0:00:00You really want to talk about Cubs baseball though, right?
0:00:02(laughing)
0:00:04That's why we're here,
0:00:04Chicago Cubs 2015 National League Champs.
0:00:08- I gotta tell you, I am delighted
0:00:10to have Joe Madden out of the AL East.
0:00:13(laughing)
0:00:14That guy, I think he's the best manager in baseball.
0:00:19I really do.
0:00:20- Well, I heard similar things about Don Baylor,
0:00:25Dusty Baker, and Lou Piniella
0:00:28before they signed down with the Cubs too. So yeah, look, Sweet Lou was a good manager.
0:00:33He I think I mean, you got it. Like, you know, he's got a certain style and intensity. But
0:00:39he was good manager with the Yankees. I thought he was a good manager with Seattle.
0:00:43He did actually succeed fairly well with the Cubs. But they also, you know, not every year.
0:00:51Yeah, well, they were better than the Cubs usually are. But they weren't. They never got up to good.
0:00:55No. It hurt me because Lou Piniella, unless my memory is really shot, he was managing Seattle
0:01:04in '95, the year right before the Yankees started their dynasty.
0:01:10The year I had a Mariners hat.
0:01:12Right. And it was Mattingly's last season, and the first time he got in the postseason.
0:01:20Mattingly played great. He had a great series, but the the Mariners won and when it just was salt in the wound that it was
0:01:27Yankee legend Lou Piniella at the helm. Well, we'll see. I'm actually so
0:01:31I'm actually going to CES for the first time. I remember this is something we talked about either a year or two ago
0:01:37Yeah, I might actually put a little money on the Cubs. We'll see. Oh, yeah, you got I know you got to do that
0:01:42I got it - you got it. You got to make a prop bet. We're gonna do it prop bets are fun
0:01:47For two reasons one you get great odds
0:01:50I don't know what the Cubs are at but I'll bet they're probably like 15 to 1 at least maybe more something
0:01:55I don't even know number two. You have the challenge of keeping track of that little piece of paper for nine months
0:02:01Right, and it's like I don't even think they print them on super high quality. It's like
0:02:07that heat transfer, you know like regular paper receipts you get from
0:02:13Retail stores and if you like leave it out in the Sun or something, it'll fade to nothing or in your wallet
0:02:18Yeah, because the heat you know, it's so you I and I find that so weird because you would think you know
0:02:23You know casino, you know, I guess it's because they don't lose if you're if you yeah destroy your ticket, but breakage
0:02:29Yeah, because I there we go. There's our Kickstarter casino receipts
0:02:34preserver
0:02:36Kit. Yeah, boom print on inkjet or something. You know something's gonna last
0:02:41You should get good odds on that
0:02:43When did you decide to go to CES a
0:02:47Few weeks ago. It was presented as an option for me here at quartz and I've never been and I figured this is the perfect
0:02:54year to go
0:02:56You know when I have the the name of a big news agency behind me to get good meetings and that kind of stuff
0:03:02But also work for a site that doesn't churn out, you know hundreds of stories a day
0:03:07so I won't have to file an article every half an hour.
0:03:11Yeah, that sounds like the way to do it.
0:03:13Yeah, it's gonna be great.
0:03:14It's a perennial topic. It's like my second week of January topic every year on this show
0:03:19is, "Boy, I thought last year I should maybe go to CES. One of these years I gotta go,
0:03:24and I didn't do it this year again."
0:03:26Yeah, I think that was us last year.
0:03:27I do it every year. I have the same thought.
0:03:30Well, I'll let you know how it is.
0:03:32And it's one of those things where my natural inclination towards procrastination is just fails
0:03:39because it's really you can't do it at the last, well you could do it at the last minute, but it's
0:03:43super expensive. Yeah and it's kind of annoying like they make you book your hotels through their
0:03:48centralized system and the flights are expensive or sold out so even you know not when I booked a
0:03:55month and a half out it was still kind of annoying but yeah it's gonna be awesome. I'll bet there's a
0:04:00a ton of people from New York go so yes yeah yeah yeah like I think if you lived
0:04:05in them you know Joe random city like I'll bet Philadelphia's Vegas flights
0:04:10probably aren't that different that week because I bet there's not that many
0:04:13people from here that go but the hotels is there a mass yeah yeah I can't wait
0:04:19to hear hear your report yeah it's gonna be great no and I totally think that's
0:04:22the way to do it is to do it as a publication that has a measured tone not
0:04:27a bombardment of we gotta have 30 posts a day and you know.
0:04:31- Yeah, it's funny.
0:04:32I was talking to someone from a large
0:04:34consumer electronics company the other day
0:04:36and they're like, so you're coming to our press conference,
0:04:39you're coming to our media day and I'm like, nope.
0:04:41I'm not even getting there until Tuesday
0:04:44after all that crap has already happened.
0:04:46- That's the way to do it.
0:04:48- Yeah.
0:04:49So no waiting in line for, you know, stupid,
0:04:53whatever they're gonna show.
0:04:55big TVs and home automation stuff probably, I had no idea.
0:05:00- Yeah, that's a good question.
0:05:01I wonder what the big thing will be.
0:05:04TVs are always the thing.
0:05:05- I think my sense, yeah, I mean TVs,
0:05:07but my sense is that this is the year
0:05:09that all the connected home stuff starts to gel.
0:05:12So, home automation stuff and refrigerators
0:05:17that talk to your pet, that kind of stuff.
0:05:21- I'll bet watches, watches have gotta be huge.
0:05:23- Oh yeah, watches too.
0:05:24Because A, and Apple watch aside,
0:05:27Android Wear is out, it's a real thing,
0:05:32and it's already starting to accelerate.
0:05:35Where they're, you know, like when they first announced it
0:05:36back at IO in June, there were two watches,
0:05:39and they both were really clanky.
0:05:42I mean, they sucked.
0:05:43Then the Moto 360, or as I call it, the 270, hit.
0:05:48And now there's been a trickle of watches that are,
0:05:50you know, that seem reasonable.
0:05:52They seem like something that people might wanna consider.
0:05:55- Yeah, we'll see.
0:05:57That'll be interesting.
0:05:58I've gotten a few pitches on shirts
0:06:04that have sensors built in
0:06:05so you can measure your heart rate through your shirt.
0:06:09So we'll see about that.
0:06:11- Yeah, 'cause the other thing
0:06:12that I think makes it have to be watches
0:06:13is then going back to Apple Watch,
0:06:16with Apple Watch on the horizon.
0:06:18And we're clearly not gonna hear anything new
0:06:20about Apple Watch before CES.
0:06:23- Right, and probably not during either
0:06:25unless they do one of those silly Apple leak type things.
0:06:29- But that means any consumer electronics company
0:06:31that wants to bet on smartwatches because Apple, you know,
0:06:36betting on what Apple is interested in
0:06:39is a pretty good way forward.
0:06:42They're gonna wanna get that stuff out before,
0:06:44as soon as they can.
0:06:45- Right, so this is HP's chance to show off the slate
0:06:49in Steve Ballmer's last keynote or whatever.
0:06:51- Right.
0:06:52- Sweet, yeah.
0:06:56- I have a little bit of follow up
0:06:57from previous episodes of this broadcast.
0:07:01- Star Wars follow up?
0:07:03- A little bit of Star Wars follow up.
0:07:05I have to go all the way back to the Merlin episode,
0:07:07which was-- - Oh, nice, again!
0:07:08- 99, episode 99?
0:07:10Yeah, that was four episodes ago.
0:07:12So we talked about Roman numerals in the Super Bowl,
0:07:16and then in a subsequent week followed up
0:07:18They are the NFL is indeed dropping the Roman numerals for not this year Super Bowl next year's
0:07:2450 which would have been just L and that looks stupid
0:07:28So they're just going to put Super Bowl 5-0 and I was happy but it ends up
0:07:35They're only doing that for Super Bowl 50 because L looks so stupid
0:07:38Starting with Super Bowl 51. They're going back to the stupid Roman numerals. So bad news on the Roman numeral front
0:07:47Star Wars. No, I don't think I have any follow-up on Star Wars. Although there was I saw a really funny bit from
0:07:55Stephen Colbert defending the new Sith lightsaber. Oh nice. I'll put it in the show notes, but it was it's really really funny
0:08:03What'd you think of it? Well, I don't really know much about Star Wars
0:08:08I know I'm sorry
0:08:11Although so my first exposures
0:08:14I don't know, my dad showed me Caddyshack and those types of movies instead.
0:08:18So we were like a Zappa household, not a Beatles household.
0:08:26But the first time I ever saw Star Wars was when they re-released them in the mid-90s
0:08:31on probably the biggest screen that existed in Chicago at that point at this movie theater
0:08:36downtown called McClurg Court that was like five times bigger than any other movie screen.
0:08:42So that was kinda cool and we went and saw those.
0:08:45And I've still never seen "Jedi."
0:08:49I'm bad, I need to do this at some point.
0:08:52- That's crazy.
0:08:53- Sorry, I sound like an idiot now.
0:08:55Anyway, I don't know what I was gonna say,
0:08:59but I thought the new lightsaber looks fine.
0:09:02- That's crazy.
0:09:03You don't have an opinion.
0:09:03Your opinion does not count. - I have no opinion.
0:09:05No, it does not count, I have no opinion.
0:09:07- All right, the other bit of--
0:09:09- Sorry. - Follow-up.
0:09:10And this is really minutia, but why not?
0:09:12let's be precise, is in last week's episode with Whiskus,
0:09:16we were talking about Bond movies,
0:09:18and I brought up that the Lazenby one
0:09:22on Her Majesty's Secret Service,
0:09:25Dave was under the impression that it was universally,
0:09:29everybody hated it, everybody knew it was a mistake,
0:09:31and it turns out, I am correct on this,
0:09:33that it's very divisive.
0:09:34Most people seem not to like it and agree it was a dud,
0:09:38but there's a fairly sizable contingent of Bond movie fans
0:09:41who either think it's their favorite
0:09:43or one of their favorites, one of the better ones.
0:09:46- I have not seen that one.
0:09:47What is polarizing about it?
0:09:50- Well, I think it's a weird story.
0:09:55I think Lazenby's take on the character was off.
0:10:00I just don't buy him as Bond.
0:10:03Other people think he's great though.
0:10:04He's definitely not Sean Connery, that's for sure.
0:10:11I don't know and there's something about the story the way the story is written that I
0:10:14just think it's a dud but some people really like the direction some people think the action
0:10:20sequences are some of the best of that era and I think I think his name is Peter Hunt
0:10:27and in the earlier movies he was the editor of the movies and he got to direct this one
0:10:35and some people think that that helped make the action sequences better because he knew
0:10:40how to shoot them to give the editing the footage that they would need. You know, that
0:10:44an editor's perspective on directing makes for better action sequences. Film Crit Hulk.
0:10:49Do you ever read Film Crit Hulk?
0:10:50I don't, but I am aware of it and I appreciate its existence.
0:10:56He's a big fan. He did a thing where he wrote about all the Bond movies and he really liked
0:10:59it.
0:11:00Oh, cool.
0:11:01Anyway, friend of the show, Nat Irons. I think he's @NatIrons on Twitter. Great guy. Works
0:11:06works at Black Pixel, really smart guy, long time friend of the show, long time daring
0:11:10fireball reader. I mean like back in 2002, this guy who's sending me typos and stuff
0:11:15like that, great guy. I said it was his favorite Bond movie and in fact he corrected me on
0:11:21Twitter and said it is in his top six. He is a fan of the movie but he would not call
0:11:25it his favorite and I wouldn't want to besmirch somebody in such a way. So, let's clear the
0:11:30record for for Nat. Oh and the last thing Whiskas made a mistake the Chris
0:11:36Cornell song I forget the name of it but it was the theme of it was not the theme
0:11:42of Quantum of Solace that was the theme for Casino Royale and I don't know I was
0:11:49tired or something let it slide I didn't catch it when Whiskas made that mistake
0:11:53The theme for Quantum of Solace was the Jack White one, which was kind of weird.
0:11:58You've watched…
0:11:59Yeah, I haven't seen that one for a while though.
0:12:02I've been watching the old ones.
0:12:04You have seen James Bond movies.
0:12:05Oh yeah, yeah.
0:12:06I've been watching the old ones.
0:12:08You know, I'd started seeing all the new ones as they had come out and I'd never seen the old ones.
0:12:12And then after you and Dan started doing the shows, I started watching them.
0:12:17and actually, as you know, they're so annoying to stream,
0:12:21so I've had to end up buying a bunch of them.
0:12:23But yeah, I dig them.
0:12:26- The streaming rights on those Bond movies
0:12:28are the craziest thing in the world.
0:12:30Somebody twittered me the other day
0:12:31that a bunch of the Connery ones are back on Netflix,
0:12:34but they're not all of them.
0:12:35And they're all--
0:12:36- No, and I think a bunch were on HBO Go,
0:12:39which is where I watched one recently.
