0:00:00Hello
0:00:01Man, you always sound so good. I
0:00:03Got I just am doing what Marco tells me to do. I know I've got it
0:00:08I keep saying I'm gonna do what Marco tells me to do and I haven't done yet
0:00:11Well, he keeps changing his opinion
0:00:13I like I bought all the stuff that he told me to buy and then like a week later is like oh, oh
0:00:17But this microphone is even better and then like two weeks later was like and then there's this microphone dude
0:00:22I'm not gonna keep buying microphones
0:00:28the other thing that gets me to is the
0:00:30the
0:00:32Now that I have the watch I feel like it's one too many devices to have to silence before a podcast
0:00:36You know, I leave my watch silenced all the time
0:00:39I do too except when I don't and I at least have to I feel like I at least have to check it before recording
0:00:46Well, that's true. Yeah, I I leave it. I leave it off the whole time. I I can't remember the last time I turned it on
0:00:54That would kind of I don't know it might be I might be wishing for too much magic
0:00:58but I kind of wish that there was like a
0:01:00Like some kind of way to tie into iTunes or iCloud and say silence all my shit. Oh, that's
0:01:09Yeah, I mean the problem with the iPhones right and right just the iPhones have the physical silent switch
0:01:15So right you could silence it, but it would still be switched to on I don't know I did I think about that
0:01:22I wish I had a button to push, you know, for the valuable podcasting demographic, I wish I had a button to push that basically said,
0:01:27"Okay, stop syncing all your drop boxes and stuff. Make everything silent.
0:01:33Just enough already." I don't know, I, the Apple Watch sound,
0:01:39that is one of the least compelling things about that product to me, and I just, I don't want to have, like, I
0:01:46can feel the little taps. I kind of don't need to hear the sound.
0:01:51Kind of agree. I forget who I was talking to. I don't it might have even been on it
0:01:55You know
0:01:55you never have that where you forget what you said on a podcast and what yeah in real life because I
0:01:58Talk about the same stuff in real life that I talk about on shows. Yeah, I was like, yes
0:02:03No
0:02:03That was just a conversation I had
0:02:05That the default might be wrong that the default for the Apple watch might be to be silent, huh? I
0:02:11Can see why it's not because it's that's so
0:02:16to every other device you own, but I feel like with the watch it actually
0:02:21makes sense where most people you know maybe but if you're new to it and you're
0:02:25unfamiliar and you're going through the infamous first week of getting to know
0:02:28Apple watch defaulting to trusting the haptics or tap ticks whatever you want
0:02:33to call them is I think the way to go yeah I don't see I don't see the point I
0:02:39mean I I can see the point in making noise when it's not on my wrist but when
0:02:42it's on my wrist and I can feel it, I kind of feel like that's enough for me. And the
0:02:47shame of it is, if there are instances where you should be alerted audibly because something's
0:02:56going on, they're mixed in with the ones where it's pointless, and so I just turn them off.
0:03:04And I'd much rather scale them back to have them be only when it's particularly important.
0:03:10But right now it's like every time anything happens, it wants to do a little ding.
0:03:14And I don't need a little ding.
0:03:15I've totally got the haptic feel down.
0:03:19I know that it's tapping me.
0:03:21I don't need a noise too.
0:03:23And the noise annoys everybody else in the world.
0:03:25The beauty of the haptics on the Apple Watch is that nobody hears your vibration like they
0:03:31hear it on the phone.
0:03:33It's just a complete secret message from your watch to you.
0:03:38so why do I need a ding?
0:03:40- You're recording, right?
0:03:41- I am recording.
0:03:43- We just got right into it.
0:03:44This is great.
0:03:45- I'm always recording.
0:03:46I had a conversation with Dan Morin the other week
0:03:51and halfway through we're like, is this a podcast?
0:03:53No, it's not, but I was recording it.
0:03:56It could have been, but it's not a podcast.
0:03:58Just in case, why not?
0:04:00- So I've been away, I've been on vacation for a while.
0:04:03So there has not been a show for a while.
0:04:06There's not really been much news that's gone on.
0:04:08it seemed like I picked a very advantageous time to go on vacation news-wise, but there was
0:04:13a couple of things that I was like, "Oh man, I wish I had time to write about this," because
0:04:19this is like a good commentary type, punditry type stuff that burst out in the last two weeks.
0:04:26But one of them, I guess this actually predates that. This is all the way back to June,
0:04:31which is when the new Pebble Time started shipping. Did you get one of those?
0:04:35I didn't. So you wore the original Pebble for years, right? For the two years, basically.
0:04:43I mean, until I got my Apple Watch, and I was one of the Kickstarter people, so I got it in whatever
0:04:49February of '13, something like that. So two years. Yeah, I kick-started it, the original, wore it for
0:04:56like two days, and I bought the new one too, because I thought, well, I mean, I'm rooting for these
0:05:02these guys. I really do hope that they pull it out and I think it's great that they have
0:05:08a different set of priorities, not just to Apple but to everybody else in the space.
0:05:14It really, especially after having worn Apple Watch for a while, it's so far behind in so
0:05:22many ways that it just can't. The thing that made me think about it and just of all the
0:05:26things I want to talk about with you, get it out of the way first, is you saying that
0:05:29when the tactics go off, you don't have to worry about people hearing them. Well, when
0:05:32the Pebble Time tactic goes off, everybody in the room knows it.
0:05:37Mm-hmm. Yeah, you know, for me, it's, and it's not their fault, but as an iOS user,
0:05:42I just, I can see the writing on the wall. Before it was like, you know, Apple had some
0:05:47Bluetooth stuff that would send out notifications, and there were other devices that could support
0:05:51it, including Pebble, and it seemed like, you know, it was what it was, but it was clear
0:05:56than the background Apple was working on a watch and was going to put all their
0:06:00effort into tying iOS with that watch. And you know, when I saw Pebble Time, I
0:06:05thought, you know, they keep adding features for Android because they can
0:06:10tie into all of the Android Wear APIs, and it just seemed clear to me that
0:06:14Pebble was going to be a much better watch on Android than it was ever going
0:06:18to be on iOS because it was never going to be a priority for Apple to support
0:06:23Pebble because why would they they've got their own watch yeah and even if you
0:06:27want to take a less cynical competitive or if you want to say anti-competitive
0:06:32view it's just never gonna be a priority for them to spend the time to make those
0:06:37API's public instead of private even if they kind of in in their heart of hearts
0:06:41if Apple wanted to support third-party watches like pebble as best they could
0:06:47on iOS they're never gonna have the API's cat caught up to where the private
0:06:51APIs for Apple Watch are.
0:06:54Just not gonna happen.
0:06:55- Nor are they going to be as rich as what is
0:06:58in the Android Wear stuff on Android.
0:07:01So if you're Pebble, you're like, you know,
0:07:02iOS is a nice market and you'd like to be there,
0:07:05but your product is worse on it than it is on Android.
0:07:09So I think, I understand why they're prioritizing things
0:07:13that way and I would make the same decision.
0:07:15And I don't blame Apple because, you know,
0:07:17what does Apple want to focus on?
0:07:19Apple Watch or kind of vague third-party support that really would only be, I mean, Google's
0:07:25talked about doing, you know, Android Wear support on iOS, but it'll be the same thing.
0:07:28There'll be an app that ties into some basic Bluetooth stuff and maybe some Google services
0:07:33they'll be able to do, but, you know, I get the impression that Apple can do some very
0:07:38clever things in the background in terms of launching, you know, like launching apps,
0:07:43grabbing the data, sending it to the watch. That is not something that is allowed by third-party
0:07:48apps and so they're always going to be ahead of things. Yeah.
0:07:51Yeah, and if that's already a problem on Apple Watch and it is, you know, in terms of sometimes
0:07:56the latency between tapping the weather complication on your face and actually getting the weather
0:08:01to update with Apple having the inside access to it. Imagine how much worse it would be
0:08:06for someone relying on third party. I can't help but think that that's why Google, that
0:08:10was like a rumor leading up to, it was months ago actually, but a rumor leading up to IO
0:08:16that was something that they might announce at IO in early June or late
0:08:19June or May or whatever the hell IO was and didn't happen and I can't help but
0:08:25think that one of the reasons you know maybe the main reason why not that they
0:08:28haven't been working on it but that it is so it pales in comparison both to
0:08:33Apple watch for iOS and Android wear for Android and so therefore why you know
0:08:38it's second rate either way no matter just my experience with the pebble thing
0:08:42is like pebble would update its apps in the background as long as the pebble app
0:08:45was running and it would run for a while.
0:08:46And at some point iOS would just kill it
0:08:48because it hadn't been running for a while
0:08:50and it needed the memory.
0:08:51And at that point that was it.
0:08:53Like Pebble won't talk to the watch
0:08:56or I mean, won't talk to the phone after that
0:08:57because you know, it's just an app
0:09:00and it doesn't have any special powers there.
0:09:04And you know, that's just how it is.
0:09:06It's a tough situation, but I like them too.
0:09:10I like the idea that this is a lower cost,
0:09:13you know, simpler, long life. I like the fact that it's got the long battery life.
0:09:17There are lots of things to like about it, but, you know, the fact is, platform vendors have so
0:09:22much power over what these other products can do. And at least with Google, they can tie into the
0:09:30stuff that Google built for Android Wear and good for them. That makes that a more compelling
0:09:34product on Android. But on iOS, it's just never—I mean, I kept having this hope for the first two
0:09:39years that they would get better, and it did get better for a while, and then it feels
0:09:44like to me they hit a wall where it's like this is all Apple is ever going to let Bluetooth,
0:09:48generic Bluetooth devices do.
0:09:50Yeah. App is a sort of nebulous word, and as time goes on, it's ever more nebulous.
0:09:56But the basic idea, because it doesn't really relate to anything like a low-level computer
0:10:01science term. It's a bundle that basically means it's a process running on your computer
0:10:10that displays a user interface to the user. To me, this is my interpretation of the word.
0:10:17It's a word inherently of the GUI era of computing. It's a thing that no matter which computer
0:10:24on that the user looks at and interacts with.
0:10:29And I, you know, even on iOS and maybe in the early days like 2008 when the App Store
0:10:34first debuted, that's really what apps were.
0:10:37They were processes that showed a user interface and had an icon and if you were looking at
0:10:42it and it, you know, it was running and if you weren't looking at it, it wasn't running.
0:10:47And it was really pretty simple.
0:10:49And now there's, you know, as iOS has evolved, there's a lot more that can happen in the
0:10:53the background and apps can stay in memory as long as there's enough memory to keep
0:10:58the most, you know, three, four, five most recently used apps. You can request for background
0:11:06downloads even when you're not running, et cetera, et cetera. But basically, to interact
0:11:11with another piece of hardware, to have a phone interacting with and controlling with
0:11:16a watch, you don't really want an app for that. It has to be part of the operating system.
0:11:20there's no way that third parties get to write parts of the operating system on iOS.
0:11:25Yeah, you need some sort of feature.
0:11:27And it's not like there aren't steps toward this in some of the iOS updates that have
0:11:32come out over the last few years.
0:11:33But, you know, for something like Pebble, you really need, like, a daemon to use Unix
0:11:37terminology.
0:11:38You need something that is a process that runs in the background all the time.
0:11:41And Apple's not going to let—Apple always has the ability to—even when there is a
0:11:46when there is a process running in the background, because iOS backgrounding, you know, S apps
0:11:50can run in the background facelessly to do some updates and things. Apple is never going
0:11:54to give up the option to kill something if it wants to improve the user experience by
0:12:01freeing up memory so that this other app can run. And so, you know, somebody like Pebble,
0:12:05they just can't, they can't install something that's running all the time and they can't
0:12:08count on it being there. And that, you know, it limits what they can do, whereas Apple
0:12:12can try to do that, we should say, because, I mean, you mentioned it. I sometimes will
0:12:17put on like a weather complication or something like that, and it just—or the sunset on
0:12:24that, what is it, the solar face, where it calculates out like the sunrise/sunset data.
0:12:28I've had that just—it gives up and it shows it like it's the equinox, because even
0:12:33though it's talking to the phone, whatever process updates that data has just died or
0:12:38stalled. And so even Apple is struggling with it and they control the operating system.
0:12:42And that's, you know, if it could, if it made any sense, and it doesn't for
0:12:47Pebble to be connected to your Mac instead of to your phone, it doesn't because you're going
0:12:53to wander away from your Mac with your watch on and want to have a connection. And that's why it
0:12:57wants to connect to a phone and not to a computer. But if it, if it made any sense,
0:13:00they could write Mac software that did everything they wanted to do, but it wouldn't go through the
0:13:05the Mac App Store. It would be the sort of thing you download from getpebble.com
0:13:09and install on your Mac the old-fashioned way because it would have
0:13:12to do things that even in the even on the Mac through the App Store you're not
0:13:16allowed to do. Well at that point you should just have Wi-Fi in the thing and
0:13:20have it just talk to a web service. Right. And then only use the phone when it
0:13:24absolutely has to but then it's not really a phone accessory anymore right
0:13:28it's just a yeah or there's a web service that the phone is talking to and
0:13:32that the watch is talking to. I mean, it's just a mess. It's not the same product at
0:13:36that point.
0:13:37Right. So my review of the Pebble, which I haven't written and I don't know if I'm going
0:13:42to write. I didn't write a review of the first Pebble because it was sort of out of good
0:13:47sportsmanship for lack of a better term, that it would have been very negative and I didn't
0:13:52feel like that was... I just didn't want to do that. Plenty of other people wrote about
0:14:00but I just felt like I'd be jumping on the pile.
0:14:03With this one, I feel like, hey,
0:14:06they've been around long enough,
0:14:07and now the market is this.
0:14:09It would be fair to write a negative review.
0:14:11So maybe I will, maybe I won't,
0:14:12but it's short, and it's basically,
0:14:15A, the hardware really does not compare
0:14:18in any meaningful way to what you can get
0:14:21with an Apple Watch Sport.
0:14:23So let's just compare it to Apple Watch Sport.
0:14:25For 350 and 399, yes, that's more expensive
0:14:28than the Pebble Time, which starts at 199.
0:14:31But it's in the same ballpark.
0:14:35To me, 199 and 349, it's close to half.
0:14:39I guess it's half if you compare it
0:14:40to the 42 millimeter version.
0:14:41But it feels like way more than,
0:14:46the Apple Watch feels way more than twice as well made.
0:14:48And to me, aesthetically, you can tell just by looking
0:14:52at a picture of the Pebble Time,
0:14:54there's this double bezel effect around the display.
0:14:58So the display is what actually lights up and is in color.
0:15:00But then around that, there's a black thing
0:15:03that goes around the display.
0:15:05And then around that is a piece of plastic
0:15:07that covers the crystal.
0:15:08So there's like two bezels around the actual watch face.
0:15:11And to me, in photographs, it looks like it is what it is.
0:15:15But while I was wearing it,
0:15:16every time I glanced at my wrist, it just stuck out.
0:15:19And I realized that I've never seen a watch
0:15:21that has anything like that before,
0:15:23digital analog or otherwise.
0:15:25and it really feels like a compromise in terms of engineering.
0:15:29So aesthetically and build-wise, I thought it was really poor.
0:15:35I know that it sounds like a petty thing, but to me, the Taptic Engine or whatever you
0:15:41want to call it in the Pebble time, the fact that it's like a vibrator from your phone
0:15:44and it's very loud, I mean like surprisingly loud, is just a deal breaker.
0:15:51Part of that is just my experience with Apple Watch with the tactics being surprisingly
0:15:55central to the experience of using Apple Watch.
0:15:59With the Pebble Time, it to me is horrendous.
0:16:01I don't even know.
0:16:02It may not even be any different than the one from the original Pebble.
0:16:06But once you got used to Apple Watch or I did at least and it's sort of this subtle
0:16:11tapping that is completely silent, that loud jarring like it just feels like the equivalent
0:16:18of holy shit, something terrible is happening
0:16:20that you need to be alerted to right away.
0:16:22Even if it's like a text message
0:16:24from somebody you're working with who says yes.
0:16:27You get like a jolt to your wrist.
0:16:29It almost feels like an electric shock.
0:16:32And that to me, I'm not judging that
0:16:33in terms of iOS or Android.
0:16:35That would be the same no matter what you're using it with.
0:16:38And lastly, my other big complaint about it
0:16:41is that this color screen that they're using,
0:16:43I understand that it gives tremendous battery life.
0:16:46And the battery life on Pebble
0:16:47is clearly the single best thing about it
0:16:49compared to Apple Watch.
0:16:51But I can't read the screen in any light
0:16:54without getting it real close to my eyes
0:16:56and holding it at a perfect angle.
0:16:57Whether it's broad daylight, well-lit room indoors,
0:17:02or especially in dim lighting.
0:17:03In dim lighting, I can't see it even when it lights up.
0:17:07It's a really, really low contrast screen.
0:17:09And maybe I'm in a bad place on that
0:17:13because of the stuff I've had with the Retina
0:17:15and stuff like that.
0:17:16Even when I close my bad eye and just look at it with my perfectly good right eye, I
0:17:22really have a hard time reading that screen.
0:17:23Worse and to me, the contrast is the big thing.
0:17:26The contrast is worse than with the original Pebble because I even went back and powered
0:17:30up my original Pebble to compare.
0:17:33Just for readability, to me, it's worse.
0:17:36It's really, really low contrast.
0:17:37Steve McLaughlin Yeah, I wasn't convinced that given the resolution
0:17:41of it, I wasn't really convinced that the color was even necessary.
0:17:45nice to have because they're going to get mocked if they don't have color, but it's
0:17:48not like there are beautiful works of art on that display because it's not a very high-res
0:17:53display. It really is about imparting this information to you and anything you do to
0:17:58junk that up and it just makes it harder to read. I don't know. I'm with you. I feel like
0:18:06I want to root for those guys, but even at the time, even when I backed that Kickstarter,
0:18:12I felt like these guys had a very short window where they could come out.
0:18:16I like that they're trying to be something different and cheaper and maybe they could
0:18:21compete with the Fitbits of the world.
0:18:25The warning sign I got was when they came out with the Pebble Steel because I didn't
0:18:30mind the design of the original Pebble.
0:18:32I mean, yeah, it was a big black watch, but it was what it was.
0:18:35It was a curved plastic big chunk and it told the time and that was fine.
0:18:41Ultimately, it always told the time and it lasted a week and it did a couple of other
0:18:44neat things.
0:18:45So I was fine wearing it as just a watch.
0:18:48But the Pebble Time, when it came out, it was more expensive and it was supposed to
0:18:50be fancy.
0:18:51And...
0:18:52I mean, the steel.
0:18:53I mean, the Pebble Steel, yeah.
0:18:54And it was not...
0:18:55It was not...
0:18:57I didn't like the design of it.
0:18:58I really wondered what they were doing at that point.
0:19:01Like, it was this nice material, but if you ran your finger over the front of it, there
0:19:06were sharp edges at the bezel because of the way they built
0:19:09the steel bezel on top of the screen.
0:19:12And so it was kind of like uncomfortable to touch.
0:19:15And yeah, at that point I was starting to wonder
0:19:18what are their priorities here?
0:19:20And do they know that this freight train is running at them?
0:19:24And Pebble Time, I think their timing was great
0:19:26for their Kickstarter 'cause it was before Apple Watch stuff
0:19:30started to really happen and they tried to get in
0:19:32just before then.
0:19:33but I don't know it's just yeah I feel bad for him but there was no way that I was gonna buy one.
0:19:40Aesthetically I actually think the original Pebble is better than either of the subsequent ones.
0:19:46Yeah I agree. It doesn't have that double bezel effect. It is a weird looking watch.
0:19:50It's clearly some kind of smartwatch type thing but it's not too big and it's to me it's very
0:19:56honest to itself. It looks like a hundred or one hundred and fifty dollar digital watch and it has
0:20:02The band that it stripped with was a... it wasn't great, but it was fine. It was a fine,
0:20:07you know, what would you ever call, you know, rubber...
