The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► How am I supposed to ruin my life as a middle-aged man right now?

00:00:03 ◼   ► The way it's manifesting for me is a truly bizarre time compression.

00:00:12 ◼   ► Yeah, I naturally have a pretty good sense of time.

00:00:14 ◼   ► Like, when I would do a talk on stage and maybe it's a 20-minute slot,

00:00:18 ◼   ► I can hit 18 minutes in my head and I know what it is.

00:00:20 ◼   ► So I got a pretty good internal clock.

00:00:22 ◼   ► And yet, I don't know what day it is.

00:00:25 ◼   ► And I don't know what-- I have to look up at the menu bar to be--

00:00:30 ◼   ► I definitely know the month plan.

00:00:32 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:00:33 ◼   ► And that's so, so--

00:00:36 ◼   ► it's just such a loss of grounding.

00:00:37 ◼   ► It's a loss of grounding in that short term of what day is it, what--

00:00:43 ◼   ► and everybody's going through it.

00:00:44 ◼   ► It's clearly shared.

00:00:46 ◼   ► And yet, at the same time, it's really exacerbating that sort of longer term--

00:00:52 ◼   ► wait, really?

00:00:53 ◼   ► It's 20 years since I started talking to Emile about stuff and reading his blog?

00:00:59 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:01:00 ◼   ► And we'll get into it in a moment.

00:01:02 ◼   ► I want to talk about it because it's the 25-year anniversary of Windows 95.

00:01:05 ◼   ► And you wrote about it.

00:01:07 ◼   ► And it's like-- I mean, it's natural.

00:01:10 ◼   ► We're mid-40s.

00:01:11 ◼   ► And it's like, yeah, we do remember stuff from 25 years ago.

00:01:14 ◼   ► And we were enthusiasts in the community.

00:01:16 ◼   ► And I remember-- I didn't get in line because I didn't have a Windows PC.

00:01:19 ◼   ► But I certainly remember reading about people getting in line

00:01:22 ◼   ► to buy Windows 95.

00:01:23 ◼   ► And it's like, you remember this stuff.

00:01:25 ◼   ► And a lot of the people-- not like I have the youngest demographic.

00:01:30 ◼   ► But I do realize there are--

00:01:32 ◼   ► The kids.

00:01:32 ◼   ► They love you.

00:01:33 ◼   ► There are people listening.

00:01:35 ◼   ► And I do hear from them.

00:01:36 ◼   ► And whenever I make jokes, they often write to me and say, no, I'm 18.

00:01:41 ◼   ► And I love your podcast and whatever.

00:01:43 ◼   ► And I'm so glad.

00:01:44 ◼   ► It makes me feel like I'm doing something right.

00:01:45 ◼   ► I definitely shouldn't have an audience completely--

00:01:49 ◼   ► You're relevant.

00:01:50 ◼   ► You're pertinent.

00:01:52 ◼   ► You know, I don't TikTok.

00:01:54 ◼   ► But I know how to spell it.

00:01:56 ◼   ► Oh, I would pay cash money to watch John Gruber on TikTok.

00:02:00 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know.

00:02:00 ◼   ► I want to see you do a lot of dances that's mostly your arms.

00:02:03 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:02:03 ◼   ► That's really-- that's what I think is your strong suit.

00:02:05 ◼   ► I have exactly as much rhythm as I look like I have.

00:02:10 ◼   ► All right.

00:02:11 ◼   ► All right.

00:02:12 ◼   ► So I just-- I'm old-fashioned.

00:02:13 ◼   ► I feel like when-- this is what old guys say, right?

00:02:16 ◼   ► Which is when I was young.

00:02:18 ◼   ► I feel like when I was young, people would dance by moving their hips or their legs.

00:02:21 ◼   ► But that's not-- that doesn't fit in frame in a vertical video.

00:02:25 ◼   ► So it's just like dances are just-- it's just from the elbows up.

00:02:28 ◼   ► Yeah, that's me.

00:02:30 ◼   ► Sorry.

00:02:35 ◼   ► A little off time.

00:02:35 ◼   ► No, but it's-- there's just a sense of-- there's another thing that somebody-- we're

00:02:45 ◼   ► going to talk-- another thing on my show notes to talk about later is somebody's observation

00:02:51 ◼   ► that Mosaic happened 10 years after the Macintosh debuted.

00:02:56 ◼   ► And there's a part of me that is like, no.

00:03:01 ◼   ► So we're talking about the App Store-- unlike most episodes of my show, this one sort of

00:03:08 ◼   ► has an index.

00:03:09 ◼   ► All right.

00:03:11 ◼   ► All right.

00:03:11 ◼   ► We got subjects.

00:03:12 ◼   ► We got topics.

00:03:12 ◼   ► Or an index comes at the end.

00:03:14 ◼   ► I guess a table of contents.

00:03:15 ◼   ► But we're talking about the App Store 12 years into the iPhone era, right?

00:03:22 ◼   ► And we all sort of have this timeline burned into this-- or 13 years, I guess, into the

00:03:28 ◼   ► iPhone era, but 12 years into the App Store era.

00:03:31 ◼   ► And OK, that's 12, 13 years.

00:03:35 ◼   ► And here's where we are.

00:03:36 ◼   ► Things have changed.

00:03:37 ◼   ► And that's sort of the shifting of the whole world underfoot is sort of where everything

00:03:43 ◼   ► is in conflict now, right?

00:03:44 ◼   ► Plates have shifted.

00:03:45 ◼   ► And now there's fault lines that are exposed.

00:03:48 ◼   ► And all right, historical context, Mosaic and graphical user interface web browsing

00:03:55 ◼   ► came 10 years after the original Macintosh.

00:03:58 ◼   ► And it's like, no, that doesn't make sense, that that was only 10 years to go all the

00:04:02 ◼   ► way from a black and white 9-inch computer with--

00:04:06 ◼   ► That's so interesting because I think of it as, oh, was it that long?

00:04:09 ◼   ► Because I have this time compression.

00:04:10 ◼   ► And this is, I think, seeing the point about everything is through this sort of funhouse

00:04:15 ◼   ► mirror of either that had to have been much longer or much less, right?

00:04:17 ◼   ► So you're feeling it's much less.

00:04:19 ◼   ► I'm like, oh, those are of a moment to me.

00:04:23 ◼   ► Those are connected.

00:04:24 ◼   ► That's still when every day I was downloading new software and trying new things.

00:04:28 ◼   ► So I feel like there's a straight line.

00:04:30 ◼   ► My first view of the web was on Next, where it was born, and that was probably in '93,

00:04:36 ◼   ► '94.

00:04:37 ◼   ► And I was using the app called World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee's first app.

00:04:41 ◼   ► And that was very much-- and that was actually the first time I had access to a Next computer.

00:04:46 ◼   ► It was in a university computer lab.

00:04:48 ◼   ► Like, they were way too rich for my blood.

00:04:51 ◼   ► I literally could see one in a magazine.

00:04:53 ◼   ► That was about it.

00:04:54 ◼   ► But that was the access to the machine.

00:04:56 ◼   ► But to me, that was also what I think a lot of the perception still was.

00:05:00 ◼   ► This is the next Apple, right?

00:05:02 ◼   ► Like Jobs explicitly called it Next, right?

00:05:05 ◼   ► This is the next big thing.

00:05:06 ◼   ► And Next is the next Apple.

00:05:07 ◼   ► And so this is my view, just like the first time I saw a Mac at a friend's house.

00:05:11 ◼   ► Again, too rich for my blood, but I could go and use one.

00:05:15 ◼   ► I think it was exactly that sense of this is the next computer.

00:05:18 ◼   ► So I saw this very much as the era of there's still new stuff.

00:05:21 ◼   ► And actually, all the way up until Windows 95, there was new stuff.

00:05:24 ◼   ► And I think after that, it was like, oh, we're just going to have software in our lives.

00:05:27 ◼   ► They're not going to have-- well, you go from a black and white computer or a color computer.

00:05:31 ◼   ► Like, very obviously an upgrade, like color TV was.

00:05:35 ◼   ► And when you went from a standalone computer to a connected computer that's on the internet,

00:05:41 ◼   ► that's very obviously an upgrade.

00:05:42 ◼   ► But after that, it was just like improvements in kind.

00:05:45 ◼   ► It wasn't here's a new category of thing to have on your desk.

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00:08:19 ◼   ► So we were talking about that.

00:08:21 ◼   ► You were talking about that, whether you think it was a long time from the original Mac to

00:08:27 ◼   ► Netscape.

00:08:28 ◼   ► I think it was a long time in my mind because to me, those early Macs in that 1984, '85,

00:08:36 ◼   ► I didn't see-- I forget how old I was when I first saw a Mac, but probably not until

00:08:40 ◼   ► like '86, '87 maybe in school.

00:08:43 ◼   ► But I'd read about it.

00:08:46 ◼   ► And this is also so bizarre that I felt like when I did first get my hands on one, I felt

00:08:53 ◼   ► a lot more familiar than I had any right to be because I had vacuumed issues of Macworld

00:09:00 ◼   ► magazine into my head without ever having seen a Macintosh, even in a store.

00:09:05 ◼   ► But that's pretty normal.

00:09:07 ◼   ► I think the '80s in context, not just for computers, but everything.

00:09:10 ◼   ► You would vicariously get something through a magazine or through reading the newspaper,

00:09:16 ◼   ► and that was your only consumption of it.

00:09:18 ◼   ► So you don't have a DVR, let alone video on demand or whatever, then you either watch

00:09:24 ◼   ► the TV show live or you would read a magazine writing about a TV show that had happened

00:09:30 ◼   ► in the past that you could never see again.

00:09:32 ◼   ► And so this is your only lens on culture.

00:09:37 ◼   ► And I'm very distinctly-- I was a kid and we went for a good while.

00:09:40 ◼   ► We visited India and totally offline and no electricity and no running water.

00:09:44 ◼   ► You come back and just reading magazines, I wonder what happened in these interceding

00:09:49 ◼   ► months in the world.

00:09:50 ◼   ► And the world for me was what's the latest Michael Jackson video or whatever.

00:09:55 ◼   ► What was this movie Top Gun about?

00:09:59 ◼   ► And that was it.

00:10:00 ◼   ► And so you could consume all of culture this way.

00:10:02 ◼   ► And computers were no different because that was the way to find out.

00:10:06 ◼   ► Again, no app store.

00:10:09 ◼   ► There's software and you should try it.

00:10:12 ◼   ► And a reviewer has told you authoritatively, this is what you do.

00:10:15 ◼   ► So that was, I think, a completely reasonable way to form an opinion of and get familiar

00:10:20 ◼   ► with a computer or any kind of technology.

00:10:24 ◼   ► And I definitely-- I mean, I read-- I remember reading the manual to the Commodore 64 before

00:10:30 ◼   ► we had one.

00:10:30 ◼   ► We had a VIC-20.

00:10:31 ◼   ► And we went to-- they had computer clubs back in the day.

00:10:34 ◼   ► And we would meet in some community center room at the mall.

00:10:38 ◼   ► And there were guys that had Commodore 64s, which we then knew.

00:10:42 ◼   ► And I didn't have one.

00:10:43 ◼   ► And they were like, oh, we got an extra manual.

00:10:45 ◼   ► You can buy a manual.

00:10:46 ◼   ► And it was probably like $4 or something.

00:10:47 ◼   ► And they were big-- computer manuals were like an inch, two inches thick.

00:10:51 ◼   ► And I read it.

00:10:52 ◼   ► I didn't have the computer it was for.

00:10:54 ◼   ► Because you're like, this is fan fiction about a device I would like to own someday.

00:10:59 ◼   ► That was me.

00:11:01 ◼   ► So I've told this story before, but it's so good and so informative that I feel like I

00:11:08 ◼   ► cannot tell it enough.

00:11:09 ◼   ► I didn't own a personal computer growing up.

00:11:12 ◼   ► Because-- and I had a lot of friends who had trouble getting one too.

00:11:16 ◼   ► And all of my friends, the basic story was that their parents didn't want to spend all

00:11:20 ◼   ► that money on a computer.

00:11:22 ◼   ► And you're never going to use it, or you're only going to use it for games.

00:11:26 ◼   ► And my parents' argument was, if we buy you a computer, you're never going to leave the

00:11:35 ◼   ► house.

00:11:37 ◼   ► And they were right.

00:11:38 ◼   ► And they were right.

00:11:39 ◼   ► It's very-- it is.

00:11:41 ◼   ► And it was so maddening.

00:11:43 ◼   ► Because I'm like, I cannot believe that this is the reason you won't buy me this thing

00:11:48 ◼   ► that I desperately want is that you think I'll use it too much?

00:11:51 ◼   ► Yes, that's exactly right.

00:11:53 ◼   ► And in hindsight, I don't know.

00:11:55 ◼   ► Like, there was a long time where I was very angry about this.

00:11:57 ◼   ► And that continues to this point.

00:12:01 ◼   ► But we did have-- we had an Atari 2600.

00:12:03 ◼   ► It wasn't like we were a Luddite family.

00:12:06 ◼   ► We had the 2600, which I loved and played obsessively.

00:12:11 ◼   ► And I had access to computers at schools.

00:12:13 ◼   ► But there was also this huge divide, even at the time.

00:12:21 ◼   ► Like, the 2600, I think, was maybe like $100, $120.

00:12:28 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:12:29 ◼   ► It was like famously $89, I think, was their big price cut for Christmas or something.

00:12:33 ◼   ► You know, and in a way that it hasn't changed 25 or more, I guess, right?

00:12:40 ◼   ► Yeah, almost 40 years.

00:12:40 ◼   ► It's almost 40 years later.

00:12:42 ◼   ► The games were expensive.

00:12:43 ◼   ► The cartridges were very expensive relative to the cost of the game.

00:12:49 ◼   ► And then towards the tail end of the 2600 era, at the time when a million ET cartridges

00:12:57 ◼   ► were being secretly buried in the ground--

00:12:59 ◼   ► [LAUGHTER]

00:13:02 ◼   ► --dumped in a hole in the ground somewhere, just buried in a ravine.

00:13:06 ◼   ► Other companies had backwards engineered the format.

00:13:11 ◼   ► And you could get off-brand Atari games from a company you'd never heard of for $5.

00:13:16 ◼   ► And it would be like-- did you have Boscov's?

00:13:19 ◼   ► I know you're from Pennsylvania.

00:13:20 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:13:21 ◼   ► I grew up outside of Harrisburg.

00:13:22 ◼   ► And we definitely-- yeah, Boscov's.

00:13:24 ◼   ► So sure, they had the clearance bin.

00:13:25 ◼   ► And they had to--

00:13:26 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:13:26 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, the generic store brand Atari cartridge.

00:13:30 ◼   ► Yeah, so Boscov started in Redding, Pennsylvania, where I'm from.

00:13:34 ◼   ► So we had like four--

00:13:36 ◼   ► The pride of Redding.

00:13:37 ◼   ► Yeah, the pride of Redding.

00:13:37 ◼   ► We had four Boscov's.

00:13:39 ◼   ► Amy's grandmother knew Albert Boscov.

00:13:42 ◼   ► It had not occurred to me that, of course, there would be a Boscov family.

00:13:47 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, Albert Boscov.

00:13:49 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:13:49 ◼   ► Sure.

00:13:49 ◼   ► Yeah, and he's exactly what you think.

00:13:52 ◼   ► He's-- I don't know if he was from Russia exactly, but he was an--

00:13:55 ◼   ► Or the immigrant.

00:13:56 ◼   ► Yeah, he was an immigrant and started a store and employed half of them.

00:14:00 ◼   ► And then Amazon killed it.

00:14:01 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:14:01 ◼   ► That's the American dream.

00:14:04 ◼   ► But Boscov's-- I mean, again, it's like there's a very small segment of the audience who's

00:14:09 ◼   ► like screaming like, yeah, Boscov's!

00:14:11 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:14:12 ◼   ► And everybody else is like--

00:14:13 ◼   ► There used to be department stores.

00:14:14 ◼   ► It's a department store.

00:14:15 ◼   ► Boscov's is still around.