0:12:41- But not all of them.
0:12:41- Not all of them, and not the ones I wanted to watch.
0:12:44So I was like, well, okay.
0:12:47- Yeah, who knows what those negotiations are like.
0:12:49But you would just think though
0:12:50that it would be like a blanket deal.
0:12:52- Are they all one company?
0:12:54- All except for Never Say Never Again,
0:12:57which is an entirely separate long story
0:13:00about how it exists.
0:13:00But all the other Bond movies are from Eon Productions.
0:13:04Eon, the abbreviation, everything or nothing.
0:13:07So it's just bizarre.
0:13:10It must just be that, you know, that's--
0:13:13- And which conglomerate owns those?
0:13:15Is it Sony or one of those?
0:13:18It used to be.
0:13:19Who owns MGM now?
0:13:21I don't know.
0:13:22I don't know.
0:13:23Yeah.
0:13:24Well, but anyway, it's crazy.
0:13:25It's very frustrating.
0:13:26Now you'll have more follow-up.
0:13:27Sorry, man.
0:13:28I think it's one of those things like a piece of buttered toast is always going to land
0:13:34face down.
0:13:35It's like whatever Bond movie you're in the mood to watch is always not going to be available
0:13:38for free on Netflix.
0:13:39Totally, yeah.
0:13:40Yeah.
0:13:41Actually, why don't I just take a break right here and do the first sponsor read and then we'll get started on perfect
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0:15:54It's not like, oh wow, that's weird
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0:16:08Definitely has a sound like you're sleeping on a bag,
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0:16:33I don't really care for the memory foam pillows.
0:16:35They seem like the weird the way they conformed to your head this thing to conforming to your head
0:16:39It's not it's not at all like a foam or anything like that. It's just like sleeping on a bag of beans
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0:18:12- First thing I wanna talk about,
0:18:13I wanna talk about this thing, I sent you the link.
0:18:15It was a article by Eric Jackson writing at,
0:18:19I always confuse Forbes and Fortune.
0:18:23I think it was Forbes.
0:18:24- It's Forbes, yeah, and as a former Forbes employee,
0:18:27we love it when you confuse Forbes and Fortune.
0:18:31You know what, I just did it the other day with there was a story by a fortune writer
0:18:36and I of course attributed it to Forbes.
0:18:38It really is as simple as in my mind they're both business magazines and they start FOR
0:18:46and that's it.
0:18:47That's how my mind files them away.
0:18:49Just remember that fortune is the boring one.
0:18:53It's like the index in my mind, like the hashing index.
0:18:56It only has like three letters.
0:18:57Yeah.
0:18:58It only goes to FOR.
0:18:59the rest. Anyway, now he wrote about this earlier in the year too and then I
0:19:06politely rebutted it but his point is he wants to see Apple use their massive
0:19:13cash reserves to make big acquisitions and my take earlier in the year was more
0:19:19or less that he was saying just do something with your money and with which
0:19:23seems to me ill-advised like it seems to me like he's articulating in a viewpoint
0:19:28that Apple has to do something with this money and you know I I just disagree I
0:19:34think doing just doing something for the sake of doing something is gonna lead to
0:19:37distractions so he has a follow-up he just posted it was at the very end of
0:19:41the month it was I go for Thanksgiving and to summarize I would say he's he
0:19:47thinks that the what they are doing with their money with the stock buybacks
0:19:50which is I think most I think it's about 70% of what they're doing and then the
0:19:54The dividends that they're now paying are a waste of money and that they they're not really
0:19:59That the the stock rise that we've seen since apples instituted. This would have happened anyway
0:20:05Just because apples financials are doing better and the the
0:20:10Vague they're not going to be able to survive without Steve Jobs fear that might have been depressing the stock is gone
0:20:16Nobody really seems to think that they're in bad hands under Tim Cook's leadership anymore
0:20:21Which I think everybody would agree with that
0:20:23So, what he thinks they should do, even if he doesn't think they should have done that
0:20:29and what he thinks they should do now is he and he's I think he's dead serious about this.
0:20:33He thinks they should buy Tesla, which he thinks would cost about 45 billion, Twitter,
0:20:40which would be about 40 billion, buy Pinterest for 15 billion, then spend 10 billion on better
0:20:48batteries through R&D and spend 10 billion to make iCloud work properly.
0:20:56So what do you think about this?
0:20:58I don't mean to laugh.
0:21:01And this also happens.
0:21:03So I also published a story today, Friday, called 10 Things I Learned About Apple This
0:21:08Year on Quartz.
0:21:10And one of the things I touched on was a little commentary about Apple's basically doing their
0:21:19first big buy ever this year, which was Beats Audio and Beats Music or Beats Electronics
0:21:25or whatever it's called, which was $3 billion, which is not $40 billion, but it's still pretty
0:21:31big.
0:21:34the context of people over the years saying Apple should buy all these companies.
0:21:41The one that's been thrown about a lot actually in years past was Adobe, that Apple should
0:21:45buy Adobe so that it owns the professional desktop software market.
0:21:53And one of the articles I found while researching this was during Fireball 14 May 2008, why
0:22:00Apple won't buy Adobe.
0:22:03And I think the post you wrote here, if you want to do a find and replace with almost
0:22:10every company on that list, you could pretty much paste it in there.
0:22:16And you've also written about why Apple buying Tesla wouldn't necessarily be the craziest
0:22:23thing because it kind of fits the model a little bit of what they do.
0:22:29But if you look at Pinterest and Twitter and Tesla, first of all, you can't buy three companies
0:22:36that big at the same time.
0:22:37I don't think that's even possible from a logistical or regulatory standpoint.
0:22:42Like imagine if you announced $100 billion in acquisitions in a week.
0:22:47My guess is that the government would say, "Yeah, very funny.
0:22:52Okay, now we're going to make you wait for two years while we sift through all this stuff."
0:22:59So beyond that and yeah let's just put that aside for now but I do agree with you and
0:23:03in particular for example I think that trying to acquire Twitter and Pinterest simultaneously
0:23:08would definitely be very complicated getting approval much more complicated than buying
0:23:15one of them or the other right more than twice as complicated because yeah it would be seen
0:23:20as and you know anti-competitive because in some ways Pinterest is a social network yeah
0:23:26and therefore it competes with Twitter.
0:23:28- But beyond that, even if you had like,
0:23:30even if all that stuff was totally doable,
0:23:34then your Apple, and you have to integrate
0:23:36Pinterest and Twitter into your company.
0:23:39And first of all, how, and second of all, why?
0:23:43Like what do you do with that?
0:23:45And it just seems to me like that is not
0:23:47what Tim Cook needs to be doing right now.
0:23:50Twitter is not gonna change Apple
0:23:54in a way that would make it solve all of its problems.
0:23:57I think there are much, much bigger problems at Apple
0:24:00that have nothing to do with spending cash
0:24:03to acquire new companies that have some relation
0:24:06to potential future businesses for Apple
0:24:09or something like that.
0:24:10- Yeah, the why is the bigger question than the how.
0:24:15Because the easiest answer to how would be to acquire them
0:24:19and kind of let them run independently.
0:24:22But then, you know, you mean like there, how to me has some solutions.
0:24:26It's why though is the, is the first question, right?
0:24:28Which by the way is, is harder than it sounds because the people who made
0:24:32Pinterest into, well, maybe not Twitter, but the people who made Pinterest, what
0:24:35it is, don't necessarily want to keep making it under the ownership of a bigger
0:24:40company. So this is a very common problem. But anyway, the wise is ultimately more
0:24:45interesting or the one I got, I don't see how owning Twitter or let's just focus
0:24:51on Twitter but owning Twitter to me doesn't help Apple do anything that Apple already
0:24:58does.
0:24:59There's no, it solves nothing, you know, in terms of Apple's core businesses which is
0:25:05really selling computing hardware and now an array of form factors, traditional PCs
0:25:13and laptops, tablets, and of course cell phones, and coming soon the watch, which are all computers.
0:25:23That's really, you know, fundamentally that's what Apple does, is they make computers.
0:25:26And the way that they succeed is by making computers that are the best in the world as
0:25:34perceived by a significant number of people who are therefore willing to pay a premium
0:25:40for them.
0:25:42And to me, that's Apple in a nutshell.
0:25:44And there's almost nothing that the company does that matters that isn't in service of
0:25:49that.
0:25:51Which is why it has all this cash to spend in the first place.
0:25:54So for example, yeah, exactly.
0:25:56And that's how they got all this gas.
0:25:57So for example, the whole thing of iTunes isn't at first, at least at like a one level
0:26:04of indirection has nothing to do with selling computers.
0:26:08I think like two levels of indirection it does because one type of computer that's no longer
0:26:16really a significant part of the company's business but one type of computer is iPods
0:26:21computers that are computing devices that are meant as portable music and video players and
0:26:28to sell those it really really helped I would say it was essential to make it easy to buy content
0:26:35for them. Therefore, that's why iTunes exists.
0:26:38And I think you're selling iTunes a little short. I mean, at its peak of utility in the early 2000s,
0:26:45like it was way easier to use than Winamp or something like that for managing a music library
0:26:52and ripping CDs and that sort of stuff. And then, arguably more importantly, it became the
0:27:00the home of sync, of syncing your devices to each other,
0:27:05to your iPod, and eventually your iPhone to your Mac,
0:27:08which that's a really great place to be.
0:27:13Michael Gartenberg I think once tweeted something,
0:27:16if you own sync, you own everything.
0:27:18I don't know, something like that.
0:27:20And that's what iCloud is supposed to do right now.
0:27:21So iTunes actually probably sold a lot of Macs, I would say.
0:27:26- Yeah, I don't mean to sell it short,
0:27:29But it's all in service of selling and selling Mac selling iPod selling phones, you know,
0:27:34right definitely it that they had the infrastructure in place both the the cloud infrastructure
0:27:40of having the store and the cloud servers that could send content over and could do
0:27:46activation.
0:27:47Remember, you have to activate your your phone, your iPhone through iTunes, and the desktop
0:27:52software which was on hundreds of millions of Macs and Windows PCs.
0:27:56let them ship the iPhone sooner than they would have been able to otherwise
0:28:01if they didn't have it in place because for years you know three or four more
0:28:04years before iCloud really became an independent thing you'd really you know
0:28:08they needed it to have the you know just for things like software update they
0:28:14didn't have the infrastructure in place to do over-the-air software updates to
0:28:17the iPhone and so if they wanted to do what they definitely wanted to do which
0:28:21was control the software updates to the phone as opposed to the carrier they
0:28:26needed iTunes for it. So I'm not trying to sell it short. I'm just saying no, it was
0:28:29in service of that fundamental business of selling the best computing devices in the
0:28:34world.
0:28:35Yeah. And now that of course the acquisitionist would say, well, now Apple should buy Spotify
0:28:41because that's the future iTunes. So why doesn't Apple just spend the cash that it has and
0:28:47buy Spotify?
0:28:48That's it. That I would not disagree with. I don't think they have to buy Spotify. I
0:28:52I don't think they have to buy rather than build their own streaming music solution.
0:28:57But if the news came out, you know, after you and I get off this show and the news comes
0:29:03out late on Friday that Apple is, you know, made an offer to buy Spotify, I wouldn't be
0:29:08surprised at all.
0:29:09Would you?
0:29:10Well, I was just making fun of it.
0:29:12So I may be.
0:29:13Really?
0:29:14I don't know that I think about it.
0:29:16No, well, I well, I might be surprised.
0:29:19I wouldn't be shocked.
0:29:20Yeah, it wouldn't seem out of character.
0:29:21In the same way that Beats, Beats was definitely a surprise.
0:29:24But it's, you know, it doesn't seem totally out of character.
0:29:31- Right, and Spotify, like it has,
0:29:33it seems to have survived long enough
0:29:35to actually be something important on its own,
0:29:39both in terms of usage and kind of a community
0:29:43and the product that it's built.
0:29:45So yeah, that wouldn't, you know, I don't know if,
0:29:49yeah, I guess the question is like,
0:29:50okay, does that, yeah, then there's all these dork questions
0:29:54like does that become the iTunes app or does the Spotify,
0:29:57I don't know the answer to that.
0:29:58And I don't know if that even matters.
0:30:03But yeah, I think that like something like that,
0:30:07which, you know, the question for all these deals
0:30:09would be like, if, even if Apple shut all the Android users
0:30:14off of these products in the planet, you know,
0:30:16and made them Apple only,
0:30:19Does that make the Apple product that much better,
0:30:22that people would buy that instead of something else?
0:30:26- No, I mean, and they could, the outcry,
0:30:29if they bought Twitter and made it Apple only,
0:30:32it would, you know, the outcry would be phenomenal.
0:30:35I mean, it would lose most of its users.
0:30:37I would guess a majority, some majority of Twitter users
0:30:41are, you know, using devices, or at least one device
0:30:45that's not an Apple product.
0:30:47It just wouldn't even, you know, I don't even,
0:30:50why would you buy them if you were just gonna--
0:30:51- Yeah, Chrome.
