Josh Miller: evaluation

Transcript context

…And also how much better you need to be. Like, if there's a 20% better than Chrome product, people are just going, "That's fine. I don't need to learn something new and everyone's using something else. I'm just going to have all these problems." So, you got to be significantly better. And that's a high bar for consumer products. Final question I wanted to touch on. You talked about the big vision for Arc and The Browser Company. And you mentioned this idea of the internet computer. And this is another question Scott Belsky suggested. By the way, Scott is the CPO of Adobe and just an awesome product-thinker person. And he just wanted to make sure that we touch on this, because I think there's a big idea here that maybe people don't realize. So, if you could just give us a brief overview of, what is just the actual vision and plan for The Browser Company and Arc, long term as a final question? Yeah. So, we call it The Browser Company of New York almost as a misdirection, because as you know from the intro, we view Arc as a replacement for your default web browser, but we're hoping it will be much more. And so, to start at the highest level and bring it down to reality, one of the things that I've done many times in my career already is underestimate pretty foundational changes in how we use technology. I've appreciated them but underestimated them. Great example is mobile. I think me and Hursh's first company would've been much more successful if we really appreciated the tidal wave that was mobile. And I think one of those macro trends we're underestimating right now is the shift to cloud computing. The shift to the internet, which may sound weird because every big public company mentions Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services. You hear about cloud, cloud, cloud and cloud. But again, that's this business term. What I mean by the shift to cloud computing is, everything in our technology, in our computing lives is moving to the internet. It has been moving, but it's going to move even more. And what I mean by that is, your applications are almost all today web-based, internet-based applications. And they will all be soon. There's very, very few pieces of truly local-only software or even local-first software left. All of our files are moving to the internet, if they're not all already there. So if you really think about your files today, and again you ignore the word "files," the stuff you need for work in your personal life. They're not sitting on your desktop, they're all URLs. It may be an air quote "PDF," but that PDF is probably out on Dropbox somewhere and you're accessing it as a URL. Your photos may seem like they're on your iPhone. They're not on your iPhone, they're on some iCloud server somewhere. When you get a new iPhone, they'll be right there. The manifestation of that actually is, if you smash your device that you're listening to this on right now, whether it's a phone or computer, other than being sad that you lost the resale value and there's a chore of replacing it and a cost of replacing it, you would not lose any of your stuff. So, imagine in five years our entire computing lives are not on our devices, on our computers, on our phones. They're out there somewhere. They're out in the internet, they're out in the cloud, which begs the question ... I remember when I was 10 and I got my first computer. It was a see-through iMac. And I wonder ... My son is two. When he's 10, what will his computer be? And I mean computer not in the technical ... Again, going back to words and the words that we use. I don't mean computer in the literal sense of my MacBook Air, but computer in the human sense of, what you need from your computer, your stuff, your applications and tools that people ... Where is that going to be? Where is his computer going to be? MacBook Air, but computer in the human sense of, what you need from your computer, your stuff, your applications and tools that people ... Where is that going to be? Where is his computer going to be? I think it's obvious at this point that we're going to have airflow computers everywhere. We already do. My car has CarPlay, my TV is a computer, my laptop is a computer. I think that's going to be even more true in five years, where hardware is commoditizing. And it will commoditize even more. They're becoming empty shells that don't have anything on it. They're just vessels. They're just interfaces to viewing our real computer, which is out there on the internet somewhere. And so, our view is that what we are building at The Browser Company is an internet computer, is a air quote "computer," where the move to the internet and move to the cloud accelerates and continues the tsunami as much as we think it will. And the way we represent that is, we say we want to be to the web browser, what the iPhone was to the cell phone. Yes. The iPhone replaced your cell phone, but it really was something much more. And so, we want Arc to be the iPhone for the internet, and that yes, it replaces your default browser. But whether or not we call it the internet computer or something else, it really is that interface, this new type of computer. If you play that one step forward, then what we're building today is, we're building our equivalent of multi-touch gestures and the first party-notes app. But, on any new computer, any computer or computing device, the developer platform itself is much more interesting and lucrative and world changing than the first-party computer itself. And so, we have no doubt that in the next decade, if we're successful, if we still exist, Arc as a development platform is going to be much more central to what we're doing, building on top of these internet computers, ours and others than anything else. So to bring that down from reality. If you think about it, the internet, the web, is really the best development platform out there in many ways. It is accessible on every single device. It doesn't matter who makes it or the shape and size. It is free to access for individuals. You don't need money to access it. It's free for developers. You don't have to pay a license to use it. There's no 30% tax on what you make. And it's democratic. The best frameworks can win. And so, in many ways, if you were to say, "Hey, in this future we want to see, what is the platform that we should be developing on top of, what has the best attributes?" The web has that. And that's why you're seeing today. Why do you think Figma is in the web browser? Why do you think Figma's blog post was "Meet us in the Web Browser"? Because as the development platform, developers cross platform in one click. There's no tax. Everyone should want to and wants to make for the web. The challenge, though, is there's an experience gap. Native software feels better for whatever reason.…

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