Techstrong Gang – November 1, 2024

Hi, everyone. Happy Friday and happy 1st of November to you. It's Turkey month.

Hard to believe. Let's see what kind of turkeys we have today on Textron Gang. Hey everyone, it's Alan Shimel here for Techstrong, and you're watching, as I said, drug gang.

Got some really interesting topics to delve into today, and it's a busy week coming up next week. Obviously, if you haven't voted next Tuesday's your day, no excuses. Um, that being said, let me introduce speaking of voting.

You can vote for our panel members today. You can write them in. They're all available.

Um, let me introduce you to them. We've got quite a panel, well represented, coast to coast, north to south. Let's start off in the, in the, uh, in the West.

We gotta go first to heavy is royalty. The c are of Silicon Valley, no longer sporting his baseball Gear. Yeah, I know.

Well, good morning Everyone. We put the, we put the balls in the midst away for the year. Yes.

First of all, my condolences to you, Alan and Mike on the World Series. You know, game five gave me a flashback to this year's Super Bowl, and the 40 ERs made mistake upon mistake, and the Chiefs took advantage to win in overtime. But this is the beauty of sports, I guess That is, that's the, that's why we, they let the raid horses race.

John, Jon Swartz with us. John, welcome. Thank you.

Joining John out in Silicon Valley, and she has almost looks like nice fall colors behind her there. Is it full? Well, kind of our Resident, it's rained this morning.

Excuse me. It rained in California this morning. It rained in ca.

That's a good day. Yes. Yes.

It rained in California in November. November Wood. Lisa Martin.

Hi Lisa. How are you? Hi.

Great, Alan. Great to see you. It's excited to be on the game today.

Thank you. It's good to have you on. Speaking of rain or no rain?

I, I, New York is in a bit of a drought. New York, Pennsylvania, that area. I've been up couple last couple times in the last couple weeks, and I know they've been having some drought.

I don't know if it has anything to do with Mike moving back there. Mike moved back there. The Yankees lost the World Series, and they're having a drought just saying our chief content officer, Mike Vizard.

Hey, Mike, welcome. Happy to see you Realize today, of course, that you being a Saint John's graduate would know that today is All Saints Day, right? Yes, it is.

So that was one of the nicest things. And did you know That God, did you know that there's a patron saint of the internet? Saint Isador of s Abel appointed by He, the Internet, the second Saint Isador lived in the 600 ad and I guess the Pope thought the internet was gonna be a fountain of knowledge, so he named this fella as the patron saint of the internet.

And who says that Pope doesn't have a sense of humor. There you go. They never taught us that in St.

John's. Well, that's 'cause you LA graduated by the time Pope John Paul II got to it, right? Yes.

He was still Cardinal Carroll Lou Jho or something, or is that the guy from Barney Miller There? Yeah, both Baby. But I did enjoy getting off for All Saints Day at St.

John's. I'll tell you that. As a Jewish kid, it was great.

I got to take off the Jewish holidays and they gave you off all the Catholic holidays. I tried to convince him I was Muslim and Hindu. They didn't buy it.

But, um, I took off as often as I could. But Mike, welcome. Let's turn down though to, uh, down, down Austin way.

I, I hope, I assume he's home in Austin. Uh, I am Visual, uh, visible impact CTO Guy Currier. I still see visual sometimes.

I'm sorry, guy. I know it's visible. No, that's all right.

That's all right. Uh, uh, as I always say, uh, I don't care what you call me. Just call me.

Okay. Happy to be here. And, uh, also a dry part of, uh, especially dry, even though it's usually dry anyway, part of the us, uh, Austin, Texas, where we are actually getting rain today, really in the form of three sprinkles and a little bit of wind.

Well, you know what? Look, the, the people in California used to state say that now they get atmospheric oceans. So yes, we do.

Seriously, yeah, Go Figure. Managed to avoid those so far. So, yeah.

And then look, he's probably the only person who's had snow. I heard it snowed yesterday. He's up high in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, our CTO and Fu vp Mitchell.

Ashley. Hey, Mitch. Hey.

I barely made it shoveled my way to the microphone this morning, you know, kicking that Snow up. I didn't get that much snow, Mitchell. No, we didn't get it down here.

It's up in the mountains. Okay. I thought you were gonna tell you walked five miles uphill in that uphill, which just ran around your legs.

You haven't shoveled till you shoveled uphill. Both direct. I gotcha.

All right, gang members, welcome. We've got an amazing, uh, couple of topics to hit on today. Our first one is, has it achieved self-actualization?

Mike, why don't you set the table for us on this? All, we're making a little reference to Maslow and his hierarchy of needs here, but it's that time of year where we kind of reflect on where is it in this giant landscape of business that we cover all the time. And, um, there's two reports out.

One is on tech strong, ITSM talking about how it people, at least the CIOs, are more closely aligned with the business. And Broadcom has a separate report out on digital CXO talking about how, um, businesses themselves are starting to be realigned, where they're selling digital products, that includes an IT team, and they're kind of reorganizing how they approach the whole thing. And Alan, you and I were talking about that a couple of years ago when we launched digital CXO in the first place.

