a16z Podcast | Innovation vs. Invention at Google I/O

everyone welcome to the a 6nc podcast today we're sharing some quick reactions to Google i/o Google's annual developer conference where the company just announced a number of new platform products for VR - messaging to the smart home a 16c deal investing partner Kyle Russell discusses the news with a 16 ZZZ Benedict Evans Connie Chan and board partner Steven Sinofsky / - Kyle so Steven yesterday Google announced quite a few different products and services several cynical commenters on Twitter came out with the idea that you know hey we've seen a lot of these things before o computer you control with your voice in the home bought that you interact with to you know interact with different services we've seen this before what why is Google showing all of this off now this none of this feels new but you push back against that why do you feel so strongly that you know this was actually a really exciting event for Google well because it was a really exciting event for Google there was no no doubt about that I mean they showed an unbelievable amount of stuff and it was coherent and clear and innovative all at once and I think what people get confused by is that like how does innovation really happen and there's this view that like innovation is the same as invention and that like you one day you don't have something and the next day you do and that was innovation but that's also an invention like there's a day without velcro and then there's velcro but not everything is velcro and in fact most things are very incremental steps and in fact most new things are like 90% old stuff like with a slightly different perspective that comes from how you think about it the collection of things your own expertise your own experiences and so when you look at something like the the work that they showed in messaging yeah like it's a messaging app and there's a lot of messaging apps actually Google already has several of their own messaging apps but they're they because of the way they think of innovation is tied to research they they see building on each idea and and almost starting over each time and that doesnt sit well often with people who are like I just want the new thing and the big thing or I want it to be completely different and so anything you look at word processes or photos or social networks or browsers little small fans or smartphones have all been like wow the new one looks a lot like the old one and and even when when the iPhone came out like while there were phones that browse the web and there were phones that had touch and there were phones that that did all the things that the iPhone did including making calls and sending text messages but it didn't people didn't did for some reason that counted as a whole new thing and everybody wants everything to appear like it's this iPhone thing in retrospect and so I with that and I just saw I just saw like innovation happening broadly and what was really going on for me was just this underlying theme that they it's not it wasn't hidden or subtle it was they've decided that the next generation of platform is artificial intelligence it's a huge differentiator it's a huge thing where they've taken a different approach and and it's a huge thing now they may or may not be right but it's super clear right and they're

also pulling on their main strengths of having access to a ton of data having the best computer vision technology out there so it totally utilizes what Google is good at yeah I mean I think the you know when kind of sat and looked through all the stuff that they've built there's this huge story around what was Google now and is now Google assistant and that's around everything that Google might know and might be able to suggest I mean I was thinking about this sort of historically that there was there was websites before Google which was just text indexing and it didn't work very well and then there's PageRank and suddenly web search works and then they start thinking about kind of knowledge graph and you search for charge mahal and it knows that there's a mausoleum in India and it knows that there's a curry restaurant around the corner and then it gets to the point like okay you're doing this search at 8 o'clock at night in East London now why have you searched for Taj Mahal you're probably looking for the curry restaurant and then now we're starting to see like in the thing in the Met the demo of the messaging app and in all the different aspects of this it's like now we're getting to the point that like we know you're going out to dinner with your friends tomorrow night what should we suggest and so there having gone kind of progressed and kind of iterated on what the search box wasn't might might appear from that now they're kind of going before the search box and thinking here what are you actually gonna need what are we going to ask for what questions might you have and so that's really the sort of the the kind of expression of AI it's getting to the point that the computer could no like every in one way I think one way to think about AI is like the computer should know this what should the computer know and this is now going to the point well the computer should know I'm going out to dinner tomorrow night yeah I think the messaging app just embodied the concept of eliminating friction and I really loved how they really leaned into that concept and if you think about all the other Google services like Google Calendar or Gmail you can just start getting super creative and brainstorming what this kind of end up looking like in a year and I think - for me like one of the things that's super interesting is just how how you you know if you put your cynical head on you come up with some master plan where they're trying to absorb all the world's knowledge and get in your way and invade your privacy into all these things but if you take that hat off you just go wow there's a bunch of problems that they're trying to solve and they're trying to make substantial leaps in the way that you know life is automated and and that's really really interesting because we we spent the 20th century automating manufacturing of things and making of things