The Vergecast - Behind the scenes of our Treo documentary, Springboard

Episode Date: December 7, 2021

Live at On The Verge in New York City, Nilay and Dieter discuss The Verge's documentary Springboard: the secret history of the first real smartphone and conduct at Q&A with the audience. Springboard is now streaming worldwide. You can watch it on The Verge’s new app on Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Roku, or Apple TV. It is now also available to watch on our YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Greetings Mobile Accomplishers. Welcome to the Verge cast. I am Deeter Bone, and this is another entry in our special run of topic-specific Tuesday episodes.

This week, we are bringing you another conversation from our 10-year anniversary party. It was called On the Verge. Specifically, we're going to play a conversation that Nilai Patel and I had after the world premiere of our documentary. It's called Springboard,

the secret history of the first real smartphone. There weren't chips that you could go buy. You couldn't go to the market and say, build me one of these things. We took off like a rocket. Everybody wanted this product. The documentary is about a nearly forgotten company called Hanspring, which made Viser PDAs and Trio smartphones years before the iPhone. You can watch it now on our smart TV apps that are on Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, and Android TV

by searching for The Verge. Or, as of today, it's also available on our iPhone. or YouTube channel, which is YouTube.com slash The Verge. I think that you're going to find a conversation to just be a bit richer, more interesting if you've watched the documentary, but I will play a couple of clips from it here on this podcast before we get started with the conversation just to give you some context. On a personal note, I'm really proud of what the Verge video team did here, but I'm also personally happy to have put this thing out into the world.

I really do feel like the people behind Hanspring haven't gotten the credit that they deserve, And my hope for Springboard is that it goes some way towards setting the record straight about who some of the early innovators were in the smartphone space. If you've been following my work for a long time, you might know that I got my start in journalism by hanging out on the forums at visorcentral.com and then writing for triocentral.com. In fact, my little intro here at the top of the podcast, Greetings Mobile Accomplishers, is actually a reference to Palm. See, back when Palm introduced the Trio 680 just a few months before the iPhone was announced,

they were trying to describe who the target market was for this smartphone. And back in 2006, nobody really knew if smartphones were actually going to take off. BlackBerrys were for email and other smartphones were really not mass market yet. So Palm's idea for the Trio 680 was that it was targeted towards, quote, mobile accomplishers, which was something that was like not quite a regular consumer, but not really business people either. You know, it's pretty common for companies to come up with categories for their target demographic, but I just thought the phrase mobile accomplishers was funny. So I started using it to introduce the Trio Central Trio cast. And I've been introducing podcasts with that phrase kind of ever since.

Greetings, Mobile Accomplishers. Here we are, the Sprint Trio Pro. We are. Greetings, mobile accomplishers. Welcome to the Verge mobile show. Anyway, this is all just to point out that I have been reporting on smartphones since forever. But more importantly, I want to put some of our discussion about Hanspring into context. Springboard is about a period of time that's roughly, say, 1998 to 2006, 2007. And back then, the smartphone world looked very different than it does today. Like I said, there was BlackBerry, but there was also Symbian, there was Pocket PC and eventually Windows Mobile. Android didn't exist back then, and the iPhone didn't exist back then. And nobody really knew how this market was going to shake out, except that a few people knew just how big it was going to be.

A phrase that's been kicked around a lot in Silicon Valley since it was originally introduced by John Scully, the former CEO of Apple when Steve Jobs got sent away before he came back, it was called the Mother of All Markets. And at Palm, they actually had a little spinny sign, and one sign pointed up to Mother of All Markets, and the bottom of it was pipe dream driven by greed or something. and no one really knew where it was going to be with the PDA market, and no one really knew where the smartphone market would land. But everybody in the back of their mind, especially at Hanspring,

had a sense that the smartphone market was going to be huge, that it was going to be the mother of all markets. And they tried to make that happen, but they were way too small. They were really scrappy, and they faced very long odds. There were lots of things working against Hanspring. But the biggest thing working against Hanspring was the carriers, the companies that actually sold the phones. They had so much power back then.

It was impossible to sell a phone without them. And in many ways, the iPhone's biggest innovation was taking some power away from those carriers. So here's a brief clip from the Springboard documentary where some of the people from Hanspring talk about how difficult it was to get anybody to just sell the trio. Sometimes these deals were so big.

You're talking about the survival of the company. The degree of gamesmanship can get so intense, your entire dream will fail unless you agree to put this app on your launcher. They were interested in adding features to their phones. They didn't view it as a computer. They said, it's a phone. Everyone's going to have phones, and phones are dominant. We were thinking, no, the future is going to be computers, and the phone is an app. I remember clearly going to sprint and saying, great idea.

Now, guess what? You can take a photo right on this thing and send it to somebody. And they said, no, we don't want to do that. Our other devices can't do that. They also were one of the principal resellers of the product. It went through their stores. We made the first products, and they wouldn't sell them. They said, no, we're not going to sell these things.