0:20:09It was a rubber... I took that off so fast. I just... I made my wrist sweaty and I got a
0:20:18leather band for it. But there's lots of people who... there's lots of other digital watches,
0:20:23though, that have a band that's very much like that. It's fine. But the fact that they picked
0:20:26a standard watch connector so that it was easy for somebody, just as easy to put a new band on it as
0:20:31it is any other standard watch. So I've seen, yeah, actually a lot of the people
0:20:36who I know who have an original Pebble use, you know, some kind of other third-party
0:20:41band. You know, I've seen you with yours many times, or used to at least. Yeah,
0:20:46Black Leather Band from the shopping mall down the street, and you
0:20:50know, it was easy to put it on. And I, you know, I like that. It was fine. It
0:20:54did, it served its purpose, but you know, the Apple Watch was always hanging over
0:20:59that product. And honestly, Google's Android Wear stuff too, because the platform vendors
0:21:07were clearly going to come in and these poor little guys were going to be kind of squeezed.
0:21:13Looking at it too, I'm looking at just the Get Pebble homepage where they show all three
0:21:17of their watches, and they still sell all three. The other thing that really gets me,
0:21:20I think that the Steel is truly an ugly watch. And I've seen a few people wearing them. Like
0:21:25Like not people I know, but I've seen people on airplanes wearing them.
0:21:31And they're very, very telltale to me.
0:21:34Like there's a certain thing about the three lugs that stick out at the top and bottom
0:21:40to connect the wristband to and the way that the display is almost, or not the display,
0:21:47but the face is almost a rectangle, but not quite.
0:21:50It's like a, it looks like a box that you've stuffed too much stuff into when you're moving.
0:21:55It doesn't look like it's it doesn't look like it's supposed to be a rounded shape. It just looks like you know
0:22:00They fattened it up on the sides a little bit
0:22:03But the other thing that really gets me about looking at the picture is that they decided to print the word pebble
0:22:08it's so bad black bezel underneath which is
0:22:11I think a horrendous design mistake and it almost like hubris, you know, like
0:22:17You can get into it with phones
0:22:21But to me, it's a lot like the way that, you know, a lot of the, you know, almost all the
0:22:25Android phones I've ever seen always have like Samsung written at the top, probably
0:22:29with a Verizon or an AT&T stamped on the glass too. And it's just like a low rent move. And
0:22:36it just, however well it flies in the phone world, it flies worse in the watch world.
0:22:40Well, you know, it's not like a Rolex doesn't have a logo on it. But it didn't feel like
0:22:46that to me. It felt like, yeah, it felt cheap to me on the pebble that, you know, oh, we
0:22:51what we're gonna do we're gonna stick our name on there and you're never gonna
0:22:54be able to get it off yeah I don't know why they did it it may just have been
0:22:58that the to get the right size bezel and into the size of their screen yeah we
0:23:03got extra space what do we do put our name there yeah I don't know I don't
0:23:08know bothers me yeah so I my advice would be I don't think there I know
0:23:13they're not a publicly held company but my advice would be if they were to sell
0:23:16your stock but I am rooting for them so I feel I don't take any pleasure in that
0:23:22really but I feel like they are this is the problem of headed going head-to-head
0:23:26with your 200 billion dollar company or yeah I guess Apple's more like an 800
0:23:32billion dollar whatever a company with Apple's resources yep let me take a break
0:23:38and I will thank our first sponsor we have we have our good friends at Harry's
0:23:45you guys know Harry's they sell high quality razors and blades for a fraction of the price of
0:23:50the big razor brands
0:23:53It was started by two guys who wanted a better product without paying an arm and a leg
0:23:57But they got really really serious about this. This is the thing that always impresses me about Harry's is you hear well
0:24:03It's some startup that's selling razors and stuff and you think that they buy this stuff white label and just buy razor blades
0:24:10Third party and relabel them and package them in their own stuff
0:24:14No, what they did is they found an old razor blade factory in Germany that they liked so
0:24:20much they bought the factory and they make their own blades.
0:24:24They're all high performing German blades crafted right to their own specs.
0:24:31That's the thing that the whole shaving experience starts with.
0:24:35Obviously before you get to any kind of products, before you get to the handles, it's the blade
0:24:38that you're rubbing against your skin.
0:24:41Harry's is so focused on that that they bought their own factory. Truly, truly impressive
0:24:45and in my experience, it really shows in the product that they sell to you. What they do
0:24:51is they offer this high quality stuff at factory direct pricing because they don't have a middleman.
0:24:57When you buy stuff from harrys.com, it's Harry's who fulfills it and ships it right to you.
0:25:02By getting rid of the middleman layer, by getting rid of distributors, by getting rid
0:25:06of third party stores, by getting rid of drugstores that you have to go to and visit and go through
0:25:11hassle of asking someone to unlock the case and open it up. They just sell it right to you. And
0:25:16the starter set is a great, great deal. Really, really low price for 15 bucks. You get a razor,
0:25:22moisturizing shave cream or gel, your choice and three razor blades. Then when you need more
0:25:29blades, they're just two bucks each or less. An eight pack is 15 bucks. A 16 pack is just 25. And
0:25:37And I think it goes up from there.
0:25:38You can buy them bulk and save more and more
0:25:40the more that you buy at a time.
0:25:41But even if you just buy eight at a time,
0:25:43it's 15 bucks for a refill.
0:25:45You cannot beat that with Gillette Fusion
0:25:49or any of those brands like that.
0:25:51I think if you go to Amazon,
0:25:54at least the last time I checked,
0:25:55here's from my notes is that at Amazon,
0:25:58and Amazon of course is a huge discounter.
0:26:00They sell everything at a discount.
0:26:01But for a 12-pack of Fusions from Gillette,
0:26:05you pay 41 bucks.
0:26:06So it's way more, it's more like three and a half bucks
0:26:10a blade.
0:26:10It truly is half the price for something
0:26:14of comparable quality.
0:26:15Great packaging, nice heavy handle.
0:26:17I was just looking at my handle recently.
0:26:19I've been traveling with it.
0:26:20I've had this thing ever since Harry started sponsoring
0:26:23the talk show.
0:26:24I've had one handle from Harry's.
0:26:25I was looking at it, I got like the chrome one,
0:26:27whatever that one's called.
0:26:29Run it under some hot water and wipe it off.
0:26:31It looks mint condition and it's not like I baby it.
0:26:34It's unbelievable.
0:26:36looks brand new
0:26:37so all i've ever done all i've ever done with these guys to refill it is i just
0:26:40buy blades and one time i bought more shaving cream and that was it
0:26:43uh... so here's what you do go to harry's dot com
0:26:46use the promo code the talk show that's the code
0:26:50and uh... you will save five bucks
0:26:53off your first purchase
0:26:55so my thanks to harry's
0:26:58got the harry's chasing yeah that that handle it's still uh... yeah still super
0:27:02sharp and yeah i just buy blades in the and the uh...
0:27:05and the Shape Cream.
0:27:06- The Winston set is the one I bought.
0:27:08That's the one that comes with the chrome handle.
0:27:10It's the Truman set that comes with the orange.
0:27:12I don't know what that is, like ceramic or plastic
0:27:14or something like that. - Yeah, I got the shiny one.
0:27:16That's that one, the original one, the one you got.
0:27:19And it's pretty and nice.
0:27:21And yeah, it's funny, I was trying to come up with
0:27:24who are the competitors, and it's like,
0:27:25I don't even remember, they're gone.
0:27:27I just get the Harry's blades now.
0:27:28(laughing)
0:27:29I've forgotten about those competitors, forget it.
0:27:31Done. - Yeah.
0:27:34All right, next on my list of topics for the show
0:27:39is this thing that popped up,
0:27:41I can't, jeez, like two weeks ago now,
0:27:42but it was at the beginning of my vacation.
0:27:44This whole idea that Safari is the new IE.
0:27:49This was-- - I was on vacation too.
0:27:50This was, I read this before going to bed
0:27:52at my in-laws house, and it made me mad,
0:27:56and I was like, I'm just gonna sleep on it.
0:27:57And I woke up in the morning, and I was like,
0:27:58nope, still mad. (laughs)
0:28:00So this was written by a web developer named Nolan Lawson at his own website.
0:28:09And it kind of blew up.
0:28:10Ars Technica republished it.
0:28:13I'm 99% sure, given Ars, that they paid him and that they republished it there.
0:28:18But it certainly brought it to more people's attention.
0:28:23And for people who were around in the '90s and disagreeing with--
0:28:28and maybe even the early 2000s, honestly.
0:28:30I think I've still got a style sheet for Daring Fireball that says IE sucks.ces.
0:28:36You do.
0:28:37Yeah.
0:28:38I honestly would have to look it up.
0:28:41I'm sure I've left a note for myself and Jimbo explaining why it has to be in a separate
0:28:46file and why.
0:28:48I think it's because I have it conditionally commented out on IE.
0:28:52I think that's the story.
0:28:53In the HTML for Daring Fireball, it's conditionally commented out.
0:28:58It's a small style sheet, i.e. _sucks.php that you've got there. It's just setting margins
0:29:04and hidden. Yeah.
0:29:06It sucks.
0:29:07Yep.
0:29:08And that was, I think, I was mostly concerned with the Mac IE, which was a better IE in
0:29:13my experience. But anyway.
0:29:14Oh, by far.
0:29:15People who had to deal with IE, it does not seem like you have to do that sort of stuff
0:29:20with JavaScript. Or not JavaScript, with Safari. So it feels like it's accusations that the
0:29:28headline was written to get attention rather than to accurately portray the article to
0:29:32me were just.
0:29:34I think, I don't think he intended it to become famous. I think I don't think so either.
0:29:42But I think I think he was frustrated. Look, he went to a conference, one of many he probably
0:29:48goes to about with web developers and all the web developers bitched about how, oh,
0:29:54know, I want to do this thing but it's not on Safari and Apple doesn't let you do this
0:29:58on Safari." And they complained about this stuff that Safari didn't do or didn't do well
0:30:03and they, you know, perceived it's like, "Who knows what Apple's doing?" And, you know,
0:30:07some of that may be Apple not communicating and some of that may be Apple not telling
0:30:10them what they want to hear, but I think it was really very much like, "Who are we bitching
0:30:15about at the meetings?" It used to be IE and now it's Safari, so Safari is the new IE.
0:30:20And he ran with that, maybe being,
0:30:23I think he was being cheeky,
0:30:25and then it kind of blew up in his face.
0:30:28But I think that was his intent.
0:30:30And when I was at Macworld,
0:30:33I would hear it from our developers, our web developers,
0:30:36that both on the front end and also for our CMS,
0:30:39who would do this stuff and show it to us, new feature.
0:30:43And we would try it in Safari and they would be like,
0:30:46we'd say, "It doesn't work in Safari."
0:30:48And they'd be like, "Ah, Safari."
0:30:49So I heard that from them too.
0:30:51I suspect that might've been more
0:30:52that they weren't properly testing on Safari.
0:30:55But I definitely have heard from the web developers
0:30:57I used to work with that Safari had some weird things
0:31:00about it that were outliers,
0:31:01and they had to do some extra stuff
0:31:03in order to get what they were building for us
0:31:05to work on Safari.
0:31:06So there's, I mean, I'm sure there is some truth to that.
0:31:09Although you could probably look at some stuff
0:31:11that's in Safari and if you've developed for it,
0:31:13then get frustrated by Chrome or Firefox too,
0:31:17depends on your perspective.
0:31:18And in Lawson's piece, I very much felt a very Chrome
0:31:22and a little bit Android kind of perspective.
0:31:24But I think in the end, what he really meant was
0:31:26we used to bitch about IE and now we bitch about Safari
0:31:29at these conferences that I go to.
0:31:31- Yeah, I think it's twofold.
0:31:33I think one is that a more accurate
0:31:35and perhaps even more sensational headline
0:31:38would have been Apple is the new Microsoft.
0:31:40- Yeah, sure.
0:31:41- If you just want a wow, blank is the new blank,
0:31:44I think that's it.
0:31:45And by that, I mean, they are in charge
0:31:48of a dominant operating system,
0:31:51where by dominant, I mean,
0:31:53it means everybody has to support it
0:31:54and most people feel like they need to support it
0:31:56as a top tier target for their web development.
0:32:01And it has a massive user base
0:32:03and the company is not motivated to dance
0:32:08to the rest of the web, open web communities
0:32:13communities tune because they don't have to and so they can do what they want.
0:32:20They can do what they want and so in many in many cases not all in both in
0:32:25both Microsoft and Apple's cases not all the time but some of the time they just
0:32:29decide well we that is not as high a priority for us as it is for you and so
0:32:34we're going to do what we want to do and that is frustrating to them. I use the
0:32:40phrase high priority or Apple's prioritizing and I got a whole bunch of angry, I was walking
0:32:47around downtown San Diego on my vacation and I keep getting these like, every time I would
0:32:52check my phone there'd be like 15, 20 new responses on Twitter and they were very much
0:32:57from web developers and they focused so much on that idea, the prioritization. Like Apple's
0:33:03got all the money, they don't need to prioritize, they can do everything which is not I think
0:33:07accurate at all, but it is... The difference is that Microsoft in those days could really
0:33:14define the web because almost every browser was using Windows and using IE. Almost like,
0:33:21I mean like what, 90%, 85% was...
0:33:23It was at least, it was probably around 90%. And at that time, the only devices that were
0:33:30browsing the web were PCs.
0:33:31Yes, there were no mobile devices doing this. And in the latter days, maybe there was like
0:33:36WAP or something like that. But basically... But that's well past the point of where IE
0:33:41became IE, you know. Right. Yeah. So that... it's a very different... one of these arguments
0:33:48is about kind of access to a platform that people like, a shiny platform, which is we
0:33:51want to be on iOS. And I definitely got a sense that, you know, this is about... originally
0:33:57I was wondering if it was about Safari and WebKit in general, and as I read his article
0:34:00I realized it's really just about mobile. He doesn't really care about the Mac Safari,
0:34:04cares about iOS and wanting access to iOS and wanting to build things that work really
0:34:08well on iOS. And I get that, but that's very different from a company that could literally,
0:34:14like they could just whatever they did was the web and that was where Microsoft was.
0:34:19So in some ways, it depends on how you define it, but in some ways, nobody's ever going
0:34:23to be the new IE ever again. And so when I read that, I start to read it as this isn't
0:34:29really about, it is about web standards, but it's about using web standards and being frustrated
0:34:34that they don't grant you the level of access to a particular platform that you want to have. And,
0:34:40you know, I understand where they're coming from, but it's not the same. It's a different kind of
0:34:48argument, and that's where that analogy falls down for me. Right. And to me, one of the things
0:34:54that Microsoft did that made IE IE is that they promoted purposefully, you know, for the reason
0:35:03that you know it's not even that there could be an argument the other way there
0:35:08is no maybe about it that they added features to IE that depended on windows
0:35:16oh yeah well especially the active X stuff which was like literally just x86
0:35:20how do we fix the web to make it more interactive we'll just embed x86 code in
0:35:24web pages I mean I guess you could argue that that would be the that it wasn't
0:35:30really about locking IE to Windows, it was about making it more interactive. But, you
0:35:37know, I think that there were ways to make it interactive that wouldn't have been so
0:35:42proprietary. And ActiveX could not have been more proprietary. There was no way for other
0:35:45platforms to add ActiveX. Even IE on Mac didn't do any ActiveX. It was really, it wasn't even
0:35:51about locking the web to IE, it was about locking the web to Windows, or at least part
0:35:55of it and a whole slew of corporate type stuff where Windows was already entrenched and where
0:36:03there were a lot of in-house Windows developers already all went that route with their websites.
0:36:10As a Mac user from the whole era, there was a whole time when everybody was... It went
0:36:17from there's no way I'm ever going to do banking online because that would be crazy. I'm going
0:36:23to get hacked and lose all my money to maybe I should do banking online to I
0:36:27think I I would like to do my banking online and then you find out that your
0:36:31bank's website only worked with you know ie version blank or later on Windows
0:36:38blank or later because the whole website was based on proprietary windows yeah
0:36:43and and the we should say that during that period the web standards people
0:36:49were a real lifeline for Mac users because they were saying this stuff isn't standard
0:36:54and Mac users were the example, like this 10% of the web is not allowed to access this
0:37:01stuff. Ultimately what cracked this open I think is first off IE got so bad that Firefox
0:37:09started becoming popular and a lot of the same, a lot of the stuff that didn't work
0:37:14on IE, didn't work anywhere but IE for Windows didn't work on Firefox on Windows either.
0:37:20And so sites started to make sure that it also worked in Firefox. And I can't tell you
0:37:24how many times you probably experienced this too. In that couple of years, things started
0:37:29working on the Mac because the websites were redesigned to work on Firefox on Windows and
0:37:36not just IE. And the Mac users were like, "Thank you very much because it works for
0:37:40us too now. And that was a web standards based thing. When you're in a minority platform,
0:37:49web standards are especially a big deal.
0:37:51Yeah, and so that's where I think the analogy between Safari and IE really breaks down.
0:37:58And to me, it's really more about Apple and Microsoft and being more interested in their
0:38:03own well-being and their own users' well-being. I've always said Apple's priorities are threefold.
0:38:10first, it's users second, it's developers third. And it wants all three to be happy,
0:38:17but when push comes to shove, that's the order in which things are going to fall. And I'm
0:38:23sure that there are people at Apple who would argue that users come first, but in my experience
0:38:27covering the company, I don't even know if I can think of a good example, but... Well,
0:38:36hard to say. I don't know. I'm sure if I gave it some time, I could think of some examples.
0:38:41There's a reason I've always said it that way.
0:38:42I mean, this is—I don't want to go down this rabbit hole, but I will say things like
0:38:49Amazon and Comixology not being able to purchase in-app from a perfectly reasonable vendor
0:38:55because Apple wants to intercept 30% because they're making money on Apple's platform
0:39:00is not an improvement of the user experience, but it is an Apple benefit. So even, even
0:39:07the fact that they disallow, say the Kindle app from having a link that goes, jumps you
0:39:11out to safari to do the purchasing of Kindle. That is a perfect example. I think you could
0:39:17also argue that their high profit margins on hardware are Apple first user second, you
0:39:24know, irrelevant to developers more or less. It's hard not to argue that it wouldn't be
0:39:29better for its customers if prices were a little bit lower across the board.
0:39:33Which is not to say that they can't do what they want. It's just to say that these are the
0:39:36priorities. Right. And then you could make a long-term argument that maybe that is good for
0:39:42users because the high profit margin strengthen Apple as a company and make it more likely that
0:39:47they're going to be successful and in a position to do cool new things going forward. You know,
0:39:53that the iPhone could be developed when it was in 2007 because they had the money,
0:39:58which were profits from the Mac to fund it, etc. I mean, but that now you're going, you know,
0:40:03another level deep in the argument. But because of this, you know, Apple first user second
0:40:11developers third, if you want to subdivide developers third, web developers are going
0:40:18to come in underneath native third party app developers every time for Apple. And that's not
0:40:24That's not to say that Apple doesn't want Safari everywhere, Mac and iOS, to be a great
0:40:29platform and to have web developers use it, but it's never going to be a higher priority
0:40:34than native stuff.
0:40:35Right.
0:40:36And this argument, I feel like, I don't know if you listened to a couple weeks ago on ATP,
0:40:43I felt like Marco and John were kind of, they weren't arguing.
0:40:48It sounded like arguing, but they were actually just arguing two different points that I agreed
0:40:52with both of them. And it depends on how you view the web. I mean, on one hand, the web
0:41:00is, and the open web is a beautiful thing that we all benefit from and that we need
0:41:05to keep because no one vendor is in charge of it. And it's a commonality that we all
0:41:11have. You don't have to go use an app. Imagine a world where you had to use an app for everything,
0:41:14right? It's like the web browser is great because some stuff doesn't need to be in an
0:41:18app, doesn't have to be in an app. People build web pages, any device, including ones
0:41:22we've never even thought of now can be devised and can read those web pages and isn't that
0:41:27great. So that's the open web and I think it's powerful and important and web standards
0:41:31are important because that way no one vendor is going to control the future of this and
0:41:36everybody can access it. But for me the other piece of it and I mean what John Siracusa
0:41:41has told me is you guys are really overdoing it but if you read the Nolan Lawson piece
0:41:47I think it is definitely in there is this concept of what he calls the it was a point made in an installable web apps
0:41:54breakout and
0:41:56the whole idea there is
0:41:58You know standards community wants to create that has decided that a good thing is to bundle up web apps and make them
0:42:06installable like apps which is that the width of the you know, the Chrome App Store that idea and that is
0:42:13That's really different because that's not the open web per se. It's sort of like using web technologies to build apps and
0:42:20That is totally where I see somebody who understands Apple somebody who's inside Apple goes
0:42:26Yeah, we're not as excited about that because that that doesn't sound like the open web
0:42:31That sounds like you guys trying to say we want to have you know
0:42:37Me too app platform on your devices and we don't love that idea, right?
