Techstrong Gang – May 23, 2025

Are you ready for a Johnny Ive AI device? You're watching Text on Gang. Hey, everyone.

Happy Friday to you. You know, I'm a glass half full kinda guy, so I'm optimistic today after a devastating loss the other night. I'm hoping my Knicks bounce back and beat the Pacers tonight at the Garden to even the series.

But let me tell you what's got me even more excited. You know, many people think that Steve Jobs was the front man, but the real little elf in the back who is designing all those cool Apple products, when Apple made cool products, was Johnny Ive, and, you know, the good folks at AI just bought the rest of the company that they didn't already own of, of Johnny's company, uh, to create AI empowered devices. And I can't wait to see, uh, some of the cool stuff Johnny Ivan, his design team are gonna come up with.

We'll get more into it in a second. Welcome to our Friday edition. We've got some really cool people to talk about it with.

Let me introduce you to them. This is really an east coast, west coast kind of day. We're gonna fly over the rest of the country, um, sitting, you know, the czar of the valley purveying over all that he can see, kinda like Simba, it's all yours.

The circle of life. He's our, he's our, uh, Silicon Valley editor, John Swartz. Hey, John.

How you doing? I'm good. So, speaking of Johnny, ive, last night, so we, we taped this on Thursday morning, last night, Wednesday nights I went to an event in Pacific Heights, which is where he lives.

And there is a, uh, startup that did a a, an event at a, at an open house, at a mansion is for sale. He was invited to the party. I don't know if he ever showed up.

I, I left bef if, if he did show up, but I don't think he would've, he's probably drunk right somewhere right now after celebrating that, that, that I would, I would be Six and a half billion. That's, and, and we'll get into it, but it's really only a little piece. He's still, he's still gonna have his own company and people, but we'll, we'll get into it.

John, good to have you here. I love Pacific Heights. I stayed there during RSA.

I remember that. It's it incredible. Beautiful.

Good stuff. Beautiful area. I used still live in an apartment building in Pacific Heights.

I stayed in an old Victorian mansion there with, well, piece of a mansion. It was two floors, four bedrooms, three baths. It was, it was nice.

This, this was five stories. Yeah. Incredible.

Nice. Well, let's move on from our royalty to the Duchess of Silicon Valley. She's, I love that marketing the Duchess, that's always a good name.

One and only Lisa Martin. Hey, Lisa, how are you, Alan? I'm doing great.

Great to see you and Mike and John. Now I know since my Warriors are out of the playoffs, I don't know John, how you feel, because Alan and Mike, you're big Knicks fans. I'm gonna put all my energy into rooting for the Knicks.

All right. We, we need the help. We need the help.

Too bad you couldn't help us the other night, you know, just hit a foul shot would help. But anyway, thanks for being here, Lisa, fresh off your Boomie mc gig. That looked like a lot of fun.

I saw robots. Yes. I got to interact with robot on stage, and it actually worked beautifully.

It was, it was a blast. Great time there, great, great energy, great customers, partners, great boomie folks. It was just wonderful.

Good stuff. And I, well, by the time you see this, he'll hopefully be home and bought from Boston, unless they've kept him hostage there. Now, who knows.

Uh, he's our chief content officer, Mike Ard. Hey, Mike, how are you? I'm all right.

I'm up here in Boston where they throw tea in the ha and we don't need no stinking royalty. Yeah, yeah. But they don't have a basketball team in the playoffs anymore.

Just say it. And, and while I was up here, I went to a Met Red Sox game, and, you know, it's, it's a rare moment, but I got to cheer. Let's go Mets.

So you probably won't hear that very often. So you are one of those guys who would cheer for the Mets over the Red Sox. Oh, most definitely.

See, I, I, I look for a zero zero tie. I don't want to see any of those teams win. But anyway, hey, let's move it in.

So, so look, six and a half billion. All equity, all equity, no cash exchanged hands here. So I don't know how drunk Johnny got though.

