YouSaid · the spoken record

John Markoff

lines on the record: 133
first: 2017-02-06
most recent: 2017-02-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I do remember They were like That was a really important thing. The lesson that I think the most important lesson that Eric gave Larry and Sergei is he'd had the mooning the giant experience from Netscape where they had basically turned Microsoft toward them because they realized that that was where the money is. They hid the fact that they were doing so well until Zachary and I wrote a piece in the Sunday New York Times when they crossed a billion dollars.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was a butcher block paper all around about growth of Google and Google on Yahoo, which was growing enormous because it was the search engine on Yahoo, which was the thing of the day, Yahoo, if you can believe it was the thing of the day. I do remember. Yeah, you remember. And so you saw the growth of Google, and then you saw the growth of Google.com, which was bigger than the growth of Google and Yahoo. And I was like, and you could see it happening as it went. And I think I turned to Harry Sergey. I said, do they know? And they were like, no, they do not know. Do not tell them.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They put ads, CompuServe, and the one that was. And AOL did advertisements on their services. And I was like, why are the other services? They wanted advertising and wanted business. And of course, AOL made its business through that. And so when I saw Google on Yahoo, I was like, oh, that's the same thing. I visited their headquarters and there was.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it was a better experience. It was a better experience. Well, yeah, I guess I felt like I did get. Maybe you think you got better results or something like that. What I do recall is when they were on Yahoo and I had seen, I had written about AOL supplanting Netscape, putting itself on the Netscape brow. If you remember, or no, CompuServe and...”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did write about them. But don't you think, so why did they win? I think they won largely because they had the cleanest UI.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there were eight different search engines at that point. I didn't even write about them. That was one that really pissed me off. Yeah.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did it affect them? I was just with one someone the other day, and I think I insulted them, and they kind of looked at me. I'm like, oh, I'm sorry. I knew you before you were a billionaire. So I don't look you up. I forget. I knew you when you didn't have any money. And it was weird because some of them get affected. Some of them don't, not very many, but some of them became like, if you're told you're a genius every single day of your life, you'd start to believe that.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But he had this idea that he was going to turn programmers into celebrities. I mean, that was the heart of his company, but it actually infected everyone. And, you know, I watched that. It became part of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. And that was a foreign world to me. I saw it, but I was already. You didn't like it.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do you look at that? I felt like Hollywood had moved north. Yeah. And it started. I think it actually started with the video game stuff. I mean, Trip Hawkins, who was an ex Apple guy who set up electronic arts.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All kinds of things manipulating the world we know. We're to get into the future and stuff like that. I want to finish up this section when this happened, the internet thing happened, everyone became a celebrity, essentially. How do you look at that?”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Meaning explain for regular. Okay, so for example, let me take one example. There is this. I mean, they're doing this Already, for example, one of the early commercial ideas is people are coding the windshields, the cockpit windows of jet planes with this material that lasers bounce off the wrong way so they don't go into the eyes of the pilot.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, well, if I had one more time, actually left rather than doing this, but I would go into material science. You know, if I was a biologist, I would go into biological science, but the material science stuff is so much fun and there's so much happening.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's much more fun being out on the edge and that period that you rose in was just tough, tenacious sort of packed journalism. And I would much rather look out on the edge.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I left the Times Steve Lore, who was my pal and colleague there, said that my habit was anytime that money showed up, it was time for me to leave.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so that was 93. In the next four years, I was run over like a Mac truck, right? I had this little world basically to myself And then it became Main Street. It literally became Main Street in the space of four years.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember typing so many times. But if you go back to that lead, it was a case of getting it all right and all wrong. What was it? So the lead was think of it as a map to the buried treasures of the Internet age. When I wrote buried treasures, I was thinking information.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People of the journal were like, why did they hire this girl to cover this? It's classic. December 7th, 1993. I wrote the very first day that we'll live in infamy. I wrote the very first article on the World Wide Web.