Podcasts about lotus notes

My guest today is Ray Ozzie, one of the great technologists, software developers, and entrepreneurs of our time. Ray is perhaps best known as the creator of Lotus Notes, a collaboration tool that revolutionized business communication in the 1990s. He later succeeded Bill Gates as Chief Software Architect at Microsoft, where he played a key part in the development of Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform. Ray's work has earned him numerous accolades, including induction into the Computer History Museum Hall of Fellows and the National Academy of Engineering. Throughout his career, Ray has been at the forefront of technology innovation and paradigm shifts, founding multiple companies, including Iris Associates, Groove Networks, and most recently, Blues Wireless, which focuses on connectivity in the physical world. His insights on cloud computing, collaboration tools, and the future of technology have shaped the industry for decades. In our conversation, we explore Ray's journey through the evolving landscape of software development, his perspectives on the current state of technology, and his vision for the future of connectivity and collaboration. Please enjoy this fascinating discussion with Ray Ozzie. Subscribe to Glue Guys! For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Ramp. Ramp's mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Ramp is the fastest growing FinTech company in history and it's backed by more of my favorite past guests (at least 16 of them!) than probably any other company I'm aware of. It's also notable that many best-in-class businesses use Ramp—companies like Airbnb, Anduril, and Shopify, as well as investors like Sequoia Capital and Vista Equity. They use Ramp to manage their spending, automate tedious financial processes, and reinvest saved dollars and hours into growth. At Colossus and Positive Sum, we use Ramp for exactly the same reason. Go to Ramp.com/invest to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus. — This episode is brought to you by Tegus, where we're changing the game in investment research. Step away from outdated, inefficient methods and into the future with our platform, proudly hosting over 100,000 transcripts – with over 25,000 transcripts added just this year alone. Our platform grows eight times faster and adds twice as much monthly content as our competitors, putting us at the forefront of the industry. Plus, with 75% of private market transcripts available exclusively on Tegus, we offer insights you simply can't find elsewhere. See the difference a vast, quality-driven transcript library makes. Unlock your free trial at tegus.com/patrick. ----- Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @patrick_oshag | @JoinColossus Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com). Show Notes: (00:00:00) Introduction to Ray's Story (00:06:44) The Role of Technology in Modern Warfare (00:10:26) The RadNote Device Explained (00:15:32) The Origin of SafeCast (00:22:26) Challenges in Building Intelligent Machines (00:32:23) The Evolution of IoT and Blues (00:39:01) The Future of Connected Machines (00:46:03) Technology Paradigm Shifts and Azure (00:50:56) The Birth of Azure (00:52:08) The Unique Dynamics of Bill and Steve (00:56:54) AI and the Future of Use Cases (00:59:00) Real-world Applications of IoT (01:05:31) The Evolution of AI and IoT (01:20:03) The Importance of Systems Thinking (01:28:52) Advice for Young Entrepreneurs (01:32:55) The Kindest Thing Anyone Has Ever Done For Ray

Send us a textWhat if you could protect your organization's data as effortlessly as sending an email? Join us for an enlightening conversation with Matt Howard, a veteran IT professional whose career spans the dawn of the application service provider model to the forefront of open-source software and application security. Matt's experience at tech conferences like DEFCON and Black Hat offers a firsthand look at the evolution of IT security. From his early days navigating the chaotic tech landscape to mastering the full technology stack, Matt's journey reveals critical insights for anyone aspiring to excel in the field of IT.Discover the future of data security architecture as Matt delves into the complexities of securing data within the finance industry and beyond. Learn how adopting a granular security architecture, similar to microservices in software development, can revolutionize secure data sharing across organizational boundaries. Through real-world applications, such as military alliances needing instantaneous and secure information exchange, Matt emphasizes the importance of dynamic, policy-driven access controls. His insights paint a picture of a more interconnected and securely collaborative world, one where data protection adapts to the demands of the moment.Trace the historical milestones of data security with Matt, from the emergence of thin client computing to the rise of cloud services and microservices. Hear about key developments like Lotus Notes and the vital role of cryptography, as well as the modern-day necessity of encryption. Learn about Virtru's innovative approach to simplifying data security with user-friendly encryption tools integrated into everyday platforms like Gmail and Outlook. Lastly, Matt introduces us to the Technical Data Format (TDF) and the OpenTDF project, shedding light on how they provide granular security benefits and regulatory compliance. As we conclude, Matt shares the privacy-centric philosophy of Virtru's founders and how you can connect with him for further insights.Support the showAffiliate Links:NordVPN: https://go.nordvpn.net/aff_c?offer_id=15&aff_id=87753&url_id=902 Follow the Podcast on Social Media!Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/secunfpodcast/Twitter: https://twitter.com/SecUnfPodcastPatreon: https://www.patreon.com/SecurityUnfilteredPodcastYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@securityunfilteredpodcastTikTok: Not today China! Not today

