The Vergecast - Why Microsoft bet on Surface

Episode Date: May 28, 2024

Today on the flagship podcast of open smart home standards:  03:25 - Microsoft’s Pavan Davuluri, leader for Windows and Devices, joins the show to discuss the future of the AI PC and what’s next for Microsoft’s hardware Microsoft’s new Windows chief on the future of the OS, Surface, and those annoying ads Microsoft’s big bet on building a new type of AI computer  Microsoft Build 2024: everything announced 30:25 - The Verge’s Jen Tuohy and David Pierce discuss the latest updates in the smart home world in a segment called “Does Matter matter yet?” The Dyson WashG1 is the company’s first dedicated mop Amazon’s Matter Casting is shaping up so nicely, I want to use it everywhere Matter 1.3 arrives with new device type and features Smart lighting company Brilliant is looking for a buyer Google launches new Home APIs and turns Google TVs into smart home hubs  01:13:20 - David answers a question from the Vergecast Hotline about AI-powered search engines.  Google is redesigning its search engine — and it's AI all the way down  Google CEO Sundar Pichai on AI-powered search and the future of the web Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Open Smart Home Standards. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am cooped up inside. It's a holiday weekend, but it's like hot and rainy all at the same time, and it's just like a nasty time to be outside. But the upside of that is it means I have an incredible built-in excuse to just spend three days playing video games. And that is essentially what has happened. I don't know if I've mentioned this on the show before, but the game over the game over. probably the last decade that has eaten up the most of my time is FIFA, the soccer game. It's not even called FIFA anymore. It's EA Sports FC now, but who cares? It's FIFA.

And I play arguably too much FIFA. I'm like pretty good at it in a way that I'm not good at a lot of the Battle Royale games. I just get crushed at Fortnite and Warzone and all of those. But I'm pretty good at FIFA, and I have become alarmingly into it, especially over the course of this year. And now it's May. It's almost June, which means it's the end of the soccer season. which means it's almost the end of the FIFA season, and I'm too deep in it at this point. I am in the subreddits. I'm in the trading discords. I spent 20 bucks on a guide to trading players inside of FIFA to get more coins to buy more

players. It's a lot. I'm deep in it. It's a whole thing. I can tell you who all the leakers are. If you ever want to talk about FIFA and compare Ultimate Teams, get at me. It's the only thing I ever want to talk about. Luckily, for most of you, that is not what we are here to talk about on this show.

Today, we're going to do two things. One, we're going to talk more about what has gone on with Microsoft the last couple of weeks. It was build. It was the Surface launch. And we have the person who runs Windows and Surface at Microsoft, Pavandavalluri, on the show to talk about both the beginning and end of this project that Microsoft has been on for a long time and what he sees coming for the next decade, too. Super fun, really interesting. Then, Gen 2 is going to come on.

And we're going to do a bit of a round robin of smart home news because a bunch of stuff, has happened, some of which I think is actually bigger than I realized. And we're just going to dig into all of it and see what's really going on. Then we're going to get to the hotline. We're going to talk about search engines, search engines on everybody's mind right now. All that is coming up in just a minute. But first, FIFA. It's champions. If you know what that means, you know that's a big deal. If you don't know what that means, stay that way. It's for the best. But anyway, I got to go play a bunch of FIFA for some reason that feels very important to me right now. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back.

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covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Welcome back. I know we've talked a lot about Microsoft the last few episodes, but it's because I think this is a big moment for the company.

It's pushing really hard on AI everywhere, across the company and especially across the products people use. It just rolled out these new co-pilot plus PCs that Microsoft seems to think might change the way we use our computers forever. And I mean, Microsoft is the most valuable company on Earth for a reason, right? But what happened over the last week actually feels to me like both the beginning of a new AI era at Microsoft and in some ways the end of a decade-long project inside of the company. And I wanted to hear from the inside how that moment feels and how we got here. So I called up someone who knows.

My name is Paven Davleury. I am leader for Windows and Devices. Paven currently runs all things Windows and Surface inside of Microsoft. He's been in that job for a few months, but he's actually been at the company for more than two decades, and as a result, has seen just about everything in the Windows and Surface world in that time. So we started our conversation by going back in time, all the way to 2012, to the first ever Microsoft Surface and Surface RT. Back then, we weren't talking about AI. We weren't even really talking about laptops. That was the time when everybody kind of

thought PCs were dead and phones were going to be the only thing. You remember that? Like, this was supposed to be the end of computers, not the beginning of some grand project for Microsoft. But you can draw a line from that moment in 2012 with the Surface RT, which was bad, all the way to this one without trying very hard. So 2012, let's go back. What was the big bet behind the surface, particularly the Surface RT? So our core thesis, you know, at that point in time, you're right, we made an Arm bet. The Arm bet was around modernizing the platform at the end of the day and bringing modern architectures to Windows. Arm was a part of it for sure, you know, in instruction sets matter, obviously, for the core operating system and the app experiences.

But really, the theory of the case for ARM was a modern system, you know, in its entirety. And so what we wanted was, yes, great, you know, performance. We wanted a great battery life. We wanted, you know, security, all these other aspects of modern platforms in that window of time. And so Arm was a big bet. And as you recall, for sure, Surface already did bring a new user experience sort of, you know, paradigm to the table for sure.

And, you know, in that window of time, we were seeing. confluence, certainly across what was happening in the PC space and the tablet space and in mobile. It was early days of tablet iteration back then. Yeah, so a lot of those constructs, I think, are still true today for sure. And the way I think about this kind of way I thought was going to bridge that from back then to today is the arm journey, as an example, has been a multi-generation exercise for us, for sure. And we certainly learned many lessons, especially on the surface team between the work we did in Surface ProX and Surface Pro 95G, for instance.

And now I think we're in a place where we brought the totality of what was needed to be just building great product for customers at the end of the day to the table. And so I feel much more confident now in terms of the work that we have done. Did you know 12 years ago how long that list of things you just described was? Because I think part of the reason I ask is it feels like, you know, the running joke is next year has been the year of Windows on Arm for a decade now. And it seems like, at the very least, you and Microsoft are substantially more confident that that is the case now than ever. But if you rewind 12 years, do you think your sense of the project was actually as big as the project turned out to be?

Yeah, this is a great example of the breadth and diversity of the Windows ecosystem. I think our superpower is the diversity of the ecosystem. Which is such a great euphemism in such a good and bad way. It makes everything wonderful and massively complicated all at the same time. Massive, exactly. So you kind of have to get your arms around enough of the massive components, I think, to be meaningful at the end of the day. And that has been, in fact, the reason why we took, for this iteration of it,

frankly, David, I think we could have done individual bits and pieces sooner and then kind of done them on an asynchronous basis. We could have done some of the dev platte stuff kind of out of band and kind of got those pieces out. We could have done parts of the core OS and then release them as, you know, incremental updates in Windows. But we chose to go out to take the time needed to go do the entire thing. One good example of that is our partnership on the Silicon Platform.

To me, the Silicon Platform is a foundation for what the OSs and app experiences are and what they can take advantage of. And it takes time to go rebuild the entire Silicon. In this case, our partnership with Qualcomm took us to a place, and quite frankly with Arm Holdings to a place where we had to go back and address some fundamentals. And, you know, Silicon Design Lifecycle takes time when you are rebuilding an entire ship for the exercise. So I think we certainly appreciated the magnitude of it in the more recent years, and I think we decided to take the time to address the completion of it,

perhaps versus doing another sort of incremental take on it. Is it easy then in that process to sort of find the moment where you're, or like identify the moment where you're like, okay, we're there. We've done the thing. And instead of, because my sentence was something like this is you could tinker with app compatibility until the heat death of the universe and never actually solve every problem in every edge case. How do you pick the moment where you're like, okay, we have kind of overpromise and underdelivered a couple of times. We know we have to get this right and we have.

Like, how do you put that flag in the ground? Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I think to me there isn't a single one-answer thing here. I typically as a team, we collectively look for a set of signals, I would say. In this instance, there were some things that we clearly learned by way of customer feedback. In fact, you know, feedback from folks like you for sure who are looking at our products. And so that to me, there's some front and center things that, you know, we just had to make sure we were delivering on emulator performance was one in such example. It was, you know, kind of sort of apparent to us what the benchmark industry competition, et cetera.

