On this episode of The Six Five Webcast host Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman discuss the tech new stories that made headlines this week. The six handpicked topics for this week are:
- A recap of Cisco Live
- Microsoft Hololens win
- Marvell and Samsung SoC News
- Arm v9 announcement
- Qualcomm’s FTC fight is over
- Dell’s One Million Connected Devices
For a deeper diver into each topic, please click on the links above. Be sure to subscribe to The Six Five Webcast so you never miss an episode.
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Disclaimer: The Six Five Webcast is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this podcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors and we do not ask that you treat us as such.
Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: Hi, this is Pat Moorhead with Moor Insights and Strategy. And I am here for another exciting Six Five Live Podcast. And I’m here with my amazing co-host, who is also broadcasting from Austin, Texas, Daniel Newman. How are you, my friend?
Daniel Newman: Hey Pat. I am doing good. This is our day. This is the Dan and Pat podcast day. It is Friday. It is Good Friday. If that’s your thing, Happy Good Friday. It is. Friday is good for everybody. So that’s a great thing too. And I am in Austin, Texas. And not too long from now I’ll be saying I am home in Austin, Texas. Right now, I’m just visiting. But yeah, thrilled to be here, thrilled to chat. Busy week in tech Pat as they always are.
Patrick Moorhead: I know. So, hey, just want to explain this. So Daniel and I think are maybe 25 feet apart, but I have so much junk in my office now, literally like stacks of notebooks and stuff like that. Two people couldn’t fit in my tiny little office or is it the egos, Daniel? I don’t know. For any of you who might not be familiar with the Six Five. What we do is we do analysis, not news. You can read news anywhere, we might sprinkle in the news too, to maybe try to describe it. But for most part we’re analysts. So we analyze things. We tackle six topics, five minutes each more like seven minutes each, but we’re not going to change the branding of the show for us wanting to talk a lot. Just a reminder, don’t take anything we say as investment advice. This is for information and educational purposes only, so don’t sue us. Thank you.
Let’s dive right in here, Daniel. Huge event, the biggest event of the week was Cisco Live and just a tremendous amount of news that went into it. Whether it was curity, whether it was observability and tools. We had a bunch of cloud things that the company covered, new type of networking. My gosh, where do we start here? So let me just hit some high points. Cisco obviously has WebEx and WebEx is industrial grade collaboration tools and they keep adding a ton of new features. And one of the more interesting, and I think we’ve all fully realized this, if we’re people managers, or even if we run a company, how do you stay connected with your employees? And that’s what insights, people insights is all about. And as you would guess, right? One person’s cool, in how you stay in touch with somebody is another person’s creepy.
Essentially, you have a lot of good data on how people are interacting. And the cool part about it is this wasn’t Cisco did in defensive mode. I had a conversation, gosh, four years ago with Francine Kusuda Chief People Officer at Cisco and Cisco is actually using this, their homegrown tool that they learned a ton about to do that. So we’ve seen these types of tools from Microsoft. I don’t see how we live in or work in a hybrid world without these tools, but there will be a conversation about a data collection because for people analytics, you need people data. Who’s talking with whom, who’s working, when they’re working all that good stuff, but it can also be used for good, which is how to check in. And if somebody’s working too much, you might want to remind them it’s okay to take the weekend off or the holiday off.
But that was a big one for me. The other one I’ll hit is observability. So this whole element of having applications everywhere, right? Whether it’s multi-cloud or hybrid cloud, you have your applications everywhere. And the ability to observe what’s going on at every step of the way, whether it’s serverless, whether it’s Kubernetes and even God forbid NAVM. How do you measure if there’s high quality of service for the application that might have third parties involved, it might have first parties involved and that’s through tools. And then there’s the security element of it, which comes in, which is the more links that you have, the more opportunities for security breaches. So this is where a thousand eyes plus the observability tools come into place. Those tools have been pulled together. And I think that Cisco did a really good job showing how you holistically use them in a hybrid cloud. So net net, for me, Daniel, it was moving down. It was Cisco executing on their strategy. There were no huge strategic surprises here. It was making what they have committed to even better.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. It was a solid event. These digital virtual events, Pat, continue to take precedence and continue to sort of suck us in to weeks of information and collection. And by the way, I do enjoy it except sometimes I have three and four monitors going concurrently, where I’m trying to keep up with what’s going on, but I enjoy Chuck’s keynote a lot. I thought Chuck did a good job of kind of tying two themes together. One is the future of the company and the direction it’s going to take. And second is how the company is playing a part in playing its role in areas like inclusiveness and diversity, social good that everybody’s looking to hear from companies. Not saying what they’re looking to hear, but everyone wants to hear where companies stand. And so Chuck did a nice job there talking about that in his keynote. The company talked about Cisco Plus, which is going to be it’s as a service vehicle for go to market. We’ve heard about GreenLake a lot from HPE. We’ve heard about Dell Apex. We’ve heard about TruScale from Lenovo, but we’ve all been kind of waiting.
