The Wisdom Wall

“for Google, Android is a tactic, and cloud is a strategy, whereas for Apple, the device is a strategy, and the cloud is a tactic. The cloud is a feature of the core strategy, whereas for Google, the device is a feature of the core strategy.”

“chip companies didn't capture the value. Um, ISPs didn't capture the value. Mobile network operators didn't capture the value. Windows and iOS did, but they were doing something else.”

“the models are kind of diff commodities, and the chatbot isn't the right UI or the right product, and the companies aren't going to be able to build all of that stuff themselves, so therefore they're low-level infrastructure.”

“these things become competitive necessities, and everybody has to buy it and use it. Um, but the cost saving or the productivity gain that you get from it just kind of gets competed away, so you don't get to charge more for it.”

“And what seems to have happened is that the locks guys won. Because there's not really a network effect. There's not actually very much software to the lock by itself. Um, it just has to lock and unlock based on something you do on your smartphone, and they can buy that from a chip manufacturer or a third party and…”

“There's a sort of a core part of the PC market that actually needs to be on a PC, because you're running Excel, or you're running Photoshop, or AutoCAD. And the other 90% of it actually doesn't need to be on a PC. It can be on a Chromebook, or it can be on something that has a browser, or it can be on a smartphone or a…”

“The classic thing that drives me crazy, people talking about Apple, thinking that the app store is like a primary revenue driver for Apple, when the whole purpose of the app store is to drive sales of a 700 dollar iPhone every two years at a 50% gross margin.”

“Sort of the all-knowing, wants to be the all-knowing oracle, and you can ask it something, and it will just know the answer, or it'll even suggest it before you, you do it. Whereas Apple, it's more like, kind of the, I don't know, it's like the servant that follows you around and hands you things as you need them…”

“And I think the kind of the platformization that we saw earlier is interesting as an attempt to solve some of the problems that Google is solving with its kind of pervasive, all-knowing AI, but getting third-party developers to solve those problems instead.”

“And I think this is kind of the point that there's, you could almost say, like, the iPad Pro is like, this is the seven, now the seven oh seven. It's the one at which you point, okay, well, the Lockheed Constellation is a beautiful aircraft.”

“So the idea that this is about identity is kind of a Western assumption, that actually those people in Burma are using Facebook like Twitter, with no connection to their identity at all.”

“The challenge, the challenge is that you, you have that nice, easy, frictionless experience and you're on Facebook and then you wake up one morning and your traffic's down by three quarters.”

“Google can tell you what you want when you already know you want it. It might get you like a magazine article that says here are 10 things that you want, but it will not, you can't go to Google and say, like, where should I go on holiday? What handbag should I buy? What lamp should I buy? It doesn't, it's not…”

“The things tend to look best, and they tend to look most refined, and they tend to have all the really coolest stuff just before they're about to be completely obsolete.”

“if you want to get read, you've got to be in some kind of a platform that's giving your audience, and increasingly that means Facebook, or it means Medium, or it means LinkedIn, or it means some other intermediate platform that kind of comes with an implicit ad blocker, a revenue model, a filter, some other set of…”

“Whether it's good or not, it's the kind of thing that's very, that's much more difficult for an Android OEM to do because Apple controls the operating system and all the apps as well. Whereas whenever Samsung tries to do something like that, it only works with the Samsung apps because developers say, well, why would I…”

“the current structure of the TV industry works really well for the TV industry, and nobody has a big incentive to change it.”

“It's a lot easier for software companies, software people to learn something else than people from another industry to learn software.”

“And it used to be that they go public early on the curve, and there's way more growth to come, and now they're going public when they're almost at the end of the curve, and so if you buy it in the IPA, well, you've kind of got all it's ever going to be.”

“When you put money into a private company, on the other hand, particularly at these late, with these late stage deals, you have a bunch of what, um, tends euphemistically to be called a structure. Around it, which means you have things like liquidity preferences, and so, and liquidation preferences, and so on. Um, and…”

“And then you layer any discovery mechanism that you lay onto that works until you try and encompass the whole of the web, and then it just collapses under its own weight.”