00:14:17 ◼   ► I don't-- I think I'm sure it's a shell of its former self.

00:14:19 ◼   ► But Boscov's was a weird department store where they were-- how would you describe it?

00:14:26 ◼   ► It wasn't a discount store.

00:14:28 ◼   ► It wasn't--

00:14:28 ◼   ► No, it was actually-- I think it was supposed to be like a sort of a little bit of prestige,

00:14:32 ◼   ► premium.

00:14:32 ◼   ► It wasn't quite like Macy's or whatever.

00:14:34 ◼   ► Right.

00:14:34 ◼   ► It was trying to be-- I think central Pennsylvania did not lend itself to Macy's for a lot of

00:14:40 ◼   ► reasons culturally and economically.

00:14:42 ◼   ► But they were like aspirational.

00:14:44 ◼   ► And they were early on, we're going to have technology.

00:14:47 ◼   ► We're going to have-- at that time, it was component stereos and high-fi and whatever.

00:14:52 ◼   ► But then definitely, yeah, they had a computer section.

00:14:55 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:14:56 ◼   ► And they-- I'm going to say it was roughly JC-- it was regional, but JC Penney's tier

00:15:02 ◼   ► prestige-wise.

00:15:04 ◼   ► But also had weird stuff.

00:15:08 ◼   ► Their toy department was-- at least ours was massive compared to what you would expect

00:15:13 ◼   ► at a store.

00:15:14 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:15:15 ◼   ► I got all my Transformers there.

00:15:16 ◼   ► And they had Atari cartridges at the tail end that didn't even come in a box.

00:15:21 ◼   ► They were in just like a sandwich bag.

00:15:25 ◼   ► You had loose cartridges?

00:15:26 ◼   ► Yeah, well, they were in a--

00:15:27 ◼   ► That sounds very illicit.

00:15:29 ◼   ► They were in a sandwich bag with a piece of cardboard on top stapled and then just hung

00:15:35 ◼   ► on pegboard.

00:15:36 ◼   ► That sounds bootleg.

00:15:38 ◼   ► That sounds like you had a-- that's like drug dealer game cartridges.

00:15:42 ◼   ► Maybe, but you could get them cheap.

00:15:44 ◼   ► And they definitely-- I think there was something fishy.

00:15:47 ◼   ► But that was exciting, right?

00:15:48 ◼   ► That's--

00:15:49 ◼   ► Wow, yeah, yeah.

00:15:49 ◼   ► No, that sounds-- I mean, that's so scandalous.

00:15:52 ◼   ► It would feel like you're getting away with something.

00:15:54 ◼   ► I mean, this is what I love is the idea-- and this sort of goes to the App Store point

00:15:57 ◼   ► is software was a physical thing in our lives.

00:15:59 ◼   ► It was a box on the software.

00:16:01 ◼   ► It was apparently a baggie at the store.

00:16:03 ◼   ► A baggie, yeah.

00:16:04 ◼   ► But that is so-- my gosh, it's depraved.

00:16:08 ◼   ► I just love how-- that definitely feels like the kid at school in the corner of the playground

00:16:14 ◼   ► opens up his coat and slides out a video game cartridge and don't tell anybody.

00:16:19 ◼   ► That seems like how you're getting your cartridge.

00:16:21 ◼   ► But then you talked about ET.

00:16:23 ◼   ► And so this is a famous story.

00:16:24 ◼   ► People can Google it.

00:16:25 ◼   ► But they overcreated.

00:16:27 ◼   ► They made too many of these cartridges for this game that wasn't very good.

00:16:30 ◼   ► And then they buried them in the desert.

00:16:32 ◼   ► I think The Verge did a story on this.

00:16:34 ◼   ► And the thing I love about this is imagine you make an app and it doesn't succeed, and

00:16:41 ◼   ► lots of them don't.

00:16:42 ◼   ► And you have to live with-- they will physically take the remains of your app and bury it in

00:16:47 ◼   ► the desert.

00:16:47 ◼   ► Like, that's so much more final than just the, like, you check your app sales charts

00:16:53 ◼   ► and, oh, I only moved three copies today.

00:16:54 ◼   ► And I guess I'm not going to make it go with this.

00:16:56 ◼   ► Like, what such a definitive failure where they're like, we have to hide your shame in

00:17:01 ◼   ► a hole in the ground.

00:17:02 ◼   ► But in a sense, though, yeah, that's interesting, right?

00:17:06 ◼   ► Like, wouldn't you feel better if, like, Movable Type 4.0 or 5.0 was somewhere and there were

00:17:13 ◼   ► a million copies in the desert?

00:17:14 ◼   ► There was something-- you know what I mean?

00:17:16 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:17:17 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, the stuff that I was doing, like, 15, 20 years ago, there's some tangible artifacts

00:17:22 ◼   ► of, and it's like-- but it's like, schwag.

00:17:24 ◼   ► It's like, oh, we had a USB memory stick or something, or we had a t-shirt or something.

00:17:28 ◼   ► Right.

00:17:29 ◼   ► But I definitely-- you know, I still hold on to-- at Glitch, we redid our office, and

00:17:36 ◼   ► we had a conference room.

00:17:37 ◼   ► And I put up-- we have a box of the original HyperCard, which was a huge influence on Glitch.

00:17:43 ◼   ► We have the original Windows 95 CD-ROM.

00:17:46 ◼   ► We have Myst on CD-ROM, like, all these different sort of classic Lotus 1, 2, 3, you know, physicalc.

00:17:52 ◼   ► What I would think of as sort of the canon of software, and I got the physical copies.

00:17:56 ◼   ► And then I wanted-- one of the later ones I wanted to add was Portal, the video game,

00:18:01 ◼   ► you know, from Valve.

00:18:02 ◼   ► And I was like, oh, you know, can we get-- because it got most of the stuff off of eBay,

00:18:08 ◼   ► and it's actually not-- it is not at all expensive to collect vintage software, as it turns out.

00:18:12 ◼   ► And our-- you know, my coworker was like, oh, we can't get Portal.

00:18:18 ◼   ► And I was like, oh, why not?

00:18:19 ◼   ► Like, why don't we-- and he's like, it was never

00:18:22 ◼   ► released on a CD in a box.

00:18:24 ◼   ► But it was-- had to be, like, Orange-- he's like, there's a bundle with, like,

00:18:27 ◼   ► 10 other games, like, in a clearance bin.

00:18:29 ◼   ► But, like, there is no package for it.

00:18:31 ◼   ► And I was like, oh, that must have been just after the end.

00:18:33 ◼   ► And obviously, the company that makes Steam is going to be, you know,

00:18:36 ◼   ► the one that's going to be the first to move to digital.

00:18:37 ◼   ► But it was such a-- I was like, oh, that's the first step into Too Late for there being

00:18:43 ◼   ► a physical artifact to software.

00:18:45 ◼   ► Because I loved-- you know, I was that kid when, as a music fan, reading the liner notes

00:18:49 ◼   ► on every album, and I loved that feel with software.

00:18:52 ◼   ► Like, on the old Microsoft packages, they would have the floppy disks in a little plastic

00:18:58 ◼   ► bag that had, like, a perforation on it that was incredibly satisfying.

00:19:01 ◼   ► Like, it got the feel that, like, unboxing something really great does, you know, these

00:19:05 ◼   ► days, where they really-- I don't think it was intentional back then.

00:19:08 ◼   ► But they just had gotten this, like, the tactile feel of what you do to unleash this product

00:19:13 ◼   ► was really gratifying.

00:19:14 ◼   ► And that was such an interesting thing.

00:19:17 ◼   ► Because that obviously was a lost art by the time it was just, like, we'll throw a CD in

00:19:20 ◼   ► a regular JUUL case or evidently throw a cartridge in a baggie.

00:19:24 ◼   ► Yeah, it was just sort of like, well, we have to give it to you on a disk.

00:19:27 ◼   ► Because there's no other way to deliver this many-- you know, what are you going to do,

00:19:31 ◼   ► suck this down on a 56K modem?

00:19:33 ◼   ► So we have to give you-- we have to give you a couple of disks.

00:19:37 ◼   ► Here you go.

00:19:38 ◼   ► You know, and they're just the pure-- you know.

00:19:42 ◼   ► Well, my Boscov story is this, is that-- so we were a 2600 family.

00:19:48 ◼   ► I had friends with Apple IIs.

00:19:50 ◼   ► Our school had Apple IIs.

00:19:51 ◼   ► I was very familiar with the Apple II platform.

00:19:54 ◼   ► And that's desperately what I wanted.

00:19:56 ◼   ► But I had friends with Commodores.

00:19:57 ◼   ► I had friends with-- I mean, again, the idea that there was a-- it just seems so natural

00:20:04 ◼   ► that there were so many completely rival computing platforms-- Texas Instruments, the Trash

00:20:10 ◼   ► Aid-- and in fact, it was not likely you would know somebody else with the same system as

00:20:16 ◼   ► you.

00:20:16 ◼   ► Like, I had one friend who had a Commodore.

00:20:18 ◼   ► And everybody else was.

00:20:19 ◼   ► Like you said, there was a TI-99-4A, and there was an Apple II.

00:20:23 ◼   ► And it was like you had some stuff in common, but no interoperability whatsoever.

00:20:27 ◼   ► Other than basic, right, is that you could get like a magazine-- you could get a magazine

00:20:32 ◼   ► with a basic program you could type in, and it would probably work exactly as is on like

00:20:37 ◼   ► a Commodore and an Apple.

00:20:40 ◼   ► You didn't have to be a programming whiz to figure out if there was like maybe one thing

00:20:44 ◼   ► that you had to change.

00:20:45 ◼   ► Like, oh, that-- but for the most part, it was the same.

00:20:48 ◼   ► But--

00:20:48 ◼   ► I had a piece I was working on comparing today's app stores to what the experience was in 1984,

00:20:56 ◼   ► say.

00:20:56 ◼   ► And the idea of getting your parents' car, ride to a bookstore, which is a thing, go

00:21:04 ◼   ► to the newsstand, go through the newsstand and find the magazine for your type of computer,

00:21:10 ◼   ► because there was a different variant, right?

00:21:12 ◼   ► Then read the articles, flip to the back, and pages and pages and pages of essentially

00:21:19 ◼   ► machine code.

00:21:19 ◼   ► And then transcribe it with no errors, typing in multiple pages of completely abstract code

00:21:25 ◼   ► for usually a few days, and then compile, and it's a bug.

00:21:29 ◼   ► It's wrong.

00:21:29 ◼   ► You typed something wrong.

00:21:31 ◼   ► Then spend a weekend debugging it.

00:21:33 ◼   ► Then get it all working.

00:21:34 ◼   ► And if all that works, all that week of prep that you had spent works, you get this little

00:21:40 ◼   ► game, little app, and you're like, OK, that's fine.

00:21:42 ◼   ► That's it.

00:21:43 ◼   ► And it's impossible.

00:21:45 ◼   ► You would not believe it if it hadn't happened.

00:21:48 ◼   ► It is absurd to believe.

00:21:49 ◼   ► And then just every aspect of that is this completely tenuous, fragile thing that you're

00:21:56 ◼   ► just like, please let this work.

00:21:57 ◼   ► Please let this work.

00:21:58 ◼   ► Right.

00:22:01 ◼   ► And sometimes you could get a clear-- you might get a clear error, like syntax error

00:22:07 ◼   ► line 40.

00:22:07 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

00:22:09 ◼   ► That was a blessing.

00:22:09 ◼   ► But you could just get something just plain dead silence.

00:22:12 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:22:13 ◼   ► Because I don't know what happened.

00:22:14 ◼   ► Just I don't know.

00:22:15 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:22:15 ◼   ► I have no idea where it went wrong.

00:22:17 ◼   ► And you just typed in three pages of stuff, and you've just got to kind of eyeball it

00:22:21 ◼   ► between this screen in front of you and a magazine.

00:22:23 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:22:25 ◼   ► It's like, no, I think I'm going to go back to getting hit by my older brother.

00:22:28 ◼   ► That was better.

00:22:28 ◼   ► Right.

00:22:29 ◼   ► But this is bad.

00:22:31 ◼   ► The 1984 Mac, which of course I wanted, but which I just wanted to see even, was $2,500

00:22:37 ◼   ► in 1984 dollars, which is like a million dollars in today's dollars.

00:22:43 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:22:44 ◼   ► I'm no inflation calculator, but that sounds right.

00:22:45 ◼   ► They didn't sell things like that at Boscov's.

00:22:48 ◼   ► You couldn't go.

00:22:49 ◼   ► It wasn't a consumer device.

00:22:50 ◼   ► No, no.

00:22:51 ◼   ► That was a special thing.

00:22:52 ◼   ► Right.

00:22:52 ◼   ► But they did have stuff at Boscov's like other rival home computer things.

00:22:59 ◼   ► Like the Coleco vision or Intellivision.

00:23:03 ◼   ► My uncle had--

00:23:04 ◼   ► And there was a category in between sort of game console and real computer, where they

00:23:08 ◼   ► had kind of a crappy keyboard, but it would do a little bit of both.

00:23:11 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:23:12 ◼   ► But the one I remember desperately-- and God, this is-- and it's the black hole that maybe--

00:23:17 ◼   ► I might have to wait till I'm retired, because if I start going down this hole now, a daring

00:23:21 ◼   ► fireball will collapse upon itself is collecting vintage computer stuff.

00:23:26 ◼   ► Oh, God.

00:23:27 ◼   ► But the one that I loved was the Vectrex.

00:23:30 ◼   ► Do you remember this?

00:23:32 ◼   ► Yeah, that was a narrow-- I mean, I remember it.

00:23:34 ◼   ► But it was a visual-- this makes sense.

00:23:36 ◼   ► It was visually interesting.

00:23:37 ◼   ► So that must have really spoken to you.

00:23:40 ◼   ► I did the math, by the way.

00:23:41 ◼   ► It's $6,220 for an original Mac.

00:23:45 ◼   ► Right.

00:23:45 ◼   ► So think about that.

00:23:46 ◼   ► Think about if your kid--

00:23:47 ◼   ► It's enormous.

00:23:48 ◼   ► It's a car.

00:23:49 ◼   ► Well, a car.

00:23:49 ◼   ► A car would cost that much.

00:23:50 ◼   ► Think about if your 11-year-old kid came up to you and said, I would like a $6,700 computer.

00:23:57 ◼   ► You got $6,000 lying around, son?

00:23:59 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:23:59 ◼   ► The Vectrex, for those who don't know-- and I'll put it in the show notes-- but it was

00:24:04 ◼   ► a self-contained-- it was sort of like the Mac of video game consoles, because you had

00:24:08 ◼   ► to play-- it had a built-- unlike everything else, it didn't hook up to your TV, because

00:24:12 ◼   ► it was vector graphics.

00:24:13 ◼   ► It had a screen built in.

00:24:14 ◼   ► Yeah, and it's a special vector graph.

00:24:15 ◼   ► And if you've ever seen games like the old coin-op Star Wars game, which is my favorite

00:24:20 ◼   ► of the genre, but Asteroids was a thing-- and instead of pixels, big fat dots on the

00:24:27 ◼   ► screen, it drew lines on the screen.

00:24:29 ◼   ► And therefore, a diagonal line would be just as straight as a horizontal or vertical line,

00:24:35 ◼   ► which fascinated me.

00:24:37 ◼   ► I mean, in retrospect, they look jaggy, but the implementation was so good.

00:24:41 ◼   ► And I think one of the other things, too, is the aesthetics of the early, mid-'80s.

00:24:46 ◼   ► Vector graphics were the symbol of the future, in a way that bitmap was not.

00:24:50 ◼   ► Right.

00:24:51 ◼   ► Now, retroactively-- which was a little bit later-- the 8-bit graphics-- the Mario icon

00:24:59 ◼   ► with the blocky graphics is sort of the-- that's the definitive 8-bit image, right?

00:25:05 ◼   ► Is that a sprite?

00:25:06 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:25:06 ◼   ► And-- but that was actually later, right?

