This is a download from BFM 89.9, the Business Station. BFM 89.9, the Business Station. My name is Rich Bradbury. This is Matt Splaind.
Did we have it wrong all this time? Are the big tech companies casting around in the same darkness as the rest of us? Try to figure out which way to pivot next? Or do they have that roadmap to world domination we always suspected?
Perching uncomfortably on the spiked metal railing of the fence is of course Matt Armitage. Matt, are you all right up here? I am, I'm feeling quite happy. I mean obviously it's a metaphorical fence so risking and paring myself for slightly better ratings for BFM is probably going to go a step too far.
Now I thought, and I got all excited because I thought we were going to be talking about non-fungible tokens and digital art this week. Well so did I. And as we were talking about our fair and talking about the fact that we keep forgetting to record what we're doing our fair when we should be. You know this story keeps evolving.
So this week there were reports about the identity of that record breaking Christie's buyer. But there's not enough information or verification to confirm it yet. So I thought we'd give it another week or two to see how the story develops. You know it's a bit like with with GameStop.
If you hit it too early, you don't know if you're commenting on a trend or a genuinely new direction for the technology. But that's kind of what makes this week's story interesting because it's also about intent. It's about challenging perceptions. It's about altering these status quo.
So you asked me a couple of weeks back what makes a good episode of Matt's Blame. And I didn't reply to you. I got sidetracked as usual. I think I was visiting a quantum event in a parallel universe that night.
Or at least, you know, that's what I tell my wife. But I think that's what makes a good episode of this show. You know, asking why technology is moving in certain directions? Who is moving it or trying to move it in those directions?
And then challenging our preconceived notions based around those facts. And even looking at why we hold those perceptions or preconceptions in the first place. Do you think that people hold a perception then that Big Tech has a correspondingly big plan? Well, I don't think the majority of people believe that there's a kind of collective or conspiratorial plan.
You know, some spectre like roadmap to world domination, as you mentioned in the intro. A small number of people might think that in the way that a small number of people believe that our planet is ruled by blood sucking lizards who can disguise themselves as humans. Which, strangely enough, is the plot of the schlocky 1980 sci-fi mini-series V. And also something that the director John Carpenter covered with a cheeky flourish in they live later that same decade.
So it's easy to think that there's some overarching plan and that each of us is a powerless cog in that machine. So that's not to say that companies, especially tech companies, don't have plans and goals. You know, of course they do. All companies do.
Otherwise, you'd have a lot of very nervous shareholders and investors. But that doesn't mean that these companies are the master strategists and world-dominating empires. But, you know, we imagine them to be at least certainly not yet. Where's this coming from?
My inbox, it's well known that I don't support inbox zero. I've currently got, I think, close to 130,000 unread emails spread around my accounts. In fact, I accidentally hit red all on about 2,000 of the other day. And I was absolutely living with myself.
But what some people think of as chaos, you know, actually allows me to see and access relevant information very quickly. In fact, recently I've had to go diving into my spam filters quite regularly to find people's mail, because the filters I've said have actually become a bit overzealous when it comes to weeding things out. So yes, this is from the New York Times on Tech newsletter, which I think comes out most a few times a week. So it might be daily.
It's impossible to kind of accurately gauge the passing of time anymore. So you can't tell if something's daily or three times a week. I actually spent most of Tuesday believing that it was Wednesday, and not understanding why my content hadn't published, and it hadn't published because it was Tuesday. And it was only scheduled to go live that evening.
All right, all right. None of this tells us what about the email that you received, Karyon? Yeah, having a senior moment. No, so this was a short piece written by Shira Ovidae, titled, Maybe Amazon Has No Master Plan.
So we did a series of shows about Amazon's growth a few years ago. And just before Christmas, I promised that we'd come back to Amazon this year. So I don't want to look too closely or specifically at the company today, mostly because the argument that Shira Ovidae makes is much more interesting when you look at it in that macro perspective and include other companies, especially as we do think of Big Tech as this globally dominating Hydra. And that's really why we've invented that collective term, Big Tech, to describe it.
