TechStuff Classic: Techs Top Rivalries

All's fair in love and tech, so they say. In this episode, we look back on some of the famous rivalries in technology.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio,
and how the tech are you? It's time for a
tech Stuff classic episode. This episode originally published on June two,

(00:28):
two thousand fifteen. It is titled text Top Rivalries. I'm
sure we could add to this list in the years
since it originally published, but let's take a listen. Today,
I'm going to talk about something that I think is
pretty interesting. Technology is often intertwined with business, and that

(00:49):
means rivalries are bound to occur. Now, there's been some
big rivalries in tech, and I wanted to take some
time to talk about a few of the most notable ones.
And this is by no means a complete list. It's
more of a sampling and include some rivalries that happened
more than a century ago. So let's get started with

(01:10):
the oldest rivalry in my list, that is a railroad rivalry.
This started way back in eighteen sixty two and President
Abraham Lincoln signed into law the Pacific Railroad Act. Now,
this was an act that was meant to create a
railroad that would unify the rails, so you get a

(01:32):
complete transcontinental rail line where you can travel from the
east coast to the west coast. And it meant that
you had to bridge this huge gap that was started
in the West. I created these two entities, Union Pacific
and Central Pacific. Now Union Pacific started in Omaha, Nebraska,
and it was to build railroads westward. Central Pacific started

(01:57):
in Sacramento, California, and it was to build to the east. Now,
the two companies were fierce competitors because the amount of
money and land they received from the government. It didn't
depend on how efficient the systems were. It depended upon
the number of miles of track they laid. So speed

(02:18):
was valued higher than safety or efficiency, and the two
companies began to feverishly lay down track at the expense
of human lives. So the heads of the two companies
were collectively referred to as robber barons. If you've ever
heard that term, it's talking specifically about the railroad tycoons

(02:39):
back in the uh mid nineteenth century. They were fighting
to get the most wealth and power. They were engaging
in all sorts of questionable activities to gain an advantage.
As the two lines of railroads converged, so, as an example,
Union Pacific would build winding paths instead of a straight line.

(03:00):
Why because it meant that they actually increased the amount
of mileage of track they were laying down. They were
maximizing the amount of money and land they were getting
from the government by making the path longer than it
needed to be. It was much more lengthy than a
straight pathway. They also used cheaper materials than they may

(03:21):
have well then they should have. Really they were using
wrought iron for the rails, which was fairly brittle, so
that was a problem. It would need to be replaced
before too long. And they were also using very cheap wood,
particularly because you know, they were starting uh in Nebraska,

(03:43):
so they didn't have access to a lot of wood.
Nebraska has a lot of planes, so they were using
stuff like cotton wood, which was fairly brittle, and they
were using that for their railroad ties. Those were the
planks that connect the two sets of rails together and
keep some space the right way. Uh. They also outsourced
a lot of the work for getting those railroad ties

(04:05):
to others in the Nebraska area, and those enterprising individuals
would take axes in hand they have dollar signs in
their eyes, and they started hacking down all the trees,
even if those trees were on private property. In fact,
it got to a point where they were making claims
that farmers living in Nebraska didn't have a right to

(04:28):
claim private property because it had not been fully ratified
by the government. Yet the folks who are living on
that property begged to disagree, sometimes for the use of force.
They would actually fire shots at folks who were coming
into the land to cut down trees. And eventually even
Union Pacific said, all right, this, this might be going

(04:51):
a bit too far. Let's re evaluate how we're doing
business here. So both companies faced dangers exacerbated by their
willing us to cut corners to make more money, and
both were plagued by attacks from Native American tribes. Union
Pacific often would attempt to fight these attacks off. Their

(05:13):
trains that they would use to move along as the
track was being built, were loaded with rifles. Meanwhile, Central
Pacific's workforce, UH they were they were often joined by
Native Americans because Central Pacific started paying off tribes and
having them join the workforce. Uh. Speaking of workforces, both

(05:36):
Union and Central used cheap labor. Central Pacifics workforce was
primarily Chinese augmented by some Native American workers, and Union
Pacific had hired on Irish laborers who were treated awfully
at that time, so both groups were even calling them
second class citizens as being generous, they were treated poorly.

