102: Marco Is Not a Platform

30 Jan 2015

Whether it’s worth answering email, learning new languages, using Apple’s money to solve problems, and the British Isles.

Episode Description:

• Follow-up:
  • Handwriting recognition with non-Roman languages (via @dansherson)
  • Marco's possibly-hypocritical (but not hypercritical) thoughts on Apple developer relations
    • The Talk Show #107: Now It's All Floppy
    • Overcast earnings
    • Hello Internet #6: Delete, Flag, Delete, Reply
    • Analog(ue) #16: I Don't Trust Systems
    • Back to Work
  • How do you learn a new language?
    • Casey's blog post
    • Tour of Go
    • Stack Overflow
    • NSHipster
  • Apple's earnings
    • Brewster's Millions
    • Debug #60: Shipping Software
    • The Talk Show #108: 'Malapros'
    • Andy Matuschak interview
• What's going on with Photos.app?
• Fake sponsor break for two awesome conferences on the British Isles:
  • NSConference
  • Úll
  • CGP Grey explains the United Kingdom
  • How to pronounce UK place names
• Familiarity and Progress (via Gary Bernhardt)
  • Bad Assumptions
  • Horace Dediu (Asymco) quote
  • Macalope
  • Sega VR
• Post-show:
  • Microsoft today
    • HoloLens
    • Kinect
    • Maya
    • Rocket
    • Oculus
  • John's sad TV news
    • John's TV
    • Destiny
    • HUD
    • HUD Issues
    • Full House

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

Transcript start

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No. Oh, no. Oh, no. All right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So you want to do some follow-up. We can start with handwriting recognition, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m assuming is more of John’s follow-up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. I don’t know why none of us thought of this, probably because we’re all Westerners. The one thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we didn’t talk about with iPads and styluses or styli is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that handwriting recognition is good. Text input with a with a pen is good

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for people who don’t write with Roman characters who have tons and tons of characters, Chinese,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Japanese, it’s a pain in the butt to enter those with a keyboard because they have to have these crazy multi level keyboards

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where you, you know, tap one key, then tap another and tap another work your way down to the actual character

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you want or combine multiple taps to make one thing. Whereas these people know how to draw if you just gave them a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pen. So if you can recognize that it’s actually way more convenient than trying to use a keyboard. So that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I mean, I don’t know if that’s harder or easier than recognizing. I assume it’s harder than recognizing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, regular Roman characters that we have. But it’s definitely

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you can get it to work, it’s definitely more convenient for the person in putting the characters than hunting through some crazy keyboard.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, absolutely. I will say that a friend of mine, Will Haynes, Um,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey he had shown me, uh, he lives in Tokyo despite having grown up in Australia.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And he had shown me the Japanese keyboard. I’m sure there’s like a name for like Kanji or something like that. And that’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey wrong too. But anyway, he had shown me the Japanese keyboard, which involves, you know, drawing these little characters

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on the bottom of the screen, very much like the, uh, palm was way back in the day. And.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey As someone who has never seen that before, it was amazing. It was extremely cool. And I could see how having a stylist would make

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it that much better.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Monkbent in the chat room is telling us that very few people write with characters these days

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and most of the young people, because everything is digital, just deal with the crappy input systems.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it could be that everyone just gets over this and they forget how to write their traditional characters. I don’t know. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like we’ve been getting on the people in the Far East have been getting along without this for a long time with these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with these various hacks of keyboards that have hierarchies to them or graffiti like systems where you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do a series of strokes to sort of narrow down And it’s kind of like auto complete for individual characters,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John which represent entire words or ideas. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we may already be past that threshold. This is where we need someone from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Far East to come on the program and tell us whether it’s something that people actually like. But it’s so hard to say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how, I mean, we’ll talk about this later when we talk about Apple’s earnings, how things play in countries other than the United States

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and what those markets really want. It’s very difficult to tell how much of what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple does is influenced by people and cultures that we know nothing about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, absolutely. As a quick aside, Marco, TIFF’s car has the iDrive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with handwriting recognition, is that correct? It does, yes. Do you use it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ever? I tried it, I think, once, and it wasn’t really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco worth it because it was actually slower than just using the wheel to go around picking the letters,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because you have to draw the characters one at a time. So you write the character and then you wait and then it recognizes it and then you keep going. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in just because of the the lag inherent in those steps it just wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really any faster than using the wheel. So I just use the wheel now when I drive her car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Fair enough. I mean it’s not a one-to-one comparison but it was the closest that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey could think of off the top of my head.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You could possibly argue it’s better for safety that you’re not looking at the screen as much. In practice that’s not true.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco In practice it is just as distracting as using the wheel. And you still have to look at the screen just as much. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I just try not to enter navigation directions while I’m moving.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, that seems like the smartest approach.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, so we had a very interesting email from Matt Chandler. And I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really wanted to talk about this. And then I thought, well, maybe that’s mean of me. And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey someone else who is not me, and I’m guessing is not Marco, added it to the show notes. This is why Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey should look at the show notes before

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the show. So he’ll know when he has a question that’s directed to him.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, you picked out this one? Oh, boy. This will be good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. OK. So from Matt Chandler, I listened to Marco on the talk show,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the episode Now It’s All Floppy, where he discussed how Apple’s feedback system is, quote, extremely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hostile, quote, because among other reasons, you get no feedback or response from Apple when you file a radar.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I was surprised by this, as some of my friends and I have filed bug reports for Overcast, both through Twitter and email,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and have never received feedback, any feedback, no form, response, tweet, or favorite on Twitter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey This didn’t bother me as I didn’t expect a response, but I wondered why Marco called this behavior by Apple extremely hostile

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey while he takes the same approach with Overcast. Yes, Overcast is smaller, but it certainly receives much less feedback

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as well. Thanks for the great show, and Marco, thanks for the great work on Overcast.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can answer this one if you want. The reason I put it in here is not because necessarily I felt Marco had to answer it, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I felt like anybody can answer it. Casey, Do you want to answer it? Marco, I know can answer it. I can answer it. Can anyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in the audience not answer this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I mean, I’d be curious to hear both of your answers. To me, it seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey pretty obvious that even in operation, the size of overcast, if one were to acknowledge

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey every single bug request and report and feature requests, that that would be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a tremendous mountain of just thanks and okay. And I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey got it. and dupe and etc. And I just I, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey can see why Marco wouldn’t want to do that. But Mark, but the difference is Marco’s business isn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, I don’t know, I already feel like this is a weak argument. But Marco’s business isn’t to make other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey people’s bug reports, his job, whereas when when you’re providing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey developer tools, that kind of is your job. John,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah, what was your answer? John? Oh, you want my answer? Now? Well, I think Matt Chandler knows the answer to yes, overcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is smaller. You think is it a little bit slower than Apple? Maybe a little bit smaller than Apple. I’m not sure. We have to check Marcos

⏹️ ▶️ ^John earnings for this year to see if they if he pulled in 18 billion dollars in profit this quarter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t think he did, but we’ll check. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} didn’t quite hit that target. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yes, overcast is smaller, but it certainly receives much less feedback as well. Exactly. It is smaller and proportionally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John receives less. How much smaller than Apple is overcast? And what proportion

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of his thing? you know, so that’s one thing obviously, it’s ridiculous. Smaller is one person, he would spend all his day all his

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time just dealing bug reports in the second case, he already covered it. He’s not a platform, he is not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John publishing API’s for people to write code against there. He has no developers, there is no overcast developer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John program, there’s no marker arm and developer program. You know, people are not paying for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a membership to a thing to be supported, you’re merely a customer and sending a report. Now all that said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s not to say that he shouldn’t give responses, form responses, personal responses,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or whatever, to the degree that he feels like he can do sort of the Daniel Jaukut,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I give you amazing, exceptional customer support. He should by all means, it is a good thing to do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. But on the list of priorities, responding to every single bug report,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and giving an acknowledgement that it was received, are probably pretty low for one person

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shop that’s doing all the stuff that Marco is doing. So I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say that he shouldn’t send a response and people shouldn’t expect one. But the explanation for why

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there was no response and why he might say it’s extremely hostile for Apple to not send a response

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is fairly clear. It’s hostile for Apple because Apple does not have any constraints that would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make it have to be such a big black hole. We know that, I mean, look

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at AppReview. They’re hiring people to look at every single of these hojillion apps that come in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if Apple wanted to do this and listed as a priority, they have more than enough money

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and resources and expertise to do this. So that’s why it’s hostile for Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because for Apple, it’s like a choice. It’s like a prioritization of something that we think should be much more important to Apple than

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is. And we know they have the resources to do it. In Marco’s case, you could still be angry at him because you got exceptional support

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from this other one person operation because they value support more than he does. But if Marco shifts

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do support differently, he’s got to pull from someplace else. What other part of Marco’s business do you think he should sacrifice

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make sure that everybody who sends a bug report gets a reply? I’m you know, that’s these are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tradeoffs that he makes. And you can argue whether the right tradeoffs or whether you like that kind of company. But I don’t think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you should be confused about why Marco can call Apple extremely hostile for doing the same thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John he does, because he’s not Apple and they’re so different than different standards apply.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So, Marco. This is going to be possibly a little controversial.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Not that I should be that surprised, or anybody who knows me should be that surprised by me prefacing something I’m about to say with that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey This should be good. Wait, let me go make some popcorn. Hold that thought.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The sad truth is that it is not worth answering your email.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You plural, not like, you know, you this guy. You everybody. In general, on average,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is not worth answering your email. And let me go into why that is. I don’t say this to be a jerk.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m saying this literally as like just simple time constraints and economics.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So here’s how this works. This morning, so usually I go through the overcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco feedback email in the evening or like before

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bed on the iPad. I’ll go through it a lot there because I respond to almost none

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of it. Really almost none. I respond to maybe three or four emails a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco day from that account. Since last night, when I last cleared it out, I’ve received 207.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And there’s still three more hours today before I go to bed. So I expect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to receive maybe 220, 250. We’ll see what happens. That’s pretty typical. Most days I receive between 60 and 200.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m getting a little more now because there’s some sync bugs I’m trying to squash. When you buy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my app, so I’m a one-person company. I blog about how much I made. It was like $160,000

