Negativity, Skepticism, and Doubt
People were tweeting me thinking I was drunk on the last show.
Oh, yeah, because you didn't get a chance to explain your voice.
Because my voice sounded terrible.
Right.
Like, that's not what you sound like when you're drunk.
That's what you sound like when you're sick.
Ah, people.
People are crazy.
All right, so what are we talking about tonight?
I think I know.
I mean, I think we have to talk about the Google Reader thing.
I think we do.
So let me start by asking, do either of you guys believe in RSS?
I presume the answer is a resounding yes.
It exists whether you believe in it or not, Casey.
Wow.
It's all around us all the time.
Just like love.
No, I use RSS constantly.
A lot of people have always said, oh, RSS is dead.
I don't use RSS.
I just replace it with Twitter or whatever.
And I think that's true for a lot of people, certainly.
But RSS as a technology is fine.
It's behind the scenes of quite a lot of things.
And
A lot of people do use it the way you think of when you say, do you use RSS?
A lot of people still do that.
And I don't really think that's ever going away because it serves a lot of really good functions.
Now, the problem with RSS, well, one of the problems with RSS...
is that it gives you a really, really easy way to shoot yourself in the foot, which is you subscribe to all the sites that everyone's heard of, all the big 30 posts a day blogs and news sites and everything.
So it's very, very easy to reach a point where you're getting 500 new RSS items per day, and you can't get to all that.
And so it piles up, and then it becomes this guilt inbox that you never want to clear.
And then usually that results in you abandoning RSS and just, oh, I can never go back to RSS.
Too many unread items.
That happens a lot, especially with geeks.
And so I can totally see why people move off of RSS when they get to that point.
But that doesn't mean that you have to.
That doesn't mean it's the only option.
And it doesn't mean RSS is dead or dying.
It just means you're using it badly.
And sure, you know, it's partially the technology's fault for being so easy to misuse or to use in an unsustainable way for yourself.
But...
That's not to say the entire technology is dead.
I mean people have the same problem with Twitter where they follow too many people and they can't keep up with their feed.
And so they find ways around it.
They skip everything.
They scroll to the top.
They only look at new stuff or whatever.
You find ways around it.
Or they trim their follower counts.
Right.
We think about lots of people saying, well, nobody uses RSS, blah, blah, blah.
But obviously in our circles, in the circles we travel in on the net –
I think the usage is still pretty widespread.
I mean, I was looking at, you know, Gruber just tweeted a little before he tweeted his stats on, I mean, he's got this on his own website, but he tweeted the actual like log line.
Yeah, and he has like 400,000.
400,000 RSS subscribers.
It's like, oh, nobody uses RSS.
Well, apparently 400,000 people at least are using it because that's just from one site stats, right?
So that's, yeah, we're a tiny group of people, right?
But, you know...
The circle that we travel in of computer nerds is big enough to sustain a technology, because there's plenty of technologies we use that nobody else is interested in.
I mean, like, how many people use Xcode, and yet that's still a viable product because it has a purpose, right?
App.net.
Right.
Well, that remains to be seen.
But, you know, like, I mean, we sustained Twitter for a long time just ourselves before everyone else discovered it.
IRC.
It's not I don't think the like the popularity of the technology.
It's way past the threshold of like it's viable.
Right.
So the only question is, you know, all right.
The technology is viable.
There's more than enough people want to use it more than enough people to sustain a market for the usage of that.
It's just a question of where do we go from here now that Google came along and pushed everybody out and then took its ball and went home.
Right.
And a lot of people are saying too like, oh, well, Google said that usage has been declining, so it's not worth keeping up.
Well, there's a whole lot of businesses that are not worth Google paying attention to at their size.
but that a lot of smaller companies can make very good businesses addressing those needs.
There's a lot of things Google doesn't do.
Certainly, you can look at some of their projects and think they do everything because a lot of their stuff is a major flop.
They do a lot of experimentation.
But if RSS is now too small for Google to care about, that doesn't mean that it's too small for anyone to care about.
It's not so much that I don't think it's too small for Google to care about now.
I don't know how much I buy the thing, oh, declining readership.
It's almost as if they didn't ever have a reason to get into it at all anyway, really.
I think by the time they got into it, it was clear that it wasn't going to be the next Twitter.
RSS was what it was, and it was never going to...
It's kind of like Usenet where they bought Deja News and stuff.
They didn't think Usenet was going to sweep the nation and the world.
Usenet was already sort of the thing that it was, but I figured, oh, I guess we might as well have that.
And them having a reasonable free product for such a long period of time kind of...
They weren't doing it intentionally to crush everybody else, but the net effect was Google's really good at keeping their servers up.
Google's really good at making their servers fast, and doing the things that they were doing is actually kind of difficult, and they're giving away for free.
So companies like NewsGator and stuff that were trying to make a business out of it couldn't do it, but they're like, yeah, we're better than Google Reader, but just barely, and they're free.
And so they just sat there until everyone else was gone or out of business, and they said, wait a minute.
why are we even doing Google Reader?
I don't know.
Let's stop doing that.
I think they kept going longer than they had to, kind of like a relationship where you don't want to break up with somebody because it's going to be bad.
You're just like, it seems like I'll just keep... For years, I think, anyone who was surprised by this
I would be shocked because like, I mean, I've been looking at Google reader for years and thinking like, why are they still going to read?
We all knew the hammer was going to fall for years and years.
Like even like Brenton Simmons had a blog post about it.
And I remember reading his blog post and saying, well, yeah, Doug, Google reader is not long for this world.
And yet here we are two years later and it just finally getting around to axing it.
So I, I don't, anyone who's mad at Google for axing it, I don't understand where that comes from other than just frustration.
So I totally, I totally see why they're getting rid of it.
Uh,
And your post that you put on Marco that you put on your website is like this finally frees us all up to maybe do something interesting in the area.
That's also true.
But I think people are still bummed.
I was bummed because we know like, all right, the other shoe finally dropped.
Now we have to have this period of time where there's nothing while we wait for something, you know.
Well, I mean, and there's already, there is Feedly.
I'm not that familiar with what they do.
I gather they make some clients, some RSS clients.
Feedly posted on their blog, like, very fast after, very quickly after Google posted their thing, that they were kind of preparing for this for a while, and they built an API-compatible clone of Google Reader for themselves that their clients will just automatically start syncing with once Google Reader shuts down.
and uh and there's already like a number i mean just tonight on twitter i even thought about building one there's already tons of people saying okay now i'm starting this new project it's just going to mirror the google api uh and you can self-host it it's open source or whatever or somebody else can build a big platform on it um i do think though it was really funny that feedly in their post they said okay so google we thought google was going to shut this down for a while so we built this thing uh we built it on google app engine
Yeah.
But that's the thing about it.
It's not that what Google Reader did is so groundbreaking.
It's the fact that it was run by Google, which meant that it was up and available in there.
And I'm sure people are going to say, oh, well, it was down lots of times.
Well, until recently.
The reason...
having someone else do this annoying stuff, like the operation stuff, running a server, keeping it up, keeping it efficient, having it work at scale for how many bazillions of, like, even the RSS, like, oh, the declining usership, the number of people who are hitting Google Reader is huge compared to, like, you know, if you're some little company, you say, okay, well, we're going to have 7 million people hit your server tomorrow and pull stuff from it.
Are you okay with that?
Can you scale?
Oh, sure.
It's not easy.
And one of the biggest challenges of designing a service like that is that
Google crawled the feeds, and then the client just logged into Google and said, hey, what's new?
So Google had to maintain this crawling infrastructure, which they do anyway.
They kind of crawl the entire internet, so they're kind of uniquely positioned to do that better than you.
Right, but for anyone else to do it, you have to build a crawling infrastructure that has to crawl millions and millions of feeds quickly and repeatedly until there's new updates.
Do you think that's an important part of the service, though?
Oh, yeah.
For all the apps integrated?
Yeah.
Because that's a major thing that your app doesn't have to do.
If you're writing an RSS client, that's a big deal.
And also, they normalize all the feeds into one particular Atom format.
So you only have to build one parser.
I mean, there's lots of reasons for clients to want to do it that way, to want to build their services against that.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I think any service that replaces Google Reader is going to have to provide at least the automatic content crawling and the normalization of the feed format.
Now, that's not to say that they... I mean, they can leave out all the social stuff.
They can leave out flagging, tagging, starring.
They can leave all that stuff out as far as I'm concerned.
But the basics of...
syncing a list of feed you're subscribed to, syncing what you have read and unread, and providing that whole crawling back end so that the client doesn't have to do it.
I think any replacement has to do those things.
And why – I'm still stuck on the crawling part.
That's just basically so the client doesn't have to open up 10 million TCP connections to 10 million different servers and pull stuff from it?
Exactly.
I mean, we see this –
We see this with podcast clients on iOS.
There's, I think, only one.
I think only Pocket Casts by Shifty Jelly.
