The Ledger, every show

“What China was doing was taking all the hundreds of millions of poor people and letting them live temporarily in all the factories of all kinds, clothes and cars and computers, whatever, and live for part of the year, and then bring massive amounts of cash bac…”

“Apple taught them how to do this. Now, they didn't plan on doing that. But osmosis happens. And they got all these skills”

“The reason Surface exists is because the PC makers wouldn't build, like, an aluminum computer, basically, or an all-in-one, for that matter.”

“When we're making surface, you know, you have to use all this pressure-sensitive adhesive and keep all the things together to make it USB thickness, and like, nobody here knows how to do that.”

“And like, we met once with and so the car companies, if you just fast forward, they all are out of China now. These joint ventures, they could never get their money out. They lost all their IP, their manufacturer. It's just horrible to, like, Volkswagen, Ford,…”

“All of a sudden, drones are the most important thing, and like, all of a sudden, we were like, we don't even, we don't, not just, we don't make the drone, we don't make any of the parts for the drone. Yeah. And they're all made, the only person who makes them …”

“The reason that it's a thousand dollars, or 1500 dollars, or whatever, is because of the innovation in manufacturing. So all that needs to happen is like another step function change in manufacturing.”

“I think it's very, very easy to say China doesn't respect intellectual property, so they can't be part of the world stage, flat out. I mean, they've crushed the pharmaceutical industry that way. You know, what they've done with BYD and Tesla, Arguably pretty r…”

“There's no way this doesn't play out like the internet.”

“Well, at some point you're going to end up breaking the problem up to the seven billion endpoints of the world, which will have vastly more compute than you can ever squeeze into one giant nuclear power data center.”

“Well, even on the data, you know, their starting point is, you know, the Chinese internet per se, those, that has much more structure to it. It's a much better training set.”

“And the rest of the companies are still trying to figure out their revenue models, which I would argue was probably premature. And it starts to look a little to me like, hey, let's charge for a web server. And it's like the business of selling, like serving HT…”

“These LLMs are going to replace search. But it turns out that's actually going to be really, really hard because there's a lot of things that search does that, that the models are bad at it really bad.”

“And then you look at Apple and their strategy, which the execution hasn't been great, but the idea that all of these things will just surface as features popping up all over my phone and they're not going to cost anything. My data is not going to go anywhere. …”

“And it's, to me, this is all the equivalent of the browser getting JavaScript. Because once the browser got JavaScript, then all of a sudden you could do anything you needed without going to some standards body or building your own browser.”

“And so I think that that the TAM is going to be a hundred X. It's going to be every endpoint. The revenue is going to come from the apps side of it, and then there'll be a developer side of it. It'll just be a different pricing model for different sets of scen…”

“In any feature that you do, when someone says, I don't like it, but it's good for, like, less skilled people, Yeah. There's a warning in that.”

“Because I think that this move to services, people are just having trouble getting their heads wrapped around it, and it's a very natural progression for any company when it starts to reach a mature level, which is, okay, are we now effectively, you know, sell…”

“Instead of looking at this as disruption, another way to look at this is to use an old phrase that existed before disruption and just refer to it as a secular shift, and that this is a shift. There's just a shift. We're going to all be in electric cars and ele…”

“The reason that there are none of the PC makers, other than Apple in a sense, are successful phone makers, is because they were exactly like Detroit. They had a graphics group, they had a peripheral group, they had an IO group, they had a storage group.”

“And what Apple is doing is, like, they are at absolute peak execution of what they're doing. At the scale they're doing it, at the quality that they're doing it, and at the changes, each iteration that, that they're doing. And what's fascinating, like, I don't…”

“And, the most interesting thing as you mature on the S-curve is that generally what happens is companies go through massive turmoil, And they change their executive staff, and they bring in people who are willing to figure out how to charge your existing custo…”

“Apple is, like, the leading chip maker right now.”

