>>Isn't the important thing I actually need to know to understand what happened here buried towards the bottom of this story
This is the major reason I unsubscribed from Wired, most articles from them are unnecessary long yet convey only a few major points, while coloring other minor points with too many unrelated facts.
I guess there are readers who enjoys that writing style but for a case like this, I just don't understand the motives.
I think it's too late, they already have planned to fork from Android for years, this (potentially permanent) ban just motivated them to speed up the process.
I second this is not about US security but about Google losing their mobile market share.
>> but about Google losing their mobile market share.
Under current policy, threats to US industry are threats to national security. That is why Canadian steel was listed as a national security threat. They aren't quiet about these things any more. Cutting into US market share is now openly described as a security threat.
The US dropped its steel tariffs against Canada and imports ~$325 billion in goods from Canada (equal to ~19% of their economy). Canadian steel represents <2% of that.
Meanwhile the US is going to allow Infineon to buy Cypress, an important US semiconductor company.
The US will have roughly a $21.x trillion economy at the end of 2019. The scale of non-China tariffs is entirely trivial, meaningless. So far there has been very little in the way of actual hits and targeting from tariffs - on the grounds of national security or otherwise - outside of the trade conflict with China.
By the numbers, the only country that has actually taken a hit with tariffs is China (in case you missed the news, Mexico bent over pretty quickly).
The response misses the point that the US is saber-rattling to keep other countries in line. China is the only country to actually challenge the US, so now the US has to show everyone who’s boss.
> Under current policy, threats to US industry are threats to national security.
Sure, maybe policy-wise, but common-sense wise the argument doesn't hold up at all. Google's minimal loss from business with Huawei is nothing compared to Huawei compromising the 5G infrastructure of the US.
I don't understand how those things are related. What does forcing Huawei to fork Android on their cell phones in China and Europe (by totally forbidding them from doing business with Google) have to do with 5G infrastructure in the US?
If the US is so concerned, can't they just ban them from 5G infrastructure? Why is it necessary to fork Android?
Under current policy, threats to US industry are threats to national security
Certain industries. Usually industries that are critical to the functioning of the economy, or that have been concentrated in hostile or semi-hostile nations without alternatives in friendly countries.
Policy, like everything else in life, is a lot more complicated than the internet likes to portray.
The idea that reliance on Canadian steel represents a threat to US national security is not plausible. Canada isn't hostile to the US, and it would be inconceivable for Canada to cut off steel exports to the US in a critical moment. The Trump administration is quite transparently misusing the phrase "national security" to justify measures meant to force trade concessions from other countries, including American allies.
That argument requires one to assume that Canada might withhold shipments of steel to the United States at some critical moment. Otherwise, it doesn't matter whether steel comes from the US or Canada. As long as Canada doesn't shut down shipments, the United States' access to steel is secure, even if 100% of it comes from Canada.
The argument that Canada might cut off US access to steel is not plausible. The fact that the Trump administration is using the phrase "national security" to try to wring economic and political concessions out of Canada is transparent.
Trump us using security measures because that's all he has there's nothing real about it. All other tariffs require Congress to act, hopefully we'll remove this power before it's abused again.
The particular one is YouTube as there is a large back catalogue of stuff.
WhatsApp is the one you needed to mention, if you have that then you are locked into a phone number based service.
Apps can go to PWA mode, if you think of the business case for a third party app going PWA then it is a good one - ease of adoption as no need to install.
If Huawei wanted to they could host videos and offer better monetisation to content creators. If you get notifications that your favourite channels have new stuff does it matter what logo is at the top of the page?
If the deal was a good one to upload the entire back catalogue to HuaweiTube then it could work. People already are used to uploading their blog post to half a dozen different places, no reason why people could not do this with video painlessly on Huawei 5G.
People who release stuff early on Patreon could be customers for this.
If HuaweiTube also allowed you to do images - as per Instagram and messaging all in one neat service (treating images as single frame videos and audio as video with no pictures) then it could be a better service.
I think that WhatsApp is the rub, people can go to the web version of Facebook on a Huawei phone, they don't need the app.
