Tag Archives: COVID-19

COVID-19 Hits Google Hard – Google Next Cloud Goes Completely Online and I/O is Cancelled

At this point of time, COVID-19 has claimed over 3,000 lives globally. These are known deaths caused by COVID-19 and there may be more than that. To be honest too, this is a very difficult write-up. Not because there is very little information to work with. It is just the fact that COVID-19 news are not getting any better. There is a glimmer of hope though; WHO claims that COVID-19 containment and treatment is very viable.

Source: MS Poweruser

Still, COVID-19, or more commonly known as Coronavirus at this point has claimed more than just lives. It is affecting communities and commerce as well. Of course it would, people run these businesses and communities, people are getting infected and therefore sick; conducting business activities then is difficult.

We saw Apple getting affected earlier on with their China stores temporarily closing. Foxconn, their manufacturing plant had also stopped operating at some point. Mobile World Congress 2020 has been cancelled; Geneva Motorshow is also being torn down as we speak because they cancelled the event at the very last minute. Even Formula 1 is being heavily affected; they lost China GP this year and who knows which other GP is being cancelled due to the global emergency that is COVID-19.

Plenty are hopeful that the disease will be contained and cured by June or July. That is why some events has been postponed to then. Even Computex 2020 seems to be happening still. The situation now is not very encouraging though.

This week alone we see more victims to COVID-19. On top of new confirmed deaths around the world we see Microsoft’s MVP physical event going completely digital. Facebook is also cancelling the F8 summit. Even Adobe is not spared; Adobe is having their Summit announcements completely online too. The hardest of all is Google having to cancel both their big conferences.

Source: Google

Google has cancelled their Cloud Next event earlier on this week. They announced thought that the conference will be a completely online affair. There was also a sort of expectation that some of the things that would be covered on Cloud Next would appear in Google’s I/O which was still reported to be happening. This morning proved our optimism wrong though. Google is cancelling the Google I/O conference; their biggest developer conference of the year has been cancelled.

If we are right, we are seeing Google’s latest Android 11 on the big stage of Google I/O. It looks like we are going to have to see it on an online stage instead; they show must go on, as they say. There is no final confirmation yet on the online streaming of Google I/O yet though. We are expecting them to go online because Google is completely equipped to livestream all their conferences, which they have done before anyway. Of course, it helps that they own YouTube anyway.

Google is not the first to be hit strongly by COVID-19. We highly doubt that Google will be the last one. We are expecting the Olympics committee to make an announcement soon regarding the Summer Olympics 2020 in Japan. For all you know, Japan might be the one that makes the announcement of a border containment. Still, these are just speculations; take it with a pinch of salt. Not Google’s cancellations though, those are confirmed.

Source: Google, Tech Crunch, 9to5 Google

More COVID-19 Casualties: Apple’s Q2 Earnings Taking a Punch

The development on the Novel Coronavirus of 2019, now more commonly known as COVID-19, is on every headline for the past month or so. If you have not heard, the Mobile World Congress 2020 (MWC2020) that is supposed to open its doors soon was shut down due to the large health concerns. They are not alone though. The F1 GP to be held in China in about two months time has been cancelled via the request of the local organisers. If you missed our news, Acer’s Predator League 2020 set to happen at the end of this month is also cancelled due to health concerns.

All these are quite expected, to be fair. What is even worse is that plenty of factories in China had to close down or stop operating for the time being thanks to the vicious spread of the virus. One of those affected manufacturing plants are Apple’s contractor, Foxconn. That also means there is currently a global shortage of Apple iPhones. Of course, that is going to hit the market and Apple’s earnings a little bit.

For good measure, for their investors anyway, Apple just predicted that their Q2 revenue will be lower than the expected US$ 63 to 67 billion. If you are thinking that it cannot be that much lower for Apple to make an announcement like this, it looks quite bad from Apple’s side. Their prediction also says that they will not even make the lowest mark of the revenue estimates for Q2 of 2020.

At this time Apple is predicting up to a 36% difference between the expected shipment for Q2 2020 and the actual shipment number. Optimistically they are expecting a 29% difference. Still, that big of a difference in shipments is going to be quite a big hit to their revenue numbers.

Apple did not mention how big of an impact the plunge in shipment will make though. At this time we cannot comment too much into their reduced shipments or even predict how much they will lose in revenue for Q2 2020. To be fair, even our attention is mostly fixed on the development on COVID-19.

Sources: 9to5 Mac, Mac Rumors, Mashable