Ray Ozzie & Scott Cook: A Future Without Industries

Kutcher: Great, thank you, David. So good morning, everyone. As David said, I’m Eric Kutcher, I’m the managing partner for McKinsey’s Western region, but probably more relevant for today is I actually lead our global tech media telecom practice for quite a bit of time. And as David said, we’re going to explore, in this world where software is kind of eating and taking over the world, what does that mean in terms of industry and industry boundaries and how to compete on a go-forward basis. And David mentioned a few of these companies that we talk about and hear about every day, but, you know, as we talked about this a bit beforehand, how do you even classify companies like Amazon or Apple or Google, or Alibaba, who just is filed to become a bank, or thought about some of the industries which have already turned upside down. Think about telecommunications with Skype and how that changed the world for them.
And so I’m joined by three esteemed colleagues who are living this each and every day, and so I thought I’d introduce them, ask them to share a little bit about what they’re doing. And so first, Gio Colella, founder and CEO of Castlight Health, Ray Ozzie, the founder of Groove Networks, creator of my favorite Lotus Notes, chief software architect of Microsoft, and now CEO of Talko, and them Scott Cook, founder of Intuit.
So maybe, Gio, we can just start—tell us a little bit about what you’ve been trying to achieve with Castlight.
Colella: Great. Well, first of all, thank you so much for inviting me. It’s really an honor and a pleasure to be here. I want to make sure one thing we correct is I’m co-founder, and that’s very important to me, because I started with Todd Park, a very good friend of mine who’s now at the White House, and I couldn’t have done it without him.
What does Castlight do? So let me first talk for a minute about the problem we’re trying to solve. Healthcare in the United State, $2.8 trillion. It’s, just to give an idea about the dimension of the problem, that is 25 percent of the Chinese GDP we’re spending in healthcare in the United States. Of this, $620 billion is spent by the American enterprise. So just to compete on a worldwide level, where other enterprises don’t spend anything on healthcare because government’s take care of it, American enterprise is spending $620 billion. A study done by McKinsey, by the way—and I wasn’t asked to quote it.
Kutcher: Well we appreciate you doing so, I think.
Colella: Yes, of course. A study done by McKinsey figures out about 30 percent of that is waste. And that’s where Castlight comes in. Castlight is a SaaS-based platform that allows employers to understand how to allocate the healthcare dollars, starting by creating the most simple thing—in any industry, but in healthcare is actually a miracle—which is transparency on price and cost. I would ask anybody in this room that now is paying more and more out-of-pocket for your healthcare if you have any idea what you’re going to be paying before you go and see a doctor, what the alternatives are, what’s the quality of what you’re going to do. I mean, think about it, would you ever go and buy a car, or buy anything else like that? Still, $2.8 trillion, $620 billion are spent being blind, with a complete asymmetry of information.
So step number one for Castlight, correct the asymmetry of information, provide employers with price, quality, transparency. Then the platform integrates across all the different departments of the enterprise, so we integrate with talent management, we allow you to design your benefits. So if we know that somebody’s spending more on emergency rooms than on other things, we help you understand how to correct that. So we’re not limiting the caregiving, we’re optimizing for healthcare. It’s the first SaaS platform ever developed in healthcare, and we launched the company five years ago, we went public a year ago. So we’re very pleased at where we are today.
Kutcher: That’s excellent. Great. And Ray, maybe talk a little bit about what you’re trying to do with Talko.
Ozzie: So I’ve been in the industry for quite a while. My passion, the thing that’s driven me from kind of the very beginning is understanding how technology could be molded into a form that enables people to work together more effectively at a distance, or work together more effectively as a team. In the Notes era, which was 30 years ago, I guess 30 years ago next month is when I started it, it was a much different world, as you well know, Scott. PCs were getting out there but they weren’t really connected. The way that people would get things done using PCs was really document-centric. It was relatively rudimentary. And the role of communication was to move those documents from place to place. The PC-based model of productivity and communications is really centered around sitting at your desk. And over time, collaborative productivity reached hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of millions of information workers. If you look at installed base it’s much larger, but really the core is hundreds of millions of people.
