51: Maybe We're Just Dinosaurs

07 Feb 2014

Microsoft’s new CEO should relaunch the giant Surface table with an exclusive new app named Paper.

Episode Description:

• The FiOS net-neutrality non-story and last summer's YouTube-throttling story.
• More FU on iPads going pro, giant-tablet-desk ergonomics, trying to understand John's theory again, and a train analogy from Casey.
• New Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Bill Gates' new wildcard role, and Microsoft's likely future direction. (Marco's post, John Gruber's post, Brent Simmons' post)
• Paper, Paper, Paper, Fifty Three, and Figure 53.
• Responsibly naming things by first searching for trademark conflicts and potentially applying for your own trademark.
• Apple's role in App Store name conflicts.
• Facebook Paper's opportunity cost to the world.
• After-show: More on Microsoft and some Retina MacBook Air speculation.

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• Squarespace: Everything you need to create an exceptional website. Use promo code CASEY for 10% off.
• Ting: Mobile that makes sense. No contracts, and pay only for what you use.
• lynda.com: Learn at your own pace from expert-taught video tutorials. Free 7-day trial.

Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Transcript start

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m gonna try not to be whiny might be punchy, but I’m gonna try not to be whiny

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I Had pretty bad internet connectivity over the last two days.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Oh really?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t think it’s because of Fios is weird possible throttling of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Books they have actually denied which is worth pointing out, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that story is crazy It’s based on like one of those online chat logs for the support person.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They don’t know anything. They barely speak English This

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the worst non-story.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I have seen a lot of very slow downloads from S3 and a lot of Netflix problems.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco However, not only is that not new, but it probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is not Verizon doing that. It’s probably Netflix being at massive scale

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where they’re responsible for like a third of the traffic on the internet. And no wonder that I have some slowdowns

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here and there during peak hours and some bad quality streaming happening. It’s not that big of a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco deal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there something is up like ours did a story on this a while back and I was really hoping they would get to the bottom of it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I don’t think they did it was like why the hell are YouTube videos so slow mmm fiber-optic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John connection and you can’t play like it just literally won’t play this YouTube video that would use 1 10,000th

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of your bandwidth if it would come and it’s lots of finger pointing of like Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^John saying the ISP and ISP saying it’s not that they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not doing anything wrong and like it’s not like why would you intentionally throttle YouTube. Like I don’t think it’s anything nefarious,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but there’s some sort of networking related problem where all the parties involved just point the fingers at each other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and nothing actually gets solved. The upshot is some YouTube videos like we’ll play

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in super duper HD, perfectly fine, not don’t even come close to using up your connection. Other YouTube videos

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will just literally never load. And it’s one of those situations is impossible to debug because you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t control the server. You don’t control any of the internal routing at the ISP. All you know is your connection

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the internet looks fine and most YouTube videos load fine, but this one doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I actually looked into that somewhat extensively about six months ago when I was really bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for me and It a lot of people on files were complaining about it and for the life me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can’t remember what the fix was but it didn’t last for very long and it was something along the lines of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you needed to Like intentionally screw up your host file for the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey big CDN or something like that. I’m probably getting these details wrong

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it was something you had to like you had to like block one of the YouTube major CDN IPs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to route to nothing so That it would retry to something else that would be faster.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} That was right, right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah like all you’re doing is trying is like temporarily routing around wherever the problem is and it’s like we don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s not a we want You to find where the problem is and say okay. Well that if I go through

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that server, it’s really slow So I’ll go through a different one like yeah, sure That’s that’s the case a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the time but like why is it slow when we try to go through that one? and what’s going wrong there. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what we want someone to fix. And it’s like, I don’t know if that’s anyone’s job. Presumably

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s someone in the ISP’s job, but I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, and the funny thing to me is the fix, and I’m doing mega air quotes here, the fix

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for the YouTube slowness was to try to route around the content

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey delivery network whose sole job is to get you that data as quickly as possible.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. I don’t know, whatever. But yeah, so you also, you two also don’t buy into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this, Verizon is immediately throttling everything under the sun story, because I do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, they could be throttling everything under the sun, but that story is based on nothing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that supports that. Like, if you’re going to put a story that they throttle, find some evidence that they’re throttling. Hell, do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John experimental evidence that they’re throttling. Don’t base it on a conversation with a customer support rep in one of the chat windows, because that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not a reliable source of anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, what else going on? Some follow-up actually, that’s what’s going on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All right, so the first item is from someone named Steven, and he was talking about using the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do more stuff. And Steven says he’s older, he’s older than us. I’ll read a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from his email here. I work in an office that uses DOS, Lotus 1.2.3,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and DOS Word Perfect. When we switched to Windows 3.1, we found that we could get our jobs done faster and easier in Windows.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in using iOS, the opposite is true. As you mentioned, it’s harder to complete office work in iOS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So the analogy of switching to iOS to complete work is the same as when we switch from command

⏹️ ▶️ ^John line DOS to GUI is just plain wrong. I kind of get it what he’s trying to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say here. I guess, well, hey, I’ll just read the rest of it because it’s short. Once we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John switch to Microsoft Excel and Word, we found we could do more things than we couldn’t DOS. We could copy and paste

⏹️ ▶️ ^John between Word and Excel. Working with files was easier. We just cut and paste it or just dragged been dropped. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s trying to say that like, it’s not the same transition, because try transitioning to an iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would make their work harder, whereas transitioning from DOS to Windows made their work easier.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think there’s a couple things at play here. One is switching from a personal computer to an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPad makes a lot of things easier for a lot of people, maybe not necessarily for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this person. And example I would give is like, People who can’t do something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on a personal computer find that they are able to complete that same task on an iPad. Whatever that task may

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be, I’m sure you can think of examples of people who you know who, if left to their own devices, could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not do something on a personal computer, but if you give them the iPad, they can. Even if it’s simple as like browsing the web,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John emailing something to someone. The great example is finding an application that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does something that they’re interested in, installing it, and using it. That I think is a really good one because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lots and lots and lots of people could not do that with a personal computer. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe they didn’t notice like, you know, boy, I wish there was an application that let me keep track

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the score in my bridge game left to their own devices, finding that application, downloading,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John installing it successfully and not screwing up their computer. And not getting a virus and not downloading

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the wrong thing is difficult. Whereas if you give someone an iPad, and they’re interested in keeping score in their bridge game,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they could probably pull that off. And at the same time, there are lots of things going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back to the DOS to Windows thing. There are lots of things that you could do in DOS that you couldn’t do in Windows

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or couldn’t do as easily. An example of anyone who is using DOS extensively would be like, what if I want to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do delete, you know, foo star dot star or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all files that begin with letter A or something like all sorts of things you can do from the command line. You’re like, well, in the GUI, I could sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of do that myself and sort things in list view and select them manually and drag them to the trash. But it’s like before I could just type

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out a wild card and it was so much easier. Why can’t I do that in Windows? Windows sucks. So saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that any individual person can or can’t do something with a with a particular computer is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a very contextual type of message. And I think it all comes back to what I was saying before. The notion

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I. O. S. Is better for people, which is a sweeping generalization. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m trying to sort of take the average of of all the people in the entire world. What can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they do with the personal computer and of all those same people in the entire world? What can they get done with an iPad?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that’s combined with, as you noted, like we’ve the premise of the whole thing was that the iPad would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to expand its capabilities if it can ever hope to take people from, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John office workers or anyone really get them off of their PC and get them on to the iPad because there are many

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things that are better for everyone about an iPad, but it’s not a viable option for you if you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do whatever it is that you want to do. So that’s why I was saying that I thought the iPad would have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John expand its capabilities and expand the range of models available if it ever wants

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do that. And I think it would want to do that because the things that the iPad is better at for all people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are also kind of better for regular people. In the same way the things that Windows is better at for all people, it was also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John better at for, you know, the more demanding users, even if they couldn’t wildcard something to delete

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it or do stuff from the command line or write batch files and stuff like that. Yeah, they lost capabilities, but there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was it was enough of a trade-off. I’ve thought more about this since the last show I don’t I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t really know if I’m as convinced as I was before There’s another piece of follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John related to this but I Don’t know. Have you guys thought about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it since then the whole? Switching iPad or did you just blessedly forget it after the show was over not once

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I haven’t really thought about it But I was not convinced when we talked about it then and I’m still not convinced now

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Are you not convinced that it’s better for that the iOS is better for people like in the in the giant general? average

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of all people kind of way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So no, no that I am absolutely convinced by that and like Sean Blanc wrote a really great story about his grandfather

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey now He uses his iPad as a camera and how maybe you know, that’s largely because of screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey size. It’s like if memory serves it’s largely because of The ease of use but it’s enabled

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey his grandfather to do some things He would have otherwise been unable to do and that’s a really great and touching example

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the story that everyone is telling or has told, which is, just like you said, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey enables people to do things that they perhaps wouldn’t be able to do. What I’m unconvinced

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about is this whole iPad Pro thing. I’m sure it will happen in some capacity in some way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but to me I don’t see anything compelling. I see no compelling reason for it to exist.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco These tools exist. Phones, tablets, computers. There is some overlap

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco between between all of them of course. And it’s like you can’t, you can use just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one of those to do all of your computing tasks. You can if you want to. And I don’t think there’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t think it has, like if the argument is, oh I can do everything on an iPad, you could probably do everything on an iPhone also.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t think there’s a whole lot of people for whom the tasks they do on iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco must be done on an iPad and can’t also be done on an iPhone. You know, certain screen size dependent things,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco notwithstanding, but I think most people have a lot of those things. But ultimately

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these are different kinds of tools and I don’t think we need to choose. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know, you have to choose the point where you have to say, you know, you have to buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these devices and you have to buy what you can afford, but you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco chances are of these three devices for most people a tablet is probably the third one to buy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not the first or second unless you have very very light needs in which case you know it might

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be the first and that’s fine I think a lot of people are trying to cram too

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco much into any one of these things and I’m not saying the computer is the best one you know there’s things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you shouldn’t cram into a computer either that work better on the tablet or a phone I think it’s about using

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the right tool for the job and when when we have new tools available

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we kind of obsess over them briefly and try and try to push the boundaries and see what we can do with them but then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know then it just becomes a part of a regular toolkit and we realize that no tool is good for everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that we’re better off using what’s best and I think tablets are not replacing PCs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know we keep seeing over and over again tablets are selling very well but I don’t think they’re replacing PCs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from for anybody except people for whom PCs were never the right tool in the first place so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that we can debate on you know whether PCs were the right tool for so many people who are buying them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you know how big that number is depends on or like I think your argument depends on how big that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco number is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think both of you are still not getting what’s in my head and neither is everyone in the audience and it’s my failure to convey

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this I guess but you keep coming back to these these things these you know these choices that don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John exist and these dichotomies that I’m not getting at and like what I’m getting maybe what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m getting at is too simple and obvious but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s like saying in the days before the PC existed, that you would look at what do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most people do all day when they sit in front of the desk. Maybe they sit in front of like desk with like stacks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of paper. I’m trying, I don’t know what it is, but like whatever it is that most people. I think it looked like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Microsoft Bob. Like they had like, there was like a desk with an organizer on one side and like one of those flippy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco card things. You mean a Rolodex? and a giant rotary phone maybe? And how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about maybe a record player? Was that how things were?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, like, well, let me actually, let me think of a comment in a different way. I was trying so hard to get you guys

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to see what is so obvious to me, but it’s impossible to convey without people extrapolating it out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into a ridiculous scenario, like sort of, you know, following it through to its logical ridiculous conclusion

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and then saying that that’s not gonna happen. I mean, like, if you wanna go at it in the sales number way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John PC sales are not growing anymore. Why not?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Do we not need to do the things the personal computers did anymore? No. Presumably,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people are buying things other than PCs. And it used to be that the PC was the computing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John device that everybody had. And we could say, arguably, now the phone is the computing device that everybody had. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there are things you can’t do on a phone. No one would want to do any video editing on a phone. No

