🔭 Apple Remains the Infinite Player

I will forever remember this Economics 101 class in CEGEP (Quebec's pre-university college). Young adults were asking in unison the teacher about Wal-Mart's utter dominance. It was like the Waltons had built the Death Star and 40 students were looking for a new hope. The poor economist tried to explain how K-Mart could give them a run for their money while the Marxists were plotting how governments could force Wal-Mart to get split apart. I recall being more worried about whether the pretty girl in the front row liked me than about Wal-Mart.

It was before Amazon became the biggest company in mankind's history, mind you. Giants fall. Markets change. The companies we feel are invincible end up getting disrupted by innovation nobody predicted.

Can you believe on July 29th, 2020, the US Congress summoned the CEOs of Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook, over antitrust concerns, with the same desperation my fellows had back in the mid-200s? Two years later, nobody in their right mind can suggest Google and Facebook are these impenetrable monopolies. All it took to bring them down a peg was a platform of silly videos and asking users how they felt about being tracked online.

⏰ TikTok's Rise and Apple's ATT have been Wake-Up Calls

2022's biggest story has to be the rise of TikTok. The video-sharing app drains both YouTube and Instagram young users, to the point it now has become #1 in that demo. I reported on the phenomenon back in July. Sure, YouTube's number overall trumps TikTok, but observers underestimate how damaging it is for a brand to become the not-cool thing.

Meanwhile, Apple's new "ask not to track" feature reportedly diminished the opt-in of users to 24%, costing Meta and Google billions in ad revenue. Yes, this was a Machiavellian move by Apple to build its own ad empire from within its first-party ecosystem, disguised as privacy-centricity. Though Apple did not force 76% of users to opt-out!

Google and Meta's CEOs made public outcries about employees coasting, lack of efficiency, and bureaucracy. Something's rotten in the kingdom of Sundar and Mark.

📹Meta's Desperate Moves

Meta's stock fell 60 percent in the past year. Sings of the turmoil: Offers to interns were rescinded. Headcounts will diminish. Zuckerberg is betting the farm on his virtual reality-powered "metaverse". A new investigation from the Ney York Times sheds light on the astronomic failures of the nascent metaverse.

The story describes how employees struggle to embrace the product strategy, to a point of referring to projects as "MMH" ("make Mark happy"). Its flagship game, Horizon Worlds, barely welcomes 300,000 active users. Worse, despite the CEO being adamant to hold company meetings within the VR environment ("Horizon Workrooms"), employees end up on Zoom meetings... Talk about a horrific outlook! I am not privy to Meta's internal politics, but somebody has got to say the King is Naked - Meta's augmented reality and virtual reality divisions sunk $10 billion last year!

As of publishing this, Meta just announced its new generation of VR headsets and a partnership with Microsoft for a Teams integration, and I couldn't be less excited. Nothing feels organic in Meta's approach. TechCrunch's review of Zuckerberg's desperate attempts at making VR a thing during Meta's VR conference confirms it. What problems are they solving? Avatars for office meetings are weird!

Speaking of getting out of touch, I'm looking at Google as well...

🥸 Google Mimicking Apple

Last week, I covered Google's new image-driven search interface. I noted my disappointment over Google's "self-absorbed" design: Google bringing in more Google services instead of being your portal to the internet.

Recent announcements reveal the long game might be Google's attempts to become another Apple. The new Pixel watch looks astonishingly like the Apple Watch. The FitBit (purchased by Google) will require a Google account starting in 2023. But Google is not Apple.

Apple's core business is design-first high-end products integrated into a user-experience-driven ecosystem. Google's core business is advertising. Chrome, the world's most popular browser, will limit ad blockers' reach with updates to its extension platform. So you get slightly fewer cool devices collecting data about you from a company starving for user data...

💔And The Failure of Google Stadia

Worse, Stadia, Google's cloud video gaming platform, will shut down. Observers were not surprised. Stadia suffered from a long string of growing pains at Google around engineering-driven design (instead of user-led). I urge you to read the thread below about the infamous failure of Google Glasses. I feel Google is driving itself into another wall at full speed with its wearables.

💸 Apple's Bids for Augmented Reality

What is Apple doing? There is this great Simon Sinek talk about Apple being an infinite player. He tells the story of showing an Apple executive with Microsoft's new Zune tablet, which was objectively a superior piece of hardware versus the iPod touch. How did the Apple leader react? "I have no doubt it is better". End of conversation. The Zune fizzled out.

Apple is an infinite player. It is not obsessed with its competition, it is obsessed with where they're going, and why they do what they do.

So when I hear Tim Cook say "not too long from now if you look back at a point in time, [...], you'll wonder how you led your life without augmented reality", I listen, despite my skepticism of AR's potential due to "people hate to wear stupid stuff on their heads in public".

If somebody can make a VR headset look cool, it's Apple. Google and Meta will keep chasing the infinite player.  

