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enterprise| enterpriseauthorTom KrazitNoneAre you keeping up with the latest cloud developments? Get Tom Krazit and Joe Williams' newsletter every Monday and Thursday.d3d5b92349
August 5, 2020
More than a year after declaring itself a neutral party in the emerging service-mesh arena, Microsoft will release its own open-source take on the technology Wednesday — while not-so-subtly tweaking its cloud rival Google in the process.
Microsoft's Open Service Mesh is a new open-source project designed to help companies manage the ever-increasing complexity of building applications in a modular way — a modern architectural concept known as microservices. It was designed as a "lighter-weight" version of Istio, the Google-backed project that addresses the same need, said Gabe Monroy, director of product management for Microsoft Azure.
That's not the only thing about Open Service Mesh that's different from Istio: Microsoft plans to transfer the project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation as soon as possible, Monroy said. Google's back-and-forth regarding its governance plans for Istio has been a hot topic over the last year, as the company has sought to retain control of that project.
Modern software development moves fast. Developers are under immense pressure to ship code early and often, which not only allows companies to introduce new features at a steady clip, but also makes it possible to fix bugs and solve problems much faster than older cadences allowed.
Microservices are one method used to achieve that velocity while ensuring reliability. In contrast to a so-called "monolith," microservices allow developers to break applications down into lots of smaller parts that can be tweaked and updated without causing problems to unrelated parts of the application.
But the benefits of microservices are balanced by the complexity of managing all those separate parts and making sure traffic flows smoothly between them. Service meshes have emerged as a solution to that problem, and there are now several companies, including Google, HashiCorp, Buoyant and Solo.io, all jockeying for position to take advantage of the increasing popularity of microservices.
Last year Microsoft said it intended to be the Switzerland of service meshes, introducing a concept called the Service Mesh Interface that helped its customers use the service mesh of their choice on Azure. Yet Monroy said customers wanted a less-complex version of Istio — one that still worked with the container project Kubernetes and Envoy, another open-source project developed by Lyft that addresses a piece of the microservices puzzle, but was easier to use. So, Microsoft built one.
Assuming the Open Service Mesh is accepted by the CNCF, the subset of the Linux Foundation formed around Kubernetes in 2015, the organization would control the governance and trademark policies of several projects in this space, including Envoy and Linkerd (built by Buoyant).
At one point, Google told its Istio partners that it would transfer control of that project to the CNCF at some point, but surprised and angered those partners late last year when it reneged on that vow. Google has since pledged to transfer Istio's trademarks to a neutral holding company, but open-source and trademark experts are not exactly sure what to make of Google's new Open Usage Commons.
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Tom Krazit
Tom Krazit ( @tomkrazit) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering cloud computing and enterprise technology out of the Pacific Northwest. He has written and edited stories about the technology industry for almost two decades for publications such as IDG, CNET, paidContent, and GeekWire. He served as executive editor of Gigaom and Structure, and most recently produced a leading cloud computing newsletter called Mostly Cloudy.
People
Why the stock market went crazy — and one way to fix it
Leif Abraham, the co-CEO of Public, joins the Source Code podcast to talk about what's happening with GameStop, how fintech companies should be helping investors, and what "finance social" looks like.
Public's app tries to make investing simpler. And a little less crazy.
Image: Public
January 28, 2021
David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
January 28, 2021
Leif Abraham wants to be very clear that most of this week's GameStop-stock insanity was not happening on his investing platform. (Maybe a little was, but not much.) While Robinhood was climbing the app store charts this week and prices were going out of control, things were a little quieter on Public, where Abraham is co-CEO. And he thinks that's a good thing: He's trying to build a company, a product, and a community that are all focused on long-term goals rather than short-term gains.
At the same time, Abraham said on this week's Source Code podcast, what's happening with GameStop — and AMC and BlackBerry and Nokia and a host of other stocks juiced by retail investors — does signal a shift in how the stock market works. It's no longer the exclusive property of suspenders-wearing bankers and vest-wearing hedge fund bros. The "retail investor," as they're often called, is a force to be reckoned with.
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</div></p><p>Public's job, as Abraham sees it, is to figure out how to help those new investors be successful measured in years, not hours or days. One way the company hopes to pull that off is by baking social features into practically every part of the app. "If you want to build true education around the stock market," he said, "no editorial department on this planet can make it happen. Building a large community around the stock market is, I think, maybe the only way to really solve that issue."</p><p>In our interview, he explained why you should care which stocks Tony Hawk owns, how to design for both fun and responsible decisions, and why it's so important — and so hard — to get more people trading.</p><div class="rm-embed embed-media"><iframe frameborder="no" height="200px" scrolling="no" seamless="" src="https://player.simplecast.com/066abf73-4893-4fce-96b6-5cfb76cdfc45?dark=true" width="100%"></iframe></div><p><em>The following excerpts from our interview have been edited for length and clarity.</em><br></p><p style=""><strong>We have to start with GameStop, right? And it's not just GameStop, it's AMC and BlackBerry, too, but there's this thing happening in public, which I feel like has not happened in public before in investing. What do you make of what's happened in the markets the last few days?</strong></p><p style="">Retail investing volume has been going from about 10% to 20% over the last few years. And that obviously has to do with just more people having access to the stock market. I think that's obviously driven a lot of interest. The other thing that has happened, I think, is just the force something like Reddit has in terms of people being able to rally behind something way quicker than they have ever been able to in the history of this planet.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p style="">I still think that it's mostly driven by people looking for a quick gain. There's obviously an aspect of David vs Goliath, the sense that the crowd can suddenly take down a hedge fund, which is a power-dynamics shift. It's pretty insane, if you think about it. But at the end of the day, I still believe that it's also driven by the general desire of finding ways for quick gains. </p><p style="">I think, especially if you look at some of the communities that have been sprung up around the stock market on Reddit and co., you will definitely see that the culture of those lends itself to more short-term thinking, very heavily speculative. What happened to GameStop has nothing to do with the fundamentals of that company. It's pure speculation, and it's really trying to play a game against the big guys, but also with the obvious goal to make some gains out of it. <br></p><p style="">Within those communities, it's often a little bit closer to gambling culture than it is to investing culture at the end of the day. And it's also a trend you've seen after March: A lot of people started adding to the stock market after seeing a drop in the market and seeing the opportunity to now get started. And so I think that kind of has, you know, accelerated that specifically.