Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 7/25 - China to Facebook: Not So Fast!

Episode Date: July 25, 2018

Another internal Facebook memo leaks, China tells Facebook “not so fast,” Steam battles Discord, why the iPhone can’t compete in China, and a Y2K bug for the new millennium. Links:Departing Facebook Security Officer's Memo: "We Need To Be Willing To Pick Sides" (BuzzFeed News)China Said to Quickly Withdraw Approval for New Facebook Venture (NYTimes)Steam is rolling out its new Discord-like chat features to all users (The Verge)General Motors wants its customers to rent their cars to other people (The Verge)Why the iPhone can’t compete in India (The Verge)Big tech warns of 'Japan's millennium bug' ahead of Akihito's abdication (The Guardian) 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 right home for Wednesday, July 25th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, another internal Facebook memo leaks.

China tells Facebook not so fast. Steam does battle with Discord, why the iPhone can't compete in China, and a Y2K bug for the new millennium. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. BuzzFeed News has gotten its hands on another internal Facebook memo, and the tendency would be to treat this as an inside baseball sort of story, but it's really worth thinking about rather as a peek inside the very real philosophical debates

that are probably going on right now inside of Facebook. As Kara Swisher said on Twitter, quote, you really need to read the whole very thoughtful memo here rather than just the pulled hot quotes that make it look like an internal cat fight. As Alex Stamos is making a much more complex and nuanced point here, that needs to be made, end quote. So to set it up, as Kara says, this is a memo from Facebook's former slash exiting chief security officer Alex Stamos

from March shortly after it came out that he was leaving Facebook. The Cambridge Analytica scandal was in full frenzy, and many were speculating that Stamos was leaving because he did not agree with how management was dealing with the controversy. In the memo, Stamos assures his colleagues he did not quit the company, in a fit of peak, but he does acknowledge the elephant in the room, which was the scandal. Quote, the world has changed from underneath us in many ways, he writes. But then he goes on to give a brutally honest assessment of the position Facebook was in,

as it suddenly, as he put it, was thrust into the struggle between nation states. He argued that a bottom-up change in Facebook's culture would be required to regain users' trust and that the problems the company was facing came from, quote, tens of thousands of small decisions made over the last decade. end quote. Quoting from further down in the memo, we need to change the metrics we measure and the goals we shoot for.

We need to adjust PSC to reward not shipping when that is the wiser decision. We need to think adversarily in every process, product, and engineering decision we make. We need to build a user experience that conveys honesty and respect, not one optimized to get people to click yes to giving us more access.

We need to intentionally not collect data where possible, and to keep it only as long as we are using it to serve people. We need to find and stop adversaries who are copying the playbook they saw in 2016. We need to listen to people, including internally when they tell us a feature is creepy, or point out a negative impact we are having in the world. We need to deprioritize short-term growth and revenue and explain to Wall Street why that is okay. We need to be willing to pick sides when there are clear, moral, or humanity. issues. And we need to be open, honest, and transparent about challenges and what we are doing

to fix them, end quote. In the context of the memo, Stamos indicated that he felt these changes in culture were already well on their way to being recognized among Facebook's leadership. And so essence, the memo was an effort to urge everyone to get on board. Still, many are reading his list of directives about moving away from growth at all costs as sort of sub-examined. As sort of tweets of possibly CEO Mark Zuckerberg and especially Facebook executive Andrew Bosworth, whose maximalist growth memo was previously leaked by BuzzFeed and which Bosworth partially walked back subsequently. The BuzzFeed piece by Ryan Mack and Charlie Wurzel ends by saying, quote, Stamos's

impassioned rhetoric and laundry list of problems Facebook needs to tackle make his departure at this crucial moment in the company's history all the more remarkable. For some familiar with the company's current culture, there is concern that Facebook is losing a voice of reason at just the wrong time, end quote. In a slightly related story, Collins Stretch, Facebook's top lawyer who led the company's investigation into Russian election interference following the 2016 presidential election and testified before Congress about this very thing is also reported to be leaving the company at the end of the year. Stretch was key, apparently, in crafting Facebook's legal response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Speaking of Facebook, this happened so fast that I didn't even get a chance to tell you about it. Just yesterday, Reuters was reporting that Facebook was setting up a subsidiary in China to create a, quote, innovation hub to support local startups and developers. The subsidiary would be a first for Facebook to have a company-owned interoperative.

