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

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on the Vergecast, Tom Warren joins us to talk all about Zoom. Talk a little bit about the T-Mobile Sprint acquisition, finally closed, that's one company now. And we get into Apple and what it's doing with video apps on the Apple TV. And they bought Darkseid, it's a big deal, coming up now on the Vergecast.

• 0:15Speaker 01

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• 0:44Speaker 02

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• 1:09Speaker 02

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• 1:18Nilay Patel?

  Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of working from home forever. No, it's great, it's gonna be a fun one. Hello. It's gonna be forever.

• 1:31Nilay Patel?

  It's, uh, every day it changes. How long is forever? You'll never know unless you listen to this, the Vergecast. I'm your friend, Eli, that was Paul. Hello. He's having an emotional breakdown. Dieter Bone is here.

• 1:42Speaker 05

  There's a Further Seems Forever joke somewhere in here, but I'm gonna let it go.

• 1:45Nilay Patel?

  Well, we'll come back to it. Our friend Tom Warren is here. Hey, Tom. Hello, from across the pond. Yeah, Tom's in England, but we're all at home. So even though we're in different places physically, we're all trapped in the same place, literally.

• 1:58Speaker 05

  Emotionally.

• 1:59Nilay Patel?

  We're all just stuck in Zoom. That's why you're here, Tom, we gotta talk about Zoom. So as always, we're recording from home. I'm hoping that you yourself are at home, if you are. So able to stay at home. I hope you're staying safe. If you're working, we thank you. You know, we realize there's some risk to that. So if you're at home, stay home. If you have to go out, please stay safe. Let us know if our quality is staying up there. I think we're doing all right, but I just want to put it out there. We are all recording this from home. But I think Andrew, our producer, is doing a pretty, pretty good job making us sound okay. So I want to, there's a lot to talk about. Tom is here to talk about Zoom, which is, I would say, one of the biggest stories in tech due to the virus and everybody staying at home. We don't talk about too much, right? There's all kinds of stuff to talk about.

• 2:44Nilay Patel?

  But I want to start with the virus itself. I don't want to belabor it, but you know, we put the show out on Fridays. And three Fridays ago, Donald Trump held up a flow chart and said, someone Neel building a website. You're killing me. Why? Because it's never going to come. It's never going to happen. I'm so good at counting days since something was promised that doesn't happen. It's like I got one skill as an editor and it's just keeping track of time. You know what? That website is being developed in a factory near Racine, Wisconsin.

• 3:15Speaker 06

  Trump held up a sign promising 5G AI 8K.

• 3:20Nilay Patel?

  Killing me. Anyway, it's been three Fridays since the flow chart. I will keep you updated as Fridays go on. Hopefully somebody builds the website. We increase testing. That would be great. I'd like to see it happen. It hasn't happened yet. Second, as the sort of virus and the staying at home ripples out into the broader economy, one person and his companies are sort of at the center of a lot of things. The person is Jeff Bezos, who famously owns Amazon, Whole Foods, Blue Origin, a space company. So Josh Jezza has been doing a lot of reporting on Amazon warehouse workers, Whole Foods workers. They have been walking off the job because they don't feel protected from disease transmission. They don't feel like they have the appropriate equipment. They don't feel the warehouses are being cleaned.

• 4:04Nilay Patel?

  Today, after a bunch of walkouts throughout the country, Amazon said it was going to start checking people's temperature who are working in warehouses and giving masks to people. So you're just seeing this curve of Amazon, which, to be fair, is very important to a lot of people right now because people are shopping from home. Jeff Bezos himself said all he's really thinking about is COVID-19 and Amazon's role in it. So we're tracking it very closely. Read Josh's reporting. It's really good. And then also today, Lauren Grush, our excellent space reporter, published Big Scoop. Bezos owns Blue Origin, and the staff of Blue Origin, the engineers, technicians are very upset because they're pushing forward with a launch, which is, the schedule's up in the air, but they're pushing forward with

• 4:48Nilay Patel?

  some testing and a launch. And people who work in Washington State might have to travel to rural Texas, which seems like a bad idea, to work on this. And there's just a lot of uproar over whether pushing forward with what is effectively a space tourism business is actually necessary and important right now. So there's some controversy there. It's interesting to me that it's all around Bezos. Like, he's a self-styled leader. He wants to be a leader. And he's got this collection of companies that are sort of experiencing some controversy about their role in the crisis. So go read Lauren's report. It's great. She actually had, we reviewed audio from one of these meetings. A little contentious. There's some quotes in there that are pretty good. That's really interesting. I think we're going to see how this plays out, and particularly how folks

• 5:32Nilay Patel?

  like Bezos, some of the other big tech leaders embrace that role as leaders, embrace their role running companies are very important to a lot of people right now. So I don't want to overdo it. Just want to call it out. It's some great work that's happening over there. Okay. Now, I don't know if it's entirely surprising that the Zoom story, because Zoom has had a pretty controversial history. We've talked about some of that controversial history here. But Tom, you've been covering a lot of Zoom stories lately. Give us a rundown on what is going on with Zoom.

• 5:59Speaker 07

  Yeah, so Zoom. The basic thing is that it has soared in popularity over the past few weeks as this coronavirus stuff has spread and everyone's sort of working at home. We've seen people use it for yoga classes, beers with friends on a Friday, and even people getting married on it. So it's kind of, we've been using Zoom for years, and it's probably-

• 6:21Nilay Patel?

  We're on Zoom right now.

• 6:22Speaker 07

  We're on Zoom right now. I don't think anyone would have guessed that people would be doing yoga classes and getting married on Zoom. Like, that's not a story anyone could have predicted as much as this virus. So everyone's kind of flopped to it for whatever reason. And I've got- Some theories. But yeah, it's had a huge influx of people and they revealed today back in December, they had 10 million participants, however you want to judge that, whether that's a daily active user or not. And now they have 200 million daily participants in meetings. So that's a massive like that's and we've seen Teams has gone up and their competitors and

• 6:58Speaker 05

  Microsoft Teams, you mean?

• 6:59Speaker 07

  Microsoft Teams, yeah. And Cisco, I think of around about 300 million, something like that.

• 7:04Speaker 05

  And that's in Cisco Webex.

• 7:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, Webex. So there's a lot of activity going on on video calls, house parties like number one or number two in the App Store. Um, there's a lot going on, but Zoom has become the particular focus for consumers and even businesses and just like a lot of the press attention is on Zoom right now. Um, so yeah, everyone's using it for all sorts of different reasons. Um, but like what's happening now is we're discovering. Um, or, you know, journalists and security researchers are discovering there's a bit of a trade off, if you want to use Zoom for all of these for these activities.

• 7:39Speaker 05

  Can I start you way back with the Zoom web server controversy? Cause this is months ago.

• 7:45Speaker 07

  That's true. That that was like last year. Yeah. So before we dig into the controversies should, yeah, we should talk about the one last year. So last year, um, it was discovered that, uh, basically it stalled a web server on on Mac OS systems, um, to uh, essentially to work like more easily on on that particular operating system.

• 8:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, actually I I I reported on this a bunch. I can give a little bit more color. So like installing a web server on a Mac, uh, sounds really bad. Like you put a whole damn web server. I don't want to serve the web. But it was, it's like a shorthand way to for them to get a bunch of like, like things done that they so they didn't have to recode it, right? So that in itself isn't necessarily bad, but what was horrific about it is they did it in an insecure way. And, uh, when you uninstalled Zoom, they left the web server on your computer running. And so that if you ever wanted to use Zoom again, they would then be able to reinstall it silently without having to ask you for it because it already had the web server on your Mac, even though you thought you uninstalled it.

• 8:48Speaker 07

  It was, it was like beyond sloppy.

• 8:50Speaker 05

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

• 9:27Speaker 07

  Yeah. And so, and then in, I think it was like January or February, some researchers published some stuff about essentially the core of Zoom and the way it works. Like, to understand a lot of these privacy and security sort of concerns is to understand how it works. So, so Zoom, if you've never used it, essentially you join a meeting through a link or through an ID, which is like between nine and 11 characters. So some researchers published some, some stuff back in, I think it was in January, basically saying you could guess these numbers or you could like brute force them in a lot of cases. So there was that, that's like, kind of like the underlying issue that's been bubbling for a little bit.

• 10:07Speaker 05

  And the issue there is like, if you know the number, you get, you get into the meeting. I mean, this is the reason that Zoom, I think is so popular. Like, you don't need a login, you don't necessarily need to create an account, you just have to install an app and everyone knows how to do that these days. Do you really need to install an app? Oh, you can use the web app, too. No, I'm saying Zoom will kind of handle that aspect for you.

