Modern Wisdom - #174 - Alex Kantrowitz - Why Are The Biggest Tech Companies So Dominant?

Episode Date: May 23, 2020

Alex Kantrowitz is a Senior Tech Reporter at Buzzfeed and an author. The biggest tech companies on the planet are incredibly dominant and today we discover what is inside each of them that drives their competitive edge. Expect to learn why powerpoint is banned from Amazon, what a one-to-one meeting with Mark Zuckerberg is like, why Apple might need systemic change if they're not going to fall behind, how Microsoft was turned around by a single man, why CeeLo Green is a good spokesperson and much more... Sponsor: Sign up to FitBook at https://fitbook.co.uk/join-fitbook/ (enter code MODERNWISDOM for 50% off your membership) Extra Stuff: Follow Alex on Twitter - https://twitter.com/Kantrowitz Buy Always Day One - https://amzn.to/2LM6tNe Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello my beauties, welcome back. My guest today is Alex Cantrowitz. He is a tech reporter for BuzzFeed and his new book, Always Day One, looks at the biggest tech companies in the world and tries to work out just why they're so successful. It's easy to look at Apple's iPhone or Amazon's delivery service and say, wow, of course they're brilliant, but it has to be more than just the products that they deliver if they're consistently being successful. And trying to find out what that secret source is, is the topic of Alex's book. It's really interesting to hear from someone who's been sat down in a press meeting one to one with Mark Zuckerberg or Met Jeff Bezos or watched Celo Green perform live attack conference in front of a 10,000 people all

shouting fuck you. So yeah, super interesting stuff, a lot to take away and a lot of insights into companies that you never thought you would get to see behind the door of. So get ready for this one. It's been a while since I mentioned this, you old time listeners will be familiar but new ones may not be. If I speak to an author, I will link their book in the show notes below. And if you follow that link, you will be supporting the Modern Wisdom podcast at no extra cost to yourself. Also, on my Amazon shop front, I have a full list of every product we have ever featured in Lifehacks and every book from every author that's ever been on the show plus a bunch of other ones that I enjoy and that is linked in the show notes below. So go and check that out and yeah if you're going to pick up the book of an author that

I feature on the show, follow that link, I would really appreciate the support. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Alex Cantrowitts. Alex Cantrowitt in the building, how you doing man? I'm doing great, really glad to be on with you, Chris. Thanks for having me today. 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%.

That's right, Chris. But to be honest, anytime we've recorded this podcast, whether it was today a couple of 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 it's not very surprising that he tried to tank his stack about five minutes before we hopped on here. So Elon's just going to keep being Elon. That's just how he does things.

Elon did an Elon, didn't he? He definitely did. Yes, he did. He went and did an Elon. I mean, his Twitter is definitely fun to follow. I mean, you just mostly because of the unpredictability about it, like he's got this valuable thing in Tesla and 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.

No, yeah, I think a guardian of his Twitter, you know, like you get, when you've got your kids and your kids aren't allowed to use the iPad for more than an hour a day or whatever. You know, like look at that. This tweets got the word stock price in it. This means that it needs to go through five layers of security first. Maybe you don't want to send that,

but until he does, his Twitter account's going to be a lot of fun to watch. And you're right as well. Despite the fact he's done that today, whenever this gets published, whenever this episode goes live, and they've probably done something that day too. So just go and have a look at Elon Musk's Twitter right now and see what he's done that today. Whenever this gets published, whenever this episode goes live, and they've probably done something that day too. So just go and have a look at Elon Musk's Twitter right now

and see what he's done. I'd love to find out. You have the same reaction. Yeah, I would be like, oh, that's ridiculous. I believe he's talking about it. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, we're not talking about Elon Musk today. We're talking about your new book, Always Day One.

Why is it called Always Day One? Yeah, that's a great question. So Jeff Bezos gets in front of Amazon's employees a couple of years ago. And he's got this note card with him. And it's at the end of this all hands meeting. And it's a question submitted from one of his employees. And it says, what does day two look like?

This is sort of not the thing that you want to ask Jeff Bezos because he's been preaching. This always day one mentality inside Amazon. And I always thought that always day one just sort of meant you got to want to work as hard as you possibly can. You work nights, you work weekends, you work holidays. And if you take your foot off the gas pedal, you're done. And so Jeff Bezos goes in front of this audience and there's 10, I mean, yeah, probably more than 10,000 people in the stadium in Seattle. And he 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. In front of the whole company. And he looks out and he goes, and that's why it's always day one. And you know, I saw this clip when I was getting deep into my reporting on Amazon. And my first view of it was, oh, he is doing this hustle, porn thing, work so hard, you know, work 80, 90 hours. Otherwise, you're out of Amazon. And if that was the case, I definitely wouldn't have had it, would not have had it as the title of the book. Because I, you know, I do think that it's important to work hard,

but I kind of skeptical of these people that say you need to work 100 hours a week or you're not gonna make it. I think it's possible to have a healthy work life balance and still do okay. What I found out that always day one needs inside Amazon is that they're always inventing the next business line without any regard for what they have today

and what they had in the past. So for them, it's about reinvention. It's about, let's keep building new products. We won't sit on our flagship products and wait for them to take us all the way. Because right now, it's just impossible to do that. In the 1920s, the average company would sit on the Fortune 500 for 67 years. Today, it's 15 years. So that's why Amazon and the rest of the tech giants live in this always day one mentality. They're constantly reinventing because they know if they get two pressures about the present and the past, they're going to miss the future. So there's this mentality that they have to continually be inventing themselves

into the future or else they're done. And there's a culture that underpins it. It's not enough to have this mentality and say, we want to live in day one. And just go about your business as a traditional company. What they've done, the real ingenuity inside these companies is building the culture, technology and process. That's allowed them to keep reinventing. And that's helped them stay on top.