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p style=""><strong>On the one hand, there are all of these obvious warning signs about why what's happening is not a good idea, to your point about company fundamentals. But on the other hand, there is this very tech utopian, like, Power to the People thing happening. There is something … magical about the fact that a bunch of insane people on Reddit can literally decide what a stock is worth, if they all decide to do it. </strong></p><p style=""><strong>It's kind of like what companies like Public have been talking about for a long time: this idea that investing shouldn't just be in the hands of these people who work behind the scenes at banks, the wizard behind the curtain. This should be available to more people. The truth is just that when you make things available to all people, some people will do insane things.</strong></p><p style="">There's obviously also a lot of risk to it, because you have a few people that truly understand it. The things that are happening with GameStop is like pretty sophisticated stuff, right? So this is not something that someone who's just brand new into the stock market can come up with and really figure out. </p><p style="">I do think that the Twitter and the Reddit hype, and then having literally famous business people tweet about it as well, just creates a lot of risk for people that have just been pulled into it because they just see something going up. And then they see something going up, they put their own money into it with the hope to get some gain at the end of that slope. And there's obviously a lot of risk there. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p style="">There will be collateral damage in the end, and likely that collateral damage will not be the people who are more sophisticated, who are likely the ones who started it. And I think that is obviously something to be very mindful of. And I feel that's where I think we have to watch out with celebrating too much, right? I agree that there is a certain beauty to see the power the people can have when they rally together. But on the other hand, in a democracy, the healthiness of democracy is driven by the education of citizens, right? I think that plays into this as well. And so you will have a lot of collateral damage that happens with it, which I'm personally concerned about.</p><p style=""><strong>As you think about that from a company perspective, what have you been doing this week? You're in the position of wanting to give people access, and these things are inherently social, so I'm curious what's been happening in and around your platform. And what do you think your job is here?</strong></p><p style="">When we built Public, from the very beginning we saw it as a chance to build a new culture on the stock market from scratch. And so if you look historically at the community that has grown up around the stock market, it has been more the day-trader type of crowd. More speculative, more short-term, more statistical analysis than long-term future vision of companies, that kind of thing. And so I believe those communities were also just something that didn't necessarily have a certain true mainstream appeal, and therefore weren't necessarily very inclusive for most people, because they're not necessarily very welcoming of people who are very new to investing. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p style="">So we took the approach to actively not start there when we acquire customers, but to basically start more with creative communities, female business communities, etc. And that's who the first users of Public were. So the culture on Public and the community is very different than what you would expect when you think of stock trading and social media, right? </p><p style=""><strong>Right, because those things typically thrive on chaos, right? And the point of it is the speed and the energy.</strong></p><p style="">Yeah, and it's about how much money did you make yesterday, not, you know, how much money did you make the last five years. On Public, you know, it's 40% women on the app, it's 90% people who are first-time investors. We look at ourselves really as something where we use social as a mechanism to scale education around the stock market, and to truly help people build financial literacy. And so the community is really much more about learning from the experiences of others, and sharing those general experiences, versus just speculating on the market and showing off quick gains. And that's just a very different culture.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="6">
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</div></p><p style="">That also comes from just the way we build features, for example. So we haven't rolled out margin loans, we haven't rolled out options trading. Instead, we've done things like a long-term portfolio, the ability to actually categorize your portfolio into short-term and long-term. And if you put your stocks into long-term, we actually tell you how many days away are you from long-term capital gains tax before you sell it, and you have to kind of confirm before you can sell the stuff.</p><p style="">Or we launch things like safety labels. For example, GameStop received a safety level a few days ago from us. If the stock either falls into a sense where the SEC would deem it more risky, they actually have a safety label in the app so contextually in that moment, when you buy them, we give you quick context before you buy them on that potential higher risk. And you have to slide to confirm to actually then buy. </p><p style="">We believe that if you're building something where it's 90% first-time investors, it comes with a certain responsibility to build the experience for them, and try to serve them with contextual information when you can. They should still make their own decisions, right? We don't want to play God and define what they're going to buy or something, but we believe there's a certain responsibility that comes with it. </p><p style=""><strong>Tell me how social fits into all of this. I think finance social is historically mostly about day trading, and all the chaos of, you know, trying to screw over short sellers. But even going back to the beginning of Public, what was the what was the instinct behind why social felt like it should be part of this?</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="7">
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</div></p><p style="">The stock market is massive and vast and deep. And so, if you want to build true education around the stock market, no editorial department on this planet can make it happen. I think social, and building a large community around the stock market, is maybe the only way you can really solve that issue. Because number one, people can curate the experience on the stock market: I can follow certain people in a certain manner, I can follow people or break down the stock market in a certain way. I can follow people that are very highly specialized in a very specific sector or trend or very specific company. </p><p style="">And you can include more different voices in a discussion other than just financial analysts. If you are deep in the future of fitness and you are interested in Peloton, maybe you want to talk also to a Peloton instructor, and not just to the person that has analyzed the last earnings report. That type of thinking is likely best fostered within a large community like that. </p><p style=""><strong>You've got me thinking about UI. As we've seen, it's really easy to incentivize people to do just about anything with your design. As you think about sort of what the product is supposed to look and feel like, what is your design and user experience process, as you try to balance that stuff?</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="8">
