Maybe We’re Just Dinosaurs
Marco:
i'm gonna try not to be whiny might be punchy but i'm gonna try not to be whiny i've had pretty bad internet connectivity over the last two days um oh really i don't think it's because of fios's weird uh possible throttling of amazon web services which they have actually denied which is worth pointing out but that story is crazy it's based on like a one of those online chat logs for the support person they don't know anything they barely speak english that's
John:
This is the worst non-story.
Marco:
I have seen a lot of very slow downloads from S3 and a lot of Netflix problems.
Marco:
However, not only is that not new, but it probably is not Verizon doing that.
Marco:
It's probably Netflix being at massive scale where they're responsible for like a third of the traffic on the internet.
Marco:
And no wonder that I have some slowdowns here and there during peak hours and some bad quality streaming happening.
Marco:
It's not that big of a deal.
John:
Well, something is up.
John:
Like, ours did a story on this a while back, and I was really hoping they would get to the bottom of it, and I don't think they did.
John:
It was like, why the hell are YouTube videos so slow?
John:
Fiber optic connection, and you can't play.
John:
Like, it just literally won't play this YouTube video that would use one ten thousandth of your bandwidth if it would come.
John:
And it's lots of finger pointing of, like...
John:
Google saying the ISP and ISP saying they're not doing anything wrong.
John:
Why would you intentionally throttle YouTube?
John:
I don't think it's anything nefarious, but there's some sort of networking-related problem where all the parties involved just point the fingers at each other and nothing actually gets solved.
John:
The upshot is some YouTube videos will play in super duper HD perfectly fine.
John:
Don't even come close to using up your connection.
John:
Other YouTube videos will just literally never load.
John:
And it's one of those situations that's impossible to debug because you don't control the server.
John:
You don't control any of the internal routing at the ISP.
John:
All you know is your connection to the internet looks fine and most YouTube videos load fine, but this one doesn't.
Casey:
Yeah, I actually looked into that somewhat extensively about six months ago when it was really bad for me.
Casey:
And a lot of people on Fios were complaining about it.
Casey:
And for the life of me, I can't remember what the fix was, but it didn't last for very long.
Casey:
And it was something along the lines of...
Casey:
you needed to intentionally screw up your host file for the big CDNs or something like that.
Casey:
I'm probably getting these details wrong.
Marco:
Yeah, it was something like you had to block one of the YouTube major CDN IPs to route to nothing so that it would retry to something else that would be faster.
John:
Right, right.
John:
All you're doing is temporarily routing around wherever the problem is.
John:
And it's like, we want you to find where the problem is and fix it.
John:
not say okay well if i go through that server it's really slow so i'll go through a different one like yeah sure that's that's the case a lot of the time but like why is it slow when we try to go through that one what's going wrong there and that's that's what we want someone to fix and it's like i don't i don't know if any if that's anyone's job presumably it's someone in the isp's job but i don't know
Casey:
Yeah, and the funny thing to me is the fix – and I'm doing mega air quotes here – the fix for the YouTube slowness was to try to route around the content delivery network whose sole job is to get you that data as quickly as possible.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
But yeah, so you also – YouTube also don't buy into this Verizon is immediately throttling everything under the sun story because I do not.
John:
They could be throttling everything under the sun, but that story is based on nothing that supports that.
John:
If you're going to put a story that they throttle, find some evidence that they're throttling.
John:
Do experimental evidence that they're throttling.
John:
Don't base it on a conversation with a customer support rep in one of the chat windows because that is not a reliable source of anything.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
What else is going on?
Casey:
Some follow-up, actually.
Casey:
That's what's going on.
John:
All right, so the first item is from someone named Stephen, and he was talking about using the iPad to do more stuff, and Stephen says he's older than us.
John:
I'll read a little bit from his email here.
John:
He says, I work in an office that uses DOS, Lotus 1-2-3, and DOS WordPerfect.
John:
When we switched to Windows 3.1, we found that we could get our jobs done faster and easier in Windows.
John:
But in using iOS, the opposite is true.
John:
As you mentioned, it's harder to complete office work in iOS.
John:
So the analogy of switching to iOS to complete work,
John:
is the same as when we switch from command line DOS to GUI is just playing wrong.
John:
I kind of get it what he's trying to say here.
John:
I guess, well, hey, I'll just read the rest of it because it's short.
John:
Once we switch to Microsoft Excel and Word, we found we could do more things than we could in DOS.
John:
We could copy and paste between Word and Excel.
John:
Working with files was easier.
John:
We just cut and pasted or just dragged and dropped.
John:
Uh, so he's trying to say that like, it's not the same transition because try transitioning to an iPad would make their work harder.
John:
Whereas transitioning from DOS to windows made their work easier.
John:
Uh, I think there's a couple of things at play here.
John:
One is switching from a personal computer to an iPad.
John:
makes a lot of things easier for a lot of people, maybe not necessarily for this person.
John:
An example I would give is people who can't do something on a personal computer find that they are able to complete that same task on an iPad.
John:
Whatever that task may be, I'm sure you can think of examples of people who you know who, if left to their own devices, could not do something...
John:
on a personal computer, but if you give them the iPad, they can, even if it's simple as like browsing the web, emailing something to someone.
John:
The great example is finding an application that does something that they're interested in, installing it and using it.
John:
That I think is a really good one because lots and lots and lots of people could not do that with a personal computer.
John:
Uh, and maybe they didn't notice like, you know, boy, I wish there was an application that let me keep track of the score in my bridge game left to their own devices, finding that application, downloading, installing it successfully and not screwing up their computer and not getting a virus and not downloading the wrong thing is difficult.
John:
Whereas if you give someone an iPad and they're interested in keeping score in their bridge game, uh,
John:
They could probably pull that off.
John:
And at the same time, there are lots of things, going back to the DOS to Windows thing, there are lots of things that you could do in DOS that you couldn't do in Windows or couldn't do as easily.
John:
An example of anyone who is using DOS extensively would be like, what if we want to do delete, you know...
John:
foo star dot star or all files that begin with letter a or something like all sorts of things you can do from the command line you're like well in the gui i could sort of do that myself and sort things in list view and select them manually and drag them to the trash but it's like before i could just type out a wild card and it was so much easier why can't i do that in windows windows sucks
John:
So saying that any individual person can or can't do something with a particular computer is a very contextual type of message.
John:
And I think it all comes back to what I was saying before, the notion that iOS is better for people, which is a sweeping generalization.
John:
And I'm trying to sort of take the average of...
John:
Of all the people in the entire world, what can they do with a personal computer?
John:
And of all those same people in the entire world, what can they get done with an iPad?
John:
And that's combined with, as you noted, like the premise of the whole thing was that the iPad would have to expand its capabilities if it can ever hope to take people from, you know,
John:
office workers or anyone really get them off of their pc and get them onto the ipad because there are many things that are better for everyone about an ipad but it's not a viable option for you if you can't do whatever it is that you want to do so that's why i was saying that i thought the ipad would have to
John:
expand its capabilities and expand the range of models available if it ever wants to do that.
John:
And I think it would want to do that because the things that the iPad is better at for all people are also kind of better for regular people in the same way the things that Windows is better at for all people.
John:
it was also better at for, you know, the more demanding users.
John:
Even if they couldn't wildcard something to delete it or do stuff from the command line or write batch files and stuff like that.
John:
Yeah, they lost capabilities, but it was enough of a tradeoff.
John:
I've thought more about this since the last show.
John:
I don't really know if I'm as convinced as I was before.
John:
There's another piece of follow-up related to this.
John:
But...
Casey:
uh i don't know have you guys thought about it since then the whole switching the ipad or did you just blessedly forget it after the show was over not once yeah i haven't really thought about it but i was not convinced when we talked about it then and i'm still not convinced now are you not convinced that it's better for that the ios is better for people like in the in the giant general average of all people kind of way so no no that i am absolutely convinced by that and uh like sean blanc wrote a really great story about his grandfather now he uses his ipad as a camera and how maybe the
Casey:
you know, that's largely because of screen size.
Casey:
If memory serves, it's largely because of the ease of use, but it's enabled his grandfather to do some things he would have otherwise been unable to do.
Casey:
And that's a really great and touching example of the story that everyone is telling or has told, which is, just like you said, it enables people to do things that they perhaps wouldn't be able to do.
Casey:
What I'm unconvinced about is this whole iPad Pro thing.
Casey:
I'm sure it will happen in some capacity in some way, but
Casey:
To me, I don't see anything compelling.
Casey:
I see no compelling reason for it to exist.
Marco:
These tools exist.
Marco:
Phones, tablets, computers.
Marco:
There is some overlap between all of them, of course.
Marco:
And it's like you can use just one of those to do all of your computing tasks.
Marco:
You can if you want to.
Marco:
And I don't think if the argument is, oh, I can do everything on an iPad, you could probably do everything on an iPhone also.
Marco:
I don't think there's a whole lot of people for whom the tasks they do on iOS must be done on an iPad and can't also be done on an iPhone.
Marco:
Certain screen size-dependent things notwithstanding, but I think most people don't have a lot of those things.
Marco:
But ultimately, these are different kinds of tools, and I don't think we need to choose.
Marco:
You have to choose at the point where...
Marco:
You have to buy these devices, and you have to buy what you can afford.
Marco:
But chances are, of these three devices, for most people, a tablet is probably the third one to buy, not the first or second, unless you have very, very light needs.
Marco:
In which case, it might be the first, and that's fine.
Marco:
I think a lot of people...
Marco:
are trying to cram too much into any one of these things.
Marco:
And I'm not saying the computer is the best one.
Marco:
There's things that you shouldn't cram into a computer either that work better on a tablet or a phone.
Marco:
I think it's about using the right tool for the job.
Marco:
And when we have new tools available, we kind of obsess over them briefly and try to push the boundaries and see what we can do with them.
Marco:
But then it just becomes a part of a regular toolkit.
Marco:
And we realize that no tool is good for everything.
Marco:
and that we're better off using what's best.
Marco:
And I think tablets are not replacing PCs.
Marco:
We keep seeing over and over again, tablets are selling very well, but I don't think they're replacing PCs for anybody except people for whom PCs were never the right tool in the first place.
Marco:
So that we can debate on whether PCs were the right tool for so many people who are buying them.
Marco:
And how big that number is depends on... I think your argument depends on how big that number is.
John:
I think both of you are still not getting what's in my head, and neither is everyone in the audience.
John:
And it's my failure to convey this, I guess.
John:
But you keep coming back to these things, these choices that don't exist, and these dichotomies that I'm not getting at.
John:
Maybe what I'm getting at is too simple and obvious, but...
John:
It's like saying in the days before the PC existed that you would look at what do most people do all day when they sit in front of their desk.
John:
Maybe they sit in front of like desk with like stacks of paper, right?
John:
I'm trying.
John:
I don't know what it is, but like whatever it is that most people.
Marco:
I think it looked like Microsoft Bob.
Marco:
There was like a desk with an organizer on one side and like one of those flippy card things.
Marco:
You made a Rolodex.
Marco:
And a giant rotary phone maybe.
Marco:
And how about maybe a record player.
Marco:
Was that how things were?
John:
yeah like well let me actually let me think of a comment in a different way i was trying so hard to get you guys to see what what is so obvious to me but it's impossible to convey without people extrapolating it out into a ridiculous scenario like sort of you know following it through to its logical ridiculous conclusion and then saying that that's not going to happen i mean like if if you want to go at it in the sales number way uh pc sales are not growing anymore um
John:
Why not?
John:
Do we not need to do the things that personal computers did anymore?
John:
No.
John:
Presumably people are buying things other than PCs, right?
John:
And it used to be that the PC was the computing device that everybody had.
John:
And we could say arguably now the phone is the computing device that everybody had, right?
John:
But...
John:
There are things you can't do on a phone.
John:
No one would want to do video editing on a phone.
John:
Nobody would want to do creative work like with Photoshop on a phone.
John:
No one wants to do development on a phone.
John:
Nobody wants to do lots of word processing on a phone.
John:
There are just tons of things that you do not ever want to do on the phone because it's too darn small.
John:
That's the reason.
John:
It's not like any of the reasons.
John:
It's just you need more space, right?
John:
People don't sit at work all day in front of their phone and do all their work on their phone, right?
John:
And yet PC sales are still not growing like they used to and may actually be going down at this point.
John:
And I'm saying...
John:
if people are sort of voting with their feet that they prefer to use these things that run iOS or things like them more than they prefer to use PCs, but they can't stop using PCs because there are certain things that the PC can do that these other devices can't.
John:
And I'm saying if, like, you can't hold back this tide.
John:
If people prefer to work with the simplicity and the, you know, without the legacy hassles, whatever they are, overlapping windows, file system, you know, all the things that we got rid of in iOS...
John:
People seem to prefer that.
John:
And if they're going to move some of their tasks down to this other device, the device has to expand to meet them in some way.
John:
They're not going to willingly wedge themselves into a tablet.
