Alphabet Acquires Cloud Security Company Wiz for $32 Billion - DTNSB 4978
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This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, March 18th, 2025. We tell you what you need to know, follow up on the context of those stories, and help each other understand. Ah, today Dr. Nicky is back telling us about the woolly mouse. And then we've got a really good email. I was thinking maybe it was moose for like your hair. I'm Jason Howell. I have woolly hair. I'm Tom Merritt. Let's start with what you need to know with The Big Story.

All right. Big M&A news. Alphabet has confirmed the largest acquisition in its history.

with the purchase of cloud security startup Wiz for $32 billion. It's an all cash deal. Google is paying an additional $1 billion as a retention bonus. That's to keep all 1700 ish current with staffers in place after the acquisition is completed. If it completes, we'll talk about that.

Wiz will retain its autonomy leading up to and beyond the actual closing of the deal. So leading up to the closing, they're just going to operate as they always have in all the different directions. And it sounds like also after the deal, they'll do that as well. This is not the first time Alphabet has tried to secure Wiz.

Last year, Wiz rejected a $23 billion acquisition offer from Alphabet in response, at that time anyways, to potential antitrust friction within the deal. Of course, Wiz has kind of built in, which we will definitely talk about, kind of approaches to rectify that this time around, or at least lessen the impact of it. The deal is still highly dependent on

upon regulatory approval. That's expected sometime in 2026, next year.

The company has agreed to a 10% termination fee if the acquisition is thwarted by regulatory pressure. So they want that money even if things fall apart. This amounts to around $3.2 billion. It's considered one of the largest of its kind. And sources say Wiz insisted on this breakup fee in order for the deal to go ahead. So that's the lesson they learned from last year.

Alphabet's acquisition of Wiz is meant to boost Google's position in enterprise cloud and security at a time when AI is integrating in all different directions. Some view Alphabet's cloud offering as lagging behind Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. So this would be a deal to kind of

boost up what they have. Wiz began, by the way, five years ago as a cloud security startup, so not very long ago, aiming to help organizations secure their cloud data and systems. It uses an agentless system that can see and manage potential risks

across all different cloud services. That's a big part of what they do. The company achieved rapid milestones in its short life, including $100 million in annual recurring revenue within 18 months of launch. Wow. And a $10 billion valuation by 2023. Now, as for Alphabet, and then we'll kick this around a little bit.

A little bit of acquisition history here, because I thought that's a big amount. But what does that stack up against with Alphabet's other acquisitions? Prior to this, their biggest was Motorola Mobility. That was back in 2011. That was a paltry $12.5 billion by comparison. Paltry. Yeah.

which sold to Lenovo, of course, in 2014, just a few years later. Then Mandiant in 2022 for $5.4 billion. And Nest Labs in 2014 for $3.2 billion. So really big deal, obviously signaling Google's intention or Alphabet's intention to really boost up its cloud offering and bring more people into their ecosystem. What do you think about this?

Yeah. It's, it's tempting to look at this and go, Oh, uh, Google reversed the two and the three. And suddenly whiz was like, now that's more like it. 32, not 23. Okay. Yeah. Uh, and I'm sure that's not, you know, nothing, uh,

But I think the bigger deal is that you don't have Lena Kahn in charge of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. You have Andrew N. Ferguson in charge of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. And while Ferguson has said that he's still going to hold big tech to account, he has also said he wants to lessen the restrictions on mergers. So I think the regulatory landscape changed.

you could say that that $23 billion to $32 billion increase was simply because Wiz is profitable. And everything you said, I don't have any disagreement with. Wiz is going to be essential into helping Google continue to increase its cloud services. I think it's been doing well with that, but it's still behind. So this is going to help with that. But I think

It's also important to note that revenue number. Wiz makes money. It's a five-year-old startup that makes money. That's not normal. So they're really good at this. This is something that companies are more and more concerned with. And if Wiz can make sure their cloud services are secure, they're going to continue to make money.

