The Rise of the Tech Ecosystem: How did we get here?
Nortel Networks early in my professional career that was a very esteemed company pushing the envelope with trying to develop the internet infrastructure for the internet as well as phones peak of the tech bubble in 2000 it was reported that they did 30 billion in revenue they were worth $250 billion in the year 2000 think about that $250 billion early 2000s also Dave do you remember that's when Blackberry started to take off that big clunky heavy laptop that you had to Lug around you didn't have to take it everywhere you could communicate with colleagues in and out and that's where Blackberry came in change the game you don't need that heavy laptop everywhere and at the time the all how you communicate email phone and text that's it all those three and that phone did it [Music] [Applause] [Music] well you're listening to welcome to what the tech your gateway to business strategies and tech secrets shaping today's workplace Are ready for a blast from the past? for you all right tell me if you remember this sound [Music] oh yes a classic for anybody that's over the age of 30 you know we were kind of joking about this earlier when this sound came on there was two things that could go wrong one of the kids could jump on the telephone and ruin the connection or one of our friends could call the house even an incoming call would have disrupted dial internet service at that time because it wasn't guaranteed when you hear that connection that those sounds that you were actually going to get through right sometimes it would keep repeating itself and it would repeat again and it would repeat again and again and again until eventually you got a connection into the quote wwwwwww internet if you were lucky enough you know I remember sometimes you'd go to log on I forget what the visual was but you were waiting you were like please connect please connect please connect and if you were on like right after dinner when there was a lot of people trying to use it you wouldn't be able to log on it just wouldn't happen just because people in the neighborhood were all logging on yeah yes it would be so frustrating cuz there was no guarantees you get we take it for granted now right the thing that keeps you off the internet now is you know the power goes out or the service provider has something that you know the servers go down and outage right and you can't log on and or you know some it doesn't happen as often on your cell phone you know your service is down for whatever reason something some bug or something at AWS goes down but we take it for granted Dave that you could pretty much be anywhere and be guaranteed to get online on the www on the internets or interwebs it's a whole different world back then and I think that's what we want to talk about today the world we're in today right and kind of peel back onion a little bit on how did we get here you know there's a lot of events that led up to we didn't just parachute in and all of a sudden you know we have ChatGPT and all the rest but certain events set themselves up one by one and we want to talk a little bit about that yeah the the evolution was quick you know the evolution was so quick you know think about 1980s to 1990s even into early 2000s there were some brands that were running the world back then they were running the communication landscape and some of these brands are no longer here you know one of them that we were chatting about earlier was you know IBM IBM was massive you know what do you remember about IBM IBM was the shis right they were the gorilla in every office they had had the main frames they had the name they basically pioneered the personal computer everything was in IBM I don't know if you remember this Dave but back then you had an IBM or you had a clone and that's when PC's started coming out and those PCS eventually eventually the whole clone thing was dropped but I was as we were putting this together yeah it wasn't anything other than an IBM was called a clone and IBM dominated that space you know today IBM doesn't make any more laptops or personal computers Lenovo bought that business from them right who would have known that IBM basically the inventors of the main frame and the personal computer would not be making computers today at least what they used to make yeah and that and that's just on the computer side you know so we're we're in the voice communications world and you know there used to be a hundred different brands of telephones oh yeah there were a lot more a lot a lot of a lot of phones you know one of the big players in that that space was Bell Labs and they're the ones that innovated that the phones and all of those telecom inventions and that spawned or spun out Lucent Technologies or do we have anything on Lucent technology there we go [Music] ideas ideas also known as Innovations uh inventions and breakthroughs from B Labs get them while they're hot Lucent Technologies we make the things that make Communications work a crazy that I'll tell you their trademarked logo is uh burned into my brain I it's funny it's just a red circle of sorts I think there's some history behind that painted Circle yeah but that that was like ingenious branding something so simple something so simple but resona you know so well it did and you know who would have thought so Bell Labs, IBM, Innovation Innovation was expens it's always been expensive uh for the most part you're You're Building devices you need Engineers you need research you need you know to push the envelope and things were centralized in these big Behemoth companies like Bell Labs like IBM who were known for innovating new things new toys new gadgets new new parts of the infrastructure and components but things were going to change in inevitably things were going to change but I don't think anybody had an idea of how much we would change as we were inching from those 80s those '90s from Lucent and then the mid90s another company that that really spawned a ton of innovation Nortel Networks I remember Dave early in my professional career next to Lucent Nell was probably an IBM that was a very esteemed company pushing the envelope with the with trying to develop the internet infrastructure for the internet as well as phones they really changed the game and put a lot of pressure on Lucent when it came to phones and phone innovations and phone system big time and they had a ton of phones you know I remember having physical compatibility guides back in early 2000 2001 so we're selling devices and people would say I have a Nortel telephone they'd give you the model number you'd flip to this particular page within a compatibility guide to find what devices were compatible and there were like two or three pages of nor cell phones they I don't know how many years they've been they were in business we did a little bit of research in the peak of the tech bubble in 2000 it was reported that they did $30 billion in revenue $30 billion in revenue blows my mind when I think about what they were making