From Zoom to Quibi, the tech winners and losers of 2020 - Napa Valley Register

techsooper.blogspot.com

We streamed, we Zoomed, we ordered groceries and houseplants online, we created virtual villages while navigating laptop shortages to work and learn from home. When it comes to technology, 2020 was a year like no other.

Here are the year's tech winners and losers:

Nintendo Switch

Even in a year heralding splashy new consoles from Xbox and PlayStation, the Nintendo Switch was the console that could. Launched in 2017, the Switch became a fast seller. That was helped by the launch of the handled Switch Lite in September 2019.

In March, it became hard to find a Switch as people searched for ways to be entertained inside their homes. Boosting its popularity was the release of island-simulation game “Animal Crossing: New Horizons,” which debuted March 20 and has now sold a cumulative 26 million units globally, according to Nintendo.

According to the NPD Group, during the first 11 months of 2020, Nintendo Switch sold 6.92 million units in the U.S. It has been the best-selling console in units sold for 24 consecutive months, a record.

Zoom

All video conferencing software from Microsoft Teams to WebEx thrived during the abrupt shift of tens of millions of people to remote working and schooling during pandemic. But only one became a verb.

Zoom Video Communications was a relatively unheralded company before the pandemic hit, but its ease of use let to wide adoption during the pandemic. There were some growing pains, including lax security that led to “Zoom bombing” breaches early on. The company revamped its security and remains one of the popular platforms to host remote meetings and classes.

Ransomware purveyors

The ransomware scourge — in which criminals hold data hostage by scrambling it until victims pay up — reached epic dimensions in 2020, dovetailing terribly with the COVID-19 plague. In Germany, a patient turned away from the emergency room of a hospital whose IT system was paralyzed by an attack died on the way to another hospital.

In the U.S., the number of attacks on health care facilities was on track to nearly double from 50 in 2019. Attacks on state and local governments were up about 50% to more than 150. Even grammar schools have been hit — shutting down remote learning for students from Baltimore to Las Vegas.

Cybersecurity firm Emsisoft estimates the cost of U.S. ransomware attacks in the U.S. alone this year at more than $9 billion between ransoms paid and downtime/recovery.

PC makers

After beginning the year grappling with exasperating delays in their supply chains, the personal computer industry found itself scrambling to keep up with surging demand for machines that became indispensable during a pandemic that kept millions of workers and students at home.

The outbreak initially stymied production because PC makers weren’t able to get the parts they needed from overseas factories that shut down during the early stages of the health crisis.

Those closures contributed to a steep decline in sales during the first three months of the year. But it has been boom times ever since.

The July-September period was particularly robust, with PC shipments in the U.S. surging 11% from the same time in 2019 — the industry’s biggest quarterly sales increase in a decade, according to the research firm Gartner.

E-commerce

The biggest of the bunch, Amazon, is one of the few companies that has thrived during the coronavirus outbreak. People have turned to it to order groceries, supplies and other items online, helping the company bring in record revenue and profits between April and June. That came even though it had to spend $4 billion on cleaning supplies and to pay workers overtime and bonuses.

But it's not just Amazon. The pandemic is accelerating the move to online shopping, a trend experts expect to say even after vaccines allow the world to resume normal lives. And thanks in part to shoppers consciously supporting small businesses, Adobe Analytics says online sales at smaller U.S. retailers were up 349% on Thanksgiving and Black Friday. At the more than 1 million businesses that use Shopify to build their websites, sales rose 75% from a year ago to $2.4 billion on Black Friday, according to Shopify.

Virtual reality

As the world adjusted to a new stuck-at-home reality, the pandemic could have been virtual reality’s chance to offer an escape. With the use of special headsets and accouterments like gloves, the technology lets people interact with a 360 degree view of a three-dimensional environment, seemingly a good fit for people stuck indoors.

But people turned to easier-to-use software and games that they already had. Few rushed to spend hundreds of dollars on a clunky new headset or tried to learn the ropes of virtual reality meeting software. And no VR games broke into the mainstream. So virtual reality, on the verge of success for decades, missed its moment, again.