How did you get such access to all of these companies? Who are you? Why should you be the person that's able to peer into the most exciting, biggest, most innovative companies on the planet? You know, that is a great question. And sometimes I've been a bit surprised, but I will say that I'm a tech reporter here in Silicon Valley, live in San Francisco. So I've spent the last five years here and I was reporting on tech in New York before that. And so I have spent a lot of time meeting with these companies in Silicon Valley. And my reporting has has been out there. People, people recognize it. So I think there might have been a sense that this book was going to have an impact. And then one thing that I have that most tech reporters don't

is a background in industrial and labor relations, meaning that I've studied the nature of work and organizational behavior, human resources, how companies are run, how people are motivated, and I brought that with me here. So by having that background and then looking at the tech companies and saying I wanna write a book about how they work and what it means for the future of the way that we work and the way we lead companies to me that must have resonated.

Yeah, I think so. As opposed to, I imagine some tech reporters must armchair philosophies about how the world might be as opposed to perhaps someone like yourself who's got more real world experience of what actually happens within these companies, what a culture like this means to the people who live it and breathe it and work it. That's right. Yeah. And I also worked in sales and marketing for three years before becoming a reporter. So I have an idea of how companies that sell products work. So that's potentially that background house. But yeah, my main philosophy as a reporter is don't get lost in narratives. Don't try to make someone look good or try to make someone look bad. Just tell the truth. And I think that's helped me out in my career for sure.

That's awesome. So high level, what's the book? You've covering different companies and looking at different cultures within them? Yeah, so it's all about how they put this always day one mentality into action inside their companies. And so they've done this in, well, actually really three ways. One is have the mentality. Right. If you have the mentality that you're going to try to milk your asset, your flagship business,

and not worry about building another business, you're going to be, you're going to be screwed. So they have the mentality. The second thing is they do, they do, is they view work differently than most of us do. I think that we need to separate work, the work we do into two buckets. One is idea work. That's anything that's involved in coming up with new ideas and bringing it to life, and the other is execution work. That's anything that's involved in supporting the existing products that you have. We've gone through three major transformations, but three eras in our work life since the factory era. People forget the factory was only 100 years

ago. That was dominating our economy 100 years ago. Human existence is much longer than 100 years. So we've had radical transformations in the way that we work in just a century. And our systems, like our cultural systems, our leadership systems, are always a little bit slow to catch up and they certainly have in this point. So let's start with the factory. In the industrial era, almost all the work that we did was execution work. There would be like one little bit of idea work which came from like the owner of the factory, right, who said, let's make widgets. And what do they hire employees to do? All execution work, just being in the factory, making widgets.

Okay, then in the middle of the 1900s, we transitioned to what's called the knowledge economy, which all of a sudden employee ideas actually mattered. But because we were so process heavy, we would have a teeny tiny bit of our time, and this is what exists in most companies now, but teeny tiny bit of our time on an ideal work, and still most of it was on execution work. Now we weren't pushing buttons and hitting levers like we were in the factory, but we were doing similar work

that wasn't really involved in creating anything new. So that could be anything from moving numbers from one spreadsheet to another, or putting the same invoice in to buy the same product at the same amount every week, or writing the same letters to the same people every week. Anyone who's been in a job knows this, right? And because there was so much execution work in the knowledge economy, our ideas really

haven't been taken into consideration by management. So I think that anyone who's, people come into companies, they're creative and they're filled with energy and they want to change the way the company works. And they see all this opportunity because all this opportunity is there. And they know we can do this and launch this product line and we can change this process. And hey, why have you thought about connecting

these two groups? And that energy usually lasts for the first six months or so until they're told, actually, you know, we don't really hear for your ideas. You hear just to like do this one little task. And it doesn't matter how much you can contribute to making this company better, we're not actually really concerned with it.

That's the message that gets sent because anyone who's brought these ideas inside the company knows generally people say, oh, you know, not really time for that. Or you know, you were hired to do this. Why are you saying that? And that's a factor of the fact that we're living in this execution work economy, because

even in the knowledge economy, most companies don't have the capability to take those employee ideas and turn them into life because they are spending all their time supporting their existing products. Okay, so this brings me into what the tech giants do. What they've done is use technology, process automation, and process optimization to take the amount of execution work they have in their companies down and then make room for idea work. And then once they have their employees, thinking of new ideas and having permission to

actually come up with ideas because that's a big part of it, they build system to take those ideas to decision makers and bring them to reality. And everyone's saying, why are Amazon Apple Facebook, Google, Microsoft so strong? What are they doing that's illegal? And they definitely have some nefarious behavior. But to me, the most important thing is culture. It starts with culture. It begins with taking down execution work, making room for idea work, building the systems

to turn those ideas into life. And that's why they're lapping the economy more than anything. It's just not something anyone talks about. And I think if the rest of us start paying attention to these systems, we have a much better chance of competing in their world, competing with them, carving out our own uses to be able to make this happen today. And that's sort of the point of the book is I said enough of this, right? I want to do the secret sauce. Yeah, teach me the secret sauce. That's right.

