a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: When Your PC Expires, What's Next?

Episode Date: April 30, 2014

Computing is in the midst of a transformation that puts your future device purchases up for grabs. It’s a safe bet that everyone will have a phone, and as the last holdouts switch over, that will inevitably mean a smartphone. But when your PC finally gives up the ghost, are you going to buy another PC? Perhaps a tablet? Or will another large screen device –a really big phone - be the ticket? Maybe just get all three? Benedict Evans and Steven Sinofsky discuss why laptops and tablets are competing for the same customers, and why it’s never wise to defend any form-factor to the death.

Welcome to the A16Z podcast. This is Benedict Evans, and I'm here with Steven Sinovsky, and we're here to talk about tablets and smartphones and the future of devices. So, Stephen, one of the things that we've been talking about looking at what looks like the flattening of iPad sales at Apple, at least for the moment, is this question of the sort of the screen size in the device. that people want and that people need. And all the pushback against the idea that tablets were the future

really kind of came from people saying, well, you're still going to need a PC because you can only do the stuff that you need to do on a PC. And a tablet is a sort of a luxury or an accessory or an optional device. But actually, if you look at what's happening in the market, it seems like actually what real people are doing is leapfogging tablets and going straight to smartphones. So not only do they decide that a tablet is good enough,

they actually decide a smartphone is good enough. And so you've got this kind of funny dynamic where maybe there's the big screen device that does certain things. And first that was a desktop and then it was a laptop and people said laptops are toys and you needed a desktop. And now you've got tablets and people say tablets are toys and you need a laptop. But they're kind of fighting it out in one space of a semi-portable big screen device. And then you've got a smartphone, which is a totally transformative thing that puts the internet in everyone's pocket everywhere. and maybe thinking about laptops, so thinking about tablets and smartphones as the new category,

is an incomplete way of thinking about it. Yeah, I mean, I definitely, first good afternoon, everybody, but, you know, I find this all really fascinating because it's very rare in our industry and in product development that you can sort of watch something transpire that's really transformative. And we're at this generational change in the type of computing.

I mean, I certainly remember the beginnings of portable computing, and it was a world of compromise. Like, the screens are smaller, the first portable computers didn't even have batteries. And they're black and white. They were black and white, and you were first. It was weird that they showed up and they were black and white right when you were getting color for the first time in your office. And so immediately there was the, you know, memory was expensive. And then the big thing back then was they weren't extensible. So you couldn't add aftermarket cards, like if you needed a parallel port or two comp ports.

A sound card. Right. And, of course, that, it's like, again, it's like, as we seem to always see, it's like the very definition of disruption. Like, it's, here you're presented with this inferior product that everybody says is not a replacement for the one you're using, but it has all of these attributes that the other one doesn't, that you really value. And I think that that, for me, is one of the biggest things that's, that's really going on. People posit this as an either or. And while a transformation is happening, if you, there's a really strong tendency to get like a polarizing debate going on, particularly in the way that we have these debates, whether they're on Twitter or in blogs. And of course, in reality, either or at a moment in time is just polarizing.

And you're likely to actually be a reality in somewhere in the gray middle tilting one way or another. But then over time, the transformation is going to happen. And like I always think about it like the example of servers and how there were all these main frames, and then client server computing comes out, and everybody says, look, these servers, quote, that are built on the PC architecture are never going to scale and have all the attributes of a mainframe. And, of course, they certainly didn't have the cost. But they picked up over time, not only did they have a superior programming model that ended up working better and scaling better, but they also picked up the attributes of mainframe, but recrafted, reimagined in a low-cost, broad, horizontal way. and so in a sense everybody was right like mainframe people were right and that they needed redundant power supplies and all of these other parts and then the client server people were right because they picked up and they i mean they took off and they dominated the marketplace yeah i think that's right and we're seeing obviously we're seeing an explosion in smartphone sales now and so there are about one and a half billion smartphones on earth now and we'll go up to maybe three billion and they'll be everywhere with 10 times the number of PCs yeah exactly and there'll be everywhere and they'll be in your pocket and they have this other conversation about them that's so much more complicated and sophisticated than the web desktop web was in any way.

But then you've got this other, the operator, as you were saying earlier, the operating system, this new operating system that comes on smartphones is also coming on the kind of the desktop computing, the large screen computing as well. So it's come to tablets. And so you get some of the compromises that work best on, that make a lot of sense on a smartphone, like power management and multitasking and having one thing on a screen at once comes to the 8, 9, 10-inch screen.

And so you get a lot more of an overlap in the question of, well, is this a laptop, is the old model, the old interface model better or it's a new interface model better? And again, that's going to evolve a lot. Right, and that's, of course, one of those things. This is all happening, and people are building products and it takes time.