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</div></p><p style="">We're looking really at the long term with the users we acquire. Specifically the space we're in right now, it's obviously — sorry to say this very cliche word — very user-centric. It's very much driven by what we believe is the most simplest, cleanest way. </p><p style=""><strong>But even giving users what they want can be complicated in this space. Because sometimes what users want is chaos! They want things to feel fun and exciting and weird and new. Listening to users seems dangerous in this case.</strong></p><p style="">I don't think when you say user-centric, it means you're just building what people ask for. I think if you're just building what people are asking for, it means you have zero vision for your company. I think it's very easy to feel like you're making the right decision if you just A/B test the shit out of it.</p><p style="">We think we're a pretty vision-strong company. That is what is driving our design and our decision roadmap. There's obviously an aspect where you have to listen to your users, and that falls into bug reports, that falls into certain other smaller features for sure. But it won't necessarily change the course of the ship.</p><p style=""><strong>That would mean then that you'd have to have a really clear, core set of first principles and values. Things that are on the white board, like, "these are the inviolable things that we care about most as a company that drives everything we do." What are those things for you, as you think about the user experience?</strong></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="9">
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</div></p><p style="">One thing we're always saying internally, and it's very high level and vague, is "we're playing a different game." If you look at fintech companies, and any fintech apps out there, I think a lot of these are just leading with the left brain. And so they're leading with, what's the APY on your savings accounts? What are the benefits on your debit card? What's the next feature you can launch? They're just leading with these utilitarian benefits. </p><p style="">We believe that, especially in investing, people invest with their heart as much as with their brain. It's not just purely rational. And that is really driving a lot of what we're doing. So we're building a people-first experience. And with that, we're building something understanding that people are driven by their values, their personal interests, and their backgrounds.</p><p style="">We had moments, like during the Black Lives Matter protests, when some Black women on the app started buying four S&P 500, companies that are run by Black CEOs, in order to highlight the fact that there are only four. And it's stuff like that, where you recognize that specifically in a social setting, and specifically when people are new to the stock market, that they will make the first investment decisions based on their personal values, based on the things that they like and enjoy. And so we're focusing heavily on understanding that human beings are highly emotional, animals. And I think that drives a lot of the decisions we make.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="10">
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David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editor at large. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.
Protocol | Enterprise
SAP unveiled a big sales promo. It's a bid to juice cloud customer numbers.
The move is the culmination of CEO Christian Klein's efforts to turn around the German software giant.
SAP unveiled "RISE with SAP" on Wednesday.
Image: SAP
January 27, 2021
Joe Williams is a senior reporter at Protocol covering enterprise software, including industry giants like Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. He previously covered emerging technology for Business Insider. Joe can be reached at JWilliams@Protocol.com. To share information confidentially, he can also be contacted on a non-work device via Signal (+1-309-265-6120) or JPW53189@protonmail.com.
January 27, 2021
SAP CEO Christian Klein is trying out a major sales gambit in his attempt to get more customers onboard the software giant's signature cloud platform.
A new offer unveiled on Wednesday called "RISE with SAP" bundles together several products, including the flagship S/4 HANA platform, under one contract with a flat cost, a promotion that the company is hoping will encourage more users to more quickly switch from the on-premise services that dominated the company's product line until the last few years.
<p>The offering, and the promotional blitz behind it, are a culmination of sorts of Klein's work over the past several months to remake SAP. While it signals progress in his vision to become a core tech provider — one that links data from all a company's operations on a single — it's also a big gambit, particularly if Klein can't address key concerns from customers, many of whom might be looking to shrink their IT spend on SAP's products. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>To incentivize the pivot, SAP is promising a "highly automated" migration with "near-zero downtimes," effectively a move to try to standardize an often arduous and costly transformation that may have prevented new and existing customers from pursuing such an upgrade. And in a nod to the open partner ecosystem Klein is pushing, those who take advantage can use SAP's cloud, one of several of the major providers (Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud or Alibaba Cloud) or a private network. </p><p>Embedded in the packaged system are also numerous "business process intelligence" tools, such as robotic process automation, that help organizations, among other applications, pinpoint tasks that can be done solely by machines. SAP <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sap-to-acquire-business-process-intelligence-company-signavio-301216350.html" target="_blank">purchased Signavio</a>, a provider of software that helps businesses manage workflows, to help further amplify these offerings, per a Wednesday announcement. </p><p>"We are bundling everything companies need to holistically transform their business, with a fast time to value regardless of their starting point," Klein told reporters.</p><p>Since COVID-19 hit, investments in the type of technology that SAP offers, the bulk of which center around the core enterprise resource planning system, fell in priority for many enterprises. Existing customers are also putting off upgrading, instead choosing to elongate use of their current platforms, many of which run via on-site data centers. The convergence of both led Klein to issue a stark warning in October that SAP's recovery would last until 2025 at the earliest. The stock price has yet to fully recover after dropping roughly 23% following that proclamation. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Wednesday's announcement shows that he's hoping to accelerate that timeline by quickly juicing the company's number of overall cloud customers. Under such a system, expensive, long-term contracts are traded for monthly subscription payments. While that might mean lower upfront costs for some clients, industry experts say they may end up paying more over the long term, especially if customers add on other services, which is one reason why the strategy is so attractive for vendors. SAP, for example, previously estimated that cloud revenue could exceed traditional sales and reach roughly $26 billion by 2025. </p><p>When asked, on average, how much more clients would end up paying under this promotion, Klein said the offering "has a lot of value in it." A spokesperson declined to say how SAP was factoring this offer into its overall financial outlook. </p><p>And for clients that held off on the cloud until now, the offer provides a seemingly viable rationale to move, with one consolidated contract likely covering the bulk of their needs, including service and deployment costs. </p><p>"It will take a great deal of work to move these large customized enterprises off of their legacy applications," IDC Program Vice President Mickey North Rizza told Protocol. "SAP customers have been given a pathway towards the intelligent enterprise using modern software." </p><p>The offering ran as a pilot project since July, with 130 customers currently signed up. As of Wednesday, it's now available for new and existing customers. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>"The machine internally is already ready," said Klein. </p>
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Joe Williams is a senior reporter at Protocol covering enterprise software, including industry giants like Salesforce, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. He previously covered emerging technology for Business Insider. Joe can be reached at JWilliams@Protocol.com. To share information confidentially, he can also be contacted on a non-work device via Signal (+1-309-265-6120) or JPW53189@protonmail.com.
