Made The Dot Smaller
Casey:
I took the bold step the very first time I think I've ever done it and marked that review.
Casey:
It's not helpful.
John:
What's up?
John:
Oh, no, I totally mark them as not helpful if they're not helpful.
Casey:
I want to talk about TV for a minute and not Breaking Bad.
Casey:
And this is going to have a point.
Casey:
I was watching Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Casey:
earlier tonight with Aaron.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
Well, yeah.
Casey:
It's okay.
Casey:
It's got promise, but it's not very good at the moment.
Casey:
Well, the reason I bring this up is because there was a portion of the episode, and this is not particularly important if you haven't seen it yet, but somebody was going behind enemy lines, if you will, and they had an almost invisible secret agent earpiece thing, and this person was trying to schmooze people they didn't know at a party, and so...
Casey:
What they did was they had the other agents like up in the magical plane thing telling the person in the field, oh, well, this is so-and-so and he has twin kids and ask him about this and that and the other thing.
Casey:
So this person could schmooze and not look like an outsider.
Casey:
Well, they walked away from this conversation where they had to schmooze with people they didn't know.
Casey:
And they said something to the effect of, wow, it's really awesome having you guys here.
Casey:
I could really get used to this.
Casey:
And then they said, and I'm quoting –
Casey:
It's like Siri if it worked.
Casey:
And so this is a national TV show.
Casey:
And granted, America is not the be all end all.
Casey:
But I mean, this is Apple taking pot shots on national television, which I thought was a little bit surprising.
Marco:
Well, to be fair, Siri has never been that reliable.
Casey:
No, I mean, it's not unreasonable.
Casey:
I just thought it was surprising that it's become part of the, I don't know if vernacular is the right word, but it's become something that everyone recognizes as an issue.
John:
That's the AI trap.
John:
Anything you do that, to a layperson, seems like it should be like another person talking to you until we get actual real, you know, whatever the term is, strong AI is not going to be like that, and there's going to be an expectation gap.
John:
I talked to a thing.
John:
I wanted to respond to me like a person.
John:
It's not going to, we all know it's not going to, but it doesn't matter because once I start talking to it like a person, it damn well better work like a person.
John:
And that combined with just reliability of like, sometimes it just says, sorry, I couldn't do it.
John:
Couldn't reach the servers or it's not available now or whatever.
John:
But even when it responds to you,
John:
You know, it's fun to play with.
John:
And then you quickly realize it's not like talking to a person and you're disappointed.
John:
And that's never going to go away.
John:
Like Google Now, Siri, these things are going to get better and better.
John:
And, you know, just be leaps and bounds over where they are today.
John:
And people will still be like, you know, there'll still be jokes about them on late night TV because they're aren't they so stupid?
John:
My dog is smarter than Siri.
John:
It doesn't understand me.
John:
It doesn't understand.
John:
And it won't.
John:
It doesn't understand.
John:
It won't understand for years, decades, our lifetime.
John:
Who knows how long it will take to get actual intelligence on the level of a human being at the other end of a computer thing.
John:
And up until that point, it's going to be the butt of jokes.
John:
It's hard to tell on the Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.
John:
episode if they were making fun of the reliability or the intelligence or both.
Casey:
Right, right.
John:
Because, like, the reliability that, you know, that Apple could get slammed on that now.
John:
Well, we can make this stupid thing reliable at the very least.
John:
And then you're just complaining about, oh, the responses aren't very smart.
John:
But when it says, oh, sorry, it's not available right now, Siri is now, whatever the heck it says when, you know, the servers don't send a response, that is something that Apple should be ashamed of now.
John:
But everything else, if you're doing anything that you talk to that talks back, you're just going to have to take your lumps.
Marco:
But as far as popular culture is concerned and as far as regular people are concerned, hell, even as far as geeks are concerned, it doesn't really matter whether the server failure happens or whether it does the wrong thing or thinks the wrong thing about what you said.
Marco:
Either way, it's a failure.
Marco:
And all it takes is a few failures where after that you just forget about using it.
Marco:
You just stop using it.
Casey:
Right, and so it seems weird to me – well, I don't know if weird is the right word, but I can't help but wonder.
Casey:
This got me to thinking that I can't help but wonder at what point is Apple going to say enough is enough and let's properly fix this.
Casey:
And I know that that – we've talked about this a lot with like –
Casey:
With iCloud and Core Data, for example, and we've talked a lot about this with Siri as well.
Casey:
But at some point, you have to think that they're going to get together and say, guys and girls, we really, really, really have to fix this.
Casey:
Like, is that time ever coming?
Casey:
Am I waiting for a train that's just not going to show up?
John:
Well, it was kind of a victory for Apple to be mentioned because the worst thing for Apple would be for them to make that same joke about Google now or something like Siri has the mind share as that thing on your phone that you talk to.
John:
And there is value in having that mind share, even if it comes along with, you know, all that other baggage and everything, just because like, you know, you, not that you're going to become the Kleenex or whatever of the thing or whatever it is, genericized, uh, branding, but you know, that that's, that's what they went to for the joke because they figure most people know of that.
John:
They'll know what we're talking about.
John:
They'll get the joke.
John:
Uh,
John:
Whereas Google Now or any of these other things that you talk to are more reliable, yes, but again, I don't think the joke was about reliability.
John:
I think it's like if it worked, as in if you could actually ask Siri things and she would give you answers versus just saying, I'm sorry, I don't know what that is, or doing a Google search for it, which is what Siri does when you try to talk to it like a person.
John:
I don't know.
John:
But I think it's good that the word is in the public consciousness.
John:
And I think Apple continues to work on the reliability and fail for the same reason they failed to make all their online services reliable.
John:
But it's also working on the intelligence part of it.
John:
I think it's just the cost of doing business.
John:
You want to be in the phone market.
John:
You've got to have some sort of thing that you talk to that does real-time intelligence searches from multiple sources.
John:
And so it's never going to go away.
John:
They're going to keep trying to make it better.
John:
And, you know, think about online services like, oh, when are they going to fix this whole online thing?
John:
Like, you know, .Mac and iTools and MobileMe.
John:
Was iCloud the one where they fixed everything?
John:
Not really.
John:
They just keep trying, I guess, right?
Marco:
You have to start wondering, what is it about Apple that makes them, quote, not good at web services?
Marco:
We all say that.
Marco:
We all write that.
Marco:
We all think that.
Marco:
Oh, Apple is not good at web services.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
What's different?
Marco:
What's going to be different a year from now compared to now in that area?
Marco:
What steps are they taking or what steps could they even take to meaningfully change that?
Marco:
What is it about the company that makes them not good at web services?
Marco:
And
Marco:
I don't really see from the outside any evidence that meaningful change is happening there.
Marco:
It seems like, as we've discussed before, it's probably a problem of engineering resources and priorities.
Marco:
And up until this time, Apple has clearly put...
Marco:
some priority on web services but they are still a very small company with their engineering resources and it doesn't really ever seem like that's going to take a massive turn for the better where suddenly their web services are going to have tons more staff on them tons more resources and be a much higher priority in the company i don't i don't see that happening
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know either.
Casey:
And it seems weird.
Casey:
Not everything is web objects, right?
Casey:
I mean, I know the iTunes stories, but we have no reason to believe everything else is web objects.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And I really don't think web objects, the technology, has anything substantial to do with why Apple is not, quote, good at web services.
Marco:
I mean, you can pick on any language or platform and say, oh, well, that doesn't scale or that's old or whatever.
Marco:
The fact is that's not the problem.
Marco:
With proper administration and proper coding, you can make anything scale.
Marco:
You can make anything work.
Marco:
The platform is rarely the problem.
Marco:
And by the way, there's nothing saying Apple has to be using WebObjects.
Marco:
Maybe they're not.
Marco:
Maybe they're using it for part of the stuff.
Marco:
Maybe they're using it for...
Marco:
just a front end somewhere and using big Oracle stuff behind it.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But I would not put blame on the fact that they occasionally have WebObject URLs that we're looking at from the front.
Marco:
I don't think that has a lot to do with it.
