The Rise of the Tech Ecosystem

Guest Speaker 5:16

ideas. Ideas, also known as innovations, inventions and breakthroughs from Bell Labs get while they’re hot, Lucent Technologies, we make the things that make communications

Dave Kelly 5:39

work. Crazy that I’ll tell you, their their trademark logo is burned into my brain. It’s funny. It’s just a red circle of sorts. I think there’s some history behind the circle. Yeah, yeah. But that was like ingenious branding, something so simple, something so simple, but resonated, you know, so Well,

Rolando Rosas 6:00

it did. And you know, who would have thought so Bell Labs, IBM innovation, innovation was expensive has always been expensive. For the most part, you’re you’re building devices, you need engineers, you need research you need, you know, to push the envelope and things were centralized in these big behemoth companies like Bell Labs like IBM, who were known for innovating new things, new toys, new gadgets, new new new parts of the infrastructure and components, but things were going to change. Inevitably things were going to change. But I don’t think anybody had an idea of how much we would change as we were inching from those 80s Those 90s from Lucent and then the mid 90s. Another company that really spawned a ton of innovation Nortel Networks. Yep, I remember Dave early in my professional career next did Lucent Nortel was probably an IBM. That was a very esteemed company pushing the envelope with with the with trying to develop the internet infrastructure for the internet as well as phones. They really changed the game and put a lot of pressure on Lucent when it came to phones and phone invasions and phone systems big

Dave Kelly 7:07

time. And they had a ton of phones. You know, I remember having physical compatibility guides back in early 2000 2001. So we’re selling devices and people would say I have a Nortel telephone. They’d give you the model number you flip to this particular page within a compatibility guide to find what devices are compatible. And they were like two or three pages of Nortel phones, they I don’t know how many years they’ve been they were in business. We did a little bit of research in the peak of the tech bubble in 2000. It was reported that they did 30 billion in revenue 30 billion in revenue blows my mind when I think about what they were making with I don’t know if there’s 30 billion telephones you know in existence any longer like that anyway, not desk.

Rolando Rosas 7:53

No, and I’m looking at the notes that you put in there Dave they were worth $250 billion in the year 2000 which ushered in the next era that we’re going to talk about a moment but think about that $250 billion that’s what they were worth a giant enormous we catch a glimpse of if you if you’re watching us in the on the video said can we put a little sound on that orange top

Dave Kelly 8:22

groove and grainy video

Rolando Rosas 8:25

low res look at that high speed internet access public internet cable down public internet I remember that and the airport’s just require internet since the multimedia conference. Jam football hotel internet, wireless internet for the phone, cell mobile phones.

Guest Speaker 8:47

You know me, one thing I can tell you is you got to be free. Bringing it all together with the true power of the internet. Nortel Networks have a world shares ideas how

Rolando Rosas 9:08

so much has changed. I remember working for one of the manufacturers that supplied the made actually products for them. And they were an account where we wanted to be in in terms of selling selling with their reps so they could push our products alongside their products. And nobody knew what was about to come in the hammer was going to come down on Nortel, the hammer was in a come down on loosen both of them, you know loosen peaked according to the different sources they picked around 99. And, you know, they also were mammoth. They had around $40 billion in revenue and 99 very close to Nortel $30 billion when they peaked in 2000. And the hammer did come down. The party ended that the bubble bursted on the.com in the early 2000s and nobody would have we weren’t expecting I remember I was in Florida at the time, and I was talking to a client. And he said to me, if you heard the news, I’m like what? Well, Nortel is closing their Latin America offices, which in South Florida. And I knew a lot of people there. And that was like the beginning of the end for Nortel. When I heard that, and no, now we know that that’s the case. But one of the things that that I want to drive about that is that innovation is something you can’t bottle into a box and control yourself. Back then proprietary was the way big, big innovation was driven by these big telecom companies. And it was all centralized. And the internet now allowed people and business to be connected from very, very, very far places. And now all of a sudden ideas could flow from multiple angles, multiple parts of the world regions that were never connected, right. And now ideas could be decentralized. You could share some ideas. I mean, it was not zoom back then. But no, it allowed some of this stuff to start. It allowed the spark, you know, it allowed companies like AOL to come in, you know, also along that, that that timeframe, if you remember, Ericsson, which later became Sony Ericsson, but Ericsson, also helped with some of those innovations in driving some of the infrastructure behind the cell phones, and also behind the infrastructure for a lot of those cell phone companies. That then also allowed, I would say, the next wave of innovation to come in. Right? If we were to summarize a little bit of that first wave, it would be the was what are we calling that Dave was the dawn

Dave Kelly 11:48

of the dawn of the Internet age, the

Rolando Rosas 11:52

dawn of the Internet age, that’s a very appropriate kind of all encapsulating for that first period 80s through 2000s. And now, the next age, or the next story that I would say is the WW, WW, the World Wide Web becoming who uses the World Wide Web anymore. I mean, the youngsters probably don’t even know that that existed, that that was a thing. You would refer to a website, when you would say a website, you would say like if it were Amazon, it’s www dot Amazon.

Dave Kelly 12:29

Right? Yeah. Just hearing you say that is so funny. My mother. My mother is a couple of years ago, I was telling her about some things that we were doing on on the Global Teck website. And she said, Oh, I’d love to see it. I said, oh, you should go online. Check it out. She said, Where can I see it? I said it’s global-teck.com. And she said, Do I need to? Do I need to also type www in front of it? I’m like, Yeah, you can, you should. But you don’t have to. Just like, well, things have definitely changed. I don’t have to do that anymore. She thought that was a huge time saver. Rolando. I know a 72 year old mother no longer has to type www that is like, automation to her.