But guy, I mean, I love the concept, but I think you and I were talking about this 25 years ago when we were at Ziff Davis, and I'm not sure it's really moved the needles so far, because I still run into it, people who are, you know, back office folks that are reporting into A CFO and they're not really that tied into the business. Where, where do you think we are as an industry? Yes.

25 years ago, uh, at least, uh, when you were 10 years old and I was five years old. Well, Exactly. Well as the, as the person who aspires to be the resident, uh, cynic and, uh, uh, negative Nelly.

Um, I'm really flummoxed by this particular topic, Mike, because, um, I don't know if you'll agree, but I have to admit that, um, there is, uh, I, I, I, I fully endorsed not just admit the idea that this trend, um, is, has been a long-term trend, but is real and is continuing because when we back, wait A second, let's stop the presses. Hey, make note of this. He's the first tar he's agreed with law.

I know. Don't know. I truly, I don't, I don't know what to do.

Um, This is like, this is like the lone the lone conservative on CNN is calling, you know, for socialism. We, you, I've Worked, I've worked with these IT shops, um, you know, after our media time together 25 years ago, Mike, and, uh, you know, Mitch, I know you've done that the same, um, uh, let, let me put it this way. Um, the initiation of this was back in the late nineties with the creation of the IT analyst function or the really, the creation, the broad acceptance of that.

So the initial take on this in IT shops was, let's get a person on this. We're gonna have a person who's gonna align with the business and get embedded in the business or the business unit or whatever it is. And they're gonna go and make demands as an advocate to the rest of it.

But at this stage, honestly, I mean, product management alone, um, has permeated all kind. And we're gonna talk about that probably in, in the next segment a little bit. It's permeated business all over the place.

All kinds of strange places. This idea of product development, product management, in the service of a constituency, IT shops call their internal clients, their customers. They're also increasingly call calling business partners, customers referring to directly to customers.

They're supporting products, um, essentially products that are profit and loss products. And they are not just the cost center for that. Um, it, it, it's just been a slow road, Mike.

It's just been a slow road. It's just taken a really long time. And I would say 10 years ago, it was lip service from C-I-O-C-T-O, um, and so forth.

Uh, uh, good marketing, like all that sort of thing. Help energize the teams internally, help good, provide good brand positioning, all of which, you know, are real contributions. But now what we see in these shops is really this general sense all the way down to the platform engineer, the data center managers, uh, you know, e even the specifiers, that what they're trying to do is, uh, even in a nonprofit organization, they have a goal and a mission, and they're investing in it, and they take part in the outcome.

Are we a hundred percent there? No. Are we even set 50% there?

I don't know. But it, it's, it's real. It is real.

I, I guy, I, I actually agree with you as well. I, I think, wait, Stop the, go Ahead. No, no.

Look, I never agree either, but you know, I, I think you, we've gotta look at this trend though, in terms of the larger trend of the maturation of it, right? Yes. You mentioned the nineties.

That's Right. It itself isn't that old, right? It sometimes we forget that the whole IT industry is, what, 70 years old, something like that.

75 years old, maybe saying it started maybe in the fifties, late forties even. So, you know, and I, in my lifetime anyway, in my working career, the biggest change has been it as a sort of like my boat, a hole in the ground, or a hole in the water that I throw money into, right? It was a cost center.

And the transition has been to it being a revenue generator, right? You can't, you can't do business today. You can't get new customers, you can't go digital without it.

By the same token, you can't do it without being digital. So those go hand in hand in glove. Um, so, you know, that has been the, I think the overarching trend.

And then certainly since covid, right? We've seen that acceleration, this transformation accelerated. And I think now, you know, these surveys and, and you know, the articles that we're putting up here for this have, um, are just noting what, what's been taking place, right?

Digital is permeated up and down the organization and where digital goes, it goes with it. I think it also, you know, you mentioned covid, that was the, at the same time when digital transformation was the buzzword, and of course, uh, CO accelerated a lot of those projects. And those are all about, I think, helped get it from being the back office to, if our strategy is gonna be dependent on software, I'm not gonna treat software as back office.

I'm gonna put them on the front lines with me so we cross the line together. 'cause if they're not incentive to do that, so there's been this move of, all right, stop putting metrics in place that are important to it within it put metrics that drive toward what the strategy with the business goals are, et cetera. If it's time to market for products, if it's, uh, gaining market share, if it's going into new markets, if it's, if it's, you know, profitability, whatever those things are, you should be able to tie your major initiatives in IT light of sight at least to well, by doing A, B and C that helps us do here.

Not, not indirect. You know, we always sort of help that, which is kind of the, the, the funny business that we played for so long. So it, it's inevitable.

If your business strategy is highly dependent on software, guess what? People that are in are part of creating that need to be incented on the business outcomes. Lisa, let me ask you a question here from the other side.

Is it the IT people who changed? Or is it more that the business people became more tech savvy and understood that the tech was kind of core to the whole motion and that's what drove this level of collaboration finally after 25 years? Because it was kind of like we had to wait for a new generation of tech savvy business executives?

