Company / division: Google
97 companies file opposition to Trump’s immigration order – TechCrunch (Feb 6, 2017)
Last week, Recode reported that several big tech companies were drafting a letter to the Trump administration on immigration, though I still can’t find confirmation that this letter has actually been sent. However, those tech companies and many others have now filed an official friend of the court brief in the lawsuit being brought against the administration by the states of Minnesota and Washington. This steps things up a notch, formally putting the 97 companies behind the brief on the other side of a court case from the administration. As with the early condemnations of the executive orders just over a week ago, Amazon is notable by its absence, as is Tesla (whose CEO Elon Musk has continued to sit on the advisory council Uber CEO Travis Kalanick vacated last week). Tesla’s absence is consistent with Musk’s overall stated strategy of trying to bring change from within, but Amazon’s absence may simply be due to the fact that it weighed in on the case separately earlier in the process (though Microsoft has participated at both stages).
Update: this tweet explains that Amazon was asked not to sign the amicus brief because it was a witness in the original case.
via TechCrunch (more coverage on Techmeme)
Google will discontinue Google Now Launcher in the coming weeks – Android Police (Feb 4, 2017)
Another chapter in the bizarre saga of Google’s various voice and assistant technologies. Now was Google’s proactive non-voice assistant play for years, while Google Voice Search handled the voice aspects. With the launch of the Google Assistant, it was logical to assume that it would displace this combination, and yet its still not clear whether that will actually happen. Google is discontinuing the Google Now Launcher as part of the GMS bundle OEMs use to pre-package various Google apps and services, but isn’t replacing it with an Assistant-based launcher, and gives OEMs the option of not replacing it with anything within their own launchers. So, Now dies as part of GMS (and in the Google Play Store) but there’s no official communication still about when Assistant might be made available broadly to OEMs. Google’s decision to make the Assistant exclusive to the Pixel at launch was a massive strategic shift, and has arguably cost them significantly in the voice platform race against Amazon, and it continues to provide very little clarity on its future as part of Android for OEMs.
via Android Police
With Chrome 57, Progressive Web Apps will appear in Android’s app drawer, settings, more – 9to5Google (Feb 4, 2017)
I saw the headline here and almost literally yawned – it doesn’t sound all that interesting on the face of it. But read the article and you’ll find that this is an important step in making Google’s Progressive Web Apps first class citizens within Android – a position they haven’t enjoyed until now. Progressive Web Apps behave like apps in many other respects, but didn’t appear in the app drawer or other locations within Android which display a grid or listing of all installed apps. Google is committed to its several web+app models such as Instant Apps and Progressive Web Apps, and this is another sign that it’s taking that effort seriously and removing friction and barriers to adoption. Though the piece acts as though Google’s motivation here is simply making apps easier to use, the other big motivator is obviously that Google’s financial interests are better served by app models that tie back to the web than by purely native apps.
via 9to5Google
Court Rules Google Has to Hand Over Data in Contradiction to Recent Microsoft Ruling – The Register (Feb 4, 2017)
The recent ruling in the ongoing case involving Microsoft and customer data stored outside the US had at least temporarily provided some reassurance that the big tech companies’ stance on this issue would be upheld in court. However, a new court in a different part of the US has now ruled the other way, though its rationale for ruling differently is that Google manages its data and data centers differently from Microsoft. This is a blow to the big tech companies who’ve fought to keep their overseas data centers (and the data held there on non-US customers) off limits for US law enforcement, but the Microsoft case was likely to go to the Supreme Court anyway. Hopefully, the court will rule in such a way that provides clarity not just in the Microsoft case but more broadly on this question.
via Register
Snap Future Shaped by Complex Ties to Google as Supplier, Rival – Bloomberg (Feb 3, 2017)
This is interesting additional detail around the Snap IPO filing I covered yesterday (and which I wrote about in depth at Beyond Devices today). Snap recently signed a 5-year deal with Google to use its cloud services to the tune of at least $400m per year, and the companies have worked together on some stuff in the past two, including some projects that never made it to production. But Google was also listed among the handful of competitors Snap specifically cited in its S-1, so this relationship is, as Facebook might say, complicated. That’s particularly the case around search, which is one of the areas where Snap was partnering with Google but eventually pulled out and decided to build its own platform instead.