You have to make the following changes. Okay, one more clip I want to play for you before we get started. It's a very brief and abbreviated history of Palm and Handspring. Now, again, the Springboard documentary only covers a portion of this, but you can get a sense of just how complicated the corporate history of Palm is by listening to this little clip. One of the big reasons that Palm never really managed to take on the iPhone is it spent all of the years leading up to the iPhone, just dealing with various corporate shenanigans. They founded Palm, which was bought by US Robotics, which got bought by Threecom. Threecom refused to spin off Palm, so Donna and Jeff quit to start Hanspring. Meanwhile, their old company 3Com finally did spin off Palm, but they split it into two divisions, one for hardware and one to sell software.

The Palm Hardware Division screwed up the market with excess inventory, and the Palm Software Division, well, it didn't accomplish very much at all. Hanspring then runs out of money, so the Palm Hardware Division buys them, but they refused to buy back the Palm Software Division. So the family's back together again, and they would continue to sell Trioos for years to come, but, The family drama isn't over. Here's what was going to happen next for Palm. Jeff and Donna would step away, but Ed Colligan stayed on to give it another go at the new Palm. But that separate Palm software company sold off and withered away, so the new Palm had to sell Windows Mobile Trioes and then start over again with new software called WebOS.

Then they ran out of money and had to sell the HP, and then HP finally killed Palm. All right. Like I said, you can go. watch the full springboard documentary on our smart TV apps or you can go to our YouTube channel YouTube.com slash the verge to watch it there. Up next my conversation with Nilai that followed the world premiere of the documentary at our 10-year anniversary party. So I think Nilai is coming up. I'm not sure where he is but actually I don't want you applaud for me. I didn't

make this. I went on camera the verge video team made this and they're stand up. Please stand up. Right. Come on. Thank you. Good, buddy. Hey, how's it going? Congratulations. Thank you. Also to the Verge Video team.

I did a lot. I'm so happy you saw my movie. All right, Dieter. I have a number of questions. Okay. How do we break the hold of the carriers? Well, what you need to do is be Apple and create a revolutionary new phone and just do the whole thing all over again. It's really, we're back in a lot of ways, right?

We do feel like we're back in a lot of ways. The carriers do have a lot of control over products, but it does seem like the tide has turned. Apple and Google do get to sort of do whatever they want, but there are a lot of parallels to this moment, to that moment. Like a new company finds it very hard to make a phone. Well, a new company can, it's easy to make a phone now, just like to build the phone.

One of the stories here is when they wanted to build the visor phone, like, okay, well, let's go get a radio. Well, where they had to like, they found like a company, I think, in France. And that was the only place they could find. a radio that would connect to a cellular network. Now you can show up in Shenzhen and be like, make me a phone and they're like, which parts would you like?

Here we go, bang, bang, bang, bang. So that part is easy, but getting a phone that is actually something that will make it into the carrier stores, get carrier marketing and be something that can be successful on a pretty big scale is much more difficult. It's, is it possible to imagine a tiny company the size of what Hanspring was

would be able to believe that they could break into the smartphone market right now? smartphone market right now. But I think that's like, there's a myth in our industry and our world, that if you make a great product, the market will find you and you will be a success. And the market is still under the control of like a tiny handful. And if you sell your product to Sprint, you'll die. It's like how many times the Sprint killed Palm? Several.

It's actually, you'll notice that we didn't get to WebOS. I feel like, like, I need good, you like left us hanging for the sequence. Well, I mean, I was inspired by Dune. You know, they just ended in the middle. Why did you decide to start here? I feel like a lot of our audience knows you'd care a lot about POM and WebOS. Why did you decide to start at such a primitive zone? Because I don't think the story is well known.

And I think that there's a hopeful element here. Like, they came up with these ideas. They were trying to make a wonderful product and thinking really deeply about the user experience and the customer experience and how apps should work. all of that. Like, they don't get the credit that I think they deserve for it. And I feel like, I mean, one, we started this six-ish months ago. So trying to tell the rest of that story would have been a lot longer. But I felt like there's an arc here to like this specific company and this thing that they try to do that like starts with some drama. There was drama before this,

by the way. And then, you know, ends with, you know, it's a sad story, but like they were still trying. But the company of Hanspring and the thing that they were trying to make, you know, it's not a well-known enough story, basically. Would you leave out? Well, we left out all the WebOS. I mean, if there's that. Actually, this was, you know, post this, but there was a famous quote that Ed Colligan gave it the Churchill Club. They'd, like, do these breakfast talks or whatever. That, if you read Daring Fireball and John Gruber, he loves to quote this thing, where he was talking to John Markoff, I think, and he said something to the effective PC guys.

aren't going to figure this out, PC guys aren't just going to walk in. To the phone market. To the phone market. And it was assumed that he was referring just to Apple saying that they're not going to figure this out. Phones are really complicated. If all you do is make PCs, you're not going to be able to figure this out. And he has been lambasted for this quite a bit.

