The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► What a week.

00:00:01 ◼   ► Yeah, it's been a really crazy one for a number of reasons.

00:00:06 ◼   ► So, it's like just before we came on the air here, there's an announcement from the mailbox

00:00:11 ◼   ► guys.

00:00:12 ◼   ► So, this is like breaking news.

00:00:13 ◼   ► I mean, I never know how to handle that on the show because it's a weekly show.

00:00:17 ◼   ► But the mailbox guys are joining Dropbox.

00:00:20 ◼   ► Yes.

00:00:21 ◼   ► So, of course, I should mention I was an investor in mailbox.

00:00:27 ◼   ► And I know you and I both tested it before it came out.

00:00:31 ◼   ► And I know you and I had differing opinions on that.

00:00:35 ◼   ► You wrote about some of yours a few weeks ago, I guess, talking about how it didn't

00:00:42 ◼   ► really work into your workflow.

00:00:43 ◼   ► Mainly, I think, you made a lot of good points, I think, but mainly because you don't use

00:00:48 ◼   ► Gmail primarily.

00:00:49 ◼   ► Right.

00:00:50 ◼   ► Well, more or less.

00:00:51 ◼   ► I used Gmail in a weird way, and it didn't fit with Mailbot.

00:00:54 ◼   ► I think it was one of the neatest emails.

00:00:57 ◼   ► My compliments were sincere.

00:00:58 ◼   ► I think it's a great app.

00:01:00 ◼   ► But it implies a certain way of doing email

00:01:03 ◼   ► that didn't fit with the way I use all my other clients.

00:01:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think that was a big part,

00:01:08 ◼   ► and will remain a big part of mailbox,

00:01:10 ◼   ► 'cause of course they're not shutting it down.

00:01:11 ◼   ► This is going to remain a product under the Dropbox brand.

00:01:15 ◼   ► But a big part of it was kinda letting go

00:01:19 ◼   ► of the way that you did previously do email,

00:01:21 ◼   ► and I think that's why the people

00:01:23 ◼   ► who had a hard time getting into it,

00:01:25 ◼   ► I talked to a number of them, of course.

00:01:27 ◼   ► And once some of those people were able to just totally

00:01:32 ◼   ► let go of the previous ways that they were doing email

00:01:36 ◼   ► and almost archive everything and then just wait

00:01:39 ◼   ► for new stuff to come in and then keep archiving it

00:01:41 ◼   ► or keep pushing it, then they sort of got into it.

00:01:44 ◼   ► And I sort of, I got into it immediately

00:01:48 ◼   ► because I had actually done that by myself

00:01:51 ◼   ► before mailbox even existed.

00:01:52 ◼   ► I just decided email was getting way out of control.

00:01:56 ◼   ► I just had to archive everything,

00:01:58 ◼   ► and then I was starting kind of fresh,

00:02:00 ◼   ► and then I would, when mailbox didn't exist,

00:02:03 ◼   ► I would almost, at the end of every week and on the weekend,

00:02:05 ◼   ► go through all my email that came in

00:02:07 ◼   ► and just go through it as quickly as possible,

00:02:10 ◼   ► and then archive anything I didn't need

00:02:12 ◼   ► and then respond to anything I needed to.

00:02:14 ◼   ► This just allowed me to do it

00:02:15 ◼   ► in a much more simple way on the iPhone itself.

00:02:18 ◼   ► - No, I think it's a really interesting way

00:02:19 ◼   ► to do email on a small screen device.

00:02:22 ◼   ► And the other thing, though, one of the reasons

00:02:24 ◼   ► I think it works so well,

00:02:26 ◼   ► and what they're almost infamous for,

00:02:28 ◼   ► is that to use the app, you've gotta sign up

00:02:31 ◼   ► and you've gotta wait for your turn,

00:02:32 ◼   ► and people crack a lot of jokes about how long

00:02:34 ◼   ► it's taking for people to get let in.

00:02:37 ◼   ► But it's not like just an arbitrary,

00:02:39 ◼   ► we're trying to be exclusive to be cool,

00:02:42 ◼   ► it's because there's a server-side component.

00:02:44 ◼   ► And this is part of what makes it work so well,

00:02:47 ◼   ► is you give your Gmail credentials to Mailbox

00:02:51 ◼   ► and they check your mail from them.

00:02:54 ◼   ► - Right.

00:02:55 ◼   ► - And the app interfaces with them,

00:02:57 ◼   ► and so it makes it way more efficient.

00:02:59 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I think they really did nail that.

00:03:02 ◼   ► They were really worried about rolling it out too quickly

00:03:06 ◼   ► that this would crash and bring down the whole thing.

00:03:08 ◼   ► So I think it really was out of necessity

00:03:10 ◼   ► that they did the system that they made.

00:03:12 ◼   ► And I think it's a pretty ingenious system.

00:03:14 ◼   ► I know a lot of people were upset

00:03:15 ◼   ► just because the wait has been so long.

00:03:18 ◼   ► They still haven't let in everyone even now.

00:03:21 ◼   ► But yeah, it was totally out of necessity.

00:03:22 ◼   ► And they worked a lot on the back end of that system

00:03:24 ◼   ► to make it all work as seamlessly as it does.

00:03:27 ◼   ► And it really does.

00:03:28 ◼   ► I mean, I now use it too on my iPad.

00:03:30 ◼   ► I use it on both iPads, the big one and the mini,

00:03:32 ◼   ► even though it's of course not tailored

00:03:34 ◼   ► specifically for those.

00:03:35 ◼   ► But it's great how it just is constantly in sync

00:03:38 ◼   ► between all of them.

00:03:40 ◼   ► And it's great that you can also use it with regular Gmail

00:03:43 ◼   ► when you're on your desktop because they do a smart things

00:03:46 ◼   ► with folders within Gmail.

00:03:48 ◼   ► So they have Mailbox slash Later slash Weekend and all the different labeling systems.

00:03:55 ◼   ► So it was a really smart way that they went about doing it.

00:03:58 ◼   ► Obviously I was a huge fan of the product and I will remain a huge fan.

00:04:02 ◼   ► I think that the Dropbox deal is very smart from Dropbox's perspective.

00:04:07 ◼   ► You think about what Dropbox is, they're now moving more towards, it looks like, becoming

00:04:12 ◼   ► sort of a cloud-based OS in their own right.

00:04:16 ◼   ► Yeah, and the Dropbox, there's a couple of things I want to talk about. It's a totally

00:04:22 ◼   ► funny coincidence that you're the guest on the show this week and that you're, you know

00:04:25 ◼   ► the mailbox guys, you're an investor. Because this literally broke like an hour ago.

00:04:33 ◼   ► But what, you know, clearly one of the things the Dropbox has got, I mean everybody knows

00:04:37 ◼   ► this, they could obviously bring them expertise with scaling to large amounts of information,

00:04:43 ◼   ► Large amounts of concurrency, huge number of users, and a terrific, almost maybe unparalleled

00:04:50 ◼   ► reputation for reliability.

00:04:52 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:04:53 ◼   ► And so I think Dropbox, they have over 100 million users, something like that, God knows

00:04:57 ◼   ► how many files they're actually working with.

00:05:00 ◼   ► But I think the mailbox guys, I think they realized that they had a huge hit on their

00:05:05 ◼   ► hands, but I think also they knew that in order for this to keep working as well as

00:05:11 ◼   ► it has been working. They need to really get to scale pretty quickly as a number of other

00:05:17 ◼   ► people I assume will be coming after them. Who knows what Google is doing itself with

00:05:22 ◼   ► Gmail. This gets them right to where they need to be. In Dropbox now, all of a sudden,

00:05:30 ◼   ► how do a lot of people still send attachments? It's over email. They have this perfect system

00:05:37 ◼   ► to do that now.

00:05:38 ◼   ► So, let me press you a little bit though as an investor.

00:05:41 ◼   ► Isn't this a little early for somebody to sell?

00:05:45 ◼   ► It is pretty quick.

00:05:46 ◼   ► We've had this happen a number of times now.

00:05:49 ◼   ► The last good example is Vine, the quick video sharing service that Twitter acquired actually

00:05:55 ◼   ► before they launched.

00:06:00 ◼   ► That's going to be a record that might be hard to play.

00:06:04 ◼   ► The good news is that I think Crunchfund, the fund where I'm a general partner at,

00:06:11 ◼   ► is doing a good job of picking some services that are pretty compelling and end up being

00:06:16 ◼   ► good things.

00:06:18 ◼   ► The downside is it is a little bit bittersweet to see these things just be taken under someone

00:06:24 ◼   ► else's wing so quickly after they launched, or like Vine before they launched.

00:06:30 ◼   ► Because you always want to see a startup try to do it by themselves, see what scale they

00:06:36 ◼   ► can get to, see if they can become the next giant company on their own.

00:06:41 ◼   ► And I think that's why every investor makes their initial investment to begin with.

00:06:47 ◼   ► Of course, there are great outcomes, and that's the way that it works, but I think that you

00:06:52 ◼   ► don't make an initial investment hoping that someone's going to sell the company within

00:06:55 ◼   ► six months because you would be an awful overall investor if you did that.

00:07:00 ◼   ► Well, and while you say it's bittersweet, there's a big difference between both of

00:07:04 ◼   ► those acquisitions and a lot of the acquisitions that I've had my eye on in

00:07:09 ◼   ► the last, I don't know, couple of years, which is it's not the they're both, you

00:07:15 ◼   ► know, Vine was acquired and so they could launch Vine and do Vine and Vine is what

00:07:20 ◼   ► Vine was meant to be and Mailbox, like we said, is continuing a Dropbox bought it

00:07:25 ◼   ► so they can continue doing it. This isn't those one of those talent acquisitions

00:07:29 ◼   ► where the bigger company takes the product in,

00:07:32 ◼   ► but all they really wanted was the team,

00:07:35 ◼   ► and the product immediately goes into shutdown mode.

00:07:38 ◼   ► I mean, a perfect parallel, 'cause it's also,

00:07:42 ◼   ► was a popular iOS Mac email client was Sparrow.

00:07:45 ◼   ► - Of course, right, and right, that's sort of,

00:07:49 ◼   ► I don't want to say that's sort of the nightmare scenario

00:07:51 ◼   ► that you kind of dread, but I think that by all accounts,

00:07:55 ◼   ► that's not been the greatest exit,

00:07:59 ◼   ► And I don't know from an insider perspective

00:08:01 ◼   ► if I'm not an investor in that or anything.

00:08:04 ◼   ► I just think that that was a pure acqui-hire.

00:08:08 ◼   ► The product is still working, but they said immediately

00:08:10 ◼   ► right after that they were basically

00:08:12 ◼   ► gonna stop developing for it,

00:08:13 ◼   ► or that they were gonna open source some of it,

00:08:15 ◼   ► I think they said.

00:08:16 ◼   ► Yeah, but it's all just faded away.

00:08:18 ◼   ► I mean, who talks about Sparrow anymore?

00:08:19 ◼   ► Right, and so yes, you're right.

00:08:21 ◼   ► That is like the worst case scenario

00:08:23 ◼   ► where that happens quite often.

00:08:26 ◼   ► And it's great that both Vine and now Mailbox

00:08:28 ◼   ► going to live on.

00:08:31 ◼   ► I think we're already seeing now in Vine's case,

00:08:33 ◼   ► there were some numbers earlier this week,

00:08:35 ◼   ► that they're getting to a scale that's really impressive pretty

00:08:39 ◼   ► quickly.

00:08:39 ◼   ► And that's something that Twitter enables.

00:08:41 ◼   ► Who knows if they would have been

00:08:42 ◼   ► able to do that on their own.

00:08:43 ◼   ► You'd like to think that they could

00:08:45 ◼   ► have done that on their own.

00:08:46 ◼   ► But I think that there's no question that Twitter gets them

00:08:49 ◼   ► to a place that they want to be faster than they could possibly

00:08:53 ◼   ► do it if they remained independent.

00:08:57 ◼   ► I would also—and again, I'm not trying to put you on the spot and have you reveal

00:09:02 ◼   ► things that they're not ready to reveal.

00:09:04 ◼   ► But in addition to scaling, Dropbox is doing really well financially.

00:09:07 ◼   ► Might help the mailbox team expand a little bit so that they can get to—I mean, I think

00:09:14 ◼   ► what's obviously would be coming next would be an iPad-native client and maybe even a

00:09:19 ◼   ► Mac client.

00:09:20 ◼   ► Sure.

00:09:21 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, I think that everyone has been clamoring for those since they started using

00:09:25 ◼   ► the iPhone version itself.

00:09:27 ◼   ► I know you said that if they had a Mac client, you might even, that would make it sort of

00:09:30 ◼   ► interesting to you because then you could use it more seamlessly with your workflow.

00:09:34 ◼   ► Right, because it seems that's the gist of my, not even a complaint, just observation

00:09:39 ◼   ► with the workflow.

00:09:40 ◼   ► Because I know a lot of people when they're on their Mac, when they do email, they're

00:09:43 ◼   ► in a browser on gmail.com.

00:09:46 ◼   ► And if that's how you do email, I think mailbox on your iPhone is, I'm not going to say a

00:09:52 ◼   ► no-brainer, but it's really something you should look at.

00:09:55 ◼   ► But I don't.

00:09:56 ◼   ► I really don't like the Gmail interface.

00:09:59 ◼   ► And so I use Gmail-backed email addresses,

00:10:02 ◼   ► but primarily just as IMAP with really good spam filtering.

00:10:06 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, I got that.

00:10:08 ◼   ► And I do use Gmail on the web, though.

00:10:12 ◼   ► I actually only use it basically for search

00:10:15 ◼   ► and to kind of look at things quickly as they're coming in throughout the day.

00:10:17 ◼   ► When I respond to email before Mailbox,

00:10:20 ◼   ► it used to be I would just use the iPad with the Logitech keyboard,

00:10:23 ◼   ► because it's so much faster than trying to use the web-based Gmail.

00:10:27 ◼   ► Yeah, so I don't know, you know, but if I could use mailbox everywhere, it would make a big difference.

00:10:34 ◼   ► That's really the bottom of my complaint. But anyway, I'm excited about this. This does seem like, it seems like good news overall.

00:10:40 ◼   ► Yeah, I think it's two great companies that will only help mailbox kind of get to the point where they need to be with all those different clients, like you said.

00:10:49 ◼   ► you said.

00:10:50 ◼   ► Right.

00:10:51 ◼   ► And Dropbox seems, you know, I mean you never know, but Dropbox really does seem from the

00:10:54 ◼   ► outside to almost like Twitter, they're determined to stay independent.

00:11:02 ◼   ► Like you never say never, but it doesn't seem like Dropbox is interested in selling.

00:11:07 ◼   ► Right.

00:11:08 ◼   ► We had the, of course, there were the rumors or talk a long time ago about the meeting

00:11:12 ◼   ► with Steve Jobs between them, you know, sort of trying to bully them into selling or whatnot.

00:11:18 ◼   ► And yeah, I mean, they've raised a huge amount of money, and I think that they're

00:11:25 ◼   ► making a huge amount of money.

00:11:26 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:11:27 ◼   ► I'm not privy to their actual finances.

00:11:29 ◼   ► But yeah, I think that they'll be fine staying independent, and I think that that's their

00:11:34 ◼   ► plan.

00:11:35 ◼   ► So that's great.

00:11:36 ◼   ► Mad Fientist Lots of other news this week.

00:11:39 ◼   ► But we have a couple of sponsors this week, so let me do one right now.

00:11:43 ◼   ► And let me tell you about Things and Things Cloud Sync.

00:11:47 ◼   ► Everybody knows things. Things has been a popular Mac and iOS to-do system for a couple of years.

00:11:57 ◼   ► But the big new thing that they've launched fairly recently is Things Cloud Sync.

00:12:01 ◼   ► And it was in the works for a while, almost was notorious for, you know, "Hey, when are you guys going to get sync?"

00:12:07 ◼   ► But it's out now, and it really does work great.

00:12:11 ◼   ► And so if you use things on your Mac and on your iPhone,

00:12:15 ◼   ► you log in with things Cloud Sync and it all just works.

00:12:20 ◼   ► Now, part of the thing that makes it great that they develop their own system rather than waiting for,

00:12:24 ◼   ► say, Apple, is all of the problems a lot of people are having with iCloud Sync and Core Data,

00:12:32 ◼   ► you know, almost notorious we could almost do a whole show on that.

00:12:35 ◼   ► They're not using that.

00:12:36 ◼   ► And I think it shows because their sync works instantly.

00:12:40 ◼   ► And they also have a really cool feature, and this would never happen through iCloud,

00:12:47 ◼   ► but one of the things they have with Things Cloud is what they call local push.

00:12:52 ◼   ► And when one device sends an update to the cloud, it also broadcasts an encrypted notification

00:12:57 ◼   ► over the local network telling other clients that are logged in at the same time on the

00:13:02 ◼   ► same account, like let's say on your home Wi-Fi network, that they should check for

00:13:07 ◼   ► updates now.

00:13:08 ◼   ► And so when you try this out, and I did it, it's almost bizarre.

00:13:12 ◼   ► It's like you type something on your Mac and you have your iPhone open, and it's almost

00:13:17 ◼   ► like you're typing on your iPhone from your Mac.

00:13:19 ◼   ► Like you hit return and there it shows up.

00:13:22 ◼   ► Really, really great.