🥊 Quick Hits

• Cryptocurrency trading service Binance was hacked. The blockchains themselves remained untouched, but the "bridges" that support transactions did. It reminds me of HTTPS: the algorithm is secure, and the vulnerabilities are in the implementations.
• Cybersecurity accounts for 25% of AI Software Market. Teams remain overwhelmed by false positives and cybersecurity vendors keep stirring up the hype.
• Dutch Court rules that forcing employees to turn on their webcam is a human rights violation. U.-S. businesses have been integrating more and more spyware on remote employees' computers. Hopefully, other jurisdictions follow suit.
• Dance Diffusion, an AI music generator, takes inspiration from Stable Diffusion to improve its capabilities. Technology has a long way to go before it can replace human popular music.

🗣️Social Media Chronicles: We Need to Talk About Elon Musk and Content Moderation, Again

Did I bark something wrong?

When I was in University, you could tell how drunk somebody was based on their willingness to get their picture taken. After 10 beers, nobody minded that their wasted self was plastered all over Facebook.

This was, in retrospect, the good times. When our moms got on Facebook, it lost all its cool. Nowadays, it seems all that is left is a warzone for progressives and conservatives to taunt each other. Here are a few stories about how bad things are getting.

❌Elon Musk's Plan for Twitter to Become WeChat Bashed

Last week, I expressed my discomfort with the media's sarcastic coverage of Elon Musk's SMS given his Asperger's condition. This week, it's The Verge, an otherwise excellent publication, that succumbs to the snark. The article covers Musk's intent to integrate Twitter into "an everything app", similar to China's WeChat. The journalist also lectures Musk on the complexity of free speech laws around the world. Yes, journalists must question the billionaire's ambitions, especially when he's involving himself in the Russia-Ukraine war. However, the piece also cobbles a bunch of separate declarations as a sort of strawman to showcase how Musk's vision appears delusional.

I'm not saying Musk is a genius who shall be worshipped! On the other hand, dismissing Musk's attempts at turning Twitter into a transactional platform before he even bought the company feels to me like an attempt at making the audience feel better about themselves. "See? He's not ambitious, he got rich during the dotcom bubble and has been riding a wave of bullshit for 20 years!"

🎤Kanye West Suspended from Twitter over Anti-Semitic Rant

Famous rapper Kanye West, who now simply goes by "Ye", was suspended from both Instagram and Twitter after hateful comments. Ye seems to have embarked on a trolling crusade, as he was seen wearing a "white lives matter" t-shirt in public.

Were Instagram and Twitter right to suspend Ye? Given their policies ban hate speech from their platform, yes. Should hate speech that does not incite action be moderated? There are layers of ethical and legal concerns around that question and I wish I knew more to form an educated opinion. Every Tweet feels like a judgment call. Ye crossed a line. That was easy. It's not always like this.

On the other hand, I feel empathy for Ye. He has been open about his struggles with bipolar disorder in the past, and he is clearly having an episode. I wish the response to his self-destruction was more compassionate. Being snarky is only useful to make you feel better, and I guess it feels very good to hit an annoying celebrity when he is down.

💦Is Fizz the Next Big Thing in Social Media?

Mark Zuckerberg famously created Facebook out of his Harvard dorm. Much of the early growth of Facebook happened on campuses. Horny college kids could finally see each other's relationship status!  It's no wonder then when a startup social media like Fizz is able to get 95% of Stanford's undergrad subscribed to their app (thanks to free donuts), media will notice.

Fizz's value comes from exclusivity. Only valid .edu e-mail addresses can register, so students know they are not interacting with spammers and bots. Its CEO also points out Fizz's content moderation model. On-site moderators are hired to filter out content, as they are deemed more skilled to spot smear campaigns. So, Facebook 2.0, right?

Right?

Call it "Fizzbook"?

Fizz is bound to fizzle out. What could go wrong with giving content moderation rights in a sector struggling with a "viewpoint diversity crisis"? Banning someone from Fizz over an awkward joke or comment can become a powerful ostracism mechanism. This power is ripe to be abused. I'm glad social media wasn't around when I was 18 because I said so much stupid stuff back then.

Even if we ignore overzealous leftism, universities do possess their own institutions to protect students from cyberbullying. Fizz will inevitably face controversies where the campus staff must weigh in. I'm not sure an emerging social network can absorb that level of pressure.

🎯InfoSec Story: Former Uber Chief Security Officer Convicted for Hack Coverup

Joe Sullivan, former CSO of Uber, has been found guilty of obstruction of justice. The executive paid a ransom and signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with the hackers as part of an attack in 2016 while Uber was undergoing scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). It is the first case of a cybersecurity executive facing jail for covering up a data breach.

Sometimes, one can agree with contradictory spins on a given news story. Call it Schrodinger's take. Yes, increased accountability for executives over cybersecurity negligence will bring a deterring effect. And yes, Joe Sullivan was put between a rock and a hard place, as most Chief Security Officers are. Forbes describes admirably how scapegoating an executive with limited power misses the forest for the tree: cyber risk and cyber incident management remain the responsibility of the C-Suite, and the board must oversee its activities.  

🎧 Quote of the Week