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July 27, 2020
With COVID-19 cutting into revenue from wireless and advertising, Verizon is doubling down on one sector of the tech industry that's booming during quarantine: video games.
Verizon plans to announce Tuesday that it has become a lead sponsor of FaZe Clan, one of the world's most popular and influential video gaming organizations. The move comes just a month after Verizon announced a long-term partnership with the professional North American league for League of Legends, the world's most popular esport, which is owned by Riot Games (which is, in turn, controlled by Tencent).
Partnering with FaZe Clan, which recently surpassed 1 billion views on its YouTube channel, associates Verizon with the group's more than 80 online influencers and FaZe's professional teams in games including Fortnite and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The sponsorship is focused on Verizon's 5G wireless services.
"If Verizon were to pick any two organizations to associate with in esports, FaZe and League of Legends are pretty much the best-case scenario," said Rod "Slasher" Breslau, a leading esports analyst. "Having a company the size of Verizon commit to this space is extremely important to show how video games and esports are one of the few bright spots in terms of reaching the audiences these companies want."
FaZe Clan is building a competitive roster for Valorant, Riot's hot new shooter. People close to the deal said FaZe will soon put Verizon's (undisclosed amount of) money to work as it expands into Valorant, including as prize money for a new Valorant tournament to be announced as soon as Tuesday. The new tournament, part of Valorant's Ignition Series, would be an element of FaZe's expansion from recorded into live gaming content.
"Gaming and esports are already at a critical mass, and this relationship with FaZe is about how to take it to the next level, both from a B-to-B standpoint but also from a consumer and player perspective," said John Nitti, Verizon's chief media officer.
Jeffrey Pabst, FaZe's chief revenue officer, said: "People look for a technology partner on the esports side, but we're also a content company turning out huge amounts of content on our phones and other devices. Verizon, especially with their 5G infrastructure, is going to take what we're doing and put it on steroids."
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Seth Schiesel
Seth Schiesel ( @SethSchiesel) is a contributing editor for Protocol focused on the business of video games and adjacent industries. He is a former editorial writer for The Boston Globe, entrepreneur and business reporter, technology writer and video game critic for The New York Times.
People
Beeper built the universal messaging app the world needed
It's an app for all your social apps. And part of an entirely new way to think about chat.
Beeper is an app for all your messaging apps, including the hard-to-access ones.
Image: Beeper
January 22, 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 22, 2021
Eric Migicovsky likes to tinker. And the former CEO of Pebble — he's now a partner at Y Combinator — knows a thing or two about messaging. "You remember on the Pebble," he asked me, "how we had this microphone, and on Android you could reply to all kinds of messages?" Migicovsky liked that feature, and he especially liked that it didn't care which app you used. Android-using Pebble wearers could speak their replies to texts, Messenger chats, almost any notification that popped up.
That kind of universal, non-siloed approach to messaging appealed to Migicovsky, and it didn't really exist anywhere else. "Remember Trillian from back in the day?" he asked, somewhat wistfully. "Or Adium?" They were the gold-standard of universal messaging apps; users could log in to their AIM, MSN, GChat and Yahoo accounts, and chat with everyone in one place.
<p>Migicovsky has spent the last two years building a modern equivalent. It's called Beeper, and it pulls 15 different messaging services — including WhatsApp, Slack, Instagram and iMessage — into a single app. The app launched this week, and will cost $10 a month for anyone who wants to use it. Migicovsky said roughly 40 people have been using the app for the last few months, and that he's come to rely on it completely. "Beeper went down for me a couple of weeks ago, and I had to fix it," he said. "And for the hours I was fixing it, I had to open up Slack, Telegram, Signal, everything. It was like going back to the Stone Ages." </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>To explain how Beeper works, and why Migicovsky thinks it's valuable, you have to understand the protocols. In the early days of online messaging (otherwise known as The Adium Era), many messaging services were based on a protocol called Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, or XMPP. When it was designed, XMPP intended to make all kinds of communication on the internet, from text to video to file transfers, into decentralized systems. For a while, it worked: From AIM to Google Talk to the early days of Facebook Chat, some of the biggest messaging services used XMPP. </p><p>A few years later, Google and Facebook — and soon others — decided to stop supporting XMPP. Some argued XMPP was too complicated a protocol and simply didn't work; others said they could develop features more quickly by keeping everything in-house. "Today, group conversations, sharing your day with stickers or emojis and messaging across multiple devices have become second nature to many of us," Google product manager Mayur Kamat <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150704141805if_/https://plus.google.com/+MayurKamat/posts/ETBvtp9VYav" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">wrote in 2015</a> announcing the switch from Google Talk (which supported XMPP) to Hangouts (which didn't). Whatever the reason, messaging apps soon became walled gardens, with everything run — and stored — in one place.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>In the last few years, though, a group of developers has been building a new protocol, one they hope can offer all the openness and decentralization of XMPP but with all the modern features people need now: encryption, voice and video, integrations with other apps and the like. It's called Matrix. "Matrix is our effort to right the balance" after decades of great tech being turned into walled gardens, said Matthew Hodgson, Matrix's technical co-founder. "If you were going to build the holy grail of messaging," the team asked themselves several years ago — a service where anyone can participate, where everything is encrypted, where nothing is locked off from the ecosystem — "what would it look like?" Some of this tech has been built in the past, but always inside a single company or service. They wanted to build it and give it to the internet.