So let's get started. I want to ask, there's a lot of like mono mono cat fight kind of thing in a lot of the blogs and the press and stuff like that. And we wanted to, the first thing I was interested in asking is what you think each has contributed to the computer and technology industry, starting with USD for Bill and vice versa. Well, you know, Bill built the first software company in the industry. And I think he built the first software company before anybody really in our industry knew what a software company was, except for these guys. And that was huge. That was really huge. And the business model that they ended up pursuing turned out to be the one that worked really well, you know, for the industry. So I think the biggest thing was Bill was really focused on software before almost anybody else had a clue that it was really the software. That's what I see. I mean, a lot of other things you could say, but that's the high order bit. And I think building a company is really hard. And it requires your greatest persuasive abilities to hire the best people you can and keep them at your company and keep them working. doing the best work of their lives, hopefully. And Bill's been able to stay with it for all these years. Bill, how about the contribution of Steve and Apple? Well, first I want to clip I am not fake Steve Jobs. What Steve Jobs is quite phenomenal. You know, if you look back to 1977, that Apple II computer, the idea that it would be a mass market machine. You know, the bet that was made there by Apple uniquely, there were other people with products, but the idea that this could be an incredible and empowering phenomena, Apple pursued that dream. You know, then one of the most fun things we did was the Macintosh, and that was so risky, And people may not remember that Apple really bet the company. Lisa hadn't done that well, and some people were saying, okay, that general approach wasn't good. But the team that Steve built, even within the company, to pursue that, even some days it felt a little ahead of its time. I don't remember that Twiggy disk drive. The 28K. Yeah. Ah, the Twiggy disk drive. Steve gave a speech once, which is one of my favorites, where he talked about, in a certain sense, we build the products that we want to use ourselves. And, you know, so he's really pursued that with incredible taste and elegance that has had a huge impact on the industry. And his ability to always come around and figure out where that next bet should be has been phenomenal. You know, Apple literally was failing when Steve went back and re-infused the innovation and risk-taking that had been phenomenal. So the industry has benefited immensely from his work. We've both been lucky to be part of it, but, you know, I'd say he's contributed as much as anyone. We've also both been incredibly lucky to have had great partners that we started the companies with, and we've attracted great people. I mean, so everything that's been done at Microsoft and at Apple has been done by just remarkable people, none of which are sitting up here, you know, today. Well, you're sort of the... No, no, no. You're sort of... So, in a way, you're the steams for all those other people. In a way, we are. In a very tangible way. So, Bill mentioned the Apple II in 1977 and 30 years ago, And there were a couple of other computers which were aimed at the idea that average people might be able to use them. And looking back on it, a really average, average person might not have been able to use them by today's standards. But it certainly broadened the base of who could use computers. I actually looked at an Apple ad from 1978. It was a print ad at Shigeru Ancients. and it said thousands of people have discovered the Apple computer. Thousands of people. And it also said you don't want to buy one of these computers where you put a cartridge in. I think that was a reference to one of the Atari or something. You want a computer you can write your own programs on. And so the world, and obviously, people still do. We had some very strange ads back then. We had one where it was in a kitchen, and there was a woman that looked like the wife, and she was typing recipes on the computer with the husband looking on approvingly in the back. Stuff like that. How did that work for you? I don't think well. So, but just think back to, I know that you started Microsoft prior to 1977. I think Apple started the year before in 76. Microsoft in 74. Right, 75. Yeah, then we did the basic in 75. Okay. Most people, some people here, but I don't think most people know that there was actually some Microsoft software in that Apple II computer. Do you want to talk about what happened there, how that occurred? Yeah, there have been the Altair and a few other companies, actually about 24, that have done various machines. but the 77 group included the PET, TRS-80, and the AMPL-2. The original AMPL-2 basic, the integer basic, we had nothing to do with, but then there was a floating point one where, and I mostly worked with laws on that. Let me tell the story. my partner he started out with Steve Waznack brilliant brilliant guy he writes this basic that is like the best basic on the planet it does stuff that no other basic's ever done you don't have to run it to find your error messages it finds them when you type it in it's perfect in every way except for one thing which is it's just fixed point right it's not floating point and so we're getting a lot of input that people want this basic to be floating point and like we're begging laws. Please, please make this floating point. Who's we? How many people are an asshole? Well, me. We're begging laws to make this floating point. And he just never does it. You know, and he wrote it by hand on paper. I mean, you know, he didn't have an assembler or anything to write it with. It was all just written on paper and he typed it in. He just never got around to making a floating point. Well, this is one of the mysteries of life. I don't know. But he never did. And so, you know, Microsoft had this very popular, really good floating point basic that we ended up going to them and saying help. And how much was it? I think you were telling us. It was $31,000 that Apple paid you for the floating point basic and I flew out to Apple. I spent two days there getting the cassette. The cassette tapes were the main ways that people stored things at the time, right? And you know, that was fun. I think the most fun is later when we were together. What was the most fun? Tell the story about the most fun that was later. And maybe later is not the most fun. Well, you know, Steve can probably start it better. The team that was assembled there to do the Macintosh was a very committed team and there was an equivalent team on our side that just got totally focused on this activity. Jeff Harbors, a lot of incredible people. And we really bet our future because on the Macintosh being successful and then hopefully graphics interface in general being successful. But first and foremost, the thing that would popularize that being the Macintosh. And so we were working together. The schedules were uncertain. The quality was uncertain. The price. When Steve first came up, it was going to be a lot cheaper computer than it ended up being. But that was fine. You worked in both places? Well, we were in Seattle, and we'd fly down. But Microsoft, if I remember correctly from what I read, wasn't Microsoft one of the few companies that were allowed to even have a prototype of the Mac? What's interesting, what's hard to remember now, is that Microsoft wasn't in the applications business then. They took a big bet on the Mac, because this is how they got into the apps business. I mean, Lotus dominated the app's business on the PC back then. Right. We had done just multi-plan. Yes. So they hit on the Apple II. And then Mitch did an incredible job betting on the IBM PC. And 123 came in and ruled that part of business. So the question was, what was the next paradigm shift that would allow for an entry? WordPerfect. We have Word, but WordPerfect was by far the strongest in WordProcene, D-Base, and Database. And Word, that was kind of a dot, a text. All of these products I'm saying were DOS-based products. Because Windows wasn't in the picture at the time. That's more in the early 90s that we get to that. And so we made this step that the parent-time shift would be graphics interface, and particularly that the Macintosh would make that happen, with 128K of memory, 22K of which was for the screen buffer, 14K was for the operating system. So it was... 14K. 14K. The original Mac operating system was 14K. 14K that we had to have loaded when our software ran. So when the shell would come up, it had all the 128K. The OS was bigger than 14K. It was in the 20s somewhere. So we ship these computers now with, you know, a gigabyte, two gigabytes of memory. And nobody remembers. 