Risky Business: Tech CEOs Under Pressure & Microsoft SharePoint Fiasco | TSG Ep. 886

Be very quiet. I'm hunting CEOs. You're watching Textron Game.

Hey, everyone. Happy Wednesday. It's Alan Shimmel and you're watching Textron Gang.

Yeah, it, it definitely seems like there's, uh, some bounties out there on CEOs. They're becoming a bit of an endangered species, though. The funny thing is, every time you lose one, you get one.

So, and sometimes with this new thing with co-CEOs, you get two. But we're gonna talk about that SharePoint, who uses SharePoint, but SharePoint security, uh, it spending all kinds of good stuff here on the gang today. We got a great gang to talk about it with you.

They're some of our regulars. Let me introduce you to them. We have Skate Scar Seller with that R in there.

Hard for me to do, but we got it. We've got our resident, uh, true North Security person, Chris Blak, and Mitch Ashley, as well as the Dean, Mike Ard. Welcome g Welcome gang.

We got a lot to talk about. So, Mike, CEOs are dropping CEOs, excuse me, CEOs are dropping like flies. Our so would seem, there was a report out that suggested CEOs in general, the turnover is a lot higher and including in the tech sector.

And of course, we've seen some infamous stuff now with the, the whole Coldplay scenario involving astronomer. And, uh, I believe Blackstone also replaced the CEO for, I think it's QTES Realty. Is that how, I think that's how that said.

But, um, apparently they felt that he wasn't driving the company maybe hard enough. And, um, this also comes on the heels of, we saw turnover at Intel early in this year. We saw a lot of drama around open AI and not having a CEO for half a second.

Um, Alan, what's you taking? What's going on here? Is there just more pressure?

Is this the bro culture at work or something else is happening around the economy? Maybe. You know, like many things in life, Mike, there's no simple answer to complex problems.

And I, I think in this particular case, there's more than one answer. Look, I would start off by saying, if you wanna be a CEO, probably try to stay off the kiss cam with your mistress. Just say it.

Right? So, but you know, kidding aside, those poor two people ha well, poor, they look it. Um, but the, the bigger issue there is that all of a sudden morals matter, ethics and morals matter in this country, in this market.

I know, Chris, you wanna jump in? Go ahead, but, and then I'll come back. There's more to the why CEOs are dropping.

Y you know, I, I, uh, I live, we have a roommate, you know, here, one of my oldest friends, Ian Nielsen, who's a musician and, and a sound engineer. We talk a lot about the, the history of, of, of communications media, right? And it, we always come back to the fact that it's a fairly short arc.

We're talking a hundred years. You know, the oldest person alive today was born before there was radio and music and, you know, vinyl and everything else. And, and we, we've gotten through this process where we have sort of run through all the human stories and the, to this point, the, the, the, the Odysseus is a return that heroes arc when, you know, this grand hero's gonna save the company and do the things.

It works pretty well for a while, but it's brittle and with a lot of transparency, you know, uh, Coldplay, um, it starts to show the weaknesses. But there are other stories. And we know in, in business that sometimes they work, you know, the heroes return, you know, when you leave and you come back and home is different, but so are you.

But that's okay, right? The hobbits return at the end of the Lord of the rinks, right? These are also stories that work.

And we know in companies, when you don't just perform, you actually do the things that tends to survive the problems that happen all the time. And if you don't and the world gets more transparent around you, well, it might not be a good plan anymore. Yep.

But the, the issue here is do we care about morals and ethics? Or if it's c to your point, Chris, if the CEO's bringing home the bacon, we don't give a crap who they're hanging out with at the Coldplay concert. But there's more to it too, guys.

There's, there's also an issue of, because there's so many confluent things going on here, CEOs who aren't adapting to the new reality of ai, to the new reality of perhaps a new world order, right? Sovereignty, it, sovereignty in these kinds of things, CEOs, frankly, that have held on a really long time. And, you know, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

And then the reformers come in and, you know, want a clean house. Um, you know, I think it's all of these trends where the economic chaos, I, I, I put it in this article right about, you know, taco and I, I'm not talking about President Trump, taco, you know, you got tech ai, couple other things in there. And so there, there we we're.