Microsoft wants to replace artists with AI
Better Zoom calls, simpler email attachments, smart iPhone cases and other patents from Big Tech.
Turning your stories into images.
Image: USPTO/Microsoft
January 25, 2021
Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
January 24, 2021
Hello and welcome to 2021! The Big Tech patent roundup is back, after a short vacation and … all the things … that happened between the start of the year and now. It seems the tradition of tech companies filing weird and wonderful patents has carried into the new year; there are some real gems from the last few weeks. Microsoft is trying to outsource all creative endeavors to AI; Apple wants to make seat belts less annoying; and Amazon wants to cut down on some of the recyclable waste that its own success has inevitably created.
And remember: The big tech companies file all kinds of crazy patents for things, and though most never amount to anything, some end up defining the future.
<h3>Alphabet</h3><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10887548&IDKey=EEF3B7984CE3%0D%0A&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-adv.htm%2526r%3D81%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Dgoogle.ASNM.%2526p%3D2%2526OS%3DAN%2Fgoogle%2526RS%3DAN%2Fgoogle" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><u>Making Zoom meetings a little nicer</u></a></p><p>Even after nearly a year at home, some people have still not figured out the best way to set up their digital meetings. They're either too close to the camera or so far away they might as well not be there. Part of the problem lies in the cameras they have available, as many webcams are too wide-angled: No one needs to see what's 8 feet to either side of you on a Zoom call. But this recent Google patent might help; it involves the meeting platform being able to gauge how far you are from the camera (by measuring the proportions of your face) and zooming in on you when you're speaking, hopefully making everyone look a little more uniform. The patent also included this wonderful diagram to explain it, which appears to have been made in Microsoft Paint: </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p><img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/2ZK0yTSkP4yE0nf5UBKwHsNu3eoS1BfhMPzivzm43jOAQ7jtOLKAMRV0MJzA9MZzH-cyVGVUsQGTlxpJwHV3kDhw3oKJB2OElrO38NikIae6v-IBnyo1sWXGs7pB8S_Qzc84eMzK"></p><h3>Amazon</h3><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10891879&IDKey=9A6594CF1637%0D%0A&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D45%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Damazon.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2Famazon%2526RS%3DAN%2Famazon" target="_blank"><u>Reusing Amazon boxes</u></a><br></p><p>Everyone is shopping online far more than ever before, meaning ever-more cardboard boxes are littering our homes and recycling facilities. Amazon's new patent aims to help rectify this by creating a system that allows customers to easily reuse boxes that products come in. It's trying to remove all the steps usually found in shipping — such as weighing your package, getting a price to ship and bringing the package to a shipping facility — and replacing them with software. You'd scan the box you have and what you're trying to send, and Amazon's app would recognize what it is and estimate how much it'll cost to ship. You then pack it up and a courier comes to retrieve it. Now your friends and loved ones will never be without their Bad Monkeys.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTUxNjQ3MC9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY2MDI2ODY5M30.EkwGsay63N-lFWpfMh7KInjiCf9ev5vsL_htdvnjk1g/img.png?width=980" id="ddd43" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="174cb26e99641a035a7e3e603522692a" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image">
</p><p><br></p><p><a href="http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=49&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=amazon.ASNM.&OS=AN/amazon&RS=AN/amazon" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><u>Choosing music based on BPM</u></a></p><p>If you're making a playlist to work out — or perhaps you're a spin class instructor looking for songs with specific tempos — this idea might be for you. Amazon's patent suggests creating a way to search music to download based on songs' beats per minute. If you want a mix of slow songs to cool down with and uptempo ones to rock out, this could be useful (and is similar to something Pandora offers today). Or if you want a playlist that includes the fastest music ever to help you write faster, this could help. Or maybe that's just me. </p><h3>Apple</h3><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10887260&IDKey=F5990016F873%0D%0A&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-adv.htm%2526r%3D86%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3D%252522Apple%252BInc%252522.ASNM.%2526p%3D2%2526OS%3DAN%2F%252522Apple%252BInc%252522%2526RS%3DAN%2F%252522Apple%252BInc%252522" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><u>Auto-returning attachments</u></a></p><p>Have you ever been sent a PDF that you're supposed to download, print, sign, rescan and email back, and then you lost the file in your downloads, opened up an old version and had to hunt down for the right one before you sent it back? Maybe you're not as scatterbrained as me, but Apple's new idea for a system that allows you to just interact with an attachment that needs to be sent back to your correspondent without leaving the email program sounds like a dream. A better dream, though, would probably be to get rid of random attachments altogether. </p><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10889261&IDKey=0F2DEC21FBE3%0D%0A&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-adv.htm%2526r%3D73%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3D%252522Apple%252BInc%252522.ASNM.%2526p%3D2%2526OS%3DAN%2F%252522Apple%252BInc%252522%2526RS%3DAN%2F%252522Apple%252BInc%252522" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><u>Seat belts that move based on where you sit</u></a></p><p>If you've ever been the third person on a road trip and wanted to sit in the middle seat in the back, you've probably gotten stuck with a seatbelt that's a bit too small; the middle seat isn't <em>quite</em> as large as the other two. This new design from Apple would essentially recognize where you sit in the backseat and move the entire seat belt machinery along so that you would be comfortably strapped in wherever you're sitting. It would also automatically reveal the buckle, so you wouldn't have to spend time hunting for where it's gone. This all sounds like it would make losing out when someone calls "shotgun" a little more bearable.