Techstrong Gang – February 6, 2025

Hey, everyone, you know, with the Super Bowl coming this weekend, is it time to kill all the referees you're watching? Textron Gang. Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimel for Techstrong Text, strong gang.

Happy Thursday. We've got a action packed show for you with some great people to discuss it. Let me introduce you to our gang members for today.

First of all, well, she's not at home in Colorado. I think she's out in California, but she's still joining us on the road. It's good to see her.

Camberley Bates. Kimberly, how are you? I'm doing great, and I think this first topic is gonna be a Lot of fun.

Yes, it is. First, you know, there's been a lot of people waiting a long time for this, but, um, anyway, Kimberly, it's great to see you joining us from Las Vegas. It's the Dynatrace twins, they're out there for the Dynatrace event.

First, let me introduce, uh, Mitch Ashley, future chairman, vp, uh, for DevOps. Mitch, you're out in your hotel room. I am work working on my tan, as you can see.

Um, a little red from this of the morning sun here, but I don't know what our first topic is, but I'm sure AI can solve it. Yes, that's a pretty stock answer these days. Also, joining us from Las Vegas, not quite as red and tan.

I, I suspect he hasn't been out in the sun as much, but he's our chief content officer, Mike Vizard. Hey, Mike, how are you? So, I'm well, but I, so I'm assuming Mitch is my fraternal twin.

'cause you know, we, the identical thing's not working. No, well, twin sons of different mothers perhaps, but we'll go with it. Joining us from Texas, is that, is that the, the Valentine's Day stuff in the back there, Ann?

Absolutely. She's already, well, it's not, won't be long now. Uh, and a whole award.

I think I finally gotten your name there. Nailed it. It only took me three months.

It's funny. But I got there. Thanks for, I appreciate the effort.

Absolutely. Thanks for joining us. And then, you know, saving the best for last as he sits on the throne in Silicon Valley, our one and only John Editor Jon Swartz.

Hey, John, how are you? I'm good. It's happy to be here.

Uh, I love the first topic, great timing. Absolutely. With the big game this weekend.

I hope, you know, we, uh, all have your Super Bowl plan set up. It should be a decent game. I'm not gonna lie.

I think I'd like to see Philadelphia win, but let, we'll talk about it later. Mike, what is this First topic we're all excited about? So, this issue is not just in the NFL, but it's coming to a head because of some, uh, calls made in the playoff games that people are, uh, upset about and continue to be upset about.

In fact, I'll tell you how upset folks are friends of mine. I've known 'em all my life. Our football fans have watched football forever, and they're not especially Bills fans or chiefs fans and, but they are hardcore fans with sports.

They are not gonna watch the Super Bowl on Sunday. They are going to go to a Chinese restaurant and boycott this game. These are people who've been watching football their entire lives and they're basically fed up and they think that, you know, the referees and the umpires, including one in the major league baseball, fired one umpire just recently because of, uh, sharing a quote unquote account where they known gambler.

Who, why would you need to do that? I have no idea. But John, I don't know what you're hearing, but people seem to actually be crying out for some technology help here.

Yes. So we have this fascinating, and I think extremely timely story on digital CXO on the idea of replacing or augmenting referees in, in the NFL and empires and MLB. So, as Mike and Alan, and I think we all know this major theme or conspiracy theory this season has been that the Kansas City Chiefs are benefiting from calls, especially calls that can't be reviewed like passenger for its calls.

In fact, yesterday, I believe this week during a media session, pat Mahomes was jokingly asked who his favorite referee was. He, he kind of laughed it off. But the point was made, I think what we have here, and, and again, it's a big backlash, um, this week, you haven't seen a lot of Super Bowl coverage.

You see mortal about the NBA trade deadline. And I think it's a utter frustration that's lingering over the, not only the success of the Chiefs, which is happens in the NFL. There's always a heavy or a dark or dark team that people root against that's dominant.

But the idea of whether the replay structure or even the officiating, even writ large, has a major problem. And I think that has been something that's been growing in, in terms of debate. For instance, if a referee misses a call, ostensibly it, the onus is on the teams to challenge the mistake.

And yet they're limited by what types of things they can challenge, which leads to these long delays and utter frustration. And I think people are looking at the idea of using ai. Same thing in baseball with the strike zone.

We have so many umpires with so many different variations of the strike zone. So we are seeing robots in the minor leagues starting to call balls and strikes. And I think there will be a push, I don't know if the NFL will ever accept it.

Perhaps they will eventually through their partners like AWS right? Um, this idea that you, you have a AI assistant of some sort to augment or maybe eventually replace the football officials. And again, in this story, which is interesting, this has been done in other sports and it's been done successfully.

