Why Are The Biggest Tech Companies So Dominant? | Alex Kantrowitz | Modern Wisdom Podcast 174

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   So, Jeff Bezos goes…

   1. AKAlex Kantrowitz0:00

      So, Jeff Bezos goes in front of this, uh, audience, and there's probably more than 10,000 people in the stadium, and you go, "What does day two look like?" And he says something like, "Day two is stasis followed by irrelevance, followed by slow, painful decline, followed by death."

   2. NANarrator0:14

      (laughs)

   3. AKAlex Kantrowitz0:14

      In front of the whole company. And he looks out and he goes, "And that's why it's always day one."

   4. CWChris Williamson0:22

      (wind blowing) Alex Kantrowitz in the building. How are you doing, man?

   5. AKAlex Kantrowitz0:27

      I'm doing great. Really glad to be on with you, Chris. Thanks for having me today.

   6. CWChris Williamson0:31

      It's timely for me to have someone that reports on tech, given that an hour ago from when we're recording this, Elon Musk just tweeted, "Tesla stock price is too high IMO," and they're now down 11%.

   7. AKAlex Kantrowitz0:46

      That's right, Chris. But to be honest, anytime you, we'd, uh, have, uh, recorded this podcast, whether it was today, a couple weeks ago, or a few weeks from now, Elon would definitely tweet something absolutely ridiculous that would send his company in some sort of tailspin, so-

   8. CWChris Williamson0:59

      (laughs) So-

   9. AKAlex Kantrowitz1:00

      ... uh, it's not very surprising that he tried to tank his stock about five minutes before we hopped on here. So, um, Elon's just gonna keep being Elon. That's just how he does things.

   10. CWChris Williamson1:09

       E- Elon did an Elon, didn't he? He definitely-

   11. AKAlex Kantrowitz1:11

       Yes, he did. Yes, he did.

   12. CWChris Williamson1:12

       He went in- went and did an Elon.

   13. AKAlex Kantrowitz1:13

       I mean, he's... His Twitter is definitely fun to follow. I mean, you just... Just mostly because of the unpredictability about it. Like, he's got this valuable thing in Tesla, and (laughs) he keeps playing with its future every time he hits that tweet button. Like, for him especially, maybe he should just, you know, have someone where he has to read the tweets aloud, and then they type it into the box, and then they send it, and that might prevent some of this stuff from happening. But it doesn't seem like he's really interested in that, so...

   14. CWChris Williamson1:39

       No, yeah, I think a guardian of his Twitter, you know, like you get when you've got your kids-

   15. AKAlex Kantrowitz1:43

       Oh, yeah.

   16. CWChris Williamson1:43

       ... and your kids aren't allowed to use the iPad for more than an hour a day or whatever. You're like, "Look, Elon."

   17. AKAlex Kantrowitz1:47

       That's right.

   18. CWChris Williamson1:48

       "This, this, this tweet's got the word 'stock price' in it. This means that it needs to go through" (laughs) "five layers of security first."

   19. AKAlex Kantrowitz1:55

       Right. Maybe you don't want to send that. But, um, until, until he does, uh, his Twitter account's gonna be a lot of fun to watch, so-

   20. CWChris Williamson2:01

       And you're right, you're right as well, despite the fact he's done that today, whenever this gets published, whenever this episode goes live-

   21. AKAlex Kantrowitz2:08

       Yeah.

   22. CWChris Williamson2:08

       ... he'll probably done something that day too. So just go and have a look at E- E- Elon Musk's Twitter right now and see what he's done. I'd love to find out.

   23. AKAlex Kantrowitz2:13

       Yeah, you'd have the same reaction.

   24. CWChris Williamson2:15

       Yeah.

   25. AKAlex Kantrowitz2:15

       Yeah, it would be like, "Oh, that's ridiculous."

   26. CWChris Williamson2:17

       "I can't believe he's tweeted that." Yeah, exactly.

   27. AKAlex Kantrowitz2:18

       (laughs)

   28. CWChris Williamson2:18

       Um, anyway, we're not talking-

   29. AKAlex Kantrowitz2:19

       Yeah.

   30. CWChris Williamson2:19

       ... about Elon Musk today. We're talking about your new book, Always Day One. Why is it called Always Day One?
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   (laughs) …

   1. AKAlex Kantrowitz15:00

      stuff instead of people. And that's what they did. They started a project that was called Project Yoda, um, which is instead of the vendor managers doing this, they would use the Force, and the Force being machine learning.

