Desperation Mode
Marco:
All right, I'm going to use the most interesting two-thirds of that for the after show.
Marco:
Now let's start the real show.
Marco:
Good idea, good idea.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
Hey, so I hear it was Christmas at the Syracuse household already.
John:
Yeah, the tiny little package arrived that weighed a lot.
John:
Yeah, I was very proud of that.
John:
It seemed very dense.
John:
It really shows how little Marco cared about the old Kindles that he sent me.
Yeah.
John:
He packed them together by stacking them one on top of each other.
John:
They were their own packing material.
John:
Nothing in between them.
John:
No bubble wrap tissue paper.
John:
I put the crappiest one on top.
John:
It's just a bunch of Kindles and other e-readers jammed together into a solid brick.
Marco:
Well, they stack very well.
Marco:
Yeah, except for the damn Kindle one, which is wedge shaped.
Marco:
Everything else stacks really well.
John:
I think they managed to like the original Kindle, like the back cover had come off in transit, but I don't think anything was broken on it.
John:
And the Kindle touch has a thing in the upper left corner where it's damaged to that.
John:
Was that already there?
John:
um what kind of thing is it like a i think there's like a small like a tiny scratch on the screen up there maybe yeah it's like a little spot that's like permanently black like a little like a dead pixel like well no it's bigger than that it's like someone took like someone took like a flathead screwdriver went pink and jammed into the screen so it's like a little crack slash area it's not it's not big it's like it's nope that's new sorry yeah whatever
John:
but anyway the kindles came when we opened them up at the table with all the kids are there and all these kindles coming out and surprising things happen because marco you know i mentioned i put this in the show notes and marco's like well there's nothing to say about that it's not it's not that exciting and you know it's it's a bunch of old kindles i thought i would just take them put them up into the attic these just the two surprising things that happened one the first thing my son said when he saw all these things is can i have a kindle fire
John:
I didn't mention Kindle Fire.
John:
I didn't show him that there was a Kindle Fire in this stack of things, but he quickly surmised that in this giant stack of things that I said are Kindles, one of them might be Kindle Fire, and that's the one that he want.
John:
Interesting.
John:
And this is before any of them were turned on.
John:
So that means that the Kindle Fire has good brand recognition among young kids whose parents don't want them to have a really expensive iPad.
Marco:
That's really interesting.
Marco:
Although he apparently didn't know enough about them to recognize that if you're going to have any Kindle Fire, the one I sent you, which is the very first one, is by far the worst one you can possibly have.
John:
It's just a big stack of stuff.
John:
And the thing is, it doesn't really make any sense because our iPad 2 is basically the kid's iPads 2.
John:
And my daughter doesn't really use the iPad 2.
John:
So it's basically his iPad 2.
John:
So he sort of has an iPad 2 that he can use more or less whenever he wants.
John:
And he still wanted a Kindle Fire because I guess he thought it would be his, his.
John:
And the second reaction is my daughter said, oh, can I have a Kindle?
John:
And I said, yes, you can.
John:
And she said, yay.
John:
So there you go.
John:
Kids love Kindles.
John:
I was trying to decide which one to give her.
John:
Like, you know, we're going to put some books on it.
John:
She's learning to read and stuff like that.
John:
my son already has an oldie and Kindle that we had that he reads on and everything like that.
John:
She's just starting to read.
John:
And I decided to actually give her the Kindle touch because as anyone with young kids knows, you put a Kindle in front of them, they touch the screen immediately.
John:
And why wouldn't they like anything that you can't touch a screen on is obviously broken.
John:
And so the Kindle Touch, you actually can touch the screen.
John:
I kind of regretted it because sometimes she wants to use her finger to trace when you're reading the words, and that doesn't really work that well on a Kindle Touch because as soon as you touch, it changes the page or whatever.
John:
But trying to give her one that you had to use, like the cursor controls or something to do books, I think that would be more difficult.
John:
And the Kindle Touch has fewer buttons and things you could bump on the edges and excellently turn pages.
John:
So yeah, you made a bunch of people happy.
John:
Although I told my son he couldn't have the Kindle Fire because I don't want him using that thing.
John:
I don't blame you.
John:
He's already got his reading Kindle, and he's got his iPad, so he doesn't really need it, so he got over it.
John:
But yeah, I was excited by the arrival of Kindles in the house.
Marco:
I first heard, like, when the Kindle Fire came out, what was it, two years ago now, roughly?
Marco:
I first heard...
Marco:
When it first came out, there was this massive common refrain I heard from people, which was that they were men, of course, because they're nerds on the internet, and it's way too predominantly male still.
Marco:
And they were men who were buying Kindle Fires to give their wife a tablet.
Marco:
Which, if you think about the quality of the Kindle Fire, not only is this a fairly derogatory thing to do, but I wonder if any of those caused marital problems.
Marco:
I mean, it is such an incredibly terrible device.
Marco:
I can't imagine that ended up well.
John:
Have you seen the new one?
John:
The HDX, whatever it's called?
Marco:
I haven't, no.
Marco:
Is it any better?
Marco:
No.
John:
I've seen it, and they're getting way better.
John:
If you compare the Kindle Fire you sent me, compared to the new one, it's like night and day.
John:
The new one is not embarrassing anymore.
John:
The only thing that I think is embarrassing about the new one is that it's externally asymmetrical, which I find incredibly offensive.
Marco:
Wait, what?
Marco:
It is?
Marco:
In what direction?
John:
Like, if you're looking at it in a portrait orientation and you're gripping it, one side is thicker than the other.
John:
It's like weird trapezoid back shape.
John:
It's for the origami style kind of case that it comes with.
John:
I mean, it makes sense in the context of the case that the thing like slots into the case because there's kind of like a tapered trapezoid on the back.
Casey:
Oh, weird.
John:
It's...
John:
it's weird, but it bothers me way more than it should.
John:
Cause like, who cares?
John:
Who cares what shape the back of the thing is?
John:
Right.
John:
But I do, I don't want it.
John:
I want it to be symmetrical.
John:
I want a thing that I hold.
John:
It just seems wrong to me, but, uh, but the screen is really, really nice.
John:
The interface is no longer disgustingly laggy.
John:
Uh,
John:
If you wanted to give somebody something that all they're going to do on it is watch Amazon instant streaming video and read books full with typos, it would be fine.
John:
I wouldn't buy it for anyone who wants to use applications, obviously, but they've come a long way.
Marco:
That's good.
Marco:
I mean, they had nowhere to go but up.
John:
Yeah, this thing is like a brick.
John:
It's sitting right next to me.
John:
I mean, I'd seen them when they were new, but it's like, was this always this huge?
John:
It's just terrible.
Marco:
And imagine, like, so many people bought that because it was sold as, like, the premium Kindle.
Marco:
Like, if you wanted an E-Ink Kindle, you should consider upgrading to this.
Marco:
And if you're reading on it, it is, in almost every way, substantially worse than the E-Ink Kindles.
Marco:
And so many people bought that as an upgrade, but that probably did not turn out well.
John:
You could fend off muggers with it, I guess.
Yeah.
John:
And the back of it is that nice textured plastic rubberized stuff.
John:
Yeah, the back felt all right.
John:
I like this, but it's so heavy.
John:
Holding this in one hand, forget it.
John:
Whereas the Ian Kindles, they're so light now.
John:
They're practically like a piece of paper.
John:
It's so much nicer to hold in one hand.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Let me take our first sponsor break.
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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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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Marco:
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Marco:
It's great for large photo storage that we were talking about last week because you're using your own bandwidth, using your own storage.
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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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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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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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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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
We got a lot, or I don't know if I should say we got, but we saw a lot of interesting news that may or may not be news about PhotoStream.
Casey:
And John, you seem to have taken point and prepared some notes for the show that we don't prepare for.
Casey:
Do you want to walk through kind of what we've learned over the last week?
John:
Yeah, since we talked so much about Everpix on a couple past shows, a couple of people on Twitter sent me a link to a recently updated Apple Knowledge Base article about PhotoStream.
John:
And we'll have the link in the show notes.
John:
And here's some text from one of them.
John:
It says, there is no limit to the amount of photos you can upload to my PhotoStream over a longer period, such as several months or years.
John:
photos uploaded to my photo stream or shared photo streams are not counted against their iCloud storage well we knew that about the iCloud storage and so we used to think oh well there was an upload limit of a thousand but now it says there's no limit right and that began the conversation on amongst all the people on twitter finding other knowledge-based articles and saying yeah but here's this knowledge-based article that has an even later date that says it's still limited to a thousand and then there were people experimenting by saying okay i've got a thousand photos in my stream
John:
I will take one more picture and I see the first picture just went off the end and it still says I have a thousand.
John:
Then people are saying, well, that's just what's on your phone.
John:
Really all of them are on your server.
John:
I went on vacation, took 3000 pictures, only a thousand were on my phone.
John:
But when I came home and went to iPhoto, all 3000 were in my photo stream.
John:
And this went back and forth and back and forth.
John:
I think we should just put all these links in the show notes.
John:
People can look at them.
John:
My takeaway from all of this is that regardless of what the situation actually is, experimentally determined, determined from Apple's documents, however you want to do it.
John:
It's obviously still way too confusing for us to figure out.
John:
And the most important feature of Everpix was not how it behaved.
John:
It was the fact that you could explain it very simply.
John:
We could pull all your photos forever.
John:
They're stored in the cloud, period, to the end.
John:
Anything that you have to look at all these documents and have a big Twitter conversation about and try to read the tea leaves on is missing the most important feature, which is simplicity and understandability.
John:
So I'm not even sure what the current situation is.
John:
The upload limit stuff seems straightforward because you just say, well, they're just saying how many you can upload.
John:
They don't say anything about how many they keep or how many will be redownloaded or anything like that.
John:
And I think pretty much people have determined it'll only keep a thousand on your device in the stream and five thousand in each shared stream.
John:
But I'm still not entirely sure about, okay, well, so given all those constraints, will it do like the guy who went on vacation said?