It's sort of a perfect storm kind of, uh, moment where air fresh leadership is on the agenda. Fresh leadership is on the agenda. What worked before may not work going forward.

You've got to toe the line when it comes to listening to your board who holds the purse strings. You've gotta be a good advocate or hero or image for your customer. And look, maybe it is the end of the tech bro thing.

Maybe as I wrote in the article, the hoodie wear and tweet storming tech bro, CEO just isn't the cool dude in town anymore. Maybe that CE o's putting on a sports jacket. Now I'm wearing a college shirt.

I'm gonna bring up ai. 'cause there's a lot of topics, lot of discussion about can AI replace CEOs? And I know the AI lab at the director of the lab at A MIT said he thought about 80% of a CEO's job could be done by ai.

But my question to you is, if AI could do a better job than a human CEO, would the board replace them with that AI Today? Maybe not, but in the future, absolutely. In a heartbeat, in a heartbeat, a freaking better financial performance of the company strategy, all that.

Absolutely. I mean, it's going to take someone who has the, the, the cahones to break the barrier, right? Like Branch Rickey bringing Jackie Robinson in.

Do you know what I mean? But once that dam is broke, I think you'll see it. Chris, what were you gonna say?

I was just gonna say, I think the question is not just for CEOs with the rest of us, when you have 80% of your time freed up, what do you do with it? And if the answer is nothing, yeah, in that case, the board's gonna replace you. Sorry, Kate.

I, I think, I think, hold on. Wait, hold on a second. On that Mitch point.

You can't replace CEOs with AI because somebody has to actually sign something and be accountable for the SEC and the rules and regs. So there's gonna always be somebody sitting there who can go to jail and things go wrong. That's a great job for someone.

I'll volunteer for that. I think at the, at the end of the day when we're talking about, um, I think like with the Coldplay situation, and, you know, this whole idea that the focus became more on what was happening for what the CEO was doing as opposed to what the company was doing, that's where things became uncomfortable for the company, right? But what's interesting is how some morals play into companies and it's like, okay, well we can't have this.

And yet within, I hate to say this, but within our government, some, some of these crazy, like, you can do whatever you want and, and you're still gonna be this leader. You know, it's, it really depends. At the end of the day, it depends who your followers are.

And there are some who are just te one, and it doesn't seem to matter what they do or what they believe or what they say. And there's others that, wow, you step out of line once and you're gone. So I think it's a very complicated issue, But I, I think it is personality driven, to your point, and a bit of a cult of personality, right?

And, and sometimes though, you know, the time comes where they overthrow the, the depo and the cult of personality doesn't work. But, but here's the thing. You know, this is why I say there's so many different, you know, currents in this water.

You are A CEO who highly believes in DEI, Tim Cook, or, you know, some of these folks, all of a sudden you find yourself at odds with, with, you know, present day, you know, uh, morals or you don't believe in DEI or you, you know, all of these things. And, and you know, because that pendulum swings. And so do you want a CEO that swings with it?

Or who has a true north? At the end of the day, I think the true north matters because you want to be able to, I think as a CEO be predictable in, in the patterns. You have to be smart.

You have to know strategize, but they also have to know the horse. You have to know who you're betting on. Right?

Well, You gotta read the room too, Chris. You got your end up. You know, Kalen, you know, I've had a longest of this conversation about this, you know, so, so we have a history of it, right?

You know, and, and you know, I'm always talking, I'm always trying to look back and Kate, your comments make you just think of the environment that allows that to, you know, is that a stable environment or is that just transitory? Is that something that worked for a couple years, a couple of decades? Even a century.

Things have changed a lot. And I see in this the fragile story, you know, this whole idea, the comic, you know, the Sergeant Rock comics I grew up on, still love them. Um, where the heroes gonna come in, and they do.

And it's, we see it play out in Hollywood. We've seen it play out in companies. We grew up with five companies.

