39: Desperation Mode
15 Nov 2013John’s new Kindles, Photo Stream confusion, Elop’s plan, and a story about enterprise software.
Episode Description:
- John's new Museum of Mediocre Reading Devices.
- The confusing Photo Stream limits, and all of these links in the show notes.
- Stephen Elop's If-I-Were-CEO Plan.
- A story about enterprise software.
- The four big assumptions about using enterprise software, why it's usually so terrible, and why big companies buy it.
Sponsored by:
- Transporter: A private cloud storage drive that you own and control. Use code ATP for 10% off any Transporter.
- Hover: High-quality, no-hassle domain registration. Use promo code ATP for 10% off.
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Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, I’m gonna use the most interesting two-thirds of that for the after show now. Let’s start the real show
⏹️ ▶️ John Good idea good idea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good to say so here was Christmas at the Syracuse a household already
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the tiny little package arrived that weighed a lot. Yeah, I was very
⏹️ ▶️ John that It seemed very dense. It was it really shows how little Marco cared about
⏹️ ▶️ John the old Kindles that he sent He packed them together by stacking
⏹️ ▶️ John them one on top of each other. They were their own packing material. Nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John in between them, no bubble wrap, tissue paper. I put the crappiest one
⏹️ ▶️ John on top. A bunch of Kindles and other e-readers jammed together into a
⏹️ ▶️ John solid brick. Well, they stack very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Except for the damn Kindle 1, which is wedge-shaped. Everything else stacks really well.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they managed to like the original Kindle like the back cover had come off in transit
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t think anything was broken on it and the Kindle touch has a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing in the upper left corner where it’s damaged to that was that already there?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What kind of thing is it like a I think there’s like a small like a tiny scratch on the screen up there maybe?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah it’s like a little spot that’s like permanently black like a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco little like a dead
⏹️ ▶️ John pixel? Well no it’s bigger than that it’s like someone took like someone took like a flathead screwdriver everyone bink and
⏹️ ▶️ John jammed into the screen. So it’s like a little quick slash area. It’s not big. It’s like, it’s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nope, that’s new. Sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, whatever. But anyway, the Kindles came, and
⏹️ ▶️ John we opened them up at the table with all the kids were there and all these Kindles were coming out. And surprising
⏹️ ▶️ John things happened because Marco, you know, I mentioned, I put this in the show, and so Marco’s like, well, there’s nothing to say about that. It’s not that exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, it’s a bunch of old Kindles. I thought I would just take them, put them up into the attic. These are the two surprising things that
⏹️ ▶️ John happened. One, the first thing my son said he saw all these things is, can I have a Kindle Fire?
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t mention Kindle Fire. I didn’t show him that there was a Kindle Fire in this stack of things.
⏹️ ▶️ John But he quickly surmised that in this giant stack of things that I said are Kindles, one of them might be
⏹️ ▶️ John a Kindle Fire, and that’s the one that he want. Interesting. And this is before any of them were turned on. So that means
⏹️ ▶️ John that the Kindle Fire has good brand recognition among young kids whose parents don’t want them to have a really
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive iPad. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although he apparently didn’t know enough about them to recognize that if you’re going to have any Kindle Fire, the one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I sent you, which is the very first one, is by far the worst one you can possibly have.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just a big stack of stuff. And the thing is, it doesn’t really make any sense because our iPad 2 is
⏹️ ▶️ John basically the kid’s iPad 2, and my daughter doesn’t really use the iPad 2, so it’s basically his iPad 2. So he
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of has an iPad 2 that he can use more or less whenever he wants. And he still wanted a Kindle
⏹️ ▶️ John Fire because I guess he thought it would be his, his, right? And the second reaction is my daughter said, oh, can
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a Kindle? And I said, yes, you can. And she said, yay. So
⏹️ ▶️ John there you go. Kids love Kindles. I was trying to decide which one to give
⏹️ ▶️ John her. We’re going to put some books on it. She’s learning to read and stuff like that. My son already has
⏹️ ▶️ John an old E Ink Kindle that we had that he reads on and everything like that. She’s just starting to read. And I decided to actually
⏹️ ▶️ John give her the Kindle Touch because, as anyone with young kids knows, you put a Kindle in front of them, they touch the screen immediately. And
⏹️ ▶️ John why wouldn’t they? Like, anything that you can’t touch the screen on is obviously broken. And so the Kindle Touch, you actually can
⏹️ ▶️ John touch the screen. I kind of regretted it because sometimes she wants to use her finger to trace like when you’re reading the words
⏹️ ▶️ John and that doesn’t really work that well on a Kindle Touch because as soon as you touch, you know, it changes the page or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to give her one that you had to use like the cursor controls or something to do books, I think that would be more difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the Kindle Touch has fewer like buttons and things you could bump on the edges and excellently turn pages. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John you made a bunch of people happy with although I told my son he couldn’t have the Kindle Fire because I don’t want him using that thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John already got his reading Kindle he’s got his iPad so he doesn’t really need it so he got over it now but yeah I was excited
⏹️ ▶️ John by the arrival of Kindles in the house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I first heard like when when the Kindle fire came out what was it two years ago now roughly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I first heard when I first came out there was this massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco common refrain I heard from people which was that they were men of course because they’re nerds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the internet and it’s way too predominantly male still and they were men who were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying Kindle Fires to give their wife a tablet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which if you think about the quality of the Kindle Fire not only is this a fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco derogatory thing to do but I wonder if any of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those caused marital problems I mean it is such an incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible device I can’t imagine that ended up
⏹️ ▶️ John well have you seen the new one the HDX whatever it’s called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t no is it any better?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve seen it and like they’re getting way better. Like if you compare the kindle fire you sent me compared to the new one, it’s like night
⏹️ ▶️ John and day. Like the new one is not embarrassing anymore. The only thing that I think is embarrassing about the new one is that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John externally asymmetrical, which I find incredibly offensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, what? It is in what direction? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re looking at it in a portrait orientation and you’re gripping it, one side is thicker than the other. It’s like weird
⏹️ ▶️ John trapezoid back. It’s it’s it’s for the origami style kind of case that comes with. I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean it makes sense in the context of the case that the thing like slots into the case because it’s kind of like a
⏹️ ▶️ John tapered trapezoid on the back. Oh weird. It’s weird but it bothers
⏹️ ▶️ John me way more than it should because like who cares? Who cares what shape the back of the thing is right? But I do. I don’t want it to
⏹️ ▶️ John be symmetrical. I want a thing that I hold. It just seems wrong to me. But the screen is really
⏹️ ▶️ John really nice. The interface is no longer disgustingly laggy.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you wanted to give somebody something that all they’re going to do on it is watch Amazon instant streaming video
⏹️ ▶️ John and read books, fill the typos, it would be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t buy it for anyone who wants to use applications, obviously, but they’ve come a long way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s good. I mean, they had nowhere to go but up.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this thing is like a brick. It’s sitting right next to me. It’s unbelievable. I couldn’t, I mean, I’d seen them when they were new, but it’s like, was this always
⏹️ ▶️ John this huge? It’s just, it’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imagine like there are so many people bought that because it was it was sold as like a as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the premium Kindle like if you wanted an E Ink Kindle you should consider upgrading to this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you’re reading on it it is in almost every way substantially worse than the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco E Ink Kindles and it’s so many people bought that as an upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that was that probably did not turn out well
⏹️ ▶️ John you could fend off muggers with it I guess and the back of it is that nice textured
⏹️ ▶️ John plastic or rubberized stuff I
⏹️ ▶️ John back felt all right I like this but like it’s so heavy you can’t like holding this in one hand forget it whereas the Ian Kindles
⏹️ ▶️ John like they’re so light now they’re like practically like a piece of paper so much nicer to hold in one hand
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey We got a lot or I don’t know if we should say we got but we saw a lot of interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey news that may or may not be news about PhotoStream and John you seem to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have taken point and prepared some notes for the show that we don’t prepare for.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you want to walk through kind of what we’ve learned over the last week?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah since we talked so much about ever picks on a couple past shows, a couple of people on Twitter sent
⏹️ ▶️ John me a link to a recently updated Apple knowledge base article about
⏹️ ▶️ John photo stream. And we’ll have the link in the show notes. And here’s some text from one of them. It says,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is no limit to the amount of photos you can upload to my photo stream over a longer period such as several months or years.
⏹️ ▶️ John Photos uploaded to my photo stream or shared photo streams are not counted against our iCloud storage. Well, we knew that about the iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John of storage. And so we think, oh, well, there was a limit of 1000. But now it says there’s no limit,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And that began the conversation on amongst all the people on Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John finding other knowledge base articles and saying, Yeah, but here’s this knowledge base article that has even later date that says it’s still limited
⏹️ ▶️ John to 1000. And then there were people experimenting by saying, Okay, I’ve got 1000 photos in my stream, I will take
⏹️ ▶️ John one more picture. And I see the first picture just went off the end, and it still says I have 1000. And people saying, well, that’s just what’s on your
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, really all the more on your server. I went on vacation, took 3000 pictures, only 1000
⏹️ ▶️ John were on my phone. But when I came home and went to iPhoto, all 3000 were in my photo stream.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this went back and forth and back and forth. I think we should just put all these links in the show notes, people can look at them. My
⏹️ ▶️ John takeaway from all this is that regardless of what the situation actually is,
⏹️ ▶️ John experimentally determined, determined from Apple’s documents, however you want to do it, it’s obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John still way too confusing for us to figure out. And the most important feature of EverPix was not
⏹️ ▶️ John how it behaved, it was the fact that you could explain it very simply. Recap all your photos
⏹️ ▶️ John forever, they’re stored in the cloud, period, the end. Anything that you have to look at all these documents and have
⏹️ ▶️ John a big Twitter conversation about and try to read the tea leaves on is missing the most important feature which
⏹️ ▶️ John is simplicity and understandability. So I’m not even sure what the current situation is.
