TechStuff Classic: Techs Top Rivalries

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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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.

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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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.

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. 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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.

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. 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 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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