The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► Hello from beautiful Southern California.

00:00:02 ◼   ► Hello from very cold, dark Philadelphia.

00:00:08 ◼   ► Oh, I expect nothing less from Philly.

00:00:11 ◼   ► No, you're still in Southern California?

00:00:12 ◼   ► Yeah, well, so I was in Arizona. So we came through LA, we go out to my mom's place in

00:00:17 ◼   ► Arizona, and then we come back through because it's such a long drive. You can't really drive

00:00:20 ◼   ► direct from San Francisco to Phoenix because the mountains are in the way. So it's about halfway

00:00:25 ◼   ► to my in-laws so we spent a day here coming down and a couple days going back.

00:00:29 ◼   ► So it's a twofer.

00:00:31 ◼   ► All the grandparents are visible and that's a pretty good trip.

00:00:34 ◼   ► Love driving though.

00:00:35 ◼   ► I'll come back to that because there's something you wrote about recently I want to touch upon

00:00:39 ◼   ► with the road trip.

00:00:41 ◼   ► But big picture, last time you were on this show.

00:00:44 ◼   ► Oh yeah.

00:00:46 ◼   ► You were still the editorial director for Macworld.

00:00:50 ◼   ► For like 48 hours, yeah.

00:00:52 ◼   ► Yeah, it was the night before the Apple event.

00:00:54 ◼   ► It was like September 8th, I think.

00:00:56 ◼   ► - Yes. - Was that it,

00:00:58 ◼   ► or was it the seventh?

00:01:00 ◼   ► - We might have recorded the seventh and published the eighth.

00:01:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think that's right.

00:01:03 ◼   ► I think I remember sending a note to Dave Whiskus

00:01:04 ◼   ► saying like, "Is that gonna go up before the Apple event?

00:01:08 ◼   ► "'Cause nobody's gonna wanna listen to it afterward."

00:01:10 ◼   ► But yeah, we were right on the cusp of the Apple event,

00:01:13 ◼   ► and then the Macworld layoffs

00:01:15 ◼   ► and everything happened the next day.

00:01:17 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:01:18 ◼   ► Yeah, that was pretty funny.

00:01:21 ◼   ► 'Cause I was like, "I could talk to John about all that."

00:01:24 ◼   ► And I was like, no, I can't talk to John about it,

00:01:25 ◼   ► 'cause it's public.

00:01:27 ◼   ► - So what big new things are gonna happen this week?

00:01:30 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:01:31 ◼   ► - I'm frightened.

00:01:32 ◼   ► Well, there's gonna be a new year,

00:01:34 ◼   ► because the Earth goes around the sun,

00:01:36 ◼   ► and nothing we can do can stop that.

00:01:38 ◼   ► So it's gonna be 2015, so there's something.

00:01:41 ◼   ► And beyond that, let's hope nothing,

00:01:44 ◼   ► I could use a little less,

00:01:48 ◼   ► fewer interesting events post-talk show.

00:01:50 ◼   ► - So it fascinates me, though.

00:01:53 ◼   ► It really does because, you know, in the grand scheme of things,

00:01:57 ◼   ► September is not that long ago.

00:01:58 ◼   ► It's, you know, three months.

00:02:01 ◼   ► Yep.

00:02:01 ◼   ► Yet somehow your new role doing your thing at Six Colors and, you know,

00:02:12 ◼   ► it all seems settled already.

00:02:15 ◼   ► You know, settled is not quite right, but it feels normal to me

00:02:18 ◼   ► now that you're writing at Six Colors and, you know, Macworld as we knew it

00:02:22 ◼   ► doesn't exist anymore. I appreciate that. It's, I mean, one of the big things, and

00:02:29 ◼   ► I've said this on other podcasts too, it's not like I wasn't planning on

00:02:31 ◼   ► leaving. I wasn't entirely sure, I mean, and I've said on other podcasts too, and

00:02:36 ◼   ► I'll say it to you directly, I mean, you are obviously a huge inspiration, and Jim

00:02:39 ◼   ► Dalrymple and Federico Vittucci, and other people I know who have gone out on

00:02:43 ◼   ► their own, John Moltz, and done their own websites, and you know, and some podcasts

00:02:47 ◼   ► and some freelance and all of that, and I had been thinking about that for a while,

00:02:50 ◼   ► And in fact, a year ago I started basically putting together a home office in my garage

00:02:56 ◼   ► because we had no workspace in the house.

00:03:00 ◼   ► It's a pretty small house.

00:03:02 ◼   ► And the garage was, we bought a minivan a few years ago and you can't park the minivan

00:03:06 ◼   ► in the garage, it's too big.

00:03:08 ◼   ► And so the garage became, when we were redoing our kitchen, it was a place where all the

00:03:11 ◼   ► junk in the house went while we were redoing it and then that all came back in and sort

00:03:15 ◼   ► of like, what do we do in the garage?

00:03:16 ◼   ► And I was increasingly unhappy with my job and I kept thinking, you know, the garage

00:03:20 ◼   ► needs to be a home office.

00:03:21 ◼   ► And I started building it.

00:03:22 ◼   ► And the entire intent was not to have really nice work at home days.

00:03:25 ◼   ► The intent was that that would be my office eventually because I would leave Macworld

00:03:28 ◼   ► and I would want to at least try to do my own thing rather than go, you know, we had

00:03:34 ◼   ► always joked, one of the past presidents of Macworld and I had joked that like, oh, Jason

00:03:39 ◼   ► will be the last one to turn the lights off at Macworld.

00:03:40 ◼   ► At the end, Macworld will be just Jason in his garage doing Macworld.

00:03:45 ◼   ► And I had that moment when I was watching you and Federico and Jim and people like that,

00:03:50 ◼   ► that I thought to myself, well, one, people can do that on their own.

00:03:55 ◼   ► I don't need to do that here, and if I'm going to do that, I want to own it.

00:03:58 ◼   ► I want to be the person who does that, not just kind of doing all my work toward the

00:04:05 ◼   ► mysterious overlords who own a company who owns a company that owns a company that owns

00:04:09 ◼   ► Macworld.

00:04:10 ◼   ► And so I was planning it.

00:04:11 ◼   ► So in a way I've been thinking about it for a long time, for more than a year.

00:04:16 ◼   ► And then there was the -- so we saw each other at XOXO right afterward, too.

00:04:22 ◼   ► So I got to see you a couple of times right around that crazy time, and I saw you at the

00:04:26 ◼   ► Apple event.

00:04:27 ◼   ► So I saw you three times in like a week.

00:04:31 ◼   ► And what was really funny about that time is that because of the timing, because we

00:04:35 ◼   ► got the iPhone review units and the iPhone reviews were all going to drop the following

00:04:39 ◼   ► week, and I had this moment where a normal person would have said, "I just left my

00:04:44 ◼   ► job of 17 years.

00:04:45 ◼   ► I'm going to take a few weeks to recalibrate and decide what I'm going to do next."

00:04:49 ◼   ► For me, it was one, I'd already been thinking about what I wanted to do next, and two, I

00:04:54 ◼   ► had that iPhone.

00:04:55 ◼   ► I was like, "Everybody knows the biggest time of year for writing about Apple stuff

00:04:59 ◼   ► is when the new iPhones and iOS and Mac OS come out, and that's now."

00:05:04 ◼   ► I thought, "You know what?

00:05:05 ◼   ► I've got to launch the site next week."

00:05:07 ◼   ► like literally less than a week after I left Macworld,

00:05:10 ◼   ► Six Colors launched, not because I'm a total crazy person,

00:05:13 ◼   ► but because I felt like I couldn't not be out there

00:05:17 ◼   ► at that moment.

00:05:19 ◼   ► So I think it's those two things.

00:05:20 ◼   ► It's that I managed to hit that site

00:05:22 ◼   ► when we were at the high season for Apple stuff.

00:05:24 ◼   ► And because I've been thinking about it for so long

00:05:27 ◼   ► that I was ready to make it happen.

00:05:29 ◼   ► And it does feel, and it feels great too.

00:05:33 ◼   ► So it feels right to be doing it.

00:05:35 ◼   ► So I think all of those things maybe feed

00:05:36 ◼   ► into why it feels like a natural thing and not some like crazy thing that just happened

00:05:41 ◼   ► a couple months ago even though that's sort of what happened.

00:05:44 ◼   ► How long were you at IDG?

00:05:46 ◼   ► Well, I was at Macworld 17 years.

00:05:50 ◼   ► I've been doing this a little more than 20, coming up 21 years of sort of full-time Apple

00:05:57 ◼   ► stuff.

00:05:58 ◼   ► But that counts as a Mac user.

00:06:00 ◼   ► So I was a Mac user until '97, '94 to '97.

00:06:03 ◼   ► And then what happened is that, which is just a hilarious moment in Apple history, right?

00:06:09 ◼   ► '97, Jobs is coming back, but Apple is dying.

00:06:13 ◼   ► And everybody's thinking, "Oh, Apple's going to go out."

00:06:15 ◼   ► At Mac World Expo, they actually have the cache infusion from Microsoft to keep the

00:06:19 ◼   ► lights on.

00:06:20 ◼   ► And meanwhile, they're working on the iMac.

00:06:23 ◼   ► And at that moment, that summer, right before the Bill Gates thing at Mac World Expo in

00:06:26 ◼   ► Boston, the executives at IDG and Ziff Davis said, "We need to cut our losses because

00:06:31 ◼   ► Apple is going to die.

00:06:33 ◼   ► we've got these two magazines and these two big staffs, so why don't we just share the

00:06:36 ◼   ► risk, put the two organizations together, lay off half of each staff and just sort of

00:06:43 ◼   ► stick them all together and make one magazine.

00:06:45 ◼   ► And we'll do that because Apple's a loser.

00:06:48 ◼   ► We need to get out of this business.

00:06:49 ◼   ► It was the single worst time, just terrible timing because a couple months later even

00:06:55 ◼   ► it was clear that Apple was going to be probably okay and then very rapidly after that much

00:07:00 ◼   ► better than okay.

00:07:02 ◼   ► And so as a result, I went over to Macworld and it was this weird 50/50 joint venture

00:07:06 ◼   ► where these two arch enemy companies co-owned our company and were at each other's throats

00:07:12 ◼   ► except for us.

00:07:13 ◼   ► And that was really bizarre.

00:07:15 ◼   ► And then after a couple of years, Ziff Davis was going through, they were getting bought

00:07:18 ◼   ► and re-bought and different investors and had all sorts of financial problems because

00:07:23 ◼   ► the guy who started that company retired.

00:07:25 ◼   ► His sons didn't want to take over the family business so they sold it off.

00:07:30 ◼   ► It was a financial mess.

00:07:31 ◼   ► Was that Ziff or was that Davis?

00:07:33 ◼   ► It was Bill Ziff and the Ziff brothers, his kids, were like, "Screw this media crap.

00:07:40 ◼   ► We're going to be venture capitalists."

00:07:43 ◼   ► And so they just sold the business and they sold it to, I mean, it's kind of inside baseball,

00:07:47 ◼   ► but they sold it to, I think Teddy Forsman, who was like, at one point had been romantically

00:07:52 ◼   ► linked to Princess Diana.

00:07:53 ◼   ► I mean, like crazy stuff.

00:07:54 ◼   ► And then he sold it like a year later to Masayoshi Son of SoftBank in Japan, who bought it.

00:08:01 ◼   ► I think Teddy Forsman picked up a billion dollars by holding it for a year.

00:08:05 ◼   ► Pretty good deal.

00:08:06 ◼   ► Good job, Teddy.

00:08:08 ◼   ► And then SoftBank.

00:08:09 ◼   ► Talk about ancient history, though.

00:08:11 ◼   ► Just think about the basic story of picking up a billion dollars by holding a mostly print-focused

00:08:16 ◼   ► -- By, yeah, a magazine publisher.

00:08:17 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

00:08:18 ◼   ► For a year.

00:08:19 ◼   ► Well, I mean, it was not worth what Maseyoshi-san paid for it.

00:08:22 ◼   ► I think I was a visionary, but he was also kind of crazy, and the money he was spending

00:08:25 ◼   ► was kind of crazy.

00:08:26 ◼   ► He's still around doing other stuff.

00:08:27 ◼   ► But anyway, so that was all so messed up that Ziff Davis was like, "We want money."

00:08:33 ◼   ► And IDG was very much like, "Oh, well, we messed this up and we want to be in the Apple

00:08:37 ◼   ► business."

00:08:38 ◼   ► Macworld was the first Apple, you know, Mac publication.

00:08:41 ◼   ► We want to keep that going.

00:08:42 ◼   ► And so they bought them out.

00:08:43 ◼   ► So the answer to the question is I was probably at IDG, you know, my start date as an employee

00:08:49 ◼   ► was 20 years, but my IDG employee start date was different and that was like the end of

00:08:54 ◼   ► '97 or the beginning of '98.

00:08:56 ◼   ► And then, you know, the buyout happened like around '99 or 2000.

00:09:00 ◼   ► So it's a weird situation where I ended up never having to fill out a resume and had

00:09:05 ◼   ► like worked for three different owners.

00:09:07 ◼   ► It's very strange.

00:09:08 ◼   ► Only in the media, I think, does crazy stuff like that happen.

00:09:11 ◼   ► Right.

00:09:12 ◼   ► And you mean you must have been really, really young when you started at Mac user.

00:09:15 ◼   ► It must have been right out of college, right?

00:09:17 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:09:18 ◼   ► I went to, when I finished college, I, all the, my friends who got jobs in media were

00:09:23 ◼   ► like working at weekly newspapers for like $11,000 a year, and I basically said, "No,

00:09:29 ◼   ► forget it.

00:09:30 ◼   ► I'm not going to do that."

00:09:31 ◼   ► And so I went to journalism school, and although I enjoyed my time at journalism school a lot,

00:09:35 ◼   ► the fact is my college newspaper was my journalism school, and I learned how to write news stories

00:09:39 ◼   ► and features and edit stories and all of that at the newspaper.

00:09:43 ◼   ► The things I learned at Berkeley journalism school were that I didn't want to do TV news

00:09:47 ◼   ► because I tried and I didn't like it.

00:09:51 ◼   ► And I made contacts.

00:09:53 ◼   ► I met people including one of the editors at Mac User who taught a class there and she

00:09:57 ◼   ► got me an internship.

00:09:58 ◼   ► So I was an intern in '93 when I was 22 and I had a job January '94.

00:10:05 ◼   ► So yeah, I was 23 when I started full-time.

00:10:08 ◼   ► So pretty young.

00:10:09 ◼   ► I think that the historical context that you have to remember is that the '96, '97 was

00:10:16 ◼   ► a terrible time for Apple.

00:10:17 ◼   ► It was the worst.

00:10:18 ◼   ► terrible to even worse probably even worse than Apple itself was the perception where

00:10:23 ◼   ► even they really were in trouble by any objective measure the company was was in serious serious

00:10:29 ◼   ► trouble both technically and financially but even given that I think that the general perception was

00:10:36 ◼   ► even worse that it was I mean to say doom and gloom it's it's it it's not you can't overstate

00:10:45 ◼   ► that the perception was truly--

00:10:48 ◼   ► - I remember that.

00:10:49 ◼   ► I remember that we would be like,

00:10:50 ◼   ► look guys, it's not quite that bad, right?

00:10:52 ◼   ► But it was very much, I think about this now,

00:10:54 ◼   ► when the Apple, 'cause the Apple is doomed,

00:10:56 ◼   ► has been a meme that's been around forever,

00:10:58 ◼   ► and it continues to this day.

00:11:00 ◼   ► And on one level, you know,

00:11:02 ◼   ► the people who make the arguments today,

00:11:03 ◼   ► the facts of what they're arguing tend,

00:11:05 ◼   ► are arguing tend to be stupid.

00:11:07 ◼   ► They're like, that's not really a fact,

00:11:09 ◼   ► or that you're not looking at the whole picture.

00:11:11 ◼   ► But in the back of my mind, I always have that moment of,

00:11:13 ◼   ► let's see what they're arguing here,

00:11:15 ◼   ► because I was present at a time when doom and gloom was happening and there was doom

00:11:19 ◼   ► and there was gloom and at the time it did seem like it was a little overstated but you

00:11:25 ◼   ► know the fact was that that I don't think it was overstated in that year in like 96

00:11:31 ◼   ► 97 in the Gil Amelio and them searching for a new operating system and and Steve Jobs

00:11:38 ◼   ► coming in that seemed to be the point where they were burning money and not selling a

00:11:42 ◼   ► lot and the clones were eating their lunch in terms of hardware sales so even their big

00:11:48 ◼   ► install base was not really benefiting them and that was where they were, that was when

00:11:53 ◼   ► they were falling apart and that's the era that you get the kind of, you know, sell the

00:11:58 ◼   ► company and give the money back to the shareholders kind of quotes.

00:12:01 ◼   ► That was a moment where it was unclear whether the executives at that time were going to

00:12:07 ◼   ► listen to the advice of analysts and pundits and become a software company and try to be

00:12:14 ◼   ► Microsoft Windows and end up being like OS/2 and dying.

00:12:18 ◼   ► And Jobs, to his credit, one of the things he did when he came back, and it was extremely

00:12:22 ◼   ► unpopular, was kill the clones and say, "No, no, no, we need to control the hardware.

00:12:27 ◼   ► We're not going to just be an OS company, we're going to control the hardware."

00:12:30 ◼   ► And that decision actually factored into the publishing companies deciding to fold Mac

00:12:35 ◼   ► user into Mac world was all the ad revenue was coming from those clone makers too and

00:12:41 ◼   ► that just vanished.

00:12:42 ◼   ► Motorola and power computing.

