0:00:00People were tweeting me thinking I was drunk on the last show.
0:00:03Oh, because you didn't get a chance to explain in your voice?
0:00:06Because my voice sounded terrible.
0:00:08That's not what you sound like when you're drunk. That's what you sound like when you're sick.
0:00:11Ah, people.
0:00:13People are crazy.
0:00:15Alright, so what are we talking about tonight? I think I know.
0:00:17I mean, I think we have to talk about the Google Reader thing.
0:00:20I think we do. So, let me start by asking, do either of you guys believe in RSS?
0:00:25I presume the answer is a resounding yes.
0:00:27exists whether you believe in it or not, Casey.
0:00:30Wow.
0:00:31Oh, goodness.
0:00:32It's all around us all the time.
0:00:35Just like love.
0:00:36No, I use RSS constantly.
0:00:38A lot of people have always said, "Oh, RSS is dead."
0:00:41I don't use RSS.
0:00:42I guess you could place it with Twitter or whatever.
0:00:45And I think that's true for a lot of people, certainly.
0:00:47But RSS as a technology is fine.
0:00:51It's behind the scenes of quite a lot of things.
0:00:54And a lot of people do use it the way you think of when you say, "Do you use RSS?"
0:00:59A lot of people still do that.
0:01:00And I don't really think that's ever going away because it serves a lot of really good
0:01:06functions.
0:01:07Now the problem with RSS, well, one of the problems with RSS, is that it gives you a
0:01:12really, really easy way to shoot yourself in the foot, which is you subscribe to all
0:01:16the sites that everyone's heard of, all the big, like, 30 posts a day blogs and news sites
0:01:21and everything.
0:01:22So it's very, very easy to reach a point where you're getting like 500 new RSS items per
0:01:28day and you just don't, you can't get to all that.
0:01:32And so it piles up and then it becomes this guilt inbox that you never want to clear.
0:01:37And so I, and then usually that results in you abandoning RSS and just, "Oh, I can't,
0:01:42I can never go back to RSS.
0:01:43Too many unread items."
0:01:44You know, that happens a lot, especially with geeks.
0:01:46And so I can totally see why people move off of RSS when they get to that point.
0:01:53But that doesn't mean that you have to, it doesn't mean it's the only option, and it
0:01:56doesn't mean RSS is dead or dying, it just means you're using it badly.
0:02:00And sure, you know, it's partially the technology's fault for being so easy to misuse, or to use
0:02:08in an unsustainable way for yourself, but that's not to say the entire technology is
0:02:13dead.
0:02:14have the same problem with Twitter, where they follow too many people and they can't
0:02:17keep up with their feed, and so they find ways around it. They skip everything, they
0:02:22scroll to the top, they only look at new stuff, or whatever. You find ways around it.
0:02:26JE: Or they trim their follower counts. Lots of people are saying, "Nobody uses RSS,
0:02:31blah, blah, blah." But obviously in our circles, in the circles we travel in on the
0:02:35net, I think the usage is still pretty widespread. I was looking at—Gruber just tweeted a little
0:02:41before he tweeted his stats on—I mean, he's got this on his own website—but he tweeted
0:02:44the actual log line that you get from the things that—
0:02:46Yeah, and he has like 400,000—
0:02:47—400,000 RSS subscribers. It's like, "Oh, nobody uses RSS." Well, apparently 400,000
0:02:51people at least are using it, because that's just from one site's stats, right? So that's—yeah,
0:02:56we're a tiny group of people, right? But, you know, the circle that we travel in of
0:03:04computer nerds is big enough to sustain a technology, because there's plenty of technologies
0:03:10to be used that nobody else is interested in.
0:03:12I mean, how many people use Xcode?
0:03:14And that's still a viable product,
0:03:15because it has a purpose, right?
0:03:17App.net.
0:03:18Right, well, the app.net remains to be seen.
0:03:20But I mean, we sustained Twitter for a long time,
0:03:23just ourselves before everyone else discovered it.
0:03:25IRC.
0:03:26I don't think the popularity of the technology--
0:03:31it's way past the threshold.
0:03:32It's viable, right?
0:03:33So the only question is, the technology is viable.
0:03:36There's more than enough people who want to use it,
0:03:38more than enough people to sustain
0:03:39market for the usage of that, it's just a question of where do we go from here now
0:03:44that Google came along and pushed everybody out and then took its ball on home.
0:03:49Right. And a lot of people are saying too, "Oh, well, Google said that usage has been
0:03:54declining so it's not worth keeping up." Well, there's a whole lot of businesses that
0:03:59are not worth Google paying attention to at their size, but that a lot of smaller companies
0:04:05can make very good businesses addressing those needs. There's a lot of things Google doesn't
0:04:08do. I mean, certainly you can look at some of their projects and think they do everything,
0:04:13because a lot of this stuff is a major flop. They do a lot of experimentation. But if RSS
0:04:19is now too small for Google to care about, that doesn't mean that it's too small for
0:04:23anyone to care about.
0:04:24It's not so much that I don't think that it's too small for Google to care about now. I
0:04:30don't know how much I buy the thing, "Oh, declining readership." It's almost as if they
0:04:34never have a reason to get into it at all anyway, really. I think by the time they got
0:04:40into it, it was clear that it wasn't going to be the next Twitter. RSS was what it was.
0:04:47It was never going to suddenly bust out and be this... It's kind of like Usenet, where
0:04:51they bought Deja News and stuff. They didn't think Usenet was going to sweep the nation
0:04:54and the world and just become... Usenet was already the thing that it was, but figured,
0:05:00figured, "Oh, I guess we might as well have that."
0:05:03Them having a reasonable free product for such a long period of time, they weren't doing
0:05:11intentionally to crush everybody else, but the net effect was that Google was really
0:05:14good at keeping their servers up.
0:05:15Google was really good at making their servers fast, and doing the things that they were
0:05:20doing is actually kind of difficult, and they're giving away for free.
0:05:23So companies like NewsGator and stuff that were trying to make a business out of it couldn't
0:05:26do it.
0:05:27were better than Google Reader, but just barely, and they're free.
0:05:31And so they just sat there until everyone else was gone or out of business, and they
0:05:35said to me, "Why are we even doing Google Reader?
0:05:37I don't know.
0:05:38Let's stop doing that."
0:05:39I mean, I think they kept going longer than they had to, kind of like a relationship where
0:05:42you don't want to break up with somebody because you know it's going to be bad, right?
0:05:45You're just like, "Oh, it seems like I'll just keep…"
0:05:48For years, I think, anyone who was surprised by this, I would be shocked because I've
0:05:54I've been looking at Google Reader for years and thinking, "Why are they still going to
0:05:57read it?"
0:05:58We all knew the hammer was going to fall for years and years.
0:06:01Brent Simmons had a blog post about it, and I remember reading his blog post and saying,
0:06:04"Well, yeah, duh, Google Reader is not long for this world, and yet here we are two years
0:06:07later and I'm just finally getting around to axing it."
0:06:12Anyone who's mad at Google for axing it, I don't understand where that comes from other
0:06:15than just frustration.
0:06:17I totally see why they're getting rid of it.
0:06:21Another post that you put on—Marco that you put on your website is like, "This finally
0:06:24frees us all up to maybe do something interesting in this area."
0:06:27That's also true, but I think people are still bummed, and I was bummed, because we know
0:06:30like, "All right, the other shoe finally dropped.
0:06:33Now we have to have this period of time where there's nothing, while we wait for something."
0:06:37Well, and there's already—there was Feedly—I'm not that familiar with what they do.
0:06:42I gather they make some clients, some RSS clients.
0:06:45Feedly posted on their blog, like very fast after, very quickly after Google posted their
0:06:50that they were kind of preparing for this for a while
0:06:54and they built an API compatible clone of Google Reader
0:06:58for themselves that their clients will just automatically start
0:07:02thinking with once Google Reader shuts down. And there's already
0:07:06like a number, I mean just tonight on Twitter, I even thought about building one, there's already tons of
0:07:10people saying, "Okay, now I'm starting this new project, it's just going to
0:07:14mirror the Google API and you can self-host it, it's open source
0:07:18or whatever, or somebody else can build a big platform on it.
0:07:23I do think, though, it was really funny
0:07:25that Feedly in their post, they said, OK,
0:07:27so we thought Google was going to shut this down for a while,
0:07:30so we built this thing.
0:07:32We built it on Google App Engine.
0:07:35Yeah.
0:07:37But that's the thing about it.
0:07:39It's not that what Google Reader did is so groundbreaking.
0:07:42It's the fact that it was run by Google, which meant that it
0:07:45was up and available and there.
0:07:46And I'm sure people are going to say, oh, well,
0:07:48slows down a lot of times. Well, until recently.
0:07:51The reason having someone else do this annoying stuff, like the operations stuff, running
0:07:56a server, keeping it up, keeping it efficient, having it work at scale for how many bazillions
0:08:00of, like even the RSS, like oh, the declining usership, the number of people who are hitting
0:08:04Google Reader is huge compared to like, you know, if you're some little company, you say,
0:08:07"Okay, well, we're going to have seven million people hit your server tomorrow and pull stuff
0:08:11from it." Are you okay with that? Can you scale?
0:08:13Oh, sure. Well, and also...
0:08:15It's not easy.
0:08:16One of the biggest challenges of designing a service like that is that Google crawled
0:08:21the feeds, and then the client just logged into Google and said, "Hey, what's new?"
0:08:26Google had to maintain this crawling infrastructure, which they do anyway.
0:08:31They kind of crawl the entire internet.
0:08:36They're kind of uniquely positioned to do that better than you.
0:08:38Right.
0:08:40But for anyone else to do it, you have to build a crawling infrastructure that has to crawl millions and millions of feeds quickly and repeatedly until there's new updates.
0:08:45Do you think that's an important part of the service, though?
0:08:50Oh, yeah.
0:08:53For all the apps integrated?
0:08:54Yeah.
0:08:55Because that's a major thing that your app doesn't have to do.
0:08:56If you're writing an RSS client, that's a big deal.
0:08:59And also, they normalize all the feeds
0:09:02into one particular Atom format,
0:09:04so you only have to build one parser.
0:09:07I mean, there's lots of reasons for clients
0:09:09to want to do it that way,
0:09:10that way, to want to build those services against that.
0:09:14So yeah, I think any service that replaces Google Reader
0:09:17is going to have to provide at least the automatic content
0:09:21crawling and normalization of the feed format.
0:09:24Now, that's not to say that they--
0:09:26I mean, they can leave out all the social stuff.
0:09:28They can leave out flagging, tagging, starring.
0:09:31They can leave all that stuff out as far as I'm concerned.
0:09:34But the basics of syncing a list of feed you're subscribed to,
0:09:39syncing what you have read and unread, and providing that whole crawling backend so that
0:09:43the client doesn't have to do it. I think any replacement has to do those things.
0:09:47And why—I'm still stuck on the crawling part—that's just basically so the client
0:09:51doesn't have to open up 10 million TCP connections to 10 million different servers and pull stuff
0:09:56from it? Exactly. I mean, we see this with podcast
0:09:59clients on iOS. There's, I think, only one. I think only PocketCasts by ShiftyJelly, they
0:10:07do server-side crawling of all the feeds, similar to what Google Reader does with RSS.