</p><p>Ultimately, Hodgson said, Matrix is more than a messaging protocol. "It's a real-time database for any kind of information," he said, from financial tickers to drone flights to VR streams. "Matrix just gives you the building blocks to synchronize it between different deployments." Messaging just happens to be something with which Hodgson and his team have plenty of experience. Not to mention, it's kind of a killer app. Matrix-based messaging can support a whole ecosystem of apps, the way email protocols do. It's all end-to-end encrypted, and it's resilient by virtue of not being housed in a single data center. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>"When Slack goes down for six hours," Hodgson said, "or Signal goes down for 24 hours, people realize, 'hang on, all my eggs are in one basket.'" There are already decentralized, harder-to-kill apps like Slack or Signal running on Matrix, where there's less security risk or possibility of downtime. He added: "The narrative is swinging in our direction." Millions of users use Matrix messaging tools already, he said, including the entire French government, which uses a Slack-like tool called Element that is built by the Matrix team.</p><p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image">
<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8yNTUxMjQ3Mi9vcmlnaW4ucG5nIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTY3MDIzNzU0NX0.NPrsWaIEy9RUG90_cIsyZMFW7foaGyiuP_vHdD2T-Ok/img.png?width=980" id="ce4ab" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="37ea800dd363bb5c0c588b2727990131" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" alt="Beeper chats">
<small class="image-media media-caption" placeholder="Add Photo Caption...">Beeper tries to wrangle lots of messaging apps into one. Eventually, that might not be necessary.</small><small class="image-media media-photo-credit" placeholder="Add Photo Credit...">Image: Beeper</small></p><p>Matrix is key to Beeper, but in a slightly different way. Migicovsky isn't trying to build a brand-new chat service to compete with WhatsApp; he's trying to wrangle all the services people use into a system that feels more open. So he's taking advantage of a Matrix feature called Bridges, which pulls other apps into the Matrix ecosystem. Sometimes this is easy: Migicovsky said IRC and Telegram have great APIs, making it easy to send and read messages from other apps. Most others are a bit hackier, though Migicovsky said it's rarely impossible: "If you can open something in a browser, we can get to it."<br></p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>One of Beeper's most enticing integrations is with iMessage, which would mean users could access their iMessages on Android or Windows through the Beeper app. This one is stupendously hacky. If a Beeper user has a Mac that's always on and connected to the internet, it's easy; Beeper just connects to the same relay that delivers messages to all your Apple devices, and sends them to Beeper. But if you don't have a Mac that fits the description, there's only one way in. "We wrote an app for jailbroken iPhones that acts as a relay," Migicovsky said. "There's a database on the iPhone called sms.db. And so we just read and write to that." </p><p>But wait, it gets hackier! There's no way to get everyone to jailbreak their iPhones, so Migicovsky found a workaround. "I buy used old cracked-screen iPhones for cheap," he said. "I jailbreak them, and send them to people with the app installed. And they just set it up and leave it somewhere connected to Wi-Fi." There's a box full of semi-busted iPhones, all the way back to the iPhone 4, on his desk right now. The plan works, though it doesn't exactly scale. "We tried a lot of different things," Migicovsky said. "It might not be like this forever." </p><p>There's one part of this setup that Migicovsky actually quite likes. "You control the phone," he said. All the code is open source, and Beeper encrypts all messages; only users have their passwords to access them. But if you really don't want Beeper getting your texts anymore, just unplug that jailbroken iPhone, and you're done.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>Migicovsky has lots of ideas for how to improve Beeper as a product, and messaging in general. "No one has really innovated in chat in the last 10 years," he said, before allowing that maybe Slack and Discord get a little credit. But that's it. He's not sure what better looks like, though. He's intrigued by new ways to sort and organize messages, even how threads could look. "I'm really just excited about having this ... not a blank canvas, a malleable canvas," he said.</p><p>The list of places people message seems to get longer every day, and Migicovsky wants Beeper to support them all. "I want to build LinkedIn and Snapchat, and I'm not dating but a lot of people want Tinder messages on this," he said. He's not trying to replace those apps entirely, though. "Discord's amazing," he said, by way of example. "It has cool animations, you have the audio chat that's really good, it's got this social element." For Discord things, people should use Discord. But texting with friends or sharing photos shouldn't be a Discord thing. Or an Instagram thing, or a WhatsApp thing, or a Signal thing, or a Slack thing. It definitely shouldn't be all of those, separately.</p>"It would be wonderful if we didn't have to build what we built," Migicovsky said. "And you could just look me up, like in a phone book or something, and say, 'I want to talk to Eric.'" In the long run, Matrix might help make that possible — already, it appears some of Twitter's decentralization work through Project Bluesky is <a href="https://twitter.com/bluesky/status/1352302821140549632" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">being done on Matrix</a>, and Hodgson said he's had conversations with a number of big players in the tech world about build a more open and interoperable messaging ecosystem. For now, the best anyone can do is put everything in one place. It's hacky, but it's progress.