• 10:31Speaker 05

  I tried to do a FaceTime call for my mom's birthday, happy birthday, mom. And like, it took 20 minutes of like tech support, right? Like FaceTime, which is like the definition of easy. And everybody has iPhones, it still took some work. So Zoom is popular because it's dead simple to use. But that, but because you just need the link, that's like scary because then anybody can jump on your call. So Tom, you're saying because you can guess these, you get, that's how you get Zoom bombing?

• 10:55Speaker 07

  Well, not necessarily. I think a lot of it is also people are setting up like yoga classes, sharing them on Facebook. It's pretty easy for trolls to, you know, find those links and share them on 4chan and wherever else. And so I think you're, you're just getting a collection of those links being found and just shared around and just the massive increase in it. But I think at the heart of the issue is, is obviously it's very easy to get into those calls because people don't pass or protect them. But that's also at the heart of the issue is that the defaults that Zoom set up to allow it, the defaults are like, you know, you just get into the call with the ID, there's, there's no like. You have to use a password or anything like that because it brings that barrier to entry down, right? And also, when you come into the call, anyone who joins the call by default

• 11:39Speaker 07

  can broadcast their video, can broadcast their screen. So it's like these defaults that they've put there because it's much easier for consumers and not consumers, but just for like anyone to jump on a call and start talking are also kind of hurting them now because that's like the key part of Zoom bombing. Like if I get a link of someone, it's probably 90% certain that they haven't password protected it. They haven't changed the defaults so that whenever you join a call, you have to like approve someone to, you know, show their video or share the screen. So you're just praying, you're praying on those defaults and defaults are always the killer with any app. If you, if you by default allow, you know, your users to do certain

• 12:21Speaker 07

  things, then someone, you know, is going to come in and be the bad guy and show you that your defaults are bad.

• 12:27Nilay Patel?

  And so that, that's like, to me is just a scale problem, right? They made it very easy and then they scaled this massive thing. And then there's a question about should we change the defaults to lock it down? Will that affect user growth, whatever? Then there's like, should Zoom moderate meetings? We talked about that a little bit last week. That feels very fraught. Like, do you want Zoom employees watching your meeting? Like, I do not just flatly do not want that to happen, but maybe you want that for a bunch of teammates. Like, so that's just scale problems. They're very hard, but they're problems that like are understood, right? They just come with massive scale and then like bad actors.

• 13:07Speaker 05

  They're problems that like you, you like tut Zoom for setting the defaults and not have a password, but you don't like get necessarily like deeply angry at them for trying to like, for being evil, right? But then.

• 13:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're not problems where it's like you had malicious intent. It's like, we just understand the category of things that are massive scale problems.

• 13:27Speaker 05

  Right. But like the, the question of do we give Zoom the benefit of the doubt? Like, there you're like, okay, sure. But like, Tom, like there's, there's other stuff going on with Zoom and security, right?

• 13:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's not just that. So alongside the Zoom bombing stuff, I think the Zoom bombing stuff really kind of has been at the center of it. But alongside that, there was some stuff about them sharing data with Facebook, which again, I think is like them allowing people to sign in with their Facebook accounts and using those credentials rather than something that's necessary, you know, like. It's not necessarily them sharing ad space in your Zoom meeting. If you want to give them the benefit of the doubt there, but they have the potential to do that. So they've had to change those, they've had to yank that code out on the iOS side at least, and rewrite parts of their privacy policy to be like, because obviously whenever these issues come up,

• 14:20Speaker 07

  people look at the privacy policy, they can see what the company can do. And they immediately go, okay, that's what the company's doing. It's not necessarily that that's what the company is doing, but it's capable of doing it. So then they have to like, you know, tie up that privacy policy. So we've seen them do that as well.

• 14:35Nilay Patel?

  There was one with LinkedIn today too, right?

• 14:37Speaker 07

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

• 15:20Speaker 07

  like whatever name I want to use, then someone on that call who has enabled the integration of LinkedIn would be able to find out that actually my name's Tom Warren and it's trying to match me to that Tom Warren LinkedIn profile. So there's obviously some privacy issues there, because not every single Zoom call that you want to be on, do you want to be revealing your name and your occupation, whatever else?

• 15:43Nilay Patel?

  So this one is to me, again, I don't know the answer here. I don't know if.

• 15:47Speaker 07

  I don't either, yeah.

• 15:48Nilay Patel?

  No, but like the answer to the question of is Zoom doing some growth hacky stuff that innocent people do and they just didn't consider scale? Or are they?

• 16:00Nilay Patel?

  Facebook, right? Where like the growth hacky stuff is a little more malicious and cynical than you'd expect. And so like that one to me is like Zoom is enterprise software, like is made for businesses. There are very few corporate functions where I need to be like, I'm going to this meeting, but I need to be anonymous. Like, there are many times where you take a meeting, and it would be useful to be like, who is this person on this 45 person Zoom call talking? Oh, it's just showing me some LinkedIn data, right? Like, that would be useful in that environment. Now we've extended Zoom to this environment, like you're saying, people are getting married, there are yoga classes, there are, therapy is happening in Zoom. There's all these new uses of consumers just using the tool, where you might want to be anonymous.

• 16:46Nilay Patel?

  We would expect your anonymity, and then this corporate feature is like, steamrolling you, and you had no idea it was happening.

• 16:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, you're right. But like, we're building up to like, that I don't know. Like, it's increasingly difficult to say, eh, maybe they're innocent. Eh, maybe they just are like a little dumb. Like, as we go-

• 17:05Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's why I wanted to start with, months ago, they had this problem. Like, this isn't a new set of concerns. This is, last year, before any of this happened, the question mark was, is Zoom an innocent, or do they do this weird installer hack that Apple had to undo, knowing it was like, one tick-

• 17:22Speaker 05

  Speaking of weird installer hacks-

• 17:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, there's another one.

• 17:27Nilay Patel?

  Oh, there's, so we're gonna do this for 45 minutes. If you're not interested in the intricacies of Zoom, uh, well, you got nowhere to go. So stay right here.

• 17:35Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 17:36Nilay Patel?

  Go ahead, Tom.

• 17:37Speaker 07

  So, two days ago, someone tweeted, um, it was basically a software engineer tweeted, um, that essentially Zoom is using, like, malware-like techniques to install itself on macOS. And basically, what that means, in, in easy terms, is, it's basically, it will prompt you for like, a username and password to like, get the call security part of macOS, and then it can just automate everything else. And just, you know, install on your system without popping up a load of pop-ups. And, you know, like, when you install an app, you have to click through and agree to- The licensing agreement, all that sort of stuff. They just want it to be as one click as possible.

• 18:14Speaker 07

  Um, which, you know, again, you can kind of understand from a user thing, but using malware like techniques is probably not the way to get there.

• 18:24Speaker 05

  Wasn't there a piece of this, Tom, that where it's like, if your computer is administered by your company that some of Zoom, some of these techniques that Zoom is using actually gets around it. So if, you know, my sysadmin for Vox Media Max doesn't want us to use Zoom, theoretically this could get around that.

• 18:40Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think it gets around some of that stuff. Yeah. Which is, you know, is not great. Trying to, trying to capture user credentials and, you know, bypass security that's built into an operating system is, you know, not, not the way to go.

• 18:54Nilay Patel?

  I mean, at one point, I believe that it, it would pop up a dialogue box that identified itself as system and ask for your password.

• 19:02Speaker 07

  Which is.

• 19:03Nilay Patel?

  You shouldn't do that.

• 19:03Speaker 06

  Also, can we maybe clear that there's a typo in the pop up? It says, system need your privilege to change.

• 19:13Speaker 06

  If you're gonna hack my Mac, get, get, get the grammar right.

• 19:17Speaker 07

  It's like the typical phishing email. Everything looks a little wonky.

• 19:22Speaker 05

  Look, guys, at least, at least Zoom tells us that it's end to end encrypted.

• 19:28Nilay Patel?

  I want to finish the installer thing because I feel like we're going to argue about encryption a lot. So, Tom, they, they've changed the installer today.

• 19:34Speaker 07

  Yeah. So two days after the Zoom's here, I responded to the guy who, you know, brought up these issues. They've changed the installer today. And just totally walked back all that, all that stuff. So that's, that's good. But it does make you wonder why they, you know, it took someone on Twitter to make them change that kind of sketchy behavior.

• 19:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay. So then this brings us to end to end encryption, which is more fundamentally like a vocabulary debate.

• 20:03Speaker 06

  No.

• 20:04Nilay Patel?

  Than almost anything.

• 20:05Speaker 06

  It was never a debate.

• 20:06Nilay Patel?

  Well, here, I'll just do the, the story of the reporting and then we can get into the substance of it. The Zoom says it's end to end encrypted. Which charitably is uh just something that rhymes with the truth. It's the most charitable I'll be there. So they they say it, the intercept points out like this isn't true. Like even their own white papers say it's not true. And then Zoom was like, oh, we were just using a shorthand. Like, that was their excuse. And then they published another blog post today explaining how they think their system works, apologizing for using it, and then walking it back. Paul, explain the the technical detail here.

