Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 08/21 - The Bull Case For WeWork

Episode Date: August 21, 2019

Next gen chips from Intel, the real HQ2 for Amazon is in India, the controversy around Apple blocking ad tracking on kids apps is a real case for King Solomon, and Ben Thompson makes a compelling bull case for WeWork. Sponsors: Pixelunion.net Read the Blog Post from BRD: Here Links: Intel Launches Comet Lake-U and Comet Lake-Y: Up To 6 Cores for Thin & Light Laptops (AnandTech) Dell unveils new XPS, Inspiron, and Vostro models with Intel Comet Lake processors (VentureBeat) Exclusive: Alibaba postpones up to $15 billion Hong Kong listing amid protests: sources (Reuters) Amazon opens its biggest global campus in India (Reuters) Gmail in G Suite now uses AI for inline spelling and grammar suggestions (VentureBeat) Shazam data is powering Apple Music's newest chart, the Shazam Discovery Top 25 (TechCrunch) Apple aims to protect kids’ privacy. App makers say it could devastate their businesses. (The Washington Post) The WeWork IPO (Stratechery) Classified: The Merge Conflict podcast is a weekly discussion with developers Frank and James on all things development, technology, & more. After years of being friends, Frank and James finally decided to sit down and start a podcast about their lives as mobile developers using Xamarin. Much more than just another mobile development podcast, Merge Conflict, reaches all areas of development including desktop, server, and of course mobile. They also cover fun things happening in the world of technology and gaming and whatever else happens to be on their minds. Head to mergeconflict.fm to learn more or search Merge Conflict in your favorite podcast app today to subscribe.   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 Wednesday, August 21st, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Next-gen chips from Intel.

The real HQ2 for Amazon? It turns out it's in India. The controversy around Apple blocking ad tracking on kids' apps is a real case for King Solomon. And Ben Thompson makes a compelling bull... Intel has unveiled the second half of its 10th-gen CPU product lineup based on the Skylake CPU architecture and 14 nanometer process. The new chips are called Comet Lake, and these bad boys are designed for thin and light laptops.

Of course, I always trust anandtech to give me the straight skinny on news like this, so quoting them. With up to six cores for the U-Series parts and four cores for the Y series, Intel is looking to further push the envelope on multi-threaded performance in a thin and light laptop. The new parts will fill out in the new parts will fill out in the series. Intel's traditional U and Y families of processors, the Comet Lake will be sharing the 10-gen Core Mantle with Intel's 10-nanmeter ice lake parts, with OEMs pulling from both product families for their ultra-portable laptops this holiday season.

Overall, the launch of Comet Lake comes at a tricky time for Intel. The company is still trying to write itself from the fumble development of its 10-nanometer process node. While Intel finally has 10-nanometer production increasingly back on track, The company is not yet in a position to completely shift its production of leading generation processors to 10 nanometers. As a result, Intel's low-power processors for this generation are going to be a mix of both 14 nanometer parts based on their venerable Skylake architecture, as well as 10-nanometer ice lake parts incorporating Intel's new Sunnycove CPU architecture with the 14-nanometer comet lake parts, filling in the gaps that Ice Lake alone can't meet, end quote.

But you're not going to have to wait long to see these new chips in new computers out in the wild because today Dell unveiled its annual XPS, InSpyron and Vostro Notebook, 2 and 1 and Ultra Portable Line Refreshes. All of these new machines will be featuring the new Comet Lake core processors. We're expanding our consumer portfolio with brand new form factors and the addition of new processors to our current XPS and Inspiron portfolio, delivering performance gains needed for, compute-intensive, demanding multi-thread workloads while still handling 4K content efficiently. Dell Senior Vice President Ray Way said in a blog post. And in doing so, we're giving our customers heavyweight performance in thin, light, and portable designs, the best of both worlds, end quote. More Hong Kong fallout spilling into the world of tech. Reuters is reporting that Alibaba has delayed its estimated $15 billion stock listing on the Hong Kong stock market,

which was set to launch this week or next because of the ongoing political unrest in Hong Kong. Quote, the delay was due to the lack of financial and political stability in Hong Kong, the people added, following more than 11 weeks of frequently violent pro-democracy demonstrations, which have plunged the city into turmoil. Hong Kong's benchmark Hangseng Index fell to seven-month lows last week. Quote, it would be very unwise to launch the deal now or anytime soon, the first person said. would certainly annoy Beijing by offering Hong Kong such a big gift, given what's going on in the city, the source added, end quote. Also from Reuters, so much for HQ2, sorry Queens, Amazon says

that it is opening an office in Hyderabad, India, which will house over 15,000 employees, making it the biggest Amazon campus anywhere in the world. The campus will be on nine and a half acres and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Amazon, it turns out, already has 62,000 employees in India. And quote, India is considered the last major growth market for the e-commerce giant, but it faces increasing competition from local players. Founder Jeff Bezos has committed an investment of over $5 billion for India operations as the company seeks to fend off competition from Walmart's e-commerce unit FlipCart. Amazon started operations. in India in 2004 from Hyderabad, but it launched its retail operations only in 2013.