00:25:08 ◼   ► If you're in 1981, '82, '83-- I think Blade Runner sort of captures this a little bit,

00:25:13 ◼   ► certainly, obviously, in Star Wars, like in A New Hope, and they have the vector graphics

00:25:18 ◼   ► drawing of the Death Star.

00:25:19 ◼   ► Like, that was what the future was.

00:25:22 ◼   ► The future was this vector-outlined, maybe solid polyshaded-- Tron was that, too.

00:25:28 ◼   ► And that was a symbol of futurism.

00:25:31 ◼   ► And so I think what you see in your graphical-- and I think Vectrex was this symbol of-- this

00:25:37 ◼   ► is Future Computer, not just because the screen is built in, although that obviously was also

00:25:40 ◼   ► Future, because the Mac did that, too.

00:25:42 ◼   ► But the way-- I think there was a visual language that showed fluidity, like motion, without

00:25:50 ◼   ► jaggies, whereas everything else was blocky as hell.

00:25:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:25:53 ◼   ► So I wanted to play the Vectrex so bad, and I knew I was going to get one.

00:25:59 ◼   ► There's no chance that my parents are going to buy me this thing.

00:26:00 ◼   ► Oh, god.

00:26:01 ◼   ► But Boscovs had one.

00:26:03 ◼   ► They not only sold them, they had a counter.

00:26:06 ◼   ► Oh, you had a demo unit.

00:26:08 ◼   ► Yeah, there was a demo unit.

00:26:09 ◼   ► But it was always a kid in front of you.

00:26:11 ◼   ► Sure, yeah.

00:26:11 ◼   ► And I just remember, I have this vivid memory of the one time there was nobody else in line

00:26:16 ◼   ► behind the kid who was playing.

00:26:17 ◼   ► And so I had-- and my mom was shopping for whatever.

00:26:20 ◼   ► So I had a chance.

00:26:22 ◼   ► If this kid in front of me would give it up, I'd have it.

00:26:24 ◼   ► But I had to pee.

00:26:25 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

00:26:27 ◼   ► That's-- you hate to-- the flesh is weak.

00:26:30 ◼   ► Right.

00:26:30 ◼   ► We're mortals.

00:26:31 ◼   ► So I did get to play for the first time, but I had to give it up and then run-- run to

00:26:37 ◼   ► the restroom and sort of put a little dot in my jeans, my tough-skinned jeans, before

00:26:44 ◼   ► I got there and then just--

00:26:45 ◼   ► Wow.

00:26:45 ◼   ► --peed like a racehorse.

00:26:47 ◼   ► That's very evocative, John.

00:26:49 ◼   ► Thank you for sharing that story.

00:26:50 ◼   ► Well, that's how desperate I was.

00:26:51 ◼   ► That's how desperate I was for this, you know.

00:26:53 ◼   ► For a higher resolution display to play games on.

00:26:56 ◼   ► Yeah, but to my mind, that 10-year period from the mid-'80s to the mid-'90s, to me,

00:27:03 ◼   ► that's so long, because to me, those mid-'80s computers, including the original Mac, even

00:27:10 ◼   ► though the interface was so new, it was so limited in terms of storage and RAM.

00:27:16 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

00:27:17 ◼   ► I mean, they really-- they cut every corner they could to get that all together.

00:27:20 ◼   ► 128 kilobytes of memory, you know.

00:27:25 ◼   ► Discs--

00:27:26 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, but even that-- I was trying to explain this.

00:27:28 ◼   ► I think I was saying this on Twitter the other day.

00:27:30 ◼   ► But again, the Big 20, it was the first computer I had.

00:27:33 ◼   ► There was a Commodore computer.

00:27:34 ◼   ► And this was one of the very early mainstream products.

00:27:38 ◼   ► And it had essentially 5K of RAM.

00:27:41 ◼   ► And I was trying to explain to somebody, a single emoji takes up 5K.

00:27:45 ◼   ► Like, a smiley that you have dropped in the end of an email as an emoji, that is more

00:27:51 ◼   ► memory than the entire computer had.

00:27:53 ◼   ► And people were like, that doesn't make any sense.

00:27:54 ◼   ► How would you put software into that?

00:27:57 ◼   ► Right.

00:27:58 ◼   ► And it's like, well, that's what you have.

00:28:00 ◼   ► There was a standard control in the original Mac for text edit fields.

00:28:05 ◼   ► And there was an app called Simple Text, or I think originally-- which was first, Teach

00:28:10 ◼   ► Text or Simple Text?

00:28:11 ◼   ► I forget.

00:28:12 ◼   ► I feel like Simple Text.

00:28:14 ◼   ► But I think I remember it wrong.

00:28:14 ◼   ► Yeah, I think it was Simple Text first, and then Teach Text was the renamed version.

00:28:18 ◼   ► But the files, they-- and that was like what a readme would be formatted on.

00:28:24 ◼   ► It would be a Teach Text file.

00:28:26 ◼   ► Because everybody had it.

00:28:27 ◼   ► It was the built-in text editor.

00:28:29 ◼   ► 32 kilobytes was the maximum size of text, which was always a bit of a problem.

00:28:37 ◼   ► You know, like you can--

00:28:38 ◼   ► You had to squeeze it in there.

00:28:39 ◼   ► You could squeeze it in there.

00:28:40 ◼   ► But I had Adam Enks, the publisher of tidbits on.

00:28:46 ◼   ► And for a while, the size of an episode or an issue of tidbits in the early days was

00:28:52 ◼   ► still limited to 32 kilobytes because it needed to work.

00:28:56 ◼   ► Had to be able to open it up.

00:28:57 ◼   ► Had to be able to open it up or view it in a text field.

00:29:00 ◼   ► It's just-- it was sort of like those early ones.

00:29:04 ◼   ► They were-- your mind-- you couldn't-- your mind can't hold 128 kilobytes of 1s and 0s,

00:29:12 ◼   ► but you can almost imagine it, right?

00:29:14 ◼   ► It was like you could-- your human mind could see it and sort of hold the scope of it.

00:29:19 ◼   ► And by the mid-'90s, computers were so powerful, and you could have so many things

00:29:24 ◼   ► running at once with the megabytes of RAM that you could have installed and the 17-inch

00:29:31 ◼   ► displays we had at the college newspaper, which were huge.

00:29:35 ◼   ► And you could see so much at once.

00:29:37 ◼   ► And it just seemed so much more expansive than your mind, right?

00:29:41 ◼   ► Like it seemed like--

00:29:43 ◼   ► Yeah, I do think your mental capacity is this thing that, in the changeover from--

00:29:48 ◼   ► I think '80s computers feel a little bit analog still.

00:29:51 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:29:52 ◼   ► Right.

00:29:52 ◼   ► And '90s computers don't.

00:29:54 ◼   ► And I think what changed in that moment is obviously the graphics interfaces come in,

00:29:58 ◼   ► all those kinds of things.

00:29:59 ◼   ► But also, if you're a coder, the thing you're always trying to do is preserve state, stay

00:30:03 ◼   ► in the flow.

00:30:04 ◼   ► You're keeping the whole mental model of the app in your head, basically.

00:30:07 ◼   ► And when you had such limited storage and capacity and capability, you could pretty

00:30:13 ◼   ► reasonably keep everything that was in the computer's mind in your mind.

00:30:16 ◼   ► Right.

00:30:16 ◼   ► And then all of a sudden, sort of two things happen simultaneously.

00:30:20 ◼   ► One, obviously, capacity and Moore's Law and all that kind of stuff goes up really quickly.

00:30:23 ◼   ► But also, it's connected to everything else in the world.

00:30:25 ◼   ► So all of a sudden, any information can come in.

00:30:28 ◼   ► If you're pulling things off the internet, the nascent web, you don't know what's being

00:30:33 ◼   ► rendered in your software.

00:30:35 ◼   ► You don't know what's showing up on your device.

00:30:37 ◼   ► It could be anything.

00:30:38 ◼   ► It used to be whatever was on this floppy disk is what I am going to have to parse and

00:30:43 ◼   ► handle and process as data.

00:30:45 ◼   ► And rather, it is like arbitrary information coming from strangers on the internet is going

00:30:51 ◼   ► to be the thing that I have to make software and wrap around.

00:30:53 ◼   ► And that was such a shift in the work of the programmer, the work of the creator.

00:30:59 ◼   ► And I think it's actually very different then because there's still this ethos I have where

00:31:05 ◼   ► like, at Glitch, we make tools for people to make apps.

00:31:07 ◼   ► Right.

00:31:07 ◼   ► And I always look at a digital audio workstation.

00:31:13 ◼   ► What is somebody doing in Pro Tools or in GarageBand as an analog?

00:31:16 ◼   ► Or you look at Photoshop or Final Cut or Premiere or whatever.

00:31:20 ◼   ► And those are creative tools where you're still actually basically trying to keep the

00:31:25 ◼   ► entire state of your work in your head.

00:31:28 ◼   ► And for Photoshop, it's easier if it's visual.

00:31:30 ◼   ► If you're doing a film in Final Cut, you're probably doing a scene at a time because that's

00:31:35 ◼   ► about as much as you have capability for.

00:31:38 ◼   ► But software went from, I think in that era before the sort of modern what we think of

00:31:44 ◼   ► as a development environment, whether it's Xcode or Visual Studio or whatever, you were

00:31:49 ◼   ► maintaining state in your head of the app that you were building, of the software, the

00:31:53 ◼   ► tool or whatever the program you were building.

00:31:56 ◼   ► And then there's this big, big shift sort of post rise of the web and then post rise

00:32:00 ◼   ► of these, what we now would call the integrated development environment, the IDEs, is you

00:32:06 ◼   ► are just handling a flow of things coming towards you.

00:32:08 ◼   ► You're almost, you're just, it's like the Space Invaders coming down to you in the video

00:32:13 ◼   ► game.

00:32:13 ◼   ► You're just sort of fighting off whatever's coming inbound to your app.

00:32:16 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:32:16 ◼   ► And as a user, yeah.

00:32:18 ◼   ► And it's sort of like it was a very sudden inversion of pre-network, pre-internet, or,

00:32:26 ◼   ► you know, and the funnel part of the inversion where you go from the part where you were

00:32:33 ◼   ► desperate, where can I get more stuff from my computer?

00:32:35 ◼   ► Right?

00:32:37 ◼   ► I've mastered every...

00:32:38 ◼   ► Oh God, yeah, yeah, yeah, literally.

00:32:40 ◼   ► Because I'll go to the bookstore and type it in if I have to, but I need to get something

00:32:42 ◼   ► from my computer.

00:32:43 ◼   ► And I have all these floppy disks and I know everything.

00:32:46 ◼   ► I know every game.

00:32:47 ◼   ► I've played every game.

00:32:48 ◼   ► I know every program.

00:32:49 ◼   ► I know every file that I've got saved because I had to make it.

00:32:54 ◼   ► I've mastered everything on my computer.

00:32:56 ◼   ► Where can I get something more?

00:32:57 ◼   ► Right?

00:32:59 ◼   ► That's the one end of this funnel where it was just this, you're alone in the desert

00:33:05 ◼   ► looking for just one new thing to put on your computer.

00:33:08 ◼   ► Then there's like the BBS dial-up era where it's like all of a sudden there's a bit of

00:33:13 ◼   ► community and a bit of sharing.

00:33:15 ◼   ► And it was such a...

00:33:16 ◼   ► It was a trickle, but it's there.

00:33:17 ◼   ► But what a brief era in hindsight, right?

00:33:20 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:33:20 ◼   ► It was so obviously transitional in retrospect.

00:33:23 ◼   ► But at the time it felt like the world had opened up.

00:33:25 ◼   ► And I think this is the thing that connectivity and the internet did to every discipline over

00:33:30 ◼   ► and over and over.

00:33:31 ◼   ► We went from scarcity to abundance.

00:33:33 ◼   ► And there's this intermediate stage that, again, is very brief, but the time feels so eye-opening.

00:33:38 ◼   ► And again, I always think of music and that's sort of all my first love.

00:33:42 ◼   ► But the idea of you had your CD collection or your record collection and you would know

00:33:48 ◼   ► the album cuts you didn't even like, because that was what you had to listen to.

00:33:51 ◼   ► So if you're like, "I'm going to listen to whatever, Steely Dan," and you're like,

00:33:55 ◼   ► "This fourth song sucks, but I need to listen to it to get to the fifth song because we're

00:33:59 ◼   ► sequentially accessing everything."

00:34:00 ◼   ► So I know all the words to the song I don't even like, right?

00:34:03 ◼   ► And that is what happens in scarcity world.

00:34:05 ◼   ► Nobody is listening through a playlist if they don't like four songs in a row on it.

00:34:10 ◼   ► Now, in abundance land, because you can sort of push the button.

00:34:12 ◼   ► And that's music, but that was true for film.

00:34:14 ◼   ► That was true.

00:34:14 ◼   ► Definitely, you wore out a VHS tape of a movie.

00:34:18 ◼   ► It was only a B-minus to you.

00:34:20 ◼   ► Because you had it.

00:34:22 ◼   ► And then that idea with what your computer could do and what you could do to access information

00:34:28 ◼   ► on your computer, the BBS era and this sort of, for folks who weren't around then, it

00:34:34 ◼   ► sort of flowed fairly seamlessly, I think, into the AOL or Prodigy era, where there were

00:34:38 ◼   ► what were called dial-up services on the...

00:34:41 ◼   ► Actually, one of the things we were talking about, Windows 95, Microsoft did the Microsoft

00:34:44 ◼   ► network.

00:34:45 ◼   ► And there were these multiple...

00:34:47 ◼   ► They were like TV channels.

00:34:50 ◼   ► I mean, the reason today we have a cable network called MSNBC is it was launched alongside

00:34:55 ◼   ► MSN, the Microsoft network.

00:34:56 ◼   ► This dial-up service was going to have a TV component.

00:34:59 ◼   ► I just explained this to my son, who's 16.

00:35:03 ◼   ► It doesn't make any sense.

00:35:05 ◼   ► It doesn't make any sense.

00:35:06 ◼   ► And I was like, "And lo, these many years later, they kept the name."

00:35:10 ◼   ► They kept the name.

00:35:11 ◼   ► Yeah, everything's an artifact.

00:35:12 ◼   ► But it's an artifact of a mental model of a moment.

00:35:15 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:35:16 ◼   ► In 1994, it seems eminently reasonable you should have a dial-up service and a television

00:35:21 ◼   ► network that have the same name.

00:35:23 ◼   ► That makes perfect sense to you.

00:35:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:35:25 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:35:25 ◼   ► Because you don't know how we're going to navigate from the old world to the new.

00:35:29 ◼   ► So you're just guessing.

00:35:30 ◼   ► And I do think it's interesting.

00:35:32 ◼   ► We have all these artifacts around us of this connection to, "We can kind of tell what

00:35:38 ◼   ► it's going to be like, but we don't really know."

00:35:39 ◼   ► And I just really…

00:35:42 ◼   ► That's so fascinating to me.

00:35:44 ◼   ► And I think that that's actually going to the point about the App Store.

00:35:49 ◼   ► We're still in a scarcity model of software.

00:35:53 ◼   ► You're going to buy software.

00:35:54 ◼   ► When we went from on a floppy disk to on a CD-ROM to maybe you download it to…

00:36:01 ◼   ► You're probably always downloading it to it's just a service that you connect to.

00:36:06 ◼   ► You don't even pay for the services to sponsor ads.

00:36:08 ◼   ► That whole continuum…

00:36:10 ◼   ► I think everything happened very, very gradually and unevenly.

00:36:13 ◼   ► And so we didn't ever have this breakthrough moment.

00:36:15 ◼   ► And the rare exception is the App Store coming out, where it was so obviously punctuated.

00:36:21 ◼   ► And I don't know if you want to jump into that.

00:36:23 ◼   ► But there's so many thoughts I have about it.

00:36:25 ◼   ► No, not yet.

00:36:25 ◼   ► Not yet.

00:36:26 ◼   ► Hold it.

00:36:26 ◼   ► Hold it.

00:36:26 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:36:27 ◼   ► I'll just say this.

00:36:32 ◼   ► I think that with the '84 to '94 decade, it was really…

00:36:38 ◼   ► And maybe I'm a little biased.