0:42:43At least right now like why would we prioritize that we're really happy with with
0:42:48native apps
0:42:50Well that said Apple of course is the company who in
0:42:542007
0:42:56First said this is how you can create apps for the iPhone
0:42:59But it's limited to what the initial version of WebKit was Apple has allowed you
0:43:05I mean because if we don't mention it we're both gonna get 500 emails about it.
0:43:08You know I forget what version of iOS added this feature but it was years ago
0:43:13it was certainly 2,000 single digit you know 2008-2009 where you hit the action
0:43:18button and on any web page you can what does it call and save add to home screen.
0:43:24If that wasn't in iOS 1 at some point it was certainly in iOS 2 but I think
0:43:30Right and there's a way a very simple way as a web developer where if you
0:43:34don't do anything when you do that you just get like a bookmark on your home
0:43:37screen and you tap it and it opens that web page in mobile Safari like a regular
0:43:42tab in mobile Safari but there's a way that you can have just with some simple
0:43:45metadata you don't even have to do any programming really just some markup you
0:43:49can have your web page open without being looking like it's in Safari it
0:43:54looks like a standalone app and some people have made some pretty you know
0:43:59know, app very, very close to native looking, native feeling solutions that way. And it's
0:44:05still there. You can still do it. The difference with I think this Nolan Lawson argument and
0:44:11the people who back him up is that they want those apps to be able to do more and more.
0:44:17And I even think that one of the proposals that they want, I mean, some of the stuff
0:44:23they want to do, I mean, this is just not going to happen if you know Apple is, is it
0:44:27the service workers, I forget what they call it, is like doing stuff in the background.
0:44:33And it's like, yeah, that is not going to happen. And it ties into something I want
0:44:37to talk about later, you know, which is the whole idea of web pages doing stuff in the
0:44:45background by JavaScript and the adverse effects it can have on performance and battery life
0:44:49and not to mention control, you know, from Apple's perspective. This is not going to
0:44:54happen.
0:44:55Yeah, and I think that, like, I get why web developers would want to do this, because
0:44:59it puts their skills in the most exciting place to be right now, is developing mobile
0:45:04apps. And they're limited there. So I think they would like this, and any web standards
0:45:10body is all about the web standards, so why would we, you know, they not want to be a
0:45:13part of this. I totally get that. And I get why Apple would be resistant, and I get why
0:45:18Google wouldn't care, and would perhaps even be egging them on and supporting it in Chrome,
0:45:23it doesn't hurt Google like it hurts Apple because Google is happy to give away an operating
0:45:28system and let everybody use it and whatever, while Apple needs to be different and pushing
0:45:33their platform forward and having reasons why it's better. So I understand all of that.
0:45:38I also think that ultimately, if every web browser does something, if this becomes sort
0:45:45of the consensus of like, "This is how it's done," I don't think Apple's going to kick
0:45:49and scream and drag its feet. I think it's going to embrace whatever ends up being the
0:45:54standards, but I do think that it at this point stuff like this Apple is completely
0:45:59understandably just saying yeah not our not our number one goal here because we really
0:46:04like native apps and yeah the sweet solution has always been there but you know the App
0:46:10Store is a huge strength of apples and I think they're they're they don't see a strategic
0:46:17benefit in allowing web developers to bypass the App Store and create experiences that
0:46:22may or may not be up to snuff from what can be done with native apps using the latest
0:46:29iOS APIs.
0:46:32Tim Cynova And part of it too, and it almost is not even
0:46:37implicit, and a lot of these arguments from the pro web developer we want, you know, we
0:46:41We see Apple is dragging its feet in this thing and that they're holding back the open
0:46:46web.
0:46:48Part of it is that Apple, yes, they have an interest in keeping the App Store as important
0:46:57as it is.
0:46:58And that's a strategic, just for Apple, advantage that richer web apps that you could just install
0:47:06from everywhere that don't have an approval, that don't go through the App Store, that
0:47:09it would hurt that.
0:47:10the other thing that these that these developers want is that they're still
0:47:14chasing the dream of right once run everywhere where they can write one app
0:47:20that would run on all mobile devices you know Windows Phone and Android and iOS
0:47:26with minimal if none if any per platform you know special cases and that's not
0:47:39just against Apple's interest, that's actually against Apple's vision for what's best for
0:47:42the platform. Because we've seen that for decades, you know, at any, any kind of right
0:47:47once run anywhere runtime type thing is inherently a second class. Yeah, experience to what can
0:47:56be done natively. And so there's a reason that that's actually in the long run, it really
0:48:02is, it's maybe anti developer, maybe anti web developer, but it's in Apple's perspective,
0:48:07much pro-user to say we want to take strategic we want to strategically keep
0:48:14that from becoming the where the industry goes because we think it's a
0:48:17much better vastly better user experience to mostly be using native
0:48:22apps and if they're mostly using native apps it allows us Apple to do new things
0:48:27quickly more quickly than if it depended on the industry update exactly right
0:48:33- Exactly, I mean those are the two big issues.
0:48:36One of them is this write once, run anywhere thing where,
0:48:40and people who use Java today get really mad
0:48:44when I talk about the 90s, but in the 90s,
0:48:46we were all sort of sold this idea
0:48:49that Java was this amazing technology
0:48:51that was going to let people write apps
0:48:53that ran on the Mac and ran on the PC.
0:48:55And anybody on the Mac in the 90s who tried that
0:48:59saw that when they ran, they ran badly,
0:49:03and they never felt like you were using them
0:49:05on the Mac anyway.
0:49:06It was a bad experience.
0:49:09And then you could put in as a developer
0:49:11huge amounts of work to try and make it better on the Mac
0:49:15and look more like the Mac.
0:49:16But at that point now you've got all this huge chunk of work
0:49:19that is about kind of localizing it for the Mac,
0:49:21and you're no longer writing once and running anywhere.
0:49:23So it was, that was my sort of like formative moment
0:49:27in terms of saying, "Oh, it's important that stuff get written for the platform that it's
0:49:32on." You can tell when it's not. I mean, you could even tell when things like Microsoft
0:49:37Office were written for the Mac, but using some code and guidelines from Windows, even
0:49:42when it wasn't right once run anywhere, it was still not a good experience on your platform
0:49:48because it was really something that had come across from a different platform. So it's
0:49:54not good for users and I don't think that I think you know this would be
0:49:58similar and that's a bad experience and Apple knows that it would almost
0:50:02certainly be a bad experience in most cases there's always that you know but
0:50:05what about this but what about this I'm sure there would be some brilliant ones
0:50:08that would be great but a lot of them would be exactly the same on Windows and
0:50:12on Android and they would look kind of like neither and be kind of icky and
0:50:17would we really want to do that and then your second point is absolutely true
0:50:20Right now Apple can say, "Hey, new APIs at WWDC, new iOS coming out, developers jump on it,
0:50:27look how we can push this platform forward. You've got access to a touch sensor now,
0:50:31you've got, you know, whatever the next thing is, you've got, we put the metal APIs in there,
0:50:35we're doing all of the stuff for you that makes making apps on our platform better than anywhere else
0:50:40and makes our platform better and makes your apps better. So let's do that."
0:50:44and then contrast that with, "Well, you know, everybody, what do we want for our standard?
0:50:50Let's run it through the standards body. Let's see what everybody says." It's not that standards
0:50:55aren't important and can't be good, but that seems pretty antithetical to what is a key part of Apple's
0:51:02strategy, which is pushing things forward itself, being opinionated and saying, "We think this is
0:51:09important. We built it," and having a team of, you know, a community of developers who will adopt
0:51:13that stuff and then everything gets better and I have a hard time seeing how that happens quickly
0:51:20in a you know in a web standards app development platform right and one of the things that seems
0:51:27to be forgotten in this whole apple is opposed to the open web mindset is something that is very
0:51:36much of a what can one opinionated company in a position of strength do which is the way that
0:51:42in my opinion, Apple single handedly burst the pox that Adobe Flash was on the open web,
0:51:51both in terms of user experience, in terms of battery life and performance, certainly in terms
0:52:02of security, even to this day, like even this in July 2015, that this hacking team outfit over in
0:52:10Italy, all their exploits were, or most of their exploits were based on Adobe Flash security holes
0:52:20that were, you know, heretofore unknown to the public. And in terms of beings having what is
0:52:28called the web, what you get on a web page being driven by standards. Well, Adobe Flash was on a
0:52:34standards proprietary format controlled owned by Adobe. And when iOS shipped without Flash,
0:52:47it was predicted by many as a reason that it would never really take off because you wouldn't be able
0:52:52to see video on the web or do anything interactive on the web. And then as time went on and famously
0:52:58Steve Jobs wrote an open letter, Thoughts on Flash, explaining why they haven't and
0:53:07why they do not plan to and will not support Adobe Flash on iOS. And it was criticized by many,
0:53:15including a lot of people who I think at the time would call themselves that, you know,
0:53:19the argument was that plugins and plugin APIs are part of the web too. Well, it turns out that it
0:53:24it did and it didn't keep it iOS users from seeing video it took years it did
0:53:29take years and it you know one site at a time as they got their act together
0:53:33switched to the open standard which is just the simple video tag from HTML 5
0:53:40but here we are today and I I surf 99% of the time in Safari and I have iOS and
0:53:50Mac and sometimes on the Mac I still run into sites where when they see that I'm
0:53:54on a Mac, they insist on serving me Flash,
0:53:57even if I change the, do the developer menu trick
0:54:00and say, okay, I'm gonna tell you that I'm an iPad,
0:54:02will you please give me HTML5 video?
0:54:04Every once in a while, I still get that.
0:54:06And I have to, if I really wanna,
0:54:08most of the time I just give up and say,
0:54:09screw you, I'm not watching your video.
0:54:11If I need to, I can go to Chrome
0:54:13and Chrome has the Flash plugin built in.
0:54:15I can't remember the last time I encountered video
0:54:18that didn't play on my phone or iPad though.
0:54:20Just about everybody seems to have their act together
0:54:22when they're actually dealing with iOS and serves that.
0:54:26And that is not just for the benefit of iOS users,
0:54:28that's for the benefit of anybody on any operating system
0:54:32or any device that wants to watch video
0:54:34and not have flash run.
0:54:35And that is the sort of thing that,
0:54:39if Apple just went along with what the quote unquote
0:54:41community wanted, they would have added plugin support
0:54:44to iOS, but by being a single opinionated company
0:54:47with different priorities from maybe the industry
0:54:51as a whole. Certainly different priorities from the all the web publishers that were
0:54:55publishing flash-based video. They changed the web.
0:54:59I think it gave Google some, you know, because Google remember tried to get flash running
0:55:07on Android for a little while and at some point that fell apart and I feel like some
0:55:12of that was also you had the courage to not bother because it was already not on iOS and
0:55:20was one of those things that wasn't going to be, they thought it would be a competitive
0:55:24advantage, it turned out to not be. And that was helpful for all of us. What would have
0:55:31happened if Adobe had gotten Flash to work efficiently on Android? Maybe things would
0:55:36have been different, but we do benefit from the fact that—
0:55:41It's an enormous what if, since they haven't gotten it running efficiently on—
0:55:45Yeah, they couldn't. They couldn't. They just couldn't. And if you saw it on Blackberry
0:55:48playbook or you saw it on like the web OS tablets. It was awful. And yeah, yeah, I mean,
0:55:55that was a...
0:55:56I can't help but think I don't know enough people at Google to say that I can vouch for
0:55:59that. I don't have any little birdies at Google who can say that this happened, but I would
0:56:03bet my bottom dollar that there were an awful lot of people within Google, if not a majority
0:56:07of people within Google who when, when they sort of doubled down on flash support on Android
0:56:13that collectively within the company, they were like, what the heck are we doing? Why
0:56:16don't we follow them and we can wipe this scourge off the you know web faster
0:56:22why in the world would we not follow their lead here here somewhere where we
0:56:26ought to be aligned with that it's because they were behind clearly it was
0:56:28because they were really defensive and behind and they thought it was one of
0:56:31their own but they to differentiation I think just for Android though right
0:56:35that's one of those areas and that was at a time and and this has certainly
0:56:38lessened greatly and I think it really does sort of correlate to when they got
0:56:43Andy Rubin, you know, sort of shuffled him onto a closet and got him out and put Android
0:56:48under the control of Sundar, whatever his name is.
0:56:54That Android at that point became a lot more integrated with Google.
0:56:59Up until then, and I wrote about this a couple of times on Daring Fireball, I always felt
0:57:02like Android felt like its own independent company within Google, sort of like what Nest
0:57:09supposedly and seems to be right now,
0:57:12that it was in Android's interest maybe to do that,
0:57:14but it certainly wasn't within Google's overall interest.
0:57:17I think Google's overall interests were much better served
0:57:19with Flash wiped out.
0:57:22I mean, Flash, 'cause one, I mean, just think about search.
0:57:25Any kind of content in Flash Player
0:57:27was either not indexable or harder to index
0:57:31than stuff that was in HTML.
0:57:33- Oh yeah, yeah.
0:57:34I think that was right.
0:57:37Google as a company is much more sort of open web standards kind of company.
0:57:42And then there was the Android group.
0:57:44And the Android group was like, "This is a -- Apple has given us an opening by refusing
0:57:48to support."
0:57:49It was kind of like, "Don't throw me in the briar patch a little bit."
0:57:51It's like, "Yay, we get to support Flash because Apple didn't."
0:57:55And then they worked with Adobe and realized, "Oh, this is not very good."
0:57:59And it was -- in the end, it was not an advantage to have Flash on mobile.
0:58:04But they thought it was and they hoped it was.
0:58:06there were lots there were ads right there were like TV ads that said real
0:58:10flash real web video yeah it was it was I mean it would but that was the thing
0:58:14is it was it was strategic to try to find a weakness for Apple and when Apple
0:58:19kind of blindsided everybody with the iPhone yeah and the ad putting that as
0:58:23an ad was in my opinion a stupid thing because nobody ever had any idea what
0:58:27was flashing what wasn't all they knew is that every once in a while and they
0:58:29still do everyone's in a while as they get a dialog box saying you can't do
0:58:32this unless you upgrade your flash. Click these 18 buttons and install all
0:58:38your password in and stuff and install all this and then come back and
0:58:41hopefully it'll work but they don't know what's flash and what's not especially as
0:58:45long as it's working. The no flash thing was really great for Apple in the end
0:58:48because I think how many how many native iOS apps were written in the early days
0:58:52of the iPhone because the you know whatever a site's extrusion into the
0:58:59world was built around Flash and they're like,
0:59:02"Oh, geez, we can't do that.
0:59:04"Let's write an app, we can do it that way."
0:59:06Like the Major League Baseball app,
0:59:09which has been one of the most successful apps ever
0:59:11and was there on, I think, day one on the App Store,
0:59:15one of the reasons that existed is because they didn't,
0:59:19they were using Flash and then later, I think,
0:59:21Silverlight for all of their audio and video stuff.
0:59:24And they couldn't do that on the iPhone
0:59:26and they really wanted to be on the iPhone.
0:59:28So they, you know, rather than rebuild their entire infrastructure on the, on the, and,
0:59:33and build, rebuild the front end for everybody, they just took those, you know, they made sure
0:59:37they had some iPhone compatible streams on their servers and wrote an app. And so in the end,
0:59:43the app market got a lot richer because companies wrote apps because they couldn't just rely on
0:59:50flash on the web. And that was good for Apple. Yeah. And, and maybe MLB would have written an
0:59:56app any either way anyway you don't know I mean they still don't have a Mac app
1:00:00if you're on a Mac and you want to watch well they ballgame you still they do
1:00:03have flash they do but or do they hits yeah they do I wrote a thing about it a
1:00:07few months ago on six colors it is I think they wrote it last year it's still
1:00:11posted it uses the it uses the streams that that the iPad app uses so it
1:00:17doesn't use flash it crashes half the time not while you're playing it but
1:00:21like the next time you launch it it crashes and then you launch it again
1:00:23that works so like every other time it crashes on launch super hinky my
1:00:27understanding is that they that they deprioritized it so it's basically I
1:00:32think there's some developers at MLB who really wish that they were building this
1:00:35thing because they're Mac users and they haven't been given any time to do it but
1:00:40it is around you can find it and yeah it does work which is I was going to say
1:00:46I'm in my in my mind I'm thinking of Mac books which is what I you know but if I
1:00:51clearly the most majority of people use and I think that's that's not a good
1:00:55machine to watch a ballgame on as I sit here talking to you staring in front of
1:00:59a 30-inch retinum I'm a which I guess kind of would be a pretty good machine
1:01:03to watch a ballgame in front of yeah I mean it's and not bad to just so I would
1:01:08like to see that yeah it's it's okay it's better than a web page right and
1:01:11and but you're right there is no they didn't need to do that on the Mac but
1:01:15they did need to do it to get on iOS and so they did yeah and who knows how many
1:01:19many other companies are in a similar position where they had a thing that worked in Flash
1:01:24and then the developers and designers probably would have wanted to go native anyway because
1:01:31they know how much better native can be and they could go to management and say we really
1:01:35want to do a native app. Our choice as a company is to use the--this is in the hypothetical
1:01:40world where you could get Flash to run on iOS. We can do this thing--we could just use
1:01:44our Flash and adjust it to the screen size and it's going to be a really crummy experience
1:01:48for them or we can take the time to write this native thing. Some companies are going
1:01:53to say, "Ah, let's do the cheaper, easier thing and stick to Flash," as opposed to
1:01:57in the actual world where the argument was we can either not run at all on these devices
1:02:02in the iPhone or we can write an app. And that's a very different proposal to management.
1:02:09We can do a crummy thing in Flash or go native or we can not be there at all or write a native
1:02:16app.
1:02:17one of the things that motivates Apple to look on skeptically at these issues of how
1:02:23do we use web technologies to have installable mobile apps. I think they look at that, and
1:02:30I'm of this opinion too, I think, that if there's a scenario where the perception is
1:02:36you don't need to write an iOS app, and you don't need to write an Android app, you can
1:02:40write a web app, and it's good enough, there will be a whole class of people who will just
1:02:46just write the good enough thing. And, you know, maybe their apps aren't great, but
1:02:51they're native, and it picks up a lot of the stuff that comes with being a native app,
1:02:56and you update it for the next OS and it picks some things up. If you have a whole swath
1:03:00of apps that are just kind of non-platform crappy, that's bad. I would argue that's
1:03:06bad for both platforms. I'm not sure it's bad for Google, I'm not sure they care,
1:03:11but I think it would be bad for Android users, it would certainly be bad for iOS users. And
1:03:14And so I think that may be part of the thought process at Apple.
1:03:18It's certainly what I thought of immediately is if we make it really easy to choose either
1:03:24one, there are a lot of people who will just choose the easiest path.
1:03:28And the easiest path is going to be bad for the user.
1:03:30So we're going to prioritize the user over the developer and make them do the extra work
1:03:36to do a native app because it's a better experience and force them to.
1:03:39Yep, and I read exactly what I've you know what I said before that in my experience time
1:03:44after time after time Apple first user second developers third and I really think that the
1:03:49heart of this you know Apple is the new IE argument is really complaining about not putting
1:03:54developers first and you know and I think in a lot of ways you could argue that that
1:04:01was Microsoft's way and that Microsoft put developers ahead of users in terms of like
1:04:07the way that Microsoft historically with Windows has bent over backwards not to
1:04:11break APIs and to keep legacy APIs around as long as they can and that yes
1:04:17we have this new thing but the old thing will still work I mean that you could
1:04:21still run DOS apps and all open in a window the problem with Microsoft is
1:04:25that unlike Apple which historically has had Apple and users and developers as
1:04:32its constituents more than any other groups Microsoft it's it's Microsoft and
1:04:36and users and developers and like the buyers, the clients, because there's so much business
1:04:44aspect to it. And I feel like so much of that compatibility stuff wasn't really about honoring
1:04:49the developers. It was more like the developers were stuck and maybe the developers even wanted
1:04:57to move forward, but the businesses didn't. They wanted it to be just exactly the same.
