Techstrong Gang – December 2, 2024

Hey, everyone. Happy Monday. Happy back from Thanksgiving.

Hangover. I don't know, did Microsoft Outlook take off for Thanksgiving too? You're watching Textron Gang.

Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimmel from Textron. Welcome to our Monday edition of Textron Gang. You know, I, you gotta love that.

Thanksgiving break, Thursday off, Friday off for most of us. Saturday, Sunday. You come back today and you're rip roaring ready to go.

Is your email platform ready to go? Can you trust it? These things always happen around holidays.

It's just crazy. We're gonna talk about this latest, uh, outage that kinda really hit us, hit some people really hard around the, uh, outlook, Microsoft outlook with our gang members. We've got, uh, some of our core, core gang members.

The, the ruling circle, if you will, governing board of, of the gang. Let me introduce you to them. First of all, I don't see any Turkey left in his beard.

He's probably cleaned up since then. It's our, uh, chief Chief, uh, no, your, well, your chief technical officer, but also VP at fu. I was gonna say Chief Technical Advisor, but they changed nomenclature there.

Title. Hey, Ashley. Hey Mitchell.

How are you? I'm very good. Good to be here.

Happy Cyber Monday. Hope your Black Friday was, you know, you got some good deals, so not if you were looking for them in your Outlook mailbox, but I think you had a problem with verification. Come on, man.

That one. How much did they pay you to set up that one? But I'm, I think, I think Google paid him on that.

Um, speaking of Google, in the land of Silicon Valley, there's no one bigger than our own. John Schwartz. Hey John, how are you?

How was your Thanksgiving? It was fantastic. We had a bunch of dogs and grandkids running around in our house.

It was fantastic. Oh, so you told me you were eating dogs. I thought you were part of those folks in, what was it, Michigan or ever state?

I'll start with that. Yeah. I'm not from Ohio.

Ohio, no. Ohio. Let's, uh, let's, right.

That's a delicacy for Thanksgiving. Okay. Yeah.

Oh, wow. Um, hey, but you know, consequential days for big tech, you know, outages, government lawsuits, competition, reinvent. It's all happening.

Yeah. Always around the holidays. What could we do?

Anyway, John, welcome and thanks. Thank you. And then joining us.

I'm sure he's, he's gotten over his first Thanksgiving back home with the family, the Vard clan. There you go. Was it a Thanksgiving a remember Mike?

It was, but I'll confess, I'm kind of sick of the leftovers already. So I'm heading to Vegas, going to Ws reinvent. Away we go.

You know, that's one of the nice things about going to someone else's house for Thanksgiving. You don't get the leftovers though. I did buy a spiral ham and a nice big Turkey breast I got in the freezer.

We don't have leftovers. I'll make it sometime in the next week or so just to, 'cause you don't get enough at just one night, one meal. You watch 'em, football and everything else.

But, um, anyway, I'm glad you had a good Thanksgiving. Did Turkey on, Did you do the spa c**k Turkey? That's kind of A new thing now.

No, no, I didn't spa c**k the tur. Well, it's, it wasn't my house. I didn't cook it at all.

Oh, you didn't go. I usually, if we're making it, I like to do a nice brine job on a Turkey. We do that too.

I'm a b briner. But when it's not your Turkey, it's not your brine. It's not my monkeys.

It's not my circus. Kinda like, there you go. Email.

Mm-Hmm. Wow. Let's move right into that, John.

You know, I spoke to a bunch of people last week who said, you know, please forgive me, but my, I can't get to my email, so I'm kind of flying blind. Is this Yeah, I mean, Yeah. What's going on?

This is, Well, I mean, as you said, if if it's the holidays, there must be some sort of outage. Um, there was a, a global outage that left thousands of, uh, Microsoft 2 65 and teams, users, teams, apps, users without service for a couple of days. And, um, it was a, a mystery.

I mean, it, it's, we're getting conflicting reports about what happened. Um, the New York Times is reporting. There was some sort of faulty software update, but most other media outlets and Microsoft itself haven't given us an explanation for what happened.

There was even some bizarre report of a, a cyber attack, although that doesn't seem to have much legs to it. Um, it basically, Microsoft and the way it responded to this event probably created as many, many problems for them as the poor users who were out of outta luck with Outlook. They were, and Microsoft was issuing updates, constant updates, telling us they didn't know what was happening.

