The Vergecast - Zoom's privacy concerns, Apple buys Dark Sky, and Sprint is dead

Episode Date: April 3, 2020

Nilay, Dieter, and Paul talk to Tom Warren about Zoom's privacy and security concerns. The crew also looks back at the history of Sprint after it finally merged with T-Mobile. Paul's weekly segment "If I were a rich man" updates the keyboard-in-the-front club. The show ends with some chat about Apple buying the weather app Dark Sky and allowing in-app rentals on their mobile devices. Stories discussed in this episode: After walkouts, Amazon pledges temperature checks and masks in all warehouses Jeff Bezos’ space company is pressuring employees to launch a tourist rocket during the pandemic Zoom is leaking some user information because of an issue with how the app groups contacts Zoom faces a privacy and security backlash as it surges in ... Zoom announces 90-day feature freeze to fix privacy and ... Zoom isn't actually end-to-end encrypted  Zoom quickly fixes 'malware-like' macOS installer with new ... Microsoft aims to win back consumers with new Microsoft 365 subscriptions T-Mobile completes merger with Sprint, John Legere steps down as CEO Sprint is dead. Long live Sprint What’s next for Sprint customers now that the T-Mobile merger has gone through? Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 review: AMD has rewritten the rules Apple now lets some video streaming apps bypass the App Store cut Amazon Prime Video now allows in-app rentals and purchases on the iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV Apple acquires popular weather app Dark Sky and will shut down the Android version Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Tom Warren, joins us to talk all about Zoom. We talk a little bit about the T-Mobile Sprint acquisition, finally closed. That's one company now. And we get into Apple and what it's doing with video apps on the Apple TV, and they bought DarkSai. It's a big deal. Coming up now on the Vergecast. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together.

Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software.

What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years 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. Hello, we're on the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of working from home forever. No, it's great.

It's going to be a fun one. Hello. No, it's going to be forever. every day it changes. How long is forever? You'll never know, unless you listen to this, The Vergecast. I'm your friend, Neely. That was Paul. Hello. He's having an emotional breakdown. Deider Bone is here. There's a further seems forever joke somewhere in here, but I'm going to let it go. Well, we'll come back to it. Our friend Tom Warren is here. Hey, Tom. Hello, from across the pond. Tom's in England, but we're all at home. So even though we're in different places, physically,

we're all trapped in the same place, literally, emotionally. We're all just stuck in Zoom. That's why you're here, Tom. We've got to talk about Zoom. So, as always, you're recording from home. I'm hoping that you yourself are at home. If you are so able to stay at home, I hope you're staying safe. If you're working, we thank you. We realize there's some risk to that.

So if you're at home, stay home. If you have to go out, please stay safe. Let us know if our quality is staying up there. I think we're doing all right. But I just want to put it out there. We are all recording this from home. But I think Andrew, our producer, is doing a pretty good job. making us sound okay. So I want to, there's a lot to talk about. Tom is here to talk about Zoom,

which is, I would say, one of the biggest stories in tech due to the virus and everybody's staying at home. We don't want to talk about too much rent. There's all kinds of stuff to talk about. But I want to start with the virus itself. I don't want to belabor it, but, you know, we put the show out on Fridays. And three Fridays ago, Donald Trump held up a flow chart and said someone, Neelai, building a website. You're killing me. Why? Because you, it did, it, it, It's never going to come. It's never going to happen. I'm so good at counting days since something was promised that doesn't happen.

I got one skill as an editor, and it's just keeping track of time. You know what? That website is being developed in a factory near Racine, Wisconsin. Trump held up a sign promising 5G AI 8K. K. Killing me. Anyway, it's been three Friday since the flowchart. I will keep you updated as Fridays go on.

Hopefully somebody builds the website. We increase testing. That would be great. I'd like to see it happen. It hasn't happened yet. Second, as the sort of virus and the same at home ripples out into the broader economy, one person in his companies are sort of at the center of a lot of things. The person is Jeff Bezos, who famously owns Amazon Whole Foods, Blue Origin, a space company.

So Josh Jezza has been doing a lot of reporting on Amazon warehouse workers, Whole Foods workers. they have been walking off the job because they don't feel protected from disease transmission. They don't feel like they have the appropriate equipment. They don't feel the warehouses are being cleaned. Today, after a bunch of walkouts throughout the country, Amazon said it was going to start checking people's temperature who are working in the warehouses and giving masks to people. So you're just seeing this curve of Amazon, which, to be fair, is very important to a lot of people right now because people are shopping from home.

Jeff Bezos himself said all he's really thinking about. is COVID-19 and Amazon's role in it. So we're tracking it very closely. Read Josh's reporting. It's really good. And then also today, Lauren Grush, our excellent space reporter, published Big Scoop. Bezos owns Blue Origin and the staff of Blue Origin, the engineers, technicians, are very upset because they're pushing forward with a launch, which is the schedule's up in the air. But they're pushing forward with some testing and a launch. And people who work in Washington State might have to travel to rural Texas.

which seems like a bad idea, to work on this. And there's just a lot of uproar over weather pushing forward with what is effectively a space tourism business is actually necessary important right now. So there's some controversy there. It's interesting to me that it's all around Bezos. Like, he's a self-styled leader. He wants to be a leader. And he's got this collection of companies that are sort of experiencing some controversy about their role in the crisis. So go read Lawrence Report.

It's great. She actually had, we reviewed audio from. one of these meetings, they're a little contentious. There's some quotes in there that are pretty good. That's really interesting. I think we're going to see how this plays out, and particularly how folks like Bezos, some of the other big tech leaders embrace that role as leaders, embrace their role running companies. They're very important to a lot of people right now. So I don't want to overdo it. I just want to call it out. It's some great work that's happening over there. Okay. Now, I don't know if it's entirely surprising the Zoom story, because Zoom has had a pretty

controversial history. We've talked about some of that controversial history here. But Tom, even covering a lot of Zoom stories lately, give us a rundown on what is going on with Zoom. Yeah, so Zoom. The basic thing is that it is soared in popularity over the past sort of few weeks as this coronavirus stuff has spread and everyone's sort of working at home. We've seen people use it for yoga classes, beers with friends on a Friday and even people getting married on it. So it's kind of, we've been using Zoom for years. We're on Zoom right now. We're on Zoom right now.

I don't think anyone would have guessed that people would be doing yoga classes and getting married on Zoom. That's not a story anyone could have predicted as much as this virus. So everyone's kind of flocked to it for whatever reason, and I've got some theories. But yeah, it's had a huge influx of people. They revealed today back in December they had 10 million participants, however you want to judge that,

whether that's a daily active user or not. Now they have 200 million daily. participants in meetings. So that's a massive, like, that's, and we've seen teams has gone up, their competitors. Microsoft Teams, you mean? Microsoft Teams, yeah. And Cisco, I think, of around about 300 million, something like that. And that's in Cisco, WebEx. Yeah, WebEx. So there's a lot of activity going on on video calls. House parties, like number one or number two in the app store. There's a lot going on. But Zoom has become the particular focus for consumers and even businesses and just like a lot of the press attention is on Zoom right now.

So yeah, everyone's using it for all sorts of different reasons. But like what's happening now is we're discovering or journalists and security researchers are discovering there's a bit of a trade-off if you want to use Zoom for all of these activities. Can I start you way back with the Zoom web server controversy? Because this is months ago. That's true.

That was like last year, yeah. So before we dig into the controversy, We should talk about the one last year. So last year was discovered that basically installed a web server on Mac OS systems, essentially to work more easily on that particular operating system. Yeah, actually, I reported on this a bunch. I can give a little bit more color. So like installing a web server on a Mac sounds really bad.