Yes. That's a great question, Mike. I think it's a, it's a mix of both, but I see a little bit more on the side of business leaders becoming more tech savvy, marketing, having a help in there with its strong collaborations that I see with the CIO to really understand how they're working together to explain change management, to describe it, to facilitate IT marketing folks are very much aligned with, with the ServiceNow and ThoughtLab survey are incentivized on revenue impact, um, cost control alignment with the business.

And so I see a lot of business leaders becoming much more tech savvy over the last, in my experience, I'd say 10 years. Uh, and I think we're seeing some of the IT folks come around. Um, but a, a big challenge of that is, is, is behavioral to change management.

And it needs to really be both sides coming together. And that's never gonna be perfect, especially as organizations vary one from the next. It's gonna be a balance of that.

But I think we're seeing it starting to move the dial forward so that ultimately the c-suite is aligned to drive the business outcomes to drive and impact revenue profitability. Alan, we've seen, we have at least one or two friends who were IT folks who became product managers? Are we gonna see more of that as this whole thing evolves, Not only product managers, but I, you know, interestingly, I do my text on TV interviews, and I would say just this week alone, I did two or three interviews with, or senior VP level product marketing folks who actually started their career as engineers, as coders and engineers, network people, and moved over to the quote unquote business side of the house.

Two of them went and got their MBAs, right? Uh, one was a psychology major and wound up going back for an MBA be, and, and then one was a, a CS major who then got an MBA and, and their product market, they, their leading product marketing at public companies and, and major companies. So I think that's a trend.

I I think we're seeing, you know, what's the career path? Well, you can become a CIO C-level. You can become a ciso, but there are a lot of people who, you know, are on a technical track, on a digital IT track and made the switch over to the business side, whether it be a product owner or product marketing or operational operations.

And, you know, I think it's from those people that you wind up getting tomorrow's CEOs, chief executive officers, because then they're well-rounded. Yeah. It's just this generational evolution as Mike.

And the premise of Mike's question is exactly right. I mean, this is what's happening within these companies. I talked to the, a chief product officer at Apptio from, from IBM yesterday, and he has that backgrounds.

Well, this is, these are the smarter, more savvy. There's the days of when you have the CEO, who is the, um, the businessman who was brought in, like, I'll, I'll just go far back. I'll date myself and talk about John Scully, like the marketing guy behind Pepsi.

Then, then you evolve to a guy like y um, uh, I thought he was Schindler well, well known for the Newton. Yeah. Oh God.

Talking about SNL skit. That, that was an SNL skit. Remember that?

Mm-Hmm. Um, but I mean, it of evolved from him to jobs. He was also a master marketer.

But then, you know, eventually these things have changed. And I think these, the whole new generation, and they've gotten better, they've gotten more, um, well-rounded in what they do. And by the way, you guys, I worked at Z Davis 35 years ago to, so it really date myself When you were five years old.

Listen, um, the, the, this no older, this, this concerns me. So, and so now I can finally bring the rain clouds in for everybody. This is, this is because I work with as, as do you, Alan, um, and you Mitch, I work with a lot of marketers.

I work with product leaders and a lot of marketers at, uh, at, at, at vendors, uh, IT vendors. Um, this is not an easy bridge to cross, uh, from out of an engineering mindset, um, where you're building value into a marketing mindset where you are trying to communicate, um, that value. Because a lot of times that value is complex.

There's nuance to it. Um, these are really important for, uh, uh, for, uh, organizations adopting technologies to understand, because they need to find the right product. And so the nuance is important, but you don't get to, uh, absorb or communicate, uh, one side or the other, that nuance in a marketing context.

So it's a process. It takes time. And, um, what I'm leading up to here is I know a lot of these folks, um, some of them quite talented and definitely future CEO material who can bridge that gap between the engineering or product development side and the communications and marketing side.

But that is, uh, an untested and immature, uh, uh, uh, you know, um, area of functionality or I dunno how to put it, right? And so that's an area of disruption. Now, um, I consume and review, um, lots of marketing materials all day long, all the time.

And a lot of times I am sitting here as an analyst trying to figure out what the heck is being communicated. And it's not because these people aren't smart. It's not because they don't know their product.

Um, it's because doing both is really tough and everyone's gonna be doing it eventually Alan as well. Maybe not everybody, but a lot of people are gonna be doing it. But that is an area of professional development that doesn't really exist right now.

Well, you know, that, that's, that's one path. But I think kinda stepping back to Mike's question again, more broadly is it's a confluence of things happening, right? Because you were asking sort of, did the business change?

Did it teach engine? To Lisa's point, it's both, right? I mean, think about how we develop software bringing in Agile, oh, this, this, this really unique idea of let's put product domain people with the team, building the product, and create this process of creating software.

Let's create more cross-functional teams, um, software becoming part of the business strategy more, let's say tech aware, sometimes tech savvy, um, executives. And, you know, not every executive is a tech savvy exec, but they know that tech is part of their strategy, and they, they either know, know enough of it themselves or surround themselves with the folks that can help put those strategies together, implement that. So I think we've been kind of heading down this path, this natural convergence or confluence of things happening together.

