Six ways to save the internet

Have you ever been in the position
of watching Silicon Valley take off

and wish that you had known
what was about to happen?

(Laughter)

So, I'm here to talk about
what I think is going to be

the most intense disruption
of the technology world

that's occurred in the last 15 years.

And I believe the end product of it
will be entirely about engagement.

In fact, I think it is possibly
a transformational change

in the way we're going
to think about engagement.

So what would you do if you knew today

that there was going to be
a major technology cycle

beginning in the next couple years,

and that you could participate in it?

What would you do?

(Audience) Jump in!

So, this is the situation
in which I find myself:

I'm a professional investor
about half the day,

the daylight half.

I was paying close attention earlier,

and I now know I need to have
10 hours sleep at night,

which is tricky, because last
night the show ended

about 12:30, and so I was, I got --

and that was in Santa Rosa,
so I got home a little late.

I want you to understand,
I've been studying the technology world,

and things have already begun to change.

But they're changing in ways

that I see literally no
commentator referring to today.

There are six things going on
that I'm going to focus on.

I want you to understand,
each one of these is a hypothesis;

it is subject to revision.

It may even be subject to elimination.

But I want you to understand

I've been working with this group
of hypotheses now for about 10 months,

and what's really interesting
is that I've been exposing them

to a lot of people in the industry,

and people have been finding it
very hard to debunk them.

So I'm going to share them with you today,

because I think collectively, we have
a chance of figuring this out.

The first thing -- and I think
this is fairly obvious --

is: Windows is dying.

And --

(Applause)

I mean no disrespect to Microsoft,

because I think, in fact, Microsoft
as a company has many things it can do

to maintain growth,

but desktops would not be one of them.

And the key indicator here,
and the only one you need to know

to understand what's going on here,

is that smartphones have
basically taken Windows

from 96% of internet-connected
devices 3 or 4 years ago,

to under 50% now.

And it is falling precipitously;

they'll be under 30 percent,
probably about a year and a half from now.

Microsoft has lots of things it can do.

It can retreat to Exchange
and crank the price there.

But the reason this is so significant

is that Windows and Enterprise
software, which is related to it --

think SAP and people like that --

those businesses account for hundreds
of billions of dollars in revenue.

And I'm suggesting we're going to have
a jump ball for that revenue.

And in a world where the US economy
is not growing that rapidly,

having somebody go away is the simplest
way to create room for new industries.

And this is where the revenues
are going to come from.

But guess what? Like a Ginsu
knife commercial, there's more!

(Laughter)

It turns out Microsoft
is not the only company

whose body is lying
across the railroad tracks today.

Another one is Google.

Now, you may not have focused on this,

but index search accounted for
90% of all search volume

about 4 years ago.

But an interesting thing happened.

Google got to be so successful
that the index became full of garbage.

In fact, the entire Web
has become full of garbage.

If you think about it, the Web has become
almost a digital Detroit.

(Laughter)

If you look hard enough,

you can find really
compelling things there.

But if you aren't really careful,
you can get mugged.

(Laughter)

And it is no shock

that each one of us
and everyone else out there

have looked for other ways to find
the things we want to find.

We started with Wikipedia,

but then Facebook came along
for matters of taste and money;

Twitter came along for real-time news;

LinkedIn, for professional things;

Match.com, for less professional things;

TripAdvisor for travel,
Yelp for restaurants,

Realtor.com for finding a home,
Dictionary.com for words,

Wordnik for the whole language.

So the thing has really changed.

And here's what's interesting:

like Microsoft, Google has
plenty of ways to respond

in terms of growing its business.

But what it cannot do
is recover its position

as the dominant player on the internet.

It is my belief that when
Google came along in 1998,

the internet was an open-source,

long-tail world with no leader.

And Google stepped into this void,
provided leadership

and implemented a strategy

that systematically commoditized
all forms of content.

And the simplest way to look at it
is to look at a Google results page:

the only logo on that page is Google's;

everything else is in the same font.