You have, uh, the minor league games with, with robots. Tennis uses the Hawkeye technology to call faults and Lang calls. Soccer has something called var, which is been used in the World Cup.

And I think it's really interesting, again, as Mike mentioned, this element of the umpire being fired in baseball. You know, all of these leagues are so dependent and in fact are embracing gambling to the point where we start worrying about the i integrities of the game. And, you know, it's happened in the NBA and in the NFL.

There've been rumors for years dating back to the seventies about umpire, about referees, making dubious calls. So I think it's fascinating and I think it's something that we'll gain traction. But in the NFL it's sometimes harder to gain traction on things like this.

But we'll see. You know, I I have a, I have a a lot of thoughts on this one. And, and I, let me confess, my name is Alan, and I'm a diehard sports fan.

I, I live for my sports. I I watch it, my kids, and it's a big part of my life. Let me first say that I think ref's, umpire's, officials blowing calls are part of the human factor of why we let the horses run.

As they say, anything could happen. You can get a call, a bad call, a good call, a not so great call, whatever. And that's part of the game.

It used to be very much, it's part of the game. Legalized gambling on sports, as widespread as it is now, has fundamentally changed my love affair with sports. I don't gamble.

Let me, let me say this. I, I'll buy some boxes for the Super Bowl, you know, and that's, that's like playing bingo. Um, I don't gamble.

However, the gambling and the amount of money that's at stake here is not just from my friend Tony's Uncle Vito, who used to hand out the little sheets to us. Mike, you remember this in New York, right? Mm-hmm.

You used to get a little sheet every day, every week, and you would pick your four winners. And if you, you bet a dollar you'd win 10 or something. You know, it's not like that anymore.

They've ruined sports with legalized gambling. Where now, right away the referees blew a call. Well, of course they, they, they got money on the game.

They, you know, they, they're sharing an account with a known gambler, right? This reminds me of Joe Namath getting banned from football almost. 'cause he had an interest in bachelor's three, right?

Where known gamblers hung out, uh, way before a lot of your time here on, on the, on, on the gang today. But so gambling has put such a magnifying glass on these things being officiated to the umpteenth degree, imperfect that it, you, you've taken the human out of it. You have to take the hu And if you take the human out of it, we all lost something.

Now, granted, I love the Hawkeye system in tennis. I go to the US Open every year. I love watching tennis like that.

And that system has taken it. I mean, I don't know, nasty Eli Netty would be upset 'cause he wouldn't be able to argue with the line judges anymore. Or the, or the, um, remember it, remember Eli or Jimmy Connors, remember ro?

Mm-hmm. These guys, no. They put on a show when they argued.

You can't argue anymore. It's, it's black and white. It shows you if it hit or it didn't.

And that works great. Balls and stripes maybe. I'm sorry, John.

Yeah. What were You gonna say? Oh, I was gonna say the one, one thing I, I, I should have mentioned too, and in, and in fairness to the referees in the NFL, the players are bigger.

They're faster. They make plays now that you, we couldn't even conceive of 10 years ago. So for the most part, they do a pretty good job.

But it's always bothering me about the NFL officials, is that many of them, for years, this was a part-time job. It wasn't like MLB, Right? No.

That, that was the knock that the NFL didn't pay their officials, like the professionals they need to be. And, and it's not like they don't print money over at the NFL and they can afford it, right. Compared to some of the other things they buy.

But that being said, I think there's a place for AI and automation and taking the official sort of out of it. But it, it varies by sport. And it vari, like for instance, the big thing in the Kansas City game was the fourth down spot.

Maybe it was the third down spot. It was a fourth down play, fourth down, where Josh Allen, to me, clearly looked like he, he made the first down. And they those.

But those are always judgment calls. Those are always 50 50 at best. That's what makes a football Well.

And the question becomes, when you have the scramble that we have in football, whether or not AI can actually be accurate or not. I mean, it's, it's a very, very complex, you know, okay, so you've got this pile or what, you know, whatever. I imagine a bunch of different kind of scenarios where, okay, so yes, and I hear it.

If you put a chip in the, in the football, okay, see I got a chip in the football, but does that get the, the entire length of the football? No. You know, there are so many, you know, permutations on how the ball moves and how the players pile on top of each other, et cetera.

I think it would be a big challenge. Although, you know, there's amazing things that they do. So, you know, I'm all For video replay.

I think video replay has added a a lot of, you know, let's, let's get it right. I mean, in baseball it's fantastic, right? Because, you know, with the manager has within whatever it is, 30 seconds, 45 seconds to say, Hey, we wanna go to the replay.

They get so many replays a game and they do it. 9% of the time that replay is definitive. Right?

He's out for whatever. So you're, I'm not, you Told me there's gambling going on in sports and cheating Well, From the says the man from Vegas there. Yes, exactly.

