Latest / The Kulturecast / BlackBerry (2023) — "You want to be great, you need to sacrifice. The more painful the sacrifice, the greater you'll be."

Transcript

BlackBerry (2023) — "You want to be great, you need to sacrifice. The more painful the sacrifice, the greater you'll be." · The Kulturecast

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Weird way.
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: Mm hmm, yep.
• 0:47
  Speaker 3: What can I do for you?
• 0:48
  Speaker 4: Okay?
• 0:48
  Speaker 5: Picture a cell phone and an email machine all in
• 0:52
  Speaker 5: one thing. There is a free wireless internet signal all
• 0:56
  Speaker 5: across North America and nobody has figured out how to
• 0:59
  Speaker 5: use it.
• 1:01
  Speaker 6: It's like the Force. Sorry, have you seen Star Wars? No,
• 1:10
  Speaker 6: that guy is sketchy.
• 1:12
  Speaker 4: I don't think he's sketchy.
• 1:13
  Speaker 6: That the guy's a shark.
• 1:15
  Speaker 4: I know how to market it, and I know who
• 1:17
  Speaker 4: we can sell it to.
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: But I want fifty percent of the company and I've
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: got to be CEO. I don't know who you think
• 1:21
  Speaker 2: you are, but deal, are you joking? We are in
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: a race to get this thing to market, and bearing
• 1:32
  Speaker 2: you're behind.
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: I need a prototype.
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: I'll do it perfectly or I don't do it.
• 1:36
  Speaker 7: Mike, are you familiar with the saying perfect is the
• 1:38
  Speaker 7: enemy of good?
• 1:41
  Speaker 4: Oh?
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: Good enough is the enemy of humanity? What do you
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: call it?
• 1:47
  Speaker 7: It's called a BlackBerry?
• 1:48
  Speaker 4: Hum?
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: Try typing with your songs. Get this baby in the head,
• 1:57
  Speaker 2: that every fortune five hundred executive you can you.
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: Call them crack ferries?
• 2:05
  Speaker 3: Sure, there's doghead. Come with us, sir.
• 2:07
  Speaker 7: No, you want to be great, you need to sacrifice.
• 2:09
  Speaker 3: The more painful to sacrifice, the greater you'll be.
• 2:15
  Speaker 6: If we put more phones on these networks, they're going
• 2:17
  Speaker 6: to crash.
• 2:19
  Speaker 4: You need to sell a million blackberries.
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: In the middle of the off the track.
• 2:27
  Speaker 4: Do you know what the sentence is?
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Are multi million dollars? Don't crown?
• 2:34
  Speaker 3: What are you doing?
• 2:35
  Speaker 5: I'm doing it at whole.
• 2:37
  Speaker 3: You guys have no idea to own a company.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: I don't.
• 2:42
  Speaker 3: Why are you ated this entire market?
• 2:48
  Speaker 4: You said they were the best engineers in the world.
• 2:50
  Speaker 3: You said they're the best engineers in Canada.
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: Why are they paying it? I shouldn't say they're paying
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: me ten million dollars? Yeah, I mean too.
• 3:03
  Speaker 4: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Culture Cast. I am
• 3:05
  Speaker 4: still your host, Chris Dashu, much to the chagrin at
• 3:07
  Speaker 4: least some of you out there. And I'm joined by
• 3:09
  Speaker 4: my two good friends all the way from West Texas.
• 3:12
  Speaker 4: He's your friend of mine. He's the professor of Media
• 3:13
  Speaker 4: and Communications all the way out there in the lovely
• 3:16
  Speaker 4: land of Lubbock. Your friend of mine, doctor David Pearl Mutter. Hello,
• 3:19
  Speaker 4: and also joining me. He's been on one episode before.
• 3:24
  Speaker 4: Mark Stashu, my dad, former telecom lawyer, which has no
• 3:29
  Speaker 4: reason to be mentioning this. At the top of this
• 3:31
  Speaker 4: we swear hello. And on this episode of the Culture Cast,
• 3:34
  Speaker 4: we are continuing to look at films that I don't
• 3:37
  Speaker 4: know doctor Pearl Mutter wanted to talk about. So there
• 3:40
  Speaker 4: you go. Yeah, we're gonna be talking about another tech film.
• 3:43
  Speaker 4: It's a little bit similar to Jobs, maybe a little
• 3:45
  Speaker 4: bit more fun than Steve Jobs. It definitely has Jay
• 3:49
  Speaker 4: barroshell in it, which Jobs did not. Can you imagine
• 3:53
  Speaker 4: if Steve Jobs was played by Jay barroshell Man that
• 3:55
  Speaker 4: would have been weird. But no, we're talking about twenty
• 3:57
  Speaker 4: twenty threes Canadian directed BlackBerry. So the film is directed
• 4:02
  Speaker 4: by Matt Johnson on a screenplay by Matt Johnson and
• 4:04
  Speaker 4: Matthew Miller. It's based on Losing the Signal, the untold
• 4:07
  Speaker 4: story behind the extraordinary rise and spectacular Fall of BlackBerry
• 4:10
  Speaker 4: by Jackie McNish and Sean Silkoff. Stars I already mentioned
• 4:15
  Speaker 4: j Barshell as Mike Lazaridis, stars Glenn Howardton yes the
• 4:20
  Speaker 4: Golden God himself from Always Sonny as Jim Balsley, and
• 4:23
  Speaker 4: Matt Johnson. The director plays Doug Fragan. We have a
• 4:26
  Speaker 4: couple other people in there, Carrie Elwist shows up for
• 4:29
  Speaker 4: a cup of coffee. Sal Rubinek is there because I
• 4:31
  Speaker 4: guess he got confused and wandered onto set.
• 4:34
  Speaker 3: Who knows.
• 4:35
  Speaker 4: But the film is about the rise and fall of BlackBerry,
• 4:39
  Speaker 4: the device that some of you may have heard of,
• 4:41
  Speaker 4: your parents probably used, and none of us use now
• 4:45
  Speaker 4: at all period. So, uh, doctor pearl Mutter, I'm gonna
• 4:48
  Speaker 4: kick it to you first because you picked this film,
• 4:51
  Speaker 4: and then mark to you afterwards. Why did we pick
• 4:54
  Speaker 4: this film and what did you think, doctor pearl Mutter?
• 4:56
  Speaker 7: Well, I picked this film and you mentioned the word
• 4:59
  Speaker 7: that I don't often use, because it was ground into
• 5:02
  Speaker 7: me that I'm supposed to be a dispassionate analytical student
• 5:06
  Speaker 7: of film. It was fun. I enjoyed this film. It
• 5:10
  Speaker 7: was a romp, another word I don't use very often.
• 5:14
  Speaker 7: I think it falls onto the category of business film,
• 5:17
  Speaker 7: but also sort of action adventure. It moves along extremely quickly.
• 5:23
  Speaker 7: I had read the book when this movie was coming out,
• 5:26
  Speaker 7: because I was always interested in this story. It was
• 5:28
  Speaker 7: adjacent to some of the work that I've done, and
• 5:31
  Speaker 7: it's not the book, it's elements of the book to
• 5:34
  Speaker 7: tell a great story that there's an Italian phrase that
• 5:38
  Speaker 7: I don't know Italian, but it's like the essence of
• 5:40
  Speaker 7: the truth, if not necessarily the truth. But I found
• 5:44
  Speaker 7: it to be fun to watch and I could sit
• 5:47
  Speaker 7: there and just go through it. Second, I think a
• 5:51
  Speaker 7: lot of modern television shows, and this is getting me
• 5:54
  Speaker 7: back into deep serious critic have a problem in creating distinctive,
• 6:00
  Speaker 7: distinguished in characters like that you can just after you've
• 6:04
  Speaker 7: watched the film, or maybe in the first five minutes,
• 6:06
  Speaker 7: you understand maybe not everything about them and who they are.
• 6:10
  Speaker 7: And we'll talk about the fact that this film blessedly
• 6:12
  Speaker 7: does not have a lot of flashbacks of somebody as
• 6:15
  Speaker 7: a five year old and their father is yelling at
• 6:18
  Speaker 7: them when they're trying to drive their tricycle or something
• 6:20
  Speaker 7: like that. But these characters, within the first five to
• 6:24
  Speaker 7: ten minutes of the film, we read them pretty deeply.
• 6:27
  Speaker 7: And I immediately thought of not because any one of
• 6:31
  Speaker 7: these characters was like Kirk Spock and doctor McCoy, but
• 6:35
  Speaker 7: like the immediacy that like, oh, I understand this guy
• 6:39
  Speaker 7: is all about this, and we learn complexities. But I
• 6:42
  Speaker 7: just thought that was such a great important storytelling note
• 6:45
  Speaker 7: that you can distinguish between characters. There's just not all
• 6:50
  Speaker 7: gray and interchangeable, which I think is a problem a
• 6:53
  Speaker 7: lot of places. I did think, as I said earlier
• 6:58
  Speaker 7: hinto that, is that this is a good lesson on
• 7:00
  Speaker 7: how to take parts of a true story to tell
• 7:04
  Speaker 7: the essential story, if not the complete story. This is
• 7:08
  Speaker 7: not the seventy hours that they probably would have needed
• 7:11
  Speaker 7: to explain all the nuances. They tell us, only tech
• 7:14
  Speaker 7: stuff which is relevant to propelling the story along. I said,
• 7:19
  Speaker 7: it was fun if you think about it. A lot
• 7:21
  Speaker 7: of the scenes in this movie consist of business meetings
• 7:24
  Speaker 7: and watching engineers put screwdrivers and pins into circuit boards,
• 7:30
  Speaker 7: and that usually isn't the basis of fun and adventure.
• 7:34
  Speaker 7: But they picked moments and revealing instances that again just
• 7:41
  Speaker 7: kept that story moving forward. And then last for my students,
• 7:44
  Speaker 7: what I would say is this is an untold story.
• 7:48
  Speaker 7: I mean the Steve Job story. A lot of people,
• 7:50
  Speaker 7: especially maybe over thirty five, know the Steve's Job story
• 7:53
  Speaker 7: or the high points of the low point of the
• 7:55
  Speaker 7: Steve Job story. But like the other side that like, hey,
• 7:58
  Speaker 7: the world used to be ruled by somebody else and
• 8:00
  Speaker 7: they were unthrowned. That's an important one. This is the
• 8:04
  Speaker 7: origins of our overstressed, over communicated world where people have
• 8:09
  Speaker 7: to wake up at two am because their boss texts
• 8:12
  Speaker 7: them that people are always worried about keeping their job
• 8:16
  Speaker 7: because new technology is going to come along and disrupt
• 8:20
  Speaker 7: and change everything. I tell my students, Yeah, I drove
• 8:24
  Speaker 7: an oldsmobile. I took pictures with the Kodak camera. My
• 8:28
  Speaker 7: first job in the movie industry was a place called Blockbuster.
• 8:32
  Speaker 7: And of course I have to explain this to my
• 8:33
  Speaker 7: students five six years ago, maybe longer, no longer than that,
• 8:37
  Speaker 7: when Sears was still an operating business. When I would
• 8:41
  Speaker 7: tell my students this, I would say, I used to
• 8:43
  Speaker 7: shop at Sears. So I asked a class of four
• 8:46
  Speaker 7: hundred undergraduate students, how many of you have shopped at
• 8:49
  Speaker 7: Sears recently? And only one young woman raised her hand
• 8:53
  Speaker 7: out of four hundred. And I looked at her and
• 8:55
  Speaker 7: I said, did your grandmother find what she was looking for?