“I feel like that's always where big companies fall down, is they think they need an MBA running a P&L for something”

“Yeah, I really agree with that, because, like, when you're at a big company, and you're hit with GDPR, like, you, I know exactly how this is going to work. Like, you've got all the subsidiaries, and you know, too. Well, you're paralyzed, because you have to, y…”

“God, that means that all of these companies are gonna have to make all of those parts, and there are only two companies that can do that, which is Samsung and LG.”

“So I think that it's a great strategy, and it drives a lot of interesting things, but the odds of this coalescing are very low, and that's why this notion, and the lesson from Sony, or RCA before it, or Whirlpool, they're all there. Like, Nobody ever came to g…”

“And this is, like, literally the biggest lesson from Microsoft Clippy, which was, like, automatic features and automation are all cool, except they kind of have to be right literally all of the time.”

“Yeah, and so, so we're in this space now where it could very well be that the PC sees its most profitable 20 years, but yet the least number of people thinking about it, or worried about it, or investing in it, and the least amount of change.”

“Very rarely is like an algorithm like this secret sauce for a company. Because you could look at what goes on from the outside and pretty much reverse engineer an algorithm.”

“PCs are going to get super expensive now. Like, and everything about them is, it's just like buying a mainframe. Like, today, you can, if you're a big insurance company running mainframe software, you can hire programmers, you can get new features. It's just 1…”

“Because the amount of innovation that's in this iPhone, you know, I would argue is on par with the entire rest of the software and hardware combination that's out there of makers and operating systems.”

“Custom chips have always been a competitive disadvantage. For a company in particular, they were a very deep competitive disadvantage for Apple when the run rate for Motorola chips went down and they couldn't sustain it. And then they made the same mistake wit…”

“Not only a chance, it's, I would just go out on a limb and say, it's absolutely certain that there's going to be a defragmentation of like just the app called messaging. And that's again, back to the whole innovation thing. I mean, we're in this very highly fr…”

“Literally, this is the only thing I've carried all week. I have no, I haven't missed my MacBook. I haven't missed my PC laptop. I have made slides. I've worked on spreadsheets. I've written a blog post. I've used apps. I've used the browser. Like, it's a hundr…”

“Cross-platform is a developer thing because no one person is cross-platform.”

“All the things about power management and security and reliability this whole sealed case notion of the phone and the tablet OS's, these modern OS's, these are huge, huge benefits. And there, there's no way of sort of retroactively adding those to the existing…”

“And the most interesting thing about it is the group that's most excited are mostly the mathematicians. And they're the ones, and so that actually confuses everybody, because if you're of the school of the people who are like, it's gonna put people out of work…”

“There's this wild underestimation about, like, you could vibe code your way into enterprise software.”

“Like first you have this, you have a agent, which is far as I can tell right now is also a new word for program that takes a very long time to run and might not finish.”

“Startups look at enterprise software and they think about it in terms of startup scale... And that's fine until you have a 100,000 people in 20 countries with different national laws and policies about business expense and all of those, and then you overlay co…”

“This notion of exception handling is just the root of the challenge with agents, which is almost everything interesting in an enterprise is an exception.”

“Well, certainly network effects outside of a company are extremely difficult for a bunch of clients and security reasons. But the biggest network effect in enterprise software is inside of a company.”

“That, the way to say it is, algorithmic thinking. Is really, really, really hard for the vast majority of people who have jobs. And so the easiest way to think about it is if you were to go into any person and ask them to create a flow chart for a particular t…”

“Until the whole, like, non-reproducible, non-random element of this AI stuff goes away, the doing stuff is gonna get very costly.”

“SAP isn't going anywhere, so then that's going to slow the diffusion of AI on that particular data source, independent of whether or not it's Agentified AI that's doing stuff or just read-only reporting on stuff?”

“Where they always think that, like, you'll be able to get, like, a fraction of a penny, but in the end, especially in the enterprise, like, people are just going to consume things, it's just cheaper and easier to buy, like, a bulk license for a bunch of stuff.”

“We see it in how the companies even have reacted to AI, where all the big companies immediately went to the government and basically said, regulate us, which to me is the lawyer culture.”