 Welcome to the Cube Pod episode 19. We're almost at 20 Dave. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante for our Cube Pod where we break down what we're looking at every week, stories hitting the internet, enterprise technology, emerging tech and what's going on in the tech industry from an enterprise perspective. It's cube season. Of course, we're on the road all the time, going to events, extracting the signal from the noise. Of course, silkenangle.com is where all the stories are heading. The growth of Silicon Angle has been great and the Cube brand is growing, Dave. It's been an amazing year. That events are coming back. Plus our digital business is booming with our content. Events are back and the market's changing radically. Huge news this week, I mean, just goes on and on. The whole Elon Musk is in the news as Facebook comes out with a competitor, Met, I should say, comes out with a competitor called Threads, which as of right now has 70 million downloads, 4 million downloads in the first two hours. I got it in the first five minutes. Elon Musk, it's basically an anti-Elon pledge, but it's also a Facebook kind of head fake with Instagram. We're going to go unpack that heavily. A lot of news there. Twitter's problems completely multiply. I have a solution. I'm not even going to talk about what Twitter could do. Frankly, I've been saying it for years and I'm going to go there, but they have really one move. Are they going to be killed by Facebook? And then other news just in is that the cage match between the physical altercation, there's odds already on Vegas around Elon Musk and Zuckerberg actually getting into an actual physical match. That was the original thing. I think that was just a lead into this sidecar carnival show of a Twitter clone by Facebook to take on Twitter as Twitter is so weak, their problems multiply. And of course, more cloud computing stories. Amazon PR is really getting killed against Microsoft. That's a big story I've been talking a lot about lately. Although I post the Matt Garvin story, that's getting a lot of traction. And venture capital still booming in AI, but yet it's down in all of the sectors. You're seeing signs of companies looking at a few dates now, people talking about companies falling out of the sky. So a lot of stuff going on there. And of course AI nonsense is continuing to hype up. Andy Jassy was on CNBC and a lot of action happening in cloud. So again, just massive stuff. ChatGPT, 4.0 is now available for everybody. They're falling from grace as traffic is dipping. So ChatGPT is down. Facebook, of all the things that they could do to save the world and make the world a better place, they're launching a Twitter clone. Like do we really need, does the world really need another Twitter clone? I mean, really? Come on. And this whole anti-musk thing is ridiculous. Twitter not sitting there, they have a lot of fuckups. But really Zuckerberg, that's the best you're going to do. Copy Twitter of all the things that they could do. I mean, I'll say that for my rant section, Dave, but Facebook has absolutely got all the guns. They have too many knobs to turn. If they want to take down Twitter, it's going to be a matter of time. They got the Instagram social graph. They avoided the cold start problem that everyone's been talking about. Every app knows it's hard. Jack Dorsey's blue sky just has 300,000 downloads. Since June 30th, wow, what a big number. Two days and 33 days in Zuckerberg we've got 70 million downloads, Dave. 70 million downloads. It took chat GPT two months to get 100 million users. Now, granted, once an app download, once a website. So the top story in tech is clearly threads. It's impacting our world as people move and try to cross-post between Twitter and threads. Again, threads is Instagram. I mean, I proved that this morning. The head of Instagram was on the record. It's just Instagram. With the social graph, all your interests, tweaking your feed, making you see what you want to see. And now I'm seeing that Adam Massiri says, threads will not encourage politics and hard news as such content brings scrutiny. That means all the news sites are going to get fucked. Trust me on this one. It's going to happen. Welcome to Pod 19, Dave. Well, I mean, you know, certainly Metta made it easy to sign up for threads. You just, anybody you follow on Instagram and follows you and made it really super easy. But I think you're right. It's just basically Instagram with a feed. I don't know. I mean, I do see you and I maybe use Instagram differently. I don't use, I use Instagram a lot, mostly for consuming content. I post every now and then, but I don't post a lot of business stuff which is different on a Twitter. I do a lot of sort of covering events and giving my thoughts and opinions. I don't know. That's just maybe force a habit and threads is fine. It's good. I mean, wow, all the downloads, maybe that's sort of, you know, the newness of it, the novelty of it. I think it's okay, but it's basically Instagram as well. So I like Instagram better than threads so far. I still like Twitter. I'd be interested to see here how you think, you know, Twitter is going to get killed or maybe could be saved. But I still like Twitter. I get good news from Twitter. I think I think Twitter is too big to die personally, but it was going to die. It's going to die because of the attacks from the right left wing party because everyone's accusing Twitter of being parlor turning into a right wing, which is not true. Now the right wing is dominating Twitter right now because you see things like the all in pod, as we know. By the way, they're not all those guys on the all in pod date or not on threads yet. It's interesting, you know. Jason Calcanus was quoted in the text messages that was discovered during the lawsuit. Private text messages, you know, I give you my sword. They don't like, I'll fight with you to the death. Is it? And so they're not on. Those guys are all in, all the all in podcasts is not on threads because they're anti, they're on Elon side. Is it, that's lame. So is it true that you can't delete your threads account without deleting your Instagram account? That is a true statement. Okay, so threads, threads is just Instagram back end with the front end user interface. Right, so this is, so it just says it all. It just says it all. So Zuckerberg is going to save us from Twitter. I guess it's this year, this is your rant. It's kind of my rant too. It's like, really, we're going to trust this guy with our privacy. I mean, their track record, Meta's track record on privacy and governance. I mean, just look at the corporate structure. It's abysmal. I mean, I love Facebook. I mean, as a company, I mean, the platform and amazing 2 billion plus users. You love the company? Oh my God. You're one of the, we're the one of minorities. No, in terms of the business model, I love it. I mean, are you kidding me? I mean, people would kill for that business model. I mean, the profitability of the company. People have been killed. The cash flow of that company, I mean, it's incredible. People have been killed because of their lack of policies. But from a business, from a cash making standpoint, it's a phenomenal business is what I'm trying to say. Google ad, Google ad words is a phenomenal business model. Targeting from Facebook is a phenomenal business model. Let me just get my thought out. You maybe should do this podcast solo, John. You can probably pull it off. You don't like those, you don't look like the sports talk radio guys who go solo. I'm always just so impressed with guys that can just keep it