They do server-side crawling of all the feeds, similar to what Google Reader does with RSS.
I don't think any other major client does that.
Please email John if I'm wrong.
I would like to know that, actually.
But
like I use downcast for my feed for my podcast client.
And every time you launch the app or every time it has to update, it has to crawl whatever, you know, all 25 or whatever number of feeds I'm subscribed to individually.
And that sucks.
And it's a big waste of bandwidth, you know, for things that don't implement, not modified stuff like that.
Um,
It's very inefficient on a thin client like a phone where you don't really want to have some massive thing.
On a desktop where you're just pulling things in the background, who cares?
If you have some app hidden in the background, that's fine.
But on iOS, that matters a lot.
When you launch the app, you don't want to have to sit there for a minute and a half while it crawls all these feeds.
Google Reader clients are awesome because they only have to sync to one thing.
They only have to hit Google and then Google comes back saying, here's a list of new things.
And with RSS, you might have way more subscriptions than with a podcast client.
So with RSS, if you subscribe to 150 feeds, and most of them aren't updated most of the time, but there's a few that are, that's way more efficient to do the Google Reader way, where the server-side crawls everything, than requiring the clients to crawl 150 feeds every 15 minutes that you launch them.
I wonder if that's a transitional thing, though.
Fast forward 20 years, is that still a factor?
Well, yes and no.
If you have umpteen core processors in our wristwatch communicator things and bandwidth is really high, it's actually faster to crawl 150 different URLs in parallel than to ask one server.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
Because think about what you have to do.
You have to use so much more data.
You have to keep the radios on longer.
I mean, that's never going to be more efficient.
It's always going to be better to go through the intermediary.
I know it won't be more efficient, but like you said on the desktop, on the desktop it's not as much of a factor because we're not worried about – opening up a TCP connection takes a long time.
So if you only have to open up one of them, that's better than having to open up 150 of them.
Yeah.
Uh, the bandwidth concerns, like assuming mobile bandwidth, you know, goes away and the CPU concerns of having all these threads going at once, which is untenable on a, on a iOS device today.
Maybe that isn't in the future.
I'm just wondering if it's like one of those things where I remember back when, uh, to do any sort of RSS syncing the server.
Like we don't do that for the web.
We don't do all the mobile web serving through a proxy unless you, I guess, uh,
what silk amazon silk does that or whatever but it used to be in the bad old days that mobile web surfing had to go through a proxy because it had to like tear down the pages for you and do all sorts of awful things and amazon's still doing it but we accept now that the trade-off is like look i'd rather have mobile safari just go right to the website
Don't compress my images.
Don't modify the markup.
It's like a real web browser.
It connects the real way.
And we're just going to, you know, bite the bullet and go with that.
It seems to me that that's got to be eventually the future, assuming RSS is still around.
That's got to be the future of this type of service long term.
Not presently, but long term.
But also, RSS, like the access pattern is different.
With RSS, almost all of those requests that the polling client makes are going to be returned back with nothing new.
You know, a three or four or whatever, you know, nothing new.
So for the client to have to check that over and over again is extremely wasteful.
And one way you can solve this is with push.
There's PubSubHubbub and RSS Cloud to address this push issue.
But push is really complicated to implement on all various ends of it.
The polling is just way simpler, so that's why we still have it.
But with RSS, I think it makes a lot of sense because almost all of the polls that happen will result in nothing new this 15-minute interval.
Then it makes sense to have all that inefficient polling happening somewhere else that can tolerate inefficiencies like a data center that's powered by AC power, not on a battery, that has a big, fat connection to the internet and is always running this app.
as opposed to an iOS app that you have to launch and you have to... Like iOS apps, who knows how this will change in the future, but at the moment, iOS apps like RSS readers can't automatically check things in the background every 15 minutes.
They have to be running.
And so when you launch it, it has to load all of its state from something right then.
And so there's so many reasons to have that be remote-based and have a Google Reader-like setup where the server's doing all the crawling and then the client just sends one very lightweight request to the server, which has already done most of the work.
And I think the thing that maybe we're not considering is the difference it is at creation time.
And one of you guys kind of lightly touched on this a second ago, but if I was about to write a podcast client, an RSS client tomorrow, I wouldn't want to have to fiddle around with –
trying to figure out all the different and varied responses i'm going to get from all these different and varied web servers i'm going to want something that's going to be a facade in front of that that's going to make that nice and clean and so i can get the part of the app that i don't want to do which is the behind the scenes boring uh getting the the rss updates and i can get that out of the way as quickly as possible so i can do the cool stuff on the ui side
Now, as it turns out, I actually am a terrible UI developer.
But in principle, if you're going to write an RSS client, you're going to do it because you have something new and exciting to do.
And you're not going to want to bother with doing all the backend stuff.
You're going to want to do all the UI stuff.
And like you were saying, Marco, having one place to get all that normalized and in a clean state is much better.
And that saves you so much time before you compile.
When you're just writing the code, it saves you so much time.
And that...
I don't think many people have very much interest in doing that boring stuff.
They just want to do the fun UI stuff.
Oh, yeah.
Also, there's a practical aspect of like with iOS apps in the App Store, if there's some new weirdo feed that you find that's some weird format, if it's a server-side configuration of the parser, you can just update that immediately.
And then all your clients have that fixed immediately.
You don't have to recode the app and go through AppReview.
Maybe it's that I'm channeling Dave Weiner too much, but the idea of all RSS feeds funneling into a service which then feeds an app...
I see all the reasons for it, but it just seems like Amazon Silk to me.
It seems like WAP.
Remember that?
What was it?
It just smells like that to me, and it seems like it's just a bump in the road along our way to a completely decentralized thing.
And maybe we need a new protocol for that.
Maybe pulling down an entire RSS feed or expecting a 304 based on some timestamp, hopefully getting your time zones right and everything, is not like... Maybe there's a better protocol.
Maybe it's app.net or something that looks similar to that where...
if you made a more efficient protocol and really decentralized it in some way, maybe it makes up for it.
But, I mean, you know, the other aspect I'm thinking of, not just the content crawling, but the main reason, the main way that I use Google Reader, I think, at least a quarter of the people who are habitual Google Readers use it in this way is...
As a syncing service, as in, I read news as, you know, that's an activity I do in some place.
And when I go someplace else, a different computer, a different device or whatever, I wanted to know that I read that thing on that other thing.
And that is really an entirely separate thing from aggregate my feeds, normalize them, tell me if there's updates and stuff like that.
Because now you're into like a...
state synchronization that has nothing to do with the feeds that has everything to do with you what did you read so far you know what did you subscribe to what did you want to subscribe to and that state synchronization is probably a harder problem uh you know i guess algorithmic algorithmically at least to find figure out what the hell the right thing is to do than the mere operational problem of crawling the entire web of rss feeds and normalizing them and providing a service for it and stuff like that
And so those two things, that's quite a bit for any one party or multiple parties to bite off, because that's what people are looking for.
I never see the Google Reader web UI.
Some people live in it, but I never even look at it.
But I use Net Newswire, and I use it on various devices and on various machines, and I want it to all be in sync.
So I want something to do that as well as the normalization.
I don't see that that's going on.
That's more of a development concern.
So if something doesn't normalize and doesn't aggregate and, for example, doesn't cache, which is the thing that drives everyone who authors an RSS feed crazy about Google Reader because if you get a bum item in there, Google Reader never forgets it, right?
It's another opportunity for someone coming into this field to do it better.
Hey, give us a way to delete that crap out or maybe we have smart caching that forgets it when it disappears.
But anyway, the syncing aspect of it is what I'm really looking for in some third-party vendor to hop up and say, hey, we're going to provide a service for all your newsreading applications to keep them all in sync and we'll charge some small amount of money and you'll subscribe to it or you'll subscribe to the app or something like that.
Yeah.
Isn't that what Fever, is that right?
Fever was supposed to do that?
It was supposed to be self-hosted with a really slick web front end.
But the problem is when you ask people to self-host a web app.
Self-hosting, I mean, I know.
There's no technical and knowledge barrier for me doing that, but I don't want to self-host anything.
Oh, I agree.
Completely.
Self-hosting, that will always extremely limit your audience requiring that.
I mean, it's a good way to learn something if you don't know about all the technologies involved.
Self-hosting is a good learning experience with an audience of one, so you're not destroying someone's business learning about server-side development.
But self-hosting is not going to explode now that Google Reader is gone.
What we all want is something to do what Google Reader did for us, which is when I read something, it knows that it's read and everything is fast and all my clients work with it.
Yeah.
And some people use the web interface, and for them, they're looking for an equivalent or better web interface.
I don't know.
I think the web interface hopefully is on its way out for RSS because, I mean, certainly RSS is being pushed pretty heavily.
It always was a very geek-centric technology.
And while there are non-geeks who use it, I'm sure there are a heck of a lot more geeks who do.
And so if RSS, like, if the web reader experience never fully gets replaced, I think that's fine.