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one would want to do creative work, like with Photoshop on a phone. No one wants to do development on a phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Nobody wants to do lots of word processing on a phone. Like there are just tons of things that you do not ever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want to do on the phone because it’s too darn small. That’s the reason it’s not like any other reason. Just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you need more space, right? People don’t sit at work all day in front of their phone and do all their work on their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phone, right? And yet PC sales are still not growing like they used to and may

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually be going down at this point. And I’m saying if people are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of voting with their feet that they prefer to use these things that run iOS or things like them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more than they prefer to use PCs, but they can’t stop using PCs because there are certain things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that the PC can do that these other devices can’t. And I’m saying if like you can’t hold back this tide,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if people prefer to work with the simplicity and the, you know, without the legacy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hassles, whatever they are, overlapping windows file system, you know, all the things that we got

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rid of an iOS, people seem to prefer that. And they,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if they’re going to move their some of their tasks down to the device, the device has to expand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to meet them in some way, they’re not going to, they’re not going to willingly wedge themselves into a tablet. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m trying to look forward to the future to think, if iOS really is better for people, surely,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and PC sales are going down or staying the same, or not growing like they used to surely at some point, all those people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with PCs, like if you fast forward 20, 30 years, are most people sitting in front of a PC with overlapping windows

⏹️ ▶️ ^John access to the file system and a mouse and everything? Or do some of those people found a way to do their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John work with an iOS type device or a tablet type device? And that’s all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m getting that like, I’m in the moment, you can always say, well, the tablets

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not appropriate for that the PC, but you could replace PC with like mini computer. Well, personal computers are good for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some people, but they’re really too simple. And real people need mini computers or workstations or whatever you want to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put it. Just like if people prefer to work in that type of environment,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it seems like those things have to come together. Like otherwise, what’s the thing? The PC sales slowly decline

⏹️ ▶️ ^John till no one buys a PC. And yet none of those people also have replaced their PCs with an electronic device.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or do they do everything on their phone? Like I’m saying, I think the tablet can expand to meet some of those needs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the future. And and my doubts are basically like, will any one company

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pull that off? Because if no one does a good job, if no one rises to meet those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John needs, they’ll just be using increasingly better and simpler PCs, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that’s conceivable as well. But I think it’s easier for iOS to get it slightly more capable

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than it is for OS X or Windows or anything else to get simpler. I don’t know. The only way we can tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is just to fast forward in the universe. But I would say dwell on, look at the, whenever Horace posts like charts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of personal computer sales, look at those. And think about how like for our life, the entire default of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a working person, you know, a knowledge worker or whatever, was to sit there in front of a PC and say, well, if PC

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sales are going down, are those all home users? And like people working people are going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John forever buy some amount of PCs? Or is that trend line indicate that there’s some sort of transition

⏹️ ▶️ ^John taking place even without any iPad Pro type of thing?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So let me kind of sort of repeat what you said to see if I understand. And what you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey saying is, since everyone seems to prefer these touch-based devices, be it a phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or perhaps even a tablet, and that’s where all the usage is going, then it stands to reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that whatever the shortcomings are, they will be solved over time and that will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey usher in all these magnificent new features. So it’s not that Apple necessarily will deliberately

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey set out and create an iPad Pro that does this. This is the iPad Pro because we say so.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s that in an evolutionary way, the iPad will become more of a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey more capable device by whatever means. We’re not really sure what that is simply

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because that’s what everyone prefers to use. So…

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s push and pull because you can’t say Apple is going to make it, therefore people are going to want it and people are going to want it, therefore

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple is going to make it. There has to be – it comes from both directions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So it’s sort of like – and this is a crummy analogy. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey when planes were brand new, they could only fly for a few minutes and not really take any passengers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and things were crummy. But everyone knew it had potential and then trains were still really exciting and popular.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, this is a very American analogy because our trains are terrible. But over time, planes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey became the clearly far and away winner because that’s the way everyone wanted it to go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so it kind of compelled the industry to satiate that need.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think we should move to the next follow-up item because I think it’s related and it will maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John clarify this. The next follow-up item I just put in and it’s based on general feedback. We’re talking about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John having a keyboard in front of some kind of tablet thing to solve the text input problem. There

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are two aspects of this that I think are worth dwelling on that people send feedback about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John One person on Twitter said that having,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know I kept saying like an architect’s drafting table with like some kind of big tablet-y type surface on it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that that is ergonomically worse than having a mouse and keyboard in front of you horizontally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and a screen vertically because you’re sitting upright when you’re using the, you know, typical mouse keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ ^John PC type thing and you’re kind of hunched over an architect’s drafting table

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you’re doing that. I’m not entirely sure about that, but it’s worth considering.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Would that be a regression, ergonomically speaking, to work on something drafting table

⏹️ ▶️ ^John style? I mean, imagine you have a stylus or something like that. Would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that be an ergonomic regression to do a task on a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John slanted up, presumably very large tablet with a stylus or your hands versus

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looking at a vertical screen and typing on on a horizontal keyboard and mouse.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It might be worse for your lower back and neck and shoulders.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I’m not entirely sure because, I mean, the history of people sitting in front

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of something and doing something is pretty long. And the history of people sitting in front of computers is short.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it’s tough to make any calls on that. Like, how many

⏹️ ▶️ ^John centuries were monks hunched over the little slanty tables,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John writing things with ink and stuff on it. Like, it doesn’t mean it was good. I know, but like, that’s been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John going on for a long time, right? And it doesn’t mean that it’s good. And so personal computers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have been going on for a short period of time. And in the short period of time we had personal computers, we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John also had the, you know, we’ve been more ergonomics conscious. And people do have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lot of problems sitting in front of computers in the current good ergonomic situation. Is that just because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we’re sitting there way too long because we don’t get up? Is it just because now we have the ability diagnose these ergonomic

⏹️ ▶️ ^John problems. And if there were doctors around in medieval times, they’d

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be diagnosing all these monks with problems as well. It’s difficult to say. And what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m thinking of are like, I think there are probably people who preferred

⏹️ ▶️ ^John work in the sort of architect’s drafting table type situation even today. And I’m thinking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of maybe creative people like animators or something, or people who are drawing on a stylus.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If you’re drawing on a surface, for example, want to draw on a vertical surface. So if the whole idea

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is that you’re going to touch the screen, whether with a stylus or with something else,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like if people prefer that as the input method, like if they would rather

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do that than use a mouse to get their work done, or they feel like it’s easier or better or faster to get their work done that way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can’t have it vertical because no one wants to draw on a vertical surface, right? They’re always going to draw on a slanted. So is that, are they compromising

⏹️ ▶️ ^John their body’s ergonomics to get a more efficient position for drawing or manipulating

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things? I’m not sure. But it’s worth considering whether that’s an ergonomic regression

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and whether even if people like using their fingers or a stylus better than using a mouse, doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so necessarily makes it so that you’re going to screw yourself up more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey See, I would wager that that might be an improvement, the drafting table or the monks table.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Having never worked at one, I have to imagine that that the reason that monks didn’t use a flat desk like we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all use today is because they found that it was ergonomically better not to hunch. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if you could get the an iPad hypothetically mounted on an incline in such a way

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that it doesn’t go sliding down that incline every time you release it, I would actually expect that to be an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey improvement. I think that would be better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because like the whole thing is you’re touching it like obviously vertical screen. I mean, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s just that’s a nonstarter for touching because we

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} can’t hold our arms out in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John front of us. and and drawing on a vertical surface is much more difficult than drawing on something that’s more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on your lap or whatever. So I don’t know. And the second one, the second one that neither of us thought of because it sounds crazy to us, but because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it sounds crazy, I figure it’s worth bringing up is getting back to the physical keyboard thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with text input and everything. The possibility that we didn’t think of was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what if having a physical keyboard is not better enough for people to care? That’s kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of what happened on the phone space. And you can say, well, the phone space is different because they I have space restrictions and it let the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John screen get bigger, I had all these offsets or whatever. But if you had asked any tech nerd before the iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John existed, what do you think about the idea of getting rid of all the hardware keyboards and replacing them with a software keyboard? They’d be like, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that might work, but you know, for serious text input, you’re always gonna need a hardware keyboard. And we’re saying exactly the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing about the personal computer. Well, you know, you can type on an iPad screen, but it’s terrible. Like if anyone’s doing serious

⏹️ ▶️ ^John text input all day, of course they need a hardware keyboard. I mean, I’m not gonna write my Objective-C code for my iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John application on a piece of glass keyboard. I need a real keyboard, right? It could be that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even though we will think that till the day we die, like just like some Blackberry users will think that to the day they die,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that it won’t matter for the rest of the world and we’ll get outvoted. Is that a horrifying scenario?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John People using big iPad looking things, none of them with a physical keyboard in sight, just typing in the, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John terrible for me to think of. I would never want to do that. But I think it’s worth considering

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that what we want may not be what everyone else wants.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And how many computing tasks these days don’t even involve that much text input? You know, if you’re like browsing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco news, browsing Facebook, occasionally typing short comments and various things, occasionally typing short emails,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like that’s not That’s not really keyboard intensive And that’s one of the reasons why

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so many people can spend so much time on phones and tablets without running into that problem very often

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m thinking even for people who type all day like we’re saying well, that’s fine but a developers never use the developer types

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all day like Like maybe we’re just dinosaurs and it’s possible like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John once we move away from the onscreen keyboard being a little picture of a physical keyboard,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can imagine an interesting futuristic kind of soft keyboard that incorporates

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gestures or some other crazy stuff that would actually make some future developer who isn’t born yet more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John efficient at writing code than we are with our little things where we press keys that are sort of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John modern day equivalent of the big things used to be attached to a lever that would make a little metal thing whack against

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an ink ribbon, make a mark on a piece of paper. Like I’m not willing to entirely rule

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out the possibility that that physical keyboard could go away on the personal computer the same way it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John went away on the phone, even though none of us will ever accept that as a good idea.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, this makes me think of a couple things. Firstly, you’re almost describing when you when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you said, oh, well, some new kind of keyboard with gestures and whatnot. making me think of graffiti or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the – didn’t Newton have an equivalent of Palm’s graffiti?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No. No, it just did real handwriting recognition. Which is why it didn’t work. Really,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really badly. I love graffiti.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I love graffiti as well. So you’re making me think of graffiti, which I think for a power user could work. But for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey an average person, I don’t know if that would work out. But you also made me think – I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if you guys had ever paid attention to someone with a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Japanese keyboard. And I’m thinking of our friend Will Haynes, who,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey who is an Australian born guy who lives in Japan, and I’ve hung out with him at WWDC

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey several many times and watching him type on that keyboard is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really weird, but really cool. And I he explained it to me once, I don’t know how it works. And all the Japanese

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey users are probably getting upset at me now. But basically, he somehow put together, I guess

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the core of the word by way of like drawing it because it’s, you know, all symbols. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it would help him auto complete the basic word he wanted. And again, if you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey anyone that uses this keyboard, seek out their two cents, because they can explain it much better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey than I. But what I’m driving at is maybe you could do something like that, but with a traditional keyboard and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sort of graffiti-esque, but maybe something different. And then the final thought

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I had was, you know, what if what makes us leave a physical

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey keyboard behind is getting a keyboard on a screen feeling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey more like a keyboard on a desk. And so that makes me think of what if we could do something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey crazy with haptics? So, you know, you could get some semblance of touch on a flat

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey piece of glass. And I feel like some video was floating around recently that that showed a demo of this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, the little things, little blisters pop up on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey screen. Right, right, right, right. So maybe that would be enough to get us over the hump of using

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a glass keyboard.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just imagine my great great grandchildren entertaining the thought of lumps rising on the screen to simulate

⏹️ ▶️ ^John keys which are simulating the keys on a typewriter and just being disgusted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by it and say that’s so stupid. Like what I was thinking of in terms of interfaces for touch keyboards,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well one is like the modern day swipe things, you know, swipe on Android or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John came from, you know, where you slide your finger. Obviously that motion of sliding your finger around that would never work