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco before expenses and taxes and all that stuff last year. So that’s roughly what I make. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one developer’s good salary. It’s not stunningly great. It’s just a good developer salary

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for the level of experience I have. That’s not so much that it would make a lot of financial sense for me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to hire another support person, for instance. And I have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tried outsource support services in the past. I’ve had very mixed results with them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I question whether that was money well spent at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I could also attempt to answer more emails by using TextExpander to make my few form

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco answers and just send those to everybody. And I did that for the first couple of months of Overcast. And I question

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whether that’s better than not answering them at all. And I should point out on Hello Internet,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they had a similar conversation of this a few months back. Is something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you’re pretty sure is a form response, a template response, is that actually better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than no response at all? Is a response that is clearly insincere

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and that I didn’t put a whole lot of time into, is that really a good thing? That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up for debate as well. The simple fact is, when you get 200 support

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco emails a day and you’re one person, and my job is not answering email, my job is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco making the product and making it work for everybody, And responding to email, and this isn’t just support email, this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco email in general, responding to email is one of the least time efficient things you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can do. And of course it varies depending on why you’re responding to email, who you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco responding to and for what, but in general, responding to email is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an extremely inefficient use of limited time. Because you are taking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco your time to produce something that’s only ever going to go to one person. Whereas

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if I spent that time instead fixing the bugs that everyone’s complaining about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then they’re fixed for everyone. Or if I can make the product better in some way for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everyone, that’s way better use of that time than responding to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every email one by one saying, thanks for the report, I’m looking into it, or thanks, I’m about to fix this, or this is fixed in the next version,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or the version’s pending approval. It’s such a better use of time. In an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ideal world, you would have time to do both. I recognize that. But this is not an ideal world, this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco reality. And in reality, when you have an app that is free up front and at the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most you can ever hope to make from somebody is $3.50 before tax, it’s really hard to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco justify spending a ton of time on answering individual emails.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I knew that going into it. I knew that from Instapaper. So, the entire app is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco designed in such a way that it sets expectations accordingly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’ll notice in the app, nowhere does it say support. It only says feedback.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And on the feedback link, first, before it lets you email it, it shows you a page with an FAQ

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and known bugs and what’s being fixed in this version, what’s being fixed in the next version. It shows you this page to try

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to address what you’re about to tell me so maybe you don’t have to tell me. Maybe you can help yourself. Maybe you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco save yourself the time sending me the email. Certainly it saves me the time of having to read it or answer it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it says right there, I will read every email,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which by the way, even that takes a lot of time, a lot more time than I would have expected when I wrote that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I read every email, and I say I will read every email, but I also say I’m just one person with limited

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time, and so I cannot guarantee a response. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the result of that is I respond to almost none of them, because I literally don’t have the time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would so much rather spend that time fixing the bugs and making the app better

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for everyone than responding to one person. And I know that sounds cold and I know that sounds harsh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but that’s the reality. That’s like when you’re paying so little for apps,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s kind of part of it. That’s kind of what you have to expect from that. Like that’s all involved in this. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so the reason I don’t answer my email most of the time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is because it’s not because I’m a jerk, least in my opinion, you can make your own evaluation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of that. It’s not because I’m trying to be a jerk. It’s because I’ve decided it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really is just an incredibly bad use of time. And I know that’s not going to please

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everybody, but I think it will please the most people overall for me to be doing things that make the app

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco better for everyone, rather than spending three hours a day answering email.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t remember if I’ve ever told this story publicly, but I feel like I have.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have a couple of thoughts. I remember vividly that I,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey when we, you and I kind of got reacquainted, so to speak, cause we were old friends, kind of fell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey out of touch, not in an angry way, just fell out of touch. And then we were starting to get back in touch and I would

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey send emails to you periodically. And this was when Tumblr was really starting to take off and,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and, and Marco Arment was starting to become like a thing more than it was just a person.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I would send you emails, Marco, and I would never get a reply or I would get a reply

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really, really late. I remember one time Aaron and I were on our way to New York when this was when you were at Tumblr because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we ended up visiting you at Tumblr. We were on our way to New York to visit and I think I tweeted about it or something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like that. And you were like, wait, you’re on your way to New York. And I said, yes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} I emailed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you about that like two months ago. You said you did. And so and God did it annoy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey me so much at the time. But then fast forward a few years and suddenly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m on a podcast and we get email. Oh, do we get email? In fact,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we even got an email about how we tell people not to send us email.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Which actually made some really good points, but I couldn’t help but laugh at the irony of it. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and so it’s, I don’t know how to explain it other than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey however, email, however much email that you, the listener gets,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there’s a decent chance that those of us on the show get more than that and Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey gets more than that still. And the other thought I had is how many shows on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey across how many podcasts have talked about how email is such a problem. There

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was that wonderful episode of Hello Internet. I think Mike and I have talked about this on analog. God knows

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that Merlin has talked about this constantly and for good reason.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey The reason everyone complains and moans about email is because email

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is kind of an inherently selfish thing that nobody really deliberately signs up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for and it just kind of happens to them. And, and so how you deal with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that, you know, you do the best you can. And that’s what Marco’s doing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, that’s, that’s really it. Like, again, I’m not trying to be a jerk by not responding to most of the email I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get. It’s like, it’s almost like a defense mechanism. I have to defend my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time and and attention because if I did respond to all that email, all these bug fixes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and improvements and things I’m making would all take longer to come out and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wouldn’t be able to do as much.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You could spend your entire day just doing email because remember that email once you respond now you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John engaging with that person and like from that person’s perspective it’s just them and you and from your perspective you’re holding

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now 200 simultaneous conversations maintaining state in each of those conversations remembering

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who that person is and what they said previously, basically imagine you know, you get you know, 200 emails to support emails

⏹️ ▶️ ^John today, if you responded to all 200, then those 200 send the response back, then tomorrow starts and you get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John another 200. And you start responding to those like you will spend 100% of your time conversing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John over email for with people who have problems with your $5 application, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you are just one person. And someone in the chat room says I’m describing a CRM system. Yes, when you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a staff of people, you can do that. But for small business, there’s with one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John person doing all the work. If that one person said, I really need to support my customers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s all that one person would ever do. They would never fix a bug, never write a new version of a program,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John never create a program, never do anything else, never do a podcast, never have any sort of extracurricular

⏹️ ▶️ ^John activities, they would just spend all their waking hours conversing with individuals over email about the problems they’re having

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with their application and never have any time to investigate them. And so maybe you could say, well, you should expand your company,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you You shouldn’t have a one-person company or whatever. But the origin of this question is about hypocrisy. How

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can you be so angry about Apple doing something that you yourself do? It’s different context.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The conditions are entirely different. Therefore, the conclusions are different.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Absolutely. And the input that the email gives me is very valuable.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco By the emails alone, the emails kind of help me decide if I have a few

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco big features that I want to do next, the emails decide what comes first. And the emails decide things like, for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco example, I’ve mentioned this on Twitter a couple times, my big feature plan

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over this winter was to do streaming. And I started streaming a little bit last fall and I haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco worked on it since for two reasons. Number one is that they’re keeping other things that keep coming up,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bug fixes, sync issues, watch kits, stuff like that. But then number two

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is that by reading the email and by reading all the tweets, which is even more, you know, even more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco big stuff coming in that way, I can see very clearly that streaming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is not what I should be doing next. What I need to be doing next, which is what I am doing next,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is auto-delete control. That right now, the app just deletes an episode when you’re done with it, because that’s how I listen and I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} care.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like, once I’m done with it, I never want to hear it again. Like, that’s it, I’m done. And I thought that’s how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the app could always work. It keeps things very simple with, like, the different states an episode can be in and things like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It keeps a lot of things very simple. That is by far and away the number one request,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the number one complaint, and the number one reason people choose not to use my app is that I don’t have that control,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the finer control over whether something gets deleted or not and when it gets deleted. By far,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s way more important than streaming based on what people are telling me and what they’ve been telling me for months.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so, you know, I wouldn’t have known that had it not been for the email. At the same time,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I get, I would say literally 40 emails a day that and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for again for a while I was responding to all of them it took hours it takes long enough just to read them even that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like and I said I’ll read on my email I’m not necessarily sure that will always be the case

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can definitely see a future in which I say I can’t even keep up with reading it all anymore

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but even that like reading it takes probably probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an order of magnitude less time than responding to it and even that’s hard enough to keep up with that’s how monkey

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mail I’m talking about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, let’s talk about something that’s a little more positive than how much email we all get. Do you have any ideas,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, it’s not email. It is Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website, portfolio, and online store. For a free

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco trial and 10% off, visit squarespace.com and enter offer code ATP at checkout. Now they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco emailed me something

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} earlier

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco today. This is kind of cool. I guess the Super Bowl is coming up pretty soon? That’s correct.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, so that’s football, right? No, I…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s also Sunday.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} They have winter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, God, I hate you. So, you know Jeff Bridges, the dude?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco He has partnered with Squarespace to bring his project to life. It is DreamingWithJeff.com

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s DreamingWithJeff.com This is an actual project. This is not just like a PR stunt.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco project created by Jeff Bridges with his friends in various locations in LA.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco He created an album of unique and relaxing sounds, guided meditations, and stories designed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to lull you to sleep. This includes tracks such as A Glass of Water, IKEA,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and Hum. I don’t know. I haven’t listened yet. I literally just got this right before

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} You

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to listen. You can listen to the tracks on the website. Go listen to some. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve heard it’s quite good. So anyway, you can You can listen to it for free on the site, DreamingWithJeff.com.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If you wanna download it, they have a pay what you like streaming system in place. This is all based on Squarespace.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can do all this with Squarespace. The publishing of the site, the listening, the buying, this is all Squarespace.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can bid on one of these box sets. It’s like a limited edition box set or you can just pay, it’s a pay what you want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to download thing. Jeff Bridges is the face of No Kid Hungry. This is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco charity group that the main mission of it is that no child goes to bed hungry in America. All

