A Particularly Exuberant Adolescence
Marco:
Yeah, retweet everything and then let's get going so nobody gets bored and leaves.
Casey:
I think we already lost that battle.
Marco:
So what are we talking about this week?
Casey:
So what are we talking about?
Casey:
Well, this was a big week.
Casey:
And first and foremost, WWDC tickets happened.
Marco:
They did.
Casey:
And that was interesting.
Marco:
It was nothing like we predicted at all.
Marco:
We were completely wrong.
John:
I was right, because I don't know.
John:
But I don't remember what I said.
John:
What did I say last time?
John:
I think I said that I thought I would get a ticket, and I did.
John:
So I was right.
Casey:
Well, how about that?
Casey:
No, I don't know.
Casey:
I saw it going very differently in my head.
Casey:
I mean, I knew it would be quick, but I think I saw someone who had the source that cannot be named that said it was 71 seconds.
Marco:
Yeah, they said it was like somebody, I guess, had dinner with somebody who would know, and they said it was something like that, yeah.
Marco:
That seems reasonable to me.
Casey:
I mean, based on what I saw, that seems right.
Casey:
And that's just, that's insane.
Casey:
So my question, or two questions really to you guys, our two-part question is, one, as has been talked about in our little circle of life ad nauseum, is this sustainable?
Casey:
And two, does Apple give a crap anyway?
Casey:
So Marco, I'm sorry.
John:
I mean, that whole line of reasoning doesn't make any sense to me where
John:
If people are angry about how things went, they decide that it has to be some kind of neglect or malicious neglect on the part of the personified entity that is this company that somehow they don't care.
John:
They care.
Marco:
Almost everyone who has a blog and likes Apple stuff in the last week has written something about WWDC and ideas on either how it could be fixed, whether it needs to be fixed, or what this means in the universe.
Marco:
and uh you know my position is basically that basically agreeing with with john you know and you know john you wrote this great thing about the lottery how you know it basically is it has become a de facto lottery even though it technically isn't one because even if you were there in the very first minute uh it was pretty random whether or not you got a ticket because there are so many server errors as everybody has everybody slammed the server even from the very first few seconds
Marco:
So, you know, it is a lottery now.
Marco:
And this is kind of – isn't that the same way that Google I.O.
Marco:
goes generally?
John:
I've never tried to get a ticket, but it goes fast.
Marco:
Yeah, I think it's similar in that, like, you know, it's basically random.
Marco:
Like, whoever gets – like, the first 5,000 database connections get it, basically, or something like that.
John:
There's no point in that because if there's nothing you can do to increase your odds, then it is a lottery.
John:
I mean, you could say, like, well, there's something you can do to –
John:
Make sure that you have non-zero odds, but you can't do anything to increase them because it's just the luck of the draw.
John:
What hit on the database you happen to get when your CDN refreshes to have the new content.
John:
The only thing you can do is decide to enter or not.
John:
means basically being paranoid for months and then being relieved when you find out it's going to be pre-announced and then sitting there at your computer with hopefully a synchronized clock and reloading the page a bazillion times.
John:
All that annoying effort is essentially you putting your little ticket into the box.
John:
And then everything that happens after that is out of your control.
John:
So it's a lottery.
John:
It's the world's most annoying lottery because if it was a regular lottery and they just said...
John:
Three months ahead of time, put your name in this box if you're interested in WWDC.
John:
Then you'd be like, all right, I did that.
John:
And then there'd be no more.
John:
You'd be like, you'd be wondering if you got it, but you wouldn't have to be sleeping with your phone next to you on loud for months at a time and signing up for alerting services and sitting there at your computer, clicking, clicking, reload.
John:
Like none of that would be required.
John:
That's all just pointless stress for the people involved.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So, I mean, at that point, why not just make it an honest-to-goodness regular lottery where you say, hey, for this week or for this day, we're going to sign you up, and then two days later, we'll draw out of a hat.
Casey:
I mean, I don't know.
Casey:
It seems like what we've got isn't right, and maybe that's just because all of the people who didn't get a ticket have launched onto the internet, like Marco said, and complained about it.
Casey:
But
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It just doesn't feel right to me.
Casey:
And one thing I read was Dan Provost, who is co-founder of Studio Neat, who makes like the Cosmonaut and the Glyph and other cool things like that.
Casey:
He had an interesting post, which I just put in the chat, about how you could do kind of a half lottery, half merit system.
Casey:
This, I believe, he based on your post, John.
Casey:
where he had said, and I'm going to butcher the details because I read it a few days ago, but he said something like, hey, for some marathon, I think it was a New York marathon, you get preference based on seniority, sympathy, the elite, legwork, or charity.
Casey:
And so he said, hey, what if we did that for WWDC where, and his examples were seniority, if you attended the past 10 WWDCs, then you'll more likely get a ticket or maybe be guaranteed to get a ticket.
Casey:
Or sympathy.
Casey:
If you lose the lottery for three consecutive years, well, womp, womp, we'll give you a ticket.
Casey:
Or elite or leg worth or charity.
Casey:
There's many ways in which you could say, hey, if you apply, if you're one of the 100 or 1,000 people that apply to these categories, we'll give you a ticket.
Casey:
But everyone else, you're going in a regular lottery, tough noogies.
Casey:
And I don't know that that's right, but I thought it was a very interesting kind of halfway to do it.
John:
I think there's a lot of problems with that.
John:
First, it's not that it increases your odds if you fulfill those things.
John:
It was grouped into guaranteed and non-guaranteed.
John:
And the guaranteed people got tickets and non-guaranteed were all put into lottery, right?
John:
I think that's right.
John:
Not the specifics of that, but the problem with having any type of things that human beings can do to guarantee a ticket is that...
John:
All you're doing is shoving the race into another realm.
John:
20,000 people would do what it takes to be guaranteed.
John:
And then it would be like, okay, well, to be guaranteed, you have to climb Mount Everest and save a child from a burning building.
John:
I have no doubt that all those people who are sitting there hitting reload would do the things required to be guaranteed.
John:
And if you oversubscribe the quote-unquote guaranteed pool, well, then you're back to the same stupid problem again.
John:
That's the problem I see.
John:
It's like...
John:
Uh, you know, the, the marathon, I guess the marathon helps a little bit because inherently it's a difficult thing to do.
John:
So if some of the guarantees are like run a whole bunch of marathons and that's perhaps maybe if that was the actual requirement to be guaranteed for WWDC ticket, you have to run three marathons in a year certified, you know, like obviously it's not going to be, it doesn't make any sense, but I'm saying if, if the things I tried to imagine what those things could possibly be.
John:
And I think of the post went into them as well.
John:
Like what could the criteria be for getting a guaranteed ticket?
John:
Uh,
John:
If they're physically possible, people will do them because there's that much demand, I think.
Marco:
Well, I think it's worth asking.
Marco:
A lot of these systems to try to prioritize people or give certain people an easier time getting tickets, a lot of them have assumed that loyalty is one of the big factors that matters.
Marco:
Like the seniority, you've gone to X past ones and you guarantee a ticket now or whatever.
Marco:
But isn't that kind of counter to WWDC and what it's for in Apple's mind?
Marco:
I mean, like, Apple loves having a very high percentage of first-timers there because that really shows they're bringing new people into the ecosystem.
Marco:
They're training new people.
Marco:
You know, there is some repetition between consecutive years of WWDC.
Marco:
And so, you know, a lot of people, even before this crazy sellout,
Marco:
A lot of people who I read or who I'm friends with were saying that they only buy a ticket like every other year because the repetition just doesn't make it worth it for them.
Marco:
And from Apple's perspective, they want as many people as possible to have experienced WWDC so that they become better developers and become more loyal or more likely to do things Apple's preferred ways.
Marco:
So Apple really doesn't want a bunch of repeat visitors.
Marco:
And so it's been...
Marco:
And we've had all the years up till now, or not including this year, but all the previous years up till this year, if you really cared a whole lot about getting a ticket, you could get one every single year.
Marco:
And that's why you have people who have been there for 10 years or more in a row.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Maybe that's over now.
Marco:
Maybe the idea, and I would say probably definitely it's over now, that the idea that if you just really want to take it really badly that you'll pretty much get one, that's over.
Marco:
And that's probably never coming back.
Marco:
And maybe that's a problem Apple doesn't want to solve.
John:
yeah that's you know with those conditions even if there weren't enough like like i said which i think there would be there would be enough people willing to do whatever it takes to be guaranteed and you would back to the same problem but assume that's not true assume that you really you really did come up with some kind of criteria that would not be oversubscribed uh then it's a question of what what do you pick what what conditions do you set for the people to be there and like you said it's not at all clear like
John:
If you ask each individual possible attendee, they'll have like, oh, I think it should be people who have been loyal and have been there many years or whatever because they should be rewarded for their loyalty.