(05:58):
Central Pacific suffered or losses to their workforce due to
accidents during the construction figures very not a lot of
people were particularly concerned about keeping an accurate count of
the number of deaths from injury, but estimations range from
five hundred to a thousand employees uh died while trying

(06:19):
to construct the railroad. Union Pacific they lost more employees
to disease and murder than they did to accidents. It
turns out they would stop in a lot of towns.
Often they would refer to them as the hell on
wheels towns where there various workforce members were encountering problems

(06:41):
with prostitutes or violent criminals, and so a lot of
them didn't make it. In fact, I think I read
one estimation that said there was a ratio of four
to one Union Pacific employees who died from murder to accidents,
So for everyone who died from an accident. Four We're
dying from being murdered, so awful awful times. Even when

(07:05):
the two railroads were getting closer together, the two companies
were engaged in shady dealings and didn't worry so much
about the tracks actually meeting up properly, which was the
whole point of this enterprise in the first place. So
the two companies were still looking at ways to maximize
the amount of money and land they could get, rather
than completing the job as was assigned. It was only

(07:27):
when the US government really got involved and made it
clear that the railroads were going to have to shape
up that they reached an agreement that Promontory Point in
Utah was the spot where the two railroads would finally connect.
Now by then both companies had spent huge amounts of
money and more than a thousand lives had been lost.

(07:47):
And if you want to look at how much track
was laid, technically Union Pacific one because I had laid
more track. But the cost of both companies, not to
mention the cost to everyone else in evolved in this,
whether it was the land that it moved through or
the people working for the companies. It really makes this
particular rivalry come out as a draw, and not a

(08:10):
pleasant one at that. Now, the next big rivalry I
want to talk about, as want I mentioned on the
show several times before, and it's Thomas Edison versus George Westinghouse.
Now you might have thought I was going to say
Nicola Tesla there for a second, but honest, honestly, really Tesla.
He was a brilliant engineer. He was also a brilliant

(08:33):
self promoter. He was a rock star of his day.
But he was not a very good businessman. So Edison
and Westinghouse were the powerhouses behind the two enormous companies
battling to supply electric power to the United States. So
it's really George Westinghouse who was the other entity in
opposition to Thomas Edison. Nicola Tesla played a very important role,

(08:57):
But if you're looking at the War of the currency,
really should say Edison versus Westinghouse, not Edison versus Tesla. Now,
this War of the currents took place just a couple
of decades after the railroad shenanigans I just talked about.
This would be in the eighteen eighties when Thomas Hasen
was looking to land an incredibly lucrative deal with the
United States to build power stations that would supply electricity

(09:21):
to homes and businesses through direct current. Now, essentially Edison
would just have to provide the patents and then he
could rake in royalties for years. He would become insanely
wealthy if he could land this deal. But there was
a problem. He was dead set on using that direct
current as a means of transmitting electricity, and that had limitations. Now,

(09:41):
there are a lot of advantages to using direct current.
Most of our electronics use direct current to operate. Anything
that uses a battery uses direct current. Most of our
most of the things we rely on use direct current.
There's usually a device that converts alternating current to direct
current so that we can actually use it. So if

(10:02):
we had direct current going straight into our homes, we
wouldn't need those additional converters and everything would be more efficient.
It's also a really simple way to generate electricity. But
they're big drawbacks, and the biggest one is that transmitting
DC power over distance isn't easy. You lose energy the
further away from the power source you are, so a

(10:25):
direct current you want the load. That is the thing
that electricity is going to power to be very close
to the source. The further away from the source it is,
the less energy is actually reaching the load, and the
less effective it is. So in other words, you would
have to build DC power plants a lot more of
them and a lot closer to the loads as you

(10:47):
go along, and that was not a great solution for
some people. Like it might be fined in an urban
environment where people are packed in very dense populations, but
in places like the suburbs or the rural areas, it
was a lot harder to justify because you couldn't build
the DC power plants as close to the homes as
needed to be. So Edison started looking into ways of

(11:11):
perhaps boosting DC power transmission. One of the people he
consulted with was Nicola Tesla, and Tesla had recommended that
Edison abandoned direct current or transmission and switched to alternating
current or a C electricity instead. Now, one thing you've
got to make clear, and I've said this before, it's

