We'll be there, live-blogging his talk. Note that, unlike Google Chairman Eric Schmidt's talk , video of this session will not be live-streamed by the D9 conference organizers.
The D9 session start times don't always stick to the posted schedule. To get live updates on what's happening at D9, and in particular when Sinofsky starts his demo, follow my Twitter feed, Rafe. PT: Hi everyone. He used to run Office. Steven: Well Nothing called "gang of four" ends well. Your tablets aren't there. What's going on? I know you have smart people. Steven: You picked two things we didn't do well on.
Don't write us off too early. We do other things well. There's more opportunity for us to do a better job. How are you going to get to the multitouch tablet. Down from Windows, or up from phone? Steven: One of the things that struck me is the flexibility of the Windows code base Windows has gotten richer.
It runs Media Center, and Servers. Walt: To name two products that have failed You turn on your iPad, and it feels light and responsive. Why would you turn to this big, heavy Windows thing? Steven: Everyone said the same thing about servers Walt: Not everyone cares about servers. We were doubling system requirements with every release. In Windows 7, for the first time, we went down in system requirements.
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Google's challenge to game consoles to kick off in November Jun 06, Sep 15, Jul 24, Both of those will become your strengths over time as we will see. Keep in mind that big companies have a lot of people that can analyze and create worry about potentially competitive products. You can bet, for example, that if you have any sort of messaging, data storage, data analysis, API, or visualization and compete with the likes of Oracle, Salesforce, Tableau, or other big company that several groups are going to start thinking about how to incorporate your product in their competitive dialog.
You can almost declare success when you hear from your customers that your product has come up in multiple briefings from a single company. When you find yourself in this position, two things work in your favor. Second, you will have time to continue to build out depth because the organizations will begin the process of a coordinated response. This just takes a long time. The best thing that can happen at this point is if you have a product that competes with two larger companies.
At that situation you can bet that you are the thing those companies care the least about and what they care the most about is each other. Once an organization grows and becomes successful, one of the key things it needs to do is define a reason for the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts.
The standard way incumbents do this is to have some sort of connection, go-to-market, feature, or common thread that runs through all the offerings. This defines the company strategy and the reason why a given product or service is better when it comes from a particular company and also the reasoning behind a company being in multiple businesses.
In practice, the internal view of these efforts quickly becomes known as a strategy tax. From a competitive perspective these efforts are like gifts in that they make it clear how to compete. For example, your product might have integrated photos but your competitor needs to point customers to another app to deal with photos.
Your product might be supported by channel partners but your competitor will only sell direct or vice versa. This can go to an API level, particularly if you compete with a platform provider who is strategically wedded to a specific platform API. A classic example for me was the Sony Memory Stick. If you were making any device that used removable storage then you were clearly going to use CF or SD. But there was Sony, marching forcefully onward with Memory Stick.
It was superior. It had encryption. It had higher capacity in theory. At one point after a trade show I left thinking they are going to add Memory Sticks to televisions and phones, and sure enough they did. What an awesome opening if you needed to compete with a Sony product. A strategy tax can be like a boat anchor for a competitor. Even when a competitor tries to break out of the format, it will likely be half-hearted. Nothing frustrates an incumbent more than an increasingly deep feature set.
Your job is to find the right place to add depth and to push the incumbent beyond what can be done by bolting capabilities into an existing product via add-ins, partners, or third parties. Depth is your strength because your competitor is focused a checkbox or a tie, figuring out the internal organization dynamics of a response, or strategizing how to break from the corporate strategy. While you might be out-resourced you are also maniacally focused on delivering on a company-defining scenario or approach.
The best approach to building out depth is to remain focused on the core scenario you brought to market in the first place. For example, if you are doing data visualization then you want to have the richest and most varied visualizations.
This example from Slack crossed my feed today and shows the depth one can go to when there is a clear focus on doing what you do better than anyone else.
Your goal is to expand the checkbox and to move your one line of the checkbox to several lines. Once you become a job then you are in an incredible feedback loop that makes your product better; you have an opportunity to land and expand to other parts of a big company; and you have an advocate who has bet a career on your product. New products have a magic opportunity to become job-defining.
