01:01:09 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays, Ben Thompson
[01:01:09] S1: I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations. Incredible progress. [01:01:13] S0: We love seeing you and the team win. [01:01:15] S1: Yeah. It's fantastic. Have a great rest of your day. Say hello to Will for us, and we'll talk to you later. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is Ben Thompson, the founder of Strathecory. He's been on an absolute tear during a slow news cycle. Does it feel like a slow news cycle to you? [01:01:41] S8: I don't know. It it and the summer is always slow. Yeah. I, you know, I take a couple days. Alright. I slow down a little bit myself. [01:01:48] S1: I feel like you've done a good job of, like, providing really insightful and interesting pieces during a slow time where I didn't know that I wanted I'm doing you a favor. Yeah. You are. [01:01:59] S8: Is that what I'm hearing [01:01:59] S1: from I didn't know I wanted you to adopt the voice of Mark Zuckerberg for twenty minutes and and go on a tear but it's not like that was driven by, like, a specific okay. There's a Wall Street Journal article where, like, Bloomberg has a scoop and, like, we need to know this. It's more just, like, resetting on the metanarrative. I wanna talk about the metanarrative, but can we start with Xbox? [01:02:20] S8: Sure.
01:02:20 · Ben Thompson, John Coogan, Rodrigo Liang
[01:02:20] S8: Sure. [01:02:21] S1: I want to know first, let's go back in time a little bit, and I want you to reality check me on the the the story I tell myself about how Microsoft wound up in the situation it wound up in with Xbox. And I think it stems with DirectX. The it's the graphics layer that allowed games to be run on multiple graphics cards. So that was a Microsoft licensed piece of property. So you this is why we don't have the Chromebox. [01:02:52] S8: You wanna go you wanna go really far far back. [01:02:54] S1: Like like, because we do we didn't get an Amazon gaming console. We didn't get a a Google gaming console. Right? Right. Like, why why [01:03:02] S8: is that so? So you well, you go back way back. I mean, can go really far back. [01:03:06] S1: Please. [01:03:07] S8: I mean, back in the day, the main technology for doing three d when it was coming along was OpenGL. And OpenGL had various [01:03:17] S4: plus [01:03:17] S8: or minuses. It was, you know, we're way back in history. But the way this is the origin of the NVIDIA story. [01:03:23] S1: Yeah.
01:03:23 · John Coogan, Ben Thompson
[01:03:23] S1: Yeah. [01:03:23] S8: Making cards to do three d graphics. You had, like, the Riva, the one twenty eight, then the TNT. Yeah. Then you get the GeForce, and, like, we're talking back in the nineties when I was, you know, your guys' age or whatever it was in college. And, you know, making the first, you know, Quake comes out, like, the real first three d games, you know. There's actually a really interesting Twitter back and forth with the old id people talking about Quake and how basically they obliterated the company by burning everyone out by launching it. Woah. But super fun super fun back and forth. But Microsoft comes out with Direct three d as an alternative to OpenGL. Mhmm. That was, I think and this is a little out of my area of expertise, but I think it was a little easier to use, had more niceties, was more tied into the platform. But this is all sort of PC gaming. Yeah. The Xbox, the way I think about it, and a lot of gamers kinda get annoyed and write about the gaming stuff because I don't really care about the game part of it. I'm more interested like the the strategy and how that fits in the overall What is your review? [01:04:25] S1: Yeah. Can we get a GTA six review? No. Well, [01:04:29] S8: I feel I feel compelled number one, I feel Rockstar, I think, is charging way too little for this game. They're charging, what, $80? Yes. Like, this is a game. [01:04:37] S1: This is you're gonna get canceled for this. This is a nuclear take. No. They should be charging like $200 for this animation. I know. [01:04:44] S8: GTA six is like the last great game.
01:04:44 · Ben Thompson, John Coogan, Rodrigo Liang, Jordi Hays
[01:04:44] S8: GTA six is like the last great game. [01:04:47] S1: Yeah. [01:04:48] S8: Like, you think about every it was built boastably all made pre AI. [01:04:52] S4: Yeah. [01:04:52] S8: Like, it is the pinnacle of this triple a Yeah. Craftsmanship years and years and years of blood and sweat and tears. [01:05:02] S1: Yeah. [01:05:02] S8: To the extent where you have, like, the Twitter analyst, like, counting cigarette butts outside of the offices to see, like, how much crunch are they in right now? I don't even he's trading [01:05:11] S1: the stock. I don't even think he's trading the stock. I think he just wants to know what GTA six. The love of the game. Literally, the game. The the GTA six. [01:05:18] S8: Are insane. Insane. I always tread in this water, like, very, very carefully. But no. So I feel compelled to buy GTA six [01:05:26] S1: Yes. [01:05:26] S8: Just in honor of it existing I like that. Even if I don't know if I'm ever gonna play it. So I'm definitely gonna do that, and I'd be happy to pay yes. I have $200. Like, $80 is ridiculous. They should charge more. Anyhow. Yeah. We had one [01:05:38] S0: of the youngest person on our team was commenting on people online complaining about the price and said something like, you didn't have you had ten years, you couldn't save up $80? I know. Seriously. It's like Whoever whoever you are, like, but like, I know kids that do lemonade stands and they clear, like, a $100. [01:05:57] S1: Yeah. You know?
01:05:57 · John Coogan, Ben Thompson, Rodrigo Liang
[01:05:57] S1: Yeah. You know? [01:05:58] S8: Oh, absolutely. I want you know, the old $20, I'll keep the change. Nothing will make a kid's day better than that. Exactly. Although, unfortunately, with inflation, I think now it's sort of like expected. It's unbelievable how expensive things are. It's bad. [01:06:10] S1: It's bad. [01:06:10] S8: Anyhow, I my GTA six. [01:06:13] S1: But we're [01:06:13] S8: we're back oh, so the the the console the console. So the way I think about Xbox Yeah. Is you go back to Microsoft, and Microsoft had this whole thing. This is pre iPhone. [01:06:23] S4: Mhmm.
01:06:23 · Rodrigo Liang, Ben Thompson, John Coogan
[01:06:23] S4: Mhmm. [01:06:23] S8: This is idea of their corporate strategy was three screens in the cloud. Mhmm. And the idea that we're going to we already own the desk Mhmm. Via the PC. We're going to own the Pocket via the phone. Mhmm. And people always used say Microsoft missed mobile. Microsoft did not miss mobile. They, like, they came out with a Windows CE in, like, 1999. Like, they were in mobile. They just had the totally wrong conceptual model because they were basing it around, you know, as an extension of the PC. Yeah. But then the third screen was the living room. How do we get in the living room? Well, people have consoles plugged in their TVs. If we can get in and own the console, we can own sort of the gateway to the living room, and we need to earn permission to be in the living room. We will do that by creating a the Xbox, the game console. And what's interesting about this is this is a strategy that totally failed. And it failed for a kind of an obvious reason in retrospect, which is first and foremost, people buy consoles to play games, not to have a portal to the Internet in their living room. [01:07:29] S1: Yeah.