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on a typewriter or on a physical keyboard because the keys, you know, it would be awkward on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a keyboard and it would not work at all on a typewriter, right? But people do it all the time. But I’m thinking like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with programming, if you had tiny gestures for matching parens and curlies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and indenting regions and selecting regions and the things you do in programming,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s kind of like, well, I type all day. I write code. I can’t use a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John keyboard that’s on a screen. I need a physical keyboard. In fact, I need a fancy physical keyboard with special key switches that are yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah, yeah. Like, I’m trying to think that like, it is conceivable to me that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John someone who’s not me could be more efficient with a very clever on-screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John keyboard. And I think the whole reason this would come to pass is that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, if tablets do become more capable and people continue to prefer to use them for more

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and more tasks, and that’s the thing that sort of goes in tandem, where it’s like, people prefer it, and so maybe it will expand

⏹️ ▶️ ^John its capability. once it expands the capability people will try it for something, use it for that purpose,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and like it, and like using their PCs less and less, and buy fewer PCs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and replace their PCs less often, but continue to buy more and more tablets, that you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that that’s how the transition would take place. So I don’t know, like in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my personal life I can think of only a few things that I prefer to do on my iPad. It’s not like I’m living

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the example of this, I’m not one of those people who tries to live on my iPad. I’m never going to give up my personal computers for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my life. I like them. There are things I’ll always want to do there. But when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I just want to read a bunch of long articles, I’d rather do that on my iPad. And when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I want to watch video, I’d rather do that on my iPad. And so there’s two things right off

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the bat. And I know a lot of other people who have a much, much longer list of things I’d rather do on their iPad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than on their personal computer. And I’m just extrapolating that trend, more or less.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fair enough. So Marco, what’s really exciting these days?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It is our friends once again at Lynda.com. L-Y-N-D-A dot com.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Lynda.com helps anyone learn creative software and business skills to achieve your personal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and professional goals. They have over 2,000 high quality engaging video courses

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco taught by industry experts and they’re adding new courses every single day.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This is a very wide breadth of courses from beginner to advanced levels. These videos have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco animations and diagrams. It’s very easy to find exactly what you need in their massive catalog. And all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this, you get access to their entire catalog for just $25

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a month, flat, unlimited. It’s really fantastic. You get the entire course library, $25

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a month for unlimited access. Over 2 million people worldwide are using Lynda.com

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to help themselves reach their professional goals. really great. You know, I actually, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when they gave us a sponsorship, I went and watched a few on Logic, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco audio editing software that I use for the show. And I learned a lot. And I tell you what, these videos

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are actually really good. I was really pleasantly pleased.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Pleasantly pleased? Anyway, I was really pleasantly pleased.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I wasn’t surprised. I expect them to be good. But anyway, I was pleased

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with the results of these videos. They really do. They say they put in animations and diagrams. They really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco did. And it’s very high production value. I really did learn a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I’m going to keep watching more. So I’m very happy with what I learned on Lynda.com. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anyway, back to the script here. They have easy to follow videos,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco curated course content, expert teachers. This is interesting. The instructors here

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are not just like some random person who wrote a tutorial on YouTube and then is giving it back to you. The teachers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are experts in their fields who are professionals working in the field. You can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco watch from any device, computer, tablet, mobile. It even didn’t require me to use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Flash on my desktop, which I always respect. It worked in my Flashless Safari, which is great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So anyway, some examples of what they offer. They have, as I mentioned, I mentioned I watch something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for Logic, the audio editing software. They also have you know other creative pro software

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like Photoshop Illustrator stuff like that Final cut video stuff they also have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco development Objective C iOS iOS 7 new stuff user interface design

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Unix principles for Mac programmers stuff like that plus web stuff pearl ASP net

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so you can be just like John and Casey respectively and PHP with my SQL so you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be miserable like me and and JavaScript if you want to be much cooler than any of us.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So you can learn all sorts of cool stuff from Lynda.com. Go to lynda.com,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Lynda.com, for a free seven day trial. If you just go to slash

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ATP at that URL, so lynda.com slash ATP,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you will get a free seven day trial. You can check out all their videos during those seven days. Well, you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really. You can check out some of their videos during those seven days, and you can see how good they are. Thanks a lot to lynda.com

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for sponsoring our show once again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, you know, I watched a video, pieces of a video earlier tonight on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Photography 101 because I don’t know anything about taking pictures. I know that I have an iPhone that takes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey pretty good pictures as long as I point at a decent subject. And the video was really well done, but the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey way Lynda set up, it works even better than you’d expect. So there was a transcript that was scrolling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the exact words that the instructor was saying. What was really cool

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was I wanted to go back and hear what he said again. So I looked at the transcript and was like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I thought to myself, well, I wonder if I can, I can. And I just clicked the sentence that I wanted him to go back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to. And this is all without flash. The video scrubbed back to exactly where I wanted to be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And it showed exactly what I wanted all over again. And I could go on and on for a long time. But suffice to say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this may not sound like it’s very good and a very good way to learn. But I learned a lot in the, I don’t know, hour I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey spent watching this video. It was really impressive.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I checked out the site too and the one thing that struck me, I’ve heard a lot of Lynda.com ads and I assume, yeah, they have a bunch of video

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tutorials up there. If you haven’t gone to the site, you have no idea how many videos they have. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do not have like 10 videos. Like I said, I’m going to learn about Photoshop. You know how many Photoshop videos

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this site has? Unbelievable amount of like, it’s not like one or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John two videos on each topic area. It’s like tens, dozens, hundreds, like on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every tiny possible detail. And they have the one on ones and that’s a good place to start. But if you want to know, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was looking at the audio things because that’s what Marco was looking at, too. And it’s like the best way to make instruments for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John live. It was like totally super esoteric all the way up to photography one on one. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you think there’s probably there’s not any video for you because you’re too much of a beginner or too much of an expert, I bet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’ll find something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. So what else do we have going on? There’s a new Microsoft CEO.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. Do we care? I think it’s interesting this week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know how much longer it will be interesting to us.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco My theory on this, which I posted today on my site, is that Microsoft could go two ways.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco could either keep trying to break into the new consumer mobile markets

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that they are failing at breaking into. It’s costing them dearly to keep trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this in both money and embarrassment, and just time, opportunity costs, stuff like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So they can keep trying and probably failing to break into mobile. Or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they can keep further investing and focusing on what they’re very successful at, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is enterprise services and the new cloud division. And they can build that up some more. They can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco secure that, lock it down, build it up. I think because the new CEO…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Is it pronounced Satya Nadella?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m not sure. I believe that’s right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I Googled it beforehand. I watched the video, the Microsoft video where they announced the guy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It wasn’t him saying his own name, but it was a Microsoft person saying it. I played it back like nine times. I can’t tell what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re doing at the end of that name. And then I Googled how to pronounce whatever. And they have all these videos where people say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it and they all swallow up the last two syllables so or the last syllable so I can’t tell what the hell they’re saying but my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John guess is Satya that’s my guess

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco okay assuming it’s pronounced Satya Nadella new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco comes from their their cloud and enterprise division and I think that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco says a lot my one reservation is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the new role that Bill Gates is supposedly taken on. Now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco part of this could be just kind of a sham to show investors

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that, like, oh, Bill Gates supports this guy and therefore you should all be at ease. Because during

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco any kind of transition like this for a big public company, especially one that’s had as few CEOs as Microsoft,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is a big deal. You want to ease investors’ concerns. So part of the Bill Gates

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing, saying that he’s going to be back three days a week and be in charge of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some kind of technology BS sounding position where he’s going to be directing something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or other. That sounds a lot like nothing to worry about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco investors, carry on, Bill Gates likes this guy and is supporting him.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Who is that making feel better exactly though?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Here’s the wild card though. Bill Gates has always had this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco kind of personality complex where he has always clearly been very desperate to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco prove to the world and the industry that he and his

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco company can innovate and that they are great inventors and are really innovative

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and are making cool stuff for consumers. That has always been Bill Gates’ obsession.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And you could tell in comments he’s made over the last 20 years how much he cares about that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and how he keeps having to like yell at people because no one believes it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so it seems like, you know, the idea of de-emphasizing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco consumer stuff and just focusing on enterprise stuff, the idea of that does not sound like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Bill Gates. It doesn’t sound like something he would do. He didn’t do it during most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of his time and when most of his power. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my position is they should literally embrace that they’re boring, that they serve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco businesses and cloud stuff well. That’s very boring to consumers. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not going to go away. Windows PCs are still going to be ubiquitous. Regardless of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how well Macs do, Macs are never going to have a 100% PC market. They never will.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They will never even come close because there’s a lot of the market they don’t address willingly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are always going to be needed for things. Yeah, we talked about how tablets are going to, you know, tablets are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco taking some of their share, but ultimately I think PCs are still

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco safe, especially in the workplace. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think if Microsoft can have a very successful business, being boring.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s the part of their business that actually work the best, that actually succeed, where in many cases they’re the best

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco option. And in the consumer space they can just keep losing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I’m not saying they should totally withdraw. You know Xbox does fine, Bing does okay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even Windows on consumer PCs does okay, but it’s not it doesn’t need to be an area where they focus intense amounts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of effort. You know my position in the post was they should just give people what they actually want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from Windows, which is keep making mostly the same thing and just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make slow incremental changes. Don’t do anything big and daring like Windows 8, don’t do that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco again. Just do slow incremental changes, slowly make the same thing better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We don’t want anything new, just make the same thing better. I’m worried that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if Bill Gates’ position is actually real and if he’s actually going to be spending a lot of time in it, and if he’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco actually going to have enough power to push product direction, I worry that he’s not going to let that happen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because he’s going to continue being so desperate to prove to the world that he’s this visionary innovator that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco he won’t let them focus on the boring stuff. But he hasn’t taken that role for a long

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time, so maybe he’s over it? I don’t know. Steve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey McLaughlin So what you’re saying is you want them to be progressive and forward-thinking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in the server space while simultaneously being boring and regressive in the consumer space? Michael

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Munger I don’t even think they have to be regressive. I think they just have to like, just stop trying to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco giant sweeping changes. Just accept your position in the consumer space is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you power the bulk of the PC market, which is boring. You don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco any meaningful presence in mobile or tablets. And my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco theory on that is that it’s too late for them to do that. And that, you know, this era of mobile

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and tablets is decided. It’s one. It’s a Google and iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hegemony. Is that the right word? I know what you’re thinking about it. I don’t know how to pronounce it. You know, Google

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and iOS will together dominate this space. You know, iOS will pretty much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have a lock on the top end. Google will have a lock on pretty much everything else for a long time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, this is like a generation in computing that this is going to last. It might be 10 or 15 years. It’s going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to be a while. And Microsoft is not in that game. And it’s too late

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for them to break into that game, I think. What could they possibly do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to take 15, 20, 30% market share? I don’t see it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I think they should focus on the parts of their businesses that work and that have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco potential for growth. And consumer mobile is not it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So, I guess it just seems, it seems contradictory that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you would want them to kind of just go in cruise control and or, I mean, I can understand if you said bail, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey okay, screw it, consumer’s just not working. Bail from everything, bail from phone, bail from Windows

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as a consumer OS, bail from Xbox, bail from it all. But it seems a little,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know, contradictory to say, well, just kind of cruise on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey consumer side but really keep kicking ass on the server side.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, like Apple hasn’t stopped making iPods.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, that’s a fair point.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it’s similar. You know, the market for iPods—and actually, I think the Windows PC market is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even safer long-term than the market for iPods long-term. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco don’t think they have to axe a business that is doing very well

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as long as they can and just keep letting it do well without investing tons of resources into keeping it doing well

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco at the expense of other things they’re doing. If they just, what I’m saying basically is put Windows and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Office into something slightly better than maintenance mode.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, like literally just keep doing what you’re doing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco keep giving people Windows the way they want it, ship an update every couple of years with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco minor changes. That’s all people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want. but they want, but you need, you can do that, but you need what some other business to be your next big thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like you can do that as like, don’t screw this up, keep it going, make incremental improvements.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that will give us the opportunity to work on the next big thing. Because if you don’t work on the next big thing and just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maintain that, eventually that thing you’re maintaining will become irrelevant and gone. You’ll get eaten

