Brian McCullough (0:04)

Welcome to the Techmeme write home for Thursday, March 13th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, intel has a new boss and they seem to want to double down on the Foundry strategy. Meta is testing community notes. Sonos is abandoning its big streaming video hardware project. Is Adobe falling behind in AI? Is Oracle the leader to take over TikTok US? And why is Jon Gruber so mad at Apple? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Intel finally has a new boss. They've appointed former board member and chip industry veteran Lip Wu Tan as its new CEO, effective March 18, and says he will rejoin the board. Intel's stock was up more than 10% on the news, quoting Reuters. Tan had been seen as a CEO contender thanks to his deep experience in the chip industry as well as a longtime technology investor in promising startups. He was approached by Intel's board in December to gauge his interest in taking the job. Reuters had reported this. Tan's appointment is welcome news, said Jackie Gold, analyst and president of jaygold Associates, which covers the chip industry. Tan has an intrinsic understanding of the semiconductor industry, both from a product design aspect as well as the needs of enabling chip manufacturing, an area that Intel Foundry needs help in making their tools more user friendly and accessible for potential customers, he said. Gold and other analysts agreed that Tan's messaging looked like he wanted to keep the company together, though they said any trouble transformation of the chip maker would take years and require investors to be patient. Tan is apparently known as a dealmaker who invested in Annapurna Labs and Nuvia and revived the fortunes of chip design firm Cadence Design Systems as its CEO. And Tan is already signaling he will stick with Intel's costly Foundry plan, which led to previous CEO Pat Gelsinger's ouster. Quoting Bloomberg. Tan, who was named to the CEO job on Wednesday, sent a letter to employees before meeting with staff in the afternoon, offering a rough sketch of his plans for the embattled chip maker. Part of the message? He will keep working to make Intel a top foundry, a business that produces chips for outside clients. That endeavor has been costly for intel so far and contributed to the ouster of prior CEO Pat Gelsinger. We will work hard to restore Intel's position as a world class products company, establish ourselves as a world class foundry and delight our customers like never before, he said in the letter, which was published on Intel's website. That's what this moment demands of us as we remake intel for the future. Plowing ahead with the foundry strategy means taking on Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing in a market that the Asian company pioneered. TSM's is dominant in the field, churning out chips for clients such as Nvidia, Apple and Advanced Micro Devices. It's still an open question whether Tan might split up the foundry and chip design business, srini Pajari, an analyst at Raymond James, said in a note to clients. Barring that move, intel will have to demonstrate that it can produce better products. End quote Meta is testing Community Notes on Facebook, Instagram and threads in the US starting on March 18th. Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan says these notes will not have distribution penalties, quoting Fox News. We had a third party fact checking program which was well intentioned at the beginning but proved to be really prone to partisan political bias and destroyed a lot of trust and credibility in the system, kaplan said. We decided to replace that system starting in the United States with a crowdsourced community based approach, which we announced in January. Next week, Meta is opening the new Community Notes program for users to write and rate notes on content across Facebook, Instagram and threads. We've developed a wait list that actually has a couple hundred thousand people on it, a broad cross section of Americans who use Facebook and Instagram who want to be able to add context to the content they are seeing when they think it is misleading, kaplan said. Meta will begin by gradually and randomly admitting people off the waitlist, and will take time to test the writing and rating system before any notes are published. Meta will not decide what gets rated or what gets written, but rather the contributors from the Facebook, Instagram and threads communities, the company told Fox News Digital. Meta also said in a blog post that contributors will not be able to submit Community Notes on ads to start with, but they can submit them on posts by politicians and public figures. Also, these Community Notes will use the same open source algorithm that powers X's Community Notes, but it plans to modify the algorithm to better serve its apps, quoting CNBC as X's algorithm and program information is open source, meaning free and available for anyone to use. We can build on what X has done, learn from the researchers who have studied it, and improve the system for our own platforms, meta said in the post. As our own version develops, we may explore different or adjusted algorithms to support how Community Notes are ranked and rated. So far, about 200,000 people have signed up to become Community Notes contributors, and the waitlist remains