We can see now we see hundreds, thousands, millions. And that's a fragile story. It's not sustainable.

It'll work sometimes, but not often. It's a saber tooth story, right? You know, they, it'll appear for a while.

As soon as conditions change, it can't sustain it. And Kate, you know, that, that we all, at the end of the day, I think of them a decent job in my career, and I've been questioned on this, but I'm like, aside from morals and ethics, I don't have the time. I don't have the time for the bs, right?

I'd rather to focus on, I don't care when my competitors are doing very much, right? I'm not gonna spend my time trying to get inside their systems, move forward and just 'cause this. So this hero, you know, fragile hero cycle has worked for, you know, part of our lifetimes, or all of it doesn't mean it's gonna last.

And look at the world, everyone can see everything. It's not, you know, it's not the exile days, it's not secret, secret, hidden things. You may, you may see a lot of things that aren't true, but your, the, the ability to hide something that is true is tenable.

Well, just speaking from my own experience that, that it seems that companies that are, you know, built by a person, a self-made whatever, entrepreneur, startup person, or they start a grocery chain or whatever it might be, those tend to be where that person is, the strong personality of the company. And Alan, I think you might agree with me, you know, startup companies, smaller companies are very personality driven by the CEO. I mean, it's built around that person, even if it's not the person that started the company.

Whereas I think when you get into other companies where this CEO could be replaced by the next one, bottom, bottom line, it comes down to the financial performance of the company, the return to the shareholders, the stock price. And when things happen, when you know, what hits the fan, whatever the issue is, whether it's a security breach or an affair by somebody on the executive team with, you know, a subordinate, whatever it is, if it doesn't become a big deal, it's not a big deal. If it becomes a big deal, then the board notices and I'll do something about it, or the leadership will.

So it's all relative. And I don't mean to be jaded about that. I just think that's the real view of the world.

Because if you told me that, you know, a high flyin really well performing, uh, company that, um, you know, stockholders are just rolling in it, and the CEO has an affair with the, uh, VP of hr, they're not gonna let go of that CEO. They never would. Unless it's really gonna impact their business.

If suddenly customers are leaving, suddenly that's, that's become the, in the way of getting financial performance out of the company. That's just my view. And to your point, I don't think customers leave.

I mean, outside of that small company where maybe the head person is also the tech leader, but, um, in general, it seems to me a lot of organizations are not gonna, you know, rethink a million dollar investment in an IT product and strategy that they've got going simply because there's a new CEO. They, they might be a little unsettled, but they're not gonna switch horses. Let me, let me give you another example on play off of that though.

Mike, would, would the customer con consider moving his million dollar investment because the CEO is caught on camera with his girlfriend, his mistress, who's also an exec team member. Is that enough for a customer to leave? Don't wanna do business with a, a company that the CEO cheats on his wife?

I think if the company didn't know about it beforehand, and then it's just water under the bridge, they got a new CEO, they recognize it. And what, What about if you're right. So what about if the company said, look, that's his private life.

It has nothing to do with how good my product is. There's no reason customer that you should have to worry about that, Right? There are some customers who are not gonna be bothered by that, and there are others who might be, and they're gonna have to make a personal decision, Right?

I suggest it's a business. You should be aware of your, your customer environment enough to make a decision. And if you make the wrong one, then either you're not paying attention, or sometimes life's hard makes the wrong choice.

But lets a Tough one. Let me, let me throw something at you. If we were gonna take this and apply it to every president who's ever occupied the White House, would we have any presidents?

Well, I, I, I think it's less about the Coldplay thing. It's a good, it's a good example, but Right. It's, it's the whole issue of caught doing right.

You know, in this one, it depends, right? I think Mike's exactly right. You understand your customers handle which way you like.

But the whole idea that we can maintain a, a, a hero image from mid your right, the startup CEO think I like that role. You got, there's two people, five people. But if it's gonna be mature, that's gotta be more than a, a person.

And as long as it is, and there's too much about that, it is, that's too fragile a narrative that can survive real life, then that's not a good company decision. Yep. Hey, I want to close this, this one out though.