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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.
Politics
In 2020, COVID-19 derailed the privacy debate
From biometric monitoring to unregulated contact tracing, the crisis opened up new privacy vulnerabilities that regulators did little to address.
Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, says the COVID-19 pandemic has become a "cash grab" for surveillance tech companies.
Photo: Lianhao Qu/Unsplash
December 30, 2020
Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
December 29, 2020
As the coronavirus began its inexorable spread across the United States last spring, Adam Schwartz, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, worried the virus would bring with it another scourge: mass surveillance.
"A lot of really bad ideas were being advanced here in the U.S. and a lot of really bad ideas were being actually implemented in foreign countries," Schwartz said.
<p>In China, where the virus first took hold, the country had already begun using draconian smartphone-based tools to <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51439401" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">track sick people's whereabouts</a> and effectively force them to stay home. In Israel, lawmakers rushed through a proposal to give government officials <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51930681" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">access to Israelis' location data</a>. As the White House met with tech giants including Facebook and Google to discuss ways they could help, Schwartz and others feared the U.S. might be next in allowing fear of the virus to subvert basic civil liberties.</p><p>Nine months into the crisis, Schwartz said, the "worst ideas" being deployed internationally have yet to take hold in the U.S. But that doesn't mean COVID-19 hasn't created a slew of smaller, but still insidious privacy setbacks for Americans who, in recent years, have become increasingly wary of all the intrusive ways that governments and private companies use their personal data. Since March, corporate offices and college campuses have been flooded with biometric scanners, employers have deployed software that lets them remotely monitor workers' keystrokes and giant corporations like Ticketmaster have <a href="https://help.ticketmaster.com/s/article/What-are-your-COVID-screening-requirements?language=en_US" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">contemplated</a> linking people's negative COVID-19 tests to their tickets to gain entry to future events. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>While many of these precautions are well-meaning attempts to preserve public safety and to use technology to get the economy up and running again, they can come at a cost to personal privacy. And yet, the crisis has once again relegated privacy legislation to the back burner in Congress as lawmakers battle over how to handle dueling health and economic disasters.</p><p>Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, says the COVID-19 pandemic has become a "cash grab" for surveillance tech companies. "I think this has been the most dangerous moment for civil rights since 9/11," he said. "When you're faced with impossible choices like whether or not to keep schools open and deprive kids of an education or put them at risk, it's so easy to be taken in by the allure of magical thinking and startups that say if you just install this tracking device you'll somehow be able to avoid doing the impossible."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>Contact tracing has been a source of concern, as governments across the country work with a slew of private firms to manage manual contact tracing with no real guardrails in place. "People by the thousands are telling contact tracers where they've been, who they're with, and we don't think there are sufficient ways to secure that data, especially when private contractors or for-profit corporations are helping," Schwartz said.</p><p>In New York, Cahn's organization supported legislation that would have protected New Yorkers from having their contact tracing data used against them in court or administrative proceedings. That bill passed over the summer, but Governor Andrew Cuomo has yet to sign it into law, leaving that information vulnerable. "In most states, police or ICE can get contact tracing data with a subpoena," Cahn said. "This not only creates a privacy threat, but it's a public health nightmare. There are millions of Americans who would second guess whether to fully disclose their potential contacts."</p><p>Apple and Google partnered on a contact-tracing tool that went to extremes to ensure people's data wouldn't be centrally stored or shared with either company or with the government. But health officials, at least early on, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/15/app-apple-google-virus/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">scoffed</a> at the limitations. "Digital apps and technology have struggled in the in-between space of wanting to track the path of this disease, this virus, while at the same time really struggling with very real privacy concerns," said Malkia Devich-Cyril, founding director and senior fellow at the advocacy group MediaJustice.