I hear that happens here, Ivan. I've not seen any of that. Uh, no, I I think I'm more in your camp, Alan, of, of, there are certain things that, that definitely could be augmented with AI or, or electronic measurement.

But even to your point ly about, you know, putting sensors in the ball, there's the ball going over the line. There's also the judgment, a call of were they down right? When they're piled up on 25, you know, 12 other people trying to push over that line.

Um, did their knee touch the ground or, you know, did their elbow head versus the hand? There's so many judgment calls in it. Um, and I, you know, is their favoritism?

Does Mahome get a, you know, get a, get a break? Well, probably, but so do a lot of people who, uh, do holding call, you know, are holding other players and they don't get called. 'cause it's fourth quarter and it's the last, you know, two minutes of the game or Yeah, that was a pass interference, but maybe not egregious enough.

So it it, there's too many judgment things in this to say, let's, let's have AI solve the problem for us. You know, you notice one thing, you notice the refereeing, I think in the playoffs is, is much better. They have all star teams of referees in these games.

And the flow of the game is much better. They don't call as many penalties, maybe because the teams that are playing are better and they don't commit as many mistakes. But there's a certain flow.

And my fear is that when you, uh, apply ai, how are you gonna apply it to a judgment call? And is that gonna mean that we're gonna have stoppages constantly? I think we have too many stoppages as it is between injuries.

And I, I think you will to turn down the, the ai, you know, uh, right. Enforcement. You could not watch an NBA game with AI because there would be a penalty call every play.

Well, There's every play in football on every play, right? Same Thing. And I don't, but but at the same time, I don't wanna impinging the integrity of the umpires and referees.

But I will say this, it costs a lot of money to go to these games now. And if I'm gonna go spend that kind of money, bring my family, have the whole thing, and to have the game essentially ruined because somebody's having a bad day, I can't get behind that. We need a different answer here because I need, you know, it's not enough to say, you know, oh, that's part of the game.

That was part of the game when it cost me 20 bucks to go to the game. Now it's costing me $200. I need a better answer.

So You're telling me must, You know, and I get back to where Alan was, what Alan was coming at is the joy of the game. You remember that? What, what is that movie?

Any given Sunday? Yeah. Oh, that's a good movie.

Anything happen? I mean, that's the beauty of football is that it's just so unpredictable. I'm, I mean, yeah, I think the others are too.

But there're just so many weird things that can happen on the field and everything else. And that's what makes it so exciting. And I, Alan, it's kind of what you said.

It's like you throw the money in there, everything changes because you've all of a sudden got folks doing whatever. And I was, I, you know, I didn't know we were gonna be doing this topic, but on the way to the airport yesterday, I was listening to, and they were talking in the news, and they're talking about that the ticket sales, the resale ticket sales for the Super Bowl are down. The prices are down 30%.

Really? Yes. Hmm.

Now they said that ticket, the lowest cost ticket is still $4,000. Yeah. But so I was thinking, okay, so is that because of the controversy?

Is that because we're tired of seeing the Kansas City, you know, at, at the Super Bowl? Probably the latter, maybe, you know. Um, but yeah, I'd read, I had read actually that it was a big, it's a much bigger stadium.

I guess it has an additional three or 4,000 seats than Vegas did. Some it may have to do with, so that could be a factor in the game too. You know, the president's going, other people are going, I don't wanna go.

Yes. You know, the only, the Only thing, the only thing that's gonna get the NF NFL's attention is if the ratings are down, then they'll address it. I mean, they're just like bottom still, bottom line oriented.

I, I'd rather Solve concussions than, You Know, we're worry about. Nevermind that. Honestly, I think ratings are gonna be down based on just my little survey of my friends out there who are not having it.

But Chinese restaurants sales are up. Is that what you tell? What About Taylor Swift?

Taylor Swift will be there Could be. So, um, Know I'm reminded of, you know, being Jewish. Where do Jewish people go on Christmas?

Chinese food. Um, Chinese Restaurants. Right?

Chinese restaurants. So I, and, and I can't imagine, and That's why movies always get launched on Christmas Day, right? Yeah.

Yeah. I, um, look, it's not just to be fair though, let's not pin this all on the NFL and the NFL referees. There are plenty of baseball guys who, who, you know, there's no joy in Mudville tonight.

'cause they called it strike three. You know, I, again, I think that's just Mike. I disagree with you.

I go to the game to see my team play. They lose because the ref made a bad call. You know, I scream, I'll kill the bugs or whatever, or, you know, but I, it's one thing to say, all right, he's human and he had a bad day, or he made a bad call.

It's another thing to say, oh, he's got money on the game. Yeah. And I don't care whether it's, whether you're Pete Rose as a manager.

