Philips Hue: The smart home’s light bulb moment

Here's an idea. What if your light bulbs were way more expensive and frankly way worse at being light bulbs, but you could make them any color you want and you could do it all with your phone? Is that something you'd be interested in? From The Verge and Vox Media, this is Version History, a show about the best and worst and weirdest and most important products in tech history. I'm David Pierce, and today I think you will be interested. It's the Philips Hue. We'll see you next time. Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.nl. Go to Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. Power your business with the platform trusted by millions today. Are you thinking about divorce? Or maybe you're already in the thick of it and have no idea where to start? This week on Net Worth and Chill, I'm sitting down with Michelle Smith, one of the nation's most sought-after divorce financial specialists who helps high net worth women navigate the emotional and financial realities of splitting up. Michelle breaks down everything you need to know, what assets are on the table, what mistakes to avoid, and what you should be doing right now to come out on top. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash yourrichbff. All right, we're back. It's time to talk smart lights, some of which we have right here in the studio. Also with me in the studio, The Verges, Jen Toohey. Jen, welcome. Doing my Vanna White here. This is very good. Hi. Happy to be here. Very excited. Also joining us remotely, Richard Gunther, the editor at the Digital Media Zone. Richard, welcome. Thank you for being here. Oh, I'm so glad to be here. I love talking about smart lighting, so this is going to be a geek fest. Oh, get ready. I think the story for our purposes today sort of starts with the iPhone. But I briefly want to go back even further. And Richard, I want to start with you here. Circa, let's say, 2006 or even kind of in the decade before that, what did the smart home look like? It was kind of a mess if you were trying to do it as a consumer. because there were a couple different things out there at the time. Z-Wave had just kind of come on to the scene as a mechanism for controlling things. X10 had been out there already for like 20, 30 years and was still limping along. I should say, by the way, when we told people we were doing this episode, I got several emails from people with, I would say, like lightly veiled threats if we didn't mention X10 and it's important in the history of the smart home. So for my own physical safety, Richard, can you just give us 30 seconds on X10 before we move on? Yeah, X10 was an early technology created, I believe, by Tandy and popularized even in stores like Sears and Radio Shack and stuff like that. My grandfather had it in his home where you could basically have a box that controlled a couple different plugs and those smart plugs. We didn't call them that at the time. We called them modules because that's so user friendly. They could be turned on and off at specific times. and it kind of filled the place of having those mechanical timers in your home to have lights on or off or to be able to control something from a different room than where the light was actually installed. So it was old technology. It was not reliable at all. And it had this great feature where the more you added to your home, the less reliable it became. The dream. Sounds great. Okay, so on the one hand, that's what we have. And it's primitive and wacky and kind of worked until you really tried to use it. And on the other side, my sense is if you really wanted something sort of big and expansive and kind of whole home, you were doing, Jen, if I'm right, these like really incredibly expensive custom installations. This was like for rich, fancy people. Like tens of thousands of dollars. Oh, wow. Okay. And this is, you know, outfitting your like Hollywood mansion kind of thing. I think even or your tech guru, your tech mansion, Bill Gates had a famously smart home in the early days. And so, yeah, there was it wasn't something that anyone really thought about. Like he said, you know, like maybe the kind of automation you might have done would be like a timer, which my husband still occasionally uses because he gets frustrated with the smart lights. But yeah, there wasn't even the idea that, I mean, a light bulb was a light that you turned on and off. People didn't really think about it. It was only if you, you know, had a lot of money to throw around and you were like, huh, what can I spend my money on? Yeah. Okay, so then this brings us to like the mid to late aughts. And two things are happening kind of at the same time here. One is the smartphone is starting to happen. And that actually becomes very important in just a second. But the other one is the one little bit of science we have to do at the beginning here, which is LEDs, which I think until starting to prepare for this, I don't think I understood how big a deal it was when we started to make the switch to LED lights, both in terms of what they did and how they worked and why they were more efficient, but also what they enabled going forward. So, Richard, can you just walk us through this a little bit here and sort of how big a deal it was and why when LED lights first came on the scene? It was huge and it was really transformative for the industry and difficult for the industry, too, because it kind of pushed against consumers' instincts. we were introducing this new technology into light bulbs that, first of all, at the time, made the light bulbs and lighting look awful because the technology just did not exist to have warm white light from this type of diode at the time. And so, you know, you look at very expensive, and I'm talking $50 for a standard lamp-sized light bulb. and it would give off this greenish, bluish, very harsh white light. And everybody's like, oh, this is the future of lighting, huh? Yay. Hospital rooms. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And, you know, the lighting industry had a challenge on its hands also then as they evolved And as the technology got better and they were able to do specific color temperatures, then they had to educate consumers. Like, what the heck is color temperature? Your person walking into Home Depot to buy a new light bulb doesn't know what that means. All they know is they've been told that the government isn't going to let them buy incandescent bulbs in a couple of years. So they better get used to this stuff. And it was confusing. The numbers are different. Like lumens and watts have nothing to do with each other. And people are used to thinking about light bulbs in terms of wattage. And they have to learn color temperature. And there's all kinds of other numbers on those boxes that most people don't even know about. So it was challenging. But it also got us to a point where, I mean, frankly, you're generating so much less heat in your homes now. and you're using so much less energy just by changing light bulbs in your homes now. Yeah. And I think the other thing, I forget where I read it, but at one point it was somebody was saying essentially, we didn't realize at the time, but we were essentially turning light bulbs into digital objects. Like they had gone from this very analog sort of material thing to a fundamentally digital object. And now we can start to do things to it, like program it. And that's where all of this starts to come from. So we go to Philips, deeply fascinating company, by the way. We don't have time to go into all of the strange things that Philips has been involved with over the years, but like I think of Philips as like the company that makes my razor much, much more than that. But anyway, so inside of Philips, there are basically two things happening sort of simultaneously on the lighting team. Again, the iPhone has come out. And so there's a team that starts to work on just building apps. They think it might be cool to control some of the things they're already starting to make. They made this product called the Living Colors Lamp. I have a clip of this lamp just for anybody who doesn't remember. It's like shockingly early little bit of color-changing lamp. Let me just play this for you. Sometimes a room can seem, well, boring, but the right LED light can change all that in the flash and bring your space Look at the TV! I love it. Yeah. This just gives you the sense of the