⏹️ ▶️ John The upload limit stuff seems straightforward because you just say, well they’re just saying how many you can upload. They don’t say anything about how many
⏹️ ▶️ John they keep or how many will be redownloaded or anything like that. I think pretty much people have determined
⏹️ ▶️ John it’ll only keep a thousand on your device in the stream and five thousand in each shared stream.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m still not entirely sure about, okay, well, so given all those constraints, will it do like the guy who went
⏹️ ▶️ John on vacation said? And yeah, you only have a thousand on your main photo stream on your phone, but
⏹️ ▶️ John when you get home and iPhoto syncs with your photo stream, will it pull down all your pictures? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no good way as far as I know to, you know, like the equivalent of ever
⏹️ ▶️ John because you go to the ever picked website and there’s all your pictures, you know, the pic, the cloud is the
⏹️ ▶️ John source of truth. Your pictures are in the cloud and they may be on local machines as a caching type thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And and photo stream and everything. We’re still not sure. So I think Apple may be making progress here,
⏹️ ▶️ John or maybe they just changed the upload limit or a throttling thing. I don’t know. But it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of one of those things where all the incremental steps don’t really matter until they get to the point where they just say, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John worry about it. It’s simple. We got you covered. And here’s how it works. And here’s you can feel secure knowing that it worked. Because right now,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think anyone feels secure in their knowledge of exactly how photo stream works with all their devices. I know I certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t either. And this, you know, I was thinking as you were narrating all this, this feels so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, Microsoft like, you know, like, oh, well, it’s this except one that and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s this except one that’s other thing. And it just it’s so blurry and weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s so not the way Apple usually is. And just like you said, I mean, it needs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be simple. And one thing, and I don’t have the piece of feedback handy, but somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sent us some interesting feedback with some back of the napkin calculations as to how much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey data storing every iOS user’s pictures from the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of time would really take up. And I don’t remember the answer off the top of my head, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not even sure that they were right, But suffice to say, it was a metric crap ton of data that they would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need, or of hard drive space they would need in order to store all of these pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from everyone under the sun. So perhaps what made EverPix even mildly doable was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey simply that they weren’t trying to do it for everyone. They were trying to do it for thousands or tens of thousands of users.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, the storage, I guess, storage for individuals, especially, I mean, maybe the sharing stuff has some angle
⏹️ ▶️ John on it. But there’s not the type of, it’s the type of service like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know, Twitter or Facebook, where everybody’s seeing everybody else’s stuff, where the complexity and difficulty really
⏹️ ▶️ John ramps up as you add more things that you can kind of silo this, if you can support, you know, 10
⏹️ ▶️ John people, you can just multiply that out to support 1000s and millions. And yes, it costs tons and tons of money.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if it’s profitable for whatever you ever pick said they’d be profitable, like 20,000 people, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was profitable at 20,000. Presumably, it’s still be profitable at 40 at 60 at 90. And it’s like, oh, that costs so
⏹️ ▶️ John much money. Look at all the storage. Yeah, it costs lots of money. Apple has billions of dollars. Maybe you’d have to have an upper investment,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if it’s profitable, 20,000 for this little dinky company, hopefully Apple at 400 million, it
⏹️ ▶️ John could still be probably or at least break even, or maybe it’s even a little bit of a cost center. But you know, like I said, it may be just the
⏹️ ▶️ John cost of doing business eventually. And the photo stream stuff is kind of like bargaining. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how about this, guys? How about we will store all your pictures and the shared photo streams are way better
⏹️ ▶️ John than it used to be for sharing photos. Like I use them all the time with my family because it’s easier than it used to be
⏹️ ▶️ John and they don’t have to do anything if they have an iOS device if I put a picture of my shared photo stream it appears and they
⏹️ ▶️ John can look at it right there and that’s better than emailing them pictures that’s even better than you know in the old days
⏹️ ▶️ John making a dot Mac website and giving him the URL of the website and they would look at and all this stuff so
⏹️ ▶️ John I like photo streams but I think Apple was hoping if we make this constrained
⏹️ ▶️ John service and we put these numbers up you know a thousand pictures blah blah blah whatever we won’t have these crazy
⏹️ ▶️ John storage demands and maybe this will solve the problem. And I think it helps, but it doesn’t solve
⏹️ ▶️ John the are all my pictures safe problem. And that is an even bigger investment with more stuff. And yeah, the numbers are terrifying
⏹️ ▶️ John when you have 400 million. But almost anything you do with 400 million people is terrifying. I mean, just think about the email they get. And they’re not even a big
⏹️ ▶️ John email provider. Like, the amount of spam that they get at iCloud.com and Mac.com
⏹️ ▶️ John email addresses alone is pretty terrifying. And that is one of those things that gets worse as the volume goes
⏹️ ▶️ John up because you get targeted by spammers and stuff. So I’m not pretending it’s a small
⏹️ ▶️ John problem, but if anybody could do it, it’s the company with billions and billions of dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John of cash. And this really is kind of a service. It’s not read
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly like iTunes. You’re not sharing the same files for everybody, but it’s not that complicated. It’s file storage. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not computational or a web application that’s all sophisticated.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s basically like a big bucket of bits that you can get back in an efficient manner and all that good stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but it’s more than that. I mean, it’s replication, it’s backup. And you’re right that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deduplication is really not an issue because there’s nothing to be gained from it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly, backup and replication and scalability and uptime and access speeds and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco archival, all that stuff, that’s.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ve already got to do that for PhotoStream. All it does is, I mean, 1,000 pictures is still not small change. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ John multiply that by 50 for 50,000 pictures for each person, it’s 50 times harder in terms of you need 50 times
⏹️ ▶️ John more storage and 50 times more money and like all the things that you need, right? And you probably can’t charge 50
⏹️ ▶️ John times the price or whatever, but it’s like, it’s not like the photo stream itself
⏹️ ▶️ John is already, hopefully all those things you described, they already have a solution for. And it’s just a matter of,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, well now we just need to pour more money in and hopefully find someplace to get more money out, charge more money for users for
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Don’t, don’t give it to everyone for free. Maybe, maybe make it a $100 a year service, a $50 a year service. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John there are things you can do, or, you again, factored into the price of the other thing, spread that $50 over the cost of
⏹️ ▶️ John all your other products. Who knows? The money stuff I feel like can be worked out. The technology
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, they should have all this stuff already in place. And if they don’t, they should have this stuff anyway, just
⏹️ ▶️ John because this is an important thing that companies in the technology sector are going to have to have at some point in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, they’re not there yet. They seem to be making motions in this direction because that document
⏹️ ▶️ John did have a recent modification date saying that the upload limits were lowered. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, like we’ll know it’s happened because they’ll have a slide up that says, you know, the slide
⏹️ ▶️ John we previously showed you about photo stream said a thousand photos, blah, blah, blah. This slide just has a single word
⏹️ ▶️ John in the middle. It says unlimited or all your photos or some crap like that. Like we’ll know it when it happens. I don’t think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to arrive at a secret knowledge base article where suddenly there’s no more limits.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, that’s the kind of thing they would want to brag about. That’s a pretty big deal. And also, they would want people to know that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re doing it. If they just start quietly backing up more than your last X photos,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re not really getting much of a benefit out of that, customer-wise, PR-wise. If customers don’t realize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can now upload everything, then we’ll use it differently, we’ll think about it differently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think it’s important for them to be very loud about it if they ever do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and also, I don’t recall if I mentioned this in the last time we talked about EverPix, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thankfully that was so quick when we did because that gives us time to talk about it now. But … Mad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, the chat room is going to kill you. John Greenewald Yeah, I know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But just to really quickly add, if Apple did take this on, imagine how much of a selling point that would be for your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey normal human that they look at it and they know enough about the landscape
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to know that, well, Windows Phone Series, Mobile 7 Series, Metro, not Metro doesn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any of the fancy photo things we want. The Android phone that everyone is telling them to get,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, that looks nice and all, and I really like that big screen, but I tell you what,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this iPhone will back up all of my pictures for me automatically, and I don’t have to worry about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why would I not get that so when I take pictures of my kids, grandkids, dog, car, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know I will never, ever, ever lose any of them. That would be a real selling point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but again, it’s really hard to do and to get right. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know a lot of people have been telling us about Google Plus and how they back up all your stuff and some people even mentioned Dropbox and the
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Plus I think is worth addressing because I think Google is signed up for like hey we’ll save all your photos we’ll do all this great stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John for you and the reason it never is on my radar for something that I want to do is because
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Plus and the whole stuff associated with it which is now almost everything that Google does
⏹️ ▶️ John is a is a social network it’s a social sharing service and I would never take
⏹️ ▶️ John my family photos and give them over to a service that’s a social service.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I wouldn’t, if Facebook said, Hey, we’ll take all your photos and preserve them forever. I wouldn’t do it. And same thing with Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Plus, because the whole purpose of those services is to share things with other people. And my photo collection
⏹️ ▶️ John is by default, something I don’t want to share. In fact, all I want to do is selectively pick maybe a handful of
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures and share them with selected people like I do in photo stream. I never want to take here’s my entire photo library,
⏹️ ▶️ John jam it up to a social network service, Even if it has controls that say, oh, yeah, no, it’ll be private by default.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everything you upload won’t be shown to anybody unless you explicitly say it will. Don’t forget to check the check. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John even if all the defaults are right, even if all the heart is in the right place, it just it just make doesn’t make me comfortable to take all
⏹️ ▶️ John my photos and put them on a social network because that’s not like I don’t want to share them with the world. I’m just looking for somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John to store my pictures, you know, like ever fixed it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saw I saw him briefly. I know I saw a lot of feedback. Oh, just use Flickr. And I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey engaged with somebody who was like, well, yeah, but they default to sharing all your pictures. No, no, no, you don’t need to default
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to sharing all your pictures. But I completely agree with you, John. That’s inherently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey opposed. Their motivations are inherently opposed to my motivations. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just not good. So anyway, we can move on from this photo stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And let me ask you, John, if you were Steven Elop and you were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to discuss without actually discussing what you’d do as the next Microsoft CEO. What would you do
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I didn’t actually read all these articles about, it was a bunch of leaks from,
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably from Elop’s camp about what he would do if he took over Microsoft. And if you’re going to leak
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like that, like, I assume the idea was to leak things
⏹️ ▶️ John that people would say, yeah, that’s awesome. Get this guy because look what he said he’s going to do. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John to like to make public pressure, you know, you offer his
⏹️ ▶️ John surrogates or whatever like suddenly there’ll be pressure from the press, from the public, from Microsoft shareholders.
