I actually think of myself as a geek. I love technology and a lot of times when I'm sitting
behind a piece of technology, I find myself amazed at the simple things that I want to be able
to do that I'm not able to do and, on the flipside, many times, I'm amazed at the cutting-edge
technology that's available to us and what is possible. And it's an interesting time
in the IT industry because we have a lot of organizations out there that really are what
we would consider commercial accounts that are running on legacy IT, right?
They do day-to-day operations in this legacy IT, yet their end-users have cutting-edge technology
at home. The intersection of devices, data and humans is where it gets really exciting,
actually. We're talking about the future of IT and you can bring these things together,
you can really create magic. Or, on the flipside, it can also become a really big barrier if
it's not managed well. One of the things that we see happening is that, if
the end users are not empowered to the level that they had access to devices in their
own personal lives at work, that creates a barrier and that's an issue for a lot of
organizations. So one of the things we see happening is convergence,
and this could mean a few things. It could be a tablet and a PC in one device - well
that's basically taking history and heritage of the PC and taking a kind of new, exciting consumer
device and combining them into something that really creates value for a user that maybe
was carrying around two devices. There's a whole lot of other types of convergence
though as well and I want to talk through a couple of those and I also want to take
you down, sort of, memory lane a little bit when it comes to these devices.
So first, talking about convergence, I don't know if you guys can see what that
is, but that is called a grapple. So their marketing slogan is, "Crunches like an apple,
but tastes like a grape". Does that sound appetizing to anybody? I've had one. It's
interesting, but I actually would rather have an apple and a grape. I don't necessarily
want the grapple. What about shampoo and conditioner in one?
I actually like my high-end shampoo and conditioner separate. I want, you know, that nice stuff.
For me, this doesn't really cut it, this type of two-in-one.
Any of you guys have a Swiss army knife? It's a jack of all trades - it has so many capabilities
and it's all in one little device that you can carry with you all of the time, but is
it the best pair of scissors? Probably not. It's definitely not the best nail file. I have a better one,
and if you think about all the devices there, it's really the fact that they're converged
into a mobile tool that you can find value in when we don't want to carry the best pair
of scissors. So when we take a look at the IT industry
and devices and convergence over time, I would like to submit that one of the very first
convergence devices is what you see here back in 2003. So this device converged the PalmPilot
and the mobile phone into one device. It was pretty cool. It actually had a little pen
on board that you could use, which is great like the PalmPilot, and it acted like a phone
so now you've taken two devices, you've combined them into one and it was a pretty
big hit. Does anybody know what that device is? That
phone was the Motorola ROKR, the ROKR. What happened with this? Well, iTunes is sitting
on that phone and, initially, the plan was that Apple really did not want to be in the business
of building phones. Actually, they wanted to partner with Motorola and they wanted to
have iTunes, as a client, sit on that device and so that was the plan until Steve Jobs
got up on stage and started to do a presentation, talking about how you can go from your favorite
song, quickly to a phone call and right back to where you left off in a song, and it didn't
work. And he looks at the device and you can tell
the look on his face is like, "This is not good enough. I'm going to have to build my own
phone." So then in 2007, out comes the iPhone, right, and this really changes the game because the
iPhone goes on one specific carrier. Do you guys remember? It went exclusive to AT&T.
So all the carriers at that time, if you think about carriers, what did they view as their
most priceless resource? Their network.
They thought about their network and the connectivity as the thing that their customers
were buying. They never, for once, thought about a worthless commodity device as something
that was important to those people. They thought the network, the data, the infrastructure
that they had put in place was really their competitive advantage. When this iPhone launched
on AT&T only people started jumping ship from their precious network to another network
for a device. That really changed the game and it opened some eyes and people said, "Uh-oh,
we have a problem here," because they had a two-year contract on that, on terms of exclusivity.
So now what happens? All these other carriers are scrambling because they have nothing like
this to be able to offer. But really, Android is born and it actually
has now become the most popular operating system in the world from a mobile perspective,
so it's a pretty interesting story when you take a look at all the different manufacturers
that are manufacturing on that platform. Well, a little while later, what does Apple
do? They create the iPad, right? Now, so we're into 2010, and this is a whole new device.
Right now, at this point in time, it's like a big phone, but different. You can't make
calls from it, but it acts like this phone a lot. Pretty amazing thing, but there's no
keyboard, but it's virtual. People start really scrambling around this and try to get
their heads around what it means, and I remember when it first happened I wondered to myself
how would anybody really use this thing? Right? And now we see them everywhere, and
not only these devices, but again, other operating systems as well. Android, Microsoft - all
these different solutions that have actually created a whole new category of computing around a
device. And so, when we take a look at convergence, and where we're going in the PC industry,
and how those devices are really being shaped and molded by what people want, we need to
look at these devices because, in your everyday, consumer life, you're using devices like this
all the time and they really impact your perception of your work PC, or device, and that's something
that Lenovo is very focused on and making sure that when we bring devices to market,
whether it's for commercial audience or consumer audience, they're full of features that
people want. And that's very important, I think, when it
comes to devices and remembering that, while some people might say device is a commodity,
here's a story that tells otherwise. So two-in-ones are becoming increasingly popular,
in fact, over 50 percent, or almost 50 percent of the world's consumer convertibles are Lenovo.
So what about other devices? We found that 80 percent, believe it or not, 80 percent
of people using tablets are using them in the home. I don't know about you guys, but
my view of that is a little skewed because I'm in the business world and I see people
using tablets all the time at work, or in between - anywhere on the go, in a coffee
shop and those kinds of things. But, truly, around 80 percent of the world is using tablets
in the home, and more than half of those people are using them for multimedia consumption
and they're sharing that device with someone else.