• 20:43Speaker 06

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

• 21:24Nilay Patel?

  Just transport encryption.

• 21:26Speaker 06

  Transport encryption. Thank you. And so it goes through the straw and then it's unencrypted on Zoom servers. Then it's reencrypted to go over the wire again to the destination.

• 21:35Nilay Patel?

  Wait, why is that straws?

• 21:37Speaker 06

  Well, I was just thinking of two things. I mean, you can crack the horseshoe in half.

• 21:41Nilay Patel?

  You were like the classic two straws method. I was like, I don't, I also like horseshoe is one hunk of metal. It's not like two things and then a server.

• 21:50Speaker 06

  No, we cannot. Imagine one bendy straw.

• 21:53Nilay Patel?

  Welcome to the Vergecast, where we argue about metaphors until we're dead. But the point here is Zoom is saying the ends are encrypted.

• 22:03Nilay Patel?

  Right? And like, the two is like, up for debate. Like, extreme debate. So they published a diagram today. I would say that easier, that maybe the easier way to think about this is when we talk about iMessage or whatever, it's who has the keys, right? Usually, when you think of end to end encrypted, the service provider does not have the key to decrypt the message. Right? So Apple, depending on whether or not you're in China, or whether you have any set of complicated iMessage in the cloud settings turned on, Apple generally does not have the keys to your messages. And they're very proud of that fact that they pushed it out in the world. The users have the keys. So Apple is moving, moving the messages between

• 22:43Nilay Patel?

  users and then you have the keys to decrypt your stuff. Zoom, in this case, has the key. And all they're saying is, in the middle, in the cloud, we're not using the key. If you're using what they call Zoom endpoints, so the app on a phone, the app on a laptop, a Zoom room, which is just the app running on a Chrome box, but I guess we can call it a Zoom room, those are their endpoints and that all stays encrypted. That is not intended. That's why it's like it rhymes with the truth. Like, it is not the truth, it has like a rhyming, like, relationship to the truth. Like, what they're saying, if intended encryption did not have a commonly accepted meaning, right? But here it doesn't.

• 23:25Nilay Patel?

  Then they have the problem of people call into Zoom using telephone lines, using other weird services. You can call into Zoom with Skype in some weird way, right? So they've built connectors inside of their cloud system to decrypt the stuff and send it out over those connections, which are obviously not encrypted, right? If they wanted to be end-to-end encrypted, I'm not sure how they could ever build the telephone bridge, or the Skype bridge, or whatever. And so, why even tell this lie?

• 23:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 23:51Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's the thing I don't understand.

• 23:53Speaker 06

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

• 24:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I think that is, I want to make sure we keep talking on Zoom. But to me, that is a, it is a criticism we have faced, because we keep covering what people are doing in Zoom. And so, like, do I want to write a story that's like, This bride who got married in Zoom because of the virus ruining her plans, used the wrong software for my personal moral reasons. That doesn't seem like the correct angle into that story. Like, there is an emergent class of cultural behavior happening in Zoom that is interesting and worth talking about. And then there's Zoom's responsibility to its users, especially that new class of users, who is not attuned to worrying about whether secret web servers are getting installed on a Mac,

• 25:00Nilay Patel?

  who is not attuned to, hey, this one-click installation is pretty shady, who is not attuned to, oh, I'm gonna actually dig into what they mean by end-to-end encrypted, whether they're just using the phrase any way they want, or whether it's the commonly accepted thing. They're not attuned to the fact that if you hit record on a Zoom call, I'm sure the person who got married in Zoom hit record, right? That's why it's your wedding. Like, I'm confident they hit record. Well, that file is on Zoom servers, and Zoom employees can watch it because they have the key. That stuff is, to me, particularly damning.

• 25:35Speaker 06

  I also think you could blame a little bit of the install shenanigans on operating system vendors. Like, there are easier ways to get software. You could imagine them having better sandboxing. I know there's another Zoom vulnerability with, like, links to network stuff.

• 25:53Speaker 07

  On the Windows side, yeah.

• 25:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, but like, you could imagine an operating system that you could have, you'd click a link in the browser, you'd get a native app running on your desktop that wouldn't be dangerous. You know, like, that could just work. Or, you know, Apple could make it Mac App Store not, like, anti-developer, and so you could just send people right there, like you do on the phone, and people are pretty comfortable installing apps on the phone.

• 26:20Speaker 07

  It's kind of a fundamental flaw with desktop operating systems. Like, you know, you said you can imagine an operating system where you click a link and then you go into a native app. That's literally iOS, you know? Like, that's what literally happens on that side of things. But yeah, like, they have to work around all of these weird oddities with desktop operating systems. Whilst also trying to exploit the fact that you can do so much more on those desktop operating systems. But I think ultimately it's like, with any of this stuff is like a balance of ease of use, privacy and security and all that sort of stuff. And like, it's trust in Zoom, like whether we can trust Zoom.

• 26:59Speaker 07

  Like, we we had these issues last year, we've obviously got a ton of issues now, and I'm sure by the time this, by the time people even listen to this, there'll be more. Like, this isn't ending, like, they've got such a focus on them now that people are going to discover a bunch of stuff. And it really, it depends on how the 200 million or however many people are using it. Like, respond to all this sort of stuff, like, do they, we've seen it with Google and Facebook, like, they've had privacy issues, for for sure, they've had a ton. But they they have good products and people still flock to them in their millions. And there's that that issue of trust, you know, people trust these companies. Do we trust Zoom?

• 27:40Speaker 07

  Like, that's that, I think that's at the heart of it, do we do we trust Zoom to fix this stuff now that they've been found out? And do people trust to use it?

• 27:49Nilay Patel?

  So they, but they they announced a big move today, right?

• 27:52Speaker 07

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

• 28:27Nilay Patel?

  And the the CEO is also holding a weekly webinar.

• 28:30Speaker 07

  Which is, you know, that's that's good. I mean, that's like a little bit of transparency, at least.

• 28:35Nilay Patel?

  I started out talking about Bezos and like Casey in the newsletter is just banging the drum that like Bezos should be issuing a briefing about Amazon's status. Every week, like it's Amazon is like that important that it it makes sense that they would give us a weekly status report. I'm like, I was talking to Casey Alston, actually, and he was like, it is crazy that Amazon hasn't said anything to its customers. Like, the Amazon product of like, push a button and get something sent to your house is like extremely degraded right now. And Amazon hasn't said a word about it. They're just like powering through it. Whereas, like, okay, Zoom is like, our CEO is going to be in a Zoom call every week, talking about privacy and security while we freeze all features. Like, that those are radically different ends

• 29:15Nilay Patel?

  of the spectrum. I think the question for me, still, is, was this stuff, were these mistakes? Were they solutions where somebody didn't think about the stakes of those solutions at the scale, which is less forgivable than mistakes, but still, you know, on the spectrum of forgivability? Or is this reflective of the company culture that doesn't actually respect users? That doesn't actually respect privacy? And like, that is the big question. When you say, do you trust Zoom? To me, that is the question, by far.

• 29:46Speaker 07

  I think that is the thing. Because like, you can see from some of the stuff they've done, the installer stuff, the stuff last year with the web server, like, some of that is, is probably, you know, to take away some of the friction of using your product. But it's also very growth hacky. It's very, it looks malicious. It just looks terrible when you get found out doing it. So like, have they considered those options? Do they think, oh, you know, what's going to happen if we audit us? And it's, it's pretty clear they haven't really considered that. And that's like, such a typical thing of a startup. Like, security is always second, you know? It's like, how do we, how do we get users? That's the primary thing. And they don't think about the privacy and security aspects until it's too late. We see this all too often.

• 30:27Nilay Patel?

  But Zoom is like, what is it, eight years old? It has a market cap of $34 billion? Like, do you, do you give them the startup benefit of the doubt? Like, I, I think that's like, another big question is, they're, they're in a place right now where so many people have never heard of them. And they're hearing about Zoom for the first, somebody was actually treating me yesterday, like, it seems concerning that Zoom came out of nowhere like this. I'm like, eight years old, $34 billion market cap, like, they didn't come out of nowhere. They're just having this moment. But they get to ride along the like, oh, we're a startup. We didn't think about it.

• 30:57Speaker 07

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

• 31:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then I think on the other side of it, they have a lot of competitors, a big, well-funded, established companies, right? And it's like, you wrote about Skype and how Microsoft has blown it with Skype completely ever since they acquired Skype. And like those companies are, they are on the attack.

• 31:50Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:51Nilay Patel?

