Upgrade - 49: Huge Engine of Money

Episode Date: August 11, 2015

Jason returns from his 2,000-mile car trip just in time to discuss the meaning behind Google’s transformation into Alphabet and the future of Twitter. And as always, they answer some of your questions.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 49 today's show is brought to you by hover simplified domain management stamps.com postage on demand and go to meeting where you can make it easy to meet with your team wherever you need to, wherever you are. My name is Mike Hurley, and I am joined by Mr. Jason Snell. Hi, Mike. How are you doing, sir? I'm pretty good. It's been a while. Yeah, welcome back from your little trip.

Thank you. We recorded a little early, and now we're recording a little bit late. And in between, I was gone for 10 days and we drove so far. We drove about 2,000 miles, which, as Federico Fatici demanded a translation, that's about 3,200 kilometers round trip. And that's also 0.011 light seconds for aliens out there listening. So good to know. And I actually wrote a little piece that we can link to in the show notes about navigating using Apple Maps. Because I did use Apple Maps the whole way.

Partially because Google Maps kind of doesn't work right on iOS 9. My phone is running iOS 9. And I noticed some features that may be new features or slightly different features, certainly not features I noticed before. And it, you know, that was, it was useful in going down. We went down some country roads and back roads in Northern California and Oregon and Washington, but we went all the way up to Seattle, just north of Seattle, I think was our northernmost point. And then back down. So a lot of car time.

A lot of car trip time. What's the bing-bong sound? So somebody says that this actually happens in iOS 8 when you're not in Apple Maps, although we were in Apple Maps and we heard it for a while, and then it went away, which was as we approached the intersection where you need to turn, my phone would just go bing bong if you need to turn left and bong bing if you need to turn right, which I thought was really cool and less annoying than the voice. And then it stopped binging and bonging and we never got that sound back. Couldn't figure out how to get that back. Didn't know why it was there.

Perhaps it was a mistake. Perhaps it was a bug. But I found it kind of pleasant to turn off the voice and still have a little sort of audible notification that we were about to turn. So that was, yeah, and there were a bunch of like warning heavy traffic ahead alerts and an offer to reroute. And the iOS 9 contextual searches for things like, you know, restaurants or gas stations or whatever. Those are good. It sure beats the old method of sort of opening Apple Maps and typing restaurants and hoping for something which was never, just never worked. That was actually much better. So that combined with Yelp helped us identify

places to eat kind of along the way. I did have somebody said something snide on Twitter about, well, you're lucky to be alive after you used Apple Maps for that long. And, you know, without getting on too much of a rant, I'm really getting tired of it. This people just making jokes about Apple Maps. Apple Maps is bad in some places and good in other places. But the sense of, like I've heard from some Waze users who really love it, and my father-in-law really loves it. I don't like it.

But I get, from them, I get this sort of like, you know, they're diehards. They love Waze. They've integrated into their lives. It's great. It doesn't work for me. I don't like Waze, but that's fine. Like I said, my father-in-law is kind of obsessed with it. But it's especially the people who are like, well, everybody knows Google Maps is great and Apple Maps is terrible, so you should never use Apple Maps because it's

terrible. Well, first off, map data varies widely. And I've said all along that I live in the Bay Area. Apple actually did a very good job with the map data in the Bay Area because they live here. And I think that it's probably much, I've heard from people, it's much, much worse depending on where you are in the country and in the world. That said, I was also driving back roads in rural Oregon and Washington, and it worked just fine. I have also had Google Maps lead me wrong within a mile of the Google campus, like really wrong. So like driving into somebody's driveway and it thought it the Google campus, like really wrong. So like driving into somebody's driveway and it thought it was a restaurant kind of wrong. So, you know, your map, your map quality may vary. But I will say I spent 2000 miles basically with Apple Maps running and

it was in iOS nine. And it was pretty good. So, you know, your mileage literally may vary. Let's do some follow up. Yeah. So the first piece comes from Matt this week. Matt wrote in to say, after listening to the latest episode of Upgrade, I recommend that you guys read Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton. It's got a lot of insiders. He got a lot of insiders to talk to him and what Matt learned

was a lot about what happened in the early days of Twitter that he did not know about and said that he actually came out of it respecting Ev a lot and without so much respect for Jack. Have you read this book? I haven't read it.

No, it's been one of those things in my mind, especially recently as we've been talking about this stuff, but I just haven't gotten around to it yet. All right, we'll put it on the list. Yeah, I mean, you'd probably get through it quicker than I will if you say you're going to put it on. But I have so many books to read. I bought that Apple book that people recommended about the kind of like when when jobs was gone

time and that's just sitting on a bookshelf i have so many books to read plus i honestly i don't relish reading books about the computer industry non-fiction books about the computer industry because i feel like my book time is i like my book time to be my entertainment time and not my reading this for work time. And I, you know, I read a lot of stuff on the web about computers and technology, but then to read books about the history of companies in the technology industry, it's, it's a lot harder for me to gin up enough enthusiasm to do that. Sure. No, I get that. I totally get that. But but just meet us both saying we'll put it on our lists like even though my list has no books on it and your list has a ton of books on it you're more likely to get to it before i do i think yeah well that's probably true but that's okay i might get

an audiobook maybe we'll see um i'll think about it uh we heard from a bunch of tweetbot users and uh and you know ohot users and others. So we talked about Twitter and we talked about the Twitter apps. You know, we got a nice note from listener Matt who said Different Matt. Matt 2. Matt Beta.

So Matt 2 said he tried the iOS app from Twitter and said it was much better than he remembered it. But I also saw, like on my timeline today, I saw Andy Baio complaining about how slow the Twitter app was on his iPhone 5. It's a problematic app. And somebody else in my Twitter timeline, while I was on vacation, so I don't even have the name, said that that team has like 70 developers or something. Some ridiculous number of people developing the iOS app. And maybe that's the problem is that they, it baffles me how bad Twitter's apps are. And we talked about it quite a bit in the last show. But yeah, who knows? I don't know what's going on there.

Maybe with all the changes, things will change. We know that they just hired the developer of what some consider the best Android iOS or Android Twitter app to presumably work on the Android Twitter app, but who knows? We saw what happened with Tweety, which was a great

mac twitter app and ios twitter yeah joaquin verge i'm gonna say uh he is the developer of falcon which is by far and away the best twitter app for android and has been for a long time yeah that could be good news but i fear with their track record it's bad news, that he'll disappear and nothing will happen. And then in six months or a year he will leave being incredibly frustrated by whatever is bogging down. I don't know, politics, bad management, bad lack of vision. I don't know what's bogging it down. I also got a bunch of questions about why I think Twitter for Mac is bad. And the show isn't long enough for me to go into all the details. But I will say, it crashes, it gets super slow and sluggish a lot of the time, it eats up disk space sometimes by saving just huge

amounts of junk to a cache folder that doesn't need to be that huge. Clicking on a tweet will, I would say one time out of five will get you an action on the tweet above it or below it. Um, because it's just lost track of what tweet that can be really awkward when you're trying to favorite something for later or retweet something, or you're clicking to see a thread about a particular tweet and you get a thread about a tweet that was near it. Um, it doesn't support the muting feature that they added. It doesn't support the muting feature that they added. It doesn't support the quoted tweet format that they added. The list goes on. It's bad.

And yet I use it because there are things in it that are great. And the reason that they're in, they're great. And it's the notifications tab is the reason I use it. And the reason that it's only in that I use it and it's in there is because those aren't in the API for third parties to use. So I, I, third parties cannot, they can try to hack it, but you know, the, the Twitter app will show me when somebody favorites something, when somebody retweets something, there's a lot of detail about what's happening on Twitter to the stuff that I'm writing that I don't see unless I'm using the Twitter app. Does it do the like favorite a tweet you were mentioned in type stuff as well as on the iOS app? It doesn't do that.