Look, Johnny Ives isn't hurting for money, but Mike, what, what do we got here? Well, it's pretty amazing. Uh, it seems to be another one of these situations in the valley where somebody's ascribing value based on, I don't know what the math is here, but, uh, sounds kind of fictional to me, but great for them.

I'm happy that it makes sense to some venture capitalist somewhere, but the rest of the world is scratching their head going, well, what the heck could you possibly come up with that I'm not already gonna get from Apple, Samsung, and a dozen other consumer electronics companies. John, any idea what's going on here? Well, they, this idea, according to the video that Sam Altman and Johnny I've made, is that they are going to create this family of AI products.

Now, whether that are, these are glasses, jewelry, uh, smart home devices, we don't know, maybe gadgets of some sort, but they're gonna be available next year, or the first ones gonna be available next year. Um, it it, it's interesting because this, this deal is, while surprising, it really isn't surprising because these two companies, um, have been working together. Io, which is a startup from Johnny, and then Altman's open ai.

They've been talking for a couple of years, and, and, and in fact, I've mentioned in a profile in the New York Times that he was working with them, and that there had been reports and the information, Bloomberg and others, that there might be a deal, if not at least, at the very least, a partnership. So as you mentioned, like yeah, there's, there are a couple, there are a number of companies. There's, there's Meta, there's Google, there's Samsung, there's Apple, which we shouldn't dis discount at all.

They're all gonna be buying into this area. This area has actually not had a lot of success. I mean, we've had a couple of well-known failures that I pointed out and, and, and, and made light of.

Um, and so they just weren't the right products for the right time. You know, my takeaway from this isn't as much about the products, but at the Lost opportunity at Apple. And it, to me, it's like a story about Apple in a certain way and what happened with Tim Cook.

So if you go back in time, Johnny left in 2019, he was there almost 30 years at Apple, and he left after years of frustration from structural changes and this kind of change in culture from the company being a design heavy company to being utilitarian, utilitarian, I can't pronounce that word. But in any event, he, he moves on. Apple continues to struggle to innovate, I think in the last few years.

Uh, cook is still there. I there, I, I was talking to some people last night about this, who know the players, and there are beginning to be murmurs of how long is Cook going to be running Apple. I mean, maybe it's time to make a transition eventually into someone who's more of an innovation person.

And that it all, it all hinges on how Apple does an app with Apple intelligence. And we're gonna see, we're gonna know within the next year or two. But I think that's something that Bears looking at in the long term versus this kind of short term win for open ai.

Lisa, we talked about this in the past, but you know, devices are already kind of creepy. They're already listening in and kind of tracking our behavior, and now they're gonna have artificial intelligence. And I can only imagine how much more creepy things might be.

I mean, am I gonna have to build some, you know, area of my house that is completely soundproof so I can have a private conversation with somebody? Or what, That's not a bad idea. Actually, I wish the code of silence, the, or the kind of shame, I wish this wall was soundproof.

You know what, what's interesting about it? And first of all, that video was a little bit mysterious. Now, they were having coffees, but there was wine behind them in that bar that they were in.

Anyway, just saying. But what was interesting to me was that Sam Altman said that we have this opportunity to kind of completely reimagine what it means to use a computer. So, kind of a vague but bold statement there.

But I think from a Silicon Valley perspective, AI is getting creepier. I actually talked about it on the radio this morning. I had a message to graduates about why not to be concerned and why you should partner with ai.

But I think what this means for Silicon Valley is AI leadership. I think this acquisition would solidify open AI as a leader in consumer AI in that space. It's gonna put pressure on competitors like Google and Meta and Apple, because they need to accelerate.

John, you talked about Apple I worldwide developer conferences coming up and what, less than a month. And so hopefully we'll hear some more innovation from Apple with respect to Apple Intelligence. But I think, I think the AI leadership, um, for open AI is, could get much stronger.