0:10:12I don't think any other major client does that. Please email Jon if I'm wrong. I would
0:10:16like to know that, actually. But I use downcast from my podcast client, and every time you
0:10:21launch the app or every time it has to update, it has to crawl whatever, all 25 or whatever
0:10:27number of feeds I'm subscribed to individually. And that sucks, and it's a big waste of bandwidth
0:10:32for things that don't implement, not modified, stuff like that. It's very inefficient.
0:10:37like a thin client, like a phone, where you don't really want to have some massive thing.
0:10:41On a desktop where you're just pulling things in the background, who cares?
0:10:45If you have some app hidden in the background, that's fine. But on iOS, that matters a lot. When you launch the app,
0:10:49you don't want to have to sit there for a minute and a half while it crawls all these feeds.
0:10:53Google Reader clients are awesome because they only have to sync to one
0:10:57thing. They only have to hit Google and then Google comes back saying
0:11:01here's a list of the new things. And with RSS you might have way more
0:11:05them with a podcast client. So with RSS, if you subscribe to 150 feeds, and most of them
0:11:12aren't updated most of the time, but there's a few that are, that's way more efficient
0:11:15to do the Google Reader way, where the server side crawls everything, than requiring the
0:11:20clients to crawl 150 feeds every 15 minutes that you launch them.
0:11:24I wonder if that's a transitional thing, though. Fast forward 20 years, is that still
0:11:28a factor? Do we still…
0:11:29Well, yes and no.
0:11:31We would just have Umpteen Core processors in our wristwatch communicator of things,
0:11:37and bandwidth is really high. It's actually faster to crawl 150 different URLs in parallel
0:11:45than to ask one server for the other.
0:11:47Oh, no. Because think about what you have to do. You have to use so much more data.
0:11:50You have to keep the radios on longer. That's never going to be more efficient. It's always
0:11:55going to be better to go through the intermediary.
0:11:56I know it won't be more efficient, but like you said on the desktop, on the desktop it's
0:12:00not as much of a factor because we're not worried about, like, you know, opening up
0:12:04a TCP connection takes a long time. So if you only have to open up one of them, that's
0:12:08better than having to open up 150 of them. But the bandwidth concerns, like assuming
0:12:13mobile bandwidth, you know, goes away, and the CPU concerns of having all these threads
0:12:17going at once, which is untenable on an iOS device today, maybe that isn't in the future.
0:12:22I'm just wondering if it's one of those things where I remember back when to do any sort
0:12:26of RSS syncing the server.
0:12:28We don't do that for the web.
0:12:29We don't do all the mobile web serving through a proxy, unless, I guess, Amazon Silk does
0:12:33that or whatever.
0:12:34But it used to be in the bad old days that mobile web serving had to go through a proxy
0:12:38because it had to tear down the pages for you and do all sorts of awful things.
0:12:41And Amazon's still doing it.
0:12:42But we accept now that the trade-off is like, "Look, I'd rather have mobile Safari just
0:12:45go right to the website.
0:12:47Don't compress my images.
0:12:49Don't modify the markup.
0:12:50like a real web browser, it connects the real way, and we're just going to bite the bullet
0:12:55and go with that. It seems to me that that's got to be eventually the future, assuming
0:12:59RSS is still around. That's got to be the future of this type of service long term.
0:13:03Not presently, but long term.
0:13:04But also, RSS, the access pattern is different. With RSS, almost all of those requests that
0:13:11the polling client makes are going to be returned back with nothing new. A three or four or
0:13:17nothing new. So for the client to have to check that over and over again is extremely
0:13:23wasteful. And one way you can solve this is with push. There's PubSubHubbub and RSS cloud
0:13:31to address this push issue, but push is really complicated to implement on all various ends
0:13:36of it. The polling is just way simpler, so that's why we still have it. But with RSS,
0:13:41I think it makes a lot of sense because almost all of the polls that happen will result in
0:13:46in nothing new, this 15-minute interval,
0:13:51then it makes sense to have all that inefficient polling
0:13:55happening somewhere else that can tolerate inefficiencies,
0:13:58like a data center that's powered by AC power,
0:14:00not on a battery, that has a big, fat connection
0:14:03to the internet and is always running this app,
0:14:05as opposed to an iOS app that you have to launch
0:14:07and you have to, like iOS apps,
0:14:09who knows how this will change in the future,
0:14:12but at the moment, iOS apps like RSS readers
0:14:11can't automatically check things in the background
0:14:13every 15 minutes.
0:14:15They have to be running.
0:14:16And so when you launch it, it has
0:14:18to load all of its state from something right then.
0:14:20And so there's so many reasons to have that be remote-based
0:14:24and have a Google Reader-like setup where the server's doing
0:14:27all the crawling, and then the client just sends one very
0:14:29lightweight request to the server, which has already
0:14:31done most of the work.
0:14:33And I think the thing that maybe we're not considering
0:14:36is the difference it is at creation time.
0:14:39And one of you guys kind of lightly touched on this
0:14:41go, but if I was about to write a podcast client, an RSS client, tomorrow I wouldn't
0:14:48want to have to fiddle around with trying to figure out all the different and varied
0:14:54responses I'm going to get from all these different and varied web servers.
0:14:56I'm going to want something that's going to be a facade in front of that, that's
0:14:59going to make that nice and clean, and so I can get the part of the app that I don't
0:15:04want to do, which is the behind the scenes, boring, getting the RSS updates, and I can
0:15:10get that out of the way as quickly as possible so I can do the cool stuff on the UI side.
0:15:15Now, as it turns out, I actually am a terrible UI developer, but in principle, if you're
0:15:19going to write an RSS client, you're going to do it because you have something new and
0:15:21exciting to do, and you're not going to want to bother with doing all the backend stuff,
0:15:26you're going to want to do all the UI stuff.
0:15:28And like you were saying, Marco, having one place to get all that normalized and in a
0:15:33clean state is much better, and that saves you so much time before you compile, when
0:15:40when you're just writing the code, it saves you so much time.
0:15:42And I don't think many people have very much interest
0:15:45in doing that boring stuff.
0:15:46They just want to do the fun UI stuff.
0:15:47- Oh yeah, also there's a practical aspect of,
0:15:50like with iOS apps in the App Store,
0:15:53if there's some new weirdo feed that you find
0:15:55that's some weird format,
0:15:57if it's a server-side configuration of the parser,
0:15:59you can just update that immediately.
0:16:00And then all your clients have that fixed immediately.
0:16:03You don't have to recode the app and go through app review.
0:16:07Yeah, like maybe it's the—I'm channeling Dave Weiner too much—but like the idea that—the
0:16:14idea of all RSS feeds funneling into a service which then feeds an app, I see all the reasons
0:16:23for it, but it just seems like Amazon Silk to me.
0:16:26It seems like WAP.
0:16:27Remember that?
0:16:28What was it?
0:16:29Yep.
0:16:30Like, it just smells like that to me, and it seems like it's just a bump in the road
0:16:33along our way to a completely decentralized thing.
0:16:37Maybe we need a new protocol for that.
0:16:38Maybe pulling down an entire RSS feed or expecting a 304 based on some timestamp, hopefully
0:16:43getting your time zones right and everything is not like—maybe there's a better protocol.
0:16:47Maybe it's app.net or something that looks similar to that where if you made a more efficient
0:16:52protocol and really decentralized it in some way, maybe it makes up for it.
0:16:57The other aspect I'm thinking of, not just the content crawling, but the main reason,
0:17:03the main way that I use Google Reader, I think at least a quarter of the people who are habitual
0:17:07Google Readers use it in this way, is as a syncing service, as in I read news, that's
0:17:14an activity I do in some place, and when I go someplace else, a different computer, a
0:17:18different device or whatever, I wanted to know that I read that thing on that other
0:17:22thing. And that is really an entirely separate thing from aggregate my feeds, normalize them,
0:17:28tell me if there's updates and stuff like that, because now you're into like a state
0:17:33synchronization that has nothing to do with the feeds, that has everything to do with
0:17:35you. What did you read so far? What did you subscribe to? What did you want to subscribe
0:17:39to? And that state synchronization is probably a harder problem, I guess algorithmically
0:17:48at least, to figure out what the hell the right thing is to do, then the mere operational
0:17:54problem of crawling the entire web of RSS feeds and normalizing them and providing a
0:17:58service for it and stuff like that.
0:18:00And so those two things, that's quite a bit for any one party or multiple parties to bite
0:18:06off because that's what people are looking for.
0:18:09I never see the Google Reader web UI.
0:18:11Some people live in it, but I never even look at it.
0:18:12I use Net News Wire on various devices, on various machines, and I want it to all be
0:18:17in sync.
0:18:18So I want something to do that as well as like the normalization, I don't see that that's
0:18:22going on.
0:18:23That's more of a development concern.
0:18:25So if something doesn't normalize and doesn't aggregate and, for example, doesn't cache,
0:18:29which, you know, is the thing that drives everyone who authors an RSS feed crazy about
0:18:32Google Reader because if you get a bum item in there, Google Reader never forgets it,
0:18:35right?
0:18:36It's another opportunity for someone coming into this field to do it better.
0:18:39Hey, give us a way to delete that crap out or maybe we have smart caching that forgets
0:18:42it when it disappears.
0:18:44The syncing aspect of it is what I'm really looking for in some third-party vendor to
0:18:50hop up and say, "Hey, we're going to provide a service for all your news reading applications
0:18:55to keep them all in sync, and we'll charge some small amount of money, and you'll subscribe
0:18:58to it, or you'll subscribe to the app," or something like that.
0:19:02Isn't that what Fever, is that right?
0:19:04Fever was supposed to do that?
0:19:05It was supposed to be self-hosted and with a really slick web front-end?
0:19:07Yeah, Fever does that.
0:19:09But the problem is, when you ask people to self-host, that's—
0:19:11Self-hosting, I mean, I know there's no technical and knowledge barrier for me doing that, but
0:19:17I don't want to self-host anything.
0:19:18Oh, I agree.
0:19:19Completely.
0:19:20Self-hosting is, that will always extremely limit your audience, requiring that.
0:19:25I mean, it's a good way to learn something if you don't know about all the technologies
0:19:29involved.
0:19:30Self-hosting is a good learning experience with an audience of one, so you're not destroying
0:19:34someone's business, learning about server-side development.
0:19:38But self-hosting is not going to explode now that Google Reader is gone.
0:19:43What we all want is something to do what Google Reader did for us, which is when I read something,
0:19:47it knows that it's read and everything is fast and all my clients work with it.
0:19:51And some people use the web interface, and for them they're looking for an equivalent
0:19:55or better web interface.
0:20:00I think the web interface hopefully is on its way out for RSS.
0:20:05I mean certainly RSS is being pushed pretty heavily, it always was a very geek-centric
0:20:09technology, and while there are non-geeks who use it,
0:20:13I'm sure there are a heck of a lot more geeks who do.
0:20:17And so if RSS, like if the web
0:20:21reader experience never fully gets replaced, I think that's fine.
0:20:25Where I think we're going to see, you know,
0:20:29I think we're going to see two things come out of this. First we're going to see
0:20:33Obviously, we're going to see that the back-end syncing platform will be replaced by a million
0:20:39different people doing basically all the same thing, which is just marrying the Google Reader
0:20:43API with some kind of hosted or open source thing that anybody can get or use.
0:20:49And that's cool, and we need that.