So it's an interesting tablet because it starts to have a large screen, so now it crosses
the line a little bit and blurs maybe what some other people would think of as more of
a notebook-type device, if you were to add, say, a keyboard to it. So this is an interesting
way that we can take devices and add features where convergence comes into play that creates
value even in a saturated market. I mean, let's be honest, how many tablets are out there?
There's tons of them and we believe that this type of convergence does create value
even in a saturated or maybe commoditized market from a device perspective.
There's another way to go about this right? When you think about I've got this device
that does this one thing and this other device that does this another thing, let's combine
them into one device. Well, as an OEM, you have the ability to do that, maybe. But what
about just connecting the devices? Is that maybe a better approach? And, sometimes, it
could be and I believe that one size does not fit all. There's a couple of examples
here. So, right now, I'm wearing a Moto 360 on my wrist, this is a pretty cool watch.
I can slide up and see that I'm getting eleven new Twitter interactions, so I guess I'm
getting tweeted.
I've got some text messages as well, I've got a few other notifications, I can also
check the time, I can see my heart rate, I can check my steps for the day and those types
of things all from this device. But this device does more than that. It allows me to talk
to it and maybe do a Google search. I can find information out from this device. I can
actually place a call from this device, and I can do all kinds of things that really are
not happening here. Where are they happening? On my phone, which is in the other room connected
with Bluetooth, right? So that's a connectivity thing where I took convergence and some of
the features and capabilities of the device in the other room and brought them to a new
window here on my wrist - that's pretty cool. I can also take this same device into my car
where I have SYNC, which is another great way to be able to use the device, so if I'm in my car and
have Bluetooth 4.0, which I do, and I can connect to two things at once so my phone
connects to the car and the watch at the same time, and now I can utilize this as my voice
activation right there on my hand to be able to instruct what I need for my phone. What
about other things like using Wi-Fi direct? This is an interesting concept, right, so
we have a product here called the Horizon Table PC - it's a large, 27-inch all-in-one
PC that you can use just like a regular PC, but it has some unique capabilities with an overlay
on top called Aura. It sits on top and it allows you to really take advantage of the
multimedia or multi-user capabilities of the device. So I could actually just set my phone
down on there and say I would like to transfer all the pictures that are on my
phone to the device or vice versa, it will open up this moon dial for me and allow me
to drag-and-drop and do all of those things I wanted to do using Wi-Fi direct. I don't
need an Internet connection. I actually am able to just set the device down. It will
recognize that device, it will open up my moon dial and the Wi-Fi direct connection
between the two makes this possible. So sometimes it's not about converging the
hardware. It can be about converging the attributes of these devices and allowing some of those
features or capabilities to become possible on those different devices even when they
don't have that capability themselves. So, for example, I don't have Wi-Fi on my watch,
but my phone does, so let's use that. Let's make these devices talk. And a lot of times
in my job, after I get all excited about devices, and I talk about all these things, I always
has somebody who says, "Oh no it's not about the devices. It's about the data. Devices
are commoditie. You guys all make them. What I really care about is price, config and SLA. Aside from that,
you're all about the same. I just showed you a bunch of innovation, but I understand this
side of the conversation too. In fact, what is a device if it's not connected and you
can't have access to the data? It's not much of a device, right?
And so, this becomes really important. So a couple things when it comes to data. I would
submit that anybody can be an expert when given access to the right data. My brother
is nine years younger than me. He's a very smart guy. He went to Cornell for engineering
and just graduated and got a job at an engineering firm. Guess where he learns most of what he
knows? YouTube. If he needs to do something, he goes to YouTube and he types it in and
he figures out what he needs to do and he does it based on a video. He learns from
those videos. And with the access to the right data, whether
it's outside of work or inside of work, you can really make people a lot more powerful.
It's really impressive what you can do or know or learn based on data. And so these
devices are really the access or the window to that data. And this collective data is
really growing and complex. In fact, it's not simple at all. When we talk about things
like, you know changing a faucet, yeah that's a simple conversation, but big data and analytics
and cloud and all of this stuff that all these organizations realize is something that they
need to harness and use is really fascinating, actually. And if you think about you in your
everyday life, whether or not you've had similar situations happen over and over
and you know that there's a trend and you're realizing it, and you think to yourself, if I had
a nickel for every time someone told me blank and you think to yourself you know I wish
there was just a way to show this using the data there is, there's all kinds of interesting
things that companies are doing using big data.
You also have to remember to use common sense. Common sense is not always so common and a
lot of times, if you're looking at the data in the wrong way, it might not tell you the
right thing. And so, I remember to always go back, and especially when people, I'm like
IT support for my family and friends. I don't know if that happens to you guys,
it's always an issue for me, my favorite quote is, "I believe the problem is user-
induced". So, I think that something is really important here is harness the power of that
big data, the analytics around it and the intelligence that you can glean from it, but
don't forget about common sense. For me, it's an exciting time because we
have amazing devices. We have amazing access to data, and we're all human and, somehow,
in some way, shape, or form all of this stuff can really impact your personal life,
your professional life and the ability to be more intelligent about all of those things
using the technology you have access to. So with that I would like to thank you very
much for your time and leave you with this quote. "We cannot solve our problems with
the same thinking we used when we created them". So Lenovo, at the heart of who we
are, is really committed to innovation and I think this is one of the things that we
try to remember is that, while we have a certain scenario today, and we create innovation within
that, it's always about looking to the future and looking outside of the current situation
to create innovation not only today, but for tomorrow. Thank you.