 Okay, welcome back. Everyone here live at IBM Pulse in Las Vegas. This is SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of IBM Pulse. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the event, Extracted Significant Noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. My co-host here at theCUBE is Dave Vellante, co-founder of wikibond.org. One of the things we love going out to do is extract the Significant Noise and getting great guests, comedians, columnists, celebrities, our next guest is one of the, all three of those, David Pogue, now with Yahoo! tech news formerly of the New York Times. Welcome to theCUBE. Why thank you. This theCUBE is where we just kind of shoot the breeze, talk about tech, not only talk about flash memory, speeds and feeds, but we're here at IBM Pulse. You gave kind of emcee the keynote this morning. I mean, pretty splashy event. They have a band out there. Bungie Jumpers. Bungie Jumpers, yeah. You had the crowd rolling in their chairs. What's your take of one of the tech scene here with an IBM? And compared to the tech scene that we're living now, WhatsApp sold for $19 billion. Everyone's shaking their head. People are like going crazy in Silicon Valley. VCs are getting richer, you know? IBM still. It's the dawn of a new bubble, I guess. It's the return to a good economy where stuff gets funded and money flows. I mean, you can't possibly argue that Facebook buying WhatsApp for $19 billion was because it's a profit play. I mean, they're never gonna get that money back. The service costs a dollar a year, and Mark Zuckerberg said, we're not going to advertise on WhatsApp. So it's not to make money, right? At least not directly. It's sort of, they bought cache. You know, it's kind of like, why did Google buy the Nest thermostats? You know, everyone says, oh, it's because Google is gonna track our movements. They're gonna know when we're home. I don't think so. I don't think that's Google's aim in buying this cool, hot company. I think Google bought Nest thermostats because they're a hot, flashy, rising, genius technology. The same way Google is doing self-driving cars and robots and rockets, because it's cool. Feels right. What has Apple done that's cool lately? Do you have any other questions? I mean, Apple's the cool of the darling of the cool. Certainly, profit-wise, they're doing well, but I mean, they don't have that driving car. Facebook doesn't have the driving car. I mean, if you look at coolness, Facebook and Google, I mean, Google is, from a geek perspective, cooler than Facebook. I mean, the Apple problem is that Steve Jobs was, as we know, unique in the universe because he was both the CEO and the inventor. I mean, there's no other company, really, where the head of the company is the guy who's the designer and says, I want this button to be moved three pixels over and I want these corners rounded. That was the amazing thing about Steve Jobs and he was the guy who came up with the iPhone and the iPad and the iMac. I mean, who is the idea guy? I mean, Tim Cook's a brilliant management guy, but he wouldn't say that he's the product idea designer. Okay, speaking of inventors and CEOs, Bill Gates has gone out of Microsoft. He's quote back, dotted line as advisor to the new CEO, but they have Nokia now, so they're golden, right? What's your name on Microsoft? You know, the great thing about there being a new CEO is that it might occur to him that the theme of this IBM Pulse conference is bold moves, bold thinking, and it's a totally hackneyed cliche, but it is totally the answer. You will never become the next big whatever if you keep doing the stuff you've been doing for 20 years. Microsoft is Windows Office Xbox, Windows Office Xbox. Here's a new year. What do you got? Windows Office Xbox. No, do something new. Try something bold. Well, they dropped their price. Oh, that's bold. They dropped their price 10%. That's bold. As you know, and this is gonna sound hackneyed too, as you know I left The New York Times in November to join Yahoo, and that is primarily why, because every single person at this company of 14,000 people, and I've met a lot of them, are thinking, every conversation runs around, what can we build? What can we grow? What should we start up? I mean, they're thinking, every single person thinks this every day, and it's just, it's rare, and I guess it's something you can afford to do only when you're the underdog, right? People kicked Yahoo for a long time because they lost their way. They went through five CEOs in a weekend. And so, the only way out of that is to invent. Let's talk about journalism. The future of journalism, everyone debates that. I mean, we're doing our share, trying to break the rules. The high priests of journalism, they don't like certain things, and you said you left The New York Times. Will they die those high priests of journalism, graduated from 1902 from the Columbia School of Journalism? I mean, it's a new era now. You're at Yahoo. You've got some new stuff going on there. You've got a clean sheet of paper, raves over there, rave needlemen. Came from The New York Times. The bastion of old technology, old standards, still do a great job. They do certainly good reporting. They still have a paper, they print it still. What is the future of journalism, and what are you doing at Yahoo to break the rules? I mean, what I'm doing at Yahoo is the same journalism I've been doing at The New York Times. And we've hired 10 just absolutely amazing