TechStuff Looks at 2020 - January through March

I used to make a predictions episode at the very end of one year, at the very beginning of the following year, to say what I thought was going to unfold over the course of the following twelve months. But I'm glad I didn't do it this time, because boy howdy, there was no way I could have predicted what this

year turned out to be. But there's another tradition that we have at tech Stuff, which is that we take a look back at the year in tech and talk about some of the big stories that happened over the previous twelve months. And it's probably gonna take at least a couple of episodes. I've only got this one finished right now, transparency here, so I haven't written the rest of this, but I will give you a spoiler that this episode only gets through March, and uh, that's not

a strong start. I think, however, we're gonna take a sort of a cliffs notes approach to the news stories. Obviously, if I did a deep dive, that would probably get us well into the middle of next year before I finished out all of And also I should let you know I am recording these episodes a little early. It's not the end of December right now. It's fact it's

mid December as I record this. So it is entirely possible that between the time I record this and the time you hear it, even more crazy stuff will have happened. But we gotta do what we can. Right So, before I started going more or less chronologically through the year, I think it only makes sense for us to acknowledge the viral elephant in the room. Coronavirus and COVID nineteen have had a devastating impact on the world and every aspect of our lives, and the tech industry was not

excluded from this by a long shot. The pandemic has contributed to major issues from supply chain concerns to you know, offices closing down to companies teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, and so we should be ready for a lot of stories that I will cover to have you know, some element of the pandemic in it and how the pandemic affected the world of technology. It will come into play over time, you know, as we go further into the year, it will obviously become a bigger part of it um.

But we should also remember that COVID nineteen that nineteen refers to the year two thousand nineteen, as it was first for order to the World Health Organization on December thirty one, two thousand nineteen. So even though we think of it, or at least I think of COVID nineteen as a twenty twenty thing, we do have to remember that it all got started at the very tail end of two thousand nineteen. There are a few other big threads in tech. Stories of the elections in the United

States were under intense scrutiny. There are a lot of stories in tech that intertwined with the elections and with politics in general, and there continues to be some serious discussion in governments around the world that revolve around big tech companies and whether they represent monopolies or are otherwise perpetuating anti competitive practices, and if they should be broken up. But I'm sure we'll touch on all of these stories

several times as we go throughout the year. Early in January, we had c E S, also known as the Consumer Electronics Show. Though we've slowly seen the event drift further are away from a strictly consumer electronics focus, little do we know at the time that the cs FOR would be forced to shift to a virtual only event. Now. I didn't attend c E S, which is a little unusual for me, but I had just finished a year of intense travel for work, and I felt like I

could probably cover most of the announcements from Atlanta. So the question is what did I miss out on? Well, there were a lot of examples of the sorts of stuff you expect at c S. For example, there were robots somewhere really just toys meant to divert someone for a little bit before you got tired of it and then it takes up space. Others purported to be, you know,

actually a practical use in some way. Samsung showed off a rolling robot called Bali B A L l I E and has a little camera in it, and it allows the robot to roam around and follow people and potentially help out with various chores. For example, let's say you spill some salsa on the floor and Bali notices this, and after it judges you for being a slob. I might be projecting here. Bali would then alert, say, your robot mop and vacuum cleaner to swoop in and take

care of that spicy mess. Well, you're left to think about your life choices. There were a lot of other robots too, but let's talk about some of the other gadgets that grabbed headlines at c e S. Samsung did it again with the unveiling of a display that can rotate horizontally or vertically so in landscape or portrait mode. CNN called it the vertical TV no one has asked for,

but I beg to differ. Um, Maybe the CNN staff can't see a need for vertically oriented display, but I know plenty of video game streamers who have a vertically aligned monitor that they used to keep track of stuff like stream chat. The setup i've seen most freak only includes one monitor for the actual gameplay footage, one monitor to show the stream view for stuff like overlays and transitions, and even a third monitor, the vertically one to to follow chat and one day, my friends, I hope to

have a setup like that. I don't currently, I'm I'm stuck with um Well, I've got three monitors in front of me, but therefore two different computers and they're not connected together. One gadget I heard about and kind of wish I had seen in person was the Julia smart processor from Cooking Pal. According to what I've read, it could chop, mix, need way and cook stuff, which kind of sounds magical to me. It looks a little bit like a coffee maker, I think, but apparently it cannot

make coffee. Kitchen gadgets are always a huge category at CEES. I think kitchens and home entertainment systems are sort of the standard consumer electronics categories. Segue introduced a new personal motorized vehicle at ce S. It was a chair on two wheels, So other than standing on a on a wheeled scooter, you sit in a two wheeled contraption and

those wheels are side by side. They're not front and back, it's left and right, so it's kind of like the classic Segue scooter and rather than leaning to control it the way you would a normal Segue, you use a joystick that's on the right side of the seat and it looks kind of cool. I would actually love to give one a spin. And before I talk about a few more ces gadgets, I do want to mention that