Casey:
Well, but the hard thing about WebObjects is that how do you hire for someone that can do WebObjects?
Casey:
Obviously, you can teach any competent programmer just about anything, but
Casey:
But if you want a WebObjects guru, there are like, what, four of them in the world, and they're all probably on Apple's payroll already.
Casey:
So yeah, in and of itself, WebObjects may not be the problem in the sense of it functions.
Casey:
And with, like you said, good coding, it'll continue to function.
Casey:
But it's hard to hire into that role if you wanted to throw people at the problem, which may or may not even be the solution.
Marco:
Well, but really, looking at a major code base for a major web service under heavy traffic that's very high profile, I mean, really, does it matter what language it's written in?
Marco:
Any new hire is going to have to go through a lot of training and a lot of time just becoming familiar with this code base and becoming useful in working with it.
Marco:
I mean, I don't think, even if it was written in Java, which everyone either knows or can be taught very quickly, I don't think that would really make a difference.
Marco:
I mean, really...
Marco:
I think if WebObjects really was the big problem they're having, either that's a giant failure of leadership or, well, actually, no, that's it.
Marco:
It's a giant failure of leadership.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
That's the reason.
Marco:
If they're being held back because they're using WebObjects, that's a really stupid reason to be held back, and there's no reason to continue it.
Marco:
These services are all pretty new.
Marco:
If that was really the problem, they could rewrite them.
Marco:
It would be a big undertaking, but it wouldn't be insurmountable.
Marco:
The fact is, I don't think that's really the problem.
Marco:
And if it is really the problem, then I'm still correct that it's a problem with something about high-level leadership and priorities rather than this technology can't do this.
John:
WebObjects is actually, not now, but back in the day, was actually a tiny example of Apple sort of doing the right thing.
John:
And I've done this rant several times on many other shows.
John:
You two should be able to recite it by now.
John:
But, like...
John:
If you're going to do web services or anything online, at the scale Apple does it.
John:
You go into a different realm.
John:
And what Marco said about, you know, you can make any web service scale on any platform is true.
John:
But once you start getting into Apple scale or Google scale...
John:
things like that do matter a little bit more than they do.
John:
There's a threshold through which you pass and it's like, okay, now any old platform won't do.
John:
And really the platform actually does matter because any tiny inefficiency is multiplied by the jillions of servers that we have, or maybe a particular architecture dictated by a particular platform doesn't allow us to be in 8 million different data centers around the world in a synchronized manner.
John:
And all these other things that come into play for like seven people in the world for like
John:
Maybe Amazon, Microsoft, Google, anybody who's got a worldwide online presence who, you know, has huge servers with just millions and millions of customers.
John:
And the good thing that WebObjects had going for it is that, you know, well, they didn't make it themselves, but it was in-house.
John:
I mean, it came with Next, obviously, like half of the technology they're using now, it all came from Next, right?
Yeah.
John:
And that's what you have to do with this scale.
John:
You have to take ownership of your online platform.
John:
You can't just use sort of off-the-shelf stuff and buy experts and have them hook them all up to each other.
John:
Once you pass a certain threshold of scale, you've got to do stuff yourself.
John:
Amazon does, Microsoft does, Google does practically everything themselves.
John:
Right down to speccing out their own hardware and everything.
John:
And Apple seems to do so much less of it.
John:
And Apple is at that scale now.
John:
They have hundreds of millions of people using iOS devices, connecting to iCloud.
John:
They're there.
John:
They're at that scale.
John:
They can't be the only person doing stuff off the shelf.
John:
They need to take ownership of their online platform technology.
John:
And I don't understand the leadership gap here, too, because it's clear that the leadership...
John:
gap doesn't exist for the client side stuff, because the the organization that does a Mac OS 10 iOS and all this other stuff.
John:
So clearly, whether this comes from the top or not, but so clearly understand that it needs to take complete ownership of its platform,
John:
We have to be responsible in making sure we have good tools, good compiler, good language.
John:
And we're going to not just do them once and just say, okay, we're done.
John:
Cocoa was awesome.
John:
You know, project builder.
John:
We're all set.
John:
We've got our own tools.
John:
We're great.
John:
They're going to be, they're going to say, no, that's, that's, we're not satisfied with that.
John:
We need a better compiler.
John:
We need to ditch project builder.
John:
We make a thing, make a thing called Xcode.
John:
We need to keep making Xcode better and better.
John:
We need to switch out our debugger for LDB.
John:
We need to rev the objective C runtime.
John:
And, you know,
John:
They just take such incredible ownership of their platform and they know they can't just let it sit there.
John:
And they're not relying on like some other vendor or some other platform to solve their problems and just throw it at a bunch of people and go, all right, here you go.
John:
Here's some pieces.
John:
You know, they totally take control of their clients and they need to service that is just as important.
John:
They need to be doing all those same things.
John:
Where is the team that has been working on this is the technology that we're going to use inside Apple to deploy online services, you know, starting 10 years ago, and continually revising it 10 years ago, they had web objects, which even then was kind of weird and dated.
John:
And they just didn't like, keep it up to date and modernize it and like, you know, like history passed it by.
John:
They didn't let that happen on the client side.
John:
They've been racing ahead as fast as they can, again, with the exception of the file system.
John:
But in most other aspects, they're taking ownership of their platform there.
John:
And on the server side, they're not.
John:
They're going to third-party vendors.
John:
And that's an untenable strategy.
John:
They need to be more like Google and Microsoft and Amazon and have their own platforms with their own announced technology and dedicate those kind of resources to it.
John:
And I don't understand why one half of the company can do that and the other half can't, because it seems like it's the same leadership, right?
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, yeah, but why do you say that WebObjects isn't getting better?
Casey:
I mean, from the outside, there's no indication it's getting better.
Casey:
But who's to say that it isn't getting better on the inside and they're just not letting anyone see it?
John:
The model of the way it works.
John:
I mean, the model of the way WebObject works is the whole idea of having –
John:
Object transparency and just kind of like working like Coco on the web and all these conveniences that you have.
John:
Like, that's not what massive online service is about these days anymore.
John:
They're about infrastructure pieces to manage storage and data in ways that are totally unlike the web object stack in terms of where the state is and, you know, how it all fits together.
John:
Just look at how, like, look at Google's Spanner thing that they use for their database stuff.
John:
And then all of its predecessors like GFS and what was the...
John:
Someone in the chat room tell me what was the thing that predated a big table.
John:
Uh, yeah.
John:
And like all these infrastructure projects that have come and gone and MapReduce and all those things and like that Google is constantly revising.
John:
Apple hasn't gone through that, that revolution.
John:
I mean, Google started out its first things of just GFS and MapReduce were already ahead of where Apple was with web objects in terms of doing things at scale.
John:
Uh,
John:
and Google is constantly throwing away its old ones and replacing with new ones over and over and over again for its service.
John:
And same thing with Amazon and all the stuff that it's using to run its services.
John:
Uh, Apple started with web objects, which was already like sort of the old model.
John:
And, you know, look, it's much more convenient for developers to do, you know, like Google has proven that, uh,
John:
you can make things annoying for developers it's certainly using big table was super annoying which is one of the reasons spanner exists for developers but it was like you know scaling is king and even though it's going to be annoying for you to do the stuff at the application level we scaling is more important and we'll work out the other things later whereas apple was like uh oh we want this to be all nice and it's kind of like working with objects and it's real convenient and everything is magically objects and persistence sounds kind of like core data i guess uh you know
John:
But online – and isn't that nice?
John:
And that is nice and everything, but that – you know, your hands are tied behind your back in terms of how do you scale this to 17 data centers with redundant hardware and all these other, you know, things.
John:
And, like, we'll know the day has come when Apple has finally sort of joined the modern age when they don't have to bring the store down before they introduce new products.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like –
John:
The reason they do that is not so much like, oh, we have to take the store down to add new products.
John:
They don't have to take the store down to add new products.
John:
They have to take the store down.
John:
This is my theory.
John:
They have to take the store down to add new products that appear to customers in a deterministic manner.
John:
Right.
