Google employees could face layoffs in the near future if recent remarks by CEO Sundar Pichai are any indication.
Like other companies, Google has been adapting to a changing economy. The company has already scaled back hiring and taken other measures to improve efficiency, including Pichai asking employees to be more productive and look for ways to “stay entrepreneurial.”
According to CNBC, Pichai is shedding light on some of the challenges Google is facing, as well as some of the possible solutions.
“The more we try to understand the macroeconomic, we feel very uncertain about it,” Pichai said Tuesday at the Code Conference in Los Angeles. “The macroeconomic performance is correlated to ad spend, consumer spend and so on,” he added.
“We want to make sure as a company, when you have fewer resources than before, you are prioritizing all the right things to be working on and your employees are really productive that they can actually have impact on the things they’re working on so that’s what we are spending our time on.”
When pressed for specifics by host Kara Swisher, Pichai seemed to take aim at Google’s growing bureaucracy, which has been blamed for slower decision-making.
“Across everything we do, we can be slower to make decisions,” Pichai. “You look at it end-to-end and figure out how to make the company 20% more productive.”
“Sometimes there are areas to make progress [where] you have three people making decisions, understanding that and bringing it down to two or one improves efficiency by 20%,” he added.
Pichai’s response is one of the strongest indications yet that Google may join other Big Tech companies in laying off workers.
Mark Cuban believes his company can take on Amazon in the burgeoning online pharmaceutical market.
Amazon has its own Prime Pharmacy services, giving users discounted prices for subscription drugs. The company has had mixed results, with a recent survey showing Prime Pharmacy is one of the least important services to customers. Nonetheless, the company is continuing to expand, eyeing a potential entry into the Japanese market.
Despite Amazon being the 800-lb gorilla in the market, entrepreneur Mark Cuban believes he has the winning formula to compete with the e-commerce giant. Cuban launched his own Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs Co. earlier this year, competing in the same space as Amazon. Despite the overlap, Cuban told Kara Swisher his secret for success, according to GeekWire:
“I look at Amazon and say, their margin is my opportunity,” Cuban said.
Cuban expounded on what he meant when Swisher asked his opinion on Amazon’s plan to purchase One Medical for $3.9 billion.
“They’re a big company, and in health care, particularly with medications, it’s hard to be lean and mean,” Cuban said. “And that’s what we are.”
Amazon has a track record of dominating in the fields it enters, from e-commerce to cloud computing. That being said, if there’s anyone who can give the company a run for its money, it just may be Mark Cuban.
“We have a pretty significant market segment leadership position in this infrastructure cloud computing space,” says AWS CEO Andy Jassy. “There are a few reasons for it. The first is we just have much more functionality by a large amount than anybody else. We are also iterating at a faster clip. When you actually look at the details that gap in functionality is widening.”
In My Wildest Dreams, I Never Imagined a 6-Year Head Start
We were trying just to get to launch (2006) without our friends across the lake (Microsoft) knowing about it. At that time Amazon was not known as a technology provider to companies. We felt it was really important for us to be first to market to have a chance to be successful. I was hoping we could just get to launch without anybody else knowing and beating us to the market. In my wildest dreams, of the many surprises we had, I never imagined we would have a six-year head start. I don’t know exactly why others didn’t follow. I think for some of the older guard technology companies our model was very disruptive to their existing businesses. It’s really hard to cannibalize yourself.
I think they kind of wished it away (Oracle, IBM, etc.). It’s hard when you have an existing business that’s working it’s hard to cannibalize it with a product with a much lower margin. I think that some of the other players probably were distracted by some of the other things they were working on. Then their initial attempt at the business turned out to be the wrong abstraction. It turned out to be a higher abstraction when builders really wanted the individual building blocks to construct and stitch together however they saw fit.
We Are Iterating At a Faster Clip
We have a pretty significant market segment leadership position in this infrastructure cloud computing space. There are a few reasons for it. The first is we just have much more functionality by a large amount than anybody else. We are also iterating at a faster clip. When you actually look at the details that gap in functionality is widening. That turns out to really matter if you’re an enterprise or a government who is going to move all their applications to the cloud. Or if you want to be able to unleash your builders to build anything they can imagine.
The second thing is we just have a much larger ecosystem of partners around our platform. It’s not just the thousands of systems integrators who build practices on AWS. Most ISVs and SAAS providers will adapt their software to work on one technology infrastructure platform, few will do two and hardly any will do three. They all start on AWS just because of our leadership position. You get to move to the cloud with a lot more of the software that you want to use.
The third thing that is pretty different is that we’re just at a different operating maturity than these other providers having been at six years longer. It turns out it’s really different running large scale infrastructure for yourself and your company where you get to tell everybody the way it’s going to be it is for running it for millions of external customers with every imaginal use case all over the world where they get to use you without any warning. It just forces a different kind of operating discipline and rigor. You can see that borne out in the operational performance.
