This has been a litigious week in tech so far. Amazon wont let Microsoft celebrate its JEDI contract win, Motorola draws a $765M-sized pie out of Hytera that stole its source codes. Elsewhere, Photoshop turned 30 this week, and Adobe is rolling out a flurry of new features. Meanwhile, Apple & Walmart see a dip in fortunes as Coronavirus dips its teeth into Big Techs revenues. There is a new book on Mark Zuckerberg that promises juicy details on the embattled tech magnate, especially around his views on privacy.
Here are This Weeks Top Stories:
Amazon Casts a Pall on Microsofts JEDI Contract Win
Coronavirus Delivers A Big Jolt to Big Tech
Motorola Wins $765M in Court Battle Over the Theft of Trade Secrets by Chinese Rival
New Book on Zuckerbergs Tryst With Privacy in Facebooks Early Days
Cloud Computing
Amazon Casts a Pall on Microsofts JEDI Contract Win
The bitterly-contested battle between Microsoft and Amazon for the Department of Defenses $10 billion JEDI contract which Microsoft won in October took an interesting turn when the U.S. Federal Claims Court took notice of the contract awarded to Redmond giant. Amazon claimed that DoD handed out the JEDI contract to Microsoft after White House intervened. While the outcome is awaited, Amazon has been asked to set aside $42 million by the Court as a potential fine in case it turns out that the injunction was issued wrongfully.
Big Picture: The $10 billion JEDI (Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure) contract that will run for ten years will, according to DoD, deploy foundational cloud technology, while leveraging commercial parity, to the entire Department, with a focus on where our military operates ? from the homefront to the tactical edge. Essentially, JEDI will be a unified cloud platform that will allow the department to store all its data, carry out analytics, estimate, plan, and track actual spending, carry out data pooling, and give access to necessary data to officers and troops at all levels and departments. Technologically-speaking, JEDI is a big step-up for DoD as it gears up to embrace the cloud revolution.
Our Take: So far, Amazons claims about interference in the two-way horse race for the JEDI contract are based on a series of tweets by the President and statements made in reference to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Is Amazon willing to bet $42 million on its belief? Well know that on Thursday.
Learn more: Amazon Challenges Biased Pentagon Cloud ContractOpens a new window
Corona virus
Coronavirus Delivers a Big Jolt to Big Tech
CoronavirusOpens a new window has dominated news headlines since the epidemic broke out in Wuhan, China. Since then, the contagion has canceled trade shows, sunk markets, impacted tech revenues, affected supply chainsOpens a new window , and claimed more than 2,100 lives. The contagion has delivered a big jolt, in terms of supply chain and impacting shipments. With stock values deeply linked to market sentiments and future predictions, many companies desist from airing bleak outlook or projections, but uncertainty around how long it will take to bring the epidemic under control has forced a few of them to come clean about Coronavirus impact on their quarterly performance.
On Monday, Apple told investors that worldwide iPhone sales in the March quarter will be constrainedOpens a new window as its manufacturing sites in China are ramping up more slowly than it expected and as a result, revenues for the quarter will also be affected. The company said that demand in China is also affected due to the outbreak as many partner stores are either closed, are receiving fewer customers, or are operating at reduced hours. In its earnings callOpens a new window for Q1 2020, Apple had forecasted revenue between $63 billion and $67 billion and gross margin between 38% and 39% for the March quarter.
TeslaOpens a new window issued a muted warning about a less-than-optimal manufacturing performance in the quarter, stating that it is unknown whether and how global supply chains, particularly for automotive parts, may be affected if such an epidemic persists for an extended period.
We may incur expenses or delays relating to such events outside of our control, which could have a material adverse impact on our business, operating results, and financial condition, the company added. Teslas Shanghai Gigafactory stayed shut for two weeks between January and February and its sales outlets across China have also remained closed after the outbreak reached epidemic proportions.
WalmartOpens a new window revealed during its earnings call that the Coronavirus outbreak may deal a couple of cents negative impact in Q1. Many of the companys stores in China are operating on restricted hours at present. Payments giant Visa had this to say about the impact of the outbreak: If planes are not flying in and out of China, if hotels are not being filled, which theyre not at the moment, and if the supply chains are being impacted, which I suspect they are, theres going to be some impact.
Big Picture: The Coronavirus outbreak has far-reaching implications. The outbreak poses a real threat to companies that source materials from China or have manufacturing centers there, and there is precious little they can do about it except for relocating operations elsewhere which is also a time and money-consuming task.
Our Take: In hindsight, the experience of weathering the contagion will serve as a valuable lesson for companies that rely on global supply chains or offshore manufacturing centers. The experience should prepare them to consider factors like viral epidemics or natural causes that can hit deliver a big jolt to markets, impact production and prepare back-up strategies to activate alternate centers or relocate employees from region to region to maintain the production flow. It may also teach tech firms to reduce their dependence on China.
