Steven Sinofsky on Microsoft's antitrust era, Apple's AI talent problem, and parallels to the dot-com boom

let's run it. I'll be right back. I I uh we got Steve Sowski in the studio uh coming on to TBPN live. Let's bring him in. How you doing, Steve? Okay, I am here. Oh, fantastic. Uh yeah, sorry. Where did we I showed up early. I apologize, but Oh, no. I love it. I connected to you guys before.

Didn't know what your process would be. Yeah, it's uh it it's evolving. It's evolving. It's a it's a pirate ship over here. It is a uh it is a startup in every sense of the word.

Um uh we we only learned later after uh the information was interviewing guests who have been on our show that it's common that when people go on live TV they talk to a producer beforehand as opposed to just what we do which is just send you a Zoom link and you just hop right on.

Like like just so everyone watching and listening and later it's clear not only do you just send a Zoom that's it like there's not there's like nothing zero. Yeah. Yeah, I mean we want to we want to bring a little bit of the Clubhouse magic, the casual uh conversation nature uh to the show as a feature.

It might be a bug, but we are hoping. I'm excited. I People were asking what are you going to talk about? I'm like I I don't know how I'm going to talk about it, let alone what I'm sure we'll have stuff to talk about. There's so much in the news all the time.

Uh I mean why don't we kick it off with a little bit of introduction on you and K like a brief overview of your career and then we can kind of de dive into a bunch of different topics from that. Sure. Well, working working backwards, uh, today I do mostly lots of informal mentoring, coaching kind of stuff.

I spend a lot of time talking to the to companies, newly forming formed ones all the way up to biggest of big and lots about strategy and tactics and management, organization and and rolling in technologies and all that stuff. Do a lot of writing.

Um I I have like my whole uh Microsoft history I've written and then I do posts every few weeks on what's going on in the world. Um in the past I worked at um Microsoft for a long time. Started as an engineer on on programming tools back in I I I think what Kaparati called like tools 1.

0 Oh, I think in that scale it's more like 0. 5 and then um all the way through office and Windows and bunch of other stuff in in the middle. Uh I also am a board partner at um A16Z. Cool.

But you guys know for sure board partner doesn't mean much in terms of writing checks or having a decision or knowing anything that's going on. So I'm learning much of what you talked about this morning the same time you are. Yeah. When wh when did you join Microsoft exactly and how did that come together? Sure.

I joined Microsoft in uh 1989. So for product chronology it was like before like six eight months before Windows 3. 0 shipped.

So I was there the summer that that was being debugged and that was sort of a big giant turning point that came together because I was in graduate school doing uh databases and programming languages which was basically what everybody in the 1980s studied. and I I just wasn't going to be a professor.

That wasn't on my radar. So, I literally had sent my resume on paper into the address that was on a box of Microsoft software that I had won at a conference for a prize for my booth. And then a day later, the recruiter called me and like three days later, I'm in Redmond interviewing.

And then I have a job and there you go. That's amazing. I have a whole story. I actually wrote the whole story out as part of my hardcore software thing. Love it. Uh there's this narrative about the the kind of the '9s era at Microsoft that the like the antitrust like like era was so tumultuous.

It was like this very painful experience for Gates and it kind of reshaped the organization. uh how much do you think that that's like uh an overblown narrative or it's or maybe it's very real and what do people maybe miss when they when they tell that story today in kind of the more compressed version? Sure.

It is totally compressed and you also have to keep in mind it's it's like 12 years long. Mhm. It it started in the early 1990s um with some FTC investigations blah blah blah and it didn't really end until like 2007 and by then I was working on Windows. Mhm.

I was on office which was certainly in there but I was also part of the very very early set of people who were running around talking about the internet at Microsoft. And so I was in the middle of all of it for the whole time.

And I there no one is going to ever convince me that it was as big a deal as everybody else made it to be. Um because like it just wasn't it's not the whole thing with litigation and regulation and the government. It's not daytoday. Yeah. Even if you're working in it. I mean, the government doesn't do stuff every day.

The legal process doesn't change every day. So, it's this massive amount of hurry up and wait.