John:
So I'm trying to look forward to the future to think if iOS really is better for people,
John:
surely and pc sales are going down or staying the same or not growing like they used to surely at some point all those people with pcs like if you fast forward 20 30 years are most people sitting in front of a pc with overlapping windows access to the file system and a mouse and everything or do some of those people found a way to do their work with an ios or type device or a tablet type device and that's all i'm getting at like i'm
John:
In the moment, you can always say, well, the tablet's not appropriate for that, the PC, but you could replace PC with like mini computer.
John:
Well, personal computers are good for some people, but they're really too simple and real people need mini computers or workstations or whatever you want to put.
John:
It's just like if people prefer to work in that type of environment.
John:
It seems like those things have to come together.
John:
Otherwise, what's the thing?
John:
The PC sales slowly decline until no one buys a PC, and yet none of those people also have replaced their PCs with an electronic device?
John:
Or do they do everything on their phone?
John:
I'm saying I think the tablet can expand to meet some of those needs in the future.
John:
And my doubts are basically like, will any one company pull that off?
John:
Because if no one does a good job, if no one rises to meet those needs, they'll just be using increasingly better and simpler PCs.
John:
Right.
John:
And that's that's conceivable as well.
John:
But I think it's like I said, I think it's easier for iOS to get it slightly more capable than it is for OS 10 or Windows or anything else to get simpler.
John:
I don't know.
John:
The only way we can tell is just to fast forward in the universe.
John:
But I would say dwell on – look at the – whenever Horace posts, like, charts of personal computer sales, look at those.
John:
And think about how, like, for our life, the entire default of a working person, you know, a knowledge worker or whatever, was to sit there in front of a PC and say, well, if PC sales are going down, are those all home users?
John:
And, like, working people are going to forever buy some amount of PCs or –
John:
Does that trendline indicate that there's some sort of transition taking place, even without any iPad Pro type of thing?
Casey:
So let me kind of sort of repeat what you said to see if I understand.
Casey:
And what you're saying is, since everyone seems to prefer these touch-based devices, be it a phone or perhaps even a tablet, and that's where all the usage is going, then it stands to reason that whatever the shortcomings are, they will be solved over time.
Casey:
And that will usher in all these magnificent new features.
Casey:
So it's not that Apple necessarily will deliberately set out and create an iPad Pro that does this.
Casey:
This is the iPad Pro because we say so.
Casey:
It's that in an evolutionary way, the iPad will become more of a more capable device by whatever means.
Casey:
We're not really sure what that is.
Casey:
simply because that's what everyone prefers to use.
John:
Well, it's push and pull because you can't say Apple's going to make it, therefore people are going to want it, and people are going to want it, therefore Apple's going to make it.
John:
It comes from both directions.
Casey:
So it's sort of like – and this is a crummy analogy.
Casey:
But when planes were brand new, they could only fly for a few minutes and not really take any passengers and things were crummy.
Casey:
But everyone knew it had potential and then trains were still really exciting and popular.
Casey:
Well, this is a very American analogy because our trains are terrible.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Over time, planes became the clearly far and away winner because that's the way everyone wanted it to go.
Casey:
And so it kind of compelled the industry to satiate that need.
John:
I think we should move to the next follow-up item because I think it's related and it will maybe clarify this.
John:
The next follow-up item I just put in, it's based on general feedback.
John:
And we're talking about having a keyboard in front of some kind of tablet thing to solve the text input problem.
John:
And there are two aspects of this that I think are worth dwelling on that people send feedback about.
John:
one is one person on twitter said that having you know i kept saying like an architect's drafting table with like some kind of big tablet type surface on it that that is ergonomically worse than having a mouse and keyboard in front of you horizontally and a screen vertically because you're sitting upright
John:
when you're using the typical mouse, keyboard, PC type thing, and you're kind of hunched over an architect's drafting table when you're doing that.
John:
I'm not entirely sure about that, but it's worth considering.
John:
Would that be a regression, ergonomically speaking, to work on something drafting table style?
John:
Imagine you have a stylus or something like that.
John:
Would that be an ergonomic regression to do a task on a slanted up, presumably very large tablet with a stylus or your hands versus looking at a vertical screen and typing on a horizontal keyboard and mouse?
Marco:
It might be worse for your lower back and neck and shoulders.
John:
Yeah, I'm not entirely sure because, I mean, the history of people sitting in front of something and doing something is pretty long.
John:
And the history of people sitting in front of computers is short.
John:
So it's tough to make any...
John:
You know, calls not like how many centuries were monks hunched over the little slanty tables, writing things with ink and stuff on it.
John:
Like it doesn't mean it was good.
John:
I know.
John:
But like that's been going on for a long time.
John:
Right.
John:
It doesn't mean that it's good.
John:
And so personal computers have been going on for a short period of time.
John:
And in the short period of time we had personal computers, we've also had the, you know, we've been more ergonomics conscious.
John:
And people do have a lot of problems sitting in front of computers in the current good ergonomic situation.
John:
Is that just because we're sitting there way too long because we don't get up?
John:
Is it just because now we have the ability to diagnose these ergonomic problems?
John:
And if there were doctors around in medieval times, they'd be diagnosing all these monks with problems as well.
John:
It's difficult to say.
John:
And what I'm thinking of are like, I think there are probably people who preferred work in the sort of architects drafting table type situation, even today.
John:
And I'm thinking of maybe creative people like animators or something, or people who are drawing on a stylus.
John:
If you're drawing on a surface, for example, you don't want to draw on a vertical surface.
John:
So if the whole idea is that you're going to touch the screen, whether with a stylus or with something else,
John:
Like if people prefer that as the input method, like if they would rather do that than use a mouse to get their work done or they feel like it's easier or better or faster to get their work done that way.
John:
You can't have it vertical because no one wants to draw in a vertical surface, right?
John:
They're always going to draw in a slant.
John:
So is that are they compromising their body's ergonomics to get a more efficient position for drawing or manipulating things?
John:
I'm not sure.
John:
But it's worth considering whether that's an ergonomic regression and whether even if people like using their fingers or a stylus better than using a mouse, doing so necessarily makes it so that you're going to screw yourself up more.
Casey:
See, I would wager that that might be an improvement, the drafting table or the monks table.
Casey:
Having never worked at one, I have to imagine that the reason that monks didn't use a flat desk like we all use today is because they found that it was ergonomically better not to hunch.
Casey:
And so if you could get an iPad hypothetically mounted on an incline in such a way that it doesn't go sliding down that incline every time you release it, I would actually expect that to be an improvement.
Casey:
I think that would be better.
John:
Because the whole thing is you're touching it.
John:
Obviously, vertical screen, that's a non-starter for touching because we can't hold our arms out in front of us.
John:
And drawing on a vertical surface is much more difficult than drawing on something that's more on your lap or whatever.
John:
So I don't know.
John:
And the second one that neither of us thought of because it sounds crazy to us, but because it sounds crazy, I figure it's worth bringing up, is getting back to the physical keyboard thing with text input and everything.
John:
The possibility that we didn't think of was...
John:
What if having a physical keyboard is not better enough for people to care?
John:
That's kind of what happened on the phone space.
John:
And you can say, well, the phone space is different because they have space restrictions and it let the screen get bigger, had all these offsets or whatever.
John:
But if you had asked any tech nerd before the iPhone existed, what do you think about the idea of getting rid of all the hardware keyboards or replacing them with a software keyboard?
John:
They'd be like, well, that might work, but you know.
John:
For serious text input, you're always going to need a hardware keyboard.
John:
And we're saying exactly the same thing about the personal computer.
John:
Well, you know, you can type on an iPad screen, but it's terrible.
John:
Like, if anyone's doing serious text input all day, of course they need a hardware keyboard.
John:
I mean, I'm not going to write my Objective-C code for my iOS application on a piece of glass keyboard.
John:
I need a real keyboard, right?
John:
It could be that...
John:
Even though we will think that to the day we die, like just like some BlackBerry users will think that to the day they die, that it won't matter for the rest of the world and we'll get outvoted.
John:
Is that a horrifying scenario?
John:
People using big iPad looking things, none of them with a physical keyboard in sight, just typing in the glass?
John:
It's terrible for me to think of.
John:
I would never want to do that.
John:
But I think it's worth considering that what we want may not be what everyone else wants.
Marco:
And how many computing tasks these days don't even involve that much text input?
Marco:
You know, if you're, like, browsing news, browsing Facebook, occasionally typing short comments and various things, occasionally typing short emails, like, that's not really keyboard intensive.
Marco:
And that's one of the reasons why so many people can spend so much time on phones and tablets without running into that problem very often.
John:
I'm thinking even for people who type all day.
John:
Like, we say, well, that's fine, but a developer's never going to use it.
John:
A developer types all day.
John:
Like...
John:
Maybe we're just dinosaurs, and it's possible... Once we move away from the on-screen keyboard being a little picture of a physical keyboard, I can imagine an interesting, futuristic kind of soft keyboard that incorporates gestures or some other crazy stuff that would actually make some future developer who isn't born yet more efficient at writing code than we are with our little things where we press keys that are sort of the modern-day equivalent of the big things that used to be attached to a lever that would make a little...
John:
metal thing whack against an ink ribbon make a mark on a piece of paper like i'm not willing to entirely rule out the possibility that that physical keyboard could go away on the personal computer the same way it went away on the phone even though none of us will ever accept that as a good idea
Casey:
You know, this makes me think of a couple things.
Casey:
Firstly, you're almost describing – when you said, oh, well, some new kind of keyboard with gestures and whatnot, you're making me think of graffiti or whatever.
Casey:
Didn't Newton have an equivalent of Palm's graffiti?
John:
No.
John:
No, it just did real handwriting recognition.
John:
Which is why it didn't work.
John:
Really, really badly.
Marco:
I love graffiti.
Casey:
I love graffiti as well.
Casey:
So you're making me think of graffiti, which I think for a power user could work, but for –
Casey:
For an average person, I don't know if that would work out.
Casey:
But you also made me think... I don't know if you guys had ever paid attention to someone with a Japanese keyboard.
Casey:
And I'm thinking of our friend Will Haynes, who is an Australian-born guy who lives in Japan.
Casey:
And I've hung out with him at WWDC many times.
Casey:
And watching him type on that keyboard...
Casey:
is really weird but really cool and and i he explained it to me once i don't know how it works and all the japanese users are probably getting upset at me now but basically he somehow put together i i guess the the the core of the word by way of like drawing it because it's you know all symbols and it it would help him auto complete the basic word he wanted and again if you know anyone that uses this keyboard seek out their their two cents because
Casey:
They can explain it much better than I, but what I'm driving at is maybe you could do something like that, but with a traditional keyboard and sort of graffiti-esque, but maybe something different.
Casey:
And then the final thought I had was, you know, what if what makes us leave a physical keyboard behind is getting a keyboard on a screen feeling more like a keyboard on a desk?
Casey:
And so that makes me think of what if we could do something crazy with haptics?
Casey:
So, you know, you could get some semblance of touch on a flat piece of glass.
Casey:
And I feel like some video was floating around recently that showed a demo of this.
John:
Yeah, the little things, little blisters pop up on the screen.
Casey:
Right, right, right, right.
Casey:
So maybe that would be enough to get us over the hump of using a glass keyboard.
John:
I just imagine my great-great-grandchildren entertaining the thought of lumps rising on the screen to simulate keys, which are simulating the keys on a typewriter and just being disgusted by it and saying, that's so stupid.
John:
Like, what I was thinking of in terms of interfaces for touch keyboards, well, one is like the modern-day swipe things, you know, swipe on Android or wherever it came from, you know, where you slide your finger.
John:
Obviously, that motion of sliding your finger around, that would never work.
John:
on a typewriter or on a physical keyboard because like the keys, you know, it would be, it would be awkward on a keyboard and it would be not work at all on a typewriter.
John:
Right.
John:
Uh, but people do it all the time.
John:
But I'm thinking like with programming, if you had tiny gestures for matching parens and curlies and indenting regions and selecting regions and, uh,
John:
The things you do in programming, that's kind of like, well, I type all day.
John:
I write code.
John:
I can't use a keyboard that's on a screen.
John:
I need a physical keyboard.
John:
In fact, I need a fancy physical keyboard with special key switches that are, yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
I'm trying to think that it is conceivable to me that someone who's not me could be more efficient with a very clever on-screen keyboard.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Um, and, and I think the whole reason this would come to pass is that, you know, if, if tablets do become more capable and people continue to prefer to use them for more and more tasks, and that's, and then again, that sort of goes in tandem where it's like people prefer it.
John:
And so maybe it will expand its capability.
John:
Once it expands the capability, people will try it for something.
John:
use it for that purpose and like it and like using their PCs less and less and buy fewer PCs and replace their PCs less often, but continue to buy more and more tablets that, you know, that that's how the transition would take place.
John:
Um, so, um,
John:
I don't know.
John:
In my personal life, I can think of only a few things that I prefer to do on my iPad.
John:
It's not like I'm living the example of this.
John:
I'm not one of those people who tries to live on my iPad.
John:
I'm never going to give up my personal computers for my life.
John:
I like them.
John:
There are things I'll always want to do there.
John:
But when I just want to read a bunch of long articles, I'd rather do that on my iPad.
John:
And when I want to watch video, I'd rather do that on my iPad.