John:
And then Apple might say, well, we want fresh blood because we want people who haven't seen these things before.
John:
And there's a whole bunch of different constituencies who want different things out of the attendees.
John:
And ultimately, Apple would be the one to set these rules.
John:
And I'm pretty sure the rules that they would pick would not make the people who are complaining about not getting tickets happy because those are mostly –
John:
Uh, you know, the people who have been there year after year and, and, you know, Apple would be ruining their, their, you know, old boys club or whatever of just like, we see the same people every single year.
John:
Uh, I think it's a moot point though, because I think there are no conditions they could possibly set that would not be oversubscribed.
John:
The only, the only way out of this I can see for the people who want to see all their friends at the same time every year in San Francisco, uh,
John:
is what's kind of been happening with the alternative conference taking place alongside WWDC.
John:
So sure, everybody go out there.
John:
Obviously, the hotels can probably hold everyone, right?
John:
So everyone go out there, whatever week WWDC is announced, and attend whatever conference you want, which may be WWDC or maybe something else, and see all your friends at night.
John:
Because there's nothing, Apple can't stop you from you and a bunch of people you know all going to the same city for the same week and hanging out at night and going to bars.
John:
You can still have that part of it.
John:
You just can't have the part where you're all in the same conference hall if there's 20,000 of you and it only holds 5,000.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And I think, Marco, you touched on an interesting point a minute ago, which is WWDC kind of is two-headed in the sense that, to me, part of it is evangelizing the platform.
Casey:
And by that, I mean grabbing new people and encouraging people who are new to the platform.
Casey:
And then part of it is just the general knowledge transfer of here's best practices, here's what's new.
Casey:
And it's hard to serve both of those audiences well, in general, doubly so when you only have, what is it, like 5,000 or 5,500 tickets.
Casey:
And so I don't know where they can go from here, but I think making WWDC bigger is probably not the answer.
Casey:
And I think, like John said, I mean, maybe it's just that the alternative things –
Casey:
Take over.
Casey:
I mean, I know the three of us were pretty much bent on being there no matter what.
Casey:
And that's what's happening.
Casey:
We're all going to be there.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
It's just it's hard.
Casey:
I don't know where to go from here.
Marco:
That's a really good question.
Marco:
I don't know either.
Marco:
I mean, I don't.
Marco:
All the suggestions of scaling up the conference and adding capacity, renting out the other Moscone's and everything, all of those suggestions sound like they would ruin it.
Marco:
I think that there's going to be a whole lot of people who just go out there and try to do alternative conferences themselves and everything, but I don't really see that...
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I guess we'll see this year, but I don't really see that catching on.
Marco:
I don't know how it could catch on.
Marco:
I don't think it's going to reach critical mass.
Marco:
I don't think enough people will go out there without a ticket.
Marco:
I don't know, but we'll see.
John:
I think, I mean, there's no solution to make WWDC what it was before, but there is, I think, a solution to the overarching problem, which is, like, how do you solve the demand for WWDC aside from the obvious raising ticket prices a lot, which will make nobody happy.
John:
But hey, that would solve it.
John:
A million dollars a ticket.
John:
Oh, plenty of time to get tickets now.
John:
Apple needs to communicate more with the developer community throughout the year in some way that at least approximates the fashion that they communicate at WWDC.
John:
Because what happens at WWDC is you have a chance to do in person.
John:
Obviously, they can't always simulate that, although tech talks help.
John:
Informal direct human communication, non-corporate communication, not communicating through official channels in written form with DTS, not burning one of your support tickets, not talking to the app review board, not communicating through button presses in iTunes Connect.
John:
All those other ways that developers have to scream into the void and throw their bugs into the black hole that is RadarWeb and the whole nine yards –
John:
Apple developers crave human contact.
John:
And if Apple can communicate more with human beings during the year in a way that satisfies some of that itch, like, so you've got some thorny technical problem, let there be some chance in hell that you're going to be able to get the type of support you can get in a WWDC lab.
John:
Talk to an actual human.
John:
in an informal way i mean i guess labs are formal too but just like that's the reason people are dying to go to wwc because that one that that one 15 minute exchange they have pays for the whole trip right and if apple was i'm not saying you have to be super duper like engaged with the community and be something that they're not they can still be apple but they they're too far over in the other direction of being we don't talk to you at all except for wwc and that's your one chance to come in contact with the insides
John:
of apple and that's why everyone needs to be there everyone wants to be there we got you know if they were just a little bit more open as a company in their communications with developers and a little bit less rigid i think that is the only thing you can do to tamp down the incredible demand for wwdc
Casey:
Yeah, I know.
Casey:
It's tough because how do you, like you said, stay Apple and stay secretive while doing something more than WWDC?
Casey:
And we'll see how the Tech Talks go this year.
Casey:
I didn't go to any last year.
Casey:
You guys didn't either, did you?
John:
I couldn't.
John:
I've been to Tech Talks before, and they really are useful.
John:
First of all, they have a couple things over at WWDC.
John:
One, they're more likely to be close to you wherever you happen to live because they have them.
John:
They come to you more or less.
John:
I mean, at least, you know, it's closer than San Francisco, you know.
John:
They have them on different continents.
John:
They have them on different coasts.
John:
And two is the one I went to was free for registered developers.
John:
I don't think – is that still the case?
John:
It was free for like if you paid for the $500 select program or whatever.
John:
I don't know if they're still free, but I have assumed they're not $1,600.
John:
But they were really like a miniature WWDC, and you got to talk to a smaller subset of the people, but it was usually like –
John:
You know, they would have the head of graphics and imaging instead of the head of graphics and imaging plus five engineers from graphics and imaging.
John:
So, you know, you get to talk to the big wig, maybe not the other people, maybe one of those people is the person who implemented the particular API that you're dealing with.
John:
And oh, well, but it's better than nothing.
Marco:
Yeah, I went to one, I think, two or three years ago.
Marco:
I think three years ago, they came to New York.
Marco:
The last year, I couldn't get in because it filled up too fast.
Marco:
And now people are setting up alert systems for the Tech Talk availability, which is hilarious.
Marco:
But I went to the one in New York three years ago, and it was really good.
Marco:
And it was...
Marco:
It was exactly like a one-day WWDC light, and it was free.
Marco:
And there were, I don't know, a few hundred people there, and it was really, really good.
Marco:
But doing those tech talks is a huge drain on their evangelism team and on the engineers who have to go with them.
Marco:
And from what I could tell, like last year's one, it was just the evangelism team that did the majority of it, and it was just tons and tons and tons of work, and it burned them out like crazy.
Marco:
And so I don't really see Apple doing those much more frequently.
Marco:
Maybe they'll do it every year now instead of just every few years.
Marco:
But even that doesn't really solve the problem that they're going around to smaller places, doing a smaller conference for less time, serving a few hundred people in each place.
Marco:
I mean, that doesn't really solve the problem.
John:
I feel like it also ties up, it disproportionately ties up a small group of important people at Apple because the crew that does the tech talks is like the developer evangelism team plus some key people who do the presentations for each section.
John:
It's unfair to lean on that group and have them tour the world because that becomes practically their job.
John:
If you really wanted to scale that up, you're taking these important people and making them
John:
not be able to do their other job because they're spending weeks or months out of the year traveling the world and giving presentations.
John:
I think this was in my WC Lottery article.
John:
I think you have to scale up the organization.
John:
You have to decide that one of the important things that Abilene needs to do is communicate with developers.
John:
Previously, we accomplished that goal by really dedicating the company to this one-week conference, and that was getting the job done.
John:
Now it's not anymore because there's just too many developers.
John:
So we need to adjust our organization to have more people dedicated to just education and evangelism, and more people who part of their time is dedicated to that, which just means basically you need more people bottom line like
John:
And if you decide that's important to the company, you can hire for it.
John:
You can hire people who want to just be like evangelists and technical, you know, face of the company type people who are also could be programmers but don't want to be.
John:
Hire people who are okay with spending a week or two weeks out of the year doing this part of, you know, doing WWDC type activities and the rest of the year as a developer.
John:
And then still have the people who are basically developers all year except for the one WWDC week.
John:
Like you just...
John:
If it's important to the company, you have to staff for it.
John:
And it seems like what they've been doing now is take the engineering organization we have that we need to make our products, and one week out of the year, shut them off and send them to San Francisco.
John:
And that's not enough yet for the developer community they have now.
John:
They need more.
Marco:
But my position in my blog post... I love how we're basically talking about our blog post.
Marco:
My position was more that you can do all these things.
Marco:
You can address the demand.
Marco:
You can try to add more developer relations throughout the year, add more developer resources, more videos, more interaction, etc.