0:30:52- Yeah, or the web, right?
0:30:54- Yeah, even just the web.
0:30:55- It just, you know, and then what would be the point?
0:30:59It just, it almost seems like, to me,
0:31:01buying Twitter would just be the,
0:31:03it would be a sign that Apple sees itself now
0:31:05as like a conglomerate, you know, like Berkshire Hathaway,
0:31:09where they just buy companies
0:31:10and they're like a meta company on top of them.
0:31:13- Right, and I'm not like an expert in kind of financial
0:31:18tricks and that kind of stuff, but someone explained to me
0:31:21buybacks the other day as, you know, if you have this money
0:31:24and you think that the best investment you can make
0:31:27is in yourself, if you think that Apple shares
0:31:29are gonna go up, then that's probably the best investment
0:31:33you can make, and just, you know, buy your own shares
0:31:35instead of buying shares in something else.
0:31:37- Yeah, I've read that too, that's very close to
0:31:42Warren Buffett, speaking of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett's advice and take on buybacks
0:31:51is that it's, you know, it's like most of his stock advice, and again, I'm no expert,
0:31:56but it's, you know, it's as simple as that, that if you, if you think, yeah, exactly what
0:32:01you said, if you think that your stock is underpriced, then it's, you know, it's a good
0:32:07It's a good use of your money, that it actually does help your shareholders and inflate the
0:32:13value of the company.
0:32:15And who better than the leadership of Apple to have a sense as to whether they think that
0:32:20their stock is underpriced?
0:32:22Right.
0:32:23Right.
0:32:24Yeah, I mean, and this is, again, an area where I'm not like an expert, but finance
0:32:31reporters that I've talked to have said that Tim Cook has actually done a really good job
0:32:36at converting Apple from being a fast growth,
0:32:40growth, growth, growth company to more of a blue chip
0:32:43where yeah, it does have a dividend
0:32:45and buys back its shares and does things with its cash
0:32:49that a growth company probably wouldn't do,
0:32:52but that big institutional investors
0:32:55really respect the way that Tim Cook has done that.
0:32:58- Yeah, and I do, as an outside observer who follows Apple
0:33:03mostly from the product and designs side,
0:33:05not the business side.
0:33:07I completely agree with that.
0:33:11And it does feel like the stock has settled
0:33:14because the market as a whole has accepted that transition,
0:33:18that they're not looking for.
0:33:19I don't see people trying to figure out ways
0:33:23to make Apple Watch an iPhone-sized business
0:33:27in any near-term future.
0:33:29It seems like expectations are reasonable.
0:33:32Whereas like two years ago,
0:33:34I feel like if they had announced the watch then, expectations would have been too wild
0:33:41because people, business writers, people looking at it from a financial perspective were asking,
0:33:48how can Apple keep growing at this crazy rate that they've grown the last seven years?
0:33:53Especially having seen the first couple of years of the iPad come out right out of the
0:33:57gate super strong.
0:33:59And look like maybe that was it, right?
0:34:01Right.
0:34:02Oh wow, this is gonna be as big as the iPhone right away.
0:34:05And then, okay, here comes the watch.
0:34:07Now it's gotta be that big too.
0:34:09- Yeah, and I'm guilty as charged on that front.
0:34:11I'm on the record as speculating.
0:34:14I didn't pick a year, but I was on the record
0:34:17of saying that I thought an iPad
0:34:18would be a bigger business than iPhone soon,
0:34:21meaning by now.
0:34:22And clearly that was wrong.
0:34:23It's not, it's settled in far lower.
0:34:27It's actually growth that's stopped.
0:34:29That's not to say growth is stalled forever,
0:34:30but it's for about a year, maybe even longer, right?
0:34:34Didn't you count the quarters?
0:34:35- Yeah, four of the last six quarters,
0:34:37it's actually shrunk year over year.
0:34:38So this year, it will almost certainly be smaller
0:34:42than it was last year.
0:34:43Not even just slowing growth, but actually shrinkage.
0:34:47- Whereas iPhone, which is older,
0:34:49is still continues to grow.
0:34:51They've never had a stronger launch
0:34:52than they did with this year's models.
0:34:55- And of course, the iPod has been shrinking
0:34:57for several years, and until very recently,
0:35:00was still a non-laughable business.
0:35:04So it's perfectly reasonable for things to eventually decline.
0:35:08But I don't think anyone would have
0:35:10expected that the iPad would be in its decline already.
0:35:15And it's probably not permanent.
0:35:18I don't think that tablets were a fad.
0:35:22Yeah, I don't think so either.
0:35:24I think what it was-- I've been thinking about this.
0:35:26And I know this is a little bit of an aside
0:35:28on this game of let's spend Apple's money.
0:35:31- No, we're gonna spend Apple's money in a minute, so yeah.
0:35:33- Yeah, if we didn't have a long digression,
0:35:36it wouldn't really be the episode of the talk show.
0:35:38- Absolutely.
0:35:39- My gut feeling on the iPad sales stalling
0:35:44is that in the early years where it was growing,
0:35:49and this is what made me think
0:35:52it was gonna be bigger than iPhone,
0:35:53is in the first few years of iPad,
0:35:56It's like iPads year one was bigger than iPhones year one,
0:35:59and iPads year two was bigger than iPhones year two.
0:36:02It never was bigger than iPhone,
0:36:04but it was bigger than the iPhone in 27, 28, 29,
0:36:09in years one, two, three of iPad.
0:36:11And then it fell behind that curve.
0:36:13And I think it's because the two markets
0:36:15are entirely different.
0:36:16The phone market is literally every person on the planet
0:36:20who can afford a phone.
0:36:22That's where we're headed,
0:36:24is that however many billion people there are on the planet,
0:36:27if they are in a country,
0:36:30you have 100 bucks and you can afford
0:36:35some monthly service charge,
0:36:37you're gonna have a cell phone if you don't already.
0:36:40So it's an enormous market.
0:36:42It's almost capped by the number of people on the planet.
0:36:45And I think the market for tablets
0:36:49is really a sub-market of the PC market.
0:36:53I think what it is is that it's really just part,
0:36:58I think that the iPad is best seen as part of the PC market.
0:37:01And what happened in the early years
0:37:03is that the market was vastly underserved
0:37:08by PCs, portable PCs that are simpler,
0:37:13more portable, and get way better battery life.
0:37:19Like the things that made the iPad the iPad
0:37:22that it just sucked all the air out of the growth
0:37:26in laptop sales, including Mac books for a while.
0:37:29That the iPad style of portable computing
0:37:36is just way better for so many use cases
0:37:38than laptops are.
0:37:41And that it had go-go growth
0:37:44while it fulfilled that unmet need.
0:37:47And then it just reached the point where,
0:37:50everybody who really wanted one got one and they still work, you know, and that there's no then the second factor is that iPads
0:37:57Continued, you know, two three four year old iPads continue to work
0:38:01Just great for most people's needs and so they don't replace them every two years like they do a phone
0:38:06So that's my that's my digression on iPad decline or growth decline
0:38:12Yeah, I think that's right
0:38:15You know, I'm not sure
0:38:18You know, this is this is like an example where it's tempting to use your own personal
0:38:22example
0:38:24But I don't know how well, you know, so I still use it an iPad one every day to watch
0:38:30video
0:38:32in my house, but we're about to have to replace it because
0:38:36Time Warner Cable is finally ending support for the their app
0:38:41No, really for iOS 5 or whatever it runs. So
0:38:46Maybe maybe Apple
0:38:48Asked them to do that so that we would buy a new iPad
0:38:51Yeah, my dad has an iPad one still and I wouldn't say he loves it because he's just not in the technology
0:38:58But he swears he does not want a newer one. It's just fine. It's in perfect shape. But now Candy Crush doesn't run. Oh
0:39:03Yeah
0:39:07It's just like it crashes at a certain point and I'm sure it's big, you know, I said I probably
0:39:12It's just the type of bug that slips in because I'm bet they don't test on the iPad one anymore
0:39:16And now they're gonna get complaints about it and they'll fix it in the next update
0:39:19But you just have to wait for them to update it. Yeah
0:39:22But I've had one it the iPad one is sort of an exception to because there's a lot of things that have dropped support for
0:39:28iPad one right but iPad two is effectively still on the market. It's because it's like the guts of that cheap
0:39:37How the mini non retina mini is effectively an iPad - yeah, I have the cash registers at the coffee shops of America
0:39:45So yeah, like if anything the opposite problem with iPad - where developers are going to be saddled with
0:39:52Supporting that level of you know CPU and RAM
0:39:55It's gonna be years and I you know
0:39:59I think the fact that they're still I know a lot of people really complain about the fact that they're still selling that because it's you
0:40:06You know, it's holding back that level of baseline support, you know, where you really
0:40:15only have to support X number of years of iPhones going back.
0:40:18iPad is sort of stretching that a lot further because they're keeping that iPad 2 level
0:40:25of device around.
0:40:27But on the other hand, I think it's a sign that in the real world, millions of people,
0:40:30that's good enough.
0:40:31Totally.
0:40:32And I think maybe it just got a little ahead of itself.
0:40:37Everyone bought a tablet, and then some people
0:40:40bought two or three because they were getting better
0:40:43or coming in at smaller sizes and that kind of stuff.
0:40:46And now combine that with the probably longer, much longer
0:40:50replacement cycle than a cell phone and a smaller market,
0:40:55now we're seeing the results of that.
0:40:56And maybe in a year or two, as people grow tired,
0:41:01or as their current iPads become less useful,
0:41:06they'll replace them.
0:41:07I think a lot of it is on Apple to,
0:41:12and I don't wanna repeat a million people
0:41:14who've talked about this,
0:41:15but is really on Apple now to further define
0:41:19what the iPad is for.
0:41:21And I think that they're starting to do that.
0:41:26- Yeah, I expect it to grow sort of like the way the Mac has,
0:41:30you know, like slowly but surely.
0:41:31If they can keep it ahead of the market, which is central.
0:41:36I mean, there's a lot of times when I talk,
0:41:40I make the assumption that Apple's gonna continue thriving
0:41:45and sometimes critics of my writing,
0:41:48or just readers with thinking critically
0:41:52So we'll point that out and assume that it's some kind of bias or that I think Apple is
0:41:58magic and that they, you know, magically just no matter what they do, they're going to succeed.
0:42:02It's all based on the fundamental assumption that they can keep doing what they've been
0:42:06doing for close to 20 years which is making superior products.
0:42:11Whether everybody agrees that they're superior or not, you know, some number of people have
0:42:15seen their devices as superior in significant ways.
0:42:19assuming they can keep doing that, I think they can keep growing.
0:42:22So there is an assumption there.
0:42:24But I think it's going to grow like the Mac, where the Mac is doing great the last few
0:42:27years and it's growing in an overall shrinking market, but it's very slow growth compared
0:42:32to the iPhone.
0:42:33Yes.
0:42:34All right.
0:42:35So now I'm going to end this parenthesis and I'm going to say, "Okay, now you're Tim Cook
0:42:38with $100 billion.
0:42:40How do you spend it to keep making those products great?"
0:42:45And it's not buying Twitter and Pinterest.
0:42:47I think it's, you know, and I wrote this in my piece today, like what would be ideal is
0:42:53if they could, if they had a year where they could just focus on making iOS and macOS and
0:42:59all their software better, that's not feasible.
0:43:02But if they could increase their engineering organization so that there were enough people
0:43:06to A, build the new stuff they wanted to build and B, keep refining the old stuff, that that
0:43:14would be a good use of money.
0:43:15it's hard to hire engineers and they're having to open up new offices and other places to do that
0:43:20kind of thing. But that's where I'd like to see Apple spend their money. Right. And then there's
0:43:25the whole mythical man month factor where you can't even if you can get more good engineers,
0:43:33you can't solve individual projects problems just by throwing more engineers at them. True. More
0:43:39engineers would definitely help. I don't think there's a single company in technology today
0:43:44That's not doesn't feel talent starved. I really don't I mean, I think it's I think it's universal Google
0:43:52Apple Microsoft
0:43:55Twitter any of those companies Facebook any of those companies, you know for everything I've seen is that the you know
0:44:02The recruiting market is as more to add as tenacious or more tenacious than it's ever been
0:44:07But it's not about throwing more people at the same projects
0:44:11it's having more people to spread into, you know,
0:44:14the size of a team is not gonna grow,
0:44:16but it's being able to have more teams.
0:44:18- Yeah, right.
0:44:20So maybe Apple should buy one of those coding schools.
0:44:22There you go.
0:44:23No, I just like, you know, and I've been watching,
0:44:30you know, I've been using Apple products
0:44:31for 25 years now or more, and you know,
0:44:34nothing was ever perfect, but it does certainly feel now
0:44:37like there are some holes in the products I use every day where you know nothing is really really
0:44:45bad but it's it could be better to be stretched a little thin yeah I think and that they've you know
0:44:51I and maybe that's a good thing maybe in the grand scheme of things if you can't achieve perfection
0:44:58and you you know and let's just assume you know it's human nature that nobody's perfect
0:45:03it's a little better to err on the side of going too fast
0:45:07than to err on the side of going too slow.