  But they're not, like, this is a moment for them to claw back from Zoom. And I think that's just another kind of pressure, which is good. In many ways, that is just competitive market pressure. That I'm like happy to see, but there's no network effect with Zoom. Like, once you use Zoom once, it doesn't have like your social graph or whatever. Like, it's pretty easy to switch from Zoom. And so I'm curious if you see people over time, just like move away from Zoom because this round of backlash actually took hold and they tried something else. It doesn't matter if like switching is easy, so they may as well stay with something else.

• 32:25Speaker 07

  I'm also curious to see how much like them scaling up to this amount of people has cost them. Like that's, it's quite a thing to go from like 10 million to 200 million in the space of like a few months. That's like massive growth. And when your product is like essentially free, like 40 minutes is, you know, everyone just thinks that's, that's a meeting time in Zoom, I think that's using at the moment. So I'm curious like how that impacts them going, going forwards. Cause some of those, those choices they're gonna have to make in the next 90 days are gonna be, you know, business, business model choices. And like, do we take it down to like a 10, 20 minute meeting, you know? Do we have 50 participants to 100, like all that sort of stuff? Like, I think, I think we're about to see Zoom change quite a lot.

• 33:09Speaker 05

  Yeah. The funny thing to me is, Neil, you just said like, it's easy to switch away from Zoom, and you're absolutely right. It's easy to switch away from Zoom. It's actually pretty hard to switch to most of the other video chat apps. Microsoft Teams, you gotta like, figure out what the hell Teams is. Hangouts still exists somehow, and you gotta figure out what Hangouts Meet is. Duo only works on phones and like, you know, smart displays. FaceTime requires that everybody have an Apple device. Every other like chat app that happens to have video chat attached to it, you gotta sign up for the chat app. There's actually like, a pretty high onboarding cost for almost everything. And that's, I mean, that's one of the reasons Zoom is so successful. But I'm just wondering, like,

• 33:54Speaker 05

  who's gonna be the first one to be like, hey, we made it as easy as Zoom. Just here's a link and you're on.

• 34:00Nilay Patel?

  We've installed a website.

• 34:03Nilay Patel?

  Well, Dieter, would you like me to read from our list of Zoom alternatives?

• 34:07Speaker 05

  I would, yes.

• 34:08Nilay Patel?

  People do have Skype in the world. It's still there. They, they didn't blow it so badly as to kill it. Like, there's Skype. I think WebEx has a free version. Whereby is that? Like, there's, Hangouts exists. It's true.

• 34:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's stuff.

• 34:22Nilay Patel?

  BlueJeans, actually, you can't get unless you pay.

• 34:24Speaker 05

  Oh, really? Okay. Never mind.

• 34:26Nilay Patel?

  But they're like, these companies see the opportunity.

• 34:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 34:29Nilay Patel?

  Right? If you've been operating a middling video conference service this whole time, and like, suddenly like, everyone's mad at Zoom, you're like, look at me! And that's great. Like, I applaud that. I think people should look at alternatives. I just think, it's tough. And the other thing is like, it's the same with Slack. It's the same with Teams. We're seeing this pattern over and over again, where all of this enterprise software is fundamentally just collaboration software. And lots of consumers, for lots of reasons, need to collaborate now. So they're using these enterprise tools. Those tools are doing more generous free tiers, or doing whatever, because they're just hoping to convert to pain at the end. So Tom, you've been looking at that stuff, too. What is sort of the status of that, the Slack Teams world?

• 35:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, what so Slack versus Teams versus Zoom. Slack is basically coming at it from we're gonna, you know, team up with everyone, team up with Zoom and Google and whoever else they can get to integrate into their app to take on Microsoft Teams, because obviously Microsoft Teams is coming in hard, shall we say, and really trying to chase them. And I think that sets up some like interesting dynamics with like this whole Zoom situation, because if you're, if you're like a Microsoft or Cisco, you've been making some good revenue on your, on your, on your video services and stuff and, you know, Zoom's getting a lot of attention elsewhere. Like, you don't want that to become a thing, because it's a freemium product and, you know, there's going to be plenty of people

• 35:52Speaker 07

  that will pay for it eventually. And it just sets up that interesting dynamic between like, it, it reminds me, Zoom reminds me of Google, you know, like they're, they're basically throwing a product out there for free, hoping that, you know, a lot of people pick it. And then they'll probably like start charging for it a little bit later on or like, you know, entice people in. And that, that just reminds me of like the Microsoft and the Ciscos, basically, they don't want their cash cow at their office being pulled away to like, you know, Google Docs and stuff. And I think what we're gonna see is stuff like Slack versus Microsoft Teams is we're gonna see these Zooms, we're gonna see more the, you know, offering stuff that's gonna be an alternative to

• 36:33Speaker 07

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

• 36:58Speaker 06

  Can I ask a question a little out of ignorance? What is Microsoft Teams outside of being Slack? And I assume there's some sort of Office integration.

• 37:07Speaker 07

  That's pretty much it. It's literally deeply integrating into Office. Skype is like their video and calling solution within Teams. And it's Slack. The thing with, the thing with Slack is that you don't do video calls, like we're not doing a video call in Slack. And there's a reason for that, because Slack video calls aren't good, so you use Zoom. And like that's, that's the drawback to Slack that they have to integrate and you know, refer parties that are better at doing some parts, whereas Microsoft's trying to bet on the fact that they can do everything and like sell it as a cheaper package.

• 37:41Nilay Patel?

  And to say that all Teams is a Slack made by Microsoft with Office integration, I would put that a different way. I would say, holy shit, Teams is a Slack made by Microsoft with Microsoft integration that everybody with Office just gets.

• 37:55Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 37:56Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 37:56Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 37:56Nilay Patel?

  That's just there.

• 37:57Speaker 07

  That's the big thing. Yeah. And they're, they're putting it as like, there's such a focus on it as being their hub. So it's, I think it's where we're going to see a lot of the experimentation with whatever they want to do with Office in the future. And especially on the website.

• 38:11Nilay Patel?

  There's also just a part where Microsoft is bigger at certain kinds of clients than any startup could be because they're Microsoft. Right? So I know some IT consultants who like service a lot of law firms and they're like, I would never put Slack in a law firm. Like Microsoft just understands what a document retention policy is. And they've had 500 engineers thinking about document retention policies and Microsoft Word for 20 years.

• 38:37Speaker 07

  It's literally their bread and butter, right?

• 38:39Nilay Patel?

  Right. And it's like Slack has like maybe one person who just Wikipeded it yesterday, right? And like, there's just a huge advantage that Mike, I'm sure Slack is better. They're a great company, but um, not to over exaggerate, but Microsoft just has that reputation. They have that client relation.

• 38:56Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 38:57Nilay Patel?

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

• 39:20Speaker 07

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

• 39:39Speaker 07

  Like, that's the thing that Slack and all the competitors are gonna play on. And we've seen it, like, that's their only competitive advantage, really, because they know that Microsoft's a juggernaut. You can pay $5 for Zoom, you can pay $5 for G Suite, you can pay $5 for Slack, then you're paying $15. Whereas Microsoft will come in and be like, you can pay $5, you know?

• 40:00Nilay Patel?

  All right, we've done 48 minutes on Zoom, which is incredible. I didn't expect us to be able to do that. But Tom, before we let you go, Microsoft actually did change how 365 works, Microsoft 365. Just tell us about that a little bit, because it's all in the same zone.

• 40:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, so essentially, they had Office 365 for consumers, which was basically your Office subscription and a bunch of cloud stuff thrown into like storage and all that sort of stuff. They've essentially rebranded that to Microsoft 365 and then tagged a few things on top of that. One of those is Microsoft Teams for consumers or for home or for life, whatever they're gonna call it.

• 40:34Speaker 06

  A family is a team of sorts.

• 40:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:38Speaker 07

  Hopefully.

• 40:40Speaker 07

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

• 41:08Nilay Patel?

  And the price is still $6.99, right?

• 41:10Speaker 07

  Yep, the price is still the same. And they've tagged these extra things on. And a bunch of Office things that they've done as well, there's a bunch of AI stuff, like an editor, like, kind of like a Grammarly sort of stuff. And yeah, they kept the price the same, which is cool. You're getting more for whatever you were paying before. And that's all coming in April. A lot of it is coming soon, in the following months. It's not totally clear exactly when it'll all be available. But you can see the path they're going on. And they're still keeping Skype. So, but it's trying to convince people to also use Teams. I don't know, like, there's definitely some sort of clash there, there's some tension.

• 41:47Speaker 06

  Aren't they rewriting Skype and Electron or something?

• 41:50Speaker 07

  Well, yes. Don't get started on that.

• 41:54Nilay Patel?

  How much do I have to pay Microsoft to just keep using Wunderlist? I would pay $20 a month to just keep using Wunderlist. And not have any other part of Microsoft 365, just not to not have to switch to Todo.