interesting for such a long period of time and you have that skill. It's amazing. But anyway, what I was saying is that the corporate governance of Facebook is a joke, right? I mean, you know, Zuckerberg is going to be in control for perpetuity, right? It's a controlled company. So we're going to trust this guy to save us from Twitter. I mean, really, to your point, you really can't do anything better than that. And then the whole cage match thing, I think Zuckerberg would kick Elon's ass. I mean, right? I mean, Zuckerberg. He's in good shape. He's been working out. He's in good shape. He's got the thing. He's got the thing. Those guys are crazy. Musk has the dad bod and Zuckerberg's getting yoked, as they say. He's a fleshy white, going to get his ass kicked. You're right. Zuckerberg would kill him. Facebook is evil genius. Okay, I'll quote your genius point because they are an amazing business model. Cheryl Sandberg built an amazing engine based on Zuckerberg's core invention, which is copied PHP code from the other guy and they're copying Twitter now. But I want to go with that. And I'll say that for my rant section, but their business model is just phenomenally strong. You can target. And for the benefits of the advertisers that offers the same exact benefits for the adversaries and Facebook.com, which is no longer the name of the company. It's now called Metta is old hat. Okay, and Instagram, by the way, which became the new Facebook, all the younger kids are on Instagram, people love Instagram. And now the interest threads and my research, quick spot research that I've done the past three days of being on the app and talking to folks from all age spectrums is that the general consensus is anyone under the age of 30 is like, this is weak. What this is turning into is the Facebook generation that now has kids, right? So if you're in college in 2007, you're now having kids here in your 30s, like Zuckerberg. And guess what? Threads is like a new nightclub. That's for the middle-aged growing social media originals. We're relics because we were pre-social media, okay, or kind of early on. So, but think about it, Zuckerberg's in his 30s and that whole crew, this is their site. It's like a new nightclub. So this is their Twitter moment. And so, I think it's not gonna, I think I'm not sure it'll have sustainability. And if it is, it's at the expense of Instagram. So, I was talking about this on threads actually, with folks like Howard Linsen who started stock twits and others, is that one of the problems that Twitter, that they have in this battle to take over the Twitter territory is that Zuckerberg's cannibalizing Instagram. So, I'd be curious to see what the daily active uniques are for Twitter, Instagram, and threads the past three days. I would bet that it would drop significantly on the Instagram side. Because remember, you're pulling your graph over from Instagram. So, Instagram traffic is gonna drop. I've already felt that on my user experience that I look at the stories and that's it. I pretty much ignore most of the feed on Instagram, now that I'm on threads because threads is engaging. They did a good job on the onboarding as you pointed out. And it's their algorithms highly tweaked on what you're doing on Instagram. So, they have pre-existing information about what you know. So, and what they're doing is they're tweaking threads with all these people coming in and serving you into the feed, things that they know you like out of the gate. That's a winning hand. That's a pre-existing condition of their scale, monopoly. That is, and by the way, they hired editors too to edit the feed. So, now we've come into the whole, are they a platform, Dave, or are they a publisher? I'm telling you, this is going to be a fun conversation. I think we're gonna be talking about threads on the podcast a lot. I can only speak to my own experience. I haven't done a lot of research as you have, but I would agree with you. I have spent more time on threads. I'm not sure it's gonna consume a lot of my time, it's the novelty that is attracted to me. And I see a lot of folks on there. I see you on there, you're pretty active. I see Stu, I see Michael Dell, and some other folks that we know. But it has taken away from my Instagram time. It has not affected my Twitter time. I still go into Twitter and check what's happening, check out my DMs, maybe do a few posts. I was very active during the Snowflake Summit on Twitter. Usually when you and I are at events, like any analysts were pretty active, and you get a bunch of new followers, and you're laying down your thoughts, blah, blah, blah. Pretty inactive this week other than consuming, but it definitely took away from my Instagram, and I'll say this, I enjoy the Instagram experience better because I use it for different things. To me, threads, Twitter, kind of similar. It was kind of fun, David. What was your first tweet of threads that you posted? I commented on the cleanliness of the look and feel. I thought they did a really good job. From a tech standpoint, I thought it was well done. And then I read that it's bolted on to Instagram. I can't delete my account. Not that I wanted to delete my account, but I just think that's typical. That you got to delete your Instagram account. I wouldn't want to delete my Instagram account. I like my Instagram. But I think I'm kind of in wait-and-see mode. I'll float a few comments and respond maybe more to other people's stuff, but Twitter's still my primary for my opinions and my thoughts, and LinkedIn too. And on Instagram, I just use it for a different experience. You're active on Facebook. I mean, your Facebook is awesome. I've been cutting back on Facebook because a lot of people are tapping out on my friend group. So Facebook's becoming the old Voguey's ground, really. I know. It's not really kind of happening. And Instagram's becoming the millennials still having fun and the Z's around TikTok. But again, threads is like a high school read. You know what it threads is? It reminds me of the first day at middle school. Hey, everybody. Good to see you again. I saw people I haven't seen in years. Hey, what's going on? It's like, hey. You got new clothes. You got your new fall clothes on. Look at me. I've been doing great. How are you doing? New sneakers. It totally is back to school. I mean, absolutely back to school. Everyone's like, have a good time, snarky comments. It's like a nightclub, Dave. It's like, it's a spectacle of a nightclub that everyone knows is good and everyone's in there. And so now that they hit the 70 million mark, it's going to get popular because of the number. And again, this is a huge technical discussion as well in the enterprise with cloud. When you have cloud scale, okay? And you have now generative AI coming around the corner. This is essentially another act in the Facebook playbook that hasn't changed anything. The users of the product, they have all the data on you. They have some sort of promise out there. This activity hub is going to be a decentralized protocol to allow you to take your data anywhere. That is complete or shit, okay? It's never going to happen. Facebook always has kind of a promise. It's going to be open. We're going to make you choose. They've never delivered on any of those promises ever, not once. And this is going to be a real problem for our business and the news and free content with has sites, bloggers, podcasters. This is going to suck a lot of energy out of those franchises. And they're already downgrading news and politics, which is where the conversations are. So I do not see Twitter dying if they make those