Microsoft Is the Clear Number Two Player Right Now
We are pretty early in this space right now. It the infrastructure technology space I don’t think there are going to be 25 winners because scale really matters. But there’s not going to be just one. The market segments that we address in infrastructure software, hardware, and data center services globally is trillions of dollars ultimately. There are going to be several successful players. I do believe that Microsoft will have a business there. They are building the business and they are the clear number two player at this point. I think there will be other players who are successful as well. As for Google, I think they are working at it.
In all of our businesses, there are startups that none of us know about today that have the ability to disrupt. If you think the technology changes in the last ten years have been disruptive, and I think they have been unbelievably dynamic, I think the next ten years is going to be faster than the last ten. There are all kinds of new technology that will evolve that will give people a chance to build businesses and pursue various segments. I don’t know exactly who they will be in our space, but I’m confident there will be.
We Are Iterating At a Faster Clip, Says Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy
Should tech companies be hiring Chief Ethics Officers in order to get better at self-examination? That’s the question posed by Kara Swisher, internet pioneer and Recode editor at large, in a New York Times column today. “I think we can all agree that Silicon Valley needs more adult supervision right about now,” Swisher wrote. “Is the solution for its companies to hire a chief ethics officer?”
Kara Swisher discussed the idea of tech companies hiring Ethics Officers in an interview on CNBC (Watch Below):
Tech Companies Have Faced Many Ethics Challenges
All these companies have faced one thing after another. Whether it’s Google in China or Google with the hack that they didn’t disclose for six months or its Facebook with so many things. I mean the elections, the issues around fake news, the issues around bots, the issues around the Russians, and everything. Then there’s Twitter with Alex Jones and things like that.
Swisher Proposes Idea of Hiring Chief Ethics Officers
These are issues that are hitting tech and that leaves out automation and robotics and all these other issues that are societally impactful. In academics, there’s a lot of people studying this stuff. There’s a bunch of AI ethics people. There are all kinds of people actually studying these issues and the impact of social media, especially on our society.
In a previous New York Times column, I talked about the weaponization of everything, that these things amplify and weaponize things, and the people who are running these companies are ill-prepared to understand the impact of what they’ve created. I would like them to have people around them that will allow them to think about that. You could do this for Wall Street, you could do this for the defense industry, you could do this for a lot.
Mark Zuckerberg Was Ill-Prepared to Deal with the Impacts
These are people who say they’re changing the world and always touting themselves as the better thing, when in fact a lot of their inventions are very damaging to society. Think about someone like Mark Zuckerberg who didn’t complete college, never took a humanities course, has not been schooled in this.
I know he’s been trying to learn a lot of things since then, but here’s one person who has complete control over this company who is ill-prepared to deal with some of the impacts.
Tech Execs Don’t Reflect at Anything They Do
I think they don’t think about it at all. They’re so non-self reflective it’s a miracle they can see in the mirrors in Silicon Valley, they’re like vampires. They don’t reflect at anything they do.
I had a really interesting interview with the woman who was a lawyer for Google and Twitter in the early days and she explained how you create the pillars of your creation. If you put things around virality you’re gonna get fake news. If you put it around relevance and truthfulness you get a different outcome. They’ve been designing for speed and virality and it moves into the things, the problems we have.
Tech Companies Are Causing Damage All Over the World
What you have to do is you have to figure out when you’re designing these companies the possible implications. That’s why I say, there’s not gonna be a Chief Ethics Officer, they don’t want anyone to slow the breaks and this is someone who would slow the breaks and say maybe we should pay more, maybe we should have human moderators, what’s going on here in Myanmar, what about India?
They have to start considering these because they’re causing damage all over the world and these technologies have massive impact and in the future are going to have even more so.
More Yahoo sports-themed-codenamed project news from Kara Swisher…
Professional Yahoo internal chatter sharer and memo leaker Swisher, of Re/code, recently reported that Yahoo has a couple projects codenamed “Fast Break” and “Curve Ball,” which are designed to help wean Yahoo off of its Microsoft partnership. Now, she’s reporting that there’s another (apparently non-search related) project in the works called Touchdown:
Apparently many months in the making, Yahoo apps — as well as third-party ones — would be published on the highly trafficked site, in an effort helmed by Mike Kerns, SVP of homepage and verticals.
I am not clear whether that makes Touchdown a kind of app discovery service or an Apple iTunes or Google Play type of destination. But the concept is that a lot of people go through the site daily and it’s found money to take advantage of the valuable digital real estate.
Yahoo’s homepage gets a ton of traffic for sure. Until recently, Yahoo had a live counter of pageviews on the page for any given day. It was not uncommon to see something like 40 million by 8:30 in the morning. The page only redirects to the company’s advertising page now.
Either way, the homepage is a major property for Yahoo, and it’s no shock that it is looking for ways to get more out of it.