Yeah.
where i think we're going to see you know i think we're going to see two things come out of this first we're going to see uh you know obviously we're going to see that the the back end syncing platform will be replaced by a million different people doing doing basically all doing the same thing which is just marrying the googly reader api with some kind of hosted or open source thing that anybody can get or use and that's cool and we need that
Well, didn't you think that would kind of be a shame?
Because everything I've heard from people who develop against the Google Reader API, well, I guess it doesn't help that it was undocumented and unsupported.
But if you had to pick an API to make it easy for app developers to implement syncing, maybe the Google Reader API is not ideal.
I understand you've got to do it completely.
easy compatibility with all the people who were talking to Google Reader.
But if I was doing one of those projects, I would be like, OK, do the Google Reader API mirroring to get us off the ground.
But let's plan a much better API that makes it even easier for developers to have that be versioned off in a different place and like, oh, now, you know.
Yeah, I'm sure that will happen with almost all of these, where they will start out with the Google Reader API to bootstrap it, and then they'll have their own clean, nice new API.
But the Google Reader API is probably going to be the standard if there is one.
Right now...
It was really easy to make an RSS app in the last few years because all you had to do was give people Google Reader Username and Password fields on login, and that was it.
Now I think we're going to basically see a third field being added to that, which is hostname.
Whatever service you're using that mirrors the API, type in the hostname here, and then type in your username and password for it in these other two boxes.
I think that's the easiest way forward for the clients.
If that is the outcome, assume we have multiple services that spring up that are going to be like this that are going to replace Google Reader and get some popularity.
If that's the case, none of them will have the leverage to make a new API.
That's why you're afraid that Google Reader will be stuck with it.
Look, the clients have already written all the code for it.
Right.
And you're like, why would I rewrite my client code just to support your new fancy API?
I've already got my client working with the Google Reader API.
It's been working with it for five years now or whatever.
It's like, why would I change it?
Well, our new API is cleaner.
Well, for new developers, maybe you get those guys on board.
But I think that would be a shame because, like I said, it's not like people are saying Google Reader is the most awesome API for syncing and keeping track of stuff.
It's maybe not so awesome.
As a funny sidebar, one of the weird little projects I did at Tumblr was back before Twitter bought Tweety from Lauren Brichter, when Tweety was its own app and everyone loved it, one of the very advanced settings fields was API hostname.
And you could type in any hostname there, and it would use that as the basis of all the Twitter API URLs.
So I wrote the Twitter API for Tumblr
enough of it so that you could browse Tumblr in Tweety, just using this field to say, like, you know, tumblr.com slash whatever.
And it was really – it was interesting because, again, like, it was like you got this whole app kind of for free by just making – by just mirroring enough of Twitter's API to make this work.
That's why I'm saying, like, the RSS, like, not that it's inadequate, but that –
it's just a piece of the puzzle.
Because RSS and Atom are standards for data representation, but they don't help you with the, all right, so what about you want to have an API that is efficient and can give you synchronization information?
That would have to be a layer on top of it.
And then that layer would say, okay, well, that...
De facto, that is the Google Reader API because it has the most client apps written against it, and it was the only player in town, and it was free.
And now that's our middle layer.
It would be nicer if there was a similarly open standard like RSS or Atom to fill that role that wasn't just like the leftover droppings of a company that was once vaguely interested in the business but lost interest.
Yeah, and it's also worth speculating on why they did this a little bit more.
I just thought of a new theory.
Now, I think the real reason they shut it down is because I've heard from various people over the last couple of months as we started to see problems.
I've heard that the staff...
assigned to work on Google Reader was basically between zero and three people, depending on who you believe and how you measure that.
So I've heard it had basically nobody working on it.
And so remember, it had a pretty bad outage like a week or two ago, something like that.
I'm guessing what happened was...
it was working fine for a long time, and then things started to break.
And when things started to break, you know, weeks ago, whenever that was, nobody knew how to fix it because nobody had looked at this code for years.
And so that's probably what made Google decide, you know what, this is just easier to kill than to fix because it's not giving us enough value.
You might as well just kill it rather than maintain it.
I think that's the real reason.
But it's worth considering one conspiracy, I think, like crazy reason, is,
When you're reading RSS, you're not going to people's websites and seeing ads.
They put ads.
I mean, the thing they don't like about, from a business perspective, the only business reason that you can think to get rid of this thing is like, look, if only they know these numbers, but how many people are using it as an API that they never see?
Like, how many people are using apps like Reader or Net Newswire or whatever and never see a single one of our ads because all they, like, it's just an API back.
And all we're doing is providing computing horsepower and uptime for them for free for zero benefit.
They never see our ads.
The people in the web interface, they can show them ads.
They can, you know,
harvest their interests.
It's just like Gmail.
If everybody used the web interface, and if that everybody was a much larger number than it currently is, it would still be around.
But from a business perspective, I think a very large number of people don't use the web interface, and the total sum of all Google Reader users is so much smaller than the Gmail user base or whatever that
It just doesn't make any sense for them to keep it.
Right.
And to that end, if you're going to replace Google Reader, why would you get into that business if the whole point of the business is to use third-party clients?
And I guess this comes back to app.net and the idea is, well, you have super nerds that are affluent enough that they'll be able to spare a few bucks a month to pay for it or 50 bucks a year, whatever the number may be.
But I wouldn't want to get into that business.
That seems...
This business models for it, I'm going to get back to Gruber with his 400,000 RSS subscribers.
That's how he makes money from his site.
One of the ways, he sells RSS sponsorships, and you get to sponsoring the RSS feed, which is the thing that customers want, and
i'm pretty sure the ads that he puts on those are in the rss feed as well right so if you if you control the rss feeds you can insert an ad into rss feeds other people's rss maybe that maybe that model does not work and people will hate it but uh you know the app.net model is certainly more direct pay us a little bit and you get to use our synchronization service and now wherever you read you know like i mean app.net could be that service i don't think it's you know quite designed for this thing exactly but
And that's the question of like, okay, so Google was subsidizing it with Zolt's profitable business, like their search revenue.
They were doing this more or less out of the goodness of their own heart.
I mean, not entirely.
Well, not quite.
I mean, they want to have access to all the world's information.
And a lot of information flows through RSS.
I mean, they bought FeedBurner for – I mean, FeedBurner was more of an ad buy.
But I think it made sense why they started this in the first place.
Well, even when they bought FeedBurner, though, it's like I don't think anyone at Google had any notion that RSS was going to grow tremendously from the point where they bought it.
And it hasn't.
And the point where they bought it already wasn't like – I mean, it was big among nerds.
But it was never – like the growth curve was never – never any illusions that it was going to take off like Facebook or Twitter.
There was no hockey stick curve at the time that they bought into it.
Maybe they wanted to have it just because like –
There's no sense in other people having this thing and people spending their time elsewhere.
And maybe the long-term evil plan is, all right, we've got to get this because it is a thing.
It's not a big thing.
It's not going to grow, but we've got to get it so we can just kind of quietly put it to sleep.
Which is, you know, the, you know, the rap on Google when they buy companies, you know, Jaiku or, you know, I don't know, name a million other companies that Google has bought that have kind of like faded away and you never really hear about them again or they, you know, or they just, they don't improve rapidly or they just, you know, it's like, it's all under Google's umbrella.
They have the option to let it go live up on a farm upstate whenever they feel like it, right?
Yeah.
I think, I mean, first of all, there's a big problem here, which it's kind of, I mean, this has a lot of parallels to way more controversial things.
But what they did really, and I don't think they planned this, but what happened was Google Reader came out and destroyed a very big market of desktop RSS readers and web RSS readers.
Google just came in and destroyed it because it was free and it synced.
And none of the things did that at the time.
And they destroyed it, and they held onto that market for eight years.
And now they're killing it.
Now, Gruber... Oh, wait a second.
I think Winer asked you on Twitter about this.
How did they destroy the market for the desktop apps?
How did they make it so it's no longer viable to sell the apps?
They definitely destroyed the services like NewsGator.
NewsGator was trying to sell you synchronization services.
But the desktop app... I mean, what they did to the desktop apps and the iOS apps was even more insidious.
They didn't destroy them.
They just made it so that...
they were the only game in town for a thing that those people needed but didn't want to write.
And so now all the clients, now Reader uses Google Reader, NetNewsWire uses Google Reader, and all these things use Google Reader because it's the only game in town.
And now they're hooked onto this train that Google was always kind of meh about anyway.
Well, it wasn't the sync engine that killed the desktop clients.
It was the web interface.
It was making RSS reading free.
So you think that took people away?
People stopped buying that Newswire because they could just go to the Google Reader website?
Absolutely.
Definitely.
Oh, I disagree.
I completely disagree.
Not all people, but hell, ask Brent.
I bet he'll tell you.
I guarantee you.
I was going to guess, who would we go to to get that information?
Google presumably knows how many people used Reader over the lifetime.
They could show us that growth curve.
Yeah, sure.