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p><img src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/1ljUJhG2G4iQ-v0kSWKki6Z4wg7E_fFCQ03urRM92hO9IbjnRZwUeiqar4l3VLf0tpDYKwpmyU--A-gFUDmYyTRJUPZOcLln-syyOm6vka2a71oqTvcQDgtwi-3O6WJ7e1Qklyqn"></p><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10892625&IDKey=A689AD279428&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D49%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3D%252522Apple%252BInc%252522.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2F%252522Apple%252BInc%252522%2526RS%3DAN%2F%252522Apple%252BInc%252522" target="_blank"><u>Cases for your AirPods, stylus and iPhone </u></a></p><p>Apple hasn't been without Jony Ive for very long, but it seems it's going ham on truly zany design concepts in his absence. In this patent, Apple explores various ways to combine a holder for AirPods and a stylus into a folio-style case for an iPhone that could also charge your peripherals and potentially display messages on the exterior. If Apple could pull this off in a way that didn't lead to a giant lumpy mess in my pocket, I'd potentially be interested, but the drawings in the patent are … less than promising: </p><p><img src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/0fbpPZ0ZDVCff0oNBktt-yaJYXoqyEz1rqXRPPbaaS1pHp5KSeO5LZm3vG8FsmdBu9Ms5s6QihhQVTWadTfWvGNn5h01dv2y1yiFfcVuRgHNvWteHNcRYb_rBPmAz03PctjwU4_A"></p><h3>Facebook</h3><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10885693&IDKey=D4DB683187A2%0D%0A&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526p%3D1%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-bool.html%2526r%3D48%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526co1%3DAND%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Dfacebook.ASNM.%2526OS%3DAN%2Ffacebook%2526RS%3DAN%2Ffacebook" target="_blank"><u>Animating digital avatars with VR headsets</u></a></p><p>Facebook is still pushing hard to make interacting in VR the future of … interacting … and this patent might help things feel a bit more natural. It suggests using cameras mounted on a VR headset pointed back at you to map real human facial expressions onto your digital avatar. Most VR programs with avatars either have faces that don't move when you're speaking or they just flap their mouths wildly; a system like this could make talking to someone dressed as a wizard or an elf or whatever else they've chosen to represent themselves online feel at least a little more normal. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><h3>Microsoft</h3><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10896455&IDKey=507447D630AA%0D%0A&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-adv.htm%2526r%3D14%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Dmicrosoft.ASNM.%2526p%3D1%2526OS%3DAN%2Fmicrosoft%2526RS%3DAN%2Fmicrosoft" target="_blank"><u>Cortana for your car</u></a></p><p>Microsoft is apparently looking into application-specific virtual assistants, such as one designed for use in a car. It's a Car-tana, if you will. The assistant would be designed to provide specific insights about driving and how you could be saving money. That would include things like preemptively letting you know when a part might need servicing, how many miles it's been since you last fueled up or that your electric car's charge is low and chargers are nearby. It could announce these things over the car's stereo system, allowing you to keep your eyes on the road.</p><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10891928&IDKey=28C797030461%0D%0A&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-adv.htm%2526r%3D50%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Dmicrosoft.ASNM.%2526p%3D1%2526OS%3DAN%2Fmicrosoft%2526RS%3DAN%2Fmicrosoft" target="_blank"><u>Computer-generated songs</u></a></p><p>Who needs musicians? Microsoft's new patent seems to want to make them obsolete. It suggests a system that can take an input, like a picture or some text, and turn it into a song. It can identify elements in the input, like the sentiment of the words or aspects of the image (like if people are outside or in a crowd) and build a melody and lyrics off of that. Sadly, as this is just a written document, there are no examples of this concept's potential output, if Microsoft has even built something like this. But if it does prove to be possible, I've got <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOck0kPtlfk" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><u>the perfect robot</u></a> to perform this system's songs. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p><a href="https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNum=0&docid=10891969&IDKey=2B298D9FF592%0D%0A&HomeUrl=http%3A%2F%2Fpatft.uspto.gov%2Fnetacgi%2Fnph-Parser%3FSect1%3DPTO2%2526Sect2%3DHITOFF%2526u%3D%25252Fnetahtml%25252FPTO%25252Fsearch-adv.htm%2526r%3D48%2526f%3DG%2526l%3D50%2526d%3DPTXT%2526s1%3Dmicrosoft.ASNM.%2526p%3D1%2526OS%3DAN%2Fmicrosoft%2526RS%3DAN%2Fmicrosoft" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><u>Turning speech into images</u></a></p><p>Microsoft is really on the art-generating bandwagon this week. This patent outlines a similar idea to the last one, envisioning a system that can take what someone is saying and turn it into images. The system could even string together generated images into a sort-of picture book: You could narrate a day you've had to the AI, and it generates something like a series of Instagram Stories based on what you say to it. Though it'd probably just be easier to actually take photos of what happened, honestly. <img src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/YiHWGhgP3yGoWZ_QImFlegpqjzeVfS3SxBB2LcXH0Ap5oMwIMtDJdzzw4iPRsFgYlGPT2v4Jl5o3ueTFWJcQlw4nMwehlG7Y2jytW7QDFNq1fzPJUScU69UflhoMV-GJbdWNSezS"></p>
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Mike Murphy ( @mcwm) is the director of special projects at Protocol, focusing on the industries being rapidly upended by technology and the companies disrupting incumbents. Previously, Mike was the technology editor at Quartz, where he frequently wrote on robotics, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics.
Protocol | China
More women are joining China's tech elite, but 'Wolf Culture' isn't going away
It turns out getting rid of misogyny in Chinese tech isn't just a numbers game.
Chinese tech companies that claim to value female empowerment may act differently behind closed doors.