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco proceeds from this album will go to No Kid Hungry, this wonderful charity. So really this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is not a joke, this is not a PR stunt, this is really Jeff Bridges’ work with Squarespace to make this happen. Dreamingwithjeff.com,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco check it out. And you can watch the Super Bowl on 2-1,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I assume that’s this Sunday? Do I have to tell anybody besides myself what date the Super Bowl is?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, tell me, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John didn’t know which Sunday it was. Okay. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey guys, oh God, you’re so bad.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Anyway, so they’ve worked

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with Squarespace to, I guess he’s gonna be involved in their Super Bowl commercial. Like they’re doing a Super Bowl commercial

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco again this year. I think they were the first one last year. So Jeff Bridges is gonna be in the Squarespace

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Super Bowl commercial, all worked in with this DreamingWithJeff.com project. So check it out,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco watch the Super Bowl. I’m reading an ad to tell people to watch the Super

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Bowl. To see the full commercial for Squarespace with Jeff Bridges. Anyway, check out Squarespace.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s the best way to build a website. We talked about it so much in the past. we’ll talk about it more in the future.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They have all these new features for Squarespace 7, this whole new design, tons of great new features. It is still,

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco decide to sign up for Squarespace, make sure to use the offer code ATP to get 10% off your first purchase and show your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco support for our show. Thank you very much to Squarespace. Start here, go anywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Did you look at the songs, Casey? No. You should. I looked on my phone on the mobile site and I have this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John cool little tape player thing and a little music player is embedded in it and they are absolutely crazy. Good, crazy?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It reminded me of something that John Roderick would make because they both have a similar kind of voice,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re both a little beardy. And just-

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Wait, how does one vocally sound

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} beardy?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John There is a song called, Hmm. It’s just because he talks over them and there’s this music.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Listen to them and tell me if you don’t picture John Roderick doing it. Anyway, it’s all for charity. You should go do it. Spend

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some money. Wow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So we had another piece of feedback from Alberto. And John,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey would you like to talk about this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Sure, this is a question. Well, we get lots of questions in the same vein. Most of the questions

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are like, I’m just starting out in Field X, and you people have some experience in Field

⏹️ ▶️ ^John X. how do I get started, so on and so forth. This is a little bit of indirectly related to that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This from Alberto, he says he listened to episode 101 about how Marco just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quote went and learned, unquote, a new computer language. And he was wondering how you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John go about learning something complex, so complex by yourself in a short time to just sit there with a textbook and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John start reading the open up a compiler and try it and see what’s what. Barton says he wants to expand his very

⏹️ ▶️ ^John simple programming skills and any tips you will give will help. This whole vein of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feedback where people want advice on how to get better at something they think we know how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do better than they currently know how, it’s always very difficult. People always ask me for recommendations

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of things to do or books to read, and I wish I had to go to answers for them, but I don’t. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for this specific answer, I’ll just let Marco answer it. I think there is an explanation of how Marco

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was able to pick up Go in such a short period of time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, can I interject before that happens? We get this—notice I didn’t wait for your answer—we get this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey question constantly. We get this question, I want to learn to program,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey where should I start? Or alternatively, I’m about to start iOS development, should I learn Swift or Objective-C?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We get this question so darn often that I actually wrote a very short blog post about it and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s only a couple paragraphs, we’ll put it in the show notes. But suffice it to say, I think the key

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey phrase in that blog post, which conveniently is in bold, is find a problem to solve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and then solve it using the most appropriate tools. And that’s really all it comes down to as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey far as I’m concerned. And I think that Marco is about to tell you that that’s kind of the path that he followed when

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey learning Go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, that’s pretty much it. So I mean, first of all, if you only know one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco language, and if you’re new to programming, or if you don’t know any programming languages yet. This sounds like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bigger deal than it really is once you know a lot. Like, when you’ve been programming for long enough,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you start realizing, especially if you’re exposed to a lot of languages, you start realizing that they’re a lot more similar than you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think. There’s a lot of overlap. Usually the differences are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really relatively minor and come down to like minor syntax details and then the available libraries

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that are built into the language or that are available for it. So like, the names of things you’re calling might be different, the symbols

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you’re using for certain things might be different, but you’re kind of doing the same kinds of things, or at least there’s a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco overlap. And you know, the concepts carry over. And so learning a new language

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really is… it’s nothing like learning a new human language. I mean, I know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they have similar concepts too, but there’s a lot… there’s a much higher learning curve for like human

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco spoken languages.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} There are more keywords. Yeah, the vocabulary is much bigger.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They’re a lot more complex. Like going between programming languages is a lot simpler than it sounds if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you’re not a programmer or if you’re new at it. It sounds like it’s a lot, but it’s really not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And yeah, it’s basically what Casey said. The way I learn, and I don’t know if everyone does this, but the way I learn

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is basically I have a problem that I need to solve in a language

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that both the language is well suited for and that I’m very motivated to do.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So when the App Store came out, I learned Objective-C, and I learned the frameworks around Cocoa and UIKit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because I really wanted to make the Instapaper iOS app and that was the only way to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I did it. And I plowed through. And same thing with Go. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco figured out I had these problems before I tried Node. I did Node the exact same way, basically, just a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bit smaller learning curve because I already knew JavaScript somewhat. But I had this problem that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my existing toolkit was not very well suited to solve. And I knew that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco many other languages would have been way better at it, as we discussed in the show. I had heard good things about these, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I picked them. And I just started kind of plowing through. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Go has a pretty good online tutorial at golang.org. We’ll put it in the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco notes. There’s a pretty good online tutorial. And actually, the problem that I was solving of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco basically being a feed crawler, one of their examples on their site is a web

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco crawler. Nice. So it actually and so my design of it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco actually based on that and it’s not very long It was you know pretty easy to base on but a lot of a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the concepts of like oh How do I make it like you know print status every second to the log file and stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like that? You know how do I track what it’s doing it like? Managing the concurrency

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco aspects like all that stuff that all came from that example first and then you know I built on that and I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I kind of made it my own but But honestly, in general, the way to start a new language, like you said before,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is really just have a project that you’re motivated to do in it. You know, if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just say, I wanna make an iPhone app, just in general, and you don’t really know what, you don’t have like a specific app in mind, you just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco wanna make an app, because you heard making apps makes money or it sounds interesting. That’s gonna be harder to get into.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s much easier if you have a specific idea of something that you really want to see, something that you really want to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make. That’s way easier to start with, because then you’re motivated to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco basically just start, just plow through it. And that’s exactly how I do it. I didn’t read

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a book, I just plowed through. When I used to learn languages, I used to read books, like when I was in high school and college.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Now, there’s so many great resources on the internet. There’s tutorials online, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco places like our second sponsor, lynda.com, which I’ll get to in a second because this ties

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco right into that. There’s all sorts of online documentation, There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco walkthroughs and there’s just so much available online that, and Stack

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Overflow has been amazingly helpful in this regard. There’s just so much available online now

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that you can just kind of start, just like start plowing through it, like start with a tutorial and just start

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco building it into what you want it to be. And that’s, and you’ll pick up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot along that path, like you’ll learn as you go. You can do it the other way, you can read a book.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve never found that very helpful, but a lot of people do. It just depends on how you learn. But in general,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the way to learn is to just start plowing through.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, the only thing I’ll add is that the specific question of how we go about learning

⏹️ ▶️ ^John something so complex in a short amount of time, both of us have been programming for a living for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a long time now. And the way we do it in such a short time is, as Marco said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we recognize the similarities between programming languages. And so we have a leg up on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John someone who’s like programming, what’s that? We don’t have to relearn the concepts of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what’s a variable, what’s a loop, what’s a conditional, stuff like that. We don’t have to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John relearn anything about functions or now that we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all know something like blocks or whatever, the closures and stuff. We don’t have to relearn those concepts. It’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how are those concepts implemented in this particular language. If you’re starting from zero,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you will somehow have to learn these basic concepts, right? But your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John second language, you’ll be able to learn quicker than your first and your third language, you will learn even quicker. So that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how basically it’s not like a technique of how do we go about learning something complex. It’s because we already

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know a bunch of similar things. So it’s very fast for us to pick up something and what Marco and Casey are both talking about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is like, alright, well, assume you can pick up the language, it’s still not going to stick in our brains

⏹️ ▶️ ^John unless we use it to actually solve a problem because it’ll just be like, I mean, I know about you, but I like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can read an entire book on a language, which I’ve done in the past, but if I don’t use it to write a program of any significance,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that just leaves my brain. And it’s like, yeah, I can recognize it when I see it. And if you remind me,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ll like be like, oh, yeah, but it doesn’t stick unless you use it. So you know, it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what’s the trick? The trick is be a programmer for 10 to 20 years first, then you’ll be able to pick up new languages fairly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quickly, unless it’s a really weird language. And you don’t know the concepts. Like if we tried to learn something like, I probably don’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lot of the concepts that are involved in Haskell. So So my first job there would be like, I can’t just pick that up because I have no analog.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I need to first learn concepts that are not in any other language that I know that are in Haskell or Erlang or something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then once I get that concept, then it becomes easier.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, it’s entirely true. And kind of building on what you were saying, I’ll read, say, NS Hipster.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And as of late, NS Hipster has been entirely in Swift. And I have barely written

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey any Swift in my life. But I can still read it reasonably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey well because I can pick out bits and pieces that remind me of other languages and kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of infer what this stuff is doing. So I can look at Swift and say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh, that looks a lot like JavaScript. That’s probably what they’re doing there. Or, oh, that looks a lot like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey C sharp. I know exactly what’s going on here. And of course that looks like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey objective C. Well, I know what that means. And so you can take this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really nice and broad foundation, and broad foundation, especially as you get more and more experience

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and apply that to all these other things. And you can do it quicker and quicker with time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What else is cool these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco days, Marco? Well, as I mentioned a minute ago, if you’re looking to learn something new, you should check out

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So Apple made a little bit of money last quarter. I’m shocked.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I know. I thought they were on the ropes. I thought that Apple was doomed, but seemingly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not. Yeah, so Apple made a metric butt ton of money, as I believe the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey official measurement that I’ve been quoted. I don’t even know really what to say