Like you put a whole damn web server. I don't want to serve the web. But it's like a shorthand way for them to get. a bunch of like things done so they didn't have to recode it, right? So that in itself isn't necessarily bad, but what was horrific about it is they did it in an insecure way, and when you uninstalled Zoom, they left the web server on your computer running, and so that if you ever wanted to use Zoom again, they would then be able to reinstall it silently without having to ask you for it because it already had the web server

on your Mac, even though you thought you uninstalled it. It was, it was like beyond sloppy. And it was so sloppy that Apple, for the first time in its history, pushed a silent update to every Mac to remove Zoom's web server. They had created such a security hole that Apple took pretty unprecedented action. Like, you do not want your operating system vendor to reach into your computer and delete code. Like, I think we would normally have a very different reaction to that for a variety of reasons. But here it was like, everyone was like, oh, yeah, Apple did it. it. Like they pushed the button they should have. So that was already the context around Zoom. And then

there's this explosion in popularity. Tom, what's happening since? Yeah. And so and then in, I think it was like January or February, some researchers published some stuff about, um, essentially like the core of Zoom and the way it works. Like to understand a lot of these privacy and security sort of concerns is to understand how it works. So, so Zoom, if you've never used it, um, essentially you join a meeting through a link or through an ID, which is like, between nine and 11 characters. So some research has published some stuff back in, I think it was in January,

basically saying you could guess these numbers or you could brute force them in a lot of cases. So there was that, that's like kind of like the underlying issue that's been bubbling for a little bit. And the issue there is like, if you know the number, you get into the meeting. I mean, this is the reason that Zoom, I think, is so popular. Like, you don't need a login.

You don't necessarily need to create an account. account. You just have to install an app and everyone knows how to do that these days. Do you really need to install an app? Oh, you can use the web app too. No, I'm saying Zoom will kind of handle that aspect for you. Fair. I try to do a FaceTime call from my mom's birthday, happy birthday mom. And like, it took 20 minutes of like tech support, right? Like FaceTime, which is like the definition of easy and everybody has iPhones. It still took some work. So Zoom is popular because it's dead simple to use. but that but because you just need the link that's like scary because anybody can jump on your call so tom you're saying because you can guess these you get that's how you get zoom bombing well not necessarily

i think a lot of it is also people are setting up like yoga classes sharing them on facebook it's pretty easy for trolls to you know find those links and share them on 4chan and wherever else and so i think you're you're just getting a collection of those links being found and just shared around and just the massive increase in it but i think at the heart of the issue is it's your obviously it's very easy to get into those calls because people don't password protect them. But that's also at the heart of the issue is that the defaults that Zoom set up to allow it, the defaults are like, you know, you just get into the call with the ID. There's no like you have to use a password or anything like that because it brings that barrier to entry down.

And also when you come into the call, anyone who joins the call by default can broadcast their video, can broadcast their screen. So it's like these defaults that they've put there because it's much easy. for consumers and not consumers, but just for like anyone to jump on a call and start talking, are also kind of hurting them now. Because that's like the key part of Zoom bombing. Like if I get a link of someone, it's probably 90% certain that they haven't passed with protected it. They haven't changed the defaults so that whenever you join a call, you have to like approve someone to, you know, show their video or share the screen.

So you're just praying, you're praying on those defaults. And defaults are always the killer with anything. with any app. If you, if you by default allow, you know, your users to do certain things, then someone, you know, is going to come in and be the bad guy and show you that your defaults are bad. So that's like, to me, is just a scale problem, right? They made it very easy, and then they scaled this massive thing. And then there's a question about should we change the defaults to lock it down, will that affect user growth, whatever? Then there's like, should Zoom moderate meetings? We talked about that a little bit last week.

that feels very fraught. Like, do you want Zoom employees watching your meeting? Like, I do not. Just flatly do not want that to happen. But maybe you want that for a bunch of teenagers. So that's just scale problems. They're very hard, but there are problems that, like, are understood, right? They just come with massive scale and then, like, bad actors.

There are problems that, like, you, you, like, tut, Zoom for setting the default to not have a password, but you don't, like, get necessarily, like, deeply angry at them for trying to, like for being evil, right? But then... Yeah, they're not problems where it's like you had malicious intent. It's like we just understand the category of things that are massive scale problems. Right. But like the question of do we give Zoom the benefit of the doubt?

Like they're like, okay, sure. But like Tom, like there's other stuff going on with Zoom insecurity, right? Yeah, it's not just that. So alongside the Zoom bombing stuff, I think the Zoom bombing stuff really kind of has been at the center of it. But alongside that, there's some stuff about... them sharing data with Facebook, which again, I think is like them allowing people to sign in with their Facebook accounts and using those credentials rather than something that's necessary.

You know, like it's not necessarily them sharing ad space in your Zoom meeting if you want to give them the benefit of doubt there, but they have the potential to do that. So they've had to change those, they've had to yank that code out on the iOS side at least and rewrite part their privacy policy to be like, because obviously whenever these issues come up, people look at the privacy policy, they can see what the company can do. And they immediately go, okay, that's what the company's doing. It's not necessarily that that's what the company is doing, but it's capable of doing it. So then they have to, like, you know, tie up that privacy policy. So we've seen them do that as well. And there was one with LinkedIn today, too, right? Yeah, there's another one today.

The New York Times reporters have discovered, I've read it and I've looked into it, but I need someone like from a security researcher background to really go over it because it's kind of strange what they're seeing. But essentially what it is is it seems like Zoom is doing some sort of data mining to match profiles or LinkedIn profiles to whoever's using Zoom. And that might manifest in like say I joined this call as Tom Warren and then I didn't have my LinkedIn profile linked at all or anything like that. They might have saved that information and maybe my hardware ID or something about my computer to sort of pinpoint who I am. And then if I join another call and it's like, I'm anonymous Tom, you know, like whatever name I want to use, then someone on that call

who has enabled the integration of LinkedIn would be able to find out that actually my name's Tom Warren and it's trying to match me to that Tom Warren LinkedIn profile. So there's obviously some privacy issues there because not every single Zoom call that you want to be on. Do you want to be revealing your name and your occupation and whatever else? So this one is to me, again, I don't know the answer here. I don't know if. I don't either, yeah. No, but like the answer to the question of is Zoom doing some growth hacky stuff that

innocent people do and they just didn't consider scale or are they Facebook? Right? Where like the growth hacky stuff is a little more malicious and cynical than you'd expect. And so like that one to me is like Zoom is enterprise software. Like it is made for businesses. there are very few corporate functions where I need to be like, I'm going to this meeting, but I need to be anonymous. Like, there are many times where you take a meeting and it would be useful to be like, who's this person on this 45 person Zoom call talking? Oh, it's just showing me some LinkedIn data, right?

Like that would be useful in that environment. Now we've extended Zoom to this environment like you're saying. People are getting married. There are yoga classes. Their therapy is happening in Zoom. There's all these new uses. of consumers just using the tool where you might want to be anonymous. We would expect your anonymity.

And then this corporate feature is like steamrolling you and you had no idea it was happening. Yeah, you're right. But like we're building up to like that I don't know. Like it's increasingly difficult to say, yeah, maybe they're innocent. Yeah, maybe they just are like a little dumb. Like as we go. I mean, that's why I wanted to start with months ago they had this problem. Like this isn't a new set of concerns.

this is last year before any of this happened, the question mark was, is Zoom an innocent or do they do this weird installer hack that Apple had to undo knowing it was like one tick over? Speaking of weird installer hacks. Yeah, there's another one. Speaking of that. We're going to do this for 45 minutes.

If you're not interested in the intricacies of Zoom, well, you got nowhere to go. So stay right here. Yeah. Go ahead, Tom. So two days ago, someone tweeted, it was basically a software engineer tweeted that essentially Zoom is using

like malware-like techniques to install itself on Mac OS. And basically what that means in easy terms is it's basically it will prompt you for like a username and password to like get the core security part of macOS and then it can just automate everything else and just install on your system

without popping up a load of pop-ups and you know like when you install an app you have to click through and agree to the licensing agreement or that sort of stuff. They just want it to be as one click as possible, which, you know, again, you can kind of understand from a user thing, but using malware-like techniques is probably not the way to get there. Wasn't there a piece of this, Tom, where it's like if your computer is administered by your company that some of these techniques at Zoom is using actually gets around it. So if, you know, my CIS admin for Vox Media Max doesn't want us to use Zoom,

theoretically this could get around that. Yeah, I think it gets around some of that stuff, yeah, which is, you know, it's not great. So trying to capture user credentials and, you know, bypass security that's built into an operating system is, you know, not the way to go. I mean, at one point, I believe that it would pop up a dialogue box that identified itself as system and asked for your password. Which is, you shouldn't do that. Also, can we be clear that there's a typo in the pop. up. It says system need your privilege to change. If you're going to hack my Mac, get it, get the grammar right. It's like the typical fishing email. Everything looks a little wonky.