And, you know, the conversation about some people crossover between two and, and Europe, you're right, it's not, you know, it's not an easy transition to make and not everybody makes, and then vice versa, right? It's like going into tech if that's not really your sort of mindset for things, but where, where's it gonna go? I think, I think tech is all throughout our lives.

It's all throughout our business, and I think we're just gonna see more and more of all of us, you know, having an influence on where we go technically in our products services. So, Mitchell, Mitch, you bring up something that I wanted to throw to Lisa. What about the other side of the street?

What about our marketing people, right? Are they, are they getting, what's the word, exposed to technology enough? Are they savvy enough about the technology, about it, about digital to, to a harness the tools that are available to them digitally, and b, understand what it is they're marketing.

We, we have a customer, it's actually a FU customer and Textron customer that I've dealt with for, I'm not mentioning names, but we've dealt with them for the 10 years that I'm doing Media ops Textron. They recently brought in a whole new marketing team, fantastic enterprise, fortune 500 marketers. They know very, very little about cybersecurity.

And it's evident, really evident. It's only a matter of time in my mind until the CEO who's a very cyber savvy, CEO, recognizes this. And maybe it was the board or the PE or whoever who put them in.

But you know, this is a problem, Lisa. How, how do we, by the same, you know, by the same token that we're talking about this crossover from tech to business tech to marketing, how is there an underground railroad going the other way? Or does it have to be underground?

Should it be above ground? It should absolutely be above ground. That's a great point, Alan.

I think that's where the C-M-O-C-I-O alignment absolutely has to happen in organizations. And to your point, you can be a world-class marketer from a Fortune 500 background, not understand even how the technology works that your marketing, that's a huge problem. And that's where, uh, the chief technology officer, the CIO and the CMO should be aligned to ensure that the education is bidirectional.

Marketing needs to understand enough about the technology to not only be dangerous from a product marketing perspective, product management perspective, but also to be able to communicate that guy you talked about, a lot of organizations still have challenges with not being able to communicate effectively. I think a lot of organizations have been on a ton of AI washing over the last few years. We've started to see organizations be aware of that, dial that back to really understand where is our value add with our products and services.

Is AI there, is it not? Does it, is it matter? Yes, it does matter.

But the, that bidirectional, that symbiosis between, I think it's really three, I think it's C-T-O-C-I-O and CIO and CMO to ensure that both sides understand this is what we need to communicate to the audience. Okay, this is how we think we should do it. Is this right?

Does it make sense to our, all of our different target audiences? And that trifecta can be hugely impactful, but it's, it's behavioral, it's cultural, and that's a hard thing to move. Agreed.

Great. I turned the whole conversation dark with one remark. I'm satisfied now, Is just, alright, you work here Just another, it's just another disruption.

Disruptions lead to production eventually. I mean, this is, this is a good thing. Yes, it's still a good thing.

Agree. It'll work out And claw it back to positivity here. It's a really, it's still a good thing, right?

Juan? Smiling and, and all we've got happy guy here. Let's take a quick break from Textron Gang and hopefully Guy stays happy.

We'll be back my back in a minute talking about DevOps as a business management philosophy. You're watching Textron Gang Cloud native now is the web's leading resource for the growing cloud native ecosystem. com is your destination for news, thought leadership, features and webinars on cloud native architecture, Kubernetes, serverless, cloud native application development, microservices, service mesh, cloud native security, and more.

Stay on the cutting edge of modern application development at Cloud native now. All right, we're back and we're gonna kind of continue on this theme a little bit, but the question now is, is the tale starting to wag the business dog? com talking about how SpaceX has been essentially applying many of the engineering principles that go with DevOps to how they run the business.

And some people are crediting that with the success the company's having in the rocket space, regardless of how you might personally feel about Elon Musk. But Alan, let's start with you and say, you know, is there a lesson here to be learned and should more organizations kind of think about the way DevOps is managed in smaller chunks and, and understanding the dependencies between things to drive the business as a whole? So putting the whole Elon Musk thing to the side as we, as I think we should, coming into election week next week, uh, and what he's tried to do, but we'll save that for another episode.

Um, look, this has been always something in DevOps, right? Because if you look at the roots of DevOps, where's DevOps come from, right? You got a little bit agile, right?

Scrum, you know, uh, uh, sprints and stuff like that. So doing things in bite-sized chunks, you know, comes from agile. And then you've got lean, not lean it necessarily, it actually comes more from lean manufacturing, right?

Demi and the, and the Toyota example and stuff like that. So when I think we, when we're talking about SpaceX, for instance, you know, and, and doing things in small sprints and running in a lean manner like that, yeah, that's DevOps. You know, some of us call it Dev BizOps.

I've heard, you know, there was a time where I think before Broadcom acquired, ca ca was big on the dev BizOps thing, right? Applying DevOps principles into the business side of the house. Um, that's really what we're talking about here.

But I, I will, as much as I'm not a fan of Elon Musk, it, it, he's done the same thing in Tesla. He's done the same thing in all of his companies. What he's done is he's taken what he learned in PayPal, right?