But the nature of business is really changing and the nature of work is changing tremendously. I think every one of you would probably acknowledge that you do work pretty much anywhere you are, because you’re all carrying cellphones. And the total addressable market of people who work, people who get things done, is now in the billions, not in the hundreds of millions. And the types of tools that were appropriate for people to communicate and coordinate in a desktop environment are different than what should be native on a phone or on a tablet. Phones and tablets are much different than what PCs were.
And so what Talko is all about is it’s a team communications platform and user experience. But really what it’s oriented around is the fact that people should communicate when they’re using their phones much more naturally with their eyes, their ears, their voice, not just their thumbs. So it’s not that typing is a bad thing or documents are a bad thing, but it’s much more natural, in many instances, to get things resolved between people by just opening the mic and using your voice, by blending what we’ve traditionally known as calls and asynchronous voice and so on.
But at its core, it’s really a bet on the changing nature of IT, the changing nature of work, the fact that firms, you know, companies are shaped differently, and people are working differently with each other day to day.
Kutcher: Great. And Scott, I think most everyone here is familiar with Intuit. Maybe describe a little bit of where Intuit’s going, given some of the changes that we’re seeing in the marketplace.
Cook: Let me combine that with a look at where we have come from, because I think that illustrates the direction and how we set that direction. So it was 30 years ago last month that we shipped our first product, Quicken, and I guess at the time, if we’d looked at industry—to get back to our panel title—I guess we would have been consumer software. I’d worked at P&G, so that seemed reasonable, and our competitors all sold various types of consumer software. Some did games as well as finance. One had the Jim Fixx running product, which encountered a little bit of a problem when Jim collapsed while running. [LAUGHTER] Bad luck.
So that’s what we did for the first few years. But then, you know, my sense was always find the big problem and solve it. And then we uncovered, almost by accident, a big problem we had no understanding of, no belief in, learned it by accident, and then attacked that problem, and that was QuickBooks. We entered the business software area, which was not our original plan, with QuickBooks, QuickBooks today on the desktop—and that worked. QuickBooks has about a 95 share of desktop accounting software, and about 65 for online.
We saw a problem in payroll. Payroll that companies have to do has some real problems with it. And then by luck we found an entrepreneur, one guy who had an even better solution to the problem than we had envisioned, so we acquired his little company and helped him finish the service and launched a payroll service. And today we’ve got twice as many payroll service customers as any of the other payroll companies, ADP or Paychex. And we still solve that problem better than any competitor. There’s not a rival who has—especially better than ADP and Paychex.
We then, one of guys noticed that we were getting some midmarket companies using QuickBooks, not the size we had planned. We’d planned on zero to 20 employees, and this guy found that we had companies of 50, 100, 200, 300 employees. And he came to me and I said, okay, maybe that’s true as an accident, but I’m sure we’re far smaller than the midmarket software companies who intentionally go after middle-sized companies. And he came back with more data saying that, no, we were actually more popular than they were. And so we finally decided to focus on that and produce a line of QuickBooks we call QuickBooks Enterprise. The name always bothered me, I think it’s like Jumbo shrimp. [LAUGHTER] Because we don’t sell to enterprises. But anyway, for midmarket companies of a few hundred employees, we’re now five to 10 times more popular than anything else.
More recently, we’ve uncovered a real problem among businesses, and maybe some of you—it’s not so true in our industry, in technology, but it’s very true outside. Sixty percent of the QuickBooks customer base had applied to get a loan for their business. Seventy percent of those got turned down. And it was a long, ugly, slow process to get turned down. And without the financing, many of them had real problems. So we started to figure out how we could attack that problem. And today, our fastest growing business in the company is QuickBooks Financing, where we help use the data in QuickBooks to help lenders find the companies they want to lend to, and to help the companies find the lender who really wants their business. And now we have a 70 percent acceptance rate instead of a 70 percent decline rate.