(11:32):
one of those things that I think a lot of
people are mistaken about. Tesla did not invent the idea
of alternating current. He's often given that credit, but that
is just not true, alternating current had already been used
when Tesla was just a kid. He a c had
existed before Tesla was really born, didn't start getting widely

(11:52):
used in Europe until Tesla was a child. But at
any rate, there were already pre existing alternating current systems
that Tesla could witness and understand. Now, I don't want
to take too much away from Tesla, because he did
have brilliant ideas on how to make alternating current more
efficient and practical. He actually improved the process dramatically so

(12:16):
it could be an effective means of transmitting power. It's
just the principle itself had already existed before Tesla rose
to prominence. Now, Edison didn't see the benefit of alternating current.
He dismissed the idea, so Tesla would end up leaving
Edison's company and try to raise money for his own operation,

(12:37):
even going so far as to dig ditches for the
Edison Company to raise money for his own company. We'll
be back with more of this classic episode of tech
stuff after this quick break. Now we need to talk

(12:57):
about George Westinghouse. He was the founder of the Westinghouse
Electric and Manufacturing Company, and he saw the value of
alternating current. He thought that was the future, so he
bought Tesla's patents. Now Edison suddenly took notice because while
Tesla he thought was kind of a wild, crazy idea
man who wasn't a real threat, Westinghouse had influence and

(13:21):
a lot of money. So now Edison actually had a
legitimate threat a legitimate competitor. Tesla, while brilliant, wasn't really
much of a threat to Edison. He couldn't do much
on his own. Westinghouse was a different story, and Westinghouse
was able to secure rights to supply power to areas
that Edison's power stations couldn't reach, like those rural and
suburban areas. Westinghouse also started making some headway into urban markets,

(13:47):
mostly by selling electricity at a loss to undercut Edison.
So Westinghouse wasn't above doing some, you know, some potentially
harmful business practices in order to eliminate the competition. Edison
also not shy about competition. He thrived on it. His
response was to create a pr campaign that claimed a

(14:09):
C power was inherently deadly because it required high voltage
running through the wires. That's how alternating current is able
to get much better transmission than direct current. With alternating current,
used transformers to step up the voltage until you get
to these very high levels to run through cable over
great distances, and then use other transformers to step down

(14:32):
the voltage to deliver the electricity to houses. And Edison
was convinced that this alternating current, this high voltage was
absolutely deadly and if it were put in widespread use,
it would cause deaths by electrocution across the United States.
I assume he believed that he certainly acted as if

(14:52):
he did uh, and he was inspired to really push
that idea. Now something happened that was a little bit
against more than a little bit, very much against Edison's principles.
But I think it says a lot about his character
based upon what he did. A dentist actually came up
to him and had proposed the idea of using electricity

(15:17):
as a means of execution, using electrocution to kill criminals.
He thought that it could be a faster and more
humane way of putting someone to death than the other
methods of the era. Now, Edison philosophically opposed the death penalty.
He was not in favor of it, but he also

(15:38):
saw in this request the possibility of associating Westinghouses alternating
current power with electrocution, and that led to Edison really
pushing this idea, ultimately leading to demonstrations public demonstrations in
which Edison would electrocute various animals, starting off with stray dogs.

(16:02):
He would pay to have stray dogs rounded up and
then electrocute them, and to demonstrate that alternating current was deadly. Ultimately,
the big one that everyone remembers is that Edison used
the alternating current to put six thousand volts into an elephant,
electrocuting an elephant to death. Um it was an elephant

(16:23):
that had previously killed three different people, although the treatment
of the elephant was a large factor in that I
would imagine at any rate, Edison thought of this as
being completely justifiable, both for the means of putting his
competitor out of business and to end what he viewed
as a dangerous technology. Now. Edison even funded the design

(16:45):
of an electric share, but he did so behind the scenes,
so he essentially paid off the inventor. Harold Brown was
given the task to design an electric chair, and Edison
was paying Harold Brown to use alternating current in that design.
So when the murderer, William Kimmler was scheduled to be