Rolando Rosas 13:16

Right? It gets it gets shorter. You didn’t have to type in and even if I believe back then you did have to type in the whole thing. Now you could just type in the domain name of the company, right? You can get right into that whole HTTP W slash did. Nobody talks about that anymore? That’s right. But this internet thing, the www. Awesome. Isn’t that like worldwide Wrestling Federation, too. wasn’t that bad? It was

Dave Kelly 13:44

gonna be I think you’re trying to say WW. F. But that was the World Wildlife Foundation. Oh, yeah. So World Wrestling, World Wrestling. Yeah. Different type of nerd over here.

Rolando Rosas 13:59

But you know that internet age. And combined with the bubble bursting on the.com, things started changing, right? Information was starting to decentralize. It certainly didn’t mean the end of IBM. But it started changing things. And we had a new emergence of new players, because PCs, in the late 90s started to get cheaper. You had this new thing called the internet. And so now, instead of simply taking your PC or laptops that started coming online, you could now leave the office with a big clunky heavy laptop. Right? So that was an innovation and then take that in if your company was ahead of the curve. You’d have some kind of internet. I remember, at the time I was working for Philip Morris, now known as Altria, we had all of all of this Sales Reps pretty much had some type of internet connectivity that was was was provided by or paid by, by them. And we use ISDN, which was an upgrade from regular dial up. So you can send information faster, because, you know, we had to, you know, plug in and the reports would get uploaded to the mainframes and all that business. And it will take time. So ISDN was the way to go. But the internet allowed this information, the information we would collect from the field to be uploaded, and back to the offices in New York, where managers would, you know, analyze and do what they need to do with that information. But But my point is that you didn’t have to be in the office, sitting at the company desk, at the company computer with the company desk phone to do the work anymore. You could send and that was back in 1997. When I was doing that laptop, in tow, head out to the customer sites, go see customer accounts, and gather the information in uploaded at the end of the night or at the end of the day, back to the office. And off we were in, you know, this allowed some other companies to take off or were going back to the internet piece. Dell, you know, they were when I went to college, every computer was a Dell. AOL, which became, you know, the largest merger in history. They actually their their offices, the headquarters is not about 10 minutes from where I live over in Dulles. And now those offices, our data center offices, so they had a whole huge complex. And now that complex is pretty much data centers. And I believe there’s one of the big military contractors is over there. So AOL has got a teeny teeny little footprint in there that that still remain. Dave, remember Compaq?

Dave Kelly 16:52

Oh, my goodness. Do I ever Yeah. So I come from my, my, my stepmother was in the tech field her entire career. So she actually came up with like, I think she started with Honeywell, but it moved into digital and a compact purchase digital and then I think HP eventually purchased Compaq. Yes. In 2000 brands.

Rolando Rosas 17:20

I actually have the notes here on that. In 2002. Hewlett Packard now known as HP completed the acquisition of Compaq for approximately $25 billion. And the merger was a significant event in the tech industry, creating a technology company second in revenue to IBM. Now this was 2002. So the the tech companies of the day, Compaq, IBM, and Microsoft was emerging as well. But But think about that. Compaq and HP because things were about printing, right? Where could you print? Where could you work or devices that allow this, you had your laptops, and HP was known for printing, and most of the printing happened at the office again, that changed when smaller printers came online. And you could print stuff at home. Right? So that enabled, that home office is the early home office, with your laptop, your printer, your in your other devices to to proliferate now, early 2000s. Also, Dave, do you remember how that’s when blackberries started to take off? Yeah, for sure. That then allowed that big, clunky, heavy laptop that you had to lug around. You didn’t have to take it everywhere. You could communicate with colleagues in and out. And some companies did allow communications externally, so that you could communicate outside the company and that’s where BlackBerry came in. Change the game. You don’t need that heavy laptop everywhere. And at the time, the how you communicate, email, phone, and text. That’s it. All those three in that phone did it well, and sounded good. And we had a guest on who was a former president of blackberry, Mr. Sandeep, if you want to hear that story, go check out that episode with Sandeep he unloads about a bunch of stuff, blackberry and other things. But Dave, Blackberry changed the game. I loved BlackBerry OS.

Dave Kelly 19:29

The first time I saw BlackBerry 20s I think it’s 2004 2005. I’m at a trade show down in Atlanta. We have a short break, and I need to take my laptop and just quickly check. Just quickly check emails. So I find a little corner. I open it up a dial into the VPN I finally get logged in. I do all this work just so I can look at a couple of emails it Took me the entire lunch break. I never grabbed lunch. But I was able to look at a couple of emails. But as I was doing that there was someone kind of sitting not too far from me. It takes, he takes out this thing out of his pocket, hadn’t really seen it before. And he’s just just kind of doing this. And then he grabs lunch. And now when we’re back in the trade show, he says, he says, hey, you know, you kind of your company should invest in me. So I’m like, Well, yeah, what is that, and he’s telling me all about it. And how much faster it is than the laptop, he’s like, I was able to get all my voice, I saw my emails done in 510 minutes, and I was back having lunch. And I couldn’t believe how much time I could have saved. If I had something like that, again, I’m doing email on this massive Dell laptop. Like I said, the VPN and dial in and, you know, to watch somebody else have this tool that wasn’t part of my organization’s kind of tech stack, if you will. It was like a game changer for them. Definitely, you know, if you have, technology is gonna leave you behind, right? There’s always going to be changes. And if you’re able to be faster than your competitor, then you have an advantage. And this guy definitely had an advantage