moves, but they got a lot of market power. They have a lot of knobs to turn, to juice up threads to be very viable against Twitter. And there's already hate against Elon. So that's almost half the people. They turn Elon into a right-wing symbol, which is guaranteed to give them half the market. And if they fork the market, then we're double posting, basically. Obviously YouTube meta have cracked the business model code on UGC, but nobody's cracked the user code. And I think several years ago, I think YouTube passed. Well, yes and no. Here's what I mean. Several years ago, we, I think you and some others on the team came up with a notion of value graph, where the user actually is in a position to monetize his or her data. And that data actually is portable. And you can pretty much do whatever you want with it. You own your own data. And that's where I think, you know, the promise of blockchain and some of the other, and even crypto came in, where you could use gamification, create a horizontal layer, and actually allow people to control their own data destiny. And the hard part, obviously, is getting a business model out of that. But I guess Reddit is the closest to that, as we saw recently. So I think actually Reddit actually has cracked the code. Well, they just shut down all those subreddits and shut down the API. How could you say that? Well, they had cracked it, and then they just screwed their user generated base. So they fucked that up. No, they just shut down the API and then resolved it. So what they did is they cracked the code to fuck over the users, you mean? Well, they had it, they had it, and they could have not screwed it, but they screwed the pooch. So I'm just saying that was an example of, I think, an organization that had it right, but then screwed it. So, and I think greed is the reason why. So there's still a need for it. So you're saying, are they the ones, you're saying they had it right, but blew it. Yes, and then they fucked it up. And so, but that model, I think, I thought was the right one until they, you know, let's take a break here, because this is a good conversation. So let's talk about who's cracked the user code, meaning user experience, utility. I think YouTube is definitely still better than threads or anything else out there. I think Twitter certainly cracked the code from day one and continues as the best product. I'm with you on Twitter, I love Twitter better than I'm a loyal Twitter. I built Twitter, as they say, it's like all with all the other millions of people. People actually built Twitter. Facebook was built by Zuckerberg, and they game it, and it's all throttled. It's no real, the users aren't building the product like they did with Twitter. The early days of Twitter, when we were going through that, you remember the fail, well, and there's a community, it was like a community. There is zero community with threads. It's essentially Zuckerberg's kingdom that's amassed a lot of users that they have all these levers to turn to gamify the crowd. That's a fact, that's well documented. And we talk about that all the time. YouTube is good. YouTube's got videos, they do it great, they stay true to their knitting, pun intended, and they're good at what they do, and they're now getting over the top on cable. So, relative to video and how creators are winning, I think YouTube's great. They got, you can snip it on top of it from a video standpoint. From a crypto decentralized on your data, then I don't think they even have any plans. I don't think anyone's cracked the code on that. But to your point, YouTube creators can make some good bank. Maybe Wikipedia is the closest, but it's kind of elitist. But maybe Jimmy Wales should solve this problem. Wikipedia is so old. It's like the time machine, but still keeps on ticking. I think Discord, Wikipedia is like the web. It nailed the code and it doesn't really change at all. It's not even a product anymore. It's like a standard. It's more of a standard, less of a user thing. It's like saying the web cracked the code. But let's talk about real software environments, Discord. I think they got it. I think Instagram had it. And Instagram beat Snapchat, by the way. How do you feel about, you know, they copy Snapchat. Now they're going to go to Threads. So I think Instagram had it and still has it. Let's see how Threads impacts that. I think Threads is going to cannibalize the crap out of Instagram. It's going to just be Instagram is one thing. Discord, YouTube are my favorites right now. I think blogging might come back. And I think substax, the subscription newsletters, they're actually going to benefit from this new threading kind of environment. Why do you think that? Because like already on Threads, it's a shitty content market. It's all it is, it's high school, hallway, right? It's like, you know, there's nothing of substance on there. Because they, well, not yet. But it's, they're gaming it for like back to school kind of vibe. And so what that allows journalists like Taylor Lorenz, who's a great journalist, allows her to flex her story and go direct to her audience and be a personality and get to do all the attention, getting snarkiness and commentary without doing long form posts. So as a lead gen mechanism, if I'm a writer, I'll get on these threads to promote my brand to get subscribers to subscribe to my paid newsletter. If you don't have a thread like this, we have a big watering hole or a public square like Twitter, Twitter, you got to really go direct and you know, expensive it is to kind of market product on the internet relative to the volume. So the ROI on Threads and Twitter, when you have large numbers like that is high. And Facebook knows this. That's why if you look at all the rankings going up right now on Threads on its third day, they're promoting the personalities. And this in fact, this is like a sub-complaint going on from the rising journalists that are in their late 20s and 30s, include me on the list. You know, New York Times where I was getting special treatment, you know, that kind of thing going on. So this total gamification on Threads, it's a case study of manipulation. It's a case study of how to crack the cold start problem that every app has that can't get off the ground and need to get that flywheel. It's an example of scale. It's an example of monopoly in action. It's Facebook, literally getting 70 million downloads for a new app. So what do you make of this lawsuit that Twitter is threatening, right? So you saw that, right? Yeah, I mean, that's total BS. I mean, he laid off all his people. He laid off all his people. I mean, come on. Oh, exactly. I mean, don't you think that's like total, totally duplicitous? He fires everybody and then, okay, so let's say Zuck picks up a few and builds a copycat. What's, is that illegal? No, the lawsuit is one thing. Elon's strategy of the lawsuit is very simple and clear and one purpose only. To sue Facebook to slow them down because he likes to play in court. Now he is- No, it's a Trump move. It's a Trump-like move. Yeah, and then, by the way, his entire Trump moves that he's been trolling since he started with Twitter, whoever advised him on that, it's totally backfiring on him right now. His only hope right now is, Elon's only hope right now is to sue them, get them in court, which by the way, Meta Facebook has a huge war chest and like you said, their business model is massively profitable. Their ad spend is like way up here and Twitter's like down on the seller, like on the rounding error compared to Facebook's numbers. So it could help, it could help actually, just attract even more