“incidentally, photos to some extent have replaced music as a lock-in.”

“Once we went to streaming services, it became really, really easy to switch from device to device, and so content really isn't a strategic lever anymore. It may be, we'll see what Apple does with music next week, but, you know, for the sake of argument, right now, content doesn't matter to Apple or Google. It's just a…”

“you aren't ever going to be a ten billion or twenty billion dollar company, because they're not your users, they're all Facebook users.”

“So what effectively what Facebook's trying to do is make Snapchat compete with the whole app store. Because Snapchat is only going to have the content that Snapchat dreams up, whereas Facebook Messenger will have the content that anybody can dream up and decide to plug into it.”

“In a funny sort of sense, it's like you could be too far up the stack to do this, just as you could be too far down the stack to do this. So just as it doesn't really make sense for a mobile operator or a handset maker to try and build a social network, it doesn't necessarily make sense for a social network to try and…”

“one of the key reasons to buy something on Amazon particularly on mobile as it's already set up with your account, so you don't need to enter a credit card in. Well, if you've got Apple Pay, then you don't need that, that, all of that aggregation goes away.”

“When you combine all of those together, it's not that there's two or three times more devices. It's that you've got five or 10 X more opportunity.”

“if you were to say to me, I'm going to disrupt the mobile business, I would say to you, with what spectrum? And if you have no answer to that, then I'm not interested. And the same, in the same sense, if you say to me, I'm going to disrupt the TV business, then I will say, well, with what content? Who's going to make…”

“so what Apple is doing, what Google is doing is they say, well, the device is dumb gloss, and all the cool stuff's happening in the cloud. And what Apple is doing is saying, no, no, no, no, the cloud is just dumb storage.”

“there's always this sort of misperception that you can turn up with technology and disrupt it, but actually the, the point of Netflix and the reason why the existing model is so strong is it's actually, no, it's, it's the content. That's, that's the lock on all of this stuff, and having the business model to make the…”

“You can't turn up with a better rocket. You just have to, actually, all you have to do is turn up with an enormous tank full of kerosene. You have to turn up with an awful lot of money.”

“The only people who can disrupt Bloomberg are people who've never seen it and have no idea what you use it for.”

“the platform war ended and Google and Apple both won, because Google and Apple both got what they wanted, but they wanted different things.”

“The interesting thing about groceries is that it breaks the Amazon model. In fact, it breaks the whole e-commerce model, because the whole point of Amazon is that everything is a commodity.”

“the winners always look invulnerable until they don't. So, IBM looked invulnerable, then Microsoft, Intel, Nokia did, then the internet giants of the, um, the last bubble, now Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon look invulnerable, but all the previous ones fell, and it was not predictable at the time how or why they would…”

“pretty much every enterprise software company is a relational database, but nobody looks at CRM or Salesforce or SuccessFactors and says, well, that won't work because Oracle has all the database.”

“What is it that crypto automates? Well, it automates another kind of technology. It automates, well, money, but it automates trust.”

“Today, you can just go to Shenzhen and say, we'll have a number three and number 15, please, and then it gets put together for you. And so the question is more about the vision and the route to market than the, kind of, the underlying, um, core technology.”

“the way that all of this is sort of fundamentally different from previous platform shifts, is that with, you know, three G or the iPhone or the web or whatever it was, You didn't know what was going to happen next, but you knew the physical limits. Like, you know, 19, 95, you knew that telcos weren't going to give…”

“either it's already here and it's just more software or it's five years away and will always be five years away.”

“They're unbundling chat GPT, just as the enterprise software company of 10 years ago was unbundling Oracle or Google or Excel.”

“You look at these titles, most of those titles don't have customer ownership and will never get it.”

“all of these services are they all bind you into the phone. And so there is a, you know, just as everything Amazon adds to Prime keeps you from cancelling your Prime account, and that drives every, drives all of your purchases through Amazon. All of these things are sort of ways of making Your next phone purchase be…”

“They're a logistics business as much as they are a technology business. There's lots of cool technology inside Dell as well, but basically they're an assembly business, and which is also what Detroit was, and what Apple isn't.”