And this sends such a, such a kind of a frightening message. And, uh, again, the ba there's a backdrop too of, uh, they just announced how, uh, cybersecurity is so important to them at their Ignite Show and how it's a major emphasis. You know, again, we don't know if it's a cyber attack, but it, it just kind of throws all this confusion into the whole mix.

And, um, to us it's, uh, I think the response is, is much an issue as the actual event itself. And it's still trying. We're still trying to sort through it.

Mitch, I'm gonna ask you something. Is the, is the software in general that we're deploying just too complex that even a Microsoft can't figure out what's going on when something goes wrong? And have we reached some level of, um, the weight of supporting all this stuff is just too high?

I think it's software at very large scale. That's a lot of times what the issues are here is, it's not one problem you have to trace down and fix it. It's a cascading set of conditions.

If it was a update that caused the issue, that might have resulted in three or four different side effects, unintended consequences for it, that I'm just throwing out that number. I'm not saying that was the issue, but that can send you in a lot of trails and sometimes acting too fast. 'cause there's a lot of pressure to get the service back up.

You know, you're got customers sitting there not getting email, not getting their codes on, you know, whatever on Black Friday. If it, you know, depending on how things last, um, or, or how long it's around, it's, it's, there's a lot of pressure to get things back up and running. And it's easy to deploy something that may not actually help, that costs make the problem worse.

I think the issue here is, is it true Microsoft really doesn't understand or didn't understand what the problem is? Um, and or are they just kind of like, just hold off folks, you know, we'll tell you when we got time to tell you. We're trying to figure out what's going on to Fix that.

So what we got here is a failure to communicate. Yes. Is that what you're telling me, Mitch?

I I, I think that is Yes. Right off the chain gang. Yes.

Uhhuh, Uhhuh from the boss. Um, well, but it, no, it, Mitch, you're being too kind. Your Midwestern roots are shown.

I know. That's my good old voice. But What you're really trying to say is, is Microsoft hiding the truth from us?

And Ken, I trust those. That's obese. That's their, that is the other side of that coin, right?

Mm-Hmm. There's the, okay, you know, is there, is, is there anything going on here that they don't wanna tell us until they can't, can't avoid, but tell us. Yeah.

Well, until they go through Culper in front of Congress again, who do, who's the poor bastard they send every time? Brad, Brad Smith, The Brad Smith. Poor Brad's gonna have to go to Congress hat in hand saying, you Know, Hey, I, I, I think, I think we learned it's not the crime, it's the cover up that always cause The Ask Richard Nixon.

Well, and let, let's not get into politics. Stop. There's also, we always do though, there's waiting for the news cycle to change, right?

I mean, you're going through this. If you're Microsoft and you're hoping, not hoping, but you hope something else, like takes over the, the conversation to take the pressure off of you. So, you know, and it's with, with the holiday shopping and all that, that, that, that's very possible.

You know what a lot of people did last week, they started creating documents in a thing called Google Docs. And a lot of people started playing around, around on a platform that they normally would not have used. So, you know, these things hurt because now a lot of those folks may just decide, Hey, this Google thing works just fine.

Look, I've come up with a, a multiple choice for po potential, uh, causes of this, you know, and I'm gonna open a betting thing. And just like they do in presidential politics, we'll decide who, who, what the responsible or what the reason is based upon what the betting shows opening up is. The clear favorite of five to four is Elon Musk, um, followed closely by Kim Jung Ill, and, and his cohorts, um, the Google team, right?

And then let's see what the public bets on. And based upon that, we'll know how it really happened. 'cause that's how we figure things out today, it seems.

Are you betting using crypto? 'cause that, you know, that's what Else else do you bet with? If it's not crypto, it ain't, you know what?

Traceability, right? I'm, I'm betting that some guy working in a Microsoft data center halfway around the world, the Plug kicked The router and that was That. Yeah.

Like it happened that hour, hour cube con thing. That woman walked behind the curtain and took out our power in the middle of my AWS interview. It's the poor, Poor janitor vacuuming the floor, right?

Yeah. What's this For? But guys, you know, turning a serious eye of this for a moment, couple of things I wanna mention.

You know, when we first started moving to the cloud and into these hyperscale environments, the thought was, wow, aren't you just creating a big honeypot, right? Man, what a great, you know, to quote the Godfather poorly at, at the Vito's daughter, his wedding us do not, if this was anyone else's wedding, there must be 30 to 40 grand in that purse. That's what you got when you got these big hyperscalers.