I was just like, yeah, enough of this. I'm in Silicon Valley. Might as well let people know what's going on. So the rest of us can start to come and act the way they do in our own companies and start to make some progress in evening this economy out. Yeah, it's fascinating that the friction of taking idea from in someone's head to the market is one of the major barriers that people need to get over.

So you've got to have the capacity within the company operationally, innovatively in order to be able to deliver that, right? But then you also need to give, have the talent and the time for that talent to come up with the right amount of ideas and then probably iterate on them and get rid of the bad ones and get rid of the bad ones and get rid of the bad ones. And then finally, you come up with this super left field thing. And that's how you end up with companies, you know, going through the book, it's mad, all of the different stuff, specifically Amazon, but all of the companies have their fingers in little different pies. And you think, why doesn't it really seem to make so much sense?

It's not part of their core business, but then you actually realize when you're constantly innovating and iterating on these different things, these ideas are going to come to the forefront and you're the person that's able to bring it to the market. It's mad. That's right. And it sounds so simple, right? Give people more time for ideas and bring them to life. It's actually fairly complex, and that's what these companies do so well. And I can give you an example if you're interested. It is.

So, you mentioned Amazon. Amazon to me does this in the most wild way that I had no idea about. And actually hasn't really been reported about too much. And I got to see it first time when I was out in Seattle, spent a good chunk of two summers in Seattle, hanging out, reporting on Amazon and cat sitting. My friend, mother's cat, Lady the Cat, who was a good friend of the process. And, you know, really, yeah, it was fun. Lady really kept me going and, you know, those days. I didn't know many people in Seattle.

So it was nice to have that cat friend in that time. But I will say that, okay, so Amazon. So one of the things I really wanted to know is how does Amazon use automation, not just in the factories and the, sorry, the warehouses, but in their headquarters as well. Because I heard some rumblings that like, hey, people are getting their jobs automated

in Amazon's headquarters. And you don't hear that too often. So what I found out is that they have a program called Hands Off the Wheel. And Hands Off the Wheel automates a lot of the traditional retail tasks for employees in Amazon's retail division. So I'll explain. So typically when you are a company like Amazon, you have these people called vendor managers. And vendor managers. Vendor managers are on the phone all day with suppliers saying we need this many units and these many fulfillment centers at this time at this price. So you got a vendor manager, they're on the phone, proctor, and gamble, and they say,

we want detergent, give us X number of units of detergent. In these locations, we want it at like 650 a unit, and we want it there, an installments of every other week or something like that and Amazon built an army of people who were working with Venderman working with vendors to stock their fulfillment centers and All of a sudden in the mid 2010s Amazon's like wait a second. We have all this data that shows us what people want actually our data Probably knows better than the vendor managers what they want, because it's precise. And what if we decide that we could have

our machine learning team work on this? And they figure out how to use computers to do all this stuff instead of people. And that's what they did. They started a project that was called Project Yoda, which is instead of the vendor managers doing this, they would use the force, when the force being machine learning.

Right? That's so good. And yeah, it's a funny name. And it's obviously, when you got nerds running the company, you're going to get good jokes like that. That's install woes references in. That's right. Yeah.

And then they moved, so they worked on this a bit. They moved it further. The program changed from project Yoda to hands off the wheel, essentially telling their vendor managers, you've been driving the car. Now we're going to let the machine learning do it on its own. A good portion of tasks inside Amazon right now are all being handled by machine learning. Things like ordering inventory management, even when a vendor wants to negotiate with Amazon,

they instead of picking up the phone now, start to suggest prices in a computer portal. Amazon says, yeah, you're okay, cool. No, that's all being done by machine learning today. In some cases, there's human intervention, but very little, and actually just citing like a figure to talk about the magnitude, one of Amazon's machine learning had said

that a manager used to be able to handle 1,000 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 must be the, 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 tests are being taken over by 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 the shepherd new ideas along. They have a process inside Amazon called the Six-Pager, where instead of starting projects with a PowerPoint, they started where you write everything down in six pages, single space to 11-point font, no pictures, and it's supposed to be like, okay, you're going to write the entire way that the project is going to look like, and we can get that

to a decision maker pretty quickly, and it doesn't matter which level you're in, 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 an example to bring this all to life. There's a guy named Dilip Kumar in Amazon's Pricing and Promotions division. And Kumar spends a couple of years under Bayzos as his technical advisor, meaning that he's shadowing all Bayzos' meetings and learning how to do the Amazon culture pretty well, and how does Amazon work inside? What business does it excel at? Typically, after someone finishes that, so he moves from pricing promotions to

the technical advisor job. Typically, when someone finishes that, they can take a big swing. And when he finishes with Bezos as this technical advisor pricing and promotions is almost all automated. 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 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 check out. People don't like waiting on lines and scanning and all that stuff. It takes a lot of time. They just rather pick their items and get the hell out. So they started thinking, okay, maybe we were going to do a big vending machine, but they're like, okay, that kind of kicks the can down the curb. So they started thinking, okay, maybe you'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, what if we use computer vision and sensors and create a store where people could just scan it with a QR code,

take whatever they want off the shelves and then leave. And that is what became Amazon's ghost 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. What's in there? I've tried it. Oh, it feels like your shoplifting. It's still kind of experimental, but I've used it in San Francisco and Seattle. And I've tried it. Oh, it feels like your shoplifting. It's unbelievable. People won't you take the stuff. And you're like, I'm out. I'm free. I just got like nine cliff bars on the house. Thanks, Bayesos. And then two minutes later, they're like nine cliff bars. You're, here's your receipt. And you're like, think it Amazon. Yeah. You know, it's really this wild, just wild experience. And Amazon, if you read the between the lines of