128K. I remember that. I remember paying a lot of money for computers with $128K in those days. So the two companies worked closely on the Mac project because you were maybe not the only, but the principal or one of the principal software creators for it, right? Is that right? Well, Apple did the Mac itself, but we got Bill and his team involved to write these applications. And we were doing a few apps ourselves. We did Mac Paint and Mac Draw and stuff like that. But Bill and his team did some great work. And in terms of moving forward, when FQ left and your company grew more and more strong, what did you think was going to happen to Apple after sort of the disasters that occurred after Steve left? Well, Apple's fate hung in the balance. We continued to do match-and-toss software and, you know, Excel, which Steve and I introduced together in New York City. It was kind of a fun event. That went on and did very well. But then, you know, Apple just wasn't differentiating itself well enough from the higher volume platform. And meaning Windows, right? I mean, awesome Windows. Okay, but especially Windows in the 90s began to take off. By 1995, Windows became possible. The big debate wasn't sort of Mac versus Windows. The big debate was character mode interface versus graphics mode interface. And when the 386 came and we got more memory and the speed was adequate and some development tools came along, that paradigm bet on GUI paid off for everybody who'd gotten in early and said, you know, this is the way that's going to go. But Apple wasn't able to leverage it. They weren't used to it. After the 512K Max was done, the product line just didn't evolve as fast. as it needed to. And we were actually negotiating a deal to invest and make some commitments on things with Gil Emilio. No, seriously. What do you mean? Don't be mean to him. I'm sorry. I'm just saying the words Gil Emilio. And so I was calling him up on the weekend and all this stuff. And the next thing I knew, Steve called me up and said, don't worry about that negotiation with Gil and Neil you can just talk to me now and I said wow Gil was a nice guy but he had a saying he said apple is like a ship with a hole in the bottom leaking water and my job is to get the ship pointed in the right direction So, and meanwhile, to all this, I mean, I want to get back to the thing we saw in 1997 at Macworld there, But Windows was just going great guns. I mean, Windows 95, to whatever extent, earlier versions of Windows had not had all the features, all the GUI stuff that the Mac had. Windows 95 really was an enormous, enormous leap. Yeah, Windows 95 is when graphics interfaces became mainstream. And when the software industry realized, wow, this is the way applications are going to be done. And it was amazing that it was ridiculed sort of in 93, 94. It was not mainstream. And then in 95, the debate was over. It was kind of just a common sense thing. And it was a combination of hardware and software maturity getting to a point that people could see it. So, I don't want to go through every detail, the whole history of how you came back. Thank you. But you in that video we all saw, you said you had decided that it was destructive to have this kind of thing. with Microsoft. Now, obviously, Apple was in a lot of trouble and I presume that there was some tactical or strategic reason for that as well as just wanting to be a nice guy, right? You know, Apple was in very serious trouble and what was really clear was that if the game was a zero-sum game where for Apple to win, Microsoft had to lose, then Apple was going to lose. But that's, a lot of people's heads were still in that place. Why was that? Well, a lot of people's heads were in that place at Apple, and even in the customer base, because, you know, Apple invented a lot of this stuff, and Microsoft was being successful, and Apple wasn't, and there was jealousy and this and that. There was just a lot of reasons for it that don't matter. But the net result of it was, was there were too many people at Apple and in the Apple ecosystem playing the game of, for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. And it was clear that you didn't have to play that game, because Apple wasn't going to beat Microsoft. Apple didn't have to beat Microsoft. Apple had to remember who Apple was because they'd forgotten who Apple was. And so to me, it was pretty essential to break that paradigm. And it was also important that, you know, Microsoft was the biggest software developer outside of Apple developing for the Mac. And so, you know, it was just crazy what was happening at that time. And Apple was very weak. And so I called Bill up and we tried to patch things up. And since that time, we've had a team that's fairly dedicated to doing the Mac applications, and they've always been treated kind of in a unique way so that they can have a pretty special relationship with Apple. And that's worked out very well. In fact, every couple years or so, there's been something new that we've been able to do on the Mac. They have a great business for us. And it's actually the relationship between the Mac development team at Microsoft and Apple is a great relationship. It's one of our best developer relationships. And do you look at yourself as rivals now today as the landscape has evolved? And we'll talk about the Internet landscape and everything else and other companies that have come forward. But how do you look at yourself in this landscape today? Because, I mean, you are competitors in certain ways. We watch the commercials. The American way. We watch the commercials. And you get annoyed at each other from time to time. You know what? I have to confess. I like TC guys. Yeah, you do. I tell them. You know, the art of those commercials is not to be me, but it's actually for the guys to like each other. PC guy is great. I like him. Not a big heart. His mother loves him. I'm telling you. I like PC guy totally better. Wow. I do. I am. You've been daring. The other guys. You guys, what makes it all work? Actually. All right. We're freaking about it. How do you look at it? Let me just ask you, Bill. Obviously, Microsoft is a much larger company. You're in many more markets, many more types of products than Apple is. You know, when you were running the company, or when Steve Ballmer is running the company, you think obviously about Google, you think about, I don't know, Linux in the enterprise, you think about lots of, I mean, Sony in the game area. How often is Apple on your radar screen at Microsoft in a business sense? Well, they're on their radar screen as an opportunity. And in a few cases, like the Zoom, if you go over to that group, they think of Apple as a competitor. They love the fact that Apple's created a gigantic market, and they're going to try and come in and contribute something to that. And we love them because they're all customers. I have to tell you, I was actually told by Jay Allard, I'm serious, that because of the nature of the processor, the development platform they used to develop a lot of the software for the Xbox 360 was Mac. And he claimed that at one point they had, like, placed the biggest order for whatever the Mac power was at the time of anybody, and it was Microsoft. I don't know if it was the biggest. But, yeah, we had the same processor, essentially, that the Mac had. This is one of those great ironies. They were switching away from that processor while the Xbox 360 was adopting it. But for good reasons, actually, in both cases. because we're not in a portable application, and that was one of the things that that processor roadmap didn't have. But, yes, we did. It shows pragmatism, but we try and do things that way. So that was the development system for the early people getting their software ready for the introduction of Xbox 360. And we never ran an ad on that. I see. Admirable restraint. There were hundreds of them. Steve is so known for his restraint. How do you look at Microsoft from an Apple perspective? I mean, you compete in computers. I mean, you could say you don't compete, you know, the era of destructive whatever you said in 1997. But you think you're consciously aware of what they're doing with computers. You followed this too closely, I think. What's really interesting is, and we talked about this earlier today, If you if you look at the reason that the iPod exists and that Apple in that marketplace It because these really great Japanese consumer electronics companies who kind of own the portable music market for a long long, invented it and owned it, couldn't write, couldn't do the appropriate software, couldn't conceive of and implement the appropriate software. Because an iPod is really just software. Software in the iPod itself, it's software on the PC or the Mac and it's software in the cloud for the store. And it's in a beautiful box, but it's software. If you look at what a Mac is, it's OS X, right? It's in a beautiful box, but it's OS X. And if you look at what an iPhone will hopefully be, it's software. And so the big secret about Apple, of course, not so big secret maybe, is that Apple views itself as a software company. And there aren't very many software companies left. and Microsoft is a software company. And so, you know, we look at what they do and we think some of it's really great and we think a little bit of it's competitive and most of it's not. You know, we don't have a belief that the Mac is going to take over 80% of the PC market. You know, we're really happy when our market share goes up a point and we love that and we work real hard at it. But Apple's fundamentally a software company and there's not a lot of us left than Microsoft. But you may be fundamentally a software company, but you've been known, at least to your customers and to most journalists, as a company that kind of pays a lot of attention integrating software and