Meet Moto X with Steve Horowitz of Motorola & Guy Kawasaki

All right.

Good afternoon, this is Guy Kawasaki, and I'm here with Steve Horowitz, who's our senior vice president of software engineering at Motorola. And unless you've been disconnected from the Internet today, you are well aware that Motorola finally introduced the Moto X smartphone. And so Steve is in New York, where he was doing a press tour, press interviews, and we pried him away from one of his favorite activities, talking to the press to get a half an hour with him. Basically, Steve, besides being a great hockey player, is also a great senior vice president of software engineering. In other words, to translate that to English, all of the software engineers at Motorola report to his organization. And so I thought, what better person to bring to explain Motox and to talk about the design center of Moto X? Then, of course, Steve Horowitz. So, Steve, first question is just can you give us some background about Motox, the design goals, the software goals? What were you trying to do, you and your team?

Well, thanks for having me here, Guy. It's always a pleasure and happy to pull myself away from the other press because you're at the top of the list here. I'd have to say that our primary goal on the software side of Moto X really was to kind of get out of the way of what the Android team already does really well. So we really wanted to focus on and feature an experience that was as core or vanilla Android as you'd find on any phone. And then alongside that, we wanted to build a series of really cool, innovative Motorola features, things that are enabled by hardware, such as our Context Aware engine, our natural language processing, some of the gestural languages and things we built into the phone. So we really wanted to. And I'll talk more about those features in a moment, but we really wanted to focus on things that would be addressing issues and problems or concerns people had about smartphones today. Basic functionality like how easily can you take a picture? Why can't I make a phone call just by talking to my phone? Why do I have to power my phone on to and unlock it to find out if I have a new email message? So we wanted to focus on those basic things and just solve those problems really elegantly and then let the Android experience take care of itself in my mind or my experience. I've been around Android for a while. I was the original lead engineer on the project, and I have a lot of confidence in that team. They build really good software, and I don't know of anybody that's actually bought phones because they like a Slight incremental improvement over Android on one phone versus the other. If you move a search box here, change a text editing technology there, or change an icon, all those little changes to Android, frankly, they take away from your ability to do really cool, innovative features alongside. So that's really what we focused on, is take a basic Android experience and then build some really cool, innovative features alongside that.

Is it accurate to say that we will have the purest form of Android?

I think without question, probably the only pure form of Android would be the Nexus devices. But they don't have all the really cool features that we've added, like quick capture and things like that.

When you see your two daughters and you tell them this is what dad is working on, what features do you highlight to teenage girls?

Well, I try to get them excited about some of the software functionality, like the touchless control where you can talk to your phone, or the active display. But honestly, the thing they're most excited about is when I showed them Motomaker and they saw and realized that this was the first phone they could ever actually design by themselves. And they could create a chartreuse phone with yellow buttons, accents. They could create a bright red backing with green. I mean, any color combinations. There are literally 2000 different kinds of combinations between the front, the back, and the accents that you can create on this phone. And when they saw that, their eyes absolutely just lit up. And that was hands down their favorite feature of the phone.

Well, so you're telling me that they're not asking you about the clock speed of the chip or the DPI or anything like that? They just want to know pink versus blue.

Well, yeah, frankly, that is a big part of the appeal to them. I think when we thought about what was important to us in building Moto X, it really was about the entire experience. Literally everything from sitting at home, designing a personal custom phone for yourself, getting it only four days later, all the way through to what is it like to use your phone in your car? How do you simplify that? We added things like trusted devices so that your phone actually connects to your Bluetooth in your car, stays unlocked for you so you don't have to while you're driving, which you're not supposed to do anyway, even to make a call. You don't have to go and unlock your phone and fiddle with things. Your phone is simply unlocked and ready for you when you're in your car. And then you just make a call. So we really wanted to focus on experiences, not, as you say, technology or features or specs. A lot of folks, I think, in the tech industry get excited about things like sunspider benchmarks and all that kind of stuff. My wife wouldn't know that from Adam. So really, this gets down to let's build experiences that people and the mass market really care about and let's do them really well.

