Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 11/27 - Why Is Shopping On Amazon So Complicated?

Episode Date: November 27, 2018

AWS goes the custom silicon route, Facebook Watch goes after the olds, will Microsoft leapfrog Apple and why does Amazon’s shopping experience suck so much? Stories from: @katienotopoulos, @ShiraOvide Tweets: @ajassy, @AlexSchleber Links: Amazon Web Services introduces its own custom-designed Arm server processor, promises 45 percent lower costs for some workloads (GeekWire) Facebook's YouTube competitor is pivoting to older audiences as teens tune out and publishers balk (CNBC) Half of all Phishing Sites Now Have the Padlock (Krebs on Security) Employees Say Startup Civil Hyped Crypto Returns, But Failed to Pay (CoinDesk) Apple has an idea to make Animoji even more fun (Cult of Mac) Don’t Look Now, But Microsoft Is Overtaking Apple (Bloomberg) What If Amazon.com Actually…Is A Horrible Website? (BuzzFeed) 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 Tuesday, November 27th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough today. AWS goes the custom silicon route.

Facebook Watch goes after the olds. Will Microsoft Leapfrog Apple? And why does Amazon's shopping experience suck so much? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. We did a segment not too long ago about how everyone and their mother is getting into the business of creating their own custom silicon chips as opposed to waiting for Intel or someone else to build to order, something that suits their needs. It seems to be the latest hotness in technology, especially if you have the scale to make it economically feasible. Well, as Alex Schleber asked today on Twitter,

is this tech companies creating their own custom silicon, perhaps the mega trend of the next decade in tech. To wit, at Amazon's cloud technology conference last night in Las Vegas, AWS announced its own custom designed arm server processor, named the AWS Graviton processor, which it promises will deliver 45% lower costs for some workloads. As Geekwire put it, quote, after years of waiting for someone to design an arm server processor that could work at scale on the cloud, Amazon Web Services just went ahead and designed its own, end quote. Apparently, this new chip comes out of Amazon's acquisition of Anapurna Labs back in 2015. AWS has been rolling out custom silicon in its data centers for

specific workloads like machine learning for a while now, but custom processors in-house. That's a major new step. AWS is the first of the major cloud computing players to launch arm-based computing resources. AWS Big Boss, Andy Jassy, tweeted, quote, New A1 instances are first to be powered by custom AWS Graviton processors based on arm architecture, excited to pass cost savings back to customers, reducing them by up to 45% for scale-out workloads like microservices and web servers. Hashtag, ReInvent, end quote. Today, Facebook officially launched Watch Party, which is,

Its group viewing feature wherein users can see and comment on the same video at the same time. You can also now schedule a watch party to attract viewers if you are a page or groups admin. And you can also host a watch party live via picture and picture of you commenting along with the video in real time. Any profile or page worldwide can now use this feature. Previously, it was being tested in the groups section. I'm not sure how much we've talked about Facebook Watch before, but essentially this is Facebook's big play to create something that can compete with the likes of Snapchat Discover especially, but then also plant some sort of meaningful flag in video generally,

elbowing for room among the likes of YouTube and even Netflix. Facebook has invested in content, like the reboot of MTV's The Real World, which I'm pretty sure we've mentioned before, but so far it seems like watch, is struggling to stand out. Suggesting this is a piece from CNBC, which says that internally, Facebook has decided to pivot watch to target older audiences

because teens are basically ignoring the service. It is also pairing down the number of original shows it will produce for watch. Sarah Madigan, who was leading the deal team for Facebook original serieses, left the company recently to work for MGM. She had previously been the director of content acquisition for Netflix. Quote, in talks with at least three media companies,

Facebook has hinted it once watched shows aimed at post-college millennials around parenting age and older. One media company said Facebook was asking them for shows hosted by traditional celebrities rather than social media stars. Facebook responded most positively to talent in their 30s through 50s. Another company said Facebook said it wanted shows for a broad audience but not focused on anyone who was under the age of 20. Any teen shows need to have adult themes that could attract older viewers.

