Why Microsoft bet on Surface

23:55The model on the edge will bring context and understanding, and these large models will do reasoning at a scale that's not possible. And I think that concert is going to open up some new experiences about the OS and app layer. Anyway, so I think that's kind of our three vectors of thought process right now in terms of where UI affordances and constructs will take themselves. And then we'll see. A year from now, I'm sure if we talk, you'll see how we're going to be smarter across the board. I think the point on these interfaces can be minimalist over time because of the reasoning capabilities is certainly a deep call.

24:26I know you've talked about it in a couple of different places. I think that's kind of on our minds. Your experimentation iteration point is a great one. And I think that is a thing we are on a learning journey ourselves, quite frankly, and how do we go do that? We'll continue to use the Windows Insider program. It's been powerful for us to learn kind of what works and what doesn't. What I love with the Insider community is we're able to do a bunch of different experiments. We're able to do them asynchronously and get signals at the level that matters for individual features in themselves. But we also have a variety of other learning tools and experimentation methods.

24:59We are able to talk to customers. We certainly get the chance to go experiment with commercial customers. And then I think from a Windows standpoint, we get to learn at the rate of the entire company. And so for me, the fact when it comes to the idea of responsible AI, for example, Microsoft is leading responsible AI in the cloud. We are learning a bunch there, and certainly we take those lessons and we apply them to customers in a Windows context because they're the same person, the same corporation, the same set of customers. And so I find, in fact, in this AI world, I have more learning tools because the way AI capabilities and services and even social experiments and how people are experiencing them is actually pretty broad-brushed across the company than features in Windows in the past by themselves.

25:41Yeah, I've always enjoyed the sort of pros and cons of being Microsoft in this ecosystem. On the one hand, you have this incredibly long history and a lot of people who are very accustomed to certain workflows and the sort of cost of change is very high. But on the upside, you can put that kind of stuff in front of huge numbers of different kinds of people pretty quickly. And I just that that tension, I feel like I see everywhere across Microsoft and is always really interesting to watch. It is a great balance. Yeah, I don't know if I have a recipe for sort of an answer that has resulted to success.

26:13Like you said, it's a tension and we have to kind of work the balance there for sure. Totally. So I know I have to let you go here in a minute. So one last question. We started 12 years ago. Fast forward 12 more years for me. Is the bet now the same one you feel like you were making with Surface 12 years ago? Or has it shifted? Like, is this a sort of inflection point in the life of what you think these devices are and what you're pushing towards with them? Okay, it's a great question. Let me try to do this in two. The philosophy and our strategy and mission with Surface has been around driving leading innovation in the Windows ecosystem in a way that we think allows Windows itself to move the needle for what is possible, but to do it in a way that is actually responsible for end customers and as a business within Microsoft.

27:05I think that aspect of Surface is going to be instrumental for us to continue to move the needle of what is possible, both in a technology sense, in a product-making sense, in a sense of how do we deliver these capabilities to customers and to businesses in a way that actually is credible for them at the end of the day. I think that aspect of Surface will continue. It has been powerful for us. Quite frankly, I think the co-pilot wave, co-pilot plus wave of PCs was only possible with the deep work that happened in Surface over the last four or five years. And so that will continue to be instrumental for us.

27:35And I expect and believe that will continue to be great for us going forward. In terms of the devices themselves, you know, time will tell. I think, you know, we've grown our portfolio. We've played, we've added, we've tried, we've learned. I think that that spirit will continue with the team. We will continue to drive innovation. We will learn through those experiments. I'm excited many of them are going to be successful, but I'm also, you know, clear-eyed some of those experiments and learnings may or may not result in, you know, in products in themselves. but in either case, I think they serve the outcome and the mission for what's critical for Surface and quite frankly, Microsoft, I think at the end of the day.

28:08Fair enough. All right. Well, I've made you late for a meeting, so I'll let you go. But someday we're just going to talk about like hinges and stuff for several hours and I'm very much looking forward to that. It's going to be bad. Sounds lovely. Thank you. All right. We have to take a break and then we're going to do a big smart home catch up because there's a lot to get to. We'll be right back.

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29:39Oh, hey, welcome to gift wrapping. Whoa, Zoe Saldana. Hey, can you wrap these please? Wow, iPhone 17s. You splurged. At T-Mobile, you can get four iPhone 17s on them. It's the perfect gift for everyone. I'm the worst. I only got my mom a robe. Well, it's better than socks. So, I have to trade in my old phone, right? No, at T-Mobile there's no trade-ins needed when you switch. Keep your old phone or give it as a gift. Incredible. In fact, wrap up my old phone too. For my Aunt Rosa. Forget that. Aunt Liz will be jealous. Sounds like my family drama. Oh, I got it. I'll give it to my abuela. I'll take reindeer paper with, hey, where are you going?

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32:02We're back. It's time now for my favorite occasional segment on the Vergecast, which is when I drag Jen Toohey onto the show and then complained to her about the smart home for a half hour or so. I call this segment, Does Matter Matter? It's pretty good, right? But actually, there is some fun stuff going on in the smart home world right now, including some potentially very big news from Google and Amazon and some other companies that matter in this space, which means Jen and I actually have a bunch to catch up on. Jen Toohey, welcome back. It's been a while. It has, David. It's always a pleasure to be back, though.

32:34I feel like we haven't had enough time to yell about matter on this show recently. It feels like it's time. I know. Well, I got to yell about matter with Neelai on the other show. So we don't talk about the other show. How dare you? OK, so I have come up with a little game for us. And I didn't tell you about it because I'm a very cruel and unhelpful podcast host. I have no idea what's about to happen. So I have five topics for you. They're all based on stories you've written recently. And I'm going to throw them at you one by one. and you're going to have to tell me whether this thing is a big deal, a medium deal, or a small deal.