Mm-hmm. Who did it, or there were a couple players last season who got suspended in baseball around betting. If you, if you are involved in pro sports with the betting that's going on there now, you've gotta be above reproach that they can never say one of the motives were you have money on the game, that that would p**s me off.

Or does. I'll go, I'm going to, I'll disagree with you on this point though. Like, it used to happen when there was a bad call.

What? Once a month. Now it's every game.

And that's what's different. And that's what people are complaining about. It's every game now.

It's not just a once in a while kind of thing. It's a, every baseball, football, basketball. You Know what, you mentioned basketball.

I watched, I watched my Knicks pretty religiously. I watched the New York Knicks got my NBA subscription. I think the NBA does a hell of a job with their re replays and stuff.

They, you know, I, I've been watching it a lot. I'm not gonna say they make every call perfect, but they go to the replay a lot. And, and the replay usually is pretty definitive.

I, I think replay here is more effective than AI anyway, though, guys, we we're 20 minutes in on this and we're never going to come to an answer. Stay tuned. Hey, if you are not watching the Super Bowl Sunday, instead of eating Chinese food, watch old Textron Gang.

We got a bunch of episodes. Go catch up on ai. Do something positive.

Let's watch it during the Commercial gang binge. We, we don't have a text on gang commercial Mitchell for the Super Bowl. Oh darn.

No, we don't got that kind of budget. Come on though. Maybe, maybe ads will go down next year.

We could do a text on gang or bought us. I thought you had your free cash. Well, I was hoping to get invited to perform at halftime, but they got someone else for that too.

Alright, we're gonna take a break here on Text Drunk Gang. We're gonna be coming back. Let's talk about something else you're watching.

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Hey guys, we're back in. ai that you should all check out, but it basically suggests that despite all the hypes surrounding ai, it's just too hard for us to implement. And it requires humans who have super skills and not everybody has those skills.

So we're not seeing AI become pervasive the way we might have initially thought. And it's just too damn hard. And you've been tracking the space for a while.

What's your sense of, you know, are we kind of like the techies are all over, this AI thing is gonna automate the world. And I think the average person's kind of looking at it going, well, that's a lovely idea, but I can't do it. I don't think we help ourselves by changing jargon every 15 minutes.

So for example, AG agentic AI is the new term. Vanti about it sounds like a company name. It's intimidating.

People have to read up what it is. They may not understand when we really could just say agent. Um, I think it's just a type of AI that can make decisions and adapt and using agents, but yet we've coined a term.

So I think as technologists, we have to resist the temptation to brand and name everything because that intimidates people and users, right? But I think that, you know, the thrust of the article was really that democratization has stalled, uh, lack of democratization has stalled, uh, trust. And the complexity is too much.

So Kempel was basically arguing that everyday users have to have specialized skills to adopt ai. And you know, we need things like no code, uh, tools and accessible interfaces, open model. And I think something that he said that really resonated with me was that we need open source foundations and data transparency.

I think there's a lot of lack of trust. Look at deep seek, for example. Everybody was on that train and then they realized, oh wait, it's China.

Oh wait, where's my data going? And then it just sort of started a chain reaction of distrust along with it. But every platform faces it because of the lack of transparency.

I mean, need to make the same argument about centralized versus decentralized, right? Uh, are these platforms taking off that are decentralized? Not as much.

Uh, so we're sort of in a will they, won't they, you know, like a Ross and Rachel situation, because I think a lot of organizations find it too complicated. And in some cases, I have to be honest, AI is really a solution looking for a problem, right? So we're sort of in the, in the in between middle earth phase where I think we're gonna get there.

But I think that he's right. Kembel was absolutely right. We need more user friendly, accessible and trustworthy AI so that people can understand, which is, and I'm, I know I say it a lot, but I love perplexity, um, because it's actually utilizing deep seek.

But it, it shows you when you use deep seek, whether you agree with the China part or not, it shows you it's chain of thought. It tells you why you get to your reasoning. And even just that subtle change has built trust with a lot of users despite who, who has released it.

So I think that that's sort of an indicating note that Kempel is right. People want more transparency when it comes to AI adoption. Yeah, it's a, it it's a really good point.

Um, I would say that the user experience with generative AI is broken. We're starting with, you know, everything is a chat for one. Not everything is, is well well suited to towards the chat.

The, the other is the fact that you have to select which model you're going to use. 5 sonnet versus other alternatives. You know, there's a lot of belief that, um, LLMs are essentially gonna be commoditized 'cause there's so many of them.

And we'll, perfect how to train 'em and build them. And yes, they'll increment and get better. I kinda look at it as, I don't care what dictionary, you know, word uses to spell check or gram what Grammarly uses to, you know, grammar check my writing, just do a good job of it.