• 42:08Speaker 07

  The founder tried to buy it back, right?

• 42:10Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 42:11Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 42:12Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft Todo is so close to being Wunderlist and then it's not. Also, I'm just gonna say this, if you make a swipey app and one thing that you can do is delete stuff with a swipe, just consider left-handed people. Because we are often in the grocery store accidentally deleting items from the grocery list as we walk around the grocery store. I'm not saying that that has happened to me. I'm just saying, please think of left-handed people when you make your swipey app. Because I want to get out of the grocery store as fast as possible lately. So it's just an idea that I have.

• 42:47Speaker 05

  I just want to point out that Microsoft 365 for $6.99 a month, Dropbox is $10 a month. Google One, which basically just gives you Google Drive and then they pretend there's other stuff there. You know, that's like $10 a month. iCloud is a bunch of money. Like, the amount of value that you get, like, you get all the other Apple stuff in iCloud for free, basically. And what you're paying for is basically like more storage. So the stuff that you get out of Microsoft for that $6.99 a month is actually more value than what you get from Google or Apple for their like $10 a month.

• 43:19Nilay Patel?

  You know, I'm just proud of Microsoft that they didn't call it Azure for consumers.

• 43:26Speaker 07

  I think they're at the point where they're, you know, they've done so many different services and consumer stuff over the years. And we don't have to dig in about all of, how that's failed. But I think they're kind of, they're at the point where they're like, understanding like who uses their products, finally? And they're not trying to, they're not trying to go after like, you know, the next million or whatever. They're like, okay, where can we add some sort of value here and make people actually go for it?

• 43:53Nilay Patel?

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

• 44:06Speaker 07

  Thanks and stay safe and well.

• 44:08Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're gonna be, we're gonna be right back.

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• 45:14Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Other big news, this actually kind of happened early. There's a lot to talk about here, but I suspect we're just going to talk about Sprint nostalgia. I think, I think I know how this is going to go. T-Mobile and Sprint merger closed and John Ledger stepped down as CEO. He's still on the board, but Mike Severt, new CEO of T-Mobile, now part of Sprint, third carrier on the scale of 18 team Verizon. I will say this, we have talked about this merger and what it means and whether it works and whether Dish Network is going to invent a 7G network, whatever they're going to do. My position on whether the merger was good idea about is clear. We've argued about it. I hope you enjoyed that conversation, but it's done now. Yep.

• 45:57Nilay Patel?

  And I think what is important for me to reframe my thinking, what I'm going to, the posture I want to take is they got to prove it. Right? They got what they wanted. You know, I started the show by joking that like, I'm good at counting days since a promise was made. They made an awful lot of promises about this merger. They made an awful lot of promises about prices not going up, about being competitive with AT&T and Verizon, about building a 5G network, about honestly making jobs in places around the country. That's how they settled a lot of state attorney general lawsuits. We're going to track those promises. I hope they keep all their promises. I want to say that very clearly. I hope they keep all their promises. I hope they are competitive. They continue that competitive spirit that made a lot of people love T-Mobile to begin with

• 46:39Nilay Patel?

  at their larger scale. It is weird to think that they're going to do that with a new CEO who is not John Ledger.

• 46:44Speaker 05

  You know, you might think that I just, I don't like John Ledger, but I see John Ledger as like, being incredibly smart and savvy. Even, I think his persona was calculated. I really do. You know, that doesn't mean that it's like, not also like sincere. I think, weirdly, I think that those aren't necessarily opposites. But, so, very early in his tenure, back in those days, my title at The Verge was Assistant Managing Editor. And I was one of the very first people to ask him about net neutrality concerns when he started zero rating music streaming services. It was at one of his Un-carrier events. It was pretty early on. And so then I got on his list, and he likes to poke fun at journalists.

• 47:27Speaker 05

  And so, I tweeted something, whatever, and he tweeted at me, "Is it your title Assistant to the Managing Editor?"

• 47:34Nilay Patel?

  Nah, it's pretty good.

• 47:35Speaker 05

  Good office thing. And I was very angry about this. I was, "Oh man, he got me. How do I do?" And then I realized, because this was back then, the most likely outcome for T-Mobile when John Ledger came on to try and turn it around, was they were going to crash and burn because they, you know, didn't get sold to AT&T, and they were going to get bought out by SoftBank. And so, I replied to him and said, "Yeah, it's a weird title. Has, you know, the CEO of SoftBank picked your title yet?" And to his credit, he was like, "Good one, Dieter. Like, you got me. I respect that."

• 48:07Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good.

• 48:08Speaker 05

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

• 48:28Nilay Patel?

  I will say that the, the CEO that SoftBank installed to save Sprint is now the, in charge of WeWork. So SoftBank has like, I don't think they've learned any lessons from that experience. And so goes, look, I, we are very critical of telecoms is the fact. I think John Leger, this is like a lion of our industry. He was no longer the CEO of this company. And like, he said a lot of things that were true about American wireless carriers and then did the opposite thing. He said, these contracts are dumb. In Europe, they don't have contracts like this. We're just gonna sell you the phone. If you want an installment plan, we'll sell you the installment plan. But we're unbundling it from the price of service. I think that was actually the first un-carrier move.

• 49:08Speaker 05

  Yeah. And the best.

• 49:09Nilay Patel?

  And by far, the best one.

• 49:10Speaker 05

  Everybody had to follow.

• 49:11Nilay Patel?

  Everybody had to follow. Uh, you know, my joke about zero rating is that when you actually have competitive carriers and they start to compete on zero rating, they end up at net neutrality by default because they've zero rated everything.

• 49:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 49:24Nilay Patel?

  Like, you sort of like end up there and that has more or less happened. I mean, it's not what I would want, but they've all ended up at unlimited plans that are throttled at 22 gig.

• 49:36Speaker 05

  Quarter unlimited plans.

• 49:38Nilay Patel?

  Like I'm saying, it's not exactly how it wants to play out, but they are all doing the thing where they're saying, okay, we're not going to let video hit your data cap. We're going to downscale it to 480p. You can't see enough on the screen. Maybe you can, maybe you can't. They're all doing it.

• 49:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 49:50Nilay Patel?

  Right? They are all aggressively trying to, to churn customers because they know that T-Mobile will churn customers to T-Mobile with aggressive pricing. Okay. Like that stuff, no CEO was doing, no CEO was coming right out and saying how they thought the industry would go. You know, even if you listen to the Vergecast, maybe you know who the CEO of Verizon is. Maybe do. Maybe you know who the CEO of AT&T is. Most people perceive them, it's Hans Vestberg and Randall Stephenson.

• 50:21Speaker 05

  I failed your test.

• 50:23Nilay Patel?

  Paul. Like, maybe you know these names and they're out there and, you know, it hands of password at CES like goes on a wild tangent about 5G frequencies and it's esoteric and it's hard to understand. Maybe you know these folks. Most people think, and like even the people who disagree with me are like AT&T and Verizon basically price against each other. AT&T raises its prices by a dollar, Verizon's not far behind, right? They are the duopoly. Ledger just started calling them the duopoly. And in fact, a lot of people know who John Ledger is. He said, that's a duopoly, that's how they work. I'm not going to do that. He became a character. He became a voice. He styled himself, I do think this is calculated, he styled themselves as the voice of a frustrated consumer. All this

• 51:07Nilay Patel?

  stuff is like pure genius. Whether or not you believe that like the leaked documents we got in the lawsuit to block the merger indicated that they were trying to merge with Sprint, so they become that scale and then eventually raise prices and just become one, make fun, right? Like that lawsuit is lost, it's in the past. You can read those documents, you can shudder for what might have been, whatever. Can they keep that spirit up now that they have the scale? One of my favorite Ledger moments was actually really recently, when he was just talking about their 5G network and how they were going to build it. And it was super relatable. And he was like, they're idiots. AT&T's network is crap. Verizon's network is a mistake. Here's how I'm building mine. Here's how

• 51:49Nilay Patel?

  it's gonna, and it's like, very few telecom CEOs have that ability to communicate, that ability to cut through the noise, and that ability to say, here's my plan, and then convince you that they're gonna do it. Randall Stephenson will tell you about AT&T's plan for HBO Max. And you're like, yeah, that's, those are some words you said, bro. Like, T-Mobile has, inside, I want to, you know, in the spirit of, I think, was it two weeks ago, I complimented the wireline CEOs for taking away their data caps. Okay. It's a different time. We're at home. We're existentially reconsidering our lives. I will compliment this telecom CEO. I think it is just an incredible run. And I truly hope they just keep their promises. I'll be counting.