open for those who wish to take part in the program, the company's blog post said. End quote Sources are telling the Verge that Sonos has abandoned plans to release a streaming video player, which was set to be the company's major hardware launch in 2025. Indeed, this was, we think, the big project that distracted Sonos and led to that disastrous app change. That product, codenamed Pinewood, was set to be Sonos next major hardware launch. It was already deep into development and had spent months in beta testing, but now the team behind it will be reassigned to other projects. As interim CEO Tom Conrad reprioritizes the company's future roadmap and continues what he hopes will be a turnaround from a bruising 2024, he told employees that a push into video from Sonos is off the table for now. The abrupt cancellation of Pinewood leaves Sonos without a significant new product to ship in the second half of 2025. The company most recently released the Arc Ultra Soundbar and Sub four at the end of last year. Internally, some employees were concerned that Pinewood would ultimately become a repeat of the Sonos Ace headphones and see the company trying to take on well established players in a new product category. When it comes to streaming hardware, Roku, Amazon, Apple and Google dominate the field. So I guess the play here is that Sonos doubles down all resources on fixing its software issues rather than launching new products. When asked about future plans, Sonos spokesperson Aaron Pategas simply confirmed to the Verge their ongoing partnership with the Trade Desk, the company behind the operating system intended for the Pinewood device. The unreleased Pinewood was meant to provide standard streaming apps with enhanced search capabilities and content integration. It would have functioned as an HDMI switcher with pass through support for gaming consoles and 4K Blu Ray players, while enabling new surround sound configurations using Sonos speakers. Microsoft has announced Copilot for Gaming, available through the Xbox mobile app initially for Xbox Insiders and designed to work as a companion or gaming coach. Quoting the Verge, Microsoft is positioning Copilot for Gaming as a sidekick of sorts, one that will accompany you through games, offering up tips and guides and useful information about a game world. During a press briefing, Sonali Yadav, product manager for gaming AI, demonstrated several scenarios for what Copilot for Gaming could be used for. One involved a concept demo of copilot assisting an Overwatch 2 player by coaching them on the mistakes they made when trying to push without teammates. In the Overwatch 2 demo, Copilot could even recommend good hero picks to complement the rest of the team, and why you'd want to pair up particular characters detailing their strengths and weaknesses. Another demo involved using Copilot with Minecraft, where you could ask Copilot questions about how to craft objects. Copilot can see your screen so it can guide you and see exactly what you're doing in a game. The demo also included the option to enable cheats in Minecraft, so Copilot could even tell you where certain crafting materials are located in the world. The demo felt very concept in nature and won't be available during the initial launch of Copilot for gaming next month. Instead, Microsoft will test early versions of Copilot with Xbox Insiders through the Copilot mobile app in April before eventually bringing Copilot to multiple devices. End Quote when you think about businesses whose sales are rocketing like Feastables by Mr. Beast or Thrive Cosmetics or Silicon Valley's weekend uniform supplier Cotopoxy, sure you think about an innovative product, a progressive brand and button down marketing. But an often overlooked secret is actually the business behind the business making, selling and for shoppers, buying. Simple. For millions of businesses, that business is Shopify. 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But worries have mounted in recent months that the company is falling behind some competitors and losing its advantage in generative AI. The company annualized recurring revenue from AI contributed $125 million during the period, and Adobe expects that to double by the end of the fiscal year. Bernstein's Mark Mordler, who recommends buying on the stock, wrote in a report that to believe that Adobe is an AI winner and that AI is not replacing existing revenue streams, investors need to be able to observe longer term trends. Keith Weiss, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, wrote that new disclosure of Gen AI contribution is a step in the right direction, but that investors need to see a clearer roadmap. At the company's invest meeting at its annual conference next week, Morgan Stanley has the equivalent of a buy rating on the stock. Analysts and investors are watching for when Adobe will be able to ramp the monetization of its generative AI products as it invests heavily in distinguishing itself from rivals by infusing sharper AI editing tools into its vast portfolio. I think guidance is rough and I think people are questioning is the AI monetization quick enough, said Parker Snook, senior research analyst at MScience. In an attempt to break ahead of an increasingly competitive market, Adobe has been aggressively integrating AI into its