That bolsters Google's bottom line at a time when they really need to have revenue coming in that isn't based on ads, because not only are they facing regulatory pressure on ads, as we all know, with with several court cases, but also the ad market is not going to stay in Google's favor forever, especially if search starts to decline as people start to rely on chatbots more and more.

So I look at this and I think that the biggest significance of this is Wiz bringing in some revenue generation for Google as a hedge against any potential future decline in advertising. Yeah, it's interesting because the regulatory moment that Google and Alphabet find themselves in

does threaten so many different aspects of their business. We hear about Chrome browser. You're going to be forced to sell Chrome browser. What happens to Android? All these different potential avenues. And then you mentioned the ad market changing in dramatic ways. So, so much of Alphabet and Google's business is being impacted in all these different ways, both regulatory and just in the market shifting. Cloud, though, there is so much money to be made in cloud. And

Google and Alphabet really want to make sure that they're competitive there. It largely seemed to be lagging behind AWS, behind Microsoft Azure, but still plenty of room to secure their spot there. And I think, yeah, it really will be interesting to see how this deal tests

the current administration's antitrust agenda in light of that. I mean, some might say this is even in light of where we are now versus six, eight, ten months ago, still a pretty gutsy move for Alphabet to pull the trigger on something this massive when it already has so many eyes on it from an antitrust perspective.

Yeah, I never thought when this was first floated last year, I thought this could pass regulatory scrutiny and should pass regulatory scrutiny because Google is not dominant in cloud. And in fact, regulation, regulatory scrutiny should say, yes, allow a competitor to get better at competing in the space.

So I didn't think it would really tick off all the boxes of monopoly because Google isn't – if Amazon were to try to buy this, maybe, right? Lena Kahn, on the other hand, had a much narrower definition, and I think they were just worried that anything Google did, any acquisition Google did would be discounted. So I think the Ferguson administration is a little more generous on that point.

You know, Ferguson, he was he worked for Mitch McConnell. He's very mainstream Republican. So I, I don't expect that you're going to see the kind of unpredictability that you might see from other appointees in the current administration. So, yeah, I think Google and Wiz were like, oh, yeah, no, this works now. Let's make it happen. And like you say, Google.

Google probably can't steal a lot of market share from AWS yet, but Microsoft has a perception, whether it's deserved or not, as being not so good at the security part of this. So getting Wiz is a big feather in Google's cloud cap too. Yeah. And I also wonder, because we've been hearing the last couple of years about slow acquisitions, mergers in an M&A, whatever you want to call it. And is this...

Yeah.

I think a lot of people don't know. I think the assumption is it won't be as bad with Ferguson in charge of the FTC, at least in the U.S., right? Nothing changes in the rest of the world. So you still could face regulatory opposition in China, in Europe. So you have to take that into account. Not everything changes just because the U.S. does.

But I think you're right. People are going to look at this and go, okay, is this going to make it? Is this going to make it through? Because that tells us something about whether or not things have changed and how they've changed. Yeah, it tells us something about this moment for sure. Yeah. Cool. Well, this moment was made possible by you, the listener. We wouldn't have had it. Thank you for letting us have it, Mark Gibson, Reed Fishler, and Larry Bailey. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

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It's being delivered, however, by Pebble's original designer and founder, Eric Michakowski's new company, Core Devices. Two new watches running the Pebble OS are in the works. The Core 2 Duo. Yes. Oh, that sounds familiar. That's also the name of an old Intel chip. But apparently the Duo is for do-over. Oh, yeah, I get it.

Core 2 Duo is a $149 watch. Okay. Not super pricey. Shipping in July with a black and white e-ink display, just like the original Pebbles. However, unlike the original Pebbles, the battery life is different. Instead of seven-day battery life, you get 30 days. What? 30-day battery life. Wow. How? Most of that is the updates to Bluetooth efficiency since 2012.