John:
And yeah, you only have 1,000 on your main photo stream on your phone, but when you get home and iPhoto syncs with your photo stream, will it pull down all your pictures?
John:
Like, there's no good way, as far as I know, to, you know, like the equivalent of EverPix.
John:
You go to the EverPix website, and there's all your pictures.
John:
The cloud is the source of truth.
John:
Your pictures are in the cloud, and they may be on local machines as a caching type thing.
John:
and and photo stream and everything we're still not sure so i think apple may be making progress here or maybe they just changed the upload limit or a throttling thing i don't know but it's kind of one of those things where all the incremental steps don't really matter until they get to the point where they just say don't worry about it it's simple we got you covered and here's how it works and here's you can feel secure knowing that it worked because right now i don't think anyone feels secure in their knowledge of exactly how photo stream works with all their devices i know i certainly don't
Casey:
Yeah, I don't either.
Casey:
And this, you know, I was thinking as you were narrating all this, this feels so, I don't know, Microsoft-like, you know, like, oh, well, it's this except one that.
Casey:
And then there's this except one that's other thing.
Casey:
And it just, it's so blurry and weird.
Casey:
And it's so not the way Apple usually is.
Casey:
And just like you said, I mean, it needs to be simple.
Casey:
And one thing – and I don't have the piece of feedback handy, but somebody sent us some interesting feedback with some back-of-the-napkin calculations as to how much data –
Casey:
storing every iOS user's pictures from the beginning of time would really take up.
Casey:
And I don't remember the answer off the top of my head.
Casey:
And I'm not even sure that they were right.
Casey:
But suffice to say, it was a metric crap ton of data that they would need or of hard drive space they would need in order to store
Casey:
all of these pictures from everyone under the sun.
Casey:
So perhaps what made EverPix even mildly doable was simply that they weren't trying to do it for everyone.
Casey:
They were trying to do it for thousands or tens of thousands of users.
John:
I mean, the storage, like a storage for individuals, especially, I mean, maybe the sharing stuff has some angle on it, but there's not the type of...
John:
It's not the type of service like, I don't know, Twitter or Facebook, where everybody's seeing everybody else's stuff, where the complexity and difficulty really ramps up as you add more things.
John:
You can kind of silo this.
John:
If you can support, you know, 10 people, you can just multiply that out to support thousands and millions.
John:
And yes, it costs tons and tons of money.
John:
But if it's profitable for whatever, you know,
John:
20 000 people well if it's profitable at 20 000 presumably it'd still be profitable at 40 at 60 at 90 and it's like oh that costs so much money look at all the storage yeah it costs lots of money apple has billions of dollars maybe you'd have to have an upfront investment but if it's profitable 20 000 for this little dinky company hopefully apple at 400 million it could still be profitable or at least break even or maybe it's even a little bit of a cost center but you know like i said it may be just the cost of doing business eventually and the photo stream stuff is kind of like bargaining it's like
John:
How about this, guys?
John:
How about we will store all your pictures?
John:
The shared photo streams are way better than it used to be for sharing photos.
John:
I use them all the time with my family because it's easier than it used to be.
John:
And they don't have to do anything.
John:
If they have an iOS device, if I put a picture on my shared photo stream, it appears and they can look at it right there.
John:
And that's better than emailing them pictures.
John:
That's even better than, you know, in the old days, making a .Mac website and giving them the URL of the website and they would look at and all this stuff.
John:
So I like photo streams, but I think Apple was hoping...
John:
If we make this constrained service and we put these numbers up, you know, a thousand pictures, blah, blah, blah, whatever, we won't have these crazy storage demands and maybe this will solve the problem.
John:
And I think it helps, but it doesn't, you know, solve the are all my pictures safe problem.
John:
And that is an even bigger investment with more stuff.
John:
And, yeah, the numbers are terrifying when you have 400 million.
John:
But almost anything you do with 400 million people is terrifying.
John:
I mean, just think about the email they get.
John:
And they're not even a big email provider.
John:
Like, the amount of spam that they get at iCloud.com and Mac.com email addresses alone is pretty terrifying.
John:
And that is one of those things that, like, gets worse as the volume goes up because you get targeted by spammers and stuff.
Yeah.
John:
I'm not pretending it's a small problem, but if anybody could do it, it's the company with billions and billions of dollars of cash.
John:
And this really is kind of a service.
John:
It's not read mostly like iTunes.
John:
You're not sharing the same files for everybody, but it's not that complicated.
John:
It's file storage.
John:
It's not computational or a web application that's all sophisticated.
John:
It's basically like a big bucket of bits that you can get back in an efficient manner and all that good stuff.
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, but it's more than that.
Marco:
I mean, it's replication, it's backup, and you're right that deduplication is really not an issue, because there's nothing to be gained from it.
Marco:
But certainly, backup and replication and scalability and uptime and access speeds and archival, all that stuff, that's...
John:
They've already got to do that for PhotoStream.
John:
All it does is, I mean, a thousand pictures is still not small change.
John:
And if you multiply that by 50 for 50,000 pictures for each person, it's 50 times harder in terms of you need 50 times more storage and 50 times more money and like all the things that you need, right?
John:
And you probably can't charge 50 times the price or whatever, but...
John:
It's like it's not like the photo stream itself is already.
John:
Hopefully all those things you described, they already have a solution for it.
John:
It's just a matter of, OK, well, now we just need to pour more money in and hopefully find someplace to get more money out.
John:
Charge more money for users for it.
John:
Don't don't give it to everyone for free.
John:
Maybe maybe make it a.
John:
a hundred dollar a year service a fifty dollar a year service like there are things you can do or you know again factored into the price of the other things spread that fifty dollars over the cost of all your other products who knows like the money stuff i feel like can be worked out the technology stuff they should have all this stuff already in place and if they don't they should have this stuff anyway just because this is an important thing that companies in the technology sector are going to have to have uh at some point in the future
John:
So anyway, they're not there yet.
John:
They seem to be making motions in this direction because that document did have a recent modification date saying that the upload limits were lowered.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Like, we'll know it's happened because they'll have a slide up that says, you know, the slide we previously showed you about PhotoStream said a thousand photos, blah, blah, blah.
John:
This slide just has a single word in the middle.
John:
It says unlimited or all your photos or some crap like that.
John:
Like, we'll know it when it happens.
John:
I don't think it's going to arrive at a secret knowledge base article where suddenly there's no more limits.
Marco:
yeah i mean that's the kind of thing they would want to brag about that that's a pretty big deal and also like they would want people to know that they're doing it i mean if they just start quietly backing up more than your last x photos they're not really getting much of a benefit out of that you know customer wise pr wise you know if customers don't realize they can now upload everything uh then we'll use it differently we'll think about it differently uh so i think it's important for them to to be very loud about it if they ever do that
Casey:
Yeah, and also I don't recall if I mentioned this in the last time we talked about EverPix, which thankfully that was so quick when we did because that gives us time to talk about it now.
Marco:
Oh, the chat room is going to kill you.
Casey:
Yeah, I know.
Casey:
But just to really quickly add, if Apple did take this on, imagine how much of a selling point that would be for your normal human that –
Casey:
They look at it – they know enough about the landscape to know that, well, Windows Phone Series, Mobile 7 Series, Metro, not Metro, doesn't do any of the fancy photo things we want.
Casey:
The Android phone that everyone is telling them to get, well, that looks nice and all, and I really like that big screen.
Casey:
But I tell you what, this iPhone will back up all of my pictures for me automatically, and I don't have to worry about it.
Casey:
Why would I not get that?
Casey:
So when I take pictures of my kids, grandkids, dog, car, whatever, I know I will never, ever, ever lose any of them.
Casey:
And that would be a real selling point.
Casey:
But again, it's really hard to do and to get right.
Casey:
So I don't know.
John:
Yeah.
John:
is a is a social network it's a social sharing service and i would never take my family photos and give them over to a service that's a social service like i wouldn't if facebook said hey we'll take all your photos and preserve them forever i wouldn't do it and same thing with google plus because the whole purpose of those services is to share things with other people and my photo collection is
John:
is by default something i don't want to share in fact all i want to do is selectively pick maybe a handful of pictures and share them with selected people like i do in photo stream i never want to take here's my entire photo library jam it up to a social network service even if it has control to say oh yeah no it'll be private by default everything you upload won't be shown to anybody unless you explicitly say it will don't forget to check the chat like
John:
Even if all the defaults are right, even if all the heart is in the right place, it just doesn't make me comfortable to take all my photos and put them on a social network.
John:
Because that's not, like, I don't want to share them with the world.
John:
I'm just looking for somebody to store my pictures, you know, like Everfix did.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
I know we saw... Briefly.
Casey:
I know I saw a lot of feedback.
Casey:
Oh, just use Flickr.
Casey:
And I actually engaged with somebody who was like, well, yeah, but they default to sharing all your pictures.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
You don't need to default to sharing all your pictures.
Casey:
But I completely agree with you, John.
Casey:
That's inherently...
Casey:
opposed their motivations are inherently opposed to my motivations and and that's just not good so anyway and we can move on from this photo stuff um and uh let me ask you john if you were steven elop and you were trying to discuss without actually discussing what you do as the next microsoft ceo what would you do with xbox
John:
Yeah, I didn't actually read all these articles about what it was a bunch of leaks from presumably from Elop's camp about what he would do if he took over Microsoft.
John:
And if you're going to leak stuff like that, like I assume the idea was to leak things that people would say, yeah, that's awesome.
John:
Get this guy because look what he said he's going to do like to like to make public pressure.
John:
you know, Elop or his surrogates or whatever, suddenly there'd be pressure from the press, from the public, from Microsoft shareholders.
John:
You've got to get his Elop guy in there because he has some amazing ideas and you guys are a bunch of bozos.
John:
But then the ideas he put out seem terrible and everyone seems to think they're terrible ideas.
John:
I don't know if this was an intentional leak by his camp.