enterprise inside a country where its main website and business remain banned. The subsidiary was registered to be in Hangzhou, where Chinese tech giant Alibaba is located. Well, not so fast. The reports of the subsidiary being approved were based on Facebook's registration showing up in a Chinese government database, indicating that Facebook had gained the necessary bureaucratic approval for this enterprise. Then, the listing, in the database mysteriously disappeared, and according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke to the New York Times, the approval of Facebook's new Chinese initiative has now officially been withdrawn by the Chinese government. What does this all mean? Well, the Times notes that it can

probably highlight how difficult it can be for any Western tech giant to even get a toehold in China, but also, quote, the kerfuffle illustrates how complicated China's bureaucracy can be, foreign companies seeking to expand here must navigate a vast and decentralized government in which provinces, cities, and ministries all vie for influence and power. While one part of the government may be happy to support a foreign company like Facebook, that could ruffle feathers elsewhere. Facebook seems to have fallen victim to just such a scenario. If you're not familiar with Discord, then you're probably not a PC gamer.

Discord is a popular chat app slash social networking hybrid that has been embraced by hardcore gamers and attended communities to the tune of 130 million users. In the world of multiplayer games of all stripes, you sometimes need to coordinate your team gameplay, and Discord began as a way to do that, but it has evolved into a general purpose gaming social network in a broader sense. Well, even if you weren't aware of Discord, I can assure you that gaming platform Steam was, and in response to Discord's popularity, Steam is rolling out new, text and voice features that it's calling Steam chat in order to prevent Discord from basically

stealing its thunder. Quote, previously, Steam was invaluable not only because of its storefront, but because it facilitated social connections between players. So said Super Data Research Manager Carter Rogers to Variety back in June, but now Discord is where gamers' main friends list live, not Steam, end quote. The problem for Steam is, is that if Discord continues to be this popular, It could basically by default have a ready-made distribution platform for games that could rival Steams that Discord could turn on whenever they wanted. Thus, Steam's new features described by the Verge thusly, quote,

the new updates are mainly around design and chat versatility. Now you can share GIFs and rich social and video links with friends in Steam chat. Sort friends by favorites, group your friends by game and by party, and maintain more fully featured group chats that are designed more like Discord servers. SteamChat also now offers built-in voice chat with many of the same perks like channels and link inviting that you get with Discord, end quote. When your commerce platform is threatened because somebody else launched a better chat app, disruption is a hell of a thing. Let's do something of a quick check-in with automotive tech here. Uber has announced that it has officially hit the milestone of completing 10,000.

billion trips across both rides and deliveries on June 10th just last month. This comes roughly a year after Uber surpassed the 5 billion trip milestone. Uber's main competitor Lyft as comparison passed the half billion trip milestone last October. Ford has announced yesterday that it is creating a separate $4 billion unit to house its self-driving vehicle initiative. This follows a similar move by General Moon. Motors, which spun off its cruise automation unit, and which attracted a $2.25 billion investment from Masayoshi Son's SoftBank Group by doing so. According to Reuters, Ford has had its own discussions with potential investors in its newly spun-off unit, but no announcements have yet

been made. And speaking of General Motors, GM has launched a peer-to-peer car sharing service called peer cars. If you live in Chicago, Detroit, or Ann Arbor, and you own or lease certain models of GM vehicles, you can now rent your vehicle out to others using GM's Maven platform. To qualify to do this, the vehicle has to be a GM model year 2015 or newer. Even though you own the car, if you choose to rent it out, the service will be insured by GM. As it previously existed, Maven was essentially a car rental service

by any other name that offered vehicles owned by GM itself that you could rent for up to 28 days. But now vehicle owners themselves, can earn extra cash by renting out their cars and trucks when they're not using them, a sort of Airbnb for vehicles, if you will. According to The Verge, Maven recommends charging $7.25 an hour and $80 a day for Chevy Cruises, $1450 an hour and $145 a day for GMC Cierras, and $225 a day for Chevy Camaros.

Maven is also offering a $150 monthly bonus to those users who list their vehicles for 50% of month after the first three months, end quote. Finally, and this is just a rumor, but it's something that people have been asking for for a while now. The Verge is also reporting that Lyft is considering a, quote, Zen mode that would allow you to alert drivers to the fact that maybe you don't feel like chatting with them at the moment. Quote, we have thought about it, Taggart-Mathieson told Casey Newton on his Converge podcast. Mathiasen is head of product for autonomous driving for Lyft. Quote, I think it's interesting.