Segue wasn't the news. Later in in June, the company announced that it was ending production on the original Segue PT scooter. This was the line of vehicles that put Segue on the map. I mean, I remember twenty years ago just before the Segue was unveiled, and now all the news channels had referred to it as it I think maybe one of the code words was ginger. I actually didn't look that up, but I want to say that it's in my brain. I could be wrong, but

no one was really sure what it was. They only knew that Dean Cayman, a true engineering genius, was going to announce something interesting, and there was a lot of speculation about what it could be, and some people were actually really good at guessing what it would end up being, which when it was unveiled, was this motorized scooter that could balance on two wheels uh, and when it was unveiled,

the media went bonkers for it. There were talks about how it would lead to a complete redesign of cities and would become the future of personal transportation for short distances, which never quite happened. But we did see some elements of that vision come true many years later in a different form, and we saw the introduction of you know, scooter rental services, for example, all over the place using

an app to unlock a scooter. I want to think of that as sort of sort of a branched pathway off of this vision of the segue, But I am still waiting for cities to get redesigned totally to make it easier to get around if you're not in a car. Back at CES, there were plenty of other gadgets, from smart watches, two drones, to flying car concepts to a

kitty litter box outfitted with AI. Now, if you ever wondered if artificial intelligence was going to rebel against humans and try to eradicate us, I think it's safe to say the answer is they definitely will, and it's because we made them stare at kitty litter in so we deserve it. There were smart speakers. There were thin and gorgeous television sets. There were led hexagon lights, which I have since seen in the background of various YouTuber videos.

There were musical instruments. There were car gadgets and systems. There were new computers, There were new VR headsets, and then there were all the really weird devices that would prompt you to wonder why anyone ever thought it up in the first place, And often that thought is followed by when can I get one of those? So started off with a big splash of consumer tech, some of it awesome, some of it weird, some of it lame

on the social networking side of things. Facebook continue you to field criticisms directed at the platform regarding misinformation, fake accounts, and politics, which would go throughout all of the company was under fire because executives had acknowledged that there were a lot of political ads on Facebook containing misinformation and sometimes outright lies, but that Facebook was not going to take any action to label or remove misleading political ads.

While the company was bowing to pressure to remove other types of content uh that contained misinformation or hate speech, the political ads would stay up, and as was an

election year here in the United states. This would become a bigger story over the following months, and it was exacerbated somewhat when a memo penned by a Facebook executive named Andrew Bosworth back at the end of twenty nineteen became public in and In that memo, Bosworth said he believed Facebook's advertising policies were a contributing factor in the outcome of the election, and that it might quote very

well lead to the same result end quote. Now, Bosworth, I should point out, was a Clinton supporter, but his point was more about how the Trump campaign was able to run a really effective digital ad campaign using Facebook's approach, rather than arguing that there was some influence of Russian

interference or misinformation campaigns. Bosworth also dismissed Cambridge Analytica's influence on the twenty sixteen election, something that I think is probably accurate for the most part, but I feel Bosworth was also dismissive of the very real, harmful impact Cambridge Analytica had and the role Facebook played in making that possible, namely through the company's terrible management of app permissions, But

that's a matter for a different podcast. Facebook will pop up more than a few times in this retrospective look at the big stories, of which is no big surprise. It continues to play a big part, sometimes a disruptive part of people's lives, both online and offline. Over at Google, David Drummond, who was the chief legal officer of Alphabet, the holding company under which Google exists, he retired amid

a growing concern at the company. Google, like a lot of other tech companies, was struggling with revelations that came to the public notice in the wake of the me