⏹️ ▶️ John You got to get a Zilop guy in there because he has some amazing ideas and you guys are a bunch of bozos. But then the ideas he put out
⏹️ ▶️ John seem terrible and everyone seems to think they’re terrible ideas. And so like I, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, you know, I don’t know if this was an intentional leak by his camp if it was, maybe they thought these were great ideas,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t think they’re great ideas and I don’t see anybody else thinking they’re great ideas. I mean, maybe they’re scary
⏹️ ▶️ John and radical and that’s the vibe he’s going for. Like he’s ready to shake stuff up. There’s no sacred cows or whatever, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, don’t get, don’t get rid of the one thing that is a cut. The one product Microsoft has is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John the most loved by customers. You can’t say it’s the most successful product because they had, you know, what was it,
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple billion dollar write down because of the red ring of death on the three sixties. And it’s lost money for years. And it did start
⏹️ ▶️ John to break even to become profitable. I think recently, but over its entire lifetime, it still hasn’t dug itself out of the hole
⏹️ ▶️ John that it took to get there. But people like it. People like the Xbox. And that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world of Microsoft, it’s not easy to say that about much of anything these days. So getting
⏹️ ▶️ John rid of that only makes sense if you decide that Microsoft is not going to be a consumer company anymore. And they’re just going
⏹️ ▶️ John to become like Oracle with a different logo. And I don’t think that’s a win scenario
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, would you try to kind of pull the opposite or maybe a similar thing to what they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do with Windows and brand everything that everything new perhaps that Microsoft does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Xbox this and Xbox that. What I mean is, you know, they take the Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mobile whatever, Windows phone series, whatever, whatever, and personally as soon as I see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Windows applied to anything, I get a little grumbly. Do you think if they rebranded
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things with Xbox that maybe that would be better? I mean clearly that worked for Comcast and Xfinity, so why wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because everyone wants to use the Xbox phone and their IT department’s gonna love that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean I agree But it seems like Microsoft could use some help in there in in any sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey branding situation branding situation I know marker. You’re the king of brands you tell me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean part of it is I don’t know their branding is pretty too. It’s pretty terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there are their marketing is is even worse and especially their advertising is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the worst but But ultimately, they could have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this terrible advertising and those terrible names for the products and they could get away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with it if the products were really amazingly good and compelling to buy. And the problem is they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. You know, Office, people love Office, or at least they use it. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think people really do love Office. It really is very good for what it does for the most part. Windows,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like some people love it, most people just kind of use it. else you know you kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it because it’s there because it’s what your business uses or whatever except you know the consumer stuff like Xbox
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s that’s a different story but the the things like they’re like Windows Phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even Windows 8 and and the new you know the surface and and things like the surface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole line of like Windows 8 convertible tablets or pure tablets slates I guess they call them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still all those things are just not that compelling and that that’s the biggest problem in the market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not it’s not they have stupid names. It’s not that they have dumbfounding commercials.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s that these things just aren’t getting any traction with consumers. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think there’s anything small they can do to fix that. I think this is a big problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It needs a big solution. And I’m not sure they can deliver it no matter what they call it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Xbox was actually kind of a triumph of the anti-branding thing, because I’m sure somebody, I’m sure a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of somebodies wanted to call the Microsoft game console something with the word Microsoft in it or something with the word windows
⏹️ ▶️ John in it. And there must have been a fight and the Xbox guys won that fight. It’s not, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft windows, Xbox or Xbox for windows or windows game machine or you know, anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just Xbox like, I mean, I guess I don’t even, I’m sure Microsoft is somewhere on the box, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the Xbox brand is not tied to Microsoft. It is not tied to windows in the same way that all the other
⏹️ ▶️ John things you just mentioned are. And I think the Xbox brand has such, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point that you made a joke about, Oh, what did they named everything? Xbox. If they made
⏹️ ▶️ John something, you know, the Xbox one does all sorts of non gaming stuff. And if they called
⏹️ ▶️ John one aspect of that non gaming stuff, Xbox TV, they didn’t, I don’t think they have anything branded that way, but it basically is
⏹️ ▶️ John Xbox TV. But if they if they called something Xbox TV, and it worked kind of like, oh, you know, we’ll take
⏹️ ▶️ John tea, like, like what the Xbox one does, we’ll take your TV in as an input and overlay stuff on it and let
⏹️ ▶️ John you switch back and forth between games and blah, blah, blah. I think that branding would work because people like Xbox
⏹️ ▶️ John and people would like the feature set, presumably. So I don’t think that’s entirely crazy
⏹️ ▶️ John to take Xbox and put it as a prefix instead of something else that’s related to what the Xbox does, as
⏹️ ▶️ John in a box that connects to your TV that does interactive things.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, John, since you’re apparently queuing everything or kicking everything off this episode,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how is the enterprise software experience treating you these days?
⏹️ ▶️ John I have this big, long sob story about enterprise software. I was trying to debate whether it fits in with
⏹️ ▶️ John just it would fit in on a complaining podcast if I had such a thing but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t it. This is your enthusiastic appreciating everything podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like If there’s some kind of lesson to take about like what not to do
⏹️ ▶️ John or something like that I don’t know you can tell me I can try I can try to go through it quickly If that’s if that’s at all possible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love to hear you attempt.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes And my version of attempting that as I talk really fast, that’s probably not what you want
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, so this is a story about enterprise software. And we’ve talked about enterprise software on past
⏹️ ▶️ John shows. And my sort of thumbnail sketch of enterprise software is that the people using the
⏹️ ▶️ John software aren’t the people who purchased the software or selected the software if it happens to be free.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so this is a story of just such a kind of piece of software. Before
⏹️ ▶️ John Mavericks was released, my work changed its VPN software from a VPN that worked
⏹️ ▶️ John with the VPN support that’s built into OS 10 to one that requires a third party client.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so here is the enterprise software assumption number one of the story. When a new version of OS 10 comes
⏹️ ▶️ John out, assume your enterprise software will not work with it. And that might not
⏹️ ▶️ John that might seem like a weird assumption. But like I when I was sort of, you know, sketching out the notes
⏹️ ▶️ John for this, I’m like, you know what, I just I do just assume that I just assume that, you know, when the new
⏹️ ▶️ John version of OS 10 comes out, most of my favorite programs will work with it. But of course, enterprise
⏹️ ▶️ John software won’t. And I’ve always I don’t question it, but I thought, why is that? There
⏹️ ▶️ John are months and months to lead up to an OS 10 release. Like there’s a developer conference, there are developer builds
⏹️ ▶️ John like the give. Like and it seems like all these companies are just shocked that Apple came out with a new app. But we’ve never seen anything
⏹️ ▶️ John like this before. Where did this come from? Mavericks, who heard of that? And then that day after
⏹️ ▶️ John it comes out, they, you know, they start work on, you know, they find out on that day whether their their
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff works for I mean, I it’s almost as if I’m not sure that enterprise software companies have
⏹️ ▶️ John anybody actively working on their software products, or at least on the Mac software, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s always just like a reactive mode. I mean, Oracle went years and no one cares about this, except for people who do
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff in my in my line of work, but Oracle went years without a 64 bit client library that worked in OS 10,
⏹️ ▶️ John like years, I think they span like three, two or three OS 10 releases without anything that worked in 64-bit
⏹️ ▶️ John because it just, you know, couldn’t be bothered. It’s like, who cares, whatever. So anyway, sure enough, Mavericks came
⏹️ ▶️ John out. My enterprise software did not work with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is Cisco VPN. I might as well just name names. Why not? I don’t think they’re going to sponsor the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sorry, Cisco. Cisco seemed, you know, genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ John shocked that Mavericks was released, and they seemed shocked that their software didn’t work with it. They’re like, like, huh, look at that. Our stuff doesn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ John with it. And they said, well, the existing version kind of worked, except it might frequently
⏹️ ▶️ John disconnect, which is like, all right, well, then it doesn’t work, really. Does it? Because if it frequently
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey disconnects, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John really what I want out of VPN software. And so I couldn’t upgrade to Mavericks until the VPN software
⏹️ ▶️ John was updated. So a short time later, I think it was only a couple of weeks, Cisco Update has a
⏹️ ▶️ John version that was compatible with Mavericks. So this is thumbs up on Cisco. See, maybe they will sponsor, because unlike Oracle, they didn’t wait
⏹️ ▶️ John three years. Weeks, only weeks after Mavericks were released. Granted, it still sort of drives me crazy, because
⏹️ ▶️ John you should not have found out when the OS was released that your software was incompatible and then scrambled for a couple of weeks to have a compatible
⏹️ ▶️ John version. But anyway, the new version said it has a workaround for a bug that’s in Mavericks,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that they filed the bug with Apple, and this version should work until Apple fixes the bug on their OS, which I completely
⏹️ ▶️ John believe, again, this bug should have been filed like seven developer releases of Mavericks ago, but whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in the meantime, here’s one that has a workaround that shouldn’t disconnect, all right? So then we come to enterprise software assumption number two.