Look, guys, at least at least Zoom tells us that it's end-to-end encrypted. I want to finish the installer thing because I feel like we're going to argue about encryption a lot. So Tom, they've changed the installer today. Yeah, so two days after the Zoom's here, respond to the guy who, you know, brought up these issues. They've changed the installer today and just totally walked back all that, all that stuff. So that's good. But it does make you wonder why they, you know, it took someone on Twitter to make them change that kind of sketchy behavior. Yeah.

Okay. So then this brings us to end to end encryption, which is more fundamentally like a vocabulary debate. No. It wasn't. It was never a debate. Well, I'll just do the story of the reporting, and then we can get into the substance of it. Zoom says it's ended encrypted, which charitably is just something that rhymes with the truth. It's the most charitable will be there.

So they say it. The intercept points out, like, this isn't true. Like, even their own white papers say it's not true. And then Zoom was like, oh, we were just using a shorthand. Like, that was their excuse. And then they published another blog post today explaining how they think their system works, apologizing for using it, and then walking it back. Paul, explain the technical detail here.

How I think when I hear the term end encryption is like imagine a horseshoe, right? So I send a message up one leg of the horseshoe, right? It goes through like signal servers, right? But the message is still encrypted. They're just passing it along to its destination. that it goes to its destination and it's decrypted on the other leg, you know, the person I was sending the message to, right? The Zoom is using the classic two straws technique. The message is encrypted over the wire just like HTTPS because it is HTTP.

Or it's the TLS encryption. It's just the basic encryption we use for websites. Just transport encryption. Transport encryption. Thank you. And so it goes through the straw and that it's unencrypted on Zoom servers. Then it's re-encrypted to go over the wire again to the destination. Wait, why is that straws?

Well, I was just thinking of two things. I mean, you can crack the horseshoe in half. You were like the classic two straws method. I was like, I don't. I also like a horseshoe is one hunk of metal. It's not like two things in the server. No, we cannot. Imagine one bendy straw.

Welcome to the Vergecast where we argue about metaphors until the dead. The point here is Zoom is saying the ends are encrypted. right and like the two is like up for debate like extreme debate so they published a diagram today i would say that easier that maybe the easier way to think about this is when we talk about iMessage or whatever it's who has the keys right usually when you think of end-end encrypted the service provider does not have the key to decrypt the message right so apple depending on whether or not you're in China or whether you have any set of complicated iMessage and the cloud settings turn on, Apple generally does not have the keys to your messages.

And they're very proud of that fact that they push it out in the world. The users have the keys. So Apple is moving the messages between users and then you have the keys to decrypt your stuff. Zoom, in this case, has the key. And all they're saying is in the middle, in the cloud, we're not using the key. If you're using what they call Zoom endpoints, so the app on a phone, the app on a laptop, a Zoom room, which is just the app running on a Chromebox, but I guess we can call it a Zoom room. Those are their endpoints and that all stays encrypted. That is not

intent encrypt. That's why it rhymes with the truth. Like it is not the truth. It has like a rhyming like relationship to the truth. Like what they're saying, if intent encryption did not have a commonly accepted meaning, right? But here it doesn't. Then they have the problem of people call into Zoom using telephone lines, using other weird services. You can call them to Zoom with Skype in some weird way, right? So they've built connectors inside of their cloud system to decrypt the stuff and send it out over those connections, which are obviously not encrypted. If they wanted to be end-to-end encrypted, I'm not sure how they could ever build the telephone bridge or the Skype bridge or whatever. And so why even tell this lie? Yeah. Like that's the thing I don't understand.

I don't really get that. Apparently their text chat is. is into encrypted, but I don't trust a single thing. And to be honest, I wouldn't have reinstalled Zoom. Like when all this happened, like last year, I tried to completely, it's difficult, but I tried to get all of Zoom off of my computer. And I had not used it until the virus hit. And you know, people want to hang out.

Yeah, and I think that is, I want to make sure we keep talking on Zoom. But to me, that is a, it is a criticism we have faced because we keep covering what people are doing in Zoom. And so, like, do I want to write a story that's like, this bride who got married in Zoom because of the virus ruining your plans used the wrong software for my personal moral reasons? That doesn't seem like the correct angle into that story.

Like, there is an emergent class of cultural behavior happening in Zoom that is interesting and worth talking about. And then there's Zoom's responsibility to its users, especially that new class of users, who is not attuned to worrying about whether secret web servers are going to install them a Mac, who is not attuned to, hey, this one-click installation

is pretty shady, who is not attuned to, oh, I'm going to actually dig into what they mean by end-to-end encrypted, whether they're just using the phrase any way they want, or whether it's the commonly accepted thing. They're not attuned to the fact that if you hit record on a Zoom call, I'm sure the person who got married in Zoom hit record, right?

Right? That's it, why that's your wedding? Like, I'm confident they hit record. Well, that file is on Zoom servers and Zoom employees can watch it because they have the key. That stuff is, to me, particularly damning. I also think you could blame a little bit of the install shenanigans on operating system vendors. Like, there are easier ways to get software. You could imagine them having better sandboxing. I know there's another Zoom vulnerability with like links. and network stuff. On the Windows side. Yeah. Yeah. But like you could imagine an operating system that you could have, you'd click a link in a browser, you'd get a native app running on your desktop that wouldn't be dangerous. You know, like that could just work.

Or, you know, Apple could make it Mac App Store not like anti-developer. And so you could just send people right there like you do on the phone. And people are pretty comfortable installing apps on the phone. It's kind of a fundamental flaw with. desktop operating systems. Like, you know, you said you can imagine an operating system where you click a link and then you go into the native app. That's literally like iOS, you know.

Like that's what literally happens on that side of things. But yeah, like they have to work around all of these weird oddities with desktop operating systems whilst also try and exploit the fact that you can do so much more on those desktop operating systems. But I think ultimately it's like with any of this stuff, it's like a balance of ease of use, privacy and security and all that sort of stuff. And like it's trust in Zoom, like whether we can trust Zoom. Like we had these issues last year.

We've obviously got a ton of issues now. And I'm sure by the time this, by the time people even listen to this, there'll be more. Like this isn't ending. Like they've got such a focus on them now that people are going to discover a bunch of stuff. And it really, it depends on how the 200 million or however many people are used. using it, like respond to all this sort of stuff. Like, do they, we've seen it with Google and Facebook. Like, they've had privacy issues.

For sure, they've had a ton. But they have good products and people still flock to them in their millions. And there's that issue of trust, you know, people trust these companies. Do we trust Zoom? Like, that's, I think that's at the heart of it. Do we trust Zoom to fix this stuff now that they've been found out and do people trust to use it? But they announced a big move today, right?

Yeah. So today, they basically said we're freezing all of our features. So no new features, no snazzy stuff for the next 90 days. We're going to do essentially like a software review on Zoom to figure out, you know, all of the privacy issues and the security issues that have been raised, work with third parties and just do like a bit of an audit, essentially, and try and fix some of this stuff up. So they've given themselves 90 days to. really fix all the issues. I mean, there's going to be more, like we just said. But at least it was

like a quick response, I guess. And the CEO is also holding a weekly webinar. Which is, you know, that's good. I mean, that's like a little bit of transparency at least. I started out talking about Bezos and like Casey in the newsletters just banging the drum that like Bezos should be issuing a briefing about Amazon status every week. Like it's an Amazon is like that important that it, it makes sense that they would give us a weekly status report. I'm like, I was talking to Casey last night, actually, and he was like, it is crazy that Amazon hasn't said anything to its customers. Like, the Amazon product of like push a button and get something sent to your house is like extremely degraded right now. And Amazon hasn't said a word about it. They're just like powering

through it. Whereas like, okay, Zoom is like our CEO is going to be in a Zoom call every week talking about privacy and security while we freeze all features. Like those are radically different ends of the spectrum. I think the question for me still, is was this stuff, were these mistakes? Were they solutions, where somebody didn't think about the stakes of those solutions at the scale, which is less forgivable than mistakes, but still on the spectrum of forgivability? Or is this reflective of a company culture that doesn't actually respect users, that doesn't actually respect privacy?