Rolando Rosas 21:17

like that. I don’t know if it’s Mark Zuckerberg that made that phrase, you know, break, run fast and break things. You know, it has this advantage, especially in tech, being first movers. And first adopters, because technology is of race. It is a race. And when you’re talking into these larger companies, when he talking about investments in r&d, and roadmap, a lot of them spend a lot of money now innovating in a different way. Just like we were talking about the innovation was, you know, in the big telecom companies of the day, Nortel and loosen whatever the innovation because it was moving around, it wasn’t centralized all in one place. It was it was starting to emerge, it was starting to shift. And you know, we’re talking about Blackberry, y’all wanted to just say this, that that BlackBerry stock peaked at an all time high of $147, in mid 2008. Oh, you know why? Well, I’m going to tell you why. It was because the wife of BlackBerry had a competitor, serious competitor that they underestimated. In 2007, called Apple. Apple decided to change the game, Steve Jobs, more importantly, came out with the iPhone in 2007. So what that means is that it didn’t take long for Wall Street, to say, you know, what, Hold up a second blackberry and look at here, yes, things changed. Phones have changed, you know, we, the way we communicate has changed from the phone that handles cordless. So if you’re watching this on on the video, you get to see this little montage that we’ve put together and by Steve Jobs or by Apple, and June of 2007, he releases or Apple releases the iPhone. And I remember Dave when it was released a lot of businesses and a lot of the headlines and I think you know some some, if you’re a competitor, you run interference, right? You run the Fudd, you know, because you want to take the steam out of out of the headlines. And you say, Wow, that’s never gonna work. Or businesses will never adopt that. Because, by the way, in 2008, when you look at the number it, Blackberry had millions of subscribers, I want to say it was in 2011. In 2011, they had 85 million subscribers worldwide. So although the stock peaked in 2008, Wall Street was saying, Hey, guys, we got to pump the brakes here because there’s some innovation coming, and maybe you’re a little overvalued, let’s take some money off the table, and put a little put our bet somewhere else. Otherwise they would have kept, you know, that stock price because the stock market’s a little bit forward looking versus actual sales that happened today. So even though they they peaked out at 85 million subscribers, Steve Jobs, if you can recall, Dave, when the iPhone came out, Blackberry was the de facto device for every enterprise. It was the way to communicate, it was the way to do business. It was what was on everybody’s hip. And because of the iPhone, we got the terminology, B Y O D, bring your own device, right. And that was enabled by a technology called, I want to say mobile device managers. So this was because these were third party software that came online so that you can manage mobile device like an iPhone, maintain security have the security policies you need because that used to reside in blackberry and what they called the bez server B S, BlackBerry Enterprise Server. And it had all the controls and all the security and IT manager would need. But now these M DMS, these mobile device managers could do the same thing. That was, I would say in my book, the beginning of the end for BlackBerry because it caught on to doing apps. It’s just started the train had already started leaving, and they could not catch up to two jobs. Did

Dave Kelly 25:43

iPhones did iPhones always have kind of a touchscreen to it? Or did they ever have tactical kind of field keyboard like Blackberry?

Rolando Rosas 25:55

No, no keyboard? Never like Lord, it was always touchscreen percent display. Yeah, but I mean,

Dave Kelly 26:03

two devices completely different trying to solve the same task, at least the same task at the time.

Rolando Rosas 26:10

Do you remember what Sandeep told us? He told us the story that Ericsson, six years before the iPhone, they had a very similar technology ready to go. And Ericsson Sony Ericsson candidate because of for business reasons. They had a touchscreen. That was a huge improvement over what was available at the time at the time you needed a stylus. And you really had to press down on the screen to make that screen work with the stylus. Well, the innovation that he had mentioned to us was a leap forward was what we now know more of a display kind of a, you know, it just kind of mirrors and follows your your touch, and whatnot. But they can do it. They poopoo that project. But that’s so interesting and fascinating that the technology existed. Apple changed the game. It became now smartphones and apps that world started to take over in the mid 2000s. Yeah, mid 2000s 2011 2012 2015. And then chugging along the way, chugging just kind of innovating. There were some three big companies that would change what we know today. The IT world was Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. And all three were working at different angles. But they would come up in a way that would be very different than IBM, very different than Nortel. And they all today are aiming for the gold standard of companies. And I would say I would propose that Apple is the gold standard today when it comes to companies for this reason. And also echoed by my one of our guests back to Sandeep from a former president of BlackBerry is the stickiness factor. You can’t be sticky today. If you only have a device today, that isn’t the only sell no matter what device it is, it’s very difficult by itself. Fitbit, by itself is difficult for it to be sticky. And a lot of those companies that tried to create Fitbit, they’ve gone under mobile companies, cell phone companies, by themselves. It’s difficult. It’s multiple HTC and palm along with Blackberry, a lot of them don’t exist and blackberry still exists. But as a totally different company. Hardware alone, Nortel was the same story. IBM gave up on their laptop business Motorola sold also there’s a smartphone business over to a Chinese company. Lenovo took over the IBM PCs. It is extremely difficult. Yeah, yeah, we can name several more hardware companies. But Apple changed the game. They decided to come up with the iPhone, they decided to come up with apps, they would charge a fee or revenue commission depending on how you look at it. Or they would take a cut of all revenue generated with their apps. They would also go on to put in streaming services. So they brought in services devices and created an ecosystem that is very sticky. They now have Apple Pay. So now it’s a complete ecosystem that you never have to leave if you’re an apple customer, man, I

