A new national survey (PDF) from CNBC/Generation Lab of 1,033 people aged 18 to 34 found that an overwhelming 81% of respondents believe a four-day workweek would boost their company’s productivity, while 19% said productivity would decline. CNBC reports: Those results from the “Youth & Money in the USA” survey come amid discussions around the potential benefits of switching from the standard five-day U.S. workweek to a four-day cadence without a pay cut. Some companies have begun testing the arrangement, and say it has mitigated employee burnout and strengthened business performance. Exos, a U.S. coaching company that trains top athletes and leads corporate wellness programs, recently reported results from the first six months of an ongoing four-day workweek experiment. The company said the shortened workweek increased efficiency along with revenue and retention.

Although respondents to the CNBC/Generation Lab survey largely agreed on workweek length, they were less unified when asked about work setting. A 60% majority said they do their best work in the office, while the other 40% said they do so at home. Further reading: 32-Hour Workweek for America Proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders

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According to CNBC, Google is laying off at least 200 employees from its “Core” teams and moving some roles to India and Mexico. From the report: The Core unit is responsible for building the technical foundation behind the company’s flagship products and for protecting users’ online safety, according to Google’s website. Core teams include key technical units from information technology, its Python developer team, technical infrastructure, security foundation, app platforms, core developers, and various engineering roles. At least 50 of the positions eliminated were in engineering at the company’s offices in Sunnyvale, California, filings show. Many Core teams will hire corresponding roles in Mexico and India, according to internal documents viewed by CNBC.

Asim Husain, vice president of Google Developer Ecosystem, announced news of the layoffs to his team in an email last week. He also spoke at a town hall and told employees that this was the biggest planned reduction for his team this year, an internal document shows. “We intend to maintain our current global footprint while also expanding in high-growth global workforce locations so that we can operate closer to our partners and developer communities,” Husain wrote in the email. […] “Announcements of this sort may leave many of you feeling uncertain or frustrated,” Husain wrote in the email to developers. He added that his message to developers is that the changes “are in service of our broader goals” as a company. The teams involved in the reorganization have been key to the company’s developer tools, an area Google is streamlining as it incorporates more artificial intelligence into the products.

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Unity has appointed Matthew Bromberg, former CEO of Zynga, as its new CEO, president and board member. “Filling a role that has been temporarily filled by former Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, Bromberg will formally join Unity as CEO on May 15,” reports VentureBeat. “Whitehurst will serve as executive chair of the Unity board, and Roelof Botha will transition from chairman to lead independent board member.” From the report: Bromberg fills a slot vacated by John Riccitiello, who resigned last fall after a pricing debacle that left game developers extremely angry at Unity. They calmed down after Unity walked back major parts of the price increase. It’s an important time for Unity as it is about to ship Unity 6, the latest version of its game engine, in competition with Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 5.4. Whitehurst will also return to Silver Lake, one of Unity’s two largest shareholders, where he had previously been a senior advisor and will now join as a managing director leading both operating and investment team initiatives.

Bromberg brings over 20 years of experience across the gaming industry, having previously served as Chief Operating Officer of leading mobile game developer and publisher Zynga, where he played a key role in the company’s turnaround, and was responsible for Zynga’s game studios globally, while also overseeing product development and design, technology, data, and analytics. Bromberg also held multiple leadership roles at Electronic Arts, where he helped scale the company’s mobile division and led teams on four continents that built popular games across all major genres.

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Pursuing an unfair business practices case against Amazon, America’s Federal Trade Commission has now “accused” Amazon of using Signal, reports the Seattle Times:

The newspaper notes that the app “can be set to automatically delete messages, to hide information related to the FTC’s ongoing antitrust investigation into the company.”

In a court filing this week, the FTC moved to “compel” Amazon to share more information about its policies and instructions related to using the Signal app… The FTC accused Amazon executives of manually turning on the feature to delete messages in Signal even after the company learned that the FTC was investigating and had told Amazon to keep documents, emails and other messages.