The company has since added video streaming and grocery delivery services under its prime offerings and is also working on a restaurant food delivery service, end quote. You might have noticed some changes in Gmail today because Google says it has begun rolling out AI-powered real-time spelling and grammar check features on Gmail for all G-suite users. Also, for your run-of-the-mill common spelling mistakes, it is now also adding as you type auto correction. Quoting Venture Beat, the inline grammar suggestions are a carryover from Google Docs, which gained them back in February 2019. Squiggly blue lines appear under erroneous phrases as you write them, and right-clicking on them accepts or dismisses the corrections. The Mountain View Company says its engine can handle basic cases like Affect versus E-Fect, and B.

there versus there in addition to more complicated rules like how to use prepositions correctly or to pick the right verb tense, end quote. There's a new music chart to keep an eye on. Apple Music has launched the Shazam Discovery Top 50, powered by Shazam data and featuring songs trending in the U.S. and more than 10 other countries. If you'll recall, Apple acquired the Shazam Music Recognition app in 2018 for $400 million. Shazam has been downloaded over a billion times and apparently gets 20 million

Shazams a day. And I missed this, but earlier this month, Apple launched its Music for Artists' dashboard that incorporates Shazam data, quoting Sarah Perez in TechCrunch. This is a different sort of metric than a traditional music chart would use, as it's not a reference to how many downloads, purchases, or streams a song has. Instead, it lends itself more to insights about up-and-com. coming artists. That said, the chart may include a variety of songs at different points in their life cycle. The majority may be emerging artists, but some songs may be experiencing a burst of momentum for other reasons. To rank on the chart, the song could be demonstrating a pattern of moving quickly through Shazam's charts, rapid growth, steady growth, or it may be growing geographically,

the company says, or all of the above, end quote. More great long reads suggestions from BRD.com. With thousands of crypto projects out there, it can be overwhelming just to wrap your mind around the space. Where do you begin? Luckily, BRD has an excellent post which breaks down the different types of cryptos and lays a foundation for your future research. Essentially, there are three main categories, projects that are solely targeting a currency use case to offer the best form of digital cash possible.

Bitcoin is one example of this. Then there are projects that are aiming to be the foundation for a Web 3.3.3.2.2.2 which is a network of applications like the internet, but in this case, decentralized. Ethereum is an example of that. Finally, the third level are the decentralized applications or DAPs themselves, which generally have tokens associated with them. A DAP can be anything such as a Flappy Bird-type game or more serious banking and financial apps. The difference is that instead of these apps needing to be approved by an app store,

they're hosted on these blockchain networks and accessible globally to anyone. Crypto does have a steep learning curve, but BRD.com is one of the best resources out there. So check out this post, Understanding Crypto from BRD.com. Link in the show notes. Apple is delaying its plans to limit third-party tracking and ads in kids apps. Apple had planned to implement changes that would have curtailed ad tracking in September, but a bunch of app developers said that the changes would decimate their business. quoting the Washington Post.

Under the new rules which Apple had planned to implement next month, kids' apps on Apple's App Store will be banned from using external analytics software, invisible lines of code that collect extremely detailed information about who is using an app and how. Apple is also severely curtailing their ability to sell ads, which underpins the business model that results in many apps being free. The changes were prompted in part by some children viewing inappropriate ads, Apple says. The new rules pit Apple's privacy prerogative against an overreach of its power. Apple says it is making the move, in part, to better protect users' privacy by shielding children from data trackers,

a move that has been lauded by some privacy advocates, but some developers say they fear that the new rules won't protect kids, possibly exposing them to more adult apps, and could pointlessly reduce their businesses, end quote. Yes, to reiterate that exact point, there are two different angles to this story. The first is Apple's platform power in this season of antitrust rumblings. As Reid Albergotti tweeted, One way to gauge the power of Apple is to look at how the company can quietly tweak its rules and upend an entire industry, end quote. About 71% of spending on apps happens in Apple's App Store. Google is only a distant second with 29%.

Here's a quote from the article. Apple would definitely throw its weight around less if it knew all. all its developers could desert it for any number of alternatives, said Christopher Sager's, a professor at the Cleveland Marshall College of Law and author of the upcoming book, United States versus Apple, that explores the company's allegedly anti-competitive behavior, end quote. But another lens to view this through is the whole Apple is the privacy company lens. As Dari Obasancho tweeted, a key test of Apple's privacy as a human right stance is if they show the same resolve on anti-tracking tech when it's iPhone developer revenue at risk, not just websites.