(17:06):
the first criminal to be executed by the electric chair,
Edison tried to popularize the term westinghoused for electrocution, as
in Kimdler was to be westinghoused, not just executed by electricity.
So again pretty negative pr campaign. By the way, that

(17:27):
execution did not go so well. Kidler was strapped into
the chair, the switch was thrown, and Kimdler he tensed up.
People said that they saw him grip the sides of
the chair so hard that his hands began to bleed um.
He was convulsing when the A C dynamo essentially ran

(17:49):
off juice when they turned the switch off. Uh, they
were raided to pronounced Kimler dead when he suddenly started
breathing again, which horrified many of the witnesses. There were
reports of people fainting or being sick because this supposedly
humane means of putting someone to death had just dramatically

(18:12):
had this this reaction of convulsions, and now the prisoner
was breathing again, not conscious, but was breathing. Meanwhile, the
A C dynamo needed to be charged again in order
for it to deliver another shock. So it took some time,
and it led some people to fear that Kindler would

(18:32):
regain consciousness, but they were able to deliver a second
fatal shock uh and actually complete the execution by electrocution.
Westinghouse was absolutely horrified by the whole ordeal and said
that the demonstration showed that electrocution is not a humane

(18:54):
method humane method of execution, and proclaimed there would never
again be an execution by electrocution. Now, all of this
grim theater ended up being unnecessary. Edison's efforts were all
for not because Westinghouse secured the right to supply electricity
to the eight Chicago World's Fair. The fair allowed Westinghouse

(19:18):
an opportunity to generate a huge amount of positive publicity
for the Westinghouse Company and for alternating current, and the
transmission method was secure, so Westinghouse one out. In the
short run anyway, eventually Edison's company would win out and
Westinghouse would kind of fade into obscurity. But the actual

(19:40):
rivalry during their lifetimes, Westinghouse was the clear winner of
that one. Alright. So those are two classic rivalries from
ages past. Now we're going to jump forward about a
century to look at the next one, because, uh, I mean,
there are tons of different rivalries I could focus on,
but some of these are really fun and some of
them are so are very illustrative of how far people

(20:03):
are willing to go in order to get their ideas across.
So that's next one I want to talk about is
Motorola versus a T and T in the mobile phone wars.
And this was in the late nineteen sixties and early
nineteen seventies when a T and T S research and
development arm called Bell Labs. We've talked about Bell Labs
in the show many times. Bell Labs was working on

(20:25):
a new way to make and receive phone calls, uh,
and it was a cellular service. It was using a
cell methodology to transfer phones from one cell to the
next to allow a continuous phone call whenever a phone
was in motion. And a T and T S aim
was to create this technology specifically for car phones. That

(20:49):
was really the application they were looking at. They weren't
thinking about mobile phones, but car phones. So I guess
you could argue that car phones are mobile, but you
couldn't take them out of the car. They would just
be you know, built into the car itself. Another company
thought there could be a different use personal mobile phones,
things that you could actually carry with you they wouldn't

(21:09):
be stuck in the car, and that company was Motorola.
So Motorola gave the project of developing a truly mobile
phone to Martin Cooper, and Cooper and his team got
to work in nineteen seventy two on developing a phone
that could be carried on a person and one that
didn't require any sort of wires connected to a base station,

(21:30):
so it would be another cell phone type of phone.
The phone that they designed was officially named the Dina
Tack d y in A T, A C H, and
inside the Motorola group they referred to it as a
shoe phone because of the shape of the phone. It

(21:50):
was a big brick of a thing that looked kind
of like the shape of a shoe. In nineteen seventy three,
the team was ready to unveil the project and perform
a public demonstration, so oh Cooper had the perfect idea
to do this. His team installed a cell transmitter on
a New York City building. They got permission to attach
a transmitter to a tower, and on April third, Ninete

(22:14):
Martin Cooper grabbed the phone. It's weighed about two pounds,
and took that out to the streets of New York
City and he used that phone to call a person
named Joel Ingle. So who was Joel Lingle? He was
an engineer who worked at Bell Labs. So essentially Ingle

(22:36):
was a T and T S counterpart to motor role
as Martin Cooper. So Cooper essentially calls his his counterpart
and to his competitor, and he rather cheekily needled Ingle
with the reveal that he was being called on a
mobile phone that wasn't a car phone, and then Cooper
went on his jolly little way to hold a press