John:
And so there's two things right off the bat.
John:
And I know a lot of other people who have a much, much longer list of things I'd rather do in their iPad than on their personal computer.
John:
And I'm just extrapolating that trend more or less.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
So, Marco, what's really exciting these days?
Marco:
It is our friends once again at lynda.com, L-Y-N-D-A.com.
Marco:
lynda.com helps anyone learn creative software and business skills to achieve your personal and professional goals.
Marco:
They have over 2,000 high-quality engaging video courses taught by industry experts, and they're adding new courses every single day.
Marco:
This is a very wide breadth of courses from beginner to advanced levels.
Marco:
These videos have animations and diagrams.
Marco:
It's very easy to find exactly what you need in their massive catalog.
Marco:
And all this, you get access to their entire catalog for just $25 a month, flat, unlimited.
Marco:
It's really fantastic.
Marco:
You get the entire course library, $25 a month for unlimited access.
Marco:
Over 2 million people worldwide are using Lynda.com to help themselves reach their professional goals.
Marco:
It's really great.
Marco:
When they gave us a sponsorship...
Marco:
I went and watched a few on Logic, the audio editing software that I use for the show.
Marco:
And I learned a lot.
Marco:
And I tell you what, these videos are actually really good.
Marco:
I was really pleasantly pleased.
Marco:
Pleasantly pleased?
Marco:
Anyway, I was really pleasantly pleased.
Marco:
Because I wasn't surprised.
Marco:
I expected them to be good.
Marco:
But anyway, I was pleased with the results of these videos.
Marco:
They really do.
Marco:
They say they put in animations and diagrams.
Marco:
They really did.
Marco:
And it's very high production value.
Marco:
And I really did learn a lot.
Marco:
And I'm going to keep watching more.
Marco:
So I'm very happy with what I learned on Lynda.com.
Marco:
So anyway...
Marco:
Back to the script here.
Marco:
They have easy-to-follow videos, curated course content, expert teachers.
Marco:
This is interesting.
Marco:
The instructors here are not just like some random person who wrote a tutorial on YouTube and then is giving it back to you.
Marco:
The teachers are experts in their fields who are professionals working in the field.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
You can watch from any device, computer, tablet, mobile.
Marco:
It even didn't require me to use Flash on my desktop, which I always respect.
Marco:
It worked in my Flashless Safari, which is great.
Marco:
So anyway, some examples of what they offer.
Marco:
They have, as I mentioned, I watched something for Logic, the audio editing software.
Marco:
They also have other creative pro software like Photoshop, Illustrator, stuff like that, Final Cut video stuff.
Marco:
They also have development software.
Marco:
Objective-C, iOS, iOS 7, new stuff, user interface design, Unix principles for Mac programmers, stuff like that.
Marco:
Plus web stuff, Perl, ASP.net, so you can be just like John and Casey, respectively.
Marco:
And PHP with MySQL, so you can be miserable like me.
Marco:
And JavaScript, if you want to be much cooler than any of us, so you can learn all sorts of cool stuff from Lynda.com.
Marco:
Go to Lynda.com, Lynda.com, for a free seven-day trial and
Marco:
If you just go to slash ATP at that URL, so lynda.com slash ATP, you will get a free seven-day trial.
Marco:
You can check out all their videos during those seven days.
Marco:
Well, you can't really.
Marco:
You can check out some of their videos during those seven days, and you can see how good they are.
Marco:
So thanks a lot to lynda.com for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
I watched pieces of a video earlier tonight on Photography 101 because I don't know anything about taking pictures.
Casey:
I know that I have an iPhone that takes pretty good pictures as long as I point at a decent subject.
Casey:
The video was really well done, but the way Linda set up, it works even better than you'd expect.
Casey:
There was a transcript that was scrolling of the exact words that the instructor was saying.
Casey:
What was really cool was I wanted to go back and hear what he said again.
Casey:
looked at the transcript and was like and i thought to myself well i wonder if i can i can and i just clicked the sentence that i wanted him to go back to and this is all without flash the video scrubbed back to exactly where i wanted to be and it showed exactly what i wanted all over again and i could go on and on for a long time but suffice to say this may not sound like it's very good in a very good way to learn but i learned a lot in the i don't know hour i spent watching this video it was really impressive
John:
i checked out the site too and the one thing that struck me i've heard a lot of lynda.com ads and i assume yeah they both have a bunch of video tutorials up there if you haven't gone to the site you have no idea how many videos they have they do not have like 10 10 videos like i said i'm gonna learn about photoshop you know how many photoshop videos this site has unbelievable amount of like it's not like one or two videos on each topic area it's like tens dozens hundreds like on every tiny possible detail and the other
John:
have the 101s and that's a good place to start but if you want to know like i was looking at the audio things because that's what marco was looking at too and it's like the best way to mic instruments for live it was like totally super esoteric all the way up to photography 101 so if you think there's probably there's not any video for you because you're too much of a beginner or too much of an expert i bet you'll find something all right so what else do we have going on there's a new microsoft ceo
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Do we care?
Marco:
I think it's interesting this week.
Marco:
I don't know how much longer it will be interesting to us.
Marco:
I mean, you know, my theory on this, which I posted today on my site, is like, I think Microsoft, and we've talked about this at Lant here, so I'm not going to go too far into it, but basically...
Marco:
I think Microsoft really could go two ways.
Marco:
They could either keep trying to break into the new consumer mobile markets that they are failing at breaking into, and it's costing them dearly to keep trying this in both money and in embarrassment, and just time, opportunity costs, stuff like that.
Marco:
So they can keep trying and probably failing to break into mobile.
Marco:
Or they can keep further investing and focusing on what they're very successful at, which is enterprise services and the new cloud division.
Marco:
And they can build that up some more.
Marco:
They can secure that, lock it down, build it up.
Marco:
I think because the new CEO... Is it pronounced Satya Nadella?
John:
i'm not sure i believe that's right i googled it beforehand i watched the video where the microsoft video where they where they announced the guy it wasn't him saying his own name but it was a microsoft person saying it and i played it back like nine times like like i can't tell what you're doing at the end of that name and then i googled like how to pronounce whatever and they have all these videos where people say it and they all swallow up the last two syllables so or the last syllable so i can't tell what they're saying but my guess is satya that's my guess okay
Marco:
Assuming it's pronounced Satya Nadella, new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella comes from their cloud and enterprise division.
Marco:
And I think that says a lot.
Marco:
My one reservation is the new role that Bill Gates is supposedly taking on.
Marco:
Now...
Marco:
Part of this could be just kind of a sham to show investors that like, oh, Bill Gates supports this guy and therefore you should all be at ease.
Marco:
Because during any kind of transition like this for a big public company, especially one that's had as few CEOs as Microsoft, this is a big deal.
Marco:
You want to ease investors' concerns.
Marco:
So part of the Bill Gates thing, saying that he's going to be back three days a week and be in charge of...
Marco:
Some kind of technology BS sounding position where he's going to be directing something or other.
Marco:
That sounds a lot like nothing to worry about investors.
Marco:
Carry on.
Marco:
Bill Gates likes this guy and is supporting him.
Marco:
Who is that making feel better exactly though?
Marco:
I don't – well, so here's the wild card though.
Marco:
Bill Gates has always had this kind of personality complex where he has always clearly been very desperate to prove to the world and the industry that he and his company can innovate effectively.
Marco:
and that they are great inventors and are really innovative and are making cool stuff for consumers.
Marco:
That has always been Bill Gates' obsession.
Marco:
And you could tell in comments he's made over the last 20 years how much he cares about that and how he keeps having to yell at people because no one believes it.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
So it seems like the idea of de-emphasizing consumer stuff and just focusing on enterprise stuff, the idea of that does not sound like Bill Gates.
Marco:
It doesn't sound like something he would do.
Marco:
He didn't do it during most of his time and in most of his power.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
My position is they should literally embrace that they're boring.
Marco:
That they serve businesses and cloud stuff well.
Marco:
That's very boring to consumers.
Marco:
They're not going to go away.
Marco:
Windows PCs are still going to be ubiquitous.
Marco:
Regardless of how well Macs do, Macs are never going to have 100% PC market.
Marco:
They never will.
Marco:
They will never even come close because there's a lot of the market they don't address willingly.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
PCs are always going to be needed for things.
Marco:
Yeah, we talked about how tablets are taking some other share, but ultimately, I think PCs are still safe, especially in the workplace.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
I think if Microsoft can have a very successful business being boring, that's the part of their business that actually work the best, that actually succeed, where in many cases, they're the best option.
Marco:
And in the consumer space, they can just keep losing.
Marco:
And I'm not saying they should totally withdraw.
Marco:
Xbox does fine.
Marco:
Bing does okay.
Marco:
Even Windows on consumer PCs does okay.
Marco:
But it doesn't need to be an area where they focus intense amounts of effort.
Marco:
My position in the post was...
Marco:
They should just give people what they actually want from Windows, which is keep making mostly the same thing and just make slow incremental changes.
Marco:
Don't do anything big and daring like Windows 8.
Marco:
Don't do that again.
Marco:
Just do slow incremental changes.
Marco:
Slowly make the same thing better.
Marco:
We don't want anything new.
Marco:
Just make the same thing better.
Marco:
And I'm worried that if Bill Gates' position is actually real and if he's actually going to be spending a lot of time in it and if he's actually going to have enough power to push product direction, I worry that he's not going to let that happen because he's going to continue being so desperate to prove to the world that he's this visionary innovator that he won't let them focus on the boring stuff.
Marco:
But he hasn't taken that role for a long time.
Marco:
So maybe he's over it.
Marco:
I don't know.
Casey:
So what you're saying is you want them to be progressive and forward thinking in the server space while simultaneously being boring and regressive in the consumer space?
Casey:
I don't even think they have to be regressive.
Marco:
I think they just have to stop trying to make giant sweeping changes.
Marco:
Just accept your position in the consumer space is you power the bulk of the PC market, which is boring.
Marco:
You don't have any meaningful presence in mobile or tablets.
Marco:
And my theory on that is that it's too late for them to do that and that this era of mobile and tablets is decided.
Marco:
It's won.
Marco:
It's a Google and iOS hegemony.
Marco:
Is that the right word?
Marco:
I know what you're thinking of.
Marco:
I don't know how to pronounce it.
Marco:
Google and iOS will together dominate this space.
Marco:
iOS will pretty much have a lock on the top end.
Marco:
Google will have a lock on pretty much everything else for a long time.
Marco:
This is like a generation in computing.
Marco:
This is going to last.
Marco:
It might be 10 or 15 years.
Marco:
It's going to be a while.
Marco:
And
Marco:
Microsoft is not in that game.
Marco:
And it's too late for them to break into that game, I think.
Marco:
What could they possibly do to take 15%, 20%, 30% market share?
Marco:
I don't see it.
Marco:
So I think they should focus on the parts of their businesses that work and that have potential for growth.
Marco:
And consumer mobile is not it.
Casey:
So I guess it just seems – it seems contradictory that you would want them to kind of just go in cruise control and or – I mean I can understand if you said bail.
Casey:
Like, OK, screw it.
Casey:
Consumer is just not working.
Casey:
Bail from everything.
Casey:
Bail from phone.
Casey:
Bail from Windows as a consumer OS.
Casey:
Bail from Xbox.
Casey:
Bail from it all.
Casey:
But –
Casey:
It seems a little, I don't know, contradictory to say, well, just kind of cruise on the consumer side but really keep kicking ass on the server side.
Marco:
Well, like Apple hasn't stopped making iPods.
Casey:
Yeah, that's a fair point.
Marco:
I think it's similar.
Marco:
Actually, I think the Windows PC market is even safer long-term than the market for iPods long-term.
Marco:
I don't think they have to –
Marco:
acts of business that is doing very well.
Marco:
As long as they can just keep letting it do well without investing tons of resources into keeping it doing well at the expense of other things they're doing.
Marco:
What I'm saying basically is put Windows and Office into something slightly better than maintenance mode.
Right.
Marco:
Literally, just keep doing what you're doing.
Marco:
Keep giving people Windows the way they want it.
Marco:
Ship an update every couple of years with minor changes.
Marco:
That's all people want.
John:
You can do that, but you need some other business to be your next big thing.
John:
You can do that as like...
John:
Don't screw this up.
John:
Keep it going.
John:
Make incremental improvements.
John:
And that will give us the opportunity to work on the next big thing.
John:
Because if you don't work on the next big thing and just maintain that, eventually that thing you're maintaining will become irrelevant and gone.
John:
You'll get eaten from some direction or another by someone else, and that will be gone.
John:
And you have to have...
John:
you have to have something else ready to go as your next one.
John:
Now it could be that services is the next big thing could be cloud or whatever, whatever you want to do.
John:
That's our next big thing.
John:
That's going to be like, yeah, we'll do, we'll do what consumers want with windows and keep having that market or wherever, but we're just doing that to sort of keep the lights on and not screw it up like we have been.
John:
And we'll use that as a launching pad to get really big in services.
John:
Uh,
John:
When I think about services, though, this is like a problem for shareholders and for Microsoft's new CEO.