Dave Kelly 29:46

think what a strategy, what a strategy. It’s like this is what we’re going to do it’s the device will create an experience but the you know, the back end programming the software the way that it It operates is really what’s going to, it was almost sinister, it’s like we’re going to keep them addicted to our product. And we’re going to come out with a new $1,200 phone every 18 months, they’re going to be forced to buy it. And our competitors isn’t going to be able to come in and then grab them because they don’t operate within the same platform. It’s I’ve only had Apple products. So as my son, but my wife is Android, there’s nothing we can do to convince her to come over to the side of things, you know, and she’s the same way. She’s like, I like Android. And these are the reasons and you know, maybe we get you guys Android phones. And my son and I looked at each other, we’re like, No way, man, we have too much invested in this. I don’t want to start over. And it feels like it would be starting over. But they I mean, fantastic business strategy, get them addicted, keep giving them new products, things that are innovative things that are exciting, and will have customers for life. And I think that’s why, you know, the forward thinkers in the stock market back in 2007. I know a lot of people that were buying Apple stock back then they were telling me that I should and I really wish I was paying attention to because some of these folks are retiring early now that I know. And it’s all

Rolando Rosas 31:24

because of Apple stock. Well, also in 2007. I’m glad you brought that part up. If we go back a little bit, Google, that’s when they released Android. So Steve Jobs released iPhone. And shortly after that, Google comes out and releases Android. They don’t want to be left out of the the smartphone game. All right. But prior to that, you know, Google also launched in 2000, Google ads, diversifying their search business. They acquired YouTube, which is the second or third largest search engine in the world. And obviously 2007, they launched Android, but like you said, they created a sticky platform like your wife. Does this one leave Android and we know that the Google ecosystem between the work and the Google workspace stuff the Android, YouTube, if you have a Google phone, it all works together, right? All easily seamless. You know, you can move from one side of the platform to another, whether it’s downloading videos, watching it, email, all the different productivity apps that come with Google and the whole ecosystem. Right. So now we’ve got Apple being gold standard, I would say, you know, Google is right in that mix, right? Right in the mix. You know, Apple has a little bit higher valuation, they have some things that Google doesn’t have. Google has a smartphone side now with Google Pixel. And Apple has a more robust product lineup when it comes to the actual devices themselves. Google responds back and they go out and acquire nest, which is a phenomenal product in the home. So Google made some serious advances. But here comes you know, players like Amazon, who started with the books, they launch prime, they decide, I don’t know if they’re taking a playbook from one of the different companies. Exactly how but, you know, Bezos moved away from just having books sold on their website, they opened up a marketplace. In 94, Bezos founded Amazon, and sold those books on like, what a crazy idea. Nobody.

Dave Kelly 33:46

Let’s sell one of the heaviest consumer goods there are, through the mail,

Rolando Rosas 33:50

through the mail, who knew, right? Who knew and then to death dose would have been a great stock to buy early as well. In 2000, he launched the marketplace. In 2000, he launched the marketplace and in 2005, launched prime, which would forever change what we think about an ecosystem as well. And in 2015, Amazon surpasses Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the world. They went on to buy whole foods in 2016. So if you’re a Whole Foods customer, now you’re part of the prime experience as well. And in 2017, AWS, which is their cloud division, would become the dominant player when it comes to cloud services. So now they’ve got this whole ecosystem in it, you throw Alexa into the mix, as well as some other acquisitions with healthcare and entertainment with Prime Video. You’ve got a well oiled machine when you come to when it comes to ecosystem. So today, we’ve got Amazon ecosystem slash platform. You’ve got Google ecosystem. slash platform, you’ve got Apple, again, ecosystem slash platform, all of them have very sticky. And I guess you’d have to throw Microsoft into that hat too. They’re not as consumers, right? In the enterprise space. They are a beast. You can’t, you can’t remove white I can say can’t but who is going to remove Microsoft from the enterprise space? Right? It is nearly impossible. There’s so sticky with all of their products in the enterprise space, that they are the gorilla when it comes to enterprise.

Dave Kelly 35:39

They are the gorilla. But you know what? Just like Amazon being David and Walmart being Goliath, at one point, Amazon became the new Goliath. So if, if Microsoft is the Goliath, you know, the crazy thing when you are the when you are the reigning champ, you have a lot of targets on you. Right? So everyone’s chasing that gold standard of sorts, they, they see someone successful, they have the market share. And if you’re competing against that, at least you know who your competition is. But yeah, I mean, Microsoft is massive. We were kind of taking a trip back down memory lane earlier, when we were talking about Microsoft, we were talking about Skype. Oh, yeah. And how, you know, Skype, I think I believe Skype was just like a consumer free telephone thing that people were trying for.

