 Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Mobile World Congress 2017, brought to you by Intel. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Palo Alto for theCUBE's special coverage of Mobile World Congress 2017. We're in our new 4,500 square foot studio. Just moved in, we'll be expanding. You'll see a lot more in-studio coverage from theCUBE as well as our normal going out to the events and extracting the signals from the noise. I'm John Furrier. I'm Jeff Frick, general manager of theCUBE. But a breakdown, all the action. As you know, we do a lot of data science. We've been watching the grid. We've been on the treadmill all weekend, all last week, digging into the Mobile World Congress, sentiment the vibe, the direction, and trying to synthesize all the action and really kind of bring it all together for everyone here. And of course we're doing it in Palo Alto. We're going to bring folks in from Silicon Valley that could not have made the trek to Barcelona. We're going to be talking to folks on the phone who are in Barcelona. You heard from Lynn Kahn from Intel. We have Floyd coming up next, CTO at SAP. We're going to be breaking down all the action from their new cloud and big Apple news. SAP now has a general availability of the iOS native development kit which should change the game for SAP. There is tons of smart cities, smart stadiums, you know, IoT, autonomous vehicles, so much going on at Mobile World Congress. We're going to break that down every day starting at 8 a.m. in-studio. And of course want to thank Intel for headlining our sponsorship and allowing us to create this great content with some contributing support from SAP Clouds. I want to give a shout out, a big shout out to Intel. Check out their booth, check out their coverage, and check out the new SAP Cloud that's been renamed from HANA Cloud to SAP Clouds without their support. We wouldn't be able to bring this wall-to-wall great commentary. Jeff, so with that aside, we've got two days. We've got Laura Cooney coming in, Bob Stafansky managing this bridge between Detroit and Silicon Valley and all that great stuff. The phones are ringing off the hook here in the studio. Go tweet us, by the way, at theCUBE or at Furrier. We have Guy Churchwood coming in. We have great content all week. We've got entrepreneurs coming in. Tom Joyce, a CUBE alumni who's an executive, interviewing for a bunch of CEO positions. Really going to break down the changing aspect of Mobile World Congress. It's the iPhone's 10 years old. We're seeing now a new step function of disruption. Peter Burris, head of research at Wikibon, said the most turbulent time. And I even compounded it worse by saying, and the phones are getting faster. So it's beyond the device. I mean, what are you seeing on the grid? You look at the data out there. John, a bunch of things as we've been watching, kind of the stream of the data that came in and surprised me. First off, just a lot of early announcements around BlackBerry and Nokia who are often not really mentioned as the leaders in the handset space. Not a place that we cover real extensively, but really kind of these guys making a move and really trying to take advantage of the void that Samsung left with some of the note issues. But what I thought was even more interesting is on our hashtag monitoring tools that IoT and 5G are actually above any of the handset manufacturers. So it really supports a hypothesis that we have that while handsets will be better and there'll be more data enabled by 5G, what 5G is really all about is an IoT enabler and really another huge step in the direction of connected devices, autonomous vehicles. You've talked about it. We cover IoT a lot, but I thought that was pretty interesting. Well, the RoboCar is also in there. That's a hash and tag. Well, I love the car. Future, future. Well, it's kind of a symbol of the future of the car which, again, ties it all together. Right, right. Well, yeah, the driverless race car, which is pretty interesting. He sports to a whole other level. Yeah, I thought that was interesting. Another little thing as we watched these digital assistants and these voice assistants, John, and I got a couple for Christmas just so I could try them out is that Motorola announced that they were going to partner with Alexa and use the Alexa voice system inside of their phones. You know, I'm still waiting for, I don't know why Siri doesn't have a standalone device. And really when you use a Google Home versus Amazon Alexa, very different devices, really different kind of targets. So I thought that was an interesting announcement that also came out. But fundamentally, it's just, it's fun to see the support of IoT and 5G and really enable this next kind of great wave of distribution, disruption and opportunity. We're going to have Sar Goli in the studio later today and tomorrow as a guest analyst for us on theCUBE. Of course, for folks who may know Sar from being on theCUBE, he was recently a senior vice president reported to Meg Whitman