Many of Amazon’s senior leaders used Signal, according to the FTC, including former CEO and current chair Jeff Bezos, CEO Andy Jassy, and general counsel David Zapolsky, as well as Jeff Wilke, former head of Amazon’s worldwide consumer business, and Dave Clark, former worldwide operations chief. “Amazon is a company that tightly controls what its employees put into writing,” FTC attorneys said in a court filing Thursday. “But Amazon’s senior leadership also used another channel for internal communications and avoided the need to talk carefully by destroying the records of their messages….”

In the court filing Thursday, the FTC asked Amazon to provide two troves of documents related to its use of Signal: Amazon’s document preservation notices and its instructions about the use of “ephemeral messaging applications, including Signal.” The FTC said Amazon waited for more than a year after it learned of the investigation to instruct its employees to preserve Signal messages. “It is highly likely that relevant information has been destroyed as a result of Amazon’s actions and inactions,” the FTC wrote in court records.

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Alphabet has reported first quarter results that topped analysts’ estimates with soaring profits in its cloud division. It also announced its first-ever dividend. CNBC shares the results: Earnings per share: $1.89 vs. $1.51 per share expected by LSEG
Revenue: $80.54 billion vs. $78.59 billion expected by LSEG
Wall Street is also watching several other numbers in the report:

YouTube advertising revenue: $8.09 billion vs. $7.72 billion expected, according to StreetAccount.
Google Cloud revenue: $9.57 billion vs. $9.35 billion expected, according to StreetAccount.
Traffic acquisition costs (TAC): $12.95 billion $12.74 billion expected, according to StreetAccount.

Alphabet’s revenue increased 15% from $69.79 billion a year earlier, the fastest rate of growth since early 2022. Alphabet said its board approved a cash dividend of 20 cents per share to be paid on June 17, to stockholders of record as of June 10. The company said it “intends to pay quarterly cash dividends in the future.”

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According to French business magazine Challenges, Apple has acquired Datakalab — a Paris-based startup specializing in artificial intelligence compression and computer vision technology. 9to5Mac reports: Datakalab described itself as “experts in low power, runtime efficient, and deep learning algorithms” that work on device. On its LinkedIn page, Datakalab highlights “industry leading compression and adaptation to deploy embedded computer vision that is fast, cost-effective and precise.” Prior to the Apple acquisition had between 10 and 20 employees.

From Datakalab’s now-defunct website: “Datakalab is a French technology company that develops computer image analysis algorithms to measure flows in public space. The images are instantly transformed into anonymized statistical data processed locally in 100ms. Datakalab does not store any images or personal data and only keeps statistical data. Datakalab products are built according to the principle of ‘Privacy by Design.'”

While neither Apple nor DatakaLab have acknowledged the acquisition, Challenges says that the deal was reported to the European Commission this month. The report says that Datakalab’s two founders did not join Apple, but multiple other employees did make the jump. Datakalab also held multiple patents related to AI compression and vision technology. The acquisition makes perfect sense given Apple’s rumored ambitions to run its upcoming AI-related features in iOS 18 “entirely on device.”

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Netflix on Thursday reported a 16% rise in memberships in the first quarter, reaching 269.6 million, beating Wall Street expectations. Starting next year, the company will no longer provide quarterly membership numbers or average revenue per user starting next year. CNBC reports: “As we’ve noted in previous letters, we’re focused on revenue and operating margin as our primary financial metrics — and engagement (i.e. time spent) as our best proxy for customer satisfaction,” the company said in its quarterly letter to shareholders. “In our early days, when we had little revenue or profit, membership growth was a strong indicator of our future potential.” Netflix said now that it is generating substantial profit and free cash flow — as well as developing new revenue streams like advertising and a password-sharing crackdown — its membership numbers are not the only factor in the company’s growth. It said the metric lost significance after it started to offer multiple price points for memberships. The company said it would still announce “major subscriber milestones as we cross them.”

