ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► I'm gonna try not to be whiny.

00:00:01 ◼   ► Might be punchy, but I'm gonna try not to be whiny.

00:00:05 ◼   ► I've had pretty bad internet connectivity over the last two days.

00:00:08 ◼   ► Oh, really?

00:00:09 ◼   ► And I don't think it's because of Fios's weird possible throttling of Amazon Web Services,

00:00:15 ◼   ► which they have actually denied, which is worth pointing out, but...

00:00:18 ◼   ► That story is crazy.

00:00:20 ◼   ► It's based on, like, one of those online chat logs with a support person.

00:00:23 ◼   ► They don't know anything.

00:00:25 ◼   ► They barely speak English.

00:00:28 ◼   ► This is a worse non-story.

00:00:30 ◼   ► I have seen a lot of very slow downloads from S3 and a lot of Netflix problems.

00:00:35 ◼   ► However, not only is that not new, but it probably is not Verizon doing that.

00:00:42 ◼   ► It's probably Netflix being at massive scale where they're responsible for like a third

00:00:47 ◼   ► of the traffic on the internet, and no wonder that I have some slowdowns here and there

00:00:51 ◼   ► during peak hours and some bad quality streaming happening.

00:00:55 ◼   ► It's not that big of a deal.

00:00:57 ◼   ► Something is up.

00:00:58 ◼   ► a story on this a while back and I was really hoping they would get to the bottom of it

00:01:01 ◼   ► and I don't think they did. It was like, why the hell are YouTube videos so slow? Fiber

00:01:06 ◼   ► optic connection and you can't play, like it just literally won't play this YouTube

00:01:10 ◼   ► video that would use one ten-thousandth of your bandwidth if it would come. And it's

00:01:14 ◼   ► lots of finger pointing of like Google saying the ISP and ISP saying it's the, not that

00:01:21 ◼   ► they're not doing anything wrong and like it's not, like why would you intentionally

00:01:25 ◼   ► throttle YouTube. Like I don't think it's anything nefarious, but there's some sort

00:01:28 ◼   ► of networking related problem where all the parties involved just point the fingers at

00:01:32 ◼   ► each other and nothing actually gets solved. The upshot is some YouTube videos will play

00:01:38 ◼   ► in super duper HD perfectly fine. Don't even come close to using up your connection. Other

00:01:43 ◼   ► YouTube videos will just literally never load. And it's one of those situations that's impossible

00:01:47 ◼   ► to debug because you don't control the server. You don't control any of the internal routing

00:01:52 ◼   ► at the ISP. All you know is your connection to the internet looks fine and most YouTube videos

00:01:56 ◼   ► load fine, but this one doesn't. Yeah, I actually looked into that somewhat extensively about six

00:02:01 ◼   ► months ago when it was really bad for me. And a lot of people on Fios were complaining about it.

00:02:07 ◼   ► And for the life of me, I can't remember what the fix was, but it didn't last for very long. And it

00:02:11 ◼   ► was something along the lines of you needed to intentionally screw up your host file for the big

00:02:19 ◼   ► CDNs or something like that. I'm probably getting these details wrong.

00:02:22 ◼   ► Yeah, it was something like you had to like you had to like block one of the YouTube

00:02:26 ◼   ► major CDN IPs to route to nothing so that it would retry to something else that would be faster.

00:02:31 ◼   ► Right, right.

00:02:32 ◼   ► All you're doing is trying is like temporarily routing around wherever the problem is. And it's

00:02:37 ◼   ► like we don't that's not a we want you to find where the problem is and not say okay well if I

00:02:42 ◼   ► go through that server it's really slow so I'll go through a different one. Like yeah sure that's

00:02:47 ◼   ► the case a lot of the time, but like, why is it slow when we try to go through that one?

00:02:51 ◼   ► What's going wrong there? And that's what we want someone to fix. And it's like, I don't know if

00:02:56 ◼   ► that's anyone's job. Presumably it's someone in the ISP's job, but I don't know.

00:03:00 ◼   ► Trenton Larkin Yeah. And the funny thing to me is the fix,

00:03:02 ◼   ► and I'm doing mega air quotes here, the fix for the YouTube slowness was to try to route around

00:03:10 ◼   ► the content delivery network, whose sole job is to get you that data as quickly as possible.

00:03:16 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:03:17 ◼   ► Whatever.

00:03:18 ◼   ► But yeah, so you also, you two also don't buy into this Verizon is immediately throttling

00:03:25 ◼   ► everything under the sun story, because I do not.

00:03:28 ◼   ► They could be throttling everything under the sun, but that story is based on nothing

00:03:33 ◼   ► that supports that.

00:03:34 ◼   ► Like if you're going to put in a story that they throttle, find some evidence that they're

00:03:38 ◼   ► throttling.

00:03:39 ◼   ► Hell, do experimental evidence that's right.

00:03:40 ◼   ► Don't base it on a conversation with a customer support rep in one of the chat windows, because

00:03:43 ◼   ► That is not a reliable source of anything.

00:03:47 ◼   ► All right, what else is going on?

00:03:50 ◼   ► Some follow-up, actually, that's what's going on.

00:03:52 ◼   ► All right, so the first item is from someone named Steven, and he was talking about using

00:03:57 ◼   ► the iPad to do more stuff, and Steven says he's older, he's older than us.

00:04:02 ◼   ► I'll read a little bit from his email here.

00:04:05 ◼   ► "I work in an office that uses DOS Lotus 1.2.3 and DOS WordPerfect.

00:04:10 ◼   ► When we switched to Windows 3.1, we found that we could get our jobs done faster and

00:04:13 ◼   ► easier in Windows.

00:04:15 ◼   ► But in using iOS, the opposite is true.

00:04:17 ◼   ► As you mentioned, it's harder to complete office work in iOS.

00:04:20 ◼   ► So the analogy of switching to iOS to complete work is the same as when we switch from command

00:04:25 ◼   ► line DOS to GUI is just plain wrong.

00:04:28 ◼   ► I kind of get it what he's trying to say here.

00:04:32 ◼   ► I guess, well hey, I'll just read the rest of it because it's short.

00:04:35 ◼   ► Once we switched to Microsoft Excel and Word, we found we could do more things than we could

00:04:39 ◼   ► and DOS, we could copy and paste between Word and Excel,

00:04:41 ◼   ► working with files was easier,

00:04:42 ◼   ► we just cut and pasted or just dragged and dropped.

00:04:45 ◼   ► So he's trying to say that like,

00:04:47 ◼   ► it's not the same transition because transitioning

00:04:50 ◼   ► to an iPad would make their work harder,

00:04:53 ◼   ► whereas transitioning from DOS to Windows

00:04:55 ◼   ► made their work easier.

00:04:56 ◼   ► I think there's a couple things at play here.

00:04:59 ◼   ► One is switching from a personal computer to an iPad

00:05:04 ◼   ► makes a lot of things easier for a lot of people,

00:05:07 ◼   ► maybe not necessarily for this person.

00:05:09 ◼   ► And an example I would give is like,

00:05:12 ◼   ► people who can't do something on a personal computer

00:05:15 ◼   ► find that they are able to complete that same task

00:05:17 ◼   ► on an iPad, whatever that task may be.

00:05:19 ◼   ► I'm sure you can think of examples of people who you know,

00:05:22 ◼   ► who if left to their own devices could not do something

00:05:25 ◼   ► on a personal computer, but if you give them the iPad,

00:05:27 ◼   ► they can't, even if it's simple as like browsing the web,

00:05:29 ◼   ► emailing something to someone.

00:05:31 ◼   ► The great example is finding an application

00:05:34 ◼   ► that does something that they're interested in

00:05:36 ◼   ► Installing it and using it that I think is a really good one because lots and lots and lots of people could not do

00:05:42 ◼   ► that with a personal computer

00:05:44 ◼   ► And maybe they didn't notice like you know boy

00:05:47 ◼   ► I wish there was an application that let me keep track of the score in my bridge game

00:05:52 ◼   ► Left to their own devices finding that application downloading installing it successfully and not screwing up their computer and

00:05:58 ◼   ► Not getting a virus and not downloading the wrong thing is difficult

00:06:01 ◼   ► Whereas if you give someone an iPad and they're interested in keeping score in their bridge game

00:06:06 ◼   ► They could probably pull that off

00:06:08 ◼   ► And at the same time there are lots of things we're going going back to the DOS to to Windows thing

00:06:13 ◼   ► There are lots of things that you could do in DOS

00:06:15 ◼   ► That you couldn't do in Windows or couldn't do as easily an example of anyone who is using DOS extensively would be like what if I?

00:06:21 ◼   ► want to do

00:06:23 ◼   ► Delete, you know

00:06:24 ◼   ► foo star dot star or

00:06:26 ◼   ► All files that begin with letter a or something like all sorts of things you can do from the command line

00:06:30 ◼   ► You're like well in the GUI

00:06:31 ◼   ► I could sort of do that myself and sort things in ListView and select them manually and drag

00:06:35 ◼   ► them to the trash, but it's like before I could just type out a wildcard and it was

00:06:38 ◼   ► so much easier.

00:06:39 ◼   ► Why can't I do that in Windows?

00:06:40 ◼   ► Windows sucks.

00:06:41 ◼   ► So saying that any individual person can or can't do something with a particular computer

00:06:46 ◼   ► is a very contextual type of message.

00:06:49 ◼   ► And I think it all comes back to what I was saying before, the notion that iOS is better

00:06:54 ◼   ► for people, which is a sweeping generalization.

00:06:57 ◼   ► I'm trying to sort of take the average of all the people in the entire world, what can they do with

00:07:03 ◼   ► a personal computer? And of all those same people in the entire world, what can they get done with

00:07:06 ◼   ► an iPad? And that's combined with, as you noted, the premise of the whole thing was that the iPad

00:07:12 ◼   ► would have to expand its capabilities if it can ever hope to take people from office workers or

00:07:19 ◼   ► anyone really, get them off of their PC and get them onto the iPad. Because there are many things

00:07:23 ◼   ► that are better for everyone about an iPad, but it's not a viable option for you if you can't

00:07:28 ◼   ► do whatever it is that you want to do. So that's why I was saying that I thought the iPad would

00:07:33 ◼   ► have to expand its capabilities and expand the range of models available if it ever wants to do

00:07:40 ◼   ► that, and I think it would want to do that because the things that the iPad is better at for all

00:07:44 ◼   ► people are also kind of better for regular people. In the same way the things that Windows is better

00:07:48 ◼   ► at for all people. It was also better at for, you know, the more demanding users. Even if they

00:07:54 ◼   ► couldn't wildcard something to delete it or do stuff from the command line or write batch files

00:07:58 ◼   ► and stuff like that. Yeah, they lost capabilities, but it was enough of a trade-off. I've thought

00:08:03 ◼   ► more about this since the last show. I don't really know if I'm as convinced as I was before.

00:08:09 ◼   ► There's another piece of follow-up related to this, but I don't know. Have you guys thought

00:08:16 ◼   ► about it since then, the whole, especially the iPad? Or did you just blessedly forget it after

00:08:20 ◼   ► the show was over? Not once. Yeah, I haven't really thought about it. But I was not convinced

00:08:24 ◼   ► when we talked about it then. And I'm still not convinced now. Are you not convinced that it's

00:08:28 ◼   ► better for that the iOS is better for people like in the in the giant general average of all people

00:08:33 ◼   ► kind of way? So no, no, that I'm absolutely convinced by that. And like, Sean Blanc wrote

00:08:38 ◼   ► a really great story about his grandfather. Now he uses his iPad as a camera and how maybe,

00:08:42 ◼   ► You know, that's largely because of screen size, if memory serves, it's largely because

00:08:47 ◼   ► of the ease of use, but it's enabled his grandfather to do some things he would have

00:08:51 ◼   ► otherwise been unable to do.

00:08:52 ◼   ► And that's a really great and touching example of the story that everyone is telling or has

00:08:57 ◼   ► told, which is, just like you said, it enables people to do things that they perhaps wouldn't

00:09:03 ◼   ► be able to do.

00:09:04 ◼   ► What I'm unconvinced about is this whole iPad Pro thing.

00:09:07 ◼   ► I'm sure it will happen in some capacity in some way, but to me, I don't see anything

00:09:12 ◼   ► compelling reason for it to exist.

00:09:16 ◼   ► These tools exist—phones, tablets, computers—there is some overlap between all of them, of course.

00:09:23 ◼   ► And it's like you can use just one of those to do all of your computing tasks. You can,

00:09:29 ◼   ► if you want to. And I don't think there's—like, if the argument is, "Oh, I can do everything

00:09:34 ◼   ► on an iPad," you could probably do everything on an iPhone also. I don't think there's

00:09:37 ◼   ► a whole lot of people for whom the tasks they do on iOS must be done on an iPad and can't

00:09:44 ◼   ► also be done on an iPhone.

00:09:46 ◼   ► Certain screen size dependent things notwithstanding, but I think most people don't have a lot of

00:09:50 ◼   ► those things.

00:09:52 ◼   ► But ultimately these are different kinds of tools and I don't think we need to choose.

00:09:59 ◼   ► You have to choose the point where you have to say, you know, you have to buy these devices

00:10:04 ◼   ► and you have to buy what you can afford.

00:10:06 ◼   ► But chances are, of these three devices, for most people,

00:10:11 ◼   ► a tablet is probably the third one to buy,

00:10:13 ◼   ► not the first or second,

00:10:16 ◼   ► unless you have very, very light needs,

00:10:19 ◼   ► in which case it might be the first, and that's fine.

00:10:20 ◼   ► I think a lot of people are trying to cram too much

00:10:25 ◼   ► into any one of these things.

00:10:27 ◼   ► And I'm not saying the computer is the best one.

00:10:29 ◼   ► There's things that you shouldn't cram into a computer,

00:10:31 ◼   ► either, that work better on the tablet or a phone.

00:10:34 ◼   ► I think it's about using the right tool for the job.

00:10:36 ◼   ► And when we have new tools available,

00:10:40 ◼   ► we kind of obsess over them briefly

00:10:41 ◼   ► and try to push the boundaries

00:10:43 ◼   ► and see what we can do with them.

00:10:44 ◼   ► But then it just becomes a part of a regular toolkit.

00:10:48 ◼   ► And we realize that no tool is good for everything

00:10:51 ◼   ► and that we're better off using what's best.

00:10:53 ◼   ► And I think tablets are not replacing PCs.

00:10:56 ◼   ► We keep seeing over and over again,

00:10:58 ◼   ► tablets are selling very well,

00:10:59 ◼   ► but I don't think they're replacing PCs for anybody

00:11:02 ◼   ► except people for whom PCs were never the right tool in the first place. So that we

00:11:07 ◼   ► can debate on whether PCs were the right tool for so many people who were buying them. And

00:11:13 ◼   ► how big that number is depends on, or I think your argument depends on how big that number

00:11:18 ◼   ► is.

00:11:19 ◼   ► I think both of you are still not getting what's in my head, and neither is everyone

00:11:22 ◼   ► in the audience, and it's my failure to convey this, I guess. But you keep coming back to

00:11:25 ◼   ► these things, these choices that don't exist, and these dichotomies that I'm not getting

00:11:32 ◼   ► at and like what I'm getting maybe what I'm getting at is too simple and obvious but like

00:11:37 ◼   ► it's like saying in the days before the PC existed that you would look at what do most people do all

00:11:45 ◼   ► day with it sit in front of the desk maybe they sit in front of like desk with like stacks of paper

00:11:50 ◼   ► all right I'm trying I don't know what it is but like whatever it is that most people

00:11:54 ◼   ► I think it looked like Microsoft Bob like they had like there was like a desk with an organizer

00:11:58 ◼   ► on one side and like one of those flippy card things.

00:12:01 ◼   ► You made a Rolodex?

00:12:02 ◼   ► And a giant rotary phone maybe? And how about maybe a record player? Was that how things

00:12:07 ◼   ► were?

00:12:08 ◼   ► Yeah, well, let me actually think of a comment in a different way. I was trying so hard to

00:12:13 ◼   ► get you guys to see what is so obvious to me, but it's impossible to convey without

00:12:17 ◼   ► people extrapolating it out into a ridiculous scenario, like sort of, you know, following

00:12:22 ◼   ► it through to its logical ridiculous conclusion and then saying that that's not going to happen.

00:12:26 ◼   ► I mean, if you want to go at it in the sales number way,

00:12:29 ◼   ► PC sales are not growing anymore.

00:12:31 ◼   ► Why not?

00:12:34 ◼   ► Do we not need to do the things

00:12:36 ◼   ► that personal computers did anymore?

00:12:39 ◼   ► No, presumably people are buying things other than PCs.

00:12:43 ◼   ► And it used to be that the PC was the computing device

00:12:45 ◼   ► that everybody had.

00:12:46 ◼   ► And we could say arguably now the phone

00:12:48 ◼   ► is the computing device that everybody had.

00:12:50 ◼   ► But there are things you can't do on a phone.

00:12:53 ◼   ► No one would want to do video editing on a phone.

00:12:57 ◼   ► No one would want to do creative work like with Photoshop on a phone.

00:13:00 ◼   ► No one wants to do development on a phone.

00:13:03 ◼   ► Nobody wants to do lots of word processing on a phone.

00:13:06 ◼   ► There are just tons of things that you do not ever want to do on the phone because it's

00:13:09 ◼   ► too darn small.

00:13:10 ◼   ► That's the reason.

00:13:11 ◼   ► It's not like any other reason.

00:13:13 ◼   ► You need more space.

00:13:15 ◼   ► People don't sit at work all day in front of their phone and do all their work on their

00:13:18 ◼   ► phone.

00:13:20 ◼   ► And yet PC sales are still not growing like they used to and may actually be going down

00:13:24 ◼   ► at this point.

00:13:25 ◼   ► And I'm saying if people are sort of voting with their feet that they prefer to use these

00:13:31 ◼   ► things that run iOS or things like them more than they prefer to use PCs, but they can't

00:13:36 ◼   ► stop using PCs because there are certain things that the PC can do that these other devices

00:13:41 ◼   ► can't.

00:13:42 ◼   ► And I'm saying if, like you can't hold back this tide.