He contends he's taken a little bit out of context. I didn't put it in because I just gave you a long story that involves talking about during Fireball. I don't know if it fits in a documentary like this, but also the actual archive of it is currently MIA. So I couldn't like go verify that he believes he was talking. He was talking about the PC industry at large. So funny story. Since we recorded this live show back in October, we did manage to get a hold of the original interview. So I'm going to play just a couple of clips from it. Now for context, I want to read how Colligan was originally quoted in this interview in print in the San Jose

Mercury News. And the quote goes like this. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. they're not going to just walk in, unquote. Now, as I mentioned on the live show, John Gruber over at During Fireball, has quoted Colligan on this very often over the past 15 years, at least 20 times by my count. And so it's become a bit of a meme. It's become a shorthand for how everybody underestimated Apple before the iPhone launched. But I don't think that's an accurate reading exactly once you hear the full quote and the context. See, the context here is that they were speaking weeks before the original iPhone was announced,

and nobody really knew what it would be. So in the interview, Markov and Colligan speculate a bit on what Apple might be working on. And then Markov jumps into his next question, where he not only asks about future competition from Apple, but also from Google. But what will it look like in 2007, you know, Apple does get in. Eric's wandering around talking about free phones. He's got Andy Rumbud, who was the founder of danger, doing something inside. He bought Andy's startup. The phone market could look, I mean, it looks crowded now.

It could look intensely crowded next year. Intensely big. The Eric there is Eric Schmidt, who was then the CEO of Google, and Andy Rubin's startup was what became Android. This was, of course, before Android launched also. Anyway, here's Colligan's reply. It's intensely big. We just have to get our fair share of the pie.

And let me tell you this. It's not as easy as it looked. Okay. You've seen Motorola, one of the biggest phone companies in the world, enter with a device that was going to take over the world and has had enormous... A queue? You're talking about the queue? Yeah.

That cue would be the Motorola queue. a very hyped up Windows mobile smartphone that had a quirky keyboard, but no touchscreen, terrible battery life, and really only so-so sales. So here's Colligan again, and I want you to pay attention to the tone of his voice here, but also how the actual words he uses are not the exact quote that I read earlier. And so I just would caution people that think they're going to walk in here and do these. We've struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. The PC guys are not going to just, you know, knock this out.

I guarantee it. So look, you know, welcome, you know, let's go for it. We can't stop all that. It's going to happen. But it's going to be, I don't think it'll be so easy for everybody as everybody thinks to enter it. It's a tough space. The difference between the old quote, PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not just going to walk in.

And what you heard Colligan actually say here, I think, is notable. There's a bit more humility here than Colligan's traditionally gotten credit for. and the topic is specifically that making smartphones is hard. Anyway, Markoff also catches on to this whole vibe that you get whenever a company has when there's a huge competitor about to come in and eat their lunch. So he asked about that specifically in the next question. You've been around this industry long enough and you probably remember. Maybe you don't, actually.

The famous Wall Street Journal ad that Apple took out in 1981, welcome IBM seriously. Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. Well, look, I, you know, I'm not trying to be cocky about it. it is a tough, it's a tough business. We've really struggled through that, you know, in the sense of making world-class radios that perform on global networks consistently with all the applications that we deliver. So that's the original interview. And while I think it's fair to say that Colligan was putting on a brave face before Apple jumped into his market, I also think it's fair to say that really he was talking about the rest of the industry that didn't have much experience

with smartphones. Apple, sure, but also Google and even Motorola. And when I asked, Coggin about it specifically during the interviews for the Springboard documentary. He said that his main point was that it was hard and also that he was a little bummed that this one section of an otherwise pretty good hour-long interview is the thing that gets quoted the most. So he was right about that. Yeah, that's an excellent point. Have any of you ever used a phone made by Dell?

Yeah. Right? I have. It wasn't great. No. Yeah. Right. Do any of you use a phone made by a little company called Mic?

Microsoft. I'm actually, I was like assuming there'd be one person here back. It's just like given our audience, but like the PC guys did not figure it out. No, they did not. What else? What were the other pieces? Because when you put together something like this, you only got 30 minutes. There are some things you have to let go of. And I know that you thought about a lot. There's more or more stories of carriers being dumb. That's what I want. Yeah. Just like 30 minutes of donkey and carriers. Jeff Hawkins rolled into a meeting for a carrier in France,

and the guy refused to believe that Quirty Keyboards were a thing. And at the time, capacitive screens weren't really there yet. They were using resistive screens, so a touch screen keyboard wasn't viable. So Query Keyboards were the shit, and Blackberries were doing it. They were doing it on the trio. And so he rolls in, and the carrier guy is like, you know, cordy keyboards will never be as fast as T9. And I challenge you to erase to type something.

And you have to put the phone under the table. And so Jeff Hawkins had to race this guy with phones under the table that he could type on a cordy keyboard faster than T9. And he won. He won. Of course he won. Come on. Yeah.