I mean, like, I'll give you like very personally, I had to personally design the what was called the browser choice dialogue that was in Windows, which was this thing the European Union made us do like you start a new computer, you log in, and then it pops up, hey, which browser do you want?

So, I personally did that, but it was like over six months and it would be like I'm working three days straight. I'm not leaving this room in our house, our apartment where I was designing it. And then nothing would happen. And then well, they would go on vacation.

They would go on they would go they would go on a 12-week vacation they you know Brussels is completely European so like they you'll see it'll happen again.

Like in fact the Google choice just came out the Google decision on Android just came out yesterday and as the summer ends just like the Supreme Court in the US they start pushing things out but the difference is in Brussels they like literally just like put chains around the door and nothing happens until September and that's amazing and so there's a lot of that but I you know there were some things about like for example the browser like ended up being completely self-inflicted by Microsoft in my personal view.

Sure. And it was just not like it wasn't the browser choice dialogue. It was not the deals with the OEMs we had to go change. It was all our own making. More than anything, it was our our perspective was either wrong or perhaps warped by the antitrust.

It made us think Windows was more important or central to every single thing we did and put us constantly trying to push it because if they're trying to push against, maybe there was something there. Mhm. But by and large I I just I think for some people it became a bigger deal than it was.

And I think for the people covering the company, I mean, if you look at books about Microsoft, most of the books about Microsoft are really about either there are like three books about the formation of the company, like a dozen books about the trial and stuff like that, and and that's about it. Yeah.

And so I I and I have a whole bibliography like a hundred books you could look at and it just I always it's just overdone. Yeah.

Zooming out a little bit in the '9s, was there anybody that that you remember being you know having incredible incredible accuracy around predictions of how the internet would evolve and impact various parts of the economy.

feel like what we do on the show today is try to understand the present of AI and and how it will impact various industries in the future. And there's a lot of people that have cool ideas. Some people sound like they have good ideas.

You know, we have these conversations all day long and, you know, we spend a lot of time trying to figure out, okay, who who do we actually kind of align uh with from a thinking standpoint?

But uh I I remember earlier this week on the show we talked about how a lot of internet entrepreneurs in the late 90s and early 2000s like really predicted that the internet would allow you to run companies drastically more efficiency because it helped with distribution.

So maybe you needed less sales and marketing and all these kind of things. And then it turns out companies like still needed massive headcount to deliver products and things like that.

So, I'm curious, you know, kind of focusing in on the '9s, was there anybody that you think was really getting it right in the moment around how the internet would evolve?

Well, of course, you know, obviously present company excluded, but the the key thing is that I I always go back to a ' 80s movie that you guys won't know, but there's a line in it, you know, no matter where you go, there you are. And with predictions, no matter what happens, someone always said it would.

And so you have to be really careful, especially with the internet, because all the all the things that people said in 1993 would happen all happened. The only problem is all the words are different and the technology stack is divided up differently.

So the question is like, is that a good prediction or not a good prediction? And so it just depends on how charitable you want to be. There are these very famous commercials that um AT&T ran.

Now you have to remember in the early 1990s AT&T had just gone through 10 years earlier a massive antitrust suit been broken up into regional Bell operating companies. But they were like the biggest company you could imagine other than IBM in the US at the time.

and and they ran all these commercials about what the future was going to look like, you know, and they were called the Someday You Will. And so they would be like, "Did you ever write a business memo while sitting on the beach?

" And there's like a person with this like 18 pound laptop and a printer next to them pounding out a memo and a cell phone the size of a shoe box. So yeah, I now can write a business memo on the side of a beach. Except I don't want to write a memo.

I'm using a cell phone that AT&T didn't really have much to do with and I'm using not really a word processor but I'm just talking.

So like yeah you can write a memo from the beach but it wasn't but that if you watch it it you know you just go crazy or could you imagine going through a toll booth and not stopping I can in fact I do that twice a day but not at all like how they predicted in the movie. So, you know, you have to be really careful.