• 8:57
  Speaker 7: And she said, yes, How did you know it was
• 9:00
  Speaker 7: I went there with my grandmother? Well, of course, because
• 9:03
  Speaker 7: nobody under the age of fifty was going to see
• 9:06
  Speaker 7: us anymore. These these great businesses with CEOs and boards
• 9:10
  Speaker 7: and billion twenty billion dollar valuations like BlackBerry went out
• 9:15
  Speaker 7: of business, and every CEO knows that and doesn't want
• 9:19
  Speaker 7: to be the next one in the textbook. And so
• 9:21
  Speaker 7: I think all of these combined to make it a
• 9:23
  Speaker 7: film worth watching.
• 9:25
  Speaker 4: Go ahead, Mark, So.
• 9:27
  Speaker 3: You know, to me, this is kind of a romp
• 9:29
  Speaker 3: down memory lane. I had a first row seat to
• 9:32
  Speaker 3: most of what this movie talks about, not obviously what's
• 9:35
  Speaker 3: going on inside BlackBerry, but what went on in the
• 9:38
  Speaker 3: telecommunications industry in the in the during the period of
• 9:42
  Speaker 3: time that this relates to. I was the chief legal
• 9:46
  Speaker 3: officer for one of the largest paging companies in the
• 9:50
  Speaker 3: United States during the nineties, had black.
• 9:52
  Speaker 7: Laden, Mark what paging is to our audience.
• 9:56
  Speaker 4: I let's go further back than even this movie goes.
• 9:59
  Speaker 3: Yeah. So, so pagers are a device for those that have
• 10:03
  Speaker 3: never seen one, are held one device that clipped on
• 10:05
  Speaker 3: your belt that someone would send you a message. Initially
• 10:10
  Speaker 3: they were voice pagers, so someone would dispatch a short
• 10:13
  Speaker 3: ten second message that would go off on your phone.
• 10:16
  Speaker 3: On your pager, you would run to a payphone. Another
• 10:19
  Speaker 3: thing probably most people have never seen, and you know,
• 10:22
  Speaker 3: call back to the number that was you know that
• 10:24
  Speaker 3: was given to you via the pager. That was then
• 10:27
  Speaker 3: followed by digital pagers that they would only show a
• 10:31
  Speaker 3: phone number and you would call the phone number that
• 10:33
  Speaker 3: was displayed on the device. And then there were things
• 10:36
  Speaker 3: called alphanumeric pagers which would then have you could actually
• 10:39
  Speaker 3: put text messages like what today we do on the
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: cell phones, that you could also put on a pager.
• 10:45
  Speaker 3: Pagers were one way. They did not have a way
• 10:49
  Speaker 3: to recommunicate back. You had to complete the communication via
• 10:53
  Speaker 3: payphone or otherwise. Remember this is the nineties. There was
• 10:57
  Speaker 3: no cell phones. Well there were cell phones, but they
• 10:59
  Speaker 3: were incredibly expensive. Pagers have existed since the probably the forties,
• 11:05
  Speaker 3: so you know, it's it was an old technology. And
• 11:08
  Speaker 3: obviously what these guys did was they made it two way.
• 11:12
  Speaker 3: There were other two way you know, the industry, the
• 11:14
  Speaker 3: paging industry near the end of its life, which would
• 11:17
  Speaker 3: have been the early two thousands, had two way pages
• 11:19
  Speaker 3: as well. Different technology, but similar idea. Okay, so one,
• 11:25
  Speaker 3: you know what makes this film interesting to me is,
• 11:27
  Speaker 3: like I said, I had a front row seat to
• 11:29
  Speaker 3: what was going on with blackberries. Was a user of
• 11:31
  Speaker 3: a BlackBerry in the early two thousands. I could kind
• 11:35
  Speaker 3: of relate some of the things that were going on
• 11:36
  Speaker 3: there and some funny stories about that. The second thing
• 11:39
  Speaker 3: that I think I'm very interested in, and they really
• 11:42
  Speaker 3: didn't do a heck of a lot with here, which
• 11:45
  Speaker 3: is they really didn't explain why it died. They you know,
• 11:50
  Speaker 3: they talk a little bit about it with the iPhone,
• 11:52
  Speaker 3: but there, you know, I was in the paging industry
• 11:55
  Speaker 3: and we actually exited stage right just before the collapse
• 12:00
  Speaker 3: of the paging industry because we realized a Cellular was
• 12:03
  Speaker 3: going to replace us entirely. And they made the iPhone
• 12:07
  Speaker 3: look like the reason that BlackBerry died, But quite frankly,
• 12:11
  Speaker 3: the reason they died is Cellular generally SMS s our
• 12:15
  Speaker 3: Message Service which everybody uses today or now you know
• 12:19
  Speaker 3: what it is, text or URCS Rich Communications Service basically
• 12:22
  Speaker 3: replaced what the BlackBerry did. Then then text messages back
• 12:25
  Speaker 3: and forth. BlackBerry generally didn't send pictures. So third obviously
• 12:32
  Speaker 3: was a user of the Palm Pilot, so I'm very
• 12:34
  Speaker 3: familiar with kind of what was going on there, another
• 12:37
  Speaker 3: kind of romp down memory lane. It was probably they
• 12:40
  Speaker 3: didn't throw in the Newton two because the Newton was
• 12:43
  Speaker 3: in there at the same time as the pomp pilot.
• 12:45
  Speaker 3: The other thing. The other two things that are very
• 12:48
  Speaker 3: interesting here that are again I'm kind of a ramp
• 12:51
  Speaker 3: down memory lane, is the stock option backdating scandal. So
• 12:55
  Speaker 3: you know this basically they talk about the CEO going
• 12:59
  Speaker 3: and backdating all these options. They talk about at the
• 13:02
  Speaker 3: end kind of the sec you know, basically letting him
• 13:06
  Speaker 3: off the hook with you know, some fines and other things.
• 13:09
  Speaker 3: What they don't really talk about, and I think is
• 13:11
  Speaker 3: the most interesting is backdating of stock options was widespread
• 13:14
  Speaker 3: in the technology industry. BlackBerry was not alone in doing this.
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: In fact, there's a very prominent law firm in Silicon
• 13:22
  Speaker 3: Valley that I believe had opinions suggesting you could do
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: backdating a stock options, which I've always found to be
• 13:29
  Speaker 3: fascinating because I never thought that it was appropriate thing
• 13:32
  Speaker 3: to do. But there was, you know, support for what
• 13:35
  Speaker 3: he was actually doing. In fact, I know of companies
• 13:38
  Speaker 3: that did exactly what they did this. The board would
• 13:40
  Speaker 3: grant options and then they would pick the date at
• 13:43
  Speaker 3: the stock price was the lowest in the last thirty
• 13:45
  Speaker 3: days or thirty days forward, not on the price that
• 13:48
  Speaker 3: the date the options were actually granted by the board
• 13:51
  Speaker 3: and the last thing that I think again, I robbed
• 13:54
  Speaker 3: down memory lane, given that everybody now has a smartphone,
• 13:57
  Speaker 3: you know, and the iPhone is the progenitor to that. Uh,
• 14:01
  Speaker 3: they don't, you know, they don't really explain how the
• 14:02
  Speaker 3: iPhone really transformed the entire industry. Uh, the iPhone was
• 14:08
  Speaker 3: not just oh it replaced BlackBerry. The iPhone creamed an
• 14:12
  Speaker 3: entire segment of the telecommunication industry. It creamed all of
• 14:16
  Speaker 3: the pagers, It creamed all the two wave pagers, It
• 14:20
  Speaker 3: creamed the blackberries. It quite frankly clean cleaned the flip phones,
• 14:25
  Speaker 3: candy bar phones, et cetera. It became the new norm
• 14:29
  Speaker 3: and it, you know, the iPhone was a huge cultural
• 14:32
  Speaker 3: shift and we we live it today. We don't anybody
• 14:35
  Speaker 3: that was not around with the introduction of the iPhone
• 14:38
  Speaker 3: and had a flip phone or a brick or you know,
• 14:41
  Speaker 3: any number of phones that were before that don't really
• 14:43
  Speaker 3: understand how consequential the iPhone was. This movie helps show
• 14:47
  Speaker 3: that it killed off an industry. The iPhone really is
• 14:50
  Speaker 3: what killed it. It was the text messaging that was
• 14:52
  Speaker 3: made easier by the iPhone. But text messaging was dying
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: before this died. The last thing I'll say is is
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: one of the ways that killed this industry, killed the BlackBerry.
• 15:05
  Speaker 3: The BlackBerry, they said had unlimited messaging. Cellular didn't have
• 15:08
  Speaker 3: unlimited messaging at the beginning either. When unlimited messaging came
• 15:12
  Speaker 3: with cell phones and you weren't charged, then the BlackBerry
• 15:16
  Speaker 3: basically became obsolete. You know, there was almost nothing they
• 15:20
  Speaker 3: could do to survive because you know, am I going
• 15:23
  Speaker 3: to carry two devices or I'm going to carry one?
• 15:25
  Speaker 3: The cell phone wins out. It's got more functionality, got
• 15:28
  Speaker 3: more everything than the BlackBerry ever would have in it's
• 15:31
  Speaker 3: in its technology space.
• 15:33
  Speaker 4: I think you could have made a movie like this
• 15:35
  Speaker 4: about MySpace, since we've had the Facebook movie already and
• 15:40
  Speaker 4: we never got the MySpace movie. You could make a
• 15:42
  Speaker 4: movie like this about MySpace because in a lot of ways,
• 15:45
  Speaker 4: it's a similar story. It's a product that was useful
• 15:49
  Speaker 4: at its creation ended up being the prototype and the
• 15:53
  Speaker 4: jumping point for other things, but because those other things
• 15:56
  Speaker 4: end up doing what it did better than it did,
• 15:58
  Speaker 4: which happens especially in an indust is like a technology
• 16:01
  Speaker 4: driven industry, where it's always kind of building on itself
• 16:04
  Speaker 4: unless you are willing to innovate along with the rest
• 16:06
  Speaker 4: of the innovators, you will get left behind even if
• 16:09
  Speaker 4: you know again, like even if you have haptic clicking
• 16:12
  Speaker 4: on your screen. Wow, Like you know, Jay Barroschell is
• 16:15
  Speaker 4: trying to pitch. He's like, oh, we're gonna have haptic
• 16:17
  Speaker 4: clicking like a BlackBerry, but a touch screen. It's like,
• 16:20
  Speaker 4: the have to clicking is not what anybody cares about.
• 16:22
  Speaker 4: But you know that's fine. That's that your perception. You're
• 16:25
  Speaker 4: missing the kind of point here as to what the
• 16:27
  Speaker 4: benefit of your product was. And that's kind of the
• 16:30
  Speaker 4: MySpace thing again. I mean, my space still exists. BlackBerry,
• 16:33
  Speaker 4: I guess technically still exists, but it doesn't exist the
• 16:37
  Speaker 4: way that it did. And when doctor Permutter and I
• 16:39
  Speaker 4: talked about the Steve Jobs film Jobs not Steve Jobs,
• 16:42
  Speaker 4: which is also a Steve Jobs movie, I know, a
• 16:44
  Speaker 4: confusing sentence that only makes sense written down on paper.
