Hold Me!
It's scary, and I don't like it.
Hold me.
We missed a lot this week, or last week, I guess.
Did we?
We missed a lot.
I was here.
He says with not a hint of bitterness.
No, of course not.
John, bitter?
No, surely not.
I did want to mention quickly the Dave Morin Vanity Fair thing.
Oh, God.
Because I think, from what I can tell,
Based on some things I've seen, both from him making a few little comments here and there, and from a few other people, including the magazine's esteemed editor, Glenn Fleischman, who apparently talked to him a little bit more, it sounds like it was pretty overblown.
It sounds like the Vanity Fair reporter might have been exaggerating or taking some of those things really far out of context or mangling them somewhat.
So I want to give the guy a little bit of the benefit of the doubt.
Because I've had reporters mangle stuff I've told them, and it's terrible because it makes you look like a total douche.
And certainly his thing did make him look that way.
But...
We don't really know how much of that he really said and how bad it really is.
So I do want to give the guy the benefit of the doubt and float the idea that that might not have been entirely accurate because it sounds like it probably wasn't.
I mean, I don't know.
Could any human being be that much of a colossal jerk without intending it?
I don't know if he's so much of a jerk, because if I had given those answers and people had complained about me giving those answers, I feel like I could defend them.
i i don't i didn't read the whole thing but i saw most of the quotes and they did seem ridiculous but assuming they are talking about real things i would say to the people who didn't like them you know come at me bro like they'd be like oh you got you got two you got two phones you got one for the day and one for the night i'd be like yeah because i don't like a battery pack makes my phone bigger uh and so if i have two phones
And I can't charge it all day because I'm running around from meeting to meeting.
So having two phones lets me have a skinnier one.
You could defend it.
And he actually did defend that particular point.
He said in some Twitter app reply to somebody that what he really said was that he has... And he does have two iPhones, which is ridiculous.
But he is also a very successful tech company CEO.
So it goes with the territory to some degree.
But he said the reason he has two...
is he has one of them for only work stuff and only work apps, and the other one for only personal stuff, so that he can leave work at work and not be distracted by personal stuff.
So that actually, okay, I still don't really ever see myself having two iPhones, even if money was no object, but I could see why he would do that.
It's not a great solution, but I feel like you could explain it and defend it.
Now, what you can't explain and defend is, I mean, assuming the quotes are accurate, is saying those things in the context of an interview and not thinking people are going to think you sound like a tool.
Because you will.
Certain things need to be...
provide context and if you don't think you're going to be able to provide that context or you know like it's not the right forum to do that like say you're talking with your friends about how you manage your phones that's the time to plot oh i have one for work and one for home and stuff like that because it's not extravagant cost wise and it is kind of annoying i bet he has lots of problems syncing stuff up between the phones and stuff but that's the context where you bring this up you don't bring it up and like hey we're talking to you for a magazine interview like it's not that's not the time to bring that up so he made
some strategic errors in when to bring things up.
And the, the always being on the offensive defensive, like you could say that as a joke, meaning mostly you keep your ringer off because you don't want to be disturbed during the day.
And the person says, and ask you why is a lot, you know, the offense defense thing.
It's a funny joke, but if, if you just see the words written there, you're like, he's dead serious.
He thinks, you know,
Well, one of the theories I heard right at the beginning, right after it was published, somebody said that it looks like he might have just been trolling them.
And if you go into it with that theory and you read it again, you can kind of see that.
I would say that is equally plausible as he's that much of a douche.
I'd say those are equal.
I would agree with that.
You told me that we had discussed this when I had first arrived in New York last week, and when you first said that, I was like, well, maybe it's possible.
But really, I mean, I think the way more likely answer is that he wasn't trying to intentionally troll them, and he isn't that much of a douche, and the real answer is it was just blown out of proportion by the reporter.
He might not be that self-aware.
That's true.
It's hard to tell.
I mean, look at the picture, the picture he's got of himself.
He does like collars that stick up, to give him that.
That is true.
And the pictures are kind of precious, and you would think...
Someone who's just a little bit more self-aware and perhaps not a CEO of a big and important company.
I couldn't put a picture of myself like that.
I don't know.
It's a tough call, but this is a fluff non-story anyway.
It'll just come and go, and I don't fault him as a person for any of this silliness.
Speaking of silliness, I guess let's go chronologically.
Facebook Home.
Yeah, I don't know what to make of that.
I was never big into Facebook, although it seems from what I can tell that both you guys, even at your peak, liked Facebook a lot less than I liked Facebook.
But I look at it a few times a week because it seems socially awkward not to.
I have never looked at Facebook a few times a week, ever.
And that's exactly my point, is that I think at my peak, certainly, and even now, I probably have embraced it more than I think either of you gentlemen.
And I think I could get away without ever looking at it, and certainly Erin and I have mostly the same circle of friends, so she could keep me updated on the 800 people that are having babies right now.
I don't know.
I couldn't imagine an entire phone experience based solely off of what all my friends are doing.
And furthermore, it seems to me like one of the things that society is challenged with these days, that sounded way overblown, but I'm going to roll with it now.
is that you're never in the moment.
You're always worrying about what your Twitter followers are saying or what your Instagram followers are commenting on and liking and so on and so forth.
And this seems to just make that even worse.
I don't know.
I just don't get it.
I think it depends on... For me, one of the reasons why I've never gotten into Facebook... I have an account, but I've never been active.
In fact, my wife created the account for me when we got engaged so that...
she would have something to point to.
So she could put you as a fiance.
Yeah, exactly.
That's when I got my account, and that's why I got my account.
That is very symbolic and apt.
Yeah.
And so I've never really been active, because it's not that I fundamentally object to the product.
I don't really care either way on that front.
It's that...
Facebook is set up to conflate the idea of people you know and people whose content you want to follow online.
And to me, those are very much non-overlapping circles.
And I think that's true for a lot of people.
And that's why the beauty of Twitter...
At first, Facebook didn't even have asymmetric following.
I think now it does.
I don't even know for sure.
That's how little I use it.
Usually, I'll end up logging in maybe once every two or three months to answer some message from somebody that I probably should answer that I get an email notification about.
Every time I log in, there's a totally different interface, and it confuses the crap out of me.
I never know how to do anything or what's going on or where something is.
You're like an old man.
Yeah, really.
I need the kids to explain it to me.
That's how I am every time I log into Facebook.
I don't need the kids to explain it to me.
I know an annoying product when I see one.
I'm like, no.
I know all the things that it can do and I can figure out how to do them eventually.
I just do not want to do them.
I don't, I don't, do not want is my reaction to Facebook entirely.
And like, I have to stop myself from like, you know how people get, you know, they're, they get all angry about Apple and they're just like angry at Apple.
And like, you just mentioned, mentioned anything about, oh, I got my new iPad today.
Oh, I hate Apple.
And they just get angry.
I have to stop myself from having that feeling about Facebook.
We're not, we don't curse on this podcast, right?
I said douche like four times.
I mean, we can curse lightly.
I'll abbreviate, but like,
Every time someone mentions anything about Facebook, I just hear it in passing.
This voice in my head says, man, F Facebook.
I'm like, wait a second.
Why are you getting angry about it?
It's just like a website where people do stuff and they enjoy things.
That's a good way for people to connect.
Not everyone can have their own website, and it's a way for people to post pictures to each other.
My rational brain knows why Facebook exists and is popular, but this other part of me has visceral hatred of it.
It's a struggle.
It's one thing to say this is a website where people can communicate.
Tumblr is a lot of those same things for people.
So I got to see that develop.
And I think what's different with things like Tumblr versus things like Facebook is that Facebook is one of these companies.
We've had a few of these in our history of this industry.
It's one of these companies where...
If something is having some success, they want a piece of it too.
And they can't stand not to be in a market.
And the originator of this was Microsoft.
In our lifetime, anyway.
In our industry, I would say.
um like i don't think i like the previous giants like ibm i don't think they were ever quite microsoft was much worse about this than facebook is so far because yeah that's true it wouldn't do anything like if anyone became remotely popular like well we're gonna do one of those and facebook at least is like all right well lots of people can go off and do lots of other things but you know they didn't make a music player when the ipod was popular on
They didn't make a tablet.
Microsoft was like, anybody does anything, even if it looks like they're going to fail, we'll make a failure product alongside it, just in case.
Well, you know what?
Let's merge with NBC, too, or whatever they did, or buy NBC.
Interactive TV could be the future.
People could be doing things on TV.
They're not as desperate feeling as...
But that type of vibe where a company gets big enough.
And I think this is a rational thing.
Google and Facebook both do it.
It's like, look, we are big and successful.
But if we're just content to be what we are, we are going to get left behind.
And so all the companies are looking to see what the next thing is going to be.
And.