00:13:44 ◼   ► If people prefer to work with the simplicity and without the legacy hassles, whatever they

00:13:51 ◼   ► are overlapping Windows, file system, all the things that we got rid of in iOS, people

00:13:57 ◼   ► seem to prefer that.

00:13:59 ◼   ► And if they're going to move some of their tasks down to the other device, the device

00:14:05 ◼   ► has to expand to meet them in some way.

00:14:07 ◼   ► They're not going to willingly wedge themselves into a tablet.

00:14:10 ◼   ► So I'm trying to look forward to the future to think,

00:14:13 ◼   ► if iOS really is better for people,

00:14:15 ◼   ► surely, and PC sales are going down,

00:14:18 ◼   ► or staying the same, or not growing like they used to,

00:14:19 ◼   ► surely at some point, all those people with PCs,

00:14:22 ◼   ► like if you fast forward 20, 30 years,

00:14:24 ◼   ► are most people sitting in front of a PC

00:14:25 ◼   ► with overlapping windows, access to the file system,

00:14:28 ◼   ► and a mouse, and everything?

00:14:30 ◼   ► Or do some of those people found a way to do their work

00:14:32 ◼   ► with an iOS-type device, or a tablet-type device?

00:14:36 ◼   ► And that's all I'm getting at.

00:14:39 ◼   ► In the moment, you can always say, well, the tablet's not appropriate for that, the PC will,

00:14:43 ◼   ► but you could replace PC with like mini computer. Well, personal computers are good for some people,

00:14:47 ◼   ► but they're really too simple and real people need mini computers or workstations or whatever

00:14:51 ◼   ► you want to put it. It's just like if people prefer to work in that type of environment,

00:14:57 ◼   ► it seems like those things have to come together. Otherwise, what's the thing? The PC sales slowly

00:15:02 ◼   ► decline until no one buys a PC, and yet none of those people also have replaced their PCs with

00:15:07 ◼   ► with an electronic device, or do they do everything on their phone?

00:15:10 ◼   ► Like I'm saying, I think the tablet can expand to meet some of those needs in the future.

00:15:14 ◼   ► And my doubts are basically like, will any one company pull that off?

00:15:21 ◼   ► Because if no one does a good job, if no one rises to meet those needs, they'll just be

00:15:25 ◼   ► using increasingly better and simpler PCs.

00:15:30 ◼   ► And that's conceivable as well.

00:15:32 ◼   ► But I think it's, like I said, I think it's easier for iOS to get it slightly more capable

00:15:35 ◼   ► than it is for OS X or Windows or anything else to get simpler.

00:15:39 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:15:40 ◼   ► The only way we can tell is just to fast forward in the universe.

00:15:42 ◼   ► But I would say, look at the Minerva Horse posts charts of personal computer sales.

00:15:47 ◼   ► Look at those.

00:15:48 ◼   ► And think about how for our life, the entire default of a working person, a knowledge worker

00:15:53 ◼   ► or whatever, was to sit there in front of a PC and say, "Well, PC sales are going down.

00:15:57 ◼   ► Are those all home users?

00:15:58 ◼   ► And working people are going to forever buy some amount of PCs?"

00:16:03 ◼   ► Or does that trend line indicate that there's some sort of transition taking place, even

00:16:07 ◼   ► without any iPad Pro type of thing?

00:16:11 ◼   ► So let me kind of sort of repeat what you said to see if I understand.

00:16:16 ◼   ► What you're saying is, since everyone seems to prefer these touch-based devices, be it

00:16:21 ◼   ► a phone or perhaps even a tablet, and that's where all the usage is going, then it stands

00:16:26 ◼   ► to reason that whatever the shortcomings are, they will be solved over time, and that will

00:16:32 ◼   ► usher in all these magnificent new features. So it's not that Apple necessarily will deliberately

00:16:37 ◼   ► set out and create an iPad Pro that does this. This is the iPad Pro because we say so. It's

00:16:43 ◼   ► that in an evolutionary way, the iPad will become more of a more capable device by whatever means,

00:16:51 ◼   ► we're not really sure what that is, simply because that's what everyone prefers to use.

00:16:54 ◼   ► Well, it's push and pull because you can't say Apple's going to make it, therefore people are

00:16:59 ◼   ► going to want it and people are going to want it, therefore Apple's going to make it. There has to

00:17:02 ◼   ► to be, it comes from both directions.

00:17:04 ◼   ► So it's sort of like, and I'm, this is a crummy analogy, but you know, when

00:17:10 ◼   ► planes were brand new, they could only fly for a few minutes and not really

00:17:15 ◼   ► take any passengers and things were crummy, but everyone knew it was, it had

00:17:17 ◼   ► potential.

00:17:18 ◼   ► And then trains were still really exciting and popular.

00:17:21 ◼   ► And while this is a very American analogy, because our trains are terrible,

00:17:25 ◼   ► but over time planes became the clearly far and away winner because that's what,

00:17:30 ◼   ► that's the way everyone wanted it to go.

00:17:32 ◼   ► And so it kind of compelled the industry to satiate that need.

00:17:36 ◼   ► I think we should move to the next follow-up item because I think it's related and it will

00:17:42 ◼   ► maybe clarify this. The next follow-up item, I just put it in, it's based on general feedback.

00:17:46 ◼   ► And we're talking about having a keyboard in front of some kind of tablet thing to solve the text

00:17:52 ◼   ► input problem. And there are two aspects of this that I think are worth dwelling on that people

00:17:57 ◼   ► send feedback about. One is, one person on Twitter said that having, you know, I kept saying like an

00:18:06 ◼   ► architect's drafting table with like some kind of big tablet-y type surface on it, that that is

00:18:12 ◼   ► ergonomically worse than having a mouse and keyboard in front of you horizontally and a

00:18:17 ◼   ► screen vertically because you're sitting upright when you're using the, you know, typical mouse

00:18:22 ◼   ► keyboard PC type thing and you're kind of hunched over an architect's drafting table.

00:18:27 ◼   ► when you're doing that. I'm not entirely sure about that, but it's worth considering.

00:18:32 ◼   ► Would that be a regression, ergonomically speaking, to work on something drafting table style?

00:18:40 ◼   ► Imagine you have a stylus or something like that. Would that be an ergonomic regression to do a task

00:18:49 ◼   ► on a slanted up, presumably very large, tablet with a stylus or your hands,

00:18:54 ◼   ► versus looking at a vertical screen and typing on a horizontal keyboard and mouse.

00:18:58 ◼   ► It might be worse for your lower back and neck and shoulders.

00:19:03 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm not entirely sure because, I mean, the history of people sitting in front of something

00:19:09 ◼   ► and doing something is pretty long, and the history of people sitting in front of computers

00:19:13 ◼   ► is short, so it's tough to make any, you know, calls and that. Like, how many centuries were

00:19:21 ◼   ► monks hunched over the little slanty tables writing things with ink and stuff on, like...

00:19:27 ◼   ► It doesn't mean it was good.

00:19:28 ◼   ► I know, but like, that's been going on for a long time, right? And it doesn't mean,

00:19:33 ◼   ► right, it doesn't mean that it's good. And so personal computers have been going on for a short

00:19:36 ◼   ► period of time, and in the short period of time we had personal computers, we've also had the,

00:19:41 ◼   ► you know, we've been more ergonomics conscious, and people do have a lot of problems sitting in

00:19:46 ◼   ► front of computers in the current good ergonomic situation. Now, is that just because we're sitting

00:19:50 ◼   ► there way too long because we don't get up? Is it just because now we have the ability to diagnose

00:19:55 ◼   ► these ergonomic problems? And if there were doctors around in medieval times, they'd be

00:20:01 ◼   ► diagnosing all these monks with problems as well? It's difficult to say. And what I'm thinking of

00:20:06 ◼   ► are like, I think there are probably people who preferred work in the sort of architects drafting

00:20:13 ◼   ► table type situation even today. And I'm thinking of maybe creative people like animators or

00:20:18 ◼   ► or something, or people who are drawing on a stylus, if you're drawing on a surface,

00:20:22 ◼   ► for example, you don't want to draw on a vertical surface.

00:20:25 ◼   ► So if the whole idea is that you're going to touch the screen, whether with a stylus

00:20:31 ◼   ► or with something else, if people prefer that as the input method, if they would rather

00:20:38 ◼   ► do that than use a mouse to get their work done, or they feel like it's easier or better

00:20:41 ◼   ► or faster to get their work done that way, you can't have it vertical because no one

00:20:45 ◼   ► wants to draw on a vertical surface, right?

00:20:47 ◼   ► They're always going to draw on a slant.

00:20:48 ◼   ► So is that—are they compromising their body's ergonomics to get a more efficient position

00:20:52 ◼   ► for drawing or manipulating things?

00:20:55 ◼   ► I'm not sure.

00:20:56 ◼   ► But it's worth considering whether that's an ergonomic regression and whether, even

00:21:02 ◼   ► if people like using their fingers or a stylus better than using a mouse, doing so necessarily

00:21:06 ◼   ► makes it so that you're going to be—that you're going to screw yourself up more.

00:21:10 ◼   ► See, I would wager that that might be an improvement, the drafting table or the monk's table.

00:21:16 ◼   ► never worked at one, I have to imagine that the reason that monks didn't use a flat desk

00:21:20 ◼   ► like we all use today is because they found that it was ergonomically better not to hunch.

00:21:25 ◼   ► And so if you could get an iPad hypothetically mounted on an incline in such a way that it

00:21:31 ◼   ► doesn't go sliding down that incline every time you release it, I would actually expect

00:21:36 ◼   ► that to be an improvement. I think that would be better.

00:21:38 ◼   ► Because the whole thing is you're touching it. Obviously, vertical screen, that's a nonstarter

00:21:45 ◼   ► for touching, because we can't hold our arms out in front of us, and drawing on a vertical

00:21:49 ◼   ► surface is much more difficult than drawing on something that's more on your lap or whatever.

00:21:53 ◼   ► So I don't know.

00:21:54 ◼   ► The second one that neither of us thought of, because it sounds crazy to us, but because

00:21:57 ◼   ► it sounds crazy I figure it's worth bringing up, is getting back to the physical keyboard

00:22:02 ◼   ► thing with text input and everything.

00:22:04 ◼   ► The possibility that we didn't think of was, what if having a physical keyboard is not

00:22:10 ◼   ► better enough for people to care?

00:22:13 ◼   ► That's kind of what happened on the phone space.

00:22:15 ◼   ► And you can say, well, the phone space is different because they have space restrictions

00:22:17 ◼   ► and it let the screen get bigger, it had all these offsets or whatever.

00:22:21 ◼   ► But if you had asked any tech nerd before the iPhone existed, what do you think about

00:22:25 ◼   ► the idea of getting rid of all the hardware keyboards are in place into the software keyboard?

00:22:27 ◼   ► They'd be like, well, that might work, but you know, for serious text input, you're always

00:22:31 ◼   ► going to need a hardware keyboard.

00:22:32 ◼   ► And we're saying exactly the same thing about the personal computer.

00:22:35 ◼   ► Well, you know, you can type on an iPad screen, but it's terrible.

00:22:37 ◼   ► Like, if anyone's doing serious text input all day, of course they need a hardware keyboard.

00:22:41 ◼   ► I mean, I'm not going to write my Objective-C code for my iOS application on a piece of

00:22:45 ◼   ► glass keyboard.

00:22:46 ◼   ► I need a real keyboard, right?

00:22:48 ◼   ► It could be that even though we will think that till the day we die, just like some Blackberry

00:22:53 ◼   ► users will think that till the day they die, that it won't matter for the rest of the world

00:22:57 ◼   ► and we'll get outvoted.

00:22:59 ◼   ► Is that a horrifying scenario?

00:23:01 ◼   ► People using big iPad-looking things, none of them with a physical keyboard in sight,

00:23:05 ◼   ► just typing on the glass?

00:23:06 ◼   ► It's terrible for me to think of.

00:23:07 ◼   ► I would never want to do that.

00:23:08 ◼   ► I think it's worth considering that what we want may not be what everyone else wants.

00:23:15 ◼   ► And how many computing tasks these days don't even involve that much text input?

00:23:19 ◼   ► If you're browsing news, browsing Facebook, occasionally typing short comments and various

00:23:24 ◼   ► things, occasionally typing short emails, that's not really keyboard intensive.

00:23:29 ◼   ► That's one of the reasons why so many people can spend so much time on phones and tablets

00:23:33 ◼   ► without running into that problem very often.

00:23:36 ◼   ► I'm thinking even for people who type all day.

00:23:38 ◼   ► Like, we say, well, that's fine, but a developer's never going to use it.

00:23:41 ◼   ► Developer types all day.

00:23:42 ◼   ► Like, maybe we're just dinosaurs, and it's possible, like, once we move away from the

00:23:47 ◼   ► on-screen keyboard being a little picture of a physical keyboard, I can imagine an interesting,

00:23:54 ◼   ► futuristic kind of soft keyboard that incorporates gestures or some other crazy stuff that would

00:23:59 ◼   ► actually make some future developer who isn't born yet more efficient at writing code than

00:24:03 ◼   ► we are with our little things where we press keys that are sort of the modern-day equivalent

00:24:08 ◼   ► of the big things that used to be attached to a lever that would make a little metal

00:24:11 ◼   ► thing whack against an ink ribbon, make a mark on a piece of paper.

00:24:16 ◼   ► I'm not willing to entirely rule out the possibility that a physical keyboard could go away on

00:24:22 ◼   ► the personal computer the same way it went away on the phone, even though none of us

00:24:26 ◼   ► will ever accept that as a good idea.

00:24:29 ◼   ► This makes me think of a couple things.

00:24:31 ◼   ► Firstly, you're almost describing when you said, oh, well, some new kind of keyboard

00:24:35 ◼   ► with gestures and whatnot.

00:24:36 ◼   ► You're making me think of graffiti or whatever.

00:24:40 ◼   ► Didn't Newton have an equivalent of Palm's graffiti?

00:24:42 ◼   ► No.

00:24:43 ◼   ► No, it just did real handwriting recognition, which is why it didn't work really, really

00:24:47 ◼   ► badly.

00:24:48 ◼   ► I love graffiti.

00:24:49 ◼   ► Yeah, I love graffiti as well.

00:24:51 ◼   ► So you're making me think of graffiti, which I think for a power user could work, but for

00:24:55 ◼   ► an average person, I don't know if that would work out.

00:24:58 ◼   ► But you also made me think, I don't know if you guys had ever paid attention to someone

00:25:04 ◼   ► with a Japanese keyboard.

00:25:07 ◼   ► And I'm thinking of our friend Will Haynes, who is an Australian-born guy who lives in

00:25:14 ◼   ► Japan and I've hung out with him at WWDC many times.

00:25:18 ◼   ► And watching him type on that keyboard is really weird but really cool.

00:25:24 ◼   ► And he explained it to me once, I don't know how it works, and all the Japanese users

00:25:28 ◼   ► are probably getting upset at me now, but basically he somehow put together, I guess,

00:25:33 ◼   ► the core of the word by way of like drawing it because it's, you know, all symbols and

00:25:39 ◼   ► it would help him auto-complete the basic word he wanted.

00:25:43 ◼   ► And again, if you know anyone that uses this keyboard, seek out their two cents because

00:25:48 ◼   ► they can explain it much better than I, but what I'm driving at is maybe you could do

00:25:52 ◼   ► something like that but with a traditional keyboard and sort of graffiti-esque, but maybe

00:25:57 ◼   ► something different. And then the final thought I had was, you know, what if what makes us

00:26:04 ◼   ► leave a physical keyboard behind is getting a keyboard on a screen feeling more like a

00:26:10 ◼   ► keyboard on a desk? And so that makes me think of what if we could do something crazy with

00:26:15 ◼   ► haptics so you know you could get some semblance of touch on a flat piece of glass. And I feel

00:26:21 ◼   ► like some video was floating around recently that showed a demo of this.

00:26:25 ◼   ► Yeah, the little things, little blisters pop up on the screen.

00:26:28 ◼   ► Right, right, right, right. So maybe that would be enough to get us over the hump of using

00:26:33 ◼   ► a glass keyboard. I just imagine my great-great-grandchildren entertaining

00:26:38 ◼   ► the thought of lumps rising on the screen to simulate keys which are simulating the

00:26:42 ◼   ► keys on a typewriter and just being disgusted by it and saying, "That's so stupid."

00:26:47 ◼   ► Like, what I was thinking of in terms of interfaces for touch keyboards, well,

00:26:51 ◼   ► one is like the modern-day swipe things, you know, swipe on Android or wherever it came from,

00:26:54 ◼   ► you know, where you slide your finger. Obviously that motion of sliding your finger around,

00:26:58 ◼   ► that would never work on a typewriter or on a physical keyboard because like the keys,

00:27:02 ◼   ► you know, it would be awkward on a keyboard and it would not work at all on a typewriter, right?

00:27:07 ◼   ► But people do it all the time. But I'm thinking like with programming, if you had

00:27:11 ◼   ► tiny gestures for matching parens and curlies and indenting regions and selecting regions and

00:27:17 ◼   ► the things you do in programming, you know, that's kind of like, well, you know, I type all day,

00:27:22 ◼   ► I write code. I can't use a keyboard that's on a screen. I need a physical keyboard. In fact,

00:27:27 ◼   ► I need a fancy physical keyboard with special key switches that are, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:27:31 ◼   ► I'm trying to think that it is conceivable to me that someone who's not me could be more efficient

00:27:39 ◼   ► with a very clever on-screen keyboard. And I think the whole reason this would come to pass is

00:27:45 ◼   ► that if tablets do become more capable and people continue to prefer to use them for more and more

00:27:52 ◼   ► task and that's the thing that sort of goes in tandem where it's like people prefer it and so

00:27:56 ◼   ► maybe it will expand its capability once it expands the capability people will try it for something

00:28:00 ◼   ► use it for that purpose and like it and like using their PCs less and less and buy fewer

00:28:06 ◼   ► PCs and replace their PCs less often but continue to buy more and more tablets that you know that

00:28:12 ◼   ► that's how the transition would take place um so i don't know like i in my personal life i can think

00:28:18 ◼   ► I think of only a few things that I prefer to do on my iPad.