2016. There's also an onboard speaker, so you can have little conversations with your chatbots. Then there's the Core Time 2. That one won't ship until December. It's $225, has a metal frame, will have a larger color e-ink touchscreen as well as improved chips, so it can do step and sleep tracking. And again, you can pre-order both of these right now, but the Core 2 Duo shipping in July, the

the core time to shipping in December. And they've already said like, you know, if tariffs come, we're just going to pass along the price. So the price could go up between now and the time you get this. You're going to have to pay that if it happens. Also, we might have to delay these if stuff happens. So these aren't firm dates. I did the checkout process, Jason. There were like six different checkboxes. I had to check, including one extra if you're an iPhone user.

By the way. Oh, and by the way. And oh, I'm sorry in advance because. Yeah. Yeah. Well, cool. Regardless of all that, I'm very curious to see how this pans out and how long into the future it'll be before Pebble Watch is just like another smartwatch like everything else. Because, you know, every year it's like, oh, and we've added this and we've added this. Soon it'll be just.

Another smartwatch. Well, it's interesting that they really didn't add much to these from 2016 other than, oh, we have, we have better Bluetooth. So let's add better Bluetooth. So we get longer battery life. Oh, we have more affordable chips for start step and sleep tracking. So we can add that. It'll work great with Android. It's still not going to be able to reply to notifications in iOS. So it'll be a little more limited if you're pairing it with an iPhone, but it will pair with an iPhone. I don't know. I,

I love this. And I love that he's out there going like, yeah, if stuff changes, we're just going to change the price. If it's delayed, it's delayed. I'm going to make 10,000 of these because I want to make them. And we're not going to throw a bunch of things in here if we don't need them yet. So I was pretty excited to jump on and buy one. Yeah. I think the last thing I'll say on this is you can feel Eric's heart in

In the process. He really just loves this project and just wants to see it succeed. And so all that other stuff is like, yeah, that might happen. That might happen. But really, at the end of the day, I just want this to exist. I just want to let this happen. Yeah. Also, no one's going to call these core devices. They're going to be called Pebbles. Yeah, of course. 100%. They run the Pebble OS after it.

Yeah. Roku users this week reported seeing video ads play before they were ever taken to the home screen. So you power it on and before you see the home screen, boop, an ad. That's nuts.

That's not good. The ads had a close option for some other people could not find it. So even if you wanted to get rid of it, you couldn't. In some cases, Roku has acknowledged that it is always trying new ad types, but this is not a permanent part of the operating system. I would put in parentheses yet. Uh,

uh many users got mad but you know what do you expect that's that's the internet yeah ads on the internet people got mad weird looks like a dog bit a man again uh yeah this is this is going to annoy people i'm glad roku is saying it's a test uh because that that'll at least help some people feel bad i bet that close option was always there

That's the one thing I'll say. Yeah, people just didn't see it. Well, those ads can hide those close options, so they're almost impossible to find, right? So I'm not blaming the people, but I'm like, I bet they technically all had a close option. So yeah, this is annoying. Mm-hmm.

Several videos on YouTube, including one from Sahil Karul, unbox what they claim is the next Google Pixel 9a smartphone and sure as looks like it is. The videos show the device's biggest change, a flat rear panel that practically removes the Pixel signature camera bump.

The videos call out sizable bezels, around 6.3 inches display, a large 5100 milliamp hour battery and solid performance benchmarks with a Tensor G4 processor. So they're not just a layer. They're unboxing this thing and doing benchmarks on it. Oh, yeah. This isn't official, though. However, we all expect this will become official by tomorrow when we're recording this Wednesday, March 19th. That's when we're expected to get the Pixel 9a announcement.