Rolando Rosas 36:37

Well, let me take you further back. What about the net to phone I remember, again, late 90s, nepta. phone so that because, look, today, we take it for granted, we have mobile devices that essentially you could put into your ear and talk for 10 hours if you wanted to. And it doesn’t cost you a dime to call from, you know, DC to California, then you paid by the minute, right? Did it cost a pretty penny to call somebody in California from New York, or even in the same state. Sometimes local calls are more expensive,

Dave Kelly 37:10

depending on the time of day you call that shit. I remember calling home from college. And if I call the after seven o’clock, then my calls were only five cents a minute or something like that, you know, you have like, you had peak hours and you add other hours a weekend, you know, weekends were a little less expensive than on Tuesday or a Wednesday. Yeah, long distance phone bills. I mean, I remember when I was living at home. Before I moved out in my very early 20s. I just graduated from college and my parents were like, You know what, you’re responsible for your own phone bill. Kids, by the way, 30 year olds that are still on your parents cell phone plans. You guys got it made, you got it. But my mother would sit me down, she’d have the 18 T phone bill should slap it down on the table. She’d look at it. And I was living in Connecticut and I had friends in Massachusetts, and my mother, my stepmother would circle be like, alright, that’s a 860 area code is a 617 area code. She add it all up. And I was paying 20 3040 bucks a month to call my friends like yeah, we paid for long distance charges. So when you mentioned net to phone, and there was that other one that magic magic

Rolando Rosas 38:29

Jack, they had a USB stick, you would plug into your computer,

Dave Kelly 38:34

I swear it sounded almost too good to be true. Like I can make telephone calls to my computer if you had a computer because that was a long time ago. But it you know, in an age where people were spending so much money, this was like necessary. Innovation and you know, those products net to phone? What do we call it wall jack, my magic Jack magic Jack. I mean, that’s the beginning of you know, voice over IP, you know, telephony over internet protocol,

Rolando Rosas 39:04

you know, huge for international calls, because I was remembered traveling, and the roaming charges on cell phones back in the day was astronomical. So for the traveling salesperson international dialing, you could do that on that to phone, or our magic jack or you would be saving tons of money them obviously the more you call, the more you save, and if the more people you had, the more you save, right and so these were necessary competitors in the in a space where the per minute charges added up to a lot, hey, I can you know I can reduce that for you by half and sometimes even by 80% by using some of these internet providers. And so it was it was so I was looking that up while you were talking the acquisition of Skype was in 2011 when Microsoft acquired I heard Yeah. 2011. So that’s so 13 years more or less from from from today? Yep. And who would have thought that that would lead to what we know now today as Microsoft Teams?

Dave Kelly 40:13

Right? Can you can you can you say can you think of three other names that teams had prior to teams link

Rolando Rosas 40:21

OCS? I mean, it, it was it, Microsoft was already tinkering with Voice over IP, right. But Skype gave them a consumer product that was fully born and ready to use versus a product that they had been, you know, they’re not a telephone company, they weren’t Nortel, they’re not a net to phone. They’re not any of those companies. They are a software company that basically put an operating system into a PC. That’s where their their bones their origin story. Right? They evolved to bring some of these other things in house. But that’s not what their expertise is. And they just went out and bought Skype. And today, teams is now the new, what do you call that the Phoenix that’s emerged out of Skype, right. And so that’s what we’re we’re left with today. You know, Dave, the world is changing. And we don’t live in the same world as 2011 2015. And these players, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, now are all having to look over their shoulder to some extent, because of what’s happening in the AI world. Now, AI has been around for years, but it wasn’t unleashed. Like it has been in the last year or so. With open AI. And what’s happening right now, as we film this podcast, we don’t know what’s going to happen with open AI. Alright, GPT may be gone by next week, because apparently the CEO has left. He’s over at Microsoft, they gave him the title of CEO to run an advanced Laboratory Division and advanced research. And from what public reports, say, a carte blanche to hire as many employees from open AI and bring them over to this new division at Microsoft, which is crazy. So essentially, they can get the entire thing without ever having to buy I mean, they invested in open AI. But essentially, all of that, know how brought over it. I’ve you’ve heard, I’ve never heard of something like that before. Like we’re in a new age where a company all of a sudden says okay, all those employees now become our employees. And there’s no merger or acquisition that ever happened.

Dave Kelly 42:39

Hey, what about the ad people that didn’t? Yeah, forgot what the headlines were yesterday. Do you? Do you recall how many total employees were at?

Rolando Rosas 42:51

I think it was 770. And 700. Of the seven, seven D signed on to the letter that basically supports that moment.

Dave Kelly 42:59

So what about those other people?