00:28:21 ◼   ► It's not like I'm living the example of this.

00:28:23 ◼   ► I'm not one of those people who tries to live on my iPad.

00:28:25 ◼   ► I'm never going to give up my personal computers for my life.

00:28:28 ◼   ► I like them.

00:28:29 ◼   ► There are things I'll always want to do there.

00:28:31 ◼   ► But when I just want to read a bunch of long articles,

00:28:35 ◼   ► I'd rather do that on my iPad.

00:28:37 ◼   ► And when I want to watch video, I'd

00:28:39 ◼   ► rather do that on my iPad.

00:28:41 ◼   ► And so there's two things right off the bat.

00:28:43 ◼   ► And I know a lot of other people who

00:28:44 ◼   ► have a much, much longer list of things

00:28:46 ◼   ► rather do on their iPad than on their personal computer. And I'm just extrapolating that

00:28:51 ◼   ► trend more or less.

00:28:53 ◼   ► Fair enough. So Marco, what's really exciting these days?

00:28:57 ◼   ► It is our friends once again at lynda.com. L-Y-N-D-A dot com. lynda.com helps anyone

00:29:05 ◼   ► learn creative software and business skills to achieve your personal and professional

00:29:09 ◼   ► goals. They have over 2,000 high quality engaging video courses taught by industry experts and

00:29:15 ◼   ► and they're adding new courses every single day.

00:29:19 ◼   ► This is a very wide breadth of courses from beginner to advanced levels.

00:29:23 ◼   ► These videos have animations and diagrams.

00:29:26 ◼   ► It's very easy to find exactly what you need in their massive catalog.

00:29:29 ◼   ► And all this, you get access to their entire catalog for just $25 a month, flat, unlimited.

00:29:37 ◼   ► It's really fantastic.

00:29:38 ◼   ► You get the entire course library, $25 a month for unlimited access.

00:29:43 ◼   ► Over 2 million people worldwide are using lynda.com to help themselves reach their professional

00:29:47 ◼   ► goals. It's really great.

00:29:50 ◼   ► So when they gave us a sponsorship, I went and watched a few on Logic, the audio editing

00:29:57 ◼   ► software that I use for the show. And I learned a lot. And I tell you what, these videos are

00:30:01 ◼   ► actually really good. I was really pleasantly pleased. Anyway, I was really pleasantly pleased.

00:30:11 ◼   ► Because I wasn't surprised, I expected them to be good.

00:30:15 ◼   ► Anyway, I was pleased with the results of these videos.

00:30:19 ◼   ► They really do, they say they put in animations and diagrams, they really did.

00:30:23 ◼   ► And it's very high production value, and I really did learn

00:30:27 ◼   ► a lot, and I'm going to keep watching more. So I'm very happy with what I learned

00:30:31 ◼   ► on lynda.com. So anyway, back to the script here.

00:30:35 ◼   ► They have easy to follow videos, curated course content,

00:30:39 ◼   ► expert teachers, this is interesting, the instructors here are not just like, you know, some random person who wrote a tutorial on YouTube and then is giving it back to you.

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00:30:52 ◼   ► You can watch from any device, computer, tablet, mobile, it even didn't require me to use Flash on my desktop, which I always respect, it worked in my Flashless Safari, which is great.

00:31:04 ◼   ► So anyway, some examples of what they offer.

00:31:07 ◼   ► They have, as I mentioned, I watch something for Logic,

00:31:11 ◼   ► the audio editing software.

00:31:13 ◼   ► They also have other creative pro software

00:31:16 ◼   ► like Photoshop, Illustrator, stuff like that.

00:31:18 ◼   ► Final Cut video stuff.

00:31:20 ◼   ► They also have development.

00:31:22 ◼   ► Objective-C, iOS, iOS 7 new stuff,

00:31:25 ◼   ► user interface design, Unix principles for Mac programmers,

00:31:28 ◼   ► stuff like that.

00:31:29 ◼   ► Plus web stuff, Perl, ASP.NET,

00:31:31 ◼   ► So you can be just like John and Casey, respectively.

00:31:34 ◼   ► And PHP with MySQL, so you can be miserable like me.

00:31:38 ◼   ► And JavaScript, if you want to be much cooler than any of us.

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00:31:45 ◼   ► Go to lynda.com, lynda.com, for a free seven day trial.

00:31:51 ◼   ► If you just go to /atp at that URL.

00:31:53 ◼   ► So lynda.com/atp, you will get a free seven day trial.

00:32:00 ◼   ► You can check out all their videos during those seven days.

00:32:02 ◼   ► Well, you can't really, you can check out some of their videos during those seven days

00:32:05 ◼   ► and you can see how good they are.

00:32:07 ◼   ► So thanks a lot to lynda.com for sponsoring our show once again.

00:32:10 ◼   ► Yeah, you know, I watched a video of, pieces of a video earlier tonight on Photography

00:32:16 ◼   ► 101 because I don't know anything about taking pictures.

00:32:18 ◼   ► I know that I have an iPhone that takes pretty good pictures as long as I point at a decent

00:32:22 ◼   ► subject.

00:32:23 ◼   ► And the video was really well done, but it does, the way Linda set up, it works even

00:32:28 ◼   ► better than you'd expect.

00:32:29 ◼   ► So there was a transcript that was scrolling of the exact words that the instructor was

00:32:34 ◼   ► saying.

00:32:35 ◼   ► And what was really cool was I wanted to go back and hear what he said again.

00:32:39 ◼   ► So I looked at the transcript and was like, and I thought to myself, "Well, I wonder

00:32:43 ◼   ► if I can, I can."

00:32:44 ◼   ► And I just clicked the sentence that I wanted him to go back to.

00:32:47 ◼   ► And this is all without flash.

00:32:49 ◼   ► The video scrubbed back to exactly where I wanted it to be.

00:32:52 ◼   ► And it showed exactly what I wanted all over again.

00:32:54 ◼   ► And I could go on and on for a long time.

00:32:56 ◼   ► It's suffice to say, this may not sound like it's very good,

00:32:59 ◼   ► and a very good way to learn,

00:33:00 ◼   ► but I learned a lot in the, I don't know,

00:33:02 ◼   ► hour I spent watching this video.

00:33:03 ◼   ► It was really impressive.

00:33:05 ◼   ► - I checked out the site too,

00:33:06 ◼   ► and the one thing that struck me,

00:33:07 ◼   ► I've heard a lot of lynda.com ads,

00:33:08 ◼   ► and I assume, yeah, they both have a bunch

00:33:10 ◼   ► of video tutorials up there.

00:33:12 ◼   ► If you haven't gone to the site,

00:33:13 ◼   ► you have no idea how many videos they have.

00:33:15 ◼   ► They do not have like 10 videos.

00:33:17 ◼   ► Like I said, I'm gonna learn about Photoshop.

00:33:19 ◼   ► You know how many Photoshop videos this site has?

00:33:21 ◼   ► Unbelievable amount of like,

00:33:23 ◼   ► It's not like one or two videos on each topic area.

00:33:27 ◼   ► It's like tens, dozens, hundreds,

00:33:29 ◼   ► like in every tiny possible detail.

00:33:32 ◼   ► And they have the 101s and that's a good place to start.

00:33:34 ◼   ► But if you want to know, like,

00:33:36 ◼   ► I was looking at the audio things

00:33:37 ◼   ► 'cause that's what Marco was looking at too.

00:33:38 ◼   ► And it's like the best way to mic instruments for live.

00:33:41 ◼   ► It was like totally super esoteric

00:33:43 ◼   ► all the way up to photography 101.

00:33:45 ◼   ► So if you think there's not any video for you

00:33:48 ◼   ► because you're too much of a beginner

00:33:50 ◼   ► or too much of an expert, I bet you'll find something.

00:33:53 ◼   ► - All right, so what else do we have going on?

00:33:56 ◼   ► There's a new Microsoft CEO.

00:33:58 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:33:59 ◼   ► - Do we care?

00:34:00 ◼   ► - I think it's interesting this week.

00:34:03 ◼   ► I don't know how much longer it will be interesting to us.

00:34:08 ◼   ► I mean, you know, my theory on this,

00:34:09 ◼   ► which I posted today on my site,

00:34:11 ◼   ► is like, I think Microsoft,

00:34:13 ◼   ► and we've talked about this at length here,

00:34:14 ◼   ► so I'm not gonna go too far into it,

00:34:15 ◼   ► but basically I think Microsoft really could go two ways.

00:34:20 ◼   ► They could either keep trying to break into

00:34:23 ◼   ► new consumer mobile markets that they are failing at breaking into. And it's costing

00:34:29 ◼   ► them dearly to keep trying this in both money and in embarrassment, and just time, opportunity

00:34:34 ◼   ► costs, stuff like that. So they can keep trying and probably failing to break into mobile.

00:34:41 ◼   ► Or they can keep further investing and focusing on what they're very successful at, which

00:34:46 ◼   ► is enterprise services and the new cloud division. And they can build that up some more. They

00:34:51 ◼   ► secure that, lock it down, build it up. I think because the new CEO, is it pronounced

00:34:58 ◼   ► Satya Nadella?

00:34:59 ◼   ► I'm not sure. I believe that's right.

00:35:01 ◼   ► I Googled it beforehand. I watched the video, the Microsoft video, where they announced

00:35:06 ◼   ► the guy. It wasn't him saying his own name, but it was a Microsoft person saying it, and

00:35:09 ◼   ► I played it back like nine times. I was like, "I can't tell what you're doing at the end

00:35:12 ◼   ► of that name!" And then I Googled "how to pronounce whatever," and they have all these

00:35:16 ◼   ► videos where people say it, and they all swallow up the last two syllables, or the last syllable,

00:35:20 ◼   ► So I can't tell what the hell they're saying, but my guess is Satya.

00:35:24 ◼   ► That's my guess.

00:35:25 ◼   ► Okay.

00:35:26 ◼   ► Assuming it's pronounced Satya Nadella, new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella comes from their

00:35:32 ◼   ► cloud and enterprise division.

00:35:35 ◼   ► And I think that says a lot.

00:35:37 ◼   ► My one reservation is the new role that Bill Gates is supposedly taking on.

00:35:45 ◼   ► Now, part of this could be just kind of a sham

00:35:50 ◼   ► to show investors that like, oh, Bill Gates

00:35:53 ◼   ► supports this guy and therefore you should all be at ease.

00:35:56 ◼   ► You know, 'cause during any kind of transition like this

00:35:58 ◼   ► for a big public company, especially one that's had

00:36:01 ◼   ► as few CEOs as Microsoft, you know, this is a big deal.

00:36:04 ◼   ► You wanna ease investors' concerns.

00:36:07 ◼   ► So part of the Bill Gates thing, saying that he's gonna

00:36:09 ◼   ► be back three days a week and be, you know, in charge

00:36:13 ◼   ► of some kind of technology BS sounding position where he's going to be directing something

00:36:19 ◼   ► or other. That sounds a lot like nothing to worry about investors. Carry on. Bill Gates

00:36:26 ◼   ► likes this guy and is supporting him.

00:36:28 ◼   ► Who is that making feel better exactly though?

00:36:31 ◼   ► I don't… well, so here's the wild card though. Bill Gates has always had this kind

00:36:39 ◼   ► of personality complex where he has always clearly been very desperate to prove to the

00:36:45 ◼   ► world and the industry that he and his company can innovate and that they are great inventors

00:36:53 ◼   ► and are really innovative and are making cool stuff for consumers. That has always been

00:36:58 ◼   ► Bill Gates' obsession. And you could tell in comments he's made over the last 20 years

00:37:03 ◼   ► how much he cares about that and how he keeps having to like yell at people because no one

00:37:07 ◼   ► believes it. And so it seems like, you know, the idea of de-emphasizing consumer stuff

00:37:17 ◼   ► and just focusing on enterprise stuff, the idea of that does not sound like Bill Gates.

00:37:22 ◼   ► It doesn't sound like something he would do. He didn't do it during most of his time

00:37:26 ◼   ► and most of his power. And, you know, like my position is they should literally like

00:37:33 ◼   ► embrace that they're boring, that they serve businesses and cloud stuff well, that's very

00:37:39 ◼   ► boring to consumers, they're not going to go away. Windows PCs are still going to be

00:37:44 ◼   ► ubiquitous, regardless of how well Macs do, that Macs are never going to have 100% PC

00:37:51 ◼   ► market. They never will. They will never even come close, because there's a lot of the market

00:37:54 ◼   ► they don't address willingly.

00:37:58 ◼   ► PCs are always going to be needed for things. Yeah, we talked about how tablets are going

00:38:02 ◼   ► going to, you know, tablets are taking some other share, but ultimately I think PCs are

00:38:08 ◼   ► still safe, especially in the workplace.

00:38:12 ◼   ► And so I think if Microsoft can have a very successful business being boring, that's the

00:38:20 ◼   ► part of their business that actually work the best, that actually succeed, where in

00:38:23 ◼   ► many cases they're the best option.

00:38:27 ◼   ► And in the consumer space they can just keep losing.

00:38:30 ◼   ► And I'm not saying they should totally withdraw.

00:38:32 ◼   ► You know, Xbox does fine.

00:38:33 ◼   ► Bing does OK.

00:38:35 ◼   ► Even Windows on consumer PCs does OK.

00:38:37 ◼   ► But it doesn't need to be an area where they focus

00:38:40 ◼   ► intense amounts of effort.

00:38:41 ◼   ► You know, my position in the post

00:38:43 ◼   ► was they should just give people what they actually

00:38:45 ◼   ► want from Windows, which is keep making mostly the same thing

00:38:50 ◼   ► and just make slow incremental changes.

00:38:53 ◼   ► Don't do anything big and daring like Windows 8.

00:38:55 ◼   ► Don't do that again.

00:38:57 ◼   ► Just do slow incremental changes.

00:38:59 ◼   ► slowly make the same thing better.

00:39:01 ◼   ► We don't want anything new, just make the same thing better.

00:39:05 ◼   ► And I'm worried that if Bill Gates' position is actually

00:39:09 ◼   ► real, and if he's actually going to be spending a lot of time

00:39:11 ◼   ► in it, and if he's actually going to have enough power

00:39:13 ◼   ► to push product direction, I worry

00:39:16 ◼   ► that he's not going to let that happen,

00:39:18 ◼   ► because he's going to continue being so desperate to prove

00:39:20 ◼   ► to the world that he's this visionary innovator,

00:39:22 ◼   ► that he won't let them focus on the boring stuff.

00:39:26 ◼   ► But he hasn't taken that role for a long time.

00:39:30 ◼   ► So maybe he's over it.

00:39:32 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:39:33 ◼   ► So what you're saying is you want

00:39:35 ◼   ► them to be progressive and forward thinking in the server

00:39:39 ◼   ► space while simultaneously being boring and regressive

00:39:42 ◼   ► in the consumer space?

00:39:45 ◼   ► I don't even think they have to be regressive.

00:39:47 ◼   ► And I think they just have to just stop trying

00:39:49 ◼   ► to make giant sweeping changes.

00:39:51 ◼   ► Just accept your position in the consumer space

00:39:54 ◼   ► is you power the bulk of the PC market, which is boring.

00:39:59 ◼   ► You don't have any meaningful presence in mobile or tablets.

00:40:04 ◼   ► And my theory on that is that it's too late for them to do that,

00:40:08 ◼   ► and that this era of mobile and tablets is decided.

00:40:13 ◼   ► It's one. It's a Google and iOS hegemony?

00:40:16 ◼   ► Is that the right word?

00:40:18 ◼   ► - I know what you're thinking,

00:40:19 ◼   ► and I don't know how to pronounce it.

00:40:20 ◼   ► you know, Google and iOS will together dominate this space. You know, iOS will pretty much

00:40:26 ◼   ► have a lock on the top end, Google will have a lock on pretty much everything else for

00:40:31 ◼   ► a long time. You know, this is like a generation in computing. This is going to last. You know,

00:40:35 ◼   ► it might be 10 or 15 years. It's going to be a while. And Microsoft is not in that game.

00:40:41 ◼   ► And it's too late for them to break into that game, I think. You know, it's just--what could

00:40:46 ◼   ► they possibly do to take 15, 20, 30 percent market share? I don't see it. So I think

00:40:53 ◼   ► they should focus on the parts of their businesses that work and that have potential for growth.

00:41:00 ◼   ► And consumer mobile is not it.

00:41:03 ◼   ► So I guess it just seems contradictory that you would want them to kind of just go and

00:41:10 ◼   ► cruise control and/or… I mean, I can understand if you said bail. Like, okay, screw it. Consumers

00:41:15 ◼   ► just not working, bail from everything. Bail from phone, bail from Windows as a consumer

00:41:20 ◼   ► OS, bail from Xbox, bail from it all. But it seems a little, I don't know, contradictory

00:41:26 ◼   ► to say, "Well, just kind of cruise on the consumer side, but really keep kicking ass

00:41:33 ◼   ► on the server side."

00:41:34 ◼   ► Well, like, Apple hasn't stopped making iPods.

00:41:36 ◼   ► Yeah, that's a fair point.

00:41:39 ◼   ► I think it's similar. You know, the market for iPods—and actually, I think the Windows

00:41:43 ◼   ► PC market is even safer long term than the market for iPods long term. I don't think

00:41:51 ◼   ► they have to axe a business that is doing very well, as long as they can just keep letting

00:41:58 ◼   ► it do well without investing tons of resources into keeping it doing well at the expense

00:42:03 ◼   ► of other things they're doing. What I'm saying basically is put Windows and Office

00:42:08 ◼   ► into something slightly better than maintenance mode. Literally, just keep doing what you're doing,

00:42:16 ◼   ► keep giving people windows the way they want it, ship an update every couple of years with minor

00:42:23 ◼   ► changes. That's all people want. But you can do that, but you need some other business to be your

00:42:30 ◼   ► next big thing. You can do that as like, "Don't screw this up. Keep it going. Make incremental

00:42:35 ◼   ► improvements, and that will give us the opportunity to work on the next big thing.