John:
Because they can add new products without taking the store down, but they have no idea when or where they'll appear for people because of their their architecture doesn't allow them to sort of, you know, have a way to say, OK, now this is available for the entire world.
John:
It's just like they can add it and then it sort of trickles out through their whatever system they have going with combined with their CDNs and other stuff.
John:
And they don't want it to spoil the surprise.
John:
So instead, they bring the whole thing down, rev the whole thing, put all the new stuff, and then just wait for the moment when they say, okay, and go bring it back up.
John:
And then you're sure that nobody sees it ahead of time accidentally, right?
John:
And you're sure that when you do turn it on, everybody sees the new thing because presumably you've had time for it to propagate during, you know.
John:
That's my theory of why they take the store down.
John:
But that's not how the web works.
John:
You can't take your store down when you don't want to spoil a surprise, right?
Marco:
Do you really think taking the store down is still necessary, or do you think they're doing it only for the theatrical element?
John:
It's because if they didn't, they wouldn't have control over when people saw things.
John:
They want it to be visible to everybody all at once as much as possible, but only starting at a given point.
John:
And I feel like this, again, it's just speculation.
John:
If they just put it up in the store now, it would either slowly trickle out to people, which would be kind of annoying because you want everybody to see it when you announce, or if you started early, some people might see it early.
John:
So I think it's about...
John:
You know, making it so that everyone sees the thing simultaneously.
John:
It could be purely for theatrics as in they don't have to do it at all.
John:
But that I think they would have stopped that by now like this.
John:
So many things that they've done for theatrics have sort of come and gone.
John:
But my guess is that it has to do with content propagation and being in control of when it appears to the first person and getting it to appear to the most people as soon as possible.
Marco:
But there's no technical reason why it has to take that long.
Marco:
They don't have to take the store down for an hour and a half to update something.
John:
How long does it take for the new content to propagate through their worldwide network of CDNs?
Marco:
It depends how they do it.
John:
I know, but I'm saying maybe it actually takes them two hours to be sure that all the new content is propagated to all the CDNs.
Marco:
But that's a choice they make in implementation.
Marco:
They can do it within a few seconds if they wanted to.
John:
I mean, who knows?
John:
This is just my guess of why they would do it.
John:
And you're right.
John:
It's down for a long time.
John:
It's not like it's down for five seconds and then comes back up.
John:
It's down for like an hour during the whole keynote, practically.
Marco:
Yeah, usually it goes down before the keynote.
Marco:
And so it's down for like three hours total.
John:
And the only other thing I think of is maybe they're trying to prevent people from accidentally buying the old products while they're announcing the new ones.
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
But you can still go into an Apple store and buy them.
Marco:
You can still buy them that morning.
Marco:
That can't be the reason either.
John:
I wonder if Apple store employees wave you off.
John:
If you go in and the keynote is going on, surely everyone in the Apple store knows the keynote is going on.
John:
If you go in on the October 22nd iPad event and you go in while someone is on stage introducing a new iPad and you try to buy an old one, you would think the Apple store guy is going to go...
John:
You know they're announcing new ones now.
John:
You can still buy this.
John:
Here you go.
John:
It's fine.
John:
You can have it now.
John:
But just in case, you might want to know.
John:
Maybe you don't know they're announcing new ones right now.
John:
I wonder if they tell you that.
Marco:
I think you might be overestimating the geekiness and attentiveness of both the staff and the customers in an Apple store.
John:
I'll be depressed if they don't even know that it's going on.
Marco:
So do you think, you know, thinking about some more of this Apple service stuff before we go to a different topic, do you think Apple's really feeling pain from this, from their stuff being the status quo of working most of the time but not being up to the standards service-wise, quality-wise, uptime-wise, reliability-wise of Google services, Amazon services, Facebook services, you know, the other big giants?
Marco:
Do you think Apple's really feeling the pain from that?
Marco:
Do you think this is really hurting them?
Marco:
Because with Google, they had to scale ridiculously well because A, not a lot of other people in their business were doing that.
Marco:
B, they were scaling way past what everyone else was doing.
Marco:
And C, that's their entire business.
Marco:
That's where everything comes from.
Marco:
If Google doesn't serve an ad, they lose money.
Marco:
Whereas Apple is selling all this hardware regardless of whether iMessage is down this morning.
Marco:
It doesn't really hurt them directly and severely where there's one or two instances of downtime here and there.
Marco:
How much pain do you think they're feeling?
Marco:
Because it kind of seems like they're not feeling enough to do anything drastic.
Casey:
Well, maybe.
Casey:
But let me answer your question by asking you a question.
Casey:
Do you think Apple is proud?
Casey:
And I think it's pretty clear to me that they're a very proud company.
Casey:
I can't imagine to come kind of full circle –
Casey:
I can't imagine that they like hearing these pot shots taken at them during Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Casey:
Does that make sense?
John:
That's the question, though.
John:
The question is – it's like a Balmer-type question.
John:
Are they in denial?
John:
If you were to ask them, like, off the record, I'm not going to report this and make a story out of it, just so you bump into Tim Cook in an elevator or whatever, and it's like, do you think Apple does online stuff as well as Google, Amazon, or Microsoft?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And this could explain the leadership gap where they're like, maybe they're in denial and they think everyone has troubles every once in a while.
John:
We're kind of in the mix.
John:
We're kind of pretty much almost as good as Google and Amazon.
John:
Maybe some days worse, some days better.
John:
Everyone has their ups and downs.
John:
Like, or do they really realize that just how, like the, what the gap is, you know?
John:
And the gap is not, if you were to put it on a little graph or something, like it's only a couple of percentage, but it's like that last couple of percentage.
John:
It's like, it's like uptime going from like, you know, three nines to seven nines is just astronomically hard.
John:
So much harder than going from 90% uptime to 99.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like the last little bits of the part that matter.
John:
I wonder like that could explain why they haven't,
John:
gotten religion on this and dedicated themselves to doing the server side, taking ownership of the server side tech the same way they do on the client side, is that they think they're not that bad.
John:
Maybe they really actually think, yeah, we have room for improvement.
John:
We're not satisfied with where we are, but
John:
It's not that.
John:
We're close, right?
John:
And I would say, no, you're not.
John:
Like, it seems like you're close, but really, those last few inches on the graph make all the difference.
John:
You are not close.
John:
There is nobody, there's not a single person who has any technical clue who would say, do you think at any day of any month of any year that Apple does online stuff better than Google?
John:
Like, it's never happened.
John:
No one has ever had that opinion.
John:
It's just 100%.
John:
Okay, Google is better.
John:
How much are they better?
John:
Are they a little bit better?
John:
But nobody believes Apple is better.
John:
Nobody.
John:
And I have a feeling that if you ask someone on the iTunes music store, of course we're better.
John:
Look how many billions of songs we sold.
John:
Look how many apps we give people.
John:
Google doesn't do stuff like that.
John:
Their store sucks.
John:
We do so much better.
John:
Because they excel in a few areas of read mostly distribution of static data to people that they think, we're an online services company and we're awesome.
John:
And it's just not the same as an interactive thing.
Marco:
Do you think anyone's ever returned an iPhone because iMessage was down for 20 minutes a month?
John:
Yeah, no, you're right about them not feeling it.
John:
It would be better if they felt they have more of a cushion than Google.
John:
They just do because there's so many other interesting things you can do with the device that don't matter.
John:
And you can use Google services, for example.
John:
You can use Google's Maps, another area where they have a little trouble.
John:
You can use Google Now.
John:
It's not their whole business.
John:
It's just part of their business.
John:
And so, yeah, no one's going to return the thing because Siri is wonky every once in a while.
John:
It doesn't hurt them as much, and it's almost kind of a shame because if it hurt them more,
John:
Maybe, you know, like jobs, I think knew they weren't, you know, the Google does stuff better, which is why I kept yelling at like the mobile meet team and having all those meetings and trying to do iCloud.
John:
Like at least he, I think he understood we're not good at this.
John:
We should get better.
John:
He didn't know how to make that happen apparently, but he sure tried.
John:
So we'll see if there ever comes a time where like, I mean, I guess Tim Cook maybe did that about maps, like apologizing for maps and we need to do better and some understanding that maps, but maybe he's just sees that as a data problem.