too movement. According to former Googler Jennifer Blakely, she and Drummond had a year's long affair, and since Blakely reported to Drummond originally anyway, this was in direct violation of Google's HR policies, but Blakely would ultimately be moved to a different department, one that she claimed was unrelated to her background, her education, her work experience, and Drummond kept climbing the executive ladder, and the message was that if

you were an executive, specifically a male executive at Google, you had a level of protection around you that would cushion you from stuff that what at the very least earn you a sanction from the company, if not worse. And this is a story we've seen happen again and again in multiple companies, from Uber to Ubisoft, and also in companies that you know, don't start with you. It had been a real blight in the business world in

general for years and the tech world in particular. And I suspect it's going to take a lot more time and effort to uncover and address toxic work cultures and policies because we've only really just scratched the surface. Gosh, we're not even out of January yet. But um, let's take a quick break and we'll come back and see if we can get out of that first month. Okay, uh see in a minute. Okay, January, Xerox initiated a

hostile takeover attempt for HP. This would be the branch of HP that is the PC manufacturer, because if you remember, HP itself had split into two entities a few years earlier. So the way a hostile takeover typically works is that you've got company A in this case Xerox, buying up shares of company B in this case HP, and it's in an effort to gain enough leverage to force company b's board of directors to agree to a merger or acquisition deal, or to bypass the board of directors completely

by forcing a shareholder vote on the matter. If you control enough shares, you can influence the vote and make it go your way, and then Company A takes over Company B. It is not always easy to do. It was huge in the eighties. This was like the go to method for one company to go after another company in the eighties. But it is really expensive and it can get really ugly. Xerox went hard after HP with a campaign that was a thirty five billion dollar acquisition

campaign that is a princely sum. Ultimately, Xerox would end this attempt in March of citing the Coronavis virus pandemic as the main reason for dropping its pursuit. Interestingly, the Xerox CEO was himself a former HP executive, so he had worked at HP before, also worked at IBM before came over, leads Xerox and then tries to take HP,

but it didn't work. In late January, Uber announced it was preparing a test of its self driving vehicles in Washington, d C. And I bring this up really to do a quick fast forward on Uber's self driving car strategy in t see. Uber has been incredibly bullish about pushing autonomous cars, mean very aggressive in developing self driving car technology. The pursuit has had more than a few bumps in

the road. You could say there were allegations that Beer was benefiting from research that was stolen from Google's way Mo program. Uh. That is something that took a really ugly turn a few years ago and continues to be an issue today in various ways. And then you had the tragic incident of an Uber self driving vehicle colliding with a pedestrian. That was terrible, and the company has had a dark and questionable record with self driving technology

while pushing it really hard. But despite all that, autonomous vehicles remained a pillar of Uber's strategy, which in itself is rough because the message you're sending to your driver's is we need you right now, but eventually we won't need you, So don't get too comfy, not not super more like not a great way to raise morale among

your employees or i should say contract workers. Anyway, later in circulated that Uber was looking to sell off the self driving division within the company, and it was pouring around twenty million dollars every month into its autonomous car research and development division. In an effort to move toward profitability, Uber has pulled the trigger and sold off the autonomous

car division to a startup called Aurora. And Aurora itself is headed by a former way Mo executive, so someone who had worked on Google's self driving car company has now moved over and created their own startup. Now, this does not mean that Uber has actually given up on

autonomous cars. They haven't. The company will have a significant ownership stake in Aurora, and this shift is likely more about freeing up Uber of those massive monthly costs while still eyeing the potential for a self driving fleet of Uber vehicles in the future. So it would be premature to say that Uber is done with autonomous vehicles. Really, it's just done pouring millions of dollars every month into

the effort. Considering how far behind Uber is on its original plans, that's probably for the best because the company had hoped to have thousands of self driving taxis active in a few different markets by the end of twenty and that just hasn't happened. So I expect Uber's overall plans haven't really changed. That much. It's just how the

company hopes to achieve them. That's what's changed. And one of the reasons Uber is looking forward to a future with robot drivers is that the company has really resisted treating its human drivers as company employees. As I alluded to just a minute ago, Uber, along with Lift, classifies drivers as contract workers, not employees, and that gets around

some pesky issues like providing benefits to people. In California, legal cases challenging this had gone as far as the California Appeals Court, and in fact that court ruled that Lift and Uber should classify drivers as employees, or really they should prepare to do that. Because some legislation was being laid out for California voters. It was called Proposition twenty two, and that proposition would create the legal standing to call gig workers contract workers rather than employees if