   2. CWChris Williamson15:09

      (laughs)

   3. AKAlex Kantrowitz15:10

      Right?

   4. CWChris Williamson15:10

      That's so good. (laughs)

   5. AKAlex Kantrowitz15:11

      And, yeah, it's, it's a funny name. And, uh, you know, it's obviously, like, when you got nerds running the company, you're gonna get good jokes like that.

   6. CWChris Williamson15:18

      Lots of Star Wars references, yeah.

   7. AKAlex Kantrowitz15:20

      That's right, yeah. Um, and then they, they moved, so they, they worked on this a bit. They wor-, they, they moved, uh, moved it further. The program changed from Project Yoda to Hands Off the Wheel, essentially taking, telling their vendor managers, "You've been driving the car. Now, we're gonna let the machine learning do it on its own." And a good portion of tasks inside Amazon right now are all being handled by machine learning. So, things like ordering, inventory management. Even when a vendor wants to negotiate with Amazon, they, instead of picking up the phone now, start to, like, suggest prices in a computer portal. And Amazon says, "Yeah, okay, cool," or "No." That's all being done by machine learning today.

   8. CWChris Williamson15:58

      Wow.

   9. AKAlex Kantrowitz15:58

      I mean, in some c- in some cases, there's human intervention, but very little. And actually, um, just citing, like, a figure to talk about the magnitude, one of Amazon's machine learning, uh, head said that vendor managers used to go, uh, used to be able to handle 1,000 products, products. Now, they can handle somewhere around 100,000. And later clarified saying it was just ballparking, it's not really, but come on. Like, that's, that must be the, um, you know, in the range of the type of mag- orders of magnitude more they're able to handle. Okay, so what happens now when all these tasks are being taken over by, uh, machine learning? A dumb company would say, "Great, let's fire the vendor managers," right? But that's not what happens inside Amazon. So these vendor managers are now all on product and program manager jobs, where they're basically professional inventors inside the company, working to shepherd new ideas along. Um, and they have a, a process inside Amazon called the six-pager, where instead of starting projects, uh, with a PowerPoint, they start it where you write everything down in six pages, single-spaced, 11-point font, no pictures. And it's supposed to be like, okay, you're gonna write the entire way that the project's gonna look like. And we can get that to a decision-maker pretty quickly. And it doesn't matter which level you're in, right? Just a couple of forwards can get that thing to Bezos or his top lieutenants. So that's the system to get ideas to decision-makers. Okay, I'll just finish with a example to bring this all to life. Uh, there's a guy named Dilip Kumar in Apple, in, in Amazon's pricing and promotions division. And, um, Kumar spends a couple of years under Bezos as his technical advisor, uh, meaning that he's shadowing Bezos, uh, all of Bezos' meetings and learning how to do the Amazon, uh, culture pretty well, uh, and, and sort of how Am- how does Amazon work inside? What is, what businesses does it excel at?... typically w- after someone finishes that, so he moves from pricing promotions to the technical advi- advisor job. Typically, when someone finishes that, they can take a big swing. Um, and when he finishes with Bezos as this technical advisor, pricing and promotions is almost all automated.

   10. CWChris Williamson18:00

       (laughs)

   11. AKAlex Kantrowitz18:00

       So he's not going to go back and do that. So he gets together with a bunch of people from the retail division and says, "We need to, uh, figure out a way to solve the most annoying part of shopping in real life with technology." And they decide the most annoying part of shopping in real life is checkout. People don't like waiting on lines and, you know, scanning and all that stuff, um, takes a lot of time. They'd just rather pick their items and get the hell out. So they started thinking, "Okay, maybe we're going to do a big vending machine." But they're like, "Okay, that kind of kicks the can down the curb." So they say instead, um, "What if we use computer vision and sensors and created a store where people could just scan in with a QR code, take whatever they want off the shelves, and then leave?" And that is what became Amazon's Go store, which exists now in a bunch of cities. It's still kind of experimental, but I've used it in San Francisco and Seattle. And-

   12. CWChris Williamson18:48

       What's it like?

   13. AKAlex Kantrowitz18:49

       ... uh, I've tried it. Oh, it feels like you're shoplifting. It's unbelievable.

   14. CWChris Williamson18:52

       (laughs)

   15. AKAlex Kantrowitz18:53

       You go in, you take the stuff, and you're like, "I'm out. I'm free. I just got, like, nine Clif Bars on the house, thanks, Bezos." And then two minutes later, they're like, "Nine Clif Bars. Here, here's your receipt."