Rolando Rosas 43:01

I don’t know. They’re either they think that being loyal to the board, or whoever’s left is the way to go. Versus Sam. I mean, we don’t 100% know, all of what led up to this, there’s reports about this. And then the other some guy feel felt, you know that the company was going in the wrong direction, someone was passed over. I mean, there’s a lot of information flying, but we do know what we can see. Which is, there’s a possibility. Open AI may just fold mean, the way it’s gone. I don’t think it’ll mean that if it comes down to it, Microsoft will just acquire the rest and take the IP with them. And you know, it’ll be completely part of Microsoft, or they could sell it off and who knows what’s going to happen. But the cat is out of the bag when it comes to working in today’s age. You know, if we’re looking forward now from the 2020s. And beyond, right around when COVID You got open AI that came on. Just recently, you have these ecosystems. And then you have what I think to be the most, one of the most interesting pieces when it comes to business today, which is how the world of E commerce, entertainment, and the platforms are changing. So if you look at what’s happening right now with tick tock, you look at what’s happening with metta. You find that the convergence of E commerce and social media are going in a new direction, you know, tick tock is Who would have thought that tick tock would try to take on Amazon but they that’s what they’re doing. They’ve got tick tock shop, they’ve got fulfillment centers, and you know, us we are being in the E commerce space ourselves. You know, we’re we’re dabbling in that, but they are such a serious contender. In the experience. If we were to go back, let’s say to what Steve Steve Jobs did with the iPhone. He said the X user experience is what matters. And Amazon did a fabulous job of that. Using a PC, tick tock is changing the way you experience online shopping via video first, instead of a product page first. I don’t know which one’s gonna win, Dave. But I do know this, that they are changing the experience, which is what Steve Jobs did back in 2007. He said, apps are the way to go. You have an app, this become super powerful, super influential. And they’re saying we’re going to change the way people experience shopping.

Dave Kelly 45:44

You know, I mean, if you think about it, when you’re on Amazon, you know, Amazon just over the past couple of years, they’re encouraging sellers to include more video, more demonstrations, when I’m on an Amazon listing. And I’m kind of looking just even just through some of our stuff that we have up there. I’m looking at product reviews by content creators I’d never seen before, you know, so they are certainly incorporating video as part of this. But when you I’ve only I’ve only played with tech talk shop a little bit. But I think that is pretty interesting. As you’re kind of swiping through, suddenly you see a product, doing something really cool solving a problem that you need solving. And then right from there, pushed click add it to cart, you didn’t seek out the demo it seat you and by the algorithm, it might have known that I needed a way to log wood around in the wintertime or whatever it might have been. So it’s almost like an algorithm is getting to know you, so that it can really serve up the product demonstration and get you to buy right away, it’s really pulling on your heartstrings effect and solve a problem so quickly. It’s like I need that. And, you know, I think we’re missing that for a little while. In commerce in general, though, I need this. And I with my question is when does when does tick tock start to charge a membership fee? like Amazon Prime? Everyone I know, everyone I know, subscribes to Amazon Prime. And all of those people were probably extremely reluctant at the very beginning. I have to pay to shop I have to pay to spend money on Amazon. Why would I do that? Well, Bezos figured that out.

Rolando Rosas 47:34

Yeah, well, he made it sticky back to our, our guests, Sandeep, he made it very sticky, he gave a value proposition that was, was probably one of the most genius ways to, to basically get customers on the platform, get them to because you know, I read somewhere and I wish I could remember what study, there’s a huge difference between you giving something to somebody and you give it away for free. And then that person, that same item, whether they pay $1, or they pay $100. For it, the moment that person pays $1, or 100, there is an investment on their part that says I am part of this in a way that I wasn’t when I was free or given to me. So now even though the investment of prime, which you know, in the grand scheme of things, it does bring them money, but it creates that investment in the person like I am part of this. And I’m committed to this. And I’m kind of married to the system right now, in a way that’s different than you know, the app store for for the iPhone. And so how does tick tock do it, they’ve got to come up with a way to give the consumer something that they would not have had prior to let’s call it tick tock prime or whatever it’s going to be called right? They’ve got a rollout more, they’ve got a handful of fulfillment centers, whether it’s you know, hey, we’re going to ship this to you tomorrow and it’s going to you know, you pay 25 bucks a year just like what Amazon Walmart has tried to do that and it hasn’t worked out in the same way as it has for Amazon because Prime membership you get you get the Prime Video, you get, you know, some some deals that whole foods when you’re shopping a whole foods as long as you’re a prime member, right and on and on and on and on and on. Tick tock doesn’t have that value proposition for a paid subscription model, unless they’re going to give you something let’s just say, well, we’re going to let we’re going to stream I don’t know music from artists, and we’re gonna release it here first, because no tick tock now, their music and their trending sounds are a way for artists to release music that’s changing the way the music industry looks at releasing music because now you the audience is being exposed to your sound your music on somebody else’s videos. And that could be millions and billions of views when you’re talking about that. So are things changing? You bet. How are they going to shake out? I don’t know. But I know that if history serves as a lesson, the user experience is vital. And if you can get that down, you can create an ecosystem around that experience. And wherever you go, it all comes back to being on the platform are part of the ecosystem. You’ve created the stickiness that our guest, former president of BlackBerry used to say that stickiness factor, I wouldn’t bet on tick I wouldn’t bet against tick tock right now. They have a lot of mojo, although they have a lot of headwinds with people complaining and Congress coming now at the end. You know, I think all this thing is gonna get sorted out there is no social media company yet. That has been blackballed out of the US. There’s just too much money involved. There’s too many employees involved for Tiktok. There’s a lot of competitive interests between Mehta and Tiktok. And I think, you know, articles have already come out and said that that Facebook has been behind some of the dirty tactics. I didn’t say that you can look it up on the web.