I also think that this partnership between IO and Open AI could lead to sort of mysterious right now, but really revolutionary AI products that apparently they say will change the way people interact with technology. So, like I said, it's a little bit mysterious, but I think there could be some new market opportunities as well. Like John, you mentioned potentially, you know, things coming into market next year, maybe smart hub gadgets, creating new opportunities that could disrupt traditional industries.

So I think it's an interesting, uh, acquisition, a little bit mysterious, and they were just covering it about a half an hour ago on my local NBC station. And, uh, it's definitely one that's peaking a lot of interest in the Valley and beyond. Alan NK Gadget.

Boy, you're usually at the front of the line for any of these new Innovations. I was, but you didn't call on me. I raised my hand.

I was trying to, I was trying to follow the rules. So let me, let, let me give you Shimmy's take on this one. So first of all, you know, there's an old saying in baseball and football, a team takes on the character of its coach.

When your coach is Tim Cook, you have a rather utilitarian team. So it's no surprise that Apple's product line kind of mirrors Tim's personality and, and his who he is now. So I'm, I'm not surprised by that.

On the other hand, I think you guys are just barking up only one tree and missing the forest. Johnny Eyes didn't just make consumer products at Apple. He didn't make just, I don't wanna say the word, it's live.

It'll pop up here. He didn't want to just say Siri. Johnny, Johnny really was responsible.

Steve, look, Steve Jobs had the final sign off and everything, but Johnny was responsible for the look and feel of that Macintosh, that silver laptop with the white apple on it that lit up, that you knew you had an apple, it made you feel just a little special. You could put the sticker over it and all kinds of things happened. That's Johnny Ives the look and feel of macros, why it looks so much more elegant than Windows did.

That's Johnny Ives, that, you know, this is a master of design, A master What fonts, Steve, Steve Jobs was known to be fanatical about what fonts they're used more than, right? Remember, I mean, apple had their fonts. That's Johnny Ives.

So when you got a Johnny Ives, that's why I think the buzzes, that's why they paid six and a half billion dollars. It's not to make creepy ai. Well, it was, I mean, he, he designed iPhone, of course.

Uh, even the Apple Park, apple Park was his last project. Yeah. Which they didn't go forward with.

But you know, when Sam Altman talks about redesigning a computer, are we gonna have some guy running down the thing, throwing a hammer into the, into the screen where, where Trump's talking or something? You know, not a bad idea. But anyway, uh, this is this.

I think what they're betting here is trying to catch lightning in the bottle again, which is have Johnny Ives and team come up with AI devices that are truly extraordinary revolutionary, the very opposite of utilitarian. I'm not looking for Apple's not gonna come out with anything exciting. You think they are?

No. But Johnny Ives can. And I think that's what Samal Altman has betting six and a half billion.

One other quick thing though, from a deal perspective, OpenAI already owned, I believe like 23% of io. So they just bought the other 75% in Essence. And, but they didn't really buy Johnny, Johnny and his team still have this other company that sounds pretty Silicon Valley.

He new agey to me, but that's him. And, you know, and, and so he's still going to be doing his things outside of this IO deal. But me, for one, I'm excited as heck to see what comes he builds out of this.

Yeah, I, I, I, so, so it's called, yeah, love the Collective is called Love from, you know, the interesting thing too, is a bunch of the Apple key designers who we worked with, with him. And so this is the thing that I keep running across, and this is what I, why I'm convinced that hook is in a transition period. I don't mean to like just blow smoke, but I've run into five or six people who have moved on to completely different companies doing incredibly interesting things.

You didn't do him at Apple. There's an argument to be made that Tim Cook was the right person at the right time for the right job. There.

You had job, he left. There had to be a transition. Johnny, Ivan, those people moved out.

They're a different company than they were, But that was 14 years ago. Jobs died. I mean, they, they, they, they passed on the torch because jobs was, Was, And, and look, if you are an Apple shareholder, you're not crying in your beer over, over how your stocks done this last 14 years.

Tim, Tim, he's the right guy for that job. But maybe Apple is no longer the company that makes exciting revolutionary products. Maybe they make evolution there.