John:
And not a server problem.
John:
I don't know.
John:
The thing about maps is if I was Tim Cook, I'd be like, okay, well, no, we just need a better map data.
John:
It's like, okay, Tim, so you haven't forgotten about the fleet of cars that are going to drive over every single road in the entire world and take pictures.
John:
Did you forget about that part?
John:
Because you don't get that for free if you just get better map data, right?
John:
Google did that.
John:
That's a crazy project.
John:
It's huge.
John:
And it's ongoing.
John:
Right.
John:
And they don't stop doing it.
John:
And if you don't have an answer for that, you're not going to have Street View.
John:
You're not going to have like, let me fly 3D through the middle of Fog Creek's offices.
John:
Like, you're so far from that.
John:
So how are you ever going to compete?
John:
And it could be that he's like, okay, well, we're never going to do that.
John:
We just need maps to say we have maps.
John:
And they can just continue to use Google Maps for our things.
John:
And Google Maps are always going to be better.
John:
But that's not an Apple kind of attitude, you know?
Marco:
And it's not – like when I say this is like a substantial problem in the company that probably won't ever change.
Marco:
Like imagine – to take another example in the industry.
Marco:
Imagine if some Microsoft CEO comes in, which I guess is plausible.
Marco:
Some new Microsoft CEO comes in, and they say, you know what?
Marco:
Our devices aren't cool.
Marco:
Everything we make, our hardware is not cool.
Marco:
Our software is not cool.
Marco:
Nobody thinks our stuff is cool.
Marco:
Let's hire somebody in charge of keeping things cool.
Marco:
Or let's increase the funding to our cool department by 50% this year.
Marco:
Do you think that's really going to change it?
Marco:
It's not that easy.
Marco:
And so I feel like looking at Apple and saying, how can they address the services issue?
Marco:
That their services aren't that good traditionally and continue to be that way.
Marco:
I don't think there is an answer.
Marco:
And in the same way that Google is never going to make something client-side that has the kind of quality and taste of an Apple client-side platform and software, I don't think Apple will ever have what it takes to make Google quality services.
John:
The good thing in Apple's favor is that the thing that Apple has that Microsoft and Google seem not to have is it's kind of like it's one of those things you'd label as intangible in scare quotes because it's not intangible, but it's like
John:
It's more mysterious, whereas the things that Google has are tangible.
John:
And a great example of it is Google was a company that made web search and they indexed the entire web, which is an amazing technical feat, right?
John:
But they decided they wanted to have a client-side OS.
John:
And they...
John:
did that by making a client-side platform that they completely took ownership of.
John:
They have their own, don't call it Java, Dalvik VM, their own API, their own IDE, their own store.
John:
They understood, if we want to have a client-side mobile platform,
John:
We need to own it.
John:
We need to own the technology from top to bottom.
John:
We're going to, like, define the VM.
John:
We're going to define the language, sort of, you know, it's Java, whatever, with native client and all of those stuff.
John:
And we're going to have the idea they understood that, hey, we were a server-side company, but we want to get into client-side.
John:
And we can't do it by, like...
John:
licensing a bunch of software from someone else, we have to take ownership of it.
John:
So that is a tangible thing.
John:
And I think that's proof that Apple could if it wanted to say, we need to get into server side, at which they have, but also say they forgot to say is and we need to take ownership of it the same way we take ownership of the
John:
The client side, the thing that's harder to transfer is like, you know, taste and culture and coolness.
John:
That is much harder to do because like there is no coolness department at Microsoft.
John:
You can't you can't increase funding and 50 percent to something that doesn't exist.
John:
Right.
John:
That and maybe it's like, oh, well, designers are tangible.
John:
We could just steal them all from Apple.
John:
But like that's hard to do because they don't want to leave Apple and go to Microsoft has good designers doing their metro stuff.
Marco:
Well, and that wouldn't work because the structure around them is different there.
John:
Right.
John:
But I think the tangible things of a server-side company prove that it can get into client-side and take ownership of it.
John:
I think there's no reason that a client-side company can't prove that it can get into server-side and take ownership of the tech stack.
John:
It just didn't do it.
John:
Whereas the intangibles about coolness and taste and design, that is much harder to do.
John:
More rarely do you see a company like Google or Microsoft saying, we're not cool and stylish, but we're going to put some effort in there.
John:
And Google has tried to increase the style, and so has Microsoft.
John:
But none of them...
John:
They're still not reaching the heights that Apple gets in terms of taste and design.
John:
They've both made efforts in that area, but it seems harder to do.
John:
Whereas I would say technology-wise, Google has as much control over, pending whatever the lawsuit is with Oracle, but as much control over and determining its own destiny for all of its core tech.
John:
All of its server-side tech, all of its client-side tech.
John:
Hell, they even took WebKit back, and they have Blink now.
John:
Like, they have taken ownership of their tech stack, and so has Microsoft.
John:
Microsoft has always had ownership because they don't like to use anything for anybody else.
John:
And same thing with Amazon.
John:
You know, even they took Android, and they took ownership of it.
John:
You know, we're not going to even call it Android.
John:
It's going to be whatever the hell the Kindle OS is, right?
John:
Shit OS?
John:
Yeah.
Yeah.
John:
I think it is totally within the realm of possibility.
John:
You do have to change how the company works, like the structure of it and stuff like that, but not in any more radical way than Google had to change when it made Android, you know?
Marco:
Transcription by CastingWords
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
And they have responsive design.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
However, what they've also added recently is this entire flexible commerce platform.
Marco:
Squarespace Commerce is currently available in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, and Spain.
Marco:
You can sell any kind of product using a very simple single interface.
Marco:
Digital goods, physical goods, whatever you want, you can sell it through Squarespace Commerce.
Marco:
They partner with our friends at Stripe, and Stripe is awesome, and everyone loves them for a very good reason.
Marco:
Stripe handles everything, so Squarespace doesn't charge any fees on top.
Marco:
Stripe takes 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Everything else is included in your Squarespace plan.
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Squarespace Commerce also offers an express checkout mode, which bypasses the shopping cart interface if you want to.
Marco:
The order management interface lets you track outstanding orders, resend customer update emails, you can print packing slips, all from a single easy-to-use interface.
Marco:
They even integrate with all the regulations so that they handle tax, shipping rules, everything that you need to know to be able to sell physical or digital goods.
Marco:
They're PCI compliant, everything is secure via SSL.
Marco:
Everything you'd want in an online store, Squarespace Commerce offers.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Just go to squarespace.com, start building your site, see if you like it.
Marco:
If you like it, use coupon code ATP10 at checkout for 10% off.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Squarespace for sponsoring ATP.
Marco:
They are everything you need to create an exceptional website.
John:
Ads are making me depressed because I've been wandering websites recently that look like they were designed in 1993 by some person.
John:
They probably paid tons of money.
John:
I'm looking at home improvement type construction companies and stuff like that.
John:
Their websites, they look like they probably spent $15,000 to give to some teenager in 1994 to make their website.
John:
To Merlin's old company.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And simple things where you can make appointments or buy things.
John:
And it's like, look...
John:
If you just spent like $8 a month on Squarespace and put up a Stripe for it, like that experience in all ways, it's cheaper for you.
John:
It's nicer for your customers.
John:
You'll make more money.
John:
It's so cheap.
John:
Especially when you look at the prices for the work they're going to do.
John:
Like, you guys have the money.
John:
You have all the money in the world.
John:
You know the prices you charge?
John:
It's so cheap.
John:
Just get a Squarespace.
John:
And I bet they're so proud of their sites.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
They invested so much money early on.
John:
Right.
John:
It was like 15 grand site in 1994.
John:
I know.
John:
Tear it down.
John:
Pay $8 a month.
John:
God.
Marco:
And I was one of those people building those sites for people.
Marco:
And everything I built was terrible compared to what any modern web CMS offers you out of the box.
Marco:
Everything I did back then was horrible, and it charged people so much money because it was all one-offs.
Marco:
But now you can just go to these big platforms.