00:42:39 ◼   ► Because if you don't work on the next big thing and just maintain that, eventually,

00:42:43 ◼   ► that thing you're maintaining will become irrelevant and gone. You'll get eaten from

00:42:47 ◼   ► some direction or another by someone else, and that will be gone. And you have to have

00:42:52 ◼   ► something else ready to go as your next big thing. Now, it could be that services is the

00:42:55 ◼   ► next big thing. It could be cloud or whatever you want to do. That's our next big thing. That's going

00:42:59 ◼   ► to be like, "Yeah, we'll do what consumers want with Windows and keep having that market aware."

00:43:04 ◼   ► but we're just doing that to sort of keep the lights on and not screw it up like we have been.

00:43:09 ◼   ► And we'll use that as a launching pad to get really big in services.

00:43:11 ◼   ► When I think about services, though, this is like a problem for shareholders and for

00:43:19 ◼   ► Microsoft's new CEO. What's the biggest company that you can think of that serves only businesses

00:43:24 ◼   ► and not consumers? >> IBM.

00:43:26 ◼   ► >> And so do you think Microsoft would be happy being the size of IBM in terms of market cap and

00:43:32 ◼   ► and the character of IBM, and the number of employees of IBM,

00:43:35 ◼   ► and the nature of those employees?

00:43:37 ◼   ► Or do you think Microsoft still wants to be the Microsoft

00:43:41 ◼   ► that they were in terms of what percentage of the company

00:43:43 ◼   ► are developers, and what's their market cap,

00:43:46 ◼   ► and what is their revenue, and all that stuff?

00:43:49 ◼   ► - By the way, I should point out that Sam Hay in the chat

00:43:51 ◼   ► is pointing out things like SAP and Oracle

00:43:53 ◼   ► as other giant enterprise companies

00:43:55 ◼   ► that consumers don't hear about.

00:43:57 ◼   ► - Right, I know, that's what I was thinking of.

00:43:58 ◼   ► I was thinking of SAP and Oracle,

00:44:00 ◼   ► but I'm thinking like, is that,

00:44:03 ◼   ► is that the, IBM is another example,

00:44:04 ◼   ► but is that the future that Microsoft sees for itself?

00:44:07 ◼   ► Like, would they be content to be a better IBM,

00:44:11 ◼   ► or a similar to IBM, Oracle, and SAP?

00:44:14 ◼   ► And I think they would consider that a defeat.

00:44:18 ◼   ► And I don't know the numbers off the top of my head,

00:44:21 ◼   ► but I would imagine it would also mean shrinking the company

00:44:24 ◼   ► in terms of market cap.

00:44:26 ◼   ► - Well, do they have a choice, though?

00:44:28 ◼   ► Like, is this-- suppose they actually can become

00:44:33 ◼   ► as big as those companies.

00:44:34 ◼   ► And suppose they actually can be as successful in the enterprise

00:44:39 ◼   ► services business to be at that scale.

00:44:43 ◼   ► It seems like that's at least plausible, if not likely.

00:44:46 ◼   ► What are their other choices?

00:44:48 ◼   ► Someone in the chat room needs to do the research for us

00:44:51 ◼   ► and say, what are the market cap for IBM, SAP, Oracle,

00:44:54 ◼   ► and what have their profits been like?

00:44:56 ◼   ► 'cause Microsoft is still making tons of profit

00:44:58 ◼   ► and I have a hard time believing that IBM, Oracle, and SAP

00:45:01 ◼   ► are making that kind of green at this point,

00:45:03 ◼   ► but I don't know.

00:45:04 ◼   ► - Well, but you know, Microsoft is not making profit on,

00:45:06 ◼   ► as far as I can tell, they're not making substantial profit

00:45:09 ◼   ► on Windows Mobile.

00:45:10 ◼   ► I would say their Surface division is doing pretty poorly.

00:45:14 ◼   ► Like the areas that I'm suggesting they stop trying

00:45:18 ◼   ► so hard in are those like, let's get back at the iPad

00:45:23 ◼   ► and let's defeat Android kind of thing.

00:45:25 ◼   ► that's the stuff where they keep failing miserably.

00:45:28 ◼   ► You know, they've gone through this period

00:45:30 ◼   ► over the last 10, 15 years where,

00:45:34 ◼   ► you know, Gruber had a great piece about this

00:45:36 ◼   ► on his site today, about how their whole original idea

00:45:39 ◼   ► of a computer on every desk and in every home

00:45:41 ◼   ► running Microsoft software, they did it.

00:45:44 ◼   ► They won.

00:45:45 ◼   ► Like, by the mid-90s, they won.

00:45:47 ◼   ► And they didn't really know what to do from there.

00:45:49 ◼   ► And so they kind of started flailing

00:45:51 ◼   ► and doing all sorts of weird stuff on the side.

00:45:53 ◼   ► That's where you got things like MSN,

00:45:55 ◼   ► and then like MSNBC, and Bing, and the Xbox,

00:46:00 ◼   ► and some stuff like that,

00:46:01 ◼   ► and some of the weird research stuff.

00:46:03 ◼   ► And a few of those things worked,

00:46:05 ◼   ► although they usually lost a ton of money

00:46:06 ◼   ► in the process of working,

00:46:08 ◼   ► and might still be losing tons of money.

00:46:11 ◼   ► A few of those things worked,

00:46:12 ◼   ► but none of them have really gotten big enough

00:46:14 ◼   ► to be like their next big business.

00:46:16 ◼   ► What I'm suggesting is they should probably

00:46:22 ◼   ► focus on what they can actually do. Focus on the stuff that they already have promise.

00:46:29 ◼   ► And like the Brent Simmons post about this too, about how if they focus more on Azure

00:46:34 ◼   ► and the mobile services, they could be a big competitor to Amazon Web Services. That would

00:46:38 ◼   ► be awesome, because right now there is no big competitor for Amazon Web Services. And

00:46:43 ◼   ► there needs to be. They really could use some competition there for the good of everybody.

00:46:50 ◼   ► And Microsoft could be it.

00:46:52 ◼   ► There's all these things they could do.

00:46:54 ◼   ► But they're instead focusing on all of these areas they keep losing badly.

00:47:00 ◼   ► And there's no hope in sight that that might stop.

00:47:04 ◼   ► That they might stop losing in these areas.

00:47:07 ◼   ► The chat room did our quick research for us.

00:47:09 ◼   ► Microsoft is 279 billion.

00:47:11 ◼   ► IBM is 189.

00:47:13 ◼   ► SAP is 89.

00:47:16 ◼   ► Oracle is some number that I just lost in the scrollback.

00:47:20 ◼   ► Oracle's 161.

00:47:22 ◼   ► And this isn't going to go into profit numbers, because I think I would imagine that Microsoft

00:47:26 ◼   ► is making more profit than those guys, at least now.

00:47:31 ◼   ► What I'm getting at is that any of these strategies are going to mean shrinking the company in

00:47:36 ◼   ► ways that are going to make the new CEO look bad.

00:47:39 ◼   ► Not that I'm saying this is the wrong thing to do, but it's kind of...

00:47:45 ◼   ► Basically, I'm thinking, what is the tolerance for this type of thing?

00:47:48 ◼   ► Like if we're going to say, "We want Microsoft to be a different kind of company, and that

00:47:51 ◼   ► kind of company is necessarily a little bit smaller."

00:47:54 ◼   ► Is everyone going to be like, "Okay, great job, Nadella.

00:47:57 ◼   ► You're doing what we want?"

00:47:58 ◼   ► Or are they going to be like, "Oh, any backsliding?"

00:48:01 ◼   ► Anything other than growth is seen as a failure for the new CEO.

00:48:04 ◼   ► That's what I'm not sure about.

00:48:06 ◼   ► Are they willing to accept shrinking the company permanently?

00:48:11 ◼   ► Not like shrinking it briefly and then growing it back, but shrinking it more or less permanently

00:48:14 ◼   ► to become a different kind of company that is necessarily a little bit smaller.

00:48:18 ◼   ► Does it have to be smaller?

00:48:20 ◼   ► Right. Can you define shrinking? Because IBM is four times as many employees as Microsoft.

00:48:25 ◼   ► I know, but that's what I was getting in terms of the nature of employees. Of those employees,

00:48:28 ◼   ► how many of them are Microsoft employees, and how many of them are contractors and sales

00:48:33 ◼   ► people? IBM is a service organization. You have a very different sort of personnel base

00:48:38 ◼   ► when you're a service organization versus when you're Microsoft developing software.

00:48:42 ◼   ► Like, you will multiply manpower, and that I think will eat into your margins because

00:48:47 ◼   ► you need to have more people.

00:48:49 ◼   ► It's a different kind of business.

00:48:51 ◼   ► And if Microsoft gets serious about this and rededicates their company to sort of business-to-business

00:48:56 ◼   ► transactions, like they're already in that business as well, but if that's what they

00:49:00 ◼   ► get into, presumably they'd have to take share from those companies we just named, right?

00:49:04 ◼   ► Like the market's not going to grow by the amount that Microsoft wants.

00:49:07 ◼   ► They're going to have to take business from IBM, take it from Oracle, take it from SAP.

00:49:10 ◼   ► And again, they're doing that now with their various enterprise things.

00:49:13 ◼   ► But if that's what the company's going to be about, A, that doesn't look like a growth

00:49:17 ◼   ► business to me because I don't think the number of business in the world that want technology

00:49:23 ◼   ► is growing.

00:49:24 ◼   ► I think they're just going to be down there slugging it out with those existing companies

00:49:26 ◼   ► that we just named.

00:49:28 ◼   ► And I think it's just a different type of organization.

00:49:30 ◼   ► And getting back to Bill Gates, I think Bill Gates would consider that a failure if Microsoft

00:49:35 ◼   ► became like IBM Oracle or SAP, even if they were the best IBM Oracle SAP type company.

00:49:41 ◼   ► And even if you didn't have to shrink the company, like Marco said, you can kind of

00:49:45 ◼   ► tell that that's not the kind of Microsoft that Bill Gates wants.

00:49:48 ◼   ► He wants the one that everybody knows, that every person in the world uses Microsoft stuff

00:49:53 ◼   ► and they love it.

00:49:54 ◼   ► He doesn't want to be SAP, where everyone in the world does not use SAP.

00:50:01 ◼   ► Most people don't know what SAP is, and the poor employees who do know what it is are

00:50:04 ◼   ► sad about it.

00:50:05 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:50:08 ◼   ► - Nice. - But you know,

00:50:08 ◼   ► like I'm suggesting that Microsoft keep the businesses

00:50:13 ◼   ► that are making them the most money.

00:50:14 ◼   ► I'm not suggesting that they eliminate

00:50:16 ◼   ► most of their profit.

00:50:17 ◼   ► If anything, my suggestion would probably

00:50:19 ◼   ► make them more profitable,

00:50:20 ◼   ► 'cause they will be able to devote less employee time

00:50:25 ◼   ► to working on radical, giant new products

00:50:28 ◼   ► that are not going to succeed.

00:50:29 ◼   ► - I think there is a glimmer of hope for a growth business.

00:50:32 ◼   ► Like cloud is one thing we discussed

00:50:34 ◼   ► where how many cloud providers are there out there?

00:50:37 ◼   ► Well, there's Amazon, and they do a lot of stuff.

00:50:39 ◼   ► But you can imagine Microsoft doing

00:50:42 ◼   ► what Amazon does but better, both because that's not

00:50:46 ◼   ► Amazon's main business.

00:50:47 ◼   ► They're in business selling you stuff and shipping it to you.

00:50:50 ◼   ► And also because Amazon presumably

00:50:54 ◼   ► would not be as maniacally focused

00:50:55 ◼   ► on the enterprise with their services as Microsoft could be.

00:50:58 ◼   ► And there's some synergy there with Microsoft's existing

00:51:02 ◼   ► enterprise product.

00:51:03 ◼   ► So that's a potential growth market where they could continue to grow their cloud services

00:51:07 ◼   ► year after year and that will look good.

00:51:09 ◼   ► It'll say, "Hey, you decided you're going to do cloud.

00:51:12 ◼   ► Every year you do more cloud stuff.

00:51:13 ◼   ► Every year your revenues and your cloud stuff goes up and people like it and people are

00:51:16 ◼   ► using it, so that's good."

00:51:18 ◼   ► I still think you probably want to have some other growth business in there.

00:51:25 ◼   ► And Mark, I would say that phone is out of the question, tablet's out of the question,

00:51:29 ◼   ► PCs aren't growing.

00:51:31 ◼   ► So don't even bother with those things.

00:51:33 ◼   ► That's maybe true.

00:51:34 ◼   ► Again, watchers and certainly Bill Gates

00:51:36 ◼   ► would consider that a defeat.

00:51:37 ◼   ► It's like, they do have a thing called the Surface,

00:51:40 ◼   ► and they seem to kind of like it.

00:51:41 ◼   ► And I bet they wish that wouldn't fail.

00:51:43 ◼   ► And they do have Windows Phone.

00:51:44 ◼   ► And canning those things would be-- that would be rough.

00:51:47 ◼   ► It would be better if that happened on a Balmer's watch.

00:51:50 ◼   ► And then the new guys comes in, well, the Phone and Surface

00:51:52 ◼   ► things are all gone, so we can concentrate on my new strategy.

00:51:54 ◼   ► But if he's got to be the guy to do that,

00:51:56 ◼   ► that's going to be difficult for him.

00:51:58 ◼   ► And if we're trying to think of an area where they can

00:52:00 ◼   ► expand that we just talked about in the beginning part of the show. If anyone can make a tablet

00:52:05 ◼   ► computer that people might use at their desk instead of a Windows PC, maybe it's Microsoft.

00:52:10 ◼   ► I know they haven't done it with the Surface. I know that's not what the Surface is aimed at.

00:52:14 ◼   ► But the magic protection that's keeping the Windows market viable for them is that nobody

00:52:21 ◼   ► else wants it. And the magic protection that may give them the ability to make the Surface Pro,

00:52:29 ◼   ► there I guess there already is a service pro, you know what I mean? A more capable larger

00:52:33 ◼   ► service for people to use, not just for consumers, but for people to use to do their work.

00:52:37 ◼   ► They can bring back the giant table. Yeah, well, the big service, right? Is that

00:52:42 ◼   ► maybe Apple doesn't want that business and maybe Android makers don't go after that business.

00:52:47 ◼   ► So if nobody else does it and it could fall to Microsoft by default, to try and fail perhaps

00:52:54 ◼   ► in that business as they have so far in the tablet and phone markets, but it's there.

00:52:59 ◼   ► I mean, I just don't like to think that we resign ourselves to be boring and to do what we know how

00:53:08 ◼   ► to do. And even if it's not a growth business, we'll take business away from our other competitors.

00:53:13 ◼   ► And it's like, that just doesn't... It's not just Bill Gates. That sounds like a defeat to me.

00:53:18 ◼   ► I would rather see Microsoft go down in flames trying to do crazy stuff. I'd rather see them

00:53:24 ◼   ► keep doing the Xbox stuff, try the Surface stuff. I mean, the Windows phone, all that stuff.

00:53:31 ◼   ► Not a success, really, but I would rather see them go out of business doing that

00:53:35 ◼   ► than stay in business being like Oracle or IBM or SAP.

00:53:39 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer** Well, what if people at Microsoft don't consider it boring

00:53:43 ◼   ► to become a pretty strong player in web services?

00:53:45 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer** It's boring.

00:53:47 ◼   ► Look at Amazon. Lots of people work on that on Amazon. It's become a giant business for them.

00:53:52 ◼   ► Microsoft's best bet may be to be acquired by Apple in 20 years, because if Apple continues

00:53:57 ◼   ► not to be able to do cloud services that well, and Microsoft becomes really good at it, there's

00:54:02 ◼   ► definite synergies there. If eventually they eliminate all the places where there wouldn't

00:54:07 ◼   ► be a good match-up, like, "Well, you have a tablet, and we have a tablet, and you have a phone OS,

00:54:11 ◼   ► and we have a phone OS, and you have a desktop OS." If you get it down to the point where the

00:54:15 ◼   ► acquisition makes sense because Microsoft is, you know, the preeminent cloud services

00:54:20 ◼   ► company and Apple continues to flail, then it would be like, "Well, that's a reasonable

00:54:24 ◼   ► matchup."

00:54:25 ◼   ► Well, to avoid us talking about synergy ever again on the show, we are also brought to

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00:54:37 ◼   ► know, I hear other podcasters reading the script, and they always remove the word "fast."

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00:55:00 ◼   ► Alright!

00:55:01 ◼   ► Yeah, you won this month!

00:55:03 ◼   ► Sorry John.

00:55:04 ◼   ► Yeah, sorry John, you got screwed. So yeah, 10% off, go to squarespace.com, use offer

00:55:08 ◼   ► code Casey this month. Squarespace is always improving their platform with new features,

00:55:13 ◼   ► new designs, and even better support. Their designs are beautiful to start with, but you

00:55:17 ◼   ► can also customize them. Whether you want to do it the easy way through the nice interface,

00:55:21 ◼   ► or whether you want to go down to the code level and inject your own CSS and JavaScript,

00:55:25 ◼   ► you can do that, you can do whatever you want, it's great. And all these fancy designs, which

00:55:30 ◼   ► are designed by actual pro designers, they all have matching mobile layouts. They're

00:55:34 ◼   ► responsive designs and so your site will look great on any device no matter what the size

00:55:39 ◼   ► it is and it will look like your site. It's not going to look like some, you know, like

00:55:42 ◼   ► they have one mobile template for all of them. No, they have different mobile templates for

00:55:45 ◼   ► every theme and it's fantastic. All this ease of use is great, but if you need any help,

00:55:51 ◼   ► they have an amazing support team that works 24 hours a day, seven days a week with over

00:55:55 ◼   ► 70 employees right here in New York City. The customer support team has won tons of

00:55:59 ◼   ► awards. Squarespace has won tons of awards. Pretty impressive. They also about, I think it was about

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00:56:12 ◼   ► if that's still a word, and you can sell physical or virtual goods right on your Squarespace site.

00:56:18 ◼   ► Integrates with credit card processor Stripe and it has really advanced stuff. Shipping tracking,

00:56:25 ◼   ► inventory management, coupon codes, stuff like that.

