This issue covers the period between October 4 - 11, 2020 with six news stories – three from English language sources, three from Chinese language sources. Disclaimer: all translated article titles are done by me, not official translations from the media outlets.

Before you go on, please check out last week's deep dive post: "When ‘Jurassic Park’ Goes to China"


Microsoft is letting more employees work from home permanently” (English Source: the Verge)

My Thoughts: This announcement makes Microsoft the company with the largest headcount, around 163,000 people, to embrace permanent remote work. While remote work was a hot topic of discussion when COVID-19 first became a global pandemic, it has died down a bit recently. The Interconnected newsletter devoted its first two posts to the topic of how the coronavirus will impact both remote work and remote consumption. Although Microsoft isn’t the first tech company to release such a policy, it is probably the first one with a sizable hardware division and product line, i.e. Surface, XBox, HoloLens. What will be important to observe going forward is how it will manage its hardware team and R&D with this new policy, which necessitates more physical constraints (e.g. research labs, material experimentation) than software (e.g. pushing code into the cloud, remote login), and managing just the sheer size of its workforce with all the taxation, local labor law, and other regulatory concerns that come with having a distributed force. As someone who has managed a remote team spanning three countries pre-COVID, it wasn’t easy.

A Xilinx FPGA chip

AMD Is in Advanced Talks to Buy Xilinx” (English Source: Wall Street Journal)

My Thoughts: Consolidation in the semiconductor industry is taking shape rather quickly, with Nvidia’s acquisition of Arm announced a few weeks ago, and now AMD of Xilinx for a rumored price of $30 billion or more. Xilinx is one of the many American semiconductor companies who have suffered revenue losses due to U.S. sanctions of Huawei -- its Huawei business is estimated to be 6-8% of total revenue. Xilinx’s specialty is also FPGA chips -- programmable hardware that are used heavily in the military and the early stages of 5G development, because 5G implementation isn’t mature and lots of experimentation is needed, which FPGAs more easily enable. One last interesting tidbit to note: both Lisa Su (CEO of AMD) and Victor Peng (CEO of Xilinx) are American tech executives born in Taiwan. So is Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. And we can’t forget the dominant chip manufacturing powerhouse that is TSMC, founded by Dr. Morris Chang. It’s safe to say that generations of technical talent and executives from Taiwan have effectively cornered the entire world’s semiconductor industry.

The Developer Experience Gap” (English Source: RedMonk)

My Thoughts: RedMonk is one of my favorite analyst firms focused on technology and developers. Even though this is the first time I highlight their writing on Interconnected, I read everything they write religiously. This piece explores the poor developer user experience that generally exists (and persists) in the infrastructure technology sector that has a myriad of solutions that’s “diverse to a fault”. This is an important observation as we think about the future growth and expansion of cloud computing, open source software, and other technology trends in the next 10-20 years. I believe developers are the most important demographic in this century of technology-fuel economy, but most people don’t view them as either a demographic or a coherent audience. The companies who do view them that way and design products that have “magical” user experience, like the iPhone for smartphone users, will be wildly successful.

BiliBili selects four banks for Hong Kong listing, seek to raise $800 million to $1.5 billion USD, aims to complete second listing by next year” (Chinese Source: iponews)

My thoughts: It’s easy to chalk up BiliBili’s Hong Kong second listing next year to yet another example of US-China geopolitical relations (or lack thereof) pushing Chinese tech companies away. That’s only a partial truth, if we dig into this listing. BiliBili is not using the Hong Kong exchange as the backup or redundancy measure to the NASDAQ; it’s trying to raise more capital to fuel the company’s growth when the market is full of cheap capital looking for places to invest. Even on the low end of its $800 million offering, that would still be almost twice as much money raised as BiliBili’s IPO on the NASDAQ of $483 million two years ago. The Hong Kong exchange’s recent rule change allowing more leniency towards companies with a dual-class share structure -- popular among high-flying tech companies -- also makes such a listing actually possible, and Hong Kong tries to compete with New York for business. BiliBili’s user-comments flying across the screen, which first originated in Japan, is a sticky user experience that’s hard for a Western audience to grapple with. It’s also just a fascinating company -- with multiple revenue models from ads, gaming, livestreaming, and membership subscription -- that deserves its own detailed business case study. Personally, I’ve attended quite a few tech conferences hosted by Chinese companies during the last few months as these events all go virtual; all of them were livestreamed on BiliBili.