exact I don't know if there's 30 billion telephones you know in existence any longer not like that anyway not desk no and I'm looking at the notes that you put in there Dave they were worth $250 billion in the year 2000 which ushered in the next era that we're going to talk about in a moment but think about that $250 billion dollar that's what they were worth a giant enormous we catch a glimpse of of if you're watching us in the on the video said can we put a little sound on that come grooving up rainy video low resolution look at that highspeed internet access totally internet cable access down public internet I remember that in at the airports internet inside the multimedia conference he got Tow Jam football Hotel internet wireless internet for the phone for sell mobile phones I know you you know me one thing I can tell you is You' got come together right now it all together with the true power of the internet Nortel Networks how the world shares ideas how so much has changed you know I remember working for one of the manufacturers that supplied that made actually products for them and they were an account where we wanted to be in in terms of selling selling with their reps so they could push our products alongside their products and nobody knew what was about to come and the hammer was going to come down on Nortel the hammer was going to come down on Lucent both of them you know Lucent peaked according to the different sources they picked around 99 and you know they also were Mammoth they had around $40 billion in revenue in 99 very close to Nortel's $30 billion when they peaked in 2000 and the hammer did come down the party ended the the bubble bursted on the dot in the early 2000s and nobody would have we weren't weren't expecting I remember I was in Florida at the time and I was talking to a client and he said to me have you heard the news I'm like what well Nortel is closing their Latin America offices which in South Florida and I knew a lot of people there and that was like the beginning of the end for Nell when I heard that and you know now we know that that's the case but one of the things that would that I want to drive about that is that Innovation is something you can't bottle into a box and control yourself back then proprietary was the way big big innovation was driven by these big telecom companies and it was all centralized and the internet now allowed people and business to be connected from very very very far places and now all of a sudden ideas could flow from multiple angles multiple parts of the world regions that were never connected right and and now ideas could be decentralized you could share some ideas I mean it it was not Zoom back then but it it allowed some of this stuff to start it allowed the spark you know it allowed companies like AOL to come in you know also along that that that time frame I know if you remember Erikson uh which later became Sony Ericsson but Ericsson also helped with some those Innovations in driving some of the infrastructure behind the cell phones uh and also behind the infrastructure for a lot of those cell phone companies that then also allowed I would say the next wave of innovation to come in right if we were to to summarize a little bit of that first wave it would be the was what were we calling that Dave was it the dawn the the the dawn of the internet age the dawn of the internet age that's a very appropriate uh kind of all encapsulating from for that first period ' 80s through 2000s and now the next age or the next story of that I would say is the wwww the worldwide web I mean who uses the worldwide web anymore I mean the youngsters probably don't even know that that existed that that was a thing you would refer to a website when you would say a website you would say like if it were Amazon it's www.amazon.com right yeah just hearing you say that is so funny my mother um my mother is a couple of years ago I was telling her about some things that we were doing on on the Global TecK website and she said oh I'd love to see it I said oh you should go online check it out she's like where can I see it I said it's a global-teck.com and she said do I need to do I need to also type www in front of it I'm like yeah you can you should but you don't have to she's like well things have definitely changed I don't have to do that anymore she thought that was a huge timesaver Rolando I know my 72 year old mother no longer has to type www that is like automation to her right it gets it got shorter you didn't have to type in and even even I believe back then you did have to type in the whole thing now you could just type in the domain name of the company so that you can get right into and that whole HTTP.. WWW nobody talks about that anymore that's over with right but this internet thing the www uh oh isn't that like worldwide Wrestling Federation too wasn't that um back was W I think you're trying to say WWF but that was the World Wildlife Foundation and also World Wrestling yeah different type of nerd over here sorry but you know that internet age and combined with the bubble bursting on the do things started changing right information was starting to decentralize it certainly didn't mean the end of IBM but it started changing things and we had a new emergence of new players because PC's in the late 90s started to get cheaper you had this new thing called the internet and so now instead of Simply taking your P or laptops that started coming online you could now leave the office with a big clunky heavy laptop right so that was an innovation and then take that and if your company was ahead of the curve you'd have some kind of internet I remember uh at the time I was working for Philip Morris now known as Altria we had all of all of the sales reps pretty much had uh some type of internet connectivity that was was was provided by or paid by by them and we used ISDN which was an upgrade from regular dialup so you can send information faster because you know we had to you know plug in and the reports would get uploaded to the mainframes and all that business and it would take time so ISDN was the way to go but the internet allowed this information to the information we would see from the field to be uploaded and back to the offices in New York where managers would uh you know analyze and do what they need to do with that information but but my point is that you didn't have to be in the office sitting at the company desk at the company computer with the company desk phone to do the work anymore you could send and that was back in 1997 when I was doing that laptop in-tow head out to the customer site uh go see customer accounts and gather the information and upload it at the end of the night or at the end of the day uh back to uh the office and off we were um and you know this allowed some other companies to take off we're going back to the internet piece Dell you know they they were when I went to college every computer was a Dell sure um AOL which became you know the largest merger in history they actually their their offices