Yep. So you won't have to wait long. But, oh, the removal of the signature camera bump. I don't know if that makes me sad. That makes me sad. I think the signature is a strong point. Why discard your signature? I just don't understand. It was your signature. Yeah. Discord is launching the Discord social SDK to let developers integrate the service's social hook.

into gaming experiences, whether you have a Discord account or not, actually. Integrations include a unified friends list, game invites, cross-platform messaging, and more. The SDK is compatible with C++, Unreal Engine, and Unity, and currently supports Windows 11 and later, as well as macOS. Discord does say that console and mobile compatibility is on the way as well.

Yeah. So this makes it easier for developers to build chat into their games. And again, you don't need a Discord account if they build it in to use this, although it'll make some things nicer because sure. That's great. Yeah.

Revenue Cat's state of subscription apps report shows why a lot of developers really, really try to get you to subscribe. When they're so insistent, they're like, hey, would you like to subscribe? This is why, according to the report, which covers more than 75,000 mobile apps, almost 80% of subscribers

subscription related app developers struggle to reach a thousand dollars per month in recurring revenue during their first two years. Uh, the report also found the revenue gap widening with the top 5% of apps earning 500 times more than the remaining 95%, 5% of the apps get 10,000 a month, uh, or more.

But yeah, I guess it's not surprising that it's hard to get people to subscribe to your app in such a competitive marketplace. But there's the numbers on it. Yeah, very, very interesting. I mean, I think just people have subscription fatigue to a certain degree. You really do have to choose where your money goes at this point because –

If you did a subscription for every single thing you used ever, we wouldn't have any money to buy hamburgers. The other part of this that I found interesting is that the ones that do reach that $10,000 a month or more level, they do it quickly. So you kind of know soon whether your app is going to reach the heights of success or not. That's a good point.

Samsung announced the official rollout of One UI 7 will begin April 7th. I bet there was some coordination there. First hitting the Galaxy S24 series, Z Fold 6, Z Flip 6. Betas for those devices are available now. Sometime soon after, Samsung plans to roll out to the S23 series. Yes, of course, the Z Fold and Flip 5.

And as far as tablets, the Galaxy Tab S10 and S9 series. The new version, which is already found on the latest Galaxy S25 series, includes the Now bar on the lock screen. Also, other redesigned aspects of the lock screen and a host of AI features. Like, I think, the really super cool feature audio eraser for video recordings, which is just really neat.

Lots of Google news today. Google has launched a feature for its Gemini chatbot called Canvas, which is similar to Anthropic's Artifacts and also similar to ChatGPT's Canvas, especially in that it's also called Canvas.

They are collaborative workspaces for writing and sharing, specifically for coding projects, but you can use them for other stuff. The Gemini Canvas provides a sidebar for comments, can do previews of code in real time. You can also do things like highlight sections and describe how you want them to change. Export your stuff to Google Docs.

You can launch it from a prompt in Gemini if you want to try it out. Also, Google is bringing Notebook LM's audio overview, you know, with its two familiar voices to Gemini. So in English, you'll be able to get audio overviews by uploading a document to Gemini. Now, Canvas and audio overview are available for free worldwide. If you can use Gemini, you can get it. However, the code preview function will only work on the web version of Gemini for now.

Neat. I'll have to play around with that. Another thing I'll have to play around with, GIMP. You remember GIMP, the free and open source alternative to Photoshop, has finally been updated to version 3.0. This is the first update since 2018's 2.10 version. What?

And the update brings some long overdue things like redesign of the UI, better support for tablets, non-destructive layer effects, improved color management, and improved workflows. I'll just say that the changelog for this is huge. So if you're interested in GIMP, go check out the changelog. I think it's worth an upgrade. Those are the essentials for today. Let's dive a little deeper into the ongoing stories and follow up.

Yeah, let's. And by let's, I mean you and Dr. Nicky, Tom. Colossal is a company founded in 2021 that has the goal to de-extinct the mammoth, which it hasn't done yet, but it has made a very small start. Dr. Nicky explains. Dr. Nicky, I'm very glad to have you back on the show to talk about something furry and cute this time.