users. Gonna attract more users of threads and Facebook will win with dollars. So it'll stay in court and then Twitter will eventually lose on the court. But Elon's only move is to stall with the court move and then just get a better product. So the so-called Elon genius, product genius, let's see what he's got. It's gonna be very interesting to see Elon step up to this challenge. Does he fold like a cheap chair? What does he step up and build a product that actually is good? Their product, he's made so many snafus, the rate limiting, he killed the API, he killed our product, we had CrowdChat.net. Anyone who knows Cube knows CrowdChat.net is dead because of Elon's mishandling of the API in the entire developer community. Brings in a new CEO from Madison Avenue, she's gonna inherit negative earnings if you will on ad sales and now a competition with an ad juggernaut like Facebook. And a social graph that's already tuned to manipulating people's preferences and feeding them what they want. Dude, it's over if this doesn't get, if they don't dig in, Instagram and AKA threads will absolutely crush them. Snapchat got killed by Instagram Reels, everyone knows that, but Snapchat was good. They're a good management team. They survived it because they're good and smart. But they still, the numbers are down on Snapchat. You ask anyone that was a Snapchat user if they're using Snapchat today, that probably is the answers. I'd say 50% no. Now, Snapchat had it for a little while. It was the hot thing among young people and then they just lost it. But people are bringing out their A-game for threads because it's new. Michael Dell, you probably saw it just put out a picture of a server, what do you call it? Threaded out a picture of a server saying- Multiple threads. Multiple threads, threads that basically allow you to do things in parallel sequences on a server. GP is pretty funny. It's a good developer joke. So it's a good developer joke. But yeah, so people are getting creative because it's new, but I have to say there's a lot of action on threads. It's the engagement's high. The engagement is there. The Cara Swisher's on there. You're seeing a lot of celebrities, a lot of the politicians are jumping right in. People are recycling their favorite hits from Twitter. I'm looking at a bunch of people like, oh, I've seen that tweet before. They go into their top tweets that they've done that are evergreen and recycling them back into threads. Back to school, new jeans and new look. It's the 80s, no more 70s. Let's go, fashion change. So this is interesting. So Alex Stamos tweeted out or threaded out, I have 300 times the follower account on Twitter, but I'm getting already much more engagement here. It's amazing how hard it is to have your tweets seen now without paying for a fake check mark, which by the way is not true. Howard Linsen said the same thing. I posted, reposted his blog because he nailed it. He like us were early day Twitter users and he actually was just before us when we invested in all the firehose work we did on Silicon Angle and theCUBE. He built StockTwits and he was a great innovator, great entrepreneur, Howard Linsen. And I've known him for years, not really good friends with him but I've known him in and around conferences and stuff and kind of journey him in together. He built a killer app and he was part of the early crowd of this is a great community and the data was used for developers and then it just went to hell on the hand basket when they started to try to monetize things and they screwed over their developers. And so he talks about that and he's saying the same exact thing. I'll do threads because I get more engagement and I'm not a big fan of Elon and Twitter's business model they screwed everything but he's still not happy. He thinks it's a backward step. And so to me, this is just Twitter rebooted as like a new nightclub and it's the new fashion. It's like, you know, it's like you wake up one day and you're in the 70s, you know and then it's like the 80s, punk rock. You go to disco to punk, you know, that's the way I see it. So what else is going on? I've been playing around with the Cube AI. It's getting better and better every week, John. I can't wait to release this thing. What are we doing here? Are we going to open it up to like a private beta? It's good enough, I think. I'm letting people in right now on the cubeai.com. Check it out. There's a company out there that's calling themselves the Cube AI and it's a development to Cube Dev. It's a funded company by John Sudoka and Decibel and some other venture guys. A little bit of confusing conflict but we'll get through that. But we're letting people in. It's got a waitlist coming in and we've got people who are active on there. I see that right now. Playing around, typing in queries but I think most of the people are typing in, you know, what's the best interview of Kubernetes and we're using that corpus of data and this is another thread, by the way. I still have to go back to threads but thread was like give me a better LLM and a data company over this nonsense. Kind of talking about this is really not a check with revolution as everyone's hyped up about it. It's basically Facebook refecting their install base. And so I think a lot of people who are working hard on some of these new technologies, Dave, like AI are like not pissed off at this hype machine with threads but more of really, this is what people are getting excited about. Another Twitter. So the AI side is great. I mean, we're using it. I posted last week, I posted Matt Garmin and Fitsy was commenting and Charles Fitzgerald coming about the hype of PR from Amazon. Really critical as I have been on Amazon's PR. They're just doing all the wrong things with PR. I mean, they're burning bridges in the marketplace and they're telling the wrong story. It's a hard story to tell and they're telling it wrong. They're telling it from a defensive perspective and that's why I posted the full transcript of my Matt Garmin interview because he was really good. He nailed it and he basically was telling the Amazon story. Every company like ours and others will have AI. So I think that's the reality. And coming off the Databricks event, it's very clear that you're gonna start to see platforms emerge to support more large language models and foundation models for AI. So I think the AI story is much bigger than the thread story and the Elon Musk versus Zuckerberg story, which is dominating the press and has ever won kind of in this hallucinogen mode right now. So this week's breaking analysis, we unpacked the Databricks conference, which I was not at, you were at. So I spent the last several days just watching the keynotes. I gotta say I was very impressed. Unlike most conferences today, which I've compressed the keynotes, Allie Goatsey's keynote, day one keynote, I think he broke Andy Jassy's record, John. It was almost three hours, that keynote. And it was really good. I think there was so much information in there that was compelling. I really liked the way he got all, you got Matei involved, your interview with Matei was great by the way. I used one of the clips from there on their open strategy. And but he brought out co-founders, he brought out Naveen Rao from Mosaic ML, who gave a really strong presentation. The fireside chat with JPMC went way longer than that. Of course, we profiled them a couple of years ago on breaking analysis with their data mesh strategy that they're doing on AWS. It was interesting to see how that's evolved. We hear the guy from JPMC saying, we're doing data products. I remember when they first