Let me just say, this is not just about the whole Coldplay astronomer thing. Don't lose sight of the how important it is for CEOs to stay current on what today's trends are, what today's not, not just trends, but sort of currents that you have to swim at. You can't swim against these currents.

And those currents today include ai, include surviving in the current political economic environments, as well as evidently, you know, minding your P'S and Q's. So, we'll take a break here on Textron Gang. Let's come back and we're gonna talk about it.

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And we're talking about the latest Gartner forecast on IT spending, which suggests that it's gonna be a little bit north of 7% and everybody's doing a little happy dance. A lot of that seems to be driven by AI and data centers yet, yet, yet buried in there is, gee, the previous forecast was at 9%, so we lost 2%. So, Mitch, what's your take on what's going on here with spending?

Is it all just AI and data centers and damn the economic news? 'cause people are just gonna invest in these emerging technologies no matter what. Well, forecasts are forecast, they're always made to be revised, right?

Conditions change, it's just the way it is. Whether it's garters or anybody else. We do our own futureum forecasts and, uh, you know, I handle the software SEC sector primarily around software development and cloud native, things like that.

And, you know, our estimates are around eight and half percent growth. CAGR of 10%, close to 10%. So it's in, it's in the same ballpark.

I think the question is about the trend that you're bringing up is are we seeing a downward or are we seeing a shift in spending? Are we seeing a lot more money going into data centers? I would argue that's true than what we were before because of ai.

We're also seeing more money going into software, both AI software, software that has AI in it, and building AI into either, uh, the software we create or the products we create. So there's, there's that rapid innovation of ai, I think is actually fueling, not obviously the chip market and also the data center market, but it's, it's fueling a lot of development. There's so much innovation happening because of ai.

You almost can, you can't back off on spending. Totally. And, uh, it's not the dark years of 2008 or something where everything just clawed back and where we are.

I think we're gonna see pretty aggressive growth still. Yep. Look, well, well, well, well, I, I think you're going to see infl.

The fact of the matter is, you know, with the taco chacha on, in, on, uh, on, uh, tariffs, we haven't actually seen it bite yet, but it's going to bite and it will cause inflation. But let, let's be clear it, to call it 7% is, you know, in my world when it's over seven five, it's closer to eight than seven. 9%, guys.

So let's call it what it is, 8%, 8% to 9%. And it's kind of flat, right? It's a percent down.

It's not, it's not the end of the world. I, I think it's more a question. This is like measuring cholesterol.

What's the good cholesterol to the bad cholesterol? Not saying spending on AI in data centers is bad cholesterol, but when it takes up an inordinate amount of that spend increase, it doesn't bode well for the rest of the sector, uh, uh, an IT spending. And that's really the issue here, right?

What's the mix? I, and and I, I agree with what you're saying on, and I also think as we have spoken before on this show, is the idea that, for me, I personally think that at the end of the day, I, I mean, of course the energy in these data centers are, you know, there's, there's an issue there. But I also think that with innovation, things are going to become more efficient.

And so these huge data centers and everything else that we're doing in this area, I, I think we're, we're putting a, we're projecting a lot more than at the end of the day than what we're actually gonna need. And there'll be more of an evening, out evening. Evening, uh, anyway, equaling out a leveling.

I like that better, uh, with software. And, um, yeah, Kate, I think you're, I think you're spot on. I'm working with both a network, uh, data, data networking company for data centers and also one for servers, compute and storage.

And that is the message. It's around efficiency. It's around a, it's around not running just mission critical workloads.

It's handling everything. 'cause things change. I mean, it can redistribute, you know, applications or virtualized systems or whatever it might be, network paths, all of these things become much more flexible and dynamic to be able to handle whatever we need, as opposed to, here's just a special purpose that's really good at running high volume transactions for this kind of a banking application.

Well, you need those maybe in, in an edge case as opposed to everything's kind of got its own platform. And I think that you're right, it's going to much more efficiency including power and water, et cetera. Well, we had a great conversation in this, you know, last week, week before and, uh, about this, right?