John:
like i wonder like all these restaurants that have these flash only sites oh don't get me started they have to be losing more than eight dollars a month in sales to to keep having their stupid flash yeah some sites do get a clue but they still like you can tell they had they paid someone in the last 10 years to do it but it's still gross it's still like you know just please just use stripe every time i i can now recognize like the stripe form like the fact that it's all client side there it's so beautiful it's just like
John:
I feel kind of bad because, you know, I made e-commerce sites too.
John:
And it used to be such a pain to make e-commerce sites.
John:
And I was like, if we had Stripe back then, it would have been done in an afternoon.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
It has all the features that I'd spend, like, months implementing, like, manually, you know.
John:
Because there weren't, you know, there was no companies that you could, like, outsource this stuff to.
John:
No one knew what they were doing.
John:
We were all just like, I guess we'll take money from people over the computer.
John:
It seemed like a crime.
John:
We were getting away with something.
John:
But, yeah.
Yeah.
Marco:
Stripe really isn't that old.
Marco:
When it came out, what was it, maybe three years ago?
Marco:
It's not that old.
Marco:
I just remember even then, even three years ago, taking money online was still a hassle.
Marco:
You basically had the PayPal API, which is a disaster in every possible way.
Marco:
Having run Instapaper subscriptions off the PayPal API, I cannot tell anybody enough that
Marco:
how much they should not use PayPal for anything.
Marco:
Even if you ignore all of the crazy stories about how PayPal locks your account and takes all your money, that's bad enough.
Marco:
But even when everything's working as intended, it's terrible.
Marco:
It's absolutely the worst thing in the universe.
Marco:
And for managing recurring subscriptions, there's no way to get a list of subscribers.
Marco:
Still, there is still no way to get a list.
Marco:
You just have to take in all those messages saying, hey, new person, and keep track of them yourself.
John:
It's like newsstand, only you can't even do that newsstand.
Marco:
That's true, I think.
Marco:
Yeah, although Newstead has the weird thing where you can go into iTunes Connect and download everybody's zip code.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But anyway, yeah.
Marco:
PayPal is the worst.
Marco:
When Stripe came out a few years ago, whenever that was, the reason why it made such a splash was on their page it was like, here's a curl command and here's a block of JSON that's equivalent.
Marco:
Here's how you charge somebody's card.
Marco:
And it's like these four lines of JSON or this one curl command.
Marco:
You're like, oh my god.
Marco:
That's so much better than everything else I've ever seen to this point.
John:
I don't have to form a soap message.
John:
Nice.
John:
It was the Amazon Payments story in the news this week too, right?
John:
Speaking of the death of PayPal, PayPal is the experts' exchange for so many other businesses.
John:
Stack Overflow is the experts' exchange as insert the blank is to PayPal and insert the blank is Amazon Payments, Stripe, and all the other companies that finally recognize that despite PayPal being the 800-pound gorilla, everybody hates it.
John:
It's terrible.
John:
It needs to die and all it takes is...
John:
some new services that, you know, can, you know, nip away at it.
Marco:
Douala is weird.
Marco:
Have you seen Douala?
John:
I've heard of it.
John:
Is that like the, uh, the interest-free lending thing?
Marco:
That's Kiva.
John:
I think you're, that's the one where you pay a quarter and you can, yeah, you can pay a quarter and send money to anybody.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
It's basically... I'm not sure how it works.
Marco:
I think it might be based on ACH or something.
Marco:
But somehow, it doesn't use the credit card network to move money around.
Marco:
So they charge only 25 cents.
Marco:
But then there's no fraud protection.
Marco:
It works a lot like cash.
Marco:
Something like that.
Marco:
I don't know all the details, but...
Marco:
Somehow they're able to only charge $0.25 for pretty much any size money transfer.
John:
Sounds like a complicated money laundering scheme that you are an unwitting participant in.
Marco:
What was weird is like – so I signed up for that a few months ago because that's how we were doing some of our ad payments.
Marco:
And –
Marco:
And, like, it feels wrong, like, because it's so, like, it feels suspicious to me to only pay 25 cents to move a giant chunk of money somewhere.
Marco:
Like, I don't know.
John:
It made me uneasy.
John:
But, you know, it shouldn't.
John:
It shouldn't, though, because, like, it's all... The fact that it costs money to transfer money is an artificial construct.
John:
Of course.
John:
Mostly artificial construct based on the old world.
John:
And now that we have all our computers are connected together, like, but the problem is there's no sort of secure standard for...
John:
There's no common secure standard for transferring money other than, I guess, Bitcoin or whatever, like really secure.
John:
And everything is kind of this strange game of trust and parties are sufficiently trustworthy and you assume that they're not – and then they communicate over this terrible protocol that it's –
John:
It's like a check where you just need the account number and routing number, and somehow you can send money into people's accounts.
John:
The entire banking system has not kept up with current technology, and it's all kind of a house of cards that we're just kind of saying, all right, everybody, let's just not blow this here.
John:
So things like Dwala come in, and it does seem crazy, but you're like, you know what?
John:
It shouldn't.
John:
We shouldn't be able to transfer money seamlessly from account to account.
John:
Why would we need a middleman for that?
John:
And it's because, well, we don't have any real secure protocols.
John:
And if we did, the NSA would be eavesdropping on them anyway.
Casey:
Well, you know what?
Casey:
Kind of along the same lines is Square Cash, which I think it was Andre Arco.
Casey:
It might have been him.
Casey:
Maybe not.
Casey:
Somebody sent me a few dollars of Square Cash just so I could try it out.
Casey:
And basically what's the way Square Cash works is you send an email to whoever, whomever, whatever is supposed to receive the money.
Casey:
You CC their email address, the Square Cash email address, and you put the dollar amount in the subject line.
Casey:
And then Square will send an email to the person receiving the cash saying, we think somebody is about to pay you.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
They send an email to the person that sent it.
Casey:
So they send it to you saying, hey, man or girl, are you really sure you want to send this money?
Casey:
And then what happens is the person receiving the money just inputs their debit card account number and all the money is transferred.
Casey:
And I think it's 50 cents a transfer.
Casey:
And I'm sure there's a limit in terms of how much you can send, but I don't know what it is.
Casey:
So it must be pretty high.
Casey:
And it works flawlessly.
John:
Yeah, you did that with us.
John:
I think you sent me like a dollar or something to try it out.
John:
Yeah, that was pretty neat.
John:
And people in the chat room are saying that they have a system in Europe that works with us.
John:
It does not surprise me.
John:
Europe has all the... Europe is the new Japan.
John:
Remember, it used to be that in Japan, they had like flying cars and hoverboards and we had nothing.
John:
All we had in the 80s was like Donkey Kong and Casio keyboards, but they had the cool stuff.
John:
And then their economy tank.
John:
But now it's like, you know, in Europe, they have, you know, socialized medicine and...
John:
And Switzerland was passing a law for the minimum monthly income to be the equivalent of $2,800 for all citizens.
Marco:
We're going to get so much email from this from people who are like, I can't believe how terrible your system in the US is.
Marco:
Don't you know how much better this is in Europe?
Marco:
And the answer is yes, we know.
Marco:
We are very aware of how terrible our system is.
Marco:
Please, you don't have to tell us.
John:
Although I think, like, I mean, they're saying, you know, they just need two numbers and they can transfer money to each other.
John:
Like, they still don't have, like, Bitcoin is actually at the forefront of this technology, as sad as it is with their, you know, crazy technology.
John:
You know what else Europe does right?
John:
And I bring this up only briefly because I just watched a video from Mythbusters about this, is roundabouts.
Casey:
So the Mythbusters, which are clearly the bastion of all things good about science, and they never ever flub anything ever, they did a test with a four-way stop versus a roundabout, and the roundabout crushed the four-way stop in terms of throughput.
Casey:
I just thought that was interesting.
Marco:
I don't even think that's up for debate.
Marco:
I think almost every study has always proven that, that roundabouts really are way better for throughput.
John:
Yeah, no, we have a ton of them around.
John:
I don't know if you have them down where you guys are, but yeah, Massachusetts is the land of the roundabouts.