People have tried to replace YouTube for decades. The platform is too sticky. Even if you solve the immense issue of content streaming at scale, ad monetisation is Google's kingdom, charging for content doesn't work, donations don't work, etc.. it's just not feasible. Their web/mobile apps are also light heads ahead.
Regardless of the shitty things YouTube's done, there's a reason it's still so popular.
We also really need to preserve the back catalogue. There's so much invaluable stuff only on YouTube.
Nobody has forked out a billion dollars for paying people to make YouTube grade videos, if Huawei had a rival service and booked every single ad slot then I think that they could either lose a billion dollars or foster a new platform.
YouTube isn't massively integrated into other services, if you had one platform that did email, video hosting, Patreon things and still image things then I think it could work.
If the on-boarding is with your device, as per how it is with Android then why could it not work?
The goal posts change all the time. Because MicroSoft failed at it doesn't mean they would fail if they did the same today. Or if some other player did.
Ditto. I've never seen WhatsApp in the wild. I've been asked if I have iMessage and Venmo more times than I can remember, but nobody has ever asked me if I have WhatsApp.
Messaging platforms are very regional. From your mention of Venmo (which is US-only) I assume you're American. WhatsApp has it's popularity outside of the US.
I've not once in my life had someone ask for an iMessage, and Venmo I've only heard about online. The last time I sent an SMS was probably a decade ago.
Currently I live in LINE-land. 90% of my communication is on LINE. Among friends abroad, everyone has Facebook messenger but it's nobody's preferred method, rather a fallback. WhatsApp is popular among friends in Europe (Sweden/Spain). Don't know anyone who's mentioned Telegram/Signal.
I've been casually following incidents of a number of governments blocking WhatsApp/Facebook to disrupt organizers of protests: every single time Telegram usage blooms literally overnight as it's harder to block. WhatsApp is not as sticky as I thought, if the entire network graph is forced off.
It depends on what common apps are available. Only option I see for Huawei to get those is by leveraging the Chinese market to incentivize devs to make a google free version of their apps. This way they should have enough critical mass to make a port worth it. Offering a version of those internationally should be just a small additional step. This obviously would require ruling party of China to open up their user base to outside companies. But they would still have a lot of control through the app store, and if established successful this control could even extend beyond their borders. I wonder if there is a way for Huawei to actually get politicians on board with something like that...
Huawei is not an advertising company. They could use a completely different approach to openness and privacy and eat Google's lunch in the current climate... if they were wise and not trying to be authoritarian or controlling. And considering Google basically privatized Linux, I would not see this as being a bad outcome... to make Android a Linux based system open source and community driven again.
As over time Google is planning on abandoning its Linux roots and moving it to what was called Fuschia.
> if they were wise and not trying to be authoritarian or controlling
Well, that IF is how you end your own argument.
In China, most of us don't give a deep thought on privacy and personal .* (personal freedom, personal rights etc). Because of this, I don't believe people here would build an OS to protect people's privacy and many other rights. You just don't have the base and market to do that here.
I think even if HongmengOS is not just a smoke, the best they could do is probably just a "better" Android "knock off". So I personally don't give that OS any high hope.
But I do have a little hope of course. As a Chinese myself, my hope is that their OS can be fully open sourced, so tech communities can learn how to build a OS from them, and maybe later fork it to fit people's own needs (for example: add privacy focused features).
My another hope is, maybe in the future, more and more (small) phone manufacturers will start to build phones that could run multiple OSs, like what Purism is trying to do. That way user will have more freedom in terms of choice.
Don't know which of my hope is likely to come true, we'll see. (I guess Purism is a better bet because they are making progress as we speak)
For any critical tech platform, though, has there ever been more than 2 major players? I would argue that everyone after the top two is such a huge way behind that they really only serve niche markets. Look at Windows Phone, which eventually ended up being a pretty nice OS. MS couldn't pay people enough, quite literally, to get developers to build for it. Any "non-Google Android" clone is going to have to deal with the way developers are deep into Google Play Services, at least in the West, and that will be extremely difficult to displace.
Blackberry in mobile OS share had it for a while, though I'm sure you'd argue that it doesn't exist anymore, but you had asked about ever, not just right now. Video game consoles are another example, with the Nintendo, Xbox, Playstation.