That's one of the many things that it doesn't yet do. The quoted tweet thing kills me now because that's the official way you quote a tweet in Twitter and it shows you the tweet that was quoted and Twitterific on iOS has it and it's just not in the Mac app. I'm not sure if people are paying attention to the Mac app or not. Anyway, it's bad. Using Twitter for the Mac sounds a lot like using Tweetbot for iPad. Yeah, it's, yeah, yeah. And the thing is that the, I use Twitter on my Mac. I'm at my Mac a lot and I use Twitter on my Mac and there are no good Mac a lot, and I use Twitter on my Mac, and there are no good options

at this point. The native Twitter app, the platform app, is the best of a bad lot right now. I don't like TweetBot for Mac. Twitterific for Mac has not been updated in years, and I don't really want to use the Twitter website. I'm not a fan of being forced into a web browser in order to use a social network. That's why I don't use Facebook very much is that I just don't go to Facebook. And the idea of keeping a Twitter window open to the website in order to click around and see things, it's just, you know, I like the keyboard shortcuts. There's lots of reasons. Anyway, so what a mess to restate the feedback we got and just say, what a mess.

It's a mess. I think that's enough on Twitter follow-up for now. We have more Twitter coming later about news because as we correctly predicted, the moment we talk about something and save that episode for a few days, then things start to happen. We got a very nice piece of follow-up from a listener. Right, who will remain nameless. Yes, which is probably best in these kinds of scenarios.

And they had something very nice to say. Apparently they said that Upgrade got them through a difficult time, which is a really nice thing to see. I think recently I've been kind of saying this kind of stuff on Upgrade. Sorry, on Analog. This is Upgrade. Hello, Jason. Hello. I've been getting a little bit jaded on certain parts of the internet as of late. There are just some things that are grating on me a little

and getting this kind of stuff uh is very very nice to see to try and understand your evident impacts on somebody's life in more than just an entertainment value uh but this person cited that my british accent my soothing british accent british accent and jason's vast knowledge and endless anecdotes which are actually I didn't realize but as soon as this person put it into context the two things that I love most about you in regards to this show I like endless anecdotes can be uh read two ways by the way it can be read as a an endless stream of different anecdotes it can also be read as anecdotes that go on forever I I assume the former uh for the listener and myself um and and they said that those those

things uh helped them get through a tough time and uh we are very sorry that a person went through that tough time um we're happy to have helped somehow yeah that was very nice and i i want to amplify your point which is there there's a lot of, I have moments where I'm opening my web browser or like my email client or my Twitter app, whichever one I'm using that day. And I have a moment of like, well, let's see what nasty thing somebody has sent or said, right? Like there's just like this feeling of like, well, let's wade in and you almost expect just the horrible negativity um and uh it's it's very nice it's very easy to let negative things collect um and it's nice when you see something that's just a a good story about a difficult

situation but it's a it was a warm fuzzy thing so thank you to that listener yeah i mean there are i get nice things said to me uh every day as i'm sure you do too oh yeah absolutely but there's something that comes from a nice thing that's really out of the ordinary and this was that and this was for sure uh michael wrote in about obituaries obituaries uh we'll put a link in the show notes to a nice new york times story that i think this is the one that i remember reading and couldn't come up with about obituaries. Obituaries! We'll put a link in the show notes to a nice New York Times story that I think this is the one that I remember reading and couldn't come up with when we were talking about it. That is about the pre-writing of stories, especially obituaries at the New York Times. So you can read more about it if you're interested in the subject of people writing

these stories way ahead of time and the kind of euphemisms they use. Like, you know, we're updating your biographical information for our database. Yeah, we're writing your obituary. The other thing related to this was we got a nice thing from, also from Michael, I believe, that was about, it was a good story and I didn't verify whether it's true, but I want it to be true, so I'm just going to go with it, which is, this part is true.

The Mercury Music Prize was given out. It was given out to, well, I'm not going to spoil the story. It was given out. A BBC news announcer was reading the script, But when she got to the name of the winner of the Mercury Music Prize, instead of the actual name, it said, the XX, just sort of like as a placeholder. And so she sort of got flummoxed and apologized and said, well, they gave out the music prizes and moved on. And as Michael pointed out, had she been a little more clued up on her modern music, she would have realized that the prize winners that year were indeed indie pop band, the XX. But this is the standard BBC news placeholder. Apparently, because we were talking about TK and Heads and H-E-D and Deck, D-E-K and things like

that. So apparently this was a conflict. I don't know if the XX is actually specifically named because of that phenomenon or whether it was just a coincidence, but that's a funny moment where, you know, if you, yeah. So if you want really good publicity for your band or whatever in the news media, you might not want to call yourself like head TK because that will be really confusing

we had some feedback in regards to audition and logic yeah yeah so we talked we talked about this in the context of um we had a i think an ask upgrade about uh why logic and not audition and um i one of the things I mentioned was, although I'm not opposed to the idea of subscription services for software, Logic was $200 and Adobe Audition was $20 a month. So very rapidly, it would become much more expensive. And that that was something, if you're starting from zero,

that would be something to take into account. Now, somebody sent me a link. And again, I just was on vacation. Somebody sent me a link saying that you can still buy a standalone copy of Adobe Audition. I searched around and couldn't find out any information about that being true. If it is true, Adobe certainly doesn't want anybody to know about it. They want you to pay for Creative Cloud in order to get Audition. We did get a nice note from listener Brandon, We did get a nice note from listener Brandon, who said that that discussion of GarageBand and when you switch to Logic and take the hit in terms of the learning curve and comparing Logic to the other sound products that you could go to, audio editing, he says he's facing that with Aperture being dead and struggling to learn a new app that feels foreign and doesn't seem to offer anything significantly better than what he'd been productive in for so long.

I'd say that's absolutely true. Aperture is going to work for a while so you could stay there. But this is the big difference, right? Like if Logic was announced as being at the end of its life, I would start having that moment like, well, pretty soon I'm going to have to switch and learn something new. Once you're using dead software for your livelihood, it's a very difficult situation and you have to grapple with it as Brandon is doing now. I will say for people like Brandon who are used to using Aperture, I can't help with the learning curve. There are lots of great online training that can help with the learning curve. But

what I can say is the Adobe Creative Cloud Photo photo bundle is by far the best deal that Adobe offers for $10. And I'm, I'm paying for this for $10 a month, you get Photoshop and Lightroom. And, um, I don't even use Lightroom. Um, and I consider $10 a month worth it for, for the latest version of Photoshop. Um, but you also get Lightroom. It's the photography bundle, and it's $10 a month. It's actually a pretty great deal. Everything else they sell is much more expensive than that, including Audition. All the other apps are sort of $20 per. You can do, I think it's $40 or $50 a month for everything in the suite. But this bundle is a great deal at $10 a month. So I will recommend that as something to try. But yeah, learning curve after your software

gets discontinued is awful. And I feel for you, Brandon. I can't believe that Photoshop is only $10 a month. I know, right? That doesn't seem right. I feel like they missed off a zero. Yeah, they made a mistake. I mean, it is an annuity.