via Bloomberg
Apple is no longer the most valuable brand in the world as Google takes top spot – MarketWatch (Feb 2, 2017)
This is one of those exercises that seems almost entirely intended to garner interest for the company doing the evaluation, and indeed Brand Finance’s actual report starts by explaining how it does similar analyses for clients. As usual, the methodology is just opaque enough that we have no idea how the results are actually arrived at in detail, but it’s fairly clear that there is a financial component – in other words, it’s very likely that Apple’s drop in revenues in the past year had a big impact on its 27% “drop in brand value”. It’s ironic, then, that the report should arrive the same week as Apple announced its highest ever revenue and iPhone shipment quarter, not to mention highest Apple Watch shipments and revenue and highest Mac revenue. The short-term financial focus of the Brand Finance exercise is clearly something of a flaw in its methodology, but it’s generally worth discarding any such study entirely, unless it’s strongly rooted in customer perceptions of brands and the products they represent.
via MarketWatch
Google, Apple, Facebook, Uber plan to draft a joint letter opposing Trump’s travel ban – Recode (Feb 2, 2017)
It’s been interesting to watch the early separate responses of big tech companies to the immigration executive orders begin to coalesce into something more like a joined-up response, with both combined efforts on possible lawsuits in states like Washington, and now this letter from several companies. This letter could have focused merely on the practical aspects of the impact of the EOs on the companies and their employees, but goes further than that (at least in the the current draft) to address refugees and use words like compassion, going beyond mere self interest. The letter is measured and offers assistance in finding better ways to address the intended goals of the recent actions on immigration, which is at once less confrontational and also slightly condescending – I’m curious to see if the text evolves at all from this version. At any rate, it’s clear that we’re going to see ongoing engagement at various levels by the tech industry in this issue, including from a number of companies which participate in Trump’s tech councils.
via Recode
There are too many ways to Google on Android – The Verge (Jan 30, 2017)
I’ve tagged this post against three different narratives, because this little mini-review taps into several broad threads. Firstly, this is about Google and parent Alphabet’s tendency to allow lots of people to work on the same thing in different parts of the company in different ways, which results in a confusing user experience because there are many ways to do the same thing (see especially messaging). Secondly, there’s the fact that on Android Google’s own messy set of services is often duplicated (or worse) with competing services and apps from OEMs and/or carriers. And lastly there’s the fact that even on Google’s own hardware, the Pixel, which is supposed to represent the epitome of Android at its best, this confusion still reigns. I was half-tempted to tag this post against the Google is Ahead in AI narrative too, because though Google does fantastically well at the back-end AI piece, it often falls short on the user interfaces and experiences that present the functionality to the user. The point is, the situation described in this article is far from ideal, but it grows out of several cultural quirks at Google/Alphabet combined with several of the downsides of the approach Google has always taken with Android, and a solution doesn’t seem imminent.
via The Verge
Silicon Valley’s responses to Trump’s immigration executive orders, from strongest to weakest – The Verge (Jan 28, 2017)
This is a good summary of the responses from the tech industry so far to President Trump’s executive orders on immigration from Friday. It also does a nice job sorting the responses by strength – there’s quite a range in the responses, from those focusing narrowly on the practical impacts on employees of each company to those issuing broader moral condemnations of the policy. This certainly won’t be the last we hear on this topic. It’s notable that as of right now Amazon is one of the major holdouts among the big consumer tech companies.
via The Verge
Google, in Post-Obama Era, Aggressively Woos Republicans – The New York Times (Jan 27, 2017)
Two politics stories today, as this one follows the Facebook story from earlier. This one also echoes an earlier story about big tech companies rethinking their political alliances both in the face of a possible shift to the right and now in the wake of an actual take over of both the executive and legislative branches by Republicans. It’s easy to see this as a swing from left to right, but I think it’s better seen as pragmatism about working with whoever is in power. The wrinkle is that Google had particularly strong ties with the Obama administration at multiple levels, and Eric Schmidt in particular was involved with the Clinton campaign, at least indirectly. Google / Alphabet arguably has the most to fear of the major tech companies from a backlash against tech companies based on their support for Democrats, and is clearly doing all it can to make nice now. Having said all that, the degree to which companies have to worry about such a backlash is surely much higher under this administration than any previous one.