00:56:28 ◼   ► Really, you can make a very advanced store with this.

00:56:30 ◼   ► And now, I believe this is a new change.

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00:57:04 ◼   ► No credit card required go to squarespace.com and use the offer code

00:57:09 ◼   ► Casey when you do decide to buy to get 10% off and to show your support for our show

00:57:14 ◼   ► So thanks a lot to Squarespace for sponsoring ATP once again. Squarespace.com offer code Casey

00:57:20 ◼   ► By the way, you would be surprised how many people misspell Casey's name in feedback.

00:57:26 ◼   ► We've seen "Kassy"...

00:57:27 ◼   ► That's true.

00:57:28 ◼   ► We see a lot of "Kassy" with two S's.

00:57:29 ◼   ► We should spell it on every episode of the show.

00:57:30 ◼   ► Yeah, maybe in like the end, in like a song or jingle or something.

00:57:34 ◼   ► Yeah, make it easy to remember.

00:57:35 ◼   ► And actually, I was gonna say, the only problem with using my name as the offer code is that

00:57:42 ◼   ► now I'm going to hear for the next three weeks on Twitter, "Oh, who the hell is Casey?"

00:57:47 ◼   ► Who the hell is Casey?

00:57:48 ◼   ► and over and over and over again. So I'm very thankful for Squarespace for sponsoring

00:57:54 ◼   ► and for honoring me with that awesome offer code, but oh my lord, I'm doomed.

00:57:59 ◼   ► Hey, you complained when the offer code was Marco, so now this is what you get.

00:58:02 ◼   ► Yeah, I didn't think that went through at all.

00:58:04 ◼   ► Not at one bit.

00:58:05 ◼   ► Oh, goodness. Sorry, what else is going on?

00:58:08 ◼   ► Well, actually, before we get off on the del, I want to talk briefly about the guy himself

00:58:12 ◼   ► and a little bit of the excitement that I get from, or maybe the lack of excitement

00:58:17 ◼   ► other people have from having this new person. Because since it was just announced, it's like

00:58:21 ◼   ► there's this world of possibilities. Despite the Bill Gates factor, there's new leadership

00:58:27 ◼   ► at a company. This company has not had a lot of CEOs in its lifetime. Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer,

00:58:33 ◼   ► then this guy. And that's a long time for each of them. And if you want to consider the Bill Gates,

00:58:39 ◼   ► Steve Ballmer thing as not really much of a transition because the two of them were there

00:58:43 ◼   ► in the beginning and the two of them sort of ran the company together and then Bill Gates just kind

00:58:47 ◼   ► of opted out. It was sort of a continuation of the Bill Gates reign. Who knows what this new guy will

00:58:53 ◼   ► do? Even though he's a company man and has been in the company for 22 years and all that other stuff,

00:58:57 ◼   ► there's the potential like there always is when you have a change in leadership

00:59:02 ◼   ► for him to do interesting, exciting, unexpected, radical things. We don't know what, at least I

00:59:09 ◼   ► don't know enough about his personality to know is he that type of person or is he just kind of

00:59:13 ◼   ► of like a slow and steady, not going to do anything crazy.

00:59:16 ◼   ► Steve Ballmer, personality-wise, always seemed crazy and insane and very interesting and

00:59:20 ◼   ► fun to watch, and his developers' stuff and throwing chairs and stuff like that.

00:59:24 ◼   ► And yet the way he ran the company was very conservative.

00:59:27 ◼   ► This guy seems like a cool, mellow dude, but maybe he's going to make crazy, radical, Steve

00:59:32 ◼   ► Jobs-esque moves.

00:59:33 ◼   ► And since he just took the job, now is the time for me to entertain those fantasies until

00:59:37 ◼   ► he goes through a year of just doing boring stuff and I get disappointed.

00:59:41 ◼   ► Well, and somebody tweeted, and I don't have it in front of me and I apologize, but

00:59:45 ◼   ► somebody had tweeted something along the lines of, you know, if you look at Google, there's

00:59:51 ◼   ► – what is the psycho guy, psycho privacy guy, CEO?

00:59:57 ◼   ► Eric Schmidt.

00:59:58 ◼   ► Thank you.

00:59:59 ◼   ► He's no longer the CEO, but I think – is he still chairman?

01:00:01 ◼   ► He's at least still on the board, I think.

01:00:03 ◼   ► Anyway, so –

01:00:04 ◼   ► Right, right, right.

01:00:05 ◼   ► So the point of the tweet was he was a business guy.

01:00:07 ◼   ► And you look at – is it Larry that's currently CEO?

01:00:11 ◼   ► He's of some sort of development background, is he not?

01:00:15 ◼   ► And Satya is also a developer.

01:00:18 ◼   ► And so you're finding this trend, such as this person was saying, you're finding this

01:00:23 ◼   ► trend towards developers as CEOs, which is a very different and powerful thing, as opposed

01:00:27 ◼   ► to having a bunch of businessmen leading these companies.

01:00:32 ◼   ► With the exception, of course, of Tim Cook, who has an MBA.

01:00:35 ◼   ► And I don't know, he was some sort of engineering undergrad, right?

01:00:38 ◼   ► I would consider Tim Cook a continuation of the Steve Jobs reign in the same way that

01:00:42 ◼   ► Ballmer was a continuation of Gates.

01:00:44 ◼   ► It's like two guys who worked in tandem for a large part of the time when they were successful,

01:00:48 ◼   ► then one is gone and the other one is sort of continuing that.

01:00:52 ◼   ► Microsoft seems kind of like Apple was before Steve Jobs came back in terms of having tons

01:00:57 ◼   ► and tons of products and tons of different things.

01:00:59 ◼   ► I've seen a bunch of threads recently in a bunch of articles about people who develop

01:01:03 ◼   ► on Microsoft's platforms complaining about how Microsoft keeps changing its minds about

01:01:07 ◼   ► technologies and APIs and how it's making their lives more difficult.

01:01:09 ◼   ► Well, that's been the case for 15, 20 years.

01:01:11 ◼   ► I mean, that's not new at all.

01:01:13 ◼   ► Well, I mean, like, it's new-ish.

01:01:14 ◼   ► Like in the Windows 95 era, you know, it was like Win32 forever, and this is, you know,

01:01:19 ◼   ► exciting new thing called MFC that's coming.

01:01:21 ◼   ► And you know, like, there was a steady period, and then there was this period of disruption

01:01:26 ◼   ► where they kept changing their mind every 10 minutes.

01:01:28 ◼   ► And it's similar with Apple, where they, towards the end of Apple's bad years, where they were

01:01:34 ◼   ► like, "We're gonna--" you don't remember any of these names.

01:01:36 ◼   ► So we were going to do Power Talk, and we were going to do Open—you probably heard

01:01:39 ◼   ► OpenDoc is his new idea—and we were going to have themes.

01:01:42 ◼   ► They kept changing their mind, and then they would cancel things, and QuickDraw GX, and

01:01:46 ◼   ► QuickDraw 3D, and Rave, and all these technologies that old Mac people know that you've never

01:01:50 ◼   ► heard of and be glad you haven't.

01:01:53 ◼   ► There was too much confusion, and every time they announced one and canceled it and tried

01:01:56 ◼   ► to replace it with something they said was better, that decreased confidence.

01:02:00 ◼   ► And that all reversed when Steve Jobs came, canceled half the company's project.

01:02:03 ◼   ► I mean, they canceled a Newton for crying out loud.

01:02:05 ◼   ► The Newton was like the most forward-thinking, interesting product Apple had, and he canned

01:02:09 ◼   ► it.

01:02:10 ◼   ► And he was right to can it so he could focus the company on what he thought they wanted

01:02:13 ◼   ► to do.

01:02:14 ◼   ► So Nadella could take all these things that are confusing people, that are sending the

01:02:19 ◼   ► wrong signals, that are making people lose confidence in the company, and get rid of

01:02:24 ◼   ► them, and take the heat for getting rid of them the same way Steve Jobs took the heat

01:02:27 ◼   ► for canning the Newton, and start on whatever he thinks is the important thing that—focus

01:02:32 ◼   ► the company basically, get people who aren't excited to leave or get fired, and the people

01:02:37 ◼   ► who remain, I guess, are terrified for a short period of time, but then you inspire them

01:02:42 ◼   ► into being exciting.

01:02:46 ◼   ► The way that rebirth can happen is you could have that incredibly painful shrinking process

01:02:50 ◼   ► and then come out of it stronger.

01:02:51 ◼   ► And I just fear that he's going to be too conservative and too afraid to rock the boat

01:02:57 ◼   ► and too afraid of his first year, all the investors are going to be pissed because he

01:03:02 ◼   ► kills a bunch of profitable product lines to concentrate on everything else he wants

01:03:07 ◼   ► to do.

01:03:08 ◼   ► It gets back to what you were saying before, maybe Microsoft is not—it would be an easier

01:03:13 ◼   ► job if Microsoft was in a worse position for the new CEO.

01:03:16 ◼   ► Exactly, yeah.

01:03:17 ◼   ► Because Apple, when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, they were dying quickly.

01:03:21 ◼   ► Yeah, like 90 days' worth of money left in the bank or something.

01:03:24 ◼   ► If somebody comes in and is like, "All right, I'm going to turn this around drastically.

01:03:27 ◼   ► Here's how to do it," then everyone would be like, "Fine, whatever you want to do,

01:03:29 ◼   ► whatever's going to work, do it."

01:03:31 ◼   ► is making tons of money. And so it's much harder because they are being successful in

01:03:36 ◼   ► so many ways. It's much harder for somebody to come in and axe everything. Like, my plan

01:03:41 ◼   ► doesn't really axe a whole lot. That's why I think it's not only most likely, but probably

01:03:46 ◼   ► what's best for them. It's more about no longer doing massive new re-thinkings of the Windows

01:03:56 ◼   ► UI and stuff like that. It's more about...

01:03:57 ◼   ► You just want them to surrender. That's what you want. To lay down and not die, but just

01:04:04 ◼   ► kind of hang out.

01:04:05 ◼   ► No, that's not it. I almost want them to go back to how they were about 12 to 15 years

01:04:14 ◼   ► ago. Like in the late '90s, early 2000s, on the lead-up to Windows XP. They were doing

01:04:21 ◼   ► very well, and it was mostly because they were working on the internals of Windows,

01:04:27 ◼   ► especially with the Windows Win 16 to NT transition,

01:04:31 ◼   ► whatever the hell it was.

01:04:33 ◼   ► - Technology is not why they were doing it.

01:04:34 ◼   ► They were doing well because, personally,

01:04:36 ◼   ► if you drew the chart of PC sales,

01:04:38 ◼   ► they were going upwards,

01:04:39 ◼   ► and every one of the PCs was sold with Windows on it,

01:04:42 ◼   ► and so Microsoft was going upwards.

01:04:43 ◼   ► That's what was bringing them upwards.

01:04:45 ◼   ► It's not so much like, all those technical things are true,

01:04:48 ◼   ► and when they started to screw it up,

01:04:50 ◼   ► their success with the PC market

01:04:52 ◼   ► hid most of those problems,

01:04:53 ◼   ► and as soon as the PC market stopped growing it

01:04:55 ◼   ► at a crazy rate, then all their problems became revealed,

01:04:59 ◼   ► and they figured out that they didn't know what to do,

01:05:01 ◼   ► and they made lots of new different decisions,

01:05:04 ◼   ► but I don't--

01:05:05 ◼   ► - You know, I disagree with that, actually.

01:05:06 ◼   ► I don't think it was about the growth slowing down

01:05:09 ◼   ► that really hurt them.

01:05:10 ◼   ► I mean, that's hurting them maybe now a little bit,

01:05:13 ◼   ► but I think what really hurt them

01:05:15 ◼   ► was a whole bunch of execution problems

01:05:17 ◼   ► when they tried to do way too much.

01:05:19 ◼   ► This, again, sound familiar?

01:05:22 ◼   ► With Longhorn, which became Vista.

01:05:24 ◼   ► They had these crazy ideas, file system reference,

01:05:27 ◼   ► these crazy ideas that, you know,

01:05:31 ◼   ► they had to cut almost all of them

01:05:33 ◼   ► to get Vista out the door

01:05:34 ◼   ► like five or six years late or something.

01:05:37 ◼   ► Vista was very late, and it was mostly because

01:05:40 ◼   ► they were way too ambitious with what they wanted to do.

01:05:43 ◼   ► They wanted to change too much, and it didn't work.

01:05:46 ◼   ► And Vista came out,

01:05:47 ◼   ► and because it was pretty sloppily done, people hated it.

01:05:50 ◼   ► They tried to change too much,

01:05:52 ◼   ► they changed too many of the wrong things,

01:05:53 ◼   ► they released a sloppy version that everyone hated badly.

01:05:57 ◼   ► And you could say a lot of that about Windows 8.

01:06:00 ◼   ► I don't think it was as sloppy necessarily,

01:06:05 ◼   ► but they tried to do a lot with it,

01:06:08 ◼   ► and a lot of it was not very well done,

01:06:11 ◼   ► and their customers hated almost all of it.

01:06:13 ◼   ► And so that, I think,

01:06:17 ◼   ► they can keep doing that pattern

01:06:20 ◼   ► of keep trying to reinvent Windows

01:06:22 ◼   ► to make a major new splash with Windows again.

01:06:24 ◼   ► But that's probably not gonna happen.

01:06:28 ◼   ► And historically, even before,

01:06:31 ◼   ► even when PCs were growing just fine,

01:06:33 ◼   ► they weren't very good at doing that.

01:06:36 ◼   ► And one more quick thing to play a little bit

01:06:39 ◼   ► of devil's advocate on the PC growth thing.

01:06:41 ◼   ► There have been so many other factors

01:06:44 ◼   ► in addition to the rise of tablets and stuff

01:06:47 ◼   ► that could also help explain the PC sales downturn.

01:06:51 ◼   ► You know, we're talking about new PC sales having slowed down or stopped or regressed.

01:06:58 ◼   ► We're not talking about PC usage necessarily slowing down or stopping or regressing.

01:07:05 ◼   ► This could also just be that PCs are being used for longer. They're on a slower replacement cycle.

01:07:13 ◼   ► And if you think about what might cause that to be the case, there's all sorts of really good reasons.

01:07:18 ◼   ► really good reasons. There's the economy, the job market, where like, you know, businesses

01:07:22 ◼   ► have to buy new computers when they hire new employees, right? Usually, if, you know, unless

01:07:28 ◼   ► that job was previously occupied and you get somebody else's old crappy computer. But,

01:07:32 ◼   ► you know, so like the job market, the economy, those are kind of crappy right now. Windows

01:07:38 ◼   ► itself, Windows 8 is not well liked, and so a lot of people are, you know, were not excited

01:07:43 ◼   ► to go out and get a new computer with Windows 8 on it. A lot of businesses held off on upgrades

01:07:48 ◼   ► because they wanted to wait until they could get something they actually wanted and liked

01:07:52 ◼   ► and could support. And if you think about why people used to buy new computers so often,

01:07:59 ◼   ► after performance stopped accelerating so quickly, past what people actually needed,

01:08:03 ◼   ► a lot of it was because malware would infect their old computer so badly that they would

01:08:08 ◼   ► think the only solution was to get a new one because they would think computers would slow

01:08:11 ◼   ► down over time and they'd have to get a new computer because this one's so slow and full

01:08:14 ◼   ► pop-ups. Like, people actually did that, to a massive scale. And so maybe the reason why

01:08:21 ◼   ► computer sales slowed down didn't have as much to do with tablets coming in as just

01:08:29 ◼   ► people need to replace computers less now because they're pretty fast already, anti-malware

01:08:35 ◼   ► stuff is pretty good these days, it's certainly a lot better than it was 10 years ago. Maybe

01:08:41 ◼   ► Maybe that's more the problem.

01:08:44 ◼   ► And so if that is what's causing the sales growth,

01:08:48 ◼   ► or at least if those are major contributing factors,

01:08:51 ◼   ► that's not saying PCs are going away.

01:08:53 ◼   ► That's just saying the average PC buyer might keep it

01:08:56 ◼   ► for five years instead of two.

01:08:59 ◼   ► And so that's not great for the market.

01:09:02 ◼   ► But the market's not going away.

01:09:04 ◼   ► It's just the replacement cycle is slowed down.

01:09:09 ◼   ► Microsoft did make many tactical mistakes,

01:09:11 ◼   ► but if the PC market was still growing 30% year over year,

01:09:14 ◼   ► it wouldn't matter because they would just be able

01:09:16 ◼   ► to force everyone to upgrade.

01:09:19 ◼   ► They wouldn't have to say,

01:09:20 ◼   ► "Hey, we'll keep making XP available forever,"

01:09:22 ◼   ► even though everyone hates Vista,

01:09:24 ◼   ► because it would be like,

01:09:25 ◼   ► "Well, there's new customers coming in every day,

01:09:27 ◼   ► "and they're gonna get the new thing,

01:09:28 ◼   ► "and we have this growth."

01:09:30 ◼   ► Growth like that cures everything.

01:09:32 ◼   ► It hides all the terrible problems,

01:09:35 ◼   ► and it's very difficult to make,

01:09:37 ◼   ► especially in the position Microsoft did,

01:09:38 ◼   ► It's very difficult to make a product so bad that it overcomes 30% year over year growth

01:09:44 ◼   ► in your market in terms of unit sales.

01:09:48 ◼   ► Because what's your alternative?

01:09:50 ◼   ► What are the customers going to do?

01:09:51 ◼   ► They had such an incredible lock on the market, such huge market share, that if you're buying

01:09:56 ◼   ► a new personal computer and your market is growing 30% year over year, you have this

01:10:01 ◼   ► huge number of people who are buying a computer who didn't have one before, and they're going

01:10:05 ◼   ► to get your new operating system on it, and they're just going to accept it.

01:10:09 ◼   ► And what's their alternative?

01:10:11 ◼   ► Well, I'm not going to buy Windows.

01:10:12 ◼   ► I'm going to buy something else.

01:10:14 ◼   ► What are you going to get?

01:10:15 ◼   ► Apple doesn't want to serve your needs.

01:10:16 ◼   ► You need something that runs Windows.