So we have some clear benchmarks that we had to go hit that were kind of markers that we set for ourselves. The second part of it, I think, was we had some expectations of, you know, when we take another iteration doing this, we do have to be kind of meaningful and world class in this context. And so that was kind of a moving target for us, and we had to go as, you know, it's a function of time, obviously, and time to market and so on. So some of those we just decided we're going to take a quantum leap kind of in that sense, and then you will have to kind of wait and watch and decide and see if that's a meaningful exercise or not. The other big component is we do, you know, get a chance to talk to customers. We do that for consumers for sure. We talk to commercial customers. We get a chance to do, you know, iterations and, you know, trials and deployments with them.

And so we learn through actual dialogue and data and telemetry from our, commercial customers to see if we've addressed the core issues. A great example of that is on the emulator itself, as much as we did tremendous work on the emulator on this iteration, there are something that you can't emulate. And so, you know, kernel mode components in Windows and, you know, anti-malware type stuff and VPN applications that commercial customers do rely on, you have to get them native. So some of those things we do, we took time to go get the data, get customer feedback, and, you know, do the trials, do some deployments, get their feedback.

And then I think you look at the culmination of Amal and then see if you've done enough of the critical mass to decide that you've kind of met that expectation. The one thing that there's kind of a gift for us in this context is the AI stuff that happened. I think the one real inflection point for us, David, was knowing that we could use this opportunity in a more general sense,

certainly Arm is a big piece of it for us and the first wave of Copilot Plus PCs are on Qualcomm Series X components. But really using the AI, point in time as an inflection for us to kind of go after a bigger vector for what value we could serve at the end of the day was another thing where, you know, timing figured into our decision-making for both value and timing for the exercise. That makes sense. That's actually a good segue into the next thing I wanted to talk about, which is that it feels like to some extent in 2012, the

surface's job in particular was to sort of remind people that PCs matter. Like we were in the era when, you know, smartphones were going to kill everything. Laptops are dead. Who needs any of this stuff anymore? Like, that's the old way. And that was, I think, obviously never the case. But that was, I think, part of what Surface existed to do was continue to, you know, push that along.

It feels like the job now seems to have shifted a bit where you're trying to, and I even notice this sort of as you're on stage talking about this stuff. Like, you have to make the case for these devices in a new way. And it's not just these things still matter because. typing as annoying on your phone, you have to like describe a different way to think about my computer than it has. So I'm curious, give me sort of the big philosophical vision of like the job to be done of a PC in this era that we're just starting right now.

Has it changed at all? It has. And I think to be honest with you on that exercise of my own learning and journey, I would say the last four years have been particularly instrumental. Because to your point, I think people go through that thought process periodically. they're like, you know, what is the job of the PC? And one thing we learned through the pandemic and coming out of the pandemic on the other side was how vital PCs were for people and just how fundamental windows is in that context of serving the breadth of education customers, through commercial

customers, through frontline workers, through, you know, consumers were at large. And so I think it reinforced for people in a way that obviously we took a pandemic. But I think in a way, it also forced us to kind of go through the introspection of how are we making sure we, We are thinking deeply about the promise of the platform, the ecosystem that Windows is on, the role for surface in that context as we go forward. I think for me, there's two constructs. One, to your point earlier, I think the deep-rooted value proposition of Windows, I think just it is a great reminder.

It is kind of a humbling thing and an inspiring experience at the same time for how important and foundational and key windows is across all of kind of work and play for people in life. As we think about the world going forward, I think for me, myself, and orientation in the space is this AI journey that the world is going through our industry, at least for sure, is a tremendous gift for us. And, you know, I think it gives us a sense of agency for what is possible on a PC and to kind of reimagine what was possible from, you know, 10 years ago, you know, 2012 for sure, we were not thinking about this in a way that I think is

somewhat of a title, you know, shift for us. To me, what I love about this is, especially with With the ability to build an entire system stack, you know, kind of be thoughtful. And this is also can part why this project took, you know, kind of longer, perhaps, and another sort of expected is it needed us to kind of go through the deep thinking on how do we deliver this proposition in a way that is somewhat durable. And I think we're at the infancy of this journey, David, I think there's going to be, you know, iteration and refinement and learning and evolution in that sense. And so it required us to go think deeply about how do we go integrate AI into our products

across the board. It took us down the path of making sure we were building the, hardware platform capability, and that's a statement across the entire Windows ecosystem. We have a whole modern generation of SOCs that I'm actually very excited about. They're going to start showing up for Windows. It's going to be great across our partners, because I think that modern platform is what then we can build on top of, both from an operating system standpoint and as a device maker in Surface.

But I think, I mean, just to that point, actually, one of the things I think you could have done, and you should tell me if you did do this, because I think it's very interesting, is say, you know, Microsoft's kind of lost in mobile. The AI thing is happening. This is our moment. We're going to relaunch the Surface Duo as an AI device and take over the universe. That is one like perfectly rational version of that thing. But you went another way and you went, you went all in on PCs.

Like even the fact that the Surface Pro itself is the same size as the last one, but is in such a meaningful way like a fundamentally different device. I think is so interesting. And it's like there's something about what happens when you put AI inside of a PC that I feel like consumers just have not seen yet. This stuff is so new. But you've had to like think ahead about what that will look like and how we'll use it. And I'm sure you've just used these devices longer than the rest of us. So like what what is about the size and shape and form factor of a PC that you can add AI to and it changes it meaningfully? A good question.

Somebody who worked on dual, you know, we definitely did think deeply about that, you know, in terms of vectors and options. I love Duo, by the way. I have a duo right over there, and I love it to pieces. It warms my heart. I love hearing that. I think, you know, my sense on that topic, first, I think AI is going to show up in a variety of different forms. For us, you know, Microsoft sort of, we're the co-pilot company, and we're going to, you know, deliver a co-pilot as a set of services and experiences on a variety of different devices, a variety of different form factors, you know, different platforms. So you're seeing that from us. We talked about it on Monday as well. So that I think is certainly a thrust for the company across the board. I think we're seeing tremendous momentum with things like the M365 copilot, for example,

in terms of embedding agentic capabilities, co-pilot capabilities, and productivity suite and applications and services. In terms of the device form factor, the thing that I'm particularly excited about with the PC orientation around it. By the way, one thing we should, to mention mobile, the one reason why the value of the neural engine and efficiency and just matrix math computation and performance per watt and all this stuff, we do inherit a lot of those capabilities of mobile platforms into these next generation mobile

SSCs. Obviously, we have the sensibilities because, anyway, so I think that, I think you know this, of course, and you're seeing this, it's happening in industry, you know, broadly, and we are a pole position when it comes to taking advantage of those IPs, those capabilities, and then bringing, you know, the largest possible neural engines at scale into Windows on the devices themselves. The thing for us when it comes to large screen form factors, you know, pro devices, laptops,

and by the way, I think Surface is one great embodiment of it, but what was kind of magical for us with this Copilot PC moment is it was not just Surface. We had, you know, lean in from our entire ecosystem partners and the signals we got from all of our OEM partners here was super strong. So it kind of gave us conviction on thinking about this, you know, broad and holistic and making sure we think of it

as a transition for a class of devices versus, you know, one particular form factor. The couple of things that make AI kind of meaningful for me in PCs, one of them is, by definition, Windows is a multi-platform, multi-app operating system. And one of the things that I think that make this AI experience as powerful is the fact that these models can reason across things happening, you know, across your screen, across multiple applications, across workflows. And I think in a world where a lot of what we do is task flow across applications and so on,

having the ability for having AI help you both in your own app but also be able to help with workflows across apps is huge, I think. And for us, the idea of recall, the notion of search and search becoming semantic. I think that, you know, today, most people don't interact with their devices in a natural language sense. Like, I think intuitively we are able to do or would like to go do. And so for search to be semantic, you know, you do need to flatten what that information architecture and data schema looks like. because, again, you don't want to be app-specific.

You want to search the way your memories would work, for instance, and how you recall things. And so that way, for us, PC, that was one powerful thing, the ability for us to be able to bring AI across applications. The second big thing is multimodality. On a PC, you're looking at content, you're typing on a screen, you have the opportunity for voice interactions. You have touch, you have ink.