Marco:
But if this is the one big one, if this is the king of the Apple developer events for the whole year...
Marco:
and every year it happens, and it's this huge event, and tons of people go, and Apple starts it by jazzing everyone up, by announcing a new version of iOS and showing it off.
Marco:
It's still going to be the big one, and that's still going to be where people are going to want to go.
Marco:
And that's going to be the one where everyone picks.
Marco:
If they can only go to one Apple conference a year, they'll try to go to that one.
Marco:
So I don't really think that any of these efforts are going to...
Marco:
necessarily address that problem.
Marco:
They will address other problems.
John:
Why do you think they'll want to go to that one thing a year and not – like what are they getting out of it that they need to be in San Francisco for that week?
John:
Because if it's just the seeing the other people, then that could be solved by just everyone going there and doing whatever.
Casey:
No, but it's the new shiny thing.
Casey:
I get to be there in person for the new shiny thing.
John:
Well, that's a separate issue.
John:
I saw a lot of people saying, they wouldn't have such demand for WWDC if they just separated the keynote or whatever.
John:
My impression is that...
John:
First of all, everyone who goes to the WDC does not get to see the keynote in person.
John:
I'm not sure how many people who don't attend the conference know this, but there's just not enough room in that room.
John:
What does the room hold?
John:
2,000 Presidio?
Marco:
When it's full, I think it's more like three or four.
John:
Right, but there's 5,500 people there at least, right?
John:
And so not everyone fits in that room, all right?
John:
So just because you get a ticket doesn't mean you're guaranteed to go in there.
John:
And second, like, press is a portion of that, and they get press passes to go just to the keynote.
John:
They don't get to go to the rest of the conference.
John:
It seems to me that, like, I know that's kind of a draw, and that's the most publicly visible thing, but there's a whole week-long conference filled with people, and...
John:
You know, the press people who are, I don't know, what percentage of the keynote do you think is press?
John:
Maybe 2%, 3%?
John:
I don't know what percent it is, but those people are not there for the rest of the week.
John:
They're gone, they're off writing their stories, they're interviewing developers, doing whatever.
John:
People want to go to WWDC because it's a week-long conference and they go to the sessions, or at least they go to some of them, or they go to the labs or they do something.
John:
if you took away the keynote entirely and just, this is just a developer thing, you would scare away the, like the press wouldn't be there, but they're not the ones buying up all the week long tickets anyway.
John:
I feel like if you separated out the keynote, there are announcements like, because who's, who's spending $1,600 and a week in San Francisco just to see something they could see live on video.
John:
And that, you know, like you're not getting anything out of being there, especially now that Steve jobs has gone and you don't have any celebrity.
John:
It's just Tim cook.
John:
He stands on a stage.
John:
He announces things.
John:
You can see it from anywhere.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You get the news in real time.
John:
I don't think that's why the tickets are selling out.
John:
I think developers want to go to WWDC.
Marco:
There certainly is a portion of that.
Marco:
There are people who work for smaller blogs or sites, and Apple Press doesn't give them press passes because they don't care about them or they don't like them or whatever.
Marco:
And they just usually try to buy tickets too.
Marco:
I see a lot of people doing that.
Marco:
But the problem is that might be a couple hundred people at most.
Marco:
out of the 6,000 people who get tickets.
Marco:
So it's not that big of a slice.
Marco:
And then there are certainly people who buy tickets who aren't press and who aren't developers necessarily, or who aren't full-time developers at least, who kind of like they buy it because they just kind of want to be there, or they try to get their company to buy it because they just want to be there because it's kind of cool.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But again, I don't think that's a whole lot of people relative to this massive pool of developers who want to be there.
Marco:
So these little subsets are there of people who, depending on how you define it, may not deserve a ticket or might be wasting a ticket.
Marco:
But anybody who's been there in the last couple of years, you know that even after Keynote Day,
Marco:
All the sessions are still crammed full.
Marco:
Like, all the popular sessions, like, it's not that everyone just buys a ticket to see the keynote and then leaves.
Marco:
Some people do, but all the sessions are still packed full, and you can't even get into some of them on, you know, Thursday, you know, still, you know, well into the week.
Marco:
So it isn't, there are people who do that, but it's not a meaningful quantity.
John:
Like I said on a past show, I think the attendance does taper off during the week, but it's mostly because every person doesn't want to go to every session.
John:
So how many of the people who clamor for a WWC tickets are desperate to go into the Cortex session?
John:
Maybe not a lot of them, and maybe that room isn't that full, and maybe people have hangovers and sleep in late in the whole nine yards, right?
John:
Because it gets distributed in a natural way.
John:
The keynote is a big rush because anyone who wants to be at WWC is interested in what they have to say, and hey, you're in there, so maybe you'll...
John:
wake up early and go but some people don't even bother waiting in the keynote line they're like i'll just see it in the overflow room or i'll just sleep late or whatever it does thin out and that's why i mentioned on a past show that you could oversell it by a couple hundred to squeeze in a little little tiny bit of extra capacity because what i definitely didn't want was you know expand the conference to be much much bigger so maybe you could squeeze in one or 200 more and i bet people who don't have tickets would love it if they expanded it just by 50 100 more people as long as they were one of the 50 or 100 more right uh
John:
so like but i you know but you're right like i think it's mostly developers i've never met anyone at the conference who was was a lucky loop because i've only gone for the past two years and the past two years have been hectic and there's no one like well you know i'm not really into it but my boss said he would pay for me to go so i decided no there's no casual wwc ticket buyers anymore uh and for the past two years i don't think there have been because they saw it too fast and if you were that casual you probably weren't like i've never met anyone who was there who did not have a legitimate reason to be there either press or
John:
or a developer.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Anything else on WWDC?
Casey:
I keep stumbling all over the words.
Casey:
I hate the term DubDub.
Marco:
It's a terrible awkward name.
Casey:
I hate DubDub.
Casey:
It just sounds so silly.
Marco:
I can't do those trendy abbreviations.
Marco:
I still say guacamole and not guac.
Marco:
I can't do those things.
John:
Nobody says guac.
John:
Who says guac besides waiters and waitresses?
John:
You'd be surprised.
Marco:
You would be surprised.
Marco:
I've not heard anyone say that.
Marco:
Anyway, way better than trendy abbreviations, this episode is sponsored by Squarespace.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
So on a quick side note, Erin makes an unbelievable guacamole.
Marco:
Does she call it guac?
Casey:
I don't think so.
Marco:
I can't say that anymore.
Marco:
I feel dirty even saying that.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
So, Marco, did you do anything interesting last week by any chance?
Marco:
Well, I announced something interesting.
Marco:
I did it the week before, really.
Casey:
Fine.
Casey:
What did you announce last week, Marco?
Marco:
I announced that I sold Instapaper.
Casey:
Well, why'd you go and do that?
Marco:
So I discussed it at length for about an hour on Dan Benjamin's quit show on 5x5.
Marco:
So I don't want to go over it too much here.
Marco:
But, you know, the gist of it was...
Marco:
that I was really getting tired of working on it, and the work was growing far beyond what I could do.
Marco:
So the combination of those two things was basically fatal, and I just couldn't do it anymore.
Marco:
And so I was seeing for like a year that I was falling behind, and it isn't...
Marco:
It isn't really about the competition, necessarily.
Marco:
A lot of people have asked me that.
Marco:
It's not really about the competition.
Marco:
It's about Instapaper.
Marco:
And what I mean by that is...
Marco:
Instapaper's problems were self-inflicted.
Marco:
You know, my problems with Instapaper were that I wasn't keeping up with my own features.
Marco:
I wasn't maintaining my own features well enough.
Marco:
And I wasn't able to move forward with my own ideas.
Marco:
And so, you know, it doesn't help that there was a lot of competition in the last couple years.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
That's not really why I wanted to get out of it.
Marco:
And the main reason why I wanted to get out of it was because I couldn't keep up with it anymore myself.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
And a lot of people might think that it's for podcasts or for the magazine or whatever else.
Marco:
And it really isn't that.
Marco:
People always dramatically overestimate how much work the magazine is for me.
Marco:
In reality, the editor, Glenn Fleischman, does like 95% of the work for the magazine.
Marco:
I work about half a day every two weeks on it.
Marco:
So it really isn't a huge time sink.
Marco:
You know, it isn't about that necessarily.
Marco:
It isn't about competition for my time.
Marco:
It's that even when I was motivated to spend 100% of my time doing Instapaper, that amount of effort is no longer enough to drive the service, to keep it even just simply maintained, let alone moving anything forward and making any big updates and doing any kind of major upgrades and redesigns and anything else.
Marco:
So I think...
Marco:
So what I wanted was a staff.