did that, we reported on it and researched it. I thought the JetBlue one was not that great. Rivian was okay. But- I love the Rivian. The video they did with the Rivian was awesome. It was awesome going up the off road. I wanna buy one of those things. But I gotta say that the themes were good. They had a lot of hits that really resonated with me. You know, me, I'm like a snowflake fanboy. I thought the keynotes at Databricks and the content was stronger. It was more in-depth. It was more featured from the technology side of the house. The founders. I didn't think snowflake gave the founder enough time. Thierry, one of the other founders typically doesn't talk much, but Benoit d'Ajaville does. And they shortchanged him. I would have liked to hear more from him. You know, Kristen Kleineman is the product guy. He went deep, which was good. But I thought that I gotta say, I was impressed. You said there were 12,000 people there. And I think, you know what? The more I think about it, these guys, they're not on the collision course that I had thought. I think the market's huge. I actually think neither has a- Are you talking about they as in Databricks or a snowflake? Databricks and snowflake. I don't think they're on the collision course, as I thought. I think they're obviously going after the same opportunity. I saw your interview with Sanjeev Mohan who said, hey, ultimately the business outcome requirements are the same, the customer requirements. They're taking different paths to get there. But I think, you know, I think snowflake is probably three or four or five years ahead in data management. And I think that Databricks is three or four or five years ahead in MLAI. Obviously, LLMs sort of changed that. But there's so much market there. And I think they're both going to do really, really well. It's hard for me to say that anyone is going to take the mantle. But like back in the day of Oracle and Sybase and InformX and IBM with the database wars, at the time, you didn't really know who was going to win, but you knew somebody was going to win. Here it's like, you got the big three cloud providers, you got snowflake, you got Databricks, you got a bunch of other, you know, smaller players. There's a big market, you know, for four or five companies, I think, to thrive. Yeah. And I think it's a platform or platforms. I think that was the might take away from the past weeks on theCUBE as a couple of things. One is the rise of the data developer. The idea of a data modern stack is emerging. We're hearing that all the time from folks investors. You got the infrastructure, you got the middleware, you got the application, that kind of construct is coming around super cloud, super computing, super infrastructure, and then you get the super cloud layer and then you have super apps. I think the generative AI trend is going to emerge very quickly at the spectrums of the stack, lower end than the top end. I think what you're going to see is you're going to see two areas of innovation coming from these companies that are going to enable this, by the way. Databricks is still just one of a few. You got at scale, vast data, which was emerging out as a data platform form, some scuttle, but I'm hearing in the industry. And others, MongoDB is a platform now. And you heard about some of their multi cloud capabilities, VMware, CrossCloud, Cisco. You're going to see a platform collision, but it's all going to revolve around the super cloud narrative that we have. And that is at the bottom of the stack that the physical layer from Silicon, Andy Jassy talked about it just yesterday on camera around the chip advantage, we're on GPUs and inference for inference and training, physical layer innovation, and then top of the stack in the app. The big gap is going to emerge in the middle. So I think you're going to see a squeezing of force for generative AI from both ends of the spectrum. And the middle layer is going to be the super, what I call the super loud layer, and that's going to be a collection of platforms. And it's going to be like a connective tissue model, where it's going to be not static, it's going to be dynamic. And right now, all the use cases for generative AI are stuff that can be automated. You're seeing that at the physical layer, like DevOps, scripts, stuff that's repeated, that's automation, easy place. Software co-pilots, you see that all the time, help me code. I think you're going to see more of that. That's at the coding level. And then network policies, you're going to see that infrastructure get quickly adopted with generative AI. And the apps are obvious. What we're doing is an example, using data as a part of feeding into a user experience that's different and better. That's happening now, okay? I was talking with Cisco yesterday, Gitu Patel came on for super cloud keynote. They already have an automated like SOC capability assistance for like securities operating centers. They got data from all the routers. They can go in and look at telemetry data in real time and predict and do all kinds of cool inferencing. So you're going to see that immediately now. The area that's going to be up for grabs is where data breaks a snowflake are, as you pointed out, at scale. That's data, MongoDB. That's going to be where the action, where the cloud comes in. Amazon's going to fight tooth and nail for that. AWS, I mean, Microsoft's going to fight tooth and nail and Google's a dark horse. And then ultimately, the benefits from all this Oracle could come out a winner, Dave, because they got the whole Oracle on Oracle compute engineered systems. They could be a compute farm for GPUs. So I think that Genevieve AI could change the landscape in the cloud world better than we've ever seen before. We've, you know us, we've always been like Amazon's miles ahead of Microsoft. That's gaps closed. Oracle, a fourth place at best. Google nipping at the heels, way behind. The order's changing, you know, the course has changed, the horses are changing. It's quite an amazing time, Dave. I got to say, this is the most compelling time I've ever seen. And if those horses change positions, just think about the ramifications to the end user opportunity and the ecosystem. It's just mind-blowingly, it's a mind-blowing experience because it's like the whole ecosystem's changed. Economics, the wealth, who gets what cash, white space for startups. It's going to be amazing. So there's like 15 things there that I could comment on, but I'll pick out a couple. You reminded me of something. So this week, I think it was this week, some, there was some leaked data from the Activision Azure hearing. And supposedly Azure's business is not nearly as big as everybody thought, including myself. But I'm skeptical. So I was chatting with Sarbjit Johal about this on Twitter and they've taken away, they've redacted that sort of leak doc so you can't really find the exact context. But supposedly they gave a number as to the trailing 12 months from last summer to the 12 before. And it was around, I want to say 12 to 15 days billion dollars smaller than most estimates. So they had it in kind of the mid to high 20s. And I was in the sort of mid 30s in that 12 month period. It was like summer to summer. So significantly smaller and a smaller share. So they cited Gartner, they cited Statistica, which you know, I don't know what the source was on Statistica, you got to double click and get up and Sarbjit didn't disclose that. And I don't, I don't have a subscription anymore. But the point is that Microsoft in its documents released that data. Now I'm still skeptical. I want to see the original wording