I really don't wanna spend any time checking it. And the fact that we require developers testing people everyday users of ai, you know, people just using their computer for work, whatever might be, you know, select your engine, your provider of choice of choice, I think, I think we've kind of got it backwards. Let's like, make the interface what the task is and not what the technology behind it of the 25 choices you've gotta choose from.

Right? I totally agree. And I think HuggingFace does a great job.

Um, they make it feel like an open marketplace. Uh, it's approachable, but again, for developers, complex Users, complexity. Yeah.

A user would, Having the open marketplace is, is is a complexity. I, I have a different take on this. I don't think it's the complexity per se.

I, I think first of all, you've gotta, not all AI users are the are alike. It's not a monolith, right? Tech folk who are used to, You know, dealing with user interfaces and, and maybe understand a little bit about what's going on with different models and stuff is one set.

I think when you look at the non-tech crowd, I think there's two main things that are holding back greater adoption. Number one, FUD for your uncertainty and doubt every day they're hearing how dangerous this could be. How we could take your job away.

How the Chinese are spying on us by doing it. How, you know, they're sucking all your information and making it available every day's. A new story here that I think, you know, non-tech folks, non-security folks are half scared to death to use the technology.

And it's kinda like moths to a flame of those who do, right? They use it basically for poly tricks and cute, nice to haves, but are not using it the way we would want them to use it. And the way this we're talking about here, the second piece of it is most non-tech people don't understand what to use it for.

They think it's a better Google go search using ai and you can search using ai. Don't get me wrong, but it's not, the power here isn't searching right? Uh, you know, how many, how many calls were, were disputed by NFL Refs or by NFL coaches in 2024?

That's a great Google, right? But it's not an A thing, Right? But it's wrong.

It's wrong a lot of the time, right? That's, that's the Thing is that's the other part. It's wrong are wrong, it's wrong, but you shouldn't be using it to search that.

Now, I do believe, and I've seen it now in our Google workspace, and I've seen it in my Microsoft office and I see it in my email program that I use and some of the others, you know, the copilot kind of thing where it is built into the app you are working on it is a little easier than just using a standalone chat bot, right? Like I open chat GPT or Claude or, or one of those on my desktop. Um, but I, I think in, you know, I had this discussion with my youngest son last night.

He's a TV broadcaster and we were talking and he said, dad, you know, local TV cable is, is getting killed. Everybody's cutting the cord. I don't know if I wanna go work for another local TV station or do I wanna be a digital storyteller and go work directly for a sports team or, you know, 'cause sports is where he is at.

I said, well Brad, if you're gonna be a digital storyteller, you better figure out how to use AI to tell your story. 'cause you're 23 years old and you are not gonna have a long career as a digital storyteller, whatever that is. Um, if you're not going to harness AI because you will be replaced if you don't leverage it.

He said, nah, you'll always need a person. You'll always need humans. There's only so much it could do.

And I think that's the other thing is there's a big feeling out there that it does this much. It's never gonna really do this much. And I think those people are wrong.

And I, okay, so the premise of this is partially is how it's slowing adoption because it's so complex. And that's probably very true. But guys, how far are we into this?

I mean, we are talking about how big AI is and how it transforms everything we know about business, everything we know about customer service, everything you know about retail, all these kind of things is, is massively transformative. And what we're fine, what you're looking at is, okay, so we're bumping up against the wall on different things. Oh, it can do this, but it can't do this.

Okay, so then we get to do invention. Oh, it's, it's gonna eat up all of our energy. We gotta have, build all these atomic power plants.

Okay, well, maybe not, maybe, you know, some of the learnings that we're getting from Deep Sea as well as IBM and how they're gaining efficiency with some of the things we're doing, we don't have to do that. So this is, you know, we're only into a very, very small, you know, maybe, maybe not even 10% of what this this can do. And that means invention.

And so I think, you know, tech people want things to move really fast. You know, it doesn't move that fast. You know, Microsoft wants everybody to adopt, you know, copilot.

So they pound on us for like, I don't know how long they're doing it, but they can't even get us off Windows 10 for crying out loud Windows 10. There are people weren't running Well. Said.

Yeah. So, You know, and, and you know, they're threatening us this year. It's like, I think they'll capitulate because we're saying absolutely long Live Windows 95 long wi live Windows 95.

I don't think, and I agree with you Kimberly, I don't think that we've had AI's killer moment yet, right? Like augmented reality had its augmented reality had its killer moment when everyone was using Snapchat filters, not realizing that they were using augmented reality, right? They were using it mass adoption without acknowledgement of the technology.

AI has not had its killer moment because although people are technically using it with voice assistance agents, whatever, I don't think it's reached that moment where we're all dying to use it, but we don't know that we're using it or we're not aware as Aware. And I don't think we're going to, I think we're gonna get into this world as, and I think about the enterprise. So I keep going back to how they're, what they're adopting, what they're doing and the kind of applications they're starting on and the applications that they're doing.