Marco:
What I needed was a staff.
Marco:
But I've been doing this for five years, and I'm a terrible manager.
Marco:
So the combination of a little bit of burnout, a little bit of wanting to try new things, and knowing that I would be terrible at managing a staff, I realized that that was a terrible idea for me to hire people directly.
Marco:
um so the much better idea was to sell a company to somebody who would staff it and who would keep it going and it took me a while to figure out you know how i wanted to do that who i wanted to sell it to um but you know as i wrote in the post like one night at like 1 30 a.m i jumped out of bed because i realized oh yeah i should sell it to betaworks that would be perfect
Marco:
And yeah, so I got out of bed, emailed John Borthwick at Betaworks because I knew him already.
Marco:
And I went in there like a few days later and we talked about it.
Marco:
And we basically had the deal like within a week, I think.
Marco:
It was pretty quick.
Casey:
So you haven't divorced yourself of it.
Casey:
And that's a poor choice of words, I'll be the first to tell you.
Casey:
But you haven't really divorced yourself of it.
Casey:
Well, you're not going to entirely to begin with.
Casey:
And how much have you really been able to let go so far?
Marco:
Well, so, you know, financially, I still own a stake in the company.
Marco:
It's just a small stake now.
Marco:
It's no longer the majority stake.
Marco:
It's no longer 100% how it used to be.
Marco:
So, you know, now I still own a small stake in the company and I'm still going to advise them kind of indefinitely, you know, whenever they have questions or if they want guidance on, you know, what I think they should do with a certain thing or decision or feature, I'm going to be advising them basically indefinitely.
Marco:
But my day-to-day role is going to be gone.
Marco:
And
Marco:
that is in the process of being migrated right now.
Marco:
Like, you know, yesterday I went in there and gave him a whole bunch of passwords and usernames and everything.
Marco:
And, and we're, you know, we're doing, uh, doing all those transfers and changeovers this week, basically.
Marco:
Uh, so I expect that, that, that my, my major stress and major responsibilities should be pretty much gone by next week.
Marco:
And, uh, so that's great.
Marco:
I'm very happy about that.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
I already feel like much of the stress has been lifted because the end is in sight.
Marco:
I've handed over the keys.
Marco:
The deal is done.
Marco:
Everything's signed.
Marco:
Nobody can go back on anything.
Marco:
I can't change my mind anymore.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
It's effectively done.
Marco:
Now we're just executing it.
Marco:
Everything on paper is done.
Marco:
And so that relieves a whole bunch of my stress and my guilt.
Marco:
I spent most of the last year not being able to keep up and having no idea how I would solve this problem.
Marco:
And feeling very, very guilty about it.
Marco:
Especially every time somebody would send me a Twitter message or an email saying how much of a dick I was being by not updating Instapaper or how neglectful I was being by ignoring their bug report or their badly parsed site report.
Marco:
They were right.
Marco:
And that made me feel even more guilty.
Marco:
And so all that guilt and all that stress has now been lifted because I've solved the problem.
Marco:
I have now established a path forward for Instapaper.
Marco:
I have given it a staff in my crazy way.
Marco:
And so I no longer have to bear all that guilt and all that weight and all that stress of maintaining and upgrading this service indefinitely myself with no help.
John:
Do you want some more stress?
John:
Because I have some more for you.
Marco:
Sure, yeah.
John:
This is a question that I don't think Dan asked.
John:
I listened to the quit episode that you were on.
John:
How do you feel now about your prospects for – because you mentioned on Quit that people also overestimate what a big moneymaker the magazine is.
John:
Not that it's not doing well or anything, but just that it's not a completely replacement for Instapaper was the impression I got listening to you.
John:
So the question is, how do you feel your chances are now you're, now you're sort of on the line to, okay, well, Instapaper is not gone, but fading away, right?
John:
You have to make the next great thing that's going to be as big as Instapaper was.
John:
And,
John:
Do you have any fear that that is going to be harder for you to do in 2013 than it was when Instapaper was launched in, what, 2004 or 2005 or something?
John:
Eight, seven.
John:
I don't know.
John:
But anyway, iOS ecosystem was young back then.
John:
And in any realm, there was less competition than there is now.
John:
So now you are on the hook to come up with, because you said what you want to do is write an iOS app.
John:
You are now on the hook to come up with an iOS app that is going to be at least as successful as Instapaper.
John:
Do you feel any pressure about doing that?
Marco:
so in summary do you have second album syndrome right um there is certainly pressure there no question but what i've also done since i launched insta paper uh was now i have a much better red blog than before i'm making good money from my blog um i have a podcast with you guys and we're making good money from the podcast and we are you're not sharing with us don't tell casey
Marco:
Some of us are making good money from the podcast.
Marco:
Oh, you guys.
Marco:
And you should see this crazy invoicing system I built, by the way, but we'll talk about that when it's done.
Marco:
So I have other income now is what I'm saying, and that helps a lot.
Marco:
So rather than having one big thing that I'm relying on,
Marco:
To me, it's way less stressful to have a few smaller things.
Marco:
And I'm diversified.
Marco:
My income is diversified, which for most people, that is not the case.
Marco:
It can't be the case.
Marco:
Most people have one job, and that provides all their income, and that's it.
Marco:
And I've been there, and it's very stressful for me.
Marco:
I always say that financially, I'm very risk-averse.
Marco:
And I also don't like not being in control of my own destiny.
Marco:
And so whenever I have everything coming from one source, that actually adds more stress.
Marco:
So I have these diverse sources now.
Marco:
And so I'm not constantly worried that whatever I do next won't live up to Instapaper because it doesn't need to because I have other income to pad it.
Marco:
That being said, the magazine is a special case because the magazine is not a regular app.
Marco:
Nobody buys the magazine because of the app.
Marco:
They buy it for the content.
Marco:
And the magazine also has crazy costs associated with running it because you're doing all this paying of authors and everything and paying the editors and paying for pictures.
Marco:
There's constant ongoing costs.
Marco:
It's not like an app where you can invest a couple of weeks worth of high cost and high time investment and then coast for a few months while it makes money.
Marco:
The magazine I have to run constantly.
Marco:
It's on a fixed schedule of effort.
John:
But it's recurring revenue, unlike the app.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
However, you know, and I thought at first when I was thinking about doing that, I thought that would be a goldmine.
Marco:
But it turns out that the reason recurring revenue was there for Newsstand is because it has to be.
Marco:
Because it's almost impossible to run something like this without it because the costs are so high.
Marco:
As I said, with software, you can put a bunch of effort in and then stop putting effort in or shift to putting minimal effort in for six months and let that profit build up and rake in all the cash.
John:
Well, that gets back to your potentially warped view of the iOS app store in that, yeah, you can do that if you have a really successful product.
John:
Most people, they launch, they get one little blip on launch day, and then it drops to zero.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And they can't ghost for six months because they're like, oh, I just put it all that time, and no one wants to buy my app.
Marco:
Well, I did find, though, with Instapaper over the years, I did find that update frequency didn't really impact sales as much as you'd think.
Marco:
There's a whole lot of apps out there that hardly ever get updated or that get frequent but very, very minor updates.
Marco:
There's a whole lot of apps out there that are making money doing very, very well or at least moderately well
Marco:
without having tons of effort poured into them constantly.
Marco:
It really depends on the app and depends on the market it's in and all that stuff.
John:
I'm not saying that you need to have updates every couple months, although I recently saw people declaring NetBot as a dead application because it hadn't been updated in two months.
John:
But anyway, my point is that regardless of updates...
John:
you you're hoping that you know the only way way you can coast for six months on sales is if you have any sales after after three weeks if your sales are not at zero you know what i mean like if you launch an app and it goes out there and a couple people buy it who are interested in it and it just doesn't appeal to anyone else that you know there's no more sales for you and doesn't matter what you do to update it because maybe you built the wrong app or whatever like that's what i'm getting at with the pressure of like even if it's not financial pressure just in terms of
John:
You know, the idea that you're looking for something that people are really going to want to buy, that there's not 100 of already out there, that's going to be something that, you know, you're going to put a certain amount of effort in, and you're going to hope that, at the very least, enough people buy it to make it for the effort that you just put into it.
John:
And then what you're hoping for is that you get much more than that, that you're able to, like you said, you know...
John:
put it into maintenance mode, get a bunch of sales, maybe work on the next major version farther down the line.
John:
Like, you know, like I said, Instapaper was a very, very, very successful product that a lot of people wanted that was unique at the time.
John:
And even after it was unique, people still wanted it because you did such a good job on it and everything like, and now, now you're, I don't know if you, I, maybe I'm feeling fresher for you.
John:
I feel like you are on the hook to come up with another hit app, regardless of the finances, like maybe fine.
