The 12 Days of Tech Christmas

Published Dec 28, 2023, 12:30 AM

While Christmas 2023 might be over, I have a little present for all of y'all -- 12 days out of 2023 that were important in the tech world for one reason or another. From cryptocurrency controversies to Apple getting into augmented reality, we look at a dozen days that stood out in 2023.

Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey thereon Welcome to Tech Stuff, I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you? So for those of you who celebrate, I hope you had a merry Christmas. And for all those who do not, I hope you had a wonderful December of the twenty fifth. And I thought it'd be fun to do a sort of retrospective episode that cheekily I call the Twelve Days of Tech Christmas. But really it's about twelve days in twenty twenty three where important tech stuff happened, stuff that is in the tech field, not tech stuff as in the name of this show. Also, I'm very sad to say these are not necessarily jolly days as a whole. The dates in this episode reference important events in tech, and many of those important events are also sad or troubling ones. But hey, I guess we all celebrate the holidays in our own way. Let's start off with Thursday, January fifth, twenty twenty three. That was the day that Amazon confirmed it would be laying off more than eighteen thousand staff, primarily from the Amazon Stores department, and the People, Experience and Technology divisions. The company cited economic uncertainty as the reason for the layoffs, a phrase that we would see repeated over the last couple of years as folks debate whether or not the word recession is applicable. Since recession has some specific qualifications to it, we typically settle on economic uncertainty. The reason I included here is not just because my heart goes out to all the folks who were affected directly or indirectly by those layoffs, but also because it was one of the earliest examples this year of companies making some pretty significant cutbacks. A big part of the problem was that tech c companies went on a hiring spree during the pandemic days, but once things began to calm down, suddenly these companies found themselves with a workforce that arguably was larger than what it needed to be. And while a lot of companies had already held significant layoff rounds in twenty twenty two, this year things amped up considerably, so in addition to Amazon, a lot of other companies like Meta, IBM, Google, Microsoft, Qualcom, and many more held rounds of layoffs this year. Here's hoping next year is much more stable. Moving on Tuesday, February seventh, twenty twenty three, this was the day Microsoft announced new versions of its web browser Edge and its search engine BING and these new versions would benefit from the power of artificial intelligence, specifically chat GPT. Microsoft had previously committed to a ten billion dollar investment deal into open AI. That's the company that makes check GPT, so you can look at this as the first of many AI implementations in Microsoft products. The integration into search met that being could provide answers to questions and thus remove the necessity to click through to search results. That's something that has a lot of companies upset. It's a lot of work to put together an informative website, at least it's a lot of work to make a good one, and to have a tool essentially crimp the relevant information from your site and then serve it up to someone who might have actually visited your page directly. Otherwise that's not a comforting thought for content dependent sites. It's a very scary thought actually, And on top of giving content sites the willies, this move has poured gas on the fire that was already lit. Among other companies that were looking into getting into AI. Suddenly there was a very real world example of how everyone else was falling behind Microsoft. Next up. Friday, March tenth, twenty twenty three, the day federal regulators shut down Silicon Valley Bank AKASVB. This marked the second largest bank failure in US history. The largest happened in two thousand and eight. And the reason that it's important to tech anyway is that Silicon Valley Bank was a critical component to the tech sector. It serviced countless tech startups, and the circumstances of twenty twenty three played a big part in why the bank ultimately failed. Startups usually aren't profitable, sometimes they don't even have a way of generating revenue, and tech companies can actually remain unprofitable for a really long time see also the history of Twitter. But it still costs money to operate, and that money has to come from somewhere. So in the tech world, that money typically comes from investors who are hoping to make out like bandits. Once the startup they're investing in either goes profitable, goes public with an IPO, or perhaps if you're really lucky, it gets swallowed up by some larger company for a hefty acquisition fee. But this means that during times when economic factors are less conducive, such as when interest rates are high, investors are less generous with their money, and that means startups might have to dip into their accounts to cover costs, and that means making withdrawals, and if the bank they're withdrawing from doesn't