Photo: Qilai Shen/Getty Images
January 27, 2021
Shen Lu is a Reporter with Protocol | China. She has spent six years covering China from inside and outside its borders. Previously, she was a fellow at Asia Society's ChinaFile and a Beijing-based producer for CNN. Her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, The New York Times and POLITICO, among other publications. Shen Lu is a founding member of Chinese Storytellers, a community serving and elevating Chinese professionals in the global media industry.
January 27, 2021
A woman we'll call Fan had heard about the men of Alibaba before she joined its high-profile affiliate about three years ago. Some of them were "greasy," she said, to use a Chinese term often describing middle-aged men with poor boundaries. Fan tells Protocol that lewd conversations were omnipresent at team meetings and private events, and even women would feel compelled to crack off-color jokes in front of the men. Some male supervisors treated younger female colleagues like personal assistants.
Within six months, despite the cachet the lucrative job carried, Fan wanted to quit.
A woman we'll call Zhang had a similar experience at her former employer, Baidu. She told Protocol that senior colleagues joked that Zhang and her younger female coworkers were hired to "please their eyes."
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Alibaba and Baidu look and act like they value female empowerment. Alibaba, the ecommerce giant, hosts a <a href="https://www.alizila.com/speakers-talk-womens-empowerment-at-alibaba-conference/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Global Conference on Women and Entrepreneurship</a> every year. Its founder, Jack Ma, has <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUuEryO0ogg" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">positioned</a> himself as a champion for women and has repeatedly said that Alibaba <a href="https://www.qianzhan.com/people/detail/271/140925-908063c9.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">owes its success to its female workers</a>. Ma has touted the company's <a href="https://ishare.ifeng.com/c/s/7pVlMyNV25i" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">relatively hefty share</a> of women in top management — currently, <a href="https://www.alibabagroup.com/cn/about/leadership" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">six out of 14</a> of the most senior roles are staffed by women. Search engine behemoth Baidu, too, likes to<a href="http://d.youth.cn/newtech/202012/t20201230_12640898.htm" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> tout</a> its relatively high ratio — <a href="http://esg.baidu.com/Uploads/File/2020/06/18/u5eeb598d72472.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">46%</a> — of women in management.
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"Workplace equality is a core value of Baidu. Female employees account for 43% of Baidu's workforce and 46% of management. Women play significant roles as top executives of the company driving technology innovation and strategy," Baidu said in an email reply. Alibaba did not respond to Protocol's requests for comment.
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So why do women like Fan and Zhang have such a rough go of it?
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This is the terrible paradox at the heart of Chinese tech, one that will threaten its capacity to innovate in the future. A wave of Chinese women are joining elite tech companies and their boardrooms, often in numbers that compare favorably to tech industries abroad, but it turns out that getting rid of sexism is far more than a numbers game. Women in Chinese tech are marginalized, demoralized and exhausted. When they get home, they're still expected to shoulder most of the childcare and household chores.
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The result: Those who manage to ascend have to learn to play — and win — a man's game. This paradox is going to sharpen as more women enter tech and become aware of gender inequality.
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Women are increasingly populating Chinese tech offices. Data shows that some of China's biggest internet companies, including <a href="https://pic2.zhimg.com/80/v2-64ca7bcc8aa012b59dbd90cdb6c7b809_1440w.jpg" target="_blank">ByteDance</a>, <a href="http://esg.baidu.com/Uploads/File/2020/06/18/u5eeb598d72472.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Baidu</a> and ride-hailing giant <a href="https://www.yicai.com/news/5260027.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Didi Chuxing</a>, each employ at least 40% female staff. By way of comparison, <a href="https://www.statista.com/chart/4467/female-employees-at-tech-companies/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">statistics show</a> that female employees fill between 28% and 42% of roles at America's five largest tech companies. In India, women make up <a href="https://go.451research.com/women-in-tech-india-employment-trends.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">34%</a> of the tech workforce; in the U.K., the figure is <a href="https://technation.io/insights/diversity-and-inclusion-in-uk-tech-companies/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">19%</a>.
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Women have also made it into Chinese tech leadership. <a href="https://www.svb.com/trends-insights/reports/women-in-technology-2019" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Seventy percent</a> of Chinese startups have at least one female executive, a higher proportion than companies in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, according to a 2019 survey conducted by Silicon Valley Bank. And more than 1,000 women have<a href="https://xw.qq.com/cmsid/20200308A0L9J400" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> made it into the boardrooms</a> of China's public tech companies, according to a study conducted by Tianyancha, a data technology service company.
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Yet Alibaba and Baidu are not the only "greasy" companies. Leading Chinese tech firms, including Tencent, have posted job ads depicting their female employees as "pretty" or "goddesses" to attract male candidates, according to a <a href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/04/23/only-men-need-apply/gender-discrimination-job-advertisements-china#_ftn99" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">2018 Human Rights Watch report</a>. In 2017, WeChat's parent company Tencent apologized after <a href="https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1815/video-of-women-on-their-knees-deals-blow-to-tencent-image" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">footage emerged</a> of a corporate event where female employees were kneeling while using their teeth to open water bottles placed between men's legs. A <a href="https://www.digitaling.com/articles/16221.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">2012 job ad</a> for food-delivery group Meituan declared that "finding a job equals finding a woman," featuring a suggestive image of a thong hanging between a woman's legs. "Do what you most want to do," the ad concluded, using a verb for "do" that colloquially means "fuck." In the years since, Meituan has repeatedly depicted young women in its promotional ads as <a href="https://www.yunyingpai.com/extend/518996.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">food on the plate</a> for delivery.