What is the Cisco strategy? And Cisco really opened up finally to what it’s going to do and how it’s going to be inclusive of the broader cloud ecosystem. So, that caught my attention. Security was another thing that I was paying attention to that came out. Cisco, despite the fact that the past year has been harder on OEMs and companies that are heavy on hardware. Cisco has actually stayed really strong in security. That’s been its growth area. And so we’ve seen continued, you mentioned observability, but we all know that there’s more and more desire to be able to really monitor the entire ecosystem both internally and externally, reduce threat surfaces, improve the way employees are able to interact with applications. By the way, you mentioned about observability 300 or so applications, SaaS applications in the average enterprise right now, Pat. I wrote up a piece about dual password list, which I thought was really interesting where using more biometric and keys, as opposed to using typical passwords, because no one likes passwords and that dual acquisition, by the way, a Michigan based company and us iron belt Midwesterners will appreciate that.
Is starting to kind of realize its potential and the company’s coming out with a way for more secure access to applications for employees, to try to kind of reduce the threat surfaces that we create through our everyday bad behavior of sticky notes and weak passwords, but overall, a strong Cisco Live, a lot of announcements. We barely brushed the surface. I hope, both of us can get our thoughts on paper over the next week or two, but overall congratulations to the team on putting on the event. And I hope we’ll see them live next year. I’m really hoping that get a few more live events in 2022.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, I hear you. And the Cisco Live, when it is actually live in the venue in Vegas. It’s really awesome. I mean, they put on a really good show. The only thing I’ll add on top is, don’t think that the network as a service thinking that that’s late. Cisco does more as a service business, now when you add what they do on the SaaS side than any of their contemporaries. So they know services, they know software. And by the way, I just, I love that app dynamics and thousand eyes acquisition. So let’s move on. Microsoft announced that they had won a $21 billion HoloLens contract with the department of defense. I actually replied to Microsoft AR and I said, “Is this a typo?” Now it is over 10 years, but still, it’s an eye-popping number.
And are these contracts always end up to be exactly as they spec? No. Are they smaller sometimes? Yes. Are they larger sometimes? No, but what I’m going to focus on is really none of this is a surprise to me and it shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody else. Microsoft has been investing in augmented reality and not just the device. Some people say, “The HoloLens win.” Well, Each device costs about $2,500. Let’s just say they customize it for the military and ends up being 10,000. You can imagine how many even to get to the 21 billion. This is about the device. It’s about the OS. It’s about the underlying applications. It’s about the specific battlefield applications. It’s about the cloud and it’s about the edge. So don’t be confused. This is not just about selling some devices. This is end to end. And quite frankly, there is no other company out there who has the ability to connect the dots between all of these.