1:05:03And for most of Microsoft's modern history, that was the priority was how do we make a
1:05:08product that will continue to get us the big contracts from the big businesses to buy a
1:05:14billion PCs and install them everywhere and let's just do that.
1:05:18And they didn't want change, they just wanted to stay in the mud.
1:05:21So they did.
1:05:22Yeah.
1:05:23All right.
1:05:24I want to talk about Chrome next.
1:05:27So remind me.
1:05:28All right.
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1:10:08Yeah, just pay to pay 15 bucks or 10 bucks or whatever and just let it ride for another year
1:10:17yeah, I I registered domains for these novels that I wrote like five years ago that I keep meaning to rewrite and
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1:10:28If I ever finish the novels and sell them or something, I would want to have the domain so I just keep paying it
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1:10:35That could be Twitter's business model
1:10:38If they just started charging you for a subsequent out you get one username for free
1:10:44I would have to start paying 50 bucks a year. I'm looking at my Twitter account
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1:11:03All right
1:11:04All right
1:11:04so Chrome here's the other thing in the Safari is the new IE argument that I saw and that to me was very clear and
1:11:10it's like to me and I
1:11:12hate to broadly generalize but I I think it's true in this case is that there's a sort of
1:11:18I was gonna say myopic but maybe it's a little bit more
1:11:22I don't know what the word is
1:11:24but it's it where you only can see your own perspective and you can't see anyone else's perspective and
1:11:29To me a lot of these web develop not all web developers, but the web developers who jumped on this particular
1:11:35storyline this safari is the new ie
1:11:38All seemed to not be able to even see things from Apple's angle, right?
1:11:42And that to me is what you what you wrote and I'll put your thing in the show notes for sure
1:11:47It's really the first thing that made me want to have you as my guest this week
1:11:49Because I thought your thing was short and sweet and I thought it really hit the point clearly that this is not in
1:11:55Stuff that's not in Apple's interest Apple is not going to be enthusiastic over
1:11:58regardless of the consensus of web standards and that's exactly what people jump jumped on you for but they don't they can't see that and
1:12:07The the thing that kept coming up and there's a couple people who made this point
1:12:11but the gist of it is if you read between the lines what they want them to do what they seem to want Apple to
1:12:16do is just give up on WebKit and and
1:12:19Let chrome and blink which is Google's fork of WebKit take over
1:12:25Just like just like chrome do what it wants on iOS or even you know
1:12:29And they would even I'm sure they would even say just you know
1:12:31You don't have to build it in for out of the box
1:12:34But just let the version of Chrome that you download from the App Store
1:12:38Use blink and I think they don't go this far, but I think it you know once that happened they would realize and
1:12:45Let blink do what it wants in terms of being able to install apps on the home page on iOS
1:12:53Which is clearly outside the bounds of what any kind of app from the App Store can do today
1:13:01because google with blank and chrome uh...
1:13:06is moving very quickly and implementing
1:13:08prospective new web standards for things like local storage and for background
1:13:15updates and stuff like that
1:13:17very very quickly
1:13:18uh... and webkit is moving and always has it seems to be moved a little bit
1:13:24slowly not that they don't support stuff but that they seemed to be in a webkit
1:13:27is more of a conservative
1:13:29standards-based rendering engine than Blink is and maybe than Mozilla's whatever they call the
1:13:39rendering engine because they've got like a new one now but you know just Mozilla as an organization
1:13:47and there's a reason you know there's a reason why Blink was forked from WebKit I mean Google
1:13:56used to be the second biggest contributor to WebKit after Apple and
1:14:00the reason basic basically the reason they forked and took WebKit on their own
1:14:06and you know name their version blink was that they Google and Apple had
1:14:11different priorities so if Apple had one if Apple followed any of this and what
1:14:16you know was in line with them all they would have had to do all along is just
1:14:20accept all of the Google's or not all or just most or more a lot more of Google's
1:14:25you know, proposed patches and additions to WebKit, and they would have had exactly what
1:14:30these people seem to think they want WebKit to be. Like, and there's a reason why it had
1:14:35to be a fork.
1:14:36Yeah, and the whole point here, I mean, it looks like an end-around to me. This is the,
1:14:41this is the, well, if you don't, if you don't want to do this, just put Chrome on there
1:14:44and let, and then we'll have, you know, it's basically make, why can't you be Android?
1:14:48Make it like Android, because then we, then we can have what we want, which is problematic
1:14:53for a couple of ways. First off, talk about giving one vendor the keys to the web. You
1:14:58do want two vendors pushing and pulling in mobile. You want them pushing and pulling
1:15:02at each other. You don't, well, unless you really are in the bag for one of them or the
1:15:07other of them. And I'm sure we've been accused of being in the bag for Apple and we've, you
1:15:11know, essentially accused Nolan Lawson of being in the bag for Google. But if you, what
1:15:15you really want is for the standards process to be a push and a pull and have it be stuff
1:15:21that neither Apple or Google is entirely happy with, but they can live with, and that is
1:15:26like a middle ground, and that's the stuff that they're both willing to do. So that makes
1:15:31sense as opposed to saying, "Oh well, why don't you just let it be Chrome on iOS, and
1:15:39we can run with it." Plus, let's also say that's a totally unrealistic thought. That
1:15:45you would have a scenario where you go to your bank, and the bank says, "Well, we've
1:15:50got an app, but it's a web app. So what here's what you need to do. If you're on an iPhone,
1:15:55you need to go to the App Store and download Chrome and install it and then come back here
1:16:00and then we'll let you tap something and install it on it. No, that will never happen. That's
1:16:04just never going to happen. It's unrealistic. And I think it shows how a lot of the people
1:16:10who are having these conversations are not thinking like a regular user. They're thinking
1:16:14like a web developer or a developer or a very technical person because, you know, just making
1:16:19Chrome available for iOS would be great for power users. I was talking to Mike Hurley
1:16:23about this because he uses Chrome. If you could use the Chrome rendering engine as a
1:16:27power user, it's like, "Yay, okay, that would be great." But you cannot ever count on that
1:16:32being – that's never going to take over. People on iOS are not going to rush to adopt
1:16:40Chrome. It's just not going to happen. It would always be a minority browser. That's
1:16:44That's actually why I'm kind of okay, not necessarily with embedding mobile apps inside,
1:16:49but I'd be okay if Apple said, "You know what?
1:16:51Yeah, okay, you can run within the Chrome app itself, you can run your rendering engine.
1:16:55We'll let you do that."
1:16:56If they did that, I don't think Chrome would ever be more than a tiny fraction of the web
1:17:02pages viewed in iOS ever, because most people are never going to download it.
1:17:08We should point out, because I know from my email, that there are a lot of people out
1:17:12there who are rightfully confused about this issue because a lot of the email I got from readers,
1:17:19more or less in support of Apple and against this Safari is the new IE, wrote to say,
1:17:25"How can they say this? Here's the link to Chrome on the App Store," which is a reasonable mistake
1:17:30to make because Chrome on the App Store does exist. It is popular with a fair number, but I
1:17:35but I think you're right, decided minority of iOS users.
1:17:39But the rules of the App Store are,
1:17:42if you want to render HTML in any way,
1:17:45you have to use the APIs for WebKit.
1:17:49And there's a bunch of them now,
1:17:50and we don't have to get into the differences
1:17:52between the different ways that you can embed a WebKit view.
1:17:55But basically, every browser in the App Store,
1:17:59and there's a bunch, ICAB exists for iOS.
1:18:04It's probably another one of those categories
1:18:06where if I haven't looked for a while,
1:18:07but there's probably like 200 apps in the app store
1:18:09that are web browsers.
1:18:11Chrome obviously would be the one that's most used
1:18:14and most famous,
1:18:15but it's using the iOS system version of WebKit.
1:18:18'Cause it's in it, that's the rules it has to be.
1:18:22And so what Chrome does is it does all the other things
1:18:24that a browser does.
1:18:25It lets you log in with your Google credentials
1:18:27and have your tabs synced up across.
1:18:29- Yeah, you can see your bookmarks.
1:18:31My wife uses Chrome on the desktop.
1:18:34And so she's got Chrome on her iPad
1:18:38because it's got her bookmarks in it,
1:18:40but it's still using WebKit.
1:18:42It's just using, you know, wrapped around Google's,
1:18:45yeah, Google sync stuff.
1:18:47- Right, and apps, you know, there are apps that for,
1:18:50and they, you know, I think by definition
1:18:52tend to be geared towards nerdier users
1:18:54who will do things like give you an option.
1:18:58Like I think, I think Tweetbot has the option
1:19:01where you could say, when I open a link in a browser,
1:19:04do you want it to be Safari or Chrome,
1:19:06if you have Chrome installed,
1:19:07so that you can open stuff in Chrome
1:19:09instead of opening it in Safari.
1:19:11- Of course, the story is in iOS 9,
1:19:12all that stuff's gonna go away,
1:19:13'cause everybody's gonna use the Safari View Controller,
1:19:16and that's just gonna be Safari inside the app completely.
1:19:20And this is not the direction Apple is going
1:19:24with this stuff to say it.
1:19:26- But it is, it can be confusing to talk about
1:19:30the differences between a rendering engine and the browser.
1:19:33But basically it's the Chrome is the browser.
1:19:38What goes around the rectangle where the HTML is rendered
1:19:42is the browser and that rectangle where the content is,
1:19:46the part that's gray when you go to during Fireball,
1:19:51that's the rendering engine.
1:19:53And it's a good example though,
1:19:58this new Safari view controller.
1:20:00So like, for example, probably everybody out there uses
1:20:03some kind, everybody listening to me right now
1:20:05is using some kind of Twitter client on their iPhone.
1:20:08Whether it's the Twitter app or Tweetbot or Twitturrific,
1:20:12they all have an in-browser thing so that you tap a link,
1:20:18you don't get switched to another app,
1:20:19you just stay right there and it renders it right there.
1:20:22But if you ever notice, when you do that,
1:20:24you don't get your bookmarks, it's not connected
1:20:26your tabs when you go to Safari the next time, whatever that page is, if you left it open,
1:20:30isn't open. Because it's the rendering engine is in the Twitter app and the browser is a
1:20:35separate app with its own tabs and things. So with this new thing in iOS 9, the Safari
1:20:39View Controller, apps will be able to open in the same way. It's a lot more like mail
1:20:45has always been in iOS. Like when you send an email in app, it's using your actual email
1:20:52account that you configured in mail. Well, that's what the Safari View Controller is
1:20:55is going to do. It's going to be a real Safari view right in the app and you'll be able to
1:20:59see all your regular Safari bookmarks and bookmarklets and etc. And then when you go
1:21:06back to Safari, Safari will be aware of that tab that's open. So it's in that you can see that this
1:21:12is one of the reasons why Apple, you know, maybe with it and I say this, I know some people, you
1:21:19know, who feel strongly on the, you know, we should be able to install whatever they want will roll
1:21:24their eyes. I'm not even saying I agree with it, but this is a reason why some people at
1:21:29Apple have clearly have resisted until now allowing users to set a system wide third
1:21:35party default web browser. Because when they come up with features like this, the users
1:21:41in Tapples mind are better off having been using Safari all along because now here's
1:21:47this amazing new feature and you get to use it because you've been a you're a Safari user.
1:21:52- All right, and Google is never gonna be able
1:21:54to provide that kind of feature.
1:21:56So then you're gonna have, even if you,
1:21:58like let's say Tweetbot or Twitterific
1:22:03embeds this new Safari view controller thing
1:22:06and also gives you the option to go open it in Chrome.
1:22:11Well, those experiences are gonna be totally different
1:22:13because one of them is gonna open a separate browser,
1:22:15you know, separate app, switch you out of the app you're in
1:22:18and the other one is going to keep you in the app
1:22:20that you're in, but layer this Safari window on top.
1:22:23And that's weird too, 'cause now you've got this like,
1:22:26opening in another app versus not, which is just not,
1:22:29you know, and it cuts both ways.
1:22:30I mean, I use a third party email client,
1:22:34and every now and then I tap on something somewhere
1:22:37and Apple wants me to use mail, and I think,
1:22:39"Oh, oh well, you know."
1:22:40I, you know, what I end up doing is I set up
1:22:43all my accounts in mail anyway,
1:22:45and tell it not to check the mail,
1:22:46and that way at least I can send mail from there,
1:22:48'cause that's usually what it's trying to do.
1:22:49But, you know, that's just, those are the breaks
1:22:52because the upside is you get all this tight,
1:22:54super tight integration between these things.
1:22:57And, you know, you can't, it makes it a lot harder
1:23:00to open it up to third parties,
1:23:01but it makes it a better user experience,
1:23:02assuming the users are using the built-in apps,
1:23:05which almost every user is.
1:23:07That's the other thing we lose sight of.
1:23:09I think there were a lot of geeks who were shocked
1:23:11at the statistic that more than half of iPhone users
1:23:15use the Notes app every day, or regularly anyway,
1:23:17not every day, but regularly.
1:23:19It's like, well, that's appalling.
1:23:20There are so many better Notes apps than that.
1:23:22Yes, but it's on the device, it's there.
1:23:25And so people use it and people use Mail
1:23:27and people use Safari, that's just, and they're gonna.
1:23:30- Well, it's like when I was on Topolski's podcast
1:23:32couple weeks ago, and he was incredulous
1:23:35that I use Apple Maps.
1:23:37It's the statistics that I've seen show that over 70%
1:23:41of iOS users use Apple Maps.
1:23:44And Maps is maybe, it's clearly maybe the one
1:23:46where there'd be the most third party users,
1:23:49especially around the world where Apple Maps
1:23:51is nowhere near as consistent as Google Maps is.
1:23:55That's one where you could really make the argument where,
1:23:58I would make the argument that for me in my use,
1:24:00it's as good as Google Maps for my use almost every time.
1:24:05The only thing I've used Google Maps for
1:24:08in the last two years is transit in New York City.
1:24:11And hopefully, once I switch to iOS 9,
1:24:14I won't even need to do that anymore.
1:24:16But I totally understand and every time I say this I get email from somebody in another country
1:24:20and they show me like what their neighborhood looks like in the two and
1:24:23Google Maps looks like Google Maps and Apple Maps, you know has like, you know
1:24:28The name of the town I live in and that's it
1:24:30So I understand obviously they don't that but the fact that it's you know somewhere around 70% and it's a decided advantage
1:24:37It just shows how powerful being the built-in app is. Yeah and let alone how you know
1:24:41how comparable Safari and Chrome are or mail and Spark or
1:24:46You know, what's the third-party email that you use?
1:24:49I'm using mailbox on my iPad and I'm using the Redell Spark on my iPhone right now.
1:24:55Yeah, boy, that's good. Man. Holy cow. That's got me thinking about switching. Yeah, really does.
1:25:00Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna go back to mail for iOS 9 just to see, you know, how it's changed, but that's a
1:25:07That's a really good app.
1:25:09This is, I feel like that was the one of the subtext
1:25:11of the latest Apple event too,
1:25:14when they rolled out Apple Music.
1:25:16I think that was a subtext was,
1:25:18and hey, did you hear about how all our default apps
1:25:21are really great and used even when there's
1:25:24tough competition, these get used more than everything else?
1:25:26Well, guess what streaming service is built
1:25:28into a built-in app now, right?
1:25:30- Yeah, yeah, that was definitely part of the message.
1:25:36It's just like these built-in--that's powerful, the built-in apps.
1:25:38It doesn't mean Apple Music's gonna take over the world or anything, but it is awfully powerful
1:25:43that it's integrated and it's on every device.
1:25:48And I read a piece today about podcasts and about how there was some survey that said
1:25:52that not only--because there's a built-in podcast app--not only are most podcasts listened
1:25:57to on iOS devices and not Android, but that most podcasts on iOS are listened to through
1:26:03the built-in podcast app because, again, it's built in. It's hard to compete with. It's
1:26:08not like Marco doesn't have a good business with Overcast, but that's among people who
1:26:14think to look for something more in the App Store and then find it and then buy it versus
1:26:19like, "Oh, podcasts. I'll search for podcasts. There it is. That's where all the podcasts
1:26:24are." That's being the platform owner. The App Store is vibrant and that's great, but
1:26:29Apple knows that some stuff needs to be in the platform.
1:26:34At least a basic version of it has to be in the platform
1:26:38because the platform needs to be rich like that.
1:26:41And that's why they improve Notes
1:26:45and that's why Maps is so successful.
1:26:49- This just in from the home office in Lincoln, Nebraska.
1:26:56There is a chance, I cannot check it.
1:26:59Well, I could check it, but I'm not going to while I'm recording.
1:27:02There's a chance that I botched the code for Harry's.
1:27:09Could be that it's just talk show without the "the."
1:27:12So anybody out there who's buying some shaving stuff,
1:27:14if you try the code--
1:27:17maybe I'll edit this, maybe not.
1:27:18Maybe this will be a little mid-episode surprise.
1:27:22You just stay tuned.
1:27:23Here's a little mini read for our good friends at Harry's.
1:27:25If you try the code "the talk show"
1:27:27and you don't get any money off your order,
1:27:28Try the code talk show without the the.
1:27:32And one of those two, I guarantee you, will save you some bucks.
1:27:34So now it's like a game.
1:27:35>> Yeah.
1:27:36>> It's like a coin flip.
1:27:38And while I'm talking about sponsors, allow me to take a moment here and
1:27:42thank our next one.
1:27:43And it's another old time friend of the show, good people at Fracture.
1:27:47It's really sad that all of our photos from recent years, so
1:27:54many of them are trapped only on digital devices or maybe they're on an Instagram
1:28:01feed and you really only look at them on these devices temporarily. Fracture is a
1:28:07modern way to break your photos out of the digital world, the best ones, the ones
1:28:12you really want to save, the ones you really want to see all the time and get
1:28:16them printed on a piece of analog media and that you can hang on your wall, you
1:28:20You can prop up on your desk.
1:28:22Here's what they do, fracture.
1:28:24They print your photos directly on pure glass, real glass.
1:28:28Comes with a foam back that's ready to mount right out of the box.
1:28:31The little one that comes with everything you need to hang it on a wall.
1:28:34Comes with a nice little screw and stuff like that.
1:28:36The bigger ones that you can prop up have, you know, the casing is as interesting as
1:28:40the printing technology that they use.
1:28:43But here's the thing.
1:28:44It just takes your photos, which let's face it are all digital these days.
1:28:47I mean, who shouldn't film anymore?
1:28:48If you are, you're already way ahead of the game in terms of having prints because you
1:28:52have to have a physical print to look at it.
1:28:58I don't know.
1:28:59There's something about a photo that is printed on a piece of analog medium that has to me
1:29:03a more emotional appeal.
1:29:05I'll give you an example.
1:29:06Here's an example.
1:29:07My wife, Amy, at the live talk show a couple of weeks ago when I had…
1:29:12I forget the name.
1:29:14I forget the name.
1:29:15- Phil Schiller.
1:29:16- Phil Schiller, that's right.
1:29:17- Up and coming technology executive.
1:29:20- Yeah, so that was a special night.
1:29:23And she was backstage and she like poked her iPhone
1:29:26through the curtain a little bit and took an amazing photo,
1:29:30truly, truly amazing photo of me sitting alongside Phil.
1:29:35We were front-lit in reality,
1:29:37but from her perspective backstage,
1:29:39we were back-lit by these lights in front of us,
1:29:43which almost have like in the way that they showed up
1:29:46on her picture, almost like a science fiction field.
1:29:48It almost looked like we were sitting in front
1:29:50of like a screening of a science fiction movie
1:29:52with two stars in front of us with these two spotlights.
1:29:55Fantastic picture, she posted it to Instagram.
1:29:59And I thought it was great, I told her it was great
1:30:03and I gave it a little heart on Instagram and there it goes.
1:30:07But my friends at Fracture, I was away on vacation.
1:30:11This is a true story.
1:30:13Got back last night.
1:30:14One of the things that we,
1:30:16where we had the mail held till today,
1:30:18and it actually worked, which is crazy.
1:30:20I don't know about people in other countries,
1:30:22but it may be in other cities,
1:30:24but in Philadelphia it often doesn't work
1:30:26when you tell them to hold your mail.