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>The imminent rollout of a vaccine presents even trickier questions, like what happens if businesses or governments begin requiring people to prove they've been vaccinated in order to access certain spaces. California's legislature already defeated a bill that would have created a blockchain-based system to create what Schwartz calls "immunity passports." EFF argued that requiring people to hand over their smartphones to prove their immunity would open them up to other privacy invasions and would require people to have a smartphone in the first place. "We view this as a horrible, horrible idea," Schwartz said, noting that EFF will be "in the trenches" if any similar proposals arise.</p><p>Over the course of 2020, there have been other, subtler attitudinal shifts too. In the spring, news outlets that, in the past, criticized apps for surreptitiously tracking and selling people's location data, suddenly began tapping that same data to track where people were actually <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/02/us/coronavirus-social-distancing.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">staying at home</a> or whether anti-shutdown protesters might be <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/18/lockdown-protests-spread-coronavirus-cellphone-data" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">spreading the virus</a>. "We think there's a lot of COVID-washing going on," Schwartz said.</p><p>That COVID-washing hasn't been uniform though, Devich-Cyril said, noting that Black and brown communities with a long history of being surveilled remain wary of that kind of intrusion. "The simple fact of a medical disaster is not enough to turn people away from their desire for basic freedoms and rights," Devich-Cyril said.</p><p>Still, despite these setbacks, privacy advocates did score some wins in the midst of the chaos. On Election Day, Portland, Maine succeeded in banning facial recognition technology. Michigan voted to require police to seek search warrants before accessing electronic data. And California passed Proposition 24, a measure that rewrites the California Consumer Privacy Act and gives Californians new rights over protecting their data. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>"That is the story of privacy in 2020," said Jim Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media, which backed Prop. 24. "That was a significant step forward." It's worth noting that not all privacy groups celebrated the passage of Prop. 24. Some, like the American Civil Liberties Union, opposed it over concerns that it created new privacy loopholes for businesses.</p><p>Schwartz is at least relieved that so many of the "bad ideas" that emerged at the beginning of 2020 have not been adopted in the U.S. But as the pandemic rages on through 2021, the fight for privacy in the face of a global health crisis will undoubtedly continue.</p>
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Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is a senior reporter at Protocol, covering the intersection of technology, politics, and national affairs. Previously, she was a senior writer at Wired, where she covered the 2016 election and the Facebook beat in its aftermath. Prior to that, Issie worked as a staff writer for Inc. magazine, writing about small business and entrepreneurship. She has also worked as an on-air contributor for CBS News and taught a graduate-level course at New York University’s Center for Publishing on how tech giants have affected publishing. Email Issie.
People
The year our personal lives took center stage at work
2020's blurring of professional and personal boundaries exacerbated disparities, humanized leaders and put personal values front and center.
In 2020, the personal and the professional became inextricable at work.
Photo: Tom Werner/Getty Images
December 28, 2020
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.
December 28, 2020
For those of us lucky enough to keep our jobs and privileged enough to be able to work from home, our whole selves were bared at work this year. Our homes and faces were blown up for virtual inspection. Our children's demands and crises filled our working hours, and our working mothers became schoolteachers and housewives, whether they wanted to or not. Our illnesses became vital public information, and our tragedies shared. Our work lives ate into our social lives until there was no boundary between them.
In 2020, the personal and the professional became inextricable at work. Remote work might be the most sexy 2020 trend, but for the CEOs and leaders I spoke with, the de-professionalization of work could be the most important effect on a personal level. It's the one that has caused the most harm to women in the workplace and destroyed work-life balance for basically everyone. It's also what has contributed to the majority of work-from-home Americans being more satisfied with their work lives than they were before, mostly because they feel more connected to their families, they're able to set their own schedules and they're more comfortable at home, according to a Morning Consult poll. While we can't know exactly how many and who will be going back to the office just yet, as long as there is some kind of flexible work schedule, people's personal lives will be part of their work lives and vice versa.