John:
What's the biggest company that you can think of that serves only businesses and not consumers?
John:
IBM.
John:
And so do you think Microsoft would be happy being the size of IBM in terms of market cap and the character of IBM and in the number of employees of IBM and the nature of those employees?
John:
Or do you think Microsoft still wants to be the Microsoft that they were in terms of how many, what percentage of the company are, you know, developers and what's their market cap and what is their revenue and all that stuff?
Marco:
By the way, I should point out that Sam Hayne in the chat is pointing out things like SAP and Oracle as other giant enterprise companies that consumers don't hear about.
John:
Right, I know.
John:
That's what I was thinking of.
John:
I was thinking of SAP and Oracle, but I'm thinking like, is that... IBM is another example, but is that the future that Microsoft sees for itself?
John:
Would they be content to be...
John:
a better IBM or similar to IBM, Oracle, and SAP.
John:
And I think they would consider that a defeat.
John:
And I don't know the numbers off the top of my head, but I would imagine it would also mean shrinking the company in terms of market cap.
Marco:
Well, do they have a choice, though?
Marco:
Suppose they actually can become as big as those companies.
Marco:
Suppose they actually can be as successful in the enterprise services business to be at that scale.
Marco:
It seems like that's at least plausible, if not likely.
Marco:
What are their other choices?
John:
Someone in the chat room needs to do the research for us and say, what are the market cap for IBM, SAP, Oracle, and what have their profits been like?
John:
Because Microsoft is still making tons of profit, and I have a hard time believing that IBM, Oracle, and SAP are making that kind of green at this point, but I don't know.
Marco:
Well, but, you know, Microsoft is not making profit on, as far as I can tell, they're not making substantial profit on Windows Mobile.
Marco:
I would say their Surface division is doing pretty poorly.
Marco:
The areas that I'm suggesting they stop trying so hard in are those like, let's get back at the iPad and let's defeat Android kind of thing.
Marco:
That's the stuff where they keep failing miserably.
Marco:
They've gone through this period over the last...
Marco:
10-15 years where... Gruber had a great piece about this on his site today about how their whole original idea of a computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software, they did it.
Marco:
They won.
Marco:
By the mid-90s, they won.
Marco:
And they didn't really know what to do from there.
Marco:
And so they kind of started flailing and doing all sorts of weird stuff on the side.
Marco:
That's where you got things like MSN and then like MSNBC and Bing and the Xbox and some stuff like that and some of the weird research stuff.
Marco:
And a few of those things worked, although they usually lost a ton of money in the process of working and might still be losing tons of money.
Marco:
A few of those things worked, but none of them have really gotten big enough to be their next big business.
Marco:
What I'm suggesting is they should probably focus on what they can actually do.
Marco:
Focus on the stuff that they already have promised.
Marco:
And
Marco:
Like the Brent Simmons post about this too, about how if they focus more on Azure and the mobile services, they could be a big competitor to Amazon Web Services.
Marco:
That would be awesome because right now there is no big competitor for Amazon Web Services.
Marco:
And there needs to be.
Marco:
They really could use some competition there for the good of everybody.
Marco:
And Microsoft could be it.
Marco:
There's all these things they could do, but they're instead focusing on all of these areas they keep losing badly.
Marco:
And there's no hope in sight that that might stop, that they might stop losing in these areas.
John:
The chat room did our quick research for us.
John:
Microsoft is $279 billion.
John:
IBM is $189 billion.
John:
SAP is $89 billion.
John:
And Oracle is some number that I just lost in the scroll back.
John:
Oracle is $161 billion.
John:
And this isn't going to go into profit numbers because I think I would imagine that Microsoft is making more profit
John:
than those guys, at least now.
John:
But what I'm getting at is that any of these strategies are going to mean shrinking the company in ways that are going to make the new CEO look bad.
John:
Not that I'm saying this is the wrong thing to do, but if...
John:
Basically, I'm thinking, what is the tolerance for this type of thing?
John:
If we're going to say, we want Microsoft to be a different kind of company, and that kind of company is necessarily a little bit smaller, is everyone going to be like, okay, great job, Nadella, you're doing what we want?
John:
Or are they going to be like, oh, any backsliding?
John:
Anything other than growth is seen as a failure for the new CEO.
John:
That's what I'm not sure about.
John:
Are they willing to accept shrinking the company?
John:
Permanently, not like shrinking it briefly and then growing it back, but shrinking it more or less permanently to become a different kind of company that is necessarily a little bit smaller.
John:
Does it have to be smaller?
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Can you define shrinking?
Casey:
Because IBM is four times as many employees as Microsoft.
John:
I know, but that's what I was getting in terms of nature of employees.
John:
Of those employees, how many of them are like Microsoft employees and how many of them are like contractors and salespeople?
John:
And like IBM is a service organization.
John:
You have a very different sort of personnel base when you're a service organization versus when you're Microsoft, you know, developing software.
John:
Like that's what I'm saying.
John:
Like you will multiply manpower and that I think will eat into your margins because you need to have more people.
John:
And it's a different kind of business.
John:
And if Microsoft gets serious about this and rededicates their company to, you know, sort of business to business, you know, transactions, like they're already in that business as well.
John:
But if that's what they get into, presumably they'd have to take share from those companies we just named, right?
John:
Like the market's not going to grow by the amount that Microsoft wants.
John:
They're going to have to take business from IBM, take it from Oracle, take it from SAP.
John:
And again, they're doing that now with their various enterprise things.
John:
But if that's what the company is going to be about,
John:
A, that doesn't look like a growth business to me, because I don't think the number of business in the world that want technology is growing.
John:
I think they're just going to be down there slugging it out with those existing companies that we just named.
John:
And I think it's just a different type of organization.
John:
And getting back to Bill Gates, I think Bill Gates would consider that a failure.
John:
if Microsoft became like IBM or Oracle or SAP, even if they were the best IBM, Oracle, SAP type company.
John:
And even if you didn't have to train the company, like Marco said, you can kind of tell that that's not the kind of Microsoft that Bill Gates wants.
John:
He wants the one that like everybody knows that, you know, every person in the world uses Microsoft stuff and they love it.
John:
He doesn't want to be, you know, like SAP where everyone in the world does not use SAP.
John:
Most people don't know what SAP is and the poor employees who do know what it is are sad about it.
Marco:
But I'm suggesting that Microsoft keep the businesses that are making them the most money.
Marco:
I'm not suggesting that they eliminate most of their profit.
Marco:
If anything, my suggestion would probably make them more profitable because they will be able to devote less employee time to working on radical, giant new products that are not going to succeed.
Right.
John:
I think there is a
John:
Amazon is not what presumably would not be as maniacally focused on the enterprise with their services as Microsoft could be.
John:
And there's some synergy there with Microsoft's existing, you know, enterprise products.
John:
So that's a potential growth market where they could continue to grow their cloud services year after year.
John:
And that will look good.
John:
It'll say, hey, you decided you're into cloud.
John:
Every year you do more cloud stuff.
John:
Every year your revenues and your cloud stuff goes up and people like it and people using it.
John:
So that's good.
John:
I still think you probably want to have some other growth business in there.
John:
And Marco had said that phone is out of the question, tablets out of the question, PCs aren't growing.
John:
So don't even bother with those things.
John:
That's maybe true.
John:
Again, watchers and certainly Bill Gates would consider that a defeat.
John:
It's like they do have a thing called the Surface and they seem to kind of like it.
John:
And I bet they wish that wouldn't fail.
John:
And they do have Windows Phone and canning those things would be...
John:
That would be rough.
John:
Like, it would be better if that happened on a Balmer's watch, right?
John:
And then the new guy comes in.
John:
Well, you know, the phone and Surface things are all gone, so we can concentrate on my new strategy.
John:
But if he's got to be the guy to do that, that's going to be difficult for him.
John:
And if we're trying to think of an area where they can expand, we just talked about it in the beginning part of the show.
John:
If anyone can make a tablet computer that people might use at their desk instead of a Windows PC, maybe it's Microsoft.
John:
I know they haven't done it with the Surface.
John:
I know that's not what the Surface is aimed at, but...
John:
uh it they have the the magic protection that's giving that's keeping the windows market viable for them is that nobody else wants it and the magic protection that you know may give them the ability to make you know the surface pro there i guess there already is a surface pro you know what i mean a more capable larger surface for you know for people to use not just for consumers but for people to use to do their work they can bring back the giant table
John:
Yeah, well, the big service, right?
John:
Is that maybe Apple doesn't want that business and maybe Android, you know, the Android makers don't go after that business.
John:
So if nobody else does it and nobody, you know, it could fall to Microsoft by default to try and fail perhaps in that business as they have so far in the tablet and phone markets.
John:
But
John:
So it's there.
John:
I mean, I just don't like that.
John:
I don't like to think that like we resign ourselves to be boring and just to do what we know how to do.
John:
And even if it's not a growth business, we'll take business away from our other competitors.
John:
And it's like that just doesn't.
John:
that it's not just bill gates that sounds like a defeat to me i would rather see microsoft go down in flames trying to do crazy stuff i'd rather see them you know keep doing the xbox stuff uh try the surface stuff i mean the white windows phone all that stuff not a success really but i would rather see them go out of business doing that than stay in business being like oracle or ibm or sap
Marco:
What if people at Microsoft don't consider it boring to become a pretty strong player in web services?
Marco:
It's boring.
Marco:
Look at Amazon.
Marco:
Lots of people work on that on Amazon.
Marco:
It's become a giant business for them.
John:
Microsoft's best bet may be to be acquired by Apple in 20 years because if Apple continues not to be able to do cloud services that well and Microsoft becomes really good at it, there's definite synergies there.
John:
You know, if eventually they eliminate all the places where there wouldn't be a good matchup, like, well, you have a tablet and we have a tablet and you have a phone OS and we have a phone OS and you have a desktop OS.
John:
Like, if you get it down to the point where the acquisition makes sense because Microsoft is, you know, the preeminent cloud services company and Apple continues to flail, then it would be like, well, that's a reasonable matchup.
Marco:
Well, to avoid us talking about Synergy ever again on the show, we are also brought to you by our friends at Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy.
Marco:
You know, I hear other podcasters reading the script, and they always remove the word fast.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
All right.
Marco:
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Marco:
Sorry, John.
Marco:
Yeah, sorry, John.
Marco:
You got screwed.
Marco:
So yeah, 10% off.
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Use offer code Casey this month.
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And all these fancy designs, which are designed by actual pro designers, they all have matching mobile layouts.
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Marco:
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No, they have different mobile templates for every theme, and it's fantastic.
Marco:
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Marco:
Pretty impressive.
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They also, I think it was about a year ago now, they launched this Squarespace commerce platform.
Marco:
It's e-commerce, if that's still a word, and you can sell physical or virtual goods right on your Squarespace site.
Marco:
It integrates with credit card processor Stripe and has really advanced stuff.
Marco:
shipping tracking, inventory management, coupon codes, stuff like that.
Marco:
Really, you can make a very advanced store with this.
Marco:
And now, I believe this is a new change, now every Squarespace plan, from the lowest to the highest, every Squarespace plan includes Squarespace Commerce.
Marco:
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Marco:
So thanks a lot to Squarespace for sponsoring ATP once again.
Marco:
Squarespace.com, offer code Casey.
Marco:
By the way, you would be surprised how many people misspell Casey's name in feedback.
Marco:
We've seen Cassie.
Marco:
We see a lot of Cassie with two S's.
Marco:
We should spell it on every episode of the show.
Casey:
Maybe in like the end, in like a song or jingle or something.
Marco:
Yeah, make it easy to remember.
Casey:
And actually, I was going to say, the only problem with using my name as the offer code is that now I'm going to hear for the next three weeks on Twitter, oh, who the hell is Casey?
Casey:
Who the hell is Casey?
Casey:
Over and over and over and over again.
Casey:
So I'm very thankful for Squarespace for sponsoring and for honoring me with that awesome offer code.
Casey:
But oh my lord, I'm doomed.
Marco:
Hey, you complained when the offer code was Marco, so now this is what you get.
Casey:
Yeah, I didn't think that one through at all.
Marco:
Not one bit.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
What else is going on?
John:
Well, actually, before we get off Nadella, I want to talk briefly about the guy himself and a little bit of the excitement that I get from – or maybe the lack of excitement that other people have from having this new person.
John:
Because since it was just announced, it's like there's this world of possibilities.
John:
Despite the Bill Gates factor –
John:
There's new leadership at a company.
John:
This company has not had a lot of CEOs in its lifetime.
John:
Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, then this guy.
John:
And that's a long time for each of them.
John:
And if you want to consider the Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer thing as not really much of a transition because the two of them were there in the beginning and the two of them sort of ran the company together and then Bill Gates just kind of opted out.
John:
It was sort of a continuation of the Bill Gates reign.
John:
Who knows what this new guy will do, even though he's a company man and has been in the company for 22 years and all that other stuff.
John:
There is the potential like there always is when you have a change in leadership for him to do interesting, exciting, unexpected, radical things.
John:
We don't know what at least I don't know enough about his personality to know.
John:
Is he that type of person or is he just kind of like a slow and steady, not going to do anything crazy?