time we're talking about. High power LEDs deliver 16 million colors to choose from. With the easy to use remote control, you can adjust. There's a remote control. It's timeless and distinctive. So this gives you a sense, right? This is this is very much a smart lamp, but it is a sort of hacky pre smartphone digital one. Yeah. But you can change the color of your light. And this is already a meaningful, exciting new thing. And so there's a team at Philips that is like, OK, wouldn't it be cool if you could change the colors on your light with this touchscreen that people are starting to have in their pockets called the iPhone? And then there's this other team working on the living color stuff led by this guy named George Yanni, who, Jen, you just spoke to the other day. In fact, George, who is the co-founder of Hue, is a theoretical physicist. And he was brought on in order to help understand complex systems, which is what they were starting very early days to design. The team had started coming up with new interfaces, new ways to interface with your lights, because they saw this potential. Now that we had a digital light experience or the potential of a digital light experience, so many more ways of interacting instead of just flipping a switch. I actually was using the iPhone to prototype new remote control interfaces because I could then update them very quickly rather than have to get new tools made every time I wanted to do a user test. But in playing around with these interfaces on the phone or web interfaces back then, there was no app store. We found actually this is a great way to control our lights because we can make it customizable. We can name the lamps we're controlling. We can have people choose their favorite colors, store scenes. And so we kind of quickly, I quickly pivoted towards a pitch which became an internal startup within Philips for actually having smartphones and digital interfaces be a new way of interacting with lights inside our home. and that was kind of the core idea like how can we develop more ways or better interfaces for lighting and as they were trying to develop this they they spun out this team to be just focused on this what was essentially a software project and then as they started to develop it they realized this was a really core idea and if you kept it just in a lamp you were really limiting its use case because you'd have to buy lots of lamps. Whereas if they could put it into a form factor where you could have it throughout your home, it would have so much more potential. And so then they went back into Philips, into another team and got this team. It's like, okay, can we build this? Can we build this light? Can we build a light bulb that can be controlled? and I will pop quiz for you, Richard. What was the protocol that the living color lamps use? Do you know? How far back does your protocol knowledge go? I do not know. Okay. I have no idea. I'll be honest. I would have found it incredibly alarming if you had known the answer to that question off the top of your head. I think it's for the best. Jen, what was it? So it was the early Zigbee Lightlink. They call it Smartlink. And it actually, they ended up, so Philips ended up developing and donating to Zigbee what is today Lightlink. And that is a huge part. I mean, you're familiar with Zigbee Lightlink, right, Richard? I am, actually. Yeah, it's funny. I worked with a venture organization that was very interested in Zigbee because of its ability to provide just flexible lighting control without infrastructure. Right, and that was the key thing that they were developing because Zigbee sort of existed at this point, But they didn't want a hub. They didn't want a central controller point. They wanted to be able to have a remote because that's what they were developing. They were developing remotes that could control a light without a central hub or could control multiple lights. And also that multiple lights could be controlled by multiple remotes. Just because, again, it's all about the interface, all about how we're going to change the way we interact with lighting. And that was the core idea. Okay. I have a question about this, actually. And this is going to immediately divert us from the history here. This is the thing I've been thinking a lot about because like you described, Jen, they started, Georgiani's team in particular, and George becomes kind of the driving force of the whole Hue project. But at the beginning, they were setting out to use the iPhone basically as a way to really quickly prototype interfaces that they were planning to eventually make into hardware remotes. The idea was like instead of having to make new physical prototypes every time we want to try something or move a button, we can just do it on a screen, get a feel, and then only make hardware once we're further along. But then in the course of doing this, they decide, oh, this is actually a software problem. And we should just go back to making things on the phone and let the phone be the primary interface to a lot of this stuff. And the thing I found myself wondering over and over is there's an alternate universe here where instead what this group of people does is go and make a bunch of really interesting new ideas about remotes and maybe like cast it far enough along and we end up at like, can we reinvent the light switch? But instead, this becomes pretty quickly a purely software enterprise. And what I want to know is are either of you as bummed as I am that we didn't get to explore what it might look like to reinvent the light switch? Richard, what do you think? Should we have done this? I think that's an amazing idea. A number of companies have tried to do this, I would argue, largely unsuccessfully. Every time somebody tries to come up with a creative new spin on the light switch, I just kind of wince a little bit. there's a bunch of folks in this space who refer to poorly designed light switches as Gunther switches because I have such an issue with poorly ergonomically designed light switches. Don't get him going on the GE sync switches. This is a great thing to be known for. People being mad at their light switches, associating them with you, I think is what a great legacy to have. And naming them after me. It's an honor. For sure. No, I would have loved that. And I mean, you could argue that Sonos sort of went down that same path, creating their own remotes for their system, but ultimately ended up just reverting back to the phone. Yeah, that's very true. We all did converge back there, right or wrong. That's where we landed. Well, and that was a really interesting part of this history, which I hadn't really realized, I suppose, at the time, because I was only just starting to cover smart home when Hugh launched, was that it was the first smart home interface for the iPhone. Like Apple had not even considered, well, who knows, Apple maybe had considered, but they hadn't said anything publicly about how this could be used to control devices in your home. And this was kind of like the beginning of the smartphone based smart home. So you can all blame Hugh. I think that's right. And I think for reasons we will get to, I think there's a pretty strong case to be made that Apple, in fact, had not thought about this at all. And I think in general, what's happening at this time is everyone is discovering new things for the smartphone to be for. This idea that I have an always connected, logged in, camera filled, location based object in my pocket is changing everything at like record speed. And this is just one version of that. But so this team starts building. I found this great clip from, this is on like the Hue Facebook page that shows one of their very early prototypes. The, George described it both in interviews, and I think to you, Jen, as a bunch of Mac minis in suitcases. And here is just a tiny bit of what that looked like. And actually the trigger, which actually got us using smartphone controlled lighting was I was working on a project for the Living Colors products So I went about prototyping the first bridge So you can see it just a bunch of circuit boards on some cardboard And this is the beginning of the SmartLights project. It's like these big, honking, early computer kinds of systems. And this is what they decide to give to people. Because this is a moment, it's important to remember, Nobody knows what smart lighting is or what you're supposed to use it for or how it's