Building software, how to build software in an agile fashion, little lean it thrown it. And that's how he, that's how they run their companies. He runs them lean, really lean, um, just in time, all of that stuff.

So, you know, to me this is, here's the good news. 'cause I'm, I'm that guy. I'm the good news guy, right?

The good news is, di what lessons from DevOps apply across the board in business And, and just about any, you know, vertical or or area you wanna look at working together as a team, breaking down silos, doing sprints, you know, in bite size. How do you eat the elephant one spoon at a time, right? Lean principles, lean manufacturing, lean it.

These are all fantastic business principles and security too, for that matter. So there you have it. John, you've been covering business for 30 years and to us who have been doing this DevOps thing for a while.

It seems like this is the natural way to do things and yet businesses blow up all the time. And so from your point of view, what is the problem that businesses have with kind of just getting stuff done? Well, it kind of alludes to what we were just previously talking about the natural friction between the different sides.

Um, and I I, I will go back. I was gonna jump in on the, excuse me, I was gonna jump in on the last and mention to you that I had a front row seat to a lot of this when I was growing up. My dad was an engineer who worked at IBM and he started several companies.

He sold one to Seagate. And one of the recurring themes that I heard from him when I was younger was that there was always a disconnect between his side and engineering and production, manufacturing, marketing communications. And I think that just continues to be ongoing.

And if we allude to even Ilan Lu, how he runs things lean and mean to the point of, um, creates chaos. And I, I, I just, I just think this, it's a diff and I will agree with guy. This is a very difficult needle to thread.

Um, there is this expectation now, especially in technology, it's become so much larger. It's, it's so much more at stake. These companies are trying to specialize in certain things while they continue to expand in other, other, other areas.

It's like all these conflicting, um, themes running against one another. Um, it's, it's, I it's just, it's a hard, it's a hard thing to do. And I'll just, I mean, the one thing that always comes back to me is that a company will excel at doing something extremely well, but that market could only last, may only last for a few years until they have to adapt and move into something different.

And they have to anticipate what that's gonna be. So they're constantly under pressure to figure out how to stay on top of things versus other industries that had traditionally stayed relatively stable. So anyway, in a long-winded way, I'm, I'm just saying this stuff is hard to do, But breaking down silos is, is at the heart of DevOps, right?

At the heart of DevOps is getting dev and ops to work together as a team, dev SecOps, get DevOps and security to work together as a team. Is it any different getting DevOps, it, SRE platform engineer, business leaders or business working together as a team breaking down. It shouldn't be engineering throws it over the wall and those sales guys gotta sell it, right?

That, that's DevOps, right? It's that, you know, you can make fun of the cultural aspects of DevOps, but that is the cultural aspect of DevOps. We're all on the same team.

We, we succeed when our company succeeds and our company succeeds when the company makes more money and makes more profits. And we're all in that together. And, you know, that's the lure of this.

So Lisa, let me ask you a question about what Alan is just saying there. 'cause one of the things that this whole conversation always raises in my mind, it's like, are the companies that we all work for today, do they all need to be restructured? Right?

We have a bunch of marketing people over here, salespeople over there, a bunch of engineers over here, and we have all these stove pipes and maybe it's, we're our own worst enemy. I'm sorry. Was that a question for me?

Yes. Okay. Okay.

That's a great question. With the stove pipes, I think it's all about, well, anytime new leadership comes in, whether it's the CEO, the CMO, there's gonna be a reorg. They're gonna come in that wanna do it their way that they've proven before.

What I like about the SpaceX model and is coming from someone who was a NASA payload scientist for five years out of school, things there in the government are very slow. Processes are not rapid. There's lack of reusability.

The failure is not an option. Motto was prominent when I was spent the early two thousands, mid two thousands at nasa. It's not that way at SpaceX that failure is not a bad F word that fail fast, iterate, understand is the organizational structure that we have working today?

If not, what are the elements of that that need to change? How do we do that quickly so we can actually test things, admit when things are wrong and move forward? That's a hard, i, I, I go back to this behavioral kind of mentality.

It's a hard thing to change, but I, I think organizations could benefit from what SpaceX is doing from that fail fast, move forward, test things and, and, and employ some reusability where things are working. I think we're gonna see that differ based on individuals, based on organizations, based on their maturation. It's an, it's a conundrum right now.

That's an interesting one to watch, frankly. You know, you talked about side uh, Yeah, go ahead. Why don't you go, Yeah, I'm mindful of, um, the, um, the, the of our audience here that we are trying to help provide some, some, you know, illumination and insight into how maybe things can be improved or done differently around your business, around your i, your department, your IT or what have you.

And so I'm both enthusiastic and real cautious about the SpaceX example. Um, it it enthusiastic in the sense of I don't normally associate fast failure with people sitting on the top of candles being launched into space. That just doesn't sound right to Lisa's point.

But on the other hand, if you can do it in rocketry, especially manned rocketry, uh, then, uh, maybe it really is applicable. But here's the thing. SpaceX is a government funded organization, essentially, that's a widely recognized part of Elon Musk's genius is to get lots of public funds to do things.