So I guess what we tell our people—what do I conclude from that? So I kind of teach, fall in love with the customer’s problem, not your solution. And I would add, fall in love with the customer’s problem and not your industry. Because the problem you need to solve may well be outside whatever formal definition of your industry.
Kutcher: So I think all of you touched upon kind of this notion of how do we solve the customer’s problem today and going forward and try to do it in a way that’s different than the past. If we come back to this notion that industry lines may not be what they were, Ray, maybe talk about what’s different today. And in particular, how do we think about where that means different companies will compete? Are there different business models? Are there different places in the value chain that really open up today that weren’t there a few years back?
Ozzie: Well, from my perspective, what’s different today is—relative to a decade or two decades ago—is everything. You know, when I began working in industry, which, again, is around when you founded Intuit, it was a different world. The products that we built were really shaped around the constraints of the delivery mechanism of how we could deliver user experience, of how we could distribute that software. So, you know, technology and distribution constraints really shaped the offerings, shaped the company, shaped how people bought them. We would build PC software because that was the best way of getting these solutions to people. We would envision what we could we do within the constraints of the PC. We would distribute them through computer stores with distributors in the middle because that was the way of getting things out. And the same is true in many, many, many industries. The companies were shaped based on a viewpoint of the technological and distribution constraints of the time. The telco carriers were shaped around copper, around the fact that there was this wire. Television broadcasters were shaped around the fact that the way to get the signal was broadcast. The record industry was records; it was the fact that there was something physical that you had to, you know, distribute out to people. You know, the taxi industry was based on the fact that the constraints are you call people like this and you have a radio-based dispatch system. It’s the technology or distribution constraints that shape the companies.
But at this point in time, it’s all been blown up. In terms of technology, if you dream it, you can build it, you know, from material science to chips to dealing with small contract manufacturers. At the software level, there are many open source modular components. There’s Web—AWS and Azure and things like that, where you can host your service. If you can think about, if you can imagine a solution that’s based on technology, in many cases, for many applications, you can just—you can do it, you can build it. And from a distribution perspective, you can directly touch your customer. Every consumer, every business partner, every employee has either a Web browser, and Android phone or an iOS phone. You know that you have a bidirectional communication channel. You can run experiments, you can touch them, you can figure out what goes on. You can optimize that product over time. And the fact that technology and distribution is basically unconstrained means that the nature of the firm can be unconstrained. Instead of thinking of the product that you would deliver within those constraints, you think what is the solution that I’m trying to deliver to a given person? What kind of healthcare solution, what kind of entertainment solution, what kind of productivity solution, what kind of finance solution? You can go right to the person who’s going to use it, dream up what they might be able to do, and then shape everything around that. And you can do this at pretty much zero marginal cost after you have built it to get broader and broader distribution. That doesn’t mean cost of sales, that reaching and getting your message out is necessarily any easier than it has been in the past, but the logistics of getting the customer relationship is dramatically different.
So the nature of the firm is changing. Incumbents and how they approach their customer base is different than somebody who’s just thinking about the customer might approach that same problem.
Kutcher: And Scott, if we build on that, what assets become most important to own as a company to really win in this marketplace? Is it the data, is it the platforms, is it the distribution? How do we think about the playing field going forward and what that competitive advantage is?