the headquarters is not about 10 minutes from where I live over in Dullas and now those offices are data center offices so they had a whole huge complex and now that complex is pretty much data centers and and I believe there's a one of the big military contractors is over there so AOL has got a teeny teeny little uh footprint in there that that still remain Dave you remember compact oh my goodness do I ever yeah so I come from my my my stepmother was in the tech field her entire career so she actually came up with like I think she started with Honeywell but it moved into digital and a compact purchase digital and then I think HP eventually purchased compact yes so many different brands I I actually have the notes Here on that in 2002 Hewlett Packard now known as HP completed the acquisition of compact for approximately $25 billion and the merger was a significant event in the tech industry creating a technology company second in Revenue to IBM now this was 2002 so the the uh the tech companies of the day company IBM and Microsoft was emerging as well but but think about that Compaq and HP because things were about printing right where could you print where could you work or or devices that allow this you had your laptops and HP was known for printing and most of the printing happened at the office again that changed when smaller printers came online and you could print stuff at home right so that enabled that home office is the early home office with your laptop your printer your and your other devices to to to proliferate now early 2000s also Dave do you remember how that's when blackberries started to take off yeah for sure that then allowed that big clunky heavy laptop that you had to Lug around you didn't have to take it everywhere you could communicate with colleagues in and out and some companies did allow communications externally so that you could communicate outside the company and that's where Blackberry came in changed the game you don't need that heavy laptop everywhere and at the time the all how you communicate email phone and text that's it all those three and that phone did it well and sounded good and we had a guest on um who was a former president of Blackberry Mr Sandeep if you want to hear that story go check out that episode with Sandeep he unloads about a bunch of stuff Blackberry and other things but Dave Blackberry changed the game I loved my Blackberry.. I was
jealous I the first time I saw a Blackberry I think it's 2004 2005 I'm at a trade show down in Atlanta we have a short break and I need to take my laptop and just quickly check uh just quickly check emails so I find a little corner I open it up I dial in through the VPN I finally get logged in I do all this work just so I I can look at a couple of emails it took me the entire lunch break I never grabbed lunch but I was able to look at a couple of emails um but as I was doing that there was someone kind of sitting not too far from me he takes a he takes out this thing out of his pocket hadn't really seen it before and he's just just kind of doing this and then he grabs lunch and now when we're back in the trade show he says um he says hey you know you got to look your company should invest in I'm like yeah what is that and he's telling me all about it and how much faster it is than the laptop he's like I was able to get all my voice sorry all my emails done in 5...10 minutes and I was back having lunch and I couldn't believe how much time I could have saved if I had something like that again I'm doing email on this massive Dell laptop like I said the VPN and dial in and you know to watch somebody else have this tool that wasn't part of my organization kind of tech stack if you will it was like a game changer for them definitely you know if you have technology is going to leave you behind right uh there's always going to be changes and if if you're able to be faster than your competitor then you have an advantage and this guy definitely had an advantage I like that um I don't know if it's Mark Zuckerberg that made that phrase you know um break run fast and break things you know it has its advantage especially in Tech uh being first movers and and first adopters because technology is a race it is a race um and when you're talking you know these larger companies when you're talking about Investments and R&D and roadmap a lot of them spend a lot of money now uh innovating in a different way um just like what we talking about the Innovation was you know in the big uh telecom companies of the day Nortel and Lucent whatever uh the innovation because it was moving around it wasn't centralized all in one place it was it was starting to emerge it was starting to shift and you know we were talking about Blackberry you I wanted to just say this that the that BlackBerry stock Peak at an all-time high of $147 in mid 2008 wow you know why well I'm going to tell you why it was because Blackberry had a competitor serious competitor that they underestimated in 2007 called Apple. Apple decided to change the game Steve Jobs more importantly came out with the iPhone in 2007 so what that means is that it didn't take long for Wall Street to say you know what hold up a second Blackberry and look at here yes things changed phones have changed you know we um the way we communicate has changed from the phone and I those cordless so if you're watching this on on the video you get to see this little montage that we've put together and I'll buy Steve Jobs or buy apple and June of 2007 he releases or apple releases the iPhone and I remember Dave when it was released a lot of businesses and a lot of the headlines and I think you know some some you if you're a competitor you run inference right you the fud you know cuz you want to take the steam out of out of the headline and you say well that's never going to work or businesses will never adopt it because by the way in 2008 um when you look at the number Blackberry had a millions of subscribers I want to say it was in 2011 in 2011 they had 85 million subscribers worldwide so although the stock peaked in 2008 Wall Street was saying hey guys we got to pump the brakes here cuz there's some Innovation coming and maybe you're a little overvalued let's take some money off the table and put a little put our bets somewhere else otherwise they would have kept um you know that stock price because the stock market's a little bit forward-looking versus actual sales that happen today so even though they they peaked out at 85 million subscribers Steve Jobs if you can recall Dave when the iPhone came out Blackberry was the de facto device for every Enterprise it was the way to communicate it was the way to do business it was what was on everybody's hip and because of the iPhone we got the terminology BYOD - Bring Your Own Device right and that was enabled by a technology called um I want to say um U um a Mobile Device Manager (MDM) so this were third party software that came online so that you can manage mobile device like an iPhone maintain security have the security policies you