But then there are also some incredibly preient like micro things that are just wild. Like when this company in Seattlebased webban was doing grocery delivery, I remember web like nobody said that was going to work. Everybody's and of course it's not just grocery now just everything shows up four hours later. Yeah.

And when they but the thing is when they said it even the world's experts in shipping like the founder of what was called Federal Express or FedEx at the time impossible cannot do local delivery because you know their whole model was okay we own a fleet of jets and we pick up your packages with trucks drive them to the airport and fly them all to Tennessee and then fly them back.

So obviously we can't do that in four hours but that's how we do overnight envelopes for $10. Yeah. And so, but you know, along comes Amazon and like a million and a half employees and they figure the whole thing out.

And so, you know, like these, you know, and there's a great a thing I always love was this prediction that's like every single utility in Linux will eventually become a company. And it turned out that really ended up being true. Yeah.

And so the whole thing with that 1995 to 2000 meaning you know Windows 95 broad internet everybody even though it was dialup to the crash the whole thing about it was all of those companies ended up being being right. It's just they were all early and early is mostly just wrong because it means the technology was wrong.

Yeah. the web the investors in web van got smoked totally and yet it was the right idea that is now played out in and that happened with every single category during the like mp3. com Spotify pets.

com Chewy like there is a $10 billion company in the public markets today that has a precursor every single one of them has a precursor in I mean like that sock puppet was the symbol of [ __ ] company Oops [ __ ] company.

com I remember I remember that website yep it was I mean you know that was a super TV commercial, come to pets. com, blah blah blah. And now like I'm literally if you if I were to move the camera, there's like nine feet of Chewy boxes right behind me. Everyone buys pet food online now.

Everyone and so so you you I like predictions dime a dozen. But it's also and also like all of those companies and I really mean this with the most feeling and sincerity. All of those companies they they had to crawl so that everybody today or to today can walk and then tomorrow other companies will run.

And I think that there's so much of that with AI right now. A lot of what's going on these are just the crawlers and you have to be careful to sort of declare them winners. The platform is known all this other stuff. I mean I love Karpathy's talk. Unbelievable.

just amazing amazing talk that he did at YC and and like he talked about like it it's not the year of the agent, it's the decade of the agent. But that's not you can't build a company by claiming hey we're the 10 yearout company. Yeah. So because you don't even start it thinking that.

You start it thinking the revolution is happening and I'm behind already. Yeah. I mean, Mark Andre talks about how he moved from college to Silicon Valley in in 93 and he was worried he missed everything. Wow, that's crazy.

I mean, and I think that you have to have that mindset to move fast to to do things that when the whole world is telling you it's not going to work, which is literally what's happening with AI right now.

Yeah, it it it feels so similar and yet the some of the revenue ramps of these companies are just so steep that they feel much more like real. They feel more real as businesses than what was going in the dot boom when there would be companies that would IPO with no revenue and just massive costs.

But at the same time, if the revenue doesn't stick around, we're going to have a lot of dead kind of corporate corpses that look a lot like flame outs. I don't know. Maybe another way to look at that though is remember what's the denominator you're dealing with.

So if you if you had an internet company in 1996, your denominator was like what like a 100 million computers in the world. Mhm. You know, you're looking at in an era when when 30% of the US had a home computer. Yeah. And and so and no mobile. So you had to like be at home or be at work to shop. Yeah.

And so so a big reason that there was no revenue was like there were no end points. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean it's so much easier to get to 10 billion in revenue of your OpenAI with on the back of Stripe on the back of everyone having an iPhone, on the back of the app store, on the back of everyone having an internet connection, everyone having a laptop.

And so the install base is just so so much bigger that you can actually build a durable business. They're still trading at a high multiple, but it seems pretty it seems pretty durable. Well, it's it might be durable, but at the very least, the near-term revenue is an entirely a product of the addressable trial market.

Totally like the number the whole thing with with every generation of technology is the gating factor has always been distribution. And and so like when the PC was new, you know, you're talking about shipping like, you know, a hundred pounds worth of stuff all around for $3,000.