(22:56):
conference about the developing technology. Now, would mobile phones be
limited to cars if it weren't for Motorola and Martin Cooper.
Probably not, And even Motorola's INVENTIONED wouldn't be ready for
consumers for another ten years or so. But the rivalry
was a really fun one, so I decided I had
to include it in this episode. Okay, we've got to

(23:19):
talk about a little company called Apple. Apple has had
some of the most famous rivalries in technology with lots
of different companies, in fact, largely because Apple is involved
with lots of different types of tech, so it's not
as simple as Apple versus Microsoft, or even Apple versus IBM,
but both will play a part. So I'm gonna give

(23:39):
a rundown on some of the biggest rivalries involving Apple,
including an internal rivalry within the company itself. Just keep
in mind that a lot of these rivalries overlap each other,
so it's not like one began and ended and then
another one began and ended. But the first one we
need to look at is Apple versus IBM. So both
companies were aiming to dominate the personal computer market. Apple

(24:02):
had an early success. They had really hit the ground
running with the Apple too. It was incredibly popular for
its time. But IBM was a huge company with nearly
a century of history behind it, and IBM had been
building computers for enterprises and felt the PC market was
the next big thing. So as the IBM PC debuted,

(24:23):
Apple had to strike back. So famous Apple at ran
during the Super Bowl, and it portrayed IBM as the
evil Empire. It was sort of Orwellian, very faceless, and
everyone is just a number, a cog in a machine.
And the Macintosh computer was positioned to be the machine

(24:45):
for people wishing to maintain their individuality rather than to
become a clone. Jobs himself had said that if for
some reason we make some big mistake and IBM wins,
my personal feeling is that we are going to enter
a computer dar ages for about twenty years. So shots
were fired. Um IBM fought back by employing a former

(25:07):
ally of Apple. And that brings us to the second
big rivalry in Apple's history. And we're talking about Apple
and Microsoft, and this one is a doozy. So the
two companies shared a lot of similarities. Microsoft was founded
on April fourth, nineteen seventy. Apple was founded on April one,

(25:28):
nineteen seventy six, so almost a year later, not quite,
just barely shy of a year later. So Microsoft is
just a hair under a year older than Apple. Meanwhile,
two of the co founders, you know, Bill Gates for
Microsoft and Steve Jobs for Apple, were very similar. Both

(25:51):
were college dropouts, both had big ideas. Gates's approach was
to develop software that would run on personal computers of
the future. Jobs As idea was to develop both software
and hardware, so he wanted to create the computers along
with the operating systems and software that was used on them,
and at first there wasn't a direct rivalry between the

(26:12):
two companies. In fact, Microsoft developed software both for the
Apple to computer and the Macintosh. But in the mid nineties,
Microsoft began to develop Windows, which is a graphical user
interface operating system. Apple and Steve Jobs in particular, felt
that Windows bore more than a passing resemblance to the
mac os, which Microsoft had access to even before the

(26:36):
operating system came to market. We've got more to say
in this classic episode of tech stuff after these quick messages.
So essentially, the accusation was that Microsoft was copying Apple.

(26:57):
This is kind of funny to me because Apple and
itself was kind of copying Xerox. But Apple is one
of those companies that while Steve Jobs felt that that
great great minds steal, he wasn't too happy when it
was being done to him. So Apple actually went beyond
words with this battle and took it to the courtroom.

(27:18):
Apple sued Microsoft or copyright infringement. The lawsuit went for
several years, but ultimately the court decided against Apple. Apple
appealed the decision. They even went so far as to
petition the U S Supreme Court to hear the case,
but they were denied. The Supreme Court said no, we're
not gonna listen to it, and the matter came to arrest.