it passed. So, in other words, if you vote yes on Proposition twenty two, what you're saying is that people who work for companies like Uber or Lift can be called contract workers, they are not employees. That that legislation passed with fifty eight percent of the vote. So Lift and Uber and a few other similar companies had collectively contributed more than two hundred million dollars to various ad campaigns in California to convince voters to support that proposition,

and it totally worked. So workers will be contract workers. They are not employees, and thus they are not entitled to employee benefits the way other employees are within the state of California. They did get a few additional benefits from that proposition, but not to the extent that they would if they actually were granted full employee status. We learned in January that a string of hotels branded with a licensing agreement from Atari will be here at some

point in the future. I think the plan is to have hotels in eight different cities and places like Las Vegas, Nevada, Nevada. I should say, I apologize, and I imagine those plans in particular hit a pretty big snag with the pandemic, which has really affected everything from the hospitality industry in general because fewer people are traveling and staying in hotels to construction. A lot of construction projects are progressing very

lowly or not at all at the moment. But these hotels, when they are completed, will cater to fans of video games with a retro design and immersive experiences built into the structures themselves, which sounds pretty nifty. I kind of dig the idea of staying at a hotel that has that sort of retro eighties style to it, especially if it's very, very subtly influenced by specific video games. Um. I think that could be a lot of fun. And if if every room has its own arcade cabinet, that's

even better. I mean, I don't think that will happen, but that would be cool. So I think now we are finally ready to move into February. So that was a lot. But we went through several stories as they played out throughout the year, and we will continue to do that in this episode. So while I might start a story that began in February, some of those stories do play out throughout the year. So let's see what

we have in store. Keeping in mind is also a leap year, so we have an extra day in February, because, of course we do, because twenties determined to get us down, but dang it, I'm not gonna let that happen. February was when we started seeing tech companies start to shut down store fronts, and then a little later after that

manufacturing facilities that were located in China. While the coronavirus had already spread outside of China, at this point, most people in the United States weren't really concerned about it yet. It was a very few number of cases in the United States, and I think a lot of people, I think even myself, thought, oh, you know, this is bad, but at least it's containable. Little did I know. I

was so naive. But tech companies were already starting to take a bit of a preventive approach, with Apple closing

all forty two of its stores in China. By early February, Facebook, Google, and Twitter all announced that they were cracking down on misinformation about the coronavirus, which I mean, I guess they did do that, but holy cats, I think information and baseless conspiracy theories about coronavirus can go toe to toe with the misinformation and such regarding the U S election, and to be fair, a lot of that stuff is

actually tied up together. The company said they were on top of all of that, but it would turn out that the tidal wave of misinformation was just too great for the services to really handle. It. It just was too tall of an order, I would argue. It is interesting to me though, that as early as February they

were talking about this. We saw an escalation of the U. S government's stance against Chinese manufacturing company Huawei in twenty In February twenty uh Whahwei makes a lot of stuff, including infrastructure components for five G networks, and I covered a lot about five G myths in a recent episode, so I'm not going to dive into that too much here.

But the overt reason for the concern about Whahwei was that the Chinese government could deceivably forced Huahwei to serve as a gateway for surveillance activities and you know, essentially leverage. It's it's incredible power to force Hahwei to have secret backdoor access to various communications networks. But if you look at the full story gets way more complicated than that. Involves things like trade disputes and stuff, and a lot of posturing as well, so it's not as simple as

the way I've laid it out. In February, the government added a few more charges at Huawei's door. They said that the company was guilty of racketeering and conspiracy to steal intellectual property in the battle between Huawei and the US government continues to this very day, as I record this in February as well, Amazon would argue in court successfully. I might add that a planned project to create a cloud computing infrastructure for the Pentagon should go on hold

and not just move forward. So at the heart of the issue was that the Pentagon had this huge contract and they awarded it to Microsoft. But Jeff Bezos and Amazon alleged that President Trump had leaned on the Pentagon to award the contract to Microsoft, even if that that contract wasn't as competitive as what Amazon was putting forward, and that it was all because the President had bad blood with Bezos and Amazon and the Washington Post, which