need because that used to reside in Blackberry and what they call the BES server B.E.S. Blackberry Enterprise server and it had all the controls and all the security and it manager would need but now these mdms these mobile device managers could do the same thing that was I would say in my book The Beginning of the End for Blackberry because when they caught on to doing apps it's just started the train had already started leaving and they could not catch up to to uh jobs did iPhones did iPhones always have kind of a touchscreen to it or did they ever have tactical kind of feel keyboard like Blackberry um no no keyboard was always display huh yeah I mean two devices completely different trying to solve the same task at least the same task at the time do you remember what sandep told us he told us a story that Ericsson six years before the iPhone they had a very similar technology ready to go and Ericsson Sony Ericsson canned it because of for business reasons but they had a touch screen that was a huge improvement over what was available at the time at the time you needed a stylus and you really had to press down on the screen yep to make that screen work with the stylist well the Innovation that he had mentioned to us was a Leap Forward was what we now know more of a display kind of a you know it just kind of mirrors and follows your your touch and and whatnot but they canned it they poo pooed that project but that's so interesting and fascinating that the technology existed Apple changed the game it became now smartphones and apps that world started to take over in the mid 2000s um yeah mid 2000s 2011 2012 2015 and then chugging along the way chugging just kind of innovating there were some three big companies that would change what we know today um the IT world were Microsoft, Google, and Amazon and all three were working at different angles but they would come up in a way that would be very different than IBM very different than Nell and they all today are are aiming for the gold standard of companies and I would say I would propose that apple is the gold standard today when it comes to companies for this reason and and also echoed by my one of our guests back to SanDeep from former president of Blackberry is the stickiness factor you can't be sticky today if you only have a device today if you only sell no matter what device it is it's very difficult by itself Fitbit by itself is difficult for it to be sticky and a lot of those companies that tried to um create fitbits they've gone under uh mobile companies cell phone companies buy themselves it's difficult it's multiple uh HTC and palm along with Blackberry a lot of them don't exist BlackBerry still exists but as a totally different company hardware alone. Nortel was the same story IBM gave up on their laptop business. Motorola sold also their smartphone business over to a Chinese company
Lenovo took over the IBM PC's it is extremely difficult yeah yeah we can name several more Hardware companies but Apple changed the game they decided to come out with the iPhone they decided to come out with apps they would charge a fee or Revenue commission depending on how you look at it or they would take a cut of all revenue generated with their apps they would also go on to put in streaming services so they brought in Services devices and created an ecosystem that is very sticky they they' now have Apple pay so now it's a complete ecosystem that you never have to leave if you're an Apple customer man and I think what what a strategy huh what a strategy it's like this is what we're going to do it's the device will create an experience but the you know the back back end programming the software the way that it operates is really what's going to it's it was almost Sinister it's like we're going to keep them addicted to our product we're gonna come out with a new $1,200 phone every 18 months they're going to be forced to buy it and our competitor isn't going to be able to come in and grab them because they don't operate within the same platform it's I've only had Apple products so as my son but my wife is Android there's nothing we can do to convince her to come over to the side of things you know and she's the same way she's like you know I I like Android and these are the reasons and you know maybe we get you guys Android phones and my son and I look at each other were like no way man we have too much invested in this I don't want to start over and if it feels like it would be starting over but they I mean fantastic business strategy get them addicted keep giving them new products things that are Innovative things that are exciting and we'll have customers for life and I think that's why you know the forward thinkers in the stock market back in 2007 I know a lot of people that were buying Apple stock back then they were telling me that I should and I really wish I was paying attention because uh some of these folks are retiring early now that I know and it's all because of Apple stock well also in 2007 I'm glad you brought that part up but if we go back a little bit Google that's when they released Android so Steve Jobs released iPhone and shortly after that Google comes out and releases Android they don't want to be left out of the the smartphone game all right um but prior to that you know Google also uh launched in 2000 Google ads diversifying their search business um they acquired YouTube which is the second or third largest search engine in the world um and obviously 2007 they launched Android but like you said they created a sticky platform like your wife um doesn't one leave Android we know the the Google ecosystem between the work the Google workspace stuff the Android YouTube If you have a Google phone it all works together right it all easily seamless you know you can move from one side of the platform to another whether it's downloading videos watching it email all the different productivity apps that come with Google and the whole ecosystem right so now we've got Apple being the gold standard I would say you know Google is right in that mix right right in the mix you know apple has a little bit higher valuation they have some things that that that Google doesn't have Google has a smartphone side now with Google pixel uh and and and you know apple has a more robust product lineup when it comes to the actual devices themselves Google responds back and they gohe and acquire Nest which is a phenomenal product uh in the home so Google made some serious advances But Here Comes um you know players like Amazon who started with the books uh they launched Prime they decide I don't know if they're taking a Playbook from one of the different companies exactly how but you know Bezos moved away from just having books sold on their website they opened up a Marketplace in 94 Jeff Bezos founded Amazon and sold those books online what a crazy idea nobody book online let's sell one of the heaviest consumer goods there are through the mail through the mail who knew right who knew and then two and that those would have been a great