Facebook was also asking for more formats that may be familiar to traditional TV viewers and middle America, like reality and talk shows, end quote. In August, Facebook revealed that around 50 million US users each month view watch content. But YouTube, of course, has 1.8 billion logged in viewers each and every month. And you sort of have to wonder how many of those Facebook watch viewers

just sort of stumbled on an autoplay video to get to that 50 million viewer number that they're touting. Remember how everybody, especially Google, wanted every website in the world to move over to SSL? Would make the web more secure, they said. Would cut down on spam and fishing websites, they said. Look for the padlock, they said. But as Krebs on security points out, new data from anti-fishing company Fish Labs shows that 49% of all fishing sites now have that padlock icon on their very definitely not safe websites. This is up from 35% a year ago.

Quote, Fish Labs believes that this can be attributed to both the continued use of SSL certificates by fishers who register their own. domain names and create certificates for them, as well as a general increase in SSL due to Google Chrome browser, now displaying not secure for websites that do not use SSL, said John LeCore, Chief Technology Officer for the company. The bottom line is that the presence or lack of SSL doesn't tell you anything about a site's legitimacy, end quote. Public service announcement then. As Krebs points out, the HTTPS part of a URL and web address, which represents SSL or the secure sockets layer only means that data being transmitted back and forth from your browser to a website is encrypted. And it's only encrypted from third parties.

It does not mean that that website that you have gone to is on the up and up. Quoting Krebs, the presence of the padlock does not mean the site is legitimate, nor is it any proof the site has been security-hardened against intrusion from hackers, end quote. Civil was a blockchain project that was supposed to not only decentralized journalism

and make it safe from censorship and government interference, but also provide a new economic model for funding sustainable journalism. In other words, it would help journalists get paid. But then, last month, civil's public token sale was canceled due to lack of demand. Now, Coyne Desk is reporting that journalists and news organizations sponsored by the blockchain startup are complaining they haven't gotten the compensation they were promised when they were hired. Apparently, the investors who purchased the failed civil token sale

were reimbursed for their investment. The question now is, what about the journalists who were to be paid in those same civil tokens? Quote, civil can talk all at once about creating a new future for media, but the reality is it's being built by putting journalists into debt, said Jay Cassano. who left the civil news outlet sludge on November 8th because, he said, undelivered tokens made up roughly 70% of his salary for five months. I had to borrow money to pay my rent and student loans, Cassano, told CoinDesk.

Civil CEO Matt Ill's disputes the current and former employee's claims. We didn't promise anyone tokens would be worth any specific amount, he told CoinDesk. Anytime we discussed potential token value with newsrooms, we made it clear we were making estimate. and that there was risk involved, end quote. People seem to love Apple's an emoji and Memoji technology, but Cult of Mac has found a patent application from Apple that suggests these gimmicks could get a new dimension, sound.

Quoting Cult of Mac, the technology described in Apple's voice effects based on facial expressions patent application describes how certain sound effects could be mapped to individual facial expression, That could mean a happy face or frowning face triggering a particular audio sample being played. It could also be used to trigger particular pre-recorded sound effects replacing ones when the user says them, such as using the spoken word bark to trigger the sound of an actual dog barking. From the sound of things, this would work a little bit like the feature in Apple's Messages app, where typing a certain word brings up the option of substituting in an emoji, end quote.

If that doesn't sound like significant news to you, then trust me, you probably don't have kids under the age of five. We spoke last week about how it's been a brutal, brutal month for tech stocks. Remember when Apple and Amazon became the U.S.'s first ever trillion-dollar companies? Well, no more. At the time of this writing, Apple's market cap is down to $826 billion, and Amazon's is down to $780 billion. Want to know who might be the king of the tech hill by the time you're listening to these words? Microsoft is currently sitting at an $820 billion market cap. Microsoft actually surpassed Apple in market cap briefly yesterday.