John:
If it was, maybe they thought these were great ideas, but I don't think they're great ideas, and I don't see anybody else thinking they're great ideas.
John:
Maybe they're scary and radical, and that's the vibe he's going for.
John:
He's ready to shake stuff up.
John:
There's no sacred cows or whatever, but
John:
Don't get rid of the one thing that is a cut.
John:
The one product Microsoft has that's probably the most loved by customers.
John:
You can't say it's the most successful product because they had, you know, was it multiple billion dollar write down because of the red ring of death on the 360s and it's lost money for years.
John:
And it did start to break even to become profitable, I think recently, but over its entire lifetime, it still hasn't dug itself out of the hole that it took to get there.
John:
But people like it.
John:
People like the Xbox.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And in the world of Microsoft, it's not easy to say that about much of anything these days.
John:
So getting rid of that only makes sense if you decide that Microsoft is not going to be a consumer company anymore.
John:
And they're just going to become like Oracle with a different logo.
John:
And I don't think that's a win scenario for anybody.
Casey:
Now, would you try to kind of pull the opposite or maybe a similar thing to what they do with Windows and brand everything new, perhaps, that Microsoft does with Xbox this and Xbox that?
Casey:
And what I mean is they take the Windows Mobile, whatever, Windows Phone series, whatever, whatever.
Casey:
And personally, as soon as I see Windows applied to anything, I get a little grumbly.
Casey:
Do you think if they rebranded things with Xbox that maybe that would be better?
Casey:
I mean, clearly that worked for Comcast and Xfinity, so why wouldn't it work here?
Marco:
Because everyone wants to use the Xbox phone, and their IT department is going to love that.
Casey:
I mean, I agree, but it seems like Microsoft could use some help in any sort of branding situation.
Casey:
I don't know, Marco, you're the king of brands.
Casey:
You tell me.
Marco:
I mean, part of it is – I don't know.
Marco:
Their branding is pretty terrible, and their marketing is even worse, and especially their advertising is just the worst.
Marco:
But –
Marco:
Ultimately, they could have this terrible advertising and those terrible names for the products, and they could get away with it if the products were really amazingly good and compelling to buy.
Marco:
And the problem is they're just not.
Marco:
People love Office, or at least they use it.
Marco:
I think people really do love Office.
Marco:
It really is very good for what it does for the most part.
Marco:
Windows, I feel like some people love it, most people just kind of use it.
Marco:
Everything else, you just kind of use it because it's there or because it's what your business uses or whatever.
Marco:
Except the consumer stuff like Xbox, that's a different story.
Marco:
But the things like Windows Phone and even Windows 8 and the Surface and things like the Surface, the whole line of Windows 8 convertible tablets or pure tablets, slates I guess they call them still,
Marco:
All those things are just not that compelling.
Marco:
And that's the biggest problem in the market.
Marco:
It's not that they have stupid names.
Marco:
It's not that they have dumbfounding commercials.
Marco:
It's that these things just aren't getting any traction with consumers.
Marco:
And I don't think there's anything small they can do to fix that.
Marco:
I think this is a big problem.
Marco:
It needs a big solution.
Marco:
And I'm not sure they can deliver it no matter what they call it.
John:
Xbox was actually kind of a triumph of the anti-branding thing because I'm sure somebody, I'm sure a lot of somebodies wanted to call the Microsoft game console something with the word Microsoft in it or something with the word Windows in it.
John:
And there must have been a fight and the Xbox guys won that fight.
John:
It's not, you know, Microsoft Windows Xbox or Xbox for Windows or Windows game machine or, you know, anything like that.
John:
It's just Xbox.
John:
Like, I mean, I guess I don't even I'm sure Microsoft is somewhere on the box.
John:
but the xbox brand is not tied to microsoft it is not tied to windows in the same way that all the other things you just mentioned are and i think the xbox brand has such you know value at this point that you made a joke about oh what if they named everything xbox if they made something you know the xbox one does all sorts of non-gaming stuff and if they called one aspect of that non-gaming stuff xbox tv
John:
They didn't.
John:
I don't think they have anything branded that way, but it basically is Xbox TV.
John:
But if they if they called something Xbox TV and it were kind of like, oh, you know, we'll take like like what the Xbox one does.
John:
We'll take your TV in as an input and overlay stuff on it and let you switch back and forth between games and blah, blah.
John:
I think that branding would work because people like Xbox and people would like the feature set, presumably.
John:
So I don't think that's entirely crazy to take Xbox and put it as a prefix instead of something else that's related to what the Xbox does, as in a box that connects to your TV that does interactive things.
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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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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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
and a bunch of other ones, and they're constantly adding more.
Marco:
So you can get .just about anything.
Marco:
And what I like about Hover a lot is that they don't believe in heavy-handed upselling or aggressive cross-selling.
Marco:
They don't believe in hiding functionality or requiring extra payment for things that really should be free, such as who is privacy on your names, subdomains, and URL forwarding.
Marco:
They also have a whole email hosting service if you'd like.
Marco:
It's optional, which is easy and affordable to create a memorable email address.
Marco:
And so you can get rid of that weird free webmail email address that you don't control, like something at gmail.com or at yahoo.com or whatever.
Marco:
They offer excellent online help, too, and this is something that really, their whole support system really sets them apart from the rest.
Marco:
Not only is there tons of online documentation, online tutorials covering pretty much everything you could possibly need to do with a domain name, but they also have this awesome no-hold, no-wait, and no-transfer telephone support.
Marco:
I actually said telephone because it's that good.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
So this is pretty great.
Marco:
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Marco:
And once again, use promo code ATP for 10% off.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Hover for sponsoring.
Casey:
So, John, since you're apparently kicking everything off this episode, how is the enterprise software experience treating you these days?
John:
I have this big long sob story about enterprise software.
John:
I was trying to debate whether it fits in with just it would fit in on a complaining podcast if I had such a thing.
John:
But this isn't it.
Marco:
This is your enthusiastic appreciating everything podcast.
John:
You know, like if there's some kind of lesson to take about like what not to do or something like that.
John:
I don't know.
John:
You can tell me I can try I can try to go through it quickly if that's if that's at all possible.
Marco:
I would love to hear you attempt that.
Marco:
Yes, indeed.
John:
My version of attempting that is I talk really fast.
John:
That's probably not what you want.
John:
All right.
John:
So this is a story about enterprise software.
John:
And we've talked about enterprise software in past shows.
John:
And my sort of thumbnail sketch of enterprise software is that the people using the software aren't the people who purchase the software or selected the software if it happens to be free.
John:
And so this is a story of just such a kind of piece of software.
John:
So before Mavericks was released, my work changed its VPN software from a VPN that worked with the VPN support that's built into OS X to one that requires a third-party client.
John:
And so here is enterprise software assumption number one of the story.
John:
When a new version of OS X comes out, assume your enterprise software will not work with it.
John:
And that might not, that might seem like a weird assumption, but like I, when I was sort of, you know, sketching out the notes for this, I'm like, you know what?
John:
I just, I do just assume that.
John:
I just assume that, you know, when the new version of OS X comes out, most of my favorite programs will work with it.
John:
But of course, enterprise software won't.
John:
And I've always, I don't question it, but I thought, why is that?
John:
There are months and months to lead up to an OS X release.
John:
Like there's a developer conference, there are developer builds, like they give you, like,
John:
And it seems like all these companies are just shocked that Apple came out with a new app.
John:
We've never seen anything like this before.
John:
Where did this come from?
John:
Mavericks?
John:
Who heard of that?
John:
And then that day after it comes out, they, you know, they start work on, you know, they find out on that day whether their stuff works.
John:
I mean, it's almost as if I'm not sure that enterprise software companies have anybody actively working on their software products or at least on the Mac software, right?
Yeah.
John:
And it's always just, like, in reactive mode.
John:
I mean, Oracle went years, and no one cares about this except for people who do stuff in my line of work, but Oracle went years without a 64-bit client library that worked in OS X. Like, years.
John:
I think they spanned, like, two or three OS X releases without anything that worked in 64-bit.
John:
Because they just, you know, couldn't be bothered.
John:
It's like, who cares?
John:
Whatever.
John:
So anyway, sure enough, Mavericks came out.
John:
My enterprise software did not work with it.
John:
Uh...
John:
This is Cisco VPN.
John:
I might as well just name names.
John:
Why not?
John:
I don't think they're going to sponsor the show.
John:
Sorry, Cisco.
John:
Cisco seemed genuinely shocked that Mavericks was released, and they seemed shocked that their software didn't work with it.
John:
They're like, huh, look at that.
John:
Our stuff doesn't work with it.
John:
And they said, you know, the existing version kind of worked, except it might frequently disconnect, which is like, all right, well, then it doesn't work really, does it?
John:
Because if it frequently disconnects, it's not really what I want out of VPN software.
John:
And so, you know, I couldn't upgrade to Mavericks until the VPN software is up in it.
John:
So...
John:
A short time later, I think it was only a couple of weeks, Cisco update has a version that was compatible with Maverick.
John:
So this is thumbs up on Cisco.
John:
See, maybe they will sponsor because unlike Oracle, they didn't wait three years.
John:
Weeks, only weeks after Maverick's release.
John:
Now, granted, it still sort of drives me crazy because like you should not have found out when the OS was released that your software was incompatible and then scrambled for a couple of weeks to have a compatible version.
John:
But anyway, the new version said it has a workaround for a bug that's in Mavericks and they filed the bug with Apple.
John:
And this version should work until Apple fixes the bug in the rest, which I completely believe.
John:
Again, this bug should have been filed like, you know, seven developer releases of Mavericks ago, but whatever.
John:
But in the meantime, here's one that has a workaround that shouldn't disconnect.
John:
All right.
John:
So then we come to enterprise software assumption number two.
John:
You will not be able to get the software you need.
John:
Can I download this new version of this VPN client that's compatible with Mavericks?
John:
First step of that is trying to find it on Cisco's website, which is not easy if you ever tried to find this type of thing.