0:45:10Totally, right?
0:45:10That you wanna be on that too fast side
0:45:14and not the too slow side.
0:45:16And I think what we've seen in the last year
0:45:20is that Apple's being a little too fast
0:45:22is they're a little too far away from that optimal line.
0:45:26Things like all the continuity features and stuff like that.
0:45:30Most of them work great,
0:45:31but none of them feel quite to me like perfect.
0:45:36Like one thing that has definitely changed
0:45:39my daily computing is,
0:45:41'cause I'm especially between phone and Mac in the house,
0:45:46I'll go downstairs and get more coffee
0:45:49and I'll take my phone out and I'll see something.
0:45:52And now, ooh, I wanna link that on during Fireball.
0:45:54And I used to do something like send it to Pinboard
0:45:58and come up to my Mac and load Pinboard and do that.
0:46:00Now I use AirDrop.
0:46:01I AirDrop to myself every day, multiple times.
0:46:04And usually it's perfect.
0:46:06You just say share, there my other device shows up
0:46:10on AirDrop and I tap it and a second or two later it's there
0:46:13and then I don't have like an extra bookmark in Pinboard
0:46:17that I really didn't want there permanently
0:46:19to do something with.
0:46:20There's no, I don't know what you would call it,
0:46:24digital detritus left over.
0:46:26It's great.
0:46:27But then there's sometimes where I'm right there
0:46:29next to my Mac with my phone and I go to AirDrop
0:46:31and my Mac just doesn't show up.
0:46:33And I haven't turned Bluetooth off or anything like that.
0:46:35Just doesn't show up.
0:46:37- And this is my experience as well.
0:46:39And it's most frustrating because I don't know
0:46:43why it's not working.
0:46:44And then it seems like I'm not in my own contacts file
0:46:50or something like that so I have to change
0:46:52the AirDrop settings to share with everyone
0:46:55and not just contacts.
0:46:57but it should know I'm me because I'm the same,
0:47:01I don't know how it knows I'm me or not.
0:47:03- I've seen some people write
0:47:04that it really doesn't work well for them at all.
0:47:06For me, I would say it works at least 95% of the time,
0:47:09maybe more.
0:47:10- I'm like in the 25% range.
0:47:12And maybe I just need to let loose with the permissions
0:47:17and let it share with everyone.
0:47:18But even just trying to sync with my own Mac
0:47:20or with my wife's iPhone,
0:47:24where we're definitely in each other's contact files,
0:47:26It still never wants to find them when we wanna use it.
0:47:31- Another example, I mean, it's not a new 2014 thing.
0:47:35It's actually a little bit older,
0:47:36but I mean, don't even get me started on my experience
0:47:38with iTunes match, which it's just, I don't know.
0:47:43My wife had it turned on too,
0:47:46and it's like, we got our new iPhones a couple months ago,
0:47:50and it's like, she was just pissed.
0:47:53She came back from the gym the one day,
0:47:54And she, at one point, she had the new phone
0:47:56and she had all of her music and it was on the phone,
0:47:59'cause it was the sort of thing with the new phone
0:48:01that she would have checked before she went to the gym
0:48:02the first time to listen to music.
0:48:04She had it and she listened to music.
0:48:06And then like the next day, she got to the gym
0:48:08and her phone had no songs, zero,
0:48:09just no songs, they're just gone.
0:48:11- That's, yeah.
0:48:12Well, I just did something immensely stupid,
0:48:16which was I put a new hard drive in my iMac
0:48:20and tried to start from scratch,
0:48:22But my iTunes, of course, through iTunes match
0:48:25already had all the metadata for all my songs in it.
0:48:29So instead of trying to download them all
0:48:31from Apple servers, I dropped the music folder
0:48:35on top of the iTunes icon in the dock
0:48:38to theoretically re-associate all those song files
0:48:43with the app.
0:48:46And then it duplicated everything in the listings.
0:48:50And I'm like, oh shit, now I have two copies
0:48:52of every song, I'm gonna have to figure out
0:48:54how to go through and unduplicate it.
0:48:57And I tweeted something to that extent,
0:48:59and people were like, "Oh, don't mean,"
0:49:01you know, that kind of stuff.
0:49:02And then, you know what's so funny?
0:49:03I came back the next day, and it had totally fixed itself.
0:49:07Like, nothing was duplicated.
0:49:09So I have no idea how that worked,
0:49:11but it actually worked.
0:49:13- Some of these features are supposed to be,
0:49:16like AirDrop, I don't even know quite how it works.
0:49:20I know it's some combination of Bluetooth and WiFi,
0:49:22and those invisible Wi-Fi networks
0:49:25that don't show up as Wi-Fi networks.
0:49:27But it's encapsulating a lot of complexity
0:49:30to make all the handshaking,
0:49:32and then it presents itself in a very simple interface.
0:49:35But it's gotta be bulletproof.
0:49:36It's gotta be that if this device A and device B
0:49:39are clearly within range of each other and they're both on,
0:49:42it should be every bit as consistent
0:49:45as when you open the Finder and you go to your home folder
0:49:50that your home folder has all of your stuff in it, right?
0:49:53Every time you go to the finder
0:49:54and you go to your home folder,
0:49:56the connection between OS 10 and the files
0:50:00on your hard drive, it's 100% consistent.
0:50:05Like AirDrop has gotta get that good.
0:50:07- Right, it should feel like magic.
0:50:09And that's where I'd rather see Apple invest
0:50:12in kind of perfecting that.
0:50:16And I'm sure it's tricky.
0:50:17Bluetooth for years seemed like it was just a joke of a technology and it seems to have
0:50:23gotten better more recently.
0:50:25It's definitely, definitely gotten better at battery life.
0:50:28The Bluetooth low energy is aptly named.
0:50:32It's, you know, because I used to never keep Bluetooth on.
0:50:34I always turned it off.
0:50:37The only thing I really could have used it for, well, we have speakers that are Bluetooth,
0:50:41but I didn't use them.
0:50:43and then my car, you can connect it to the car so you can get your calls through the
0:50:48thing. But it was such a hassle to remember to turn Bluetooth off before I got in the
0:50:52car that I never did. And if I left it on, which I always would, if I did remember to
0:50:56turn it on, I would forget to turn it off when I got out of the car. And I'd be like,
0:51:00"Geez, I didn't even use my phone for a while. Why did the battery life drop?" And
0:51:02it's because I had Bluetooth on. But it doesn't, you know. Now it just seems like
0:51:05you can leave Bluetooth on your phone and it's good.
0:51:09I would say the biggest thing that Apple could do with the amount of cash that they have
0:51:13is focus it on ways that give them competitive edges that can't be matched by anyone else
0:51:24or by as few other companies as possible.
0:51:29Because I think that's the key to their success for 20 years is that they've had design chops
0:51:35that couldn't be matched.
0:51:37um and arguably still aren't right and but focus on more and more of those things i think that the
0:51:44whole sapphire debacle in arizona was an attempt at that yes and they botched it and i think you
0:51:51know the idea was that um they were going to work out a deal with uh what was that company uh i don't
0:51:59remember but yeah well you know they worked out a deal where they were going to uh you know supply
0:52:05the capital to create an unheard of number of sapphire furnaces and they would have the right
0:52:11to buy as you know the you know all of the sapphire that the facility produced which if it
0:52:17had worked or if they can somehow salvage this and it does eventually work they'll have something that
0:52:23nobody else will have nobody else you know Samsung won't be able to make a phone you know in in in
0:52:29quantity with the sapphire display because there won't be anywhere in the world to buy them I think
0:52:34it's a perfect example of the sort of thing that Apple should be doing with its money.
0:52:38Yeah. And it's something that Apple can do now that it couldn't do in the old days before they
0:52:42had this giant massive sum of cash, you know, in 2002 2003, Apple didn't have the ability to spend
0:52:5010 or $20 billion on x because they didn't have 10 or $20 billion sitting in a bank account.
0:52:56Right. And instead, they famously like negotiated just crazy great terms on, you know,
0:53:02deals with suppliers and buy out all the flash or whatever right but now they're in a position to bankroll the
0:53:10creation of an entire new
0:53:12Basically industry. I mean this by the way, the company is called GT advanced technologies and
0:53:18The stat that I found crazy is that Apple already is
0:53:23using
0:53:251/4 of the entire world supply of sapphire just for the iPhone camera lens and fingerprint reader
0:53:32and that was the Wall Street Journal.
0:53:33So--
0:53:34- And they've already promised that the top two tiers
0:53:38of Apple Watch are gonna have Sapphire covered displays.
0:53:41- Right, so that's a crazy amount of the market
0:53:44that they already control for these two tiny components,
0:53:48granted on hundreds of millions of products,
0:53:50but you can imagine now,
0:53:53take those hundreds of millions of iPhones
0:53:54and multiply the Sapphire by whatever,
0:53:5720 or something like that,
0:53:59and you literally are creating an entire new market.
0:54:02And that's what you could do with
0:54:04when you have $100 billion.
0:54:06- Secondary digression is on the Sapphire thing.
0:54:10And one of the things I've been thinking about lately
0:54:12is one of the things that's come out of the court filings
0:54:15with the bankruptcy of GT advanced technology
0:54:17is that we now know what we suspected all along,
0:54:20but we know for sure now that at some point,
0:54:23Apple had hoped to use Sapphire in this year's new iPhones
0:54:27for the displays, not just for the camera back.
0:54:30That if everything had gone perfectly,
0:54:33or at least according to plan,
0:54:34or some measure like that,
0:54:36Apple, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus would have Sapphire displays.
0:54:40And they don't.
0:54:43Which makes me wonder how much,
0:54:47whether they're now, the fact that GT Advanced failed,
0:54:50whether they're in trouble now
0:54:53with the Sapphire displays for the watches.
0:54:57- Ah, huh.
0:54:58- And not that they would have to change it,
0:55:00'cause they've already promised that they're coming out.
0:55:02I would be shocked if they switched to glass
0:55:06for the addition in the stainless.
0:55:09But I'm wondering if we might not see
0:55:12one of those Apple launches where, you know,
0:55:15midnight everybody's madly clicking,
0:55:18and you know, by like 12, 15 Eastern,
0:55:21or I guess they go on sale Pacific, I don't know.
0:55:23But 15 minutes after the pre-orders go online,
0:55:27people are already seeing quotes of four to six weeks.
0:55:30And the next day, you're already seeing
0:55:34six, seven weeks estimated delivery.
0:55:37- Oh yeah, that could be. - And not necessarily
0:55:38because it's so many people buying them,
0:55:40but because it's the Sapphire,
0:55:42if they were banking on GT advanced technology,
0:55:46the Sapphire might be a significant constraint.
0:55:49Just a hypothetical. - Right, both in,
0:55:50- Yeah, in supply and maybe even in price.
0:55:53Although at this point they'd probably eat the money
0:55:58and make the watches, I have no idea.
0:56:01- Yeah, but I'm not-- - I'm not Tim Cook,
0:56:03so I don't know. - Yeah, exactly.
0:56:04I think that this is the sort of thing though
0:56:06that Tim Cook is the best in the world at, at least so far.
0:56:10But the other thing that I thought
0:56:11that I'm probably wrong about that,
0:56:13that the Sapphire will be a significant gating issue
0:56:16on production is that they're gonna need
0:56:18lot less sapphire for Apple watch than they would have for the phones because
0:56:23the phones are you know how many did they sell in the holiday quarter how
0:56:26many they expected to sell this holiday quarter I don't know but I'm gonna make
0:56:30up a number and say 50 million yeah and figure maybe 30 to 40 million of those
0:56:35are iPhone 6s right so something yeah could be yes to say at least 30 million
0:56:39iPhone 6s which are bigger and in the case of the 6 plus a lot bigger than the
0:56:46Whereas the watch, you know, nobody knows how many
0:56:49they're gonna sell, but especially in the more expensive
0:56:51stainless and addition levels.
0:56:53- Right, it's not 30 million in a quarter.
0:56:55- And it's not a five inch display.
0:56:59- And we're not gonna be told how many they've sold.
0:57:02- No, which is true.
0:57:04- Yeah, so yeah, that's a great example.
0:57:08Another one which they did do is test flight.
0:57:10I mean, I think that's the sort of thing
0:57:13that they actually probably know they should have done sooner
0:57:16and probably were just being snobby about it.
0:57:20Why are all these developers using TestFlight
0:57:22when they should be using our built-in drag and drop
0:57:25email attachment app testing system?
0:57:28So anytime you see a bunch of app developers
0:57:33jumping onto a third-party tool like that,
0:57:36just pick it up.
0:57:37I mean, they've certainly tried to build a few of them.