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</div></p><p>"In some respects, it has created intimacy in a way we didn't expect. Because you can't hide your life. You can't hide your whole self," explained Erika Fisher, chief administrative officer and general counsel at Atlassian. This can allow people to set their own schedules around their needs and increase empathy between workers and their managers. The increased intimacy also became an equalizer in meetings, because it democratizes participation and gives everyone the same physical space online, according to Fisher. "You don't have to worry about the man-spreading that happens in meetings, literally or metaphorically," she said.</p><p>Personal politics and activism at work are also an element of newly blurred professional boundaries. The summer of protests following the killing of George Floyd, combined with the chaos of the 2020 election cycle, spurred more than just diversity pledges by corporations; it created a new wave of people bringing their politics and values to work. While Brian Armstrong <a href="https://www.protocol.com/coinbase-social-political-policies-backlash" target="_self">stirred up support in some corners when he declared that political and social beliefs had no place at Coinbase</a>, his memo also crystalized for others that personal identity and personal values should be welcomed where they work. Company leaders at SF-based edtech startup Outschool encouraged their employees to get involved in the 2020 election, while people like Kary Campbell, Airbnb's former director of design, <a href="https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/sourcecode/social-media-ultimate-test?rebelltitem=5#rebelltitem5" target="_self">told me that</a> "companies and societies can no longer just exist to create profitable numbers for their shareholders. We need to evolve as human beings to be more creative than that." </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>While global comms provider Mitel has never taken explicit political positions, the historically quiet company saw a big jump in activism, affinity group creation and values discussions among its workforce this year. "I think we can agree that people need to be treated fairly and that we should embrace and welcome who people are," said Mary McDowell, the company's CEO. "That is part of people's whole selves. It's part of what they bring to work now, when it wasn't before."</p><p>But while falling professional boundaries have been good for some people and some parts of work, they've seriously damaged others. Just because personal lives are now dictating work schedules and kids, pets and houses take center stage on screen doesn't mean that workers' relationships with peers and managers are as healthy or social as they were before. Instead, intimate personal information is shared without the buffer of friendship and companionship that can be found in the office, <a href="https://www.aei.org/articles/remote-work-is-becoming-the-new-normal-it-comes-with-tradeoffs/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">making most workers feel <em>more</em> lonely</a>, isolated and judged, not less. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>"Increased intimacy also makes differences much more acute," Fisher said. And it's those differences that contribute <a href="https://www.protocol.com/mckinsey-head-of-diversity-lareina-yee-interview" target="_self">to the fact that one in four women in corporate roles have considered downshifting their careers</a>, according to McKinsey's Women in the Workplace 2020 report. The "always-online" remote work norm has made caretaking responsibilities, which fall more heavily on women, increasingly visible at work; now, "worry that their performance is being negatively judged because of caregiving responsibilities during the pandemic" is one of the key factors affecting why working mothers are considering downshifting their careers, according to the report.</p><p>But falling professional boundaries could also help solve the problem, said Lareina Yee, McKinsey's chief diversity officer and the report's leader. Many companies have policies that encourage flexibility and leave-taking, but workers don't see their leaders take advantage of those policies. If leaders are clear that they are fighting the same battles, they can "de-risk this perception that their career will be hurt if they actually say they need to use something that a company already offers," she said. </p><p>Fisher is focused on physical space in her search for solutions. Some workers are comfortable in their home spaces and willing and even eager to share them on video, but others may not have privacy, or a clean room, or enough space to be conducive to work and to help them feel comfortable at home. Twitter's RoomRater and other Zoom-rating accounts, while mostly funny and well-intentioned, <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/epdzkn/room-rater-twitter-account-work-from-home-zoom" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">made that abundantly clear,</a> literally assessing the quality of a person's room and helping legitimize the judgment and subsequent shaming of people's personal spaces. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>So, whether people go back to the office full time, Fisher wants to find ways for Atlassian to provide a physical space that allows people to enjoy the flexibility of work-from-home while reducing the disparities and judgment that can come with the increased intimacy. "Space is one of the choices that you can extend to people," she said.</p><p>In 2021, the conversation about work will be a conversation about the choices we make in physical spaces, and about whether we want to rebuild the walls between our personal and professional lives. Fisher described it best: "There's this wave happening. Even when the wave comes ashore and washes back out … There will be a different direction."</p><p>Here at Protocol, we've written more stories about the future of work than I have the energy to count (I got to 20 before I gave up, and that only took me as far back as May). So if you're looking for more on what we learned in 2020, I selected some of the most interesting and important articles we've written this year: </p><p>Issie Lapowsky <a href="https://www.protocol.com/parents-working-from-home-survey" target="_self">wrote about how remote work is hurting mothers</a>, and Mike Murphy <a href="https://www.protocol.com/accenture-cto-paul-daugherty" target="_self">delved into why the future is probably not entirely remote</a>. David Pierce profiled <a href="https://www.protocol.com/dropbox-spaces" target="_self">Dropbox's Drew Houston, who hopes to capitalize on a new world of work</a> and interviewed <a href="https://www.protocol.com/superhuman-ceo-rahul-vohra-interview" target="_self">Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra on how to run a remote company</a> on our podcast. I talked to <a href="https://www.protocol.com/peter-schwartz-salesforce-remote-work" target="_self">Salesforce's futurist Peter Schwartz</a> about why companies will lose talent if they aren't flexible about work and dug into <a href="https://www.protocol.com/atlanta-tech" target="_self">how new ideas about work will make it easier</a> for companies to diversify their workforce by investing in places like Atlanta.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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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.
