Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson - A Beginner's Guide to ARM, Amazon and Buy with Prime, Apple in the 90s, Who Wants to Own WWE?

Episode Date: January 19, 2023

A question about the "Svengali of tech" spawns an overview of ARM and the roots of its business model, follow-up to this week's Amazon conversation, and the future of the WWE leads to discussion of the streaming landscape and the NFL's invincibility.

Hello and welcome to Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp, and this is a free preview of today's episode. I think you're going to be blown away by how much you use Google. How much I use Google? Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's the other thing is I'm thinking, like, I don't really use Google at all. So that's why I need to keep a Google diary, and we can share the results next week. Mandar says, given Apple's rapidly growing ad business,

at what point does it make sense for them to launch their own AI-powered search engine? and drop Google as the default. Wouldn't this be the true disruption for Google as Apple has the distribution, Open AI does not? What do you think, Ben? I mean, everyone's been theorizing about Apple's starting a search engine for years and years and years. And my question is why? Like, Google is literally an entire massive organization devoted to providing the best product

for this specific use case. and they pay Apple billions of dollars a year to, for, to, to, like, Apple is being paid by Google to have the best product as the default on their, on their phones. Like, why would you want to, like, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why, it's a great point. I don't see any reason or motivation. And there's no evidence that Apple would be particularly good at this. Like, they're not, like, that's the thing. Apple is so good at so many things that it's easy to just take it as a,

foregone conclusion that, okay, if Apple wanted to, they could build the best search engine. No, every, all that. Apple's online stuff all stinks, right? Like, and, and, Safari is like deeply mediocre relative to other browsers that you could use, including Google Chrome. And so, um, I think that's a good area to push back on it. In Safari's defense, it is much more efficient. Like, it uses less battery life.

But I, I, I agree. I, I, I, I think that there's, you know, we're going to get haters for that take, but I I think it's a good take. I agree with it. Okay. Well, it's a normy take, you know, deal with it, dorks. To keep it moving. Carthick says, back in the fall, you guys were talking about the difficulty of retaining talent when your business isn't going up and to the right anymore. That discussion came up in the context of Facebook's recent struggles, but it also got me wondering, how did Apple escape that kind of death spiral in the 1990s? Do you have anything? thoughts here, Ben. I think the Apple's journey through no man's land is pretty interesting to me. And I don't know much about what that decade looked like.

Well, Apple was by depending on who you listen to weeks away from bankruptcy of not meeting payroll. So I mean, I think like it was they pretty touch and go. Pretty touch and go. I think Apple. Apple has always been different in like. if you really care particularly about sort of the user interface and the experience of what it means to actually interact with and use a device, Apple has always been different. It just really is the case. And, you know, and you go, the alternative was Microsoft and, you know, a Microsoft computer was faster.

It was more capable. There's more programs. Everything about it was better in every single respect than a Mac. and yet there was some cadre of people that still bought the Mac because all that stuff mattered to them less than what it felt like to use that computer. And that's like a really hard thing for people to latch onto and grasp. It's not something you put in a spreadsheet, right? It's like someone that has good chemistry in the locker room.

It's like a clutch player, right? Sort of. I mean, it's kind of hysterical that those people wound up being on the right side of history because it was an irrational stance. to adopt at the time. I think I knew people who were Mac people at all costs. And it just never really made sense to me when PCs were better and had a far more diverse set of software options.

Oh, they were best cheaper. They were way better, way more capable, and much cheaper. Right. It was not, it was, it was bad. But the Apple people got the last laugh, which was great. That differentiation extended to talent. If that's what you cared about, where else were you going to go? Right?

Yesterday, there's companies that care about that to a much greater extent because of Apple's success and influence. But in the 90s, that looked like a losing bet. And so they did retain this sort of core, core talent base that that's what they really cared about. And then obviously, Steve Jobs comes back, the reverse acquisition of them next. He basically, he had gathered his own people that cared about the same things or, you know, and basically took over the entire leadership of Apple and, you know, started sort of building it back up back then. But it was that differentiation. And it's interesting, I think I don't know if I mentioned on this podcast, but one of my long-running Microsoft takes is that Microsoft was saved by being in Seattle in that when they were in their sort of their dark era, had they been in Silicon Valley, they would have lost all their talent. but they're in Seattle.

All these people had houses, had kids. You're going to uproot your family. I don't want to work for Amazon because they're freaking maniacs over there. They're cheap and they work you hard. Like Microsoft Life, yeah, kind of feels like we're not doing anything relevant, but, you know, life's pretty good. And then when Satchie Adele took over and sort of reoriented the strategy, there was a big talent base that he could sort of leverage and sort of build on going forward.

Apple pulled that off by their sort of differentiation in attitude. And it's interesting. I haven't been in Silicon Valley for a few years. But even, you know, there's always been a sense that Apple's kind of its own world. Like people who work at Apple, even if they leave to do a startup, it's usually an Apple-focused startup. And like, now, I think with the iPhone that changed it because the iPhone became so important and iOS engineers became so important that there was more of a dispersal. But Apple's kind of been its own world relative to the rest of the industry. And that was really the case in the 90s.

Like, Macs were over here. and everyone else was over here having a good old time. And that worked to Apple's advantage. They might as well have been in Seattle. And I think that that was a big thing that helped them retain talent. Very interesting. Yeah. Well, and the next side of things is also kind of fascinating because a lot of that technology

would come to animate like the next generation of Apple. Yeah. No, I mean, the core of the operating system that is on your phone or on your computer is is downstream from next. Right. And so it's hilarious when people sort of dismissed that, and this is a normie take and say, like Steve Jobs was kind of just like wasting his time for 10 years

because all of it ultimately built the most successful company the world's ever known. So again, the Apple people got the last laugh. Alastatia and Della and the Microsoft people also getting the last laugh these days. Apple and Microsoft back on, yeah, I mean, It really is kind of striking. Like with someone, you know, in like 200 years, if people care to look back at this era, there are going to be the two companies that people talked about.

They were there at the beginning and they're probably going to be there at the end. All right. And that's the end of the free preview. If you'd like to subscribe and receive every episode of this show, you can do so by subscribing to Stratecre Plus. That'll give you access to every Sharp Tech episode, all of our Sharp China episodes, the Dithering podcast with Ben and John Gruber, daily analysis of the tech business from Ben,

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