Learn more: AI Tools Helped Canadian Analytics Firm Detect Coronavirus OutbreakOpens a new window
Tech Industry
Motorola Wins $765M in Court Battle Over Theft of Trade Secrets by Chinese Rival
Motorola Solutions was awarded $764.6 million in damages by the U.S. District Court in Illinois after successfully proving that Chinese rival Hytera Communications Corp stole its proprietary tech to develop its digital two-way radios.
Todays verdict is a tremendous victory for our company. Motorola Solutions has always invested significantly in R&D to bring pioneering and beneficial technology to our customers around the world. In contrast, Hytera was profiting off of the hard work and innovation of our world-class engineers. The jurys verdict validates our global litigation against Hytera by definitively affirming that stealing trade secrets and source code will not be tolerated, said chairman and CEO Greg Brown.
Big Picture: Motorola first filed the trade secret theft and copyright infringement complaint against Shenzhen-headquartered Hytera Communications in March 2017. Motorola alleged that Hytera used trade secrets it stole from it to develop two-way radios and repeaters, copied its source code into the source code used in Hytera products, and also stole over 10,000 Motorola Solutions confidential documents and millions of lines of Motorola Solutions highly confidential source code.
During the trial, Hytera admitted that it possessed thousands of Motorola Solutions confidential documents and that some of its products still contain stolen Motorola Solutions source code. Motorola claimed $345.8 million in compensatory damages and $418.8 million in punitive damages and to its pleasant surprise, the court awarded the same amount it requested.
Despite the massive theft and re-use of its tech, Motorola continues to remain the number one player in the global two-way radio market followed closely by Kenwood and also rivaled by the likes of Icom, Vertex, Yaesu, Pulas, Wintec, Sepura, Linemax, Hytera, and Linton. Two-way radios continue to power
analog and digital Walkie Talkies and have extensive applications in sectors like utilities, industry and commerce, and government and public safety.
Our Take: The win comes as a major boost for Motorola, especially because $4.7 billion out of its total revenues of $7.9 billion in 2019 came from sales of products like telecommunications equipment, accessories, and related software. The two-way radio market is expected to rise by 5% till at least 2024, and to maintain its numero uno position in the market, Motorola will need to discourage the use of its proprietary technologies and patents by rivals. The win will most likely dissuade other firms from taking a similar route as Hytera as Motorola now has a handy precedent in its armor.
New Book on Zuckerbergs Tryst With Privacy in Facebooks Early Days
Next Tuesday, Wireds editor at large Steven Levy will publish Facebook: the Inside StoryOpens a new window a tell-all page turner that will contain details of his nine meetings with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg since 2005, Zuckerbergs jottings in his private notebooks about plans for Facebook which he has since destroyed, and how Zuckerberg got away with dry-eyed apologies numerous times after playing with the privacy of millions of users.
Big Picture: The private jottings, however, will be the most revealing aspects of Zuckerberg and the rise of Facebook. It is in these notebooks where Zuckerberg listed out his plans and ideas before implementing them. But what will stand out the most will be one comment on privacy that may define his legacy one day What makes this seem secure, whether or not it actually is? he asked himself.
The book also comes out with many firsts like how Zuckerberg always bossed the board meetings, how he agreed to Facebooks acquisition by Yahoo that was ultimately not to be, the controversy around News Feed, and the separation of tasks between him and Sheryl Sandberg.
Our Take: Facebooks role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal- after it turned out that Facebook allowed third party apps to harvest user data without placing restrictions has raised suspicion among millions of users on how privacy-friendly the platform really is, regardless of public apologies tendered by Mark Zuckerberg and other executives. The new book should give concerned Facebook users more information on how serious Facebook is about user privacy, whether the company prioritizes profits over privacy, and whether all the apologies tendered by the company are nothing but hollow talk to escape accusations and lawsuits.
Learn more: Is Facebook Misleading Regulators, Lawmakers about Its Libra Currency Project?Opens a new window
Trivia
Adobes Photoshop Turns 30!
They say everything gets better with age… HBD, @PhotoshopOpens a new window ! ? You’ve never looked better. To celebrate, we’re launching new features on both desktop & iPad. Share the ?? with #PsILoveYou30Opens a new window .
Adobe (@Adobe) February 19, 2020Opens a new window
Adobe Photoshop turned 30 this week. To celebrate the occasion, along with the Academy Award that Photoshop won last year, Adobe has released a flurry of exciting new features. These include content-aware fill workspace improvements, lens blur improvements, Mac OS Dark UI support, and performance improvements for the desktop version, a new object selection tool for the iPad version, and major performance improvements to the upload and download experience of cloud documents for PSDs of 75 MB and larger.
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