There's an argument that says the iPhone has been evolutionary since the iPhone three. There's been nothing. I just got my wife a 16 pro, she replaced, I think it was a 13.

And she doesn't know the difference. It's, it's just minor iterations every year. And they, and, and they play this smoke and mirrors game Absolutely with press, They included it.

But Johnny Ives. But here we, you got a blank piece of paper here for this maestro to, to, to design on, right? I'm who know, I don't know if we under even know.

We we're assuming consumer devices we're assuming we creepy ai. Who knows? Is it, is it a robot?

Is it a humanoid robot? Is it some other pet? Is it some something we haven't thought about?

He's not a me too kind of guy, so I don't expect Me too. I think it'll be, it's gonna be a mix of things. It'll be robots and all kinds of things embedded into appliances that are, I don't think it's gonna be any one thing.

It's more about the experience that will happen across multiple. It's gonna be a look and feel of these products that you are going to know, just like you knew it was an Apple product, even the Newton and the, And the way they interact. Now, here's the part I am a little bit concerned about as we get into this brave new world is, you know, theoretically agents will talk to each other.

But I got a sneaking suspicion that, you know, apple AI is gonna talk better to Apple AI than it does Samsung ai or, and vice versa, right? They're Gonna embrace and extend the AI agent interface, Maybe the walled garden AI approach. Yeah.

Yeah. So there might be all these walled gardens that start to emerge around all this AI stuff that, you know, I don't want to have that conversation over and over again. Every time there's an innovation, I just want something to work together.

So then go to Google. There are plenty of Apple fanboy out here. We're gonna be fine with it.

I I'm telling you right now, you're not gonna change that. Well then, then, then I will just stay with my Google phone and my Google earbuds and all my other Google gadgets. 'cause at least I feel like there.

So you're not, you're not gonna gonna have the cool stuff. And maybe, maybe Johnny Ives open AI will be more open. I don't know.

May I don't know, maybe. But you know, you are telling me that some boomer's gonna build something really cool for the 20-year-old 20-year-old set. I don't know.

Maybe there's a kid out there who's got a better idea and a better field. The greatest generation, my friend. Well, not us.

It was, it was our parents. All right, on that note, let's take a break. We're watching Text Drug Bank.

We're gonna come back and talk. What, you know, SAP joins the agent, craze the race. Ready, set, go.

You're, you're watching the Gang. Hey folks, we're back in. Yes, if you watched any episode this week, you know that there was more shows this week than I can remember at any given time.

And SAP had their own little event called SAP Sapphire, which they were all down in, uh, I think it was Orlando. Um, and one of the things they were talking about is agents on steroids. And it was a network of agents who are gonna be what they described as omnipresent.

And the idea here is that these agents are continuously on continuously monitoring every activity and then suggesting in combination with each other helpful things to be done. And in an SAP's mind, this is how they're gonna automate entire end-to-end processes. So Alan, what's your take on this?

You know, it's not much different than what Microsoft was describing, but very, you know, ERP kinda CRM specific, You know, it's triple Crown season, right? Uh, the Preakness, I forgot who won the Preakness. It's a one word name.

Not justify journalism. Of course you would know that one. John, uh, yeah, journalism won the Preakness came in second in the Derby.

I feel like I'm watching a horse race here. And really, SAP went out of the gate at a long shot of about 45 to one. You wanna talk about the ultimate me too?

I, you know, look, let, let's be fair. SAP doesn't make their bones on leading the pack. SAP makes their bones on.

They've already got a huge install base who use these er to use their ERP tools. There's a lot of inertia steering that ship. They don't need to be the first to market.

They just need to be decent. They need to be, they, they need, they can't be last as they turn for home on that last turn, right? They can't be less.

But if they're in the middle of the pack, their customers are gonna be happy because it's too much of a hassle to tear that out and go try to use one of these cutting edge ones that try to, you know, win the race necessarily. So when you look at what they've had, what they've announced here, it's a solid set of what, what is becoming run of the mill AI agents that, that do task in their ERP world. But here's all sounds great, but here's where I think we've gotta be cautious.

