Important Note

Tech Narratives was a subscription website, which offered expert commentary on the day's top tech news from Jan Dawson, along with various other features, for $10/month. As of Monday October 16, 2017, it will no longer be updated. An archive of past content will remain available for the time being. I've written more about this change in the post immediately below, and also here.

Each post below is tagged with
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    • and
  • Narratives
    • as appropriate.
    Microsoft Kills Off its Music Streaming Service, Partners with Spotify Instead (Oct 2, 2017)

    Microsoft has today announced that it’s killing off its own streaming music service, Groove Music, and will be partnering with Spotify instead as the latter builds an app for Windows 10 and the Xbox One. This isn’t a huge surprise – Microsoft’s various incarnations of music streaming services have never done as well as its base of Windows users should have enabled them to – but it’s an admission of how completely Microsoft has failed when it comes to consumer content services, where it’s basically a non-player. That, in turn, is indicative of Microsoft’s continued challenges as a consumer ecosystem, especially relative to Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, which dominate much of consumer time and content consumption. Microsoft’s consumer presence is largely limited to its de facto standard status as a maker of paid productivity software and increasingly free standalone productivity apps on mobile platforms, alongside its search and gaming platforms. None of that engenders much positive loyalty to Microsoft from consumers, and it generates very little revenue for the company on the consumer side. And yet it continues to try to straddle the consumer and enterprise worlds in a way few have ever managed to do successfully. Giving up in music is a logical and sensible step, but it’s certainly not going to get Microsoft any closer to cracking the consumer market. Meanwhile, it’s yet another channel – albeit likely not a big one – for Spotify to sign up more streaming music subscribers.

    via The Verge


    Tesla Reports Q3 Production and Deliveries, Including Under 300 Model 3s (Oct 2, 2017)

    Tesla today released its customary quarterly update on car production and deliveries, for Q3 2017. The overall number of cars produced was 26 thousand, just 5% up on last year’s total for the quarter, with just 220 Model 3 cars produced relative to the 1500 the company had projected. The company delivered to customers slightly fewer cars, including 260 Model 3s, indicating that it’s still a very long way from the mass production of these cheaper cars which it’s been forecasting. Tesla’s statement on the lower than expected Model 3 production is worth quoting in full: “Model 3 production was less than anticipated due to production bottlenecks. Although the vast majority of manufacturing subsystems at both our California car plant and our Nevada Gigafactory are able to operate at high rate, a handful have taken longer to activate than expected. It is important to emphasize that there are no fundamental issues with the Model 3 production or supply chain. We understand what needs to be fixed and we are confident of addressing the manufacturing bottleneck issues in the near-term.” All of this is classic Tesla – in effect: we fell short of our targets, unexpectedly, but we’ll still be able to meet our previously stated targets in the end. Past experience shows Tesla does generally recover from such setbacks, but not usually enough to deliver on original goals – something that’s been pointed out repeatedly by me and by others, but which still seems to engender remarkably little skepticism about its public pronouncements by many investors.

    via Tesla


    Facebook to Share Russian Ads with Congress, Hire 1000 to Review Ad Submissions (Oct 2, 2017)

    Facebook has made yet another announcement in what’s rapidly becoming the saga of Russian ad-buying on the platform and the ongoing fallout from it. This time around, it says it’s going to share the details of the 3000 suspicious ads placed on the platform with the US Congress, and it’s also going to hire a thousand additional people for its ad review team to ensure that inappropriate ads don’t get through. The rest of the announcement focuses mostly on fleshing out promises made over the last couple of weeks, though there’s still relatively little transparency on what’s actually going to change and/or when in some cases. Over the weekend, Mark Zuckerberg also personally apologized for any role Facebook may have had in sowing divisions in the world and promised to work to make things better in future, as part of a post relating to the Yom Kippur Jewish holiday. It’s clear that he’s taken all of this far more seriously and increasingly personally as well over recent months, though many still want him and Facebook to do far more to increase transparency over how Facebook has been used for ill and how it will change as a result.

    via Recode


    Roku Updates Streaming Hardware, Drops Top Price Point, Pushes Towards Sticks (Oct 2, 2017)