but we didn't do much to automate living like you know the GE Carousel of Progress talked about like washing your dishes okay so that was a machine that saved labor but all the things that we do all day now there's so much of it that should be a lot easier and it should be more anticipatory and it turns out you know we do a lot of patterns in life and the self-driving car is a recognition of like most driving is very pattern based so why should it also be pattern based yet high-risk or pattern based and slow or a pattern pattern based and and you just have to think about it constantly I think that when it does launch there will be youth cases where it goes wrong like you can just imagine the photos that they interpret incorrectly occasionally or the suggested phrase that just you can just imagine a whole tumblr being created around this well it's just they're all gonna be stupid computer tricks yeah like and people like I read a whole article about don't forget that there are all these problems with AI and like it was like it all boiled down to a phrase that AI can be wrong and I'm like thinking myself right and everything the can of a Gutenberg press wasn't accurate well yeah the the fact that there's a tool doesn't mean that all problems go away I mean I remember using when Google Maps launched and there was a sort of a period of a couple of years where Google Maps didn't work at all in the UK unless you put the postcode in it was just totally unable to work out what the address was and there was like a kind of there was probably maybe a tumblr or something other schools called WTF Google Maps if like crazy results how could it possibly have thought what the answer was and you know what here we are ten years later it works well and and like I you know I certainly lived through like all the autocorrect and spelling dictionary and grammar checking kind of things that

were stupid computer tricks and that was our phrase that was like literally we had a kind of bug that you could open up with the descriptors stupid computer trick which was like the algorithm went nuts for those in our audience who didn't watch the live stream of i/o yesterday or follow on long on Twitter I want to quickly lay out the different products and services that were announced so there was a low which was a brand new separate from hangouts messaging application specifically for mobile iOS and Android there was on top of that Google assistant basically the modern revision of Google now their service that's been built into Android built into the Google app for on iOS and there was also things like instant applications where in the same way that you load a web app today by just going to URL and it shows up it's just you know a website that you go to you can do the same thing with native applications loading them in chunks so looking at cross that you know Benedict something that you talk about a lot is this you know tech Tourette's these buzzwords that every couple of years come up and they're the focus of what all the big incumbents are talking about you know today it's AI bots know both his last month's date there was some you know there were aspects of those buzzwords in what Google talked about yesterday yeah I mean I think I mean it was to kind of Stephens point I think one one should think look at that any of these two big tech companies in terms of what is a tactic and what is a strategy and so you look at the Google messaging app a low ok hangouts was a bit of a mess and it was a bit fragmented and didn't do anything that kind of modern messaging apps to you okay so let's just kind of reset that and we'll make a new app and we'll call a low fine done that's like having a better notifications panel it's just housekeeping inside the operating system inside the product group but with a kind of the fundamental strategy through Google is what you call Google assistant which is basically an expression of AI an expression of Google turning the search model upside up up on its head or looking at it from another angle how do we get to the point that we can actually answer questions as opposed to giving your list of 10 blue links how do we get to the point that we can even predict those questions as opposed to giving you and links and they give you a demo inside a lo that says you can do that inside a lo see you can message somebody and say you know what West once we go - and then you can ask Google assist well what are the restaurants near there but that will also work in messenger and that will work on the web and it will work in anything that you're doing on on your Android device and anything you do on the web and to some extent that'll probably be part of the Google keyboard on iOS as well but that's kind of the point is what Google does is understand knowledge and understand data and find ways of manipulating that and that's cars and that's computer vision and it's probably drones and it is Google assist in its search and it's everything that flows out of that and I feel like like Google assist is almost like just like PageRank doesn't really exist anymore PageRank is 200,000 our different algorithms like Google assist is like the umbrella for everything new that Google is thinking about how they understand what you're doing and that to me is like the fundamental thing and then they were like two other interesting things one is the VR project and then the other is the the Google Instant apps on just your thesis there just for a second because I could put it in in terms that people make immediate splits over which is it's a platform in an app and so strategy or tactic and and the thing where people get confused is like that there what we saw yesterday was the Google platform like IO is for developers it's the whole and so they're gonna show some apps along the way and it's interesting yeah you know yeah there's a new messaging app below and like and a new video app and even within Google those are just the apps and it's the platform they're a platform company intrinsically and it that's also worth contrasting it with you know a device centric view or contrasting it with an enterprise centric view or a social graph centric view and but the core is it's just a platform