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How did that change your coverage? Because if you like this stuff, a lot of people felt that a lot of people didn't get the internet. Like I said, the people of the journal were like, why did they hire this girl to cover this”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm sorry. Created Netscape, and they took this idea out of the National Center for Supercomputer Applications and turned it into a world-changing event. But then there was this wave that you came in immediately afterwards where people realized that any to any was the most important new thing. And that was the model. And they exploited it. But Tim O'Reilly, he set up the first commercial internet website.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We'll get to the iPhone in a second in the next part, but who do you think really did get it among those companies? And what do you think the most significant moments of that internet shift were? Was it Netscape? Was it Yahoo? Was it so many companies?”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stupider. They did exactly the same stuff. I'll never forget when. No, this is 10 years of the iPhone, I guess. I guess when the iPod before that was introduced, we were in a meeting with Gates before one of our events, probably one of the first All Things Deconference. And he said, what is an iPod but a hard drive and a white box? It's trivial”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, I think this always happens when you're sitting on a monopoly or you're sitting on an old architecture, you have to eat your children. Nobody, even though they say that. I mean, the wonderful thing about Microsoft, I grew up with those guys and I remember them saying, you know, we're never going to be as stupid as IBM. And then when you look at what happened, they actually did exactly the same stuff. They made the same mistakes in the end, which is sort of rich. I'll never forget.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Half the lines of coden there are Berkeley eunuchs. I mean, it's more open than you would think. So the open world basically overwhelmed them. And they didn't want it. They wanted that.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me give an opening for. Well, so for the same reason, it's the open versus closed debate. These guys all believed in proprietary control. I mean, that's how they built their industries. That's my IBM IBM Intel. Apple to this day, right? Which is ironic that Apple was able to, well, Apple was never as closed as they seem. If you look at macOS.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“1992. So I Right, right. Yes, let me give an opening for Cara Fisher. But why didn't they see it? What was the part? I mean, you were interested in networks. I remember talking to you about it when I came here”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then, of course, there And by that time we'd already expanded. I mean, you know, I started all by myself, but then. This dates me. I came to Silicon Valley after being at the Times for four years to replace Andy Pollock and Peter Lewis got this new beat called the Internet Beat in 1992. So I stopped covering the internet in 1992. Right, right.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I made my career. I was a deep believer from reading Werner Vinch and Shockwave Rider was the first book about it. I mean, that was a book, Shockwave Writer, which was John Brunner Argued for that kind of impact on society, that networks transformed everything.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, those guys were tremendously bundle or berry was the sort of strategy of Microsoft. They either acquire you. They would take you over or they would destroy you. And they did a variety of anti-competitive things over a long period of time. And the industry took it up to the point where they went to Washington and things got reset.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why was that? Well, so that's one of these wonderful Microsoft discovered a choke point and the chokepoint was the A prompt, your disk drive prompt, which was access to your information. And they controlled that and they monetized it. And I've always thought it's ironic that really the only difference between the Google Text box and the command is you can make spelling errors with Google one right, right, right. But basically they both found choke points that they learned how to monoplace. And so there were these parallels. Was there something”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everyone had computers and IBM Well, the world, including most of those corporations, were blindsided by the internet, right? Everybody had an island, and they thought they would bring you into their island. Right. So Microsoft.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course. But at that point, it was a clubby little family thing. Mitch Kapoor was one of the people in that world. No one's talking to one. Lotus one two three The Sun Guys, Scott and Bill Joy and Vinod, Kosla and”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was an Osborne clone before Compact, right? Rod Canyon was another figure. But Adam, Adam was just, it was an era. He was fun. He was boisterous. He was slightly pompous. He had these great little, there was a beginning of this period of the wars that you entered in the midst of, which was PC Forum, I mean the executive wars between different personalities”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he was British, he'd been grown up in India. He started as a writer. He wrote for InfoWorld. And then in the late 1970s, he was the first guy who came up with the notion of bundling software with computing. He came out with this portable computer called the Osborn One that was wonderful for writers and everything. It was this crazy little machine with a five-inch screen and two floppy disk and all the software you need, which included a database, a Word processor, a spreadsheet. Telecommunications program. Paul Freiber ruined his back carrying one around because they weighed 40 pounds.