The Pulse #86: Is Shopify’s new “mastery” framework a response to higher interest rates?
The Pulse #86: Is Shopify’s new “mastery” framework a response to higher interest rates?
The e-commerce giant is taking a new and different approach to career growth and promotions. Also: more evidence the tech job market is tougher, and AI consolidation is already underway
The Pulse is a series covering insights, patterns, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Notice an interesting event or trend? Send me a message.
Today, we cover:
Industry pulse. NVIDIA launches an even more powerful AI chip, The US sues Apple for abusing its smartphone market position, Dell says you can’t work remotely AND get a promotion, and more.
Shopify’s Mastery framework: a response to higher interest rates? The e-commerce giant is taking a new approach to career growth and promotions. I’ve talked with insiders about how it’s been received by them, after publishing a look into the levels of the Mastery framework, last year.
More evidence the tech job market is tougher. Carta’s report on startup hiring and compensation shows in black-and-white what we’ve long suspected: 2023 really was bad for job seekers. It was the first time in many years that startups shrunk in size by hiring fewer people than who left. Equity compensation also dropped, although salaries increased.
Are we at an AI consolidation “inflection” point, already? The AI industry seems to be speedrunning the creation of categories: rapid fundraising, fast product launches fast, swift regulation, and then… consolidation? Inflection AI raised $1.3B just 9 months ago, and now Microsoft has basically acquired the company in an unusual way which doesn’t trigger antitrust rules.
1. Industry pulse
NVIDIA launches an even more powerful AI chip
Producing the world’s most sought-after AI supercomputer – the H100 – isn’t not enough, evidently: NVIDIA has unveiled an even more powerful one, called Blackwell (a chip called GB200). Blackwell offers better performance: around 5 times the computational power of the H100 (20 petaflops – floating point operations per second – versus 4 petaflops)
The interesting part of the announcement is that NVIDIA also announced an “inference microservice.” This will allow companies to run inference on their own models. This is much cheaper than training a model, and would allow companies buying NVIDIA GPUs to have a cheaper option than paying services like OpenAI, Atrophic, or others, to use their models.
NVIDIA is already the de facto hardware provider for AI applications, and is now moving up the stack to offer more software services, and take an even bigger cut of revenue. At this rate, I wouldn’t be surprised if NVIDIA becomes a competitor to AI model companies like OpenAI!
Apple refuses to let Spotify’s app update go live
Two weeks ago, the European Commission fined Apple $2B for anti-competitive practices because of restrictions it placed on music streaming companies like Spotify. The EU also mandated that Apple needs to allow Spotify to display pricing information for EU users.
Apple still has not approved an app update which Spotify submitted on 5 March, whose approval is mandated by the EU. Apple doesn’t offer exact timelines on how long it takes to approve an app, and approvals typically happen within a day. Apple has used the tactic of delaying app updates or rejecting them as a way to send a message to companies whose actions it doesn’t like. Spotify knows this all too well: in 2016-17 Apple made “more frequent, unexpected and unjustified rejections” to their app updates.
Apple is doing it again by delaying the latest update for obvious reasons. It’s yet another reminder to Spotify and other app developers that in the App Store, Apple is king. The EU might fine them $2B, it might mandate that Spotify needs to be allowed to show pricing information; but the EU cannot mandate how fast Apple grants approvals, right?
This is how Apple might slowly but surely become the most-hated company by its own developers; by having an overlord mentality and bullying its own customers. In this way, it feels that Apple is turning into the Microsoft of the 1990s, in terms of rock-bottom developer sentiment.
Apple is making clear why it needs to be regulated – and strictly. A good regulator wants to regulate as lightly as possible. However, what happens when one of the biggest players acts in bad faith, in not following the spirit of regulation?
Then, there’s no choice but to create more granular regulation, even to the point of “micromanaging.” This regulation will be more invasive and have more side effects. Apple, at this point, is dragging regulators towards making stricter rules. I think this will happen, and the tech giant will have only itself to blame.
The US sues Apple for abusing smartphone market position
Apple might have chosen a bad time to anger regulators, as it’s no longer just the EU that is stepping up against the Coupertino giant. The US Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit arguing that “Apple exercises its monopoly power to extract more money from consumers, developers, content creators, artists, publishers, small businesses, and merchants, among others.”
The goal of the lawsuit is stated as follows:
“This case is about freeing smartphone markets from Apple’s anticompetitive and exclusionary conduct and restoring competition to lower smartphone prices for consumers, reducing fees for developers, and preserving innovation for the future.”
Basically, the US has a similar issue with Apple as the EU does; Apple became the dominant smartphone platform in the US through innovation, but has since resorted to throttling competition in a way that the regulator says is unlawful.
This US lawsuit will teach us a lot more about Apple’s alleged anti-competitive practices, and how this secretive company really operates on the inside. If Apple follows a similar strategy as in the EU of ignoring the regulator and provoking a response, then it will backfire.