Jeff Bezos' annual shareholder letters, they're going to make this a more prominent part of their retail operation. It's just all the parts coming together. They've taken the technology, minimized execution work, made room for idea work, build 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, 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 winning movie studio and a grocer. All of this is a product of culture. That's people think, when you don't see inside, there's this vision, oh Bayesos is the guy doing this, he presses a button, and that's how it happens. Actually, what he's done is built the 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. It's no surprise that they're so dominant, man. Like, absolutely. 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 wider geographic range and all the rest of it. I'd never heard of UI path before.

Can you tell us what UI path is, please? Yeah, it's an automation company. So a lot of times people say, well, the tech giants are doing this so I could never do it. But it's really not the case. And when we talk about minimizing execution work, make room for ideal work, there are off-the-shelf solutions that any company can use.

So in the introduction of the book, I talk about this company called UI Path. And what UI Path does, it's software will watch your screen as you work. So you sort of open up a session and let's say you're like filling out a form. It can watch your screen as you work and each button you click and each keystroke you make, you just label it to the machine learning system and it will remember how to do it on its own. And so it can do, it can fill out forms,

it can send letters, it can move data from one spreadsheet to another. It can take over all this execution work that we do all day long and take it over via automation. So I went to this conference in Miami and it was crazy and C.L. Green was the opening singer, which was hilarious, he's going to the audience.

All right, if you got someone you need to say fuck you do now is the time. And they're all like, fuck you. And I'm like, you guys are like automating people's jobs. Like I said, it's kind of weird. Yeah. But, but it was amazing to see how many people, how many different industries were represented at this conference, let alone the stuff that it can do. But it was like, you saw automotive, you saw insurance, you saw was like you saw automotive you saw insurance you saw health

you saw technology companies there you saw banks and You know one of the things that I was striking to me was that This technology is available to people clear. There's interest Inside companies to put it into place, but it's almost as if they're like driving blind They're like yeah, we want to automate, but I heard very little about the broader strategy of why to automate. So I do think that like if they're able to do this and put some of the lessons from the tech giants in place, then they'll be in much better shape. Didn't you say that it's able to do hiring, it can sort hiring people. And then when it comes time to get rid of them as well,

that this UI path thing can send them their letter. Yeah. So it's able, I know it's wild, but it's able to write letters. So if you, you know, new higher letters are pretty formulaic. So when you have a new higher letter, UI path can handle that. And so of course, you can have a termination letter that it can do as well. It's just something about it. Oh, man. And so upon kind of seeing this big overview, obviously we've touched on Amazon, but there's Google, Microsoft, Apple, and stuff as well. And it sounds dumb, but I kind of presumed that these big companies just operate the same way.

Like when you get to the sort of size of these companies, you'll have optimized everything, and the size of the operation will have whittled away any ability to actually enact real change, cultural or operational. And you just kind of, there were all going to be super homogenous, but again, upon reading and having a look at the different ways that companies are deploying. Now, the end result is still the same, which is we need to be able to innovate quickly, we need to have a lack of friction from idea to deployment, and we need to keep resources and blah, blah, blah, and look

cool and wear hoodies. But other than that, hoodies are important. Hoodies are very, very important. You know, I mean, like, I was surprised. I would have thought it would have been much more homogenous. That's right. Yeah, so I would say, in all of this day, when I talk about how each one of these companies has their

own flavor to build it, putting these systems into place. We talk about Amazon. It's the six-pager. It's the use of machine learning. Inside Facebook, it's a feedback culture, which is something that a lot of people might be surprised by. Facebook isn't exactly the company that you think is one that takes feedback very well, given that people from the outside have protested almost every product decision

that they've made and they've said basically, like F off, like I'm gonna do this monoron. Yes, exactly. But inside the company, there is this feedback culture and in the book actually sit in on a day long feedback training where people inside Facebook

are taught to give and receive feedback. Major meetings end with request for it. There are posters around Facebook's Manlo Park offices that say feedback is a gift. And actually the first time I met Zuckerberg, I was surprised because typically your typical CEO briefing is the CEO will tell you, okay, sit down here's 25 minutes of me selling our new product. Then the PR person will sort of watch your facial expressions, maybe allow you to ask one question, oftentimes to say, okay, and that's it. Is that what it's like being a tech reporter with the big dough? That's right.

Yeah, that's usually what it's like, but with Zuckerberg, it was totally different, because we walked in there and he's like, I want your feedback on this. It's like, okay. Yeah, he has a lot more interest. He's more interested in listening to what was going on than selling, and that's when I started asking people in Facebook's orbit what's going on.