I guess Brent could show us the growth curve of sales of NetNewsWire.
He might not be allowed to with his deal with NewsGator, but I don't know.
I can tell you, just having lived through that, anecdotally, I saw that happen.
I saw many RSS clients just give up and die, and the few that were left were the ones that integrated Google Reader.
But iOS gave a resurgence to readers.
Yes, that's true.
And it wasn't like Google Reader's website went away.
And in fact, I believe it worked reasonably well on mobile from as early as anything worked reasonably well on mobile and iOS.
But that kind of gave a resurgence.
And suddenly, things like Reader are a creature of iOS.
Net Newswire was sitting there as the once and possibly not future king of desktop reader market.
And people were not clamoring to write reader applications.
But as soon as the iPhone launched, now everyone wants to write a newsreader application, which, of course, are all talking to Google Reader.
And to give me some idea of Google Reader's dominance right now, I pulled up my feed stats, and 90% of subscribers to my feed are subscribed via Google Reader Sync.
That's how big this is, 90% of my subscribers.
But you can't tell if those are using web interface, right?
No, because they don't distinguish.
But that gives you some idea.
If this service shuts down, not only is this leaving a gaping hole in the RSS sync business, but this could have a massive impact on the readership of websites.
I could also boost their ad impressions because now people actually have to go to the website.
Maybe.
But one of the reasons RSS is so great is because it allows you to very easily follow sites that don't update frequently enough for you to check every day.
So before RSS came out, if you had a blog that posted once a month, nobody would read it.
And you'd have to post every day so that people would go to your site every day and check for new stuff.
And a lot of people still work that way.
As someone who has a website that posts not once a month but very infrequently, I can tell you people still won't read it.
Generally, yes.
But the great power of RSS is enabling you to follow a whole bunch of sites that update infrequently.
and be and doing that in a manageable way so because it's so easy to read them then those sites that do update infrequently they have better audiences they have more reeks they're more influential even if they don't write every day and you can get some of that value now from twitter or facebook or all these other crappy services um please email casey but uh i there's still so much of that happening on rss
as you can tell by stats from me and Gruber or anybody else, a ton of that activity is on RSS.
So I think it could be really disruptive come July when this shuts down and
Sites like mine and Gruber's and other people who have heavy RSS readership, especially in the geeky spaces, sites like this, we could see major shifts in either direction.
I'm not really sure.
We could see major shifts in how people read our sites.
I mean, you'll be able to tell in the months leading up, I guess.
The nice thing about Google Reader is it puts in the little subscriber numbers and log lines and everything.
But, like, if those people disperse, I don't know if all the other things they disperse to will identify themselves in such a nice, convenient way.
So it may be difficult to, like – I mean, counting RSS subscribers is different than counting – all you're counting there is, like, someone decided this was worthy enough to put in their feed, and when I make something new on the site –
Yeah.
i'm not sure like i'm not sure how long they will do that for whether it's whether they'll just do it indefinitely so like many of these numbers aren't even reading your site anymore uh or whether they like have some kind of timeout period where they stop counting you after a while of not looking at reader i'm not really sure well it's like twitter followers i mean how many of those are human beings who have used twitter in the last year and how many people are just people who followed you when they joined twitter for three days two years ago and you know are not there anymore
Web stats and viewership things are always kind of voodoo, but Google Reader at least gave some sort of unification to the voodoo.
It summarizes it for you.
It's measured the same way because everybody's using it.
It's 90% of your subscribers anyway, so now that's going to become much fuzzier.
Even if every single one of those people who was actually reading your site continues to, to be able to detect them and track them and confirm to yourself that's the case is probably going to be difficult.
So you're begrudging the disappearance of Google, the all-seeing eye, because it doesn't let you see everything?
I'm not begrudging.
I'm just saying it's a strange scenario, a strange situation we found ourselves in.
I mean, this is what happens when a company – I mean, Microsoft has done it before, too.
The company with some profitable business can use that profit to subsidize other businesses that –
It's speculating and these may or may not be things that we want to get into.
And like I said, I think Google never had any illusions that RSS was going to do a hockey stick.
But it's like, well, it's worth keeping our eye on and we should buy everything up that has anything to do with it.
So then we can sunset it, to use Marco's favorite term, when we feel like it.
And so they're like, yeah, now is the time.
Like I said, I think they stayed in it longer than they had to.
It was easy because they already had all that web crawling infrastructure in place that they could use.
So it was easier for them to do it than it would be for anyone else to do it.
Yeah, I mean, not so much, like, because that's where, that's their muscle.
That's, you know, their company is built on.
We can put up services on the internet that scale to any number of people, including the entire internet, like our search does.
And our whole business is built around, like, we have a section of the company that just works on an infrastructure, constantly improving it, and sort of it helps every service that we do.
That's why whenever they buy a startup, they're like, okay...
I don't care what crazy crap you were doing before.
It's time to get on board the Google train because we know what the heck we're doing.
And even though our way seems crazy to you, let me tell you that you should rewrite your application from scratch on top of our infrastructure, which will delay your business for years.
And by the time you're done, maybe no monster product anymore.
But we're not going to let you keep running your crazy PHP Ruby thing here if we can help it because you really need to get with the program because our program is pretty damn good.
Whereas other random companies, you know, if you're starting from scratch or even if you're some other big company like Microsoft is trying to get some data center expertise and, and Apple and like, they just, none of those companies dedicate, maybe Amazon is the only other one that dedicates proportionally the same amount of resources about we need to get our crap together server side because it's an essential part of our business.
Yeah, I know we sell things, but like, you know, where does EC2 come from?
Well, cause we want to sell things better.
Uh, and Hey, that's a marketable service in S3 and all those things.
Uh,
Amazon, I think, is the only competitor who has the kind of expertise in scale.
And I think they're still much more sort of slapped together, evolved over a long period of time under tremendous pressure with a crazy man with a whip at their back versus sort of Google's philosophical PhDs algorithmic strategy for indexing the entire web.
Anyway, I don't know.
I mean, that that kind of blew away a lot of other stuff that was being talked about.
I mean, I guess we have a new pope and we now have one less podcast network.
But otherwise, I don't I don't know what what else is happening in the world of technology.
Marco, you don't want to talk about South by Southwest?
Come on.
You're a veteran.
You're a veteran.
I'm sure you have tons of useful and insightful things to say.
I'm so happy I didn't go this year or the year before this or I think the year before that.
That's a bold-faced lie because you're missing out on Salt Lick.
Man, South by Southwest.
I mean, the whole conference thing, oh, God, what a mess that is.
First of all, one thing that's worth talking about briefly, I think, is Google I.O.
tickets went on sale, I think, this morning.
And as usual, it sold out very, very quickly.
And I saw our friend Japone complaining about duplicate transaction logs, stuff like that.
It did not sell out gracefully, but it did sell out quickly.
And we see with that, we see with WWDC selling out, not that quickly, but at least still very quickly every year,
And there's an interesting question, like, what do you really do about that?
Like, what can you do about that problem?
Because, you know, WWDC tickets are going to come on sale any minute now.
We don't know.
You know, it could be any time between now and late May that they will probably make tickets available for WWDC of this year.
And we don't know.
And they're probably going to sell out within, you know, a half hour, 45 minutes.
Yeah.
Apple has tried different things, different prioritizations.
They'll have these tech talks around the country.
They'll have mini WBDCs around the country, and you can only get a ticket to those if you haven't gone to WBDC recently.
So there's this priority thing where if you get locked out of one, you can go to the other.
But...
They still have this problem of there's just way more demand than there is supply of tickets.
And they can't just do the typical economic thing of just raise the price really high because that would kind of make them look like dicks.
And they would get a lot of flack for that.
It probably wouldn't be worth it.
And Google is actually making the problem worse because Google I.O.
tickets, it's become a pattern that Google gives everyone free hardware at their devices that's usually worth about as much as the ticket price, which is like $900.
So...
A lot of the people buying those Google tickets are probably just wanting the free hardware and not really giving a crap about the conference.
That, I think, is a really bad thing for Google to be doing.
They should probably stop doing that.
What do you think Apple could do to reduce demand for WBDC or to make it sell out less quickly?
Or do you think they even need to solve this problem?
Yeah.
Here's one thing they could do that's like you talked about raising the prices being seen as a dick move.
Well, this is also kind of a dick move, but it's one with economic precedent and it's slightly less is they could just do what airlines do and overbook.
And the reason I think this will actually work out with them is that
except for the keynote, which maybe even including the keynote, you see how the herd thins out as hangovers start to come into effect, or even just late in the day when people are just going on fumes and they just can't go anymore.
I think you could probably over... I mean, maybe there's fire codes and stuff like that or whatever, but they're limiting them.