33:11And then we're going to talk about it. Okay. I have theses, but I want to know what you think about all of these. Does that sound good? We're just going to dive in. It's going to be great. Sounds good. The first one, big deal, medium deal, small deal. The Dyson Wash G1, Dyson's first mop. People are very excited about this thing, Jen. Big deal, medium deal, small deal. What do we think? From a smart home perspective, teeny tiny deal. Okay. Because it's not a smart thing. Well, it depends on your definition of smart, but it's not internet connected in any way. It is not an IoT device. From the world of floor washing, however, I would say it's kind of a big deal.

33:51Because, you know, it's very expensive, but Dyson, love them or hate them, they are innovative. They do come up with some interesting solutions for common problems in our home. And whilst there are lots of great ways to mop your floor, this does actually seem like it has an interesting construct that's going to take a lot of the hard work out of mopping. I mean, frankly, I have never mopped my floors in years because I use robot mops. But that's part of my job. But when I used to have to pull the mop out with the bucket. Oh, it's the worst. It's the worst. And this does actually seem like a good solution.

34:26And I have used some of the automated versions of there. So it's a mop that does not have any kind of motor in it or any kind of fan. So it's very different from any of the products that Dyson's brought out prior. You know, it's known for its fans, it's known for its hair dryers, it's known for its vacuum cleaners. This does not suck or blow. Oh, interesting. Although it sucks in a different way. And that's the kind of neat engineering trick here, which I think is interesting in terms of cleaning your floors. But people love Dyson products. and people are prepared to pay a lot of money for them.

35:01I do think it's ridiculously over-engineered and ridiculously overpriced, but I'm quite confident it will work well. So that makes it a big deal, I suppose. Okay. What do you think about this? I feel exactly the same way. Every Dyson thing I've ever tried or owned, I think is wonderful and preposterous at the same time. Like I bought my wife an air wrap for Christmas a couple of years ago. Oh, you wonderful husband. Oh, it is hands down the most successful gift I have ever bought my wife. She loves it. And it's an awesome thing. But it is also like ludicrously expensive. And it involves a lot of like, let's be clear, you're not getting any more gifts for several years after this.

35:38Like this is it was like your engagement ring and this like these are the two big gifts you're ever getting from me. But the stuff they make tends to be great. And I think part of the reason I'm fascinated by the mop thing is I think as someone who has had a robot vacuum running around for a long time, the robot mop thing seems like it ought to be the next thing. But at least from the little bit of experience I have with them, they're not nearly as good as the robot vacuums. And you're shaking your head like you agree with me on that. I agree. Yes, they're not. They've got better, but you have to pay an awful lot for the really good ones.

36:12And yeah, it's just nowhere near the same as actually mopping your floor. And this thing will actually mop your floor because it uses water. The water is constantly flowing onto the mop and to a big mop. Most of the mops on robot mops are small and maybe, you know, have a very small surface area. So you're not really getting a lot of clean for your motion. Whereas this uses like a two large roller mops that constantly spray clean water onto them and then sucks up with agitation the dirt. So it doesn't, like I said, doesn't have a motor, So it's not a vacuum, but it uses agitation to kind of get up the dirt.

36:53So, yeah, you know, the pictures they sent and the demo they showed me. I mean, they're very excited about this. This was big enough that they even rolled out, you know, Sir James Dyson himself to the press. Oh, yeah, which is pretty rare these days. Yeah. So they were very excited by it. But$700. I know. I just I'm sort of in the position of like when in the early days of the Roomba, it was like, yes, this is a good idea. I hope everybody decides to work on this. And they kind of did. And robot vacuums got to be pretty good. I'm hoping that's where we are with mops now, because it feels like if I could solve that problem robotically, it would be amazing.

37:26Even if I bought this Dyson one, I would use it like twice and then be like, mopping is a lot of work. I don't I don't care. But I'm hoping this is like a spark for people to work on this stuff. Yes, I think that's true. I'm just surprised they haven't come out with a robot mop. You know, they came out with a robot vacuum, but they've yet to come up with the robot mop, which seems like a natural progression for them. I don't know, maybe this was their sort of shot to say, actually, we don't think the robot version is ever going to work. You know, you still need to do the manual part, but we've taken a lot of the hard work out.

37:56I mean, the main the good thing about this compared to so there are other options out there from from companies like Roborock that make robot vacuums that are handheld wet, dry vacuums. So they can mop and vacuum as you go. But they're huge and bulky. And, you know, it's like a workout pushing them around the floor. Whereas this is much more lightweight and apparently kind of, you know, has the motion. It's doing the hard work. You're just guiding it. Eventually, you know, we'll have the full size Android in the house, Android robot that can come around and push it for you. Maybe that's their plan.

38:31Sold. That will upgrade to big deal. But for now, we'll leave it at small deal. I think that's fair. Small deal. All right. Next thing on the list, you tested out Amazon's Matter casting. A, I want to know about your experience. And B, mattercasting in general, big deal, medium, small deal. What do you think? I think it's a big deal. I do. But it's stymied at the moment because I just don't see that Apple or Google are going to embrace it because they already have their own proprietary solutions for casting content to your TV. And mattercasting is like, it's like Amazon's working on it the most right now, it seems like.

39:08But in theory, it's like an open standard for sending content around between devices, basically, right? Yes. So it is. It's part of the Matter standard. It actually came out with the first iteration of Matter, so 1.0. But it's been very sort of under the radar. I have written about it, but it's not not many. There's not much adoption. It has been driven by Amazon. So the way Matter works, there's working groups and you have sort of a lead of each ahead of each working group and the head of that working group is an Amazon engineer and he's pushing this and he's working with from they're not allowed to tell me exactly who's in the group but he implied it's mainly TV manufacturers and app makers so like Hulu or and I don't know that Hulu's there but that kind of sure those kind of people are working on developing it and so but yes just to clarify So matter casting is a way of casting content from one device to another at its core.

40:02But what it's been used for here is casting content from your phone or tablet to a screen, i.e. your TV. But it could be to any screen in your home. So Amazon's using it as a way to cast prime video content to a Fire TV stick or an Echo Show 15. Matter casting has to be enabled on both ends. and if you're familiar with Fire TVs, and right now they do not have a native way of casting content. So this is really the first time Amazon's had something like this and it's been kind of a frustrating experience for people that use Fire TVs not to have. You can mirror, but mirroring's never great. But right now it only works on Prime Video, though they say they have a number of app makers who are going to enable it, including Plex and Sling.