hardware. Microsoft has made some recent moves to be a little more like that, obviously not in your core biggest businesses, but with Xbox and Zoom. And, you know, the surface computing device we saw today is another example. These aren't markets that hold up in size to Windows or Office, but there are some of your more recent initiatives. Are the company's approaches to this urging a little? Alan Kay had a great quote back in the 70s, I think. He said, people that love software want to do their own hardware. You know? Well, Bill loves software. I can resist that. The question is, are there markets where the innovation and variety you get is a net positive? The negative is that in the early stage, you really want to do the two together. So you want to do prototyping and things like that, you know, really is one thing. And then take the phone market. We think we're on 140 different kinds of hardware. We think it's beneficial to us that even if we did a few ourselves, it wouldn't give us what we have through those partnerships. Likewise, we take the robotics market. Very undeveloped. We have over 140 all tiny volume robots using Microsoft software, and the creativity is building toys, security things, medical things. We love the innovation and the ecosystem that's going to grow up, who knows when, but we're patient around that, and we'll have a great asset with this robotic software platform. So there are things like PC, phone, and robot where the Microsoft choice is to go for the variety, Apple is great for them they do what works super well for them and there's a few markets like Xbox 360, Zoom and this we have two new ones, the Surface thing and this round table which is the meeting room thing where we'll actually through subcontractors but it's R, the P&L on the wrist and all that for the hardware the design is completely a Microsoft thing the round table, is that something you've announced or were you just we've shown prototypes of it That's the thing where it's got the 360-duty cameras and all those. It's like Cisco has something in that market and HP too, right? HP has a very high-end thing that's a tiny bit like it. But anyway. All right. Have you ever regret, was there something you might have wanted to do differently? And maybe you feel like this happened after you left Apple. something you might have done differently where you could have had a much bigger market share for the Mac? Well, before I answer that, let me make a comment on Bill's answer there, which is it's very interesting in the consumer market and the enterprise market. They're very different spaces. And in the consumer market, at least, I think one can make a pretty strong case that outside of windows on PCs, it's hard to see other examples of the software and hardware being decoupled working super well yet. It might in the phone space over time. It might. But it's not clear. It's not clear. You can see a lot more examples of the hardware software coupling working well. And so I think this is this is one of the reasons we all come to work every day is because nobody knows the answer to some of these questions and we'll find out over the coming years. Maybe both will work fine. Yeah, maybe they won't. Yeah, it's good to try both approaches. In some product categories, take music players, the solo design works better. In the PC market, the variety of designs at this stage has a higher share. It has a higher share? Yeah, There's a lot of higher shares. It's not that much different music players the other way around. Is there some moment you feel like, I should have done this or Apple should have done that and we could have had? Oh, you've got this idea of the hardware software integration, and it's working very well now. There's a lot of things that happened that I'm sure I could have done better when I was at Apple the first time, and a lot of things that happened after I left that I thought were wrong turns, but it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter, and you kind of got to let go of that stuff. And, you know, we are where we are. So we tend to look forward. And, you know, one of the things I did when I got back to Apple 10 years ago was I gave the museum to Stanford and all the papers and all the old machines and kind of cleared out the cobwebs and said, let's stop looking backwards here. It's all about what happens tomorrow. And you can't look back and say, well, gosh, you know, I wish I hadn't gotten fired. I wish I was there. I wish this. I wish that. It doesn't matter. And so let's go invent tomorrow rather than worrying about what happened yesterday. We're going to talk a little bit about tomorrow, but let's talk about today the landscape of how you see the different players in the market and how you look at what's developing now. What has surprised both of you since having been around for so long and still very active in everything? I mean, your companies are still a critically key company, but there are many, many companies that are becoming quite powerful. How do you look at the landscape at this moment and what's happening, especially in the Internet space? I think it's super healthy right now. I think there's a lot of young people out there building some great companies who want to build companies, who aren't just interested in starting something and selling it to one of the big guys who want to build companies. And I think there's some really exciting companies getting built out there. Some next generation of stuff that some of us play catch-up with and some of us find ways to partner with and things like that. But there's a lot of activity out there, wouldn't you say? Yeah, I'd say it's a healthy period. The notion of what the new form factors look like, what an absolute interface can do, the ability to use the cloud, the Internet, to do part of the task in a complementary way to the local experience. There's a lot of invention that the whole approach of startups, the existing companies who do research, we'll look back at this as one of the great periods of invention. There's a lot of things that are risky right now, which is always a good sign. And you can see through it. You can see to the other side and go, yes, this could be huge, but there's a period of risk that nobody's ever done it before. An example that would, for example. I do, but I can't say. Okay. And so, but I can say, when you feel like that, that's a great thing. Right. That's what keeps you coming to work in the morning. And it tells you there's something exciting around the next corner. Okay, but so the two of you have, certainly you're involved every day with the Internet. You have Internet products. You have a whole slew of stuff on the Internet. You have iTunes and .Mac and all of that. But on another level, you're the guy to represent the rich client, the personal computer, the big operating system and all that. And there is a certain school of thought, and I'm sure it's shared by some people in the room, that this is all migrating to the cloud and you'll need a fairly light piece of hardware that won't have to have all that investment, all the kind of stuff you guys have done throughout your careers. So as much as people might think of you as rivals, one way to think of you is the two guys. We're both dinosaurs? We're both dinosaurs or whatever. I can talk about that? No. Seriously, in five years, is the personal computer still going to be the linchpin of all this stuff? Well, you can say that it will be predicted, but it won't be. You know, the network computer took us over. About, what, five years ago we disappeared. Remember the single function computer? There was somebody who said that these general purpose things were a dumb idea. The mainstream is always under attack. The thing that people don't realize is that you're going to have rich local functionality. I mean, at least our bet, as you get things like speech and vision, as you get more natural form factors, It's a question of using that local richness together with the richness that's elsewhere. And if you look at the device, say, that's connecting to the TV set or connecting in the car, there are wide-awaited hardware Internet connections. But when you come to the full screen, rich, edit the document, create things, And I think we're nowhere near where we can be on making that stronger. I'll give you a concrete example. I love Google Maps. Use it on my computer, you know, in a browser. But when we were doing the iPhone, we thought, wouldn't it be great to have maps on the iPhone? And so we called up Google. And they had some, they'd done a few client apps in Java on some phones. And they had an API that we worked with them a little on. and we ended up writing a client app for those APIs. They would provide the back-end service. And the app we were able to write, which was pretty reasonable at writing apps, blows away any Google Maps client. Just blows it away. Same set of data coming off the server, but the experience you have using it is unbelievable. It's way better than the computer. And just in a completely different league than what they'd put on phones before. And, you know, that client is the result with a lot of technology on the client, that client application. So when we show it to them, they're just blown away by how good it is. And you can't do that stuff in a browser. So people are figuring out how to do more in a browser, how to get persistent