   16. CWChris Williamson19:02

       Damn it, Jeff.

   17. AKAlex Kantrowitz19:02

       And you're like, "Dang it, Amazon."

   18. CWChris Williamson19:04

       Yeah, yeah.

   19. AKAlex Kantrowitz19:04

       You know, it's really this wild, just wild experience. And, uh, Amazon, if you read the, between the lines of Jeff Bezos' annual shareholder letters, like, they're going to make this a more prominent part of their retail operation. Um, and so because... So, it's just all the parts coming together, right? It's like you, they've taken the technology, minimized execution work, made room for idea work, built a system to get ideas from people to decision-makers. And when that system works as well as it does, you get another new invention from Amazon, which is Go. And this is sort of how they've been able to do so many different things, from, like, a first-party marketplace, to a third-party marketplace, to a logistics and fulfillment center, uh, uh, l- sorry, logistics and fulfillment operation, to a cloud services division, to a voice computing platform, and a hardware manufacturer that does things like the Kindle and all of their speakers, and then not to mention an Academy Award win- winning movie studio and a grocer.

   20. CWChris Williamson20:00

       (laughs)

   21. AKAlex Kantrowitz20:00

       All of this is a-

   22. CWChris Williamson20:01

       (laughs)

   23. AKAlex Kantrowitz20:02

       ... i- it's, yeah, this is a product of culture. And that's people think, you know, there's this b- when you don't see inside, there's this vision, "Oh, Bezos is the guy doing this. He presses a button and that's how it happens."

   24. CWChris Williamson20:11

       Yeah.

   25. AKAlex Kantrowitz20:12

       Actually what he's done is built a culture to harness other people's ingenuity and bring it to decision-makers. And that's how Amazon's been able to be so inventive.

   26. CWChris Williamson20:20

       It's no surprise that they're so dominant, man. Like, absolutely (laughs) . How can you, how are you supposed to compete with that? It's a company who has the most innovation, the most resources to bring that innovation to market. So even if you have the idea, they can probably execute the same idea as you've had, but quicker and better, and deploy it more through a, a wider geographic range and all the rest of it. Um, you mentioned about, uh, Jeff Bezos and PowerPoint. He banned PowerPoint by sending-

   27. AKAlex Kantrowitz20:50

       Mm-hmm.

   28. CWChris Williamson20:51

       ... an email with just a subject line, and it just said-

   29. AKAlex Kantrowitz20:54

       Mm-hmm.

   30. CWChris Williamson20:54

       ... uh, like, "No more PowerPoint presentations allowed in meetings," or something.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   (laughs) …

   1. AKAlex Kantrowitz30:00

      is generally more potent than, um, government regulation, or, um, you know, your competitors, because, uh, Microsoft could sit on this, um, on this Da- Desktop operating system for as long as it wanted, but the world changed, and we started doing computing on the browser, and we started using our phones, uh, instead of our desktops. And then what use is Windows? It's much more ... I mean, it is exactly how Bezos described that day one, day two mentality, right? Stasis, yes. Irrelevance, uh-huh. You know, slow, painful decline, check.

   2. CWChris Williamson30:29

      (laughs)

   3. AKAlex Kantrowitz30:30

      Okay, death? It was heading that way-

   4. CWChris Williamson30:32

      (laughs)

   5. AKAlex Kantrowitz30:32

      ... until they had to change their, their course. Um, and so after Ballmer, a guy named Satya Nadella came in and took over and became the CEO. And Satya had been a 20-year veteran of Microsoft, and worked on, uh, Bing, which is kind of funny. Everyone makes fun of Bing. Like, "Oh, that's just the shitty search engine."

   6. CWChris Williamson30:50

      It's the special needs version of Google, isn't it? Yeah.