0:20:50Well, didn't you think that would be kind of a shame?
0:20:53Because everything I've heard from people who develop against the Google Reader API
0:20:55basically doesn't help that it was undocumented and unsupported.
0:20:58Like if you had to pick an API to make it easy for app developers to implement syncing,
0:21:03Maybe the Google Reader API is not ideal.
0:21:05I understand you've got to do it for easy compatibility with all the people who were
0:21:08talking to Google Reader, but if I was doing one of those projects, I would be like, "Okay,
0:21:12do the Google Reader API mirroring to get us off the ground, but let's plan a much better
0:21:18API that makes it even easier for developers to have that be versioned off in a different
0:21:23place and like, 'Oh, now...'"
0:21:25Oh, sure.
0:21:26Yeah, I'm sure that will happen with almost all of these, where they will start out with
0:21:31the Google Reader API to bootstrap it, and then they'll have their own clean, nice new
0:21:35API. But the Google Reader API is probably going to be the standard if there is one.
0:21:42Right now, it was really easy to make an RSS app in the last few years because all you
0:21:46had to do was give people Google Reader username and password fields on login, and that was
0:21:51it. Now I think we're going to basically see a third field being added to that, which is
0:21:57hostname. Whatever service you're using that merges the API, type in the hostname here,
0:22:03and then type in your username and password for it in those two boxes. I think that's
0:22:09the easiest way forward for the clients. And so, if that is the outcome, assume we have
0:22:16multiple services that spring up that are going to be like this, that are going to replace
0:22:21Google Reader and get some popularity. If that's the case, none of them will have the
0:22:26the leverage to make a new API. You need one--
0:22:30That's why you're afraid the Google Reader will be stuck with it.
0:22:33Right.
0:22:34It's just--
0:22:35Because, look, the clients have already written all the code for it.
0:22:38Right. And you're like, "Why would I rewrite my client code just to support your new fancy
0:22:42API?" I've already got my client working with the Google Reader API. It's been working with
0:22:45it for five years now or whatever. It's like, "Why would I change it?" "Well, our new API
0:22:49is cleaner." Well, for new development, maybe you get those guys on board. But I think that
0:22:53would be a shame because, like I said, it's not like people are saying, "Google Reader
0:22:56is the most awesome API for syncing and keeping track of stuff." It's maybe not so awesome.
0:23:02As a funny sidebar, one of the weird little projects I did at Tumblr was back before Twitter
0:23:09bought Tweety from Lauren Brikter when Tweety was its own app and everyone loved it, one
0:23:15of the very advanced settings fields was API hostname. And you could type in any hostname
0:23:21there and it would use that as the basis of all the Twitter API URLs.
0:23:26So I wrote the Twitter API for Tumblr, enough of it so that you could browse Tumblr in Tweedy,
0:23:31just using this field to say Tumblr.com/whatever.
0:23:41And it was interesting because again, you got this whole app for free by just mirroring enough of Twitter's API to make this work.
0:23:50And that's why I'm saying the RSS, not that it's inadequate,
0:23:55but that it's just a piece of the puzzle.
0:23:58Because RSS and Atom are standards
0:24:02for data representation, but they don't help you with the,
0:24:05all right, so what about you want to have an API that
0:24:08is efficient and can give you synchronization information?
0:24:11That would have to be a layer on top of it.
0:24:12And then that layer was saying, OK, well, de facto,
0:24:16that is the Google Reader API, because it
0:24:17has the most client apps written against it,
0:24:19It was the only player in town, and it was free.
0:24:23And now that's our middle layer.
0:24:25It would be nicer if there was a similarly open standard like RSS or Adam to fill that
0:24:31role that wasn't just like the leftover droppings of a company that was once vaguely
0:24:36interested in the business but lost interest.
0:24:40And it's also worth speculating on why they did this a little bit more.
0:24:44I just thought of a new theory.
0:24:46Now, I think the real reason they shut it down is because I've heard from various
0:24:53people over the last couple of months as we started to see problems, I've heard that
0:24:58the staff assigned to work on Google Reader was basically between zero and three people,
0:25:04depending on who you believe and how you measure that.
0:25:07So I've heard it had basically nobody working on it.
0:25:11And so, remember, it had a pretty bad outage, like a week or two ago, something like that.
0:25:18I'm guessing what happened was it was working fine for a long time, and then things started
0:25:24to break.
0:25:25And when things started to break, you know, weeks ago, whenever that was, nobody knew
0:25:30how to fix it, because nobody had looked at this code for years.
0:25:33And so that's probably what made Google decide, you know what, this is just easier to kill
0:25:38than to fix, because it's not giving us enough value.
0:25:40might as well just kill it rather than maintain it. I think that's the real reason.
0:25:44But it's worth considering one conspiracy, I think,
0:25:48like crazy reason, is when you're reading RSS, you're not
0:25:52going to people's websites and seeing ads.
0:25:56They put ads, I mean, the thing they don't like about, from a business perspective,
0:26:00the only business reason that you can think to get rid of this thing is, look,
0:26:04only they know these numbers, but how many people are using it as
0:26:08API that they never see. Like, how many people are using apps like Reader, NetNews, Viber,
0:26:12whatever, and never see a single one of our ads because all they—like, it's just an
0:26:15API back end. All we're doing is providing computing horsepower and uptime for them for
0:26:19free for zero benefit. They never see our ads. The people in the web interface, they
0:26:23can show them ads, they can harvest their interests, and it's just like Gmail. If everybody
0:26:29used the web interface, and if that everybody was a much larger number than it currently
0:26:34it would still be around. But from a business perspective, I think a very large number of
0:26:41people don't use the web interface, and the total sum of all Google Reader users is so
0:26:45much smaller than the Gmail user base or whatever that it just doesn't make any sense for them
0:26:49to keep it.
0:26:50Right. And to that end, if you're going to replace Google Reader, why would you get into
0:26:55that business if the whole point of the business is to use third-party clients? And I guess
0:27:01this comes back to app.net and the idea is, well, you have super nerds that are affluent
0:27:05enough that they'll be able to spare a few bucks a month to pay for it or, you know,
0:27:0950 bucks a year, whatever the number may be, but I wouldn't want to get into that business.
0:27:13That seems silly.
0:27:14Well, I mean, this business, this business miles forward. I'm going to get back to Gruber
0:27:16with his 400,000 RSS subscribers. That's how he makes money from his site, you know.
0:27:21But he has, well, one of the ways, he sells RSS sponsorships and you get to, you're sponsoring
0:27:26the RSS feed, which is the thing that the customers want. And I'm pretty sure the ads
0:27:30puts on the site, those are in the RSS feed as well, right? So if you control the RSS feeds,
0:27:34you can insert an ad into RSS feeds, other people's RSS feeds. Maybe that model does not
0:27:39work and people will hate it, but the app.net model is certainly more direct, pay us a little
0:27:44bit, and you get to use our synchronization service. And now wherever you read, like,
0:27:49I mean, app.net could be that service. I don't think it's quite designed for this thing exactly,
0:27:54but that's the question of like, okay, so Google was subsidizing a results profitable business.
0:27:59business, like their search revenue. They were doing this more or less out of the goodness
0:28:03of their own heart. I mean, not entirely.
0:28:05Well, not quite. I mean, they want to have access to all the world's information, and
0:28:11a lot of information flows through RSS. I mean, they bought FeedBurner for, I mean,
0:28:15FeedBurner was more of an ad buy, but I think it made sense why they started this in the
0:28:20first place.
0:28:21Well, even when they bought FeedBurner, though, it's like, I don't think anyone at Google
0:28:25Google had any notion that RSS was going to grow tremendously from the point where they
0:28:32bought it.
0:28:34And it hasn't, and the point where they bought it already wasn't like, I mean, it was big
0:28:38among nerds, but it was never, like, the growth curve was never, there were never any illusions
0:28:43that it was going to take off like Facebook or Twitter.
0:28:45Like, there was no hockey stick curve at the time that they bought into it.
0:28:48Maybe they wanted to have it just because, like, there's no sense in other people having
0:28:53this thing and people spending their time elsewhere, and maybe the long-term evil plan
0:28:57is, "All right, we've got to get this because it is a thing, it's not a big thing, it's
0:29:01not going to grow, but we've got to get it so we can just kind of quietly put it to sleep,"
0:29:05which is the rap on Google when they buy companies, you know, Jiku or, I don't know, a million
0:29:12other companies that Google has bought that have kind of faded away and you never really
0:29:17hear about them again, or they don't improve rapidly.
0:29:23It's all under Google's umbrella. They have the option to let it go live up on a farm
0:29:28upstate whenever they feel like it, right?
0:29:31I think, first of all, there's a big problem here. This has a lot of parallels to way more
0:29:39controversial things. What they did really, and I don't think they planned this, but what
0:29:47What happened was Google Reader came out and destroyed a very big market of desktop RSS
0:29:53readers and web RSS readers. Google just came in and destroyed it because it was free and
0:29:57it synced. None of the things did that at the time. They destroyed it and they held
0:30:02onto that market for eight years and now they're killing it.
0:30:07Now Gruber—
0:30:08Well, wait a second. I think Weiner asked you on Twitter about this. How did they destroy
0:30:12the market for the desktop apps? How did they make it so it's no longer viable to sell
0:30:16the apps. They definitely destroyed the services like NewsGator. NewsGator was trying to sell
0:30:21you synchronization services. But the desktop app, I mean, what they did to the desktop
0:30:25apps and the iOS apps was even more insidious. They didn't destroy them. They just made it
0:30:28so that they were the only game in town for a thing that those people needed but didn't
0:30:33want to write.
0:30:34Well, at first.
0:30:35If you're writing, you know, and so now all the clients, now Reader uses Google Reader,
0:30:38NetNewsWire uses Google Reader, and all these things use Google Reader because it's the
0:30:42only game in town. And now they're hooked onto this train that Google was always kind
0:30:46of meh about anybody. Well, it wasn't the sync engine that killed desktop clients, it
0:30:51was the web interface. It was making RSS reading free.
0:30:56So you think that took people away, people stopped buying that newswire because they
0:30:59could just go to the Google Reader website and use it?
0:31:02Absolutely, definitely. Oh, I disagree. I completely disagree.
0:31:04Not all people, but I, hell, ask Brent, I bet he'll tell you. I guarantee you it was
0:31:09in there. I was going to guess, like, who would we go
0:31:11to to get that information? Like, we could, Google presumably knows how many people used
0:31:15reader over the lifetime, they could show us that growth curve. And I guess Brent could show us the growth curve of sales of NetNewswire.
0:31:21It's not to pin down a lot.
0:31:27Just having lived through that, anecdotally, I saw that happen. I saw many
0:31:32clients just give up and die, and the few that were left were the ones that
0:31:37integrated Google Reader. Like you had to.
0:31:42But iOS gave a resurgence to readers. All of a sudden, and it wasn't like Google Reader's website
0:31:44website went away, and in fact I believe it worked reasonably well on mobile from as early
0:31:49as anything worked reasonably well on mobile on iOS.
0:31:51But that kind of gave a resurgence in suddenly things like Reader are a creature of iOS.
0:31:59Net News Wire was sitting there as the once and possibly not future king of desktop reader
0:32:05market, and people were not clamoring to write reader applications, but as soon as the iPhone
0:32:08launched, now everyone wants to write a news reader application, which of course we're
0:32:11all talking to Google Reader.