If you are used to me being on the show by now, you know that whenever there's a mammoth story, I'm here. I'm on DTNS. Yes, we shine the mammoth light and Dr. Nikki arrives. For real. Yeah.

Yeah, and you may have noticed that Colossal is usually or always the company behind these stories. On March 4th, they announced their Wooly Mouse, calling it a watershed movement in the de-extinction mission that they have in their press release and accompanying pre-print.

So if you're unfamiliar, a preprint is basically an early version of a scientific manuscript, but it has not undergone peer review yet. Okay. So then that means not that the science is wrong necessarily, but no one has checked it. That's the idea of peer review, right? Yeah, not officially through a journal. To have other scientists look and say like, oh yeah, no, this all looks right. Correct. Okay. I'm guessing you might have issues with this.

Yeah, so I will say the mice are extremely cute. But whenever I see a story by Colossal, I immediately want to jump into the nitty gritty details. And quite a few other people have done this as well. So I kind of did lean on them for this. So.

Colossal's team used gene editing to create mice with mutations that they claim are, from their quote, mammoth-centric. That's already a little bit suspicious for me. Mammoth-ish. Yeah. So mammoth-like, appearing mammoth-ish, but potentially not mammoth-ish.

As or whatever you would say. But not actually mammoth. Exactly. Perhaps. So they tested different gene mutations that affect mice, making their hair maybe appear differently, but not those that affect mammoths.

And the mutated mice do have a really great stage name. They're called the colossal woolly mouse. Pretty great. But we already have woolly mice and we've had them since the 1970s when we started breeding lab mice. We're aware that certain mutations or knockout genes are established as creating just extra fuzzy mites. It's a, it's a knockout or it's a gene in the hair,

You know, keratin production area just makes more hair. Go ahead. Like we can breed animals that are fuzzier, right? Yeah.

Just like you have fancy pigeons and fancy dogs. If you watch the dog show, there are also fancy mice breeders and they go after these kinds of traits and you can go and buy these mice from Jackson, like the mouse producer right now. And you can get your own woolly mice if you want. Wait, are there fuzzy pigeons? Is that what you just said? There's fancy pigeons. So Darwin was really into pigeons. Okay. But they're like curly haired pigeons or curly pigeons. Yeah. Okay. Okay. That's a whole thing. Cool. Um,

So we covered when we talked to you about a paper on mammoth genes that Colossal discovered, did they not use those genes? No.

Yeah, so this was back in 2023. Colossal uncovered about five genes related to differences in hair kind of texture, keratin texture between the woolly mammoth and current elephants. But they were not a part of this experiment. Exactly zero genetic changes directly related to mammoth DNA were a part of this experiment, to be clear. Yeah.

And honestly, these mice tell us exactly nothing about mammoths. However, they do tell us that mammoths are really good for PR as Colossal is now worth $10 billion. Wow.

And they were founded in 2021. And that's also when we started covering their stories. In fact, my, I think one of my first D10S lives was episode four, four, four, seven was about a colossal trying to clone the Dodo. Guess what? They haven't done that yet either. So you could, you could kind of start to see the pattern that's coming out here. Okay. So I'm a little disappointed that they just made a mouse that looks kind of like it could be a woolly mammoth, but there is no woolly mammoth in it. Um,

Does this there's is there anything in this that brings us closer to creating or reviving the mammoth? So I think the point of this paper was that they're getting really good at doing multiple gene edits and that accelerates like gene editing science. I guess they kind of framed it in a bit of a clickbaity way. Yeah.

They claim that they want the woolly mammoth by 2028. I think that's entirely ridiculous. And I've covered this again in the past. Like, if you could even edit an Asian elephant to have mammoth genes, you would still have to have an Asian elephant give birth to an edited embryo. And we can barely have elephants in zoos that give birth correctly.

And so as Bethany Brookshire put it on Blue Sky, if this were even remotely possible, you would still end up with an Asian elephant in a mammoth onesie. And I think that's about where we're at right now. A genetically created mammoth onesie, which would be, you know, at least a step from just dressing it up in something, but not much farther. That's too bad. Yeah.