01:10:18 ◼   ► We're the ones selling something that's running Windows.

01:10:19 ◼   ► I'm not saying this is a good thing or a healthy thing.

01:10:21 ◼   ► I'm just saying that was able to mask all of their problems until it slowed down.

01:10:27 ◼   ► And I'd have to see the curves on it.

01:10:29 ◼   ► I think it probably started to take a dive around what, iPad time, like 2010 or something,

01:10:34 ◼   ► it really took when the PC sales turned the other direction.

01:10:38 ◼   ► So like the Vista debacle, we all hated it and thought it was terrible, but if you look

01:10:42 ◼   ► at Microsoft's earnings and everything during that period, it's not that they were doing

01:10:45 ◼   ► okay.

01:10:46 ◼   ► They were testing the theory.

01:10:47 ◼   ► How terrible of a product can we make and still be successful?

01:10:52 ◼   ► And if people don't have an alternative, you can make a pretty terrible product and still

01:10:55 ◼   ► be successful.

01:10:56 ◼   ► In fact, you can not upgrade Windows for five years and do this horrible project and still

01:11:03 ◼   ► be successful and compare that to Apple who couldn't replace their operating system for

01:11:06 ◼   ► many many years and did not have 30% year over year growth and almost went out of business.

01:11:13 ◼   ► So I don't know. I look at Microsoft's fortunes going forward and I still think about them

01:11:22 ◼   ► needing to find some market with the kind of growth that the PC market had. Apple found

01:11:26 ◼   ► one. It was the phone market. Phone market has that kind of growth now. It won't always

01:11:29 ◼   ► have that growth someday, that growth will stop.

01:11:31 ◼   ► And the iPad market has similar growth for now.

01:11:36 ◼   ► But I get really depressed when I think about Microsoft never being in another business

01:11:40 ◼   ► with that kind of growth curve.

01:11:43 ◼   ► All right.

01:11:44 ◼   ► So what else is going on?

01:11:48 ◼   ► I should note I actually just came out with a new iOS app.

01:11:53 ◼   ► We have one more sponsor this week.

01:11:55 ◼   ► No, hold on.

01:11:56 ◼   ► I want to talk about my new iOS app.

01:11:58 ◼   ► I came up with one and it's a really, really clever name.

01:12:01 ◼   ► Do you want to guess what it is?

01:12:02 ◼   ► - Hmm, is it Xbox One?

01:12:05 ◼   ► - No, nor is it-- - Cardboard.

01:12:07 ◼   ► - You know, it's not cardboard 'cause I thought--

01:12:10 ◼   ► - Oh, is it Facebook?

01:12:11 ◼   ► - It is Facebook, how did you know?

01:12:14 ◼   ► No, it's called paper.

01:12:16 ◼   ► - That should be fine.

01:12:18 ◼   ► - Do we have any thoughts on this?

01:12:19 ◼   ► Like, I don't even know what to say.

01:12:20 ◼   ► It seems like this is a he said, she said,

01:12:24 ◼   ► I feel like this is the soap opera corner

01:12:26 ◼   ► of our industry that I really have no interest in. Like, I think it's a David and Goliath

01:12:31 ◼   ► tale. Okay. Everyone knows everyone's kind of being jerks. Okay. I don't know. Do you

01:12:37 ◼   ► guys have thoughts on this?

01:12:38 ◼   ► David Schleifer The system for resolving this, you know, it's

01:12:42 ◼   ► called the legal system. It's boring and slow and annoying. But when a bunch of people all

01:12:48 ◼   ► want to do the same things, and he said, she said in blogs, you can resolve this in civil

01:12:53 ◼   ► court. And I'm assuming that's what they'll do.

01:12:55 ◼   ► Yeah, that's expensive though.

01:12:58 ◼   ► Well, Facebook's got the money, I can tell you that, so maybe they win by default.

01:13:02 ◼   ► Actually, 53 I think is doing pretty well too. I think the smaller paper company is

01:13:08 ◼   ► probably upset about that more than anybody. But, I don't know, this stuff is hard. You

01:13:13 ◼   ► know, like there's, you know, I talked, I forget whether it was this show or not, but

01:13:18 ◼   ► I talked at length about the process I went through for naming Overcast. And, you know,

01:13:24 ◼   ► When I name most things, I just kind of throw something out there and it usually just works

01:13:31 ◼   ► okay enough.

01:13:34 ◼   ► Overcast I knew was going to get a lot of attention when I announced it, but I wasn't

01:13:38 ◼   ► ready yet, and I wanted protection by trademark protection, but I didn't want to pre-announce

01:13:48 ◼   ► the name or have it in the public record at the trademark office before I announced the

01:13:52 ◼   ► product.

01:13:53 ◼   ► concerns, I knew that what I was making now was going to get more scrutiny than anything

01:13:59 ◼   ► I've made before because my audience is bigger now. And so, when naming this thing, I knew

01:14:06 ◼   ► that if there is any potential for a trademark conflict of any sort, that it would bite me.

01:14:13 ◼   ► I knew it. You know, if you, like, for a while industries, like new industries or new areas

01:14:18 ◼   ► or new platforms, if they're really small

01:14:21 ◼   ► and kind of under the radar, you can get by

01:14:24 ◼   ► squatting on somebody's trademark inadvertently.

01:14:27 ◼   ► Usually it's unintentional, but you can get by

01:14:29 ◼   ► having a trademark conflict because no one's

01:14:31 ◼   ► gonna notice 'cause it's this tiny little platform

01:14:33 ◼   ► no one cares about, right?

01:14:35 ◼   ► And for a while, I think the App Store was that

01:14:39 ◼   ► for the first few years maybe, but now it's big.

01:14:41 ◼   ► Now it's a giant, it's this giant business,

01:14:44 ◼   ► this giant ecosystem that has quickly become

01:14:48 ◼   ► kind of merged with and partially taken over

01:14:51 ◼   ► the whole consumer technology space.

01:14:54 ◼   ► So it's this massive thing.

01:14:56 ◼   ► So I knew that whatever name I picked,

01:15:01 ◼   ► I would have to vet as being pretty safe to use.

01:15:06 ◼   ► And so every name I thought about using,

01:15:09 ◼   ► I went to the USPTO.gov site and searched

01:15:12 ◼   ► and did a trademark search for the name

01:15:14 ◼   ► for similar types of spellings and stuff,

01:15:17 ◼   ► I vetted every single name I wanted to use.

01:15:19 ◼   ► And I had this giant text file with, you know,

01:15:21 ◼   ► like inbox of names I want to check out

01:15:23 ◼   ► and like the bottom like names I can't use.

01:15:25 ◼   ► And most of the names I can't use

01:15:27 ◼   ► were because of trademark conflicts.

01:15:29 ◼   ► That's just the reality of once you get into

01:15:32 ◼   ► like the big mass business world,

01:15:36 ◼   ► you have to worry about things like trademark conflicts.

01:15:39 ◼   ► Similarly, before I announced the product name at all,

01:15:44 ◼   ► Like, weeks before I announced the product,

01:15:48 ◼   ► I filed for the trademark.

01:15:49 ◼   ► Because I knew that there was a risk

01:15:52 ◼   ► that if I announced it, then somebody else could go

01:15:56 ◼   ► file a trademark for it and release something

01:16:00 ◼   ► and steal my name.

01:16:02 ◼   ► And I actually had to pay money for the name

01:16:04 ◼   ► because of another trademark.

01:16:06 ◼   ► I had to have a coexistence agreement

01:16:08 ◼   ► with another trademark owner.

01:16:11 ◼   ► So, you know, I took the steps to both secure the name in a way that I'm unlikely to get

01:16:19 ◼   ► threatened or sued because I did enough research to know that I'm probably okay with all trademarks

01:16:24 ◼   ► except this one and that one I got an agreement for, and also file my own trademark application

01:16:31 ◼   ► to help protect the name from being stolen by other people after I announce it.

01:16:35 ◼   ► These are things that legitimate businesses have to do all the time.

01:16:39 ◼   ► The App Store is now one of those places where you have to do that sort of stuff.

01:16:43 ◼   ► You can't just release an app with a name and hope no one ever quote "steals" it.

01:16:49 ◼   ► You know, if you didn't file a trademark, you basically have no case to anybody, including

01:16:54 ◼   ► Apple.

01:16:55 ◼   ► You can't email Apple and say, "Hey, these guys stole my app name and it's some generic

01:16:59 ◼   ► term like paper and Apple's not going to help you there."

01:17:02 ◼   ► If you say, "I have a trademark, here's the number and this is squatting on it,"

01:17:05 ◼   ► they will help you a little bit.

01:17:06 ◼   ► Not a whole lot.

01:17:07 ◼   ► - Apple's App Store system seems so terrible

01:17:10 ◼   ► for the naming stuff.

01:17:12 ◼   ► I always was, first of all, I was always shocked.

01:17:14 ◼   ► I remember the first time I realized this way back

01:17:16 ◼   ► in the iOS 2.0 days or whenever App Store came out,

01:17:19 ◼   ► that the name that it has on your home screen

01:17:21 ◼   ► doesn't really have to be,

01:17:23 ◼   ► I guess maybe it has to be related to the name of the app,

01:17:25 ◼   ► but it's not the same thing.

01:17:26 ◼   ► Like you get to pick what the short name is, right?

01:17:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's weird.

01:17:28 ◼   ► - So that's kind of misleading.

01:17:29 ◼   ► And the second thing is,

01:17:30 ◼   ► if Apple had just simply said,

01:17:33 ◼   ► "You can name your app once, the names have to be unique."

01:17:37 ◼   ► they would have implemented their own

01:17:39 ◼   ► de facto trademark system, you know what I mean?

01:17:41 ◼   ► But they don't.

01:17:42 ◼   ► - Right, because a lot like how domain names work, right?

01:17:45 ◼   ► Domain names are kind of like, you know,

01:17:46 ◼   ► if you have the dot com and you start using it

01:17:49 ◼   ► for something prominent, you don't have to worry

01:17:52 ◼   ► that much about someone else trademarking it after you

01:17:54 ◼   ► because there's evidence that you were there.

01:17:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, but there's still the legal system

01:17:57 ◼   ► and like if you try to use coca-cola dot com,

01:17:59 ◼   ► Coca-Cola will come and get it from you

01:18:01 ◼   ► 'cause they're a big company.

01:18:02 ◼   ► But you know, just for the small guys

01:18:04 ◼   ► for just like the name squatters and all that ridiculous stuff. They just did, you know,

01:18:08 ◼   ► yeah, name is read only and there's unique index on it. Ta-da! That solves so many problems because

01:18:14 ◼   ► it sounds like all these people are like, you're reading all this sob stories about,

01:18:18 ◼   ► they put it in a foreign store and then they change the name and put it into the US store and

01:18:21 ◼   ► all. It's just because that field is so mutable. It's led to so much evil letting people change

01:18:26 ◼   ► that name over and over again. I don't think it's too much to ask to make people pick a name once.

01:18:31 ◼   ► You could say, "Limited character set, limited length. Pick your name. You get one shot at it

01:18:37 ◼   ► if you don't like the name." It's like, "First come, first serve." It would have to be like,

01:18:42 ◼   ► "You have to upload the app at that time." Or maybe you only get the name once your app is approved,

01:18:47 ◼   ► and then you stake your claim on that name. Whatever system they come up with,

01:18:50 ◼   ► it will be self-regulating to a degree much higher than the current app store.

01:18:55 ◼   ► And then you'd only need to go to the stupid legal system, which is only an option for

01:18:59 ◼   ► for certain people, if someone else had a name

01:19:03 ◼   ► and got there at first and you felt like

01:19:04 ◼   ► you had a right toward it, like for example,

01:19:06 ◼   ► if you registered a trademark in Overcast

01:19:08 ◼   ► and Apple had this system and before you were done

01:19:10 ◼   ► with the app, someone uploaded an app called Overcast,

01:19:13 ◼   ► yeah, now you gotta go to the legal system and say,

01:19:15 ◼   ► "Hey, you can't use that name 'cause I have a trademark

01:19:17 ◼   ► "or whatever," but if you uploaded Overcast

01:19:20 ◼   ► with that name, capital O, everything else lowercase,

01:19:23 ◼   ► that's it, and had the product for sale,

01:19:26 ◼   ► wouldn't you feel better knowing that it's impossible

01:19:28 ◼   ► anyone else to upload another app called Overcast.

01:19:31 ◼   ► That would be nice.

01:19:32 ◼   ► But it's not.

01:19:33 ◼   ► They can upload an app, whatever they want, and rename it to Overcast with like a non-breaking

01:19:38 ◼   ► space at the end or some emoji or just puts a bunch of keyword spam at the end.

01:19:43 ◼   ► Once again, the App Store is not helping in this regard.

01:19:48 ◼   ► I don't really understand why Apple, they're so strict about everything else, why they

01:19:52 ◼   ► were not more strict with app naming.

01:19:54 ◼   ► You know, what's funny too is that most apps have found, most developers have found that

01:20:01 ◼   ► because of the incredibly primitive way that App Store search works, you're actually better

01:20:06 ◼   ► off putting a bunch of keywords after your name.

01:20:08 ◼   ► I remember when Twitterrific changed the name of their app from Twitterrific to Twitterrific

01:20:13 ◼   ► for Twitter. And it's like, "Jesus, the search is so bad that Twitterrific is not..."

01:20:17 ◼   ► Like they had to write Twitterrific for Twitter because people would search for Twitter and

01:20:20 ◼   ► and it wouldn't match Twitter.

01:20:23 ◼   ► The fact that the names can be so long

01:20:24 ◼   ► that you can keyword spam them,

01:20:26 ◼   ► that there's not a unique identifier.

01:20:28 ◼   ► Like, sure, by all means, let people change the description,

01:20:30 ◼   ► have a secondary tagline.

01:20:32 ◼   ► There's a place for people to put in

01:20:34 ◼   ► like the elegant notes taking app or whatever,

01:20:36 ◼   ► but having that be the name of the app

01:20:38 ◼   ► because of a side effect of where their stupid search works

01:20:40 ◼   ► is just, like this, if, again, I said this before,

01:20:44 ◼   ► if you just picked randomly 10 developers from the app store,

01:20:48 ◼   ► put them in a room and say, and a whiteboard and said, "Come up with 10 ideas to make

01:20:52 ◼   ► the App Store better," they would fight to kill each other for what those 10 ideas

01:20:56 ◼   ► are.

01:20:57 ◼   ► They wouldn't be like, "I can't really think of anything."

01:20:58 ◼   ► Like, there's so many obvious things they can improve just year after year.

01:21:02 ◼   ► Nope, not really.

01:21:03 ◼   ► Not really improving.

01:21:04 ◼   ► Hey, Marco, really quickly, do you want to tell us about something else that's really

01:21:08 ◼   ► fun and exciting?

01:21:09 ◼   ► Let's do one more.

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01:21:42 ◼   ► You own your device outright from the start, and then they have this great pay-for-what-you-use pricing model.

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01:22:15 ◼   ► They will automatically put you into whatever bucket

01:22:17 ◼   ► is cheapest that will fit your usage.

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01:24:24 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to Ting for sponsoring the show once again.

01:24:27 ◼   ► - So I'm sorry, do we have any more

01:24:28 ◼   ► on the paper or app store stuff?

01:24:31 ◼   ► - I don't know.

01:24:33 ◼   ► I mean, and it's the funny thing about this

01:24:35 ◼   ► like, you know, nobody has clean hands in this. Like, there's 53, the company, who had

01:24:40 ◼   ► a naming dispute with Figure 53, another company, and I gotta say from the blog post on Figure

01:24:47 ◼   ► 53, it didn't make 53 look great, and then 53 made this paper app that was also not great

01:24:54 ◼   ► because somebody else already had an app named Paper, and then Facebook comes along and makes

01:24:58 ◼   ► their app named Paper, and 53 has tried to file a trademark on it now, but they filed

01:25:06 ◼   ► the trademark on the day that Facebook released their app called Paper, so that might be a

01:25:09 ◼   ► problem for them. Who knows? It's just a mess. I think, legally, none of us are experts enough

01:25:16 ◼   ► to know who's legally in the right here. I think all of them are being dicks, though.

01:25:22 ◼   ► Yeah, and not just being dicks, like, it's kind of stupid.

01:25:26 ◼   ► Like, the worst one I think is Facebook, because the paper app is pretty well established on

01:25:31 ◼   ► iOS.

01:25:32 ◼   ► Like, it's -- I don't know how popular it is, but I've heard of it, and I don't do drawing

01:25:35 ◼   ► on the iPad.

01:25:36 ◼   ► So it's, like, it's not a new application.

01:25:39 ◼   ► It's pretty popular.

01:25:41 ◼   ► If Facebook's going to come up with this application, like, pick a different name.

01:25:45 ◼   ► Like, you know, why?

01:25:46 ◼   ► Why pick -- you're just making people confused about your own product.

01:25:49 ◼   ► You know, the search is going to be difficult, talking about it is going to be difficult,

01:25:53 ◼   ► and it's not as if paper was just such a natural name for what Facebook was doing that they

01:25:57 ◼   ► couldn't resist it.

01:25:58 ◼   ► It's not really a natural name for what they were doing.

01:26:00 ◼   ► In fact, if anything, it's a more natural name for a drawing program.

01:26:03 ◼   ► So I think they're all making their own lives more difficult, with the exception of whoever

01:26:06 ◼   ► were the first and maybe second one to come up with this name, where with Facebook, no

01:26:10 ◼   ► excuse to use paper.

01:26:12 ◼   ► Pick a different name.

01:26:13 ◼   ► Yeah, and it also shows to me a level of arrogance because, like you said, paper the app—

01:26:19 ◼   ► The second one, which might be the first one, I'm thinking of who you believe.

01:26:23 ◼   ► Possibly the first.

01:26:24 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:26:25 ◼   ► But you know what I mean.

01:26:26 ◼   ► The paper app that involves drawing that we all think of or certainly used to think of

01:26:31 ◼   ► as the unequivocal paper up until a week ago or whatever, it is extremely arrogant in my

01:26:37 ◼   ► mind that Facebook, just like you said, knows that this exists, knows that a lot of people

01:26:43 ◼   ► know that this exists.

