Company / division: Alphabet
Google makes it easier to see and share publishers’ real URLs from AMP pages – Search Engine Land (Feb 6, 2017)
One of the biggest frustrations publishers have had with Google’s AMP format is that it takes over the URL of the site where the content originates. Given that many URLs are shared in shortened form in Twitter clients and similar venues, this often means all the viewer sees is a google.com domain, which can be confusing. This tweak to the AMP settings doesn’t solve the fundamental problem that AMP pages use Google URLs, but offers a workaround of sorts allowing users to share the canonical original URL for the publication instead. That’s a start, but the domain issue and other reasons not to like AMP and other similar formats like Facebook Instant Articles remain.
NetEase Offers Google a Way Back to China — The Information (Feb 6, 2017)
Though the NetEase tie-up is the main “new news” here, the broader story is that there are still important barriers to Google getting back into China (just as there are for Facebook), the thorniest of which is whether Google sacrifices its stance on censorship in order to re-enter the market. That was the primary reason it left back in 2010, and yet the Chinese government’s approach hasn’t really changed in the interim. Unlike Facebook, which is prevented by the government from operating in China at all, Google chose to leave China of its own volition, and the main barrier to re-entry would be deciding to go back in despite the moral quandaries inherent in such a choice. This is where Apple’s history in China is interesting – as first and foremost a hardware company, it has been able to run the core part of its business just as it does elsewhere, with any censorship applying to narrow slices of its overall business, such as individual apps in the App Store or the iBooks store as a whole. For Google and Facebook, however, access to information is their central value proposition, and so sacrificing the completeness of that offering to censorship is a much bigger concession.
via The Information
Google and Facebook to help French newsrooms combat ‘fake news’ ahead of presidential election – VentureBeat (Feb 6, 2017)
If only these companies had made such a concerted effort to combat fake news in the US a year ago rather than only really springing into action in the very late stages of last year’s presidential campaign (and in Facebook’s case, mostly after it was over). It appears both companies are taking their duty to put accuracy above ad revenue a bit more seriously in France than they did in the US, a sign of increased realism about the power that each company has in shaping the news people see.
via VentureBeat
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
Planet Labs Inks Deal for Google’s Satellite Business – Bloomberg (Feb 3, 2017)
I first commented on this story when Mark Bergen reported that a deal was in the works a few weeks back, and what I said then was that this was yet another example of the sharper focus Alphabet has had under Ruth Porat. It’s a great example of selling off a business that has very little direct ties to the rest of Alphabet and where the underlying mapping imagery can more easily be bought from a third party – there’s no reason for Alphabet to own satellites itself for mapping.
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
Tesla Is Testing Self Driving Cars on California Roads – Bloomberg (Feb 1, 2017)
The headline is news, I guess, but far more interesting are the detailed reports each company testing autonomous vehicles in California has submitted for 2016. These reports lay out – in some cases in quite a bit of detail – the results of testing during the year, including the miles driven and the number of disengagements. This is a great counterpoint to the article last year which suggested Tesla had an edge over others in autonomous driving because its cars had driven many more miles – the reality is that Tesla’s truly autonomous cars drove just 550 miles on California roads, while Google/Waymo’s drove 636,000, or over a thousand times as many miles. What’s more, Waymo’s vehicles required just 0.2 driver interventions per thousand miles relative to Tesla’s 0.33 per mile. It’s also notable that the vast majority of Tesla’s disengagements were on wet roads – road conditions continue to be a major factor in the ability of many autonomous driving systems to function correctly, which obviously puts them a very long way from mass production and release to customers. I’m planning to dig into all these numbers some more.
via Bloomberg (see also this blog post from Waymo)
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
The Google Car was supposed to disrupt the car industry. Now Waymo is taking on suppliers – Recode (Jan 28, 2017)
This is a subtle shift, but an important one – one that began to become apparent a few weeks back. Alphabet is fundamentally a software, rather than hardware, company (Google’s recent push into first party hardware notwithstanding) – that’s where its skills have always lain, and where it has been able to add the most value both in its own products and in partnering with others. However, in the car space, it’s increasingly clear that Waymo will pair those software skills with developing hardware skills around things like LIDAR, and potentially attempt to sell packages of hardware and software or even complete systems, rather than just providing the software brains that will leverage hardware from other suppliers in cars. There are pros and cons here – on the one hand, Waymo doesn’t yet have great credibility in hardware in cars, and so trying to bundle the two together may threaten its ability to sell its software. On the other hand, it didn’t have much credibility in self-driving software either a few years back, but has earned it over time and now has partnerships with FCA, among others, so perhaps it can win trust in the same way with hardware as it makes progress here.
via Recode
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.
Apple Officially Joins Partnership on AI (Jan 27, 2017)
I commented on the reports that Apple was about to join the Partnership on AI yesterday, so I won’t revisit all of this today. Two notable things from today’s announcement, though: Apple’s representative will be Tom Gruber, who runs Siri at Apple, and that may be indicative of where Apple sees ownership of AI residing within the company (it has no formal head of AI); secondly, Apple has been involved with the Partnership from the outset, but hadn’t formalized its membership until today. That might signify that there were some details of Apple’s membership which needed to be worked out before it felt comfortable joining -I’d love to know what those were. Separately from Apple’s involvement, it’s worth noting that the board now has representatives from a number of other organizations beyond tech companies including several universities. So the Partnership won’t just be about driving the agenda of the tech industry here.
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