Hello and welcome back to Trending, Business Insider’s weekly look at the world of tech. I’m Alexei Oreskovic, Business Insider’s West Coast Bureau Chief and Global Tech Editor. If you want to get Trending in your email inbox every Wednesday, just click here.
This week: Tech’s “surge” of goodbyes and Facebook’s network effects nightmare
The tech business thrives on newness – new products, new features, new speeds. Even when the new stuff is really just old stuff with a new name, you can be sure there will a press release to mark the occasion (see: AOL and Yahoo become Oath, circa 2017; and Oath becomes Verizon Media Group, circa 2018).
But a lot of changes in tech lately have involved eliminating things.
- Let's start with the Segway, or "Ginger" as the self-balancing two-wheeler was once nicknamed. The Segway rolled into the sunset this week: After nearly two decades ferrying tourists and security guards, the "human transporter" that was supposed to revolutionize society will no longer be made, the company announced. While the Segway was buried under a warm blanket of nostalgia, Uber's goodbye to its Jump electric bikes caused some backlash. Video footage of Uber demolishing thousands of e-bikes from a company it spent $200 million to acquire two years earlier struck many as wasteful and as another indictment of the tech industry's problematic values.
- Microsoft pulled the plug on two fairly big projects recently, including its chain of retail stores (much to the chagrin of Business Insider Deputy Editor Matthew Weinberger) and the Mixer online streaming service. The end of Mixer was especially surprising, as Microsoft had just shelled out tens of millions of dollars to attract top-tier talent like game streamers "Ninja" and "Shroud." Ashley Stewart and Ben Gilbert have a must-read story on how Microsoft's expensive effort to take on Amazon's Twitch went fatally wrong.
- And then, there's been a seemingly spontaneous rush to banish the trolls and to shun their enablers. The sudden ejection of abhorrent accounts and forums on Reddit and YouTube is significant mainly in the fact that it's taken the companies so long to do so little.
The advertising boycott of Facebook, however, is gaining a surprising momentum that feels like a nightmare version of the network effects that helped Facebook grow its audience so rapidly. Instead of users' sociability contributing to Facebook's value, the peer pressure among advertisers is now working against it.
Just a couple of weeks ago a handful of brands announced plans to stop advertising on Facebook because of its policies allowing toxic or misleading content. Now the band of boycotters includes giants like Adidas, BestBuy and Coca-Cola.
Is the Facebook boycott approaching a "tipping point" that could significantly harm its revenue? That depends on how long the marketer's resolve lasts. An anonymous CMO at Fortune 500 company recently told Business Insider's Lucia Moses: "I'm constantly fighting with our business leads who think it's killing their business to not be on Facebook.
And this CMO's perspective on other companies in the boycott says a lot:
"Half the CMOs out there are sincere. The other half are doing it because they're worried about being tone-deaf," the person said. "They've all written their boycott statements vaguely enough so they can keep their options open and come back to Facebook."
Introducing BI's first-ever interactive Big Tech salary database
How much does a marketing director at Apple get paid, and how does it compare to what Netflix pays? How about a mechanical engineer at Tesla or Google?
We assembled salary data for 13 of the top tech companies, including Apple, Amazon, Google, Netflix, Tesla, and Uber, based on the companies' filings to the US government.
These are not estimates: The figures correspond to actual salaries that tech companies report for foreign workers hired through H-1B visas. As such, the interactive database, which lets you drill down by company and by job title, provides a uniquely revealing window into Silicon Valley compensation.
Check out BI Big Tech interactive salary database here
Sound bite of the week:
"I've seen people fall to the ground and succumb to their circumstances. Or figure out a way to get through that."
Talend CEO Christal Bemont on growing up in a family of four living in a trailer in Missouri, and what it taught her about resilience and leadership.
The big picture: So what did you do during lockdown?
Montreal technical director Nicolas Temese wanted to celebrate the 60th birthday of an iconic computer, so he built his own version of an IBM 1401 datacenter - complete with everything from the central processing unit to the punchcard reader - at a tiny scale.
The 1401 is considered one of the first mass-produced computers (a whopping 12,000 units were produced!) and it turned 60 in 2019. Temese began his Lilliputian passion project on his evenings after work in December 2019 and he's chronicled his progress on Instagram.
Temese's IBM 1401 is a replica, not a functioning machine, of course. But given the power of Moore's law and the unpredictable duration of the coronavirus lockdowns, there's no telling what kind of upgrades he could make.
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Recommended Readings:
Not necessarily in tech:
OK, I think that's enough for this week. Thanks for reading, and remember, if you like this newsletter, tell your friends and colleagues they can sign up here to receive it.
- Alexei