0:32:14To give you some idea of Google Reader's dominance right now,
0:32:17I pulled up my feed stats, and 90% of subscribers to my feed
0:32:26are subscribed via Google Reader Sync.
0:32:28That's how big this is, 90% of my subscribers.
0:32:31And then there's like--
0:32:32But you can't tell if those are using web interface, right?
0:32:35No, because they don't distinguish.
0:32:37But that gives you some idea.
0:32:38Like if this service shuts down, not only
0:32:43is it's leaving a gaping hole in the RSS sync business.
0:32:48But this could have a massive impact
0:32:52on the readership of websites.
0:32:55I could also boost their ad impressions,
0:32:57because now people actually have to go to the website.
0:32:59Maybe.
0:32:59But one of the reasons RSS is so great
0:33:03is because it allows you to very easily follow
0:33:07sites that don't update frequently enough for you
0:33:10to check every day.
0:33:11So before RSS came out, if you had a blog that
0:33:14posted once a month, nobody would read it.
0:33:18And you'd have to post every day so that people
0:33:21would go to your site every day and check for new stuff.
0:33:24And a lot of people still work that way.
0:33:25As someone who has a website that posts not once a month,
0:33:28but very infrequently, I can tell you people still won't
0:33:30read it.
0:33:31Generally, yes.
0:33:32But the great power of RSS is allowing you or enabling
0:33:39you to follow a whole bunch of sites that update infrequently and doing that in a manageable
0:33:46way.
0:33:49Because it's so easy to read them, then those sites that do update infrequently, they have
0:33:53better audiences, they have more reeks, they're more influential, even if they don't write
0:33:57every day.
0:33:58You can get some of that value now from Twitter or Facebook or all these other crappy services
0:34:02please email Casey. But there's still so much of that happening on RSS. As you can tell by stats from me and Gruber or anybody else, a ton of that activity is on RSS.
0:34:15So I think it could be really disruptive come July when this shuts down and sites like mine and Gruber's and other people who have heavy RSS readership, especially in the geeky spaces,
0:34:31sites like this, we could see major shifts in either direction. I'm not really sure.
0:34:38We could see major shifts in how people read our sites.
0:34:41You'll be able to tell in the months leading up, I guess. The nice thing about Google Reader
0:34:44is it puts in the little subscriber numbers and log lines and everything. But if those
0:34:48people disperse, I don't know if all the other things they disperse too will identify
0:34:52themselves in such a nice, convenient way. So it may be difficult to like—I mean, counting
0:34:58I think RSS subscribers is different than counting.
0:35:01All you're counting there is someone decided this was worthy enough to put in their feed,
0:35:06and when I make something new on the site, their little feed thing becomes bold, presuming
0:35:10they even look at their little feed thing, which is not...
0:35:15Those 400,000 Google Reader subscribers, you don't know how many of them are actually going
0:35:19to look at that feed.
0:35:21Maybe people have stopped using Google Reader at all, but Google Reader will keep hitting
0:35:24their site and counting them as part of their subscription.
0:35:28I'm not sure how long they will do that for.
0:35:31Whether they'll just do it indefinitely so many of these numbers aren't even reading
0:35:35your site anymore, or whether they have some kind of timeout period where they stop counting
0:35:39you after a while of not looking at Reader.
0:35:41I'm not really sure.
0:35:42Well, it's like Twitter followers.
0:35:43I mean, how many of those are human beings who have used Twitter in the last year, and
0:35:46how many people are just people who followed you when they joined Twitter for three days
0:35:50two years ago and are not there anymore?
0:35:54Web stats and viewership things are always kind of voodoo, but Google Reader at least
0:35:58gave some sort of unification to the voodoo.
0:36:02It summarizes it for you.
0:36:04It's measured the same way because everybody's using it.
0:36:06It's 90% of your subscribers anyway, so now that's going to become much fuzzier.
0:36:11Even if every single one of those people who was actually reading your site continues to,
0:36:16to be able to detect them and track them and confirm to yourself that's the case is probably
0:36:20going to be difficult.
0:36:22So you're begrudging the disappearance of Google, the all-seeing eye, because it doesn't
0:36:27let you see everything.
0:36:28I'm not begrudging.
0:36:29I'm just saying it's a strange scenario.
0:36:33Strange situation we found ourselves in.
0:36:34I mean, this is what happens when a company—you know, I mean, Microsoft has done it before,
0:36:38too—the company with some profitable business can use that profit to subsidize other businesses
0:36:43that it's speculating in.
0:36:45These may or may not be things that we want to get into.
0:36:48And like I said, I think Google never had any illusions that RSS was going to do a hockey
0:36:52sticky stick. But it's like, well, it's worth keeping our eye on, and we should buy everything
0:36:58up that has anything to do with it so that we can sunset it, to use Marco's favorite
0:37:03term, when we feel like it. And so they're like, yeah, now is the time. Like I said,
0:37:06I think they stayed in it longer than they even had to.
0:37:08And it was easy for them. It was easy because they already had all that web crawling infrastructure
0:37:11in place that they could use, so it was easier for them to do it than it would be for anyone
0:37:15else to do it.
0:37:16Yeah, I mean, not so much, like, because that's their muscle. Their company is built on weird
0:37:22can put up services on the internet that scale to any number of people, including the entire
0:37:27internet like our search does, and our whole business is built around like we have...we
0:37:31have...the section of the company that just works on an infrastructure, constantly improving
0:37:35it, and sort of it helps every service that we do.
0:37:37That's why whenever they buy our startup, they're like, "Okay, I don't care what crazy
0:37:41crap you were doing before.
0:37:42It's time to get on board the Google train because we know what the heck we're doing.
0:37:45And even though our way seems crazy to you, let me tell you that you should rewrite your
0:37:49application from scratch on top of our infrastructure, which will delay your business for years,
0:37:53and by the time you're done, maybe no one wants your product anymore.
0:37:55But we're not going to let you keep running your crazy PHP Ruby thing here if we can help
0:37:59it because you really need to get with the program because our program is pretty damn
0:38:03good.
0:38:05Whereas other random companies, if you're starting from scratch or even if you're some
0:38:09other big company like Microsoft is trying to get some data center expertise and Apple
0:38:13and like they just—none of those companies dedicate—maybe Amazon is the only other
0:38:18one that dedicates proportionally the same amount of resources about we need to get our
0:38:22crap together server-side because it's an essential part of our business.
0:38:25Yeah, I know we sell things, but where does EC2 come from? Well, because we want to sell
0:38:29things better. And hey, that's a marketable service in S3 and all those things. Amazon,
0:38:35I think, is the only competitor who has the kind of expertise in scale, and I think there's
0:38:41still much more sort of slapped together, evolved over a long period of time under tremendous
0:38:47pressure with a crazy man with a whip at their back versus Google's philosophical PhDs
0:38:54algorithmic strategy for indexing the entire web.
0:38:58Anyway.
0:38:59What else can we do?
0:39:03I don't know.
0:39:04That kind of blew away a lot of other stuff that was being talked about.
0:39:08I guess we have a new pope, and we now have one less podcast network, but otherwise, I
0:39:12don't know.
0:39:13What else is happening in the world of technology?
0:39:18Marco, you don't want to talk about South by Southwest?
0:39:20Come on.
0:39:20Oh my god.
0:39:21You're a veteran.
0:39:22You're a veteran.
0:39:23I'm sure you have tons of useful and insightful things to say.
0:39:26I'm so happy I didn't go this year or the year before this
0:39:29or I think the year before that.
0:39:31That's a bold-faced lie because you're missing out on Salt Lick.
0:39:36Man, South by Southwest.
0:39:37I mean, the whole conference thing, oh god,
0:39:40what a mess that is.
0:39:43First of all, one thing that's worth talking about briefly, I think, is
0:39:47Google I/O tickets went on sale, I think, this morning.
0:39:51And as usual, it sold out very, very quickly. And there were lots--like I saw
0:39:56our friend Japon complaining about duplicate transaction logs, stuff like that.
0:40:00It did not sell out gracefully, but it did sell out quickly.
0:40:04And
0:40:06we see with that, we see with WWDC
0:40:09selling out, not that quickly, but at least still very quickly every year.
0:40:13And there's an interesting question, like, what do you really do about that?
0:40:18Like, what can you do about that problem?
0:40:21Because, you know, WWDC tickets are going to come on sale any minute now.
0:40:25We don't know.
0:40:26You know, it could be any time between now and late May
0:40:29that they will probably make tickets available for WWDC of this year.
0:40:33And we don't know. And they're probably going to sell out within, you know, a half hour or 45 minutes.
0:40:37uh...
0:40:39uh... and you
0:40:40apple is tried different things you know
0:40:43different presentations of like
0:40:45they'll have these tech talks around around the country
0:40:47well they'll have a kind of many w_b_c_'s around the country and you can
0:40:51only get a ticket to those
0:40:52if you haven't gone to w_b_c_ recently so there's kind of this priority thing
0:40:56where if you get blocked out of one you can go to the other
0:40:59uh... but
0:41:01you know they they still have this problem of there's just way more demand
0:41:04than there is supply
0:41:06of tickets and
0:41:07they can't just do the typical economic thing of
0:41:10just raise the price really high
0:41:12because that would kind of make them look like dicks
0:41:14and they would get a lot of flack for that, it probably wouldn't be worth it.
0:41:18And
0:41:19like Google is actually making the problem worse because
0:41:22Google I/O tickets, it's become a pattern that Google gives everyone
0:41:28free hardware
0:41:29at their devices.
0:41:30That's usually worth about as much as the ticket price,
0:41:33which is like nine hundred bucks.
0:41:35So
0:41:36like a lot of the people buying those Google tickets are probably just wanting the free
0:41:40hardware and not really giving a crap about the conference.
0:41:44And so that's kind of, like that I think is a really bad thing for Google to be doing.
0:41:48Like they should probably stop doing that.
0:41:51Like what do you think Apple could do to reduce demand for WWDC or to make it sell out less
0:41:59quickly or do you think they even need to solve this problem?
0:42:02Here's one thing they could do that's like you talked about raising the prices being
0:42:06seen as a dick move. Well, this is also kind of a dick move, but it's one with economic
0:42:11precedent and it's slightly less, is they could just do what airlines do and overbook.
0:42:15And the reason I think this will actually work out with them is that except for the
0:42:20keynote, which maybe even including the keynote, you see how the herd thins out as hangovers
0:42:27start to come into effect. Or even just late in the day when people are just going, "Oh,
0:42:32on fumes and they just can't go anymore. I think you could probably over... I mean,
0:42:39maybe there's fire codes and stuff like that or whatever, but they're limiting them. But
0:42:42I think you could overbook it and with the exception of a few choke points,
0:42:45continue to be okay. Because really, with the exception of like... I know this because I'm
0:42:52there in every session like a crazy person. Most people are not. It really thins out during
0:43:00certain points. And so I feel like that's one way to get around this is just sell more
0:43:03tickets. You know, sell as many tickets as, even if you think it's going to be like, "Oh,
0:43:08it's crazy that I don't want to be like, the classroom sizes are going to be too giant
0:43:12or whatever," I think it will still work out because those rooms are not at capacity in
0:43:15the middle of the week in some boring session. It's just me and--
0:43:18Well, you know, I don't know. I think you could probably get maybe 20% more tickets
0:43:23sold that way. Not even more than that.