Netflix also noted that it expects paid net additions to be lower in the second quarter compared to the first quarter “due to typical seasonality.” Its second-quarter revenue forecast of $9.49 billion was just shy of Wall Street’s estimate of $9.54 billion Shares of the company fell around 4% in extended trading. Netflix reported first-quarter net income of $2.33 billion, or $5.28 per share, versus $1.30 billion, or $2.88 per share, in the prior-year period. The company posted revenue of $9.37 billion for the quarter, up from $8.16 billion in the year-ago quarter.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: VMware by Broadcom will deliver a significant update to its flagship Cloud Foundation bundle in the middle of this year and follow it up with a major update early in 2025. Both releases will show off Broadcom’s plan to make the package easier to implement and operate, and hopefully assuage customer concerns about price rises. More on that later. First, the updates. One release is currently scheduled to debut in July, according to Paul Turner, vice-president of product management and the leader of the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) team. The release will allow use of a single license key for all the components of Cloud Foundation, improve OAuth support as a step towards single sign-on across the VMware range, and add an NSX overlay that will allow implementation of software-defined networks without requiring IP address changes.

Turner explained those features as exemplifying the sort of simplification VMware by Broadcom thinks is needed to make Cloud Foundation easier to implement. A bigger release Turner hopes will debut in early 2025 — though he would commit to only a H1 launch — will be a “unified” release in which more of VCF is better integrated. Today, Turner admitted, VMware customers may have implemented vSphere and the Aria management suite, but might still need or choose discrete storage for each. Future VCF releases will increasingly unify the products so that silos aren’t needed. Prashanth Shenoy, vice president for VMware by Broadcom’s cloud platform, infrastructure, and solutions marketing, told The Register the release will be called VCF 9 and will represent “the fullest expression of Broadcom’s vision for product integration.” “When customers deploy VCF there are seams — when they deploy networking and storage, they feel like they do not have a unified developer or operator experience,” Shenoy admitted. VCF 9 will tidy that sort of thing up and make the process “seamless.” Buyers can also expect improved log file analysis, the ability to acquire templates from a marketplace and adopt them as PaaS, and plenty more.

Turner and Shenoy told The Register that the two releases are hoped to make VCF adoption easier, and by doing so demonstrate the value of the bundle. Today, they argue, would-be hybrid cloud adopters using VCF are in reality integrating siloed products — which doesn’t prove the value of the vStack well. VCF 9’s planned integrations, they argue, should demonstrate the power of the stack and the wisdom of Broadcom’s decision to create a VMware unit dedicated to VCF. That team, they explained, means developers for each of the bundle’s components work together on a unified experience, rather than to create their own product. It may also demonstrate the value of VMware by Broadcom’s new licenses – which some users have complained are considerably more expensive now that subscriptions are required, and products are only sold in bundles. Sylvain Cazard, president of Broadcom Software for Asia-Pacific, told The Register that complaints about higher prices are unwarranted since customers using at least two components of VMware’s flagship Cloud Foundation will end up paying less. He also noted that the new pricing includes support, which VMware didn’t include previously.

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Poland has fined Amazon close to $8 million for misleading consumers about the conclusion of sales contracts on its online marketplace. The sanction “also calls out the e-commerce giant for deceptive design elements which may inject a false sense of urgency into the purchasing process and mislead shoppers about elements like product availability and delivery dates,” reports TechCrunch. From the report: The country’s consumer and competition watchdog, the UOKiK, has been looking into complaints about Amazon’s sales practices since September 2021, following complaints from shoppers, including some who did not receive their purchases. The authority opened a formal investigation into Amazon’s practices in February 2023. Wednesday’s sanction is the conclusion of that probe. The UOKiK found consumers who ordered products on Amazon could have their purchases subsequently cancelled by the tech giant as it does not treat the moment of purchase as the conclusion of a sales contract, despite sending consumers confirmation of their order — even after consumers have paid for the product. For Amazon, the conclusion of a sales contract only occurs once it has sent information about the actual shipment. […]