Cook: I think the exact asset you want to own will vary by your role in the industry or your role in business, what layer you’re working on. But I think, to follow on with Ray’s comment, I think there’s a new source of those assets, that was not prevalent or really even available 30 years ago, that is now underpinning the success of many of the most interesting businesses in the world. And I guess the analogy, or the one clear example would be Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales started—it was a two-step process. He started trying to distribute an encyclopedia for free. But he created it the old fashioned way, paying experts, noted scholars, to write the articles. And after six months and, I don’t know, $400,000, he had 20 articles up and he could project that curve, or that curve, and see that wasn’t going to work. So a buddy of his told him about this thing called a wiki. Well, he converted over to wiki software, not to get outside contributors, just to make it easier for his paid contributors, the noted scholars, to write and edit articles. And he left it open, because who the hell else was going to write the articles? And then, amazingly, some other people started finding it and contributing. And they started contributing at a higher velocity than his paid experts, and Wikipedia started turning up. And the idea was, the key here isn’t just that distribution was free because of the Internet, or essentially so. It’s that the actual product became free because of the contributions of others. So think about what—and so think what happened to Encyclopedia Britannica. And so Wikipedia’s produced, what, the eighth most popular website in the world. And what’s their cost of goods for the content? It’s zero. Think about all the people writing reviews for Amazon. So hundreds of thousands of people spending their time, volunteering it, to make Jeff Bezos another billion dollars richer. Well that’s not actually why they do it, but. [LAUGHTER] And think about Waze, the company that Google bought recently. Open source software that Ray mentioned. We live in an amazing time, and it’s something that did not exist 30 years ago, where hundreds of millions of people, through their behaviors, their contributions, their location, their search patterns, are creating assets of huge value to others—think of Facebook—all for free. This is a new mode of creating the most valuable assets in the business. And typically these have network effects which are so profound that competitors try to copy and, whoosh, bounce right off. That’s I think what’s particularly notable about this age, is the new way of creating profound assets.
Kutcher: So, Gio, in that, and you think about Castlight, and you think about how quickly you’ve been able to scale it, what is it about these trends that’s enabling you to do things that weren’t done before?
Colella: Yeah, so, first of all, I’m listening, and I get excited just as I hear you guys talk, so it’s really hard for me to sit still when I’m listening to you. Think—which it’s not that rare, for whoever knows me. But think about this, think about the excitement of this moment in healthcare. So everything, Ray or Scott, you’ve described—and by the way, it’s pretty humbling for a five-year-old company to be here with the guy who’s pretty much the father of technology in the United States and the guy who’s defined consumerism in technology. So thank you for listening to me.
Think about this. You’ve described something that could have happened only in America. And let me tell you where I’m getting with this. The financial incentives, the economic macro-picture of healthcare was up until recently Russia. We were literally living in a socialist system within the capitalist system of a $2.8 trillion industry. My strong belief is that technology—you’re right, technology can do anything if it is located in the place where you have the right incentives and the right freedom. You said it when we were talking earlier, you said the interesting thing about “The Innovators,” the new book, is could those things be done today again? Because, well, it’s the first time in the United States healthcare that is becoming a free market. It’s the first time that we have the perfect storm. We have technologies like you’ve mentioned that allow us to do pretty much anything we want, and the financial incentives are heading in the right direction. So here you have the new frontier. You have again, $2 trillion available for efficiency that until yesterday were a disaster, were a complete bureaucracy. And Castlight is sitting at the forefront of this. I believe, and, again, there’s not a humble bone in my body, but I believe that our success wasn’t about Castlight, wasn’t about Gio, it was about being at the right time, right place. And we’re just at the beginning. We’re just scratching the surface.
I’ll stop by saying, I mean one this is, just sitting next to Ray and I hear him talk, I come from a conversation I had a month ago with the CTO of a major health plan in the United States, who I will—I mean, guys, I hope you believe me, he was looking me in my eyes and said, “Could you explain a little bit to me what this thing the cloud is all about?” This is the CTO of one of the biggest health plans in the United States. And my jaw dropped, and we left the room and my CTO said, “Are you depressed?” First of all, I don’t get depressed. Second, think of the opportunity. I mean, this guy doesn’t even know what the cloud is and he’s managing 40 million lives. So it’s a pretty exciting moment.
Cook: Well I looked out of my hotel room window today and got a new definition of the cloud. [LAUGHTER]
Kutcher: Welcome to Half Moon Bay. So we have some incumbents and some attackers. How do you think about, if you’re in that incumbent position, given the changes in business models and given some of the changes in the economics, how do I make sure I stay ahead? And as the attackers, how do we think about really going after and changing the world, given our willingness to adopt business models? So maybe we’ll start with Scott.