In just about every market there exists two natural economic leaders - the quantity (a.k.a. cost) and the quality leaders. There are market leaders other than the natural two who can arise through other means, such as ecosystem lock-in, tech patents, brand exclusivity, or some other method.
Before smartphones monopolised the market, there was a good variety of handsets to choose from (still is if you look at things from a hardware perspective).
Same was true for micro computers all throughout the 80s and up to mid 90s.
Games consoles, cars, TVs, laptop OEMs, enterprise cloud hosting providers, etc.
And yet China has parallel search engines, chat platforms, e-commerce platforms and social networks. A billion people make a big enough target audience to enable a lot of things.
I disagree with your first sentence in its sweeping overgeneralization. The second sentence seems somewhat true but there's a reason why eBay failed in China: they ported their English website over without consideration for the idiosyncrasies if the chinese market and netizen.
These two sentence are also not intrinsically linked. Just because there has been protectionism does not mean that the China apps are automatically worse. In fact, a bunch of features of weibo and we chat have found their way to Twitter and WhatsApp. (One example are voice messages which were a core part of wechat from the start. They were important to get people in rural areas or older people to use the app, due to the difficulties of typing Mandarin, especially dialects.)
Voice messages have been around since before smartphones, come on.
There is little reason to expect companies that have had multi-national success not to succeed in China if it weren't for protectionism; while there are certainly examples of poor execution, you'd have to be blind to think that was the reason for every such case, or even a significant portion thereof.
That's not entirely true. WeChat in many ways is more impressive than whatever US equivalent is for a Chinese audience. And Didi executed far better than Uber without protectionism being in play. It's nontrivial to execute in a foreign culture to your own.
Indeed, Chinese apps have diverged significantly from what's used in the West. There were a bunch of Chinese copycat apps at first, but some of them have been supplanted by new and very different apps. Everyone in China used to be on a Facebook copycat called "Ren Ren," but it's gone the way of MySpace, and everyone is now on WeChat, which has no equivalent in the West.
It doesn't actually work that way. If it did, Baidu would have half the global market for search. Instead, they've stagnated after maxing out in China and Google has continued to expand globally.
Ctrip (20 years old) doesn't have a consequential business outside of China, where Booking and others are dominant. Ctrip's business is firewalled inside of China.
Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram dominate globally, while eg WeChat has stagnated outside of China. WeChat's growth started to flatline about three years ago. Within another year they'll go entirely flat on growth (stalled at just over a billion monthly active users, most of which are in China and a few other countries).
Spotify and Apple own the global streaming music business. China's competitors are heavily domestic.
Netflix, Amazon and Disney (+Hulu) will own the global streaming movies & TV business.
Almost nobody outside of China listens to or can understand Chinese music, movies or TV shows. Outside of China it's a small market for their media content. This is a fundamental that can't be overcome, the world is not going to learn Mandarin.
On video gaming, China can never compete because there's a vast amount of content the Chinese Government will simply never allow. They barely allow their own video game giants like Tencent to function properly within China, it's a nightmare. The gaming segment will continue to be dominated by the US, Europe and Japan. As in the other cases, China's gaming companies are hamstrung by their system. The best they can do is buy foreign assets and try to operate them outside of China.
When it comes to social, China can never compete due to their extreme speech, cultural & political controls. There can be no global Chinese equivalent of Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Imgur, et al. China's regressive approach is so extreme they've banned joke apps - that one ban probably wipes out a third of the social media landscape in terms of usage. You never have to worry about a Chinese company competing with you if you're eg Imgur or Twitter.
There is some potential for shopping & goods trade, however even mighty Alibaba has struggled in their quest for expanding outside of the domestic Chinese market.
All those made in China apps have a hard time penetrating non Chineese markets. But they could if they want to, like TikTok which is popular in India too.
Maybe. But really displacing any of those services is maybe 10,000 developers away... we already have F-droid what if you co-opted it to publish commercial apps for no fees. What if you set 10,000-20,000 developers to work on an open source fork that was run by the Linux foundation? What if you made a real effort to make it truly open source and free? Would people jump ship? It's possible. No one has tried or had the resources to try. And Google becomes more and more entrenched.