Its enforcement also calls out Amazon for using deceptive design to encourage shoppers to click buy by presenting misleading information about product availability and delivery windows — such as by listing how many items were in stock to be purchased and providing a countdown clock to order an item in order to get it on a particular delivery date. Its investigation found Amazon does not always meet these deadlines for orders, nor ship products immediately as they may be out of stock despite claims to the contrary shown to consumers. “Amazon treats the data it provides on availability and shipping date as indicative but the way it is presented does not indicate this,” the UOKiK noted, adding: “Consumers can only find out about this in the terms of sale on the platform.”

While Amazon does offer a delivery guarantee — offering a refund if items do not ship within the stated time — the authority found it failed to provide consumers with information about the rules of this service before placing an order. It only offers details at the order summary stage. And then only “if the consumer decides to read the subsequent links specifying delivery details.” Shoppers who did not follow the link to read more may not have been aware of their right to apply for and receive a refund from Amazon if there is a delay in shipment. It also found the e-commerce giant failed to provide information about the “Delivery Guarantee” in the purchase confirmation sent to shoppers. Amazon said it will appeal the fine. The company also writes: “Fast and reliable delivery across a wide selection of products is a top priority for us, and Amazon.pl has millions of items available with fast and free Prime delivery. Since launching Amazon.pl in 2021, we have continuously invested and worked hard to provide customers with a clear, reliable delivery promise at check out, and while the vast majority of our deliveries arrive on time, customers can contact us in the rare event that they experience a delay or order cancellation, and we will make it right.

Over the last year, we have collaborated with the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK), and proposed multiple voluntary amendments to continue to improve the customer experience on Amazon.pl. We strictly follow legal standards in all countries where we operate and we strongly disagree with the assessment and penalty issued by the UOKiK. We will appeal this decision.”

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Neil Irwin reports via Axios: The dearth of productivity growth over the last couple of decades has held back incomes in the U.S. and other rich countries, according to a report out Wednesday from the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the global consultancy. Productivity growth has been weak in the U.S. and Western Europe since the 2008 global financial crisis, but things looked better among many emerging markets. The McKinsey report finds that global labor productivity growth was 2.3% a year from 1997 to 2022, a rapid rate that has increased incomes and quality of life in large parts of the world. China and India account for the largest portion of that surge — half of overall global productivity improvement, with other emerging markets accounting for another 25%, led by Central and Eastern Europe and emerging Asian economies.

In the U.S., the report finds that the decline in capital investment following the 2008 financial crisis has resulted in a $4,500 lower per-capita GDP in 2022 than it would have if pre-crisis trends had continued. Rapid advances in manufacturing technology, especially for electronics, petered out in the same time period, subtracting another $5,000 from per-capita GDP. “Digitization was much discussed as the main candidate to rev up productivity again, but its impact failed to spread beyond” the tech sector, the authors write. The authors are optimistic that a confluence of factors will make the years ahead different.

The rise in global interest rates and inflation are evidence of stronger global demand. Many countries are experiencing labor shortages that may incentivize more productivity-enhancing investment. And artificial intelligence and related technologies create big opportunities. “Inflationary pressure and rising interest rates could be signs that we are leaving behind secular stagnation and entering an era of higher demand and investment,” the report finds. “In corporate boardrooms around the world right now, there’s a tremendous amount of conversation associated with [generative] AI, and I think there’s a broad acknowledgment that this could very much transform productivity at the company level,” Olivia White, a McKinsey senior partner and co-author of the report, tells Axios. “Another thing that’s happening right now is the conversation about labor. Labor markets in all advanced economies, and the U.S. is really sort of top of the heap, are very, very tight right now. So there’s a lot of conversation around what do we do to make the people that we have as productive as they can be?”

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