It's, it's a, it's a honeypot. It's a, it's a, it's a, a too big of a target to leave alone. They're constantly going for it.

Now, the counter to that argument is, yes, it is, but we also put hundreds of times the resources into protecting it, making it bulletproof, making it more scalable, making it redundant, making it not crushable than you would by yourself if you were running exchange server in your closet. That's, that's the truth, right? And, um, and there's always been that, and, and it, and it still is, you know, when every, anytime there's a cloud outage, there's, whether it's a security incident or just pure mount, you know, poor software or poor updates, it would be a b***h if it was a bad update in the Windows kernel or something.

I mean, I feel bad for Microsoft for a very, very millisecond, but for an Android, that's an eternity. Um, Well, the happiest day I've had running it is when I didn't have to run exchange and I handed the keys over to Microsoft. Yeah, yeah.

Because exchange is a b***h. Now that is being said, I was never a fan of using web apps for my word, Excel and PowerPoint. I still like them downloaded and run on my machines.

Yeah, I do too. You know, and that's, it's the same thing with the Google item. Why?

I don't like Google, I don't like running stuff. That kind of stuff. As a SaaS in the cloud, 25 browser Tabs.

So, and that's a whole nother subject, the SaaS in the cloud. However, the, the other big issue here is crisis management. So, on one hand, Microsoft's gonna say, I followed the Bible.

I gave them frequent updates as we knew it. I told them, and, uh, what, and I wasn't afraid to tell them we didn't know, but we feel your pain, right? That's one crisis management type of strategy.

As I said, some people will say, oh, you're full of crap. You didn't, you knew it. You didn't, you didn't come clean.

Another strategy. I'm sorry. Yeah.

If You read the updates. Yeah, I was gonna say this. That's, that's a really good point, Alan, because when you read these updates, they're essentially saying the same thing.

They're just reiterating, but They're saying, Hey, we kept the lines open, right? We kept you, we kept you in informed, right? We were good crisis management.

On the other hand, I think it was crappy crisis management because at some point, there's an argument to be made is if you got nothing to say, don't say it. Or find out, gimme something, give me something. Hey, we're not sure what it is, but we're rebooting everything and we're doing, we're restoring from a backup and it should be up, you know, in 24 hours and 36 hours and whatever it is, Right?

They Never offered estimates for no, They, anything, they, You're totally In the, you're totally in the dark, right? So you have no Idea. So you're losing trust.

A lot of people just felt like, well, these constant updates, you were just teasing me. Stop teasing me. Exactly.

Exactly. So lemme draw a contrast, you know? Sure.

How does this compare to George Kurtz CrowdStrike, right? Who immediately, as soon as he could, you know, realistically could, he pretty quickly got out there and Mia Culpa and said, this is the problem we're working on it, we're still, uh, trying to understand this, but here's what we know so far. And wrote a full disclosure.

You know, here's a, here's a blog article that kept getting updated with the latest of what they knew and, you know, right. And they made some pretty drastic mistakes. Here you have the, you know, it's kind of the, the clown car, right?

Here come, here's another clown. But we don't know what's in the car yet. Right.

What's, what happens when everybody gets out and what was the cause? So it, it's to your point about crisis management, it's, it's expectations management too, and transparency, right? It's not just sending out communications.

Uh, the thing I also wonder about is if it is cyber, if it was cyber or how much of it was cyber? There's a four day disclosure requirement now with the SEC, um, to report, you know, a material. Obviously this is a material impact from cyber.

So does that sort of obfuscation of, we don't know, but we'll tell you more later. Multiple times. I'm not saying they're hiding anything, I'm just saying just non effective communications.

Does that get in the way of, well, there really was a cyber issue way back. Ain't wind, but they didn't tell us. So there's a lot of potentials of running a foul here.

Mike. You know, it's funny that Mitch Yeah, go ahead. Sorry Mike, You didn't read the, uh, line 497 about the user agreement that said they don't have to tell you nothing.

Well, and then we take everything. Was That nothing or nothing Matter an apostrophe? Was There a g at the end of that or have you been in New York too long already?

No, he is an R at it. R at the end. Nothing, Nothing.