00:36:40 ◼   ► Well, maybe not.

00:36:41 ◼   ► But I think it was really a business transformation.

00:36:45 ◼   ► Right?

00:36:46 ◼   ► It was work that was changed so quickly.

00:36:49 ◼   ► It was totally.

00:36:50 ◼   ► And in my…

00:36:51 ◼   ► Because that's who it was buying.

00:36:53 ◼   ► There wasn't…

00:36:54 ◼   ► The home market in total was nothing compared to what…

00:36:57 ◼   ► Companies were all in.

00:37:00 ◼   ► They were like, "We have to have spreadsheets.

00:37:02 ◼   ► We have to have word processors."

00:37:03 ◼   ► Right.

00:37:03 ◼   ► I love those early stories.

00:37:05 ◼   ► When you hear the story of Dan Bricklin talking about the first time…

00:37:10 ◼   ► He had the idea for…

00:37:12 ◼   ► VisiCalc.

00:37:15 ◼   ► VisiCalc.

00:37:16 ◼   ► Jeez, I was going to call it 123.

00:37:17 ◼   ► And I was like, "No, 123 is way too new."

00:37:20 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:37:21 ◼   ► VisiCalc.

00:37:22 ◼   ► And I remember the story he tells of showing it to an accountant.

00:37:25 ◼   ► And the accountant was just like, "You have no idea.

00:37:28 ◼   ► You just turned my 40-hour week into an hour."

00:37:32 ◼   ► He goes, "Are you serious?"

00:37:33 ◼   ► And he's like, "Let me…

00:37:34 ◼   ► It's like this is all I do is add these numbers up."

00:37:37 ◼   ► And he's like, "Oh, really?"

00:37:38 ◼   ► Yeah, it's unfathomable, the increase in productivity.

00:37:42 ◼   ► And how quickly everybody embraced it.

00:37:44 ◼   ► And my perspective…

00:37:45 ◼   ► All I've ever done professionally before I did during Fireball is I made websites,

00:37:50 ◼   ► and which of course didn't exist, couldn't have existed pre-computer.

00:37:54 ◼   ► Pre-web.

00:37:54 ◼   ► I got paid to make websites, and I did graphic design.

00:37:58 ◼   ► And the graphic design work I did a lot in the late 90s typically wound up in print.

00:38:04 ◼   ► But none of it.

00:38:07 ◼   ► I never once…

00:38:08 ◼   ► I graduated college in 1996.

00:38:11 ◼   ► And especially in the four years from '96 to around 2000, I did an awful lot of freelance

00:38:17 ◼   ► work, graphic design, professionally, and doing a lot of it like…

00:38:21 ◼   ► All of it really as a freelancer going into different companies.

00:38:25 ◼   ► I never once…

00:38:26 ◼   ► In hindsight, I realize this.

00:38:28 ◼   ► I never once encountered pre-QuarkXPress, Illustrator, Photoshop graphic design.

00:38:36 ◼   ► - Like physical copy of it.

00:38:38 ◼   ► - Never.

00:38:38 ◼   ► Never.

00:38:39 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:38:39 ◼   ► - It just never…

00:38:40 ◼   ► In the student newspaper where I learned all this at Drexel,

00:38:44 ◼   ► when I first got there at '92, '93, was all Quark, Illustrator, Photoshop,

00:38:50 ◼   ► print out to laser printer.

00:38:52 ◼   ► And we didn't send…

00:38:55 ◼   ► Even when I left in '96, we didn't transfer the paper to the printer who printed the newspaper

00:39:00 ◼   ► digitally.

00:39:01 ◼   ► We did print out tabloid-sized things and pasteboard them up and hand them to the printer,

00:39:07 ◼   ► and then they photo scanned them in.

00:39:09 ◼   ► - Right.

00:39:09 ◼   ► So you had an analog output.

00:39:10 ◼   ► - Analog output.

00:39:11 ◼   ► But everything else was digital.

00:39:14 ◼   ► And in my professional life, I never once encountered it.

00:39:17 ◼   ► And in hindsight, the Macintosh only came out in 1984, and the Laser Writer was only '86.

00:39:23 ◼   ► So the '84 to '86 doesn't even count for revolutionizing the graphic design industry

00:39:30 ◼   ► because of what didn't happen yet.

00:39:32 ◼   ► Right?

00:39:32 ◼   ► So in like six years…

00:39:34 ◼   ► - But you were also early on that.

00:39:35 ◼   ► You were early to have a fully digital career.

00:39:38 ◼   ► You had peers that did do paste up work and physical print work.

00:39:42 ◼   ► - Right.

00:39:42 ◼   ► - And I sort of had the same experience where my first job and then later my first company

00:39:47 ◼   ► were basically doing technology for construction companies.

00:39:50 ◼   ► And then there were some exactly what you said.

00:39:52 ◼   ► They had gone early to getting an IBM PC, and they had whatever the spreadsheets were,

00:39:57 ◼   ► Lotus 1-2-3.

00:39:58 ◼   ► And in that era, it was like, "Okay, we're going to move to Windows, and we're going

00:40:03 ◼   ► to upgrade to Windows, and that's going to be a new computer and a new printer and all

00:40:06 ◼   ► that kind of stuff."

00:40:07 ◼   ► But I definitely had…

00:40:09 ◼   ► I mean, this is actually…

00:40:09 ◼   ► This is one of those things where I tell people and they just don't believe me.

00:40:12 ◼   ► But like…

00:40:13 ◼   ► So I had Mennonite companies, people who were our clients, and I sold computers to Mennonites.

00:40:21 ◼   ► And for people who are not in those communities, Mennonites, I think for outsiders, are

00:40:25 ◼   ► indistinguishable from Amish.

00:40:27 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:40:27 ◼   ► - They wear the bonnets.

00:40:28 ◼   ► And definitely we had folks that had the buggies and all that kind of stuff.

00:40:35 ◼   ► They are plain folk.

00:40:37 ◼   ► But Mennonites are a little more willing to engage with the outside world in those regards

00:40:42 ◼   ► than Amish folks are.

00:40:43 ◼   ► But anyway, the first time I ever…

00:40:45 ◼   ► This is a true story.

00:40:46 ◼   ► The first time I ever in person saw an original Mac, the 128K Mac, was on the desk of a

00:40:55 ◼   ► Mennonite construction company in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

00:40:58 ◼   ► And they had bought one when it was new.

00:41:01 ◼   ► And they had had it all the way into…

00:41:03 ◼   ► By then, that point must have been '91, '92.

00:41:05 ◼   ► It was old.

00:41:06 ◼   ► But they were like, "Well, it still works.

00:41:07 ◼   ► We're not going to get rid of it."

00:41:09 ◼   ► They are plain folks.

00:41:09 ◼   ► They don't get rid of an implement that still works and the Mac still worked.

00:41:14 ◼   ► And it was so instructive because they were a very extreme example.

00:41:19 ◼   ► But a lot of these people were going from handwritten spreadsheets, literally, like

00:41:24 ◼   ► boxes on a piece of paper, to a computer.

00:41:27 ◼   ► And that idea of that transformation of your life, to the point about the accountant talking

00:41:34 ◼   ► to Dan Bricklin when he invents a spreadsheet, you are going to go from this being all you

00:41:38 ◼   ► do all day to a trivial task that a computer can do for you.

00:41:41 ◼   ► I think it's almost impossible to overstate.

00:41:45 ◼   ► And how jarring it must have been.

00:41:46 ◼   ► Now, even if you're not Amish or near Amish, if you are just a regular person growing up

00:41:51 ◼   ► in society, I think there's such anxiety around it.

00:41:55 ◼   ► And I think that's actually the point about like, while you're talking about your parents

00:41:57 ◼   ► being like, "We don't want you to be at the computer.

00:41:59 ◼   ► You're going to spend all day with it."

00:41:59 ◼   ► That's different than if I said I wanted a guitar.

00:42:03 ◼   ► My parents would not have said, "Oh, you're going to spend all day inside on the guitar."

00:42:06 ◼   ► Because that's an instrument.

00:42:08 ◼   ► That is expression.

00:42:09 ◼   ► That is an art form.

00:42:12 ◼   ► And the reason I think that there was a really common attitude in those eras, and it's not

00:42:18 ◼   ► so much true now because it would be absurd to be like, "Don't be on your phone."

00:42:21 ◼   ► But that you would say, "I don't want you to spend all day on the computer," was there

00:42:25 ◼   ► was a skepticism about technology as a whole.

00:42:28 ◼   ► And like I said, this is the era of Blade Runner, but it's also War Games, Matthew Brodrick

00:42:33 ◼   ► film where he starts a nuclear war with his home computer.

00:42:35 ◼   ► [Laughter]

00:42:35 ◼   ► - Shall we play a game?

00:42:37 ◼   ► - Exactly, right?

00:42:39 ◼   ► And so there's this cultural anxiety about what are these machines doing to us?

00:42:44 ◼   ► Are we losing our souls?

00:42:45 ◼   ► Which seems quaint now, right?

00:42:48 ◼   ► Because they were right, actually, about a lot of their concerns.

00:42:50 ◼   ► There are books written in '82, '83, and I'm forgetting the name of one of them, but I'll

00:42:54 ◼   ► send you for the show notes if I can remember.

00:42:55 ◼   ► But it was a fairly prominent book.

00:42:57 ◼   ► It was one of those, like, the thinkers of the time are writing about it.

00:43:01 ◼   ► Obviously, I was a child, so I wasn't thinking about the book, but I went back and looked

00:43:04 ◼   ► at it.

00:43:04 ◼   ► And they're talking about, "This is going to enable mass surveillance, and this is going

00:43:08 ◼   ► to displace people's jobs, and it's going to cause all these things that have come to

00:43:13 ◼   ► pass."

00:43:13 ◼   ► And so I think a lot of people had a skepticism about personal computers that was also born

00:43:22 ◼   ► of, keep in mind, at that point, recent history, mainframes had come from a lot of military

00:43:27 ◼   ► research.

00:43:27 ◼   ► The country was still processing Vietnam and Watergate and all this kind of stuff.

00:43:33 ◼   ► And so whether it's jobs, gates, like all those early guys, they were very unapologetically

00:43:39 ◼   ► long-haired hippies and very much like what was then called counterculture and saw themselves

00:43:45 ◼   ► as reacting to that.

00:43:46 ◼   ► And I think that still informs, like there's this back and forth of that ambivalence about

00:43:52 ◼   ► the role of computers and where they came from and what they were going to do to people

00:43:55 ◼   ► that I think has gotten erased because I think we have this sort of warm, fuzzy nostalgia

00:44:01 ◼   ► view of a lot of it.

00:44:02 ◼   ► Like, I think there's like the Halt and Catch Fire version, and then there's like sort of

00:44:07 ◼   ► kitschy '80s, like I said, the 8-bit graphics and a Mario sprite.

00:44:10 ◼   ► But the idea that there was actually a reckoning culturally with what are these things going

00:44:14 ◼   ► to do to our lives, and then that repeated with the internet, right, with cybercrime

00:44:20 ◼   ► and like the sort of cyber era, you know, early '90s.

00:44:24 ◼   ► Yeah, when cyber was an actively used prefix.

00:44:27 ◼   ► Yes, exactly, right.

00:44:29 ◼   ► When people would unironically talk about something being cyber.

00:44:31 ◼   ► The cyber era.

00:44:32 ◼   ► That's what we should call it.

00:44:34 ◼   ► Right, it's very clear, you know what I mean.

00:44:36 ◼   ► And Wired magazine comes out and interestingly, like Wired or whatever was the like techno

00:44:43 ◼   ► utopianism.

00:44:43 ◼   ► Oh, this is going to free us all.

00:44:45 ◼   ► We will be free from the shackles.

00:44:46 ◼   ► And it's funny because that's also this very counterculture, you know, Timothy Leary, we're

00:44:52 ◼   ► going to, this, computers are LSD kind of thing.

00:44:54 ◼   ► Yeah, let's talk Windows 95, 25 years of Windows 95.

00:44:59 ◼   ► And it is a fine version of Windows.

00:45:02 ◼   ► You know, people lined up to buy it.

00:45:04 ◼   ► It was an operating system.

00:45:06 ◼   ► They did.

00:45:08 ◼   ► It's so weird.

00:45:09 ◼   ► That's the weirdest thing.

00:45:10 ◼   ► Like if you think about that retrospectively, you're like, well, what does it do?

00:45:12 ◼   ► Well, it lets your other software do stuff.

00:45:15 ◼   ► Right.

00:45:16 ◼   ► How do you sell that product?

00:45:17 ◼   ► People used to, people used to line up for lots of things.

00:45:21 ◼   ► This is another thing that definitely dates us.

00:45:24 ◼   ► But like concert tickets, you know, right.

00:45:28 ◼   ► You had to the only way to get good.

00:45:31 ◼   ► I slept in a parking lot for Janet Jackson tickets.

00:45:33 ◼   ► Yeah, I was a regular at the Ticketmaster in my college years over at 30 something in

00:45:41 ◼   ► Lancaster in Philly.

00:45:42 ◼   ► There was a Ticketmaster right next to the Chili's.

00:45:46 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:45:47 ◼   ► Yeah, I know that place.

00:45:49 ◼   ► I think that Chili's is a gentleman's club now.

00:45:51 ◼   ► I'm not sure.

00:45:52 ◼   ► But there was a Ticketmaster.

00:45:55 ◼   ► And when certain acts were coming to town, you'd have to, you know, maybe not overnight,

00:46:00 ◼   ► but you definitely, you know, the tickets went on sale at nine.

00:46:03 ◼   ► You'd have to get there at like four or five in the morning.

00:46:05 ◼   ► Yeah, you go early.

00:46:06 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:46:07 ◼   ► If it was a big show, I mean, again, I grew up in the sticks.

00:46:09 ◼   ► And so if it was a big show, you'd be out there because it was like one ticket window

00:46:14 ◼   ► for all these things.

00:46:15 ◼   ► But I think that sense of scarcity is such an interesting thing.

00:46:18 ◼   ► And then context-wise for Windows 95, it's like, I had had my first company by then and

00:46:25 ◼   ► people were all on Windows.

00:46:27 ◼   ► That was just what you used at work then.

00:46:28 ◼   ► Nonetheless, you were a graphic designer, basically.

00:46:30 ◼   ► And they were doing spreadsheets and stuff.

00:46:34 ◼   ► So you weren't going to splurge for a Mac that was perceived as much more expensive

00:46:39 ◼   ► at the time.

00:46:39 ◼   ► And it was wild because, you know, it was like being a plumber, right?

00:46:45 ◼   ► If your printer breaks, you call the computer guy and he'll come and plug in a new printer

00:46:49 ◼   ► for you.

00:46:50 ◼   ► But you didn't have an opinion about it.

00:46:53 ◼   ► You didn't think about it.

00:46:53 ◼   ► It was like thinking about your, you know, these reconstruction companies.

00:46:56 ◼   ► It's like thinking about your table saw.

00:46:57 ◼   ► If your saw blade breaks, you replace it.

00:46:58 ◼   ► But you're not like, "I can't wait for the new table saw.

00:47:01 ◼   ► That's weird."

00:47:03 ◼   ► And then literally summer of '95, we had customers calling us.

00:47:09 ◼   ► You would call back then and call us and be like, "Are you going to put Windows 95 on

00:47:15 ◼   ► when it comes out?"

00:47:15 ◼   ► And that was such a, like, it was inconceivable.

00:47:20 ◼   ► It was just a weird thing.

00:47:21 ◼   ► I'm like, "How do you even know about it?

00:47:23 ◼   ► I know about it, but it's my job.

00:47:24 ◼   ► How do you know about it?"

00:47:25 ◼   ► It was weird watching it remotely as a Mac user at the time.

00:47:32 ◼   ► And what gets popularized is the religious angle of it.

00:47:38 ◼   ► You know, the people who were truly...

00:47:40 ◼   ► Yeah, there were partisans fighting for it.

00:47:42 ◼   ► I mean, it was like the internet is today.

00:47:44 ◼   ► Yeah, it was.