going to work or any of this stuff. So the thing that they do is they get 100 kits of stuff, a bunch of cables and nonsense inside of suitcases, and they put them in people's houses and they just ask them to use them. Did George tell you about this early testing process? The key thing about any technology is you need to have a reason for it to exist, right? You need a use case. You shouldn't really be working from the technology towards the use case, but find the use cases and solve the problem. Obviously, they were doing it the wrong way around, but they found a lot of use cases straight away. But you know what's interesting about that? They didn't find one. No. Do you know what I mean? Like, I think a lot of times you go on a process like this and you find like the Amazon Echo is a good version of this, right? Yeah. They went out and found, OK, everybody wants to use this to listen to music. This is fundamentally a sort of universally music based product. And then everybody has little things that they want to do on the side so we can build a whole ecosystem. But from everything I found in the research, one of the weirdest things about smart lighting was that everybody immediately found use cases for it and none of them were the same. I actually ended up setting up a routine where I would get my light would turn red if my boss had emailed me. Why? It was super helpful. You wake up at one o'clock in the morning and all your lights are red and you're like, oh, God, what has happened? I would just have one light turned red, not all of them. But yeah, that would have been kind of terrifying. I can imagine, and Neelai would like love that, the power. Oh, yeah, don't tell him that's available to him. Neelai, don't listen to me. This was just at the beginning of it. Like I had just started working not in an office and, you know, not being tied to my computer all the time. It was great to be like, oh, OK, better go check. So, yeah, those were the main things they found. And the really fun point he made about the group, the test group, was he said, none of them wanted to send them back. He said, when you can't get the products back, that's a good sign. Especially when it's like an incredibly early, incredibly primitive, to your point, Richard, just barely working version of these things. Immediately there is something that brings people to them. Yeah. And Richard, I do want to talk about the just barely working this of this, because you mentioned LEDs being hard to do. But I think the more I looked into this, the more any smart light bulb just starts to seem like kind of a miracle. and especially in these early days. I mean, literally just light bulbs are hot and that makes every other piece of this process much, much harder. Like, give us a sense of sort of how big a technology problem something like a smart light bulb actually is. Well, if you look at early generation LED lights, the biggest problem was heat dissipation because this wasn't like, you know, slowly burning out a filament in the middle of a glass ball, the electronics themselves got quite hot from the light emitting diode. And so they needed to come up with ways and heat sinks and creative ways of getting air through. So you see some crazy early generation bulbs with fins and holes in them and all kinds of weird designs. Do we have a picture of the very first one? Because that shows, the very first Hue bulb had the fins, which you do still see today in like really cheap bulbs. But yeah, they had the, they looked ugly. I mean, here in front of us, we have, this is the first generation that they released and it was a sleek, beautiful bulb with this like silver bottom and then the kind of ice cream cone top. But the original prototypes that they took, that they developed and were sharing with people before they launched, had those big fins and they did not look nice. They looked like cheap plastic. And the really interesting thing technology-wise that George shared with me when I talked to him about this is he said they weren't originally looking to develop a colored light bulb. They were originally looking for tone. So the warm white to the cool white tone, tunable lighting. That was the thing that had a use case already. But in order to do that, they had to use very special LEDs. I think at the time when we were making this, it was just barely possible to make a color-changing light bulb in a light bulb form factor. So the first light bulb we made was not a 60-watt equivalent. It was like 45-watt equivalent. didn't do saturated colors we had to use automotive grade electronics inside it because parts of it got up to 125 celsius so it was just barely possible and the way we made it just possible was by using a lime green led which is the the most efficient type of led in order to boost the amount of white light that we could generate and that meant actually kind of colors came as a direct consequence. Side note, when George talks about it, he calls them lead lighting, which is a lot easier to say. I like that. Lead lighting. I have never heard it called that. I'd never heard that either. And then they realized, okay, color shades, adding color gives this a whole different value. It's a different product and another value proposition. So yeah, it was a real, and then they used another company within Philips, Color Kinetics to help develop the color light. And Color Kinetics is still around, and it's the company that lights up the Empire State Building and does stuff like that. Very cool company and a very smart acquisition on Philips' part. Yeah, that's, again, Philips, deeply fascinating company. Everything you can imagine Philips has made at one point or another. Yeah, the one other bit of the tech that I saw that I thought was really cool is they were having trouble managing the radio that you need to connect to actually get signals to and from the bulb. Because the heat sinks that they were using to keep the bulbs cool were actually interfering with the radio frequency. Turns out when you put a radio in a big metal thing, it's hard for it to actually communicate. But what they find a way to do is actually attach the two pieces together. And so they turned the heat sink essentially into the antenna and actually managed to make it work for them instead of against them. But again, as far as I can tell, it is a minor miracle that any of this worked at all. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, while we're talking about those heat sinks, one of the things that was problematic for LED lighting in the beginning was that that heat sink took up all the bottom space of a light bulb. So typically when you went to the hardware store to buy a very expensive LED light bulb that was probably terrible, it only shined light upwards. Yeah. Because it only had the top part with a lens on it that exposed the light. And what Philips did was brilliant in shaping the lens portion of the bulb in a way that it actually cast light out and down, not just up. Yeah. And today we don't have them here, but the current Hue bulbs are fully glass. They don't have this. Right. Yeah, they just look like light bulbs. They just look like regular light bulbs. Yeah. Yeah, it was actually kind of wild coming into the studio and seeing how much these don't look like light bulbs. There was a there was a wired story when these first one came out that called them smushed ice cream cones, which I think is exactly the mental image that everyone should have in their mind if you're listening to this. Yes. So we're going to we should take a break here because this is a good moment. But we're going to leave the story at CES 2012. A bunch of stuff has happened. This is going very well. The tests are going really well. Phillips continues to invest. George builds his team. It's one of those things where like there's a lot of tech to build and there's a lot going on. But everyone pretty quickly understood the power of this thing. It wasn't like he had to go and fight for his belief. It was like, no, they put this in front of people and everybody immediately was like, oh, my gosh, this is amazing. But what they have to figure out how to do now is sell the most expensive light bulbs you can possibly imagine to people. So let's leave it there for a minute. We're going to take a break and then we're going to come right back. Is Kamala Harris running for president again? Listen, I might. I might. I'm thinking about it. But does anybody want that? Yeah. Yeah? Yeah, I do. Well, I don't see why not. Absolutely, I think Kamala Harris will run for president again. I don't think there'll never be a woman president in the United States. Now, wait, wait, wait. You can't just walk away on that. Tell us why. I know it's still early to talk about 2028. But as we build to our post-Trump future, it seems to be a big question about the Democratic Party. Kamala Harris leads all of the presidential polling. So does this mean that the person who led the ticket in 2024 is going to lead the party again in 2028? The campaign needs to be called by Biden. It's just a tainted brand. Do you think from a donor community largely that there's any appetite for a Harris return? I don't. I'm Estet Herndon. And this is America Actually. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. One, two, three. I'm stand-up comedian Gianmarco Cerezi. And I'm actor-penis model Russell Daniels. The Downside is our podcast where we bring on guests to talk about how miserable their lives are. Because let's face it, things are not getting better. Every episode, we talk about what's wrong with our lives, our guests' lives, the world. But in a fun way. Bottom line is you're going to walk away feeling better about your life. We've had so many cool guests. Caleb Huron. Busy Phillips. Stavros Halkias. Laverne Cox. Hassan Piker. Alana Glazer. I promise you're going to have a good time. Now on the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is The Downside. All right, we're back. So it's CES 2012. Picture it in your mind. We're in Vegas. Thankfully, I think I was there. I wasn't there. I was there. You and me, Richard. Absolutely, I was there. What were you doing? Cast your mind back. 2012, Richard. You are going to laugh at me, but I was probably seeking out companies that were selling light bulbs. This is why you're here, Richard. I told you. This is why. So, okay. So, Phillips is there with Hugh trying to figure out what's going on. But again, Phillips, big company, up to lots of stuff, has a meeting with the Apple team, the Apple resale team. for what I believe was about other stuff. Speakers. Speakers, okay. Yeah, high-end speakers. Fidelio, apparently they had a line of speakers. I'm not familiar with them. But yes, that was what they were. They were pitching to the Apple team, the Apple retail team to sell these speakers in. Did George tell you who was in that meeting? No. Dang. I did ask. Good, as you should have. And he was probably right not to tell you. But anyway, so the Hue team, as far as I can tell, basically sneaks into this meeting. It was like, hey, we have a thing we'd like to show you. They show this to the Apple team. The Apple team gets very excited. They love the idea that it works on an iPhone. And Apple. And this was like, they agreed to take it at the Apple store. Because A, validation from Apple, even at that time, was a big deal, right? Having this company that is sort of the leading innovator in this space be like, that's a neat thing. We'd like to sell that is a huge endorsement of anything that you're making. Plus, there's a lot of Apple stores and a lot of people in Apple stores. So if you can just be on the walls being like, hey, this thing works with a new iPhone. And not a lot of stuff in Apple stores. That's key. Like this really stood out in the Apple store. There wasn't a lot that you could buy like in an Apple store back then. Now there is. Yeah, true. Yeah, now you can get weird stuff in an Apple store. But so Apple agrees to a four month exclusive in Apple stores, which is going to run through basically the whole holiday season the next year. And that's when the Hue's come out. They come out in, I believe it was October of 2012. These things start to ship. And they were six months late. Six months late. Yeah. This is part of the story I found out recently, which is, and it's a key part of the story that I hadn't even really registered. But when you talk about Hue today, you realize this bulb is an original bulb, the one in front of me. I just paired it with the current new HueBridge Pro, and it works perfectly, flawlessly. So these are the bridges. This is the first gen, and I think, was this the second gen? Yeah. Okay. They're basically just, it was a round piece of plastic, and then it was a rectangle piece of plastic. And this was the thing that plugged into your router that actually connected the whole network. Yeah, and that's how the bulbs connected to it over the Zigbee protocol, and you were able to control your lights with your phone. It was the heart of the system. Bring back the round one. I like it better. But so the reason they had to stop, the reason they were late, they decided, really importantly, at the last minute was we need to make these bulbs upgradable. Up until that point, the idea was just the bridge could create new features. And through the app, you could have new features for the bridge. but they decided, okay, we're going to strip out all the features we've tried to cram in here and we're going to make it upgradable so that we can do it right as we go along rather than try. So that they can actually upgrade the bulb and not just. Just the bridge. Because, yeah, so that means that your bulb can now, that's why this bulb can work with today's bridge, even though it's 12 years old. Right. Because it could be firmware upgradable. So that was a key change. And they said we had to tell Apple, you're going to have to wait a little bit. And once they got that fixed and made it upgradable, then it launched in the Apple stores. Do you remember what it cost? Yes. Here's a trivia question for both of you. Richard? I do. $199 for three bulbs and a bridge. Three bulbs and a bridge. Yep. I just want to point out the other price of three light bulbs. A dollar? Two dollars? Well, not LED. Not LEDs. That's true. Granted, not LEDs. I mean, back then, it would have been, what, maybe about $20? I found a story of ours from about 2012 that said, yeah, somewhere in the range of like $20 to $25 for an LED bulb. Yeah. So for three, you'd be looking at $75, maybe. So we're at two and a half times the price of an already incredibly expensive light bulb. Well, and also, as Richard said earlier, this was a point where people were being pushed to buy LEDs instead of CFLs and incandescent. And they didn't like it. They didn't like that they were more expensive. These things, new technology is supposed to get cheaper, not triple in price. Right. So those first bulbs, how bad were they? As like purely from a is this a good light perspective? I think I want to get to all the cool stuff it could do because I think like it is it is I should say it is immediately clear that lots of people are willing to sacrifice good light for all the cool stuff it can do. And it can do a lot of cool stuff and we can get to it. But Richard, they weren't good lights, were they? Well, I mean, they were great as long as you didn't like green or really deep blues because those colors were just sickly and awful. No, I mean, I think about the fact that you're sitting there with an original bulb in front of you. I know that to this day, I still have and use some of my original floods that I bought 13 years ago, which is insane. And they still work. I just don't use them for green or blue. No. Fair. I'm showing some green and blue there if you're watching. It's not pleasant. No. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff that I think now we take for granted as Hue features missing. Even some of the stuff they had talked about is like, these are clear things we want to do. The geofencing stuff didn't exist yet. Didn't exist. Music syncs didn't work yet. You couldn't move it to another bridge yet. So it was all, so all this stuff was coming and they knew they wanted to do it, but a lot of it didn't work yet. You couldn't even, like you're here now with the full sort of gamut of colors. Yeah. And you can you can it's like the the dropper on the color wheel that everybody has for everything now. They didn't have that. There's this really funny picture where it's basically you can pick from a bunch of colored pencils. Yes. And that's essentially the color wheel. And you could upload a picture. Well they had a picture They had pictures The first app was atrocious Yes It was terrible In retrospect It was absolutely terrible Yeah Actually I have a clip from a PC Magazine hands at the time Can I just play this for you really fast It a good picture of what this was This is Eugene Kim from PCMag The next thing you'll want to do is fire up the free Philips Hue app, which will then prompt you to press the button on your wireless bridge. So you press the bridge. Still how it works today. Once you have the bridge connected and your app is paired, go ahead and screw in your Philips bulb to any lamp. You can already see how bad the app is. There's the bulb. I also appreciate the half-second delay where it turns on. Here you can use the dimmer, or you can drag around an on-screen icon to change the color. See, it had some manual color picking, but not a lot. No, and he said it was very much kind of hacky. It wasn't really, it's not like the color wheel you have today. But then this one's my favorite. It's just a wall of 12 presets that are all little like Polaroid-y pictures. It's not good. No. The app is very bad. I like their idea, though, that they were trying to make this feel like something that you could connect to rather than just being a color wheel. We use this throughout the smart home today, and it really came from this idea of a lighting scene, which is a thing in interior design. And back then you could pay someone thousands of dollars to come and design your lighting. You still can do that today. But Hue has made it much more accessible. And today, in fact, their most recent update or launch was lighting scenes that actually work within your lights. Now you can tell you where your lights are in your home so it can adjust the scenes to feel more realistic inside your space. And that is a huge, I mean, and this is something that goes throughout smart lighting. You really cannot appreciate smart lighting until you experience it because no one knew they wanted this. No one thought they needed this. But once you got it, you were like, oh, this is, I love this. Yeah, I think like my own example of this recently is I work in my basement and there's this big overhead light right above that sits sort of right at the level where it's right at the top of my eyeline all day and was giving me headaches. And I put in really warm smart bulbs and it's just immediately better. It's like, oh, just little things like that. And so over and over and over and over, people start having this experience with these hue bulbs. And I don't know what George told you, but from everything I could tell, the reception to this was almost universally positive. Every single review I read was basically like, it is absurd that this thing is $200. What are we even doing here? But also this thing is amazing and I love it so much. Yeah, and it was, I think there were two. So the key was the Apple partnership. If they had launched this in a Home Depot, just on the shelf next to all the other Philips bulbs, I just think it would have really struggled. But because they were able to partner with Apple, get into the Apple stores, they were reaching the correct audience, to your point. Like they were reaching people that were willing to try this out. And then that gave them the runway to then to be able to develop a product that everyone could use. Because originally it was also iPhone only, obviously, to begin with. So I think that was a really key being in the Apple stores. But he said they, because it was incredibly expensive to manufacture these bulbs, he said they lost money on every single bulb they sold at the beginning. Really? Yeah. It was no profit margin because this technology was so new and they had put so much resources and engineering into it. At 60 bucks a bulb, they're losing money. At 60 bucks a bulb, they were losing money. Wow. And he said, you know, and obviously that was their biggest fear is that the price was going to cause people to not buy this. But so originally they only made, he didn't give me a number, but the first run was very constrained because they really weren't sure. They knew they had a great product. They just didn't know that they were going to be able to communicate that to the target audience. And the Apple store really ended up being key to that. I remember writing at the time about how all the retailers were struggling so bad trying to figure out how to market smart home products. And they all were just terrible at it. Apple understood retail and considered the fact that most of the people that walk into that store are going in there with the mentality that I'm going to spend more for something in this store than I would pretty much anywhere else. Right? They're buying Apple products. They are already paying an Apple tax. Right. So you're getting the right consumer in that store for your product. And I think price over time has gotten much better. They're still more expensive, but they're a lot less more expensive. But the other thing that I think starts to happen right now is there's a really interesting turn in this whole market. The idea of getting a smartphone and saying, I could use this to control things in my house. Wouldn't that be cool? And then you lead to smart lighting. just sort of percolated around the industry. And I'm curious to what extent you guys feel like Hugh was first to this idea or if it was just the one that kind of got it right and shipped it. I mean, Insteon was out, but did they have an app at that point? How were you controlling? They did have an app. It was janky at the time, but yes, they did. So there were a couple of people before in this space, but it wasn't widespread and it certainly wasn't like everyone was talking about and using it. It was very niche. Right. And for the most part, they were all one-offs. You know, the thing that Philips did so brilliantly was opening it up. Yes. Was making it compatible with everything. They were promiscuously compatible with all of these different ecosystems that were also starting to come up at this time. Because now as we started seeing a bunch of different smart products, now you had to figure out, well, how are we going to make them work together? I don't have to have a separate app for every single one of them. So you started seeing these systems that would either through software alone, like IFTTT or You Know Me, or through a big box of radios coming out with hubs like Wink and the first generation smart things. These are all names I have not heard in so long. This is so wild. I mean, Staples Connect. Staples was in this game. And arguably, they had one of the best solutions out there. It was phenomenal. Revolve, even Logitech Harmony at one point in time had compatibility with them. They worked with Nest. I mean, they worked with the expensive stuff, with Control 4 and Crestron. They worked with everything and they opened their API so third-party developers could build their own apps to control Hue stuff. It was brilliant. And it's the exact opposite move that most companies would think as far as how to handle their IP. And, yeah, and actually that when I was asking George about the first, he said. So I think we were the first Internet connected smart light bulb, right, that was commercially available, right? also color changing. So I think that's a claimed thing. But I think another thing, if we actually even go beyond lighting, I think we were the first, let's say, internet connected consumer product that opened for anyone to control and use. We had this tagline at the beginning, right? What you do with Hue is up to you. And then the API opened and the first third party device app was Hue Disco, which is still around which turns your lights into party lights syncs with the music and within within a year I think there were over 200 different apps that worked with Hue Lights that you could go and play and do anything you wanted with and that that ecosystem really did I think help drive interest in the product and is as as you say Richard so sort of contrary to everything that came before it and in some ways to a lot of us come after it and so yeah and that that really sort of set a tone that like this isn't just a proprietary expensive device. These bulbs, when they came out, were rated for 15,000 hours of use. Yeah. These things are supposed to last a tremendously long time. And if I get 10 years out of a gadget, that's like an incredible, huge victory. If I get 10 years out of a light bulb, that's kind of a bummer. And so I think just Philips made its life really hard in that respect by saying, we're not making a gadget, we're making a light bulb. And I think, to its credit, has done a really good job of