00:13:25 ◼   ► Other notable features they've got, they've got integration with Siri so you can speak

00:13:29 ◼   ► your to-dos directly into things.

00:13:32 ◼   ► They have a new daily review feature that streamlines your daily decision making, sort

00:13:36 ◼   ► sort of take a look at your whole pile of to-dos, what am I going to do today?

00:13:41 ◼   ► And they have a new custom designed scrolling date picker.

00:13:44 ◼   ► It's really, really nice UI.

00:13:47 ◼   ► I think they really have sort of built something better than the OS standard for picking dates

00:13:52 ◼   ► to assign dates to your to-dos.

00:13:55 ◼   ► So check out things too.

00:13:58 ◼   ► Give it a spin, but you've really got to think about the Cloud Sync to understand just how

00:14:02 ◼   ► great the system that they have right now is.

00:14:05 ◼   ► Check them out at culturedcode.com, C-U-L-T-U-R-E-D-C-O-D-E dot com.

00:14:14 ◼   ► And my thanks to them for sponsoring the show this week.

00:14:16 ◼   ► It's interesting that Things was one of your sponsors.

00:14:21 ◼   ► Going back to Mailbox for a second, their original product was Orchestra, which was

00:14:25 ◼   ► also a to-do list.

00:14:27 ◼   ► Yeah, it just never really…

00:14:30 ◼   ► I think it was pretty interesting.

00:14:31 ◼   ► were doing before Siri existed, they were doing some of the voice techniques to kind

00:14:36 ◼   ► of, you know, just be able to hit a button and speak your to-do list. Yeah, just never

00:14:40 ◼   ► really took off in the same way that some of those other to-do lists have.

00:14:44 ◼   ► Yeah, I sort of feel like they… and the orchestra thing was sort of, "Hey, everybody's

00:14:50 ◼   ► using their inbox as a to-do list. Is there a way that we can go with that?" And they

00:14:54 ◼   ► tried something. And I remember looking at it and thinking, "Interesting," but didn't

00:14:59 ◼   ► click. Right, but it's going to end up being, you know, it already is, one of those

00:15:05 ◼   ► fascinating stories where what they were doing early on, while it didn't

00:15:09 ◼   ► quite click, really did lead to the idea of what Mailbox was, because when you

00:15:13 ◼   ► look at the Mailbox app, it basically is, I think that they realized the

00:15:18 ◼   ► notion of your email inbox is a to-do list that someone else makes for you, so

00:15:23 ◼   ► why don't we just kind of take that to the next, you know, logical step and make

00:15:27 ◼   ► it an actual sort of to-do list, push stuff off to do later, to bring it back, that kind

00:15:31 ◼   ► of stuff.

00:15:32 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:15:33 ◼   ► And it's an interesting way of not staying too attached to your first idea and letting

00:15:38 ◼   ► it take you to a next new idea.

00:15:42 ◼   ► Yep.

00:15:43 ◼   ► Don't stay too attached.

00:15:45 ◼   ► Yep.

00:15:47 ◼   ► So, what else?

00:15:49 ◼   ► What do you want to do next?

00:15:50 ◼   ► How about the Schiller interviews?

00:15:51 ◼   ► Sure.

00:15:52 ◼   ► So, on the eve, I guess it was actually two days before, but it's so that the articles

00:15:59 ◼   ► would hit the day before the Galaxy S4 launch. Phil Schiller did two interviews, one with

00:16:06 ◼   ► the Wall Street Journal, one with Reuters.

00:16:09 ◼   ► Are we sure there were only two also? Because I know both you and I didn't see that Reuters

00:16:12 ◼   ► one to begin with, I think.

00:16:14 ◼   ► No, neither. No, and I think it hit later, which is weird. Maybe it was conducted later,

00:16:20 ◼   ► too.

00:16:20 ◼   ► And why Reuters?

00:16:21 ◼   ► When does Apple talk to Reuters?

00:16:22 ◼   ► Like what's going on there?

00:16:24 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:16:25 ◼   ► It's all a little new.

00:16:29 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:16:31 ◼   ► Curious?

00:16:32 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:16:33 ◼   ► I don't think either really went well.

00:16:35 ◼   ► Or at least it didn't play out, I think, the way that Apple wanted to.

00:16:39 ◼   ► Although I do think, and I think you're a little bit more – this was a mistake than

00:16:45 ◼   ► I am.

00:16:46 ◼   ► Right.

00:16:47 ◼   ► But I don't want to put words in your mouth.

00:16:48 ◼   ► But I'll just say the headlines.

00:16:49 ◼   ► headline in the Wall Street Journal was, "In rare move, Apple goes on the defensive against

00:16:55 ◼   ► Samsung."

00:16:56 ◼   ► Right. That's clearly not what Apple was going for by speaking. If anything, they would want

00:17:02 ◼   ► the opposite, right? Apple goes on the offensive.

00:17:04 ◼   ► Exactly. Well, and that's what Reuters headline was. Reuters headline is, "Apple's Shiller

00:17:10 ◼   ► blasts Android, Samsung on Galaxy's Eve." So at least that's, I think, the headline

00:17:16 ◼   ► that Apple was going for.

00:17:18 ◼   ► Yeah. I assume with the Reuters thing, the only sense I can make of it is that they knew

00:17:26 ◼   ► that this was going to be a huge press event. I think one of the first ones that Samsung

00:17:31 ◼   ► has done in the United States for these types of things. And so with Reuters, they wanted

00:17:36 ◼   ► to get the biggest, widest mainstream media reach as possible, and same with Wall Street

00:17:42 ◼   ► Journal and also a little bit more from the business perspective, I imagine.

00:17:49 ◼   ► But it's still, I don't know. I do think it was a mistake for them to do that just because,

00:17:55 ◼   ► in hindsight, of course, the Wall Street Journal headline is bad for them. But I also just

00:17:59 ◼   ► think, I don't know, I don't think that they needed to do it. What's the benefit of doing

00:18:03 ◼   ► it versus not saying anything? What ended up happening is that Samsung sort of, I think,

00:18:12 ◼   ► everyone would agree, shot themselves in the foot

00:18:14 ◼   ► with that kind of weird presentation.

00:18:17 ◼   ► So if Apple had said nothing,

00:18:18 ◼   ► it would be the same outcome, I think.

00:18:21 ◼   ► I just don't see what the major benefit was

00:18:24 ◼   ► of Schiller trying to talk to these guys.

00:18:26 ◼   ► - I called it an unforced error

00:18:28 ◼   ► because Schiller had one technical error

00:18:31 ◼   ► in his Reuters interview where he, based on rumors,

00:18:33 ◼   ► said that the Galaxy was gonna launch

00:18:36 ◼   ► with a year-old operating system,

00:18:37 ◼   ► which I think meant Android 4.1,

00:18:41 ◼   ► It's shipped in July.

00:18:43 ◼   ► But it doesn't.

00:18:44 ◼   ► It's actually on the latest,

00:18:45 ◼   ► it's the first Android phone I can ever remember

00:18:47 ◼   ► that's other than a Nexus that's shipped

00:18:50 ◼   ► with the currently latest version of Android,

00:18:53 ◼   ► which is 4.2, which is from November.

00:18:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, I assume that everyone thought

00:18:58 ◼   ► that wouldn't be possible given they have to redesign

00:19:02 ◼   ► or whatever touchwiz their awful interface on top of it.

00:19:07 ◼   ► - I don't think they call it that anymore.

00:19:08 ◼   ► Or at least they didn't mention it.

00:19:09 ◼   ► I watched the whole presentation,

00:19:11 ◼   ► And I don't remember that the word TouchWiz even showed up.

00:19:13 ◼   ► I think that they're just calling it Galaxy.

00:19:17 ◼   ► - Well, that's smart.

00:19:18 ◼   ► That's what they should do.

00:19:19 ◼   ► If they want to break away, it seems like all indications are they are sort of creating

00:19:24 ◼   ► their own brand around these Galaxy phones, not mentioning Android as little as possible.

00:19:30 ◼   ► And TouchWiz was just an awful name.

00:19:33 ◼   ► So it's good to do Galaxy, I think.

00:19:37 ◼   ► But yeah, I'm kind of coming around to you.

00:19:39 ◼   ► And I thought that was the only error that Schiller made,

00:19:41 ◼   ► is Schiller said that, and now you can pick on something

00:19:44 ◼   ► that he said and say, "Look, that's not even true."

00:19:46 ◼   ► And it was risky, I think,

00:19:47 ◼   ► 'cause he obviously didn't know.

00:19:49 ◼   ► I thought maybe he had some intel on it and knew

00:19:54 ◼   ► and attributed it to rumors that,

00:19:56 ◼   ► "Hey, it's gonna have a year-old operating system."

00:19:58 ◼   ► But that the only way he would have said it publicly

00:20:00 ◼   ► is if he somehow knew, like, a source at a carrier

00:20:03 ◼   ► or something like that. - Right.

00:20:05 ◼   ► But it ends up that's not even true.

00:20:07 ◼   ► - But why do you think that he did it?

00:20:09 ◼   ► Why do you think that he's going for,

00:20:12 ◼   ► what's he going for by saying anything?

00:20:14 ◼   ► It just doesn't seem like the Apple we all know.

00:20:18 ◼   ► - Well, usually what they do is if they want

00:20:22 ◼   ► to take a little air out of,

00:20:24 ◼   ► and it's certainly not unique to Apple,

00:20:27 ◼   ► but everybody kind of plays this game,

00:20:28 ◼   ► that if one of your opponent's competitors, let's say,

00:20:32 ◼   ► is on the cusp of a big announcement,

00:20:34 ◼   ► do something right before it to take a little air out to distract a little bit from it.

00:20:40 ◼   ► So Apple would usually do is, I can't off the top of my head and think of it, but announce

00:20:46 ◼   ► some sort of minor update, you know, like 10.83, but something for the iPhone.

00:20:53 ◼   ► I don't know, a minor update to something.

00:20:55 ◼   ► Speed bumps to the MacBook Airs, I don't know.

00:20:58 ◼   ► Have something to announce the day of or the day before just to take some of the top spots

00:21:04 ◼   ► at Techmeme and the equivalent. But not say anything, just announce a product and let

00:21:10 ◼   ► you think, "Well, maybe it's a coincidence, could be." And I don't know, maybe it's that

00:21:16 ◼   ► they had nothing to release and still wanted to somehow insert themselves into the news

00:21:23 ◼   ► this week?

00:21:24 ◼   ► Yeah, that strikes me as the right thought, if there is anything, if there is any strategic

00:21:32 ◼   ► thinking here, it probably is the fact that they do usually do some sort of incremental

00:21:37 ◼   ► update stuff right before, and they may just not have anything because we're in this very

00:21:43 ◼   ► extended weird lull of no real product updates because they did so many at the end of last

00:21:49 ◼   ► year.

00:21:50 ◼   ► And the other thing, and it's loose, I can't make a completely logical cohesive argument

00:21:57 ◼   ► for it. But I think it's loosely related to the stuff that I've been writing about lately about

00:22:02 ◼   ► just the plain bullshit that a lot of the business press has been writing. You know, like this,

00:22:09 ◼   ► the Reuters interview in the second paragraph where I wrote a whole piece last night about

00:22:13 ◼   ► this, this paragraph, which is the second paragraph in the story, which is pretty

00:22:19 ◼   ► important. The marketing chief's rare attack on arrival on the eve of the Galaxy S4's global

00:22:25 ◼   ► premiere in New York underscores the extent of the pressure piled upon a company that

00:22:29 ◼   ► once stood the undisputed leader of the smart phone arena, comma, so far so good, right?

00:22:37 ◼   ► There is more pressure on Apple because they're no longer undisputed. And then the rest of

00:22:42 ◼   ► the clause, the rest of the sentences, "But ceded its crown to Samsung in 2012." And that's

00:22:47 ◼   ► just, again, this is a news, this is what, you know, it boggles my mind because, I mean,

00:22:53 ◼   ► Honestly, I could maybe just skip the whole article I wrote and just point out that Apple had 70% of the profit in the industry

00:22:59 ◼   ► last year and Samsung, you know had

00:23:01 ◼   ► 32 of it, you know, so they're both doing really well

00:23:05 ◼   ► It's an amazing statistic that two companies have

00:23:08 ◼   ► The entirety of the profits of the industry and that all the other companies combined are losing money

00:23:14 ◼   ► We make Samsung and Apple share out up to over a hundred. That's pretty amazing. I think that

00:23:19 ◼   ► it's sort of

00:23:22 ◼   ► - If I had to guess why these stories keep happening,

00:23:25 ◼   ► I think you're exactly right,

00:23:27 ◼   ► and I said this in a much more subtle way,

00:23:29 ◼   ► I even tweeted about it a few months ago,

00:23:30 ◼   ► where it's just that the tech press is more or less bored

00:23:33 ◼   ► because they've written the same thing

00:23:34 ◼   ► that Apple is winning Apple,

00:23:36 ◼   ► like oh my god, how much money is Apple making,

00:23:38 ◼   ► all that over and over again.

00:23:40 ◼   ► And so the only reason,

00:23:41 ◼   ► it's almost like blogging journalism 101,

00:23:44 ◼   ► you build something up to knock it down later.

00:23:47 ◼   ► And there's no way to really knock Apple down

00:23:49 ◼   ► other than to say the market share thing, right?

00:23:52 ◼   ► I mean, there's, and it's like,

00:23:54 ◼   ► it is sort of a silly metric when you think about it

00:23:56 ◼   ► as compared to the profit thing,

00:23:58 ◼   ► because what matters at the end of the day

00:24:00 ◼   ► in how healthy a company is, is not the market share,

00:24:03 ◼   ► even though it seems like it should be correlated

00:24:05 ◼   ► to the actual profit and to the revenue.

00:24:10 ◼   ► It's actually not, and so it doesn't make a lot of sense.

00:24:13 ◼   ► And so some of these guys may be thinking

00:24:16 ◼   ► still along the lines of the Wintel days

00:24:19 ◼   ► And so eventually Samsung with this huge market share

00:24:23 ◼   ► will just turn a few screws

00:24:25 ◼   ► and really kind of drive Apple into the ground

00:24:27 ◼   ► and then the profit will just evaporate overnight

00:24:30 ◼   ► because of that.

00:24:32 ◼   ► And I think that's ridiculous.

00:24:34 ◼   ► The only way you could argue that that wasn't ridiculous

00:24:38 ◼   ► is if somehow the carrier subsidy model

00:24:41 ◼   ► changes in the United States,

00:24:43 ◼   ► or if worldwide that market becomes so much more important

00:24:48 ◼   ► and if Apple doesn't do anything

00:24:49 ◼   ► kind of come out to more strongly meet some of the Android competition in places like

00:24:55 ◼   ► India and China. I think that that's the only way you could make the argument that the market

00:25:00 ◼   ► share stuff does matter, but it doesn't seem like any of that stuff is changing.

00:25:04 ◼   ► No, and one of the points I've made in the past is that you can cheat to gain market

00:25:09 ◼   ► share. And maybe cheating isn't quite the right word, but what you can do is take unsustainable

00:25:17 ◼   ► like charge for a thing below costs, you know, and eventually though you've got to

00:25:24 ◼   ► figure out a way to make money on it, you know, famously like in the console

00:25:30 ◼   ► business of video games, like everybody knew that like when the new Xbox 360

00:25:35 ◼   ► came out, it, Microsoft was losing money on each unit sold, right, and it was a way

00:25:42 ◼   ► of gaining market share. But there's really no way to cheat to gain profits. So somebody

00:25:50 ◼   ► could sell phones at cost and gain market share, but they can't sell-- there's no way

00:25:55 ◼   ► to cheat and gain profit share. Profit share is a more accurate measure, especially over

00:26:00 ◼   ► a long period of time. So I just sent you a link. It's from Benedict Evans.

00:26:07 ◼   ► Twitter DM is just so great. Let me just say how wonderfully fast it is.

00:26:12 ◼   ► It's a chart from Benedict Evans, or a couple of charts, but it's the bottom one that to me

00:26:17 ◼   ► is more interesting, where he compares unit sold, revenue, and operating profits of three entities,

00:26:26 ◼   ► Apple, Samsung, and all others. And this is the global handset market share.

00:26:33 ◼   ► And I'll put it in the show links, because I think that this chart says a lot.

00:26:37 ◼   ► And what you see is, in terms of units, other has like 60%, right?

00:26:45 ◼   ► Apple has only 10%, real small, and Samsung has, you know, somewhere around, I don't know,

00:26:51 ◼   ► 20 to 30%.

00:26:52 ◼   ► Then in revenue, other only has about 30, and Samsung has about 30, and Apple has about

00:27:00 ◼   ► 40.

00:27:01 ◼   ► close to a sort of three-way tie in revenue.

00:27:05 ◼   ► But then you look at profits, and it's the complete inverse

00:27:08 ◼   ► of the first one.

00:27:09 ◼   ► It's really kind of symmetric, where other has almost nothing.

00:27:14 ◼   ► Samsung has about 30, and Apple has like 70.