and built out that telco service provider, NFV business model for HP. And he's been to Mobile World Conference almost every year. He didn't make it this year. He'll be coming in studio. And he told me prior to me extremely vetting him for theCUBE, if you will, to use a Trump term, after extreme vetting of Sar Goli, I said to him, he really wants to make the point of, and this is going to be critical analysis and kind of poking a hole into the hype, which is he doesn't think that the technology's ready for prime time. And specifically, he's going to comment around, he doesn't believe that the apps are ready for all this bandwidth. He doesn't think, he thinks that 5G is a solution looking for a problem. And I don't necessarily agree with him. So we have a nice commentary. So we'll look for SAR today on theCUBE at the 1130s coming on. So it's going to be a little cage match there with SAR. So... I always go back to the Amara's law, which again, I think is the most underrepresented and most impactful law, which is probably in the short term in the hype cycle, 5G is probably not going to deliver on the promise up to the level of the hype. But as we find over and over with these funny things like Bluetooth, who would ever like Bluetooth? Would be such an integral part of so many things that we do today. I think over the long term, the midterm, I think the opportunities is giant. I mean, I think for people to understand 5G at least the way I was described it over the weekend when I was at my, out of the cross games and soccer games over the weekend is the folks that are in tech. 5G is the holy grail for IoT, mobile cars and AI because what 5G does, it creates that mesh of RF or RF radio frequency at a whole new level. You look at the radios that Intel is announcing across their telco partners and what Intel is doing really is a game changer and we all know LTE when the signal is low on the phone everyone freaks out. We all know when Wi-Fi doesn't work the world kind of comes to a crawl. I mean, you just think 15 years ago Wi-Fi wasn't even around. So now think about the impact of just what we rely on with the digital plumbing called wireless. You think about the impact of going around the fiber to the home and the cost it takes to bring fiber to the Lincomp was commenting on that. So having this massively scalable bandwidth that's a radio frequency wireless is just a game changer and if you do low latency, 10, 20 gig, that's all you need. Then you're going to start to see the phones change and the apps change and as Peter Burr said a turbulent change of value propositions will emerge. It's funny at RSA a couple weeks back that the chatter was people at RSA they don't use Wi-Fi. They rely on secure mobile networks and so 5G is going to enable that even more. And as you said, if you can get that fat bandwidth to your phone in a safer and secure, more trusted way what is the impacts on Wi-Fi and what we've come to expect on our devices and the responsiveness. And all that said, there will be new devices. There will be new capabilities. And I guess the other thing is kind of funny is that of course the Oscars made their way up on the board. I thought that might wipe everything out after last night, but no IoT and 5G is still above Oscars on the trending hashtag. I mean Oscars brings up, you know, it's funny. I mean, we all watched the Oscars, the SNF who I think it was still game, it was some sort of ploy but again, you bring up entertainment with the Oscars. You look at what Hollywood's going through and the Hollywood reporter had an article talking about Reed Hastings with Netflix. He talked today. I thought about 4K and really kind of higher end, you know, videos. So the entertainment business is shifting. The cord cutting is happening. We're seeing more and more what they call over the top and this is the opportunity for the service providers but also for the entertainment industry. And with social media and with all these new form factors changing, the role of media will be a packet data game and how much can you fit in there? Whether it's eSports to feature filmmaking, the game is certainly changing and again, I think Mobile World Congress is changing so radically. It's not just a device show anymore. It's not about the handset. It's about what the enablement is and I think that's why the 5G impact is interesting and then making it all work together because a car, talking to this device, it's complicated. So there's got to be the glue. There's all kinds of new opportunities and that's what I'm intrigued by the Intel Qualcomm situation where you got two chip guys battling it out for who's going to be that glue layer under the hood. Right and a lot of the, if you look at some of the quotes coming out of the show too, a lot of the kind of high level threats you got to get away from the components and get into the systems and solutions which we hear about over and over and over again. It's always about systems and solutions. I think they will find a problem to solve with the 