have the cash to cover all the withdrawals of all its clients, you've got a problem. Next thing, you know, there's around on the bank, and then you get George Bailey standing on a desk and say, no, Tom, your money's not here. It's in Billy's app developer company, and Charles, your money is in Timmy's ride hailing startup and so forth. That was a really bad reference to It's a wonderful life, In case you didn't pick up on that anyway, SVB collapsed. I remember I was on my way to south By Southwest when this was happening, and I saw folks all around me in the airport who are also traveling to Austin, Texas try to remain calm while simultaneous wondering if they had just lost access to all their money. It was a wild experience. Now, in the end, the US Treasury Department reassured all the depositors that their money would be covered, and that was a pretty darn significant accomplishment in its own right. We move on to Tuesday, April eighteenth, twenty twenty two. That's when Reddit changed its API policy. So in tech and API is an application programming interface. So essentially, it's a tool that developers use to create new apps that tap into some other platform or applications capabilities. It's like using someone else's work to act as the foundation for your own work, and in an ideal situation, all parties benefit from this arrangement, but things were changing it. Reddit and AI is largely the reason why companies that are building out large language models need to train those models on massive data sets. One way that you can build a data set is to scrape data off a platform that has a ton of communication stored on it. Reddit is such a platform, and the training can give lms a chance to build models that structure messages in a way that's more human, or at least more human in Reddit terms, which depending on which subredit you're on, can get pretty spicy. So Reddit wanted to make changes in order to charge these AI companies more money to scrape data off their site. They're like, we're providing the data, we should be making money off this. It could be a huge revenue generator, but it had a lot of other consequences. While Reddit was still working on the changes in April, the announcement raised some alarms that got louder over the course of the spring. Reddit would charge developers money depending on the frequency at which their apps connected with Reddit. For popular apps, this would mean the developer could owe as much as a million dollars or more per month, a cost that no one could really afford, and so a lot of popular Reddit based apps had to shut down. This infuriated the Reddit community, and many subreddits went dark in response. T Some went further and conducted a form of online guerrilla warfare against Reddit, which prompted Reddit to backtrack on some of its changes. But it all got very ugly and the fallout isn't over yet. Next up, Monday, June fifth, twenty twenty three, Apple shows off the Vision Pro mixed reality headset. For years, rumors were buzzing about Apple and the company's efforts to develop augmented reality glasses. They were right up there with other legendary rumored projects like an Apple branded television set or maybe even an Apple car. While we might still be waiting on those, Apple finally revealed an AR headset at the twenty twenty three WWDC or Worldwide Developer Conference. Now, this headset is not the stylish pair of eyeglasses that folks were hoping for. It's a form factor that Apple reportedly chased, but they found it difficult to actually make it work. And let's be fair to Apple, it's really hard to cram all the components you need for a really compelling, good working pair of AR glasses into a form factor that's just an eyeglasses frame. Even if you want to go chunky with the frame, it's it would be really hard to do all of that. So Apple's device doesn't look like glasses. It looks more like a high tech pair of ski goggles. The technology reportedly will be controlled through various means, including hand gestures, voice commands, and using your eyes to command the goggles to do stuff. It also sets you back a small fortune. Apple said these sets will start at three thy four hundred and ninety nine dollars a set. They're not available just yet. We'll have to wait till next year to actually get our hands on them. I've read various reviews of people who got a chance to experience at firsthand, the people who are at WWDC. They sound really nifty. I don't know if they sound nifty enough for people to PLoP down thirty five hundred dollars on them. But I also am not the kind of person who has an extra three five hundred bucks just laying around to try it out. So what do I know? All Right, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we will wrap up our twelve days of Tech Christmas. We're back, and we're up to Sunday, July twenty third, twenty twenty three, and on that night Elon Musk declared the era of Twitter had come to an end, and from that point forward, Twitter would be known as X. Twitter had launched way back in two thousand and six. It had adopted its bird logo, which was nicknamed Larry the Bird, back in twenty ten, but on this night in July, the letter X took over. Musk has long had an obsession with that letter. Back in nineteen ninety seven, he co