Everyone talks about digital transformation, but it seems like no one really explains what it means... until now. In today's episode, Rob and Justin dive deep to cut through the buzzwords and lay out the reality. They're tackling why digital transformation isn't about making huge, instant changes but rather about the smart, subtle tweaks in areas that usually get ignored but badly need a digital lift. They dive into how leveraging tools like the Power Platform can spark significant improvements, showing that it's the small changes that can really boost efficiency and smooth out your workflow. Ever found yourself wondering how to translate all the chatter about digital evolution into actionable steps? That's exactly what Rob and Justin are unpacking. They're guiding you through how minor, yet clever adjustments can transform your processes. It's all about enhancing the routine, one step at a time. And, as always, if you enjoyed the episode, be sure to leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform to help new listeners find us. EPISODE TRANSCRIPT: Rob Collie (00:00): Hello, friends. In today's episode, Justin and I demystify what is meant by the phrase digital transformation. Phrases like that are one of my least favorite things. Why do I say that? Well, these are phrases that get used a lot. They cast a big shadow. You encounter them almost anywhere you go. That's fine by itself. But in the case of digital transformation, that massive shadow is multiplied by no one understanding what it actually means.  (00:30): Now earlier in my career, I used to be really intimidated by things like this. Everyone seems to know what this means because they're using it all the time. I don't know what it means, so should I just pretend and play along like everyone else? But at some point, many years ago, I had this moment where I realized that the Emperor has no clothes. It almost never has clothes. Now when I encounter phrases like this, instead of being like paralyzed or intimidated, I instead start working in my own definition and this process takes time. I've been picking apart and stewing on the definition of digital transformation now for probably the better part of a year plus. Somewhere along the way in that process, I realized that we at P3 are doing quite a bit of digital transformation work, I just hadn't realized it yet because I didn't have a good enough definition.  (01:18): Lately, I've been noticing that my definition for digital transformation has reached a steady state. It's not changing over time anymore, which tends to be my signal that I've arrived at a definition that works. Now seemed like a good time to sit down and compare notes with Justin, who's been following his own parallel process of arriving at a definition. I'm very pleased with where we landed. A practical and specific definition that can be reduced to practice with an almost paint-by-numbers type of approach.  (01:47): If you asked someone for a definition of something like digital transformation, and by the time they're done giving you their definition, you can't practically boil that down to what it means for you, that's not a problem with you, that's a problem with the definition. A lot of times, people's definitions for terms like this are almost like deliberately vague, as a means of projecting power, as a means of actually controlling you. You'll get a lot of definitions that are engineered to sound smart, engineered to sound authoritative, but not engineered to provide anything resembling clarity. Because if you sound smart, and you sound authoritative but you leave your audience hungry, you create a feeling of dependency. Folks, I just think that's yucky. That's just gross.  (02:35): To show you what I mean, I just ran the Google search, "What does digital transformation mean?" The very top hit, enterprisersproject.com, defines digital transformation as "the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business resulting in fundamental changes to help businesses operate in how they deliver value to customers." Did that clear it up? Nope. Boiling that one down, it sounds a lot like you should use computers and use them to make changes. But it sounds smart, sounds authoritative.  (03:06): Here's the second result from our old favorite, McKinsey. McKinsey defines digital transformation as "the process of developing organizational and technology based capabilities that allow a company to continuously improve its customer experience and lower its unit costs, and over time sustain a competitive advantage." All right, so that one sounds like McKinsey is almost starting with that original definition and adding additional value to it. They're saying use computers to improve, and to make money, and to compete. If you have $1 million to spend, you can get advice like that.  (03:43): All right, with those two definitions, we don't even need an episode. We can just skip it? Because everyone knows exactly what they're talking about. These are the top two hits on Google, folks. Useless. Part of the reason these definitions are useless, again, is because they're designed to be useless. But I also think though, that a lot of times you hear definitions like this is because the people writing them actually cannot boil them down. By the time you come up with a truly useful definition, or a framework, or a guide for understanding a topic like this, it almost by its definition, it's not going to sound nearly as sexy, nearly as smart. It's going to sound relatively simple, mundane. But those are the valuable definitions, the ones that we can actually apply, that make a difference in how we actually view our own business. (04:29): That's what we set out to do in this episode. I think we succeeded, came up with a very practical, applicable definition that you'll never find on McKinsey's website. Let's get into it.  Speaker 2 (04:42): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please?  Speaker 4 (04:46): This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast, with your host, Rob Collie, and your cohost, Justin Mannhardt. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element.  Rob Collie (05:12): Justin, one of the things that we really like to do, I really like to do, I think you do as well, is to take a phrase or topic, and demystify it. Especially phrases that you hear repeated over, and over, and over again, and everyone has to pretend that they understand what they mean. But even when they do, they often have very different pictures in their heads.  (05:33): One that I think is due for a treatment, and we've hinted at it once before on this podcast but not with any depth, is digital transformation. What does it mean?  Justin Mannhardt (05:45): What does it mean, what does it not mean, all parts in between.  Rob Collie (05:50): Starting with the places where I hear it. I often hear it in the context of this is something that's already done. The big talking head analysts at places like Gartner- Justin Mannhardt (06:00): Yeah.  Rob Collie (06:00): Will talk about it like it's in the rearview mirror. "The shift to digital, the pivot to digital has forced the following things," so has forced, it's a past tense thing. Which further underlines the idea that well, if it's already happened, clearly everyone knows what it means. They don't stop to define it, they're just tossing that aside as a means of getting to the next point. I find that to be one of the most troubling habits of the talking heads.  (06:28): The first few times I encountered this phrase, I didn't really know what it meant. I imagined that it meant switching to ecommerce from brick-and-mortar. Justin Mannhardt (06:37): Yeah.  Rob Collie (06:37): I didn't even realize that that was the impression I had, it was just this vague feeling in the back of my head.  Justin Mannhardt (06:42): The word digital, I'm just thinking about this now because a lot of times, you'll look at one of these diagrams, it's like, "Your digital transformation wheel includes all these things." You'll see something like, "Move to the cloud." I'm like, "Okay, were the servers with the software, was that software analog or something?"  Rob Collie (06:59): Yeah, we've been digital for a long time, right? Justin Mannhardt (07:01): Yeah.  Rob Collie (07:01): Most broadly defined, you could say that the digital transformation really got going with the adoption of the PC.  Justin Mannhardt (07:09): Right.  Rob Collie (07:10): That was when digital transformation started. In the sense that it started in the 1980s, maybe it is something worth talking about somewhat in the rearview mirror, but that's not what they mean. They don't mean the adoption of the PC. Justin Mannhardt (07:23): No. But it's interesting, when you think about the timeline of technology evolution. People say, "Oh, you described it as past tense." Digital transformation has occurred in en masse in market. Now today, it's like AI is here, en masse in market. But the pace at which new things are coming out, what's really happening is just the long tail is longer back to where companies were at in this journey. It's not like the entire industrial complex has been collectively moving to the modern current state across the board. There's companies that are still running SQL 2000, that's their production world still. This isn't something that's happened.  Rob Collie (08:09): I think that the big talking head analysts often tend to really only talk about the most elite sub-strata of even their own clients. When they talk about this as something that's completely done, even most of Gartner's paying clients, I would suspect, aren't anywhere close to done. But we still haven't really started talking about what it actually means.  (08:32): Let's say it is not the switch from paper and pencil systems to electronic line-of-business systems. Not only do we have the PC, and that's been long since mainstreamed, the notion of line-of-business software, server based software, whether cloud or otherwise, line-of-business software is also I think incredibly well entrenched. We're done with having key business systems running in a manual format. That's long since rearview. That also isn't what they mean by digital transformation. (09:07): Of course, both of those are digital and they were huge transformations, but that's not the digital transformation we're talking about. It's anything that's happened after that.  Justin Mannhardt (09:15): Yeah.  Rob Collie (09:16): It's a lot harder to pin down the things that happened after that.  Justin Mannhardt (09:20): In general, I agree with you because the big blocks, software, the availability of the cloud, not having intensive paper process in most companies, that's largely been accomplished. To different levels, of course. Then, what's left? What's the definition? What are we trying to do?  Rob Collie (09:41): Well, if you think of the line-of-business application and the PC, the PC interfaces with all the line-of-business apps. I would say that, and even this is not 100% true, but I would say that the conversion to digital systems is complete, or complete-ish. Justin Mannhardt (09:59): Okay.  Rob Collie (09:59): When you look at your business as individual silos. Justin Mannhardt (10:03): Say more. You've got a digital environment for finance, digital environment for sales, is that what you mean?  Rob Collie (10:09): Yeah. Core workflows have largely been digital for a while. All the workflows that take place between systems, or the workflows that take place adjacent to a system, those are the things that we're talking about when we talk about digital transformation, going after those workflows.  (10:30): Everything we've been doing in the world of business software since at least the 1980s has been digital transformation.  Justin Mannhardt (10:38): Yeah.  Rob Collie (10:39): But our digital transformation, we're really talking about at least the third chapter. It's not chapter one or two. It's like the next frontier, identifying and going after a new class of workflows that would benefit from essentially software support.  Justin Mannhardt (10:56): Right.  Rob Collie (10:56): Okay. Now because almost by definition, just by subtraction ... We're saying, "Look, we've got the PC, we've got the line-of-business systems that handle the core workflows within a silo. What's left?" Well, it's almost like a perfect mathematical proof. What's left is the stuff between and outside. (11:14): Given that everyone's mix of line-of-business systems is, I like to say, best of breed, meaning random. It's whatever we decided at the time. It seemed like a good idea at the time. Legacy.  Justin Mannhardt (11:25): Yeah.  Rob Collie (11:26): You're never going to have anything off-the-shelf that helps you solve the workflows. The middleware problem between your systems is always going to be a custom solution.  (11:38): We should give examples of these. When I said outside or adjacent to, there's even workflows that they're not really between systems, they're just the offline portion of working with the system. I'm thinking about a budgeting process, for instance. The world's first budgeting systems were mostly there to record your budget that you enter into it. As those budgeting systems have gotten better, they've included more and more of the human workflow that goes into creating, and evaluating, and kicking the tires before it's finalized. Those offline human workflows, getting more and more structured about them, can make a huge difference. Justin Mannhardt (12:19): Not just structured, Rob, more tightly integrated with the adjacent system itself. I like that adjacency, because if you have a financial system where your budget or your forecast lives, there's a martialing of activity, analysis, input. Then you say, "Okay, we need to get it look like this," and then we put it in the thing. What happens in that processes, you get all sorts of scattered iterations of ideas and it gets loose. But if you could have all that iteration tight, the final submission is already handled or much easier.  Rob Collie (12:51): Yeah. Sticking with the budgeting example for a moment, it still echoes one of the themes I mentioned for the between systems, the between silos case. Which is that one-size-fits-all systems, off-the-shelf systems, they really struggle to address all the nuances of your particular business. It's very, very difficult. The more, and more, and more you try to get the offline processes, the human processes brought into the digital workflow, the more an off-the-shelf software package is going to struggle. It's getting further and further away from the safety of the core of the task.  (13:28): This is why the Power Platform approach to budgeting and planning is often, in fact almost always, a more effective, in terms of cost-effective, time effective, results effective. The core libraries for doing all of the things that you need to do are basically already there and it's inherently designed to be customizable.  Justin Mannhardt (13:48): And very nimble. Even the big players in FP&A software, they're not that great, in our opinion, at the end of the day. But the price points just exclude anybody that's not a very sizeable, formidable company. You're not looking to spend that kind of money if you're even a few hundred million a year type operation. You're just not going to sign up to that agreement. You are left with a middleware type of a problem, that you're either solving with spreadsheets, pen and paper, or something else. Our platform can slide right in there.  Rob Collie (14:26): Of course, there is a huge advantage to performing a "digital transformation" on a process like that because the human, offline, pen and paper, sending random emails, getting answers, tracking them, it's incredibly tedious, it's incredibly error-prone. Just super, super slow. It's not like you can perform many iterations. You're not even really going to be able to pull off one iteration and you call it good. But you're just going to miss so much. The budget could have been so much better. If you've got a bad budget, of course you're going to pay for that later.  (14:58): That's the adjacent case. Let's talk about the between a little bit as well. What's an example of a workflow that would span across different line-of-business systems but require a human being essentially, or humans, to essentially carry the buckets of water between those different pipes?  Justin Mannhardt (15:18): We'll make up a company today, Rob, we'll start a new company and it's going to be called I Manufacture Things, Inc. Hey. At I Manufacture Things, Inc., I've got a sales team.  Rob Collie (15:28): Do we make things other than ink?  Justin Mannhardt (15:30): No, that's incorporated.  Rob Collie (15:32): Oh, okay.  Justin Mannhardt (15:32): We just make things.  Rob Collie (15:34): Can't help it. Can we be We Manufacture Things Ink, Inc.?  Justin Mannhardt (15:38): Sure.  Rob Collie (15:39): All right. But anyway, we manufacture things.  Justin Mannhardt (15:41): There you go. We've got a sales team and they're using a CRM system, such as Salesforce, or HubSpot, or whatever. They're out there, they're doing quotes, they're tracking opportunities, and eventually someone says, "Yeah, I'd love to buy a palette of ink," or whatever. Our company, we're not using the CRM to deal with the production and fulfillment of that order. Okay, so now there's this process where my order form, let's not use any paper in this example, it's still digital but it lands as a PDF form in someone's email inbox that says, "Hey, Customer Service Rep, here's an order." Oh, okay. Now I'm keying said order into our production system that says, "Go manufacture this thing." Now we need to ship the thing out somewhere, and now we're in our logistics system.  (16:33): There's all these little hops between systems. Which technology has become more open, and sure there's things like APIs and code based ways to integrate them, but that's not in range for a lot of companies. That's an example of where you could stitch in these little Power Platform type solutions to just, "Hey, let's map the relevant fields and information from the CRM into the order management system." If there's some blanks that need to get filled in, that's okay. Maybe I'm just starting from a queue of new orders right in the system, and I'm maybe adding three or four pieces to that puzzle instead of all of it. Rob Collie (17:12): Okay. I want to make a global note here. Note that we're talking about this broad topic, digital transformation. We're already way down into very detailed, specific use cases. In my opinion, that's what digital transformation is, it's a collection of all of these individual use cases where things can get faster, more efficient, more accurate. It is the sum of many small things. Each one of them might have tremendous impact. This is the way.  (17:46): In this particular example, I've been describing the Power Platform as the world's best middleware for a while now. Even Power BI is middleware. It's beautiful, beautiful, beautiful capability is that it can simultaneously ingest data from multiple different line-of-business silos that have never once talked to each other. The only place that they meet is in a Power BI semantic model.  Justin Mannhardt (18:10): Yeah.  Rob Collie (18:10): And they play a symphony together that Power BI makes them play. They still have never seen each other, but Power BI is what bridges the gap. Now, Power BI is read-only by itself, it doesn't make changes to any systems. (18:25): In this particular case, it sounds like Power App's and Power Automate's music. Let's just get really tangible here. I know that it's a very specific, but it's a fictional example. But lots of people have almost exactly this problem. Justin Mannhardt (18:39): Yeah.  Rob Collie (18:39): Just talk me through what a solution to that particular problem might look like if we implemented it in the Power Platform. How much work, how much elapsed time do you think it would take? Let's dig into this one a little bit.  Justin Mannhardt (18:51): If what I want to do is, when we receive an order or close a deal in our CRM, I want that to move some data to another system, let's just say that's assumed. Power Automate can solve this need. Obviously there's a lot of detail, you can look some things up online, or you can email robandjustin@p3adaptive.com and we can trade some ideas here. But there are tons of out-of-the-box connectors, and in those connectors they have what's called a trigger. I could say, "When this happens in Salesforce," for example, "I want to start building a flow." I can say, "Okay, I want these fields, and I want to write them from Salesforce to this destination." Maybe that destination's a database, maybe that destination is another system that Power Automate supports that you can write to.  (19:37): It could be just this simple mapping exercise. When this happens over here, grab this data, and create a new record over here in this system. Rob Collie (19:46): Okay. A trigger in this case would look something like, "When a record in Salesforce is marked as a win," we've signed a deal, someone wants to buy a palette of whatever. Then automatically, it wakes up, looks at the record in question that the data associated with the sales win in Salesforce, grabs certain fields out of the Salesforce record, certain pieces of information. Let's keep it simple for a moment, and just pushes them into a simple SQL database or something, that could be stood up in minutes. We don't have to spend a lot of time. Or maybe, we just drop it into OneLake.  Justin Mannhardt (20:23): Lots of options there. I think this is a nice little simple example, because when you talk about Power BI, that's a very tangible apparatus. These are the things you set up, and you never really go ... You monitor it of course, but you never really go engage with it. You put the glue in place, and it's magic and it's cool. That's a simple version. (20:44): But sometimes, the data coming from its source is incomplete relative to what it's destination requires to take the next action. In this type of scenario you could either say, "Well okay, once it gets over there, we're just in that system, maybe we're adding to it." But this is where you might insert a Power App into the process. Win a deal in Salesforce that triggers, grab these fields. Let's go ahead and write it over to Dataverse, this is a back end of a Power App, for example. Or a database, or SharePoint, who knows. It depends on what makes sense.  (21:18): Now we've got a Power App that maybe has a little work cue that says, "Hey, Rob, you've got new orders." You're either approving them, or you're annotating them with additional information. You're doing the human process, like you were describing before, maybe ensuring some hygiene, completeness, whatever. Then you do something in Power App that says, "Okay, go ahead and kick this down the line from here."  Rob Collie (21:40): Yeah. Here's an example. In the CRM system where the sale is being executed, there's probably an address for this customer that is associated with that account, especially if we've done business with them before. But this customer might have many different physical locations. A palette of stuff showing up at the wrong physical location would be a real problem. Justin Mannhardt (22:06): Yeah.  Rob Collie (22:08): Even just a sanity check Power App that hits the sales rep back, shows up in their inbox or something, shows up in Teams, somehow there's a cue for them to process these things, where they need to just glance at the order and validate that the shipping address is the right one.  Justin Mannhardt (22:28): Yeah. Rob Collie (22:28): Even if that's all it is, that's the only additional piece of information is yes, no, that's the right address. Justin Mannhardt (22:34): Yeah. Or sometimes there's a material that is sold is related to a bill of materials to produce. Maybe there's some choices that need to get made in the manufacturing process, such as what specific raw materials are we going to use for this order? Which machine are we going to produce it on this week? Maybe you're just adding the execution instructions.  Rob Collie (22:59): This is interesting because you could stop yourself at this moment and go, "Wait a second. Shouldn't those questions be encoded and implemented into the CRM?" The answer is of course, they could be. But your CRM might not be a nimble place to make those sorts of changes. Justin Mannhardt (23:20): That's right. Rob Collie (23:22): It's also a dangerous thing to be customizing. Justin Mannhardt (23:24): Yes. Rob Collie (23:25): There's a lot of validation and testing that's required. There's a reason why modifying and writing custom code into one's CRM doesn't happen all that frequently. Whereas this process you're describing is relatively safe, by comparison. It doesn't rock the boat. It's between. Forcing these sorts of modifications and customizations into the individual silo line-of-business applications, if that were so feasible, that would already be happening.  Justin Mannhardt (23:55): I've worked for companies like this, I've engaged with companies in my consulting career like this, where they have done that. They said, "We've got the talent in-house, so we're going to customize this thing." Then you get into a conversation of, "We'd like to upgrade to the newer version." They realized, "Oh, we can't."  Rob Collie (24:18): Yeah. "It'll break out customizations," yes.  Justin Mannhardt (24:20): Or sometimes, the programming language that the customizations are done in is not the same programming language in the newer version. While it's possible, if you have the resources, the time, and the money, it becomes a heavier lift. It begs the question, why?  Rob Collie (24:36): I was describing the heavy lift being that the original line-of-business system might be resistant to change, resistant to the customizations that you want to implement. You're describing it as also, even if you do perform those customizations, the next major software upgrade is going to be a problem. That rings true for me. I remember the object model in Office- Justin Mannhardt (24:59): Oh, yeah.  Rob Collie (25:00): All the VBA solutions that were out there, being incredibly paralyzing in terms of the things we could do with the product, because if you broke people's macros, they wouldn't upgrade to the new version of Office. Justin Mannhardt (25:09): Yeah, been there. Yeah.  Rob Collie (25:12): I promise you that, at Microsoft, we took that problem and approached it with a level of discipline that it was probably 10 times greater than the average line-of-business software vendor. Because most line-of-business software vendors see themselves as platform vendors. They want to be considered like that, but they don't want to pay the price of it. So that's good. (25:30): But then, the other thing is is if you built it into the line-of-business system, then inherently you're saying, "Okay, whatever that extra logic is, then it's up to that line-of-business system to then push those records across the wire." The new information has to go from the CRM to the other system. That kind of customization, both ends of the process are going to be very non-cooperative with this. This is another reason why doing this in a lightweight, nimble, intermediate layer provides a shock absorber to the system. Justin Mannhardt (26:08): I like that analogy.  Rob Collie (26:09): It's pretty easy for Power Automate, all it's doing is pushing a handful of doing to something and that other something is going to take care of all the validation, all of the retry. Validation with human beings, but also the logging in to the other system and all of that. Coding all of that into your CRM is almost a non-starter. This is why the between workflows have remained so non-digitized. Justin Mannhardt (26:42): Yeah. There's also a lot of tedium should be in play here, too. You have a written process, you look at your SOP documents and you say, "Oh, when this happens, Jan sends an email to Rob." Okay, well we could probably just get the Power Automate to send the email to Rob, if that what needs to happen.  (26:59): An example of this is something I built for myself at P3. When a potential new customer reaches out to us, and they want to meet with us and just chat, I wanted a process that reminded myself to go check out who that company is, understand who I'm going to talk. I just had a trigger that said, "When a meeting gets scheduled from this arena, just create a task for me to remember to do this before the meeting." Even little things like that, that are just personally useful, have been really beneficial as well. (27:33): It's much easier to say well yeah, dashboards, charts, graphs, cool. Or even fabric, even though that needs some demystifying still. This middleware, it's invisible, there's so many options. There's 100,000 little improvements you could make with it.  Rob Collie (27:48): The world has spent a long time coming around to why dashboards could be valuable.  Justin Mannhardt (27:55): They still are.  Rob Collie (27:56): Yes. When you say the word dashboards and you show that work product, even in the abstract to someone, the communication of what the value is benefiting from all of that history of the world waking up to the value of dashboards. Honestly, it wasn't that clear 15 years ago. It wasn't clear to people, most people anyway, why they needed them, why they were better than just running the reports out of each line-of-business system. But because it's such an inherently visible work product, it is a lot easier, I'm going to use the word, it's a lot easier to visualize what the impact will be, what it does for you. Whereas these other workflows, until you know that they're improvable, this is why digital transformation is so hard to understand because it is really talking about spaces where it's hard to visualize software helping because it's never been able to help.  (28:53): Let's go back to this example where the sale happens in the CRM system. Some information just automatically gets dropped in a data store, off to the side for the moment. There's potentially some Power App clarification. There are human inputs that are required here and you still want a human being to provide those. Justin Mannhardt (29:16): I want to point out here too, it's easy to get into a situation where that data store is simply being read by a report, even a Power BI report. But if the human's going to say, "Yes, no," or add to it, the Power App is just a way better piece to put there.  Rob Collie (29:32): Yeah. Let's have this example be like an example that we would look at and smile, be proud of. The Power App is involved. Then when the human interaction is done, they press okay or approve in the Power App. Take me to the next step.  Justin Mannhardt (29:49): Well ideally, we are pushing data and information into the next system or workflow.  Rob Collie (29:57): This is a two silo problem. We have the CRM system and then we have the manufacturing, work order and shipment system, the fulfillment system. Justin Mannhardt (30:06): The WMS.  Rob Collie (30:08): Is that what that is?  Justin Mannhardt (30:08): Yeah.  Rob Collie (30:09): Okay. We've already covered the first silo. We've gotten the human interaction. Now it's time to send it on to the second silo. How does that work?  Justin Mannhardt (30:20): This just comes down to what the point of integration is in the second silo. We could be inserting records into a SQL database, we could be making a post request to an API endpoint. In Power Automate, most of these things are WISIWIG in nature. There is an open code interface if you need to get to that and want to do that, need it. But usually, it's just mapping. You find your destination and it says, "Oh, here's the fields to map to." You say, "Okay," you just drag and drop. It just depends on what your destination system is, but you're just creating a target in your workflow, and the data goes.  Rob Collie (30:55): The way I like to look at this is that, even though each line-of-business silo system, they're never really built to talk to each other. Justin Mannhardt (31:04): Right, they need a translator.  Rob Collie (31:05): Yeah. The translator and the shock absorber. But at the same time, it's not hard to get the information you want out of one system, and it's not hard to write the information you need into another. But when you try to wire them directly through to each other- Justin Mannhardt (31:23): Yeah.  Rob Collie (31:23): That is actually really difficult. You need this referee in the middle, that's able to change gears, like the ambassador between the two systems. When you think about a translator system, an ambassador system, a shock absorber, whatever you want to call it, whatever metaphor you want, you can also imagine an incredibly expensive, elaborate piece of custom software that's being written to do that. That's not what we're talking about. Justin Mannhardt (31:47): No. Rob Collie (31:48): Let's recap. Trigger fires in CRM system, some data gets slurped out related to that sale, dropped in an intermediate location that then powers a Power App. Power App is able to read that information, it knows who to reach back to to get the clarification, the approval, et cetera. It might be multiple people that need to provide some input. Justin Mannhardt (32:09): It could be a whole workflow that lives right there. Rob Collie (32:12): But eventually at the end of that workflow, in this case we'll just assume it's one step, one human being, the sales rep just needs to sign off, then the Power App's job is done. That's the human interaction part. Now we're back to Power Automate, correct?  Justin Mannhardt (32:24): That's right.  Rob Collie (32:25): Power Automate will notice there's another trigger that the Power App is done with its part, the approval button was pressed. Justin Mannhardt (32:31): Clicked, yeah.  Rob Collie (32:33): Then it turns around, and it knows, because again we wire it up ... It sounds like we might be lucky, it's just drag and drop, one time development. But if it's not, it's probably not that much code, to go inject the new work order into the WMS system?  Justin Mannhardt (32:52): Yeah, it's the WMS, warehouse management system. Rob Collie (32:53): Let's call that the end of the story for this one integration. Let's say things go incredibly well in this project. We don't really encounter any hiccups. Best case scenario, how long on the calendar would it take for us to wire something like this up?  Justin Mannhardt (33:12): Yeah, best case scenario this is something that gets done inside of a week. Rob Collie (33:15): That's the difference.  Justin Mannhardt (33:16): Yeah.  Rob Collie (33:18): All right. Worst case scenario, both of these systems are more stubborn than usual, the connectors aren't built into the system, and they still have some relatively rudimentary ways of data access, but it's nothing WISIWIG off-the-shelf. We just get unlucky with these two stubborn line-of-business systems. How bad can that be?  Justin Mannhardt (33:37): Well, instead of being inside of a week, maybe it's weeks, like two or three. The only reason that gets extended would be okay, instead of pure WISIWIG drag and drop, maybe we are having to do some light handling of adjacent array. But there's tools for that. You can say, "Parse this into fields so I can now drag and drop it." Maybe instead of our Power Automate workflow having three, four steps, maybe there's 10. Some of those steps have a little bit more involvement. Maybe there's some time because we got to troubleshoot a little bit more and make sure we've got it all right. But I think the overall point here is these are relatively light touch on the calendar.  Rob Collie (34:18): I had a job in college that I've never brought up on this show. Justin Mannhardt (34:23): Ooh.  Rob Collie (34:23): I was obsessed about this workflow for nearly a whole decade afterwards. Where I was working for a construction company, and there's this thing in the construction industry that I'm sure is still a thing, and it's called the submittals process. Where it turns out, when you're going to build a building, there's an ingredients list for a building. You were talking about different material options for manufacturing. So we're going to make a brick exterior. Okay, what kind of brick? There are many different colors, kinds, textures, levels of quality. Literally, the owner of the building, the person paying to have the building built, that owner and their architect, and sometimes their structural engineers, are going to want to hold a physical brick in their hand. Justin Mannhardt (35:05): Right. Rob Collie (35:06): This is the brick that you are going to use. They want to inspect it with their eyes, whatever, they want to feel ... Maybe even run tests on it.  Justin Mannhardt (35:14): Smack it with a hammer. Rob Collie (35:16): Right. Then, when you build the building, you better use that brick because they're holding onto the brick, the sample, the reference brick. You think about the number of ingredients that goes into building a building, and the building in question that I was working on helping out with this process was the new chemistry building at Vanderbilt University. It was not just a regular building, it had all kinds of specialized hardware, and exhaust, and crazy stuff that wouldn't be in a normal building.  (35:44): There's this long list of materials that need to have submittals produced for them, samples. The requests all go to a million different vendors. You have to ask the subcontractor, the plumbing contractor, what pipe they plan to use. You find out what pipe they plan to use and then you say, "Okay, where do I get a sample of that pipe?" Sometimes you have to send the request for the sample to the pipe manufacturer, or something the subcontracting, the plumber, people will do it for you. Ah! It's awful. (36:14): I was brought in to just be the human shock absorber in this process. I was constantly taking information from one format, copying and pasting it, if I was lucky. Usually, re-hand entering into another one. I have to do this multiple times. I have to do this on the outgoing request, and then the incoming materials coming back. Ugh, and then the shipping labels and everything. It was just they brought me in because they had their assistant project manager for the construction company, the general contractor, on this site. All of this was having to go through him. It turns out, he had another job which was called build the building.  Justin Mannhardt (36:54): Just a minor, little job.  Rob Collie (36:56): Yeah. The job of push the samples around was a fine thing to subcontract to a college student. I swear, I did 40 hours a week on that for a whole summer, and then part-time for the next two years. That's all I did.  Justin Mannhardt (37:13): Make note, students. If you take an internship and you end up like Rob, learn how to do Power Automate stuff and use that for your internship.  Rob Collie (37:22): By the way, we already had Lotus Notes with a tremendous amount of customized Lotus Note template for this process.  Justin Mannhardt (37:30): Yeah.  Rob Collie (37:30): But all that really was was just another line-of-business system that didn't talk to anything. It spit out paper is what it did, it spit out printed slips that announced, "This is your brick."  Justin Mannhardt (37:42): Congratulations.  Rob Collie (37:44): That would be a really, really challenging digital transformation process today, because not only is it cross system, it's also cross companies. But I'm sure that, if we looked at that process today, we would find things that could be optimized.  Justin Mannhardt (37:56): Oh, yeah. Your example reminded me of a really important opportunity in the construction industry or lots of trades. You're talking about people that are out in the field, on job sites, on location, they're not sitting in offices at workstations. All of these things we're talking about, especially these Power App interfaces, can be optimized for mobile. Instead of, "Oh, I'm going to write this down so when I get back to my home office," I can put something on the smartphone. Even if you're not picking from a list of material SKUs or whatever, you can say, "Hey, Rob needs a brick."  (38:36): Now this goes back to your central office, and it's into a work queue, and another screen in the Power App, then they can go navigate the vendors and all that sort of stuff, too. That's a great example of where you can just put a little spice on it.  Rob Collie (38:50): I said that was the only thing I did in that job, that's not true. I had other jobs. One of them was the plumbing contractor was deemed to be running well behind schedule, they were not installing pipe fast enough, pipe and duct work. They assigned me, the construction company assigned me the job of going out there, walking through the building and seeing how much had been installed, linear feet of various materials, and writing it down. I was terrible at this. It's not a good fit for me at any age, but at age 20, I was just constantly under-reporting how much work they'd actually done and getting them in trouble.  Justin Mannhardt (39:32): This does not sound like a good use of Rob.  Rob Collie (39:34): Eventually, everyone bought me the little thing that wheels along on the ground and counts distance. What I would do is I'd be looking overhead at these copper pipes that were hanging from the ceiling, and I'd just stand beneath one end of them and walk across the building, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. But then, what would I do? I would write it down. I'd write down a number. What floor am I on? What side of the building am I on? Which pipes am I looking at? "Oh yeah, 150 linear feet." By the way, have I already counted those pipes? Did I count those pipes last week? I don't know.  Justin Mannhardt (40:11): There's errors in the world that have Rob Collie's fingerprints on them. There's a building somewhere that's had some pretty serious issues over the years and it's Rob's fault.  Rob Collie (40:21): The plumbing contractor had a pretty good sense of humor about it. They knew I was a youngster. Anyway, really just another example of something that could be digitally transformed today and it doesn't have to be difficult.  (40:33): This is not something that's a global, let's go digitally transform the whole company all at once. You can pick and choose some high value examples. And decide if that's a sufficient win for you, you might be encouraged to do it elsewhere. There's no thou shalt do all of these things, there's nothing like that. You get to choose where your cost benefit curve lies. But just even knowing that this is possible I think and what it entails.  Demystifying ... The process we just walked through, with today's technology, is not difficult. We're talking, as you said, within a week to several weeks on the worst case end. You do realize a bunch of benefits from that.  Justin Mannhardt (41:16): Yeah. I love how well the Power Platform, and this idea of it being middleware, just leans right into an idea that's been around for a long time in companies, which is continuous improvement. You can look at a problem, like the ones we've been describing, and you can go down the path and you say, "Okay, is there a piece of software that would solve or improve this problem?" You could look into something like that. Or you could say, "Actually, we have these other tools that we've been learning how to use and integrate into our organization, and we'll just take a week, or three weeks and make it better." If you decide to replace a silo down the road, like, "Hey, we're going to do a CRM take out," you've not saddled yourself up with this huge level of tech debt. Rob Collie (42:05): Yeah, that's huge.  Justin Mannhardt (42:06): Because a lot of these decisions have so much pressure because you're like, "If we don't get this right, then we'll have all this." It's actually okay to be like, "Yeah, we're going to throw this away and build a different one." I think that's an important aspect of these things. You can empower a team of people who are just interested in making things better and it's not this huge sunk cost or investment that you're never going to get back. You're going to get value from it, even if you're only going to leverage it, say for a year. It's like, "Hey, that week was worth it because it eliminated this many errors," or lost time, or whatever. Then we did something else. Rob Collie (42:44): This really hearkens back to something that I struggled to explain to people in my time at Microsoft. I had an intuition, and a lot of people had the same intuition, we weren't doing a great job of explaining it. What I'm going to talk about is the XML revolution. (43:01): XML, and JSON, and all these sorts of things, are just taken for granted today. There's nothing magic about them, it's completely commoditized and that's the way it should be. But those of us who saw this XML thing coming as a real game changer, I think we're really just keying in on exactly this thing we're talking about. The world had been obsessed with APIs up until that point. Every system had an API on it that was capable of doing verby things. Read/write, make changes. These APIs tended to be very heavy. Anyone that's ever written any macro code against Excel will know that the Excel API is incredibly complicated. I'm talking about the desktop VBA comm automation. Go play around with the range object for a couple of days.  (43:49): The idea that two systems with good APIs could then talk to each other was still this myth that I think most of the software world believed. Our belief was stubbornly that we just hadn't gotten the APIs right yet. The next standard in API was going to get it done. What XML did, all it was really doing was saying, "Look, there's going to be a data transmission format that is completely separate from any API, and it's super, super readable, and it's super, super simple." It's the beginning of this shock absorber mentality. Since then, we've discovered that it doesn't have to be XML. Justin Mannhardt (44:30): Oh, yeah. Rob Collie (44:31): But the XML thing did eventually lead us down the road of Hadoop, and DataLakes, and all of that. But yeah, this notion that you get the necessary data from system one, and there's this temporary ah, breath that you can take, and you can disconnect the process of slurp from system one and inject new into the other system. You can ever so slightly disconnect those two so they're not talking directly to each other. When you do that, you gain just massive, massive, massive benefits. (45:03): Yeah, it's kind of neat to connect that now. Again, I used to talk to people all the time like, "No, XML is magic. It's going to blah, blah, blah." People would go, like my old boss did, again would be like, "I don't get it. Why is it magic?" I'd be like, "Well, it just is, man. You don't understand." He beat that out of me. It was one of the greatest that anyone's ever given me. By the time I was done with him, I could explain why XML was valuable but not at the beginning. I certainly didn't envision where we've landed here.  (45:27): Okay, so I think this was pretty straightforward, right? If you want to identify what digital transformation means for your organization ... This actually really parallels the talk I gave on AI the other night here in Indy.  Justin Mannhardt (45:39): Oh, right. Yeah.  Rob Collie (45:40): Don't talk about it from the tech point of view. Justin Mannhardt (45:43): Yeah.  Rob Collie (45:43): Think about it from the workflow point of view. Where are the workflows in your company? What's really beautiful about digital transformation is that we can provide this extra guidance that, what are the workflows that happen between systems or adjacent to systems?  Justin Mannhardt (46:00): Yeah.  Rob Collie (46:00): It helps you focus on what we're talking about. It's not often you get a cheat code like that, so you can really zero in on something.  (46:08): I suspect that once you have that algorithm for looking, you're going to find lots of things. The Power Platform makes it- Justin Mannhardt (46:18): Ah, it transforms them in digital ways. Rob Collie (46:20): It puts that completely within range, completely within budget in a way that you wouldn't necessarily even expect. It's just kind of magic. It's the same level of magic that you'd get from Power BI, but in a read/write workflow sense.  Justin Mannhardt (46:33): Between and adjacent to, that's magic. That's a magic algorithm because I bet a lot of people, when you say digital transformation, they are thinking on or within the system, not between it. Rob Collie (46:45): Yeah. It's another one of these marketing terms that's almost deliberately meant to be mystical. Everyone's supposed to pretend that they know what it means, but then it's left for all of us out here in the real world, close to where the rubber meets the road, to actually do something real with it. (46:59): I wonder what percentage of the time people use the phrase digital transformation, if you scratch the surface, you'd find that they were completely bluffing?  Justin Mannhardt (47:07): Yeah. There's a category of thinking digital transformation, or even data analytics, where there's just all these abstract, conceptual statements or diagrams that mean very little. Let's just zoom into an actual problem, even if it's a little one, and fix it. Then, we'll go to the next one and fix that. We don't need big, fancy frameworks, teams, and steering committees to do any of that.  Rob Collie (47:35): I've got another example. Justin Mannhardt (47:36): Oh, yeah?  Rob Collie (47:37): It's one that we've implemented here at P3. We have these Power BI dashboards that measure the effectiveness of our advertising. It turns out that advertising in particular on Google AdWords is not a global thing. It's the sum of many micro trends, your overall performance. It's highly, highly, highly variable based on which keywords you're matching against, what kinds of searches you're matching against, and what kind of messaging you're presenting to the user of Google. The only way to improve, most of the time, is to improve in the details.  (48:11): All right. For a while, we had this workflow where we'd identify an intersection of ads that we were running and what we were matching up with, in terms of people's searches. We'd identify a cluster of those that, I'll just keep it simple for the moment, where we'd say, "Look, right now we're providing the same message to a bunch of searches that aren't really the same search and we need to break this out, and provide a more custom, tailored message to each of these individual searches." We'd mark something for granularization.  (48:43): But originally, what we would do is we were looking at this report, we'd write down essentially this intersection and say, "Go split that out."  Justin Mannhardt (48:51): What did we do?  Rob Collie (48:52): Immediately, we'd lose all track of what did we even decide to do? Because then someone had to go over to totally Google AdWords system and enter new ads, and break this thing out. Even knowing whether that had happened, producing the work list of things that needed to happen, was very difficult because we were in the context of a Power BI dashboard that didn't do any communication elsewhere. We couldn't track what our to-do list was. Except again, completely offline. We built a Power App and embedded it into some of these reports. You'd click on the thing you'd want to break out, the Power App would pick up that context, and then we'd just use a little drop-down and say, "What do we want to do to this?" We're going to mark this for granularization.  (49:39): That did produce us a to-do list, that then could also be re-imported back into the report, so that we could se that we had marked that one to explode it out. We didn't have to look at it again, and we also in the reporting, could see whether that splitting up had been done because you'd come back to the Power App and say, "Done." Even better, you'd enter the IDs of the new groups, so that you can say, "Hey, this one is now superseded by these."  (50:07): Now we never got to the point of directly writing back to Google AdWords to make the changes. That still happened offline. We certainly could have imagined a world in which a Power App, a much more elaborate process was built that, then separately from the dashboard, would prompt you to write the new ad copy and things like that. You get to choose where the 80/20 is in your process. For us, the 80/20 was recording the list and tracking the lineage while we're in the context of the report. That was a big deal.  Justin Mannhardt (50:39): There are over 1000 pre-built and certified connectors available for the Power Platform. Rob Collie (50:46): That's it? Just kidding. Justin Mannhardt (50:48): They're adding things all the time. We live in a SaaS world. All these things, they're real. Rob Collie (50:53): Yeah. That's a really critical point about Microsoft, is that they have realized that they are the middleware company.  Justin Mannhardt (50:59): Satya is all about it.  Rob Collie (51:00): Yes. In the Bill and Steve era, this was not Microsoft's game. They wanted to own everything.  Justin Mannhardt (51:06): Yeah.  Rob Collie (51:07): In Satya era, it's more like, "No, we want to work with everything."  Justin Mannhardt (51:11): It's great, I love it.  Rob Collie (51:12): Just recently, as I've gone down this path myself, reverse engineering in my own little way what this term means and coming to the conclusions that we have, I've realized that we are a digital transformation company. It's not the only thing that we do. Is read only Power BI middleware, is that digital transformation? Well, probably. By the strictest definition, probably yes, but not by the spirit of the law. The spirit of the definition means a read/write workflow. I'd mentioned in this last example, Power BI can be part of a read/write workflow. There's no reason to sideline it. In the other episodes, where we talked about improvement and action is the goal, how a Power App can be added to a Power BI report to help you take action on what the report is telling you. But just the broader Power Platform, Power Apps and Power Automate in particular. We do have a handful of clients where, most of the work we're doing is digital transformation work. Justin Mannhardt (52:08): Right, this type of work.  Rob Collie (52:09): The adjacent in between that we're talking about. Even though we're mostly thought of as a Power BI company, as we're doing our next round of website rebuild, we've 100% put a digital transformation page on our sitemap. It'll probably use some of this language we're talking about here. Digital transformation, what does it mean? It is both not that special of a term, there's no rocket science to it, and at the same time, there's a lot of value to be realized from it.  Justin Mannhardt (52:36): Totally. Here's a fun little call back to our origin story as individuals and as a company. We spend a lot of our time helping, for example, like the Excel analyst move over to Power BI and we're trying to solve these middleware gaps. That's why I think, for us, it's just been quite natural to provide these types of services and capabilities to customers as we've grown because it's the same type of person that's spirited to solve these types of issues, and the technology, and the openness of it brought everything in range. It's fun to reflect back on how broad we can show up to a customer beyond just dashboards.  Rob Collie (53:22): Yeah. It's a miracle and a testament to what Microsoft has pulled off. You can certainly imagine a world in which they could enable that uptempo, highly efficient, what we call faucets first methodology for dashboards. Justin Mannhardt (53:22): Yeah.  Rob Collie (53:38): And stopping there. To extend it to something like workflow and applications, and have implementation of these solutions feel very, very, very similar. Justin Mannhardt (53:50): Yeah.  Rob Collie (53:50): It's completely compatible with our ethos. It's almost like I didn't even notice when we made that transition into doing both. It sneaked up on me. That's a good sign. I feel a little silly that it took me a while to digest it, but I love that it happened organically without us having to go- Justin Mannhardt (54:10): Right. Rob Collie (54:11): Pick up another toolset from another vendor, or change our hiring profile dramatically, or anything like that.  Justin Mannhardt (54:18): Yeah. Now, we've got some of these cool projects where you've got maybe someone that their expertise is more on the Power BI side, working right alongside someone whose expertise is more on the Power Apps, Power Automate side. They're just moving in lockstep with the same customer, closing these middleware gaps, building the reporting, and the action lives around it. It's that whole thing working together that makes it all really cool. Rob Collie (54:41): I'm also developing an intuition that AI, maybe not the only application of AI, but I think a lot of the surface area of where we will find AI to be useful, plugs into this digital transformation thing, the adjacent in between. In particular, in sub workflows within the overall workflow.  Justin Mannhardt (55:03): Yes.  Rob Collie (55:03): Did your reaction fit that?  Justin Mannhardt (55:06): Yes, totally. Totally, totally, totally. Yeah.  Rob Collie (55:09): Then, we're good. I think it's easy, with dashboards, with BI, to imagine the global. Going from a non-dashboard company to a dashboard company, it's very easy to imagine that as a global thing and it's probably the right thing. Any place where you're flying without the information you need in a convenient, easy to digest format, let's go and get that. Even there, with the transformation to a data oriented organization, a data driven culture, you still pick places to start.  Justin Mannhardt (55:39): You got to start somewhere.  Rob Collie (55:40): This other thing, digital transformation is a little harder to imagine is a global thing, and that's fine. I think AI's the same way. You should not be thinking about AI as a global transformation for your business. Just like digital transformation, it is a go find particular places where you can score these wins.  Speaker 4 (56:00): Thanks for listening to the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive Podcast. Let the experts at P3 Adaptive help your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Have a data day. 