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In gender studies, the <a href="https://tidsskrift.dk/scandinavian_political_studies/article/download/32616/30682" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">theory of critical mass</a> hypothesizes that deliberative bodies must be made up of at least <a href="https://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/egm/eql-men/index.html#:~:text=Women%20have%20gained%20the%20right,States%20of%20the%20United%20Nations.&text=The%20figure%20of%2030%20percent,content%20of%20political%20decision%2Dmaking." rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">30%</a> women to impact policymaking. But at least when it comes to tech, it's clear that neither a high percentage of female execs nor a workforce approaching gender parity equate to workplace equality. Julie Yujie Chen, who teaches at the University of Toronto and has researched the experience of Chinese women in tech, doesn't believe the presence of more women executives in a Chinese tech company will work in favor of female employees. "Women in tech is not a representation issue," she told Protocol. "It is about challenging the norms."
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Lin Zhang, an assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire who has interviewed dozens of female entrepreneurs in China's tech companies, said many of the women who thrive in this ultra-competitive, male-dominated industry not only have become resigned to workplace masculinity and sexism, but have internalized it. "Because of the generally hostile gender culture in China, there's not much solidarity among women," Zhang said. "Now that they're up there, they feel like, 'I have paid my dues. It's your turn.'"
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Alibaba's Fan echoes this: "Although women are much present in Alibaba's senior management, they all have transformed themselves to be greasier than the men. That's how they entered that powerful circle."
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Shi is a 30-year-old manager of a content-producing team at Nasdaq-listed video-sharing platform Bilibili. Like Fan and the other female tech workers interviewed for this story, she spoke to Protocol on the condition that she be identified by a pseudonym to avoid retaliation from her employer. Shi said the women in her company leadership "completely subscribe to the 'wolf' mentality. They are just as territorial, aggressive and exploitative as the men."
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One result is tech products that objectify women and reinforce gender stereotypes, at least in the way they are marketed and used. Didi Chuxing is helmed by a woman — company president Jean Liu — and Didi's staff was <a href="https://www.yicai.com/news/5260027.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">40%</a> female in 2017, the most recent year for which statistics are available. However, it encountered scandal with Hitch, a carpooling service launched in 2015 that suggested hookups between drivers and passengers in its 2018 <a href="https://new.qq.com/omn/20180828/20180828A08PZK.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">ads</a>. Two female Hitch passengers were <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/26/business/didi-chuxing-murder-rape-women.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytimesworld" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">raped and killed</a> that same year. The general manager at Hitch was a woman named Huang Jieli.
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Even relatively "woke" Chinese companies demand a lot of their employees. A major culprit is Chinese tech's infamous 996 work schedule — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days per week — which can wear workers down. I spoke with most interviewees after 10 p.m. in China, after they had finished a long day's work. Message alerts from colleagues often interrupted our conversations.
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This work culture further disadvantages women because of the larger milieu in which they live. Women still shoulder most of the childcare and housework burden in Chinese households. A 2019 National Bureau of Statistics <a href="https://cnlgbtdata.com/files/uploads/2020/01/%E4%B8%AD%E5%9B%BD%E7%A4%BE%E4%BC%9A%E4%B8%AD%E7%9A%84%E5%A5%B3%E4%BA%BA%E5%92%8C%E7%94%B7%E4%BA%BA2019EN-final.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">report</a> showed that women spent more than twice as much time as men on unpaid household work. "The lack of reliable childcare service becomes a structural barrier for women to advance their career," said Chen, "especially in sectors like the tech industry."
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Although a large number of young Chinese women have joined tech, they are more likely to concentrate at the lower end of the skill and productivity spectrum, such as human resources, public relations and business operations. Programming, often the power center, remains a male-dominated division, with female programmers comprising only 10.4% of its ranks in 2020, according to a<a href="https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/109185515" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"> report by Chinese digital working platform Proginn</a>. (In the U.S., figures range between <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/1126823/worldwide-developer-gender/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">8%</a> and <a href="https://www.frgconsulting.com/blog/female-developers-workforce/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">11%</a>.)
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Of course, China has its share of relatively egalitarian companies. Take ByteDance. While it spent last year at the center of U.S. controversy over data-sharing with Beijing, it's seen at home as valuing diversity and inclusion. Dong, who works in the ByteDance HR department, told Protocol she chose the company for its relatively egalitarian culture. It was the only prospective employer that did not inquire about her marital status when she was job-hunting in 2018, and the supervisor of the department she was interviewing for was a woman in her late 30s.
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But Dong thinks ByteDance is swimming against the tide. She says several senior female colleagues in her team still had to quit because they couldn't juggle work and childcare demands. It's not a problem unique to China, but female workers there are getting less help than in other countries. "Tech companies in other countries are trying to create a better environment for female workers who face similar social expectations," Dong said. "But in China, they won't specifically create supportive policies for you. The baseline is lower. It's like, 'I'm already doing well by not treating you badly.'"
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Shen Lu is a Reporter with Protocol | China. She has spent six years covering China from inside and outside its borders. Previously, she was a fellow at Asia Society's ChinaFile and a Beijing-based producer for CNN. Her writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, The New York Times and POLITICO, among other publications. Shen Lu is a founding member of Chinese Storytellers, a community serving and elevating Chinese professionals in the global media industry.
People
Google's union has big goals — and big roadblocks
Absence of dues, retaliation fears and small numbers could pose problems for the union's dream of collective bargaining, but Googlers are undeterred.
Recruiting union members beyond the early adopters has had its challenges.
Photo: David Paul Morris/Getty Images
January 22, 2021
Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (@ anna_c_kramer), where she helps write and produce Source Code, Protocol's daily newsletter. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.
January 22, 2021
When the Alphabet Workers Union launched with more than 200 Googlers at the beginning of the year, it saw a quick flood of new sign-ups, nearly quadrupling membership over a few weeks. But even with the more than 710 members it now represents, the union still stands for just a tiny fraction of Google's more than 200,000 North American employees and contractors. The broader Alphabet workforce could prove difficult to win over, which is a hurdle that could stand in the way of the group's long-term ambitions for substantive culture change and even collective bargaining.