You know, and I don't, you know, uh, to be clear, I don't, I haven't been looked at the numbers. I have no specific idea why, you know, the numbers are where they are. But this, if I was gonna think about it, I would expect that everything we're talking about is true and that people are over, over focusing on the use cases we see right behind us, where, you know, a lot of us who think about where we are and where we're going are saying this is really out of, out of kilter and m what you just said.

It's like you just, as you look at actual workloads, what needs to run on their GPU, what are we currently running on GPUs? Are we forecasting that we're gonna keep using that? And I'm telling you, we're not.

What does that imply towards the arms and everything else? So, you know, wherever the, whatever the details we're saying, I wouldn't expect, you know, you know, huge growth on conditions right now or, or, or, or reductions. But who, who, I'm sure it's fascinating for the financial geeks out there exactly who's spending on and what probably tells a lot of the story that we were talking about last week.

So Alan, let's get down to the heart of this thing then. Yeah. Are we living in some sort of AI bubble?

And when was It gonna pop? Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Without a doubt.

Irrational exuberance. But that being said, let me give you another take on this. You know, I remember back to the great recession in 2008, right?

2008, 2000. Um, the fact of the matter is though, it was extremely painful for so many of our friends and family in the world, in the US and in the world, the IT sector was not as badly hit. In fact, spending probably never stopped in the IT sector, right?

Mitch, you and I were working together then, right? It Shifted around, but it stayed about, it Shifted around, but it stayed. And I think it's gonna be, you know, you spoke, you, I mentioned inflation before.

I do think inflation is coming up. I do think interest rates are not going to go down. If inflation goes up, it's gonna hurt.

The housing market has, the housing market goes, the broader economy goes, we are gonna have some economic pain. However, I do think that things like ai, which will boost productivity, output efficiency will, will suck up dollars will soak up dollars as people look to get more bang for their buck. And so it spending may not be hit as hard as the broader economy will.

If, if the economy goes south, Well, Alan, one person's cloud boom cycle is another person's 3D TV boom cycles, right? You don't want to be the 3D TV manufacturer. Um, everything has its overhyped, you know, phase and then kinda get through the tr dissolution.

But, and I think what's interesting about AI is it's the constant amount of innovation in the, the kind of cycle time of that happening. We don't, haven't seen that slowing down yet. I think it, it's everything because of the amount of business that's going in.

And you could also claim that that, uh, China and Deeps seek, have heard reports of they're looking to replicate everything that OpenAI does to try to disrupt the market. You know, it is, it is truly a race like we haven't seen before. Will we hit, will the gas kind of run out and we're gonna hit a certain RPM and that's the next No, at some point though, it's put up or shut up, Mitch, right?

You, you, at some point you gotta say, where is it really saving US dollars, right? We saw Microsoft had a report. I think Microsoft's trying to claim that it AI saved them $500 million already.

And that why it's, that's why it's okay, I guess to cut 20,000 jobs. Um, The devil's in the details on those things, right? Yeah.

We don't, we don't, we don't necessarily believe that that wasn't as a result of over hiring in the first place, though. 'cause you go talk to other mid-level companies and execs and they're saying, you know, we're not seeing that level of productivity gain from ai. No, but, but the but the mega guy, you know, the hyper guys are the Salesforces, the Microsofts, the Googles, right?

And is it a tech bro, billionaire game. Chris, you had your hand up. Yeah.

Yeah. It is funny. You know, as a narrative integrity person, I have to say that, uh, you know, to be clear, you know, I'm a CEO of an AI company using AI for these purposes, um, which is embedding a plug for my company, quiet wire.

But it's, it's funny you go back to the last segment and to the point, if the CE has 80% of their time freed up and does nothing with it, yes, you're getting replaced by an ai. But my experience and just in the last 60 days, the experience of a, a huge, Alan, I haven't had a chance to catch up with you, talked to Gati ever and the GTFO, uh, prompt challenge, he runs every Thursday now a laundry list of the best people standing there with a, with AI saying, alright, for the last two months, we, me and my team have been doing this, and we're seven. We, we thought we would take seven years to do this, but we're already done.