FULL SHOW NOTES https://podcast.nz365guy.com/532 Embark on a transformative journey with Jeff ANGAMA, the MVP from France, whose mantra of thinking big yet starting small has led him to success in the world of tech. As a solutions engineer at AvePoint, he's carved a niche for himself by embracing rapid failure as a stepping stone to greatness. Our conversation with Jeff isn't just a peek into his professional life; it's an adventure across cultures—from his gastronomic tales in Singapore to academic pursuits in China. We uncover the pivotal moments in his career, including spearheading a colossal digital overhaul for a French cleaning powerhouse, transitioning them from Lotus Notes to the modern workspace of Microsoft Teams and Outlook.We then shift gears to dissect the anatomy of an MVP—what it takes, the grind, the community spirit, and the art of knowledge-sharing. Jeff walks us through his content creation strategy, engaging with fellow tech enthusiasts, and how he's adapted his outreach from comprehensive blog posts to the more concise, emoji-laced microblogs on LinkedIn. Governance in Microsoft's ecosystem and the excitement brewing around AI like Copilot take center stage as we talk about the hot topics for future conferences. And if you're curious about the behind-the-scenes of preparing for those coveted speaking slots, Jeff provides an insider's perspective on selecting topics that resonate and crafting presentations that captivate. Tune in for an episode that's as much about personal growth as it is about professional acumen.OTHER RESOURCES: Microsoft MVP YouTube Series - How to Become a Microsoft MVP  How to Deploy Power Platform in a Mid-Market Enterprise - https://www.tekkigurus.com/how-to-deploy-power-platform-in-a-mid-market-enterprise/ Public speaking tips discussed - https://youtu.be/HAnw168huqA AgileXRM AgileXRm - The integrated BPM for Microsoft Power PlatformSupport the showIf you want to get in touch with me, you can message me here on Linkedin.Thanks for listening

It’s another day at the workplace. Everything is the exact same. The cafeteria ran out of bananas again. Your co-worker can’t stop yapping about the event of the moment. Your boss wants a report in. If only something could help alleviate this boredom! Perhaps a chatting application built into my required mailing software for my… Read more S8:E5 – IBM Lotus Sametime for IBM Lotus Notes Users

This week, we discuss what “enshittification” is, what causes it, and whether it can be prevented. Plus, stay tuned until the end to hear the Software Defined Talk origin story. Watch the YouTube Live Recording of Episode 451 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4CnW_RciZ4) Runner-up Titles Enshittification The Fahrenheit 451 Reorganization Wait for Wifi Taxes by beef rib It's actually not fine Smoking crack in Disneyland AI is accelerating the crappiness. Why don't you just sell more cloud? Generated Garbage I can't tell if it's a coffee mug or a ballistic missile. Accidentally upgraded Jury duty…”pretty cool.” Rundown Airalo (https://www.airalo.com/spain-esim) for mobile cell phones plans when traveling. How Google perfected the web (https://www.theverge.com/c/23998379/google-search-seo-algorithm-webpage-optimization) AdNauseam - Clicking Ads So You Don't Have To (https://adnauseam.io/) Subprime Attention Crisis (https://www.audible.com/pd/Subprime-Attention-Crisis-Audiobook/0593454103?ref_pageloadid=Dsqv0n17FOwUqOpK&ref=a_library_t_c5_libItem_0593454103_0&pf_rd_p=80765e81-b10a-4f33-b1d3-ffb87793d047&pf_rd_r=7C4TQFGZXK856S6W40BH&pageLoadId=Fo0QcV8X3KEf9ys4&creativeId=4ee810cf-ac8e-4eeb-8b79-40e176d0a225) 2023 Word of the Year Is “Enshittification” (https://americandialect.org/2023-word-of-the-year-is-enshittification/#:~:text=Sheraton%20New%20York%20Times%20Square,of%20the%20Year%20for%202023) Instagram's co-founders are shutting down their Artifact news app (https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/12/24036539/artifact-shutting-down-kevin-systrom) Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find (https://www.404media.co/google-search-really-has-gotten-worse-researchers-find/) Relevant to your Interests Tens of thousands of GPUs go under-utilized in the cloud (https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/15/cloud_providers_gpu_analysis/?trk=feed_main-feed-card_reshare_feed-article-content) Creating a Sales Commission Plan (https://open.substack.com/pub/onlycfo/p/creating-a-sales-commission-plan?r=2d4o&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post) The Quiet Death of Ello's Big Dreams - Waxy.org (https://waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-death-of-ellos-big-dreams/) Nutanix set to benefit most from Broadcom's VMware upheaval (https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/18/broadcom_vmware_channel_disruption/) VMware is killing off 56 products amid "tectonic" infrastructure shift (https://www.thestack.technology/vmware-is-killing-off-56-products-including-vsphere-hypervisor-and-nsx/?ref=the-stack-newsletter) Taming the dragon - Chinese and US Semiconductor competition (https://kitsonjonathon.substack.com/p/taming-the-dragon-chinese-and-us) ‘I dreamed of blocky pixels': the strange, sweaty, sociable early days of gaming – in pictures (https://www.theguardian.com/games/2024/jan/20/strange-sweaty-sociable-early-days-of-gaming-in-pictures) Lofree Flow (https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/01/20/Lofree-Flow) — Keyboard Review via Tim Bray Remembering Bell Labs as legendary idea factory prepares to leave N.J. home (https://www.nj.com/essex/2024/01/remembering-bell-labs-as-legendary-idea-factory-prepares-to-leave-nj-home.html) IBM Consulting orders a return to office - and means it (https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/18/ibm_consulting_office/) Apple Dials Back Car's Self-Driving Features and Delays Launch to 2028 (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-23/apple-car-ev-set-to-debut-in-2028-with-limited-autonomous-driving) Introducing Docker Build Cloud (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cyxPwXfmwHU) It's time to build (https://open.substack.com/pub/benn/p/its-time-to-build?selection=0c874398-fde8-45be-b547-f51d3c6a7c93&r=2d4o&utm_medium=ios) "And we call it... the Vision Pro holster. We think you're going to love it." (https://x.com/JoannaStern/status/1748354349116301487?s=20) For a moment there, Lotus Notes appeared to do everything (https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/19/remembering_lotus_notes/) Campfire is ONCE #1 (https://world.hey.com/dhh/campfire-is-once-1-d2cebd12) Lessons learned: 1,000 days of distributed at Atlassian - Work Life by Atlassian (https://www.atlassian.com/blog/distributed-work/distributed-work-report) Bosses want to work from home more than employees do, says new survey—but they're still pushing RTO requirements (https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/10/bosses-want-to-work-remote-more-than-employees-but-still-push-return-to-office.html) Nvidia, a $1 trillion AI powerhouse, is fine with remote work (https://fortune-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/fortune.com/2023/10/14/nvidia-skips-return-to-office-sticks-to-remote-work-among-hottest-tech-companies/amp/) Why constant job cuts could be the new normal for Big Tech (https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-new-normal-constant-layoffs-job-cuts-google-amazon-meta-2024-1) Culture Change at Google (https://social.clawhammer.net/blog/posts/2024-01-19-CultureChange/) Frustrated Googlers are speaking out on the corporate dysfunction (https://www.threads.net/@marcslove/post/C2Y7qCPu6Gz/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==) Bell Labs & Google: bookends of the same sad story? (https://om.co/2024/01/22/bell-labs-google-same-sad-story/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email) Mourning Google (https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/01/15/Google-2024) Nonsense We lost some real stars this past year (https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8p6Tsv6/) Startups Are Shutting Down! (https://youtu.be/-V9yPGdubHQ) It's Just a Water Bottle (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/01/stanley-cups-valentines-day-target-starbucks/677190/) Listener Feedback Robert recomends the Zojirushi SM-SR48E Stainless Mug (https://www.zojirushi.com/app/product/smsre) Conferences That Conference Texas, Jan 29, 2024 to Feb 1 (https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/The-Business-BS-Dictionary--CFtt8vL15hIcWTIAgoxIWH6nAg-xCwuOhkOT7Ts26WfLtsX8) CfgMgmtCamp, Feb 5–7th (https://cfgmgmtcamp.eu/ghent2024/) — Coté speaking. The Uk's Open Technology Conference Open Source Software, Open Hardware Feb 6–7 (https://stateofopencon.com) SCaLE 21x/DevOpsDays LA, March 14th (https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/21x)– (https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/21x)17th, 2024 (https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/21x) — Coté speaking (https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/21x/presentations/we-fear-change), sponsorship slots available. KubeCon EU Paris, March 19 (https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe/)– (https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe/)22 (https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe/) — Coté on the wait list for the platform side conference. DevOpsDays Birmingham, April 17–18, 2024 (https://talks.devopsdays.org/devopsdays-birmingham-al-2024/cfp) SDT news & hype Join us in Slack (http://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/slack). Get a SDT Sticker! Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) and we will send you free laptop stickers! Follow us: Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/sdtpodcast), Twitter (https://twitter.com/softwaredeftalk), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/softwaredefinedtalk/), Mastodon (https://hachyderm.io/@softwaredefinedtalk), BlueSky (https://bsky.app/profile/softwaredefinedtalk.com), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/software-defined-talk/), TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@softwaredefinedtalk), Threads (https://www.threads.net/@softwaredefinedtalk) and YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi3OJPV6h9tp-hbsGBLGsDQ/featured). Use the code SDT to get $20 off Coté's book, Digital WTF (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt), so $5 total. Become a sponsor of Software Defined Talk (https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/ads)! Recommendations Brandon: Travis County Jury Duty (https://www.traviscountytx.gov/district-clerk/jury-duty) Matt: Perplexity.AI (https://www.perplexity.ai) Coté: Kantjil & De Tijger (https://maps.app.goo.gl/GC11U6FpGsoQ9A1b8?g_st=ic) or Kartika (https://maps.app.goo.gl/VqSxkb5m2zVdugLz7?g_st=ic) — which is also good and less fancy in a good way. Photo Credits Header (https://unsplash.com/photos/flat-screen-monitor-z1aLTzG2VGU) Artwork (https://unsplash.com/photos/flat-screen-monitor-z1aLTzG2VGU)

FULL SHOW NOTES https://podcast.nz365guy.com/519 Ever wondered how spicy curry ties into the low-code revolution? Jason Earnshaw from Huddersfield, our Low Code Practice General Manager with a penchant for Dynamics 365, spices up our show with his rich stories from the IT landscape. His journey from the days of Lotus Notes to the cutting-edge Power Platform offers a delectable mix of personal anecdotes and professional insights, proving that technology and curries do get better with time.This episode is a time capsule, where we journey through the evolving world of IT, from the nostalgia of Microsoft CRM's transformation into Dynamics 365 to the emergence of solutions like Mendix. It's a narrative woven with reflections on the past and excitement for the future, as Jason walks us down memory lane, sharing how XRM's potential was overshadowed by internal politics and how customer needs drive the ever-changing tech ecosystem.Finally, the conversation shifts gears to the culture and aspirations driving A&S Group, where community involvement and diverse perspectives aren't just buzzwords—they're the very fabric of their success. We untangle the complex tube map of project management, stopping at critical stations like ALM and security, and discuss how these elements contribute to delivering tailored pathways to triumph for their clients. Join us for a session that marries the technical with the personal, the past with the present, and success with the community.AgileXRM AgileXRm - The integrated BPM for Microsoft Power Platform 90 Day Mentoring Challenge 2024 https://ako.nz365guy.comSupport the showIf you want to get in touch with me, you can message me here on Linkedin.Thanks for listening