stock to buy early as well in in 2000 he launched the marketplace in 2000 he launched the marketplace and in 2005 launched Prime which would forever change what we think about an ecosystem as well and in 2015 Amazon surpasses Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the world they went on to buy Whole Foods in 2016 so if you're a Whole Foods customer now you're part of the Prime experience as well and in 2017 AWS which is their Cloud division would become the dominant player when it comes to cloud services so now they've got this whole ecosystem and then you throw Alexa into the mix as well as some other Acquisitions with Healthcare and entertainment with Prime video you've got a well oiled machine when you come to when it comes to ecosystem so today we've got Amazon ecosystem platform you've you've got Google ecosystem slash platform you've got Apple again ecosystem platform all of them have very sticky and I guess you'd have to throw Microsoft into that hat too they're not as consumer right in the Enterprise space they are a beast oh go you can't you can't remove well I can say can't but who's going to remove Microsoft from the Enterprise space right it is nearly impossible they're so sticky with all of their products in the Enterprise space that they are the gorilla when it comes to Enterprise they are the gorilla but you know what just like Amazon being David and Walmart being Goliath at one point Amazon became the new Goliath so if if Microsoft is the Goliath you know the the crazy thing when you are the when you are the reigning champ you have a lot of targets on you right so everyone's chasing that gold standard of sorts they see someone successful they have the market share and if you're competing against that at least you know who your competition is but yeah I mean Microsoft is massive we were kind of taking a trip back down memory lane earlier when we were talking about Microsoft we were talking about Skype oh uh yeah and how Skype you know Skype I think I believe Skype was just like a consumer free telephone thing that people were trying for a while me take you further back what about the Net 2 Phone I remember again the late '90s net to phone so that cuz look today we take it for granted we have mobile devices that essentially you could put it to your ear and talk for 10 hours if you wanted to and it doesn't cost you a dime to call from you know DC to California back then you paid by the minute right did and it cost a pretty penny to call somebody in California from New York or even in the same state sometimes local calls are more expensive depending on the time of day you called [ __ ] I remember calling home from college and if I called after 7:00 then my calls were only 5 cents a minute or something like that you know you had like you had peak hours and you had other hours a weekend you know weekends were a little less expensive than on Tuesday or a Wednesday yes long distance foone bills I mean I remember when I was living at home um before I moved out in my very early 20s I just graduated from college and my parents were like you know what you're responsible for your own phone bill kids by the way 30-year-olds that are still on your parents cell phone plans you guys got it made you got it made but my mother would sit me down she'd have the a AT&T phone bill she'd slap it down on the table she'd look at it and I was living in Connecticut and I had friends in Massachusetts and my stepmother would circle be like that's a 860 area code there a 617 area code she'd add it all up and I was paying I don't know $20 $30 $40 bucks a month to call my friends like yeah we paid for long-distance charges so when you mentioned net to phone and there was that other one that magic jack Magic Jack they had little USB stick you would plug into your computer I swear it sounded almost too good to be true like I can make telephone calls to my computer if you had a computer because that was a long time ago but um it you know in an age where people were spending so much money this was like necessary Innovation and you know those products net toone what do we call it wallack um Magic Jack Magic Jack I mean that's the beginning of you know voice over IP you know telephony over Internet Protocol you know huge espcially for international calls cuz I was remember traveling and the roaming charges on cell phones back in the day was astronomical so for the traveling salesperson international dialing you could do that on net to phone or or Magic Jack or you you would be saving tons of money the obviously the more you call the more you save and the more people you had the more you save right and so these were necessary uh competitors in a in a space where the per minute charges added up to a lot hey I can you know I can reduce that for you by half and sometimes even by 80% by using some of these internet providers and so it was it was so but I was looking that up while you were talking the acquisition of Skype was in 2011 when Microsoft acquired 2011 so that's so 13 years more or less from from from today yep and um who would have thought that that would lead to what we know now today as Microsoft team right can you can you can you say can you think of three other names that teams had prior to teams link OCS I mean it was it Microsoft was already tinkering with voice IP right uh but Skype gave them a consumer product that was fully born and ready to use versus a product that they' been you know they're not a telephone company they weren't Nortel they're not a Net 2 Phone they're not any of those companies they are a software company that basically put an operating system into a PC that's where they're their bones their origin story came from right they evolved to bring some of these other things in house but that's not what their expertise is and they just went out and bought Skype and today teams is now the new what do you call that the Phoenix that's emerged out of Skype right and so that's what we're we're left with today you know Dave the world is changing and we don't live in the same world as 2011, 2015 and these players Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google Now are all having to look over their shoulder to some extent because of what's happening in the AI world now ai has been around for years but it wasn't Unleashed like it has been in the last year or so with open Ai and what's happening right now as we film this podcast we don't know what's going to happen with OpenAI ChatGPT may be gone by next week because apparently the CEO has left he's over at Microsoft they gave him the title of CEO to run an advanced laboratory division Advanced research and from what public reports say a card blanch to hire as many employees from open aai and bring them over to this new division at Microsoft which is crazy so essentially they can get the entire thing without ever having to buy I mean they invested in Open I but essentially all of that knowhow brought over it have you heard I've never heard of something like that before like we're a new age where a