And so these AI models are increasingly going to become multimodal for us. And so the fact that we are a multimodal operational, We're a multitasking operating system. It gives us a fertile ground to go, you know, bring these capabilities. And quite frankly, I think my sentiment is we have a point of view on where that value starts. The fact is people are going to do things with them that we start with as a point of view,

and then they are going to bring their own ideas, and I think that's going to be powerful. The last thing I'll say, David, is, you know, the power of the Windows ecosystem is our app catalog and what developers do on top of it. And the beautiful thing with AI now is we are finding a strong pull from traditional, Windows applications, as well as a set of folks who are traditionally sort of web apps,

if you will, and build websites and stuff, who are very interested in knowing what they can do with the AI capabilities local on device. And so the pull from them of reimagining what apps can be, and that's full spectrum, quite frankly, from I want to change the UI because I don't need as many radial buttons, dials, and so on, because the agents can start understanding what's happening, all the way through, I want to do net new things where I need local models, And I want those local models to have a sort of attributes that we can, you know, kind of a Windows platform standpoint, build platform capabilities to serve them. That's another strong signal, which is why I think, you know, Windows devices are a great place

because we have a rich catalog that exists at scale today. And they have a very broad surface area for taking advantage of AI. Yeah. You just brought up my favorite user experience thing to think about right now. And I can't stop thinking about it. And I'm curious how you're thinking about it, which is the sort of UI of AI also feels very uncertain. because a lot of what you just described is what I would call like infrastructural AI. It's sort of underlying technology in service of something that shouldn't really feel like

AI as you do it, right? It just makes it faster or smarter or whatever else. When we talk about AI a lot, we talk about chatbots, right? Like that is, that is, I think, the sort of accidental synonym of AI in a way that I really hate and hope we get past. But I am curious, I mean, I think AI, it sounds like for you, sort of runs that whole spectrum. But as you're thinking about, like, what this stuff should look like and where people should see AI and sort of how loudly it should scream AI at them when they see it. How are you thinking about that right now? You know, as a company, David, there's a variety of teams who are looking broadly and deeply at that topic. Yeah, because nobody knows anything. It's so fun. It's all so new.

I think, honestly, that's kind of the beauty of it. Right now, it's a place for innovation. We are early in the life cycle, like you said. I think my sense is people are looking for a paradigm, and for a period of time at least. I think there's going to be iteration, evolution. There's going to be different people with different points of view. The value is going to surface itself in different ways. And then I think perhaps there'll be some patterns that are more stickier in a certain sort of use cases than others. Can you get away with that on Windows, though? Like Windows is not, I would say, famously a place where you can do a lot of experimentation without immediately infuriating millions of people around the world. Can you play like that in something as big and important as Windows?

Yeah, actually, let me try to complete response for it in the previous thing, and I'll come back to your iteration question. Okay. The question, where does it surface itself? You know, we shared a little bit, we shared a glimpse of this at the Bill conference. You know, one of our big learnings, at least in the canvas of Windows is using AI for serving kind of customers where they're at in their workflows. And so we have a lot of very highly used surfaces, very high traffic surfaces in Windows right now. And one of the things we're thinking about is how do we have these agentic experiences, just help people get to their intent, faster, easier, quicker. And so that's one sort of thought process where I think in terms of UI evolution, you'll see the UI evolve itself to a place where you'll see

co-pilot showing up in more diffuse, but infuse manner across the operating system. It's not going to be screaming at you, but I think it's the subtle ways of being able to do things that you perhaps do today, but it'll just get you through them faster, more efficient, kind of more intentful way. There's another big thought process, which is around the idea of recall that we just introduced, features and preview, the notion that you can bring net new capabilities, I think is going to create new shell surfaces, is going to create new experiences, and it'll become a place where we'll refine and iterate and add new value as well. Once you have a semantic index, to your point, that's sort of a structural notion, that is going to surface itself in a variety

of different ways. And so I think that, you know, that's another way to think about it. And of course, then there's the app experiences and how do those app experiences in themselves take advantage of copilot capabilities. We introduced the new co-pilot, you know, thinking, yes, on Monday as well. And then I think you'll see, if you think of as hybrid AI, there's going to be a pattern, I think,

where you'll see these large models in the cloud working with models on the edge. The model on the edge will bring context and understanding and these large models will do reasoning at a scale that's not possible. And I think that concert is going to open up some new experiences about at the OS and app later. So I think that's kind of our three vectors of thought process right now

in terms of where, you know, U.I, you know, affordances and constructs will take themselves. and then we'll see. A year from now, I'm sure if we talk, you'll see how you're going to be smarter across the board. I think the point on these interfaces can be minimalist over time

because of the reasoning capabilities is certainly a deep call. I know you've talked about it in a couple of different places. I think that's kind of on our minds. Your experimentation iteration point is a great one. And I think that is the thing we are on a learning journey ourselves, quite frankly, and how do we go do that? We'll continue to use the Windows Insider program. It's been powerful for us to learn, you know,

kind of what works and what doesn't. What I love with the insider community is we're able to do a bunch of different experiments. We're able to do them asynchronously and get signals at the level that matters for individual features in themselves. But we also have a variety of other learning tools and experimentation methods. We are able to talk to customers. We certainly get a chance to go experiment with commercial customers. And then I think from a window standpoint, we get to learn at the rate of the entire company. And so for me, the fact, when it comes to the idea of responsible AI, for example, Microsoft is leading responsible AI in the cloud.

We are learning a bunch there, and certainly we take those lessons and we apply them to customers in the Windows context because they're the same person, the same corporation, the same set of customers. So I find, in fact, in the AI world, I have more learning tools because the way AI capabilities and services and even social experiments and how people are experiencing them is actually pretty broad brush across the company than features in Windows. in the past by themselves. Yeah, I've always enjoyed the sort of pros and cons of being Microsoft in this ecosystem. On the one hand, you have this incredibly long history and a lot of people who are very accustomed to certain workflows, and the sort of cost of change

is very high. But on the upside, you can put that kind of stuff in front of huge numbers of different kinds of people pretty quickly. And I just, that tension, I feel like I see everywhere across Microsoft and is always really interesting to watch. It is a great balance. Yeah, I don't know if I have a recipe

for an answer that has resulted to success. Like you said, it's a tension and we have to kind of work the balance there for sure. Totally. So I know I have to let you go here in a minute. So one last question. We started 12 years ago. Fast forward 12 more years for me. Is the bet now

the same one you feel like you were making with Surface 12 years ago or has it shifted? Like is this a sort of inflection point in the life of what you think these devices are and what you're pushing towards with them? Our, okay, it's a great question.

Let me try to do this. The philosophy and our strategy and mission with Surface has been around, you know, driving, leading innovation in the Windows ecosystem in a way that we think allows Windows itself to move the needle for what is possible, but to do it in a way that is actually responsible for end customers and as a business within Microsoft.

I think that aspect of Surface is going to be instrumental for us to continue to move the needle of what is possible, both in a technology sense, in a product-making sense, in a sense of how do we deliver these capabilities to customers and to businesses in a way that actually is credible for them at the end of the day. I think that aspect of Surface will continue. It has been powerful for us. Quite frankly, I think the co-pilot wave, copilot plus wave of PCs was only possible with the deep work that happened in Surface over the last four or five years.

And so that will continue to be instrumental for us. And I expect and believe that will continue to be great. for us going forward. In terms of the devices themselves, you know, time will tell. I think, you know, we've grown our portfolio, we've played, we've added, we've tried, we've learned. I think that spirit will continue with the team. We will continue to drive innovation. We will learn through those experiments. I'm excited. Many of them are going to be successful, but I'm also, you know, clear-eyed some of those experiments and learnings may or may not result in, you know, in products themselves. But in either case, I think they serve the outcome and the mission for

what's critical for surface. And quite frankly, Microsoft, I think, at the end of the day. Fair enough. All right, well, I've made you late for a meeting, so I'll let you go. But someday we're just going to talk about like hinges and stuff for several hours, and I'm very much looking forward to that. It's going to be bad. Sounds lovely. Thank you. All right. We have to take a break, and then we're going to do a big smart home catch-up because there's a lot to get to. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify.

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It's time now for my favorite occasional segment on the Vergecast, which is when I drag Jen Too-A onto the show and then complain to her about the smart home for a half hour or so. I call this segment, does matter matter? It's pretty good, right? But actually, there is some fun stuff going on in the smart home world right now, including some potentially very big news from Google and Amazon and some other companies that matter in this space, which means Jen and I actually.

have a bunch to catch up on. Jen Tui, welcome back. It's been a while. It has, David. It's always a pleasure to be back, though. I feel like we haven't had enough time to yell about matter on this show recently. It feels like it's time. I know.