Okay. I have to say that my favorite feature is probably the flicking of the wrist to launch the camera. I can't tell you how many times I have to futz to get the camera with other phones. I converted from iOS to Android a couple years ago because of another Motorola phone. So that's my favorite feature. Also, I don't want to seem arrogant, but a lot of people take pictures of me with them and I swear it's like a five minute process. And they hand the phone to the total stranger and the total stranger, first thing they do is they make it into a selfie or they make it into video, or they quit the app. And the feature I like about the camera, once you're using it, is you just press anywhere. So what were the genesis of those kind of features? Because somebody saw the light there.

Yeah. I'll give you a background story that I think you'll appreciate specifically about the camera that goes to exactly what you're saying. A few years ago, I was in Vancouver at the Winter Olympics having dinner at an Italian restaurant. Turns out right behind me was Wayne Gretzky eating dinner at a table with somebody else. My friend mentioned that, hey, that's Wayne Gretzky. So after dinner, I was very polite. I went up to him to try to say hello, get a picture. Somebody else went up to him at the same time and they said, hey, will you take my picture with Wayne? And he said to his other friend, his friend took his iPhone and he sat there and he literally couldn't figure out how to take his friend's picture with Wayne Gretzky. So I took his iPhone and I said, well, here's how you do it. You launch this click here. So people are always struggling with that. When you have a moment like that, literally a moment where Wayne's a nice guy, but he's not going to sit around for five minutes while you figure out how to use your phone. You just can't take that time with quick capture. You don't have to think. It becomes what I call a macro gesture. You literally just take your phone and shake it like this. And now you're in the camera. So it really changes the way you think about photography with your phone. It simplifies it to the point where you start using your phone to take photos in context and environments and places that you would never have thought of before. And it really is. It's the kind of thing where it's hard to appreciate it when you think about, oh, it's just a gesture to launch a camera. But it is the kind of experience with your phone that once you use it, you never want to use another kind of camera again.

By the way, Steve, I was at the Winter Olympics the same Vancouver. I saw Wayne later and he said, you know, I met Steve Horowitz. He's the guy, the lead engineer on the Android team. I've always wanted to meet him. So I think you made his Olympics too, Steve.

Oh, I wish that were the case. Trust me, I was thrilled to meet Wayne, but maybe not the other way around.

Okay, so let me put you on the spot. All right, so let's suppose that you're sitting at a dinner or you and I are talking, and I said, you know, Wayne Gretzky looks like he's about 5ft 5. And you say, no, Wayne is more like 6 5. So show us. We're going to do a live demo, take a high risk, and I'm going to let you say, I'm going to let you use always on and find out how tall is Wayne Gretzky?

Okay, well, so here I have my phone, and I honestly have never tried that particular one. I've always asked other questions, so I will point it at you. It's off. And I'll say, okay, Google now, how tall is Wayne Gretzky?

Wayne Gretzky is 6ft 0 inches tall.

All right, there you go. Google is the word.

Maybe we should end this right now. Quick while we're ahead, huh?

That's right. Game over, as they say in Canada.

How about you show some more commands you can do with always on?

Sure. The beauty of the always on functionality is it just unlocks Google now and the power of Google search for you without having to think about it. So you can ask it really questions that you might really be interested in, but you don't have to think hard about it. You can say, okay, Google now, when's the next Red Sox game?

The Red Sox are playing the Mariners today at 7:10pm So I mean, I'm.

In New York, so probably not a popular question to be asked, but nonetheless, again, I don't know if you can see it, but you can certainly hear it. So you can ask it things like, okay, Google now, do I need an umbrella today?

Yes. The forecast for today in New York is 84 degrees with a thunderstorm.

So it just really changes the game for you and you start to ask it things. You can ask it to navigate, you can ask it to call. But the beauty of the always on the voice technology, the touchless control, is that you don't have to think about what to ask. You can just ask in natural language and then we don't have to make the phone better by downloading a software update. We're calling Google Now. We're basically taking advantage of the Google services, which are always getting better and are also very aware of things that you might do elsewhere on Google. So it takes all the best of Google and brings it to your phone in a way that just makes it unbelievably accessible.