40:47So they're really pushing it hard. The thing that's different about it versus Google Cast or Apple Airplay is, and this is where the app makers come in, is you actually, it's an app to app communication. So you're replicating the app on your phone and on your TV. So you can control everything you can do in the Prime Video app or the Hulu app or which other Netflix app mirrors exactly on your TV. So you're not kind of like, when I use Apple Airplay, I'm like, I want to fast forward, but I can't, like, the controls aren't intuitive. And app makers are like, we've made these great experiences for you on our phone apps.

41:24Let's just make that what you use on the TV. So it's simplifying the process, basically. And I think it works really well. My experience was just limited to Prime Video because that's the only one that works. But it worked great. It was much easier for me than other forms of casting. So I think it's going to be a big deal for Fire TV at the moment. But in the smart home in general, matter casting means any device can cast to any device. So your washing machine can cast to your TV. I know that's the stuff of nightmares for some people, but I like getting an alert on my TV when my washing is done.

42:01You could also, once matter brings cameras in theory to the standard, you know, you could have a non-propriety way of viewing your video doorbell on your TV. So you wouldn't have to have a certain TV, you wouldn't have to have a certain video doorbell for that to work, which is the way it is today. And it's a universal, you know, standard open protocol. Anyone can use it. You know, that's a good thing in the smart home. We like these open standards as opposed to the closed infrastructure of, you know, AirPlay or Google Cast. You know, there's a lot of potential here. Right now, though, it's, yeah, it's all Amazon and no one else.

42:39I've spoken to Apple and spoken to Google about it, and they're all like, nope, not saying anything. We're not using this yet. And this is one of the problems with Matter. Not all platforms are required to use or implement every part of the Matter standard. And for example, one of the problems right now, I love the idea of being able to cast to my TV from any Matter device. But Samsung, one of the major TV manufacturers, even though they're fully on board with Matter, they have not committed to their TVs or any of their appliances being Matter enabled. So we're going back to this issue of, you know, there's these great open standards and open protocols that you can use, but not everyone's adopting them.

43:23So that kind of, you know, kneecaps the whole initiative from day one. Right. Well, and with Mattercasting in particular, it seems like if I'm Google or Apple, i'm looking at it saying okay at least matter in general solves problems right like you can understand why eventually you're going to want to be part of this broader ecosystem that you don't have to control all of by yourself yeah whether they want to now or not uh spoiler alert we're going to get to in a minute but the question of like is it a long-term good idea sort of makes sense my sense is for casting if i'm running airplay or google cast i'm like we've kind of solved this problem and like sure it might be nice to have a bigger broader thing to do but what most people want to do is they want to tap a thing on their phone and have it play on their television and we've done that so to me it's like i'm curious to see if anybody can sort of build a use case that is so much more useful for matter casting than that and then i think you might start to see everybody get on board but until then my sense is apple looks at airplay and is like yeah we did that.

44:26Like we're good. We want to get it on more screens, like in hotels and whatever, but like AirPlay works. It's fine. We were not going to invest more resources. But the advantage there, the hotel TV screens is a great example. Hotel TVs would not need all new hardware to work with Mattercasting. All they need is an update to an app. So, you know, instead of waiting till what, 2050 when we can go into a Hilton and AirPlay to our LG TV or whichever, I forget who it is that made the deal with, but you'd be able to do it tomorrow. It just, all you need to do is update the software on the app on the TV and the software on the app on your phone.

45:04I mean, you can have it built into the TV itself, but you don't have to have a matter-enabled TV for this to work necessarily. So it's, it would be an easier solution. And I think where the momentum might shift is if Amazon is successful in getting the app manufacturers on board here and the TV manufacturers, because yes, the TV can have AirPlay and Google Cast, but if it also has Mattercasting, it would be a more seamless experience for the user because it's very, you don't have to figure out if it supports this or that. It will just work, which is the whole promise of Matter. It will just work.

45:41Big air quotes. Yeah, exactly. All right. So while we're on the subject of Matter, Mattercasting, big deal. I agree. I think long-term big deal, short-term. Not so much. Yeah. Big deal for Prime Video Fire TV owning customers. Sure. Yes. Matter 1.3 came out a couple of weeks ago. You wrote a story about it. Matter 1.3, big deal, medium deal, small deal. Big deal. Okay. Big deal. A lot of momentum. I was very not excited by Matter 1.1. Matter 1.2 was a little bit more interesting because there was a lot more device types added. But Matter 1.3 just brought a whole load of more potential with it because more device types, the device types weren't that exciting.

46:26It was kind of what we expected. Like we got washing machines last time. So now we had tumble dryers. Like, woo. There were a few interesting additions there. But I think the big, big deal here, well, Mattercasting came, updates to Mattercasting came with 1.3, which I was excited about, that was the ability to cast from device to device, not just the app to app. But the big deal, I think, is the energy reporting, energy management features, which we've been waiting for. We knew it was coming, but we've been waiting for this. And this is, you know, to me, energy management in the smart home really takes the smart home from sort of niche to almost necessary.

47:06Because today, you know, conserving resources, using less energy in our homes, saving money are all things that, you know, many people are worried about, concerned about trying to do. And the smart home can make it so much easier to do all of this stuff automatically. One of the main sort of showcase pieces that came out with MATA 1.3 that exemplifies this is electric vehicle management. So EVSE chargers, so electrical vehicle supply equipment, is now a device type in MATA, as is the ability to control and create management of the way it charges. So for example, you could use your MATA app or MATA enabled app to tell your EV, I want to have 80 miles of range by 2pm this evening or this afternoon.