0:43:25Oh, that's something. I know. I'm not saying this is going to be a doubling in size. You
0:43:28just overbook a little bit.
0:43:29- Yeah, 'cause the problem is that the popular
0:43:34or mainstream sessions really are filled up to capacity.
0:43:38And a lot of times-- - Yeah, and they duplicate.
0:43:39- You'll have to wait online for 20 minutes
0:43:43or a half hour before the session starts,
0:43:45and then you get in there and you can't even sit down.
0:43:47There's only standing room,
0:43:48there's people backing up in the back.
0:43:50- Yeah, there's only 10 sessions like that,
0:43:52and they duplicate them.
0:43:53They're addressing that with, they do them twice.
0:43:55They do them once on one day
0:43:57and then once on two days later or whatever.
0:43:59This is all in service of not doing the thing at South by Southwest, which is, "Oh, let's
0:44:03just keep going to bigger and bigger venues."
0:44:05Because that way, you will just run a conference.
0:44:06Right.
0:44:07Let's stretch across the entire city.
0:44:08Right.
0:44:09So, you know, you can't just go into an even bigger convention center in a different city
0:44:13and just get bigger and bigger.
0:44:14But like someone was saying, can you do something to improve things, keeping the same conference
0:44:20center and everything?
0:44:21I think you can get a little bit more out by overbooking.
0:44:23I wonder, this year, maybe it's just because I'm paying attention, but I don't think so.
0:44:28I think this is actually happening. This year it seems like Apple pessimism is at an all-time
0:44:34high of just the company's prospects, the effect of competition, the products.
0:44:40Yeah, but we're not among the people who go to WWDC.
0:44:42Right.
0:44:43Or for that matter, people who are selling popular apps in the App Store. I mean, EA
0:44:47is probably still pretty darn bullish about iOS in terms of where you can make money.
0:44:52How much money did we put into this game and how much did we get out? Keep making those
0:44:55iOS games.
0:44:56say that but it's funny I would agree with you Marco that I've had regular
0:45:00people who are not total dweebs like us come to me and say yeah you know I don't
0:45:05know if I'm gonna get an iPhone again when I'm up for a new phone because I
0:45:07haven't done anything new in a while oh yeah me too you know if you're a nerd
0:45:11you can say whoa whoa whoa what do you mean they haven't done anything new but
0:45:14to a regular person I mean springboard looks the same as it's always looked
0:45:17most of these apps mostly oh you are UI button is a UI button UI labels UI label
0:45:22all these things look the same a table views a table view granted you have
0:45:25collection views now and actually I haven't seen them used that much come to think of
0:45:29it, but it doesn't look flashy anymore.
0:45:33Maybe iOS 7 will bring it flashy.
0:45:34Well, what could they do to change that?
0:45:35Oh, I agree.
0:45:36I don't know.
0:45:37I completely agree.
0:45:38I'm not saying that...
0:45:39Because I think a UI overhaul wouldn't do it.
0:45:41Those same people would be like, "Oh, it's still a rectangle with a screen on it."
0:45:45Unless it starts hovering above their desk by two inches.
0:45:48Well, there's different levels.
0:45:51like the people who write for The Verge, who they're never going to be happy with whatever
0:45:56Apple does, or actually the writers are good, the commenters on The Verge are never going
0:46:02to be happy with whatever Apple does that's new because they're going to complain, "Oh,
0:46:06it's not like Android and it's not doing enough and blah, blah, blah." Okay. That segment,
0:46:10they can't satisfy. But like Casey, I have regular people asking me all the time, or
0:46:16talking to me all the time about comments that make it sound like all this Apple skepticism
0:46:23in the media actually reflects what they are thinking.
0:46:27There is no question that Apple is being significantly and severely affected by the attention in
0:46:35the media that it gets, negatively.
0:46:38Really, I have regular people say...
0:46:41Even a week ago, I had somebody ask me, "Oh, I was thinking about getting an iPhone, but
0:46:46but I heard the iPhone 5S is coming out next month,
0:46:49so I'm gonna wait.
0:46:49Like I hear, and every, of course, every iPhone,
0:46:51you hear that. - That happens all the time.
0:46:52- But like, but you hear like, oh, you know,
0:46:55they didn't really change that much.
0:46:56I'm like, well, have you seen the iPhone 5?
0:46:58Like, believe me, it's a big difference.
0:47:01But people aren't even giving it a shot
0:47:02because they're hearing in the media
0:47:04and on the news and the websites and everything,
0:47:06they're hearing all this stuff about Apple
0:47:08being doomed and not innovating enough.
0:47:10I hear regular people have asked me about Samsung
0:47:12for the first time ever in the last six months.
0:47:14I've never heard anybody ask me about Samsung.
0:47:16In the last six months, I'm now hearing it.
0:47:19And I think Apple's doing great, but the mainstream culture, the mainstream rhetoric
0:47:26around Apple is now that they're suffering, and that's really damaging them.
0:47:31No question.
0:47:32So I think there's only probably two things they could do to get the regular people, I
0:47:38mean, ignoring the echo chamber of people who don't even know what the verge is, to
0:47:41get those people who still might come up to you and say, "Ah, they haven't changed that
0:47:45much."
0:47:46What can you do to bring them around?
0:47:47Because I think outside of the tech nerd circles, there definitely is the media and their perception
0:47:54and everything in there.
0:47:55But it's when someone who doesn't even remember that Apple makes the iPhone or just kind of
0:47:59vaguely knows what the iPhone does, when they get the news story on their local news or
0:48:02whatever that there are some problems, that's when they start to get those bad feelings.
0:48:05What can you do to bring those people around?
0:48:07You can't do it with new OS overhaul because no matter how crazy you change springboard,
0:48:11no matter how weird you make things look, those people are never going to know that's
0:48:16not how the phone always looked.
0:48:18They don't have nothing to compare it to that does not impress them.
0:48:20That's nothing.
0:48:21You can get them either by making a new product that gets people excited about Apple again,
0:48:28insert whatever product you want here, television, watch, hoverboard, self-driving car, spaceship,
0:48:35Anything like that, automatically those people are like, "Oh, Apple's back.
0:48:39It's some crazy new thing, blah, blah, blah."
0:48:41Suddenly, the iPhone seems viable again.
0:48:44I wouldn't bank on that happening.
0:48:45I don't think Apple's banking on that happening to get their phone sales.
0:48:49The second thing I think would actually work, and they probably are going to end up doing,
0:48:53is just make it have a bigger screen.
0:48:56As dumb as that sounds, not dumb that it has a big screen, but dumb that before you weren't
0:49:02excited about it, but now you are. That is enough of a change that a regular person,
0:49:07it's bigger, a regular person will notice that change. And again, not that I'm saying
0:49:11a big screen is not a good idea, because I think it is a good idea, but I'm saying that
0:49:14is the type of change far beyond like a radical new UI or something like that, that you put
0:49:20on the phone, which is much harder to do. Bigger screen, I think can revitalize interest
0:49:27in the iPhone. Bigger screen, I guess, lower cost, but a combination of the two.
0:49:31Because Apple is behind in the screen size war, as we talked about this last time, with
0:49:37the resolution and all that stuff and what they're going to do in that area, but those
0:49:40are all technical details.
0:49:41So just bottom line is, when the Samsung S4 comes out tomorrow, whatever day it is it's
0:49:46going to be, the new Galaxy phone, it's going to have a big, amazing screen on it that's
0:49:52going to be bigger and more amazing-er than the iPhone 5 screen, even.
0:49:57You know what I mean?
0:49:58And regular people can see that.
0:49:59They look at the iPhone 5, they look at that other phone, and they say, "Well, that's more of what I want."
0:50:05"It looks better, it looks nicer."
0:50:06I mean, the Android phones that, you know, the big thing now is that, you know, native 1080p on Android phones at like 460 dpi or something.
0:50:12These are fairly amazing screens, and they're still pretty darn thin, and yes, they're much bigger and heavier, but...
0:50:17like, that's what Apple's up against here, and I think to revitalize interest in its phone line in particular,
0:50:23it's going to have to answer to that.
0:50:26And I think that's pretty much all it will take to get people the ball back rolling on
0:50:29that and then their longer term problem is, you know, "Oh, what's the next big thing?"
0:50:33And then they've got to figure out what the hell they're going to do with TVs or watches
0:50:36or hover cars or whatever.
0:50:38That's a mess.
0:50:40I wonder a little bit if some of this problem is self-created in the sense that, you know,
0:50:46Jon, you've been talking for a long time about how poor Apple is at services.
0:50:53And if you think about it, well, Siri was a brand new thing, and it was supposed to
0:50:58be amazing, and it was supposed to cure all of our problems, and it ended up being fraught
0:51:02with problems, and it was kind of a disaster.
0:51:06Then Apple Maps...
0:51:07Well, I think it was successful in terms of getting people interested.
0:51:11It's that phone that you can talk to.
0:51:12Even if people bought it, talked to it on the first day, played with it, and then stopped
0:51:16using it because it didn't quite work right, it served its purpose at that point.
0:51:20And I think people come out of it with a generally positive, like it's a positive experience.
0:51:25I heard there's this phone that you can talk to. I bought this phone that you can talk
0:51:28to. Me and my friends had an hilarious two days talking to it. Now I don't use it anymore,
0:51:32but I'm not sore about it. Like, I think, basically, I think Siri was a net positive
0:51:36for the iOS platform and the iPhone in general.
0:51:39Oh, sure.
0:51:40It may be. But it started positive. It may or may not have ended positive. Then you have
0:51:44Apple Maps, which nobody wanted.
0:51:46It did not start positive.
0:51:47Right.
0:51:48And obviously, as nerds, we understand
0:51:51kind of the political motivations behind all this.
0:51:53But for a regular human, you didn't
0:51:55want it in the first place.
0:51:56Suddenly, your phone, which you previously loved,
0:51:59one of the critical aspects of this phone now sucks.
0:52:03And you didn't even ask for it.
0:52:04And that's why IOS 6 adoption from most reports--
0:52:08I haven't looked at David Smith's in a while--
0:52:10IOS 6 adoption was terrible until the Google Maps
0:52:13app came out.
0:52:13That's actually not true.
0:52:15Well, that's what I was saying.
0:52:16There was a lot of negative perception, certainly, and a lot of people were holding back, but
0:52:19in the grand scheme of things, it was minimal.
0:52:24It hurt them PR-wise way more than it hurt iOS 6 adoption rates.
0:52:27I think this is another example of the positive of Siri, and then eventually it's like, "Man,
0:52:32you leave it around."
0:52:33This was an initial negative, but I think the same phenomenon happened.
0:52:36Initial negative instead of initial positive.
0:52:38But eventually it's just like, "Meh."
0:52:41Now I think people buying phones, it's a transition that hurts you.
0:52:44transition, you know, like, you know, or helps you in the case of transition to
0:52:48Siri was like, "Wow, this is an amazing new thing. This helps Apple get people into
0:52:51stores, gets people to buy it." And then it just fizzles and it's like, "Meh, fine." The
0:52:55transition from, you know, to a bad thing, suddenly there's this new bad thing and
0:53:00maps are bad and they're going from the maps that were better to the bad ones
0:53:03or just, "I'm getting bad ones," but that trickles off too. And now anyone buying a
0:53:06phone now, you know, even though the Apple Maps are still not as good as Google
0:53:11maps, it's kind of like, "Oh, these are just the maps my phone came with, and if I don't
0:53:16like them, I can try that Google one, and what's the big deal?"