“Is, particularly when you look at kind of a super big company that's got lots of stuff going on, is there are some things that are actually, this is the board level fundamental strategy of what they think is crucial to the existence of the company in the next five years. And then there's stuff that are kind of…”

“The second thing is that anyone who isn't Apple or Google has major platform envy, and they want to find a way of going around that, not being, worrying about Apple or Google cutting them off at the platform level on the smartphone.”

“Basic fallacy in sort of non-technical people looking at AI in any sense is you see the machine do something, and you think, well, for a human being to be able to do that, they would have to be able to do all these other things. Therefore, the machine must have that capability. And you forget, actually, you're looking…”

“The ideal for a dishwasher, where you don't have to worry about, like, different fabrics, is absolutely, you should just shut the thing and press go, and that should be it, and there shouldn't be any settings at all, and the rest of it should be the chips problem, but there should be no UI.”

“Previously, you'd have the vision of the thing you wanted, and there'd be like a 10 year march to get the technology to build it. Now all the technology is there for almost anything you can think of. And people are trying to work out, well, what is the thing you would create?”

“generally the stuff that, uh, you know, any of the stuff that's a strategy for one company is tactics for other companies. So, you know, Apple's strategy is to have an operating system, and for Apple, Google, that's just a tactic. Google's strategy is to do search. For Apple, that's just a tactic, and so on.”

“And then everything else sits on top of that and is radically decentralized. So everything is a team. There's a team of, like, three people. So shoes in Germany are three people, and makeup in France is four people. And music players, well, pick a category. It's a small number of people, and it's completely atomized,…”

“It's something where it's easier for Apple to create a really great customer experience, because Apple knows what lens and what GPU and what image processing chip is in the phone. Whereas when you are at Android or at Samsung, you've got that kind of disconnected experience where it's not all linked together.”

“Apple thinks about the cloud as dumb storage and Google thinks about the phone as done of dumb glass.”

“we had 20 years of the web browser mouse keyboard, and that was like the monolith for how the internet worked. And now we've broken that apart, and we've got all these different shards all kind of floating around and landing in different places and being juggled and changed and moved around. And Apple and Google every…”

“the smartphone itself is kind of, is a platform for the internet in a way that Windows was not. You targeted the browser, you didn't target Windows, but on the smartphone, you target the smartphone operating system, and it's not neutral. Apple and Google change stuff.”

“It's like, problem, the app store has two million things in it. Solution, create an app store inside Messenger. Problem, the Messenger app store has two million things inside it. Like, if you haven't actually done something, you have to do some other thing. All, all you'done is just move the problem.”

“In a funny kind of way, you could almost, it's kind of an imperfect analogy, but you can also Almost argue that like the user experience and the injection molded plastic and so on has become software. That is to say in a kind of, there's a sort of analogy in here that you've got the sort of the underlying physical…”

“an awful lot of this stuff is, um, it's actually smartphone components. I mean, it's obviously like a thermostat or a drone or all of those kinds of things are basically just smartphones with wings.”

“the way that I think about maps are sort of, is that maps are kind of, um, page rank for the real world.”

“In 2000, if that failed, that was 50 to a hundred people, and 20, 30, forty million dollars gone. Today, exactly the same product. Is a hundred grand, 500 grand, a million dollars, three, four, five people who are out trying to get a good job at Google and Facebook.”

“the opportunity that would have topped out at a half billion dollar company 15 years ago is now topping out at a fifty billion dollar company. You know, the scale of the business that it's possible to raise is so much bigger, and therefore the hyper growth period is much, much, much bigger. The period at which you are…”

“that's how you solve the binary problem of the app is installed or it's not installed, because you've got this intermediate layer where content can show up that doesn't have to be the app.”

“the smartphone is a platform, an internet services platform in a way that the PC was not.”

“the fundamental way to understand Google is as a vast machine learning engine and everything that they do is about reach. And they don't really care what the reach is as long as they've got more and more of it.”