Alphabet Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2016 Results – Alphabet (Jan 26, 2017)
One of the things I was most interested in as part of Alphabet’s results was what happened to the Google Other category of revenues, because that’s where sales of the new hardware devices will be reported. That category grew 62% year on year, but also includes Play store revenues as well as Google’s enterprise cloud service revenues, and has been growing at a decent clip already. I’d estimate around $600-700m in revenue from the new hardware products, which probably translates into 600-700k Pixel sales and sales of Home, WiFi, and Daydream hardware. That’s not a bad start, but of course supply was constrained and distribution limited, so there’s clearly potential for more here. Back in the core business, it’s striking how the number of paid “clicks” on Google’s own properties remains the one big driver of ad revenue growth, while total paid clicks on third party sites and the cost per click on all sites continues to fall. YouTube is the major driver here (those clicks include views of video ads where no-one actually clicks), offsetting the erosion of revenues from the shift from desktop to mobile, and was an obsession among analysts on the call. Sundar Pichai focused his remarks on machine learning rather than AI, although the two topics are closely related – it was interesting to hear Satya Nadella kick off the Microsoft earnings call an hour later with talk of AI.
You might also be interested in the Alphabet Q4 2016 deck which is part of the Jackdaw Research Quarterly Decks Service.
via Alphabet (more on Techmeme)
Source: Google’s Pixel 2 to feature improved camera, CPU, higher price, but ‘budget’ Pixel also in works | 9to5Google (Jan 26, 2017)
Lots of interesting stuff in here, but of course none of it certain to pan out in the actual product. To my mind one of the most interesting aspects is that the price of the Pixel 2 is expected to be $50 higher than the first-generation Pixel, which was already priced at premium levels – that part doesn’t ring quite true to me, unless it’s an Apple-like creation of an additional tier above the standard ones. Pricing its only phone higher than the base iPhone model would unnecessarily limit the market, and that seems unlikely. The camera focus makes sense – the first version majored on the camera and the Assistant differentiator should have been eroded relative to other Android devices by then, so hardware features will be important. The budget version is also interesting in the context of the recent reports about Google bringing Android One to the US – it certainly wouldn’t be unprecedented for two parts of Google to be working on essentially the same problem in different ways, but the hardware strategy there has been more joined up lately. The other thing to note is the details about chips, as Google is apparently testing both Samsung and Intel components as well as something it’s built itself. There have been repeated rumors about Google building ARM-based servers, and it’s possible that it’s also experimenting with its own ARM-based chips for smartphones too, though this would be a massive multi-year effort, especially tough without an acquisition of significant existing skills a la Apple/PA Semi.
via 9to5Google
HTC’s top Vive designer is leaving to work on Google Daydream – The Verge (Jan 26, 2017)
It’s musical chairs week in VR, with Hugo Barra leaving Xiaomi to head VR at Facebook, and now an HTC designer moving to Google to work on Daydream VR there. This is one of the hottest areas in tech, and it’s therefore no surprise that it would prompt moves between companies as ambitious people try to find roles in the sector. For HTC, which continues to struggle mightily on the smartphone front and has only a side business in VR, it may become increasingly difficult to attract and retain talent in the face of an onslaught from some of the biggest names in the business.
via The Verge
New exploit turns Samsung Galaxy phones into remote bugging devices – Ars Technica (Jan 25, 2017)
This is another one of those occasions where Android’s relatively open and complex structure allows for malware which couldn’t exist on iOS. In this particular case, it’s the layering of third party software (a customized version of the SwiftKey keyboard) on top of a customization of the UI and services (by Samsung) on top of the Android base layer. To be fair, this attack isn’t nearly as broad a threat as malware distributed through the Google Play Store – it requires a man in the middle attack and is therefore mostly a risk to those who might be deliberately targeted by hackers – but it’s still not good news, especially given the wide distribution of the devices in question. The complex route security patches have to take in the Android world is another element that will hamper the resolution of this issue.
via Ars Technica
Google’s 2016 Bad Ads Report: 1.7 billion ads removed, including fake news ads – Search Engine Land (Jan 25, 2017)
The quality of online advertising continues to be one of the big challenges for any company making a business out of selling ads. Between scams, predatory practices, and more recently fake news (and fake news sites), there are lots of ways online advertising can be abused, and Google reports each year on how it’s clamped down on some of this behavior (the report itself is here). Fake news doesn’t actually get a mention in the report directly – the closest link is sites pretending to be news sites for clicks, and then attempting to sell something such as weight loss products. But we do know that Google also shut down advertising on some fake news sites that were using its ad products in 2017. Draining scammers and predators of funds from Google goes a long way to breaking their business model, so we need to see more of this kind of thing.