That makes sense to me. We're going to take questions. So if you have them, you know, line up over there. The one thing, as I watched this, you know, we have seen this documentary a lot. But watching it with all of you, it seems like Donna Dubinsky does not get the credit she deserves. She being a pioneer in this industry. Yeah. Yeah, she came on, she was the CEO.

She used to work at Apple. The number of fights at these three executives, but Donna and Ed in particular, who both were at Apple, had with Steve Jobs that aren't in this cut. Like, there's a lot. They would call and yell at each other all the time. And, you know, she talked about how fast the company grew. There were magazine articles of like the Titans of, you know, Silicon Valley at the time.

And you, like, look at these pictures of these people. There's like, it's 15 white dudes and Donna in the middle. And she's much shorter than two. And, you know, it's like the late 90s, so they're all wearing pants that are like, you know, this wide. I don't know. Like what it was. But yeah, it was remarkable. She was successful and dynamic and, you know, doing really well.

They just, they hit these dramas. The joke that I make is that the history of Palm and Hanspring is every 18 months, if somebody would have just given them $300 million, they would have won. And they tripped over their own feet a bunch. But yeah. What do you see now that reminds you of that? Of that excitement? Not the excitement.

Where are the small companies that if only someone would just give them the money and the time that they would break through? Well, there's a website called The Verge. We're very good. If you'd like to give us $300 million. We're just 18 months away from defeating Apple. So you could just help us out. That would be great. I see a lot of those companies.

It's a cliche now, right? You haven't made a product. You've made a favorite. feature where like somebody has a great idea and we all love it and the big company can just take it and like integrate it into the operating system or they'll buy the nascent company and crush it. And in many ways, buying the nascent company and crushing it is a superior alternative to whatever happened to POM. Right? Like that cycle of mergers and deaths and spinoffs and then HP kills you is like, no thanks. Right? Like I'd rather just like like

Google Acquire my company. Yeah. But I think I still feel that, right? The, the, small companies don't get the opportunity to take the market. Yeah. Something else happens. So I see excitement and dynamism all over the place. People making hardware and software tools for creators. There's just so much exciting stuff going on there. The question is, where do you see that excitement and that possibility and the something the size of smartphones?

Yeah. And that is much more difficult to predict. And is it possible that there is a market that you could theoretically go after without the resources of a tech giant? I'm not sure. I think that's one of the reasons that maybe crypto is so interesting to people is because it seems like it's a potentially huge thing that you could get into without being, you know, Google or Apple or Microsoft. For one second, I thought you were going to say the Metaverse and I was going to kick you off this. We're going to take a break, but when we come back, we'll have more of my conversation with Nili about the history of smartphones, plus some questions from the audience. Support for this show comes from Shopify.

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Claude. dot AI slash Vergecast. All right, we're back. All right, we've got some questions. Let's start over here. Hi, Eli. Hi, Deeter.

Oh, my God. The hype desk is back. Hello. Sam, the chef, Sheffer. Hey, everyone. Deeder, that was really awesome to watch. It's also crazy to think that so much happened in 20 years, 10 years, right? Like, that iPhone came out in 2007.

It's a long time ago. Do you have a vision or, you know, sort of like an idea? or thoughts on what do things look like in 10 years with mobile computing, spatial computing, gaming computing, and then 20 years, because that stuff was 2000. We're in 2021. Yeah. What does that future look like to you?

I'll give you 10. I'm too chicken to do 20. Actually, Jake Casternaccus, wonderful editor at the verge. I owe him a final draft on an article about this. I was clapping for Jake. Jake, Jake, Jake, Jake, Jake, Jake, Jake. It's like the third time. Anyway, I think that there's either going to be a radical, like, technological innovation that we can't see. Like, screens will go from folding to projecting into our eye from like a little camera or, you know, something, they'll be implanted, some huge thing, and there's no way to predict.

Or it will just be more relentless incremental innovation. And I say that, and it sounds like a bummer, but from 2007 to now, it's arguably relentless incremental innovation. and the cultural changes that have been wrought by that, those incremental changes are massive. And so the smartphone 10 years from now may look very much like the smartphone that we have today, just better cameras, better screens, better stuff. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't still have the power to change our culture, change the way we live our lives.

I have two answers, one of which is a relentless plug. One, I always look at display technologies. The thing that bounds the devices in our lives is the display. So we could not have smartphones with CRT displays, although it would be rad. Like, rad. We needed LCDs, and then we needed really thin LCDs, we needed power-efficient LCDs, we needed touch technology. That is the thing that makes technology possible. We don't have a next display technology.

We're like close in some ways. I think Addie and Dieter corrected me on the Vergecast a couple weeks ago, and I was like, it's all CDs. And like, no, there's like hints of other stuff. But there's not that turn. We might have folding. So that's what I would look at, because that is the thing that allows the leap. The second thing is the rentless plug is we, uh, Norie Donovan, our EP and a bunch of other people, DeVorge and I are, and a bunch of other smart people. I'm not doing anything.