Like, you know, Google decided, look, we need to do something with social and refocus their entire company on Google+.
And Facebook, already the king of social, said, you know, we see the area where we're weak is in mobile and that is not going away.
It's going to be a big thing.
And we got to figure out something there.
So I think it's a reasonable strategy for companies who are very large not to be happy with what they are and just get better at it, but to look for the other thing that's going to be big.
Not everything.
Facebook's not making a game console.
They're not like, you know...
doing uh things that will deliver groceries to your house or whatever like whatever ebay is doing stuff like that like they're they've picked a reasonable thing i think for like look we have to be in mobile if we're not in mobile we're screwed long term and so they're doing something well the way they're doing it though and this is this is partly why i brought up the the sprawl argument the way they're doing it
is seemingly designed with the assumption that everyone using it exclusively uses Facebook or primarily uses Facebook as their communication mechanism to anybody.
And it seems like... And part of that might just be...
blindness to people who only partially care about Facebook or communicate with some of their friends on Facebook and some not.
And part of it might be an effort to actively extinguish that kind of use and to convert those people to spread the tentacles and bring them in and railroad them into using Facebook for way more of the communication they previously were doing through other channels like text messaging or anything else.
And
And that kind of rubs me the wrong way.
So if it's just ignorance where they're just thinking, well, of course, everyone who uses Facebook only uses Facebook.
That's one thing.
I don't think they're that stupid, though.
Facebook has shown extremely good product sense, product sensibilities, skills in getting people in and keeping them there.
So I don't think you can attribute any Facebook move to stupidity.
I think they have very, very smart people running that company.
And so, you know, it's not like Microsoft.
You know, they have extremely smart people running that company.
So they know exactly what they're doing.
And I think it's very clear what they're doing here.
They are extinguishing or at least attempting to extinguish Facebook.
any other communication methods on the phones that have been infected by this home thing.
Well, not extinguishing it.
All the old stuff is still there, too.
Well, they're trying to bury it, is what I'm saying.
They just want to be there, too.
If they're not a sibling, at least with SMS, text messaging, or whatever other thing people are using, if they're not at least a sibling with that, if you have to launch the Facebook app, they're subordinate to the rest of the phone experience, kind of like they are on iOS, right?
Yeah.
They think they should at least be a sibling with those things, and since Android allows you to take over the lock screen and stuff, it looks like they're out in front of everything else, but I would still call that a sibling just because it's the first thing you see.
It's still alongside the other stuff.
Maybe.
I don't know.
I think we'll see how it plays out because one very careful line they have to walk is if they do go too far in that direction of being too aggressive and not working very well or making the phone not work very well, if you want to do a lot of non-Facebook communication, if they go too far in that direction, they'll have fewer installs of this thing and fewer sales of those phones that have it pre-installed.
So...
They have to walk that line somewhat.
I guess it'll be interesting to see how this plays out and to see is this still roughly the same kind of thing in six months or a year and how many people are using it.
Yeah, the thing I was thinking about for home and for another topic I hope we talk about, I have a blog post stewing on this, and I will go ahead and spoil the whole blog post.
Does it involve a utensil?
There's not that much overlap, it seems, between people who read the blog and people who listen to the podcast, because very often I choose not to blog something that I podcasted about, and people are like, what are you talking about, podcast?
I don't know what you're talking about.
Anyway...
So in both of these situations, I'm viewing it kind of like an RTS a little bit.
And the resource that is critical to victory in the realm of both Facebook Home and also in the WebKit Blink thing is developers.
They need to mine for more developers, basically.
And the reason I'm thinking about it in that respect, and I'm talking about developers who make this stuff, is
Then on home, everyone's like, oh, this is just a precursor.
They're going to fork Android.
They're going to do their own OS, right?
They could do the lock screen now, but clearly they're going to make their own phone OS.
And thanks, Google, for giving us the head start with Android.
We'll take what you've got and go off in our own direction, kind of like Blink did with WebKit, right?
uh but and the same thing with samsung like oh samsung's working on their android port thanks google for all this your hard work now we're off to the races haha screw you google we're making all the money you're screwed like they can't they can't beat facebook with google plus uh and they can't uh they can't make money off android because samsung's selling all the phones and making all the profit so poor google did all the work to make android and other people just stole and did what they wanted like that's one narrative about this thing but in in the case of samsung and facebook
I have to think, look, does Facebook have the skill to say, oh, thanks, Google, we're taking Android, and we'll just take it from here.
We'll fork it, and we'll go off on our own.
Can they support a platform?
Can they develop an OS on an ongoing basis?
Well, do they need to?
Well, but that's the whole thing.
Like, it's saying, okay, you either fork it, in which case, okay, well, you're on your own.
It's not like you're going to keep merging with the next version of Android that Google puts out.
You will diverge.
You will fork.
You will split.
You will not be able to benefit from the future work that Google does, or it will be very difficult for you.
Otherwise, you're not forking.
Otherwise, you're just piggybacking.
So when people say, oh, they're going to make their own OS and it will be a fork...
Like, you're giving up being able to do sane merges with the next major version of Android.
Like, you're either going to be the platform owner or you're not.
Right now, Google is the platform owner because they made it.
They continue to make it.
The next version of the OS comes from them.
And the other people say, okay, well, Google's come up with the next major version.
Let's integrate it and screw it up in some way and put our little crap on it, right?
And that's what Facebook's doing now.
But a fork is become master of your own destiny.
Own the OS.
We make our own OS.
It used to be based on Android.
Yeah, whatever.
But now it's our own thing and we develop it.
We support the developers like to the point where you could have application compatibility diversion some point in the future because that's what a fork eventually leads to.
Right.
Oh, this one works on Facebook's OS, but not on regular Android, not on Samsung's OS.
And I don't think Facebook has the ability to be a platform owner.
Maybe they can hire up that ability.
Certainly, they didn't have the ability to make a well-designed UI until they hired all those designers.
But right now, I don't think Facebook has the ability to be a platform owner, because that is a high bar.
How many successful platform owners have we seen in our industry?
Microsoft, Apple, Google...
And Facebook.
They're not making a native OS.
That's what I'm talking about.
Well, see, and that's the thing is that it is a very big distinction.
But to kind of shove that aside just for a moment, I mean, when I remember back to the original days of Facebook where it was completely Facebook controlled, there were no apps, there was no freaking Farmville or anything like that.
it was a very different place.
And that was really about sharing your life.
And at that point, it wasn't yet about throwing away all of your privacy.
Or if it was, they were quieter about it.
But now, to your point, it's not a native platform.
But it's still, to a large degree, it's a platform.
I mean, you have all these different apps, if you would call them that, running on top of their platform.
And they've done a lot of kind of wild things in order to make...
their platform work.
And what comes to mind, and this is kind of what you guys were saying about them having so many really bright people there, and Marco, I presume you would know better than I, didn't they write like a PHP to C++ cross-compiler or something like that?
Yeah, at some point they did some crazy thing, but that's server-side.
You're right.
They have a web platform and they have an API platform, but writing an OS, like...
You have a hardware device, and you are the operating system on the hardware device, and you build up in layers from the thing controlling the cell radio to the graphics system to every other part.
Like, it's an OS, an actual native OS.
And Google is doing all that work now.
Well, not quite.
They started with Linux.
I mean, come on.
Let's be realistic here.
Right, but, like, they didn't fork Linux, right?
Right.
You know, it's like they have a base foundation that they follow, but when you do the OS part, like, that's...
That's where you're making the API, and the new version has a different API for scrolling, and has different buttons, and has this.
That's OS development, and OS development involves all that annoying crap of like, oh, you've got to have API documentation, and you've got to have a developer program, and you've got to have an SDK, and you've got to make sure the tools work.
All the crap that Apple does, all the crap that Google does for its Google development.
And you have to develop the OS.
You have to make it better.
Year after year, they want a new major version that does something better, that has faster graphics, that uses the GPU better, that has new APIs.
It takes a lot of people, a lot of skill, a lot of expertise to do that, and it's not easy.
Amazon was the example.
They forked Android to make their little tablet thing.
Amazon, they forked it, and it's their own thing, but they don't have the skills in-house to continue to develop their own OS.
Inevitably, they're going to have to.
Either just be this evolutionary dead end that slowly evolves in whatever direction they want, or they're going to have to do some super painful re-sync or another re-fork or something.
But clearly they have not taken the reins of the OS.
I think they actually have pulled more recent changes from Google into their version already for some of the newer devices.
I'm pretty sure somebody told me that they had done that before.
See, if they're doing that, they're not really much of a fork at that point.
Then you're just kind of like one of those people who's taking what Android's done and mutating it.
You either have your own OS or you don't.
Are you dependent on Google or not?
If Google decides we're not developing Android anymore, are you screwed?
That's how you can tell whether...
You are really a master of your own destiny.