00:47:44 ◼   ► And it was an early sign of how the internet serves to polarize people.

00:47:51 ◼   ► Very much so.

00:47:52 ◼   ► Where, and I always had the palpable sense.

00:47:54 ◼   ► And I'm not trying to say that I'm any kind of sociological genius.

00:47:58 ◼   ► I just think I'm humane and empathetic enough that it...

00:48:04 ◼   ► And my interests, my parents' worries should be damned.

00:48:09 ◼   ► My interests, you know, have been outside the computer.

00:48:14 ◼   ► I played sports and I liked going.

00:48:15 ◼   ► I just mentioned I did go to concerts.

00:48:17 ◼   ► I had real life.

00:48:20 ◼   ► I have seen the outdoors, mother.

00:48:22 ◼   ► I have seen the outdoors.

00:48:26 ◼   ► I never looked like I needed to hit the sun to get some vitamin D.

00:48:29 ◼   ► It wasn't like, you know, come out like I was in a bunker.

00:48:33 ◼   ► But it always seemed so obvious to me in the Usenet era that,

00:48:39 ◼   ► my God, if we could just get these same people in a room together,

00:48:43 ◼   ► it wouldn't be like this.

00:48:44 ◼   ► No.

00:48:45 ◼   ► No.

00:48:46 ◼   ► You could see that they had dehumanized each other

00:48:48 ◼   ► because they were interacting through these platforms.

00:48:51 ◼   ► And in that era, I remember very distinctly CompuServe.

00:48:55 ◼   ► So this was another one of these dial-up services like AOL or whatever.

00:48:57 ◼   ► It was one of the earlier ones.

00:48:58 ◼   ► And it was probably one of the first places,

00:49:01 ◼   ► and actually that's where the GIF was invented,

00:49:03 ◼   ► was for animation on that platform.

00:49:06 ◼   ► And there was a very...

00:49:08 ◼   ► Really early...

00:49:11 ◼   ► It was like the prototype of today's online battles in social media.

00:49:14 ◼   ► Right?

00:49:15 ◼   ► And the amazing thing about it was it would happen over anything.

00:49:18 ◼   ► Like operating systems were actually, I think,

00:49:19 ◼   ► one of the areas where it became a really big conversation

00:49:22 ◼   ► because everybody had one, very obviously.

00:49:25 ◼   ► And also, if you were using technology at that point,

00:49:27 ◼   ► you had to have been an enthusiast.

00:49:29 ◼   ► There was no casual computer user on CompuServe or on AOL

00:49:34 ◼   ► because you had to have done the work to get connected in the first place,

00:49:36 ◼   ► which was hard as hell.

00:49:37 ◼   ► You had to buy a modem and hook it up and do all this stuff, right?

00:49:40 ◼   ► And so it became a part of your identity.

00:49:42 ◼   ► You were a person that liked computers.

00:49:43 ◼   ► And being a person that liked computers was not cool at all.

00:49:47 ◼   ► I think it's so hard for people to understand.

00:49:50 ◼   ► Like now, Jack Dorsey was on a yacht with Beyonce and Jay-Z two days ago.

00:49:56 ◼   ► And Jack is not cool.

00:49:59 ◼   ► I've known Jack for a long time.

00:50:01 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:50:01 ◼   ► And I'm like, "That is wild."

00:50:03 ◼   ► I know he's got his nose ring in now and whatever.

00:50:06 ◼   ► God bless him.

00:50:08 ◼   ► But I'm just like...

00:50:08 ◼   ► They're nerds, right?

00:50:11 ◼   ► And so that idea of the biggest pop star in the world is going to hang out...

00:50:16 ◼   ► Or the biggest two pop stars in the world are going to hang out with a guy who made an app.

00:50:20 ◼   ► Like that is not in reality in the '80s and '90s computer world, even into the 2000s.

00:50:26 ◼   ► And what's wild about it too is also how arbitrary it was.

00:50:30 ◼   ► Because this sort of...

00:50:31 ◼   ► I think it was operating systems and then the battles were video game consoles when they came

00:50:36 ◼   ► out and the PlayStation people and the Sega people versus the Nintendo people.

00:50:43 ◼   ► And it was like, "Guys, you own all of these.

00:50:45 ◼   ► What are you talking about?"

00:50:47 ◼   ► I can't get into that because we'll get distracted, but I was a Sega Genesis person,

00:50:51 ◼   ► and I've mentioned what my opinion is on the Nintendo.

00:50:55 ◼   ► I can tell it about you.

00:50:56 ◼   ► Oh my God, do people think I'm wrong on that one?

00:50:58 ◼   ► But it was a much better system.

00:51:00 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:51:01 ◼   ► I believe that in the Bible it says, "Sega does what Nintendon't."

00:51:05 ◼   ► I'm not an expert, but that's a fair...

00:51:07 ◼   ► No.

00:51:08 ◼   ► You can laugh now, but it was the first time we were seeing the prototypes of these behaviors

00:51:16 ◼   ► where I'm like, "Why is this guy so mad?"

00:51:17 ◼   ► And the one that jumped out to me, and you'll probably remember this, but there was...

00:51:21 ◼   ► So IBM was still a player back then in tech, and they had an operating system called OS/2.

00:51:26 ◼   ► Oh yeah.

00:51:26 ◼   ► And they had a new version called OS/2 called OS/2 Warp that came out right around the same

00:51:30 ◼   ► time as Windows 95, a little before.

00:51:32 ◼   ► And I am willing to believe it was technologically superior.

00:51:35 ◼   ► This was what all of its acolytes, many acolytes told us.

00:51:39 ◼   ► But they were notorious zealots, right?

00:51:41 ◼   ► So it was like, "Oh, is it also ran?"

00:51:43 ◼   ► I mean, it was the smallest of the small audience.

00:51:45 ◼   ► It was maybe 5% of computers.

00:51:47 ◼   ► And you had to be...

00:51:48 ◼   ► I mean, that was some nerd shit.

00:51:49 ◼   ► Way less than 5%.

00:51:50 ◼   ► Really.

00:51:51 ◼   ► Way less.

00:51:51 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:51:52 ◼   ► I mean, I'm being charitable.

00:51:53 ◼   ► I don't...

00:51:53 ◼   ► Like, they're still going to get mad at me.

00:51:55 ◼   ► Like, there were guys in my mentions in 2020 on Twitter talking to me about OS/2 was better.

00:52:00 ◼   ► I was like, "Sir, sir, you are probably damn near 60 years old, first of all.

00:52:06 ◼   ► Second of all, the war is lost, sir.

00:52:08 ◼   ► It's been lost."

00:52:11 ◼   ► And it sounds absurd, but it's like you realize that the sort of culture of grievance

00:52:19 ◼   ► and the dehumanization of social media and the idea of like, "My product is my identity.

00:52:26 ◼   ► Like, the thing I've purchased is who I am."

00:52:27 ◼   ► Like, all those seeds were planted.

00:52:30 ◼   ► And it was so fascinating because Windows 95 was that catalyst because it was culturally relevant.

00:52:34 ◼   ► If it had not been...

00:52:35 ◼   ► If everybody ignored it or just been some app that you buy,

00:52:40 ◼   ► it wouldn't have mattered.

00:52:41 ◼   ► But this was such a big deal that they're talking about it on late-night TV shows,

00:52:45 ◼   ► and people are lining up at stores.

00:52:47 ◼   ► And that's so interesting because the...

00:52:49 ◼   ► Like, you can always tell a lot about the culture of organizations by what they criticize,

00:52:55 ◼   ► what they have contempt for.

00:52:56 ◼   ► To me, the definitive Apple statement of all time is Jobs saying, "Microsoft has no taste."

00:53:01 ◼   ► Because it just sort of speaks to what they aspire to.

00:53:04 ◼   ► Even though he said that while he was in exile, it was before he came back.

00:53:09 ◼   ► It was like a mid...

00:53:10 ◼   ► While he was in an ex, you know.

00:53:13 ◼   ► - Right, right, right.

00:53:14 ◼   ► He's still wandering in the desert at that point, but it's like...

00:53:17 ◼   ► It was to that point.

00:53:19 ◼   ► Even in exile, the ethos and the value of what is the thing you care about is so fundamental.

00:53:25 ◼   ► - Yep.

00:53:25 ◼   ► - Right?

00:53:26 ◼   ► And even when Microsoft is in the sort of Department of Justice trial and

00:53:31 ◼   ► being really, really castigated for the first time,

00:53:35 ◼   ► there's this sort of derision from Gates of like, "This is beneath us.

00:53:39 ◼   ► Why are you dumb people asking us questions?

00:53:41 ◼   ► You don't know.

00:53:42 ◼   ► You don't understand computers."

00:53:43 ◼   ► And that same sort of contempt.

00:53:44 ◼   ► And so this is a really interesting thing.

00:53:46 ◼   ► You can really tell about what the anxieties of an organization and its culture are

00:53:50 ◼   ► that makes technology.

00:53:51 ◼   ► And this idea of the IBM acolytes really, really wanted to prove

00:53:57 ◼   ► their operating system was technologically strong.

00:54:00 ◼   ► And it's like, "You know what?

00:54:03 ◼   ► Nobody cares."

00:54:05 ◼   ► Nobody is evaluating your implementation of multitasking

00:54:10 ◼   ► as a way of judging what product they're going to use.

00:54:13 ◼   ► And that still bothered the tech.

00:54:15 ◼   ► It still does.

00:54:16 ◼   ► So there was a real operating system has to be a command line,

00:54:19 ◼   ► or a real operating system has to have these technical constraints.

00:54:22 ◼   ► And the idea that the aesthetics and the brand and the marketing

00:54:25 ◼   ► and the cultural positioning and the social value of software,

00:54:30 ◼   ► let alone operating systems, the most abstract software,

00:54:34 ◼   ► is going to be this decision made because the box is pretty and has clouds on it.

00:54:38 ◼   ► Like that was such anathema to a prior culture of computing.

00:54:43 ◼   ► And it was what it took to really break to mainstream.

00:54:46 ◼   ► And also the thing that I think they're still resentful of.

00:54:49 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:54:50 ◼   ► One of my favorite Windows 95 stories.

00:54:53 ◼   ► And it speaks to that bridge, the early outreach of the computer industry

00:54:59 ◼   ► starting to touch mainstream culture.

00:55:03 ◼   ► So you mentioned Jack Dorsey just two days ago hanging out with Beyonce.

00:55:07 ◼   ► And we just don't even think about it.

00:55:10 ◼   ► It's so absurd.

00:55:11 ◼   ► So 1995, the Rolling Stones had never licensed any of their music

00:55:15 ◼   ► to anybody to use in a commercial.

00:55:18 ◼   ► And Mick Jagger went to business school.

00:55:20 ◼   ► And one of the reasons the Stones are massively, massively rich

00:55:27 ◼   ► and never got into disputes like the Beatles have with the ownership of their libraries,

00:55:32 ◼   ► they were better business people.

00:55:33 ◼   ► Because Mick was a better business person.

00:55:35 ◼   ► I don't think Keith is.

00:55:36 ◼   ► So Mick always handled stuff like this.

00:55:40 ◼   ► Keith Richards with the Green Accountants shade on, sitting at the Brass Lamb during the books.

00:55:45 ◼   ► So I don't know what the number is.

00:55:47 ◼   ► But Mick's standard answer for 20-some years, whenever anybody would call up and say,

00:55:52 ◼   ► we want to use one of your hits in a commercial, is he didn't say no.

00:55:56 ◼   ► He just would throw out this ridiculous $50 million or whatever.

00:56:01 ◼   ► I don't know what the number is.

00:56:01 ◼   ► It doesn't matter.

00:56:02 ◼   ► But it was always like at least 20 times higher than they were possibly thinking it would cost.

00:56:08 ◼   ► And then they would just hang up and they'd never go.

00:56:10 ◼   ► And Microsoft calls up and they got the Start menu.

00:56:13 ◼   ► It's the foundational UI element of Windows 95 compared to what came before.

00:56:18 ◼   ► It's the signature thing.

00:56:19 ◼   ► The Stones have a hit song, Start Me Up.

00:56:22 ◼   ► They call up.

00:56:23 ◼   ► They say, we want it licensed Start Me Up.

00:56:25 ◼   ► And Mick says, $40 million, thinking that they hang up the phone.

00:56:28 ◼   ► And they're just like, OK, where do we write the check to?

00:56:30 ◼   ► And he's like, what?

00:56:33 ◼   ► And that's it.

00:56:33 ◼   ► There was no negotiation.

00:56:34 ◼   ► They're like, oh, is that it?

00:56:36 ◼   ► And it just speaks to how much money Microsoft had.

00:56:39 ◼   ► And they were like, oh, that's fantastic.

00:56:43 ◼   ► That's perfect.

00:56:44 ◼   ► All right, let me take a break.

00:56:44 ◼   ► Let me take a break.

00:56:45 ◼   ► Let's just hold this.

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00:59:17 ◼   ► All right.

00:59:18 ◼   ► We were talking about Windows 95.

00:59:20 ◼   ► I just mentioned this story with the Stones song getting licensed by Microsoft and how

00:59:25 ◼   ► this is--

00:59:25 ◼   ► This is the thing.

00:59:26 ◼   ► Music finance is an obsession of mine.

00:59:29 ◼   ► The economics and ownership of music.

00:59:30 ◼   ► But the thing that's really, really interesting here, first of all, is mid-'90s, you still

00:59:34 ◼   ► have the idea of selling out.

00:59:35 ◼   ► Only a year or two before, you have Kurt Cobain in Rolling Stone magazine with the t-shirt

00:59:42 ◼   ► saying corporate music still sucks.

00:59:43 ◼   ► And Bob Dylan very adamantly, like, you won't license my music for everybody.

00:59:47 ◼   ► And it was a scandal only a couple of years before when the Beatles licensed Revolution

00:59:53 ◼   ► for a Nike commercial.

00:59:53 ◼   ► Right.

00:59:54 ◼   ► They're like, oh my god, how could you-- how could you sully yourselves?

00:59:57 ◼   ► Right?

00:59:58 ◼   ► So it's the inverse of culture now where it's like everybody brags about who they got the

01:00:02 ◼   ► endorsement from and who's sponsoring them and what product placement they got and whatever.

01:00:05 ◼   ► But that cultural context is really, really important because part of the reason why the

01:00:10 ◼   ► Stones are-- in addition to Jagger's business acumen, part of the reason the Stones are

01:00:14 ◼   ► saying you won't license their song is because the sort of '60s ethos of this is art.

01:00:19 ◼   ► How would you use this in an ad that would be beneath you?

01:00:24 ◼   ► And this is really interesting because part of the myth-making, the legend-building around

01:00:31 ◼   ► Windows 95 at the time was they talked about licensing the song.

01:00:35 ◼   ► There was this sort of meta-industry thing where they said, well, it must have cost $12

01:00:39 ◼   ► million, $14 million.

01:00:40 ◼   ► Remember, I heard that.

01:00:40 ◼   ► And actually, years, years later, the number came out was $3 million, which is still a

01:00:46 ◼   ► boatload of money, especially at that point.

01:00:49 ◼   ► But it's not actually that wild.

01:00:51 ◼   ► And I think it was a $200 million ad campaign.

01:00:54 ◼   ► It's like, OK, we spent 1% of our money on a song.

01:00:56 ◼   ► Nobody would blink at that now.

01:01:00 ◼   ► But I think they just saw where the future was going, was that you were going to have

01:01:04 ◼   ► to market stuff.

01:01:05 ◼   ► And I also think one of those animating forces of Microsoft all the way through the '90s,

01:01:09 ◼   ► really until 2000 and the sort of bomber era and well into that era, is their resentment

01:01:16 ◼   ► of Apple.

01:01:16 ◼   ► We're so much bigger, and we have so much money.

01:01:19 ◼   ► And Apple is really on the rocks over those next couple years after Windows 9.

01:01:23 ◼   ► It comes out.

01:01:24 ◼   ► And yet, Microsoft's like, but why are they cool and we're not cool?

01:01:27 ◼   ► And I think they sort of at this moment arrive at, if we spend the money and buy some friends

01:01:34 ◼   ► and get a song and – and at that point, too, start me up as like 14 years old.