But I think you could overbook it, and with the exception of a few choke points,
continue to be okay because really with the exception of like I know this because I'm I'm there in every session like a crazy person you know most people are not that that really thins out during certain points and so I feel like they get that's one way to get around this is just some more tickets
sell as many tickets as... Even if you think it's going to be like, oh, it's crazy that I don't want to be... The classroom sizes are going to be too giant or whatever, I think it will still work out because those rooms are not at capacity in the middle of the week in some boring session.
It's just me and... I don't know.
I think you could probably get maybe 20% more tickets sold that way.
Not even more than that.
That's something.
I'm not saying this is going to be a doubling in size.
You just overbook a little bit.
Yeah, because the problem is that...
the the the popular or mainstream sessions really are filled up to capacity and a lot of times like and they do you'll have to wait online for you know 20 minutes or a half hour before the session starts and then you get in there and you can't even sit down like there's like only standing room there's like people backing up in the back like yeah there's only like it's only like 10 sessions like that and they duplicate them they're they're addressing that with like you know they do them twice they do them once on on one day and then once on two days later or whatever like
This is all in service of not doing the thing of South by Southwest.
All is just keep going to bigger and bigger venues because that way you will destroy the conference.
Right.
Or just go into an even bigger convention center in a different city and just get bigger and bigger.
Can you do something to improve things, keeping the same conference center and everything?
I think you can get a little bit more out by overbooking.
I wonder, you know, this year, maybe it's just because I'm paying attention, but I don't think so.
I think this is actually happening.
This year, it seems like Apple pessimism is at an all-time high of just the company's prospects, the effect of competition, the products.
Yeah, but not among the people who go to WWDC, it's not.
Right.
Or for that matter, people who are selling popular apps in the App Store.
I mean, EA is probably still pretty darn bullish about iOS in terms of where you can make money.
How much money did we put into this game and how much did we get out?
Keep making those iOS games.
You say that, but it's funny.
I would agree with you, Marco, that I've had regular people who are not total dweebs like us come to me and say, yeah, you know, I don't know if I'm going to get an iPhone again when I'm up for a new phone because I haven't done anything new in a while.
Oh, yeah, me too.
Yeah.
If you're a nerd, you can say, whoa, whoa, whoa, what do you mean they haven't done anything new?
But to a regular person, I mean, Springboard looks the same as it's always looked.
Most of these apps, a UI button is a UI button, a UI label is a UI label.
All these things look the same.
A table view is a table view.
Granted, you have collection views now.
Actually, I haven't seen them used that much, come to think of it.
But it doesn't look flashy anymore.
And maybe iOS 7 will bring flashy.
What could they do?
Oh, I agree.
I don't know.
I completely agree.
I'm not saying that... Because I think a UI overhaul wouldn't do it.
Those same people would be like, oh, it's still a rectangle with a screen on it.
Unless it starts hovering above their desk by two inches.
Well, there's different levels...
There's the people who write for The Verge who they're never going to be happy with whatever Apple does.
Or actually, the writers are good.
The commenters on The Verge are never going to be happy with whatever Apple does that's new because they're going to complain, oh, it's not like Android and it's not doing enough and blah, blah, blah.
That segment they can't satisfy.
But like Casey, I have regular people asking me all the time or talking to me all the time about...
Comments that make it sound like all this Apple skepticism in the media actually reflects what they are thinking.
There is no question that Apple is being significantly and severely affected by the attention in the media that it gets.
Negatively.
I mean, really...
I have regular people say – like even a week ago, I had somebody ask me, oh, I was thinking about getting an iPhone, but I heard the iPhone 5S is coming out next month.
So I'm going to wait.
Like I hear – and every – of course, every iPhone you hear that.
That happens all the time.
But like – but you hear like, oh, you know, they didn't really change that much.
I'm like, well –
have you seen the iPhone 5?
Believe me, it's a big difference.
But people aren't even giving it a shot because they're hearing in the media and on the news and on the websites and everything, they're hearing all this stuff about Apple being doomed and not innovating enough.
I hear regular people have asked me about Samsung for the first time ever in the last six months.
I've never heard anybody ask me about Samsung.
In the last six months, I'm now hearing it.
And I think Apple's doing great, but...
The mainstream culture, the mainstream rhetoric around Apple is now that they're suffering, and that's really damaging them.
No question.
So I think there's only probably two things they could do to get the regular people.
I mean, ignoring the echo chamber of people who don't even know what The Verge is, to get those people who still might come up to you and say, ah, they haven't changed that much.
What can you do to bring them around?
Because I think, like, outside of the tech nerd circles, like, there definitely is.
The media and their perception and everything in there.
But it's when someone who doesn't even remember that Apple makes the iPhone or just kind of vaguely knows what the iPhone does, when they get the news story on their local news or whatever that there are some problems, that's when they start to get those bad feelings.
What can you do to bring those people around?
You can't do it with new OS overhaul because no matter how crazy you change springboard, no matter how weird you make things look, those people...
are never going to know that's not how the phone always looked.
Like, they don't have nothing to compare it to that does not impress them.
That's nothing.
You can get them either by making a new product that gets people excited about Apple again.
Insert whatever product you want here.
Television, watch, hoverboard, you know, self-driving car, spaceship.
Anything like that, automatically those people are like, oh, Apple's back, it's some crazy new thing, blah, blah, blah, suddenly the iPhone seems viable again.
I wouldn't bank on that happening, and I don't think Apple's banking on that happening to get their phone sales.
The second thing I think would actually work, and they probably are going to end up doing, is just make it have a bigger screen.
And as dumb as that sounds, not dumb that it has a big screen, but dumb that before you weren't excited about it, but now you are, that is enough of a change that a regular person... It's bigger.
A regular person will notice that change.
And again, not that I'm saying a big screen is not a good idea, because I think it is a good idea, but I'm saying that is the type of change, far beyond a radical new UI or something like that, that you put on the phone, which is much harder to do.
Bigger screen...
I think, can revitalize interest in the iPhone.
Bigger screen and, I guess, lower cost, but a combination of the two.
Because, I mean, Apple is behind in the screen size wars.
And we talked about this last time with the resolution and all that stuff and what they're going to do in that area.
But those are all technical details.
So just bottom line is when someone, you know, when the Samsung S4 comes out tomorrow or whatever day it is, it's going to be the new Galaxy phone.
It's going to have a big, amazing screen on it that's going to be bigger and more amazing-er than the iPhone 5 screen.
You know what I mean?
And regular people can see that.
They look at the iPhone 5, they look at that other phone, and they say, well, that's more of what I want.
It looks better, it looks nicer.
I mean, Android phones, the big thing now is that native 1080p on Android phones are like 460 dpi or something.
These are fairly amazing screens, and they're still pretty darn thin.
And yes, they're much bigger and heavier, but...
that's what apple's up against here and i think to revitalize interest in its phone line in particular it's going to have to answer to that and i think that's pretty much all it will take to get people the ball back rolling on that and then their longer term problem is you know what's the next big thing and then they got to figure out what the hell they were going to do with
TVs or watches or hover cars or whatever.
I wonder a little bit if some of this problem is self-created in the sense that, John, you've been talking for a long time about how poor Apple is at
Well, at first…
I think it was successful in terms of getting people interested.
It's that phone that you can talk to.
Even if people bought it, talked to it on the first day, played with it, and then stopped using it because it didn't quite work.
It served its purpose at that point.
And I think people come out of it with a generally positive... Like, it's a positive experience.
I heard there's this phone that you can talk to.
I bought this phone that you can talk to.
Me and my friends had an hilarious two days talking to it.
Now I don't use it anymore, but I'm not sore about it.
Like, I think...
Basically, I think Siri was a net positive for the iOS platform and the iPhone in general.
Oh, sure.
It may be.
But it started positive.
It may or may not have ended positive.
Then you have Apple Maps, which nobody wanted.
It did not start positive.
Right.
And obviously, as nerds, we understand...
kind of the political motivations behind all this but for a regular human you didn't want it in the first place suddenly your phone which you previously loved one of the critical aspects of this phone now sucks and you didn't even ask for it and that's why you know ios 6 adoption from most reports i haven't looked at david smith's in a while but you know i was 6 adoption was terrible until the google maps app came out that's actually not true
There was a lot of negative perceptions, certainly, and a lot of people were holding back, but in the grand scheme of things, it was minimal.
I mean, it hurt them PR-wise way more than it hurt iOS 6 adoption rates.
I think this is another example of the positive of Siri, and then eventually it's like, man, you leave it around.
This was an initial negative, but I think the same phenomenon happened.
Initial negative instead of initial positive –
But eventually it's just like, meh.
And now I think people buying phones, it's the transition that hurts you.
It's the transition, you know, or helps you in the case.
The transition to Siri is like, wow, this is an amazing new thing.
This helps Apple get people into stores, gets people to buy it.
And then it just fizzles and it's like, meh, fine.
The transition from, you know, to a bad thing, suddenly there's this new bad thing and the maps are bad and they're going from the maps that were better to the bad ones or just I'm getting bad ones.
But that trickles off too.