• 52:32Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, so they've already lit up LTE for some Sprint customers. So T-Mobile's LTE is lit up. They are promising some 5G software updates for some Sprint 5G phones to take advantage of T-Mobile's 5G network. So they've made some of the early moves that they could. They have told, they told Heimgarten Berg, ask them a million questions. What's going to happen? What are you doing? La la la. And like, look, we're not closing anything tomorrow. We're, you know, we've got three years. We promised not to raise prices. We don't have any immediate plans to close down any stores or whatever. So like, hopefully they do things right. Hopefully there aren't mass layoffs. Hopefully like they could keep their promises. We shall see.

• 53:12Nilay Patel?

  I imagine like every merger comes with layoffs. This is a bad time to be, you know, laying off your redundant sales or HR staff or whatever, whatever savings you thought you were going to get there. It's a bad time to be closing Sprint stores. They know that's a bad look. They promised to keep a lot of that stuff up for three years. Great. The real questions I have is like at the end of two and a half years, right when the, you know, they're getting to the end of we've promised to keep prices the same. Are they going to roll out some new data plans that are more expensive, that are better? And they're going to like leave the old ones grandfathered in, right? Are they going to start playing games with the promise? That is something telecom companies do all the time. Sprint customers right now, I think are relatively, our explainer, what happens to Sprint customers now? It's like, it's been the top post on the site all day. And the answer is nothing.

• 53:58Nilay Patel?

  The answer is like, maybe in a couple of months, the logo on the top of your bill will change, but that's it for now.

• 54:02Speaker 06

  And you're probably going to get better service if your phone supports it.

• 54:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. If you've got a newer phone and you, you know, they, they decide they want to push a software update to it. Maybe you'll get better service. Okay, that's a delight. If you've got like some old Android phone, it's probably going to be very similar for you for a long time, right? So hopefully all that stuff plays out. I think the real questions are, when do they start deprecating Sprint's network to reform that spectrum for 5G? That's a big question. When do they start, you know, the next iPhone will come out. Is that just going to be a T-Mobile phone? Are they going to make two variants for Sprint and T-Mobile networks right now? Like, I don't know the answer. So I think that stuff is like a little up in the air, but it will get resolved. And then I think, I said we were going to do Sprint history. I think. Sprint as a company has a long legacy.

• 54:52Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, you wrote about it today, but like a bunch of technical decisions Sprint made around WiMAX, around voice over LTE, all that stuff is going to get unwound. And so a bunch of those devices are going to stop working. Not WiMAX devices already stopped working, but like Sprint's legacy CDMA network, their voice network, all that stuff is going to start to go away. And I don't know on what timeline that is yet. And they're not saying, because they only just closed the deal.

• 55:15Speaker 05

  Yeah. And I think if you're a Sprint customer and you're like worried about that, I don't think you need to be. I think that your phone's going to work fine. I think that, I don't know, like people hang on to phones longer than they used to. So like, it used to be like, oh, it's three years and three years you're getting a new phone anyway, whatever. That's not necessarily true anymore. But this is like another thing to like, watch T-Mobile, see if they do right by Sprint customers, who might get caught in a technical cul-de-sac because their phone depends on a Sprint technology that's getting EOL'd.

• 55:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then, and then like next to that, which is not directly to T-Mobile, you know, Dish Network now has a seven-year NDO agreement. How fast is Dish Network going to start selling phones? This, this like crazy software-defined radio 5G plan.

• 56:00Speaker 06

  You know, if you think about it, Dish has got to start a network. They need somebody to run the network. John Ledger doesn't have a job.

• 56:09Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God, that would be incredible. That would be great. Be like, I'm doing it again.

• 56:15Speaker 06

  Oh, man.

• 56:17Nilay Patel?

  It'll be great. I think he's just pretty happy.

• 56:19Speaker 06

  It's like a new game plus as a telecom CEO.

• 56:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, that stuff, that is even more wait and see, are you going to keep your promises? Right? And, you know, the sort of conventional wisdom is why would you believe them? They've never kept this kind of promise before.

• 56:37Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. I imagine it's harder to build a network when no one can leave their house, right? Like, they've got to get a bunch of network technicians up on poles to build stuff and write code for the software-defined radios. One just imagines that it's currently harder than you expect.

• 56:50Speaker 05

  And companies don't generally blatantly blatantly break promises they made to the FTC or the DOJ. They might like skirt around it, but they don't blatantly just do full on.

• 57:00Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man.

• 57:03Nilay Patel?

  I feel like Casey's, like every other day Casey's newsletter, it's like Facebook breaks promise to the FTC.

• 57:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:11Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and what's the FCC gonna do? Fine, then $10? Like, it's fine. Uh, yeah, we'll see. Dieter, do you want to talk about Sprint for two minutes? I feel like it isn't it.

• 57:19Speaker 05

  I mean, just a couple of minutes. We've run long. The, the thing that I tried and failed to work into my newsletter like four times. I, I basically, I wrote the story that like back in the day, if you were into smartphones, Sprint was a great network because it didn't have all the limitations that Verizon threw at you. It didn't cost as much as AT&T. You didn't have to worry about whether the global phone was compatible with like you did on AT&T. And you could get like this Sprint employee referral option, which was like made the phones cheap. They were more accessible to people that didn't make a ton of money than the other carriers and that really mattered. They were one of the early carriers that did unlimited plan, the simply everything plan. Like Dan Hesse was the CEO who rolled in and like was going to, you know, change everything.

• 58:00Speaker 05

  And he like unveiled on a limited plan and blah, blah, like, like that, he was the John Ledger of his day, only he was, you know, 20 feet tall. Dan Hesse was a very tall CEO, but the thing I wanted to put in there and I just couldn't quite get it is Sprint. Also, they made a bunch of really bad technical decisions, right? YMAX, they bought Nextel, you know, Iden. But when they started like as a long distance company, like they were technically good. They had one of the very first all digital networks for cellular companies. Like they, they moved away from the classic TDMA, like analog cell phone system first. Their logo is that weird yellow fan that is supposed to be representative of a pin bouncing off of a table.

• 58:42Speaker 05

  Because their whole spiel was you can hear a pin drop on our network because it's so technically good. So there's like, there's an alternative history here where Dan Hesse makes the right call. Or they have a little bit more money or YMAX turns out not to be a dumpster fire or whatever. Where we would just, they would just have succeeded. And maybe that means that like AT&T ends up buying T-Mobile and like we're back at three no matter what. Because no matter what, everything ends up terrible, but there was a chance. And so if you were, you know, in a certain demographic. In the in the US in like the mid 2000s like Sprint was a great place to be like there was actually a real

• 59:25Speaker 05

  community around it too like you could go to Hoho you could Sprint's Sprint's thing was called Buzz about wireless there were there were like a handful of forums that you could go to and like talk to other Sprint users and like get into it and it was it was weird that people were like loyal to Sprint and that made like makes no sense to me now but they were and the same with the people are like loyal to T-Mobile like that is a wacky trick to pull off I don't feel any loyalty to my broadband provider

• 59:51Nilay Patel?

  None at all

• 59:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, are you saying when when the pre because when the pre came out I switched to Sprint to use the pre did were you still a Sprint subscriber was that would have been 2008

• 1:00:01Speaker 05

  No, I was bouncing around by then that was 2008 so I had switched to AT&T for the iPhone and also just to have other phones because I needed to test more Windows mobile phones and more were available by then and I didn't include the pre as like another like oh good job Sprint because the only reason the pre was on Sprint is because they got rejected by Verizon so

• 1:00:22Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I would say I was reading as everyone should read Dieter's piece it's it's it's very sweet it's a it's a

• 1:00:28Speaker 06

  It's so good

• 1:00:29Nilay Patel?

  It's just like a very nostalgic thing to read the edit I would have made was and then Sprint started killing everything

• 1:00:34Speaker 06

  Yeah

• 1:00:35Nilay Patel?

  Like Sprint became the kiss of death for palm twice now I think they've they've killed it No, the little palm was on Verizon nevermind

• 1:00:42Speaker 06

  Yeah

• 1:00:43Nilay Patel?

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

• 1:01:23Nilay Patel?

  Everyone always tells me that's an overread. I mean, a lot of things destroyed Sprint. But that bet where they didn't have the standard network just ruined that like they've been fighting back from that bet literally ever since. And I think when it came time for 5G, everyone learned the lesson. Like, there was not a deep 5G standards debate. There's a deep 5G like frequencies debate, millimeter wave, whatever. But like, that's more based on where is available spectrum. It's not like it's going to work differently. And I, as far as I can tell, there's not a major carrier in the world that's not going to build a standards 5G network by the end. There's a little bit of like, we got ahead of the

• 1:02:05Nilay Patel?

  standard to build our network first. Gamesmanship going on, fine. But by the end, it'll be a standardized network across the world. And that is, I swear to God, that is like, all the telecom executives got in the smoke-filled room at NWC and they're like, we're not going to sprint this up, right?

• 1:02:22Speaker 05

  They're like, you know, they decided it would be a marathon, Eli.