of this number one. Number two is Microsoft's trying to paint the picture that it's not the monopoly and it's never divulged those numbers. So it could basically say whatever it wanted to, it could take its whole intelligent cloud business and say, okay, this much is IS and BAS and there's so much fluff in there. But nonetheless, you know, there is some evidence that people are overestimating Microsoft's, you know, presence in cloud. So that's one thing I wanted to talk about. You mentioned it. We know it's all along actually, but they've been saying that all along. Well, it's hard to say because they give guidance on growth that they don't give guidance on the actual starting point of the numbers. So you had to guess as to what the numbers were. You know, you survey data and talk to people. And I do have, actually I have data points that suggest that they're larger than that leaked doc suggested. But again, I got to see the context and it could be Microsoft playing games with numbers. You also mentioned Vast. I watched, I was sitting at the bar having dinner after snowflake, waiting for the red eye. There's too many red eyes. And watching your interview with the founder or co-founder of Vast, Jeff Denworth, and I put out on LinkedIn, I thought this was a storage company. So there's something cooking there where they've got some announcement coming beyond storage. They were in the conversation around data platforms, which is interesting, you know, coming at it from, you know, kind of a data storage view versus, you know, your snowflake and Databricks to coming at it from their data warehouse and analytics point of view and then the cloud guys coming at it from the cloud point of view. So it'd be interesting to see if Vast has some new perspectives. You know, their founder, Rennan is, you know, he's one of these Israeli guys that think about things differently. You know, you remember the Aguazio guys, they always had really good thought leadership. So really curious as to what they got cooking there. And then the other thing you mentioned, SuperCloud. We got SuperCloud 3 coming up in July 18th. When we're going through, it's a live event and we drop in a lot of the prerecords. We got Matthew Prince the other day, it was amazing. George Kurtz, I talked to him this morning. Jaya Baloo, who's the chief security officer, Rapid7. Phil Venables is a CSO, a CISO at Google Cloud. Jay Traudry is going to be in studio live that day. We've got Mario Duarte coming in. Doug Merritt, Doug Merritt's going to get retirement exclusive. Doug Merritt's coming into the studio that day and a number of other folks coming in. You just had G2 and Tom Gillis. I had FOMO because I had something else going on. I couldn't participate in that. So really, the whole focus on cross-cloud security and the impact of generative AI, one of the things that's come out of my prerecords is that generative AI, the consensus is, and a lot of people will talk about this, but if you get them talking in private, you can get them to sort of admit it, that initially the technology community had the advantage here because they had all the AI tech. Not that the adversaries didn't have access to AI tech, they did, but it wasn't as prevalent as it is post-chat GPT. So they had the advantage, the tech vendors, the defenders, and now it's flipped and the adversaries seem to have the advantage now, whether it's phishing emails or driving automation or just making the attacks more efficient, taking Patch Tuesday and more quickly finding out where the holes are that used to take a lot of work, a lot of thinking, that time is compressed. So Patch Tuesday becomes Hack Wednesday. It's now like Patch Tuesday becomes Hack Tuesday because you can compress the time at which you can hack. So that's an interesting flip that I hadn't really sort of heard or thought about deeply. So we're going to keep probing on that. And the super-cloud is just an awesome community event to gather people and it's sort of an editorial event and not a lot of pimpage and commercials, which is good. I mean, people always get their commercials in there, but that's not really what it's about. So it's good. I'm excited. Good rant. I mean, I got to tell you, super-cloud is emerging. We had folks are using as a verb now in terms of identifying that super-cloud layer. You know, I just think the world is coming into a cultural shift. I was just reading the Wall Street Journal around some of the drugs that are coming out. We're in this post-Crisper gene editing thing, weight loss drugs, long, living longer. There's more evidence coming in and gene editing techniques. And it's very interesting to see how the drug market's going to change there. So you got that kind of biochemical trend. It's tech related, obviously. Glad that stuff couldn't do before cloud computing. I'm really intrigued by the industrial impact of the edge, industrial edge, internet of things, as we call it. I think this next gen cloud that we wrote about last November at re-invent with our exclusive with the CEO of AWS, Adam Sileski, we hinted at this next gen super-cloud is playing out. And I think looking back at 2023, I think we're going to look at it and saying, Dave, that was a year that we really kind of saw super-cloud emerge. I think there's going to be a lot of cultural extinctions happening. When I say extinctions, I mean communities. You look at virtual machines, for instance. Huge VMworld is an event that's happened over and over again. Now it's called VMware Explorer. They just get bought by Broadcom. You're going to see that entire generation of IT ops practitioners evolve and get re-skilled into cloud operations, which is a natural row that's been on for over a decade. Okay, so what does that mean? Does that mean there you've become Microsoft people or AWS people or Oracle people? There's no people. It's one thing. It's called cloud and cloud and AI. So like if you think about how IT work has been done and you're a historian like me, we like to look at the history and then go forward, think about the impact of the technology trends we're on now and how it's going to impact the work of the personnel involved that we all know. Friends, stackin' racks, top of rack switches, IT, glasshouse, mainframes. Now we have a company I interviewed that's essentially got a code ball. I got AI bots, code generators, assistants who code code ball. They've ingested the entire language and it's a code ball programming and they're running the table in FinOps. FinTech, I mean. You know why? Because no one can hire code ball programmers. Well, guess what? AI does that now. So, and then you got AI bridging modern applications or older applications into the modern era. So the role of people, where do they go? And so the companies that could capture that value as a community in this new economic time where collective intelligence, things like threads points out to us that you can avoid these cold starts if the crowd's already there. So you got the dynamic going on in tech that we've never seen before in a sense the matrization of the world in technology is so there. So to me, I think that's so compelling. If I'm an investor, I'm looking at the role of the people and the social media in our relationships that they have. And I think that's why the AI and their data is more valuable. And that's why I think our value at SiliconANGLE and theCUBE after 13 years of having data and having a lot of metadata and language data allows us to put into position to be a check against hallucinations, check against quality, check against our community. So companies like us, and I think the