We're not talking about a viable business on its own, honestly. Um, as, as you know, I think of the John Hurt line from the movie contact. Why build, the first rule of government contracting is why build one thing for a billion dollars when you can build two identical things for $2 billion.

And so the fast failure of the rockets may be part of SpaceX, uh, uh, rapid development scheme, but the failures, they don't really pay for it. The public trust pays for it. And there's a good strategic reason for that.

So how do you apply that necessarily to your business? You need more cautions probably in a lot of cases where you need to limit the fast failure because of the potential fallout of it. So I just think that, that from the standpoint of, of people listening to this or watching this, um, it, it's a really good indication how far you can push these DevOps or agile principles potentially.

But you have to keep the entire business picture in mind. You don't always have that luxury that SpaceX has to blow up multimillion dollar, uh, uh, test proofs of concept, if you will. So I, I, I've gotta disagree a little bit guy, because when you look at SpaceX, yes, they get a lot of fat Nassar, government, military and contracts, but I would venture that the, their bread and butter is launching private satellites.

They launch a lot of private satellites. The whole what's his ISP thing called, uh, satellite, you know, the, uh, what's, Uh, star Starlight Starlink starlink, I, I'm gonna bet you that fully 25 to 50% of their payloads were starlink satellites, right? Uh, that does get some government contracts too.

As long as you stay on his good son, he doesn't cut you off like Ukraine or something. But I, I couldn't help taking a shot there. But, um, but they do do a lot of private, they do do a lot of private.

And, and when those starling satellites fail in orbit, or don't get into the right, achieve the right orbit because the rocket failed or whatever, or a commercial satellite, the most of the commercial satellites are in short, right? And those insurance companies that you, I've never met an insurance company that's happy paying out policies in spite of their TV commercials, right? They're, they're never happy paying out a claim.

So, you know, there is pressure there. Certainly as much as I'm not a fan, you gotta give SpaceX their due. They've proven to be more efficient, more, more, uh, more efficient dollar wise and, and a, a viable solution.

'cause otherwise, we'd be waiting for our friends in Russia to bring home people in the Cosmo dope or whatever they call it there in, in Kazakhstan. Yep. Um, so I, I'll give them, you know, give the devil their due.

I, I do think it's been a, a, a private success. What's interesting is we don't know because they're not public. He hasn't taken SpaceX public.

No one knows what's under those covers. And yeah, there's a fair amount of sort of speculation going on here. Yes.

Um, and I guess that's, you know, what we're paid for to a certain degree. Full disclosure, I just think, um, I've seen a lot of times, uh, it agile in particular thrust upon a product development scheme where the fallout of it, uh, the, uh, wasn't, um, contributed to, you know, a lot of friction killing of, of, of fruitful product lines just because it was done in a somewhat thoughtless way. We're just asking the market and the people using this to be thoughtful about it.

Remember, there's a lot of factors at play. Fair enough. Not helpful, but yeah.

All right. Hey, we gotta take a break. We still got one more topic here today on Textron gag.

Stay tuned. We'll be right back. com is the leading resource for news analysis and education on challenges facing the cybersecurity industry.

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Much like, uh, mark Twain talking about how his demise was exaggerated. Apple is back saying that they're not completely abandoning virtual reality. And John has a story about that.

John, give us the backstory on this. I thought Apple was kind of putting all this stuff in deep storage. Yes, yes.

They're pushing back a little bit. So anyway, let the short story so far of Apple Vision Pro, which we've heard so much about, I think is more about marketing and perception that it is about technology. So there was a series of stories that the information just published that talked about poor sales out of the gate for Apple Vision Pro because of the cost, the weight, the lack of AppSec, lack of content.

So I heard from a, there's a friend of mine who worked on that project, who worked on Apple Vision Pro for years as an engineer. He left the company, he left Apple after about 10 years to start a VR content of music. And, and, and he's now considers himself or wants to be an Apple developer.

And he told me that you, the things are far from over. In fact, apple actually is shifting gears and moving towards a, a cheaper model. God, it only can be cheaper, right?

It's 3,500 bucks and is trying to get lighter. And they are working with developers, although based on what he told me, working with Apple, even as an ex Apple employee, is incredibly difficult and frustrating as a developer. So he's been in contact with them, they're helping him on the technical side, they may help him on the marketing side.

Um, I guess what I, the, the fable of this story is Apple had spent, he says, up to $10 billion developing this product. I know they're, they usually wait until a market is well established before they jump into it. In this case, they're kind of got, they're going into a kind of a slowly evolving markets like we talked about earlier.

It, this, this is a, this is another interesting market, mixed media, which you've heard about for eons. And so the expectation game now is that Tim Cook has talked to the Wall Street Journal, in which he said, this is not a mass market product. It's something for, uh, tomorrow's technology today.

So he is, he's spinning, he's re spinning it. So I guess what Apple is going to try to do and try to salvage from all this is eventually when we get to version two or three of this product, maybe it's gonna be cheaper, maybe it'll be lighter, maybe there'll be more content to consume. But I, I still think it's, it's probably going to be not a mask product in any way, but kinda a specialized, and I know Guy, we talked about this and, and I'll leave it to you or Lisa to talk about expectations of Apple products, especially after what happened with iPhone, which was a hit out of the gates, and then even Apple Watch, which actually started slowly and has evolved into a, a good seller for Apple.

