The October Surprises from Google, Apple & Microsoft with Ben Bajarin

Ben Bajarin from Creative Strategies & Techpinions joined us in a two parter conversation about the ongoing trends of technologies globally. We began the first conversation on the October announcements that emerge from Google, Microsoft and Apple, and discussed their road ahead with their philosophies in different products and the impact to the Asian OEMs from Microsoft & Google movements into hardware.

Here are the interesting show notes and links to the discussion (with time-stamps included):

• Ben Bajarin (@benbajarin, LinkedIn) from Creative Strategies and Techpinions. Also check his podcasts: Techpinions & Significant Digits [0:38]
  • What have you been up to since we last spoke? [0:58]
• Google, Microsoft & Apple Events in October [2:29]
  • Three events have happened over the whole month of October for Google, Microsoft and Apple, can you summarise the major announcements coming from each one of them and their implications in a broader context:
    • Google – Google Pixel and Home [2:49]
    • Microsoft Studio [6:43]
    • Apple Macbook Pro with the magic bar and TV app [9:48]
  • Should Apple acquire Netflix? (References: Jan Dawson, Ben Thompson and Om Malik) [22:27]
  • There has been different perspectives on Google’s new approach with Pixel where they want to focus on a hardware strategy, but from their track record in buying Motorola and Nest and shutting down, do you think that their efforts in the Pixel series any different from the past like Nexus? [26:17]
  • The competitive advantage for Google and Microsoft is in software and services and yet they have made many attempts to hardware. We appreciate the different philosophies between hardware and software. Hardware demands discipline, detail orientation, longer time and perfection whereas software demands agility, iterative feedback and shorter time, and that is the reason why Google and Microsoft have not been that successful at hardware, and Apple with software. Amazon seemed to be able to straddle between both. In observing their continuous attempts, do you see that they will break out anytime soon? How will the battle between these companies look like in the future? [29:36]
  • Google and Microsoft has not spent any efforts in the supply chain and distribution similar to the Asian OEMs (Huawei, Oppo & Samsung), how can their hardware efforts succeed? [33:38]
  • Since the Microsoft & Apple events, many tech pundits claimed that Microsoft is more innovative than Apple, from your perspective, is that true or merely that both companies are pursuing different strategy ahead? One shift in the recent Apple and Microsoft is that the pricing has gone up for PCs, is it just a business strategy with PCs becoming trucks? [36:27]

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The show is hosted by Bernard Leong (@bleongcw) and are sponsored by Ideal Workspace (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn) with their new Altizen Desk on Indiegogo (Twitter, Facebook, Medium). Also check out Ideal Workspace’s new standing desk, Altizen and sign up for their mailing list. Sound credits for the intro music: Taro Iwashiro, “The Beginning” from Red Cliff Soundtrack.