The flops and the failures of 2019
Some spectacular blunders have made this year interesting for the tech industry, writes David Court.
Facebook’s digital currency, Donald Trump’s Huawei ban and foldable phones that break when you fold them are just a few of the stories that have made 2019 a crazy year in the world of technology.
Before we embark on another year of madness, here’s a quick recap of my favourite technology stories of the past 12 months.
Foldable smartphones (that can’t fold)
I’ve been covering technology launches for more than a decade, and largely, they’re all the same. Chief executives stand on a stage, desperately trying not to look like the nerds we all know they are, and deliver an hour-long keynote about why their company is so wonderful.
However, when you strip back the showbiz from the launches, what you’re invariably left with, is a product that’s just a little bit better than the previous model.
That changed in 2019 for the first time in a long time. The reason? Foldable smartphones had arrived. And it was a two-horse race between Samsung and Huawei for who would be first to market.
Samsung won the race by a nose, but there was one small problem. Its product, the Samsung Galaxy Fold, broke when you folded it.
Somehow, Samsung didn’t know about this obvious flaw until it sent out review units to journalists a week before the phone was due to hit the shelves.
Predictably, when the reviews flooded in with warnings to readers about how it couldn’t handle being folded, Samsung delayed the launch.
Note: Samsung has now launched a revised Galaxy Fold with a display that doesn’t break when folded.
Facebook new Cryptocurrency, Libra
Unperturbed by its reputation as an untrustworthy brand, Facebook announced its hugely ambitious plans to launch a new currency.
Amazingly, the plan looked credible at first. Facebook’s vision was/is to partner with dozens of other big-name brands like Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, Vodafone Group, Uber, Spotify (the list goes on), and create a decentralised cryptocurrency managed using a Facebook-built blockchain software.
This was a traditional blockchain like Bitcoin where anyone with a good processor can mine. One of the differences here is that mining will only be performed by Libra’s 29 founding companies on high-speed servers.
The hybrid blockchain design would give the cryptocurrency the decentralised security benefits of traditional blockchain, without the slow speeds an open-for-all model creates. The following months haven’t been kind to Libra. Mastercard, Visa, PayPal, Stripe and eBay have all dropped out.
Trump’s ban on Huawei
Huawei was going like the clappers in March. It had just released, arguably, the world’s best smartphone the P30 Pro and its R&D department had spent years creating the best, and cheapest, 5G technology.
Two months later, the wheels came off in spectacular fashion as Trump signed an executive order banning US companies from working with, or using, technology made from anyone considered a national security risk. With Trump also adding Huawei to the ‘‘Entity
List’’ that immediately, you guessed it, made it an official national security risk.
This had huge consequences for Huawei. The immediate problem it faced was that it could no longer license American technologies for its smartphones, which meant no Google services and no ARMdesigned technologies in its chipset.
The more significant problem it faced was that America had effectively told the world that Huawei technology couldn’t be trusted because of its alleged close ties with the Chinese state.
Streaming wars
This isn’t our war (right now). Neon and Lightbox are cute in comparison, and are soon to be oneand-the-same thanks to Sky’s recent acquisition of Lightbox. But over in the US, things have stepped up a notch. Over there, video streaming is now in full war mode – in all its capitalistic glory.
Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Apple, HBO are each spending billions of dollars a year in an attempt to be the dominant player in the market.
Is this a good thing for us, the consumer? Yes and no. On one hand, there’s about to be a boatload of high-quality content available on-demand. However, the segregated market means you might have to pay for multiple subscriptions to enjoy it all.
Uber and WeWork’s IPOs
This year will also be remembered as the year Uber and WeWork both stuffed up their IPOs.
SoftBank’s infamous US$100b VisionFund heavily backed both tech disrupters. The strategy for both companies was similar: Invest early, invest heavily, go public, make bank.
Uber led the way with its IPO in May and has managed to drop a whopping 34 per cent market in the seven months since then.
WeWork didn’t even make it that far. Everything went wrong immediately after it publicly filed documents for an IPO to take place in August.
Since then, WeWork has removed its co-founder and chief executive, Adam Neumann, and the company’s value has fallen by more than half.
Leaving the rest of the industry, me especially, with a feeling of schadenfreude.