⏹️ ▶️ John you will not be able to get the software you need. Can I download
⏹️ ▶️ John this new version of this VPN client that’s compatible with Mavericks? First step of that is trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to find it on Cisco’s website, which is not easy if you ever tried to find this type of thing. You would think it would be right there next to
⏹️ ▶️ John the words I read that told me they had a new version, but it’s not, because that was like in a forum somewhere with some Cisco person. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, this is reminding me of when I had to install RAID drivers for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAID cards on Linux. It’s exactly the same thing. thing. You have to dive through these like crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enterprise sites and good luck finding anything. And then they want you to join their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco program for their premium support and everything. Like, no, I bought the card. I just want to download the thing that makes it work.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Whenever you find yourself in a forum, almost especially if it’s an official forum,
⏹️ ▶️ John like this is not just some random forum with a bunch of people. Like, is it official person from the company responding to the
⏹️ ▶️ John forum? I mean, this is what drove the creation of, of stack overflow for one and
⏹️ ▶️ John discourse for another. Like if you find yourself in a traditional forum scrolling through pages and pages of replies, looking for
⏹️ ▶️ John the ones from the official Cisco guy, trying to like, it’s like replaying the journal on a file system. Everything comes back to file
⏹️ ▶️ John systems, guys. It’s like replaying the journal on a file system to reconstruct the history
⏹️ ▶️ John to like zoom up to the current day so that you have to read these giant threads to find the information. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I eventually found the page that had this text on it. I copy and pasted
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of stuff on the website because I just love the copy from these websites. Anyway, the following directory contains versions of AnyConnect
⏹️ ▶️ John for all platforms. The current download for OS X is version 3.1.04074. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a real version number for enterprise software. And all other platforms are 3.1.04072.
⏹️ ▶️ John AnyConnect version, big long number, is required for OS X 10.9, and all other Mac platforms
⏹️ ▶️ John may either use one of the old versions. Anyway, so underneath that tiny, tiny, tiny text
⏹️ ▶️ John is a huge scrolling iframe containing many, many downloads, most of which are not from my platform, including
⏹️ ▶️ John items like with text like this. Package enables F-I-P-S, all caps,
⏹️ ▶️ John for Mac OS X, all one word squished together, Intel, in scare
⏹️ ▶️ John quotes for some reason, platform. So package enables FIPS for Mac OS X
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel platforms. File contains the VPN API for Mac OS X
⏹️ ▶️ John spaced out this time, Intel platforms. Standalone DMG package for Mac OS X Intel platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ John Web deployment package for Mac OS X Intel platforms. All of these are the old version number,
⏹️ ▶️ John despite the note on the top saying that you want to have the new version number. And I don’t know which do I want. FIPS, do I want VPN API, do
⏹️ ▶️ John I want standalone DMG package, do I want web deployment package? Like no instructions in that regard.
⏹️ ▶️ John Easiest way to find what I want was to search for the version number string on the page. Do like in page, in browser,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, search for the thing. Cause then I found like way down, you know, instead of, you scroll past like a hundred
⏹️ ▶️ John of these things, for Linux, for Windows, different versions of Windows, different platforms, different versions. Eventually I
⏹️ ▶️ John found the one that I want. And the thing, I guess the take home lesson of this is like the next time you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John on some web developers, some developers website and auto
⏹️ ▶️ John detects what platform you’re on and gives you a gigantic shiny red glossy button with a download link for the latest version
⏹️ ▶️ John of their software for your platform, appreciate it because that’s not how, you know what I mean? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, when you go to a website and like, like that’s what they want you to have. You want to go to some indie Mac developers. a
⏹️ ▶️ John gigantic button that says download now download right here even if it’s a link to the Mac App Store they’ll take you right
⏹️ ▶️ John to the thing not on enterprise software you have to have to hunt for the download link and they’ll be decoys like
⏹️ ▶️ John all those ones I just read and you have to know what FIPS is and I don’t you know no explanation of this stuff a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of these Atari GZs too just throw an X-Tune Runky wrench for the non tech savvy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I find it I find the download link that I want I click it and no luck I get a message saying I have to log in
⏹️ ▶️ John right so okay well I figured that would be the case because they’re not I can’t just let you download their software. That’s crazy. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco said, you have to register an account. You can’t just have the thing. So I register. I create an account. I
⏹️ ▶️ John check my email for the confirmation message. I click the confirmation link. I’m all set. I attempt to
⏹️ ▶️ John log into my new confirmed Cisco account. And I get this error message. Again, word for word.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your login was unsuccessful for one of the following reasons. You entered your user ID and or
⏹️ ▶️ John password incorrectly. Please try again. That’s a bulleted item. And here’s a second bulleted item. You recently registered
⏹️ ▶️ John or reset your password, and our systems are updating your information. Please try again in five minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s slave lag. That’s actually an error message. So then we come to enterprise software assumption
⏹️ ▶️ John number three. What works in the rest of the world does not work in the enterprise world. In the rest of the world, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you create an account and they email you a confirmation link and you click it, like you go through the whole, of
⏹️ ▶️ John course you can log into that account. You just confirmed it. Hell, most of the time you can partially log into it, even if you
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t confirmed it. You don’t just say, oh, you haven’t confirmed your email yet. But in the enterprise world, merely creating an account
⏹️ ▶️ John and clicking the confirmation doesn’t mean you can log into it. Right? So, yeah. So I wait five minutes, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Same error. I wait 10 minutes, same error, 15 minutes, same error. I’m thinking like, well, maybe I mistyped
⏹️ ▶️ John my password and maybe I mistyped it twice during the account creation process is possible. Or may have the cap
⏹️ ▶️ John locks on or some crazy thing like that. Right? So I reset my password. That thankfully they haven’t forgot your password
⏹️ ▶️ John link. I would have to go off into another realm because sometimes they don’t even have a forgot your password. Like you didn’t like call somebody or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John I reset my password. You know, it sends you an email, click this link to reset, type in new password. I try logging
⏹️ ▶️ John in with my newly reset password. And what I of course get is that same error message that says you entered a
⏹️ ▶️ John user ID and or password incorrectly, please start again as one bulleted item, or you recently
⏹️ ▶️ John registered to reset your password. And I did recently reset my password. And I realized like, that’s not going to help
⏹️ ▶️ John me because if I get that error message, again, this error message says your login was unsuccessful for one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John following reasons. And it gives two possible reasons. One, user ID or password incorrect. Two,
⏹️ ▶️ John you just recently registered or reset. Well, I did just recently reset.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually four reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, yeah, two bullet points. Please try again in five minutes. Wait five minutes, wait 10 minutes,
⏹️ ▶️ John wait 15 minutes, wait a whole day. You actually did it again? Waited a whole day. Like, who knows? It was the enterprise
⏹️ ▶️ John software. Maybe, like you said, maybe it hasn’t propped. Maybe some person has to write it down on form
⏹️ ▶️ John and mimeograph it and put it in a pneumatic tube. I don’t know how things get into the real
⏹️ ▶️ John database. And somebody’s going to enter into an Excel spreadsheet, and someone prints that Excel spreadsheet, and then sends it FedEx
⏹️ ▶️ John to the Topeka office. And the Topeka offices enters it in their COBOL system. And then finally, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can go, I don’t know how it works. I gave it a whole day, same error message. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a repeat of enterprise software assumption number three. It works in the rest of the world. It doesn’t work in the enterprise world. To create an
⏹️ ▶️ John account, you can’t log into it. To reset your password, you can’t log into it. So now I’m in desperation mode. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I email the support link. You know, find on the website something like technical support
⏹️ ▶️ John for the Cisco website, right? Here’s the entire text of my email. I can’t log into my account
⏹️ ▶️ John at Cisco.com. I gave the username as well. I’ve tried resetting my password. Each time it says
⏹️ ▶️ John it succeeds, but each time a new password still does not work. I think that’s straightforward. I don’t know what else to tell them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I gave them my username. I said that I can’t log in. And their first thing is going to be like, oh, maybe you forgot your password. You
⏹️ ▶️ John should probably reset it. So I felt like I should tell them I’ve reset my password several times, actually, because I did do it several times.
⏹️ ▶️ John And each time it says, yes, we’ve reset your password. But each time I try to log in again, my newly reset password doesn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s all I said. I didn’t have to go into this big rigamarole about the weird messages and stuff like that. I figure maybe there’s something weird
⏹️ ▶️ John on my account, or I’m locked out, or they should be able to see on their end failed login attempts or something. Who knows? So I
⏹️ ▶️ John got a response about 12 hours later, which is pretty darn good. And I’m not being sarcastic about this in terms of customer
⏹️ ▶️ John support. For any company, 12 hours is a pretty good turnaround time on a support email, especially for a big
⏹️ ▶️ John company like Cisco. Here’s the reply. Dear John, thank you for contacting Cisco.
⏹️ ▶️ John By adding star.cisco.com to the trusted sites, you are able to log in successfully.
⏹️ ▶️ John How to do it? Question mark, comma. Follow these easy steps, period. Just this crazy,
⏹️ ▶️ John crazy punctuation. A, the steps are labeled with a capital A, period.
⏹️ ▶️ John Click the Tools button, then click Internet Options.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Anyone who has those windows down.
⏹️ ▶️ John B, click the Security tab. C, now click Trusted Sites, then click on the Sites button. D, and it goes through the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John instructions for in Internet Explorer, adding star.cisco.com as a trusted site. Because I guess the assumption is my
⏹️ ▶️ John problem is that I can’t log in because it’s not a trusted site. I didn’t say anything about trusted site. I didn’t send them any screenshots. I didn’t mention platform.