Y like, you know, you had to set up a store where people wore our coats and ties and it was like buying a car and all this other stuff. And you know, to today where like the friction to use GPT is it's like what? Three clicks on an iPhone. Mhm. And you're paying them $200 a month. Yeah. Like I mean, it's so fast.

It blows my mind. Yeah. And it's funny because it maths out like like $200 a month, $2,400 a year. Like you're right in $3,000 PC Dell TV territory like immediately, but it's with three clicks instead of a visit to the store and a talk with somebody in a suit. Right. That's honestly no cost of sale. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Dell's revenue ramp if you remember they went from five to seven to 12 to 18 to 25 and just like just absolutely just compounding compounded but at the same time the that's slower than cursor right totally that's slower than open AI best denominator yeah yeah the denominator that makes sense almost always it's the denominator that you you can use to unconfuse things or to level set yourself yeah I I'm I'm personally like very bullish on that idea of like the denominator being much bigger and the addressable market and that just the ability to ramp with something useful.

Uh I've been I've been talking to Jordy about this after WWDC. It seemed like Apple was shifting to a more developer friendly mindset with uh you know free ondevice inference.

They planned this for a long time but it felt like maybe the moment is here where we'll start to see companies that are building AI apps that that have zero variable cost only fixed cost to develop them and then can ramp very quickly. What were your uh what were your WWC reactions overall?

How did you process that that that event? Um well, of course, you know, I I always have massive empathy for all the people that have to participate in like a giant developer conference because like nothing can be more stressful.

I I feel cheated because they get to do it all on video and not crash in front of an audience, which turns out to be like quite the right of passage. But for me, it was really three things. Uh, one of them was obviously liquid glass, which you know, love the shout out to Vista Arrow in there. Take your victory lap.

I love it. There we go. Yeah, actually super. But I I just don't I think like until you've literally foisted a new design on the world of existing customers, you don't get to have a an opinion. Like it it it's just like a good take, you know?

I I h it there is literally because it is so easy to just poke holes and everything. Now the thing is is that what Apple's doing now they haven't quite done as much in the past which is first there's just way more people paying attention. Yeah.

And second, like it they are releasing things that aren't nearly as baked relative to say eight years ago or iOS 7 or whatever because there's just you don't have that ability to do that anymore.

And so, but the flip side is like I they are going to be so good at fixing any of the things that people got hysterical about in the first 12 hours. And you actually saw the arc go from to like the I see all the positives. Well, yeah. People were so clearly just rooting for it to fail immediately.

And it's like, how do you have so little faith when you use an iPhone, you use a MacBook, you use Apple software all day long, every single day of the year, and you're going to immediately call them out as idiots because like you found one example where the contrast was the contrast wasn't great.

And and it's also just like like it's one thing to criticize uh Apple intelligence which is a new entirely it's a it's an entirely new discipline for Apple like they they need to learn they need to hire there's so much more experimentation that needs to be done there.

It's a challenge versus UI which is like what they have been bestin-class at forever and there's no one else that's really been challenged. They've always been great at design. So I would I would it's much harder. be curious to get your thoughts on Apple's positioning in the AI talent wars.

We were joking on the show yesterday that if you're a, you know, top tier one AI researcher, you can get a signing bonus that is greater than Tim Cook's annual salary, total comp last year. Tim Cook made 774. 6 million I think last year as the CEO of a you know $3 trillion company.

And then we've been hearing about if you're justund if you're if you're a top, you know, 100 AI researcher, you can just go get that, you know, on day one at Meta.

And so it feels like Apple is not set up to have these, you know, immense comp packages and in many ways that positions them in a way that they will potentially struggle to actually recruit, you know, top talent uh or or retain them in this kind of current meta.

This is you can play either side of this or three sides depending on how you want to count it. This it's a very very tough time when this sort of starts to happen.

I mean we we went through this at Microsoft when with browsers, you know, and the hiring the right people who did who did languages or were interpreters or who were just known in the space who were networking and and so look, one side of it is super easy.

Like if you're the founder of a big giant company and have infinite money, you have the authority to go hire these people for whatever you personally think is the right number and the authority to deal with the the implications of that.