John:
Steve Ballmer, personality-wise, always seemed crazy and insane and very interesting and fun to watch and his developers' developers' stuff and throwing chairs and stuff like that.
John:
And yet the way he ran the company was very conservative.
John:
This guy seems like a cool, mellow dude, but maybe he's going to make crazy, radical Steve Jobs-esque moves.
John:
And since he just took the job, now is the time for me to entertain those fantasies until he goes through a year of just doing boring stuff and I get disappointed.
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, and somebody tweeted – and I don't have it in front of me, and I apologize.
Casey:
But somebody tweeted something along the lines of if you look at Google, there's – what is the psycho guy, psycho privacy guy, the CEO?
Casey:
Eric Schmidt.
Casey:
Thank you.
Marco:
He's no longer the CEO, but I think – is he still chairman?
Marco:
He's still on the board, I think.
Casey:
Right, right, right.
Casey:
So the point of the tweet was he was a business guy.
Casey:
And you look at, is it Larry that's currently CEO?
Casey:
He's of some sort of development background, is he not?
Casey:
And Satya is also a developer.
Casey:
And so you're finding this trend, or such this person was saying, you're finding this trend towards developers as CEOs, which is a very different and powerful thing, as opposed to having a bunch of businessmen leading these companies.
Casey:
With the exception, of course, of Tim Cook, who has an MBA.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
He was some sort of engineering undergrad, right?
John:
I would consider Tim Cook a continuation of the Steve Jobs reign in the same way that Balmer was a continuation of Gates.
John:
It's like two guys who worked in tandem for a large part of the time when they were successful.
John:
Then one is gone and the other one is sort of continuing that.
Casey:
Yeah.
Yeah.
John:
Microsoft seems kind of like Apple was before Steve Jobs came back in terms of having tons and tons of products and tons of different things.
John:
I've seen a bunch of threads recently and a bunch of articles about people who develop on Microsoft's platforms complaining about how Microsoft keeps changing its minds about technologies and APIs and how it's making their lives more difficult.
Marco:
Well, that's been the case for 15, 20 years.
Marco:
I mean, that's not new at all.
John:
Well, I mean, like it's new-ish, like in the Windows 95 era, you know, it was like win 32 forever.
John:
And this is, you know, exciting new thing called MFC that's coming.
John:
And, you know, like it was, there was some, there was a steady period.
John:
And then there was this period of disruption where they kept changing their mind every 10 minutes.
John:
And it's similar with Apple where they, towards the end of Apple's bad years where they were like, we're going to,
John:
you don't remember any of these names.
John:
We were going to do power talk and we're going to do, you'd probably heard open doc, open doc is this new idea.
John:
And we're going to have themes and we're going to like, they kept changing their mind and then they would cancel things and quick draw GX and quick draw 3d and rave.
John:
And like all these technologies that old Mac people know that you've never heard of and be glad you haven't.
Uh,
John:
There was too much confusion, and every time they announced one and canceled it and tried to replace it with something they said was better, that decreased confidence.
John:
And that all reversed when Steve Jobs came, canceled half the company's projects.
John:
I mean, they canceled a Newton for crying out loud.
John:
The Newton was like the most forward-thinking, interesting product Apple had, and he canned it.
John:
And he was right to can it so he could focus the company on what he thought they wanted to do.
John:
So Nadella could...
John:
Take all these things that are confusing people, that are sending the wrong signals, that are making people lose confidence in the company, and get rid of them.
John:
And take the heat for getting rid of them, the same way Steve Jobs took the heat for canning the Newton, and start on whatever he thinks is the important thing.
John:
Focus the company, basically.
John:
Get people...
John:
The people who aren't excited leave or get fired.
John:
And the people who remain, I guess, are terrified for a short period of time.
John:
But then you inspire them and you inspire them into being exciting.
John:
And you sort of like that.
John:
That's the way that rebirth can happen is you could have that incredibly painful shrinking process and then come out of it stronger.
John:
And I just fear that he's going to be too conservative and too afraid to rock the boat and too afraid of like, you know, his first year.
John:
All the investors are going to be pissed because he...
John:
kills a bunch of profitable product lines to concentrate on everything else he wants to do.
John:
It gets back to saying before, maybe Microsoft is not
John:
It would be an easier job if Microsoft was in a worse position for the new CEO.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Because, you know, Apple, when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, they were dying quickly.
John:
Like 90 days worth of money left in the bank or something.
Marco:
You know, if somebody comes in and is like, all right, I'm going to turn this around drastically.
Marco:
Here's how to do it.
Marco:
Then, you know, everyone will be like, fine, whatever you want to do, whatever is going to work, do it.
Marco:
Microsoft is making tons of money.
Marco:
It's much harder because they are being successful in so many ways.
Marco:
It's much harder for somebody to come in and axe everything.
Marco:
My plan doesn't really axe a whole lot.
Marco:
That's why I think it's not only most likely, but probably what's best for them.
Marco:
It's more about...
Marco:
no longer doing massive new re-thinkings of the Windows UI and stuff like that.
Marco:
It's more about... You just want them to surrender.
John:
That's what you want.
John:
To lay down and not die, but just kind of hang out.
Marco:
No, that's not it.
Marco:
I want them...
Marco:
I almost want them to go back to how they were about 12 to 15 years ago.
Marco:
You know, like in the late 90s, early 2000s, on the lead up to Windows XP.
Marco:
Like, that was... They were doing very well.
Marco:
And it was mostly because they were working on the internals of Windows.
Marco:
You know, especially with the Windows Win 16 to NT transition, whatever the hell...
John:
it was the technology is not why they were doing they were doing well because the personal if you drew the chart of pc sales they were going upwards and every one of those pcs was sold with windows on it and so microsoft was going upwards that's what was bringing them upwards it's not so much like all those technical things are true and like when they started to screw it up their success with the pc market hid most of those problems and as soon as the pc market stopped growing it at a crazy rate then all their problems became revealed and they figured out that they didn't know what to do and they made lots of new
Marco:
new different decisions, but I don't... You know, I disagree with that, actually.
Marco:
I don't think it was about the growth slowing down that really hurt them.
Marco:
I mean, that's hurting them maybe now a little bit, but I think what really hurt them was a whole bunch of execution problems when they tried to do way too much.
Marco:
This, again, sound familiar?
Marco:
With Longhorn, which became Vista, they had these crazy ideas, file system reference, these crazy ideas that...
Marco:
They had to cut almost all of them to get Vista out the door five or six years late or something.
Marco:
Vista was very late, and it was mostly because they were way too ambitious with what they wanted to do.
Marco:
They wanted to change too much, and it didn't work.
Marco:
And Vista came out, and because it was pretty sloppily done, people hated it.
Marco:
They tried to change too much.
Marco:
They changed too many of the wrong things.
Marco:
They released a sloppy version that everyone hated badly.
Marco:
And you could say a lot of that about Windows 8.
Marco:
I don't think it was as sloppy, necessarily.
Marco:
But they tried to do a lot with it, and a lot of it was not very well done, and their customers hated almost all of it.
Marco:
And so that, I think...
Marco:
You know, they can keep doing that pattern of keep trying to reinvent Windows to make a major new splash with Windows again.
Marco:
But that's probably not going to happen.
Marco:
And historically, even before, even when PCs were growing just fine.
Marco:
They weren't very good at doing that.
Marco:
And one more quick thing to play a little bit of devil's advocate on the PC growth thing.
Marco:
There have been so many other factors in addition to the rise of tablets and stuff that could also help explain the PC sales downturn.
Marco:
We're talking about new PC sales having slowed down or stopped or regressed.
Marco:
We're not talking about...
Marco:
pc usage necessarily slowing down or stopping or regressing uh this could also just be that pcs are being used for longer they're on a slower replacement cycle and you think about what might cause that to be the case there's all sorts of really good reasons there's the economy the job market where like you know businesses have to buy new computers uh when they hire new employees right usually if you know unless that job was previous occupied and you get somebody else's old crappy computer
Marco:
But, you know, so like the job market, the economy, those are kind of crappy right now.
Marco:
Windows itself, Windows 8 is not well liked.
Marco:
And so a lot of people are, you know, we're not excited to go out and get a new computer with Windows 8 on it.
Marco:
A lot of businesses held off on upgrades because they wanted to wait until they could get, you know, something they actually wanted and liked and could support.
Marco:
And
Marco:
If you think about why people used to buy new computers so often, after performance stopped accelerating so quickly, past what people actually needed, a lot of it was because malware would infect their old computer so badly that they would think the only solution was to get a new one because they would think computers just slow down over time and they have to get a new computer because this one's so slow and full of pop-ups.
Marco:
People actually did that to a massive scale.
Marco:
And so maybe the reason why computer sales slowed down didn't have...
Marco:
as much to do with tablets coming in as just people need to replace computers less now because they're pretty fast already.
Marco:
Anti-malware stuff is pretty good these days.
Marco:
It's certainly a lot better than it was 10 years ago.
Marco:
Maybe that's more the problem.
Marco:
And so if that is what's causing the sales growth, or at least if those are major contributing factors, that's not saying PCs are going away.
Marco:
That's just saying the average PC buyer might keep it for five years instead of two.
Marco:
And so that's not great for the market, but the market's not going away.
Marco:
It's just the replacement cycle is slowed down.
John:
Microsoft did make many technical mistakes, but if the PC market was still growing 30% year over year, it wouldn't matter because they would just be able to force everyone to upgrade.
John:
They wouldn't have to say, hey, we'll keep making XP available forever, even though everyone hates Vista.
John:
Because it would be like, well, there's new customers coming in every day and they're going to get the new thing.
John:
And we have this growth that growth, you know, growth like that cures everything and hides all the terrible problems.
John:
And it's very difficult to make, especially in the position Microsoft.
John:
And it's very difficult to make a product so bad that it overcomes 30 percent year over year growth in your market in terms of, you know, unit sales.
John:
because what else what else what's your alternative what are the customers going to do they had such an incredible lock on the market such huge market share that if you're buying a new personal computer and you know your market is growing 30 year over year you have this huge number of people who are buying buying a computer who didn't have one before and they're going to get your new operating system on it and they're just going to accept it and like
John:
What's their alternative?
John:
Well, I'm not going to buy windows.
John:
I'm going to buy something else.
John:
What are you going to get?
John:
Apple doesn't want to serve your needs.
John:
You, you need something that runs windows.
John:
We're the ones selling something that's run windows.
John:
I'm not saying this is a good thing or a healthy thing.
John:
I'm just saying like that was able to mask all of their problems until it slowed down.
John:
And I'd have to see the curves on it.
John:
I think it probably started to take a dive around what iPad time, like 2010 or something when it really took, when the PC sales turned the other direction, uh,
John:
I don't know.
John:
So like the Vista debacle, we all hated it and we thought it was terrible.
John:
But if you look at Microsoft's earnings and everything during that period, it's like they were doing OK.
John:
They just made they were testing the theory.
John:
How terrible of product can we make and still be successful?
John:
And if people don't have an alternative, you can make a pretty terrible product and still be successful.
John:
In fact, you can delay not release a product for, you know, not upgrade Windows for five years and do this.
John:
horrible project and still be successful and compare that to apple who couldn't replace their operating system for many many years and did not have 30 year over year growth and almost went out of business uh
John:
So I don't know.
John:
I look at Microsoft's fortunes going forward, and I still think about them needing to find some market with the kind of growth that the PC market had.
John:
Apple found one.
John:
It was the phone market.
John:
The phone market has that kind of growth now.
John:
It won't always have that growth.
John:
Someday that growth will stop.
John:
And the iPad market has similar growth for now.
John:
But I get really depressed when I think about Microsoft never being in another business with that kind of growth curve.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So what else is going on?
Casey:
I should note I actually just came out with a new iOS app.
Marco:
We have one more sponsor this week.
Casey:
No, hold on.
Casey:
I want to talk about my new iOS app.
Casey:
I came up with one, and it's a really, really clever name.
Casey:
Do you want to guess what it is?
Casey:
Hmm.
Marco:
Is it Xbox One?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Cardboard.
Casey:
You know, it's not cardboard because I thought... Oh, is it Facebook?
Casey:
It is Facebook.
Casey:
How did you know?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
It's called Paper.
Casey:
That should be fine.
Casey:
Do we have any thoughts on this?
Casey:
I don't even know what to say.
Casey:
It seems like this is a he said, she said.
Casey:
I feel like this is the soap opera corner of our industry that I really have no interest in.
Casey:
I think it's a David and Goliath tale.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Everyone knows everyone's kind of being jerks.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Do you guys have thoughts on this?
John:
There's a system for resolving this, you know.
John:
It's called the legal system.
John:
It's boring and slow and annoying, but when a bunch of people all want to do the same things, and he said, she said in blogs, you can resolve this in civil court, and I'm assuming that's what they'll do.
John:
Yeah, that's expensive, though.
John:
Well, Facebook's got the money, I can tell you that, so maybe they win by default.
Marco:
Actually, so, 53, I think, is doing pretty well, too.
Marco:
I think it's, you know, the smaller paper company is probably upset about that more than anybody, but...