“VR is the peace dividend of the smartphone wars. Not that it's peace, but, you know, it's the dividend of the smartphone wars is all these components.”

“I think three D video is really at the kind of pre Eisenstein stage. You know, somebody has actually got to work out, Hey, you can cut, um, And you can move the camera and then start filming again.”

“There's a narrative in the industry that says we need a common standard for messaging apps, which, to me, I think, completely misunderstands the motivation, the motivation of anybody who's building a messaging app. That's the last thing they want.”

“And so Apple retail really was a self-funding marketing operation.”

“And so another way of saying this is kind of, you know, the question of what Android is kind of matters to the future of mobile. The question of what iOS is doesn't matter in quite the same way.”

“And the interesting thing that is starting to happen with computing and with software now is it's pushing out of the technology industry. And so when you have, you know, when you have mobile everywhere, when you have payments being pulled in, when you look at companies like Airbnb or Uber or Lyft, um, where you're…”

“you can describe Apple as a sort of club where the price of membership is buying a new box every two years, and the benefits of being a member of the club keep expanding in terms of all these sort of incremental services around the edges.”

“It's not that they lose money on anything they do. It's just that all the profits they take, they put into new things. So they spend business profits from yesterday's business on tomorrow's business.”

“to look at the profitability of Amazon, it's a bit like looking at our firm. And saying, okay, well let's add up the P and L of all of the companies that we've invested in. And is it positive or negative? And I don't think that would tell you anything meaningful about how well our portfolio was doing at any given time.…”

“the difference is at some point we have to go back to our LPs and say, well, we're kind of done with that bunch of companies and here's your three or four X return. Right. Whereas Bezos doesn't have to go back to his LPs. People are just willing to let him keep putting, you know, every time, every time he sells a…”

“So they throw that into your Prime subscription, they throw as many things as they possibly can that have no marginal cost other than bandwidth, which is not really the issue, into their, into your Prime subscription. As a way of enticing you into taking out a Prime subscription and keeping it in the first place. And…”

“And if you then turn around and say, well, gee, look, you know, they're spending this much on video content, and they can't possibly be making a profit on that. Well, yeah, they're making a profit by selling you headphones. That's how it works.”

“There's kind of a trade-off between application discovery and feature discovery. That if you've got a simple app, if you've got an application with all of your stuff in it, it's probably easier for you to get people to install that app. But then they're never going to find all of your features. Whereas if you break…”

“what the smartphone did was unbundle the internet from the web and amongst many other things.”

“If you want to make a cool video chat app, you've got a really serious problem. Making it work consistently across Android devices. It will take you twice as long or three times as long as it did to code it on iOS.”

“for Google, all hardware is just kind of dumb glass that links back to their cloud. Whereas for Apple, the cloud is kind of dumb storage that supports their platform.”

“In the US, that's not really the point at all. You know, it's just Amazon, Amazon video, Netflix video, whatever, get them on the device and get them to buy groceries from us, get them to buy diapers from us, get them to buy headphones from us, and the TV is the loss leader.”

“In the time of the first internet bubble, you know, a prototypical startup, an archetypal startup, you would have a hundred people, and you'd have raised ten million dollars, and you'd have a million users. And now, you'll have raised one million dollars, and you'll have 10 people, and you'll have a hundred million…”

“So retail rent is money that you spend to reach a customer. It's money you spend instead of marketing or instead of advertising.”

“There's U.S. e-commerce, which is four, five hundred billion dollars, and then there's U.S. retail, but then there's global retail, and then there's global consumer spending. So we go from thinking about a couple of hundred billion dollars to 40, 50 trillion dollars of potential opportunity that really means we've only…”

“when you change how you buy things, you change what people buy.”

“Is that finding patterns becomes a generalizable solution. So is there a cat in this picture becomes the same kind of question as which customers are going to churn, or is that car going to let me merge, or is there something odd happening on our network, or is this customer, um, behaving fraudulently.”

“Now, if mixed reality is at a sort of a 2006 stage, then crypto or cryptocurrencies feel more like a 2000, sorry, a 1994 stage, um, which is sort of where HTML, HTML was sent.”