And like, that is the big question. When you say, do you trust Zoom, to me, that is the question by far. I think that is the thing. Because like you can see from some of the stuff they've done, the installer stuff, the stuff last year with the web server. Like some of that is probably, you know, to take away some of the friction of using your product. But it's also very growth hacky. It's very, it looks malicious. It just looks terrible when you get found out doing it.

So like have they considered those options? Did they think, oh, you know, what's going to happen with people audit us? And it's pretty clear they haven't really considered that. And that's like such a typical thing with a startup. Like security is always second, you know? It's like, how do we get users? That's the primary thing. And they don't think about the privacy and security aspects until it's too late.

And we see this all too often. But Zoom is like, what, is it? Eight years old? It has a market cap of $34 billion. Like, do you give them the startup benefit of the doubt? Like, I think that's like another big question is they're in a place right now where so many people have never heard of them and they're hearing about Zoom for the first. Somebody was actually tweeting me yesterday.

It seems concerning that Zoom came out of nowhere like this. I'm like, eight years old, $34 billion market cap. Like, they didn't come out of nowhere. They're just having this moment. But they get to ride along the like, oh, we're a startup. We didn't think about it. I think they, yeah, they've got the thing that everyone wants, right? So it's free.

You can use it for 40 minutes. You can have like up to 100 people in it, which is like their competitors just don't have that. Like, there's no real match that's free. And I think that's just that gives them a lot of the ability to go massive. like we've seen, but it's also just shining a massive light on the mistakes they've made. And I think they just need to take these 90 days and look at the decisions they've made for the product and whether it's worth those trade-offs, you know? Yeah. And then I think on the other side of it, they have a lot of competitors,

a big, well-funded, established companies, right? And it's like, you wrote about Skype and how Microsoft has blown it with Skype completely, ever since they acquired Skype. And like those companies are they are on the attack. Oh yeah. But they're not like this is a moment for them to claw back from Zoom. And I think that's just another kind of pressure, which is good. In many ways that is just competitive market pressure that I'm like happy to see. But there's no network effect with Zoom.

Like once you use Zoom once, it doesn't have like your social graph or whatever. Like it's pretty easy to switch from Zoom. And so I'm curious if you see people over time just like move away from Zoom, because this round of backlash actually took hold. They tried something else. It doesn't matter if switching is easy, so they might as well stay with something else. I'm also curious to see how much them scaling up

to this amount of people has cost them. Like, that's, it's quite a thing to go from like 10 million to 200 million in the space of, like, a few months. That's, like, massive growth. And when your product is, like, essentially free, like 40 minutes is, you know, everyone just thinks that's a meeting time in Zoom, I think, that's using it at the moment.

So I'm curious, like, how that impacts them going, going forward because some of those choices they're going to have to make in the next 90 days are going to be, you know, business, business model choices. And, like, do we take it down to, like, a 10, 20 minute meeting, you know, do we have 50 participants to 100? Like, all that sort of stuff. I think, I think we're about to see Zoom change quite a lot. Yeah.

The funny thing to me is, you know, I just said, like, it's easy to switch away from Zoom, and you're absolutely right, it's easy to switch away from Zoom. It's actually pretty hard to switch to most of the other video chat apps. Microsoft Teams, you got to figure out what the hell Teams is. Hangouts still exist somehow

and you got to figure out what Hangouts meet is. Duo only works on phones and like, you know, smart displays. FaceTime requires that everybody have an Apple device. Every other like chat app that happens to have video chat attached to it. You got to sign up for the chat app. there's actually like a pretty high onboarding cost for almost everything and that's I mean that's one of the reason Zoom is so successful um but I'm just wondering like who's going to be the first one to be like hey we made it as easy as Zoom just here's a link and you're on we even saw the website

uh well Dieter would you like me to read from our list of Zoom alternatives I would yes people do have Skype in the world it's still there they they didn't blow it so badly as to kill it like There's Skype. I think WebEx has a free version. Whereby is at the... Like, there's hangouts exist. Blue jeans. Yeah, there's stuff. Blue jeans actually you can't get unless you pay.

Oh, really? Okay. Never mind. But these companies see the opportunity. Yeah. Right? If you've been operating a middling video conference service this whole time and like suddenly like everyone's mad at Zoom, you're like, look at me!

And that's great. Like, I applaud that. I think people should look at alternatives. I just think it's tough. And the other thing is like, it's the same way. Slack. It's the same with Teams. We're seeing this pattern over and over again where all of this enterprise software is fundamentally just collaboration software and lots of consumers for lots of reasons need to collaborate now. So they're using these enterprise tools. Those tools are doing

more generous free tiers or doing whatever because they're just hoping to convert to paid at the end. So Tom, you've been looking at that stuff too. What is sort of the status of that the Slack teams world? Yeah. So Slack versus Teams versus Zoom. Slack is basically, coming at it from we're going to you know team up with everyone team up the zoom and google and whoever else they can get to integrate into their app to take on Microsoft teams because obviously Microsoft teams is coming in hard should we say and really trying to chase them and i think that sets up some like interesting dynamics with like this whole zoom situation because if you're if you're like a Microsoft or a Cisco you've been making some good

revenue on your on your on your set on your video services and stuff and you know zoom's getting a lot of attention elsewhere. Like, you don't want that to become the thing because it's a freemium product and, you know, there's going to be plenty of people that will pay for it eventually. And it just sets up that interesting dynamic between, like, it reminds me, Zoom reminds me of Google, you know, like they're basically throwing a product out there for free, hoping that, you know, a lot of people pick it. And then they'll probably like start charging for it a little bit later on or like, you know,

entice people in. And that just reminds me of like the Microsoft and the Cisco's, basically they don't want their cash cow out of their office being pulled away to like, you know, Google Docs and stuff. And I think what we're going to see is stuff like Slack versus Microsoft teams is we're going to see these zooms. We're going to see more, you know, offering stuff that's going to be an alternative to office and whatever else.

And we're going to see them all sort of kind of like team up and integrate with each other and try and take on Microsoft. Because Microsoft has clung on to office for so many years, and they don't ever seem to lose a grip on it. But I feel like there's a time coming where someone's going to strike something right with the balance between all of these third-party apps and package it all up in the right way.

Can I ask a question a little out of ignorance? What is Microsoft Teams outside of being Slack, and I assume there's some sort of office integration? That's pretty much it. It's literally deeply integrating into office. Skype is like their video and calling solution within teams. And it's Slack. The thing with Slack is that you don't do video calls.

Like, we're not doing a video call in Slack. And there's a reason for that because Slack video calls aren't good. So you use it. And like that's the drawback to Slack that they have to integrate and, you know, with third parties that are better at doing certain parts. Whereas Microsoft is trying to bet on the fact that they can do everything. thing and like sell it as a cheaper package. And to say that all Teams is a Slack made by Microsoft with Office integration, I would put that a different way. I would say, holy shit, Teams is a Slack

made by Microsoft with Microsoft integration that everybody with Office just gets. Yeah. Right? Yeah. That's just the big thing. Yeah. And they're putting it as like, there's such a focus on it as being their hub. So I think it's where we're going to see a lot of the experimentation with whatever that they want to do with office in the future, and especially on the website. There's also just a part where Microsoft is bigger at certain kinds of clients than any startup could be, because they're Microsoft, right? So I know some IT consultants who, like, service a lot of law firms, and they're like, I would never put Slack in a law firm. Like, Microsoft just understands what a document retention policy is, and they've had 500

engineers thinking about document retention policies and Microsoft Word for 20 years. It's literally their bread and butter, right? Right. And it's like Slack has like maybe one person who just Wikipediaed it yesterday. Right? And like there's just a huge advantage that my, I'm sure Slack is better. They're a great company, but, um, not to over exaggerate. But Microsoft just has that reputation.

They have that client relationship. Like, yeah, they've got a huge, uh, moat of just having been there of time for a product that kind of looks like Slack. And that is pretty good. Like, teams didn't have channels for like a hundred years, right? Like, they didn't have basic features that we take for granted in Slack, but they were there. And they had that understanding of what some of these bigger corporate clients seen. So I do think this is a war.

I think the thing that Slack and the Zooms are going to rely on is, like, people loving their products. Rather than you don't necessarily always love Microsoft products. That's like a thing. It's something you use at work. That's like a kind of common thing. It's like something you're given. It's not something you go out and buy. And I think that's the thing that Slack and all the competitors are going to play on.