media, if you're Vox or you're these other big companies, they're going to be in a good position. And I think if I'm not, if I'm them, if I'm not retooling right now with AI, they're going to be extinct. So, I mean, it's a very fascinating conversation. I'm observing this at VMworld this year, Vmug, all these people, they're all awesome tech dudes and gals. And guess what? You know what they're doing? They're provisioning cloud and AI and edge. So they love the super cloud, you know why? Because they want to work on multiple clouds, not just be just Amazon or just Azure. They got to be multi-talented, multi-disciplined across multiple code bases. And with AI coming, that can be done for them. So I think you're going to see a massive acceleration of the endpoints, physical and application AI, and then the middle is going to be all, it's going to develop over the next 24 months so fast. And it's going to be a land grab. Databricks, Stoflake, AtScale, VastData, MongoDB, you name the companies, Cloudflare, just go down the list, it's going to be a run. And I think you're going to look at the public companies and the privates and go, which one's going to be capturing that? And you're going to be able to tell right away, do they have vaporware or do they have legit product? Yeah. And thinking about, you mentioned that we're, the industry historians in a way, we're seeing a step function in the compression of the cycle of the time it takes for change to occur. I mean, I've never seen anything like this. It's usually more gradual. And we certainly saw a little bit of a step function with the internet, in total, it was a huge step function, but it kind of really didn't have a massive, it was more like an S-curve, an O-Give that could have sort of slow slope and then hit. And then the cloud was sort of similar. And I feel like NAI, it's like a new O-Give. The steep part of the S-curve has been like smashed into what would normally be the gestation period. Now, maybe it's because the gestation period started in the 1950s, 60s or 70s, and it's been taken a long time, but I don't think so. I think it's that we've now got so much data and so much processing power and so many people sort of working on this that you've seen, you went from whenever, OpenAI announced chat GPT, what was that, November? It was like this massive step function and awareness. And you see GPT-3.5, now GPT-4, GPT-4 is now available. All these other models are coming out, these LLM models and everybody, to your point, is taking advantage of it. And the market, okay, you've got Snowflake and Databricks and the Cloud guys, we've talked about them thriving. You know, you go to Dell Tech World, you go to HPE Discover, these companies are kicking ass. There's a vibrant community, the shows were packed, both Dell and HPE had 10,000 people there. So really interested crowd all talking about LLMs. How do I take advantage of this? Oh, it's going to be on-prem. Oh, it's going to be in the cloud. Oh, it's going to be both. Oh, it's going to be at the edge. Just this massive, massive market. The TAM is, it's like, when you listen to guys at Snowflake, the Wall Street analysts are pressing them, like, how do you quantify this? How big is it? And they're like, look, we don't know. We actually can't give you a credible answer because we can't take a bunch of IDC data and extrapolate it and put it forward. It's like the entire economy. It's like, John, how big is the internet? Right? Let's say the entire GDP of the world. OK. Well, I did a little network effect calculation. I shared that with you. And there's 40 billion people that, if you factor in the LinkedIn, remember that LinkedIn had that first degree separation kind of calculation back when they first came out? Yeah, first degree friends. And then they showed you your network reach. That's very much in play right now. And I think a lot of people have so much connective relationships that the graphs are important right now. And I think that's why I'm fascinated by threads and keep talking about it because it's playing out on a third day. I'm going to be continuing to be on that experiment and do a report on it. But I did the math on some of our relationships over 13 years. We've interviewed close to 18,000 people on theCUBE in 13 years. And like 30,000 videos, that has network effect. We're on LinkedIn. Our audience from a first-party standpoint is so much smaller relative to the multiplier that it reaches globally. Because everyone always asks me, what's your reach? I'm like, well, that's an interesting question. We don't really do email marketing, so we're not optimized to capture every name. We're optimized to get flow and push it out as far as we can. But that's not a measurement system that's compatible with today's market, but that's network effect. So people are like, okay, so can you tell me the number? Well, I ran the math. Dave, we've reached 30 million people potentially. So, but do we have 30 million people in our network? Yes, technically, do we reach 30 million people? They don't watch TV. They're not watching. They're not going to theCUBE site or the SiliconANGLE every day. But our content, when published, hits a surface area, first party, and then has a network effect that progresses. It has life. And so you're seeing what these threads, these algorithms that turn the knobs are very important tuning mechanisms for understanding network routes, you know, a people's affinities. So Facebook has absolutely mastered that. Okay, no one else has. This is where I think the AI stuff is going to be massive opportunity. And I think, you know, when people ask questions like, what is your traffic for SiliconANGLE? I roll my eyes. You didn't say, you're an idiot. All right, so they don't get it. Well, I asked that question too, but it's not because I'm an idiot. It's because it's a data point, but- Well, you can ask, what was the consumption estimate of something, but not, you can't usually globalize and say, how many uniques do you get per month? That was an old web traffic metric. It's still a metric, but to your point, if that's the only metric that you're looking at, you're missing probably an order of magnitude more consumption. Yeah, I'd say a site like TechCrunch or yahoo.com has massive monthly uniques relative to others, but they're not optimized for other things, right? They're not optimized for pushing content. In fact, a lot of them have paywalls and they're anti-sharing. So open source is coming. I've said this before in the podcast, I don't want to say it again, but the idea of closed versus open is interesting. Threads is closed, but open for everyone if you have an Instagram account, but closed for anything else. So how do you make money from threads if you go for your user? You promote yourself, promote your services, right? Just the same way you would do on Twitter, right? I mean, unlike YouTube, right? YouTube? They'll pay it. Yeah, YouTube is kinda good, you know? TikTok is totally head fake. Creators on TikTok are getting squeezed. Well, I made a comment on threads the other day. I'm like, is this good for mental health? I'm on the app all the time because I like it, it's addicting, but I'm thinking more on threads, but TikTok's more brain dead. Let me ask you a question. How much time do you spend now on Clubhouse? Zero. Okay, you were like amazing on Clubhouse. You were participating, you were into it. You spent a lot of time there because you were interested, not only, you were interested in the format, the tech, and obviously you're a social person, but I don't spend any time there either. I used to go in pretty