Pretty soon everyone is asking that person how they get their job done so much better or more efficiently and your product spreads. The amazing thing about this dynamic is that it often goes unnoticed because rarely are you replacing entirely something that is already in use, but simply augmenting the tools already in place. In other words, the incumbent simply goes about their business thinking that your product just complements their existing business.
This obviously sounds like a big leap to accomplish, but it speaks to the product management decisions and how you view both the product and customer. With enterprise products it is almost always a two step process. It is another way of landing in the whitespace of the organization. The challenge of existing winners breaking into new or adjacent businesses is real and difficult. Very rarely does this happen. The inherent obstacles, both technically and culturally, new products have specific entry points to compete.
Tagged with product management , strategy , tradeoffs. As a big fan of side projects, he also caught the maker bug. One of those projects was working as a technical expert for a leading Seattle-based law firm. The legal profession — particularly the area of litigation and trials — is a costly, complex, labor-intensive, and, frankly, error-prone process. Beyond that, it is steeped in the complexities of individual courts and jurisdictions dictating, sometimes at the trial level, how technology can be used.
Having personally worked through the transition from WordPerfect to Windows over the better part of a decade, I know the challenges of bringing technology to this highly knowledge- and people-intensive process are significant. Attorney and corporate counsel, know these challenges well from their experiences.
They set out to invent something that meets both the demanding technical needs of litigation along with the unique business requirements of law firms, which often do not have the resources or skills required to manage complex software deployments. In fact, complex deployments of on-premises software defines the current state-of-the-art in litigation support software. There is also a need for modern solutions to deeply technical problems — such as searching terabyte corpora for relevant documents the state-of-the-art is mostly keyword search or identifying clusters of relevant documents based on machine learning techniques versus relying on humans to manually sift through and connect millions of documents.
Historically, an industry vertical with such a legacy business model and architecture i. Those are the artifacts of the legal discovery process that flow across both sides of the aisle in ever-increasing volumes. These volumes are beyond what many law firms can deal with, and as some might know, producing large amounts of data can often be part of a legal strategy used against smaller firms.
Finally, the pace of change for software in the litigation industry needs to increase. Part of the legacy world the legal profession faces is the same that any enterprise faces: A desire to move away from high, up-front product costs and transition to a cloud and software-as-a-service SaaS model. Everlaw architected a solution that starts from customers: attorneys at small firms, large firms, state offices, and on both the defense and plaintiff side of cases.
To begin the journey, Everlaw assembled an engineering team of hard-core computer scientists, many from UC Berkeley. In the Andreessen Horowitz pitch meeting, it turns out a lot of the former CEOs, execs, and founders have been involved in litigation. Our collective experience, especially as defendants, led to an immediate bond with AJ as he detailed the Everlaw solution.
So far, their experience with customers has been amazing. Since most attorneys are part of the world of mobile and cloud experiences, as soon as they see Everlaw, they see how much easier, faster, and higher quality their trial preparation and work can be.
At Andreessen Horowitz, we are always incredibly excited to see technology founders taking on the hard work of reimagining an industry. It is clear that mobile, machine learning, and cloud delivered via SaaS will revolutionize every vertical, including legal.
We love the work that AJ, Jeff and the Everlaw team have done to bring such high-powered efforts to an incredibly important part of the economy. For those reasons, we could not be more excited to be partnering with Everlaw and leading their Series A funding round, joining the existing investors. I am super excited to be joining the Everlaw board to support their ongoing work.
Software eats legal. This post originally appeared on a16z. Posted in a16z , posts. CES is the best place to go to see and learn about making products. In one place you can see the technology ingredients available to product makers along with how those ingredients are being put together and how they are interacted with and connected to customers.
I love going to CES and walking the show floor north to south, convention center to Sands and seeing and touching the products, including the way random show-goers perceive and question what is out there. As much as I love attending, I also love taking a step back and thinking and writing about what I learned. Doing so provides great context for me in working with startups on their products, talking with enterprise customers about their needs, and partnering with bigger companies to enhance their go to markets.
As a reminder, CES is not a big electronics store nor is it a research lab. It is somewhere in between. While there are many ready-buy products on display, most are not yet ready to use. Many of the most interesting technologies are not yet in products. Most companies are working to put forth their best vision for where things are heading.