47:59And I want you to use the least expensive energy to get there between now and then. And you just, you know, hit button and it will do that for you as opposed to you having to go in and like check, you know, is there clean energy now? And some electrical vehicle supply equipment can do this today, but it's proprietary. So you have to have, you know, the Tesla charger and the Tesla app or the Kia charger and the Kia app, whereas this will open this ability to any smart home app that uses Matter. So in theory, your Apple Home app or your Samsung SmartThings app could do this kind of management for your EV for you.

48:35In fact, Samsung already does have some electric vehicle management, but again, it's specific brands and specific cars. And so you have to have the right equipment, whereas bringing this type of management to matter will open it up so that it should work with anything that can work with matter. And it works locally, obviously, which is a bonus, but we'll need to use the cloud, obviously, to get things like energy prices. But beyond EVs, You could see this applying to using your tumble dryer, your washing machine, making sure your fridge and freezer does a defrost cycle at a time when energy is low.

49:11If you connected everything in your home and appliances, almost all appliances are now part of MATA, which is what came with 1.3. We're mainly just waiting on heat pumps, which they say are coming next. And that's obviously a big part. And there was one other appliance. I can't remember off the top of my head. It was water heaters, right? Water heaters. So both of those obviously are big energy consumers, although heat pumps less than traditional HVAC. So but still being able to manage the energy use, energy reporting. And this is where I think it's going to get interesting with the platforms like Apple Home, Google Home, because this gives them the opportunity to start differentiating.

49:50Right. So to date, a lot of people have said, well, matter just commodifies everything. Everything works with everything. So why is there a benefit for these platforms? And for anyone that wants to create something in the smart home and how you manage the energy, what kind of service you can provide on top of this type of reporting that the system is now providing is going to help differentiate. So if Apple Home comes up with a great way of managing energy throughout your home with your connected appliances, you might be more inclined to use their app. Samsung already has a pretty good Samsung energy system in place.

50:27So I think it's got the head start there. And Google Home, we'll see. Alexa already has some energy management built in if your device supports it. So I think in the next few months, and I've already seen a few come out, we're going to see a lot more devices adopting matter in order to, because this is a reason to put matter in your device. Having energy management is a huge sort of push for the smart home. It's not the sexy fun stuff, but it's really important. I think back to like the days of the Nest thermostat. And to some extent, that thing that it was just like, we will help you lower your heating and cooling bill for your house is maybe still to this day the single like simplest, most compelling smart home use case for most people.

51:13And I think this just adds to that in really interesting ways, but also seems like it sets up this cool flywheel potentially where it's like, okay, not only are you able to control more and more of your stuff, but the stuff that you're controlling can feed more data back to the system, which means like you're saying, the system can start to do better and the people building these systems can do more stuff with that information and you can actually start to like improve upon itself over time. as opposed to just a lot of what we've had so far is just sort of increasingly elaborate controllers. And that's fine as far as it goes, but like the job of the smart home should be to do most of this on its own.

51:53And we're like, we're slowly getting to the point of, it feels like the puzzle pieces for that are starting to get into place, which is very exciting. It is. And this is something I've been talking to companies about for years and it takes that it's taken them years to, you know, get the partnerships, get the electric companies on board. It's a huge project, whereas this should make it a lot easier to push us forward. And the really exciting part, I think, and this is also something I wrote about in the last couple of weeks, is that it could help shift not just your home, but energy use in the entire country or world by promoting and helping push forward the idea of virtual power plants.

52:35And this is something, So Nest Renew, you mentioned Nest. So Nest Renew has turned into a new program now called Renew Home. But Google's still involved, but Google kind of shifted its Nest Renew, which is the service that helps you save energy when you use your Nest thermostat, to a new sort of platform that merged with a company that had already been doing demand response programs in select states in the country. But now it's working towards sort of creating virtual power plants using every smart house and every house that has smart appliances as virtual power plants. And that's something that could really help reduce the strain on the grid, you know, and create a better experience for everyone.

53:15So it's for the greater good. Totally. I think that's really exciting. You mentioned heat pumps and water heaters. Are there other like huge categories still missing in matter? what what's kind of still on the on the to-do list there cameras is is a big one although they said that's definitely coming um although it will come from what i understand in a very limited fashion it will really it'll just be that you can view your stream and control your stream in any platform but if you want recorded video you want the added things like ai identification of people animals that's all going to be from your from the manufacturer still so it'll just be though that you'll be able to, in theory, view your video anywhere or use it for hopefully for triggering automations like motion detection.

54:01Or if you spot an animal, turn the siren on. This is for my chicken coop. So I think people want cameras there because you want one app to see everything, but you're still going, and this is a theme with Matter, you're still going to need to use manufacturer apps if you want the added benefits, if you want the added features. But if you just want the basic use case of smart home. That's one that's really requested. People really want cameras. And then the other, which I don't think we're ever going to get, is security systems. Oh, sure. So, you know, your smart home security system. I think those may bridge into MATA, because most of them are Z-Wave based.

54:41But there's just too much around the UL. So all security systems, most, you know, if you have a certificate, most of them are UL certified. and that requires a lot of certification. It's a tough certification to get. It's an important one. It ensures your security system is going to work in the way you expect it to. And I just don't see much. I think the meshing between security systems and Matter is just not likely to happen anytime soon. But I think we may get to the point where you can bridge it so you can still control everything in one app. But those are the main things that we're at now.

55:17That feels like an okay outcome to me with both of those actually. to say, you know, you can sort of take what's happening inside of those systems and use it in the broader system. But the idea that like, in theory, everything in my Matter home should have perfect access to everything I've ever recorded on my security camera actually feels kind of weird. So maybe at the very least taking that one slightly slowly makes some sense to me. So I'm actually for once I will give the matter folks some credit for going slowly here. That feels good. And then there is one more though, sorry. Adaptive lighting.

55:54We're still waiting for better control of lighting. They say that's coming soon. But again, this is going to be one of the things you need to use your apps for. But I still, I want to be able to use it. I want every light in my house, no matter which manufacturer it's from, to be able to sync to the scene that I've chosen. And they say that's coming. So hopefully in the next update, But sorry, yes, I could keep going. Got it. All right, two more. So I think I know where both of these will fall. So we'll do the less exciting one first. You wrote about Brilliant, this smart home company that was, I would say, once sort of high flying and now seems to be in very rough shape.

