Category: Business Planning

Business Planning, Businessbrokerjournal.com Plan your business and keep yourself updated on the latest happenings around the globe.

The end of unlimited Google Photos storage is part of a bigger pivot

Posted onAuthoradmin

There are two ways to look at Google’s recent announcement that it will discontinue unlimited Google Photos storage starting next June. The first is Google’s official explanation: People are uploading a lot more photos and videos than they used to, making the service harder to sustain for free. “When we launched Google five years ago, the upload velocity that we had then, versus today’s mobile world, is a lot different,” Google Photos VP Shimrit Ben-Yair told me recently. But there’s another explanation that Google didn’t make quite as explicit: The end of unlimited Google Photos storage marks a pivot of sorts for the search giant, away from being so overwhelmingly dependent on targeted ads as its dominant business model. The future of Google could be as much about subscription revenue as advertising, with Google Photos’ push for paid cloud storage as the centerpiece of those efforts. Beyond the ad business Google’s shift away from an ad-centric model isn’t entirely new. While advertising made up nearly 90% of the company’s revenues in 2015, that share has since fallen to 83.9% last year and 80.6% over the first nine months of 2020. Nonadvertising revenue comes from the apps and media people buy from the Google Play Store, sales of devices such as Pixel phones and Nest speakers, subscriptions to services such as YouTube TV, and Google’s enterprise business, which includes cloud computing services and business-class productivity tools. Still, there are signs that Google may be accelerating those nonadvertising efforts, with subscription revenue as the focal point. Last month, for instance, Google discontinued unlimited cloud storage for business users as part of its rebranding from G Suite to Google Workspace . Instead of getting unlimited storage for $12 per user per month, teams with at least five members will get 2 TB of storage per user at that price. Companies must pay $18 per month per user for 5 TB of storage, and Google doesn’t even advertise the price of unlimited storage, which it only offers through its sales department. Google also sharply increased the price of its YouTube TV streaming bundle over the summer, from $50 per month to $65 per month. While other live TV services have also raised prices, and TV networks deserve most of the blame for making pay TV too expensive, the price hike shows that Google’s become more intent on making the service profitable. Google’s also added a few new subscription services over the last year or so. In September 2019, it launched Play Pass , a $5-per-month bundle of Android apps and games from the Google Play Store. A couple of months later, it got into the cloud gaming business with Stadia . And just last month, Google started selling Pixel phones on a subscription basis to customers of its Google Fi wireless service, helping to ensure that they stay connected to the company’s cellular plans over the long haul. All of this suggests that Google isn’t feeling as confident in the advertising business as it used to, and for good reason: Threats to its longstanding cash cow are everywhere Read More …

Silicon Valley expects a chillier relationship with Biden than Obama

Posted onAuthoradmin

Now that the Biden administration has announced a transition team and is gradually announcing key advisory and cabinet appointments, the posture of the new administration toward Silicon Valley is becoming clearer. And it’s not the look of a budding friendship. When Biden last worked at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., the White House had an open and friendly relationship with Silicon Valley. For example, the Obama administration also recruited talent from Silicon Valley to form the U.S. Digital Service , the elite technology “startup” within the White House that helped government agencies streamline systems and exploit new agile development methods. Obama also created the position of U.S. chief technology officer within the Office of Science and Technology Policy. From a regulatory standpoint, the tech industry enjoyed a light touch during the Obama years. Its relationship with the Biden administration will likely be different and less trusting. That’s one of the reasons it’s closely watching the formation of the new Biden administration, now in its beginning stages. There’s a lot to watch, since so many government agencies now impact the business of tech. Some high-level appointments, such as Ron Klain as chief of staff, will deal with a broad spectrum of issues, many of which don’t touch tech directly. But others, like the appointment of Janet Yellen as Treasury secretary could, for example, have implications for digital currencies and other financial tech. “There are enormous fintech issues that will be facing the financial regulators, most principally the office of the Comptroller of the Currency, but some issues that’ll touch upon the FDIC, Federal Reserve ,and Treasury as well,” says Jeff Hauser, founder and director of the Revolving Door Project, which tracks presidential appointees who come from various industries. Antitrust under Biden Of chief concern to Big Tech is the Biden administration’s thinking on antitrust. Proposals for breaking up big tech companies in the last couple of years from people such as Massachusetts senator and former presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren have ridden a wave of populist feeling in the country. The Department of Justice has already filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google in federal court, and the Federal Trade Commission is reportedly in the final stages of deciding whether to file its own suit against Facebook. The agencies are also conducting investigations into alleged anticompetitive aspects of marketplaces run by Amazon and Apple. The Valley is waiting for Biden to announce his attorney general and FTC chair , which could tell a lot about the new administration’s plans to control Big Tech. I don’t think this administration is going be kind to Big Tech in general.” Eric White, Seismic Capital Company Biden said precious little about antitrust on the campaign trail, but his statements on adjacent issues give some clues to his thinking Read More …