And so, you know, because most of the tablet-sized operating systems started from the phone, they picked up that. And I would say, like, it's sort of a little bit of a bummer to me, but there hasn't been as much innovation in the larger screen modern OS-based platforms as one would have liked. I mean, certainly on surface and on Windows, tried things with split screen and multitasking. Well, this is a really funny thing that when the iPad came out, the critic said, oh, it's just a big iPod Touch. And everyone who sort of looked at it and thought, this is amazing. So that's a really stupid thing to say. And then we find out that when they were doing the software, Steve Jobs is going around

with a big stick saying, hurry up, it's just a big iPhone touch, it should be easy. And as you say, you know, if you were just thinking of it as a big iPod touch, you don't do the kind of things that, obviously, the Surface was doing around the split screening. And, you know, you have these puzzles, say, for example,

if you've got to write your app twice, if you're on iOS, really, to get a good experience. On Android, people think you don't have to write your app twice, but actually you do because you've got a fundamentally different screen size, so you need to sit and completely rethink what it should look like. But you still then basically, as you say, got a phone-offs. And it's not quite kind of bringing the productivity center. And that's exactly what the mainframe people

said about Windows and other desktop offerings. They said these are basically desktop operating systems. You're trying to run in a data center. And I think that it's important during the transition to not lose sight of the incredible attributes that are going to come when the evolution is given time to take place. Like, you know, for example, like all the things about power management and security and reliability, this whole sealed case notion of the phone and the tablet OSs, these modern OSs, these are huge, huge benefits. And there's no way of sort of retroactively adding those to the existing, you know, OSS,

whether it's MacOS or Linux or Windows. In fact, I was reading a review last night from one of my favorite bloggers, Paul Thurott. And Paul said, you know, it's 2014, and here we are still agonizing over battery life on the latest Windows PC. And I look at that and go, well, we're not agonizing. It's achieving the very, very best that you can achieve. And even then, it's in an idealized circumstance because as soon as you start loading your own software on it, that software just doesn't have the protections for battery life, the app isolation. the security. And so that's why you get this, the modern PC architecture, degraded over time. It's just a nature of the architecture. Whereas the phones, now, of course, what's interesting

is people will immediately jump to, oh, my phone is now starting to degrade a little bit. And believe me, this is something that the phone people are looking at really carefully, because they all started with these hardcore app rules and isolation. And they're all, and that's why the app stores are such a sort of a point of friction, because they are trying to, to maintain, you know, the modernness and the integrity that came from all of that. But the bottom line is the architecture of these new OSs support a whole model that's just vastly superior. It's just that from the replace a laptop exactly doing the things I was doing before, well, they don't do that. But then again, the pieces. And there's good reasons why

they do that. Right. And the desktop didn't do what the notebook did. And the server didn't do what the mainframe did. Yeah. And the funny thing around, I mean, this is sort of a slight slide topic, the interesting contrast in the smartphone space is that the iOS is the one that's really sealed and really locked down and really easy to use. And Android says we're going to make some slightly different compromises here. And therefore, you would argue that iOS is actually better for that expansion into people who've never touched a PC before. Yeah. Whereas because of the pricing and the way the products are sold, it's completely the other way around. That actually iOS is the one that goes to the early adopters and Android is the one that all

the grandmas get, where actually the grandmas should be given the $50 iOS device. Or grandparents. grandparents should be given the $50 iOS device. But I would still say, like, even from a notion of an innovation curve, you know, like, I can tell my own, you know, my own obvious history and my frustration is a little bit, like, you know, the number of times I see the iPads out in the wild with the keyboard attachments. And, you know, like, I just think a keyboard is a great input device. Like, it's really fast.

And I'm old, so I'm trained for a very long time on using a keyboard. And I've certainly watched, you know, people, you know, much, much younger than me. fly over glass at 50, 60 words a minute without a problem. But for me, it works really well. The posture is right and all that. But at the same time, the underlying OS platform support for having a keyboard, it's got like 30 or 40 bugs that you just sort of wish would get fixed. Like the arrow keys don't always work, tab keys don't work. You wish that there were some keyboard shortcuts for some really obvious things. And you know, and you just kind of wish those would get fixed. And And that's across Android and...

But they will get fixed. I mean, the puzzle to me in the tablet space is, it's like if you contrast tablet, the takeoff of tablet sales and take off the smartphone sells. Well, everyone buys, everyone has a phone. Everyone gets a phone every two years. And so you've got a category conversion

of your going from a dumb phone to a smart phone. And that's just totally unavoidable. And we will, you know, there's 1.7 billion. Phone sold every year. They convert smart, mostly. Whereas in the, if you think of, if you think of a large screen category as desktop laptop tablet, then you're not buying a new one every two years.