And that's how I learned that there's this feedback culture inside Facebook where people are encouraged to bring ideas not only with AirBoss but to their skip level manager and all the way up to Zuckerberg himself. And so feedback, a lot of people's people say feedback is about putting people in their place, letting them know what's going to happen before the review. So they're not surprised when they sit in there and you get like a meat served. You're not meeting your expectations. Okay, you should know.

I think that's totally wrong way to look at feedback. I mean, it's good to not have your people surprised. But what feedback functions for Inside Facebook is that make sure that people feel comfortable sharing ideas with anybody inside the company and then people inside the company feel comfortable receiving other ideas. And when Facebook has been told, hey, from people inside, actually we're not approaching this right, it has shown an ability to change and shift direction. And that's why it's gone from an online directory to a broadcast platform that operates largely on desktop to a mobile app that's still in doing this sort of broadcast to all your friends.

And now it's changing again, moving to more intimate networks like groups and messaging. So this is all because of feedback. These aren't Zuckerberg's brilliant ideas on his own. And if people, when they read the book, they'll see it's other people inside the organization pulling them aside and being like, hey, Mark, we're missing this important thing, we got to make a change. And when he's listened, it's actually worked out pretty well for them. The CEO is a maid to look like just these bottomless pits of innovation, aren't they? But it's actually the coalescence of everything that's happened below that. So before we go on a couple of other companies, I want to see if you can do this.

I want to see if you can try and. I want to see if you can try and personify each of the companies that you looked at into a character. So for instance, I think Amazon would be kind of the jock in school, super clean cut, dates the prom queen, Apple might be like the Art E philosophy student who all the girls fancy, but he keeps himself to himself and spends lunchtime sketching trees. How would you sort of personify some of the companies that you looked at? Yeah, Amazon would be the MBA that's brilliant, but doesn't have very much empathy for other people. Okay, yeah, on the spectrum somewhere. Yeah, let's put them there. Yeah. So Facebook, who Facebook is, is almost like the, the, the kid in high school that everyone thought was perfect, you know, that was good at sports and good at talking to people. And, you know, it was attractive, but also sort of missed part of what living

is all about because everything was so easy for them. Yeah, yeah, no challenge. Yeah, no challenge, yes. So that's kind of what I think. Google might be, Google's just your classic nerd. Nerd with attitude. Yeah. You know, nerd with a half sleeve tattoo.

That's right, nerdy kid and you're like, okay, but not like, you know, a nerd you feel bad're like, okay, but not like, you know, a nerd you feel bad about just like, yeah, I get that, you know, okay, this person's going to be very successful. Apple, Apple is like one of those high society people that, you know, speaks their own language and, you know, feels very comfortable around people like them. But most of this is, but when they try to get out to most of society, they can't really relate. Microsoft, okay, and Microsoft is someone

who's had a glow up, they were like an ugly teen and they became the hottest person that, you know? That's it. Even nailed Microsoft there, I absolutely agree. And so, we've talked about Amazon, we've talked about the feedback and stuff in Facebook. What characterized Microsoft feed? Well, Microsoft is this amazing case study

because they were in this day to mentality under Steve Balmer, their former CEO. And back in the day, all they cared about was Windows, their desktop operating system. And in the age where we were not doing any computing on the browser and using desktop computers instead of mobile phones, they were the king, right? And they knew it. And Congress knew it, and they ended up, you know, bringing antitrust action against them. And then everything

shifted. And this is sort of why time is generally more potent than government regulation or, you know, your competitors, because Microsoft could sit on this 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 instead of our desktops and then what uses Windows. Much more, I mean, it is exactly how Bezos described that they want, they too, mentality, right?

Stasis, yes, irrelev know, slow, painful decline, check, okay, death, it was heading that way until they had to change their course. And so after Balmer, 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 Bing, which is kind of funny. Everyone makes fun of Bing.

Like, oh, that's just the shitty search engine. It's a special need to vision of Google, isn't it? I wouldn't go that far, but yeah, it's in somewhere in that range. And so, the thing with Bing is that it's a cloud computing system. And because it works on, it's a powerful program that works on the internet that has to make sense of all these different links coming in and spit something out to people that work. So because that you had worked on that, he had been able to 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, put it on Windows.

We're going to be working on a browser and that's cloud computing and there's going to need to be an infrastructure that's going to support cloud computing. And the funny thing about that is when you enable cloud computing, you actually hasten Windows to client 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's actually pretty gutsy-moved 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 on the internet 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 bomber days You weren't even allowed to or yeah

You're basically not allowed to have an iPhone or an Apple product inside That's true and oh, yeah totally people like would to get scoring and bomber even pretended to smash an iPhone When he saw it in a meeting so and then it's, Sario was like, we got to move past this. So, what he did was he reoriented this company, which wasn't a day to mentality, brought it to day one. And then once he figured out we're going to, the company was going to structure it self in a way that supports cloud collaboration, the internet, then the tough job started, which was to change Microsoft's culture, which

had been, you know, alpha male or larger, 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 was 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's now the most valuable tech company again, which is unbelievable. Have they really turned it around? Because to me, as someone who doesn't really, I'm not watching this, this share price, I don't know what's going on, who's got what amount of

market in this and the other. But to me, Microsoft still now feels like just the grandad 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 CEOs done's actually given them a resurgence. That's right. Yeah, the most valuable of all the five big tech companies. Why? Which is 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.