If you're not the founder, but you have great authority, which I think Tim does, you could do the same thing, but you do tend to start to think about the ripple effect of what you're going to do a little bit more. you know, you think, okay, well, now do I have to do special comp for other people?

Do I have to deal with a bunch of other people who are going to go shop themselves around? But one thing to keep in mind is there is also a level of adverse selection that happens at times like this.

Like the first people to leave from the outside might look like rock stars, but it might not have been working so great on the inside. Like I saw lots of people leave Microsoft for whom on the outside was a little bit of gossip and whisper. Oh, what a disaster.

But on the inside you're like h they were already we you know and then also you see big losses you know and and this happened a great deal in the very early days of of computing with people who were doing the programming languages that was like a huge battle in particular between a company that's no longer around um in the Bay Area called Borland International.

Oh yeah. And Microsoft and we sued each other over people leaving. It was those are my competitors and I worked on development tools. It was very very nasty. Now, you know, that was back in the day. That was six figure comp, not you put them in the dirt. You put them in the dirt.

It'd be so funny to play back during the peak of the dot bubble. Microsoft was worth 620 billion. Imagine the different fork in the road of history if they had gone to Mark Andre and said, "We want to we want to pick up Netscape.

We're bringing you in and we're making you, you know, a 20 billion offer or something like that. " Do you I mean, I'm not there's nothing news like but yeah, lots of those discussions all happen. Yeah. again antitrust, but they hadn't invented the 49% acquisition. This is this is revolutionary technology.

This this whole thing is that this is just super interesting. I I something to add. I I know you guys love talking about M&A. So, here's a thing to really think about with the regulators and M&A.

If I could toss this in, please, which is you you never you can't lose sight of one particular aspect of competition in the world of regulation, and that's competition between regulators. Oh, interesting. Who's going to outregulate who?

Yeah, that so when we were being regulated, the US was clearly in charge of global regulation.

And so we sort of define the treaty terms like if the US chooses to regulate first, we're going to have a discussion between FTC and DOJ and then we'll decide and then we'll come to you and we'll explain to you how you will honor whatever our system arrives at. Mhm.

And it turns out the Europeans really wanted, you know, like a gold medal in regulation. And so they started to to sort of assert, well, we're just going to do more of it. And if we're so good at it, we should do it more 10x. We're going to force your companies to follow our rules.

And then they're going to have to choose whether or not to do it different in our market or lose and lose efficiency or do it the same in our market. And then the same thing is going to start to happen much more in Asia.

I mean it happens quite a bit in China already as Tim Cook is dealing with constantly but the rest of Asia is going to do this too. We dealt with it in Japan quite a bit and and then you know but the regulators are talking to each other all the time.

In fact the regulators probably talk to each other more than they talk to their victims. Sorry their their constituents and their dance partners. Yeah. Right. And so you don't lose sight.

I think it's just really important to understand that because if if one of them starts to to do something like if if if the US decides not to challenge say an M&A the EU is going to just jump on it out of you know competition and spite or whatever and now of course you have UK and EU you know and and they're important markets and so a lot of it's not it's almost like collusion it's what it felt like I'm not saying it is it's what it felt like between the mass the major regulators of the world over who is going to take charge.

But that a variable in there is is the ego of the regulators and and in Europe they don't really have constituents. They talk all about how they're elected and appointed and they list they they operate you know very regally. In the US it's much more difficult.

You see how the president can directly influence it, how they can appoint people and and there are activists and all that. So you trust me like there's so much that goes on there that is a big factor in how things go.

Uh how how are you thinking I mean on the the the competing regulators it feels like the next fight should be potentially over the routing of the Siri button on the iPhone.

Uh it feels like if if consumers were able to uh press and hold that button and begin dictating to chat GPT uh they would be pretty happy compared to the roll out of Apple intelligence just thinking about like consumer preferences. Um, do how do you think about that battle playing out?

Because that's a little bit in the weeds in and from a from a consumer tech perspective, but if I'm predicting out what the next battleground will be, the invocation of the AI assistance seems top of mind. Uh, is that the right frame? How how should we think about this playing out?