56:33Brilliant kind of collapsing, for lack of a better term, big deal, medium deal or small deal? I can sense you wanting to be nice to Brilliant here. it's not surprising i kind of saw it coming it was a great idea i have written a lot about wanting better controllers in my home and it worked very well as that type of controller i had been looking for but only with certain products and that was you know it was almost it's almost like a symbol of the problems the smart home have had to date it's they've been around a long time they launched almost 10 years ago, I think. They've been around a long time.

57:11It's a good product, good hardware. So they've basically gone out of business. I mean, they're still keeping the lights on. So the system still works. I have one in my house and it's not stopped working. They're looking for a buyer. I did actually check in with the CEO just a few days ago and he said, no news yet, but it's looking promising. And he's hoping that users of the system, which is a smart light switch that's installed, wired to your house, but can also be used as a smart home controller to control your Sonos system, view of your video doorbell, control your lights, your thermostat. It's sort of an all-in-one smart home controller, but it had very limited integrations.

57:50And the company said to me over the years when I'd asked them about this, it's like, it's not that we don't want these integrations, it's that companies won't work with us. And this is one of the reasons that Matter came about, because of this issue with interoperability and having to make individual integrations with every device out there. And they've been trying to do this for years, but they'd hardly added any new integrations in the last few years. And they weren't adopting matter. And I had asked them, they said they were, they said they were, but they hadn't done it yet. And didn't really feel like it was coming down the pipeline.

58:24Aaron, the CEO, told me that they did have a new generation ready to roll, better hardware, better integration, not better integrations yet, but they had sort of more there that was going to make on-device processing, AI. It was going to be a much improved device and less expensive because, oh my gosh, I forgot to mention how expensive these devices were. Starting at$400 for a light switch was just too much. And that was always their problem, too expensive. But when I asked, it doesn't sound like they'd added thread or matter yet, even to this next generation. And I think there's some potential for a buyer who does, if someone does come and take this product and sort of keep it as it is, but improve upon it, that's really where I think it has a lot of potential to be a decent smart home controller if it can work with everything.

59:14But yeah, I mean, it's kind of a medium deal. It is a symbol, I think, of the churn of the smart home. Like we're a decade or so into this sort of DIY smart home now. And we're seeing, you know, some of the early pioneers kind of drop off. They've either been bought or they've sort of become somewhat boring, like Ring. They're not really innovating anymore, but they're, you know, they have a core customer group that they have a great business, but it's not exciting anymore. Brilliant is an example. I think, you know, they were an independent company and they kept independent till the very end, but it's hard now for these startups.

59:51And I'm guessing, I don't know if this next question is going to be about a startup because I think it might be. It's not actually. Oh, okay. Well, Quilt was the startup. The other one that I wrote about, which is a heat pump company. But yeah, it's not an easy space right now for startups. And it hasn't been for the last few years. And Brilliant was kind of sadly a victim of that. Yeah. Brilliant is always going to have a sort of special place in my heart. I tried a very early version of it that just sucked. I mean, it was so broken and bad. I put it in my wall and then the light on the balcony of my apartment wouldn't turn off until I took it out of the wall.

1:00:31But eventually they fixed it and I got a working version of it. That was like an early prototype that I just thought was hilarious. But eventually I got a thing that worked. It was really great. They got a lot of things right, but it always felt like a touchscreen on your wall can't possibly be the correct answer to this problem. And it does seem like the thing that Brilliant was was always going to be sort of a transition into how the smart home is actually supposed to work. And it feels like good for us, but bad for Brilliant. That is the transition that's happening right now. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think you're right.

1:01:01The smart home needs to be smarter. Yeah. Agreed. All right. Last one. Google launched a bunch of new home APIs at Google I.O. And I confess I'm torn between either. this is a huge deal that might actually change a lot of things. And this is nothing and no one will adopt these APIs and no one cares. So where are you? Big deal, medium deal, small deal? Oh, I think it's a huge deal. I think it's huge. I think it's huge, huge, huge. I hope it's not Google just saying, we have had enough of this, someone else deal with it. Yeah. So what is sort of the idea behind the APIs that they're launching here?

1:01:39So they have launched their home APIs, which is giving access to developers, device makers, app makers, to any device connected to Google Home, including Google's devices. So thermostats, presumably smoke alarms, cameras, they've said not necessarily initially, but that may be coming. But one of the key parts is it's also giving access to the automation engine. So now, essentially, with these APIs, a device maker can create an app from scratch for their device or for any device that connects to Google Home and create a smart home experience for you. So you wouldn't have to use Google Home, the Google Home app, but you could use any automation system that the Google Home app provides and any devices that connect to it.

1:02:31And with Matter, there are many devices to connect to it. So both works with Google and Matter devices will be accessible through these APIs. And it basically is similar in some ways to how Apple Home's original HomeKit worked. If you've ever used like an Eve app or Nanoleaf app, you could access every device that was connected to Apple HomeKit in the Eve app or the Nanoleaf app on iOS. This Google Home API will work on both iOS or Android. and could basically mean people can create an entire smart home platform from scratch on an app that you could use that isn't Google Home, but uses Google's smarts in the background, which are good.

1:03:13They just have been stymied because I feel like perhaps not enough resources are going into developing Google Home at Google. I mean, Google's got its fingers in many pies, and it's always felt like Google Home is a bit of an afterthought. I think it's really only still here because of the hardware. So I think this is big. I think it's also really big because open APIs are really the sort of lifeblood of the smart home. When things are closed and locked down, like Brilliant, when it shuts down, it no longer works. But if Brilliant had a local API, like Google Home's opening its APIs, then even if they go out of business, the device is still going to work in your home.