and platforms have lots of apps and to view the whole importance of the day through just what the app does miss can miss the whole you know the iceberg of like that's a platform underneath it yeah exactly everything Google does plugs onto the kind of cool competent to see you know whether it's Gmail or advertising or web search or self-loathing cars they will plug onto that core platform of understanding data right so when it comes to the app messaging application a low one do you think it's going to be you know successful given their kind of I almost don't care well it doesn't matter if really what they're making which is like if you were on the hangouts team and you look to hangouts okay that's kind of a mess we've got this different stuff and it's not great kill will reset our messaging strategy and this is the thing we'll do but that's kind of like you know Steven 15 years ago saying you know what the charts module in Excel we kind of we need we need to rebuild that it's like well that was on the roadmap maybe it's this year maybe it's next year but that's not the strategy the strategy is office an office in Windows and the same for for Google I okay the messaging thing was kind of a mess we sorted the messaging thing out but the point is the data platform I also think in the Western world messaging is still fragmented even though there are leaders that have hundreds of millions of users it's not like Asia where there's really two players that dominate right Smith States there's still a chance for a new messaging app to get significant uptake not only a chance it's I would just go out on a limb and say it's absolutely certain that there's going to be a defragmentation of like just the app called messaging and and that's again back to the whole innovation thing I mean we're in this very highly fragmented state which in the tech world doesn't last very long now maybe unlike previous generations it's not going to get to one because the mobile world is just too ginormous that it won't have one even if it's global there'll be one in China and one in the US and one in Europe or some of this is basically we're talking about the laws of thermodynamics yeah but but like when people like that was that was sort of one of the little Twitter battles yesterday for me was like this notion that we're done with messaging and I look and I kind of wanted it there were more characters I would have said like so like iMessage is all that humankind can accomplish in the world of communicating with other humans and were completely done which like was literally by my pitch for why we needed a Windows word processor in the late 80s was because people thought DOS word processors were done which was weird because they were six years old and six years ago we were using like special weird word processing hardware and so this is super super early in this messaging and if you look at the ones we all use every day like they're all wildly deficient relative to each other yeah and and that's like so that's a state that's completely unstable and you could view that as Wow iMessage isn't on Android where you could mute it and really doesn't do emoji well enough or you could view it as none of the ones in the US do all of the features that they have in Asia and if you think about adding in or incorporating Google Drive Maps email calendar buying stuff yeah looking across these products that we've talked about so far you know Google home where it's going to be this Amazon echo competitor the messaging application with Google kind of discussions baked in where you can talk back and forth with this Google bot the connection to the underlying data platform is pretty clear but there you know there's another set of announcements that set felt a little bit removed from that core competency that core focus the core strategy as I mentioned before the instant apps but also the big VR news that they're making

this reference design for a headset that all of the big Android OEMs will be able to build the top of make their own headsets essentially competing with the gear VR this idea that so class full Samson button synapse is a really big deal yeah that's huge you know not to say that that wasn't a big deal I was just saying that wasn't clearly connected to this underlying search and it knows more about you you know VR and instant apps are not part of that there are other things oh great right so instant apps it's like I mean you know this is you know you can make all sorts of jokes about this like basically this is the reincarnation of Java it's like I go to a web page and then native code downloads and starts running many day is actually as as oracle is currently suing Google over exactly this question of whether Android is basically basing each other and say yeah I mean just to explain what happens I'm still alas two or three years what we've had is that if you tap on a link on iOS or Android and that's a link to a service it also has an app then if you don't have the app installed then it'll go to the web page if you do have the app installed it will go to exactly the same piece of content inside the app and that's just sort of been baked in in the lawful over the last two or three years and on iOS or Android now what Google have now said is and really interestingly it goes all not just in the next version of Android but in on every version of Android back to I think kick out which is like the vast majority of Android devices you tap on this deep link if you don't have the app it will automatically pull down the app from play and start running it kind of chunk by chunk so in principle you tap on the link to a story in The New York Times The New York Times app appears on your screen and is running on your computer even though you haven't on to the Play Store and downloaded it and they're doing that by kind of breaking the app up into parts and part of pulling them down one by one in the background while you're using it and that changes what an app is pretty obviously and it changes one of the sort of fundamental problems on the smartphone which was this sort of binary question of is the app installed or not and how do you get people to install your app and now they're on the