Should every company create its own self-driving program? Mike and Farhad debate.
Each Saturday, Farhad Manjoo and Mike Isaac, technology reporters at The New York Times, review the week’s news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry.
Mike: Bienvenidos, Señor Manjoo! I’ m in a Spanish-speaking mood this morning because I just found out that “Despacito” quickly rose this week to become the most streamed song of all time. Have you heard it?
Farhad: I really do not like that song. It’s not terrible as a song, but every time it plays it sticks in my head for hours, which I guess explains its streaminess.
Mike: Yeah, me neither. Also, you should watch this video of Justin Bieber trying to cover the song and just spouting a bunch of gibberish on stage at a nightclub because he can’ t speak Spanish. Get it together, Biebs!
Farhad: Mike, that video is two months old. You think I’ d wait that long before watching a Bieb video? Nope.
Mike: Anyway, I guess we should talk about tech and what happened this week.
Google Fiber, the broadband service that Google started years ago to challenge the cable company monopolies, has run into yet another set of snags. They lost their new C. E. O. for untold reasons. Five months in, and he’s a goner. Ouch!
Farhad: Even Sean Spicer lasted longer.
Mike: Also this week, Amazon edged a toe into the trendy meal kit delivery space. You know, the thing where a company sends you a bunch of groceries and you cook dinner for yourself. That sent Blue Apron’s recently public stock price down in the tank. Everyone is always scared of Amazon moving into their business.
Speaking of which, I decided to bite the bullet and try one of these meal kits. I signed up for Blue Apron, so we’ ll see if I can make it through a cooking session without setting my house on fire. I also tried cooking a week’s worth of dinners from Green Chef, which were really tasty. Everyone keeps telling me Sun Basket is good, too.
Really what I’ ve learned is that dinners are essentially becoming Lego blocks for adults. I’ m not sure if I like it.
Farhad: Yeah, I don’ t get meal kits either. I cook every day and part of the enjoyment, for me, is buying the stuff to cook. But I’ m also a work-at-home columnist, so perhaps I’ m not the target audience. I do think Amazon’s entry makes sense here. It wants to get into the food business, meal kits are clearly popular, and it has a powerful sales platform. So, yeah, bad news for Blue Apron.
Mike: In other news, Amazon inexplicably started a social network for commerce, called Spark, that many see as an Instagram competitor. It’s like a catalog in an app.
I can’ t see any reason I’ d want to use this. Seems like it would make much more sense for Amazon to buy Pinterest, which already skews heavily toward shopping and list-making. But perhaps I’ m wrong. (Also, Amazon just spent a bunch of money on Whole Foods, so they might not want to whip out the checkbook again so soon.)
Farhad: Another reason for Amazon to buy Pinterest is to get some good digital designers. Take a look at this Spark thing — I think Myspace might have been more aesthetically restrained.
Mike: Yeah.
Meanwhile, over in Twitter -land, the company said that early results on its abuse reduction tactics showed they were actually working. As a result of using technology and artificial intelligence better, abuse and harassment seem to be slowly decreasing on the site, according to some slightly opaque statistics they’ ve shared.
And yet, you still have an account and are allowed to tweet at me. Big oversight, methinks.
Farhad: Watch it, Mike. I’ m your only friend on Twitter.
Mike: Indeed. So one thing I want to make sure we get to is the latest on Lyft. The company announced it would develop its own self-driving technology and would hire hundreds of engineers for a new facility in Palo Alto dedicated entirely to autonomous vehicle research.
If that wasn’ t enough, they’ re also inviting automakers, software developers and tech companies to be a part of their “Open Platform Initiative, ” essentially a way for Lyft and other companies to co-develop self-driving technology. Eventually, Lyft sees this as a way to supply its network with more cars to service riders, provided by partners like Waymo, General Motors and more.
I’ m curious to hear your take on this, but my inclination is to believe it’s a smart enough play by Lyft. If you believe that autonomous vehicles are the future — and literally almost every major company in transportation believes this is the case — then you need to position your business for a day in which there are more robot drivers than human ones. That could benefit Lyft, as they could take a larger cut of revenue from each ride they complete. (Admittedly, there are many other costs associated with driverless tech, to be clear.)
However, Lyft just isn’ t as well funded as Uber, the $70 billion behemoth that is developing its own self-driving tech in house. So I can see a kind of platform play and striking deals with partners as a decent compromise.
What do you think? I have a feeling you disagree with me.
Farhad: Yeah, I don’ t get this. Sure, I understand wanting to have a stake in a transformative technology. But self-driving is a supercompetitive field right now. Every car company and every large tech company is working on self-driving software. And some of the biggest and most advanced self-driving companies — including Waymo, the Google spinoff, and MobileEye, which was just purchased by Intel — have signaled that their primary interest is to sell their tech to other companies.
In other words, self-driving looks as if it’s shaping up like the cloud business. There’ ll be two or three big providers that will sell tech to lots of different transportation companies. And those transportation companies — whether they’ re carmakers or shared-ride providers like Lyft or some other type of business — will build many different kinds of businesses using that licensed technology, just like Netflix stores its videos on Amazon’s cloud.
So it’s weird to me to see all these transportation companies spending so much to create their own tech.
