Transcripts For BLOOMBERG Best Of Bloomberg Technology 20170902

Recognizable names in the Tech Industry. For decades. We will bring you an exclusive interview with michael dell. First to our lead, the worlds most valuable startup may be going public sooner than we think. The new boss at uber met his new employees and he outlined some of his Top Priorities at the job including coming up with a new set of Core Principles and bringing in a new chairman to help implement the agenda. The of the calm some of com team and tweeted out remarks. In his own words, the company has to change. What got us here is not going to take us to the next level. In the meantime, Travis Kalanick has already expressed interest in returning to a more active role in the company which could create a potentially awkward dynamic that the new boss will have to manage. In the meantime, it was all smiles at the new board meeting. As Arianna Huffington shared this. We spoke with our bloomberg tech reporter, eric newcomer, and our global head of technology to find out what else happened at that meeting. There were jokes celebrating travis role at the company. Saying that what got them to this point is not what is going to get them ahead, and then there is the conversation about the ipo. I do not know. 18 to turn 18 to 36 months seems a far enough time away for me. This is a guy who has run a Public Company for a long time, so he understands the importance of going public at some point. Emily what do you make of the show of camaraderie . The all smiles, the hugs . I think it is more than just what was said that also how it was said. This is a showing of unity. Travis was there shedding tears and making introductions. Other Board Members were there. Perhaps not everyone on that very contentious board, but it was in message sent to employees, drivers, and the media, and their customers, that they are trying to say that these dark days are over. The want to hit the reset button and get out of these headlines a little bit while repairing damage to the brand. Emily travis says he wants a more active role, and he is clearly very emotional about how this has unfolded. Do you think that could be travis . For now i would say no. The board approved an independent chairperson so they would have to reverse themselves. Emily what role could travis take on . I think advisor could be the role for now. It is not clear if it is going to be anything more than that. Remember, this is all tied up in litigation. The other news today, is that there is a lawsuit fired against , travis which requires arbitration. It is somewhat of a victory for travis. He wanted this to be resolved, but his status is very much still in question. Pending the outcome of that, i think we will see what type of influence he retains on the board. Emily lets talk about that lawsuit moving into private arbitration. He was asking for it to be dismissed which it was not. Another early uber investor released a letter today. And it was in delaware to speak with the court. I just want to read a little bit of it. He is coming in on the side of travis saying, we are swimming in the crucible of one of the biggest business battles of our generation. The lives of millions of jobs created to iniquitous taxing cartels. I am glad i got all of that out. What is going on here . I think, shervin he is a big friend of travis, and he has a lot of passion. He wants to show support. He is communicating in his own way that travis has done good by creating uber which he sees as a public utility which took up the taxicab coalitions. So i think he is trying to frame it in an overdramatic way. The problem is not only that the writing is overinflated, but it comes at a terrible time. This was a day about unity and he is drawing more attention to the divisions. Emily what is the strategy here . I think hes trying to muster public support for what he sees as still a divided board, but he does not make the argument all that persuasively. Emily when you think of that 18 month to 36 month time frame for an ipo . That is a bit sooner than we would have thought, right . It is near enough to say that it is possible, but who knows . It is so far away that it is hard for people to get their heads around and take too seriously. So, i think it is kind of a nothing statement which sounds sort of serious. This is a company that is growing quickly but is losing quite an amount of money per quarter. He has to make sure digit decisions about where he wants to grow and where he wants to pull back with sort of these and these ancillary businesses. I think he is buying himself time. Right now this is the proverbial stiff arm to give himself some time. A little later we will hear from this travel company. We will also bring you our exclusive interview with michael dell and his thoughts on the cloud. This is bloomberg. Google agreed to comply with demands for the way it operates its shopping structure. The tech giant faced a deadline on tuesday to disclose how they plan to stop discriminating against rival shopping services. The plant is sharing with regulators but declined to comment further. If they did not submit a plan to the eu by the deadline it would face fines on top of their 2. 