Tech Brew Ride Home - The AMA/Listener Call In Episode

Episode Date: April 21, 2019

Listeners ask questions. I try to give coherent answers. Sponsors: VistaPrint/ride remars.amazon.com, promo code: ride Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the TechMeme Ride Home, the long-promised AMA or listener Colin questions episode. I'm Brian McCullough, if I forgot to mention that. This is actually more work to produce than a typical weekend episode where I just turn on a mic and ask someone some

dumb questions. But if you all really enjoy this, we can do it again, maybe every few months or so. Anyway, no real need for any more preamble. Let's just get right into it. Hey, Brian, this is Carl from Seattle. I've been thinking about these online game streaming services. I participated with On Live back when they tried it several years ago. I've played in the Google beta when they put Assassin's Creed online. And I found that these services work really well to the point where I could play without

any problems. But the services don't really come up with a good business model for selling games. Either they sell games at full price, and then there's little benefit to using them if you have your own gaming machine, or they sell a subscription service that doesn't have a lot of the games you want to play. Do you think Google has any plans to actually launch a service that would make sense for consumers? So let me straight up point out that, as I've said, I don't have a super good grounding in the gaming world myself. I do play games. I've got a Steam account, Twitch account, have had all of the consoles at one time or another, dabble in Fortnite, etc. But I'm not in a place where I sample all of these various offerings and experiments on the regular. But there are

two things that stand out to me here. First, we like to talk a lot about these platforms and what their core competencies are, and even their cultural biases, what they're good at, basically. You know, the wrap on Apple for years was that they're not good at services, and Google was, I mean, who uses Iwork at all? Everyone uses Google Docs, Maps, Gmail, etc. But has Google ever really had an entertainment product that's been a hit? That's more Apple and Amazon's jam, with the possible exception of YouTube proving the rule there, of course. And we know Google doesn't get social, seemingly doesn't get people. So them trying a gaming service. I mean, Microsoft has understood gamers for decades, right, has driven the gaming industry into the modern era.

Google is coming at this absolutely as noobs. Their technology works, they've demonstrated that, but do they understand gamers? I think your skepticism around whether or not they understand what gamers want enough to produce a product that gamers want is very much an open question. But it's an open question for everyone, right? You have all of these tech platforms all at once deciding they want to get in on the gaming industry, and we've already heard rumors of clashes with developers, often cultural clashes, and that makes a lot of people wonder if the platforms are just going to try to shoehorn games into some model that works for them.

And that gets us to my second point. I think that for these big tech platforms, this is all about devices. They want you to game on their hardware, on their computers, and phones and tablets and smart home tablets and web browsers and whatever. That's the future they see. Gaming on whatever screen is at hand, hopefully their screens are at hand, and seamless transitions between screens and sessions and whatnot.

So that leads me to my second point, the notion of some sort of subscription product, probably being what we're going to get, or at least a membership or account product across devices that stores your games, the ones you've bought or subscribed to, but also your saves, achievements, which titles you have access to, etc. The question will be, will that really be seamless, or will it, as you say, lead to the sort of siloing we're already seeing in streaming video where you might not have access to the content you really want

because it's in some other services silo? There's also the question of how much money these players are willing to throw around to pay for the development of these games and get exclusives and all that, which, by the by, could be very good for game developers, as it's been very good for content producers in the TV and movie and video space over the last decade, as we've seen. Hey, Brian, Carl, from Minneapolis.

I apologize for some of the background noise. As Prince would say, sometimes it snows in April, and I'm walking my dog in the middle of a lovely snowstorm with crunchy powder on my feet. Anyway, I wanted to ask a question about your perspective on regional tech innovation. Here are a lot of the events and a lot of the happenings on the coasts, a lot of the happenings in the valley and in your neck of the woods in New York.

But I'm curious if you would offer a perspective or have done any research on innovation, whether it be in MedTech or health in the Midwest, as we'd like to call the North, or in other regions of the U.S. I would love your take on it. Seems like you're an astute learner and you probably have some of this information at your fingertips. Awesome show. Love to listen and keep up to awesome work.

My advice to young people getting into tech for years has been to go where the action is. Like if you're a doctor that wants to specialize in a certain kind of medicine or a researcher who wants to specialize in a certain area, you would go to the school or institution that does the best work in the world in that area. If you want to be a filmmaker, go to USC or NYU. Don't, like I tried to do, just find the closest approximation to a film program that you can in Florida, just because you're there.

That tends not to work out. So, yes, for my adult life, I say to people, go to the coasts because in tech, that is where the action is. You rub shoulders with other people doing interesting things, and you can get swept up in the tide of history and that dumb startup. You got hired at just because they needed a warm body, ends up being Google or something. This has been true throughout history, by the way. If you wanted to be a player in the early automotive industry, the Upper Midwest was the place to be in the early 20th century, not the South or the West or the Northeast. If you wanted to be in a rock and roll band, get you to London in the early 60s, that guy over in the corner strumming a guitar might just end up being Eric Clapton, right? Now, to what degree for tech this is changing is much debated?