01:26:45 ◼   ► I mean, hell, it was featured on the App Store for like a year.

01:26:47 ◼   ► Yeah, it's not an obscure app.

01:26:49 ◼   ► It's extremely popular.

01:26:51 ◼   ► Facebook should come out with an application to manipulate your photos for the IRS and

01:26:55 ◼   ► call it Photoshop.

01:26:57 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:26:58 ◼   ► Like, it's just so arrogant of Facebook.

01:27:01 ◼   ► And as a company that I feel like is losing more and more credibility in the minds of

01:27:08 ◼   ► not only nerds but non-nerds, that kind of arrogance just seems, I don't know, silly

01:27:13 ◼   ► to me.

01:27:14 ◼   ► And it's just so unnecessary.

01:27:16 ◼   ► Like Facebook comes out of this looking pretty bad.

01:27:20 ◼   ► And for what?

01:27:22 ◼   ► You know, they could have named the app anything and it would have gotten the exact same attention.

01:27:26 ◼   ► It would have had the same success.

01:27:28 ◼   ► You could argue whether they should have just called it frickin' Facebook and replaced their

01:27:31 ◼   ► old app with it.

01:27:32 ◼   ► I mean, like, there's—there was no reason for this.

01:27:34 ◼   ► It was completely avoidable.

01:27:36 ◼   ► And they—I think you're right, Casey.

01:27:37 ◼   ► It's just arrogance.

01:27:38 ◼   ► It's—they had to know about the 53 app name paper, and they just said, "You know what?

01:27:44 ◼   ► Doesn't matter.

01:27:45 ◼   ► We're gonna go right in there anyway."

01:27:46 ◼   ► Is it even called Facebook paper, or is it just—the letter P is the first part of the

01:27:50 ◼   ► name?

01:27:51 ◼   ► Oh, you know none of us have it installed.

01:27:52 ◼   ► Yeah, I installed it.

01:27:53 ◼   ► Now, let me tell you about the install experiences.

01:27:56 ◼   ► I had higher hopes in this.

01:27:57 ◼   ► I installed it, right?

01:27:59 ◼   ► And I launch it, and there's an intro movie,

01:28:01 ◼   ► which of course annoys me, and I almost made a tweet,

01:28:04 ◼   ► like seriously people, don't make an intro movie

01:28:06 ◼   ► for your iOS app no matter how important you think it is.

01:28:09 ◼   ► But then of course during the intro movie

01:28:10 ◼   ► lead up tutorial thing, it crashed.

01:28:12 ◼   ► 'Cause I mean, I'm running it on my iPod Touch,

01:28:16 ◼   ► you know, memory's probably fragmented,

01:28:18 ◼   ► it's trying, God knows how much memory it's using

01:28:20 ◼   ► trying to show me this full screen video and tutorial thing,

01:28:23 ◼   ► and of course it crashed, right?

01:28:25 ◼   ► Or it got killed, or it ran out of memory,

01:28:26 ◼   ► whatever it is like what a terrible first launch experience install launch

01:28:31 ◼   ► do you want it do you get to use the app hell no you get to watch a video with

01:28:35 ◼   ► audio and try to go through a tutorial and then it crashes it was all I could

01:28:39 ◼   ► do to make myself tap that icon again to say no I actually really do want to see

01:28:43 ◼   ► but if this is any other app or just deleted it immediately it's like sorry

01:28:46 ◼   ► failure I eventually got it up and running after I just wanted to like just

01:28:51 ◼   ► get me to the part where I use the I'm not a typical customer I guess but I

01:28:55 ◼   ► I think a typical customer,

01:28:57 ◼   ► I don't know if they'd be charmed by that.

01:28:58 ◼   ► It kind of reminds me of the welcome video

01:29:01 ◼   ► that used to run at the beginning of OS X.

01:29:03 ◼   ► I guess that's kind of neat if you're opening up your Mac

01:29:05 ◼   ► for the first time and it's not that long,

01:29:07 ◼   ► but I don't think people have tolerance

01:29:09 ◼   ► for that crap on a phone.

01:29:11 ◼   ► - I have not installed it,

01:29:12 ◼   ► and I'm looking at just the site,

01:29:15 ◼   ► and it seems to me like the information density

01:29:18 ◼   ► is just way too low in a lot of it.

01:29:20 ◼   ► Like when you look at, they have an example that,

01:29:23 ◼   ► "Oh, I just completed my first marathon."

01:29:25 ◼   ► And that takes up the entire damn screen.

01:29:29 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:29:30 ◼   ► - It's not the information density,

01:29:32 ◼   ► it's the information quality.

01:29:33 ◼   ► Because as many, many people have said

01:29:35 ◼   ► when they looked at this,

01:29:37 ◼   ► paper would be awesome if all your friends

01:29:39 ◼   ► were professional photographer model writers.

01:29:42 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:29:43 ◼   ► - In California.

01:29:44 ◼   ► - Right, yeah, exactly, who live in beautiful places.

01:29:47 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's the same problem that Facebook Home had.

01:29:49 ◼   ► Remember the thing where they took over

01:29:50 ◼   ► Android's home screen?

01:29:52 ◼   ► - Yeah. - It's the exact same problem

01:29:53 ◼   ► with that, it's like Facebook--

01:29:54 ◼   ► - I think that was a better idea at least though.

01:29:56 ◼   ► - I don't know whether they're ignoring the reality

01:29:59 ◼   ► or whether they actually don't think

01:30:01 ◼   ► this is the reality of their product,

01:30:03 ◼   ► but the reality is people post a bunch of terrible crap

01:30:07 ◼   ► on Facebook and chances are if you use Facebook,

01:30:08 ◼   ► your timeline's full of a bunch of terrible crap.

01:30:11 ◼   ► And it's designers who are thinking about the ideal case

01:30:16 ◼   ► rather than the realistic case.

01:30:17 ◼   ► - I think that Facebook Home though

01:30:18 ◼   ► is actually a very good idea to try to make

01:30:21 ◼   ► the phone experience people-centric.

01:30:23 ◼   ► 'Cause you think, most of what people do with their phones

01:30:26 ◼   ► is communicate with people,

01:30:27 ◼   ► texting their friends or whatever.

01:30:28 ◼   ► And if they already do a lot of stuff in Facebook,

01:30:30 ◼   ► let's try to make it so that Always Available

01:30:33 ◼   ► is this thing where you can flick around

01:30:34 ◼   ► little circular blobs of your friends and message them.

01:30:37 ◼   ► The implementation wasn't great,

01:30:38 ◼   ► and the audience wasn't wide enough,

01:30:41 ◼   ► and it didn't take off.

01:30:43 ◼   ► I'm not saying it was a success as a product,

01:30:45 ◼   ► but at least that's in Facebook's wheelhouse

01:30:47 ◼   ► of people like to use Facebook,

01:30:49 ◼   ► People do use phones to communicate with each other.

01:30:51 ◼   ► We do have a social graph.

01:30:53 ◼   ► People do send Facebook messages to each other.

01:30:54 ◼   ► Let's try to surface that in a phone interface.

01:30:57 ◼   ► Whereas paper is just like,

01:30:59 ◼   ► let me find the amazing, fanciest way possible

01:31:01 ◼   ► for you to just scroll through Facebook.

01:31:04 ◼   ► And that I don't think is as innovative

01:31:07 ◼   ► or as interesting as home was,

01:31:08 ◼   ► and home was a failure too.

01:31:10 ◼   ► So I don't, I mean, will paper be a failure?

01:31:13 ◼   ► People download it and use it.

01:31:15 ◼   ► I guess it's fine.

01:31:16 ◼   ► Like it's no skin off the airbag

01:31:17 ◼   ► if they go back to the plain Facebook app.

01:31:18 ◼   ► It seems like a lot of spit and polish for what's mostly a turd.

01:31:24 ◼   ► So this is what annoys me about Facebook because they have, you know, they applied a ridiculous

01:31:31 ◼   ► amount of resources into developing this app.

01:31:34 ◼   ► And resources, like they applied incredible designers and developers time to do this.

01:31:42 ◼   ► And there's an opportunity cost there to both Facebook and to the world.

01:31:46 ◼   ► What if Facebook didn't buy all these people?

01:31:49 ◼   ► And what if these people were working on their own stuff?

01:31:52 ◼   ► - They would've made a thermostat.

01:31:53 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:31:55 ◼   ► - Maybe that, maybe something else.

01:31:57 ◼   ► - I think one of them did.

01:31:59 ◼   ► - What if Facebook didn't use all these people's time

01:32:02 ◼   ► to make this app that the world doesn't really need

01:32:07 ◼   ► and that will probably not even be maintained in a year

01:32:09 ◼   ► because it probably won't succeed,

01:32:12 ◼   ► and it's not even an upgrade of their existing app,

01:32:14 ◼   ► as the side project. I mean, the world has lost, because of this, the world has lost

01:32:21 ◼   ► value and has lost potential new things these people could have done instead. And Facebook

01:32:26 ◼   ► has lost their time and their talent. I mean, it's, this is a problem with this aqua-hire

01:32:33 ◼   ► culture that the people, the products that get aqua-hired get destroyed, usually as part

01:32:41 ◼   ► the deal, they get shut down, or excuse me, they get sunset, and the people are then put

01:32:48 ◼   ► to work for these big companies working on how to make ads prettier or some junk like

01:32:53 ◼   ► that.

01:32:54 ◼   ► Like, there's a major opportunity cost to all of this, and the industry, you know, if

01:32:59 ◼   ► things ever feel stagnant, maybe that's why.

01:33:02 ◼   ► I guess.

01:33:04 ◼   ► Do you think Mike Maddis uses Facebook?

01:33:08 ◼   ► Maybe not.

01:33:09 ◼   ► Maybe that's why it has had like this ideal picture of what Facebook posts were actually like

01:33:14 ◼   ► But I don't know I mean like I would have loved to see what he would have done

01:33:19 ◼   ► We did see part of it. You know what he and his company would have done if they weren't bought by Facebook and

01:33:25 ◼   ► I think it would have been better for I think it would have been more useful to more people than this

01:33:31 ◼   ► Wait, where was he bought from?

01:33:34 ◼   ► Was it sofa was that no Mike Mike Madison did push pop press. That's it push pop press. That's right

01:33:39 ◼   ► Yeah, right and didn't he also work on the UI for nest. Oh, I don't know about that

01:33:43 ◼   ► Someone can google it but my memory was that he did that as well

01:33:47 ◼   ► Also, how terrible is it that I just phrased my question? Where was he bought from?

01:33:52 ◼   ► Genuinely like that's it. That's that's not cool. What's accurate?

01:33:57 ◼   ► I mean that's I don't ding the people who worked on this

01:33:59 ◼   ► I'd like they seem to be very talented and I don't ding them at all for you know

01:34:03 ◼   ► going where someone wanted to pay them to do great design. It's just, you know, they're doing it on

01:34:08 ◼   ► top of, I wonder if they're doing it on top of things that they themselves don't use, which I

01:34:12 ◼   ► don't think in and of itself is a condemnation. Like that's the job of, you know, just ask Mike

01:34:18 ◼   ► Montero, that's the job of a designer. Someone's got a job for you, they pay you to do it, you do

01:34:21 ◼   ► the best job possible. You don't have to be a user of the product. Maybe it helps sometimes, but it's

01:34:25 ◼   ► like, it's, you know, if you are a great designer and they pay you to do a great design and you do

01:34:29 ◼   ► a great design and you solve a customer problem with your great design, then you've succeeded.

01:34:35 ◼   ► And it doesn't really matter if that customer problem is not a problem that you yourself have.

01:34:39 ◼   ► But at the same time, like I said, you're putting a beautiful face on

01:34:45 ◼   ► something that's almost not deserving of that beauty. And maybe giving it to an audience who

01:34:53 ◼   ► does not value the work that you've done to the degree that you think. Maybe you think you're

01:34:58 ◼   ► solving a problem that they have and they don't really have that problem. So I don't

01:35:02 ◼   ► know.

01:35:03 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Lynda.com, Squarespace, and Ting. And we

01:35:10 ◼   ► will see you next week.

01:35:11 ◼   ► Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental.

01:35:21 ◼   ► Accidental.

01:35:22 ◼   ► Oh, it was accidental.

01:35:24 ◼   ► Accidental.

01:35:25 ◼   ► John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him

01:35:29 ◼   ► 'Cause it was accidental (accidental)

01:35:32 ◼   ► It was accidental (accidental)

01:35:35 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:35:40 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

01:35:45 ◼   ► @C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

01:35:49 ◼   ► So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

01:35:54 ◼   ► ♫ Anti-Marco Armin

01:35:56 ◼   ► ♫ S-I-R-A-C

01:35:59 ◼   ► ♫ U-S-A Syracuse

01:36:01 ◼   ► ♫ It's accidental

01:36:03 ◼   ► ♫ Accidental

01:36:04 ◼   ► ♫ They didn't mean to

01:36:07 ◼   ► ♫ Accidental

01:36:08 ◼   ► ♫ Accidental

01:36:09 ◼   ► ♫ Tech podcast so long

01:36:13 ◼   ► - So I gotta tell you that my father's gonna listen

01:36:18 ◼   ► to this episode and blow a gasket.

01:36:21 ◼   ► - Oh, because I said IBM is boring?

01:36:22 ◼   ► No, no, no, actually I don't think that would bother him at all.

01:36:25 ◼   ► Because the offer code is Casey?

01:36:26 ◼   ► No, not that either.

01:36:28 ◼   ► He works in investor relations for IBM and so because of that he knows market cap and

01:36:33 ◼   ► all these other numbers off the top of his head because it's his job.

01:36:36 ◼   ► So inevitably something that one of us said is going to be wrong in his eyes and only

01:36:42 ◼   ► I get to hear the aftermath.

01:36:45 ◼   ► You should ask him, if we have this opportunity, you should ask him and you can share the results

01:36:48 ◼   ► with us if not with the entire audience.

01:36:51 ◼   ► If he was investor relations for-- and he could substitute IBM's numbers in his current

01:36:56 ◼   ► job and take Microsoft's numbers, would he do that?

01:36:59 ◼   ► Because he has to say, here's our market cap, here's our revenue, here's our margins, here's

01:37:04 ◼   ► what our growth was.

01:37:05 ◼   ► Would he trade those numbers for Microsoft numbers?

01:37:08 ◼   ► Obviously he would trade them for Microsoft numbers in 1996, right?

01:37:11 ◼   ► But would he trade them for Microsoft's numbers now?

01:37:12 ◼   ► Because that's to get a good idea of if our assessment of the size and relative health

01:37:19 ◼   ► and success and sort of growth profiles of these companies

01:37:22 ◼   ► is anything close to what we were guessing

01:37:25 ◼   ► based on known numbers.

01:37:26 ◼   ► You know, like, are IBM's margins way lower

01:37:29 ◼   ► because they have a huge staff

01:37:31 ◼   ► and because the margins on service are lower than they are

01:37:33 ◼   ► in the stuff that Microsoft does?

01:37:35 ◼   ► Are there, is IBM's revenue higher,

01:37:37 ◼   ► but the margins are lower?

01:37:38 ◼   ► Are they similar?

01:37:39 ◼   ► Are they making similar profits?

01:37:40 ◼   ► So just ask him, if you could take Microsoft's numbers

01:37:42 ◼   ► for, you know, last year or last quarter, whatever,

01:37:44 ◼   ► would you do that?

01:37:45 ◼   ► Would it make people smile more

01:37:47 ◼   ► or would it just be a wash?

01:37:49 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't know. And I don't know very much about any of this, so I won't even

01:37:54 ◼   ► begin to wager a guess. But yeah, I'm sure I won't even have to prompt him. Even if

01:37:58 ◼   ► this part doesn't make it in the show, I'm confident he will seek me out and explain

01:38:03 ◼   ► to me all the ways in which all of us were wrong.

01:38:05 ◼   ► Of course. And by the way, I really feel the need to clarify. My argument is not that Microsoft

01:38:13 ◼   ► should only do the kinds of things that IBM and SAP and Oracle do. I'm saying they should

01:38:19 ◼   ► move into that direction, but I'm not saying that you need to get rid of Windows and Office

01:38:24 ◼   ► licensing and stuff like that. That's not what I'm saying at all.

01:38:26 ◼   ► That is Oracle. That's the same thing. That is the new version of what Oracle and SAP

01:38:35 ◼   ► are doing. I don't think that's a growth market anymore, selling personal computers for people

01:38:39 ◼   ► to use at work. And getting back to your thing you said before, is it just because people are

01:38:43 ◼   ► using computers for longer? It's so hard to tell that because you can't tell until the time comes

01:38:48 ◼   ► when they're going to buy a new one. If people just stop buying PCs, you could say, "Well,

01:38:51 ◼   ► that's it. The PC market is done. No one wants PCs anymore." But it could be the case that

01:38:55 ◼   ► they're merely just keeping their old ones for longer. And so you have to wait. Are they keeping

01:38:59 ◼   ► them for five years, for 10 years, for 50 years? If everyone stopped now and no one bought a new

01:39:03 ◼   ► PC for 50 years, we would say, "Well, the PC is dead." But if 50 years rolls around, they all

01:39:07 ◼   ► all replaced their PCs.

01:39:08 ◼   ► It's like, no, they were just waiting longer between PCs.

01:39:12 ◼   ► So it's hard to tell when you're in the midst of it.

01:39:14 ◼   ► I mean, the customers aren't synchronized in that manner.

01:39:17 ◼   ► But there are so many factors here

01:39:19 ◼   ► that it's like something's going on over there.

01:39:22 ◼   ► And all we know is that this is no longer the growth

01:39:24 ◼   ► market that it once was.

01:39:25 ◼   ► Is it dwindling to go out away forever?

01:39:28 ◼   ► Will the installed base shrink?

01:39:30 ◼   ► I mean, computers will eventually break, won't they?

01:39:32 ◼   ► I mean, you can't use them forever.

01:39:33 ◼   ► Something will happen to them.

01:39:35 ◼   ► you'll have to either decide,

01:39:36 ◼   ► do I need to replace this thing that just broke,

01:39:39 ◼   ► or do I not need this in my life anymore?