01:01:39 ◼   ► That was clearly, to my mind, I felt at the time, I was like, I don't remember the song.

01:01:45 ◼   ► I was a kid when this came out.

01:01:47 ◼   ► But I was like, oh, they had some middle-aged guy that this was the song that was cool when

01:01:51 ◼   ► he was young, and they wanted to play this song because he's going to be the guy buying

01:01:55 ◼   ► this.

01:01:55 ◼   ► And that was like, oh, right.

01:01:57 ◼   ► And now I think about it.

01:01:58 ◼   ► I'm like, oh, yeah, if you got a song 14 years ago, I'd be like, sure, yeah, I like

01:02:01 ◼   ► this song.

01:02:01 ◼   ► When this come out.

01:02:02 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

01:02:03 ◼   ► Because I'm old.

01:02:04 ◼   ► And I think that's such a – all that stuff was not evident at the time.

01:02:08 ◼   ► I was like, this is corny.

01:02:09 ◼   ► And they got these old guys out there playing the song.

01:02:11 ◼   ► And they had Jay Leno, which they were thrilled about.

01:02:13 ◼   ► And I was like, I didn't think he was cool.

01:02:14 ◼   ► That now we all know he's not cool, but that was such a – it was such an interesting

01:02:18 ◼   ► thing of they still didn't have taste.

01:02:20 ◼   ► But they knew how to pretend they were culturally relevant.

01:02:24 ◼   ► Yeah, that's what was always the thing to me.

01:02:27 ◼   ► I was always aligned with that.

01:02:29 ◼   ► And again, it's like you said, why I was attracted to the Vectrex, because it was graphically

01:02:33 ◼   ► novel.

01:02:34 ◼   ► It wasn't the technical arguments, right?

01:02:38 ◼   ► And it was like I totally – I read the O.S. 2 Warp magazine once.

01:02:42 ◼   ► And it was like, I get it.

01:02:44 ◼   ► And I ended up graduating with –

01:02:45 ◼   ► Yeah, those guys were serious about it.

01:02:46 ◼   ► Yeah, I ended up graduating with a degree in computer science.

01:02:49 ◼   ► And I can program and make stuff, and I get it.

01:02:52 ◼   ► But that just didn't ring my bell.

01:02:55 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

01:02:56 ◼   ► It wasn't the thing I was asked to –

01:02:57 ◼   ► There was no soul to it.

01:02:58 ◼   ► Yeah, it was the taste thing.

01:03:00 ◼   ► And that's – so the thing I remember about Windows 95 and – the other thing that you

01:03:09 ◼   ► have to remember about when we talk about the cultural aspect of this was the way

01:03:13 ◼   ► that like in a group, if you're on the internet, it was Usenet.

01:03:17 ◼   ► If you were on any group on AOL or CompuServer, any of these services, it doesn't matter

01:03:22 ◼   ► what the group was about.

01:03:23 ◼   ► If it was about quilting, if it was about the Boston Celtics, if it was about vintage

01:03:29 ◼   ► Corvettes, there were groups for all of these interests.

01:03:32 ◼   ► And at some point throughout the year, it would break into a Mac versus PC flame war.

01:03:37 ◼   ► And it would get ugly.

01:03:38 ◼   ► 100 percent.

01:03:38 ◼   ► All right.

01:03:39 ◼   ► Yeah, totally.

01:03:40 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:03:42 ◼   ► All of a sudden, it's –

01:03:42 ◼   ► To the death.

01:03:43 ◼   ► Hatfield versus McCoys, and it's like, you know, what are you talking about?

01:03:47 ◼   ► And there was this weird thing where sort of pre-95, pre-Windows 95, there was a – the

01:03:56 ◼   ► PC enthusiasts were – there was this command line versus GUI aspect of the argument.

01:04:02 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

01:04:02 ◼   ► Very strongly.

01:04:04 ◼   ► And clearly, that one, I was like, you guys are wrong, right?

01:04:07 ◼   ► History is not on your side, and it's very obvious.

01:04:11 ◼   ► Right.

01:04:11 ◼   ► And there was this Steve Jobs line about like when they first saw the stuff at Xerox

01:04:16 ◼   ► PARC that was a GUI that, you know, it just basically, oh, I just instantly knew, oh,

01:04:21 ◼   ► all computers are going to work like this.

01:04:23 ◼   ► We just had to figure out the right way to do it.

01:04:25 ◼   ► That was ridiculous.

01:04:27 ◼   ► But then it's just like anything in politics, and I mean that in the lowercase p political

01:04:33 ◼   ► sense of anything being political, right?

01:04:35 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:04:36 ◼   ► That when people's minds change, it happens quickly, right?

01:04:41 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:04:41 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:04:42 ◼   ► I keep saying to people in the –

01:04:43 ◼   ► There's a tipping point.

01:04:44 ◼   ► I just keep talking to people in the context of national politics, like just for a cent.

01:04:49 ◼   ► And again, we're talking the same 12 years we're talking about with the App Store.

01:04:53 ◼   ► Just remember that when Barack Obama ran for president the first time, he was against legalized

01:04:59 ◼   ► same-sex marriage.

01:05:02 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:05:02 ◼   ► Marriage equality was a late arrival.

01:05:04 ◼   ► Right.

01:05:05 ◼   ► And, you know, and it just seems like, what?

01:05:07 ◼   ► That was 12 years ago?

01:05:07 ◼   ► That was Obama, right?

01:05:09 ◼   ► And it's like, well, it wasn't because he was opposed, it was that was what was politically

01:05:12 ◼   ► feasible, and that's how quickly public sentiment changes.

01:05:15 ◼   ► That's an issue that doesn't even come up, even in today's world.

01:05:18 ◼   ► Just gone.

01:05:19 ◼   ► The whole command line, you know, real computer has a command line, a real user knows how

01:05:24 ◼   ► to use it.

01:05:25 ◼   ► And it just went away.

01:05:26 ◼   ► Windows 95 came out, and we had – again, it speaks to what I was saying before.

01:05:29 ◼   ► You were doing so much on your computer, you needed it.

01:05:33 ◼   ► And so much of it was graphical, right?

01:05:35 ◼   ► I mean, you know, you're looking at pictures, you're looking at the GIFs on websites.

01:05:39 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:05:39 ◼   ► It didn't make any sense to talk about it in a command line aspect.

01:05:42 ◼   ► And there was a certain segment of Mac user who wanted it to be a religious argument who

01:05:47 ◼   ► was like, hey, what happened to the command line argument, guys?

01:05:50 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:05:50 ◼   ► And it's like, you know, it's sort of like not knowing how to accept that you won.

01:05:56 ◼   ► You know, you're the dog that caught the car.

01:05:58 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:05:59 ◼   ► And it's like –

01:05:59 ◼   ► Yeah, it's not a very – yeah, it's being a sort of winner, right?

01:06:03 ◼   ► Right.

01:06:03 ◼   ► And I think it's such an interesting thing, too, because it was also both sides were supposing

01:06:07 ◼   ► that it was about logic.

01:06:08 ◼   ► Right.

01:06:09 ◼   ► And it wasn't.

01:06:10 ◼   ► It was like asserting identity and asserting belonging and saying you're part of a community

01:06:15 ◼   ► by what you reject.

01:06:18 ◼   ► Like, what you are not is what defines you in these online communities.

01:06:21 ◼   ► And this is still the issue.

01:06:23 ◼   ► Like, this is still the issue, right?

01:06:24 ◼   ► Because everybody is really sort of saying, like, I have to prove I am not part of outgroup

01:06:29 ◼   ► because that is what – you know, we didn't have the metrics back then, but that's what

01:06:35 ◼   ► drives engagement.

01:06:36 ◼   ► That is what's going to get a response.

01:06:38 ◼   ► It's how we're going to form our identity with each other.

01:06:41 ◼   ► And I do think it was about, you know, in that era, everybody had a handle online.

01:06:45 ◼   ► They didn't have their real name, right?

01:06:47 ◼   ► And so, you would be whatever, Macfan52, right?

01:06:51 ◼   ► And so, you were choosing how you're going to represent yourself to people.

01:06:56 ◼   ► And the only way you could do it was through increasing the emotional tenor of what's

01:07:05 ◼   ► going on.

01:07:05 ◼   ► And it's so weird because that was also the moment when we had, you know, civilians

01:07:11 ◼   ► coming in and getting technology.

01:07:12 ◼   ► They were like, I heard about a Pentium.

01:07:14 ◼   ► I heard about a Windows 95.

01:07:15 ◼   ► I just saw the Netscape IPO and I realized the internet must be something.

01:07:19 ◼   ► Like, this is all in a moment, right?

01:07:20 ◼   ► Like, the Pentium bug is early '95.

01:07:22 ◼   ► Netscape IPO is the first or second week of August of '95.

01:07:26 ◼   ► Windows 95 comes out the third week of – or, you know, end of August of '95.

01:07:33 ◼   ► Like, all of a sudden, a person who is not interested in computers is like, I don't

01:07:37 ◼   ► need to know that or that's not part of my job or I'm not going to spend $2,000 to

01:07:41 ◼   ► have one at home is like, I am missing something and I better get it.

01:07:46 ◼   ► And I'm better – and, you know, a year later, AOL goes – they've already started

01:07:50 ◼   ► to send out the disks and stuff, but like, you know, they go with unlimited, you know,

01:07:54 ◼   ► internet access a year later.

01:07:56 ◼   ► All of a sudden, people are like, you know, I got to get on.

01:08:00 ◼   ► I got to get in.

01:08:01 ◼   ► And they're running right into that first wave of computer users, tech users saying

01:08:07 ◼   ► like, we have figured out that us fighting with each other about things that mean nothing

01:08:11 ◼   ► is what we're going to use this platform for.

01:08:13 ◼   ► >> And isn't it funny how it's certain that these things come around, you know, and

01:08:18 ◼   ► kind of do apply however antiquated they are?

01:08:21 ◼   ► Like –

01:08:21 ◼   ► >> Yeah.

01:08:22 ◼   ► The analogies are there.

01:08:24 ◼   ► >> Right.

01:08:24 ◼   ► But like with AOL.

01:08:25 ◼   ► So AOL always gets a bad rap in hindsight.

01:08:28 ◼   ► It wasn't great.

01:08:28 ◼   ► It didn't have taste.

01:08:30 ◼   ► It was technically limited.

01:08:32 ◼   ► You know, but –

01:08:33 ◼   ► >> But it was good at some stuff.

01:08:35 ◼   ► >> Well, but the – and the huge foresight.

01:08:37 ◼   ► And it was easy for someone like me who was in college at the time and had access to real

01:08:42 ◼   ► Unix systems that I could telnet into to get internet access and then use, you know, things

01:08:48 ◼   ► that transformed a terminal connection into an IP connection.

01:08:52 ◼   ► You know, it was like IP over telnet.

01:08:54 ◼   ► >> Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:08:55 ◼   ► Right, right.

01:08:55 ◼   ► >> It was easy for me to –

01:08:59 ◼   ► >> That is the tin can, the string.

01:09:00 ◼   ► >> Down on AOL.

01:09:01 ◼   ► >> The internet.

01:09:02 ◼   ► >> Right.

01:09:02 ◼   ► But that breakthrough – you have to remember that at the time, all the online services

01:09:07 ◼   ► would bill by the hour, like the way that long-distance phone calls worked at the time.

01:09:11 ◼   ► And it was like you could see – so there's a bean-counters perspective where it's like,

01:09:15 ◼   ► of course we're going to bill by the hour.

01:09:17 ◼   ► This thing is addictive.

01:09:18 ◼   ► People love it.

01:09:20 ◼   ► And we're making a mint by charging by the hour.

01:09:23 ◼   ► And the breakthrough that AOL had of we're just going to charge you some reasonable amount

01:09:28 ◼   ► per month and you can just use it as often as your fellow family members will let you

01:09:33 ◼   ► hog the phone, right?

01:09:36 ◼   ► >> Yeah.

01:09:36 ◼   ► I mean, it was radical and brave, right?

01:09:38 ◼   ► Because it is foregoing revenues, but also it is enabling something horizontally, right?

01:09:45 ◼   ► There's a sort of democratization to that.

01:09:47 ◼   ► And I think that was actually one of the reasons that like tech insiders had been derisive

01:09:52 ◼   ► of AOL.

01:09:53 ◼   ► There's a phrase that used to be used all the time then on Usenet of the September that

01:09:57 ◼   ► never ended, which is alluding to September is when students would come back to universities

01:10:00 ◼   ► and a bunch of new people would come onto the internet and they didn't know the norms

01:10:03 ◼   ► and so they were frustrated by that.

01:10:06 ◼   ► And then AOL being like the equivalent of those people all the time, September that

01:10:10 ◼   ► never ended.

01:10:11 ◼   ► And what it was was saying we don't like these new people.

01:10:13 ◼   ► They aren't us.

01:10:15 ◼   ► They aren't the tech experts, tech insiders.

01:10:17 ◼   ► And I always really hated that.

01:10:20 ◼   ► I always was like, isn't this why we're doing this?

01:10:23 ◼   ► Didn't we want to give this power and this technology to everybody?

01:10:27 ◼   ► And I mean, this echoes with me.

01:10:28 ◼   ► This is the experience I had in Silicon Valley where I was like, aren't we trying to build

01:10:32 ◼   ► the social networks for everybody, that everybody can be on them and not be harassed and have

01:10:38 ◼   ► their lives ruined or whatever else?

01:10:39 ◼   ► And it was like, no, they really were like, this is for us.

01:10:42 ◼   ► This is our playhouse.

01:10:43 ◼   ► And I think that fundamental pattern keeps playing out over and over and over, which

01:10:48 ◼   ► is like, do we care about the overall experience of the design or is it only the pure

01:10:54 ◼   ► of this kind of technology is what defines merit.

01:10:56 ◼   ► I've always thought that.

01:10:59 ◼   ► And I was always, and again, I'm not trying to retroactively claim to be more empathetic

01:11:04 ◼   ► than I was as a 20 year old.

01:11:06 ◼   ► I was a jerk in a lot of ways that, and people are like, was it jerk?

01:11:10 ◼   ► And it's like, yeah, I probably still am, but I was more of a jerk.

01:11:13 ◼   ► I was a lot more of a jerk and I was cocky, but I was never as like anti let those newbies

01:11:21 ◼   ► in and let the AOL people in as to me, it was always more, doesn't this just show how

01:11:29 ◼   ► broken the system is?

01:11:30 ◼   ► Like it just shows these systems weren't built for this.

01:11:34 ◼   ► And think about just the simple fact of email and we're literally, it's the social network

01:11:39 ◼   ► that will outlive us all.

01:11:40 ◼   ► It's the cockroach of social networks, but the fundamental of idea of once you have an

01:11:45 ◼   ► email address, anybody, anywhere can send you email and the marginal cost of sending

01:11:51 ◼   ► it is literally zero.

01:11:53 ◼   ► I mean, as close to zero as you can possibly get, it's like the power to keep the computer

01:11:59 ◼   ► on that's chunking out the spam.

01:12:01 ◼   ► Like if, and the real world analogies work, like if physical printed mail had that, if

01:12:09 ◼   ► you got as much junk mail in through your door as you get spam, it's ridiculous.

01:12:17 ◼   ► And there's no possibility in the real world of a spam filter, right?

01:12:21 ◼   ► So just like go into your email program and look at your junk mailbox and look at how

01:12:25 ◼   ► many mails you don't even have to look at every day.

01:12:27 ◼   ► Imagine if they were coming in through your door every day, but that's the way the system

01:12:30 ◼   ► was made because it never even occurred to anybody when they made the email system that

01:12:34 ◼   ► anybody would abuse it.

01:12:35 ◼   ► It just was a poorly designed system.

01:12:38 ◼   ► - And that's what it is, like that idea of like the assumptions are baked into the technology

01:12:42 ◼   ► at such a deep level, right?

01:12:44 ◼   ► And who it's for, who was using it, what they anticipated.