That form of commoditization
has been tremendous for Google

and horrible for almost everyone else.

And I believe, to a first
order, it is over --

not because index search is going away,
but because, like word processing,

it's gone from the most important
application we all had,

to just another thing we do.

And you see this in mobile in particular.

Because in mobile, people have found
other ways to find what they want.

Index search is too disruptive
on a cell phone,

so the rate of index search
is a small fraction on cell phones

to what it is on desktops.

And that is the leading indicator
that Google's recovery, if you will,

will be in something other than search.

The third hypothesis I have
is no longer controversial,

but it's important
to understand what happened.

If the left-hand side of this equation
is the open-source World Wide Web,

with its belief in the long tail,

its belief in an absence of regulation,

of an absence of security and control,

it's really a frontier.

Apple came along with a different vision.

They said, "We think the Web is dead.

We're going to go on the internet,

because that's the big data store,

and we're going to provide you
with branded, thoughtful, value-added,

copyright-protected content."

And people have overwhelmingly chosen that

over Google's vision.

Over the last three years,

Apple's gone from being
an ulcer in computers

to this year they will ship approximately
100 million internet-enabled devices.

One hundred million.

They'll probably be just short of that.

The point here is, it's Apple's world.

We're lucky to be part of it,

because Steve is quite intolerant
about who he lets in.

(Laughter)

But think about this:
imagine Georgia in the Civil War. OK?

Apple is Sherman,

World Wide Web is Joe Johnston.

And the point is, they've lost.

So the Web is looking at this and going,

"My God, we've got to come back."

And the cost in order to do this is
they have to sacrifice Google.

So Google has pushed
the pendulum of technology

to the absolute limit of commoditization,

to the point where people
who spent their whole lives

developing really valuable,
compelling entertainment

and really valuable, compelling journalism

and really valuable, compelling novels,

can't make money doing it anymore.

So the Web said, "OK,
if Google's over here, and Apple's here,

HTML 5, the next generation, is going
to be on the other side of Apple."

So the new battle, instead of being
commoditization versus the App Store,

is going to be between the App Store
and highly differentiated content.

If you don't know what HTML 5 is,
let me help you understand.

It is a programming language.

But it's a profound one.

Because for the first time,

you're going to be able
to construct a web page

where the entire thing can have
embedded interactivity,

can have video, audio,
whatever it is that you want.

But no more Flash boxes.

And it's a huge, huge change,

because it essentially
opens up a new canvas.

And it doesn't just open it
up for The New York Times,

it opens it up for everybody on WordPress,

it opens it up for every band ...

Because suddenly, the ability to produce
a differentiated, highly compelling,

value-added -- maybe
even monetizable -- product

will be there.

And what's really interesting
is, thanks to Apple,

there's nothing that commoditizers
can do about you.

Apple may try to stop us,
but I don't think they will.

I think they're smarter than that.

So the key point is, I don't know
where we're going to stop

as the pendulum swings back.

But I think the days
of hypercommoditization are behind us.

And we can all play in this.

In a moment I'm going to tell you
how I'm doing it personally.

Tablets.

This is the other side
of why Windows is dead.

If any of you does not own an iPad --

Look, I don't own any Apple stock,
so I have no axe in this,

but seriously, if you don't own an iPad,
you cannot possibly understand

the most important things going on now.

(Laughter)

No, I'm really serious about this.

And I think the most important point
is that the other players on this thing,

at the moment,

have made no impact.

And keep in mind,

it was our investment that built
Palm's webOS that HP's shipping

soon, eventually, someday.

(Laughter)

I think it's highly probable
Apple wins this thing

with market share closer
to what they have on the iPod

than to what they have on the iPhone.

That would be 70 or 80%.

If that's right, Apple's going to be
50 to 100 billion dollars bigger

in a few years

than they are today.

And I literally don't see anybody
else even challenging them.