It has always worked best for me to think about the show directionally and not as a post-holiday shopping excursion.
This is a long post. The breadth of CES is unprecedented. Where else would you see booths from car companies, delivery services, film studios, computer makers, electronics component makers, cable tv companies, mobile phone carriers, micro processor and chip makers, home improvement superstores, and so on.
From startups to mega-caps, from every country, from supply chain components to complete products everything is represented. The opportunity is unique. CES has become a software show. Even the interesting hardware is dominated by firmware, cloud services, and connectivity.
The major observations impacting product makers and technology decision makers on display at CES include:. For many years much of the show floor was dedicated to the problems of where to store bytes, how to move those bytes around a network, how to type, or even how to convert bytes from one format or device to another.
The whole industry has moved up the stack. This set of attributes represents the starting point for most any product. It is also a huge opportunity for consumers because it means the ability to adjust devices over time, even for residential equipment, is much easier than the past. Imagine when you move, you can just relocate your security camera, for example. Given wireless video casting, even HDMI cables will fade into the background for most people. Or maybe you recall a CES where just being able to have a camera was a big deal.
CES shows that all of these scenarios have come together and basically in anything you want to make one can have all of these and more or pick and choose easily what capabilities to expose. From a base capability perspective this includes:. All of these are available to product makers and likely harder and more expensive to acquire discretely than they would be by essentially taking a mobile phone BOM and making a device.
If you talk to the makers at the booths, most every device has more capabilities in hardware than is being exposed in the current release of software. The big challenge is no surprise. Software development is unable to keep up with the hardware. It would be hard to overstate the clear opportunity to build winning products using stronger software relative to competitors.
Said another way, spending too many cycles on hardware pits you against the supply chain for most products. Some of the devices that include most of these include a rubber duck speaker, remote control , knit cap music player , light bulb speaker, camera, climate , walkie-talkies location, camera , power strip remote control, telemetry, power usage report , flower pot soil water level, camera.
The list goes on and on! The most visible example of the ecosystem of components, manufacturers, and distribution coming together is in residential—products to control, protect, and monitor the home. There were dozens of companies showing what looks to be essentially the same product:. In addition, there are more specialized and harder to make controllers for legacy home systems like garage door remotes, water heater, sprinkler, and so on. Plus there are cameras for security monitoring and doorbells and locks to control entry, though many systems struggle with offering and integrating those.
The reality is that all of these basically just work and provide evidence of the supply chain at work. These are offered by startups, white labeled to many local distributors who will handle installation, and all the major home improvement stores carry them. There were at least a dozen full service companies on the floor. They are all essentially the same offering. While they all have apps, for many scenarios some of these can prove quite awkward for some basic control—to the point where it is more annoying than helpful to use.
Traditionally this has been an area where the reviews clamor for integration and synergy across device. A couple of things became clear this year:.
In fact, this year saw a significant change in integration. Last year most all home automation was integrated with Nest. This year everyone integrated with Alexa from Amazon Echo. Time will tell if Alexa will be replaced next year or if Nest will up the level of integration.
IFTTT an a16z portfolio company was frequently used in demonstrations for conditional and multi-step scenarios. Two great examples of this are programmable door locks and video doorbells.
Both of these are logical integrations for the rest of a security system and while basic integration over z-wave is possible, for most scenarios answering the door, programming new combinations the vendor specific app is required.
These are difficult to make products that need to fit in legacy infrastructure, so this is to be expected.
That said, because of the rising tide of infrastructure, the locks and doorbells have come a long way in the past year. Ring doorbell even released a battery operated rechargeable camera to accompany the doorbell it is basically the motion-activated doorbell camera without the bell. Vivint has done good work to integrate Kwikset locks, a first party doorbell, as well as Amazon Echo to provide a more complete solution.
But for now, the base level capabilities are there and work across many providers. It is likely that these will further coalesce into a market where it is easier and better to get all the components from one company rather than trying to stitch them together. The good news is that this category is a pretty simple DIY project.