Politics
What the Biden administration can learn from Ajit Pai’s FCC
The Biden administration's goals for internet infrastructure would be best pursued using economic incentives rather than heavy-handed directives, argues Douglas Holtz-Eakin.
FCC chairman Ajit Pai gave the private sector plenty of latitude. Will that continue under the Biden administration after Pai steps down?
Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
December 22, 2020
Douglas Holtz-Eakin (@djheakin) is president of the American Action Forum and former director of the Congressional Budget Office.
December 22, 2020
As Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai prepares to step down on Jan. 20, there are more than a few lessons the incoming Biden administration could learn from his tenure at the agency. Perhaps the most important lesson is that each of the new administration's goals for internet infrastructure — bridging the digital divide, universal broadband, rapid deployment of 5G — is best pursued using a regulatory approach that emphasizes economic incentives over heavy-handed directives.
Since March 1, internet usage has increased by roughly 30%, yet our networks have not buckled under pandemic-era pressures. Unlike much of Europe, we have not seen our access or speeds limited. This level of resilience is no accident. Under Pai, the private sector has had the appropriate incentives and latitude to do what it does best: invest in opportunity and innovate. The regulatory strategy and decisions got us to where we are today.
<p>Many did not expect this outcome. When Pai's FCC repealed net neutrality two years ago, there was a flood of concern and consternation that this repeal would enable opportunistic and malicious internet providers to throttle access or slow down speeds. No pervasive bad behavior emerged. Instead, by lifting these regulatory burdens, the FCC helped spur <a href="https://www.ustelecom.org/broadband-capex-investment-looking-up-in-2017/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">a surge of private investment</a> in broadband deployment, not only <a href="https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/measuring-broadband-america/raw-data-measuring-broadband-america-eighth" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">connecting more Americans</a> in hard-to-reach or underserved communities, but also supporting more nimble, resilient networks that can handle rapid changes and growth in internet demand. At the same time, broadband prices <a href="https://www.ustelecom.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/USTelecom-2020-Broadband-Pricing-Index.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">continue to decline</a> even as speeds continue to increase. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>In the presence of this hands-off regulatory approach, most Americans today are able to telework, learn online, and participate in remote health care consultations with little to no fuss. To be sure, we are far from finally closing the digital divide, but the current FCC has left us with a blueprint of the most efficient way to meet this goal and others for our internet infrastructure. </p><p>That blueprint is straightforward: Solutions to the connectivity and economic challenges we face today — from getting and keeping our students and educators online during the pandemic, to expanding remote access to health care delivery, to expanding the reach of high-speed connections — can only be sustained when the economics make sense. We need a rigorous, data-driven approach to solving these challenges. The Pai FCC has pursued this path, often on a bipartisan basis, and in the process has helped to boost connectivity in underserved communities, expand economic opportunity and — unknowingly — prepare our country to navigate an unprecedented public health and economic crisis. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>The next FCC chair and the Biden administration as a whole should not abandon this light-touch approach; they should double down on it. In order to finish the job of connecting all Americans to high-speed internet service, the incoming FCC should avoid interfering in the marketplace and burdening companies with unnecessary restrictions. As my colleague Jennifer Huddleston has explained, this is the exact approach that we should continue taking with regard to <a href="https://www.americanactionforum.org/insight/keeping-a-clear-path-to-5g/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">development and deployment of 5G</a>. </p><p>5G has the potential to bring high-speed connections to the hardest-to-reach places, but the federal government is considering building and running a single national 5G network — the exact opposite approach of the Pai FCC's approach. Taking this kind of single-contractor approach to 5G, as Huddleston mentioned, is <a href="https://www.atr.org/conservatives-unite-send-message-congress-don-t-nationalize-5g" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">likely to be costlier for taxpayers</a>, take significantly longer to deploy and undermine the competitive system we have today in which multiple actors are working to develop and deploy 5G and related technologies. In a truly competitive marketplace, consumers benefit from greater choice, while businesses are rewarded for their ability to provide cutting-edge services. The future of 5G and the emerging technologies it will enable are full of promise, and it would be a shame to throttle the development and deployment of 5G when our country has all the right tools to succeed. </p><p>To swiftly and meaningfully expand broadband and 5G connectivity, the new administration must continue to rely on the tested economics that has encouraged innovation and investment across our entire internet infrastructure. As the transition team prepares for a new FCC Chair, they must remember that the United States built a robust and innovative digital economy by limiting government interference. It would be foolish to abandon that strategy now.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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Douglas Holtz-Eakin (@djheakin) is president of the American Action Forum and former director of the Congressional Budget Office.