state of things when you're disconnected from a browser, how do you actually run apps locally using apps written in those technologies so they can be pretty transparent whether you're connected or not. But it's happening fairly slowly. And there's still a lot you can do with a rich client environment. At the same time, the hardware is progressing to where you can run a rich client environment on lower and lower cost devices, on lower and lower power devices. And so there's some pretty cool things you can do with clients. Okay, so you're saying rich clients still matter, but maybe I misunderstood you, but your example was about a rich client that is not a personal computer as we have thought of a personal computer. What I'm trying to say is, I think the marriage of some really great client apps with some really great cloud services is incredibly powerful. And right now can be way more powerful than just having a browser on the client. You're talking about a software company, being a software and services company rather than a... I'm saying the marriage of these services plus a more sophisticated client is a very powerful marriage. architecturally the question is do you run just in the cloud and all you have down locally is the browser and that is the same question for the phone as it is for the full screen device there will always be different screen sizes because these are the 5 inch screen does not really compete with the 20 inch screen does not compete with the big living room screen those are things that there will be some type of computing behind all of those things all connected to the internet But the idea that locally you have the responsiveness of immediate interaction without the latency or bandwidth limitations that you get if you try and do it all behind, that's what leads to the right balance. What does that device look like in five years? What would be your principal device? Is it one? I think you use, I could be wrong, I think you carry a tablet. Right. You're right. Which has not necessarily stormed the world yet. Yeah, this is like Windows 1992, I think. That is, I'm unrepentant on my beliefs. Okay. But to go back to Kara's points, what would you each imagine that you would carry as your principal, let's say, thing to do? I mean, Jeff Hawkins showed a very light email and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I don't know if you guys saw, but Jeff Hawkins showed a Linux-based, a very small, I think he called it a companion to a smartphone today. A phone companion. It sounded a little naughty, frankly. It doesn't matter. You weren't there. But what would you think each would be? I assume you carry tablets. I don't know what brand it is. Maybe you change them up. I don't know. You obviously carry a MacBook Pro, I would guess. Yeah, well, and an iPhone. And an iPhone. You have one? I do. Right here? Yes. Oh, he has. Well, he took it out before. What? Really? Sorry. Last year's iPhone earlier. Anyway, go ahead. So where's your device? What's your device in five years that you rely on the most? I don't think you'll have one device. I think you'll have a full-screen device that you can carry around, and you'll do dramatically more reading off of that. Yeah, I mean, I believe in the tablet form factor. I think you'll have voice. I think you'll have ink. You'll have some way of having a hardware keyboard and some settings for that. And then you'll have the device that fits in your pocket, which the whole notion of how much function should you combine in there. You know, there's navigation computers. There's media. There's phone. Technology is letting us put more things in there. But then again, you really want to tune it so people know what they expect. So there's quite a bit of experimentation in that pocket-sized device. But I think those are natural form factors. and it will have the evolution of the portable machine and the evolution of the phone will both be extremely high volume, complementary. That is, if you own one, you're more likely to own the other. And then at home, you'd have a setup that they all plug into? Well, at home, you'll have your living room, which is your 10-foot experience, and that's connected up to the Internet. And there you'll have gaming and entertainment. And there's a lot of experimentation in terms of what content looks like in that world. And then in your den, you'll have something a lot like you have at your desk at work. You know, the view is that every horizontal and vertical surface will have a projector. So you can put information, you know, your desk can be a surface that you can sit and manipulate things. Can I please have a room in my house that doesn't have a screen and a projector in it? You bet. Thanks. The bathroom. That's a perfect place for it, actually. So what's your five-year-old look at those devices you'll carry? You know, it's interesting. The PC has proved to be very resilient. Because as Bill said earlier, I mean, the depth of the PC has been predicted every few years. Here when you're saying PC, you mean personal computer in general, not just Windows PCs. I mean personal computer in general. And, you know, there was the age of productivity, if you will. You know, the spreadsheets and word processors, and that kind of got the whole industry moving. And it kind of plateaued for a while, was getting a little stale. And then the Internet came along, right? and everybody needed more powerful computers to get on the Internet. Browsers came along and it was this whole Internet age that came along, access to the Internet. And then some number of years ago, you could start to see that the PC, that was taken for granted, things were trying to plateaued a little bit, and innovation-wise at least. And then I think this whole notion of the PC, we called it the digital hub, but you call it what you want, sort of the multimedia center of the house, started to take off with digital cameras and digital camcorders and sharing things over the Internet and kind of needing a repository for all that stuff. And it was reborn again as sort of the hub of your digital life. And you can sort of see that there's something starting again. It's not clear exactly what it is, but it will be the PC maybe used a little more tightly coupled with some back-end Internet services and some things like that. And, of course, PCs are going mobile in an ever greater degree. So I think the PC is going to continue, this general-purpose device is going to continue to be with us and morph with us, whether it's a tablet or a notebook or a big curved desktop that you have at your house or whatever it might be. So I think that'll be something that most people have, at least in this society. And others maybe not, but certainly in this one. But then there's an explosion that's starting to happen in these, what do you call post-PC devices, right? You call the iPod one of them. There's a lot of things that are not... You can get into trouble for using that term. I want you to know that. What? I'm kidding. post-PC devices. Why? People write letters to the editor. They complain about it. Anyway, I think there's just a category of devices that aren't as general purpose, that aren't, that are really more focused on specific functions, whether they're phones or iPods or Zooms or what have you. And I think that category of devices is starting, is going to continue to be very innovative. And we're going to see lots of them. I mean, an example of whatever. that's the name. Well, an iPod is a post-PC device. Oh, yeah. The phone is a post-PC device. Because the iPhone and are some of these other smartphones, and I know you make, you believe that the iPhone is much better than these other smartphones at the moment, but are these things, aren't they really just computers in a different form factor? I mean, when you say we see the word phone, it sounds like... We're getting to the point where everything's a computer in a different form factor. So, so what? Right? So what if it's built with a computer inside it? It doesn't matter. It's what is it? How do you use it? And how does the consumer approach it? And so who cares what's inside it anyway? What are the core functions of the device formerly known as the cell phone, whatever we want to call it, the pocket device? What would you say the core functions? Like five years out, what are the core functions of that pocket device? How quickly all these things that have been somewhat specialized, the navigation device, the digital wallet, the phone, the camera, the video camera, how quickly those all come together, it hard to chart out But eventually you be able to make something that has the capability to do every one of those things And yet given the small size you still won want to edit your homework or edit a movie on the screen of that size And so you'll have something else that lets you do the reading and editing and those things. Now, if you could ever get a screen that would just roll out like a scroll, then you might be able to have the device that did everything. You know, in the very first D conference, we had these guys from e-Ink here. I'm sure you both talked to them. They were talking about that. That was five years ago. It's always five years out. There's some advances in projection technology that are more likely to deliver it, I think, than the flexible material guys. But it's not even on the horizon, no