Cloud computing back end is not as sexy as an iPhone, but it has a very bright future. You look at now, we're all sitting at home right now, and Microsoft's collaboration technology with things like Teams, the usage is going through the roof. They are really moving to where the enterprise technology, but they're crushing it there. And there's a bright future for them. I mean, businesses have far more money to spend than consumers do on these sort of high

ticket low volume kind of apps and services, I suppose. But yeah, that's interesting. That is interesting that one person, obviously you have brought the CEO, will have brought a team with him, and other people have had to have get on board to deploy his ideas. But the 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, I mean, he's a very capable guy, obviously, who understands what he's talking about, but he's just some fellow that's gone like,

I think we should try and do this and then the entire shape and direction of a company changes. It's so mad. Yeah, it is amazing. And by the way, it's sort of that characterization sort of underscores how difficult it is to do what he did, because it is one person that's pushing this change. And it's pretty remarkable that he was able to do it.

Most people that try end up failing, but he was able to make it happen. Yeah. Okay, Google, let's talk to us about Google. What was Google's signature special move? They're special move. I feel like this is like a more complex. That's exactly. They're like that moral combat character that can go across the screen, you know, shoot across the screen. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know you mean. Because they're,

you know, a Facebook, if ideas go up and down from the bottom to Zuckerberg, inside Google, ideas go side to side, cross divisions very well. And that's because Google's interconnected in the series of their own social networks. They have emailless serves that span the whole company. They have their own meme board, like a Reddit or an imager, where people make memes about the company

and vote them up and vote them down. They have Q&A's where people can ask leadership any questions they want, although that's been paired back a little bit. And most importantly, they work in an open drive. Meaning they use Google Docs, slides, and sheets. And the sharing on almost all those docs is set to open. So anybody in the company can go look into anyone else's documents. And at first, people say that's kind of weird. But what it does is it allows people to get caught up

to speed on projects incredibly fast. And when you're in a Google Doc, you can also add your ideas and comments and people do that. So just like the six-pager got ideas to basals quickly, and the feedback culture gets ideas to Zuckerberg quickly. Ideas inside Google can move side to side incredibly fast. And the example to show how this has worked really well is the Google Assistant, which is their voice assistant. And the Google Assistant combines so many different products. It combines search and Android and mail and calendar and maps and YouTube.

And in order to build an effective assistant, you need everybody working together. Otherwise, you know, it's going to be pretty dysfunctional and people won't use it. And people don't have a lot of patience for a voice assistant. Like if you say, hey, Google enough and it doesn't respond, you're not going to keep saying it. I'm going to type this shit in. So, you know, so because they were able to collaborate, they're able to build this pretty effective assistant. And the assistant, again, is this evolution of search.

It's another reinvention, right? Because when you speak with a voice assistant, you say, what's the weather going to be, right? How would you find that otherwise? Type it into search. You say, when's my package coming? How would you find that out? Type it into search or type it into Gmail. So if Amazon was able to get the lead because got a

muter, because Alexa started answering those questions instead of Google, Google's domination search was really would really be challenged. But because Google was able to reinvent this way through collaboration, now it has a real foothold in the voice assistance space and is able to hold its own and its most important product. Is that going to be, is the voice assistance space going to be as big as some of my friends think it is? Because I've got a couple of buddies who are addicted to Siri. Like, that absolutely addicted.

They won't do anything. They refuse to touch their phones. For me, other than controlling music and stuff, and I'm listening to it, I tend to not use it that much, but moving forward, can you see voice assist? Is it the next big thing, one of the next big things? I think it very well could be. And the reason why I say that is because we're still at the pretty early moments of artificial intelligence technology.

And what we're doing by talking to these things is training them. And every conversation they have helps them get a little bit better. So I think that it's amazing. There's already tens of millions of I think that it's amazing. There's already tens of millions of these things in people's homes. And as that grows, they'll get better at figuring out what we want from them. They'll get better at talking back to us. Like I even see that the Alexa starts to get more conversational with time. Like I say set an alarm and she goes, all right, I'm setting your alarm for 8 a.m. tomorrow. You want me to set that for every day this week?

And I'm like, how the hell did you know that? Right? So I do think, yeah, this is going to be big. It will be big and they'll also start plugging in with other people's products. And, you know, I can, I have an idea why your friends like Siri so much, right? Because we're, I mean, especially now we're all on our screens, all, you know, all this time. We're tapping, we're looking, watching, and it's like, you know, if we can do any computing by not having to deal with the screen, some people love that. And I think especially as they get better, you know, people will really embrace it. So I'm bullish on it.

Nice bullish. That's Alex Cantrowitt bullish on voice voice commands all of it. That's an interesting point about how voice controller other non-physical versions of input will affect our tech use, you know? Because if you can do a ton of the things on your phone, let's say it's 100 years further on and we're able to, we've got microchips that can detect the correct neurons that are firing in our brain and we can just control stuff with our brains

or we've got some sort of wearable or whatever it is. The line between screen time and not screen time could either diverge or could completely come together so that either there's barely any screen time or the all-time screen time, you know what I mean? Yeah, definitely. I would bet that we're heading towards a world where almost all-time is screen time. But the cool thing about voices that enable screen time to not be screen time, right?