• 16:48
  Speaker 4: We talked, and I think doctor Permutter, you said it
• 16:50
  Speaker 4: specifically that we are living in Steve Jobs's world now,
• 16:53
  Speaker 4: and this world that we live in is a creation
• 16:55
  Speaker 4: of Steve Jobs. And I mean, if you watch this movie,
• 16:58
  Speaker 4: you really understand because this movie, even though this movie
• 17:02
  Speaker 4: took place effectively in my lifetime, most of this movie
• 17:06
  Speaker 4: is taking place. If not, I believe all of this
• 17:08
  Speaker 4: movie is taking place in my lifetime. The pre iPhone
• 17:12
  Speaker 4: days feel so just bizarre. Even watching television footage from
• 17:17
  Speaker 4: pre two thousand and eight, pre two thousand and seven
• 17:20
  Speaker 4: feels bizarre. It feels just antiquated in a way that
• 17:24
  Speaker 4: post iPhone things didn't. And it again it speaks to
• 17:28
  Speaker 4: like Mark and Doctor Promoter have both said, like, we
• 17:31
  Speaker 4: have this idea here of an industry being changed from
• 17:35
  Speaker 4: the inside out by people, and then being changed even
• 17:38
  Speaker 4: further from the inside out, and the people that were
• 17:40
  Speaker 4: one kind of tier above can't figure out how to
• 17:44
  Speaker 4: get further down into the kind of weeds of things
• 17:46
  Speaker 4: because they're just left out in the cold. And it's
• 17:49
  Speaker 4: not of their own fault. I mean it is, but
• 17:51
  Speaker 4: it isn't, but it is. I mean, Steve Jobs is
• 17:54
  Speaker 4: a singular mind, and it's hard to compete with a
• 17:57
  Speaker 4: singular mind. I'm not saying Mike Lazaridis and Jim Falsely weren't.
• 18:01
  Speaker 4: They're very good technology and business people, but Steve Jobs
• 18:05
  Speaker 4: was a visionary period and for good and for bad unfortunately,
• 18:09
  Speaker 4: Like that's you know, if you're able to execute on
• 18:12
  Speaker 4: the vision of what you're coming up with. And again,
• 18:14
  Speaker 4: Steve Jobs eventually did it can be globally transformative. I
• 18:18
  Speaker 4: mean again, there are plenty of examples like this of
• 18:21
  Speaker 4: globally transformative things. I like that this is a smaller
• 18:25
  Speaker 4: scope story. And it's not about the products that change
• 18:29
  Speaker 4: the world. It's more about the products that change the
• 18:31
  Speaker 4: way we did things and the way industries did things
• 18:35
  Speaker 4: for a time, and like Mark said, and like doctor
• 18:37
  Speaker 4: Pearlmutter said, affected the way business is done now. The
• 18:40
  Speaker 4: kind of always on call culture that's expected in that
• 18:44
  Speaker 4: grind and hustle culture that a lot of people my
• 18:47
  Speaker 4: age and younger have rejected in a lot of ways
• 18:49
  Speaker 4: because it's not healthy. I mean, it's healthy in again,
• 18:52
  Speaker 4: it's a balance, really obvious. That's where this comes from.
• 18:55
  Speaker 4: Like you said, Mark, it's the connectivity of things that
• 18:58
  Speaker 4: the BlackBerry really was important.
• 19:01
  Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I'll say this much first place. This
• 19:05
  Speaker 3: this is obviously a microcosm.
• 19:07
  Speaker 4: This is a story about.
• 19:08
  Speaker 3: A company and a technology. It killed. The iPhone killed
• 19:12
  Speaker 3: a lot more than this company. By the way, the
• 19:15
  Speaker 3: thing they don't talk about, I'm surprised they didn't. In
• 19:17
  Speaker 3: the in credits, BlackBerry ended up with a huge patent
• 19:21
  Speaker 3: lawsuit that basically creamed it. At the end, I believe
• 19:25
  Speaker 3: it was billions of dollars of damages for basically infringing
• 19:29
  Speaker 3: on other people's patents in its technology. Uh, not unusual
• 19:33
  Speaker 3: in the techno, in the in the telecommunications industry, there's
• 19:36
  Speaker 3: patents up all over the place. But then you know,
• 19:39
  Speaker 3: the deathnell comes through other things as well, not just technology,
• 19:43
  Speaker 3: because I don't think very few companies could survive what
• 19:46
  Speaker 3: ended up happening with the with the patent lawsuit. But
• 19:49
  Speaker 3: the other thing I'll say is you know that the
• 19:51
  Speaker 3: story you talk about like MySpace paging was a to
• 19:55
  Speaker 3: me is a much better story in some respects because
• 19:59
  Speaker 3: one way, pagers because they've been around for a long time,
• 20:02
  Speaker 3: and the industry completely didn't see it coming. I mean,
• 20:05
  Speaker 3: it just completely cleaned their clock. You went from things
• 20:09
  Speaker 3: with you know, uh, probably one hundred million users at
• 20:12
  Speaker 3: its peak to nothing in less than a couple of years, okay,
• 20:16
  Speaker 3: hollowed out industry that had you know, billions of dollars
• 20:20
  Speaker 3: in equity value. They got creamed out very quickly. So yeah,
• 20:25
  Speaker 3: the what you talk about the always on this the
• 20:28
  Speaker 3: one thing that I don't think is accurate, which is
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: having lived through the paging world and having lived through
• 20:35
  Speaker 3: the BlackBerry world, it is not akin to what's happening today. Okay,
• 20:39
  Speaker 3: uh there, it was all one to one messaging. Paging
• 20:43
  Speaker 3: in first place, you could decide whether to call back
• 20:46
  Speaker 3: or not. So let's just start with that. I mean,
• 20:48
  Speaker 3: you know, people expect you to call back when you
• 20:50
  Speaker 3: got it paid. But at the end of the day,
• 20:52
  Speaker 3: they understood you. You know, you didn't have a phone
• 20:53
  Speaker 3: right there, so you had to you know, access a
• 20:56
  Speaker 3: payphone or do whatever. So you know, that's one thing.
• 20:59
  Speaker 3: You know, BlackBerry was more so you know they talk about,
• 21:03
  Speaker 3: you know, people using it in meetings and stuff. Absolutely,
• 21:05
  Speaker 3: people were communicating to each other in meetings using Blackberries.
• 21:09
  Speaker 3: It was kind of a secret under the table communication mechanism.
• 21:13
  Speaker 3: But at the end of the day, it's nothing like
• 21:15
  Speaker 3: what you have today, because I think today is fueled
• 21:18
  Speaker 3: by the social media that didn't exist when the BlackBerry exists.
• 21:21
  Speaker 3: It was still a communication device, not a social media device.
• 21:27
  Speaker 3: So if I wanted to talk to you, Chris, I
• 21:29
  Speaker 3: can only talk to you. I couldn't talk to Prometer
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: at the same time, and we couldn't all have these
• 21:34
  Speaker 3: kind of weird gang together and O. There were groups
• 21:37
  Speaker 3: you could do, and there's other things like that you
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: could do, but it's nothing like what you have today
• 21:42
  Speaker 3: with Facebook and everything else. It just didn't exist. So,
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: you know, saying that you're always on et cetera and email,
• 21:49
  Speaker 3: Let's remember email wasn't that pervasive in the nineties. The
• 21:53
  Speaker 3: Internet did not get started until, you know, in terms
• 21:56
  Speaker 3: of becoming commercially available until the midnight you know, kind
• 22:00
  Speaker 3: of a more broad kind of base thing. So you
• 22:03
  Speaker 3: know it was today is that this is kind of
• 22:05
  Speaker 3: show you where the start of it was, But I'm
• 22:08
  Speaker 3: not sure you can equate that to this, but we
• 22:10
  Speaker 3: have today.
• 22:11
  Speaker 7: Yeah, it's interesting to me. Again, one of the things
• 22:14
  Speaker 7: that I appreciated this film is that we had no
• 22:18
  Speaker 7: origin story flashbacks. We have these characters and there's no
• 22:22
  Speaker 7: flashback to when they were five. There's I mean, there's
• 22:26
  Speaker 7: no there's there's there's none of the silliness that's in
• 22:29
  Speaker 7: so many films that where they have to go back
• 22:32
  Speaker 7: in time to explain a character in the present time.
• 22:36
  Speaker 7: It's just told within the story, Like you feel like,
• 22:38
  Speaker 7: what is what is the background with Jim like his
• 22:41
  Speaker 7: obsession with hockey, African masks, his character of being this
• 22:47
  Speaker 7: like out Steve Job is seeing Steve Jobs sometimes in
• 22:50
  Speaker 7: his harshness with people like what is that not relevant?
• 22:54
  Speaker 7: What's relevant is in the moment. And you're absolutely right, Mark,
• 22:59
  Speaker 7: And this is something I lived through myself, like teaching
• 23:02
  Speaker 7: it and talking about it. And in two thousand and
• 23:04
  Speaker 7: eight when I wrote this book Blog Wars, about the
• 23:07
  Speaker 7: rise of what was then the premier social media platform
• 23:12
  Speaker 7: for political engagement, political blogs, which, of course it's interesting
• 23:16
  Speaker 7: how they've almost completely disappeared. Now my students don't talk
• 23:19
  Speaker 7: about I think I'll blog or I'll go check a blog, right,
• 23:24
  Speaker 7: but you could see the beginnings like in the nineties.
• 23:28
  Speaker 7: I remember I was teaching the same class I've taught
• 23:32
  Speaker 7: for almost thirty years, which is Introduction to what used
• 23:34
  Speaker 7: to be called Introduction to Mass Communication. And now this
• 23:37
  Speaker 7: semester during the summer twice, I'm teaching Introduction to median Communication.
• 23:42
  Speaker 7: And I do give my students origin stories of like
• 23:45
  Speaker 7: Dwight Eisenhower used television advertising because there was a relatively
• 23:49
  Speaker 7: new medium the nineteen forty nine called television and New
• 23:53
  Speaker 7: York Ad Agency said you know, we can use this
• 23:55
  Speaker 7: to help sell you during the campaign, and they created
• 23:59
  Speaker 7: ads for a political campaign. Wow, And you can still
• 24:03
  Speaker 7: see I like Ike, you know, and the man from
• 24:05
  Speaker 7: Abilene and you can still see those ads today. So
• 24:08
  Speaker 7: I'm always interested in how things started small and then
• 24:12
  Speaker 7: got gigantic and you could see early elements of what
• 24:17
  Speaker 7: is successful. What this film does, I think personally effectively
• 24:21
  Speaker 7: is it takes this slice of this fear that you
• 24:25
  Speaker 7: can see in the face of the character of Mike
• 24:28
  Speaker 7: Lazaridi's who's this Obviously we're told he is a genius engineer.
• 24:33
  Speaker 7: He is a genius engineer, right, and he fiddles with
• 24:37
  Speaker 7: the technology, is able to create things which are astounding.
• 24:41
  Speaker 7: But you can see the very beginning when he meets
• 24:43
  Speaker 7: Jim Balseley that he's realizing we're missing something. We're missing
• 24:48
  Speaker 7: an element on the crew of the spaceship, right, of
• 24:51
  Speaker 7: somebody who's going to like actually move us forward, who's
• 24:55
  Speaker 7: going to handle the business end, the negotiations end. And
• 24:59
  Speaker 7: he shows is early fear, which unfortunately a lot of
• 25:03
  Speaker 7: very successful companies did not. And there are a lot
• 25:06
  Speaker 7: of stories to tell, right like Kodak famously had patents
• 25:11
  Speaker 7: for digital photography. Knew it wasn't like Kodak had no
• 25:14
  Speaker 7: idea there was something called digital photography. But from the
• 25:17
  Speaker 7: books I've read, I read two books about CODEC. They
• 25:20
  Speaker 7: made a decision, Hey, we are a chemical company. We
• 25:23
  Speaker 7: sell chemical. If we get into this digital thing, we're
• 25:27
  Speaker 7: going to take away from our chemical business and we're
• 25:30
  Speaker 7: going to hurt ourselves. So why would we hurt ourselves?
• 25:33
  Speaker 7: Same thing with Blockbuster, which had the opportunity to heavily
• 25:37
  Speaker 7: get into streaming, had a huge revenue stream to invest,
• 25:41
  Speaker 7: but said no, no, we've got these stores. We can't
• 25:43
  Speaker 7: abandon these stores. That's our revenue. And I see it
• 25:47
  Speaker 7: in my career at twice I've been a quote manager unquote,
• 25:51
  Speaker 7: a director of a school, dean of a college, and
• 25:53
  Speaker 7: part of my job was alumni outreach and fundraising. So
• 25:58
  Speaker 7: I got a chance to meet thousands of a alumni.