    Roku has announced updates to pretty much its entire hardware line, just days after very successfully going public on the NASDAQ. The new range of devices is mostly priced the same, with the exception of the top tier, which has dropped $10, leaving the price range at $30-100, while the other notable change is ever smaller devices, with most of the line now actually plug-in sticks or very close to the same size. Roku promises increased speed through better processors, wider 4K support, and other hardware changes. But it also debuted version 8 of its Roku OS, which includes better support for integrating antenna-based viewing of over-the-air channels, something which has become increasingly common as a complement to online streaming of cable channels among cord cutters. As with recent changes from Amazon, these improvements and price tweaks further separate the three market share leaders from Apple and its new Apple TV boxes, which now start at $50 above any other box from the three major competitors and rise to twice the highest price of a Roku device. I continue to believe Apple can carve out its own niche in this market, but it’s certainly never going to have substantial share as the rest of the market shifts towards cheaper sticks, often sold at or below cost. That’s a market Apple simply isn’t going to compete in.

    via The Verge


    Sony Pre-Announces New PlayStation VR Headset with Integrated Headphones, HDR (Oct 2, 2017)

    Sony has announced somewhat out of the blue that it has new PlayStation VR hardware coming, at the same price as its current hardware, but with better support for HDR and with integrated headphones, both of which features overcome annoyances with the current hardware. In some ways I’m surprised that the price isn’t going back up a bit – the recent price drops had seemed to be possible evidence that new hardware was coming, and therefore that Sony was clearing inventory, but it appears the price cuts we’ve seen essentially across the industry lately are here to stay. That, in turn, means that this is going to continue to be a crowded and price-pressured market, with little margin available in the early running as companies look to expand the addressable market beyond merely hardcore gamers, something that’s still proving tough.

    via Engadget


    Disney and Altice Agree Last-Minute Deal to Avert Blackout of ABC, ESPN (Oct 2, 2017)

    Disney and cable operator Altice (owner of the former Cablevision properties) came to a last-minute agreement on Sunday to avert a blackout both sides had been warning customers about as they negotiated new terms. This has been one of the first big renegotiations for Disney since it became clear how badly the ESPN business is going from a subscriber perspective, and as such is seen as a bellwether for how the next few years will go for Disney. All the details haven’t emerged yet, not least because the sides are still apparently hammering some of them out, but it’s clear that Altice did pay for price increases, though not as large as Disney wanted. That’s critical because regularly contractual price increases have been the thing keeping many cable operators’ revenues growing even as their subscriber numbers have been falling. If the increases aren’t large enough to offset the declines in subscribers, that picture starts to change, and so far we don’t know for sure whether that’s the case. But whether Disney is able to get the price increases it needs to stay ahead of subscriber declines is the critical factor in future negotiations. Altice is one of the smaller pay TV providers in the country, and if it had sufficient leverage to negotiate price increases down, that likely doesn’t bode well for Disney going forward. You’ll see headlines saying that the deal demonstrates pay TV companies will still pay for sports, but that was a given – the question was how far Disney would budge to ensure that remained the case.

    via Bloomberg


    ★ Travis Kalanick Appoints Two New Board Members without Board or CEO Approval (Oct 2, 2017)

    The latest round of controversy at Uber erupted Friday night as Travis Kalanick unexpectedly appointed two new members to the Uber board as part of an earlier agreement, albeit without the knowledge or approval of either the existing board members or new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. This is best seen as further evidence, if it were needed, that Kalanick’s main objectives continue to be serving his own self-interest rather than Uber’s best interests, and that if he’s using these appointments to bolster his power on the board, the rest of the board should resist that effort. The Recode piece I’m linking to below has a great overview of what all this means at this point and how it might play out, and importantly says that the board members don’t object to those nominated as much as the process. The context is that the board has been working on governance changes that would formally limit both Kalanick’s voting power and his ability to come back in a management role, changes he naturally opposes. At this point, I can’t imagine Kalanick actually thinks he’s doing what’s best for Uber, and in the meantime he continues to do the company substantial damage and distract it from the real changes which need to be made, including governance changes recommended in the Holder report. It’s ever clearer that Kalanick hasn’t changed and and indeed hasn’t taken any of what’s happened over the last ten months or so to heart.