Well, I got to yell about matter with Nili on the other show, so. We don't talk about the other show. How dare you? Okay, so I have come up with a little game for us, and I didn't tell you about it because I'm a very cruel and unhelpful podcast host. I have no idea what's about to happen. So I have five topics for you. They're all based on stories you've written recently.

And I'm going to throw them at you one by one and you're going to have to tell me whether this thing is a big deal, a medium deal, or a small deal. And then we're going to talk about it. Okay. I have theses, but I want to know what you think about all of these. Does that sound good? We're just going to dive in. It's going to be great. Sounds good.

The first one, big deal, medium deal, small deal. The Dyson Wash G1. Dyson's first mop. People are very excited about this thing, Jen. Big deal, medium deal, small deal. What do we think? From a smart home perspective, dey-diny deal. Okay.

Because it's not a smart thing. It's, well, it depends on your definition. It's not smart, but it's not internet connected in any way. It is not an IOT device. From the world of floor washing, however, I would say it's kind of a big deal. Because, you know, it's very expensive. but Dyson love them or hate them, they are innovative. They do come up with some interesting solutions for common problems in our home.

And whilst there are lots of great ways to mop your floor, this does actually seem like it has an interesting construct that's going to take a lot of the hard work out of mopping. I mean, frankly, I have never mopped my floors in years because I use robot mops. But that's part of my job. But when I used to have to pull the mop out with the bucket, Oh, it's the worst. It's the worst. And this does actually seem like a good solution.

And I have used some of the automated versions of there. So it's a mop that does not have any kind of motor in it or any kind of fan. So it's very different from any of the products that Dyson's brought out. Briar. You know, it's known for its fans. It's known for its hair dryers. It's known for its vacuum cleaners. This does not suck or blow.

Oh, interesting. Although it sucks in a different way. And that's the kind of neat. engineering trick here, which I think is interesting in terms of cleaning your floors. But people love Dyson products and people have to pay a lot of money for them. I do think it's ridiculously over-engineered and ridiculously overpriced. But I'm quite confident it will work well. So that makes it a big deal, I suppose. Okay. What do you think about this? I feel exactly the same way. Every Dyson thing I've ever tried or owned, I think is wonderful and preposterous at the same time. Like, I bought my wife an

air wrap for Christmas a couple of years ago. Oh, you wonderful husband. Oh, it is hands down the most successful gift I have ever bought my wife. She loves it. And it's an awesome thing. But it is also like ludicrously expensive and it involves a lot of like, let's be clear, you're not getting any more gifts for several years after this. Like this is, it was like your engagement ring and this. Like these are the two big gifts you're ever getting from me. But the stuff they make tends to be great. And I think part of the reason I'm fascinated by the mop thing is I think as someone who has had a robot vacuum, running around for a long time. The robot mop thing seems like it ought to be the next thing.

But at least from the little bit of experience I have with them, they're not nearly as good as the robot vacuums. And you're shaking your head like you agree with me. I agree. Yes, they're not. They've got better. But you have to pay an awful lot for the really good ones. And yeah, it's just nowhere near the same as actually mopping your floor.

And this thing will actually mop your floor because it uses water, like the water is constantly flowing onto the mop. And to a big mop, most of the mops on robot mops are small and maybe, you know, have a very small surface area. So you're not really getting a lot of clean for your motion. Whereas this uses like a two large roller mops that constantly spray clean water onto them and then sucks up with agitation, the dirt. So it doesn't, like I said, doesn't have a motor. So it's not a vacuum. But it's a It uses agitation to kind of get up the dirt. So, yeah, you know, the pictures they sent and the demo they showed me. I mean, they were very excited about this. This was big enough that they even rolled out, you know, Sir James Dyson himself to the press. Oh, yeah, which is pretty rare these days. Yeah.

So they were very excited by it. But $700. I know. I'm sort of in the position of like when in the early days of the Roomba, it was like, yes, this is a good idea. I hope everybody decides to work on this. And they kind of did. And robot vacuums got to be pretty good. I'm hoping that's where we are with mops now.

because it feels like if I could solve that problem robotically, it would be amazing. Even if I bought this Dyson one, I would use it like twice and then be like, mopping's a lot of work. I don't care. But I'm hoping this is like a spark for people to work on this stuff. Yes, I think that's true. I'm just surprised they haven't come out with a robot mop. You know, they came out with their robot vacuum, but they've yet to come up with the robot mop, which seems like a natural progression for them.

I don't know. Maybe this was their sort of shot to say, actually, we don't think the robot version is ever going to work. know, you still need to do the manual part, but we've taken a lot of the hard work out. I mean, the good thing about this compared to, so there are other options out there from companies like Robo Rock that make robot vacuums that are handheld wet, dry vacuums. So they can mop and vacuum as you go. But they're huge and bulky. And, you know, it's like a workout pushing them around the floor, whereas this is much more lightweight and apparently kind of, you know, has the motion. It's doing the hard work.

you're just guiding it. Eventually, you know, we'll have the full-size Android in the house, Android robot that can come around and push it for you. Maybe that's their plan. Sold. That will upgrade to big deal. But for now, we'll leave it at small deal. I think that's fair.

Small deal. All right. Next thing on the list, you tested out Amazon's matter casting. A, I want to know about your experience and B, matter casting in general, big deal, medium, small deal. What do you think? I think it's a big deal. I do.

But it's stymied at the moment because I just don't see that Apple or Google are going to embrace it because they already have their own proprietary solutions for casting content to your TV. And Mattercasting is like it's like Amazon's working on it the most right now, it seems like. But in theory, it's like an open standard for sending content around between devices, basically, right? Yes. So it is part of the Matter standard. It actually came out with the first iteration of Matter, so 1.0. But it's been very sort of under the radar. I have written about it, but it's not many, there's not much adoption.

It has been driven by Amazon. So the way matter works, there's working groups and you have sort of a lead of each, a head of each working group. And the head of that working group is an Amazon engineer. And he's pushing this. And he's working with, they're not allowed to tell me exactly who's in the group, but he implied it's mainly TV manufacturers and app makers. So like Hulu or, and I don't know that.

Hulu's there, but that kind of, those kind of people are working on developing it. So, but yes, just to clarify, so matter casting is a way of casting content from one device to another at its core. But what it's been used for here is casting content from your phone or tablet to a screen, i.e. your TV, but it could be to any screen in your home. So Amazon's using it as a way to cast prime video content to a fire TV stick or an echo show show. 15. Matter casting has to be enabled on both ends. And if you're familiar with fire TVs, and right now, they do not have a native way of casting content. So this is a, this is really the first time Amazon's had something like this. And it's been kind of a frustrating experience for

people that use fire TVs, not to have. You can mirror, but mirroring's never great. But right now it only works on prime video, though they say they have a number of app makers who are, who are going to enable it, including Plex and Sling. So they're really pushing it hard. The thing that's different about it versus Googlecast or Apple Airplay is, and this is where the app makers come in, is you actually, it's an app to app communication. So you're replicating the app on your phone and on your TV. So you can control everything you can do in the Prime Video app or the Hulu app or which or the Netflix app mirrors exactly on your TV. So you're not kind of like, when I use Apple Airplay, I'm like, I want to fast forward, but I can't like, the controls aren't intuitive. And app makers are like, we've made these great experiences for you on our phone apps.

Let's just make that what you use on the TV. So it's simplifying the process, basically. And I think it works really well. My experience was just limited to prime video because that's the only one that works. But it worked great. It was much easier for me than other forms of casting. So I think it's going to be a big deal for Fire TV at the moment. But in the smart home in general, matter casting means any device can cast.

to any device. So your washing machine can cast to your TV. I know that's the stuff of nightmares for some people, but I like getting an alert on my TV when my washing's done. You could also, once matter brings cameras in theory to the standard, you could have a non-propriety way of viewing your video doorbell on your TV. So you wouldn't have to have a certain TV. You wouldn't have to have a certain video doorbell for that to work, which is the way it is today. And it's a universal, you know, standard open protocol. Anyone can use it. You know, that's a good thing in the smart home.

We like these open standards as opposed to the closed infrastructure of, you know, airplay or Google cast. You know, there's a lot of potential here. Yeah. Right now, though, it's, yeah, it's all Amazon and no one else. I've spoken to Apple and spoken to Google about it and they're all like, nope, not saying anything. We're not using this yet. And this is one of the problems with matter. Not all platforms are required to use or implement every part of the matter standard.