Google Privacy-Policy Change Faces New Scrutiny in EU – WSJ (Jan 24, 2017)
Europe continues to be the locus of a lot of regulatory effort aimed at paring back perceived privacy invasions by big US online advertising companies, notably Facebook and Google. In this case, Oracle is part of a coalition that seeks controls on Google’s tracking of user data, and the focus of the current complaint is the change Google made to its terms and conditions last June, pursuant to which it now combines data on its users across its various services and DoubleClick. No action has been taken yet by European regulators, so this is only a complaint by one of Google’s biggest foes at this point, but this area has proven a thorny one for Facebook already, and could yet become one for Google too.
via WSJ
DCN report shows publisher revenue from Google, Facebook, Snapchat – Business Insider (Jan 24, 2017)
This article (and the report it’s based on) frustratingly focuses on average numbers across a range of very different publishers, rather than providing something more detailed, which limits the usefulness of the data, but there’s some interesting stuff in here regardless. For one, this reinforces the sense that publishers are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to supporting the major new content platforms – on the one hand, they feel they can’t afford to be absent, and on the other systems like Facebook Instant Articles and Google’s AMP don’t seem to allow them to monetize as they do on their own sites. One surprising finding is how strongly Snapchat shows here relative to its overall share of ad revenue. The picture is muddied by the fact that the report covers both video and news content, and so YouTube makes a very strong showing overall too. The key takeaway for me is that these companies continue to tread a difficult and dangerous path as they work with these platforms, ceding a lot of control to them and potentially seeing less revenue as a result.
Update: the actual report is now available here in full.
via Business Insider
Virulent Android malware returns, gets >2 million downloads on Google Play | Ars Technica (Jan 23, 2017)
Malware continues to be one of those things that essentially only affects Android in the smartphone world – iOS is for all intents and purposes immune to it because of the strong review process that all apps go through and because apps are sandboxed within the OS. The biggest single downside of Android’s relative openness is this vulnerability to malware, and that’s especially worrisome when the malware is distributed through the official Google Play Store. The numbers here are small in the grand scheme of the Android installed base of well over a billion users, but if you’re one of those two million, that doesn’t matter.
via Virulent Android malware returns, gets >2 million downloads on Google Play | Ars Technica
Android Instant Apps starts initial live testing – Android Developers Blog (Jan 23, 2017)
Google announced Instant Apps at I/O last year, and I wrote about them in the context of the overall evolution of apps in June here. This is one of many interesting experiments around how apps might evolve, and one that’s uniquely well-suited to Google’s natural bias towards the web and search. It previously tested app streaming back in 2015, and that is also live for some apps today – the two concepts are similar but slightly different. They’re both ways to use apps without downloading, but app streaming streams an image of the app running elsewhere, while Instant Apps downloads the app in the browser for temporary usage and then clears the content again once an interaction is complete. That’s a subtle difference, but both alternatives get at the same objective – making apps available without all the effort of a typical app install from within a search, ideal for a one-off use of an app, but obviously not a replacement for those apps used regularly.
via Android Instant Apps starts initial live testing | Android Developers Blog
Alexa and Google Assistant have a problem: People aren’t sticking with voice apps they try – Recode (Jan 23, 2017)
Call this a rare bit of cold water poured on the hot topic of voice assistants and especially Amazon’s Alexa. The data here suggests that the third party “Skills” available through Alexa have essentially zero staying power, with most abandoned very quickly after the first use. I suspect that’s partly down to the awkward syntax you have to use to invoke Skills on Alexa, and partly down to the fact that most of the Skills are novelties at best, with many providing very little utility at all – the number of Skills available is one that Amazon likes to tout and reporters dutifully report, but is largely meaningless while this is the case. In addition, none of this really says anything about the usefulness or sticking power of the built-in functions, and that would be a great subject for a survey. I would guess that people stick with the core functions a lot more than these Skills, or return their devices because they’re not using them – the latter was my own eventual outcome when testing the Echo.
via Alexa and Google Assistant have a problem: People aren’t sticking with voice apps they try – Recode