Let's see 3% payment cost vs 30% fees... If they wanted to just charge the transaction cost. And yes there are cost centers and profit centers. If you want to eat the cost of something you could do it. And once it becomes successful maybe you start raising fees slowly to catch up to that 30%. Many strategies are possible.
> For any critical tech platform, though, has there ever been more than 2 major players?
Here's a partial list of major server operating system vendors over the years: IBM, Sun, HP, Red Hat, Novell, Microsoft ...
Everyone one of those has existed since at least the 1990s and it's rare for the largest individual vendor to have more than 30% share at any given time.
The key to maintaining this is common interfaces. You write against POSIX or Qt or Java and it runs on most systems even though they're all different vendors.
But all of that stuff comes from the little guys. All the Unix vendors got together to create POSIX because then developers get access to more users by targeting POSIX than Win32, even though Windows at the time had more market share than any individual Unix. Sun creating Java allowed developers with mostly Windows customers to write their Windows applications in Java, which then gave them Mac and a dozen other platforms for free, including Sun Solaris, which the developer probably wouldn't have targeted on its own.
The phone hardware vendors could take a page out of that book and create their own modern POSIX for mobile to replace the Google-specific APIs on Android. Heck, they would only need one implementation of it, the same as all the old Unix vendors have largely standardized on Linux today.
I'm not sure how a professor at a pretty good school like NYU has a blunt tone like this.
Beside personally criticizing people by their personal choice, which I found baseless, there is zero information here. There are people with that life style like that all the time, just because they happen to be tech CEO doesn't mean it's a sign to a macro thing like bubble.
One thing I've been regreting the most after 10 year living in the valley is that I shouldn't have listened to the 'tech bubble' propaganda back in 2016, nor delayed buying my first house, which should have saved me ton of cash.
Recently I think the scandals haven't been the single biggest factor when deciding between Facebook and other firms.
The common reason I heard from most of my friends who turned down FB, or quitted FB was that the working culture is too demanding and kind of pressure. Google on the other hand is more laid back and family friendly. So people who started building a family will prefer Google over FB. The nice thing is FB tends to offer higher level than Google, so in some cases, if you get matched, it works out pretty well.
I have a friend who worked at FB, after he came back from paternity leave, his manager told him he has been slacking (his reviews were always "meet all"/"exceeding" before), it's time to put in more work, he quitted after a month.
While I'm not quite sure about Tesla's responsibility, I do think CA DOT has its part in this tragic accident. Had the attenuator been replaced right after the previous accident, it could have saved the driver's life.
Usually I don't complain much about the gov, but just look at the construction mess they've created on 101, it's been like that for more than 4 years!
IIRC, the barrier was damaged from an accident that happened 11 days prior [0]. One or two weeks later, I remember driving past the area of the crash a Sunday or two Sundays after the Tesla fatal wreck (I vaguely remember the time period because I remember picking up a visiting friend in early April). Traffic had slowed down to a crawl for miles, and it appeared that a crew was doing work on that barrier -- I assume they were fixing/replacing the barrier.
My point is, it seems premature to blame CA DOT for its role. Do you have evidence that the delay in replacing that particular barrier was slower than the normal time window? Because it seems likely that fixing that barrier is a construction job that can only be done on a weekend, because it's impractical to jam the 101 during a weekday commute.
There should have been no delay - it is designed as a critical part of highway safety infrastructure, as the death in this situation highlights; it should have been immediately reconstructed - and hopefully this lawsuit will lead to that protocol being implemented/adhered to.
Is there a law or regulation that mandates this? The article says Caltrans claims a storm caused the delay:
> "Once our Maintenance team has been notified, the Department's goal is to repair or replace damaged guardrail or crash attenuators within seven days or five business days, depending on weather. These are guidelines that our Maintenance staff follow. However, as in this case, storms can delay the fix."
The delay may or may not have been justified (I guess we'll find out if the family decides to sue the state). But an actual regulation is important, because not only would it provide explicit criteria to show Caltrans is in the wrong, it would've (or at least should've) meant funding and procedures are in place. There's always a tradeoff between cost and safety. If the state of California doesn't provide the funding and staffing it would require to replace this barrier with "no delay", then it seems difficult to fault Caltrans for negligence.
I'm not sure of the specifics - I would argue it should be mandated; at minimum they could have put barrels full of sand or water - whatever they use - as a stopgap.