00:12:45 ◼   ► Power computing, Motorola, Super Mac, which was I think Umax did it, they called them

00:12:50 ◼   ► Super Mac because they got that license from Apple for like scanners but it turned out

00:12:54 ◼   ► they could use it for anything so they called they could call them Super Mac.

00:12:57 ◼   ► What were the power computing ones called?

00:13:00 ◼   ► Tower, Power Wave. I had a Power Wave, which was the--which was a, you know, that was my

00:13:07 ◼   ► one non-Apple computer that I've ever bought, was the Power Computing Power Wave. Power

00:13:12 ◼   ► Tower Pro, they had a whole bunch of power-related things.

00:13:16 ◼   ► I never owned one, but I'd--we had a--I used a couple.

00:13:20 ◼   ► It was way--the Power Wave and the Power Tower Pro, they were way better than the PowerMax

00:13:26 ◼   ► of the era. I really--I really do believe--I mean, they were all beige. They were, like,

00:13:29 ◼   ► They were Apple Gray or you could get Power Computing beige, but they were all beige boxes.

00:13:33 ◼   ► But they were pretty cool.

00:13:36 ◼   ► Essentially Power Computing was like Dell.

00:13:37 ◼   ► I think it was all Dell executives in Austin.

00:13:41 ◼   ► And they were trying to use Dell build to order, you order it and then we make it and

00:13:45 ◼   ► then we ship it to you technologies to cut their margins and have no inventory.

00:13:51 ◼   ► And it was a pretty well-run company.

00:13:53 ◼   ► And I guess well-run enough that not only was it really the number one clone maker,

00:13:57 ◼   ► well run enough that they had enough leverage of some kind that Apple just

00:14:00 ◼   ► bought them out

00:14:00 ◼   ► rather than just letting them die. Or fight them legally.

00:14:05 ◼   ► Exactly, because there would have been lawsuits for sure. Because iOS 8

00:14:08 ◼   ► or not iOS 8, see, there we go. Mac OS 8

00:14:11 ◼   ► See, I would have called it, my mistake would have been to call it System 8.

00:14:14 ◼   ► System 8, sure. Mac OS 8 was

00:14:18 ◼   ► a major update and what Apple, what Jobs realized and his people when they came

00:14:22 ◼   ► back is that the clone licenses were for

00:14:24 ◼   ► System 7. So they basically said this is OS 8 and you don't get it and that was

00:14:28 ◼   ► how they killed the clones. It was pretty simple really nice and clean and then

00:14:32 ◼   ► they ended up paying some people off including buying the assets of power

00:14:35 ◼   ► computing. Right because the original plan for Mac OS 8 was a little bit more

00:14:39 ◼   ► ambitious than what it ended up being. It was more or less like a nicely cleaned

00:14:45 ◼   ► up version of System 7.6. Yeah. But with a theme to make it look new. Right.

00:14:50 ◼   ► Right never underestimate how much a new window chrome can make make it look like something new that it wasn't but here's the thing

00:14:57 ◼   ► The historical contest so Apple it was in severe trouble and it's no surprise that that's if Davis and IDG would would make a deal

00:15:05 ◼   ► Like that, but it is funny. Like you said like people don't remember this and I was on the outside. I wasn't writing

00:15:10 ◼   ► You know, I wasn't writing anything, you know for magazines at the time yet

00:15:16 ◼   ► But I was an you know, no surprise a very avid reader of both Mac user and Mac world

00:15:21 ◼   ► All through the 90s. So I was aware of this but that it was this weird strange bedfellows thing where

00:15:28 ◼   ► When they unified the two it was this joint venture between the two arch rival tech publishing companies

00:15:35 ◼   ► So with a staff comprised of the two of half of like literally we're gonna lay off half your colleagues

00:15:41 ◼   ► And then we're gonna stick you with your arch enemies go make a magazine. Good luck

00:15:45 ◼   ► It was it wasn't just the owners. It was like the staff. We were we were the Yankees and the Red Sox, okay, and

00:15:53 ◼   ► All of it because I have to have to use baseball metaphors when I'm on the talk show and suddenly they're like, okay

00:15:59 ◼   ► We're gonna release half the Yankees and half the Red Sox and then you're gonna have a new team

00:16:03 ◼   ► Good luck make the chemistry work and it was a disaster. It really was I I was always

00:16:08 ◼   ► And there were they were very different magazines. I think that you know from the outside view Mac world was

00:16:15 ◼   ► a little bit more staid and buttoned up and formal in tone and in coverage and

00:16:23 ◼   ► Mac user was a little bit more casual and more like personal computer like

00:16:31 ◼   ► user centric you know like I hope you're you're we're assuming that you're a

00:16:34 ◼   ► little bit more likely to be a home user or a student or an enthusiast and Mac

00:16:38 ◼   ► world was a little bit more for the perfect you know you're using a Mac at

00:16:42 ◼   ► work. Yeah and it was it had a more authoritative tone it was actually the I

00:16:45 ◼   ► think the tagline was the Macintosh authority at one point and and it was

00:16:50 ◼   ► the prestige I mean it had a bigger staff it had a bigger budget Mac user was

00:16:54 ◼   ► always a little more homespun a little more just as a reader and I was a reader

00:16:59 ◼   ► of both and and before I started at Mac user and it was a little more of the

00:17:04 ◼   ► rebels and the users and people who who don't go back that far an analog would

00:17:10 ◼   ► be something like MacAddict a little bit. MacAddict was even more so, I think, than

00:17:14 ◼   ► MacUser, a rebellious kind of thing, but that was definitely the voice difference between

00:17:21 ◼   ► MacUser and MacWorld. Which is funny, because when you think about it on another level,

00:17:25 ◼   ► they were like the two magazines in the US that were monthly that had roughly the same

00:17:28 ◼   ► budget. You know, MacWorld was bigger than MacUsers, but roughly the same, doing the

00:17:32 ◼   ► same thing. Their headquarters at the end there were like two blocks away from each

00:17:36 ◼   ► other. So these are, you couldn't find things that were more similar, and yet the output

00:17:40 ◼   ► was different and the staffs were different and the culture was different.

00:17:43 ◼   ► So it's kind of funny that even though we had all of these things in common, the products

00:17:46 ◼   ► were different and the people were different.

00:17:50 ◼   ► And I do think too, as an outside observer and someone who is very critical, I thought

00:17:54 ◼   ► both were excellent magazines.

00:17:56 ◼   ► I agree.

00:17:57 ◼   ► And especially compared to the other PC type magazines of the era.

00:18:04 ◼   ► We were in the same building as like PC computing and there was also PC Mag and PC World.

00:18:10 ◼   ► And I didn't read them a lot, but, you know, Mac, yeah, and MacWorld was full of, the old

00:18:16 ◼   ► MacWorld was full of people who really, they wanted to be in the magazine business.

00:18:20 ◼   ► And they had high aspirations, and you would see it.

00:18:22 ◼   ► And MacUser, it was a combination, you'd look at their issues when they'd come out, and

00:18:26 ◼   ► you'd be like, "Oh, wow, look what they did with that."

00:18:28 ◼   ► Because they did the same stories, a lot of them, that we did, right?

00:18:30 ◼   ► There's a new Apple product, how are we going to do it, how are they going to do it?

00:18:33 ◼   ► And you could just compare, which is like, that is some serious competition, like you

00:18:37 ◼   ► You put it to bed and you wait two weeks and then suddenly out of the mailbox comes the

00:18:41 ◼   ► competition of what did they do and did you beat them, did they beat you?

00:18:46 ◼   ► And you would look at some of their things and be like, "Wow, that is, they did a really

00:18:50 ◼   ► good job."

00:18:51 ◼   ► Other times you'd be like, "Ah, we did them one better."

00:18:54 ◼   ► But then at Macworld what they would really do is they would have these ambitions to do

00:18:59 ◼   ► like New York magazine industry kind of stories, bigger picture stories and big features and

00:19:04 ◼   ► and big ideas, and some of those were real successes

00:19:07 ◼   ► for them, and some of those were, I would say, failures

00:19:10 ◼   ► that were kind of the hubris of like, you know,

00:19:13 ◼   ► yeah, we're Macworld, but really,

00:19:14 ◼   ► we might as well be Vanity Fair.

00:19:16 ◼   ► And I think that was a part of their culture there,

00:19:19 ◼   ► where Macworld was that, and MacUser was more,

00:19:23 ◼   ► you know, Apple people who were there

00:19:26 ◼   ► because they loved writing about technology.

00:19:28 ◼   ► And this is, you know, not entirely true of both staffs,

00:19:31 ◼   ► but I would say predominantly, there were many more people

00:19:34 ◼   ► loved magazines and were writing at a technology magazine because that was the job at Macworld.

00:19:39 ◼   ► And there were more people who were there because they loved the technology and happened

00:19:43 ◼   ► to get a job writing about it at a magazine at MacUser.

00:19:46 ◼   ► We were more--and you saw it in the end--the people who stuck around covering Apple afterward

00:19:51 ◼   ► and writing about tech afterward were mostly people from MacUser and not from MacWorld.

00:19:55 ◼   ► Yeah, the people from MacWorld who I remember who've obviously gone on to, you know, continue

00:19:59 ◼   ► to do great work.

00:20:01 ◼   ► Pogue was a back page columnist and Steven Levy was

00:20:05 ◼   ► Both of which were not on staff. They were freelance columnists, but yeah, absolutely.

00:20:11 ◼   ► Did a lot of the back page columns

00:20:13 ◼   ► Which I, you know, was always what I aspired to be.

00:20:16 ◼   ► I got to edit Pogue for a while and that was great.

00:20:18 ◼   ► He wrote features for us and he wrote the back page and

00:20:21 ◼   ► he was a pleasure to work with and I still, you know, I still keep in touch with him.

00:20:24 ◼   ► It was a pleasure to work with Pogue.

00:20:26 ◼   ► My plan was always to figure out a way that I could get to that back page without having to do any of the grunt

00:20:32 ◼   ► Work of being a regular editorial staffer for years beforehand. Well me and I wished and mission accomplished

00:20:39 ◼   ► I I wound up figuring out just such a way

00:20:41 ◼   ► And I think I would say this and to that the person who to me best exemplified

00:20:48 ◼   ► The Mac user side of that split in that era was the fact that Andy in ATCO was on was a Mac user writer

00:20:55 ◼   ► at the time. And you know, talk about another guy who's, you know, never been,

00:21:01 ◼   ► you know, still at the top of his game now and still writing about the same

00:21:04 ◼   ► stuff, but the way that his writing is so infused with his personal style

00:21:10 ◼   ► was very very Mac User, you know, that we're just gonna let--we've got

00:21:15 ◼   ► this nut on our staff and we're just gonna let him fly.

00:21:18 ◼   ► Well, I mean, Mac User was--it was Andy and Chris Breen and Bob Levitas and, I

00:21:24 ◼   ► I mean these are people who write with personality and that was definitely the idea.

00:21:29 ◼   ► And when I got to Macworld that was one of the things that surprised me is that there

00:21:33 ◼   ► was a statement that they valued their writers that I heard a lot but it did seem to me that

00:21:39 ◼   ► it was also a machine kind of generating a consistent copy and what you do when you generate

00:21:47 ◼   ► consistent copy is you also stamp out voice and I would say that Macworld was much tighter

00:21:51 ◼   ► on that front but also had less voice and MacUser was definitely messier.

00:21:55 ◼   ► It was, you know, I would say in fact you go back and look at old MacUser stuff and

00:22:00 ◼   ► you tell me which MacUser or MacWorld, which one would seem more reasonable on a blog today.

00:22:05 ◼   ► It's very clear MacUser was in that style.

00:22:07 ◼   ► They were much looser and had more voice than MacWorld did.

00:22:11 ◼   ► I remember arguing with fellow editorial staffers on my college newspaper at Drexel and, you

00:22:19 ◼   ► this would be '94, '95, '96, about which was better. And the two other guys who really were

00:22:25 ◼   ► really both into writing and pursuing careers and thinking about it at least, and were Mac nerds and

00:22:32 ◼   ► read both magazines monthly. The other two guys, Adam and Andrew, were both on the... Oh, come on,

00:22:37 ◼   ► Macworld's the better magazine. Because I think that they were looking at that, like you said,

00:22:43 ◼   ► it's a little bit more like it's a magazine magazine. Yeah, it's polished and... Yeah.

00:22:47 ◼   ► Well, MacUser was always very polished. It didn't lack polish, but it--to me, my argument--remember

00:22:52 ◼   ► my argument was it just seems to me like the people at MacUser are having more fun doing--they're

00:22:57 ◼   ► having more fun putting these issues out. And I was like, why--why would you want to

00:23:01 ◼   ► get into this if it wasn't to have fun?

00:23:03 ◼   ► Well, that was a great--I mean, I still stay in touch with those people from MacUser, and

00:23:06 ◼   ► I don't know--I assume that the MacWorld people stay in touch too. I really can't speak to

00:23:10 ◼   ► that side, but we were--yeah, it was a great--it was a great group of people, and that was--and

00:23:15 ◼   ► And yeah, we were very proud of our product.

00:23:17 ◼   ► I would say that it was less polished only

00:23:21 ◼   ► in calculated ways.

00:23:23 ◼   ► Like you wanted to look a little wackier

00:23:26 ◼   ► and be a little messier because that shows the personality.

00:23:29 ◼   ► But it was not like we didn't know what we were doing.

00:23:32 ◼   ► It was like, you know, that was what we were trying to do.

00:23:36 ◼   ► It's like a band making an album that sounds raw

00:23:39 ◼   ► and not super produced.

00:23:40 ◼   ► It's because you want it to,

00:23:42 ◼   ► that's the effect that you want.

00:23:44 ◼   ► And honestly, if you're the number two,

00:23:47 ◼   ► then you don't wanna pretend to be number one.

00:23:49 ◼   ► You wanna do something different.

00:23:50 ◼   ► And MacUser was very definitely number two to MacWorld.

00:23:53 ◼   ► So that was what we did.

00:23:55 ◼   ► And yeah, it's just funny that in the end,

00:23:58 ◼   ► in the end I spent 17 years at MacWorld,

00:24:01 ◼   ► but if you'd asked me the first three years

00:24:02 ◼   ► I was working in the business,

00:24:03 ◼   ► I'd be like, "Oh, MacWorld, I hate those guys."

00:24:06 ◼   ► And it ends up being the brand

00:24:08 ◼   ► that I'm most associated with in my career,

00:24:10 ◼   ► which is just crazy.

00:24:11 ◼   ► And every now and then on Twitter,

00:24:13 ◼   ► I get, there are two things I get, like, it's like there's an alarm that goes off.

00:24:17 ◼   ► Every three months or so, somebody sends me a thing saying, "Is this you at the iPod announcement

00:24:23 ◼   ► event?"

00:24:24 ◼   ► Because there is a reverse shot of the audience a couple of times, and I'm in it.

00:24:27 ◼   ► I'm totally, yes, it is me.

00:24:29 ◼   ► And the other one that pops up is, "Hey, I was watching this rerun of Friends, and

00:24:34 ◼   ► Chandler is reading an issue of Macworld."

00:24:37 ◼   ► And I thought, you know, and they think of me, and they're like, "Oh, isn't this cool

00:24:40 ◼   ► that Macworld wasn't Friends?"

00:24:42 ◼   ► And I appreciate that because they're thinking of me in connection with the brand.

00:24:45 ◼   ► That's great.

00:24:46 ◼   ► I was a Mac user when that episode aired and I was so pissed off.

00:24:49 ◼   ► It's like, "God damn it!

00:24:51 ◼   ► Why is it Macworld?"

00:24:52 ◼   ► Right.

00:24:53 ◼   ► Chandler would have been a Mac user guy.

00:24:55 ◼   ► Yeah, I know.

00:24:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:24:57 ◼   ► Could he be more of a Mac user guy?

00:24:58 ◼   ► But in the end, now I love it because it's like, yeah, there's a Mac magazine in Friends.

00:25:02 ◼   ► That's great.

00:25:03 ◼   ► And then there would be.

00:25:04 ◼   ► That guy would read Computer Magazine.

00:25:06 ◼   ► That was shorthand for what kind of a nerd he was and that's great.

00:25:09 ◼   ► But it's funny because that's how far I've come around now.

00:25:11 ◼   ► At the time it was just infuriating because our arch enemy got on must-see TV on NBC and

00:25:18 ◼   ► now I look back and it's like, "Yay, look, Macworld on Friends, that's great."

00:25:22 ◼   ► It's just, it's, you know, that's what happens.

00:25:23 ◼   ► I end up spending 17 years at what was originally the arch enemy.

00:25:27 ◼   ► I imagine that, not to use another baseball metaphor, but I imagine that's what it's like

00:25:31 ◼   ► if you like grew up a Giants fan and then you end up getting drafted by the Dodgers

00:25:34 ◼   ► and play for the Dodgers.

00:25:35 ◼   ► It's like, well, you know, now I'm a Dodger.

00:25:38 ◼   ► That's just how it is.

00:25:39 ◼   ► I grew up a Giants fan, that's great.

00:25:40 ◼   ► I'm not there anymore. I'm here.

00:25:42 ◼   ► Or if it's your son or something, you know, or something like that.

00:25:44 ◼   ► Totally, right. Where it just changes your perception after a while.

00:25:48 ◼   ► It's like, who gives a crap, you know?

00:25:49 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:25:50 ◼   ► If your son is playing for the Red Sox, boy, you know, next day you're going out and you're

00:25:53 ◼   ► buying a lot of Red Sox stuff.

00:25:55 ◼   ► Yeah, absolutely.

00:25:56 ◼   ► Yeah. And then before we leave the subject, the last thing I wanted to touch on, though,

00:26:02 ◼   ► is that, all right, Apple, terrible shape, '96, '97.