John:
It's a free app and you never charge for it.
John:
I know you wouldn't do that, but yeah.
John:
You know, like because you are associated with like you are associated with like one of the pillars of the iOS application world.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
And if the next thing you come out with is nursing clock 2.0 and 10 people buy it, it's going to be disappointing.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, and, you know, I don't.
Marco:
I don't really know what to expect with whatever my next app ends up being.
Marco:
I have two or three ideas that I'm deciding between, and one's leading the way, so I'm probably going to go with that.
Marco:
And I'm probably not even going to keep it secret for long, but I don't know.
Marco:
It's still secret now until I decide, at least.
Marco:
But I think...
Marco:
I don't know what to expect in the market because Instapaper sales over the last few months have been pretty soft relative to past sales.
Marco:
But I think that's because the app has been kind of in disrepair.
Marco:
I really haven't updated it in a long time.
Marco:
My last official update I think was February or something.
Marco:
But the last meaningful update I think was December.
Marco:
It's been a while.
Marco:
That might have even been the last shipped one.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It's been a while.
Marco:
And, um, you can even see like on GitHub as, as I was doing the handover, I looked at my commit history and it's really sad.
Marco:
Um, but you know, I think, um, so, you know, my sales haven't been awesome the last few months.
Uh,
Marco:
Part of that, though, could be that Apple hasn't released any new iOS devices in the last few months.
Marco:
Every spring until now has had a new iPad in it, and that always has boosted sales.
Marco:
It's hard to tell why sales were soft the last couple of months or why they might not have been or whatever.
Marco:
It's very hard to tell with iOS because it's always been a roller coaster.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
With the exception of the last few months, Instapaper's sales were solid the entire rest of its history.
Marco:
They were really solid.
Marco:
And so I have to wonder, if I release something new,
Marco:
Will it do as well as Instapaper was doing in the last few months because the market's so saturated?
Marco:
Or will it have some kind of massive explosion of income because all those people who were buying Instapaper over the years, they now have another app they can buy?
Marco:
What I mean is Instapaper never had upgrade revenue.
Marco:
And so now I have all those people who I never got upgrade revenue from.
Marco:
Not that they would automatically buy whatever I make.
Marco:
I mean, there's some of those people, but not a crazy amount.
John:
Well, they would have all bought Nursing Clock if that was true.
Right.
Marco:
But there's going to be... I don't know how big the market really is firsthand today.
Marco:
If I launch something new today, I don't know.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
It's going to be hard to tell until I actually just do it.
Marco:
It's going to be hard to tell how many people there are sitting around looking to buy new apps because I've really only addressed them slowly over time as they've trickled in, as they've bought new devices and everything.
John:
Well, the magazine is a good example because it's not entirely unrelated to Instapaper, even though it's a newsstand app and it's a different business model and it's just different.
John:
But it's addressing an audience of people who are interested in reading things on their iOS devices.
John:
And, you know, made by the same person with a similar aesthetic.
John:
So that's going to, you know, if you like Instapaper, you probably like the magazine.
John:
And, you know, just in terms of the application and typography and all that stuff.
John:
So that was kind of like a natural sibling application.
John:
And it's the type of thing where you feel like you have if you have a built in audience of like fans of your products and you go off and make, you know, again, nursing clock or like a random game or something.
John:
Maybe the audience that loved Instapaper, maybe they like games, maybe they don't.
John:
Maybe they're a lactating mother, maybe they're not.
John:
But with the magazine, it's like, oh, well, you probably like reading stuff, and here's another way for you to read even more stuff, and that works.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I think having a built-in audience helps, but you also have to know your audience a little bit.
John:
I'm sure you wish this, too.
John:
You had better information about the people who are buying your applications and how they found them and all those other things you've complained about so many other times that you don't have about
John:
Where do the Instapaper buyers come from?
John:
How do they come to you?
John:
And how satisfied are they?
John:
And what aspects of Instapaper do they like and not like?
John:
And all these things that you wish you knew about your customers.
John:
And all you see is just a number that hopefully makes a nice graph that goes up or at least stays level at a high level.
Marco:
The magazine is not a good indicator because, as I said, people don't judge it based on it being an app.
Marco:
They judge its content because it's conceptually a magazine.
Marco:
Nobody really judges paper magazines based on the quality of the paper they're printed on.
John:
Whoa.
John:
Well, don't sell the magazine app short because so many people, myself included, have rejected electronic versions of content that they otherwise find interesting because the applications are so awful.
John:
And you, by not making an awful application, like that's part of the Instapaper brand of like, your whole thing was I can make that awful website that it's impossible to read nice and readable for you.
John:
And the magazine is nice and readable.
John:
And I think that is really a factor because...
John:
There are publications I read in paper that I refuse to use their iOS apps because they're terrible and slow and bulky and want to download 700 megabyte issues and all those disgusting things that are not an issue with the magazine app.
Marco:
Yeah, but most people – like, I mean, the magazine app, no matter how good I make it, you're only going to be using it for maybe an hour every two weeks.
John:
Yeah, it's mostly like a lack of a negative instead of like, oh, a big positive.
John:
But I think the lack of a negative is standout because the other people competing in this field have such big negatives in that area.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But, you know, it's just –
Marco:
What I'm saying is I don't think it represents the app market very well because people don't judge it as an app.
Marco:
They judge it as content.
Marco:
And that's a very different business.
Casey:
I think to John's point, it's both, but it's more about the content than it is about the app.
Casey:
Because, I mean, if the app was a steaming turd, nobody would buy it.
Marco:
Well, that's not true, though, because look at all the Conde Nast apps.
Casey:
Well, and I was going to say, you know, maybe your fans, however you define that group, be that one or 1,000 or 1 million, maybe some of them would buy it, but presumably nobody else.
John:
Well, Condé Nast has the built-in audience of the people who are interested, you know, from the paper world of whatever magazine they're shilling their bad...
John:
Yeah.
John:
and despite their terrible applications people will come to that so content really is driving those things and they're fighting their way through the applications but for me and for more tech savvy people if i even if i like the content there's just a limit to what i can tolerate from these applications before i say you know it's actually better for me to just get a paper version right but i i think it's probably fair to say that you might be a little bit more critical than than the average person
John:
Well, I mean, the 700 megabyte thing with, like, if you're interested in Wired or whatever, Wired is a name brand that existed before iOS that people want.
John:
But there's a limit.
John:
Like, you know, people just can't wait for that much stuff to download and their iOS devices fill up.
John:
And my wife had that problem with newsstand because she reads a bunch of magazines in newsstand.
John:
And the issues are huge.
John:
And she has, you know, 32 gigabyte iOS devices and they fill up.
John:
And it's like, oh, now she knows she just has to go to newsstand and, you know, delete out old stuff.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And it's because these things are gigantic, these magazines that should not be this big.
Marco:
Yeah, but you know what?
Marco:
The reason why they are that big is because in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't matter.
Marco:
Because in the grand scheme of things, as you said, she's had these problems with these apps.
Marco:
And as I'm sure she experienced, they're not that great to use.
Marco:
The reading experience isn't that great.
Marco:
But she still subscribes because they're not being judged as apps.
Marco:
They're being judged as magazines.
John:
Well, I mean, it's a lot of it's carryover from name brands.
John:
Just think of The Daily that didn't have a pre-existing name brand, had an awful application that people didn't like.
John:
And you could say, oh, The Daily's content wasn't as good.
John:
Is The Daily's content not as good as People Magazine?
John:
It's probably about the same or USA Today or whatever.
John:
It's just that people in USA Today were names that existed before iOS, but The Daily was not.
John:
And that means a lot.
Casey:
Yeah, but Marco Arment was a name before the magazine.
Casey:
And so I think to some degree, I think you did trade on your name.
Casey:
And that's not a bad thing.
John:
Oh, I definitely did.
Casey:
You should.
Casey:
And so I'm curious to see with whatever comes next, assuming it's not Nursing Clock 2, how that ends up.
Casey:
I did have one other question for you.
Casey:
Out of curiosity, maybe you don't have a good answer for this, but what has surprised you since the announcement other than the absolutely hysterical at replies, many of which you retweeted?
Casey:
Oh, they were great.
Casey:
I was dying laughing all of whatever it was Thursday, Friday.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
watching all of them but what has surprised you i mean when was your first really good night's sleep was it immediately after you opened communication with betaworks was it as soon as you released both neither i think it was last night it was it was you know the night that i got home from their office the from visiting them the first time after the sale had closed and doing this whole transfer of a bunch of stuff
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
So to answer your other question, though, I forgot.
Marco:
What surprised you?
Marco:
Right, that's right.
Marco:
I think...
Marco:
Overall, I was expecting a bit more heat.