webpage or the app and you send them out and you have to pay Facebook loads of money to get people to install your app and so you know and it's a huge kind of technical achievement or instead of technical change and it really challenges the question of this binary split between apps and the web and if you think that they owned the Google Play Store - the natural linkage for people to upgrade to the full app it makes a lot of sense for Google it's not even that you're upgrading it it is a full app and there's a kind of what I'm not quite clear about is kind of what happens when you leave it does it still remain on your home screen or do you have to go well there's a lot there are a lot of interesting details about how just you know how do you really have to build your app so that it works well and what are your data charger there's a lot of stuff you could go all conspiracy theory on that it's not gonna work or that it's but fundamentally what they're there you know again back to they're solving problems because they always start with the hard technical problem and and work backwards from that and fundamentally they're still trying to solve the problem of you know the local device has a certain set of runtime capabilities and code has to exist and come from other places the the web and the browser solves a problem in a certain way by putting the browser runtime on every device you could imagine and then the code that you could download was JavaScript and an HTML but it turns out to not be rich enough for a whole bunch of interaction styles and a whole bunch of things so this isn't but it was a better trade-off at the time now we have more bandwidth we have incredible compute power on the devices so like what's another run up the hill to solve a problem of getting chunks of code on device and so this seems you know particularly interesting ly innovative the fact that there is appstores the fact that that they own the runtime and the java environment and the eclipse tools that they said ninety percent of the people are using for the top hundred twenty-five like they could actually solve this which was which would be a huge change in computing yeah and what excites me about instant apps is it really does eliminate friction for the end consumer and it also reflects to me that Google understands something that we chat has known for years and it's critical to the success of official accounts on WeChat which is if you can eliminate the need to sign-in and the limit the need to input your payment credentials that is huge for increasing the velocity and the conversion of transactions and so the Google demonstrated one example where you could pay for parking within just a couple of clicks wave Android pay with Android pay without the app but just so we have set but yeah we but just staring at the parking meter so this is I mean there's a fascinating comparison on the one hand with Facebook's attempt to do BOTS and on the other hand with the rumor that Apple will do Apple pay on the web on the mobile web I don't believe that that's a rumor anymore yeah so so you have this kind of pressure for so Facebook launch is BOTS and part of the argument for BOTS is well it's pain in that you don't want to have to get people to install your app so maybe you could just interact with them inside the messaging app WeChat ad solves that problem by actually giving you web views which gives you like a nice rich interaction model Facebook tries to do it with AI and where the chat model which may work for some use cases and doesn't work for some other use cases Google comes along and says screw that will just give you the damn app mind all of these workarounds I mean it reminds me I was on a young I remember like in I think 2002 or 3 talking to the CTO of Motorola and he was talking about how hard it was to put a hard disk into a mobile phone to compete with the iPod because you know you drop it and it breaks and people wouldn't accept that in a mobile phone and in the same time Apple of course and they're not fitting and they're not worth thinking about partly so putting flash to make the iPod Nano and there's like you know never don't solve that problem you know jump over it and solve it in a completely different way and I think that's what Google has done yes they have you know in respect their holy eye platform which is partly around BOTS if you want to call it that but actually they just said oh no you know that's not who you saw the problem if the problem is how do you get the app onto the phone let's fill that problem there's not solve it by making some other thing well and also let's take advantage of a whole bunch of learning and a whole bunch of changed aspects of the technology landscape that make a different approach you know like it's not virtualization you know it's not like rebuild a new app runtime it's not different set of abstractions they're they're trying to figure out a new way to solve it people were speculating that you'd solve this was like a kind of a Citrix approach where you know you have the at running remote in a VM and you kind of screencast you saying hey screw that we'll put a lap on the phone yeah there are some cases that where a webview can be beneficial versus of parts of an app like the giving developers the ability to do these one-off marketing campaigns or to react much faster and just change something same day yeah I think that's right I mean it comes back to Stephens point that you know we had 20 years of the web browser mouse keyboard and that was like the mana list for how the internet worked and now we've broken that apart and we've got all these different shards all kind of floating around and landing in different places and being juggled and changed and moved around and Apple and Google every summer kind of throw all the pieces up in the air again and say ok now it's going to look different again and again and again and we haven't got any kind of sense of resolution or stability here because we keep having this kind of intuitive innovating innovation to round out this discussion I when I jump to my favorite topic virtual reality and Google while you know it didn't come to market with a high-end headset that you connect to a computer it was the first of the major