   7. AKAlex Kantrowitz30:52

      That's right. (laughs) I wouldn't go that far, but yeah-

   8. CWChris Williamson30:54

      (laughs)

   9. AKAlex Kantrowitz30:54

      ... it's, it's somewhere in that range. Um, and so, uh, the, th- so the thing with, with Bing is that, um, it's a cloud computing system. And, uh, because it works on ... It's a powerful program that works on the internet that has to make sense of all of these different, uh, links coming in and, and spit something out to people that work. So because Satya had worked on that, uh, he had been able to, um, uh, see where the future of computing was going, basically saying, "We're not going to work on programs that we install, like come in the mail and we install on our computers anymore. You know, put it on Windows. We're going to be working on a browser, and that's cloud computing, and there's gonna need to be an infrastructure that's going to support cloud computing." And the funny thing about that is, um, when you enable cloud computing, you actually hasten Windows' decline, because if you can access a program on the browser, you can use it on a Windows machine or an Apple machine or a Chromebook, and you don't really need Microsoft anymore, or at least in the Windows component. So it was actually a pretty gutsy move to say, "We're going to go support cloud first." And the other thing he says is, "We're going to make sure that our services are available everywhere." So Microsoft Office, you know, you used to only really be able to get on a Windows machine. You couldn't really get it on the internet. And that ended, and they made an app for the iPhone, which is sort of unbelievable given Microsoft's history. You know, back in the Ballmer days, you weren't even allowed to, or yeah, you were basically not allowed to have an iPhone or an Apple product inside-

   10. CWChris Williamson32:18

       (laughs)

   11. AKAlex Kantrowitz32:18

       ... the company.

   12. CWChris Williamson32:18

       Is that true?

   13. AKAlex Kantrowitz32:19

       And ... Oh, yeah, totally. People were like ... Would get scorned, and Ballmer even pretended to smash an iPhone when he saw it in a meeting.

   14. CWChris Williamson32:25

       No way.

   15. AKAlex Kantrowitz32:25

       So, and then Satya was like, "Okay, we got to move past this." So what he did was he reoriented this company, which was in a day two mentality, brought it to day one, and then once he figured out we're gonna ... The company was going to structure itself in a way that supports cloud, collaboration, the internet, um, then the tough job started, which was to change Microsoft's culture, which had been, you know, alpha male, lar- large, I mean, loudest person in the room, yell at each other, to a culture where they had to start using technology. And again, I'm going to sound like a broken record, but it's really what happened. Minimizing execution work, making room for idea work, channeling ideas to decision-makers. And that's how Microsoft turned it around, and it is now the most valuable tech company again-

   16. CWChris Williamson33:06

       So is-

   17. AKAlex Kantrowitz33:06

       ... which is unbelievable.

   18. CWChris Williamson33:07

       ... have, have they really turned it around? Because to me, as someone who doesn't really know, I'm not watching the s-

   19. AKAlex Kantrowitz33:11

       Yeah.

   20. CWChris Williamson33:12

       ... the share price. I don't know what's going on, who's got what amount of market and this, that, and the other. But to me, Microsoft, um, still, uh, now feels like just the granddad at the party type thing, this sort of older guy who used to kind of maybe have it, but now he's playing second string to these other companies. But it sounds like the work that the new CEO has done has actually given them a resurgence.

   21. AKAlex Kantrowitz33:36

       That's right, yeah. They're the most valuable of all the five big tech companies.

   22. CWChris Williamson33:40

       Why?

   23. AKAlex Kantrowitz33:40

       Which is, uh, because I do think that investors see the value in what they're doing, which is moving towards the future. So the products that they work on are not as sexy. Like, cloud computing backend is not as sexy as an iPhone. Uh, but it has, you know, a very bright future. And you look at it now, like we're all sitting at home right now, and Microsoft's collaboration, uh, technology with things like Teams, the usage is going through the roof. So they are really moving to where the enter, like where ... I mean, they're definitely B2B enterprise technology, but they're crushing it there, and there's a bright future for them.

   24. CWChris Williamson34:13

       I mean, businesses have far more money to spend than consumers do-

   25. AKAlex Kantrowitz34:18

       Mm-hmm.

   26. CWChris Williamson34:18

       ... on these sort of high, high-ticket, low-volume kind of, uh, apps and services, I suppose. But yeah, that's interested, that is interesting that, um, that one person, and obviously he'll have brought, this CEO will have brought a team with him, and other people-

   27. AKAlex Kantrowitz34:32

       Mm-hmm.

   28. CWChris Williamson34:32

       ... who have had to have got on board to deploy his ideas. But the, uh ... A business the size of Microsoft can be changed by the fundamental ideas and the vision of just some bloke. He's just some guy, you know?

   29. AKAlex Kantrowitz34:47

       Yeah.