Well, you know, after all, we are part of Google. Right?

Of course.

It's kind of logical, right? We are more than a patent, right?

That's right.

Can you explain basically, so that was kind of a great demo, but can you explain what's going on? How did you get it? What if somebody walked up to your phone and said, okay, Google now, can it start asking it to do stuff? So how did you train it? How much is it authenticating it with your voice? How's it going to work in the real world?

Sure. There are a couple things I think that are worth noting about that touchless control feature you mentioned training. When you first get the phone, it does ask you to say the phrase OK Google now three times. What it's doing is it's making a unique voice imprint of the way you specifically say that phrase. So that if you guy came to me, in fact, why not try it? Why don't you try to say, well, I guess we can't. We don't have a microphone here. Ok, we have Will here. We'll see what happens. And sometimes it works, doesn't. Let's see. Ok, Google Now. So it doesn't like Will or doesn't listen to Will. But if I say OK Google now, what time is it in Paris?

The time in Paris, France is 11:14pm.

So I mean literally live demo. There are some cases where somebody's voice sounds similar but you just saw it there. It does not listen to anybody's voice but the person who trained it. And I think the other really important part of this is something that is ready for you at all times, means that it's doing something, it's active. And we all know that one of the biggest issues with phones today is battery life. So one of the things that we did and worked really hard on from the very beginning of building this feature. And even the gesture, my phone is off, shaking it to start the camera. That's a gesture that's constantly listening to see how my phone is acting. All those things are facilitated by this incredibly low power sensor that we built into the phone that has a little bit of battery draw, but the battery draw is miniscule, much, much less than if you were running what they call the full apps processor. The full power of the phone, it doesn't require the full power of the phone to be ready for your voice command or to listen or to respond to your gesture. So we really had to balance it between being really smart, but also being really, really efficient with power.

I didn't realize this till just a few weeks ago when I was flicking my phone. I was always authenticating first. And then I learned that even if the phone is, if you flick it, it'll go to the camera, right?

That's correct, yeah. I mean, that is again, one of those things where you don't have to think about it. You can take photos, it'll go to the camera without having to enter a PIN or a lock screen. But in the interest of privacy, if you do have your phone locked, and about 50% of people do and 50% don't, then if you do have your phone locked because you don't want people to access things, if somebody gets a hold of your phone, you, they can take pictures all they want, but when they try to go look at the photos that have been taken, they can't see them. So it really does make the key functionality available to you, but protects your privacy. If you want to have your phone locked.

Okay, I bet there are a lot of really technical people watching this. So can you discuss the software engineering process when you're in a large company like Motorola and you have thousands of engineers, how does this work? I don't even understand how that works. So can you explain that?

Well, sure. Luckily, we're not thousands of software engineers, because that would be hard. I think one of the things that is really unique about doing things that are, I believe, as innovative as what we've done with Moto X. And frankly, if you look back at the original Android, is it's about having small teams of really focused people. The original Android team, when we started, it was eight people. When we shipped the very first Android phone, the T Mobile G1, we had less than 100 engineers on the project for literally from scratch to generation one of the new mobile OS that's now shipping on 80% of the smartphones in the world. So to do things like that, you have to have a smaller team of really focused people. And then you have to make sure that you have, especially when you get into things like devices at the scale that Motorola produces them, you have to have really, really good testing, automated testing, and abilities to ensure that if somebody checks something in. We're a pretty technical audience here, so hopefully this won't go over people's heads. But if somebody checks something in and the phone battery life goes down by 10 minutes, we know that immediately we have all kinds of tests and automation and labs that ensure that we are increasing the quality or maintain the quality, the battery life, the stability, all of these things. They have to be monitored constantly. And naturally, as you get further and further into the development process and closer to ship, you apply an even higher bar in terms of what kinds of changes people can make. It's fairly standard software engineering practices. But one of the things that Motorola does really, really well is this idea of testing and ensuring that the quality isn't slipping. And in fact, we've even found bugs where other applications, and I won't name names from large developers have shipped an update. When we get the update, we put it on our device and we realized that that update itself has bugs. And so we then contact that app developer and let them know that, hey, this update that you just shipped that you thought was ready to go, well, it actually crashes after 150 hours of stress testing. And we can actually give them literally the stat crawl that shows them exactly where things crash. We're even using that to help folks outside of the Motorola core development team.