I mean, you are paying $120 a year to Adobe for as long as you want to keep using Photoshop. But that one's worth it. If it was $20 a month, I would probably consider going elsewhere. But for $10 a month, I didn't even hesitate. I said, is Photoshop worth $120 a year? To me, given all the things I do with it, the answer was absolutely yes. And so that was not a problem. I mean things I do with it, the answer was absolutely yes. And so that was not, it was not a problem. I mean, I never use it. I mean, I have a version of Pixelmator that I bought

a year or two ago that does the job for me because I find Photoshop to be too confusing and too complex for what I need it for. And I vary, I probably open Pixelmator a couple of times a year. Sure. And I've got Acorn and I like it, but I have been using Photoshop since I was in college. And I know all those tools. I know how it works. And so having it around, and what I discovered was that my Retina iMac,

the version of Photoshop that I have in a box, doesn't support Retina. And that was the moment where I thought, okay, well, I'm going to pay for it then. I'm going to pay for the new version because it'll actually use the Retina pixels on my display. And I haven't regretted it. You would be burning your eyes trying to look at the older version with that beautiful display. Indeed. This is actually the last piece of follow-up slash the first piece of follow-out this week um next week is the one year anniversary of relay fm um as jason mentioned before the show which is also episode 50 of

upgrade and episode 100 of clockwise which is it's a big week so beautiful it is indeed a very big week um and we are me and steven are going to be doing a live streamed q a um at 1 15 p.m eastern time on august 18th which is our uh one year anniversary uh we would love your questions for that q a uh you will be able to hashtag use the hashtag hashtag relay qa umQA I'm putting a blog post in our show notes as well this week so you can see that. We will be offering it on demand I guess in our

B-Sides feed, which I'll also put a link to in our show notes in case you've not seen it before. In that B-Sides feed at the moment you will find the special where Jason and Stephen spoke about space for about an hour. If you want to listen to that, you should because it's fun. But we'll be

taking some questions. We'd love it if you could contribute with any questions or anything you'd like to know about Real AFM as we celebrate our one year anniversary. And that is one of a few little things we have planned for next week to celebrate. Nice.

So you can do that. Right, should we take our first break for this week's episode? I think that's a great idea. Excellent. This week, this show is brought to you by our friends over at GoToMeeting from Citrix. Now, I want you to take a moment to paint yourself a little image in your mind. Allow me to paint a picture with these words. If you try and think about how much time your company or your own business, the company you're in or the business that you own, how much time and money

must be spent trying to hold meetings. I mean, you think about all the hassle that goes into that, like trying to get everybody in the same place at the same time, like trying to synchronize all those calendars and making sure that that person can get from that meeting on time because this person's across town and all that kind of stuff. You've got to get all that into place. And once you've done that, you've got to set up the actual meeting rooms. So you've got to find a meeting room available. And once you've done that, you've got to get the projector set up and you've got to get all the tech set up. Then you've got to be able to get all the refreshments sorted. Once you've done that, you've got to get the projector set up and you've got to get all the text set up. Then you've got to be able to get all the refreshments sorted. Once you've done all of this, you've gone through all of this hassle, all this aggravation, you can then hold your meeting.

But what if I could tell you about a way where you don't need to do that? Like you can just say to somebody, click this link at this time and you'll be in the meeting. Like that would be fantastic, right? And this is what Citrix GoToMeeting can do. It is the smarter way to meet. GoToMeeting makes it easy to meet with your team whenever you need to, wherever you are. Because with GoToMeeting, you can meet any computer, tablet or smartphone even. You can use any of those devices. You don't need to think about any travel expenses. You don't need to think about the hassle of travel or the time of travel, none of that

you can join your team anybody in your team can join the meeting by just clicking a link, no sign ups needed no speed bumps are in the way you can turn on your webcam as well and with HD quality video it's like being in the room of everyone you can also share screens to present

review and get feedback all in real time. So with GoToMeeting, you'll be able to see what everyone sees. Everyone will be able to see what you can see. And you and your team can get on the same page and get going quickly. You can stop wasting time with the crazy logistics of trying to arrange meetings. Go and sign up for GoToMeeting today. You can try it for free for 30 days.

There is nothing to lose. Just go to gotomeeting.com, G-O-T-O, meeting.com, and click the Try It Free button, and you'll have yourself online with your first meeting up and running in just minutes. Once again, that is gotomeeting.com for your free 30-day trial. Thank you so much to GoToMeeting for supporting this show. Yay. So you mentioned Twitter.

We spoke about Twitter. Yeah, let's talk about Twitter more. Because it ended up we were very right in our feeling that we were right to cover this um last week oh man we we hit we hit it right at just the right time as it turned out we were worried our timing was off but it turned out to be on because i wanted to talk about them because there was a lot of interesting stuff going on but i was concerned you know as you will have heard from listening to the show i was concerned that by recording it in advance some stuff might have happened some stuff has happened but luckily not really too much in the time that has been an issue for us.

So we were talking about Jack and whether we thought Jack was the right move for CEO. Right, Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, CEO of Square, former CEO of Twitter. Yes. Just to set the table there. And he has expressed an interest, an acting CEO of Twitter, right? He's the interim acting CEO of Twitter. He is I-CEO. Yeah, but somebody said, somebody within Twitter said,

well, we don't consider this to be a position that can be filled by somebody who is doing other things, which was this code for, like, Jack, you got to quit square if you want the job and um and jack's response was something like well i'm not going to quit square and i do want the job i think is basically how it went so so the question was going to be well what happens now and we got some of that last week while i was in the car so tell me what happened last week uh chris saka who we also spoke about last week we cited his post about about uh about what twitter should do next strategically with its product and who has been people have have suggested uh that this post may have been the reason that um got dick costello fired basically or was the reason Dick Costolo stepped down, or whatever was the reason Twitter gave.

Sucker issued a selection of tweets, the most important being that he believes that Jack should be CEO, Adam Bain, who is the current COO, I believe, should become president, and Ev Williams should become chairman of the board. That's his overall feeling. So you should have Jack as CEO, Adam Bain to president and COO,

and Ev should become executive chairman of the board. This was Saka's overall feeling. There's many tweets. I put a link to a TechCrunch article that has links to them in there. But basically, he thinks, for whatever reason, Saka believes that this is the right move. He thinks that Dorsey is the one with the product vision to be able to go in and do that again. And I just listened to the talk show with John Gruber and his guest, Matthew Panzarino, and they talk about this as well. It's also a good listen if you are interested in this topic, which I hope you are because you're listening to us right now. That's right.

If you're not interested in this topic, you should have forwarded to the next – well, we don't have chapter markers yet. in this topic, you should have forwarded to the next well, we don't have chapter markers yet, but yet, but you should forward to the next bit about Google and not be here. So if you are interested, then you should probably read that article.

So a little table of contents, a little index happening in the middle of the show there. It's not a vertical, really. It's more like a meta feature of the podcast where i appear in a future in a mic in a future beta what we'll do is there'll be a sound there'll be like a ding sound or a bing bong perhaps and then a german voice will appear because i just have decided it will be a german man and he will say he will explain the structure of the rest of the show. You are effectively the Clippy of this podcast now.

You know that, don't you? You appear to be doing a podcast. Can I help you with that? You appear to be in your first of two topics. Can I help you? So I think at this point, whether or not Jack is actually good for the role or the right person for the role, there is now a lot of public opinion

swelling that is the right choice and chris saka doing what he's done is now painting investor opinion so which is part of his game all along i think yep yes yes what a great way but i will say i think i think saka is is um legitimately a believer in the power of Twitter and the potential of that company. And like we said on the last show, I really do believe that Jack Dorsey cares about Twitter and has some feelings about what Twitter could do better. And like I said, I don't know the personalities and I don't know the inside of how Twitter is working and how it's broken. So I can't say, I'm not going to be one of those people that says, well, he should totally get the job because, you know, reasons. Because it's way more complicated than that. There may be somebody who's a much better choice.