00:26:04 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

00:26:05 ◼   ► print industry as a whole almost unspeakably high at that time.

00:26:13 ◼   ► Like you can't-- and you think in hindsight, well,

00:26:15 ◼   ► how could that be?

00:26:16 ◼   ► Because I think in hindsight, we can all

00:26:18 ◼   ► see the writing was on the wall, that newspaper and magazine

00:26:23 ◼   ► publishers didn't get the internet,

00:26:27 ◼   ► still don't to a large extent.

00:26:29 ◼   ► And that even if they did, the way

00:26:32 ◼   ► that it was going to affect advertising revenue

00:26:35 ◼   ► and the time that people spend reading and how they spend reading it was all going to

00:26:40 ◼   ► be massively disrupted.

00:26:42 ◼   ► And you'd think by '97, '98 that that would have been evident, but it wasn't because profits

00:26:48 ◼   ► were at an all-time high.

00:26:50 ◼   ► And I say this as someone who was at the time working as a graphic designer at the Philadelphia

00:26:55 ◼   ► Inquirer.

00:26:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:26:57 ◼   ► So all the money was -- I mean, that was where all the advertising was.

00:27:00 ◼   ► There was no -- there was momentum on the Internet.

00:27:03 ◼   ► were getting interested in it, but there was no money on the internet.

00:27:05 ◼   ► That would be crazy.

00:27:06 ◼   ► And I had somebody tell me, "We're not interested in even doing a web page, because

00:27:10 ◼   ► the future's on CompuServe."

00:27:11 ◼   ► I mean, it was just they were not -- there was so much money in print advertising that

00:27:15 ◼   ► -- like Computer Shopper, which was also a Ziff Davis property, when I was at Ziff Davis,

00:27:19 ◼   ► that was like a phone book that came out every month, and all it was was ads.

00:27:22 ◼   ► There was enough editorial to allow them to use the editorial rate when they shipped it

00:27:26 ◼   ► in the postal service.

00:27:29 ◼   ► But it was not meant as an editorial product.

00:27:31 ◼   ► It was a catalog.

00:27:32 ◼   ► that was just literally we just made a thing so you could put your ads in this thing and

00:27:36 ◼   ► then we'll send it out. That was the world then.

00:27:38 ◼   ► And the reason why was because the only way that as somebody who is going to be buying

00:27:44 ◼   ► external hard drives or SCSI cables or printer cartridges or all of the various crap that

00:27:51 ◼   ► you needed to buy to keep your office running, you needed something like Computer Shopper

00:27:59 ◼   ► so that you could see what was available and what it cost.

00:28:03 ◼   ► I mean, you needed it.

00:28:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, that was how you shopped for stuff.

00:28:06 ◼   ► I mean, right when the Macworld thing happened

00:28:09 ◼   ► and I was going to XOXO,

00:28:12 ◼   ► Nielle Patel from The Verge sent me an email

00:28:13 ◼   ► and said, "Would you like to write a thing?

00:28:15 ◼   ► "We're scanning in a bunch of old Macworld covers.

00:28:16 ◼   ► "Would you like to write a thing

00:28:17 ◼   ► "about the end of Macworld in print?"

00:28:19 ◼   ► And I said, "Sure."

00:28:20 ◼   ► And that was what I ended up going with

00:28:22 ◼   ► 'cause I thought, okay, The Verge's audience is pretty young

00:28:24 ◼   ► and they may not even remember computer magazines

00:28:27 ◼   ► anything but kind of an oddity you see in an airport or something.

00:28:30 ◼   ► And that was the point I made was, there was a time when the only way you found out about

00:28:34 ◼   ► a new product and the only way you found like what you could buy was by buying a computer

00:28:39 ◼   ► magazine.

00:28:40 ◼   ► So like the computer magazine would come out and you would you would pore over the pages

00:28:44 ◼   ► to find out what Apple announced or what Microsoft announced or whatever you were interested

00:28:48 ◼   ► in and then in the back you would leaf through and be like you know what monitor should I

00:28:52 ◼   ► get or what cable can I get and you know there's an ad here for you know 1-800 max.

00:28:57 ◼   ► and here's Mac Warehouse over here and Club Mac over there and you'd pour over that stuff

00:29:01 ◼   ► and I did that. I mean I would go through those issues 10, 20 times parsing every sentence

00:29:06 ◼   ► about which PowerBook I wanted to buy and parsing every list of products in the different

00:29:12 ◼   ► back of the magazine catalogs for the best deal on some accessory and then you'd call

00:29:18 ◼   ► an 800 number and give them your credit card and they'd ship it to you and you'd get it

00:29:22 ◼   ► like five days later.

00:29:23 ◼   ► That was the way the tech world worked.

00:29:26 ◼   ► Now it's really different, but back then,

00:29:28 ◼   ► that magazine was not the only,

00:29:30 ◼   ► but almost the only conduit for that information.

00:29:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, people just did not see that disruption coming.

00:29:36 ◼   ► The equivalent for newspapers was classified ads,

00:29:39 ◼   ► where anything you needed to buy,

00:29:41 ◼   ► you gotta rent a new apartment.

00:29:44 ◼   ► Your roommates are moving out of town,

00:29:47 ◼   ► and by September, you've gotta find a new place to live.

00:29:49 ◼   ► Well, the only way to do it was to use a newspaper.

00:29:53 ◼   ► There was, I mean, there wasn't, there was no plan B.

00:29:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, it was essentially a monopoly

00:29:58 ◼   ► just because of the, you know, they were the only ones,

00:30:01 ◼   ► maybe there's an alt-weekly.

00:30:02 ◼   ► I will say the one thing that I think was a sign

00:30:05 ◼   ► in hindsight of the magazine stuff falling apart

00:30:07 ◼   ► was all of those catalogs started printing,

00:30:11 ◼   ► you know, they started doing all their money into catalogs.

00:30:14 ◼   ► It's like we were gonna print a catalog,

00:30:16 ◼   ► all the mail order companies just became catalogs.

00:30:18 ◼   ► and they took the hit on postage.

00:30:22 ◼   ► Although in hindsight, I also think they should have

00:30:23 ◼   ► just hired a couple of young editors

00:30:25 ◼   ► to wrap enough content around it to call it a magazine,

00:30:28 ◼   ► Mac Warehouse Magazine.

00:30:29 ◼   ► And that actually really put, that was the first time

00:30:34 ◼   ► I think that those computer magazines really felt the pain

00:30:37 ◼   ► of their ad revenues going down,

00:30:40 ◼   ► was the catalogs were like a guaranteed seller for them.

00:30:44 ◼   ► And then suddenly they would pull out

00:30:46 ◼   ► and go back down to a couple of pages

00:30:48 ◼   ► because they would rent the list from Macworld

00:30:52 ◼   ► and then send everybody who gets Macworld a catalog.

00:30:54 ◼   ► And that was cheaper.

00:30:56 ◼   ► And that was less money for Macworld.

00:30:57 ◼   ► And that totally happened.

00:30:58 ◼   ► So there were some signs, right,

00:30:59 ◼   ► that things were starting to break apart.

00:31:01 ◼   ► And the computer readers are always gonna be the first one

00:31:04 ◼   ► to embrace that new technology.

00:31:06 ◼   ► So I always knew that they would be the ones to,

00:31:09 ◼   ► we would feel it first.

00:31:11 ◼   ► And we totally did.

00:31:12 ◼   ► - Yeah, and it's the same reason why

00:31:16 ◼   ► 10, well, probably more like 15 years ago,

00:31:20 ◼   ► when blogs first started percolating up

00:31:23 ◼   ► and becoming a thing, that so many of them

00:31:26 ◼   ► were technology focused.

00:31:28 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

00:31:28 ◼   ► Just an unbelievably disproportionate number of them

00:31:32 ◼   ► were technology focused compared to the interests of the world

00:31:36 ◼   ► at large, because it's the people who

00:31:38 ◼   ► are enthusiastic about technology who

00:31:41 ◼   ► were able to get a blog up and running and keep it running.

00:31:45 ◼   ► And that's the story of my life, which is I had a nice job at a tech publisher.

00:31:50 ◼   ► And so when I wanted to experiment with blogs, I couldn't really write about technology because

00:31:53 ◼   ► that was my day job.

00:31:54 ◼   ► So, you know, all those great tech blogs being founded then and I did like a stupid TV blog,

00:31:59 ◼   ► which was great.

00:32:00 ◼   ► And it was early in the days of blogging and I learned a lot.

00:32:02 ◼   ► But that was one of those funny things that I ended up experimenting in all of these other

00:32:06 ◼   ► areas because my employer wasn't that interested in experimenting in those areas.

00:32:12 ◼   ► That's why I do so many side projects,

00:32:14 ◼   ► because for years, my employer wasn't interested in trying

00:32:17 ◼   ► those things out.

00:32:18 ◼   ► They were looking at where all the money was coming from,

00:32:21 ◼   ► which is that that's the core of the innovator's dilemma, right?

00:32:23 ◼   ► It's very hard to focus on something

00:32:25 ◼   ► when there is this giant sack of money right in front of you.

00:32:29 ◼   ► Let me take a break and thank our sponsor on this show.

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00:33:26 ◼   ► It's free.

00:33:27 ◼   ► It's just try it out.

00:33:28 ◼   ► Everything gets backed up.

00:33:30 ◼   ► And then what do you do from that point forward

00:33:32 ◼   ► to stay backed up?

00:33:32 ◼   ► Nothing.

00:33:33 ◼   ► You just keep your Mac running.

00:33:34 ◼   ► And it runs silently in the background.

00:33:36 ◼   ► And every once in a while, it just uploads what's new.

00:33:39 ◼   ► keeps everything in sync. They've got an iPhone app so that you can access your account which

00:33:44 ◼   ► will get you access to anything any of your files that are backed up in backplace you can just grab

00:33:49 ◼   ► them from the iPhone app at any time email them right there from your iPhone or whatever when

00:33:54 ◼   ► you're away from your Mac. So it's got plenty of uses that are not just about catastrophic oh my

00:33:59 ◼   ► god my whole computer is broken the whole hard drive froze up I've got nothing I need to restore

00:34:06 ◼   ► everything. They can deal with that, but it's also useful for just restoring one

00:34:11 ◼   ► file at a time when you're on the road at somewhere else and you just need to

00:34:15 ◼   ► grab it. Could not be more useful either way. When you do need a full thing, if you

00:34:19 ◼   ► need your whole system restored, you don't have to wait to download the whole

00:34:22 ◼   ► thing. You can pay a little bit of money and they'll put everything on a

00:34:27 ◼   ► USB hard drive and overnight it to you and then boom there you are the next day

00:34:32 ◼   ► with hard drive with all of your stuff. Unbelievable peace of mind knowing

00:34:37 ◼   ► you've got everything backed up offline out of your house out of your office.

00:34:43 ◼   ► Where do you go to find out more? I can't believe there's still people who listen

00:34:47 ◼   ► to this show who haven't signed up but here's where you go. Go to backblaze.com/daringfireball

00:34:54 ◼   ► You get a risk-free no credit card required trial. Just install it, try it,

00:34:59 ◼   ► guarantee you you'll sign up and then after that here's what you pay you pay

00:35:02 ◼   ► five bucks a month per Mac that you're backing up that's it five bucks a month

00:35:08 ◼   ► everything backed up so my thanks to back blaze just a tremendous tremendous

00:35:14 ◼   ► service really I say that before I say it again I hope they stop sponsoring the

00:35:18 ◼   ► show because everybody who listens to the show signs up for them at some point

00:35:24 ◼   ► Which brings me to a post you had on Six Colors this week about a sponsorship

00:35:34 ◼   ► that didn't go well. Yeah. It was like a, what'd you say, no other gatekeeper but me

00:35:40 ◼   ► and you wrote that one of the privileges of being an editor. That before you

00:35:44 ◼   ► didn't really have to worry about it. That there really was a separation

00:35:47 ◼   ► between editorial and sales. You know, that you just worried about, you guys on

00:35:51 ◼   ► the editorial side just worried about what you're gonna write about and you

00:35:54 ◼   ► a sales staff that sold stuff and you know in theory sold ads and in theory they could

00:35:58 ◼   ► have sold an ad that you guys were you know somehow uncomfortable with and you could have

00:36:03 ◼   ► had a discussion or whatever but for the most part you didn't need to worry about it but

00:36:06 ◼   ► now as a one person publishing company you do.

00:36:12 ◼   ► Yeah there was a it turns out there is a great luxury in being able to be an editor at a

00:36:17 ◼   ► large organization and when some ad that is selling I mean like at Macworld we had a bunch

00:36:22 ◼   ► of like DVD ripper apps that were, you know, spamming our forums and writing these fake

00:36:30 ◼   ► posts, native ad posts about, that were posing as how-tos but it was for their software and

00:36:35 ◼   ► just really awful junky stuff.

00:36:37 ◼   ► And we had the luxury, I mean behind the scenes we would complain about it, but we also had

00:36:40 ◼   ► the luxury of saying, "Hey guys, it's not us.

00:36:42 ◼   ► You know, we have salespeople, they don't tell us what to write and we don't tell them

00:36:45 ◼   ► what ads to sell."

00:36:47 ◼   ► And when you're in my position and your position, I mean you've got, right now I don't have

00:36:52 ◼   ► anybody selling spots for me but that might happen down the road.

00:37:03 ◼   ► But I know you've got somebody selling, but it's still a small operation, it's like you

00:37:06 ◼   ► got you and maybe Dave working on ad sales and you know it comes to you, you're the proprietor

00:37:12 ◼   ► even if you've got somebody selling for you and with podcasts it's like this when I have

00:37:16 ◼   ► somebody selling an ad in my podcast or you do in yours, you've got, you're the proprietor

00:37:21 ◼   ► Even if you've got somebody selling it, and you have to make that decision.

00:37:23 ◼   ► You have to say, "Yeah, this ad is okay."

00:37:28 ◼   ► And so even if it's not, you know, every ad is not a personal endorsement, and you can't

00:37:33 ◼   ► -- I had somebody say that to me, and I wrote about it in that post.

00:37:35 ◼   ► It's like, I don't -- I'm not a developer, but I know I can look at a developer service

00:37:40 ◼   ► or tool and say, "That seems good to me.

00:37:43 ◼   ► That seems on the up and up."

00:37:44 ◼   ► It fits with the audience.

00:37:45 ◼   ► >> Yeah, you can't have it.

00:37:46 ◼   ► You can't have it.

00:37:47 ◼   ► In theory it sounds great that you would only take a sponsorship from a service or product that you actually use and the deck for

00:37:55 ◼   ► a while

00:37:56 ◼   ► Maybe they still even say that but then at with the deck

00:37:59 ◼   ► It's a big 30 site network and it's not that hard to say that somebody somewhere in the network is using the thing, right?

00:38:06 ◼   ► But when it's just you and it's just me I can't do that

00:38:09 ◼   ► No, and and it's not even fair like I use BB edit if I have to code something up. I use BB edit

00:38:15 ◼   ► Would I accept a sponsorship from Coda? Of course I would. Coda is an amazing app

00:38:21 ◼   ► from a great company and in theory I maybe someday I would use it. You know I

00:38:26 ◼   ► mean that to me is my criteria. Is this something that I would recommend

00:38:30 ◼   ► because I use it? That criteria isn't... it's too limiting. Is this

00:38:34 ◼   ► something that I would recommend readers investigate and consider? Yes, absolutely.

00:38:39 ◼   ► That's my criteria. And it has to cross that level and that's harder to

00:38:44 ◼   ► defined but it has to cross that level to be something you feel comfortable in.

00:38:50 ◼   ► On one level it's just to be comfortable with it and say I think this is a legitimate product

00:38:54 ◼   ► and all that.

00:38:55 ◼   ► And again I don't want to throw the guys under the bus who did that sponsorship but the fact

00:38:58 ◼   ► is, and they have a story and I think part of the problem is there's a language barrier

00:39:01 ◼   ► and although I'm skeptical of that product and you know it's an antivirus product and

00:39:05 ◼   ► it included an iOS component and everybody's like whoa, iOS antivirus that seems really

00:39:09 ◼   ► shady to me.

00:39:11 ◼   ► And they have a marketing story that I think they're not telling effectively, but the bottom

00:39:15 ◼   ► line was, "I don't believe in iOS antivirus.

00:39:18 ◼   ► I don't think that's a thing.

00:39:19 ◼   ► And I think my audience doesn't think that's a thing.

00:39:22 ◼   ► And I'm skeptical about Mac antivirus, but at least I'm a little more open-minded about

00:39:25 ◼   ► that than I am about iOS."

00:39:27 ◼   ► And so when I posted this thing, which, you know, I didn't read the stuff closely when

00:39:32 ◼   ► I got it because I was traveling and then I put it up as I was going out the door, and

00:39:38 ◼   ► then people started saying, "What the hell is this?"

00:39:40 ◼   ► And I didn't have an answer for them.

00:39:43 ◼   ► And that was that moment where I'm like, "Oh, you know, if I can't conceive of somebody

00:39:48 ◼   ► asking me and me having an answer, that's probably not a product I should..."

00:39:53 ◼   ► If I'm not comfortable standing by it to that point, not saying I tried it and I like it,

00:39:56 ◼   ► but I think this is a reasonable person would think that this product is interesting and

00:40:01 ◼   ► you should check it out.

00:40:04 ◼   ► That to me would be the difference.

00:40:06 ◼   ► And so while sitting in the passenger seat of my car, this all blew up while I drove

00:40:11 ◼   ► the first leg.

00:40:12 ◼   ► Then my wife drove the second leg and I opened up my phone and I'm like, "Oh, geez."