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who else is interesting? Let's see from the early days, personal computer. Well, Steve was around, but some of the other companies, Adam Osborne. I mean, is that going too far back? No, go.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the short term, he was right. Basically, the risk guys lost because they needed to be 10x faster to actually get in, and they were only 2x faster. But the irony is that now here we are, how many years later an ARM is everywhere, which is risk, which is started by Apple. So they risk some.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so there was, you know, the semiconductor guys, Grove was very important, and Grove was Andy Grove. Andy Grove, who had taken over, Bob Noyce had died. And Grove was fun because he had such a wonderful direct personality. And we fought. I don't know if you remember this, but there was this period where there were, which was known as the Risk Wars, where there was new architectures who were potentially a threat to Intel. And, you know, I was one of the risk advocates, and he would just go after me on that. So it was great fun.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You assess those two because we did the obviously the famous joint interview with them that was fantastic and actually, there's a lot said there. My favorite moment is when I asked what was the thing about the relationship nobody knew about and jobs who was always trying to pants Gates went, well, we've been married for several years now. And of course, Gates was horrified. It was so great. You saw him.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he would try to stay on message I won a couple times. I got him to say that nobody read books anymore. Do you remember that? That was fun. He was not happy with that. I got him to say that taking LSD was one of the two or three most significant things that he'd done in his life, something that even his wife couldn't share with him and the people in industry. And that was kind of.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was gaming you all the time. There really was a reality distortion field. Mostly he won I had a difficult situation because I felt like I couldn't blow up the relationship. And so he could jerk me around by the way, right.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jobs was my absolute hardest interview because it was always manipulative and personal and I just felt, I mean, I super respected what he did. I liked Steve. I hated interviewing him.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But gates and jobs, you know, who became icons, as a reporter, you must have had this, I'd be curious. So I love talking to Gates, even though they were these intellectually banging arguments that you'd have, but it was totally not personal. It was very intellectual.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I sort of grew up with gates and jobs at all. In that case, they were either going or just having gone public.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. So talk a little bit about the personalities of the people, because now we all know the personalities, and they're sort of treated like celebrities. But at the time, same thing with the internet people, you knew them when they weren't billionaires or when they weren't kings of industry.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This one, they said, Well, how do you run your company? And he told them about something called email. What? You run your company by email, and so that led to me writing an A1 story about how email was being used by totally predictable.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so my premise was to, I was basically still in that sort of sociologist turned journalist, sort of look at this technology is going to change the world and sort of the Times actually turned out to be very receptive to that. I would walk in and tell them about something and their eyes would get wide. There was this wonderful moment. It was probably... ninety one. I was just recently thinking about this, and Bill Gates came to the editorial board to talk about it.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Neil Stevenson. Neil Stevens Well, there's no crash. Snow crash. The premise is America only does two things well. One is write software and the others deliver pizzas”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I had been into. Remember, no, I had been fascinated by, you know, for me, okay, so there was this period where everything I saw was life imitating art because I was reading cyberpunk fiction.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, because I was the one who determined who did it, and the wonderful thing about Robert Morris Tappet Morris, who was one of the Y combinator founders. Is that his dad was the chief scientist of the National Security Agency, which made it a much better story.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first day's story, which was a Thursday, the Washington Post had six bylines on their Morris Worm story because remember they still thought it was the Arpanet and so they thought that it might be an attack, a military attack on the US. It's a big deal.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Became one of your special things. Oh, it did, actually. And actually, there was this moment, which was the Morris Worm. And the Morseworm was significant because it was the first time the American public realized for both good and ill that there was this thing called a network and that it was going to have it could have an impact on the world.”
2017-02-06 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: John Markoff, ex-reporter, The New York Times · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT