The dreaded gmail redesign is here

Welcome to Birch Bytes, the weekly insights newsletter for marketing and business strategists!

Happy Thursday! Or for everyone in Japan - Happy Mountain Day! Let's get right into this week's updates!

Is cloud hosting as reliable as we thought? An explosion at a Google data center sent three people to the hospital and around the same time the search Goliath suffered a severe service outage for Search and Maps.

The promise of these cloud providers is incredible redundancy, which left everyone with one eyebrow raised on how one data center could do this. Google followed up fairly quickly saying these two events had nothing to do with each other. These were just two separate mess ups. We guess that's better?

The dreaded gmail redesign is rolling out! Our team was hit with the new redesign earlier this week, and as a zoom/slack company, we have no plans on using spaces, chat, or meet. Is there anyone out there deep in the Google eco system enjoying it?

Google shames Apple For iMessage lock in. Seems like Google has finally given up on actually competing with iMessage in the US and is going the old fashioned way to make change - lobbyist and PR shaming! They launched the website android.com/get-the-message/ trying to change some minds over at Apple.

Google does have a point though - a more unified RCS standard could have a positive impact for businesses and brands, RCS would open up a much more interactive way of communicating. Apple's Business Chat solution has not gotten a lot of adoption and the fragmentation and lock in leaves this area lacking.

The rest of the world rolls their eyes and continues to use WeChat 😀

Apple tells Taiwan to label its products as made in China. There have been rumbles of supply chain adjustments because of the recent Taiwan disputes but if even Apple can't escape the fallout we are truely seeing the foundation of this industry adjust. Companies getting their products from over seas will need to keep an eye on their supply chain and should probably be pro-active about their sourcing starting immediately.

That's it for this week! Catch you later!

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