Cook: So as the token incumbent on the panel, maybe two thoughts. We’ve benefited from many rivals. Microsoft decided to pursue us for 19 years, and copied every one of our products. And I think ultimately the—
Kutcher: It’s getting interesting. [LAUGHTER]
Cook: I’m sorry?
Kutcher: Nothing, sorry.
Cook: And I think ultimately that—19 years later, they ultimately decided to give up on all of those businesses, and maybe the—and I mean frankly we were paranoid, scared shitless about competing with Microsoft. Because back when that started, Microsoft had crushed every competitor they had gone against. And so maybe it was particularly sweet when, as they were trying to help their customers who would no longer have versions, they would put up on their website, you know, “We recommend you use Quicken.” [LAUGHTER]
I think what we did there was just stay more focused on the customer and the customer problem. So as they were copying what we’d done, we were moving to solve the next thing. And not getting into kind of a feature race, although at times we did a little of that, but stayed focused on the problem nobody else has solved. So I think that’s part of it.
And I think another thing to recognize is that, in this world we’re talking about, when cost, because of the things Ray described, that we’ve described today, costs often are dropping to essentially zero, marginal cost of production. In physics, when you drop temperature to zero, you get close to absolute zero, the laws of physics kind of go out the window and new rules apply. And I think some of that’s true in economics. Economics was always built around scarcity in cost and allocation of scarce resources. When prices go to zero and costs go to zero, some of the economic traditions go out the window. So we had a competitor who’s giving away their tax product, TurboTax online, one of their competitors was giving away their federal tax product for free and then charging you for the state version. And we looked at that and resisted and looked at that, and that competitor kept gaining share, and finally our leaders of our tax business said, “If you can’t beat them you’ve got to join them.” So we started giving away TurboTax for free. And it’s free federal, and if you want to then do the state version, you pay for the state version. And that now counts for a majority of our users. And in fact, last tax season, we enhanced it, we ramped up the power of the free version with a lot more capability, ahead of any of our competitors. In fact, it was such a good business to give it away free that we amped it up to get even more of it. And we gained share really nicely because of that. This would have been something I would have never dreamed of doing, but in fact, it’s been a great piece of business for us. But we would have only done it if we had been spurred by a competitor. So that’s why I sometimes talk about the benefits of having competitors.
Kutcher: How do you think about it as the attacker that’s forcing the incumbent?
Colella: Yeah, I think you’re talking about me, right? Yes. Very important about our culture and our company is that we don’t think of it that way. We’ve coined the term humanitarian capitalism, and we really really—and I get particularly upset when I hear talk about attackers, about language. We believe that this is not a winners take it all. We believe this is a team sport. We believe that in our capitalistic society there is a space for everybody, and we’re focusing not on attacking, but on being the best ones out there. Our drive is for perfection. Our drive is we win if we deliver to our customer what the customer needs in the best possible way. And what will happen to our competitors, they will—if they’re smart, they will morph into something that works with us. If you look at the history really of competition, very rarely—and even recently you think Blackberry—very rarely they’ve really lost. They’re just morphing into something different. Which is the topic, by the way, of this talk, right, of how do industries evolve. So it goes deep into who were are at Castlight. You will never hear us see ourselves as attackers. You’ll hear a lot of talk about team sport—sometimes it’s rugby, but it’s a team sport. It can be rough around the edges.
So how do we work is we’re laser, laser focused on two things. One is the ultimate goal is to build an iconic company, and so we focus on our customers and our people. And the second thing is we’re not building just a company, we’re solving a set of problems. And everything else around us will either solve the problem with us or will find a niche in there. So it’s a little different, the way we approach it. And hopefully it’ll pay back, over time.
Kirkpatrick: I’m going to suggest we open up a bit to the audience for a few questions. And so I think if you raise your hand—or comments, questions or comments.