On the one hand, Silicon Valley is still the place to be to a large degree. Zuck never went back to Boston, right, for reasons. And I've been hearing the sentiment Silicon Valley is over for two decades now, and it's never really come to pass. But at the same time, yes, the valley and the Bay Area are too expensive to start something now. that's something that I think has passed a threshold that it's almost undeniably true. I think the larger trend, though, is that in a macro 30,000 feet perspective, in a lot of ways, tech for the last 30 or 40 years has meant the software industry.

But the software industry is so distributed and diffuse now. To be in software, it doesn't tie you down to any geographic location at all. And it's not just software now. Tech is so many different things, a universe of things, med tech, like you mentioned, FinTech, space tech as we've been exploring, and things like drones. I just learned that my alma mater, the University of Florida, is a bit of a hub for drone tech because of a major drone startup that got started in Gainesville about a decade ago. So these niches of tech beyond just software are more distributed around the globe. So again, go to where the action is for the niche that you're interested.

in, and that might be today, Colorado or Texas or what have you. I think the advice still holds that if you want to do a certain thing, don't just stay in Florida and think that a certain thing will incubate where you want it to incubate just because you're there. Go to where the action is. It's just maybe the action is everywhere now. Hey, Brian, this is Brady. So I know you talked a little while back about why you thought Snapchat might be coming out of its funk, but as someone who used Snapchat for a while and then quit, I don't know, a while ago, could you just like walk through that in a bit more detail? Like, why should those of us who don't care about Snapchat at all or like ever, ever use it,

care about its new developments? And where again are we most likely to start seeing it appear on the rest of the rest of it? regular web or on the regular mobile web like Facebook managed to do. Could you walk through that a little bit more slowly for us, you know, older folks who just kind of aren't in the Snapchat thing these days? Well, look, I'm not a Snapchat user myself, and that's kind of my point. It's not for me. And those recent numbers that they shared, that something like 80 or 90% of people under 25, still use Snap is what opened my eyes a bit, because what is undeniable is that Snap is undeniably good at innovating new social products that point the way

to the future of social. So that recent event that they held seemed to me and to a lot of people that Snap was remembering what it was good at, its core competencies that like they're just going to do what they do best. And where will we see whatever it is that they innovate next proliferate? Well, we'll see it proliferate all over the place where whatever knew that they come up with gets traction and gets copied, right? But that's also the change in strategic thinking that impressed me. They know they're going to get copied. That's been a hard learned lesson for them. So they're going to copy the Facebook Playbook and make their innovations more distributed and more widely available. Whatever it might be that they come up with that's new, some new stickers or

something, some new social convention. Again, I'm not Taylor Lawrence, so I'm not so up on what the kids today are doing. But it seems like Snap has decided to allow whatever the new hotness like Stories is that they come up with. They've decided to allow that to plug into other apps like Tinder or whatever. Instead of keeping their innovations inside their app and trying to, you know, steal Tinder's audience with this new innovation, they're just going to be like, here, use our new feature. It's the best of breed for this type of feature. If you're going to copy it anyway, here you go, use ours. You can derive value through us, become more beholden to us, and and our brand goes wider. It's the login with Facebook play. It's the like button on every

website play. It's the integration of those things into iOS and Android, right? Snap wants five years from now to have snappy things integrated into Uber or TikTok or whatever is coming next. It might not work out for them, but it is interesting. Hi, this is Sean from New York. My question is, how much does news matter compared to long-term trends that don't generate any headlines. Good question. So, and I hope that this is what you like about the show, I'm basically more interested in the trends and narratives

and the long arc of history and how technologies evolve than I am about the day-to-day news. You can probably guess that. I mean, I do give you the news. That's the basic proposition of the show. But then again, you could just create a bot that just reads the tech meme headlines every single day. What I actually try to do is give you all the headlines, organize them, and then contextualize them so that you can think about them like you're a founder or a VC or a tech guru, like they do, how they try to read the tea leaves and see where the future is going.

Some of what we do on the show is just TLDR as a service. I'm online all day reading all this stuff so that you don't have to, but some of it is where the puck is going as a service. I'm online all day reading this stuff to try to figure out where to skate if you want the puck as a service. Again, that's what I'm trying to do, and hopefully I'm doing it fairly well, and that's why you're listening. Hey, Ryan, this is Matt Lassin with Health from Detroit. How's it going? Quick question. There are actually less of a question and more of an inquiry into your personal feelings, but I'm almost 40. And growing up, you know, we have TV shows, movies, books, video games that we think about now, and they bring back really good, happy memories and nostalgia. And growing up in the web, when it first started coming to fruition about 25, 30 years ago,

all the early things that were first time out there, first time the world's ever seen it, you know, hosting services like Lycos or GeoCities, you know, a lot of them are gone, but we think about them and they bring back happy memories. And they kind of, you know, push us along and built us up over the years to where we are now. Do you think that kids or younger people these days in the industry or even just users of that internet stuff, for lack of a better term, if it has the same nostalgia, effect on them or is the fly-by-night ephemeral, you know, nature of the web now totally different where it has a different effect on people. So just curious what you thought. Thanks, dude. Bye-bye.