    via Recode


    Google Makes End of First Click Free Official, Plans Subscription Partnerships (Oct 2, 2017)

    The two halves of this story have been bouncing around for a while now, but it seems they’re finally official. We’ve been hearing for some time about plans to end Google’s “First Click Free” policy, which gave newspapers the option of making their paywalls porous to search users or forgoing traffic from search, and its replacement is now being announced. It stops punishing publishers for not offering free access to articles, while giving publishers more granular control over how many free news items users of Google search get before they hit the paywall. At the same time, Google is talking (again) about plans to help news organizations drive subscriptions. As I’ve said repeatedly, both Facebook and Google are viewed with distrust by the news industry, but the former has at least been visibly acknowledging the tension and seeking to do something about it, while Google has been slower to act. It’s good to see it finally making changes now, although the subscription tools won’t debut until next year are are still not being spelled out in detail.

    via New York Times


    Amazon Saw Under 400k Viewers for First NFL Game (Oct 2, 2017)

    This is the second piece I’ve done on Amazon’s Thursday Night Football debut last week – see here for the first. After I wrote that piece, the NFL released audience numbers for the broadcast, and they show that just under 400k people watched the Amazon version, while 14.6 million people watched the live broadcast on CBS and the NFL Network, and 243k watched Twitter’s debut broadcast last year. On the face of it, it’s impressive that Amazon, with its much smaller number of members relative to Twitter, and with a sign-in requirement, was able to achieve broader viewership, but it also arguably promoted it much more heavily than Twitter did last year before its first game. It was certainly promoted heavily within the Amazon Video apps on various platforms the day of the game, making it hard to miss if you logged on planning to watch something else. And it’s also possible that interest in all NFL games is heightened at the moment because of the recent controversy over kneeling during the national anthem by players. The real question, of course, is what Amazon’s goal is here, and whether it’s achieving it. My guess is that it sees NFL games partly as a value-add for existing customers, and partly as a ploy to gain new subs for Prime. I’ve no doubt it will achieve the former, but the latter is a tougher sell – signing up for a Prime subscription is a lot to ask when the game is broadcast on TV.

    via Recode


    Daily Podcast Episode 67 – September 29, 2017 (Sep 29, 2017)

    The daily podcast episode for September 29 is up now on SoundCloud and should be syncing shortly to iTunes, Overcast, and other podcast apps. As usual, the podcast spends about one minute on each of the items covered on the site today, and also points to a few other items in the news today which I didn’t cover but which are nonetheless interesting. You can find today’s episode on SoundCloud and all episodes on iTunes, Overcast, and so on. The additional items covered are below:


    Google Will Provide Tighter Security Options for High Profile and High Risk Users (Sep 29, 2017)

    Bloomberg’s Apple and Google reporters have teamed up for a story about Google building new tools to help secure the accounts of high profile users or others with higher exposure to attempted hacking. This is apparently a response to some previously reported hacks of prominent users’ Gmail accounts and will combine new ways to secure logins with restrictions on third party app integrations and other features designed to close potential entries for hackers. The feature has a name – Advanced Protection Program – and will be marketed to executives and politicians among others, suggesting that it will be a fee-based service, likely an add-on to corporate deployments of Google’s G Suite. All of this feels very topical in the midst of all the reporting about Russian meddling in last year’s US elections, and although that’s mostly currently focused on ad buying and influence through social networks rather than hacking, it’s all obviously connected, with widespread allegations that the Russians were feeding documents from various hacks to Wikileaks, for example.

    via Bloomberg


    Mark Zuckerberg Sought to Use Facebook Resources For His Foundation’s Projects (Sep 29, 2017)