Is China's Tuber browser officially approved? The government takes you over the Great Fire Wall with real name” (Chinese Source: VOA Chinese)

My thoughts: Can hopping over the Great Firewall to check Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube become legal? That certainly seems to be what the Tuber browser is trying to accomplish. Tuber’s release was apparently even praised by the Global Times, the state-run media outlet, as an important step towards China’s further opening up. But to use Tuber, you’d have to register with your Chinese cell phone number, which is linked to your ID, thus the authority can (and will) track what you are doing outside of the “wall”. To what extent this Tuber browser will make an impact in China’s Internet user behavior is unclear, especially since it looks to be shut down already:

Searching for China’s Snowflake” (Chinese Source: PingWest)

My thoughts: Snowflake’s splashy IPO a few weeks ago has set many in the tech and investment community into a frenzy -- a rare occurrence for a big data company; Berkshire Hathaway’s involvement certainly had a lot to do with it. That frenzy wasn’t limited to the U.S.; many in China are wondering if the country will produce its own Snowflake, given its burgeoning though still immature enterprise tech sector. Whether that will happen depends heavily on how well Chinese enterprise startups can develop a “cloud-native” product to meet the “cloud-native” expectations of developers and customers. This PingWest article takes on that question by talking to two companies that may have the best chance in achieving that goal: PingCAP and Kyligence. Full disclosure: I’ve worked with both companies in the past in a management and operator role. I don’t hold shares in either company.

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本期《每周互联》总结概括的时间段是:2020年10月4至11日,包括本作者挑选的六条新闻:三条原文是英文,三条原文是中文。声明:所有翻译的文章标题都是我做的翻译,不是官方翻译。

还希望大家有空看看我上周最新的深度分析文章:《侏罗纪公园去中国


微软允许更多的员工永久性地在家远程工作”(英文来源: The Verge)

我的想法:这条宣布使微软变成接受永久远程办公的公司里员工最多的(约16.3万)一家公司。当COVID-19刚刚演变成一个全球范围的疫情时,远程办公是个热门话题,这个亮点最近减弱了不少。《互联》最早的两篇文章也讨论了关于疫情会如何影响远程工作远程消费的趋势。尽管微软并不是第一家发布此类政策的科技公司,但它可能是第一家拥有巨大的硬件部门和产品线的公司,例如Surface、XBox、HoloLens。未来值得观察的是,它将如何利用这项新政策来管理其硬件团队和研发,一项需要更多实体设施约束的不笨(例如研究室、材料实验等),而不只是纯软件开发(例如将代码推到云端、远程登录等)。另外一方面就是怎样管理更加分散的庞大团队,同时适应和遵守各种当地的税收体制,劳工法,以及其他监管制度。作为一个曾经管理过跨越三个国家的分布式远程团队的人,我的个人体验是要关好这些事情并不容易。

A Xilinx FPGA chip

AMD正在就收购Xilinx进行深入谈判”(英文来源:  华尔街日报)

我的想法:  半导体行业的整合正在加速成形,几周前英伟达宣布收购Arm,现在AMD以约300亿美元或更高的价格想收购Xilinx。由于美国对华为的制裁,许多美国半导体公司遭受了收入损失,Xilinz是其中一个。据估计,其华为业务占总收入的6-8%。Xilinx的专长是FPGA芯片——在军事和5G开发的早期阶段大量使用的可灵活编程的硬件。用在5G领域合理因为5G科技具体落地的方式现还不成熟,需要大量的实验,而FPGA可以更容易实现需要的实验。更有趣的是:Lisa Su(AMD的CEO)和Victor Peng(Xilinx的CEO)都是出生在台湾的美国科技高管。英伟达的CEO Jensen Huang 也是台湾裔。当然也不能忘记占全球领先地位的芯片制造巨头,台积电,它是由张忠谋博士创立的。可以说,从台湾出来的一代又一代的技术人才和高管已经垄断了整个世界的半导体行业。