The better news is that because of the SaaS revenue for monitoring, it is not hard to find an offering that comes with free installation such as from Comcast. Home integration happens with this in theory, though in practice the supply chain makes it easier to avoid cross-manufacturer integration if at all possible. This year the focus of many of the same makers turned more to fitness and less about overall lifestyle.
There were certainly many connected measurement devices body composition, weight, sugar levels, blood pressure, etc. It looks like the major band makers agree and this year became much more focused on the specifics of exercise. Much of the technology is about adapting algorithms to understand what the telemetry means depending on the sport i. For most people, just walking for a fixed amount of time would be an improvement and a watch focused on timing laps for multiple sports is unnecessarily complicated and potentially demotivating.
The other aspect where these bands both differentiate and are still searching for broad fit is in software. With some sports sharing times rides, trails, etc. The longer term goal of a device that tracks meaningful body telemetry that regular people can act on themselves is not far off. Fitness monitoring is not unique to humans. There were a number of products to help to monitor your pet with a pet wearable. Drones were more numerous and more capable than last year.
As much as the category is maturing, it is worth noting how early this really is. There are two large players in Parrot and DJI who commanded a significant presence on the floor. Beyond that, once again we can see the supply chain at work as there were countless companies with largely similar products.
The most common experience in the drone booths would be to watch someone come up to a company rep and ask about the range and then follow up asking about the payload. I must have seen this 20 times and each time the person walked away disappointed, as if they where hoping this was the magic booth that had the drone that really could deliver groceries or fly cross-country.
The other question was how autonomous the drone was and always the answer was disappointing. The vast majority of what is going on is still in the realm of traditional radio controlled RC flight in new form factors with amazing cameras made possible by the influence of the smartphone supply chain. Even the major vendors are still in the early stages of the basics of geofencing, route planning, and other scenarios focused on safety.
Drones are never going to be jets or general aviation, just as PCs were never going to be mainframes. On the other hand, things will not evolve so fast and loose the way PCs did because drones share the same airspace as jets in a way that PCs never shared with mainframes. Reliability, safety, and more will need to happen sooner rather than later. Piloting a drone will be a profession, not a hobby, until they can really pilot themselves but even then….
With that there will be opportunities. In the case of drones, it is more the minimal amount of software. One example of this at work was Parrot demonstrating their work with senseFly a Parrot company for agriculture. It offered the full command center for monitoring in the case of disaster or other need. You get in it and it flies you somewhere. Totally mind blowing. Given the differences in regulatory climates, this product is making fast progress in China and is already airworthy.
Next year is going to be an incredibly interesting year for drones. That is certain! Given the size of the market and the importance car companies played in the 20th century it is obvious why so much focus is on self driving cars or on alternative powered cars or both at the same time. All this coverage needs to be put in context of what was on display at CES. Second, while the whole North Hall of the convention center is devoted to cars, the vast majority of what is on display is traditional after-market customizations and even standard cars.
The most interesting topic to ponder is really the nature of disruption that is taking place. Existing auto companies are seeing every aspect of their business upended. On the one hand all of their expertise in engines, interior design, drive trains is called into question by electric cars. On the other hand, autonomous driving challenges the fundamental business model of these car makers. Together these disrupt the entire process cars are built—a supply chain of parts makers, product managers, brand managers, dealer franchises, and more that has been built up over years.
It is one thing for GM to show a Bolt, which by all accounts looks amazing. But it will be quite another to deliver these at scale, sell them, and change the pricing and business models along the way.
The role software and hardware again, the smartphone supply chain will play and how companies execute those areas will almost certainly be determining factors. Will the car makers look to the existing supply chains in place or be able to make huge and difficult choices to trust new suppliers with new components? Basically making a car SoC. While we were at CES Tesla updated their customers vehicles with the ability to summon your car.
In a world where car makers still mail out DVDs or USB sticks to update maps, it is interesting to think about how things need to change inside those companies to enable that sort of customer experience.
If you think all of this is just being pro-Valley or cynical, then I would offer this counter example. So in a year they will announce what they intend to do of course many people are working on that now. The clear focus is on driver assist leading to autonomy which they might be very advanced in.