Marco:
I didn't go into this knowing people would hate it or expecting everyone to hate it, but I thought I would hear more from the anti-acquisition fans, people who have had a bunch of apps that they used to be acquired in the past and shut down, and they hate that, and so they rage against any acquisition.
Marco:
I think the only actual negative I read from anybody who I thought was remotely credible, I think on that, was Ben Brooks, who complained.
Marco:
He said he briefly considered switching to pinboard when he first read my announcement because it was acquired by somebody.
Marco:
But with the exception of Ben, I don't really think...
Marco:
Certainly nobody else who I would consider a legitimate person whose opinion I want to listen to, none of them had a major problem with it.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I think if you're a real... If you're a devoted Instapaper user, I think you could read my blog post and you could see how I was saying I was having trouble keeping up with it for the last year.
Marco:
And if you're a devoted user, I think you'd read that and say, yeah, he's right.
Marco:
Because you would know.
Marco:
You would have seen very few updates in the last year and very few...
Marco:
very little maintenance going on and not a lot of movement on the feature set.
Marco:
Any devoted user can see those shortcomings.
Marco:
And so I was really expecting a lot more flack from that crowd, and I didn't get it.
Marco:
And I'm very happy about that, really.
Marco:
I'm very pleasantly surprised that the response was ridiculously positive.
John:
I think people are okay with it because they could see a plausible – like the story you put together, I'm selling this to these people and they're going to take it and run with it.
John:
People look at that and like, yeah, that makes sense because it wasn't like when Sparrow goes to – I think Sparrow announced at the time of the acquisition.
John:
But sometimes a company buys another thing and you know it's doomed because you can't imagine any reason they would keep it around.
John:
It just doesn't make any sense.
John:
So with you selling to who you sold to, it's like, oh, that's what they do.
John:
They're not going to shut it down.
John:
They didn't get you.
John:
Like, the only reason they would do this thing is if they wanted to have this product.
John:
And later, when they screw up the product by putting ad banners on top of it or whatever, we'll blame them.
John:
Because it'll be like, well, when he sold it, you know, it wasn't like...
John:
When he sold it, it was a story that made sense.
John:
Surely they're going to keep this product and they're not going to immediately shut it down.
John:
So your responsibility is gone once you've given it a good home.
John:
And if the home turns out not to be so good a year later, we don't go back and say, damn you, Marco, for selling it.
John:
Now we blame the new owners for mistreating us.
Marco:
To be fair...
Marco:
It's never wise for me to assume that people will read what I write before responding.
John:
People you care about responding, they're going to read it.
John:
That's why I think people weren't angry and I wasn't angry.
John:
The other thing about you feeling guilty about not adding features, I know from doing enough tech support with my family and everything that applications that don't change as long as they do what people want them to do are actually kind of a comfort.
John:
I'm trying to walk my sister through the Google Reader shutdown now, and she would just like it if the ancient version of NetNewsWire she's using would continue to work forever and ever exactly the same way as it always did.
John:
And Instapaper not changing for a year, you think it's the end of the world, but people who are using Instapaper happily for a year, they're like,
John:
what what was wrong with instapaper i use it every day it's fine i read things on it you know what i mean like i know you get the email like the text parts are screwing up or whatever but that's that's a small fraction of the audience most of the people are just using it happily and as far as they're concerned there's nothing wrong because they're not they're not cruising the market for read later services every day comparing them weighing them and they're just using their their phone or their ipad happily with these applications you know
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I mean, I still use Instapaper every day, and it's fine.
Marco:
But it could be so much better, and that's very clear.
Marco:
And the text parser could be so much better, and there's so much about it.
Marco:
I think what really told me that it was time was there was about a two-week period where David Smith had convinced me to try to keep it and try to work on it before deciding to sell it.
Marco:
And
Marco:
And I did.
Marco:
And I started like one night I sat down and I was all motivated.
Marco:
And I sat down and started the big 5.0 branch and started tearing stuff out and started changing major things around and started laying the foundation for what I wanted to do in 5.0.
Marco:
And
Marco:
I wasn't motivated to do it for more than about 20 minutes.
Marco:
And that's what really told me, like, you know what?
Marco:
I really don't want to be doing this anymore.
Marco:
Because I looked at the giant mountain of work ahead of me to do even just like a modest redesign and, you know, a modest feature set addition.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I didn't want to do it.
Marco:
I froze up.
Marco:
It was like being told when I was in middle school, being told I had to sit down and do my homework.
Marco:
I just did not want to do it.
Marco:
And motivationally, I had no steam left.
Marco:
And that's when I knew.
Marco:
That was probably back in January or so that I did that.
Marco:
And that's when I knew I have to start finding somebody to buy this thing.
Marco:
And I also, I had a great talk with Brent Simmons, because Brent said it a few times, I think, in the past.
Marco:
He said on various podcasts or sites or somewhere, he said, you know, because people always asked why he decided to sell Net Newswire.
Marco:
And his usual answer or his theory was something along the lines of, I know that once I no longer want to work on something, I need to sell it.
Marco:
and give it to somebody and it's the best thing for everybody really it's the best thing for you because you can go and do something else and it's the best thing for your product and your customers because they'll they'll then be in the hands of somebody who actually wants to work on the thing and actually make it better so you know and and when brent said that i don't know probably years ago it stuck with me and uh
Marco:
So I actually called him, too, when I was thinking about what to do here.
Marco:
And I talked to him, and he was very generous with his time.
Marco:
And yeah, he basically kind of encouraged me to follow my instinct.
Marco:
And he's like, if you don't want to work on it anymore, you don't want to work on it.
Marco:
It's simple as that.
Marco:
There's not a lot to really change that.
Marco:
So that helped a lot.
Marco:
So a combination of David Smith and Brent Simmons, I really owe them some thanks for helping me clarify what I wanted to do.
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Do we want to do one more or do we want to cut it now?
Marco:
We can do one more.
Marco:
What do we got?
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I was curious if you guys had any input.
Casey:
I don't think we've talked about this on the show.
Casey:
Any input into this new or not new.
Casey:
I can't think of the word I'm looking for.
Casey:
But anyway, there's a rumor that iOS 7 will be flattened.
Casey:
And Johnny Ive has gone through Godzilla and flattened New York and iOS 7.
Casey:
And I was curious if you guys had any insight, not insider information, but just insight into what you think that means, whether you believe it, etc.
John:
This is like the most boring rumor ever because it would be more exciting if... I guess it would be exciting with screenshots, but as soon as Forrestal was out, the virtual ink hadn't dried on the stories being written about him going out.
John:
The people weren't saying, that means the next version of iOS will be flat.
John:
I mean...
John:
And this is just like, as we creep up on the date, the noise about that ramps up.
John:
And now you start getting unnamed sources, but we don't have any screenshots yet or whatever.
John:
But yeah, this is what everyone has been saying, right?
John:
It's like, it's kind of like leading up to the iPad announcement.
John:
We're like, what do you think?
John:
Is there going to be an iPad?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like where the smoke clears fire.
John:
So it make, you know, I don't know if it's going to be as extreme as people might be picturing it, but it makes perfect sense that things had gone very far in one direction and a change in leadership, uh,
John:
away from the guy who was reportedly in favor of that extreme direction is obviously going to result in the thing looking different.
John:
So show me the screenshots is what I have to say.
John:
I'm just waiting patiently.
John:
This is fully what I expect, but it's kind of like confirming things we already thought.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know.
Marco:
I think it's more likely that... Well, I think the reason they had to do this is because people are so... We've talked about it in the past.
Marco:
People are so kind of complacent and just so bored with smartphones and in particular with iOS and Apple products in general that I think...
Marco:
Apple needs to do stuff to shake things up a bit.
Marco:
Normally, in the past, we've always kind of stuck with, if it isn't broken, don't fix it.
Marco:
And Apple doesn't need to redesign things for the sake of redesigning them.
Marco:
But I think in this case, this year, I think they do.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
iOS does look kind of old.
Marco:
You know, iOS 6 gave a minor refresh to some of the controls and everything, but it still looks mostly the same way it did in 2007.
Marco:
And, you know, Apple has never had this severe pessimism before.
Marco:
It's never reached this level before.
Marco:
So I think they do need to just shake things up.
Marco:
Just refresh things.
Marco:
And different isn't necessarily going to be worse.
Marco:
Chances are, if they're rethinking things at all, if they're going into it saying we're going to have a major change, then it's probably going to be better overall.
Marco:
And so I think the rumors of it being a very major visual change are very plausible.
Marco:
And if they do it, I think it'll both be good and necessary.
John:
There's two things this reminds me of.
John:
One is an older episode of Hypercritical I did talking about the Surface tablet and the Windows Metro UI.