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from some direction or another by someone else and that will be gone. And you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to have something else ready to go as your next one. Now it could be that services is the next big thing. be cloud or whatever, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you want to do, that’s our next big thing. That’s going to be like, yeah, we’ll do, we’ll do what consumers want with windows and keep

⏹️ ▶️ ^John having that market or wherever, but we’re just doing that to sort of keep the lights on and not screw it up like we have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John been. And we’ll use that as a launching pad to get really big in services. Uh, when I think about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John services though, I mean, this is like a, a problem for. Shareholders and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for Microsoft’s new CEO. What’s the biggest company that you can think of that serves

⏹️ ▶️ ^John only businesses and not consumers. IBM and so do you think Microsoft would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be happy being the size of IBM in terms of market cap and the character of IBM

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and in the number of employees of IBM and the nature of those employees or do you think Microsoft still

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wants to be the Microsoft that they were in terms of how many what percentage of the company are you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know developers and what’s their market capital what is their revenue and all that stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about I should point out Sam Hayden the chat is pointing out things like SAP and Oracle as other giant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco enterprise companies that consumers don’t hear about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right. And now that’s what I was thinking of. I was thinking of SAP and Oracle, but I’m thinking like, does, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that, is that the IBM is another example, but is that the future that Microsoft sees for itself?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like would they be content to be a better IBM or a similar,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John similar to IBM, Oracle and SAP? And I think they would consider

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that a defeat. I don’t know the numbers off the top of my head, but I would imagine it would also mean shrinking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the company in terms of market cap.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, do they have a choice, though? Suppose they actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can become as big as those companies. And suppose they actually can be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as successful in the enterprise services business to be at that scale.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It seems like that’s at least plausible, if not likely. What are their other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco choices?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Someone in the chat room needs to do the research for us and say, what are the market cap for IBM, SAP, Oracle,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and what have their profits been like? Because Microsoft is still making tons of profit. And I have a hard time believing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that IBM, Oracle, and SAP are making that kind of green at this point. But I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, but Microsoft is not making profit on, as far as I can tell, they’re not making substantial profit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on Windows Mobile. I would say their Surface division is doing pretty poorly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The areas that I’m suggesting, they stopped trying so hard in are those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, let’s get back at the iPad and let’s defeat Android kind of thing. That’s the stuff where they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco keep failing miserably. They’ve gone through this period over the last

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 10-15 years where… Gruber had a great piece about this on his site today about how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco their whole original idea of a computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they did it. And they won. By the mid-90s, they won. And they didn’t really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know what to do from there. And so they kind of started flailing and doing all sorts of weird stuff on the side.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s where you got things like MSN, and then MSNBC, and Bing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the Xbox, and some stuff like that, and some of the weird research stuff. And a few of those

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things worked, although they usually lost a ton of money in the process of working and might still be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco losing tons of money. A few of those things worked, but none of them have really gotten

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco big enough to be their next big business. What I’m suggesting is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they should probably focus on what they can actually do. Focus on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff that they already have promise.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The Brent Simmons post about this too, about how if they focus more on Azure and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the mobile services, they could be a big competitor to Amazon Web Services. would be awesome because right now there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is no big competitor for Amazon Web Services and there needs to be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They really could use some competition there for the good of everybody and you know Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco could be it. There’s all these things they could do but they’re instead

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco focusing on all these areas they keep losing badly and there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no hope in sight that that might stop that they that they might stop losing in these areas.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The chat room did our quick research for us. Microsoft is $279 billion, IBM is $189, SAP is $89, and Oracle is some number that I just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lost in the scroll back. Oracle’s $161.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And this is going to go into profit numbers because I think I would imagine that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Microsoft is making more profit than those guys, at least now. I mean, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but what I’m getting at is that any of these strategies are going to mean shrinking the company in ways

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that are going to make the new CEO look bad. Not that I’m saying this is the wrong the wrong thing to do. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, if you know, it’s, it’s kind of I’m basically I’m thinking, what is the tolerance for this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John type of thing? Like, if we’re gonna say we want Microsoft to be a different kind of company, and that kind of company is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John necessarily a little bit smaller, is everyone going to be like, okay, job, Nadella, you’re doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what we want? Or are they going to be like, oh, any backsliding and anything other than growth is seen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as a failure for the new CEO? Like that’s, that’s what I’m not sure about. Like, are they willing to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accept shrinking the company permanently, not like shrinking it briefly, and then growing it back, but shrinking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it more or less permanently to become a different kind of company that is necessarily a little bit smaller.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Does it have to be smaller?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Right. Can you define shrinking? Because IBM is four times as many employees as Microsoft.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I know, but that’s what I was getting in terms of nature of employees of those employees. How many of them are like Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ ^John employees and how many of them are like contractors and salespeople and like IBM is a service organization.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You have a very different sort of personnel base when you’re a service organization versus when you’re Microsoft,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, developing software. Like I was saying, like you will multiply manpower and that I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will eat into your margins because you need to have more people and it’s a different kind of business.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if Microsoft gets serious about this and rededicates their company to business to business

⏹️ ▶️ ^John transactions, they’re already in that business as well. But if that’s what they get into, presumably they’d have to take share from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John those companies we just named. The market’s not going to grow by the amount that Microsoft wants. They’re going to have to take business from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John IBM, take it from Oracle, take it from SAP. And again, they’re doing that now with their various enterprise things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But if that’s what the company is going to be about, A, that doesn’t look like a growth business to me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because I don’t think the number of business in the world that want technology is growing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think they’re just going to be down there slugging it out with those existing companies that we just named. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s just a different type of organization. And getting back to Bill Gates, I think Bill Gates would consider that a failure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if Microsoft became like IBM or Oracle or SAP, even if they were the best IBM, Oracle,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John SAP type company. And even if you didn’t have to shrink the company, like Marco said, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can kind of tell that that’s not the kind of Microsoft that Bill Gates wants. He wants the one that everybody knows, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John every person in the world uses Microsoft stuff and they love it. He doesn’t want to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John SAP, where everyone in the world does not use SAP. Most people don’t know what SAP is, and the poor employees

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who do know what it is are sad about it. Nice.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But I’m suggesting that Microsoft keep the businesses that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are making them the most money. I’m not suggesting that they eliminate most of their profit. If anything,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my suggestion would probably make them more profitable, because they will be able to devote less

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco employee time to working on radical, giant new products that are not going to succeed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think there is a glimmer of hope for a growth business. Cloud is one thing we discussed, where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how many cloud providers are there out there? Well, there’s Amazon, and they do a lot of stuff. But you can imagine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Microsoft doing what Amazon does, but better. both because that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not Amazon’s main business. Their main business is selling you stuff and shipping it to you. And also because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Amazon is not, presumably would not be as maniacally focused on the enterprise with their services

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as Microsoft could be. And there’s some synergy there with Microsoft’s existing enterprise

⏹️ ▶️ ^John product. So that’s a potential growth market where they could continue to grow their cloud services

⏹️ ▶️ ^John year after year. And that will look good. It’ll say, hey, you decided you’re going to do cloud. Every year you do more cloud

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stuff. every year your revenues and your cloud stuff goes up and people like it and people using it. So that’s good. Uh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I still think you probably want to have some other growth business

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in there. And Marco had said that phone is out of the question. Tablets out of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the question. PCs aren’t growing. So don’t even bother with those things. That’s maybe true again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John watchers and certainly Bill Gates would consider that a defeat. It’s like there, you know, they do have a thing called the surface

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they seem to kind of like it and I I bet they wish that didn’t wouldn’t fail. And they do have Windows phone and canning those

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things would be. That would be rough. Like it would be better if that happened on a Balmers watch, right? And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the new guys comes in. Well, you know, the phone and surface things are all gone so we can concentrate on my new strategy. But if he’s got to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the guy to do that, that’s going to be difficult for him. And if we trying to think of an area

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where they can expand that we just talked about in the beginning part of the show, if anyone can make a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tablet computer that people might use at their desk instead of a Windows PC, maybe it’s Microsoft.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I know they haven’t done it with the Surface. I know that’s not what the Surface is aimed at, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they have the magic protection that’s keeping the Windows market viable for them is that nobody

⏹️ ▶️ ^John else wants it. And the magic protection that may give

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them the ability to make the Surface Pro, or I guess there already is a Surface Pro, you know what I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a more capable, larger Surface for people to use, not just for consumers, but for people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to use to do their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco work. They can bring back the giant table.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, well, the big service, right, is that maybe Apple doesn’t want that business. And maybe Android,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, the Android makers don’t go after that business. So if nobody else does it, and nobody, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it could fall to Microsoft by default to try and fail, perhaps, in that business, as they have so far in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the tablet and phone markets. But it’s there. I mean, I just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t like to think that, like, we resign ourselves to be boring and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do what we know how to do. And even if it’s not a growth business, we’ll take business

⏹️ ▶️ ^John away from our other competitors. And it’s like, that just doesn’t, it’s not just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Bill Gates. That sounds like a defeat to me. I would rather see Microsoft go down in flames trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do crazy stuff. I’d rather see them, you know, keep doing the Xbox stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John try the Surface stuff. I mean, the white windows phone, all that stuff, not a success really,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I would rather see them go out of business doing that then stay in business being like Oracle or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John IBM or SAP.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, what if people at Microsoft don’t consider it boring to become a pretty strong player

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in web services? It’s boring. Look at Amazon. Lots of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco work on that on Amazon. It’s become a giant business for them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Microsoft’s best bet may be to be acquired by Apple in 20 years, because if Apple continues not to be able to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cloud services that well, and Microsoft becomes really good at it, there’s definite synergies there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If eventually they eliminate all the places where there wouldn’t be a good matchup, like, well, you have a tablet and we have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a tablet and you have a phone OS and we have a phone OS and you have a desktop OS and we like if you get it down to the point where

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the acquisition makes sense because Microsoft is, you know, the preeminent cloud services company

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and Apple continues to flail, then it would be like, well, that’s a reasonable matchup.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and use the offer code Casey when you do decide to buy to get 10% off and to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco show your support for our show. So thanks a lot to Squarespace for sponsoring ATP once again. Scriptcase.com,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco offer code Casey. By the way, you would be surprised how many people misspell Casey’s name

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} in feedback.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} We’ve seen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Cassie, we see a lot of Cassie with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John two S’s. We should spell it on every episode of the show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, maybe in like the end, in like a song or jingle

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} or something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, make it easy to remember. And actually I was gonna say, the only problem with using my name

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as the offer code is that now I’m going to hear for the next three weeks on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Twitter. Oh, who the hell is Casey? Over and over and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey over and over again. So I’m very thankful for Squarespace for sponsoring and for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey honoring me with that awesome offer code. But oh my lord, I’m doomed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Hey, you complain when the offer code was Marco. So now this is what you get.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey didn’t think that one through at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Not at one bit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, goodness. What else is going on?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, actually, before we get off in the Dell, I want to talk briefly about the guy himself and a little bit of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John excitement that I get from or maybe the lack of excitement other people have from having this new

⏹️ ▶️ ^John person because since it was just announced it’s like there’s this world of possibilities

⏹️ ▶️ ^John despite the Bill Gates factor there’s new leadership at a company this company

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has not had a lot of CEOs in its lifetime Bill Gates Steve Ballmer than this guy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and that’s that’s a long time for each of them and if you want to consider the Bill Gates Steve Ballmer thing as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not really much of a transition because the two of them were there in the beginning and the two of them sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of ran the company together and then Bill Gates just kind of opted out it was sort of a continuation of the Bill Gates

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reign who knows what this new guy will do even though he’s a company man and it’s been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the company for 22 years and all that other stuff there is the potential like there always