Protocol | Enterprise
How Christian Klein’s reboot of SAP’s strategy is working out
The pandemic wasn't kind to the company. But the way it's working with the major COVID-19 vaccine makers is a model for what comes next.
Christian Klein became SAP's sole CEO in April.
Photo: Picture Alliance/Getty Images
January 11, 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.
December 22, 2020
Christian Klein took over as SAP's sole CEO in April. It wasn't an ideal time to take the helm of an organization that sells expensive enterprise software.
As the spread of COVID-19 forced corporations everywhere to cut costs, one of the first places they looked was IT budgets. Specifically, companies around the world trimmed spending on back-end products, such as those offered by SAP, many of which still run via on-premise data centers.
<p>But now, with an end to the pandemic in sight, Klein is charting a path toward recovery. Central to his strategy is for SAP to become even more of a key tech vendor for the world's most complex companies, analysts say. That means doubling down on industries that are already robust SAP customers, such as manufacturing and automotive, as well as convincing them to pivot to use SAP products in the cloud.</p><p>"We have always been the leading on-premise application platform," Klein <a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/sap-charts-new-course-to-accelerate-cloud-shift-co-innovation-one-data-model/" target="_blank">told Wall Street analysts</a> earlier this year. "Our intention is to repeat that for the cloud."</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="1">
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</div></p><p>Those sorts of sectors would be ideal clients for SAP because they run very data-heavy operations. SAP's enterprise resource planning software helps track those processes and, perhaps more importantly, allows the stored information to be more easily accessible across the enterprise. </p><p>And by transitioning to the cloud-based products, SAP has the opportunity to deepen its relationships with existing customers. For one, clients switch from paying large upfront costs to monthly installments. That's an increasingly attractive model for organizations because it becomes easier to scale up or down based on demand. As that adoption grows, it could also increase the likelihood that corporations will pile on additional cloud-based SAP applications, ultimately helping the provider achieve its vision of underpinning all operations across the enterprise. </p><p>"[With] asset-intensive organizations, it's important to be able to manage the end-to-end processes. And that is something that SAP has focused on," said Paul Saunders, a senior research director at Gartner.</p><p>That strategy is apparent in the company's work with the life sciences industry. Moderna, which hopes to start <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/moderna-vaccine-slaoui-likely-approved-by-end-of-week-2020-12" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">distributing its COVID-19 vaccine this year</a>, uses SAP's ERP software known as S/4HANA. That's enabled Moderna to "improve the quality of drugs being produced," according to a <a href="https://www.sap.com/documents/2017/11/8c9e515b-e27c-0010-82c7-eda71af511fa.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">synopsis of the partnership</a> from SAP. And Moderna is deploying other solutions on top of the core ERP, like a program that will help the company <a href="https://news.sap.com/2020/12/sap-moderna-covid-19-vaccine-distribution/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">prevent counterfeit vaccines</a>. Similar tools are in use at AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline and <a href="https://blog.asug.com/hubfs/ASUG83120%20-%20Pfizer's%20Flight%20to%20SAP%20Cloud%20Platform.pdf" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Pfizer</a> — pharmaceutical companies working on COVID-19 vaccines — according to publicly available information.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="2">
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</div></p><p>"When you look at what is just happening out there on the vaccine side, there we are almost supporting every manufacturing, every logistic provider," Klein <a href="https://seekingalpha.com/article/4392353-sap-ses-sap-ceo-christian-klein-presents-fourth-annual-wells-fargo-tmt-summit-2020-conference" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">said at a recent Wells Fargo conference</a>.</p><p>That all serves to demonstrate how, despite its most recent struggles, SAP remains a powerhouse in the enterprise software industry. </p><p>But it's not to say Klein's onto a sure thing: For many of these companies and others, SAP is just one of a slew of vendors currently in use. Enterprises are also reimagining how they use their ERP systems, according to <a href="https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/tech-trends.