writers from the top old media. We've hired people from The Washington Post and The New York Times and more people from The New York Times. And they're still the great journalists. So, really the only thing that's changing and will continue to change is the printed on paper portion. I mean, do you know a single college kid who graduates, gets his first department and signs up for home delivery of a paper? I don't know. It doesn't happen. So, I mean, that trend line can only go one way. But I gotta believe, and I do believe that there will always be a New York Times, that there will always be journalism. There has to be somebody who does the reporting and curates it and posts it. It might not be on paper, but it'll be electronic and it'll still be there. So, journalism's not dead, obviously. You're hiring a bunch of old school journalists, bring them into a new school site, Yahoo Tech, right? So, talk about the genesis of that site. What was the spark that created that site? Well, I mean, if you look at my career, my shtick has always been explaining things to laymen. So, I do Nova shows for PBS, explaining science. I used to write, blah, blah, blah, for dummies books. I did seven of those yellow books for beginners. So, I have come to believe that it's an enormous audience. It's most of the world. Most of the world is right now feeling overwhelmed by technology, by the complexity, and by the pace. So, my feeling was this is a perfect opportunity to create a website for precisely those people. We don't cover funding announcements. We don't do, you know, management changeovers. It's about what to buy and how to use it once you got it. So, that was my dream and also, it's gotta be funny. Every single article on this site will give you a couple of chuckles. So, you hire a journalist and humorist. That's precisely right, yeah, journalist and humorist. And most of the journalists are really funny as well. And they have, now they have a, they don't have to be limited by space on paper. They can just go all in online. There's no lineage problem, right? That's a huge thing. When we were describing the site, I said there should be long form articles, 3,000 words long. There should be one line articles, like a tweet, like an observation or a one liner. Why create an artificial 1280 word chunk? No, articles should be as long as it takes to tell the story and no longer. And there should be video and audio and pictures right in the middle of the sentence. It's electronic. It's electronic storytelling. It is, why is every tech site in the world a video at the top of the page and then an article that says the same thing? No, have a paragraph and then say, here's how you attach the power connector in this strange way, video. It should be intermixed. It should be experimental. It should use the digital bits in any way that's necessary. So I, speaking of old school journalism in new school, I'm looking at your site, this article by Rob Pegararo on TV everywhere. I had the same experience with, with trying to watch the Sochi Olympics. I'm on vacation, US playing in Russia. I go to sign it. I can't remember my bloody cable password. I just said, I'm calling my wife. What's the password? 10 years ago, you made it up. So I got 20 minutes of free and then missed the rest of the game, right? So that mindset, don't you think it has to change? Why won't old media eventually morph? I mean, the pain will be so great and then it'll hit bottom and then they'll sort of replicate. I was just thinking, you know, the thing Steve Jobs used to do so well is he would look at some field or some area and immediately see what's wrong with it. Something that we've all accepted as Sucky, but we do it every day. And here's one of them. Why do we enter our whole name, address and credit card information over and over and over on every website where we ever buy anything? Why do you put in your name and password on every website you ever use? Why isn't there some kind of solution to online identity? So everywhere we go, the site and the computer recognize each other and oh, it's you. I mean, it seems like that should be solvable and it seems like the whole world would welcome it and even pay for it. Well, your discussion this morning around phone mails was classic, right? John, you don't have a long phone mails, right? Your service provider lets you bypass it, but we in Massachusetts have a different challenge but David gave a great discussion this morning about how long it takes to actually leave a message and you explained why. Yeah, the carriers put the 15 minute recording of instructions, you know, you maybe begin speaking at the tone when you've finished recording, you may hang up and we've had answering machines for 45 years. We don't need instructions on how to leave a message. It is there exclusively to run up your bell, to run up your airtime. It's 15 seconds twice a day. I said this morning that if you do the math times 120 million Verizon customers, that's three quarters of a billion dollars a year. The Verizon rakes in by making us sit there hostage to those instructions. That's innovation, people. Well, that's what's, what's happens gonna kill all that thing. Yeah. So you mentioned kids don't read the paper when they get out of college or they, you know, when they go to college. And so that's more of a dynamic. They don't email. They don't email. They don't need to leave. They don't know how to, they don't even, my kids don't even turn on their voicemail