7 billion dollars penalty. Oracle is hiring another 5000 employees. The move is the latest in a backandforth between salesforce. Las vegas played host to vm world. I caught up with michael dell at the event. I started by asking what he was most excited about. What we are seeing is this emergence of a multicloud world. Customers are figuring out that cloud is not a place but a way of doing i. T. Automatingdernizing, infrastructure and also leveraging public cloud and other services and software. Is incredibly well positioned to connect that future and do it in a secure manner. You emily you think hybrid cloud is the way the future . I think customers are adopting i. T. In a hybrid fashion. All the customers we talked to are already using many different modes of i. T. To theu imagine forward future of an enormous number of connected devices as the cost of sensors comes down. You will actually have a distributed computing world that is far more vast than what we have today. Emily talk to me about some of the partnerships. Vmwear partnered with amazon about a year ago. Also with google. What is the impetus twoparter to partner with your enemies. The goal was to partner with the number one private and public clouds. That gives customers great flexibility to leverage their software and capability on a public cloud environment. That is great. With google, we are bringing together pivotal and developer friendly capabilities that pivotal has brought to half of with a google0 created cloud operating system put in the open source community. Bringing that to the 500,000 ar hasustomers that vmwe in a secure manner. That is creating a developer friendly infrastructure that allows companies to develop nextgeneration apps, put them in containers and employ them on premise or in the public cloud. This is exactly what customers are asking us to do. Emily do you have concern that these public cloud owners could steal your private Cloud Business . See is that when new things happen in the industry, if they are good for customers, if you do stand in the way you do so at euro parol. Vmwear just came out when it was a tiny company, dell was the first Server Company to embrace it. We sold fewer servers at the beginning because you could virtualize the server. We sold a whole lot more than we ever imagined and we are number one in the world now and servers. We have been growing in double digits and since doing very well. When customers want different modes of i. T. , when it want the public cloud in addition to the private, it is important for us to listen and bring those capabilities to our customers. When it comes to the amazon or google deal, how can tell more broadly use that deal how can dell use that more broadly . Certainly combining sales. Orce across the company we will be bringing those capabilities to our customers. One of the things weve seen in the combination is the idea that, customers dont want to have more partners. They want you are partners. Number one in everything, all in one place to our customers, we have seen a fabulous response. Revenues greater than we thought, faster than we thought. It is because we brought a broad set of capabilities. Vmwear go dell and ahead together like Peanut Butter and chocolate. Emily on monday, amazon spent its first day as the owner of whole foods cutting prices by as much as 43 . Markdown items or seen with orange signs. The son of how the retailers changing the amazon echo was a company thatr is traditionally known for k ale. , bananas, price cuts lean beef, Peanut Butter was a big one. Emily avocados, that is all i want to know. They were down a dollar. My favorite rotisserie chicken was down five dollars. Which is a huge price cut. Emily was a crowded. . It was. Interesting, james, that you would see amazon echo in the store. Do you think people will be buying these at whole foods while they are Grocery Shopping . The echoes . Emily yeah. Possibly. The echo was the First Successful entry into the living room trying to be copied by google and apple, not as successful as the echo. The whole transaction for tozon, this is another point underscore the deflationary impact you are seeing from amazon across all retail. As you increase touch points with the customer, as especially as it relates to grocery, the opportunity is not just limited bigger pictureo into restaurants, prepared foods and all the way down the supply chain. A big win for amazon to get this deal to be approved by the fcc. Emily within the grocery business, how do you see grocery competitors responding . Whether cosco or walmart or kroger . Emily i dont think you i dont think you can. The Business Models are so different. What amazon has the opportunity to do is operate at a target 0 margin. They are able to do that because the business is subsidized through the cash flow proceeds from a wf. There is no grocer that have that luxury and no retailer that has that luxury that is why you continue to see a deflationary impact from amazon. Longterm,you look this grocery is a massive step toward capturing greater broader economy. Up, and other scoop on the next iphone. We will tell you what new tricks they might have up their sleeve later this month. This is bloomberg. Emily one of the world deposit largest just drone manufactures is making a security push. Pay