⏹️ ▶️ John But this is the can response I get. All right, so OK, forget about that. Time to get creative.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know why I didn’t do this earlier, but I made an incognito window in Chrome, or the equivalent of deleting
⏹️ ▶️ John cookies. Like, just start with a fresh slate, right? And I go to the call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it porn mode. It’s all right. Is that what they
⏹️ ▶️ John call it? The kids call it these days? And I go to the login form, and I enter my password. And it works. log in.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m I see the top of the page like my username, I can go to my account and like, Hey, my account, it works, everything works
⏹️ ▶️ John great. And so I renavigate to the download link, I click on it and it asked me to log in.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now, and now I read the message, the message that shows you when you try to click
⏹️ ▶️ John on the link, the message that was there the first time, but that it didn’t finish reading because I’m impatient said to download the software,
⏹️ ▶️ John you must log in and had a link to log in. And the first time I encountered this problem, I immediately click the login link
⏹️ ▶️ John and it went through you You don’t have an account, create an account, blah, blah, blah. But that message continues. You must log in
⏹️ ▶️ John and have a valid service contract associated with your Cisco.com profile.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is enterprise software assumption number four. Sometimes, despite all the terrible things that are terrible about
⏹️ ▶️ John enterprise software, it’s at least partially your fault. If I had read that message the first time, I probably would have
⏹️ ▶️ John stopped this process and said, well, I don’t have a valid service contract associated with my Cisco.com profile. In fact, I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John have a Cisco.com profile. But instead, I read, to download the software, you must log in. Log in was blue and underlined.
⏹️ ▶️ John I clicked on it and I went off. So I, like every other user doesn’t read all the messages, just gets to the part that I wanted to get
⏹️ ▶️ John to. So I can’t get this all for myself. I don’t have a service contract.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry, can I pause you real quick? Go for it. How long between the first time you saw the login link
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and clicked it and the realization now that you needed to read the rest of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the message? Because you mentioned at least a 12 hour wait, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, so like
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried it one day and went through this whole big thing and then it kept asking me to wait. So I said, fine, I’ll wait till tomorrow. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried the second day and then did the email thing and then got the email back, I guess, the third day. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not sitting there hammering. This is just each day I make another run at it. OK.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, I think the problem with the incognito window thing is that it probably cookied me seeing that, oh, he was trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to get to destination x. But before you can get there, we have to send you off on this tangent to create an account and log into it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think what happened was I went off on a tangent, created an account. And every time I went to the login form,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was trying to send me to the destination that it didn’t have permission to get to. So every time I logged in, it would probably accept my authentication,
⏹️ ▶️ John try to send me to the destination, and then bounce me back and say, oh, you can’t get this because you haven’t logged in, and send me back to the login form.
⏹️ ▶️ John And of course, the error message doesn’t say anything about that, and the error message is terrible anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That wasn’t one of the 400 error possibilities?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s like, why else would clearing cookies, you know, why else would the equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ John of clearing cookies allow me to get logged in? Because it sent me, just dumped me on the home page then, right? So I couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get this off by myself, so I figured, let me try to get it the way that my work says I’m supposed to get
⏹️ ▶️ John it right and their their instructions, which I’ve done before, obviously, because I have the existing version of
⏹️ ▶️ John this VPN software that works in mountain line is make sure you’re not on the VPN step one, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John always striking me strange. But anyway, and go to some special URL, log in with my special work credentials, loaded
⏹️ ▶️ John Java applet that will try to detect my platform and send me the file. And most of this time, of course, this doesn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ John right because my login credentials work. But then sometimes it bounces me back to the login page, and then that whole browser
⏹️ ▶️ John is fried and you need to clear cookies or quit the browser and relaunch it and have a chance at it. Or sometimes the job app won’t load.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the job applet hangs and says, can’t detect my platform. So I try chrome and try safari, try firefox.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t try I. E. In my V. M. Because it auto detects your platform and if it works in I.
⏹️ ▶️ John E. In windows, but then it gives me the windows version of the V. P. M. Which is useless to me. I need the host and version of it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I always fight with this. I’m used to it. Eventually I get it downloaded. Look at, of course, it’s still the old version. All right, so now I just
⏹️ ▶️ John have to work, wait for work to update its old version of the software. And this is kind of the state of math
⏹️ ▶️ John now, which is like, I can’t get the software myself. I have to wait for my office to update the version
⏹️ ▶️ John of the software. I told him, you know, I told him at the beginning of this process before any, I started any of it, I had sent a support ticket
⏹️ ▶️ John and said, Hey, can I have the version of the VPN that works with Mavericks, blah, blah, blah. But I know the turnaround times are really long in
⏹️ ▶️ John that. So while this was going on, I was figuring, well, let me try to get the thing myself. Right. And the question is,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess, why does this have a downloader? Like, why does it require a service contract? Why,
⏹️ ▶️ John why are all these things that just happened to me? Why are they there? Why isn’t this VPN installer just a download link on
⏹️ ▶️ John Cisco’s website? Why isn’t this just on a share in my work that I can get? And I guess it just comes down
⏹️ ▶️ John to control. Like IT departments and offices want to have control because they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to just let anybody install any VPN software they want. They have to
⏹️ ▶️ John qualify it to determine that it works with all the other software that is qualified to work in the company or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it makes sense from their perspective because it’s the best way to have predictable results when you’re supporting
⏹️ ▶️ John hundreds and hundreds of people. You got to have a set of approved software. Nothing new goes in that set
⏹️ ▶️ John until it’s tested and you make sure it works with all the other approved software. And you can’t just let users
⏹️ ▶️ John download whatever the hell they want to install on their computers. Like that’s the opposite of IT support. And we can, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John get into a whole nuanced discussion about whether that’s the right model for IT support or whatever, but it’s the current model. And
⏹️ ▶️ John computer nerds are the worst, like, because we just all want to do it ourselves. And yeah, I do want to do it myself.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s kind of like how they say doctors make the worst patients. I think computer nerds make the worst people to support
⏹️ ▶️ John in IT, and I’m sure the IT department hates the fact that I’m emailing them. Can I have a big giant version number of
⏹️ ▶️ John this piece of software because it works with this version of the OS and blah, blah, blah? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s this whole culture of people who really, really don’t like Apple. Period. They just don’t like Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they don’t like Mac in all capital letters. And I have to wonder,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bet the percentage of people who manage IT
⏹️ ▶️ Marco departments at large companies, I bet among them, the percentage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them who are the kind of people who hate Mac in all capitals is way higher than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco average. And just culturally, I guarantee you that’s the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so they don’t like it, they don’t respect it. And I think that also applies to enterprise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software developers as well. And I think that’s partly why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the enterprise software people are always totally caught off guard when a new version of OS X comes out. Because they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco respect Mac people or Apple or the platform enough to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pay any attention whatsoever to the betas or to prioritize the releases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that fix horrible bugs that only affect Mac people. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that, you know, it’s just a whole culture of like, well, you know, you people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who want to use Mac all capitals, you’re just like this, this annoyance for us. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not real software and anything that goes wrong. That’s definitely a Mac and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all capitals bug. And that’s, that’s not our bug that that’s their bug. And they messed something up because Apple’s stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I bet that’s a lot of this.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was definitely the Oracle vibe. But the vibe from Cisco is weird, though, because as soon as, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the forums lit up with like, hey, Mavericks is out and my VPN doesn’t work. Cause this is a widely used product. It
⏹️ ▶️ John seemed like the official Cisco people were genuinely concerned about this failure
⏹️ ▶️ John and didn’t know about it. Like, Oh my God, our stuff doesn’t work with the new version. I, I, we just
⏹️ ▶️ John released, this just came out. How could we have known? Like they either not aware that there are developer
⏹️ ▶️ John builds of it or like it’s. And the thing is they reacted quickly. Like they got a new buildup in,
⏹️ ▶️ John in, you know, in weeks. It wasn’t that it was less than a month. Like that’s pretty fast for enterprise software for such a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John This has got to go through all you know, like they reacted like this is this is important. We need to have a version
⏹️ ▶️ John of this that works. But if that was the it’s baffling to me, like if they’re so concerned about it, like
⏹️ ▶️ John this didn’t have to be this way. You could have known this was coming by being part of the Apple. Like not
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody, but just one dude in the company. Right. And the other thing is, I always picture in these companies, there is like one guy who’s like a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John user, the one guy they have working on the Mac software. Surely that guy is a big Mac nerd and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s held back by his bosses or something like that But I don’t understand why you know
⏹️ ▶️ John If a little one-person IndyMac software developer shop can make sure all
⏹️ ▶️ John of his software all of his 17 applications that he’s written over the years are all work on Mavericks
⏹️ ▶️ John and Have his software ready before the you know before the official public release and I guess
⏹️ ▶️ John Cisco can’t I mean Maybe it’s because they’re a big company because they’re slow moving I don’t know, just like, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not just big company, like Adobe’s software, I’m assuming work within Mavericks. Like, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t understand it. But the enterprise stuff I do understand even a little bit, like with the VPN
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, especially, you can’t just download software. Like the software they give you from that Java thing is
⏹️ ▶️ John pre-configured with all the values for your company. And again, that’s better for, you know, because most people in the
⏹️ ▶️ John company aren’t tech nerds. So you just want to give them something and just say, look, just run this, it’ll be all set up for you. Which is convenient,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it also means that Even if I was able to download that software from Cisco, I would have to then know all
⏹️ ▶️ John the different values I have to put in. What is the server name? What is the port? What is the protocol that I have to check here in this checkbox
⏹️ ▶️ John and all that stuff to get it configured? So I would have to download the official version and try to dig into
⏹️ ▶️ John it and find PLIST files or other configuration things to figure out what all the values are. Or try to ask IT,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is, hey, can you tell me the values to self-configure? They’d be like, what are you doing, self-configure the VPN
⏹️ ▶️ John client? You can’t do that. You can only download our official one. And we’re not up to that version yet. You really don’t, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m a pain in the butt. This is mostly slash partially my fault,
⏹️ ▶️ John but enterprise software is also terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is. And I think I might be able to explain some of that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before I do that, Marco, is there anything else that’s awesome that you’d like to tell us about?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is. It is our wonderful friends at Squarespace. Squarespace is
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco For a free trial and 10% off, go to squarespace.com and use offer code ATP11
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco new designs, and even better support. They have beautiful designs for you to start with, and all the style options
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you end up needing any help at all, they have an amazing support team that works 24 hours a day, 7 days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a week, with over 70 full-time employees based in New York City alone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, Squarespace starts at just $8 a month, and that includes a free domain name if you sign up for a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year. Every design, they have these beautiful templates, I mean really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do as little or as much as you want to customize them. I chose to do very little for the ATP site,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it still looks amazing. Their built-in themes are just that good. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these themes, they’re built by professional designers, they’ve won awards, they even all come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with matching mobile templates. They have these responsive designs that are really fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They look just like the rest of the site. So it looks, you know, on theme, on brand, if you will. And
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco up for Squarespace, make sure you use our offer code ATP11 to get 10% off your first
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⏹️ ▶️ John You should change our template. All these cool templates that Squarespace has. You say template? Template?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that how you want to say it? I say template. Anyway, there are cool ones. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey see them. It
⏹️ ▶️ John There are cool ones. I see them on other people’s website. Now ours looks kind of boring. Can’t you just change it by clicking something and