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is when you have a change in leadership for him to do interesting exciting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unexpected radical things we don’t know what at least I don’t know enough about his personality to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know is he that type of person or is he just kind of like a slow and steady not gonna do anything crazy Steve Ballmer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John personality wise always seemed crazy and insane and and very interesting and fun to watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and his developers developers stuff and throwing chairs and stuff like that and yet the way he ran the company was very conservative

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this guy seems like a cool mellow dude but maybe he’s gonna make crazy radical Steve Jobs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John esque moves and since he just took the job now is the time for me to entertain those fantasies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John until he goes through a year of just doing boring stuff and I get disappointed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well and somebody tweeted, and I don’t have it in front of me and I apologize, but somebody had tweeted something along the lines

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of, you know, if you look at Google, theirs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what is the psycho guy, psycho privacy guy, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} CEO? Eric Schmidt?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Thank

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco He’s no longer the CEO, but I think, is he still chairman? He’s still on the board, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} Right, right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The point of the tweet was he was a business guy and you look at, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it Larry that’s currently CEO? He’s of some sort of development background,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is he not? And Satya is also a developer. And so you’re finding

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this trend or such as this person was saying, you’re finding this trend towards developers as CEOs, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is a very different and powerful thing as opposed to having a bunch of businessmen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey leading these companies. With the exception of course of Tim Cook who has an MBA

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I don’t know, he was some sort of engineering undergrad, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Paul Moore I would consider Tim Cook a continuation of the Steve Jobs reign in the same way that Balmer was a continuation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of Gates. It’s like two guys who worked in tandem for a large part of the time when they were successful then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one is gone and the other one is sort of continuing that. Microsoft seems kind of like Apple was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John before Steve Jobs came back in terms of having tons and tons of products and tons of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John different things. I’ve seen a bunch of threads recently and a bunch of articles about people who develop on Microsoft’s platforms

⏹️ ▶️ ^John complaining about how Microsoft keeps changing its minds about technologies and APIs and how it’s making their lives more difficult.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco been the case for 15, 20 years. I mean, that’s not new at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I mean, like it’s new-ish. Like in the Windows 95 era, it was like Win32 forever, and this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is an exciting new thing called MFC that’s coming. And there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was a steady period, and then there was this period of disruption where they kept changing their mind every 10 minutes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John similar with Apple where they, towards the end of Apple’s bad years, where they were like, we’re going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to, you don’t remember any of these names. We were going to do power talk and we’re going to do, you’d probably heard open doc,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John open doc is this new idea. And we’re going to have themes and we’re going to like, they kept changing their mind and then they would cancel things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and quick draw GX and quick draw 3d and rave and like all these technologies that old Mac people know that you’ve never

⏹️ ▶️ ^John heard of and be glad you haven’t. Uh, there was like, it was too much confusion. And every time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they announced one and canceled it, it tried to replace it with something I said was better, that decreased confidence.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that all reversed when Steve Jobs came, canceled half the company’s project. I mean, they canceled a Newton for crying out loud, but Newton

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was like the most forward thinking, interesting product Apple had, and he canned it. And he was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right to can it, so he could focus the company on what he thought they wanted to do. So Nadella

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could, you know, take all of these things that are confusing people, that are sending the wrong signals, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are making people lose confidence in the company, and get rid of them, and take the heat for getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rid of them the same way Steve Jobs took the heat for counting the Newton and start on whatever he thinks is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John important thing that, you know, focus the company basically. Get people, the people who aren’t excited to leave

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or get fired and the people who remain, I guess, are terrified for a short period of time, but then you inspire them and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you inspire them into being exciting and you sort of like that. That’s the way the rebirth can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John happen is you could have that incredibly painful shrinking process and then come out of it stronger. I just fear

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that he’s going to be too conservative and too afraid to rock

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the boat and too afraid of like, you know, his first year, he’s all the investors are going to be pissed because he,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, kills a bunch of profitable product lines to concentrate on everything else he wants to do. Like it gets back to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John saying before, maybe Microsoft is not it. It would be an easier job

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if Microsoft was in a worse position for the new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco CEO. Exactly. Yeah. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, they were dying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco quickly. They had like 90 days worth

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of money left in the bank or something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If somebody comes in and says, I’m going to turn this around drastically, here’s how to do it. Then everyone would be like, fine, whatever you want to do, whatever’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going to work, do it. Microsoft is making tons of money. And so it’s much harder because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they are being successful in so many ways. It’s much harder for somebody to come in and ax everything. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my plan doesn’t really ax a whole lot. That’s why I think it’s not only most likely,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but probably what’s best for them is it’s it’s more about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no longer doing massive new rethinkings of the Windows UI and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like that like it’s more about… You just want them to surrender.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s what you want. To lay down and not die but just kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of hang out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No that’s not it like I I want them I almost want them to go back to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how they were about 12 to 15 years ago you know like in the late 90s early 2000s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on the lead up to Windows XP like like that was they were doing very well

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it was mostly because they were working on the internals of Windows you know with especially with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco NT trim with the you know Windows win 16 to NT transition whatever the hell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was the technology is not why they were doing they were doing well because the personal if you drew the chart of PC sales

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they were going upwards and every one of the PCs was sold with Windows on it and so my shirt was going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John upwards that’s what was bringing them upwards. It’s not so much like all those technical things are true

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and like when they started to screw it up their success with the PC market hid most of those problems and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as soon as the PC market stopped growing it at a crazy rate then all their problems became revealed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they figured out that they didn’t know what to do and they made lots of new different decisions but I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know I disagree with that actually I don’t think it was about the growth slowing down that really hurt

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them I mean that’s hurting them maybe now a little bit but I think what really hurt them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was a whole bunch of execution problems when they tried to do way too much. This again

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sound familiar? With Longhorn which became Vista. They had these crazy ideas

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco file system reference and this crazy these crazy ideas that you know they had to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cut almost all of them to get Vista out the door like five or six years later something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it Vista was very late and it was mostly because they they were way too

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ambitious with what they wanted to do. They wanted to change too much and it didn’t work. And Vista

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco came out and because it was pretty sloppily done, people hated it. They tried to change too

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco much, they changed too many of the wrong things, they released a sloppy version that everyone hated badly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And you could say a lot of that about Windows 8. I don’t think it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as sloppy necessarily, but they tried to do a lot with it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and a lot of it was not very well done and their customers hated almost all of it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so that I think, you know, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can keep doing that pattern of keep trying to reinvent Windows to make a major new splash with Windows

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco again. But that’s probably not going to happen. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco historically, even before, even when PCs were growing just fine, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco weren’t very good at doing that. And one more quick thing to play a little bit of devil’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco advocate on the PC growth thing. There have been so many other factors in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco addition to the rise of tablets and stuff that could also help explain

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the PC sales downturn. We’re talking about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco new PC sales having slowed down or stopped or regressed. not talking about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco PC usage necessarily slowing down or stopping or regressing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This could also just be that PCs are being used for longer. They’re on a slower replacement

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco cycle. And if you think about what might cause that to be the case, there’s all sorts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of really good reasons. There’s the economy, the job market, where like you know businesses have to buy new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco computers when they hire new employees, right? Usually if you know unless that job

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was previous occupied and you get somebody else’s old crappy computer. But you know so like the job market,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the economy, those are kind of crappy right now. Windows itself,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Windows 8 is not well liked and so a lot of people are you know we’re not excited to go out and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get a new computer with Windows 8 on it. A lot of businesses held off on upgrades because they wanted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to wait until they could get you know something they actually wanted and liked and could support.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And if you think about why people used to buy new computers so often.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco After performance stopped accelerating so quickly, past what people actually needed, a lot of it was because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco malware would infect their old computer so badly that they would think the only solution was to get a new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one because they would think computers just slow down over time and they have to get a new computer because this one’s so slow and full of pop-ups.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like people actually did that at massive, to a massive scale. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe the reason why computer sales slowed down didn’t have as much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to do with tablets coming in as just people need to replace

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco computers less now because you know they’re pretty fast already anti-malware stuff is pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco good these days it’s certainly a lot better than it was ten years ago you know maybe maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s more you know the problem and so if that is what’s causing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the sales growth, or at least if those are major contributing factors. That’s not saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco PCs are going away, that’s just saying the average PC buyer might keep it for five years

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco instead of two. And so, you know, that’s not great for the market, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s just, you know, the market’s not going away, it’s just, you know, the replacement cycle is slowed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco down.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now, like, Microsoft did make many technical mistakes, but if the PC market was still growing 30%

⏹️ ▶️ ^John year over year, it wouldn’t matter because they would just be able to force everyone to upgrade.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They wouldn’t have to say, hey, we’ll keep making XP available forever, even though everyone hates Vista,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because it would be like, well, there’s new customers coming in every day, and they’re going to get the new thing, and we have this growth.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Growth like that cures everything. It hides all the terrible problems.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s very difficult to make, especially in the position Microsoft is in, it’s very difficult to make a product so bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that it overcomes 30% year-over-year growth in your market in terms of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unit sales. Because what else is it? What’s your alternative? What are the customers going to do? They

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had such an incredible lock on the market, such huge market share, that if you’re buying a new personal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John computer and your market is growing 30% year-over-year, you have this huge

⏹️ ▶️ ^John number of people who are buying a computer who didn’t have one before, and they’re going to get your new operating system on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, and they’re just going to accept it. And what’s their alternative? Well, I’m not going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to buy Windows. I’m going to buy something else. What are you going to get? Apple doesn’t want to serve your needs. You need something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that runs Windows. We’re the ones selling something that’s run Windows. I’m not saying this is a good thing or a healthy thing. I’m just saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that was able to mask all of their problems until it slowed down. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’d have to see the curves on it. I think it probably started to take a dive around, what, iPad time, like 2010 or something,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when it really took, when the PC sales turned the other direction. I don’t know. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Vista debacle, we all hated it and thought it was terrible. But if you look at Microsoft’s earnings and everything during that period, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like they were doing OK. They just made, they were testing the theory. How terrible of a product can we make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and still be successful? And if people don’t have an alternative, you can make a pretty terrible

⏹️ ▶️ ^John product and still be successful. In fact, you can delay, not release a product, not upgrade Windows for five

⏹️ ▶️ ^John years and do this horrible project and still be successful. And compare that to Apple, who couldn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John replace their operating system for many, many years and did not have 30% year-over-year growth and almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^John went out of business. So I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I look at Microsoft’s fortunes going forward, and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John still think about them needing to find some market with the kind of growth that the PC market

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had. Apple found one. It was the phone market. Phone market has that kind of growth now. It won’t always have that growth. Someday that growth

⏹️ ▶️ ^John will stop. And the iPad market has similar growth for now. But I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get really depressed when I think about Microsoft. never being in another business with that kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of growth curve.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. So what else is going on?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I should note I actually just came out with a new iOS app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco We have one more sponsor this week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, hold on. I want to talk about my new iOS app. I came up with one and it’s a really, really clever name.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Do you want to guess what it is? Hmm.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Is it Xbox one?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, no.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Is it a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cardboard? You know, it’s not cardboard because I thought- Oh, is it Facebook?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It is Facebook! How did you know? No, it’s called paper. That should be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fine. Do we have any thoughts on this? Like, I don’t even know what to say. It seems like this is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey he said, she said. I feel like this is the soap opera corner of our industry

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that I really have no interest in. Like, I think it’s a David and Goliath tale. Okay.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Everyone knows everyone’s kind of being jerks. Okay. I don’t know. Do you guys have thoughts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The system for resolving this, you know, it’s called the legal system. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John boring and slow and annoying. But when a bunch of people all want to do the same things, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John he said she said in blogs, you can resolve this in civil court. And I’m assuming

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s what they’ll do. Yeah, that’s expensive, though. Well, Facebook’s got the money,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can tell you that. So maybe they win by default.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Actually, 53 I think is doing pretty well too. The smaller paper

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco company is probably upset about that more than anybody. But I don’t know, this stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is hard. I talked, I forget whether it was this show

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or not, but I talked at length about the process I went through for naming Overcast.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And when I name most things, I just kind of throw