1:03:58It's like the lifeblood of the smart home APIs. And opening this to anyone to be able to use, I think, is really exciting. But you are right. It does depend on people actually picking up and using it. So far, though, there are a number of big companies that are using it. ADT is using the facial recognition on Google Nest cameras. The facial recognition is going to let your system disarm when it recognizes someone that you've authorized to come into your home. It's called Trusted Neighbor. It's a new service that they're rolling out later this year. And that's all using Google Home APIs. And it's, again, going back to what I mentioned before, what this gives is the potential for companies to build better experiences than, say, Google Home has been doing today, but using the tools that are already there rather than having to reinvent the wheel or develop individual partnerships with all of these companies to have access to their devices.

1:04:54But Google is like Alexa in that it works with pretty much everything, but just in a limited way. And now you're going to have, I think, much, you're going to see more innovation from manufacturers and device makers. And that is exciting if it happens. Yeah. Well, part of what I wonder about the home API thing is if it means we can get a bunch of new kinds of devices with new capabilities. Like the ADT thing you're talking about is a really good example of that. And again, it goes back to this idea of sort of making the system work with itself in really cool ways, which I think is super exciting.

1:05:28But then I just keep thinking about one of the examples that they gave where they're like, DoorDash can make it so that when the delivery person comes to your house, it like automatically unlocks for them and turns the front light on or whatever. And I, on the one hand, I think there are probably really cool, exciting versions of that that exist in the world. On the other hand, I think that might be the most like solution in search of a problem thing I've ever heard in my entire life. So do you think there's anything to that idea that maybe this is how the smart home sort of invades the rest of the online ecosystem?

1:06:01Or is this just a smart home thing? Yeah, so that was the way they were selling it. In fact, it was very not smart home. They were like, now any developer with any app can use smart home devices. And I get where they were coming from there. I do think that to date, the smart home has kind of felt niche and closed. And like you need all of these devices to get any benefit out of it. And this, whilst it does seem like a solution in search of a problem, the DoorDash idea is, you know, you don't have to be a smart home device maker to take advantage of what you can do with these APIs. And I think that was an important message to get out there, just to show, to maybe get people thinking about what they could do with this type of technology.

1:06:46Because it shouldn't just be limited to, you know, good night routines or welcome home routines. There is so much more that we could be doing with our homes. I think that was a slightly uninspired example. But I think that people that are going to be taking advantage of this really will be the smart home device makers. I'd be interested to see if, you know, Uber or Airbnb, I could see potentially taking some real advantage of this. And companies that are sort of home related, if not necessarily smart home related. So I think there's a lot of potential. But like all of these developer conferences, you know, these announcements we get, it really is going to depend on how much this has inspired developers to go out and do something.

1:07:30So we will have to wait and see. It feels like a fun moment in that sense that there's actually a lot of sort of new fun toys for anyone working in the smart home to play with. Between all the new stuff coming in Matter and what Google's up to and obviously Amazon is continuing to invest in Alexa. And it's like there's just sort of more stuff to work with than there has been. Yeah. Which I guess means we're probably due for some more chaos in the near term, but also maybe means a lot of this stuff that has just been sort of theory waiting for infrastructure is like starting to become real, which I think is really cool.

1:08:08Yeah, I think you're right. And it is it is an exciting time. And, you know, we mentioned that this was sort of the end of a cycle for one load, a lot of startups in the smart home. But it is the potential beginning of a cycle. I mean, there's a couple smart home startups I've been talking with over the last few months who have some great products that they're ready to launch, but they're still just been waiting on this type of infrastructure to come along to make it possible. And whilst the signs are there, and this is one thing that I was quite disappointed about with MATA 1.3, is that we still don't have the support from platforms.

1:08:40I mean, Google's opening up its APIs was a nice step in the right direction, but they still don't support half of the new device types that are in MATA 1.3. Apple hasn't gone beyond MATA 1.0. I mean, if we're lucky, we may get 1.2 devices, which are robot vacuums, washing machines, fridges in Apple Home with iOS 18, if we're lucky. But that means another whole year until we get tumble dryers. So I just I really hope that the platforms and Amazon's been very slow here. Samsung's been a little faster. And I get why they're being slow to some extent. They don't want to break people's homes. But if we don't start getting this out there and the consumers get to use it and get excited about it, then we are not going to get the developers coming on board and making these good experiences.

1:09:28You know, we need we need both sides of the solution here to to get people excited. So I really want to see Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung just go all in on what this platform, this protocol, this smart home standard that they've developed to solve this problem. They can't just leave it there. Now that they've brought it to life, they've really got to put the work in and see this through. And so far, it's been pretty limited, and that's been quite disappointing. So I'm hoping that we'll hear something exciting at WWC next month. I'm not holding my breath. I think it's just going to be all about AI, but I may be wrong.

1:10:08I suspect you're right. Prove me wrong, Apple. Fingers crossed. All right, before we go, you've been playing with tons of new smart home gadgets. Give me your favorite, coolest thing you've been playing with recently. Oh, well, actually, I have to go with my smart chicken coop. Okay, do tell. Yes, I've been testing a new smart chicken coop. It's called Coop and it is a startup based out in California. And it is very well designed, Chicken Coop. But the main kind of smart features, it has two cameras in with really impressive AI capabilities. So it can tell me if the door of the coop is open. It can tell me if there's an egg laid.

1:10:50It can count how many chickens are in my coop. So in case one's gone missing. And it will also tell me if it spots like a fox or a coyote or if it spots a cat or a bobcat, like different predators, different nuisance animals. Like it has some really interesting AI capabilities, as well as the automatic door that will open and close at the right time based on sunrise or sunset so that the chicks go in and out. I have baby chicks right now. I got new ones to test out this coop because my ladies were too big to fit in this coop. It's quite small, but it's been a lot of fun. It's just, I mean, baby chicks.

1:11:26I mean, that's fun. You can't beat it. You can't beat that. It's very expensive. I think I want to say it's like$2 ,500. But having built my own chicken coop with wood, well, having watched my husband build our own chicken coop and helped buy the stuff at Lowe's, they're not cheap. It's an expensive product, whether you buy one or build one. So it's interesting to see this kind of innovation, smart home innovation, sort of moving outside of the home and into the garden and, you know, homesteading with my chickens. So yeah, that's been really fun. I've been enjoying that. I love it. Baby chicks for journalism.