0:57:42like CloudKit, which I haven't used,
0:57:45is very similar to Parse, which I do use,
0:57:48which Facebook owns.
0:57:50That's the kind of thing that they should just keep an eye
0:57:53on for that kind of stuff.
0:57:55And none of those are billion dollar deals.
0:57:57Those are all much smaller.
0:57:59- I think manufacturing in general is a big deal.
0:58:01And I can't help but wonder if,
0:58:05this is another purely hypothetical,
0:58:07but we know that they're building
0:58:10like the Mac Pros in the US or assembling them.
0:58:13And if they have grand plans to shift more and more
0:58:18of their assembly to the United States,
0:58:21which if they do, my guess would be that it would be more
0:58:26along the lines of robotatizing the assembly line.
0:58:31'Cause if you ever look like this, you know,
0:58:33it was surprising to me, like when we first started
0:58:35getting behind the scene looks at Foxconn
0:58:38and how phones are assembled and iPads are assembled
0:58:40and how much of it is just done by hand,
0:58:42by just people at a bench putting these pieces together.
0:58:47I think if they brought that to the United States
0:58:51to make it cost effective,
0:58:52it would probably not be like a bonanza
0:58:54of manufacturing jobs.
0:58:56It would probably be about figuring out a way
0:58:58to robotatize the assembly.
0:59:00And then they could bring it internally,
0:59:02and they'd have these roboticized assembly lines
0:59:06that no one else in the world would have, right?
0:59:08Like Foxconn gains the ability to do X,
0:59:12then anybody who uses Foxconn gets the ability to do X.
0:59:16- And Foxconn itself too.
0:59:18- Exactly, which is--
0:59:19- I'm a little surprised they have not been
0:59:20more competitive already.
0:59:22- Right, and for example, just look at the Nokia tablet
0:59:26that looks as like a iPad mini lookalike,
0:59:30and it's every, you know, drilled aluminum, all this stuff.
0:59:33It's really like a relabeled Foxconn product.
0:59:36it's a Foxconn tablet that Nokia is putting their name on.
0:59:40Where do you think Foxconn learned to make a tablet
0:59:42that looks like that?
0:59:43Well, they learned it from Apple.
0:59:44You know, I don't think it's any coincidence that Samsung,
0:59:49which makes a lot of components,
0:59:52and until recently made all the CPUs for the iPhone
0:59:55and iPad, you know, got better at making cell phones
0:59:59after they, you know, worked with Apple on that.
1:00:02So I wouldn't be surprised to see that.
1:00:05to me would be an interesting way for Apple to spend money. And I think the GT Advance deal
1:00:09was a sign of that. It's not just about materials, but maybe assembly in general. But maybe for some
1:00:15reason, why did they do the whole thing with GT Advance instead of Apple just making and owning
1:00:22their own Sapphire furnace? I don't know. For some reason, they seem resistant to...
1:00:25They want to decrease the risk. And then if they fail...
1:00:29- And if you looked at the court filings on the terms,
1:00:32like boy did they ever decrease the risk.
1:00:35It's crazy how basically Apple has complete control
1:00:40over everything and GT basically can't do anything.
1:00:45- Right, and GT's court filing was kind of pathetic
1:00:49'cause they made us this offer that was horribly unbalanced.
1:00:54And everybody's like, wow, Apple's really mean.
1:00:56There was even a phrase where they quoted a guy
1:00:58that in a phone call, a guy from Apple told them
1:01:01to put your big boy pants on.
1:01:02- Yeah.
1:01:04- It was a very dismissive,
1:01:07but my take on that is it wasn't like GT Advance
1:01:09had to say yes to this, they agreed to all of it.
1:01:12- Right.
1:01:13- It's sort of like unsaid in their filings is,
1:01:15well, of course we said yes, because if it worked out,
1:01:17look at how much money we would have made.
1:01:19- Totally.
1:01:20- Right?
1:01:21- Yeah.
1:01:22Meanwhile, there's a $50 million NDA penalty.
1:01:25- Yeah, that was an interesting thing that came out of it.
1:01:27- Yeah, 15, and it was, and it got worse
1:01:30like for subsequent ones.
1:01:31- Yeah, it's great.
1:01:32- One thing I've noticed, and if you look at the list
1:01:35of suppliers and stuff that we know about Apple Watch,
1:01:40it's a different list than that makes iPhone and iPad.
1:01:44Just like the component makers,
1:01:47it's coming from a lot of different companies.
1:01:49And I can't help but think that's because Apple
1:01:51is dissatisfied with their manufacturing partners
1:01:54for those things because of all the rampant leaks
1:01:57- Could be, yeah.
1:01:58- Yeah, in a way that competing products
1:02:01seem to be piggybacking on their innovations.
1:02:03So I think that the one thing they could do
1:02:05with their resources now is try to make those things,
1:02:10something that they own.
1:02:13I think an interesting example of that already,
1:02:18I would say are the A-series systems on a chip,
1:02:23which it's like they've turned the whole we use different CPUs than the standard components
1:02:32that everybody else does thing on its head.
1:02:34In the old days when Apple was on Motorola 68,000 chips and later PowerPC chips and the
1:02:41Wintel industry was on x86 Apple was selling in lesser quantities and they could never
1:02:47the quantities were never enough to keep up right.
1:02:50There's no way for Motorola and IBM and the partners that were making PowerPC chips to
1:02:56really sustain the advances that were necessary to keep up with Intel because the numbers
1:03:03just weren't there.
1:03:04And Apple couldn't have had no resources to do it on their own.
1:03:07Whereas now, by making these wildly popular, massively selling devices that are using these
1:03:13chips they're getting the economy of scale advantages with their A5 series, you know,
1:03:20A6, A7, A8.
1:03:23And by all accounts, you know, like at a non-tech in those places, faster and far more power-efficient
1:03:28chips than the Snapdragon's that everybody else is using.
1:03:31And they, you know, they're not sharing.
1:03:34Nobody else gets to make a phone with these amazing systems on a chip.
1:03:38How can they do more things like that?
1:03:40Yeah, and so there's a hardware element to that and then there's a software element and
1:03:45I think a lot of people and a services element too. I mean what can you know, I
1:03:51Keep coming back to iCloud and I'm trying to think like bigger picture is is iCloud a success so far and there's you know
1:03:59There's a lot of griping about little things here and there. I think it is sort of a success
1:04:04I mean, you know, it backs up my phone every night and I don't even think about it
1:04:09And it seems like they they're trying to do more with it
1:04:12But that's the kind of thing where you know that could that could easily be a huge advantage over
1:04:18over everyone else like
1:04:21You know
1:04:23Just back people stuff up. You know make sharing super easy
1:04:26That's gonna be hard to be a it should be it should get better and they should keep I think it is
1:04:32I think it's quietly getting a lot better
1:04:34I think that they're nibbling at the problems around the edges
1:04:36But it's never gonna be a sustaining advantage.
1:04:39It'll be as a lock-in advantage where once you're there
1:04:42and your backups are already there,
1:04:44it's a lot easier to just buy an iPhone
1:04:45and have your backup restored to the new iPhone
1:04:48than it is to switch to Android.
1:04:50But it's not really that big of a competitive advantage
1:04:53because Google stuff is so good at those things.
1:04:56That you're--
1:04:58- Yeah, Google like, yeah, Gmail and Google Calendar
1:05:00and Google Hangouts are really good,
1:05:02but I don't know if Google Drive is really catching on
1:05:05or anything like that.
1:05:06So I don't know, anyway.
1:05:10- Right, I think that Apple has a better chance.
1:05:12I think that cloud stuff in general,
1:05:15the best that they can hope for
1:05:17is to be as good as the state of the art.
1:05:19- Right, and I think a lot of the,
1:05:20actually a lot of the people saying
1:05:22that they should buy all these companies are saying,
1:05:24oh, they'll learn how to be better at the cloud
1:05:26if they own Twitter or Pinterest or something like that.
1:05:30And I mean, there was probably a point
1:05:33where I used to think that,
1:05:34I don't think that would help right now.
1:05:35No, I don't think so.
1:05:36No.
1:05:37No, I don't think that the problem is fundamental, just generic cloud.
1:05:41I think the problem is just specific problems.
1:05:43Yeah.
1:05:44Yeah, and Pinterest, him saying that they should buy Pinterest, I mean, Pinterest is
1:05:47a good company and they're doing interesting things, but it doesn't make any, again, the
1:05:52same thing with Twitter.
1:05:54I just don't see how that gives Apple any advantage in what they do.
1:05:59If they think that Pinterest is a good investment today, it would make far more sense for like,
1:06:05What's that come brayburn capital, you know the secretive Nevada company that that controls apples?
1:06:11Investments, you know
1:06:15Some of this stuff they do do, you know with the cash
1:06:17You know, it would make sense for brayburn to just buy stock in Pinterest and just you know
1:06:23Think it you know, they don't make money on it, but rather than have Apple buy them and control them
1:06:30Yeah, well next time talk to em next time you talk to mg ask him if if he were running Apple ventures instead of
1:06:37Working at Google Ventures what he'd be?
1:06:40Doing with that hundred bill. Yeah
1:06:42Let me take a break here and thank our second sponsor of the show our very good friends at
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1:09:33All right.
1:09:34What else do you want to talk about today?
1:09:36Oh, well, something I want to talk to you about for a while, and that's the idea of
1:09:42institutional taste.
1:09:43I think this might be a group or term, I'm not sure.
1:09:46But I've been thinking about it,
1:09:48and as I've been kind of taking a look at companies
1:09:52this year and writing about them at Quartz,
1:09:55and I'm curious about a bunch of things,
1:09:59but I guess first, how do you define institutional taste?
1:10:04- I would say it's almost like a cultural value,
1:10:08like a shared cultural value,
1:10:11that you see things the same way
1:10:13and you value things the same way.
1:10:16One of the points, like a recurring theme in my work
1:10:20in recent years is the idea that,
1:10:23it's not just what your priorities are,
1:10:27your top three priorities,
1:10:28but it matters what order those top three priorities are in.
1:10:31It matters which one you can say that you value.
1:10:40just pick, you know, material. The materials you use, the shape and the weight. Or like
1:10:48with Apple, like they value thinness, they value weight, they value battery life, they
1:10:54value elegance, they value how it feels. But it's clear that Apple institutionally values
1:11:02thinness and weight more than they value battery life because otherwise they you know they've
1:11:11I here's here's my old iPhone 4 right here by my desk which is you know I think when
1:11:19it came out was billed as being the world's thinnest phone and if it wasn't it was pretty
1:11:23darn close and it's just a couple years ago so and you know if they valued battery more
1:11:29than thinness, I think that today's iPhone 6s would be maybe not as thick as the iPhone
1:11:344, but they'd be thicker than they are and they would have used that thickness to put
1:11:38more battery in there. It just matters what, you know, which order those priorities are.
1:11:45Not that they don't care about battery life, but they obviously value thinness and weight
1:11:48above that. I think institutional taste, that's just a sign of it and it propagates that it's
1:11:54people who share those values and that taste that are drawn to work at the company and the company
1:12:00recruits people who share those values and then it you know it it sustains itself i think it tends to
1:12:09and and i'm sure you know and obviously like this is something that apple excels at you know whether
1:12:16whether we can really define it or not or really um you know kind of explain everything that it
1:12:21applies to this is kind of a pro-apple argument to be made. Are there other companies you see that
1:12:28you think have good institutional taste? I know we can name a bunch that have bad, you know,
1:12:33historically have had bad taste. Are there others that you think have good taste?
1:12:39Tom Bilyeu: I think Google clearly does and I think that's why they have as rabid of fans as
1:12:47Apple does but that they tend to be different people.
1:12:51Most people who truly say they love Google either are ambivalent about Apple or they
1:12:56have mixed feelings about Apple.
1:12:58Probably mixed feelings is more common where they probably do use a MacBook.
1:13:01A lot of them use MacBooks but that they feel more affinity for Google.
1:13:06But Google's good taste is in things like simplicity and minimalism.
1:13:12I mean, I think the fact that if you just go to Google.com and what you see on that
1:13:19page here in 2014 is so close to what you saw back in 2002 or whenever, when Google
1:13:30was a beta at Stanford, where it's just a box and two buttons.
1:13:35And I mean, look at how much minimal crap they've added there.
1:13:40And for all that we complain about Google and the advertising that they do, that they've
1:13:44still resisted the urge to really put advertising on that homepage, that they still only show
1:13:50it on results.
1:13:51Imagine what they could charge for just one ad, something like the deck, just one thing
1:13:57up in the corner on that page.
1:13:59Imagine what they could charge, and they don't.
1:14:01And I think it's a sign of Google's taste.
1:14:05Do you think so – and I'll just throw this out there.
1:14:08think that historically a company with bad taste has been Microsoft, which shows in everything from
1:14:16their kind of visual design to the awkwardness of their stage presentations to product decisions and
1:14:25all that kind of stuff. But I've actually been surprisingly, I guess, surprised at how...