    Even though the shareholder lawsuit over plans to create a new class of shares at Facebook has been settled, some of the materials in the suit have just been unsealed and revealed some interesting tidbits. Business Insider has latched onto this particular one, which is that Mark Zuckerberg wanted to have Facebook employees work on projects for his Chan Zuckerberg Initiative foundation, but got pushback from other board members, notably Marc Andreessen. On the one hand, this feels like just the kind of thing some people worried about when Zuckerberg created the foundation while still running Facebook, risking a blurring of lines between the two. It feels clearly inappropriate for him to try to swing corporate resources behind his personal projects and it’s good that he was shot down. But I’m also minded of the many things that Google invested in during its pre-Alphabet days which were effectively personal passion projects for the two founders. Some of those things had at least tenuous connections to Google’s core business, but others felt much more disconnected, and yet the fact that there was no real shareholder oversight with most of them meant that they happened anyway (and the founders could at least argue they were potentially commercial projects, even if some of them were years from generating revenue). The fact that Zuckerberg created a separate foundation to pursue his projects makes the separation that should exist much clearer and thereby highlights these potential conflicts of interest much more clearly.

    via Business Insider


    Amazon’s First NFL Game Goes Smoothly, Demonstrates Little Innovation (Sep 29, 2017)

    Amazon streamed the first of its Thursday Night Football games last night, and this Mashable piece does a good job summarizing the experience for fans (I had other commitments and only tuned in very briefly). It appears the stream mostly held up bar some audio hitches, which hasn’t always been the case for new streaming video services in their debuts but should be par for the course with a provider like Amazon that already has massive streaming scale. The most noteworthy thing about the broadcast is how little innovation Amazon built around it, with the only meaningful departure from a normal broadcast being an alternative audio feed with British commentators providing color for those more familiar with a version of football where people actually use their feet. Twitter, of course, had the rights last year, and at least tried to pair the video feed with relevant tweets, an integration that offered little value at the time, but one on which Twitter has iterated since with more recent live events. By contrast, there was seemingly nothing about last night’s broadcast which felt uniquely Amazon-like, while the ads suffered from the same problem as most streaming video: too much repetition. I’m hoping Amazon was playing things reasonably safe with its first broadcast and will do more interesting things later in the season, because at this rate the NFL might as well just license the streaming rights to traditional broadcasters too.

    via Mashable


    Facebook Gives Data on Russian Accounts to Google To Assist Investigation (Sep 29, 2017)

    In Twitter’s statement on Russian meddling in last year’s elections, it mentioned that Facebook had shared with it data on the accounts it had previously reported, and it now appears Facebook has shared similar data with Google as well, as it investigates its own role in all of this. The three companies have been the main focus – so far – of US congressional investigations into the use of online advertising and platforms to influence the outcome of last year’s elections, so it’s natural that the companies would share whatever data they have with each other. Twitter, though, was reprimanded (rightly or wrongly) by at least two members of Congress this week over seemingly relying too heavily on Facebook’s prior work rather than performing its own extensive search of past activity, and it seems Google is doing rather more of its own digging, though there’s no word so far on what it’s found. Both Google and Facebook have been widely criticized over their roles in allowing problematic activities to take place on their platforms, but I continue to argue that the cost of policing such activity at such a level as to eliminate it 100% would be disproportionately expensive in time and money.

    via Recode


    Amazon Announces Fire OS 6, Based on Last Year’s Android Nougat (Sep 29, 2017)

    Alongside this week’s big Amazon hardware announcements, it’s apparently made a quieter announcement too: the launch of Fire OS 6, the latest version of the company’s fork of the Android operating system, which is used on Fire TV and Fire tablets. This new version is based on Android 7.1.2, which was the last version of Android 7 to be released before this year’s launch of Android 8 / Oreo a few weeks back. So although it definitely brings Fire OS more up to date than the previous Lollipop/Marshmallow-based version, it’s still about a year behind in terms of core Android features. It’s not yet clear when Fire OS 6 might come to Amazon’s tablet lineup, or which Android features it might bring with it, but it’s a good reminder that Amazon still bases some of its most important products on a proprietary flavor of Android, yet another front in the coopetition between Google and Amazon.

    via Android Police


    Rovio’s IPO Ends the Day Flat with Opening Price (Sep 29, 2017)