01:39:41 ◼   ► Maybe that's the outside, you know, 50 years isn't,

01:39:43 ◼   ► you know, how long does it take for a PC to break

01:39:46 ◼   ► or become useless for common tasks

01:39:48 ◼   ► because it doesn't have like a, you know,

01:39:50 ◼   ► in the old days, like it can't connect to the internet

01:39:53 ◼   ► and you can't put an ethernet card in it,

01:39:55 ◼   ► so it became worthless.

01:39:57 ◼   ► I don't know, I think we'll just have to wait and see.

01:39:58 ◼   ► But anyway, I think that business

01:40:00 ◼   ► is a serving business type of, you know,

01:40:03 ◼   ► Like, I think we would all agree that if there's any place that the iPad is going to steal

01:40:07 ◼   ► share from the PC, it's going to be consumers first, because maybe they don't need a PC

01:40:10 ◼   ► at home.

01:40:13 ◼   ► So the enterprise market where you keep selling Windows desktops on people's desks, they can

01:40:19 ◼   ► keep doing that.

01:40:20 ◼   ► It doesn't seem like anyone else wants that business, but it doesn't seem like it's going

01:40:23 ◼   ► to be a big growth business either.

01:40:25 ◼   ► So I always think they have to find what is their growth business while they continue

01:40:30 ◼   ► to use the Markov strategy for Windows and everything, what is their growth strategy

01:40:36 ◼   ► for the future?

01:40:38 ◼   ► Just bring XP back.

01:40:39 ◼   ► That's the growth strategy.

01:40:40 ◼   ► That's it.

01:40:41 ◼   ► Start selling XP all over again.

01:40:42 ◼   ► Well, it's like, well, maybe Xbox could be their growth strategy if they could figure

01:40:45 ◼   ► out that.

01:40:46 ◼   ► If they could just outlast Sony and Nintendo or buy both of them.

01:40:52 ◼   ► I think they already tried to buy Nintendo once.

01:40:54 ◼   ► They may have that opportunity again.

01:40:56 ◼   ► I can't imagine that market is substantial enough to matter on their balance sheet at

01:41:01 ◼   ► the end of the day.

01:41:04 ◼   ► Even if they dominated the game console market, who cares at their scale?

01:41:08 ◼   ► How big is that market, really?

01:41:10 ◼   ► And do you think, again, to everyone playing Binko at home, again, your argument for Nintendo

01:41:19 ◼   ► was always that as long as there continues to be a market for dedicated game hardware—

01:41:24 ◼   ► It's not a growth market either, probably.

01:41:26 ◼   ► Well, but again, like, I think, related to your Nintendo argument, my argument for Microsoft,

01:41:34 ◼   ► I think holds, as long as there is a market for mass market PCs, like as long as there

01:41:41 ◼   ► is a market for non-high-end specialty like Apple, like non-high-end PCs, cheap, widespread,

01:41:49 ◼   ► customizable from God knows who, like, as long as that market continues to exist, Microsoft

01:41:55 ◼   ► and its Windows client business will be fine. And the Windows server market depends on that.

01:42:01 ◼   ► And so that'll be fine.

01:42:02 ◼   ► I only said that about Nintendo because I don't think they're capable of anything else.

01:42:08 ◼   ► That's why I said that about Nintendo. Nintendo is confined to that reality because they are

01:42:14 ◼   ► not capable of making their own mobile operating system and app store and platform, right?

01:42:18 ◼   ► But I think Microsoft is capable of pretty much anything that any other technology company

01:42:23 ◼   ► is capable of.

01:42:24 ◼   ► breaking into smartphones and tablets. Well, I mean, the hardest thing to do is to make

01:42:28 ◼   ► a platform, and Microsoft knows how to make a platform. Doesn't mean all their platforms

01:42:32 ◼   ► are going to be successful, but of the few companies in the entire world that have proven

01:42:36 ◼   ► they know how to make and support a platform, Microsoft is definitely one of them. So that's

01:42:41 ◼   ► why, like, Kin, or Playz for sure. Well, you know, they can't all be winners, but at least

01:42:46 ◼   ► they've shown they can do it once. Nintendo has never done it, and it's really hard. Like,

01:42:50 ◼   ► You know, Palm kind of sorted it at once with Palm OS,

01:42:53 ◼   ► but couldn't do it again.

01:42:55 ◼   ► Lots of other companies have never been able

01:42:57 ◼   ► to make a general purpose computing platform

01:42:59 ◼   ► despite trying or never make a long lived one

01:43:01 ◼   ► that'll just kind of fade away.

01:43:03 ◼   ► So I'm not willing to confine,

01:43:05 ◼   ► Nintendo I'm willing to confine to that

01:43:07 ◼   ► 'cause they can barely do what they're doing now

01:43:09 ◼   ► and they just don't have it.

01:43:10 ◼   ► But Microsoft has so many people, so many smart people,

01:43:12 ◼   ► so much institutional experience

01:43:14 ◼   ► that there is no technology section of the market

01:43:18 ◼   ► that they should feel is out of reach

01:43:20 ◼   ► because they will never be able to--

01:43:21 ◼   ► it's not like they can do everything,

01:43:23 ◼   ► but they should pick what they want to do.

01:43:24 ◼   ► But I'm not willing to say Microsoft, basically,

01:43:27 ◼   ► you just better hope there continues

01:43:29 ◼   ► to be a market for PCs because you can't do anything else,

01:43:31 ◼   ► right?

01:43:32 ◼   ► Despite, like as you said, evidence to the contrary,

01:43:34 ◼   ► where they haven't been able to do it in phones,

01:43:37 ◼   ► haven't been able to do it in tablets.

01:43:38 ◼   ► But I think they showed in game consoles,

01:43:40 ◼   ► even though it's, again, not a growth market,

01:43:42 ◼   ► there was another place where they developed a platform

01:43:44 ◼   ► and were as successful as the other people who

01:43:46 ◼   ► were doing the similar thing.

01:43:49 ◼   ► titles? Yeah, whatever. Cool. Go team. Good talk. I think it's interesting, like, listening

01:43:58 ◼   ► to Back to Work this week, it's interesting that, you know, Merlin is just now replacing

01:44:06 ◼   ► a 2006 Mac Pro. And mostly because Mavericks, like Mavericks does not install officially

01:44:13 ◼   ► on it, so we have to kind of hack the installer, and it's kind of unstable now. But, you know,

01:44:19 ◼   ► this is an eight-year-old computer. And, granted, it was a very high-end computer eight years

01:44:24 ◼   ► ago, but that's still an eight-year-old computer that was really working just fine until a

01:44:31 ◼   ► few months ago.

01:44:32 ◼   ► Well, that's when it filled up with dander, finally. Like, there was a little bit of room

01:44:37 ◼   ► left, but once it filled entirely, then, you know, it's full, you've got to get a new one.

01:44:42 ◼   ► But yeah, I think that says a lot about the market.

01:44:50 ◼   ► And granted, yeah, it's a little bit different with Macs versus PCs, but it's not that far

01:44:55 ◼   ► off.

01:44:56 ◼   ► I think laptops help a little bit because people break them and stuff.

01:44:59 ◼   ► I don't think laptops can last as long.

01:45:02 ◼   ► I think it would be harder to find someone who is still using a 2006 laptop who hasn't

01:45:06 ◼   ► had a repair, because it's kind of like cars.

01:45:08 ◼   ► You can keep them for a long time, but eventually you're going to replace so many parts of that

01:45:13 ◼   ► car.

01:45:14 ◼   ► So if anyone has got a 2006 laptop, either they're okay with the parts that are falling

01:45:19 ◼   ► off of it or getting loose or whatever, or they've replaced parts on it.

01:45:22 ◼   ► Actually, I have a bit of a story about that.

01:45:25 ◼   ► My first Mac, which was a 2008-ish poly book, white poly book, I gave that to Aaron when

01:45:34 ◼   ► I got my late 2011 MacBook Pro.

01:45:39 ◼   ► And around the time I did that, I was able to get Apple to replace the case because it

01:45:46 ◼   ► had split in a few spots.

01:45:48 ◼   ► And that was one of the like get out of jail free cards that if the case had split on a

01:45:53 ◼   ► poly book, you could get Apple to give you a new case pretty much without question.

01:45:58 ◼   ► So Underscore actually came and visited Saturday morning and Erin had to reboot her computer

01:46:04 ◼   ► for some reason or another and we were measuring the time it took to reboot this 2008 poly

01:46:09 ◼   ► book in like tens of minutes almost at this point.

01:46:14 ◼   ► It might have been like 10 or 15 minutes it took to reboot.

01:46:16 ◼   ► And so I ended up going to the Apple store with Underscore partially to kill time, partially

01:46:24 ◼   ► to actually impulse buy her either an 11 inch air or a 13 inch air.

01:46:29 ◼   ► I had intended to get the 13, uh, and underscore said that Mrs.

01:46:34 ◼   ► Underscore really likes the 11 because on rare occasions, she will put it in

01:46:37 ◼   ► her purse, blah, blah, blah.

01:46:39 ◼   ► And so we ended up going to the Apple store.

01:46:41 ◼   ► I was standing in the Apple store with underscore and I didn't buy a thing

01:46:44 ◼   ► because I couldn't figure out whether or not Aaron would want the 11 of the 13.

01:46:50 ◼   ► And she had somewhere else to be, so she couldn't go with us.

01:46:52 ◼   ► Um, and I didn't end up buying anything and I still haven't.

01:46:55 ◼   ► And Erin swears to me, there's no point because she really doesn't

01:46:58 ◼   ► use her computer for that much.

01:47:00 ◼   ► But I'm, I'm in that weird, uncomfortable moment where I feel like it's time for

01:47:05 ◼   ► her to get a new Mac, probably an air.

01:47:08 ◼   ► And yet at the other side, on the other side of the coin, I can't really justify

01:47:11 ◼   ► it because all, all she does with it is like basic word processing occasionally.

01:47:15 ◼   ► And then, you know, web browsing and that's about it.

01:47:18 ◼   ► Wait until the air is a red net, at least you can wait longer.

01:47:22 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's what I said.

01:47:23 ◼   ► Like when you told me this, I said that

01:47:25 ◼   ► if I wasn't in a rush,

01:47:28 ◼   ► I would not buy a MacBook Air right now.

01:47:31 ◼   ► Because the rumors of that 11.9 inch Retina Air,

01:47:36 ◼   ► I think are very interesting.

01:47:37 ◼   ► Because to me, that kinda sounds like a replacement

01:47:41 ◼   ► for the MacBook Air, not a new model.

01:47:43 ◼   ► - Don't you know that's the 12 inch iPad Pro, Marco?

01:47:45 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:47:47 ◼   ► I love the screen rumors,

01:47:48 ◼   ► 'cause like that 12 inch screen rumor is everywhere,

01:47:50 ◼   ► Everyone keeps saying 12 inch iPad 12 inch iPad. It's like why is the air not the first like that's the main headline

01:47:56 ◼   ► I pay you know retina air screens and the secondary one is like oh, and I suppose it could be for a 12 inch

01:48:01 ◼   ► I bet instead. It's the reverse. It's like well 12 inch screen. That's obviously 12 inch iPad

01:48:05 ◼   ► See I really I really think if they release that thing. There's a very good chance that

01:48:10 ◼   ► That replaces both MacBook Airs, which is which is controversial because they would make the smallest Mac a little bit bigger

01:48:18 ◼   ► I think it's easy. I don't think that's even that controversial because by that time like

01:48:24 ◼   ► Seeing 13 inch new retina 13 inch MacBook Pros all the time now like it's so skinny

01:48:29 ◼   ► Like that you don't need like the 13 inch air is practically redundant make one air make it super duper skinny fine

01:48:36 ◼   ► What do you think is the compromise price?

01:48:37 ◼   ► And I think I think that will make people feel better about like oh don't want a 13 inch air or a lemon

01:48:42 ◼   ► Yeah, or 13 inch mac but now it'll be is like the air is the super skinny one

01:48:46 ◼   ► there's one of them and then you got a 13 and a 15 and they're both pretty darn skinny too, so yeah

01:48:51 ◼   ► I mean yeah, I totally really the 13-inch retina is so good and so and so thin and light I do think it it

01:48:57 ◼   ► largely removes the need for the 13-inch air and

01:49:00 ◼   ► If if something comes out that's closer in size to the 11

01:49:04 ◼   ► Then that could be it

01:49:07 ◼   ► I mean there's gonna be a few people who would be upset by that

01:49:10 ◼   ► But you know already like between the 11 and 13 like I think there

01:49:13 ◼   ► I think the ideal size is between those two.

01:49:16 ◼   ► Yeah, the 11 is a little too small.

01:49:18 ◼   ► Yeah, and that scream resolution on the 11 is killer.

01:49:21 ◼   ► Like that, in a bad way, a killer.

01:49:23 ◼   ► Like, it's really...

01:49:25 ◼   ► That scream resolution is tight.

01:49:27 ◼   ► Also in a bad way.

01:49:28 ◼   ► Why do all these words mean good and bad?

01:49:30 ◼   ► The 90s ruined language.

01:49:32 ◼   ► [laughter]

01:49:34 ◼   ► And music.

01:49:34 ◼   ► [guitar riff]

01:49:38 ◼   ► Come on, now.

01:49:40 ◼   ► I was thinking, Casey, with Aaron replacing her thing

01:49:43 ◼   ► and not sure that she needed a new one.

01:49:44 ◼   ► My mother is in a similar situation where she thinks she doesn't need a new laptop,

01:49:48 ◼   ► and I think she does, and she's needed one for a long time, but she won't give it up

01:49:51 ◼   ► because she needs the optical disk in her mind, and I've been trying to convince her

01:49:55 ◼   ► this is not the case.

01:49:56 ◼   ► Anyway, her current strategy is that she's going to do the old car route, which is, "Can't

01:50:00 ◼   ► we just upgrade my laptop?"

01:50:03 ◼   ► And I had to gradually tell her that, yes, this is possible, and this is a thing that

01:50:06 ◼   ► can be done.

01:50:07 ◼   ► And so the next time she visits, I'm giving her more RAM and putting in an SSD.

01:50:13 ◼   ► And actually, one of the biggest reasons not to impulse buy a laptop at the Apple store

01:50:20 ◼   ► is that you're stuck with the stock levels of RAM and hard drives and everything else.

01:50:24 ◼   ► Whereas if you go and if you order online, I guess check, so the stock is only 4 gigs

01:50:29 ◼   ► of RAM, which I would not buy that today.

01:50:32 ◼   ► Don't they have, with the soldering on the motherboard and RAM, which is pretty much

01:50:35 ◼   ► all of them now. Don't they have both models at Apple stores? Like the, you know, the 8

01:50:40 ◼   ► and 16?

01:50:41 ◼   ► They usually only carry at Apple stores the ones that are, that are, like, you know, like,

01:50:45 ◼   ► there's four errors you can select to start with on Apple.com, like 2 11s and 2 13s. Usually,

01:50:51 ◼   ► like, they'll carry those, those four. Like, the ones that are the starting configs on

01:50:54 ◼   ► Apple.com. So each family will have, like, two or three of them. But you won't be able

01:50:59 ◼   ► to get all the different options usually.

01:51:00 ◼   ► It's a shame. There's not really that many options.

01:51:03 ◼   ► Yeah, actually you're right. These days there's even fewer than there used to be because they

01:51:06 ◼   ► keep like, you know, soldering on certain things and stuff like that. But yeah, I mean

01:51:10 ◼   ► like, like if I were getting, if I were getting an 11 inch air today for whatever it's worth,

01:51:15 ◼   ► you know, looking at the base model, first of all there's a storage issue with 128 gigs,

01:51:20 ◼   ► you know. Storage aside, I would not get 4 gigs. I would get 8 gigs of RAM, definitely.

01:51:25 ◼   ► And you can get a substantially faster CPU for 150 bucks more.

01:51:30 ◼   ► Yeah, everyone always asks me, "Should I get the i7?"

01:51:33 ◼   ► I was like, "It's 100 bucks more. Of course you get it."

01:51:35 ◼   ► Well, it's 150, but still, that's a relatively small amount of money for a computer for what's

01:51:41 ◼   ► going to be, over time, a pretty substantial gain in your total usage of the thing. Similar

01:51:46 ◼   ► with the RAM. The RAM is 100 bucks to go from 4 to 8 gigs. So, yeah, I would say base price

01:51:51 ◼   ► plus 250 bucks for the CPU and the RAM, that's a good buy. Where it starts to get challenging

01:51:56 ◼   ► as the storage. And whether that's enough for you will of course depend on you.

01:52:01 ◼   ► And I think if I were to do it, I think I would get a 13 because I talked to her about

01:52:06 ◼   ► Mrs. Underscore putting hers in her purse on occasion and Erin basically said that that's

01:52:12 ◼   ► wonderful that it would fit but I can't ever see myself doing that. And so I'd probably

01:52:17 ◼   ► get her 13. We agree that 4 gigs is just unacceptable because this would be a 5 or 6 year computer

01:52:24 ◼   ► hopefully.

01:52:25 ◼   ► 8 gigs is unacceptable too.

01:52:27 ◼   ► So that's why you do it.

01:52:28 ◼   ► Yeah, but I mean, I don't believe the Airs can take more than 8, can they?

01:52:32 ◼   ► No, you're right.

01:52:33 ◼   ► I don't think they can either.

01:52:34 ◼   ► But that's like, again, presumably when the Retina ones come out, there'll be some fancy

01:52:37 ◼   ► 12-inch Air that can go up to 16.

01:52:40 ◼   ► That's true.

01:52:41 ◼   ► And I should also note that when I bought my personal laptop, which is effectively the

01:52:48 ◼   ► same as my work one, it's a 15-inch anti-glare, high-res MacBook Pro.

01:52:53 ◼   ► This is pre-Retina.

01:52:54 ◼   ► I got, I believe I got the most baller one I could possibly buy, and I think you had

01:52:59 ◼   ► the same one at the time, Marco.

01:53:01 ◼   ► But anyway, I walked in and bought that at the store.

01:53:05 ◼   ► So they actually carried the completely specced up version.