1:14:33I've been like their files even little things like their file formats like old versions like when you read how when somebody's backward
1:14:40Engineered an old version of work, you know the word doc file. Yeah, it's so con it's just horrible
1:14:47It's just it nobody would design a file format like that and if they had taste
1:14:52Yeah, I don't and I don't know if it was satire
1:14:54but like the Microsoft Bob logo is pretty much like emblematic of
1:14:59Yeah of Microsoft
1:15:01It seems like it's getting a little better. I don't know maybe you know, they're making some smart decisions now
1:15:07Can this taste be taught or changed or is it you know in any sort of?
1:15:15Timeframe that would matter or is it the kind of thing that's kind of too deeply ingrained in a company that to change I
1:15:22Think you have to go through some sort of
1:15:25Stressful transition to change and I think that's what we're seeing with Microsoft. I think you know
1:15:31and it's even bubbled up to the point where,
1:15:34not that, I don't think he got forced out,
1:15:37but it's pretty close.
1:15:39It's about as close as you can get to forcing out a CEO
1:15:42of a wildly profitable major corporation, right?
1:15:47I mean, and without any sort of impropriety
1:15:52or anything like that, nobody accused Ballmer
1:15:54of any kind of fiscal impropriety or crimes
1:15:58or anything of the sort.
1:16:00It was really, honestly, I think it really,
1:16:03eventually his lack of taste caught up with him
1:16:05and the market had moved on, right?
1:16:08And so I think Microsoft is going through
1:16:10that sort of transition and we definitely see it, I think.
1:16:13I mean, it's Windows, the new version of Windows,
1:16:17the stuff you see on the surface is,
1:16:20it's absolutely positively not a copy of iOS
1:16:25and it's good.
1:16:28I don't think I would prefer it, I really don't.
1:16:30It's been a long time, it's been a couple years
1:16:32since I tried living with Windows Phone.
1:16:34But I don't think it's to my liking.
1:16:37But it certainly is, and it's in,
1:16:39wherever it ranks in the world of OS design right now,
1:16:43it certainly shows a taste that Microsoft
1:16:45never had in the old days.
1:16:47- Yeah, and at the same time, we've gone from a company
1:16:50that used to say, oh, why would anyone
1:16:53buy their kids an iPod to, hey, we've got Office for iPad,
1:16:58or why would anyone buy their kids an iPod or whatever.
1:17:00- Right.
1:17:01- To now there's Office for iPad
1:17:03and they're integrating Dropbox into PowerPoint
1:17:07and all this kind of stuff.
1:17:08And it seems really, I don't know,
1:17:12maybe it's too short a timeframe,
1:17:15but I'm a little excited about what I see there.
1:17:20- I would go so far as to tie it together
1:17:23with the first half of the show
1:17:25and say that it's actually not even so much about taste,
1:17:28but that Microsoft is institutionally backing away
1:17:31from the view that they can do it all themselves
1:17:34and that they should do it all themselves.
1:17:36Like the Microsoft at its peak of industry dominance
1:17:41did everything other than the hardware.
1:17:43And they really kind of defined PC hardware
1:17:48in a way that they, without making any PCs themselves,
1:17:52they had enormous influence on it.
1:17:55But they literally did everything.
1:17:56They wrote their own operating system.
1:18:00They wrote all of the major apps for that operating system.
1:18:04They had their own developer tools.
1:18:07They had their own eventually like with C#, their own developer and Visual Basic, their
1:18:11own languages.
1:18:14They went their own way in a route that it was just unprecedented and that nobody else
1:18:20has ever really tried to do again.
1:18:22And this is where I tie it with the first half of the show is to me the warning sign
1:18:27for Apple like the biggest canary in the coal mine as we you know how is Apple ever you
1:18:33know going to you know what am I looking for to see if Apple is maybe starting to lose
1:18:37their edge are signs of hubris right I think that's the word that Microsoft had and that
1:18:42that that's the today's Microsoft doesn't have that anymore like and all like all those
1:18:47things you just listed you know where they're advertising the iOS apps they're
1:18:54integrating with Dropbox I just saw I think the other day this week where now
1:18:59that you can do they have a thing where they're running on Google's cloud
1:19:03service oh yeah right you can run exchange and you know run Windows
1:19:10servers and Google's cloud all of those things are signs that they now they're
1:19:15they're off of that, you know, Microsoft only all the way down the stack.
1:19:22And I guess we should also disclose they've also, you know, sponsored your
1:19:27podcast and your app. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which, you know, totally, exactly.
1:19:31That's a good point. No, absolutely. Yeah, and I tell you the fact that Azure and
1:19:37all the window, you know, all their cloud-based services are
1:19:40are absolutely positively not designed as cloud services
1:19:44for Microsoft client devices.
1:19:46They are designed as cloud, what's the word, agnostic.
1:19:51- Yeah.
1:19:53- You know, they're just good cloud services.
1:19:55- Yeah, so I'm very interested to see
1:19:59what some of the most, you know, balmy Microsoft stuff,
1:20:04what happens to that, like those stores
1:20:06that were kind of crappy ripoffs of Apple stores.
1:20:09You know, what happens to those now?
1:20:12That kind of stuff.
1:20:14But we'll see, it's only been less than a year, so.
1:20:18- I'll tell you a company who I think
1:20:19has a bad institutional taste is Amazon.
1:20:23- Oh yeah, oh yeah, totally.
1:20:24- Really, really bad taste. - You know what,
1:20:25and I think that's what,
1:20:27that's exactly what inspired me to ask you about this,
1:20:30was thinking about that phone, man.
1:20:33That Amazon phone. - The Fire phone?
1:20:36- Oh yeah.
1:20:37- Did you ever use one?
1:20:38No, I haven't yet.
1:20:39Yeah, I haven't either.
1:20:40But boy, the reviews were bad.
1:20:43And now that it's been on the market for a while,
1:20:45and I've seen a little bit more random--
1:20:48a few random people who just picked one up on a lark,
1:20:51it's even worse.
1:20:54The things I've seen from people who aren't gadget reviewers
1:20:58from The Verge or whatever site, people who just review
1:21:02a lot of phones, where the Fire Phone was, in my opinion,
1:21:05very poorly reviewed in general.
1:21:07But the just real people who don't do it,
1:21:09who just bought it to see what it's like,
1:21:11really just scorched it.
1:21:12It's bad in every way.
1:21:15- And it's funny because I like Amazon as a service.
1:21:19Like I probably spend more money on Amazon
1:21:21than any other place besides my,
1:21:25whoever owns my apartment building.
1:21:27But just the, they've never had a good looking website.
1:21:32All their hardware stuff just screams out,
1:21:34either we're just doing this to do it,
1:21:37or we don't really care that much
1:21:39about how good it is to use.
1:21:41The scathing reviews of the Kindle,
1:21:45the newest Kindle saying,
1:21:47"Look, this is supposed to be
1:21:48"the top-end e-reader in the world.
1:21:51"Why don't you treat it like that?"
1:21:53- They've never had good page turning on a Kindle, ever.
1:21:56It's the most astounding thing
1:21:58in all of consumer electronics.
1:22:01And it's not astounding that the first one
1:22:03or the second one, or maybe even the third one,
1:22:05didn't have great page turning.
1:22:08But it's astounding to me that it really has never gotten
1:22:11just iteratively better year after year.
1:22:13And at this point, after seven or eight years on the market,
1:22:18that they don't have page turning down is crazy.
1:22:21- Or even like justifying the text,
1:22:24forcing it to be fully, the full width of the screen
1:22:29and not letting you left justify it.
1:22:31- I just, I wrote about this a few weeks ago.
1:22:34It's a solved computational problem.
1:22:36It's not easy, but it's solved,
1:22:38and there are even open source solutions to it.
1:22:40Tech, the T, lowercase e, capital X,
1:22:45typesetting system that Donald Knuth created
1:22:48back in the '70s.
1:22:52There's an open, I linked to an academic paper
1:22:56that one of his students wrote in like 1980
1:22:59that just, and it's not, it's a solved problem.
1:23:03to do proper justification without unseemly gaps between words and with
1:23:11intelligent use of hyphenation. It's a solved problem and yet they don't do
1:23:15it in the Kindle. It's crazy. Yeah well I have good fonts they don't you know the
1:23:21font selection is atrocious and it's not like it's not like having good
1:23:26fonts and good line you know layout isn't a core part of what the device is.
1:23:32It's the whole point of the device.
1:23:35- Yeah, exactly.
1:23:36- It would be like if the iPods
1:23:38didn't really have good music playback.
1:23:40- Right, yeah.
1:23:41Although maybe some argue that they didn't,
1:23:43but still, if you're trying to make the best reading device
1:23:47in the world, which I guess they're not,
1:23:49they would certainly act more like it.
1:23:53Or maybe they're doing the best they can,
1:23:55which is where the institutional taste comes in,
1:23:57is just that they don't.
1:23:59The difference is that most people view a book as a string.
1:24:07You know what I mean?
1:24:08Like in programming terms.
1:24:09That it's a string of text and that if you review somebody's novel, it doesn't really
1:24:15matter what.
1:24:17I've never seen, and it just indicates what I'm obsessed with, but I've never seen a book
1:24:23review that includes a review of the layout of the book.
1:24:26Whereas if I reviewed a book, I'd be tempted to do that.
1:24:31To me, clearly it's not the main reason you read a novel.
1:24:34I guess in general, I would rather read an interesting, well-written novel that's poorly
1:24:39typeset than read a terrible novel that is beautifully typeset.
1:24:44Of course, that's the difference.
1:24:47Even me, as somebody obsessed with typography, would agree with that.
1:24:49Whereas with music, nobody ever says, "I don't care if the music sounds bad," like
1:24:53at a technical level.
1:24:55fundamental to listening to music but as the person making the device it should
1:24:59be you know you should that should be the obsession you know the people making
1:25:03Kindles Lee at the top level of the design team should be people who are
1:25:07obsessed with good typography it's criminal that they're not yeah but I
1:25:12think it's a sign of app Amazon's institutional taste their priorities I
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1:27:10All right, last bit.
1:27:12So let's talk about Instagram, which just announced 300 million active users, which
1:27:20is almost entirely likely more than Twitter has at this point.
1:27:26Twitter has not yet released their December quarter numbers, and it's a little different
1:27:31because they do the quarterly average.
1:27:33Yeah, and if you look at the graph, though, it's pretty clear that Instagram is-
1:27:36It's growing faster.
1:27:38And it's pretty amazing.
1:27:40I think it's you know, it's certainly the the number two or number three app that I check after I wake up
1:27:46and
1:27:48It's it's kind of cool that you know, even after Facebook bought them, although that kind of maybe gives them an edge to
1:27:55Although Facebook hasn't really integrated as much as as it could have
1:27:59Then it's still growing so quickly. I still feels like very much of its own thing
1:28:03I think it totally does I would say as somebody who doesn't use Facebook and
1:28:08Therefore was and for very specific reasons that it just doesn't appeal to me when they bought Instagram
1:28:12I and I was a big fan of Instagram. I was very worried and they said oh, but we're not gonna mess with it
1:28:18We're not gonna Facebook eyes it we're gonna let Kevin Systrom and his team, you know
1:28:22Do we bought them because we love what they're doing and we're gonna have them keep doing what they're doing
1:28:27And it's like I've heard that before right you hear that every time there's a popular thing gets acquired
1:28:32You hear it's not gonna get we're not gonna mess it up and most of the time it gets messed up eventually
1:28:38And it's I would say from the outside
1:28:41As an Instagram user it's completely true. If you did if I didn't follow tech news, I would have no idea that Instagram was bought by
1:28:49By Facebook, so I made it kind of a jerky tweet the other day
1:28:55But one of the things that surprised me the most is you know and you and you could say like oh
1:29:00Are they just kind of napping over there?
1:29:02They've changed it so little that it almost could seem like it's negligence.
1:29:08Not that I think that they should throw a bunch of features at it, but there's a lot
1:29:12of little things that I think are still missing from Instagram that would really actually
1:29:18make it better.
1:29:20For example, something as simple as being able to have multiple users in the app.
1:29:26I know a woman who runs four Instagram accounts for three restaurants and her personal one,
1:29:31and every time you wanna switch accounts,
1:29:32you literally have to sign out
1:29:34and then sign in with your username and password.
1:29:38- Conceptually, Instagram is very similar to Twitter.
1:29:41And comparing Twitter to Facebook is difficult
1:29:45because it's just different purposes, very different design.
1:29:49But fundamentally, Instagram is Twitter for pictures.
1:29:51- Yep.
1:29:52- And combined with that, instead of having replies,
1:29:57you have comments on the picture.
1:29:59And so it's slightly different order.
1:30:00The pictures are still Twitter order, newest at the top, oldest at the bottom.
1:30:05The only real conceptual difference in the main timeline is that comments go under the
1:30:09picture they're commenting on as opposed to Twitter where the replies are all in a chronological
1:30:14stream as well.
1:30:15Very, very similar.