But what I would say is, somebody who cares about Twitter needs to be in charge of Twitter. Somebody who is willing to make big changes and fix what has been broken and get this company that's product has been really complacent for too long, moving in some direction somewhere. And, you know, we might not all even like the direction it goes, but it needs to go somewhere because it just seems mired and has been mired for the last few years. And Jack Dorsey does seem to care about it. And so, you know, I would rather have somebody like Jack Dorsey than, you know, Dick Costolo. But he might not be the best choice, but he's definitely a high profile choice as the co-founder and as being, you know, mooted for the job by people who probably know better than we do about the details.

So I think now that now this public opinion is, I think, that Jack is the right person. I think that part of it is people just like the beauty of the story. You know, again, all of us on the outside, people who don't have inside knowledge of Jack, of Twitter, of what happened when Dick Costolo was there, what's going on with the product, all of these product people left. That's the other thing that happened after we recorded that episode is that even when we recorded it, I know at least one product person had left. But then it was reported that like three more product people at Twitter had had left that week that was like this um exodus of people from twitter and uh so you know something something needs to happen but we don't know unless you're one of the people who knows the inside it's all just a guess you know it's it's none of us really know unless you're on the inside. I think that just what is, I think, clear at the moment, to me anyway, is that whether Dorsey is the right man to solve the problems, I think he is the right man to be there to, or the right person, I should say uh he's the right person now to be there to help do a public image reset uh from costolo's time and you know we talk about costolo in bad terms

neither of us really know uh how much control he had however, it was under his time that things went really bad. But the best we can do is just be like, well, he may have been who was put in place to be the person at the time. He may have never been the right person

or the wrong person. And that may not have been his fault decision or anything like that. However, that all we know is what we can see. And all we could see was that the product became worse during the time that he was CEO. Yeah. And that they seemed to miss a lot of opportunities and kind of lose their way in terms of what they were doing. That

they made some tough decisions early on that were unpopular but could have been mitigated by having results from those decisions. And a lot of those results never seemed to come. And, yeah. But we don't know. What we do know is the outcome, right? We know what Twitter has not done over the last few years. That much is clear. It's pretty clear that they've missed a lot of opportunities the last few years. That much is clear. It's pretty clear that they've missed a lot of opportunities the

last few years. So something else that happened really interestingly, I think, yesterday as we record this, on Monday the... It's Tuesday. Oh, it happened on Monday the 10th. Yeah, when we should have been recording but weren't. So Dorsey spent $875,000 to buy 31,000 shares in Twitter. And he sent out a tweet which had a picture or had a link to his SEC filing. And the tweet just said, investing in Twitter's future. So he bought a massive chunk of stock. Now, he already owns a massive chunk of stock now he already owns a massive chunk of stock anyway and this is actually a small amount compared to the overall amount of stock that he owns already

um but this came at a time where over the last uh he owns 22 million shares and he bought another 31 000 so you know not huge um it's symbolic but it that's that's exactly it it was the symbol because over the last couple of weeks uh since the earnings call twitter's stock has just been tumbling um and they are now below IPO level. I think they IPO'd at $40 a share, something like that. And now they're in the mid to high 20s region at the moment. And so this is kind of, there have been a lot of people talking this week, who's going to buy them?

A lot of people have been pointing at Google and we'll talk about that in a minute. But lots of people have been eyeing up potential companies to buy Twitter. So I think that what Dorsey is trying to show here is that he believes in the company and wants the company to remain. So he's putting his money where where his mouth is yeah it that's the symbolism of it is that companies that are going that are falling apart people are selling their shares so they can get they can cash out before it all falls apart and he's sending a signal like i'm investing in twitter's future it does feel like he's also sending a signal saying i want to be a part of twitter's future right oh 100 yeah it's it's

this is as much a pr move for jack as a ceo as it is him believing in it like i think you can hold those two things as exclusive but they are mutually exclusive like they are these are things that he believes both of these in my opinion it is a pr move to try and show that he's the right visionary for the role but also he is genuinely saying that he he believes in it and wants it to stick around yeah yeah i guess i guess we'll see what happens something something is happening at twitter right change is happening at Twitter, right? Change is happening at Twitter. It's happening right now. We've seen it. There may be jockeying for position.

It may not be exactly what we expect. But we know, and with those departures too, we know that there's a lot of change happening there. And I got to say, again, as an outsider, I think it's good because it's change. Because what Twitter has been doing has not been working. So change it up, you know, and hopefully they will make good decisions and they will change it in good ways. But they got to change it. Yeah, I think that this is the, I continue that I think that Dorsey is the right person because I think that they need a CEO that has a name to them. Promoting another type like Costello who is not known to the wider community is probably a bad move. Especially when now they need to be able to attract talent to head up some of their C-level positions, I guess.

Yeah, it's a major platform company. And the job of the CEO isn't just to be the strategist in some ways. The job is to build a team that can execute on the strategy and formulate the strategy. And that's a job. That's a big job. And so I don't feel like you need somebody big because of PR reasons, because it needs to be recognizable and send a message to the strategy. And that's a job, that's a big job. And so I don't feel like you need somebody big because of PR reasons, because it needs to be recognizable and send a message to the shareholders, although that may be true too. I think the big thing is you need somebody who is of a stature

in Silicon Valley, that they are going to be able to build a team and recruit people and get a really good team in place and energize the people who are already there. And they need to know the landscape. So I think that's the most important thing is if you've got somebody who nobody ever heard of, that's the danger there is that this is the captain of the ship. And you need somebody like when Yahoo hired Marissa Mayer, right? I mean, you want somebody that people know and who's worked with lots of good people all over the industry. And that's what you want in a job of a CEO of a company as important as Twitter. Should we take a break? I think that's a good idea. This week's episode is also brought

to you by Hover, the best way to buy and manage domain names. When I come to think about buying a domain name, Hover.com is the first and only place that I think to go to. When you have an idea for a project, naming it can be difficult because you want to be able to get a name that you want quickly. Once you think of something, once you think of a name for the project, you want to be able to get that domain name as fast as possible. You don't want to have to wade through a bunch of options and you just want to be able to check if the domain is available. If it is, get all the permutations of it that you want and get out. If it isn't, you want to know as quickly as possible so you can get back to the naming stage. I don't want to be faced with a thousand of screens when

I'm buying domain names, whether I'm trying to buy them quickly or not. I just don't want to have to deal with it. It is a hostile environment in which to buy these types of things. You've selected what you want, and you want to get to the checkout. Really, you want that to be a couple of clicks at most. You don't want to have to be pushing things away left, right, and center just to try and be able to give a company money. And Hover believes in this, and they make sure that their whole process, their whole checkout process, their domain management process, all of that is as simple as possible to try and keep what can be quite a confusing thing as easy as possible for you so you'll be happy as a customer because that's important to them. You just enter the phrase that you want when you go to hover.com.

You enter the domain that you want, and they'll show you what's available. They have all of the TLDs you'd expect. Their.com domains start at just $12.99 and all of their domains include whoisprivacy.com where available for free. So if a domain provides whoisprivacy.com, hover.com will give it to you. You can uncheck to say you don't want it if you don't want it, but they will check that box for you because why wouldn't you want your private information private? Hover have a no hold, no wait, no transfer telephone support policy for their customer support, which is really awesome. When you call Hover, you'll be talking to an actual human being. But if you prefer, you can contact them via email. They also have documentation and guides on their website as well if that's the type of stuff that you like they have their valet service where

they'll switch domains for you no matter how many you have so you don't have to worry about any of the hassle of trying to switch from your current provider they do volume discounts for bulk domain renewal they have custom email addresses with storage and forwarding as well, and just so much more. You can get yourself 10% off your first purchase at Hover.com by using the code FOLLOWOUT, or one word, at checkout. So thank you so much to Hover.com for supporting this show. You can get 10% off your first purchase with the code FOLLOWOUT. Thank you so much to Hover for their support today. Thank you, Hover.