And for example, one of the problems right now, I love the idea of being able to cast to my TV from any matter device. But Samsung, one of the major TV manufacturers, even though they're fully on board with matter, they have not committed to their TVs or any of their appliances being matter enabled. So we're going back to this issue of, you know, there's these great open standards and open protocols that you can use, but not everyone's adopting them. So that kind of, you know, kneecaps the whole initiative from day one. Right. Well, and with Mattercasting in particular, it seems like if I'm Google or Apple, I'm looking at it saying, okay, at least matter in general solves problems, right? Like you can understand why eventually you're going to want to be part of this broader ecosystem

that you don't have to control all of by yourself. Whether they want to now or not, spoiler alert we're going to get to in a minute. But the question of like, is it a long-term good idea? It sort of makes sense. My sense is for casting. If I'm running Airplay or Google cast,

I'm like, eh, we've kind of solved this problem. And like, sure, it might be nice to have a bigger, broader thing to do. But what most people want to do is they want to tap a thing on their phone and have it play on their television.

And we've done that. So to me, It's like I'm curious to see if anybody can sort of build a use case that is so much more useful for matter casting than that. And then I think you might start to see everybody get on board. But until then, my sense is Apple looks at Airplay and is like, yeah, we did that. Like we're good. We want to get it on more screens, like in hotels and whatever. But like Airplay works.

It's fine. We're not going to invest more resources. But the advantage there, the hotel TV screens is a great example. Hotel TVs would not need all new hardware to work with. That is true. That is true. All they need is an update to an app. So, you know, instead of waiting to, what, 2050,

when we can go into Hilton and an airplay to our LGTV or whichever, I forget who it is that made the deal with, but you'd be able to do it tomorrow. It would just, all you need to do is update the software on the app on the TV and the software on the app on your phone. I mean, you can have it built into the TV itself, but you don't have to have a matter-enabled TV for this to work, necessarily. So it's, it would be an easier solution. And I think where the momentum might shift is if Amazon is successful in getting the app manufacturers on board here and the TV manufacturers, because yes, the TV can have Airplay and Googlecast, but if it also has Matter casting,

it should, it would be a more seamless experience for the user because it's very, you know, you don't have to figure out if it supports this or that. It will just work. Which is the whole promise of matter. It will just work. Big air quips. Yeah, exactly. All right. So while we're on the subject of matter, matter casting, big deal. I agree.

I think long term, big deal, short term. Not so much, yeah. Big deal for Prime Video, Fire TV owning customers. Yes. Matter 1.3 came out a couple of weeks ago. You wrote a story about it. Matter 1.3, big deal, medium deal, small deal. Big deal.

Okay. Big deal. A lot of momentum. I was very not excited by math. So 1.1, Matter 1.2 was a little bit more interesting because there was a lot more device types added. But Matter 1.3 just brought a whole load of more potential with it. Because more device types, the device types weren't that exciting. It was kind of what we expected.

Like we got washing machines last time, so now we had tumble dryers. Like, woo. Sure. There were a few interesting additions there. But I think the big, big deal here, well, Mattercasting came, updates to Mattercasting came with 1.3. which I was excited about, that was the ability to cast from device to device, not just the app to app. But the big deal, I think, is the energy reporting, energy management features,

which we've been waiting for. We knew it was coming, but we've been waiting for this. And this is, you know, to me, energy management in the smart home really takes the smart home from sort of niche to almost necessary. Because today, you know, conserving resources, using less energy in our homes. saving money, are all things that, you know, many people are worried about, concerned about trying to do. And the smart home can make it so much easier to do all of this stuff automatically to one of the main sort of showcase pieces that came out with Matter 1.3 that exemplifies this

is electric vehicle management. So EVSE charges, so electrical vehicle supply equipment, is now a device type in matter, as is the ability to control. and create management of the way it charges. So, for example, you could use your Matter app or Matter-enabled app to tell your EV, I want to have 80 miles of range by 2pm this evening or this afternoon, and I want you to use the least expensive energy to get there between now and then. And you just hit button and it will do that for you, as opposed to you having to go in and check, you know, is there clean energy now?

And some electrical vehicle supply equipment can do this today, but it's proprietary. So you have to have the Tesla charger and the Tesla app or the Kia charger and the Kia app, whereas this will open this ability to any smart home app that uses matter. So in theory, your Apple Home app or your Samsung Smart Things app could do this kind of management for your EV for you. In fact, Samsung already does have some electric vehicle management. but again, it's specific brands and specific cars. So you have to have the right equipment, whereas bringing this type of management to matter will open it up so that it should work with anything that can work with matter.

And it works locally, obviously, which is a bonus. But it will need to use the cloud, obviously, to get things like energy prices. But beyond EVs, you know, you could see this applying to using your tumble dryer, your washing machine, making sure your fridge and freezer uses a de-frost, does a defrost cycle at a time when energy is low. Like if you connected everything in your home and appliances, almost all appliances are now part of matter, which is what came with 1.3. We're mainly just waiting on heat pumps, which they say are coming next.

And that's obviously a big part. And there was one other appliance. I can't remember off the top of my head. It was water heaters, right? Water heaters. So both of those obviously are big energy consumers, although heat pumps less than traditional HVAC, but still being able to map. manage the energy use, energy reporting.

And this is where I think it's going to get interesting with the platforms like Apple Home, Google Home, because this gives them the opportunity to start differentiating. So to date, a lot of people have said, well, matter just commodifies everything. Everything works with everything. So why is there a benefit for these platforms? And for anyone that wants to create something in the smart home. And how you manage the energy, what kind of service you can provide, on top of this type of reporting that the system is now providing is going to help differentiate.

So if Apple Home comes up with a great way of managing energy throughout your home with your connected appliances, you might be more inclined to use their app. Samsung already has a pretty good Samsung energy system in place. So I think it's got the head start there. And Google Home will see. Alexa already has some energy management built in if your device supports it. So I think in the next few months, and I've already seen a few come out, we're going to see a lot more devices adopting matter in order to, because this is a reason to put matter in your device, having energy management is a huge sort of push for the smart home. It's not the sexy fun stuff, but it's really important.

I think back to like the days of the nest thermostat. And to some extent, that thing that it was just like, we will help you lower your heating and cooling. bill for your house is maybe still to this day the single like simplest most compelling smart home use case for most people. And I think this, this just adds to that in really interesting ways, but also seems like it sets up this cool flywheel potentially where it's like, okay, not only are you able to control more and more of your stuff, but the stuff that you're controlling can feed more data back to the system, which means like you're saying, the system can start to do better. And the people building these systems can do more stuff with that

information and you can actually start to like improve upon itself over time as opposed to just a lot of what we've had so far is just sort of increasingly elaborate controllers and that's fine as far as it goes but like the job of the smart home should be to do most of this on its own and we're like we're slowly getting to the point of it feels like the puzzle pieces for that are starting to get into place which is very exciting it is and this is something I've been talking to company's about for years and it takes them, has taken them years to, you know, get the partnerships, get the electric companies on board, you know, it's a huge project, whereas this should make it a lot easier to push us forward. And the really exciting part, I think, and this is also something I wrote

about in the last couple of weeks, is that it could help shift not just your home, but energy use in the entire country or world by promoting and helping push forward the idea of virtual power plants. And this is something. So Nest Renew, you mentioned Nest. So Nest Renew is turned into a new program now called Renew Home. But Google's still involved, but Google kind of shifted its Nest Renew, which is the service that helps you save energy when you use your Nest thermostat to a new sort of platform that merged with a company that had already been doing demand response programs in select states in the country. But now it's working towards sort of creating virtual power plants using every smart house and every house that has smart appliances as virtual

power plants. And that's something that could really help reduce the strain on the grid, you know, and create a better experience for everyone. So it's for the greater good. Totally. I think that's really exciting. You mentioned heat pumps and water heaters. Are there other like huge categories still missing in matter? What's kind of still on the on the to-do list there? Cameras is a big one. Although they said that's definitely coming. Although it will come from what I understand in a very limited fashion.