1:12:03That's the dream right there. All right, Jen, thank you as always. Super fun having you. Thank you. We won't leave it so long next time. All right, we got to take one more break, and then we'll take a question from the Vergecast Hotline. We'll be right back.

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1:15:28all right we're back let's get to the hotline as always the number is 866 verge 11 the email is vergecastatheverge.com. We love all your questions and we try to answer at least one on the show every week. This week, we have a question about search engines, which actually, we got a lot of questions about search engines, but I was particularly taken with this one from Nathan. Hey guys, this is Nathan from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Listen, I was just thinking about this whole generated response from Google when you go to Google something. And I'm just wondering, is the big deal here that it's Google is doing it?

1:16:01Because they're not the first to be doing this. I'm sure, as you guys know, the Arc browser is AI generating whole kind of web pages every time you search something on your phone. And then I'm one of the 12 people that uses Edge at work, and I actually use Bing to search because then it will auto-generate a response with Copilot first and then kind of give me all the web results. So when Google was telling Eli that that's actually something they're experiencing, that people have higher click-through rates from those generated responses, I mean, I can really back that up because that's exactly what I do.

1:16:31And so I'm wondering, is the problem just that Google's doing it? Is the problem that they're so large that if they're doing this, this impacts the way that the search world works? You know, because obviously there's top dogs. And that when the Edge browser and when the Arc browser are doing this, that doesn't really matter because they're just not the dominant search. I feel like that's maybe the argument here. So I was just wondering what your guys' thoughts were on that. If it's just a matter of scale, not a matter of what they're doing, or if there's more to this. Thanks, guys. Okay, I think the answer to this question is mostly yes, but kind of yes and no.

1:17:06I think on the one hand, the scale of Google is the thing. You just can't overstate the extent to which Google is the center of the internet. For anyone who makes a website, whether it's a cooking blog or a news site or just a place to show off your photography, Google is the Internet. It is the main discovery tool of the Internet. So what you've seen is everything over the last, I don't know, 15 years really has reshaped in order to work the way that Google has asked it to work. You see cooking blogs just to keep harping on that. They have changed the way that they make their pages in order to suit Google.

1:17:45The thing where at the bottom you have the recipe, but at the top you have, you know, 2 ,000 words of stories about the person. And there's a bunch of photos and there's a bunch of sub headlines that are all kind of questions that don't really fit, but are questions people might be Googling. All of that is designed for Google. The SEO, search engine optimization, has completely reshaped the web. This is a thing we've talked a lot about on the show. This is a thing we've written a lot about on the site. I'll put some links in the show notes. But Google has fundamentally reshaped the web because it is so important, because when people want to find things on the Internet, they don't go other places.

1:18:20And I think the Arc Search and Bing are instructive examples here, actually, because it's true that Bing has been doing this longer than Google. You could already AI your way through the internet with Bing. And it's not that no one noticed, but no one really cared because Bing is not meaningful to the traffic and revenue and existence of websites in the way that Google is. It just does not matter what everybody else does cumulative in the same way that it does what Google does. Google has something like 90 % of the search on the internet. That's a crazy number. That is one of the things that has brought Google into the antitrust scrutiny that it has because it is so powerful, because it has no real meaningful competitor.

1:19:06The flip side of that is that I think the things that we're talking about apply just as much to these other things you're talking about. When Arc, for instance, rolled out the browse for me feature where you type in a search query, you hit browse for me. And instead of giving you a bunch of search results, it sort of compiles a web page for you, which is a lot like what the AI overviews on Google are doing. It gives you the summary and then some links and some multimedia stuff. People had the same kind of visceral reaction, which is that it felt like this exchange of value that people who make websites have with discovery tools was gone.

1:19:41The idea for two decades has been that I am going to make something and I'm going to let Google access it and index it and cache it on its servers and make ads when people try to find it in exchange for sending traffic to my website. And the idea that I could monetize or in other ways benefit from the traffic to my website, that was the trade. Google gets to have and have access to and in some ways sort of intermediate how people find my website because it sends people to my website. That is the trade. That is the trade people have made on the Internet for 20 years. That feels different when it's AI.

1:20:19And I think the way people reacted to ARK, there have been people who said this with Bing. There have been people who worried about this with perplexity. All of these tools run into the same thing, which is they shortcut that. They completely end around that exchange of value. and just say, don't worry, I went and visited all those webpages for you and brought back the information that you need. Never mind that the crawler on that webpage doesn't accrue me any advertising money. It's not going to click my affiliate links. It's not going to be impressed with my stuff and read more articles. It's not going to make the cookies that I suggested and then save it and tell friends about it and bring more traffic.

1:20:58It doesn't do any of that. It just pulled it into a database and spat out the information with essentially no link back to the original source of the information and certainly no reason to go find the source of that information because I've already given you everything you need right here in the summary. On the one hand, cool user experience for lots of things. On the other hand, totally breaks the value exchange of the internet, right? So I think the thesis is not that different between what you're seeing from all of these AI companies and what you're seeing from Google. The difference is just the scale.

1:21:30And Google has been existentially important to websites for two decades in a way that I think has been problematic for a really long time. There is this sense that Google won in some way, that Google became the arbiter of the internet and that the only thing to do as a media company or as a cooking blog or as a person with a website of any kind was to play Google's game or try to find a way to get money from Google directly. And so you've seen a lot of these fights over the years of companies like News Corp picking fights with Google and saying, you have to pay us for our content or we're going to disappear.

1:22:10And I think what has been true forever is that these websites have needed Google more than Google has needed these websites. And that has been a challenge. And one thing you've heard us talk about, and Nilay in particular talks about this, is that Google doesn't actually owe these websites anything. And I think Google would tell you that it cares about them and believes in the web and wants to preserve the open web. That's all really easy to say out loud. And it's also not particularly meaningful when Google is able to do the things that it's doing now, which is say, well, our responsibility is actually to get users to the information that they want as quickly as possible.