“the internet lets you buy, but it doesn't really let you shop.”

“And in fact, if you want to find a manufactured product that has the same kind of scale as mobile phones, you really need to look at things like shoes or toothbrushes. There's no other, um, kind of sophisticated manufactured product, certainly no other electronic product that has anything like that kind of scale.”

“It powers wearables and Internet of Things and connected cars and drones and everything else, because fundamentally all of those things are basically smartphones just put together in a different way, but put together by the same people with the same components.”

“On the one hand, the size of the addressable market is increased by an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude. On the other hand, the cost of going to market, the cost of building those businesses, or at least the cost of getting to the first million or two users, has collapsed by several orders of magnitude.”

“And this is something that you see quite often as digital impinges upon old-fashioned industries, that it's first of all digital makes the old product better, and then all of a sudden it creates a new product that kills the old product entirely.”

“And in the same sense, Airbnb and Uber and Lyft are fundamentally enabled by smartphones. They may, they would not be possible without smartphones. They certainly wouldn't be possible without the internet, but they're not in The technology business. They're not selling smartphones. They're not selling a technology…”

“Another way of thinking about this, I think, is that when technology is fully adopted, it tends to disappear.”

“So the archetypal startup in 2000 might have had a hundred staff and a million users. Today it might have 10 staff and ten million users”

“When technology is fully adopted, it tends to disappear.”

“And there's a lot of places where corporations are using it to automate some like specific back office process where you're not asking the user to work out what they do with the new tool. Instead, you're saying, okay, here's a problem that we can solve.”

“One of the characteristics of tech is that the moment that you understand something and you know how it works and what's going to happen, Is the moment you should move on to something else, you should always be looking for the quiet places where we don't know what the answers are.”

“whenever you get a new technology, you start by doing the old thing, but more. More spreadsheets. More PowerPoints. More email. Better email. But the important stuff is not doing the old thing, but more. It's doing something new that you couldn't have done with the old thing.”

“the term AI is a little bit like the term technology or automation. It see, it only kind of applies when something's new. When something's been around for a while, it's not AI, AI anymore.”

“But we don't know the physical limits of this technology, because we don't really have a good theoretical understanding of why it works so well. Nor, indeed, do we have a good theoretical understanding of what human intelligence is. And so we don't know how much better it can get.”

“the new thing is generally not very good or terrible at the stuff that was important to the old thing, but it does something else.”

“you can start at one end and walk out at the other end with a complete smart speaker.”

“You're actually not seeing the consumer bit. You're mostly, mostly what you're seeing is everything that sits behind the point of the spear.”

“The more you start adding scripts, and you're saying, if this, then that, and also this other thing, and do this thing if somebody else happens, the more you've just lost 98% of the Earth's population.”

“Apple did not win PCs. So you can all talk about whether Apple disrupted IBM, but Apple didn't actually get the benefit from that. Not in, and in fact, PC companies didn't really get the benefit from that. PC companies became low margin commodity companies, and the people who got the benefit were Microsoft and Intel.”

“Well, so the way I kind of think about this is we're now kind of on the upper slopes of the S-curve for smartphones. There was a period when, like, the first smartphones were amazing, and then there's a period of very, very rapid improvement, the screens get better, the devices get amazing. Every year or every other…”

“it's no longer actually the camera module. It's everything. It's, it's the GPU and the CPU and the machine learning software and everything else that's being, that's being done in.”

“I think Apple doesn't do minimum viable products. What they do is they create building blocks.”

“And that's one of the reasons you see so many of these different things, because they're all riding on the smartphone supply chain.”

“to me, a Chromebook is exactly what Larry Elson was trying to do 20 years ago. I mean, technically the architecture might be different. It's exactly the same thing. It's a web browser that runs client, that runs applications over the network.”

“Google is a company that's around handling vast amounts of data. And everything that Google then does is sort of an expression of that.”