John:
We have plenty of them.
John:
Yeah, no, they're all over the place here.
Casey:
Well, they're becoming popular here, and it's funny watching everyone try to navigate them because nobody knows what they're doing.
Casey:
John, while I'm thinking of it, how's the review going?
Casey:
Do you feel like you have a release date based on the, what is it, October 22nd iPad event that everyone's kind of assuming will be Mavericks as well?
Marco:
And we got the GM like two hours after the last show.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, that's right.
Casey:
That's right.
John:
I mean, it turned out that Apple Insider story that I was poo-pooing, like they had it right.
John:
It was just they were talking about the people who get like the early seeds.
John:
Because as soon as I saw the story, I went to the, you know, Apple developer website and saw nothing there.
John:
I'm like, oh, maybe it's just bogus.
John:
But it was just, you know, it was a staged rollout.
John:
The super-duper, you know, Apple seed program people got it.
John:
And then a couple hours later, we got it.
John:
So the update on the review is, yay, I've got a GM.
John:
Boo, I had to redo a whole bunch of screenshots.
John:
God, the things they changed are just insane.
John:
Like...
John:
They changed functionality, too.
John:
So I had to rewrite an entire section because everything I had written about and all the screenshots that I'd taken were no longer there.
John:
And the worst thing about the section I had to rewrite is I don't understand one of the things that they changed.
John:
They changed the pop-up menus, where they are, and what the choices are, and understand all the choices except for one.
John:
And so right now in my review, I have written...
John:
that i could not figure out what this meant like i tried i tried so many maybe it means this let me try it nope maybe it means this let me try it like i could not figure and of course i asked apple like i have so many questions into apple but they you know ignore me so maybe i'll hear from them maybe i won't but having a gm build is good so i did a lot of work revising things by the end i was getting pissed because it's like
John:
I mean, this, we've all seen the screenshots, you know, you know, the labels are the tag things or whatever in the finder.
John:
You see in the screenshots, they put like a colored dot next to the file name.
John:
If you give it like a red lip, they change the size of those dots by like a pixel.
John:
Come on guys.
Casey:
They did that just to troll you.
John:
Every single screenshot that had a freaking dot.
John:
Yeah, I was like, and I like the old size better.
John:
Like they made them like slightly smaller.
John:
I'm like, oh, come on.
John:
And so now it's just like, yeah, if I had to redo a screenshot because they totally changed the way something works, fine.
John:
But I had to redo it because you made the dot smaller.
John:
That's just cruel.
John:
And then like the one I tweeted was that one pop-up menu was like two pixels farther away from the label.
Marco:
We have to have, like, some very high-ranking design manager on OS X has to be a listener of this show.
Casey:
I was just about to say that, and if that is the truth, like, can you imagine, or even if it's just whoever's in charge of that particular screen just singing to themselves, you know what, I'm going to troll John Syracuse it.
John:
the reason i moved the one with the pop-up menu like that one i kind of give them a pass for it because it was misaligned in in the in the pre-release builds like you know what a dialog box looks like has a bunch of pop-up menus supposed to be all like kind of left you know their left edges all line up and one of them wasn't the top one was like sticking out more than it should have so they were simply correcting like this is how you can tell it's the gm like someone who did a once over on every single screen and get and when someone interface builder like didn't drag the little thingy to be like you know what i mean and so they realigned it and it's like
John:
I've got to retake the screenshot.
John:
At that point, I was like, really?
John:
Is every screen changed in some small way?
John:
People are asking me on Twitter, is there anything that I'll let slide if it's not off?
John:
That pop-up menu is off by a pixel, right?
John:
Once you see that it's off by a pixel, you can't unsee it.
John:
I'm not going to leave the pre-release screenshot out there, not just because it's pre-release, but because it's like, hey, the top pop-up menu is in a line.
John:
Someone screwed up an interface builder, right?
John:
So I'm going to fix that one.
John:
there in every review there's at least two or three shots that are not from gm and different ways that only i would notice and i've never been called on it so now i shouldn't even say this was now someone's going to go sit there and like graphically diff every single thing and find the one that but rest assured there will be shots in there that uh that were taken uh not on the gm and the different in immaterial ways of like you know a pixel here a pixel there that no one will ever notice uh
John:
And I'm okay with that because seriously, I'm not going to redo every single one of these screenshots.
Marco:
The only person on Earth who would notice is you.
John:
Or, like, the person who, you know, the graphic designer who's like, I changed that.
John:
That's a different color now.
John:
That just, you know.
John:
Nope, not even them.
John:
Well, maybe.
John:
Like, we'll see.
John:
Like, yeah, because it gets cumbersome redoing it.
John:
Especially when, like, if it was just changing screenshots, fine.
John:
But when I had to redo a whole section because they totally changed the functionality, it's like you wait until the GM built to massively change its functionality.
John:
Oh, well.
Marco:
And do you think it's ready to be called a GM?
John:
Remember when they started doing this, they'd be like, here's the GM seed.
John:
And we're like, what does that mean?
John:
What is a GM seed?
John:
Does this mean you are seeding us the GM?
John:
Or does this mean it's like, we'll ever see a release where it says GM seed 2.
John:
Because that's the big fear.
John:
It's like, what?
John:
GM seed 2?
John:
That shows that you are misinterpreting the previous title.
John:
The previous title did not mean it was a seed of the GM.
John:
It meant this is...
John:
It's like, it's like release candidate.
John:
They used to use that terminology of like, maybe this is GM.
John:
Here you go.
John:
You know?
John:
And so I really hope there will not be another one that says GM seed too.
John:
And I don't think there will.
John:
I think they could ship this and it would be fine.
John:
I need a price and a date.
John:
I need a price and a date.
John:
I have right now the text in my review says, I don't know what the price is because now I can, now I can press the button and like publish it.
John:
And you know, I could submit it to an ebook store and it would be valid assuming they don't change the GM.
John:
Right.
John:
But I also have two more different versions based on two different guesses of what the price might be.
John:
So I need a price.
John:
I need a date.
John:
I'm waiting patiently.
Casey:
What else is going on?
Casey:
How's the Overcast going?
Marco:
This episode is also brought to you in part by Audible.
Marco:
Audible is the leading provider of downloadable audiobooks with over 150,000 titles in virtually every genre.
Marco:
Their catalog is huge and it grows constantly.
Marco:
Only a few months ago we were saying 100,000 downloads or titles.
Marco:
Now it's 150,000.
Marco:
They're huge and always growing.
Marco:
If you want to listen to it, Audible has it.
Marco:
You can listen to audiobooks anytime, anywhere.
Marco:
They support iPhones, iPads, computers, Kindles, even old iPods if you're one of those people still carrying an old iPod.
Marco:
Or if you use one to exercise or whatever the case may be, you can even play audiobooks there.
Marco:
Audible is offering ATP listeners a free audiobook along with a 30-day trial.
Marco:
Go to audiblepodcast.com slash ATP to take advantage of this special offer.
Marco:
So, John, from what I understand, you actually have a book recommendation.
John:
Yeah, this is not a new book recommendation because anyone who's listened to my past podcast knows that I talk about the same three books over and over again.
John:
This is one of them.
John:
But it's in a different context this time.
John:
It's in the context of an audiobook.
John:
This book is – I don't read a lot of biographies, but this is my favorite biography that I've ever read.
John:
It also won a Pulitzer Prize, so it has some pedigree to it.
John:
And it is also, interestingly, a book that most people will never, ever read on their own.
John:
in paper form because it's like over a thousand pages and truth be told it's like if you're not into the subject matter that's a lot of pages to read about one person no matter how interesting they were now i am super into this uh this one person because it's the biography is of robert moses uh i knew this was gonna be yes and i grew up on long island and i went to all the beaches and parks that they talk about in here and it's just an amazing experience for me so i'm such a crazy you know big fan of long island to read about
John:
How all these things that I enjoyed in my youth came to be in their sort of tortured history and the interesting man that was behind them.
John:
And, you know, it really is an amazing book.
John:
But I recognize when I recommend it to people like they're like, yeah, I'm going to read this phone book or whatever.
