silicon Valley sprung forth from the Googleplex to one degree or another. I think Google fashioned itself as the place where you never had to leave grad school. You never had to become a stodgy old grown-up, either as a company or as a worker, where you never had to feel like it was work at all because it wasn't hierarchical and staggy and adversarial. To have that now come full circle to go from that sort of an intended or implied culture to a situation where you have management essentially hiring a union-busting consulting firm because workers and managers have arrived at such an adversarial position is sort of. shocking. Again, I'm not saying Google is alone in having these issues or signaling them out for any

sort of judgment about them, but I do think we can definitively say, given all of these reports over the last year, that the original workplace culture of Google sounds like it is definitively dead at this point. And because, at least, the popular image of that culture has been so central to Tech's image of itself, I think that that is worth pointing out. episode 501 in the bag nothing pithy to share with you today

so I'll just talk to you tomorrow