So I, I, I wonder with AAV A VP, is this just a niche product for people who can afford it, or is it going to break through to a larger audience? I think you bring up the Apple Watch, um, example of it launched in 2014. It was really expensive.

It was, it was more of a niche product and now it's, I don't know how I live without it. I've had it for a very long time. I think the Vision Pro right now, you talk about target market fit, and Apple is known for doing this, where it's going into to markets late, or it's going into with a very specific and very narrow market here, the device costing $3,500.

I've actually gotten to play with it. It's very cool. It's heavy, it's bulky.

Guy and I were in a tech field. I remember that guy. I came months ago and there was a gentleman in, in the TechCo day wearing his vision for like, the entire time.

And I was wondering what his experience was. But I think what, what Tim Cook is saying is, look, this is not a mass market product. We know that we, we have acknowledged that it's not on the back burner.

We're gonna be really listening to customer feedback to develop the products for lower end. I think it's still a solution looking for a problem. Um, but I think, I think in a way it's kind of classic Apple and they make many things successful.

Although the one thing I was never a fan OFM was the Apple cube. Remember those from back in the day. Um, but I think what they need to do is, is their pricing strategy has, has been proven time and again, so they have, they have the foundation to be able to take what they see.

You said, uh, John 10 billion in sale, uh, in, uh, um, r expense that they r Element cost In RD Thank you. And I, based on some of the numbers that I saw, John from your article and some other ones, it looks like their projection is to sell about 800,000 units in 2024. Maybe we'll see an uptick here we are in November with Black Friday and Cyber Monday and that sort of thing.

But I think they need to act quickly on what's the market telling them, and how does the market help them define what's that lower end product or products that can compete with meta. So that's the problem while compete with Meta. Yeah.

Yes. Go ahead Joe. Go ahead, guy.

Sorry. Um, I, I'm, I'm not sure what this product is intended for exactly. It's consumer space is not, you know, a particularly, you know, particular area of expertise for me.

But Lisa, what I'm conscious of is the sort of the societal impact or the cultural impact of this sort of thing. What was, what was remarkable, uh, or what I noticed about that gentleman wearing one during, uh, except for when he presented thankfully, but during, you know, the entire time he was, he was in the studio for, for the tech field bay was that it was, it was strange. His eyes are masked.

You're not seeing a lot of his face, and you Would if you were wearing one. So you rather I would see his face. It would, well, you would see a, A vr, a vr, you know, projection of his face, if you will.

Okay. I did not know that. Nonetheless.

Um, the, you know, the, the, I was reminded of when Bluetooth, the, uh, first started to be adopted and used Bluetooth headsets by people. And, um, when I first saw a few people walking down the street, um, you know, talking, you know, to apparently nobody themselves, right? Yeah.

It took me a minute to realize what they were doing, and it was still kinda weird. But this is, this is bigger because a Bluetooth headset is on the side of your page. You can still see the whole page, you can still see the eyes, the whole thing, and I don't wanna belabor this.

The point is that in, uh, settings like industrial or commercial settings or gaming, um, uh, that's what more where I associate the meta product with, um, that it's just, you know, it's part of the deal. It's part of what happens. Everybody puts one on, everybody does it, or you do it may be yours or it may be one that you rent or borrow for the purpose.

Um, and that's where I see this market developing, how much it bleeds out into the SCRW, the so-called Real World. Um, it seems to be a very slow potential process. Um, and that is very much where Apple plays in almost all of its markets.

It's not commercial or industrial or even, you know, so much gaming. And that makes this a really long-term investment for them at best. So I, I'd like to weigh in here.

Sit down folks. This is gonna take a while. When the iPhone first came out, when the iPhone I, I should tell you, I'll tell you a big great story.

We moved offices down here in, I moved my personal office in cleaning out the desk. I found a little SD card. It was actually an SD mini inside of the full size sd, if you remember how those were.

What the hell is this? I found an SD card reader and I plugged it in. It was from a an HTC phone, I think from 2007 and some great music.

I must've been going through a country kick. It was all country music. And, um, and, and pictures of my, of my kids when they were 10 years ago, right?

No, almost 20 years ago, 18 years ago. Something, my friend RA's little boy who interned for us this summer from when he's like two years old, it's on here. Um, I had a great Windows phone, my Windows phone, you could talk on the phone and you can do Microsoft Office things.

It was pretty cool. The iPhone came out and I said, who the heck needs an iPhone? And I had a friend who worked for us with Still Secure.

Mitchell's not here. He couldn't tell you. Our friend Andrew Greeley, Andrew's a classic Bossie me mate, you know, he say, Hey mate, hey mate, shimmy, shimmy.

I said, he's an Apple fanboy. I said, Andrew, why the, why would I spend all so much more money for this iPhone when I got my Windows phone? He said, shimmy, shimmy.