01:12:47 ◼   ► And I think of a generation later where we were building early social platforms, all

01:12:53 ◼   ► the mistakes we made were the same thing of just conceiving like how many people could

01:12:57 ◼   ► possibly use this and what are they going to use it for?

01:12:59 ◼   ► And you don't know what you don't know.

01:13:01 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:13:03 ◼   ► And again, we did, we made this, I say we, I never had comments on my site because I

01:13:09 ◼   ► kind of saw it.

01:13:10 ◼   ► - You got it right.

01:13:10 ◼   ► But that's actually a great example, right?

01:13:14 ◼   ► Like I did for a long time and it was this very optimistic, well, I still have friends

01:13:21 ◼   ► that I made that way.

01:13:22 ◼   ► There are people that were at my wedding, there are people that have been there for me and

01:13:26 ◼   ► the hardest parts of my life that I know because of the comments on my site, right?

01:13:31 ◼   ► And so like there was a place to make a connection if you were going to put in the work.

01:13:35 ◼   ► That was sort of the other part was like, well, who would have a website and not moderate

01:13:38 ◼   ► the comments?

01:13:39 ◼   ► That would be wrong.

01:13:40 ◼   ► - Right.

01:13:40 ◼   ► - You know what I mean?

01:13:41 ◼   ► Like that naive, that was actually the part, that was the part where we fell down.

01:13:44 ◼   ► It wasn't like, oh, put a comment box on your website is a bad idea.

01:13:48 ◼   ► It was, you know, I think the choice you always made, I remember this from back in the day,

01:13:52 ◼   ► you're like, I don't want to deal with that.

01:13:54 ◼   ► - Yes.

01:13:55 ◼   ► - And I'm like, and I'm like, that makes perfect sense.

01:13:57 ◼   ► That is a reasonable choice.

01:13:59 ◼   ► But the idea that you would say, I don't want to deal with that and I'm going to have it

01:14:03 ◼   ► was not a thing that we anticipated.

01:14:04 ◼   ► Like that was one where it's like, who on earth would do that?

01:14:07 ◼   ► Who would say, I don't want to be responsible for what I'm putting out in the world.

01:14:11 ◼   ► And I would like to have it.

01:14:12 ◼   ► Like that seemed so irrational, let alone that every newspaper in the country would do it.

01:14:17 ◼   ► - Right.

01:14:17 ◼   ► - Like that was unimaginable.

01:14:20 ◼   ► I was like, that's so stupid.

01:14:21 ◼   ► Obviously nobody would ever do that.

01:14:23 ◼   ► And everybody did it.

01:14:24 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:14:24 ◼   ► It was, and it was such, again, we could do a whole nostalgic show, but there was in the

01:14:29 ◼   ► early era of newspapers going online, they would just have open comments on every article.

01:14:35 ◼   ► - Why open?

01:14:35 ◼   ► - It was just anybody you just type your name in, you know, they'd ask for an email, never

01:14:40 ◼   ► verified it.

01:14:41 ◼   ► And you'd type whatever your comment is.

01:14:43 ◼   ► And every news article you read on any topic just had whoever wanted to commenting below

01:14:48 ◼   ► it and they would just put them in there.

01:14:50 ◼   ► And ignoring automated spam, it was just, you know, the level of crackpottery that you

01:14:58 ◼   ► would think it might be.

01:14:59 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:14:59 ◼   ► - And I think that's sort of this recurring thing where like that caused real harm because

01:15:05 ◼   ► we didn't anticipate the abuse of the system.

01:15:07 ◼   ► - Right.

01:15:07 ◼   ► - And there's this tension that comes, and I think this goes to the point about sort

01:15:11 ◼   ► of Windows 95 or everything.

01:15:13 ◼   ► There's this back and forth around democratization of technology along with enabling new forms

01:15:18 ◼   ► of abuse, misuse, or manipulation.

01:15:21 ◼   ► And they go hand in hand every time.

01:15:23 ◼   ► Like there's always that cycle.

01:15:24 ◼   ► And it was, I mean, people were worried about this in the rise of desktop publishing.

01:15:28 ◼   ► You talk about that as like, well, if anybody can print a pamphlet, you know, if anybody

01:15:33 ◼   ► can make something that looks professionally designed, how are we going to know it's

01:15:37 ◼   ► real information?

01:15:38 ◼   ► I was like, you never did.

01:15:39 ◼   ► But that was a real concern that was raised.

01:15:41 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:15:41 ◼   ► - It was like a laser print is going to make it look official.

01:15:44 ◼   ► You know, it's like, yeah.

01:15:45 ◼   ► And I was like, great, then my band is going to look like it's putting on a real show.

01:15:48 ◼   ► - Right.

01:15:49 ◼   ► - You know, but they were like, well, then you're going to have, you know, propaganda

01:15:51 ◼   ► there.

01:15:51 ◼   ► And so that framing, I think, just comes back over and over and over.

01:15:55 ◼   ► And it's such a like, after the 50th time, the cycle repeats, are we going to learn the

01:16:00 ◼   ► lesson?

01:16:00 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:16:01 ◼   ► - All right, let me take a break right here.

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01:18:09 ◼   ► All right, let's get up.

01:18:10 ◼   ► Let's flash forward to the future.

01:18:11 ◼   ► And let's talk about-- and I think that it's like the jump cut in 2001 where the bone in

01:18:18 ◼   ► the air transforms into the floating space station that's like a missile silo.

01:18:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:18:27 ◼   ► The App Store and where Apple is and where we've gotten in this sort of eruption of--

01:18:32 ◼   ► it's just college.

01:18:34 ◼   ► Not to make light of the other protests of more pertinent social matters, but it's protest,

01:18:39 ◼   ► right?

01:18:40 ◼   ► There's an eruption of protest about Apple's control of the App Store.

01:18:44 ◼   ► This is the biggest widescale criticism of certainly the App Store, and I think of Apple's

01:18:50 ◼   ► business practices that I can recall in their modern era.

01:18:53 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:18:54 ◼   ► And I'm struggling to keep up with it at Daring Fireball.

01:19:00 ◼   ► I really am.

01:19:00 ◼   ► I'm even struggling to come up with the analogy, but the best I've come up with is like--

01:19:06 ◼   ► there's no single way to wrap it up, and that's my instinct.

01:19:12 ◼   ► My style is to write.

01:19:14 ◼   ► And even if it takes me 3,000 words, I get the 3,000-word Daring Fireball column out

01:19:21 ◼   ► on the thing.

01:19:22 ◼   ► And then at the end, I type that last period, and it's like, boom.

01:19:26 ◼   ► There it is.

01:19:27 ◼   ► Drop the mic.

01:19:27 ◼   ► That's my word.

01:19:28 ◼   ► Right.

01:19:28 ◼   ► Your definitive take.

01:19:29 ◼   ► There is no-- there's no way to do that with this App Store issue.

01:19:33 ◼   ► It is like--

01:19:34 ◼   ► No, this thing is fuzzy.

01:19:36 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:19:36 ◼   ► And it's so sprawling, and there's so many different things.

01:19:39 ◼   ► It's like going into a Vegas buffet, and you're hungry, but you can't even possibly sample

01:19:49 ◼   ► everything, right?

01:19:50 ◼   ► There's just no way to do it.

01:19:52 ◼   ► It's not feasible.

01:19:53 ◼   ► It's like there's the beverage station that everybody goes to.

01:19:58 ◼   ► Everybody has to get something to drink when they go to the buffet.

01:20:00 ◼   ► Right.

01:20:00 ◼   ► There's some consensus.

01:20:01 ◼   ► And that's the 30%.

01:20:02 ◼   ► The 30-70 split is like the beverage station.

01:20:06 ◼   ► And it doesn't matter if you're here for the prime rib, or you're a vegetarian, or you're

01:20:11 ◼   ► actually just going to do all dessert because screw it, you're on vacation.

01:20:15 ◼   ► You're still going to the beverage station, so everybody is talking about 30% is too much,

01:20:20 ◼   ► blah, blah, blah.

01:20:21 ◼   ► But there's so much other stuff.

01:20:22 ◼   ► But the thing that to me is like the part of the argument at the forest level rather

01:20:29 ◼   ► than the tree level that is very frustrating, and I feel people aren't talking about it

01:20:36 ◼   ► enough, is however much money Apple is making from this, this is a side gig for them.

01:20:44 ◼   ► It really is.

01:20:45 ◼   ► Yeah, it's not material.

01:20:46 ◼   ► And you talk about the abuses-- and again, going back to the '90s, I was never-- even

01:20:54 ◼   ► as a Mac enthusiast at the time, I was never very keen about the DOJ's suit against Microsoft

01:21:01 ◼   ► and never really thought-- I wasn't really like a Mac user who was like, ah, they're

01:21:05 ◼   ► getting there.

01:21:06 ◼   ► I was like, this doesn't seem right to me and seems short-sighted.

01:21:09 ◼   ► I didn't think that making IE free was abusive.

01:21:13 ◼   ► I was like, yeah, I think that this is the way things are going.

01:21:16 ◼   ► And it kind of sucks that Netscape was selling copies of Netscape Navigator Pro or whatever

01:21:20 ◼   ► they called it, but--

01:21:21 ◼   ► Gold.

01:21:22 ◼   ► Yeah, gold.

01:21:22 ◼   ► It was, though, what Microsoft-- what people accused-- what people were upset about Microsoft's

01:21:32 ◼   ► abuse of their position was their primary business, right?

01:21:35 ◼   ► And that this-- to encapsulate it, the idea that they had control of the operating system

01:21:41 ◼   ► and their real moneymaker was the office suite of software that ran on the operating system--

01:21:47 ◼   ► that was their whole business.

01:21:48 ◼   ► Their whole business was licensing the operating system to OEMs and selling Office.

01:21:55 ◼   ► Like, the whole idea that Microsoft became the biggest company in the world or the second

01:21:59 ◼   ► biggest company in the world-- and Bill Gates is a cultural icon-- at the time was entirely

01:22:05 ◼   ► about this two-sided coin of they have the OS that every computer runs on, and they have

01:22:11 ◼   ► the apps that run on the OS.

01:22:15 ◼   ► And that's their whole business, and that's where people poked at.

01:22:17 ◼   ► And now we're talking about Apple and Apple having dominance.

01:22:21 ◼   ► That's for sure.

01:22:22 ◼   ► We can argue about what's a monopoly.

01:22:24 ◼   ► But we're talking about them and this widespread criticism of their business practices over

01:22:30 ◼   ► a thing that is not really--

01:22:33 ◼   ► I'm not going to say it's not material, but it's not that big a deal.

01:22:36 ◼   ► And you can say, oh, services, services, services-- that's what they've been pushing.

01:22:39 ◼   ► But even when you break out services, the part from the App Store is only-- I'm not

01:22:45 ◼   ► saying it's a tiny part of it, but it's only a small part of it.

01:22:48 ◼   ► You know, they make $20 billion a year from Google just to make Google the default search

01:22:53 ◼   ► engine, and I think they've only got like $50 billion in services a year.

01:22:58 ◼   ► Like, a huge chunk of their services isn't-- is just money from Google.

01:23:02 ◼   ► It's not even all of these subscription things that Apple is selling.

01:23:06 ◼   ► Right.

01:23:06 ◼   ► That's like found the money under the couch cushions.

01:23:08 ◼   ► So yeah, there's a lot in there, and I want to-- I think actually context setting is really

01:23:12 ◼   ► useful.

01:23:12 ◼   ► You go back to the earlier topic, Windows 95.

01:23:17 ◼   ► One of the things they introduced along with Windows 95 and Office 95 and all that stuff

01:23:21 ◼   ► was Microsoft introduced the "Design for Windows 95" logo.

01:23:23 ◼   ► And it was like-- it was seen as valuable.

01:23:27 ◼   ► You're going to be part of the marketing campaign, but you're not called App.

01:23:31 ◼   ► I was going to say App, but your program, your software, has to conform to a certain

01:23:35 ◼   ► set of rules.

01:23:36 ◼   ► And I was all in favor of it.

01:23:38 ◼   ► I thought it was great because it's like there's a lot of crap.

01:23:40 ◼   ► There's a lot of shovelware.

01:23:41 ◼   ► There's garbage bargain basement CD-ROMs at your Office Depot store back then.

01:23:48 ◼   ► And so it'd be like, no, no, no.

01:23:50 ◼   ► If you want to get this logo, you got to do these things.

01:23:53 ◼   ► And I was a big believer in it, and I saw a straight line from that kind of thing to

01:23:58 ◼   ► the early versions of the App Store.

01:24:01 ◼   ► Right?

01:24:01 ◼   ► And so my context on that was-- you'll remember this, but for your audience, I was working

01:24:07 ◼   ► in a company that did blogging tools at the time.

01:24:09 ◼   ► We had a blogging service called TypePad.

01:24:11 ◼   ► It's like WordPress is now.

01:24:12 ◼   ► And the TypePad app launched at the launch of the App Store.

01:24:18 ◼   ► It was the second app ever shown off.

01:24:20 ◼   ► Michael Sippy, who's now at Medium, was on stage with Steve Jobs showing off this app.

01:24:24 ◼   ► And so we got a glimpse at what it is to be the featured app during an Apple keynote,

01:24:31 ◼   ► really before anybody.

01:24:33 ◼   ► Right?

01:24:34 ◼   ► And what they asked for.

01:24:36 ◼   ► Like what was it going to take to be in the App Store as the first app that people see?

01:24:41 ◼   ► And it was interesting because to my mind, it was very much of a piece with design for

01:24:47 ◼   ► Windows 95 or design for Windows XP or any of these kind of things.

01:24:50 ◼   ► Like this is-- and that was actually very, very contentious at the time.

01:24:54 ◼   ► The idea that Apple would set standards, separate from the 30%, separate from anything else,

01:25:00 ◼   ► the economics of it, the idea that they would set rules about what you could or couldn't

01:25:04 ◼   ► do on the device with software that you made was extremely controversial.

01:25:09 ◼   ► And I think that's sort of important to start with, is there is a fundamental developer

01:25:13 ◼   ► tension.

01:25:13 ◼   ► And that's a long time ago, but it's not that long time ago.

01:25:16 ◼   ► I think Apple-- in particular, Apple developers have a longer institutional memory than most

01:25:22 ◼   ► developer communities.

01:25:23 ◼   ► So because we still talk about things getting Sherlocked.

01:25:26 ◼   ► How long ago was that?

01:25:27 ◼   ► Right?

01:25:27 ◼   ► So--

01:25:28 ◼   ► How many people really remember Sherlock?

01:25:30 ◼   ► I mean--

01:25:31 ◼   ► Right, right.

01:25:32 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:25:32 ◼   ► I mean, how many users did Sherlock have at its peak versus people who've talked about

01:25:36 ◼   ► an app getting Sherlocked, right?

01:25:37 ◼   ► Right.

01:25:37 ◼   ► Let alone Watson, the third party tool that got Sherlocked.

01:25:41 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:25:42 ◼   ► Right, right, right.

01:25:43 ◼   ► Yeah, Watson is a footnote.

01:25:46 ◼   ► Right?

01:25:46 ◼   ► And so we have a perception about what developer culture in the Apple ecosystem should be.

01:25:52 ◼   ► And interestingly, even the iOS ecosystem, though it's much larger and more culturally

01:25:57 ◼   ► relevant, is still shaped by the Mac history.

01:26:00 ◼   ► Right?

01:26:00 ◼   ► So like the way we parse what I ought to be able to do because I make software is this

01:26:08 ◼   ► very-- it's a set of cultural norms and expectations.

01:26:11 ◼   ► And that's why it's fuzzy.

01:26:12 ◼   ► Because it is not about an economic argument about 30%, where if they reduce 30%, 28%,

01:26:18 ◼   ► everybody would be like, OK, we're good.

01:26:19 ◼   ► Let's pack up.

01:26:19 ◼   ► We're good.

01:26:20 ◼   ► Right?

01:26:20 ◼   ► Like, it is not that at all.

01:26:21 ◼   ► And this is actually what Microsoft got wrong in the DOJ and antitrust trial around Internet

01:26:26 ◼   ► Explorer, which was, one, the amount of resentment of Microsoft was off the charts.