It’s still early, everyone’s getting their coffee. Back there in the—
Van Grove: Hi, Jennifer Van Grove with theStreet.com. My question is for Scott, and it actually has to do with attackers and incumbents. So I know that you have a relationship with Evan Spiegel, you’re kind of a mentor, and I was hoping that you could talk about that kind of relationship, what kind of advice you provided him, and then kind of maybe give your opinion on their future and what they can do going forward.
Cook: Yeah, I’ll leave it to him to make a projection on their future. How I met Evan, so they teach a couple of courses on Intuit at Stanford, and I’ll go and attend some of those case discussions. And one year—and this was a case about the beginning of the company, when Tom and I were starting the company, and our search for venture capital, which we utterly failed to get. We didn’t get a penny of venture capital in the early years. And so it’s a case about that. And this particular class of MBAs was really missing the boat. You know, they couldn’t, they just weren’t getting to the issues, they just didn’t understand—and it was actually the worst case discussion of that case I had seen. And then, toward the end of the class, one guy way up at the sky deck of the classroom just gave his take on the case. And he nailed it. He saw the stuff that the other MBAs didn’t. It was really, it was profound. So I asked the professor afterwards, “Who was that MBA?” The professor said, “That’s no MBA, that’s an undergrad who’s auditing the class.” So I said, “I’ve got to meet this guy.” So that’s how I met Evan, and I quickly offered him a—he was still a student, so I offered him a part-time job in the company. We were incubating in our headquarters a new service product for India, so I had him hop on the team. Which he did for a month and a half, and then he decided he had better things to work on. And so that’s how I met Evan. I think he’s—I give him all the credit. I have to say, so I’m also an investor in Snapchat, and I invested in the company because of him, because I thought he was such a great entrepreneur. I was sure he would find a business idea that would actually work, instead of this original one. But I presumed he’d pivot after it didn’t work, so maybe my advice isn’t worth that much to him. [LAUGHTER]
Kutcher: Okay, I think I saw a hand over here. Okay, in the back.
Surowiecki: James Surowiecki, The New Yorker. I just want to push back a little bit against the idea of the future without industries. And maybe I want to just ask this question: You know, we talk about this as an age of disruption, and it certainly seems to reflect something about the way it feels, certainly if you’re in the hotel business or in the media business. And yet, if you look at actual statistics, there’s a lot evidence that the business climate has actually been more stable in the last decade or so than—I mean setting aside the macroeconomic issues—than in the 1980s and 1990s. So turnover in the Fortune 500, the number of startups, you know, all these things are actually lower than they have been. And, you know, even if you think about the tech industry, Scott, as you said, I mean Intuit has these—you know, your market share is immense in a whole host of fields. If you think about the tech giants of today, are they really that different than they were seven or eight years ago? So I mean I’m wondering how we can reconcile these things. I mean why are the companies that are so powerful able to stay on top, if in fact there’s this incredibly disruptive technological environment underneath it all?
Cook: The word "disruptive" is used to mean many things. And Clay is a friend, and if you ask Clay Christensen, he rues the fact that he picked that word. Usually disruptive is used in ways with an evil edge. The Schumpeterian—what’s it, the turnover of businesses—
Audience: Creative destruction.
Cook: Yes, creative destruction, destruction. I tend to look at it on the positive side. Don’t look at who went away, look at what’s here now that wasn’t here before. Skype, free global video calls. For free! What an amazing—I was just with a British fellow who said that when he moved here 20 years ago the cost of long distance was so high he would talk to his parents for a few minutes every two weeks, once every two weeks. He said, “Now with our grandkids, my kids, we leave Skype on.” And it’s video, color! So what a wonderful—that’s a disruption to how we lived, I don’t care about companies. It’s so much better. You know, Instagram for photos and Facebook for connecting with old friends, and Uber, oh, thank God! What a wonderful world we get to live in, with all these new things changing how we live. Wikipedia and a smartphone, so now a village girl in India with a smartphone, a cheap Android smartphone and a data plan, will have more information about the world at her fingertips than Bill Clinton did as president. Isn’t that wonderful or what? So I don’t know, that’s—it’s undeniable we’re getting great stuff from this that is improving our lives phenomenally.