John:
You would think it would be right there next to the words I read that told me they had a new version, but it's not because that was like in a forum somewhere with some Cisco person.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
This is reminding me of when I had to install raid drivers for raid cards on Linux.
Marco:
It's exactly the same thing.
Marco:
You have to dive through these crazy enterprise-y sites and good luck finding anything.
Marco:
And then they want you to join their program for their premium support and everything.
Marco:
I'm like, no, I bought the card.
Marco:
I just want to download the thing that makes it work.
Marco:
Ugh.
John:
a mess yeah whenever you find yourself in a forum almost especially if it's an official forum like this is not this is not just some random forum with a bunch of people like there's an official person from the company responding to the forum i mean this is this is what drove the creation of uh you know stack overflow for one and discourse for another like if you find yourself a traditional forum scrolling through pages and pages of replies looking for the ones from the official cisco guy trying to like it's like replaying the journal on a file system everything comes back to file systems guys it's like replaying
John:
It's like replaying the journal on a file system to reconstruct the history to like zoom up to the current day so that you have to read these giant threads to find the information.
John:
But anyway, I eventually found the page that had this text on it.
John:
I copy and pasted a lot of stuff from the website because I just love the copy from these websites.
John:
Anyway, the following directory contains versions of AnyConnect for all platforms.
John:
The current download for OS X is version 3.1.04074.
John:
That's a real version number for enterprise software.
John:
And all other platforms are 3.1.04072.
John:
Any Connect version, big long number, is required for OS 10.9.
John:
And all other Mac platforms may either use one of the old versions.
John:
Anyway, so underneath that tiny, tiny, tiny text...
John:
is a huge scrolling iframe containing many, many downloads, most of which are not from my platform, including items with text like this.
John:
Package enables FIPS, all caps, for Mac OS X, all one word, squished together.
John:
Intel, in scare quotes for some reason, platform.
John:
So package enables FIPS.
John:
FIPS for Mac OS 10, Intel platforms.
John:
File contains the VPN API for Mac OS 10 spaced out this time, Intel platforms.
John:
Standalone DMG package for Mac OS 10, Intel platforms.
John:
Web deployment package for Mac OS 10, Intel platforms.
John:
All of these are the old version number, despite the note on the top saying that you want to have the new version number.
John:
And I don't know which.
John:
Do I want FIPS?
John:
Do I want VPN API?
John:
Do I want standalone DMG package?
John:
Do I want web deployment package?
John:
You know, like no instructions in that regard.
John:
Easiest way to find what I want was to search for the version number string on the page.
John:
Do like in page in browser, you know, search for the thing.
John:
Because then I found like way down, you know, instead of you scroll past like hundreds of these things for Linux, for Windows, different versions of Windows, different platforms, different versions.
John:
Eventually, I found the one that I want.
John:
And the thing, I guess the take home lesson to this is the next time you're on some web developers, some developers website and order to text what platform you're on and gives you a gigantic shiny red glossy button with a download link for the latest version of their software for your platform.
John:
Appreciate it.
John:
because that's not how you know what i mean like you know when you go to a website and like like that's what they want you to have you want to go to some indie mac developers this is a gigantic button that says download now download right here even if it's a link to the mac app store they'll take you right to the thing not on enterprise software you have to have to hunt for the download link and there'll be decoys like all those ones i just read and you have to know what phips is and i don't you know no explanation of this stuff
John:
a bunch of these atar gz's too just to throw an xd monkey wrench for the non-tech savvy so i find it i find the download link that i want i click it and no luck i get a message saying i have to log in right so okay well i figured that would be the case because they're not gonna just let you download their software it's crazy like marco said you have to register an account you can't just have the thing so i register i create an account i check my email for the confirmation message i click the confirmation link
John:
I'm all set.
John:
I attempt to log into my new confirmed Cisco account and I get this error message.
John:
Again, word for word.
John:
Your login was unsuccessful for one of the following reasons.
John:
You entered your user ID and or password incorrectly.
John:
Please try again.
John:
That's a bulleted item.
John:
And here's a second bulleted item.
John:
You recently registered or reset your password and our systems are updating your information.
John:
Please try again in five minutes.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
John:
It's slave lag.
John:
That's actually an error message.
John:
So then we come to enterprise software assumption number three.
John:
What works in the rest of the world does not work in the enterprise world.
John:
In the rest of the world, if you create an account and they email you a confirmation link and you click it, like you go through the whole – of course you can log into that account.
John:
You just confirmed it.
John:
Hell, most of the time you can partially log into it even if you haven't confirmed it.
John:
You don't just say, oh, you haven't confirmed your email yet.
John:
But in the enterprise world, merely creating an account and clicking the confirmation link doesn't mean you can log into it, right?
John:
So yeah, so I wait five minutes, right?
John:
Same error.
John:
I wait 10 minutes, same error, 15 minutes, same error.
John:
And I'm thinking like, well, maybe I mistyped my password.
John:
Maybe I mistyped it twice during the account creation process.
John:
It's possible.
John:
Or maybe I have the cat blocks on or some crazy thing like that, right?
John:
So I reset my password.
John:
Thankfully, they haven't forgot your password link or I'd have to go off into another realm because sometimes they don't even have forgot your password link and you can like call somebody or something.
John:
I reset my password.
John:
You know, it sends you an email, click this link to reset, type in new password.
John:
I try logging in with my newly reset password.
John:
And what I, of course, get is that same error message that says, you entered your user ID and or pressed it incorrectly, please start again as one bulleted item.
John:
Or you recently registered to reset your password.
John:
And I did recently reset my password.
John:
And I realized, like, that's not going to help me because if I get that error message, again, this error message says, your login was unsuccessful for one of the following reasons.
John:
and it gives two possible reasons one user id password incorrect two you just recently registered or reset well i did just recently reset there's actually four reasons yeah well yeah you know two bullet points please try again in five minutes wait five minutes wait 10 minutes wait 15 minutes wait a whole day you actually did it again waited a whole day like who knows it was with enterprise software like maybe like you said maybe it hasn't probably maybe like some person has to write it down on a form and like mimeograph it and
John:
And put it in a pneumatic tube.
John:
And I don't know how things get into the real database.
John:
And sometimes I enter into an Excel spreadsheet.
John:
And someone prints that Excel spreadsheet.
John:
And then sends a FedEx to the Topeka office.
John:
And the Topeka offices enters it in their COBOL system.
John:
And then finally, you can log.
John:
I don't know how it works.
John:
I gave it a whole day.
John:
Same error message.
John:
And this is a repeat of enterprise software assumption number three.
John:
It works in the rest of the world.
John:
It doesn't work in the enterprise world.
John:
To create an account, you can't log into it.
John:
Reset your password, you can't log into it.
John:
So now I'm in desperation mode and I email like the support link, right?
John:
You know, find on the website something like technical support for the Cisco website, right?
John:
Here's the entire text of my email.
John:
I can't log into my account at cisco.com.
John:
I gave the username as well.
John:
I've tried resetting my password.
John:
Each time it says it succeeds, but each time my new password still does not work.
John:
I think that's straightforward.
John:
I don't know what else to tell them.
John:
I gave them my username.
John:
I said that I can't log in, and their first thing is going to be like, oh, maybe you forgot your password.
John:
You should probably reset it.
John:
So I felt like I should tell them I've reset my password several times, actually, because I did do it several times.
John:
And each time it says, yes, we've reset your password, but each time I try to log in again, my newly reset password doesn't work.
John:
That's all I said.
John:
I didn't have to go into this big rigmarole about the weird messages and stuff like that.
John:
I figure maybe there's something weird on my account or I'm locked out or they should be able to see on their end failed login attempts or something.
John:
Who knows?
John:
So I got a response like about like 12 hours later, which is pretty darn good.
John:
And I'm not being sarcastic about this in terms of like customer support for for any company.
John:
12 hours is a pretty good turnaround time on a support email, but especially for a big company like Cisco.
John:
Here's the reply.
John:
Dear John, thank you for contacting Cisco.
John:
By adding star.cisco.com to the trusted sites, you are able to log in successfully.
John:
How to do it?
John:
Question mark, comma.
John:
Follow these easy steps, period.
John:
Just this crazy, crazy punctuation.
John:
a the steps are labeled with a capital a period click the tools button then click internet options anyone who has those windows oh yeah b click the security tab c now click trusted sites then click on the sites button d and it goes to the whole destruction instructions for in internet explorer adding start at cisco.com as a trusted site because i guess the assumption is my problem is that i can't log in because it's not a trusted site i didn't say anything about trusted side i didn't send them any screenshots i didn't mention platform but this is the canned response i get all right so okay forget about that time to get creative
John:
I don't know why I didn't do this earlier, but I made an incognito window in Chrome, you know, or the equivalent of deleting cookies.
John:
Like, just start with a fresh slate, right?
John:
You can call it porn mode.
John:
It's all right.
John:
Is that what they call it?
John:
The kids call it these days.
John:
And I go to the login form, and I enter my password, and it works.
John:
I log in.
John:
I see the top of the page, like my username.
John:
I can go to my account.
John:
I'm like, hey, my account.
John:
It works.
John:
Everything works great.
John:
And so I re-navigate to the download link.
John:
I click on it, and it asks me to log in.
John:
And now I read the message, the message that shows you when you try to click on the link, the message that was there the first time, but that I didn't finish reading because I'm impatient.
John:
It said, to download the software, you must log in.
John:
And I had a link to log in.
John:
And the first time I encountered this problem, I immediately clicked the log in link and it went through.
John:
You don't have an account, create account, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But that message continues.
John:
You must log in and have a valid service contract associated with your Cisco document.
Yeah.
John:
So this is enterprise software assumption number four.
John:
Sometimes, despite all the terrible things that are terrible about enterprise software, it's at least partially your fault.
John:
If I had read that message the first time, I probably would have stopped this process and said, well, I don't have a valid service contract associated with my Cisco.com profile.