1:22:46And again, that's actually an interesting product argument. It subverts a huge amount of the way that the internet has worked, in part because all of these websites are so reliant on Google and what Google has meant to them for so long. This is what we went through with Facebook when Facebook made everybody pivot to video with the promises of huge amounts of traffic and tons of money, and then that all sort of dried up. And everybody kind of got used to Facebook's wishy-washiness and back and forth on supporting websites and caring about traffic outside and eventually just realized, well, okay, we're going to treat Facebook as kind of a value add, right?

1:23:19If we get traffic from Facebook, terrific, but I'm not going to bend over backwards in order to get traffic from Facebook. And that hurt a lot of websites' traffic. There are a lot of websites that went away when Facebook stopped sending them traffic. And the same has never really happened with Google, in part because Google more or less remained a good citizen of that value exchange we're talking about until now. And there's a lot left to be seen. I think it's possible, as Nathan says, that really great content is going to be more prioritized. And the question will be, what happens to the folks who write this sort of commodity stuff?

1:23:58I think a lot about the articles years ago that every time John Oliver would post anything, every website on the internet would be like, John Oliver roasts whoever, right? Like, he gets mad about hot dogs. And lots of people cared about what John Oliver did, so they would Google John Oliver on a Monday morning after the Sunday night show. And whoever was at the top of search results made a ton of money and got a lot of traffic. That was always kind of a weird game, and I think you could reasonably argue that the best outcome is actually just that you get to John Oliver much more quickly instead of a website talking about John Oliver.

1:24:29But what if there's really great, unique context added or lots of interesting new information or somebody did good reporting on top of the reporting that John Oliver did? This question of that sort of sliding scale between what is commodity information that everyone should know and no one has particular claim to. Like, when was Abraham Lincoln born? That is just a question. It doesn't matter who has the answer. There are not particularly interesting reasons to go to one place or another for the answer. I just want to know when Abraham Lincoln was born. All the way down to truly great original stuff, whether it's a new recipe or new art that somebody made or a new essay from somebody smart that you like or original reporting in the news business.

1:25:12Google is now in a position of having to decide where one of those things ends and the other begins and is also just making this bet or at least this promise to publishers that, oh, we're going to get so much better at giving people information that they're actually going to be more curious and they're going to want to know more stuff. I'm very suspicious of that argument, to be totally honest. Google is like, if we just surface better stuff to more people, more people will click on it. As somebody who makes their living making things on the internet, I sure hope that's true. I'm not confident that that's true.

1:25:43But it does put Google back in this position of once again, being the arbiter of all of this stuff. And I think you'll see us talk a lot more in the near future about different kinds of search engines, because I think search engines are great, right? Like what Google was for a really long time was really valuable to a lot of people. And I think Google has shifted away from that to something else. That new thing might be great. It might be different. It might be terrible. Who knows? But I think there's going to be interesting competition in this space for a long time because Google is kind of running away from the thing that people loved about it.

1:26:18And that is weird to me, to be totally honest, that there are a lot of companies that you can understand why they pivot. Google is taking this beloved, wildly successful business and kind of pivoting away from it. And I think you're going to see a lot of folks come in and say, well, actually search was both a good product and a good business. And maybe what we need to do is be part of that because Google is going to just leave that gap open in the market again. So I think all of this is going to get more interesting and more competitive, but also the immediate threat to publishers and bloggers and anyone who makes a website on the internet is that all of a sudden it could just dry up traffic.

1:26:57Google has made changes before that people have turned around and said, oh, Google made a small algorithm change and my website essentially disappeared from the internet. That's a real thing that happens. And it happens to bad websites that probably should have their spammy stuff removed from google search and it applies to really great websites that don't deserve that and just get caught up in google's changes for whatever reason and we're already seeing with these ai overviews lots of unintended weirdness there's there's always people out there posting stuff about i think there was one that it was like add glue to your pizza sauce to make it stickier like don't do that but that's the stuff that's out there now.

1:27:35So we're at the beginning of a thing that Google has just turned on and is making a gigantic bet on and is shifting its whole core product towards. And the ramifications of that are just barely beginning to show up. And it's going to take a while. And I think it's going to be scarier to a lot of people than Google is going to be willing to acknowledge. So all of that That is to say, yes and no, Nathan, right? I think that the same principles apply, but Google is doing it in a way that is so much bigger and more important to the health of the open internet and the economy of how people make money from websites that it feels bigger because it is.

1:28:15And I have no idea where it's all going to go, but we're going to talk about it an awful lot on this show for the rest of the year, I suspect. All right, that is enough for now. That's it for the VergeCast today. Thank you to everybody who's on the show. And thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more, as always, on everything we talked about at TheVerge.com. I'll put some links to all of our SEO coverage from last year. We covered this a ton. We're still covering it a ton. Super fun stuff. Lots of Microsoft news, lots of smart home news. We'll put it all in the show notes. But, you know, read TheVerge.com.

1:28:43If you come to our website, we don't have to worry about Google. That's kind of the whole point of what we're trying to do. It's a good website. We do our best. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, Surface devices you would like to sell me, you can always email us at vergecastattheverge.com or call the hotline 866-VERGE11. We love hearing from you. Like I've mentioned before, my favorite Slack channel at The Verge is the one that just puts everybody's voicemails into a place where we can listen to them all day. And I love it. And people keep asking to be let into that room so they can hear the hotline voicemails.

1:29:15It's the best. I love it. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Poore. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Nilay, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about presumably more open AI shenanigans, all the stuff that's to come at WWDC, and lots more. See you then. Rock and roll.

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1:30:24We all have moments where we could have done better, like cutting your own hair. Oh, yikes. Or forgetting sunscreen, so now you look like a tomato. Ouch. Could have done better. Same goes for where you invest. Level up and invest smarter with Schwab. Get market insights, education, and human help when you need it. Learn more at schwab.com.