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about this. It’s a tremendous amount of money, and Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is doing really, really well. And I don’t know what to make of this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Even as someone who is very new to the Apple ecosystem, as we’ve talked about very recently, in fact,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s odd for me to see Apple doing this well. What’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not going well financially for them these days? Anything?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, even a tiny part of Apple’s business, like the iPod business, for instance,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even that is doing amazingly relative to many other companies.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco People mentioned, apparently, the amount of money that they lost due to currency fluctuations

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this quarter was like Google’s entire quarterly profit, something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They just make an insane amount of money. Honestly, I don’t think this is that interesting from the money perspective. I think what’s more

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco interesting, and even then only mildly, But what’s more interesting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is kind of looking at the trends of like how well things like the iPhones and the iPads are selling.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco What does the growth curve look like? You know, are they accelerating? And I think what we’re seeing right now,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we’re seeing that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus were just massive hits.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I think we all kind of knew that already, but to see it like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco officially recorded in the totals here is really something to see. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they have made very strong inroads into other markets, Asia,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco places like that, and also into the Android market with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I think these financial stories are mostly interesting in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the ways they sort of highlight Apple’s impotence.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Not that that’s the main story. Not that’s the main story. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the main story we hear, the main story is like, oh, they’re making a lot of money. Then everyone, you know, group does this claim chowder

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and everyone makes fun of the stock analysts who thought they were going to sell things. And then we look at the trends. How are the Macs doing?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John How the iPads doing? Like I think I’ve seen all those stories and there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have been some good ones about that. But what I always think about when well, two things, when companies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when Apple or any company has these big earnings. One is the old cat mole

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quote that success hides problems. And so when you see massive success, you think, boy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that much success can hide a hell of a problem. You know, like you can have just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dinosaur sized problems, $18 billion, like what kind of problem could $18 billion not hide,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? And so that’s what I think about. And the second thing is the frustration of, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of like in those, you know, not SimCity, I don’t play that enough, but any of those sort of like simulation games

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with an economy where eventually you break the game and you essentially have unlimited funds,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? And yet there are things, even with unlimited funds, there are things you can’t do because usually it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the game world doesn’t allow it. This is where the analogy breaks down. But when I think about Apple with all this money is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all this money is not enough for them to buy their way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to whatever you wanna pick, to do network services as well as Google or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Amazon or even Facebook, to be able to hire and retain the world’s best talent. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there, there are some problems that throwing money at them just will not solve, right? And that must be frustrating,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because it’s like, how do you get? How do you get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John these things that we need to get? What do we need? And most companies is like, Oh, if we only had more money, but an apple, it’s like, No, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have all the money in the frigging world. Why can we not turn this money into insert thing that Apple feels

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that it’s lacking and from the outside, we there are many things that we feel Apple is lacking. And on the I bet the main thing I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re lacking is how can we get people? How can we get really good employees? Because we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all know what it’s like at Apple and or any large organization. Everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can’t be in charge at Apple. Some people have more of a say in what the company does than other.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s a hierarchy. Every, you know, corporation is a hierarchy. And so how can you get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all of the world’s best people? You can only get all the world’s best people who want to work for a company and only a certain

⏹️ ▶️ ^John number of those can ever rise to a position in Apple whether they’re in charge or anything, and really smart people want to be in charge of something because they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really smart people. So that’s why people come to Apple, get experience, and if they’re really awesome, they leave and start their own companies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or do their own things, and maybe they come back. Like, it’s frustrating to see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John talent leave you and go to other companies or go to startups. So that’s kind of the nature of the business. And so that’s why it makes me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think about all this giant mountain of money. As if I was at Apple, like, how do we transform

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this money into improvements in our products and services? And we all we do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on the show is talk about all the areas where Apple is weak. And I think of every one of those areas and almost

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all those areas. Money may may, you know, be necessary, but it is clearly not sufficient

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because if all it took was money, they would be great at everything because they have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all the and this is not like they had block quarters before. They just have a massive amount of money in the bank. They

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have a massive amount of money like they could. You know, it’s like, why not just pay all your employees? Five million

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dollars a year. Apple could be like done and then all your employees leave because they retire on their five million dollars in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John first year. And you’re like, well, we just destroyed the company with money. That was a really bad idea, guys. So it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John actually it’s kind of like Brewster’s Millions, a reference that neither one of you get because you weren’t born. But no good movie. Nope.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Everyone go watch Brewster’s Millions to understand the problem that Apple has. Yes, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is Richard Pryor in this analogy.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, I love Richard Pryor. Oh, see, now I actually want to watch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this. I think you’re right. I mean, I said like there’s there’s just a lot of problems that money

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco either can’t solve or it makes worse or isn’t sufficient enough to solve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and and most I mean I would say looking at what we identify as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple’s problems from the outside and assuming that they’re at least partially true,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it seems like Apple’s two biggest problems are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco getting and retaining good talent, number one, and number two, just like organizational inertia

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of like the way things are set up, the way like, you know, departments are structured, the way the incentives

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are. Like, I honestly, I think anyone interested in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the quality problems or perception of them, whether you think they’re real or not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think you should listen to this week’s episode of Debug, which is Neaton Gunatra

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and Don Milton, part three. And they talk about this. They talk about these accusations

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of quality issues. And it was interesting to hear. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco partially, I think they were actually, especially Neaton Gunatra, I think they were

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco actually quite defensive. But it was little,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I had mixed emotions listening to it, but it gives a lot of insight into

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the way things are done at Apple and they don’t work there anymore,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but they were there fairly recently and they were there for some fairly recent releases and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the way things are done, it sounds a lot like all the high priority

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bugs tend to get fixed, but there’s not a lot of time left for the less high priority

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bugs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, this is how every company works. Like I haven’t listened to that, it’s in my queue, but like they’re probably defensive because like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what they’re not saying, whether they realize it or not is you don’t know what it’s like, man, to get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anything done inside the company, you have to X, Y, and Z. And when you’re telling me that I should be doing this, it’s like, well, but you can’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because like Apple, the structure of Apple becomes the fixed thing. And it’s like to get anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John done within the structure, you have to do this. Maybe that means within the structure, the only thing you can do is get the high priority

⏹️ ▶️ ^John bugs fist, because then you can get someone higher up to pay attention to you and you can make a priority for your team. You can get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it done. Anything lower priority, can’t work within the system. So really what they’re angry about when they’re being defensive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is they’re angry at the system into which they are placed, and then they’re put into the system and told, now get

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things done. And they would like to do what they think is the right thing. But within

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the system, you have to work the system, right? And who gets to change the system, this gets back to, you know, who

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is in charge? Are the people in charge, the best people to be in charge, you can’t have a company where people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John move up the ranks over many years, and then someone realizes, like, that guy has no idea what he’s doing, get him out

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of there and bring someone like people don’t like it when you hire new people and above them. They don’t like when they bring in new people that say all the current people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there don’t know what they’re doing. Change like that takes time because egos get bruised and people have to be kicked

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out of the company and like, and if there’s too much churn, it seems like a volatile place and it’s not fun to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, all the problems of any human doing anything in a group are magnified in a corporate setting. And that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the main sickness of all corporations. And I would say, Apple has done better than any other company

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to fight against the sort of corporate malaise to actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John produce good products. And they’re rewarded with a bit buckets of money. But even those buckets of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John money can’t cure all the sicknesses within the organization, and no amount of money

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can make it so that people who want to be chief suddenly want to be your Indians. So you’re never going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to have all the best people. They’re always going to leave and do their own thing. They’re always going to be restless and do something else. And,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, I still say, like, the most practical thing that Apple will do with its money is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John address its shortcomings that can the money has the most effect on, for example, prioritizing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John network services and infrastructure. You can throw money at that. If people learn

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that Apple was going to spend $300 billion trying to catch up to Google and Amazon and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Facebook and network infrastructure and data center expertise, a lot of people who have network infrastructure and data center expertise

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would go work for Apple. But right now those people don’t want to work for Apple because the idea is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple is a place where those things are not prioritized and all the glory people are working on UI kit or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whatever. Right. I mean, that’s like, it seems like they’re the,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, the two biggest problems in that area of like, what frustrates people who are there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are the way the system is set up. And the the,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the stress of working within that and like the deadlines of like what you have time to work on and what you don’t have time to work on, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from what I’ve heard from so many people in and out of Apple, those are the two biggest

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problems. A lot of people there are very happy doing what they’re doing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but there’s a lot of people there who can’t get the time or the staff to fix

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the problems they want to fix. And there’s a lot of people there who are fighting the good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fight and working on things that need to be worked on, but they don’t get the support from above or the resources

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from above. I guess it’s of the same problem. Or it’s just not a high enough priority for the company. Or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s kind of stuck in this weird division somewhere where it kind of maybe should be somewhere else. Or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s some roadblock in the middle of the hierarchy that’s making it hard for them or something like that. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco these organizational challenges. And you’re right, every company is going to have problems like this. That doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make them non-problems. And really, I mean, I mean, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you gotta listen to this debug. It really encapsulates it so well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And even when Nitin Ganatra was attempting to argue against

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this point, he was proving this point unknowingly because he was saying,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco his point of view is that he thinks this is like, I think he said it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco probably like six P1, which means highest priority, the P1. six P1 bugs,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and then we’ll all forget about this. And then they proceeded to talk about how the P2 bugs hardly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ever have, everybody wants to work on the P2 bugs, but they’re hardly ever allowed to because of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco release cycle leaving so little time. And everything’s just about like, is it high priority? Fix it. If it’s not a high priority,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we can’t afford to work on it right now. And so I’m not feeling,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when I say I’m feeling a lack of quality here, I’m not feeling six P1 bugs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m feeling 6,000 P2 bugs that have accumulated over the last five years and aren’t being fixed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, I agree.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I was going to say that the success side problems thing, the reason you can’t get prioritization

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from your boss to fix the P2s or whatever, and the reason you think that’s not a priority, these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are the priority, is because if you were to ever be able to make your case,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what would say is, we need to do this because of and you laid all these reasons. And what they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would say is, well, I don’t think we need to do this because X, Y, Z. And you’d have this argument. And eventually when you’d come down to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as you move your way up the ladder is like, well, obviously my,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my priorities as the boss are the correct ones because look at how successful as Apple has been. And the higher you go up in the company, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John more the person can say, well, I understand the people below me might believe X, Y, and Z should