For me, the most exciting transportation product was the Gogoro SmartScooter , which was also at the show last year. Think of the product as an electric Vespa with a max speed of 60mph and a range of about 60 miles at 40mph. You can own the scooter or potentially share them the way Divvy bikes are shared in major cities in the US.
The company also has a home station to charge batteries in two hours. Booths used to be filled with TVs. TVs are important but this year saw a greatly reduced push around smart TVs and a much bigger emphasis on overall image quality. The reason for this is HDR and 4K. While most people gravitate to 4K which debuted two years ago and is widely available now, including streaming content the real news is HDR.
If you imagine scenes from Jessica Jones or Daredevil, HDR makes those scenes so much better, much more like what you would see in person. Unlike more pixels which we all know most people and most rooms can no longer discern, HDR is immediately visible to most viewers. All the major companies were showing off HDR displays. Netflix and other content providers will also be supporting HDR. Take a moment to consider why this is not like the transition to HD and why it will happen much faster.
HD required new content and going back to existing libraries of film and rescanning to make Bluray which you then needed to buy to play in your Bluray player. Network TV had to make the transition. Broadcast spectrum had to be allocated, and so on.
Now this is all about software—recording is captured in RAW which has the information to make HDR though more can be done in sensors for sure, which is a huge opportunity! Even distribution is no longer focused on just studios with new content coming from new players who have software perspective to bring. Dolby is doing very exciting work to bring HDR to theaters and to home screens. They also showed some incredible work on sound called ATMOS which is a sound encoding that allows a single speaker bar to use a large number of drivers to deliver 7.
It was incredibly cool to sit there and hear sound coming from everywhere Mad Max! Still TVs continue to just get better. In the magic of software and physics department, Sony was showing short throw laser projectors that were mind blowing. Cameras are everywhere in products. Once again this is enabled by the supply chain create by the pull of smartphones.
Incredibly high quality cameras can be integrated into very small places and draw very little power. Cameras are gaining more resolution, working better in lower light or infrared, and offering new capabilities driven by software. In particular, motion sensing, face detection, and object recognition software capabilities are becoming key parts of cameras. As with home security, the supply chain makes it easy to have the camera, but software is what makes it useful.
A great example of this at work is the Blink camera. By using motion detection software and bluetooth LE this camera becomes completely wireless—it uses CRA batteries that can last 6—12 months.
It is like a completely wireless Dropcam but not one you would look at all the time unless you wanted to change batteries. Netgear Arlo is a camera taking a similar approach. These cameras communicate over Bluetooth to a small powered base station that connects to a wired network. In a dynamic similar to smart watches, the action cameras seemed to struggle this year.
There was no pulling back from extreme sports or just extreme in general as the main purpose for GoPro, for example. There were a vast number of GoPro-like clones out there.
The playback would use Google Cardboard. A good example is the Nikon KeyMission which captured 4K images. It is quite the hipster product. It shoots film, which comes in classic Super 8 cartridges that you ship back to Kodak where they are developed and then delivered as scanned footage.
As a silver-halide-enthusiast, I find it very neat but I am a bit skeptical. What might have been more interesting it to build a camera that had the UX affordances of shooting with film but the convenience of digital along the lines of a Nikon Df still camera. One project in this part of the show was the Enlaps camera. It has two 4K cameras, solar power, and a web service that handles the complexity of time lapsed intervals so you can easily stream the results to your phone.
Once again our pets get some love from cameras too. With PetChatz you can release pet pleasing smells and treats using your mobile device. What is there shows the continued ability for the mobile supply chain to deliver all the components for a small computer and to now package them in ever-improving quality packages at ever-decreasing prices. All of the vendor phones displayed the floor were of course Android. Most of the scenarios that were Android-only seemed somewhat dubious to me.
That said, there were dozens of phone makers with very high quality builds of phones. There are lots of these companies differentiating mostly by channel approach country, carrier, unlocked, rate plans and less and less by software I think. At the extreme low end, some of the China manufacturers still show some pretty old school stuff.
Those are actual buttons. No word on talk time. I actually saw it work! There were quite a few new Windows 10 laptops, all-in-ones, and big tablets announced this year most with Spring availability. The Samsung 9 and the LG Gram garnered a lot of attention. The Samsung comes very close to the Macbook in form factor in a larger screen.