There are some really good devices like ODG and even Magic Leap. There are some really good development environments. I think Apple likely has a really good augmented reality development. AWS has a great cloud and they do a lot of cloud-based interaction with augmented reality today or a small as nascent market is, but there is no company who has every step of the way here. It’s funny, I tweeted Daniel and Rony Abovitz, I think that’s his name. The founder of Magic Leap clapped back at me on my tweet and said, “Well, basically it’s more, it could be about politics and being plugged in.” And I said, my response to him was, “Yeah, that plays a part in this”, but I didn’t want to get into it with him. But I thought that was an interesting, but expected response. Obviously, Magic Leap was in there. He’s no longer CEO, but he was founder, obviously Magic Leap was in there and didn’t end up where they wanted to be.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. So first of all, huge, win. It’s up to 21 billion, like you said. Will that be the final number? We don’t know. What I really like about this is, it’s bringing relevance to a technology that’s sort of been in and out of the spotlight. That’s been given varying amounts of credibility. Some people have said it’s over hyped. Some people are saying the applications in the real world are grabbing a hold of markets that, basically everything from we’re years away to it’s never happening. And Microsoft is proving this with real world conversions in business. I remember maybe two years ago at Mobile World Congress, we went and heard some of the big updates on HoloLens. We saw it in the real world. We had no idea that we were going to be spending a year locked up, but the potential applications, I think it was Alex Kipman gave a great presentation in Spain, but the applications, I mean, we’re getting closer. We did the HoloLens keynotes at Ignite this year. And was it perfect? No, but have we come a long way in terms of being able to immerse ourselves in an environment? Absolutely.
When you look at the application of the military though, I mean, look, who’s at our age or your age or my age that hasn’t watched like Robocop, and seeing the ability for that lens with all that information at your disposal, right in front of, well, I mean, when these people are out in the battlefields and stuff, the amount of data and information that can be transmitted and giving these people information, that’s important at their disposal in front of their eyes. I mean, this is a critical application. This is a real world critical application. And so it’s a great win and you were right, Pat. Microsoft has done a nice job of committing itself to not just being a hardware maker here, but really being an ecosystem player.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: Leveraging everything from platform and software to its Azure services, to be able to deliver this in the cloud. And then of course, locally, when it’s required from a bandwidth standpoint, by embedding or at least working towards embedding real LTE and 5G connectivity in future versions of these devices. So big win, big number Pat. I’ll take 1%.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, finders fee. I just can’t get over that $21 billion, but …
Daniel Newman: Remember Jetta? How much attention we paid to Jetta and that was 10.
Patrick Moorhead: No, I know. I know. And, there has been heads up display and augmented reality in Jets since the ’70s.
Daniel Newman: And you got one on your car, right?
Patrick Moorhead: I do. I do. Yeah. Chevy’s all come with heads up displays now, so.
Daniel Newman: Same with the Kia.
Patrick Moorhead: So hey, let’s move forward here into chips, Daniel. We both know that chips are sexy and chips are strategic and Marvell and Samsung had an announcement about an SoC that I think is very provocative and interesting.
Daniel Newman: It absolutely is. By the way, our last episode may have been our best title ever, Chips and SaaS Kicking-
Patrick Moorhead: I know.
Daniel Newman: … A$$. We don’t want to get that parental guidance label on our show.
Patrick Moorhead: We don’t.
Daniel Newman: We’re PG, this is a family show, Pat. This is a family show for tech geeks, media, people that care about what’s important about the news and tech. We give the depth. Anyway. So yeah, Marvell and Samsung partnered up. They’re going to jointly develop a new system on Chip, also known as a SoC, big S, little o, big C. And the whole idea here is about enhancing 5G network performance. So this new SoC that’s being co-developed is going to be used basically on advanced radios. Samsung’s big, massive MIMO. And they’re planning on rolling this thing out soon. It’s in like Q2 of 2021. So this is a short runway launch and development, and it’s all about basically new technologies. Improving cellular radios, expanding capacity, increasing coverage, lowering power consumption. And it’s been built by the way with something important. Is we’re going to hear talk a lot through the lens of 5G, but it’s also built to support 4G networks simultaneously. Multi mode is really important right now because 5G is growing, but it is not pervasive. And so having newest technology able to support both the last and the next generation is very important.