Bezos owns. This mess stretched on for several months until on early September, the Pentagon would say, you know what, We're still gonna go with Microsoft, where we've heard your complaints, but we're going to move forward. Amazon is still trying to stop that from happening. Uh, they're trying to have depositions with people like President Trump, in fact, all for the purposes of supporting their argument. But that's not really

going anywhere. Right now. Can't imagine why, but there's a real chance that we're not done with this story yet and that it might stretch well into Gamers in the United States likely breathed a sigh of relief. I mean, if they noticed that in February the i r S very quietly deleted a statement that had previously said the

virtual currency of Fortnite could possibly be subjected to federal taxes. Now, my guess is most gamers weren't even aware that that was a possibility in the first place, because it wasn't exactly displayed prominently. But this is more than just a curious story. If the I r S had kept that policy, it might have said a precedent for all sorts of virtual currencies, which so far have been largely exempt from

taxable income. For its part, and I r S leaders said that the whole thing was a mistake in the first place and was never meant to have been published. So who's to say it was in mid February when we first started hearing about the possibility of shortages in various electronics. As tech companies and supply chains and manufacturing got more and more affected by the pandemic, we weren't necessarily calling it a pandemic, yet that's obviously what it

turned out to be. Apple warned its investors that its revenue numbers would be impacted because the coronavirus was affecting iPhone production, which would lead to a shortage in stores, so fewer sales than had been predicted at that point, So that was an early indicator that things were serious.

February is also when Larry Tesler passed away. Now that name might not be familiar to you, but his work definitely is because he was the guy who created the copy, cut and paste functions in computers, which have been basic commands in all these various systems ever since. And another person whom we lost in February was Kazuhisha Hashimoto, who

was the genius behind the Konami code. Now, if you're not familiar with the Konami code, it is a sequence you can enter on a game pad to activate some sort of cheat code or easter egg in numerous games, and technically it is up, up, down, down, left, right, left right b A. Sometimes there are a couple of other steps, but that is the basic code, and the first game to feature this code was Gratis or Gradius if you prefer. But I first became aware of it

in a game called Contra. Since then, it's appeared in numerous games, including games that were not made by Konami. So a lot of gamers when they get a new game, if they've got a game pad or some other controller like that attached, they will just try it just for the heck of it to see if anything happens. You'll be surprised at how often something does happen because so many people who developed games grew up playing stuff like Contra, and they're paying tribute in a way by including that

code in their own games. Frequently it does something very silly, and uh, I really appreciate that. By the end of February, the coronavirus concerns were starting to really grow. Facebook canceled its scheduled conference and we would see many other planned events follow suit. South By Southwest held on until the very last minute. They canceled for the first time in thirty four years after the conference received a directive from

the city of Austin to shut down. So that happened in March uh and south By Southwest happens at the end of the March e three actually canceled before south By Southwest did. E three is the big video game conference that happens in early June, so E three was

being much more proactive than south By Southwest. Other events that either canceled or pivoted to a digital experience included TED twenty twenty, the New York Auto Show, the Minecraft Festival, the First Robotics Competition, the IBM Think Conference, the Adobe Summit, Apple w w d C, def Con China, Google Io, Mobile World Congress, Red Hat Summit twenty and tons more.

In slightly more lighthearted news, Twitter got a bit of egg on its proverbial face after the service verified the account of a businessman and politician named Andrew Waltz who was running for Congress, except that Andrew Waltz wasn't a real person. He was made up seas as my quister

compatriot would say. A seventeen year old high school student in New York created the profile of Andrew Waltz and submitted it to Twitter for verification and got it, which raises the question of exactly what Twitter's process involves for verification. I mean, I have a verified check mark next to my name on Twitter. Am I real? Because some days

I just don't know. But seriously, it brought to light the extremely not transparent process that Twitter uses to determine if someone warrants a verified tag or not, and it also pointed out how the service appeared to be very much not ready for the types of shenanigans that we expected to see leading up to the election in the