And now anyone buying a phone now...
uh you know even though the apple maps are still not as good as google maps it's kind of like oh these are just the maps my phone came with and if i don't like them i can try that google one and you know what's the big deal right so i think maybe those two things cancel each other out but i think going forward neither one of them are a factor except for maybe reputation wise among nerds i i think like they've they've cleared
They've cleared the PR disaster of maps and are on to, like, now we've got to see what the next thing is.
Are we going to have something that's going to be a big negative or a big positive?
They need something for the next phone other than just, like, it's faster, slightly.
But, you know, I'm not really sure that anything they do with the next iPhone, although I do agree that they need to make the screen bigger for at least one of the models that they sell.
And a cheaper one can get people excited, too.
You know, I'm not entirely sold on the cheaper one idea.
Although, we should talk about two.
I don't know if you saw.
So I've been talking about the weird new CPU in the Apple TV that was just released.
That was just updated quietly.
And ChipWorks has this post here.
I'll paste it into our chat thing so that you guys can see it.
They have this post up that they've been taking apart the CPU in it.
And they found... So my original theory...
Which we actually talked about, I believe, on episode one of this show.
My original theory was that... Because originally we had thought that they were die-shrinking the A5X.
And there's really no good reason for the Apple TV to need an A5X yet.
Maybe if they have a future model that can do high-end games, maybe then okay.
But there was really no good reason for it to have an A5X.
We later found out, just a couple days ago, we found out that it is indeed not an A5X, but it's an A5 that is somehow a lot smaller than the normal A5 package.
So again, we speculated, okay, it's a die shrink.
So what are we going to do with the new A5?
Because the Apple TV doesn't have an...
making a whole separate processor for it.
So now, the most recent news that we have is that the processor on the new Apple TV is indeed still an A5, is substantially smaller than the regular A5, but the reason why is because it only has one CPU core instead of two.
It's still the same process, I believe it's the 32 nanometer process from Samsung,
So it's still the same manufacturing process, just now there's only one core on the chip.
Now before, with the Apple TV, I believe, didn't we say they were burning out one core, whether it failed the yield test or whether they were just artificially... Yeah, this makes perfect sense, because by the time they've been manufacturing dual cores for A5 such a long time, the number of ones that are bummed and have one bad core on them now has got to be...
pretty darn low.
I mean, like, that's the question of, like, were they just, you know, it's an efficient use of the ones where one core doesn't work, or are they literally taking them and, you know, burning the fuses out on one of the cores?
If it was the case that they were trying to get things that one core didn't work,
Presumably, the number of those has dwindled now because they've been making this chip forever.
So there's no more leftovers for it.
But given how few Apple TVs they sell, it would probably still be cheaper to just give them dual-core working chips than it would be to make a separate... I'm looking at this because the whole reason why the Apple TV CPU change was interesting...
is the theory that they make so few of these, it doesn't justify a custom CPU.
So therefore, whatever CPU they're using in this is probably going to be put into a future more popular product.
And so that's, I think, worth considering.
What could they make with a small, single-core A5?
And that, to me, screams low-end iPhone or low-end iPad mini.
Yeah, I suppose it's possible.
I mean, like, it's really tough to tell because it's not, it's not Herculean effort to, and they have been selling more Apple TV.
So making a single core A5 just for the Apple TV is not, Apple TV is not crazy, crazy.
I mean, they really have been increasing the number of these things that they sell.
And especially if they're, whatever their crazy grand TV plan keeps getting pushed off into the future for, you know, presumably content related reasons.
Uh,
that they're maybe just playing for the future of the Apple TV.
And unlike the other things that run apps and stuff, there's no real reason that year after year, the Apple TV has to get tremendously faster or they finally got up to 10 ADP.
So like, what more does it need to do?
Like it shows video in 10 ADP.
You can't run apps on it.
Uh,
It could be they're settling in for the long winter, waiting for whatever the heck, and they want to continue to have 60% year-over-year growth on the Apple TV or whatever they were at before.
They're selling a not insignificant number of these things.
Maybe now it deserves its own chip.
Not a big deal chip, just a single car A5.
Single-core A5 for a cheaper phone, I'm wondering how much cheaper does that make it?
Because the cost of that single-core A5 versus dual basically comes down to the area of the chip.
The big cost components in that thing is like, I have to imagine the screen, the battery, the CPU, the GPU, and the case are your big cost components there.
I'm not sure how much shaving a tiny little bit of cost on the CPU is going to get you over the line in terms of low cost.
I'm not sure.
Well, not alone, but if you can shave X percent off of a lot of the key components, then that matters.
That's what I was going to say.
In aggregate, it might be enough.
It's conceivable.
I mean, did we think that the single-core A5 is useful?
Oh, sure.
Other than a low-cost feature?
I mean, most of what iOS apps do is not multi-threaded.
So we can kind of look and see.
Core animation is multi-threaded.
Okay, but most of the things that are really CPU intensive that apps are doing, for the most part, I think we'd be fine with single core for a low-end product.
I think if you look at, you know, if they're trying to shave off...
dollars and cents here to try to get down to lower price points first of all i think the ipad mini is probably the more obvious choice here than an iphone just because the iphones are still subsidized in most markets so they have more room to play with there whereas the ipad mini it's you know they want to get that down cheap um and the a5 is probably even with this with this smaller version i would imagine the a5 is probably still too much power to be using something like a watch i i don't think that would work
But I think it would be fine as a low-end model for either the iPhone or the iPad.
Well, see, you think, like, the iPad mini, I have problems here, too, because, like, again, I have to think of, you know, if they wanted to push the iPad mini price down to give an even lower price one, where else are they going to get, where else are they going to pull value out of that?
Cheaper cameras, slightly cheaper CPU, they can't really give it less battery, they can't really make the screen worse.
Oh, on the contrary, if they only have one CPU core, they can give it a little bit less battery.
Yeah, but that's not...
Not that much.
Like, I have an easier time thinking that you could shave down a phone because it's subsidized.
That, you know, that you could work it out so that it ends up looking way cheaper to the customer where you just saved a little bit of cost and maybe your margin's lower.
I'm not sure how much you can squeeze the Mini with a single Chlor A5 in it.
And I'm also not sure that Apple ever wants to take any of its products and go backwards in terms of performance.
You know?
So can I propose two alternate theories, one of which I think is ridiculous and the other I think is marginally ridiculous?
You can probably propose one and a half before we interrupt you.
That's probably true.
So one of them is, what if the whole point of this, and one of you guys just inferred it a second ago, what if the whole point of this, this chip is physically smaller, is it not?
Yeah.
So what if the whole point was either to increase battery volume in the same size case, or alternatively, what if we are finally getting our iPhone Nano that we used to talk about constantly and then gave up on?
If you really want the space back, you've got to shrink 28 nanometers or get Intel to FABM at 22.
If you really want space back, that's the way to do it.
You don't ditch a core and stick to 32.
I'm more inclined to believe that cost is the reason because you take a 32 nanometer process that your manufacturers already have a lot of experience with, really good yields, not pushing the limits of technology.
Give me one that's a little bit cheaper.
Yeah.
uh, but if you wanted to space back, if you want to drive iPhone nano or something, you'd, I, you get that.
It's much easier to get that space, but going through a new process.
I mean, this 20 nanometers seems like it's on the, in the cards for 2013 for Apple products from, you know, Taiwan semiconductor or whoever they're going to do that.
And if the Intel things come through, maybe that's not going to happen this year, maybe next year.
But, uh,
if that isn't just a pipe dream.
But I think that's the way you get space back.
Well, you say that that's the easiest way to get space back, but it's also a more expensive way to get space back, is it not?
Well, I mean, but it's an expense you have to incur anyway.
It's not like you're going to stick at 32 nanometers forever.
The train is going along, and this is the year where Apple...
All the other phone manufacturers are already at 28 or lower.
The big Android guys already have phones that have 28-nanometer quad-core things with 1080p screens on them.
They're outclassing Apple's hardware in all respects, with the exception of power consumption, but they make up for it by having a bigger battery because they have bigger screens.
It's going to happen anyway.
Apple's going to have to make that transition.
If you're going to do that, you wait to put out your iPhone Nano until all your components shrink down.
And I believe also like shrinking, we always talk about the CPUs and I guess the GPUs as well, you know, the system on a chip, whatever.
But there's other components inside there, not many, but there are other ones.
And some of them, I think Anna and Tech had a good article about the process used for the cell radios, which are limited by the various analog things that go into them.
But those could stand to be, I mean, that's what, you know, the first LTE chipsets were not great and sucked up a lot of battery.
There are other places where you can get some savings by shrinks where just, you know,
Even if you had a 20 nanometer CPU, if all the rest of your chips are fabbed at like 45 or 65 or some crazy size, that can make you sad as well.