0:53:19So I think maybe those two things cancel each other out, but I think going forward, neither
0:53:24one of them are a factor, except for maybe reputation-wise among nerds.
0:53:28I think they've cleared the PR disaster of maps and are onto, "Now we've got to see what
0:53:35the next thing is.
0:53:36Are we going to have something that's going to be a big negative or a big positive?
0:53:39They need something for the next phone other than just like it's faster, slightly.
0:53:44But I'm not really sure that anything they do with the next iPhone, although I do agree
0:53:49that they need to make the screen bigger for at least one of the models that they sell.
0:53:54Just for all the reasons.
0:53:55And it's cheaper to get people excited too.
0:53:56You know, I'm not entirely sold on the cheaper one idea.
0:53:59Although we should talk about it too.
0:54:02I don't know if you saw.
0:54:03So I've been talking about the weird new CPU in the Apple TV that was just released.
0:54:09that was just updated quietly.
0:54:11And Chipworks has this post here.
0:54:13I'll paste it into our chat thing
0:54:15so that you guys can see it.
0:54:18They had this post up that they've been taking apart
0:54:21the CPU in it.
0:54:22And they found-- so my original theory,
0:54:24which we actually talked about, I believe, on episode one
0:54:26of this show, my original theory was that-- because originally
0:54:31we had thought that they were dye shrinking the A5X.
0:54:35And there's really no good reason for the Apple TV
0:54:37to need an A5X yet.
0:54:39Maybe if they have a future model that can do high-end games, maybe then, okay.
0:54:43But there was really no good reason for it to have an A5X.
0:54:46We later found out, just a couple days ago,
0:54:49we found out that it is indeed not an A5X, but it's an A5
0:54:53that is somehow a lot smaller than the normal A5 package.
0:54:57So again, we speculated, okay, it's a die shrink, so what are we going to do with the new A5?
0:55:01Because the Apple TV doesn't have an--they don't sell enough Apple TVs
0:55:05to justify making a whole separate processor for it.
0:55:09So now, the most recent news that we have
0:55:13is that the processor on the new Apple TV
0:55:16is indeed still an A5, is substantially smaller
0:55:21than the regular A5.
0:55:22But the reason why is because it only has one CPU core instead
0:55:26of two.
0:55:27It's still the same process.
0:55:30I believe it's the 32 nanometer process from Samsung.
0:55:34So it's still the same manufacturing process.
0:55:37Just now there's only one core on the chip.
0:55:38Now before, with the Apple TV, I believe, didn't we say they were like burning out one
0:55:42core because whether it failed the yield test or whether they were just artificially…
0:55:46This makes perfect sense because by the time they've been manufacturing two cores for
0:55:50A5 such a long time, the number of ones that are bum and have one bad core on them now
0:55:56has got to be pretty darn low.
0:55:58I mean, that's the question of like, were they just, you know, it's an efficient use
0:56:01of the ones where one core doesn't work, or are they literally taking them and burning
0:56:06the fuses out on one of the cores? If it was the case that they were trying to get things
0:56:11that one core didn't work, presumably the number of those has dwindled now, because
0:56:17they've been making this chip forever. So there's no more leftovers for it.
0:56:21But given how few Apple TVs they sell, it would probably still be cheaper to just give
0:56:26them dual-core working chips than it would be to make a separate...
0:56:31I'm looking at this because the whole reason why the Apple TV CPU change was interesting
0:56:36is the theory that they make so few of these, it doesn't justify a custom CPU.
0:56:41Therefore, whatever CPU they're using in this is probably going to be put into a future
0:56:46more popular product. That's, I think, worth considering.
0:56:51what could they make with a small single core A5?
0:56:56And that, to me, screams low-end iPhone or low-end iPad mini.
0:57:01Yeah, I suppose it's possible. I mean, it's really tough to tell.
0:57:06Because it's not a Herculean effort, and they have been selling more Apple TV.
0:57:11So making a single core A5 just for the Apple TV is not crazy crazy.
0:57:16crazy crazy. I mean they really have been increasing the number of these things that
0:57:19they sell and especially if they're whatever their crazy grand TV plan keeps being pushed
0:57:26off into the future for you know presumably content related reasons. They're maybe just
0:57:32playing for the future of the Apple TV and unlike the other things that run apps and
0:57:35stuff there's no real reason that year after year the Apple TV has to get tremendously
0:57:39faster or they finally got up to 1080p. So like what more does it need to do? Like it
0:57:44It shows video in 1080p, you can't run apps on it.
0:57:48It could be they're settling in for the long winter, waiting for whatever the heck,
0:57:52and they want to continue to have 60% year-to-year growth on the Apple TV or whatever they were at before.
0:57:56They're selling a not insignificant number of these things,
0:58:00maybe now it deserves its own chip. Not a big deal chip, just a single-core A5.
0:58:04Single-core A5 for a cheaper phone?
0:58:08I'm wondering how much cheaper does that make it?
0:58:12of the single core A5 versus dual, you know, it basically comes down to the area of the chip.
0:58:16And like, the big cost components in that thing is like, I have to imagine
0:58:20like the screen, the battery, the CPU, the GPU, and
0:58:24the case are your big cost components there. I'm not sure how much shaving
0:58:28a tiny little bit of cost on the CPU is gonna, like is that gonna get you
0:58:32over the line in terms of low cost? I'm not sure.
0:58:36Well, not alone, but you know, if you can shave x percent
0:58:40off of a lot of the key components, then that matters.
0:58:44- Right, that's what I was gonna say.
0:58:45In aggregate, it might be enough.
0:58:46- It's conceivable.
0:58:47I mean, like, do we think that the single core A5
0:58:50is useful in any case? - Oh, sure.
0:58:53- Other than a low-cost phone?
0:58:56- I mean, most of what iOS apps do is not multithreaded.
0:59:00So we can kind of look and see, or at least--
0:59:03- I don't know, core animation is multithreaded.
0:59:04- Okay, but most of the things that are really CPU-intensive
0:59:08that apps are doing, for the most part,
0:59:11I think we'd be fine with single core for a low end product.
0:59:15I think if you look at-- if they're trying to shave off
0:59:19dollars and cents here to try to get down to lower price points,
0:59:23first of all, I think the iPad Mini is probably the more
0:59:26obvious choice here than an iPhone,
0:59:28just because the iPhones are still
0:59:29subsidized in most markets.
0:59:31So they have more room to play with there.
0:59:33Whereas the iPad Mini, they want to get that down cheap.
0:59:37And the A5 is probably, even with this smaller version,
0:59:42I would imagine the A5 is probably still too much power
0:59:46to be used in something like a watch.
0:59:47I don't think that would work.
0:59:49But I think it would be fine as a low-end model
0:59:54for either the iPhone or the iPad.
0:59:57- Well, see, you think, like,
0:59:59the iPad mini, I have problems here too,
1:00:01because, like, again, I have to think of, you know,
1:00:05If they want to push the iPad mini price down to give an even lower price one, where else
1:00:12are they going to pull value out of that?
1:00:15Cheaper cameras, slightly cheaper CPU, they can't really give it less battery, they can't
1:00:20really make the screen worse.
1:00:21Oh, on the contrary.
1:00:22If they only have one CPU core, they can give it a little bit less battery.
1:00:26Not that much.
1:00:27I have an easier time thinking that you could shave down a phone because it's subsidized.
1:00:36You could work it out so that it ends up looking way cheaper to the customer where you just
1:00:39saved a little bit of cost and maybe your margins are lower.
1:00:41I'm not sure how much you can squeeze the mini with a single Core A5 in it.
1:00:46And I'm also not sure that Apple ever wants to take any of its products and go backwards
1:00:52in terms of performance.
1:00:55So can I propose two alternate theories, one of which I think is ridiculous and the other
1:01:02I think is marginally ridiculous?
1:01:04You can probably propose one and a half before we interrupt you.
1:01:06That's probably true.
1:01:08So one of them is, what if the whole point of this—and one of you guys just inferred
1:01:13it a second ago—what if the whole point of this—this chip is physically smaller,
1:01:18is it not?
1:01:19Yeah.
1:01:20A lot.
1:01:21So what if the whole point was either to increase battery volume in the same size case or, or
1:01:25alternatively, what if we are finally getting our iPhone Nano that we used to talk about
1:01:31constantly and then gave up on?
1:01:33If you really want the space back, you've got to shrink, you know, 28 nanometers or
1:01:38get Intel to FABM at 22.
1:01:39Sure.
1:01:40If you really want space back, that's the way to do it.
1:01:41You don't ditch a core and stick to 32.
1:01:44Like if space was, you know, I'm more inclined to believe that cost is the reason because
1:01:49you take a 32 nanometer process that you already have, that your manufacturers already have
1:01:52have a lot of experience with, really good yields, not pushing the limits of technology,
1:01:58give me one that's a little bit cheaper.
1:02:01But if you wanted to space back, if you wanted an iPhone Nano or something, it's much easier
1:02:06to get that space going through a new process.
1:02:08I mean, 20 nanometers seems like it's in the cards for 2013 for Apple products from Taiwan
1:02:16semiconductor or whoever they're going to do that.
1:02:18And if the Intel things come through, maybe that's not going to happen this year, maybe
1:02:21next year, but if that isn't just a pipe dream. But I think that's the way you get space back.
1:02:27Well, you say that that's the easiest way to get space back, but it's also a more expensive
1:02:31way to get space back, is it not? Well, I mean, but it's an expense you have to incur anyway.
1:02:35It's not like you're going to stick at 32 nanometers forever. The train is going along,
1:02:39and this is the year where Apple—all the other phone manufacturers are already at 28 or lower,
1:02:44right? The Android—the big Android guys already have phones that have 28-nanometer quad-core
1:02:49things with 1080p screens and they're outclassing Apple's hardware in all respects, with the
1:02:55exception of power consumption, but they make up for it by having a bigger battery because
1:02:58they have bigger screens, right?
1:03:00So Apple, you know, it's going to happen anyway.
1:03:02Apple's going to have to make that transition.
1:03:04If you're going to do that, you wait to put out your iPhone Nano until all your components
1:03:08shrink down.
1:03:09And I believe also, like, shrinking...
1:03:11We always talk about the CPUs and I guess the GPUs as well, you know, the system on
1:03:14a chip, whatever.
1:03:16But there's other components inside there, not many, but there are other ones, and some
1:03:18Some of them—I think Anand Tech had a good article about the process used for the cell
1:03:23radios, which are limited by the various analog things that go into them.
1:03:29Those could stand to be—I mean, the first LTE chipsets were not great and sucked up
1:03:33a lot of battery.
1:03:34There are other places where you can get some savings by shrink, so even if you had a 20
1:03:39nanometer CPU, if all the rest of your chips are fabbed at like 45 or 65 or some crazy
1:03:44size, that can make you sad as well.
1:03:46So bringing all the internal components of your mobile thing along on a train of continual
1:03:54process shrinks, I think you can get to your iPhone Nano with that technique, and that's
1:04:01maybe the only way you can get there.
1:04:02Because otherwise, if you just take the internal...