At some point, we may play around with that idea, but it's unfortunately not a feature at this point. And another interesting piece from the virtual pages of The Verge. You might know that Apple has had some success with the iPhone in China. It's not the most popular smartphone in China by any means, but any success in a market so large can be considered considerable success. But darn it all, Apple seemingly can't get any love for the iPhone in India, which is another enormous market, obviously.

Apple reportedly shipped fewer than one million iPhones in India in the first half of this year, which represents less than 2% of the 60 million or so smartphones shipped in India so far this year. Samsung, in comparison, shipped 17.4 million smartphones and Jami 19 million over the same period. And it's even worse when you consider that iPhone shipments actually seem to be declassed. Apple shipped as many as 3.2 million iPhones in India last year, so unless things really pick up with the release of new iPhones later this year, they're going to have a hard time surpassing last year's number. So what gives with the iPhone in India? Kunal Dua is the editor-in-chief of Gadgets 360, and writing in The Verge, he says that, yes, price is the big issue. Like in most markets, Apple is at the absolute high end, but Indian consumers seem to be.

particularly price sensitive. In order to combat this, Apple actually quietly relaunched the six-year-old iPhone 6 in India recently, and the iPhone 6 is currently the most popular iPhone in the country. Apple has also started assembling some iPhones in India to get around the so-called make-in-India import duties and to help make the pricing more competitive. But another headwind that Apple faces in India might surprise you. Feature phones. feature phones have never really gone away in India.

They hold 50% of the Indian market to this day, shipping 56 million units in Q4 of last year, and the feature phone market is actually growing, while smartphone sales remain flat. Dua concludes his piece by noting that volume is not the only strategy Apple can pursue in India. It could help matters by moving more manufacturing to India to become more price competitive, but that's a chicken and the egg sort of thing. Would Apple want to make a commitment like that until the market is there to justify it? Perhaps the way forward is to focus on building its brand

and waiting for the expected explosion in the Indian middle class to catch up. As Tim Cook said, when he visited India in 2016, Apple is committed to having a presence in the country for, quote, a thousand years. Finally today, remember the Y2K bug when everyone feared the world could come to a grinding halt just because the year 2000 was coming and computers weren't programmed to handle years with more than two digits.

Well, that isn't quite just so much 90s nostalgia if you work in technology in Japan. Here's the problem. On April 30th of next year, Emperor Akehito of Japan is scheduled to abdicate his throne in favor of his son, Nairohito. Akehito has been emperor since 1989, so basically the entire web and modern internet era. But the way it works in Japan is that the calendar counts up from the coronation of each new emperor. And not only that, but the calendar marks the era that that emperor represents. So Akehito represents the Haishai era and the Shoa era of Emperor Hirohito preceded him. Sorry if I butcher any of those words and names, by the way.

So, okay, computing systems will have to account for a new calendar counting up from the coronation of a new emperor for the first time since the Internet basically went mainstream. That's a bit of work, but not a big deal, right? Everybody knows the change is coming, and there's time to prepare. But here's the problem. The official name for Naruhito's upcoming era has not yet been announced. So you can't even begin to start programming the calendar updates because you don't know the name of the era. This is a problem for software developers. Microsoft just released a software update in April to help developers,

but also for international standards bodies. Quote, a much harder problem faces Unicode, the International Standards Organization, which most famously controls the introduction of new emojis to the world. Since Japanese computers use one character to represent the entire era name, Unicode needs to set the standard for that new character now, but it can't do that until it knows what it's called, and it won't know that until late February at best.

Unfortunately, version 12 of Unicode is due to come out in early March, which means it needs to be finished before then and can't be delayed, end quote. For other systems, a possible solution might already be obvious. Just do nothing. Ignore the change completely. Many older computers and networking systems in Japan, those from the 80s or earlier, have simply never been updated. So they still think the year is Shawa 93, even though that era ended. with the last emperor 17 or so years ago. So, for example, in May, Japan's national tax agency announced

it was thinking about continuing the high-sci dates after the switchover, merely to avoid confusion in tax payments. Hey guys, I went a full day without my screen going blank today. I think I've figured out a specific series of steps that allows me to unplug the external monitor without everything going bad, sort of like the so-called golden path that Steve Jobs used to demo the first iPhone and keep it from crashing on stage.

But I'd better not push my luck, of course, so that's all for today. I've been Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. And I'll talk at you again tomorrow.