continuing to support it all the way along that journey. Like the fact that you can pair the very first bulb with your very modern phone and the newest version of the Hue app is like there are not a lot of examples of that in the tech industry. And this is a core part, I think, that we haven't discussed of the success of the Philips Hue lighting system is it really does 89, 95 percent of the time just work. I'll give you almost. I'll give you almost. I mean, it's local, solid, reliable. And that's why people continue to recommend them today, even though there are so many competitors. And there are people that are coming up and doing a really good job. And with Matter, interoperability is no longer Hugh's big selling point. So it's definitely a changing landscape today. But they created a very good first generation product. they really did develop the platform or develop the market for smart lighting. Agreed. Okay, that is a perfect segue into the version history questions. So let's take a quick break and then we're going to come back and we have the eight questions we ask of every product. We'll be right back. I'm Seth Matlins. My new show, Create or Destroy, Reimagining Marketing, explores how every decision a company makes, not just the marketing ones, but the HR, IR, pricing, org design, and planning ones. The ones most don't consider marketing at all contribute to either creating value or destroying it. Each week I sit down with CMOs, CEOs, founders, cultural thinkers, the people building, breaking, reimagining how businesses grow or don't for conversations about what creates value and what destroys it. It's a business show. It's a marketing show. The creator destroys the show that argues they've always been the same thing. From the Vox Media Podcast Network and the Wisdomist Company. New episodes drop weekly on YouTube and your favorite podcast app. All right, we're back. It's time now for the eight version history questions, the eight questions we ask about the legacy of every product. But before we get to that, I should just point out that while we were at break, this late, which Jen just said all those nice things about, stopped working and now Jen can't get to connect again because the smart home is cool and great. You had to point that out. I blame the Wi-Fi. I just really admire Jen's optimism and excitement about the smart home and feel the need to pour water on it every once in a while. So let's start with we call this the time matrix. It is a completely normal concept that everybody understands with no complicated questions. It's weird. And this maps, is this the right idea or the wrong idea? And was it the right time or the wrong time? I will go first on this. I would submit that this was clearly the right idea, but I think you could argue that this was at the wrong time. Like in term, not in terms of like, you know, how can you make lots of money? But in terms of can you make this thing really well? They were pretty clearly just a couple of years too early technologically. But Jen, I suspect you're going to disagree because I think my sense is from talking to George. There's a real sense that like if they didn't do this one, it wasn't like they could have just waited around for a couple of years and the technology would have magically surfaced to make a better one. Yeah, I think I agree. It's right. It was right idea. I mean, I think we've talked at length about how valuable smart lighting is. And they basically invented, you know, and with the color changing and the hue changing, the temperature changing, they really brought that mainstream. and it was the right idea because obviously people loved it when it came. I do think it was the right time because I don't think it would have happened if they had tried to do it later because I think the other reason that it was key was that iPhone because you suddenly had created a use case for something for a very hot, cool new device that everyone was interested in so you were really bringing all the pieces and parts together. They just weren't quite there on the technology and so they kind of had to fudge it a little bit until the technology caught up. So I guess you could maybe skidget a little bit down to wrong time. Just a little bit because if it could have, if they could have done the bulb that came out two years later initially, then it would be smack dab in right idea, right time, I think. But they had to compromise a little bit to get where they went. Yeah. Richard, you get to break the tie here. What do you think? I'm all in. I'm right product, right time, right place. I think that first mover advantage, particularly with regard to where the smart home was at the time when we started seeing all of these hubs pop up and all of these other ecosystems that people were playing with, they were there at the right time to be the brand of choice for light bulbs. And again, make fun of me if you must. I used to attend an annual lighting conference called LightFare. And the number of companies that were dying out just trying to get the LED lighting, not even a smart bulb, but just trying to get the LED lighting correct. I mean, there was a path of dead companies that had pretty good products but couldn't get there. So I think they made the right move by going out with what they had and getting all these partnerships in place that they could then build on and iterate on. And yeah, I'm all in. That's a good case. I buy it. All right. It's right at your right time. You can have this one. All right. Question number two. Was this peak anything. I have a couple to offer you. I think I have one that I feel very strongly about and then I have just a couple of other ones I want to throw at you. Was this peak smart lights? Probably not, right? It got better for a lot of reasons right after this. Yeah, I wouldn't. It was not peak smart lighting. I would say we're probably close to peak smart lighting now, actually. We might be. Was this peak weirdly coming up with strange ideas for smart lighting? I feel like everybody's gotten sort of normal about their smart lights now, but back to 2012 and everybody got it and was like, what if I could sync this up with my toaster? And it's like, that's nothing. And everybody wanted to do it anyway. That's so true. Yeah. There were some weird use cases. I'm trying, I wrote a whole article on all the fun things you could do. Oh yeah. One of my favorites, it would change to a preset color when the space station flew over my house. That's nothing. That's nothing. This was all thanks to if this, then that, if you remember. and then the big use case everyone would say was like this was totally peak if this than that unquestionably peak if this than that yes um like if your football team or your sports team scored it would flash the colors of your team i mean you can still get it to do that today but yeah that was i think it was peak color changing lighting possibly like today honestly i don't use the color changing much myself it's much more the tones the water the temperature is more important for me. But it is fun, you know, around holidays and such. But I think it was peak color changing lighting, maybe. I don't know. Richard, do you have any wacky scenes? What makes your lights flash? I don't have any wacky scenes, actually, except I like using them for fun stuff at Halloween and stuff like that. There's some really great apps that allow you to play scary effects that sync with lights to make it look like a, you know, dungeon lighting or things like that. So that can be kind of fun. Yeah, that's pretty good. No, for me, I mean, it's always been about the ambiance for me. And, you know, we didn't even get to talk about the product that Jen talked me into buying, which was the Hue Sync, which allows the Hue Sync box, which will synchronize what's going on with your TV, with the room. Right. I mean, stuff like that. Yeah. I kind of feel like they've done better than anybody else in terms of creating experiences with light. So maybe peak lighting experience. I like that. What I do think they have in terms of peakness is peak integration. I don't think anybody has done it as well as they have. And it's not just their lighting products. Their lighting products, their sensors, and by the way, they make amongst the best sensors on the market. and their buttons and remotes It all accessible through all these other ecosystems which is smart smart smart Yeah, that's really good. And I