We're gonna see this customer service capability. It's gonna change how we do, how customer service happens. So we won't even know that's going on.

We'll just know that it's changed. And that same thing is gonna happen with, you know, some of the logistics. We're gonna see logistics change as they apply that kinda things.

I mean, just that mere thing about what, you know, when I was talking to Novartis or they're presenting at AWS and saying, you know, they went from 50 people filling out the forms that they have to fill out in order to get a drug over to the FDA to being able. And in eight weeks or 13 weeks or however long it was down to like three days, it's like, holy crud, that's transformative. So there are these pockets of transformation, it's just that we don't see it as a day-to-day thing.

It's just going to happen over time. Well, there's two types of change that, that occurs with technology. One is doing what we do, but doing it with the technology that either does it faster, cheaper, maybe it eliminates a task, whatever it might be.

The other is doing something you couldn't do before. It just wasn't feasible possible. Or we didn't even think about solving it that way.

You know, may maybe, uh, you know, one might be, uh, you know, discovering new proteins is something, an activity that we have that we do and say in labs already, we just hadn't used ai. Now we do, et cetera. But um, you know, maybe we create a new element.

Nobody thought I could create a new element. Now I can do that with ai. I'm just making up something.

But something that was brand new, never, never thought of before. Those, those are the kinda real, to me, that's the real transformative change. The, um, doing things better, faster, cheaper, or not at all is the evolutionary part of change.

And we're still mostly in that phase, but, But until those two moments happen, there's gonna be this disconnect between the type of experiences you expect daily from AI and what you're being fed with ai, which is just the conundrum. Plus, as Alan said, you mentioned the FUD factor. Something like Deep Sea comes along immediately becomes number one free app on the app stores, then only to be told the users who've downloaded, only be told 24 hours later what's happening to your data and what's China doing with it.

These things work against, against ai. It's just this kind of conundrum of hype versus reality. And I think to some extent, deep Seq was exposed in embarrassment of riches.

We had all just accepted the way that things were being done was how they needed to be done. And here they came and they unseated us. Although I really wanna know what Chip they used.

I don't think that that's been public yet. But that was a game changer in a way that I think almost needed to happen because we just had sorted accepted this mass consumption of energy was a given. We accept, we accepted that this was the path and they showed us, actually, no, it's not so good.

Good for them. I don't think. I don't think, just just to go on the record here, um, I don't think Microsoft's gonna give up on Windows 10.

What they're gonna do is launch Windows 12. They're gonna call it the AI enabled version. And because 13 is unlucky, they're only gonna stay on even numbers from there on out.

So we'll go from 12 to 14 and that's how it'll get us all on board. I actually give them a lot of credit because as an SEOI am seeing Bing in the top 10 of traffic as you know, uh, search engines bringing traffic to my clients for the first time probably ever. Bing is, Bing is not, not ads organic, uh, because of of chat GBT and because of the integration.

So good for them. I, I don't disagree with you, but I have noticed that I am being pulled into using Bing against my will. And then I have to look at it and then I go, oh crap, that was a bing result.

And then I go back to Google to get the result that I am looking for. 'cause the Bing result is still kind of crappy. That's just your bias against all Microsoft.

I, I'm a big Windows user, but Eng is still Not as good. Whatcha you getting from Google? They're a little Gemini thing and then a bunch of sponsored ads and then all the way down on the bottom, you actually get a search result.

It's ridiculous. That is ridiculous. That is, Well it's turning.

They're hurt, they're hurting traffic. Right? The more people get from Absolutely.

You know, the zero click content, the less they're gonna click on sites. It's leveled out many, many sites Yes. 'cause of those overviews.

Yeah. And, and I guess that's what they wanted, but to me it's not great search anymore. No, well they're doing it on purpose.

'cause they wanna be the provider of the content, right? They're essentially not being a facilitator. They wanna become the provider of the content using AI results that they pull from the people who create the content.

Yeah. Yet another company taking content without permission. So is there any, uh, uh, Anna, maybe you have this data since this is what you, what's your core business is.

I mean, I personally, I I don't even read it. I just go down because I don't trust it. I mean, I AI generator, this goes back, this goes back to what you were talking about.

I don't trust the data that's getting presented to me by Google on, on that summary. Um, I just kind of start pinging down 'cause I wanna go something that's been vetted by somebody, a person, and that's not been vetted. So is are people doing that?

Are they, are they just ignoring that and going down or what's happening with it? Um, Well most of the time You need a summary, right? Do you really want a summary of this?

I'm not looking For that. Right? Well, the, the overviews were only as of a month ago, only in 17% of, of queries.