To bring all the internal components of your mobile thing along on a train of continual process shrinks, I think you can get to your iPhone nano device.
with that technique and that's that's maybe the only way you can get there because otherwise if you just take the internal like it's not like there's a lot of room left over in the iphone 5 as it is and just shrinking the screen is not going to if anything that's going to hurt you because then you have less room for a battery in there so i'm i'm not sure the iphone nano as a concept really makes much sense and if it does i think they'll get there by shrink and not by chopping out cores
I also think, too, demand might not really be there for that.
People want their smartphone screens to be big.
I think Apple will very well address the market of people who want to keep their smartphones small with the regular-sized iPhone.
I really don't think they're going to go big only in their product line, but I don't think they have to go smaller than the iPhone 5 size, really.
I think they might go big only.
I see the iPhone 6 having a larger screen than the 5, and them not offering a smaller one except by still selling the iPhone 5, basically.
Well, the only way they could do that, I think, would be if the screen was bigger, but not a ton bigger.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not expecting them to make a phablet, but...
Well, but the problem is if they don't really make a substantial jump, then it's not going to really serve them very well in the reasons why they should need a big screen in the first place.
It's not going to really stand up well in a store next to these giant Android phones.
It's not going to potentially replace the need for an iPad for some people, or at least they would think that they would buy that phone.
I think it would stand up better in the store, just a little bit bigger.
I mean, it's the question we talked about, I think it was last week.
It's like,
Do you just make it bigger at the same res, which is what we all assume?
And I believe that would be completely adequate to give them the boost they need of having something bigger.
Or do you bite the bullet and actually, you know, whether it's 1080p or pick a new canonical res?
Because, you know, Apple's not above picking a new canonical res.
They did it once with the iPad.
I guarantee you they'll do it again sometime in the history of iOS, you know, before the company goes out of business and the heat death of the universe.
There will be a new resolution besides...
you know, 1024 by 768 points and whatever the heck the iPhone is.
I mean, they did it with the iPhone 5 as well.
Like, that will happen.
It's just a question of when.
And a question of now, is it too soon?
You know, they just went tall phone.
Is it too soon?
Do they have to wait a generation to bump it out again?
But that's going to happen.
And I could see them doing that sooner rather than later if they start feeling the pinch.
Yeah, but if they only make one size iPhone, then imagine if they only made one size laptop.
What size would that be?
Probably the 13-inch.
Then you miss out on the great value of the 15 and the 11.
If you look at the phones, if they're going to keep having just one model,
for the foreseeable future, and if they make the next one bigger, say, then they're missing out on all the greatness in product design, all the sales, all the goodwill that would come from the people who would want the smaller phones, like the five that we have now, compared to other big phones at least, and people who would want even bigger phones like the weirdo phablets.
I think, ultimately, as this market matures, which I think it's pretty safe to say the smartphone market is fairly mature at this point, I think they have to go to multiple sizes.
It was on my 2013 to-do list, you know, what do you call it?
Diversify the iPhone line, and that means not just keep selling the old one as your different size.
So, yeah, like, I mean...
The reason I say that it's not inconceivable that they won't is because that's been Apple's MO for so long.
There is one iPhone and there's the older iPhones.
And the older iPhones fill our needs.
And what I've been saying they need to do is diversify the line by not doing that, by having, you know, there's actually not one iPhone.
There's actually two iPhones and possibly some older ones.
And what if the single core A5 is how they do that?
Yeah, I mean, you can combine them both and say, we're diversifying the line, we're getting a bigger screen, and the way we're diversifying is that the one with the smaller screen is the cheap one.
Exactly.
Which would disappoint the people who want a smaller phone that's full performance, but they should feel the same pain that iPod touch users have had to feel, where we just want all the good things.
But no, you can never get all the good things.
So that, yeah.
They have so many options for how they can diversify their line, whether they just want to do it on size, they also want to try to do it on cost.
I mean, hell, they could come out with three of them.
They go right from having one phone to having three phones.
It's conceivable that all these things are possible.
It's just I don't know which one of them.
It's hard to read what they think the issue is.
We all think they need a bigger screen.
Does Apple believe that?
I think at this point they probably do.
Some of us think they could benefit from a lower cost one, but I can imagine the bean counters at Apple going, you know what, actually, that's something that you as a customer might want, but actually it would be worse for Apple as a business, so we're not going to do that.
I have a hard time seeing into that calculus.
So to take this sort of kind of full circle, does that mean that in order to continue to, what was the Steve Jobs-ism, like to delight and amaze our customers or whatever it was, in order to keep people talking about the iPhone is what I really mean, do they not do a 5S this year?
Do they instead do either a 6 or do they do a 5S and a iPhone Plus or whatever you guys called it?
Is something unexpected enough to get people talking positively about the iPhone again?
That's a timing issue.
If they could, they definitely would.
I can say that right now.
If they had planned enough in advance and foreseen this, they would definitely do that.
I just don't think that the current situation they find themselves in, they planned on
two three years out and that's the kind of planning you have to you would have to have to say we're going to go from you know this four four s five five s cadence actually we're not going to do that with the five we're going to do four four s then we're going to do five then six start planning now because they had they would have to start playing that very long time ago i think they would really benefit from that but if they didn't start playing it two three years ago i don't think they they're capable i think like they just they got to ship what they have which is going to be a five s sure and you know keep going like
And we don't know.
The problem is we're having complete information, so we don't know all this wildcard stuff.
Whatever the heck else they're doing that's not a phone, that's not an iPad, presumably there's something or several things on various burners in various states of whatever, any of those things, if they come to a boil...
You know, make this much less of an issue.
Oh, we got the 5S, but we also got the Apple Hover car.
No one cares that it's a freaking 5S anymore.
You know what I mean?
Like, whatever crazy other things, whether it's watches or TV stuff or, you know, new services or they buy some other company.
Like, so many other things can...
not make this an issue, but if there's nothing new for this entire year and they just have the 5S and they make all their products better in the ways that we always expect them to make things better, I think that will not be a great year for Apple in terms of their perception in the industry.
Although I would argue that they have – Gruber talks a lot about the concept of momentum.
And I would argue right now that – Traction, yeah.
That Apple has so much negative momentum or traction in the press and in people's perceptions of how they're doing.
They have so much negativity around them right now.
and skepticism and doubt that I don't think anything they released this year is going to fix that.
I don't think it can be fixed.
They could release a flying unicorn watch toaster tomorrow, and it wouldn't change anybody's mind.
Everyone would just find some reason to complain about it.
If they released some new product that was actually good, it has to actually be good, that would turn it around.
They would come out of the year, and it would just be like a bump.
But the only product that they've released in recent memory that everyone thought was good from the start was the iPhone.
Not everyone's going to think it's good from the start, but I'm like net-net coming out of it.
It's kind of the same naysayers that everybody had.
I mean, the iPad had them.
The iPhone probably had the most positive reception, but even that had like, well, it's a nice product, but you're not going to be a phone maker.
I mean, you just don't know how to, you know, you're not going to just walk in.
Like, everything's got the negative, but it doesn't matter.
Like, the net out of that was exciting new thing, Apple's exciting, doing exciting new thing that's risky, and...
interesting and I want to know what's going on with it, right?
Whereas just keeping making better Macs and better iPads and iPhones year after year
Some of which, you know, are not as interesting as, like, the best phones from best Android phones.
That's boring.
And the worst thing you want to be is boring.
I mean, you know, even if they come up with a watch and everyone says it's a piece of crap, that's more exciting than not coming out with a watch, right?
And the net at the end of the year, I think, would be positive from that because we were like, everyone hates it, but who knows?
It's kind of crazy and it's got this one interesting thing that we didn't think of and, you know.
So uncertainty and excitement is more interesting than just boring iteration on the same things.
Although, yeah, I don't understand the finance industry.
Like, wouldn't they want boring iteration?
Wouldn't they want a gigantic machine that churns out money?
But I guess they want explosive growth.
So they were looking for the next hockey stick graph, and the graphs for the phones and the iPad are not hockey sticky enough for them.
Wow.
Is that a technical term?
Yeah, I mean, they are.
Every time we see Horace's graphs on Asimco, like, they're still hockey sticks.
Like, look at the friggin' iPad graph.
That should be like, wow, small smiles.
Look at that growth curve.
It's great.
And Apple's dominating the tablet industry and, you know, all these great things.
And the story is still Android tablets to surpass iPads next year.
Right.
Which may actually be true, but it's like, you know, they have two great products on hockey stick trajectories, the phone and the iPad, and that's not enough.
That's not enough.
Right.
Because those things used to look more attractive when they had, like, no competitors.
And going back to what Casey said earlier, this has been, as we discussed last episode, this has been, like, a draft blog post in my head for weeks, and I just haven't written it out.
But...
But I'll ruin it for you guys here.
I feel like Apple's next big product here, you know, all the press and maybe the public, they want it to be some gadget.
They say, oh, I want it to be a watch or I want a toaster or I want... I said hover car.
A hover car.
That's not a gadget.
Well... That's not a gadget.
Gadgety.
It's people who want hover cars are probably people who want smartwatches also.