Apple is not relying on anyone to develop their rest.
Microsoft is not relying on anyone.
Neither is Google.
But if Google just folds its arms and says, you know what?
Never mind that Android stuff.
We're going to stop developing it.
Everyone who makes an Android device who has been using Android in any form are going to be like, but the next year when Apple comes out with a new version of their mobile OS, what will we do?
And Google should be like, well, you know.
What does that mean?
Someone could quote from Watchmen right now if they knew the quote, but I don't.
But you nerds listening do, so imagine it in your head right now.
That's how you can tell whether you're independent.
It's worth considering what happens in that scenario.
Let's say – not that Google stops developing Android.
No, they're not going to do it, but I'm just saying that's just like a thought exercise to see if you really are independent.
But what if they take a closed source?
that's probably even less likely than them stopping development.
I don't know.
Is it?
I think the licensing prevents them from actually doing that on a go-forward basis.
I don't think they can just close the door and say, okay, well, what we released so far is open, but going forward, all of that will be closed.
Why?
If Amazon can do it,
I don't think Amazon has everything.
I don't know the licensing issues involved, but that seems very unlikely, like, legally speaking, and even if it's legally, like, politically, can you imagine what would happen there?
Like, it's much more likely that they will use their licensing agreements with the Google.
Their licensing agreements with the Google services to be like, you know how, like...
If you want to be able to use the Google services with your thing and be certified as an Android device and all the other tools they have to put people in lines they've been trying to use, like get carriers to stop mucking up their OS and stuff, they probably will continue to turn the screws on those.
But that doesn't do anything against Amazon, probably, because if they're just like, oh, well, you can't even call your thing Android.
All right, fine, we won't.
Okay, well, you can't even use the Google Play Store.
Okay, fine, we won't.
We'll have our own store.
Yeah.
I don't know what kind of screws they can turn on Amazon.
I don't think they could bring it closed, closed source.
But same type of deal.
Say they did take it closed source.
If you all of a sudden are sweating bullets because you realize you do not have people who can develop, maintain support at a mobile OS, which is an incredibly complicated thing, right?
Then you realize, oh, geez, we really were a parasite on Google, which may have been bad for Google and great for you when it was happening, but realize that's what you are.
So everyone who's clamoring for a Facebook...
you know fork or a samsung fork i think samsung is even less likely to be able to develop their own mobile os right that would be both of them could staff up to do it like facebook just bought os meta which was that company run by amit singh if i'm pronouncing his name correctly the author of the gigantic mac os 10 internals book that's off to my right right now uh he's a smart guy and
heavily into os as he did this like stealth startup that we don't even know what they're doing with a bunch of other smart people and facebook bought them i tweeted uh this afternoon that like you know now he's got an os now facebook has an os internals team so maybe they are staffing up for it but like that's that's the resource that they need to mine for if you want to be independent of google and have be a player in in the mobile space along with uh you know apple microsoft rim and google whoever you whoever you want to say out there who has actually a mobile platform you've got to be master of your own destiny and do that
i wonder though you know it's i think it's worth it's worth considering let's say something happened with google or with android or some something happened where it forced amazon to no longer be able to pull changes from google whatever whatever it is whether it's going closed source or whether it just becomes really impossible for them to do it or google does something else who knows but
suppose Amazon has to basically get stuck with what they have so far and either let it stagnate forever and just build minor things on top of it or hire some ridiculously large OS team to develop that, which is a major undertaking, as you said.
How long do you think they could go
without doing that like how long do you think they could keep selling kindle branded tablets and maybe even eventually phones uh while keeping the same rough version of android they have now and just doing minor tweaks of it as necessary over time a couple years probably
I'm thinking it might be like 10 years.
Not 10, because like, I mean, think about, I know things have matured a little bit, and it's not like horrendously slow or whatever.
But, you know, hardware, even if just in terms of hardware support, hardware moves on, like, you know, 10 years, all the phones are gonna be using 64 bit system on a chips, and they're gonna have a 32 bit OS.
And so like, right away, you just forget it, you need to do something there, you're not gonna be
Maybe those chips won't even run 32-bit stuff.
You have to have a solution for fat binaries, and maybe it's a different architecture.
Maybe they're all x86 then.
God knows what's going to happen in 10 years.
They cannot last that long, but a couple of years they could do it.
And by the end of that run, it would be like, boy, this really doesn't... The Amazon stuff already feels clunky and slow.
It's not even awesome now.
They don't have a big cushion.
But nobody buys the Amazon hardware because it's good.
Because it's not.
It's actually really quite terrible in most ways.
But nobody buys it for that.
The OS is not great.
And nobody buys it for that either.
People buy the Amazon stuff because of price and because of the Amazon content ecosystem.
In that order, those are the two big reasons why people buy the Amazon stuff.
I wish I knew how many people were actually buying Kindle Fire tablets and of those people, how many people were using them like tablets and not just as a way to play Angry Birds and read books.
Oh, but John, it's a record number of Kindle buyers this year.
It's like 20% more than last year.
And last year, it was the number one selling product on Amazon.
I don't pay attention to them until they've come to play.
Reading, fine.
I assume they're doing well in that because I don't see anyone else being dominant in the e-reading space.
But in the tablet space, it seems like they're just...
haven't really committed but they're like amazon is patient so they'll keep doing what they're doing and i don't doubt like of all the companies amazon has shown that it's willing to staff up to do crazy ass stuff you know uh so maybe someday they will be you know jeff bezos will wake up and say you know what we need no s team hire everybody and we will we won't they don't need to make any money for another two decades so right
And so the reason I bring that up in the context of Blink is because Blink is a similar situation where you had WebKit, you know, it was KHDML with a bunch of Linux nerds making their stuff for, like, Conqueror and everything.
Apple comes along and says, actually, we have, like...
We're going to pay people to develop this and they will quickly dwarf all your efforts because they're, you know, highly motivated, highly paid, highly skilled people versus your group of Linux volunteers.
And lo and behold, guess what?
Now we are the rulers of this thing and we dub it WebKit.
And thanks a lot, KHDML, KJS.
We are now running the show here.
And then Google comes along, makes its browser Chrome says, oh, we'll use WebKit.
That's great.
And Apple and Google go in lockstep, you know, developing stuff until eventually it's like Google has more committers and is putting more code into WebKit than Apple is.
And then, you know, there's this tension between the different process models and all this other stuff.
And they can't cooperate with each other because they're deadly enemies and they're supposed to be working on the same project.
And Google says, you know what, we're going off on our own.
And at that point, Google is entirely able to support its development.
If anything, Apple might be like, but does that mean you're not going to contribute security fixes to WebKit anymore?
Because those are really nice.
We like those.
And, you know, like Google made its own JavaScript engine, which was pretty darn good.
And Apple was like, man, we were so proud of our JavaScript engine.
They just made their own and they keep making theirs better.
And I guess ours is good.
But like, geez, every two weeks they keep making that thing faster and it's scary and I don't like it.
Hold me.
So, you know, this is a situation where Google has the developers.
Google does not need to mine for more developer resources.
They are in the driver's seat of Blink.
I have no trouble believing they will continue to develop Blink at, if not even more rapid pace than they have been developing WebKit.
And I feel like Apple is the one who is a little bit sheepish in this situation and going, geez, we really were benefiting from Google putting all those developers against WebKit.
And now...
You know, presumably some percentage, not all, but some percentage of those guys are only going to be committing to Blink.
And that's kind of not a great situation for Apple to be in.
But of course, if Blink really is open, Apple can always switch to it in a couple of years.
Oh, yeah, right.
Like that would ever happen.
It would happen if they keep it open.
I could see it happening.
Either that or Apple needs to replace those developers to keep up the pace, you know, because web rendering engines is complex and competitive field.
I think it's interesting.
We've always heard that, and as far as I know this is still true, that teams at Apple are really quite small.
And that their overall engineering staff is not nearly as big as you would think it would be for the number of products they have, the amount of money they make, etc.
And I think this is one of those things where, similar to server infrastructure, where their model just does not stand up to competition from other big tech giants, especially somebody like Google, where Google is willing to throw massive engineering resources at almost any problem that they want to solve.
And so if Apple wants to keep its teams small...
which seems to be the way it's set up to work, and certainly it seems like that's just a choice they've made.
If they want to keep their team small and not throw massive resources at this one particular problem, then they won't be able to compete.
They won't be able to keep up in this market anymore.
It's gotten too big for that model to work.
Well, they have small numbers of really smart people.
Sure, but at some point it becomes just a time problem.
Yeah, well, Google has larger numbers of equally smart people.
Exactly.
That's where the problem is.
They don't think they fear anything from Samsung throwing 100 times the number of bodies at it, but they're all mediocre.
Yeah, Samsung has never shown any ability to write good software.