It will really, it'll just be that you can view your stream and control your stream in any platform. But if you want recorded video, you want the added things like AI identification of people, animals, that's all going to be from the manufacturer still. So it'll just be there that you'll be able to, in theory, view your video anywhere or use it for hopefully for triggering automations like motion detection or if you spot an animal, turn the siren on. This is for my chicken coop. So I think people want cameras there because you want one app to see everything. But you're still going, and this is a theme with matter, you're still going to need to use manufacturer apps if you want the added benefits.

if you want the added features. But if you just want the basic use case of smart home, that's one that's really requested. People really want cameras. And then the other, which I don't think we're ever going to get, is security systems. Oh, sure. So, you know, your smart home security system,

I think those may bridge into matter because most of them are Z-wave-based, but there's just too much around the UL. So all security systems, most, you know, if you have a certificate, most of them are UL certified. And that requires a lot of certification. It's a tough certification to get.

It's an important one. It ensures your security system is going to work and the way you expect it to. And I just don't see much. I think the meshing between security systems and matter is just not likely to happen anytime soon. But I think we may get to the point where you can bridge it so you can still control everything in one app. But those are the main things that we're at now. That feels like an okay outcome to me with both of those, actually, to say, you know, you can sort of take what's happening inside of those systems and use it in the broader system.

But the idea that, like, in theory, everything in my matter home should have perfect access to everything I've ever recorded on my security camera, actually feels kind of weird. So, like, maybe, maybe at the very least, taking that one slightly slowly makes some sense to me. So I'm actually, for once, I will give the matter folks some credit for it going slowly here. that feels good. And then there is one more, though, sorry. Adaptive lighting. We're still waiting for better control of lighting. They say that's coming soon.

But again, this is going to be one of the things you need to use your apps for. But I still want to be able to use it. I want every light in my house, no matter which manufacturer it's from, to be able to sync to the scene that I've chosen. And they say that's coming. So hopefully in the next update. But sorry, yes, I could keep going. Got it.

All right, two more. So I think I know where both of these will fall. So we'll do the less exciting one first. You wrote about Brilliant, this smart home company that was, I would say, once sort of high flying and now seems to be in very rough shape. Brilliant, kind of collapsing, for lack of a better term, big deal, medium deal or small deal? I can sense you wanting to be nice to brilliant here. It's not surprising. I kind of saw it coming.

It was a great idea. I have written a lot about wanting better controllers in my home, and it worked very well as that type of controller I had been looking for, but only with certain products. And that was, you know, it was almost like a symbol of the problems the smart home have had to date. They've been around a long time. They launched almost 10 years ago, I think. They've been around a long time.

It's a good product, good hardware. So they've basically gone out of business. that they're still keeping the lights on. So the system still works. I have one in my house and it's not stopped working. They're looking for a buyer. I did actually check in with the CEO just a few days ago. And he said, no news yet, but it's looking promising.

And he's hoping that users of the system, which is a smart light switch that's installed wired to your house but can also be used as a smart home controller to control your sono system, view of your video doorbell, control your lights, your thermostat. it's sort of an all-in-one smart home controller, but it had very limited integrations. And the company said to me over the years, when I'd ask them about this, it's like, it's not that we don't want these integrations, it's that companies won't work with us. And this is one of the reasons that Matter came about because of this issue with interoperability and having to make individual integrations with every device out there. And they've been trying to do this for years, but they'd hardly added any new integrations in the last few years. and they weren't adopting matter.

And I had asked them, they said they were, they said they were, but they hadn't done it yet. And it didn't really feel like it was coming down the pipeline. Aaron, the CEO, told me that they did have a new generation ready to roll, better hardware, better integration. Not better integrations yet, but they had sort of more there that it was going to make on-device processing, AI. It was going to be a much improved device and less expensive because, oh my gosh, I, I forgot to mention how expensive these devices were. Starting at $400 for a light switch was just too much. And that was always their problem, too expensive.

But when I asked, it doesn't sound like they'd added thread or matter yet, even to this next generation. And I think there's some potential for a buyer who does, if someone does come and take this product and sort of keep it as it is, but improve upon it. That's really where I think it has a lot of potential to be a decent smart home controller if it can work with everything. But yeah, I mean, it's kind of a medium deal. It is a symbol, I think, of the churn of the smart home. Like, we're a decade or so into this sort of DIY smart home now. And we're seeing, you know, some of the early pioneers kind of drop off. They've either been bought or they've sort of become somewhat boring, like ring.

They're not really innovating anymore, but they're, you know, they have a core customer group that they have a great business. But it's not exciting anymore. Brilliant is an example, I think, you know, they were an independent company and they kept independent until the very end. But it's hard now for these startups. And I'm guessing, I don't know if this next question is going to be about a startup because I think it might be. It's not, actually. Oh, okay. Well, I was, Quilt was the startup. Oh, yeah. The other one that I wrote about, which is a heat pump company. But yeah, it's not an easy space right now for startups. And it hasn't been for the last few years. And Brilliant was kind of sadly a victim of that. Yeah, brilliant is always going to have a sort of special place in my heart.

I tried a very early version of it that just sucked. I mean, it was so broken and bad. I put it in my wall and then the light on the balcony of my apartment wouldn't turn off until I took it out of the wall. But eventually they fixed it and I got a working version of it. That was like an early prototype that I just thought was hilarious. But eventually I got a thing that worked. It was really great. They got a lot of things right.

But it always felt like a touchscreen on your wall. can't possibly be the correct answer to this problem. And it does seem like the thing that Brilliant was was always going to be sort of a transition into how the smart home is actually supposed to work. And it feels like good for us but bad for Brilliant, that is the transition that's happening right now. Yeah. Yeah.

No, I think you're right. The smart home needs to be smarter. Yeah. Agreed. All right. Last one. Google launched a bunch of new home APIs at Google I.O. And I confess I'm torn between either.

is a huge deal that might actually change a lot of things, and this is nothing and no one will adopt these APIs and no one cares. So where are you, big deal, medium deal, small deal? Oh, I think it's a huge deal. OK, good. I think it's huge, huge. I think it's huge, huge.

I hope it's not Google just saying, we have had enough of this, someone else deal with it. Yeah, so what is sort of the idea behind the APIs that they're launching here? So they have launched home, their home APIs, which is giving access to developers, device makers, app makers, to any device connected to Google Home, including Google's devices. So thermostats, presumably smoke alarms. Cameras, they've said not necessarily initially, but that may be coming. But one of the key

parts is it's also giving access to the automation engine. So now, essentially, so with these APIs, a device maker can create an app from scratch for their. device or for any device that connects to Google Home and create a smart home experience for you. So you wouldn't have to use Google Home, but you would, that the Google Home app, but you could use any automation system that the Google Home app provides and any devices that connect to it. And with Matter, there are many devices to connect to it. So both works with Google and Matter devices will be accessible through these APIs. And it basically is similar in some ways to how Apple Home's.

original HomeKit worked. If you've ever used like an Eve app or Nanoleaf app, you could access every device that was connected to Apple HomeKit in the Eve app or the Nanoleaf app on iOS. This Google Home API will work on both iOS or Android and could basically mean people can create an entire smart home platform from scratch on an app that you could use that isn't Google Home but uses Google's smarts in the background, which are good. They just have been stymied because I feel like perhaps not enough resources are going into developing Google Home at Google. I mean, Google's got its fingers in many pies and it's always felt like Google Home is a bit of an afterthought. I think it's really only still here because of the hardware.

So I think this is big. I think it's also really big because open APIs are really the sort of lifeblood of the smart home. When things are closed and locked down, like Brilliant, you know, when it shuts down, it no longer works. But if Brilliant had a local API, like Google Home's opening its APIs, then even if they go out of business, the device is still going to work in your home. It's like the lifeblood of the smart home APIs. And opening this to anyone to be able to use, I think, is really exciting. But you are right. It does depend on people actually picking up.

using it. So far, though, there are a number of big companies that are using it. ADT is using the facial recognition on Google Nest cameras. The facial recognition is going to let your system disarm when it recognizes someone that you've authorized to come into your home. It's called Trusted Neighbor. It's a new service that they're rolling out later this year. And that's all using Google Home APIs. So, and it's again, going back to what I mentioned before, what this gives is the potential for companies to build better experiences than, say, Google Home has been doing today, but using the tools that are already there, rather than having to reinvent the wheel, or develop individual partnerships with all of these companies to have access to their devices.