I ain't telling you nothing We gotta tell you is nothing, Nothing. I don't gotta tell. I know my rights.

Copper. I don't gotta tell you. Nothing, nothing.

Customers, nothing. Guys Don't use guys won't do nothing. It's nothing.

Guys Don'ts. What? That's what, that's what Microsoft said during the CrowdStrike issue, right?

They said nothing. They just, they just went, mom. The other thing too is, I mean, we talked about another app Recently, but behind the scenes, John, they said, Brad, grab your hat head to Washington.

Oh God. Yeah. Oh, stop.

Yeah, I don't, you know, the other thing is, we mentioned another, another outage was the Starbucks mobile app that went out during the PR premiere of their holiday menu and the red cup, whatever, it was a fiasco. But to their credit, they issued some sort of update that, that actually gave us an idea. They knew what the problem was and they addressed it.

And I think back to even, um, Azure, there was an outage in July from Microsoft eventually found out it was, it was a cyber attack, which kind of leaves in the back of your mind, okay, so what exactly is happening with this latest incident? You know, it's a trust issue them. But again, right there is a trust issue.

And again, it's crisis management. Instead of saying, Hey, we feel you're pain, we know it's an outage. We're working on it.

Say, this is what we've ruled out. You know, what the power seems to be on the power's working. The temperature of the servers are all within range.

We're continuing down our, you know, our checklist here of outage checklist. And we'll keep you posted on the progress and then give them three or four things on the outage checklist that you checked every, so at least, you know, an empty hollow message of we feel your pain. We're not sure what's going on over and over again is better, is worse than no message at all.

Is, I guess the point I'm making from a, from a crisis handling this One other comment. I feel like every time Brad goes to Washington, it's like someone else goes out to clean in the, in the show silo, you know, and they leave, they leave the silo. They're like, okay, see you later.

And they, they crater on the hill. Yep. That's a tough jump.

It's a bad jump. I Don't even know if he needs to go to Washington. 'cause I watched him go several times now.

And it's the same speech. So they could just send a little AI avatar that says, you know, An agent. An agent.

We call it an agent. Agent agent bras, they're working on it. Hi, I'm an agent.

I, Let's, let's pretend we have this meeting because we all know The outcome. Anyway. All kidding aside, if you were one of the people out there who were affected, it's no joke to you.

And, and, um, we're sorry to hear it. Luckily, we, we here at Techron, we're not affected. Mitchell has, uh, engineered our own, uh, mail and document solution as part of our cracker Jack IT team.

com. That next block over next to the pyramid. We got a gun.

It's coming. Yeah. I think he just hired some guy named Gutenberg or something, but whatever.

Um, yeah, I mimeograph that and send it to you. Yeah. Mimeograph in the mail.

I love the smell of the mimeo. Who remembers the mimeograph machine smell? Man, it's a great smell.

Probably it was probably toxic as all hell into sniffing glue or something that in the overhead projector right on it with, you knows, I think a few, A few billion brain cells went missing because of those. So obviously, obviously Thanksgiving has had an effect on our productivity here. Guys, let's get back on board this.

Let's take a quick, let's take a quick break, put on our work close. Come back and we'll discuss our next, uh, topic, which is, uh, what's going on with the Google and DOJ conflict. Is there a conflict you're watching?

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Now Hey guys, we're back. And we're talking about this Google thing in the DOJ and I'm having a bad case of deja vu 'cause I think I watched this drama about two decades ago. But John, what's going on with this whole thing?

'cause it sounds like, let me get this straight. We wanna take a big company and take away its browser and somehow or other that's gonna make everything better. I'm confused.

Yeah, I'm confused too. This is kind of like a, a takeoff of a mystery of Microsoft, which we just talked about. So the Justice Department has made this request that, uh, after they beat Google in court, that they wanna sell, they want Google to sell its prone browser and potentially its Android mobile operating system.

And it, it, it is like dejavu. It goes back to the Microsoft case, which went on for years in, which eventually ended up in Microsoft making some concessions. But it's basically being the same company.

And I think we're gonna see a sense of deja vu all over again with Google. Um, the, the whole process, there are two timelines. There's a judge who is going to be, uh, listening to Google's counter proposal to what the government has offered.

He has until April. Google has until April to file it. The judge has until August to make a decision.

And then of course, we're gonna go back to court, and then we will have an escalation of things. This could go on for years. And consequently, I don't think it's gonna amount to much of anything.