1:30:27- Oh yeah. - Well, we got a whole pile
1:30:28of mail today, including a bunch of packages,
1:30:30and one of them was from Fracture, and it was for me,
1:30:32and I thought, that's weird.
1:30:33I don't remember, I did not order anything
1:30:35from Fracture recently, and when you do order from Fracture,
1:30:37this stuff comes right away.
1:30:38Well, I opened it up, and here it was.
1:30:40It's a little square picture.
1:30:41they took it out of Amy's Instagram feed.
1:30:43That picture printed on glass for me.
1:30:47And it just, I didn't know what it was.
1:30:50I opened it up and I saw it and I was just like, wow.
1:30:54And it just was like a little jolt to my heart.
1:30:57And I thought, wow, that's great.
1:30:58So anyway, my thanks to Insta, not Instagram,
1:31:00to Fracture for the gift, but to all of you,
1:31:05do that with your favorite pictures.
1:31:07Go through your Instagram and pick a couple of your
1:31:09favorites and send them to fracture and get them printed out and you really are
1:31:14gonna appreciate it looks so great let's see if I can get the code right because
1:31:19if you do get it right you're gonna get 15% off your first fracture order and
1:31:24the code for my show is I don't really have it here and drum roll Paul drum
1:31:30roll to do I'm gonna guess it's during fireball and we'll see if that's right
1:31:37But my thanks to them. Go to fractureme.com. Get something printed out. Do it. And use
1:31:43that code and you'll save some money and you'll have something beautiful to hang on the wall.
1:31:46I've got like six of them here.
1:31:47Do you know what you could use? Use this. I know that this is the code that they use
1:31:52because they sponsored that live show. The code that they used for that one was...
1:31:58You know what's funny? I have it right here in front of me, but I can't see. Oh,
1:32:02it's because I don't have the Safari status bar showing it's
1:32:08WWDC use that code WWDC and then they'll think you're coming from the Phil Schiller episode
1:32:17So either way you'll get the money
1:32:20So the other thing that we that I missed while I was away on vacation
1:32:29Was this whole thing that sort of blew up and I did write about this while you know because you can't you know
1:32:34You did we're never really on vacation. I'm discovering that
1:32:36Yeah, it is I'm curious how that's going for you now that you're a year in
1:32:42It probably was different when you were at a publication that had a real staff that could keep everything
1:32:48Yeah, you can say I'm on vacation you take care of it for me and then you go on vacation
1:32:52Everybody helps each other out
1:32:53But when you know
1:32:54It's I do have Dan Morin writing for me a couple of days a week for six colors
1:32:57So I was able to say sort of like, Dan,
1:32:59this is the day that we're driving in the car
1:33:01for eight hours, can you write on that day?
1:33:03And also it's a shift in gears from my brain works
1:33:06as thinking of like Macworld, we'd post 10 stories a day.
1:33:10And I actually looked to you and Jim and Federico
1:33:14and I, and you know, there's no,
1:33:16there are no rules for this.
1:33:17And I want to do right by my sponsors
1:33:18and not like abandon the site for a week.
1:33:20But at the same time, I have to train myself out of the idea
1:33:23that if I don't have like five new items a day,
1:33:26or even, you know, if a day goes by and all I have is a link or two, it's fine.
1:33:31And I have to learn that lesson, that it's not, you know, I'm not running a comprehensive
1:33:36news site that is going to have to feed the beast every day, and I, you know, I can't.
1:33:40I just, I can't. I'm one person.
1:33:43Steven: The sponsorship model, to me, it works both ways, where if you're writing more and
1:33:47you're having a busy day, you're getting a bunch of things and more, you're getting a
1:33:50lot more page views per day, and people might see the sponsor link in the sidebar if you
1:33:54have it there or something like that. But on the other hand, with the idea that you
1:33:59post like a little thank you to the sponsor, that idea then—and the times when you're
1:34:04slower, at least this is the way I see it—the times when I'm slower and I'm not posting
1:34:09as much, that post thanking the sponsor stays closer to the top longer.
1:34:14It's true.
1:34:15And it's, you know, I don't know which one is better. I don't know if it's better
1:34:19to be the sponsor on a busy week at Daring Fireball or a slower week at Daring Fireball,
1:34:23But I think there's a very simple argument to be made that there are pros and cons to
1:34:27both of them.
1:34:28One of them buries your thing sooner and the other one you have more pages being loaded
1:34:34during the week.
1:34:35So I've never once gotten a complaint about that.
1:34:38Every once in a while, sometimes August is a little slower to sell.
1:34:42Last year August did not sell for me.
1:34:44It was like twice during the month of August I had to post like, "Hey, next week is still
1:34:50available, get in touch, blah, blah, blah, sort of, you know, really sort of down to
1:34:55the last day. This year, August sold out for me already in July. So, I don't know. But
1:35:01it's, you know, so August is a weird month, though, for advertising, I mean, infamously
1:35:05in all forms of media, TV, print. I mean, it's always slow. But other than the month
1:35:11of August, I've never had complaints about that.
1:35:13Yeah, it's, I mean, sometimes people will say to me, like, hey, it's Christmas, how's
1:35:16Like I was thinking about sponsoring your site
1:35:18I see that Christmas is open and my answer has always been and I've never once had a complaint about it
1:35:24It is slower because people aren't at work and they're not get you're not getting those page views of I'm bored at work
1:35:29Or I've just sat down and I you know, just want to see what's going on
1:35:32But on the other hand I was like I think that what happens is a lot of people are at family events and they get bored
1:35:39And they just go to their iPhones. So it's it's actually not that slow a week. Yeah, I agree. I agree
1:35:44It's a yeah, I just kind of feel like I'm still trying to get into the rhythm of like
1:35:48What's the heartbeat of the site? I don't want the site to seem like it's abandoned, right?
1:35:51So I want to keep a little bit of a rhythm there also
1:35:54Yeah, I mean I just I want to send a message that the site is here and it's gonna have stuff on it
1:36:00And I'm still learning. I'm still learning but it is it is definitely a change
1:36:03And it's not like I totally ignored work when I went on vacation
1:36:06You know
1:36:07I would be responsible and I would check in and I would occasionally see that news was breaking and write something
1:36:12thing. I mean, I wrote a—I actually won an award for a thing I wrote at my in-laws
1:36:18dining room table on an iPad. I actually won an award. I'm like, that is—I will always
1:36:24look at that. I've got the little plaque here somewhere. And it was like for online commentary,
1:36:29some journalism group. And I look at it and I think, well, iPad at the dining room table
1:36:34in Irvine, but it's different here because, you know, something happens like that Nolan
1:36:42Lawson thing and I'm like well I can't pass this to somebody if I want to say
1:36:47something about it I need to say something about it so it's just a little
1:36:49bit different not having that not having that net anymore but I'm getting I'm
1:36:53getting there I'm getting used to it I I know that it was August I don't remember
1:36:59the exact date but I was actually at the Jersey Shore with my folks and you know
1:37:04Amy and Jonas heading out to dinner.
1:37:11So it was probably around 5 or 6 o'clock in the evening
1:37:14when the news broke that Steve Jobs was stepping down as CEO.
1:37:19And somebody texted me.
1:37:24And it was one of those things--
1:37:28I'll bet everybody-- a lot of people when they first--
1:37:31that was the sort of thing you texted other people about, right?
1:37:33You heard that and you think of somebody and you think I got to text somebody
1:37:35And I bet a lot of people who get you know saw the news the same way
1:37:39We're like there's got to be a mistake this you know, and then your second thought is no actually it makes a lot of sense
1:37:45You know and you kind of dreading it
1:37:47But like I said, I you know told my family and then you know, my parents are a little a little bit not it
1:37:56They more or less understand what I do now
1:38:00But they understand it well enough that my you know when I said that they're everybody every nobody gave me a single moment of grief
1:38:07Of okay, we understand you're not coming to dinner. Yeah, I had to drop everything and think about what I wanted to do and write
1:38:13You know, that's one of the few times I can think of where I did that
1:38:17But yes, you are on call and it makes me worry. It does make me worry. One thing I don't do is I almost
1:38:23And I if I do I have tremendous anxiety, even if it's just for a couple of hours
1:38:28I don't even like flying without Wi-Fi, as I do kind of feel like I need to be online all the time, just in case something like that happens.
1:38:34I gotta say, I'm not as worried about it as I was, and this is only because for years, every single thing I did was in the frame of "What if Steve Jobs dies?"
1:38:47Like, even when he wasn't that sick, and it was just like "What if Steve Jobs dies in a plane crash?" or something like that,
1:38:53I had that like, what could be so huge? What is the huge thing? And after he died, I realized
1:39:02for a while I would ask myself, what if Steve Jobs died? Oh, okay. And I just, for whatever
1:39:08reason that was like, I always felt like that was the number one story that they would ever
1:39:14be where you'd have to set up all the alarms. And I mean, it would still be true if something,
1:39:20know, heaven forbid, happened to a major Apple executive or there are disasters that could
1:39:25happen. But whatever it was like, I think I have a kind of a complex about that, about
1:39:30Steve Jobs. And with him gone, that little neurotic part of my brain got like filed away,
1:39:38got disconnected. And so it's not quite as bad now. But you're right. I mean, this is
1:39:41the this is part of this business. It's again, less true now that I feel like I don't, I'm
1:39:46not in the breaking news business. I may be in the breaking analysis business, but I'm
1:39:50in the breaking news business where at Macworld, like literally, if something even like remotely
1:39:56big broke, I would just be in the CMS making a new article saying headline, write a paragraph,
1:40:03you know, more information to come post, like just to get it out there because we were really
1:40:08in that game. And I'm not in that game so much now, but it's true. You also, you know,
1:40:14I do think this is breaking analysis in a way, you know, you don't want to be left with
1:40:19not saying anything about something huge that happens that matters to the people who read
1:40:23your site or my site. You need to be engaged. And I at least have Dan to help out on some
1:40:31accounts. But you know, during Fireball is you, so it needs to be you or it's nobody.
1:40:38You got to get an intern or something. Jimmy the intern.
1:40:41Well, yeah, it's like for a while, I don't really regret it, but I wonder if I ever,
1:40:48if I've painted myself in a corner where it's like, you know, it's like Trump with his haircut,
1:40:52you know what I mean? It's like everybody's giving him grief about it, but he's like stuck
1:40:55with it so long where he can't, yeah, you can't really give in, you know what I mean?
1:41:02And it's like, I feel like every single word ever written on Daring Fireball was by me,
1:41:08know it's a nice streak but then it turned you know turns into a Cal Ripken
1:41:11thing at some point yeah where maybe I should take a month off and not do
1:41:15anything but you know I really don't want the site to go dark for a ride but
1:41:18then I don't want I don't have a guest poster one you're like David Letterman
1:41:21no guest hosts right but I've but I even said to you and I did when I did your
1:41:28show to talk about Letterman that I actually feel like that hurt him in the
1:41:31long run where I feel like there was a stretch a couple of years ago where it
1:41:37it felt like maybe he was a little burned out.
1:41:40It felt like he, you know,
1:41:42and I don't think that ever happened to Carson
1:41:43because Carson, as the years went on,
1:41:45took off more and more time.
1:41:47And one of the ways that he was able to take off time
1:41:50was that instead of just showing reruns,
1:41:51they had guest hosts.
1:41:52- Yeah, he was working three days a week
1:41:54and for 30--
1:41:56- 40 weeks a year. - 40 weeks a year.
1:41:58Man, what a deal.
1:41:59And well, so only doing this for 10 months now.
1:42:03I mean, I, look, if you, if you said,
1:42:06'cause you did sort of set this model,
1:42:08but some of the people who followed you, like Jim,
1:42:12like Federico, so the Loop and Max stories,
1:42:16they changed the equation a little bit.
1:42:20And Jim has like Dave Mark and he's had Sean King
1:42:24and he had Peter Cohen for a while,
1:42:26like supplementing what Jim does.
1:42:28And in fact, I think Dave Mark posts more stuff to the Loop
1:42:31than Jim does at this point.
1:42:33And then Federico, although he is the primary author
1:42:36of Mack's stories, he's got a bunch of,
1:42:39like I saw Brett Terpstra on there the other day,
1:42:41and I mean, he's got some people who contribute,
1:42:44and that, I felt like that was enough,
1:42:46that that sort of freed me.
1:42:47I was like, oh, and with so many people I used to work with
1:42:51losing their jobs simultaneously,
1:42:52I said to Dan, you know,
1:42:56in lieu of him getting a full-time job somewhere,
1:42:58would you like to write some stuff with me?
1:43:00And, you know, in the first days after Mackworld
1:43:03had the big layoffs, like Dan Frakes wrote a thing,
1:43:05And, you know, a few people wrote things for Six Colors,
1:43:09but with Dan, it was a good opportunity
1:43:11'cause he wanted to keep his hand in the game.
1:43:13He didn't want to vanish from writing about Apple
1:43:15'cause that's his profession,
1:43:17but he wasn't working somewhere full-time.
1:43:20So, you know, I think it was beneficial for him.
1:43:23It was really beneficial for me,
1:43:25but would I have done that
1:43:27if I hadn't seen some other people who said,
1:43:30"No, it's not just me.
1:43:31"It's sort of me and some of my friends
1:43:32"who are doing this," and I might not have.
1:43:35and it's just a different feel. It's just a different feel. I can't, I mean, I could
1:43:40see it, wasn't that one of the, I don't know whether it was Kottke or was it Andy
1:43:44Bayo? I remember somebody who was like a big link blogger did this at one point where they
1:43:49basically said, "I'm handing the reins."
1:43:51No, Kottke's done that for years. Kottke has, but when Kottke does it is he gives it
1:43:56away for the whole week.
1:43:57Right, exactly.
1:43:58You know who I actually, I believe the first person who ever did it for him, I think this
1:44:03a little bit of inside the world of personal/professional blogging, whatever you call this thing that
1:44:11we do, trivia is I think his first guest poster was Adam Lisagor.
1:44:17And it was the first time.
1:44:20I'd never even heard of him before.
1:44:24And we could look this up.
1:44:25If it wasn't the first, he was one of the first.
1:44:27And it was before Twitter.
1:44:29so it was before anybody who's heard of Adam Lisa Gore by Twitter had heard of him.
1:44:32And it was certainly before anybody who's heard of Adam Lisa Gore before Sandwich's video.
1:44:37And I went back and read it and it was, of course, fantastic. It was like, "Holy hell,
1:44:43this guy's amazing." But Kottke's done that for years and he picks, you know, very—he
1:44:49picks people though a lot of times and they're good, but he—and this is part of Jason Kottke
1:44:54being Jason Kottke and being very talented. He picks people who bring like a very different—
1:44:58Right voice to the site like people who are not cocky like
1:45:02Whatever that means to be cocky like because I think that's sort of hard to define
1:45:06Yeah, I forget all the guy he's had a bunch of guest posters over there when I was in Arizona visiting my mom
1:45:12we were watching like a baseball game and a sandwich video came on and I said, hey, I know that guy and
1:45:17My mom's like, oh really? How and I told her like, oh well, it's a lisagor and just this and just that and and
1:45:25Now she sends me emails saying hey, I saw I saw that friend of yours again on a different ad
1:45:30Like okay, I don't need updates about the sandwich video Empire, but it's cute. It's sweet
1:45:36Hey Amy, and I were at a bar the first time that we
1:45:40Saw a sandwich on real TV. It was like barred ESPN was on the TV behind the bar
1:45:46It's a real moment when you see him on real TV instead of the internet
1:45:49Posting things on the internet whatever but he's on TV
1:45:53Right, we couldn't get the words out of her mouth
1:45:54I forget which one of the two of us noticed first
1:45:57but we both were just like not even saying anything just pointing at the TV and then we like
1:46:01Like we're like we know that guy we know him and everybody, you know, we look like two mad people
1:46:06But we were like, well if you're traveling you see ads you don't see other places and this is what this was
1:46:10It's whatever he was selling him this ad in Phoenix was not a product that is available in my area
1:46:16And so I was just like I've never seen this before but there he is
1:46:20He's so what came to mind to me was
1:46:23Was the scene in Goodfellas when the crew finds out that Tommy got made? Oh, yeah
1:46:29Because it's like they're never gonna get made because it's just a bit is a
1:46:34So right, so he's the only one who could get made and they're in tight with him
1:46:40So this is the best they're ever gonna do is have it made guy and we're never gonna be on TV
1:46:45I don't want to be on TV commercials. No way. I mean, it's not I'm not even you know, it's not gonna happen, right?
1:46:49Uh, so the closest we're going to get to being on TV is having sandwich be on TV.
1:46:53So we were like, holy cow, this is amazing. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so hopefully,
1:47:00uh, it's the same thing as when people, when, when your, um, relatives don't understand what you do
1:47:04writing on the internet, this was always the case. I said this right after, um, I think when we talked
1:47:10about, about Mac world and all that at the end of last year, that one of the things that I took
1:47:14great pride in was so many people we published in the magazine and they could like take a
1:47:20piece of paper of a magazine with their picture and their name on it and say, "Look, mom,
1:47:25look grandpa, I wrote a thing in a magazine." And it was like validation in a way because
1:47:30it was understandable and not something that people you knew got to do unless they were
1:47:36very special. And I feel like watching Adam on a TV is a little bit like that too. It's
1:47:42like, "Wow, that's the real television. This isn't this internet crap that we do.
1:47:46That's the real TV."
1:47:47DAVE SMITH Exactly. I just hope that Adam doesn't come
1:47:51to the same end that Tommy did.
1:47:53MATT ROWE You mean, oh, no.
1:47:55DAVE SMITH Spoiler.
1:47:57MATT ROWE Yeah, sorry.
1:47:59DAVE SMITH I'll tell you what, anybody out there who
1:48:01hasn't watched Good Times, you're--
1:48:02MATT ROWE Good. What is wrong with you? Go do that immediately.
1:48:04DAVE SMITH I promise you. And then go listen to Syracuse's
1:48:06four and a half hour discussion of it. Which I don't, I'm not, I'm laughing just because it's,
1:48:12it's good, not because it's not worthy of it. - Oh no, I have a, I'm hoping I do this before
1:48:18somebody else gets it, but I want to do an incomparable with Sir, Siracusa about the
1:48:21Godfather. - Ooh, man, don't you gotta, that'd be like a, if, if Goodfellas was--
1:48:27- I know an 80-- - Four hours.
1:48:28- 80 part episode about the Godfather. Someday I'll do that, because I love that. We, we, you
1:48:34know, "Incomparable" is so much about, like, sci-fi stuff more than anything else, but
1:48:40I do want to do more classic movie stuff, and that's one that, I mean, I would love
1:48:45to do "Goodfellas," but I feel like it's kind of, it's been done. I would not want to just
1:48:49rehash that same conversation that Jon and Dan had, and that's one of my favorite movies
1:48:53of all time, but "Godfather," I'd love to do that too, because that's a classic too.
1:48:58Alright, I have one more break to make and I gotta talk to you about Backblaze.
1:49:04I feel like this show is loaded up with the all-stars of Tearing Fireball and the talk
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1:49:43This isn't some kind of cross platform crap like we were talking about before.
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1:50:12Now, is there any kind of magic that makes it all get backed up immediately?
1:50:15No, definitely not.
1:50:16So the more stuff you have, the longer it's going to take to do it.
1:50:18You get a 30-day free trial.
1:50:20Should be long enough with any kind of modern internet connection to get the whole thing
1:50:23backed up by the end of the free trial.
1:50:28After that, what happens?
1:50:29Well, of course, everything gets backed up incrementally after that.
1:50:32So one file changes, that file gets backed up.
1:50:35You've got nice controls.
1:50:36You can pause it.
1:50:37You can throttle the amount of bandwidth that it will use if you need to do something else
1:50:41like record a podcast and you just signed up.
1:50:45But seriously, once you have it installed, you never notice it.
1:50:47It just runs.
1:50:49No hassle, never just does exactly what you think it should do, which is just silently
1:50:54back up everything to the cloud.
1:50:57How can you access it after that?
1:50:59You could do it almost any way you could imagine.
1:51:01You just need one file, log in, find that file.
1:51:05It's all organized the same way the hierarchy is on your computer.
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1:51:1125% of all restores from Backblaze customers are just one file.
1:51:15That's it.