remember, especially in those early days when Alexa, Google Assistant, and then HomeKit were all really on the come up, they were all so different that I feel like I spent a lot of my time, and I'm sure you both spent a lot of your time, just explaining to people what worked with what. Yeah. And having you just be a yes. Yeah. It was such an unbelievable victory that it was like, I actually don't have to ask about all the other things in your house. These bulbs will work. They will work. Yes, they're expensive. They will work. Yeah. And that was so meaningful for so and in many ways still is so meaningful. I think that's a good one. The only other one I had was was this peak smartphone excitement, which I think like there's a there's a real moment in 2012 that that's kind of happening anyway. This is like Instagram is starting to come up. Social media has not turned on us yet in any sort of meaningful cultural way. But I think just thinking back to all of these emos and the idea that I could take out my phone and control my lights was so futuristic and mind blowing to so many people. that part of me is like there's a moment in that that is like my smartphone is now not just a digital device. It is it is my conduit to the universe. And it's like there's something so powerful about that that I remember experiencing for the first time. And like I just I almost want the Hue lights to be peak smartphone. It feels like a reach. Now, we had an I the iPad just came out, right? 2010. So, yeah, it was like but this was right when people were starting to actually buy them. So, I mean, I would argue it was peak iPad. Oh, interesting. It finally gave you a use for your iPad because this was the problem. I got an iPad in 2011 and I literally was like, what am I supposed to do with this thing? It doesn't do anything. And I ended up and using all my smart home apps and like mounting on the wall and using it as a smart controller, which, you know, but that was definitely the geeky way. But it was, yeah, that interaction using, you know, your phone or your iPad with your lighting was, and I think today we are trying not to do that in very meaningful ways because we want to get away from our phone. So the excitement over using our phone to control our home, yeah, I would say this was peak iPhone because today, like I said right at the beginning, you know, people don't want a folder full of apps to control their home. They want it to be much more seamless. Yeah, there was like a two-year run where it was super cool to do, and then everyone was like, oh, it's actually kind of annoying. I don't like this. My phone's over there. All right, let's move on. So question number three. I struggled with this one. I'm curious if you guys have anything. If you could time travel back and develop this thing yourself, if we're putting you next to George, you're building this thing together, could you make the product more successful? And I want to talk in particular about the very first ones. Is there anything you would have changed? I came up empty on this one that I think, and this might be to your point, Richard, why it's right place, right time, that I'm not sure I could have made it cheaper or pushed in any particular direction or made sure to add a feature or something. I don't know. I came up empty, but I'm curious if either of you have any ideas. I would, I do think they should have kept a remote visit. Oh, that's a good one. And I just, I feel like it became, and this is our conversation about the phone, it became something that only the person with the phone had control of. You know, in a home, I had young children at the time. And yeah, that, and the idea, the original idea had been to create a physical remote for products. So I don't think it would have hurt to have kept the remote in there. I don't think it would, that would have made it more successful though. I think it just would have helped with that one flaw. Richard, what about you? Any ideas? Yeah, two things. I agree completely with the remote idea. Personally, I don't really like most of the remote or controller options they've come out with. The first one, the tap, which I really prefer to call the press really hard because it's kinetically powered. So you really have to press on it to generate the power to send the signal. But it's all of them are a different thing than people are used to seeing to control lights. And I think one of the things that, let's say Lutron, as an example, has done extremely well with their Pico remotes is coming out with something that looks roughly like and now exactly like a wall switch itself and in fact operates like a wall switch. And if they had done something like that in a remote form factor, they eventually came out with a similar type of wireless remote that sort of looks like a wall switch, but conveniently, and I say that ironically or sarcastically rather, doesn't actually fit in the same space that a paddle would be. You have to have it attached in the wall next to it on a separate plate. And I just don't think they have that physical control thing down well even yet. Yeah, yeah. That's something that they've struggled with for sure. Yeah. And then the second thing would be the app. As an experienced guy, I would have had a lot to say about that first app before it went out. And I would have loved a sit down or a consultation with the product manager on that to get a better understanding of where they were going. I really think that first app missed the mark. So when you say for peak iPhone, I don't think of it that way because I just looked at it and I'm like, oh, this is terrible. But you can control your lights, Richard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then in a couple of years, I'll have five more apps to control other lights. Then what? Yeah, that's the dream. And now we've spent a decade trying to figure out what to do about that fact. Yeah, right. Maybe it's all Hugh's fault. All right, number four. I think we can actually kind of breeze past these next two because the thing is still up and going. But I'm curious, will the youth ever make it cool again is question number four. And actually, Jen, I want to spend this question to you in particular. Do the kids love smart lights? What do the teens think of smart lights these days? I don't think, I think you don't really think about smart lines until you have a home. So I don't think the youth are really interested in smart lighting. I think they are interested in the like RGB dynamic lighting, like color changing lighting. I mean, my son came home one day with little LEDs that he could put inside his car and control with a remote so that his truck was like flashing. That's fun. But I think the youth aren't going to really be interested in this until they buy their own homes or move into their own homes. I mean, these lights are now an absolute staple of the creator economy, right? Like every YouTuber, every creator, every TikToker, they're all running around with these lights. Hue lights, though, I would guarantee. That's fair. But yes, the RGB lighting in your kind of YouTube video set up with, you know, and that's Nanoleaf really cornered that market. So I think RGB color changing lighting, the youth has made cool and loves. But smart lighting, the way it works integrally in our home, they'll love it when they're older. Yeah. Your kids aren't asking for hue bulbs for Christmas this year? No. No. No, no, no. It's going to be interesting when my son moves into college and has to start using light switches, though. I'm quite intrigued. Has to start using light switches? Okay, so when you turn 18, it's like, okay, you're going to figure out what beer tastes like, you're going to have to figure out how to get home, and you're going to have to learn how to use light switches. And you can vote. And do your own laundry. Yeah, that one I'm most worried about. Richard, what do you think? Yeah, I agree that it's probably – I do think the young generation has fully embraced color lighting and color-changing lighting. I don't know that it's Philips, though. I think you're right. They're going to go for something cheaper and more accessible. But, you know, I struggled with this when I was prepping because I do feel like at the time there really wasn't a kid's room without some sort of color bulb in it. And if you think about it, the primary purpose or audience for color bulbs at the hardware store back in the incandescent