⏹️ ▶️ John changing the template?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That can be your homework for the week, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John No. I don’t have the login credentials to the Squarespace site.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Good. Don’t give him trouble. I’d be adding or rotating
⏹️ ▶️ John CSS3 cubes all over that site.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, somebody please send me the code to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s easy to find. Just type CSS3 rotating cube. You’ll find it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s amazing. Do not give him the login credentials,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Marko. Well, now I’m tempted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco No, you can finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fix all the typos. I’m making the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, let give me the login credentials and don’t give him to John. He already is doing way too much planning as evidenced by the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, that sounded a lot like preparation and notes to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I because like once this process started, I’m like I need to write this stuff down because of the details
⏹️ ▶️ John are important. The exact error message. If you just say I tried to do something then it was a bunch of errors and stuff. It doesn’t like you
⏹️ ▶️ John really need to get the detail. So I wrote them down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, let me tell you, you know, if we’re all honest with each other,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The people come to the show for me and sort of kind of for Marco. You’re just a tag along.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will kick you off my show if you continue to do this kind of preparation. This is unacceptable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m just letting you know you’re on notice. So earlier, KJ Healy in the chat said, think of it this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way. People who develop Minecraft mods as children grow up to be enterprise software authors as adults.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think that might pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ John the Minecraft mod authors are way more enthusiastic and dedicated than
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey these Enterprise
⏹️ ▶️ John people. They totally want to be there. Like as soon as the new Minecraft version they have, like I have, here’s a version
⏹️ ▶️ John of my mod that works with the beta of 1.7 and they track the beta as this works with the second beta
⏹️ ▶️ John of 1.7. And when 1.7 official comes out, you can be damn sure their mod works with it if you can ever find a download
⏹️ ▶️ John link and if you can figure out how to install it.
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have all the prerequisites that they don’t mention because they assume everybody knows.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, man. I mean, Enterprise software is a hard problem. I mean, it’s like, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a small amount of experience in it because my first job after college for a couple years was writing enterprise software.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was a little different. It was a very small company, but our customers were very big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco companies. And it’s just a tough business because any effort
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would want to put in for making things better, improving the UI,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improving the design, improving the flow of anything, the customers didn’t really care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever asked for that, when I would actually get to spend some time doing it and I would work on it for like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco month, no one cared, no one said anything, it didn’t get us any more sales, it probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t result in any benefit to the company at all, actually. And as you said, John, at the beginning, with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enterprise software, the people who make the buying decisions usually are not the people who are going to be using it every day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it’s just this bizarre market where it is a big market and there’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of money to be made there, but it just does not work the way you’d expect based on consumer software.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just very, very different. All the incentives are different. The whole process of making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and selling and maintaining it is extremely different. It’s just this weird, bizarre
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alternative universe that people like us who are mostly in the consumer side just can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly understand, and I think we’re better off for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s mostly true. So as someone who has kind of a leg in both universes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can tell you a few things firstly. I’ve noticed at my company. So I work at a consultancy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s Somewhere around 60 to 80 people I forget exactly what the number is now and we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey typically work on the Microsoft stack but not exclusively And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will tell you that I’ve noticed since I started at this particular company about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a year ago, a little over a year ago, almost a year and a half ago now, I was one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey few people to have a Mac because I pretty much negotiated on the way in that I’m not gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a PC or this conversation’s over. And so I was one of the handful of people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that had a Mac and now I’m noticing that there are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way more Mac users, not only developers, even the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey executives are using various flavors of Macs more and more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with each passing day. And in fact, our singular IT guy, he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just decided, you know, I’ve got a 15 inch high res anti-glare
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MacBook Pro just sitting in the closet, maybe I should use that myself. And similarly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his Android phone, I don’t remember specifically what it was about- They’re all the same, right? A month and a half
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, right. Well, and there’s a million, but they’re all the same. But anyway, the point is- like cats.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. So about a month ago or whenever it was, I guess it was right around the time the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5s came out. He said to me, Hey, my Android phones, headphone jack is busted and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I use that for all my music everywhere. So I need something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to fix this. And I was thinking if you just got a 5s Casey, do you have an old iPhone that you want to unload?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I said, well, yeah, I have a 4s, but I can’t in good conscience, give that to you, let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alone sell it to you. But let me see what I can do.” And it ended up another friend of mine had a five and he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paid my friend for the five. And so in the course of two or three months, this guy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this friend of mine slash RIT guy went from being an Android and Dell user to an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone and Mac user. And so the reason I bring all this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up is because in a smaller corporate environment, it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey starting to be more and more prevalent for even non-technical people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the executives at the company to use Macs. And I thought that was kind of interesting. Now with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the enterprise software specifically, so we work with all different size
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clients. We work with extremely small clients and we work with pretty big clients. And I’m measuring pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey big at generally speaking tens of thousands of employees. And if there’s anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve noticed is that firstly, the group that we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specifically working with can in large degree make or break a project. So if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the team at the client that we’re working with is really enthusiastic and really excited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and really wants to build what’s right, then we can play off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that and we can build what’s right. There are other times that we’ll be working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a group, a group of the client that is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enthusiastic and has been beaten down. And just like you said, Marco, when you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were at the search engine company, even if we pose the most amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey solution to a problem, it’s usually met with, eh, nobody’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey care. Exactly. And I think what that comes from is, noticed in big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey companies across a couple of jobs now, because I’ve been a consultant for a while, that in really big companies,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems like what I would define as middle management. So people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that are not peons, but are not really that important either, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all, well, firstly, there’s a million of them. And they all, deep down inside,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey realize that they’re kind of expendable. And the problem is that they know this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deep down inside. And so now it’s their mission to prevent anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else from knowing that they’re expendable. So what does that mean? What that means
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is anytime you’re in a meeting, Susie and Timmy and Johnny and Sally and everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there, all these middle managers need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s actually their names?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, of course not. But all of these middle managers need to speak up and let it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be known, I said something interesting and I said something important.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This was my idea. And because of that, nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gets done because everyone has to have an opinion about everything. And nobody can agree on everything. And everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wants to make sure they know that I said that thing. I’m important. I shouldn’t be the one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get the pink slip and it’s just soul sucking and it’s terrible. And the unfortunate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing is a lot of times that is the entire company. But what’s almost worse is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is when you have a group that’s really excited and really interested
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and really cares. And then they’re met with so much inertia.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s really, or so much, I guess, non inertia. In other words, the company that around them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is so stagnant that there’s nothing they can do to move it. And I, and again, I bring all this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up because what if the Cisco VPN people hypothetically knew that Mavericks was coming out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and wanted to go to WWDC and really cared that all this was happening, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone around them just didn’t care and didn’t let them take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey action. And that’s what you see in corporate America. And it’s mind-boggling to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as someone who lives or works in corporate America, yet in a very small version of corporate America,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s mind-boggling to me that this works, that these humongous companies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ever make any money. I don’t know how they do it. It’s truly, truly amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Success hides problems. It does. There’s a bunch of money coming in, and these middle
⏹️ ▶️ John managers can play that. It’s like you’re funding. It’s kind of like the dot-com bubble when it
⏹️ ▶️ John was a bunch of dot-com companies selling each other services with their own VC money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco probably missed out on the first bubble.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was in college during that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that was basically, very quickly, especially in the big metro areas, is
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d have VC-funded startups selling their services to another VC-funded startup. And it was like it was like the strange
⏹️ ▶️ John exchange and swap with VC money until all the money ran out. And then you realize all of our customers were other
⏹️ ▶️ John people who didn’t have any customers except for us. And we were all just in this giant, you know, it’s a bubble. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the only winners were the people who made the foosball tables. Not even
⏹️ ▶️ John that. The winner, the real winners were the people who resell used office equipment.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the repo men come in with the big trucks and they come and sell that. You know, you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the building owners probably made out pretty well, too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, high rents for a short period of time, but then lots of vacancies was the problem. Yeah, but like, so
⏹️ ▶️ John the difference in a company is that presumably they have some moneymaker, some product or service that got itself entrenched that
⏹️ ▶️ John really does make money over the long term. And that funnel of money fuels internal dysfunction.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, it doesn’t cause internal dysfunction, it literally fuels it. Like, there’s an engine there
⏹️ ▶️ John of dysfunction running. And the only way it keeps running is if you keep pouring money in. Because if you didn’t pour money in, all these people
⏹️ ▶️ John doing nothing would get fired or you’d have layoffs or something else would happen. But if everything’s going well,
⏹️ ▶️ John you guys get to play this game of basically internal office politics foosball
⏹️ ▶️ John without worrying, because, hey, the money’s coming in, and you guys just jockey over who gets the credit for which amount of money that came in and do a source
⏹️ ▶️ John of inefficient internal things. And in that type of scenario, if we’re imagining in the Cisco
⏹️ ▶️ John scenario, I guess the company’s still reactive enough that all of a sudden
⏹️ ▶️ John when the customer complaints stop flooding in, that’s an input to the company. that’s a metric that someone’s tracking
⏹️ ▶️ John that has an effect. Oh, customer complaints. We have important customers, big important customers
⏹️ ▶️ John who want this now, even if it’s just like the CEO of some company that spends a bazillion dollars at Cisco.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then he has Mavericks and he wants his VPN to work. Then it’s a fire drill and everyone all hands on deck.