But Google is like Alexa in that it works with pretty much everything, but just in a limited way. And now you're going to have, I think, much, you're going to see more innovation from manufacturers and device makers. And that is exciting if it happens. Yeah. Well, part of what I wonder about the home API thing is if it means we can get a bunch of new kinds of devices with new capabilities. Like the ADT thing you're talking about is a really good example of that. And again, it goes back to this idea of sort of making the system work with itself in really cool ways, which I think is super exciting. But then I just keep thinking about one of the examples that they gave where they're like DoorDash can make it so that when the delivery person comes.

comes to your house, it like automatically unlocks for them and turns the front light on or whatever. And I, on the one hand, I think there are probably really cool, exciting versions of that that exist in the world. On the other hand, I think that might be the most like solution in search of a problem thing I've ever heard in my entire life. So do you think, do you think there's anything to that idea that like maybe this is how the smart home sort of invades the rest of the online ecosystem or is this just a smart home thing? Yeah. So that was the way they were selling it. In fact, was very not smart home. They were like now any developer with any app can use smart home devices.

And I get where they were coming from there. I do think that to date the smart home has kind of felt niche enclosed. And like you need all of these devices to get any benefit out of it. And this, whilst it is, it does seem like a solution in search for a problem. The DoorDash idea is, you know, you don't have to be a smart home device maker to take advantage of what you can do with these APIs. And I think that was an important message to get out there just to show to maybe get people thinking about what they could do with this type of technology because it isn't, it shouldn't just be limited to, you know, good night routines

or welcome home routines. There is so much more that we could be doing with our homes. I think that was a slightly uninspired example. But I think that people that are going to be taking advantage of this, really, it will be the smart home device makers. I'd be interested to see if, you know, Uber or Airbnb, I could see potentially taking some real advantage of this and companies that are sort of home related, if not necessarily smart home related. So I think there's a lot of potential, but like all of these developer conferences, you know, these announcements we get, it really is going to depend on how much this has inspired developers to go out and do something. So we will hope to wait and see.

It feels like a fun moment in that sense that there's actually a lot of sort of new fun toys for anyone working in the smart home to play with between all the new stuff coming in matter and what Google's up to. And obviously, Amazon is continuing to invest in Alexa. And it's like there's just sort of more stuff to work with than there has been. Yeah. Which I guess means we're probably due for some more chaos in the near term, but also maybe me a lot of this stuff that has just been sort of theory waiting for infrastructure is like starting to become real, which I think is really cool.

Yeah, I think you're right. And it is an exciting time. And, you know, we mentioned that this was sort of the end of a cycle for one load, a lot of startups in the smart home, but it is the potential beginning of a cycle. I mean, there's a couple smart, smart home startups I've been talking with over the last few months who have some great products that they're ready to launch, but they're still just been waiting on this type of infrastructure to come along to make. to make it possible.

And whilst the signs are there, and this is one thing that I was quite disappointed about with Matter 1.3, is that we still don't have the support from platforms. I mean, Google's opening up its APIs was a nice step in the right direction, but they still don't support half of the new device types that are in Matter 1.3.

Apple hasn't gone beyond Matter 1.0. I mean, if we're lucky, we may get 1.2 devices, which are robot vacuums, washing machines, fridges in Apple Home with iOS 18, if we're lucky. But that means another whole year until we get tumble dryers. So I really hope that the platforms and Amazon's been very slow here, Samsung's been a little faster.

And I get why they're being slow, to some extent, they don't want to break people's homes. But if we don't start getting this out there and the consumers get to use it and get excited about it, then we're not going to get the developers coming on board and making these good experiences. You know, we need both sides of the solution here to get people excited. So I really want to see Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung just go all in on what this platform, this protocol, this smart home standard that they've developed to solve this problem.

They can't just leave it there now that they've brought it to life. They've really got to put the work in and see this through. And so far it's been pretty limited and that's been quite disappointing. So I'm hoping that we'll hear something exciting at WWC next month. I'm not holding my breath. I think it's just going to be all about AI. Yeah. I may be wrong.

I suspect you are right. Prove me wrong, Apple. Fingers crossed. All right. Before we go, you've been playing with tons of new smart home gadgets. Give me your favorite coolest thing you've been playing with recently. Oh, well, actually, I have to go with my smart chicken. Cooke. Okay. Do tell. Yes. I've been testing a new smart chicken coop. It's called Coupe. And it is a startup based out in California. And it has, it is very well designed chicken coop. But the main kind of smart features, it has two cameras in with really impressive AI capabilities. So it can tell me if the door of the coop is open. It can tell me if there's an egg laid. It can count how many chickens are in my coop. So in case one's

on missing. And it will also tell me if it spots like a fox or a coyote or if it spots a cat or a bobcat, like different predators, different nuisance animals. Like it has some really interesting AI capabilities as well as the automatic door that will open and close at the right time based on sunrise or sunset so that the chicks go in and out. I have baby chicks right now. I got new ones to test out this coop because my ladies were too big to fit in this coop. It's quite small, but it's been a lot of fun. It's just, I mean, baby chicks. I mean, that's fun. You can't, you can't beat it. You can't beat that. It's very expensive. I think I'm going to say it's like $2,500. But having built my own chicken coop with wood, well, having watched my husband

build our own chicken coop and helped buy the stuff at Lowe's, they're not cheap. You know, it's an expensive product, whether you buy one or build one. So it's interesting to see this kind of innovation, smart home innovation, sort of moving outside of the home and into the garden and, you know, homesteading with my chickens. So, yeah, that's been really fun. I've been enjoying that. I love it. Baby chicks for journalism. That's the dream right there. All right. Jen, thank you, as always. Super fun having you. Thank you. We won't leave it so long next time. All right. We've got to take one more break, and then we'll take a question from the Vergecast hotline. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not everyone.

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access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Clod.a.ai slash verge cast. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive

is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think, I think, that the world can be much better that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people?

So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay, I don't care if you have, All that, that's like secondary, third. Like, that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America actually. Let's begin. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it.

Before the disembark, asymptomatic. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID. Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the and yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning, and we assessed that individual.

They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon. All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866 Verge 1-1. The email is Vergecast at the verge.com. We love all your questions, and we try to answer at least one on the show.

every week. This week we have a question about search engines, which actually we got a lot of questions about search engines, but I was particularly taken with this one from Nathan. Hey guys, this is Nathan from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Listen, I was just thinking about this whole generated response from Google when you go to Google something. And I'm just wondering, is the big deal here that it's Google is doing it? Because they're not the first to be doing this. I'm sure, as you guys know, the ARC browser is AI generating whole kind of web pages every time you search something on your phone, and then I'm one of the 12 people that uses Edge at work, and I actually use Bing to search, because then it will auto-generate a response with

co-pilot first, and then kind of give me all the web results. So when Google was telling Eli that that's actually something they're experiencing, that people have higher collect-through rates from those generated responses, I mean, I can really back that up because that's exactly what I do. And so I'm wondering, is the problem just that Google's doing it? It's the problem that they're so large that if they're doing this, this impacts with the way that. that the search world works, you know, because obviously there's top dogs, and that when the edge browser and when the arc browser are doing this, that doesn't really matter because they're just not the dominant search. I feel like that's maybe the argument here. So I was just

wondering what your guys' thoughts were on that. If it's just a matter of scale, not a matter of what they're doing, or if there's more to this. Thanks, guys. Okay, I think the answer to this question is mostly yes, but kind of yes and no. I think on the one hand, the scale of Google is the thing. You just can't overstate the extent to which Google is the center of the internet. For anyone who makes a website, whether it's a cooking blog or a news site or just a place to show off your photography, Google is the internet. It is the main discovery tool of the internet. So what you've seen is everything over the last, I don't know, 15 years really, has reshaped in order to work the way that Google has asked it to work. You see cooking blogs just to keep harping on that.

They have changed the way that they make their pages in order to suit Google. The thing where at the bottom you have the recipe, but at the top you have, you know, 2,000 words of stories about the person. And there's a bunch of photos and there's a bunch of sub headlines that are all kind of questions that don't really fit but are. questions people might be Googling, all of that is designed for Google. The SEO search engine optimization has completely reshaped the web. This is a thing we've talked a lot about on the show. This is a thing we've written a lot about on the site. I'll put some links in the show notes. But Google has fundamentally reshaped the web because it is so important, because when people want to find things on the internet, they don't go other places. And I think the arc search and Bing

are instructive examples here, actually, because it's true that Bing has. been doing this longer than Google. You could already AI your way through the internet with Bing. And it's not that no one noticed, but no one really cared because Bing is not meaningful to the traffic and revenue and existence of websites in the way that Google is. It just does not matter what everybody else does cumulative in the same way that it does what Google does. Google has something like 90% of the search on the internet. That's a crazy number. That is one of the things that has brought Google into the antitrust scrutiny that it has because it is so powerful, because it has no real meaningful competitor.