United States. Alright, moving on to March, there weren't nearly as many February stories as the word January stories, partly because it's a short month, even with the extra day, but also mostly because it's just rare to hear about a lot about tech in February in general. The big story by now in March was definitely coronavirus, as we were starting to get the first serious indications of how

dangerous and viral COVID nineteen really was. On the tech side, there was a growing effort to fight against misinformation and to create tools that people could use to see where the virus was is, you know where it was most concentrated, what you should be doing, you know what the hospitalization rates and so on were. And this was largely gathered out of the data from various health organizations that would become more complicated as the US administration made it more

challenging to access that kind of information. News outlets reported in March that a major investor in Twitter, a hedge fund company called Elliott Management Corporation, was trying to push for big changes at Twitter, including replacing the CEO and co founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey. And part of the issue was a concern that Dorsey is also the CEO

of another company, Square, that's the payments technology company. And I've seen some recent pieces that dive into this trend for leaders in Silicon Valley to sit the head of more than one company, and it seems to me that more people are kind of growing uncomfortable with the idea for multiple reasons. And one is that if a CEO isn't focusing all of their attention on one business, than

the businesses they oversee can suffer. Another is that there's a fear that these leaders are more likely to do what's best for themselves rather than what's best for the ventures that they lead. But in any case, the efforts so far have not paid off. Dorsey is still the CEO of both Square and Twitter as of this recording. Apple would settle a big lawsuit in March, paying five

hundred million dollars to do so. At the heart of the matter was the charge that the company was purposefully slowing down older iPhones over time, presumably as a means of convincing phone owners that it was time to upgrade to a new iPhone. And this is a big problem in tech in general. Every company wants to make that next must have device, But what happens when all the people who must have it um have it? When you hit market saturation, you're not going to sell more of

those devices because there are no more customers left. So you can create the next generation of that thing, but unless that next generation is really spectacular, you're not likely to get a significant percentage of your earlier customers to buy in. The more affluent of them might do that, but you've got to build in some sort of need or desire to upgrade every year or every two years, And after a while, it gets harder to make the next version of whatever it is that much better than

the previous one. So if it's hard to make an even better version, why not work backward and make the older versions worse. It's planned obsolescence in action. Anyway, Apple would pay half a billion dollars to settle that lawsuit, which for Apple, I guess is probably what you can find if you search the couch cushions in the break room. We've got a lot more to cover since we're still

in Mark, but let's take another quick break. The battle against misinformation regarding the coronavirus continued in March, with some of the source of that misinformation coming from pretty darn high up on the chain. For example, President Trump made some rather grandiose statements about a coronavirus information site that Google was developing, claims that Google CEO Sandar Picha I

was quick to walk back quite a bit. While Trump claimed that the site was going to give people a chance to assess their symptoms, kind of like get an idea how likely it is that they actually had COVID and then find the best place to go and be tested, which I adjusted expectations, he said, No, the site is really going to be more about educating people about the virus and include best practices for prevention, not treatment or testing.

It would not be the last time that would we would see one narrative emerge from US leadership, only to be contradicted by the companies that were actually working on the purported solutions. As the first stages of panic began to really grip the United States, we started seeing the run on staples here in the U S the main one being toilet paper, and companies like Amazon tried to ramp up to meet demand as stores were pretty much

gutted of their supplies. Amazon also hired around one hundred thousand new employees to work in distribution centers to prepare for the new demand as people did more shopping online because of the coronavirus, that's something that we would see continue throughout most of Around this time, we also started getting some of the earliest details for the next generation and video game consoles, namely the Xbox Series S and Series X and the two versions of the PlayStation five.

Over the following weeks, we would slowly learn more like the fact that both companies were going to offer two versions of these consoles. Sony's was an interesting approach. They had a version of the PS five that included an optical drive capable of playing back four K Blu Ray discs, and then they had one that did not have an

optical drive. It was digital only. Other than that, the two versions are identical well, with one important distinction, which is that the PS five that does not have a drive is one dollars cheaper, but we didn't know the prices for a really long time that that was held back for quite some bit. In Microsoft's approach was different.

It offered up a digital only version of the Xbox console, but unlike Sony, this version did not pack as much as the flagship Series X console, which includes the optical drive. There's a larger gap between the two Xbox consoles, both in terms of specs and in terms of price. The Series S costs two hundred dollars less than the Series X. As the year would go on, the planned launch of those consoles had to deal with the same realities the rest of us were grappling with, namely how the pandemic

was making things harder. Perhaps the biggest challenge for Microsoft was that the pandemic caused massive delays in game development, which meant the Series X and the Series S consoles launched without any real exclusive titles to show off how powerful these news systems actually were. Sony fared a little better on that front, but shortages in PlayStation five consoles meant that it was devilishly hard to get hold of the PS five, even as late as the recording of

this episode. As I sit here recording, there are news reports of stores like Walmart selling out of their restock in a matter of minutes. The supply just doesn't meet the demand so far with the PS five, while the poor Xbox consoles are just waiting for the killer app to convince gamers to fork over the cash to buy a new system. As for my own take on the consoles,