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something out there and it usually just works okay enough.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Overcast I knew was gonna get a lot of attention when I announced it, but it wasn’t ready yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I wanted protection by trademark protection, but I didn’t want to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I didn’t wanna like pre-announce the name or have it in the public record at the trademark office before I announced

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the product. Anyway, all these concerns. I knew that what I was making now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was going to get more scrutiny than anything I’ve made before, because my audience is bigger

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now. And so, when naming this thing, I knew that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if there was any potential for a trademark conflict of any sort,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that it would bite me. I knew it. You know, for a while, industries, like new industries or new

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco areas or new platforms, if they’re really small and kind of under the radar,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can get by squatting on somebody’s trademark, you know, inadvertently. You know, usually it’s unintentional,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but you can get by having a trademark conflict because no one’s gonna notice because it’s this tiny little platform no one cares about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right? But, and for a while, you know, I think the App Store was that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the first few years maybe, but now it’s big. Now it’s a giant, it’s this giant business, this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco giant ecosystem that has quickly become kind of merged with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and partially taken over the whole consumer technology space. So it’s this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco massive thing. So, you know, I knew

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that whatever name I picked, I would have to vet as being pretty

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco safe to use. And so every name I thought about using, I went to the USPTO.gov

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco site and searched into the trademark search for the name and for similar types of spellings and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff. I vetted every single name I wanted to use. And I had this giant text file

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with, you know, like inbox of names I want to check out and like the bottom, like names I can’t use. and most

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the names I can’t use were because of trademark conflicts. That’s just the reality of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco once you get into like the big mass business world, you have to worry about things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like trademark conflicts. Similarly, before I announced

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the product name at all, like weeks before I announced the product,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I filed for the trademark. Because I knew that there was a risk that if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I announced it, then somebody else could go file a trademark

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for it and release something and steal my name. And I actually had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to pay money for the name because of another trademark. I had to have a coexistence agreement

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with another trademark owner. So I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco took the steps to both secure the name in a way that I’m unlikely to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco threatened sued because I did enough research to know that I’m probably okay with all trademarks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco except this one and that one I got an agreement for and also filed my own

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco trademark application to help protect the name from being stolen by other people after I announce it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco These are things that legitimate businesses have to do all the time. The App Store is now one of those places

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where you have to do that sort of stuff. You can’t just release an app with a name and hope

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no whenever quote steals it you know if you if you didn’t like file a trademark

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you basically have no case to anybody including Apple like you can’t email Apple and say hey these guys

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stole my app name and it’s some generic term like paper and you know like Apple’s not gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco help you there if you say I have a trademark here’s the number and there’s a squatting on it they will help you a little bit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not not a whole lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple Apple’s the App Store system seems so terrible for the naming stuff it always was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John first of all I was always shocked I remember the first time I realized this way back in the iOS 2.0 days when our app stories

⏹️ ▶️ ^John came out that the name that it has in your home screen doesn’t really have to be I guess maybe it has to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be related to the name of the app but it’s not the same thing like you get to pick what the short name is

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} right yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s weird so that’s kind of misleading and the second thing is if Apple had just simply said

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can name your app once the names have to be unique they would have implemented their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John own de facto trademark system you know I mean, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they don’t right because a lot like the hot like how domain names work right domain names are kind of like you Know if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you have the dot-com and you start using it for something prominent You don’t have to worry

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that much about someone else trademarking it after you because there’s evidence that you were there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah But there’s still the legal system and like if you try to use Coca-Cola calm Coca-Cola will come and get it from you because they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a big company like but up But you know just it for the small guys and for just like the name squatters

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and all that ridiculous stuff They just did you know? Yeah, name is read only in his unique index

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on it But uh, you know that solves so many problems because it sounds like all these people are like you’re reading

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all this sob stories about They put it in a foreign store and then they change the name and put it into the US store

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, it’s just because that that field is so mutable. It’s led to so much evil letting people change that name

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over and over again I don’t think it’s too much to ask to make people pick a name once you could like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say, you know Limited limited character set limited length pick your name you get one shot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at it. If you don’t, if you don’t like the name, and it’s like, and it’s like first come first serve, and it would have to be like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, you have to upload the app at that time, or maybe you only get the name once your app is approved. And then you then you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John state your claim and that name out or whatever system they come up with, it will be self regulating to a degree

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much higher than the current app store. And then you’d only need to go to the stupid legal system, which is only an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John option for certain people. If you I mean, if someone else had a a name and got

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there at first and you felt like you had a right to it. Like for example, if you registered a trademark and overcast and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple had this system and before you were done with the app, someone uploaded an app called overcast.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, now you got to go to the legal system and say, Hey, you can’t use that name because I have a trademark or whatever. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you uploaded overcast with that name, capital O, everything else, lowercase, that’s it. Uh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and had the product for sale. Wouldn’t you feel better knowing that it’s impossible for anyone else to upload another

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app called overcast? That would be nice. But it’s not. They can upload an app, whatever they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want, and rename it to Overcast with a non-breaking space at the end or some emoji or just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John puts a bunch of keyword spam at the end. Once again, the App Store

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not helping in this regard. I don’t really understand why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple, they’re so strict about everything else, why they were not more strict with app naming.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, it’s funny too is that most apps have have found most developers have found

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that Because of the the incredibly primitive way that app store search works

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You’re actually better off putting a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John keywords after your name I remember when Twitter if it changed the name of their app from Twitter if ik to Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if ik for Twitter and it’s like Jesus the search is so bad Like they had to write

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twitter if ik for Twitter because people would search for Twitter and it wouldn’t match terrific like it that’s the you know the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fact that the names can be so long that you can keyword spam them that there’s not like a unique identifier

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like sure by all means let people change the description have a secondary tagline you know like there’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John place for people to put in like the elegant notes taking app or whatever but having that be the name of the app because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of like a side effect of where their stupid search works it’s just like this if again

⏹️ ▶️ ^John i said this before if you just picked randomly 10 developers from the app store

⏹️ ▶️ ^John put them in a room and say and a white whiteboard and said, come up with 10 ideas to make the app store better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They would fight to kill each other for what those 10 ideas are. It wouldn’t be like, I can’t really think of anything. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s so many obvious things that can improve and just year after year. Nope, not really, not really improving.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Hey, Marco, really quickly, do you want to tell us about something else that’s really fun and exciting?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Let’s do one more. It’s our friends at Ting. Ting is mobile that makes sense.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They’re a simple to use mobile service provider from the people at Two Cows, the company behind However,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Ting is a reseller of the Sprint network here in the US. Go to atp.ting.com

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to learn more. So they have great rates, which actually their price is just lower, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is worth noting, especially on data. They dramatically reduced the price on data. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they had great rates before, now they have even greater rates. And there’s no contract and no early

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco termination fees. You own your device outright from the start, and then they have this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco great pay for what you use pricing model. So you pay a base price, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco six bucks per month per device, and then on top of that you should automatically build

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with this like bucketing system for whatever actual amount of minutes and messages and megabytes that you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco use that month. So you’ll pay at least six bucks and then you know if you only use a couple hundred megs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’ll pay another few dollars on top of that. If you don’t use any text this month you won’t pay anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the text service that month. They will automatically put you into whatever bucket is cheapest that will fit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your usage. So, and it doesn’t matter if it fluctuates month to month, that’s the whole point, it can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fluctuate, and you won’t, you know, you don’t have to worry about, like, oh, I’m going on a trip,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m gonna need more data, so I gotta increase it this month, but then next month I have to remember to bring it back down, or else I’ll get charged

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco again. Nothing like that. You just pay for what you use. It’s that simple with Ting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can even see their prices, even if you use the same amount every

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco month basically, their prices are extremely competitive and are probably cheaper than what you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco paying now. Go to atp.ting.com and check out their savings calculator.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And you can enter in your last few bill usage amounts into Ting and they will

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tell you what you paid at your provider and what that would cost you at Ting. And you can see even over time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you buy the device up front and you pay this much per month and you save this much, when do you come out ahead? Whether

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s immediately, whether it’s three months down the line, whatever the case may be, you can see they have these great tools on their site

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to see just how much you’re going to save. They will even help you get out of a contract

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you have to pay an early termination fee. They have this great deal where they will give you up to 25%

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco back in Ting credit of your ETF, up to $75, which is really great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like Hover, Ting has great customer support with a no-hold, no-wait telephone support line.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They have online help too if you want it, but this is great. You can call them between 8am and 8pm Eastern,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and a human being picks up the phone who’s able to help you. No hold, no wait, no transfers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s really great. So check out Ting. They have all sorts of stuff you can do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can pool devices together under one account and manage a fleet of devices. You can have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco test devices if you’re a developer and you don’t want to pay a whole bunch of monthly costs for some other phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Really fantastic service here. Go to ATP.ting.com. You can bring your own compatible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Sprint device, or you can buy one from them, new or used. Or you can get one on eBay or whatever. It doesn’t matter how you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get it. Any compatible Sprint device, you can see the list on their site. Go to ATP.ting.com.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thanks a lot to Ting for sponsoring the show once again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m sorry, do we have any more on the paper or app store stuff?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know. The funny thing about this is nobody has clean hands in this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 53, the company, who had a naming dispute with Figure 53, another company,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and I got to say from the blog post on Figure 53, it didn’t make 53 look great. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then 53 made this paper app that was also not great because somebody else already had an app named

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Paper. And then Facebook comes along and makes their app named Paper. And 53

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has tried to file a trademark on it now, but they filed the trademark on the day if Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco released their app called Paper, so that might be a problem for them. Who knows? It’s just a mess. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think legally, none of us are experts enough to know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who’s legally in the right here. I think all of them are being dicks, though.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And not just being dicks, it’s kind of stupid. The worst one, I think, is Facebook, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Paper app is pretty well established in iOS. I don’t know how popular it is, but I’ve heard of it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and I don’t do drawing on the iPad. So it’s like, it’s not a new application. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pretty popular. If Facebook’s going to come up with this application, like pick a different

⏹️ ▶️ ^John name, like, you know, why? Why pick you just you’re just making people confused about your own product.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know, the search is going to be difficult talking about it is going to be difficult. And it’s not as if paper was just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John such a natural name for what Facebook was doing that like they couldn’t resist it. It’s not really natural name for what they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were doing. It’s in In fact, if anything, it’s a more natural name for a drawing program. So I think they’re all making their own lives

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more difficult, with the exception of whoever were the first and maybe second one to come up with this name were. But Facebook,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no excuse to use paper. Pick a different name.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. And it also shows, to me, a level of arrogance. Because like you said, paper

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the app. The

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco second one, which might be the first one, depending on who you believe. Possibly the first. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But you know what I mean. The paper app that involves drawing that we all think of, or certainly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey used to think of, as the unequivocal paper up until a week ago, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It is extremely arrogant in my in my mind that that Facebook, just like you said, knows that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this exists, knows that a lot of people know that this exists. I mean, hell, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was featured on the App Store for like a year. Not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it’s not an obscure app. It’s extremely popular.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Facebook should come out with an application to manipulate your photos for iOS called Photoshop.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Exactly, like it’s just so arrogant of Facebook and as a company that’s, that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey feel like is losing more and more credibility in the minds of not only

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey nerds but non-nerds, that kind of arrogance just seems, I don’t know, silly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it’s just, it’s so unnecessary. Like Facebook comes out of this looking pretty bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and for what? You know, they could have named the app anything And it would have gotten all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it would have gotten the exact same attention It would have the same success you could argue whether they should just called it frickin Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and replace their old app with it I mean like there’s there was no reason for this it was completely avoidable,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and they I think you’re right Casey It’s just arrogance. It’s they they had to know about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the 53 app name paper, and they just said you know what doesn’t matter We’re gonna go right in there Anyway, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it even called Facebook paper, or is it just start the letter P is the first part of the name Oh, you know none of us have it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John installed. I installed it. Now let me tell you about the install experiences. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had higher hopes than this. I installed it, right? And I launch it and there’s an intro movie,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which of course annoys me. And I almost made a tweet like, seriously people, don’t make an intro movie for your iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app no matter how important you think it is. But then of course, during the intro movie lead up tutorial thing, it crashed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because I mean, like I’m running it on my iPod touch, you know, memory’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John probably fragmented. It’s trying God knows how much memory is using trying to show me this full screen video and tutorial