Might be working on a show for a large streaming service about what life looks like 50 and 100 years in the future. Is that an exclusive? Sure. Let's call it that. And I'm very, that's, it's months away, but we're spending a lot of time thinking about that. And I will tell you, not easy to predict the future. But we're doing our best. So that'll come out later. Cool. Thanks.

Over here. Hey, I'm Linus. I'm proud owner of a Microsoft duo. So if you ask about Microsoft phone owners, there's at least one. My question is, I think, when you take any of these ideas, you can pursue their origins down to, I mean, like software keyboard, for example, you can pursue them down from the iPhone to, to the handspring all the way down to academia for a lot of these ideas. So when you try to tell the story about the origin of ideas like this, where do you, how do you think about where to start? Is it from the first product? Is it from the origins of the idea themselves and the people who wrote about them,

thought about them, or is it even earlier? Where did you decide where to start with the story? Yeah, I thought about that a lot, because it's like, am I just wanting to tell the story of Hanspring? Because that's how I got my start in reporting. And I just, is this whatever. And I, maybe this is rationalization, but I feel like you start, I wanted to start with,

the products that like had an audience and had a community and had like a real shot at like hitting big numbers. I think that going back to before those products to academia, to there's again, there's other Palma Westphones before this thing from Kyocera, Waucom or whoever. But these were the products that like had more forward-looking ideas and also like had a commercial market and had a significant community around them. Neil, I asked some of the stuff I left out. the community around visors and handspring and later Palm was obviously very important to me. So. Okay.

Hi. Hi, my name is Scott. I have a question. I don't know if I'm remembering this correctly, but I believe that Palm OS at one point was connecting to iTunes and Apple killed that. So am I remembering that correctly? And if so, where does that fit into this timeline of this company? I do not know if there was ever a bridge from Palm OS to-

Oh my God. something about Palm OS that you don't know. To iTunes? Good night, everybody. Hang on, wait, wait, wait. It was great seeing all of you. Is it the missing sync? No.

Okay. Now, WebOS. Yes. See, this, that's different. Oh my God, just feel my power grow right now. WebOS did connect to iTunes, and on the All Things at these stage, that's when they had that hack. They showed it off.

They did it by making the Palm Prix, which comes after this story, identify as an iPod via its USB identification. So when you plug in a USB device, it says, I'm a blah. And so the Palm Preep, when it plugged into a Mac, said, I'm an iPod. And then iTunes was like, cool, let's sync. Yeah.

And then Apple did not like that. They did not like that. And then there was a cat and mouse game for, I don't know, three, six months where Apple would find a way to block it and Palm would find a way to turn it back on. And then they finally stopped and they stopped doing it. So that was then. But earlier, do you see that digital pub slide

that famous Steve Jobs thing, you know, there's no iPod in that slide. There was a creative Rio. Yeah. Delightful product. I had one. I had it in college in 2003. It got me zero dates.

No one was interested in it. But Apple had a product called I-Sync, and it could transfer to other players, and then they released the iPod and they cut all that off. So there was like one tiny moment, and I know more about Palm and Dieter. I'm done. Okay.

Yeah. Actually, if we're talking about music stuff, You may have noticed it, I talked about the Sounds Good Springboard module. It was an MP3 module. That company got started, and there was a young intern at that company, and then the springboard market died, so they moved on to push email services, and then that company got bought by Motorola,

and then that young intern... Do you guys wonder why we are so angsty about mergers on our show every time? It's like, there was a good idea, then a company bought it, and then they died. No, no, no, but that young intern, moved up the ranks in Motorola and was like, hey, Razor's not going to last forever. We should make an Android phone. And he talked them into it. And he launched the droid.

And the droid is one of the phones that killed Palm. And then Motorola got bought by Lenovo. Who is the interview? Rick Osterlo, who currently is in charge of the pixel. It's so good. Over here. Hi, Dieter. Huge fan since Trio Central is.

I'm going to say three words that might cause PTSD for you. access Linux platform. So, okay. Oh god, he didn't ask a question. So you mentioned it in there that the split between Palm One and Palm stores happened. I personally think that that schism was one of the biggest cell phones in technology history. Do you think if they hadn't split apart, they might have been able to execute a bit better? When Hanspring came back to Palm, the hardware division, they were up to re-up their license for Palm OS.

and Ed Colligan wanted to just buy them instead of get a license. And the board said, no, just re-up the license. But it's only like another so-and-so million dollars more. And they like, nah. And so they gave the Palm OS company, Palm Source, all of this money. And then the Palm Source company was like, look at all this money that we just got paid. We must be worth a lot of money. Does anybody want to buy us?