00:40:15 ◼   ► And in the course of about an hour, I responded to the tweets about it, looked more at the

00:40:24 ◼   ► company's responses, thought about it a little bit, and then I actually opened up Transmit

00:40:30 ◼   ► for iOS and edited the include file for the sponsor on my server and I took it out and

00:40:34 ◼   ► And I deleted their post and I posted a tweet about it and I sent an email to the guy saying

00:40:39 ◼   ► look I'm gonna refund your money but I'm not gonna run the ad because I'm not comfortable

00:40:43 ◼   ► with it and my audience isn't comfortable with it.

00:40:46 ◼   ► And I actually got a text from Lex Friedman saying what if I sell that spot for you and

00:40:53 ◼   ► I said sure go ahead if you want to sell it and he did and I posted the new ad all from

00:40:59 ◼   ► sitting in the passenger seat of my car on my iPhone which is a pretty fun like technology

00:41:03 ◼   ► story but yeah it was educational because I couldn't run and hide behind the salespeople

00:41:12 ◼   ► and you're in the exact same boat and Jim Dowd-Rimple's in the same boat and all of

00:41:16 ◼   ► us who are out here doing this thing, we aren't insulated like that and so we have to make

00:41:21 ◼   ► different rules and there is an expectation that some people have that when we read an

00:41:25 ◼   ► ad on a podcast or post a sponsor on our sites that it's a personal endorsement and what

00:41:31 ◼   ► What I always say is, if I have used the product, and I want to talk about that, I will talk

00:41:36 ◼   ► about it.

00:41:37 ◼   ► But your money doesn't buy my personal endorsement.

00:41:40 ◼   ► My personal endorsement can't be for sale.

00:41:42 ◼   ► That's the flip side of the--not only is it impractical to try every product, and not

00:41:46 ◼   ► every product is for you, even though you know it's good, the flip side is, I want the

00:41:49 ◼   ► freedom to evaluate every product that I want to, and if I'm selling evaluations, that calls

00:41:55 ◼   ► the whole thing into question.

00:41:58 ◼   ► Those rules are very different than if you're in a big editorial organization, but you still

00:42:01 ◼   ► have to kind of come up with the rules and try to disclose them to your

00:42:05 ◼   ► audience as best you can I think but it was a good lesson for me I'll tell you

00:42:08 ◼   ► that yeah antivirus it falls into an interesting crevice where it's a close

00:42:16 ◼   ► call and and I would say that the the sibling to antivirus are system cleanup

00:42:24 ◼   ► utilities. Oh yeah yeah yeah. And I don't think I've ever taken a sponsorship for

00:42:33 ◼   ► antivirus because I really do believe strongly that you you not only don't

00:42:39 ◼   ► need it on a Mac but that you actually it will call it typically cause more

00:42:43 ◼   ► harm than good. Mm-hmm. I really do believe that and you know for iOS it's

00:42:49 ◼   ► even more so I think it's at that point you're talking about snake oil. Now

00:42:53 ◼   ► Now there's possible, you know, I don't know, you know, like the case of the sponsor you're

00:42:56 ◼   ► talking about.

00:42:57 ◼   ► It's possible that you could use something on iOS that would have something to do with

00:43:02 ◼   ► antivirus where you're scanning email attachments somehow or something like that.

00:43:06 ◼   ► I think that's what they're doing is they're scanning attachments in your email and maybe

00:43:09 ◼   ► on your Dropbox or stuff like that for viruses.

00:43:12 ◼   ► But it's not going to affect your iOS device.

00:43:14 ◼   ► Right.

00:43:15 ◼   ► It's not so hard for me to come up with a what-if scenario where it would have some

00:43:18 ◼   ► actual practical utility in theory but I don't see how it you know yeah exactly

00:43:24 ◼   ► it's not actually doing antivirus at the system level on iOS like what you think

00:43:28 ◼   ► of traditionally and then you simplify the marketing message and it's protect

00:43:31 ◼   ► your eye your iPhone and that's not right and that's that's I think that's

00:43:35 ◼   ► where a lot of this this comes from and the cleanup utilities are to me it's a

00:43:40 ◼   ► little bit more like the antivirus to me is a little bit more on the dark side of

00:43:44 ◼   ► the gray area and the cleanup utilities are a little bit more on the light side

00:43:48 ◼   ► But I have I've had sponsors who run, you know clean up utilities and I think it's been a while

00:43:55 ◼   ► And I remember somebody on Twitter one time just you know, they weren't being antagonistic. They weren't trying to

00:44:01 ◼   ► Jab me but it was an honest questionnaire. Like do you use this?

00:44:05 ◼   ► Would you recommend it and I remember thinking like probably not and I kind of felt a little

00:44:10 ◼   ► Like I didn't take the sponsorship back and I don't quite regret it

00:44:14 ◼   ► but it was the closest I've ever come because I just wasn't sure because I don't think a

00:44:19 ◼   ► lot of that stuff is all that useful either.

00:44:21 ◼   ► I feel like part of the genius of the OS X system design is that you don't typically

00:44:31 ◼   ► get the system doesn't degrade over time, which did happen with classic Mac OS.

00:44:36 ◼   ► If you weren't careful, and certainly Windows, right?

00:44:39 ◼   ► Definitely happens with Windows.

00:44:40 ◼   ► They want a Mac.

00:44:41 ◼   ► many of these things happen because it's like oh we have a Windows product we

00:44:44 ◼   ► have an Android product we need Apple products and they can't really do much

00:44:48 ◼   ► but they want to have that that spread of products and so they come out with

00:44:52 ◼   ► one although you know cleanup especially with SSDs there's totally and they may

00:44:57 ◼   ► be out there but there's totally a good case to be made for cleanup that's doing

00:45:00 ◼   ► smart things like you've got preferences from apps from 2004 that you know that

00:45:04 ◼   ► you migrated and you've got duplicate files in all these different places and

00:45:08 ◼   ► and you've got iTunes Match turned on,

00:45:10 ◼   ► so I could save a lot of space

00:45:12 ◼   ► by deleting your music folder.

00:45:15 ◼   ► Stuff like that, there is an argument to be made,

00:45:19 ◼   ► but you're right, then you get into details

00:45:20 ◼   ► and you're like, eh, do I really believe

00:45:22 ◼   ► in this particular product enough to,

00:45:24 ◼   ► not enough to endorse it,

00:45:25 ◼   ► but enough to expose my audience to it?

00:45:28 ◼   ► 'Cause there is some understanding between us

00:45:32 ◼   ► and our audiences that some of this stuff's gonna be,

00:45:36 ◼   ► you know, vetted at least, right?

00:45:38 ◼   ► It's on the up and up, right?

00:45:39 ◼   ► Not necessarily we endorse it and use it personally,

00:45:41 ◼   ► but it's on the up and up.

00:45:42 ◼   ► And I think that's right.

00:45:44 ◼   ► I think they should expect that from us.

00:45:47 ◼   ► - The next, you know,

00:45:49 ◼   ► 'cause it dates all the way back to next,

00:45:51 ◼   ► but the Coco preferences system

00:45:54 ◼   ► is so brain dead super simple.

00:45:57 ◼   ► It's, you know, it's not genius

00:45:59 ◼   ► because it's this complicated genius system.

00:46:02 ◼   ► It's genius because it is just simple.

00:46:06 ◼   ► It's like one of the simplest, stupidest things they could do,

00:46:09 ◼   ► where each app has a unique identifier,

00:46:12 ◼   ► and they just use domain names.

00:46:13 ◼   ► So like barebones is com.barebones.bbedit.plist.

00:46:21 ◼   ► And that file goes in your library preferences folder.

00:46:25 ◼   ► And it's guaranteed to be unique because that domain

00:46:27 ◼   ► name belongs to barebones, so they get to control that.

00:46:30 ◼   ► There's com.apple.mail for mail.

00:46:33 ◼   ► And it's just a file.

00:46:35 ◼   ► And the app reads from that file,

00:46:38 ◼   ► and that's where your preferences are stored.

00:46:39 ◼   ► And if you delete bbedit,

00:46:42 ◼   ► and that com.barebones. you know, delete the app,

00:46:45 ◼   ► that file is sitting there.

00:46:47 ◼   ► It's only a couple hundred kilobytes,

00:46:49 ◼   ► and it never gets in the way.

00:46:50 ◼   ► It's not like a database that's getting gummed up.

00:46:52 ◼   ► It's just a file that's in the folder,

00:46:55 ◼   ► and you're, you know, there is no harm.

00:46:57 ◼   ► So if you've tried 50 different text editors,

00:47:00 ◼   ► and then settled on one,

00:47:02 ◼   ► those 49 preferences files in your preferences folder,

00:47:05 ◼   ► don't slow a damn thing down.

00:47:07 ◼   ► - No, it's gonna be when you've got Adobe CS4

00:47:09 ◼   ► and CS5 and CS6 in there.

00:47:11 ◼   ► - Or on the other hand, like something like,

00:47:13 ◼   ► well, I never use GarageBand,

00:47:14 ◼   ► so I'll delete the GarageBand app.

00:47:16 ◼   ► Well, GarageBand has like a 400 megabyte.

00:47:20 ◼   ► - Loops and instruments are enormous.

00:47:22 ◼   ► - Yeah, so there's like a huge application support folder,

00:47:26 ◼   ► relatively huge compared to most apps,

00:47:28 ◼   ► that, you know, and again, if you're on an SSD

00:47:31 ◼   ► and space is at a premium because, you know,

00:47:33 ◼   ► like the default SSD is still like 256 gigabytes,

00:47:38 ◼   ► you could save some serious space.

00:47:41 ◼   ► And it's hidden away now that the library folder

00:47:44 ◼   ► is invisible by default for most, you know,

00:47:47 ◼   ► for new user accounts.

00:47:50 ◼   ► It's not something, you know,

00:47:53 ◼   ► I can see how a cleaning utility could actually help

00:47:55 ◼   ► like a typical user if it was carefully written

00:47:58 ◼   ► and you know, but it's a borderline call.

00:48:01 ◼   ► - Can I tell you about my favorite,

00:48:03 ◼   ► my favorite preference joke?

00:48:06 ◼   ► Adobe, of course, is the answer.

00:48:11 ◼   ► There is in my, and maybe in yours too, I don't know,

00:48:13 ◼   ► in my user library folder, so tilde/library,

00:48:18 ◼   ► there's a folder, there's the application support folder,

00:48:20 ◼   ► right, which is where you're supposed to write

00:48:21 ◼   ► all your folders, or write your preference files.

00:48:25 ◼   ► I also have a folder in my library called

00:48:28 ◼   ► application support slash adobe slash acrobat.

00:48:31 ◼   ► That's the name of the folder.

00:48:33 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:48:36 ◼   ► - I don't have that.

00:48:37 ◼   ► - I don't even know, I didn't even know that was allowed

00:48:39 ◼   ► to have slashes in a folder name, but somehow they did it.

00:48:43 ◼   ► You magnificent bastards, you did it.

00:48:45 ◼   ► And I just, it makes me, I wanna delete it

00:48:48 ◼   ► and yet every time I see it, it just makes me laugh.

00:48:51 ◼   ► It's like, how incompetent is that?

00:48:54 ◼   ► yeah good job you're in the application support folder totally nailed it i'll send you a screenshot

00:49:00 ◼   ► it's it's super nerdy um but that was actually when when when the next acquisition was made and

00:49:12 ◼   ► uh and they were going to do this well we're going to we're going to make one

00:49:20 ◼   ► operating system with the best of everything. One of the problems was Next

00:49:23 ◼   ► was a traditional Unix system that used slash

00:49:26 ◼   ► as the directory

00:49:29 ◼   ► separator. So slash was not...

00:49:32 ◼   ► well maybe you could do it with a backslash, but you know slash was something that you

00:49:35 ◼   ► couldn't put into

00:49:36 ◼   ► a file name or folder name. Right, you try to type it and it would give you a

00:49:41 ◼   ► minus or something.

00:49:42 ◼   ► Right, but HFS, the Apple

00:49:45 ◼   ► disk format...

00:49:48 ◼   ► What would you call it?

00:49:49 ◼   ► Where's Syracuse when you need them?

00:49:51 ◼   ► Well, whatever, the HFS used--

00:49:53 ◼   ► - File system.

00:49:54 ◼   ► - File system, used colon.

00:49:56 ◼   ► Colon was the separator.

00:49:57 ◼   ► So you couldn't type a colon in a name.

00:49:59 ◼   ► So you could type slashes.

00:50:01 ◼   ► And so also, like a publication,

00:50:03 ◼   ► you might for each issue of a newspaper,

00:50:07 ◼   ► like a weekly newspaper, I think maybe we did--

00:50:10 ◼   ► - We did this on Macworld, yeah.

00:50:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, it would be like month slash,

00:50:16 ◼   ► We are you know month or year slash month slash date, you know, and that would be it

00:50:21 ◼   ► and so we had all these things that had

00:50:23 ◼   ► Slashes in the actual file names and there was and it just seemed like well something's got to give here

00:50:32 ◼   ► But there was a white paper. Oh

00:50:34 ◼   ► God I forget who wrote it, but I met him

00:50:37 ◼   ► There's an ex-engineer who wrote a white paper figuring out a way to conveniently solve it and the bottom line

00:50:43 ◼   ► Me, you know, the bottom line is the the penalty we had to pay is that you can't have a colon or a slash in

00:50:50 ◼   ► a file name now

00:50:51 ◼   ► For real, but you can it looks like you have a slash in the file name. It somehow is

00:50:58 ◼   ► Fake like when it looks like you have a slash in a file name. It's not a slash. I

00:51:02 ◼   ► Love it, but it all worked out. It actually did work out

00:51:07 ◼   ► We had we had that we had a catastrophe where we we we did that

00:51:11 ◼   ► we at some point at Macworld changed our file name format that used to be you

00:51:16 ◼   ► know the volume number and the issue number so it would be like 16 /04 and

00:51:21 ◼   ► that was the whatever that was April of what's 84 plus 16 right April 2000 issue

00:51:30 ◼   ► and when OS X happened we we moved them all to dashes because we were afraid

00:51:35 ◼   ► because there was a period where OS X would not let you input the slash you

00:51:38 ◼   ► It would transmogrify it on the fly to a dash,

00:51:42 ◼   ► 'cause dashes were dangerous.

00:51:44 ◼   ► And to this day, my Apple scripts,

00:51:46 ◼   ► I have to do a lot of, you know, POSIX path stuff,

00:51:50 ◼   ► because if you get an alias in the finder,

00:51:53 ◼   ► it comes in with colon delimited.

00:51:56 ◼   ► And then there are other tools that want it

00:51:58 ◼   ► as a Unix path, a POSIX path,

00:52:00 ◼   ► and you have to do like POSIX path of alias

00:52:05 ◼   ► in order to get it in the right format

00:52:06 ◼   ► so that you can send it to a script or something.

00:52:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't think anybody is more familiar

00:52:12 ◼   ► with the crazy rules over how to specify HFS

00:52:17 ◼   ► versus Unix-style pass than anybody

00:52:19 ◼   ► who's written any Apple script.

00:52:21 ◼   ► - It's like, why is this not working?

00:52:22 ◼   ► And you're like, oh, right.

00:52:24 ◼   ► Now it needs to be a Unix path.

00:52:26 ◼   ► Or, 'cause inevitably with AppleScript,

00:52:29 ◼   ► boy, we are in the weeds now,

00:52:31 ◼   ► you use Duchal script,

00:52:34 ◼   ► which is an incredible boon to AppleScript,

00:52:36 ◼   ► to be able to just basically fire off a Unix script

00:52:39 ◼   ► and get a result back.

00:52:40 ◼   ► It's great.

00:52:42 ◼   ► But if you're using something,

00:52:43 ◼   ► a file you got in the finder,

00:52:45 ◼   ► Unix shell script doesn't understand those colons,

00:52:48 ◼   ► so you need to convert it and then you send it off.

00:52:50 ◼   ► And so that, yeah, that happens all the time.

00:52:53 ◼   ► - We are definitely off in the weeds.

00:52:58 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah.

00:52:59 ◼   ► I do that with Markdown.

00:53:00 ◼   ► Actually, that was one of the things I would always do,

00:53:02 ◼   ► is I'd like grab something and run it through Markdown

00:53:04 ◼   ► and get the results back and all that.

00:53:06 ◼   ► You got to get the file names right.

00:53:08 ◼   ► So what were we talking about before we went off on the file

00:53:11 ◼   ► system?

00:53:13 ◼   ► Wow.

00:53:14 ◼   ► Old days.

00:53:16 ◼   ► Next, you were talking about next engineers?

00:53:18 ◼   ► God, what was it?

00:53:19 ◼   ► We have to back up a little.

00:53:21 ◼   ► Sponsors, sponsor conflicts?

00:53:23 ◼   ► I think that's where we were.

00:53:24 ◼   ► Yeah, I think that's probably it.