And we're trying to figure out what we do with, so the acceleration as applied, and you know, what I think about the, you know, the state of the usage and the vendors of AI to date is inefficient as to be extremely kind. But I see right now, this year, this quarter, you know, fascinating people in our community all around the world saying, wait, I can get this all done this fast. And no vi I mean, I love vibe code, the general theme of it, but look, when I vibe code, I'm sketching out architectures.

There's real coating, which people do really well. This allows us to do the development phase of things so quickly. And that implies too, to your point, Alan, economic impacts.

I I, I am very bullish on this, in this environment. Does it enough to compensate for all the downsides? You, you know, better than I, but this is a lifting economic force over the next couple years.

0, but, and it's about augmentation, augmentation of humans, human machine teaming. And I think the more that we embrace this teaming concept, the more you can expect, um, from humans. We'll see.

You might, going back to our first block, ask a question that says, geez, if X company, you know, laid off so many people, 'cause ai, maybe their CEO needs to be looked at a little more closely about how efficiently that company was operating in the first place. Just saying, Let me draw a contrast. The people that you hear saying they're experiencing high levels of productivity, uh, because of ai, especially in software development, are tech companies.

You don't hear, uh, GE saying, we're experiencing 80% of our code being generated by, or you don't hear Bank of America talking about it. And not that they aren't also, but there, there's, there's multiple reasons for this. One is the tech companies are the ones that are investing in this.

They're also the ones that have the most to gain, um, by the products and services that they sell. So they're also applying it internally and their messaging is always gonna be built around. Here's the, here's the benefits we've experienced using our own technology.

You should be able to do that too. It's, it's a pattern we see all the time, right? Switched our database, switched our whatever.

Because here's the productivity gains you can see. And initially, if you can't pinpoint to other customers, you point to yourself. And that's the phase orient.

The real, what matters is when we see other companies starting to pronounce real numbers that affect the bottom line, when you see the GEs or the Bank of America or whoever, not the tech companies, And the technology is just laying around right now. And Kate, you, you nailed it, right? You know, it's a teammate thing, and we discussed enough about this and, and frankly we need clarity of it, but, you know, the AI and languages, whatever is a teammate.

Look, I, I have had business relationships and working relationships with humans. I'm assuming I've never met or heard or seen their voice, nothing but text could be a basket of squirrels. Who cares?

Build a team, run a team. And that's not what we've been doing with AI at all, except for tiny use cases. Every story is, you know, this big company using ai.

What they're talking about is they have some little model and they're prompting things at it. They're not integrated into those teammates. And that's where this is going.

And if you do, holy cow, Well, it could be that the whole tech world is in a AI bubble induced by our tech, bro, billionaires, we'll come back here on Textron Gang. Let's switch it to security. That ai, uh, application.

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Home of security Bloggers Network. Hey folks, we're back. And as Alan said, it may surprise you to learn that there was a security incident involving old Microsoft software.

This time it's SharePoint and apparently it involves on premises instances of SharePoint. And, uh, Chris, I'm gonna start with you and your reaction on this whole thing, but I'm kind of sitting here just scratching my head a little bit, going, who in his right mind is running on premises editions of 30-year-old software? Well, yeah, he, he did, did mention the US government.

So I, I, you know, that stands as that. But you know, lot, lots of critical infrastructure as well. You know, Kendall's not picking on anybody too much, but, uh, it is fascinating.

So, so yesterday, uh, in exactly this context, this con this story came up and Alan Friedman's, uh, uh, CSA Asba, uh, working group, uh, meeting, which he, and he announced he is leaving, uh, yesterday. So we all know that now, and next week will be the last one. But it's been this five minute, uh, time where we're small talk.

And since it's a public, uh, uh, meeting, I'll say, I apologize to my friend John, sorry if you're watching this, but, uh, he brought this up right in the beginning, and I decided to take the curmudgeon approach knowingly and say what we had said on this show a week or two, a couple weeks ago, about, there was like 16 billion or trillion passwords stolen or another breach of the whatever. And that conversation, we said, this does this matter. And, you know, so I, so in that five minutes, you know, I, I sent, I reflected that back to them.