Hurting Google ad revenue via Safari is one thing, harming iOS ecosystem, another, end quote. And Peter Green tweeted this. Apple aims to protect kids' privacy. App makers say it could devastate their business. But what does it say about your business model if it's dependent on the violation of children's privacy? End quote. To be clear, these new rules from Apple do not. not ban data collection full stop, just third-party data collection. Developers can still collect their own data, and Apple's own analytics is still just fine, of course. But, quote, critics say Apple is throwing the baby out with the bathwater by banning all external tracking and advertising on children's apps, even when those apps comply with regulations around data

privacy. This will simply kill the kids app category, said Dylan Collins, chief executive of Super Awesome, which helps app developers navigate child privacy laws in several countries. Apple's changes are, quote, easy to perceive as ham-fisted, end quote, and shows Apple doesn't understand how the changes will affect the sector, he said, end quote. So I guess this is the epitome of a 2019 tech story. Is Apple being an unfair monopolist, wrecking markets and businesses on a whim, or is it not doing enough to live up to its self-avowed mission to defend and protect user privacy as a product feature, especially for kids? Finally, today, I do try to balance things as best as I can as far as my conscience will allow.

So, for all of the snark and skepticism of WeWork that we've done on the show recently, it's worth looking at the Bull case for the company. Of course, if anyone was going to write a level-headed take on WeWork, it would be, of course, Ben Thompson in Stretaiccary. It's worth reading Ben's whole piece, no matter what you think of We-Work, And my two cents would be Ben is gamely trying to make a decent case here, although it still feels like a stretch to me. But still, this is frankly the most logical argument I've ever heard for how we work might actually, you know, work. Ben essentially makes the AWS analogy, as he points out,

this is what AWS did, quote, new companies had instant access to entire server stacks for basically free because payments tracked usage, which for new companies is zero. Growing companies did not need to obtain funding for or spend the time on extensive buildouts, months or years ahead of future growth. Instead, they could pay for new capabilities as they needed them. Established companies no longer needed to have a competency in managing server installations and could instead focus on their core competencies while outsourcing to cloud providers. In all three cases, the fundamental shift brought about by AWS was from servers as capital investment to variable costs. The benefits were less about saving dollars and cents and more

about increasing flexibility and optionality. At least, that is to start. Today, AWS has offerings that extend far beyond basic compute and storage to capabilities like serverless, which paradoxically requires owning a huge number of always available servers that are uniquely possible because of AWS's scale, end quote. So, in essence, what Ben is saying, is just plug real estate into any of the value propositions above. His bullcase for WeWork is that it has the potential of turning the fixed cost of real estate into a variable cost that mirrors the advantages of a public cloud. AWS spreads the cost of data centers around the world so that putting your infrastructure on AWS costs way less than doing it on your own. Similarly,

with WeWork, startups get to ramp up space when and how and where their needs ramp up. Companies can expand quickly around the world with essentially turnkey office solutions and no more signing leases years ahead of time. Now it's month to month, year to year as you need. Quoting again, given this vision, WeWorks' massive losses are, at least in theory, justifiable. The implication of creating a company that absorbs all of the fixed costs in order to offer a variable cost service to other companies is massive amounts of upfront investment. Just as Amazon needs, needed to build out data centers and buy servers before it could sell storage and compute,

WeWork needs to build out office spaces before it can sell desktops or conference rooms. In other words, it would be strange if WeWork were not losing lots of money, particularly given its expansion rate, end quote. Two more things that Ben points out, which I found interesting. If you do buy the premise that WeWork could replace all office real estate, then they've only realized 0.2% of their total market opportunity globally. If you bought that, then you might be close to justifying the company's valuation. And essentially, WeWork has no competition. I know there's IWG and Regis, but think about it. There really is no lift to WeWork's Uber.

If WeWork is right about this market opportunity, it essentially has this market to itself. Of course, that lack of competitors might actually be the most damning thing to point out. Because there could be another reason why no one is attempting to do what we work is trying to do. Maybe no one else thinks that it's going to work. I'm going to leave you today with a new classified ad from a listener. As always, if you too want to post a classified ad for other listeners, go to ridehome.com. slash classifieds.

The Merge Conflict podcast is a weekly discussion with developers Frank and James on all things, development, technology, and more. After years of being friends, Frank and James finally decided to sit down and start a podcast about their lives as mobile developers using Jamarin. Much more than just another mobile development podcast, Merge Conflict reaches all areas of development, including desktop, server, and, of course, mobile. They also cover fun things happening in the world of technology and gaming and whatever else happens to be on their minds. Head to Mergeconflict.fm to learn more or just, of course, search Merge Conflict.

In your favorite podcast app today and subscribe.