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
This stuff is hard.
Marco:
You know, like there's, you know, I talked, I forget whether it was this show or not, but I talked at length about the process I went through for naming Overcast.
Marco:
And, you know, when I named most things, I just kind of throw something out there and it usually just works okay enough.
Marco:
Overcast, I knew was going to get a lot of attention when I announced it, but it wasn't ready yet.
Marco:
And I wanted protection by trademark protection, but I didn't want to pre-announce the name or have it in the public record at the trademark office before I announced the product.
Marco:
Anyway, all these concerns.
Marco:
I knew that what I was making now was going to get more scrutiny than anything I've made before because my audience is bigger now.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
When naming this thing, I knew that if there was any potential for a trademark conflict of any sort, that it would bite me.
Marco:
I knew it.
Marco:
For a while, new industries or new areas or new platforms, if they're really small and kind of under the radar, you can get by squatting on somebody's trademark inadvertently.
Marco:
Usually it's unintentional, but you can get by having a trademark conflict because no one's going to notice because it's this tiny little platform no one cares about, right?
Marco:
But – and for a while, you know, I think the App Store was that for the first few years maybe.
Marco:
But now it's big.
Marco:
Now it's a giant – it's this giant business, this giant ecosystem that has quickly become kind of merged with and partially taken over the whole consumer technology space.
Marco:
So it's this massive thing.
Marco:
So –
Marco:
I knew that whatever name I picked, I would have to vet as being pretty safe to use.
Marco:
And so every name I thought about using, I went to the USPTO.gov site and did a trademark search for the name and for similar types of spellings and stuff.
Marco:
I vetted every single name I wanted to use.
Marco:
And I had this giant text file with inbox of names I want to check out and the bottom names I can't use.
Marco:
And most of the names I can't use were because of trademark conflicts.
Marco:
That's just the reality of once you get into the big mass business world, you have to worry about things like trademark conflicts.
Marco:
Similarly, before I announced the product name at all, like weeks before I announced the product, I filed for the trademark.
Marco:
Because I knew that there was a risk that if I announced it, then somebody else could go file a trademark for it and release something and steal my name.
Marco:
And I actually had to pay money for the name because of another trademark.
Marco:
I had to have a coexistence agreement with another trademark owner.
Marco:
So I took the steps to both secure the name in a way that I'm unlikely to get threatened or sued because I did enough research to know that I'm probably okay with all trademarks except this one and that one I got an agreement for.
Marco:
and also file my own trademark application to help protect the name from being stolen by other people after I announce it.
Marco:
These are things that legitimate businesses have to do all the time.
Marco:
The App Store is now one of those places where you have to do that sort of stuff.
Marco:
You can't just release an app with a name and hope no one ever, quote, steals it.
Marco:
If you didn't file a trademark, you basically have no case to anybody, including Apple.
Marco:
You can't email Apple and say, hey, these guys stole my app name, and it's some generic term like paper, and Apple's not going to help you there.
Marco:
If you say, I have a trademark, here's the number, and this is squatting on it, they will help you a little bit, not a whole lot.
John:
Apple's App Store system seems so terrible for the naming stuff.
John:
First of all, I was always shocked.
John:
I remember the first time I realized this way back in the iOS 2.0 days when App Store came out, that the name that it has on your home screen doesn't really have to be
John:
I guess maybe it has to be related to the name of the app, but it's not the same thing.
John:
Like you get to pick what the short name is, right?
John:
Yeah, it's weird.
John:
So that's kind of misleading.
John:
And the second thing is, if Apple had just simply said, you can name your app once, the names have to be unique, they would have implemented their own de facto trademark system.
John:
You know what I mean?
Marco:
But they don't.
Marco:
A lot like how domain names work.
Marco:
Domain names are kind of like if you have the .com and you start using it for something prominent, you don't have to worry that much about someone else trademarking it after you because there's evidence that you were there.
John:
But there's still the legal system, and if you try to use Coca-Cola.com, Coca-Cola will come and get it from you because they're a big company.
John:
But just for the small guys and for just the name squatters and all that ridiculous stuff, they just did – yeah, name is read-only and there's a unique index on it.
John:
Ta-da!
John:
That solves so many problems.
John:
Because it sounds like all these people are reading all these sob stories about they put it in a foreign store and then they change the name and put it into the U.S.
John:
store.
John:
Just because that field is so mutable, it's led to so much evil letting people change that name over and over again.
John:
I don't think it's too much to ask to make people pick a name once.
John:
You could say...
John:
you know, limited character set, limited length, pick your name, you get one shot at it.
John:
If you don't like the name, and it's like first come, first serve, and it would have to be like, you know, you have to upload the app at that time, or maybe you only get the name once your app is approved, and then you stake your claim on that name.
John:
Whatever system they come up with, it will be self-regulating to a degree much higher than the current app store.
John:
And then you'd only need to go to the stupid legal system, which is only an option for certain people,
John:
If you I mean, if someone else had a name and got there at first and you felt like you had a right to it, like, for example, if you registered a trademark on Overcast and Apple had this system and before you were done with the app, someone uploaded an app called Overcast.
John:
Yeah, now you've got to go to the legal system and say, hey, you can't use that name because I have a trademark or whatever.
John:
But if you uploaded Overcast with that name, capital O, everything else lowercase, that's it, and had the product for sale, wouldn't you feel better knowing that it's impossible for anyone else to upload another app called Overcast?
John:
That would be nice.
John:
But it's not.
John:
They can upload an app, whatever they want, and rename it to Overcast with a non-breaking space at the end or some emoji or just puts a bunch of keyword spam at the end.
Yeah.
John:
Once again, the App Store is not helping in this regard, and I don't really understand why Apple, they're so strict about everything else, why they were not more strict with app naming.
Marco:
You know, what's funny, too, is that most apps have found, like most developers have found that Apple
Marco:
Because of the incredibly primitive way that App Store search works, you're actually better off putting a bunch of keywords after your name.
John:
I remember when Twitterific changed the name of their app from Twitterific to Twitterific for Twitter.
John:
And it's like, geez, the search is so bad that Twitterific is not identical.
John:
They had to write Twitterific for Twitter because people would search for Twitter and it wouldn't match Twitterific.
John:
The fact that the names can be so long that you can keyword spam them, that there's not a unique identifier.
John:
Sure, by all means, let people change the description, have a secondary tagline.
John:
There's a place for people to put in the Elegant Notes Taking app or whatever.
John:
But having that be the name of the app because of a side effect of where their stupid search works is just...
John:
like this if again i said this before if you just picked randomly 10 developers from the app store put them in a room and say and a whiteboard and said come up with 10 ideas to make the app store better they would fight to kill each other for what those 10 ideas are it wouldn't be like i can't really think of anything like there's so many obvious things that can improve and just year after year nope not really not really improving
Casey:
Hey, Marco, really quickly, do you want to tell us about something else that's really fun and exciting?
Marco:
Let's do one more.
Marco:
It's our friends at Ting.
Marco:
Ting is mobile that makes sense.
Marco:
They're a simple-to-use mobile service provider from the people at Two Cows, the company behind Hover.
Marco:
Ting is a reseller of the Sprint Network here in the U.S.
Marco:
Go to atp.ting.com to learn more.
Marco:
So they have great rates, which actually their price is just lower, which is worth noting, especially on data.
Marco:
They dramatically reduce the price on data.
Marco:
So they had great rates before.
Marco:
Now they have even greater rates.
Marco:
And there's no contracts and no early termination fees.
Marco:
You own your device outright from the start.
Marco:
And then they have this great pay for what you use pricing model.
Marco:
So you pay a base price.
Marco:
It's $6 per month per device.
Marco:
And then...
Marco:
On top of that, you just can automatically build with this bucketing system for whatever actual amount of minutes and messages and megabytes that you use that month.
Marco:
So you'll pay at least $6, and then if you only use a couple hundred megs, you'll pay another few dollars on top of that.
Marco:
If you don't use any text this month, you won't pay anything for the text service that month.
Marco:
They will automatically put you into whatever bucket is cheapest that will fit your usage.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
And it doesn't matter if it fluctuates month to month.
Marco:
That's the whole point.
Marco:
It can fluctuate and you don't have to worry about like, oh, I'm going on a trip.
Marco:
I'm going to need more data.
Marco:
So I got to increase it this month.
Marco:
But then next month, I remember to bring it back down to get charged again.
Marco:
Nothing like that.
Marco:
You just pay for what you use.
Marco:
It's that simple with Ting.
Marco:
You can even see their prices, even if you use the same amount every month, basically, their prices are extremely competitive and are probably cheaper than what you're paying now.
Marco:
Go to atp.ting.com and check out their savings calculator.
Marco:
And you can enter in your last few bill usage amounts into Ting, and they will tell you what you paid at your provider and what that would cost you at Ting.
Marco:
And you can see, even over time, if you buy the device up front and you pay this much per month and you save this much, when do you come out ahead?
Marco:
And whether it's immediately, whether it's three months down the line, whatever the case may be, you can see they have these great tools on their site to see just how much you're going to save.
Marco:
They will even help you get out of a contract if you have to pay an early termination fee.
Marco:
They have this great deal where they will give you up to 25% back in Ting credit of your ETF, up to $75, which is really great.
Marco:
Like Hover, Ting has great customer support with a no-hold, no-wait telephone support line.
Marco:
They have online help too if you want it, but this is great.
Marco:
You can call them between 8 a.m.
Marco:
and 8 p.m.
Marco:
Eastern, and a human being picks up the phone who's able to help you.
Marco:
No hold, no wait, no transfers.
Marco:
It's really great.
Marco:
So check out Ting.
Marco:
They have all sorts of stuff you can do.
Marco:
You can pool devices together under one account and manage a fleet of devices.
Marco:
You can have test devices if you're a developer and you don't want to pay a whole bunch of monthly costs for some other phone.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
Really fantastic service here.
Marco:
Go to atp.ting.com.
Marco:
You can bring your own compatible Sprint device, or you can buy one from them, new or used, or you can get one on eBay or whatever.
Marco:
It doesn't matter how you get any compatible Sprint device.
Marco:
You can see the list on their site.
Marco:
Go to atp.ting.com.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Ting for sponsoring the show once again.
Casey:
So I'm sorry, do we have any more on the paper or App Store stuff?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
And the funny thing about this is nobody has clean hands in this.
Marco:
There's 53, the company, who had a naming dispute with Figure 53, another company.
Marco:
And I got to say, from the blog post on Figure 53, it didn't make 53 look great.
Marco:
And then 53 made this paper app that was also not great because somebody else already had an app named Paper.
Marco:
And then Facebook comes along and makes their app named Paper.
Marco:
and 53 has tried to file a trademark on it now but they filed the trademark on the day that facebook released their app called paper so that might be a problem for them who knows it's it's just a mess i think legally none of us are experts enough to know who's legally in the right here i think all of them are being dicks though
John:
yeah and not just being dicks like it's kind of stupid like the worst one i think is facebook because the paper app is pretty well established in ios like it's i don't know how popular it is but i've heard of it and i don't do drawing on the ipad so it's like it's not a new application it's pretty popular if facebook's going to come up with this application like pick a different name like you know why why pick you're just you're just making people confused about your own product
John:
you know the search is going to be difficult talking about it is going to be difficult and it's not as if paper was just such a natural name for what facebook was doing that like they couldn't resist it it's not really a natural name for what they were doing it's in fact if anything it's a more natural name for a drawing program so i think they're all making their own lives more difficult with the exception of whoever were the first and maybe second one to come up with this name were but facebook no excuse to use paper pick a different name
Casey:
Yeah, and it also shows to me a level of arrogance because, like you said, paper the app.
Marco:
The second one, which might be the first one depending on who you believe.
John:
Possibly the first.
Casey:
But you know what I mean.
Casey:
The paper app that involves drawing that we all think of or certainly used to think of as the unequivocal paper up until a week ago or whatever.
Casey:
It is extremely arrogant in my mind that Facebook, just like you said, knows that this exists, knows that a lot of people know that this exists.
Casey:
I mean, hell, it was featured on the App Store for like a year.
John:
Yeah, it's not an obscure app.
John:
It's extremely popular.
John:
Facebook should come out with an application to manipulate your photos for iOS and call it Photoshop.
Yeah.
Casey:
exactly like it's just so arrogant of facebook and and as as a company that's that i feel like is losing more and more credibility in the minds of not only nerds but non-nerds that kind of arrogance just seems i don't know silly to me and it's just it's so unnecessary like facebook comes out of this looking pretty bad and for what
Marco:
They could have named the app anything, and it would have gotten the exact same attention.
Marco:
It would have had the same success.
Marco:
You could argue whether they should have just called it freaking Facebook and replaced their old app with it.
Marco:
I mean, there was no reason for this.
Marco:
It was completely avoidable.
Marco:
And I think you're right, Casey.
Marco:
It's just arrogance.
Marco:
They had to know about the 53 app name paper, and they just said, you know what?
Marco:
Doesn't matter.
Marco:
We're going to go right in there anyway.
John:
Is it even called Facebook paper, or is it just the letter P is the first part of the name?