1:51:16that from your iOS device. They have an app. You can log in with that, get a file from
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1:51:26So it's a great way. It's not even just backup. It's a great way to just remotely access the
1:51:29stuff on your Mac from anywhere. Let's say catastrophe hits. Your hard drive shits the
1:51:36bed. All you have to do is you can just get everything. If you want to download it, you
1:51:41can download. It's going to take a while. What you could do is just buy it on a USB
1:51:44hard drive. They sell the USB hard drives at cost and then you can get a FedEx to you
1:51:50the next day. Here comes a USB hard drive, has everything that you've needed on it. Really,
1:51:56really great stuff. It really isn't just for disasters but having an offline backup like
1:52:01back blades out of your house somewhere just in case some kind of catastrophe doesn't just
1:52:06hit your computer but hits your home just cannot give you ... I can't tell you the peace
1:52:11of mind that you have when you know that everything on your computer is backed up somewhere outside
1:52:16your house. No add-ons, no gimmicks, no additional charges, no upsells or anything like that.
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1:52:47So my thanks to Backblaze.
1:52:48Go sign up at backblaze.com/daringfireball.
1:52:53So the last thing I want to talk about, Jason, is this thing that came up.
1:52:56I don't even know how it started, but everybody this month has been talking about how advertising
1:53:02on the web has made things slow. And it's this weird catch-22 that a lot of sites have
1:53:09gotten caught in. I wrote about iMore on Daring Fireball just as an example of a site that
1:53:19I love, I link to all the time. I know a whole bunch of the people who work there. Maybe
1:53:25I know everybody who works there. Of the staffed sites that cover--that was the phrase I use.
1:53:31I couldn't think of a better term,
1:53:33but of the sites with like a payroll and a staff
1:53:36that cover Apple, I think right now
1:53:38they're the top of the heap.
1:53:39Really do like them, and I really think
1:53:42that they love their readers and wanna do right by them.
1:53:45And they have a website that is really heavy
1:53:49with trackers, ad trackers, and with a lot of video content.
1:53:54It caught four or five megabytes to download
1:53:56just a regular article, five, six, 700 words.
1:53:59and
1:54:01It's more than just the time it takes to download that if you're on a slow connection or something like that
1:54:07It's the fact that they that some of these trackers run execute for over a minute doing who knows what the hell they do on
1:54:13JavaScript which hurts the performance of of your battery, you know and
1:54:183/4 literally, I mean, I don't even think I'm exaggerating three or four hundred HTTP calls for separate resources on the page
1:54:28And it sounds like well, they should just switch to different ads, but it's really is sort of a catch-22 where
1:54:33That's the way for the sort of revenue. You need to run a site with a staff like that
1:54:38The only way to do it is through advert
1:54:40You know these existing ad networks and the way the ad networks work is exactly what you see. I'm more is not
1:54:45outside the bounds of
1:54:48These sort of sites in fact, I would guess I haven't done this
1:54:52but I would guess that if you went around and went to all the sites that have you know, your mashables and
1:54:57and the Verge and Engadget.
1:55:00- I was hoping somebody would weigh the Macworld pages
1:55:03'cause they've just gotta be enormous.
1:55:05- They have to be Macworld and IDG.
1:55:08I mean, and you know this.
1:55:09I mean, I can't let it go, but I mean,
1:55:11Macworld had a feature, you know, it still does, I guess,
1:55:13where it auto plays video on page loads,
1:55:16which I'm guessing wasn't popular with the staff.
1:55:19- No, I mean, that was the number one thing that the staff,
1:55:22I think it's still not popular with the remaining staff,
1:55:26But certainly everybody who was there back a year ago,
1:55:29that was the number one.
1:55:30I fought to get that turned off for like six months
1:55:33and I finally got it turned off
1:55:34and then they replaced the guy who was in charge
1:55:36of the company with a new guy
1:55:37who immediately turned it back on.
1:55:39Yeah.
1:55:41- It's, you know, and Bet Thompson, I would guess,
1:55:46among anybody who doesn't have a site that does this.
1:55:49So he's sure to know.
1:55:50Ben Thompson at Stratechery, Stratechery?
1:55:53- Yeah, he got rid, he changed the pronunciation.
1:55:55- It's just Stratechery now.
1:55:56- Well, I'm gonna stick with Stratechery.
1:56:00- You can do that.
1:56:01- Ben Thompson of Stratechery has made the case eloquently
1:56:05that this is the business dynamics,
1:56:08this is the corner that the industry has painted itself into.
1:56:11This is the only source of advertising
1:56:12that can generate the sort of revenue
1:56:14that they need to do this.
1:56:16How did we get here, right?
1:56:20- Yeah.
1:56:22- It's, you know, we, so my boss for a long time at IDG,
1:56:27for like most of the last couple of years I was there,
1:56:31IDG has an ad network.
1:56:32So he, and he was in charge of it.
1:56:33And then he was put in charge of our company,
1:56:35our consumer group.
1:56:37A good guy, I really like him actually, but you know,
1:56:39ad network, I learned about ad networks
1:56:41and about programmatic buying and all of these things.
1:56:46Like in the, back in the day,
1:56:48and I can't believe I'm saying this about the web,
1:56:50But back in the day, it was all like really,
1:56:53I mean, web advertising has never been good, I would say,
1:56:59or rarely been good on the mainstream.
1:57:02It was all, it's all click-driven.
1:57:06You know, everybody wants to see return on investment
1:57:08based on clicks or based on purchases,
1:57:09which I actually think is baloney.
1:57:12That one of the most valuable kinds of advertising
1:57:17is branding advertising, brand advertising,
1:57:20which is another old boss of mine used to say,
1:57:22a sales guy used to say,
1:57:23you've gotta be known to be considered
1:57:26and considered to be bought.
1:57:28And the way you get known is through brand advertising.
1:57:32You're then perceived as being a legitimate player.
1:57:36And that's powerful,
1:57:38but it might not lead to a direct sale, right?
1:57:41It's just to get you in the ballgame.
1:57:43It's like saying, if you sell accounting software
1:57:46and you blanket the internet with,
1:57:49and podcasts and websites and all that with accounting software. Are people going to say,
1:57:54"Oh yeah, my company needs accounting software right now. I'm going to click through." Or
1:57:57is it more going to be like, "That name is going to stick in them," and a year later
1:58:01they're going to think, "Oh yeah, this is a piece of accounting software. Maybe I should
1:58:05look into that. Maybe we should buy that." But that's not measurable by the web, and
1:58:09the web has really pushed, because TV, with TV and magazines and newspapers, you couldn't
1:58:14measure direct. You could maybe do like a specific phone number or P.O. box or something
1:58:18like that and try to measure the volume, but really it was very hard to do. And the web
1:58:23made it much more technically possible to do that sort of thing, and it kind of drove
1:58:30everything to this crappy instant response kind of advertising. And then this takes it
1:58:35even with the ad networks, it takes it even further where it's no longer the heyday of
1:58:40the web where there were still like custom sales staffs with very specific like relationships
1:58:45with buyers who understood what your content was about and understood what your audience
1:58:51was. And now it's very much like everybody's in a pool, they say who their demographics
1:58:56are, page views, not even like sites, but page views in certain parts of certain sites
1:59:01are wholesaled and run through a program that's just buying a certain number of pages of a
1:59:08certain kind on a stock exchange, essentially. And it's like if you didn't think web advertising
1:59:14was bad enough five years ago, it is way worse now.
1:59:18Ben Thompson had a great piece. I just made a note to put it in the show notes. So knock
1:59:23on wood, it'll be in the show notes. It's always a crapshoot with me. He had a great
1:59:30post explaining how the modern advertising networks work.
1:59:34Yeah. He gave me the shivers because I learned that in the last couple of years. Yeah.
1:59:39And in terms of... I've got a whole bunch of plays. I haven't had the time because I've
1:59:43been away but I probably will I don't know about it if it'll happen before this podcast airs but
1:59:49sometime within the next few days I'm going to write about it and link to all these things but
1:59:53there's a piece at Digiday which is a I think a new site and if it's not I have never heard of
1:59:59it before but it's an interesting article by Ricardo Bilton about how the Washington Post cut
2:00:05its page load time by 85 percent in two years that two years ago the washingtonpost.com typical
2:00:12article page took eight seconds for the page to load. And that was measuring where it was
2:00:18usable by the, not necessarily completely done, but at the point where it looked done to the
2:00:24typical reader. And they've, in two years, by making it a top priority in the whole development
2:00:31staff, that they've got it down to 1.7 seconds, which is an 85% performance increase. And they
2:00:39Mentioned this this is in the article which is interesting that this is the guy he's the his name is Gregory
2:00:46Frantech hope I'm pronouncing that right his name is spelled a little unusually
2:00:51But he's his title is chief architect at the Washington Post and one of the quotes from him
2:00:55Is that in commerce?
2:00:58There's a quote that one second load time is the one that everyone wants to hit in media
2:01:04It doesn't seem as if there was ever that much emphasis on performance said Frantech
2:01:08And that's in other words that we're writing like a commerce of website on the web
2:01:12There was this mantra got to be one second or less or we're gonna lose this person
2:01:16You know like god forbid somebody like goes so far is to put their
2:01:20The product in their cart and then they go to check out and they're waiting and waiting and waiting and they're like ask her it
2:01:27And they close well, you know that would drive that team and rightfully
2:01:30so if they would say we got to get that in one second so that we don't lose them and
2:01:33That media sites didn't have that that drive
2:01:36Maybe they would say well be nice if if the page loaded in a second, but yeah, you know two seconds isn't bad
2:01:42And then two seconds isn't bad three seconds isn't bad. And then if three seconds isn't bad
2:01:46I'm sure they'll not gonna they're not gonna leave us if it gets to four seconds on average and
2:01:50Then all of a sudden you end up with a Washington Post taking eight seconds to load which is a long time
2:01:55It is I mean and you know
2:01:59We can make all the arguments we want about how amazing
2:02:03You know how amazed with Thomas Jefferson be if you could show him a web where every page loaded in eight seconds
2:02:09Well, yeah, he'd be blown away. But guess what, you know, I wouldn't take him long before he'd be saying
2:02:14Hey, can't we get these to load a little quicker?
2:02:16It eventually no matter who you are where your perspective is eight seconds is too long
2:02:22But the media backed themselves into that corner. Anyway this article with the post
2:02:25Concludes there's a lot that publishers don't have complete control over
2:02:32over, however, and it's basically ads.
2:02:35And here's the quote from the guy, Fransic.
2:02:37"We have very little control over ads
2:02:39"that load later slowly, but we wanted to make sure
2:02:41"the core user experience was as solid as possible.
2:02:44"That's what we have control over," said Fransic.
2:02:46And that, to me, is so telling,
2:02:48that here's the Washington Post,
2:02:50and even they say they don't have control
2:02:53over the time it takes for the ads to load.
2:02:56That, to me, is startling.
2:03:00- Yeah, well, everything's on ad networks.
2:03:02And so, I mean, I think what your goal needs to be
2:03:05is you need to not be held accountable.
2:03:08You need to build your pages so that they load
2:03:12regardless of what happens with the ads
2:03:14is basically what you have to do.
2:03:15And that can be hard.
2:03:19I can't tell you how much.
2:03:21When I would fight for a development time at IDG
2:03:24with our development group,
2:03:26so much time went into AdOps, so much time.
2:03:29And the big problem was AdOps was often driven
2:03:32by salespeople who would sell some crazy campaign
2:03:35and then they would have to deliver it.
2:03:36And then the front end developers would have to try
2:03:39and find ways to make it not break all the pages,
2:03:43which is a totally backward way of doing it.
2:03:45But that would happen all the time.
2:03:46And so much went into that.
2:03:49And the fact was more could go into it because your,
2:03:53imagine, I mean, it's like anything,
2:03:55imagine something that's completely out of your control
2:03:57being dropped into every little bit of product that you do.
2:04:01That's what happens with these things.
2:04:03- And it's mind-boggling.
2:04:04- Yeah, you try to mitigate it.
2:04:05You try to reduce it as much as possible
2:04:07and make it so that if the ad server fails,
2:04:10and remember, this doesn't happen so much anymore,
2:04:11but there used to be a time when one JavaScript call,
2:04:15you know, breaking somewhere would prevent pages
2:04:18from loading, like anywhere on the way.
2:04:20- Yeah, because I don't, and I could be wrong here,
2:04:23but I'm pretty sure that in the early days,
2:04:25all JavaScript was synchronous, it wasn't asynchronous.
2:04:28- Right, so get to that part on the page
2:04:29and it would just wait for that third party server to load.
2:04:33- Yeah, and the way pages used to render too,
2:04:36like in the,
2:04:39anything below it in the DOM would not render.
2:04:45And I don't even think that was that long ago.
2:04:50I seem to recall where there were problems
2:04:52one time when the DEC network server went down, big chunks of Daring Fireball didn't render because
2:04:58the DEC network JavaScript include call was at the top of the HTML, not at the bottom.
2:05:06So it's not even, you know, the net, you know, that's only going back to the Daring Fireball era,
2:05:12let alone the 90s. Here's my theory on this. And let me run it by you because, and again,
2:05:17this is one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show this week, is that you can speak to this.
2:05:21To me, I've always thought, and I've always been an outsider, I've never had a full-time job working
2:05:28at a publication. What I always saw, and to me it seemed very obvious in the early years, was for the
2:05:38most part the big name "web" in the early years came from two sides. It came from print and it
2:05:43came from TV. So CNN had a big news website, New York Times had a big news website. And
2:05:51in both cases, institutionally, the institutions did not value the websites as much as they
2:05:58valued their traditional form. So print publications favored print over, it was the favored child
2:06:05over the web. And the web was this thing that they were maybe not even drawn kicking and
2:06:10streaming to but you know in some cases in some publications I think that was
2:06:13true and a lot of them it just was always the second secondary child and
2:06:21that they didn't have respect for it and they didn't have the respect for it that
2:06:25they have for their flagship product because and here's what I would say the
2:06:34New York Times was never gonna let advertisers into their printing press
2:06:37like you Chevy you know doesn't get to put an ad in the New York Times and get
2:06:42to go into the printing press and slow down the delivery of the next morning's
2:06:46New York Times because they want to make sure that you know the colors are
2:06:50aligned on the printing press or to draw another analogy Chevy doesn't get to put
2:06:57an ad in the New York Times that the New York Times doesn't see first yep
2:07:00CNN doesn't let the advertisers control whatever goes on over the air during the
2:07:0730 seconds that they bought. They give them a video and the video you know they
2:07:14have the video in their hands before it runs. CNN delivers the video right
2:07:18whereas the web from the very early on evolved in this way where there was a
2:07:24lack of respect that they wouldn't have like for example New York Times is never
2:07:27going to sell an ad that sticks to the two pages surrounding the op-ed page so
2:07:36that if you want to read the op-ed page,
2:07:38you've got to break an envelope seal,
2:07:41find a sharp thing and do that.
2:07:43Whereas they have things on their website
2:07:45that are the equivalent of that,
2:07:47where you have to spend a few seconds doing something
2:07:50or waiting for something before you get to read
2:07:52what you're going to read.
2:07:53Whereas they would never sell an ad like that
2:07:55on their print product.
2:07:57And the fact that they started from a position
2:07:59of disrespect and they were the big name sites,
2:08:03not just, I'm down to say New York Times and CNN
2:08:05in particular, all of those sites though
2:08:07that had existing successful print publications
2:08:10or existing successful TV news operations,
2:08:13they set the standard for the online ad industry
2:08:18and the industry involved in a way
2:08:20where the inmates run the asylum,
2:08:22the advertisers got whatever they wanted
2:08:24because the publications didn't have respect
2:08:26for their sites and didn't have respect for their users.
2:08:30- Yeah.
2:08:31- So you don't think I'm off the mark?
2:08:35- No, I mean, I think the challenge has always been
2:08:38that it's been hard.
2:08:40It's always been hard to make money online.
2:08:43I know that seems crazy to say,
2:08:46but I can tell you from a publication standpoint,
2:08:49it's always been hard.
2:08:50It was not, I'd say at the point that it was clear
2:08:54that the web was the most important product
2:08:58and that like a magazine, like I worked for, was not.
2:09:03it was probably another five, maybe seven years
2:09:08before the web revenue got anywhere close
2:09:12to the print revenue.
2:09:13And that's because it was even like five years ago,
2:09:17there was, I saw a story the other day
2:09:19that was pointing out this,
2:09:20that Mary Meeker slide deck that gets dropped
2:09:22at the D conference every year,
2:09:24or the code conference now, right?
2:09:26But the same conference. (laughs)
2:09:29And five years ago,
2:09:32she had one of those things that we had seen too, you know, internally at IDG and everybody
2:09:36in the industry had seen it where even though web was being used to a great degree, the
2:09:41advertising wasn't on the web. It was all on TV and print. And that's a red flag because
2:09:49that's like, well, this is going to change. It is going to change. But for a long time,
2:09:52it didn't change. And so you got this, you know, we're giving away all our content for
2:09:56free and we're desperately trying to make money in it because we know that the future
2:10:00is going to be in this medium, but nobody's buying.
2:10:04So we're gonna then redouble our efforts
2:10:07to do anything we can.
2:10:09And I think it was dangerous
2:10:12because there was some desperation
2:10:16at a time when it was about to be a sea change.
2:10:21And the clients were going to be coming
2:10:24with all their big checkbooks to the web very soon,
2:10:29because that's where the eyeballs were going. That was where everybody wanted to go. And,
2:10:35you know, it was probably not realistic to say, "Well, we're just going to hold out."
2:10:38But the fact is everybody was just like, "No, no, no, we're desperate. Please give us money
2:10:41now. Please, let's make this valid." Also, I think there was maybe a little bit of a
2:10:44first ones free kind of mentality, like, "What can I do to get you to try to advertise on
2:10:50the web? Because we really need you to do that because this is where it's all going
2:10:53to go. As a result, though, I mean, we've got this situation where what people pay is
2:11:00not a lot. It's completely--I mean, imagine not only the New York Times saying, "Well,
2:11:05you can run an ad we haven't seen, and we'll cover the editorial section in a code that
2:11:12you have to enter before you can peel off the piece of paper and read the rest of the
2:11:17newspaper. But let's take the analogy further. What if the New York Times doesn't have any
2:11:26control over any of it and isn't even using their own salespeople? Like, there's a robot
2:11:31somewhere, there's a stock exchange, an ad exchange somewhere that's just automatically
2:11:37serving. Like, the salespeople are even gone at that point. That's sort of where the web
2:11:41biz now. And, you know, it's just, it's a very different medium, and that's fine, but
2:11:47what Ben Thompson would tell you is, unless you have scale, unless you're BuzzFeed, maybe,
2:11:52unless you have just huge scale, where you have so many pages that you can section it
2:11:57up in a bunch of different ways, or unless you are very small but have an amazing audience,
2:12:04like Daring Fireball, if you're in the middle, it's tough. It's tough to do it, because you
2:12:09You don't have the scale, so a lot of advertisers don't even want to talk to you, and you're
2:12:13using these ad networks.
2:12:15And that's where iMore is, that's where Macworld was and is.
2:12:19And you end up doing that thing where you put more and more junk on your pages because
2:12:24every piece of junk you put on your pages is more money, and you're desperately trying
2:12:29to make enough money to pay your people who are building your website and who are writing
2:12:33your articles, and it's tough.
2:12:36I'm not convinced.
2:12:37It's actually one of the reasons why I was so committed to leaving IDG for the
2:12:43last couple of years and knew I needed to get out. I'm not convinced that this
2:12:49you know this business model is gonna work for 80% of the websites. I'm just
2:12:56I'm not convinced that it's gonna work. Give it away for free in
2:12:59exchange for loading up on advertising. Well I really do think that it might
2:13:07the reckoning might come sooner than later.
2:13:10- Yeah.
2:13:11- Because, and it's from multiple factors,
2:13:15multiple directions, it's not one thing is going to do it,
2:13:19but without question, and that's what makes it
2:13:22so interesting to me timing-wise,
2:13:24'cause to me it ties in with, tangentially perhaps,
2:13:29but it turns, it ties into that argument that,
2:13:34hey, Apple has like, the argument from the Apple,
2:13:36Safari's a new ie part of their argument is that like ie that they perceive Apple is having abandoned it that they've sort of lost
2:13:44interest in it and that the reason that
2:13:45Safari isn't adding all these features they want them to add is that Apple either can't do it or is understaffed or disinterested
2:13:52What escapes their mind?