matter which of the two approaches. many times. We have some Microsoft research people work on that. There's a lot of investment, but it's at least in the five-year time frame. You, five years from now, what's going to be on that topic device? I don't know. And the reason I don't know is because I wouldn't have thought that there would have been masks on it five years ago. But something comes along, gets really popular, people love it, get used to it, you want it on there. So people are inventing things constantly and I think the art of it is balancing what's on there and what's not on there is the editing function. And clearly most things you carry with you are communications devices. You want to do some entertainment with them as well but they're primarily communications devices and they're going to, that's what they're going to be. Outside the computing area, what are the exciting areas in the internet space at all that you're looking at that you find that's interesting to each of your companies in general for you. Any kind of social networking, any kind of wikis, those kind of things that we've talked about in the past couple of days today. Essentially. You know, we're working on some things that I can't talk about. Again. Again, yeah. Very beautiful. There used to be a thing, isn't it, at Apple? That would blow it away. Blow it away. Wow. There used to be a saying at Apple, isn't it funny a ship that leaks from the top? That's kind of like a sweater without sleeves is a vest. I hope that's it. That was what they used to say about me when I was in my 20s. There's a zillion interesting things going on on the Internet. The most interesting things to me are these incredible new services. people are bringing up and there's a lot of them surrounding entertainment but there's a lot of them that have to do with just sort of figuring out how to navigate through life a little more efficiently and I think it's really great when you show somebody something and you don't have to convince them they have a problem that they're solved. They know they have a problem you can show them something and go oh my god I need this and I think you going to see a lot of things like that happen over the next year or two. You obviously have a very large internet business with iTunes and you sell a lot of stuff on the Apple store, but you were early with this idea that when you bought a computer from Apple, you had this kind of internet service back in and it was called .Mac and I think a lot of people feel you haven't developed it very much. I couldn't agree with you more and we'll make up for lost time in the near future. and in your case, you obviously have huge things like Hotmail, for instance, which is, I guess, and Windows Messenger, which are both widely used, and I don't even know how many users. It's a billion. Huge numbers. But on the other hand, you haven't, as Steve Ballmer was talking about today, you have other people have much stronger positions in things like search and other parts of the Internet. So are you guys, because you are the personal computer companies that are best associated with that, not as nimble as some of these competitors at this point? Do you worry about not being as nimble, both of you? I mean, obviously, Microsoft's a much bigger company, but you're a big company. Steve, Apple is. Do you worry about not being as nimble as some of you sitting out there with, you know, the kind of 10 employees that you guys had in 1977? Well there's always going to be great new things that come out of other companies and you want to be in a position to benefit from those to have those inventions drive demand for Windows and personal computers and then some of those upstream things you want to participate in. I hope Steve mentioned we are going to participate in search hopefully to a higher degree in the future than at present so we'll we'll see what we can do there. A lot of the applications are more specialized they're not areas we'll go into and take what can happen with education now that video is mainstream and all these tools that let you do rich interactions are very mainstream I'm very excited about that you know the idea of empowerment goes back to the very beginning of our industry and some of those dreamings that this would be used by students or the teachers to get better and learn from each other in these new ways we're just at the threshold where some of those things can happen and yes our companies can contribute to that but as a whole it's the ecosystem jumping on and building on each other where you can finally say finally technology did something for education. See I look at this a little bit differently which is we're not trying to do a lot of this stuff because it's not what we do we don't think one company can do everything. So you've got to partner with people that are really good at stuff. Like, we're not, I mean, maybe Microsoft is great at search. We're not. We're not trying to be great at search. So we partner with people that are great at search. And we don't know how to do maps on the back end. We know how to do a great, the best maps client in the world, but we don't know how to do the back end. So we partner with people that know how to do the back end. And what we want to do is be that consumer's device and that consumer's experience It's wrapped around all this information and things we can deliver to them in a wonderful user interface and a coherent product. And so in some cases, you know, we have to do more work than others. You know, in the case of iTunes, there wasn't a music delivery service that was any good. We had to do one, so we'll do one. But in other cases, there's companies doing a way better job because we're not as good at this stuff as other people are, and we'd love to partner with them. And so, you know, we selectively do that. And I think it's really hard for one company to do everything. Just for entertainment. You're both in the entertainment world. Entertainment is important to both your companies for your music right now. And as you get into Apple TV, Microsoft is within the Hollywood area. Where do you see that going in the era of YouTube? We've had a couple of network people here talking about changes that are happening in Hollywood and everything else. What is happening now to entertainment delivery? Where do you all play? could you be the delivery mechanism in one way or the other for most people? Well, the big milestone is where the delivery platform is the internet, and so you bring the richness and the interactivity. I think you can get a little bit of a glimpse of the future of TV more from looking at community-type things like Xbox Live, where people are talking to each other, finding friends, watching things together, talking about those things. That, if you map that onto genres like educational shows or sports shows or watching the Olympics or the elections, that ability to navigate becomes very, very powerful. And we're not an entertainment company. Yes, we do Halo, which is this big video game. But by and large, we're a platform. And so it's the top software things, whether it's the speech or the ink or the deep graphics. That's where things that take 10 years to get done, the ITTV stuff, the foundation there, you know, it took 10 years to get it done. Now it's finally coming to fruition. And we have people like AT&T betting their company on putting that together. So we're just at the start of having a scale entertainment delivery vehicle, both through PCs, unfortunately not connected up to the TV set in most cases. But that's the point of innovation. And now things like ITTV and Xbox that are connected up in the living room. Steve, you were today, Bill, you weren't here, but Steve showed a new function of Apple TV that brings YouTube directly to the TV. Is there going to be more of that community? Do you see yourself as the way Bill says is an enabler of entertainment or putting aside your Disney role? But you're I think I think people want to enjoy their entertainment when they want it and how they want it on the device that they want it on. So ultimately that's going to drive the entertainment companies into all sorts of different business models. And that's a good thing. content company that's a great thing more people wanting to enjoy your content more often in more different ways that's why you're in business but the transitions are hard sometimes and you know the music industry it turned out that the internet got fast enough to download songs pretty easily there was no legal alternatives and maybe they made some bad choices and how they reacted to that but you know they're still trying to make the transition to a very different way of doing business or ways of doing business while they're under attack from piracy. And we can all highlight some of the mistakes that have been made, but, you know, still, it's a tough job. And Hollywood, I think, you know, has watched what's happened in music, learned some things to do, some things not to do. But, you know, they're still trying to map this out. How do they make some of these transitions, some new business models, different platforms, allowing their customers way more freedom on when they want to watch stuff and how they want to watch it? And I think there's a tremendous amount of experimentation and thought going on that's going to be good. It's going to be really good