It's really important to understand

that Apple's cost structure is so
favorable relative to everybody else,

it's almost impossible to imagine
any of the cell phone guys,

particularly Android guys, catching up.

Because Apple's gross margins
exceed the retail price

of almost every Android phone.

Here is the one that I want
to leave you with

as an investment idea, first and foremost.

The mania on Wall Street is about social.

Social is a sideshow.

And I say this as somebody whose fund
has most of its money in Facebook.

It is a one-off.

This is not --

To borrow a phrase from Star Wars:

"This is not the mania
you are looking for."

The one we're talking about will be
so much bigger than this.

Facebook has won.

It is the new Windows. OK?

A few other guys -- Twitter,
Yelp, Skype, LinkedIn --

are building successful platforms

that are much smaller
than what Facebook has.

And they'll be successful.

But everybody else coming along is going
to have to follow the Zynga model.

They're going to have to make themselves
subordinate to the platform of Facebook.

And Zynga's inability to build
anything successful off of Facebook,

I think, is the key indicator
of why this platform is so powerful.

So if you do a start-up today
in the social world,

build it on top of Facebook.

It's the only piece of advice
I can give you.

But the most important piece
of advice is: forget social.

Social is now a feature,
it's not a platform.

So embed social,

the same way that Catherine said,
"Embed gamification into everything."

It's all about engagement.

The future is going to be different.

And the core question is:

What are we all going to do about it?

What I do is very simple:
I believe in full-contact investing.

So I looked at HTML 5
about a year ago, and I said,

"This thing could be really important.
How do I find out?"

So my band, Moonalice,

which, a couple years ago,
did an album with T Bone Burnett,

that we thought was going to be
a huge hit and blah, blah, blah ...

Well, we learned that nobody cared about
hippie music done by old folks, so --

(Laughter)

So we put it all onto the net,
went on Facebook and Twitter.

We started doing things
called "Twittercasts,"

the first live concerts
and then prerecorded concerts,

distributed over Twitter.

Then we started using live stream,
the same thing we're using here today,

to do internet-based
live video of our shows.

And then recently, we bought
a satellite network.

Why? 'Cause it cost less than three months
of what our manager used to cost.

(Laughter)

And right now, we broadcast
every one of our shows --

other than the U2 show --

live, in HTML 5,

via satellite,

in a system we totally control.

We have an app that's about to ship
within the next month.

It's -- "app" is the wrong term;
our website is being upgraded to HTML 5.

And in it, you will be able,
from any phone, anywhere,

to play any song we've ever played live

and view any live video that we have,

which is 150, 200 shows.

Now, it cost practically
nothing to do this.

And we're this teeny-weeny little band.

Now, I know more about technology
than most people,

but that's just because I know
more than most people who are 55.

But people who are 18 to 20,
who live in this world,

are going to be able
to use these platforms

in music and everywhere else

in a fundamentally different way.

I think creativity is coming back.

Moonalice is something
that's built around that.

We have poster artists
for every single show.

We have photographers who work
every show, we have painters.

And the notion is, I believe
that creativity has been stifled,

not so much by technology,

but by the general deterioration
of American culture --

you know, people's unwillingness
to be educated,

this notion that we have to fall back
on ritual and beliefs, instead of facts.

But I think technology is finally
going to do us a favor.

I think it's finally going to give us
the tools to make us independent.

And there's little glimmers, right?

We see the Arab Spring

and the impact that Twitter
and Facebook had.

Pretty exciting.

But imagine a world

in which everything is an app.

In HTML 5, digital Detroit
gets replaced by this thing

where every tweet is an app,

every advertisement
is an instance of a store.

Think about what that means.

So instead of seeing an Amazon display ad,

you see the store, say,
on the New York Times Book Review.

You can both create demand
and satisfy it in the same place.

Why?

Because that's better for everybody.

Saves time, increases engagement,

because it keeps you on the page.

We're going from a web of elevators,

where you go to different places,
and you go off sites and you lose people,

to a control panel model.

And guess who's going to make it?

You are.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)