You can be plugged in, but it can be ambient sort of in the background. It's a great voice. It's something requiring your full attention. That's a brilliant way to put it. I've never thought of it like that, but it is it's part of the environment when you use Hey Siri or okay. Hey Siri. Hey Google. Okay Google. Okay Google. Hey Google. I think both work. Got you. And then what's the Amazon? It's just a one. It's just Alexa Alexa. Imagine if someone's if someone's kids being called Alexa, what a nightmare.

Oh, I know, man, I'm Alexa. Like, what's the letter away from the nightmare, man? Chris, you don't use any of these voice assistance at all. Not really. So I use Siri for controlling music and podcasts and stuff like that. I know there's tons of things that I can do with it, but I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. And this is someone who's trying to down-regulate his screen time and, you know, he's into new tips and tricks and things like that, but it's just not like, I feel like trying to do it will end up creating more work than if I just put it in myself. I'm like, hey, Siri, direct me home using this, like this route. And then it'll open up Google Maps instead of Apple Maps or Apple Maps instead of Google Maps or something. So I think maybe there's just another 10 or 20%

of progress that needs to be made. And then I'll probably just be all over it and I'll just be talking to my phone all across the day. Yeah, and it's probably because you're talking a Siri, that's why you're frustrated, the other two are much better. Are they? That's interesting. So I had him Stephen Wolframon, you know, Stephen guy created Wolfram language and Wolfram Mathematica. And I'm talking to him about like those answer engines and the ways that the people that don't know Stephen Wolfram is his company is the company that created the answer engine that's able to take words that you say,

convert that into code and then re-give you back whatever the answer is. So it's actually super complex. To take the noise that comes out of your mouth, work out what you meant, turn that into something the computer or the phone can read and then give it back out. And the fact that even we take it so much for granted, man, but the fact that you can just make a sound with your face, and then your phone does a thing is like, totally unbelievable.

It's unreal, man. And the fact that innovation just continues to pump away, you know, and then you've got, oh, well, a couple of like 10 years ago, maybe you'd watch like some 3D film with like, you know, crap like red and blue things, the cardboard things, you used to get over your face and be like, wow, this is amazing, you'd be at Disneyland. And then now you've got like an Oculus Go headset all in one, no extra stuff required. You just slipped this thing on and now you're in like Jurassic Park fighting dinosaurs and stuff. It's wild, man. I spoke to a lady as well who has the world's first PhD in immersive storytelling.

So this is like cutting edge VR stuff. And she recommended that I go to Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds, immersive VR experience down in London. And I went to go and do it, dude, it is the wildest thing. I have ever. That's crazy. Oh, like, combination of VR, AR, holographics and real life actors.

Dude, it was just like the craziest two hours ever. You just feel like, I don't know what the entertainment industry is going to be like in 30 or 40 years time when that sort of stuff gets scaled out, but you're not even going to watch movies anymore. You'll be living movies. And then I'm into it. I'm ready for that. That's so great. So good. And then you go back and you're like, Oh, I'll watch a YouTube video of a trailer and you realize just how much less impact that has. So yeah, like when your iPhone is able to throw smells at you and stuff like that, that's when we're going to be killing it.

So, okay, Apple, my favorite one out of the lot, everybody here is an Apple fan. What's going on with Apple, tell us. Well, I'm sorry to disappoint your listeners, but it is a company with a culture that needs a transformation. Wow. And I think that's because, inside Apple, they've been very good. I call it a culture of refinement.

They've been very good at refining the iPhone, which is their flagship product, right? And they do that by keeping people in silos and keeping everything secret. And what that does, it allows people to concentrate on their one task. So the 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 make the iPhone thinner, that's what they're focused on. The people that make the screen better, that's what they're focused on. The people that make 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. 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 example. While your friends might 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 Siri is terrible. 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. We talked about the Google assistant, Google needed, you know, people across search and Android and YouTube and maps and calendar. All these different divisions and 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 without any barriers at all and inside Apple these silos have prevented the assistant folks from actually getting out there in a way that would be meaningful and helping Siri from actually getting out there in a way that would be meaningful and helping Siri, you know, become something that can overtake the Google Assistant and the Echo. And the one example that I give is that, you know, the Google, I mean, Apple gave Amazon a multi-year 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, 2016, 2017, 2018. And then Apple said, okay, finally, they're going to build a speaker to put Siri inside of great. So they build the home pod. The home pod is not selling at all. It's so total embarrassed. And the echo and the Google home

are in tens of millions of homes. And it's again, it's funny because like for Apple, Apple's 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 it, 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's going to have to change because it's not going to be a visual or physical design first. It's going to be computer design and that requires collaboration. And it's struck out on the home pod. 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. Okay. And the way they think about this, yeah, yeah. The way they think about this is sort of like to say it's really struggled to build its own car. It's trying to build a self-driving car. And the way they think about this, 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, that the way that it looks, and then, you know, functional software, which is the self-driving software, bam, Apple should have the elite on the market there. But it's had put this old iPhone style mentality 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. And then also there's been the influence of design. Right? So design inside Apple is the most important division.

First, they figured out how it's going to look, and they figured out what's going on inside. So the engineering something's actually. Exactly. Yeah, well, it's worked very well for a lot of products, but for the car, it just hasn't worked well because, 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 in the road and embed them in the car because typically with a solid driving car, it looks like

this horrific, you know, rolling submarine with all these different, you know, knobs and and. The landing was wrong. Yeah. It looks almost as bad as the echo. And so, of course, Apple isn't going to be done 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 much, and your peripheral vision is cut in a certain way. I mean, how do you make 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. So look, yeah, sorry, sorry, go ahead. I just think that my seduction into Apple is probably very common amongst just normal consumers. You think all of their products are super slick.