1:30:17And so therefore, I completely agree with you, it makes every bit of sense that you
1:30:21could have multiple accounts in Instagram that it does in Twitter.
1:30:25Right, and it's something like that where another one is like hyperlinks.
1:30:31You can't even link a comment, you can't put a link in a comment or anywhere really, which
1:30:39on one hand cuts down spam.
1:30:41You don't have as much people spamming links.
1:30:43On the other hand, you see people like both humans and companies saying, "Here's something
1:30:50we did to access it.
1:30:53go to our bio and click the link in our bio.
1:30:55- Yeah, that's a very--
1:30:58- And it's a hack, it's a clever hack,
1:30:59but it's still, it's like, you know,
1:31:01these are places where a competitor
1:31:03could eventually catch hold.
1:31:05Another one is shopping, like they're,
1:31:06and now they're, in the US there's a company called Spring,
1:31:09and in Japan there's a company called Origami
1:31:12that are basically Instagram with a buy button
1:31:15attached to it.
1:31:16And even just a hyperlink from Instagram
1:31:19do so much to make services like that unnecessary.
1:31:23And I wonder if it's Instagram just keeping things really simple because that's what works
1:31:28and it's really hard to argue with that.
1:31:29You know, they've done so well.
1:31:32Or if a few little features like that could really have gone a long way.
1:31:38Dave Asprey Yeah, and if the hyperlinks work the way
1:31:42they do in almost all Twitter clients where instead of bouncing you out to a third-party
1:31:46browser, it opens a web view right there in the app, you're
1:31:49not even losing the engagement. Because when they close the web
1:31:54view, they're probably going to be right back where they were in
1:31:56Instagram. So I don't think it's about like, engagement,
1:31:59trapment. Right? I can only guess that it's a spam thing.
1:32:04But even then, I feel like that's making us the users
1:32:08suffer for a problem that they're supposed to solve.
1:32:11Yeah, right. I mean, imagine if Twitter said, Oh, we're getting
1:32:14rid of all links because of spam. I mean, you know, it's just no, right? You can't do
1:32:19that. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah, I would think that the way that they would do it would be to
1:32:23follow Twitter's lead and do their own Tico thing because that's that's fundamental to
1:32:27Twitter's anti. I know that they do other things too. And that they're, you know, they
1:32:31track all sorts of analytics through all the links that go through Twitter now that they're
1:32:34all redirected through t.co. But part of it too, is that let's them centralized spam,
1:32:41malware and that kind of stuff. Right. Right. Any kind of bat anything. I say spam, meaning
1:32:46anything that would that is like, we should delete that and identify the user as a you know,
1:32:52Yep. They turn it out the lights on you. I know I haven't been kicked out. You know,
1:32:56it's funny. There's supposed to be another meeting in here right now. I emailed the person asking if
1:33:00I can use the room so they might show up angrily any minute now. But so we could sign off on a
1:33:06a moment to notice. But I heard I heard a loud click.
1:33:08And I was missing the garbage can with my seltzer. Sorry about
1:33:13that. So another feature is the you know, the equivalent of the
1:33:17reblog the re gram. And I could totally see why they don't, why
1:33:22they don't have that feature, because you know, then it's all
1:33:25your photos, and it's it's more authentic, and it's not a bunch
1:33:28of junk. But on the other hand, people are hacking that and
1:33:31there are apps that will let you you know, do this regram even a
1:33:35video with an overlay and that kind of stuff.
1:33:38Have you seen those?
1:33:39No, I haven't.
1:33:40Okay.
1:33:41Well, I see them.
1:33:42I know what you mean though.
1:33:43It's probably not even like 5% of the pictures in my feed, and I'm sure if there were regramming,
1:33:48there would be more than that.
1:33:51But it's still interesting that that's the kind of thing where pretty much every other
1:33:55stream-based social network has added that feature, whether it's Tumblr's Reblog or on
1:34:02on Vine you can re-vine, on Twitter you can retweet.
1:34:06On Instagram you basically have to re-upload a photo.
1:34:10- I would almost say it's the defining feature of Tumblr.
1:34:12- Yeah, probably.
1:34:14- Yeah, that's interesting.
1:34:15And it's hard, you have to, and from a phone
1:34:18you're kinda stuck 'cause you can't just save an Instagram
1:34:20to your local thing and pick it out and put it back in.
1:34:24You've gotta do goofy stuff.
1:34:25I guess when I do say it, it's usually just a screenshot.
1:34:28- It's a screenshot, and there are apps that do this.
1:34:30it's like re-gram app or something like that.
1:34:33And these are all I'm sure decisions that they've made
1:34:37and they seem to have just decided no for all of them.
1:34:40And again, it's really hard to argue with them.
1:34:43Whatever they're doing is working so well
1:34:46that you almost can't argue that they could be doing better.
1:34:50And they've made little changes like the explore screen
1:34:54is so much more interesting now that they are basing it
1:34:57on your friends and people you follow, so that's great.
1:35:02The image tools that they built, not just the filters,
1:35:06but the different image tools are really, really,
1:35:09really good, you know.
1:35:10- I also think that they have excellent
1:35:13notification controls because I easily,
1:35:17and without any confusion, set up Instagram
1:35:20so that I'm only notified when people who I follow
1:35:25do something of interest.
1:35:27Like I don't want notifications when any Joe
1:35:30on the internet favorites one of my Instagrams.
1:35:32I only want ones, you know, I get very few--
1:35:35- Can you believe people leave that on?
1:35:36Like I'll pick up someone's phone sometimes
1:35:38and they'll have 40.
1:35:41- I will not name names because I find it to be such
1:35:44a curiously needy feature, but I have definitely seen people
1:35:49who have that turned on.
1:35:50- Well, I look at see who, you know, who likes my photos.
1:35:55- I think that's one of the most interesting parts of that.
1:35:57- Oh yeah, but I don't want notifications for it.
1:35:59No, no, I'm not, it's not like I don't care
1:36:02and I don't like look back at yesterday's thing
1:36:04and then open up the list and see it,
1:36:06but I don't want notifications for it.
1:36:08- Totally, and then another one is like,
1:36:09they don't have an iPad app.
1:36:11- Yeah, that's a huge one.
1:36:12- It drives me crazy because it's actually,
1:36:14you know, at first people were like,
1:36:16well, why would you use Instagram on an iPad
1:36:18who's taking photos on an iPad?
1:36:19Well, the answer is a lot of people take photos on an iPad
1:36:22and I look at a ton of Instagram on the iPad.
1:36:26And it's actually gotten better,
1:36:28it's actually, well, it's really great on the iPhone 6 Plus
1:36:31and it's gotten a little better over the years
1:36:33as the 2X multiplication setup on the iPad
1:36:38has gotten a little better, but still, it's like,
1:36:41come on, is it really, is it that hard to make an iPad app?
1:36:44Maybe it is, I don't know.
1:36:45- No, not in broad strokes, not,
1:36:51It might be depending on how your app was architected,
1:36:53but if you're able to support the new iPhone 6 sizes,
1:36:58then you're doing stuff that makes it really easy
1:37:02to do iPad 2.
1:37:03In fact, it's so easy that with this whole size class thing,
1:37:08and it was a huge, huge point of emphasis
1:37:12at WWDC this year, it's a huge part of iOS 8.
1:37:15All of it clearly was about setting things up
1:37:17so that apps were ready for the iPhone 6
1:37:19with the two new sizes.
1:37:22But it's so-- creating an iPad app now is really almost,
1:37:27almost like just creating another bigger iPhone size.
1:37:32If you can do the 6 and 6s, you can do the iPad.
1:37:34And I say that even though Vesper, which
1:37:37does support the 6 and 6s, still doesn't have an iPad version.
1:37:40But if we really wanted to drop everything else
1:37:42we were doing and do that, it actually
1:37:44wouldn't be that much work.
1:37:45And Marco even talked about that with Overcast,
1:37:48where he got an, he called it an accidental version
1:37:53of an iPad version of Overcast.
1:37:55- Oh yeah, I remember, yeah.
1:37:56- Because there was a bug where if you used a storyboard
1:37:59for your startup screen, didn't matter if you also specified
1:38:03in your XML that, hey, me, this app, I'm iPhone only.
1:38:07So if I'm running on an iPad, run me in the iPhone mode.
1:38:11The OS had a bug where if you had that storyboard
1:38:15as your startup image, it would say,
1:38:17You're a modern app. So I'll run you as an iPad app and it actually without him ever even intending it or trying it
1:38:23It actually was was usable. So yes it there's
1:38:26At this point it seems like there's no technical reason why Instagram should not have an iPad app and then one more is the icon
1:38:35I mean, you know every literally every app on my iPhone home screen has
1:38:39Done something a little more
1:38:43Iowa seven inspired I can almost see it. I'm not an icon artist, but I can almost see
1:38:49what the flat Instagram icon would look like. Keep the colors, keep the basic gimmick that it looks
1:38:58like a Polaroid and just flatten it. Right. So is this, uh, you know, and they're not,
1:39:05not doing these things to spite people. So I just wonder, and I guess I should probably be a good
1:39:10journalists and ask them. And maybe I will, but it's still, it's as a frequent user, it has,
1:39:17it has puzzled me over the years. And especially recently, as you see that it is,
1:39:22you know, arguably the second or third most important social network in the world that,
1:39:29you know, and I totally am on the side of simplicity and saying no and all that stuff. But
1:39:34Yeah, well, I think that your your bucket list right there, your checklist of what Instagram
1:39:39would should do is excellent because it does to me it doesn't add any complexity like supporting
1:39:46the iPad doesn't make using Instagram more complex it just makes it better you know yeah
1:39:50and and in addition I'll just throw out this point in addition to the fact that you're
1:39:54right that a lot of people and Apple even admits it now that a lot of people use their
1:39:59iPad as a camera for for producing iPad or Instagram content but clearly photo photography
1:40:05is something that always looks better bigger always so it would be better if you had both
1:40:11you know side by side it would always be better to look at instagram uh on the ipad i think when
1:40:16they eventually do i think they will right they're going to come out with an ipad app i think when
1:40:20they do people are going to be like wow this is amazing i can't believe that they didn't do this
1:40:25before totally all right so if you're kevin cistram get on it man yeah you know what and i understand
1:40:32As part of Facebook, they've had to build out
1:40:36an advertising business.
1:40:37And I find their ads to be totally fine.
1:40:40I look at them and I see, oh, that's kind of cheesy,
1:40:43so that's an ad, but I'm not mad that it's there.
1:40:47And I know that they have to build a business,
1:40:49so I'm happy that they're doing that.
1:40:51And maybe they're waiting on adding hyperlinks
1:40:54until they have a commerce business of some sort.
1:40:56But it just makes me maybe a little bit more
1:41:01maybe like them a little less, I guess.
1:41:05- Yeah, I wonder if that's what they're holding out for,
1:41:07that you're only gonna get,
1:41:09you only get links if you pay for it.
1:41:11- I don't know, but that doesn't make sense.
1:41:12Yeah, I don't know if that helps anyone either, so.
1:41:15Cool, all right, well, I love Instagram,
1:41:18and I'm not trying to be a jerk, but.
1:41:22- I think one way that you can measure,
1:41:24and I know that this monthly active viewers thing
1:41:26is like the industry standard numerically,
1:41:28but I feel like the way that you can,
1:41:30The better way to measure social networks
1:41:33is when you're out in the real world
1:41:35and you look at like the menu at the restaurant you're at
1:41:38or the window of the place where you're gonna buy
1:41:40baked goods or something like that.
1:41:44Which icons do they have there, right?
1:41:47And for a long time, it was just Facebook and Twitter,
1:41:50a lot of places I saw.
1:41:51- Or YouTube or, yeah.
1:41:54- Yeah, yeah, depending on, yeah, sometimes YouTube.
1:41:57But usually, the big one, it was Facebook and Twitter,
1:41:59the pairing.
1:42:00And, man, I see Instagram everywhere now.
1:42:05I don't know.
1:42:06I should – I'll actually – I'm going to make an effort now that if I see Facebook
1:42:10and Twitter but don't see Instagram, I'll take a picture of it and start collecting
1:42:14it and I'll bet I don't get many of them.
1:42:17I see Instagram everywhere.
1:42:19It's clearly on par with Twitter in terms of that.
1:42:24And I would even add – going back to Eric Jackson's thing, I do see the Pinterest
1:42:29logo a lot more places now, not as much as those as Facebook,
1:42:33Twitter and Instagram, but it's growing.
1:42:35Yep. Yeah, I think so. Especially anything with like a
1:42:38visual component to it. Shopping food. You know, that sort of
1:42:45stuff. Actually, I actually think, you know, not to get too
1:42:49deep on this, but I actually think that companies make better
1:42:53Instagrammers than they make Twitter users. I think that, you
1:42:57I follow a lot of restaurants and stores
1:43:01that I've been to on vacations and that kind of thing.