Social media election labels

It was the year of labels on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and even TikTok. Ahead of the Nov. 3 U.S. presidential vote, the companies promised to clamp down on election misinformation, including baseless charges of fraud and candidates' premature declarations of victory. And the most visible part of this was the bevy of labels applied to tweets, posts, photos and videos.

“Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process,” read one typical label applied to a tweet by President Donald Trump.

But many experts said that while the labels made it appear that the companies were taking action, ”at the end of the day it proved to be pretty ineffective," as Jennifer Grygiel a professor at Syracuse University and social media expert, put it.

Quibi

Less than a year ago, Quibi launched a splashy Super Bowl ad that posed the question “What’s a Quibi?” People may still be scratching their heads.

Quibi, short for “quick bites,” raised $1.75 billion from investors including major Hollywood players Disney, NBCUniversal and Viacom.

But the service struggled to reach viewers, as short videos abound on the internet and the coronavirus pandemic kept many people at home. It announced it was shutting down in October, just months after its April launch.

Uber and Lyft

Fresh off of their initial public offerings the year before and still struggling to show they can be profitable, the ride-hailing services were clobbered by the pandemic in 2020, as people stopped taking cars and huddled down at home.

In May, Uber laid off 3,700 people, or about 14% of its workforce. Lyft also announced job cuts.

But there are some signs of hope. After significantly reducing costs by restructuring in the second quarter, Lyft said last month it expects to have its first profitable quarter at the end of 2021. And the companies scored a major victory in California, where voters passed Proposition 22, granting them an others an exception to a law that sought to classify their drivers as employees, an expense that analysts thought would have pummeled their business in the nation’s most populous state.

U.S. TikTok ban

While India outlawed the popular video sharing app, in the U.S. TikTok appears close to riding out Donald Trump's term without the president succeeding in his efforts to ban it.

Earlier this month, a federal judge blocked a potential ban. It was the latest legal defeat for the administration in its efforts to wrest the app from its Chinese owners. In October, another federal judge postponed a shutdown scheduled for November.

Meanwhile, a government deadline for TikTok's parent, ByteDance to complete a deal that would have Oracle and Walmart invest in TikTok has also passed, with the status of the deal unclear.

While President-elect Joe Biden has said TikTok is a concern, it’s not clear what his administration will carry on the Trump administration’s attempts at a ban.

Jury's out: Big Tech

Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google did well financially, with each company's stock price and profit up considerably since the start of the year. They gained users, rolled out new products and features and kept on hiring even as other companies and industries faced significant cuts.

But not all is well in the world of Big Tech. Regulators are breathing down each company's neck and that’s unlikely to ease up in 2021. Google faces an antitrust lawsuit from the Department of Justice. And Facebook has been hit by one from the Federal Trade Commission along with nearly every U.S. state that seeks to split it off from WhatsApp and Instagram.

More cases could follow. Congressional investigators spent months digging into the actions of Apple and Amazon in addition to Facebook and Google, and called the CEOs of all four companies to testify.

2020: The year of streaming

As the coronavirus pandemic took hold in 2020, the TV streaming wars became even more competitive. Here's a look at the year in streaming.

More to watch than ever

Reese Witherspoon, left, and Kerry Washington starred in Hulu's "Little Fires Everywhere."
Erin Simkin/Hulu

The lack of live entertainment has meant we’re spending more time streaming, but 2020 has also been a year of job losses and worsening financial circumstances, so paying for a half-dozen monthly subscriptions isn’t feasible or even desirable for most people.

Hence this jostle for market dominance, which has been a windfall for audiences willing to brave the fire hose in search of quality. There’s more to watch than ever — name your niche and there’s someone catering to it — but there are also more barriers to entry, like a garbage user interface.

HBO Max, Roku finally reach deal

WarnerMedia finally reached a deal with Roku, bringing HBO Max, the company's nascent streaming service, to Roku devices starting on Thursday, Dec. 17.