Laurent Doguin, Director of Developer Relations & Strategy at Couchbase, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to talk about the work that Couchbase is doing in the world of databases and developer relations, as well as the role of AI in their industry and beyond. Together, Corey and Laurent discuss Laurent's many different roles throughout his career including what made him want to come back to a role at Couchbase after stepping away for 5 years. Corey and Laurent dig deep on how Couchbase has grown in recent years and how it's using artificial intelligence to offer an even better experience to the end user.About LaurentLaurent Doguin is Director of Developer Relations & Strategy at Couchbase (NASDAQ: BASE), a cloud database platform company that 30% of the Fortune 100 depend on.Links Referenced: Couchbase: https://couchbase.com XKCD #927: https://xkcd.com/927/ dbdb.io: https://dbdb.io DB-Engines: https://db-engines.com/en/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/ldoguin LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ldoguin/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Are you navigating the complex web of API management, microservices, and Kubernetes in your organization? Solo.io is here to be your guide to connectivity in the cloud-native universe!Solo.io, the powerhouse behind Istio, is revolutionizing cloud-native application networking. They brought you Gloo Gateway, the lightweight and ultra-fast gateway built for modern API management, and Gloo Mesh Core, a necessary step to secure, support, and operate your Istio environment.Why struggle with the nuts and bolts of infrastructure when you can focus on what truly matters - your application. Solo.io's got your back with networking for applications, not infrastructure. Embrace zero trust security, GitOps automation, and seamless multi-cloud networking, all with Solo.io.And here's the real game-changer: a common interface for every connection, in every direction, all with one API. It's the future of connectivity, and it's called Gloo by Solo.io.DevOps and Platform Engineers, your journey to a seamless cloud-native experience starts here. Visit solo.io/screaminginthecloud today and level up your networking game.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, I'm Corey Quinn. This promoted guest episode is brought to us by our friends at Couchbase. And before we start talking about Couchbase, I would rather talk about not being at Couchbase. Laurent Doguin is the Director of Developer Relations and Strategy at Couchbase. First, Laurent, thank you for joining me.Laurent: Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.Corey: So, what I find interesting is that this is your second time at Couchbase, where you were a developer advocate there for a couple of years, then you had five years of, we'll call it wilderness I suppose, and then you return to be the Director of Developer Relations. Which also ties into my personal working thesis of, the best way to get promoted at a lot of companies is to leave and then come back. But what caused you to decide, all right, I'm going to go work somewhere else? And what made you come back?Laurent: So, I've joined Couchbase in 2014. Spent about two or three years as a DA. And during those three years as a developer advocate, I've been advocating SQL database and I—at the time, it was mostly DBAs and ops I was talking to. And DBA and ops are, well, recent, modern ops are writing code, but they were not the people I wanted to talk to you when I was a developer advocate. I came from a background of developer, I've been a platform engineer for an enterprise content management company. I was writing code all day.And when I came to Couchbase, I realized I was mostly talking about Docker and Kubernetes, which is still cool, but not what I wanted to do. I wanted to talk about developers, how they use database to be better app, how they use key-value, and those weird thing like MapReduce. At the time, MapReduce was still, like, a weird thing for a lot of people, and probably still is because now everybody's doing SQL. So, that's what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to… engage with people identify with, really. And so, didn't happen. Left. Built a Platform as a Service company called Clever Cloud. They started about four or five years before I joined. We went from seven people to thirty-one LFs, fully bootstrapped, no VC. That's an interesting way to build a company in this age.Corey: Very hard to do because it takes a lot of upfront investment to build software, but you can sort of subsidize that via services, which is what we've done here in some respects. But yeah, that's a hard road to walk.Laurent: That's the model we had—and especially when your competition is AWS or Azure or GCP, so that was interesting. So entrepreneurship, it's not for everyone. I did my four years there and then I realized, maybe I'm going to do something else. I met my former colleagues of Couchbase at a software conference called Devoxx, in France, and they told me, “Well, there's a new sheriff in town. You should come back and talk to us. It's all about developers, we are repositioning, rehandling the way we do marketing at Couchbase. Why not have a conversation with our new CMO, John Kreisa?”And I said, “Well, I mean, I don't have anything to do. I actually built a brewery during that past year with some friends. That was great, but that's not going to feed me or anything. So yeah, let's have a conversation about work.” And so, I talked to John, I talked to a bunch of other people, and I realized [unintelligible 00:03:51], he actually changed, like, there was a—they were purposely going [against 00:03:55] developer, talking to developer. And that was not the case, necessarily, five, six years before that.So, that's why I came back. The product is still amazing, the people are still amazing. It was interesting to find a lot of people that still work there after, what, five years. And it's a company based in… California, headquartered in California, so you would expect people to, you know, jump around a bit. And I was pleasantly surprised to find the same folks there. So, that was also one of the reasons why I came back.Corey: It's always a strong endorsement when former employees rejoin a company. Because, I don't know about you, but I've always been aware of those companies you work for, you leave. Like, “Aw, I'm never doing that again for love or money,” just because it was such an unpleasant experience. So, it speaks well when you see companies that do have a culture of boomerangs, for lack of a better term.Laurent: That's the one we use internally, and there's a couple. More than a couple.Corey: So, one thing that seems to have been a thread through most of your career has been an emphasis on developer experience. And I don't know if we come at it from the same perspective, but to me, what drives nuts is honestly, with my work in cloud, bad developer experience manifests as the developer in question feeling like they're somehow not very good at their job. Like, they're somehow not understanding how all this stuff is supposed to work, and honestly, it leads to feeling like a giant fraud. And I find that it's pernicious because even when I intellectually know for a fact that I'm not the dumbest person ever to use this tool when I don't understand how something works, the bad developer experience manifests to me as, “You're not good enough.” At least, that's where I come at it from.Laurent: And also, I [unintelligible 00:05:34] to people that build these products because if we build the products, the user might be in the same position that we are right now. And so, we might be responsible for that experience [unintelligible 00:05:43] a developer, and that's not a great feeling. So, I completely agree with you. I've tried to… always on software-focused companies, whether it was Nuxeo, Couchbase, Clever Cloud, and then Couchbase. And I guess one of the good thing about coming back to a developer-focused era is all the product alignments.Like, a lot of people talk about product that [grows 00:06:08] and what it means. To me what it means was, what it meant—what it still means—building a product that developer wants to use, and not just want to, sometimes it's imposed to you, but actually are happy to use, and as you said, don't feel completely stupid about it in front of the product. It goes through different things. We've recently revamped our Couchbase UI, Couchbase Capella UI—Couchbase Capella is a managed cloud product—and so we've added a lot of in-product getting started guidelines, snippets of code, to help developers getting started better and not have that feeling of, “What am I doing? Why is it not working and what's going on?”Corey: That's an interesting decision to make, just because historically, working with a bunch of tools, the folks who are building the documentation working with that tool, tend to generally be experts at it, so they tend to optimize for improving things for the experience of someone has been using it for five years as opposed to the newcomer. So, I find that the longer a product is in existence, in many cases, the worse the new user experience becomes because companies tend to grow and sprawl in different ways, the product does likewise. And if you don't know the history behind it, “Oh, your company, what does it do?” And you look at the website and there's 50 different offerings that you have—like, the AWS landing page—it becomes overwhelming very quickly. So, it's neat to see that emphasis throughout the user interface on the new developer experience.On the other side of it, though, how are the folks who've been using it for a while respond to those changes? Because it's frustrating for me at least, when I log into a new account, which happens periodically within AWS land, and I have this giant series of onboarding pop-ups that I have to click to make go away every single time. How are they responding to it?Laurent: Yeah, it's interesting. One of the first things that struck me when I joined Couchbase the first time was the size of the technical documentation team. Because the whole… well, not the whole point, but part of the reason why they exist is to do that, to make sure that you understand all the differences and that it doesn't feel like the [unintelligible 00:08:18] what the documentation or the product pitch or everything. Like, they really, really, really emphasize on this from the very beginning. So, that was interesting.So, when you get that culture built into the products, well, the good thing is… when people try Couchbase, they usually stick with Couchbase. My main issue as a Director of the Developer Relations is not to make people stick with Couchbase because that works fairly well with the product that we have; it's to make them aware that we exist. That's the biggest issue I have. So, my goal as DevRel is to make sure that people get the trial, get through the trial, get all that in-app context, all that helps, get that first sample going, get that first… I'm not going to say product built because that's even a bit further down the line, but you know, get that sample going. We have a code playground, so when you're in the application, you get to actually execute different pieces of code, different languages. And so, we get those numbers and we're happy to see that people actually try that. And that's a, well, that's a good feeling.Corey: I think that there's a definite lack of awareness almost industry-wide around the fact that as the diversity of your customers increases, you have to have different approaches that meet them at various points along the journey. Because things that I've seen are okay, it's easy to ass—even just assuming a binary of, “Okay, I've done this before a thousand times; this is the thousand and first, I don't need the Hello World tutorial,” versus, “Oh, I have no idea what I'm doing. Give me the Hello World tutorial,” there are other points along that continuum, such as, “Oh, I used to do something like this, but it's been three years. Can you give me a refresher,” and so on. I think that there's a desire to try and fit every new user into a predefined persona and that just doesn't work very well as products become more sophisticated.Laurent: It's interesting, we actually have—we went through that work of defining those personas because there are many. And that was the origin of my departure. I had one person, ops slash DBA slash the person that maintain this thing, and I wanted to talk to all the other people that built the application space in Couchbase. So, we broadly segment things into back-end, full-stack, and mobile because Couchbase is also a mobile database. Well, we haven't talked too much about this, so I can explain you quickly what Couchbase is.It's basically a distributed JSON database with an integrated caching layer, so it's reasonably fast. So it does cache, and when the key-value is JSON, then you can create with SQL, you can do full-text search, you can do analytics, you can run user-defined function, you get triggers, you get all that actual SQL going on, it's transactional, you get joins, ANSI joins, you get all those… windowing function. It's modern SQL on the JSON database. So, it's a general-purpose database, and it's a general-purpose database that syncs.I think that's the important part of Couchbase. We are very good at syncing cluster of databases together. So, great for multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, on-prem, whatever suits you. And we also sync on the device, there's a thing called Couchbase Mobile, which is a local database that runs in your phone, and it will sync automatically to the server. So, a general-purpose database that syncs and that's quite modern.We try to fit as much way of growing data as possible in our database. It's kind of a several-in-one database. We call that a data platform. It took me a while to warm up to the word platform because I used to work for an enterprise content management platform and then I've been working for a Platform as a Service and then a data platform. So, it took me a bit of time to warm up to that term, but it explained fairly well, the fact that it's a several-in-one product and we empower people to do the trade-offs that they want.Not everybody needs… SQL. Some people just need key-value, some people need search, some people need to do SQL and search in the same query, which we also want people to do. So, it's about choices, it's about empowering people. And that's why the word platform—which can feel intimidating because it can seem complex, you know, [for 00:12:34] a lot of choices. And choices is maybe the enemy of a good developer experience.And, you know, we can try to talk—we can talk for hours about this. The more services you offer, the more complicated it becomes. What's the sweet spots? We did—our own trade-off was to have good documentation and good in-app help to fix that complexity problem. That's the trade-off that we did.Corey: Well, we should probably divert here just to make sure that we cover the basic groundwork for those who might not be aware: what exactly is Couchbase? I know that it's a database, which honestly, anything is a database if you hold it incorrectly enough; that's my entire shtick. But what is it exactly? Where does it start? Where does it stop?Laurent: Oh, where does it start? That's an interesting question. It's a… a merge—some people would say a fork—of Apache CouchDB, and membase. Membase was a distributed key-value store and CouchDB was this weird Erlang and C JSON REST API database that was built by Damian Katz from Lotus Notes, and that was in 2006 or seven. That was before Node.js.Let's not care about the exact date. The point is, a JSON and REST API-enabled database before Node.js was, like, a strong [laugh] power move. And so, those two merged and created the first version of Couchbase. And then we've added all those things that people want to do, so SQL, full-text search, analytics, user-defined function, mobile sync, you know, all those things. So basically, a general-purpose database.Corey: For what things is it not a great fit? This is always my favorite question to ask database folks because the zealot is going to say, “It's good for every use case under the sun. Use it for everything, start to finish”—Laurent: Yes.Corey: —and very few databases can actually check that box.Laurent: It's a very interesting question because when I pitch like, “We do all the things,” because we are a platform, people say, “Well, you must be doing lots of trade-offs. Where is the trade-off?” The trade-off is basically the way you store something is going to determine the efficiency of your [growing 00:14:45]—or the way you [grow 00:14:47] it. And that's one of the first thing you learn in computer science. You learn about data structure and you know that it's easier to get something in a hashmap when you have the key than passing your whole list of elements and checking your data, is it right one? It's the same for databases.So, our different services are different ways to store the data and to query it. So, where is it not good, it's where we don't have an index or a service that answer to the way you want to query data. We don't have a graph service right now. You can still do recursive common table expression for the SQL nerds out there, that will allow you to do somewhat of a graph way of querying your data, but that's not, like, actual—that's not a great experience for people were expecting a graph, like a Neo4j or whatever was a graph database experience.So, that's the trade-off that we made. We have a lot of things at the same place and it can be a little hard, intimidating to operate, and the developer experience can be a little, “Oh, my God, what is this thing that can do all of those features?” At the same time, that's just, like, one SDK to learn for all of the features we've just talked about. So, that's what we did. That's a trade-off that we did.It sucks to operate—well, [unintelligible 00:16:05] Couchbase Capella, which is a lot like a vendor-ish thing to say, but that's the value props of our managed cloud. It's hard to operate, we'll operate this for you. We have a Kubernetes operator. If you are one of the few people that wants to do Kubernetes at home, that's also something you can do. So yeah, I guess what we cannot do is the thing that Route 53 and [Unbound 00:16:26] and [unintelligible 00:16:27] DNS do, which is this weird DNS database thing that you like so much.Corey: One thing that's, I guess, is a sign of the times, but I have to confess that I'm relatively skeptical around, when I pull up couchbase.com—as one does; you're publicly traded; I don't feel that your company has much of a choice in this—but the first thing it greets me with is Couchbase Capella—which, yes, that is your hosted flagship product; that should be the first thing I see on the website—then it says, “Announcing Capella iQ, AI-powered coding assistance for developers.” Which oh, great, not another one of these.So, all right, give me the pitch. What is the story around, “Ooh, everything that has been a problem before, AI is going to make it way better.” Because I've already talked to you about developer experience. I know where you stand on these things. I have a suspicion you would not be here to endorse something you don't believe in. How does the AI magic work in this context?Laurent: So, that's the thing, like, who's going to be the one that get their products out before the other? And so, we're announcing it on the website. It's available on the private preview only right now. I've tried it. It works.How does it works? The way most chatbot AI code generation work is there's a big model, large language model that people use and that people fine-tune into in order to specialize it to the tasks that they want to do. The way we've built Couchbase iQ is we picked a very famous large language model, and when you ask a question to a bot, there's a context, there's a… the size of the window basically, that allows you to fit as much contextual information as possible. The way it works and the reason why it's integrated into Couchbase Capella is we make sure that we preload that context as much as possible and fine-tune that model, that [foundation 00:18:19] model, as much as possible to do whatever you want to do with Couchbase, which usually falls into several—a couple of categories, really—well maybe three—you want to write SQL, you want to generate data—actually, that's four—you want to generate data, you want to generate code, and if you paste some SQL code or some application code, you want to ask that model, what does do? It's especially true for SQL queries.And one of the questions that many people ask and are scared of with chatbot is how does it work in terms of learning? If you give a chatbot to someone that's very new to something, and they're just going to basically use a chatbot like Stack Overflow and not really think about what they're doing, well it's not [great 00:19:03] right, but because that's the example that people think most developer will do is generate code. Writing code is, like, a small part of our job. Like, a substantial part of our job is understanding what the code does.Corey: We spend a lot more time reading code than writing it, if we're, you know—Laurent: Yes.Corey: Not completely foolish.Laurent: Absolutely. And sometimes reading big SQL query can be a bit daunting, especially if you're new to that. And one of the good things that you get—Corey: Oh, even if you're not, it can still be quite daunting, let me assure you.Laurent: [laugh]. I think it's an acquired taste, let's be honest. Some people like to write assembly code and some people like to write SQL. I'm sort of in the middle right now. You pass your SQL query, and it's going to tell you more or less what it does, and that's a very nice superpower of AI. I think that's [unintelligible 00:19:48] that's the one that interests me the most right now is using AI to understand and to work better with existing pieces of code.Because a lot of people think that the cost of software is writing the software. It's maintaining the codebase you've written. That's the cost of the software. That's our job as developers should be to write legacy code because it means you've provided value long enough. And so, if in a company that works pretty well and there's a lot of legacy code and there's a lot of new people coming in and they'll have to learn all those things, and to be honest, sometimes we don't document stuff as much as we should—Corey: “The code is self-documenting,” is one of the biggest lies I hear in tech.Laurent: Yes, of course, which is why people are asking retired people to go back to COBOL again because nobody can read it and it's not documented. Actually, if someone's looking for a company to build, I guess, explaining COBOL code with AI would be a pretty good fit to do in many places.Corey: Yeah, it feels like that's one of those things that would be of benefit to the larger world. The counterpoint to that is you got that many business processes wrapped around something running COBOL—and I assure you, if you don't, you would have migrated off of COBOL long before now—it's making sure that okay well, computers, when they're in the form of AI, are very, very good at being confident-sounding when they talk about things, but they can also do that when they're completely wrong. It's basically a BS generator. And that is a scary thing when you're taking a look at something that broad. I mean, I'll use the AI coding assistance for things all the time, but those things look a lot more like, “Okay, I haven't written CloudFormation from scratch in a while. Build out the template, just because I forget the exact sequence.” And it's mostly right on things like that. But then you start getting into some of the real nuanced areas like race conditions and the rest, and often it can make things worse instead of better. That's the scary part, for me, at least.Laurent: Most coding assistants are… and actually, each time you ask its opinion to an AI, they say, “Well, you should take this with a grain of salt and we are not a hundred percent sure that this is the case.” And this is, make sure you proofread that, which again, from a learning perspective, can be a bit hard to give to new students. Like, you're giving something to someone and might—that assumes is probably as right as Wikipedia but actually, it's not. And it's part of why it works so well. Like, the anthropomorphism that you get with chatbots, like, this, it feels so human. That's why it get people so excited about it because if you think about it, it's not that new. It's just the moment it took off was the moment it looked like an assertive human being.Corey: As you take a look through, I guess, the larger ecosystem now, as well as the database space, given that is where you specialize, what do you think people are getting right and what do you think people are getting wrong?Laurent: There's a couple of ways of seeing this. Right now, when I look at from the outside, every databases is going back to SQL, I think there's a good reason for that. And it's interesting to put into perspective with AI because when you generate something, there's probably less chance to generate something wrong with SQL than generating something with code directly. And I think five generation—was it four or five generation language—there some language generation, so basically, the first innovation is assembly [into 00:23:03] in one and then you get more evolved languages, and at some point you get SQL. And SQL is a way to very shortly express a whole lot of business logic.And I think what people are doing right now is going back to SQL. And it's been impressive to me how even new developers that were all about [ORMs 00:23:25] and [no-DMs 00:23:26], and you know, avoiding writing SQL as much as possible, are actually back to it. And that's, for an old guy like me—well I mean, not that old—it feels good. I think SQL is coming back with a vengeance and that makes me very happy. I think what people don't realize is that it also involves doing data modeling, right, and stuff because database like Couchbase that are schemaless exist. You should store your data without thinking about it, you should still do data modeling. It's important. So, I think that's the interesting bits. What are people doing wrong in that space? I'm… I don't want to say bad thing about other databases, so I cannot even process that thought right now.Corey: That's okay. I'm thrilled to say negative things about any database under the sun. They all haunt me. I mean, someone wants to describe SQL to me is the chess of the programming world and I feel like that's very accurate. I have found that it is far easier in working with databases to make mistakes that don't wash off after a new deployment than it is in most other realms of technology. And when you're lucky and have a particular aura, you tend to avoid that stuff, at least that was always my approach.Laurent: I think if I had something to say, so just like the XKCD about standards: like, “there's 14 standards. I'm going to do one that's going to unify them all.” And it's the same with database. There's a lot… a [laugh] lot of databases. Have you ever been on a website called dbdb.io?Corey: Which one is it? I'm sorry.Laurent: Dbdb.io is the database of databases, and it's very [laugh] interesting website for database nerds. And so, if you're into database, dbdb.io. And you will find Couchbase and you will find a whole bunch of other databases, and you'll get to know which database is derived from which other database, you get the history, you get all those things. It's actually pretty interesting.Corey: I'm familiar with DB-Engines, which is sort of like the ranking databases by popularity, and companies will bend over backwards to wind up hitting all of the various things that they want in that space. The counterpoint with all of it is that it's… it feels historically like there haven't exactly been an awful lot of, shall we say, huge innovations in databases for the past few years. I mean, sure, we hear about vectors all the time now because of the joy that's AI, but smarter people than I are talking about how, well that's more of a feature than it is a core database. And the continual battle that we all hear about constantly is—and deal with ourselves—of should we use a general-purpose database, or a task-specific database for this thing that I'm doing remains largely unsolved.Laurent: Yeah, what's new? And when you look at it, it's like, we are going back to our roots and bringing SQL again. So, is there anything new? I guess most of the new stuff, all the interesting stuff in the 2010s—well, basically with the cloud—were all about the distribution side of things and were all about distributed consensus, Zookeeper, etcd, all that stuff. Couchbase is using an RAFT-like algorithm to keep every node happy and under the same cluster.I think that's one of the most interesting things we've had for the past… well, not for the past ten years, but between, basically, 20 or… between the start of AWS and well, let's say seven years ago. I think the end of the distribution game was brought to us by the people that have atomic clock in every data center because that's what you use to synchronize things. So, that was interesting things. And then suddenly, there wasn't that much innovation in the distributed world, maybe because Aphyr disappeared from Twitter. That might be one of the reason. He's not here to scare people enough to be better at that.Aphyr was the person behind the test called the Jepsen Test [shoot 00:27:12]. I think his blog engine was called Call Me Maybe, and he was going through every distributed system and trying to break them. And that was super interesting. And it feels like we're not talking that much about this anymore. It really feels like database have gone back to the status of infrastructure.In 2010, it was not about infrastructure. It was about developer empowerment. It was about serving JSON and developer experience and making sure that you can code faster without some constraint in a distributed world. And like, we fixed this for the most part. And the way we fixed this—and as you said, lack of innovation, maybe—has brought databases back to an infrastructure layer.Again, it wasn't the case 15 years a—well, 2023—13 years ago. And that's interesting. When you look at the new generation of databases, sometimes it's just a gateway on top of a well-known database and they call that a database, but it provides higher-level services, provides higher-level bricks, better developer experience to developer to build stuff faster. We've been trying to do this with Couchbase App Service and our sync gateway, which is basically a gateway on top of a Couchbase cluster that allow you to manage authentication, authorization, that allows you to manage synchronization with your mobile device or with websites. And yeah, I think that's the most interesting thing to me in this industry is how it's been relegated back to infrastructure, and all the cool stuff, new stuff happens on the layer above that.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Laurent: Thanks for having me and for entertaining this conversation. I can be found anywhere on the internet with these six letters: L-D-O-G-U-I-N. That's actually 7 letters. Ldoguin. That's my handle on pretty much any social network. Ldoguin. So X, [BlueSky 00:29:21], LinkedIn. I don't know where to be anymore.Corey: I hear you. We'll put links to all of it in the [show notes 00:29:27] and let people figure out where they want to go on that. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really do appreciate it.Laurent: Thanks for having me.Corey: Laurent Doguin, Director of Developer Relations and Strategy at Couchbase. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this episode has been brought to us by our friends at Couchbase. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment that you're not going to be able to submit properly because that platform of choice did not pay enough attention to the experience of typing in a comment.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