And for that matter, neither has Amazon on the client side.
Amazon writes pretty good server-side software, but their client-side software has always been pretty abysmal.
So, stupid question.
WebKit, is that C and C++?
Is that right?
WebKit, you mean?
Yeah, isn't that what I just said?
WebKit is C++, is it not?
Italian?
I don't know.
The reason I ask is, I was just thinking to myself, I don't know all the different kinds of things that Apple works on, but off the top of my head, obviously all their OS X and iOS stuff, that's all Objective-C by and large.
What is Clang?
Is Clang C++?
Yeah.
Clang is C++.
It's built as a series of C++ libraries.
Right.
So what I'm thinking is you couldn't take, in principle anyway, you couldn't take a bunch of iOS or OS X developers and say, hey, go work on WebKit.
I mean, obviously, if you're a good developer, you can figure it out.
But if these are people who are living and breathing Objective-C and you throw them into the world of what I presume to be very complex and difficult C++, that's not easy.
And I can't imagine that the Clang team, A, is very big and B, has enough free time to go and just decide to be WebKit gurus.
And, you know, they also do web objects, which is Java, if I'm not mistaken.
So, again, not exactly apples to apples, pardon the crummy pun.
But I guess what I'm saying is if they wanted to throw a bunch of bodies at the WebKit problem, I would assume that there's not that many bodies to throw that are that good at C++.
And either way, it sounds like one of the other things we heard lately, or at least that I heard or saw flyby lately, is that apparently iOS 7 is running behind.
And so all the OS 10 developers have been punted over to iOS 7 to get that squared away before WWDC.
Yeah, that is the rumor.
Well, I mean, first of all, I don't think it's an issue of language familiarity.
I think it's an issue of code-based familiarity.
That's a very good point.
Programmers are not interchangeable widgets, you know, Casey.
Pointy-haired boss.
You can't just take the programmer and put him into slot.
No, those teams are...
dedicated to people with knowledge, skills, and experience in specific areas.
That's why you can't actually mine for developers like in StarCraft.
It's not like you could say, we need more web engines.
How many people in the world do you think there are that can even be useful working on a world-class JavaScript interpreter for web engines?
Like, the number of people who even qualify for that is small, and the people who have done it before, have experience, and can make their engine faster than the next guys, like...
It's slim pickings for that.
I don't know how many people there are in the world who, you know, the people in the V8 team and the Nitro team at Apple, and I guess maybe those crazy people doing the Rust-based thing at Mozilla and Samsung.
Like, that's it.
That's the pool of people in the world who have, like, years of experience making JavaScript engines.
And getting someone up to speed, even if you're the world's best programmer in whatever language, is going to take you a long time.
Absolutely.
My point was just that if they wanted to handle this internally, I agree with everything you just said.
It's not as easy as just picking up the chess piece and moving it over a few spots.
But if they wanted to handle this internally, I don't know that that would be easy regardless of the unfamiliarity of the code base.
And so then you have to start talking about, well, let's go hire a bunch of people to throw at the problem.
And that's just not an easy thing to do.
I don't think it's necessarily an issue of not having the right talent in the company.
I think it's an issue of not wanting to allocate it to that project.
Because for the most part, Apple's version of WebKit is very competitive in general.
It works.
It works well.
And it doesn't seem like a pressing issue necessarily.
Well, wait a second.
I'm going to actually stop you there.
It works and works well, because this is another thing that I think of when I think of the WebKit blink divorce and who's holding the short end of the stick.
Who's missing a chair when the music stops and how it might be Apple?
So Chrome was sort of developed in secret, came out of nowhere.
We're going to use WebKit.
Here we go.
But they did their own process model with the process per tab and stuff.
Right.
And not knowing the details of how it's implemented, but just having used both browsers a lot, I think it's very safe to say that Chrome's implementation is way better than Safari's.
Right, and so theirs came first, and Apple wanted to do something similar, and Google wouldn't give it to them because Google did that code above the engine layer.
Like, it's in the Chrome app itself.
It's still open source.
It's still in the Chromium code base.
Apple could have, you know,
I forked it and grabbed it and done whatever, but it's not in the engine.
And Apple and the WebKit team implemented it in the engine so that even if you embed WebKit inside your just random application, you still get multiprocess.
Whereas in Chrome's model, if you – I don't know if you can – oh, they're still using WebKit.
But, like, Chrome does the multiprocessing stuff.
Chrome handles the, oh, figuring out how many processes correspond to watch tabs and managing them and reaping them and doing all that stuff.
That's in the Chrome application.
So if you were to take out, you know, the WebKit core that they're using and embed it, you would not get multiprocess protection.
Whereas if you embedded Apple's WebKit, you would.
But anyway, the proof is in the pudding.
As you said, Chrome did it first.
And when Apple tried to do it, Safari was wonky for like two years.
I would say it still is.
I still get, like, oh, WebPager's not responding.
Would you like to reload?
That never happens to me in Chrome.
And there's, like, a new friggin' build of Chrome every two days that I'm at my computer, you know, with the beta thing and everything.
Google is crushing them.
And so it's like, all right, well, who has the better web?
Who has the better web, you know, rendering engine designers on staff?
I don't really know who's better.
All I know is that Chrome is rock solid and stable, and I'm on the beta channel, and WebKit has been wonky since they added multiprocess.
So it's not looking good for the home team, you know?
Oh, exactly.
But I think that...
I think the chances of Apple having a meaningful amount of talent shifted onto this project that wasn't already working on it is probably pretty minimal because, I mean, A, something's wrong with the leadership at Apple somewhere along the line between the top and WebKit because...
Safari has been so terrible since Lion.
I still use Safari as my primary browser, so I still feel this a lot.
I don't think anybody who uses Safari on a regular basis will tell you that it's better now than it was in 10.6.
There's a few better features and a little bit better support for some web
standards things because it's a newer build a web kit but i think overall ever since they split the process model uh into the renderer versus the front end uh it's been slower and more crashy and and just generally worse i think it's i think it's been faster stability definitely has been worse it feels faster to me than it used to be like i i think the features and speed and everything it's i still use safari as my main browser as well
although I run Chrome constantly alongside it.
I would still rather use Safari than Chrome, it's just that every once in a while Safari craps out, and that grates on me, because it's like, why doesn't Chrome crap out?
Why is Safari crap out?
And why do I have a new build of Chrome that presumably fixes bugs and improves performance every three days?
And I've had Chrome tabs crash.
I mean, I think every Chrome user probably has seen that at least once, but it's... I mean, I use Chrome a lot less than I use Safari, so obviously this is not quite valid, but...
I see way fewer problems in Chrome.
The problems I see in Chrome that make me not want to use it are all of Google's creepiness where they keep trying to reach for more of my data and more of my stuff.
And that's just kind of, you know, I find that distasteful, so that's why I don't use the browser.
But I can't deny that technologically it is way ahead of Safari.
And I feel like we've come full circle, and now we're back to talking about creepy people like Facebook.
I don't know.
It's an interesting thing.
And one thing I was wondering while I was listening to you guys talk is I feel like there's an obvious answer I'm not realizing.
What is the motivation for Apple to really have a world-class web rendering engine?
I mean, I wasn't around for the days of Internet Explorer on the Mac, so I never felt that pain.
But obviously, it's just prudent in general to have a really good web browser on your platform.
But why does Apple need to have the ultra number one, super fantabulous, best web experience in the world?
You can reverse it and say all those surveys that are out there, like X percentage of the smartphone sold are Android and Y percentage are Apple.
So then you look at web usage, X percentage of the hits to any popular website, it's overwhelmingly iOS users.
And it's because Apple was the first one out of the gate with a web browser that actually worked worth a damn that fit on your phone.
And so that attracted all the people who like browsing the web, and you can browse the web from your phone.
I mean, not just for phones, but for anything like that.
It's a strategic advantage to have a really good web rendering engine.
And leaving that to someone else, if you're a company like Apple, is crazy.
Because when you're left with someone else, they do a crappy job.
Microsoft doesn't really care about the Mac version.
You know, even when they do a great job, Internet Explorer 5 for Mac was an awesome, you know, in terms of CSS support, and was actually a pretty darn awesome browser.
You missed that and everything.
Yeah.
It was amazing.
That's why all the designers loved Mac back in the day, because they're like, oh, this thing understands CSS, you know, that spec from 1996.
Yeah, that one, it implements like, all right, 60% of it, but it's better than 0%.
But still, if it's not under your control, then Microsoft loses interest and never makes an IE6 for the Mac, or I don't remember what the OS X version is.
was maybe that was 6.0 but anyway they ignore it and you can't get like yeah mozilla to like to pay any attention to and you're like look this is hurting our platform if you if browsing the web from our computers suck it sucks that that's bad for us so we need to take the reins on this uh and that paid off double when it came time to uh you know feel the phone like oh we already have a web branding engine and we wisely chose the khtml instead of
The Gecko rendering engine, which is a smaller and lighter weight, and we are driving that project now, and we can tailor it to our platform.