And so they sold to a company in Japan Access. They made Access Linux Palm. and nobody else was licensing this operating system except for Palm, obviously. And so it sort of didn't have anywhere to go. And the team that was developing a lot of very interesting, innovative ideas for Palm Source at Access Linux Palm,

they started leaving the company and they all started going to a place where they're like, you know, there might be something interesting and cool here where we can execute these ideas. One of the most important engineers was Diane Hackthorne, and that company was Google, and they made Android,

along with the folks from Sidekick. So, yes, biggest cell phone in history. Yeah. Sometimes you wonder why Dieter knows everybody, and it's like because you knew them when they were babies. It's, like, one of the secrets of 10 years of doing this is like, oh, we know a lot of important people now because we paid attention to them when they were not very important.

And, like, coming up with people is, like, one of the secrets, and it just takes time. Hey, so I'm thinking back to, like, the HDC Touch Pro 2, if you remember that, like the Windows mobile stuff. Yeah. And then I feel like after that, the next big leap was Microsoft went all in on the Lumia devices, tried to push that Windows 8 tile stuff, did not work out on desktop or mobile. Do you think if Microsoft would have switched to Android a lot earlier on?

Would we have like a whole suite of Microsoft? Like, could they be the pixel or similar to that? Is that a victory? Yeah, I don't know. Eli, would you like to discuss, because it's been a minute, the Burning Platform memo? It's like two days in a row of Stephen Elop reference. on this stage. You might recall, Stephen Lop went to Nokia, he became the CEO, and he wrote this memo about saving Nokia. You don't recall this because you're sane people with lives. This is

very important to us. And the memo is an extended allegory about people who lived on an oil derrick in the middle of the ocean, and the oil derrick catches fire. The oil derrick in this metaphor is Symbian, another competing smartphone operating system. And you're, Troy, it's been a long time since I read it, but I believe the choices were to burn to death or to dive into the frigid ocean. And he's like, sometimes he got to dive. And this was his management philosophy for this company. And he's like, we're diving. And the frigid ocean was Windows phone.

Yep. Right? So it's like this big thing. He sends this memo, and I'm imagining, I am not finished, as you may have noticed. Maybe this has some, like, meaning. If any of you are finished, let me know. If people just talk about the burning oil derrick all the time. But maybe it has some residents.

But I imagine the employees of Nokia are like, well, this sucks. But they could have picked Android. And I think if Nokia had picked Android, the whole market may have been different. Yeah. But instead, the ex-Microsoft employee who took over as Nokia's CEO, surprisingly picked Microsoft's platform, sold Nokia at Microsoft. Microsoft lost its CEO. They got a new CEO.

Yeah, the more interesting questions, these are just some guys who make choices. I feel like we like elevate CEOs a lot. Like many times they're just guys. Yeah. And like you might make the same choices. And I think this is like a pivotal choice. But everyone around that choice was like you should have picked Android. Yeah.

I mean, when I said like the current iPhone Android world we live and it wasn't inevitable, this is one of the things that maybe could have changed it. And so the big question I think that we face now that tech companies are so massive is, is there still the potential for that kind of disruptive change that will reshift things around? And my heart wants to say yes, but I think that it's harder than it used to be. Yeah, and I think it's like another carrier reference.

The carriers saw the duopoly, and they wanted Microsoft to be a third competitive thing so they could get price leverage. They needed to get leverage against Apple, and they still do. And like, that was their decision. And I think ELOP saw a business opportunity and not a product opportunity, and that's always a mistake. So I love the documentary, and it got me thinking about how history always repeats itself. And so I was wondering, do you see a device category like VR or AR or small board computing that is kind of going through a similar cycle where it just hasn't found its form factor yet that is like the real hit of the iPhone?

Disclosure. Oh, God. We did it. I cannot believe. You just wanted me to get the disclosure. Yeah, that's all I wanted. Also, if we are taping that, we need to send that to every journalism ethics college course in American. Like, our disclosures are brand, which is super weird.

Yeah. Nobody applauds for disclosures for disclosure. My spouse works for Oculus, Facebook Reality Labs, the division of Facebook that works on VR. And maybe AR, I don't actually know. I do think that you're, that said, I do think that AR is like an interesting possibility. like an interesting possibility, VR is an interesting possibility, but the screen thing is real, and the resource thing is real. Can you do, can you break into that without having a platform? That's pretty tough. I think I mentioned tools for creators a little bit earlier, and this is not

a fully formed idea, but I think that people that are making stuff that doesn't just feel like it's an accessory for the iPhone, or it's an accessory for the iPhone or an Android phone, but it has its own, like, independent existence in some way that lets you make stuff. That's the most exciting thing to me right now, like musical tools, you know, creative tools. Yeah, I'm with that. We talk about the AR stuff on the podcast all the time. The number of problems to solve from how will you make the battery last all day to who gets to decide who augments reality. Like just, I mean, like, I know Facebook's going to rebrand itself, but imagine you're wearing the Facebook glasses and you look at the United States Capitol building. Like, you don't want

your uncle augmenting that image in front of your eyes, right? Like, you don't want to literally live in a different reality than a person standing next to you wearing the glasses. And, like, that is the big problem, right? Like, my dream, I said this yesterday, like, if I could just know all your names, I would be the most powerful person in America, but I cannot, and I will not remember your names, and I refuse to get better at it. But just like, imagine what you need to solve for that problem. You need to build a worldwide facial recognition database.

that seems bad. I'm just going to keep introducing myself to you. That's a preferable outcome. So I think AR is really interesting, but that stack of problems from like the battery won't last very long to everyone lives in a different dystopian hellscape. In the same, like that's, let's calm down. Let's breathe.