if you're a content owner. Can I ask about the user interface of the personal computer for a minute? Vista has just come out, which is your best version of Windows. You've done, has some UI improvements in it. You're about to do yet another version of the Mac OS called Leopard in the fall. which, from what you've shown publicly at least so far, has some improvements. But fundamentally, these are still the kind of file icon, folder icon, drop-down menu. I know I'm minimizing. There's a lot of other things. There's gadgets and widgets and all kinds of other cool things in there now. But, you know, you can see that it's still all built on what you started with, what Xerox did research on. Is there any offing in the next four or five years? Is it possible there's a new paradigm for organizing the user interface of the personal computer? Let's read cell phones and things out for a minute for just the personal computer, Bill. One of the things that's been anticipated for a long time is when 3D comes into that interface. And there was a lot of experimentation. It's like some of the Internet where you kind of walk around and meet people. but in fact the richness, the speed, it just didn't sustain itself. Now we're starting to see with some of the mapping stuff, a few of the sites that the quality of that graphics, the tools and things are getting to the point where 3D can really come in. So I definitely say that when you go to a store, a bookstore, you'll be able to see the books lined up, you know, the way you might be interested in or lined up the way they are in the real store. So 3D is a way of organizing things, particularly as we're getting much more media information on the computer, a lot more choices, a lot more navigation than we've ever had before. And we can take that into this communications world where the PC is playing a much more central role, kind of taking over what was the PDX, sort of one of the last name frames in the business environment. That will be a big change that will come to it. And as we get natural input, that will cause a change. And what about this multi-touch stuff? It's really interesting. Obviously, Steve showed some of it on the iPhone when he introduced the iPhone. Steve Ballmer today showed a bunch of it with the surface computing device. It happens, although it's not part of our program, that HP, which is a sponsor of this conference, has a multi-touch sort of display over here out in the foyer. Is this, will this make its way? The minority reports this kind of thing. Yeah, will this make its way into, maybe you call it direct manipulation of objects with your hands and your fingers. Will this make its way into mainstream, let's say, laptop computers as a new UI or an additional part of the UI? Or is that just a specialized device? Well, the job is on the left side. Vision, software is doing vision. And so, you know, imagine a game machine where you just can pick up the bat and swing it or the tennis racket and swing it. We have one of those. No, no, that's not it. You can't pick up your 10-0, your 10-0, and swing it. You can't sit there with your friends and do those natural things. That's a 3D positional device. This is video recognition. This is a camera seeing what's going on. And, you know, in a meeting, like you're on a video conference, you don't know who's speaking when they're audio-only, things like that. The camera will be ubiquitous. Now, of course, you have to design it in a way that people's expectations about privacy are handled appropriately. appropriately but software can do vision that can do it very very inexpensively and that means this stuff becomes pervasive you don't just talk about it being in a laptop device you talk about it being part of the meeting room or the living room or but on the laptop the way that and and you know maybe i'm wrong maybe this is what we have is great and we don't need any new big radical change but When I turn on my laptop, whether it's my Vista laptop or my Mac laptop, you know, there have been improvements, but it's a lot like it was 10 years ago. It's much better. The graphics are better and all that. You talked about that radical change. You know, you have the mouse. For both your companies. You have the icons. You move around. And you talked about what a big gamble it was in 84 to do that and then follow along with Windows. We still essentially have that approach. I'm just wondering, is that going to change? But touch, ink, speech, vision, those things come in, but they don't come in as a radical substitute. I think you're also underestimating the degree of evolution. Because you live with it year by year. You know, say we sent you away for 10 years, and you came back and you said, wow, there's a search paradigm, and that's more at the center of how you find these things. There's tagging, that's more at the center of how you find these things. there's, you know, the evolution is a very good thing. In fact, even in that evolution, the stuff we did with Office, there's this balance you strike where when you make a change, in that case, the ribbon, you're going to have some users who feel like, oh, geez, I have to spend a little bit of time to be brought along to that. But there has been good evolution. But these natural interface things are the revolutionary change, and they'll be very revolutionary. That together with the 3D that I talked about. I know you're working on something. It's going to be beautiful. We'll see. Yeah, I can't talk about it. But the. Bill discusses all his secret plans. You don't have this anyway. I know. It's not fair. But it's. I think the question. The question is a very simple one, which is. How much of the really revolutionary things people are going to do in the next five years? are done on the PCs or how much of it is really focused on the post-PC devices. And there's a real temptation to focus it on the post-PC devices because it's a clean slate and because there are more focused devices and because they don't have the legacy of these zillions of apps that have to run in zillions of markets. And so I think there's going to be tremendous revolution in the experiences of the post-PC devices. And the question is how much to do in the PCs. And I think, I'm sure Microsoft is, we're working on some really cool stuff. But some of it has to be tempered a little bit because you do have, you know, these tens of millions in our case or hundreds of millions in those case users that are familiar with something that, you know, they don't want a car with six wheels. They like a car with four wheels. They don't want to drive with a joystick. They like the steering wheel. And so, you know, you have to, as Bill was saying, in some cases you have to augment what exists there, and in some cases you can replace things. But I think the radical rethinking of things is going to happen in a lot of these post-PC devices. I'm going to ask you a more personal question. We have just a minute before we're going to open up for questions. What's the greatest, I'm not going to call this a Barbara Walters and ask what she would like to be. She would love to be Barbara Walters, let me just tell you. No, I would not. What's the greatest misunderstanding... Thank you, Steve. ...about your relationship? I mean, you're obviously going to go down in history books, all in that kind of thing. But what's the greatest misunderstanding in your relationship and about each other? What would you say would be this idea of cat fight, a cat fight this idea of which one of the many we took a marriage secret for over a decade now Canada that trip to Canada I don't think either of us have anything to complain about in general and I know that the project like the Mac project you know it was just an incredible thing a fun thing where we were taking a risk we did look a lot younger in that video you were 12 that's how I planned what was 12 but you know it's been fun to work together I actually kind of miss some of the people aren't around anymore you know people come and go in this industry it's nice when somebody sticks around and you know have some context of all the things that have worked and not worked and the industry gets all crazy about some new thing you know like you know there's always this paradigm of the company that's successful is going to go away and stuff like that it's nice to have people seeing the waves and waves of that and yet they're willing when it's going to be a to take the risk to bring in something new. Has it been important? One last question and then we'll go to the audience. He didn't answer. He just said he talked about his secret game area. I thought that was your answer That wasn my answer You know when Bill and I first met each other and worked together in the early days generally we were both the youngest guys in the room right individually or together I about six months older than he is, but roughly the same age. And now when we're working at our respective companies, I don't know about you, but I'm the oldest guy in the room most of the time. And that's why I love being here. Happy to oblige. Happy to oblige. And, you know, I think of most things in life as either a Bob Dylan or a Beatles song. But there's that one line in that one Beatles song, you and I have memories longer than the road that stretches out ahead. And that's clearly true here. Well, you know what? I think we should end it there. Let's just end it there. I'm going to have a little tea right here. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you. Wow. Okay, so audience questions. Questions. Can we have the lights? Roger from Elevation Partners. Hey guys, that was incredible. Thank you very much. We've got a big election coming up next year. I'm curious if there are any issues that you see in Silicon Valley that we all ought to be focused on communicating effectively to the next potential president of the United States. But is there any common ground that we share? Because it's weird. You don't actually hear any issues that people are talking about right now. I'm curious if you guys have any in mind. Yeah well certainly education is one that I'd put at the top of the list. Are there technological solutions right now that they could do something about or is that just sort of like? No the technology is going to be helpful and more and more but the way that teachers are measured and made excellent the way that the high schools are designed the expectations they have it's it's not just a pure technology thing it's more an institutional practice where the opportunity is and you know there should be a lot of debate about the different ways of doing that. Boy we've got some pretty big problems and I think Most of them are much bigger than anything Silicon Valley can contribute right now to solve. So hopefully some of those are good. I also think we underestimate how much all of our industry depends on stability. We've enjoyed a long period of stability and we've been able to focus on technology and growing our businesses and stuff. And I think we take that for granted sometimes. One of the more interesting areas that we all suffer from of course is in the area of energy dependence and there's a lot of work going on. I know a lot of investing going on in the way. I don't know if the results are there but a lot of investing going on in alternative energy and maybe maybe Silicon Valley can play a small role in some of that. Are you guys investing in that area? Personally I am. Some. Which might be a lot a billion here or there are you investing there no just appreciate over there hi Donna for any pictures my question is really at what point is there too much diversity it was talked about a few times in the discussion the fact that now microprocessors They're very low cost, memory is low cost, software is ubiquitous, but my life has been made better by standards like coding standards, network standards, and it seems like we're reaching a point where diversity is starting to take hold to a point where we're not going to be able to have the kinds of convergence devices that I think everyone would really be able to appreciate. I'm wondering, you know, is this going to be like health care or mass transit where you just can never put it back in the bottle again? And I'd like to get your perspective on that. There's still an opportunity to have some grand convergence devices that can really simplify people's lives and enrich their lives. Well, I think Bill and I would agree that we can get it down to two. No, I think there's a... It's hard to limit imagination and innovation. I think there's always going to be a bunch of new-grade things, but I think that's part of what we put up with to get the innovation. We put up a little bit of aggravation to get the innovation. And I think the marketplace is awfully good at allowing diversity when it should and then getting rid of it when it shouldn't. And I'm letting it come back sometimes. Yeah. I mean in terms of standards and things. The internet standards have been incredibly powerful. You know, video formats, things like this. And so I don't see things that are going to really hold back a convergence device. You know, sure, there's a lot of wireless approaches, but that's pretty healthy right now. They each have various merits. A few of them will end up overlapping the other ones until the other ones aren't. But I think the industry has done very well at latching on the standards for the things that there were no longer any innovation in and then focusing on the places where it wasn't clear which approach was best. Hi, Jesse. Hi, I'm Jesse Cornwood, headbutler.com. Because you're not the youngest guys in the room anymore, it's perhaps appropriate to ask you a question about legacy, each of you. Bill, even your harshest critic would have to admit that your philanthropy work is planet-shaking, incredible, and could be if you make it a second act so amazing that it would dwarf what you've actually done at Microsoft. If you had to choose a legacy, what would it be? And Steve, do you look at Bill and you think, gee, that guy is so lucky. He had a company so rich with talent that he didn't have to personally come in every day and say that, you know, I wish I had the opportunity. Okay, I can answer that one. Well, the most important work I got a chance to be involved in, no matter what I do, is the personal computer. You know, that's what I grew up, you know, my teens, my twenties, my thirties. You know, I even knew not to get married because I was so, until later, because I was so obsessed with it. That's my life's work. and it's lucky for me that some of the skills and resources that I put skills first that I was able to develop through those experiences can be applied to the benefit of the people who haven't had technology including medicine working for them. So it's an incredible blessing to have two things like that. But the thing that I'll, you know, if you look inside my brain, it's filled with software and, you know, the magic of software and oblique in software. And, you know, that's not going to change. So your question was about whether I wish I didn't have to go to Apple every day. No, if you envied Bill a bit, this second act that he has. Oh, no, I think the world's a better place because Bill realized that his goal isn't to be the richest guy in the cemetery. Right? That's a good thing. And so he's doing a lot of good with the money that he made. You know, I'm sure Bill was like me in this way. I mean, I grew up fairly middle class, lower middle class, and I never really cared much about money. And Apple was so successful early on in life that I was very lucky that I didn't have to care about money then. And so I've been able to focus on work and then later on my family. And I sort of look at us as two of the luckiest guys on the planet because we found what we loved to do and we were at the right place at the right time. And we've gotten to go to work every day with super bright people for 30 years and do what we love doing. And so it's hard to be happier than that. You know, your family and that. What more can you ask for? And so I don't think about legacy much. I just think about being able to get up every day and go in and hang around these great people and hopefully create something that other people will love as much as we do. and if we can do that, that's great. Yeah. Thanks, Stephen, Bill. Rob Kelly, I'm here with my business partner. We've got a 100-person internet media business. I'm wondering what would be the single most valuable piece of advice you'd give us to even attempt to create some of the value that you guys have done in both your very impressive companies. I think actually maybe in both cases correct me if I'm wrong the the excitement wasn't really seeing the economic value even when we wrote down at Microsoft in 1975 a computer on every desk and every home we didn't realize oh and we'll have to be a big company every time I thought oh god Can we double in size? Can we manage that many people? Will that feel fun still? And so every doubling is like, okay, this is the last one. And so the economic thing wasn't at the forefront. The idea of being at the forefront and seeing new things and things we wanted to do and being able to bring in different people who are fun to work with, eventually with a pretty broad set of skills and figuring out how to get those people, those broad skills to work well together has been one of the greatest challenges. You know, I've made more of my mistakes in that area maybe than anywhere, but, you know, eventually getting some of those teams to work very well together. So, you know, I think it's a lot about the people and the passion, and it's amazing that the business worked out the way that it did. People say you have to have a lot of passion for what you're doing and it's totally true and the reason is because it's so hard that if you don't, any rational person would give up. It's really hard and you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don't love it, if you're not having fun doing it and you don't really love it, you're going to give up. And that's what happens to most people, actually. If you really look at the ones that ended up being successful, unquote, in the eyes of society and the ones that didn't, oftentimes the ones that were successful loved what they did so they could persevere when it got really tough. And the ones that didn't love it quit because they're sane. Who would want to put up with this stuff if you don't love it? So it's a lot of hard work and it's a lot of worrying constantly. and if you don't love it, you're going to fail. So you've got to love it, you've got to have passion and I think that's the high order bit. The second thing is you've got to be a really good