Kutcher: Any other thoughts?
Ozzie: I’ll just share that disruption doesn’t necessarily mean that the incumbents have to fall. If you—to Reid’s point yesterday, if you manage innovation the right way within your org, you do have the opportunity to participate in the way that things are changing. It does generally involve ring-fencing the innovation in some way, shape, or form, because there are very good, very strong, very well-intentioned business leaders who have a lot of day-to-day accountability, who have to keep the train running on time. But if you have a ring-fenced group that takes a purely solution-focused viewpoint, takes the customer viewpoint, reimagines solutions the way that they could be imagined if you were a startup, and you nurture this thing and encourage those people to succeed, you can indeed ultimately grow it and do a reverse takeover of the internal business, if possible. You know, I’m sure that if you did a case study of each one of the companies that goes through transitions, you’d get really interesting stories and nuances. Scott’s business had to shift from a pure PC-based business to a business that embraced the Web—
Cook: And now the phone.
Ozzie: And now the phone. And you have to stay focused on the customer, what the customer need is, and manage the transition. You might begin at ring-fence, but over time you have to manage that transition of the business. Where it’s really difficult is where it does cut across industry boundaries. And for example, in healthcare, we have a viewpoint of how the entire ecosystem surrounding healthcare has been built up over time. You go and see your doctor, they make a recommendation to a specialist. At the same time, all of us, or many of us, are carrying Fitbits and various interesting little health devices, and these things are going to grow and grow and grow to be a new viewpoint that is very centric to your needs about health. I’m associated with a little startup that—it’s a nonprofit—but there were people who were concerned about their health around Fukushima after the 3/11 tsunami. And Thermo Electric and many others manufacture Geiger counters. And that industry was not set up in any way, shape, or form related to healthcare, and then people would go to their doctors and say, “I don’t understand how to deal with this.” And so this volunteer group brought a bunch of people together with a solution focus and said, okay, we’ll make inexpensive Geiger counters that automatically log the radiation wherever you go, that you can measure around your property, you can go to the schools, it all gets uploaded to the cloud, people can get a viewpoint of not only the current situation, but how the situations’ changing over time. It’s a very customer-focused aggregation of experts, data, using devices as you will. But I just think there are certain things that cut across boundaries and there are certain things that can be done within a company. But it’s just an exciting time.
Kutcher: I’m going to say we have time for one last question. In the back—
Patsalos-Fox: Michael Patsalos-Fox, Stroz Friedberg. We’re a cybersecurity business. I wonder if I could ask the speakers to look forward and ask them this question: If you had to look at one industry, just one industry that you thought is going to undergo cataclysmic discontinuities and change, which would that be, and why?
Kutcher: Anyone care to start?
Colella: I’m biased.
Kutcher: Gio?
Colella: Healthcare, I would say. There’s absolutely no doubt—it’s already happening. It’s just completely being turned over its head.
Ozzie: I agree from an industry perspective with healthcare. I look at in a—when I think of the biggest single change, though, I think of it in a little bit different context, or a different pivot. I know we talk about software eating the world, but right now surveillance is eating the world. And I look at various industries and say will people wake up to the fact that surveillance is changing, transforming so many things? Will people take a different view of the solutions that they’re delivering or the vendors that they’re dealing with in the context of this new landscape that we’re in?
Cook: I’d say urban logistics, so how people and goods move within urban environments. And I think we’re seeing a lot of it already underway with Uber and various package delivery and self-driving cars. I think the propensity of people in cities to own cars will change as a result. Cars will be sold more into pools that will be shared. And this, if it really goes broadly in urban environments, could have quite an impact on the auto industry and the capacity—the form factors of the vehicles and the capacity of production.
Kutcher: Great. Let me thank each of our panelists, so thank you for this. I think we left with a lot more to think about, about how the industries are going to blur and the future of what some of these industries might look like. So thank you for all your time.