An airhacks.fm conversation with Brian Benz (@bbenz) about: C64, writing an inspirational notes app in Basic, writing software on paper cards for Apple, exploring gas fields in the see with Lotus 123 and dBASE, working on System 38, travelling Europe with train and bicycle, writing replication engine in Clipper-llrp, floppy disc replication, Lotus Notes and CouchDB, Lotus Notes by Iris Associates, The Lotus Notes and Domino 6 Programming Bible book, The XML Programming Bible, writing a XML replication engine, LexisNexis, using Apache Xerces and Apache Xalan, Append-only storage, job interview at Microsoft in XML area, Apache POI, Microsoft Open Tech, using AWS as XML search API, joining the first JavaOne Brian Benz on twitter: @bbenz

David Allen, Eric Mack, and John Forrister discuss their software journey, from early years to their current use of the Microsoft 365 suite of tools. A consistent theme is that it's not about the tool, but about bringing a productive mindset and habits to any tool. They discuss how the tools shape our behavior, and may or may not promote good GTD habits. The story starts in the mid-1990s with Lotus Notes. They talk about why Notes, and also why Microsoft 365 now. There are interesting tangents into groupware, CRMs, and instant messaging. Be sure to listen after David hops off, as Eric and John continue discussing for another few minutes, and invite your input on future topics. You can listen to the entire conversation from November 2021 at GTD Connect®. -- This audio is one of many available at GTD Connect, a learning space and community hub for all things GTD. Join GTD practitioners from around the world in learning, sharing, and developing the skills for stress-free productivity. Sign up for a free guest pass Learn about membership options Knowing how to get the right things done is a key to success. It's easy to get distracted and overwhelmed. Stay focused and increase productivity with GTD Connect—a subscription-based online learning center from the David Allen Company. GTD Connect gives you access to a wealth of multimedia content designed to help you stay on track and deepen your awareness of principles you can also learn in GTD courses, coaching, and by reading the Getting Things Done book. You'll also get the support and encouragement of a thriving global community of people you won't find anywhere else. If you already know you'd like to join, click here to choose from monthly or annual options. If you'd like to try GTD Connect free for 14 days, read on for what's included and how to get your free trial. During your 14-day free trial, you will have access to: Recorded webinars with David Allen & the certified coaches and trainers on a wide range of productivity topics GTD Getting Started & Refresher Series to reinforce the fundamentals you may have learned in a GTD course, coaching, or book Extensive audio, video, and document library Slice of GTD Life series to see how others are making GTD stick David Allen's exclusive interviews with people in his network all over the world Lively members-only discussion forums sharing ideas, tips, and tricks Note: GTD Connect is designed to reinforce your learning, and we also recommend that you take a course, get individual coaching, or read the Getting Things Done book. Ready to start your free trial?

This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on September 18th, 2023.This podcast was generated by wondercraft.ai(00:34): Data accidentally exposed by Microsoft AI researchersOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37556605&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(02:29): OpenRA – Classic strategy games rebuilt for the modern eraOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37553193&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(04:35): What if OpenDocument used SQLite? (2014)Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37553574&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(06:23): Apple TV, now with more TailscaleOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37560787&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(08:23): Striking auto workers want a 40% pay increase–the same rate their CEOs' pay grewOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37563231&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(10:03): NSA Backdoor Key from Lotus-Notes (1997)Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37554504&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(11:47): Replanting logged forests with diverse seedlings accelerates restorationOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37556025&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(13:47): Memory-efficient enum arrays in ZigOriginal post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37555028&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(15:48): The brain is not an onion with a tiny reptile inside (2020)Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37555118&utm_source=wondercraft_ai(17:25): Japan's Hometown Tax (2018)Original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37555004&utm_source=wondercraft_aiThis is a third-party project, independent from HN and YC. Text and audio generated using AI, by wondercraft.ai. Create your own studio quality podcast with text as the only input in seconds at app.wondercraft.ai. Issues or feedback? We'd love to hear from you: team@wondercraft.ai

This week's question is all about what is important in your time management and productivity system.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Planning Course The Time Blocking Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The Time And Life Mastery Course The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Episode 283 | Script Hello and welcome to episode 283 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show. With the constant influx of new productivity tools it can be difficult to settle on a set of tools because you are worried that you might be missing the boat or there could be something out there that is better than what you are using now and could, in theory, make you even better at managing your time and being more productive.  But wait, do all these new tools really offer you the opportunity to improve your time management or productivity? Have you considered the time cost penalty of switching and then learning the new way to find what you need and organise everything?  The truth is not what you may think and it's something I learned several years ago. Once I did, my productivity shot through the roof. I was better organised and I quickly discovered I had more time to do the things I loved doing. Which was a bit of a shock.  So that brings me to this week's question, it's also a question I frequently get on YouTube comments, and I thought it would be a good idea to share my discoveries with you so you can make your own decision.  So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question. This week's question come from Kevin. Kevin asks, Hi Carl, I've always wondered why you don't use apps like Notion and Obsidian. I notice a lot productivity YouTubers use these apps, but you seem to stick with the same apps. Is there a reason you don't check these apps out?  Hi Kevin, thank you for your question.  To answer your question directly, the reason I don't switch my apps is because David Allen told me not to.  Now, for those of your who don't know, David Allen wrote the “bible” of time management and productivity: Getting Things Done and he is considered the Godfather of today's productivity systems.  Back in 2016, David visited Korea and I reached out to him and I got to meet him. We had lunch together, and we inevitably talked productivity. The conversation soon got onto tools and I asked him if he really does still use eProductivity—an app that was an offshoot of the old Lotus Notes. He confirmed he did. Now at that time, I was still on my productivity tools journey. I don't think I stuck with a task manager for longer than three of four months before I was searching around for a new one to “play with”.  I was curious, and asked him if he'd ever considered using something else—something that was available on his iPhone or iPad as as well as his computer. (eProductivity was only available on a computer) and he said: Why?  I was a bit stuck there, but he added why would he change something that works? Something that he'd learned to use inside out and could pretty much use with his eyes closed. He also pointed out that eProductivity was reliable, it didn't rely on syncing (which back in 2016 was not particularly reliable for anything) and he couldn't remember the last time it crashed.  As our conversation continued, David elaborated on his system. He carried with him a leather wallet that contained a little note pad and pen. If he thought of something he'd write it down on the notepad and when he got back to his office (or hotel room) he would tear out the notes and add them to his inbox (or traveling inbox if he was on a business trip).  Later when he had time he would transfer those notes to eProductivity. This gave him an opportunity to filter out the stuff that didn't need any action and decide whether something was a note or a task.  That process wasn't something he'd developed overnight. It took twenty years or more. Refining and developing the so called muscle memory to automatically add something to the note pad when anything came up isn't something you will develop over a few weeks or months. It takes years.  But more importantly, the method David Allen had created for himself ensured he was always asking the right questions about something. If you've read the Getting things Done book, he writes about these questions. They are:  What is it? Is it actionable? If so, what needs to happen?  It was during our conversation, I told him of my dilemma at that time which was Todoist or OmniFocus? David answered, “pick one and stick with it.”  It was that that revolutionised my productivity. “Pick one and stick with it” has been my mantra since then. This is why I still use Todoist and Evernote to this day.  Everything David told me, happened. My productivity went through the roof. I was no longer searching around looking for something better, I was focused on, forgive the pun, getting things done.  Suddenly, I was able watch a little TV in evenings instead of reading about new productivity tools. I started having longer and better conversations with my wife because I wasn't distracted playing around with another new toy.  I'm sure it's no coincidence that from around late 2016 early 2017, I was able to run two businesses, produce two YouTube videos a week and write a blog post as well as start this podcast. None of that would have been possible if I were still searching and looking for new and better tools.  You the see the time cost involved in switching your tools every few months is ridiculous. There's the searching around and watching countless YouTube videos. Then there's the switch cost, where you move everything across and organise things how you want it (which ironically is rarely different from the way you organised it before) and finally, the biggest time suck of all, learning to use the new app. That can take weeks, if not months to get up to the speed you were at using your previous app.  Oh, and there's all that researching trying to figure out how to do something you were able to do in your previous app, which you now discover is not available in your new app.  Do I want to go through all that again? No thank you. Now, that's not to say there are no reasons for changing your tools. Evernote is a classic example. A few years ago they changed their app considerably when Evernote changed to Evernote 10. The early versions were horrible and everything I'd learned in the previous eight years changed and I was faced with relearning how to use Evernote. I was very tempted to change to Apple Notes at that time. I didn't because I know the penalties of changing and I'm glad I didn't. Evernote 10 is now reliable and robust and I've had three years to learn how to use Evernote 10.  But, had Evernote not solved those initial problems, I would have changed. I need my tools to work so I can work. I don't want to spend time in the day trying to figure out how to fix a broken app.  The more I research productive people, the more I see tools are not important. Recently, I researched author Jeffrey Archer. He began writing his books in the 1970s and wrote them by hand. He still does today. In interviews, he talks about having a system that works, so why change it.  John Grisham writes his books in Word—there are loads of new writing apps that are possibly better than Word, yet he knows Word, it works, so why change it? For him, Word is a part of his writing process, and over 50 books later, why change that system?  For me, Todoist and Evernote are all a part of my process. Todoist tells me what I need to work on, Evernote contains my notes on whatever I am working on, whether that is a YouTube video, this podcast, a blog post or a course. It's seamless, it works and can all be done in less than two seconds. Why would I want to change that?  A client of mine is a screenwriter and he's been using Final Draft for over twenty years. Can you imagine how quick he is getting down to writing his scripts?  I worked with a copywriter who had used Apple's built in Text Edit app for fifteen years and would not contemplate using anything else to do her work because as a simple text file her work was transferable to any computer system or app. The brilliance was in the simplicity of her system.  I've worked with photographers who can do incredible magic with Adobe's Lightroom at lighten speed because they've used it every day for over ten years.  It all comes down to what you want. Is it the thrill of playing with something new? There's nothing wrong with that, but you need need to be honest about it. You do not want to be fooling yourself in to believing that the next new app will make you more productive. It won't.  What will make you more productive is the system you put in place. Going back to Jeffrey Archer, his writing system is simple. He disappears on the 27th December to his house in Mallorca, where for the next five weeks he will follow the same process each day, By the 2nd or 3rd February, he has a completed first draft of his next book. All handwritten on a large bundle of paper.  That's how you become more productive. Focus on your process for doing your work. Whether you are a salesperson, an interior designer, a doctor or a software developer. Pick tools that will work for you for many years to come and focus on doing your work not the tools. The simpler your system, the better and faster you will be.  All you need is a calendar, a task manager and notes app for your productivity tools. These days, I would advise these are all available on each of the devices you have, so you have everything you need with you at all times. Pick tools that work for you and stick with them. By sticking with them, your system will develop, grow and adjust and that pushes you towards focusing on your work—which is the secret to becoming more productive and better with managing your time.  Thank you Kevin for your question and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Nelumbo nucifera, or the sacred lotus, is a plant that grows in flood plains, rivers, and deltas. Their seeds can remain dormant for years and when floods come along, blossom into a colony of plants and flowers. Some of the oldest seeds can be found in China, where they're known to represent longevity. No surprise, given their level of nitrition and connection to the waters that irrigated crops by then. They also grow in far away lands, all the way to India and out to Australia. The flower is sacred in Hinduism and Buddhism, and further back in ancient Egypt. Padmasana is a Sanskrit term meaning lotus, or Padma, and Asana, or posture. The Pashupati seal from the Indus Valley civilization shows a diety in what's widely considered the first documented yoga pose, from around 2,500 BCE. 2,700 years later (give or take a century), the Hindu author and mystic Patanjali wrote a work referred to as the Yoga Sutras. Here he outlined the original asanas, or sitting yoga poses. The Rig Veda, from around 1,500 BCE, is the oldest currently known Vedic text. It is also the first to use the word “yoga”. It describes songs, rituals, and mantras the Brahmans of the day used - as well as the Padma. Further Vedic texts explore how the lotus grew out of Lord Vishnu with Brahma in the center. He created the Universe out of lotus petals. Lakshmi went on to grow out of a lotus from Vishnu as well. It was only natural that humans would attempt to align their own meditation practices with the beautiful meditatios of the lotus. By the 300s, art and coins showed people in the lotus position. It was described in texts that survive from the 8th century. Over the centuries contradictions in texts were clarified in a period known as Classical Yoga, then Tantra and and Hatha Yoga were developed and codified in the Post-Classical Yoga age, and as empires grew and India became a part of the British empire, Yoga began to travel to the west in the late 1800s. By 1893, Swami Vivekananda gave lectures at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago.  More practicioners meant more systems of yoga. Yogendra brought asanas to the United States in 1919, as more Indians migrated to the United States. Babaji's kriya yoga arrived in Boston in 1920. Then, as we've discussed in previous episodes, the United States tightened immigration in the 1920s and people had to go to India to get more training. Theos Bernard's Hatha Yoga: The Report of a Personal Experience brought some of that knowledge home when he came back in 1947. Indra Devi opened a yoga studio in Hollywood and wrote books for housewives. She brought a whole system, or branch home. Walt and Magana Baptiste opened a studio in San Francisco. Swamis began to come to the US and more schools were opened. Richard Hittleman began to teach yoga in New York and began to teach on television in 1961. He was one of the first to seperate the religious aspect from the health benefits. By 1965, the immigration quotas were removed and a wave of teachers came to the US to teach yoga. The Beatles went to India in 1966 and 1968, and for many Transcendental Meditation took root, which has now grown to over a thousand training centers and over 40,000 teachers. Swamis opened meditation centers, institutes, started magazines, and even magazines. Yoga became so big that Rupert Holmes even poked fun of it in his song “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” in 1979. Yoga had become part of the counter-culture, and the generation that followed represented a backlash of sorts. A common theme of the rise of personal computers is that the early pioneers were a part of that counter-culture. Mitch Kapor graduated high school in 1967, just in time to be one of the best examples of that. Kapor built his own calculator in as a kid before going to camp to get his first exposure to programming on a Bendix. His high school got one of the 1620 IBM minicomputers and he got the bug. He went off to Yale at 16 and learned to program in APL and then found Computer Lib by Ted Nelson and learned BASIC. Then he discovered the Apple II.  Kapor did some programming for $5 per hour as a consultant, started the first east coast Apple User Group, and did some work around town. There are generations of people who did and do this kind of consulting, although now the rates are far higher. He met a grad student through the user group named Eric Rosenfeld who was working on his dissertation and needed some help programming, so Kapor wrote a little tool that took the idea of statistical analysis from the Time Shared Reactive Online Library, or TROLL, and ported it to the microcomputer, which he called Tiny Troll.  Then he enrolled in the MBA program at MIT. He got a chance to see VisiCalc and meet Bob Frankston and Dan Bricklin, who introduced him to the team at Personal Software. Personal Software was founded by Dan Fylstra and Peter Jennings when they published Microchips for the KIM-1 computer. That led to ports for the 1977 Trinity of the Commodore PET, Apple II, and TRS-80 and by then they had taken Bricklin and Franston's VisiCalc to market. VisiCalc was the killer app for those early PCs and helped make the Apple II successful. Personal Software brought Kapor on, as well as Bill Coleman of BEA Systems and Electronic Arts cofounder Rich Mellon. Today, software developers get around 70 percent royalties to publish software on app stores but at the time, fees were closer to 8 percent, a model pulled from book royalties. Much of the rest went to production of the box and disks, the sales and marketing, and support. Kapor was to write a product that could work with VisiCalc. By then Rosenfeld was off to the world of corporate finance so Kapor moved to Silicon Valley, learned how to run a startup, moved back east in 1979, and released VisiPlot and VisiTrend in 1981. He made over half a million dollars in the first six months in royalties.  By then, he bought out Rosenfeld's shares in what he was doing, hired Jonathan Sachs, who had been at MIT earlier, where he wrote the STOIC programming language, and then went to work at Data General. Sachs worked on spreadsheet ideas at Data General with a manager there, John Henderson, but after they left Data General, and the partnership fell apart, he worked with Kapor instead. They knew that for software to be fast, it needed to be written in a lower level language, so they picked the Intel 8088 assembly language given that C wasn't fast enough yet. The IBM PC came in 1981 and everything changed. Mitch Kapor and Jonathan Sachs started Lotus in 1982. Sachs got to work on what would become Lotus 1-2-3. Kapor turned out to be a great marketer and product manager. He listened to what customers said in focus groups. He pushed to make things simpler and use less jargon. They released a new spreadsheet tool in 1983 and it worked flawlessly on the IBM PC and while Microsoft had Multiplan and VisCalc was the incumbent spreadsheet program, Lotus quickly took market share from then and SuperCalc. Conceptually it looked similar to VisiCalc. They used the letter A for the first column, B for the second, etc. That has now become a standard in spreadsheets. They used the number 1 for the first row, the number 2 for the second. That too is now a standard. They added a split screen, also now a standard. They added macros, with branching if-then logic. They added different video modes, which could give color and bitmapping. They added an underlined letter so users could pull up a menu and quickly select the item they wanted once they had those orders memorized, now a standard in most menuing systems. They added the ability to add bar charts, pie charts, and line charts. One could even spread their sheet across multiple monitors like in a magazine. They refined how fields are calculated and took advantage of the larger amounts of memory to make Lotus far faster than anything else on the market. They went to Comdex towards the end of the year and introduced Lotus 1-2-3 to the world. The software could be used as a spreadsheet, but the 2 and 3 referred to graphics and database management. They did $900,000 in orders there before they went home. They couldn't even keep up with the duplication of disks. Comdex was still invitation only. It became so popular that it was used to test for IBM compatibility by clone makers and where VisiCalc became the app that helped propel the Apple II to success, Lotus 1-2-3 became the app that helped propel the IBM PC to success. Lotus was rewarded with $53 million in sales for 1983 and $156 million in 1984. Mitch Kapor found himself. They quickly scaled from less than 20 to 750 employees. They brought in Freada Klein who got her PhD to be the Head of Employee Relations and charged her with making them the most progressive employer around. After her success at Lotus, she left to start her own company and later married. Sachs left the company in 1985 and moved on to focus solely on graphics software. He still responds to requests on the phpBB forum at dl-c.com. They ran TV commercials. They released a suite of Mac apps they called Lotus Jazz. More television commercials. Jazz didn't go anywhere and only sold 20,000 copies. Meanwhile, Microsoft released Excel for the Mac, which sold ten times as many. Some blamed the lack os sales on the stringent copy protection. Others blamed the lack of memory to do cool stuff. Others blamed the high price. It was the first major setback for the young company.  After a meteoric rise, Kapor left the company in 1986, at about the height of their success. He  replaced himself with Jim Manzi. Manzi pushed the company into network applications. These would become the center of the market but were just catching on and didn't prove to be a profitable venture just yet. A defensive posture rather than expanding into an adjacent market would have made sense, at least if anyone knew how aggressive Microsoft was about to get it would have.  Manzi was far more concerned about the millions of illegal copies of the software in the market than innovation though. As we turned the page to the 1990s, Lotus had moved to a product built in C and introduced the ability to use graphical components in the software but not wouldn't be ported to the new Windows operating system until 1991 for Windows 3. By then there were plenty of competitors, including Quattro Pro and while Microsoft Excel began on the Mac, it had been a showcase of cool new features a windowing operating system could provide an application since released for Windows in 1987. Especially what they called 3d charts and tabbed spreadsheets. There was no catching up to Microsoft by then and sales steadily declined. By then, Lotus released Lotus Agenda, an information manager that could be used for time management, project management, and as a database. Kapor was a great product manager so it stands to reason he would build a great product to manage products. Agenda never found commercial success though, so was later open sourced under a GPL license. Bill Gross wrote Magellan there before he left to found GoTo.com, which was renamed to Overture and pioneered the idea of paid search advertising, which was acquired by Yahoo!. Magellan cataloged the internal drive and so became a search engine for that. It sold half a million copies and should have been profitable but was cancelled in 1990. They also released a word processor called Manuscript in 1986, which never gained traction and that was cancelled in 1989, just when a suite of office automation apps needed to be more cohesive.  Ray Ozzie had been hired at Software Arts to work on VisiCalc and then helped Lotus get Symphony out the door. Symphony shipped in 1984 and expanded from a spreadsheet to add on text with the DOC word processor, and charts with the GRAPH graphics program, FORM for a table management solution, and COM for communications. Ozzie dutifully shipped what he was hired to work on but had a deal that he could build a company when they were done that would design software that Lotus would then sell. A match made in heaven as Ozzie worked on PLATO and borrowed the ideas of PLATO Notes, a collaboration tool developed at the University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana  to build what he called Lotus Notes.  PLATO was more more than productivity. It was a community that spanned decades and Control Data Corporation had failed to take it to the mass corporate market. Ozzie took the best parts for a company and built it in isolation from the rest of Lotus. They finally released it as Lotus Notes in 1989. It was a huge success and Lotus bought Iris in 1994. Yet they never found commercial success with other socket-based client server programs and IBM acquired Lotus in 1995. That product is now known as Domino, the name of the Notes 4 server, released in 1996. Ozzie went on to build a company called Groove Networks, which was acquired by Microsoft, who appointed him one of their Chief Technology Officers. When Bill Gates left Microsoft, Ozzie took the position of Chief Software Architect he vacated. He and Dave Cutler went on to work on a project called Red Dog, which evolved into what we now know as Microsoft Azure.  Few would have guessed that Ozzie and Kapor's handshake agreement on Notes could have become a real product. Not only could people not understand the concept of collaboration and productivity on a network in the late 1980s but the type of deal hadn't been done. But Kapor by then realized that larger companies had a hard time shipping net-new software properly. Sometimes those projects are best done in isolation. And all the better if the parties involved are financially motivated with shares like Kapor wanted in Personal Software in the 1970s before he wrote Lotus 1-2-3. VisiCalc had sold about a million copies but that would cease production the same year Excel was released. Lotus hung on longer than most who competed with Microsoft on any beachhead they blitzkrieged. Microsoft released Exchange Server in 1996 and Notes had a few good years before Exchange moved in to become the standard in that market. Excel began on the Mac but took the market from Lotus eventually, after Charles Simonyi stepped in to help make the product great.  Along the way, the Lotus ecosystem created other companies, just as they were born in the Visi ecosystem. Symantec became what we now call a “portfolio” company in 1985 when they introduced NoteIt, a natural language processing tool used to annotate docs in Lotus 1-2-3. But Bill Gates mentioned Lotus by name multiple times as a competitor in his Internet Tidal Wave memo in 1995. He mentioned specific features, like how they could do secure internet browsing and that they had a web publisher tool - Microsoft's own FrontPage was released in 1995 as well. He mentioned an internet directory project with Novell and AT&T. Active Directory was released a few years later in 1999, after Jim Allchin had come in to help shepherd LAN Manager. Notes itself survived into the modern era, but by 2004 Blackberry released their Exchange connector before they released the Lotus Domino connector. That's never a good sign. Some of the history of Lotus is covered in Scott Rosenberg's 2008 book, Dreaming in Code. Others are documented here and there in other places. Still others are lost to time. Kapor went on to invest in UUNET, which became a huge early internet service provider. He invested in Real Networks, who launched the first streaming media service on the Internet. He invested in the creators of Second Life. He never seemed vindictive with Microsoft but after AOL acquired Netscape and Microsoft won the first browser war, he became the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation and so helped bring Firefox to market. By 2006, Firefox took 10 percent of the market and went on to be a dominant force in browsers. Kapor has also sat on boards and acted as an angel investor for startups ever since leaving the company he founded. He also flew to Wyoming in 1990 after he read a post on The WELL from John Perry Barlow. Barlow was one of the great thinkers of the early Internet. They worked with Sun Microsystems and GNU Debugging Cypherpunk John Gilmore to found the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF. The EFF has since been the nonprofit who leads the fight for “digital privacy, free speech, and innovation.” So not everything is about business.    