1:04:04It's not like there's a lot of room left over in the iPhone 5 as it is, and just shrinking
1:04:08the screen is not going to...
1:04:10If anything, that's going to hurt you, because then you have less room for a battery in there.
1:04:13So I'm not sure the iPhone Nano is a concept,
1:04:16really makes much sense, and if it does,
1:04:18I think they'll get there by shrink
1:04:21and not by chopping out cores.
1:04:23- I also think too, just demand might not really
1:04:25be there for that.
1:04:26People want their smartphone screens to be big.
1:04:28And I think Apple will very well address
1:04:33the market of people who wanna keep their smartphone small
1:04:37with the regular sized iPhone.
1:04:39And I really don't think they're going to go big only in their product line, but I don't
1:04:45think they have to go smaller than the iPhone 5 size, really.
1:04:50I think they might go big only.
1:04:53I see the iPhone 6 having a larger screen than the 5 and them not offering a smaller
1:04:58one except for by still selling the iPhone 5, basically.
1:05:00Well, the only way they could do that, I think, would be if the screen was bigger but not
1:05:06like a ton bigger.
1:05:08Yeah, I mean, I'm not expecting them to make a phablet, but…
1:05:12But the problem is, if they don't really make a substantial jump, then it's not going
1:05:16to really serve them very well in the reasons why they should need a big screen in the first
1:05:20place.
1:05:21It's not going to really stand up well in a store next to these giant Android phones.
1:05:25It's not going to potentially replace the need for an iPad for some people, or at least
1:05:29they would think that they would buy that phone.
1:05:31I think it would stand up better in the store just a little bit bigger.
1:05:34I mean, it's the question we talked about, I think it was last week.
1:05:37It's like, do you just make it bigger at the same res, which is what we all assume, and
1:05:41I believe that would be completely adequate to give them the boost they need of having
1:05:45something bigger.
1:05:46Or do you bite the bullet and actually, you know, whether it's 1080p or pick a new canonical
1:05:51res, because, you know, Apple's not above picking a new canonical res.
1:05:53They did it once with the iPad.
1:05:54I guarantee you they'll do it again sometime in the history of iOS, you know, before the
1:05:58company goes out of business and the heat death of the universe, there will be a new
1:06:01resolution besides 1024 by 768 points and whatever the heck the iPhone is.
1:06:06They did it with the iPhone 5 as well. That will happen. It's just a question of when
1:06:11and a question of now, is it too soon? They just went tall phone. Is it too soon? Do they
1:06:15have to wait a generation to bump it out again? But that's going to happen. I could see them
1:06:20doing that sooner rather than later if they start feeling the pinch.
1:06:24Yeah, but if they only make one size iPhone, then like, you know, like imagine if they only made one size laptop.
1:06:30Like what size would that be? Probably the 13-inch, right?
1:06:34And then you miss out on the great value of the 15 and the 11.
1:06:38You know, if you look at the phones, like if they're gonna keep having just one model for the foreseeable future,
1:06:44and if they make the next one bigger, say, then they're missing out on all the greatness in product design, all the sales, all the
1:06:52the goodwill that would come from the people who would want the smaller phones, like the
1:06:57five that we have now, compared to other big phones at least, and people who would want
1:07:01even bigger phones, like the weirdo phablets.
1:07:04I think ultimately as this market matures, which I think it's pretty safe to say the
1:07:09smartphone market is fairly mature at this point, I think they have to go to multiple
1:07:14sizes.
1:07:15It was on my 2013 to-do list.
1:07:17What do you call it?
1:07:19diversify the iPhone line, and that means not just keep selling the old one as your
1:07:23different size.
1:07:26The reason I say that it's not inconceivable that it won't is because that's been Apple's
1:07:28MO for so long.
1:07:29There is one iPhone, and then there's the older iPhones.
1:07:31The older iPhones fill our needs, and what I've been saying they need to do is diversify
1:07:34the line by not doing that, by having—there's actually not one iPhone.
1:07:38There's actually two iPhones and possibly some older ones.
1:07:42And what if just single core A5 is how they do that?
1:07:46You can combine them both and say, "We're diversifying the line, we're getting a bigger
1:07:50screen, and the way we're diversifying is that the one with the smallest screen is the
1:07:52cheap one."
1:07:53Exactly.
1:07:55Which would disappoint the people who want a smaller phone that's full performance, but
1:07:57they should feel the same pain that iPod touch users have had to feel where, "We want all
1:08:02the good things!"
1:08:03But, no, you can never get all the good things.
1:08:06They have so many options for how they can diversify their line, whether they just want
1:08:09to do it on size, they also want to try to do it on cost.
1:08:12I mean, hell, they could come out with three of them.
1:08:13Like they go right from having one phone to having three phones.
1:08:17It's conceivable that all these things are possible.
1:08:19I don't know which one of them.
1:08:21It's hard to read what they think the issue is.
1:08:24We all think they need a bigger screen.
1:08:26Does Apple believe that?
1:08:27I think at this point they probably do.
1:08:29Some of us think they could benefit from a lower-cross one, but I can imagine the bean
1:08:33counters at Apple going, "You know what?
1:08:35Actually, that's something that you as a customer may want, but actually it would be worse for
1:08:38Apple as a business, so we're not going to do that."
1:08:41I have a hard time seeing into that calculus.
1:08:46To take this full circle, does that mean that in order to continue to…
1:08:54What was the Steve Jobsism like?
1:08:57Delight and amaze our customers or whatever it was?
1:08:59In order to keep people talking about the iPhone is what I really mean.
1:09:03Do they not do a 5S this year?
1:09:06Do they instead do either a 6 or do they do a 5s and a iPhone Plus or whatever you guys
1:09:13called it?
1:09:14Is that enough to… is something unexpected enough to get people talking positively about
1:09:21the iPhone again?
1:09:22That's a timing issue.
1:09:23I think like if they could, they definitely would.
1:09:26I can say that right now.
1:09:27Like if they had planned enough in advance and foreseen this, like they would definitely
1:09:34do that.
1:09:35maybe that, you know, I just don't think that the current situation they find themselves
1:09:40in, they planned on two, three years out. And that's the kind of planning you would
1:09:44have to have to say, "We're going to go from this 4.4.S. 5.5.S cadence. Actually, we're
1:09:49not going to do that with the 5. We're going to do 4.4.S. and then we're going to do 5,
1:09:52then 6. Start planning now." Because they would have to start planning that a very long
1:09:56time ago. I think they would really benefit from that, but if they didn't start playing
1:10:00it two, three years ago, I don't think they're capable. I think they just got to ship what
1:10:04they have, which is going to be a 5S, and keep going. The problem is we're having complete
1:10:12information, so we don't know all this wildcard stuff. Whatever the heck else they're doing that's
1:10:17not a phone, that's not an iPad, presumably there's something or several things on various
1:10:21burners in various states of whatever, any of those things, if they come to a boil,
1:10:25make this much less of an issue. "Oh, we've got the 5S, but we've also got the Apple hover car."
1:10:32No one cares that it's friggin' 5S.
1:10:34You know what I mean?
1:10:35Whatever crazy other things, whether it's
1:10:37watches or TV stuff or new services
1:10:41or they buy some other company-- so many other things
1:10:44can not make this an issue.
1:10:47But if there's nothing new for this entire year
1:10:48and they just have the 5S and they make all their products
1:10:52better in the ways that we always expect them to make
1:10:54things better, I think that will not
1:10:56be a great year for Apple in terms of their perception
1:11:01in the industry.
1:11:02Yeah, although I would argue that they have, you know, Gruber talks a lot about the concept
1:11:10of momentum, and I would argue right now that—
1:11:13Traction.
1:11:14Traction, yeah.
1:11:15—that Apple has so much negative momentum or traction in the press or in people's
1:11:21perceptions of how they're doing.
1:11:24They have so much negativity around them right now and skepticism and doubt that I don't
1:11:31anything they release this year is going to fix that. I don't think it can be fixed. They
1:11:34could release a flying unicorn watch toaster tomorrow and it wouldn't change anybody's
1:11:39mind. Everyone would just find some reason to complain about it.
1:11:42If they released some new product that was actually good, it has to actually be good,
1:11:48that would turn it around.
1:11:49Well, but the only product...
1:11:50They would come out of the year and it would just be like a bump.
1:11:52But the only product that they've released in recent memory that everyone thought was
1:11:56good from the start was the iPhone.
1:11:59Not everyone's going to think it's good from the start, but I'm like net-net coming out
1:12:01of it.
1:12:02It's kind of the same naysayers that everybody had, I mean that iPad had them.
1:12:05The iPhone probably had the most positive reception, but even that had like, "Well,
1:12:09it's a nice product, but you're not going to be a phone maker.
1:12:11You're not going to just walk in."
1:12:14Everything's got the negative, but it doesn't matter.
1:12:16The net out of that was, "Exciting new thing.
1:12:18Apple's doing exciting new thing that's risky and interesting, and I want to know what's
1:12:24going on with it."
1:12:25as just keeping making better Macs and better iPads and iPhones year after year, some of
1:12:32which, you know, are not as interesting as like the best phones from best Android phones.
1:12:38That's boring. And the worst thing you want to be is boring. I mean, you know, even if
1:12:43they come up with a watch and everyone says it's a piece of crap, that's more exciting
1:12:46than not coming out with a watch, right? And the net at the end of the year, I think, would
1:12:51be positive from that because everyone hates it, but who knows? It's kind of crazy and
1:12:54it's got this one interesting thing that we didn't think of. And, you know, uncertainty
1:12:58and excitement is more interesting than just boring iteration on the same things. Although,
1:13:03yeah, I don't understand the finance industry. Like, wouldn't they want boring iteration?
1:13:06Wouldn't they want a gigantic machine that churns out money? But I guess they want explosive
1:13:09growth. So they were looking for the next hockey stick graph and the graphs for the
1:13:14phones and iPad are not hockey sticky enough for them.
1:13:17Wow. Is that a technical term? Yeah. I mean, they are. Every time we see
1:13:22Horace's graphs on Asympto, like, they're still hockey sticks. Look at the friggin'
1:13:25iPad graph. That should be like, wow, all smiles, look at that growth curve. It's great.
1:13:30And Apple's dominating the tablet industry and all these great things, and the story
1:13:34is still Android tablets surpass iPads next year. Which may actually be true, but it's
1:13:40like, you know, they have two great products on hockey stick trajectories, the phone and
1:13:44the iPad, and that's not enough. That's not enough, because those things used to look
1:13:50more attractive when they had no competitors.
1:13:52And going back to what Casey said earlier, as we discussed last episode, this has been
1:13:57a draft blog post in my head for weeks and I just haven't written it out, but I'll
1:14:02ruin it for you guys here. I feel like Apple's next big product, all the press and maybe
1:14:09the public, they want it to be some gadget. They say, "Oh, I want it to be a watch,"
1:14:14or "I want a toaster," or "I want a hovercar."
1:14:17I said hovercar. That's not a gadget.
1:14:19- It's gadgety, it's people who want hover cars
1:14:21are probably people who want smartwatches also.
1:14:24So everyone wants it to be some kind of hardware gadget,
1:14:27a TV set, which I think would be probably
1:14:29the most boring product ever.
1:14:31All these things, and there was also,
1:14:35speaking of Gruber, a good discussion of this on Talk Show
1:14:37with Guy English and Gruber last week.