And we've seen it. Like that's their only competitive advantage, really, because they know that Microsoft are jugginaught. You can pay $5 for Zoom. You can pay $5 for G-tweet. You can pay $5 for Slack. Then you're paying $15. Whereas Microsoft will come in and be like, you can pay $5, you know. All right.

We've done 40 minutes on Zoom, which is incredible. I didn't expect us to be able to do that. But Tom, before you, we let you go. Microsoft actually did change how 365 works, Microsoft 365. Just tell us about that a little bit. Because it's all in the same zone. Yeah. So essentially they had Office 365 for consumers,

which was basically your office subscription and a bunch of cloud stuff thrown in, so like storage and all that sort of stuff. They've essentially rebranded that to Microsoft 365 and then tagged a few things on top of that. One of those is Microsoft teams for consumers or for home or for life, whatever they're going to call it. A family is a team of sorts.

Yeah. Hopefully. And then there's like a safety app, a family safety app, which essentially is like a combination of find my friends, you know, like where you're tracking your kids and maybe your husband or wife and see in their location and also a combination of screen time. So you're seeing how much a device is used. And that's going to work across Android, Xbox and Windows and not necessarily. only iOS because it's iOS.

And the price is still $699, right? Yep, the price is still the same. And they've tagged these extra things on. And a bunch of office things that they've done as well. There's a bunch of AI stuff like an editor, like kind of like a grammary sort of stuff. And yeah, they kept the price the same, which is cool. You're getting more for whatever you were paying before.

And that's all coming in April. A lot of it is coming soon in the following months. It's not totally clear exactly when it'll all be available. but you can see the path they're going on. And they're still keeping Skype. But it's trying to convince people to also use teams. I don't know. There's definitely some sort of clash there.

There's some tension. Aren't they rewriting Skype and Electron or something? Yes. Don't get started on that. How much do I have to pay Microsoft to just keep using Wonderlist? I would pay $20 a month to just keep using Wonderlist. And not have any other part of Microsoft. 365, just not to not have to switch to to-do.

The founder tried to buy it back right for that. Really? Yeah. Microsoft's To-do is so close to being Wonderlist and then it's not. Also, I'm just going to say this. If you make a swipey app and one thing that you can do is delete stuff with a swipe, just consider left-handed people. Because we are often in the grocery store accidentally deleting items from the grocery list

as we walk around the grocery store. I'm not saying that that has happened to me. I'm just saying, please think of left-handed people when you make your swipy app because I want to get out of the grocery store as fast as possible lately. So it's just an idea that I have. I just want to point out that Microsoft 365 for $6.99 a month, like Dropbox is $10 a month. Google 1, which basically just gives you Google Drive and then they pretend there's other stuff there. It's like $10 a month. ICloud is a bunch of money.

Like the amount of value that you get, like you get all the other Apple stuff in ICloud for free basically, and what you're paying for is basically like more storage. So the stuff that you get out of Microsoft for that $6.99 a month is actually more value than what you get from Google or Apple for their like $10 a month. You know, I'm just proud of Microsoft that they didn't call it Azure for consumers. I think they're at the point where they're, you know, they've done so many different services. and consumer stuff over the years and we don't have to dig in about all of, I know how that's failed. But I think they're kind of,

they're at the point where they're like, understanding, like, who uses their products, finally. And they're not trying to, like, you know, the next million or whatever. They're like, okay, where can we add some sort of value here and make people actually go for it? All right.

Well, I think the story of enterprise software coming to consumers is just going to keep ramping up, especially while everyone is at home. So Tom, you're going to be on that story. We look forward to having you back. Thanks for joining us, man. Thanks. And stay safe and well.

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Other big news, this actually kind of happened early. There's a lot to talk about here, but I suspect we're just going to talk about sprint nostalgia. I think, I think I know how this is going to go. T-Mobile and Sprint merger closed. And John Ledger stepped down as CEO. He's still on the board. But Mike Sievert, new CEO, T-Mobile, now part of Sprint, third carrier on the scale of 18-T and Verizon.

I will say this. We have talked about this merger and what it means and whether it works and whether Dish Network is going to invent a 7G network using whatever they're going to do. My position on whether the merger was good idea about is clear. we've argued about it. I hope you enjoyed that conversation. But it's done now. Yep. And I think what is important for me to reframe my thinking, what I'm going to, the posture I want to take is they got to prove it. Right. They got what they wanted. You know, I started the show by joking that, like, I'm good at counting days since a promise was made. They made an awful lot of promises about

this merger. They made an awful lot of promises about prices not going up, about being competitive with 18T and Verizon about building a 5G network, about honestly making jobs in places around the country. That's how they settled a lot of state attorney general lawsuits. We're going to track those promises. I hope they keep all their promises. I want to say that very clearly. I hope they keep all their promises. I hope they are competitive. They continue that that competitive spirit that made a lot of people love team a little to begin with at their larger scale. It is weird to think that they're going to do that with a new CEO who is not John Ledger. You know, you might think that I just, I don't like John Ledger. But I see John Ledger as like,

being incredibly smart and savvy. Even, I think his persona was calculated. I really do. You know, that doesn't mean that it's like not also like sincere. I think that's weirdly, I think that those aren't necessarily opposites. But so very early in his tenure, back in those days, my title at The Verge was assistant managing editor. And I was one of the very first people to ask him about net neutrality concerns when he started

zero rating music streaming services. It was at one of his uncarrier events. It was pretty early on. And so then I got on his list, and he likes to poke fun at journalists. And so I tweeted something, whatever, and he tweeted at me, is it your title assistant to the managing editor?

Nah, that's pretty good. Good office thing. And I was very angry about this. I was, oh, man, he got me. How do I do? And then I realized, because back then, the most likely outcome for T-Mobile

when John Ledger came on to try and turn it around was they were going to crash and burn because they, you know, didn't get sold to AT&T, and they were going to get bought out by SoftBank. And so I replied to him and said, yeah, it's a weird title. Has, you know, the CEO of SoftBank picked your title yet? And to his credit, he was like, good one, Deeter. Like, you got me. I respect that.

That's pretty good. He took T-Mobile from that, from like, everyone's like, well, that's going to crash. And SoftBank's going to take it over to, he did well. SoftBank was like, well, what the hell do we do? They bought Sprint, which is all of a sudden the droopy dog of America. Sprint stopped trying. They just stopped caring. And then Team Mobile buy Sprint.

Like, incredible turnaround story. I will say that the CEO that SoftBank installed the Save Sprint is now in charge of WeWork. So SoftBank has like, I don't know they've learned any lessons from that experience. And so it goes. Look, we are very critical of telecoms, is a fact. I think John Ledger, this is like a lion of our industry who is no longer the CEO of this company. And like, he said a lot of things that were true about American wireless carriers and then did the opposite thing. He said, these contracts are dumb. In Europe, they don't have contracts like this.

We're just going to sell you the phone. If you want an installment plan, we'll sell you the installment plan. But we're unbundling it from the price of service. I think that was actually the first uncarrier move. Yeah, and the best. By far the best one. Everybody had to follow. Everybody had to follow. You know, my joke about, zero rating is that when you actually have competitive carriers and they start to compete on zero rating, they end up at net neutrality by default because they've zero rated everything. Yeah. Like you sort of like end up there.

And that has more or less happened. I mean, it's not what I would want, but they've all ended up at unlimited plans that are throttled at 22. Quote, quote, unlimited plans. Yeah. Like I'm saying, it's not exactly how it wants to play out. But they are all doing the thing where they're saying, okay, we're not going to let video hit your data cap.

We're going to downscale it to 480P. You can't see enough on screen anyway. Maybe you can maybe can't. They're all doing it. Yeah. Right? They are all aggressively trying to churn customers because they know that T-Mobile will turn customers to T-Mobile with aggressive pricing.

Okay. Like that stuff, no CEO was doing. No CEO was coming right out and saying how they thought the industry would go. You know, even if you listen to the Vergecast, maybe you know who the CEO of Verizon is. Maybe do. maybe you know who the CEO of 18T is. Most people perceive them, it's Hans Vesperg and Randall Stevenson,

by those are those guys. I failed your test. I had it. Paul. Like, maybe you know these names and they're out there. Hans Vesberg at CES like goes on a wild tangent about 5G frequencies

and it's esoteric and it's hard to understand. Maybe you know these folks. Most people think, and like even the people who disagree with me are like, AT&T and Verizon basically price against each other. AT&T raises its prices by a dollar, Verizon's not far behind, right? They are the duopoly.