I think that has ratcheted up Oh, a lot. 'cause as they're making a mad, they're making a mad push for Gemini. Like, you'll notice Gemini, if you're in Gmail, is offering to read your email for you and summarize it.

They're, they're pushing it down our throats. I personally always read it because I'm trying to dissect how it's putting itself together. Where is it pulling sources from?

I'm reading it for a curiosity and an analysis viewpoint, but often I do skim below it. And those statistics I don't think are readily available yet. But I have a feeling that, um, the average consumer is maybe not so discerning.

They're like, oh, answer easy. Good if, especially if it's something simple, right? Like, when is a business open or how do I get there?

You know, those sorts of queries know the more complex stuff. I hope so. I hope we're not blindly trusting them, but I I'm afraid a lot of consumers will.

I wanna right click and delete it And I would be nice. Just a little X and closed all thing. All right.

Hey, we gotta take a break. We're gonna come back and discuss, uh, our third segment today. But you're gonna have to wait for us to come back.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Hey everybody, that's my Alan Chimble invitation right there. Um, we, uh, Mitch and I are out at the, uh, Dynatrace conference this week.

And Dynatrace, if you don't know, is a provider of an observability platform. And they've been around for a long time. And we're, the show is really about how to bridge this divide between IT operations folks that have been using various platforms to observe it and what developers see.

Because we all have heard the story about developer says, well, it worked on my laptop, but it doesn't work in the production environment. And this conversation's been going on longer than anybody cares to admit. In fact, you know, I would say three quarters of applications when they're first built probably don't run on the production environment they're intended to until they get tweaked and somebody kind of bangs them in the shape.

But Mitch, you're here with me. Are we making progress here? What's your take on what's going on with Dynatrace specifically?

But in general, can we get better at this? 'cause it seems like, I feel like I've been having this conversation for three decades now. You mean if it works in production, it would've worked in test, is that what you're saying?

Yeah, Something like Something. No, it's interesting where, you know, we used the term shift left about security. We're seeing shift left happen with observability, right?

Moving earlier into the kind of workflows that happened before things get into production. I think, you know, a year or two ago it was all focused around how do we consolidate to one source of truth between securities, the SecOps, um, use of security and, and it ops use of observability, uh, for those applications. Now it's how do we, how do we get a window into observability data that's captured in testing, but also in production all the way back up into the development part of the process.

And that was a big part of what dynatrace's announcements are. And there are a few companies that are focused on this area, which I think is really encouraging is literally as a developer being that because they ingest the code base and, and, uh, analyze it against the, uh, the telemetry data that they're getting as a developer, you can say, I'm looking at this piece of code. What are the log messages or alerts or alarms or telemetry data that was captured as part of this?

'cause I'm trying to understand if that's the error that I'm really trying to track down or in operations, right? You can say, here's where the issue, uh, the symptoms of the issue that we're seeing and immediately go to some of the parts of the code base that that might be. But it also applies for testing, you know, know, solving bugs and things like that.

So why wouldn't you want to benefit from what we're seeing in production, which is ultimately why we're writing in the code and also what we're seeing in test, uh, because that's part of kinda getting through that process into production. So there's a lot of good things. Uh, Dynatrace is one of the companies that's doing this new rec, new Relic is another, um, honeycomb is a very developer focused observability platform.

Of course, the, you know, the other players, Splunk and others have been around for a while and, and they can play in development, but some are, are catering more to earlier in this awkward development lifecycle. Y You know, it's funny, observability, let's face it, observability originally was replacing a PM, which, you know, when I look at the software development life cycle with deployment being kind of the center and stuff left and stuff, right? A PM was all on the right side, right post-deployment, how's my application performing?

But now observability and we saw at a cube con, I suspect we'll see the cube con in London in a few weeks again, or two, a couple months again, and, and here at Dynatrace. And what you're saying, Mitchell, the action in observability now is on the left side and, and, you know, pre-deployment and moving further into the developer. And I, I didn't see that coming to tell you the truth.

I I, uh, I didn't think that that was Where, Where, where the action would be. But plainly, that's, that's where these folks are, are moving, right? It's like Predeployment and connecting development and ops together.

So, sorry Mike, I didn't mean to step on you there. Go ahead. No worries.

But Kimberly, I was involved in this philosophical debate last night and it meant something like this. Wait a second. Were there beers involved?

It might have been a couple of beers involved, just chuck it. But, but the core conversation, old fashion, is it, is it, is it incumbent upon the developers to make their applications work in the production environment as dictated by the IT ops folks? Or is it incumbent upon the IT ops folks to figure out a way to make the application run and who's, you know, responsible or who should give more here in this conversation?