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Deloitte</a>, and shifting more non-critical business functions to other third-party applications to reduce legacy IT debt — a phenomenon that could ding SAP in the long run. Some companies, for example, may seek to take software that helps manage the human resource function off of the ERP and run it separately. </p><p>And despite being a market leader in ERP software, SAP isn't without competition. Oracle remains a key rival, and its founder Larry Ellison has alluded to a more fierce competition ahead in the cloud. He even told analysts during a recent earnings call that Oracle would soon announce a slate of large-scale customers it stole from SAP. </p><p>"Oracle is the clear market leader in cloud ERP," Ellison declared on a call with Wall Street analysts earlier this month. That "will become even more obvious when we announce that several major large-scale SAP ERP customers are leaving," he added. Still, that's a promise Ellison also made last year, and one which has yet to materialize — at least publicly. An Oracle spokesperson declined to comment. </p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="3">
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</div></p><p>Despite the challenges, SAP's overall sales grew slightly to nearly $20 billion In the first nine months of 2020. But while for Klein the recovery is a long-term vision, his plan hasn't exactly been embraced by investors. Following a statement in late October that <a href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/sap-stock-price-2020-outlook-downgrade-2020-10-1029720099" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">outlined a two-year delay in reaching prior revenue targets</a>, SAP's stock dropped 22% — a fall it has yet to recover from.</p><h2>Underpinning vaccine development</h2><p>Even so, a deeper look at how SAP is deployed across top vaccine-makers shows why it's hard to count the software giant and its CEO's vision out entirely.</p><p>Companies typically want to remain quiet when it pertains to an ongoing initiative as critical as eradicating a virus that led to a global pandemic. True to form, spokespersons for Moderna, AstraZeneca, J&J, Pfizer, GSK and Sanofi did not respond to a request for comment about how they use SAP products for this article. But many of the objectives previously outlined by executives at those firms in adopting the company's technology align with the goal of now quickly developing and producing a vaccine.</p><p>GSK, for example, has <a href="https://www.ariba.com/resources/library/library-pages/gsk-and-sap-ariba-how-innovation-improves-lives#video" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">over 90% of its pharmaceutical and vaccine businesses</a> running on SAP's ERP system. The global deployment enables the UK-based manufacturer to better "leverage the significant amounts of data" it collects and develop insights from that information to improve operations, former technology product manager Jonny Dent said during a February webinar.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="4">
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</div></p><p>On top of that software, GSK also uses Ariba, SAP's procurement manager, to improve how the company works with its many suppliers and contract manufacturers — the same ones that could be tasked with helping to mass-produce a vaccine.</p><p>"We're a SAP house through-and-through," Dent told participants at the time.</p><p>At Sanofi, the French drugmaker opted to implement S/4HANA in 2017. The software initially went live in several pilot countries in 2018 in Europe before the company deployed it more broadly earlier this year. One of the goals of the pivot was to consolidate the 10 disparate ERP platforms that Sanofi had as a result of over 300 acquisitions since its founding in 1999, according to a <a href="https://www.sap.com/assetdetail/2020/07/12b04aa9-a37d-0010-87a3-c30de2ffd8ff.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">promotional video posted by SAP</a>. Now, the company says information can be more easily accessed by individuals across different business units.</p><p>AstraZeneca uses SAP's Work Manager software to better oversee its manufacturing equipment. The tool effectively allows factory workers to more closely track their performance on the floor to help managers determine when machines may be close to breaking down. One exec previously said it led to a "6[%] to 8% increase in efficiency." Such an application could play a role in ensuring the production of a vaccine doesn't run into any major hiccups.</p><p>And J&J employs Ariba <a href="https://news.sap.com/2018/02/sap-ariba-and-johnson-johnsons-future-includes-new-technology-better-health-for-everyone/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">to help it partner with more diverse suppliers</a>. Overall, roughly 80% of J&J's spend runs through Ariba, totaling more than 250,000 purchase orders as of February 2018.</p><p><div class="ad-tag"><div class="ad-place-holder" data-pos="5">
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</div></p><p>So as SAP aims to become an end-to-end partner for key industries, its work with Moderna, GSK and other pharmaceutical companies will serve as a model for how it should try to insert itself in other sectors. Now Klein just needs to make sure that happens. </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.
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