Ledger just started calling them the duopoly. And in fact, a lot of people know who John Ledger is. He said, that's a duopoly. That's how they work. I'm not going to do that. He became a character. He became a voice. He styled himself, and I do think this is calculated.

He styled themselves as the voice of a frustrated consumer. All this stuff is, like, pure genius. Whether or not you believe that, like, the leaked, documents we got in the lawsuit to block the merger indicated that they were trying to merge with Sprint so they become that scale and then eventually raise prices and just become fine right like that lawsuit is lost it's in the past you can read those documents you can shudder for what might have been whatever can they keep that spirit up now that they have the scale one of my favorite ledger moments actually really recently when he was just talking about their 5G network and how they were

going to build it and it was super relatable and he was like they're idiot It's AT&T's network is crap. Verizon's network is a mistake. Here's how I'm building mine. Here's how it's going to. And it's like very few telecom CEOs have that ability to communicate, that ability to cut through the noise, and that ability to say, here's my plan. And then convince you that they're going to do it. Randall Stevenson will tell you about AT&T's plan for HBO Max.

And you're like, yeah. Those are some words you said, bro. Like, T-Mobile has, inside, I want to, you know, in the spirit. of, I think, was it two weeks ago I complimented the wireline CEOs for taking away their data caps? Okay. It's a different time. We're at home.

We're existentially reconsidering our lives. I will compliment this telecom CEO. I think it is just an incredible run. And I truly hope they just keep their promises. I'll be counting. Yeah. Well, so they've already lit up LTE for some Sprint customers. So T-Mobile's LTEs lit up.

They are promising some 5G software updates for some Sprint 5G phones to take advantage of T-Mobile's 5G network. So they've made some of the early moves that they could. They have told, they told Heimgardenberg asked from a million questions, what's going to happen? What are you doing? And like, look, we're not closing anything tomorrow.

We've got three years. We promise not to raise prices. We don't have any immediate plans to close down any stores or whatever. So like, hopefully they do things right. Hopefully there aren't mass layoffs. Hopefully, like, they can keep their promises. We shall see. I imagine, look, every merger comes with layoffs.

This is a bad time to be, you know, laying off your redundant sales or HR staff or whatever, whatever savings you thought you're going to get there. It's a bad time to be closing sprint stores. They know that's a bad look. They promise to keep a lot of that stuff up for three years. Great. The real questions I have is, like, at the end of two and a half years, right when they're getting to the end of, we've promised to keep prices the same. Are they going to roll out some new data plans that are more expensive that are better and they're going to, like, leave the old. grandfathered in, right? Are they going to start playing games with the promise? That is something

telecom companies do all the time. Sprint customers right now, I think are relatively, our explainer, what happens to Sprint customers now? It's like it's been the top post on the site all day. And the answer is nothing. Yep. The answer is like maybe in a couple months, the logo on the top of your bill will change, but that's it for now. And you're probably going to get better service if your phone supports it. Yeah, if you've got a newer phone and you, you know, they decide they want to push, a software update to it, maybe you'll get better service. Okay, that's a delight. If you've got like some old Android phone, it's probably going to be very similar for you for a long time, right? So hopefully all that stuff plays out. I think the real questions are, when do they start

deprecating Sprint's network to reform that spectrum for 5G? That's a big question. When do they start, you know, the next iPhone will come out. Is that just going to be a T-Mobile phone? Are they going to make two variants for Sprint and T-Mobile networks right now? Like, I don't know the answer. So I think that stuff is like a little up in the air, but it will get resolved. And then I think I said we were going to do Sprint history. I think Sprint as a company has a long legacy. Deere, you wrote about it today. But like a bunch of technical decisions Sprint made around WMAX, around VoiceOver LTE, all that stuff, is going to get unwound.

And so a bunch of those devices are going to stop working. Not YMX. The VOMX devices already stopped working. But like Sprint's a legacy CDMA network, their voice network, all that stuff is going to start to go away. and I don't know on what timeline that is yet. And they're not saying because they only just close the deal. Yeah. And I think if you're a sprint customer and you're like worried about that,

I don't think you need to be. I think that your phone's going to work fine. I think that, I don't know, like people hang on to phones longer than they used to. So like it used to be like, oh, it's three years. And three years are going to do a new phone anyway, whatever. That's not necessarily true anymore. But this is like another thing to like watch T-Mobile, see if they do right by Sprint customers who might get caught.

in a technical cul-de-sac because their phone depends on a sprint technology that's getting EOLed. Yeah. And then next to that, which is not directly to T-Mobile, you know, DISH Network now has a seven-year NVNO agreement. How fast is DISH network going to start selling phones? This, like, crazy software-defined radio 5G plan. You know, if you think about it, DISH has got to start a network. They need somebody to run the network. John Ledger doesn't have a job.

Oh, my God. That would be. Incredible. That would be great. Be like, I'm doing it again. Oh, bad. It would be great. I think he's just pretty happy. It's like a new game plus as a telecom CEO.

Yeah. I mean, that stuff is even more weight and see. Are you going to keep your promises, right? And, you know, the sort of conventional wisdom is, why would you believe them? They've never kept this kind of promise before. We'll see. I imagine it's harder to build a network when no one can leave their house, right? They've got to get a bunch of network technicians up on poles to build stuff and write code for these software-defined radios.

One just imagines that it's currently harder than you expect. And companies don't generally blatantly, blatantly break promises they've made to the FTC or the DOJ. They might like skirt around it, but they don't blatantly just be full on. I don't know, man. I feel like Casey's, like every other day Casey's newsletter, it's like Facebook breaks promise to the FTC. Yeah. And what's the FCC going to do? Find them $10?

Like it's fine. Yeah, we'll see. Deeter, do you want to talk that Sprint for two minutes? I feel like it isn't. I mean, just a couple of minutes. We've run long. The thing that I tried and failed to work into my newsletter like four times. I basically, I wrote the story that like back in the day, if you were into smartphones,

Sprint was a great network because it didn't have all the limitations that Verizon threw at you. It didn't cost as much as AT&T. You didn't have to worry about whether the global phone was compatible with like you did on AT&T. and you could get like this sprint employee referral option, which was like made the phones cheap. They were more accessible to people that didn't make a ton of money than the other carriers, and that really mattered. They were one of the early carriers that did unlimited plan, the Simply Everything plan. Like Dan Hessey was the CEO who rolled in and like was going to, you know, change everything.

And he like unveiled on a limited plan and blah, like that he was the John Ledger of his day. Only he was, you know, 20 feet tall. Dan Hessey was a very tall CEO. But the thing I wanted to put in there, and I just couldn't quite get it as Sprint. Also, they made a bunch of really bad technical decisions, right? Why Max? They bought Nextel.

You know, Iden. But when they started, like, as a long-distance company, like, they were technically good. They had one of the very first all-digital networks for cellular companies. Like, they moved away from the classic TDMA, like, analog cell phone system first. their logo is that weird yellow fan. That is supposed to be representative of a pin bouncing off of a table because their whole spiel was you can hear a pin drop on our network because it's so technically good.

So there's like there's an alternative history here where Dan Hessey makes the right call or they have a little bit more money or why Max turns out not to be a dumpster fire or whatever where we would just, they would just. they would just have succeeded. And maybe that means that like AT&T ends up buying T-Mobile and like we're back at three no matter what because no matter what, everything ends up terrible. But there was a chance. And so if you were, you know, in a certain demographic in the U.S. in like the mid-2000s, like Sprint was a great place to be. Like there was actually a real community around it too. Like you could go to Hofo. You could like Sprint's, oh, Sprint's thing.

It was called Buzz About Wireless. There were like a handful of forums that you could go to and like talk to other Sprint users. and like get into it. And it was, it was weird. The people were like loyal to Sprint. And that made, like, makes no sense to me now, but they were. And the same way that people are like loyal to Team Mobile. Like, that is a wacky trick to pull off.