> Usually I don't complain much about the gov, but just look at the construction mess they've created on 101, it's been like that for more than 4 years!
If they finish construction then they stop getting paid.
Yes, nevermind the video that emphasizes "the driver is doing nothing" on their tesla.com/autopilot page since 2016, or that all vehicles come with hardware for full autonomy.
There's nothing bizarre about threeseed's characterization.
That is a demo of full self driving, which is a perpetually coming soon feature. You even need to pay for it separately.
The actual section on what autopilot can do and what it requires of the driver is pretty clear:
> Autopilot advanced safety and convenience features are designed to assist you with the most burdensome parts of driving. Autopilot introduces new features and improves existing functionality to make your Tesla safer and more capable over time.
> Your Tesla will match speed to traffic conditions, keep within a lane, automatically change lanes without requiring driver input, transition from one freeway to another, exit the freeway when your destination is near, self-park when near a parking spot and be summoned to and from your garage.
> Current Autopilot features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.
As a Model 3 owner, it does do those things quite accurately. Certainly more so than the MobileEye based system on our Volvo, which can't lane keep and stops abruptly.
I find it convenient and more relaxing when driving, but I heed their warning (which I also agreed to when enabling autopilot in car) and pay attention, being prepared to take over at all times.
Can we just stop with the 'Apple stopped innovating' propaganda, the same thing can be said about any big corps, be it Google/FB/Netflix/...
Innovation doesn't just mean creating new products (the Airpod is one of Apple's killer product by the way), improving current products used by millions of people while keeping them coming back to buy more and more is not easy, this is also counted as innovation in my book.
It's funny how they put CA EV Rebate in the 'after savings' part. This rebate has income cap at $300k/household. If I made less than that, I would think really hard before purchasing a $90k car.
It seems like being academically excellent and being successful in industry are totally different things. I still remember the hype about Udacity and Coursera a few years ago.
Beside VmWare and Akamai, I haven't seen any company founded by university faculty that have survived and made impact (even though VMware was tiny compared to what it is today when EMC acquired them)
>I haven't seen any company founded by university faculty that have survived and made impact
Bose, Broadcom, Qualcomm, Financial Engines, Genentech, MathWorks, Boston Dynamics, Pixar (I think it counts), Arista Networks, MIPS, Rambus, Duolingo, Sun Microsystems. Depending on what your cut off is for made an impact, I'm sure there are dozens more from Stanford alone.
Akamai's CEO, Dr. Tom Leighton's math class at MIT, still my all-time favorite. It change my life, since I thought I will never be able to understand math above high school algebra.
Gilber Strang's linear algebra and Stewart's calcus is the other two.
I still don't understand why the last investor is the first one to be able to cash out. Is this common in startup?
I was thinking the first investor is the one that took the big risk investing in the company, shouldn't they have the rights to cash out first when there is a liquidation event?
LIFO is designed to prevent Ponzification (for lack of a better term). Imagine if earlier investors could just vote to issue dividends after a later round, effectively taking money from later investors that was supposed to fund company operations and putting in their own pockets.
for startups without meteoric growth (most of them), it becomes harder to raise money later. especially in an area with no real moat (commodity wifi). if the revenue growth is not a hockey stick it’s harder and harder to sell your story. this translates into stiffer preference
In this case, he should have recruited students who are well versed in these things to help conducting the course as TAs. He could have only taught about the principal/design, and let the TAs teach the real coding part.
I found this approach is very effective for students because they basically learn the skills from their peers or even roommates, and if they are friends on campus, they can ask questions any time outside of TA hours. My alma mater has an excellent undergrad TA program where students who performed well in the course are recruited to be TAs when the course is offered later again.
This does happen most of the time, and UM has quite a large TA group. He almost definitely had TAs and the majority of the learning is around discussion/recitation sections and practice. In this case, he also wasn't developing the course from scratch either. So, the content in the course was built by those more familiar with the web.
This is the major reason I unsubscribed from Wired, most articles from them are unnecessary long yet convey only a few major points, while coloring other minor points with too many unrelated facts.
I guess there are readers who enjoys that writing style but for a case like this, I just don't understand the motives.