• 1:02:27Nilay Patel?

  We're not going to make the YMAX thing. No one here is doing YMAX, right? We can all agree. And like, that to me is like, just, it's one of those inflection points in tech history that, you know, now it's just like sort of ancient history. But it taught so many people like a crucial lesson about how to build these networks. Okay. Paul, do you have any deep nostalgic Sprint thoughts?

• 1:02:47Speaker 06

  I'm just a little, okay, two things. Sprint has a better logo and color than T-Mobile.

• 1:02:54Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 1:02:55Speaker 06

  And it's always been true. And despite Sprint, I feel like now when I look at the Sprint logo, I think of failure. So like, some of the shine is off, but I still like the aesthetic better. Also, Nextel was a real fun moment. Remember those walkie talkie phones?

• 1:03:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Oh, there are people who are still mad at Sprint for blowing Nextel. Like, I wrote that lossy piece the other day, or three months ago, however, what day is it?

• 1:03:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:03:21Nilay Patel?

  However, long ago that was. And like, there was one half-hearted Nextel joke in it. And like, people were treating me like, I'm still mad about Nextel.

• 1:03:28Speaker 05

  They really screwed that up.

• 1:03:29Speaker 06

  There was just like, a certain, certain dude loved just strolling into the office with his Nextel phone, blaring all his conversations.

• 1:03:42Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's it. We'll be right back.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

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• 1:04:15Speaker 02

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  Let's get into layering.

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• 1:04:40Speaker 08

  Hi, I, uh...

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

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• 1:04:45Speaker 06

  All right, Paul Miller. Mm-hmm. Every week, my friend. That's right. What is it called? I do a segment every week and it's called If I Were a Rich Man, sung to the tune of If I Were a Rich Man from the musical. Fiddle on the roof.

• 1:05:05Speaker 06

  Dieter, you have to stop singing.

• 1:05:08Speaker 06

  Asus has re-upped its membership in the keyboard in the front club. Yes. They have shown up in such a big way with the Asus ROG Zephyrus Duo 15. So they had already done this dual screen laptop, right? The big problem, so you have keyboard in the front, right? Where your palms used to be on crappy laptops.

• 1:05:36Speaker 06

  Above the keyboard deck, it was a screen.

• 1:05:39Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:05:39Speaker 06

  And then you also have a regular screen.

• 1:05:41Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:05:41Speaker 06

  The obvious problem, anybody could see it the first time that they saw this laptop, is that the flat screen above your keyboard is at a bad viewing angle. So it's going to be kind of hard to use.

• 1:05:53Nilay Patel?

  And it also, there's also a giant bezel on the main screen underneath it.

• 1:05:57Speaker 06

  Also that. So now they have sort of like the Leonardo da Vinci of laptop manufacturing. They have created a hinge that also while you're opening the laptop, the second screen tilts up towards you. And now it's at a perfect angle for glanceable information. It's touchscreen, you can use a stylus. It's just, it's so cool. And it's $3,000 and I am so far away from having $3,000. But it's really just the greatest laptop on the planet right now.

• 1:06:36Nilay Patel?

  What I, what I just, I'm just gazing at this, this image. There's like people like me who are like, I wonder if this will be like, this device will be good on an airplane. Like I think about that.

• 1:06:45Speaker 06

  What?

• 1:06:45Nilay Patel?

  And then there's like another group of people for whom that is absolutely not a consideration.

• 1:06:53Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like at no point did the designers of this machine care about an airplane seat back or even like a first class experience. Like they were just like, no, this is pretty much going to be on your desk at home.

• 1:07:08Nilay Patel?

  This is great. I'm very excited for it.

• 1:07:10Speaker 05

  We're not going to have time to get into it at the end of the show. So I just want to point out that a bunch of laptop stuff happened. Monica Chin reviewed the Asus ROG Zephyrus with AMD chip. And it is stunningly good. And it really throws down on Intel's 10th gen stuff, which is now starting to come out alongside new Nvidia stuff. So like a bunch, a bunch, a bunch of laptop stuff happened. But we might save that if we can for next week because it's way too much to get into today.

• 1:07:38Nilay Patel?

  We should, we'll just have Monica on next week.

• 1:07:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think we'll just have Monica on.

• 1:07:41Speaker 06

  I just wanted to say, when you're talking about airplanes, right? A lot of these new Intel laptops that are coming out with the new Nvidia stuff are. Big gaming laptops. And I think the interesting thing about like the AMD laptop is probably not going to beat most of them in gaming. It looks like it has a probably a stronger CPU. The CPU is just astonishing. It's really wonderful. But that might be your gaming on an airplane laptop compared to a lot of these other ones, which actually might be, you might be able to get more game for your buck from the Intel laptops, it looks like.

• 1:08:18Speaker 06

  But if you want a slightly smaller, slightly better power wise, power efficiency gaming laptop, the Zephyrus G14 might be the, might be the, the ticket.

• 1:08:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And Monica, I should review that one this week. We should, we'll just have her on next week. It's like, it's that time to rethink laptops. So we should just do that, assuming the, you know, the world is still here, which, you know, 50 50. All right, Dieter, some, there is like Apple drama.

• 1:08:49Speaker 05

  Man, any other week, we would spend the entire Vergecast doing this. So out of nowhere, Amazon's Prime video app on iOS just suddenly had like rent and buy buttons on it. And people were like,

• 1:09:05Nilay Patel?

  And obviously the history here is that has never been allowed in any iOS app before.

• 1:09:09Speaker 05

  If you sell digital goods on iOS, not only do you have to sell it through Apple, you are not allowed to have a whisper to a reference to the possibility that you could maybe pay for it any other way. If you have a link out to your website, if you say, hey, you could subscribe on our website, you get rejected. And so to go from that to all of a sudden, there's just straight up buy buttons in the Amazon app.

• 1:09:32Nilay Patel?

  Without the 30% cut. Cause you can sell digital goods on, in iOS, we have to give Apple a cut. But this was buy buttons at the same price as a regular Amazon store.

• 1:09:41Speaker 05

  So everybody asked Apple for comment and kind of shockingly, Apple had a comment and here it is. I'm just going to read this. And Apple has an established program for premium subscription video entertainment providers to offer a variety of customer benefits, including integration with the Apple TV app, AirPlay to support, TVOS apps, universal search, series support, and where applicable, single or zero sign in. On qualifying premium video entertainment apps such as Prime Video, Altice One and Canal Plus, customers have the option to buy or rent movies and TV shows using the payment method tied to their existing video subscription. So lots of things to unpack here.

• 1:10:26Speaker 05

  The idea that this program is established is very interesting because Mark Gurman, Mark Gurman, who knows quite a bit about Apple tweeted like, yeah, this is established, but I never heard of it and you know that I would have. Yep, you definitely would have. Two, the, the, the, the thing that apparently qualifies you for not having to pay the Apple tax is being a quote, "premium subscription video entertainment provider." And I would just like to interrogate that for a moment. What makes you a premium video, premium subscription video entertainment provider? What, what, what is it?

• 1:11:06Nilay Patel?

  It's pronounced Sven.

• 1:11:10Speaker 05

  Is Netflix a premium video subscription entertainment provider?

• 1:11:13Nilay Patel?

  I think the trade here is actually the other thing.

• 1:11:17Speaker 05

  What's that?

• 1:11:17Nilay Patel?

  That list of things.

• 1:11:19Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, sure.

• 1:11:20Nilay Patel?

  You're in the TV app, you get to use Siri. That is a bunch of Apple features, right?

• 1:11:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:11:26Nilay Patel?

  You get airplane support, whatever it is. The trade is, what does Apple want on the Apple TV most of all? They want the TV app to be the actual interface.

• 1:11:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:11:34Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:11:35Speaker 05

  So they gotta give you whatever they're gonna give you to get it.

• 1:11:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so they, it's basically, we'll give you your 30% back if you integrate with the TV app in the suite of proprietary Apple things.

• 1:11:45Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:11:45Nilay Patel?

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

• 1:12:11Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 1:12:11Nilay Patel?

  And if you want to take your cutback, you actually end up agreeing to that long list of support that bolsters Apple's operating system and bolsters there, which is, again, maybe that's a fair trade.

• 1:12:23Speaker 05

  But, but, okay, that's a fair trade, but say you're in the business of not making a TV app, but you make another premium video subscription service, like, I don't know, Fortnite.

• 1:12:34Speaker 05

  How do you, how do you get that deal? How does anybody else get that deal? How does, how do you, like, the only way to get that deal is to go into a smoke-filled room with Apple and like make that deal. Every other developer just doesn't have access to it. And I mean, so Tim Sweetie, CEO of Epic, noted App Store curmudgeon, I guess is a fine way to put it. He did tweet about this and he said, "Congratulations to Apple on their move towards opening up the iOS App Store to payment competition."

