Daydream is sort of splitting the difference between Cardboard and Oculus Rift. Right? They’ve got this reference design for a headset which presumably will incorporate a VR-enabled phone. If you’ve ever tried Cardboard, which seems completely ridiculous and reminds me of the 3D glasses that you’d get at the old school 1980’s movie theater where you strap on this piece of cardboard with the funny lenses and all of the sudden there’s this headache-inducing experience known as 3D movies. Cardboard I thought was going to be that but actually there’s some New York Times applications that are actually kind of enjoyable … using Cardboard. I was really surprised.

This is the bottom up approach to VR which means that it’s accessible to people in a way that Oculus Rift frankly is not with such a high price tag. Where it’s probably going to appeal to a certain strata of folks. Let’s start with Daydream. Are you daydreaming of Daydream, Dirk?

That goes back to the Google roots of the company. Certainly Google wasn’t the first search engine by a mile but what they did is they took the idea of search engine as sort of the powerful central point of a giant platform of crap. They removed the crap and so the search engine is the important part.

What they’re doing with Daydream is moving down the path of having the technology be more usable, more accessible, and more able to be integrated into someone’s daily life and environment instead of being some gigantic thing strapped to their head. Which is how the most popular VR technologies have been manifesting so far.

I’m heartened and optimistic about Daydream as the Google foray into VR but for me VR technology ain’t there yet. I’m happy to sit on the sidelines and let other people burn a lot of money and energy dallying with the latest and greatest stuff that thirty years ago would have been in a Sharper Image store. Then when it gets to be something really practical and interesting, I’ll get into it more in my own life. Daydream is a path down VR as integrated part of A Digital Life and that’s great. It shows that Google’s thinking about the problems in the right way as they generally do.

I haven’t really found that object yet that’s got me excited about smartwatches. Frankly, I kind of like not having anything on my wrist. I suppose if I’m jogging or something that might be the occasion for me to put on a smartwatch of some kind that could track all of my calorie-burning activities. It’s just not there for me yet. It’s interesting that Google is folding the smartwatch or the wearables into its larger platform. Which also includes of course the ability to be used by automakers as part of Android for Auto. The ability to have tendrils into all these aspects of how digital is becoming part of all of our environments, I think that’s … Strategy-wise, I think that’s pretty spot-on. I know that a lot of companies are trying to do the same thing but Google seems to have the ability to actually execute on a lot of these things.

I think this new Android release, Android N, but they’re going to crowd source the naming scheme so be prepared for some sort of thing that would appeal to your sweet tooth, some kind of candy. I think it’s just going to further entrench Google as one of the top competitors in any sort of mobile ecosystem going forward.

There’s a lot of reasons why but I think at the core of Apple’s success and Apple’s ascension over the last twenty years is hitting the sweet spot of let’s make this easy for the every man or woman to come in and get what they want in a safe environment that’s usable and accessible and intuitive. Android ain’t that. They’re still on their old model.

I don’t think that Google with Android as a platform is going to reach their full potential until they figure that out, until they get out of the chaos mode. You know whether it’s Android itself or some future platform that the next latest and greatest that replaces Android down the road, I think that’s going to be sort of the nexus of where Google needs to solve it, to own sort of the personal computing ecosystem for a real majority of people.

Beyond that, going back to the devices as you were talking about, I’ve talked about this on the show a whole bunch. Right now, there’s too many devices in the personal computing ecosystem. We’ve got our laptop or desktop main machine. We’ve got our iPad tablet device. We’ve got our smartphone. Now they’re proposing to bring watches in at a little different level but still in that ecosystem where things like the Fitbit or these sort of complimentary IoT devices. Brass tacks, there should be no more than two personal computing devices that cover all of the use cases that people need within their ecosystem. There may be other accessories off that. I have my laptop. I also have a big monitor that the laptop plugs into. At the end of the day, the laptop is the computing device. Right? Right now, the market is trying to make four different devices fit in. Again, the personal computer, the tablet device, the smartphone device, and the watch-like device, and that’s two devices too many. It’s why watches are flailing.

I think there’s a great opportunity for innovation for the company that really nails what are the two devices. In the long term, it’s one device because the nanotechnology, the miniaturization will get to such a point that we have one thing that is the personal computing thing with accessories coming off it. Pushing that onto the farther out shelf, in the nearer term, the company that can solve for here are the correct two computing devices in people’s ecosystem to solve these use case in sort of the best hybrid way, that’s what we really need. Trying to solve at the watch level is putting one more unnecessary device into the stream. It’s just strategically wrong.

As you pointed out before, it’s in part you’re still sort of making yourself fit with the UI’s. The interface isn’t made for you, you’re conforming to the interface. You know that that’s sort of early adopter problem. In every instance where I’ve encountered that with previous technology, it was always a sign that it’s slightly immature and that ultimately I was making myself work for the technology and not the technology work for me.

We can have high hopes for Allo and for the AI-enabled chatbot but my guess is that it’s going to be a couple more iterations before we start really getting these chatbots working. In the mean time, I’m going to forget all of their names. I’m like the mouse-pointer click which doesn’t require a name. You have to speak to Siri and you have to speak to Alexa and now Allo and whoever the other chatbots are. It’s like you have a whole AI family that you’re going to have to interact with for a while. I don’t know what they do about that but the code words for starting these up are almost going to be as bad as password management.