I think there will be some sort of concession. I I just don't see, here's the reason why. I don't see, why would you disrupt a major, major company that's a, a major cog in the economy, especially with an incoming administration that is kind of playing nice and hard against tech.

I just don't, I just don't see them doing something as radical as this. And um, again, it's a lot of bluster, a lot of times gonna be spent, but ultimately I think the chances of any part of Microsoft being sold off or torn off is gonna be minus Is Google not Microsoft though, right? I mean Google, yeah.

M so sorry. Yeah. But Google, it is just gonna be the same situation as with, with Microsoft 20 years earlier.

I mean, to me, I don't it because I mean, wouldn't you have to go back and revisit the Microsoft agreement and be consistent and so you're gonna get them to spin off their browser too? I mean, how does that all come together in your head? It's, it's a non-start.

I think this whole thing is, is a non-starter. I I just, it's not gonna go, it's, this is not gonna go in waste. It's gonna be a lot of posturing.

You know, the weirdest thing too is that ironically the, uh, the Trump administration, the first administration that he had his first term, that was when the Department of Justice went after Google, which set up this entire case. And now it looks as if, given the relationship and it's kind of developing that there's kind of, there's this comfy, somewhat comfy relationship between the larger tech companies and the Trump administration. They're co up To them.

Let's be clear, it's not a somewhat comfy, it's, it's, it's paid with, it's, it's, it's gold. Yeah. You know, it's, it's, There was always all money paid there.

Yeah, exactly. It's, We talked about this LA last week. It is an oligarchy.

And the weird thing that was kind of a carrot a stick strategy though, where there are, there are threats, overt threats that really will not lead to anything. And so therefore you, you get the tech executives to cow down to you and do what you're bidding. It's like, for instance, we even could even talk about the terrorists.

We won't, but you talk about the terrorists, that they're gonna be exemptions for tech companies, I'm sure. So here we have this whole situation where these guys are going to serve the administration in a certain way. They're gonna play nice with the administration.

And I think Google will be part of that. And I think this, this whole case is just going to go on for years and even eventually it leads to nothing. So I, I, I've got some views on this.

So first of all, let's be really clear, the only thing this administration cares about from Big tech is the free speech issue. So we could turn everything into the cesspool that Twitter is, right? They could give a Flying Wa about whether Google Monopolizes search or not, as long as there's free speech and they could put forth the in sp number one.

Number two, this is a classic example from the we here to help people who just don't get it, instead of making Google sell off Chrome, right? 'cause Google doesn't have an O asset. Chrome's, well, they do Android, but it, it is a little different.

The windows. Why can't you just make Chrome that the first time you run it and anytime you want thereafter, you could pick who the default search engine is. And if it's not Google and it's Bing or it's deco, or it's whatever, the next search here that you want an open AI search or something and you don't use Google search, problem solved, problem solved.

What's so hard about that? Like, what did they not think of that? Is there something I'm not seeing?

Right? Because if the idea is, is that Chrome is inflicting Google search on people, why not just disjoint the search from the browser and give people a search, a choice of search engines and you're done Instead of all this, who, who are we gonna sell Google Chrome to the, the people who want TikTok? I I don't think this is behind.

I I mean, I agree with what you're saying, Alan. We've been down this road before and there was a whole lot of money spent for a pretty basic solution with we now we have, you know, edge is the solution to Chrome in this, in this problem. Um, you know what I wonder about this is the timing of it is now such that if that was the outcome, okay, just make it easy for the user to choose what they're gonna use for the search engine.

We're on the cusp of open AI and, and generative AI being a search solution, um, for this man. Some people use Well, No, that's why I said it. Open AI is is one default search.

Exactly. Not default one, the search choices And maybe opening up the browser that way or open up the choice of the search engine within the browser. That's, that's one of the threats of why they're holding back to say, well, I it's not bing, I'm worried about it's open AI and half a dozen other.

Yeah, But isn't that a better solution than forcing them to sell Chrome mold together? Yeah, they're not gonna do that. Are they really?

And you know, I don't think any of us believe that will happen. We, we don't live in an SEC world of breaking companies up. It just doesn't happen.

And people proactively do set up the alphabet, you know, companies to be able to separate. I got three letters for you. A TT At t.

Yeah. Well, when did that happen? In the seven, in the eighties, right?

That's, that's how long ago that was. And I live, we all live went through that. Hey, You know, if, if anything, I think when, um, the FTC chair Lena Kahn gets forced out, which is probably inevitable, you're gonna see all sorts of m and a activity.

Big tech's gonna be going through all these big deals that so far she's discouraged through her actions. So I think if anything, they're gonna get bigger and fatter. So do you think Trump and the crew will drop this case, or do you think that they will pursue it as part of their quote unquote big tech agenda?

Or, or to Alan's point, do they just want somebody to come down on Mar-a-Lago and kiss the ring and that's that It's friend or foe? I are they friend or foe if they're friend? Exactly.

Exactly. It's like the, We talked about the Godfather earlier. It's the same thing.

You go, you go to kiss the ring, you make nice, you ask for some favors and then you're on the good side until, Well, until the last time you're Google invited Trump over for Sunday dinner, even though he isn't, that is a good, You know. Yeah. I mean that's the world you live in, right?

And, and that goes for whether you're a corporate executive or a foreign country, you know what I mean? If you flatter, if you flatter this administration, you're, you're good. Well, founder and, you know, support them.

Some Tech, some tech companies are better at doing this than others. I think Apple's really the best. They're the model in terms of cook's, management of, of, of Trump, so to speak.

Quiet. He's pretty good about it. Quietly.

Good job. Slike. Oh, Then The flip side of you, Amazon, Alright, Not objecting Trump on the side of every iPhone.

I mean, you know, like the Saudis did, But also Alan, we talked about this in the past, but to what degree will it matter if AI is kind of the new search engine anyway? And so maybe Google's just gonna say, you know, well over time we may not care about the quote unquote search Engine. Well, so first of all, Google is already doing AI search.

So yeah, they're gonna be a leader in that. Explain. But that's what could happen is if this thing drags off for so many years, it becomes a moot point.

Yeah. And that Google's domination of search is not, I mean, there was back in the day, right? Everyone thought Alta Vista was gonna be a real problem, Whip crawler, Right?

And by time they got around to doing anything, who the hell even remembered Alta Vista? So You have a good point. Maybe this is a delay tactic to let Gemini cut become, you know, effectively replace it.

Ooh, then that's Machiavellian there. Yeah, I know. It's sort of like, yeah.

Intrigued. Mm-Hmm. So you Donate, donate the browser to some sort of consortium and you know, and, and then you're on your way.

Okay, Let's think about that. Yeah. Consortiums or browser.

You know what I think we should do though, guys? We should start a tech strong betting app. You know, Martin Logan on this.

There we go. And for these kinds of things, we should put out solutions and allow and set the odds and allow people to bet on it. And then we can report on the, on the action, you know, what the current odds are and stuff.

It might be much more profitable than this writing articles, than doing videos. How much we make on every bet. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, the House always wins. Absolutely.

Double zero. Something to think about. Something to think about for the degenerate gamblers out there who wanna bet on tech stories.

I'm sorry I even said this out loud. Someone's gonna steal my frigging idea. Uh, it's already, AI is already writing the app.

We're gonna have feed, listen into AI and Right app. All right, let's take a break. We're here on Textron Gang.

It's after Thanksgiving. We're officially in the holiday season though, guys, and we're at AWS Reinvent this week. com is the number one online destination for DevOps education and community building.

com covers all aspects of DevOps, including DevOps, best practices and tools, DevOps culture, DevSecOps, business impact, continuous testing, continuous delivery and more. com has the largest collection of original DevOps content featuring breaking news, blog posts, podcasts, and more. com to learn more.

com where the world meets DevOps. All right folks, we're back in, just in case. I want to clear one small thing up.

DraftKings is not about to buy trial. Okay? So there we go.

That we know of. You did not steal my idea, but On the betting front, we are all going to Las Vegas and AWS is gonna be there and Smart Money says AWS is up to something with Gen ai and they've kind of tipped their hand a little bit in the sense that they are now recently partnered with both Datadog and Wiz to add plugins to their, uh, Amazon queue developer platform, which is a gen AI platform for managing operations and DevOps workflows. It's kind of a cousin to Amazon Q business, which is their larger business workflow AI platform.

But it's the same idea. Mitch, do you think we're gonna see a lot more of these plugins? And does this become one of the dominant platforms for managing workflows, at least in an Amazon environment?