I'm going to I have to figure out how to be short and cool in this that that's a triggering topic. Here's why it's triggering. Yeah. So when we were going through our antitrust stuff on Windows, Yeah. you know, the original original Windows antitrust case was about the browser. Yeah.

And then it turned into the browser and instant messaging and the music player. Yeah. And the music player was about not really about playing music, but about the codecs to plays m play music.

I mean, it's just really quickly, can you can you give us a little bit more backstory on like the actual definition of default browser because um you could have three icons.

There's some apps that will if you click a link it'll open a default browser, but I feel like in many ways like the my default browser choice doesn't even affect me that much because I'm clicking the button to open Chrome on my MacBook and then I leave Chrome open for months at a time and it it never even pops up.

Even if I had a different even if I had Safari selected as like the default, I would still be in Chrome all day every day for months at a time. And so was that the nature of the default or was it just about what was installed? Right. Right. Fantastic point.

So that like you're basically playing the role I played and arguing this whole thing is moronic. Put me in coach. So there is no argument. You lose the case. You deal with what it is. Okay. On on the PC originally the default there there were two things about it.

One is you would just get like a mail message in whatever your mail program was and click on it and then something had to happen. Yeah. And the question is what would happen? Today, of course, you're already in your favorite mail client, which is Gmail in the browser, which is just going to open another tab. Yep.

Exactly. So, so back in the day, there was this leap you had to do. Yeah. Plus, that was one thing. The other thing was it was like freaking wild, wild west of hacking every place in Windows to get the other browsers to pop up. Sure. So, the iPhone stopped all that nonsense. Yeah.

But the European Union just came back one day and they just decided, well, if you could do that for the browser, you should do it for everything, everything. And it shouldn't it should have like a a choose your default. Yeah. No one loves pop-ups more than the Europeans.

They love they wanted like literally so so the reason that we ended up with that stupid ballot screen Yeah. was because we agreed that you should get a choice for the browser that's pushed in your face. Yeah. so that we didn't have to make a choice for like every single file type in the operating system all the time.

Yeah. Yeah. And it just it's an awful awful thing. And it turns out in the real world where there are humans and not regulators, people just they just don't care. Now immediately if this were some ongoing discord like I get a zillion tech enthusiast people. I care I want to do this and I want to hit this fall for that.

Not only that, but like if I'm in a tab and I open this, I want this browser and I want that. And no humans really want to do that. Yeah. But you can't convince the regulators that choice is bad. Like you see that's you're arguing that choice is bad. Yeah.

So, Windows ended up with this incredibly long list of like file types that you could pick and choose and the iPhone sort of resisted that. And I really am complet I wrote a giant post about how I'm on the side of Apple in this because when you buy a product, you buy into the product. Yeah. Exactly.

And you you you're buying the whole thing and and the the counterargument is yes, but that whole thing is a distribution channel. And so therefore, you can't it's like buying a highway and saying what cars can drive on it. Mhm.

But it isn't like buying a highway because there's another highway right next to it that you can buy called Android. Yeah. And so the market's already solved this problem.

And what the what Europe is doing is actually reducing choice because they're taking away the choice called really really smart people who I pay money for that have my best interests at heart are are doing it this way and I I actually want to buy that.

And when you're trying to do computing for 8 billion people, that's a valuable choice to have in the market. Somebody who respects privacy, somebody who's going to protect my credit card, somebody who's going to protect my data and and do things that might make it more difficult for people to exploit those. Yeah.

Like I I have all Yeah. The payments the payments issue in in the app store will be interesting if if apps can just everybody has their own payments and login and all this stuff.

I believe that consumers will eventually get extremely frustrated because they'll realize I have $500 of random subscriptions every month and to find and cancel all those things where Apple in the app store right now it's really nice.

You can see who what am I paying for and you can you know click in, you know, very quickly unsubscribe from everything and that is good for the user potentially better than getting a small discount for circumnavigating the app store, right?

I mean, like I'm doing the Brian Johnson and you know, like I've got all the bands, all the rings and you know, they all get access to my Apple Health data and that's freaking me out. Okay. Because like they can just read it. It's it's sort of like what happens with all the social apps that get your contacts.