John:
In fact, I don't even have a Cisco.com profile.
John:
Instead, I read, to download the software, you must log in.
John:
Login was blue and underlined, and I clicked on it, and I went off.
John:
So I, like every other user, doesn't read all the messages, just gets to the part that I want to get to.
John:
So I can't get this all for myself.
John:
I don't have a service contract.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
Can I pause you real quick?
Casey:
How long between the first time you saw the login link and clicked it and the realization now that you needed to read the rest of the message?
Casey:
Because you mentioned at least a 12-hour wait, right?
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
So I tried it one day and went through this whole big thing, and then it kept asking me to wait.
John:
So I said, fine, I'll wait until tomorrow.
John:
And then I tried the second day and then did the email thing and then got the email back, I guess, the third day.
John:
I'm not sitting there hammering this.
John:
It's just each day I make another run at it, right?
Casey:
OK, I'm sorry.
Casey:
So carry on.
John:
And by the way, I think the problem with the incognito window thing is that it probably cookied me seeing that, oh, he was trying to get to destination X. But before you can get there, we have to send you off on this tangent to create an account and log into it.
John:
And I think what happened was I went off on a tangent, created the account.
John:
And every time I went to the login form, it was trying to send me to the destination I didn't have permission to get to.
John:
So every time I logged in, it would probably accept my authentication, try to send me to the destination and then bounce me back and say, oh, you can't get this because you haven't logged in and send me back to the login form.
John:
And of course, the error message doesn't say anything about that.
John:
And the error message is terrible anyway.
Casey:
That wasn't one of the 400 error possibilities.
John:
Yeah, it's like, why else would clearing cookies, you know, why else would the equivalent of clearing cookies allow me to get logged in?
John:
Because it sent me, just dumped me on the homepage then, right?
John:
So I couldn't get the software myself.
John:
So I figured, let me try to get it the way that my work says I'm supposed to get it, right?
John:
And their instructions, which I've done before, obviously, because I have the existing version of this VPN software that works in Mountain Lion, is make sure you're not on the VPN step one, which is always striking me strange.
John:
But anyway, and go to some special URL, log in with my special work credentials, load a Java applet that will try to detect my platform and send me the file.
John:
And most of this time, of course, this doesn't work.
John:
right because my login credentials work but then sometimes it bounces me back to the login page and then that whole browser is fried and you need to clear cookies or quit the browser and relaunch it and have a chance at it or sometimes the java applet won't load well the java applet hangs and says it can't detect my platform so i try chrome i try safari try firefox i can't try ie in my vm because it auto detects your platform and if it works in ie in windows but then it gives me the windows version of the vpn which is useless to me i need the os 10 version of it right
John:
So I always fight with this.
John:
I'm used to it.
John:
Eventually, I get a download, a look at it.
John:
Of course, it's still the old version.
John:
All right.
John:
So now I just have to wait for work to update its old version of the software.
John:
And this is kind of the state I'm at now, which is like, I can't get the software myself.
John:
I have to wait for my office to update the version of the software.
John:
I told them, you know, I told them at the beginning of this process before I started any of it, I had sent a support ticket and said, hey, can I have the version of
John:
the vpn that works with mavericks blah blah but i know the turnaround times are really long in that so while this was going on i was figuring well let me try to get the thing myself right and the question is i guess why does this have a downloader like why does it require a service contract what why are all these things that just happened to me why are they there why isn't this vpn installer just a download link on cisco's website why isn't this just on a share in my work that i can get
John:
And I guess it just comes down to control, like IT departments at offices want to have control because they don't want to just let anybody install any VPN software they want.
John:
They have to qualify it to determine that it works with all the other software that it's qualified to work in the company or whatever.
John:
And it makes sense from their perspective, because it's the best way to have predictable results when you're supporting hundreds and hundreds of people.
John:
You got to have a set of approved software.
John:
Nothing new goes in that set until it's tested and you make sure it works with all the other approved software.
John:
And you can't just let users download whatever the hell they want to install on their computers.
John:
Like that's the opposite of IT support.
John:
And we can, you know, get into a whole nuanced discussion about whether that's the right model for IT support or whatever, but it's the current model.
John:
And computer nerds are the worst, like because we just all want to do it ourselves.
John:
And yeah, I do want to do it myself.
John:
But it's kind of like how they say doctors make the worst patients.
John:
I think computer nerds make the worst people to support in IT.
John:
And I'm sure the IT department hates the fact that I'm like emailing them.
John:
Can I have a big giant version number of this piece of software because it works with this version of the OS and blah, blah, blah.
Yeah.
Marco:
There's this whole culture of people who really, really don't like Apple.
Marco:
Period.
Marco:
They just don't like Apple.
Marco:
And they don't like Mac in all capital letters.
Marco:
And I have to wonder, I bet the percentage of people who manage IT departments at large companies...
Marco:
I bet among them, the percentage of them who are the kind of people who hate Mac in all capitals is way higher than average.
Marco:
And just culturally, I guarantee you that's the case.
Marco:
And so they don't like it.
Marco:
They don't respect it.
Marco:
And I think that also applies to enterprise software developers as well.
Marco:
And I think that's partly why the enterprise software people are always totally caught off guard when a new version of OS X comes out.
Marco:
Because they don't respect Mac people or Apple or the platform enough to actually pay any attention whatsoever to the betas.
Marco:
Or to prioritize the releases that fix horrible bugs that only affect Mac people.
Marco:
I really think that it's just this whole culture of like, well, you people who want to use Mac, all capitals, you're just like this annoyance for us.
Marco:
And that's not real software.
Marco:
And anything that goes wrong, that's definitely a Mac and all capitals bug.
Marco:
And that's not our bug.
Marco:
That's their bug.
Marco:
And they messed something up because Apple's stupid.
Marco:
You know, I bet that's a lot of this.
John:
That was definitely the Oracle vibe.
John:
But the vibe from Cisco is weird, though, because as soon as, you know, the forums lit up with like, hey, Mavericks is out and my VPN doesn't work.
John:
This is a widely used product.
John:
It seemed like the official Cisco people were genuinely concerned about this failure and didn't know about it.
John:
Like, oh, my God, our stuff doesn't work with the new version.
John:
Yeah.
John:
This just came out.
John:
How could we have known?
John:
They're either not aware that there are developer builds of it.
John:
And the thing is, they reacted quickly.
John:
They got a new build up in weeks.
John:
It was less than a month.
John:
That's pretty fast for enterprise software for such a while.
John:
This has got to go through all... They reacted like, this is important.
John:
We need to have a version of this that works.
John:
But if that was the... It's baffling to me if they're so concerned about it.
John:
Yeah.
John:
This didn't have to be this way.
John:
You could have known this was coming by being part of the Apple, like, not everybody, but just one dude in the company, right?
John:
And the other thing is, I always picture in these companies, there is like one guy who's like a Mac user, the one guy they have working on the Mac software.
John:
Surely that guy is a big Mac nerd.
John:
And maybe he's held back by his bosses or something like that.
John:
But I don't understand why, you know...
John:
a little one person indie Mac software developer shop can make sure all of his software, all of his 17 applications that he's written over the years are all work on Mavericks and have his software ready before the, you know, before the official public release.
John:
And I guess Cisco can't, I mean, maybe it's because they're a big company because they're slow moving.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Just like, and it's, it's not just a big company like Adobe software.
John:
I'm assuming work within Mavericks.
John:
Like, I don't know.
John:
I don't understand it, but, uh,
John:
But the enterprise stuff I do understand even a little bit.
John:
With the VPN stuff especially, you can't just download software.
John:
The software they give you from that Java thing is pre-configured with all the values for your company.
John:
And again, that's better because most people in the company aren't tech nerds.
John:
So you just want to give them something and just run this.
John:
It'll be all set up for you, which is convenient.
John:
But it also means that even if I was able to download that software from Cisco, I would have to then know all the different values I have to put in.
John:
What is the server name?
John:
What is the port?
John:
What is the protocol that I have to check here in this checkbox?
John:
all that stuff to get it configured.
John:
So I would have to download the official version and try to dig into it and find like P list files or other configuration things to figure out what all the values are or try to ask it, which is, you know, Hey, can you tell me the values to self configure?
John:
They'd be like, what are you doing?
John:
Self-configure the VPN blind.
John:
You can't do that.
John:
You can only download our official one and we're not up to that version yet.
John:
You really don't, you know, so I'm, yeah, I'm a pain in the butt.
John:
Uh, this was mostly slash partially my fault, but enterprise software is also terrible.
Casey:
It is.
Casey:
And I think I might be able to explain some of that.
Casey:
But before I do that, Marco, is there anything else that's awesome that you'd like to tell us about?
Marco:
There is.
Marco:
It is our wonderful friends at Squarespace.
Marco:
Squarespace is the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio.
Marco:
For a free trial and 10% off, go to squarespace.com and use offer code ATP11 for the month of 11.
Marco:
Squarespace is constantly improving their platform with new features, new designs, and even better support.
Marco:
They have beautiful designs for you to start with, and all the style options you need to create a unique website for you or your business.
Marco:
It's incredibly easy to use, and if you end up needing any help at all, they have an amazing support team that works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with over 70 full-time employees based in New York City alone.
Marco:
So Squarespace starts at just $8 a month, and that includes a free domain name if you sign up for a whole year.
Marco:
Every design, they have these beautiful templates.
Marco:
I mean, really, you can do as little or as much as you want to customize them.
Marco:
I chose to do very little for the ATP site, and it still looks amazing because their built-in themes are just that good.
Marco:
So these themes, they're built by professional designers.
Marco:
They've won awards.
Marco:
They even all come with matching mobile templates.
Marco:
They have these responsive designs that are really fantastic.
Marco:
They look just like the rest of the site.
Marco:
So it looks on theme, on brand, if you will.
Marco:
And it's really fantastic.
Marco:
Your content will look great on any size screen on any device.
Marco:
You can start a free trial today with no credit card required and start building your website right now.