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be done, but I I believe it should be Q. And history has shown that I’ve been pretty right because Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John been doing pretty well. And like, it’s the sort of, that’s the ultimate success hides problem thing is that when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you get into an argument about what people should be doing, that you need more staff to address this, that and the other thing, everybody can’t be in charge, again, for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the millionth time. There has to be people who are in charge. And the people who are in charge always have at their back,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple is the most successful company in the world. We make the best products. We have 100% customer sat. Everybody loves us. We make a bazillion

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dollars. Everybody’s buying iPhones. Like, they always have that sitting right behind them. And so no matter what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John argument you make based on a reason in the end, and in the end, that leaders might kind of be right, it’s like, well, what do you want? We’re the most successful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John company in the world. Do you think the priorities I’m setting as, as your boss or your boss’s boss or your boss’s boss’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John boss or as Tim Cook, are those priorities, the wrong priorities? In what way are they wrong? Look how successful

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we are, what criteria should we be judging ourselves on? Pick a criteria, pick a metric, we are the best.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And you’re saying, Oh, it’s not good enough, because you can’t get people to fix your p2 bugs, right? That’s that’s success

⏹️ ▶️ ^John side problems. what you run up against. And if you’re one of the lower down people and you can’t convince the uppers,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s like either you agree that they kind of have a point and you become a company man and you argue that Apple doesn’t have reliability problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on podcasts, or you leave the company and say, well, these people are never going to listen to me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And whether they’re right or not, this is not the environment I want to be in. And so you leave.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, you know, I’m speaking of podcasts that we haven’t listened to yet, or at least I haven’t. A

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey friend of the show, Ben Thompson was on the talk show this week. And one of the things that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I noticed in the notes was them talking about Apple employees who have gone on sabbaticals and then come

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey back. And I know that both you guys were mentioning that a minute ago. And then with regard to the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey P2 bugs that Marco was talking about, I know I brought this up a couple episodes ago, but the Andy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Matuszek interview on Objective CIO, he talks about that indirectly, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just talks about how the incredible pace and the priority of just getting new hardware and other

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey super important things done prevents them from working on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the not as showy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco issues. Right. Or major changes over time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Right. Right. So both homework assignments if you’re bored. All right.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Anything else on earnings other than that I want the bank account numbers for the 170 or whatever it is billion

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey dollars? I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John haven’t heard the call yet, but I read in many places that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Not that they gave a breakdown of six versus six plus But they merely just said the six sold better than a six plus.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Did you guys read that as well?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, that’s that’s what they said that that the six was the top seller in the line But they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco didn’t say how many you know what the ratio was and they don’t usually break down the ratio like that So I don’t think we’d ever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco get good info on that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m mostly interested in I’m always interested in not so much what they don’t say because they don’t say pretty much anything but what they do say what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what value is there or what would motivate them to tell us that the six sold more than the six

⏹️ ▶️ ^John plus right I don’t know I mean it doesn’t I can’t I can’t even

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think of like a cynical like faking out your competitors like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe they just I don’t know I don’t understand why they would say that and all I can think about is like why why did you tell me that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like I assumed it I I assumed it before the phones were even released the six would sell better than the six plus you’re not telling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me how much better so it doesn’t give me any actual information other than like six sold more than the six plus. But why are you telling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me this? I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know. You know, it’s funny, I actually asked on Twitter, why wouldn’t they say that? Because I was having a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a dunce moment and it was like, well, why not? Who cares?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We’re all friends, right? And and immediately I got a thousand replies

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey very gently telling me I’m an idiot. But, you know, a lot of the responses were, well, don’t give your

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey competitors anything. And and that that makes sense. And, and, and, uh, gosh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there was one or two others that were really good, but it basically boiled down to what you’re saying, John, you know, why,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey why share that information? What good does Apple, what, what benefits does Apple gain from sharing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. I mean, I guess Apple breaks down things that it doesn’t have to all the time, but like product mixes one, then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple is almost never broken down. I’ve always assumed there’s lots of reasons. Like you said, if people will give you a good response to them, I always assume

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the reason they don’t break it down is because they don’t want to tell their competitors sort of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, This is the mix of demand for these products. So if you’re going to make a line of phones, this is roughly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how many big ones this size and how many small ones this size you wanna have, right? Exactly. Like they just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s not the reason. That’s just the reason I always think of. There are actually probably even better reasons. But then that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John both make you think why? I mean, someone in the chat room said they were answering our question.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but the press asks questions all the time at these conferences and Apple just says, no, we’re not gonna tell you that. They just do it all the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time, right? Why decide to say that the six turns more? It’s not even anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re not even bragging about. It’s not like a thing that you’re bragging. They’re not countering a story, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think. Is there a story out there that the, I don’t, I don’t know. I can’t, I can’t figure it out. But,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, maybe they just, you know, they decided to throw the press a bone and tell them this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because it’s another bullet point for a story. But I don’t think it puts Apple in a particularly good or bad light.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I haven’t listened to the call yet. We’ll see what it was really like.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right. So there’s been a little bit of rumblings lately, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I was not aware of until somebody else pointed it out, and in this case, Wes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Dart from Australia, he or she said, it might be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey worth revisiting the new photo app for Mac. I remember you guys were pretty excited about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have a daily Google alert for all news about it. It seems Apple have been removing references

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to it from their website. That doesn’t instill a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of confidence, does it? I mean, that’s probably not a good sign. And it also was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey funny to me, semi-related, that somebody pressed Tim Cook on whether or not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on the earnings call, whether or not the Apple Watch is really going to be released

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey early in 2015 because it’s apparently coming out in April. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Tim said, from what I gather, well, the way we think of it is the first third of the year is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey early. The middle third is just the middle third. And the last third is late.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So sure, why not? It’s still early, right? We’re all friends. And I dunno, it just struck me as funny.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So are you guys concerned about the fact that, that photos apparently may

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not be the photo app may not be a thing anymore?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, it seems like, you know, reading the tea leaves here and hearing a few rumblings here

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and there, uh, I think the answer is not that the photos app is canceled or anything. I think it’s just late.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You know, like it was, I believe didn’t, did they say, I thought, I thought the initial release date was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like last fall but I think somebody else corrected me recently and said it was also early 2015? Yeah

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was always next year so I think it was always supposed to be 2015 sometime.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Okay so you know if if that means by the end of April 2015 and they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco suddenly removing all these references to it I mean I it really does sound like based on

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know a few rumblings here and there it from what I can tell it’s just delayed it’s not late

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Or it’s not it’s not canceled.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. And like I always wonder what these stories with the sort of, you know, implied like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple’s removing references of photomap for the Mac dot dot dot. Those stories like will never say

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this means Apple is canceling it because the like that’s the implication. But they only want to imply they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want to say it right. And or even speculate about it, because my question would be, all right,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you’re saying this because you think the photos out for the Mac is canceled, is that a really a thing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you think would happen that Apple would cancel both iPhoto and photos for the Mac and there

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} would be no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and aperture. Yeah, and aperture and there would just be no photo management for them. I mean, I suppose that could be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a thing like, by all means make that argument tell me why Apple does not want to be in the business of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John making, you know, first party photo management applications for your Mac anymore. I would love to hear

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that argument, but they will never make that argument. They will just say that it’s being full of in the site and let you just worry about something.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So in the absence of someone making a compelling argument that Apple no longer wants to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make photo apps for the Mac, which I bet you know, and if I had to make that argument, by the way, I would say, history has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John shown over the past several years that Apple’s not great at making fun of management apps. And if Apple didn’t make one and give one away for free, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would open up the market to third parties. But then it’s third parties would have to work with the photos in the cloud.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And if Apple doesn’t have an API for that, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I’m not saying it’s totally ridiculous. It could happen, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I don’t see anyone making that argument. So is just like, oh, well, late software is late, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know that what else is new? And you take it off the site just because it’s kind of embarrassing to have it up

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there for a long time and not have it available. And maybe, you know, it was on the website too

⏹️ ▶️ ^John soon. You’re showing screenshots of something that doesn’t exist that people can’t get.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Why are you enticing them to say the same thing with like still selling aperture when it’s canceled like that’s not a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good movie either. And so this just seems like a correction. If this photos app doesn’t come out until next year,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t care, just make it freaking work.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s the thing, I mean, you’re right, photos on your Mac, that’s such an important thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like that’s not something you can mess with. Like I wouldn’t, if it was a beta, I wouldn’t install

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t know if I’m gonna even install the final version when

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} they say this is a release.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Seriously, just to try, like I barely trust

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPhoto with my photos and like this new system, whatever it is, I’m gonna run it in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John parallel with iVoto for a long time before I trust it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, I mean like, whether I use it immediately and whether I like kind of trust it with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everything immediately will entirely depend on whether I can read its directory structure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco If I can read it back out and I can back it up with Time Machine and all that stuff that we talked about months ago when they announced

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this, I’ll be comfortable using it. If it doesn’t have all those things, it’s gonna be a tough sell.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah. Anyway, we didn’t actually get a third sponsor this week, so instead I decided to kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of throw this one to two conferences that are run by our friends and are really nice. Both

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco happening in March, both happening, oh boy, I gotta consult this EGP Grey video. Is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Ireland the UK? I think, I think the bottom half

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is. Anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The bottom, that’s how they refer to it, I think, the bottom half.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I remember seeing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that in that video. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey me too. Yeah, so anyway. Oh God, you’re gonna get so much email.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco To review, the two largest islands in the British Isles are Ireland and Great Britain. Ireland has under two countries, the Republic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of Ireland and Northern Ireland, while Great Britain mostly contains three,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey England, Scotland, and Wales. These last three, when combined with Northern Ireland, form the United Kingdom.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Uh, anyway, uh, NS Conference, uh, at nsconference.com is an awesome conference