An airhacks.fm conversation with Dave Johnson (@snoopdave) about: PDP-8 with a paper tape reader, airhacks.tv questions and answers, TRS-80, playing asteroids, asteroids, Defender and Battlezone were based on vector graphics, learning Pascal and C, Data General Eclipse MV/8000, Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS GIS), working for University of Kingston, working on jfactory for Rouge Wave, HAHT Software, The Soul of a New Machine, distributed Visual Basic application server, using xdoclet to generate EJB, using castor for persistence, Apache Roller started as sample application, Sun hires dave, working on Lotus Notes social, starting at wayin, Roller supports Pingback, Lotus is using roller, using Rightscale to deploy Java software to AWS, using Jenkins and CloudFormation, episode with Scott McNealy "#19 SUN, JavaSoft, Java, Oracle", Roller uses Apache Velocity, working on RSS parser Rome, switching from MongoDB to Apache Cassandra, UserGrid data store, Oracle acquires apiary , starting at CloudBees, episode with Kohsuke Kawaguchi "#143 How Hudson and Jenkins happened", starting at Apollo, several thousand blogs on roller Dave Johnson on twitter: @snoopdave

Carrie Hane is an evangelist at Sanity, a cloud-based content platform provider. Carrie is co-author of Designing Connected Content, which advocates for content modeling as part of the digital design process. This is also the subject of our conversation.A side note: Carrie is one of the keynote speakers at this year's information architecture conference, which takes place in New Orleans from March 28 - April 1. I'll be teaching an introductory IA workshop at the conference, so if you want to learn about IA and can get to the southern U.S. in late March, come see Carrie and me at the Conference. There's a link below.Show notesCarrie Hane - LinkedInCarrie Hane - TwitterDesigning Connected Content: Plan and Model Digital Products for Today and Tomorrow by Carrie Hane and Mike AthertonSanityInformation Architecture ConferenceTanzen Consulting blogContent Modeling: What It Is and How to Get Started – Content Modeling GuideSanity newsletterWhat is Lotus Notes? - Definition from TechopediaGartnerWhat does it mean for a database to be schemaless? - QuoraAndy FitzgeraldShow notes include Amazon affiliate links. We get a small commission for purchases made through these links.If you're enjoying the show, please rate or review us in Apple's podcast directory:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-informed-life/id1450117117?itsct=podcast_box&itscg=30200

An airhacks.fm conversation with Ralph Soika (@rsoika) about: Starting programming with Atari 600XL The thick book: My Atari XL Computer - Learning Basic, programming print hello, GOTO 10, publishing and developing a Moon Lander game in a magazine, developing logistics software, starting a company to develop Lotus Domino solutions, starting with Delphi, then transitioning to Java, starting with Java 1.0, implementing a Java backend for Lotus Domino, writing Java agents for Lotus Domino server CouchDB is based on Lotus Notes, the Groove peer to peer software, programming Java applets and Swing applications, implementing workflow modeller with Eclipse, founding the imixs company, building to build a workflow engine on J2EE, removing code with every release of Java EE, the 106th airhacks.tv and is Java EE dead?, building a human-centric workflow engine, ACL on documents for confidential data processing, learning from Louts Notes, Java Persistence API and PostgreSQL, fast queries with Blobs, Apache Lucene and PostgreSQL, kubernetes in the cloud and on premise, AWS ECS Fargate, AWS App Runner, Azure Container Instances, Azure App Service, managed alternatives in the clouds Ralph Soika on twitter: @rsoika

An airhacks.fm conversation with Mary Grygleski (@mgrygles) about: 808X as first computer, Hong Kong was high tech, enjoying space missions, Star Trek and Star Wars, the intriguing registration terminal, writing code in Pascal, 3 GL programming languages and SQL, set theory and SQL, the seven layers of OSI, OSI model, IBM MVS, AS 400 is the opposite of micro services, developers get bored too early, learning X-Windows, working with early Oracle databases, using dBASE, clipper and FoxPro, transarc, stratos tx, Transarc the transaction file system, Transaction Processing: Concepts and Techniques, working on SMTP / MTA, CouchDB and Lotus Notes, the Sun Ultra 30 workstation, starting at Sybase, EA server Sybase / Jaguar, using emacs for Java development, then netbeans, Java EE and the hierarchical class loaders, working on EJB 3 specs, mobile apps with Apache Cordova, reactive systems at IBM, using akka, Eclipse Vertex and MicroProfile, working for datastax and Pulsar, Datastax provides support for Apache Cassandra and Apache Pulsar, separating the compute from the storage, astra the managed cloud platform Mary Grygleski on twitter: @mgrygles

Rosa Metra e una Workforce Change Manager con oltre 20 anni di esperienza internazionale nell'implementare strategie all'avanguardia che permettono di accelerare l'adozione di nuove tecnologie e la trasformazione culturale, di competenze e di well being in un'ottica di business regeneration. E specializzata in Progettazione Organizzativa e Change Management, Leadership e Middle Management Coaching eCritical Skills and Competencies building e RegeneratiVe Business Transformation. E CEO della societa di consulenza britannica Change Works Ltd, della societa di consulenza italiana Human Change Consulting Srl e autrice della metodologia HumanTech® Adoption. Autrice di molteplici soluzioni di apprendimento B2B, ha supportato organizzazioni globali in tutto il mondo negli ultimi 20 anni tra cui Mercedes Benz, Unilever, Condé Nast, Roche, Salesforce, EDF Energy, British Airways, BPM, Hitachi, Cargill, Sony, IBM, Pearson e altri. La sua formazione scolastica di una figura come la sua è costruita nel tempo, nel suo caso da un Master in Marketing Events Management-London Metropolitan University, Londra, Laurea in Scienze e Tecnologie della Comunicazione-Università degli Studi di Milano Università IULM, Milano (Italia) e Università Parigi XII, Parigi (Francia), Diploma in Ragioneria e Commercio-Instito Tecnico Faravelli (ITCG), Pavia (Italia) Corsi, Certificazione PROSCI Practitioner, Retail Brand Management - University of the Arts London, Dubai, Formazione sulla gestione dei progetti snella da CareerBuilder & Xebia.fr, Parigi. Sul fronte competenze informatiche, questa la sua expertise utile per la sua figura: Project Management: Jira, Confluence, Basecamp and Pivotal Tracker Analytics: Google Analytics, Omniture Site Catalysts, Flurry and Distimo Marketing and Sales: Eloqua, Exact Target, Salesforce and Sugar Office and Utilities: Cloud, CRM, Microsoft Office: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, Access, Outlook Express, Corel Word Perfect, WinZip, Lotus Notes, Notes Buddy, Citrix, Go To Meeting, Skype, Communicator and Googledocs Web: Internet, Front Page, Dreamweaver, Wordpress, .net, ruby on rails Digital Media: Power Director,Video Studio, Win DVD, DVD Copy Illustration and Design: CorelDRAW, Illustrator, Fireworks, Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, InDesign, Flash, Painter X, Autocad. App, siti utili libri e link humanchangeconsulting linkedin Informazioni su come sia strutturato il percorso per diventare Metaverse Change Manager Metaverse Change Manager Metaverso è una delle parole più cercate sui motori di ricerca. Tutti ne parlano, tutti vogliono entrarci, ma in pochi sanno davvero di cosa si tratti e che opportunità possa offrire. Per quanto riguarda il mondo aziendale, può rappresentare un ostacolo o una grande occasione, indipendentemente dal prodotto, dal target di riferimento, dallo stato di digitalizzazione e innovazione, dal budget, dalla struttura interna e dal livello di apertura verso le trasformazioni guidate dal digitale. Se all'inizio il metaverso sembrava relegato soltanto all'ambito del gaming, oggi sta aprendo le porte a una rivoluzione in ambito commerciale, educativo e sociale. Le aziende che riusciranno a sfruttare appieno il potenziale del metaverso saranno quelle in grado di fornire ai propri dipendenti le conoscenze e gli strumenti necessari per entrare concretamente in questo mondo, lavorando su un piano virtuale con la stessa efficienza del piano reale. Ogni azienda dovrà sviluppare nuove competenze e c'è il bisogno impellente di una risorsa esperta del metaverso incaricata della missione chiave di guidare la definizione, la formazione e l'adozione del processo di utilizzo del metaverso all'interno della propria organizzazione: il Metaverse Manager. Human Change Consulting offre alle aziende la possibilità di risolvere questo problema con la figura del Metaverse Change Manager, il manager del futuro. Un manager che conosca le diverse piattaforme, che impari il linguaggio di sviluppo e che abbia le caratteristiche tecniche per diventare un lead del metaverso con nozioni di change. Perché il suo ruolo è anche quello di imparare a spingere e sostenere l'adozione del metaverso nelle società. Se le aziende hanno la tecnologia ma le persone non sono supportate a utilizzarla, non avranno mai l'adozione che si aspettano.

Microsoft had confusion in the Windows 2000 marketing and disappointment with Millennium Edition, which was built on a kernel that had run its course. It was time to phase out the older 95, 98, and Millennium code. So in 2001, Microsoft introduced Windows NT 5.1, known as Windows XP (eXperience). XP came in a Home or Professional edition.  Microsoft built a new interface they called Whistler for XP. It was sleeker and took more use of the graphics processors of the day. Jim Allchin was the Vice President in charge of the software group by then and helped spearhead development. XP had even more security options, which were simplified in the home edition. They did a lot of work to improve the compatibility between hardware and software and added the option for fast user switching so users didn't have to log off completely and close all of their applications when someone else needed to use the computer. They also improved on the digital media experience and added new libraries to incorporate DirectX for various games.  Professional edition also added options that were more business focused. This included the ability to join a network and Remote Desktop without the need of a third party product to take control of the keyboard, video, and mouse of a remote computer. Users could use their XP Home Edition computer to log into work, if the network administrator could forward the port necessary. XP Professional also came with the ability to support multiple processors, send faxes, an encrypted file system, more granular control of files and other objects (including GPOs), roaming profiles (centrally managed through Active Directory using those GPOs), multiple language support, IntelliMirror (an oft forgotten centralized management solution that included RIS and sysprep for mass deployments), an option to do an Automated System Recovery, or ASR restore of a computer. Professional also came with the ability to act as a web server, not that anyone should run one on a home operating system. XP Professional was also 64-bit given the right processor. XP Home Edition could be upgraded to from Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, Millineum, and XP Professional could be upgraded to from any operating system since Windows 98 was released., including NT 4 and Windows 2000 Professional. And users could upgrade from Home to Professional for an additional $100.   Microsoft also fixed a few features. One that had plagued users was that they had to gracefully unmount a drive before removing it; Microsoft got in front of this when they removed the warning that a drive was disconnected improperly and had the software take care of that preemptively. They removed some features users didn't really use like NetMeeting and Phone Dialer and removed some of the themes options. The 3D Maze was also sadly removed. Other options just cleaned up the interface or merged technologies that had become similar, like Deluxe CD player and DVD player were removed in lieu of just using Windows Media Player. And chatty network protocols that caused problems like NetBEUI and AppleTalk were removed from the defaults, as was the legacy Microsoft OS/2 subsystem. In general, Microsoft moved from two operating system code bases to one. Although with the introduction of Windows CE, they arguably had no net-savings. However, to the consumer and enterprise buyer, it was a simpler licensing scheme. Those enterprise buyers were more and more important to Microsoft. Larger and larger fleets gave them buying power and the line items with resellers showed it with an explosion in the number of options for licensing packs and tiers. But feature-wise Microsoft had spent the Microsoft NT and Windows 2000-era training thousands of engineers on how to manage large fleets of Windows machines as Microsoft Certified Systems Engineers (MCSE) and other credentials. Deployments grew and by the time XP was released, Microsoft had the lions' share of the market for desktop operating systems and productivity apps. XP would only cement that lead and create a generation of systems administrators equipped to manage the platform, who never knew a way other than the Microsoft way. One step along the path to the MCSE was through servers. For the first couple of years, XP connected to Windows 2000 Servers. Windows Server 2003, which was built on the Windows NT 5.2 kernel, was then released in 2003. Here, we saw Active Directory cement a lead created in 2000 over servers from Novell and other vendors. Server 2003 became the de facto platform for centralized file, print, web, ftp, software  time, DHCP, DNS, event, messeging, and terminal services (or shared Remote Desktop services through Terminal Server). Server 2003 could also be purchased with Exchange 2003. Given the integration with Microsoft Outlook and a number of desktop services, Microsoft Exchange.  The groupware market in 2003 and the years that followed were dominated by Lotus Notes, Novell's GroupWise, and Exchange. Microsoft was aggressive. They were aggressive on pricing. They released tools to migrate from Notes to Exchange the week before IBM's conference. We saw some of the same tactics and some of the same faces that were involved in Microsoft's Internet Explorer anti-trust suit from the 1990s. The competition to Change never recovered and while Microsoft gained ground in the groupware space through the Exchange Server 4.0, 5.0, 5.5, 2000, 2003, 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016 eras, by Exchange 2019 over half the mailboxes formerly hosted by on premises Exchange servers had moved to the cloud and predominantly Microsoft's Office 365 cloud service. Some still used legacy Unix mail services like sendmail or those hosted by third party providers like GoDaddy with their domain or website - but many of those ran on Exchange as well. The only company to put up true competition in the space has been Google. Other companies had released tools to manage Windows devices en masse. Companies like Altiris sprang out of needs for companies who did third party software testing to manage the state of Windows computers. Microsoft had a product called Systems Management Server but Altiris built a better product, so Microsoft built an even more robust solution called System Center Configuration Management server, or SCCM for short, and within a few years Altiris lost so much business they were acquired by Symantec. Other similar stories played out across other areas where each product competed with other vendors and sometimes market segments - and usually won. To a large degree this was because of the tight hold Windows had on the market. Microsoft had taken the desktop metaphor and seemed to own the entire stack by the end of the Windows XP era. However, the technology we used was a couple of years after the product management and product development teams started to build it. And by the end of the XP era, Bill Gates had been gone long enough, and many of the early stars that almost by pure will pushed products through development cycles were as well. Microsoft continued to release new versions of the operating systems but XP became one of the biggest competitors to later operating systems rather than other companies. This reluctance to move to Vista and other technologies was the main reason extended support for XP through to 2012, around 11 years after it was released. 

Transforming a business isn't an easy task at the best of times; organisational inertia, complicated project timelines and budgetary constraints are all among the obstacles that an incoming IT leader will have to deal with when trying to enact their vision. It's even more challenging, however, when that business is still using technology that's several decades out of date. This week, we're talking to Rita Bullivant, director of IT and change for Melton Building Society, about her experiences with modernising a legacy organisation, the challenges involved in building a transformation programme from the ground up, and what to do with a business that still uses Lotus Notes.To find out more about the topics discussed in this episode, head to https://bit.ly/ITPP-ground.