founded x dot Com, one of the components that would eventually become PayPal, a company that ultimately forced Musk out of it when the other leaders in the group figured he was too troublesome to keep around, and Musk had wanted to build his own version of an everything app similar to we Chat in China. The rebranding extends to what we call stuff posted to X. Before, if you posted something to Twitter, you called it a tweet. Now we typically call them posts, although Musk himself initially suggested we call them x's, maybe we just still call them tweets because a lot of folks continue to reference ex as Twitter anyway despite the official change. As I say in another episode, this rebranding shook things up in the tech world. A lot of people question the wisdom of the decision. They argued that Twitter had stored a lot of value in its brand and logo, and that by tossing those things aside, Musk was really making things harder on himself. But here we are anyway. Next up. Tuesday, September twelfth, twenty twenty three. This marked the opening day for the massive antitrust lawsuit that the US government has brought against Google. So at the heart of the matter our accusations that Google, through various means, has worked to ensure that Google Search is the default search engine for various devices and platforms, that Google actively worked to discourage competition in the space, often by offering large payouts to companies, in an effort to secure Google Search as the default. It is the largest antitrust action brought against a tech company since the US government went after Microsoft a few decades ago. Now, back then, it was all due to how Microsoft positioned its web browser. At that time, the web browser was Internet Explorer and made it the default browser on Windows devices, and further, how Microsoft worked to integrate its operating system and its browser together, which critics argued was an attempt to make it impractical or even impossible, for someone to use some other form of browser. That case at one point led to a decision, a legal decision that would force Microsoft to break up into smaller companies, but later on a different judge overturned that initial ruling and Microsoft was allowed to remain. Microsoft. Could Google face similar pressure to break up into smaller companies, It's hard to say. For more than two decades, the US government has been largely hands off as companies like Google have gained greater influence in power. Maybe we're seeing a genuine swing in the other direction, but it's an ongoing story that will stretch into next year at the very least. And the fact that the US is entering into an election year and a change in administration could mean a drastic change in how we handle these sorts of cases. I wouldn't bet anything one way or the other at this point. Next up, Friday, October thirteenth, twenty twenty three. Friday the thirteenth, that's also the day that Microsoft closed the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. It took nearly two years to do it. I think twenty months total. Microsoft first announced the intent to acquire Activision Blizzard in January of twenty twenty two. The deal reached the value of nearly sixty nine billion with a B dollars. Initially, the plan was to close the deal by July of twenty twenty three. But these massive deals, you know, they take a really long time to work out all the details. This one took longer than was planned, largely due to regulatory resistance all around the world. A lot of regulators raise concerned that Microsoft would be consolidating the video game space to a point that hurt competition. Sony representatives actively consulted with regulators, worried that Microsoft would lock popular video game titles like the Call of Duty series under an exclusivity agreement and thus deny other platforms the chance to carry those games. Microsoft and Activision repeatedly made promises to multiple parties that they wouldn't do that, at least not for another ten years or so, but the deal seemed like it was up in the air for most of twenty twenty three. Even today, the US Federal Trade Commission is a bit dodgy on the whole thing. But I'll talk about this more in another episode, so let's just keep it moving along. Thursday, no November twenty twenty three, the first of a lot of November stories. Sam Bangman Freed aka SBF was found guilty of seven charges ranging from fraud to conspiracy. Now, if you're not familiar with SBF, he was co founder of two important cryptocurrency companies. The first, Alimeda Research, was a trading firm. Essentially, it allowed customers to invest in various crypto related things. The second and more infamous of the two companies was FTX and Actual Cryptocurrency Exchange. In late twenty twenty two, FTX began to fall apart as folks discovered that the leaders of the company had secretly been funneling customer funds stored in FTX to cover costs over at Alameda Research, without telling anyone or asking permission to do so. The revelations led to the collapse of both companies, the arrest of much of the leadership of those companies, and various investigations into what was going on in crypto in general. We're still failing the consequences of this disaster today, and SBF is now facing sent after