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that is in, oh boy, Leicester? I think it’s Leicester. Leic- oh, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like the Boston style, you just kind of delete the middle of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John word. We can get some help from this in the chat. There was a good video I saw of Americans pronouncing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John British place names. I should find that for the notes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Lysester.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Lester.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Like a creepy dude, Lester?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Uh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah, sure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey My bad. Here it was. I was so smug, I thought I really nailed it, but I was wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Anyway, all right, so that’s March 16th, 18th, NSConference.com in Leicester in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the UK. Speakers to this include some of my friends, Jesse Char, Daniel Jockett, Paul Kofasas,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Laura Savino, Jamie Newberry, and a bunch more people who I don’t know quite as well, It’s a very, very good list.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I will be speaking there as well. I tend to speak at about one conference per year, and I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco been wanting to do this one for a while, and the scheduling just never worked out until this year, and I’m very happy to have finally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco worked this out. So check out nsconference.com. Also, OOL. I apologize

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to Casey, because he really wants to go and probably won’t go, because baby stuff is hard, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so, not that I blame you. So anyway, it’s OOL, U-L-L dot I-E. This

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is March 30th and 31st in Killarney, Ireland. Speakers to OOL include lots

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of people we know. Jason Snell, Guy English, Dalrymple, Georgia Dow, Dave Wiskus,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Serenity, Renee, some guy named John or Jonathan Gruber, I think he’s an economist, and more.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Go to OOLULL.IE, because that’s pretty cool. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yeah, so NS Conference and OOL wanted to give them a nice shout out since we didn’t have a third sponsor this week. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco what else?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So we’re gonna get so much hate mail I’m not looking forward to it. Anyway, I wanted to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey quickly talk about a tweet that I had seen retweeted by my friend Andre Arco.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey This tweet is by Gary Barnhart. It says, the history of programming is much more about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey programmers’ unacknowledged emotional attachment to familiarity than it is about invention.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And the first thing I thought of when I read this tweet was Marco’s insistence on sticking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey with PHP forever, up until a month ago. The difference, though, in Marco’s defense

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is that you acknowledge your ridiculous insistence on this ridiculous language,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey rather than just stick your head in the sand. Although, I guess maybe I should have thought of John first. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey since I don’t feel like there’s any

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} sort

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of- Why were you thinking of me first?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Perl is fine. You don’t need- why do you need to learn any languages? Perl is the best language,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} period. I know a whole bunch of languages. I learn new ones all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John When Go and Dart comes out, when Go comes out, when all these new languages come out, I read all the documentation for

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the languages.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yes, but the only one you really need, like Marco said, is Perl.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Just dollar signs for everyone, John. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John guess JavaScript is the only one you have really. Because no matter where you work, you will find yourself

⏹️ ▶️ ^John writing JavaScript.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} That’s true, actually.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco JavaScript, the worst language everywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} That

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} should

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John slogan.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, you guys. I don’t really have much to say other than that I thought the tweet was cool and it reminded me of you guys.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, that’s true not just of programming languages, it’s true of anything. Like again, with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any sort of group organization with a hierarchy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where people are in charge, there’s going to be an attachment of the people in charge to the things that they are familiar

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with. And since they’re in charge, they get to impose that on everybody else. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any attempt to change is met with resistance from the people who are attached to the thing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re familiar with. And there are specific instances in programming, whether it’s specific

⏹️ ▶️ ^John language or technology or a particular code base that people get attachments

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with. In many cases, specifically with tech, what’s required

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is somebody who’s not a tech person to make a decision

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and impose it on the tech people. That’s how you get situation. That’s how you get essentially,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, Mac OS 10, right? Because Apple had all sorts of next generation operating

⏹️ ▶️ ^John system initiatives within its walls. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John none of them were focused enough. And they were put under very difficult constraints. And they just couldn’t get the job done.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So the only way they could break out of that was they had to, someone who is not a programmer, who has no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John attachment to the Mac toolbox or to anything involving classic Mac OS, to come

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in and say, we’re doing something different. because none of the people who were there,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh, in, in the trenches, we’re going to do that because all those people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were experts in the current Mac operating system, and they may have had ambitions to make a new operating system, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they certainly had an attachment to the current one. And it takes kind of an outsider. And usually an outsider is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not a tech person. In this case, the outsider was the CEO of the company who decided to purchase another

⏹️ ▶️ ^John company that came along with Steve jobs. And he did a little inside out takeover type thing. Those are the people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who decided that Apple’s next generation operating system was built on next step. Nobody, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John inside the company working on a new kernel or whatever, decided that next step was going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to be the thing. So like there’s a way out of this. How do you deal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with that emotional attachment? You have a, you get a decision made by somebody who has no emotional attachment

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to those things. And you know who, I didn’t even know who the, I guess it was Gil Emilio

⏹️ ▶️ ^John then was the CEO. I can’t even remember the frigging CEO progression in Apple. He did not have an emotional attachment

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to classic Mac OS. So the idea of, you know, using the Windows NT kernel or buying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John next or buying B or any of those things, he is not burdened by any emotional attachment to technologies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or languages or anything having to do with the current technology stack.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That was kind of a crisis to unity, though, because if your company’s going down the tubes, the person can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the person in charge is empowered to do that. And again, the success hides problem things who at Apple is empowered

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make them massively change their priorities for network services.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Anyone who has that sort of ability, like there’s no crisis causing it to happen at this point, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for all the noise we make talking about Apple and their problems, like then they turn in these financial numbers and it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tell me again why I have to totally change the way we do things or otherwise. Otherwise, what what happens if we don’t? We have another record

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quarter. Hmm.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, you know, Blackberry was doing great in 2006.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know. I know it’s hides problems right to the point that it doesn’t. Right. And Apple, especially because if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple misses its fantastical earnings by just a little bit, it’s like, oh, God, Apple is doomed. They only made 16 billion.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And last year they made 18. If they make 16 billion this, you know, the same quarter next year. Are they doomed?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, they made 16 billion dollars in a quarter. They’re fine. Right. So it’s but people will still go crazy over it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So I guess that’s kind of the upside. I guess no one really talks about this, but the upside of the crazy Apple blogosphere

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and the pundits who are like Apple is doomed no matter what Apple does, they’re about to be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John destroyed by whatever their competitor is. That is actually that sort of manufactured

⏹️ ▶️ ^John crisis-tunity. It’s like, it’s not real, it’s a phantom. Oh, I don’t wanna say it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John All right, it’s not a real problem. But the perception

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that there is a problem is the only thing that could ever give anybody inside Apple any sort of clout

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make a, you know, to have a crisis that leads to an opportunity, right? Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John otherwise, if there were any other company, we would be like, nothing ever changes. We’re doing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John great. I don’t understand why I would ever listen to you. Everything is fine.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, and you know, and just to put a little bit of nuance on this, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when I complain about Apple’s quality problems, or what I perceive as those quality problems, I’m not saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple’s doomed. They’re not. Apple’s gonna be fine for a long time. You know, Apple’s gonna be,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even if they have a bad patch, it’s going to be a little bit like Microsoft is today, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is like Microsoft is, you know, I think by most of our estimations,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is, they’re going through like their worst period ever right now. They’re still making tons of money

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and they’re still fine. And you know, they’re not making as much money necessarily as they could be, or maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as they were in the past. I don’t know about that, but you know, they’re still like, even in this state

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of them producing things that don’t do well in the market and things that tend to suck a lot,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or fail at least, they’re still, as a company, and financially and everything, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fine, it’s not even funny. And so, you know, Apple, even if they had a colossal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco series of terrible moves and terrible products that flopped in the marketplace, which doesn’t look like it’s gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco happen anytime soon, but even if that happened, they have so much money coming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in. They’re still gonna be selling to so many people. They’re still gonna have such great success

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco relative to the market as a whole, relative to other companies, relative to zero, that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re gonna be fine. So I’m not saying they’re doomed. I’m not even saying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that they’re gonna start making less money, I don’t know that, who knows. I do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco think though that, following the theme of success hides problems,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can be selling tons and doing very well in profit,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in market share, at any kind of money metric you want to measure, and still not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco be making stuff that’s good enough. That is a different metric. And similar

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to how I said you can lose the functional high ground without losing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it to somebody else, you can just lose it yourself, you can still be doing very, very well.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can still be making tons of money. You can still be the market leader in whatever metric

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you choose to be. Despite that, your stuff might not be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as good as it could be or should be. That is a totally separate measure that often does not correlate

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to your market success.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking mostly about like, you know, like this bad assumptions article about Ben Thompson,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who may or may not be in our chat room. that like it’s the analysts who are like Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to come out with a network, you know, or the competitors are going to crush them. They need their lower price phones are going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John destroy them in China. Like all these people who just don’t understand Apple or their business.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They’re the people who are manufacturing, like, you know, the drama on the stock market with their price, like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John why Apple’s P.E. ratio is not what it should be, according to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John almost any rational thought. It’s just like, you know, as this big article says, we’ll put in the show notes So like Apple is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John eternally, I think a Simcoe said similar things. Apple is eternally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like on the edge of doom. Like I think this

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} was, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think this was an a Simcoe thing. It said like, they’re constantly falling to earth. They just keep missing it. So basically they’re in

⏹️ ▶️ ^John orbit, right? Like it’s just, and it’s not, and this is from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the people, the people who like matter, like in the financial markets and everything like that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And everybody hates that. you have a whole website’s dedicated to just like, I mean, the MacLope, like all he does is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just he or she is, is just take down the these people who

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just have no idea what they’re talking about. And constantly you’re talking about Apple and seemingly having people listen to them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Um, but there is a benefit to that. And the benefit is if that chatter gets loud

⏹️ ▶️ ^John enough, it can be fuel for things to happen inside the company that otherwise wouldn’t. I mean, and the other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fuel is what Marko talked about that any good company, and especially Apple knows don’t let yourself be Blackberry,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? don’t let yourself be Microsoft. Don’t miss the mobile revolution. Don’t decide that a hardware keyboard

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is the way forward. Damn it. Like you can always get blindsided. And if I had

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an Apple to its credit and perhaps better than anyone else, has been really good over the past

⏹️ ▶️ ^John decade or so about trying not to let that happen to himself, not resting on it. Like that’s that’s what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the watch is all about. Is the watch the right thing? Is Apple TV the right thing? Like these are things that Apple is trying.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John They don’t try a million things, but they know we’re going to, you know, We’re going to be the iPhone company forever. That

