The tech company musical chair continues, with Microsoft 👑 maintaining its position at the coveted #1 spot — unchanged from last week. The Redmond firm is due to report its earnings this week, alongside other giants including Apple and Amazon (both of which were also in the Top 5).
Market observers are probably keeping a close watch in case there are clues of a possible acquisition of Netflix 📺. Though that's not all! A glitch this past week made Microsoft's MS Teams unusable for thousands of customers worldwide who rely on the service to make calls, schedule meetings, and organize their workflow. The company narrowed down the cause to a recent software update that "contained a broken connection to an internal storage service." 🤖
While one of its applications was breaking down, Microsoft also announced a new offering: DeepSpeed Compression. I'd try to explain what that is, but I think Microsoft does a better job, so here's what they're saying about the technology on their website: "DeepSpeed Compression [is] a composable library that combines novel compression technologies and highly efficient system optimizations to make [deep learning] model size smaller and inference speed faster, all with much lowered compression cost."
Got it? Cool! 😅
If mobile phones are more your thing, GSMArena did a piece on Microsoft's failed attempts to conquer the phone market. Meanwhile, The Verge reports the company is speeding up the Xbox Series X/S boot time by 5 seconds. So all in all, a pretty busy news week for Microsoft. 📰
Tesla 🚗 may have been a week early on its earnings but that still wasn't enough for it to claw its way up to the top. The car company had a lot to unpack this past week, resting comfortably on the #2 spot on HackerNoon's Tech Company Rankings. CEO Elon Musk, who enjoys American Pie-esque level of teen humor (see below), was in the news for having had an affair with Sergey Brin's wife — costing him his friendship with the Google co-founder, according to The Wall Street Journal. 💋
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1551054131413991424?cxt=HHwWgICqpfjguYYrAAAA
The carmaker also surprised markets after announcing that it had liquidated 75% of its Bitcoin holdings for $936 million during the second quarter of the year.
If you, like most of the internet, cannot decide whether the company made a profit or loss off of the sales — CoinDesk has an article detailing what the sale does (and does not) mean for the company.
Bitcoin sales aside, Tesla was also in the news for receiving a second subpoena from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over Musk's tweets in 2018 about taking the electric automaker private, Reuters reports.
More hardware news from Apple 🍎, this week's #3. According to Forbes, the next iteration of the Apple Watch will come in three versions: the default Apple Watch Series 8, a new Apple Watch SE, and a beefy version called Apple Watch Series 8 Pro or just Apple Watch Pro. The hardware leak coincides with a report commissioned by Apple detailing how its products empower people with their health information. 🏃
Side note: Apple also announced this past week that it would be slowing down hiring in 2023 given the clusterf*ck that is the U.S. economy right now.
Apple isn't the only tech giant focusing on healthcare. Amazon 📦, which landed on the #4 spot, announced it will be acquiring NASDAQ-listed One Medical for $3.9 billion. Some market observers think the acquisition — the first major purchase under CEO Andy Jassy — is worrisome for their privacy and data. Additional deep dives look into the financial aspects of the purchase and its implications for the future of primary care. 🏥
Rounding off this week's rankings was Intel 🖥️ at the #5 spot. News at the world's largest chip manufacturer can be elusive, but the latest was related to a bill in the U.S. that provides $52 billion in grants to strengthen America's semiconductor industry in a bid to counter China. Intel has been lobbying for weaker "guardrails" against China in the CHIPS Act in a bid to protect its business in the Asian nation at odds with America.😒
And that's a wrap! Thank you for reading this week’s Tech Company Brief. If you'd like to follow these rankings in real-time, feel free to head down here. See y'all next week.
PEACE! ☮️