5G, I think it's out there but it is, you know, you have to get away from the components. It's an ecosystem play, right? My philosophy, Jeff, is kill me with the bandwidth problem. Give me more bandwidth. I will consume more bandwidth. I mean, look at compute power as an example. People thought Moore's law was going to cap out, you know, decade ago. You look at the compute power in the chips and with the cloud, with Amazon and the cloud providers. It's almost infinite compute so then the role of data comes in. So now you got data, now you got mobile. So I think give us more bandwidth. I think the apps have no problem leveling up. Sucking it up well. It's going to be the debate with Sargalite. So we'll see what he has to say. Like the old chip, right? The Intel Microsoft thing where, you know, Microsoft or Intel would come out with a faster chip then the OS, we eat up more of it as part of the OS and it kept going and going. But I think, you know, we talk to a lot of VCs, John and if you're trying to predict the future and building for the future, you really have to plan now for almost infinite bandwidth for free, infinite storage for free, infinite compute for free. And while those curves are, you know, kind of asymptotically approaching free, they're not there yet. That is really the world in which we're heading and how do you reshape the way you design apps, experiences, interfaces without those constraints, which before were so, so significant. I'm just doing a little crowd chat here. Go to crowdchat.net slash MWC. If you want to leave news links or check in with the folks chatting. And I'm just talking to SAP and SAP had the big Apple news. And one of the things that's interesting in Peter Burris talked about this on our opening this morning is that confluence between the consumer business and then the infrastructure's happening. And that is what's called DevOps, but now you're starting to see the developers really focusing on the business value of technology. But yet it's not all developers, even though people are saying, oh, the developers are the new king makers. Well, I would say that, but the business model still is driven by the apps. And I think developers are certainly closer to the front lines, but I think you're going to start to see a much more tighter coupling between the C level folks in business and the developers. It's not just going to be a developer led 100% direction. So whether it's entertainment, roll of data, that's going to be pretty interesting, Jeff. So Apple's just about finished building the new spaceship headquarters, right? I think it opens up next month. I'm just curious to get your take, John, on Apple. I mean, obviously the iPhone changed the game 10 years ago. What's the next big card that Apple's going to play? Cause they seem to have, you know, kind of settled down. You know, they're not at the top of the headlines anymore. Well, from my sources that Apple, there are many and deep inside at the highest levels. What I'm hearing is the following. Obviously they're doing extremely well financially. Look at the retail, look at the breadth of business. I think Tim Cook has done an amazing job and to all my peers and pundits who are trashing Apple, they just really don't know what they're talking about. Apple's dominating at many levels. They're dominating firstly on the fiscal performance of the company. Their digital presence in terms of their stickiness is second to none. However, Apple does have to stay on their game because you look at Huawei and all the phone guys, they are in essence copying Apple. So I think Apple is going to be very, very fine. I think where they could really double down and win on is what they did by getting out of the car business. I think that was super smart. There was a post by Autoblog this weekend saying Silicon Valley failed. I completely disagree with that statement. Although in the short term, it looks like on the scoreboard, they're kind of tapping out although Tesla is here, as well as a bunch of other companies. But it's not about making the car anymore. It's all about the car's role in a bigger digital ecosystem. So to me, I think Apple has poised beautifully to use their financial muscle to either buy car companies or deal with the digital aspect of it and bring that lifestyle to the car where the digital services for the personalization of the user will be the sticking point for the transportation. So I think Apple has poised beautifully for that. They have some issues, certainly every company does, but compared to everyone else, I just see no one even close to Apple at the financial level, just with the cash and then just what they're doing with the tech. So from a digital perspective, now Google's got the self-driving cars, Facebook's a thread, Amazon, so those are the big ones I see. Now the other thing that's happening this week is the game developer conference in San Francisco at Moscone. So again, huge consumers of bandwidth, huge consumers of compute power, not so much storage. I mean, I haven't heard much kind of of the confluence of the 5G movement with the game developer conference, but clearly that's going to have a huge impact as most gaming is probably going to move to more and more mobile platform-less desktop. Well, the game developer conference, the one that's going on the GDC, is kind of has a different vibe right now. It's losing, it's a little bit lackluster in my mind. It's classic conference, it's very monetized. The event seems to be over-monetized. It's all about making money rather than promoting community. The community in gaming is shifting. So if you look at like how that show is run versus say E3 and now you got TwitchCon and then Mobile World Congress, one of the big voices is no eSports conversation. That certainly will be the big thing. To me, everything that's going digital around gaming is a home run. I think gaming is going to shift in a huge way from what we know as console, cult, it's going to go completely mainstream in all aspects of the devices. As 5G overlays on top of the networks with the software, gaming will be the first pop. You're going to see eSports goes nuclear, TwitchCon, those kinds of Twitch genres are going to expand and certainly the cube will have in the future a gaming cube. So there'll be a cube, anchor desk for most of the gaming culture. Certainly younger hosts are going to come on. We're going to be planning on that. But to me, I think the gaming thing is going to be much more lifestyle, less culty. I think the game developer conference has lost its edge. Right, and one of the other things that comes is obviously Samsung made a huge push. They're advertising crazy last night on the Oscars with the Casey Neistat ad about the people are creating movies. And they've had their VR product out for a while. But there's a lot of social activity saying what is going to be the killer app that kind of breaks through VR? We know Oculus has had some issues. What are you kind of reading between the tea leaves there, John? Well, it's interesting the Oscars was awesome last night. I was loved to watch the Hollywood spectacle. But one of the things that I liked was that segment where they introduced the technical Oscars and they kind of were tongue and cheek is the no one in Hollywood really has any clue and they were pandering. Well, we didn't even know what they meant, but it was really the alpha geeks who were pioneering what used to be the green screen technology. Now you go in CGI, it's our world. I mean, I'm like, yeah, I want to see that more of that because that is going to be the future Hollywood. The tools and the technologies for filmmaking is going to have a Moore's law like impact. It's the same I was mentioning about eSports. You're going to see all kinds of new creative. You're going to see all kinds of new tech. They talked about these new cameras. I'm like, do a whole show on that and we'd love it. But what it's going to enable is you're going to see CGI come down to the price point where what we look at PowerPoints and Adobe Creative Suite and these tools, you're going to start to see some badass creative come down for CGI. And this is where the artist aspect comes in. I think art design will be a killer field. I think that is going to be the future of filmmaking. I think you're going to see an indie market explode in terms of talent. The new voices are going to emerge. The whole diversity thing is going to go away because now you're going to have a complete disruption of Hollywood where Hollywood owns it all. That's going to get flattened down. I think you're going to see a massive democratization of filmmaking. That's my take. And then of course we just continue to watch the big players. The big players are in here. It's the startups that provide the spice, but I'm looking here at the Ford SAP announcement that came across the wire. We know Ford's coming in at scale. GM has done a lot of stuff with IBM as well. So those people bring massive scale and scale as we know drives pricing. And I think when people like to cap on Moore's Law, they're so focused on the physical. I think the power of Moore's Law has nothing to do with the microprocessor per se. It did early days, but really it's an attitude, which we talked about a little bit briefly about what does the world look like if you have infinite networking, infinite compute and infinite storage at basically free. And if you start to think that way, that changes your perspective on everything. All right, Jeff, well thanks for the commentary. Great segment, really breaking down the impact of Mobile World Congress. Again, this show is morphing from a device show, phone show to a full-on end-to-end network, companies like Intel are leading the way and the entire ecosystem of industry partners are going to write software for this whole new app craze, Mobile World, of course. We'll be covering it here all day today, Monday the 27th and all day the 28th. Stay tuned, stay watching. We've got more guests coming right back with more after this short break.