• 1:13:04Speaker 05

  I don't think that's what's happening here. I mean, yeah, it's pretty good.

• 1:13:07Nilay Patel?

  I think so. The other thing that is true is that Apple and Amazon have been pretty cozy on the TV side.

• 1:13:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, they've been, they've been moving closer to each other and being just a little bit friendlier. And there's, there's, they've been making, cutting deals on Apple stuff getting sold on Amazon. They're like, they, they actually like started tamping down on third-party sellers. So like, they've been talking to each other for a while now.

• 1:13:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And, you know, if you're Altis, Altis One and Canal Plus are cable companies.

• 1:13:30Speaker 06

  It mentions payment method tied to their existing video subscription. So this is the idea that you have, I already have a Prime subscription. I just want to use the card on file to also pay for things from Apple's interface. Well, right, right now, Apple's interface kind of makes you think that you misclicked and that you like can't buy something.

• 1:13:52Speaker 05

  But like, there's a possibility of like incredible nesting doll stuff happening here, right? Because both Apple and Amazon try to get you to pay for HBO through their interface.

• 1:14:03Nilay Patel?

  I don't, hmm, no, it just says buy and rent movies or TV shows. I don't know that the Amazon app actually sells you HBO. I mean.

• 1:14:11Speaker 05

  Well, it does on the Fire TV.

• 1:14:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:12Speaker 05

  Is what I'm, not inside the thing, but yeah.

• 1:14:14Nilay Patel?

  There's only one way to find out and that is for me to just try to spend some dumb money on my Apple TV tonight. So that's premium video. It's a Sven. That's great. You know what Amazon still can't do is sell you a book in the Kindle app?

• 1:14:27Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:14:28Nilay Patel?

  Right? And it's like, great, it's a tiny bit towards payment competition, but there's all this stuff that people have asked for forever. Spotify's still not happy, right? Like, you still can't just sign up for Spotify without going. Netflix, I'm sure, is still complaining about this stuff. It's a tiny little move. It's good. I'm happy. I'm sure Apple doesn't see a lot of... Apple cannot be that worried that people are gonna buy movies on Prime Video instead of the Apple TV Movies app right now. Like...

• 1:14:54Speaker 05

  They're not, no.

• 1:14:55Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, I think they just wanna fill out the TV app and they wanna get people to use it. And this is a carrot you can throw. It's not gonna cost them any money. Whether... The real one is Netflix. And they... I don't see a path from here to there, but we'll see how it goes. Okay. We've waited. We've waited. The real drama, the hottest drama in tech this week, is that Android users will no longer be able to tell if it's raining. Apple bought Dark Sky.

• 1:15:23Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 1:15:23Speaker 06

  Here it goes.

• 1:15:25Nilay Patel?

  Oh, you're opening Dark Sky on your Android phone for the last time?

• 1:15:27Speaker 06

  Press...

• 1:15:28Nilay Patel?

  Oh, you're uninstalling it? No! You'll never be able to get it back!

• 1:15:31Speaker 05

  Ahhh!

• 1:15:32Nilay Patel?

  It's over!

• 1:15:35Nilay Patel?

  Wow. I am shocked that there is this much drama, heartache over a weather app being sold to Apple.

• 1:15:42Speaker 05

  People are very angry. I... I... I tweeted a little bit too fast. I said it feels incredibly petty for them to shut down the Android app and the API. The API is gonna last till 2021, so that's, like, pretty good. They shut it on the Android app, I think, July 1. And then a bunch, a bunch, a bunch of other weather apps use Dark Sky's weather information via their API. And that is getting shut down at the end of 2021, so quite a while from now. Um, but it's interesting. You know, like, Dark Sky sells access to that API. So, like, Apple could've just kept that business going, but they... They chose not to. And the Dark Sky app on iOS is sticking around. So, it's unclear, like, what the strategy is here.

• 1:16:20Speaker 06

  As a paid app, right?

• 1:16:22Speaker 05

  As a paid app.

• 1:16:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I'm sure in iOS 15, it'll, you know, they're deprecated. It'll just be the weather app in iOS.

• 1:16:27Speaker 06

  That's... That's what... What... When I... When I got over my anger, I... The... The way I started thinking about it is, a lot of people don't buy apps. A lot of people don't even download apps. Fewer people buy apps. And Dark Sky as, like, a differentiator for... As a built-in, like, the weather on your operating system is so cool versus... Like, the way I think of Dark Sky is, phones are great, because one of the things you can do on phones is you can install Dark Sky on them. But as an operating system vendor, like, you could differentiate by having such a cool app. So, it kinda makes sense in that. It's just annoying.

• 1:17:06Nilay Patel?

  I've been challenging myself to think, cause like, Dieter, you wrote this in the news, like, Amazon bought Eero and we were just like sad for a while, but we were just like, oh, that company didn't make it. We liked them. It seems to be going fine. Here, Darkseid is beloved. Apple bought them. Apple's history with acquisitions is actually not wonderful. Remember Beats? They seem deeply respected inside of Apple. They bought the bedded sleep tracker. No one's ever heard from them. Like, Shazam, Apple bought Shazam. What happened to that? Like, so like their history of these acquisitions is a little, little jumpy. At the same time, what did Darkseid prove? Like, A, it's a unique product. They synthesized available weather data to do a different kind of prediction. That's really cool. They proved that there's

• 1:17:51Nilay Patel?

  a market for paid weather API. They proved there's a market for paid weather apps. They did not steal your location, bundle it up and sell it, which a bunch of other shady weather apps do. Okay. So then they got, they just got sold to Apple. All that means is there's a market for that thing for someone else to serve, right? And my inbox is full of those apps. Great. So like, it's bizarre that like, for me to be like, well, that's fine. And then my other question is like, Google's entire mission statement is like, we use cutting edge AI to be helpful to you. And they don't appear to be able to tell Android users if it's gonna rain. And it's like, shouldn't they just do it? Shouldn't Google's weather

• 1:18:32Nilay Patel?

  native Android already be this good? It's shocking to me that Darkseid is that much better. Back when we used to go outside, I used to ask Google Assistant what the weather was every day. And like, that seemed fine. But it's weird that, I mean, like you're saying, people love things and people love Darkseid. Maybe it's just that reaction. But it's shocking that the default Google weather service was not so good that a market could even exist. I don't know. Is Android, is weather on Android just not good? Like I

• 1:19:01Speaker 05

  No, weather on Android is fine. It just, it doesn't have that like, the thing that Dark Sky does is it, I mean, it's beautiful. First of all, it is a beautiful app and it's very, very well designed, which, sorry to say, is not always a thing you can expect in an Android app. And it also like gives you the little ping. If you want it, hey, it's going to rain in 15 minutes. And like, that feels like magic and it like is often right. It's usually right. And that's like the one, like Google's weather app is fine. It's always right, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it's not as instant and it doesn't give you that like, that ping. They could maybe turn it on tomorrow if they wanted to. It's sitting there in the notification tray by default on most Android phones that have got like a Google Assistant on it.

• 1:19:46Speaker 05

  So it's like there, but it's not like actively letting you know, hey, it's going to rain.

• 1:19:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. That's the thing. That to me is like, it's strange to me that such a market exists for it's going to rain on a device where the entire cell of the app, the operating system is like, it's built by the AI company. But I don't know, maybe, maybe Google do a thing. Like it's an opportunity for them to. I just, what I still don't have is a rationale for why Apple bought Dark Sky.

• 1:20:14Speaker 05

  I mean, they, they want the good weather app, right? They probably just want a better weather app. I mean, you remember back in the day, like when Yahoo released its weather app? And everyone was like, oh my God, this is great. And then like it made Apple step up its weather app game. Like, yeah, weather app's a big deal. It's like the thing that everybody uses. The weather channel exists for a reason.

• 1:20:37Nilay Patel?

  It's funny because it is the one thing I use voice assistance for more consistently than anything else. Okay. We've gone a little long. We're going to wrap it up. We'll be back on Tuesday. I'm actually interviewing Kevin Scott, the CTO of Microsoft about AI. I'm going to just ask him. It's between an hour of me being like, how do you predict the weather? We'll see how that goes. I might, we're going to ask him some good questions, but I'm excited to talk to him. He's really smart dude. We're back on Friday with the chat show. We're doing this at home. Please let us know how it sounds. Again, I suspect we're doing okay, but let us know. We're, we're trying to make it better consistently, constantly. Thank you for sticking with us. I hope you're staying home. I hope you're staying safe. I hope you're just really checking the weather. Thanks to Tom Warren for joining us at the top. And we'll be back next week. We're definitely going to have Monica to talk about laptops. All right. That's it. Rock and roll.

• 1:21:21Speaker 06

  Paul.

• 1:21:40Speaker 09

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• 1:22:11Speaker 10

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