    Rovio, the Finnish company behind the Angry Birds franchise, held its IPO today, just a day after TV box and platform maker Roku, but saw very different results. Whereas Roku saw a massive jump in its stock price in its first day of trading, Rovio’s stock ended the day back where it started, having traded in a pretty narrow range all day. In the context of Roku’s IPO and expectations for Spotify’s, I’ve been asked a lot recently about the prospects for tech IPOs overall, and my response is always the same: it’s not really about the “climate” for tech IPOs (though that clearly matters), but about the performance of each company in its own right. In the case of these two companies, a quick glance might make you think Rovio was actually in better shape, profitable and growing whereas Roku is unprofitable and growing. But it’s all about the trajectory and ultimate potential when it comes to valuations, and while Roku seems to be in the midst of a clear transition which should lead to profits and revenue growth, Rovio continues to be very reliant on a single franchise, Angry Birds, and though it’s expanded the nature of gameplay in games released under that banner considerably, none of its recent game launches have come close to matching the performance of the top games globally over the last couple of years. So Rovio is a mid-tier mobile game maker with some profits and growth but there’s no great success story here, nor any sign of a dramatic positive change in its fortunes. Spotify, on the other hand, is like Roku currently unprofitable, but there is at least a theory as to how it might eventually turn that around with enough growth in paid streaming, off the back of recently renegotiated record deals.

    via TechCrunch


    Apple Has Acquired a Small French Photo Analysis Company (Sep 29, 2017)

    Apple has made another one of its characteristic quiet, small acquisitions of a technology company, this one a French business specializing in computer vision for photo analysis. Unlike some other photo analysis tools, however, this one isn’t so much about recognizing the content of photos as determining which photo in a group might be technically best, or which photos are duplicates. It’s easy to see those technologies being used in future version of Apple’s Photos app on the iPhone to select the best picture from a burst of photos, or to manage a photo library on a Mac. Apple has put enormous attention into its cameras almost from day one of the iPhone, but its photo management software hasn’t kept pace for much of that time, though recently it’s began to invest more seriously in it both on the iPhone itself and on the Mac. This small acquisition is a sign that it plans to continue to make incremental improvements, if nothing else.

    via TechCrunch


    Google is Reportedly Working on an Echo Show Competitor (Sep 29, 2017)

    This report from TechCrunch appears to be based to some extent on the same tip I mentioned both in yesterday’s item and on the podcast last night: it suggests that Google is working on a competitor to the Amazon Echo Show. It sounds like it would run key Google apps and serve as a smart home hub, and might also run Netflix, while the screen is expected to be similar in size to the Echo Show’s, at 7 inches. This is still a small slice of the overall voice speaker market, one which needs to prove itself more as a strange hybrid of stationary tablet and voice speaker with a display. Videoconferencing is one of the features Amazon’s promoted most with regard to the Echo Show, and it sounds like Google’s device will support that too, but of course we all have many devices capable of that function already, and the additional utility of having that device always in the same place is limited. Google’s leaked Home Mini and rumored Home Max seem much more promising in the near term.

    via TechCrunch


    Daily Podcast Episode 66 – September 28, 2017 (Sep 28, 2017)

    The daily podcast episode for September 28 is up now on SoundCloud and should be syncing shortly to iTunes, Overcast, and other podcast apps. As usual, the podcast spends about one minute on each of the items covered on the site today, and also points to a few other items in the news today which I didn’t cover but which are nonetheless interesting. You can find today’s episode on SoundCloud and all episodes on iTunes, Overcast, and so on. The additional items covered are below:


    Google Announces Assistant is Coming to Android TV Starting with Nvidia Shield (Sep 28, 2017)

    If there are two big recent trends in voice assistants, they’re control of music and control of TVs. Every major company in this space is making announcements about these two areas, with Amazon adding voice control to its music apps and then Alexa to its new Fire TV box, Apple preparing the music-centric HomePod for launch, and Sonos prepping an event next week which is also likely to be music-oriented. In that context, then, it’s no surprise that the latest set of devices to get Google Assistant support are those running Android TV, of which there are currently very few, notably the gaming-centric Nvidia Shield and Sony’s Bravia TV sets. The Nvidia Shield support was actually announced way back at CES in January if I recall correctly, but support is only rolling out now. More broadly, Apple TV and Amazon’s Fire TV already support voice control, while there’s also an Alexa integration with DISH’s satellite service, and Comcast offers its own native voice control through its remotes, so this is becoming table stakes for a TV interface. The specific voice functions Android TV supports seem roughly on par with those offered on other platforms, though perhaps a bit more limited.

    via Google