“the introduction of, of new subscription pricing options last week, potentially changes the economics for a developer, because now if you're going to make a really interesting productivity app, instead of having to charge 50 dollars for it, or give it away for free, and those are basically your only options, or charge…”

“Well, there's some interaction patterns where that's going to work really well. Like if you want, if you placed an order online and you want to change the order or you want to see if it's available and you want to ask like an actual question, there's an actual question you want to ask. Right. What do you have available…”

“Facebook, those are push channels, whereas the web is a pull channel.”

“you can look at Snapchat video is exactly the same as Instant Stories or Google AMP in a funny kind of way, even though one is that the bandwidth consumption is very different. But they're about somebody with a closed platform creating new content formats and making people, telling people if you want to be in this…”

“what Zuckerberg is extremely good at is surfing user behavior. And that if anything is unbalancing the surfboard, he pushes them off.”

“Yeah, but, you know, again, that's the kind of thing that would have taken, like, five years of hardcore technology development. And now, and now it's just, and now it's, you know, it's 50 dollars, and it's just smartphone chips inside, so you can make all kinds of, it's like a stocking stuffer of things, you know,…”

“the sort of the tech industry is kind of like a solar system and smartphone is the sun and everything else orbits around it.”

“One of them is it becomes ever more apparent that, um, on mobile it's a smartphone OS that's the platform, or the OS that's the platform, whereas on, like, the desktop internet you targeted a web browser.”

“unlike, say, a web browser on a, either a Windows or a Mac, where the web browser was the platform and the Windows or the Mac computer wasn't really where you were building internet services. Whereas on a smartphone, not only are you building in the web browser and inside apps, but you've got all this other stuff going…”

“You know, the pace of improvement is kind of slowing a bit, um, just because, you know, we're not making, the curve is kind of flattening out a bit, and it's a bit harder every year to tell why this one's better than the one from last year.”

“from looking at the kind of the metrics that I've seen, it looks like the iPad Mini is basically not working, because people are just buying, if you're, like, your, your, your people will buy the Six Plus.”

“Siri should work well here because it's such a kind of a narrow domain. Um, it doesn't have to deal with any question you could possibly ask. It's just got to, like, do voice recognition, like, I want to watch Guardians of the Galaxy. It's not hard.”

“And so, um, a little bit like what happened with PCs or smartphones 10 years and 20 years ago, um, you move to a point that it may be easier for people who are not in the car business to be in the car business, because the amount of stuff that you have to make, how that stuff gets made, how it gets, how the value chain…”

“what self-driving does is it transforms the layout of the city because things like parking and gas stations and, um, strip malls and the kind of the whole layout of the retail and commercial real estate starts to change because it's all built around parking as much as it's built around driving.”

“when a car becomes electric, it becomes software, and so your upgrades, you know, instead of paying an extra 5000 dollars for the sports gearbox, there is no gearbox.”

“It's as though someone took a shipping container of Lego and dumped it on the floor. You have all these bits, and we're just picking them up, working out what we can do with them. And so that's what's behind drones and wearables and connected TVs and connected cars and Internet of Things and all of these other things.”

“a computer should never ask a question. It should be able to work out the answer to.”

“Apple and Google are both kind of climbing the mountain. This is a thing I'm probably saying too often, but they're kind of climbing the mountain from the opposite side. So, on the one hand, you have all of these sensors, and you have beacons, which of course is what Estimate does, um, for working out exactly where an…”

“and when the friction goes, suddenly the UX changes, and things that were possible but a pain become completely ordinary, and you just do them all the time.”

“you are the most important thing in a corporation's life, but the corporation is not the most important thing in your life. And so they want you to have the app, but that doesn't mean you want the app.”

“I think there's a, there's an analogue when you look at what's happening with all the companies that are bidding for Nokia's here maps at the moment, that location in a sense is page rank for the real world.”

“there's an old computer science saying that a computer should never ask you a question it should be able to work out the answer to.”

“I think what Apple and Google are both doing is killing the list of 10 links. The 10 blue links.”