The initial boom of interest from Googlers was thrilling for Alex Peterson, a software engineer and union spokesperson. "It's really reinvigorating what it means to actually be a community of Googlers, which is something that's been eroding over the past four or five years, or even longer."
<p>But since those initial weeks, Peterson acknowledges that recruiting members beyond the early adopters has had its challenges. One of the biggest barriers, according to Peterson, is the union's dues structure. As Googlers' pay goes up, they become more hesitant to commit 1% of their salaries to dues: The more people are paid, the bigger that figure becomes. People with children and high Bay Area rents also have a more difficult time factoring the union dues into their budgets, Peterson said, though he remains impressed that hundreds of people are willing to pay dues anyway. "There's definitely going to be an ongoing conversation about whether or how to restructure the dues system with that in mind," he said. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Retaliation is another big fear preventing some from joining, though the union has strict security rules in place to protect anonymity for those who want it. When the union first launched, many of its founding members hoped that publicly putting their names behind the union would encourage people to join who were afraid of retaliation earlier in the process. But that fear hasn't gone entirely away. "We've gotten emails from people just asking how anonymous they can be," Peterson said.</p><p>Some union members never reveal their name to anyone but their captain — the person in charge of their particular unit of workers in a particular location — and they can use anonymous names in the AWU Slack group. Everyone is required to use a private email address, and they avoid using Google products in their work because, while they trust Google's privacy policies to protect them in theory, they worry that a rogue Google member could try to violate those policies to out members. The official member list is closely guarded by a few people on the union executive team. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>The absence of a collective bargaining unit has also been a common deterrent for those hesitating to sign up, Peterson said. Traditionally, union members pay dues in part because of the promise of higher wages and better benefits negotiated through a formal bargaining process. Because AWU includes various groups of Google workers and company contractors, it isn't <a href="https://www.protocol.com/google-union-awu" target="_blank">legally eligible</a> to go through the formal collective bargaining process. </p><p>And yet, while the AWU can't form its own collective bargaining unit, there are other ways to enable some members to engage in collective bargaining, Peterson explained. Because workers in the union are organized by both their location and their role, the AWU hopes that it will be able to use its partnership with the Communication Workers of America, which helped organize AWU, to form smaller collective bargaining groups within the union. For example, a group of engineers in the Seattle office, or researchers in San Francisco, could form their own unit with the expertise and assistance of the AWU and their CWA union partners (Google warehouse workers in Pittsburgh did this <a href="https://slate.com/technology/2019/09/google-contractors-vote-to-unionize-in-pittsburgh.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">independently</a> in 2019). </p><p>"A really small group like this can end up having really big influence if they are strategic about what they're trying to accomplish," said Beth Allen, the spokesperson for CWA. "There is sort of big power for big change, and then there is influence and making a real difference for individual workers. Making a real difference for individual workers happens from day one." According to Allen, organizing and getting to know the new members is more than enough of a heavy lift for the organizers, and signals great early progress.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>The AWU won't be the first union working with CWA to pursue a structure like this, Allen said. She cited the Committee for Better Banks, which pushes for industry change, as one example. Some workers within that committee later formed a collective bargaining unit to address their specific problems, a model AWU workers could emulate. "That's definitely a possibility if there is a particular work group where there's a large number of members and the kinds of problems they're facing would have a collective bargaining agreement as the best way to address that," she said. </p><p>The CWA has been working to organize tech and gaming workers since early 2020, when it launched a campaign called <a href="https://www.code-cwa.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">CODE-CWA</a>. "We've seen activism throughout the industry in workers organizing, and have been approached by workers in the industry," said Wes McEnany, one of CODE-CWA's organizers. "CWA is trying to meet the moment. We're not creating the moment."</p><p>As part of that effort, CODE-CWA hosts regular trainings with tech workers, advising them on ways to talk to their colleagues about organizing. "It's not just winning the vote. It's building democracy in the workplace, and that's a process," McEnany said.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>Since the AWU went public, McEnany said his team has been bombarded with inquiries from other tech workers interested in forming similarly-structured unions at their own companies. "They look at the two-tiered workforce, where there are more vendors and contractors in the industry than full-time employees. It's not hard to look around and see there are serious inequities happening here," McEnany said, noting that he believes the online content moderation space is particularly ripe for organizing.</p><p>McEnany and his growing team at CWA are hoping to convince some of these workers that minority unions can still have an impact, even if they lack collective bargaining power. "We think there's no reason to not bring this model back," he said. "This is not just solidifying protest culture, but taking a more robust organizing approach to it."</p><p>Peterson, for one, isn't worried that AWU is still relatively small compared to Alphabet. Many of the founding members envision a union that's united by community values, not just labor protections, and they know they need to prove themselves to the broader Googler community before that can happen.</p><p>He hopes that beginning in February, the various committees and groups will start to solidify and begin discussions about their first campaigns and goals, including setting a formal recruitment goal and plan. He's also hoping that some workers will be able to return to the office in the summer, which should ease some of the recruitment difficulties and also help union members get a better sense of how their colleagues feel about the work. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>"Among those of us who have already joined, we're extremely motivated by not just workplace conditions and our ability to change policies and things like that, but also the consumer advocacy side," Peterson said. "We have to prove ourselves in a certain sense with our workplace victories to demonstrate what we have to offer to those who might be less tuned in to the consequences of some of Google's product decisions."</p><p><em>Issie Lapowsky contributed additional reporting. </em><br></p>
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Anna Kramer is a reporter at Protocol (@ anna_c_kramer), where she helps write and produce Source Code, Protocol's daily newsletter. Prior to joining the team, she covered tech and small business for the San Francisco Chronicle and privacy for Bloomberg Law. She is a recent graduate of Brown University, where she studied International Relations and Arabic and wrote her senior thesis about surveillance tools and technological development in the Middle East.
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