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Wired: What's your master plan for global domination?
Riley: Phase one was smarter watches. Phase two, which we're working on now, involves products that upload, download, and collaborate. The MP3 player gets us onto the Net, and we can build new sports experiences once we have these devices networked.
Phase three goes beyond objects to a world where the chips and the network are ubiquitous, where the athlete has total access to information. Nike's the aggregator of the tech, a sort of tech portal.
How will this sports hub work?
Nike becomes the place athletes go to monitor their performance. On your body, you have chips carrying data on your performance, heart rate, biorhythms, and a dozen other things. Once people learn how digital integrates into their lives, a new kind of Nike can cater to individual interests, and can nurture global communities of sports freaks. In 10 years, our customers' athletic and digital lives will be one.
And in the meantime?
The next round of products will allow you to dock with a computer. With the sdm[triax 100, for example, you might share a training log across the Net with a friend. When you bring the watch back to your home base - your gym, your living room, your desktop computer - it communicates with the Web page via a wireless link and automatically compares your stats with your buddy's. It's Nike's job to manage that database, either for a fee or by subscription. Or it could be free as a way for Nike to maintain its relationship with you.
Since 1997, Nike has seen flat sales for the first time in its history. Has the mood changed?
It's become more fiscally conservative. It was in the wonderful mid-1990s time period, when the business jumped from $3 billion to $9 billion, that people were very open to wild new ideas. You'd design a product, write the business plan, and then go to Phil [Knight, company chair] and say, "What do you think?" "Yup, go do it," he'd say. Now we've plateaued at $9 billion and there's a strong emphasis on watching the profit-and-loss line. The brand is open for change right now. With [techlab, we're adding a new component.
Just in time - over the last three years, the swoosh has become a symbol of, among other things, unfair labor practices abroad.
We've taken the brunt of the attack, and we've created higher standards for factories around the world as a result. Overall, it's a positive thing.
Let's talk about your experience at Apple. Why do you think the Newton failed?
That's such a complex thing. We tried to make it a really dynamic computer. It was a portable RISC processor, more powerful than the Mac - it did everything. But we didn't see at the time that we should have stripped out some of it. If we had made three or four different versions of the Newton, I think we would have had a whole different outcome.
How does [techlab avoid the same mistakes?
We're keeping things simple and we're taking it slow. After working on the Newton, I realized that the most successful stuff is simple. But the thing about geeky, techno-savvy people is that they're so deep into it that they can't see simple stuff.
You can see the focus on simplicity in your MP3 player.
It doesn't even have a display; all you're doing is listening to stuff. I don't want to get into serious programming while I'm working out. I also like the adjustments we've made to the typical digital watch - the orientation of the buttons, how the readout looks on the chronometer.
Take us far into the future. Where do you think sports tech is headed?
You're still going to have the basic idea of performance and competition. But now, suddenly, there's an opportunity to track all the data that's lost whenever an athlete performs. There will be a database of info on people who've set records and accomplished huge things in sports.
This summer, we're going to hook up Lance Armstrong to our new heart-rate monitor to show people on www.nike.com how his body reacted during different parts of the race. What if we could do this for anybody and have them effortlessly compare their statistics with Lance Armstrong's? High-profile athletes could put their training data on the Web and our customers could link their devices to check on their own progress.
So will digital gaming become more like sports, and vice versa?
I think the future of gaming will be about reliving the experience of sports. Physical gaming is the best of both worlds - you're watching stuff and getting a workout. It's kind of there now at the gyms where you can surf the Web on treadmills or bicycles. But imagine you could go to a Web site that ties into your entire workout history. Or what if I have a friend who's in a spinning class in Denver, while I'm spinning in California? We set it up to go to the gym at the same time, and I can watch him while I ride and give him shit. Then it's like I'm in this race with him, and I'm cursing at him, telling him how bad he looks.
Is it all one-way, from athlete to computer?
No, I think it's downloading physical experiences, too. Say I want to know what it feels like to slam-dunk the ball like Kevin Garnett, to hold a car at 200 mph around a curve like Michael Shumacher, or to climb Mount Everest without getting killed. Put me in that space. We're on the hairy edge of finding a way to do that.
