After taking last week off due to some changes in my personal circumstances, I’m also changing up how I do my tech news roundup posts. Instead of afternoon posts on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, going forward I will be posting on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, with the option of extra posts as warranted. My longer form posts will come on Wednesdays, with something new coming hopefully next week.
With that, here are a few of the tech stories I’ve found interesting.
Google Shutting Down First Party Stadia Game Studios
I recently wrote about my experiences with Google Stadia, and I found that I liked the service more than I thought I was going to. When Google first launched Stadia is also created a few internal game development studios that would create Stadia exclusive games made by Google. Now, without releasing a single game, Google has shuttered those studios, instead deciding to focus on Stadia as a platform for 3rd party developers.
Google is well known for shutting down products and services, so this has caught the attention of the industry, and what the future of Stadia holds. I think Stadia still has a future, and that what we currently call Stadia will continue to exist in some form for the long term. But what may happen is that the actual Stadia service morphs into something of a white label service, where Google provides an infrastructure for game streaming that other companies can use. We are already seeing toes being dipped in this. In the United States, users who subscribe to Ubisoft’s game subscription service have the ability to play the games available on that service through Stadia. That is where the future of the Stadia platform could be.
I don’t see the service that Stadia is going away any time soon. Game streaming is too big a market. But how Google chooses to market it, and push it as a product, may change over the next year. This one is worth watching.
https://www.engadget.com/google-stadia-game-studios-shut-down-montreal-los-angeles-201811811.html
Jeff Bezos is Stepping Down as Amazon CEO
Huge news from one of the largest companies on the planet. Jeff Bezos has decided to step down as CEO of Amazon, transitioning to a new role of “executive chairman.” In the news release, Bezos says he wants to spend more time on the other ventures he is involved in, like space flight and combating climate change.
Andy Jassy, the current CEO of Amazon Web Services, will take over as CEO of Amazon in Q3 2021. Amazon is obviously more than one person, and the company will not suddenly turn into something completely different tomorrow, but a shift of this level could see long term shifts in the company. Microsoft became a very different company when Bill Gates handed the reigns to Steve Ballmer, and again after Ballmer turned the company over to Staya Nadella. Apple has undergone similar changes after Tim Cook became CEO. Amazon will undergo similar changes over the next several years, and I’ll be watching to see exactly what that entails.
The Saga of iCloud Password Sync on Windows
This has been a thing that has been happening since my last update, but Apple has very messily been rolling out support for being able to use stored passwords in iCloud on Windows. First, Apple released a new version of the iCloud for Windows App that claimed to support iCloud password sync in Google Chrome via an extension in the Chrome Web store. Problem was that extension did not exist. A few days later, the extension was made available in the Chrome Web Store, and users were able to take advantage of that functionality.
Now Apple has removed the version of iCloud for Windows that allowed that to work, which was Version 12, and replaced it with the previous version, 11.6. Users who already had version 12 installed can continue to use it, but new downloads are for the older version, 11.6.
Apple is real bad at doing things on Windows, which is weird since the vast majority of iPhone and iPad users use Windows PC’s, not Macs.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22263118/apple-icloud-windows-password-sync-version-removed
Alphabet Discloses Google Cloud Revenue For the First Time
Alphabet, the corporation that owns Google and the Google related companies, broke out and disclosed Google Cloud’s earnings for the first time as part of their quarterly earnings reports. Google Cloud is the company’s competitor to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. This is not a product that users use directly, but it is where the future of the “server and datacenter” space is, and thus is hugely important. Amazon has long had a huge lead with AWS, but Microsoft’s Azure platform has grown to what some would argue is a superior product, especially for those who have been using the Microsoft product stack for decades. Google Cloud has been a 3rd place competitor, but the sheer size of this market and the amount of money to be made means Google is investing heavily in Google Cloud.
How heavily? Well in 2020 Google Cloud lost about $5.5 Billion USD. That’s a huge number, but something a company like Alphabet/Google is able to absorb. More importantly, Google Cloud is growing, fast. The service’s revenue jumped 50% in 2020, to $13 Billion USD. This makes Google Cloud Alphabet’s second biggest revenue generator, behind Google’s Adsense platform. Yes, Google Cloud is losing money hand over fist right now, but it is only a matter of time before it does break even, and once it does it’ll likely be Google’s biggest business, in the sector with the most growth potential.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22263048/google-cloud-loss-alphabet-q4-2020-earnings
Changing Batteries is Really Hard in Space
This is one story I just find, well, cool. While I don’t give a second thought about changing a battery in a device I use, unless it is a dead car battery when it’s -30 outside, that task becomes a lot harder when the batteries are outside a space station. The International Space Station goes through batteries on a regular basis, as the station must store energy generated by its solar panels for when the station is behind the Earth and out of direct sunlight. Something that happens every 45 minutes. Batteries do wear out, and are among the most frequently replaced items on the Space Station. NASA started developing special lithium ion batteries to replace older nickel metal hydride batteries in 2014, and started sending them to the space station in 2016, and it took until last week to replace the 42 older batteries with 24 newer ones. Replacing all of those batteries was a 7 year process of development started and delivery.
Maybe I won’t complain next time I have to replace a car battery in the middle of winter.
Or maybe I will.
https://www.engadget.com/nasa-complete-upgrade-batteries-iss-125015025.html