Hooray! So, Alphabet. This was one of the most surprising tech news stories I have ever seen, I think. Basically, okay, so

people are saying Google renamed themselves to Alphabet yesterday, which isn't technically what they did. They created New Google, which is run by a company called Alphabet. Google. This is going to get real complicated real fast. Okay, yeah. From here on out, we will refer to it as old Google and new Google. Okay.

So old Google no longer exists. Now, old Google was a company which owned all of the things that you know of as Google, search, apps, owns Android, YouTube, Nest, all of those things. That company has gone away. What stands in its place is Alphabet. Alphabet owns the new Google, which is now going to be run by new CEO Sundar Pichai, which we'll get to in a minute. Alphabet itself is going to be run by CEO Sergey Brin and Larry Page as president.

And Alphabet is a collection of companies, the largest of which is the new Google. So, for example… This is a separation of sort of like Larry and Sergey's big playground, which is Google. And now what we've got is Larry and Sergey's big playground is Alphabet. And one of the things in the playground is Google. What a great way of putting it, yeah. Right? Because, you know, we've always heard about Larry and Sergey are like,

oh, we've got big ideas and crazy things that we're going to do, and we're going to buy this, and we're going to integrate that, and we're going to invest in this. And then there was, like, the Google that is search engine and Android. And what this does that I really like is separate those. So they're not like independent of each other. The playground, Google's in the playground, but like we no longer have this concept

where there's like, there's Google and then there's like the googly part of Google. Now we have Alphabet and then Google is one of the things in Alphabet. Yep. So for example, Sundar Pichai, who is the CEO of the new Google, he will actually report into the CEO of Alphabet, which is bright. Which is weird for a CEO to report to someone.

Well, I mean, CEOs report to the board, right? I mean, yeah. And actually, my president back at IDG reported to the CEO of the parent company. I mean, that's how it works. These are like divisions. These are wholly owned and operated companies within a portfolio. And so that's the structure, which is actually kind of nice, right? Because now Sundar is the CEO of Google and needs to make the decisions about what Google does.

And Google is very clearly like, this is your territory. You run this. And then the big boss, instead of having a board, they may have a board, but basically they answer to Larry and Sergey, which is good. I think that's clear. There is still some weirdness, though, in what is part of the new google yeah so like some of the stuff they took out so they took out nest um which why now when you look back you can see why they didn't rename some of the companies they bought more recently yeah well nest yeah i feel like that was always their intent was not to subsume it into Google and that they wanted Nest and the Nest brand to continue and they wanted their home efforts to be around Nest.

And there was always that confusion. I think we talked about it during the Google I.O. keynote aftermath was this confusion about like the home networking stuff that Google is putting forth that's going to be a part of Android. stuff that Google is putting forth that's going to be a part of Android and then like what the Nest home networking program is and are they the same? Are they not the same? Why would they not be the same? So that one that one makes a lot of sense, right? And I think actually will be great for Nest because then Tony Fidel, you know, Tony Fidel runs Nest and he reports to Larry and Sergey. Tony Fidel runs Nest, and he reports to Larry and Sergey. He has nothing to do with Sundar, and he can make his own way, and he can start counteracting the complaints from people saying, you know, why would I want to buy home products from Google, and they're going to take all my information and feed them into Google? Because now he can say, nope, that's not our business.

That's not why we're here. We don't give any of that to Google. That's not our company. And that's good. And that may have been true before, but it's clearer now that Nest is Nest and not Google. But then parts like the Google Ventures and Google Capital are now just Ventures and Capital. They're going to be part of Alphabet. Google X is now X Labs. Right, which is the crazy, that's the crazy far out stuff, you know, robots and self-driving cars and things like that. And then Google Fiber is now just Alphabet Fiber or just Fiber? I think that's one of the questions is, are these going to be rebranded?

Is Google Ventures going to become Alphabet Ventures or is it just going to be Google Ventures and it's not part of Google? It's Google Ventures and it's a different thing. I think there's some questions over time. I'd be madness if they did. And we started thinking of Alphabet as the thing. But they, you know, Larry and Sergey have said, you know, that Alphabet is not necessarily a consumer facing brand. If that's true, maybe Google Ventures will come up with its own name. You know, that's not Google Ventures. That's some other, you know, indecipherable Silicon Valley venture capital company name. I don't know.

That part, I don't know. Yeah. And so. Have you ever had the alphabet fiber cereal it's not very good never heard of it alphabet fiber I've had it's not real I just made it up but you know it sounds like cereal it's it's fiber it's very high and it's high in fiber it's bran but shaped in

the in the in the shape of letters alphabet fiber or just alphabetty spaghetti okay if it's whole grain then it would be alphabet fiber spaghetti so um youtube and android are remaining part of google this i don't understand well youtube i understand because youtube is an advertising play you know it's it's all about the video advertising and so uh that makes sense to me that it's part of google because and it's so tightly integrated now even though they're trying to unwind it a little bit in the end it's about programmatic advertising and what is google but but advertising at this point it's youtube has had its own ceo for a long time that's like something that i find so it's just very i actually weirdly more

understand android being a part of google uh than youtube being part of google which is funny because i think you're the other way around some of some of this might be about the way that they're technically intertwined and some of this may be about their feeling about the directions these businesses are going in. And, you know, I don't know, because again, not on the inside, but I look at this and think, you know, they may say, look, Google as a search engine, text ad product, that's kind of going to fade away eventually, but, you know, it's going to move to video and what's video. Well, it's YouTube and we've got YouTube and they're all part of the same thing and they're all part of the same infrastructure. And even though users see them as different products and they're actually, you know, they've made that

more separate. You don't need it. I think you don't need the Google login to post hateful comments on YouTube anymore. That's coming. They're splitting those apart. And it, they may view that as being essentially the same business that like this part of the business and this part of the business are different but they're not that different they really go together um in a way and android is the same question it's like i look at that and think well android is i agree with you kind of weird to have be part of Google? At the same time, though, why does Android exist? Why does it exist? It's free, right? I mean, they put huge amount of engineering resources in it, and they give it away. Why do they do that? It's because they want to capture a percentage

of the market that they can use as part of Google's strategy for advertising, because they never wanted to live in a world where Apple dominated or Microsoft dominated mobile advertising because they could be locked out. And now they can't be locked out because they give this thing away and they're integrated into it. Well, by that standard, Android absolutely is part of Google. And if you separated Android into Android Incorporated, wouldn't that be weird to have this company that just created this thing that they gave away

and was always operated at a massive loss because the whole goal was to make profits happen somewhere else? So I think it fits. Also, I saw somebody on Twitter say that this is just a this is just a big tax thing this is this is all about like things like like taxes and and maybe saving on taxes and uh also being able to kind of like send messages to investors and the public about how profitable the core part of google is versus the the playground But I am not a tax attorney, a corporate tax attorney, so I don't know about that conspiracy theory. It doesn't seem right to me because it's all going to be owned by Alphabet in the same way that it was all owned by Google.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it may be structured differently. Who knows? But I love it from a clarity standpoint, though. I mean, I've said on this show many times and on other shows, and I've written about it. I have for a long time talked about the two Googles, right? There's the Google that is what we know as Google, what we think of as Google, which is search and Android and YouTube. And then there's the what I just called earlier the playground. It's the stuff where Larry and Sergey are trying to imagine what the next big things are and use the money from search advertising to fund investment in these other crazy areas, figuring that they may be able to control the future of the car or the future of robots or the future of biotech or whatever it is, the bets that they're placing. And so there's this really down to business, money-making, run by lawyers, hard to work with company that's called Google. And then there's the big ideas company. And then you throw in acquisitions like Nest and you're like, okay, I don't even know,

is that in the box? Is that out of the box? box what's that about and now i feel like this is much clearer that there is this money huge engine of money that is driven by advertising which is google and then there's all the other stuff and all the other stuff is the speculative stuff that is in the playground, is in Larry and Sergey's playground. And that includes Nest, which I think is a bet on smart home technology is essentially what that is. That is a bet about investing in the future of something just like the self-driving cars are, just with a product. So it's a little closer to reality than something like the self-driving cars are. just with a product. So it's a little closer to reality than something like the self-driving cars are. So I like that. This is them making clear that Google is not one thing and that there are at least two and maybe many more parts of Google that have totally different purposes.

