From left, GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and future GitHub CEO Nat Friedman at GitHub headquarters in San Francisco.
Source: Microsoft
Microsoft said Wednesday that Nat Friedman, CEO of the company’s GitHub subsidiary that provides software for storing source code, is stepping down. Thomas Dohmke, GitHub’s product chief will replace him.
The announcement comes weeks after one of GitHub’s most prominent competitors, GitLab, went public on the Nasdaq. Following the debut, GitLab was worth $16.5 billion, two times what Microsoft paid for GitHub in 2018.
“As Chief Product Officer, I’m proud of the work our teams have done to bring new capabilities to GitHub Codespaces, Issues, Copilot, and many of the 20,000 improvements that we shipped last year. Together, we’ve built a roadmap that will transform the developer experience for open source maintainers and enterprises using GitHub for years to come,” Dohmke wrote in a blog post.
Dohmke takes over for Friedman on Nov. 15.
Dohmke was co-founder and CEO of app-testing software start-up HockeyApp, which Microsoft acquired in 2014. He joined GitHub at the time Microsoft closed the GitHub acquisition in 2018.
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A woman uses a dash cart during her grocery-shopping at a Whole Foods store as Amazon launches smart shopping carts at Whole Foods stores in San Mateo, California, United States on February 25, 2024. The smart shopping cart makes grocery shopping quicker by allowing customers to scan products right into their cart as they shop and then skip the checkout line.
Tayfun Coskun | Anadolu | Getty Images
Amazon will begin selling its smart grocery carts to other retailers, the company said Wednesday, marking its latest bid to turn its Dash Cart technology into a service.
A handful of Price Chopper and McKeever’s Market stores located in Kansas and Missouri are testing the smart grocery carts, which track and tally up items while customers shop, Amazon said.
Amazon launched the Dash Cart in 2020 at its Fresh supermarket chain before adding it to select Whole Foods stores. They use a combination of computer vision and sensors to identify items as they’re placed in bags inside the cart. As shoppers add and remove items, a display on the cart adjusts the total price in real time.
Amazon is following a similar playbook previously deployed for its “Just Walk Out” cashier-less technology. Just Walk Out was first conceived for use in Amazon’s Go convenience stores, until Amazon began selling the system to third-party retailers in airports, stadiums, hospitals and other venues.
While it’s signed up more third-party Just Walk Out users, Amazon has pulled the technology from many of its own grocery stores. Earlier this month, Amazon said it would scrap Just Walk Out at some Fresh stores, and the two Whole Foods locations where it was installed. The company’s Go convenience stores and smaller Fresh stores in the U.K. will continue to use the technology, while it will expand Dash Carts in its U.S. Fresh stores.
Amazon teams working on Just Walk Out, Dash Carts and other physical store technologies were among those hit by layoffs earlier this month.
On Wednesday, Amazon said it has “strong conviction that Just Walk Out technology will be the future in stores that have a curated selection where customers can pop in, grab the small number of items they need, and simply walk out.”
Just Walk Out relies on an array of cameras and sensors throughout the store that monitor which items shoppers pick up and charge them automatically when they leave. Amazon and other start-ups that have developed similar cashier-less checkout systems were slow to launch them in larger format stores, originally launching the systems in convenience marts, due to the complex and expensive technology involved.
Those systems came under scrutiny earlier this month after reports from Gizmodo and others claimed Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology relied on human moderators who “watched you as you shopped.” Many of the reports cited a May 2023 story from The Information which said Amazon uses roughly 1,000 employees in India to review JWO transactions and label footage to help train the AI models that make it work.
Amazon said reports that workers watched customers from afar are “untrue,” though it conceded that human staffers are responsible for labeling and annotating shopping data.
“Associates don’t watch live video of shoppers to generate receipts — that’s taken care of automatically by the computer vision algorithms,” the company said. “This is no different than any other AI system that places a high value on accuracy, where human reviewers are common.”
At Amazon’s annual cloud conference in 2016, the company captured the crowd’s attention by driving an 18-wheeler onstage. Andy Jassy, now Amazon’s CEO, called it the Snowmobile, and said the company would be using the truck to help customers speedily transfer data to Amazon Web Services facilities.
Less than eight years later, the semi is out of commission.
As of March, AWS had removed Snowmobile from its website, and the Amazon unit has stopped offering the service, CNBC has confirmed. The webpage devoted to AWS’ “Snow family” of products now directs users to its other data transport services, including the Snowball Edge, a 50-pound suitcase-sized device that can be equipped with fast solid-state drives, and the smaller Snowcone.
An AWS spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the company has introduced more cost-effective options for moving data. Clients had to deal with power, cooling, networking, parking and security when they used the Snowmobile service, the spokesperson said.
“Since we introduced Snowmobile in 2016, we’ve released many other new services and features which have made migrating data to AWS even faster and easier for our customers,” the spokesperson wrote.
An AWS Snowmobile truck appears in a Seattle parking lot in 2019.
Andrew Evers | CNBC
Snowmobile was priced at $0.005 gigabytes per month, not including other costs, according to a page formerly on the AWS website. For a company with 100 petabytes of data — the capacity of a Snowmobile — a transfer job would cost about $500,000 per month.