Like all they get they get your contacts and then they just have them and there's no taking them back. Mhm. you know, so you sort of have to run your life if you care about that with like the secret contact list that doesn't integrate with anything. And and I hate that you have to do that. Yeah.

And and so I I think that that we're and so here's the funny part about like this defaults and and the Siri button and all that is that yeah, of course you want choice and I want to have the hardware button. First, I don't want the hardware button, but that's a different problem.

And but the the thing is is that that the the European Union is is at the one hand they're going to push for choice choice and openness, but they're also the freaking GDPR data protection popup people. Interesting. So that you can't reconcile and the security people. Yeah.

So if you ever read if you read the digital markets act which is the big one that's that making the stores required all that it's got all the stuff that just waves their hands at it literally says and of course security should not be compromised. Excuse me. Like what does that really mean? Security can't be compromised.

Like that's kind of a big deal. Yeah. And so that's the loophole through the whole thing that's like well that means you you really have to approve the third party stores and you have to do this stuff but that's not what they wanted you to do.

And and so they've set themselves up because they've just regulated at opposite ends of the spectrum openness of and choice and security privacy like it's unreconcilable and which is literally iOS Android like you pick. Can you tell me the story of the iPhone launch and how you processed that at the time? Oh, sure.

So I was there and and I had flown back from from uh like in the room I think and um I I left and so a bunch of things like first you know you remember he did the whole thing where he just railed on on Windows smartphones at the time you know where he does the market share based on each OEM and and I was using I was actually using a Trio at the time which was the Palm device.

I I wouldn't use the our phones, but I was locked into trio because and I had been a BlackBerry person because Outlook tested Blackberries very early on like before they were released. I was completely one of these crackberry people.

I actually read the entire DOJ finding on a Blackberry flying on a plane because the pedra signal travels through the clouds. No way. You could actually download it like 2K at a time. Um I my view of it was a lot of the simplicity was going to be difficult.

I actually was I loved that they didn't support Flash and that if and that a year later they were like, "Yeah, we're not doing Flash ever, so no way. " Because I I thought Flash was a virus. And and I but I I I definitely was on the touch skeptical side.

Um but, you know, I was online in June and to pick my you know, 4 GB black one up at the AT&T store in Seattle. waited on the giant line, got yelled at, traitor, all that stuff, you know. Um, you know, and you I used it in 10 minutes in I was like, whoa. And it didn't have push. It didn't have copy and paste.

I knew all the and you know, the touch keyboard was brilliant, but not quite. And of course, having been on on the office team when the when word autocorrect was invented, I was I was like, "Wow, I know how this is going to go. " Like, every error is going to be like a meme and the whole, you know, the whole deal.

But and it was obvious obvious that there was going to be an app. There was way to do apps. It was the app store a year later that really changed things for me personally because it was the there were stores. Palm Pilot had a store. There was a website called Handango Window.

But you needed like a rocket science degree and a serial cable and all this stuff to get apps onto these phones. and their phone, their app store was unbelievable from the technology, from the APIs and the ability to write them and the go to market.

You know, people mock and rail on 30% freaking brilliant because the amount of money it took to get an app recognized in the marketplace was way more than 30%. So, I I I was like over the top like this is going to screw us up big time by by 08. It's a great story. Wow. Great lore. You're a big tech defender. So are we.

Yes. Big tech gets a lot of hate, but you know, I mean, there's so much to talk about. It's fantastic. Thank you so much for joining. This is a really Oh, thank you guys. I love what you guys are doing. So, really thankful to have a chance to chat with you. Come on again soon. Yeah, we'd love to. Oh, I would love to.

Thanks so much. Great. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Bye. Uh, really quickly, let's tell you about Bezel. Your bezel concier is available now to source any watching. Seriously, any watch. Go to getbessel. com. And Quaid had a Bloomberg hit.

Quaid was on Bloomberg TV this morning talking about the watch market. That's amazing. I love it. Alternative. These are alternative assets, right?