So, I think it’s really an overall strong partnership. I mean, this is really all about helping the operators. They have a lot of demand, a lot of interest, people want better performance, these radios and giving this access is got to be a priority for companies. And as I see it, this partnership by the way brings Marvell, which is a very strong player in this space, kind of under the radio-r, I’m punny. I’m under the radar, not always getting its attention, but Samsung looked to Marvell because of its, really leading edge technologies that it’s been building. Its capabilities to be a good partner, probably a lack of overlap in competing areas. Their interests are more synergistic, basically seeing them as the right company that could help them. So everything from improving antenna to improving 3D beam, forming, Pat. Vertical, horizontal, so many things going on, but overall, as I see it, great partnership, this isn’t one, I think that we need to beat the crud out of, but it is one that is going to be interesting in terms of delivering better performance in dense markets, through new 5G and legacy 4G, LTE devices.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. Marvell is very capable of pulling in other people’s intellectual property and partnering with them. And I think this is a good example. And whether it’s on an SoC, whether it’s a hardened ASIC, I really like this play. And essentially what Marvell is doing here on the 5G Edge side is what A&D does on the game console side. Which is having a semi-custom implementation where they’re pulling an IP from another vendor and creating value together. So I like this play. I like this play a lot. We needed more Arm news. So let’s switch to Armv9. New instruction sets happen once every 5 to 10 years or updates to them and Arm da da-da da brought out their ninth version. And actually it’s not actually the ninth there were derivatives of eight, but we’ll call it nine because they called it nine.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. Well we’re branding. I mean, we’re just doing the branding thing here, Pat. But yeah, the way this thing is reading out and the way this story is being told. Arm is rolling out what’s essentially its biggest overhaul of its technology in a decade. So Pat you and I love talking about semiconductors and chips, we talk about Arm a lot. We talk about the ecosystem a lot. You’ll be hearing more about Intel from us very soon. And we’ve talked about it a lot, but Arm is a big and important player here. And basically it’s because Arm is adding new layers of capabilities and new layers of competition in the marketplace offering its intellectual property it’s instruction. Arm doesn’t build the chips. People use Arms instruction sets and build the chips. So when you’ve heard about AWS Graviton and AWS Inferentia, these are built on Arm instruction sets.
A lot of things, when you hear about Qualcomm’s chips, Qualcomm partners with Arm. When you hear about a lot of things going on in IoT and Edge, Arm technologies are being used. Arm is a massive juggernaut in the mobile space right now. Where Arm is only really just starting to get its foot in the door is where players like Intel and AMD have long been extremely strong, x86 obviously is their technology.
Well Arm is starting to build their own. So you’re starting to hear about Arm-based variance of say CPU’s for data center and Arm-based variant of CPU notebooks surface for instance, came out with an Arm based version over the last couple years. Lenovo has been doing this as well. Samsung has been playing in this space and then in the data center, like I mentioned, you’re hearing of variants coming from AWS, but Ali Baba has been going down this road.
We recently heard news about Microsoft building some homegrown chips. Well, this is all Arm. And by the way, Arm is in the middle of likely being acquired by a little company that does GPU’s known as Nvidia. Well, Jensen Huang has been anything but secretive about the fact that he sees CPU server and notebooks as a big opportunity, as an area where that company has not really played. Where right now, 80% of the notebooks are Intel. 90% of the server are Intel and then AMD has most of the rest in those categories. Well, combine these two companies can work together with these new instruction sets that are built to be more secure for these particular applications that I mentioned. They’re designed to be better with specific workloads like AI and ML.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: Which are very important right now. And you’re hearing that from all the chip makers for both data center and on device. Arm is building its instruction sets to be more friendly for those particular kinds of applications, which is going to draw in those OEMs that have been using Arm maybe on a very limited basis. Maybe they have one or two skews. Well, they’re trying to attract more skews. They’re trying to attract more skews for the homegrown data center enterprise ASICs that are being built by the big hyperscalers. They’re also trying to get more attention from the manufacturers that are making notebooks that are making computers.
So this V8 to V9 transition seems to have a lot of focus on that. Now there’s a lot of technical here, Pat but the … and I’m not going to get too deep. We don’t even have enough time to get too deep, but let’s just say, according to everything I’ve read, the new blueprints are looking at something around 30% performance increases. They’re going to be able to deliver in their next two generations of processors for both mobile and data center servers. So they’re going to improve their current core business, but they’re also going to plan to improve that data center sector, which is a big opportunity. And it’s something that, like I said, the Nvidia Arm acquisition, if it gets approved and goes through, is very excited about the potential around.