So it's easy to assume that there's some connection that goes beyond a commonality of purpose. And we've talked about this before. It overlooks the fact that the tech companies are competing with each other in so many ways. In a kind of Twitter versus Facebook versus TikTok kind of fight-em-out conversation.
Yeah, much broader than that. Look at artificial intelligence, which we talk about most of the time on this show. Google is a leader in that space, but Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, IBM, they're all competing for that same market share. We know that Google is mostly out of the social media space, although YouTube is arguably a social media company to an extent rather.
And Waze is sort of pushed as a social community. There was a fascinating piece I read on why this week called How You Can Use Google Maps as a Social Network. I mean, I'm not going to go into it here. The title is self-explanatory, so you can go and check that out.
But there are all sorts of areas where these companies and their billionaire founders overlap and compete directly with each other. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have their own space companies. For some reason I wrote Jeff Bezos as jazz Bezos in my notes, but that's a better name for him. Google's X Labs has explored various space travel-related technologies, like balloons and space elevators, Tesla and Google and probably Apple have their own autonomous car concepts.
And when it comes to new technologies and entertainment, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, HBO, they all have their own skin in the game. And as we've mentioned before, healthcare and financial services. Yeah, as well as Facebook's abandoned digital currency Libra. You know, absolutely everyone right now has an e-wallet or payment technology of some sort.
Maybe my local Thai restaurant has its own e-wallet. Do you have an e-wallet service? I certainly have a service where people can make deposits, but my lawyers have told me to refrain from calling it an e-wallet or a payment gateway or even allowing access to your funds in any way that might constitute any kind of legal responsibility. But sure, you can sideload my virtual holdings app from most non-regulated app stores.
And it's actually a game. You trade money for the appearance of having money in an account that you can't withdraw money from. So it's to recreate that feeling of the good old days before online banking and ATM machines when banks only seem to open for about four hours a week and bank managers were pretty much allergic to anyone making withdrawals. I mean, I bet that almost anyone over the age of 40 still has money in one of those old, locked up bank accounts somewhere.
I have no idea what you're talking about, my few. Me being the young whippersnapper that I am have no idea of the reference that you're making. I bet you have 17 building society accounts in the UK that you have no idea how to access. I mean, maybe a post office account as well.
Exactly. But you know, it still comes back to that central point about tech companies maybe having some areas where there are interests overlap. Government regulation, for example. So that's why it was interesting to see the different approaches to paying for media content in Australia that the tech companies have taken.
Microsoft has had deals with copyright owners for some time and Google and Facebook caved in and in order to sign their own deals earlier this year. But overall, we see a commonality between the companies when it comes to governments and regulations. Most of the companies want light touch regulation, although they are willing to throw each other under the bus in some areas. You know, Facebook and Google make a lot of their money from our data.
I mean, that's their primary income sources. Well, certainly for Facebook. And Apple decries that approach to information and privacy, but then they have the cushion of a business model based around actually selling us stuff. Alright, so bring it down from that wide perspective as you acknowledge that the start of the show.
Each of those companies must have its own blueprint for world domination, if you will. Well, right, as I said, you know, they have business plans. Of course they have business plans. And we can see the expansion parts that we think they're going to take.
But what it's easy to assume and what we'll get into after the break is that these plans are coherent and they're pushing towards a specific end goal. And that's the part I think we perhaps overestimate them. You know, we have the first generation of people who've never known a world before Facebook. They've never had to leave the house without a device connected to the internet who have essentially no knowledge of a world before the internet.
So for them, brands and companies, you know, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Apple, Samsung, Amazon, Microsoft, dozens more. These companies are fixed pillars in the fabric of their lives. They haven't experienced a world that was dominated by other companies. And maybe they won't.
Well, perhaps, but history suggests it's unlikely. Look at the history of the car companies in the 20th century. I think we did a show a while back, maybe a year or more, about how the car companies were the big tech of their age. They were the pioneers reshaping society.