2:13:55To go back to my point earlier about their they're not being able to see it from a perspective other than theirs is that Apple
2:14:00Is doing exactly what it wants with Safari and they are putting a lot of effort into it
2:14:04But it's not really about these features that these developers want it's about features for the user and and Renee
2:14:10Richie at I'm or had a great article about it where he cut said it was you know
2:14:14Apple is steering it towards this user centric web
2:14:17and again
2:14:19It's Apple favoring users over developer
2:14:22But that's what a lot of the stuff and there was a lot of stuff about Safari at WWDC this year
2:14:30some of my I mean, it's partly because it's it's more of this type of stuff I deal with firsthand, but
2:14:35There's an awful lot of stuff that
2:14:39WWDC sessions that felt directly related to me and my work and what I'm interested in and you know
2:14:43the content blockers is one and
2:14:45you know the new news app is another and
2:14:50They're both to me driven by the same thing
2:14:53which is that we want to do things that make stuff you want to read load quicker and
2:14:59Keep maintain more of your privacy. We want to you this should be faster
2:15:04It should be a better experience and you should have the feeling that it's more private
2:15:09Because that's the other flip side of the whole
2:15:12Inmates running the assignments asylum argument with online advertising is this is the magic of code
2:15:18Right in general just the idea of running software code and this whole, you know, code software is eating the world
2:15:24It's the first time that advertising
2:15:27Could do any of this stuff, right? I mean that the idea of tracking someone who watches TV in the old days over the air
2:15:34It was impossible right and the the the metrics and of course advertisers want metrics and of course, they want the metrics to be
2:15:40accurate
2:15:42But the you know, the Nielsen ratings especially in the old days were famously
2:15:46inaccurate in terms of whether the the Nielsen families were actually a honest about what they watched and be
2:15:52demographically
2:15:54representative of the country as a whole
2:15:57I think newspaper and magazine circulation was probably, and probably still is, more accurate
2:16:04because it's better regulated through the, what's it called? I'm sure you know. There's a standard
2:16:10group that- Like the IAB?
2:16:11Yeah, like the IAB. Or at least, and if it's not accurate, at least it's consistent,
2:16:17or more consistent. But for the most part, if you placed a full page ad in the New York Times,
2:16:26Whether, you know, they actually was read by, you know, they tell you they print, you know,
2:16:321.1 million copies or whatever it is on a weekday. And how many people read it? Well, who knows,
2:16:37because some of those copies are in a doctor's office and people come in, you know, 10 patients
2:16:40come in and read the front page of the same copy of the New York Times. But you basically know,
2:16:44roughly, loosely, how much exposure you're getting from the New York Times. And if you advertise in
2:16:52in Sports Illustrated instead of advertising in Vogue,
2:16:56you know the basic difference between the demographics
2:17:00of those two big magazines.
2:17:02And when you advertise in Macworld,
2:17:04the print magazine, you have a pretty good idea
2:17:07of the demographics to a loose degree.
2:17:09But it's nothing at all like what you get from the trackers
2:17:12that the ad networks do online in terms of knowing
2:17:15that here's a person who not only reads Macworld,
2:17:18but they also read three of these photo sites.
2:17:22And so we can serve a targeted ad, which in some sense,
2:17:26there is a plus side to it, where maybe it can serve you
2:17:29an ad that truly is interesting to you
2:17:31because it's about some amazing new Mac software meant
2:17:34for photographers.
2:17:35When it works like that, that's fantastic.
2:17:37But in terms of are you comfortable,
2:17:40would you be comfortable buying a print magazine that somehow
2:17:43knew which other print magazines you ran?
2:17:46Red, it doesn't even make any sense.
2:17:48Like how would that even be accomplished?
2:17:50That's the magic of code.
2:17:51Like letting code run in general
2:17:53and advertising changed the game.
2:17:56- Yeah, the question is,
2:17:57I mean, trying to think of a way forward,
2:18:00I ask myself sometimes, what would I rather see?
2:18:04Would I rather see a web?
2:18:06I think it's unlikely that we'll see a web
2:18:08where almost everything is behind a paywall.
2:18:11I think that seems unlikely.
2:18:12Although I think more stuff will be harder to get to
2:18:16and that there will be experiences that you'll be able to have on the web or in apps as a paid whoever that are better.
2:18:24I do think that will probably happen.
2:18:26But what I really ask myself is, would I rather have the web littered with more and more junk,
2:18:36or would I rather have a web that had less junk on it but it knew who I was?
2:18:43And maybe this makes me a bad person,
2:18:46but I think I honestly would rather have a good experience
2:18:49and share some of my personal information
2:18:51than have a terrible experience
2:18:54because they don't know who I am.
2:18:55Unfortunately, the world we live in is
2:18:57they wanna know everything about who you are
2:18:59and they wanna fill your screen with junk.
2:19:02And they also wanna put up a paywall after 10 articles
2:19:06so that you can pay to see all the junk and be tracked.
2:19:10So it's like everything is there.
2:19:11And I don't know what the solution is
2:19:13other than muddling along with it being kind of generally awful, other than if companies
2:19:19start going out of business. And I think that that may be, I just saw Michael Sippy, who
2:19:26has been on the internet for a million years and used to be the head of product at Twitter,
2:19:29refer to it as the great reaping, right? It's like, what happens then? If that happens,
2:19:34where like a lot of these mid-range sites just go out of business, something interesting
2:19:40might happen after that, that is people, and probably people like you and me, either on
2:19:46their own or in small groups banding together to try and find some new way of doing things
2:19:50that's not like that. But it might take that, like a dissolution of these staffs, like what
2:19:56happened with Macworld. Imagine that happening just again and again and again, where you
2:20:00end up with a whole lot of people who are just forced to do something different. The
2:20:05apocalyptic version of that is that they're just gone. They go take jobs at places that
2:20:09aren't in the media and you never hear from them again and the world is a poorer place for it. And
2:20:13then all we're left with is some people kind of on the far left end of the curve like Daring
2:20:19Fireball and some people at the far right end like Buzzfeed and that there's nothing left in
2:20:23the middle. But I fear that that is a strong possibility. The reckoning is that the overlooking
2:20:31the fact that the users have the ability to fight back. And the music industry faced this with the
2:20:36in the Napster era, where they wanted a magic solution
2:20:40that would keep users from doing downloads.
2:20:44You still see it with film and TV,
2:20:47with their reluctance to be more generous,
2:20:50not generous, not in terms of like lowering prices,
2:20:53but the way that stuff is all still regional,
2:20:55I mean, it drives, we're so lucky living in the US,
2:20:58but it drives some of my friends in Canada nuts
2:21:02when TV shows don't show up right away.
2:21:06let alone other countries around the world
2:21:08where they show up after they do in Canada.
2:21:09It's crazy, there's no reason for that.
2:21:11And you wonder why people in Canada might resort
2:21:15to illegal downloads to get the TV shows
2:21:20that they can't get the same day
2:21:22that people get in the US.
2:21:23It's because they're being an idiot about it.
2:21:26And don't underestimate the fact that users can fight back.
2:21:31And if you think, ah, who cares if our webpages
2:21:33take eight seconds?
2:21:35and then you view people who install ad blockers
2:21:38as criminals or something like that
2:21:40and expect some kind of magical solution
2:21:42to route around the ad blocking.
2:21:44It's not gonna work, it's not gonna be magical.
2:21:47And now that it's starting to get built into a high level
2:21:51and a truly flagship operating system.
2:21:54I know that you can install ad blockers
2:21:55on the Mac for a while,
2:21:56but in terms of affecting a great swath of high profile
2:22:03on good demographic users, having these content blockers
2:22:07in iOS is, I think, gonna be a game changer.
2:22:11I really do.
2:22:12And I say this again as somebody who makes my entire living
2:22:16practically from advertising.
2:22:18I am incredibly sensitive to the fact that,
2:22:22I can't really recommend ad blocking.
2:22:25I don't run an ad blocker.
2:22:27- Neither do I.
2:22:28- I do run Ghostery, and I have Ghostery set in Safari
2:22:32to block trackers.
2:22:33So I do block ad trackers according to Ghostery,
2:22:36but I don't block ads.
2:22:38So I do obviously see different ads than I would
2:22:40if I didn't have Ghostery installed.
2:22:43And I do plan though to run Safari content blockers,
2:22:47and I don't plan to run them to block ads,
2:22:48but I absolutely plan to run them
2:22:50to block JavaScript trackers.
2:22:52And I think there's gonna be an awful lot of people
2:22:58who are not as
2:22:59You know, and I think rightfully so.
2:23:04I don't pass judgment on them,
2:23:06but who aren't gonna have, draw that distinction
2:23:08between blocking ads and blocking trackers,
2:23:11and they're just gonna block all of it.
2:23:13- Oh yeah, no doubt.
2:23:15- And when the performance increase is dramatic,
2:23:18when you, when all of a sudden you try this content blocker,
2:23:23and all of a sudden these things start loading
2:23:25remarkably faster on your old iPhone,
2:23:29just because you installed iOS 9,
2:23:30there's no, you know, it's not like people
2:23:34are gonna uninstall them later.
2:23:36And it's, you know, I just,
2:23:39I really do think that that's gonna come.
2:23:41So what did Sippy say?
2:23:42It's a what's coming?
2:23:44- The great reaping. - The reaping, yeah.
2:23:47Where some sites in the middle,
2:23:49that middle between the super-scaled sites
2:23:52like Facebook and Buzzfeed,
2:23:54and us on the bottom of the tree that--
2:23:58- Right, it's what Ben Thompson calls the smiling curve,
2:24:00where it's like, there's like a good uptick on the left
2:24:03and a good uptick on the right,
2:24:05and it's not very good in the middle.
2:24:07- Yeah, the way, I mean, and again,
2:24:10a lot of times when I talk about this or write about this,
2:24:12I also get, so please, you know, let me address it.
2:24:14I, my criticism of IMOR was not, I don't, it is true,
2:24:19I do not have a here's what IMOR should do
2:24:22to solve the problem.
2:24:23I wish I did, if I did, I would be the first one
2:24:25to share it with them.
2:24:27I don't, but I wrote that article not saying,
2:24:31hey, here's what they should do,
2:24:33and it certainly wasn't meant to,
2:24:35they should do what I do, because it wouldn't work.
2:24:37I have an operation that is a very nice living
2:24:40for a staff of one, and maybe I could hire one person
2:24:44or hire somebody full time, or part time,
2:24:46or something like that.
2:24:47- Billy the intern again.
2:24:49- Right, but the Daring Fireball/the talk show model
2:24:54is not something that would run a staffed organization.
2:24:58It's not. - No.
2:24:59- So I'm not saying that.
2:25:00I'm just saying I would like to see them try
2:25:02and maybe somebody could find a way to find something new
2:25:06that could run something of that size.
2:25:09But I feel that to the other thing,
2:25:10if there is a lament,
2:25:11it's that people have stopped trying new things
2:25:13in advertising. - Yeah.
2:25:14It's this catch-22 of the advantage
2:25:18of giving away your content for free
2:25:19is that you get more viewers,
2:25:21but then you have to monetize them all,
2:25:23because, which is a word I hate,
2:25:25but because it conjures up sort of this imagery
2:25:27of turning people into stacks of coins or something,
2:25:30but that's basically what it is, right?
2:25:31And so you've got, how do you do that?
2:25:33And the answer is you put ads everywhere
2:25:36and you try to track them.
2:25:37And the fact is people are reluctant to give you money.
2:25:41A lot of people.
2:25:43Your other choice is to say, look, I don't care.
2:25:46I'm going to charge people for my stuff
2:25:50and it'll be a much smaller group,
2:25:52but if they pay me enough, it'll be worth it.
2:25:53The challenge is getting the math to work,
2:25:55or a hybrid of that, right,
2:25:56where you give some stuff away,
2:25:57like Ben Thompson gives some stuff away to get visibility.
2:26:00- Including the article that I will link to this week.
2:26:02- Exactly right, but he also writes
2:26:04several other pieces a week
2:26:05that only go to the people who pay him $100 a year,
2:26:07which I think is actually kind of a great deal,
2:26:09and it allows him to make a living just doing that,
2:26:12which means you get, as a subscriber,
2:26:14you get his entire output,
2:26:15other than the one free piece a week.
2:26:17- I feel like that is part of the genius of his model.
2:26:21I feel like $100 is magic.
2:26:23- Yeah.
2:26:23- And I wasn't sure what to think of it when he started,
2:26:26but I feel like it's magic.
2:26:27And there's an awful lot of people who would say,
2:26:28"I'll never pay $100 a year for anything online."
2:26:33But somehow if you're, but then there,
2:26:36I think a lot of those people wouldn't pay $10 a year.
2:26:38- Right, right.
2:26:39And he's a really smart guy.
2:26:41I mean, this is my fear is that if everybody in the middle,
2:26:45their companies blow up and they say,
2:26:47"Well, I'm gonna do what Ben Thompson does."
2:26:49fact is, I mean, not everybody, how many hundred dollar a year subscriptions for
2:26:54websites or newsletters are people going to be willing to pay?
2:26:58No, you have to be one of their favorites.
2:27:00Right, but that's the old, you know, what is it, thousand true fans thing, which is you
2:27:06don't actually need, you don't actually need a hundred thousand people. You need
2:27:10a thousand people or two thousand people who like your stuff
2:27:14enough to buy your t-shirt and maybe your, you know, membership or donate or
2:27:19whatever. And that's, I feel like, I mean, I've thought about that a lot since going
2:27:24out on my own, is how do I want to balance advertising with direct--I had lots of people
2:27:29say, "I don't, you know, I don't, I like your advertisers or I don't like your advertisers
2:27:34or whatever. I just want to support you and I don't have anything to advertise myself.
2:27:38How do I do that?" And I haven't given anybody a way to do that yet. And I remember during
2:27:42the really bad times at IDG that, you know, usually you're riding high and the sales guys
2:27:48are in charge and they're like, "Yeah, we're selling ads. We don't really care about anything
2:27:52else." And then in the dark times, they suddenly say, "Hey, you know what's really great is
2:27:56we've got people paying us $35 a year to get a magazine. That's really good because we'd
2:28:00be out of business without that." And I'm reminded of that, that right now my living
2:28:05is almost 100% directly or indirectly funded by advertising. And do I want to have, let
2:28:11people, can I provide them something that they would want to support and also get something
2:28:16from it. But that's the danger is that if you follow that through, it might work for
2:28:22me. It certainly works for Ben Thompson right now. But in the end, if most of the people
2:28:28get cleared out of the market, I'm not sure if that'll work or not. Then again, back in
2:28:3220 years ago, there were people who subscribed to 15 magazines a month, right? And those
2:28:37were all probably $50 or $40 or $20 a year, maybe not $100 a year, but my dad used to
2:28:44get the Kiplinger letter, and that was like $100 a year or more, and that was like a little
2:28:49newsletter like typewritten. Even when they started doing it on computers, they made it
2:28:54look like it was typewritten. And it was like an investing in business newsletter. And that's
2:28:59sort of what Ben's doing. And it makes sense. But I don't know. The math may not work. You
2:29:04may end up—it may turn out that the web has created a glut of information and people that,
2:29:12the end just can't be supported. Unfortunately, I fear sometimes that what we do is going
2:29:19to be like being a steelworker.
2:29:21Tim Cynova Yeah, I wonder. I don't know. The other thing
2:29:25I wrote about with the iMore thing was that to me it was a good example of a slippery
2:29:30slope by which I mean that once with me at Daring Fireball and again, I'm not saying
2:29:38it applies to other sites or larger sites, but it worked for me, was that I never once
2:29:42put anything on Daring Fireball that I wasn't comfortable with, except for the time that
2:29:46I tried running Google AdSense, like when Google AdSense first came out. And I've talked
2:29:52about this, you know, talks and stuff like that before, but long story short, the ads
2:29:56weren't that good and they weren't paying much. And I got some control over the color
2:30:00of them, but it wasn't enough. And they were just text, you know. But, and it was, and
2:30:07It was at a time when during Fireball I was making zero dollars.
2:30:10I really wanted it to make something greater than zero dollars so I could spend more time
2:30:15on it.
2:30:16Ideally, and again, for years it was just an idle dream that I could maybe just do it
2:30:21full time.
2:30:23I really wanted that to work, but I was so uncomfortable with the fact that some of those
2:30:28Google AdSense ads that I was getting, and I had no control over them.
2:30:32Some of them were relevant.
2:30:33Most of them weren't.
2:30:35I took them down after like a month or two.
2:30:38But I never put anything-- and God bless Google.
2:30:42One thing Google has always known
2:30:43is that the web should be fast.
2:30:44And the AdSense ads never once seemed
2:30:47to slow down during Fireball.
2:30:48If they had, I would have taken them down day one.
2:30:52But I had the ability, because there was nobody
2:30:54I had to answer to, I could say, I'm
2:30:57never going to add anything that slows during Fireball down.
2:30:59And I'm never going to add something that I'm not proud of
2:31:03and I'm not gonna add something to Daring Fireball
2:31:06that has 100 HTTP requests, et cetera, et cetera.
2:31:10So I never broke the line on that,
2:31:11and now I'm fortunate enough that I found other ways
2:31:15to make money, and I have a terrific business right now.
2:31:19But in the interim, I absolutely left money on the table.
2:31:23There were years in the 2007, 2008, 2009 era
2:31:27where I had, and I listened to some of the pitches
2:31:30from ad networks, you know, they were, you know,
2:31:35at least, and who knows if they would have,
2:31:37but the numbers they were telling me
2:31:38that they could give me per month
2:31:40were way more than what I was making.
2:31:42I mean, you know, by, you know,
2:31:44maybe not by a factor of 10,
2:31:45but by a factor of a very nice integer.
2:31:47It was way more money than I was making per month
2:31:51from Daring Fireball at a time
2:31:53when it really would have been meaningful
2:31:55to me and my family, but I turned it all down
2:31:57because I absolutely wasn't comfortable
2:31:59with the at.
2:32:01Now how many people at a site where you're not just,
2:32:05one person who, I'm not gonna call myself an artist,
2:32:08but maybe it comes at it with an artistic integrity angle.
2:32:12But if you're at a site where there's a corporate structure
2:32:16above you and you're supposed to justify stuff
2:32:19with profit and loss and stuff like that,
2:32:22how many people are gonna go,
2:32:23how many publications could go years turning down stuff
2:32:26and building something different instead.
2:32:30- Oh, I can't tell you how many times,
2:32:31I mean, the slippery slope is true.
2:32:32I can't tell you how many times.
2:32:33You wrote a bunch of things about like tint,
2:32:37that thing that--
2:32:38- Yeah, what it still does, where it adds,
2:32:41you copy the name Jason Snell
2:32:44to get the spelling of your name right.
2:32:46Not that your name is hard to spell.
2:32:47- But it adds all this crap on your clipboard.
2:32:49And there were those ads that, what were they called?
2:32:53That were, you still see them,
2:32:56where they take phrases in stories, in editorial content,
2:33:00and hyperlink them to advertising, and usually badly.
2:33:04That's where you say, and it was like this
2:33:06in the early days of Google too,
2:33:07you'd say something like, "You know the drill,
2:33:09"and all the ads are for power drills."
2:33:11- Right. - You're like,
2:33:12"That's totally wrong."
2:33:13- Right, and yes, if you're a close reader,
2:33:16you could see that those links were styled differently.
2:33:18Maybe they were underlined in green instead of in blue.
2:33:20- Exactly.
2:33:21- But you have to be a close reader.
2:33:23I mean, it's like, every time I'd see them,
2:33:24I think there is no way my mom would know the difference
2:33:26between this link and the link
2:33:28that the writer of the article put in,
2:33:30which they really wanted the reader to know,
2:33:32"Hey, if you wanna know more about this, click this link."
2:33:36- We would have, I can't tell you how many times,
2:33:38and this is one of the things that kind of wore on me
2:33:40in my job is, I can tell you how many times I had a meeting
2:33:42with a new salesperson or a new executive who would say,
2:33:46"Hey, have you heard about these great new things
2:33:49that do this?"
2:33:50And it would be the same old thing.
2:33:51It would be stuff like that,
2:33:52these contextual ads and hyperlinks.