00:53:25 ◼   ► I remember in the early days of doing sponsorships

00:53:33 ◼   ► during fireball

00:53:35 ◼   ► Weekly ones that I was telling myself the first conflict I can remember having was and this was at the time

00:53:41 ◼   ► Do you remember for a brief period there was some controversy over app bundles? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, or you know, like

00:53:48 ◼   ► Those you would know we Mac heist and all of that. Yeah, like a

00:53:52 ◼   ► Mac heist and I had come out sort of against them as sort of devaluing software at least the extreme ones

00:54:00 ◼   ► where you were getting, you know, an inordinate amount of software for a seemingly absurd low price and

00:54:06 ◼   ► then a bundle wanted to sponsor during fireball right and I

00:54:12 ◼   ► I

00:54:14 ◼   ► Don't know I was very I can't remember which bundle it was but I was very conflicted because I felt like on the one hand

00:54:20 ◼   ► I've just written against them. But on the other hand, you know, it's a good deal

00:54:24 ◼   ► It is what it is, you know and nobody, you know

00:54:27 ◼   ► It's not like the bundles were putting these apps into the bundles without their permission. It was

00:54:32 ◼   ► You know and and I think I wound up going with it I did it I took it because I thought you know, it's

00:54:39 ◼   ► it

00:54:42 ◼   ► in some sense you

00:54:44 ◼   ► You have to be the publisher, you know every publication there never really was a wall between editorial and

00:54:51 ◼   ► Advertising even in a big organization. It might have seemed like a wall

00:54:56 ◼   ► in the trenches. Yes. But eventually you work up the chain and there's a person

00:55:02 ◼   ► whose responsibility, you know, typically their title was like publisher. Like

00:55:06 ◼   ► certainly in the newspaper industry that was the title, is somebody who is

00:55:10 ◼   ► concerned with both things. Yeah and for me, I mean that's what I always said

00:55:14 ◼   ► about my job is that I sat on that, I sat on the top of the wall and then it's like

00:55:17 ◼   ► I got to shield my people from the stuff that was happening on the other side of

00:55:20 ◼   ► the wall as best I could. But my boss was the president of the company and the head

00:55:25 ◼   ► of say it was either the head of sales themselves or the head of sales

00:55:28 ◼   ► reported to them and at that level you know there were always conversations now

00:55:34 ◼   ► again my job was to kind of steer them in the right direction and protect my

00:55:37 ◼   ► people from it but you know ultimately yes if you have if you have a business

00:55:44 ◼   ► the business people are gonna have demands that they're gonna want to make

00:55:47 ◼   ► and then it becomes part of the game to negotiate and get things back in a in a

00:55:52 ◼   ► place that everybody can live with that is not you know hinky for that

00:55:56 ◼   ► editorial side that is that was always part of my job up at the top it's just

00:56:00 ◼   ► harder when you you know what you're saying it's like now it's all exposed

00:56:03 ◼   ► it's just it's this guy it's you you're the guy you gotta you gotta do it you

00:56:07 ◼   ► gotta you gotta make that decision right but overall you know in seven years ish

00:56:16 ◼   ► seven to eight years of selling weekly sponsorships there have been very few

00:56:20 ◼   ► times where it's come up. I mean and they've even been very few times that

00:56:24 ◼   ► that I've had to reject a sponsor. Seems like they know. Well I'm hoping yeah I'm

00:56:29 ◼   ► hoping that that actually is a part of this it's it's partly me and it's also

00:56:34 ◼   ► partly just in the environment that it's I'm hoping it doesn't happen. This was

00:56:40 ◼   ► one out of like 16 it's not even now what 12 weeks one out of 14 weeks

00:56:45 ◼   ► something like that. Well and like I said to you I really do think that that

00:56:48 ◼   ► antivirus and cleaning utilities are sort of especially and like I said

00:56:53 ◼   ► darker side is the antivirus are an exception. Yeah. That there are I can't

00:56:58 ◼   ► think of any other topic you know it's sort of advertiser that's in that area.

00:57:03 ◼   ► Well I could I could see and again I don't think I would come down on the

00:57:06 ◼   ► side of not running an ad for them but you know there are a lot of there are a

00:57:09 ◼   ► lot of memes that go through our our community and our audiences as they and

00:57:14 ◼   ► they're all interconnected right. I have this thing with six colors where I see

00:57:17 ◼   ► you post a link and I'm like well I could post a link to that but everybody's

00:57:20 ◼   ► reading John's site so do I even need to bother or should I just link to John's

00:57:22 ◼   ► link and say just read John's link about it? You know we are all kind of in the

00:57:27 ◼   ► same ecosystem together and there are some of the memes that come out like

00:57:30 ◼   ► there's the whole you know if you're not paying for the product then you're the

00:57:32 ◼   ► then you're the you're what they're selling and I could see something like

00:57:37 ◼   ► that coming up where there's some product that is gonna sponsor you and

00:57:40 ◼   ► what they're really wanting obviously it's free and isn't it great and I could

00:57:44 ◼   ► see people being like "hey that's you know that's no good there's this other

00:57:47 ◼   ► developer who's trying to sell it these guys are doing it for free and they're

00:57:50 ◼   ► just going to get our information and all that" I could see scenario like that

00:57:53 ◼   ► although it doesn't seem to have come up up to now but I could I could see

00:57:57 ◼   ► something like that that would be unpopular with a part of the community

00:58:02 ◼   ► because it seems to be the kind of thing that we all rail against like what you

00:58:06 ◼   ► were saying about the app bundles thing but I think it's encouraging that you

00:58:10 ◼   ► haven't seen a lot of that and that's and that's good but I think I think it's

00:58:13 ◼   ► It's worth, you know, this is so inside baseball, but I think it's worth people hearing that

00:58:17 ◼   ► it's not like we don't think about these issues and take them seriously.

00:58:20 ◼   ► And honestly, I think that's one of the downsides of the big organizations with the separations

00:58:24 ◼   ► of church and state is there's a clear message, and I think people even get trained to expect

00:58:29 ◼   ► it from everybody, which is, you know, we don't care.

00:58:33 ◼   ► It's like the editors are the ones you talk to.

00:58:35 ◼   ► They have no power.

00:58:36 ◼   ► You never talk to the salespeople.

00:58:39 ◼   ► The organization doesn't really care unless it's a serious black eye for the organization.

00:58:44 ◼   ► And so, you know, why even bother?

00:58:45 ◼   ► There's just going to be cruddy stuff that gets advertised.

00:58:48 ◼   ► And with us, you know, we do take it seriously and that's not true.

00:58:51 ◼   ► That's not how we want it to be.

00:58:52 ◼   ► I mean, there's also a reason that our sites don't have junk all over them because that's

00:58:58 ◼   ► crappy.

00:58:59 ◼   ► But big organizations have no problem littering their sites with junk.

00:59:04 ◼   ► Jay Rosen who teaches journalism at NYU and is a big presence in the whole inside baseball

00:59:14 ◼   ► world of online journalism.

00:59:16 ◼   ► But I think he said, I want to put words in his mouth, but something to the effect of

00:59:20 ◼   ► if you work at a publication, doesn't matter whether it's print or online or both or whether

00:59:25 ◼   ► it's new or old, but if it's big enough that it's not just like a one person thing, but

00:59:30 ◼   ► big and you can you can be isolated and just concentrate on editorial if you

00:59:36 ◼   ► don't know understand the business model right of the publication you're you're

00:59:41 ◼   ► you're screwed you're not you're you're not being responsible and you're

00:59:44 ◼   ► probably screwed yeah well the way he phrases you should quit your job which

00:59:47 ◼   ► is probably a little extreme but he's not wrong that you should you should

00:59:53 ◼   ► understand why your company does what it does and what decisions they're making

00:59:56 ◼   ► making and whether they're good or not.

00:59:58 ◼   ► And, you know, I, over the years, I have been fortunate

01:00:03 ◼   ► to work with a bunch of incredibly talented people.

01:00:06 ◼   ► But what I will say is, I was always surprised

01:00:10 ◼   ► at how some incredibly intelligent, talented people

01:00:14 ◼   ► would have no conception about how parts

01:00:18 ◼   ► of our business worked.

01:00:19 ◼   ► Even though some of that was communicated fairly clearly,

01:00:24 ◼   ► and some of that has to do with frame of reference,

01:00:25 ◼   ► and some of that has to do with not wanting to hear it.

01:00:28 ◼   ► 'Cause if you're trained as a journalist

01:00:30 ◼   ► and you hear from the sales guys or the business people,

01:00:32 ◼   ► it's very easy to put that in a box.

01:00:33 ◼   ► It's like that's not my concern.

01:00:35 ◼   ► In fact, it's my duty to not even pay attention to that.

01:00:37 ◼   ► But it always surprised me that I would hear,

01:00:40 ◼   ► even up to the end,

01:00:41 ◼   ► and one of the things Rosen points out too

01:00:43 ◼   ► is that you need to know the difference

01:00:44 ◼   ► between what product people refer to as product

01:00:46 ◼   ► and what editorial people refer to as product,

01:00:48 ◼   ► which is super important.

01:00:49 ◼   ► Because the media today,

01:00:50 ◼   ► so much of what happens at these sites

01:00:52 ◼   ► is based on the product roadmap

01:00:54 ◼   ► and product managers and developers.

01:00:55 ◼   ► And the product is not just the words on the website.

01:00:58 ◼   ► The product is the features of the website

01:01:00 ◼   ► and the design of the website

01:01:02 ◼   ► and tools that editors can use

01:01:04 ◼   ► to build things on the website.

01:01:05 ◼   ► And if you're thinking of the product

01:01:07 ◼   ► as being what you write

01:01:09 ◼   ► or as product as being some weird amorphous sales thing,

01:01:13 ◼   ► you have a really distorted view of what your business is

01:01:17 ◼   ► and that's probably not a healthy place to be.

01:01:21 ◼   ► And I would have that

01:01:22 ◼   ► I would have people talking about HR or developers or marketing people, people not in ad sales

01:01:30 ◼   ► and people who'd been at the company for a long time would say, "Oh, well, those are

01:01:36 ◼   ► sales people."

01:01:37 ◼   ► It's like, no, they're not sales people.

01:01:40 ◼   ► They're other parts of the business that aren't editorial, but they're not sales people.

01:01:45 ◼   ► I understand why people would cultivate a simplified view in the sense of like, "I just

01:01:49 ◼   ► don't want to hear it.

01:01:50 ◼   ► I don't want to know about it."

01:01:51 ◼   ► But in reality I think it is a good thing to know about that stuff and understand it

01:01:55 ◼   ► and understand your place in it.

01:01:57 ◼   ► And then if it doesn't make you comfortable, it certainly makes you a better judge of whether

01:02:00 ◼   ► the decisions your business is making are solid or are bad or desperate.

01:02:06 ◼   ► And if you are in any position to determine what kind of stuff is going to go in the product,

01:02:12 ◼   ► then knowing where your business is going could actually help.

01:02:16 ◼   ► You could actually get some good ideas or help have a bigger voice in deciding what

01:02:21 ◼   ► gets built next. So I thought that piece, while a little bit hypey and saying you

01:02:27 ◼   ► should quit your job is a little bit rich, but he's not wrong about a lot of

01:02:31 ◼   ► those points that you really should understand the business that you're in.

01:02:33 ◼   ► Yeah, I think he has a sort of better to overstate it than understate it style.

01:02:41 ◼   ► Yeah. Well, and without going into sensationalism. Well, I'm

01:02:47 ◼   ► trying to communicate some of this stuff. I mean, like I said, some of this, you're

01:02:50 ◼   ► You're trying to battle against, "La la la, I don't want to hear it, it's not my job,

01:02:55 ◼   ► it's in the business side, I'm an editor, I don't need to hear it."

01:02:57 ◼   ► So you kind of do need to shout sometimes and say, "No, no, no, pay attention to this."

01:03:02 ◼   ► Especially something like the difference between what, you know, product.

01:03:04 ◼   ► I mean that's come up in a bunch of cases where people have angrily left various website

01:03:09 ◼   ► startups who are editorial people.

01:03:11 ◼   ► They're like, "Oh, they're just in it for the product."

01:03:13 ◼   ► And it's like, I dealt with, at the end there at IDG, I worked with a really great product

01:03:18 ◼   ► manager and he and I spent a lot of time talking about ways we could improve the

01:03:21 ◼   ► product. Unfortunately most of those things never got prioritized but that

01:03:25 ◼   ► was a great experience because we were working together, editorial and product

01:03:30 ◼   ► management, to identify things that would make the website better and

01:03:35 ◼   ► sometimes it's better to refer to it that way than to say "the product"

01:03:38 ◼   ► because that sounds a little bit like you're selling something but the fact is

01:03:41 ◼   ► you know my editors were frustrated by the fact that all they could really do

01:03:45 ◼   ► was put text in the CMS and why can't we do this and why can't we do that and the

01:03:49 ◼   ► answer was well we could do that if we worked with the product group but you

01:03:53 ◼   ► got to speak their language and that is a challenge so I appreciate when Rosen

01:03:57 ◼   ► sort of waves his hands and it's like hey pay attention this is really

01:04:00 ◼   ► important because a lot of people in journalism don't want to hear that they

01:04:06 ◼   ► want to just work and it's a natural response right to be like no no no I'm

01:04:09 ◼   ► just gonna do my thing that I'm comfortable with but I think it leads to

01:04:12 ◼   ► to bad places.

01:04:14 ◼   ► - I think it's a danger,

01:04:16 ◼   ► it's dangerous to use the word religion,

01:04:18 ◼   ► but I do feel like in a casual way,

01:04:23 ◼   ► the belief that if you're a journalist,

01:04:27 ◼   ► that you should, you're almost like obligated

01:04:31 ◼   ► in a moral sense to not pay attention to the business side,

01:04:35 ◼   ► was ingrained in at least a generation,

01:04:38 ◼   ► maybe several generations, especially,

01:04:40 ◼   ► I don't know if it's especially US centric or not, but it it certainly seems so in the newspaper industry that it was just almost

01:04:47 ◼   ► Almost religious that it was you know, and and it was only sustainable because newspapers were you know

01:04:55 ◼   ► Like you said they had a monopoly. Yeah, and they were incredibly profitable licensed to print money, right?

01:05:00 ◼   ► I remember when I was at the Inquirer there was a time

01:05:03 ◼   ► Where they had and this is in the late 90s where they had buyouts

01:05:08 ◼   ► Because they had a quarter where their profit margin was 19%

01:05:13 ◼   ► They were the inquirer was a night ritter paper Wow

01:05:18 ◼   ► And they were so they that 20% was like this like red line in the sand

01:05:24 ◼   ► You know, I guess you can't have a line in the sand

01:05:27 ◼   ► And you know that they dipped to 19 and they were like instantly went into red alert and you know

01:05:35 ◼   ► Sirens went off and they like bought people out

01:05:37 ◼   ► And it was crazy. Like I don't know if you guys have this. I think it's an East Coast thing called Metro

01:05:43 ◼   ► It's a free daily newspaper. I don't even know if they're still around here in Philly, but it was they were a free daily

01:05:50 ◼   ► And they'd set up most of their kiosks at commuter entrances subway entrances bus stops

01:05:58 ◼   ► Not real thick but you know, you know, it was definitely a competitor to you know

01:06:06 ◼   ► the Inquirer and the Daily News. Because if you could read the Metro for free and finish it before

01:06:12 ◼   ► you got where you were going, you had no reason to buy the Inquirer or Daily News. And it led to

01:06:18 ◼   ► crazy scenarios like the guy who was in charge. As the graphic design work I did, I worked with

01:06:24 ◼   ► a lot of the classified advertising people and did a lot of the promotional stuff that they needed to

01:06:31 ◼   ► give to people. And so like the guy, he was a great guy, I forget his name, but he was in charge of

01:06:36 ◼   ► auto advertising, classified, all auto advertising, which was huge, huge, huge business, took the buy

01:06:43 ◼   ► out, which was like two or three years salary. And a week later, he took the job as the automotive

01:06:49 ◼   ► ad guy at Metro, at the Metro. And it was like, they just paid him three years salary to go

01:06:58 ◼   ► and start selling ads at a rival.

01:07:01 ◼   ► And while they were still incredibly profitable.

01:07:03 ◼   ► I mean, it was just crazy. - I mean,

01:07:05 ◼   ► I've definitely experienced the layoffs

01:07:07 ◼   ► while we're profitable,

01:07:08 ◼   ► where the business people are like,

01:07:09 ◼   ► no, no, we're profitable, we're gonna make a profit,

01:07:11 ◼   ► we're profitable, and then they lay off 10 people.

01:07:13 ◼   ► And there is nothing worse than saying,

01:07:16 ◼   ► you can't work here anymore

01:07:17 ◼   ► because we're not quite making enough profit.

01:07:19 ◼   ► And that's a disconnect in business.

01:07:22 ◼   ► I mean, there are businesses that are all about

01:07:24 ◼   ► looking for growth and investment,

01:07:25 ◼   ► and there are businesses that are just trying

01:07:27 ◼   ► to be sustainable profitable businesses that can employ a bunch of people.

01:07:32 ◼   ► And that too is part of the disconnect of like not understanding what kind of business

01:07:35 ◼   ► you work for and what their metrics are and not on a very detailed level of like what's

01:07:39 ◼   ► the bonus structure for the salespeople but to understand like what are they looking for

01:07:44 ◼   ► and you know what do they expect from us and what's the growth.

01:07:48 ◼   ► And some of that is it has to come from the top and you know in my years I would get a

01:07:54 ◼   ► a varying degree of that, depending on who the CEO was,

01:07:57 ◼   ► of what do we show the employees.

01:07:59 ◼   ► And to a varying degree, the employees wanted to

01:08:02 ◼   ► or didn't want to hear it.

01:08:04 ◼   ► But I think that's just a dangerous situation

01:08:06 ◼   ► to be in, to not understand what kind of company

01:08:09 ◼   ► you're working for and what their goals are.

01:08:10 ◼   ► I mean, at Knight-Ritter, at least,

01:08:12 ◼   ► it was clear that 20% was the line.

01:08:14 ◼   ► And if you weren't showing 20% profit margin,

01:08:17 ◼   ► that was red alert time.

01:08:19 ◼   ► Boy, those were the days.

01:08:20 ◼   ► And I think the danger there is that it

01:08:24 ◼   ► seemed very clear, because I wasn't involved,

01:08:26 ◼   ► I wasn't going to be in my career.