The flip side of that is that I think the things that we're talking about apply just as much to these other things you're talking about. When ARC, for instance, rolled out the Browse for Me feature where you type in a search query, you hit Browse for me, and instead of giving you a bunch of search results, it sort of compiles a web page for you, which is a lot like what the AI overviews on Google are doing. it gives you the summary and then some links and some multimedia stuff. People had the same kind of visceral reaction, which is that it felt like this exchange of value

that people who make websites have with discovery tools was gone. The idea for two decades has been that I am going to make something and I'm going to let Google access it and index it and cache it on its servers and make ads when people try to find it in exchange for sending traffic to my website. And the idea that I could monetize or in other ways benefit from the traffic to my website, that was the trade. Google gets to have and have access to and in some ways sort of intermediateate how people find my website because it sends people to my website. That is the trade. That is the trade people have made on the internet for 20 years.

That feels different when it's AI. And I think the way people reacted to ARC, there have been people who said this with Bing. there have been people who worried about this with perplexity. All of these tools run into the same thing, which is they shortcut that. They completely end around that exchange of value and just say, don't worry, I went and visited all those web pages for you and brought back the information that you need. Never mind that the crawler on that web page doesn't accrue me any advertising money. It's not going to click my affiliate links.

It's not going to be impressed with my stuff and read more articles. It's not going to make the cookies that I suggested and then save it and tell friends about it and bring more traffic. It doesn't do any of that. It just pulled it into a database and spat out the information with essentially no link back to the original source of the information. And certainly no reason to go find the source of that information because I've already given you everything you need right here in the summary. On the one hand, cool user experience for lots of things. On the other hand, totally breaks the value exchange of the internet. So I think the thesis is not that different between what you're seeing from all of these AI companies and what you're seeing from Google.

The difference is just the scale. And Google has been existentially important to websites for two decades in a way that I think has been problematic for a really long time. There is this sense that Google won in some way, that Google became the arbiter of the internet and that the only thing to do as a media company or as a cooking blog, or as a person with a website of any kind, was to play Google's game or try to find a way to get money from Google directly. And so you've seen a lot of these fights over the years of companies like News Corp,

picking fights with Google and saying, you have to pay us for our content or we're going to disappear. And I think what has been true forever is that these websites have needed Google more than Google has needed these websites. And that has been a challenge. And one thing you've heard us talk about,

and Neli in particular talk, about this is that Google doesn't actually owe these websites anything. And I think Google would tell you that it cares about them and believes in the web and wants to preserve the open web. That's all really easy to say out loud. And it's also not particularly meaningful when Google is able to do the things that it's doing now, which is say, well, our responsibility is actually to get users to the information that they want as quickly as possible. And again, that's actually an interesting product argument. It subverts a huge. huge amount of the way that the internet has worked, in part because all of these websites are so

reliant on Google and what Google has meant to them for so long, this is what we went through with Facebook when Facebook made everybody pivot to video with the promises of huge amounts of traffic and tons of money and then that all sort of dried up. And everybody kind of got used to Facebook's wishy-washiness and back and forth on supporting websites and caring about traffic outside and eventually just realized, well, okay, we're going to treat Facebook as kind of a value ad, right? If we get traffic from Facebook, terrific. But I'm not going to bend over backwards in order to get traffic from Facebook.

And that hurt a lot of websites traffic. There are a lot of websites that went away when Facebook stopped sending them traffic. And the same has never really happened with Google, in part because Google more or less remained a good citizen of that value exchange we're talking about until now. And there's a lot left to be seen. I think it's possible, as Nathan says, that really great content is going to be more prioritized. And the question will be, what happens to the folks who write this sort of commodity stuff? Like, I think a lot about the articles years ago that every time John Oliver would post anything,

every website on the internet would be like, John Oliver roasts whoever, right? Like, he gets mad about hot dogs. And lots of people cared about what John Oliver did. So they would Google John Oliver on a Monday morning after the Sunday night show. And whoever was at the top of search. results made a ton of money and got a lot of traffic. That was always kind of a weird game, and I think you could reasonably argue that the best outcome is actually just that you get to John Oliver much more quickly instead of a website talking about John Oliver. But what if there's

really great unique context added or lots of interesting new information or somebody did good reporting on top of the reporting that John Oliver did? This question of that sort of sliding scale between what is commodity information that everyone should know and no one has particular claim to? Like, when was Abraham Lincoln born? That is just a question. It doesn't matter who has the answer. There are not particularly interesting reasons to go to one place or another for the answer. I just want to know when Abraham Lincoln was born. All the way down to like truly great original stuff, whether it's a new recipe or new art that somebody made or a new essay from somebody smart that you like or original reporting in the news business. Google is now in a position of having to decide where one of those

things ends and the other begins and is also just making this bet, or at least this promise to publishers that, oh, we're going to get so much better at giving people information that they're actually going to be more curious and they're going to want to know more stuff. I'm very suspicious of that argument, to be totally honest. Google is like, if we just surface better stuff to more people, more people will click on it. As somebody who makes their living, making things on the internet, I sure hope that's true. I'm not confident that that's true. But it does put Google back in this position of once again being the arbiter of all of this stuff. And I think you'll see us talk a lot more in the near future about different kinds of search engines because I think search engines are great,

right? Like what Google was for a really long time was really valuable to a lot of people. And I think Google has shifted away from that to something else. That new thing might be great. It might be different. It might be terrible. Who knows? But I think there's going to be interesting competition in this space for a long time because Google is kind of running away from the thing that people loved about it.

And that is weird to me. To be totally honest, that there are a lot of companies that you can understand why they pivot. Google is taking this beloved, wildly successful business and kind of pivoting away from it. And I think you're going to see a lot of folks come in and say, well, actually, search was both a good product and a good business. And maybe what we need to do is be part of that because Google is going to just leave that gap open in the market again. So I think all of this is going to get more interesting and more competitive, but also the immediate threat to publishers and bloggers and anyone who makes a website on the internet is that all of a sudden it could just dry up traffic. Google has made changes before that people have turned around and said, oh, Google made a small algorithm change and my website essentially disappeared from the internet. That's a real thing that happens,

and it happens to bad websites that probably should have their spammy stuff removed from Google's search, and it applies to really great websites that don't deserve that and just get caught up in Google's changes for whatever reason. And we're already seeing with these AI overviews lots of unintended weirdness. There's always people out there posting stuff about. I think there was one that it was like add glue to your pizza sauce to make it stickier. Like don't do that. But that's the stuff that's out there now. So we're at the beginning of a thing that Google has just turned on and is making a gigantic bet on and is shifting its whole core product towards.

And the ramifications of that are just barely beginning to show up. And it's going to take a while. And I think it's going to be scarier to a lot of people than Google. is going to be willing to acknowledge. So all of that is to say yes and no, Nathan, right? I think that the same principles apply, but Google is doing it in a way that is so much bigger and more important to the health of the open Internet

and the economy of how people make money from websites that it feels bigger because it is. And I have no idea where it's all going to go, but we're going to talk about it an awful lot on this show for the rest of the year, I suspect. All right, that is enough for now. That's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everybody who was on the show, and thank you, as always, for listening.

There's lots more, as always, on everything we talked about at the verge.com. I'll put some links to all of our SEO coverage from last year. We covered this a ton. We're still covering it a ton. Super fun stuff. Lots of Microsoft news, lots of smart home news. We'll put it all on the show notes. But, you know, read the verge.com.

If you come to our website, we don't have to worry about Google. That's kind of the whole point of what we're trying to do. It's a good website. We do our best. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, surface devices. is you would like to sell me, you can always email us at Vergecast at the verge.com or call the hotline 866, Verge 1-1. We love hearing from you. Like I've mentioned before, my favorite Slack channel at the Verge is the one that just puts everybody's voicemails into a place where we can listen

to them all day. And I love it. And people keep asking to be let into that room so they can hear the hotline voicemails. It's the best. I love it. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Willpore. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. Nilai, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about presumably more open AI shenanigans, all the stuff that's to come at WWDC, and lots more. See you then. Rock and roll.