• 26:00
  Speaker 7: And just like law school graduates, our graduates are everywhere
• 26:04
  Speaker 7: because everybody has a marketing department or a communications department
• 26:08
  Speaker 7: and so on. And I was really interested. About fifteen
• 26:10
  Speaker 7: years ago, I was talking to a guy who was
• 26:14
  Speaker 7: the manager of a small, medium sized about a thousands
• 26:18
  Speaker 7: of people reported through indirectly or directly to him, and
• 26:22
  Speaker 7: he was talking about a new idea that they were judging,
• 26:25
  Speaker 7: and he said, you know, the board opposed it at first,
• 26:28
  Speaker 7: but the interns all liked it, so we decided to
• 26:31
  Speaker 7: go with that. And I thought, nineteen sixties, I don't
• 26:35
  Speaker 7: think that would have been the path to making the decision.
• 26:38
  Speaker 7: But the board actually said, Okay, if eighteen to twenty
• 26:41
  Speaker 7: year old to twenty two year olds are telling us
• 26:43
  Speaker 7: we need to do this, we probably need to do this.
• 26:45
  Speaker 7: And that does show a shift of realizing that we
• 26:50
  Speaker 7: are dominant in the market, right, and MySpace was dominant
• 26:53
  Speaker 7: in the market. We could do the geo cities story too, right,
• 26:58
  Speaker 7: the live journal story. There's so many like forgotten the Internet,
• 27:02
  Speaker 7: the forgotten civilizations like the Hittites and the Assyrians. You know,
• 27:07
  Speaker 7: we just have their ruins somewhere in some archive.
• 27:10
  Speaker 4: Where's the Napster story, doctor Pearl Buttter, That's what I want,
• 27:13
  Speaker 4: the Napster, the LimeWire story.
• 27:15
  Speaker 7: Yeah, there's so many of these. But it also was
• 27:19
  Speaker 7: fascinating to me this new world where at least the
• 27:22
  Speaker 7: smart CEOs and maybe they're thinking they're doing this too much.
• 27:26
  Speaker 7: They're saying, like disruption like, I swear to God, my
• 27:29
  Speaker 7: father was a business professor, and I had this conversation
• 27:33
  Speaker 7: with him in the nineteen nineties. People didn't use the
• 27:35
  Speaker 7: word disruption in business meetings in nineteen sixty seven. Now,
• 27:39
  Speaker 7: if you're a CEO and you don't like have your
• 27:42
  Speaker 7: ted talk and talk about disruption, you're not considered to
• 27:46
  Speaker 7: be a qualified CEO. So I'm fascinating how this movie,
• 27:50
  Speaker 7: for young people and for like people my age, talks
• 27:53
  Speaker 7: about sort of the shift in how companies viewed themselves
• 27:57
  Speaker 7: and were run.
• 27:58
  Speaker 3: Yeah. But you know the other thing that I find
• 28:00
  Speaker 3: fascinating about this movie, and again I liked it has
• 28:03
  Speaker 3: a beginning and an end, and it's encapsulizes again. But
• 28:06
  Speaker 3: I think you could do it otherwise, perhaps other industries,
• 28:10
  Speaker 3: perhaps that were deeper impacted by what was happening. But
• 28:13
  Speaker 3: you know, you talk about him being a brilliant engineer,
• 28:19
  Speaker 3: but the problem that had to be solved was not
• 28:21
  Speaker 3: solved by him. It was solved by all these guys
• 28:24
  Speaker 3: the CEO brought in from Google and other places. And
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: I mean that's what got him in the stock option
• 28:29
  Speaker 3: backdating problem, right. He needed to get these people with
• 28:33
  Speaker 3: particular expertise that BlackBerry didn't have.
• 28:36
  Speaker 7: There's a fantastic line in the movie which Chris introduced
• 28:40
  Speaker 7: this as a Canadian movie, and it is a very
• 28:42
  Speaker 7: Canadian movie. I mean, most of the movie takes place
• 28:44
  Speaker 7: in Waterloo, Canada, and it's about a company that was
• 28:47
  Speaker 7: once the wealthiest company in Canada, like the entire country
• 28:52
  Speaker 7: of Canada. Right, But there's that moment right where he
• 28:55
  Speaker 7: is asked. He's told, like, I thought, we had the
• 28:58
  Speaker 7: smartest engineers in the world here right in this company.
• 29:01
  Speaker 7: And he says, the smartest engineers. How the Canadian Board
• 29:04
  Speaker 7: of Sensors let that through.
• 29:05
  Speaker 3: I mean, look, it's not a knock on Canadian engineers.
• 29:09
  Speaker 3: The fact is what they needed was people. So the
• 29:14
  Speaker 3: interesting thing is they needed two groups of people. Obviously,
• 29:18
  Speaker 3: the engineers at BlackBerry understood their technology and understood how
• 29:23
  Speaker 3: their technology worked. But one of the things that was
• 29:26
  Speaker 3: critical was understanding how the telecommunications networks themselves operated. Google's
• 29:32
  Speaker 3: an interesting one because they really don't. They didn't at
• 29:34
  Speaker 3: the time understand how telecommunications, but they understood how the
• 29:38
  Speaker 3: Internet worked. Okay, they understood IP, they understood the Internet protocols, etc.
• 29:44
  Speaker 3: Which is ultimately where I think they had to take
• 29:46
  Speaker 3: this in order to increase. The interesting thing they don't
• 29:50
  Speaker 3: talk about is the reason they were able to stick
• 29:53
  Speaker 3: more users on the system was it's a speed rate issue.
• 29:58
  Speaker 3: So you know, again you'll remember this, David, if you
• 30:01
  Speaker 3: were in the if you were doing anything in computers
• 30:03
  Speaker 3: in the sixties and seventies, used to be called the
• 30:05
  Speaker 3: BOD rate, right, how fast a communication could go over
• 30:09
  Speaker 3: a line, you know.
• 30:10
  Speaker 7: And Chris, could you play the sound effect of the
• 30:13
  Speaker 7: squeal of a modem?
• 30:16
  Speaker 3: Yeah. The the issue was when they first came out,
• 30:21
  Speaker 3: everybody was five twelve k, which is really slow. Okay,
• 30:25
  Speaker 3: five twelve bod and then you went to ten twenty
• 30:28
  Speaker 3: four and you kept going up in increment. As you
• 30:30
  Speaker 3: increased the speed, you increase the number of users you
• 30:34
  Speaker 3: could have, the amount of traffic you could handle, and
• 30:37
  Speaker 3: so to some extent, my guess is I knew it
• 30:40
  Speaker 3: in the paging industry. I don't know it which specifically
• 30:43
  Speaker 3: whatspect the BlackBerry's technology. My guess is, and it wasn't
• 30:46
  Speaker 3: make for a very interesting story. Is you had to
• 30:48
  Speaker 3: increase the speed at which everything went over the network,
• 30:51
  Speaker 3: because if you double the speed, you doubled them. A
• 30:54
  Speaker 3: number of people you could have on the network. You
• 30:55
  Speaker 3: triple the speed you could do a vice versa, and
• 30:58
  Speaker 3: it went up in multiples of you know, two or four.
• 31:01
  Speaker 3: So you know, that was interesting. I do have an
• 31:03
  Speaker 3: interesting kind of aside I'll relate. So blackberries are very pervasive.
• 31:09
  Speaker 3: In the early two thousands, there was a very famous
• 31:13
  Speaker 3: corporate raider who was acquiring another company and he had
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: a president of one of his companies was in the
• 31:22
  Speaker 3: boardroom and he had a BlackBerry and he was, you know,
• 31:25
  Speaker 3: you know, the corporate raider was, you know, doing whatever
• 31:29
  Speaker 3: he wanted to acquire this particular company that I'm aware of,
• 31:32
  Speaker 3: and the president was taking a message on BlackBerry. The
• 31:35
  Speaker 3: corporate raider reached over, grabbed the BlackBerry and threw it
• 31:38
  Speaker 3: against the wall and busted it and said, I don't
• 31:40
  Speaker 3: want any these believity belief things in my meetings. Okay,
• 31:44
  Speaker 3: So I do think, you know, at the senior levels
• 31:46
  Speaker 3: they really rejected this. I actually had a company that
• 31:50
  Speaker 3: I was with that refused to allow people to have blackberries,
• 31:54
  Speaker 3: even if you're working on one hundred million dollar deals.
• 31:57
  Speaker 3: You actually had to take a telephone call. Hey, there's
• 31:59
  Speaker 3: a doc. I been waiting for you to review that
• 32:01
  Speaker 3: you had to then go on email to pick up
• 32:03
  Speaker 3: because he refused to have you know, BlackBerry they found
• 32:06
  Speaker 3: him and so insidious a device. Okay, Now, obviously we're
• 32:10
  Speaker 3: way past that now with with iPhones, tech messaging, et cetera.
• 32:14
  Speaker 3: But you know, at that early stage, there was a
• 32:17
  Speaker 3: lot of resistance.
• 32:18
  Speaker 7: Yeah, I have in my email, sorry Chris, your dad
• 32:22
  Speaker 7: and having a really great conversation the kids. We'll let
• 32:25
  Speaker 7: the kids talk later.
• 32:27
  Speaker 4: Who didn't live through Yeah, I lived through it, but
• 32:30
  Speaker 4: I didn't have a BlackBerry. I just remember dating at it.
• 32:33
  Speaker 4: I remember I remember being at a super Bowl that
• 32:37
  Speaker 4: I went to when I was in college with my
• 32:40
  Speaker 4: family and finding someone's BlackBerry underneath my seat. That was
• 32:43
  Speaker 4: the one and only time I ever found and saw
• 32:45
  Speaker 4: a BlackBerry. I didn't have one. I had a I
• 32:48
  Speaker 4: had a one of those Nokia phones with the extend antenna,
• 32:51
  Speaker 4: and then I went from that.
• 32:53
  Speaker 3: To a otherwise know it as a candy bar phone.
• 32:56
  Speaker 4: Yeah, I went to an iphon. I went to an iPhone,
• 32:58
  Speaker 4: So I never I never had a BlackBerry. I will
• 33:00
  Speaker 4: tell you though, I do like the tactile feel of
• 33:03
  Speaker 4: a keyboard on a phone. I think, what's funny is
• 33:06
  Speaker 4: with the things coming back into the world, not nostalgia wise,
• 33:09
  Speaker 4: but just you know. I mean, if you look at
• 33:11
  Speaker 4: the way the kids today, kids not the kids, but
• 33:14
  Speaker 4: kids today dress, They're wearing things that were popular in
• 33:16
  Speaker 4: the nineties. Bagg ear, jeans, flared at the bottom, looser
• 33:20
  Speaker 4: clothing like that's was a trend in the nineties. I
• 33:23
  Speaker 4: think that the tactile feel of a keyboard is something
• 33:27
  Speaker 4: that there is out there for people now within the
• 33:30
  Speaker 4: world of the use of technology, because I am sure
• 33:32
  Speaker 4: that there are people that, you know, Mike Lazaridis or not,
• 33:36
  Speaker 4: would want to have a haptic clickety clack keyboard. And
• 33:40
  Speaker 4: you know what, I am one of those people that
• 33:42
  Speaker 4: wouldn't mind that. I actually don't mind that. When I
• 33:44
  Speaker 4: used to have an Xbox three sixty and I would
• 33:47
  Speaker 4: game online, I had a little keyboard thing you plugged
• 33:50
  Speaker 4: into the bottom and it had a little keyboard on
• 33:52
  Speaker 4: the bottom. You cook, a cook, that's you know that.
• 33:55
  Speaker 4: I appreciate that, and I can't be the only one.
• 33:58
  Speaker 4: But in this day and age, everything is touched screen.