Huge dividends, big payoff.
It was a great decision to do that.
And, like, the WebKit team and the WebKit project are probably, like, the third most important, maybe fourth, I don't know, third or fourth most important thing that Apple has done in the last couple of decades.
It's, like, macOS 10, iOS, WebKit, and I guess you'd have to include in that, like, iPod Hi-Fi.
yeah the ipod hi-fi and itunes yeah yeah in that order i think you know one thing that annoys me about google forking it though is is this this arrogance and i and i shouldn't say this is exclusive to google because apple has and will make similarly arrogant moves um but
But it's the arrogance of them saying, basically, it's technologically inconvenient for us, for a few of our programmers, to be working in your code, so we're going to fork it.
It basically takes the technological burden off of the handful of people at Google who it's affecting and puts it onto every web developer in the future.
I don't know about that.
Now we're going to have one more engine that we won't know is going to be similar enough that we're going to have to test separately on, and eventually it's going to diverge in how it renders things, and so we're going to have to deal with that.
I don't know.
It feels like... Did you read Glenn's thing on that?
No.
You don't read anything he writes, I know.
I don't think I saw it.
Sorry, I was gone out of the country for a week.
Oh, yes, I know.
They have the internet over there in German.
Anyway, his thing, and I'm mostly on board with this, was that we're past the point where any one rendering engine has enough...
has enough weight in the market to do something in an incompatible way.
And any sort of divergence by any party is seen as damage, and you get dinged for it.
No one is dominant enough to say, oh, well, that's just the way Internet Explorer does it, so everyone's got to deal with it.
And the point I would add to that, although he might have added this as well, I don't remember, is he says a lot of things.
The variance just among quote-unquote WebKit is already insane.
The variance between WebKit on iPhone, WebKit on iPad, WebKit on some other phone platform, WebKit on some Nokia thing, WebKit on some television-connected device, WebKit in various versions of Mac OS X, that variance is already bigger than the variance between Blink and iPad.
And WebKit is going to be up until the point where you get to things like NACL.
And I'm sure they're going to put Dart in their stupid thing, too.
But I don't think Google has the weight, at least so far.
Well, isn't Chrome the number one browser now?
Yeah, but not like 90%.
You know, it's like they have a plurality or whatever.
Word is when you don't have more than 50%, but you're the biggest piece of the pie.
Look at that vocabulary today.
Nice.
Probably got it wrong.
We'll wait for the corrections.
Yeah, no, I don't think they have enough weight for that.
It's a danger.
It's something to look out for, because they do want to put in the native client thing, and they do want to shove Dart down our throats, even though it's not a very interesting language, I don't think.
They have all sorts of grand plans, but right now, they're just forking, they're getting rid of all the baggage they don't care about, and I bet Apple's looking around jealously that they're like, you know what?
We only really care about the Mac and iOS, too.
Why are we supporting all these other platforms?
It's like now they're weighed down by the community of people, you know, the WebKit community, right?
I mean, maybe they don't feel that way.
Maybe they just say, we're going to do what we want, and then we're just going to land our changes, and we're going to break everyone else's platforms, and boo-hoo.
But...
Right away, Google was like, ah, finally, freedom.
Now we're making a web engine just for us, drop all the other build targets, drop everything else we're not interested in, and start landing the commits that we care about, the kind of control that Apple sort of had with WebKit up to this point.
But Google's left the baggage behind, and now they're free, and Apple is left holding the bag without Google's help and still having to support the WebKit community.
That's why I was thinking, if Google runs away with Blink,
but keeps it open source, Apple could find themselves in a few years going, you know what, the next version of Safari uses Blink.
And you know, honestly, if that would also mean they would move more towards the Chrome process model, I would love to see that.
That would be an ego hit for the WebKit team, don't you think?
Like all the people who did, you know, the WebKit 2 stuff with the split rendering engine and the night for a JavaScript engine and just say, no, we're going with V8 and their process model.
And I mean, it would be a downgrade because Apple does embed WebKit and all sorts of things.
And it's part of their SDK for their, you know, they have a native SDK for their OS, you know, for both iOS and the Mac.
And if you want to do a web view, you can embed it and you get multi-process web rendering.
You wouldn't get that with Blink because that logic, again, is in the application.
Yeah.
Unless they package that up in some way or refine it, but who knows where Blink's going to be in a few years.
Well, you know, I think we see this.
This is kind of a common failure with Apple of, you know, Apple had such a great streak for so long, and they do so many things pretty well that...
it seems like they're culturally unable to accept when they do things badly or inefficiently or just not as well as everyone else in the market.
And they seem often unable or unwilling to turn those things around.
And with this, this is the kind of thing where WebKit became dominant and was so successful, not because Apple did it, but because...
Apple was putting the most effort into it.
Dave Hyatt from – he formerly worked on Mozilla and everything.
They hired all the people who had experience, who had cut their teeth doing the web rendering engine that's going to beat Internet Explorer, the whole Mozilla.
All those people, they're disenfranchised.
They're disappointed.
We'll pay you a good salary.
Come work for us.
Apple's cool.
The company's doing well.
Maybe you'll get stock options.
They were able to staff up with –
the wandering masses of people with real-world experience building web rendering engines, and they did a great job.
And compare that with who was out there working on Conqueror, just like random people who are kind of into, they want to have a web rendering engine for KDE.
But Apple took it and ran with it.
Right.
And by the way, I've got to mention, everyone's linked to it already, but if you haven't heard this yet, you have to listen to Guy English and Rene Ritchie's podcast, Debug.
Not only should you be listening to this podcast anyway, but there's an episode number 11 from two weeks ago that had an interview of Don Melton, the guy who I think he had...
He was managing the WebKit team.
He was brought on.
He was the first member of the WebKit team.
He was the first manager, and then he came on board at the same time.
And he discussed a lot of this stuff, and it's a really good episode.
You should listen to it.
I'll put it in the show notes.
But, you know, anyway, so Apple did so well with that because they were building on a solid foundation and just poured tons of effort into it.
Now...
Google is doing that.
Google is building on a solid foundation of WebKit, and they're pouring tons of effort into it.
And so it's going to be really hard for Apple to keep up with that.
Did you see the graphs that I put in the chat room?
Oh, no, I don't click links.
Click that link.
Okay, fine.
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Every time I see this Igloo thing, I weep.
I wish my work used this for their internet because we do not, and it is not good.
You don't know what it's like out there in the world, man.
I don't.
Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange, just the worst software in the entire world.
Casey knows that stuff, right?
Oh, do I ever.
Can you imagine, I don't know if Casey, in your J-O-B job, if you have to deal with stuff that's worse than this, but this Igloo stuff is like, oh my god, I would kill for this.
We have a wiki.
It's not like this wiki.
We have a calendar, and it's so painful.
What's especially cool about Igloo, and they're not paying for me to say this, what's especially cool about Igloo is that
They like our stuff.
They listen to our shows.
They always sponsor 5x5, and they're sponsoring this.
And they'll put into the landing page, they'll put in custom stuff to have jokes about our show in it, or they gave away an AeroPress last year.
They like our stuff.
They're really supporting us.
So I really appreciate that.
So thanks to them.
Yeah, I remember.
Didn't they have a big Merlin landing page?
Yeah.
Like SodaStream on it or something?
Exactly.
Yeah, like they're really into this stuff.
Yeah.
So they seem like really cool people.
I was like, do they have like a dedicated person whose job it is to listen to these podcasts or are they just actual fans?
I guess they have to be actual fans.
I think they're just actual fans.
They wouldn't know enough to make those clever pages with the AeroPress and the Merlin thing or whatever, or be inspired enough to do something that funny if they were just doing it as part of their job.
Right.
Plus, I think they're in Canada.
Let me double-check that.
But I think that's why it's called Igloo.
I was going to say, it's Igloo.
What else do you need to look at?
Are there Igloos in Canada?
Maybe up in the very top part, I guess.
I mean, it would have to be, right?
Yeah.
God, where's Dalrymple when we need him?
I know.
Anyway, so I got this page to load.
Let me go back to it here.
So what is this?
Graphs of commits?
Oh, yeah, look at that.
So look at the ones, summary of activity, reviewed commits per company, active authors per company.
Blue is Apple, and the yellowish pea green is Google.
Yikes.
So you can see what has happened here.
Apple's – like, you can't – measuring commits is not a good measure.
I wish it was, like, lines of code or something.
Well, it's not good either.
But it's a rough estimate.
And if you look at it, you're like –
Who's been the driving force behind WebKit in the past several years?
And you look at these graphs and it looks like it hasn't been Apple.