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe that little unit that Casey was hypothesizing, you know, it’s like, yeah, we’ve been telling you
⏹️ ▶️ John that for a week. We’re like, oh, no, okay, now you get to do it because it’s a fire drill and now there’s some external pressure to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But who knows? Many scenarios like this could be possible. I just don’t know what’s going on inside
⏹️ ▶️ John there. And the thing about enterprise software is it exists for a reason that is mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John understandable. The people in my company who do IT, like Marco was talking about the
⏹️ ▶️ John IT people who hate the Mac, I’ve had those IT people. I don’t have them now. My company has a good IT
⏹️ ▶️ John department that wants to do the right thing and, in fact, are usually enthusiastic about Macs and are trying to support it. Their deficit
⏹️ ▶️ John is maybe they don’t have the experience. And so they don’t really know, but they’re figure it out, but their
⏹️ ▶️ John requirements are like enterprise software is made for them. Again, the customers that Marco was saying he’d make improvements
⏹️ ▶️ John to the enterprise software and no one would care. The customers wouldn’t care. The customers are not the people using the software again. It’s enterprise
⏹️ ▶️ John software. The customers are the people buying it and things they care about are very different. Like in our company,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re now supporting Max more or less officially like I was the first Mac into the company like four or five years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John and now their Macs are everywhere. They’re officially supported. But to give an example, the Macs that are officially
⏹️ ▶️ John supported have to run PGP hold this encryption. And if you’re a Mac user, like why would they do that? Why wouldn’t they just run file
⏹️ ▶️ John vault two? It’s awesome. Everybody loves it. Well, because file vault two is not enterprise software, meaning it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John cater to the needs of the enterprise and more than needs of the enterprise. For like, in my company for like, you know, compliance
⏹️ ▶️ John with various industry regulations, you have to have the ability to report that
⏹️ ▶️ John not just install hold this encryption and all the machines but you know, prove in whatever way this I’d prove
⏹️ ▶️ John for whatever auditing purposes that everyone has it installed and PG behold this encryption as enterprise software sells
⏹️ ▶️ John the enterprise and says feature checkbox on the back of the box that doesn’t actually exist anymore
⏹️ ▶️ John can report that it’s enabled on all such and such a systems right file vault two is not enterprise
⏹️ ▶️ John software doesn’t have that feature maybe apple remote desktop does or some other pieces of software that’s more geared toward the enterprise but if you just
⏹️ ▶️ John get a new Mac and it comes with Mavericks and you collect the check off the file vault to check box and enable it all or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever there’s no report central reporting structure to know and they need to do that for compliance.
⏹️ ▶️ John So of course they’re going to buy the software package that says, Hey, IT manager, we know that you have to do these stupid reporting
⏹️ ▶️ John things because your legal department tells you to our software does that for you. And yeah, so of course, they’re going to go for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as a user, you’re like, I just want to run the built in stuff because PGP, all this encryption bricks on a machine every time it runs
⏹️ ▶️ John a minor point update, as it has many times in the past, and like it would be so much easier and cheaper, you wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to buy this third party product, we just enable file vault two, it’s awesome, everybody loves it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it department to its credit wants to do that. But short term, it’s like we have PGP PGP works PGP
⏹️ ▶️ John fills our fills our reporting compliance. And this is the dysfunction in the enterprise is that those customers
⏹️ ▶️ John have needs that may seem dumb, but their real needs and if you’re not going to serve them, some enterprise software company will and
⏹️ ▶️ John that enterprise software company is allowed to be terrible on all the other axes as long as they’re good along the axes that matter
⏹️ ▶️ John to the IT department. And they usually are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, I’m just so glad I don’t work on anything important.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should have like a bring your indie developer to work day.
⏹️ ▶️ John We bring in people who work from home on their own projects and we make them sit through HR seminars and take
⏹️ ▶️ John compliance training courses in flash.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would love to watch Marco just sit there and squirm and be uncomfortable 40
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seconds into the HR annual this is how not to sexually harass your co-workers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No that wouldn’t be a problem the problem would be when you’d have me sit down at some Windows PC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with some like crap Dell keyboard and and say all right here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your 4-tran terminal and you’re gonna be writing financial management software you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to follow all these rules and do a lot of math and there’s gonna be another person sitting 18 inches from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your elbow oh wait that was Bloomberg and that’s why I didn’t take that job I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we’re done. All right, we good?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think we’re good. Thanks a lot to our sponsors this week hover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco File transporter and Squarespace and we will see you next week
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over they didn’t even mean to begin because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental Accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental. And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at ATP.FM And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter, you can follow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O, A-R-M, N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R, A-C, USA
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental. It’s accidental. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to, accidental. Accidental. Tech podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hey, so let’s not do ATP, and let’s just do neutral and talk about John’s car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, this is a major event. You know, Casey and I get cars all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, once every 10 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the last time you got a car, John, was the iPod even out yet? I’m serious.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, my car was older than more than 10 years old. But we had a newer car, because
⏹️ ▶️ John we had a 2007 car. That’s the car my wife drives. So we had a newish car. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was like a 2004, before that. And that got told and replaced it with a 2007. I always
⏹️ ▶️ John get the years of our cars wrong, which you would think would be something I know, but I’m thrown off by the whole model year
⏹️ ▶️ John having very little to do with the actual year distinction. But anyway, we had 2007 car, which is a pretty new
⏹️ ▶️ John car, but the car I was driving was 2002 Civic. So yeah, and
⏹️ ▶️ John this one I assume I will also have for 10 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So now you have two Accords. Yep. How does that feel?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Feels just fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the most glowing ad for an Accord. How does it feel to have two of them? feels
⏹️ ▶️ Casey From John, that is glowing.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s my third Accord.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is the Honda Accord encapsulated into
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t share your opinion of the Honda Accord. I find it a…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, you do. I think it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I find it a much more interesting car than other similarly priced, quote unquote, boring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Should have gotten a Mazda 6, but you know No, nobody’s perfect.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I would have if I had test drove it. The main thing I was test driving it for was
⏹️ ▶️ John clutch, shifter, driving position, and visibility. Like, that’s what I was test driving it for. Because if I didn’t like the clutch
⏹️ ▶️ John and shifter, or the driving position, or the visibility, or like the ride, I guess, I would have gone test drove
⏹️ ▶️ John the 6. But I did like it, and so I didn’t even feel the need to go and get it. Because I really don’t like how the 6 looks. It
⏹️ ▶️ John just, I’ve seen a lot of it on the road. And I would have gone to it if it was like, well, if the Accord was terrible. Because I do
⏹️ ▶️ John need a new car. It’s like, I’m not getting this car for my health. because the old car was just going downhill. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if the Accord was good, I didn’t see a reason to continue to. And plus, I didn’t want to drag it out. So I didn’t even bother test driving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m kind of surprised that you’re able to get a car at all and be satisfied with it at all. Because cars,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even great cars, have such ridiculous glaring flaws, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interface and stuff. I
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, it’s filled with terrible things. So the good thing about having a new car every
⏹️ ▶️ John more 10, 12 years or so is that it’s like if you kept like your Mac for years and
⏹️ ▶️ John years and you didn’t have a Mac Pro and you replace it. Say you had like a MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John from five or six years ago, any new portable Mac you get you’ll be like oh my god
⏹️ ▶️ John this is such a you know because there’s so many things change in that period of time. Now cars don’t move as fast as computers but
⏹️ ▶️ John there are big changes between 2002 and now so I get to see like let’s just see how far
⏹️ ▶️ John standard equipment has come because I really don’t get any options I don’t even think there were any interesting options to speak of in the car that I got.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so all sorts of stuff are standard now. Like my car did not have a little key
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you pressed to unlock the doors. And that’s standard now on pretty much every car. I don’t even know if
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get a car without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, in 2007, that wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John standard? No, 2002. Oh, right. Sorry. Like my car. Of course, the Accord had it, right? And I get
⏹️ ▶️ John to see the 2007 car kind of in the middle. But yeah. What else did my car not have? Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, the key fob thing was a big deal because the kids had to wait until I got into the car, the little lock thingy because it did have a
⏹️ ▶️ John little button to unlock all the doors just wasn’t on the key fob so I had to unlock my door with the key get in and then
⏹️ ▶️ John press the little thingy and then they could open their door.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, wait, wait. My 94 Saturn, which of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey course was white before you even asked, you jerks. Of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John course it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 94 Saturn I had, if I recall correctly, if you put the key in the driver’s door and like double turned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a quarter turn to the right, it would actually unlock all the doors from the exterior.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re saying your Civic from eight years later didn’t do that?
