Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 04/27 – Earnings Quick Hits

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 Wednesday, April 27th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. Quick summation of alphabet and Microsoft earnings.

Starting point is 00:00:43 DJI is trying to prevent its drones from being used in the Ukraine war. Google has released tools to make it easier to spin up your own YouTube. Apple wants you to repair your iPhone yourself and a deep dive into why autocorrect can't ducking get it right sometimes. Ducking. I said ducking, which is the iPhone autocrected version of that curse word. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Let's do some quick earnings hits to start off today. Alphabet reported Q1 revenue rose 23% year-over-year to $68.01 billion.

Starting point is 00:01:18 Net income dropped, however, to $16.44 billion down from $17.93 billion year-over-year. Traffic acquisition costs also rose 23% over that same time period. Google Cloud reported $5.82 billion in Q1 sales up from $4.05 billion. year-over-year and above estimates of $5.75 billion, but also had to report an operating loss of $931 million, which was down from $974 million year-over-year. Alphabet also said that its board of directors has authorized $70 billion in share repurchases, a major step-up from 2021's $50 billion authorization, and 2019's $25 billion authorization. So all at all, it's a mixed bag, not terrible, but not as good as recent have been. And Microsoft reported Q3 revenue of $49.4 billion up 18% year over year, net income of

Starting point is 00:02:18 $16.7 billion up 8% year over year. Office revenue, up 12%. LinkedIn revenue, up 34%. Windows OEM revenue, up 11%. Key for Microsoft, of course, Microsoft's cloud revenue grew 32% year over year to $23.4 billion in Q3, including $19.1 billion from Intelligent Cloud, up 26% year over year. and from Azure and other cloud services, which were up 46% year over year. And Microsoft's CEO, Satcha Nadella, said more than 10 million people have already streamed games over Xbox cloud gaming, but did not offer a definition for what counts as a streamed game. So, again, for Microsoft pretty steady, Microsoft's stock was up more than 5% this morning, and Alphabets was down around 2%, so that should give you an idea of what the street thinks,

Starting point is 00:03:05 though I would note that tech stocks are bouncing back broadly this morning, so Microsoft could just be writing that wave, though it's notable that Alphabet is not. This isn't a stock market show, of course, but I will note that the NASDAQ hit a 52-week low, led by tech stocks yesterday, including Tesla being down 12.2% yesterday, Coinbase down 5.9%, Netflix down 5.5%, Apple down 3.7%, and meta down 3.2%. I'll say again, this isn't a stock market show, but as we cover the startup scene, I'm just making note of the fact that the tech stock market remains depressed, which affects what startups are raising and how they can raise. It ain't pretty right now. I feel like it's going to

Starting point is 00:03:46 take some tech company to come public with a really healthy IPO to turn this whole market around. Question is, who's going to do it? All of this stock market watching is worth it to feel the grain of the startup ecosystem, but also because it does have real-world effects. Robin Hood yesterday said it plans to lay off around 9% of its full-time employees. after growing its headcount from 700 to nearly 3,800, just between 2019 and 2021, which was the ramp up to their IPO when they got out the door showing growth before, all of that sort of deflated, quoting in Gadget. Robin Hood's revenue grew from $278 million in 2019 to over $1.8 billion in 2021,

Starting point is 00:04:33 and it hired so many new employees to, quote, meet customer and market demands that its headcount grew from 700 to nearly 3,800. CEO Vlad Tenev explained that the rapid growth and headcount led to, quote, some duplicate roles and job functions, and the company decided that reducing its workforce is the right move to improve efficiency. We will retain and continue to hire exceptional talent in key roles and provide additional learning and career growth opportunities to our employees, he said. The CEO's announcement comes just as the company's stock hit its lowest closing price, $10 a share since it went public. As TechCrunch reports, it also comes, just before Robin Hood announces its first quarter results on April 28th, and could be a

Starting point is 00:05:11 measure meant to preempt investor disfavor in case the results fall short. Chinese drone maker DJI says it will temporarily suspend business in Russia and Ukraine to ensure its products are not being used in combat, quoting Bloomberg. Dronmaker DJI technology has halted all business activities in Ukraine and Russia, becoming the highest profile Chinese company to withdraw from the war-torn region. The world's largest producer of unmanned aerial vehicles is 10,000. temporarily suspending business to comply with regulations in various jurisdictions, it said in a brief statement without elaborating. Its pullout follows U.S. sanctions on Russia for invading Ukraine,

Starting point is 00:05:52 which Washington has threatened to enforce broadly. D.J.'I's move sets it apart from other major Chinese corporations. The Biden administration has urged companies from semiconductor manufacturing international to Lenovo to join sanctions against Russia, but most have refrained from publicly commenting on the matter. Drones in particular have been pivotal in the war used extensively by both combatants to identify targets and coordinate attacks. Ukrainian officials have, however, accused the Chinese company of sabotaging the country's defense efforts, which DJI has denied, according to the Wall Street Journal, end quote. Back to Google, Google Cloud has launched Media CDN, which lets media customers deliver content using the same infrastructure that powers YouTube,