I mean, it does sound like maybe there was some gene editing progress made. Yeah, I'm not going to say that their gene editing work is bad. It's not mammoth-centric. And I also want to point out, when you read scientific studies, it's really important to look at their conflicts of interest at the end of the paper. And this one notes that the authors of the preprint have filed a patent application based on their work, which tends to indicate that the work is more financially...

The goal is a bit more financial. Yeah. Motivated than, than maybe just pure science, which is debatable, but it's important to look at those things when you're looking at these papers. So good on colossal for getting really good at gene editing boo for saying that it's a mammoth. Cause it's not. Yeah. Uh, well that that's important. Uh, thank you for helping us understand when we see those stories that say, uh, they, they created a mouse, woolly mammoth hybrid. They didn't until it has tusks. I'm not. Yeah.

Even then, they probably just got them from an elephant, not from a mammoth. Just glued them on. Yeah. But that there is some science being done here. It's just not the science you're seeing in the headlines. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, Dr. Nikki, thank you so much for helping us understand this. If folks want to follow what you do, where should they go?

They should go to my website, NicoleEckermans.com. And I'm also on Blue Sky as Dr. Headbutt. Go find me there and tell me about all your mammoth stories. What do you want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is our subreddit. We get great stories over there on the subreddit. Submit stories and vote on them at reddit.com slash r slash Daily Tech News Show.

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We end every episode of DTNS with some shared wisdom. And today, Mike in Virginia is helping us understand. Yes. Mike wrote to tell us he's disappointed in the forthcoming acquisition of Pokemon Go by Scorpily. We talked about that last week because Scorpily is owned by Savvy Games, which was created and is majority owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund. Mike writes, I do not want to continue to use an app that would give the Saudi government access to my location data. I

I do not believe the app can continue to function in a way where I would feel assured that Saudi authorities could not or would not use it to find and harass users who disagree with the kingdom's policies. It's a shame the sale of a U.S. company that specializes in location data will be sold to a repressive government like Saudi Arabia, but I suspect regulators are not thinking of the safety of critics of Saudi Arabia. Thanks for giving me the heads up on this deal, Mike in Virginia.

I don't know how many people are going to have this reaction or even aware, uh,

of this sort of thing. I wrote back to Mike and I was like, I don't think it's going to make a difference in your opinion, but just remember, Scorpely is a US company based in Culver City, California. So it is still protected by US law and it would be able to defend itself against requests for data on Pokemon Go. But I get where Mike's coming from. He's like, you know, I just don't want to risk it.

Yeah, well, and I think some people will definitely hit that point to where they just don't want to risk it regardless of the information, the fact around it. I mean, really, at the end of the day, we use so many apps and we share so much information and we don't really know what's going to ultimately end up to that information if the company is sold to another company. It's the risk we take when we play the game. And the Saudi Investment Fund is an investor in a lot of things, including a co-investor with SoftBank.

So if – Mike's not saying I don't want to use any company that takes money from the Saudi investment fund. He's specifically worried about it being wholly owned. In this case, Savvy Games being wholly owned by the public investment fund. And that to him is a little different because they have full control of the company versus their investor. Think of a company. There's probably some Saudi public investment fund in.

Yeah, yeah, indeed. Well, thank you to Dr. Nikki. Thank you to Mike for sending in this thoughtful email for contributing to today's show, as you always, you know, all of you do. Thank you for that. And thank you for being along for Daily Tech News Show. The show is made possible by our patrons on patreon.com slash DTNS. DTNS has a live version called DTNS Live on YouTube and Twitch. You can find details on that and more on dailytechnewsshow.com. We will talk to you tomorrow. Bye, everybody. Bye.

The DTNS family of podcasts, helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program. That was chatty. Yeah, I felt very chatty today. Very chatty.

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