• 34:00
  Speaker 4: You know, if it's not a touch screen, it's it's
• 34:02
  Speaker 4: more strange than if it does have a keyboard.
• 34:04
  Speaker 3: Yeah, The other thing that the movie doesn't really explain is,
• 34:08
  Speaker 3: and this is critical, is you know the kind of
• 34:11
  Speaker 3: the tension with Bell Atlantic and BlackBerry and the iPhone.
• 34:16
  Speaker 3: So when the iPhone originally came out, it was exclusive
• 34:19
  Speaker 3: to AT and T. They paid more money than you
• 34:22
  Speaker 3: can imagine in order to have an exclusive right to
• 34:26
  Speaker 3: sell the iPhone. Everybody else didn't have access. There was
• 34:29
  Speaker 3: no other device that was similar to the iPhone at
• 34:32
  Speaker 3: the time, so you know, they were desperate to get
• 34:35
  Speaker 3: some sort of device that would compete with the iPhone
• 34:39
  Speaker 3: when they realized that the iPhone was going to blow
• 34:41
  Speaker 3: the market up. Because I think the iPhone exclusivity ran
• 34:45
  Speaker 3: for more than a year, I want to say, two
• 34:47
  Speaker 3: or three years. So you know, imagine you're sitting in
• 34:50
  Speaker 3: Bell Atlantic's boardroom as a cellular provider and your competition
• 34:55
  Speaker 3: has a device you can I get access to and
• 34:57
  Speaker 3: it's blowing the market up, right. That is you know,
• 35:01
  Speaker 3: they don't really talk about that was kind of the
• 35:03
  Speaker 3: impetus for them trying to find another device, them, you know,
• 35:05
  Speaker 3: going to China, doing all these things because they had
• 35:08
  Speaker 3: to do something to try to compete. It wasn't just
• 35:11
  Speaker 3: BlackBerry had a problem. The entire industry had a problem.
• 35:14
  Speaker 7: Some of these things are hinted at. This a really
• 35:16
  Speaker 7: great scene there where one of the engineers is talking
• 35:19
  Speaker 7: to another one there in BlackBerry Central, Hey, this iPhone.
• 35:24
  Speaker 7: They're going to have an application store where anyone can
• 35:28
  Speaker 7: design an application and anyone can download an application. And again,
• 35:32
  Speaker 7: to my students, this is like and then they invented oxygen,
• 35:37
  Speaker 7: and people breathed it like, it's so inconceivable that one
• 35:42
  Speaker 7: would not have apps of their own choosing and hundreds
• 35:46
  Speaker 7: of thousands, millions of choices. Now you're both right, because
• 35:52
  Speaker 7: in my students and I love to have these conversations
• 35:54
  Speaker 7: with them, I see two things going on at the
• 35:57
  Speaker 7: end of my email as an automatic signature. One of
• 36:00
  Speaker 7: the things I learned as a manager was to be
• 36:02
  Speaker 7: really careful about communicating with people after hours, because I
• 36:08
  Speaker 7: would be maybe I'm working on something and it would
• 36:10
  Speaker 7: be midnight, and I'd go like, Okay, yeah, I'd like
• 36:13
  Speaker 7: this person tomorrow morning at eight o'clock to take a
• 36:16
  Speaker 7: look at this because it's important. So I would say, hey, Joe,
• 36:20
  Speaker 7: could you look at this? This is important. And the
• 36:23
  Speaker 7: very first time I started as a manager, and then
• 36:25
  Speaker 7: I realized, Oh, their staff and I'm their supervisor, and
• 36:30
  Speaker 7: Joe will wake up at seven o'clock, come into work,
• 36:34
  Speaker 7: check his email and panic because the boss sent him
• 36:37
  Speaker 7: an email at midnight and he waited eight hours to respond.
• 36:41
  Speaker 7: And so I learned not only to tell people like, look,
• 36:45
  Speaker 7: I will physically call you on the phone if there
• 36:47
  Speaker 7: is an actual emergency. Anything else you get from me,
• 36:51
  Speaker 7: it's not an emergency. That's the only time you'll hear
• 36:54
  Speaker 7: from me. And I put at the bottom of my
• 36:56
  Speaker 7: email in a cursive font, and please know my working
• 37:00
  Speaker 7: hours may not be your working hours. You do not
• 37:03
  Speaker 7: feel it is necessary to respond outside of your normal
• 37:06
  Speaker 7: schedule because I was so worried about like, you know,
• 37:09
  Speaker 7: some twenty three year old staff or panicking there.
• 37:11
  Speaker 3: Yeah, it taither. My experience is different, I mean quite frankly.
• 37:15
  Speaker 3: You know, people responded whenever they needed to respond. But
• 37:18
  Speaker 3: you know, just again, the legal profession is a little
• 37:21
  Speaker 3: bit different than I suspect the company you were in,
• 37:24
  Speaker 3: and it is more of a twenty four by seven
• 37:26
  Speaker 3: kind of environment. But you know, I got people get
• 37:29
  Speaker 3: emails at midnight. They're not expected to respond by one am.
• 37:32
  Speaker 3: You know, they'll respond when they get to it. But yeah,
• 37:35
  Speaker 3: I understand, and I think my students have revolted in
• 37:38
  Speaker 3: some ways. Like they On the one hand, they're on
• 37:41
  Speaker 3: social media a lot, right, and they're expressing themselves on
• 37:44
  Speaker 3: social media, and they're posting and sharing and doing things
• 37:47
  Speaker 3: which is were science fiction to me teaching introduction and
• 37:51
  Speaker 3: mass communication in the nineteen sixties. On the other hand,
• 37:53
  Speaker 3: there really is a sort of rejection and like, man,
• 37:58
  Speaker 3: I'd like to be in a house in the woods
• 38:01
  Speaker 3: with no electricity and and just get my bucket of
• 38:05
  Speaker 3: water from the well and have no connection too. They're
• 38:09
  Speaker 3: both operating in this in the mind at the same time.
• 38:12
  Speaker 3: But you know what, a.
• 38:13
  Speaker 4: Lot of it they live in the forest, like Uncle
• 38:16
  Speaker 4: Ted hun huh, doctor doctor promoter Ted Kaczynski out there
• 38:20
  Speaker 4: just chilling in the cabin.
• 38:22
  Speaker 3: No technology for mea Walden's pond, right. But I'll say
• 38:27
  Speaker 3: this much a lot of it is caused by the
• 38:29
  Speaker 3: people themselves. But you know, managers, there are managers that
• 38:33
  Speaker 3: I obviously expect people to respond immediately, et cetera. But
• 38:36
  Speaker 3: I'm not sure that that is the majority or even
• 38:39
  Speaker 3: even even a significant portion of it. But people want
• 38:43
  Speaker 3: to be connected. People are curious people are you know,
• 38:46
  Speaker 3: this has become part of their lives to do this,
• 38:49
  Speaker 3: and you know it is it becomes addictive, of course.
• 38:53
  Speaker 3: And I don't mean addictive in the sense of, you know,
• 38:55
  Speaker 3: like you know, drugs, but it's addictive in the sense
• 38:57
  Speaker 3: of you feel left out if you're not seeing what's
• 39:00
  Speaker 3: going on and right now all the time. I'll say
• 39:03
  Speaker 3: the other thing that they don't really talk about in
• 39:05
  Speaker 3: this movie, and it's a very interesting kind of aspect.
• 39:07
  Speaker 3: And I'll build on what you said about the app store.
• 39:10
  Speaker 3: What makes the app store so fundamental to the success
• 39:15
  Speaker 3: of the iPhone and everything else is, yeah, applications, but
• 39:19
  Speaker 3: more important, it allows you to personalize the device to
• 39:23
  Speaker 3: your needs and wants. Okay, so before the iPhone, there
• 39:28
  Speaker 3: was a lot of people figuring out how to do
• 39:30
  Speaker 3: different kinds of cases. Right, I want my phone have
• 39:33
  Speaker 3: a different case than yours. That's how I express my individualism, right,
• 39:37
  Speaker 3: is how my different kind of phone I have, or
• 39:40
  Speaker 3: a different kind of case, or I might have things
• 39:42
  Speaker 3: that dangle for my phone or whatever. To heck, the
• 39:45
  Speaker 3: iPhone took that to the next level with the app
• 39:47
  Speaker 3: So you know, I'm sure if I put my iPhone
• 39:50
  Speaker 3: next to yours. We got entire We have some apps
• 39:53
  Speaker 3: that overlap, but lots that don't. And it allows you
• 39:56
  Speaker 3: to personalize. And one of the things that BlackBerry unli
• 40:00
  Speaker 3: like palm Pilot did is it didn't I don't think
• 40:02
  Speaker 3: it really opened up to third party developers. Pompilot did that.
• 40:06
  Speaker 3: Pompilot had third party development and it was a fairly
• 40:09
  Speaker 3: robust industry people developing PalmPilot apps and putting it for
• 40:15
  Speaker 3: the Pompilot. And I think a lot of them were free.
• 40:18
  Speaker 3: There might have been something that we're paid. I don't know,
• 40:21
  Speaker 3: but you know, if you build a closed environment and
• 40:24
  Speaker 3: don't have any way to personalize it, it's a problem.
• 40:28
  Speaker 3: And what's curious about it is the iPhone is known
• 40:31
  Speaker 3: as a walled guard right. You can only get things
• 40:34
  Speaker 3: on the iPhone generally if they come through the app store.
• 40:36
  Speaker 3: In order to get them on the app store, you
• 40:38
  Speaker 3: have to go through Apple. Apple basically has to approve it,
• 40:41
  Speaker 3: et cetera. It's interesting that Apple built an app store
• 40:44
  Speaker 3: that allowed third party development because they are a walled guarden.
• 40:48
  Speaker 3: But you juxtapose that with Google and the Android operating
• 40:52
  Speaker 3: system that you can do anything you want, right, you know,
• 40:55
  Speaker 3: the play store. The play store, you could basically at
• 40:58
  Speaker 3: the beginning upload any than you wanted for download on
• 41:01
  Speaker 3: any phones, anytime, anywhere kind of thing. An entirely different approach,
• 41:05
  Speaker 3: quite frankly, more of an Internet approach than a walled
• 41:08
  Speaker 3: garden approach. But you know, it was interesting that Apple
• 41:11
  Speaker 3: took that approach, and it is I think one of
• 41:14
  Speaker 3: the reasons that BlackBerry probably failed, but by not allowing
• 41:18
  Speaker 3: people to have third party apps on those phones. By
• 41:21
  Speaker 3: the way, I don't think you could have customized cases
• 41:23
  Speaker 3: for Blackberries either.
• 41:25
  Speaker 4: Pagers.
• 41:25
  Speaker 3: You couldn't, so I suspect the BlackBerry. You know, it
• 41:28
  Speaker 3: was black and that was the color you got. It's
• 41:30
  Speaker 3: kind of like the original modelty forward right heavy color
• 41:33
  Speaker 3: you want as long as its black well.
• 41:34
  Speaker 4: And it's because again, like some of what is being
• 41:38
  Speaker 4: I guess in my mind, that's what makes this story
• 41:41
  Speaker 4: so different from the story of the iPhone is when
• 41:43
  Speaker 4: you see the story of the iPhone, at least in
• 41:45
  Speaker 4: the dramatic sense in my time, i'd in the real sense,
• 41:47
  Speaker 4: but in the dramatic sense, you get the sense that
• 41:49
  Speaker 4: just to juxtapose this against the Steve Jobs movie again,
• 41:53
  Speaker 4: the Michael Fossbender one he understood that people wanted to
• 41:57
  Speaker 4: just do with the device. It wasn't necessary like purpose
• 42:01
  Speaker 4: driven as much as just like, you have the opportunity
• 42:03
  Speaker 4: to do something with this that you have never done before.