So, you know, everyone wants it to be some kind of hardware gadget, a TV set, which I think would be probably the most boring product ever.
All these things, and there was also, speaking of Gruber, a good discussion of this on talk show with Guy English and Gruber last week.
But I think...
Apple's next big product shouldn't be any of those things.
It should be dramatically improving their services and their software in that order.
Yeah, good luck with that.
And I know it's probably not going to happen, and it wouldn't make anybody except users and nerds happy.
It's not flashy.
It's not very newsworthy most of the time.
It's not going to fix their perception.
But what their products need the most is significant, substantial progress in services and quality of software.
And I would much rather they take what they already have, what they've already started...
all these different things they have going on these platforms, just make them really great.
Make the services better and improve the quality of the software.
I would so much rather have that than a smartwatch.
But you're right.
The market does not demand that, even though the market's better off with that.
But the market demands a gadget.
Yeah.
they would see that it's like a shark that stopped moving.
They'd be like, oh, they're retrenching.
Well, they're saying that now.
In some respects, Apple has like... A little tiny bit... I mean, they don't think they recognize this from a technical perspective, but at least from a strategic perspective, that's what the Maps thing was about.
It's like...
The future is more of this network-connected service thing, not less.
We need to take control of this.
We need to take the reins.
And, you know, they screwed up with Maps.
But at least they recognized that it's not a tenable long-term strategy to rely on your most bitter rival for an essential service that your phone provides.
So, you know, we all understood why they had to do Maps.
At least there's some recognition that they realized that.
Speech recognition could be another similar issue with them not really owning that technology.
But...
If they woke up one day and fully realized how screwed they are on their inability to do network services and how important they're going to be in the future, they would have to sign themselves up for a multi-year sort of dark period of...
figuring that stuff out.
Kind of like the multi-year dark period coming out of the 90s where they had their whole crappy OS that they had to rev and they had to keep the company in business and then they start working on the next big thing and they did and they came out of it and went gangbusters.
They probably need another period like that to get their house in order on the server-side stuff because it's not like we're in a future where that server-side stuff is going to be less important.
You know, there's no going back.
And so they either need to get really good at it or get really chummy with someone whose interests are aligned with theirs who is good at it.
And that used to be Google, but it's not anymore.
So, you know, I mean, all these reasons are like, people keep saying that Apple's getting slammed for illogical reasons or like, oh, they're making all this money hand over fist, but Wall Street is crazy.
In some respects, the negativity that is reflected in the press about them is like,
accumulation of all the negative things that i'd been thinking about apple for like the past 10 years but that at the time i was thinking of them uh no one else agreed with them like apple's going gangbusters everybody loves it all their products are great and you'd be like but but server side this and they'd be like what are you talking about their stuff is awesome they have no right you know and now it's kind of all coming home to roost and maybe maybe that's just projection maybe they're they're being negative for another reason but i don't think the current negative view of apple is that crazy i mean
It's kind of crazy.
I don't know the details of the finances or whatever, but you see they're making tons of money.
They're not going out of business.
They're a successful company.
They're well-run.
They have products of people.
All the things that Gruber posts again and again.
But at the same time, I see where all their strategic weaknesses are, and I see that it's not like you can snap your fingers and make those strategic weaknesses go away.
Even making a new Apple TV or a watch does not make all those weaknesses go away.
It just staves off the inevitable for a little bit longer.
In fact, a new gadget or a new platform would probably make a lot of these problems worse.
Marginally worse.
Here's more things that require software and services that they're having trouble keeping up with.
I mean, like, they are presumably they're reaping the benefits to Google reaps.
It's like, okay, well, if we do have a new TV thing, presumably, you know, it's based on iOS, and we can leverage the App Store, and we can leverage iCloud.
Like, so they are getting a common core of stuff that they work on that makes all their products better.
It's not like, you know, they're going to go out and make something totally unrelated where they can't reuse any of their tech or platform.
Yeah.
It's a marginal increase, but the thing that makes us feel bad about it is a distraction.
Could you just get the crap that you have now to work right?
Stop with the watch stuff.
We have this crazy perception that probably isn't rooted in reality of them taking off their AAA players and putting them on whatever the big new project is.
Like, oh, pull off all the best, most awesome iPhone people and put them on the hover watch.
right and like no like you don't pull those guys off we need the good people like we felt like we felt like that when they you know seemingly pulled like the big good awesome important people off mac os 10 for a while to be all hands on deck with the you know ios and the app store which was the right business decision but like they have finite resources and we don't want them to be that was another thing on the talk show episode we don't want them to be spread too thin like they don't have an infinite number of awesome talented people uh
And with the financials and the share price and everything going down, it may be harder to acquire and retain those amazing people.
So maybe you don't have so many to spread around as you used to.
Yeah, I mean, that's a major problem for them.
The size of the company is, talent-wise, it's smaller than it needs to be.
They have very limited resources that they can allocate to these things.
And you're right, the business case for pulling a snow leopard.
With snow leopard...
They basically spent, what was it, 18 months development of it not adding a lot of user-facing features.
The whole message of Snow Leopard was we're going to rebuild a lot of the foundation of this and add things, really important foundational APIs like Grand Central Dispatch.
We're going to really make the foundation better and awesome and fix a lot of bugs rather than adding a whole bunch of new user-facing features.
And Mountain Lion was kind of like that compared to Lion.
But
I feel like they need to have a period like that for services and for all their stuff.
They need a company-wide period of two years of just improving the stuff we have.
But you're right that business-wise and market-wise, that will never be a smart idea to do.
Well, they could afford to do it on the Mac because all eyes were on iOS.
That's true.
So that's one reprieve.
I mean, there's no excuse for the services because, like, I guess all eyes are never going to be off iCloud because that's the nature of services is, like, an underpinning infrastructure.
But if they – not that they're going to introduce a third platform, but if they did –
Eyes would be off iOS briefly, and then those guys could do iOS 8, which would be their Snow Leopard or whatever, right?
But I don't think that's going to happen.
I mean, two platforms is plenty for them.
They're much more likely to...
I mean, maybe they get away with it, iterate on like, you know, the watch or TV or some other thing where it gets its own fork of the OS is still iOS based or whatever.
And then you have time to sort of, you know, pin down the phone OS.
But I don't I think services are much more dire than than the OS stuff, because I think they're on a pretty good track with the OS revisions.
I think they're already in refinement mode on iOS.
There's a couple of major things they need to add here and there.
But the services are really the big deal.
Because it's not something you do by snapping your fingers.
They can't have a Snow Leopard release of services that cures their problems.
It's a problem that can't be fixed in 12 to 18 months.
Exactly, and it requires a lot of substantial changes, substantial investments in infrastructure and talent that does that, and really big shifts and big investments that just take a long time.
Even if they were 100% prioritized on that right this second, that just takes a long time to build that up.
So if they want to do that fast, here's my advice to them.
Buy Facebook, shut it down, use the talent to do your server-side stuff.
Because do you think they have enough money to buy Facebook?
Probably.
I don't know.
It might be close.
You're looking for a big investment.
Remove Facebook from the earth, which is a general good for humanity, right?
Take all those people.
Most of them are probably going to leave and go off and do other things, but enough of them will stay.
They're not Google-caliber people, but they know how to run a service that a whole jillion people use that has better reliability than iCloud.
I would even think that if they would have bought Twitter, I mean, now I don't think Twitter would sell at a price that people want to pay.
I think they tried.
Right, but if they would have bought Twitter, they would have had a lot of that type of talent and a lot of that type of experience and infrastructure.
Yeah.
Not Facebook level, but certainly probably better than whatever Apple's doing now.
I mean, isn't a lot of iCloud still outsourced to Microsoft Azure or Azure, however you say that?
Azure.
And I was going to say exactly that.
I don't think Microsoft is terribly capable as a host, unlike Amazon, whom has become very capable as a host.
But I wonder, and I was going to ask you guys until you brought it up, I wonder if Apple and Microsoft could find a common enemy in Google and perhaps the two of them could fumble along together in order to improve their services to the point that they're actually, I don't know, functional.
I mean, that's kind of what they're doing, isn't it?
Yeah, but not like you'd have to wait for Microsoft to be much to have fallen much even lower than it has now for them to ever because Microsoft is in the same situation as Apple kind of where they both recognize that Google does that server side stuff better.
It's just that Microsoft has been in typical Microsoft fashion much more sort of head down.
OK, this is an area where we are not strong and we're going to improve and we're going to hire, you know, the guy who did Lotus Notes and we're going to.
revamp our entire server-side architecture and we're going to be serious about this.
Apple hasn't done all that, or at least not as publicly.
Who knows what they're doing internally, but it's clearly not a top-line item.
I don't see Microsoft as...
a big win for apple to cooperate in this regard and i also don't see microsoft ever stooping to that level and say we're just going to be your helper in the battle against microsoft no against google rather now microsoft still wants to be a big player even though we all kind of recognize that it's not going to be well everyone except microsoft