00:27:23 ◼   ► And I feel like-- so one of the things there is I feel like lazy thinkers who

00:27:27 ◼   ► really do think that market share equates to profit share and revenue share. They understand

00:27:33 ◼   ► Samsung because Samsung is right around 30 each way. They sell about 30% of the phones,

00:27:39 ◼   ► make about 30% of the revenue, and make about 30% of the profit in the industry. And that

00:27:43 ◼   ► and everybody thinks, well, that's a normal business. And then there's Apple, who's all

00:27:48 ◼   ► over the, you know, who it's the complete inverse, they only sell 10% of the phones,

00:27:53 ◼   ► but they get about 30, 40% of the revenue,

00:27:55 ◼   ► but they make 70% of the profit.

00:27:58 ◼   ► And it just doesn't register in people's minds as possible.

00:28:02 ◼   ► And so they think it's unsustainable and then, you know.

00:28:05 ◼   ► - You know, the other side of this

00:28:07 ◼   ► that people have been railing on for a few years now

00:28:09 ◼   ► is that when someone else dominates the market share,

00:28:14 ◼   ► and in this case now, Samsung and Android overall,

00:28:19 ◼   ► that developers will just flock to them

00:28:21 ◼   ► And that's not sustainable for Apple because people will just go for the huge quantity

00:28:28 ◼   ► of numbers.

00:28:29 ◼   ► Developers will go for where the market is.

00:28:32 ◼   ► And the problem there, as you know as well as I do, is that while yes, there is some

00:28:37 ◼   ► legitimacy to that argument you're already seeing, you see more developers go more quickly

00:28:42 ◼   ► to Android, they're still doing primarily iOS first, mailbox being a great example of

00:28:47 ◼   ► that, because if you do want to do something that's an actual business and you're making

00:28:51 ◼   ► money off of it, whether, not necessarily a venture-backed

00:28:55 ◼   ► business even, but if you're trying to do just a small shop

00:28:58 ◼   ► and you're making your own apps that you intend to sell,

00:29:01 ◼   ► it's still so much better to do that within the iOS ecosystem

00:29:05 ◼   ► than it is within Android.

00:29:06 ◼   ► And so that plays against the market share argument as well.

00:29:11 ◼   ► Totally.

00:29:12 ◼   ► And another, I feel like there's so many facets here,

00:29:16 ◼   ► but it's not that hard to understand it.

00:29:18 ◼   ► Another one is the idea if you value market share above all else, then you're assuming

00:29:24 ◼   ► that one user is as good as another or almost, that they're roughly equivalent.

00:29:29 ◼   ► And they're not. It's really, especially in the phone market, it really is not true. And that's

00:29:35 ◼   ► why, and I again, I wrote this on a branch a while back, but people don't want to say it because by

00:29:43 ◼   ► saying that somebody is a better customer than another, right? They feel like they're coming

00:29:47 ◼   ► dangerously close to saying they're a better person than another and that's not what I mean at all like a

00:29:52 ◼   ► person an individual who just goes into a

00:29:55 ◼   ► Verizon store and says just I want a new I want a new phone and gets talked into an Android, you know a droid whatever

00:30:02 ◼   ► And just uses it to make phone calls and answer texts which which by the way

00:30:08 ◼   ► Let me interrupt you because this is exactly the story of my father when I went to go visit him over

00:30:14 ◼   ► Thanksgiving holidays there in Florida, my parents.

00:30:17 ◼   ► Right.

00:30:18 ◼   ► He pulls out this phone, and I'm like, oh, you finally

00:30:21 ◼   ► got a new phone.

00:30:22 ◼   ► He had a flip phone or whatever for all these years.

00:30:24 ◼   ► He has this Android phone.

00:30:25 ◼   ► I forget what it was.

00:30:26 ◼   ► I tweeted about it because it was the funniest thing.

00:30:28 ◼   ► He just says, like, I hate this fucking piece of shit.

00:30:31 ◼   ► Because he just says--

00:30:32 ◼   ► all he's like, all I want to do is make a phone call on this.

00:30:35 ◼   ► So they gave me this phone.

00:30:37 ◼   ► I picked this phone because it was the free one that Verizon

00:30:39 ◼   ► was pushing at me.

00:30:41 ◼   ► And he happened to know, of course, because he follows me.

00:30:44 ◼   ► I knew that an iPhone was on the verge of being launched,

00:30:47 ◼   ► so he got it in September or something like that.

00:30:51 ◼   ► So I knew a new iPhone, so I didn't wanna get that one,

00:30:53 ◼   ► even though I probably happily would've gotten that.

00:30:55 ◼   ► I know what a big fan you are of it.

00:30:57 ◼   ► But this was just the free one,

00:30:58 ◼   ► and so I said, "Yeah, sure, why not?"

00:30:59 ◼   ► And so they give this to me, and he's like,

00:31:01 ◼   ► "God, it's got all this crap on it.

00:31:02 ◼   ► "I don't know, there's stuff that's preloaded.

00:31:04 ◼   ► "All I wanna do is make a phone call,

00:31:05 ◼   ► "and they make it so hard to do that."

00:31:07 ◼   ► So my dad is the perfect example of that.

00:31:10 ◼   ► - Absolutely, I mean, that's canonical.

00:31:12 ◼   ► And now he's probably not using it to browse the web.

00:31:14 ◼   ► No.

00:31:15 ◼   ► Right.

00:31:15 ◼   ► Which is hilarious.

00:31:16 ◼   ► He's not installing apps on it.

00:31:19 ◼   ► And so yes, it counts towards Android market share.

00:31:21 ◼   ► But it also counts away from these bizarre, seemingly

00:31:25 ◼   ► bizarre, statistics that show that iPhone users buy way more

00:31:30 ◼   ► apps, download way more free apps, browse the web more.

00:31:35 ◼   ► All of these usage statistics that

00:31:37 ◼   ► show that iPhone users use their phones more than Android

00:31:40 ◼   ► makes them, it's because they're better customers.

00:31:42 ◼   ► They're people who knew what they wanted.

00:31:45 ◼   ► And the people who knew what they wanted and made a choice

00:31:47 ◼   ► are more likely to choose an iPhone.

00:31:49 ◼   ► And they're better customers in so far as that

00:31:51 ◼   ► they're more willing to spend money

00:31:52 ◼   ► because they had to spend money.

00:31:54 ◼   ► Or you can get a free iPhone now,

00:31:56 ◼   ► but iPhone users disproportionately buy

00:32:00 ◼   ► the highest end model.

00:32:01 ◼   ► The best selling iPhone isn't the free one,

00:32:04 ◼   ► it's the iPhone 5.

00:32:07 ◼   ► And last year the best selling iPhone was the 4S.

00:32:09 ◼   ► The top-selling one, which is more expensive, sells more units than the $99 one from a year

00:32:16 ◼   ► ago and the free one from two years ago.

00:32:19 ◼   ► And the $99 one sells more units than any other phone made by anyone else, right?

00:32:24 ◼   ► It's the top two are always, it's the iPhone 5 and then the iPhone 4S, and then it's one

00:32:28 ◼   ► that I think the Galaxy S3, I think, was the latest stats on what the top actual smartphones

00:32:34 ◼   ► were.

00:32:35 ◼   ► It may have been, I don't know, I don't want to say that.

00:32:38 ◼   ► We should look it up.

00:32:39 ◼   ► have been that the iPhone was the top three top selling ones?

00:32:42 ◼   ► Maybe not, but it was close.

00:32:43 ◼   ► Yeah, it was close.

00:32:44 ◼   ► And I think that all three are in the top five, at least

00:32:46 ◼   ► in the United States.

00:32:47 ◼   ► Right.

00:32:47 ◼   ► And again, worldwide, it only accounts to Apple's--

00:32:52 ◼   ► all iPhones only account for 10% of all phones.

00:32:54 ◼   ► That just shows, though, how long the tail is of how

00:32:59 ◼   ► many phones are out there.

00:33:00 ◼   ► Right.

00:33:01 ◼   ► That there's so many gazillion phones on the market that

00:33:05 ◼   ► have 0.002% of the market.

00:33:08 ◼   ► And so Google only counts the ones

00:33:11 ◼   ► that access the Google Play Store in their statistics

00:33:13 ◼   ► where they break down the OS stuff.

00:33:15 ◼   ► But I think those other guys count

00:33:17 ◼   ► all different kinds of things, the people who do the surveys

00:33:19 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

00:33:20 ◼   ► And someone had the great way of putting it.

00:33:23 ◼   ► I forget who this was, but basically it's

00:33:25 ◼   ► almost like some of those Android phones

00:33:27 ◼   ► out there are the equivalent of dark matter, where they're

00:33:30 ◼   ► out there and you know they're out there.

00:33:32 ◼   ► And there are small little signals

00:33:34 ◼   ► that indicate-- you can almost infer that they're out there,

00:33:37 ◼   ► But there's no real direct signals because the people aren't using them in a way that

00:33:40 ◼   ► you can measure directly.

00:33:41 ◼   ► Right.

00:33:42 ◼   ► I totally agree.

00:33:43 ◼   ► And I think a big example of that is a lot of the ones in China, which are – none of

00:33:49 ◼   ► them – I don't think or very few of them are hooked up with the regular Google Play,

00:33:55 ◼   ► Gmail, Google Maps set of apps that Google wants Android phones to be using.

00:34:01 ◼   ► They're all set up with the Chinese equivalents, the Baidu and whatever map service they have

00:34:08 ◼   ► over there.

00:34:09 ◼   ► So how long do you think until Samsung moves away from that stack, the Google stack?

00:34:16 ◼   ► We got the news yesterday.

00:34:18 ◼   ► I think one of the now three Samsung CEOs gave an interview with someone saying that

00:34:25 ◼   ► their first Tizen, is that how you pronounce it, Tizen phone is coming later this year,

00:34:29 ◼   ► So that's their own operating system that they co-develop with Intel and some others.

00:34:34 ◼   ► How long do you think Samsung remains loyal to Google's actual stack for Android?

00:34:41 ◼   ► I think not much longer.

00:34:43 ◼   ► Although, honestly, I know that they're talking about Tizen.

00:34:48 ◼   ► And this, to me, is just going on a complete hunch.

00:34:51 ◼   ► But whenever I hear about a new OS from a company that's never shipped a computer operating

00:34:56 ◼   ► system before. I automatically assume it is never gonna hit the light of day because it's

00:35:02 ◼   ► just so hard and there's so few companies who have ever successfully launched an operating

00:35:08 ◼   ► system. I mean, right now there's only three I think that are in business. There's Apple,

00:35:14 ◼   ► there's Microsoft and now Google. And to their credit, you know, Android was new and, you

00:35:20 ◼   ► You know, they did something very, very difficult,

00:35:24 ◼   ► but they pulled it off.

00:35:25 ◼   ► - Right, and it took a while for them to do it, right?

00:35:30 ◼   ► The initial versions of Android were pretty bad.

00:35:32 ◼   ► - I presume, though, that Tizen is never really gonna hit.

00:35:35 ◼   ► And even if they launch a phone with it,

00:35:37 ◼   ► it's not gonna take off.

00:35:38 ◼   ► I think what's more likely is that they pull an Amazon

00:35:42 ◼   ► and fork Android.

00:35:44 ◼   ► - I totally agree.

00:35:45 ◼   ► - And the reason for that, and do their own store,

00:35:47 ◼   ► with their own Samsung or, they'd probably call it the Galaxy store and, you know, have

00:35:53 ◼   ► developers submit their Android apps through the Galaxy store, do their own books and music

00:36:01 ◼   ► and stuff like that. But the reason I think that's more likely than Tizen taking off is

00:36:07 ◼   ► that it would be, I think it would be so much easier to get developers on board because

00:36:11 ◼   ► just like with Amazon, you don't have to recompile your app.

00:36:14 ◼   ► Yep. I'm not saying there's no technical differences. And that is not a pain in the

00:36:19 ◼   ► ass to be an Android developer and to have to deal with certain differences between developing

00:36:24 ◼   ► for the Kindle Fire HD and the, you know, I don't know, the Nexus seven or something like that. And

00:36:31 ◼   ► going through, there might be some I'm sure there's some technical differences. But for the most part,

00:36:35 ◼   ► though, you write your app to one of the Android API, you say, we'll go to API level 15, you know,

00:36:42 ◼   ► which equates to, I don't know, Jelly Bean or something like that.

00:36:45 ◼   ► Right.

00:36:46 ◼   ► And it should work on any of these Android platforms.

00:36:50 ◼   ► But I think that's more likely than Tizen taking off.

00:36:54 ◼   ► Because presumably with Tizen, they would either have to have an all new API

00:36:57 ◼   ► and get developers to totally rewrite their apps, or do something like have an Android emulation layer,

00:37:04 ◼   ► at which point you're already going to have a massive performance problem on mobile.

00:37:10 ◼   ► and why not just stick with Android at that point?

00:37:14 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I think you're exactly right there

00:37:16 ◼   ► because I also think the only way that that works,

00:37:19 ◼   ► that Tizen will work, would be if Samsung said,

00:37:22 ◼   ► look, we're only doing Tizen, we're gonna cut off Android

00:37:25 ◼   ► and we're gonna cut off Windows Mobile

00:37:28 ◼   ► because then we go back to the market share thing

00:37:30 ◼   ► where it's like the scale of Samsung

00:37:32 ◼   ► would still make it interesting to some developers,

00:37:35 ◼   ► but if they're going to keep doing Android

00:37:37 ◼   ► and that's the majority of their scale,

00:37:39 ◼   ► would any developer kind of waste their resources, their limited resources that they already

00:37:43 ◼   ► have on Tizen?

00:37:44 ◼   ► Right.

00:37:45 ◼   ► So the problem with Tizen is twofold, actually.

00:37:47 ◼   ► One is actually shipping it, getting it to the point where it's complete enough to say

00:37:52 ◼   ► this is a reasonable, modern mobile OS with an API for developers and everything else

00:37:58 ◼   ► you need.

00:37:59 ◼   ► A, I doubt that they can even pull that off.

00:38:02 ◼   ► I really do.

00:38:04 ◼   ► But B, even if they do, how do you get developers to write for it?

00:38:08 ◼   ► And there's the problem that BlackBerry faces right now,

00:38:11 ◼   ► because the new BlackBerry 10 is real.

00:38:14 ◼   ► They shipped a real modern operating system

00:38:18 ◼   ► that if they had shipped this exact same thing

00:38:20 ◼   ► four or five years ago, might have set the industry on fire.

00:38:23 ◼   ► But nobody's writing apps for it.

00:38:25 ◼   ► And so they're stuck with this stupid idea

00:38:27 ◼   ► of running Android apps in emulation

00:38:29 ◼   ► or something like that, which nobody wants to do.

00:38:31 ◼   ► - And we see it with Windows Phone.

00:38:33 ◼   ► I mean, Microsoft has been offering to pay everyone,

00:38:35 ◼   ► every developer I talk to these days says,

00:38:37 ◼   ► Yeah, Microsoft's been offering to pay 10 grand or whatever

00:38:40 ◼   ► for us to do this app.

00:38:41 ◼   ► And it's just not that interesting to them

00:38:42 ◼   ► because there's a number of reasons.

00:38:44 ◼   ► First of all, it's like, yeah, we could do it

00:38:46 ◼   ► or we could have Microsoft do it,

00:38:48 ◼   ► but then we still have to support that app going forward.

00:38:51 ◼   ► And it's like, we just don't have the resources to do it.

00:38:53 ◼   ► And the scale just isn't interesting enough.

00:38:55 ◼   ► And so even with all of Microsoft's resources

00:38:57 ◼   ► and their cash being offered to developers,

00:39:00 ◼   ► people still aren't doing it.

00:39:01 ◼   ► Right.

00:39:02 ◼   ► And so imagine if, I don't know,

00:39:05 ◼   ► you know, it's like, so the S4 launches last night, and whatever you want to say about

00:39:11 ◼   ► it, it's at least, at the very least, it's a better version of the S3. And the S3 is

00:39:16 ◼   ► a well-respected phone, and it runs all the Android apps, you know, and it's, because

00:39:20 ◼   ► it's so popular, it's not going to be overlooked by most app developers. They're going to make

00:39:25 ◼   ► sure that their app works on the S3. They're going to make sure it works on the S4.

00:39:29 ◼   ► Yep

00:39:31 ◼   ► So whatever the fragmentation problems are in Android buying a galaxy s4

00:39:35 ◼   ► You're probably gonna see the least of the fragmentation problems as a user

00:39:40 ◼   ► Yeah, now imagine six months from now. They launched the galaxy blah blah blah

00:39:45 ◼   ► I don't know the galaxy Tizen the galaxy T. I don't know call it something like that and it runs Tizen

00:39:50 ◼   ► I mean it runs no apps

00:39:52 ◼   ► I mean, I don't get it right or they if they can maybe get a couple of developers on board

00:39:57 ◼   ► I don't know, but I don't even see them doing that.

00:39:59 ◼   ► I mean, one of the weird things to me about last night's,

00:40:02 ◼   ► oh, let's just call it a shit show,

00:40:05 ◼   ► was that they had no third-party developers,

00:40:08 ◼   ► no mention of any third-party software whatsoever.

00:40:11 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:40:12 ◼   ► So two other wildcards in there,

00:40:16 ◼   ► 'cause I do think you're right,

00:40:17 ◼   ► that if they do something,

00:40:18 ◼   ► and if they do something and they plan to be successful,

00:40:20 ◼   ► it is forking Android,

00:40:22 ◼   ► because the two wildcards now are

00:40:24 ◼   ► now are what Google's doing with Motorola,

00:40:27 ◼   ► so rumors of the X phone or whatever it is,

00:40:30 ◼   ► and then what Amazon is doing in the phone space.