I'm speaking to you on a MacBook Pro that I upgraded to, even I didn't need to, just because the new one looked good, I got an iPhone, I got AirPods, I bought my mom and dad's AirPods for the last Christmas and the Christmas before, and blah, blah. But because the design is so seductive and so visceral and so easy to see, like Microsoft, perfect example, I do not think sexy when I think Microsoft. But money talks, the numbers don't lie, and

they're the biggest company of all the ones that we've spoken about, and they're doing some of the least sexy shit, but I guess it all depends on what the vision is. The other thing as well that I've noticed when you're talking about Apple is, it seems like a very old style approach to management and also careers within a company in that you've got specialization. This is Henry Ford shit. This is like 1910 shit. The guy that turns the knob, he's the knob turner,

and the guy that pulls the lever, he's the lever puller, and it seems like that siloing could go one of two ways, but given the fact that all of your competitors 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 going to be forced to make a change or start really losing ground? Yeah, 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 is definitely still in it. Like Ford is a good

example, specialization, right? Like that's what happens inside the company. So I think Apple's going to be okay. I think that like the things that you're talking about, I'm also, I have an iPhone, I have AirPods, I'm talking to you through 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 last 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. 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 to I think they'd be as effective as they are today even if they opened up a bit. And 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 next change so they're kind of be like Microsoft if Microsoft stuck with windows and didn't get into new businesses. Yeah, I get it. Look, Alex, man, it's been really, really awesome. Finishing up final question, what is your vision for tech or what are your predictions for the big things happening in tech over the next five to 10 years? What shall we be on the lookout for?

I mean, I would say be on the lookout. So right now we've had tech change our consumer lives in a big way, meaning that we're now using Netflix to watch TV, to watch yet TV and movies, and we all have phones and apps, and it's really changed our experience living life outside of the office. And it's funny because in the office, it feels like we're still living in the 1990s sometimes,

given the programs that we use. So I, my first big prediction is that we're going to start to see technology change our work lives in the same way that it changed our consumer lives. And I think work is always a little bit slower to adapt. And I think that that's really going to make a difference in terms of the way that we work. So I would look out for that. I think AI is gonna be way more advanced and change the way that we live. In ways that I'm not even sure how to predict. Like one thing I've thought about. You're the guy, Alex, it has to be you.

If it's not you, who's it gonna be? Yeah, well, I guess it sort of goes to the point of the book, right? There can't be just one person with the vision. It's everybody's ideas that come together that actually push forward the change. But it's going to happen in so many different industries. My dad is a podiatrist.

In the US, when you're a doctor, you spend some of your time working with patients and almost all of your time filling out charts. My dad, every time I come home, he's just filling out charts. I'm like, Dad, do you do anything else but fill out charts? He's like, no. So I mean, it'll be amazing when we start to see this technology start to gain, you know, if if if UI path technology can write an HR letter, right? Why can't there be other technology that starts filling out the paperwork for doctors? I mean, of course, you'd have to have it at a pretty high, you know, specification and have to, you know, understand privacy. But a lot of this stuff is just like, you

know, write down and spit back. It's not so complex. It's just, you have to key it into all these different systems. So there needs to be technology to be able to do that. That might change the medical field because instead of having doctors spend their time doing paperwork, you might actually have doctors spending their time taking care of patients. And wouldn't that be cool? So, and I think they changed government as well. A guy expect us to see if we have the political will to see leaner, more effective governments. Our governments are the ultimate, uh, uh, uh, groups, bloated groups.

I mean, talk about execution work. All the government does execution work. Imagine those people had some time to come up with ideas to figure out problems like climate and poverty and health. That would be amazing. Well, the fact is, there is, within a government, you have to use the word think tank, you know? In that, the think tank is the exception because everybody else is busy doing the ops.

That's exactly right, Chris, and that's a freaking big problem. So we need to work to solve that. Hey, it looks like it's got a good handle on what we're talking about. Alex, your link, the link to your book will be in the show notes below, always day one highly recommended. Where can people go to check out your stuff online? Yeah, I appreciate it, Chris. So you can, yeah, they check the show notes for the book also. Google always day one and read some of the reviews. I think people have been happy with it so far.

And then if you want to connect with me, I'm a pretty online person. You could just type my last name into Twitter, K-A-N-T-R-O-W-I-T-Z. My DMs are open and I check my mentions, so I'd love to hear from you there. Amazing. Everything that we've spoken about will be linked in the show notes below. You already know what to do. If you enjoyed the episode, go and give Alex a follow, let him know what you think. Dude, I really enjoyed that.

I'm looking forward to seeing what the next few years is going to store now. I'm excited. Thank you. Yeah, me too. It's going to be a while a few years. That's for sure. I hope it becomes calmer and less trapped in our house than it is now. But yeah, we'll see.

We'll see. Dude, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Chris. This was really great. Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with a friend. It would make me very happy indeed. Don't forget, if you've got any questions or comments or feedback, feel free to message me at Chris Willek on all social media. But for now, goodbye friends.

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