Microsoft's shares have only dipped about 8.5% amid the recent tech sell-off versus a 22% dip for Amazon and 25% for Apple. How has this happened? quoting Shira Ovid in Bloomberg, the near-term reason is Microsoft has been less damaged by U.S. stock investors' recent reversal of optimism about tech companies that had been rewarded for fast growth above all else. And longer term, Microsoft has continued to roll as the go-to shepherd for corporate clients anxiously navigating technology changes in their industries. Microsoft has refashioned its products and how it sells them to capitalize. on businesses' desire to buy technology that helps future-proof their workforces and operations, end quote.

In other words, Microsoft has stepped into the role that IBM used to play for businesses, tech handholding and consulting with a healthy dose of Azure cloud computing thrown in for good measure. It also helps that Microsoft is largely not being caught up in the current U.S.-China Trade War, brouhaha, which dinged Apple's stock especially this morning. Concerns about data privacy and advertising as a business model, Microsoft is not really in those businesses. And also, funny enough, it's not really in the smartphone game either, so the fact that smartphone sales are flatlining, emoji of Satcha Nadella wiping that dirt off his shoulder, I guess. Or as Shirovide puts it, quote, Microsoft is the tortoise in a technological

world obsessed with hairs. We know how that race turned out. Finally today, Katie Natopoulos has a piece up in BuzzFeed that gets at something that has really been bugging me these last few months. Have you tried, you know, to actually shop on Amazon lately? It used to be really simple. You did a search, the lowest price version of the thing you searched for, usually popped up at the top. You might have to tweak the search a bit to determine the fastest, shipping option, but that was it. You could get in, get out, and be confident that in a couple of days, you had the thing you needed. Now, there's just a dizzying array of options. There's something called Amazon's Choice, which is an algorithmic suggestion based on a whole slew of factors,

including ratings, shipping times, maybe even price. It's super confusing. A lot of times, I find the thing I really want is not Amazon's choice, and so now I have to hunt for the the thing I really want. Hunt for it among what? Well, thousands of other choices. There are those ads that pop up now, that vaunted advertising push that we've been talking about. They pop up first. The ads may not be the best price or even the thing that you were searching for in the first place. Then there's the subscribe and save option. There's the third-party sellers. There's the nudge to save money by signing up for an Amazon Visa card. There's the two-year warranty that Amazon wants to tack on to seemingly anything that's non-perishable.

And has this happened to you? You think you've bought something that will be delivered in two days via prime, but it turns out that somehow you really ended up ordering something from a third-party seller, and it will come in two weeks. This has happened to me at least three times recently. Let me quote from Katie here because I 100% agree with her sentiment. it. Somehow, Amazon's website, the place where it sells a gazillion things that make a gazillion dollars, sucks. The experience of shopping on the site itself fails in spectacularly

stupid ways for a company that is quite arguably the most important at the moment that touches infinite aspects of our daily lives, how we shop, the groceries we eat, the movies and TV shows we watch, how a massive amount of human labor is compensated, how our government's postal system works. There are simply giant glaring holes in its main product, Amazon.com, end quote. I agree. Amazon has become the retailer with so many upsells. It's frankly becoming annoying. So note to Jeff Bezos. You've always said you're hyper-focused on customer experience above all else. You've killed retail by making buying something a frictionless, brain-dead, simple thing to do. You've even got dash buttons, so we don't have to do anything more than press a button to reorder something.

So why does it suddenly take 14 different clicks or taps or decisions just to buy a ream of computer paper on your e-commerce website? You've taken your eye off the ball, Jeff, and the ball is Amazon.com. I want to thank Google NYC for hosting my talk at their offices yesterday. I talked about the book and it was filmed, so I'll let y'all know when it gets posted to YouTube. Special thanks to the five TechMeme Ride Home listeners who came up to me after the talk and introduced themselves. Special shout out to at Volcom Steve.

Thank you all so much, five friends of the pod out of a crowd of about 50 or 60 who attended the talk. That's not a bad percentage. Don't be afraid to tell your co-worker about the tech meme right home. Let's spread our mutant podcast army throughout Google's workforce like a virus. Thanks to Chris Higgins, of course,

for covering for me yesterday so I could go do that. And thank you all for continuing to listen and spreading the word about the show to your techie friends. Talk to you tomorrow.