Starting point is 00:06:38 including tools for ad insertion, quoting TechCrunch. Media CDN, which joins Google's CDN portfolio for web and API acceleration is by no stretch of the imagination the first of its kind. There's plenty of CDNs optimized to serve media, but Google touts ostensibly unique benefits like delivery protocols tailored to individual users and network conditions and industry-leading offload rates. With multiple tiers of caching, we minimize calls to origin even for infrequently access content. Google VP Shalach Shulka wrote in a blog post yesterday. This alleviates performance or capacity stress in the content origin and saves costs. Media CDN also features tools for ad insertion, allowing customers to dynamically inject video

Starting point is 00:07:20 content with ads. Moreover, the service is built with AI and ML to power interactive experiences, Google says, like real-time stats during sporting events and purchase links embedded in virtual billboards. Media CDN offers comprehensive APIs and automation tools, detailed pre-aggregated metrics, and playback tracing make it easy to diagnose performance across the entire infrastructure. Shokla continued. Real-time visibility is, provided via Google's cloud operations suite, end quote.

Starting point is 00:07:47 Google is a small fish in a big pond when it comes to the market for CDN services. In 2019, IDC estimated that Akamai controlled 42% of the content delivery market, after Akamai China Net Center held 13% of the market that year, while Verizon had about 5%, end quote. And back to Apple. Apple has launched self-service repair in the U.S., covering iPhone SE and iPhone 12 and 13 lineups, with plans to expand to Europe and add M1 Max by the end of 2022. Quoting CNET.

Starting point is 00:08:25 Apple said it designed the program to offer adventurous and capable people, access to the same parts, tools, and instructions it gives to its own certified technicians and partner repair shops, hopefully making it easier for people to repair devices instead of resorting to buying a new one. We believe we have a responsibility to customers and the environment to offer convenient access to safe, reliable, and secure repairs to help customers get the most out of their devices. The company wrote in a document published Wednesday that outlines its plans. Apple's Do It Yourself program comes at a time when it and the larger tech industry are under pressure to allow people the choice to repair their devices at home for lower costs, an idea that's often called Right to Repair. The larger right to repair movement has been gaining steam in the past couple of years.

Starting point is 00:09:05 It's become a popular topic on social media sites, including through videos of tech influencers teaching people how to repair various devices. Lawmakers and voters in states across the U.S. are increasingly considering and passing laws. forcing companies to change their approach as well, particularly by publishing repair manuals and giving customers access to diagnostic tools for the products they buy. In 2020, voters in Massachusetts passed a law forcing automakers to allow third parties to access vehicle data that had previously been locked away. Less than a year later in 2021, President Joe Biden signaled support for right to repair when he signed an executive order asking the Federal Trade Commission to consider rules that would make it harder for companies to restrict how people can repair their devices.

Starting point is 00:09:44 Some of the tech industry's biggest players, meanwhile, have spent the last year offering repair programs of their own. Companies including Google, Samsung, HTC, and Microsoft announced partnerships with the popular online repair site, I Fix It to sell parts or tools for some of their devices. Apple, for its part, won't offer all replacement parts for its devices, focusing instead on common problems like cracked screens and malfunctioning batteries or cameras. It's also building diagnostic tools into its purchasing program to help calibrate and authenticate new parts if they're needed. Those diagnostic tools won't be made available unless people buy the parts from Apple, the company said, end quote. Remember when the Apple studio display came out and people noticed that the camera on it was basically crappy?

Starting point is 00:10:31 Apple said at the time it would release a software update to fix all that, and some users have gotten that software update already, applied it, and well, the camera still sucks. Images still seem washed out. Seems the software update didn't really fix much. According to 9 to 5 Mac, that's because this is a problem that can't be fixed with firmware updates. Quoting Philippe Esposito. The update doesn't seem to miraculously improve the quality of the studio displays webcam, and there's a reason for that. It's all about the ultra-wide lens. Apple proudly says that the studio display has a 12-mixel camera,

Starting point is 00:11:08 which should be enough for sharp images. After all, the iPhone and other Apple devices also have 12-migel front-facing cameras, but why is the studio display webcam so different in terms of image quality? While most Apple devices have a regular wide front camera, studio display has an ultra-wide lens. This is because it has Center Stage, a feature that uses machine learning to always center the image on a person during a video call or video recording. Since this camera has no optical zoom, Center Stage digitally crops the image to center the people in the frame. So while an iPhone is capable of taking a real 12-machixel selfie,

Starting point is 00:11:42 center stage cameras capture images at 12 megapixels using the ultra-wide lens and then digitally crop them to look like a regular photo or video. This process results in less sharp images. For instance, my third-generation iPad Air has a 7-megapixel front-facing camera. When I compare it to my iPad Mini 6, which has center stage, the old iPads images look sharper. And that's why the webcam on the iMac or MacBook Pro will always look better than the one on the studio display because they're not ultra-wide. When you're taking a picture or shooting video with a regular webcam, you're taking advantage of every single pixel of it.