Dave Kelly 51:23

Right. Hey, when? When we talk about Facebook and meta. Now, I knew that they were playing around for a little while with a subscription service. Did they ever launched that? I

Rolando Rosas 51:36

don’t use Facebook. I’m not aware. I mean, I’m going to plead the fifth on this, Dave. I don’t I’m not I’m not aware. I’m not in. I don’t want to say I know when I don’t and I in this case, I’m not aware of exactly their intention. But I know that from meta there bet big billions, big billions on the metaverse the jury’s still out on that. I’ve seen some new improvements. There was a an interview with Lex Friedman and, and Mark Zuckerberg on the metaverse and it did look fascinating. It did look like an amazing new video experience. That’s how I would I would say, but that video experiences still requires the big huge goggles, again, can meta nail the user experience when it comes to the metaverse? If they can, and they can execute on that they may have something there is the timing right for it. I think so. For this reason, Dave, the remote work revolution is changing the face of work, it is changing the face of the future of work. I don’t think anybody today can argue against what the pandemic has done for remote work, and every study that’s been coming out and I’m gonna give big props to a future guest that’s coming to come on. So if you’re watching this now, you may want to check out that interview with Nick Bloom. That we have. Oh, I think you’re gonna be fascinated by what you learn there with Nick Bloom, who has been studying remote work for the for decades now. And I don’t think we’re going back, Dave. So the convergence of things like remote work, we’ve got AI, and we’ve got new players coming onto the scene when it comes to commerce, as well as communications, like companies like zoom that became extremely popular over the pandemic era. I think we are moving into that whole new shift like we saw, we’ve talked about the 80s, the 2000s. Now the 20s. I’ll call them the 20s. Moving forward, I think the combination of AI, remote work, decentralization of technology, is going to change how we view the business world, and who’s going to come out on top. Right,

Dave Kelly 53:52

right. Well, I can certainly see that some of these platforms, they can create stickiness, by bringing value of integrating within current customers tech stack. So if you can build automation with AI, and bring CRMs and your video and your voice communications and you know all these other bits, if you have a good platform that’s able to tie it together, create it create an experience where your users rely on you know, the the integration of all of these things, and you have a winning platform for sure. So and

Rolando Rosas 54:33

zoom does have a an app marketplace, again, taking the low page out of out of apple on that. They’ve got a call center product, they’ve got a phone product. So now you can do your video and continue engaging with customers and colleagues on the Zoom, telephone side of things and text messages. They’ve got an AI companion, so I think they’re trying to position themselves In a way that I don’t know if they would have even imagined it prior to the pandemic, where they’re in all the spaces competing against a gorilla, in this case, Microsoft, for on the enterprise side. Did you know Dave, that Zoom has two architectural platforms when it comes to their, to their technology, they have the zoom cloud that we as businesses and customers use, and they have a zoom government that is allowed slightly different animal to conform and comply with some of the government regulations when it comes to security and privacy and the rest that I didn’t know up until recently. But I’d say that because companies that tend to adapt and zoom seems like right now they’re really shifting, moving into areas that seem like, you know, why why are they there? Why would you why would you get into a battle with Microsoft and trying to get into the enterprise space, I think the race is to see who now who can create the best user experience for workers, workers that work remote, as well as those in the office and let those two different parts of the organization communicate seamlessly with each other. And its customers. So as it relates to businesses, if you have an ecosystem that can allow this beautiful dance and orchestration, of communications, collaboration, archiving of documents and, and things like that, I think and you mix in AI to enable that to happen. You said that something earlier, the speed, right, the AI allows us to do things that we couldn’t do at a speed and you just this episode alone, the information that we’ve been able to harvest, to get ready for this episode, in the old days, Dave would have taken weeks, going through articles, going on the internet, reading them, finding the information, and then disseminating the information amongst us coming up with all of that lined up nice and neatly, we were able to do that in under two hours. You know, so if you’re watching us and you wondering how to, we were able to use the power of AI, to extract information from the 80s, all the way up to 2020, in less than two hours. So we could put this podcast together for you, which is amazing. I think, what has taken us weeks, man, yeah, find all those news clippings and whatnot,

Dave Kelly 57:40

you know, something you said is pretty interesting to me, you are talking about archives, and AI. So I’m imagining, I’m imagining an organization today, that’s adopting some of these new technologies. And then just say, in the course of three or four years, they can use their own internal AI, to go back and analyze the archives. So it’s not going out into the internet. It’s just what’s happened internally, analyze, analyze the past four years of conference calls, that were, you know, this particular meeting or whatever it might be, but the AI is going to be at be able to analyze your businesses, meetings that are archived, and then assist with strategy to be successful in the future, or point out obvious failures or missed opportunities, the Feed the Future of AI is, you know, we’ve talked about it internally and in on some of our podcasts where it’s, AI is not going to replace you. It’s not going to take your job. The people that know how to use AI better, we’ll be the ones that you really need to fear type of thing. And analyzing archives within a business can lead to interesting strategies for those businesses. Sorry, it was kind of an unthought tangent. I just went on, but I’m just thinking, you know, everything that we do internally is archived,