Zu sagen, dass der heutige Gast der Nerds viele Leute kennt ist eine ziemliche Untertreibung! Aber irgendwie passt es ja, ist Dr. Steinmaurer doch der Geschäftsführer des Fachbereiches Telekommunikation und Post bei der RTR. Wie ein außergewöhnlicher Karriereweg bei Juristen aussehen kann, und was Wiener Taxilenker mit Telekomregulierung zu tun haben, erfahrt ihr in dieser Folge!     Website der RTR: https://www.rtr.at/rtr/startseite.de.html RechtEasy-Podcast Folge 10 mit DR. Steinmaurer: https://www.rechteasy.at/podcast-10-dr-klaus-m-steinmaurer-geschaeftsfuehrer-der-rtr-rundfunk-und-telekom-regulierungs-gmbh-im-fachbereich-telekommunikation-und-post/ Uniforce Junior (studentische Beratung): https://juniorconsultant.net/karrierefragen/studentische-berater/uniforce/ Gesetze: FernmeldeG: https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/GeltendeFassung.wxe?Abfrage=Bundesnormen&Gesetzesnummer=10012231&FassungVom=1996-04-30 TelekommunikationsG: https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/GeltendeFassung.wxe?Abfrage=Bundesnormen&Gesetzesnummer=20011678 WKStA: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirtschafts-_und_Korruptionsstaatsanwaltschaft Kanzlei HNP: https://www.haslinger-nagele.com NoL-Podcast-Folge 28 (mit Prof. Zankl): https://www.nerdsoflaw.com/2020/11/nerds-of-law-28-you-always-law-twice-mit-professor-zankl/ Lotus Notes: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Notes BWB: https://www.bwb.gv.at   Subscribe to the Podcast RSS Feed https://nerdsoflaw.libsyn.com/rss Apple Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/nerds-of-law-podcast/id1506472002 SPOTIFY https://open.spotify.com/show/12D6osXfccI1bjAzapWzI4 Google Play Store https://playmusic.app.goo.gl/?ibi=com.google.PlayMusic&isi=691797987&ius=googleplaymusic&apn=com.google.android.music&link=https://play.google.com/music/m/Idvhwrimkmxb2phecnckyzik3qq?t%3DNerds_of_Law_Podcast%26pcampaignid%3DMKT-na-all-co-pr-mu-pod-16 YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7rmwzBy-IRGh8JkLCPIjyGMA-nHMtiAC Deezer https://www.deezer.com/de/show/1138852   Nerds of Law® http://www.nerdsoflaw.com https://twitter.com/NerdsOfLaw https://www.instagram.com/nerdsoflaw/ https://www.facebook.com/NerdsOfLaw/ Music by Mick Bordet mickbordet.com   Nerds of Law ® ist eine in Österreich registrierte Wortmarke.

Juxtaposed against some software of the 90s like Microsoft Access, Lotus Notes, and Visual Basic, there is a distinct contrast in our current world. Malcolm argues that with today's fixation on Continuous Deployment, software has become static, brittle, and inflexible. In this episode, we talk about how users have consequently become disempowered. Why have we have created a culture so dependent on developers? What is the hidden cost of this incrementalism? And, how can we redistribute agency to users again?

With over 2.6 billion active users ad 4.6billion active accounts email has become a significant means of communication in the business, professional, academic, and personal worlds. Before email we had protocols that enabled us to send messages within small splinters of networks. Time Sharing systems like PLATO at the University of Champaign-Urbana, DTSS at Dartmouth College, BerkNet at the University of California Berkeley, and CTTS at MIT pioneered electronic communication. Private corporations like IBM launched VNET We could create files or send messages that were immediately transferred to other people. The universities that were experimenting with these messaging systems even used some of the words we use today. MIT's CTSS used the MAIL program to send messages. Glenda Schroeder from there documented that messages would be placed into a MAIL BOX in 1965. She had already been instrumental in implementing the MULTICS shell that would later evolve into the Unix shell. Users dialed into the IBM 7094 mainframe and communicated within that walled garden with other users of the system. That was made possible after Tom Van Vleck and Noel Morris picked up her documentation and turned it into reality, writing the program in MAD or the Michigan Algorithm Decoder. But each system was different and mail didn't flow between them. One issue was headers. These are the parts of a message that show what time the message was sent, who sent the message, a subject line, etc. Every team had different formats and requirements. The first attempt to formalize headers was made in RFC 561 by Abhay Bhutan and Ken Pogran from MIT, Jim White at Stanford, and Ray Tomlinson. Tomlinson was a programmer at Bolt Beranek and Newman. He defined the basic structure we use for email while working on a government-funded project at ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) in 1971. While there, he wrote a tool called CYPNET to send various objects over a network, then ported that into the SNDMSG program used to send messages between users of their TENEX system so people could send messages to other computers. The structure he chose was Username@Computername because it just made sense to send a message to a user on the computer that user was at. We still use that structure today, although the hostname transitioned to a fully qualified domain name a bit later. Given that he wanted to route messages between multiple computers, he had a keen interest in making sure other computers could interpret messages once received. The concept of instantaneous communication between computer scientists led to huge productivity gains and new, innovative ideas. People could reach out to others they had never met and get quick responses. No more walking to the other side of a college campus. Some even communicated primarily through the computers, taking terminals with them when they went on the road. Email was really the first killer app on the networks that would some day become the Internet. People quickly embraced this new technology. By 1975 almost 75% of the ARPANET traffic was electronic mails, which provided the idea to send these electronic mails to users on other computers and networks. Most universities that were getting mail only had one or two computers connected to ARPANET. Terminals were spread around campuses and even smaller microcomputers in places. This was before the DNS (Domain Name Service), so the name of the computer was still just a hostname from the hosts file and users needed to know which computer and what the correct username was to send mail to one another. Elizabeth “Jake” Feinler had been maintaining a hosts file to keep track of computers on the growing network when her employer Stanford was just starting the NIC, or Network Information Center. Once the Internet was formed that NIC would be the foundation or the InterNIC who managed the buying and selling of domain names once Paul Mockapetris formalized DNS in 1983. At this point, the number of computers was increasing and not all accepted mail on behalf of an organization. The Internet Service Providers (ISPs) began to connect people across the world to the Internet during the 1980s and for many people, electronic mail was the first practical application they used on the internet. This was made easier by the fact that the research community had already struggled with email standards and in 1981 had defined how servers sent mail to one another using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, or SMTP, in RFC 788, updated in 1982 with 821 and 822. Still, the computers at networks like CSNET received email and users dialed into those computers to read the email they stored. Remembering the name of the computer to send mail to was still difficult. By 1986 we also got the concept routing mail in RFC 974 from Craig Partridge. Here we got the first MX record. Those are DNS records that define the computer that received mail for a given domain name. So stanford.edu had a single computer that accepted mail for the university. These became known as mail servers. As the use of mail grew and reliance on mail increased, some had multiple mail servers for fault tolerance, for different departments, or to split the load between servers. We also saw some split various messaging roles up. A mail transfer agent, or MTA, sent mail between different servers. The received field in the header is stamped with the time the server acting as the MTA got an email. MTAs mostly used port 25 to transfer mail until SSL was introduced when port 587 started to be used for encrypted connections. Bandwidth and time on these computers was expensive. There was a cost to make a phone call to dial into a mail provider and providers often charged by the minute. So people also wanted to store their mail offline and then dial in to send messages and receive messages. Close enough to instant communication. So software was created to manage email storage, which we call a mail client or more formally a Mail User Agent, or MUA. This would be programs like Microsoft Outlook and Apple Mail today or even a web mail client as with Gmail. POP, or Post Office Protocol was written to facilitate that transaction in 1984. Receive mail over POP and send over SMTP. POP evolved over the years with POPv3 coming along in 1993. At this point we just needed a username and the domain name to send someone a message. But the number of messages was exploding. As were the needs. Let's say a user needed to get their email on two different computers. POP mail needed to know to leave a copy of messages on servers. But then those messages all showed up as new on the next computer. So Mark Crispin developed IMAP, or Internet Message Access Protocol, in 1986, which left messages on the server and by IMAPv4 in the 1990s, was updated to the IMAPv4 we use today. Now mail clients had a few different options to use when accessing mail. Those previous RFCs focused on mail itself and the community could use tools like FTP to get files. But over time we also wanted to add attachments to emails so MIME, or Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions became a standard with RFC 1341 in 1993. Those mail and RFC standards would evolve over the years to add better support for encapsulations and internationalization. With the more widespread use of electronic mail, the words were shortened and to email and became common in everyday conversations. With the necessary standards, the next few years saw a number of private vendors jump on the internet bandwagon and invest in providing mail to customers America Online added email in 1993, Echomail came along in 1994, Hotmail added advertisements to messages, launching in 1996, and Yahoo added mail in 1997. All of the portals added mail within a few years. The age of email kicked into high gear in the late 1990s, reaching 55 million users in 1997 and 400 million by 1999. During this time having an email address went from a luxury or curiosity to a societal and business expectation, like having a phone might be today. We also started to rely on digital contacts and calendars, and companies like HP released Personal Information Managers, or PIMs. Some companies wanted to sync those the same way they did email, so Microsoft Exchange was launched in 1996. That original concept went all the way back to PLATO in the 1960s with Dave Wooley's PLATO NOTES and was Ray Ozzie's inspiration when he wrote the commercial product that became Lotus Notes in 1989. Microsoft inspired Google who in turn inspired Microsoft to take Exchange to the cloud with Outlook.com. It hadn't taken long after the concept of sending mail between computers was possible that we got spam. Then spam blockers and other technology to allow us to stay productive despite the thousands of messages from vendors desperately trying to sell us their goods through drip campaigns. We've even had legislation to limit the amount of spam, given that at one point over 9 out of 10 emails was spam. Diligent efforts have driven that number down to just shy of a third at this point. Email is now well over 40 years old and pretty much ubiquitous around the world. We've had other tools for instant messaging, messaging within every popular app, and group messaging products like bulletin boards online and now group instant messaging products like Slack and Microsoft Teams. We even have various forms of communication options integrated with one another. Like the ability to initiate a video call within Slack or Teams. Or the ability to toggle the Teams option when we send an invitation for a meeting in Outlook. Every few years there's a new communication medium that some think will replace email. And yet email is as critical to our workflows today as it ever was.

En el episodio #54 del Podcast Hablemos Copywriting comparto la historia de esto que conocemos como mercadeo vía email o email marketing. ¿Cuándo se Envió el Primer Email de la Historia?   Uno de los programadores de la Red de Agencias de Proyectos de Investigación Avanzada envió el primer email en 1971.   En 1972 se creó la primera versión piloto de un sistema de gestión de correos electrónicos.   ¿Cuándo se Usó por Primera Vez el Email para Mercadear y Vender un Producto?   En 1978 se usó el email por primera vez para vender. Se dice que el gerente de mercadeo de Digital Equipment Corporation envió un email a casi 400 personas anunciando la venta de unas computadoras.   En 1982 los usuarios dejaron de usar el término mensaje de correo electrónico y lo redujeron a correo electrónico.   En 1989 la palabra SPAM se añade al Oxford English Dictionary.   Para 1989 el mercadeo vía emails siguió ganado terreno con el debut de Lotus Notes 1.0 y además AOL grabó su famosa frase sonora You Got Mail.   En 1996, Microsoft desarrolló lo que hoy conocemos como Outlook y también nació Hotmail.   Y en 2003 el gobierno de los Estados Unidos aprobó la Ley CAN-SPAM.   Además de que a partir de ese momento surgieron mútiples proveedores de servicio de email marketing como Active Campaign, AWeber y Mailchimp, entre otros para hacer nuestra vida empresarial mucho más sencilla para llegar a más suscriptores, sin esfuerzos innecesarios.   Estoy segura que después de conocer más de 40 años de exitosa cronología tienes razones adicionales para que acoger el mercadeo vía emails como uno de los canales principales de comunicación digital para tu negocio digital.   ¿Quieres Estar al Día en Todo lo Relacionado con la Escritura Persuasiva?  Suscríbete al Podcast Hablemos Copywriting para que ganes más clientes e ingresos para tu empresa. ¿Necesitas Ayuda con tus Copys?  Como Copywriter puedo ayudarte porque si emociona investigarlo, imagínate escribirlo. Aquí tienes toda mi información de contacto.  Contáctame por email: jrestocopy@gmail.com Sígueme en Instagram: www.instagram.com/jrestocopywriter Sígueme en Facebook: www.facebook.com/jrestocopy Sígueme en Clubhouse: @jrestocopy

From the archives: Kelly Forrester and Erick Mack talk about eProductivity with Lotus Notes as one of the tools that David likes to use with his GTD® practice.