2:33:54And it would end up being yet another argument
2:33:57where I would have to say that's editorial content
2:33:59and we choose what we link to
2:34:01and by overwriting links with other links to other places,
2:34:04you're breaking, you're laying advertising
2:34:07on top of editorial and it's not appropriate
2:34:10and it's a bad user experience and et cetera, et cetera.
2:34:12I generally won those arguments at Macworld,
2:34:15which I kind of can't believe I even did,
2:34:17but I generally won those.
2:34:19I think we never implemented those.
2:34:21But the argument was always the same,
2:34:24which is, well, it's incremental revenue.
2:34:26And the best I could do was say, look,
2:34:29all the editors will tell you this is wrong.
2:34:30It will be terrible for the users
2:34:32and all they're promising you is an extra $40,000.
2:34:35Is it worth it to you?
2:34:36But a lot of organizations,
2:34:38and IDG said yes on all sorts of other things.
2:34:40They just didn't on that one particular one,
2:34:42for whatever reason, they'll just say yes,
2:34:44because they're like,
2:34:45they're desperately trying to keep ahead of the,
2:34:49they're trying to keep afloat.
2:34:50And so it's like, well, this is another $20,000
2:34:52and this is another $40,000. At one point when I was put in charge of MacWorld's website,
2:34:57the homepage was almost entirely non-editorial. Like, literally, I think more than half the
2:35:02homepage was non-editorial, and it's because every time somebody came to them, whoever
2:35:06was in charge at that time, the president of the company, I think, basically, and said,
2:35:09"We've got to deal with you. What if you link to this thing and we'll give you a cut?" They
2:35:13just said yes. And it's hard to say no. It is hard to say no, and it's hard to keep a
2:35:18vision. And if you're somebody who is dealing with the bottom line, you're not running a
2:35:22a charity. You do want to make a living and you want to bring in more money so that your
2:35:27company can stay in business. At the same time, somebody who is thinking of the big
2:35:32picture realizes that you are breaking your product by adding this to it and that eventually
2:35:38what you're left with is nothing and you're not going to get revenue for it because your
2:35:42product is so terrible that nobody wants to see it anymore.
2:35:45Right. And one little incremental thing at a time, all of a sudden you've set yourself
2:35:49in opposition to your readers.
2:35:51Yeah, and like Macworld, I can't tell you how, I mean, one of the reasons morale was
2:35:55so low was that our readers, first off, the people who made these decisions never heard
2:35:59from the readers. We had to hear from the readers. We had to be the ones who bore the
2:36:03brunt of it and tried to explain why this was going on. The people who actually made
2:36:06these decisions never had to hear from them. In fact, the reason I got the autoplay video
2:36:10turned off for that brief time that I got it turned off is that I passed my boss a 60-page
2:36:15Google Doc of complaints from readers about autoplay video. We just compiled it. I just
2:36:21had the editors, I said, "Anytime you get an email from somebody or a tweet or whatever,
2:36:25put it in here." And I handed it to him and I said, "These are complaints from readers
2:36:29about autoplay." And finally, what broke him down, he was like, "What do you want me to
2:36:33do?" And I said, "I want you to shut it off." And he was like, "All right." And then, like
2:36:36I said, two months later, he was replaced with a guy who immediately turned it back
2:36:39on. But that, you know, if you're one of those editors, that was, you could tell that
2:36:45this was bad, but the people who were making these decisions never had to hear from people.
2:36:49never really were thinking about that. Oftentimes you'd have like an editorial
2:36:53group and you'd have like the website building group and then you'd have like
2:36:56a money group, the sales and deals group. And what would end up happening is
2:37:01there's no--what should happen is that group in the middle, the
2:37:06website product group, should actually be concerned about the product. They should
2:37:09they should be the one that everybody else has to convince that this is a good
2:37:13idea. But in so many editorial organizations, some on the web and
2:37:17especially the ones that came from print, but not just them.
2:37:20Um, that group ended up being seen as like a technical services group rather
2:37:25than like the keepers of the product.
2:37:27And as a result, the other two groups would just, the edit and sales would
2:37:31just run rough shot over them.
2:37:32And that is where the slippery slope comes from a lot of the time is that the,
2:37:36either there's nobody in charge of the product or the people in charge of the
2:37:39product can't say no, and they can't, they can't even say stop and think.
2:37:44And so, you know, a sales guy makes a deal that he's gonna get a commission on that is gonna junk up the site.
2:37:50He doesn't care. He's gonna make money. And somebody else's problem about it junking up the site.
2:37:55And he'll never hear from a reader that it was junking up the site. He just doesn't care.
2:38:00And that's why the slippery slope happens.
2:38:02Yep. That's a great, great story. Well, an interesting story. It's a very sad, bad story.
2:38:10The last factor in all of this is this and it we've been going on a long time, but I've been off for a while but it
2:38:16But it to wrap this up is the mobile versus desktop web disparity and Mary Meeker's slide
2:38:23Let me let me make a note to see if I can link to that
2:38:26But her slide on the amount of time people spend on various medias TV print stuff like that versus the amount
2:38:33Percentage of the percentage of their time they spend on them versus the percentage of advertising that is devoted to them
2:38:39It is shown ever since she's been doing it that new stuff is underrepresented by ads early and then eventually it catch it
2:38:47Inevitably catches up
2:38:49It's almost like money ball where eventually the advertisers realize that we can we can underpay for what it's worth on
2:38:55This new thing and get more bang for our buck than the existing ones and the graph shows that the amount of time people spend
2:39:03On TV corresponds closely to the amount of money spent on TV advertising the amount of time people spend with print
2:39:09Corresponds pretty closely to how much time they spend on it and in the early days of the web
2:39:12Like you said it was not even five years ago. Not even the early is like five years ago
2:39:17That wasn't true and it has been her slide this year. It's caught up. Yeah. Oh TV TV is totally screwed, by the way
2:39:23That's the other part of that is like everybody's realized that TV is not worth it
2:39:28And so TV advertising is gonna go in the hole as a part except for except for the and again
2:39:34I think it's probably gonna be one of those upside-down smiles where like the big-name sports lot still gonna lie the end, right?
2:39:41Any life? Yeah
2:39:42NFL is gonna be fine. The Oscars are gonna be fine
2:39:45You know episodes of 30-minute sitcoms are gonna be in big trouble, yeah
2:39:54But the big thing that she showed though is that there's a big disparity with mobile and desktop and mobile is
2:40:01Consuming like I think about as much time as the desktop web
2:40:05But it's way underrepresented
2:40:08She said I think her number was something like 35 or 40 billion dollars a hole between how much money should be being spent
2:40:15If you say that, you know all time should be represented by advertising equally
2:40:19And like you said even just five years ago. The desktop web was there
2:40:23Yeah
2:40:24I think video too goes into that where people are watching video and the percentage of video advertising is nothing compared to the
2:40:30Where the people are is not where the advertising is in mobile and video
2:40:34Yeah, absolutely not and that's really gonna come with kids because I mean it's it we both we both have it's Jonah still 10
2:40:42He's a lot. He just turned 11. Yeah, he's a little bit older than Julian
2:40:45And so we have 10 11 year old kids and then my daughter's 13
2:40:48And you know, they they don't watch TV. They watch they watch online videos
2:40:53They watch YouTube mostly and it's mostly minecraft videos. Although not entirely but you know YouTube and Netflix and he's yes, he's a
2:40:59is it's fascinating to watch him he's he loves if he finds a new show he likes and I don't
2:41:04even know how he finds them. He will deep dive and watch the entire
2:41:08it's word of mouth. My son's done that my daughter and her friends will do that too
2:41:11where they'll just find something and they'll be talking about binge watching they just
2:41:15go nuts with it. So you know, the next generation is bringing this on too. And so they you know,
2:41:20the money is going to try to find a way to reach them.
2:41:23Yeah, definitely. It'll catch up eventually. There's no doubt about it because somebody's
2:41:29going to be smart. The problem is that mobile right now, you know, it's hard to advertise
2:41:33on mobile, right? The screens are small. The mobile advertising we've seen has been lousy.
2:41:38That's exactly where I want to go with this though and why the content blockers coming
2:41:42to iOS is so big. Is that for as obnoxious as advertising is on desktop web and how it,
2:41:49you know, and let's face it, the line between desktop and mobile is sort of arbitrary because
2:41:54Because most people are using laptops as their "desktop" now, and we have a lot of the same
2:42:00issues where maybe your internet connection is not a great Wi-Fi connection.
2:42:06Maybe you're in a hotel and you've got a Wi-Fi connection that's slower than your phone connection.
2:42:13Or maybe you're on the train between New York and Philly and you're tethered to a cellular
2:42:23device and you go through sections of New Jersey where cellular coverage is crap. I
2:42:28mean, you go in the city, you know, you go places, there's, you know, buildings block
2:42:34the Verizon cell tower, and for two blocks, you've got crap connection. Everybody knows
2:42:39this is true. Well, those are the cases where waiting for stuff and having ads that, you
2:42:45know, run a script for a minute, whether it's feels slow or not, if it just runs for a minute,
2:42:53but it's stressing the antenna on your phone,
2:42:55this is how your battery can go down so quickly,
2:42:58depending on your cell coverage.
2:43:01That just doesn't fly on mobile.
2:43:03And the idea of having ads that block the content
2:43:07when you've got, you know, you've already got
2:43:09so little space on the device already,
2:43:11and to have a permanent piece of Chrome covering part of it,
2:43:14and that isn't even site navigation, it's an ad,
2:43:17drives you crazy.
2:43:18And of course people are gonna block it.
2:43:20It's way, it's all of it is way worse.
2:43:22Everything that's bad about desktop advertising
2:43:24is way worse on mobile advertising.
2:43:26- Oh yeah, it's back and forth.
2:43:27- And everything that you can do
2:43:28that's a good way of doing advertising on desktop
2:43:31works even better on mobile.
2:43:32Like that's why I think that mobile in the long run
2:43:34should be even more valuable
2:43:36because a sort of, you know,
2:43:39Daring Fireball, Six Colors, Loop Insight,
2:43:43hey, thanks to my sponsor type thing
2:43:45takes up more of the screen at a time.
2:43:48And I think you have a user on mobile
2:43:50who's more focused on what they're doing.
2:43:53It should be at least as valuable, if not more so,
2:43:56in the long run.
2:43:57- If anything makes me optimistic,
2:43:59we talked about the great reaping,
2:44:00if anything makes me optimistic,
2:44:02it's that the fact is that Mary Meeker chart,
2:44:06that number of eyes on a mobile web or on a video,
2:44:11you know, I don't love advertising.
2:44:14A lot of people really hate it.
2:44:15A lot of people are just allergic to it.
2:44:17But when I talked about the money earlier,
2:44:20I mean, the money wants to reach them.
2:44:22Like Coca-Cola and the big advertisers of the world,
2:44:25the movie studios who want to get people out
2:44:29on Thursday nights and Friday nights,
2:44:31they want to reach people.
2:44:33And they're gonna have money to spend.
2:44:35The way that the economy works, that bar,
2:44:39that bar graph of like huge bar chart
2:44:42for the bar of people who are using it,
2:44:45and teeny tiny one for how much money's being spent,
2:44:49It's like osmosis, it's going to grow.
2:44:52That money is going to follow the people.
2:44:55So if I'm optimistic, what I think is,
2:44:57somebody's gonna figure this out somehow,
2:45:00because there's money ready to be spent,
2:45:04as long as there are people who,
2:45:05somebody can figure out how to get people to receive it.
2:45:08And I don't know what that is.
2:45:09Maybe it is native.
2:45:11I used to fight so hard against native advertising
2:45:13on Macworld where they would try to like fake,
2:45:16I mean, they would try to fake stories.
2:45:18They try to make things look like they were stories,
2:45:20but they weren't.
2:45:21But you know, what Daring Fireball does
2:45:22and what Six Colors does, I mean, that's native advertising.
2:45:25I do a post a week from a sponsor.
2:45:27And it says this is a sponsor, but I give them space.
2:45:30They give me money and I give them space.
2:45:32They give you money, you give them space.
2:45:34And you thank them and I thank them.
2:45:35And it's nice.
2:45:36Maybe that's the way forward.
2:45:38Maybe, I mean, I don't think Coca-Cola wants to set up,
2:45:41or Verizon, Verizon tried this,
2:45:43like set up their own website,
2:45:44set up their own app with content in it,
2:45:47and then have their ads be insidiously placed in it,
2:45:51I think that's less likely to work.
2:45:52And that's the great thing
2:45:54that an independent media company can do,
2:45:56is say, we're gonna make good content
2:45:58and build an audience
2:45:59and have a place for you to give us your money
2:46:01so that you can get your stuff in front of them too.
2:46:04That's why the media has worked,
2:46:05mass media has worked so successfully for so long.
2:46:08And everything may need to be broken before we get there,
2:46:12but the recipe hasn't changed.
2:46:15There are still marketers who have a lot of money,
2:46:17who really wanna market their product
2:46:19to the people who are spending time using media.
2:46:22And there are huge numbers of people,
2:46:24including our kids, using media.
2:46:26And there's gonna be somebody in the middle
2:46:28who puts those two things together.
2:46:30- And eventually the water will reach its own level.
2:46:32- Yeah, yeah, it's that osmosis thing.
2:46:34Eventually those numbers will align.
2:46:36They have to.
2:46:38- In the fat days of print magazines,
2:46:41and there's still some print magazines that are doing well,
2:46:43But in the days when they were at their peak,
2:46:45there was still a maximum number of ads
2:46:47you could squeeze into an issue.
2:46:48- Right. - Right?
2:46:50There wasn't an infinite number.
2:46:51There's only so many ads you can put
2:46:54in an issue of the newspaper.
2:46:56And there's only so much editorial
2:46:59you can force aside on each page.
2:47:02TV is a great example, where in theory,
2:47:05they could sell as many minutes as they want as ads.
2:47:08But when, especially if you talk about
2:47:10the pre PVR era where you couldn't skip ads
2:47:15and you had to be watching live.
2:47:20It equalized pretty quickly somewhere,
2:47:24what was it like 22 or 23 minutes an hour of content
2:47:27and six or seven minutes of ads?
2:47:28- Yeah, although that happened like,
2:47:31the original Star Trek,
2:47:32most of the episodes run about 51 minutes
2:47:34and a modern TV drama is about 42 minutes.
2:47:37So time-- - So you can see that's,
2:47:38- So that gives you a timeline of where--
2:47:42- In the last 45 years, they've added another 10 minutes
2:47:44per hour of commercial load.
2:47:46- So somewhere between the mid-60s and 1980, '81,
2:47:49they went from, so what would that have been?
2:47:5250, 51 minutes of content an hour to 42.
2:47:56And I don't think you could push it any further.
2:48:01- No, you're limited by time.
2:48:04I mean, technically you could have 60 minutes
2:48:06of advertising in an hour.
2:48:07- Right, and nobody would watch it.
2:48:09- But, so instead what they do is they say,
2:48:11okay, well we're gonna have straightforward commercials
2:48:12for 20 minutes.
2:48:14We're gonna have content for 40 minutes,
2:48:15but in the, like American Idol, right,
2:48:16but in the content, we're gonna have,
2:48:18or a baseball game, right, sponsored segment.
2:48:20Like, I don't know about the Yankees, but the Giants,
2:48:23like, they'll have a good defensive play,
2:48:25and they'll say, well that's your forward right choice.
2:48:27Right, I mean everything has got,
2:48:29and it has nothing to do with it really,
2:48:30but it's like, there are like 10 pieces of flair
2:48:33that they have to give out during a game,
2:48:35and then the broadcast booth is sponsored
2:48:37and that's how you increase the load beyond.
2:48:39And that's, I guess we call that native advertising
2:48:41on what we're doing, which is,
2:48:43and to a point I think it's not bad.
2:48:46The classic era, in the classic era,
2:48:49and you can think back to old computer magazines and stuff,
2:48:52the ads were good, like people liked the ads.
2:48:54They didn't roll their eyes at the ads.
2:48:55They were good, they were information.
2:48:56And it's funny, in podcasts I feel like
2:48:59when you do a good podcast ad, it's the same thing.
2:49:03It's like, it can be entertaining,
2:49:05It can be informational.
2:49:07And the web kind of got it wrong.
2:49:09And I think that's one of the reasons
2:49:11we're in this kind of hole
2:49:12and then maybe there needs to be a crack up
2:49:14before we find whatever that new solution is
2:49:16where people actually like don't mind the ads
2:49:19and maybe like them.
2:49:20- Started with user hostile ads and went down from there.
2:49:23- Yeah, punch the monkey.
2:49:24- Yeah, punch the monkey.
2:49:25- That was the original sin of the web was punch the monkey.
2:49:29And since then it's all been downhill.
2:49:33It was so bad when if you were a web developer enough
2:49:37to know that it was just an animated gif.
2:49:40- Oh my God.
2:49:40(laughing)
2:49:42- Jason Snell, thank you so much for your time
2:49:45and your insight.
2:49:46I think this has been absolutely great.
2:49:48People, we've already mentioned it several times,
2:49:51but your new site is sixcolors.
2:49:54God, I hope it's .com.
2:49:56- It is .com.
2:49:57I paid the money, man.
2:49:58I wanted a domain you could spell.
2:50:01No, I ended in calm. I forgot I I knew there was another thing
2:50:05I know but I know that you can spell colors with every way you're you can spell it colors with a you and I even
2:50:10Went to Serbia and got six color dot RS whichever way that you are comfortable spelling colors. It will work for you
2:50:17Your podcasts
2:50:21Which is a big part of it a big part of your independence. I'm guessing right? Yeah. Oh, yeah
2:50:26Let's just listen. There's the incomparable incomparable the incomparable calm. Yeah
2:50:31And that's a great show weekly still you call it just a weekly pop culture show
2:50:37I mean, it's really more like a network. Well, and yeah, it is there's the main show and then there's a whole bunch of other shows
2:50:42on the network
2:50:44Alright, I'm just cheating and I'm reading from your website, but then there's upgrade which is essentially the official six colors podcast
2:50:51It's like a little inspired by you. Yeah, that's I didn't make a six colors podcast upgrade is basically my weekly tech thing
2:50:57like the talk show is for you. Yeah, but you got Mike Hurley as your co-host.
2:51:04Who doesn't like an English guy? You have to throw a little English in there. It's good.
2:51:07And then Clockwise, which is our, me and Dan Morin and two guests every week, and it's a half an hour,
2:51:14like us, which is like, I like to provide an alternative because I hear from people who are
2:51:18like, "Oh, podcasts are too long." It's like, well, although sometimes we get complaints,
2:51:21people are like, "It's too short. You should make it longer." It's like, no,
2:51:24if you'd like a longer podcast by every other podcast just take a look at the leaderboard in
2:51:30in overcast yeah uh uh tv talk machine with your pal tim goodman from the hollywood reporter that's
2:51:39uh that's uh i i know him and he's really great on podcasts and i he was not going to do a podcast
2:51:45unless somebody like posted it for him and i was like i could do that so yeah you post cod you
2:51:50You post podcasts in your sleep.
2:51:52And Robot or Not, the most important podcast alive today where John Siracusa and I debate
2:51:57whether things are robots or not for about three minutes per episode. Because why? I
2:52:03don't know. It's pointless. It's fun.
2:52:05That's because you guys are just, you guys have your mic like in front of the computer
2:52:08all the time. You guys can pop these things out like, you know.
2:52:11Yeah. Oh yeah. You just, just a little, little, a little backstage material for the talk show
2:52:18listeners is John and I, you know, we talk for a while about lots of robots and then
2:52:22that becomes lots of episodes. We don't talk once a week about a robot for five minutes.
2:52:28That would be inefficient.
2:52:29That's pretty smart. All right. Thank you so much, Jason.
2:52:33Thank you. It's a pleasure.
2:52:34Let me thank our sponsors for the week. We got, let me see if I can do it out of memory.
2:52:37We had Harry's.
2:52:38We did.
2:52:39You get your shaving stuff. You got your hover. You get your domain name. You got your fracture.
2:52:44You can print a picture of your freshly shaven face with Harry's and then you can put on
2:52:50a domain name you host with Hover.
2:52:52Right, and back it up to Backblaze.
2:52:53And then you back it up to Backblaze.
2:52:55So there's our sponsors, so my thanks to all of them and hopefully it won't be three weeks
2:53:00before my next episode.
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