But I do think AR and VR, to me, are still the most interesting things. Hello, Jens. Real quick, any comments are, where does danger fit into this whole narrative? Oh, bye. Yeah, I mean, they're here, they're around. And I think one could make a very similar documentary about danger and about the sidekick.

And with similar sad endings. But I think that their influence, like it went into Android, but a little bit more indirectly. Larry and Sergey were big sidekick fans. So, like, there's an influence line there. But I don't think that there is as, like, I don't know, frankly, as tragic a story of, like, yeah, almost had it. The reason I bring them up is because they had the carrier relationship. And so to me, it's very interesting, right? They had that with T-Mobile.

Yep. Like, there was an interesting opportunity. Oh, for sure. They got it to agree. Yeah, having the carrier relationship doesn't mean you win. Blackberry had a carrier relationship. Yeah. Also, remember, T-Mobile was very small.

Our carrier is not all the same size. Yeah, yeah. So being the cool partner on the smallest carrier doesn't make you win. Hey, thanks, guys. So, you know, the documentary obviously did not realize this, like many people here, did make me realize, though, it seems very similar to the wearables market. The whole Kickstarter, Pebble, right, market? They pioneered a lot of Pebble fans.

Is somebody here wearing a Pebble? Do we have like a Windows Phone Pebble combo in the audience? I guess my question is, do you see some parallels in how the wearables market is sort of a last 10 years example of this happening to that market? Pebble gets acquired and they're killed by Fitbit, basically. So in this metaphor, the wearables are the small. and the carriers are the people that own the smartphone platforms. Yep.

Like, imagine that you could get a notification on a watch that isn't an iPhone, that you cannot. You can get notifications you can't do, they're not smart, right? You can't just, like, reply to them. That is a feature limitation of the platform that prevents the competitor from competing with the Apple Watch. Like, there it is. If you could get a notification and actually reply to it on the phone, I guarantee you some people would pick not an Apple Watch to use with their iPhones. But they're the carrier.

Dieter has written an excellent editorial about this, actually. And he was like, should I pitch it at a little? Should I pitch it as the iPhone, it's like the smartphone companies or the new carriers? Something like that, yeah. And we decided to use the word carrier. But when we say carrier, we say it with like malice and hatred in our heart. Go ahead. Hi.

So we talk a lot about hardware and software where they come from, where they go to. And people make terrible choices in buying hardware and using software all the time, which leaves marketing, advertising how products are positioned in the market. and I'm just kind of curious. How do you think this story relates in that kind of sense? Whether it's the failure of Hanspring, the ascent of the iPhone, but that's an important way that markets are shaped, I feel like. Give me an example.

I think that you could have a terribly designed product that maybe has a terrible user interface, terrible software, and if it's positioned really well in the market, if it's advertised, and given some of this comes down to carrier deals, comes down to money, comes down to all of those things, but things that are really terrible that are genuinely garbage get really popular and sell a ton of units.

And that's just due to other forces in the market. And I look at this, and given I don't know the full history of Hanspring, but would promotion, would different positioning, would any of that have shaped this differently? And given Apple knocks marketing out of the park every chance they get. So it was almost a surefire bet

that the iPhone would do well. But like, I just wonder how the market, if you think the market would have shaped differently. I don't know if I'm cynical is that. I think that a good product can fail because it didn't get proper marketing. But I think bad products will out. And the best marketing isn't going to keep a bad product like it's not going to have longevity. You know, you'll get one or two rounds maybe. Yeah.

But you're not going to become like an important iconic product if it sucks. And I think that I'm actually, I don't think marketing. saves a bad product. Unless you're ruthlessly locked into its ecosystem. Unless you're ruthlessly locked into its ecosystem. But I am unsurprisingly, I'm more cynical than Dieter. And I just thinking about this, like a thousand people asked me about Cizzer Vodka yesterday.

The whole joke there is very dumb, but underlying it is like my friends and I realize that mid-range vodka is a commodity product and we could just like tell jokes about marketing it and we would just yell vodka taglines at each other and that's That's the whole joke. Right? Like, if you think Apple makes the same product as everyone else, but Steve Jobs is a better marketer, they'll win. I think Apple makes great products,

and the marketing is a bonus because they're really good at marketing. But at the end of that, you get the thing home and you turn it on, and either it is horrible, and your Android TV crashes a lot, and you have to answer to your family, or it's really good, right? And, like, that is as simple as it gets. And I think with some kinds of product, the marketing is a whole story, right? Like, that is the vodka joke. And with other kinds of products, your experience and how you feel about it instantly transcends the marketing.