00:40:33 ◼   ► So they already have, of course, the Kindle tablets,

00:40:34 ◼   ► and those have been successful to some degree at least.

00:40:38 ◼   ► And now what they're going to do with a phone,

00:40:40 ◼   ► which again is just rumored, but it seems like

00:40:42 ◼   ► that's pretty likely that they're going to do that.

00:40:43 ◼   ► And so does Samsung sit back and wait

00:40:46 ◼   ► for those two things to happen before they fork Android

00:40:49 ◼   ► and do their own thing, or do they preempt them?

00:40:52 ◼   ► That's kind of the big question in my mind.

00:40:55 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't know.

00:40:56 ◼   ► I'm not quite sure what they're, it's hard to tell.

00:40:59 ◼   ► - Because it's all about being, I mean,

00:41:02 ◼   ► if Google really does make their own flagship phone

00:41:07 ◼   ► that's beyond Nexus, you know,

00:41:09 ◼   ► because it's a company that they actually own,

00:41:11 ◼   ► a Motorola phone, and they just kind of put

00:41:15 ◼   ► their marketing muscle, they start pushing it on Google.com

00:41:19 ◼   ► and they start to have more strained relationships

00:41:22 ◼   ► Samsung. Samsung does not want to be in that position, obviously. One of the most interesting

00:41:26 ◼   ► charts that you put up in your last post last night and someone else tweeted about, and I saw

00:41:32 ◼   ► this, the notion that Samsung is making more profit off of their smartphones than Google is

00:41:41 ◼   ► making as an entire company, which is just fascinating because all of that profit you

00:41:45 ◼   ► have to assume for Samsung is from Android. I mean, they're probably making a little bit off

00:41:49 ◼   ► of some of the other things.

00:41:51 ◼   ► Yeah, because of Samsung's business, or mobile business at least, of selling anything, you

00:41:57 ◼   ► know, everything from cheap candy bar phones to truly high-end.

00:42:01 ◼   ► I mean, some of the Galaxy S4 models have eight core processors.

00:42:05 ◼   ► And that's another weird thing about the Galaxy S4.

00:42:07 ◼   ► Just as an aside, there is no single Galaxy S4, at least in a way.

00:42:11 ◼   ► And I know there's a couple of different iPhone SKUs around the world for like different antenna

00:42:15 ◼   ► bands, but like the system on a chip is the same.

00:42:18 ◼   ► You get the same performance.

00:42:20 ◼   ► Whereas depending on what country you're in,

00:42:21 ◼   ► you get a radically different system on a chip

00:42:24 ◼   ► with the Galaxy phones.

00:42:25 ◼   ► Like, and apparently the US isn't getting the eight core one

00:42:29 ◼   ► that all the spec nerds are slavering over.

00:42:33 ◼   ► They're getting the four core. - Oh, I didn't even realize

00:42:34 ◼   ► that. - Yeah, the US is gonna,

00:42:36 ◼   ► ah, who knows?

00:42:38 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:42:39 ◼   ► This makes no sense to me.

00:42:41 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:42:42 ◼   ► But anyway.

00:42:42 ◼   ► - But you have to think about that

00:42:46 ◼   ► from Google's perspective for a second.

00:42:48 ◼   ► They, as a company, they're a public company,

00:42:52 ◼   ► they need to keep growing the bottom line,

00:42:53 ◼   ► just like Apple does, just like every public company does.

00:42:57 ◼   ► They have a company out there that is showing them

00:43:00 ◼   ► exactly how to do that, because they're making more money

00:43:03 ◼   ► off of a product that Google created

00:43:05 ◼   ► than Google is making as an entire company itself.

00:43:08 ◼   ► So at some point, you have to think

00:43:10 ◼   ► that it's their fiduciary duty to cut that off

00:43:13 ◼   ► and start taking that profit

00:43:15 ◼   ► and those revenues themselves, right?

00:43:17 ◼   ► - Right, and it hasn't, seemingly hasn't worked out

00:43:20 ◼   ► like the PC industry did,

00:43:23 ◼   ► where Intel and HP,

00:43:28 ◼   ► and back in the day, Compaq,

00:43:31 ◼   ► the people who made the PC hardware that ran Windows

00:43:36 ◼   ► made a lot of money.

00:43:37 ◼   ► Intel particularly, but Dell and HP and Compaq

00:43:41 ◼   ► all had really good years making a lot of money

00:43:43 ◼   ► selling PCs, and Microsoft made more than any of them

00:43:47 ◼   ► by providing the operating system and software.

00:43:50 ◼   ► And Google obviously wasn't gonna make it the same way

00:43:53 ◼   ► by selling the software.

00:43:56 ◼   ► - Right.

00:43:57 ◼   ► - But I think that they assumed that by giving away

00:44:01 ◼   ► the software but having it with all these Google services

00:44:03 ◼   ► that they would profit as handsomely through all the ads

00:44:07 ◼   ► that they could show and the search results and et cetera.

00:44:11 ◼   ► And it does seem like they're doing better.

00:44:14 ◼   ► I don't know what the numbers are off the top of my head,

00:44:16 ◼   ► but it does seem like they are monetizing increasingly

00:44:19 ◼   ► better on mobile, as you might expect, certainly

00:44:21 ◼   ► with the scale again, and just getting better ads

00:44:24 ◼   ► and getting better about figuring out

00:44:26 ◼   ► how to do this on mobile.

00:44:28 ◼   ► But it's nowhere near the profit that Samsung

00:44:31 ◼   ► is seeing by selling devices.

00:44:33 ◼   ► No, definitely.

00:44:34 ◼   ► It's not even close, I think.

00:44:37 ◼   ► And it's a little hard with Samsung,

00:44:39 ◼   ► because Samsung doesn't reveal

00:44:43 ◼   ► their handset sales numbers at all,

00:44:45 ◼   ► famously stopped a while back.

00:44:46 ◼   ► So they don't say how many Galaxy phones have been sold.

00:44:49 ◼   ► And so whenever you do see a comparison of,

00:44:52 ◼   ► and I think it's an important thing

00:44:55 ◼   ► that's always overlooked is,

00:44:57 ◼   ► when you see a comparison between how many iPhone 5s

00:45:02 ◼   ► were sold last quarter and how many Galaxy 4s were sold

00:45:08 ◼   ► in the same quarter.

00:45:09 ◼   ► The number for the iPhones comes from Apple

00:45:13 ◼   ► in an SCC filing.

00:45:14 ◼   ► That is like, they're legally mandated to tell the truth.

00:45:18 ◼   ► Well, although I guess Apple, does Apple,

00:45:21 ◼   ► I guess Apple doesn't break down by--

00:45:23 ◼   ► - Yeah, they just say iPhones overall.

00:45:25 ◼   ► - All right, iPhones overall.

00:45:26 ◼   ► But at least there's a legal number.

00:45:28 ◼   ► Whereas what Samsung does is nothing.

00:45:32 ◼   ► It's all based on analyst conjecture.

00:45:34 ◼   ► - Right.

00:45:35 ◼   ► - And the analyst says it was this many.

00:45:37 ◼   ► You can kind of back it out with Apple though

00:45:41 ◼   ► by based on average, they do reveal

00:45:43 ◼   ► the average selling price.

00:45:45 ◼   ► And so you can kind of make a reasonable informed guess.

00:45:49 ◼   ► Whereas the analyst numbers really seem like

00:45:51 ◼   ► they're just pulled out of the air for Samsung.

00:45:54 ◼   ► But what they do give is a number for their entire

00:45:57 ◼   ► mobile and telecom division.

00:45:59 ◼   ► Now they sell some other stuff from that division

00:46:02 ◼   ► other than mobile phones, but I can't believe

00:46:05 ◼   ► that it's that much to make that big of a dent.

00:46:08 ◼   ► And that division made more profit last quarter

00:46:11 ◼   ► than all of Google.

00:46:12 ◼   ► - That is crazy and untenable, I think,

00:46:17 ◼   ► for the Google-Samsung relationship.

00:46:19 ◼   ► - So I wanna do, let me do another sponsor break,

00:46:23 ◼   ► but let's parlay after the break,

00:46:25 ◼   ► let's go and talk about what that means

00:46:27 ◼   ► with the Andy Rubin news.

00:46:28 ◼   ► Think about that.

00:46:29 ◼   ► So a second sponsor that I wanna thank

00:46:31 ◼   ► is I wanna thank Pixelmator,

00:46:34 ◼   ► or as we call it here Pixelmator.

00:46:37 ◼   ► And what they want me to tell you about is their new version,

00:46:40 ◼   ► Pixelmator 2.2 Blueberry.

00:46:43 ◼   ► It's not out yet, coming out at the end of March.

00:46:46 ◼   ► I kind of can't believe they're calling it 2.2.

00:46:47 ◼   ► This really seems like a 3.0.

00:46:50 ◼   ► Because what they've done is they've added a ton of new vector shape

00:46:54 ◼   ► features.

00:46:55 ◼   ► And it's really sort of adding almost

00:46:58 ◼   ► like a vector/illustrator type aspect to the app going way beyond just pixel image editing.

00:47:10 ◼   ► Really great state of the art shape tools that let you create gorgeous compositions.

00:47:14 ◼   ► You can use it for things like logos, posters, web layouts, easy to use drawing tools.

00:47:25 ◼   ► is familiar with vector based drawing tools from other apps is going to find a

00:47:30 ◼   ► lot of stuff in there that's exactly the same. All sorts of shapes, rectangles,

00:47:35 ◼   ► ellipses, rounded rectangles, polygons, lines, all of these things are vector not

00:47:40 ◼   ► pixel. You've got fill, stroke, shadow, modes, shape settings, you can assign

00:47:48 ◼   ► shape styles, create a style for a shape, save it as a saved almost like a like a

00:47:53 ◼   ► a style sheet, then create a new shape and then instantly apply the style that

00:47:57 ◼   ► you painstakingly made for the first one.

00:48:01 ◼   ► Smart shapes have easy to use controls that let you quickly adjust the

00:48:06 ◼   ► shapes outline to get just the look that you're after. Custom shapes, I mean it's

00:48:12 ◼   ► these things look like hand-drawn icons but they're vector so they scale. The

00:48:18 ◼   ► The other thing they have is shape sharing.

00:48:21 ◼   ► So when you create a new custom shape, you can export it, drag them out to the desktop,

00:48:26 ◼   ► send it to your friend.

00:48:27 ◼   ► Your friend drags it into their shapes palette and they've got the shape that you made over

00:48:32 ◼   ► on your machine.

00:48:34 ◼   ► It's a really great feature.

00:48:36 ◼   ► I really, like I said, I cannot believe that they're calling it a 2.2 instead of a 3.0

00:48:40 ◼   ► with all of this stuff.

00:48:42 ◼   ► They've also added a whole bunch of other improvements.

00:48:44 ◼   ► They've improved their type tool.

00:48:47 ◼   ► improved their gradient presets, all sorts of performance upgrades. So go check it out

00:48:54 ◼   ► at pixelmator.com. P-I-X-E-L-M-A-T-O-R dot com. And get Pixelmator.

00:49:08 ◼   ► I'm a big fan of Pixelmator. Mator. Whatever you want to call it.

00:49:11 ◼   ► Pixelmator. Don't let me throw you off. It's really Pixelmator.

00:49:13 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:49:14 ◼   ► It's now, it's, I mean, how can I not stick

00:49:17 ◼   ► with the running gag?

00:49:18 ◼   ► - Yeah. - It is, it's a phenomenal app.

00:49:20 ◼   ► - Yep.

00:49:21 ◼   ► So Andy Rubin.

00:49:24 ◼   ► - Andy Rubin.

00:49:25 ◼   ► So,

00:49:26 ◼   ► is it a bombshell?

00:49:30 ◼   ► I think it's a bombshell.

00:49:31 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Although I'm not

00:49:32 ◼   ► as juiced into Google as--

00:49:34 ◼   ► - So my understanding is, and I've talked to a few people

00:49:38 ◼   ► about this now, this was a complete surprise

00:49:42 ◼   ► pretty much across the company.

00:49:44 ◼   ► I think a few people probably knew about it in the days leading up to it, but certainly not the weeks.

00:49:49 ◼   ► And just look at his schedule. He was scheduled to talk at the D11 conference and all these other places.

00:49:55 ◼   ► Far in the future, obviously, on behalf of Android.

00:50:00 ◼   ► Now he's no longer going to be speaking on behalf of Android because he's no longer doing that.

00:50:05 ◼   ► I didn't know that. So is he taking off the D11 conference?

00:50:09 ◼   ► I don't know. I actually don't know what's going on with that. I don't know if they would

00:50:12 ◼   ► put, yeah, maybe they put in Sundar, the guy who took over for him.

00:50:16 ◼   ► That would be interesting to see.

00:50:17 ◼   ► Yeah. But yes, the understanding is that this was a huge shock within the company as well.

00:50:22 ◼   ► I always thought that within Google, and it's curious that they had these two post-PC

00:50:30 ◼   ► operating systems, Android and Chrome OS. And I always thought it was sort of,

00:50:37 ◼   ► I think you're going to love this.

00:50:38 ◼   ► You're going to love this.

00:50:39 ◼   ► It's sort of like the scene in the Batman movie with the Joker where the Joker goes

00:50:45 ◼   ► into the black guy's gang pretending to be dead, pops out of the bag, kills the leader,

00:50:51 ◼   ► and there's two guys left.

00:50:53 ◼   ► He snaps a Q stick in half and says, "We've got room for one more guy in our gang," and

00:50:59 ◼   ► throws the pool sticks.

00:51:00 ◼   ► Right?

00:51:01 ◼   ► I've always thought that was Chrome versus Android, that they've got room for one post-PC

00:51:06 ◼   ► operating system, you two guys fight it out. Right. And now, so you know, following that

00:51:14 ◼   ► along, it looks like Chrome OS in some way won, at least their leader won, because now

00:51:21 ◼   ► he's in charge of both. Right, and I guess the surprising thing to me is that it seems

00:51:25 ◼   ► to me like Android is the one that's doing better, but maybe that's because I've been

00:51:29 ◼   ► blinded by pure market share, right? Because there's a gazillion Android things out there,

00:51:34 ◼   ► and nowhere near as many Chrome OS devices.

00:51:37 ◼   ► Right.

00:51:37 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know.

00:51:38 ◼   ► I think that-- I do--

00:51:40 ◼   ► I mean, I think there's no question

00:51:42 ◼   ► that Android is doing significantly better than Chrome

00:51:44 ◼   ► OS.

00:51:45 ◼   ► It is curious, though, as to why they would do that.

00:51:48 ◼   ► Part of it is maybe the fact that Sundar Pichai, who's

00:51:55 ◼   ► going to be the new head of both units,

00:51:58 ◼   ► is very well regarded within Google.

00:52:00 ◼   ► Everyone I've talked to loves him.

00:52:01 ◼   ► I've met him a few times.

00:52:02 ◼   ► He's a really nice guy, really level-headed.

00:52:05 ◼   ► We got into it, I used to get into it with him

00:52:08 ◼   ► over bundling Flash and Chrome,

00:52:11 ◼   ► how they automatically, they make you download it

00:52:14 ◼   ► and automatically enable it.

00:52:16 ◼   ► He's just like, he would give his viewpoint,

00:52:20 ◼   ► I'd give mine, we'd disagree,

00:52:21 ◼   ► but he was very open-minded and very thoughtful

00:52:23 ◼   ► about the way that he would think about all this stuff

00:52:25 ◼   ► and the fact that he would come in

00:52:26 ◼   ► to have these conversations,

00:52:28 ◼   ► just with some random blogger at the time

00:52:31 ◼   ► to kind of talk about some of these bigger ideas.

00:52:35 ◼   ► So I think part of it is that he's very well regarded.

00:52:38 ◼   ► And also remember, there were those stories,

00:52:40 ◼   ► I guess it was last year,

00:52:41 ◼   ► maybe even almost two years ago now,

00:52:43 ◼   ► where he was sort of one of the guys

00:52:46 ◼   ► who was being hotly recruited by almost every startup.

00:52:49 ◼   ► I think the reports were that Twitter was trying

00:52:52 ◼   ► to hire him and I think it was actually Mike Arrington

00:52:55 ◼   ► who broke the news that in order to keep Sundar around,

00:52:59 ◼   ► and they gave him something like 50, 75 million dollars

00:53:02 ◼   ► worth of restricted stock or something like that.

00:53:07 ◼   ► And so I think that he's clearly someone

00:53:11 ◼   ► that Google really wanted to keep around

00:53:13 ◼   ► and really wanted to make happy

00:53:14 ◼   ► and again is really highly regarded.

00:53:16 ◼   ► And while Chrome OS may not be setting the world on fire,

00:53:19 ◼   ► Chrome certainly has.

00:53:21 ◼   ► It's the largest browser in the world now

00:53:23 ◼   ► which is pretty remarkable.

00:53:25 ◼   ► And so why not just put a fresh set of eyes on it?

00:53:28 ◼   ► That's kind of the only thing I can imagine is going on.

00:53:32 ◼   ► I doubt that Andy Rubin was pushed out in a bad way.

00:53:40 ◼   ► I mean, he is saying--

00:53:41 ◼   ► Like in a forestall way.

00:53:42 ◼   ► Yeah, because he is staying with the company.