John:
Oh, you know none of us have it installed.
John:
I installed it.
John:
Now, let me tell you about the install experiences.
John:
I had higher hopes in this.
John:
I installed it, right?
John:
And I launch it, and there's an intro movie, which, of course, annoys me.
John:
And I almost made a tweet, like, seriously, people, don't make an intro movie for your iOS app, no matter how important you think it is.
John:
But then, of course, during the intro movie lead-up tutorial thing, it crashed.
John:
Because, I mean, you know...
John:
Like, I'm running it on my iPod Touch.
John:
You know, memory's probably fragmented.
John:
God knows how much memory it's using trying to show me this full screen video and tutorial thing.
John:
And of course it crashed, right?
John:
Or it got killed or it ran out of memory, whatever it is.
John:
Like, what a terrible first launch experience.
John:
Install, launch, do you get to use the app?
John:
Hell no, you get to watch a video.
John:
video with audio, and try to go through tutorial and then it crashes.
John:
It was all I could do to make myself tap that icon again to say, No, I actually really do want to see any other app or just deleted it immediately.
John:
It's like, sorry, failure.
John:
I eventually got it up and running after I just wanted to like just get me to the part where I use the I'm not a typical customer, I guess, but I think a typical customer.
John:
I don't know if they'd be charmed by that.
John:
It kind of reminds me of the the welcome video that used to run at the beginning of OS 10.
John:
I guess that's kind of neat if you're opening up your Mac for the first time and it's not that long, but I don't think people have tolerance for that crap on a phone.
Casey:
I have not installed it, and I'm looking at just the site, and it seems to me like the information density is just way too low in a lot of it.
Casey:
Like when you look at – they have an example that, oh, I just completed my first marathon, and that takes up like the entire damn screen.
Casey:
I don't know.
John:
It's not the information density.
John:
It's the information quality because as many, many people have said when they've looked at this, like –
John:
Paper would be awesome if all your friends were professional photographer model writers.
John:
In California.
John:
Right.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Who live in beautiful places.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's the same problem that Facebook Home had.
Marco:
Remember that thing where they took over Android's home screen?
Marco:
It's the exact same problem with that.
Marco:
It's like Facebook.
Marco:
I think that was a better idea, at least, though.
Marco:
I don't know whether they're ignoring the reality or whether they actually don't think this is the reality of their product.
Marco:
But the reality is people post a bunch of terrible crap on Facebook.
Marco:
And chances are if you use Facebook, your timeline is full of a bunch of terrible crap.
Marco:
And it's designers who are...
John:
who are thinking about the ideal case rather than the realistic case i think that facebook home though is actually a very good idea to try to make the phone experience people centric like because you think like most people do with their phones like communicate with people like texting their friends or whatever and if they already do a lot of stuff in facebook let's try to make it so that like always available is this thing where you could flick around little circular blobs of your friends and message them and like the implementation wasn't great and it it
John:
the the audience wasn't wide enough and it didn't take off you know like i'm saying it was a success as a product but at least that's like that's in facebook's wheelhouse of like people like to use facebook people do use phones to communicate with each other we do have a social graph people do send facebook messages to each other let's try to to surface that in a phone interface whereas paper is just like let me find the amazing fanciest way possible for you to just scroll through facebook
John:
And that I don't think is is as innovative or as interesting as home was and home was a failure, too.
John:
So I don't I mean, will paper be a failure?
John:
People download it and use it.
John:
I guess it's fine.
John:
Like it's no skin off their back if they go back to the plain Facebook app.
John:
But it seems like a lot of spit and polish for what's mostly a turd.
Marco:
So this is what annoys me about Facebook because they have – they applied a ridiculous amount of resources into developing this app.
Marco:
And resources – like they applied incredible designers' and developers' time to do this.
Marco:
And there's an opportunity cost there to both Facebook and to the world.
Marco:
What if Facebook didn't buy all these people?
Marco:
And what if these people were working on their own stuff?
Marco:
They wouldn't write a thermostat.
Yeah.
Marco:
Maybe that.
Marco:
Maybe something else.
Marco:
I think one of them did.
Marco:
What if Facebook didn't use all these people's time to make this app that the world doesn't really need and that will probably not even be maintained in a year because it probably won't succeed?
Marco:
And it's not even an upgrade to their existing app.
Marco:
It's just a side project.
Marco:
I mean...
Marco:
The world has lost because of this.
Marco:
The world has lost value and has lost potential new things these people could have done instead.
Marco:
And Facebook has lost their time and their talent.
Marco:
I mean, it's – this is a problem with this acqui-hire culture that –
Marco:
The products that get acquihired get destroyed, usually as part of the deal.
Marco:
They get shut down.
Marco:
Excuse me, they get sunset.
Marco:
And the people are then put to work for these big companies working on how to make ads prettier or some junk like that.
Marco:
There's a major opportunity cost to all of this.
Marco:
And the industry, if things ever feel stagnant, maybe that's why.
John:
I guess.
Marco:
Do you think Mike Mattis uses Facebook?
Marco:
Maybe not.
Marco:
Maybe that's why it has had this ideal picture of what Facebook posts were actually like.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
I would have loved to see what he would have done.
Marco:
We did see part of it.
Marco:
What he and his company would have done if they weren't bought by Facebook.
Marco:
and I think it would have been better.
Marco:
I think it would have been more useful to more people than this.
Marco:
Wait, where was he bought from?
Marco:
Was it Sofa?
John:
No, Mike Mattis did Push Pop Press.
John:
That's it, Push Pop Press.
John:
That's right.
John:
Right, and didn't he also work on the UI for Nest?
John:
Oh, I don't know about that.
John:
Someone can Google it, but my memory was that he did that as well.
Casey:
Also, how terrible is it that I just phrased my question, where was he bought from?
Casey:
Genuinely, that's not cool.
John:
That's accurate.
John:
I don't ding the people who worked on this.
John:
They seem to be very talented, and I don't ding them at all for going where someone wanted to pay them to do great design.
John:
It's just they're doing it on top of – I wonder if they're doing it on top of a thing that they themselves don't use, which I don't think in and of itself is a condemnation.
John:
That's the job of just as –
John:
mike montero that's the job of a designer someone's got a job for you they pay you to do it you do the best job possible you don't have to be a user of the product maybe it helps sometimes but it's like it's you know if you are a great designer and they pay you to do a great design and you do a great design and you solve a customer problem with your great design uh then you've succeeded and it doesn't really matter if that customer problem is not a problem that you yourself have but at the same time i i you know like i said it's you're putting a beautiful face on
John:
something that's not like almost not deserving of that, of that beauty.
John:
And like, and maybe giving it to an audience who does not value the work that you've done to the degree that you think like maybe, maybe you think you're solving a problem that they have and they don't really have that problem.
Marco:
So I don't know.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, lynda.com, Squarespace, and Ting.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Margo and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
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, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C
Casey:
So I got to tell you that my father is going to listen to this episode and blow a gasket.
John:
Because I said IBM is boring?
Casey:
Well, no, no, no.
Casey:
Actually, I don't think that would bother him at all.
Casey:
Because the offer code is Casey?
Casey:
No, not that either.
Casey:
It's just he works in investor relations for IBM.
Casey:
And so because of that, he knows market cap and all these other numbers off the top of his head because it's his job.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
And inevitably, something that one of us said is going to be wrong in his eyes, and only I get to hear the aftermath.
John:
Well, you should ask him.
John:
We have this opportunity.
John:
You should ask him, and you can share the results with us, if not with the entire audience.
John:
If he was investor relations...
John:
And he could substitute IBM's numbers in his current job and take Microsoft's numbers.
John:
Would he do that?
John:
Because he has to say, here's our market cap, here's our revenue, here's our margins, here's what our growth was.
John:
Would he trade those numbers for Microsoft's numbers?
John:
Obviously, he would trade them for Microsoft's numbers in 1996, right?
John:
But would he trade them for Microsoft's numbers now?
John:
Because that's to get a good idea of like...
John:
If our assessment of the size and relative health and success and growth profiles of these companies is anything close to what we were guessing based on known numbers, are IBM's margins way lower because they have...
John:
a huge staff and because the margins on service are lower than they are and the stuff that Microsoft does.
John:
Are there is is IBM's revenue higher, but the margins lower is are they similar?
John:
Are they making similar profits?
John:
So just ask him if you could take Microsoft's numbers for you know, last year or last quarter, whatever, would you would you do that?
John:
Would it would it make people smile more?
John:
Or would it just be a wash?
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
And I don't know very much about any of this.
Casey:
So I won't even begin to wager a guess.
Casey:
But yeah, I'm sure I won't even have to prompt him.
Casey:
Even if this part doesn't make it in the show, I'm confident he will seek me out and explain to me all the ways in which all of us were wrong.
Marco:
Of course.
Marco:
And by the way, I really feel the need to clarify.
Marco:
My argument is not that Microsoft should only do the kinds of things that IBM and SAP and Oracle do.
Marco:
I'm saying they should move into that direction, but I'm not saying that you need to get rid of Windows and Office licensing and stuff like that.
Marco:
That's not what I'm saying at all.
John:
That is Oracle.
John:
That's the same thing.
John:
Like continuing to do, because that is the new version of what Oracle and SAP is like, I don't think that's a growth market anymore, selling personal computers for people to use at work.
John:
And getting back to your thing you said before, is it just because people are using computers for longer?
John:
Like it's so hard to tell that because you can't tell until the time comes when they're going to buy a new one.
John:
Like if people just stop buying PCs, you could say, well, that's it.
John:
The PC market is done.
John:
No one wants PCs anymore.
John:
But it could be the case that they're merely just keeping their old ones for longer.
John:
And so you have to wait.
John:
Are they keeping them for five years, for 10 years, for 50 years?
John:
If everyone stopped now and no one bought a new PC for 50 years, we would say, well, the PC is dead.
John:
But if 50 years rolls around, they all replaced their PCs, it's like, no, they were just waiting longer between PCs.
John:
So it's hard to tell when you're in the midst of it.
John:
I mean, the customers aren't synchronized in that manner.
Yeah.
John:
there are so many factors here that it's like something's going on over there and all we know is that this is no longer the growth market that it once was uh is it dwindling to go out away forever will the installed base shrink i mean computers will eventually break won't they i mean you can't use them forever something will happen to them or you'll have to either decide do i need to replace this thing that just broke or do i not need this in my life anymore maybe maybe that's the outside you know 50 years isn't you know how long does it take for a pc to break or
John:
Or become useless for common tasks because it doesn't have like a – in the old days, it can't connect to the internet, and you can't put an Ethernet card in it, so it became worthless.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I think we'll just have to wait and see.
John:
But anyway, I think that business is –
John:
A serving business type of, you know, like, I think we'd all agree that if there's any place that the iPad is going to steal share from the PC, it's going to be consumers first, because maybe they don't need a PC at home.
John:
So the enterprise market where you keep selling desktops, Windows desktops on people's desks, they can keep doing that doesn't seem like anyone else wants that business.
John:
but it doesn't seem like it's going to be a big growth business either.
John:
So I always think they have to find their, what is their growth business while they do, while they continue to use the macro strategy for, you know, windows and everything.
John:
What is their, what is their growth strategy for the future?
Casey:
Just bring XP back.
Casey:
That's the growth strategy.
Casey:
Start selling XP all over again.
John:
It's like, well, maybe Xbox could be their growth strategy if they could figure out that.
John:
If they could just outlast Sony and Nintendo or buy both of them.
John:
I think they already tried to buy Nintendo once.
John:
They may have that opportunity again.
Marco:
I can't imagine that market is substantial enough to matter on their balance sheet at the end of the day, really.
Marco:
Even if they dominated the game console market, who cares at their scale?
Marco:
How big is that market, really?
Marco:
And do you think, again, everyone playing Bingo at home, again, your argument for Nintendo was always that as long as there continues to be a market for dedicated game hardware... It's not a growth market either, probably.
Right.
Marco:
Well, but again, related to your Nintendo argument, my argument for Microsoft, I think, holds as long as there is a market for mass market PCs.
Marco:
As long as there is a market for non-high-end specialty like Apple, non-high-end PCs...
Marco:
Cheap, widespread, customizable from God knows who.
Marco:
As long as that market continues to exist, Microsoft and its Windows client business will be fine.
Marco:
And the Windows server market depends on that.
Marco:
And so that'll be fine.
John:
I only said that about Nintendo because I don't think they're capable of anything else.
John:
That's why I said that about Nintendo.
John:
Nintendo is confined to that reality because they are not capable of making their own mobile operating system an app store and platform, right?
John:
But I think Microsoft is capable of pretty much anything that any other technology company is capable of.
John:
Except breaking into smartphones and tablets.
John:
Well...
John:
I mean, the hardest thing to do is to make a platform.
John:
And Microsoft knows how to make a platform.
John:
Doesn't mean all their platforms are going to be successful, but of the few companies in the entire world that have proven they know how to make and support a platform, Microsoft is definitely one of them.
John:
So that's why I like...
John:
Well, they can't all be winners, but at least they've shown they can do it once.
John:
Nintendo has never done it, and it's really hard.