software to boost the appeal of products such as Photoshop, which is used by professionals across a variety of industries. Annual recurring revenue for Adobe's AI and add on offerings was $125 million at the end of the quarter. Adobe expects to double this ARR figure in the next three quarters as it exits fiscal 2025, its CFO Dan Dern told Reuters in an interview. End quote the information is reporting that Oracle is a leading contender to help run TikTok US ByteDance Management prefers Oracle but wants to retain a hands on role with TikTok's operations quote. According to investors familiar with ByteDance's thinking, the Chinese company is hoping Trump will approve a deal based on the contours of Project Texas, a multi billion dollar initiative set up between TikTok and Oracle in the past couple of years. In which TikTok stores US user data on Oracle servers and lets Oracle review the source codes of the algorithm, Dictating what users see on the ByteDance's preference could draw criticism that it would leave control of TikTok still in Chinese hands, undercutting the point of the law. But President Trump has expressed support for keeping TikTok alive, partly because he credits it with helping him win the election, which likely strengthens ByteDance's negotiation position. And the law gives the president discretion to decide what qualifies as a ByteDance divestiture of TikTok. One issue that is unresolved is whether the US government will get an economic interest in TikTok through the deal, as President Trump has suggested. Some options that bidders have discussed include giving the government a 50% revenue share in TikTok US or a 50% cut of proceeds from a future sale or IPO of the US Entity. However a deal is structured, Oracle is expected to be involved as the cloud computing provider for TikTok, renting its servers to the app, according to one of the bidders. Another firm could also be involved in the task of managing the TikTok app, said people involved in the talks. Oracle primarily sells software to businesses and has less experience running consumer facing social or e commerce applications. Finally today, an essay from our friend Jon Gruber. He's angry. He says that by previewing Smarter Siri vaporware, his words at WWDC and the iPhone 16 launch, Apple burned a reputation earned over decades for only promising actual working products. Quote why did Apple show these personalized Siri features at WWDC last year and promise their arrival during the first year of Apple Intelligence? Why for that matter do they now claim to anticipate rolling them out in the coming year if they still currently do not exist in demonstrable form? If they do exist today in demonstrable form, they should demonstrate them. I'm not trying to be obtuse here. It's obvious why some executives at Apple might have hoped they could promote features like these at WWDC last year. Generative AI is the biggest thing to happen in the computer industry since previous breaks breakthroughs this century like mobile, starting with the iPhone, followed by Android, social media, Meta and cloud computing, Microsoft, Google and Amazon. Nobody knows where it's going, but wherever it's heading, it's going to be big, important and perhaps profitable. Wall street certainly noticed, and prior to WWDC last year, Apple wasn't in the game. They needed to pitch their AI story, and a story that involved nothing but Table stakes AI features isn't nearly as compelling a story as one that involves innovative, breakthrough, ambitious personal features. But while there's an obvious appeal to Apple pitching the most compelling, most ambitious AI story possible, the only thing that was essential was telling a story that was true. If the truth was that Apple only had features ready to ship in the coming year that were table stakes compared to the rest of the industry, that's the story they needed to tell. Put as good a spin on it as possible, but them's the breaks when you're late to the game. The fiasco here is not that Apple is late on AI. It's also not that they had to announce an embarrassing delay on promised features last week. Those are problems, not fiascos. And problems happen. They're inevitable. Leaders prove their mettle and create their legacies not by how they deal with successes, but how they deal with how they acknowledge, understand, adapt and solve problems. The fiasco is that Apple pitched a story that wasn't true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn't true. And they set a course based on that. Who said, sure, let's promise this and then, sure, let's advertise it. And who said, are you crazy? This isn't ready. This doesn't work. We can't promote this now. And most important, who made the call? Which side to listen to? Presumably. Presumably that person was Tim Cook. Tim Cook should have already held a meeting like that to address and rectify this Syrian Apple intelligence debacle. If such a meeting hasn't yet occurred or doesn't happen soon, then I fear that's all she wrote. The ride is over. When mediocrity, excuses and bullshit take root, they take over. A culture of excellence, accountability and integrity cannot abide the acceptance of any of those things and will quickly collapse upon itself with the acceptance of all three. End quote. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.