More than two years after the Pandemic, technology is more pervasive, more powerful, and richer than before. Or is it?
This year — and the past few weeks in particular — has complicated what was a fairly straightforward understanding of how most of America’s tech industry and digital superstar companies are evolving.
Continuously for the past year or so, peers and i have written That technology is undisputed winner of the quirky pandemic economy. People and businesses need what tech companies are selling, and growing dependence has made tech stars grow faster and become far more profitable than enthusiasts. technology in Silicon Valley can imagine. Dollar bonus. A+.
Now I think that point should be revised to be incomplete. Some of the trends of 2020 and 2021 – including more work, shopping, product marketing, entertainment, and online socialization – have already begun to buck. With hindsight, it is now unclear to what extent the digital boom of those years was a blip and how much the acceleration of lasting technological transformations will be.
That uncertainty, along with inflationary and weak economy, making it hard to figure out what’s going on in technology today or even judge the past few years. We may be at the cusp of a great time for technology or the beginning of a patch for their products and finances. Let me say again What the mantra of 2022 should be: No one knows anything.
Some tech executives are mostly confident about their future, while others sweat nervously. It is almost as if they live in two separate realities. And maybe they do.
In a realm that is the land of Big Tech, with princes like Microsoft, Google, Amazon (maybe), Apple (maybe) and a few others in fortresses berating us with pipsqueaks.
Revenue at Google and Microsoft continues to grow from what appears to be their massive unsustainable digital advertising and software sales in 2021. Both companies this week said they feel it good about their prospects but also warning of troubles ahead.
On Tuesday, Google executives said the word “uncertainty” or a variation of it 13 times during a conference call with investors. The company said it could start to see clearly in 2023 that Google is slowing hiring. Planning a spending diet months in advance is a sign that the company doesn’t expect to weather what could be a U.S. recession and other global problems.
Some of the winners of the scariest phase of the pandemic are also struggling, raising the question of whether their early 2020s were partly an illusion.
Netflix lost subscribers in the US and Canada for two quarters. That has led some experts suspect whether streaming as a whole can grow as big, fast, and lucrative as optimists believe. Snap, the company that owns the Snapchat app, saw luck and usage skyrocketed in 2020 before going back to the way it was: A The company is not very successful with an uncertain future.
Shopify, whose software helps businesses directly set up an online storefront, speak This week they believe the pandemic has no lasting effect on people’s shift from in-person shopping to the internet. If Shopify is right, the whole idea that the pandemic has prompted a shift in shopping habits will explode. It will be a temporary high.
Amazon wasn’t so direct, but the company did admit that it has overestimated how quickly e-commerce sales will grow and is cutting some spending. (Amazon and Apple release quarterly financial results late Thursday.)
And Meta… phew. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a company go from cocky to clumsy Magoo so quickly.
The company’s revenue fell for the first time, and its Instagram app is having identity crisis. But I cannot say whether this is the beginning of the end of Meta as a dominant digital power or a temporary lull due to a combination of inflation, changes in privacy Apple and the ugliness compared to the pandemic-related increase in ad sales and profits it has reported. Meta’s annual revenue is almost double what it was this time in 2019. That’s not a sign (yet) of a company in permanent decline.
With the United States and other major economies increasingly weaker, it is possible that digital superstars will use this uncertain time to forge into new areas and expand their dominance. It is also possible that even the giants cannot sustain if their lucrative markets, including high-end smartphones, online advertising, e-commerce and enterprise software, grow. more slowly over the next few years or shrink.
Is technology winning? Can I take a long vacation and revisit this question in 2023?
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Tip of the week
Useful changes to your gadgets
Brian X. ChenThe New York Times’ consumer technology columnist, published a helpful list of standard setting that we should change for iPhone, Facebook apps, and other technologies to make available the data we share with digital companies. Brian is here with many of his favorite settings tweaks to make our gear more fun (or less annoying):
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Maximize video resolution on iPhone: On iPhone, open Settings, select Camera, and tap Video Recording. Choose one of the 4K options. (I shoot at 30fps.) This will ensure that your camera is recording video at the highest resolution. The downside is that your recordings will clog up a lot of your phone’s digital memory. But if you already pay for a nice camera, why not use it?
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Minimize distractions on your wrist: On my Apple Watch, I want to turn off notifications for every app except the messaging and workout apps. To do that, open the Watch app on your iPhone, tap Notifications, and turn off notifications for each app. (Also, I always leave the clock sound muted.)
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Put your favorite features at your fingertips: On your Android phone, you can customize the “quick settings” menu for shortcuts to features you use often. Swipe down from the top of the smartphone screen and swipe down again. If you tap the icon that looks like a pencil, you can select additional tiles that let you, such as turn on your phone’s flashlight, or go into airplane mode from your phone’s home screen. You can also rearrange the order of these feature shortcuts to suit your preferences.
Before we go…
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Congress moves closer to funding US chip factories: The US government seems to be able to do something relatively rare and use taxpayer money to subsidize an industry – in this case, it would pay computer chip manufacturers to make certain products in the United States. My colleague, Catie Edmondson, reports that the goal of this grant, which also includes a grant to support American science and technology research, is to counter China. There is also a long list of other questssome of which are more messy.
From The New York Times Opinion: U.S. supremacy in key technology areas, such as chips, requires the United States to do more to generate talent, both in the United States and abroad.
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Two historians found the mental asylum medical record of a person for sale on eBay. Surname Written in Slate that e-commerce sites should take more responsibility for what they sell, and they worry that the public is treating mental illness and disability as entertainment.
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A video game is both an escape and a reminder of illness: A writer for The Washington Post, Gene Park, was recently diagnosed with cancer and found herself hooked on “Cyberpunk 2077,” a video game about treatment for a terminal illness. Park Written.
Hug this
Look at these tiny jacana bird! (Jacanas are tropical wading birds with very long legs and toes.)
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