00:53:44 ◼   ► It's not announced what he's doing yet,

00:53:46 ◼   ► but it seems like he's going to stay there.

00:53:49 ◼   ► And there may have been some sort of,

00:53:54 ◼   ► let's just get a fresh set of eyes on this thing.

00:53:56 ◼   ► You've been doing it for a long time.

00:53:58 ◼   ► I think either somebody's going to find out.

00:54:01 ◼   ► Either it'll leak and we'll find out sooner or we'll have to wait and see what Andy Rubin

00:54:06 ◼   ► does.

00:54:07 ◼   ► Because on the one hand, yeah, it could be that he wasn't quite pushed and maybe he was

00:54:10 ◼   ► bored and maybe he really does have a new idea for a new thing.

00:54:15 ◼   ► He really wants to just start from scratch in the Google X incubator.

00:54:22 ◼   ► So maybe he really – this is all – we're reading too much into it and Andy Rubin really

00:54:26 ◼   ► he just said, "I'm kind of done with this.

00:54:28 ◼   ► "This is feeling like a chore.

00:54:30 ◼   ► "I wanna go do something new."

00:54:32 ◼   ► - Right.

00:54:33 ◼   ► - And Larry Page is like, "That's great, have at it."

00:54:36 ◼   ► And Sundar, you take over, we totally trust you.

00:54:41 ◼   ► On the other hand though, if he was kind of pushed,

00:54:45 ◼   ► then maybe going to Google X is the Google equivalent

00:54:50 ◼   ► of serving as an advisor to Tim Cook, right?

00:54:54 ◼   ► - Right.

00:54:55 ◼   ► Because I don't even know, like, Forstall technically might still be, I don't know

00:55:01 ◼   ► how long that lasts.

00:55:02 ◼   ► Like, I never quite noticed when, you know, that's what they did to Tony Fidell.

00:55:05 ◼   ► Right.

00:55:06 ◼   ► How long was he actually there?

00:55:07 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:55:08 ◼   ► Right.

00:55:09 ◼   ► And they never really, it's like a gradient that just sort of feeds away.

00:55:12 ◼   ► They don't put out a press release saying, "Tony Fidell has stopped being a special

00:55:15 ◼   ► advisor to Steve Jobs now."

00:55:17 ◼   ► Right.

00:55:18 ◼   ► And then, you know, all of a sudden, two years later, Ness comes out and is like, "Oh, yeah,

00:55:22 ◼   ► whatever happened to Tony Fidell?

00:55:23 ◼   ► When did he stop being a special advisor?"

00:55:25 ◼   ► So, like, I'm pretty sure, though, that Scott Forstall is still technically a full-time

00:55:30 ◼   ► Apple employee who's a special advisor to Tim Cook, who, you know, never comes in and

00:55:35 ◼   ► never advises Tim Cook.

00:55:37 ◼   ► So maybe that's the equivalent.

00:55:39 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:55:40 ◼   ► We'll see.

00:55:41 ◼   ► Because, like, what have—you know, let's see if Andy Rubin is still at Google a year

00:55:44 ◼   ► from now.

00:55:45 ◼   ► I really—I have no clue.

00:55:46 ◼   ► My guess is that I think that he is going to do something else within Google, but that's

00:55:52 ◼   ► just a pure guess.

00:55:53 ◼   ► My other thought, which again is based on nothing,

00:55:56 ◼   ► is that I could see that this played out in a way

00:56:00 ◼   ► where Larry Page has taken over control of the company

00:56:04 ◼   ► for however long it's been now.

00:56:06 ◼   ► It's been two years, it's been a year and something.

00:56:10 ◼   ► So his thing was all about kind of streamlining

00:56:13 ◼   ► the processes, getting everyone on the same page,

00:56:16 ◼   ► and cutting off some of the bureaucracy.

00:56:20 ◼   ► And so a lot of indications about Andy Rubin

00:56:23 ◼   ► were that while people who were under him

00:56:26 ◼   ► loved working for him, and he was obviously a brilliant guy

00:56:30 ◼   ► and did a great job with Android,

00:56:31 ◼   ► he wasn't the easiest person to get along with,

00:56:33 ◼   ► and there were a lot of politics involved

00:56:35 ◼   ► within the Android system.

00:56:37 ◼   ► Just look how long it took to get Chrome on Android.

00:56:39 ◼   ► Why was there a different browser for all that time?

00:56:42 ◼   ► - No, and that was, you probably even know this better,

00:56:46 ◼   ► in fact, I know that you know it better than I do,

00:56:47 ◼   ► but even I know that that was a political thing

00:56:50 ◼   ► within the company.

00:56:51 ◼   ► There was, and it was like possibly between Andy and Sundar.

00:56:56 ◼   ► - Sundar, it could have been, I don't know.

00:56:57 ◼   ► - But it was definitely that they had,

00:56:59 ◼   ► the Chrome guys had a version of Chrome

00:57:02 ◼   ► that ran on Android better than the Android

00:57:05 ◼   ► just blandly named browser.

00:57:07 ◼   ► - Right.

00:57:08 ◼   ► - Way long before they put it into Android.

00:57:11 ◼   ► Like, it really did seem a little--

00:57:14 ◼   ► - And I think that Chrome Android team is still separate

00:57:19 ◼   ► from the Android team itself,

00:57:22 ◼   ► and that will obviously change under Sundar.

00:57:24 ◼   ► But so anyway, I think that,

00:57:26 ◼   ► I do think that I could see how that is,

00:57:30 ◼   ► is the situation that went down.

00:57:32 ◼   ► It was just, you know, everything's going great,

00:57:35 ◼   ► but things are still a little bit too political.

00:57:37 ◼   ► We really, we have this rocket ship,

00:57:39 ◼   ► we don't wanna slow it down at all.

00:57:42 ◼   ► You know, if you're open to it, you know, you can,

00:57:45 ◼   ► we'd love to have you do something else within Google,

00:57:49 ◼   ► and love to have you stick around,

00:57:50 ◼   ► but maybe we can just really see where we can take this now

00:57:54 ◼   ► with the foundation that you've built for it.

00:57:56 ◼   ► And another part is, I pulled this up

00:57:58 ◼   ► when you mentioned we were going to be talking

00:58:01 ◼   ► about the Andy Rubin thing.

00:58:03 ◼   ► So I would imagine that he's probably not been

00:58:08 ◼   ► the best person to work with from a negotiating standpoint

00:58:12 ◼   ► with the carriers, just look at the fact that,

00:58:14 ◼   ► remember it was in May 2011 at I/O,

00:58:17 ◼   ► and we're coming up on the next Google I/O now.

00:58:19 ◼   ► It was made 2011, so two years ago,

00:58:22 ◼   ► that Google announced their Android update initiative,

00:58:26 ◼   ► where they were gonna have all of the Android partners

00:58:29 ◼   ► were going to commit to getting the newest version

00:58:33 ◼   ► of Android on the Android devices within 18 months.

00:58:36 ◼   ► This was the promise, this was set on stage,

00:58:38 ◼   ► Andy Rubin announced this, and it was a big deal.

00:58:41 ◼   ► We haven't heard a word about it since.

00:58:43 ◼   ► And no one's really called them out for it,

00:58:46 ◼   ► which is sort of--

00:58:47 ◼   ► in order to worry about it and clearly has not come true.

00:58:49 ◼   ► And clearly has not come true, right.

00:58:51 ◼   ► And so that's another part of it maybe

00:58:55 ◼   ► that Google realizes that coming up,

00:58:58 ◼   ► now that they have Motorola under their wing,

00:59:01 ◼   ► if they're going to keep kind of operating

00:59:06 ◼   ► within with these carriers and with worldwide carriers,

00:59:09 ◼   ► they really need a force that's not so abrasive

00:59:13 ◼   ► towards working with these guys.

00:59:16 ◼   ► - That could be.

00:59:17 ◼   ► And if this is all true, it is perhaps oddly parallel

00:59:22 ◼   ► to the Forstall situation at Apple.

00:59:27 ◼   ► Internal politics, a sort of hard to get a great leader

00:59:32 ◼   ► and clearly successful over the last few years,

00:59:35 ◼   ► but hard to get along with.

00:59:37 ◼   ► - Yeah, and like just silos his team

00:59:42 ◼   ► into a fiefdom of sorts.

00:59:44 ◼   ► and replaced by somebody who is seemingly better

00:59:49 ◼   ► to get along with.

00:59:50 ◼   ► At least at Apple, Federighi is who I'm thinking

00:59:52 ◼   ► he's replaced him on a technical side.

00:59:54 ◼   ► Johnny Ive, I don't know, I've never heard anything

00:59:56 ◼   ► about what it's like to get along with him.

00:59:58 ◼   ► Although he doesn't really seem confrontational.

01:00:00 ◼   ► - Right.

01:00:01 ◼   ► - He clearly has very high standards,

01:00:02 ◼   ► but I've never heard anybody call him an asshole.

01:00:07 ◼   ► - Right.

01:00:08 ◼   ► Yeah, what's weird about the Ive thing taking over

01:00:11 ◼   ► is that he really doesn't like to be on stage, right?

01:00:14 ◼   ► So he never does that.

01:00:15 ◼   ► He does the video stuff, but he does not be on stage.

01:00:17 ◼   ► And Forstalt was always on stage, though.

01:00:19 ◼   ► It's interesting.

01:00:21 ◼   ► But yeah, so going back to Reuben,

01:00:23 ◼   ► again, that's all pure speculation.

01:00:25 ◼   ► But I wouldn't be shocked if it was something

01:00:28 ◼   ► along those lines.

01:00:29 ◼   ► Because it's just like you think about what the--

01:00:32 ◼   ► kind of logically what the most obvious answer is,

01:00:34 ◼   ► something like that.

01:00:35 ◼   ► There could have been some bombshell.

01:00:37 ◼   ► Maybe something happened.

01:00:38 ◼   ► Maybe some partner deal got badly screwed up

01:00:40 ◼   ► that we'll hear about or something like that.

01:00:42 ◼   ► Do you think the timing on that announcement

01:00:45 ◼   ► is a little weird with regard to it coming

01:00:48 ◼   ► on the eve of the Galaxy S4?

01:00:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, it is. - Is that sort of,

01:00:52 ◼   ► is that sort of the Google equivalent

01:00:54 ◼   ► of the Phil Schiller interviews of,

01:00:55 ◼   ► let's take some piss out of Samsung's thing?

01:00:58 ◼   ► - Huh, that's interesting.

01:00:59 ◼   ► I hadn't really thought about that.

01:01:01 ◼   ► Yeah, the timing is strange,

01:01:05 ◼   ► just because it seems like there's nothing,

01:01:08 ◼   ► there's no other reason to announce it then

01:01:10 ◼   ► and for that change to happen then, right?

01:01:12 ◼   ► other than this is the only Android-related thing

01:01:15 ◼   ► that's coming up, right?

01:01:17 ◼   ► - Right.

01:01:18 ◼   ► - It didn't work.

01:01:19 ◼   ► - Well, and it's possible, yeah.

01:01:21 ◼   ► You know, and it kind of got looped into,

01:01:24 ◼   ► and we can come back to this later if we have a little time,

01:01:26 ◼   ► but there were a whole bunch of Google,

01:01:27 ◼   ► we're making some changes this week, announcements,

01:01:31 ◼   ► you know, stuff with their calendar API,

01:01:33 ◼   ► big one that everybody listening to the show

01:01:35 ◼   ► probably wants to know about is that they've,

01:01:36 ◼   ► they're shit canning Google Reader come July.

01:01:40 ◼   ► But they mixed, the official Google blogs had this post

01:01:44 ◼   ► with like, here's the eight changes we're making.

01:01:46 ◼   ► And they just like threw some of these things in the middle.

01:01:48 ◼   ► It's like, oh, we're changing our calendar API.

01:01:51 ◼   ► Oh, and by the way, Andy Rubin is no longer leaving Android.

01:01:53 ◼   ► - Right, that would have been a great

01:01:54 ◼   ► bullet point number four or whatever.

01:01:56 ◼   ► - Right, our search results are 2% faster.

01:01:59 ◼   ► Oh, by the way, Google Reader is gonna be dead in July.

01:02:02 ◼   ► But I can't help but think that, I don't know.

01:02:06 ◼   ► And I do think it comes down to like that observation

01:02:09 ◼   ► that Samsung's making more from Android.

01:02:14 ◼   ► And there was the Wall Street Journal story

01:02:15 ◼   ► that this is a major concern that maybe Samsung

01:02:18 ◼   ► is usurping Android from Google.

01:02:21 ◼   ► - Right.

01:02:22 ◼   ► - That that might be a problem.

01:02:23 ◼   ► That as popular as Android is,

01:02:27 ◼   ► it may not be as it's evolving as aligned

01:02:30 ◼   ► with Google's interests as Chrome and Chrome OS are.

01:02:34 ◼   ► - Right.

01:02:36 ◼   ► maybe Andrew Rubin is going to become the fourth CEO of Samsung.

01:02:45 ◼   ► So what about the Galaxy S4 event? Did you watch it?

01:02:48 ◼   ► No, I didn't watch it. I was following along with the tweet stream. I didn't watch the

01:02:53 ◼   ► live stream of it, though. So I didn't actually get to experience firsthand what a fiasco

01:02:58 ◼   ► was, but I read a lot of the coverage of it, and sort of talking about how it was sort

01:03:02 ◼   ► of sexist in a way misogynist and not just yeah in a lot of ways but well the one thing good thing

01:03:10 ◼   ► i can say about it is that it was an hour long yeah so short yeah it it's really bizarre i mean

01:03:20 ◼   ► it i saw a couple people on twitter say the same thing that it's you know that it the the that

01:03:25 ◼   ► bizarre Qualcomm CES keynote. Had a short life as the weirdest tech keynote.

01:03:36 ◼   ► Did they have jugglers or something?

01:03:38 ◼   ► I didn't see, what, CES or the Samsung one?

01:03:42 ◼   ► The Samsung one.

01:03:43 ◼   ► No, they didn't see jugglers. They might have. My eyes started getting blinky. But

01:03:47 ◼   ► they had this. It was in Radio City Music Hall, and they had a big orchestra and a lot of

01:03:53 ◼   ► Broadway-style theatrics.

01:03:57 ◼   ► But then it opened with a lot of specs.

01:04:02 ◼   ► It opened with the president of the company coming out--

01:04:05 ◼   ► I forget his name-- but he came out and just sort of introduced

01:04:10 ◼   ► all the features they were going to talk about, but said nothing about them.

01:04:13 ◼   ► He just sort of read the H1 level outline of the new features

01:04:18 ◼   ► they were going to introduce and said that--

01:04:21 ◼   ► leading innovation and thank you very much and got off the stage.

01:04:24 ◼   ► And you know, and I think, I don't know, I think he wanted to come out, but English is

01:04:29 ◼   ► clearly a second language, so he wasn't going to be able to emcee the show.

01:04:34 ◼   ► The emcee was some actor, I don't know what his name is, something Chase, but he is, you

01:04:38 ◼   ► know, he's not famous, he's just like a stage actor.

01:04:41 ◼   ► Okay.

01:04:42 ◼   ► Fifteen minutes of specs, him, this actor talking to Samsung America's equivalent of

01:04:48 ◼   ► Phil Schiller, I guess, VP of marketing.

01:04:51 ◼   ► and talking about specs.

01:04:53 ◼   ► And then, like that's about 15 minutes.

01:05:00 ◼   ► So far, so good.

01:05:01 ◼   ► Not really weird, it is sort of the opposite

01:05:03 ◼   ► of the way Apple does shows,

01:05:04 ◼   ► where Apple does shows and talks about features,

01:05:07 ◼   ► and then at the end will tell you the specs

01:05:11 ◼   ► that they want to reveal.

01:05:12 ◼   ► Like the specs is sort of the one sheet

01:05:14 ◼   ► that they give you at the end of the show.

01:05:16 ◼   ► Like, you know, and here's the price,

01:05:17 ◼   ► and here's the, you know,

01:05:19 ◼   ► here's the carriers that we're gonna be on,

01:05:21 ◼   ► here's the bands of you know such and such that we're going to support blah blah blah get off

01:05:25 ◼   ► they did the specs first then 15 minutes in they just they said they're going to switch

01:05:30 ◼   ► they're going to tell us about the phone with a series of skits and they and and it was just

01:05:39 ◼   ► they kept getting weirder and weirder where the first one is is i think it was the first one but

01:05:45 ◼   ► but it's like here's an elementary school in New York

01:05:48 ◼   ► and they're having the school play

01:05:50 ◼   ► and here's a girl and there's a little girl

01:05:53 ◼   ► on stage dancing and her dad doesn't have a Galaxy S4

01:05:57 ◼   ► so the pictures he's taking won't be 13 megabytes.

01:06:01 ◼   ► And all of a sudden the girl breaks out of character

01:06:04 ◼   ► and comes out and addresses the MC and says, "What?"

01:06:08 ◼   ► And then she turns to her dad and berates him

01:06:11 ◼   ► for not having a 13 megapixel S4

01:06:14 ◼   ► and why is she practiced?

01:06:17 ◼   ► And it's like--

01:06:18 ◼   ► - Oh, God, that sounds awful.

01:06:20 ◼   ► - Right, it's an awful child.

01:06:22 ◼   ► What kind of a child would do this?