Everything we've heard this week, and I mean, everything we've heard this week, not from just SAP, but from Microsoft and, and, and Dell and, and all of these other places that we've reported from this week, these are all on the come, none of this is necessarily real right now, right? It's all what's coming, maybe it's in beta or pieces of it have rolled out, but this is all, you know, typical Silicon Valley tech industry, you know, selling the dream, brother selling the dream. And what's gonna happen is at some point we're gonna separate winners and losers based upon who converted their dream to reality.

Now, you can make fun of SAP as I did, right? As the 45 to one shot, but the dream they sell isn't farfetched. It's it's middling of the road.

And, and they will, there's little doubt in my mind they'll deliver. They'll go, it may not be the coolest, greatest, sharpest, sexiest thing out there, but it'll, it'll work for them. It may not be the first, it won't be the last, but it'll work.

And that's SAP right there. And there's two things about this that are unclear. One is, AI is expensive.

So now I'm gonna have, you know, yeah. And these are systems and records. So, you know, it might still be cheaper to actually have a human go enter a piece of data than use the ai, because the AI is gonna run up a bunch of tokens, and those tokens will quickly add up.

I mean, a simple process is like 40 or 50 token alone. I, I get it. But, but here's the bet that's being made here by all these companies as well, right?

Like, we like a sort of a Moore's law kind of equation that, you know, as the time rate goes forward, left to right, the cost of AI computing comes down, Right? But it ain't happening this year or next. So that's all.

Well, a lot of these agents may not be out here this year and maybe next year. But a, you know, if we're not gonna fundamentally change the co cost of ai, all of this stuff that we've been talking about for the last six months is, is crack that we're smoking, right? And let's get off the crack.

We we're all bet that, you know, what made deep seek the story, it was because they could do it cheaper. But that's the way transistors give way to, to circuits and electronics get shrink, shrinking. And, you know, Moore's lords in terms of computing.

This is, this is, this is what we do. This is, we, you know, I think that bet is kind of already baked into our system. I I think everybody's trying to figure out if this is a 2026 phenomenon or a 2027 and beyond phenomenon.

That's all we're trying. I think everybody agrees it's gonna happen. Not everybody seems to know for sure the when of it.

No. But, but here's my, again, this shimmy's take on these things. Not just this, but with every technical innovation that I've come in, it gets announced in my own hype cycle.

It gets announced out here. The hype gets crazy up here. It starts getting real.

And there's always gonna be pundits who said, not real yet, not real yet, not real yet, not real yet not. And then at some point all of a sudden someone says, Hey, wait a second, it's real. I don't know when that point's gonna be, because I think that's different for different people, right?

My Silicon Valley friends tend to get a lot more excited faster than maybe the, the cynical New Yorkers, right? And you may say it's real a lot before Mike's gonna say it's real. I'm, I'm from Florida, we're plastic, you know?

And So when I used to work at Forbes years and years ago, I, I, I would, we've fall into this. We had a, we had a Silicon Valley bureau and we would get excited and hyped by things. And then the guys back in New York would say, would always like throw water on it.

And we were, and it was always like in between and shall in in the, the, the mid mid point was, right? I mean, and I, and I think this kind of interesting thing about SAPI, like SAPI respect them, but I think you're absolutely right, Alan. They're, they, they're not trying to win any argument.

They're not trying to blow us over. They're just trying to be good enough. And I don't mean that as a put dent.

Oh, that's, and that's, that's reputation and it works. So, um, kudos to them for picking their, Lemme let me paint an SAP nightmare scenario for you. So imagine a world where there are these agents, but they're not SAP agents, but they're able to invoke SAP services on the backend.

So they could be agents from, I don't know, Microsoft Apple pick them. And then everything that SAP does is a backend service that comes essentially a headless service. And there is no SAP brand in front of you anymore.