01:26:32 ◼   ► It is like what Apple is now for the people that don't like it, you know, Epic or whatever,

01:26:36 ◼   ► where they were just seen as bullies.

01:26:38 ◼   ► They were seen as having all the control.

01:26:40 ◼   ► And we have a fundamental mismatch between how the tech industry works, how modern software

01:26:45 ◼   ► platforms work, and how the law works.

01:26:49 ◼   ► Right?

01:26:49 ◼   ► So antitrust law is based on a whole bunch of false assumptions.

01:26:52 ◼   ► You know, one of them is that there's this market and there are these two players.

01:26:55 ◼   ► Right?

01:26:56 ◼   ► I can buy whatever.

01:26:57 ◼   ► I can buy a pencil from this company.

01:26:58 ◼   ► I can buy a pencil from that company.

01:26:59 ◼   ► And there is nobody that is like, I'm going to make a considered decision about what social

01:27:06 ◼   ► network I'm going to use.

01:27:07 ◼   ► And I evaluated all the options.

01:27:09 ◼   ► And Facebook didn't have the features I want, so I'm going to use Brand X.

01:27:13 ◼   ► It doesn't exist that way.

01:27:14 ◼   ► Right?

01:27:14 ◼   ► And that's the misapprehension that our regulatory framework has in the US.

01:27:19 ◼   ► And that affects the whole world because everybody's using American companies' technology.

01:27:23 ◼   ► And then, and this sort of goes to, you know, when you were talking, I think, with Neelay

01:27:26 ◼   ► about the congressional hearings.

01:27:28 ◼   ► Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, these companies are completely different.

01:27:35 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:27:36 ◼   ► Like they all have apps, but their business models are different.

01:27:38 ◼   ► Their goals are different.

01:27:40 ◼   ► In some ways, they compete with each other.

01:27:41 ◼   ► In some ways, they all collaborate together.

01:27:42 ◼   ► But they have nothing in common fundamentally.

01:27:45 ◼   ► Right.

01:27:45 ◼   ► And even in terms of what they're trying to do in the world.

01:27:47 ◼   ► And so when you have all that stuff that's wrong and the people talking about it are

01:27:52 ◼   ► developers that have their own distinct culture and goals of what they're trying to enable

01:27:55 ◼   ► and what they expect from a platform, and that is illegible to policymakers and to users.

01:27:59 ◼   ► Like that's, I think, where the fuzziness comes from because everybody is forced to

01:28:03 ◼   ► reframe their argument in terms that are either, in the case of Epic, legible to lawmakers,

01:28:10 ◼   ► to regulators, which is their clear audience that they're sort of speaking to, or to consumers,

01:28:15 ◼   ► which they're also speaking to.

01:28:16 ◼   ► But all the other devs are like, I need the user to understand why this, you know, the

01:28:20 ◼   ► 30% cost will be passed down to you.

01:28:22 ◼   ► Like people fixate on the 30% because users like that must be expensive.

01:28:25 ◼   ► That's, I think it's very easy to understand.

01:28:28 ◼   ► But if we talk about what we're actually trying to enable is competition, then the question

01:28:32 ◼   ► is what competition to whom at what level?

01:28:34 ◼   ► Right.

01:28:36 ◼   ► And in the case of Microsoft and DOJ, it manifested in the end of the game as they had people

01:28:42 ◼   ► in the room watching them during meetings that slowed them down from being able to do

01:28:45 ◼   ► stuff.

01:28:45 ◼   ► And we saw that with the stagnation of Microsoft for the decade after, right, from the first

01:28:50 ◼   ► decade of Bloomberg's rise, where they just made a bunch of boring enterprise products

01:28:53 ◼   ► and they made billions of dollars and nobody cared, except for the Xbox.

01:28:56 ◼   ► Right.

01:28:57 ◼   ► And that's actually great because you have the rise of, well, web standards, period,

01:29:04 ◼   ► which would not have happened if the Internet Explorer monopoly had stayed.

01:29:08 ◼   ► You had Firefox and then Chrome.

01:29:11 ◼   ► You had, and the thing at the moment I think about all the time is in the original iPhone

01:29:17 ◼   ► demo, when Jobs gets out the iPhone and he does the pinch and zoom on the New York Times

01:29:23 ◼   ► homepage.

01:29:24 ◼   ► Right.

01:29:25 ◼   ► And it is stunning.

01:29:26 ◼   ► It's just, it's one of the, it's one of those moments in that entire, in the entire

01:29:29 ◼   ► history of Apple, right?

01:29:30 ◼   ► That, and they got tech that is stunning.

01:29:32 ◼   ► And for me, that was like, well, Jeffrey Zeldman and many others had fought for web standards

01:29:39 ◼   ► for the decade prior to that.

01:29:41 ◼   ► And that was why that could render on Safari.

01:29:43 ◼   ► Period.

01:29:44 ◼   ► And then on any platform.

01:29:45 ◼   ► And the New York Times hadn't done a damn thing, right?

01:29:48 ◼   ► It was the New York Times.

01:29:49 ◼   ► And the reason it was such a great demo and so perfectly selected by Jobs was the New

01:29:54 ◼   ► York Times homepage.

01:29:56 ◼   ► It still is kind of recognizable.

01:29:58 ◼   ► It still looks very New York Times-y.

01:30:02 ◼   ► And it came up on the phone and he was just the master of demos, right?

01:30:06 ◼   ► Because it didn't, he didn't belabor the point, but he brought it up.

01:30:09 ◼   ► It, it, you can see it's the New York Times on the phone and it looks exactly right.

01:30:16 ◼   ► So you're, you as the viewer, you, I, everybody had the same thought was, wow, that little

01:30:22 ◼   ► drone has it.

01:30:23 ◼   ► It's real.

01:30:24 ◼   ► And then immediately you think, but it's useless.

01:30:26 ◼   ► It's too, way too small.

01:30:28 ◼   ► Not like, not like, oh, you have to be 21 years old with perfect eyes and you can read

01:30:32 ◼   ► it.

01:30:32 ◼   ► Like literally nobody could use, nobody could read it.

01:30:34 ◼   ► The pixels were too small.

01:30:36 ◼   ► And then immediately he pinches to zoom or double taps, you know, and then he was like,

01:30:40 ◼   ► also, you could just double tap and it'll zoom in and zoom into the image.

01:30:43 ◼   ► And that's where the web standards angle really worked was because you could double tap on

01:30:47 ◼   ► the page and it would semantically pick out the element you double tap.

01:30:53 ◼   ► Right.

01:30:53 ◼   ► The div and then go, yeah.

01:30:54 ◼   ► And so this is a really interesting thing because there's so much in there and obviously,

01:30:57 ◼   ► you know, the greatest software or tech demo of all time, but, but, but you come back from

01:31:02 ◼   ► that and there's a bunch of interesting things packed into there.

01:31:05 ◼   ► First of all, like his framing of it's the real web, not the baby web.

01:31:08 ◼   ► And people forget there had been wap and all exactly like all these weird, like, you know,

01:31:13 ◼   ► junkie mobile sites, but also developers and through developer culture and developer advocacy

01:31:22 ◼   ► had spent a decade prior saying we need to be ready for new devices.

01:31:27 ◼   ► And then eventually, you know, Ethan Marko and others would call it responsive web, you

01:31:31 ◼   ► know, a few years later and as it sort of came to be known, but this idea of we're going

01:31:35 ◼   ► to embrace web standards are going to brace the responsive web.

01:31:37 ◼   ► This is something that came from developers articulating a value around really freedom.

01:31:44 ◼   ► Like it is this very highfalutin, you know what I mean?

01:31:48 ◼   ► And like, it is like wave the flag kind of stuff.

01:31:51 ◼   ► We ought to be free and we ought to use standards.

01:31:53 ◼   ► And it was like.

01:31:55 ◼   ► And I was a part of the web standards project and I was like, you know, this sounds very

01:31:58 ◼   ► theoretical and very abstract.

01:31:59 ◼   ► I don't know what we're fighting for.

01:32:01 ◼   ► Why does standards on their own matter?

01:32:02 ◼   ► Why does it matter for renders and Internet Explorer?

01:32:04 ◼   ► Why isn't that good enough?

01:32:05 ◼   ► You know, you have to really interrogate that if the challenge and that's sort of the mode

01:32:09 ◼   ► we're in is people can't say where they're going to.

01:32:13 ◼   ► Developers can't say the solution to mobile apps being fair to people and developers and

01:32:20 ◼   ► users is do XYZ because they couldn't for the same reason in 2000 when I started working

01:32:26 ◼   ► on web standards project, we couldn't say, well, we want a smartphone, which didn't exist

01:32:30 ◼   ► then to be able to render the New York Times homepage.

01:32:33 ◼   ► But if everybody's building to this standard and there's an openness there and anybody

01:32:37 ◼   ► can participate in a fair way, then experiences will be enabled like this.

01:32:42 ◼   ► And actually it's really interesting because there is no retroactive claiming.

01:32:45 ◼   ► Jobs didn't nod to thanks to web standards.

01:32:47 ◼   ► If we so far you could do this and nobody in the even in the advocacy community didn't

01:32:52 ◼   ► claim it as a win.

01:32:53 ◼   ► I mean, that's what's really, really striking is like when you change developer culture,

01:32:56 ◼   ► everything happens at this weird, ephemeral, non visible level.

01:32:59 ◼   ► I mean, this is why I build developer tools like this is why this is my job is like I

01:33:02 ◼   ► obsess over this.

01:33:03 ◼   ► And so in the moment we're in with with the App Store, what I think are the principles

01:33:10 ◼   ► that if we could get to a distillation of it is put aside consumers for a minute for

01:33:14 ◼   ► developers is one, I want to level playing ground.

01:33:19 ◼   ► I do want it to be the same rules.

01:33:20 ◼   ► I want it to be something I can understand.

01:33:22 ◼   ► And I know what I'm getting into.

01:33:23 ◼   ► What did I agree that I, you know, this is not a Darth Vader deal.

01:33:27 ◼   ► Pray it'll alter the deal further.

01:33:28 ◼   ► Right.

01:33:29 ◼   ► And that is what it feels like.

01:33:31 ◼   ► I think I think actually everybody has some degree of consternation there.

01:33:35 ◼   ► And that it doesn't actually affect most apps.

01:33:39 ◼   ► It's not actually on policies that most devs are going to run into.

01:33:42 ◼   ► But the uncertainty is the killer.

01:33:44 ◼   ► And then the other part is there is different, there are different deals.

01:33:49 ◼   ► It is unfair.

01:33:50 ◼   ► And that's because, well, if you're Adobe or you're Epic and you're Fortnite or you're

01:33:54 ◼   ► Microsoft with Office, they do make a different deal with you.

01:33:57 ◼   ► If you're Facebook, they do make a different deal with you.

01:33:59 ◼   ► And they can't say it right.

01:34:02 ◼   ► And before they couldn't say it because it doesn't fit Apple's aesthetic.

01:34:05 ◼   ► Like we don't explain.

01:34:06 ◼   ► That's not what we do.

01:34:07 ◼   ► Now they can't say it because there's congressional scrutiny.

01:34:10 ◼   ► And if you admit, you know, like, you know, Amazon's ethos can be F you.

01:34:15 ◼   ► That's what we did.

01:34:17 ◼   ► What's your problem?

01:34:18 ◼   ► And old Microsoft definitely would be like, yes, and yeah, we did.

01:34:23 ◼   ► So what?

01:34:23 ◼   ► What are you gonna do about it?

01:34:25 ◼   ► Right.

01:34:25 ◼   ► Apple can never be that.

01:34:27 ◼   ► They don't they don't they don't want to communicate that way.

01:34:29 ◼   ► And then I think, you know, there's a sort of idealism to it.

01:34:32 ◼   ► And so they are facing the reality of one, they do.

01:34:36 ◼   ► They are a giant.

01:34:37 ◼   ► They're a trillion dollar business.

01:34:39 ◼   ► That didn't happen that way accidentally.

01:34:41 ◼   ► And they do make calls and they do make partnerships and they do compromise.

01:34:43 ◼   ► I mean, it's just like, you know, Tim Cook is probably the greatest supply chain manager

01:34:50 ◼   ► in human history, or at least since like Genghis Khan.

01:34:52 ◼   ► Right.

01:34:53 ◼   ► And and I think if given his druthers, he'd be like, we would like to not be in bed with

01:34:58 ◼   ► the human rights injustices in China right now.

01:35:01 ◼   ► But he's like, you know what?

01:35:02 ◼   ► You got to do what you got to do.

01:35:03 ◼   ► That's where he's at.

01:35:04 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:35:04 ◼   ► Everybody makes a choice.

01:35:05 ◼   ► And I want I think they're on that same same part with developer rules.

01:35:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:35:09 ◼   ► I know that's not a bad analogy.

01:35:11 ◼   ► I get it, you know, and I but I do feel that there is a very easily like a lot of this

01:35:19 ◼   ► would be very hard to unwind and could be and should be and maybe will be at the point

01:35:23 ◼   ► of a regulatory gun, you know, and maybe not.

01:35:26 ◼   ► But there's an easier part where it really does feel like they're Darth Vader in people.

01:35:34 ◼   ► And in terms of we're changing the deal.

01:35:36 ◼   ► And at least when Darth Vader screwed Lando for that deal, it was for the fate of the

01:35:45 ◼   ► galaxy, right?

01:35:46 ◼   ► Like it was he's going to he wants Luke.

01:35:48 ◼   ► Yeah, right.

01:35:49 ◼   ► Thanks for hi.

01:35:49 ◼   ► Like Luke, it was obvious was the key to the whole thing.

01:35:53 ◼   ► Right.

01:35:53 ◼   ► And it's it's almost as though Darth Vader was putting the squeeze on Lando over, you

01:36:00 ◼   ► know, wedge Antilles, you know, he's a good pilot.

01:36:03 ◼   ► You know, if you just pick your, you know, favorite Star Wars nerd obscure character,

01:36:07 ◼   ► like, why are you doing this over Portkins guy?

01:36:09 ◼   ► But sure, right.

01:36:10 ◼   ► But like, you know, with with with this idea that that Apple has a team combing through

01:36:16 ◼   ► the App Store looking for apps that have been in there for years, maybe 10 years, like the

01:36:22 ◼   ► WordPress app has been there for over 10 years years.

01:36:25 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:36:25 ◼   ► And retroactively, nefariously being like now, right, shake down and, you know, and

01:36:30 ◼   ► that, you know, companies like and you know, disclaimers, sponsor of this podcast, Squarespace

01:36:36 ◼   ► and and all the other hosting all the things that WordPress competes with that Apple's

01:36:42 ◼   ► looking at apps in that space and saying, you have a free app that you just use that

01:36:48 ◼   ► you can get in and you know, add content to your CMS and stuff like that of a paid service

01:36:53 ◼   ► you're paying for outside because it's not really a thing you do on your phone.

01:36:56 ◼   ► Your phone is you're just using the app as a better client than a web client would be.

01:37:00 ◼   ► Why in the world are they trying to get them to do in app purchases that they don't want

01:37:07 ◼   ► to do?

01:37:07 ◼   ► And then people mistakenly jump to add the polarization angle is that Apple is trying

01:37:13 ◼   ► to take 30% of WordPress's money or 30% of Squarespace's number.

01:37:18 ◼   ► That's not even true, because they're only going after 30% of the people who would sign

01:37:24 ◼   ► up through the app, which is clearly less, far less, especially for that.

01:37:29 ◼   ► That math doesn't matter.

01:37:30 ◼   ► I mean, you're right about that, but like, why people feel it, but it just shows why

01:37:35 ◼   ► is Apple?

01:37:35 ◼   ► Why doesn't Apple see that they are however much money?

01:37:39 ◼   ► They're the last few, the drops of cash they're getting out of this campaign.

01:37:45 ◼   ► Are so much less in value than the brand damage they're doing to the company and brand damage.

01:37:53 ◼   ► You cannot put a dollar sign on what is no, no.

01:37:56 ◼   ► And to win back developer trust, like, I mean, you look at Microsoft, which was vilified