Well, a few weeks ago, I was in Libertyville and I went into the stress test lab and they showed me this thing that simulates a person's butt. And they would put the phone in that butt tester and make the butt hit the bottom to see if the phone would crack. So I was very impressed with that.

Yeah, my favorite one. And I've been a software guy, still am. But Motorola is the first time I worked for a hardware company with a mix. And my favorite test, along the lines of what you say is called the purse test, where it simulates having a phone inside somebody's purse and knocking around with keys and mirrors and wallets and whatever else is in somebody's purse and ensuring that the strength of the screen and the enclosure and that the software doesn't accidentally activate and make a call while you don't intend it to. So there's lots of these kinds of things that you're talking about that are actually simulating real world scenarios, but accelerating that process so that we don't have to find out six months later that we had a really bad bug. When a phone jostles around the purse a lot, I bet a lot of.

People are also curious. So when the mothership Google creates a new version of Android, how does it percolate to all the other carriers? What, what happens? I don't think you have to necessarily be specific to Motorola, but I bet people are curious how that gets out, because with Apple, it's obvious. Right? So Apple is the mothership. It updates everybody directly.

Boom.

That's it. What happens in the Android world.

So, just to make sure I understand your question, you're saying how does an update go from Motorola to a carrier, or how does an update from Android go to a device manufacturer? Which of those two were you interested in?

The latter. Android to device manufacturer to people. I'd like to know the whole process.

Sure. So the Android team is always hard at work on whatever the next version of Android is. And what they do is they work literally behind closed doors, building the next version of it. And when it's ready to go, they literally open source it. It's called the Android Open Source package, and it's literally the entirety of the source code for Android that they then publish into the open source market. And then at that point all the OEMs are notified basically that there's a new version of Android out there. I mean, there's a little bit of advance notice that's given to all of us via the Android developer relations folks where they'll tell us you can expect a new version at some point. But we are like every other Android manufacturer out there where once it gets pushed publicly, that's when we have access to the source code. And once we get that, we then literally feverishly get a copy of that in house into our servers, just like any other OEM would. And then we go through all of the changes and the modifications to see which changes might conflict with changes that we've made. The beauty of the approach we've taken by being nearly pure vanilla Android is that we find, or we are going to find, I think in the future, that these changes that Android makes are going to conflict with us in very few areas. So that our upgrade cycle and our process for upgrades should be very easy based on the strategy we've taken on the software side.

Okay. I have been obviously watching the news about this, and I know it's not exactly in your purview, but lots of people have this impression that personalization is permanently only AT and T. But just confirm for everybody that that is an initial process. Right. There is going to be a time where other carriers have the ability to personalize the phone.

Right.

Because if your daughter's on Verizon, what are they going to do? Right?

Yeah, absolutely. It's the kind of thing where I can't speak to specific time frames. But as with anything that's as breakthrough as Moto Maker, we wanted to make sure that we really focused on getting it right with one carrier in one channel for launch. And that's really why we've chosen AT&T as an initial launch partner. And they've been great to work with and we're thrilled to have them. And then in the future, you could expect that this will be available to other carriers as well.

Okay. Okay. So I think what I've learned being a Motorola for these past six or seven months or so is this phone is all about sort of three things. It's, it's about the personalization, the colors and these things. It's about the responsiveness that you flick the camera to take the picture or you flick the phone to take the picture. And it's about this sort of pure Google loyalty to Android experience. And I have to tell you, I really enjoy my phone. We have just a couple few more minutes. Do you want to add anything from a software perspective? Any key points that you think people should know about from the software angle?