(27:39):
Microsoft helped the PC dominate the market over the Macintosh.
So Microsoft gets involved in IBM and IBM clones and
provides this Windows, this graphical user interface operating system and
helps the PC command a huge amount of the market

(28:00):
share and shrinking Apple's influence to less than ten percent
of the overall market, which is a big change. This
also brings up the internal rivalry I mentioned earlier, the
one that happened in Apple. Steve Jobs was a divisive figure.
Seems like it's an accurate thing to say he's a
really passionate salesman, a very visionary person as far as

(28:20):
product design was concerned. Um, you know, people had have
criticized Jobs by saying that he was more of kind
of a grand idea man and relied heavily on other
people to implement it. But his success record shows that,
uh that his ideas were very popular with people. They

(28:41):
were on track. He was very concerned with design, and
it turns out that concern was well founded. But he
was also seen as hot headed and difficult to work with.
This is true both in the early days of Apple
as well as the second reign of Steve Jobs. So
he was the found of the company, but he wasn't

(29:01):
the CEO by the mid eighties. In fact, Jobs had
hired on John Scully to fill that position in nineteen
eighty three, that's when Apple became a publicly traded company.
By night five, after disappointing McIntosh sales figures and complaints
from Jobs as employees that Steve Jobs was very difficult
to work for, Scully consulted the board of directors and

(29:23):
together they decided that it was best to remove Jobs
from his leadership position. So technically Steve Jobs still worked
for Apple, but he was kind of pushed to what
was called Siberia where he had very little influence on
anything that was going on in Apple and really had
nothing much to do. So that didn't sit well with

(29:43):
Steve Jobs. He actually decided to quit. So in the
summer of nineteen eighty five, he left Apple and he
formed a new computer company called Next, and he launched
a little animation studio you might have heard of called
Pixar during that time. Meanwhile, Apple didn't do so well
without Jobs, Steve Jobs, that is, there were a series

(30:05):
of decisions that had kind of watered down the culture
of the company, including licensing of technology, something that Steve
Jobs never would have stood for, and the company itself
was on the verge of collapse in the ninety nineties.
That was when the boards that reached out back to
Steve Jobs and said please come back, originally as sort

(30:26):
of an interim CEO, but Jobs would of course become
the permanent CEO. So Steve Jobs agreed to come back
and things began to turn around, though not immediately. So
one of Steve jobs first actions, it was kind of
a move of desperation. Uh, the company was doing really poorly.
He ended up turning to Microsoft for help. So, even

(30:48):
though Apple and Microsoft at this point had a rather
tumultuous relationship, largely because Apple had come after Microsoft so
hard in the lawsuit, Jobs turns to Microsoft for help,
and Apple and Microsoft strike a deal. Microsoft invests a
sizeable sum of money into Apple, and in return, Apple

(31:11):
forms of partnership with Microsoft, names Internet Explorer as the
browser of choice for Mac computers, as well as integrating
other types of Mac software into or Microsoft software into
the max. So this partnership lasts for about five years.
That's how long the agreement was UH was supposed to last,

(31:32):
and then after that they could choose to renew it
or not. So once those years were up, things went
back to being pretty rough between Microsoft and Apple. That's
when we started seeing the Mac versus PC ads coming
out on the high I'm a Mac and I'm a PC,
the ones with John Hodgman in them. It's also when
Apple made the decision to move into a space that

(31:53):
Microsoft hadn't really cracked yet, which was mobile computing. And
that's how Apple managed to build momentum and eventually pass
Microsoft in value. So it was a long battle and
Microsoft dominated the market for ages and really still in
the PC market, Microsoft is ahead of Apple. But when

(32:14):
you look at where most of the movement is going toward,
with the mobile platforms being way more important than desktop
and laptops happened to be these days, Apple has kind
of one you would say that they're currently winning, especially
if you look at the value of the two companies.
Apple's value is astronomical. Now. When jobs came back to Apple,

(32:38):
another rival restarted up. That's when Michael Dell of Dell
Computers made a statement that ruffled some feathers. Dell said
that if he had been put in charge of Apple
at that time, when the company was on the verge
of collapsing, he would have just shut it down and
returned the money to shareholders. Jobs meanwhile said that Dell

(32:59):
and Apple were the only two companies in the computer
industry that we're actually making money at that time. Only
Apple did it through innovation, while Dell did it by
quote being Walmart end quote sick burn. Now, there are
other rivalries to talk about with Apple. During the mobile era,