Patrick Moorhead: Good analysis, Daniel. And I think the only thing I’ll add to that is just to reinforce that an ISA means that everything that Arms partners have the ability, the actual instruction set from the start supports it. I like their focus on security. And if the big aha and V8 was 64 bit, I would say that the biggest thing in V9 is security and the confidential computing element of it, which is zero trust. Meaning we trust nothing that comes in and it has to have a key to let you in. The one thing that would have been nice to get out at the beginning was this idea of realms, which makes it even more secure. That will come in a little bit later after the introduction, but I just thought those were pretty cool. And-
Daniel Newman: I haven’t read about that, Pat. Is realms kind of like enclaves? Is it like the idea that you can kind of have-
Patrick Moorhead: It is very similar to that.
Daniel Newman: Okay.
Patrick Moorhead: You can separate. The level of granularity that you can separate is even further.
Daniel Newman: But you can kind of put that data that’s particularly, for instance, high compliance, regulatory data in its own little realm, separate from all the other data that you want applications to access or the amount of hardening?
Patrick Moorhead: In spirit, it’s similar to what IBM is already doing.
Daniel Newman: Awesome.
Patrick Moorhead: And I got to tell you, it’s been hard to compare. There are even things that AMD did in third gen with SEV and SEM, that we’re … I’m still doing the compare and contrast right now, Daniel.
Daniel Newman: I won’t ask any more hard questions, sir.
Patrick Moorhead: No, it’s good. And the final thing I’m going to say is instruction set doesn’t connote performance, okay. You have to do something with it and you have to have the right design. And there’s nothing in the new V9, like I can’t count machine learning in there and say, oh, we’ll give you credit for performance because you’re going to lay transistors in there. You actually have to design for performance. And I think Apple has shown and I think AWS has shown is that the Arm instruction set even V8 you can make performance. So I just had to throw that in there. Sometimes explaining, oh, it’s the wrong instruction set, the x86 instruction set is more powerful, right? It’s like, well, it’s actually, that’s not the case. It’s actually about the design.
Daniel Newman: Well, I mean, it’s a lot about the partnerships. There’s a reason that the people that are leveraging these, Pat, are companies with extreme resource capabilities and understandings of the workloads they’re trying to build. Right? They’re partnering with Arm, they’re their licensees. And they’re accessing the IP. It’s like how device makers access IP from Qualcomm to build devices. For instance, these are the for instances here, it’s not like you and I can be like, oh, we want a chip. We’re going to license it. And we’re going to throw it in a laptop. And you and I are going to start building computers on Arm, it is a partnership that requires technical competency deep within the organization, not just the Arm instruction sets.
Patrick Moorhead: Oh, yeah. And I’ll tell you, Daniel, a new grounds up CPU used at AMD was about $1 billion in investment. Nothing that’s light there. Okay, let’s go into more chippery here. Let’s go into antitrust and Qualcomm and the FTC. Okay. After years, Ninth District Court of Appeals said, “We’re not going to go back to the well and try to go back after Qualcomm.” The FTC press release was kind of snarky, talking about forces out there that don’t make sense. Well that force was the FTC case, getting tossed by the Ninth District. And this goes all the way back to the FTC suing Qualcomm with a complaint that was driven by Apple, Samsung and even Walway. And here we are at the final conclusion of that. And the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said that Qualcomm was not using monopolistic power to harm competition or harm the consumer and their current methods of doing licensing were FRAND compliant.
So this pretty much shuts the door. I thought about maybe, Daniel, putting a question mark on this, because these things live forever. Are we going to see something on 6G? Probably. Was this, that the FTC had its hands full with Facebook and Apple and Amazon. I don’t think so. The government has, in some cases it seems like unlimited resources to go after people. I don’t think that’s the case. Heck I’d hate to get a target on my back, but if you remember too the Department of Justice actually came out and said, that the FTC ruling was odd, which you never see. And this even goes all the way back to, I called it a clown show. One of my … I don’t know if it’s my most proud moment I’ve had in my Forbes article, calling the FTC case a clown show, but it had all these weird things, right?
It came in right at the very end of the Obama Administration. They didn’t even have all of the folks on the board to make the vote. Right? Because they had left and came in the last days of the administration. And I also remember the weird thing and I was, Daniel, I’ve talked about this before. I was what they call a key witness on AMD versus Intel and KFTC and EU versus Intel. I got grilled for 24 straight hours by Intel lawyers, which was fun. So I learned a little bit about antitrust face-to-face and one of the things is that monopolistic behaviors, you actually harm a consumer. So did prices go up? Did innovation slow down? FTC never had evidence. They had a theory of evidence against that. The other thing is, hey, was competition harmed?