Starting point is 00:12:17 Unfortunately, no matter what Apple does in terms of software updates, there's nothing that will dramatically improve the studio display webcam. The only two possible solutions to solve this problem are to use a higher-resolution sensor so that the cropped image is at least 12 megapixels or a larger sensor to capture more light, which would help reduce noise in the image. However, as you may have guessed,

Starting point is 00:12:36 both solutions require a hardware upgrade, which means that owners of the first-generation studio at its play will have to deal with the webcam the way it is, end quote. And finally today, if you've ever wondered why autocorrect seems to fail you all the time every now and then on your iPhone, Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal has a deep dive explanation. First, she wants you to try the experiment of turning off autocorrect briefly on your iPhone. Then try to type. Yeah, you'll see how much autocorrect is already saving your bacon. it corrects more than you know. So why can't it learn some things that it should be able to nail easily?

Starting point is 00:13:20 Quote, perhaps you've seen your phone fill in your intended word as someone's last name or the name of an app on your phone. Here's what's going on. When you type, the autocorrect algorithms are trying to figure out what you mean by looking at various things, including where your fingers landed on the keyboard and the other words in the sentences, while comparing your word fragment to the words in two unseen dictionaries. First, the static dictionary built into iOS, This contains dictionary words and common proper nouns, such as product names or sports teams. There were over 70,000 words in this when the first iPhone launched, and it's gotten bigger since then. Then there's the dynamic dictionary. Built over time as you use your phone, this consists of words that are unique to you. The system looks at your contacts, emails, messages, safari pages, even the names of installed apps.

Starting point is 00:14:04 It's also where new words unique to your vocabulary get logged. By the time you type an unknown word, the software will typically add it to the dynamic dictionary and stopped trying to turn it into something different, said Ken Kossienda, who created the iPhone's autocorrect software. The static dictionary and the dynamic dictionary would be in a little bit of a battle with each other, Mr. Kossienda said. The software is designed to break the tie, he added, but it doesn't always pick what you would pick. What you can do? The surefire way to make sure your phone knows your personal vocabulary is to go to your iPhone into settings, then into general, then keyboard, then text replacement. Now add your words or phrases to

Starting point is 00:14:42 both the phrase and shortcut fields, which will add them to the dynamic dictionary. I have another pet peeve, though, all the grammatical errors autocrect introduces. I frequently see in instead of on, it's instead of its, and wheel instead of well. Over time, Apple's autocrect has become more sophisticated and aggressive, correcting words based on the previous words and a sentence, and even retro-correcting words after you've typed a few more. It does that by using machine learning algorithms that absorb what people have written on the internet. With iOS 15, Apple started using a privacy focus method for training its algorithms using iPhones in the wild without collecting typing data from them. The improvements from this can then be shared in iOS updates, the Apple spokeswoman

Starting point is 00:15:24 said. The autocrect system can be updated frequently with our more casual English, the are you going to love this type of stuff? The bad? Some argue it can pick up our typos and are no good, very bad writing habits. Apple says some of these grammatical errors I mentioned are likely because of my typing. For instance, I might get on instead of in because I and O are neighbors to each other. As for Well and to Wheel, Apple said the software is looking at previous words for context. Mr. Kossianda said if you typed words like Well or Hell, his software wouldn't add the apostrophe because it couldn't tell what you meant. Obviously, this is one of the changes made to autocorrect since his departure. You can download a third-party keyboard from the app

Starting point is 00:16:06 or like Google's Gboard or Microsoft Swift key, though I suggest looking into what data they might collect and share. One option called Typewise has a feature I wish Apple would steal in Autocrrect Undo button. So has Autocrack gotten worse? Part of me, the part that just had to retype part because it was corrected to Pet, says 100% yes. The other part of me thinks the software has just gotten more aggressive. As the machines learned more and helped us type better and faster,

Starting point is 00:16:33 we became lazier typers. We're blissfully oblivious to autocorrect's many fixes, but we do notice the errors. Are some errors dumb? Do they seem avoidable? Especially if the system just did nothing instead? Sure, which is why I think we need more control over the machines. I'd like to see an autocrect aggressiveness dial where I could adjust the level of correction. At the very least, I'd like to disable some of those auto-apostrophes, end quote. That's all for today, but it's been a while since I've done this. Let me just run down the podcast credits.

Starting point is 00:17:12 Reminder that you can rate and review this podcast, anywhere podcasts are rated and reviewed. Maybe do that in order to bury that guy who keeps yelling at me about NFT coverage. You can also watch this show on YouTube on our YouTube channel, but, you know, there's not really video. It's just the audio of the show with a little placeholder sort of image. If you want to subscribe to an ad-free version of this show

Starting point is 00:17:37 and save yourself about an hour every week. Also, you could support my work here directly. You can sign up at tech.comcast.com. My Twitter handle is at Brian MCC. What else? I don't know. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 04/27 – Earnings Quick Hits

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