I don't feel any loyalty to my broadband provider. Yeah. None at all. Yeah. Are you saying when the pre, because when the pre came out, I switched to Sprint to use the pre. Did, were you still a Sprint subscriber? That was 2008. No, I was bouncing around by then.

That was 2008. So I had switched to AT&T for the iPhone and also just to have other phones because I needed to test more Windows mobile phones and more were available by then. And I didn't include the pre as like another like, oh, good job, Sprint. Because the only reason the pre was on Sprint is because they got rejected by Verizon. I mean, I would say I was reading as everyone should read at Deeter's piece. It's very sweet. It's a, it's a, it's so good. It's just like a very nostalgic thing to read.

The edit I would have made was and then Sprint started killing it. everything. Yeah. Like Sprint became the kiss of death for Palm twice now, I think. They've killed it. No, the Little Palm was on Verizon. They're right. Yeah.

But the Sprint exclusive just became this kiss of death. And it was, it's like remarkable that that has just happened several times. The other thing that really, I think, is the lesson of Sprint and like inside of this sort of big broadband debate, standards debate that we were constantly having, Sprint made a billion dollar mistake in picking YMAX over LTE to get to market first. And they never had the scale to get the chips to be smaller, to be less power hungry, to be less hot, quite frankly. And so the phones were just worse, but they had faster network speeds for like all

of a year, right? And that literally that bet destroyed Sprint. Like, everyone always tells me that's an overread. I mean, a lot of things destroyed Sprint. But that bet where they, they didn't have the standard. network just ruined that like they they've been fighting back from that bet literally ever since and I think when it came time for 5G everyone learned the lesson like there was not a deep 5G standards debate there's a deep 5G like frequencies debate millimeter wave whatever but like

that's more based on where is available spectrum it's not like it's going to work differently and I as far as you can tell there's not a major carrier in the world that's not going to build the standards 5G network by the end. There's a little bit of like, we got ahead of the standard to build our network first, gamesmanship going on, fine, but by the end,

it'll be a standardized network across the world. And that is, I swear to God, that is like, all the telecon executives got in the smoke filled room at MWC, and they're like, we're not going to sprint this up, right? They're like,

you know, they decided it would be a marathon, Eli. Yeah. Like, we're not going to make the Wi-Max thing. No one here's doing YMAX, right? We can all agree.

And like that to me is like just, it's one of those inflection points in tech history that, you know, now it's just like sort of ancient history. But it taught so many people like a crucial lesson about how to build these networks. Okay. Paul, do you have any deep nostalgic sprint thoughts? I'm just a little. Okay, two things. Sprint has a better logo in color than T-Mobile. Wow.

And that's always been true. And despite Sprint, I mean, I feel like now when I look at the Sprint logo, I think of failure. So, like, some of the shine is off, but I still like the aesthetic better. Also, Nextel was a real fun moment. Remember those walkie-talkie phones? Yeah. Oh, there are people who are still mad at Sprint for blowing NextTel.

Like, I wrote that lawsuit piece the other day, and like, three months ago, however, what day is it? Yeah, exactly. However long ago that was. And, like, there was one half-hearted Next-Tel joke in it, and, like, people were treating me, like, I'm still mad about Nextel. They really screwed that up. There was just like a certain, certain dude loved just strolling into the office with his next telephone deep image just blaring all his conversations. All right, that's it.

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What is it called? I do a segment every week. And it's called, if I were a rich man sung to the tune of if I were a rich man from the musical. I'm filling out of the roof. Deeter, you have to stop singing. Asus has re-uped its membership in the keyboard and the front club. Yes. They have shown up in such a big way with the Asus, R-O-G, Zephyrus Duo 15.

So they had already done this dual-screen laptop, right? The big problem. So you have keyboard in the front, right, where your palms used to be on crappy laptops. And then above the keyboard deck, it was a screen. And then you also have a regular screen. Yep. The obvious problem anybody could see it the first time that they saw this laptop is that the flat screen above your keyboard is at a bad viewing angle. So it's going to be kind of hard to use.

And it also, there's also a giant bezel on the main screen underneath it. Also that. So now they have sort of like the Leonardo da Vinci of laptop manufacturing. They have created a hinge that also while you're opening the laptop, the second screen tilts up towards you. And now it's at a perfect angle for glanceable information. It's touchscreen. You can use a stylus. It's just, it is so cool.

And it's $3,000. And I am so far away from having $3,000. But it's really just the greatest laptop on the planet right now. What I, what I just, I'm just gazing at this, this image. There's like people like me who are like,

I wonder if this will be like this device will be good on an airplane. Like I think about that. What? And then there's like another group of people for whom that is absolutely not a consideration. Right. Like at no point did the designers of this machine care about an airplane. playing seat back or even like a first class experience.

Like they were just like, nope, this is pretty much going to be on your desk at home. This is great. I'm very excited for it. We're not going to have time to get into it at the end of the show. So I just want to point out that a bunch of laptop stuff happened. Monica Chin reviewed the ASS-R-G Zephyrus with an AMD chip. And it is stunningly good. And it really throws down on Intel's 10th-gen stuff, which is now starting to come out.

alongside new NVIDIA stuff. So like a bunch, a bunch of laptop stuff happened. But we might save that if we can for next week because it's way too much to get into today. We should. We'll just have Monica on next week. Yeah, I think we'll just have monica on. I just wanted to say when you're talking about airplanes, right, a lot of these new Intel laptops that are coming out with the new NVIDIA stuff are big gaming laptops.

And I think the interesting thing about like the AMD laptop is, probably not going to beat most of them in gaming. It looks like it has probably a stronger CPU. The CPU is just astonishing. It's really wonderful. But that might be your gaming on an airplane laptop compared to a lot of these other ones, which actually might be,

you might be able to get more game for your buck from the Intel laptops, it looks like. But if you want a slightly smaller, slightly better power-wise power efficiency gaming laptop, the Zephyrus G14 might be the the ticket. Yeah. And Monica actually reviewed that one this week.

We'll just have her on next week. It's like it's that time to rethink laptops. So we should just do that. Assuming the, you know, the world is still here, which, you know, 50-50. All right, Dieter some, there's like Apple drama. Man, any other week we would spend the entire Vergecast doing this. So out of nowhere, Amazon's Prime Video app on Iowa,

just suddenly had like rent and buy buttons on it. And people were like, what? And obviously the history here is that has never been allowed in any iOS app before. If you sell digital goods in iOS, not only do you have to sell it through Apple. You are not allowed to have a whisper to a reference to the possibility that you could maybe pay for it any other way.

If you have a link out to your website, if you say, hey, you could subscribe on our website. You get rejected. And so to go from that to all the same, sudden there's just straight up buy buttons in the Amazon app. It's shocking. Without the 30% cut. Because you can sell digital goods in iOS, but you have to give Apple a cut.

But this was buy buttons at the same price as a regular Amazon store. So everybody asked Apple for comment. And kind of shockingly, Apple had a comment. And here it is. I'm just going to read this. And Apple has an established program for premium subscription video entertainment providers to offer a variety of customer benefits. including integration with the Apple TV app, AirPlay 2 support, TVOS apps, Universal Search, Series

support, and where applicable, single or zero sign-in. On qualifying premium video air entertainment apps such as Prime Video, Altice 1, and Canal Plus, customers have the option to buy or rent movies and TV shows using the payment method tied to their existing video subscription. So, lots of things to unpack here. The idea that this program is established is very interesting because Mark German, who knows quite a bit about Apple, tweeted like, yeah, this is established, but I'd never heard of it. And you know that I would have. It's like, yep, you definitely would have.

Two, the thing that apparently qualifies you for not having to pay the Apple tax is being a, quote, premium subscription video entertainment provider. And I would just like to interrogate that for a moment. What makes you a premium subscription video entertainment provider? What is it? It's pronounced Sven. Is Netflix a premium video subscription entertainment provider? I think the trade here is actually the other thing. What's that?

That list of things. Oh, yeah, sure. You're in the TV app. You get to use Siri. That is a bunch of Apple features, right? Yeah. Airplay support, whatever it is. The trade is, what does Apple want of the Apple TV most of all?

They want the TV app to be the actual interface. Yeah. Okay. So they got to give you whatever they're going to give you to get it. Yeah. So it's basically, we'll give you your 30% back if you integrate with the TV app in the suite of proprietary Apple things. Yep. Which is not a bad deal.