Well, Apple actually shifted to Intel. There was competition out there and look at MediaTech today on 5G. Last time I checked MediaTech was doing pretty well with 5G and Huawei. If they could actually get fab space would be doing even better with their own designs. Samsung has their own 5G design. So net net, the burden of proof was never there. There was this theory of damage. Damages, not real damages. So anyways, it’s over. Is it over? I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe in 5, 10 years. It’ll rear its ugly head again.
Daniel Newman: Look, when it comes to antitrust and regulators, it’s never really over, but this particular case, the time expired for the FTC to appeal at the time. This means that it would have to be a new case with new evidence. That’s different enough from the last case that it Morin’s presentation. If the FTC decides it has that case, I’m sure it will find a way to bring that case to light. Pat, you covered a lot of it and there’s not a lot for me to add, but I do want to say, when you think about the witnesses that were provoking the idea of harm based upon this licensing model that costs somewhere around $20 or so per device to an Apple to use all of Qualcomm’s billions of dollars of R and D investment that it does years ahead, by the way of monetizing.
There’s two major problems with that. One is how does a company worth trillions of dollars, a trillion plus dollar valuation company like Apple that has margins that are speculatively over 80% on their iPhone devices, claim harm about … when they’re charging over $1,500 for some other top tier devices, claim harm over a $25 piece. That wasn’t a harm thing. That was a greed thing. And it’s very clear what they wanted to go down to a part level licensing using FRAN that others like Nokia and Ericsson, companies that by the way, have been absolutely unwound by this kind of licensing to not be able to make enough profit, not be able to grow. And they wanted to pull it apart and do the same thing. It was a thread in the sweater and they wanted to pull the Qualcomm sweater apart, make it a weaker company.
And by making it a weaker company, it put more cachet around Apple and the innovation that Apple creates. But Apple is an implementer as much as an innovator, many times is an implementer. Where Qualcomm legitimately, right now you want to talk about companies involved in 6G, Qualcomm is a company involved in 6G and I’m tired already of talking about 6G, because 5G is barely here. But they right now are spending billions of dollars to make sure that they’re a part of the standards creation for the rest of the 5G releases. And what’s going to be part of 6G and they do not know for certain what that will mean financially, but that’s the risk companies take. So Judge Lucy Koh, the FTC, Apple, Samsung, Huawei, all of these companies that were sitting there crying fault are companies that want to take out the benefits of companies that make big risks in innovation early on.
Yes, I’m bullish and I’m positive about Qualcomm, but that’s not the kind of harm antitrust regulators are there to save. It’s for people like you and me, people that are listening to this show right now that don’t want to pay $1,500 for a device that could be $1,00 and still they could make a lot of money. I’ll go any day, Pat, of the week and look at earnings for Apple and look at earnings or Qualcomm. And look at the margins. I’m pretty comfortable saying Apple is not harmed by anything Qualcomm’s doing when you look at its bottom line performance.
Patrick Moorhead: Do you think … gosh, you were on a fricking roll dude. It must be Friday. So do you think Apple is at risk of looking like a harming monopolist in the way that it treated Qualcomm? The day before the settlement, what came out in what was called the OEM trial in San Diego, evidence came out that there was a plan that Apple had, to crush Qualcomm. It was essentially, “Hey, let’s go get the lower cost licensees. So we can set a low bar that makes Qualcomm price looks high, and then we’re going to stop paying Qualcomm.”