Yeah, I would say just based on whatever the heck they're measuring here, it looks like Google started to outpace Apple in about 2009 or so.
As soon as Chrome came out, because they were in self-mode until Chrome appeared, right?
And then Chrome comes out.
I mean, like, the active authors, I think, is a reasonable metric.
Because the commits, you're like, you don't know how big the commits are and what's, you know, the standards for the size of a commit.
Maybe they're just putting in a bunch of little changes.
But the active authors is like, Apple's got an uphill battle.
Because people who work for Google are not dumb and are not terrible programmers.
And that's a big area with the Google color in terms of number of authors.
And so, yeah, it's a concern, I think.
Yeah.
In fact, what's interesting is that on the author's quantity graph, Nokia actually has a few more than Apple.
Where do you see that?
Authors per company?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which color is Nokia?
Red?
Red, yeah.
And Apple's the light blue, not the dark.
Anyway, this is probably really boring to listen to.
Let's move on.
I think you're misreading that graph.
The graph will be in the show notes.
People can judge for themselves.
all right we'll see but uh anyway it looks like it's half as many for nokia as apple if you just hover somewhere it'll it'll oh yeah i'm looking at the pie below it but that might be that might be like the entire time all right anyway sorry most boring podcast ever let's listen to us click around and browse the web um moving on uh do you want to talk about uh panic status board
What I want to talk about about Panic Status Board is the pricing, which I think is genius, especially coming in after Jury's big thing on pricing.
It's like, you know, I don't think Panic needed to hear this from Jury.
They knew it already, and they're demonstrating their mastery of app pricing.
Yes.
So let's first give a quick overview of it.
Give them a little free plug here because they're cool people and they're very friendly.
Our friends at Panic, they made this app called Status Board that they had something similar for internal use, and then they decided a couple years ago to just start making it into a product.
And it is basically what it sounds like.
It's for iPad, and it's optimized specifically also if you want to output to a big HGTV panel on a wall in an office.
But you don't have to do that.
You can just use it on an iPad.
And it just has customizable...
little widgets that you can arrange on the screen to show things like, uh, any kind of, any kind of thing you can graph, you can put in there.
Uh, they have built in widgets for things like weather and, and tweets and stuff like that.
Um, and so it's, it's made to be like hanging on a wall in a tech company or something, which is exactly how they use theirs, uh, to just show like, you know, status of the company, how things are moving, any kind of metrics you want to graph, et cetera.
And, uh,
And I don't think it's the first thing to ever do this, but it certainly looks like it's probably the nicest.
And it's interesting.
So the whole tech blogosphere kind of exploded talking about this yesterday when it came out.
Just because, mostly because we're friends with those guys.
Like, almost everyone who's writing about it has met these guys at some point, and everyone who works at Panic is ridiculously nice and smart, so it's a pretty easy company to get friendly with.
And so, you know, part of it was just because of that, but I think the app is pretty damn good.
And...
The problem I have with it, first of all, I think it was very smart to require iOS 5 because that means it can run on the iPad 1.
And I bet a lot of people, myself included, have an old iPad 1 lying around not doing anything.
So that's very nice.
Second thing is that I wish I had a way to mount this in my bathroom.
This would be the perfect bathroom wall display.
You just got to get a TV and then just airplay to it.
What would you be monitoring while you're on the pot?
Oh, he's got things to monitor.
Well, that would be the perfect RSS ticker kind of spot, weather.
People bring the paper in there.
This would be the digital version.
You wouldn't have to touch it.
He needs to see the software network failures in real time.
Oh, God.
I don't know what's going on over there.
But anyway, so what John was alluding to is that the pricing of this is interesting.
So it's $10 to buy the app, and then there's an in-app purchase if you want the ability to output to the TV.
Now, they've actually disabled AirPlay mirroring programmatically.
I don't know exactly how they do that, but I'm sure it's just some flag where you can say they shouldn't be a mirror.
Same way HBO Go did it.
There you go, yeah.
So I'm sure it's supported in the SDK.
So they disabled AirPlay mirroring supposedly because they said they tried it and the quality was terrible, like the picture quality was terrible.
So instead, they have their own custom handling of the external display, which I think requires – I don't think it can go over to AirPlay.
I think it requires one of the cable adapters.
Yeah, HDMI adapter.
And even that one they were complaining about with the lightning connector, how they did a whole blog post about how it compresses stuff and it's all gross looking, whereas the old ones... And now we know why they were so interested in that.
But they took TV out and made that an in-app purchase that was originally priced at $50.
And then...
Rusty from Shifty Jelly was complaining on Twitter about it because he's in Australia, so he kind of got the app before the entire U.S.
because of the date, the release date.
So he started complaining about it.
The first hour it was released, Panic responded, and then they decided to lower the price.
So now it's a $10 in-app purchase on top of the $10 app to get TV output.
And so I think a lot of things about this are very interesting.
First of all,
I think we'll get to the app price in a second.
First of all, the charging for TV out, which is something these devices can normally do for free to mirror, at least, doing your own implementation, which you think is better, and then disabling the mirroring, and then charging for it, that's going to anger a lot of people.
And so that's kind of a ballsy move.
Charging $50 for that is even more interesting, because you figure, I can see where they're coming from.
Like...
If you're doing this, you probably have dedicated a TV or monitor solely to this purpose.
So you've spent hundreds or thousands of dollars for the hardware to plug this into.
You're dedicating an iPad to it, too.
Exactly.
Maybe I wouldn't have stuck to the $50, but I think both sides, the app price and the aftermarket purchase could have been increased because this is not a casual application.
You're like, oh, you know what I could use in my life?
If you need a status board, it's because you have an environment like a company or a work group or something that needs money.
You are...
you are signed up i'm looking for something to be so i can monitor the status of things and whatever that thing is important enough that i need to see it now and it's like you it's like it's like selling things to businesses the reason you can charge so much money for businesses it's like they're a business they're already paying through the nose like to rent their office and to pay for health care for all their employees and like their money's going out like crazy and if someone you know so we want a thing to put up a status board in the room how much is that 700 bucks fine just buy it like
We have these big TVs in our conference rooms that you can, like, hook up your laptop to, and they have a camera on top of them, and they have little PCs strapped to the back of them.
I don't even want to know how much those things cost.
They're probably, like, thousands of dollars.
They're terrible, by the way.
They're absolutely terrible.
So anybody who's in the market for a status bar of any kind would not blink for two seconds if this thing costs, you know, maybe $100 is as extreme, but, like, $20?
Forget it.
That's, like, it's basically free.
Right.
And originally $60, if that was still the price.
That's still free.
Anything less than $300 is discretionary, petty cash spending on anybody who wants to have a status board.
Right, because if you're putting a $330 iPad stuck to the back of a $500 TV or $600 TV, then...
the software is free right then yeah effectively the software is free and so like and i think the pricing is smart too because most people who download it are probably never going to connect to any kind of external display most people who download it are probably curious nerds who want a status thing like for their desk or like like it's the same people and first of all like me of course i'm not i'm not denying membership in that group but um
It's similar to how in the late 90s, people started getting little tiny LCD matrix displays that would connect via serial or USB to their computer and having their CPU fan speed and temperature on a little LCD display next to their monitor.
just just to have like you know little little additional information and and of course people do that with cars all the time and they have like those tacky external meters and everything like people like nerds like that kind of stuff we like that and so to have something like this where many nerds have old ipads sitting around not doing much and and so you know dedicating an ipad to it is not that much of a stretch for a lot of people like us and uh
And so to have this little $10 app, granted, $10 for an iPad app is on the high end of what people usually charge, and I'm sure they're getting a lot of flack for that.
But it's such a cool thing.
We want that.
And if any of us actually get it working and mount it somewhere and use it every day, it's totally worth $10.
Yep.
And that the low price of like the low price of $10 makes me think they couldn't decide whether like the curious nerd market and the P and the business market, or not even just business people who actually need a status board is one market and curious nerds is another market.
And they're kind of trying to straddle the line between it's not totally outside the curious nerd range.
I mean, I bought it.
I'm never going to frigging use the thing, but I have, I have a panic problem.
I buy every single one of their applications regardless of whether I'm ever going to use it because I want them to continue to exist and succeed.
Yeah.
also a little bit of a cable sasser fanboy but anyway uh that's the curious nerd market and but like you could ignore them entirely and price the thing at 200 bucks and you you might actually make more money uh because like if this catches on with businesses they will just they'll just buy it they will just buy it if they need something like this they'll buy it because if they don't they want to have a status board and maybe they'll see some story and wired like they have that status board story like why doesn't our status board look that good ours is just some right web page with ugly fonts that we put up on a screen it's not you know what i mean like
Well, I think the pricing here is very smart because – and I think the original pricing of the $50 in-app purchase for the TV out and a $10 purchase for the app, I think that's even smarter, and they'll probably have to go back to that at some point because it does straddle that line because you need a low entry price for the app because it's also an ecosystem.