I said, we were just talking about this in the show. And it's like, honestly, yes, of course. I mean, uh, again, right?

I'm shocked, shocked. So how much does it matter? And, you know, so in, in, in, uh, respect to John, you know, I get it and, and it is big, but you know, isn't this kind of what we expect to see all the time?

To your, to your question, Mike, who's running this old stuff, we kind of know, you know, federal agencies, railroads, you know, what's the patching? None, you know, is it gonna be vulnerable to and exploited by the, yeah. So what do we do next?

You know, it's just old hat at this point. But again, I think we have the tools to go forward. We just need to spend more time talking about those and less talking about breaches.

I, if I could just add, I, I though Chris, um, I think one of the things that, that I believe that we've seen, uh, being cybersecurity folks, is that oftentimes breaches can be, um, almost like test beds. Like, you know, what can I do? And, and that's what I feel like I see when I read about this situation.

And the other concerning thing is the attack methodology, the way they did the, you know, lateral movement, which is, it's not that we haven't seen lateral movement, and it's not that we haven't seen, you know, privilege, access and gain, you know, all those parts of, of, of the methodology of attacks. But it, it, to me, it it was almost brilliant, um, that they have to, you know it, right? Well, and this, it just exacerbate my point.

This is why I, I why I said it this way and, and, uh, and, uh, because I, I'd nor normally not on mic, on their show, on the call, right? And I just saw this one coming up and I thought, I'm just going to make a big noise and saying, we're not talking about it, rah rah. But you're right, it's a beautiful one.

But in that room, in that, and particularly at the end of seven years of conversations with Alan, by Alan and Josh Corman and all these wonderful people, and we're gonna spend, you know this and because I knew, you know, I was leaving, and we, we enjoy these things and we're gonna go there again on this, spend the whole five minutes talking about another breach, even if it's that beautiful. Instead of saying everything we've been building so far actually gets to that. The whole point is that not only can people get away with pedantics silly cybersecurity and narrative, you know, attacks, you know, they have our whole career, but we're right at the point where even something like that in a supply chain conversation where we're just finishing up on the software inventory, the software bill material, whole thing.

It's not finishes, but it's embedded in the planet. That's everywhere. What's the next step?

The next step is systems that are aware enough that even that sort of thing where there's really smart people on the other side isn't so obviously going to work. He always works. No.

And why isn't it obviously going to work? I'll tell you why, because I think system Probably better. No, Chris, I'm gonna tell you what, me, you, Mitch, Mike, Kate, probably most of the people watching this live in a tech bubble.

We, we know what we do when we're talking about MCP servers and, and gen AI and, and SBOs and, and all of these things. We know exactly what we're talking about. What we forget is that the civilians out there don't, and no matter how much time we spend talking about SBOs and generative AI and, and, you know, tech Bros and all of the things that we spend our days talking about, we can't lose sight of the fact that a lot of parts of this world run on 30-year-old software.

0, moving to the cloud versus a, in a cloud native architecture versus monolithic. They don't know. They got something called SharePoint that they've been using for 20 plus years.

That's all that matters to them. And, and so I've seen this in tech in my whole career. While we live in this bubble of early adopter, most of the world lives in that second 35% of the mainstream, right?

But, but again, this, this is, we all know this, everything you said, you and I know we all complain about all the time. It's all true. And I, I I would pauses it that we've built systems that are now at the point of being able to take that into account.

You know, no, we're not gonna get everybody to get rid of their SharePoint. That's not the answer, obviously. No, we're not gonna shame them all into doing, but I think we have enough pieces, and with agenda ga, AI and all these, you know, no one part is magic Firewalls aren't the solution, but history doesn't literally repeat forever.

It rhymes for a long time. And if it's annoying enough, you know, we get the harmonics tuned out. And I think these problems are so extreme and right at such a point, but we have enough the right tools that I think old folks like you and I, Alan, you know, can maybe see the end of it, you know, in our lifetimes and maybe even our careers.