Marco:
When you do decide to sign up for Squarespace, make sure you use our offer code ATP11 to get 10% off your first purchase and to show your support for ATP.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Squarespace for their very frequent and awesome support of ATP.
Marco:
They're everything you need to create an exceptional website.
Marco:
Thanks, Squarespace.
John:
You should change our template.
John:
All these cool templates that Squarespace has.
John:
You say template?
John:
Template.
John:
Is that how you want to say it?
John:
I say template.
John:
Anyway, there are cool ones.
Casey:
It also says Mario.
John:
There are cool ones.
John:
I see them on other people's website and ours looks kind of boring.
John:
Can't you just change it by clicking something and changing a template?
Marco:
That can be your homework for the week, John.
John:
No!
John:
I don't have a login credentials to the Squarespace site.
John:
I'd be adding or rotating CSS3 cubes all over that site.
Marco:
Oh, somebody please send me the code to do that.
John:
That's easy to find.
John:
Just type CSS3 rotating cube.
John:
You'll find it.
Casey:
Oh, that's amazing.
Casey:
Do not give him the login credentials.
Casey:
Well, now I'm tempted to.
Casey:
No, no.
Marco:
He can finally fix all the typos I make in the show notes.
Casey:
Oh, give me the login credentials and don't give them to John.
Casey:
He already is doing way too much planning, as evidenced by the last segment.
Marco:
So, yeah, that sounded a lot like preparation and notes to me.
John:
Well, because like once this process started, I'm like, I need to write this stuff down because the details are important.
John:
The exact error message.
John:
If you just said I tried to do something, then it was a bunch of errors and stuff.
John:
It doesn't like you really need to get the details.
John:
So I wrote them down.
Casey:
John, let me tell you, you know, if we're all honest with each other, the people come to the show for me and sort of kind of for Marco.
Casey:
You're just a tag along.
Casey:
I will kick you off my show if you continue to do this kind of preparation.
Casey:
This is unacceptable.
Casey:
I'm just letting you know.
Casey:
You're on notice.
Casey:
So earlier, KJ Healy in the chat said, think of it this way.
Casey:
People who develop Minecraft mods as children grow up to be enterprise software authors as adults.
Casey:
And I think that might pretty much sum it up.
John:
The Minecraft mod authors are way more enthusiastic and dedicated than these enterprise people.
John:
They totally want to be there.
John:
Like as soon as the new Minecraft version, they have like, I have his version of my mod that works with the beta of 1.7 and they track the betas.
John:
This works with the second beta of 1.7.
John:
And when 1.7 official comes out, you can be damn sure their mod works with it.
John:
If you can ever find a download link and if you can figure out how to install it.
John:
And if you have all the prerequisites that they don't mention that because they assume everybody knows.
Marco:
Oh, man.
Marco:
I mean, enterprise software is a hard problem.
Marco:
I mean, it's like... I mean, I have a small amount of experience in it because my first job after college for a couple years was writing enterprise software.
Marco:
And it was a little different.
Marco:
It was a very small company, but our customers were very big companies.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
It's just a tough business because any effort I would want to put in for making things better, improving the UI, improving the design, improving the flow of anything, the customers didn't really care.
Marco:
Nobody ever asked for that.
Marco:
When I would actually get to spend some time doing it and I would work on it for like a month, no one cared.
Marco:
No one said anything.
Marco:
It didn't get us any more sales.
Marco:
It probably didn't result in any benefit to the company at all, actually.
Marco:
Because as you said, John, at the beginning,
Marco:
With enterprise software, the people who make the buying decisions usually are not the people who are going to be using it every day.
Marco:
And so it's just this bizarre market where it is a big market, and there's a lot of money to be made there, but it just does not work the way you'd expect based on consumer software.
Marco:
It's just very, very different.
Marco:
All the incentives are different.
Marco:
The whole process of making and selling and maintaining it is extremely different.
Marco:
It's just this weird, bizarre alternative universe that people like us who are mostly in the consumer side just can't possibly understand, and I think we're better off for it.
Casey:
Well, that's mostly true.
Casey:
So as someone who has kind of a leg in both universes, I can tell you a few things.
Casey:
Firstly, I've noticed at my company, so I work at a consultancy that's
Casey:
somewhere around 60 to 80 people.
Casey:
I forget exactly what the number is now.
Casey:
And we typically work on the Microsoft stack, but not exclusively.
Casey:
And I will tell you that I've noticed since I started at this particular company about a year ago, a little over a year ago, almost a year and a half ago now, I was one of the few people to have a Mac because I pretty much negotiated on the way in that I'm not going to have a PC or this conversation's over.
Casey:
And so I was one of the handful of people that had a Mac.
Casey:
And now I'm noticing that there are way more Mac users, not only developers.
Casey:
Even the executives are using various flavors of Macs more and more with each passing day.
Casey:
And in fact, our singular IT guy, he just decided, you know,
Casey:
I've got a 15-inch high-res anti-glare MacBook Pro just sitting in the closet.
Casey:
Maybe I should use that myself.
Casey:
And similarly, his Android phone – I don't remember specifically what it was about a month and a half ago.
Casey:
They're all the same, right?
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Well, and there's a million, but they're all the same.
Casey:
But anyway, the point is – It's like cats.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
So about a month ago or whenever it was, I guess it was right around the time the 5S came out, he said to me, hey, my Android phone's headphone jack is busted, and I use that for all my music everywhere, so I need something to fix this.
Casey:
And I was thinking, if you just got a 5S, Casey, do you have an old iPhone that you want to unload?
Casey:
And I said to him, well, yeah, I have a 4S, but I can't in good conscience –
Casey:
Give that to you, let alone sell it to you.
Casey:
But, you know, let me see what I can do.
Casey:
And it ended up another friend of mine had a five and he paid my friend for the five.
Casey:
And so in the course of two or three months, this guy, this friend of mine slash RIT guy went from being an Android and Dell user to an iPhone and Mac user.
Casey:
And so the reason I bring all this up is because in a smaller corporate environment, it's actually starting to be more and more prevalent for even non-technical people like the executives at the company to use Max.
Casey:
And I thought that was kind of interesting.
Casey:
Now, with regard to the enterprise software specifically...
Casey:
So we work with all different size clients.
Casey:
We work with extremely small clients and we work with pretty big clients.
Casey:
And I'm measuring pretty big at, generally speaking, tens of thousands of employees.
Casey:
And if there's anything I've noticed is that, firstly, the group that we're specifically working with can, in large degree, make or break a project.
Casey:
So if the team at the client that we're working with
Casey:
is really enthusiastic and really excited and really wants to build what's right, then we can play off of that and we can build what's right.
Casey:
There are other times that we'll be working with a group at the client that is not enthusiastic and has been beaten down.
Casey:
And just like you said, Marco, when you were at the search engine company, even if we pose a
Casey:
the most amazing solution to a problem, it's usually met with, eh, nobody's going to care.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
And I think what that comes from is I've noticed in big companies across a couple of jobs now, because I've been a consultant for a while, that in really big companies, it seems like what I would define as middle management.
Casey:
So people that are not peons, but are not really that important either.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
They all, well, firstly, there's a million of them, and they all deep down inside realize that they're kind of expendable.
Casey:
And the problem is, is that they know this deep down inside.
Casey:
And so now it's their mission to prevent anyone else from knowing that they're expendable.
Casey:
So what does that mean?
Casey:
What that means is anytime you're in a meeting, Susie and Timmy and Johnny and Sally and everyone there, all these middle managers need to have –
Casey:
I said something interesting and I said something important.
Casey:
This was my idea.
Casey:
And because of that, nothing gets done because everyone has to have an opinion about everything and nobody can agree on everything.
Casey:
And everyone wants to make sure they know that I said that thing.
Casey:
I'm important.
Casey:
I shouldn't be the one to get the pink slip.
Casey:
And it's just soul sucking and it's terrible.
Casey:
And the unfortunate thing is a lot of times that is the entire company.
Casey:
But what's almost worse is when you have a group that's really excited and really interested and really cares, and then they're met with so much inertia that's really – or so much, I guess, non-inertia.
Casey:
In other words, the company around them is so stagnant that there's nothing they can do to move it.
Casey:
And again, I bring all this up because what if the Cisco VPN people hypothetically knew that Mavericks was coming out and wanted to go to WWDC and really cared that all this was happening, but everyone around them just didn't care and didn't let them take action?
Casey:
And that's what you see in corporate America.
Casey:
And it's mind-boggling to me.
Casey:
As someone who lives or works in corporate America yet in a very small version of corporate America –
Casey:
It's mind-boggling to me that this works, that these humongous companies ever make any money.
Casey:
I don't know how they do it.
Casey:
It's truly, truly amazing.
John:
Success hides problems.
Casey:
It does.
John:
There's a bunch of money coming in, and these middle managers can play that.
John:
It's like your funding.
John:
It's kind of like the dot-com bubble when it was a bunch of dot-com companies selling each other's services with their own VC money.
John:
Marco probably missed out on the first bubble.
Marco:
Yeah, I was in college during that.
John:
Yeah, but that was basically, you know, very quickly, especially in like the big metro areas is you'd have VC funded startups selling the services to another VC funded startup.
John:
And it was like, it was like the strange exchange and swap with VC money until all the money ran out.
John:
And then you realize all of our customers were other people who didn't have any customers except for us.
John:
And we were all just in this giant, you know, it's a bubble, right?
Marco:
And the only winners were the people who made the foosball tables.
John:
Not even that.
John:
The real winners were the people who resell used office equipment.
John:
The repo men come in with the big trucks and they come and sell the, you know, you get an error on real cheap.
Marco:
And the building owners probably made out pretty well too.
John:
Yeah, high rents for a short period of time, but then lots of vacancies was a problem.
John:
Yeah, but like, so the difference in a company is that presumably they have some moneymaker, some product or service that got itself entrenched that really does make money over the long term.
John:
And that funnel of money fuels internal dysfunction.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like, it doesn't cause internal dysfunction.