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing and of course it crashed right or it got killed or ran out of memory whatever it is like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what a terrible first launch experience install launch Do you want to do you get to use the app? Hell no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you get to watch a video with audio and try to go through a tutorial and then it crashes. It was all I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John could do to make myself tap that icon again to say no, I actually really do want to see if there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any other app or just deleted it immediately. It’s like sorry, failure. I eventually got it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John up and running after I just wanted to like just get me to the part where I use the I’m not a typical

⏹️ ▶️ ^John customer I guess but I think a typical customer I don’t know if they’d be charmed by that It kind of reminds me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the the welcome video that used to run at the beginning of OS 10 I guess that’s kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John neat if you’re opening up your Mac for the first time and it’s not that long But I don’t think people have tolerance to that crap

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on a phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve not installed it and I’m looking at just the site and it seems to me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like the The information density is just way too low in a lot of it. Like when you look at,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they have an example that, oh, I just completed my first marathon and that takes up like the entire

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey damn screen. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} know. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not the information density, it’s the information quality, because as many, many people have said when they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John looked at this, like paper would be awesome if all your friends were professional photographer model

⏹️ ▶️ ^John writers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco In California.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Right. Right, exactly. Who live in beautiful places.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it’s the same problem that Facebook Home had. Remember that thing where they took over Android’s home screen?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco exact same problem with that. It’s like Facebook… I think that was a better idea,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at least, though.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know whether they’re ignoring the reality or whether they actually don’t think this is the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reality of their product, but the reality is people post a bunch of terrible crap on Facebook.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And chances are, if you use Facebook, your timeline’s full of a bunch a terrible crap. And it’s designers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco who are thinking about the ideal case rather than the realistic case.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think that Facebook Home, though, is actually a very good idea to try to make the phone experience people-centric.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because you think, like, what most people do with their phones is communicate with people, like texting their friends or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if they already do a lot of stuff in Facebook, let’s try to make it so that always available is this thing where you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John flick around little circular blobs of your friends and message them. wasn’t great, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it the audience wasn’t wide enough, and it didn’t take off, you know, like, I’m saying it was a success

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as a product. But at least that’s like, that’s in Facebook’s wheelhouse of like, people like to use Facebook,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people do use phones to communicate with each other, we do have a social graph, people do send Facebook messages to each

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other, let’s try to surface that in a phone interface, whereas paper is just like, let me find the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John amazing fanciest way possible for you to just scroll through Facebook. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I I don’t think is as innovative or as interesting as Home was, and Home was a failure too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, will Paper be a failure? People downloaded it and use it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I guess it’s fine. Like, it’s no skin off their back if they go back to the plain Facebook app. But it seems like a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of spit and polish for what’s mostly a turd.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So this is what annoys me about Facebook, because they applied

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a ridiculous amount of resources into developing this app. and resources.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They applied incredible designers and developers’ time to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this. And there’s an opportunity cost there to both Facebook and to the world. What

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if Facebook didn’t buy all these people? And what if these people were working on their own

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff? They would have made a thermostat. Maybe that. Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something else. I think one of them did. What if Facebook didn’t use all these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people’s time to make this app that the world doesn’t really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco need and that will probably not even be maintained in a year because it probably won’t succeed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it doesn’t even it’s not even an upgrade of their existing app it’s just a side project I mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the world has lost because of this the world has lost value and has lost

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco potential new things these people could have done instead and Facebook has lost their

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time and their talent. I mean it’s this is a problem with this acquihire

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco culture that the people the products that get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco acquihired get destroyed usually as part of the deal they get shut down or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco excuse me they get sunset and the people are then put to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco work for these big companies working on how to make ads prettier or some some junk like that like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s a major opportunity cost to all of this and the industry you know if if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco things ever feel stagnant maybe that’s why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I guess do you think Mike Mattis uses Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe not maybe that’s the problem maybe that’s why it has had like this ideal picture of what Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco posts were actually like but I don’t know I mean like I would have loved to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco see what he would have done. We did see part of it, you know, what he and his company would have done

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if they weren’t bought by Facebook. And I think it would have been better for… I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it would have been more useful to more people than this. Wait, where was he bought from?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Was it Sofa? Was that…

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, Mike Mattis did Push Pop Press. That’s it, Push Pop Press, that’s right. Yeah. Right, and didn’t he also

⏹️ ▶️ ^John work on the UI for Nest? Oh, I don’t know about that. Someone can Google But my memory

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was that he did that as well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Also, how terrible is it that I just phrased my question? Where was he bought from?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Genuinely, like that’s that’s that’s not cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s accurate. I mean, that’s I don’t think the people who worked on this, like they seem to be very talented, and I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think them at all for, you know, going where someone wanted to pay them to do great design.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s just, you know, they’re doing it on top of I wonder if they’re doing it on top of things that they themselves

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t use, which I don’t think in and of itself is a a condemnation like that’s the job of you know just as uh

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mike montero that’s the job of a designer someone’s got a job for you they pay you to do it you do the best job possible you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to be a user of the product maybe it helps sometimes but it’s like it’s you know if you are a great designer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they pay you to do a great design and you do a great design and you solve a customer problem with your great design

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh then you’ve succeeded and it doesn’t really matter if that customer problem is not a problem that you yourself

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have but at the same time i i you know like i said it’s you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John putting a beautiful face on something that’s not like almost not deserving

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of that of that beauty and like and maybe giving it to an audience who does

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not value the work that you’ve done to the degree that you think like maybe maybe you think you’re solving a problem that they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have and they don’t really have that problem so I don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week lynda.com, Squarespace, and Ting.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And we will see you next week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, it was accidental

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And you can find the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twitter, you can follow them at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey list and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a I see oh a RM and T Marco are men

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco SIR AC USA Syracuse

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s accidental. They didn’t mean to.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Accidental. Tech broadcasts so long.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So, I gotta tell you that my father’s gonna listen to this episode and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey blow a gasket.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, because I said IBM is boring?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, no, no, no, actually, I don’t think that would bother him at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Because the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco offer code is Casey?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, not that either. he works in investor relations for IBM. And so because of that, he knows, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey market cap and all these other numbers off top of his head, because it’s his job. And so inevitably,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey something that one of us said is going to be wrong in his eyes, and only I get to hear the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey aftermath.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, you should ask him, but we have this opportunity, you should ask him and you can share the results with us, if not with the entire

⏹️ ▶️ ^John audience. If he was investor relations for, and he could

⏹️ ▶️ ^John substitute IBM’s numbers in his current job and take Microsoft’s numbers. Would he take, would he do that? Like, cause he

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has to say, here’s our market cap, here’s our revenue, here’s our margins, here’s what our growth was.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Would he trade those numbers for Microsoft numbers? Either, you know, obviously he would trade them for Microsoft numbers in 1996, right? But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what are you training for Microsoft’s numbers now? Cause that’s, that’s to get a good idea of like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if our sort of assessment of the size and relative of health and success and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sort of growth profiles of these companies is anything close to what we were guessing based on known numbers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Are IBM’s margins way lower because they have a huge staff

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and because the margins on service are lower than they are and the stuff that Microsoft does? Are there, is IBM’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John revenue higher, but the margins are lower? Are they similar? Are they making similar profits? So just ask him. If you could take Microsoft’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John numbers for last year or last quarter or whatever, would you do that? Would it make people smile

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more, or would it just be a wash?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I don’t know. And I don’t know very much about any of this, so I won’t even

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey begin to wager a guess. But yeah, I’m sure I won’t even have to prompt him. Even if this part doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey make it in the show, I’m confident he will seek me out and explain to me all the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ways in which all of us were wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Of course. And by the way, I really feel the need to clarify. My

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco argument is not that Microsoft should only do the kinds of things that IBM and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco SAP and Oracle do. I’m saying they should move into that direction,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I’m not saying that you need to get rid of Windows and Office licensing and stuff like that. Like, that’s not what I’m saying at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That that is Oracle. I say like that. That’s the same thing. Like continuing to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because that that is the new version of what Oracle and SAP is like. I don’t think that’s a growth market anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Selling personal computers for people to use at work and getting back to your thing you said before, is it just because people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are using computers for longer? Like, it’s so hard to tell that because you can’t tell until the time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John comes when they’re going to buy a new one. Like if people just stop buying PCs, you could say, well, that’s it, the PC market is done. No

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one wants PCs anymore. But it could be the case that they’re merely just keeping their old ones for longer. And so you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to wait. Are they keeping them for five years for 10 years or 50 years? If no one but if everyone stopped now, no one bought a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John new PC for 50 years, we would say, well, the PC is dead. But 50 years rolls around, they all replaced their

⏹️ ▶️ ^John PCs. It’s like, no, see, they They were just waiting longer between PCs. So it’s hard to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tell when you’re in the midst of it. I mean, the customers aren’t synchronized in that manner. But there are so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John many factors here that it’s like, something’s going on over there. And all we know is that this is no longer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the growth market that it once was. Is it dwindling to go away forever? Will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the installed base shrink? I mean, computers will eventually break, won’t they? I mean, you can’t use them forever. Something will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John happen to them. Or you’ll have to either decide, do I need to replace this thing that just broke?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Or do I not need this in my life anymore? Maybe that’s the outside, you know, 50 years isn’t, you know, how long

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does it take for a PC to break or become useless for common tasks? Because it doesn’t have like a,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, you know, in the old days, like it can’t connect to the internet and you can’t put an ethernet card in yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it became worthless. I don’t know. I think we’ll just have to wait and see. But anyway, I think that business

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a serving business type of, you know, like I think we’d all agree that if there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any place that the iPad is gonna steal share from the PC, it’s gonna be consumers first. because maybe they don’t need a PC

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at home. So the enterprise market, where you keep selling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Windows desktops on people’s desks, they can keep doing that. Doesn’t seem like anyone else wants that business,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be a big growth business either. So I always think they have to find

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what is their growth business. While they continue to use the macro strategy for Windows and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everything, what is their growth strategy for the future? Just bring XP back.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s the growth strategy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Start

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey selling XP all over again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s like, well, maybe Xbox could be the growth strategy if they could figure out that. If they could just outlast

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Sony and Nintendo, or buy both of them. I think they already tried to buy Nintendo once. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^John may have that opportunity again.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can’t imagine that market is substantial enough to matter on their balance sheet at the end of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the day, really. Even if they dominated the game console market, who cares at their scale?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco How big is that market, really? And do you think, again,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everyone playing Bingo at home, again, your argument for Nintendo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was always that as long as there continues to be a market for dedicated game hardware.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s not a growth market either, probably. Right, well, but again, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco related to your Nintendo argument, my argument for Microsoft, I think,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco holds as long as there is a market for mass

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco market PCs. Like as long as there is a market for non high-end specialty like Apple, like non

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco high-end PCs, cheap, widespread, customizable from

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco God knows who, as long as that market continues to exist, Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and its Windows client business will be fine. And the Windows server market

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco depends on that. And so that’ll be fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I only said that about Nintendo because I don’t think they’re capable of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anything else. That’s why I said that about Nintendo. Nintendo is confined to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that reality because they are not capable of making their own mobile operating system and app store and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John platform, right? But I think Microsoft is capable of pretty much anything that any other technology

⏹️ ▶️ ^John company is capable of. Except breaking into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco smartphones and tablets.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I mean, the hardest thing to do is to make a platform. And Microsoft knows how to make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a platform. Doesn’t mean all their platforms are going to be successful, but of the few companies in the entire world that have proven

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they know how to make and support a platform, Microsoft is definitely one of them. So that’s why I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like Kin or Playz for sure. Well, they can’t all be winners, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at least they’ve shown they can do it. Once, Nintendo has never done it, and it’s really hard. Palm