being convicted. In fact, as I write this, the latest news is that SPF's lawyers had requested a delay in the sentencing and the judge has denied the request. He is due to be sentenced on March twenty eighth next year. Monday, November sixth, twenty twenty three. We work files for bankruptcy talk about a fall from grace, all right. First off, we work I don't think technically belongs in the tech sector, except everyone treated it like it was a tech startup, largely because it did mimic a lot of tech startups, But really we Work is just about securing office space and then subleasing that space out to other entities. That's it. It's not a new business idea, and traditionally it's got a pretty low profit margin that really feels the squeeze during uncertain times, whether it's economic uncertainty or a pandemic where no one leaves the house. But once upon a time, the we Work business had hit a valuation of fifty billion with a B dollars. This year, the company declared bankruptcy. I imagine someone standing up on one of those white tables shared office environment and pulling a Michael Scott and just yelling out, I declare bankruptcy. This doesn't mean the company's going away, by the way, it is going to restructure and in theory come back as a viable business. We Work has already been the subject of numerous podcasts and even an Apple TV series called We Crashed. I'm sure there will be even more media treatments on the whole story in the future. Friday, November seventeenth, twenty twenty three, Open AI's board of directors fires CEO Sam Altman now sometimes companies will make a big move on a Friday, like holding massive layoffs that kind of thing. And there are a lot of different reasons for this, but one big one is that it can marke an effort for the company to try and avoid a big old stink in the media because folks are switching to weekend mode. Perhaps that was why the board of directors for open ai, the company behind chat gpt to fire Sam Altman, the CEO, on a Friday over a zoom call of all things. Now, I've already talked about this on a recent episode, but generally speaking, the board of directors was concerned that Altman's leadership was contrary to the mission of open ai, which started off as a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing artificial intelligence in a safe, measured way meant to benefit all of humanity. Altman, by contrast, was seen as an aggressive entrepreneur who was pushing products out into the market, perhaps a little too quickly, and launching a for profit version of open ai in order to secure funding for research and development. The decision was a bombshell, but it didn't exactly last long. Over the weekend, mounting pressure on the board of directors forced them to reconsider their decision, and by the following week things would look very different at open Ai. All but one of the border directors stepped down to be replaced by new board members. Altman returned to the head of the company, and mega investor Microsoft wagged a finger at open Ai and said, you better not pull that kind of stuff again. And twelfth and final two day November twenty first, twenty twenty three, the day that Chong Peng xau Akacz in his cryptocurrency exchange Binance entered guilty please with regard to massive anti money laundering cases brought against it by the United States Justice Department, essentially a year after the collapse of FTX, which CZ arguably contributed to. CZ had to face the music. The US Department of Justice alleged that Binance had served as a money laundering haven for criminals, that it also allowed parties to bypass official sanctions around the world, and that it served as an unlicensed means to transfer money, something that can come in awful handy if you're engaged in less than legal enterprises. As part of the plea, the organization agreed to pay more than four billion with a b dollars in fines. CZ himself will have to pay a personal fine of fifty million dollars. He's also agreed to step down as CEO. He could face jailed time up to eighteen months or longer if the prosecutors decided to go harder on him. The agreement also called for a government monitor to step in and oversee finance, and that CZ has not allowed any involvement in the company until three years after that monitor takes the gig. It was a tough blow to CZ, but compared to his rival SBF, you could say he got off easy. And that's it. Those were our twelve days of Tech Christmas, twelve important dates this past year where something in tech happened that really was notable. I hope you enjoyed this look back. We're going to have a couple more look backs before we close out the year, and then, Heaven help us, we're going to look forward and try another kind of a predictions episode. I think we'll see. I'm nervous to do it because it's been so long and they are so hard to do, and it also means that ultimately I have to hold myself accountable and take a look back at the end of next year to see whether or not I was even remotely accurate. Really, I think what the tech Stuff predictions episodes show is that it really is impossible to predict the future. In the meantime, I hope you are all well and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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