Yeah, I think we've talked about a number of the features here. I think the one software feature that we've frankly left out that is, and I don't mean to play favorites, but is at least the one that's transformed my usage of the phone more than anything else is this idea of active display and this idea that instead of having to power your phone on to see if you have something new, like new email or text message, and then if you do, having to unlock it to see who it's from, the phone actually shows you on the display at all times, whether you have something new and what. I mean, at all times, it senses when you would want to look at that and when you want to be notified of that. So literally, if the phone is in your pocket and you take it out of your pocket, it immediately shows you the time. And I have nothing new here, but it's always there. And I don't have to press anything. I don't have to think about it. I just glance at my phone and it's there. Then if you want to learn more about what's on the phone, what the notification was all about, you can actually tap that notification. You can peek at it, and you can then actually see who it's from. And if it's a text message, what it is, if it's an email message, the first couple lines. So this idea of not having to unlock, not having to power the phone on, but still having access to critical information at all times really changes the way I use a phone. And I think that is, again, a great example of integration of hardware and software functionality on this device that leads.

To the reduction of boring dinners and meetings, if nothing else. Because I know I've used that feature where you don't want to look at your watch to tell people that you're impatient and you don't want to pick up your phone and authenticate to tell people you're bored, but you can sort of just glance at your phone and it gives you that notification. Now, some people would say, well, but isn't that going to kill my battery? So maybe you should explain why that's not the case.

Sure. I mean, much like our touchless control, we built this in a way that's incredibly friendly to the battery. One thing I mentioned is the fact that we can sense whether the device is in your pocket or not. We know whether the device is face down or face up. If it's face down or if it's in your pocket, we don't light up the screen, we save the battery. If the phone is face up or if you take it out of your pocket, we show you the initial notification screen and we keep it on there for long enough for you to see it. And then if you still stare at it, then we sort of fade it in and out. We call it breathing so that it's still there if you want it, but it's not always taking battery away. The idea is that when you first take it out or you first turn it over, you can see what you need to, and then you can forget about it forevermore. So, again, we're just being really smart about when we light the screen up. And we're also lighting up and using battery only to power the portion of the screen that has a notification. We're not lighting up every pixel on the screen. So that is another significant battery saver. If you look at the battery usage on your phone in settings, you'll find that for the most part, most of your battery is going to the screen. So you have to be really careful about what you do on the screen and how often you use it. And that's really where we focus to make Active Display a really battery friendly feature.

Okay. And there's one more feature that I think many people are going to miss or, or not understand, which is Motorola Connect, where I get when people send a text message to my Moto X phone, it opens up a window on my computer in Chrome and so I can get text messages to my phone in Chrome and answer with a real keyboard. So can you explain the magic behind that? I find that so useful.

Sure. That feature is basically called Motorola Connect and it's powered by a Chrome extension, as you say. Really what that is all about is, again, these are all opt in features. If you choose to use that, then what we'll do is if you do get a text message, we'll make sure that gets routed to your computer as well as to your phone. So it's not like it'll go to one place or another, but you can keep your focus where you want it. If you're out and about, it's on your phone and you reply. If you're sitting there typing an email or doing something on the web, you don't have to take your hands off the keyboard to suddenly go and see what's going on with your phone. So the idea here really is about having the information presented wherever the user is and whatever context they're in without having to switch context, without having to think about, is it a text message on my phone? Is it a hangout chat? It's in my Hangouts app. The idea is just bring everything to one place. So people who are trying to connect with you don't have to know where you are. They don't have to know if you're on your computer or on your phone. But wherever you are, that's where your information will be.

All right, so I know you're just dying to get back to shucking and jiving with journalists and bloggers. I think we will release you from this interview, this hangout on air. Thank you very much. For those of you who are curious, let's see, in an hour and a half, we are going to have Mr. John Rinaldi. And John Rinaldi is the product manager of Moto Maker. So he's actually going to step us through the process of how you would order a personalized, customized 18 different combinations of backs and various things online and place an order and get it in four or five days. So that'll be in an hour and a half. And, Steve, thank you very much. I owe you a few passes on the ice for this.

You already got me into a tournament with Brett Heddikin. So that's it. You repaid all the debts. All right.

Take care, Steve. Thank you very much.

Great talking to you, guy.

Bye. Bye. Bye.