It's just something that's being invoked on the back end. And, uh, then the, you know, that becomes a set of commodity processes on the back end. And Lisa, you know, as a marketer, can you feel the pit in your stomach start to get queasy?

If you're thinking about, you know, the SAP brand, You know, I, I just, I'm not sure there's a pit in my stomach. In fact, I don't think there is. I think what they did well with the announcements was, was the messaging.

They're aiming to automate tasks and improve efficiency using AI agents. That's what they wanna deliver for their bread and butter customers, of which there are so many. They talked about the Juul AI agents really being designed to understand the context of tasks and, and, and provide that personalized support that we all want.

I don't think they're concerned about their brand being absconded or, or blurred away. I think what they wanna do is, is really provide this framework for orchestrating these agents so that there's integration with other frameworks and end, end-to-end process automation. And I think at the end of the day, what they want to do is delight their customers and make that those tasks automated, contextualized and personalized.

And that's kind of what they said in what they were announcing this week. So I don't think they're concerned about the lines being blurred as much as they are delighting their existing customer base. I, you know, and Mike, in terms of non SAP agents working with SAP, I think that's gonna be a conscious decision.

SAP makes, because they could spin it as them being, you know, the platform that the whole ecosystem works for. Or they could decide they're not gonna, they're going to, they're gonna take an Apple approach, if you will, and say, well, it works, you know, a little bit with Microsoft, but it works best with our own agents. Or, or they might go the other way and say, our agent's gonna be, you know, the superior agent and my agent can kick your agent's ass and therefore it will do what I tell it.

Will we, can we play that song Secret Agent man? Secret Agent Man, it's going to, it's, look, this whole agent, thing's gonna play out. It's gonna be very, I I had this, the conversation with Mihir, um, I forgot mi last name, the Automation Anywhere.

CEO, SLA Su Shukla Shukla, Mihir Shukla. He's the CEO 20 year CEO at Automation Anywhere. It's not whose agent you use.

'cause we're all going to use agents from everywhere. It's whose agent Orchestrator you use that they give a hell about. And I think that is this, Mihir is no dummy, right?

And, and I think he's dead on. And I think that's where the smart money is, is making their bets ServiceNow, making their bet on it. Salesforce Benioff making their bet on it.

Mihir making his bet on it. Um, that's, that's the key. We're we're going to use, you know, agents from everywhere and anywhere.

Some will be ephemeral, some will be persistent, some will be good, some will be bad, some might be really elegant. Design by Johnny. I, I'm kidding, but who, who do we use to orchestrate?

How do we manage this army of agents doing our buy bidding? Those will be the big winners in this, in this thing. All right?

So it's gonna be like Batman. You're gonna get the agent you need not deserve and see how it goes. Like, No Bateman Bateman, Right?

Love those commercials. Alright. Yeah, that's All right.

We've taken it, we've taken it to the umpteenth. We're gonna take a break here on Text Drug tv. We'll be back in a minute.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. All right, folks, back, we're back with the last show of the week. Boy, it was, I gotta tell you, I'm tired.

But Dell World Technologies was out there and they were talking up their new server platforms and partnerships with a MD and how they're gonna be able to use AI accelerators from Nvidia and a MD and Intel. And they also previewed some new systems where they're gonna combine what they're calling HCI and traditional three tier systems into this one integrated system. And we talked about something similar to that a week or so ago as well.

But, um, Lisa, you know, one thing you gotta say about Dell and all these guys for all the chat about software, maybe it's the hardware guys that they're gonna make all the money Very well could be. Yep. This week was Dell Technologies world.

I wasn't there this week. I had a lot of friends who were, so, I saw tons of coverage, lots of selfies with Michael Dell. He's always so good about that.

But they announced this range of infrastructure innovations that are designed to support AI workloads. They talked about, uh, validated designs for ai. They talked about AI ready servers.

So there's your point there, Mike, about the hardware guys, because DE has introduced AI ready servers. They say, Hey, these are optimized for performance, uh, for efficiency to support demanding AI workloads. They also talked about some new storage and networking solutions all designed to support its AI workloads.

But I think why this matters for customers is what Dell is trying to say is that, Hey guys, we're gonna simplify AI adoption for you. Every company. We talked about this, um, uh, Alan R-S-A-C-A couple weeks ago.

Every company has to have an AI story. Well, it's challenging. It's, it's, it's, it's very complex, especially when you bring in the cyber resilience, uh, sphere if you will.

But I think what Dell is trying to do here is, is simplify the adoption for customers of AI by providing these solutions that are, they're pre-configured, they're pre-tested, they're also trying to improve performance so that customers can run AI workloads more effectively, simplification, more effective, more efficient. And also what they're saying is that, hey, customers, if you leverage our AI ready infrastructure, you're gonna gain a competitive advantage because you're gonna be able to deploy AI solutions faster and more efficiently than your competitors. So that, that was kind of, I think thematically what I got out of what they're announcing really efficiency, um, performance, make AI adoption easier in this complex landscape.

There's a tension in all of this conversation too, and I'd love to, you know, get Alan's opinion on it. 'cause I think we've seen this before, but you know, a lot of the AI platforms that are in use today are do it yourself kind of things that people stitch together and integrate it. And they're hard to support, but they were typically created by infrastructure people that were attached specifically to a data science team.

And now, you know, as we see more of the inference start to be running, and, uh, software artifacts themselves are getting built into DevOps workflows, there's an argument to be said that it's time to just build standardized platforms that you get from a Dell or an HPE or somebody else in much the way you buy any other servers. So are we, are we on the cusp of that? Al Are we on the cusp of it?

It goes back to the AI agent thing, right? So lemme back up. Yes, we're on the cusp of it, but when do we actually get there?

John May think we get there a lot sooner than you may think we get there, right? Because there's an argument to be made. What we've got now is, or what's coming down the pike right now, is there, it it's, you know, it may not be all the way there that we, we, we, you know, it's not achieving the full promise, but we're already starting to see this stuff get real to a certain extent, right?

And now where we talked about SAP being a, uh, not a laggard, but you know, the second half of the mainstream, let's call it kind of company, that's, that's their market. Not, not the early adopters and not the first half of the mainstream. Dell is, is very much also a company that doesn't like to jump into a market unless that market is substantial.

And unless Dell feels good that they can capture a substantial share of that substantial market emphasis on substantial. So when you see a company like Dell coming out with this, they've already validated in their minds that this is a, a substantial market, not 10 years from now. Now it's a substantial market now.

So we're on the cusp and they're making their play to capture their fair share of that market, which in Michael Dell's mind is always an outsized share of that pie, right? It's a big piece of double piece of pie. And so, I, I think there's your answer.

If Dell's saying it, they're doing it, it's real. They don't, Dell doesn't usually they're not, they're not Apple though. Apple's never a first to market company either, right?

Dell's not a first to market company. So this, we're we're past the cusp. Yeah.

I mean, to your point, de Dell always waits to, you know, when there's enough critical mass of customers to buy something that in, in numbers that can be measured in millions and billions, that's when they start worrying about it. Yep. And only when they have a plan to be a substantial player in it, they never want to be a fringe player And they leverage their ecosystem.

Well, to your point, Alan, they don't wanna be a fringe player, but they also leverage that ecosystem. Well, and some of the things they announced, I thought, Hey, I could see new partnerships here, new collaborations and the AI ecosystem, which would further solidify them as one of the go-to platforms. You know, think you'd take away for in, in a sense like where Mike was, this is, I, I think I, I think Mike would agree, this is probably as many announcements and in many, uh, big companies competing against each other in the same space that I've seen in one week, maybe in decades.

And I, and I think that the takeaways we have the leaders making their, their moves, but we also, as you said, Alan, SAP and Dell and what, to me, what's always interesting, and I keep asking the companies themselves that are gonna make these decisions, and they're all kind of in a, in a kind of a, a holding pattern, like a plane flying over a city waiting to land. They just, they're just waiting for this stuff to come out. And again, just to synthesize what you've all said Al already, we don't know what the timing is gonna be, but it's definitely gonna happen.