Now, those companies are largely still there, but their position in the overall cultural and societal mix has changed. And I would expect to see similar changes with some, if not all, of the current crop of big tech names. If not in my lifetime, which is probably about an hour and a half, then certainly within that of our younger listeners, because much of the behavior we see from these big companies is about anticipating those next leaps and jumps. Sometimes it's about caroling or dominating them.
Occasionally it's about squashing them. But mostly I think it's about relevance, which is why Amazon is such an interesting case study example, because its reach is so broad and it's constantly getting wider. Alright, when we come back, more on the no plan plan of the big tech company. See it on Matt's Blaine on BFM 89.9.
Beautiful festive moments. BFM 89.9, the business station. BFM 89.9, the business station. My name is Rich Bradbury and this is Matt's Blaine.
Before the break, we were supposed to be talking about big techs, Ultimate and Game, or lack thereof. What we mostly got was anecdotes about the 1980s, TV shows and bank managers. And I have to push you for just a little bit, a little bit more substance. Now I'm having to resist the urge to talk about the Joy Division and new order compilations that were also called substance.
Don't worry, I'll stick to the matter in hand, which started, I think, at inbox zero or the lack thereof. So in Sheera Obeday's contact piece, she talks about Amazon and some of its expansionary steps. Most of us know that Fresh Groceries was one of the sectors that Amazon wanted to crash. And in 2017, or thereabouts, the company bought over the US supermarket chain, Whole Foods for, I think, about 13 billion dollars, which gave them a network of around 350 or more stores across the US that they could integrate into their logistics chains.
But as Obeday points out, the story behind that is that Amazon had already been selling groceries to varying degrees, depending on your different markets and where you were living for around 15 years. So far, the Whole Foods takeover perhaps hasn't been the enormous success Amazon anticipated. See the expansion of startups like Instacart over the last year, which has recruited tens of thousands of independent contractors to work for it during the pandemic, sending people into supermarkets to shop for you. Similar to the service Happy Fresh in Malaysia, which Richard kindly prompted me on, because I forgot, you can argue that Amazon is a long way from being top of mind when it comes to fresh produce.
So, what about Amazon Fresh? Well, that's the point, really. We've mentioned Amazon Fresh before, but I'll do a quick recap for everyone. It started life as Amazon's Fresh Grocery Delivery Service, but it's since expanded into physical stores.
One of the main features of the stores, apart from the fact that the pricing is generally lower than Whole Foods, which has a slightly more upscale profile, is that the stores are very tech-centric. The company is experimenting with the same pickup and go technologies. It tried out in its Seattle pop-up stores, meaning that Amazon Prime members can shop or will be able to shop in the near future, simply by picking up the groceries and leaving the stores. Cameras and tags do the rest of the work and charge everything automatically to your Amazon account.
Does that suggest that the Whole Foods buy over was a failure then? Well, no, it suggests that maybe integrating the chain into Amazon's wider vision for securing a big chunk of the grocery industry hasn't rolled out as quickly or as smoothly as the company may have wanted. So, the groceries market is reportedly worth something like $900 billion just in the US. So, you could see that as a potential missed opportunity, given the opportunities we've had for tech-centric retail that have come up during the coronavirus.
And it's quite telling that Amazon Fresh's physical stores are being rolled out internationally from the start, allowing the company to test multiple markets and generate data and feedback about very different consumers and their needs and wants. So, that data-centric approach is much more in line with our conception of what Amazon is, much more so than the company buying a bricks and mortar food retailer like Whole Foods. And I'm guessing that Amazon is probably interested in more than making money from selling tomatoes. Food is a gateway for the company.
Food is something that we have to buy. It's not just something we want to buy. And that opens a path to the huge array of Amazon's other services, their retail, their financial services, even to their healthcare, because in-store pharmacies are increasingly becoming a place to do basic health checks. And that in turn feeds into the data and insights that are generated by wearable smartwatches and health monitors, which Amazon is also trying to expand into.