(33:20):
which I guess we're still in technically, there were a
couple of big ones. Apple had a real problem with Google.
Steve Jobs really had a big problem with Google. Jobs
felt that the Android operating system was a complete rip
off of iOS and he wanted to see it destroyed,
famously saying that he would spend every penny of Apple's

(33:41):
billions of dollars in order to do it, and that
he would pursue this to his last dying breath. Now,
Apple really concentrated on going after Android, not by targeting
Google directly, but instead looking at the companies that actually
used Android operating system. And specifically they targeted Samsung both

(34:02):
because there were hardware designs that Apple said infringed upon
their trademarks and patents uh and there were software issues
that they said were infringing upon patents. And so the
patent wars began between Samsung and Apple, and they're so
extensive that I'm not going to go into them here
except to say that there have been billions of dollars

(34:25):
awarded in various cases, sometimes for Apples, sometimes against Apple,
in different courts around the world. And it's a very
complicated series of accusations and counter accusations. So it's been
pretty ugly, definitely one of the more um notable rivalries

(34:45):
in recent years. Now. On the social media side, one
of the great rivalries of the past few years was
between my Space and Facebook, which might seem hard to
believe now because a lot of people aren't even aware
that my Space was a thing at this point or
haven't thought about it in years, but my Space was
the dominant player in the game for quite a few years.

(35:06):
It was hard for someone on my Space to see
or to imagine that Facebook could possibly get ahead and
ultimately render my Space obsolete as a social networking site.
So my Space was founded in two thousand three. Facebook
would follow a year later, and my my Space incorporated
a ton of features, some of which weren't really that subtle.

(35:28):
You could customize your profile page in my Space quite
a bit. You could put on all sorts of different backgrounds.
You could include very simple animations in there that would
make your eyes bleed. You could include clips of music
that would auto play when you would visit the profile, which,
let me tell you how fun that was. Facebook, on

(35:48):
the other hand, was much more minimalist in its design.
Initially and in the earliest phases, it was not much
more than a tool to help college kids find a
date um and in fact, it was only open to
college students originally. Now during the mid two thousand's, MySpace
dominated Facebook, and in two thousand five, News Corporation acquired

(36:11):
my Space for five hundred eighty million dollars. It's an
enormous acquisition at the time. In two thousand six, my
Space was the most visited site on the web. Google
was second place, But Facebook's design and features were evolving
over time. The site started opening up to larger and

(36:31):
larger populations, opening up beyond college students and By two
thousand nine, the tables had turned and Facebook was receiving
more visitors than my Space. So the former giant began
to see members leaving for Facebook. Some of them were
following friends who had already left my Space, some of
them were joining friends who had Facebook accounts but had

(36:52):
never even bothered to build a MySpace account. And in
two thousand eleven, News Corporations saw the writing on the
wall and sold my Space for an undisclosed sum. Now
the sum is officially undisclosed, but there have been a
lot of estimations out there, with the lowest being at
around thirty five million dollars. So remember they bought the
company for five hundred eighty million selling it for thirty

(37:16):
five million. That's a huge loss for News Corporation. Since then,
my Space reinvented itself as a music entertainment destination. That
did that back in two thousand twelve with the help
of Justin timber Lake, and all the user generated content
that had existed on the site has long since been deleted,
So all those profiles, the messages, the photos, the journal entries,

(37:39):
all of those things are gone, and that caused a
lot of grief with people. Some folks were saying, you know,
I know, I don't go to my Space to comment
anymore to interact with my friends, but I did still
have a lot of stuff there that was important to me,
like pictures of people who are no longer around, or
thoughts on on subjects that were really important. But I

(38:00):
didn't have anywhere else. So that caused some consternation when
they deleted all that user generated information. So how did
my Space actually fall like that? How did that all happen?
How could my Space, which had dominated had become the
most visited website in the world. How could it fail
so completely to this upstart Facebook. Well, a lot of

(38:22):
people have put thought to it, and one hypothesis is
that News Corporation put my Space under the leadership of
business executives who are used to formulating a strategy and
executing it. So, in other words, they would sit down,
make goals, make plans on how to achieve those goals,
and set forth doing it. And they were very you know,

(38:42):
kind of locked into those ideas. Meanwhile, Facebook grew up
in an environment where the company could experiment with ideas
and discard them if they didn't work very quickly. They
were very nimble in that way, so I could change
much more quickly, adapting to what people liked and get
rid of things that they didn't like, while my my
Space was bogged down and more of a corporate structure.