John:
And one of the things I said on that episode was that if you spend a long time staring at the Metro UI...
John:
This was a video that showed the philosophy behind it.
John:
If you spend a long time staring at that, as I was watching this hour-and-a-half-long demo of this guy explaining the philosophy, and then you go back and look at any iOS device, the iOS device looks old.
John:
It looks weird, like wood-textured and big 3D lumpy things.
John:
And it's like, that looks like the past and looks like the future.
John:
And the second thing I'm thinking of is, if you look at the evolution of Mac OS X and its look...
John:
which changed many times, frequently for fashion-based reasons, from the incredible pinstripes and the shiny blue buttons and the things like now you go back and look at a 10.1 screenshot, you're like, oh my god, how did we ever use that, right?
John:
To the slow evolution to remove the pinstripes.
John:
Not as much texture.
John:
The buttons are no longer giant, you know, teal capsules.
John:
Now they're a little bit flatter.
John:
Now flatter still.
John:
Now all the windows look the same.
John:
Now brushed metal is gone.
John:
mac os 10 has evolved and it seems like every apple os and hopefully every apple application if we're lucky is forced now to go through this thing where you get like the bam here we are aqua gel buttons pinstripes textures crazy things and then you just have to like you have to mellow with age you know and it seems like ios had a particularly exuberant adolescence
John:
where it went a little bit crazy with green felt and wood and stuff like that.
John:
But now it's kind of like the leopard thing where in leopard, they unified the look of all the windows and got rid of brush mail.
John:
If I'm remembering, I think it was 10, five, uh,
John:
And, you know, it makes sense for it to be maturing in that direction.
John:
But I think the other, you know, overall in all of this is the idea of fashion.
John:
And that is a real thing.
John:
And it's not change for change sake.
John:
It's fashion because fashion changes.
John:
And if staring at Metro and then looking back at my iOS device makes my iOS device feel heavyweight and old and look like a Walkman from the 80s, that's time for the fashion to change.
John:
So I think this is a completely natural evolution.
John:
And I, for one, welcome our new flat overlords.
Yeah.
Casey:
I have a couple of thoughts.
Casey:
Firstly, the chat room is going crazy with the exclamation point S to suggest topics, which is comical because unless somebody else put one in there, there's no show bot.
Casey:
But secondly, I'm going to probably get this all wrong because this is an accidental podcast and I didn't do any research.
Casey:
The hallmark feature of iOS 4 was multitasking, right?
Yeah.
Casey:
And then the hallmark feature of iOS 5 was Notification Center.
Casey:
Is that also right?
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And Linden.
Casey:
Exactly.
Marco:
And iCloud.
Casey:
And iCloud.
Casey:
That's another good one.
Casey:
So what was the hallmark of 6 other than Maps?
Casey:
Passbook, right?
Yeah.
Marco:
There kind of wasn't just one.
Marco:
It was a combination of more and better iCloud, tons of new APIs for interface and stuff.
Marco:
Maps.
Marco:
Yeah, Maps was one of the big focuses.
Marco:
Yeah, I
Marco:
I guess that's like the biggest – like the hallmark user-facing feature I think was pretty much Maps and Passbook and just a whole bunch of refinement on other things.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
So what I'm driving at is are we somehow falling into a TikTok with iOS?
Casey:
Because I don't know that I would say that we had been up until maybe now.
Casey:
But it sort of kind of seems like, starting with iOS 5, which was really massive, iOS 6, I think there's a genuine and valid argument that that was big, but maybe not massive.
Casey:
And now we're talking that theoretically iOS 7 would be a pretty big, massive change, I guess visually, if nothing else.
Casey:
Do you guys think we might be heading for TikTok in iOS?
Yeah.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, I guess the big question is, you know, visually, sure, you know, if they re-theme the whole thing, that's going to be a lot of work.
Marco:
It's going to matter a lot to people.
Marco:
And maybe people will really start thinking it's fresh again.
Marco:
I guess the big question, though, is whether any of the other, like, core defining limitations of iOS still exist.
Marco:
Like, how many things will we be able to do with iOS 7 that we couldn't do before?
Marco:
either as users or developers or both?
Marco:
That is a big question.
Marco:
And six didn't really add a lot of those things for users.
Marco:
It did add a lot for developers.
Marco:
But for users, it was pretty minimal.
Marco:
Seven, I don't know.
Marco:
If they do something that, for example, that breaks down some of the walls between applications and has any kind of...
Marco:
cross-application contracts-like system or intents-like system, that would be great.
Marco:
And that would radically change how things can work.
Marco:
But that's also a really big job, and who knows if they've been able to pull that off in the time they've had.
Marco:
We don't really know.
Marco:
And who knows if they would want to do that.
Marco:
Keep in mind, Forrestal has not been gone for very long.
Marco:
And so they really...
Marco:
You know, anything that Forstall was keeping there that we want to change probably has not had time to change for iOS 7.
Marco:
Maybe iOS 8, that might have time to change.
Marco:
But, you know, for this, I'm guessing 7 is going to be mostly a cosmetic update and then with, you know, some kind of... Because, like, you can even look at past versions like we just did and you can say, all right, well...
Marco:
the rate of change for major user-facing features and major new APIs does seem to be slowing down as the platform matures.
Marco:
So there's not a whole lot of low-hanging fruit left.
Marco:
Like, you know, last year we got Passbook because, you know, we already did all the other big stuff that was doable in that time.
Marco:
So, you know, you start getting these kind of, like, lighter-weight features.
Marco:
You know, Game Center in iOS 5, I think was Game Center or 4.0.
Marco:
You start getting these lightweight, fluffier features, not multitasking, major architectural changes.
Marco:
So I don't know what to expect with 7, but it wouldn't be that much of a disaster if they didn't break down any of those walls and they just did a major visual refresh and a few minor tweaks.
John:
I was thinking of iOS 7, you have to divide into two halves.
John:
One half is the features that were planned and partially implemented before Forrestal was gone.
John:
And the second half is anything that happened after he was gone.
John:
And so at least a good half of iOS 7 was going to happen regardless of the change in leadership.
John:
And then once the change in leadership happens, there's only so much you can do in half the development time that you have.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
That's why they're working with this pushing up against the line.
John:
And one of the things he could presumably do in half the time is like a reskin type of thing.
John:
But the one semi-interesting thing I saw in these rumor articles was the idea that
John:
built-in applications that people use every day that come to define the iOS experience could potentially be rethought, not in terms of the look and feel, but in terms of the feature set and how they work.
John:
Kind of like the podcast revision that made it more normal, but the one app I saw and got excited about was one of the articles vaguely mentioned, the Mail app, which is not exactly the same for the entire life of iOS, but is certainly not flashy.
John:
And stuff like that coming back on the table for
John:
for revisions for uh rethinking how that application could work because even though we we know that's not like os you know it's just an app right it comes with the os and it defines like when we think of os we're actually thinking of the operating system we're like oh you know inter-application apis and stuff but when other people think of it they're like when i buy a new iphone and i push the little thing that says mail what do i see oh it's totally different they change the os you know that's
John:
That concept of an OS, basically the stuff that comes on my phone, is probably just as important, if not more important, than the actual stuff that just makes up the OS.
John:
And in both realms, I think there's a tremendous amount that can be improved.
John:
We've talked about the new application communication, but there's the whole...
John:
there's the whole uh not natural evolution that ios is going to climb as the hardware gets better like you know just in terms of the the out of memory killer and not being able to run background applications and like all these things that they're not coming down this year they're not coming down next year they're going to be around for a long time but we're slowly clawing away at them as the hardware starts getting you know eventually the hardware in our phones will be at the level of the hardware in our sad 2008 mac pros right now right it's
John:
not there now my mac pro is 16 gigs of ram and my phone does not and you know but we'll get there and once we get there the out of memory killer becomes less important you know what i mean and not being able to run in the background maybe becomes less important depending on how much
John:
better battery technology you can get some of that stuff so there is a long slow painful road for the OS to climb as a natural evolution of it but in the meantime there's so many other things they can do to make the actual using of the phone better simply by revving bundled apps and doing server side stuff like I know you said oh it's not a big deal you know but like
John:
Maps, Game Center, stuff like that, that's stuff that's actually happening off of your phone, and it's going to become increasingly important.
John:
It will increasingly define the experience of using your phone.
John:
So even if it doesn't seem like iOS 7 has anything in it in it, if there's some big, massive, important server-side feature, like you can watch any TV show for free for $2.99 a month paid to Apple or something crazy as Pipe Dream or whatever...
John:
And all they do is put a video player on your phone.
John:
You're like, wow, that's amazing.
John:
But it all happened off of your phone.
John:
So is that a feature of iOS 7?
John:
Well, no.