Rolando Rosas 59:15

right? Yeah. Yeah, we use there’s data everywhere. We’re more drown. I’ve said this before we’re drowning in data. And what do you do? I’ve read somewhere that we most companies only really tap into about 30% of the all the data they have, but imagine having the ability to have something on autopilot that says, you know, last year at this point, you sold x and you may want this year to prepare for this event in this way. And I think the Predict the future of predictive modeling around AI when it comes to inventory when it comes to business when it comes to language when it comes to combining all these different datasets and then says To start giving you suggestions on actions that you can take, I think that’s the next leap, when we can get to that point where we can get predictive modeling into the hands of decision makers, and they’re able to make decisions that are very good based on the data that saying, Okay, this could happen in the next two weeks, four weeks, a month, based on these patterns based on these history based on all these datasets, I think it gets even more interesting because it can make your business more resilient. You know, Dave, there’s so many businesses that fail in the first year, only one person only, I believe, one, between one depending on where you’re sourcing is, one and 5% of businesses make it to 20 years. And there’s a lot of things that happen in a business that have to go right to stay in business that long. But if you can feed information that can help you stay in business, cashflow is up, you may want to do this cash flow is down, you may want to do that. Too much inventory, do this, not enough inventory do that, if you you know, in the healthcare world, there’s AI for a bunch of different things that are that are looking at diagnosing different diseases that radiologists can’t see as well, right. So if you have aI working together with the radiologist, you’re able to spot things that the naked eye cannot see or can’t pick up on a pattern, I think we’re definitely going into an age that where the work, we knew it the way from the 80s, all the way up to the 20s is going to be completely different, completely different from the 20s moving forward with the emergence of platforms, ecosystems, and AI,

Dave Kelly 1:01:45

very decentralized. You know, when we say that things change, and nothing stays the same at least 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, we had a chance to breathe, and think about it. And now, literally overnight, these technologies are changing the way that people work.

Rolando Rosas 1:02:06

Oh, no doubt. And in some ways for the better. And there, there will be some displacement, I don’t think there’s any way around it, there’ll be some displacement. But just like with every technology that interrupts and changes things, there’s displacement there, the the horse and buggy guys that cleaned up the poop behind the horses didn’t love that the cars are coming around ticker their jobs. The fact that, you know, internet made Book Depository is a very different thing, because now you could put documents in storage electronically. It’s a whole different thing, right? I remember in late 90s, there used to be boxes and boxes and stuff that went from our offices to storage somewhere, just because we had to hold on to documents. And, you know, you know, what, if something happens, you know, six years from now, and, you know, some lawsuit happens and that those were all in storage, now they’re in the cloud, you know, so the evolution of change does create disruption. And it’s cuts in both ways, people, people’s jobs will be some that steak. But on the other side, there’s some other jobs that didn’t exist that will come out of of this as well, like you said, Hey, maybe you got to be the AI expert in knowing how to maximize and leverage this. Who knows, we know that the world is very, very different today. And that’s kind of what we wanted to drive home today, to let you know that, that just like Dave said, things don’t stand still. And if you want to be a business that is going to be around for the next 20 years, in this new age. Small changes can make a big difference. Nothing stays the same. There’s nothing that’s the same from last year or even five months ago. And those small changes that you make today. Tomorrow, two months from now, those are all help you adapt, moving forward. And that’s been one of the keys for our business is to keep making those small changes, because the Times change, you know, nortel’s not in business anymore. We used to sell a lot to them. IBM has changed who they are, Dell has changed who there are. Apple has changed to Microsoft. And so our business model has slowly adapted over time because the industry is changing. And everybody in every industry is seeing that happen to them right now. So Dave, did we miss anything else? Did you want to jump in and say any any other thing regarding the what are we calling this part? Yes, the gold standard,

Dave Kelly 1:04:43

the rise of the tech ecosystem. My parting word. My parting words are for business owners specifically that are out there if you haven’t had a chance to look at, you know some of the platforms you’re using, come talk to us, you’re gonna get left behind by competitors that are adapting the technologies. We also understand that within the small to medium business, you don’t always have access to the best tech specialists, we want to extend our hand and be that trusted advisor for you. So if you want to have conversations about upping your game, technology, integration, communication integration, you know, please check us out global-teck.com. I wasn’t trying to be a commercial at the very end. But I am thinking about just some of the devices that we had spoken about here. And kind of how people started my migrating over to different technologies. They were, they were doing it to save money initially. And they may have thought it was too good to be true. But now when you look back at it, it’s like, Oh, thank God, I jumped on that train. Because if I hadn’t, I would have been left behind. So we want to help bring some of these small to medium businesses, we want to help raise you with us. help improve your game so that you’re around another 20 years and longer.

Rolando Rosas 1:06:10

I like that Dave, the only thing I would add there is that if we’re going to toot our horn a little bit, let’s just let’s let’s say this as well, for those businesses that haven’t had a text message, or maybe they have what happens in tech a lot, whether it’s software or hardware. If this when the problem happens, no, it’s this guy’s fault. That guy’s fault to do. tu tu tu tu tu and the accountability isn’t there. We because we offer solutions that are service based, like like Microsoft Teams, and voice and all the rest, as well as the devices that work on those platforms. Our interest is working with folks that want everything to work in harmony. And our interest is the customer, not this, which happens a lot because you bought your phones or hardware devices over here. They don’t care if you know your platform was working well or not. It doesn’t matter to them. Or I said, and we invite you to talk to us if you want to explore new solutions, or even consolidate old ones, which is happening quite a lot right now as companies are trying to save money. So I want to thank you today for joining us in this adventure and this road trip so to speak, from the dawn of the internet, to the gold standard, which to play on words for sure. And so David, I invite you to check out that episode you had mentioned Sandeep of blackberry, if you want to hear more about how to survive, how to survive, how to survive the hostile environment when it comes to technology. You want to check out Sandeep compensation that we had with him. Fascinating minutes talking to him about this in the technology space, so I invite you to go check that out. And if you’re on YouTube, check out these videos right here that we’ve got for you where Dave and I will join you and talk about how you can maximize your business potential. I’ll see you in those episodes.