5, you know, the, the, the latest announcement that they make, well, we'll, we'll have more details later. That's what the holding pattern is, is about. And they're also waiting for what Apple has to say.

So it's all kind of just this, this huge rush. And then awaits Talent's also betting on the CIO and most of those CIOs are kind of anxiously looking across the room there at these AI budgets that are starting to increase within their organization and suck it up more of the dollars. And they want control of those budgets because they're gonna be large scale projects.

And you can then roll up all kinds of interesting upgrades alongside that AI project. Much like a bill going through Congress. And they wanna be able to go back to the CFO and say, yeah, we have an AI motion.

It's big, but it includes all these pieces and standardized stuff that we can manage. And they're used to making that kind of case versus, I don't know if, um, you know, a lot of the I internal IT organizations that I know, I don't think they can build custom systems, never mess maintain them. I think they've lost that skill over the years And for good reason.

I mean, it's just, I mean, who, who wants to build custom system one-offs anymore, right? I, I just, you know, uh, I think back to when I was in the, at inter reliant, we were in the data center business and all the different servers and machines and you know, we bought 30 companies in 36 months. Most of them were, were hosting companies.

And you know, it, the, the, the disparity between the machines you would see from company to company. You know, some people had white box PCs that they kind of went out and got the motherboards themselves and built sitting in, in Baker Baker's racks, right? Other people really had like Rackable, rackmounted servers, you know, then Cobalt came out with this little one U blue server that had red lights that blinked.

And I remember asking Pat Conte there, head of sales, pat, what are the red lights? Blinking symbolize? He said, nothing but they're cool as s**t, aren't they?

And I said, yeah, they are. And everybody started and we were able to sell those 99 bucks a month dedicated server, sold them like hotcakes, right? This is, you know, you know, we're talking about, by the way, we were Dell host.

I did that deal. Interline, the company I helped put together was, was Dell host that we were an OEM relationship. Dell invested in us.

And that was another sweet deal, right? For Dell. We used to have to buy the server, they would sell it, they would sell it for 40% more than we could sell it for.

'cause our salespeople stunk compared to Dell. We'd have to buy the server from them. So we pay them for it.

Then Dell would collect the money from the end user every month for hosting and give us a piece of that for the, what we did. So they made money on the, in the out and the in between. And we were sitting there having to keep the customer happy.

But it brought a lot of business into us. 'cause you know, it allowed us to be Dell host. And This is, this is the magic of a thing called the channel, right?

And Dell is a master channel. So that, So good for them, you know, and next generation servers and yeah. You know, I, I, so those are the, probably the least, you know, I I I, I was reading the coverage, like you were, at least we had a lot of FU folks there.

Um, okay, there's a new power edge. Wow. You know, um, honest.

But, but, but compute and storage get the scale independently, but you buy them together in a bundle and consensually manage them. Does that not get your heart going? Yeah, just a little bit.

Just a little bit. But there are people who geek out on that, right? And, and so more power to 'em.

Anyway, let's call a wrap on this week's Textron gang, the week of AI agentic AI conferences. We shall it shall be heads forth, be known as, um, have a great weekend. Hey, just a heads up, you know, for those in the US you know this, but for around the world this weekend is what we call Memorial Day weekend, where we honor our fallen soldiers over the years on Monday.

So we will not be doing a show on Monday. We'll, we'll be returning on Tuesday. And, um, enjoy the long weekend.

If you are lucky enough to have the long weekend, uh, we have a, as usual, a full text from tv, uh, uh, schedule right behind today's show so you can watch it the rest of today. And again, quick reminder, we are on our OTT channel. Go check us out on Roku, Amazon, apple tv, iOS or Android.

Mike, John, Lisa, thank you very much. Thank you for watching. This is Alan Hummel.

We're out.