Oh, God, man. I try to keep this top of mind every single day. Don't become an old person who's just like, man, the music today is just not as good as the music was when I was coming up. My grandfather thought that way about rock and roll. My dad thought that way about rap. I think that way about whatever the music is today. This is sort of like my Snapchat answer. I promise you, there is an equivalent to CalicoVision or Doom or Mist or whatever. I promise you there is an equivalent to GeoCities out there right now that the kids are on today and they'll be writing nostalgic pieces about that place 20 years from now in whatever equivalent of BuzzFeed there is 20 years from now. But you and I don't know about these things, these places, because they're not for us.

I try hard to keep biases like these in mind so that I'm not blind to the new. Always assume that the new is out there. Always assume that there is great stuff bubbling up. Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there. And just because you don't see it doesn't mean it can't be there. Your dad wasn't aware of GeoCities or, I don't know, BBSs or the original watchman issues when they came out. And you were because you were in a position to be aware. And he wasn't. I want to always be biased towards the new. I want to always be accepting that the new will always come whether I want it to or can appreciate it or not. And that's another key point to accept. I have to accept that I've aged out of certain things. I have to accept that contemporary music just won't sound good to me.

I guess what I'm saying is be certain that there is good stuff out there, that the kids are having a good time using it, that 20 years from now, they'll look back on it with nostalgia. Even though, yeah, A lot of stuff on the web sort of makes people feel icky these days. A lot of technology is fly by night or intrusive or whatever. People are out there having fun. There's good stuff. And in fact, just operate with an assumption of certainty that it's out there. Kids are loving it.

And 20 years from now, they'll miss it. All right. Two more. And these were written questions, but they're so good I want to read them to you. Brian, last name withheld, wrote, quote, Generation Z is accustomed to streaming their TV consumption on streaming platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube. When do you predict companies such as Verizon, Xfinity, Bell South, and other telecommunications companies pivot their product lines to exclusively stream TV content and no longer sell and support standard digital TV, end quote. I think that linear TV will probably be around until at least my generation dies off. It'll certainly be around as long as my parents are around. They won't shut the old stuff off because there's too much infrastructure in place.

There's still an audience in place. I mean, you can still get TV and radio over the air if you want. But when will most consumption be on streaming platforms? Probably sooner than you think. less than 10 years, but that's my point. You could still watch TV over the air if you want. It's just that for a long, long time, the majority of people don't anymore. And finally, Tony last name withheld, wrote to ask about the favorite Silicon Valley parlor game of our time.

Who should Apple buy with their mountain of money? Seriously, we all play this game from time to time. Should Apple buy Tesla? maybe if Tesla gets into financial trouble. Should they buy Netflix? Well, they should have done that, even as recently as three years ago, but that ship has sailed. Tony wants to know if they should buy Disney, quote, considering their shared values, its close board members' positions and Lorraine Jobs' stake in both, maybe just maybe

they are planning something together. Maybe Disney's service will be the basis in Apple's plans and augmented by its own productions. Maybe that's why Robert Eiger remains on the board and has been carefully wording his statements about that position. Maybe this synergy will allow Apple to concentrate on products and have a trusted partner-developed media. Maybe that's how Apple avoids antitrust litigation. Disney gains access to all Apple devices and can sell separately to non-Apple devices, creating even more value for Apple. Maybe Disney wants to securely ink those deals first, end quote. Well, yes, this does make a ton of sense for a ton of reasons, many of which you've mentioned.

Yes, Apple could afford it, even though just barely Disney's stock price has been on a tear. It's a lot, a lot of money. It would basically be more of a merger of equals than a straight acquisition. But I would say this. Don't expect it to happen if it ever does happen until the dust settles. and people know which of these streaming products gets traction. We're all assuming, myself included, that Disney pluse will be a hit, but we don't know that. Maybe Apple's streaming product will be the hit, and they won't need Disney.

Maybe both will be a hit, and they don't need each other. Don't expect either company to be willing to throw in the towel, I would say. Not at this point. They're investing tons of money, too much money, to, cut bait just yet. Because maybe this mad land rush for content is just a fad that we'll look back on in a few years' time and shake our heads about. Let me leave it with this statement as food for thought. Right now, Disney might be more valuable to Apple as an independent player than it would be right now at this moment as an asset under Apple's corporate umbrella. And that's without even getting into

value dilution, antitrust issues, and even core competencies, culture clashes, and entire business lines that don't mesh.