So I think just one super quick follow up to that is had Hanspring been positioned correctly in the market, had then, again, money, carrier deals, all that. Yeah, yeah. Could Hanspring have succeeded just by virtue of having better marketing, better positioning, better whatever that extra something is, because everything else there was in the right place. They could have, but I'm not going to say that they would have. I think that they had really good ideas.

I think that they executed them pretty badly in these products because they just didn't have the resources they need to execute them well. But that's not a guarantee that they would have made it. But they would have had a better chance than they ended up having. Yeah. Cool, thanks.

We've gone over. It's good, but we're gonna take these last two. Let's start over here. I had a question about what you guys think between Apple and Samsung, because Apple makes everything like the software, the hardware, and Samsung gets their software from Google for free, but their phones are priced the same. How do you guys think that they can justify charging the same when they get a major investment that they don't even really have to pay for? Huh. Yeah. That's actually a good question. Is it free? Yeah. Like, yeah, it's free, but Google demands, like, there's a reason. every Samsung phone has two browsers and two email clients.

Like at some point the tax they're paying is that they have to ship half of Google's product and half of Samsung's product. Right? And then we are like, Samsung's product sucks. And like, okay. But if they weren't paying that tax and they didn't know that, you know, they're going to release the phone. And then we're going to be like, Bixby, he's a dog with shoes. And then no one's going to use it because we are going to tell everyone that Google's doing a better job.

Like I think that tax, it might not be monetary. And I understand what you're saying about they price the phones the same. And that is like a whole, like the hardware is still expensive, right? There's a reason Samsung is ahead on hardware features all the time. Maybe they're reinvesting that money somewhere else. But I think there's a very practical effect of the tax, which is that they've had to compromise what might have been their user experience to accede to Google's demands.

And I guess I would also add, don't shed a tier for Apple having to invest in software development because they make more profits than anybody. Like they're doing fine. They're doing fun. Last one. A lot of pressure on you. Okay.

Hi. I was wondering what you think of the viability of Linux-based phones. Yeah, that's my question. Yeah. It's like a perfect ender. Yeah. It has been tried. I think that even Google with Fuchsia maybe is thinking Linux isn't the best kernel.

I mean, it's not a question of the viability of Linux as a technology and is it appropriate for a smartphone. There's lots of fascinating conversations to have there, and many of you would be able to beat me at that conversation really quickly. It's a question of, can there be a third smartphone right now? And that seems dubious. That's going to take a minute, if ever. Right. There's two parties involved. There's carriers who will not allow anything good to happen. Can you tell I feel? If you're a carrier partner and you're in the audience, please see our ad salespeople. They would love to talk to you. And then there's customers. I'm like, are you going to buy a Linux phone

that doesn't own an Instagram app? Well, actually, maybe now you would. Some other good app, Snapchat. They're great. Thanks for being on station. Right, like that, those developers are not incentivized to build those applications. And bringing up a new platform means they will not have all the capabilities that the current mature platforms do.

So between the carriers and then knowing that you will not be able to deliver any kind of tangible value except for freedom, which is great. I like it. But I also just like having a useful phone. I think that just makes that investment very difficult to justify. Can we not in the duopoly down note? One more round of applause for the video team.

Yeah, there you go. Very good. That's it. We didn't actually plan an ending. So we're, no, thank you all for coming. I want to actually just say thank you to Dieter. You might have noticed a weird theme of our 10-year birthday is like fragility. We just did an entire documentary about fragility and the verge was once very fragile. I think I said this to almost everybody who talked to me over the course past few days. They're like, what did you learn in the past 10 years? I'm like, I wish I had a time machine

so I could go back 10 years in time and tell myself it was going to be okay. I really do. Like, Deeter and I, at the very beginning, spent nights in the bar by my house, Zabloski's RIP, it's closed, like literally in tears because at the beginning of this was so hard

and it wasn't going to work and we were working too hard. And now it's here, and we have a great video team, we have all these people who work with us and all of you who care for, We do not take it for granted, and Dieter is my brother, and I don't think I would have been able to do it. I can't.

Give us my hand. Thank you so much. Okay, my thanks to Nilai for the chat, to everybody who came to our 10-year event, and of course to the people who spoke with me in the documentary, Donna Dubinsky, Ed Colligan, Jeff Hawkins, Peter Skilman, and Rob Hightani. And of course, a huge thanks to the entire Verge video team for all the hard work they put into making an excellent documentary. We'll be back on Friday with the Vergecast chat show, and then we're going to have one more topic-specific episode next Tuesday, when, as promised, we're going to dig into the new smart home standard that's called Matter. This week's Vergecast is produced by me, Andrew Marino, and Liam James.

If you want to hear more special episodes like this, or if you have any other feedback about The Vergecast, I am Backlon on Twitter, and my email remains very easy to guess Deeter at theverge.com. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll chat again soon. Thank you.