   30. CWChris Williamson34:47

       I mean, he's a very capable guy, obviously, who understands what he's talking about, but he's just some fella that's gone-
4. 45:00 – 57:07

   Mm-hmm. …

   1. AKAlex Kantrowitz45:00

      people that make the battery life live longer, that's what they're focused on. The people that make the screen better, that's what they're focused on. The people that, uh, made the iPhone thinner, that's what they're focused on. The computing power, that's what they're focused on. And they don't spend a lot of time distracted speaking to other people. And that's helped make the iPhone the best phone on the market. I don't think there's any doubt about that. I have one. Um, but for Apple, it's made it difficult for the company to reinvent itself. And I think we can go back to the voice assistant, uh, example.

   2. CWChris Williamson45:28

      Mm-hmm.

   3. AKAlex Kantrowitz45:28

      And, and while your friends might be using Siri only, uh, be using Siri as the only way they use their phones, they're probably the only two people on the planet to do that, because, um, Siri is terrible. And the reason why Siri is terrible is because it was thought about as, not as a voice platform, but as a feature on the iPhone. So just sort of like this fun thing that, like a fun magical assistant you could talk to, not something that could connect you via your voice to the rest of the internet. And because of that, Apple said, "Okay, well, Siri folks, why don't you sit in your own room?" And that's not how it works. Like, we talked about the Google Assistant. Google needed, you know, people across Search and, and Android and YouTube and Maps and Calendar, um, all these different divisions, and, uh, yeah, and music, to be able to integrate with each other and be able to talk to each other to be able to build this thing, um, without any barriers at all. And inside Apple, these silos have prevented the assistant folks from actually getting out there, uh, in a way that would be meaningful and helping Siri, uh, you know, become something that can overtake the Google Assistant and the Echo. Um, and the one, the one, uh, example that I give is that, um, you know, the, the Google ... I mean, Apple gave Amazon a multiyear head start. It gave Google like a five-year head start on Google Assistant. Like, Siri came out in 2012. These other things came out in 2016, 2017, 2018. And then Apple said, "Okay, finally they're going to build a speaker to put Siri inside of." Great. So they built the HomePod. The HomePod is not selling at all.

   4. CWChris Williamson46:54

      It sucks-

   5. AKAlex Kantrowitz46:55

      It's a total embarrassment.

   6. CWChris Williamson46:57

      ... so bad.

   7. AKAlex Kantrowitz46:58

      And the Echo and, and Google Home are in, in tens of millions of homes. And it's, again, it's funny because like for Apple, Apple is so interested in design, right? So they think about the, um, they think about the sound of the speaker and the look of the speaker and the feel of the speaker, whereas the Echo is the ugliest appliance I have in my whole life. It's disgusting to look at. (laughs) I'm looking at it now and I want to throw it out the window. But it's not about the speaker, the way it looks, it's about the assistant inside. And so that's something that Apple is going to have to change, because it's not going to be a visual or physical design first. It's going to be a computer design, and that requires collaboration. And it's struck out on the HomePod. It's also struck out... I mean, yeah, I think it's fair to say it's really struggled to build its own car. It's trying to build a self-driving car.

   8. CWChris Williamson47:46

      Okay. I didn't-

   9. AKAlex Kantrowitz47:46

      And the way they think about this-

   10. CWChris Williamson47:48

       ... I didn't know that.

   11. AKAlex Kantrowitz47:48

       Yeah, yeah. The way they think about this is sort of like the iPhone, right? The iPhone had beautiful hardware, great software, put it together, best phone on the market. Car, self-driving car is similar, right? Beautiful hardware. The, um, the, the way that it looks, and then beau- and then, you know, functional software, which is the self-driving software. Bam, Apple should have the elite on the market there.

   12. CWChris Williamson48:08

       Mm-hmm.

   13. AKAlex Kantrowitz48:10

       But it's had, put this old iPhone style mentality into, into building this car.So they don't let the machine learning engineers talk to each other that are working on different projects. So you'd have people working on the car, people working on face ID. One of them is locating, like, lanes and markers and stuff like that. The other one is locating facial features. And it's been difficult for them to talk to each other, which means their technology develops slower. Then also there's been the influence of design, right? So design inside Apple is the, is the most important division. First, they figure out how it's going to look, then they figure out what's going on inside. So, the-

   14. CWChris Williamson48:45

       (laughs) We're speaking backwards engineering something's pretty.