With just 7 COVID-19 deaths in Taiwan, even huge events are back in business

Posted onAuthoradmin

It’s a Saturday afternoon at 3:00 in the afternoon, and Taipei Metro’s blue line is packed. Riders are standing shoulder to shoulder. Exiting passengers positioned in the interior kindly ask those in front of the doors to make way. All passengers are sporting compulsory masks—including those heading to the four-day Outdoor Show at the Nangang Exhibition Center. Right inside the exhibition center entrance, a young man is positioned off to the side behind a standup desk. On top sit a laptop and connected security camera. As attendees flow through the doors, the camera captures their body temperature and relays it to the laptop, where their respective temperatures pop up in front of their faces on the screen Read More …

Big Tech was already dominant. Has coronavirus made it unstoppable?

Posted onAuthoradmin

People often ask me what stocks I own. My investing advice is simple: I only invest in unregulated monopolies. They aren’t supposed to exist, but our antitrust laws were written in the era of steam engines, and enforcement has been nonexistent. Big tech is the twenty-first century version of John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, and there is no trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt on the horizon to rein them in. How have they done it? The algorithm is this: innovate, obfuscate, and exploit. Especially in a pandemic. Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity by Scott Galloway Put simply, COVID-19 has been an effective weapon of mass distraction from big tech’s bad behavior. No news story survives 12 hours while a pandemic coupled with a national display of incompetence renders everything else what it is, less important. But whether we are paying attention or not, unchecked growth and market dominance lead to a slew of problems. Inevitably, companies without serious competition become less innovative and capture more profits and share from exploiting their position, and less from creating real value. And to protect that position, they perform infanticide on other innovators. No wonder that Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook have added hundreds of billions in market value since March Read More …

Gmail’s new logo is just a taste of Google’s plan to rethink productivity

Posted onAuthoradmin

Let’s get one thing out of the way right off the bat: Google’s habit of repositioning products has become a bit of a punchline. From the seemingly endless cycle of shifting messaging service strategies to the recent branding 360 with the Google TV – Android TV – Google TV again saga, the company has a slight reputation for failing to commit to any particular concept for long. Sometimes, though, a new beginning makes sense. Sometimes, a product’s evolution seems appropriate. And sometimes, despite the well-warranted inclination to sigh at the notion of Yet Another Google Name Change, the reason for a rebranding actually resonates—and feels like a step in the right direction. That’s certainly the case with Google Workspace, a new identity Google is rolling out for the entity formerly known as G Suite (which itself was formerly known as both Google Apps and Google Apps for Your Domain) this week. Workspace is, on the surface, an updated name and brand for Google’s collection of productivity apps—Gmail, Docs, Calendar, Drive, and so on. The rebrand is more than just a new name: It also includes some significant changes both in function and in appearance. That means that all these apps’ logos are getting a big makeover—so get ready to say so long to the iconic Gmail envelope. “This is the moment in which we break free from defining the structure and the role of our offerings in terms that were invented by somebody else in a very different era,” says Javier Soltero, Google’s vice president and general manager of G Suite and now Workspace. So if it isn’t just a new name, what is it? Well, it’s complicated. Workspace isn’t exactly a new service , in and of itself. It’s more of a new mindset—a connective tissue that reimagines how Google’s productivity apps exist and reshapes them as more than just vaguely related individual pieces. “The space in between those apps becomes really important,” Soltero says. Read More …