tech incumbents to release something that's actually used by millions of people cardboard actual headsets made out of cardboard that you slot your phone into for a very basic virtual reality experience well while I was amazing that they got in the hands of so many people it wasn't exactly an extremely compelling experience especially if you have tried some of these higher-end headsets but now they're kind of pushing in that direction you know with a daydream reference design that they're gonna give access to to all the different Android OEM so they can make their own headsets basically at this gear VR tier as well as optimizing the Android operating system for virtual reality use it seems like they're making you know a much more serious effort than cardboard seem to be well I think the basic story here is smartphones EVR and like right now VR is kind of a branch of the PC in much the same way that you could argue the games console was sort of a branch of the PC certainly the Xbox was but it was kind of a branch off to one side of the PC and now if you need $3,000 worth of kit it's kind of a branch off the PC but clearly the mass-market use case is it's not a Ted it's not a PC with an umbilical cord and $3,000 it's you know it's a couple of hundred dollars and it's probably that probably means your smartphone and it probably doesn't mean a cable and so it's pretty clear that the future of VR is something to do with your smartphone and that probably means Android and iOS and it probably doesn't mean custom hardware from particular people that probably means something more or less standardized in the way that the smartphone got more or less standardized in the PC got more or less standardized with differentiation within there and so you know clearly Google that's the kind of the owner of the Android platform is the people to drive that I sort of said earlier like poor Samson like you're kind of looking at the instant apps and you think poor Facebook you know look at the look at daydreamin you think poor Samson because you know there's like this is the logical place for this to be as a platform owner and so that's what we've done and so there will be VR api's on Android and there will probably be VR kit on the iPhone so Connie as our expert on China you know here we talk a lot about what these big Silicon Valley based tech companies are working on when it comes to VR how do you think the Google daydream news affects how you know VR is gonna roll out in China given that's gonna be baked into the Android operating system which everyone everyone's building on top of it's exciting I think that means in some cases poor Samsung because you'll have a lot more competition yeah I think also this is one again it's just the the stark contrast and how they're approaching it they're gonna build what they view is the really hard part of the problem and sort of allow the board set of partners to work on the part that they believe is easy in this case it'll be well this they're all gonna be smart phones that are gonna differ by a little bit so we'll build the hard part and let them and then for the VR enthusiasts it's gonna be very interesting because there's fast forward this twelve eighteen months and you could see the reviews and the columns and it's gonna be the Samsung VR kit there's a Xiaomi VR kit and just like 12 different ones that are like the same but different and people are gonna evaluate those and then there'll be the oculus one and then there'll be the hololens one and they'll be the Apple one and it'll be the whatever the Apple one is and that we don't know if there is one or not that you know but but but that is itself is going to show this the stark contrast between these approaches and it really is this analogy of like they're gonna bet on an ecosystem of partners that are gonna attempt to deliver an experience versus this all up and that's this pendulum that the whole tech industry has swung back and forth between vertical and horizontal for generally you'll have Apple and Facebook trying to do the full stack and you'll have Google saying well we're going to provide the hard bit and everything else will be a commodity around it I do you think that will end up though at least in the short term having a big range of quality for the end-user experience and it reminds me of you know years ago when a developer had to support all kinds of phones mm-hmm yeah I mean I was looking at the Facebook the Google event of like there'll be the phones that are certified for do it for daydream and it's like you know back in the day when like games came with a sticker on the side that they were certified for Nvidia well I actually always like you know it was like 3d effects it was like you know or Sound Blaster like this game supports Sound Blaster you know which VR headset do you have well you know today we say full-stack because we that's like a good metaphor for how the stuff is written but but like this is just the history of our industry and and it's particularly bold given how early it is in in AI and machine learning and and in the VR space that they're willing to say we think this is the commodity part and this isn't and then I think that is super I think that's super interesting and it's gonna definitely at say Connie's point man these are gonna be so widely different in quality plus people are gonna take the ones that don't have the sticker and still try to make it work and so there's gonna be a whole enthusiast world of like you know overclocking and root kidding and forcing whatever random hands that you have to to do that it's gonna be messy and innovative at the same time which is pretty much how innovation happens yeah it's gonna be a bit like phones in the early 2000s actually well there'll be all sorts of shapes and sizes and colors and things and then there'll be the resolution point and then it explodes and then there's a resolution point again Stephen as you said as we were starting off really excited about everything I was announced yesterday with that said thank you all for making time to chat with me about everything that Google talked about and yeah that's it for this podcast thank thank you