It's about the AppSec. It's about, I said, what AppSec? He said, they're not there now, shimmy shimmy, but in a year it's gonna be 10,000 AppSec.

I said, Andrew, stop smoking that s**t, right? And maybe it wasn't 10,000 AppSec in the first year, but by the time the second Apple iPhone came out, I bought the phone and I've been an Apple iPhone user ever since. And an Apple Watch user and everything else.

Apple, it's about the AppSec. It's about the AppSec. And that's The problem.

I don't think, Alan, it's not only about the AppSec now, because these killer AppSec, I, they're, there are no killer AppSec. I'm Just, I've played with it. Well, Okay, so, but take out, I I, I withdraw the word killer.

But nonetheless, I think that the, the, the sort of, you know, real world impact, like the physical space impact, um, even the, so, so you remember the Google glasses, right? Those were smaller and you know, they were just wearing glasses And small. This, here's the, here's the, you started like, It's, it's just a lot.

It's just a higher hill decline. And it, I felt the same way about the iPad. It's not a consumer's Product.

I mean, it's a consumer product, not an industrial product. And that's why Apple's in it. Apple doesn't sell their industries.

They sell to consumers. You will have killer VR AppSec when the five of us here can put on our Apple things. And we are in a common VR environment and interacting the same way we do in real life.

And that's the promise of these things. It's not really any is that gonna be legal? It's not, ain't for the social, uh, introvert who's going to just be the only one there wearing it.

If you're the only one there wearing it, you're just an introvert and you're weird. But when we're all wearing it, and we could be in a common environment interacting either in an augmented reality or a virtual reality, you're gonna be left out if you don't have it, because there's gonna be things you could do, learn and experience there that you can't without it. The problem is getting there, right?

This is a, a, a dream that Zuckerberg bought into how much and billion Apple changed the Name of his company, right? How much did, did Zuckerberg put into this? But they haven't gotten there.

I I didn't wanna spend the 3,500 for the Apple, I did spend the 3 99 or whatever it was for the meta two goggles, and I had him here in the office, and I had everybody, I said, anybody wants to play with it, play with it. The first three months, everybody played with it and it sat on my desk for the next year until finally one of our, the guys who were on, one of the guys who were run our webinar said, you know, what, can I give it to my kid for Christmas? I said, yes, sure.

And I sent it to him actually Nashville, and he gave it to me. That's the problem. It's the AppSec.

We need the, the technology's cool and there's all kinds of applications. But until you have the AppSec that are gonna say, hey, right, why do we have the Sony PlayStation five or the Xbox? If you didn't have Madden, if you didn't have Call to Duty, if you didn't have the, the games that suck these people in that make them must play, they wouldn't sell what they sell.

I have a question. I have a question. What year will it be before the Textron Gang is peers in that virtual reality thing?

You, me, we're working on it now. No, we're not. We're not.

We're not kidding. Well, we're kidding, we're kidding. We, we wouldn't announce it till it was ready anyway, but soon imagine that our readers at home or our viewers at home will be able to interact with us in a virtual world.

You know how I got into computers 1990? Well, I did. Well, you can't share that because besides that, but 19 92, 93, you know, like many of you were playing on, on, on the Well, or on Genie or CompuServe, remember these things?

There was the Imagination Network. Anybody ever play on the Imagination Network? I'm old, I remember it Over at like a, you know, what is it?

A 9,600 board modem? Sure. It put onto your little dos screen, a graphical interface where they had different lands.

There was casino land that was loosely based on, on, uh, leisure suit. Larry, you guys don't remember that either. I remember, I remember You had to be, you had to, you had to, you had to fax in proof that you were over 18 to go into the casino land.

But there was fantasy land in this land, in that land. And it took forever for the environment to load. But you would go in there and you would be able to interact with other people.

You know, in, in the leisure, Sue Larry Land, a girl can come over and gimme a kiss and you'd get a little lip thing on your, on your cheeks here and you could chat with people. It was amazing. I kept thinking one day we're gonna be in this virtual thing.

So it was 1993, 2003, 13, 23. That was 30 years ago. We still haven't made it real, but one day they're gonna make it real and when they make it real, half of our population's gonna live in there.

Right. And, you know, that's, and that could be a bad thing, but I, I do think that that's a future. So It sounds like Bladerunner, Like blade Rudder.

Yeah. Very much. Yeah.

That means it his companion of yeah. Of uh, that's what support character charact. Anyway, alright.

Enough about me. Um, gives you a little insight into just, you know, how weird I can be. But, um, anyway, I think we gotta call, pull the plug on this VR reality.

By the way, 10 x times what Meta Charges is way too much, right? Had that Apple thing been $1,500? I probably have one just saying, um, guys, we're off for the weekend.

Next week's a big crazy week. Let's hope and pray that we don't have violence and we have a smooth election is Amen. And things go well.

We'll be here Monday with a Fresh Gang episode with lots of good stuff to talk about. Until then though, Mike, guy, Lisa, John, thanks for joining us and being part of the Gang today. Thank you for watching.

Hey, we've got a great text on TV schedule the rest of today, so stay with us there. Uh, have a great weekend everyone. We're out.