⏹️ ▶️ John There were Civics in 2002 that had this feature, but not in my Civic. You know, like I’m always getting, I’m always buying
⏹️ ▶️ John from the bottom of the line, right? Especially back in the old days, like the stick shift was always the bottom of the bottom of the line,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? All the other ones came with automatics, right? So, you know, and I’m always buying stick shift cars, so I’m always,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I’m not buying sports sedans, and even those don’t come with manuals anymore. So I’m always
⏹️ ▶️ John getting the cheap trim levels. Like, some more things that are first on this car for me, This is my
⏹️ ▶️ John first car with power seats and only has one of them. It’s the driver seat,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? What else is the first on this car first car with fog lights
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now? Are you a complete tool and use them anytime the headlights are on like me or are you actually an adult
⏹️ ▶️ John about it? I don’t even know how to turn them on yet I’m assuming it’s somewhere on the same
⏹️ ▶️ John stock as the headlights, but sometimes there’s a separate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco button like off to the left somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t I don’t see myself being a big fog light user, but who knows this. First car with dual exhaust.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s exciting. Ooh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty sure they’re real dual exhaust. I have to look under the car. I think one of them could be cosmetic. But I’m pretty sure it’s real.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you were talking about, was it Bluetooth or USB connection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John for the iPod? Yeah, first
⏹️ ▶️ John car with a USB connection, first car with Bluetooth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Bluetooth is standard on all cords. That’s good to know, actually.
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know, because I didn’t actually get the bottom of the bottom of the line.
⏹️ ▶️ John I actually got the sport level trim is not the bottom of the line. get an LX with a
⏹️ ▶️ John stick shift. And I didn’t. So this is the first car that I bought that was slightly more expensive than it had to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I could have gotten an Accord manual LX trim level, which would have been less expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John and not had all this fancy stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And would you get an EX?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, Sport is the name of the trim
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh. It’s a separate trim level. Has 18-inch wheels, first car with 18-inch wheels.
⏹️ ▶️ John Has the dual exhaust, has the fake carbon fiber inside it, has a leather-wrapped steering wheel, also a first.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not heated, of course. So it’s very nice. It’s a very fancy car for me. First car I ever bought that was more than $20,000,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though it just barely crossed over that line.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s still a pretty good deal. To get a really nice car of that size class,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even with moderate options, to get that for just over $20,000 is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty good. No option,
⏹️ ▶️ John because the sport trim level comes with all this stuff. Like, there’s the optional dealer installed add-on crap that you can get, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t think there are any other options that you could get for it to speak of. And maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough. But yeah, I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ John taking what it came with. And yeah, it was a pretty good deal. Car shopping always sucks, so whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I got it done in a three-day weekend.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I love car shopping in theory. And then when it comes time to actually go to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dealerships and try to test drive anything and try to find anything, it’s such a pain in the butt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I just want to end it as quickly as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s funny you say that. So Erin and I went with a friend of ours,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and she’s looking into perhaps either an S4 or an equivalent. And so of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I made her drive an M3 at the local BMW dealer. And this particular M3 was pretty busted.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was an 08, and it had the prior version of iDrive, which I’d never actually seen before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And oh my goodness, all the stories are right. It is that bad. But anyway, we went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to test drive this car, and I was thinking, ooh, maybe I’ll take it for a little spin. And it was a six-speed, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she actually wants a six-speed, and I was all excited about it. And the process to get in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the car took forever. Once we got out of the car, it took forever. The car was kind of all busted up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the second gear crunched. I think a couple wheels were out of balance.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We felt the rear tires, and they had no tread. Yet the fronts, suspiciously, had a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tread, and it was just not good times. But yeah, you’re absolutely right. The actual act of buying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a car is terrible, or even test driving a car is terrible. And this was a used one. It wasn’t even like it was new.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think I’ve gotten the swing of buying cars. But it’s just, I mean, especially the cars I buy,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not a lot of drama involved. There’s no rarity. There’s no real
⏹️ ▶️ John hunting down of the cars. You know, it’s a Honda Accord. That’s more or less a commodity.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is a little bit difficult to find the stick shifts, because it’s trying to search for them. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John minor dealers might not have them in stock, but they can get them if you want. If I’m going to find one in stock, I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find it. I am surprised that you were able to find one so easily to test drive. I feel like that’s like usually you can get them to order you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one maybe, but to actually find a stick shift to test drive at a dealer is pretty rare these days.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Internet. I did Internet searches for dealers in your area who have this thing and signed called around as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John But, you know, just a combination of the Internet and calling around. That was my first order of business was
⏹️ ▶️ John first find one of these things that I can test drive to see if I like it. And once I found it, then started
⏹️ ▶️ John the new phase of the search, which is I know exactly the car I want down to the trim level and color and then just go price shopping
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s always annoying because Nobody wants you to Talk to them or come into
⏹️ ▶️ John a dealer or do anything without completing in a sale And so every single one of them it’s like this is not going to end in a sale
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m price shopping Nobody and nobody likes that. I tried to do there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing a friend of mine did that it was like You pay us $200. We do all the crap for
⏹️ ▶️ John you and we hopefully save you more than $200 on the price of the car And he was very satisfied
⏹️ ▶️ John with the service. And it’s a local website that does it, but the website says they’re not taking any more orders.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, my wife says it was 2006 Accord, not 2007. I told you, I can never remember the model year versus the,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I think you just got served.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. The, so that service that does that car buying thing said we’re not doing that anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they were overbooked, or maybe they’re going out of business, or I don’t know. So I couldn’t do that. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then I had heard that Costco has a car pricing thing that was similar, and we’re a Costco
⏹️ ▶️ John member. So I tried doing that. And that’s like, fill out this thing and tell
⏹️ ▶️ John it what car you want, and it will direct you to a dealer. It turns out there’s only one dealer in our area that does the Costco
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And so I did the thing on the internet and filled out this thing. And it sent me some email. It said, hey, come down to
⏹️ ▶️ John the dealer. I’m like, well, I don’t want to do that. So I called the dealer and said, hey, I did this Costco thing. Will you tell me? I want to
⏹️ ▶️ John know, what is the Costco price for this car? The whole idea was they’ll just give you a price that they can’t tell you on the
⏹️ ▶️ John website. And it’s a no haggle price. And here it is. And they said, oh, we can’t tell you the price here. You have
⏹️ ▶️ John to come into the dealer, which, of course, they want you to come into the dealer. Everyone wants you to come in. And again, you’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of ruin the point
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. I mean, if it’s a no haggle thing and it was a good deal, I just wanted to know what the price was. So I had to drive all the way up there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Basically, it was just like, I’m here because you told me I had to drive here so you would tell me the price. Now please tell me the price.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then of course, they don’t want you to go. Once they tell you the price, they would be like, OK, thank you
⏹️ ▶️ John for the price. I’m now going to leave. They want to say, well, you know, hey, Don’t you want to buy what’s gonna take to get me into
⏹️ ▶️ John a car today and go through all that business or whatever so eventually I I got a reasonable deal like
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing was one of the web I’m searching through all these websites for You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is the invoice price for this car? And what are local deals like or whatever and there’s like a
⏹️ ▶️ John million different websites to do this also looking up the blue book value of my car thinking of trading it
⏹️ ▶️ John in like the old civic and everything and at one of the dealers The
⏹️ ▶️ John you know the the bad cop guy like there’s always the good cop bad
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco cop the sales manager
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the bad cop guy pulled up on his computer one of the websites I had been
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s here’s the range of prices that people are paying locally And it’s like immediately you go okay Do not look at
⏹️ ▶️ John that website ever again
⏹️ ▶️ John if the dealer is showing it to you the information on that website is not going To help you at all Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think I got a reasonable deal. I didn’t get an amazing deal like I got on my wife’s accord,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that was just an unbelievable deal. But that was because it was like a car that someone else had ordered and put a bunch of crap on and
⏹️ ▶️ John then bailed out on the deal. And now they had a car tarted up with all these aftermarket extras that nobody wanted. It was a stick shift.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we scooped it up and took it off their hands. So you can’t expect to get that deal every year. So I got an OK deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was going to say, I got a pretty good deal on the trade-in, considering the car was covered with acorn dents.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did they give you more than $10? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s like the perfect use of the dealer trade-in. Because dealer trade-ins, they will underball the crap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of the price. And so it’s worth it to just, if you have a car like that, that’s just going to be really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard to get much value privately. The perfect use for the dealer trade-in.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because no individual wants a car. And it didn’t have an air conditioning compressor. Like, the reason I was getting new cars is the
⏹️ ▶️ John air conditioning compressor would cost over $1,000 to fix, according to the way too expensive dealer
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. It’s like, all right, it’s the end of the time for this car. So I had a car that was ugly. It was a stick
⏹️ ▶️ John shift, covered in dents, and no air conditioning. And the dealer I ended
⏹️ ▶️ John up buying from originally said, we’ll give you about $1,000, $1,500 for it. And I’m like, well, that’s terrible, because the Blue Book value sans
⏹️ ▶️ John acorn dent. The Blue Book value of the car, if it was not dented, or I guess you put the condition as fair or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the air conditioning compressor worked, it was like $2,500, $3,500. But that was not deducting for
⏹️ ▶️ John the compressor. But I ended up getting $2,500 for the trade-in for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So I felt like I got a good deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John $2,500 for a 2002. I mean, who knows? You just assume that’s off the price.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are they really giving you $2,500 for your thing, or is it just some negotiating tactic? Bottom line is I gave them about $20,000,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I got a new car. And I gave them my old car. the end.