01:08:28 ◼   ► I was never even full time.

01:08:29 ◼   ► I was always a contractor.

01:08:30 ◼   ► But I loved the business.

01:08:32 ◼   ► And I loved being-- but my view from the ground floor

01:08:36 ◼   ► and just looking at the whole thing

01:08:38 ◼   ► was that it was so clear to me once I got in and sort of got

01:08:41 ◼   ► the gist of how the Philadelphia Inquirer ran at the time,

01:08:45 ◼   ► that the people who were in that building working

01:08:49 ◼   ► on that newspaper were incredible people, absolutely

01:08:53 ◼   ► amazing people I

01:08:55 ◼   ► Forget the exact years

01:08:57 ◼   ► But there's a stretch from like the mid 80s to mid 90s where the Philadelphia Inquirer were won more Pulitzer Prizes than any

01:09:04 ◼   ► Newspaper in the US. Yeah, it was a tremendous tremendous team and eventually all these this great talent that wound up

01:09:12 ◼   ► You know working at the New York Times and Washington Post and Newsweek and time and they all took these buyouts and went to these

01:09:18 ◼   ► other places but at the time it was amazing and they you know were dedicated

01:09:22 ◼   ► to the craft and dedicated to the civic you know duty of a newspaper in a big

01:09:27 ◼   ► metropolitan city and all this stuff but it was so clear that Knight Ritter was

01:09:32 ◼   ► an in was a corporate as a corporate parent didn't give two shits if they

01:09:35 ◼   ► were selling widgets or newspapers or whatever as long as they hit that 20%

01:09:42 ◼   ► profit margin and had growth didn't matter what they were doing had no no no

01:09:47 ◼   ► No love or interest in what it meant to actually be making a newspaper.

01:09:52 ◼   ► And you know, like we were saying, when you've got the license to print money, it's a little

01:09:56 ◼   ► bit easier to be blissfully ignorant.

01:09:58 ◼   ► But I think, again, somebody could listen to this podcast and say, aha, here they are.

01:10:03 ◼   ► They're all admitting that journalism is not truly objective.

01:10:07 ◼   ► It's actually affected by what the business does.

01:10:10 ◼   ► Well, you know, the truth is, of course it is.

01:10:12 ◼   ► Unless you are Consumer Reports or something.

01:10:15 ◼   ► And even then you have the objective of getting donations and if you don't get them you can't

01:10:20 ◼   ► stay in business.

01:10:21 ◼   ► There is always a fundamental precept of a media business about what they're doing and

01:10:27 ◼   ► what why they're doing it.

01:10:29 ◼   ► And like a sports writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer who is from San Francisco can't say

01:10:34 ◼   ► you know I've decided I'm going to write about the Giants.

01:10:38 ◼   ► It's like no no we're in the business of covering Philadelphia.

01:10:40 ◼   ► I got that when I went to Mac user, they told me like Apple's big in education, but we're

01:10:45 ◼   ► not targeting education.

01:10:46 ◼   ► It's like that was the target market.

01:10:48 ◼   ► Our target market was the Mac and it was the business market primarily and then secondarily

01:10:54 ◼   ► you know other users using it at home but not education.

01:10:58 ◼   ► Why was that?

01:10:59 ◼   ► Because they didn't spend a lot of money and those advertisers didn't want to reach them

01:11:03 ◼   ► because of that and yeah that was focusing what we could write about but you know that's

01:11:08 ◼   ► just a fundamental business constraint. What, you know, the objectivity comes on, like,

01:11:13 ◼   ► on the inside of those constraints. Like, this is what this publication is. This is

01:11:16 ◼   ► what this website is. Whatever it is. And then within there, I need to be free to make

01:11:20 ◼   ► the decisions about the best way to serve that audience. But how do you choose the audience?

01:11:24 ◼   ► In large part, in most of these businesses, is you're choosing an audience you can make

01:11:28 ◼   ► money selling ads to. And that's okay, but that is a fundamental thing that, I mean,

01:11:35 ◼   ► freedom only goes so far there is a fundamental precept of your business

01:11:39 ◼   ► that you do need to follow as much as that guy might like to write about not

01:11:43 ◼   ► if not the Giants but write about darts or Canadian football or whatever it's

01:11:47 ◼   ► like that's not what you're here to do that's not who we serve with with the

01:11:51 ◼   ► Philadelphia Inquirer right yeah and you have to be able to you know even even in

01:11:57 ◼   ► our lean mean you know one person type operations like six colors or daring

01:12:02 ◼   ► Fireball, you still have to be able to do it in a way that makes sense financially.

01:12:08 ◼   ► And the thing that makes me think about that, so in the whole 10, 15 years, it's very, very

01:12:14 ◼   ► feasible to just run a web blog out of your pocket.

01:12:19 ◼   ► I think I could, I forget what I pay per month for doing Fireball, but if I really wanted

01:12:23 ◼   ► to go for, if I just wanted to do it without any sponsorships or ads or any revenue at

01:12:27 ◼   ► even with the readership I have I think it would be like a hundred dollars a

01:12:31 ◼   ► month yeah maybe maybe I could probably find a way to you could do it yeah you

01:12:34 ◼   ► could certainly do it for 50 right I'm paying 50 and I'm running the

01:12:38 ◼   ► incomparable and six colors on the same server for $50 a month it's not a

01:12:42 ◼   ► problem yeah but the reason that podcasting has exploding has exploded

01:12:46 ◼   ► recently is that until recently it was financially unfeasible there was no way

01:12:50 ◼   ► it doesn't seem like that long ago when I started during fireball but there's

01:12:55 ◼   ► There's just no way financially that in 2002, 2003, 2004,

01:12:59 ◼   ► that I could distribute 100 megabyte MP3 files

01:13:04 ◼   ► to thousands of people.

01:13:05 ◼   ► It would have cost thousands and thousands of dollars a month.

01:13:09 ◼   ► Even a couple of years ago,

01:13:10 ◼   ► I think that would have been the case.

01:13:11 ◼   ► No, the rise in podcasting correlates exactly

01:13:16 ◼   ► to when it became financially pretty cheap.

01:13:21 ◼   ► Yeah, through SoundCloud or Libsyn or Squarespace

01:13:24 ◼   ► or through a hosting company that gives you a terabyte of data

01:13:28 ◼   ► for $50 a month, that sort of thing.

01:13:30 ◼   ► Right.

01:13:31 ◼   ► But until recently, there was no such thing.

01:13:33 ◼   ► Correct.

01:13:34 ◼   ► The bandwidth limits were in the low gigabytes or even

01:13:39 ◼   ► the hundreds of megabytes.

01:13:41 ◼   ► And so if your files are--

01:13:44 ◼   ► typical podcast for this show is somewhere around 100 megabytes,

01:13:47 ◼   ► sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more,

01:13:48 ◼   ► depending on how long it is.

01:13:50 ◼   ► But every 100 people, that's 100--

01:13:54 ◼   ► or that's a gigabyte, right?

01:13:56 ◼   ► Or no, every 10 people.

01:13:58 ◼   ► I don't know, it adds up super fast.

01:13:59 ◼   ► It adds up really fast.

01:14:00 ◼   ► I did the math when we were pulling the incomparable off

01:14:02 ◼   ► of 5x5, and I was trying to figure out

01:14:04 ◼   ► whether we would host that on our own server

01:14:06 ◼   ► or whether we wanted to use a CDN for it.

01:14:08 ◼   ► And I did the math, and I was like, wow,

01:14:10 ◼   ► that's a lot of data, just on a regular episode

01:14:12 ◼   ► of a moderately popular podcast.

01:14:14 ◼   ► It's a, just in five years ago terms,

01:14:18 ◼   ► an impossible amount of data.

01:14:20 ◼   ► - And cost aside, it wasn't even something

01:14:23 ◼   ► people would tolerate when they were connecting

01:14:26 ◼   ► with very slow connections.

01:14:27 ◼   ► They might think, I'd like to listen to that,

01:14:29 ◼   ► but Jesus, it's gonna take all night to download.

01:14:31 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, I remember those days of like,

01:14:33 ◼   ► leave the Mac on downloading podcasts and iTunes

01:14:36 ◼   ► 'cause it's gonna take forever.

01:14:38 ◼   ► - All right, but you really,

01:14:39 ◼   ► you need to understand stuff like that.

01:14:41 ◼   ► You need to know that if you're gonna do video,

01:14:43 ◼   ► you're probably gonna have to host it YouTube

01:14:44 ◼   ► or something like that just because that way

01:14:46 ◼   ► you don't have to pay the bill.

01:14:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, and you better know what the terms are

01:14:50 ◼   ► for YouTube then and you know,

01:14:51 ◼   ► are you gonna use YouTube's ads

01:14:53 ◼   ► and what percentage do you get and is that gonna,

01:14:55 ◼   ► you know, then how many people do you need to get

01:14:57 ◼   ► is viewing each video for you to be able

01:14:59 ◼   ► to make a living doing that.

01:15:00 ◼   ► - Right, yeah, you know, it's not too complicated

01:15:03 ◼   ► but you've got to, there's all these abstractions

01:15:07 ◼   ► where you can just pretend that these things don't exist

01:15:09 ◼   ► and you don't have to worry about them.

01:15:11 ◼   ► It doesn't work like that.

01:15:12 ◼   ► Let me take a break, good time to take a break and thank another long time friend of the

01:15:17 ◼   ► show, our good friends at Squarespace.

01:15:21 ◼   ► You guys know Squarespace.

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01:15:34 ◼   ► What type of website?

01:15:35 ◼   ► Something like a blog or do you want to host a podcast?

01:15:38 ◼   ► Squarespace can handle the audio too.

01:15:40 ◼   ► That's another cost effective way.

01:15:41 ◼   ► Yes, absolutely. You could do a blog, you can do a podcast at Squarespace. But what

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01:16:59 ◼   ► did in a text editor through FTP and you had to know HTML and browsing was

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01:18:50 ◼   ► What else is going on?

01:18:51 ◼   ► I don't know. I mean the funny thing about this time of year is it's pretty quiet. And

01:18:58 ◼   ► talking about going out on my own, we used to have like a whole staff who would come

01:19:01 ◼   ► up with ideas of like stuff you could write that you could put in the system and just

01:19:06 ◼   ► sort of have it play out over the last two weeks of the year when nothing was going on.

01:19:10 ◼   ► And doing this myself, I'm like, "Oh yeah, I should probably put something--I should

01:19:13 ◼   ► probably write something today because there's nothing going on." But it's difficult because

01:19:16 ◼   ► there's really, you know, there's nothing going on. So you end up writing lots of, "Hey,

01:19:21 ◼   ► Let's look back at 2014 and what did we learn and what are my favorite things and I don't

01:19:26 ◼   ► know it's a tough time of year because there isn't a lot of tech stuff going on.

01:19:32 ◼   ► I've used it in the past this year I've just been busy it's just been a crazy busy holiday

01:19:36 ◼   ► thing with family and stuff.

01:19:38 ◼   ► A lot of times I use this the low period to write something that it might take a long

01:19:45 ◼   ► time and therefore you know like if I have a big thought piece on you know

01:19:49 ◼   ► where I what we know about the Apple watch now two or three months later I

01:19:55 ◼   ► wish I had more time for that maybe in this coming week I will but I have idea

01:19:59 ◼   ► but something like that where it's not has nothing to do with what's new or

01:20:03 ◼   ► news but just take advantage of the fact that there isn't any news to really

01:20:08 ◼   ► focus on and write it something like that right yeah I that's one of the

01:20:13 ◼   ► things that I've been grappling with and doing the site is how do you balance writing, you

01:20:19 ◼   ► know, being a one-person operation, right? If you're busy writing a deep think piece

01:20:23 ◼   ► about something that's going to go on for a thousand words, you're not writing things

01:20:27 ◼   ► to post on the site today. And I feel like with a less established site like mine, I

01:20:31 ◼   ► definitely feel pressure to keep the lights on every day and try to balance those things.

01:20:36 ◼   ► And you know, you have a different pace. You can post some links and then you put out a

01:20:41 ◼   ► bigger piece every so often and I like your pace but I don't feel like I can do that right now.

01:20:48 ◼   ► I feel like I need to keep the heartbeat a little stronger because I'm trying to establish myself

01:20:52 ◼   ► and pick up an audience that I may not have, you know, have captured yet. But then I end up in this

01:21:00 ◼   ► situation where it's like, wow, it's going to take me three days to write. Like the review of the

01:21:04 ◼   ► retina iMac was an example where it took me like two or three days to write that and one of my

01:21:08 ◼   ► challenges was always should I keep writing this now or should I stop and

01:21:14 ◼   ► find something short to write and post to the site just to let people know I'm

01:21:17 ◼   ► still alive while I'm also writing this longer piece and trying to find that

01:21:21 ◼   ► balance is tricky. It's one of the, again, not being on a team anymore and

01:21:26 ◼   ► being just myself I've learned the powerful lesson of how little one person

01:21:31 ◼   ► is capable of producing versus a staff. Then every once in a while though I

01:21:36 ◼   ► I surprise myself and I'm like, "Holy crap, I got a lot done in the last--a lot published

01:21:40 ◼   ► in the last 24 hours." Like, not just like stuff that I'd been working on for a long

01:21:44 ◼   ► time and happened to finish, I would just be like, "Wow, I got like eight links and

01:21:50 ◼   ► a full article all done in the last day. Why can't I do this every day?"

01:21:53 ◼   ► Well, I think part of it is energy and part of it is that that stuff doesn't always happen

01:21:59 ◼   ► like that, right? I mean, there are days--I know exactly what you're talking about and

01:22:02 ◼   ► maybe I didn't recognize them as much before as I do now, but there are those days where

01:22:05 ◼   ► oh my god there's like five great links and there's like three articles I could

01:22:10 ◼   ► write about things that happen today and those are wonderful days and and maybe

01:22:13 ◼   ► you defer a couple of those articles to later in the week and you just keep on

01:22:17 ◼   ► writing about it and then there are other times when it's just like wow what

01:22:20 ◼   ► is happening nothing is happening and and you know CES is gonna happen next

01:22:26 ◼   ► week I think yeah and there's always something interesting to write about

01:22:30 ◼   ► there even if it's sort of the anti-CES I'm very happy to not be going to CES

01:22:35 ◼   ► this year. But so that you know things the news cycle will will spin up again

01:22:40 ◼   ► but you're right it is kind of nice to have that ability to either spend time

01:22:44 ◼   ► with family or reflect a little bit or work on a longer-term project and you

01:22:48 ◼   ► know I've been thinking about that too but the with travel it becomes a lot

01:22:51 ◼   ► harder to to find the time to do that stuff when you're when you're traveling

01:22:56 ◼   ► or with family and all that. Yeah do you have the I know I don't know did I don't

01:23:02 ◼   ► I don't know if you've ever, I happen to know that Six Colors is running on movable type.

01:23:06 ◼   ► Yes.

01:23:07 ◼   ► I've been reading and read a post about that at some point.

01:23:10 ◼   ► Just like kind of come out of the closet and be like yes.

01:23:13 ◼   ► It might be the last new major site to launch on movable type.

01:23:18 ◼   ► It's possible.

01:23:19 ◼   ► I heard from the people who were doing the current version of movable type because I'm

01:23:21 ◼   ► using movable type four which I think maybe you're using.

01:23:25 ◼   ► Yes definitely.

01:23:26 ◼   ► The last, I mean the joke would be the last good version.

01:23:29 ◼   ► That's what a lot of it, because five was not so good.

01:23:32 ◼   ► I heard from the people who are the current support license people for movable type and

01:23:36 ◼   ► they're like, you know, we want to talk, maybe we can give you a license and we can use you

01:23:40 ◼   ► as an example.

01:23:41 ◼   ► And on one level I was like, oh, that's interesting.

01:23:43 ◼   ► But then I also was kind of thinking, I'm not sure they added anything that I would

01:23:46 ◼   ► actually want.

01:23:48 ◼   ► And I'm fortunate to have my friend Greg Noss is like savant with Pearl for one and movable

01:23:54 ◼   ► type for two.

01:23:56 ◼   ► And so in a way I've got an off the shelf, you know, CMS from five years ago or eight

01:24:00 ◼   ► years ago and a guy who can customize it to do whatever and so that's pretty good

01:24:05 ◼   ► and I threw out all their templates I didn't use any of their templates when I

01:24:07 ◼   ► built the site templates it's all original templates but you know

01:24:12 ◼   ► sometimes it's just go with what you know and all the movable type is old and

01:24:16 ◼   ► weird I also know it like I I could have done WordPress but I actually don't know

01:24:21 ◼   ► WordPress I would have to learn a lot about WordPress or Squarespace or

01:24:25 ◼   ► anything that I was doing and I thought I've already got the server here it's

01:24:28 ◼   ► already running movable type for some other projects why not just do that I

01:24:33 ◼   ► can do that without learning anything about the CMS and I can just focus on

01:24:37 ◼   ► the content and getting the templates live and when I was launching a site in

01:24:40 ◼   ► a week that seemed like a good idea so you know it's fine. Do you have the

01:24:44 ◼   ► IMT plugin that gives you like a posting interface from the iPhone? Oh I

01:24:52 ◼   ► don't think I do. See that to me is the game changer and I don't know and I know

01:24:58 ◼   ► I know that WordPress has like a pretty good, maybe even better iPhone optimized interface.

01:25:06 ◼   ► I forget who else wrote IMT.

01:25:08 ◼   ► I know Brad Choate, C-H-O-A-T-E, who was a long time Six Apart employee wrote the plug-in

01:25:15 ◼   ► originally.

01:25:16 ◼   ► It goes back to like 2008.

01:25:17 ◼   ► I mean it came out or maybe even 2007.

