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Big Tech, big money

Good morning! This Friday, Big Tech companies go from blockbuster hearings to blockbuster earnings, how algorithms might choose your office schedule, and apps for getting out of your filter bubble.
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No wonder the big tech companies wanted to have this week's hearing before they reported earnings. It'd be hard for Jeff Bezos to say "we're so small and have lots of competitors" while causally reporting $88.9 billion in sales on the platform, a cool $8 billion more than analysts expected. Especially on the same day the government reported the largest quarterly economic decline in the 70 years it's been reporting that data.
Apple had a monster quarter, too. And neither is terribly surprising. Crappy webcams and all, Apple products were always going to do well as the world shifts to work-from home. (Looks like "we fixed the horrible MacBook keyboard" was worth a billion or so, too.) And for all of Amazon's issues this year, it's obviously a crucial part of the COVID economy.
The other two companies that reported yesterday, Google and Facebook, have similar businesses but had somewhat different quarters.
So what's the takeaway? Well, never read too much into pandemic results. But it seems clear that social ads are a powerful business even in the worst of times, because the only thing people won't stop doing is talking to each other. And that there's no substitute for having more than one money maker — Facebook's hardware and Oculus businesses are growing, as is YouTube, but neither makes a proper dent in their company's revenue yet.
Oh, and it never hurts to have a cloud business. That's doing well for *checks notes* everybody.
For lots more on these earnings, check out this week's Index newsletter. If you subscribe now, you'll get today's issue right on time.
Kevin McAllister writes: When offices open again (someday), they won't be open to everyone. So who gets to come in, and when? SquareFoot President Michael Colacino said his company has been developing an in-house model to figure it out.
Like any algorithm, this one will learn over time once new inputs around efficiency are defined. SquareFoot's also starting to take into account other organizations' reopening plans and broader trends, such as school openings, that could shift the balance come September.
The next frontier is to have the algorithm harness even more of those data inputs and ultimately get it into the hands of clients. "We have a lot of data about how people communicate within the office — their email traffic, their Slack traffic — which we've never really done much with," Colacino said. "I think the next thing that we're going to do is look at how people interact electronically and try to add that into the overall system."
A lot of people have spent the last, say, four years realizing that their version of the internet is not like the rest of the internet. Algorithmic timelines, news feeds and recommendations mean we live deeper and deeper inside our own bubbles.
This week, two tools got some attention for giving users a way out.
Jake Harding, the creator of Vicariously, told me it's just a weekend project that caught fire. He used to work at Twitter, and after years as a heavy user said "it was just feeling exhausting, my following list is just polluted." Rather than unfollow everyone and start from scratch, he thought he'd start by seeing who his favorite tweeters were following.
Harding said he has no intention of turning Vicariously into a business, beyond buying himself a nice dinner every now and then. But he's thought about building a tool that lets users see all social platforms — Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, you name it — through someone else's eyes.
Or maybe the platforms should do it. How users see social is increasingly how they see the world. Instead of walking a mile in someone else's shoes, maybe we should spend an hour in their YouTube feed.
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On Facebook's earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg went on some post-hearing offense about reducing ad targeting:
Going all-remote might actually be easier than a hybrid working setup, Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo said:
Joe Biden tweeted out his social media strategy:
If you want to make it in the music biz (or any biz, really), Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said an every-few-years release schedule won't cut it:
That's how many months the U.S. government wants Anthony Levandowski to spend in prison, after he pled guilty to stealing Google's tech as he left to found Otto and eventually go to Uber. Levandowski's lawyers say he shouldn't be in jail at all. Instead, they wrote, "He proposes to offer himself as an object lesson in 'what not to do,' by candidly sharing the story of his misdeeds and speaking about the devastating consequences that followed."
Microsoft's new Flight Simulator game is coming in a bit over two weeks. And from the sound of this great preview and story about the game's creation, it's going to be worth the absurdly long wait. (I mean, seriously, there have been like 11,000 Assassin's Creed games since Flight Simulator X.) You have just enough time to clear some space in the home office, get your sim rig ready, and clear your calendar because you've got some flying to do.
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Today's Source Code was written by David Pierce, with help from Shakeel Hashim. Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Have a great weekend, see you Sunday.
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