regularly. Used to host stuff, and so, you know, that's the big question. Is the novel to you this, where are all? The conversations were good there, and then when they tried to grow, they lost it. So the question for threads is, they're already at 70 million. I mean, that's a huge number. It's an act of, the threads are active. There's no doubt about it. 70 million is active. There's good content on there. Like you said, it finds you. Content finds you. Yeah. It's very visual, very Instagram-like in a way, but much more interactive and engaging. So it's, yeah, it's Instagram meets Twitter on meta as a walled garden, but it's good. It's actually very good. I mean, it's got the Instagram vibe with the old Twitter engagement. You remember when we first got on Twitter, I used to write on the old Wiki, I would tweet it out, and we had a counter on the Wiki, and this is on the old wikibond.org, which if you go there, it's still up. But I'd be careful, but anyway, I would tweet out at like 2 a.m., a blog that I just wrote or a Wiki that I just post, and it would get like, like within seconds, it would have hundreds of views because it was early on Twitter. And so you got great engagement early on. So to the earlier point, it's you getting much better engagement on threads than you get on Twitter, typically, with the Instagram vibe. So it's good, it's actually really good. I mean, my traffic on Twitter is plummeting, you know? What do you mean? Your traffic, how are you measuring that? Every post, you can see how many tweets, people view your tweets. Yeah, well, it mixed for me. I mean, it depends on what it is. Like when I sit there and do those stupid, like hold my phone out and say, oh, we're here live at the Snowflake Summit, you know, ecosystem, blah, blah, blah. It actually gets really good traffic. So I put a thread on threads, we've got 232 views. Yeah, well, when I post something that's, I think, you know, nuanced or intelligent or it's something that nobody else is talking about, but doesn't, isn't goofy, you know, it's hundreds versus tens of thousands sometimes, if you goofball it. I don't know, it's hard to say. You have the CNBC guy who did a Skype thing, got 65,000 views, he's from CNBC. That should be like 50,000. And then you go on LinkedIn, you're getting hundreds of thousands. I mean, that might post on Matt Garment over 100,000 views, you know, it tracks, you know, flies. So, you know, you got to go with the audiences. And I think, you know, Twitter's losing audience. That's why I asked about the Dow, you know, Daily Active Uniques. It's going to be a very interesting tell sign, you know, what, what happened. And I think, you know, Facebook's dangerous company in the sense they're massive scale. This is going to prove, you know, I think ultimately if I'm at a DOJ, I'm at the, you know, monopoly department there down government, you know, the board about Amazon. I think Facebook is flexing their muscles on what they can become. And you know, I'll go with the ranch section, so we're starting that now, but, you know, Facebook, and I said this on theCUBE, and I'll go back to prediction. I think it's true, because that's what they're doing. When they were under siege for the election stuff, they changed their name to Metta, remember that? And I said, you asked me why do you think they did that? I said, not because of Metaverse, because they're going to hide for a while. They were still printed money with Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp as a monopoly. And they're going to, Zuckerberg's going to hide. He's foil boarding, he's traveling the world, showing everyone his thing, Instagram's going. And at the right time, they're going to turn back on the Facebook. Well, this is basically the Facebook DNH infrastructure, algorithmic user manipulation, user product, user is the product. And I think now's the time where you're starting to see Facebook flex there, we're back, okay? And someone called it a comeback. I'm like, comeback, they were already rich. It wasn't like they had any comeback. They were, you know, sent to the, they kicked out of town basically after they broke democracy. And so now they're coming back out. I mean, they're not the most well-loved company from an ethics standpoint, as you pointed out. But Elon Musk isn't either. So I think their entry to the market is, look at threads, it's essentially Instagram. This is their modern Facebook. Facebook of the old is like the 70s. Bell bombs, leisure suits. Now you got punk rock fashion with Instagram threads. And it's the modern version. And again, everyone who's in that age group or in their 30s having kids, you know, they're not moving fast breaking things. They're just having a good time and it's a new party. And they're gonna cut the politics out and all the news. And it's gonna be a Twitter takeover. That's the goal of this whole initiative. And that's why they're putting an entire company resource of meta behind threads to get a hundred million, to beat chat, GPT, get back in the AI game. And it's a comeback in the sense of, okay, don't forget about all the stuff we did years ago with Facebook and give us a mulligan. And they do that through control. And nobody's talking about the metaverse. So that's a win. That's a fail. But that's a win for meta and that nobody's talking about the metaverse because it was a fail. And then, you know, as you saw Fitzy's post, I think you saw he put out a new post today, basically snarking on how the EU doesn't have access to threads on top of not having access to Bard. So welcome to the world of you can't get access to it because we're over-rotating on regulation. So good luck. All right, well, Dave, it's been episode 19. You wanna have a rant section? I just ranted pretty much the whole time on threads. You have to, you know, I mean, again, I'm gonna be on it for more commentary. This is not gonna be the first time we're gonna be talking about threads. I guarantee you the angles on this thing will be multi-fold. One, monopoly. Number two, are they a platform or are they editorial? They get editors. They can be sued. So what's, you know, as you look at these platform regulations, good question. We'll bring that up another time but it's gonna come up a lot. But the quick rant is nobody trusts Facebook meta. I mean, come on. The governance model, they're not gonna save the world from Twitter. Or even if they have moderators, their intentions are to make money. Okay, good, that's what their job is to make money. But don't give me this where open and the kumbaya. That's just nonsense. I mean, nobody should believe that. I don't know, maybe people do, but I don't. You don't. No, I think I believe meta like I believe the government. I think they're full of shit and a lot of things. I don't believe, they just, you know, they say things but behind the scenes, the hallway talk is a lot different. Now they have to be careful to put it into email. They have to couch it with fancy words and veiled narratives. But we know what meta wants, meta wants profit. Right, they want world domination. That's clear. You are the product. All right, well, we believe in open free content. We don't believe in Walt guards. We believe in pushing content out there. And we love, we love technology. And then of course, Dave, we're going to SiliconANGLE.com where all the stories are the cube.net. We're on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Threads, Reddit. I'm not, I have blue sky, but I don't use it at all. I don't need anything else. And I'm, the channels are open. WhatsApp, Signal, whole nine yards. Episode 19, see you next time.