around 30,000 to anyone who finds flaws in the software. Afterward Program Comes the u. S. Army ordered personnel to stop using drones used by dji. Dji says the program was used to protected data. Apple has set september 12 for its most product significant Product Announcement in years. Include a facialrecognition so. They are planning to eliminate the concept of a home button. That is according to people familiar with the gadget. The move would mark the biggest interface change in the iphones 10 year history. We have the skill. Iphone users will be excited about the new phone. They have been working on this for a long time. Trying out a bunch of new features to make a big splash for the 10th anniversary. It will not be a virtual home button. It will be a new system based around gestures and some control. The home button is staying on the sevens. There will be there will be three new phones. The others will have the home buttons. Emily what else did you say . There are design changes, the corners, the screen. Dont get ispeople the new iphone will be significantly taller. You will see more text messages, more maps, pages, apps. A big change to the screen. Emily talk to us about toshiba and the chip unit and apples interest in that . They are looking for new ways to get components for lowestcost and highest quality and quantity. Some of the newer mac labs and other devices, it is a critical component to the iphone, just as the screen or cellular reception modem is critical. They want to be able to get as many of those and toshiba does great work on chips. Emily what does this mean for apple in terms of performance and supply chain issues . Probably little in terms of performance because it is on par with Storage Capacity and speed. Having more suppliers gives them more leverage. Emily do we know anything more about when we will see this new phone in person . Midseptember is what we understand. Our bloomberg tech reporter there. Success this year helped push tim cook to new heights. He was awarded shares of apple 90 million. At with anders who wrote this for bloomberg news. When he came to the ceo role, apple said they would give him a massive chunk of stock in two increments for 10 years. Years later it was restructured and split up over the years. Cook, in a typical year he can collect 280,000 shares as long ande remains on the job another 280,000 shares if the share price needs to thirds of the companies in the s p 500. They did so in the past three years so he collected though shares. Emily wow. Go functionat pay on bloomberg. You can see that he is highflying, number two at the moment. Talk about this versus the rest of the tech ecosystem with the new conversation . In the bigger scheme, it is almost absurd that even tim cooks figure which is really high, does not hit the ceiling when it comes to pay in the tech sector. We have seen the ceo of walmart north of 200 million in 2016 and prior to that, there are others, within google. ,ven though tim cook gets money it does not tend to be up at the very top. Talk to us about whether or not this will be sustained . Will we always see the compensation tied to the share Price Performance . Should it be tied to another critical measurement revenue for example . That is a frequent debate among consultants and in the boardroom and the executive suite. Is a share price the best measure of corporate performance . Some people say, perhaps you should focus on internal financial matters such as revenue or product development, which will in turn drive it share prices. Share prices being the goal but not the journey to get there. Award for him is set up, it is tied to share price, the board can change that. It has been successful for shareholders and for cook himself. I would not say that i see any changes coming in the near term. Who knows . How does it fit with those that work at apple, with the general public . Im speaking from london where there was so much government pressure and a public outcry weres were paying being paid significantly more than the average person on the street. How is it going to be absorbed in america where it is more a land of those that can make it . Making a lot of money is not seen as a bad thing in the United States of america. We know that. Cook did get pushback for his compensation when he first signed on and got this large 370 million award. It was at his request that part of these shares were tied to the performance and if the shares dont be at least two thirds of the companies in the s p 500 and he gets fewer shares. Coming up, bitcoin prices have been hovering at record levels once again. We take a deep ive at what is driving the crypto craze next. All episodes of bloomberg are Live Streaming on twitter. This is bloomberg. Emily welcome back to the best of Bloomberg Technology. Im emily chang. Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have been searching this year. Causing interest in Digital Assets to spike. This week we took an indepth look at the rise of virtual currencies. We began by looking at what has made the market so volatile. Caroline hyde reports. Cryptocurrencies r a run. Cryptocurrencies are run. Record heading they have shot up over 350 so far this year. 1000 at them over start of the are two over 4500 recently. Number two in the digital money market is under move as well. Companies trying to figure out how to use this technology. Look at a recent 30 day slap shot in bitcoins price and you can see a roller coaster. Plummeted 13 coin after hackers install 65 million. This year, ethereum also fell on hard times. This technology is new and that causes there to be problems along the way. Even with volatility inherent, there are still plenty of promising opportunities. There is a growing mainstream acceptance. Investors like mark cuban are already throwing their weight behind cryptocurrencies and the Block Chain Technology that underlies them. More Financial Institutions such as fidelity and Retail Investors embracing them. If the fcc approves the first bitcoin electronically traded fund, it will make it easier for the everyday investor to jump in. Bitcoin has also soared past gold for the first time this year. We are not four years removed the bitcoin crash of 2013, there might be one short bet you want to make when looking at cryptocurrencies. Buckle up. Emily Caroline Hyde joins us the from london along with cofounder of Elevation Partners, a private equity firm that invests in private intellectual property. Great to have you on the show. I think it is important to distinguish between cryptocurrencies and the Block Chain Technology that comes underneath them. The thing about cryptocurrencies is they really are not currencies. Likeare commodities soybeans. There are things that people trade to create a return. Emily what does that mean about the value . Design. Volatile by currencies by definition need stability. This, it is more like trading gold futures or oil futures. Those will be inherently volatile. There is something valuable underneath but you would not use gold futures to pay your mortgage or your childs college tuition. Emily if you own bitcoin now does it have longterm value . It is too early to know. Structurally they do not seem like they can make the transition to become real currencies but i am not sure that matters to investors. I think they are in it for volatility in return and that may work out. I think we are not done with the sharp drops and i think there are enormous structural issues. There are thats of the there s of the cryptos and the whole concept of the role of minors and the fact that these are adopted by black and gray , it confirmsests my basic notion. I think these are far from mainstream currency option. Emily you mentioned people getting robbed, the number of base, the about coin biggest exchange, has gone from six to 300, and we are seeing so much more mainstream acceptance. Give us some examples of how we are seeing Mainstream Investors embrace this. I think that is what is so fascinating. Fidelity, one of the biggest money managers, they are mining bitcoin. To get intoking this as an asset class. We are seeing banks, distinguishing between cryptocurrencies and Block Chain Technology that is sharing recordkeeping. Bankstual technology, six today joining a project which is called a utility settlement coin. They are building their own coin. It will be available next year. To make Financial Transactions that much easier. This is why they want to introduce this technology. Not as a store of value, as we are seeing bitcoin become. That is what is so interesting. We saw the split in bitcoin. Bitcoin cash is at the heart of this. What is it . Does it become a haven when you see a flight to value or concerns about north korea for example, gold shoots up. Or does it become a payment mechanism . Do we need to start to see improvements in the size of the transaction . This is how much bitcoin is beating gold. Talking about the flood of investors into this market, you are in for a roller coaster ride whether you gain exposure . Check out my bloomberg at the moment. What do you get . A crypto roller coaster. You see Bitcoin Investment trust on the white line. Buy bitcoinant to outright they want exposure on the bottom after. We see the 90 day volatility of that investment trust, is more than three times the volatility of bitcoin. Overall,ou want to be it seems you are in for a rough ride. The runoffou look at in bitcoin, it is dwarfing the runup before the tech bubble, the housing bubble, roger, is that a concern . Only if you are low on bitcoin. If you are taking your profits, it is not a problem. When you talked about 170 billion in this category, that is why, you see banks and others coming in. Why are we having this segment right now . There is a lot of interest. Viewers, is tohe separate the commodity of bitcoins from the notion of cryptocurrency. A currency needs to have stable value. I dont think you will get there from this. The third piece, this is the one i am excited about, is the underlying Block Chain Technology. There are a lot of reasons why people would like to be able to do highvolume Financial Information transactions at a low cost with privacy and security. Watching Technology Offers that promise. Everyone is excited by that. What i would love to see is one of these banks or Financial Institutions create a currency. Try to create a stable store value that would rival a national currency. Thatis the Promised Land so many people are hoping for. Emily when it comes to block