John:
Palm kind of sort of did it once with Palm OS, but couldn't do it again.
John:
Lots of other companies have never been able to make a general-purpose computing platform despite trying or never make a long-lived one.
John:
It'll just kind of fade away.
John:
So I'm not willing to confine.
John:
Nintendo, I'm willing to confine to that because they can barely do what they're doing now.
John:
And they just don't have it.
John:
But Microsoft has so many people, so many smart people, so much institutional experience that there is no technology section of the market that they should feel is out of reach because they will never be able to.
John:
It's not like they can do everything, but they should pick what they want to do.
John:
But I'm not willing to say...
John:
microsoft basically you just better hope there continues to be a market for pcs because you can't do anything else right uh despite like as you said evidence of the contrary where they they haven't been able to do it in phones haven't been able to do it in tablets but i think they showed in game consoles even though it's again not a growth market there was another place where they developed a platform and were as successful as the other people who are doing the similar thing so all right titles
Casey:
Yeah, whatever.
Marco:
Cool.
Casey:
Go team.
Marco:
Good talk.
Marco:
I think it's interesting.
Marco:
Listening to Back to Work this week, it's interesting that Merlin is just now replacing a 2006 Mac Pro.
Marco:
And mostly because Mavericks does not install officially on it, so he has to kind of hack the installer, and it's kind of unstable now.
Marco:
But this is an eight-year-old computer.
Marco:
And granted, it was a very high-end computer eight years ago, but that's still an eight-year-old computer that was really working just fine until a few months ago.
John:
Well, that's when it filled up with dander, finally.
Yeah.
John:
Like, there was a little bit of room left, but once it filled entirely, then, you know, while it's full, you've got to get a new one.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
But, yeah, I think, you know, it's...
Marco:
That says a lot about the market.
Marco:
Granted, yeah, it's a little bit different with Macs versus PCs, but it's not that far off.
John:
I think laptops help a little bit because people break them and stuff.
John:
I don't think laptops can last as long.
John:
I think it would be harder to find someone who is still using a 2006 laptop who hasn't had it repaired because it's kind of like cars.
John:
You can keep them for a long time, but eventually you're going to replace so many parts of that car.
John:
So if anyone has got a 2006 laptop...
John:
Either they're okay with the parts that are falling off of it or getting loose or whatever, or they've replaced parts on it.
Casey:
Actually, I have a bit of a story about that.
Casey:
My first Mac, which was a 2008-ish polybook, white polybook, I gave that to Aaron when I got my late 2011 MacBook Pro.
Casey:
And around the time I did that,
Casey:
I was able to get Apple to replace the case because it had split in a few spots, and that was one of the get-out-of-jail-free cards that if the case had split on a polybook, you could get Apple to give you a new case pretty much without question.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
So Underscore actually came and visited Saturday morning and Aaron had to reboot her computer for some reason or another.
Casey:
And we were measuring the time it took to reboot this 2008 Poly book in like tens of minutes almost at this point.
Casey:
It might have been like 10 or 15 minutes it took to reboot.
Casey:
And so I ended up going to the Apple store with underscore partially to kill time, partially to actually impulse buy her either an 11 inch air or a 13 inch air.
Casey:
I had intended to get the 13 and underscore said that Mrs. Underscore really likes the 11 because on rare occasions she will put it in her purse, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
And so we ended up going to the Apple store.
Casey:
I was standing in the Apple store with underscore, and I didn't buy a thing because I couldn't figure out whether or not Erin would want the 11 of the 13.
Casey:
And she had somewhere else to be, so she couldn't go with us.
Casey:
And I didn't end up buying anything, and I still haven't.
Casey:
And Erin swears to me there's no point because she really doesn't use her computer for that much.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I'm in that weird, uncomfortable moment where I feel like it's time for her to get a new Mac, probably an air.
Casey:
And yet on the other side of the coin, I can't really justify it because all she does with it is like basic word processing occasionally and the web browsing.
Casey:
And that's about it.
John:
Wait until the Airs are Retina, at least.
John:
You can wait longer.
Marco:
Yeah, that's what I said.
Marco:
Like, when you told me this, I said, you know, that if I wasn't in a rush, I would not buy a MacBook Air right now.
Marco:
Because the rumors of that 11.9-inch Retina Air...
Marco:
I think are very interesting.
Marco:
Because to me, that kind of sounds like a replacement for the MacBook Air, not a new model.
John:
Don't you know that's the 12-inch iPad Pro, Marco?
John:
I love the screen rumors, because that 12-inch screen rumor is everywhere, and everyone keeps saying, 12-inch iPad, 12-inch iPad.
John:
It's like, why is the Air not the first... That's the main headline.
John:
Retina Air screens.
John:
And the secondary one is like, I suppose it could be for a 12-inch iPad.
John:
Instead, it's the reverse.
John:
It's like, well, 12-inch screen, that's obviously a 12-inch iPad.
Marco:
See, I really think if they release that thing, there's a very good chance that that replaces both MacBook Airs, which is controversial because it would make the smallest Mac a little bit bigger.
John:
I think it's easy to... I don't think that's even that controversial because by that time...
John:
seeing 13 inch new retina 13 inch macbook pros all the time now like it's it's so skinny like that you don't need like the 13 inch air is practically redundant make one air make it super duper skinny find what do you think is the compromise price and i think i think that will make people feel better
John:
About like, oh, do I want a 13-inch Air or an 11-inch Air or a 13-inch MacBook?
John:
But now it'll be just like the Air is the super skinny one.
John:
There's one of them.
John:
And then you can have a 13 and a 15.
John:
And they're both pretty darn skinny too.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, yeah, I totally agree.
Marco:
The 13-inch Retina is so good and so thin and light.
Marco:
I do think it largely removes the need for the 13-inch Air.
Marco:
And if something comes out that's closer in size to the 11, then that could be it.
Marco:
I mean, there's going to be a few people who would be upset by that, but already, between the 11 and 13, I think the ideal size is between those two.
Marco:
Yeah, because 11's a little too small.
Marco:
Yeah, and that screen resolution on the 11 is killer.
Marco:
In a bad way, it's killer.
Marco:
That screen resolution is tight, also in a bad way.
Marco:
Why do all these words mean good and bad?
Marco:
The 90s ruined language.
Marco:
And music.
Music.
John:
Come on now.
John:
I was thinking, Casey, with Aaron replacing her thing and not sure that she needs one, my mother is in a similar situation where she thinks she doesn't need a new laptop, and I think she does, and she's needed one for a long time, but she won't give it up because she needs the optical disc in her mind.
John:
and i've been trying to convince her this is this is not the case anyway her current strategy is that she's going to do the old car route which is can't we just upgrade my laptop and i had to gradually tell her that yes this is a possible and this is a thing that can be done and so the next time she visits i'm giving her more ram and putting in an ssd
Marco:
And actually, one of the biggest reasons not to impulse buy a laptop at the Apple store is that you're stuck with the stock levels of RAM and hard drives and everything else.
Marco:
Whereas if you go and if you order online, I just check.
Marco:
So the stock is only four gigs of RAM, which I would not buy that today.
John:
But don't they have, with the soldered on the motherboard and RAM, which is pretty much all of them now, don't they have both models at Apple stores, like the 8 and 16?
Marco:
They usually only carry at Apple stores the ones that are, like there's four areas you can select to start with on Apple.com, like 211s and 213s.
Marco:
Usually they'll carry those four, like the ones that are the starting configs on Apple.com.
Marco:
So each family will have like two or three of them.
Marco:
But you won't be able to get all the different options usually.
John:
It's a shame.
John:
There's not really that many options.
Marco:
Yeah, actually, you're right.
Marco:
These days, there's even fewer than there used to be because they keep soldering on certain things and stuff like that.
Marco:
But yeah, I mean, if I were getting an 11-inch air today, for whatever it's worth, looking at the base model, first of all, there's a storage issue with 128 gigs.
Marco:
Storage aside, I would not get 4 gigs.
Marco:
I would get 8 gigs of RAM, definitely.
Marco:
And you can get a substantially faster CPU for $150 more.
John:
Yeah, everyone always asks me, should I get the i7?
John:
I was like, it's $100 more.
John:
Of course you get it.
Marco:
Well, it's $150, but still, that's a relatively small amount of money for a computer for what's going to be over time a pretty substantial gain in your total usage of the thing.
Marco:
Similar with the RAM.
Marco:
The RAM is $100 to go from 4 to 8 gigs.
Marco:
So yeah, I would say base price plus $250 for the CPU and the RAM, that's a good buy.
Marco:
Where it starts to get challenging is the storage.
Marco:
And whether that's enough for you will, of course, depend on you.
Casey:
And I think if I were to do it, I think I would get a 13 because I talked to her about Mrs. Underscore putting hers in her purse on occasion.
Casey:
And Aaron basically said that that's wonderful that it would fit, but I can't ever see myself doing that.
Casey:
And so I'd probably get her 13.
Casey:
We agree that four gigs is just unacceptable at that.
John:
because this would be a five or six year computer hopefully eight gigs is unacceptable too so that's why yeah but i mean i i don't i don't believe the airs can take more than eight can they no you're right i don't i don't think they can either but that's like again presumably when the retina ones come out there'll be some fancy fancy 12 inch air they can go up to 16.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
And I should also note that when I bought my personal laptop, which is effectively the same as my work one, it's a 15-inch anti-glare high-res MacBook Pro.
Casey:
This is pre-retina.
Casey:
I believe I got the most baller one I could possibly buy.
Casey:
And I think you had the same one at the time, Marco.
Casey:
But anyway, I walked in and bought that laptop.
Casey:
So they actually carried the completely specced up version.
Casey:
I think it had the default amount of RAM, but in terms of like processor and screen and all that, they had the fully specced version ready to buy at the store.
Marco:
Yeah, it was different there because they had the anti-glare option and the high-res anti-glare.
Marco:
They had these four different screens or three different screens you could pick.
Marco:
And it was a little bit different then.
Marco:
But yeah, when I bought my Retina...
Marco:
I decided to be impatient one night.
Marco:
I'm like, you know what?
Marco:
I'm going to go buy one of those things.
Marco:
It was months after WWDC when it was announced.
Marco:
One night, I'm fighting with web development trying to get my site to look right.
Marco:
I'm like, you know what?
Marco:
Screw it.
Marco:
I'm just going to go buy one of these things at the Apple store and I'll get the cheapest one they have because I don't need that much for this laptop.
Marco:
And I did.
Marco:
And it worked okay, except that it only – I think it has 8 gigs of RAM, and I wanted 16 or something like that.
Marco:
Like the RAM is like the one thing I regretted on it, and that's something that you could only get online at the time.
John:
Yeah, now they started the RAM, and that's another reason to always go up.
John:
It's like I'm upgrading my mom's RAM.
John:
I'm not going to be able to do that for her next Mac.
Marco:
It's worth it these days to look at the configs online and not necessarily buy anything on Impulse in the store.
John:
I don't think I told you guys I ordered a new TiVo, too.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, the Romeo, right?
John:
Finally gave in, yeah.
John:
I mean, I did it because I went to the TiVo site and looked at my current crop of TiVos, and the TiVo HD XL that's upstairs has paid for its lifetime service multiple times over at this point, so...
John:
even though my current tivo premiere has not paid for its lifetime service yet i'm going to keep that once i'm just going to shift it up um and supposedly you can actually get money for these old tivos that have lifetime service because the person who buys it doesn't have to pay a monthly fee like the lifetime service goes with the with the hardware so i'll eventually be trying to sell i'll see how see how much of that is true how much money can i actually get for this thing but it's perfectly good dvr with two turners the records in hd and the ui is faster than the premiere
Casey:
It's perfectly good as long as you don't mind ads in your DVR, which I didn't realize was a thing, and somebody pointed out to me after the show when we talked about this at length.
Casey:
How do you of all people put up with that?
John:
They used to not be there at all, and you can make them go away, but they come back.
John:
It's not like the ad play video in your face or anything like that.
John:
It's just like next to the scrubber after you're done watching the show when it says you're done with the show, would you like to delete or whatever, there's an ad banner above the little scrubber bar.
John:
which i i wouldn't even mind that much a if it was relevant and sometimes it is like it'll be an advertisement for some show like hey this show is premiering hit thumbs up to record or whatever and like that's actually a useful feature because i'm like oh yeah i did want to see that show and because i don't watch commercials anymore i'll forget when a show is premiering and when it pops up that thing if i can just press a button and say yeah record that for me that's good but when it's just like bounty paper towels are awesome
John:
fine whatever it's kind of like it's kind of like the ads on gmail where it's like eventually you just don't see them but they keep making it worse and worse and the worst thing about it is that sometimes it takes a while to load that ad and so before you get the screen that says do you want to delete this show or keep it or whatever you're waiting and i realize what i'm waiting for is for it to load the stupid text ad banner so yeah that's not great uh
John:
But I still prefer it.
Casey:
You keep justifying this however you want, but it's still BS.
John:
Well, you know, it's only a matter of time before.
John:
The only reason that isn't appearing on your DVR is because your DVR doesn't have the software for it yet.
John:
But wait, they'll get there.