talent scout because no matter how smart you are, you need a team of great people and you've got to figure out how to size people up fairly quickly, make decisions without knowing people too well and hire them and see how you do and refine your intuition and be able to help build an organization that can eventually just build itself because you need great people around you. Liz. Liz Byer, a question against historical curiosity. You approach the same opportunity so very differently. What did you learn about running your own business that you wish you had thought of sooner or thought of first by watching another guy? I give a lot to have Steve's taste. He has natural, it's not a joke at all. I think in terms of intuitive taste, both for people and products. You know, we sat in Mac product reviews where there were questions about software choices, how things would be done. I do this as an engineering question, you know, and that's just how my mind works. and I see Steve make the decision based on a sense of people and product that it's even hard for me to explain. The way he does things is just different. And, you know, I think it's magical. And in that case, wow. You know, because Woz and I started the company based on doing the whole banana, we weren't so good at partnering with people. And, you know, actually, the funny thing is, Microsoft's one of the few companies we were able to partner with that actually worked for both companies. And we weren't so good at that. It's where Bill and Microsoft were really good at it because they didn't make the whole thing in the early days. And they learned how to partner with people really well. And I think if Apple could have had that, a little more of that in its DNA, it would have served it extremely well. and I don't think Apple learned that until, you know, several, a few decades later. Last question. Oh, I'm sorry. Over here. Hi, Charlie Brenner from Fidelity Investment. In our financial services industry, we are focusing very strongly on aging and retiring baby boomers, a huge demographic. We're not that old. No, I wasn't. The question is different from what it sounds like it's going to be. But most of the innovation that we see coming from computer and Internet companies is kind of youth oriented. And I'm just wondering if there are activities going on in your companies acknowledging what's going to happen in generationally. Not true. I'll give you one example. So we started building in video cameras into almost all our computers a few years ago. and the response by people of all ages but in particular seniors has been off the charts because they're buying these things now and they're buying them for their grandkids their sons and daughters with their grandkids so they can stay in touch with their grandkids and they're video conferencing more than younger people are and it's incredible what this has done so that's just one simple example but there's like dozens of them that have clicked with you know seniors that are living independently that want to stay in touch with extended families and do other things like that. Yeah, I think that it's a very good point when you look at the size of the market. And that's probably why it's great that there are all these companies out there who can see, okay, what would you do for seniors? I think the natural user interface is particularly applicable here because the keyboard, you know, we're sort of warped in that we grew up using the keyboard, and so it's extremely natural to us. things like, and that's probably why when we showed the Surface computer, I showed it privately to a bunch of CEOs a couple weeks ago. I was kind of stunned by how blown away they were. But their ease of navigation is just not the same. And when they saw that, the idea that they could organize their photo album, it meant more to them than it did to me. I'll give you another example. We've got a little shy of 200 retail stores now. And one of the things the stores are doing is personal training now. It's called one-to-one. And we are up to now a run rate of a million personal training sessions. They last an hour per year. A million per year. You only started a little while ago, right? Yeah. You started about a year ago. And we're up to a million training sessions a year run right now. And a lot of those folks, some of them anyway, many of them are seniors and they're coming in and they're spending an hour learning how to use Office and they're spending an hour learning how to video conference and they can basically come in as much as they want and they can schedule these things throughout a year and they pay $99, I think, a year for it. And it's been great. Last question. Now the last question over there. We all share a common science fiction experience of the metaverse or the matrix where we all could communicate without being in the same place. And by the way, thank you both for providing us the best platform so far to go to chat rooms or to all go to a MySpace. It's a far cry from these things that we see on Star Trek as a holodeck. What kinds of things can you imagine that are partway there that could be much better than the three-window iChat that we might see in the next five or ten years? I don't think Steve's going to announce his transporter. I want Star Trek just give me Star Trek I think short of the transporter most things you see in science fiction are in the next decade the kinds of things you'll you'll see that the virtual presence the virtual world that both represents what's going on in the real world and represents whatever people are interested in, this movement in space as a way of interacting with the machine. I think the deep investments that have been made at the research level will pay off with these things in the next 10 years. I don't know. And that's what makes it exciting to go into work every day. Because there's, as we talked about earlier, this is an extraordinarily exciting time in the industry. and lots of new stuff happening. So, yeah, I can't even begin to think of what it's going to be like 10 years from now. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you.
How to use PLOD. Let's walk through how to use PLOD, from recording and marking highlights to generating summaries, asking PLOD questions, and sharing your content. 1. Recording. If you're using PlodNote Pro, NotePin, or PlodNote, just long press the device to start high-quality recording. Want more detailed hardware instructions? You can find them in the PLOD Apps Explore page under Help and Support. Once connected, you can also start a recording directly from the app. If required by law, please obtain consent from all participants before recording. Respect privacy and comply with applicable law. 2. Highlights. Mark key moments during recording pressed to highlight. Both PlodNote Pro and PlodNote Support pressed to highlight to mark the moment instantly, signaling to AI what matters most and achieving real-time human A, eye alignment, so insights remain accurate, actionable, and aligned with your intent. Add highlights, audio, image, text, to the app. You can also add highlights directly in the Plot app. Along with simple tap to highlights, you can snap a photo or type text directly to enrich context. Real-time summary. Whenever you create a highlight, Plot Intelligence analyzes the context and generates a short, clear summary line, helping you review and recall key points in a full picture. 3. File Detail Page When you open a recording file, you'll see two sections. Sources Contains the full audio and complete transcript. Notes AI-generated summaries in multiple formats, helping you quickly grasp the core points Plot intelligence is powerful enough to handle different summary scenarios Multidimensional summaries tailored to your role and context Thousands of templates to choose from. Works with different large AI models for quality and accuracy. 4. Ask Plod. Ask Plod is your built-in AIQ and A tool available on every file's detail page. Beyond simple facts, it helps uncover deeper insights from your meetings. Smart suggestions. PLOD recommends follow-ups to help you dig deeper into your meetings, not just skim the surface. Dash global search. Ask questions across every recording to find tasks, opinions, or key details dash without scrolling one by one. Accurate answers with source references. Answers are generated from both audio and transcript, with original quotes attached. Click to replay the moment or view the context to ensure accuracy. Save key answers as notes. Add answers straight into the current note or save them as a new one. Key details stay captured, making follow-up easy, from asking to saving in one step. 5. Share and Export Plod supports multiple export formats, including audio files, full transcripts, AI summaries, and even mind maps. You can also generate a shareable link and choose what to include. For example, share only the summary and audio. That's a quick tour of PLOD. We hope PLOD becomes your intelligent partner for work and life, helping you capture important moments, distill key insights, and boost your efficiency and creativity. For additional support, please visit our Help Center at HTTPS, www.plod.ai page's CHI support, or contact our support team through support at plod.ai. Thank you for choosing PLOD, and we wish you an enjoyable experience.
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