• 42:06
  Speaker 4: And Steve Jobs was taking a kind of running header
• 42:09
  Speaker 4: that that was part of going to be part of
• 42:11
  Speaker 4: what drove the kind of the consumer trends is that
• 42:14
  Speaker 4: people were gonna want to, like you said, Mark express
• 42:16
  Speaker 4: themselves with their phone, with their technology. And I'm not
• 42:21
  Speaker 4: saying that Balsilly and Buddies over at Palmpile or BlackBerry
• 42:25
  Speaker 4: understood didn't understand that. I just don't think that they
• 42:28
  Speaker 4: were necessarily interested in that. I don't think that that
• 42:31
  Speaker 4: was their goal. I think that their goal was to
• 42:34
  Speaker 4: make a product that allowed for the ease of communication
• 42:37
  Speaker 4: between people, which is kind of I mean, you know,
• 42:40
  Speaker 4: and utilizing something that's I mean, obviously this all comes
• 42:43
  Speaker 4: from something being utilized that wasn't being utilized before. I mean,
• 42:47
  Speaker 4: they talk about it at the beginning of the movie.
• 42:48
  Speaker 4: He's like, there's this network that nobody's using, and we
• 42:52
  Speaker 4: understand how to use it, and no one else has
• 42:54
  Speaker 4: been able to take advantage of it, and that allows
• 42:56
  Speaker 4: you to communicate in a more efficient way. They're not
• 42:59
  Speaker 4: sitting there going we want to be able to put
• 43:00
  Speaker 4: apps on there or anything else, and that comes down
• 43:02
  Speaker 4: to a device that feels more personal to you, which
• 43:08
  Speaker 4: changes how you use technology. I mean, computers in the
• 43:11
  Speaker 4: home were so important because you could do what you
• 43:14
  Speaker 4: wanted with it, the ability to use it how you chose,
• 43:17
  Speaker 4: And we didn't really have that with phones until the iPhone,
• 43:21
  Speaker 4: which was I mean but even early on, like it
• 43:23
  Speaker 4: took a long time for the iPhone app store to
• 43:26
  Speaker 4: get where it is now, I mean, it was awful
• 43:28
  Speaker 4: for years because even Apple didn't understand the ramifications of
• 43:31
  Speaker 4: what they had on their hands, which is what they
• 43:33
  Speaker 4: mean they do now.
• 43:34
  Speaker 3: Yeah, two things I'll say. One, even the flip phones
• 43:37
  Speaker 3: and the candy bar phones had apps, right, they were different,
• 43:41
  Speaker 3: they weren't as they weren't the same kind that we
• 43:43
  Speaker 3: have today. There were much more rudimentary. But the second
• 43:46
  Speaker 3: thing I'll say, and as you compose and you compare
• 43:48
  Speaker 3: this with the Jobs movie, this is very much an
• 43:51
  Speaker 3: engineering centric company, and I think this does really explain
• 43:56
  Speaker 3: a lot of what happened in it. It's the we
• 43:59
  Speaker 3: were we will build it and they will come is
• 44:02
  Speaker 3: an engineering theory, which is, I'm going to build the
• 44:05
  Speaker 3: best product that has all these neat things. I think
• 44:07
  Speaker 3: tactile feel is what everybody wants. I can build it in,
• 44:10
  Speaker 3: I can make it great. I can do all that
• 44:12
  Speaker 3: without asking people what they want. Right, And I think
• 44:15
  Speaker 3: when you think about what Jobs was doing, I don't
• 44:18
  Speaker 3: know that he's a great engineer. He was able to
• 44:21
  Speaker 3: tap into what people wanted, not what they could, not
• 44:24
  Speaker 3: what they could Actually, you know, oh, I can make
• 44:27
  Speaker 3: it go faster. Well, who cares? What you care about
• 44:30
  Speaker 3: is personalizing. I care about having apps, I care about
• 44:33
  Speaker 3: having all this other stuff. That's what's important to me.
• 44:36
  Speaker 3: Not it goes faster.
• 44:37
  Speaker 4: Who cares?
• 44:38
  Speaker 3: That's an engineering thing. And you know, engineers can get
• 44:40
  Speaker 3: really excited about it. And I think that really shows
• 44:44
  Speaker 3: here and again the juxtapose between the players here obviously
• 44:49
  Speaker 3: all the engineers. That's the way they thought about the world.
• 44:52
  Speaker 3: I'm not sure that you know that they able to
• 44:56
  Speaker 3: ever overcome that. And I think they tried, but I
• 44:58
  Speaker 3: don't think they really rununderstood what they were up against.
• 45:01
  Speaker 7: That's a really good point. The user experience part of this,
• 45:07
  Speaker 7: the user centeredness, and Jobs himself, like in the movie.
• 45:11
  Speaker 7: And then I was when we talked about the Steve
• 45:14
  Speaker 7: Jobs movie with Michael Fastbinder together Chris and I mentioned
• 45:17
  Speaker 7: that I had read the book. It was loosely based
• 45:19
  Speaker 7: on by Walter Isaacson, the Big eight hundred page I
• 45:22
  Speaker 7: think biography of Jobs, and one of the seminal moments
• 45:26
  Speaker 7: in the book which is not in the movie, but
• 45:28
  Speaker 7: I understand because the movie was sort of focusing on
• 45:30
  Speaker 7: three events within somebody's life. And we were talking about
• 45:33
  Speaker 7: biopicks and how that was a good biopick because it
• 45:36
  Speaker 7: didn't feel it needed to check the boxes of everything.
• 45:40
  Speaker 7: Here's Napoleon when he first was toilet trained, you know, check,
• 45:43
  Speaker 7: Let's move on to something else.
• 45:45
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 45:45
  Speaker 7: This BlackBerry movie, again partly fictional, but it picked events
• 45:50
  Speaker 7: that propelled forward the story and left a lot of
• 45:53
  Speaker 7: other stuff unexplained for good for good reason. But in
• 45:58
  Speaker 7: the Jobs book there's a moment where and I have
• 46:02
  Speaker 7: a connection to this because, as I mentioned last time,
• 46:05
  Speaker 7: I'm teaching this class intro to mass communication is the
• 46:08
  Speaker 7: nineteen nineties, and I have a week on the internet
• 46:13
  Speaker 7: and this is nineteen ninety six, right, and I had
• 46:15
  Speaker 7: just published an article on presidential website like Bill Clinton
• 46:21
  Speaker 7: put up his team put up a website where you
• 46:25
  Speaker 7: could go and get Bill Clinton's positions on issues of
• 46:29
  Speaker 7: the day, which is a revolutionary thing to have direct access,
• 46:32
  Speaker 7: not to have to read a newspaper to a quick
• 46:35
  Speaker 7: to the hell a quick story. Some of you go
• 46:38
  Speaker 7: back and look the Lincoln Douglas debate debates between Abraham
• 46:42
  Speaker 7: Lincoln running for president in eighteen sixty and Stephen Douglas,
• 46:45
  Speaker 7: very famous, you know, talked about the history of communications.
• 46:49
  Speaker 7: How did Lincoln get the text? Because he was he
• 46:52
  Speaker 7: was extemporaneous for most of them. He had notes, but
• 46:55
  Speaker 7: he but they were talking for six hours. He got
• 46:58
  Speaker 7: newspapers over the next couple of weeks to get the transcripts,
• 47:02
  Speaker 7: because reporters sat in the front row and wrote things down,
• 47:05
  Speaker 7: and that's how he found out what he said. And
• 47:07
  Speaker 7: by the way, he picked opposing newspapers because he figured
• 47:11
  Speaker 7: they'd be more complete about taking notes. But the point
• 47:16
  Speaker 7: was that the world of communications at that time. Nineteen
• 47:20
  Speaker 7: ninety six, I'm in the classroom and a student comes
• 47:23
  Speaker 7: to my office and he says, professor, I want to
• 47:25
  Speaker 7: show you something. And he downloads a song from Napster,
• 47:29
  Speaker 7: which was probably illegal undoubtedly, undoubtedly in my state of
• 47:35
  Speaker 7: Louisiana computer But the next week in class, I say, gosh,
• 47:39
  Speaker 7: you know, I know the music industry is going to
• 47:41
  Speaker 7: have to do something. And I actually threw out the
• 47:43
  Speaker 7: term digital jukebox right like, because we were paying twenty
• 47:46
  Speaker 7: three dollars for a CD with one good song. Maybe
• 47:49
  Speaker 7: you vaguely remember this mark and they didn't. It took
• 47:53
  Speaker 7: Steve Jobs. And in the book Steve Jobs, there's a
• 47:56
  Speaker 7: meeting between Steve and the president of Sony where the
• 47:58
  Speaker 7: president of Sony basically admits they have not been able
• 48:02
  Speaker 7: to solve this problem, and Steve Jobs says, well, here's
• 48:04
  Speaker 7: how you solve this problem. And part of it was
• 48:06
  Speaker 7: ignore the engineers, think what the user experience is going
• 48:11
  Speaker 7: to be, and then engineer towards that rather than saying, hey, engineers,
• 48:15
  Speaker 7: build whatever you want and then we'll tell the public.
• 48:18
  Speaker 7: That's what you got to take. And I don't mean
• 48:21
  Speaker 7: to say all engineer today, if you go to engineering school,
• 48:25
  Speaker 7: you learn to be very ux centered because you have
• 48:29
  Speaker 7: to be. You wouldn't get a job if you didn't
• 48:32
  Speaker 7: care at least somewhat about that. But I think this
• 48:34
  Speaker 7: film did a really good job of showing that of like,
• 48:37
  Speaker 7: you can be the best engineer in the room, but
• 48:40
  Speaker 7: that doesn't mean your product is going to be successful.
• 48:43
  Speaker 3: But there's I mean, the world is littered with products
• 48:46
  Speaker 3: like this that you know are great that you know,
• 48:49
  Speaker 3: they do fantastic things and you know, but they don't
• 48:51
  Speaker 3: solve a you know what people want, right, And it's
• 48:54
  Speaker 3: a it's not a criticism of engineering. It just does
• 48:57
  Speaker 3: does show the engineering culture that is is you know,
• 49:00
  Speaker 3: centered around Hey, you know I can just add this,
• 49:03
  Speaker 3: this will make it great or this is really important
• 49:06
  Speaker 3: and it may not be what the people want, and
• 49:09
  Speaker 3: you know, that's it. There are lots of businesses that
• 49:12
  Speaker 3: fail because they they just don't catch on with what
• 49:15
  Speaker 3: people really want. It's not a criticism of them, it's
• 49:17
  Speaker 3: just that's what happens.
• 49:18
  Speaker 4: Well, and that's I mean, that's kind of you know
• 49:20
  Speaker 4: what I was speaking to. And especially you know, I
• 49:23
  Speaker 4: think you kind of see that. You see that a
• 49:25
  Speaker 4: little bit in this movie when you have and again,
• 49:28
  Speaker 4: for whatever reason, Carrie Elwis is in this movie for
• 49:31
  Speaker 4: like five minutes as Carl Yankowski, who's in charge of
• 49:35
  Speaker 4: Pomp Pilot. He shows up and he tries to like
• 49:38
  Speaker 4: pitch to them what the change would be if these
• 49:43
  Speaker 4: two things came together, and Lazariti is embalsily like they
• 49:48
  Speaker 4: do not see what he is getting at as a
• 49:51
  Speaker 4: benefit to their product, even though he says, you know,
• 49:53
  Speaker 4: even though they kind of essentially an old lie to
• 49:55
  Speaker 4: his facing. Oh yeah, that's great, you know whatever. But
• 49:58
  Speaker 4: it's again, I think to your point, Market speaks it
• 50:00
  Speaker 4: this idea of like the people involved don't always have
• 50:04
  Speaker 4: their finger on the pulse of what is wanted. They
• 50:07
  Speaker 4: think they know, and for everyone that thinks they know,
• 50:11
  Speaker 4: there's one person that actually does. And whether or not
• 50:13
  Speaker 4: that person actually ever gets listened to is also another story.