   15. AKAlex Kantrowitz48:46

       Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's worked, it's worked very well for a lot of products, but for the car, it just hasn't worked well because, um, and I spoke with some people who had worked on this, the design team asked them to take the sensors that are out there to figure out what's going on on the road and embed them in the car. Because typically, with a self-driving car, it looks like this horrific, you know, rolling submarine, uh, with all these different, you know, knobs and, and laundromats-

   16. CWChris Williamson49:10

       Satellite dish that whirs round in a... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   17. AKAlex Kantrowitz49:12

       Oh. It looks almost as bad as the Echo. And, uh-

   18. CWChris Williamson49:15

       (laughs) Yeah.

   19. AKAlex Kantrowitz49:16

       ... so a- a... Of course Apple isn't going to be down with that. So they say, "Okay, take the sensors, put it in the car." So it looks much nicer. But for the machine learning engineers, it's much more difficult to figure out what they're trying to do because it's like putting blinders on your eyes, right? Now you can only see this, you know, th- this much and your peripheral vision is cut in a certain way. And then how do you make a, a machine learn how to do self-driving if it can't get the full range of vision? And so that's one of the reasons why the product has struggled.

   20. CWChris Williamson49:40

       Shit. I-

   21. AKAlex Kantrowitz49:41

       So, look... Yeah, sorry, sorry, go ahead.

   22. CWChris Williamson49:43

       I, I, I just think that my, uh, seduction into Apple is probably very common amongst, like, just normal consumers. You know, you think all of their products are super slick. I'm speaking to you on a MacBook Pro that I upgraded to even though I didn't need to just because the new one looked good. I got an iPhone, I've got AirPods. I bought my mom and dad AirPods for, like, last Christmas and the Christmas before and blah, blah. You know, like, but because the design is so seductive and, um, so visceral and so easy to see, right? You know, like Microsoft, perfect example. Like, I do not think sexy when I think Microsoft, but-

   23. AKAlex Kantrowitz50:25

       Yeah.

   24. CWChris Williamson50:26

       ... money talks, you know. The numbers don't lie. And they're the biggest, the biggest company of all the ones that we've spoken about and they're doing, like, some of the least sexy shit. But I guess it all depends on what the vision is. And the oth- the other thing as well, uh, that I've noticed when you're talking about Apple is, it seems like a very old style approach to, um, management and also careers within a company in that you've got specialization. You know, this is Henry Ford shit. You know, this is like 1910 shit.

   25. AKAlex Kantrowitz50:56

       Right.

   26. CWChris Williamson50:56

       The guy that, that turns the knob, he's the knob turner and the guy-

   27. AKAlex Kantrowitz51:01

       Yeah.

   28. CWChris Williamson51:01

       ... that pulls the lever, he's the lever puller and the duh, duh, duh, duh... You know what I mean? And it seems like that siloing, um, could go one of two ways, but given the fact that all of your competitors are, are being super effective with this super transparent free flow of information, it seems surprising that Amazon have done that. Do you think that they're gonna be forced to make a change or start really losing, losing ground?

   29. AKAlex Kantrowitz51:27

       Yeah. A- and I do think that this sort of goes to show how difficult it is for a lot of companies to get away from the factory mentality, right? And Apple's definitely still in it. Like, Ford is a good example of specialization, right? Like, that's what happens inside the company. So I think Apple's going to be okay. I, I think that, like, the things that you're talking about, like, I'm also, I have an iPhone, I have AirPods, um, I'm talking to you through, uh, an Apple computer. So I do think that they're going to be doing fine. But to go back to where we were in the beginning of the conversation, if the average company on the Fortune 500 lasts for 15 years now instead of 67, that means there's going to be shifts that will come along that they won't be prepared for unless they're ready to adapt. And to me, the main question is, is Apple going to be ready to adapt when those shifts come for it? Like, maybe it is voice computing, maybe it's some other shift that we're not aware of. Um, and are they going to lose their lead because of that? And I think it's quite possible. So I do still have hope that there will be a culture change there and they'll be able... I think they'd be as effective as they are today even if they opened up a bit. Um, and, uh, yeah, I think that they... if there's not a culture change, they'll be... They'll still make good phones, but they'll struggle to navigate the, the next change. So they're kind of, they'll kind of be like Microsoft if Microsoft stuck with Windows and didn't get into new businesses.

   30. CWChris Williamson52:45

       Yeah, I get it. Look, Alex, man, it's been really, really awesome. Finishing up, final question. What is your, uh, vision for tech or what are your predictions for the big things happening in tech over the next five to 10 years? What should we be on the lookout for?

Episode duration: 57:07