company all of a sudden says okay all those employees now become our employee and there's no merger or acquisition that ever happened hey what about the 80 people that didn't yeah I forgot what the headlines were yesterday um how do you do you recall how many total employees were at I think it was 770 and 700 of the 770 signed onto the letter that basically supports Sam mman so what about those other people I don't know they're they're either they think that being loyal to the board or whoever is left is the way to go versus Sam I mean we don't 100% know all of what led up to this there's reports about this and that and the other some guy feel felt you know that the company was going in the wrong direction someone was passed over I mean there's a lot of information but we do know what we can see which is there's a possibility open may just fold I mean the way it's going I don't think it'll I mean that if it comes down to it Microsoft will just acquire the rest and take the IP with them and you know it'll be completely part of Microsoft or they could sell it off and and who knows what's going to happen but the cat is out of the bag when it comes to working in today's age you know if we're looking forward now from 2020s and Beyond right around when Co you got open AI that came on just recently you have these ecosystems and then you have what I think to be the most one of the most interesting pieces when it comes to business today which is how the world of e-commerce entertainment and the platforms are changing so if you look at what happening right now with Tik Tok you look at what's happening with meta uh you find that the convergence of e-commerce and social media are are going in a New Direction you know TikTok is who would have thought that TikTok would try to take on Amazon but they that's what they're doing they've got TikTok shop uh they've got fulfillment centers you know us you know being in the e-commerce space ourselves you know we're we're dabbling in that uh but they are a serious contender and The Experience if we were to go back let's say to what Steve Jobs did with the iPhone he said the ex user experience is what matters and Amazon did a fabulous job of that using a PC Tik Tok is changing the way you experience online shopping via video first instead of a product page first I don't know which is going to win Dave but I do know this that they are changing the experience which is what Steve Jobs did back in 2007 yeah he said apps are the way to go you have an app that's become super powerful super influential and they're saying we're going to change the way people experience shopping you know I mean if you think about it when you're on Amazon you know Amazon just over the past couple of years they're encouraging sellers to include more video more demonstrations when I'm on an Amazon listing and I'm kind of looking just even just through some of our stuff that we have up there I'm looking at product reviews by content creators I'd never seen before you know so they they are certainly incorporating video as part of this but when you I've only I've only played with TikTok shop a little bit but I think that is pretty interesting as you're kind of swiping through suddenly you see a product doing something really cool solving a problem that you need solving and then right from there push click add it to cart you didn't seek out the demo it seek you and by the algorithm it might have known that I needed a way to log wood around in the winter time or whatever it might have been so it's almost like an algorithm is getting to know you so that it can really serve up the product demonstration and get you to buy right away it's really pulling on your heartstrings if it can solve a problem so quickly it's like I need that and you know I think we're missing that for a little while in Commerce in general the I need this and um I yes my question is when does when does TikTok start to charge a membership fee like Amazon Prime everyone I know everyone I know subscribes to Amazon Prime and all of those people were probably extremely reluctant at the very beginning I have to pay to shop I have to pay to spend money on Amazon why would I do that well Jeff Bezos figured that out yeah well he he made it sticky back to our guest Sandeep he made it very sticky he gave a value proposition that was was probably one of the most genius ways to to basically get customers on the platform get them to cuz you know I read somewhere and I wish I could remember what study there's a huge difference between you giving something to somebody and you give it away for free and then that person that same item whether they pay a dollar or they pay $100 for it the moment that person pays a dollar or a hundred there is an investment on their part that says I'm part of this in a way that I it wasn't when I it was free or given to me so now even though the investment of prime which you know in the grand scheme of things it does bring them money but it creates that investment in the person like I am part of this and I'm committed to this and I'm kind of married to this system right now in a way that's different than you know the app store for uh for the iPhone and so how does TikTok do it they've got to come up with a way to give the consumer something that they would not have had prior to let's call it TikTok prime or whatever it's going to be called right they've got to roll out more they they've got a handful of of fulfillment centers whether it's you know hey we're going to ship this to you tomorrow and it's going to you know you pay $25 bucks a year just like what Amazon Walmart has tried to do that and it hasn't worked out in the same way as it has for Amazon because Prime Membership you get you get the Prime video you get you know uh some some deals at Whole Foods when you're shopping at Whole Foods as long as you're a Prime member right and on and on and on and on and on Tik Tock doesn't have that value proposition for a paid subscription model unless they're going to give you something let's just say well we're going to let we're going to stream I don't know music from artists and we're going to release it here first because no Tik Tok now their music and their trending sounds are way for artists to release music that's changing the way the music industry looks at releasing uh music because now the audience is being exposed to your sound your music on somebody else's videos and that could be millions and billions of views when you're talking about that so are things changing you bet how are they going to shake out I don't know but I know that if history serves as a lesson the user experience is vital and if you can get that down you can create an ecosystem around that experience and wherever you go it all comes back to being on the platform or part of the ecosystem you've created the stickiness that are guest former president of Blackberry used to say that's stickiness Factor right I wouldn't bet on Tiktok I wouldn't bet against TikTok right now they they have a lot of Mojo although they have