I think they're both really impressive. If I were to buy one right now, and I haven't, I would probably be staking out stores as they restock the PS five, staking out online, I should add, not in person, but that's really because of the lack of really compelling exclusives for the series X so far. But honestly, I'm waiting for a while for either of them both so that any bugs or flaws can be ironed out in the next batch of hardware, because we've already heard about issues

both for the Xbox and the PS five. There have been problems with production models so far. I would rather wait for those to get worked out for version you know, one point one. And also I want to wait until there are more games to play in the various libraries. I love consoles, I also love PC games as well. I am currently way behind in that the PCs I have right now are underpowered when it comes to the

most recent Triple A titles. I wouldn't be able to play any recent Triple A title on anything but like the lower settings on my hardware as it stands. And then the consoles I have are from the previous generation. I mean, I've got the p S four and I've got the Xbox One, and they're from the early point of those generations. They're not the the more powerful versions

that were released later in the life cycles. So I'm well behind, but I can be patient because I want to make sure that when I spend that kind of money, I'm getting the most for it. Let's move on. So SpaceX and March was rushing to try and push forward

its Starlink satellite business. Starlink is a network of communications satellites that will deliver or broadband satellite internet to customers here on Earth, and so far SpaceX has put up about around a thousand satellites up into orbit as part of this network, with plans to push that up to around anywhere from twelve thousand to maybe more than forty

thousand satellites in the future. Uh. There's a beta test right now where people are testing out the connectivity and that seems to be going pretty well, but it's still in beta as of this recording. SpaceX has had a pretty eventful twenty The company laid the groundwork, so to speak, for space tourism operations in the future, which could potentially see private citizens making trips up to the International Space Station in the future. That's something that hasn't happened for

several years now. It did happen a few times in the past. Only a few private citizens ever did it. Richard Garriot, the creator of The Ultimate Series of Games, is one of them. But we might see that happen again in the future due to what SpaceX is trying to do and um in late May, SpaceX would supply the launch vehicle and spacecraft that NASA would need need

to uh deliver astronauts to the International Space Station. It made it the first time that astronauts would launch from American soil since the US discontinued the Space Shuttle program. In the Dragon spacecraft brought Douglas Hurley and Robert Benkon to the I S S, and the mission emphasized how important the private space industry is to America's space strategy, at least in the near future. And in a test late in the year, space x is Starship s N

eight vehicle exploded while executing a belly flop maneuver. The maneuver was going as planned at least for a while, but then one of the spacecraft's engines shut down unexpectedly and the vehicle crashed in a fiery explosion. Now, fortunately

this was an unmanned test. No one was hurt. There were there's no one aboard, there was no one on the ground that was hurt, and it was generally understood that this maneuver was going to be really difficult to pull off, and it was likely that some sort of failure would occur. In other words, they had pretty much thought that this was a possibility, and the goal of the test was really to gather more information about the launch and the apogee of the flight path, so the

mission overall was not a failure. The spacecraft is a prototype of the class of vehicles that SpaceX intends to use for missions that would go to places like Mars in the future, which is pretty exciting stuff. In late March, the video game Animal Crossing New Horizons launched on the Nintendo Switch, and it became an instant hit. The franchise of games has been popular for years, but the unique circumstances of a world going into lockdown gave the game

a considerable boost. As people were searching for ways to interact with friends without you know, having to leave the house. Soon, having your little avatar visit the virtual islands of your friends became a really popular pastime. It wasn't long before people were talking about it being a Game of the Year contender. And I think the game is a good one, but I think the experience of the game was heightened

largely because it helped people cope with being alone. I think in a world without the pandemic, I don't know that it would have Game of the Year contender status. And Animal Crossing wasn't the only game to help people find a distraction during the pandemic. Several games became really popular in including some that had escaped attention. Chief among those was the game among Us, a hidden role game that puts players into an environment where at least one

of the players is attempting to sabotage everyone else. Most players are scurrying around the map to complete various tasks, and those tasks involved usually pretty simple actions on the layers part, like dragging a marker on the screen with