开发者体验的空缺”(英文来源: RedMonk)

我的想法:   RedMonk是我最喜欢的专注于科技和开发者的分析公司之一。尽管这是我第一次引用他们的文章在《互联》上,但他们写的每篇文章我都必读。这篇文章探讨了在基础科技领域中普遍存在的(并且持续存在的)糟糕的开发者体验问题。整个基础设施行业有大量的各种解决方案,可以说是“过分的多元化”。这是大家在思考未来10-20年云计算开源软件和其他科技发展趋势的重要观察。我相信,在这个科技推动经济发展的世纪里,开发者是最重要的人群,但大多数人并不把他们视为一组人群或受众。那些能用这种方式看待开发者并设计出具有“神奇”般用户体验的产品的公司,就像iPhone为所有手机用户提供的体验,将会非常成功

传B站委任四家银行安排香港上市,寻求募资8亿至15亿美元,目标明年完成二次上市”  (中文来源: 独角兽早知道)

我的想法: 很容易把B站准备在香港的第二上市和中美地缘政治关系的演变挂钩,做为把中国科技公司挤出美国的新例子。但如果我们深入的看这条新闻,事实更复杂些。B站去香港上市并不只是作为NASDAQ的“备份”;它是想筹集更多的资本来为公司的增长提供燃料,现在市场也充满着廉价资本寻找投资的地方。即便最终的募资量是范围内低端的8亿美元,那也是两年前B站在NASDAQ上市时集资的4.83亿美元的近两倍。香港交易所最近的规则变化对双重股权结构的公司更加宽容,这种结构在科技公司里很普遍,也使得B站去香港上市更实际。香港也在试图与纽约竞争资本市场的各种生意。B站的弹幕(最早起源于日本)对西方观众来说是种难以理解但非常有粘性的用户体验。它也是家非常耐人寻味的公司,有多种收入模式:广告、游戏、直播和会员订阅等,非常值得当一个商业案例去深入研究。就个人而言,在过去的几个月里,我参加了许多由中国公司主办的技术大会,因为疫情关系都变成线上大会,所有会议都是在B站上直播

中国Tuber浏览器受官方核准?政府带你实名翻墙”  (中文来源: 美国之音--中文)

我的想法: 翻墙查看Facebook、Twitter、Instagram、YouTube等会合法话吗?这显然是Tuber浏览器企图实现的目标。中国官方媒体《环球时报》甚至称赞Tuber的发行是中国进一步开放的重要一步。但是要使用Tuber,用户必须用中国手机号码注册,号码当然是实名制的,与身份证挂钩,这样有关当局就可以(也绝对会)监督你在“墙外”看什么。Tuber浏览器会在多大程度上影响中国互联网用户的行为尚不清楚,尤其是看似它已经被封了:

寻找中国的Snowflake” (中文来源: 品玩)

我的想法:  Snowflake几周前大张旗鼓的IPO让科技界和投资界的许多人疯狂——这对于一家大数据公司来说是罕见的;这种疯狂与Berkshire Hathaway的参与无疑有蛮大的关系。这种狂热并不限于美国;许多中国的科技和投资人事也是一样,考虑到中国企业服务行业的发展又不成熟之中,是否会生产出自己的Snowflake。能否实现这一目标在很大程度上取决于中国企业服务创业公司能否开发出“云原生”的产品,以满足开发者和客户对“云原生”的期望。品玩的这篇文章通过与两家最有可能实现这个目标的公司,PingCAP和Kyligence,来探讨了这个问题。声明:我曾与这两家公司合作过,担任过管理及运维的角色。我不持这两家公司的股份。

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