1:43:03On Instagram, even places I may never go back to,
1:43:08just to kind of remember them,
1:43:10that I would never follow on Twitter.
1:43:11'Cause on Twitter they're talking,
1:43:13here are our daily specials or something like that,
1:43:15or here's a link to a story that we were mentioned in.
1:43:19Whereas on Instagram, they're showing photos of their shop
1:43:22or of their neighborhood or of their products
1:43:24or of their customers and that kind of stuff.
1:43:26I find it really interesting
1:43:27I follow the official Yankees account on Instagram and Twitter and on Twitter a lot of the time when they tweet
1:43:34My my finger starts hovering towards the unfollow button
1:43:38And on Instagram, it's almost always great
1:43:42It's like a some kind of picture of you know
1:43:44Either either something going on in the current Yankees season and from us from a staff member with incredible access, right?
1:43:51Like, you know on the field at batting practice like a great angle
1:43:55of something or it's like a piece of history,
1:44:00like a history and it always makes me smile.
1:44:02It's like exactly why I wanted to follow them on Instagram.
1:44:05Whereas on Twitter, it's just a bunch of hashtags and shit.
1:44:08- Yeah, where, you know, and this is like,
1:44:10maybe to close out, you know, Evan Williams yesterday
1:44:13was quoted, I think in Fortune saying,
1:44:16"I don't give a shit if Twitter has more users
1:44:19than Instagram," which is well put.
1:44:21And by the way, aside, Evan Williams is working way harder
1:44:26than Evan Williams needs to be working.
1:44:28He's really done a great job with Medium.
1:44:30And I'm really impressed by that.
1:44:33Anyway, but I think he's right.
1:44:35I think that Twitter and Instagram,
1:44:37like comparing them because you have the same metric,
1:44:40monthly active users, sure, that's fair,
1:44:43but they really are different products.
1:44:45And there's obviously bad blood
1:44:48because Twitter probably could have
1:44:51and should have bought Instagram and Facebook,
1:44:56that kind of thing.
1:44:57- Yeah, and I think in their buyer's remorse
1:45:00over not having bought them is why they bought Vine,
1:45:03and Vine is, I don't think it's a failure,
1:45:06but it's not at that level.
1:45:07Yeah, I don't see Vine. - Yeah, it still exists,
1:45:09and it's doing some interesting stuff,
1:45:10but it's not Instagram.
1:45:12- Nobody's putting Vine logos on their restaurant windows.
1:45:15No, I mean, it's not even a joke,
1:45:17but it's a really good sign of real world awareness.
1:45:20I'll tell you another thing I noticed about Instagram is I when I go to like
1:45:25Sporting like a Yankee game or something like that
1:45:28I see people taking instagrams and using Instagram more than on their phone more than I see them tweeting
1:45:34Do you want to hear something funny is that while we've been taping this?
1:45:38podcast about
1:45:4120 people I work with have stopped by this conference room and taken pictures of me through the glass
1:45:47And I bet they're gonna wind up on Instagram
1:45:49and not on Twitter.
1:45:51- If you see him, send him to me.
1:45:53- Yeah, I will.
1:45:54- We'll put him together and show him.
1:45:55- Yeah, it's been very strange.
1:45:56You know, the first couple, I was like,
1:45:57"Aha, very funny."
1:45:59And like 10 people have taken pictures of me.
1:46:02But anyway, my bigger point is like Twitter and Instagram
1:46:06are not really the same thing.
1:46:07I mean, Twitter is like breaking news from the fronts,
1:46:11you know, the war fronts in Ferguson.
1:46:16Although I guess Instagram, people were posting photos
1:46:19and that kind of stuff,
1:46:20but Twitter is like the global pulse of information
1:46:24and Instagram is, look how cool my life is,
1:46:27that kind of thing.
1:46:28So comparing them-- - Or look at this thing,
1:46:32or look at where I am.
1:46:33- Yeah, here's where I am.
1:46:34If anything, Instagram has destroyed something
1:46:37like Foursquare more than it has really affected Twitter
1:46:41and Twitter's problems are its own problems.
1:46:44There are so many things that Twitter needs to figure out,
1:46:47but competing with Instagram, I don't think is the answer.
1:46:51And being upset that, you know,
1:46:53or people trying to make them look small
1:46:56because Instagram has more users,
1:46:58I don't think that has anything to do with it.
1:47:00- Yeah, it's the same concept.
1:47:02It's just you pick a list of people or certain companies,
1:47:07and you will see a chronological stream of what they post.
1:47:10Same concept as Twitter, but in practice,
1:47:12because of the differences in what it is,
1:47:14you know, photos versus text,
1:47:16it ends up having a very different purpose.
1:47:19And this fact, what you just said
1:47:20is actually kind of interesting,
1:47:22'cause it's almost like Instagram is a better fulfillment
1:47:24of Twitter's original idea of its purpose,
1:47:27the what am I doing right now, right?
1:47:30It used to be like, what was the original prompt
1:47:32for Twitter in the field?
1:47:33- Oh, I don't know.
1:47:36- It's like, what's up or, you know, what are you doing?
1:47:38- What's going on?
1:47:39- Yeah. - Or maybe that's
1:47:40what it is now.
1:47:40You know, and people used to tweet like in 2006.
1:47:42- What's happening?
1:47:43- Yeah, like @thedenist or something like that.
1:47:47- Yeah, totally.
1:47:48- And like, nobody would tweet that anymore, right?
1:47:50- No.
1:47:51- Like, nobody's gonna tweet @thedenist, just those words.
1:47:54But I would--
1:47:55- You know who will?
1:47:56Steve Wozniak will.
1:47:58- But I have definitely seen like, when I see like friends,
1:48:02I see friends who take like a first person perspective
1:48:05of their feet in the dentist chair.
1:48:07- Yeah, right. - And it's like, oh,
1:48:08you know, hope he's, you know, hope he's feeling,
1:48:10I hope he doesn't have a bad, some kind of tooth problem.
1:48:13- Yeah, totally.
1:48:16- And it fits, you don't mind it
1:48:18if you can compose it artistically.
1:48:20- No, it's great. - I said this week
1:48:21when that news broke, and again, like you said,
1:48:24I don't think it's any kind of bad news for Twitter
1:48:26that Instagram's bigger.
1:48:27It's just an interesting sign.
1:48:29It doesn't mean that they're even more valuable than Twitter.
1:48:33It's just interesting.
1:48:35But I do think, though, that part of their success
1:48:39is that they've kept that simplicity and there's like a,
1:48:44they know, the people running Instagram and designing it
1:48:46and keeping it, they know exactly what it is
1:48:49and they get it.
1:48:50Whereas to me, part of Twitter's problem in recent years
1:48:52is that the people running Twitter
1:48:54don't seem to get what Twitter is.
1:48:56They're just, they've seeming, to me they seem lost
1:49:00and I think part of it is that they have this ambition
1:49:03to be as big as Facebook and I think the problem is
1:49:08that what Twitter is good for is fundamentally
1:49:12never gonna be as big and as profitable
1:49:15as what Facebook is.
1:49:17And so can you live with that?
1:49:20Why not if you're still profitable?
1:49:23- Yeah, I think that's a great way of putting it.
1:49:24- Like if you make, I don't know, toaster ovens
1:49:29and you find out that the toaster oven business
1:49:35is not as profitable as the automobile industry,
1:49:37Should you start making cars?
1:49:39No, I don't, just keep making good toaster ovens.
1:49:43And just let it be the business that it is.
1:49:46And I just think that Twitter is so obsessed with Facebook
1:49:50that they've lost their way at a leadership level.
1:49:53- Yeah, or, well, I don't know if it's,
1:49:56I don't know if they think that way internally.
1:49:59I think that the outside perspective,
1:50:03especially among the investor community,
1:50:05It's like, well, why isn't Twitter becoming as big as well?
1:50:08- My evidence that I think that they do it internally
1:50:12is the way that first person, or not first person,
1:50:14first party Twitter clients,
1:50:17meaning if you go to twitter.com
1:50:18and you use the Twitter app,
1:50:20that your timeline is no longer
1:50:23just the simple chronological order
1:50:26of here are the people you follow in their tweets,
1:50:28that there's all sorts of other stuff
1:50:30that's injected in there.
1:50:31- Yeah, but I don't think that stems
1:50:34from trying to be more like Facebook,
1:50:37I think that is trying to solve the problem
1:50:39that most people have a shitty timeline
1:50:41because they don't follow enough people.
1:50:43They signed up for Twitter.
1:50:45They maybe followed, auto followed the people
1:50:48that were suggested to them.
1:50:50But getting people to keep following more Twitter accounts
1:50:54is kind of essential to building a really great timeline.
1:50:56Like I love my timeline.
1:50:58I also follow 3,300 people.
1:51:01And I even run out of stuff to read.
1:51:04So how do you automatically pre-install
1:51:07a really great timeline for someone
1:51:09that's based on what they like?
1:51:11And I think that's what they're trying to get at
1:51:12with this algorithmic stuff.
1:51:15And what I would like to see from Twitter
1:51:17is exactly this pre-installed kit.
1:51:20If you could go to the homepage and say,
1:51:22"Show me soccer Twitter right now, boom,
1:51:24"and I'm following 1,000 accounts
1:51:26"that people are talking about really great soccer."
1:51:28Or, "Let me see tech media Twitter
1:51:31"around an Apple event," or something like that.
1:51:34- Yeah, and don't be as simplistic as a hashtag, right?
1:51:37Like what they've got now is if you use
1:51:38the exact right hashtag, you can do it,
1:51:40but only if all the tweets are using the hashtag,
1:51:43whereas it seems, you know, Google web search
1:51:48seems like existence proof that you could build something
1:51:52where you could just say soccer, like you said,
1:51:54and just get, figure it out, like here's some great
1:51:58soccer tweets to follow.
1:52:00- So I think that's what they're trying to get at,
1:52:02And as is typical for Twitter, the worst thing they ever do
1:52:09is explain themselves.
1:52:10So they've done a typically poor job explaining why they're
1:52:15doing any of this stuff.
1:52:16And now with yet another product leader,
1:52:21who knows what they're going to keep working on,
1:52:23what they're not going to keep doing.
1:52:26Although I will say, the new guy in charge of product, Kevin,
1:52:30has been there forever.
1:52:32And if there's anyone I as a user trust to not be a hoser,
1:52:37it's him.
1:52:37So let's, all right.
1:52:41- Can't beat that.
1:52:43- Yeah.
1:52:44- Dan Fromer, thank you very much for your time.
1:52:48- Yeah, thank you.
1:52:49- Where can people find out more from Dan Fromer?
1:52:53- Oh, follow me on Twitter, FromDome or on Instagram
1:52:58if you wanna see cute dog photos, I guess.
1:53:01Yeah, those are the best places to follow me now right now. I'm mostly writing at courts, which is QZ calm
1:53:08But you'll find all the best at from dome linked from linking to the court stuff. Yeah everything everything I do, you know, wherever it is
1:53:17Yeah, let's get you some Instagram followers. Yeah. Oh and they're getting rid of all the spam accounts. So we'll see how many
1:53:25Spam followers I have ends up. I was not following you on Instagram. Oh
1:53:29I'm decent on Instagram. Yeah, it's a little braggy. It's like hey look at me
1:53:35I'm in Tokyo, but so what you know, I think that's what it's for. Yeah, I agree. I like it. Yeah
1:53:40See, I didn't know you were in Tokyo. I'm not right now. I know I'm looking at the picture actually have some really great stories
1:53:48I'm working on from Tokyo that I was reporting in Tokyo that I'll be publishing over the next few weeks
1:53:53weeks. I did two already. One was, did you see that new OK Go video?
1:54:01Yes, the one that was shot from a drone?
1:54:04Yeah. So I went to, so I was in Tokyo, I think now three weeks ago, maybe something like that.
1:54:10So I emailed Honda and said, "Hey, can I ride one of those things?" And so I got to meet the guy who
1:54:17invented it and ride around one of those little scooters.
1:54:20They're called a UniCub.
1:54:21And that was awesome, that was super fun.
1:54:25So if you search, well I don't even know
1:54:27how you would find this.
1:54:28I should put a link on my website
1:54:31to these stories sooner than later.
1:54:33And another thing is, Toshiba, like most Japanese,
1:54:38old Japanese tech companies, is struggling with growth.
1:54:42So they took an old floppy disk factory
1:54:46in the suburbs of Tokyo and turned it into a clean room,
1:54:49indoor lettuce farm.
1:54:51So I toured that and posted a bunch of photos of that.
1:54:54And that was super cool.
1:54:55I had to put on kind of a half bunny suit
1:54:57and sterilize my camera.
1:55:00But it was awesome.
1:55:03- That's a great shot.
1:55:04- Yeah, it was very cool.
1:55:05So that stuff is on my Instagram, I guess.
1:55:09Actually it is.
1:55:10And you can't link through to the stories
1:55:14because Instagram doesn't allow any links.
1:55:16Because they're not listening to Dan Frommer.