On there, it was all and it didn’t get a whole lot of coverage because literally the day after they settled, but I knew there was a plan to crush Qualcomm. I was told by everybody there wasn’t, but there was. I don’t always get it right, but I was here because I know how business is tough. And Apple is one of the fiercest competitors out there, even though they’re a juggernaut in terms of size, they are fierce. And they would have crushed, look at all the companies who tried to crush Qualcomm. Broadcom was going to come in and cut off its research, right? That would have killed it. Every major international [crosstalk] came in. I mean-
Daniel Newman: I mean, these OEMs are deep Qualcomm partners, but all of them benefited to see a weaker Qualcomm, but the US and the innovation ecosystem in the US does not benefit. It is one of the national treasures of innovation here in the US and it would be a very risky thing for regulators to try to weaken this company, who’s spending so much money to keep American technology companies in the lead on certain connective and communications technologies. Pat, you know what, this was supposed to be a two minute quick, Six Five topic, but this has ended up being our longest topic of the show.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: But it is a passionate topic. I don’t feel sorry for any of those big companies. I do feel that consumers need to be protected. That’s what regulators should be doing. I hope that’s what they’re paying attention to, by the way, I think Apple has a ping pong paddle that takes every ball like this that gets shot at them, and it’s got a redirect button straight at Amazon.
Patrick Moorhead: Right.
Daniel Newman: Shoot right over to Amazon.
Patrick Moorhead: Right, right. Exactly. And, interestingly enough, Apple in some of the arguments it used against Qualcomm is coming back to bite it in its own. Now it’s being investigated as well. Hey, let’s move to a feel good. It’s Friday. It’s Good Friday that some of our listeners celebrate, let’s talk about Dell Technologies Support for the 1 million connected devices. Daniel, more than ever and this is something I give credit to the millennials that have come in as shareholders, customers, employees that care more now than ever what companies are doing in social impact. And whether it’s equal opportunity, sustainability environment, basically helping others. And ironically, some of these tech companies are have bigger budgets then, and GNP than, than countries itself. Dell Technologies rolled out its 2030 social impact goals in 2019. You and I both wrote about them and you and I were probably at the event here in Austin Analysts Council, where they rolled it out. One of those big goals is about transforming lives. Okay. And they want to positively impact a billion people as part of that.
And one of the programs that they’re affiliating themselves with is this, and it’s run by Take on Race, which includes Intel, Microsoft, AT&T and some other folks is this 1 Million Connected Devices Now. I think it is awful that particularly during COVID that some kids don’t have a device to go to school with, online. That’s horrifying to me and that does need to be addressed. And what Dell is doing with the Take on Race group is participating in helping to raise money, to get a million connected devices now and give equal opportunity that I think you and I both believe every child does deserve. I’ll end with there’s a lot of companies who do things, they get involved in the social activities that it doesn’t make sense. Dell is a solutions company end to end. They’re a device company. They lead market share in commercial devices. They are involved in something that makes sense to me, as opposed to writing a check to something and not knowing where it’s going and what it’s supporting. So hats off to Dell and the other members of this.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, I’ve definitely enjoyed listening to Dell, whether it’s been Jeff Clark or Michael consistently talking about this kind of improving society through technology. And by the way, this was a company that was pretty open and outspoken about it prior to COVID, prior to some of the media attention that has been given. This research you talked about was commissioned before COVID was really in the spotlight and the desire for the company to do everything from, up its sustainability efforts to upping its equality efforts has not been something that only came on with the pressure of some of the media push and narrative towards companies doing more. And I always liked that because you get kind of a authenticity and trust in that right now. They’re not reacting Pat, they’re being proactive. And so, there’s not a lot to hit on here.
I shared this article, you and I are friends. I don’t always share your articles socially because we are also two competitive analyst firms and partners on our Six Five stuff. But I love what you wrote about it. I thought you hit it really well, Pat, you got the sentiment, right. And you are spot on good feel good way to end. It’s not enough yet. We’re not there. It hasn’t all been solved. But seeing companies stepping up to do more is what I want to see. And so, kudos to Dell, kudos to everyone, by the way out there listened to our episode of the Six Five plus two every time.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. So here we went 40 minutes and that’s kind of going to be our benchmark, I guess Six Five, 30 minutes plus five someday we’ll get it there. I’m not renaming the show though. And neither are you. It was your brilliant idea. But anyways, for those who stuck with this, I just want to thank you so much for tuning in. If you want to follow us, you can follow us on every major podcast channel, or if you prefer video to see our smiling faces go in and subscribe on Daniel, or mine, YouTube, either at Futurum Research or at Moor Insights and Strategy YouTube, we want to thank you. And for those who celebrate Easter, have a wonderful relaxing weekend. Take care. Bye-bye.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