01:06:24 ◼   ► It's an awful, awful bratty spoiled child,

01:06:29 ◼   ► and the dad is apologizing,

01:06:31 ◼   ► and he instantly apologizes to his daughter and says,

01:06:34 ◼   ► "Don't worry, I'm gonna get an S4 tomorrow,

01:06:37 ◼   ► "and our next show I'll have these great S4 pictures."

01:06:42 ◼   ► - So it's like--

01:06:43 ◼   ► I gotta watch this now.

01:06:44 ◼   ► So is this like, is this a cultural thing?

01:06:46 ◼   ► Is this something that's poorly translated

01:06:47 ◼   ► from like South Korean into American culture?

01:06:50 ◼   ► - Somebody Twittered me and said,

01:06:52 ◼   ► and is somebody on Twitter who I think is Korean

01:06:56 ◼   ► or South Korean and said that it clearly to him

01:06:59 ◼   ► seems like it was written by South Koreans

01:07:02 ◼   ► and just translated to English.

01:07:04 ◼   ► Although I don't know, is that right?

01:07:05 ◼   ► That in Korea, your father expects his 13 year old girl

01:07:09 ◼   ► to berate him publicly?

01:07:10 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:07:11 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:07:13 ◼   ► I don't know how long I'm going, but next was this boy, and it's the same boy who was

01:07:20 ◼   ► in their little commercials, and he was tap dancing earlier in the show, or I guess he

01:07:25 ◼   ► was tap dancing on the thing.

01:07:27 ◼   ► The gimmick with his parents was that they're using this new picture-in-picture photo thing,

01:07:32 ◼   ► which seems terrible to me.

01:07:34 ◼   ► But the idea is that the major new feature – one of the major new features they're

01:07:37 ◼   ► to advertise is that when you the dad are taking pictures instead of just your wife and kids in the

01:07:46 ◼   ► picture you can get in the corner just like when you do a Skype chat or a video chat there's in the

01:07:52 ◼   ► corner from the front facing camera your face shows up too. And you can take a picture that

01:07:58 ◼   ► way so that you can be in the picture but if you really consider that being in the picture I mean

01:08:04 ◼   ► I heard it was more along the lines of like, you're watching a sports moment and then you

01:08:09 ◼   ► take a picture of your reaction shot along with whatever just happened.

01:08:11 ◼   ► I guess that makes more sense than what they were showing.

01:08:14 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:08:14 ◼   ► There was the school, I forget, I really started getting just boggled my mind.

01:08:22 ◼   ► A weird one was the act, then they said, "We've shown," they'd showed something else,

01:08:27 ◼   ► and then the actor said, the guy who was the MC said, "All right, we've shown you

01:08:31 ◼   ► what the Galaxy S4 means to normal people. And he says, "Let's see what it's like for someone who's

01:08:38 ◼   ► really special, a New York City actor." And he took a role. But it's like, what kind of attitude is

01:08:45 ◼   ► that? Like, you've just slagged your customers and said, "You know, moms and dads, you know,

01:08:50 ◼   ► you guys are boring. Let's see how it affects me, an awesome actor." And we're supposed to all of a

01:08:56 ◼   ► sudden the set is supposed to be his New York City apartment and out of the ground in the stage rises

01:09:04 ◼   ► a red convertible sports car. But I swear to you it's on its side. It is sideways. And the actor,

01:09:14 ◼   ► and everybody looked at it and he pointed to it and he goes, "Hey, hey, you know, parking's tight

01:09:19 ◼   ► in New York City." And that was the only explanation for why the car was on its side.

01:09:23 ◼   ► I can only assume that it was because whatever elevator they had on the stage wasn't wide enough for the car to come up

01:09:29 ◼   ► Right way so rather than not have the car they had the car come up sideways

01:09:34 ◼   ► Why did they just cut the car in half?

01:09:36 ◼   ► And then he had like this incredibly ignorant conversation with his agent

01:09:44 ◼   ► I have to watch this thing now the guy also honest to God

01:09:51 ◼   ► This is like when he was like talking about like the family using the s4 to do something

01:09:55 ◼   ► The MC would literally say let's go back to our fake family and see how they use

01:10:01 ◼   ► The new video thing in the phone or whatever, but he'd just say let's go back to our fake family. I

01:10:07 ◼   ► Almost wish I went to this now. I would have loved a live tweet during I

01:10:11 ◼   ► Kind of do wish I was I literally was there

01:10:15 ◼   ► I think it would have been something to see but then the one that really got me the one that like really made me almost

01:10:19 ◼   ► break out just watching it at home into a flop sweat was this bridal party in

01:10:26 ◼   ► Miami and the the skit was about five or six women who have been longtime friends

01:10:32 ◼   ► one of them is getting married this weekend and they're having her bridal

01:10:35 ◼   ► shower and and they're talking about all the things they love about the galaxy s4

01:10:43 ◼   ► and the different cases that they have.

01:10:46 ◼   ► And it was so sexist, it was ridiculous.

01:10:52 ◼   ► And these women are interested in things like calories

01:10:56 ◼   ► and losing weight and marrying doctors.

01:11:01 ◼   ► Right, when they found out about the health features,

01:11:05 ◼   ► these health tracking features in the phone,

01:11:06 ◼   ► the one woman says, "My mother always wanted me

01:11:09 ◼   ► "to marry a doctor.

01:11:10 ◼   ► "Well, this is the next best thing."

01:11:12 ◼   ► And then the actor breaks into an immediate disclaimer that they just cut to the actor

01:11:17 ◼   ► who's the emcee and he goes, "The Galaxy S4 is no replacement for a medical doctor."

01:11:21 ◼   ► I swear to you.

01:11:24 ◼   ► And then they go back to them.

01:11:26 ◼   ► And then there's one of the women, and I know that Molly Wood from CNET really just

01:11:30 ◼   ► ripped it apart, and I linked to it today, and she just ripped this thing apart perfectly.

01:11:33 ◼   ► But she described the one of these women as the comically drunk cougar.

01:11:42 ◼   ► And there's literally no exaggeration.

01:11:45 ◼   ► And it is not like, oh, she exaggerated

01:11:48 ◼   ► for the point of criticizing.

01:11:49 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:11:50 ◼   ► It was a woman, older, I'd say in her mid-40s

01:11:54 ◼   ► or something like that, with a drink in her hand

01:11:57 ◼   ► and her Galaxy S4 in the other,

01:11:59 ◼   ► and they were talking about this new feature

01:12:00 ◼   ► they have, this no-touch tracking,

01:12:02 ◼   ► where you can kind of just point your finger at the screen.

01:12:04 ◼   ► Let's see how it works.

01:12:05 ◼   ► I mean, we have no idea.

01:12:06 ◼   ► But anyway, but they were talking about

01:12:07 ◼   ► why you would wanna use it, and her reason was

01:12:09 ◼   ► she didn't wanna put her drink down.

01:12:11 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:12:13 ◼   ► And then they used her for this eye tracking feature.

01:12:17 ◼   ► Now this features is supposed to be that

01:12:19 ◼   ► like when you're reading an article,

01:12:20 ◼   ► if you look down, the screen is gonna start

01:12:23 ◼   ► scrolling automatically.

01:12:25 ◼   ► And if you're watching a movie or a video

01:12:27 ◼   ► and you look away from the screen,

01:12:29 ◼   ► it will pause instantly.

01:12:31 ◼   ► And then when you look back, it will go.

01:12:33 ◼   ► And I swear to you, I'm not making this up.

01:12:36 ◼   ► He called her over, her character's name was Dee Dee.

01:12:38 ◼   ► He goes, Dee Dee, come on over here.

01:12:40 ◼   ► and she's still got a drink in her hand, so she's watching the movie.

01:12:45 ◼   ► And a greenskeeper comes out, a young, looked latina.

01:12:51 ◼   ► They said that these women were all in Miami.

01:12:53 ◼   ► Young Latino stud comes out with a leaf blower, and that's what catches her eye and takes

01:13:01 ◼   ► her away from the movie.

01:13:02 ◼   ► She's watching this younger, very attractive man, and she's sort of stunned.

01:13:09 ◼   ► then he the MC has to remind her that she has to look back at the screen to

01:13:13 ◼   ► pretend that the video starts playing again and she says oh yeah and then she

01:13:17 ◼   ► does it and then the guy takes his shirt off and she immediately looks over at

01:13:21 ◼   ► him again like in awe oh my god well I mean you really have to see it to

01:13:28 ◼   ► believe and I guess you know maybe the explanation I've heard is that that sort

01:13:32 ◼   ► of thing is considered like that's what a typical TV show is like in South Korea

01:13:37 ◼   ► But I don't know anything about that.

01:13:40 ◼   ► So just compare and contrast that to, you know, like, I think we both really like the

01:13:47 ◼   ► one unveiling that Apple did where it was of the iPad, and it's just Steve Jobs on stage

01:13:52 ◼   ► with a chair.

01:13:53 ◼   ► It's like, could it be any more different than what you're describing right there?

01:13:58 ◼   ► Right.

01:13:59 ◼   ► And they did introduce, the other thing is that they introduced a bunch of features.

01:14:03 ◼   ► And I'm not going to judge them because I haven't used them.

01:14:07 ◼   ► And they didn't even really show them.

01:14:08 ◼   ► They just talked about them.

01:14:10 ◼   ► So with this eye tracking feature, they didn't actually show it working.

01:14:16 ◼   ► I doubt that the woman's phone really was even on.

01:14:18 ◼   ► I think she was just pantomiming it.

01:14:20 ◼   ► There was no video that you could see on a screen showing it in actual use or anything

01:14:25 ◼   ► like that.

01:14:26 ◼   ► You just had to pretend that these things were working.

01:14:28 ◼   ► And they just had characters pointing fingers at it.

01:14:31 ◼   ► But they gave each one of them like 30 seconds.

01:14:34 ◼   ► They introduced like eight features

01:14:36 ◼   ► and gave none of the features any breathing room

01:14:39 ◼   ► to actually understand how it would actually work.

01:14:42 ◼   ► - That sounds amazing.

01:14:45 ◼   ► Talk about the finger tracking thing.

01:14:50 ◼   ► Like you said a woman didn't want to put down her drink.

01:14:53 ◼   ► Why is that a good feature for a phone?

01:14:55 ◼   ► When will that be useful?

01:14:57 ◼   ► - I don't know.

01:14:59 ◼   ► It sounds to me terrible.

01:15:01 ◼   ► Again, I'm not going to prejudge it and say that it is terrible,

01:15:04 ◼   ► but it sounds terrible to me.

01:15:06 ◼   ► I guess one of the explanations that it makes the phone easier

01:15:08 ◼   ► to use with gloves, that you could point a gloved finger at it

01:15:13 ◼   ► and scroll the screen.

01:15:14 ◼   ► But even in the brief demo they showed that,

01:15:18 ◼   ► it seemed to work about as well as you think it would.

01:15:21 ◼   ► Like, it was nowhere near tracking the finger

01:15:23 ◼   ► the way a finger on the actual glass tracks the scrolling.

01:15:29 ◼   ► And so I love the dichotomy here of a lot of people

01:15:34 ◼   ► in the media giving Apple a hard time

01:15:36 ◼   ► because they haven't come out with new

01:15:37 ◼   ► and innovative features.

01:15:39 ◼   ► You know, what are deemed like giant tent pole features

01:15:42 ◼   ► is the thing.

01:15:43 ◼   ► And look at what the S4 has.

01:15:45 ◼   ► It's finger tracking.

01:15:47 ◼   ► Like what is that?

01:15:48 ◼   ► Who spends time working on that?

01:15:51 ◼   ► And why on earth does anyone think that that's going

01:15:53 ◼   ► to be a really selling point of that device?

01:15:57 ◼   ► Well, and the one that struck me was one of the examples they gave.

01:16:00 ◼   ► I guess cold weather with gloves is one where you can't touch.

01:16:03 ◼   ► And the one where the woman had a drink in her hand, why not just use your thumb on your

01:16:09 ◼   ► other hand, except for the fact that because the phone is five inches big, it's not good

01:16:14 ◼   ► for one-handed use, right?

01:16:15 ◼   ► Like I mean, again, I'm biased.

01:16:17 ◼   ► I really like the smaller size of the iPhone.

01:16:20 ◼   ► I've tried five-inch phones.

01:16:21 ◼   ► Really don't like them very much specifically because I do – I use my iPhone one-handed

01:16:25 ◼   ► a lot.

01:16:26 ◼   ► But that seemed like if you have a drink in one hand and still want to use your phone

01:16:30 ◼   ► in the other, it seems like, you know, just use your thumb.

01:16:34 ◼   ► I joked on Twitter that it's great if you're murdering someone and you have blood all over

01:16:38 ◼   ► your hands and then you can just – and that – you can still use your phone afterwards.

01:16:42 ◼   ► So that's good.

01:16:43 ◼   ► And you don't have to clean it up afterwards.

01:16:49 ◼   ► Let me do our last sponsor real quick and then we'll talk about Google Reader.

01:16:51 ◼   ► Sure.

01:16:52 ◼   ► And our last sponsor is Studio Neat.

01:16:54 ◼   ► These are the guys behind the Glyph, a bunch of other great products.

01:16:58 ◼   ► Well, their newest product is an iPhone app called Simple Bracket.

01:17:02 ◼   ► I'll bet you've heard of this, MG.

01:17:04 ◼   ► It's an iPhone app for filling in your March Madness NCAA college basketball brackets and

01:17:10 ◼   ► competing with friends and family.

01:17:14 ◼   ► Super easy to log in.

01:17:15 ◼   ► How do you identify yourself to your friends and family?

01:17:17 ◼   ► It's easy.

01:17:18 ◼   ► You log in with your Twitter ID and it's built right into the iOS.

01:17:21 ◼   ► You don't even have to enter your password.

01:17:23 ◼   ► you just authorize it to use one of your Twitter accounts that you've already got set up in

01:17:26 ◼   ► iOS. It has a beautiful UI. I mean, you know, everybody knows I'm a huge fan of Futura.

01:17:30 ◼   ► These guys know how to use Futura. And I think they've done some really innovative thinking

01:17:37 ◼   ► with the way that the actual brackets, anybody out there who knows what I'm talking about,

01:17:41 ◼   ► filling in the NCAA brackets, knows what I'm talking about. There's like a standard look

01:17:45 ◼   ► to them. Those of you out there who have no idea what an NCAA, what the NCAA tournament

01:17:49 ◼   ► is this app is probably not going to be of interest to you.

01:17:52 ◼   ► But if you know what the tournament is, you've got to check it out.

01:17:54 ◼   ► And I think they've done something really clever with the way the bracket is laid out

01:17:58 ◼   ► where the traditional layout would, you think, "Ah, I don't see how that would fit on an

01:18:02 ◼   ► iPhone screen."

01:18:03 ◼   ► Well, they thought the same thing and they've come out with a really neat layout.

01:18:06 ◼   ► I think it works perfect for something as complicated as a 64-team elimination bracket.

01:18:13 ◼   ► Really, really clever user interface and layout.

01:18:18 ◼   ► They've got their own scoring system and it's – how do you judge who wins one of these

01:18:23 ◼   ► bracket tournaments?

01:18:24 ◼   ► Well, they went to a mathematician and got a new formula for computing the winner and

01:18:28 ◼   ► it gives proper weight to upset picks based on the probability of outcome.

01:18:33 ◼   ► So in other words, if you pick a bunch of upsets, you get more credit than someone who

01:18:38 ◼   ► maybe had the same number of wins in the first round but their wins were all from favorites,

01:18:43 ◼   ► which to me does seem fair.

01:18:46 ◼   ► It's available now. Just go to the App Store, search for Simple Bracket. It's one

01:18:52 ◼   ► buck, which is unbelievable to me because I think it's a great app and everybody

01:18:56 ◼   ► who's going to use it, you know what you're going to do. You're going to bet

01:18:58 ◼   ► in pools way more than a buck. Well, you can use this to manage your pool and, you

01:19:03 ◼   ► know, gambling is not legal in your state. I did not tell you to do it. No, but you can use it. You can

01:19:09 ◼   ► set up your own pools with your friends and invite people. It all gets managed

01:19:12 ◼   ► through this app. If you're going to set up a pool and everybody in pool has an iPhone,

01:19:17 ◼   ► I mean, I can't imagine a better way to do it. It's a lot of fun. You could even do it

01:19:21 ◼   ► for fun without the gambling. Grab the app now, though, because the teams are going to

01:19:26 ◼   ► be announced on Sunday and you're going to want to have it by then to start making your

01:19:31 ◼   ► picks. So go to the app store, search for Simple Bracket if you have any interest in

01:19:35 ◼   ► the NCAA tournament. And my thanks to Studio Neat.

01:19:38 ◼   ► neat.

01:19:39 ◼   ► You like the NCAA tournament?

01:19:42 ◼   ► Yes, though. I know Michigan, where I went to school, they just lost today in the Big

01:19:47 ◼   ► Ten tournament, so I'm not thrilled about that, but they'll still be a relatively

01:19:50 ◼   ► high seed in the NCAA tournament, so I'm excited for it.

01:19:54 ◼   ► You do the same thing I do. My favorite team—the school I went to, Drexel, they're seldom

01:19:59 ◼   ► in the tournament, although when they are, it's very exciting. But my favorite big

01:20:02 ◼   ► name team has always been North Carolina. And so I always, whenever I fill out my bracket,

01:20:07 ◼   ► The first thing I do is just fill in North Carolina right through to the end.