Because, you know, ultimately the application drives the business. So it's, you know, who, what's, what's the dog and what's the tail here? Well, I think it depends.

Classic engineer, That's definitive right there. It really depends upon what part the application. You have a future as a referee here perhaps.

So Ball this part of the line, it's the DevOps and the ball went on this lining side, the operations problem. So I mean, so on the, on the observability, I mean, this is what you're talking about is where, where things get glued together, right? So if the application has to run appropriately itself, okay, so it's whether that, so how it gets deployed, how it's connected to probably in gonna say these things, I may don't, probably don't have any idea what I'm talking about here, but how it's connecting to the database, the live database it's working on, how it's, you know, it's working with the other applications that have to run there, you know, when, when, when they come up, et cetera.

So there's, I think there's probably scenarios where it's an IT operations problem and there's scenarios where it's a DevOps problem. So that's why when you're saw saying shift left, you're not just gonna shift it over to the guy. This says, it's all your fault, all your problem, all your issues I need.

And that's where the observability probably comes into play is that I'm getting more of a, you know, full war look, look at how this thing is running and operating. Is that good? Yeah, no.

So I, look, I believe developers should not develop in a vacuum, right? Because that never ends well. And so Kimberly, to your point, when you're a developer and you're writing an app that's gonna make a database call, it's incumbent upon you to make sure that that call actually does get made and that, you know, your SQL is right or whatever you are using to make, you know, make the call the query, and that that information is passed through and it, and it moves on to the next, it moves on to the next task.

Um, I, I was, and I've always felt, even before DevOps, I've always felt this way that, you know, the developer sits there and says, well, it ran on my machine. That that's nonsense, man. You know that you didn't do your job Well, I always thought, Go ahead Anthony, as we go, go, Mike.

No, no, No, Kimberly, you go, go ahead. Well, so if you, that's why, I mean, if you think about it, Alan, was it two, three years ago when platform ops became a thing at Q Con, right up until that time, the only people that were at Cube Con we're developers, right? And they said, I don't need operations because I can stand this entire thing up myself and I can run it.

Well then things kind of got bigger, and once we started getting bigger, we started dividing the responsibilities a bit more. And then we said, okay, so there's this other thing called platform ops that we have to have. But so dev operations and platform operations gotta get together.

And oh, by the way, there's this other guy called SEC too. So it isn't, one person doesn't have all the knowledge for this. They, it's just impossible to do.

It's too com too big and too complex, which is why they're having the AI engine there, et cetera. So Mitch, I think, and I'm Italian, I'm not Italian, but I'm still using my hands On, I I see that, but that's good. Well, look, coming east, I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna Surprisingly disagree with Alan.

Um, all the time that we see this, it's like developers go out and they go, well, the database, the production environment is using. So, so I'm gonna go out and, you know, get a different database. It'll be MongoDB, a document database, I'll run it myself, I'll manage it myself for about nine months.

And then I get tired of that. And then I take this giant turd of a thing and I give it over to the it ops people and say, now it's yours to run because I'm busy, I gotta go write another application. This happens all the time.

And so, Mitch, you're laughing. Yeah, I just, your choice of words just struck me odd there. Well, yeah, I personally think, you know, let's just wind it all the way back, you know, development and production is the answer to all this.

'cause then you don't have a difference between your development environment and your production environment. I say in all just no, I'm not suggesting that you that we do that. I think Kimberly, you're definitely onto it, which is connecting that what you said with Alan's point is part of platform engineering is creating the platforms that are gonna help you get through the process and get to production.

So you're not go building your own environment to develop, do development in that is wildly different or even mildly different from what's in production, but it causes you to trip up in getting it there. And that's part, I think that part, part of the rule, maybe even the responsibility platform engineering, is to do everything we can to make that process flow, flow as smoothly as possible. So as we move from development through test into production, but it's containerized or it's platforms or whatever it is, that helps us keep those environments as consistent as possible.

I agree. com, another tech drug site. You can learn all about this there, guys.

Did I tee that up? Yeah, we, we've gotta end it. But before we end, let me just say I would discount anything Mike Vizard said about disagreeing with me.

'cause the rumor is he does share an account with a known gambler. Um, I hope you've enjoyed this text With, And thanks for joining us. We'll see you soon, Kimberly, as always, it's a pleasure to have you on.

I know you're headed on a little bit of a cruise vacation. Enjoy it. I hope the weather's great for you, Mitchell, Mike, enjoy Vegas.

Get home soon. John, keep an eye on Silicon Valley for us out there. Okay, I one.

All righty. Until next time, happy Thursday, we'll be back tomorrow. Of course, we have a full text drunk TV lineup immediately following the gang today.

So stay tuned, stay here on your favorite channel. We're coming at you. This is Alan Shimel.

We're outta here.