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is not a viable strategy. You will end up as a BlackBerry eventually. No matter, it’ll, you know, it may take a while, but it’ll eventually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John happen. Like if I had to pick out something that is dangerous to Apple right now, I would pick out like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John VR or something. Maybe VR will be a fluke and it’s not a big deal, but Apple should be worried about it. Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John should have contingency plans. Apple should be working on VR. Like, maybe it’s not a big deal.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe VR comes and goes and it’s like, you know, we didn’t need to be worried about it, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco doesn’t VR come and go every seven or eight

⏹️ ▶️ ^John years.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} I know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you don’t know, but you never know what’s gonna take. Maybe it won’t take now. If you had said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tablet computers, you better be worried about that, Apple, when pen for Windows came out, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the grid pad or whatever. Oh my God, Apple, you better be worried about this. They’d be like, what if they said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no, we don’t need to be worried, that’s stupid. And then it went away. And you’re like, see, we were totally right. That whole thing with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tablets, that’s pointless. No one’s gonna be, that stuff is useless. And if Apollo was out, oh, you better do it in this PDA

⏹️ ▶️ ^John space. We tried the Newton, it was crappy. Nobody wants to have like a smart device with a touchscreen. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stupid, right? If Apple kept having that attitude, they would have never made the iPhone, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Just be and so VR comes and goes, like you said, and it’s like, see, we were right. We didn’t have no, you have to, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John absolutely have to explore every avenue. Maybe nothing comes of it, but you have to be on the lookout for it. I think Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that going for it, that it’s always going to be on the lookout for what the next thing that’s going to blindside

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and trying to stay ahead of it. But the more difficult thing is when you don’t have anybody

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who’s competing with you in terms of product quality, profits, customer sat, anything like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that? What do you have to motivate you to be better and or to change

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the way you do business? Because any argument you make about changing the way you do a business can eventually end

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in. What is it that you think? How could we do better in some way? Which metric

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that we can measure? Would we do better? And would we make more money? Would we have higher customer satisfaction? I guess

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe you could say we would have more market share, but then they have a counter to that. You know like if you lower

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it if you sold a lower price phone you would increase your market share and then Apple said yes But we don’t care about market share. We care about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John making the best products and making a lot of money possibly in that order

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco All right still waiting for that Sega VR headset

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Okay Let me know how that works out for you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, Sony’s making one you got the Oculus You’ll be able to get a VR headset someday

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Thanks a lot to our sponsors this week Squarespace and Lynda.com and I guess Jeff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Bridges and we will see you next week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twitter, you can follow them At

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey A-N-T Marco Armin

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Syracuse It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey accidental They didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mean to accidentally take the broadcast so long.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey What else going on? Anything fun?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, at this point, I think we’re never going to watch the Microsoft thing, right? Because we all forgot to do it for two weeks in a row, right? Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey were we supposed to?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ll probably watch it a little bit. I read articles with highlights, and I know more or less what was announced. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just want to see it, I guess. I mean sometimes when I watch those things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it very quickly becomes not about what’s been announced but about how it’s being announced

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and sometimes that could be good and sometimes it can be bad if it’s really long and boring then it’s bad But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can always be surprised like I would remember that one of the best Microsoft things I watched in a long time was that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when Windows 8 Metro was like announced and it was like the The UI guy explaining the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John UI philosophy behind the Metro interface. That was really good

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think, I mean I’ve heard so many people talking about this Microsoft thing and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco various things about it. I think the the biggest

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco red flag for me is that all these features that are designed for like, it sounds like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they have basically one one continuous UI between phones, tablets,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and PCs, and you know convertible laptops and everything, you know, everything like rather

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than kind of the Windows 8 environment of like these two separate environments and Windows RT which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think no one’s even really mentioned yet recently with this stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think they canned that didn’t they?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think so but I don’t I don’t know if that’s been confirmed I think it’s just been implied but all that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stuff the problem is that whole like system of oh it’ll be wonderful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can have these apps that run the same on all these different platforms you can have things being handed you know all that stuff

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you have to not consider what happens if you have all the Microsoft devices

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because that’s not gonna happen like that’s unrealistic that so you have to instead consider

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you have to instead be like alright so what happens if I only have one or two of these what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe I only have the laptop and the Xbox or maybe it’s just like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the tablet and and a laptop or something like that like no one’s gonna buy the Windows phone anytime soon

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so like you what happens then in like a mixed environment where I’m not totally bought

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in? Is this stuff still compelling, if it works at all? Is it still compelling?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That I think is… I hope Microsoft is smart

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and practical and humble enough to recognize that they need to be worried about that and they need to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make sure that works well. I don’t know yet if they are.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco In general, the new Microsoft is moving in that direction of being more pragmatic and honest

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco about their position in mobile, but we’ll see. And then HoloLens,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, HoloLens, from what everyone says, is a really awesome tech demo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that everyone hopes will come out sometime soon with some kind of reasonable hardware that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco performs something well and works with some kind of mystery software. But that’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} whole

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco lot of ifs. That’s a big line of pretty big problems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to solve before this thing is truly compelling. So I hope it succeeds.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it’d be cool. I think it would be cool to kind of like shake things up in the industry and to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have Microsoft be at the front of it again is kind of exciting because they haven’t been for a while.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So I think that would be interesting. I think it’d be cool. I hope it works. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco there’s so many ifs, and people are comparing it to the original demos of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Kinect back when it was still called Project Natal, I think, right? That was what that was? Sounds familiar.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, yeah. So people are saying the original demos of that were insanely awesome,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ridiculous stuff, and then the real thing came out and it wasn’t nearly that good in reality. And so that could happen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here, but from what everyone has said who has tried the HoloLens at the press event, everyone said like it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco was really good. Like it was actually really good. But of course, it was all prototype hardware, prototype software,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pretty far from reality, pretty far from release. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah, but like I saw some people who are normally skeptical say it was really good, too, but it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John really good, like a fun amusement ride. But like what problem is this solving for me? Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in gaming, it’s easier because like gaming is an amusement ride. That’s the problem that’s solving for you. It’s entertainment, right? But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for right for something that’s not a gaming system, The demo could be amazing because you didn’t know the things you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John experiencing were possible and it was a super rock solid implementation of these ideas. But then it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you gave this to me and put it in my house, what would I use it for? Games are easy. I would use it to have fun,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right? If it doesn’t make me sick, and it’s fun and novel and interesting, and it makes new gameplay thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like, it’s just fun. So that’s all you need out of that. But for like, I kept showing people like 3d modeling

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and stuff. Are you kidding me? Take someone who uses Maya all day and tell them you’re gonna do everything with HoloLens.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It could

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} get there eventually.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe you have to do, but like those applications are fiendishly complex. They just, they’re like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the UI looks like the dashboard of a 747, right? You’re gonna try to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do that by waving your hands around in space. What is it making easier that,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like what is it making possible or easier for people in those complex? Are you gonna use it for word processing?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Are you using it for web browsing? Like maybe, I don’t know, but like it’s up to Microsoft to figure that out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And putting a bunch of people in these little things and having them be wowed by technology

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a start, I guess. But the Apple thing is you have to come up with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at least one thing that you think this thing can do better than something else. And you have to be right about it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t know what that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yet. Yeah, there was a good discussion about this on Rocket, our friend’s new podcast, by Brianna Wu that she was talking about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco She does 3D work all day. And she knows other people who do it. And she knows that’s not really how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people do 3d work and everything I think too you know it we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco seen as you know tablets have gotten big and phones and everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and we’ve seen you know all these all these like weird peripherals that the people that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco computing industry has tried over time I think we’ve mostly figured

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco out the things that work really well for most tasks and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m not saying that we can never do anything different or that we can never find better ways but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a lot has been tried and a lot has failed and I think it’s when when you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco look at like to get a lot of work done a lot of precise complicated work done

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a keyboard and a pointing device and a screen is really really effective

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and again that might not be the most ideal solution but we have a lot of inertia behind that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} solution

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you just got to wait until it becomes the it becomes the best way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do it like touchscreens with touchscreens forever. People hated them. People just hated touchscreen. How long have we had touchscreens my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whole practically my whole life we’ve had touchscreens and universally reviled right? And is that does that mean

⏹️ ▶️ ^John touchscreens are a bad idea? It’s like no, someone eventually has to do them right enough that you go

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, yeah, touchscreens, Apple happened to be the one that got there, right. And so VR is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same way we’ve had VR forever. Every time we’ve seen it’s like mate, half the time wasn’t even good as an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John amusement, like those big giant heavy things you put on in the 90s in a video arcade. It wasn’t even fun, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We’re probably at the point now where you can make fun games with it if they can work out all the problems. But you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, we’ll know it when someone finally crosses that threshold and it’s like, it’s not like VR

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a bad idea. The reason people keep trying is because it’s an amazing idea. You just got to be the first one to do it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right and not that people go, Oh, yes, every other and people will say, every other previous effort of VR

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or AR sucked. And this is the one that’s good. And you won’t even have to convince people because no one needs to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be convinced now that touchscreens are a good thing. And people born in the, you know, sort of the post smartphone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John era will never believe you. And we said, well, for all my life, touchscreens were terrible and everybody hated them.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it’s like, well, what was different about them? They were slightly less responsive. Like that’s it? Like, yeah, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pretty much it. Some of them you had to press real hard. Some of them were a little bit less responsive. Like it doesn’t take much, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You know? So that’s why people are excited about Oculus because it seems like. And again, I haven’t tried it myself, but it seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like they’ve crossed that threshold into no longer sucking for games. And we’ll see. I’ve tried

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oculus Rift. Which one? I have no idea. As soon as I tweeted about it, everyone was like, which one,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which one? I don’t have a freaking clue. But I tried one. I genuinely don’t know which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one. I’m not trying to be funny. I tried it for two minutes and it was cool

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as hell. And I was playing like one game where I was flying around and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like shooting at something or other. And I played another game where basically I was just, well, I don’t even know if it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey was a game, to be honest. I was just walking around like a balcony on the edge of a cliff and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s freaking trippy, man. It is weird. Uh, I am not typically prone to motion sickness,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so I didn’t get any and I was only, I only had the headset on for a couple of minutes, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I would assume since there is even the slightest bit of potential latency