We'll see Oh, Out, out there somewhere. Is this, go ahead, Mike. Sorry.

I'm of a completely different opinion. I'm gonna be extreme. If you are running software that's more than 30 years old and you get hacked, I'm kind of willing to say we should just find your ass into oblivion and you may be subject to jam.

The, the only problem, Mike, is that a lot of our, uh, v energy grid actually has, you know, Microsoft, you know, xp. So, um, I hate to say that, but it means that we would be going into the dark. This Is Out there somewhere, is a, i somewhere out there is an IBM XT computer running, VisiCalc supporting, Hey, some dude's, officer, hey, OS two warp, right?

I love O2 Warp. Don't go there. You know, I still think it's better than Windows, but DOS 3, 4, 1 baby.

But No, but it's, I mean, this is the world we live in, right? I mean, a lot of industrial manufacturing, you know, if they, they, they work by, if it, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Yeah, They're right, right?

You know, the security person, they say otherwise, but you're, look, you're a little tiny electric co-op in Warner Robins, Georgia, you know, and the backhoe operator is the IT person. And Sue, go ahead and sue them. You know, they're not upgrading.

They shouldn't It. All this stuff is broken, and we know it, it's called reckless disregard for the facts. I love old cars and machines, and they're always broken a little bit.

My boats are always broken a little bit by sailing thousands of miles. So you hit, But look, it happens, right? So if you are using SharePoint, make sure I think there's a patch out, but it doesn't, it's not for every SharePoint.

It doesn't close the whole thing off. You Need to harden your system too. Not just Patch, I'm sorry, but that's not just the point, right?

It's not just the patch, it's, it's, they actually have to do some extra serious steps on this situation. But I'm sorry, go ahead. Yeah, no, I, I and, and it's time, it's time for the, for the checkup, Chris.

Well, let me get specific for a second, right? You know, this is literally where AI can help, right? You know, if you having a, a, a, a sophisticated AI working with you as a teammate, and you're looking at communication structures, and you ask the question like you would of, of, of somebody who can get you the answers, you know, is it possible to deal with this issue at this small co-op or these six co-ops that I'm, that I'm dealing with?

And you can get an answer, then the answer is yes. And now I'm guessing as you go through that, you'll write a lot of scripts, you'll build a lot of stuff, but you'll find that that takes about three hours and you'll have some system that isn't gonna replace those, but will give you enough visibility that you can have a, a operational level of comfort with it. And I see that to our point, Mitch, you know, I can see we cannot, this is not about ai.

This is about using these tools, these systems for things. Pick one, this is a good one. If somebody does it in 90 days, I guarantee they, they'll have a textbook for us.

And, and to Mike's point, maybe it's just time to retire that, You know, The SharePoint well, I thought that Microsoft, I forget what they call their SharePoint thing now, but anyway, I think, I think as soon as that AI agent discovered it's running in a SharePoint environment, it's gonna be asked to turn off. So forget it. They'll build a business justification to get the budget or not, instead of just being this thing that people don't wanna talk about.

That's, yeah, of course you didn't want to retire the old stuff, but we, I see the fault in our community of just walking up to people who have been running up something for 27 years and saying, check that out without saying, oh, you have budget and the budget is controlled by local, political, whatever. It's right, these agents, you know, these, these teammates we can bring in will make, give us that clarity so we can look at it and say, the solution is, tear it out, buy a new one, put a pa, whatever. It's, It's not even a question of budget and all that.

It's what people are comfortable with if they're comfortable, right? And they, they don't like to use this stuff. Alright.

Hey, but we're outta time, so we're gonna pull the plug on this version of Textron Gang. I hope you've enjoyed it. We've got our usual Textron TV coverage immediately following, so check that out.

Um, we'll be back tomorrow on Wednesday with fresh topics and more gang folks. But until then, this is Alan Shimel for Textron Gang. Thanks for joining us, everyone.

We're out.