chain, there is talk that it could revolutionize financial services, real estate, giant technology companies. And the sale of information. Emily where do you think the block chain could be the most revolutionary . Or is that an exaggeration . Too early to tell. , it is liketing is the internet before it. It is a distributed system where scalability is not a problem. With the scale of markets you have today, if you take that off the table as an issue, you can apply it to almost anything. What remains to be seen is which markets will find this most appealing and in the current state the answer is experiments. Consumers are not yet interacting with this regularly. We are going to run that experiment and see. To me, that part is exciting. It makes it worth going through what i think will be further issues around the socalled currency part of this discussion. Emily that was Elevation Partners cofounder. Up, plans for the Company Including a possible partnership with uber. This is bloomberg. Emily as we discussed earlier, expedia ceo, the Online Travel company did not waste time. They promoted the chief Financial Officer to the top job. A day afterh him accepting it. Things, you talk about them for years. If prepare the team for the big game. You get a call on sunday night and the game is tomorrow. It unfolded like that. Already for this eventuality when it did unfold. Not however one had planned. We are all excited. We are happy. Im happy for the people at uber. I think he will do fantastic. Emily when it comes to you and your job, no one else was considered. Vision . Your some things you might do differently . I have been very involved in the Strategic Direction of the company for a long time. We have been lockstep in all of decisions. Isdains i dont have a long list of things im dying to change. We have a number of priorities across the company. Becoming more international is one of the key priorities. I will be focused on expanding globally. The two did the transition that homeaway is a big priority. If i do my job well it might go faster. Emily lets talk about that. You have deep ties to ubers ceo. What are some ways you could Work Together . Like free overrides for expedia customers . Have talked how we could work with them, integrating their services. Im hopeful that in the future now that we have a direct connection the talks might be easier. Into adara is walking challenging situation. Dynamics, we have heard about how he can deal with personalities. Tell us more about why you think he has what it takes to take on some of these personnel challenges . Above all he has one of the highest levels of Emotional Intelligence i have ever seen. He knows people. He is humble. He listens. Above all, he makes the people around him better. People want to be around him and think like he does. He is a great role model, and man of high integrity. He values diversity, gender balance, he really stands for a lot of the great things, from what we read, may be lacking at uber. I have 100 confidence that it will be a Better Company under his leadership. There was a report that was retracted that you are going with him to uber. There was a point there that had he had a lot of positions to fill. Are you concerned that a number of expedia employees will follow him . We feel good about our executive team. We have one of the most talented teams out there. We have been together for a very long time. They are really excited about the prospects around expedia inc. They are highly engaged and committed. We have been working on a strategy that we are not yet done so there is a lot of work still to do ahead of us. Reese we feel pretty good about our team. Emily that was the ceo of expedia. Coming up, Cloud Computing partnerships. If you like bloomberg news, check us out on the radio. You can listen on the Bloomberg Radio app and on sirius xm. This is bloomberg. Emily samsung is investing 7 billion in flash memory chips. The threeyear investment will go toward a plant. Moreusiness has become profitable than apple in its second quarter. An executive was sentenced to prison in a bribery scandal. Several new partnerships with the likes of google and amazon. To talkwn with vmware about Cloud Computing partnerships. Conversations,e we want no surprises because we are trying to be thoughtful about our relationships with them. Ibm, are working. We go through all of those discussions because it is important to us. Think about these partnerships like friendships. I may do some things that you didnt want me to do but let me explain to you, i dont want to surprise you. Maybe there are opportunities for us to Work Together in different ways. That is how we approach working with our ecosystem partners. We say it is all friends. That are you concerned this partnership with amazon for example, could lead to them stealing your business . Absolutely not. It, customersbout , if they wanted to move to the Amazon Service, they would have. It is not like the Amazon Service of yesterday. It is been around for a decade plus. What customers have found, is to replatform my application, it is hard and doesnt give me a lot of value. Yesterday i had the app tomorrow i have the app running through there and i had to put in a lot of work to get it there, that is