David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yup. That is one of mine too. I think the spin that I had on that was if you think about what Microsoft was trying to do at that point in time with Windows Mobile, the Microsoft way of thinking which is evolving now but certainly still at that point in time was like “we control everything you need to distribute a computing experience to a customer. We have a deep relationship with Intel. We have all the software developers that can make our own proprietary operating system. We don’t use open source. And we have relationships with all the carriers, the phone carriers and we can push this stuff out in to market,” and that’s great and people will use it, especially corporate customers because they need it. But Windows Mobile especially in that day and age sucked. I believe I had one of those devices at one point in time and it was very frustrating. They didn’t approach it from this way that, Ben, you’re talking about, that we’re talking about now like okay, we can just take Linux and build this and let’s build something awesome on top of it. So, that’s one. The other one that I wanted to talk about that I referenced earlier was thinking about how the mobile market has played out, it’s interesting to see like you kind of see this in technology that the area of competition and what’s interesting kind of moves up the stack. So in the old PC world, it was the hardware. You can buy a Mac or you can buy a PC. Then in the beginning of the phone world, as we talked about, it wasn’t really so much about the hardware whether you’re going to buy because Android wasn’t competing in hardware. But it was the services, you know, are you going to buy an Android phone that has Google Services baked into it or are you going to buy an Apple phone that has Apple services and that Google can still participate in that but they’re paying the Apple tax. What’s interesting is I think that the great mobile holy wars are pretty much over as far as we think, I mean who knows what will happen in the future. The level of competition has kind of further elevated up the stack to the application layer. And services.…

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