days was either kids or college rooms or the holidays. And that was it. They were novelties. So as a novelty, I think they still are very cool for younger people. Whether the younger people are going to make Phillips the name, I doubt that. Yeah, that's fair. Too expensive. And then last one before we get to the Hall of Fame questions. What feature of this one, and for this one we'll talk about the first Hue bulb, should every current version have? I, again, came up empty on this one because I think it is a remarkable achievement of Philips that every single thing about the new bulbs is better than the old bulbs. But maybe I'm missing something. Did either of you have any ideas for this one? No, I mean, there's nothing. As you say, all the new bulbs have the current features. There's nothing missing. I do, I kind of miss the shape. You like the ice cream cone? Yeah. I mean, see, like you were saying, coming in and seeing them, I was like, oh. As like naked bulbs go, it kind of has a way about it. It had a look. Yeah. Whereas the current ones look just like regular light bulbs, which are fine. But they had a touch of style, which has sort of fallen by the wayside a little. And they did, considering, and I saw early prototype pictures, how ugly it looked. They did a really good job making something. I mean, you wouldn't look at this and think this was a piece of tech from 2012. Like, it looks like a modern piece of technology. But I don't want all my bulbs today to look like that. I just liked that. I just wish, it's cool that they had this interesting design. But no, I think that's the beauty of Hue is, you know, they made all their bulbs upgradable. Everything's backwards compatible. So, yeah, they sort of talked their way out of this question. Richard, I'm assuming your answer is the app. You'd like to have the app back. You want that back back. Absolutely. Missed it terribly. I think this is a hard question to answer because of how forward compatible they have been. From the beginning, all of those capabilities are still there. Oh, wait, no, I do miss them popping on after the power's restored from a power outage. That was really nice. That was a huge complaint, I remember, at the time. Yes, they finally fixed it. They would just turn on at full brightness. That happened to me and my husband once. And yeah, he was like, these need to leave our bedroom. Not great. All right. Now let's get to the Virgin History Hall of Fame questions. Three questions. It has to pass all three tests if it want to make it into the Virgin History Hall of Fame. Question number one is, did this product do something truly new? I think this one's easy. I think the answer is yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes, it was very much groundbreaking. It brought smart lighting into the market. Even though George had to use like 12 adjectives for what it was the first step. I think it does add up to something. But like a consumer level smart light bulb that, you know, anyone could go and buy and be able to use with however they wanted. Yeah, it was new and it brought the concept of smart lighting to residential homes. And yeah, they did a, there was nothing like this before. And now there's an entire market around this. So, and it was a successful new product for sure. So, yeah, I can't see any reason, you know, I mean, you know about Richard, you know more about the history of smart lighting. But in that space with it was the color changing that was specifically new. But everything, every other part of the package that they pulled together created a whole new sort of category in this space. Absolutely. You mentioned a DJ that had hacked this before. That was really kind of the only space, the entertainment space and stuff like that. And that's where you saw color changing capability. And even that was kind of immature at the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think this one's an easy one. I agree. Question number two. This one I think is trickier. Was it either remarkably good or remarkably bad? You can make it into the Hall of Fame by being remarkably bad, but you have to be remarkably bad. Richard, I'm curious your thoughts on this. Where does Hugh fall on that spectrum for you? I think it was good. I don't think it was remarkably good. I don't think the things that were bad about it make it remarkably bad. I think if this were a one to five scale, it would be a four for me. I think that's kind of where I land, too. It is a couple of those features away from being even the thing that Philips knew it was supposed to be. They knew this thing was not done and feature complete and everything it could possibly be when they shipped it. They just knew they needed to ship it. Yeah. Do you want to? I feel the sadness in it failing this test. I feel like the smart light bulb, the first smart color-changing light bulb should be in the Hall of Fame. First smart internet connected color-changing LED space. Consumer available. I think it was remarkably good in one way, if that counts. not maybe in its core purpose, but in its creation, like its upgradability and its interoperability. Like the fact that they did not create a locked down ecosystem in this space was remarkable and great because like they created an entire ecosystem around their product that they didn't control and they didn't want to control. They were happy to let, you know, 200 apps spring up. People, you know, some of them were quite expensive to pay like $5 if you wanted to use the Hue Disco app. But that was remarkable for its moment. But as a core lighting product, yeah, I agree with Richard. And as to your point that they made the best thing they could at the time, but it wasn't the best it could have been. Well, at the time, it wasn't the best it could be. Exactly. I wish we didn't have to think day one. I know. This is how he gets you. Right. It ultimately evolved to be the gold standard of color lighting. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's right. But I think this is where it gets tricky because we're not like if this were sort of the whole course of hue. Yeah. I think clearly remarkably good. Yeah. But the sort of first iteration of it, I think, just barely misses the test. Yeah. I'm very sorry. And so this brings us to our last question, which is, did it change history? Was this thing capital I important? Is there a world before it and a world after it? And I actually think it passes this test. I think you look at the smart home, even at large, but especially in smart lighting, there is before Hue and there is after Hue. Yeah, completely. Yeah. In every category of the smart home, too. It's not because it wasn't just about lighting. it was about how it connected to everything else in your home. Like you could unlock your smart lock and your lights would turn on. You could adjust your thermostat and your lights would dim. Like it created, it along with the original Nest thermostat created the current app-connected smart home that we are in today. And yeah, I totally agree. There's before Hue and after Hue. And after Hue was better. Richard, agree or disagree? What are your thoughts? 100% agree. Okay. Yeah, I think the Hue bulb is not going to make it into the Virgin History Hall of Fame, but it's going to like hold a press conference about how mad it is. And there are a lot of people are going to agree. All right. We are done here. Thank you both so much. This has been incredibly fun. We're going to figure out how to get all these lights connected again. It's going to be a great time. Richard, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure. This has been so much fun. Absolutely. Jen, thank you as always. Thank you. Thank you to all of you for watching and listening. And a reminder that the best thing you can do to get all of this is to read and listen to Richard, read The Verge, listen to all of our podcasts, subscribe to The Verge, theverge.com slash subscribe. It's what enables us to do all of this stuff. Thank you so much. We'll see you next time. The Verge in History is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Victoria Barrios, River Branson, Eric Gomez, Owen Grove, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, Andrew Marino, and Alex Parkin. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. Studio support from Matthew Heffrin. Our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland. 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