So I like that about it too, because that's been true. It's always been true. And yet people got confused. They're like, why is a search engine building self-driving cars and investing in robots and hiring all the robot engineers? The answer is the search engine wasn't doing that. That was Larry and Sergey who want to invest in robots and self-driving cars and not the poor people working on the search engines and on Android who don't get to play with robots. They just have to work on their software. So now that's Sundar's part of the business. He can worry about it. There's one thing that I wonder about this, that this decoupling of Google from everything else makes me think that Alphabet could make more Facebook-like acquisitions where they buy a company because they think it's

interesting or for whatever reason, but then it doesn't have to, like it can do a similar thing to Google, but it doesn't have to be rolled into Google. Well, Nest is the model for this. Nest, I really believe that Google looked at Nest, that Larry and Sergey looked at Nest and said, I really like what they're doing. Tony Fidel is really brilliant. They could probably change the world if they weren't struggling as a startup and got a huge influx of cash. Why don't we just buy them and give them some money and let them really blow people away with their technology? I think that's the story of them buying Nest. So they could do that again. away with their technology. I think that's the story of them buying Nest. So they could do that again. And you're right. I think this gives Google the

freedom to acquire things that are core to Google, and it gives Alphabet the freedom to acquire things that are not core to Google, but that are like good bets and that go beyond the Ventures thing, right? Because Ventures, they could just, you know, invest in something. But this is like buying it just outright. You know, this is not a good example. But if they said, oh, we get it now, the, you know, TiVo is really great. We're just going to buy TiVo. And there wouldn't be the question of like, how does TiVo fit in with Google? The answer is, well, no, we just bought it because we want to do something. You know, we want it to do whatever TV things. Like I said, it's a bad example, but just to pick a company. That could happen, right? That kind of thing

could happen. And it doesn't get all muddied in, what does that mean for Google? It doesn't mean anything for Google. If Google buys it, you'll know it's Google buying it. If Alphabet buys it, you'll know it's not Google buying it so a lot of people are asking the question could alphabet buy twitter now sure they could sure they really could it would not shock me if if if you saw alphabet make some you, this happens a lot, where companies buy other companies because they don't want their competition to get them. Not because... I mean, Nest, I feel like, in some ways,

that's what Nest was. Yeah, that's what I meant by the Facebook model as well. Like, Facebook or Instagram or WhatsApp to protect Facebook. To protect Facebook, right. Yeah, Facebook wanted Instagram not because Facebook needed Instagram to be in Facebook, but because Instagram needed to not belong to their competitors. Like, was he bought Oculus because Facebook missed on mobile and they should have been ahead of mobile.

So he bought what he thought was the next big thing. He bought the leader in that. So he bought Oculus, which is very smart. No, that's a great – Oculus is a great example of somebody's going to snap this up and we think it's big. And, you know, if anybody's going to own it, It's us. But in sometimes, I think smart business people look at acquisitions and realize that the dream of taking some amazing product and integrating it into your product is a little bit false. And that really, you've got two choices, which is you can swallow it whole and break it up into pieces and hopefully use the pieces. And that means the technology, the patents, the people to build something good for your core business. Or you realize this thing works because of the way it's structured and we just want it to stay around

and we can help it be better and we can integrate it a little bit. I feel like those are more realistic acquisition scenarios and that the second one doesn't really happen unless you are a company with just money coming out your ears, which Facebook, Google, Apple, those companies actually, they could just buy whatever. Most companies are much more tactical and Apple actually behaves, I think, more like a small company that tactically buys things. It's rarer that they make a huge purchase. And we'll have to see how the Beats acquisition goes in the long term, right? I mean, this is one of those arguments.

In the end, did Apple get much out of Beats other than breaking the music service down to its constituent parts and trying to integrate it into iTunes? And that may turn out to be not much. Or it may turn out to be something iTunes. And that may turn out to be, you know, not much. Or it may turn out to be something good, but it may turn out to be nothing because it's hard to integrate those things. But there's this whole scenario of like, let's just buy it and keep it over there. And then, you know, it'll be friendly to us because we own it.

And if one of them wins, we've already, we got both. Yeah. You know, you're got both. Yeah. You're hedging your bets. Instagram. Oculus is a good bet on the future. Instagram is a great hedge against your competition taking this thing that is great and using it to compete with you. That's a great example of that.

Facebook's like, well, what is one of the things that is incredibly powerful for our service? It's photos. What's a danger? Well, Instagram is really great for photos too. Well, if we buy Instagram and kill it, that doesn't solve anything. And if we buy Instagram and integrate it into Facebook, that doesn't really solve anything. But we could just buy Instagram and make the links with Facebook really good and let Instagram be great on its own. And Alphabet is structured like that. It's totally structured like that. So could they buy Twitter? If they think that Twitter is a good idea that just needs to be under new management and have more cash to fulfill their vision, then maybe so. It's a public

company so it gets complicated. I worry that Twitter is just too far down maybe so. It's a public company, so it gets complicated. I worry that Twitter is just too far down the road. There's been too much water under the bridge for Twitter to be something that could get sucked in. I think Twitter would have to be laid pretty low. I think that confidence in it in the stock market would have to decrease, and for it to be something where somebody would want to pick it up and say well we think we can rehab this and there's good stuff here and twitter doesn't seem to be in that place right now so alphabet it's crazy it is crazy i think it's very exciting though ostomir in the chat room said uh i'm still waiting to see if the next acquisition will pay off for Apple. That's a great example of something that's just getting broken down and absorbed. And in the end, Apple is as much next, Apple's technologies are basically next technologies more than their Apple technologies

from that period anyway. But I'm with you. Alphabet, I think it's a great idea. And we'll see how they put it into practice. But I like the clarity of it. I like that. I mean, look, Google conspiracy theories will always exist. But it feels like there's some clarity of communication, like this is what Google is now. And this is what Google is not now. the crazy self-driving cars or investing in robots or in you know building an army of drones or whatever um to have that not be google i think it's good i think it's good to be clear that that's not google that is larry and sergey building drones in to you know as part of their private army yeah and i genuinely believe that they will want to be as not involved in Google as possible. Like, just so boring, go away. I want to go to the moon. And I think that's where they are.

Just give me money. I think that's kind of it, right, with Google. It's like, look, we built a machine. Accidentally, at Stanford, we built a machine that prints money. Keep writing the checks, folks. Sundar, keep it going. We'll check in. Love what you're doing. Love the product. Don't get me wrong. Love the product, but just keep writing the checks so that we can go play over here in this stuff and change the future. You're not about the future, except in your little area. You're about making

us money. It will be interesting to see how that goes over with people who work at Google. That Google is no longer this entity that is, you know, anything can happen. It's, you know, Google, new Google is, we're about this. Maybe that's good. That's a focusing thing. But it does sort of change things. And I do think that the attitude is very much like, just keep giving us money so that we can invest in more self-driving cars and uh i love me some sundar pichai i think he's awesome yeah i think he's a smart guy and i think

uh you know having that gives some clarity too doesn't it it's like all the stuff here is you that's it like that's, that's you. It's you. Talk to us. We're your bosses up here. But that is your business. Not Android. Not Google Plus. Not YouTube.