“The apps tend to loop, a lot of the apps remind me of, like, using a J-Me feature phone app in 2006, where, like, you'd squashed way too much stuff down onto that screen, and I think the stuff that really works is when it's just one thing that's almost, like, floated out of your pocket onto your wrist, so you don't…”

“I mean, I think, you know, to Stephen's point about platform, this is clearly, you know, and again, this is what speaks to the, again, a sort of thing I talk about a lot, which is kind of a difference between Apple and Google, which is for Google, there's a whole Google Now story in here around, you know, making useful…”

“Really hard for the Android ecosystem to deliver that, because nobody controls the whole stack.”

“does your door lock need to talk? Your door lock might talk to your alarm. It probably doesn't need to talk to your TV set.”

“And so all of the friction that made it difficult to use more than one social network on the desktop web goes away on mobile, or almost all of it.”

“what's actually happening much more broadly than Facebook Messenger is you're seeing notifications becoming another runtime on the device.”

“Again, Google Glass didn't do anything that you couldn't do with a smartphone but, you know, it kind of tried to do it in a different way. And so does the watch but without all the kind of the glass hole problems of the sort of imposing the screen between you and other people.”

“And then the watch again, it's another step in abstraction, and it's another step in the importance of delight over feeds and speeds.”

“And I think the progression of the technology industry, I mean, one of the ways I describe this is sort of technology outgrowing tech, is that it moves from selling technology products To selling things that create, fill other desires or, um, kind of other pleasures.”

“Um, and so the technology fades more and more into the background as an enabler for other experiences that are not about how fast you run this program. Rather, it is about you lift your wrist, and you tap on Uber, and you press yes, and then you drop your wrist. Rather than pulling the phone out and loading the app and…”

“when you look at things like Touch ID, when you look at Apple Pay, when you look at the things that they do with that integration, um, you know, it's very hard for a commodity OEM using somebody else's operating system and somebody else's components to compete with that proposition.”

“our grandparents could have told you how many electric motors they owned. You know, there was one in the car, and one in the refrigerator, and one in the vacuum cleaner. And now there's probably a dozen in your wing mirror, and you've got dozens of different electrical devices in your home. But you didn't go out and…”

“What are you going to put on the shelf in Home Depot that will sell itself as you walk past it from five feet away? Which is, that's kind of the challenge here, because that's the app store for the Internet of Things. It's certainly the app store for Connected Home.”

“generally the way it works is you have this shining vision of the wonderful thing, and the technology doesn't quite live up to it for years and years and years, whereas because all the stuff got made for smartphones first, all the components got made for smartphones first, you've got all the products, and they all…”

“every, every website attempts to expand until you can turn, get people to install an app. And then every app attempts to expand until you can send notifications. And then every notification expands until it becomes an app.”

“What they also, I think, of course, do is reinforce an app model as opposed to a web model, incidentally.”

“and at every change, the people who were profoundly comfortable and know absolutely how to do everything that they wanted to do with the previous generation look at this and say, well, this is a toy.”

“What first of all happens is that the new thing has to fit the existing way of doing it. And you say you torture it and kind of cripple it and you make it fit what you did before. And then over time, people come in and this is where the kind of the transformative change comes in. People build an entirely new business…”

“on the one hand, they look like a great partner, because they've not gone and built their own payment platform, they're not trying to compete with Visa or Master They're not trying to compete with Chase or Wells Fargo or Lloyd's or, you know, any of the retail banks. They're just going out and providing a better…”

“if I've got a payment card on my phone in software that can be provisioned in software immediately, that changes almost everything about the kind of the whole go to market of how you do financial services. And yes, I can put my Chase card or my Amex card into it, but that still is kind of a profound change into how you…”

“And the only way you report zero profit every year is on purpose.”

“the stock price and the compensation is the only risk to the strategy. Because if the stock price falls, then you have a problem keeping people.”

“Google picks up that vast long tail of, and it probably, in fact, on the, on the desktop internet, Google also picks up the 20 things that you use every day, because that's how you get to them. You just go into Google and you search for Facebook, or you go into Google, of course, you go into Google and you search for…”

“And it feels like where we're settling is it's a one per household or two per household device that gets bought every three or four or five years.”