Like, it's a deal. You can take it or leave it. Netflix does not want to integrate with that TV app. They don't want to do it. They want you in the Netflix interface, just watching that next step. episode of Tiger King every, every minute, right? That's, I think that, I don't know, but my inclination and the rumors out there are very much that Apple can't get people in the TV app, they can't get them to use that long, long set of other services. And if you want to take your cutback,

you actually end up agreeing to that long list of support that bolsters Apple's operating system, that bolsters their, which is, again, maybe that's a fair trade. But, but, okay, that's a fair trade, but say you're in the business of not making a TV app, but you make another premium video subscription service, like, I don't know, Fortnite. How do you get that deal? How does anybody else get that deal? How do you, like, the only way to get that deal is to go into a smoke-filled room with Apple and, like, make that deal.

Every other developer just doesn't have access to it. And, I mean, so Tim Sweetie, CEO of Epic, noted App Store curmudgeon, I guess, is a fine way to put it. He did tweet about this, and he said, congratulations to Apple on their move towards opening up the iOS App Store to payment competition. It's like, great. I don't think that's what's happening here. I mean, yeah, it's pretty good. I think, so the other thing that's true is that Apple and Amazon have been pretty cozy on the TV side.

Yeah, they've been moving closer to each other and being just a little bit friendlier. And they've been making cutting deals on Apple stuff getting sold on Amazon. They're like they actually like started tamping down on third party sellers. So like they've been talking to each other for a while now. Yeah. And you know, if you're altis, LTEs 1 and Canal Plus are cable companies. It mentions payment method tied to their existing video subscription. So this is the idea that you have, I already have a prime subscription.

I just want to use the card on file to also pay for things from Apple's interface. Right now Apple's interface kind of makes you think that you misclicked. and that you, like, can't buy something. But, like, there's a possibility of, like, incredible nesting doll stuff happening here, right? Because both Apple and Amazon try to get you to pay for HBO through their interface. I don't know. No, it just says buy it and rent movies or TV shows. I don't know that the Amazon app actually sells you HBO.

I mean. Well, it does on the fire TV. Yeah. It's what I'm, not inside the thing. But, yeah. There's only one way to find out. And that is for me to just try to spend some dumb money on my Apple TV tonight. so that's premium video it's a fenn that's great you know what amazon still can't do is sell you a book in the

kindle app yep right and it's like great it's a tiny bit towards payment competition but the there's all this stuff that people ask for forever Spotify's still not happy right like you still can't just sign up for Spotify without like Netflix i'm sure is still complaining about this stuff it's a tiny little move it's good i'm happy i'm sure apple doesn't see a lot of Apple cannot be that worried that people are going to buy movies in Prime Video instead of the Apple TV movies app right now. They're not. No. Right. Like I think they just want to fill out the TV app and they want to get people to use it and this is a carrot you can throw. It's not going to cost them any money. Whether the real one is Netflix and they, I don't see a path from here to there, but we'll see that goes. Okay. We've waited. We've waited the real drama. The hottest drama in tech this week is that Android users.

will no longer be able to tell if it's raining. Apple bought Dark Sky. Oh. Here it goes. Oh, you're opening Dark Sky in your Android phone for the last time? Oh, you're uninstalling it? No! You'll never be able to get back!

It's over! Wow. I am shocked that there is this much drama heartache over a weather app being sold to Apple. People are very angry. I tweeted a little bit too fast. I said it feels incredibly petty for them to shut down the Android app in the API. The API is going to last until 2021, so that's, like, pretty good. They showed it

on the Android app, I think July 1, and then a bunch, a bunch, a bunch of other weather apps use Dark Sky's weather information via their API, and that is getting shut down at the end of 2021, so quite a while from now. But it's interesting, you know, like Dark Sky sells access to that API. So, like, Apple could have just kept that business going, but they chose not to. And the Dark Sky app on iOS is sticking around. So it's all. unclear, like, what the strategy is here. As a paid app, right? As a paid app.

Yeah, but I'm sure in iOS 15, you know, they're deprecated and I'll just be the weather app in iOS. That's what, when I, when I got over my anger, I, the way I started thinking about it is a lot of people don't buy apps. A lot of people don't even download apps. Fewer people buy apps. And dark sky as like a differentiator for as a built-in, like, the weather on your operating system is so cool.

versus like the way I think of Dark Sky is phones are great because one of the things you can do on phones is you can install Dark Sky on them. But as an operating system vendor like you could differentiate by having such a cool app. So it kind of makes sense in that. It's just annoying. I've been challenging myself to think because like,

Dieter, you wrote this and you said Amazon bought Euro and we were just like sad for a while. But we're just like, oh, that company to make it. We like them. It seems to go and fun. Here, Dark Sky is beloved. Apple bought them. Apple's history with acquisitions is actually not wonderful. Remember beats? They seem deeply respected inside of Apple. They bought the bed at sleep tracker. No one's ever heard from

them. Like on Shazam, Apple bought Shazam. What happened to them? Like, so like their history of these acquisitions is a little, little jumpy. At the same time, what did Darkseye prove? Like, A, it's a unique product. They synthesized available weather data to do. a different kind of prediction. That's really cool. They proved that there's a market for paid weather API. They prove there's a market for paid weather apps. They did not steal your location, bundle it up and sell it, which a bunch of other shady weather apps do. Okay, so then they got sold to Apple. All that means is there's a market for that thing, for someone else to serve, right? And my inbox is full of those apps. Great. So like, it's bizarre that like for me to be like,

well, that's fine. And then my other question is like, Google's entire mission statement is like, we use cutting edge AI to be helpful to you. And they don't appear to be able to tell Android users if it's going to rain. And it's like, shouldn't they just do it?

Shouldn't Google's weather native Android already be this good? It's shocking to me that dark sky is that much better. Back when we used to go outside, I used to ask Google Assistant what the weather was every day. And like that seemed fine. But it's weird that, I mean, like you're saying, People love things and people love Dark Sky.

Maybe it's just that reaction. But it's shocking that the default Google weather service was not so good that a market could even exist. I don't know. Is Weather and Android just not good? No, Weather and Android is fine. It doesn't have that like the thing that Dark Sky does is it, I mean, it's beautiful, first of all. It is a beautiful app. And it's very, very well designed, which, sorry to say, is not always, uh,

thing you can expect in an Android app. And it also gives you a little ping if you want it. Hey, it's going to rain in 15 minutes. And, like, that feels like magic. And it, like, is often right. It's usually right. And that's like the one, like, Google's weather app is fine. It's always right.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it's not as instant. And it doesn't give you that, like, that ping. They could maybe turn it on tomorrow if they wanted to. It's sitting there in the notification tray by default on most Android phones that have got, like, a Google assistant on it. So it's like, there, but it's not, like, actively letting you know, hey, it's going to rain. Yeah. I just think it's, that to me, it's strange to me that such a market exists for it's going to

rain on a device where the entire cell of the operating system is like, it's built by the AI company. But maybe Google do a thing. Like, it's an opportunity for them, too. I just, what I still don't have is a rationale for why Apple bought Dark Sky. I mean, they, they want the good weather app, right? They probably just want a better weather app. I mean, you remember back in the day, like, when Yahoo released its weather app, but everyone was like, oh, my God, this is great. And then, like, it made Apple step up its weather app game.

Like, weather app's a big deal. It's like the thing that everybody uses. The weather channel exists for a reason. It's funny because it is the one thing I use voice assistance for more consistently than anything else. Okay, we've gone a little long. We're going to wrap it up. We'll be back on Tuesday. I'm actually interviewing Kevin Scott, the CTO of Microsoft, about AI.

I'm going to just ask him. It's between the hour of me being like, how do you predict the weather? We'll see how that goes. We're going to ask him some good questions. But I'm excited to talk to him. He's really smart, dude. We're back on Friday with the chat show. We're doing this at home.

Please let us know how it sounds. Again, I suspect we're doing okay, but let us know. We're trying to make it better consistently, constantly. Thank you for sticking with us. I hope you're staying home. I hope you're staying safe. I hope you're just really checking the weather. Thanks to Tom Warren for.

at the top. And we're back next week. We're definitely going to have Monica to talk about laptops. All right. That's it. Rock and roll. Paul. Paul.