All of it. All of it. If it's in Google, it's yours. Make a good. That's great. And send the checks. Because we've got to buy some new self-driving cars. Doesn't hurt to have a non

white guy as a ceo of one of the big three tech companies as well i feel i feel like well yeah one more right because we already have such a nadella of course we do yeah yeah right so um in fact for probably a conversation for another time but uh i'm sure some tech magazine or even general interest magazine or website you know probably like a time magazine cover that everybody goes time magazine still being published but but it will be somebody will do a big feature or take out or what does it all mean thing about this being um another chapter in the rise of non-white workers, especially Asian workers in Silicon Valley, to even more positions of prominence. And Sundar Pichai is another example of that. Satya Nadella is an example of that. You know, that has been, the workforce has been composed, the Silicon Valley workforce has been, if there's diversity from the white people in it, there are lots of Asian people from all over Asia, from all the way from India to China and Japan in the valley.

But now we are seeing them increasingly in these prominent positions. Um, and it's just interesting that it's like, it's maybe it took time for that to all just kind of like keep rolling, but, uh, I think it's great to see. And, um, and so now we have Sundar in charge of Google. I think it's, yeah, he's a smart guy. He's a sharp guy. And I think he will benefit from having clarity over his domain now. Yep. No doubt.

Tim Cook sent him a tweet. Did you see the tweet? I did see the tweet. Congratulations on your promotion. Aww. And then he was like, thanks. Thanks, man. on your promotion oh and then he was like thanks thanks man you know there is this this part of me that does really love that like uh microsoft is run by a guy of indian descent uh actually yeah

both nadela and pachai were both born in india so then you have the leader of Google was born in India, and then the leader of Apple is openly homosexual. I think it's fantastic. I love that. I just think that is such a great thing that even five years ago, we may have found to be strange, right? To hear, like, really? Silicon Valley diversity is problematic in a lot of ways, a lot of ways. Yep. Diversity is problematic in a lot of ways, a lot of ways.

Yep. But at least we can point to a major gay executive, a couple major Indian executives. If you want to throw in Yahoo, you've got a major woman executive, and HP has had a woman CEO. And there's some of that's going on. Yeah. Some of that's going on you know yeah some of that's going on and you're right five years ago well five years ago it was eric schmidt and steve ballmer and steve jobs right in those parts in those roles yeah and like you know we're saying about we know the diversity isn't great like we know that um you know that is a thing that i think 2015 will

be remembered for is people realizing a lot of this stuff, like actually truly realizing it. But one of the ways it gets better is from the top. Also, I know it will be very easy to say, well, this is going to be business as usual as Google, because in the end it's still Sundar and it's still Larry and Sergey running the show from above. I don't know.

This is different than Tim Cook taking over at Apple, and this is different than Satya Nadella taking over at Microsoft. But both of those gentlemen showed that they were not afraid to make change in how their company had done things over the long term. And I think their companies have benefited from it. And it will be interesting to see what happens at Google, but I would say it's more likely than not that Sundar will be able to do...

This will give him... He's been invested in power with this title and he's been giving clarity about what his business is. And I think you'll see Google maybe make moves that they would not have made before when they were this amorphous mass of things and who's in charge of what division. I think we may see a much more clarity in Google now and coming from letting Sundar make some decisions about what they're going to do and what they're going to focus on that were harder

to make before when it was this bigger thing and kind of unwieldy. Should we do some Ask Upgrade? We should. Jason, who is bringing Ask Upgrade to the people this week? Ask Upgrade is being brought to the people by stamps.com. We've talked about them before. If you are running your own business, mailing and shipping can be a huge pain. It can feel like a no-win situation. I have told you many times before of my dislike in going to my local post office. I don't want to say terrible things about the Mill Valley Post Office, but there's often long lines, and it's slow, and I don't want to go there. I don't want to go there.

It takes time. I find it unpleasant, and I know I don't need to go there. Now, if you were a small business, you could lease a postage meter and do it that way for all of your shipping. But those can be very expensive. They usually require multi-year commitments. There are hidden fees. But there is a better way, and that is stamps.com. With stamps.com, you buy and print official U.S. postage for any letter or package. You do it right on your desk using your own computer and your own printer. And stamps.com

is way easier to use than a postage meter and costs just a fraction of what a postage meter does. You can save up to 80% with stamps.com compared to a postage meter, and you will avoid those time-consuming lines at the post office. And I can compared to a postage meter, and you will avoid those time consuming lines at the post office. And I can walk to my post office. If you have to drive to the post office, it can be even more time that you save. Stamps.com costs $15.99 a month. That's it. There's no long-term multi-year commitment like a postage meter. There's no markup on postage. In fact, you can even get special postage discounts with stamps.com. So it's really a no- brainer. I've been using stamps.com. I've got a really cool USB scale that lets me weigh things. I can put things in boxes, print out my postage, tape things up, put it outside or give

it to my letter carrier. They take it away and that's it. I don't go to the post office. I can ship everything right from here. And stamps.com has a special offer for you right now. You can use our promo code, which is the name of the show upgrade for a special offer. You get a no risk trial, and there is $110 bonus offer, including a digital scale and up to $55 in free postage. So don't wait, go to stamps.com. Before you do anything else, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in upgrade. That's stamps.com. Click on the microphone, enter upgrade. Thank you so much to stamps.com for supporting this show and all of RelayFM

and most particularly bringing hashtag askupgrade to the people. To the people. Power to the people. So talking about those powerful people, first off, Andrew would like to know any thoughts jason having been independent for about a year how is the outlook um are your business and

personal economics sustainable at their current uh rate i i think i want to talk about this more in mid-september when um when it's been a year but the short version is, I'm having a good time. The economics seem to be fine. It is not quite the mix economically that I expected. I have some stuff that is less money than I thought and other stuff that's more money than I thought. Not commuting is great. And doing this show and other podcast stuff has been a great addition. I really enjoy having part of my life be doing podcasts, not just for fun, but actually as part of my job. And so, you know, that's my thought about it. What about you, Mike, independent for about a year next week? Well, no it's we we actually i think i quit

my job after you well you did but you started relay before so okay well you know how are a quick super quick status report on you how's it how's your outlook uh things are really good i mean i make a lot more money just in general, which is fantastic. And, you know, if the money is one of the things, then that is a big thing for me. But I am happy. I mean, the things that I am unhappy about are, like, just not issues, really. And any other things that I tend to be unhappy about in my life tend not to be work now, which is, you know, that's,

I think that's rare for most people and definitely rare for me having looked over the last five years of my life. I am very happy. My main problem is just trying to balance my time. And I've been making some steps along that road recently, but I've got some other things coming up that are going to take that away again. So I'm just trying to balance things out a bit better to try and better understand where my time is going, where my money is coming from, and just trying to build not a better work-life balance per se, but a better balance in my work. Yeah, I'm having the exact same issues now, which is now I've reached the point where I have to make some decisions about what do I spend my time working on? Because I'm fortunate in that I have more potential work than I can do. So I need to

choose. I need to make smart decisions about what I do and what I say no to, where I choose to put my time and then how I structure my time. And that's all going on. So that's a whole other level beyond the basic level, which is, you know, oh, God, is this going to work? Am I not going to have any money? Am I, you know, am I going to have to start applying for jobs anywhere because I just, you know, I can't pay my mortgage payment? That's not been the case, but that leads to that other level, which is how do I structure this? How do I make these decisions? You know, what do I spend my time on? What do I not spend my time on?

Yep. So next up, we have a question from John, and this is a Twitter-based question. John asks, if Twitter turned off its feed to the third-party clients, so it turned off the API 100% as of the 1st of January 2016, do you think this would be a catalyst for people to leave? I think no.