John:
So get the audio book.
John:
And this, unlike I think in the past episode where Marcus said he liked to bridge things, this is an unabridged audio book of a thousand page Pulitzer Prize winning biography.
Yeah.
Marco:
Do they have an abridged version out of curiosity?
John:
No, you don't want the abridged version.
John:
You want it to be like, admit to yourself that you're never going to read it, right?
John:
And instead, just use it as an audiobook.
John:
66 hours is like more than two and a half days of audio.
John:
Say you're going on a cross-country drive or something.
John:
This is what you want.
John:
And think about the value you're getting for your money for this.
John:
Use this as just an unbelievable value, enriching your life in a way that you would never do on your own because you have to admit to yourself that you're never going to read this book, but you will just stick it in your iPod and listen to it on your...
John:
drive to and from your colleges across the country or whatever so highly recommended the power broker pulitzer prize winning by robert a carrow who a man with an amazing accent if you google him and find some youtube videos all about long island and robert moses two things near and dear to my heart that is awesome although not not robert moses himself because he was a terrible person but anyway read the book all right thanks a lot
Marco:
That is so like the typical John Syracuse of pick.
John:
Yes, it is.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Audible for sponsoring ATP.
Marco:
Go to audiblepodcast.com slash ATP to take advantage of our free 30-day trial.
Marco:
Thanks a lot, Audible.
Casey:
So was that your hint that you don't want to know or don't want to share what's going on with Overcast?
Marco:
There's not a whole lot to share.
Marco:
I mean, another week went by.
Marco:
I'm working on it.
Marco:
I've been working on it.
Marco:
I'm doing a little bit more with the sync engine.
Marco:
Today I was writing playlist sync and a couple of other, you know, preference sync type of things.
Marco:
I mean,
Marco:
Nothing really exciting.
Marco:
Just optimizations, fixes, and just moving forward with the feature set.
Marco:
Adding podcasts, removing podcasts, that's all still in the works.
Marco:
There's still a whole lot missing.
Marco:
But yeah, that's about it.
Marco:
NuttyGamer in the chat wants me to talk about pricing for the app.
Marco:
And I...
Marco:
Pricing is interesting, but honestly, I have not really made a decision yet.
Marco:
I'm not just saying that to be coy.
Marco:
I really haven't decided what I'm going to do yet.
Marco:
There's a lot of options.
Marco:
I really don't think I'm going to do the paid upfront thing.
Marco:
There's a lot of value to that.
Marco:
With the new iOS 7 Receipt Validation API...
Marco:
I could launch as paid up front, see how it goes, and then move to free within-app purchase and simply migrate those users over who bought it.
Marco:
You can migrate them over, and you basically know if they bought the paid version or not when you make the same app free.
Marco:
So you could move from paid to free within-app purchase easily for the first time ever, whereas before iOS 7, you could not do that.
Marco:
There was no good way to do it, and you'd just anger everybody.
Yeah.
Marco:
So I could do that.
Marco:
And I've certainly thought about doing that.
Marco:
I'm leaning towards not.
Marco:
But the reality is also, I'm probably still at least three to four months away from release.
Marco:
At least.
Marco:
That's why I said I'm going to try to get it out this year.
Marco:
In reality, I think January or February is more realistic and more likely.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
All these pricing dynamics could be different then.
Marco:
I might change my mind on the business model in the last month.
Marco:
I really don't know.
Marco:
That's about it, I guess.
Marco:
BD Fortin in the chat asked a good question, which I addressed on another show.
Marco:
I don't think I addressed it here.
Marco:
What about an iTunes Match-style subscription to remove ads and give the money to the podcasters?
Marco:
Basically, the readability model.
Marco:
Collecting money from people and then distributing it to what you listen to.
Marco:
There's a number of practical problems to that.
Marco:
most of which is what readability faced, which is if you default to collecting money for everyone without them claiming it, it's kind of weird, and there's a lot of issues with that.
Marco:
I could do something like integrate with Flatter.
Marco:
Flatter is a decent service.
Marco:
It's not really my style, but it's a good service, and they have good intentions and stuff like that.
Marco:
I think the biggest problem with the podcast app or platform collecting money for everybody and distributing it out...
Marco:
is that I don't think you could get any number of podcasts to really agree on how they want to do that, how they want to message that, how they want to receive that money.
Marco:
A lot of podcasts already collect money directly through themselves and wouldn't want the competition.
Marco:
A lot of them, it would cause confusion as to who the people should be paying themselves.
John:
Yeah, the advertisers, I mean, it's not good for advertisers either, because like that hybrid thing makes nobody happy.
John:
Like you can either have a podcast that's listener supported, or you can have a podcast that's ad supported.
John:
But when you try to do both, it's like, well, the advertisers are pissed that they're not getting those people who are like paying to skip their ads.
John:
And so like, you know,
John:
you're advertising to fewer people and then some people are pissed because they feel like they have to pay for it or should pay for it so they can skip the ads because we know that some people are skipping the ads and they're not so it's much cleaner to say look it's free it's supported by ads or it's you pay for it and you know they give it to you like the magazine type model where there's no ads you just pay money like those are such so clean and understandable and you
John:
Especially hybrid solutions that you impose on people that they haven't chosen to do.
John:
Just sadness all around, I think.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
And John, wasn't it one of the last hypercritical episodes where you talked about how advertisers almost always outbid the listeners or audience directly?
Marco:
That's very true.
Marco:
Almost always, a podcast can make more through ads than through direct payments.
Marco:
But anyway, I don't think it's the platform or app's responsibility to...
Marco:
to monetize podcasts.
Marco:
I think every show is going to have a different audience with different needs and different priorities.
Marco:
And I think I should just leave it up to the shows and their producers, how they want to monetize and where they want to do that.
Marco:
Also, from a practical point of view...
Marco:
Didn't Instacast have Flatter integration for a while and it caused tons of problems with AppReview?
Marco:
Anytime you collect money in an app, either not through Apple or if you're collecting money to distribute in some other weird way when telling people that in the app...
Marco:
you're running a very big risk of being rejected for any update you try to make or being kicked out of the store when you're already in it.
Marco:
Because that's right tiptoeing along the line of what Apple will allow within that purchase rules.
Marco:
And it is just... Oh, here's the link.
Marco:
Thank you, underscore David Smith.
Marco:
It is just not worth even risking that.
Marco:
And to build a major feature around depending on that is not wise.
Marco:
So not only do I think it wouldn't really get past Apple very reliably, but I also don't think it's a very good idea for one particular podcast app or even any group of them to try to create and enforce a new universal podcast monetization model where every show is going to want to do something different.
Marco:
And even like...
Marco:
Even the language around collecting the money.
Marco:
I talked forever ago on Build and Analyze about Flatter and TipJoy, I think, and a couple of things like that, where I was saying, I don't like the idea of having a tip jar on my site.
Marco:
Just socially, that's kind of a weird thing to me.
Marco:
And I would want to very carefully control any language or implication or pressure around asking people to give me money for something.
Marco:
And everyone's going to have different opinions on what that is for them and what they want to present to people, what they want to ask people to give or to do, and in what context and with what language.
Marco:
So there isn't one solution that's going to please everybody who cares about this stuff as much as I do.
Casey:
You know, another thing that we've gotten a lot of feedback on, and I don't know if there's really anything you can or do have to say about this, but a lot of people seem to have taken offense at you saying that the now playing screen is the only thing that matters.
Casey:
Do you have anything that you'd like to clear the air about?
Casey:
And maybe not.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I mean, I can see both sides of this story, so I don't have any particularly strong opinions about it, but...
Casey:
I don't know if you had anything to say.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I don't want to take too long on this because I don't want to make it too boring.
Marco:
But yeah, last episode, I threw off the comment that I was focusing a lot of my design effort on the now playing screen and that the rest of the app could just be like a bunch of table views and it wouldn't really matter that much because, you know, you spend the most time navigating the now playing screen.
Marco:
And whatever exactly I said there, we got a lot of email about it from people saying, that's wrong.