01:20:10 ◼   ► It doesn't matter whether they're having a good season or a bad season.

01:20:13 ◼   ► I always fill them into the end, and I've never once not done it.

01:20:16 ◼   ► And here's the reason why for me is because I'm less interested in winning the thing

01:20:21 ◼   ► than I am in the agony I would cause myself if I didn't pick them and they actually

01:20:27 ◼   ► won.

01:20:28 ◼   ► I would think, "How can I doubt my own favorite team?"

01:20:30 ◼   ► So I always just start by just filling them in right to the end.

01:20:33 ◼   ► And then I go back and start filling in all the other ones.

01:20:36 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:20:37 ◼   ► Do you do the same thing with Michigan?

01:20:38 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:20:39 ◼   ► Unfortunately, Michigan has been awful for about a decade because they were on probation

01:20:42 ◼   ► for the whole Chris Webber, Fab Five type stuff, including when I was at school.

01:20:48 ◼   ► So they're finally good again.

01:20:49 ◼   ► So I'm excited for the tournament this year now that they're good again.

01:20:52 ◼   ► Now that they are in the tournament, they were there last year, but now that I can actually

01:20:55 ◼   ► fill them in for the bracket.

01:20:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:20:57 ◼   ► You know, I never thought about it.

01:20:58 ◼   ► I'm not trying to rub it in.

01:20:59 ◼   ► But it just occurred to me that probably the biggest moment in Michigan basketball history

01:21:05 ◼   ► It was against North Carolina.

01:21:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, the false timeout.

01:21:09 ◼   ► - Right.

01:21:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, that was great.

01:21:11 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:21:13 ◼   ► Chris Weber has done a lot of good from Michigan.

01:21:16 ◼   ► - You know what though?

01:21:17 ◼   ► Even as a North Carolina fan,

01:21:20 ◼   ► it was sort of an ignominious way to win.

01:21:22 ◼   ► It was like you're waiting for this firecracker

01:21:25 ◼   ► to go off of an exciting down

01:21:27 ◼   ► to the last second basketball game,

01:21:30 ◼   ► and the way that it finished was,

01:21:32 ◼   ► oh, one of the guys on the other team

01:21:34 ◼   ► poured water on the firecracker.

01:21:35 ◼   ► - Right, right.

01:21:36 ◼   ► - Right?

01:21:37 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:21:38 ◼   ► - It's like, you win, 'cause that's not allowed.

01:21:39 ◼   ► You're not allowed to put water on the firecracker.

01:21:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah.

01:21:44 ◼   ► - What happened, for anybody who doesn't know,

01:21:46 ◼   ► and again, I don't mean to rub salt in the wood,

01:21:48 ◼   ► but it was a close game.

01:21:49 ◼   ► I think North Carolina was up by one.

01:21:52 ◼   ► Could be getting that wrong,

01:21:53 ◼   ► but Michigan could've won, and they had the ball,

01:21:56 ◼   ► but they had no timeouts left,

01:21:58 ◼   ► and one of their star players,

01:21:59 ◼   ► probably the star player, tried to call a timeout,

01:22:02 ◼   ► And in basketball, if you don't have timeouts and try to call a timeout, it's a technical

01:22:06 ◼   ► foul.

01:22:07 ◼   ► The other team gets to shoot some free throws and they get the ball back and that sort of

01:22:11 ◼   ► ended the game right there.

01:22:14 ◼   ► That was the most anticlimactic ending possible ever.

01:22:18 ◼   ► Alright, Google Reader.

01:22:21 ◼   ► So I think you and I are going to maybe disagree on this.

01:22:24 ◼   ► Well, I think that you will think that we will because I was being sort of funny on

01:22:28 ◼   ► on Twitter yesterday about it, but I actually am fairly annoyed by this.

01:22:34 ◼   ► Just because I see my traffic logs and stuff and I see where a lot of the people are reading

01:22:40 ◼   ► from, it's a ton of people still reading from Google Reader.

01:22:44 ◼   ► So I don't know where they...

01:22:46 ◼   ► I mean, obviously, a lot of people now are saying that they're going to step up and fill

01:22:49 ◼   ► the void, but it's still...

01:22:51 ◼   ► It's an underlying layer that a lot of these other services were using.

01:22:55 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:22:56 ◼   ► what there's two there's two aspects to google reader there's the google reader

01:22:59 ◼   ► the traditional google reader interface where you go to the web and you go to

01:23:02 ◼   ► reader google.com or whatever the url was and and read google reader there and

01:23:07 ◼   ► tons of people definitely do that because i see that from my referral logs

01:23:11 ◼   ► of people coming from google reader urls all the time um i know what a lot of

01:23:16 ◼   ► daring fireball readers do is and i think that they you know i don't know i

01:23:19 ◼   ► don't know what it's going to mean for daring fireball because i think what

01:23:22 ◼   ► happens is most of my stuff my link list stuff they read and they know how it

01:23:25 ◼   ► how it works and they click the headline

01:23:27 ◼   ► and I never see them.

01:23:28 ◼   ► They just go to where I'm pointing, which is fine with me.

01:23:31 ◼   ► It's your attention that I want more than,

01:23:33 ◼   ► I don't want the page views 'cause I don't sell ads

01:23:35 ◼   ► by page views.

01:23:36 ◼   ► And I'm just glad to have you reading my feed

01:23:39 ◼   ► and that's why I sell sponsorships that go into the feed.

01:23:42 ◼   ► They pay for it, so it's great.

01:23:44 ◼   ► But what a lot of people do is when I write a full article,

01:23:47 ◼   ► like the one I wrote last night,

01:23:48 ◼   ► then instead of reading it in Reader,

01:23:50 ◼   ► then they come to my site because they wanna read it

01:23:52 ◼   ► on Daring Fireball.

01:23:53 ◼   ► And when I write a full article, I get almost always

01:23:57 ◼   ► the number one referral is Google Reader.

01:24:00 ◼   ► And if not, it's some Tico URL from Twitter.

01:24:03 ◼   ► - Right.

01:24:04 ◼   ► And yeah, those are going to go away.

01:24:08 ◼   ► I mean, so I have not used,

01:24:11 ◼   ► I used to be a Google Reader junkie.

01:24:13 ◼   ► Like maybe, I think there was a service I used the most.

01:24:17 ◼   ► I was like, I was so adamant about making sure

01:24:21 ◼   ► that I read every single thing,

01:24:23 ◼   ► whether, not necessarily reading, but at least seeing

01:24:25 ◼   ► and skimming every single thing that was in there.

01:24:27 ◼   ► I had like over 100 feeds that I was doing that for,

01:24:31 ◼   ► and I was just very diligent about throughout a day.

01:24:34 ◼   ► That was like my go-to thing, especially in my prime time

01:24:39 ◼   ► of doing tech blogging.

01:24:40 ◼   ► That's like how I would stay on top of every little thing.

01:24:43 ◼   ► And now, my life is different now, of course,

01:24:46 ◼   ► but it just seems like I never use Google Reader anymore.

01:24:51 ◼   ► I would use occasionally Reader, the iOS app,

01:24:54 ◼   ► which is on both iPhone and iPad and is great,

01:24:59 ◼   ► but uses Google Reader as kind of the underlayer for it.

01:25:03 ◼   ► - Right, that's the second use of Google Reader,

01:25:05 ◼   ► is as an API and a syncing API for client apps.

01:25:10 ◼   ► - Yep, right. - And that to me,

01:25:12 ◼   ► and Brent Simmons pointed out yesterday,

01:25:14 ◼   ► is at least in like referral logs is dark matter.

01:25:17 ◼   ► - Right. - Because it doesn't show up.

01:25:19 ◼   ► - Right. - Right?

01:25:20 ◼   ► Don't underestimate how many people are using apps

01:25:24 ◼   ► for feed reading, and a lot of those apps

01:25:26 ◼   ► use Google Reader as their way of syncing.

01:25:28 ◼   ► - And so people say, a few of these guys,

01:25:30 ◼   ► so Dig has come out, Feedly, Flipboard,

01:25:34 ◼   ► like a number of them have come out

01:25:35 ◼   ► and said that they're going to recreate, right,

01:25:37 ◼   ► Google Reader, but a few of them have said

01:25:39 ◼   ► that they're gonna try and recreate the API as well.

01:25:41 ◼   ► It's not clear to me how they're doing that.

01:25:44 ◼   ► Are they just going to scrape the,

01:25:49 ◼   ► kind of your, what is it, OPML?

01:25:50 ◼   ► Isn't that what the--

01:25:52 ◼   ► - I don't know, I don't know enough about

01:25:55 ◼   ► how the Google Reader API worked.

01:25:56 ◼   ► It must be more than just OPML though,

01:25:58 ◼   ► because there has to be a way for clients to send like,

01:26:00 ◼   ► hey, this one's been read.

01:26:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, right, you're right.

01:26:03 ◼   ► - And pull more, it's, but I've also heard though,

01:26:08 ◼   ► you know, and Brent Simmons is actually,

01:26:11 ◼   ► yeah, but not even heard, it's not even like a secret,

01:26:13 ◼   ► but it's not a great API.

01:26:15 ◼   ► Well, the reason everybody adopted it is that it worked.

01:26:18 ◼   ► know, and it's a kind of a crummy API, but it worked. And it was never really published

01:26:22 ◼   ► as an official API. The API use is all sort of, and it was never really official. Like,

01:26:28 ◼   ► Google never really blocked it and never said, "Don't use it," but they never said, "Hey,

01:26:32 ◼   ► here's an API you can use for syncing." People sort of backwards engineered it.

01:26:37 ◼   ► And for example, some of the best documentation for it, Brent Simmons of NetNewswire fame,

01:26:43 ◼   ► but he doesn't do NetNewswire anymore. That's at BlackPixel. But while he was doing NetNewswire,

01:26:48 ◼   ► NewsWire. At NewsGator, he and the guy behind FeedDemon, I'm blanking on his name right

01:26:57 ◼   ► now, but sorry about that. But the FeedDemon app, which is like NetNewsWire for Windows,

01:27:03 ◼   ► he sort of backwards engineered a lot of their API and documented it for their own use at

01:27:10 ◼   ► NewsGator for their apps. But Google never really published docs for it. So all these

01:27:15 ◼   ► These people who say they're going to duplicate it are duplicating an API that was never really

01:27:19 ◼   ► fully published.

01:27:20 ◼   ► That's interesting. The response to it was amazing. Just looking at my Twitter feed,

01:27:31 ◼   ► everyone was so pissed off. I do wonder. I got into it a little bit with someone yesterday,

01:27:38 ◼   ► wondering if this is the first time under the Larry Page era that Google goes back on

01:27:43 ◼   ► It almost seems like there's a chance they could do that right because the backlash has just been so great

01:27:49 ◼   ► Like Google has to see this and look like maybe we did have something there. Maybe we just didn't put enough resources

01:27:54 ◼   ► Maybe we made a mistake and like I don't think anyone would

01:27:57 ◼   ► Think poorly on them if they said they came out and said exactly that like well Marco Arman made the argument that it would be

01:28:04 ◼   ► The worst thing they could do that

01:28:05 ◼   ► Maybe the best thing they could have done was just stick with it and improve it

01:28:08 ◼   ► But now once they've announced that it's dead and all these other people start building

01:28:12 ◼   ► Competitors and trying to break out of the ecosystem the worst thing they could do or I think he called it a dick move

01:28:16 ◼   ► Would be to then say nope never mind

01:28:19 ◼   ► We're gonna we're gonna keep it going and then have all that wasted effort in the mean time

01:28:23 ◼   ► I guess unless they say reversely yeah, if they reverse course quickly enough though. I'm not quite sure that that applies

01:28:29 ◼   ► Yeah, I thought his other point Marcus other point was better where it's sort of I think this was his point at least that

01:28:36 ◼   ► Google Reader, while all these people are up in arms

01:28:40 ◼   ► about it, and rightfully so in some ways,

01:28:42 ◼   ► it's also, it really did sort of stifle innovation

01:28:45 ◼   ► in the RSS space, because it just became

01:28:48 ◼   ► such a dominant player, and sort of,

01:28:50 ◼   ► that maybe not killed off some of the other guys,

01:28:52 ◼   ► but they all had to either be compatible with it,

01:28:55 ◼   ► and so it really didn't help that space at all,

01:29:00 ◼   ► and so now maybe there will be innovation there again.

01:29:03 ◼   ► - At a certain point, free and good enough,

01:29:06 ◼   ► and with Google behind it,

01:29:09 ◼   ► it's almost impossible to overcome.

01:29:13 ◼   ► - Right.

01:29:14 ◼   ► - I don't know if that's quite true,

01:29:15 ◼   ► but in the case of the RSS market as it stood around 2005,

01:29:19 ◼   ► it was impossible for anybody to really overcome it.

01:29:22 ◼   ► And everybody who sort of survived,

01:29:25 ◼   ► like apps like Reader and Net News Wire,

01:29:27 ◼   ► survived by getting on board with it

01:29:31 ◼   ► as their syncing engine.

01:29:32 ◼   ► Right.

01:29:34 ◼   ► How do you view, though, RSS overall?

01:29:36 ◼   ► I mean, this is sort of the point where we may disagree.

01:29:39 ◼   ► It's like, obviously, both of our readers

01:29:43 ◼   ► are fairly still addicted to it and use it.

01:29:46 ◼   ► And you and I both, in the past, if not now,

01:29:49 ◼   ► were addicted to using it.

01:29:50 ◼   ► But it's never really been a mainstream thing.

01:29:54 ◼   ► I think everyone would agree on that.

01:29:57 ◼   ► I think that you could make the argument that it's

01:29:58 ◼   ► a mainstream thing in that people use things

01:30:01 ◼   ► like Flipboard and stuff maybe,

01:30:02 ◼   ► but they don't realize they're using RSS.

01:30:04 ◼   ► But no one, like my parents, have no idea what RSS is.

01:30:07 ◼   ► And now, Twitter and Facebook and the social services

01:30:12 ◼   ► have sort of replaced the need for it,

01:30:14 ◼   ► but to some extent, some of them still use it.

01:30:16 ◼   ► Like, I don't know, how do you syndicate out

01:30:18 ◼   ► the Daring Fireball Twitter account?

01:30:20 ◼   ► Do you just sync from a RSS feed?

01:30:22 ◼   ► Is that how you do it?

01:30:23 ◼   ► - Yeah, I wrote a little thing

01:30:24 ◼   ► that just reads my RSS feed and auto-tune.

01:30:26 ◼   ► I know there's other services that do it,

01:30:28 ◼   ► but I wanted to do it my own way

01:30:30 ◼   ► so I could truncate.

01:30:31 ◼   ► If I happened to write a title that plus the URL was greater

01:30:35 ◼   ► than 140 characters, I wanted to truncate it.

01:30:38 ◼   ► Got it.

01:30:38 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:30:39 ◼   ► So I did the same thing.

01:30:40 ◼   ► And I just wanted control over it.

01:30:41 ◼   ► I just wanted control over--

01:30:44 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:30:45 ◼   ► That makes sense.

01:30:46 ◼   ► Yeah, and you know what?

01:30:46 ◼   ► It's also the only way I could figure out

01:30:48 ◼   ► to get my custom link shortener in the tweets.

01:30:50 ◼   ► So the @daringfireball account is a little-- I don't know.

01:30:54 ◼   ► It's only like 40 lines of Perl code.

01:30:56 ◼   ► OK.

01:30:58 ◼   ► - But so how do you view RSS now?

01:31:00 ◼   ► Since it never has become a mainstream thing

01:31:02 ◼   ► and it wasn't going to, right?

01:31:04 ◼   ► - There's two, I think there's two ways to view it.

01:31:06 ◼   ► One is as technical plumbing.

01:31:08 ◼   ► And I don't think Google Reader's disappearance

01:31:11 ◼   ► changes that at all.

01:31:12 ◼   ► Google Reader disappears and people who, like you said,

01:31:16 ◼   ► who read Flipboard, and Flipboard just keeps working

01:31:19 ◼   ► as ever, it's not like websites are gonna pull their feeds.

01:31:22 ◼   ► I'm not going to, just because Google Reader's down.

01:31:24 ◼   ► Even if those tends to, I don't even know how many,

01:31:29 ◼   ► I really don't know how many people,

01:31:31 ◼   ► but lots and lots of during five hour readers

01:31:33 ◼   ► read it through Google Reader.

01:31:34 ◼   ► Even if those readers don't subscribe to the feed again

01:31:38 ◼   ► in another app and they just go away,

01:31:40 ◼   ► I'm still not taking my feed away, you know,

01:31:42 ◼   ► 'cause I know there's enough people who use it elsewhere

01:31:44 ◼   ► and people who read it through Flipboard

01:31:45 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

01:31:46 ◼   ► I mean, it's still worth having a feed.

01:31:48 ◼   ► So the way that RSS is just plumbing that other apps use

01:31:52 ◼   ► and people don't even know they're reading RSS.

01:31:55 ◼   ► Google Reader really I don't think has any relevance

01:31:57 ◼   ► to that.

01:31:58 ◼   ► I don't think it changes at all.

01:32:00 ◼   ► I think where it does though, I think the other aspect

01:32:02 ◼   ► of RSS is among the people who do know what RSS is,

01:32:07 ◼   ► and it's clearly a minority of the overall public,

01:32:11 ◼   ► but who they are are the news junkies.