• 50:16
  Speaker 4: I mean, you know, to go back to the Jobs
• 50:18
  Speaker 4: movie and to compare it to this. In this movie,
• 50:20
  Speaker 4: we have the the Wosniak adjacent character is the way
• 50:25
  Speaker 4: I would I would call him because he is somewhat
• 50:27
  Speaker 4: Wosniak adjacent. Matt Johnson, who plays Doug Fragan, who is
• 50:31
  Speaker 4: the kind of the hippie of the three of Balsaly,
• 50:34
  Speaker 4: Lazaritis and Fragan, and he, you know, he and Lazaritas.
• 50:39
  Speaker 4: You know, Lazaritis has this moment of like where he
• 50:41
  Speaker 4: can choose to not go down a certain path, and
• 50:45
  Speaker 4: you can see that Fragan is going down that other
• 50:47
  Speaker 4: path of like this is an engineering thing. This is
• 50:50
  Speaker 4: this Like we're still in the garage essentially, we're still
• 50:52
  Speaker 4: watching movies. We're still doing that, you know, Friday movie
• 50:55
  Speaker 4: night and all that. And you know, Lazaritus goes down
• 50:58
  Speaker 4: the other route with Michael Ironsides, which I loved. By
• 51:01
  Speaker 4: the way, having Michael Ironside in this movie is just
• 51:03
  Speaker 4: like the like the the corporate you know, like the
• 51:06
  Speaker 4: corporate raider from Hell. I mean, he's just as he's
• 51:08
  Speaker 4: playing a very specific kind of character in this movie,
• 51:10
  Speaker 4: and I appreciate it. You know, gets the job done
• 51:12
  Speaker 4: and there you go.
• 51:13
  Speaker 7: He was It's this movie isn't the same universe as
• 51:15
  Speaker 7: Starship Troopers. Michael Lorris I was.
• 51:18
  Speaker 4: A total recall.
• 51:19
  Speaker 7: Even that was a deleted scene where he transports back.
• 51:22
  Speaker 4: From Yeah, no kid, but he has to set him straight.
• 51:25
  Speaker 4: You know. It's like it's like jobs in Jobs when
• 51:28
  Speaker 4: he's you know, when Wozniak is like, give us, give
• 51:31
  Speaker 4: the engineers some credit, He's and jobs like no, and
• 51:34
  Speaker 4: he's like I've been, I've been, You've been answer asking
• 51:36
  Speaker 4: this question for thirty years now. I'm not gonna do it.
• 51:39
  Speaker 4: And there's some of that in this movie where it's like,
• 51:42
  Speaker 4: you know what. In Jobs, he shows that the engineers
• 51:45
  Speaker 4: like why Jobs was able to reject the engineers, and
• 51:47
  Speaker 4: why Jobs was able to say he could reject the engineers.
• 51:50
  Speaker 4: In this movie, it almost is the counterpoint of like,
• 51:54
  Speaker 4: you can't reject the engineers forever because at the end
• 51:58
  Speaker 4: of the day, as we see at the end of
• 52:00
  Speaker 4: the movie with Lazaritas in his you know, you know
• 52:03
  Speaker 4: the unit where all these units are stored and he
• 52:05
  Speaker 4: starts picking them up and listening to him and he
• 52:07
  Speaker 4: hears that hum that he talks about at the beginning
• 52:10
  Speaker 4: of the movie. With products made in China, it's like,
• 52:12
  Speaker 4: this is why you don't ignore the engineer, because the
• 52:15
  Speaker 4: engineers do know what they're talking about. They are the
• 52:17
  Speaker 4: ones that make the product. But it's sometimes they are
• 52:20
  Speaker 4: myopic and scope of what they're trying to do and want,
• 52:23
  Speaker 4: and they're just trying to make an interesting product. The
• 52:25
  Speaker 4: end user doesn't matter. I mean, you do see that
• 52:27
  Speaker 4: in Jobs when they're asking him about the system being
• 52:30
  Speaker 4: closed and they're like, who would want that? And he's like, well,
• 52:32
  Speaker 4: that's what I want. It's like, well, that might not
• 52:34
  Speaker 4: be what the users want. He's like, I don't care,
• 52:36
  Speaker 4: that's what I want. And I think it's Wosniak says,
• 52:38
  Speaker 4: you know, we're not making products with your like failings,
• 52:43
  Speaker 4: We're not making products with your faults. We're trying to
• 52:45
  Speaker 4: make perfect products here for the users. And it's like this,
• 52:48
  Speaker 4: there's some of that here where Lazaritis and Frank and
• 52:51
  Speaker 4: like they they are somewhat immutable in their beliefs of
• 52:55
  Speaker 4: what they want to do. I mean Lazaritis in that
• 52:57
  Speaker 4: meeting with sal Rubink's character where he's like, yeah, it's
• 52:59
  Speaker 4: gonna have a click screen, It's like, Jesus, dude, that's
• 53:02
  Speaker 4: not what people want. Like people don't want that. They
• 53:05
  Speaker 4: still can't get out of their own way in some respects,
• 53:07
  Speaker 4: and that's where you have Jim Balsley, who again can't
• 53:09
  Speaker 4: get out of his own way. But that's also because
• 53:12
  Speaker 4: then again, like Mark mentioned with the back dating of
• 53:14
  Speaker 4: the stock options, you know, you sometimes have to do
• 53:17
  Speaker 4: things to get things done that aren't necessarily the most
• 53:20
  Speaker 4: above board. And there are people in all aspects of business,
• 53:26
  Speaker 4: in the business world or the world in general, that
• 53:29
  Speaker 4: live in a grayer area than some of us do.
• 53:31
  Speaker 4: Some of us are a gray area that's charcoal, and
• 53:33
  Speaker 4: some of us live in a gray area that's actually gray.
• 53:36
  Speaker 4: And sometimes people like that get things done. And look,
• 53:39
  Speaker 4: I'm sure you'll say this, Mark, plenty of people were
• 53:41
  Speaker 4: doing this that didn't get in trouble.
• 53:43
  Speaker 3: Well, I mean it was fairly ramp in Silicon Valley,
• 53:46
  Speaker 3: especially the backdating. But you know one thing you mentioned
• 53:49
  Speaker 3: about pomp Pilot. You know they don't mention in the
• 53:51
  Speaker 3: movie because obviously it's not about pomp Pilot. You don't
• 53:53
  Speaker 3: see pompilots around anymore either. No, God, no, right now.
• 53:58
  Speaker 3: The interesting thing, and I think this does show a
• 54:01
  Speaker 3: bit of hubris. The reason why they didn't combine with
• 54:04
  Speaker 3: pom Pilot was because they were going to get diluted
• 54:08
  Speaker 3: too much and they weren't going to get their net
• 54:10
  Speaker 3: worth where they thought it was so he could go
• 54:12
  Speaker 3: buy the penguins and put him in Hamilton. Okay, So
• 54:16
  Speaker 3: there is a lot of greed in this movie and
• 54:20
  Speaker 3: a lot of things are driven by it, especially by
• 54:22
  Speaker 3: that character. And you know, had they combined with pom Pilot,
• 54:26
  Speaker 3: would they have been a more effective competitor against the iPhone?
• 54:29
  Speaker 3: Could they have perhaps killed iPhone and it's in its
• 54:32
  Speaker 3: infancy maybe. I mean, that's a that's an interest because
• 54:35
  Speaker 3: if you think about the pomp Pilot, which they didn't
• 54:37
  Speaker 3: talk about in the movie, other than you know that
• 54:39
  Speaker 3: that one set of things, it had a lot of
• 54:41
  Speaker 3: what the iPhone ended up having. It had third party apps,
• 54:45
  Speaker 3: it had a screen, it had a touch screen. You
• 54:47
  Speaker 3: could you know, send messages, you could do a lot
• 54:49
  Speaker 3: of things with it that ended up being what the
• 54:52
  Speaker 3: iPhone had. And had it had the connectivity that the
• 54:57
  Speaker 3: BlackBerry did, it might have very well killed the eye
• 55:00
  Speaker 3: phone and its infancy. But because of their own net
• 55:03
  Speaker 3: worth greed, they never let that go through well.
• 55:06
  Speaker 4: And I like the scene where we have Balsely running
• 55:09
  Speaker 4: through the airport talking to the AT and TCO and
• 55:12
  Speaker 4: he's like, you know, there's only you know, there's only
• 55:14
  Speaker 4: one minute in a minute. It's like, you know, you're
• 55:16
  Speaker 4: go only sell sixty minutes in a minute in an hour.
• 55:19
  Speaker 4: It's like that that ultimately becomes what this is is,
• 55:23
  Speaker 4: how do we figure out a different way to charge
• 55:25
  Speaker 4: people without there being a cap on it, without there
• 55:28
  Speaker 4: being a ceiling of usefulness, and we just sell them
• 55:32
  Speaker 4: data would just sell them data. We'll just sell them data.
• 55:34
  Speaker 4: And that's that is what ends up becoming the death
• 55:38
  Speaker 4: knell of BlackBerry. Really part of it is what data
• 55:41
  Speaker 4: was BlackBerry ever gonna use unless they made a device
• 55:44
  Speaker 4: that was effectively an iPhone, which then is not a
• 55:47
  Speaker 4: BlackBerry anymore. Then it's just an iPhone. That's the thing
• 55:51
  Speaker 4: that ultimately wills out towards the end of the movie
• 55:53
  Speaker 4: is nobody has an idea that's different from an iPhone.
• 55:55
  Speaker 4: It's just an iPhone derivative at this point, And to
• 55:58
  Speaker 4: be fair, more or less, every thing at this point
• 56:00
  Speaker 4: that is a phone is an iPhone derivative. Even if
• 56:03
  Speaker 4: you have a phone that's not an iPhone, it looks
• 56:05
  Speaker 4: like an iPhone. It's a big screen, and that's kind
• 56:08
  Speaker 4: of all that phones are anymore unless you buy a
• 56:10
  Speaker 4: phone that is specifically not that with the intention of
• 56:13
  Speaker 4: it not being that. But pretty much now every phone
• 56:17
  Speaker 4: is a is a screen that you touch, which came
• 56:21
  Speaker 4: from one place and has been derivative out of control
• 56:25
  Speaker 4: by everybody else. But because of course it has, it's
• 56:27
  Speaker 4: the most successful phone to ever be created in terms
• 56:30
  Speaker 4: of user accessibility and interface.
• 56:33
  Speaker 7: The other thing I'd add mark is that. Of course,
• 56:35
  Speaker 7: the technology graveyard of ancient civilizations is littered with successful
• 56:42
  Speaker 7: innovations that were then bought by a giant corporation that
• 56:46
  Speaker 7: thought they could buy their way to innovation, and then
• 56:49
  Speaker 7: it collapsed. You know, two thousand and five, News Corporation
• 56:53
  Speaker 7: says okay, five hundred and eighty million dollars for MySpace,
• 56:56
  Speaker 7: and then six years later, justin Timberlake, MySpace for thirty
• 57:02
  Speaker 7: five million dollars. Right, So what happened in those six years?
• 57:06
  Speaker 7: That's something. And I don't think I actually had a
• 57:09
  Speaker 7: MySpace page, but I remember MySpace was a massive place
• 57:14
  Speaker 7: where people put their stuff, you know, their their their pages,
• 57:18
  Speaker 7: and you know, it was basically you could have your
• 57:20
  Speaker 7: own web page through through MySpace. And of course this
• 57:23
  Speaker 7: was before the as you mentioned, the rise of social
• 57:26
  Speaker 7: media and the mid two thousands of Facebook and everything
• 57:29
  Speaker 7: that we have now. But I think this movie is
• 57:32
  Speaker 7: a really good one for my students to watch to ask, like,
• 57:36
  Speaker 7: in a company, how can you innovate? What is my role?
