Morning Consult Tech: What’s Ahead & Week in Review
 

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Essential tech industry news & intel to start your day.
July 4, 2021
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Morning Consult Tech will be off Monday for the Fourth of July holiday. The newsletter will resume Tuesday.

 

Good morning, Morning Consult Tech readers, and Happy Independence Day! I hope your day is filled with great food, fireworks, friends and family (in a healthy and safe environment, of course).

 

Speaking of parties, many of them will include alcohol — which requires either a beer run or (in some areas) delivery. In this week’s quiz, can you guess the share of U.S. adults who said they intend to use an alcohol delivery app in the future? Answer choices:

 

A: 10%     

B: 15%     

C: 25%     

D: 45%

 

Check out the answer at the bottom of today’s newsletter.

 

What’s Ahead

Amazon.com Inc. founder and Chief Executive Jeff Bezos will mark his final day as the tech giant’s leader on Monday, the 27th anniversary of the company’s incorporation. Amazon Web Services leader Andy Jassy, who has worked for Amazon for 24 years, will take the helm, while Bezos will still have a presence at the company as executive chairman. Why it matters: Jassy will be taking over Amazon as the company faces some of the biggest threats to its reign in the e-commerce industry, from antitrust efforts against tech companies by the White House and Capitol Hill to a renewed push for unionization of its workers, this time by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Frankly, it will be odd to see someone other than Bezos, who started Amazon as an online book marketplace in his garage in 1994, handling a company that (love it or hate it) completely changed how most U.S. consumers buy products. But don’t expect him to drop out of the spotlight, as he transitions his focus to other projects, including the growing private-sector space race with his aerospace company Blue Origin LLC against fellow rich-dude-turned-space entrepreneurs Elon Musk (SpaceX) and Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc).

 

 

The Brookings Institution is holding a webcast titled “Reconciliation 101: An explainer of the budget process” on Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. Why it’s worth watching: Infrastructure week (month? year?) took a turn recently when President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats began discussing proposals that could be included in a separate bill passed through budget reconciliation (via a simple majority vote). This came just after Biden and a group of bipartisan senators finally struck an infrastructure compromise that mostly included traditional bread-and-butter measures (fixing roads, bridges, etc.) A separate bill could include some of the White House’s “social” infrastructure, such as child care and climate change initiatives. While broadband funding has been locked into the current infrastructure package, it is unclear what tech-related provisions might be included in a bill slated for budget reconciliation, but Brookings’ webcast can at least shed some light on how this complicated process works once a full-fledged bill has been laid out.

 

 

Financial Times Live will be hosting a virtual webinar Thursday in partnership with Slack Technologies Inc. called “The Future of the HQ.” Why it’s worth watching: For many, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the way people work (at least in the short term), especially for those in tech-related workplaces who did their jobs remotely during lockdowns and beyond (including yours truly). Now, as society begins to return to normal, many employers are considering how their workers will carry out their jobs going forward. Most proposals — at least from larger tech companies — include a full work week in the office, a hybrid schedule of days spent both in the office and at home, and a full-remote work week. But the future work schedule isn’t just about location: Some companies have experimented with a four-day work week versus the usual five-day, 9-5 grind, and some of them have found both morale and productivity have increased among their employees. “The Future of the HQ” event is expected to feature some of these discussions and will include comments from Slack co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Cal Henderson, The John Lewis Partnership Executive Director of Operations Andrew Murphy and Spotify Technology SA Chief Human Resources Officer Katarina Berg.

 

Events Calendar

 

Week in Review

 
Stat of the Week
 

$5.4 million

 

The selling price for the non-fungible token of the original files of the source code for the “World Wide Web” application.

 
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