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of sort of did it once with Palm OS, but couldn’t do it again. Lots of other companies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have never been able to make a general purpose computing platform despite trying or never make a long-lived one,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’ll just kind of fade away. So I’m not willing to confine. Nintendo, I’m willing to confine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to that, because they can barely do what they’re doing now. And they just don’t have it. But Microsoft has so many people, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John many smart people, so much institutional experience, that there is no technology section

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the market that they should feel is out of reach because they will never be able to. It’s not like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they can do everything, but they should pick what they want to do. But I’m not willing to say Microsoft, basically,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You just better hope there continues

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} to be a market

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for PCs because you can’t do anything else, right? Despite, like, as you said, evidence of the contrary

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where they haven’t been able to do it in phones, haven’t been able to do it in tablets, but I think they showed in game consoles,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even though it’s, again, not a growth market, there was another place where they developed a platform and were as successful as

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the other people who were doing the similar thing, so. All

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right, titles? Yeah, whatever. Cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Go team.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Good talk. I think it’s interesting like listening to Back to Work this week,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s interesting that you know Merlin is just now replacing a 2006

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mac Pro. And mostly because Mavericks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco does not install officially on it so you have to like kind of hack the installer and it’s kind of unstable

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco now. But you know this is an eight year old computer and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco granted it was a very high-end computer or eight years ago, but that’s still an eight-year-old computer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that was really working just fine until a few months ago.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well that’s when it filled up with dander finally. Like there was a little bit of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John room left, but once it filled entirely then you know, well it’s full, you got to get a new one.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah I think you know it’s a that’s that’s really that says a lot about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the market and you know granted yeah it’s a little bit different with Macs versus PCs but It’s not that far

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think laptops help a little bit because people break them and stuff. I don’t think laptops can last

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as long. I think it would be harder to find someone who is still using a 2006 laptop

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who hasn’t had it repaired, because it’s kind of like cars. You can keep them for a long time, but eventually you’re going to replace

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so many parts of that car. And so if anyone has got a 2006 laptop, either they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OK with the parts that are falling off of it or getting loose or whatever, or they’ve replaced parts on it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Actually, I have a bit of a story about that. My first Mac, which was a 2008-ish white Polybook,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I gave that to Aaron when I got my late 2011 MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Pro. And around the time I did that, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was able to get Apple to replace the case, because it had split in a few spots.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And that was one of the get out of jail free cards, that if the case had split on a Polybook,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you could get Apple to give you a new case pretty much without question. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Underscore actually came and visited Saturday morning and Aaron had to reboot her computer for some reason or another.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And we were measuring the time it took to reboot this 2008 Polybook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in like tens of minutes almost at this point. It might have been like 10 or 15 minutes it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey took to reboot. And so I ended up going to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple store with Underscore, partially to kill time, partially to actually impulse

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey buy her either an 11-inch Air or a 13-inch Air. I had intended to get the 13,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and Underscore said that Mrs. Underscore really likes the 11 because on rare occasions she

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey will put it in her purse, blah, blah, blah. And so we ended up going to the Apple store. I was standing in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the Apple store with Underscore, and I didn’t buy a thing because I couldn’t figure out whether or not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Erin would want the 11 or the 13, and she had somewhere else to be so she couldn’t go with us.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I didn’t end up buying anything and I still haven’t. Erin swears to me there’s no point because she really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey doesn’t use her computer for that much, but I’m in that weird, uncomfortable moment

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey where I feel like it’s time for her to get a new Mac, probably an Air, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey yet on the other side of the coin, I can’t really justify because all she does with it is basic word

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey processing occasionally and web browsing and that’s about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Wait until the errors are retina at least. You can wait longer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s what I said. When you told me this, I said that if I wasn’t in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a rush, I would not buy a MacBook Air right now because the rumors

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of that 11.9 inch retina error I think are very interesting because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to me that kind of sounds like a replacement for the MacBook Air not a new model.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Don’t you know that’s the 12-inch iPad Pro, Marco? I love the screen rumors

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because like the 12-inch screen rumors everywhere and everyone keeps saying 12-inch iPad, 12-inch iPad. It’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why is the Air not the first like that’s the main headline? iPad, you know, Retina Air

⏹️ ▶️ ^John screens and the secondary one is like oh I suppose it could be for a 12-inch iPad instead it’s the reverse. It’s like well 12-inch screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s obviously obviously a 12 inch iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco See, I really think if they release that thing, there’s a very good chance that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that replaces both MacBook Airs. Which is controversial because it would make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the smallest Mac a little bit bigger.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think it’s easy to, I don’t think that’s even that controversial because by that time, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seeing 13 inch new Retina 13 inch MacBook Pros all the time now, like, it’s so skinny.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, you don’t need, like the 13 inch Air is practically redone. one air, make it super duper

⏹️ ▶️ ^John skinny, find what you think is the compromise price, and I think that will make people feel better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about like, oh, do I want a 13 inch air or a 11 inch air or a 13 inch MacBook. But now it’ll be just like, the air is the super

⏹️ ▶️ ^John skinny one, there’s one of them, and then you’ve got to have a 13 and a 15, and they’re both pretty darn skinny too. So…

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, yeah, I totally agree. Like, the 13 inch Retina is so good and so thin and light,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I do think it largely removes the need for the 13-inch air. And if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco something comes out that’s closer in size to the 11, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that could be it. I mean, there’s gonna be a few people who would be upset by that, but already,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco between the 11 and 13, I think the ideal size is between those two. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 11’s a little too small. Yeah, and that screen resolution on the 11 is killer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in a bad way, killer. That screen resolution is tight also in a bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco way why do all these words mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} good and bad

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah what the 90s ruined language and music

⏹️ ▶️ ^John come on I was like Casey with Aaron replacing her thing and not sure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that she needs one my mother is in a similar situation where she thinks she doesn’t need a new laptop and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think she does and she’s needed one for a long time but she won’t give it up because she needs the optical disk in her mind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I’ve been trying to convince her this is this is not the case anyway her current strategy is that she’s going to do The

⏹️ ▶️ ^John old car route, which is can’t we just? Upgrade my laptop, and I had to gradually tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John her that yes This is a possible, and this is a thing that can be done and so the next time she

⏹️ ▶️ ^John visits I’m giving her more RAM and putting in an SSD

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And actually one of the biggest reasons not to impulse buy a laptop at

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Apple store is that you’re stuck with the stock levels of RAM and hard drives and everything else. Whereas if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco go and if you order online, I guess check, so the stock is only four gigs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of RAM, which I would not buy that today.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But don’t they have, with the soldered on the motherboard and RAM, which is pretty much all of them now, don’t they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have both models at Apple stores? Like the eight and 16? They

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco usually only carry at Apple stores The ones that are, there’s four errors

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can select to start with on apple.com, like 2.11s and 2.13s. Usually they’ll carry those four.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The ones that are the starting configs on apple.com. So each family will have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco two or three of them. But you won’t be able to get all the different options usually. It’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shame, there’s not really that many options.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, actually you’re right, these days there’s even fewer than there used to be because they keep soldering on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco certain things and stuff like that. I mean, if I were getting an 11-inch air today,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for whatever it’s worth, looking at the base model, first of all, there’s a storage issue with 128 gigs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Storage aside, I would not get four gigs. I would get eight gigs of RAM, definitely. And you can get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a substantially faster CPU for 150 bucks more. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John everyone always asks me, should I get the i7? I was like, it’s 100 bucks more, of course you get it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, it’s 150, but still, that’s a relatively

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} small

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of money for a computer for what’s going to be over time a pretty substantial gain in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your total usage of the thing. Similar with the RAM, the RAM is $100 to go from 4 to 8 gigs. So yeah, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco would say base price plus $250 for the CPU and the RAM, that’s a good buy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Where it starts to get challenging is the storage. And whether that’s enough for you will of course depend on you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I think if I were to do it, I think I would get a 13 because I talked to her about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Mrs. Underscore putting hers in her purse on occasion. And Aaron basically said

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s wonderful that it would fit, but I can’t ever see myself doing that. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’d probably get her 13. We agree that four gigs is just unacceptable, because this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey would be a five or six year computer, hopefully.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Eight

⏹️ ▶️ ^John gigs is unacceptable, too. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} that’s why you’d get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey her. Yeah, but I don’t believe the ears can take more than eight, can they?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, you’re right. I don’t think they can either. But that’s, again, presumably when Retina ones come out, there’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be some fancy, fancy 12 inch air that can cope to 16.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s true. And I should also note that when I bought my personal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey laptop, which is effectively the same as my work one, it’s a 15 inch antique layer,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey high res MacBook Pro. This is pre Retina, I got I believe I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey got the most baller one I could possibly buy. And I think you had the same one at the time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco. But anyway, I walked in and I walked in and bought that at the store. So they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey actually carried the completely spec’d up version. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it had the default amount of RAM, but in terms of like processor and screen and all that, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey had the fully spec’d version ready to buy at the store.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it was different there because they had like the anti-glare option as a set and the high-res

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anti-glare. They had these four different screens or three different screens you could

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} pick.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it was a little bit different then. But yeah, I like when I bought my RAM, retina,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I decided to be impatient one night and like, you know what, I’m gonna go buy one of those things. It was months after

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco WWDC when it was announced and one night I’m fighting with web development trying to get my site to look right. I’m like, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco know what, screw it. I’m just gonna go buy one of these things at the Apple store and I’ll get the cheapest one they have because I don’t need that much

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for this laptop. And I did. And it worked okay except that it only

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco had, I think it has 8 gigs of RAM and I wanted 16 or something like that. The RAM is like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one thing I regretted on it. And that’s something that you could only get online

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at the time. Yeah, now they started with the RAM and that’s another reason

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} to always

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go up. Right. It’s like, I’m upgrading my mom’s RAM. I’m not gonna be able to do that for her next Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s worth it these days to look at the configs online and not necessarily buy anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on impulse in the store.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think I told you guys I ordered a new TiVo too.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh yeah, the Romeo, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Finally gave in, yeah. I mean, I did it because I looked at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the, I went to the TiVo site and looked at my current crop of TiVos and the TiVo HD XL that’s upstairs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John has paid for its lifetime service multiple times over at this point. So even though my current TiVo

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Premier has not paid for its lifetime service yet, I’m gonna keep that one, so I’m just gonna shift it up. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John supposedly you can actually get money for these old TiVos that have lifetime service because the person

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who buys it doesn’t have to pay a monthly fee. Like the lifetime service goes with the hardware. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ll eventually be trying to see how much of that is true. How much money can I actually get for this thing? But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s perfectly good. DVR with two tenors, it records in HD, and the UI is faster

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than the Premiere.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s perfectly good as long as you don’t mind ads in your DVR, which I didn’t realize was a thing and somebody pointed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey out to me after the show when we talked about this at length. How do you of all people put up with that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, they used to not be there at all, and you can make them go away, but they come

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back. It’s not like the ad play video in your face or anything like that. It’s just like next

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to the scrubber after you’re done watching the show when it says you’re done with the show. Would you like to delete or whatever? There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an ad banner above the little scrubber bar, which I wouldn’t even mind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that much a if it was relevant and sometimes it is like it’ll be an advertisement for some show like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John hey, this show is premiering hit thumbs up to record or whatever and like that’s actually useful feature because I’m like, oh, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I did want to see that show and because I don’t watch commercials anymore. I’ll forget when it shows from hearing when it pops up that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing if I can just press a button and say yeah record that for me that’s good but when it’s just like bounty paper towels

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are awesome fine

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} whatever it’s kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like it’s kind of like the ads on Gmail where it’s like eventually you just don’t see them but they keep making it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John worse and worse and the worst thing about it is that sometimes it takes a while to load that ad and so before you get the screen that says

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do you want to delete this show or keep it or whatever you’re waiting and I realize what I’m waiting for is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for it to load the stupid text ad banner. So yeah, that’s not great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I still prefer it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You keep justifying this however you want, but it’s still BS.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, you know, it’s only a matter of time before… The only reason that isn’t appearing in your DVR is because your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John DVR doesn’t have the software for it yet. But wait, they’ll We’ll get there.