• 57:40
  Speaker 7: What different strengths people bring? Teamwork? You know, for students,
• 57:46
  Speaker 7: what they hate the most is what's probably the most
• 57:49
  Speaker 7: important for them to learn is group projects. If you
• 57:52
  Speaker 7: asked a classroom full of students, like, who is excited
• 57:55
  Speaker 7: about doing a group project? You would, I mean, they
• 57:58
  Speaker 7: wouldn't boo me, but they would boo the idea. Yeah. Like,
• 58:03
  Speaker 7: but I say, look, guys, life is a group project.
• 58:06
  Speaker 7: If you're going to work anywhere except that cabin in
• 58:10
  Speaker 7: the woods with no running.
• 58:12
  Speaker 4: You can't even work for yourself without working with other people.
• 58:15
  Speaker 4: Take it. Take it from me, like as a group project.
• 58:18
  Speaker 7: And I thought it did really well here in showing
• 58:23
  Speaker 7: how these three people Doug, Mike and Jim did have
• 58:27
  Speaker 7: these strengths that played off each other. Maybe there could
• 58:31
  Speaker 7: have been more on that, and they were certainly not
• 58:34
  Speaker 7: successful in the long run, like you know, Kirksbach and McCoy.
• 58:38
  Speaker 7: But like it did show that you can't have a
• 58:40
  Speaker 7: workplace where everybody is like you, that you need the
• 58:43
  Speaker 7: strength of different personalities and different skill sets working together.
• 58:47
  Speaker 7: So I thought, in being a business movie, that was
• 58:50
  Speaker 7: sort of a helpful lesson. Maybe not in this particular
• 58:52
  Speaker 7: case for more than ten years, but still.
• 58:55
  Speaker 3: Yeah, But you know, I don't think we should I
• 58:58
  Speaker 3: don't think we should focus on the fact that it failed.
• 59:01
  Speaker 3: It was very successful at the time. It was unable
• 59:04
  Speaker 3: to move beyond where it was. Some of it was
• 59:07
  Speaker 3: because of their own inherent limitation in the way they
• 59:10
  Speaker 3: thought about the world. But I will tell you that
• 59:13
  Speaker 3: when the iPhone came out, there were lots of people
• 59:16
  Speaker 3: that said it wasn't going to be any more successful
• 59:20
  Speaker 3: than the new okay. So you know, it wasn't like
• 59:23
  Speaker 3: iPhone comes out, everybody says it's brilliant all of a sudden,
• 59:25
  Speaker 3: it's it's wildly successful. That's not that that's that's not
• 59:29
  Speaker 3: the world, okay, because there's a couple of things. One
• 59:33
  Speaker 3: people didn't see it that way. I could tell you,
• 59:35
  Speaker 3: having worked with a company that was in the cellular
• 59:38
  Speaker 3: industry at the time, we did not start selling data
• 59:42
  Speaker 3: until in you know, into the late you know late
• 59:45
  Speaker 3: you know, eights nines and into the early you know teens.
• 59:50
  Speaker 3: Why because that wasn't what we thought people wanted. And
• 59:53
  Speaker 3: when we found out that they ultimately wanted it, we
• 59:55
  Speaker 3: obviously could offer it. Uh, but you know, it was
• 59:57
  Speaker 3: not it was not immediately a parent And that's what
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 3: people and and I'll say this much, people don't realize
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 3: that cellular data data over cell phones existed back into
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 3: the nineties, just nobody, nobody could ever figure out the
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 3: use case, never could figure out what would make it go.
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 3: The iPhone is what made it go because finally people
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 3: could figure out how to use this new thing that
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 3: wasn't minutes, it wasn't you know, just voice. But until then,
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 3: I mean, it existed for years before. I mean there
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 3: were you know, AT and T had built a data
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 3: network and was offering you know, cellular data services in
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 3: the early two thousand, long before the iPhone, but they
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 3: didn't have many users because no one could figure out
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 3: how to use it what it was useful for.
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 4: So but you know, I.
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 3: Think as you look at this team, they were very successful.
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 3: The fact that they ultimately failed is is probably less
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 3: about there. They had a you know that their working
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 3: relationship didn't work. It's just they didn't have the vision
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 3: to really understand where the world was going. And not alone.
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 3: There were a lot of other people that were in
• 1:01:02
  Speaker 3: a similar situation.
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 7: By the way, if you look up the biography of
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 7: these people, they're all like fabulously wealthy.
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 4: Oh yeah, it's good, no one, no one feels there's
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 4: nobody to feel sorry for in any of this, Like yeah, yeah.
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 3: I mean know that one guy that I mean he
• 1:01:16
  Speaker 3: is one of the wealthiest people in all of Canada,
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 3: right because he cashed out when the stock was at
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 3: its peak.
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 7: Yeah, right, which is by the way, again, that takeaway
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 7: is that a lot more people have made a lot
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 7: of money on failure. I mean that there's a reason why,
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 7: and I mean nobody who doesn't know, who doesn't understand it,
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 7: should do this. But like there's reason. There's puts as
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 7: well as calls in stock options, and a lot of
• 1:01:40
  Speaker 7: people have made money on stocks going down as much
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 7: there or selling out. I looked up the biography of
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 7: Jim Ball Silly and like, wow, he's had an amazing
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 7: He gave a huge amount of money to education, Like
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 7: the University of Waterloo has a school named after him.
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 7: He's in the way scholarships. Actually, it sounds like he's
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 7: having a super fun life. He does not own, you know,
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 7: an HL hockey team, but like I think he has
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 7: front row seats and he lives. So yeah, this is
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 7: also a good movie to sort of And again I
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 7: always think through the eyes of my students, so like
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 7: to define what is success, right, Like I mean, at
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 7: the television show that's adjacent to this was was the
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 7: HBO show Succession, which is a meditation on succession, like
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 7: in like king's dying and who will take over their kingdom,
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 7: but also like succession in success And I think that's
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 7: always a good question to ask because different eras maybe
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 7: redefine it. In succession, you have a group of billionaires
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 7: who are all struggling for power, and a normal person
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 7: would go like, wait a minute, if you lose this
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 7: struggle for power, you get to sit on your seven
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 7: billion dollars and feel sorry for yourself.
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 4: Right, So wasn't it that what they said in jobs?
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 4: It's like they're the they're the most well dressed people
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 4: in the unemployment line, Like yeah, you don't tell you
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 4: know they're going to.
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 7: Yeah they have the biggest houses on the unemployment line
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 7: or something.
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 3: Absolutely, But I mean I would I thought that they,
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 3: you know, they should have at the end explained that
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 3: these guys all ended up being very wealthy, because the
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 3: the impression you're left with is that the company ended
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 3: up being a failure and they all, you know, are
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 3: on the bread line, you know, with their with their
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 3: pans out looking for food, and that's not what happened.
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 7: I think I think that's for Doug, We're told Doug
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 7: is like one of the richest men in Canada, and
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 7: like even USA, people with their prejudice about can they
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 7: realized that's probably pretty rich, you know. Yeah, yeah, but
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 7: I don't I think it were just maybe another sentence
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 7: of that would have explained. I don't think we're thinking
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 7: any of them are on a bread line. Well, I mean, well,
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 7: when you think our companies, what a breadline is, by
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 7: the way.
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 3: Well, but you think about company failure, I think a
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 3: lot of people would associate that with economic failure as well, right,
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 3: and and it you know, clearly these people sold a
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 3: lot of them sold at the peak, right, And that's
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 3: where I think Doug did. And in fact, that's what
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 3: I believe the Wikipedia page says, which means, you know,
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 3: he took the money off the table when it was there. Now,
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 3: I have been with companies where the senior management was
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 3: against anybody it thought it was it was disloyal to
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 3: take money out, so people ended up being worth hundreds
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 3: of millions and then ended up being begging for money
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 3: from a bankruptcy court at the end. Okay, I've seen
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 3: that movie. So you know, as I think about this,
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 3: you know, that was one of the things I first
• 1:04:41
  Speaker 3: looked up and said, Okay, so what really happened these
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 3: guys economically, and they they're not they're not they're not
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 3: poor that they may not be as rich as they'd
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 3: like to be well, And I.
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 4: Think that, you know, to bring this kind of full
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 4: circle all the way back to the top, you know,
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 4: I think that is maybe for your student's doctor promoter.
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 4: And I think Mark, like you've mentioned, success and failure
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 4: is somewhat relative in a lot of ways. I mean,
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 4: these guys were successful and failed at the same time.
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 4: I mean those two things can almost be somewhat true
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 4: at the same time. I mean, their business was going
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 4: out of business, and it's not like it just stopped
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 4: one day. I mean BlackBerry still exists. They don't make phones.
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 4: They are a communication solutions company now, which okay, I
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 4: mean it was a company that worked on communications, So
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 4: that makes sense, I guess. But to bring it all
• 1:05:31
  Speaker 4: the way, like I said, back to the top, like,
• 1:05:33
  Speaker 4: success is very relative, and when you look at the
• 1:05:37
  Speaker 4: success that they did or didn't have, it's, like you said, Mark,
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 4: it's better to know how it all ended up. Because
• 1:05:43
  Speaker 4: the movie I think kind of fumbles it right at
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 4: the end and can't can't do it, can't do the
• 1:05:47
  Speaker 4: story bit just as it needs.
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 3: You know, what reminds me of is a sports figure,
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 3: you know, right, the guy you know, we all talk
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 3: about Babe Ruth and all the home runs he hit,
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 3: but we don't talk about the latter years where he
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 3: wasn't very sixs right. We remember him for his success.
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 3: And you know, in business you have to think about
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 3: that as well. Did it when they were they were
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 3: very successful. It's like, you know, they were making every
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 3: jump shot three points for being made. They were the
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 3: top of the game. They were doing all this that's
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 3: to be applauded. The fact that they ended up bailing
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 3: is no different than the sports athlete who can't make
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 3: three point shots anymore.
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 4: I mean to say, it happened, right, and it happened
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 4: to them. Michael Jordan played for the Wizards. I know
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 4: everybody likes to forget that, but Michael Jordan played for
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 4: the Wizards. So well, Doctor Perlmutter, thank you so much
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 4: for bringing this one down the pipeline. I was not
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 4: going to watch it otherwise, not because I didn't want to,
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 4: but because I watched so many movies. But I'm a
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 4: huge fan of Glenn Howardton, which you know, he's great.
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 4: I mean as a fan of Always Sunny. To have
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 4: him in a like somewhat dramatic role but still being
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 4: mean to everyone. It it was. It was very much
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 4: exactly what I was hoping for. So thank you for
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 4: thank you for programming this one. It was very good.
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 4: So if you want to find me and the other
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 4: things that I work on in the other conversations at
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 4: the bri Us have had about films, you can find
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 4: that overt weirdingwaymedia dot com where this show and so
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 4: many other fantastic shows can be found, like the Projection Booth,
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 4: adestv Ladies, and so much more. So head on over
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 4: there check those out. Like rate and review this show
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 4: on iTunes or Spotify. Please iTunes first, Spotify second. If
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 4: I have a choice, your choice is whichever one you
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 4: want to pick. Just like, rate and review the show
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 4: wherever you get it. If you want to kick a
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 4: couple of dollars, our way Patreon dot com slash culture
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 4: cast is where you can do that. But ultimately, liking
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 4: and rating and reviewing the show is even more helpful
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 4: than money. Doctor Pearl Mutter doctor statue. Technically both of you,
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 4: thank you so much for your time and candor. On
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 4: a like Mark said, a trip down memory lane and
• 1:07:43
  Speaker 4: as always, we'll catch you on the next episode.
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 3: From the Books, for the Books, from the Boss, the
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 3: Books f