01:25:19 ◼   ► It came out very early.

01:25:23 ◼   ► It doesn't give you all of movable type.

01:25:24 ◼   ► It only gives you, just pick a blog, either make a new entry or edit an existing entry

01:25:31 ◼   ► and then when you open an entry it's just, you know, here's the fields that you show.

01:25:37 ◼   ► So I hacked mine a little bit just to make it a little bit more specific to how I use

01:25:41 ◼   ► the fields.

01:25:42 ◼   ► But…

01:25:43 ◼   ► Yeah, well that's what I did with, like Greg wrote a plug-in that does audio processing

01:25:49 ◼   ► because doing podcasts in movable type is problematic because movable type doesn't

01:25:53 ◼   ► like what the byte count is and you're supposed to put that in the RSS feed the

01:25:57 ◼   ► length and the byte count of the file you're linking to and so he just wrote a

01:26:00 ◼   ► plug-in for me that that does that and that means I can keep using it is a

01:26:05 ◼   ► little bit like you know an IT person saying I know that there have been five

01:26:09 ◼   ► versions of Adobe Photoshop that have come out but we're just going to stay on

01:26:13 ◼   ► you know version 3 because it works for us and we're okay right it's a little

01:26:18 ◼   ► like that being on this old CMS but it works fine and if at the point that it

01:26:22 ◼   ► It doesn't work fine.

01:26:23 ◼   ► It's got a perfectly reasonable database format,

01:26:25 ◼   ► and I could migrate it somewhere else.

01:26:27 ◼   ► But like I said, knowing somebody

01:26:29 ◼   ► who can write a movable type plug-in in a few hours

01:26:34 ◼   ► to solve a problem helps a lot.

01:26:36 ◼   ► I could do anything with six colors, though.

01:26:38 ◼   ► It's so simple.

01:26:39 ◼   ► The incomparable is much crazier.

01:26:40 ◼   ► It's in movable type, but it's got multiple blogs,

01:26:42 ◼   ► and they're all related to each other.

01:26:44 ◼   ► So it's like a relational database.

01:26:45 ◼   ► Yeah, right.

01:26:46 ◼   ► Well, the incomparable is no longer one thing.

01:26:48 ◼   ► Right, right, because it's multiple podcasts.

01:26:50 ◼   ► So we've got a podcast blog and an episodes blog

01:26:54 ◼   ► and they interrelate and that's how you can generate

01:26:56 ◼   ► multiple podcast feeds and a master list and a master feed.

01:27:00 ◼   ► And all of that is actually a bunch of movable type things.

01:27:03 ◼   ► That's a totally crazy thing, but it works.

01:27:06 ◼   ► And we built it because there was just things

01:27:10 ◼   ► that the Dan Benjamin CMS didn't offer.

01:27:13 ◼   ► And they were not things Dan should ever have built

01:27:16 ◼   ► because his other shows would never use them.

01:27:19 ◼   ► But for like, I want an index so that people can find out that we talked about Raiders

01:27:23 ◼   ► of the Lost Ark in like episode 8 or something.

01:27:26 ◼   ► And they can go to a page and scroll down to Raiders of the Lost Ark and there's a link

01:27:30 ◼   ► to the podcast where we talked about it.

01:27:32 ◼   ► And Dan's site was never going to do that, and that's not his fault, it's just it didn't

01:27:36 ◼   ► make sense for him, but I wanted those features.

01:27:38 ◼   ► So we built this crazy thing in movable type.

01:27:41 ◼   ► And you know, it's crazy, but it works pretty well.

01:27:45 ◼   ► And once I had that up and running, it was really easy to just add the Six Colors blog

01:27:51 ◼   ► on to movable type too, because I was already wrangling it and Greg already knew it, and

01:27:55 ◼   ► so we decided to do that too.

01:27:57 ◼   ► The nice thing about movable type is, you know, its template language is fairly simple,

01:28:00 ◼   ► but it's pretty robust, and it's rendering static pages, which means you're not going

01:28:07 ◼   ► to get fireballed, which is nice too.

01:28:09 ◼   ► Well, everybody renders static pages.

01:28:12 ◼   ► just a question of whether they're rendering them immediately or whether

01:28:16 ◼   ► they're calling it caching. Well that's true, that's true, and caching with

01:28:20 ◼   ► WordPress has gotten a lot better, which is good, and I've used

01:28:23 ◼   ► WordPress, it's just I'm not comfortable with it. It's interesting to see stuff

01:28:29 ◼   ► like this is in some cases is a nerd litmus test a little bit, right? It's like

01:28:34 ◼   ► oh what blog platform do you use and and there's some immovable type is not cool

01:28:38 ◼   ► It's old and weird, but right tool for the job, you know, right tool for the job.

01:28:44 ◼   ► And I'm a big believer in that, that I shouldn't have to spend a week getting up to speed in

01:28:48 ◼   ► a platform that's going to let me do exactly what I was going to do on the thing that I

01:28:52 ◼   ► already know.

01:28:53 ◼   ► And if I had to jump, I would.

01:28:54 ◼   ► In fact, when I'm thinking about doing like site registrations or something for the website,

01:29:01 ◼   ► that one option I have to do like a membership, a voluntary membership for Six Colors, there's

01:29:07 ◼   ► a WordPress plugin that does a good job with that.

01:29:10 ◼   ► I think that's what Ben Thompson's using.

01:29:13 ◼   ► It might be and it's what Sean Blanc is using.

01:29:15 ◼   ► Or if not, he's customized.

01:29:16 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:29:17 ◼   ► But Sean Blanc I know told me about it.

01:29:19 ◼   ► And you know, if I want to use that tool, I can just set up a WordPress instance too

01:29:25 ◼   ► and use that for that and not for the rest of it and just have them interconnect.

01:29:29 ◼   ► And I can do that too.

01:29:30 ◼   ► It's not, you know, it's not necessarily bad to do stuff like that, but it does make me

01:29:35 ◼   ► feel not cool when I get.

01:29:37 ◼   ► I got an email the other day from somebody who was like, "I see this feature on your

01:29:41 ◼   ► blog and I would like to implement that.

01:29:43 ◼   ► I assume you use WordPress like I do.

01:29:45 ◼   ► How did you do it?"

01:29:46 ◼   ► I'm like, "Oh, okay.

01:29:47 ◼   ► Bad news.

01:29:48 ◼   ► Not using WordPress."

01:29:49 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:29:50 ◼   ► I've gotten that over the years too with the combined posts thing.

01:29:54 ◼   ► Although you can definitely do it in WordPress, but you would have to do it in a different

01:29:58 ◼   ► way.

01:29:59 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:30:00 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:30:01 ◼   ► And again, I don't know how you'd do it in WordPress, but I know exactly how you'd do

01:30:02 ◼   ► it in movable type.

01:30:03 ◼   ► So especially for just wanting to get it up soon, it made a lot of sense to do that.

01:30:10 ◼   ► I kind of like movable type.

01:30:12 ◼   ► It's funky and weird, but I had an argument with somebody where they were talking about

01:30:16 ◼   ► what real markdown was.

01:30:18 ◼   ► I mean, don't get me started, don't get you started, but I had a moment where I said,

01:30:22 ◼   ► you know, I still consider markdown.pl the definitive markdown, and they very, I think,

01:30:27 ◼   ► thought they were being very smart.

01:30:29 ◼   ► They said, yeah, but you don't actually, you know, how much of what you do actually gets

01:30:32 ◼   ► processed by markdown.pl and I said all of it because either I run it in a

01:30:37 ◼   ► script in bbedit and it outputs HTML and I paste that in somewhere or I'm using

01:30:42 ◼   ► movable type which is using the markdown.pl on the fly to convert those to HTML

01:30:47 ◼   ► so I'm you know it has that advantage too. Even my the markdown dingus at

01:30:53 ◼   ► daring fireball which is an extremely popular thing I mean I had thousands of

01:30:59 ◼   ► There the number of people who use that web page every day is

01:31:03 ◼   ► Greater than I think the daily readership of daring fireball when I went full-time

01:31:07 ◼   ► It's it's that popular

01:31:10 ◼   ► It's just a little PHP form or you can enter some markdown hit a button and then it gives you the output beneath which you

01:31:16 ◼   ► Can then copy and paste elsewhere?

01:31:18 ◼   ► Which I originally wrote just for people I didn't think people would actually use it as a as a tool tool

01:31:24 ◼   ► I thought it was just like if you're learning this if you're reading about this and you want to learn

01:31:28 ◼   ► Type something here, and then you can see the output here

01:31:32 ◼   ► And there's no better way to learn then you know you can see that you put

01:31:36 ◼   ► Asterisks around the word and then in the output it puts em tags around the word

01:31:40 ◼   ► But people use it on a daily basis. Just like oh, I want to convert

01:31:45 ◼   ► I need to get some I need to have this in HTML

01:31:47 ◼   ► I'll quick - it out here hit the button and copy and paste it and I have so anyway

01:31:51 ◼   ► That's great, but it's a little form written in PHP, but behind the scenes it still calls out to the pearl verse

01:31:57 ◼   ► And it sounds, when I did that, I thought, well that's never going to scale.

01:32:04 ◼   ► Like if this page gets popular, it's got to be slow.

01:32:07 ◼   ► But it's not.

01:32:08 ◼   ► It's because the whole thing is so stupid simple that even if it's a PHP script that

01:32:13 ◼   ► calls out to the Unix shell and runs a Perl script on the text file and then puts the

01:32:16 ◼   ► input back in, it all takes place in a fraction of a second.

01:32:19 ◼   ► You're waiting longer for the network than you are for my server to do that.

01:32:25 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:32:26 ◼   ► - It's amazing how far we've come.

01:32:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, 'cause I remember when running a Perl script

01:32:30 ◼   ► was actually like, you know,

01:32:32 ◼   ► - Stop the presses. - Kinda slow.

01:32:33 ◼   ► Right, it was like, should I write this in C

01:32:36 ◼   ► or should I just write like a Perl script

01:32:39 ◼   ► and it's like, well, it'll take a second or two

01:32:41 ◼   ► for Perl to fire up, but you know what,

01:32:42 ◼   ► I don't, it's so much easier, I'll just do it.

01:32:47 ◼   ► I wanna take a break, and this isn't even a sponsor break,

01:32:49 ◼   ► I wanna circle back half an hour.

01:32:52 ◼   ► the research department, the award-winning research department here at the talk show,

01:32:57 ◼   ► has found the white paper that I was talking about. It's by Wilfredo Sanchez. I cannot

01:33:03 ◼   ► believe I forgot Fred's name because I've even had drinks with him at WWDC. Great guy.

01:33:10 ◼   ► It's a USENEX 2000 presentation. So this is from the year 2000. The challenges of integrating

01:33:18 ◼   ► the Unix and Mac OS environments. And I will put it in the show notes guaranteed. It is,

01:33:24 ◼   ► I swear it sounds very dry, but it is a terrific read if you have any technical interest in

01:33:31 ◼   ► this sort of thing like, well, how do you square the circle of having a classic Mac

01:33:35 ◼   ► OS with colon separators and Unix with slash separators and other issues too like the fact

01:33:41 ◼   ► that the Unix file system didn't have file IDs and the Mac had aliases and didn't have

01:33:46 ◼   ► have Simlinks and Unix didn't have aliases and did have Simlinks and etc.

01:33:51 ◼   ► How did they make it all work?

01:33:54 ◼   ► It is a wonderfully well, you know, it's typical just for someone who would be a great engineer

01:33:58 ◼   ► at Apple.

01:33:59 ◼   ► It is, it's written in very, very clear language.

01:34:02 ◼   ► So I will put it in the show notes.

01:34:04 ◼   ► I don't want to forget that.

01:34:06 ◼   ► And my apologies to anybody out there who's listening who remembered that Fred Sanchez

01:34:14 ◼   ► wrote that paper and for the last 45 minutes has been writing email while they listen to

01:34:19 ◼   ► us continue on this show.

01:34:20 ◼   ► Tim Cynova Isn't that great when you get the Twitter

01:34:22 ◼   ► feedback that's like, "Oh, you can't – the answer is this," and you're like, "Just

01:34:25 ◼   ► keep listening.

01:34:26 ◼   ► We got it."

01:34:27 ◼   ► So my apologies to them.

01:34:29 ◼   ► Tim Cynova I know where you are in the show right now.

01:34:32 ◼   ► Your patience will be rewarded.

01:34:33 ◼   ► Just keep on listening.

01:34:35 ◼   ► Tim Cynova You had another – oh, you know what?

01:34:39 ◼   ► Let's talk about the interview Sony thing.

01:34:41 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, that is something that was going on over over Christmas right this whole thing

01:34:48 ◼   ► where

01:34:51 ◼   ► Sony Entertainment got hacked by somebody

01:34:54 ◼   ► Many people including the US government believe either by the North Korean government or by a group sponsored by the North Korean government, right?

01:35:02 ◼   ► Perhaps in protest of this movie Seth Rogen

01:35:08 ◼   ► James Franco or as

01:35:11 ◼   ► President Obama called him James Flacco.

01:35:13 ◼   ► James Flacco, yeah.

01:35:15 ◼   ► What's the story? He was conflating him with the Ravens quarterback, right?

01:35:19 ◼   ► Yeah, Joe Flacco, right.

01:35:20 ◼   ► Joey Flacco.

01:35:21 ◼   ► You know, a movie that is about a comedy about them assassinating North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

01:35:32 ◼   ► Right, they're asked by the CIA to assassinate him.

01:35:36 ◼   ► him. Yeah and then they got hacked and all this embarrassing stuff came out and

01:35:43 ◼   ► then they got threatened there were threats whether they were real or

01:35:48 ◼   ► imagined that any theater it was supposed to come out on Christmas Day I

01:35:51 ◼   ► guess and any there were threats that any theater that showed it was going to

01:35:54 ◼   ► you know perhaps suffer some kind of terrorist attack. I think they said there

01:35:58 ◼   ► would be another 9/11 at movie theaters near you. Yeah right which it doesn't

01:36:03 ◼   ► seem like seems implausible yeah yeah you're gonna fly how many airplanes into

01:36:08 ◼   ► the movie theaters but anyway theaters decided I think I I think it was a

01:36:16 ◼   ► mistake but I think they made a simple economic decision which was well

01:36:20 ◼   ► Christmas is a huge time for movies and period this movie in particular wasn't

01:36:24 ◼   ► gonna be a big hit anyway just screw this movie and keep the theaters open

01:36:28 ◼   ► right and then you know next thing you know Sony wanted to release it online

01:36:31 ◼   ► and

01:36:33 ◼   ► they did but iTunes was not among the

01:36:35 ◼   ► Streaming outfits that had it on on day one day, right?

01:36:40 ◼   ► As we record we're recording on

01:36:43 ◼   ► the 29th

01:36:45 ◼   ► 29th it hit iTunes yesterday the 28. Mm-hmm

01:36:48 ◼   ► I

01:36:50 ◼   ► Think that summarizes the situation. Yeah, and there was a there was one weird story that I that

01:36:55 ◼   ► Suggested that Sony had called the White House

01:37:00 ◼   ► asking for help in getting Apple to put it on iTunes,

01:37:05 ◼   ► which I have not seen any corroboration of that,

01:37:07 ◼   ► but that was the one that struck me as like,

01:37:09 ◼   ► that's weird, that's a weird.

01:37:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, that was the New York Times and it was an off,

01:37:14 ◼   ► it was just like in the middle of the article

01:37:16 ◼   ► and it was just sort of offhand.

01:37:18 ◼   ► - I mean, I don't know if that's your call to switchboard

01:37:19 ◼   ► and you ask for Eddie Q's number

01:37:20 ◼   ► or is that like President Obama,

01:37:22 ◼   ► can you do us a solid and call Tim Cook?

01:37:24 ◼   ► There's a spectrum of what might've happened there.

01:37:28 ◼   ► And it's unclear from that,

01:37:29 ◼   ► There's sort of the implication that they wanted it to be an iTunes exclusive, but Apple

01:37:34 ◼   ► wasn't interested.

01:37:36 ◼   ► And then what ended up happening is that it went up on Christmas Eve on Google Play and

01:37:44 ◼   ► on YouTube for purchase or rental and Xbox Live.

01:37:53 ◼   ► But not iTunes until the 28th, I guess.

01:37:58 ◼   ► You know, I wrote today, just before we started the show, I gave it my headline of the week

01:38:04 ◼   ► award.

01:38:05 ◼   ► Finally.

01:38:06 ◼   ► What was the...

01:38:08 ◼   ► BGR's headline was Apple...

01:38:10 ◼   ► Oh God, I don't want to get this wrong because it's so classic.

01:38:16 ◼   ► BGR's headline was Apple finally decides to stand up to Sony Hackers releases the interview

01:38:22 ◼   ► on iTunes.

01:38:23 ◼   ► Oh man.

01:38:26 ◼   ► So whether it's true or not, I've got nobody on the record, but speaking to some people

01:38:32 ◼   ► at Apple, nobody directly involved at iTunes, but people who know people who are involved

01:38:36 ◼   ► at iTunes, the story I've heard, and it makes sense, because for example, if you're a developer,

01:38:40 ◼   ► this is public knowledge, iTunes Connect closes around the 22nd or 23rd, and they even say,

01:38:47 ◼   ► you go to the iTunes Connect site, they say iTunes Connect is closed until December 28th.

01:38:51 ◼   ► They close a couple days before Christmas,

01:38:54 ◼   ► and they don't open until a couple days afterwards,

01:38:58 ◼   ► and that's it.