your mouse or with a touch screen to a certain location. Meanwhile, the trader or traders imposters in other words, try to pick off the good guys without getting caught, or otherwise find a way to sabotage the game so they win if they kill enough of the good guys so that they can't get voted off. The good guys win if either they finish all their tasks or they vote off the traders, assuming they can suss out who the bad

guys are. The game first came out in but it was when it would explode in popularity and inspired various memes like red as Look and kind of Suss, and it even served as a means to raise money for various causes. We even saw US representatives like Alexandria Casio Cortez joined the game and let me tell you AOC was cleaning house. She was really impressive. Her her kill

of Pokemone was brutal. Other games that were really popular in included Phasma Phobia, a game in which players investigated haunted houses in an attempt to identify the type of spirit that was lingering behind, hopefully without angering the ghost

too much, because those ghosts could get pretty violent. Uh. There's Fall, guys, and that's the game in which players compete against one another in a series of funny little obstacle courses and challenges and you're trying to be the one victorious, little jelly bean like figure among all the others. That was a big hit, and there were some big Triple A titles that got a lot of attension as well.

Not all of the attention was positive. The Last of Us Part two, a long anticipated sequel to an incredible PS three game, ticked off some players with its narrative twists. Cyberpunk, which launched after several delays, has been the subject of ongoing criticism as players encounter very bugs in different versions of the game on different platforms, But generally speaking, the pandemic has had a big impact on game development and release schedules, and it also drove more people to play

and stream games. Twitch saw a big uptick and use, including a big boost in November of people watching just chatting streams, meaning streams that weren't necessarily about even streaming a video game. We even saw video games being used to address the very real problem that people can no longer gather together in person without risking their health or in some cases breaking an ordinance. This all dependent upon whether or not you lived in a place that was

instituting and enforcing restrictions due to the coronavirus. Here in Georgia not so much, but that's a matter for a totally different show. We saw people create virtual events using games like Minecraft to allow people to gather together and celebrate stuff like weddings or graduations, making the best out of a challenging situation. At the end of March, employees at a Staten Island Amazon warehouse staged a walkout. The protest was over how Amazon was handling, or rather failing

to handle, the coronavirus crisis. There were several diagnosed cases of COVID nineteen at that warehouse, and the employees had petitioned Amazon to shut down the warehouse in order to

give the facility a deep cleaning. That was a move that Amazon resisted, and Amazon would fire one of the workers responsible for the waalk out a guy named Chris Smalls, although the company said it was because Smalls had come into work after he was told to stay home because he had been exposed to someone else who had COVID nineteen. So the company was saying, this guy got exposed to COVID nineteen, he could have been, uh contagious. He came

into work anyway, that's why we fired him. Chris Small says, that's not true. I was fired because I helped organ nice this walkout. Uh, it's it's a sticky matter. And we'll wrap up this episode with a general observation and trend that would extend through Starting in March, we began to see a massive shift toward online platforms, both for entertainment, as movie theaters were closing their doors to using online platforms for online conferencing services, most notably Zoom. The Zoom

explosion is hard to overstate. Heck, one of the ongoing jokes has been the various digital backgrounds that people have used in their Zoom meetings. And then there are the various accidents and indiscretions that have happened on camera as people, whether they were aware or not. We're broadcasting some questionable behaviors to other folks online. I am not going to

dive into all that because yuck. But Zoom would play an important part as people would use it to conduct business, to have virtual visits with one another, and to do special events like live readings of famous scripts. And while it had been around for nearly a decade, Zoom really became a big deal in And meanwhile, some online platforms had to make adjustments on the fly to account for

the limitations of the Internet. In March, YouTube reduced video quality in worldwide delivery of videos, and the reason was to decrease network loads and congestion. As more people watched content on YouTube and other services, networks were getting hit hard and so a lot of services were throttling stuff like resolution in order to compensate. Well, that gets us through March of and we've got a long way to

go to get through the rest of it. But we've also covered some stories that unfolded throughout the year, so I'm not gonna go back and talk about those again in the next episode. So we'll see if we can get through the rest of twenty in one episode, or we might have to make this a three for I don't know yet, but if you guys have sugestions for topics that should cover in future episodes of text Stuff, let me know. You can reach out on Twitter. The handle to use is text stuff H s W and

I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.