John:
It's a feature of Apple's crazy content deals with the world of media and things happening on their servers.
John:
But I think that's just going to increase with time.
John:
The things that happen off of your phone are going to become just as important.
Marco:
Well, I think they are just as important today, just Apple has not done very well historically in that area.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm being optimistic for two seconds.
John:
It's past.
Marco:
I think something else to consider also is that we're now in a time, you know, Steve Jobs officially left the company and then died a few months later, unfortunately.
Marco:
But he officially left the company, what now, two years ago?
Marco:
roughly, or, you know, one and a half, something like that, or two and a half.
Marco:
It's been a couple of years, at any rate.
Marco:
And from what we know from various reports, it sounds like Forstall really carried a lot of Steve's torches, but now Forstall's been gone, too, for, you know, a few months.
Marco:
Whatever they were holding on to, like the old Steve Jobs causes...
Marco:
For all the good that Steve had for the company and for the products, he also was holding certain things back.
Marco:
And you can look at things like power user features and control issues.
Marco:
You can see a lot of what Steve championed and a lot of what he refused to compromise on was very, very good, and some of it wasn't.
Marco:
And so we're seeing now, like, it's been long enough that the post-Steve Apple is really starting to build its own personality separately from the Steve past.
Marco:
And Forstall being out, I think, is going to accelerate that in a few ways because he was, you know, he had a lot of power and was very loyal to Steve and his ideas as far as we know.
Marco:
So we might start seeing some of these walls in iOS fall more quickly than we hoped.
Marco:
We read rumors, I'm sure all of us read them, that OS 10.9, is it?
Marco:
Are we up to 10.9 already, the next one?
Marco:
Yes, 10.9.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
what are they going to do with 10?
Marco:
Anyway, you know, OS 10.9, the rumor is that it's going to have better power user features, like more power features in the Finder and stuff like that.
Marco:
They just said tabs.
Marco:
That's hardly a power user feature.
Marco:
Yeah, that's kind of weak actually.
Marco:
But if they do go that direction, I think that's worth paying attention to because so far Apple, you know, in most of the previous releases, especially with Lion, I think it's like a major step backwards for many power user features or possibilities thereof.
Marco:
But,
Marco:
I think it's worth looking at Apple from the perspective of what are they doing now.
Marco:
Look for signs of a potentially major course change in their products.
Marco:
And not just one big one, but look for little course changes.
Marco:
I think the podcast app might be a microcosm of this.
Marco:
You know, like, you can see, like, they had this crazy, like, extremely polarizing, mostly bad design in the first version after they split it off from iTunes.
Marco:
And then the new update kind of toned all that down.
Marco:
And a lot of people said that was, like, you know, a forced all versus Ive kind of thing.
Marco:
But, you know, we don't necessarily know.
Marco:
It doesn't seem that severe.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
it was like the 1.0 of that app was very clearly a Steve Jobs-style app.
Marco:
Whether he ever saw it or not, I don't know.
Marco:
Probably not.
Marco:
But that was very much a Steve Jobs-style app.
Marco:
And then the new one is a major course change from that and now going towards better.
Marco:
And so I wonder if...
Marco:
It's probably too soon to really see a whole lot of that so far in iOS 7 and OS 10.9, but I bet we're going to see some of it.
Marco:
I bet we're going to see hints of it and the beginnings of it, and I'm really curious to see how that turns out.
John:
I think you are onto something there.
John:
I think we can start a new meme here.
John:
And the new meme is Steve Jobs as the new Forrestal.
John:
Because everyone's blaming, like, whatever thing you don't like, it was Forrestal's fault.
John:
Now that he's gone, it will be fixed, right?
John:
But if you extend that backwards to Steve Jobs, you say, you know, Steve Jobs is the one.
John:
He was the one who was making the mail app be so simple for all these years.
John:
Damn him.
John:
And now, finally, he's gone and we'll have, you know.
John:
I'm mostly making a joke there, but about the podcast app and everything, you're right, we don't know who's responsible for what and everything.
John:
We just can look at coincidental timings.
John:
But one thing we do know from years and years of talking head videos from Johnny Ive is his design philosophy as expressed in those videos.
John:
And we know two things.
John:
One, I think that really was his design philosophy because he was Steve Jobs' design guy, and I don't think he was up there spouting something he didn't believe in.
John:
And his philosophy has always been,
John:
that the thing has to be true to itself.
John:
And whatever it is, whatever essential element, I mean, this works much better for hardware than software, but whatever essential thing that's essential about this thing, you know, like the flower iMac where the base has to be true to being a base and hug the ground, but the screen is thin and it should float in the air, or that it shouldn't have extraneous decoration or bulges or other things that are not a part of the essential nature of the hardware product, right?
John:
That is his hardware philosophy expressed over and over and over again and embodied in all of his products.
John:
if he applies that same philosophy to software, which is an if, but if he does, the essential nature of a podcast application is not an animated tape deck.
John:
I can imagine him thinking about what does it mean to listen to audio on an iPod, not what does it mean to what kind of things in the past can we connect it to.
John:
It's the reason people think he's against skeuomorphism and all that other stuff, because he wants to know
John:
you know forget about the past on this device on this thing what this thing is doing how how is this software true to itself and we don't know how that embodies itself yet but i think we'll start to get a feel for it when we see what ios 7 looks like and hopefully even more so not so much what it looks like but if he uh
John:
Maybe not this version, but the next version.
John:
Some commonly used application, whether it's Safari or Mail or some other thing on the phone or on the iPad, for that matter, and rethinks, like, what does it mean to browse web pages on a portable device?
John:
And what is the essential nature of that activity?
John:
And is it different than a toolbar on top, a toolbar on bottom with a little numbered button that you clicked?
John:
You know, like those type of things I like to see him rethink.
John:
And this will be really interesting to see how his hardware philosophy works
John:
transfers onto software.
Casey:
Do you expect much of it in the sense that, as you just pointed out, this isn't his normal cup of tea?
Casey:
So do you expect that that'll be successful, or would you wager that it will be kind of ugly or a little rough at first?
John:
I worry about the fact that at least half of iOS 7 happened before
John:
he before the switcheroo right so i worry about him trying to jam too much into the second half of ios 7 development or you know i don't know how i don't know how much time he got in this but like but i know this is not going to be like a top to bottom i of os you know eight will be that if assuming he's still on board right uh
John:
So I worry that doing too little means just shipping in iOS 7 has not changed that much.
John:
And you're like, oh, Johnny, I didn't make a difference.
John:
And trying to do too much is like, oh, we've got to reskin everything, and everything's got to be radically new, and we've got to redesign all the built-in applications, and then you don't have time to really polish it.
John:
and or it's all buggy as crap yeah there's that on top of it as well so i i i worry about seven for those reasons but assuming there's not another change in the leadership eight should be where we really get to see uh you know it's all johnny ive at that point and we don't have to worry about any leftover full forestall or steve jobsism who was that guy messing nobody liked him anyway yeah all right do you want to end on that
Casey:
I think we're good.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Well, thank you very much to our sponsor this episode, Squarespace.
Marco:
They're everything you need to create an exceptional website.
Marco:
Use offer code ATP5 for 10% off, and it'll tell them that we sent you.
Marco:
And thanks, guys.
Marco:
Please rate us on iTunes in the podcast review directory.
Marco:
Unless you don't like the show, then you can skip that step if you'd like.
Marco:
And I believe that's it.
Marco:
Thank you.
John:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental, accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental, accidental.
John:
Tech Podcast, so long.
John:
yada bite in the chat room who says it's not skeuomorphism it's a visual metaphor i mean there's aspects of both i so don't care to debate the definition of skeuomorphism people you know the it's the skeuomorphism backlash like everything isn't skeuomorphism and they're right but then they think nothing is like leather stitching that's skeuomorphism because you don't actually need stitches to hold the leather to anything because like
John:
There's nothing for it to hold.
John:
So why would you draw stitches?
John:
Well, because the real-life item to connect leather to another piece of leather needed stitching to do it because you couldn't glue it.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
That's skeuomorphism.
John:
It's an element from an earlier physical element that no longer has any purpose in the newer element, but you put it there anyway.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I don't even want to agree with you because I don't want to hear from people about this.
Casey:
I think I just passed out briefly.
Marco:
I think I do agree with you, but I don't want to commit to that.
John:
You can just look it up.
John:
It's a word.
John:
It has a definition.
John:
You can look it up.
John:
There are visual metaphors, and there is skeuomorphism, and they are different things, but they overlap a lot.
Casey:
Hey, so in wildly unrelated news, I finally unloaded the Subaru, so you rat bastards can leave me alone now.
Marco:
Now you only have one white car.
Casey:
God, I hate you so much.
Casey:
I knew I was setting myself up for that.