It's a platform.
It's a small one, but it's still a platform.
You need people to develop modules –
for common things to be stuck in there and so like out of the box for instance it doesn't support any kind of like google analytics or any kind of web analytics engine there's already people working on that and there's already some engines that already have plugins for it um like i i think google analytics would be a very obvious candidate for something that needs that needs to be here and someone's already whipped that up right problem oh yeah good okay there it wasn't done by like noon today and then i stopped looking but
It was done on launch day.
I don't know if it's done in a nice way, but someone just threw together some Ruby to connect, and you just have that running on your server and point it to your own URL, like the do-it-yourself thing.
Oh, yeah, right.
They need an ecosystem to start building to add value to this thing.
so that the people who want to make a TV will have an easier time with it and will more want to do that.
So I think it's a very smart split to have a relatively inexpensive app for the nerds to play with and then be able to sell it to people who are devoting hardware to it to be able to sell it at a higher price to them.
So I think it's genius.
And I don't think they're going to really sell a massive amount of those in-app purchases, but I don't think they need to sell a massive amount of them.
Well, the other thing I thought was interesting is I looked at the, I don't know if I should call it an SDK, but basically the mechanism by which you can input random data that they're not privy to into the app.
And it was very, very straightforward.
If I remember right, for tables, or I'm sorry, for graphs, you can give it CSV or JSON.
For tables, you can give it
um csv or html html tables yeah yeah and then you can just go wild and say and and they will render just straight up html be it table or graph or whatever anything you want just html as one of these little widgets and it was it was very cool and i looked at the i think it was three different pdfs that talk about these three different methods tables charts and just random anything and
And the sum total of the documentation for all of that was, I don't know, 15 pages or something like that.
John, did you look at these as well?
It reminded me of a very Apple way to do things.
And I kind of mean that in a good way and also in a bad way.
I don't know.
I don't know if this is a good way or a bad way.
You can decide for yourself.
But like...
Panic decided how things should look on a status board because that's part of the charm of the product is we're going to give you a nice-looking status board, not that thing that you had some random programmer throw together, right?
We're going to have our designers work on it and, like, lay down the law for, like, these are the types of graphs you can have.
These are the colors they can pick because they look cool together.
This is how the things are shaded and, like...
It's not just like, hey, look, you have a little corner of a web view and just go nuts and put your stupid blinking background and autoplaying music in it.
That's not how it's going to work, right?
But then the SDK is necessarily very limited to these are the kind of things you can do.
These are the elements you can put in them.
You can have a word.
You can have an image.
You can have an optional little line of bar graphs.
You can use HTML tables.
There's a couple of styles we've defined.
It's very, very limited where if a company like Google did it, like look at Google's graphing API, right?
So that's the other end of the spectrum where they said, we're going to make a graphing API, and it's going to be just like, you know, we are not – it's like the DHH thing.
It's not opinionated software.
The Google Graph API is we have a bazillion parameters.
You can make a whole bunch of graphs.
It's extremely flexible.
Make anything, any color, any size, any label you want.
And we have this really complicated API for doing that and go nuts.
Where the panic one was like, there are seven things you can do or three things you can do, a couple of variations on them, and that's it.
And so it's extremely limited in terms of flexibility, but the reward you get for that is it's impossible to make a status board that's just horrendously ugly.
And the tech they use to do it, I look at it and I think to myself,
csv and html tables like i guess that'll work but like they didn't develop a general purpose system for an api and then build their apis on it they just kind of decided these are the kind of things we're going to have what's the most convenient thing for you to emit like that's that's one possible strategy but like i don't know maybe maybe it's the the programmer disease let's cite the xcd comic if you see the one where uh
Someone asks the other person to pass the salt, and he gets hung up trying to implement a general-purpose system for passing things across tables.
I'm probably blowing the punchline, but it's like programmer mindset where you can't just do some simple thing.
You have to like, wait, no, I can develop a generic system for doing things like this and use this to build the thing you want me to do.
That's the programmer mindset.
Looking at their API...
And a lot of Apple's APIs and things Apple does, clearly they're not infected by that disease.
They're like, why should we do that?
We know exactly what we want to do.
Let's make it as simple as possible, even if we haven't created a Lego construction set for building arbitrary status display things, because they haven't.
So that's the tradeoff in what they've done.
I don't know if you want to decide whether that's good or bad.
To some extent, I think pragmatically, as a user of this thing, pragmatically, that's a very good thing.
For the most part, if you're building one of these or tweaking this or setting one up for yourself or your company, it's futzing around.
It's overhead.
It's not a business critical thing.
And so you don't really want your programmers or yourself to be tied up tweaking this thing for three weeks.
Get in, get out.
And not make it be ugly.
It's on rails.
More DHH lingo there.
Right.
It is designed so that you give it your data and you make a few minor adjustments and that's it.
And you don't have to think about how to make it nice looking or anything like that.
They take care of that for you.
That's a major appeal, I think.
But as soon as you want to do something that it doesn't support, you're sad.
Exactly.
And that's, again, that's certainly the Apple way.
But I think for this, because it's non-mission critical, I think the right answer for a lot of people who face that is, oh, well, just live without it or deal with what it does do.
I'm not sure how many people will actually think that way.
It's version 1.0.
So the guy who wants to see the live video camera of the security camera that's out in front of his building is one of his status quo items.
Oh, we don't currently support live video, right?
But if they get enough demand for live video, they will come up with a nice, attractive, simple way to do live video, and version 2 will have a live video thing.
But they've just not made out the gate anything.
a generic status board type thing where you can build anything you want.
You can't, they give you a couple of little things.
This is what you can do.
Future versions may have new ones, but they're not, they're not designing an OS.
Like they're not making it, you know, it's, it's very concerning.
And like Casey said, the big payoff for that is like, I read every word of those instructions.
Cause it's like three pages of text, nicely written, simple, you know, you don't have to really know anything about anything to understand what they're saying.
You just need to have a little tiny bit of background and like,
I don't even know if you need any web development background.
I guess you would to put up a server or something.
But it's so dead simple and so possible for normal people to do.
Well, and you remember one of the things they cited was, hey, if you have Dropbox, you could just put a – I think it was a CSV example.
You just put the CSV in Dropbox, and you copy a public link, and next thing you know, now it's in your status board.
That's how it's geared.
It's explaining to people who don't know that, hey, did you know that something you put in Dropbox is accessible via HTTP on the internet?
People might not know that, and you wouldn't mention that if you were writing technical documentation, but panic documentation, there's not a lot of words, but take two sentences out to remind the people who are reading this, maybe they don't realize you can do that with Dropbox.
And one thing, I mean, and this app so far, I mean, it is a 1.0.
There's a few people reporting crashes on the iTunes reviews, but overall, the level of polish in this is incredible.
I mean, like, you know, like Fog Creek, you know, famously Joel Spolsky with Joel and Software, you know, he and Michael Pryor started this company, and they have a few very successful products.
And one of their first major product, Fog Bugs,
is is so successful that it seemed to at least for a while basically keep the entire company afloat pretty much entirely on its own and it made so much money for them that they were able to make things extremely nice for their developers make very very nice office environment and just add a ridiculous amount of features into this product and and
it has it's like you know they had this great cash cow and so they were just redirecting all of that cash into ridiculous features for this thing panic i don't know what their cash cow is they have a number of well-known products um maybe transmit i would guess but um you know panic and actually probably coda these days but
Actually, we know what their cash cows are because somebody pointed out… Oh, it says so on their example screenshots.
Well, sort of.
If you look… God, I'm trying to find… They just tweeted a link that showed their revenue and the graphs for the past day, and you see the status board line shooting up like a rocket and everything else.
Everything else looks like zero, but that's obviously the reason they showed that is it's launch day, and there's no numbers in the y-axis, so it's like…
But Panic, I feel like they are a company where they've had their cash cows and they've made a very nice office and made things very nice to developers.
And rather than just adding a whole bunch of features constantly with all that money, they add polish with all those resources.
The Fog Creek ways to just add feature after feature after feature to Fogbugs.
You know why that is, of course.
Because they're cool?
I don't know.
Because Joel is from Microsoft and they're a bunch of Windows users.
That's what it is.
It's a different ethos.
Possibly.
They came from Microsoft.
You two maybe don't realize it because that's where you came from, too.
But it's just a different ethos.
They come from the world of Microsoft.
They weren't even big on Mac support.
It's like why their software was nice, but it never quite looked nice.
As nice as you would think it should look.
It has every feature under the sun, though.
It took a while to even get Joel to switch to a Mac.
I think he's on a Mac now.
Those guys are like the semi-enlightened PC developer type things, but they kind of know what they're supposed to be doing.