a lot of headwinds with you know people complaining and Congress coming now at the end you know what they I think all this thing is going to get sorted out there is no social media company yet that has been blackballed out of the US there's just too much money involved there's too many employees involved for TikTok um there's a lot of competitive interests between Meta and Tik Tok um and I think you know articles have already come out and said that that Facebook has been behind some of the dirty tactics I didn't say that you can look it up on the web and you'll find some of those articles yourself right hey when uh when we talk about Facebook and meta now I knew that they were playing around for a little while with the subscription service did they ever launch that I I don't use Facebook I'm not aware I I you know I'm going to plead the fifth on this Dave I don't not I'm not aware I'm not as I don't want to say I I know when I don't and in this case I'm not aware of exactly their intentions but I know that for meta they're bet big billions big billions on the metaverse the jury still out on that I've seen some new improvements there was a uh an interview with Lex Friedman and Mark Zuckerberg on the metaverse and it did look fascinating it did look like an amazing new video experience that's how I would I would say but that video experiences still requires the big huge goggles again can meta nail the user experience when it comes to the metaverse if they can and they can excute on that they may have something there is the timing right for it I think so for this reason Dave the remote work revolution is changing the face of work it is changing the face of the future of work I don't think anybody today can argue against what the pandemic has done for remote work and every study that's been coming out and I'm going to give big props to a future guest that's coming to come on so if you're watching this now you may want to check out that interview with Nick Bloom that we have uh I think you going to be fascinated by what you learn there with Nick Bloom who has been studying remote work for the for for decades now and I don't think we're going back Dave so the convergence of things like remote work we've got Ai and we've got new players coming onto the scene when it comes to Commerce as well as Communications like companies like Zoom that became extremely popular over the pandemic era I think we are moving into that whole new shift like we saw we talking about the 80s the 2000s now the 20s I'll call them the 20s moving forward I think the combination of AI remote work uh decentralization of of technology is going to change how we view the business world and who who's going to come out on top right right well I can certainly see that some of these platforms they can create stickiness by bringing value of integrating within a current customers Tech stack so if you can build automation with AI and bring crms and your video and your voice Communications and you know all these other bits if you have a good platform that's able to tie it together create a create an experience where your users rely on you know the integration of all of these things and you have a winning platform for sure well and Zoom does have a an app Marketplace again taking a little page out of out of apple on that um they've got a call center product they've got a phone product so now you can do your video and continue engaging with customers and colleagues on the zoom telephone side of things and text messages uh they've got an AI companion so I think they're trying to position themselves in a way that I don't know if they would have even imagined it prior to the pandemic where they're in all these spaces competing against a gorilla in this case Microsoft uh for on the Enterprise side uh did you know Dave that Zoom has two architectural platforms when it comes to their to their uh technology they have The Zo Zoom Cloud that we as as businesses and customers use and they have a zoom government that is a slightly different animal to conform and comply with some of the government regulations when it comes to security and privacy and the rest that I didn't know up until recently but I say that because companies that tend to adapt and Zoom seems like right now they they're really shifting moving into areas that seem like you know why why are they there why you know why would you get into a battle with Microsoft and try to get into the Enterprise space I think the race is to see who now who can create the best user experience for workers workers that work remote as well as those in the office and let those two different parts of the organization communicate seamlessly with each other and its customers so it's it reles to businesses if you have an ecosystem that can allow this beautiful dance and orchestration of communications collaboration um um archiving of documents and and things like that I think and you mix in AI to enable that to happen you said that something earlier the speed right the AI allows us to do things that we couldn't do at a speed I mean just this episode alone the information that we've been able to harvest to get ready for this episode in the old days Dave would have taken weeks big going through articles going on the internet reading them finding the information and then disseminating the information Among Us coming up with all of that lined up nice and neatly we were able to do that in under two hours you know so if you're watching us and you're wondering how we were able to use the power of AI to extract information from the 80s all the way up to 2020 in less than two hours so we could put this podcast together for you which is amazing I would have taken us weeks man yeah find all those news clippings and whatnot you know something you said is pretty interesting to me you were talking about archives and AI so I'm I'm imagining I'm imagining an organization today that's a adopting some of these new technologies and then just say in the course of three or 4 years they can use their own internal AI to go back and analyze the archives so it's not going out into the Internet it's just what's happened internally analyze analyze the past four years of conference calls that were you know this particular meeting or whatever it might be but the AI is going to be be able to analyze your business's meetings that are archived and then assist with strategy to be successful in the future or point out obvious failures or missed opportunities of the future of AI is you know we we've talked about it internally and uh and on some of our podcasts where it's AI is not going to replace you it's not going to take your job the people that know how to use AI better will be the ones that you really need to fear type of thing and analyzing archives within a business can lead to interesting strategies uh for those businesses sorry it was kind of an unthought tangent I just went on but I'm just thinking you know everything that we do internally is archived right yeah yeah we use there's data everywhere we're we're