John:
It literally fuels it.
John:
Like, there's an engine there of dysfunction running, and the only way it keeps running is if you keep pouring money in.
John:
Because if you didn't pour money in, all these people doing nothing would get fired, or you'd have layoffs, or something else would happen.
John:
But if everything's going well, you guys get to play this game of basically, you know, internal office politics foosball without worrying.
John:
Because, hey, the money's coming in, and you guys just jockey over who gets the credit for which amount of money that came in and do a source of inefficient internal things.
John:
Uh...
John:
In that type of scenario, if we're imagining a Cisco scenario, I guess the company is still reactive enough that all of a sudden when the customer complaints stop flooding in, that's an input to the company.
John:
That's a metric that someone's tracking that has an effect.
John:
Oh, customer complaints.
John:
We have important customers, big important customers who want this now.
John:
Even if it's just like the CEO of some company that spends a bazillion dollars at Cisco.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And then he has Mavericks and he wants his VPN to work.
John:
Then it's a fire drill and everyone all hands on deck.
John:
And maybe that little unit that Casey was hypothesizing, you know, like, yeah, we've been telling you that for a week.
John:
Like, oh, no, OK, now you get to do it because it's a fire drill.
John:
And now there's some external pressure to do it.
John:
Yep.
John:
But who knows?
John:
Many scenarios like this could be possible.
John:
I just don't know what's going on inside there.
John:
And the thing about enterprise software is it exists for a reason that is mostly understandable.
John:
The people in my company who do IT, like Marco was talking about the IT people who hate the Mac.
John:
I've had those IT people.
John:
I don't have them now.
John:
My company has a good IT department that wants to do the right thing and, in fact, are usually enthusiastic about Macs and are trying to support it.
John:
Their deficit is maybe they don't have the experience.
John:
And so they don't really know, but they're going to figure it out.
John:
But their requirements are like enterprise software is made for them.
John:
Again, the customers, Marco was saying he'd make improvements to the enterprise software and no one would care.
John:
The customers wouldn't care.
John:
The customers are not the people using the software.
John:
Again, it's enterprise software.
John:
The customers are the people buying it.
John:
And the things they care about are very different.
John:
Like in our company, we're now supporting Macs more or less officially.
John:
Like I was the first Mac into the company like four or five years ago, and now their Macs are everywhere.
John:
They're officially supported.
John:
uh but to give an example the macs that are officially supported have to run pgp whole disk encryption and if you're a mac user like why would they do that why wouldn't they just run file vault 2 it's awesome everybody loves it well because file vault 2 is not enterprise software meaning it doesn't cater to the needs of the enterprise and more of the needs of the enterprise for like in my company for like you know compliance with various industry regulations you have to have the ability to report that uh not just install whole disk encryption on all the machines but
John:
you know, prove in whatever way they decide, prove for whatever auditing purposes that everyone has it installed.
John:
And PGB hold this encryption as enterprise software sells to the enterprise and says feature checkbox on the back of the box.
John:
It doesn't actually exist anymore.
John:
Can report that it's enabled on all such and such systems, right?
John:
File vault two is not enterprise software.
John:
It doesn't have that feature.
John:
Maybe Apple remote desktop does or some other piece of software that's more geared toward the enterprise.
John:
But if you just get a new Mac and it comes with Mavericks and you collect the check off the file vault to checkbox and enable it all or whatever, uh,
John:
There's no central reporting structure to know, and they need to do that for compliance.
John:
So of course they're going to buy the software package that says, hey, IT manager, we know that you have to do these stupid reporting things because your legal department tells you to.
John:
Our software does that for you.
John:
And yeah, so of course they're going to go for that.
John:
And as a user, you're like, I just want to run the built-in stuff because PGP, a whole disk encryption, bricks my machine every time it runs a minor point update, as it has many times in the past.
John:
And it would be so much easier and cheaper.
John:
You wouldn't have to buy this third-party product.
John:
We could just enable FileVault 2.
John:
It's awesome.
John:
Everybody loves it.
John:
And IT department, to its credit, wants to do that.
John:
But short-term, it's like we have PGP.
John:
PGP works.
John:
PGP fulfills our reporting compliance.
John:
And this is the dysfunction in the enterprise is that
John:
Those customers have needs that may seem dumb, but they're real needs.
John:
And if you're not going to serve them, some enterprise software company will.
John:
And that enterprise software company is allowed to be terrible along all the other axes as long as they're good along the axes that matter to the IT department.
John:
And they usually are.
Marco:
God, I'm just so glad I don't work on anything important.
John:
You should have like a bring your indie developer to work day.
John:
We bring in people who work from home on their own projects and we make them sit through HR seminars and take compliance training courses in Flash.
Casey:
I would love to watch Marco just sit there and squirm and be uncomfortable 40 seconds into the HR annual this is how not to sexually harass your coworkers meeting.
Marco:
No, that wouldn't be a problem.
Marco:
The problem would be when you'd have me sit down at some Windows PC with some, like, crap Dell keyboard and say, all right, here's your Fortran terminal, and you're going to be writing financial management software.
Marco:
You have to follow all these rules and do a lot of math, and there's going to be another person sitting 18 inches from your elbow.
Marco:
Oh, wait, that was Bloomberg, and that's why I didn't take that job.
LAUGHTER
Casey:
I think we're done.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We good?
Marco:
Yeah, I think we're good.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our sponsors this week.
Marco:
Hover, File Transporter, and Squarespace.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
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:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
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.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
They did it.
Casey:
Hey, so let's not do ATP and let's just do neutral and talk about John's car.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, this is a major event.
Marco:
You know, Casey and I get cars all the time.
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, once every 10 years.
Marco:
But the last time you got a car, John, was the iPod even out yet?
John:
It was.
John:
I'm serious.
John:
Well, my car was more than 10 years old.
John:
But we had a newer car because we had a 2007 car.
John:
That's the car my wife drives.
John:
So we had a newish car.
John:
It was like a 2004 car.
John:
before that and that got told and replaced it with a 2007 i always get the years of our cars wrong which you would think would be something i know but i'm thrown off by the whole you know model year having very little to do with the actual year distinction but anyway uh we had a 2007 car which is a pretty new car but the car i was driving was 2002 civic so yeah and this one i assume i will also have for 10 years
Marco:
So now you have two Accords.
John:
Yep.
Marco:
How does that feel?
John:
Feels just fine.
Marco:
That's the most glowing ad for an Accord.
Marco:
How does it feel to have two of them?
Marco:
It feels fine.
Casey:
From John?
Casey:
That is glowing.
John:
This is my third Accord.
Marco:
That is the Honda Accord encapsulated into a few words.
Oh!
John:
I don't share your opinion of the Honda Accord.
John:
I find it a... No, you do.
Marco:
I think it's fine.
John:
No, I find it a much more interesting car than other similarly priced, quote-unquote, boring cars.
Casey:
Should have gotten a Mazda 6.
Casey:
But, you know, nobody's perfect.
John:
Well, I would have if I had test drove it.
John:
The main thing I was test driving it for was clutch, shifter, driving position, and visibility.
John:
Like, that's what I was test driving it for.
John:
Because if I didn't like the clutch and shifter or the driving position or the visibility or, like, the ride, I guess, I would have gone and test drove the 6.
John:
But I did like it, and so I didn't even feel the need to go and get it.
John:
Because I really don't like how the 6 looks.
John:
I've seen a lot of them on the road.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I would have gone to it if it was like, well, if the Accord was terrible, because I do need a new car.
John:
It's like, I'm not getting this car for my health, because the old car was just going downhill.
John:
But if the Accord was good, I didn't see a reason to continue to.
John:
And plus, I didn't want to drag it out.
John:
So I didn't even bother test driving the 6.
Marco:
I'm kind of surprised that you're able to get a car at all and be satisfied with it at all because cars like even great cars have such ridiculous glaring flaws, especially like the interface and stuff.
John:
I mean, yeah, no, this is still a terrible thing.
John:
So the good thing about having a new car every more 10, 12 years or so is that you it's like if you kept like your Mac for years and years and you didn't have a Mac Pro.
John:
And you replace it.
John:
Say you had like a MacBook from five or six years ago.
John:
Any new portable Mac you get, you'll be like, oh, my God, this is such a, you know, because so many things change in that period of time.
John:
Now, cars don't move as fast as computers, but there are big changes between 2002 and now.
John:
So I get to see like, let's see how far standard equipment has come because I really don't get any options.
John:
I don't even think there are any interesting options to speak of in the car that I got.
John:
And so all sorts of stuff are standard now.
John:
Like my car did not have a little key thing that you press to unlock the doors.
John:
And that's standard now on pretty much every car.
John:
I don't even know if you can get a car without that.
Marco:
In 2007, that wasn't standard?
John:
No, 2002.
John:
Oh, right.
John:
Sorry.
John:
Like my car.
John:
Of course, the Accord had it, right?
John:
And I get to see the 2007 car kind of in the middle.
John:
But yeah.
John:
What else did my car not have?
John:
Well, the key fob thing was a big deal because the kids had to wait until I got into the car, hit the little lock thingy, because it did have a little button to unlock all the doors.
John:
It just wasn't on the key fob.
John:
So I had to unlock my door with the key, get in, and then press the little thingy, and then they could open their door.
Casey:
Wait, wait, wait.
Casey:
My 94 Saturn, which of course was white before you even asked, you jerks.
Casey:
Of course it was.
Casey:
94 Saturn I had.
Casey:
If I recall correctly, if you put the key in the driver's door and like double turned a quarter turn to the right, it would actually unlock all the doors from the exterior.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
You're saying your Civic from eight years later didn't do that?
John:
There were Civics in 2002 that had this feature, but not my Civic.
John:
I'm always buying from the bottom of the line.
John:
Especially back in the old days, the stick shift was always the bottom of the bottom of the line.
John:
All the other ones came with automatics.
John:
I'm always buying stick shift cars, so I'm not buying sports sedans, and even those don't come with manuals anymore.