the problem we are solving. Of you can take advantage cloud scale, clout geography, cloud economics without replatforming the application. In many cases, these applications, they might have been curated for 20 or 30 years. As they built those. Complex networks, security management, now we give them the easy button. Amazon is excited because they have heard that from their customers too. Emily it has been a year since the biggest merger. What has it been like for you . Merger,we announced the michael and i got on stage. Describe,s to independent, ecosystem, acceleration. We are ant, independent company. We are governed by the board. Emily michael does it bug you too much . Of course he bugs me. He is the chairman but i am managed by the board and it is the multiplicity of the board. He was committed to the independent ecosystem and he has to accelerate his business with us. A billion dollars of synergy. The independent is working great. The board is happy when the company is doing well. That is wonderful. Ecosystem. Think about the partnerships we have announced. Ibm, amazon, hp. All of those are not necessarily in the traditional view of dells best interest. We are clearly seen the ecosystem is being supported. Finally, we raised our guidance for the acceleration. , we arerter we did seeing themselves more of our products and build more new products together. Overall we are exceeding the expectations that we had a year ago when we announced the deal. Emily how is the networking business doing . . Is it still growing is rapidly are you seeing meaningful competition from cisco . Networking is great. The vision i laid out is bold in the sense that it is not just the data center, between data centers, between clouds, we are stretching it to be into the core Service Provider network, todays announcement into nextgeneration container. We are viewing it as a common fabric that connects these things together. Turning data centers into centers of data that have a connection across everywhere they go. It is going well. The relationship with cisco, they continue to view this, that networking layer, we are in this hardware business and what were finding is customers are running a lot of our overweight Overlay Network on their on theirappeared hardware. Our vision is much bigger and broader than any traditional view of networking. That is why it is a thrilling point oh what we are doing. Emily a last question about security. You have a new security product. How concerned are you about the level of threats were seeing from cyberspace . Will the industry ever be able to it ahead . As i declared in my keynote on monday, i think we, the Tech Industry have failed our customers insecurity. 2000 Different Companies insecurity. Mindboggling innovations going on but there are so many products that are chasing bad. We need to think holistic league in a different way we need to think holistic league in a different way we announced new products. Apt defense is one of those. There are things that we need to fundamentally due to change the game. Eliminateture must many of those products and make it secure. Products and companies go away. They disappear into the infrastructure. Turn it off. It is always secure. Second, we must integrate into the core security ecosystem and automate, integrate, validates of customers on trying to put pieces together. We have done it for them. Third, and enable consistent cyber hygiene. We have been involved with the u. S. Government. We had representatives and senators talking about cyber hygiene and introducing legislation. We laid out our five cyber hygiene principles. If you do these things, you will not be sony targets. The service area of those will be radically reduced if not eliminated. Like a great sports team, you practice the basics. Theeople are practicing basics and implementing these things consistently and well we think we would eliminate a large portion, maybe 80 to 90 of all cyber losses. We believe this is the right way to think about security in the future. Are stepping forward in a much bolder way in ouring with dell ecosystem. It is time to change the game in cybersecurity. Emily that does it for this edition of best of Bloomberg Technology. We will bring you all the latest in tech throughout the week. Tune in each day at 5 p. M. In new york. All episodes of Bloomberg Technology or Live Streaming on twitter. Check us out on weekdays. That is all for now. This is bloomberg. So new touch screens. And biometrics. In 574 branches. All done by. Yesterday. Banks arent just undergoing a face lift. Theyre undergoing a transformation. A data fueled, security driven shift in applications and customer experience. Which is why comcast business delivers Consistent Network Performance and speed across all your locations. Hello, mr. Deets. Every Branch Running like headquarters. Thats how you outmaneuver. Coming up on bloomberg best, the stories that shaped the biness around the world. Storms lashed the gulf coast. We are looking at a production impact, a demand impact and a refined product impact. Tensions rise over north korea. I dont think a military response is on the table. Brexit talks with sharp words from the eu. These two sides are as far away as they have ever been. The u. S. Job report