01:38:59 ◼   ► Like whatever you want, if you're a developer,

01:39:01 ◼   ► if you wanna get a bug fix in,

01:39:03 ◼   ► you've gotta get it in before they close,

01:39:04 ◼   ► and otherwise you're gonna wait about a week

01:39:06 ◼   ► because they wanna give people time off.

01:39:09 ◼   ► So my understanding, I think that what happened was Apple,

01:39:12 ◼   ► and the New York Times article kinda hinted at this.

01:39:14 ◼   ► Not that Apple wasn't interested,

01:39:16 ◼   ► but they weren't interested in doing it on Sony's timetable.

01:39:19 ◼   ► that it was, this was like the blackout period for iTunes.

01:39:23 ◼   ► And it's not easy, like this stuff is non-trivial.

01:39:27 ◼   ► Like to have all these movies streaming around the world,

01:39:31 ◼   ► it takes a while for them to propagate around to the CDNs,

01:39:35 ◼   ► the content delivery networks that Apple uses.

01:39:38 ◼   ► And again, in theory,

01:39:41 ◼   ► if they wanted to get it up on Christmas,

01:39:43 ◼   ► I'm sure they could have,

01:39:44 ◼   ► but I think they would have had to call people back

01:39:45 ◼   ► vacation and you know make all sorts of exceptions and I just think Apple's

01:39:50 ◼   ► decision was this is not our problem you know yeah we have the movie if we get

01:39:55 ◼   ► the movie three days from now so what yeah I think they might have said it's

01:39:58 ◼   ► not gonna be the bigger thing I don't know I look at the I look at how this

01:40:02 ◼   ► story had gone and kind of think that somebody at Apple probably should have

01:40:06 ◼   ► said let's be prepared to slide this thing up on Christmas Day just because

01:40:12 ◼   ► that may be how this goes. I think it was clear a while ago people were talking

01:40:16 ◼   ► about maybe they would just make it available video on demand and I know

01:40:21 ◼   ► that that's probably telling an employee or two at Apple that they

01:40:25 ◼   ► need to come to work or be on call to come to work over the

01:40:29 ◼   ► holiday and that sucks but at the same time you know although that headline is

01:40:34 ◼   ► ridiculous I do feel like there was a chance here for Apple to just kind of be

01:40:39 ◼   ► part of the story and instead the story was "Oh, Apple doesn't have it, that's weird."

01:40:45 ◼   ► And I don't know, I mean if they're in the business of working with the studios to get

01:40:47 ◼   ► this stuff up wouldn't you want to be seen as being on the forefront of this and being

01:40:51 ◼   ► flexible enough to get it up and I kind of feel like what was revealed is that Apple's

01:40:55 ◼   ► systems are a little bit rickety and they were running a skeleton crew and so they just

01:41:01 ◼   ► couldn't get it up in time for the timing of it which is kind of weird although if you've

01:41:05 ◼   ► used iTunes connect it's not unreasonable to think that that's a

01:41:09 ◼   ► weird you know back-end system that regular people never have to see but

01:41:14 ◼   ► yeah it's not a big deal but it is a little surprising that it shouldn't

01:41:17 ◼   ► Apple be at the forefront of this stuff and be like sure we can put that up no

01:41:20 ◼   ► problem yeah I do I do kind of feel that aside you know and again who knows what

01:41:24 ◼   ► the actual capabilities are I don't know for sure but I do think that it might be

01:41:28 ◼   ► true that Apple's back-end system for this stuff is less nimble than you know

01:41:34 ◼   ► And you know, no surprise that Google might be a lot more nimble in this regard. Yeah. Yeah that they can do something quicker

01:41:40 ◼   ► They can pull something put it up quicker and have it propagate and stream around the world quicker than Apple can

01:41:47 ◼   ► Were they mean Apple Apple still the company that when they make changes to the store has to take the store down for an hour

01:41:52 ◼   ► Or two. Yeah, exactly

01:41:54 ◼   ► Exactly. Yeah

01:41:55 ◼   ► I just think that's that's part of the story and they've gotten better at it also used to be that they would be like TV

01:41:59 ◼   ► shows that would come out and it was like supposed to be released on midnight

01:42:03 ◼   ► after the after the show aired or something like that and then on iTunes

01:42:07 ◼   ► it would always be like sometime the next day or maybe the day after and I

01:42:11 ◼   ► never knew whether that meant that somebody at the TV studio just didn't

01:42:14 ◼   ► get the file to them in time or whether it was like literally there's a lag in

01:42:19 ◼   ► iTunes Connect for content and you know the systems are slow or the approval is

01:42:23 ◼   ► slow and that stuff gets gets delayed and they seem to be better at that now

01:42:28 ◼   ► too but it's possible I don't know it's also possible that Google and Microsoft

01:42:32 ◼   ► and whoever else posted this thing had no problem telling their staff to work

01:42:38 ◼   ► on Christmas and maybe they maybe they had that plan and Apple has this kind of

01:42:41 ◼   ► corporate culture of dismissing everybody for that period of time and

01:42:46 ◼   ► you know maybe that's that played into this too I don't know it's not really

01:42:51 ◼   ► anybody though right I mean it can't really be everybody because you know on

01:42:55 ◼   ► Christmas morning when everybody's launching new iPods or iPads and iPhones.

01:42:59 ◼   ► Somebody's got to be there.

01:43:00 ◼   ► There are always people on call.

01:43:02 ◼   ► So that's the part that just, I don't know, maybe they just didn't think it was that big

01:43:05 ◼   ► a deal and that it was, that they didn't need to be there.

01:43:09 ◼   ► It's just, it's funny, in the end when the president is talking about it in his news

01:43:11 ◼   ► conference it's probably a big enough deal to pay attention to it, I think, if you're

01:43:15 ◼   ► Apple.

01:43:16 ◼   ► Just to not be, even if you're not going to be the only exclusive provider of it, to not

01:43:19 ◼   ► be the one major player who's not providing it.

01:43:23 ◼   ► I'm not saying they were afraid or anything that it's a lot of stupidity and in those statements

01:43:26 ◼   ► But I'm just saying for PR purposes alone. Don't you want to be not seen as being a step behind?

01:43:31 ◼   ► Microsoft and Google Play

01:43:34 ◼   ► yeah, I totally agree with that and and though the movie is a

01:43:39 ◼   ► Silly stupid comedy and not like a serious political statement

01:43:44 ◼   ► Which you know what?

01:43:45 ◼   ► I think if it had been if it had been some kind of like documentary on North Korea that had

01:43:52 ◼   ► You know sparked the hack and public need to see this movie

01:43:57 ◼   ► Right that I bet I wouldn't be surprised if Apple had made the exception then but I feel like it almost doesn't matter like

01:44:05 ◼   ► And I actually did rent the movie. Have you rented it now? It was really bad

01:44:10 ◼   ► Yeah, that's what I've heard

01:44:11 ◼   ► I mean I did not I don't know guys that they're best but at their worst seems like not a not a best showing for them

01:44:17 ◼   ► No, there are very few movies that even even though I'm like halfway through and like wow

01:44:22 ◼   ► I regret running this but I'll stick it through to the end that this one I did not make it

01:44:27 ◼   ► Like my wife and I just looked each other's like let's just go to bed. Let's go sleep

01:44:30 ◼   ► Because otherwise, I think I'm gonna fall asleep down here in front of this thing. It was not funny, but I still feel like you know

01:44:38 ◼   ► We can't have our movies being held to the whims of you know anonymous nutjob hackers. Yeah

01:44:46 ◼   ► Oh, yeah, totally got it. You got to stick to your guns and I kind of feel like

01:44:50 ◼   ► So as stupid as the movie itself actually is I kind of feel like it really was an exceptional situation that warranted probably

01:44:58 ◼   ► Exceptional and you know an exception from Apple from what they would typically do, right?

01:45:04 ◼   ► You know, it wasn't just like Sony had called them up and they're like we had this movie from the summer and

01:45:13 ◼   ► We've got it scheduled to come up with you guys on January 2nd

01:45:16 ◼   ► But you know what?

01:45:17 ◼   ► It's like can we do it like a week early and maybe get it up on Christmas and Apple's like no you guys you know

01:45:22 ◼   ► Before you know your chance to do that was last week

01:45:25 ◼   ► It's coming up on January 2nd. This was not just like a regular situation

01:45:30 ◼   ► Like you said the president United States is talking about right, right?

01:45:33 ◼   ► I mean, I'm glad that it ended up back in theaters and it sounds like it was the theater chains

01:45:37 ◼   ► We're like we're afraid we don't want to scare people away from the other movies

01:45:40 ◼   ► so we're just gonna punt it. And I'm glad that that some theaters finally showed it,

01:45:45 ◼   ► and I'm glad that it was on VOD and that people could watch it. And yeah, it's a shame in a way

01:45:50 ◼   ► that this isn't over a more serious, thoughtful piece of work instead of a kind of stoner road

01:45:57 ◼   ► comedy. But, you know, I like Franco and Rogan. I mean, I like from all the way back in Freaks

01:46:02 ◼   ► and Geeks days, actually. And the fact that Seth Rogan is a guy who headlines movies is totally

01:46:09 ◼   ► crazy for me because I mean look at that guy he's not a movie star and yet he is a movie star I love

01:46:14 ◼   ► that and he's a writer who has become you know he was primarily a writer who has become more of an

01:46:19 ◼   ► actor now I have lots of positive thoughts about those guys even if their movie is kind of sucky

01:46:23 ◼   ► I'm glad that it got out there and yeah yeah you would think I don't know you would think somebody

01:46:30 ◼   ► that would be like yeah guys I think we need to do this and and I think perhaps that did happen

01:46:35 ◼   ► eventually after the fact where maybe on Christmas Day somebody was like, "Why are we not out

01:46:40 ◼   ► there with this?"

01:46:41 ◼   ► And so now we see it, you know, because it went on iTunes faster than I thought once

01:46:46 ◼   ► it didn't go on iTunes on the day of release.

01:46:48 ◼   ► I thought, "That's going to lag behind and they're going to come up and turn all the

01:46:51 ◼   ► lights back on and then they're going to put it out there."

01:46:54 ◼   ► It got up there faster than I thought after they passed by the initial drop date.

01:46:59 ◼   ► Now, it was exactly -- I would say it was exactly what I expected.

01:47:03 ◼   ► I read between the lines and my guess was all they said was we're not gonna do this

01:47:09 ◼   ► We're not gonna get this up by Christmas. Oh, that's it

01:47:11 ◼   ► We'll get it in you know, somebody will come back in on Friday or Monday and push the button. Yeah

01:47:15 ◼   ► We'll make it. Yeah. Yeah stupid movie cannot

01:47:19 ◼   ► Really not I really cannot an incident. Yeah an international incident

01:47:24 ◼   ► propelled by a

01:47:27 ◼   ► Stoner Road comedy. It's amazing. This is amazing

01:47:32 ◼   ► world we live in. Alright, let me take a break and thank our third and final sponsor of the

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01:50:57 ◼   ► - I have 16 domains at Hover.

01:50:59 ◼   ► I may have a problem, but I do.

01:51:02 ◼   ► - And count.

01:51:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, and this is where I put all the,

01:51:04 ◼   ► when I got six colors, that's where I put it.

01:51:07 ◼   ► - Yeah, see, I was about to say I'm gonna repeat myself,

01:51:09 ◼   ► but it must have been something I told you in person,

01:51:11 ◼   ► because you haven't been on the show.

01:51:13 ◼   ► I think Six Colors is such a great name.

01:51:16 ◼   ► - Thanks.

01:51:17 ◼   ► - When you came out with that, you didn't ask me,

01:51:19 ◼   ► you didn't say, "Hey John, what do you think of the name?"

01:51:21 ◼   ► My feelings were a little hurt.

01:51:23 ◼   ► I think it was 'cause you knew you had a home run.

01:51:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, well that was, I mean,

01:51:26 ◼   ► I expected a lot more hand wringing and difficulty.

01:51:29 ◼   ► Honestly, I did some brainstorming

01:51:32 ◼   ► when I decided I was gonna do this site.

01:51:35 ◼   ► And I thought, I don't want it to be iSomething

01:51:38 ◼   ► or Mac something.

01:51:39 ◼   ► I'd already spent years dealing with a brand name

01:51:42 ◼   ► with Mac in it that was talking about iOS and I also wanted the freedom to

01:51:45 ◼   ► talk about other tech stuff that's not Apple related at all but I also didn't

01:51:48 ◼   ► want it to be just completely divorced I wanted I wanted to mean something to me

01:51:51 ◼   ► completely divorced from Apple I was like well if I can tip my cap at Apple

01:51:55 ◼   ► somehow and yet have it not be necessary to understanding just have it be an easy

01:51:59 ◼   ► to scan site. Site name that that was what I was looking for and I also wanted

01:52:04 ◼   ► to be something that was kind of normal words and spellable and a dot-com those

01:52:08 ◼   ► Those were sort of all my rules because I did TV.net, which was T-E-E-V-E-E dot net

01:52:13 ◼   ► and there's nothing worse than having to spell it out and then point out it's not a dot com,

01:52:16 ◼   ► it's a dot net.

01:52:18 ◼   ► I wanted it to be simple.

01:52:20 ◼   ► And then that struck me, that classic, it comes from the D interview that Steve Jobs

01:52:26 ◼   ► did with Walt and Kara about when he came back to Apple, wrapping back around to the

01:52:31 ◼   ► beginning of the show in '96, '97, and he was amazed at how many good people were still

01:52:38 ◼   ► there when he thought the company should be just empty because it was in such dire straits.

01:52:42 ◼   ► And the phrase that struck him at the time was, somebody told him, or multiple people

01:52:46 ◼   ► told him, that, you know, "We bleed six colors here," or "I bleed six colors," that the classic

01:52:52 ◼   ► Apple rainbow logo, which was the logo at the time, it's like, it's in my blood.

01:52:55 ◼   ► This is, Apple is part of who I am, and that struck Steve.

01:52:59 ◼   ► It's like, oh yeah, bleeding six colors, that makes sense.

01:53:01 ◼   ► You love Apple like I love Apple, let's make some great stuff.

01:53:03 ◼   ► And I felt like that was, that was it.

01:53:06 ◼   ► like I'm not going to always praise everything Apple does, I'm going to criticize Apple,

01:53:09 ◼   ► I'm going to try to be fair when I write about Apple, and I'm going to write about things

01:53:11 ◼   ► that aren't Apple.

01:53:12 ◼   ► But Apple has defined my career in tech journalism, there's no doubt about it, and it would be

01:53:17 ◼   ► crazy for me not to find a way to reference that.

01:53:21 ◼   ► And so I thought, you know, bleed six, six colors, bleed six colors, you know, let me

01:53:26 ◼   ► look that up.

01:53:27 ◼   ► And I found out that there were no websites called that.

01:53:30 ◼   ► The dot-com domain for it was available, it was owned by somebody, but it was just a site

01:53:35 ◼   ► literally saying make me an offer and I thought oh well it's like and then I

01:53:39 ◼   ► gave it a few days where I just thought maybe maybe not do I want to do this

01:53:43 ◼   ► what do I want to do but I never went to a backup name because I thought well

01:53:48 ◼   ► this is great it doesn't say Mac it doesn't say I it's a dot-com it's

01:53:50 ◼   ► regular English words and so yeah so then I ended up making making those

01:53:56 ◼   ► people an offer and transferring it to hover and I bought six colors with a U

01:53:59 ◼   ► for everybody in Commonwealth countries it redirects to the one without the U.

01:54:03 ◼   ► Does it redirect or does it mirror it? It redirects it and what I want to do at

01:54:08 ◼   ► some point is write a script or something that mirrors it with all of

01:54:12 ◼   ► the words swapped out for their English equivalents but I haven't gotten to that

01:54:16 ◼   ► point yet. Maybe that would be a good addition to smarty pants. Englishify.

01:54:21 ◼   ► Like yeah put a monocle on a top hat on it but yeah so it was I'm glad you like

01:54:27 ◼   ► it I mean I've gotten incredibly positive feedback from it which is which

01:54:30 ◼   ► is great because you never expect positive feedback from anything on the

01:54:32 ◼   ► internet you expect people to grouse about it but I've been

01:54:37 ◼   ► happy to have the people say nice things about it and yeah I'm happy about it.

01:54:42 ◼   ► Like I said I expected this to be a real trial and for me to get something

01:54:46 ◼   ► that was a compromise because you hear those stories like Marco tells a story

01:54:49 ◼   ► about Overcast and how he had all these different ideas and you know things he

01:54:52 ◼   ► couldn't get and things that didn't pass a trademark search or

01:54:56 ◼   ► anything like that and you know for this I was really just looking for a ideally

01:55:00 ◼   ► dot-com domain. I would have taken some others probably if I could have come up

01:55:05 ◼   ► with something clever. But you know this for me was a good fit. It's like if you

01:55:08 ◼   ► get what it's referencing then great. And if you don't it doesn't matter. It's just

01:55:12 ◼   ► a brand. I mean like Daring Fireball is it's a good name. You know it's a

01:55:18 ◼   ► good name. But it's funny though because it's not enough to have a good

01:55:21 ◼   ► name though because well I wonder about that today. Like I know like Jason Fried

01:55:27 ◼   ► At base camp I was gonna say 37 seconds. I still always want to call them 37 seconds

01:55:32 ◼   ► I will for the rest of my life, but he's written about

01:55:35 ◼   ► How domain names don't mean as much anymore and they have base camp calm down, right?

01:55:41 ◼   ► But for I think at least 10 years your base came HQ

01:55:45 ◼   ► HQ everybody who used base camp knows that it was HQ and his thing was look man people just google base camp

01:55:52 ◼   ► You know, and then what you know when they have an account they just start typing B in their auto

01:55:57 ◼   ► you know in their address field and it fills in and