like that's so old, voicemail. My son has, they don't set up their voicemail. So I want to ask you, the state of the consumer, you talk about consumer, you appear for consumerization. What is the state of the consumer right now? Social interaction, we're all connected on mobile devices. What's your observation of the state of the consumer? Are they idiots? Are they digital natives born in the digital age? Are they getting, are they smarter than us? What's your take of this new generation? Well, I think you put your finger on it. There are endless debates on every issue because there's two groups of people we're talking about. The younger generation, the ones who entered college last fall were never alive in a world without the internet. And the ones in high school right now were never alive without using phones with no cord on them. So the younger generation has a very different take on everything from their parents. The privacy discussions that we're all having, is it okay for Google and Samsung and Microsoft and Apple to harvest our data in order to give us free, cool services? Well, young people say, sure, it's anonymous, it's aggregated, it's not me, they're personally, they're tracking, and their parents are like, what, that's an invasion of privacy? No, they'll never see eye to eye. Things are changing as the younger generation becomes the majority, but right now there's this big black line between the older and younger audiences, I think. What's your take of IBM here at this conference, a big company, big blue, you know, mainframe kind of DNA, would you think they have it in them to go the consumer or what? I mean, the little secret is that I'm not a B2B guy. I don't understand platform as a service. Go ahead, make a quick time movie that make fun of me. I don't understand it. I'm a consumer technology guy. But what I will say is that IBM's story, as I've watched it from afar, is amazing. The way they shed consumer technology, said we're going to get full time into being a services and information consulting company, and now it seems like they're doing the same thing with this enormous emphasis on stuff moving to the cloud. The smarter plan is pretty brilliant though. From a camp marketing standpoint, that's pretty rock solid. That's true, and you can see at this conference all the announcements they're making that they're deadly serious about becoming the cloud expert. They're requiring companies, they're integrating stuff in cool ways, so I'm impressed. What about Netflix? Obviously, House of Cards season two is upon us. Do you review the Netflix kind of stuff or is it mostly devices? Oh no, absolutely. The broadband thing is pretty controversial, this whole Comcast thing. Some people say, hey, net neutrality's dead, some say we don't need it, the truth. What the hell do you make of that? You look at those issues, do you have a clue? Yeah, no, no, absolutely. What's your take on all that? So I think I'm a fan of net neutrality. I think it needs to get reinstated. Right now, we're living without it. And this whole thing about Netflix announcing that they're going to pay Comcast for smoother transmission is confusing to me, because that was what we feared would happen if there was no net neutrality. And now here's Netflix doing it voluntarily. The consumers like to say, I love Comcast, I haven't met anyone who says I love Comcast. It's the most hated company in America. It's true. I happen to live in Connecticut where we have CableVision, which is year after year the most adored cable company in America. They have 10,000 subscribers. It's so huge. How big is, I mean, they're still around. They were the original, weren't they? But I've had a chance to see Netflix, to see Comcast firsthand. My wife actually lives in San Francisco for very complicated reasons. So I've gotten to see what it's like as a Comcast customer. All she wanted was a DVR. So they sent her a box. We couldn't figure, I couldn't figure out how to set it to a cut up. They sent a technician with a replacement box and said, that isn't even a DVR. They sent you another cable box. It has no hard drive in it. It's just like, oh my God, how hard is it? So yeah, I'm highly suspicious of the cable companies and the cell phone companies. And so this whole thing, I think there's going to be some journalist who figures out the real story behind this Netflix-Comcast deal. Who strong-armed whom? And what was at stake? And when did it happen? I think there's a story in that. There's definitely a story in there. We're working on this whole, who pays, who impeaches, it's not Comcast, it's Verizon, there's other carriers and they share packets and they block the P2P networks for a long time. If you remember those days. Yeah, exactly. I want to ask you about your take on, just in general, what surprised you in the past two years? Two, three years in consumer tech. But you didn't see coming that was like, wow, that was game changing or that's took me by surprise, good or bad. The great thing is you can never predict the future of consumer technology, right? Every time you, I mean, every time we have CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, we try to, we see what electronics companies think is coming and for 15 years in a row, it was you're going to watch the web on your TV and nobody has ever wanted it and nobody still wants it. This year it was curved television screens. Really? No, no. So everything that becomes a hit is surprising because nobody predicted it. The rise of the health bands is surprising and I think delightful that you're, for the first thing, you know, the up band, the FitBest, for the first time, you can see into that one third of your life, the time when you're sleeping, suddenly you know what happened during that night. That's fascinating. Turns out that more and more people are listening to music in a way I would never have predicted. You know, Apple originally said, you're going to pay a dollar a song and you're going to own it. And there were these little upstarts that said, no, no, you're going to pay a subscription. And Apple said, no, no, people will never pay for a monthly subscription to music that leaves them with no music when you stop paying. Nobody saw the rise of the free unlimited, you know, the Spotify's and the iTunes radios and the Pandora's. Those are immensely popular and nobody thought that's where it would go when compared with the ability to buy the music and play the exact song you want at the exact time. So that's kind of a shocker. And of course, the rise of Netflix and now Amazon as TV producers, that's a shocker. What about the Android debate and how you see that shaking out Samsung? How that just came out of nowhere. I mean, Apple had the lock on that. Did you see it accelerating that fast? Did you see Samsung coming out of the woodwork? No, nobody could have seen that. The Android play is very much, you know, like the old Internet Explorer play. So Google said, we'll write this operating system and we'll give it away. So, and we'll let other companies make the phones that run it. That's the old Windows ploy. And that's how, you know, Internet Explorer became a force for a while because it was free. So that's not so surprising that that playbook worked again. What about Twitter? They had their first earnings call and I think I was the only one live tweeting their earnings call. I mean, no one was tweeting their earnings calls. Their first earnings calls of public company, they kind of had a shortfall. And do you follow Twitter and some of the consumer aspects of that service? I follow the consumer elements intensely. I don't really cover the business case. You think it's ready for consumer? I mean, everyone's using it at some level, but is it dying? I mean, it's just people don't know how to use it. What's your take on Twitter? I obviously don't think it's dying. It's growing. To this day, I'm not sure how it's ever going to become a money maker in a big way. But lots of companies started out that way. I mean, Amazon lost money for its first decade or whatever. Still losing money. Still losing money? Depends on which balance sheet you look at. We cover Amazon websites. No, she's good. No, she's good. Income statement, not so much. Really? Yeah, we like it. I mean, we love Twitter. Profitist business, mom. That's amazing. We like Twitter. Final word, just for you, just to share the audience. Just give a quick plug on the Yahoo Tech. Just your vision, the team, the update. Share with the folks what's happening. Sure. I just believe that most people, not technologists, probably not your audience, but most people are feeling flooded and frustrated by the pace and the complexity of technology. So this site is a bunch of professional reviewers, like me. It's the same thing I always do at the times, what you should buy. But then we don't stop there. It's tips and tricks. It's the underlying stuff that you don't know. Always in terms of the consumer. The consumer, the consumer's consumer. The people who use this stuff, what's in it for you? That's our goal. Do you feel entertainment's a big part of it being entertaining? And entertainment is a huge part of it. Did I forget to say that? Yes, the sites are very, very, the articles are very funny. And we're making videos every week. And they're also whether or not. Can you share the Marissa story about when you guys first talked for the first time about doing this project? Yeah. This all started last summer when Marissa and her head of news and finance, Rob Barrett, had a meeting with me and said, we want to talk about your coming to Yahoo. And I'm like, well, what is it that you have in mind? I mean, this is a guy who's written 1,280 words every Thursday for 13 years for the New York time. So I wanted to know what they had in mind. I'm like, you're saying you want me to write a column? Every day? Well, yeah, we have a column. They're like, yeah. Or do you have in mind a whole website? They're like, yeah. Or are you talking bigger, like a conference? Absolutely. Is there an app involved? Yes, just whatever I said. They're like, yes, and we'll fund it and we'll build it for you. And I'm fundamentally a creative guy. I was a Broadway theater conductor for 10 years out of college. This kind of let's build it. Let's grow. It's just intoxicating to me. And they've totally delivered so far. Yeah, I want to applaud you. It's a great effort. We really are big fans of what you're doing. Love the entertaining. Love the controversy leaving the times. Your email or whatever your blog post was kind of entertaining. Certainly got all the high priests of the journalism community tossing and turning. But hey, creative, be entertaining, and do it in ways that people want. And that's mobile and kind of new journalism. So congratulations. David Polk here on theCUBE. This is SiliconANGLE's exclusive coverage of IBM Pulse. I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back after this short break.