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    App stores are hugely lucrative—and under attack

    Since the first iPhone landed in people’s pockets in 2007, apps have steadily become the portal of choice to the digital world. The mobile devices on which they run now account for two-thirds of global web traffic. Inhabitants of rich countries spend about five hours a day, roughly a third of their waking lives, staring at apps. Globally some 3.5bn people use them each month.That has made the app stores that distribute them a lucrative business for Apple and Alphabet, the tech titans whose iOS and Android operating systems power the vast majority of mobile devices around the world. That, in turn, has drawn the attention of governments, which are leaning on the duopoly to limit access to disfavoured apps while also working to loosen its stranglehold over the market. They risk irking consumers on both counts. More

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    For Gen-Z job-seekers, TikTok is the new LinkedIn

    YOUNG JOB-SEEKERS are different from their elders. They expect employers to be cuddlier, more forgiving and more generous with perks and pay cheques. The way they go about hunting for work is also distinct. Rather than relying on family and friends, a growing number of Americans are turning to TikTok in search of advice that will help them climb those all-important first steps up the career ladder.Scrolling through their feeds on the short-video app they might come across a creator called Lauren Spearman. Ms Spearman uploads videos about “red-flag job postings” and “unreasonable job applications”. Or they might find Kennie Bukky, who shares her “salary journey” and hot tips for pay negotiations. If they scroll down further, sooner or later they are likely to happen upon Brittany Peatsch. She went viral after posting a video account of her own experience being laid off from Cloudflare, a software company, and now creates videos offering advice to others suffering through similar ordeals. More

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    Can Alibaba get the magic back?

    ALIBABA USED to be synonymous with the success of Chinese e-commerce. Lately the company has been synonymous with its woes. In 2021 it became the grimacing face of an official crackdown against China’s biggest technology firms, whose growing size and seeming social indispensability must have spooked the Communist Party. It was fined a record $2.8bn for monopolistic practices that, the government said, were hurting customers and merchants. Its co-founder, Jack Ma, disappeared into self-imposed exile. Rivals such as PDD, which began life as a group-buying platform, and ByteDance, which owns TikTok and its Chinese sister app, Douyin, proved better at catering to thrifty consumers and at adapting to new trends such as “social commerce”, which mixes shopping and showbusiness.In late 2022 Alibaba’s market value, which two years earlier had exceeded $800bn, fell below $170bn, close to a record low since its blockbuster initial public offering (IPO) in 2014. To reverse the decline, in March last year the company decided to split itself in six. Five firms were spun out: a logistics business (Cainiao), a cloud-computing one (Aliyun), an international e-commerce operation (which contained Alibaba’s main global platform, AliExpress, and a few regional subsidiaries), a digital-services company (which controls Ele.me, a food-delivery app) and a small media group. Alibaba proper retained the domestic retail operation, which is centred around Taobao and Tmall, its two giant marketplaces, and which accounts for nearly 70% of the group’s revenues. More

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    Will chatbots eat India’s IT industry?

    WHAT IS THE ideal job to outsource to artificial intelligence? Today’s AIs, in particular the ChatGPT-like generative sort, have a leaky memory, cannot handle physical objects and are worse than humans at interacting with humans. Where they excel is in manipulating numbers and symbols, especially within well-defined tasks such as writing bits of computer code. This happens to be the forte of giant existing outsourcing businesses—India’s information-technology (IT) companies. Seven of them, including the two biggest, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Infosys, collectively laid off 75,000 employees last year. The firms say this reduction, equivalent to about 4% of their combined workforce, has nothing to do with AI and reflects the broader slowdown in the tech sector. In reality, they say, AI is an opportunity, not a threat.Chart: The Economist More

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    Is America Inc’s war for talent over?

    Two years ago companies in America were scrambling to plug vacancies from shop floors and call centres to corporate headquarters. Workers laid off during the pandemic proved difficult to lure back, particularly those that had opted for early retirement. Others who spent their lockdowns dreaming of new beginnings resigned en masse once business resumed as normal. The share of American workers quitting their jobs each month went from 2.3% before the pandemic to a record 3% at the start of 2022. By March of that year there were two job openings for every unemployed worker in America.Chart: The Economist More

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    Big tech’s great AI power grab

    BIG TECH wants more computing power. A lot more. According to their latest quarterly reports, Alphabet (Google’s corporate parent), Amazon and Microsoft—the world’s cloud-computing giants—collectively invested $40bn between January and March, most of it in data centres equipped to deal with growing artificial-intelligence (AI) workloads. Last month Meta, which does not have a cloud business but does run a data-hungry social-media empire, said its capital expenditure could reach $40bn this year as a result of AI-related projects. That is not far off the $50bn that Saudi Aramco, an oil colossus, is planning to splurge. Microsoft is likely to spend more.The comparison with the famously capex-happy energy industry is apt not just because of the sums involved. AI needs vast amounts of processing power. And that processing power needs vast amounts of electricity. On May 2nd Bob Blue, chief executive of Dominion Energy, one of America’s biggest utilities, said that data-centre developers now regularly ask him for “several gigawatts” (GW). Dominion’s total installed capacity is 34GW. More

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    AI and other tricks are bringing power lines into the 21st century

    THE RISE of artificial-intelligence (AI) data centres, with their insatiable hunger for electricity, is asking an awful lot of the world’s utilities and grid operators. On the bright side, AI can also give a fair bit back, by helping transform ancient, overloaded and dumb electricity networks into something fit for the digital and decarbonised age. America’s Department of Energy reckons that AI and other improvements to the country’s existing grid could liberate as much as 100 gigawatts (GW) in transmission and distribution capacity over the next three to five years without the need to build new lines. That is about 13% of current peak demand of around 740GW.Some of these “grid-enhancing technologies” are now being rolled out, thanks to doughty startups developing them, their financial backers and utilities, which are becoming less resistant to innovation. GETs, as they are known for short in the industry, fall into two main categories: hardware upgrades to transmission grids and software upgrades to those grids’ brains. More

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    Does Perplexity’s “answer engine” threaten Google?

    When Aravind Srinivas was accepted at the University of California, Berkeley, to do a PhD, his mother was disappointed. Like many Indian parents, she wanted him to go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But things worked out after all; on the west coast he interned at OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind, both of which became leaders in generative artificial intelligence (AI). With that experience, he co-founded Perplexity, a generative-AI startup recently valued at $1bn that provides fast, Wikipedia-like responses to search queries. He is an unassuming interviewee, but an ambitious one. His “answer engine” is aimed at competing with Google search, one of the best business models of all time. Think Martin Luther taking on the Catholic church.Mr Srinivas is a student of disruption. When a podcaster asked him recently to compare the cultures of OpenAI and DeepMind, he explained how the engineer-led, free-wheeling approach of the former disrupted what he called the research-obsessed “very British” hierarchy of the latter (which was founded in London). He resorts to disruption theory when discussing Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Rather than explaining how Perplexity’s business model will enable it to attack the search giant, he uses a celebrated concept outlined in “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, a management bestseller from 1997 by Clayton Christensen, to identify what he sees as Alphabet’s Achilles heel. He is not alone. The innovator’s dilemma has been invoked to explain why Google is threatened by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and by other generative-AI sites such as You.com. The argument is seductive. But it is off the mark. More