Google is out of Wall Street’s doghouse! Stock of Google’s parent company Alphabet shot up 9% on Wednesday as investors rushed to buy up stock of a company whose future is no longer overshadowed by a looming antitrust ruling. Now the focus of antitrust anxiety turns to the other three big tech firms facing government lawsuits—Meta Platforms, Apple and Amazon. And here’s a question: Is there anything we can take away from the Google ruling that applies to how those cases might play out? You might think the answer would be no, because the cases are all so different (beyond the fact that the government alleges all three companies are monopolists). But according to Joel Thayer, an antitrust lawyer who has worked with small tech firms and who has ties to Republicans, you’d be wrong to think that. He said on The Information’s TITV on Wednesday that Judge Amit Mehta’s order that Google share some of its precious search data with rivals implied a “monumental shift” in legal thinking—which was bad news for the big tech firms. Essentially, the judge was ruling that big tech has to share its infrastructure to give a leg up to smaller rivals “so the consumer can get better benefits,” Thayer said.
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Google is out of Wall Street’s doghouse! Stock of Google’s parent company Alphabet shot up 9% on Wednesday as investors rushed to buy up stock of a company whose future is no longer overshadowed by a looming antitrust ruling. Now the focus of antitrust anxiety turns to the other three big tech firms facing government lawsuits—Meta Platforms, Apple and Amazon. And here’s a question: Is there anything we can take away from the Google ruling that applies to how those cases might play out?
You might think the answer would be no, because the cases are all so different (beyond the fact that the government alleges all three companies are monopolists). But according to Joel Thayer, an antitrust lawyer who has worked with small tech firms and who has ties to Republicans, you’d be wrong to think that. He said on The Information’s TITV on Wednesday that Judge Amit Mehta’s order that Google share some of its precious search data with rivals implied a “monumental shift” in legal thinking—which was bad news for the big tech firms. Essentially, the judge was ruling that big tech has to share its infrastructure to give a leg up to smaller rivals “so the consumer can get better benefits,” Thayer said.
Put another way, Thayer said, the ruling means that “the outputs themselves [in this case, search data] cannot be controlled by particular firms.” He argued that the same analysis could apply in the Apple and Meta cases. What does that mean in practice? Does it imply that Apple could be forced to open up its iMessage system to rivals, or that Meta could be required to open up its social media data to make it easier for other companies to compete? It’s too early to say. There’s surely plenty who would argue with Thayer’s point.
And while he highlighted the ruling’s risks for the other big tech companies facing lawsuits, another part of the Google decision seemed to be good news for those firms. Judge Amit Mehta pushed back hard on the Justice Department’s proposal that Google should divest its Chrome browser and maybe its Android mobile operating system.
In his ruling, he cited higher courts’ instructions that “divestiture is a remedy that is imposed only with great caution, in part because its long-term efficacy is rarely certain.” It’s hard to read that and imagine Meta has anything to fear about a breakup, for instance. Thayer’s analysis, though, suggests that data sharing could become more common, empowering smaller rivals in ways we haven’t previously seen.
Salesforce’s Missed Calls
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff had a confession to make on the software firm’s quarterly earnings call Wednesday evening: In the past, a lot of potential customers didn’t get callbacks from Salesforce.
“Somewhere between 20 million and 100 million people who have contacted Salesforce in the last 26 years…haven’t been called back. It’s just because we didn’t have enough people,” Benioff asserted. But now every salesperson has an artificial intelligent agent that is acting as a salesperson. And that “agentic salesperson is calling every single person back,” Benioff said.
Hold on a second. How could it be that Salesforce didn't respond to that many people? His estimate translates to between 15,000 and 74,000 calls a week that went unanswered—or as many as 10,000 a day, including weekends. Does that make any sense?
Benioff’s explanation got more puzzling. He added that in the past seven weeks, the AI sales agent had held “conversations with tens of thousands of inbound leads, even setting up appointments…and helping close deals.”
If AI agents are calling back every single person, and Salesforce was previously ignoring between 15,000 and 74,000 calls weekly, then surely in the past seven weeks the number of inbound leads the agents were calling should be between 100,000 and 500,000, not “tens of thousands.” Aside from how Benioff just threw Salesforce‘s salespeople under the bus, what’s up with the figures he's citing?
In Other News
• The chief financial officer of Elon Musk’s xAI left the company after just a few months on the job, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. Mike Liberatore had joined xAI as CFO in April and left in July, according to the report.
• Figma’s June-quarter revenue grew 41% to $249.6 million, the newly public company said Wednesday. But the stock dropped 13.7% after Figma forecast its revenue growth would decelerate to 33% growth in the current quarter, and 37% for the full year ending in December.
• Salesforce revenue rose 10% to $10.2 billion in the fiscal quarter that ended in July, breaking a streak of 8% revenue growth in the prior four quarters that had drawn concerns about its future growth prospects in the AI era.
• Apple is working on a web-search engine powered by artificial intelligence, similar to products offered by AI rivals Perplexity and OpenAI, Bloomberg reported. The tool will integrate with Apple’s Siri voice assistant, and potentially its Safari web browser and Spotlight search tool.
Today on The Information’s TITV
Check out today’s episode of TITV in which we talk about the implications of the Google court ruling.
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