I think you'll, you will hear about AI everywhere, right? Every, every, every announcement or Every four out of five announcement have AI in it. I think we're gonna hear a lot more about developer queue.

That's what you were referring to with the plugins to talk to Datadog and Wizz and, you know, I we're, we're in the era of people realize that you're not gonna stay in a self-contained world of Amazon, Azure or, or Microsoft or, or whatever cloud or Oracle, et cetera. Google is that data lives in multiple places, their services and other clouds. And part of your partner market system is to be able to interconnect you because those apps are also running in those clouds.

So I think we're gonna see a lot of focus around AI generated AI workflows for, for developing software, testing software. You know, I'm not disclosing anything I know ahead of time. Um, uh, so, so don't take it that way.

But, um, I I think we're gonna, my point being, I think we're gonna see more focusing on the development of software, not just AI capabilities in software Fair. I I don't disagree with that one, Mitch. It's probably even odds.

Did you check our betting app? How are we Doing? No, but I'm, I'm thinking about my mind's racing as we're doing this.

I I got an idea. We'll talk afterwards. Um, This is, this is happening.

Oh my God, Your brain's always racing, Helen. Yeah, I know, but Alan, this week you're gonna be over at the wind doing some interviews, so what's Going on? Yes, we will be live at AWS we, we'll actually be broadcasting the entire, uh, Tuesday through Thursday there.

Uh, some will be live interviews going on right there. Some may be some AWS relevant interviews we've done in the past, but good content. So if you wanna keep up on what's going on in AWS do you know, log in here at Textron tv, um, Mitch, Mike, you'll both be there.

I'm sure. Maybe we can stop in and, and do some updates and recaps as well on a daily basis if you're not too busy at the tables and stuff like that. Um, I know we go for the keynotes, but Gotta fund our betting app somehow.

Yeah, we gotta fund this baby somehow. Exactly. But, um, anyway, I'm looking forward to that meeting with the regulators as this whole thing comes together, you know?

Well, that's why we gotta get Martin Logan. So Martin Logan is one of my partners in media ops, and Martin is actually the C-T-O-C-P-O for Caesar's Entertainment. He actually built their whole online, uh, gaming infrastructure.

Well, he didn't single hand. He runs the team that built it, but, um, he'd be a great guy to do this. This, he would.

So the plan's falling into place right here, got the personnel Pulling strings Back to the napkin. We do it on text, pulling The strings. Yeah, it's gonna, it, there's gonna have to be an even bigger wall between editorial and the rest of the gambling business though.

Otherwise we'll be accused of putting our fingers on the scale that tip the odds one way or the other. Well, we'll just play some pink flight FLA music down the wall. I don't know, but no, it's gonna be a great reinvent.

They're expecting 60, 65,000 people. All strip is taken up with it. Um, you know, they just had the F1 event there.

The ones are playing at the sphere. There's a lot going on in Vegas. It's gonna be a busy, busy week.

Something for everybody. Here's what I'm gonna be keeping my eyes on the parties. The extravagance of tech parties are directly tied into how the economy or how they feel about the economy going forward, right?

So you wanna talk about bets and, and greeting tea leaves and, you know, stuff like that. Keep your eye on the parties. It's a good indicator.

Makes sense to me. Um, I have nothing else. What about you guys?

Well, Yeah, just one thing on this, you know, AWS has been the dominant cloud provider for since the beginning of this, maybe a decade ago. Do you think that that is starting to shift though and, you know, are we seeing more of not just Microsoft and Google, but all these other third party providers, Oracle, and even small independents that seem to be gaining more at traction? I'm, I don't know if you're seeing it, but I feel it.

I I think you got a balloon that's being still being blown up. And so you have other people on the surface of that balloon perhaps. But when you look at the landmass that AWS takes up on that balloon, it's at least constant if not growing, it's just a bigger balloon.

Part of is, where do you see the growth coming from because of its, you know, people modernizing applications, enterprises, they're probably moving it to either Google or, or Azure possibly. I'm sorry, to AWS or Azure, possibly Google. Yeah, We're not in the exuberant startup phase is Kind of what No, which is Where AWS has had a heyday, you know, For their Well, I, I was just gonna say that Mitch, I, I think what we really are seeing is the full on trend, you know, transition from infrastructure as a service to whatever platform as a service is today and sa as a service, software as services kind of as a service to begin with.