You've got a PC replacement cycle of five years. And now the PC you bought four years ago is upstairs and turned off and you're sitting on the couch watching TV and you want to see who that actor is or what that product is. You're not sort of, the tablet will flow into that model and then the tablet will be downstairs on the couch as well. But you've got to make a decision. I'm going to replace my PC or not. So you've got to, the tablet actually has to break into

the PC replacement cycle. Right. As much as it does to establish itself as a new category. Right. And I think it, I mean, I think it's, we're really on the cusp. And I do think that, that what's happening is, is that the, the innovation that's taking place in software on the PC is on a decline. And the innovation that people are starting to pour into the mobile devices, primarily phones, and something that's going to, going to obviously change over time when you see things, like Adobe Lightroom, that's for tablets and things like that. And then on the hardware side, we're just going to start to see more and more innovation and also just a higher value on all day battery life and on portability of that larger screen.

I mean, even something as simple as printing or using an external monitor, these are things that the first tablets didn't do. And now those are second nature for everybody. Like actually, you know, when iPad Office came out from Microsoft, the first thing everybody says is it didn't print. Except it was only two years ago that nobody printed anything from their tablet. And now the marquee app, like the first thing, it doesn't contribute to the printing scenario that... Yeah, well, that's like buying a fax card for your PC 15 years ago or 10 years ago. It's like, well, we've got to print, we've got a fax. Yeah. And I'm just, I think that it's incredibly

exciting to just start to see how the software is going to start to evolve. Because the one thing for sure is that the laptops that people have, they're just not getting carried around at all anymore. And so in a sense, laptops have become desktops. And I saw that. I was at a customer that has about 18,000 employees all around the world. And they just put telemetry on their own network. And they issue laptops to every employee, and they're the safe and secure, managed laptop. And they're just watching those laptops remain more and more stationary. And actually, they're also noticing they're not even powered on. And what's happening is people are just Just, you know, like you used to go to a meeting and everybody would flip up their laptops.

And now you go to a meeting and people are bringing their own personal tablets into the meeting because mostly what they're doing is taking notes and checking mail. And when people talk about tablets are for consumption, you know, it's always been a red herring kind of thing because, of course, like the number one app used on tablets is mail, which is arguably you consume a lot of mail, but you presumably are producing some of it. Yeah, I think there's another, I mean, it's an interesting point of this consumption thing that, I mean, there's an old line that every new technology is a toy and people think it's a toy and you can't do

real work on it and there's all sorts of problems with the idea of what real work is but also part of the expansion of the ownership of these devices is moving it away from people who are typing 60 words a minute all day and it's you know the idea that there's something wrong with a tablet because people spend most of their time playing games and looking

at Facebook and doing email well what did you think consumer PCs were used for for the last 15 years? Of course they weren't writing novels and doing you know running AutoCat on them right well in the thing that's that you leave out is that the pie just grew dramatically yeah like so instead of just just typing for for 20 hours a week in email or even 30 hours a week now you're sitting in front of that device for 40 hours a week or 50 hours a week and and as we go through this sort of form factor shift

I do think we're going to start to see more and more innovative things today I read a rumor HP is going to have a a clamshell device from based on Google software and the rumor was it's based on Android software. And I think that we're going to start to see this sort of watershed moment where the form factor is really just almost become distinctions without a difference when it comes to tracking sales and things like that. Yeah, well, you see that with the tablet, the fablet thing as well. I mean, people can get into very kind of irate arguments about whether a fablet is a phone

or tablet or something else. It's all just glass. You've got a piece of glass and it's cut to a shape that fits in a pocket or doesn't fit in a pocket but you know arguing about what the precise size should count as a phone or not seems kind of irrelevant you're just going to have this endless proliferation of screens and people will have two probably they'll have one that they put in their pocket and carry everywhere they will have they may or may not have a much bigger one that allows them to do more stuff that predominantly stays at home and that may be what we would think of as a PC running windows or macOS it may be a something

running one of these new operating systems. Yeah, I think that that's really the most important thing, which is just that there's this desire to polarize the argument as either or right now, right here today. And the truth is, if you have to decide today, you're going to decide one way or another. But defending it to the death, you know, without allowing for the change that's happening so rapidly in the ecosystems, I think would be a mistake when it's very clear that these benefits. And you don't want to be one of those people caught arguing that, you know, mainframes are here to stay, desktop towers are here to stay, when it's kind of clear the direction that everybody's

heading. Yeah, I mean, just to sort of to wrap up, I mean, there's a final thing that I keep seeing in mobile, which is, you know, in one sense, the platform wars have played out, and we've got Apple and Google and maybe Windows, and, but nothing settled at all. It's not like the last platform was where, you know, Internet Explorer 1, Windows 1, and that was kind of, you know, then you kind of knew what the interaction model was going to be for the next 15 years, and, you know, Microsoft iterated on Windows and Apple iterated on Mac and so on, but that was basically it doesn't look that different. Whereas we have no real idea what iOS or Android can look like in five years time or what Windows phone will look like in five years time. This stuff is

still just all changing really radically. Well, thanks a lot, Stephen. That was actually really interesting way of thinking about what's happening with these devices and with all the software on them. Thanks a lot for having me join again.