The difference between them and Panic is a great illustration because...
You know, Fog Creek probably has more great programmers than Pandas.
They have more people, period.
Like, it's a much bigger thing.
Like, the Fog Creek people are really smart and successful and do great things and have a great working environment and all that stuff.
But when we look at the end products, and there's just no comparison.
They are different kinds of products for different audiences.
Totally.
So everyone go out and buy Status Board.
It's a good app.
It's the kind of thing that I don't need this app.
But now I'm looking for a reason to need it.
If you're a curious nerd, you're like, I've got to find some reason to use this.
Because we have old iPads.
I'm probably never going to use it.
But I just like that it exists.
And I'm usually, in my various businesses, I'm generally pretty terrible at monitoring metrics.
I just don't do it.
And many metrics I don't even collect.
And I don't do any kind of data mining or anything like that.
You can't manage what you can't measure.
Yeah.
Or you don't measure, sorry.
And so I feel like this is like an aspirational purchase for me.
Maybe if I buy this cool app to do this cool thing on my wall or my desk, then maybe I'll become that kind of person who starts measuring things and paying attention.
It's very unlikely, but maybe.
Weirder things have happened.
And what I was going to say before is very early on, somebody noticed, and I can't find for the life of me where this link came from, but I saw it on Twitter.
Somebody noticed that they had posted pictures of the status board, I think perhaps when they were dogfooding it, but it wasn't released.
And you could see their revenue graph, and this was right before the status board public release, and it was very, very, very clear that their desktop apps were making all of the money, and their iOS apps, by comparison, were making almost none.
I saw that graph too, but the x-axis was like,
three days so you can't really tell i mean but historically transmit i think was their big thing but they also have unison with the you know the usenet subscription thing and i always wondered how much that makes because that's recurring revenue and you know it's a small audience but the people who yeah but you weren't supposed to talk about usenet
Yeah, I know.
I don't know.
It's an interesting wrinkle of them producing a status board product and doing stories about like there was a wired story before the app was even out about status board things showing their status board.
It's in their office and everything, and it's kind of like revealing the innards of your business semi-accidentally.
I don't think they probably care because like, so what?
What are you going to do with that information?
I don't think it was that accidental.
You make the next panic.
See how easy it is.
Right.
I think before we leave this topic, I think we should revisit the $10 price point of just buying the app because that's also unusual in how high it is for an iOS app.
And, you know, obviously the question – there's obviously two big questions here.
One would be, you know, can they pull that off?
And then the other one would be, can you pull it off?
And, you know, or can X pull it off?
Can one pull it off?
Yeah, right.
You could, definitely, but –
So I think the question of whether they can pull it off is probably yes, for a long time, if not indefinitely, just because of, you know, to some degree, there's not that much competition in this market, but also just because of who they are, that they are very well known already.
They have a great reputation, and their customers know that their stuff is very well made.
And so their customers are very likely to be willing to jump in blind and blow $10 on the chance this might be good or useful to them.
And if they really do think it will be very useful to them, then $10 is not that ridiculous of a price to pay.
It's not like it's $100 or $1,000.
It's $10.
And if most of their customers are coming from the desktop world, where software is usually far more than $10, then that seems like a very inexpensive product.
There's also the curious nerd market is presumably the people who understand that software is worth money.
We all know the people who don't understand why you would ever pay for software and like they want Angry Birds to be free and blah, blah, blah.
But they would not be happy customers of the status board app or wouldn't want it.
So if you're selling to the curious nerd, it's like, oh, these people already understand that you pay money for software.
So I don't have to overcome that hurdle.
I don't have to pander to their 99 cent thing.
Well, I think that's the case.
I think that for the status board app in particular,
There's not a lot of looky-loos who are just browsing through the store and like, oh, I'll buy that status board app.
Well, that's true, yeah.
But I wouldn't necessarily assume that geeks are willing to pay more.
Not so much more, but they just understand.
It's not outrageous to them for the $10.
The $50 thing is probably still over their line for those people who aren't buying for a business.
They're just like, I just wanted to play with them, but on my TV, I'm not paying $50.
They already went back on that a little bit.
Think about things like pages and stuff like that.
At a certain point, you're selling to people who accept that software is worth money and $10 is not that much in the grand scheme of things.
You already bought an iPad.
It was a lot more than $10.
Yeah, I don't know.
So I think what we have here is a it's fine for panic situation.
You know, like they can charge $10.
But, you know, the question is, can any iOS developers charge $10 for a good product?
Yeah.
go back to the jury thing it's like if you make software for dentists you can you can charge more than that right like this is as you said this is like this is very clearly aimed at businesses and nerves and so and both of those especially businesses are usually willing to pay uh for stuff at all and businesses you can charge a good amount for and and this is still cheaper than anything else they would probably find but
So it depends on what you're doing.
And in this market, it does seem like there's really not any kind of major competition for the same kind of quality or taste put into this app.
But...
You know, I wonder, you know, like if I was making a new app today, like I found with Instapaper that I really can't price it any higher than like $5.
And currently it's $4 even just because I found that I made more there.
Well, that's an app that everyone who owns an iPhone should have.
Status Board is not an app that everyone who owns an iPad should have.
You know what I mean?
Like you are trying to sell, like who could benefit from Instapaper?
Everybody, anybody, anybody who reads web pages on their phone, which is basically anybody with an iPhone can benefit from this app.
Who can benefit from Status Board?
Already you're just cutting it down to a tiny, narrow fraction of the world who even has need for this in their life.
And so you can charge them more because if they need it, they need it.
It's not just like a frivolous type of thing.
So I think that's a spectrum that Jerry was talking about.
If you're making a to-do app, there's a bazillion of them.
Anybody can use a to-do app.
It's not specific to some particular problem domain where a status board is.
It's specific to if you've been thinking about for any reason in your life
I'd like if I could see that up on a board, like just because even if you just think it would be cool, you are one of the people who has that need.
But most people will never have that need, have no reason to ever have anything like that.
So, yeah, you can't, you know, like if you make, you know, quote unquote, boring software for specific people with very specific problems, you can get away with charging them more.
But Instapaper, you can't because that Instapaper is for everybody.
It's for the whole it's basically the angry birds of, you know, like anybody can use it.
I guess that's true.
And I found whenever I've done a search for some kind of relatively specialized app, I've always found that A, they're all terrible.
If you're looking for some kind of specific X app, they're terrible.
Dentistry software, terrible.
Yes.
Like they're all terrible and most of them are not 99 cents or free.
Most of them are like five or eight dollars.
Like they're up there in the iOS price world.
And part of that's just because they can because there's no competition or very little.
And part of that's because if you're not selling to the mainstream and you need to be able to pay a programmer or pay yourself a reasonable rate, you have to charge more than a dollar because you're just not going to sell that much volume.
I mean, I think it's actually the reverse, though, because like if you know if you are a dentist, you're not going to do everything on paper.
You need dentistry software.
And if a dentist decides they want to do something on their phone having to do with dentistry and they search for dentistry apps and there's like two of them and you're one of them.
Like, you know, you can charge.
You have the power to charge more because there's the terrible application that crashes on launch and then there's yours, which doesn't.
And you can charge that guy almost whatever you want.
Almost whatever you want within reason because he is a captive audience.
Whereas when he searches for games...
He has many choices, and they're all perfectly fine, and they're all great.
He searches for to-do lists.
There's a million of them, but the choices are slim.
Maybe there's no apps for a particular kind of medical imaging that you want to be able to airplay images from the big giant.
Who knows?
There's very specific problems.
Someone has a problem in their job, and they would like to use an iOS app to help them
solve it in some cool way.
And they probably fantasize it about like, boy, I wish there was something that did that.
If one of those things appear or two of them appears, they'll put down $10, you know, in a second, like, cause they've been dying to give someone money for something.
And then the app will be terrible.
So if, if you can, if you can field a, even just a competent entry in those things, you can charge a lot more money.
Usually requires some domain knowledge, which is, you know, why you're able to charge a little bit more as well.
But if you can feel the great app, like, you know, status board is a great app.
then you're so far ahead of the game.
All right, you want to wrap it up?
I think we're good.
Yeah, we're going long here.
All right, thanks to Igloo Software for sponsoring this episode again.
Go to igloosoftware.com slash ATP to start a free trial there because they're awesome.
And yeah, let's play it out with the song.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
And if you're into Twitter...
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
It's accidental, accidental.
They didn't mean to.
Accidental, accidental.
Tech podcast so long.
What song are you going to play?
I'll play the same song again.
Which one?
I like the second one with the bleeps and boops.
You are so into the bleeps and boops.
That concludes another thrilling episode.
I like that one so much.
See, the other one is so catchy.
It gets stuck in your head.
This is what happens if you let the fish fan pick the music.