Amazon’s decision to axe Snowmobile comes as Jassy implements cost cuts across the company to contend with lackluster sales growth. Amazon has slashed more than 27,000 jobs since late 2022 and has discontinued projects in the devices and retail units. The cuts have continued this year, with Amazon laying off hundreds of jobs in AWS earlier this month.
While it’s fairly routine for AWS and rivals Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform to get rid of products and services, the elimination of Snowmobile stands out due to the splashy way it was introduced at the company’s showcase Reinvent conference in Las Vegas in late 2016.
Jassy, who at the time led AWS, was delivering his keynote before tens of thousands of people in the crowd, when the 18-wheeler joined him on stage.
“We’re going to need a bigger box,” Jassy said, as audience members rushed to raise their smartphones to capture photos of the spectacle.
Jassy told the crowd why the truck was groundbreaking. Over a 10 gigabit-per-second connection, it would take 26 years to move an exabyte, or 1 million terabytes, of data to the cloud, he said. An AWS customer could do the job with 10 Snowmobiles in under six months, he said. Each Snowmobile had a capacity of 100 petabytes on hard disk drives.
In a blog post coinciding with the launch on Nov. 30, 2016, Amazon cloud evangelist Jeff Barr described Snowmobile as “a ruggedized, tamper-resistant shipping container 45 feet long, 9.6 feet high, and 8 feet wide” that “can be parked in a covered or uncovered area adjacent to your existing data center.”
Barr helped to convey the supposed simplicity of the process with photos of a Snowmobile built out of Lego getting connected to a corporate data center.
“We intend to make sure that Snowmobile is both faster and less expensive than using a network-based data transfer model,” Barr wrote.
But the product didn’t take off.
A spokesperson for satellite operator Maxar said the company used Snowmobile once in 2017 to move more than 100 petabytes to AWS from its own servers.
“Since then, we have been uploading our imagery and associated data directly to the cloud,” the spokesperson said.
AWS still leads the giant cloud infrastructure market and generated $90.8 billion in revenue last year, accounting for 16% of Amazon’s total sales. The company’s spokesperson said AWS’ Snowball Edge devices, which clients can return to Amazon by mail after filling them up with data, are smaller than the Snowmobile vehicles, cost less and have a shorter turnaround time.
There’s also the AWS DataSync service for moving data, announced in 2018. Clients generally find that sending data to AWS online is more economical than using Snowmobile, the company said.
“We couldn’t be more proud of the value that Snowmobile has brought to customers, and we’re pleased to see them choosing newer, more efficient technologies,” the spokesperson wrote.
Elon Musk attends the premiere of ”Lola” held at the Regency Bruin Theatre in Los Angeles, California, U.S., February 3, 2024.
Aude Guerrucci | Reuters
Tesla plans to ask shareholders to reinstate CEO Elon Musk’s $56 billion pay package from 2018 after a Delaware court voided the record-setting stock grant earlier this year and described it as “deeply flawed.”
The company announced the move in a preliminary proxy filing Wednesday, just days after the company told employees it would cut headcount by 10%.
Tesla said the court decision created a “fundamental problem for the company”. As a result, Tesla also plans to ask shareholders to let the company move its state of incorporation from Delaware to Texas, something Musk had threatened to do in the aftermath of the unfavorable court ruling.
The two proposals are likely to be fiercely controversial. Tesla has hired a proxy solicitor, Innisfree M&A, and plans to spend an undetermined amount, in the millions, to help secure the votes for the two proposals, according to the filing.
Tesla has not hired Innisfree since 2018, when it first asked shareholders to vote on Musk’s pay package. Companies often only advertise the cost of proxy solicitations when major proposals or proxy fights are expected.
Musk’s pay package was mooted after a shareholder won a lawsuit against the company earlier this year. Delaware Chancery Court Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick found that Musk, rather than Tesla’s board, controlled the company and that the board’s compensation committee, rather than negotiating with Musk over the terms of the deal, “worked alongside him, almost as an advisory body.”
The Tornetta decision prompted Musk to say, “Never incorporate your company in the state of Delaware.”
Tesla, in its Wednesday filing, cast doubt on the decision from McCormick, who has been across some of Musk’s other legal dealings. “The Company and the Board believe that the decision in Tornetta ignored material evidence presented at trial and that the Delaware Court made errors of fact and incorrect conclusions of law,” Tesla said in the proxy filing.
The company also noted that “dozens of institutional stockholders” have told Tesla that they disagree with the Tornetta decision.
Delaware has long been a preferred home for corporations — more than 60% of the Fortune 500 are incorporated there — because the state has a robust legal framework and court system dedicated to resolving corporate issues, like executive pay, but also broader contract negotiations.
Tesla’s new proposal cautions shareholders that the Delaware court found their initial 2018 disclosures to be deficient, and urged them to read the full text of the decision.
In January, the same day the pay package was rejected, Musk asked his X followers if Tesla should re-incorporate in Texas. Months later, Tesla’s board is now asking shareholders to approve their answer to that question.
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