John:
I'm always getting the cheap trim levels.
John:
Some more things that are first on this car, for me, this is my first car with power seats.
John:
It only has one of them.
John:
It's the driver's seat, right?
John:
What else is the first on this car?
John:
First car with fog lights.
Casey:
Now, are you a complete tool and use them anytime the headlights are on like me, or are you actually an adult about it?
John:
I don't even know how to turn them on yet.
John:
I'm assuming it's somewhere on the same stalk as the headlights.
Marco:
Sometimes there's a separate button off to the left somewhere.
John:
Yeah, I don't see myself being a big fog light user, but who knows?
John:
First car with dual exhaust.
John:
It's exciting.
Casey:
Ooh, fancy.
John:
I'm pretty sure they're real dual exhaust.
John:
I have to look under the car.
John:
One of them could be cosmetic, but I'm pretty sure it's real.
Marco:
And you were talking about, was it Bluetooth or USB connection for the iPod?
John:
Yeah, first car with the USB connection, first car with Bluetooth.
Marco:
So Bluetooth is standard on all cords.
Marco:
That's really good.
Marco:
That's good to know, actually.
John:
I don't know, because this...
John:
I didn't actually get the bottom of the bottom of the line.
John:
I actually got the, the sport level trim is not the bottom of the line.
John:
You can get an LX with a stick shift and I didn't.
John:
So this is the first car that I bought.
John:
It was slightly more expensive than it had to be because I could have gotten an Accord manual LX trim level, which would have been less expensive and not had all this fancy stuff.
John:
And would you get an EX?
John:
Uh, no sport is the name of the trim level.
John:
Oh, that's a whole, it's a separate trim level has 18 inch wheels.
John:
First car with 18 inch wheels.
Uh,
John:
Has, you know, the dual exhaust has the fake carbon fiber inside.
John:
It has a leather wrap steering wheel.
John:
Also a first not heated.
John:
Of course, that's not, you know, so it's, it's, it's very nice.
John:
It's very, it's a very fancy car for me.
John:
First car I ever bought that was more than 20 grand, even if it just barely crossed over that line.
Marco:
That's a pretty good deal.
Marco:
To get a really nice car of that size class, even with moderate options, to get that for just over $20,000 is pretty good.
John:
No option, because the sport trim level comes with all this stuff.
John:
There's this optional dealer-installed add-on crap that you can get, I think, but I don't think there are any other options that you can get for it to speak of.
John:
Maybe I wasn't looking hard enough, but yeah, I'm just taking what it came with.
John:
It was a pretty good deal.
John:
Car shopping always sucks, so whatever, but I got it done in a three-day weekend.
Marco:
I always I love car shopping in theory.
Marco:
And then when it comes time to actually go to the dealerships and try to test drive anything and try to find anything, it's such a pain in the butt that I just want to end it as quickly as possible.
Casey:
Yeah, it's funny you say that.
Casey:
So Erin and I went with a friend of ours, and she's looking into perhaps either an S4 or an equivalent.
Casey:
And so, of course, I made her drive an M3 at the local BMW dealer.
Casey:
And this particular M3 was pretty busted.
Casey:
It was an 08, and it had the prior version of iDrive, which I'd never actually seen before.
Casey:
And, oh, my goodness, all the stories are right.
Casey:
It is that bad.
Casey:
But anyway, we went to test drive this car, and I was thinking, ooh, maybe I'll take it for a little spin.
Casey:
It was a six-speed because she actually wants a six-speed, and I was all excited about it.
Casey:
And the process to get in the car took forever.
Casey:
Once we got out of the car, it took forever.
Casey:
The car was kind of all busted up, and the second gear crunched.
Casey:
I think a couple wheels were out of it.
Casey:
out of balance um we felt we felt the rear tires and they had no tread yet the fronts suspiciously had a lot of tread and it was just not good times but uh yeah you're absolutely right the the actual act of buying a car is terrible or even test driving a car is terrible and this was a used one it wasn't even like it was new no gross
John:
I think I've gotten the swing of buying cars, but it's just, I mean, especially the cars I buy, there's not a lot of drama involved.
John:
There's no rarity.
John:
There's no real hunting down of the cars.
John:
You know, it's a Honda Accord.
John:
It's more or less a commodity.
John:
It is a little bit difficult to find the stick shifts because it's trying to search for them.
John:
You know, minor dealers might not have them in stock, but they can get them if you want.
John:
But, you know, if I'm going to find ones in stock, I'll find them.
Marco:
I am surprised that you were able to find one so easily to test drive.
Marco:
Usually you can get them to order you one maybe, but to actually find a stick shift to test drive at a dealer is pretty rare these days.
John:
The internet.
John:
I did internet searches for dealers in your area who have this thing.
John:
It's not called around as well, but you know...
John:
just combination of the internet and calling around that was my first order of business was first find one of these things that i can test drive to see if i like it and once i found it then started the new phase of the search which is i know exactly the car i want down to the trim level and color and then just go price shopping and that's always annoying because nobody wants you to talk to them or come into a dealer or do anything without completing in a sale and so every single one of them it's like this is not going to end in a sale i'm price shopping
John:
Nobody likes that.
John:
There's a thing a friend of mine did that was like, you pay us $200, we do all the crap for you, and we hopefully save you more than $200 on the price of the car.
John:
He was very satisfied with the service.
John:
It's a local website that does it, but the website says they're not taking...
John:
Any more orders?
John:
My wife says it was 2006 Accord, not 2007.
John:
I told you, I can never remember the model year versus the... Anyway.
John:
I think you just got served.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So that service that does that car buying thing said, we're not doing that anymore.
John:
Maybe they were overbooked or maybe they're going into business or I don't know.
John:
So I couldn't do that.
John:
And then I had heard that Costco has a car pricing thing that was similar.
John:
And we're a Costco member.
John:
So I tried doing that.
John:
And that's like, fill out this thing and tell it what car you want, and it will direct you to a dealer.
John:
And it turns out there's only one dealer in our area that does the Costco thing.
John:
And so I did the thing on the internet and filled out this thing, and it sent me some email.
John:
It said, hey, come down to the dealer.
John:
I'm like, well, I don't want to do that.
John:
So I called the dealer and said, hey, I did this Costco thing.
John:
Will you tell me, you know, I want to know what is the Costco price for this car?
John:
The whole idea was they'll just give you a price that they can't tell you on the website, and it's a no-haggle price, and here it is.
John:
And they said, oh, we can't tell you the price here.
John:
You have to come into the dealer, which...
John:
Of course they want you to come into the dealer.
John:
Everyone wants you to come in.
John:
Doesn't that kind of ruin the point of this Costco thing?
John:
I mean, if it's a no-haggle thing and it was a good deal, I just wanted to know what the price was.
John:
So, you know, I had to drive all the way up there.
John:
Basically, it was just like, I'm here because you told me I had to drive here so you would tell me the price.
John:
Now please tell me the price.
John:
And then, of course, they don't want you to go.
John:
Once they tell you the price, they would be like, okay, thank you for the price.
John:
I'm now going to leave.
John:
They want to say, well, you know, hey, don't you want to buy what it's going to take to get you into a car today and go through all that business or whatever.
John:
So eventually I...
John:
I got a reasonable deal.
John:
I'm searching through all these websites for, you know, what is the invoice price for this car and what are local deals like or whatever.
John:
And there's like a million different websites that do this.
John:
I'm also looking up the blue book value of my car, thinking of trading it in like the old Civic and everything.
John:
And at one of the dealers, the bad cop guy, like there's always the good cop, bad cop.
Marco:
The sales manager.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The bad cop guy pulled up on his computer one of the websites I had been looking at to show, like, here's the range of prices that people are paying locally.
John:
And it's like immediately you go, okay, do not look at that website ever again.
John:
Because if a dealer is showing it to you, the information on that website is not going to help you at all.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And I think I got a reasonable deal.
John:
I didn't get an amazing deal like I got on my wife's Accord because that was just an unbelievable deal.
John:
But that was because it was like a car that someone else had ordered and put a bunch of crap on and then bailed out on the deal.
John:
And now they had a car tarted up with all these aftermarket extras that nobody wanted.
John:
It was a stick shift and we scooped it up and took it off their hands.
John:
So you can't expect to get that deal every year.
John:
So I got I got an OK deal.
John:
I was going to say, I got a pretty good deal on the trade-in, considering the car was covered with acorn dents.
Casey:
Do they give you more than $10?
Marco:
Yeah, that's the perfect use of the dealer trade-in.
Marco:
Because dealer trade-ins, they will underball the crap out of the price.
Marco:
And so it's worth it to just, if you have a car like that, that's just going to be really hard to get much value privately.
Marco:
The perfect use of the dealer trade-in.
John:
Yeah, because no individual wants a car.
John:
And it didn't have an air conditioning compressor.
John:
The reason I was getting new cars is the air conditioning compressor would cost over $1,000 to fix according to the way too expensive dealer or whatever.
John:
It's like, all right, it's the end of the time for this car.
John:
So I had a car that was ugly, that was a stick shift, covered in dents, and no air conditioning.
John:
Uh, and like the, uh, the dealer ended up buying from originally said, we'll give you about a thousand, 1500 for it.
John:
And I'm like, well, that's terrible.
John:
Cause the blue book value sans acorn dent, the blue book value of the car, if it was not dented, or I guess you put the condition is like fair or whatever.
John:
Uh, and, and the air conditioning compressor worked, it was like 2,500, 3,500 dependent, but that was not deducting for the compressor.
John:
Uh, but I ended up getting 2,500 for the trade in for it.
John:
So I felt like I got a good deal, 2,500 for a 2002.
John:
I mean, who knows?
John:
Like there, they could, you just assume that's off the price.
John:
You know, like, are they really giving you $2,500 for your thing or is it just some negotiating tactic?
John:
Bottom line is I gave them about $20,000 and I got a new car.
John:
And I gave them my old car.
John:
So the end.