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey between real world and it that John, you would vomit profusely. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I mean, I thought it was spot on. I thought it was really cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, I think that that’s the challenges they’re taking. One of them is motion sickness. Can you make this so that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a reasonable percentage of the population does not get motion sick? And you just have to keep trying to make it, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reduce the lag and, you know, make it because most people don’t get motion sick. Just walking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John around all day in a 3D world. Once you put that thing on your head, any disagreement between

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what your inner ear is telling you and what your eyes are seeing is going to be interpreted by people who are prone to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John motion sickness as, maybe you’ve eaten poison, you should vomit that up now. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s the problem they’re working on essentially. What they’re saying is, oh, we’re looking at low latency displays and reduce tearing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and reduce latency, but that all that builds up to, is this something that a large enough portion of the population

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can use and will find fun? Because that’s the goal, you want people to buy it. And it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seems like they’re getting closer to that threshold, right? Uh, but that’s just for games, Microsoft,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John nothing so far that I’ve read or seen. And I read a lot, but not seen much has convinced me that they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have reached the, uh, the iOS moment, the iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John moment for touchscreens, like that they have, you know, this is a thing that everyone will want to use.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s not just an entertainment. It is actually a better way for you to interact with software

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because of reasons XYZ and I haven’t seen that yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, it seems like a very good technical achievement in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the labs so far that might make for a very good product but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that no one has quite figured out like what’s the killer app? Like what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will make it worth spending five hundred or thousand dollars on one of these things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and possibly changing the entire way you work physically or or your desk setup or whatever, like what will make it worth

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all of that cost and change that’s so much better on this thing than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on what you have?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s such a, now you sound old, killer app. That’s what people used to say of like, well, it’s great and all, but you need the killer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app for your platform. But like the touchscreen did not have a killer app in the sense of like, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know, an application made touch, like the whole thing, the whole experience

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of a handheld thing that’s mostly a screen, that was essentially the quote unquote killer app. But like that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that phrase was back from the days when it was literally a single application like, Oh, you need a Mac because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it has page maker, right? Or you can get Photoshop or whatever. Like that was a killer app that was attractive for your platform.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The killer app for touchscreens was touchscreens are better for everything on a phone, practically,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe borderline keyboard, but there’s so much better everything else that the trade off is worth.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think I mean, one of the biggest challenges they might have with this, and I know this sounds really superficial, but trust

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco me, it will matter—is portability. You know, the reality is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think most people today do their work on a laptop. Desktops are really a dying

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco breed and, again, they’re never going to be dead, but certainly laptops

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are the default computer for most people. And mobility matters for a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of those people—not all of them, interestingly, but for a lot of them it matters. And if this thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is something that goes on on your head and has these screens or whatever like it. That actually might

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not fold nice and flat and skinny and light into a bag.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, HoloLens is actually better than Oculus because Oculus is like giant ski goggles, right? And so,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, they seem to actually be because they’re AR, not VR. Like you can see through the lenses you’re wearing glasses

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that you can see the real world in and they just overlay images onto it. VR is like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John completely covered. You can’t see anything outside, which is why it’s mostly better for entertainment where you don’t need to see the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John outside world. But not so good for an office setting where you’d have a bunch of people

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} who are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John essentially blindfolded.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, also, I would expect to have not knowing anything about this. Admittedly, I would expect that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco A.R. is probably a lot easier to work out the motion sickness problems for.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, probably because you do have the visual cues of everything else, but then that what that does is it reveals

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all of you. That’s what people were saying about the tech demo, like it reveals any latency or miscalibration

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you have is revealed because the real world is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it stays perfectly steady. And they would say, like, I looked at a coffee table and there was a Minecraft structure

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on it. And they pretty much say it looks solidly stuck to the table. I couldn’t when I wiggled my head,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the Minecraft structure didn’t like, well, it moved, you know, move from side to side or jiggle like or or it looks like there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was a hole in the coffee table. And there was like a thing down and like, no matter how I looked at that hole, it still looked like a hole. I’d

⏹️ ▶️ ^John never sort of lost track of where the coffee table was and accidentally drew it a millimeter to the left and to the right, because that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John takes you out of the illusion. It’s like bad special effects like, oh, OK, well, the coffee table is real.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But the little castle on top of it isn’t, you know, ignoring like photorealism and lighting just to have it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John connected to the world. And that’s that’s one of the big problems in a yard. It seems like Microsoft has solved that pretty well. But it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OK, now what do you do with that? Besides put Minecraft castles on tables?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Why wouldn’t you?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I have one. I put it in the after show. I have sad TV news for before we go.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, no. What happened?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Sad, sad, sad TV news. It’s sad on multiple levels. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ve got my fancy TV that I like. It’s a Panasonic plasma TV. I know all about plasma TVs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and their limitations. I take very good care of my television or so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I thought encouraging all the kids not to leave television shows, paused

⏹️ ▶️ ^John making my children watch four by three live action television shows stretched out into 16 by nine just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so I felt the entire screen. But recently, I recently got a PlayStation four and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’ve been playing a lot of Destiny on it, and that turned out to be a mistake. We’ve got about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe 80 hours into Destiny, split between me and my son, and we both really like the game

⏹️ ▶️ ^John despite its flaws or perhaps because of its flaws, I’m not sure anymore. But Destiny has one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feature that I should have paid more attention to and didn’t. And in the lower left corner

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the screen while you were playing, Destiny is a heads up display that shows a 100% yellow

⏹️ ▶️ ^John line and 100% white silhouettes of guns. And when I was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John flipping inputs the other day I noticed that I could still see the yellow line and the little silhouettes of the guns in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John corner of my screen and I said nooooooo. Oh no.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh no. So this is sad for multiple reasons. Now one,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John some quick googling led to a giant jackpot of people begging

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Bungie to make the HUD transparent or to make it optional. You know, this is something that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most games are good about giving you a way. All you need to do is make it a little bit transparent

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because the background is constantly changing, right? The problem is when you make something opaque, then it never changes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it’s just there for just hour after hour. And that’s terrible. Bungie hasn’t done that yet. I saw one acknowledgement

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that they acknowledged that they’ve heard this complaint before and they can’t give any timelines and blah, blah, blah. But that was back in November

⏹️ ▶️ ^John so there hasn’t been a patch yet to fix this and the second thing is regarding plasma TVs

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there is Image retention and burn-in and the only difference is as far as I can tell that burn-in is considered

⏹️ ▶️ ^John permanent and image retention is considered Not permanent is what I have permanent or not Many stories from people who

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have played past games on their plasma TVs not just destiny But many other games say I stopped

⏹️ ▶️ ^John playing the game and it took months for it to go away But it eventually did other people say it never went away And so like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the people say never when I they had burn in the other people had image retention and there’s different Debates other

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if your plasma TV supports 3d it’s more susceptible to either image retention or burn in or whatever and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Anyway, my TV has a screen wipe feature that puts white across bar across the screen. That’s supposed to help

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But the bottom line is from what I’ve read The best cure is to just simply continue to use your TV as normal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t play that game anymore Wait several months to a year and maybe it will go away away. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it has faded already. But the worst part of this is now Destiny is banned from my television

⏹️ ▶️ ^John until they pass that to the thing, which means that I can’t play Destiny, which also means that my

⏹️ ▶️ ^John son can’t play Destiny. And that is the worst part of this. Well, second worst. I think if that thing stays on

⏹️ ▶️ ^John my screen, I’ll be super pissed. No one else at this point. I think no one else would even notice it unless I pointed it out because it is actually fairly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John faint. But you know me. So my my solution to this is I’m buying a gaming

⏹️ ▶️ ^John monitor, 1080p gaming monitor, and I’m going to move the PlayStation four into the computer room

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and play it there instead of on the television, because we got to play our destiny. You know, these

⏹️ ▶️ ^John guns, these guns aren’t going to level themselves.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Wow. So let me ask you a serious question. I I’m not trying to troll you.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Um, you bought this TV, this specifically a plasma TV.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey If I understand things correctly, because the blacks are better, but But otherwise

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s mostly the same as any other TV. Is that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No. Pretty much everything about it’s better. It handles motion better. The color accuracy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is better. The blacks are better. It is better than any television you could buy,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John except for the possibility of OLEDs. But OLEDs, by the way, also have burn-in problems.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, anyway, what I’m driving at is you bought this TV for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a difference that probably only your robot eyes can see.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Anybody could see it anybody could see it put them next to each other in a showroom You will pick my TV as the better-looking

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey one yet You can’t use the TV to do the one thing you want to do with you, which is play destiny

⏹️ ▶️ ^John No, because the destiny like video games.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I don’t it’s all the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John games fault,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} right? No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the motion the motion is an important thing in gaming, right? But the thing I really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John want good picture for us for television and movies like live-action because games like are you know? They’re limited by

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the graphics that are in the games. They’re not photo realistic and you know I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I want to watch my favorite movies and television shows and all the other stuff on my nice fancy screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m perfectly happy to move my gaming to a little 23 inch monitor in the computer room right

⏹️ ▶️ ^John but I am NOT happy I wouldn’t be happy to watch like my studio Ghibli

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blu-ray on a little tiny computer screen or to you know watch the Godfather movies on a little tiny computer screen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or to watch the next season of Game of Thrones a little tiny computer screen. So I’m still what I’m trying

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to do is preserve my my TV for its intended purpose, which is watching television

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and movies. Its intended purpose is not gaming. And in fact, the monitor will probably have a much lower input

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lag and lower latency than my television does for gaming. I tried to get a TV that has low input lag as possible

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to make it acceptable for gaming, but it’ll probably be much better on this monitor that I got.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, well, I’m sad to hear that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, and I worried about it for other games, too, like Zelda games have HUDs and stuff too, but all you need is a little bit of transparency.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And, you know, it has not been a problem with any and I’ve gamed a lot of that, like hundreds and hundreds of hours I’ve gamed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on this TV and on my previous TV. So some of the chair was complaining

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that stretching four by three is a crime. I’m not saying I watch shows like that. I’m saying I make my kids watch shows like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. They’re watching Full House. It’s standard death. They’re I make I make them stretch it. They watch Full House.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, that’s their reruns for the show looks awful in any

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} in any aspect

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ratio.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, come on. Cut it out. No? Aww.