01:32:13 ◼   ► - Right.

01:32:14 ◼   ► - And I think news junkies are, it's again,

01:32:19 ◼   ► it's just sort of like with the phones,

01:32:21 ◼   ► where every reader is not equivalent, right?

01:32:25 ◼   ► It's not like, well, if only 3% of overall readers

01:32:29 ◼   ► use RSS and know what RSS is, then it doesn't really matter

01:32:32 ◼   ► if Google Reader goes away.

01:32:34 ◼   ► But those 3% of readers are the best readers,

01:32:36 ◼   ► because they're junkies, and they're going to come back

01:32:38 ◼   ► multiple times a day.

01:32:39 ◼   ► They're the ones who are likely to read every single thing I

01:32:42 ◼   ► post.

01:32:44 ◼   ► They're like the most avid readers of Daring Fireball.

01:32:47 ◼   ► So I think that's incredibly valuable.

01:32:49 ◼   ► Like, sometimes, you know, it's the same way that the Mac could be an important part of

01:32:57 ◼   ► the computer industry with 4-5% market share.

01:33:00 ◼   ► Right.

01:33:01 ◼   ► And that's sort of why this confuses me about why Google did it.

01:33:03 ◼   ► Because first of all, they're obviously, they haven't put resources into it in a long time.

01:33:07 ◼   ► The entire team that built it is long gone.

01:33:09 ◼   ► They probably had a few people, like literally a few people working on it, you know, in their

01:33:13 ◼   ► spare time or whatever.

01:33:15 ◼   ► But that's all they needed, right?

01:33:17 ◼   ► Like, it didn't need anything.

01:33:18 ◼   ► and they weren't going to build any new features for it.

01:33:20 ◼   ► I have to wonder if they're doing it just as a signal to,

01:33:25 ◼   ► we really are behind, again, Google+,

01:33:28 ◼   ► and we want people to read the news that way,

01:33:30 ◼   ► and we don't want it.

01:33:31 ◼   ► But it almost seems like just shooting themselves

01:33:33 ◼   ► in the foot with just pure bad PR for no real reason.

01:33:38 ◼   ► Because again, not taking up a lot of resources or whatever.

01:33:41 ◼   ► Yes, it's a great noble cause to say

01:33:43 ◼   ► that you want to be focused and have fewer products.

01:33:46 ◼   ► And I think that that has helped Google

01:33:48 ◼   ► in a lot of regards, but this is something

01:33:50 ◼   ► where it's such a passionate user base

01:33:53 ◼   ► that it was gonna never be anything but a negative for them.

01:33:56 ◼   ► It sort of reminds me of when Yahoo sunsetted Delicious,

01:33:59 ◼   ► right, it was like they ended up having

01:34:02 ◼   ► to spin it out and sell it.

01:34:03 ◼   ► It's like, does Google do that?

01:34:05 ◼   ► Do they sell it to someone else?

01:34:07 ◼   ► - And I bet there's a lot of, I bet it's a lot of overlap

01:34:09 ◼   ► between the people who are diehard Delicious users,

01:34:11 ◼   ► I bet are largely overlap with people

01:34:13 ◼   ► who are very avid Google Reader users.

01:34:15 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:34:16 ◼   ► And Google had to know that it's like the heavy Google Reader

01:34:20 ◼   ► users are also a lot, probably every single tech blogger

01:34:24 ◼   ► out there.

01:34:25 ◼   ► And they knew they were just going

01:34:26 ◼   ► to get pounded and pounded and pounded on these things.

01:34:30 ◼   ► But they did it anyway.

01:34:31 ◼   ► But I think you retweeted that one funny tweet where it's

01:34:34 ◼   ► like, so Google wants to focus.

01:34:38 ◼   ► Google Glass, good.

01:34:40 ◼   ► Google Cars, good.

01:34:42 ◼   ► Self-driving cars, magic glasses.

01:34:45 ◼   ► The Brazilian social network.

01:34:49 ◼   ► Those stay.

01:34:49 ◼   ► Google Reader, done.

01:34:52 ◼   ► Yeah, that's pretty funny.

01:34:54 ◼   ► That would--

01:34:55 ◼   ► Yeah, so I'm surprised that they did this, at least the way

01:35:01 ◼   ► that they did it.

01:35:02 ◼   ► And it's happening very soon, too.

01:35:04 ◼   ► It's only a few months, which doesn't

01:35:06 ◼   ► give those other teams that are working on things from scratch

01:35:08 ◼   ► dig a lot of time to come up with something.

01:35:11 ◼   ► Well, and sometimes, I do wonder what Google sees as valuable.

01:35:19 ◼   ► Clearly what they can sell ads against is valuable to them.

01:35:22 ◼   ► That's where their revenue and profits come from.

01:35:23 ◼   ► Right.

01:35:23 ◼   ► And that's an important point, because they

01:35:25 ◼   ► tried to do that with FeedBurner,

01:35:27 ◼   ► and then they had FeedSense, right?

01:35:29 ◼   ► And that just never took off.

01:35:30 ◼   ► Right.

01:35:32 ◼   ► And FeedBurner is still around, but the fact

01:35:35 ◼   ► that they're doing this to Google Reader would make--

01:35:39 ◼   ► and I've never put a feed in FeedBurner.

01:35:41 ◼   ► specifically because I never want to trust,

01:35:45 ◼   ► even though they give you good analytics,

01:35:47 ◼   ► I've always thought I'd rather control my feed

01:35:51 ◼   ► than have the analytics.

01:35:54 ◼   ► - So I am in FeedBurner, and I do wonder now,

01:35:57 ◼   ► what does that mean?

01:35:59 ◼   ► FeedBurner has been probably, in my mind,

01:36:01 ◼   ► one of the most neglected Google products

01:36:04 ◼   ► in the last at least five years, six years,

01:36:06 ◼   ► whatever it's been, way more so than Google Reader.

01:36:09 ◼   ► - They bought it and just stopped doing anything with it.

01:36:11 ◼   ► Right, and you know, it's sort of humorous,

01:36:13 ◼   ► that Dick Costolo was one of the founders of it,

01:36:16 ◼   ► to the point of, humorous aside,

01:36:18 ◼   ► he used to actually, I would have problems

01:36:20 ◼   ► with my personal blog feed,

01:36:22 ◼   ► I would email Google about it,

01:36:23 ◼   ► and it would be Dick Costolo on the email,

01:36:26 ◼   ► saying, "Hi, MG, let me look into that for you,"

01:36:29 ◼   ► while he was, sort of funny how times change.

01:36:32 ◼   ► But, so, yeah, they really didn't do anything with it,

01:36:35 ◼   ► and if you ever wanna hear someone

01:36:38 ◼   ► just complain nonstop about feed burn,

01:36:40 ◼   ► just talked to Gabe Rivera of TechMeam, because he sees,

01:36:43 ◼   ► it's not only that FeedBurner was neglected,

01:36:45 ◼   ► it would like really mess up feeds in some way,

01:36:49 ◼   ► to the point where like when he was trying to crawl them

01:36:51 ◼   ► for TechMeam to get headlines on there,

01:36:53 ◼   ► it'd be all kinds of problems,

01:36:54 ◼   ► and he had to create his own system

01:36:55 ◼   ► to like un-FeedBurner feeds.

01:36:58 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:37:00 ◼   ► - Yeah, and part of the,

01:37:01 ◼   ► and I've heard that too about FeedBurner,

01:37:03 ◼   ► that FeedBurner mangles feeds,

01:37:04 ◼   ► and that's so, it's so almost ironic,

01:37:08 ◼   ► because one of the best things about Google Reader

01:37:11 ◼   ► is that Google Reader is famously good

01:37:14 ◼   ► at understanding mangled feeds.

01:37:18 ◼   ► That mismanaged feeds with misformed XML,

01:37:24 ◼   ► Google Reader was famous for being able to-- I understand

01:37:28 ◼   ► what you really wanted.

01:37:30 ◼   ► Like in the way that web browsers have always

01:37:33 ◼   ► dealt as gracefully as they can with mangled HTML.

01:37:39 ◼   ► Part of the whole idea behind RSS--

01:37:43 ◼   ► not RSS, XML as a whole at the beginning was--

01:37:47 ◼   ► and I don't want to get into a big rant on web standards,

01:37:49 ◼   ► but the XML guys were sort of idealists.

01:37:52 ◼   ► And they looked at HTML and said,

01:37:54 ◼   ► this is a nightmare the way that all the browsers have

01:37:57 ◼   ► to support mangled, invalid HTML.

01:38:01 ◼   ► let's make it a rule that XML parsers, if they encounter an XML error, have to break.

01:38:06 ◼   ► And that's actually in the spec. And RSS is a form of XML. So if you have bad RSS, whatever the app that's reading it is supposed to throw up an error.

01:38:16 ◼   ► And everybody who writes software was like, "That's like the worst user experience ever. I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do my best to read it."

01:38:25 ◼   ► And I think overall RSS is a lot better formed and more valid than HTML, but it's, you know,

01:38:31 ◼   ► it's just the nature of the world.

01:38:33 ◼   ► People are going to write bad XML.

01:38:35 ◼   ► And Google Reader did a great job of making sense of it.

01:38:39 ◼   ► And that meant that like apps like Reader or Net News Wire that go through Google Reader

01:38:45 ◼   ► for syncing could get the advantages of that sort of parsing smartness.

01:38:51 ◼   ► So, I wonder now if, as a result of this, there's either going to be one of two things

01:38:59 ◼   ► happen. Either people like you and I who get a significant number of readers coming in

01:39:04 ◼   ► from Google Reader just lose those guys, like you said, and they don't come back. Or does

01:39:11 ◼   ► it help a few of the new guys that can actually innovate on top of what a news reader should

01:39:18 ◼   ► be sort of like reinvigorate the space? Do you think that that will happen or do you

01:39:21 ◼   ► think it will be like, that's it, they'll now read through Twitter and so they'll

01:39:26 ◼   ► read less?

01:39:28 ◼   ► You never know. I think there's an opportunity, clearly there's an opportunity here for

01:39:31 ◼   ► reinvigoration of the entire RSS market. And if you're really a news junkie, I mean,

01:39:37 ◼   ► and I do, I really do worry about it like in terms of the overall traffic at Daring

01:39:41 ◼   ► Fireball because anytime you have to make a choice, you can make a choice not to do

01:39:44 ◼   ► Whereas like, so like a diehard daring fireball reader

01:39:47 ◼   ► who's subscribed through Google Reader

01:39:49 ◼   ► and reads everything I write,

01:39:50 ◼   ► once Google Reader goes away,

01:39:52 ◼   ► that reader has a choice of, you know,

01:39:55 ◼   ► that, this, that, the other replacement for Google Reader,

01:39:58 ◼   ► but another one of the choices they have

01:40:00 ◼   ► is just not to subscribe

01:40:02 ◼   ► and just think in the back of their mind,

01:40:03 ◼   ► ah, I'll check daring fireball out on the web

01:40:05 ◼   ► whenever I think of it.

01:40:06 ◼   ► - Right, and you have to imagine

01:40:07 ◼   ► that that's going to be at least some percentage

01:40:10 ◼   ► are not going to be available.

01:40:10 ◼   ► - It has to, it's gonna be more than zero, right?

01:40:12 ◼   ► It's, you know, and who knows how big it is.

01:40:16 ◼   ► So I mean, I'm not going to say I'm worried,

01:40:18 ◼   ► but it's certainly something I'm concerned about.

01:40:20 ◼   ► I mean, here's one of the other things, too,

01:40:22 ◼   ► is I have no idea how many people read Daring

01:40:24 ◼   ► Fireball through Google Reader.

01:40:25 ◼   ► I posted a thing the other day where when they hit your feed,

01:40:28 ◼   ► they put in the user agent string

01:40:31 ◼   ► how many subscribers there are to your feed in Google Reader.

01:40:34 ◼   ► And for Daring Fireball, it's 370-some thousand,

01:40:37 ◼   ► plus a bunch of other hundred and some that are--

01:40:40 ◼   ► that for some reason Google Reader sometimes puts your feed in under a different ID. But

01:40:46 ◼   ► it's, you know, somewhere on the order of close to 400,000. But there's no way that

01:40:51 ◼   ► there's actually 400,000 active readers because that counts everybody who's ever subscribed

01:40:56 ◼   ► to my feed in Google Reader whether they're still using Google Reader or not. Right? When

01:41:01 ◼   ► somebody who uses any feed reader, Google Reader, Net News, or anything, when they stop

01:41:06 ◼   ► using it, when they just sort of fade away from using Google Reader and don't really

01:41:10 ◼   ► check in anymore. Nobody goes in and unsubscribes from all their feeds first. They're still

01:41:16 ◼   ► subscribed. So I have no idea. Is there 100,000 active readers of Daring Fireball's feed

01:41:21 ◼   ► in Google Reader? Is it actually close to that 370,000 number? Is it really only 25,000?

01:41:27 ◼   ► I have no idea.

01:41:28 ◼   ► And so do you also think—someone put this forward, I think it was on Twitter yesterday—the

01:41:34 ◼   ► The notion that because FeedSense,

01:41:37 ◼   ► so the monetization of the feeds never really took off

01:41:40 ◼   ► in the way that anyone was hoping,

01:41:42 ◼   ► Google viewed this as like, it's almost like the antithesis

01:41:46 ◼   ► of what they want to do because they want people

01:41:51 ◼   ► to be on the web, they want people to be using Google,

01:41:53 ◼   ► and they want people to be on websites

01:41:54 ◼   ► where they're showing up Google Ads.

01:41:56 ◼   ► And a lot of people, you know, like I would just view things

01:42:00 ◼   ► through the feed reader if it had a full feed,

01:42:02 ◼   ► and I would never hit those sites,

01:42:03 ◼   ► I'm not going to go there to comment and do other things.

01:42:06 ◼   ► And so there's an argument that could be made that I was, in a way, if you want to

01:42:12 ◼   ► call it mooching or whatever, off of those sites that were making no advertising money

01:42:17 ◼   ► off of me. And so since Google being the largest by far web advertiser, Google to some extent

01:42:23 ◼   ► then was losing money as a result of that.

01:42:26 ◼   ► I guess so. Maybe. I can't help but think that that must be part of the equation that

01:42:30 ◼   ► they put, you know, to decide to stop this, that they couldn't, you know, they didn't

01:42:34 ◼   ► think it was a way to make money. But the thing that surprises me is that they didn't

01:42:37 ◼   ► see it as a way to collect interesting information about people.

01:42:41 ◼   ► Like, here's what, you know, that maybe they can't put ads on it while you're reading

01:42:46 ◼   ► in Google Reader, but they do know what you're reading in Google Reader. And that seems to

01:42:50 ◼   ► me like it would inform the ads they can show you elsewhere when they can show you ads.

01:42:56 ◼   ► So that's what surprises me, is it seems to me that knowing what a couple of million news

01:43:00 ◼   ► junkies are reading seems like really interesting information from a Google perspective, like

01:43:06 ◼   ► something that they could do something, that just seems like prime Google material.

01:43:10 ◼   ► And I just always assume that's why they built it in the first place.

01:43:12 ◼   ► And that reminds me of something which I hadn't thought about until right now, but someone

01:43:16 ◼   ► had, oh, it was BuzzFeed.

01:43:19 ◼   ► BuzzFeed about three months ago, because I linked to it, and so I just searched for it

01:43:23 ◼   ► quickly.

01:43:24 ◼   ► had the story that goes in depth about the night

01:43:28 ◼   ► that Google shut off the social features

01:43:31 ◼   ► within Google Reader and switched over

01:43:33 ◼   ► to Google+ integration.

01:43:36 ◼   ► And this was like a giant thing for a lot of these users.

01:43:38 ◼   ► It was really like the first step when everyone knew like,

01:43:40 ◼   ► oh God, the end is coming or whatever.

01:43:43 ◼   ► But there's like, there's this whole thing

01:43:45 ◼   ► called like Share Bros.

01:43:47 ◼   ► I know that sounds ridiculous,

01:43:48 ◼   ► but there's some kind of community called Share Bros

01:43:51 ◼   ► within the Google Reader community that were just like,

01:43:53 ◼   ► using Google Reader just to share with one another.

01:43:56 ◼   ► And it really was like a very tight-knit community, I guess,

01:44:01 ◼   ► of people around news.

01:44:03 ◼   ► And Google could have had all of this interesting information

01:44:06 ◼   ► around that kind of data.

01:44:08 ◼   ► But instead, they tried to go for the Google+ integration,

01:44:12 ◼   ► and it alienated all of those users.

01:44:14 ◼   ► And then they either took off, or they were just pissed off.

01:44:19 ◼   ► But that speaks to what you were getting at, where Google could

01:44:21 ◼   ► have done a lot more interesting things.

01:44:23 ◼   ► like they had a really great social network for news

01:44:27 ◼   ► and they never really did anything with it.

01:44:30 ◼   ► - Right, it just doesn't quite,

01:44:32 ◼   ► I've always thought that Google had two types of things

01:44:35 ◼   ► they're interested in.

01:44:36 ◼   ► One, the things that they can actually sell ads against.

01:44:39 ◼   ► And then two, the type of things where they can collect

01:44:42 ◼   ► information about you if you're signed into Google