Isn't all of this like just a normal part of business experimentation though? To an extent, but as we said, it's perceptions. We have this perception of big tech companies being all knowing that they're able to manipulate data and information and nudge or even force us into choosing their preferred option and think that we did ourselves. And I'm sure that some companies would love nothing more than to do that.
But you have to tread a very fine line with that kind of messaging. Companies won't overtly use words like manipulate. Instead, our news feeds are customized to fit our profile. So that fine line comes in the gray area where customization blends or trips over into manipulation.
So in a sense, it's a relief to realize that maybe these companies are as clueless about what's going to come next as the rest of us are. And they're simply throwing lines into the water and seeing which ones hook a fish. I watched a YouTube video about fishing this morning. That's why I said fish.
I was just going to ask, where did that come from? Anyway, but what does have, I'm sorry, you just throw me a for a loop there Matthew. What does have anything to do with Amazon's secret home robot project? Well, in a way, although I guess secretive is a better way to describe it than secret.
You know, if your project is being reported in business inside of the Virgin Forbes, it's hard to say that it's secret. You know, it's about a secret as knowing that my e-wallet service is an enormous con. Not that that should stop anyone from downloading it. Amazon's robot project appears to be called Vesta.
And the basic premise seems to be that it's an Amazon Echo on wheels. Now, that's probably a bit of an ungenerous description. It may have a telescopic screen similar to the ones that we've seen on telework robots. It will probably be armed with an array of sensors that will help to run your home, you know, testing humidity and temperature and all of that kind of stuff.
The company reportedly has 800 staff working on its development. And it's said to be in the kind of advanced or final stages. I mean, do we really want an Echo on wheels? Well, the Echo has been a huge success for the company.
But as you said, you know, the worry seems to be echoed by some analysts. This may be a niche product. You know, a lot of companies have tried and died on the altar of at-home robots. So a lot of it's going to depend on on cost.
Amazon's Echo speakers are incredibly cheap and surprisingly versatile. But, you know, at the same time, Amazon doesn't have everything all its own way. Its fire tablets are a great gateway for people looking for low-cost entertainment tablets. But its fire phone was a high-profile flop.
It seems that the trade-offs we're willing to make for a voice-focused device like Echo and entry level tablets aren't transferable or the same trade-offs that we're willing to make for the functionality we expect from a smartphone. So the bigger point around this, I guess, is that we see similar patterns of behavior at many of the tech companies. We know that Google or Alphabet rather is interested in creating data-centric urban developments. It has a company, Sidewalk Labs, which is dedicated to doing just that.
But its plans for an ambitious key-side redevelopment project in Toronto created a lot of pushback over everything from local tax collection to privacy concerns relating to all of that data they were going to accumulate. And there isn't even time here to go into the PR mess of its attempts to define the conversation about data and ethics. Which probably brings us back to the F word, right? Well, again, no time to talk about the Supreme Court of Facebook or the Fellowship of the Book or whatever it's called that was announced this week.
The company always seems to loom large in those discussions about technology that people can't live without but somehow are really wary of, largely because of how good the company has become at monetizing us all. The same secret source that applied to Facebook, it then applied to Instagram. But that doesn't mean that they have some kind of minders touch. At the start of the year, there was a lot of media coverage about the, about WhatsApp, Facebook's incident messaging service, changing its terms and services.
A lot of people said they were going to leave the service and join another messaging app. Although if my experience is anything to go by, you know, those concerns were overblown. At the moment, only Ollie is using Telegram to talk to me and Jinmay is my only signal buddy, despite the deluge of notifications I get that people have signed up for them. But on the whole, WhatsApp doesn't get that much attention, especially for the business media.
And I think part of that is due to the fact that a lot of media is very US-centric. And WhatsApp really isn't that popular in the US. So it doesn't have the same cultural significance or dominance that the app has outside of the United States. How does WhatsApp tie back to this idea that tech companies aren't all seeing and all knowing them?