“All of this sort of, this kind of Berlin wall that you have between the web and native code is fading away.”

“any company that isn't doing something you think they should do, it's either they've decided not to do it, or they haven't got the resource to do it, or it's on the roadmap, but it's not ready yet.”

“So it feels like Apple are kind of backing off a little bit from the absolutism of you, there should not be a user accessible file system at all.”

“On Android, people think you don't have to write your app twice, but actually you do, because you've got a fundamentally different screen size, so you need to sit and completely rethink what it should look like.”

“the tablet actually has to break into the PC replacement cycle. As much as it does to establish itself as a new category.”

“Music was an ecosystem battleground, and it's turned into a checkbox commodity feature that you throw into any new product as, as like something you have to have. You know, you're launching a phone, you're launching this, you're launching, you've got to have a phone in music service, but nobody really cares anymore,…”

“where you have a country that's actually big enough to sustain real scale businesses and has a fundamentally different language and culture, then it's quite hard for Amazon or Google to roll in.”

“the reason that we only had the web on the desktop internet was because it was impossibly difficult to do anything else, and you had to have this incredibly strong selling point to get somebody to actually go and download an application.”

“the smartphone itself becomes a social platform, whereas Facebook, you know, whereas, you know, on the desktop you had the browser, and then inside the browser you had Facebook, and then inside Facebook you had a social platform, whereas on a smartphone that's turned upside down, it's the device itself is a platform.”

“it's extremely hard to kill an ecosystem as long as the product's good and the customers keep buying it. You know, the way that BlackBerry killed its ecosystem, in effect, was by having a product that was no longer competitive.”

“for 20 years, the web, the internet and the web were the same thing. Um, and that's not the case on mobile. On the desktop, you had this box on the screen And everything happened in that box. Um, and there was a little bit of fighting 15 years ago about who got to make that box, and the Andreessen in Andreessen…”

“Apple is moving down the stack and Google's moving up the stack, both of them, of course, into their comfort zone, into a place where it's hard for the other to follow them.”

“And advertising of itself doesn't change very much over time. It tends to stay stable as a share of GDP.”

“In fact, I think calling it AI itself is unhelpful. Talking about artificial intelligence is sort of unhelpful. It's more useful, um, first of all, to say machine learning, which is the primary technology we're interested in, to talk about automation, and I think to talk about enabling layers.”

“Machine learning doesn't replace one person. It gives you the capability to do what you could only have done if you had a thousand of those people before.”

“just as my multitouch was in 2006, and that then became the interaction model for the whole world, mixed reality is sort of in that kind of stage. It's in the stage of prototypes that work, not in the stage of the shipping commercial product, but pretty close.”

“there tend to be three phases of technology deployment. There are companies that make technology, and that's the companies that you've seen today, that you'll see later on, the companies that we invest in, that everybody in this part of the world builds. Then there are companies that buy technology, and then there are…”

“software is kind of outgrowing the tech and technology is outgrowing the tech industry. Because technology is no longer selling technology as technology to people who are writing a check for it, while the people are using technology to build things that are not in the tech industry at all.”

“as we go to mobile, for the first time, the tech industry is selling to everybody on Earth.”

“So you've got this kind of Cambrian explosion of innovation on top of the smartphone now that that's become like a relatively solid platform where you kind of know what you're dealing with and all these things have become possible.”

“I tend to think about these kinds of events as splitting into three categories. So first of all, there's the stuff that is a nice incremental improvement if you're used to the platform, like something cool happens in the calendar, something cool happens in the way the browser works, or something. And that's all, that's…”

“the more CPU you've got, the more things you can put inside of sandbox instead of letting them run on bare metal.”

“The fundamental framework for thinking about machine learning, it's a tool to scale people, but to scale people in two very different ways. One of them is, I have a million pictures in the basement, and I now have a million interns that I can send down to look at all of those... But the other is, I have a million…”

“Um, not a smartphone yet, but that's converting quite quickly to smartphones. And of course the thing that drives that is cheap Android.”