drown I've said this before we're drowning in data and what do you do I've read somewhere that we most companies only really tap into about 30% of the all the data they have but imagine having the ability to have something on autopilot that says you know last year at this point you sold X and you may want this year to prepare for this event in this way and I think the pr the the future or predictive modeling around AI when it comes to inventory whether it comes to business when it comes to language when it comes to combining all these different data sets and then says it's start giving you suggestions on actions that you can take I think that's the next leap when we can get to that point where we can get predictive modeling into the hands of decision makers and they're able to make decisions that are very good based on the data that's saying okay this could happen in the next two weeks four weeks month based on these patterns based on this history based on all these data sets I think it gets even more interesting because it can make your business more resilient you know Dave there's so many businesses that fail in the first year only one only I believe one between one depending on where your sourcing is one and 5% of businesses make it to 20 years and there's a lot of things that happen in a business that have to go right to stay in business that long but if you can feed information that can help you stay in business cash flow is up you may want to do this cash flow is down you may want to do that uh too much inventory do this not enough inventory do that if you you know in the healthcare world there's AI for a bunch of different things that are that are looking at diagnosing um different diseases that Radiologists can't see as well right so if you have ai working together with the radiologist you're able to spot things that the naked eye cannot see or can't pick up on a pattern I think we're definitely going into an age that where the work we knew it the way from the 80s all the way up to the 20s is going to be completely different completely different from the 20s moving forward with the emergence of platforms ecosystems in AI very decentralized you know when when we say that things change and nothing stays the same at least 10 years ago 20 years ago 30 years ago 40 years ago we had we had a chance to breathe and think about it and now literally overnight these Technologies are changing the way that people work oh no no doubt and in some ways for the better uh and there there will be some displacement I don't think there's any way around it there'll be some displacement but just like with every technology that interrupts and changes things there's displacement there the the horse and buggy guys that cleaned up the poop behind the horses didn't love that the cars were coming around and take care of their jobs uh the fact that um you know internet made uh book depositories a very different thing because now you could put documents and storage electronically it's a whole different thing right I I remember in the late 90s there used to be boxes and boxes and stuff that went from our offices to storage somewhere just because we had to hold on to documents um and you know you know what if something happens you know 6 years from now and you know some lawsuit happens and well those were all in storage now they're in the cloud you right so the evolution of change does create disruption and it cuts in both ways people people's jobs will be some at stake but on the other side there's some other jobs that didn't exist that will come out of of this as a result like you said hey maybe you got to be the AI expert in knowing how to maximize and leverage this um and who knows who knows that the world is very very different today and that's kind of what we wanted to drive home today to let you know that just like Dave said things don't stand still and if you want to be a business that is going to be around for the next 20 years in this new age small changes can make a big difference nothing stays the same there's nothing that's the same from last year or even five months ago and those small changes that you make today tomorrow two months from now those will all help you adapt moving forward I know that's been one of the keys for our business is to keep making those small changes because the times change you know Nortel is not in business anymore we used to sell a lot to them IBM has changed who they are Dell has changed who they are Apple has changed to are Microsoft and so our business model has you know slowly adapted over time because the industry is changing and everybody in every industry is seeing that happen to them right now so Dave did we miss anything else did you want to jump in and say any any other thing um regarding the uh what are we calling this part yes the gold standard the rise of the tech ecosystem you know my parting word my parting words are for business owners specifically that are out there if you haven't had a chance to look at you know some of the platforms that you're using come talk to us you're going to get left behind by competitors that are adapting the Technologies we also understand that within the small to medium business you don't always have access to the best tech specialist we want to extend our hand and be that trusted advisor for you so if you want to have conversations about upping your game technology integration communication integration you know please check us out global-tech t.com I wasn't trying to uh be a commercial at the very end but I am thinking about just some of the devices that we had spoken about here and kind of how people started migrating over to different Technologies they were they were doing it to save money initially and they may have thought it was too good to be true but now when you look back at it it's like oh thank God I jumped on that train because if I hadn't I would have been left behind so we want to help bring some of these small to medium businesses we want to help raise you with us um help improve your game so that you're around another 20 years and and longer I like that Dave the only thing I would add there is that if we're going to toot our horn a little bit let's just let's let's say this as well for those businesses that haven't had a tech spers maybe they have what happens in Tech a lot whether it's software Hardware you get this when a problem happens no it's this guy's fault it's that guy's fault and the accountability isn't there we uh because we offer solutions that are service-based like uh like Microsoft teams and voice and and all the rest as well as the devices that work on those platforms our interest is working with folks that want everything to work in harmony and our interest is the customer not this which happens a lot because you bought you know your phones or hgardware devices over here they don't care if you know your platform is working well or not it doesn't matter to them or it and we invite you to talk to us if you want to explore new Solutions or even consolidate
2024-02-09 07:31