Well, because that secret source side talked about that works for Facebook and Instagram is proving much harder to crack for WhatsApp. So the company is casting its net wider. WhatsApp has billions of users. In some countries, it's more widely used than either Facebook or Instagram.
But it generates very little revenue. So that's critical for a free service for the company to be able to generate the revenue needed to run it for the users. So Facebook seems to have backed off the idea of serving us ads on the platform, or it hasn't yet come up with a method that we it thinks that we'll find palatable. It seems to be experimenting with a lot of models to try and monetize, trying to turn it into a customer service tool for brands with a mixture of bot-based and human customer service representatives.
It's trying to cement it as a way to transfer money and even pay for things. And it's launched a business service called catalog that serves as a virtual storefront that allows small businesses to list their products. A bit like Choppie and Graham and Lazado and Amazon and lots of Jack Maas platforms. And that's really the point of all of this.
We start from this default assumption that big tech is going to dominate our future. And I'm not saying it won't, but often those tech companies are retrofitting existing platforms to try and make them financially viable. It's not a foregone conclusion that those efforts are going to succeed. As Oviday mentions in the New York Times newsletter, digital and hybrid grocery chains like Ocado in the UK and Market Curly in South Korea are getting really close to cracking some of the problems that Amazon is having with groceries.
And the same thing, you know, we're seeing that same thing with the proliferation of e-wallet technologies, obviously, apart from mine. You have to ask yourself, you know, can a company like Facebook compete with platforms that have been built from the ground up as payment systems and to increasingly added social components? Facebook's trying to achieve the same goal, but from a starting point at the opposite end of the course. So a few weeks ago, you know, we talked about facial recognition payment systems and how hundreds of millions of people will be using nothing more than their face to pay for goods and services in China by the end of this year.
What's the stop the big companies buying over these innovators? Well, nothing. You know, going back to Facebook, in Scram, WhatsApp, Oculus, these are all companies that Facebook bought over. And, you know, we see that same pattern of acquisitions repeated across the tech world.
But it's interesting from our point of view, because it comes back to that thing about perceptions. Many people believe that these companies are monoliths equipped with some kind of implacable plan for our technological enslavement. Yet in many cases, these companies have to buy the vision and innovation they need just to keep pace with, let alone stay ahead of the markets they operate in. In some instances as well, we see the size and scale of those companies becoming an impediment to change and adaptation.
Isn't it a slightly esoteric argument? Does it matter where the ideas come from? If these companies end up in control of them? I mean, I appreciate that point, but I think it is more than just an academic distinction, especially as lawmakers around the world are finally showing some appetite for raining in that power.
So if you wanted me to sum it up in a pithy way, I guess you could describe it as futility versus utility. So as I mentioned, a generation that doesn't know the world without these companies sees them as pillars, it sees them as certainties. It's in the interests of big companies to present any challenge to their dominance as being futile. So the more you get people to believe that, the more it becomes because you're reinforcing that incorrect viewpoint.
And that's where the utility comes in. Big companies can be out thought, they can be out-renovered. The classic example is when file hosting service Dropbox declined to be bought over by Apple. Steve Jobs supposedly told its bosses that they were making a huge mistake because Dropbox is a feature, not a product.
Well, it's a feature that's now 14 years old. So maybe we're being led to believe that the game is more linked than it is and that the big plan is no plan at all. Very interesting. Thank you for that, Matt.
Ladies and gentlemen, you have been tuned in to Matt's plane here on BFM 89.9. If you'd like to get more information about Matt, you can follow him over on Instagram and Twitter. He's at Culture Matt. You can also head over to CulturePop.com for transcripts of these shows and information about CulturePop and its consulting services.
This has been Matt's plane here on BFM 89.9, the Business Station. Thank you for listening to this podcast. To find more great interviews, go to bfm.my or find us on iTunes, bfm 89.9, the Business Station.