The deal is a significant one not just for Roku users who have waited for the service to be available since it launched over the summer, but also for WarnerMedia. Roku is the leader in the streaming-device marketplace with more than 100 million users. That user base is important to WarnerMedia, which is trying to drive new subscribers to HBO Max. The service has notched 12.6 million activations since it launched in May.

The service has been available on multiple other devices such as Apple TV and, as of last month, Amazon Fire TV. Yet Roku was a holdout.

The timing is also notable. HBO Max will debut the highly anticipated "Wonder Woman 1984" on the service Christmas Day.

Quibi's demise

Quibi, of course, went belly up before the year would end. Even with $1.75 billion in funding, the mobile-only platform from founders Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman was a dud from the word go and a notorious footnote in a year that became primarily a stay-at-home experience.

The fall of movie audiences

This image released by Warner Bros. Entertainment shows Gal Gadot in a scene from "Wonder Woman 1984."
Clay Enos/Warner Bros. via AP

Even before the pandemic, many audiences were staying home already, squeezed out by the rising cost of movie tickets.

Boosters of the theatrical-first model like to cite 2019's record-setting global box office ($42.5 billion) as proof that streaming will kill the goose that lays the golden egg. What they’re leaving out is the reality that theater attendance — the number of tickets sold — was down. Why did the industry make so much money last year anyway? Because it’s more expensive than ever for moviegoers to get in the door.

Also, here’s a fun fact: For years now, Oscar voters have watched the vast majority of eligible films — wait for it — at home. They like the convenience. To which a person might reply: Who doesn’t?

TV series drive streaming

Anya Taylor-Joy stars in “The Queen’s Gambit,” a miniseries on Netflix about chess.
Netflix

TV series are extremely important to the streaming ecosystem.

It was a year that included “Little Fires Everywhere” on Hulu, “The Boys” on Amazon, “The Morning Show” on Apple (which actually premiered a year ago November) — each tackling hot button issues in the glossy packaging of high-end TV.

But the inundation of content has become so intense that it can be hard to remember which streaming shows really broke through this year. Quick, name a new series on Peacock. Or CBS All Access. It’s not like the titles come immediately to mind. Not the way “The Queen’s Gambit” on Netflix might, and that’s because Netflix still has so many more subscribers than anyone else.

Originally a DVD-by-mail service, Netflix was the first to really grasp and harness the potential that streaming had to offer, and the company’s trajectory has shaped everything that’s come since. Here’s longtime entertainment journalist Richard Rushfield with some context:

“Thanks to Netflix’s success — it was the stock of the decade — Wall Street made the decision that streaming is how you make money: You start a subscription streaming service and ultimately it takes over the world. The fact that Netflix isn’t a profitable company hasn’t saved anybody else from that mindset.”

Consider the enormous success Disney had over the last 10 years with blockbuster movies in theaters. “That had no impact on Wall Street,” Rushfield said. “The stock didn’t budge, it even went slightly downward. And then the day they announced Disney+, the stock shot up.” Which explains the recently announced deluge of upcoming Marvel and “Star Wars” TV spinoffs specifically intended for the streaming service.

The future

Will all these newcomers still be in business this time next year?

“December 2021, I think yes. But in 2022, I would guess not,” says journalist Rushfield. There’s a real possibility of mergers or buy-outs. “They can’t all survive spending at the level they’re spending right now, making these billion-dollar bets on TV series,” said Rushfield. “But there’s also a question of, can Netflix survive? Apple could swallow Netflix without taking a breath, really.”

Why is streaming’s current top dog so vulnerable? “It has a huge amount of debt. And it now has seven major competitors for the first time, and they’re not just competing for subscribers but talent.”

Plus, Netflix continues to lose its most popular library titles (everything not made by Netflix) including “The Office,” which moves to Peacock on the first of the year. (Peacock is ad-supported and therefore free, but there is also a premium tier that costs a monthly fee and would it surprise you to learn that executives have decided that all but the first two seasons of “The Office” will live behind a paywall?)

2020 has been a buffet of uncertainty and so often we turn to Hollywood to alleviate those anxieties, if only for a brief respite.

Here’s to strong internet connections in 2021.

Let's block ads! (Why?)