1:14:40But I think Apple's next big product shouldn't be
1:14:44any of those things.
1:14:46it should be dramatically improving their services
1:14:50and their software in that order.
1:14:52- Yeah, good luck with that.
1:14:53- And I know, I mean, I know it's not gonna,
1:14:55it's probably not gonna happen,
1:14:57and it wouldn't make anybody except users and nerds happy.
1:15:01You know, it's not flashy,
1:15:04it's not very newsworthy most of the time.
1:15:07Like, it's not gonna fix their perception,
1:15:10but what their products need the most
1:15:13is significant substantial progress
1:15:16in services and quality of software.
1:15:20And that, I would much rather they take
1:15:24what they already have, what they've already started,
1:15:27all these different things they have
1:15:29going on these platforms, just make them really great,
1:15:32make the services better,
1:15:34and improve the quality of the software.
1:15:37I would so much rather have that than a smartwatch.
1:15:42But you're right. The market does not demand that, even though the market's better off with that.
1:15:47But the market demands a gadget. They would see that it's like a shark that stopped moving.
1:15:52They'd be like, "Oh, they're retrenching." And in some respects, Apple has like,
1:15:58a little tiny bit, I mean, they don't think they recognize this from a technical perspective,
1:16:03but at least from a strategic perspective, that's what the maps thing was about. It's like,
1:16:08The future is more of this network connected service things, not less.
1:16:12We need to take control of this, we need to take the reins, and they screwed it up with maps.
1:16:16But at least they recognize that it's not a tenable long-term strategy
1:16:20to rely on your most bitter rival for an essential service that your phone provides.
1:16:26So we all understand why they had to do maps. At least there's some recognition that they realized that.
1:16:31Speech recognition could be another similar issue with them not really owning that technology.
1:16:36If they woke up one day and fully realized how screwed they are on their inability to
1:16:44do network services and how important they're going to be in the future, they would have
1:16:49to sign themselves up for a multi-year dark period of figuring that stuff out.
1:16:57Kind of like the multi-year dark period coming out of the '90s where they had their whole
1:17:00crappy OS that they had to rev, and they had to keep the company in business and then start
1:17:05working on the next big thing, and they did, and they came out of it, and went gangbusters,
1:17:09right?
1:17:10They probably need another period like that to get their house in order on the server-side
1:17:16stuff, because it's not like we're in a future where that server-side stuff is going to be
1:17:20less important.
1:17:22There's no going back.
1:17:24And so they either need to get really good at it, or get really chummy with someone who's
1:17:27interested or aligned with theirs who is good at it.
1:17:29And that used to be Google, but it's not anymore.
1:17:33All these reasons are like, people keep saying that Apple's getting slammed for illogical
1:17:37reasons or like, "Oh, they're making all this money hand over fist, Wall Street is crazy."
1:17:41In some respects, the negativity that is reflected in the press about them is like accumulation
1:17:52of all the negative things that I'd been thinking about Apple for the past 10 years, but at
1:17:56the time I was thinking them, no one else agreed with them.
1:18:00Apple's going gangbusters, everybody loves it, all their products are great, and you'd
1:18:02you'd be like, "Butt, butt, server-side this," and they'd be like, "What are you talking
1:18:05about? Their stuff is awesome. They have no comp—" Right? You know? And now it's kind
1:18:08of all coming home to roost. And maybe that's just projection. Maybe they're being negative
1:18:12for another reason. But I don't think the current negative view of Apple is that crazy.
1:18:16I mean, it's kind of crazy in terms—I don't know the details of the finances or whatever,
1:18:20but it's like, you see they're making tons of money. They're not going out of business.
1:18:24They're a successful company. They're well-run. They have products that people like all the
1:18:27things that Google posts again and again. But at the same time, I see where all their
1:18:30strategic weaknesses are, and I see that it's not like you can snap your fingers and make
1:18:34those strategic weaknesses go away.
1:18:36And even making a new Apple TV or a watch does not make all those weaknesses go away.
1:18:41It just staves off the inevitable for a little bit longer.
1:18:44In fact, a new gadget or a new platform would probably make a lot of these problems worse.
1:18:51Marginally worse.
1:18:52I mean, I get an urge to.
1:18:53Here's more things that require software and services that they're having trouble keeping
1:18:57up with.
1:18:58I mean, they are presumably reaping the benefits to Google Reaps.
1:19:02It's like, okay, well, if we do have a new TV thing, presumably it's based on iOS, and
1:19:08we can leverage the App Store, and we can leverage iCloud.
1:19:11They are getting a common core of stuff that they work on that makes all their products
1:19:15better.
1:19:16It's not like they're going to go out and make something totally unrelated where they
1:19:18can't reuse any of their tech or platform.
1:19:21It's a marginal increase, but the thing that makes us feel bad about it is a distraction.
1:19:27Could you just get the crap that you have now to work right?
1:19:29Like stop with the watch stuff.
1:19:30Like you just, you take it, you don't,
1:19:32we have this crazy perception
1:19:33that probably isn't rooted in reality
1:19:35of them taking off their AAA players
1:19:38and putting them on whatever the big new project is.
1:19:40So like, oh, pull off all the best,
1:19:41most awesome iPhone people
1:19:42and put them on the hover watch, right?
1:19:44And like, no, like you don't pull those guys off.
1:19:47We need the good people.
1:19:48Like we felt like, we felt like that when they, you know,
1:19:51seemingly pulled like the big, good, awesome,
1:19:53important people off Mac OS X for a while
1:19:55be all hands on deck with the iOS and the App Store, which was the right business decision,
1:19:59but they have finite resources and we don't want them to be—that was another thing on
1:20:03the talk show episode—we don't want them to be spread too thin.
1:20:07They don't have an infinite number of awesome, talented people.
1:20:11And with the financials and the share price and everything going down, it may be harder
1:20:15to acquire and retain those amazing people, so maybe you don't have so many to spread
1:20:19around as you used to.
1:20:23a major problem for them. The size of the company is, talent wise, it's smaller than it needs to be.
1:20:30They have very limited resources that they can allocate to these things. And you're right,
1:20:35the business case for pulling a Snow Leopard. With Snow Leopard, they basically spent, what was it, 18 months
1:20:42development of it, not adding a lot of user-facing features. The whole message of Snow Leopard was,
1:20:50We're going to rebuild a lot of the foundation of this and add things, you know, really important
1:20:54foundational APIs like Grand Central Dispatch. We're going to really make
1:20:58the foundation better and awesome and fix a lot of bugs, rather than
1:21:02adding a whole bunch of new user-facing features. And Mountain Lion was kind
1:21:06of like that, you know, compared to Lion. But I
1:21:10feel like they need to have a period like that
1:21:14for services and for all their software. They need like a company
1:21:18wide period of like two years of just improving the stuff we have.
1:21:23But you're right that business-wise and market-wise, that will never be a smart idea to do.
1:21:28Well, they could afford to do it on the Mac because all eyes were on iOS.
1:21:32That's true.
1:21:33So that's one reprieve.
1:21:34I mean, there's no excuse for the services because like I guess all eyes are never going
1:21:42to be off iCloud because that's the nature of services is like an underpinning infrastructure.
1:21:45But if they—not that they're going to introduce a third platform, but if they did,
1:21:50eyes would be off iOS briefly, and then those guys could do iOS 8, which would be their
1:21:55snow leopard or whatever.
1:21:57But I don't think that's going to happen.
1:22:00Two platforms is plenty for them.
1:22:03They're much more likely to—maybe they get away with it iterating on the watch your
1:22:08TV or some other thing, where it gets its own fork of the OS, it's still iOS-based
1:22:13or whatever, and then you have time to sort of pin down the phone OS. But I think services
1:22:20are much more dire than the OS stuff, because I think they're on a pretty good track with the OS
1:22:25revisions. I think they're already in refinement mode on iOS. There's a couple of major things
1:22:31they need to add here and there, but the services are really the big deal, because it's not something
1:22:37you do by snapping your fingers. They can't have a snow leopard release of services that cures their
1:22:42their problems. It's problems that can't be fixed in 12 to 18 months.
1:22:45Exactly. And it requires a lot of substantial changes, substantial investments in infrastructure
1:22:51and talent that does that, and really big shifts and big investments that just take
1:22:57a long time. Even if they were 100 percent prioritized on that right this second, that
1:23:02just takes a long time to build that up.
1:23:04So if they want to do that fast, here's my advice to them. Buy Facebook, shut it down,
1:23:08the talent to do your server-side stuff.
1:23:10Because do you think they have enough money to buy Facebook?
1:23:12Probably.
1:23:13I don't know.
1:23:14It might be close.
1:23:15You're looking for a big investment.
1:23:17Remove Facebook from the earth, which is a general good for humanity.
1:23:22Take all those people.
1:23:23Most of them are probably going to leave and go off and do other things, but enough of
1:23:26them will stay.
1:23:29They're not Google-caliber people, but they know how to run a service that a hoejillion
1:23:33people use that has better reliability than iCloud.
1:23:37So, yeah, that's my plan.
1:23:39- I would even think, like,
1:23:40that if they would have bought Twitter,
1:23:43I mean, now I don't think Twitter would sell
1:23:44at a price Apple wanna pay. - I think they tried.
1:23:46- Right, but like, if they would have bought Twitter,
1:23:47they would have had a lot of that type of talent
1:23:50and a lot of that type of experience and infrastructure.
1:23:52- Well, I think Twitter is not--
1:23:53- Not at Facebook level, but not, you know,
1:23:56certainly probably better than whatever Apple's doing now.
1:23:59I mean, isn't a lot of iCloud still outsourced
1:24:01to Microsoft Azure or Azure, however you say that?
1:24:03- Azure, and I was gonna say exactly that.
1:24:06I don't think Microsoft is terribly capable as a host, unlike Amazon, whom has become
1:24:12very capable as a host.
1:24:14But I wonder, and I was going to ask you guys until you brought it up, I wonder if Apple
1:24:19and Microsoft could find a common enemy in Google and perhaps the two of them could fumble
1:24:23along together in order to improve their services to the point that they're actually, I don't
1:24:28know, functional.
1:24:29Well, that's kind of what they're doing, isn't it?
1:24:31Sort of.
1:24:32You'd have to wait for Microsoft to have fallen much even lower than it has now for them to
1:24:38ever--because Microsoft is in the same situation as Apple, kind of, where they both recognize
1:24:42that Google does that server-side stuff better, just that Microsoft has been, in typical Microsoft
1:24:48fashion, much more sort of head down, "OK, this is an area where we are not strong and
1:24:53we're going to improve, and we're going to hire the guy who did Lotus Notes, and we're
1:24:56going to revamp our entire server-side architecture, and we're going to be serious about this."
1:25:01And Apple hasn't done all that, or at least not as publicly.
1:25:03Who knows what they're doing internally.
1:25:05But it's clearly not a top line item.
1:25:09So I don't see Microsoft as a big win for Apple
1:25:14to cooperate in this regard.
1:25:16And I also don't see Microsoft ever stooping to that level
1:25:18and say, we're just going to be your helper in the battle
1:25:22against Google.
1:25:23Microsoft still wants to be a big player,
1:25:25even though we all kind of recognize
1:25:27that it's not going to be.
1:25:28Well, everyone except Microsoft.