So, but you know, I think AWS was born clearly as an infrastructure, as a service play, and they clearly now are moving into platform as a service, applications as a service or application building blocks as a service, if you will. So I think that's the big, the big thing there. And then, and that's been going on and it's not from this year only.

And don't forget Alibaba, there's some other big clouds out there too, right? You really wanna be on a Chinese cloud with the present administration here in the us. Well, let's see, how does telescope, we'll see how that works out.

Alright, So if you talk to the DevOps folks over at AWS, they will tell you that, you know, from their point of view, they are the DevOps team for all these application developers out there. So I think they're more platform engineers, Right? Fair enough.

That's where DevOps Yeah. Functions are shifting to who's doing, you know, doing the DevOps tool set, John? Yeah, I was, so I was gonna throw something out.

Um, so I reached out to, so Daniel Newman from Future Term Group is going to be there as well. And he mentioned to me something that Bears watching it, it's a theme he is been looking at, and it's starting to come up more and more in, in, uh, research reports and in quarterly earnings. This idea of Amazon making this transition from being a customer of Nvidia to eventually becoming a competitor.

And, uh, he was pointing to the Amazon's $8 billion partnership with philanthropic. So they basically doubled their investment in that company. And there was a Bloomberg report that says that that partnership could advance Amazon's training hardware and software tools enough for, for them to cut into a Nvidia stranglehold on the AI chip market.

Well, Microsoft's doing the same thing, right? Microsoft Silicon and their software behind it. Exactly.

Google's gonna do it too. Look, you know, that's how the tech world works. Someone always wants your cheese.

NVIDIA's gonna, right? These Are the great chunk of cheese right now. Yeah.

Right? And these guys are major, major customers. We're talking tens of billions of dollars a year that they are spending with Nvidia.

And that's gonna eventually change. And that's, this is part of the storyline. I'm not saying it's gonna happen overnight, but it is.

No, It's gonna take time. But this is why like the, the, the, the Google story we covered earlier today, oftentimes by the time the government and we get through all the appeals and the whole rigamarole, the market takes care of itself. The market's a, you know, an amazing thing in terms of, as long as things are not so monopolistic that it's impossible, the market will kind of balance itself because the technology changes so quick that it's game changing, right.

You know, that's like even going back to Microsoft, you know, the, the, the whole case of the government of Internet Explorer versus Netscape. And then from there, what happens? Google emerges.

I mean, the market market evolves and this market evolves so fast that, uh, we don't know where it'll be in a couple years. There was an article, and I think it was in Bloomberg couple, I think it was last week, talking about, they called it Amazon's Moonshot plan to rival Nvidia in the chip market. So it it's a real thing.

It's a real thing. I think you're spot on, John. So Alan, I just wanna point out one of those small thing.

I think there is a gambling app for tech already. I think it's called the stock exchange. Yeah, no, but that yeah, you're right, you're right.

No, but I was gonna get a little more granular, right? Yeah. So should we start another stock exchange?

I don't know. It's going to, I Guess, you know, you could think that the stock exchange is going to become more like football and baseball where you're kind of betting on what will happen in a particular inning. So maybe we are betting on that.

Some Will say it already is. Yeah, it already is. I mean, in a sense, you know, that was what we remember when we were talking about the Dallas Cowboys and the CIO that, that we, that story about him.

He said that's the killer app betting in real time, onside at a game or even Watching. That's what I'm thinking. So here's the killer app, Alan, the tick, the ticker tape, the ticker meter, you know, the, the Old rich niche.

Am I dating myself? Yeah, I'm gonna tell anyone outside the family what you're thinking. Oh, okay.

Let's, Let's discuss this and then we'll come Back property. Okay. I know where the source is for, I know where the data for this comes from, so, Okay, we're gonna discuss it.

Stay tuned. It couldn't be tech strong part two. Anyway, hey, let's wrap up.

Tech strong gag, guys, it's been a pleasure. Glad you all enjoyed Thanksgiving. We hope you've enjoyed your long holiday weekend if you took it.

Of course, if you're not in the US or area you, you may think we're just spouting off, but, and rubbing it in. But anyway, we will be back tomorrow from Vegas for Amazon's reinvent. Until then, this is Alan Shimel for Textron Gang.

Everyone have a great day.