(39:03):
And in the end, Facebook's approach worked in that social
media sphere and my Space didn't. Some more recent rivalries
we've seen include companies like Uber and Lift, both of
which are those car hailing services. You know, you get
an app on your phone and you can hail a

(39:25):
car driver from Uber or driver from Left and use
that to take you to wherever you're going to go.
They're very similar services. Both of those services have riled
city governments and taxi companies. But in two thousand and fourteen,
Uber really made the news got a lot of negative
press for this. They had a campaign to throw a
monkey wrench in lifts operations. Normally, I would say allegedly,

(39:49):
but memos from Uber leaked and we're published by various
publications on the web, and so Uber employees or contractors
were encouraged to use Lift services in an effort to
recruit drivers away from Lift and over to Uber. There
were also policies that told contractors to order and then

(40:12):
cancel Lift rights. This had a couple of different reasons,
uh you know, motivations. One was that it kept Lift
drivers busy without having them earn money. So they would
be responding to a call and driving from one point
to another to pick up a fair and then the
the call would be canceled, and so they wouldn't be

(40:33):
making money in that meantime, they'd be wasting time going
from point A to point B. The other reason was
to help mask the recruitment efforts from Uber executives. So
rather than allowing Lift to identify a pattern and to say, oh,
this one person is consistently trying to recruit our employees

(40:54):
or our drivers over to Uber, let's ban them for life.
This was a way of trying to obfuse skate that.
So it's all very spy movie esque. Uber employees are
contractors were even using burner cell phones and varying their
behavior to avoid setting patterns to help limit the chance
of being discovered. Now, Lift even went so far as

(41:16):
to sue its own former CEO. The executive had jumped
ship to Uber, and Lift claimed that that executive had
shared confidential information about a ride sharing program and this
was partially because both Uber and Lift announced such a
ride sharing program on the very same day, and Lift said, well,

(41:36):
the whole reason why this happened was that someone who
had uh confidential information shared it with our competitors. So
that's unfair and we're suing for it. Another big rivalry
going on right now is between Netflix, Amazon and HBO.
So Netflix and Amazon had been battling it out for
a while trying to secure content that is exclusive to

(41:58):
one or the other uh um. They're also creating their
own individual original content and trying to kind of dominate
the streaming market. Meanwhile, HBO is a nerd the fray
with HBO go with its own streaming service, and that
has prompted Netflix chief content officer to say the goal

(42:18):
for us is to become HBO faster than HBO can
become us. Now, whether this means that the cable industry
as a whole will eventually be completely replaced by competing
streaming services remains to be seen. We're getting a lot
of really fantastic content from this, you know, Daredevil from
Amazon for example, or from Netflix rather for example, Amazon

(42:40):
is going to bankroll the man who killed don Keyxote,
the Terry Gilliam movie that has had famously perhaps infamously
troublesome uh past, So really exciting from a content perspective,
But it also means that if you want to get
access to all of these things, you have to subscribe

(43:01):
to multiple streaming services. So the more crowded this gets,
the harder it is for the individual consumer. Or you
have to make tough decisions which once do you subscribe
to and which ones do you not? Um will it
all shake out that this is the future of television.
I'm interested to see. I would suspect, at least for
the near future, this is how it's going to go.

(43:22):
Whether it's sustainable, I don't know. Maybe it's exactly what
everyone's looking for. I know a lot of people have
hoped for ala carte cable where they can pick and
choose which channels they have access. Well, this might be
the beginning of that world, but it might mean that
you have to subscribe to all these different individual services
in order to do it, and if there are a
lot of them, it may end up meaning that you're

(43:43):
paying more per month than your cable bill was before.
So we'll have to see. I hope you enjoyed that
tech Stuff classic episode about text top rivalries. If you
have suggestions or topics I should cover in future episodes
of tech Stuff, do not hesit hate to reach out
and let me know about it. The best way to
do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show

(44:05):
is tech Stuff H s W and I'll talk to
you again really soon. Y. Text Stuff is an I
Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio,
visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows