Welcome to a Slice of Silicon Valley episode 21.
Last time I talked about something that was a major event that happened without thing 20 years ago. And during this event we were hired by intel to help craft a keynote for the CEO of a 20 year vision for computing. And before I get into that, I want to reflect so people think about it. The problems that lie underneath the ways that we interact is what engineers are marvels at figuring out solutions to. So as I talk about the problems of 20 years ago, many of those still exist. We just have better tools in which to do something about it. And there were three takeaways from what we learned from that exercise. First, we felt that if people had a secure way to connect wherever they were located that there would be more they would be able to exchange in knowledge, in lessons, in commercial things and social things and sustainability things. And when we worked on the demo, we were connecting a team together that were producing a global video creation for the head of sales at intel. And through that process, we learned the challenges associated with telling stories and being able to bring the production resources to really amplify the story in a compelling way and the challenges associated with bringing workflow. Most people do things in ad hoc ways. The ability now that we're all connected in new ways is to create new workflows. You could look at the modern side of this. We're all learning about AI and how to adopt AI. If you look back then, it was really how do we start developing the capabilities in the cloud that we could connect and we could start to share things, do things, create workflows, define outcomes that we could get together. These were several of the problems that some great engineers came around so we could find solutions to those. Today we're calling it Web Three. I think it's getting a bad name. It's really how in a decentralized world, when we have a platform, that all these things are connected, that we now can do new things and hopefully find the better side of those things, not the weaponized side of those things, to get done more that we couldn't otherwise. And the third piece of this, which is the most important, is the people. And we have this acronym called Secure Personal Internet 20 years ago and I think that's still true today as a way in which to look at the problems associated with how we connect and communicate online. We all know in the media and the press on a daily basis what's going on with Twitter, what's going on with Facebook, how do people connect? Can it be weaponized, can it be curated? And we don't have real good answers. We're seeing some of the limitations of what we call Web 20. And again, it starts with the customer, it starts with us as people who are heart and soul come into those things that we want to get done. And so I wanted to share in 20 years, how has that changed? Well, the problems really haven't changed just the tools. We now have a lot more at our disposal to be curious and figure out how those things connect that can better service. You see a lot of knowledge networks coming together, you see a lot of communities coming together, people starting to experiment, experiment with the metaverse, but recognizing it's early. We're going to explore a lot, but there may not be as much commercial intent for a while. On the other hand, that's part of how innovation happens. And at the core of this is how do we figure out how to take the things that we're used to doing that we've been doing for a long time and make it easy enough to start to adopt new ways of taking these new tools and assembling them to help us lift up. That is what our charter is as we head into the next 20 years and hopefully you'll join us. So thank you very much and we'll see you again soon.