As a Windows PC it has more ports of course. The LG is crazy light as you can see in the photo below. They were not quoting any battery life and there is no touch screen. Both skipped using USB C for power though which is disappointing in terms of specs.
The area where PCs still currently lead phones is in graphics capabilities. But you can only experience this if you use the massive discrete cards from NVIDIA primarily and not with the integrated graphics on every laptop. Razer which builds a great community of PCs and accessories offered up a pretty unique combination. It would be an accomplished Ultrabook on its own.
This turn the Ultrabook into a pretty high end workstation. The specs are great. It is tough to beat this story of entrepreneurial spirit. Meet 13 year-old Taylor Rosenthal. As an avid team sports participant he has more than once run across the challenge of needing the right first aid gear for minor cuts and scrapes on the playing field.
He made his way to CES to show off his company, which he told me is remaining independent even though he already received a significant buyout offer! Tagged with CES , product management , sharing. The hallways can be literal or figurative i. Amazon delivered an amazing amount of AWS features and capabilities conveniently listed here. All while this is going on, startups continue to iterate, create new categories, and introduce new technologies my biased, favorite list is on producthunt.
All in all, was tremendously busy with so many of the products introduced clearly pushing the state of the art. Before getting to the choices that have nuance or subtlety, the following are two top-of-mind factors that get to the heart of building products in This year, rightfully, brought an overdue and intense focus on the role of diversity and inclusion within leadership, engineering, and businesses in general. The time is right for there to be an exponential change in our approach.
We all know this is more than an opportunity, but a necessity. Products are used by an infinite variety of people from all walks of life, backgrounds, and abilities, and it follows that products should be built that way as well.
Looking at this through the lens of rapid change and how working on this early on is so critical, startups need to address this early in a company and team! The discussion needs to happen and from that plans and acting on those plans needs to follow. The run of security breaches in continued unabated. The damage continues to go up and there seems to be no end in sight to being able to secure legacy infrastructure.
There are, however, some good news scenarios. First, the move to mobile, particularly iOS, and third party SaaS services affords an opportunity to reset the security landscape. Of course these new operating systems are not absolutely secure as we have seen, but the level of security that comes from a new architecture and the investment in up front security places you on much firmer ground. There is no denying this so if you want to be secure, getting more of your use cases to mobile is going to help.
Start with building on top of existing identity and authentication methods, build all communication channels as encrypted, and encrypt stored data within your own services. Previously these were viewed as enterprise features to be added later or to charge more for, but now these are essential to bootstrapping a service.
They are just a start, necessary but not sufficient. Nearly every discussion about what to purchase or what to build next needs to happen in the context of security and privacy. In general, there are nuances and more importantly context that drive a particular approach. Therefore, hallway discussions are rarely won or lost but are a necessary part of deciding on product strategy.
The best product manager or product leader discussions to have in This past year has been an incredible year of progress in artificial intelligence or machine learning. Progress has been so significant that the pinnacle of tech leadership has articulated a growing concern of the risks of AI!
Even so, this generation of AI has gone from recognizing cat videos to being able to quickly and easy tag your friends in photo galleries and online services. Nearly every good recommendation engine is now powered by deep neural networks and machine learning. A couple of great examples of machine learning include visual search at Pinterest and i mages within Yelp listings. This year even saw Google generate smart email replies for you!
These are incredible advances in how problems are solved. The common thread is classifying existing large and labeled data sets within deep neural networks. This contrasts significantly with previous approaches to these same problem areas that would use click streams or other algorithmic approaches.
They are all better by leaps and bounds over existing solutions that rely on smaller data sets and algorithmic approaches. As with every previous AI advance, it is likely that some aspects of these new approaches will be combined with the current state of the art.
In particular, the role of existing linguistic solutions will prove incredibly valuable for smaller data sets or difficult to classify solutions for natural language queries or processing in general. Pay close attention to how the research advances though because the role of deep learning for these scenarios is changing quickly.
Are tablets turning into laptops? Are laptops turning into tablets? Are tablets losing out to larger screen phones? The permutations of form factors have been dizzying this year.
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