Out on the bleeding edge of tech hardware with Broadcom's CEO (interview)

Above: Broadcom makes chips for fitness monitoring devices like smart watches.

Image Credit: Broadcom

VB: How many engineers do you have now?

McGregor: We have about 12,000 employees, and I think about 80 percent are engineers, so we have about 10,000 engineers in the company. We’ve gotten a huge amount of feedback to the idea of hackathons. People are raring to go. We wanted to make sure that we got these things out into the distribution channels. Customers got the first ones. It’s fun for schools and things like that, because you can immediately start doing stuff. But the employees are next.

We had one employee take one of these home, duct tape it to his washing machine, and use the accelerometers in it and hack the software a little so that it would beep his phone when the washing machine stopped. He was able to do that in a couple of hours.

What you could do is, you like games and stuff like that. You could get 10 of these things and put them all over your body. Now you have a game controller. You get the software for it and now you can move your hands, move your head, turn your head up and down. It’s all sensored. Put it on your feet. That was one of the things I liked about the original Wii product. It got kids up off the sofa. I don’t know about you, but you play one of those Wii games, you’re winded at the end of it.

VB: What do you think of the Apple Watch? Is that going to kickstart a bigger market?

McGregor: I haven’t seen one yet, so I’ll reserve judgment. Apple is pretty good at creating new product categories, so I wouldn’t count them out. I thought it was interesting that they have a model in gold. Most people under 30 don’t wear a watch at all. They just look at their cell phone. Most people over 40, if they wear a watch it’s gold and has a Swiss brand on it. It’ll be interesting to see how you simultaneously go after both of those demographics.

Above: Broadcom 4K TV

Image Credit: Broadcom

VB: Anything else on your mind?

McGregor: We have all kinds of stuff going on with this 4K transition. The TV space is going to change. Broadcom is basically powering all the set-top boxes and cable and all that technology to enable that. We’re pretty excited. The 4K stuff really does look good. The content will follow reasonably quickly. It’s not going to be the same issue with 3D TVs, where they were hard to install and people hated the glasses. This is just visibly better. Most high-end TVs are going to be 4K pretty quick here, once we get the content. That’s driving a wave of set-top box investment. For gamers it’s going to be visibly much better.

VB: Are you able to see any insight into the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this year, this early?

McGregor: It’s going to be 4K everywhere, 4K content everywhere, and all kinds of different user interfaces for talking to your TV set and waving at your TV set.

VB: What do you think about the entrance from companies like Google or Amazon into the set-top space?

McGregor: It’s all good. There are going to be a lot of different ways to get content. There will be a huge range of over-the-top products to get standard free internet content. Content becomes king here. Who has content, how you get it, who has the rights to it, all that becomes really important.

The premium content is still going to come through protected license boxes, where the decryption technology is controlled. The Disneys and Major League Baseballs and NFLs of the world make a lot of money off that content. They don’t want it casually getting out into the free world. Premium and live content will traditionally go across high-quality digital rights management. The free internet stuff will go over all kinds of stuff. We do both.