Back in September, The Wall Street Journal and its tech site All Things D announced that they were parting ways, and now with the new year, we get to see both the new Wall Street Journal tech section and the new All Things D.
The new All Things D is not actually called All Things D at all, but is a brand new site called Re/code, which operates under a brand new company called Revere Digital, which has launched with backing from NBCUniversal News Group and Windsor Media. Revere Digital will host news sites and apps as well as a series of conferences called Code Conference.
Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg (the two All Things D / re/code leaders) explain the new company, site and conference in a New Year’s blog post.
Re/code brings the same All Things D team along for the ride. This includes: John Paczkowski, Peter Kafka, Ina Fried, Katherine Boehret, Liz Gannes, Lauren Goode, Arik Hesseldahl, Mike Isaac, Bonnie Cha, Jason Del Rey and Eric Johnson.
Swisher and Mossberg write:
Why have we chosen Re/code as the name for our new creation? Simply put: Because everything in tech and media is constantly being refreshed, renewed and reimagined. And this is the reinvention of ourselves.
While we are presenting an improved new face, we promise that, if you liked what we were doing at All Things Digital and the D conferences, you will love what we are now planning for Re/code. We pledge to bring the same energy and standards to our news, reviews and events, with the plus of adding in even more talented staff and resources to the mix.
The first Code Conference will take place from May 27th to May 29th. More events with partner CNBC are planned for “throughout the year”.
The Wall Street Journal website has redesigned its Technology section. You can take a look at that here.
Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal are parting ways with tech blog AllThingsD, which is led by tech journalist heavyweights Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.
Gerard Baker, Editor in Chief of Dow Jones and Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal put out the following statement on the matter:
For years, Dow Jones/The Wall Street Journal has enjoyed working with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher to bring the best of tech coverage to readers around the world under the All Things Digital brand; however, after discussions, both parties have decided not to renew the agreement when the contract expires at the end of this year.
Technology is the central driver of economic growth and the Journal is committed to being the indispensable global source of news and information in this critical area. We plan to embark on a major global expansion of our technology coverage, which will include adding 20 reviewers, bloggers, visual journalists, editors, and reporters covering digital. As part of this global push, we will also be expanding our conference franchise to include an international technology conference and building a new digital home for our first-class technology news and product reviews on The Wall Street Journal Digital Network. This new initiative will be an integral part of The Wall Street Journal and will be rooted in the Journal’s reputation for excellent, fair, objective, reliable and stimulating journalism.
As part of the mutual separation, Walt Mossberg will be leaving the Journal at the end of this year. I want to offer heartfelt thanks for more than twenty years of Personal Technology columns as well as his very fine reporting on national and international affairs in the years before he turned his attention to technology coverage.
Mossberg and Swisher released a joint blog post about the news. The AllThingsD site and Mossberg’s column in the Wall Street Journal will continue through the end of the year.
“Then, starting Jan. 1, 2014, we will still be Web-siting and conference-producing and much more, albeit under a new corporate structure with new partners and investors,” the two write. “While we can’t give any details yet — and there are details — you can assume that this new independent business will be laser-focused on continuing and extending Web journalism and conference journalism with the highest standards. Plus, we will finally be able to have added resources, so we can grow in new and exciting ways, including hiring more journalists and doing much more video.”
Mossberg will continue to write reviews on the new site, and they’ll be adding additional ones from other writers. Swisher will continue to report and grow the team.
A year ago when it was revealed that AOL would be acquiring TechCrunch, a big deal was made about how TechCrunch would continue to operate as it always had, free from editorial oversight by AOL. That would mean TechCrunch could say whatever nasty things it wanted to about AOL and get away with it.
Arrington writes in a fresh post, “As of late last week TechCrunch no longer has editorial independence. Some argue that the circumstances demanded it. I disagree. Editorial independence was never supposed to be an easy thing for Aol to give us. But it was never meaningful if it shatters the first time it is put to the test.”
It does still appear to be editorially independent enough to let air all of this internal turmoil for the masses, including this very post by Arrington, so I guess that’s something.
According to Kara Swisher at All Things D, who has been very vocal about her disdain for the whole mess, says that Arrington has reached out to AOL CEO Tim Armstrong to try and buy TechCrunch back. She says her sources say that he would have to pull together the funding to do so, and that things are currently at a “stalemate”.
In Arrington’s post, he proposes two options to AOL:
1. Reaffirmation of the editorial independence promised at the time of acquisition. Given the current circumstances, that means autonomy from Huffington Post, unfettered editorial independence and a blanket right to editorial self determination. To put it simply, TechCrunch would stay with Aol but would be independent of the Huffington Post.
or
2. Sell TechCrunch back to the original shareholders.
“If Aol cannot accept either of these options, and no other creative solution can be found, I cannot be a part of TechCrunch going forward,” signaling that this could be his last TechCrunch post.