Marco:
As soon as I start playing a show, I turn the screen off, put the phone in my pocket, and that's it.
Marco:
So I'm interacting more with the rest of the app.
Marco:
So what I was getting at, whether I said it or not, who knows, if I messed up, oh well.
Marco:
That's the reality of talking for two hours every week, unrehearsed and with no preparation.
That is a natural.
Marco:
What I mean is the now playing screen has very frequent interaction.
Marco:
Whether you're skipping a section or using the scrubber or playing and pausing because you've got to listen to something somewhere else.
Marco:
Very frequent interaction.
Marco:
Some of that you can do with the remote with a clicker in some cases.
Marco:
Some of it you can't.
Marco:
Some of it you're doing directly.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
That screen, to me, everything else about the app, it matters a lot less how it's designed.
Marco:
Because no matter how you design it, you're probably scrolling through some kind of list or collection of shows that each within it has a list of episodes, or maybe you have playlists that have a list of episodes within them.
Marco:
Whatever the case is, those are pretty straightforward designs.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
Yeah, you can tweak it here and there.
Marco:
You can add a little flourish here and there.
Marco:
There's a lot of little decisions you can make differently, but structurally, navigationally, the rest of the app is not that hard to design.
Marco:
It just isn't.
Marco:
If you want to go that route with your podcast app, feel free, but...
Marco:
The fact is it doesn't really matter how I present a list of episodes in the grand scheme of things.
Marco:
I'll try to do it as nicely as I can, but I'm not losing sleep over that.
Marco:
The now playing screen, there's more variability, although you wouldn't know it based on looking at the apps out there right now, but there's more variability in how that can be designed.
Marco:
And I think it matters more because...
Marco:
Yeah, maybe you're interacting with it for a split second and putting it back in your pocket.
Marco:
But what if you're jogging?
Marco:
Or what if you're in a car and you can't really look at it safely?
Marco:
There are situations like this where it matters how it's designed.
Marco:
It matters how it's laid out.
Marco:
It matters what's on there and what's not to a level that I think is more nuanced and more important and harder to design for than a list of episodes.
Marco:
That's what I meant.
John:
I think I understood what you meant and what I would have said to my interpretation of it was that that's where you're concentrating your development effort for the 1.0 because you have to pick something.
John:
But the one kernel of truth that I think was in all the feedback, at least from my perspective, is when I think of podcast apps, which, again, I don't use.
John:
I listen on the iPod Shuffle.
John:
The problem that I would like solved by them that is not solved adequately by most of the ones that I use is the particular way that I deal with deciding what I'm going to listen to.
John:
When I do it manually, it's this terrible process of using iTunes, and iTunes 11 has gotten even worse about this, and me hunting around for the stupid things, dragging them onto my iPod shuffle,
John:
If I'm lucky, I can hunt around for all of them and then drag them all at once.
John:
But if I'm unlucky, I have to do them two or three trips.
John:
Then I go over to the iPod Shuffle and all those things are down at the bottom.
John:
And then I manually drag them up into the order that I want and rearrange them.
John:
And then I wait for it to sink again.
John:
Because I have an idea of what I want to do.
John:
I'm like, okay, well, today I'm going to listen to this.
John:
And then I want to listen to that when it comes out.
John:
And then I'm going to go on a binge and catch up with this podcast.
John:
And when I go on this car trip, I want to do these things.
John:
So that whole idea of managing what I'm going to listen to next...
John:
is the thing that I just think is not solved by the current crop, certainly not by my stupid iPod shuffle, and by the current crop of iOS podcast applications.
John:
And so even though I would be spending most of my time on the now playing screen, the features that are important to me are the ones that let me sort of
John:
Set up my queue of like, you know, I don't know if you want to call like a Netflix queue or whatever.
John:
Like, here's what I'm going to listen to next.
John:
And that queue is just random arbitrary.
John:
It's not like one podcast has higher priority than the other, or like, there's no automated way to do it.
John:
It's like, I manually pick what, what I want to listen to and what order.
John:
Uh, and that's, that's what I, if I had to pick another part of the UI for you to concentrate on, that would be the second one because yeah, most of the time we'll be on either now playing screen or the controls on the sleep screen or whatever.
John:
Uh, but to get to that screen at all, I have to sort of have my queue set up.
John:
You know what I mean?
Marco:
Makes sense.
John:
And the other thing about this, I think, is that I'm assuming you're not telling us every single feature that you're going to have in the application because why would you?
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
So that's something for people to keep in mind is they don't realize that you're not going to...
John:
Reveal every single feature that Zap will have or that you're planning in the future because that's just not what you do when you're making an application because why would you give your competitors the head start and never mind the features that are going to be in version 1.1 and 2.0 and so on and so forth.
John:
So I would keep that in mind.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I mean that's the other thing too.
Marco:
Like everything I'm talking about is 1.0.
Marco:
Like as soon as I release it, there's hopefully going to be a lot of users.
Marco:
And those lot of users are going to give me feedback and are going to use it in ways I didn't expect.
Marco:
And I'm going to see how it works with full scale and how the server stuff works and how the structure of the app works, how navigation works.
Marco:
People are going to report problems or suggest improvements that I haven't thought of.
Marco:
And so all this planning and all this thinking about the design and making these decisions, that's all just for 1.0.
Marco:
And it could all change a month after I release it.
John:
Think about Instant Paper 1.0 and how it compared to the final version.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
I don't even want to think about Instant Paper 1.0.
John:
So, yeah.
John:
Long way to go.
John:
It's a marathon, not a sprint.
Marco:
Some people have nostalgia and positive memories, and they look back fondly on the stuff they made in the past.
Marco:
I am not one of those people.
Marco:
I look back on stuff I made like three years ago and I was like, oh, I'm embarrassed.
Marco:
Like I don't even want to think about it.
Marco:
I don't want to look at it.
Marco:
I'm just deeply embarrassed by it, which is probably unhealthy.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
It keeps moving forward at least.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
We good?
Marco:
Yeah, I think so.
Marco:
Cool.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our two sponsors this week, Squarespace and Audible, and we will see you next week after our singleton trip.
Marco:
Indeed.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
Marco:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, 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-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R
John:
This is like the least we've ever gotten through our little notes document that Marker doesn't look at.
Casey:
Yeah, I know.
John:
One item, this zero follow-up, and Casey put in the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
John:
item right before the show, and that's the only one we did.
Marco:
This is the first time I've actually gone the whole show without even looking at the document.
Marco:
It is?
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Well, it doesn't matter.
John:
Two out of three, Casey, as long as we stay strong.
John:
We have to not compromise.
John:
Don't negotiate with terrorists here, just because he doesn't want to use the document.
John:
We have the majority.
John:
Two out of three people use the document.
John:
The document is official.
Casey:
It's been placed.
John:
Whether Marco looks at it or not.
Casey:
Okay, so did you see that Bimmer Post put out a thing?
Casey:
This is Accidental Neutral.
Casey:
Bimmer?
Casey:
Bimmer, whatever.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Bimmer Post.
Marco:
Don't even talk about religious arguments.
Marco:
Don't even get into that.
Marco:
Oh, God.
John:
Yeah, seriously.
John:
Is that a real – is there actually a controversy about that?
Casey:
There is.
John:
There is.
John:
Well, did we both – did we all three of us agree that it's Bimmer?
Casey:
Apparently Casey doesn't.
Casey:
No, it's because it's spelled B-I-M-M-E-R.
John:
I know, I know, I understand.
John:
But the nickname for the car is Beamer, right?
Casey:
Yeah, well, that's the religious debate, is that the motorcycles are Beamer or Beamer, and the car is Beamer or Beamer, and I think the car is actually supposed to be Beamer, if you talk to a zealot.
Marco:
See, this is why I just avoid saying either of them.
Marco:
I don't want to have to deal with that.
Marco:
Porsche, Jaguar, yeah, it's a wrap.
Casey:
Subaru.
Casey:
No, no one says that.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
I see that.
Casey:
Now I can't even remember what the hell it was I was trying to talk about.
John:
Beamer Post.
John:
Controversy.
John:
Beamer Post.
Casey:
Uh...