Yeah. We've already seen attempts. When app.net came about it was because um twitter was becoming extremely hostile and was becoming even more so and we all tried it we all used it and we all went back to twitter even though nothing changed so i believe people would just get used to the official clients and would complain and moan as much as possible until twitter actually made some changes that others would want to see but i just don't see it happening uh quite simply because the reasons that other services like app.net didn't stick

is because it's not just us anymore. And I think for most of the tech nerds that are on Twitter, they probably follow a bunch of people in their lives or people that they admire or respect that wouldn't move because they already use the first-party clients. So it's just not a problem. And I know I don't want to be checking two services. So I think that the only way that people switch away

is if it dies, completely dies. Yeah, I agree. I find great value in third party clients and I use a third party client on iOS, but I agree with you that realistically realistically pretty much everybody would just switch. And if somebody says, well, no, I wouldn't, I would just stop. It's like, all right, well, I know that especially some class of tech nerds who've got a third-party client that they really rely on would get really angry and they would leave. And some of them might never come back, but others would.

come back, but others would. For me, you know, the thing that would kill it for me and make it very hard for me to use Twitter is if they killed like the Mac client, if they just killed it and said, just use the website, that would make it very hard for me. Although I would just, you know, again, I would just go on using iOS, I suppose, at that point. But I don't think that's going to kill Twitter. You alluded to the idea that we would just kind of go to the official client and complain. Sometimes I wonder, probably not, but I wonder sometimes if the nerdiest people with the most attention to detail and the most technology knowledge if they were using the official twitter clients would twitter feel more pressure and get more feedback to make their products better probably not but i think they would that i do think that there's a whole class of users who would be really persnickety and finicky and their power users and they really want twitter to be better and they're using third-party clients. And if they were

forced into the app, I do wonder if perhaps Twitter would be like, oh, wow, people are really complaining about this feature. And now people are just like, ah, forget it. I'll just use this other app that does it. But this comes back to what we were talking about last time as well, which is pick something, Twitter. I feel like the current situation with third parties, with these tokens and all of that, it's an untenable, it feels like a transitional thing. And yet it was done by a group that is no longer basically running Twitter. So I feel like Twitter needs to decide something. Are you a service that has third party clients that offer alternatives? If you are, give them access to,

in the API, to all of your features. If, as we said, in exchange for showing your ads or whatever you have to do, whatever you have to do. If you're not, then maybe you should just say, we're going to close the door.

Because we're in this really weird situation where as nice as Twitterific is, as much as people love TweetBot, they have limited futures because of the token thing and limited features because there are all these Twitter features that do not work on third party clients because they're not in the API. So which is it, Twitter? I feel like that is the most important thing because right now we're in this weird limbo state so i don't want them to turn off the feed to third-party clients i would actually like them to go the other direction and say you know what third-party clients help us as a service go ahead and make them and make them good and as long as you follow our rules but if they're not going to do that i kind of feel like they do they should just go the other direction because because this limbo state is not useful for anyone yep 100 so uh frank asked

how do you recommend podcasters uh how long do you recommend podcasters keep session files like logic files or garage band files after releasing how do you handle this we're gonna get some really different answers so how do you handle this? We're going to get some really different answers. So how do you handle this, Mike? I keep them for a time period until my hard disk starts to fill up. And then I go in and delete the oldest few months. Because for me, so many of my shows are topical.

Yeah, yeah. And they just don't need anything done to them after a certain period of time. I would imagine you'd keep them behind the app forever. Maybe I should do that. I think you should. I actually have them saved on a different part of my system. So that I have all of the others go into just a folder I call podcast scratches. It just lives there.

Yeah, I feel like if it's something that could live longer, I think I talked about this before, that you should keep them around. I keep everything because I've got this Drobo that's got a billion terabytes in it. And so I've got the space for that's got a billion terabytes in it. And so it's, you know, I've got the space for them. So I saved them all. I would imagine that eventually I will start deleting old, you know, old clockwise and old. The episodes of upgrade that I've added are less. It's less likely I'm ever going to need to go back to the masters for any of those you know even if you do a best of you can pull from the mp3 file and it sounds fine and and you know I and I don't honestly don't anticipate that I would do that very much for incomparable because

those things last and I'm always pulling things out for for the end of year recap shows and things like that I keep those around and that allows me to do things like I generated our Star Wars, you know, episode two and episode three episodes. I generated new versions of them, you know, a few months after we posted them with, you know, like as a special version and Total Party Kill, I did like an audio book version of one of our seasons.

And I was able to do all of that because i kept the masters around but um you know so so somewhere between until your hard drive i mean really it's until your hard drive fills up i think is a good answer but it's more important if it's something that you might actually uh need access to later um and some stuff is timeless and some stuff is timely. Like I would throw away all my old clockwise's tomorrow if I needed to, but I'm not going to throw away the incomparable radio theater because I still go back. I actually will still open up radio theater things. I was doing this the other day because I already have like the intro music for a certain recurring thing and I can just copy it out of Logic and paste it into a new project. And I get all of the volume and all of the tracks

and they're all in the right sequence. So it's great to have that kind of stuff around. But for timely stuff, it's a lot less important. And Chalakan asks finally today, do you think Apple will sell curated watch faces on the App Store? This is a really good one.'m curious about what what you think eventually yes they will will they do it anytime soon i don't think so maybe version three or four

yeah right now watch faces for apple watch feel like um they're like you know the apps that are on your mac or on your iphone that only update when the os updates that's what the watch faces are it's like they're in the os they're part of the os if they want to add new watch faces they will add them in the os i do think that at some point yeah they will have to but i i don't think it'll it'll be soon um certainly i mean watch os too we know what's in it and that's you know watch faces built by third parties are not one of the things that's in it so I think it's inevitable I think there'll be an approval process but I think it's more likely that we'll see kind of like new watch faces show up from Apple over time then you know, with software updates.

It's going to be a long time before we see more of that in the, like in an app store kind of model. So I agree with you, Mike. I mean, we're getting some with watchOS 2, but not nearly enough. There should be a couple more, like what they're doing, just a couple of photo faces and you can add a photo face of your own. Right now the strategy is, look, if you want to customize these, these faces with, um, with complications, we'll let you do that. That's, that's where you, the, the developers

get in. Um, and I think that's, I think it's fine. Honestly. Um, I think it's fine. I would like to see more faces on and more variety of faces from Apple and I hope that comes but I can understand them being really cautious with such a new platform about something as key as the watch face. I get it. Yeah, it doesn't bother me. I mean, sure, would I like to see some

of my favorite UI designers create great looking user interfaces for the watch face? Sure. Do I need it? No, because in all honesty, the utility face that I use is really great looking and I change the color on it every time I change my watch band and it makes me happy. That's all I really need.

I don't need more than that, to be honest. Right, so that's about it for this week. If you would like to find our show notes, you can go ahead and visit relay.fm slash upgrade slash 49. If you want to find Jason online, he is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L on Twitter, and he writes over at sixcolors.com

and hosts many other great podcasts on the incomparable.com. And of course, it's the host of Clockwise on RelayFM as well. I am at iMike, I am YKE, and I host a whole host of other shows at RelayFM, like I Am On Connected, and

I'm also on Analog, Cortex, Virtual, Quistif, probably missing one or two. I've definitely done that, I've definitely missed some, but hey-ho. That's how it goes. Oh, with the pen addict. There you go. No, never mind. I'm just going to move on from here. Thanks again

to our sponsor this week. Our sponsors this week. Stamps.com, Hover, and GoToMeeting. If you enjoy the show, please go and support them. And we'll be back next week. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, Jason Snell.

Oh. Look at that. The Easter egg!