About JasonJason is now the Managing Director at Redpoint Ventures.Links: GitHub: https://github.com/ @jasoncwarner: https://twitter.com/jasoncwarner GitHub: https://github.com/jasoncwarner Jasoncwarner/ama: https://github.com/jasoncwarner/ama TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Honeycomb. When production is running slow, it's hard to know where problems originate: is it your application code, users, or the underlying systems? I've got five bucks on DNS, personally. Why scroll through endless dashboards, while dealing with alert floods, going from tool to tool to tool that you employ, guessing at which puzzle pieces matter? Context switching and tool sprawl are slowly killing both your team and your business. You should care more about one of those than the other, which one is up to you. Drop the separate pillars and enter a world of getting one unified understanding of the one thing driving your business: production. With Honeycomb, you guess less and know more. Try it for free at Honeycomb.io/screaminginthecloud. Observability, it's more than just hipster monitoring.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Liquibase. If you're anything like me, you've screwed up the database part of a deployment so severely that you've been banned from touching every anything that remotely sounds like SQL, at at least three different companies. We've mostly got code deployments solved for, but when it comes to databases we basically rely on desperate hope, with a roll back plan of keeping our resumes up to date. It doesn't have to be that way. Meet Liquibase. It is both an open source project and a commercial offering. Liquibase lets you track, modify, and automate database schema changes across almost any database, with guardrails to ensure you'll still have a company left after you deploy the change. No matter where your database lives, Liquibase can help you solve your database deployment issues. Check them out today at liquibase.com. Offer does not apply to Route 53.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by Jason Warner, the Chief Technology Officer at GifHub, although he pronounces it differently. Jason, welcome to the show.Jason: Thanks, Corey. Good to be here.Corey: So, GitHub—as you insist on pronouncing it—is one of those companies that's been around for a long time. In fact, I went to a training conducted by one of your early folks, Scott Chacon, who taught how Git works over the course of a couple of days, and honestly, I left more confused than I did when I entered. It's like, “Oh, this is super awful. Good thing I'll never need to know this because I'm not really a developer.” And I'm still not really a developer and I still don't really know how Git works, but here we are.And it's now over a decade later; you folks have been acquired by Microsoft, and you are sort of the one-stop-shop, from the de facto perspective of, “I'm going to go share some code with people on the internet. I'll use GitHub to do it.” Because, you know, copying and pasting and emailing Microsoft Word documents around isn't ideal.Jason: That is right. And I think that a bunch of things that you mentioned there, played into, you know, GitHub's early and sustained success. But my God, do you remember the old days when people had to email tar files around or drop them in weird spots?Corey: What the hell do you mean, by, “Old days?” It still blows my mind that the Linux kernel is managed by—they use Git, obviously. Linus Torvalds did write Git once upon a time—and it has the user interface you would expect for that. And the way that they collaborate is not through GitHub or anything like that. No, they use Git to generate patches, which they then email to the mailing list. Which sounds like I'm making it up, like, “Oh, well, yeah, tell another one, but maybe involve a fax machine this time.” But no, that is actually what they do.Jason: It blew my mind when I saw that, too, by the way. And you realize, too, that workflows are workflows, and people will build interesting workflows to solve their use case. Now, obviously, anyone that you would be talking to in 2021, if you walked in and said, “Yeah, install Git. Let's set up an email server and start mailing patches to each other and we're going to do it this way.” They would just kind of politely—or maybe impolitely—show you out of the room, and rightfully [laugh] so. But it works for one of the most important software projects in history: Linux.Corey: Yeah, and it works almost in spite of itself to some extent. You've come a long way as a company because initially, it was, “Oh, there's this amazing, decentralized version control system. How do we make it better? I know, we're going to take off the decentralized part of it and give it a central point that everything can go through.” And collaboratively, it works well, but I think that viewing GitHub as a system that is used to sell free Git repositories to people is rather dramatically missing the point. It feels like it's grown significantly beyond just code repository hosting. Tell me more about that.Jason: Absolutely. I remember talking to a bunch of folks right around when I was joining GitHub, and you know, there was still talk about GitHub as, you know, GitHub for lawyers, or GitHub for doctors, or what could you do in a different way? And you know, social coding as an aspect, and maybe turning into a social network with a resume. And all those things are true to a percentage standpoint. But what GitHub should be in the world is the world's most important software development platform, end-to-end software development platform.We obviously have grown a bunch since me joining in that way which we launched dependency management packages, Actions with built-in CI, we've got some deployment mechanisms, we got advanced security underneath it, we've Codespaces in beta and alpha on top of it now. But if you think about GitHub as, join, share, and see other people's code, that's evolution one. If you see it as world's largest, maybe most developed software development platform, that's evolution two, and in my mind, its natural place where it should be, given what it has done already in the world, is become the world's most important software company. I don't mean the most profitable. I just mean the most important.Corey: I would agree. I had a blog post that went up somewhat recently about the future of cloud being Microsoft's to lose. And it's not because Azure is the best cloud platform out there, with respect, and I don't need you to argue the point. It is very clearly not. It is not like other clouds, but I can see a path to where it could become far better than it is.But if I'm out there and I'm just learning how to write code—because I make terrible life choices—and I go to a boot camp or I follow a tutorial online or I take a course somewhere, I'm going to be writing code probably using VS Code, the open-source editor that you folks launched after the acquisition. And it was pretty clear that Atom wasn't quite where the world was going. Great. Then I'm going to host it on GitHub, which is a natural evolution. Then you take a look at things like GitHub Actions that build in CI/CD pipelines natively.All that's missing is a ‘Deploy to Azure' button that is the next logical step, and you're mostly there for an awful lot of use cases. But you can't add that button until Azure itself gets better. Done right, this has the potential to leave, effectively, every other cloud provider in the dust because no one can touch this.Jason: One hundred percent. I mean, the obvious thing that any other cloud should be looking at with us—or should have been before the acquisition, looking at us was, “Oh, no, they could jump over us. They could stop our funnel.” And I used internal metrics when I was talking to them about partnership that led to the sale, which was I showed them more about their running business than they knew about themselves. I can tell them where they were stacked-ranked against each other, based on the ingress and egress of all the data on GitHub, you know, and various reactions to that in those meetings was pretty astounding.And just with that data alone, it should tell you what GitHub would be capable of and what Azure would be capable of in the combination of those two things. I mean, you did mention the ‘Deploy to Azure' button; this has been a topic, obviously, pre and post-acquisition, which is, “When is that coming?” And it was the one hard rule I set during the acquisition was, there will be no ‘Deploy to Azure' button. Azure has to earn the right to get things deployed to, in my opinion. And I think that goes to what you're saying is, if we put a ‘Deploy to Azure' button on top of this and Azure is not ready for that, or is going to fail, ultimately, that looks bad for all of us. But if it earned the right and it gets better, and it becomes one of those, then, you know, people will choose it, and that is, to me, what we're after.Corey: You have to choose the moment because if you do it too soon, you'll set the entire initiative back five years. Do it too late, and you get leapfrogged. There's a golden window somewhere and finding it is going to be hard. And I think it's pretty clear that the other hyperscalers in this space are learning, or have learned, that the next 10 years of cloud or 15 years of cloud or whatever they want to call it, and the new customers that are going to come are not the same as the customers that have built the first half of the business. And they're trying to wrap their heads around that because a lot of where the growth is going to come from is established blue chips that are used to thinking in very enterprise terms.And people think I'm making fun of them when I say this, but Microsoft has 40 years' experience apologizing to enterprises for computer failures. And that is fundamentally what cloud is. It's about talking computers to business executives because as much as we talk about builders, that is not the person at an established company with an existing IT estate, who gets to determine where $50 million a year in cloud-spend is going to go.Jason: It's [laugh] very, [laugh] very true. I mean, we've entered a different spot with cloud computing in the bell curve of adoption, and if you think that they will choose the best technology every time, well, history of computing is littered with better technologies that have failed because the distribution was better on one side. As you mentioned, Microsoft has 40 years, and I wager that Microsoft has the best sales organizations and the best enterprise accounts and, you know, all that sort of stuff, blah, blah, blah, on that side of the world than anyone in the industry. They can sell to enterprises better than almost anyone in the industry. And the other hyperscalers—there's a reason why [TK 00:08:34] is running Google Cloud right now. And Amazon, classically, has been very, very bad assigned to the enterprises. They just happened to be the first mover.Corey: In the early days, it was easy. You'd have an Amazon salesperson roll up to a company, and the exec would say, “Great, why should we consider running things on AWS?” And the answer was, “Oh, I'm sorry, wrong conversation. Right now you have 80 different accounts scattered throughout your org. I'm just here to help you unify them, get some visibility into it, and possibly give you a discount along the way.” And it was a different conversation. Shadow IT was the sole driver of cloud adoption for a long time. That is no longer true. It has to go in the front door, and that is a fundamental shift in how you go to market.Jason: One hundred percent true, and it's why I think that Microsoft has been so successful with Azure, in the last, let's call it five years in that, is that the early adopters in the second wave are doing that; they're all enterprise IT, enterprise dev shops who are buying from the top down. Now, there is still the bottoms-up adoption that going to be happening, and obviously, bottom-up adoption will happen still going forward, but we've entered the phase where that's not the primary or sole mechanism I should say. The sole mechanism of buying in. We have tops-down selling still—or now.Corey: When Microsoft announced it was acquiring GitHub, there was a universal reaction of, “Oh, shit.” Because it's Microsoft; of course they're going to ruin GitHub. Is there a second option? No, unless they find a way to ruin it twice. And none of it came to pass.It is uniformly excellent, and there's a strong argument that could be made by folks who are unaware of what happened—I'm one of them, so maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong—that GitHub had a positive effect on Microsoft more than Microsoft had an effect on GitHub. I don't know if that's true or not, but I could believe it based upon what I've seen.Jason: Obviously, the skepticism was well deserved at the time of acquisition, let's just be honest with it, particularly given what Microsoft's history had been for about 15—well, 20 years before, previous to Satya joining. And I was one of those people in the late '90s who would write ‘M$' in various forums. I was 18 or 19 years old, and just got into—Corey: Oh, hating Microsoft was my entire personality.Jason: [laugh]. And it was, honestly, well-deserved, right? Like, they had anti-competitive practices and they did some nefarious things. And you know, I talked about Bill Gates as an example. Bill Gates is, I mean, I don't actually know how old he is, but I'm going to guess he's late '50s, early '60s, but he's basically in the redemption phase of his life for his early years.And Microsoft is making up for Ballmer years, and later Gates years, and things of that nature. So, it was well-deserved skepticism, and particularly for a mid-career to older-career crowd who have really grown to hate Microsoft over that time. But what I would say is, obviously, it's different under Satya, and Scott, and Amy Hood, and people like that. And all we really telling people is give us a chance on this one. And I mean, all of us. The people who were running GitHub at the time, including myself and, you know, let Scott and Satya prove that they are who they say they are.Corey: It's one of those things where there's nothing you could have said that would have changed the opinion of the world. It was, just wait and see. And I think we have. It's now, I daresay, gotten to a point where Microsoft announces that they're acquiring some other beloved company, then people, I think, would extend a lot more credit than they did back then.Jason: I have to give Microsoft a ton of credit, too, on this one for the way in which they handled acquisitions, like us and others. And the reason why I think it's been so successful is also the reason why I think so many others die post-acquisition, which is that Microsoft has basically—I'll say this, and I know I won't get fired because it feels like it's true. Microsoft is essentially a PE holding company at this point. It is acquired a whole bunch of companies and lets them run independent. You know, we got LinkedIn, you got Minecraft, Xbox is its own division, but it's effectively its own company inside of it.Azure is run that way. GitHub's got a CEO still. I call it the archipelago model. Microsoft's the landmass underneath the water that binds them all, and finance, and HR, and a couple of other things, but for the most part, we manifest our own product roadmap still. We're not told what to go do. And I think that's why it's successful. If we're going to functionally integrate GitHub into Microsoft, it would have died very quickly.Corey: You clearly don't mix the streams. I mean, your gaming division writes a lot of interesting games and a lot of interesting gaming platforms. And, like, one of the most popularly played puzzle games in the world is a Microsoft property, and that is, of course, logging into a Microsoft account correctly. And I keep waiting for that to bleed into GitHub, but it doesn't. GitHub is a terrific SAML provider, it is stupidly easy to log in, it's great.And at some level, I wish that would bleed into other aspects, but you can't have everything. Tell me what it's like to go through an acquisition from a C-level position. Because having been through an acquisition before, the process looks a lot like a surprise all-hands meeting one day after the markets close and, “Listen up, idiots.” And [laugh] there we go. I have to imagine with someone in your position, it's a slightly different experience.Jason: It's definitely very different for all C-levels. And then myself in particular, as the primary driver of the acquisition, obviously, I had very privy inside knowledge. And so, from my position, I knew what was happening the entire time as the primary driver from the inside. But even so, it's still disconcerting to a degree because, in many ways, you don't think you're going to be able to pull it off. Like, you know, I remember the months, and the nights, and the weekends, and the weekend nights, and all the weeks I spent on the road trying to get all the puzzle pieces lined up for the Googles, or the Microsofts, or the eventually AWSs, the VMwares, the IBMs of the world to take seriously, just from a product perspective, which I knew would lead to, obviously, acquisition conversations.And then, once you get the call from the board that says, “It's done. We signed the letter of intent,” you basically are like, “Oh. Oh, crap. Okay, hang on a second. I actually didn't—I don't actually believe in my heart of hearts that I was going to actually be able to pull that off.” And so now, you probably didn't plan out—or at least I didn't. I was like, “Shit if we actually pulled this off what comes next?” And I didn't have that what comes next, which is odd for me. I usually have some sort of a loose plan in place. I just didn't. I wasn't really ready for that.Corey: It's got to be a weird discussion, too, when you start looking at shopping a company around to be sold, especially one at the scale of GitHub because you're at such a high level of visibility in the entire environment, where—it's the idea of would anyone even want to buy us? And then, duh, of course they would. And you look the hyperscalers, for example. You have, well, you could sell it to Amazon and they could pull another Cloud9, where they shove it behind the IAM login process, fail to update the thing meaningfully over a period of years, to a point where even now, a significant portion of the audience listening to this is going to wonder if it's a service I just made up; it sounds like something they might have done, but Cloud9 sounds way too inspired for an AWS service name, so maybe not. And—which it is real. You could go sell to Google, which is going to be awesome until some executive changes roles, and then it's going to be deprecated in short order.Or then there's Microsoft, which is the wild card. It's, well, it's Microsoft. I mean, people aren't really excited about it, but okay. And I don't think that's true anymore at all. And maybe I'm not being fair to all the hyperscalers there. I mean, I'm basically insulting everyone, which is kind of my shtick, but it really does seem that Microsoft was far and away the best acquirer possible because it has been transformative. My question—if you can answer it—is, how the hell did you see that beforehand? It's only obvious—even knowing what I know now—in hindsight.Jason: So, Microsoft was a target for me going into it, and the reason why was I thought that they were in the best overall position. There was enough humility on one side, enough hubris on another, enough market awareness, probably, organizational awareness to, kind of, pull it off. There's too much hubris on one side of the fence with some of the other acquirers, and they would try to hug us too deeply, or integrate us too quickly, or things of that nature. And I think it just takes a deep understanding of who the players are and who the egos involved are. And I think egos has actually played more into acquisitions than people will ever admit.What I saw was, based on the initial partnership conversations, we were developing something that we never launched before GitHub Actions called GitHub Launch. The primary reason we were building that was GitHub launches a five, six-year journey, and it's got many, many different phases, which will keep launching over the next couple of years. The first one we never brought to market was a partnership between all of the clouds. And it served a specific purpose. One, it allowed me to get into the room with the highest level executive at every one of those companies.Two allow me to have a deep economic conversation with them at a partnership level. And three, it allowed me to show those executives that we knew what GitHub's value was in the world, and really flip the tables around and say, “We know what we're worth. We know what our value is in the world. We know where we sit from a product influence perspective. If you want to be part of this, we'll allow it.” Not, “Please come work with us.” It was more of a, “We'll allow you to be part of this conversation.”And I wanted to see how people reacted to that. You know how Amazon reacted that told me a lot about how they view the world, and how Google reacted to that showed me exactly where they viewed it. And I remember walking out of the Google conversation, feeling a very specific way based upon the reaction. And you know, when I talked to Microsoft, got a very different feel and it, kind of, confirmed a couple of things. And then when I had my very first conversation with Nat, who have known for a while before that, I realized, like, yep, okay, this is the one. Drive hard at this.Corey: If you could do it all again, would you change anything meaningful about how you approached it?Jason: You know, I think I got very lucky doing a couple of things. I was very intentional aspects of—you know, I tried to serendipitously show up, where Diane Greene was at one point, or a serendipitously show up where Satya or Scott Guthrie was, and obviously, that was all intentional. But I never sold a company like this before. The partnership and the product that we were building was obviously very intentional. I think if I were to go through the sale, again, I would probably have tried to orchestrate at least one more year independent.And it's not—for no other reason alone than what we were building was very special. And the world sees it now, but I wish that the people who built it inside GitHub got full credit for it. And I think that part of that credit gets diffused to saying, “Microsoft fixed GitHub,” and I want the people inside GitHub to have gotten a lot more of that credit. Microsoft obviously made us much better, but that was not specific to Microsoft because we're run independent; it was bringing Nat in and helping us that got a lot of that stuff done. Nat did a great job at those things. But a lot of that was already in play with some incredible engineers, product people, and in particular our sales team and finance team inside of GitHub already.Corey: When you take a look across the landscape of the fact that GitHub has become for a certain subset of relatively sad types of which I'm definitely one a household name, what do you think the biggest misconception about the company is?Jason: I still think the biggest misconception of us is that we're a code host. Every time I talk to the RedMonk folks, they get what we're building and what we're trying to be in the world, but people still think of us as SourceForge-plus-plus in many ways. And obviously, that may have been our past, but that's definitely not where we are now and, for certain, obviously, not our future. So, I think that's one. I do think that people still, to this day, think of GitLab as one of our main competitors, and I never have ever saw GitLab as a competitor.I think it just has an unfortunate naming convention, as well as, you know, PRs, and MRs, and Git and all that sort of stuff. But we take very different views of the world in how we're approaching things. And then maybe the last thing would be that what we're doing at the scale that we're doing it as is kind of easy. When I think that—you know, when you're serving almost every developer in the world at this point at the scale at which we're doing it, we've got some scale issues that people just probably will never thankfully encounter for themselves.Corey: Well, everyone on Hacker News believes that they will, as soon as they put up their hello world blog, so Kubernetes is the only way to do anything now. So, I'm told.Jason: It's quite interesting because I think that everything breaks at scale, as we all know about from the [hyperclouds 00:20:54]. As we've learned, things are breaking every day. And I think that when you get advice, either operational, technical, or managerial advice from people who are running 10 person, 50 person companies, or X-size sophisticated systems, it doesn't apply. But for whatever reason, I don't know why, but people feel inclined to give that feedback to engineers at GitHub directly, saying, “If you just…” and in many [laugh] ways, you're just like, “Well, I think that we'll have that conversation at some point, you know, but we got a 100-plus-million repos and 65 million developers using us on a daily basis.” It's a very different world.Corey: This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle HeatWave is a new high-performance accelerator for the Oracle MySQL Database Service. Although I insist on calling it “my squirrel.” While MySQL has long been the worlds most popular open source database, shifting from transacting to analytics required way too much overhead and, ya know, work. With HeatWave you can run your OLTP and OLAP, don't ask me to ever say those acronyms again, workloads directly from your MySQL database and eliminate the time consuming data movement and integration work, while also performing 1100X faster than Amazon Aurora, and 2.5X faster than Amazon Redshift, at a third of the cost. My thanks again to Oracle Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: One of the things that I really appreciate personally because, you know, when you see something that company does, it's nice to just thank people from time to time, so I'm inviting the entire company on the podcast one by one, at some point, to wind up thanking them all individually for it, but Codespaces is one of those things that I think is transformative for me. Back in the before times, and ideally the after times, whenever I travel the only computer I brought with me for a few years now has been an iPad or an iPad Pro. And trying to get an editor on that thing that works reasonably well has been like pulling teeth, my default answer has just been to remote into an EC2 instance and use vim like I have for the last 20 years. But Code is really winning me over. Having to play with code-server and other things like that for a while was obnoxious, fraught, and difficult.And finally, we got to a point where Codespaces was launched, and oh, it works on an iPad. This is actually really slick. I like this. And it was the thing that I was looking for but was trying to have to monkey patch together myself from components. And that's transformative.It feels like we're going back in many ways—at least in my model—to the days of thin clients where all the heavy lifting was done centrally on big computers, and the things that sat on people's desks were mostly just, effectively, relatively simple keyboard, mouse, screen. Things go back and forth and I'm sure we'll have super powerful things in our pockets again soon, but I like the interaction model; it solves for an awful lot of problems and that's one of the things that, at least from my perspective, that the world may not have fully wrapped it head around yet.Jason: Great observation. Before the acquisition, we were experimenting with a couple of different editors, that we wanted to do online editors. And same thing; we were experimenting with some Action CI stuff, and it just didn't make sense for us to build it; it would have been too hard, there have been too many moving parts, and then post-acquisition, we really love what the VS Code team was building over there, and you could see it; it was just going to work. And we had this one person, well, not one person. There was a bunch of people inside of GitHub that do this, but this one person at the highest level who's just obsessed with make this work on my iPad.He's the head of product design, his name's Max, he's an ex-Heroku person as well, and he was just obsessed with it. And he said, “If it works on my iPad, it's got a chance to succeed. If it doesn't work on my iPad, I'm never going to use this thing.” And the first time we booted up Codespaces—or he booted it up on the weekend, working on it. Came back and just, “Yep. This is going to be the one. Now, we got to work on those, the sanding the stones and those fine edges and stuff.”But it really does unlock a lot for us because, you know, again, we want to become the software developer platform for everyone in the world, you got to go end-to-end, and you got to have an opinion on certain things, and you got to enable certain functionality. You mentioned Cloud9 before with Amazon. It was one of the most confounding acquisitions I've ever seen. When they bought it I was at Heroku and I thought, I thought at that moment that Amazon was going to own the next 50 years of development because I thought they saw the same thing a lot of us at Heroku saw, and with the Cloud9 acquisition, what they were going to do was just going to stomp on all of us in the space. And then when it didn't happen, we just thought maybe, you know, okay, maybe something else changed. Maybe we were wrong about that assumption, too. But I think that we're on to it still. I think that it just has to do with the way you approach it and, you know, how you design it.Corey: Sorry, you just said something that took me aback for a second. Wait, you mean software can be designed? It's not this emergent property of people building thing on top of thing? There's actually a grand plan behind all these things? I've only half kidding, on some level, where if you take a look at any modern software product that is deployed into the world, it seems impossible for even small aspects of it to have been part of the initial founding design. But as a counterargument, it would almost have to be for a lot of these things. How do you square that circle?Jason: I think you have to, just like anything on spectrums and timelines, you have to flex at various times for various things. So, if you think about it from a very, very simple construct of time, you just have to think of time horizons. So, I have an opinion about what GitHub should look like in 10 years—vaguely—in five years much more firmly, and then very, very concretely, for the next year, as an example. So, a lot of the features you might see might be more emergent, but a lot of long-term work togetherness has to be loosely tied together with some string. Now, that string will be tightened over time, but it loosely has to see its way through.And the way I describe this to folks is that you don't wake up one day and say, “I'm going on vacation,” and literally just throw a finger on the map. You have to have some sort of vague idea, like, “Hey, I want to have a beach vacation,” or, “I want to have an adventure vacation.” And then you can kind of pick a destination and say, “I'm going to Hawaii,” or, “I'm going to San Diego.” And if you're standing on the East Coast knowing you're going to San Diego, you basically know that you have to just start marching west, or driving west, or whatever. And now, you don't have to have the route mapped out just yet, but you know that hey, if I'm going due southeast, I'm off course, so how do I reorient to make sure I'm still going in the right direction?That's basically what I think about as high-level, as scale design. And it's not unfair to say that a lot of the stuff is not designed today. Amazon is very famous for not designing anything; they design a singular service. But there's no cohesiveness to what Amazon—or AWS specifically, I should say, in this case—has put out there. And maybe that's not what their strategy is. I don't know the internal workings of them, but it's very clear.Corey: Well, oh, yeah. When I first started working in the AWS space and looking through the console, it like, “What is this? It feels like every service's interface was designed by a different team, but that would—oh…” and then the light bulb went on. Yeah. You ship your culture.Jason: It's exactly it. It works for them, but I think if you're going to try to do something very, very, very different, you know, it's going to look a certain way. So, intentional design, I think, is part of what makes GitHub and other products like it special. And if you think about it, you have to have an end-to-end view, and then you can build verticals up and down inside of that. But it has to work on the horizontal, still.And then if you hire really smart people to build the verticals, you get those done. So, a good example of this is that I have a very strong opinion about the horizontal workflow nature of GitHub should look like in five years. I have a very loose opinion about what the matrix build system of Actions looks like. Because we have very, very smart people who are working on that specific problem, so long as that maps back and snaps into the horizontal workflows. And that's how it can work together.Corey: So, when you look at someone who is, I don't know, the CTO of a wildly renowned company that is basically still catering primarily to developers slash engineers, but let's be honest, geeks, it's natural to think that, oh, they must be the alpha geek. That doesn't really apply to you from everything I've been able to uncover. Am I just not digging deeply enough, or are you in fact, a terrible nerd?Jason: [laugh]. I am. I'm a terrible nerd. I am a very terrible nerd. I feel very lucky, obviously, to be in the position I'm in right now, in many ways, and people call me up and exactly that.It's like, “Hey, you must be king of the geeks.” And I'm like, “[laugh], ah, funny story here.” But um, you know, I joke that I'm not actually supposed to be in tech in first place, the way I grew up, and where I did, and how, I wasn't supposed to be here. And so, it's serendipitous that I am in tech. And then turns out I had an aptitude for distributed systems, and complex, you know, human systems as well. But when people dig in and they start talking about topics, I'm confounded. I never liked Star Wars, I never like Star Trek. Never got an anime, board games, I don't play video games—Corey: You are going to get letters.Jason: [laugh]. When I was at Canonical, oh, my goodness, the stuff I tried to hide about myself, and, like, learn, like, so who's this Boba Fett dude. And, you know, at some point, obviously, you don't have to pretend anymore, but you know, people still assume a bunch stuff because, quote, “Nerd” quote, “Geek” culture type of stuff. But you know, some interesting facts that people end up being surprised by with me is that, you know, I was very short in high school and I grew in college, so I decided that I wanted to take advantage of my newfound height and athleticism as you grow into your body. So, I started playing basketball, but I obsessed over it.I love getting good at something. So, I'd wake up at four o'clock in the morning, and go shoot baskets, and do drills for hours. Well, I got really good at it one point, and I end up playing in a Pro-Am basketball game with ex-NBA Harlem Globetrotter legends. And that's just not something you hear about in most engineering circles. You might expect that out of a salesperson or a marketing person who played pro ball—or amateur ball somewhere, or college ball or something like that. But not someone who ends up running the most important software company—from a technical perspective—in the world.Corey: It's weird. People counterintuitively think that, on some level, that code is the answer to all things. And that, oh, all this human interaction stuff, all the discussions, all the systems thinking, you have to fit a certain profile to do that, and anyone outside of that is, eh, they're not as valuable. They can get ignored. And we see that manifesting itself in different ways.And even if we take a look at people whose profess otherwise, we take a look at folks who are fresh out of a boot camp and don't understand much about the business world yet; they have transformed their lives—maybe they're fresh out of college, maybe didn't even go to college—and 18 weeks later, they are signing up for six-figure jobs. Meanwhile, you take a look at virtually any other business function, in order to have a relatively comparable degree of earning potential, it takes years of experience and being very focused on a whole bunch of other things. There's a massive distortion around technical roles, and that's a strange and difficult thing to wrap my head around. But as you're talking about it, it goes both ways, too. It's the idea of, “Oh, I'll become technical than branch into other things.” It sounded like you started off instead with a non-technical direction and then sort of adopted that from other sides. Is that right, or am I misremembering exactly how the story unfolds?Jason: No, that's about right. People say, “Hey, when did I start programming?” And it's very in vogue, I think, for a lot of people to say, “I started programming at three years old,” or five years old, or whatever, and got my first computer. I literally didn't get my first computer until I was 18-years-old. And I started programming when I got to a high school co-op with IBM at 17.It was Lotus Notes programming at the time. Had no exposure to it before. What I did, though, in college was IBM told me at the time, they said, “If you get a computer science degree will guarantee you a job.” Which for a kid who grew up the way I grew up, that is manna from heaven type of deal. Like, “You'll guarantee me a job inside where don't have to dig ditches all day or lay asphalt? Oh, my goodness. What's computer science? I'll go figure it out.”And when I got to school, what I realized was I was really far behind. Everyone was that ubergeek type of thing. So, what I did is I tried to hack the system, and what I said was, “What is a topic that nobody else has an advantage on from me?” And so I basically picked the internet because the internet was so new in the mid-'90s that most people were still not fully up to speed on it. And then the underpinnings in the internet, which basically become distributed systems, that's where I started to focus.And because no one had a real advantage, I just, you know, could catch up pretty quickly. But once I got into computers, it turned out that I was probably a very average developer, maybe even below average, but it was the system's thinking that I stood out on. And you know, large-scale distributed systems or architectures were very good for me. And then, you know, that applies not, like, directly, but it applies decently well to human systems. It's just, you know, different types of inputs and outputs. But if you think about organizations at scale, they're barely just really, really, really complex and kind of irrational distributed systems.Corey: Jason, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more about who you are, what you're up to, how you think about the world, where can they find you?Jason: Twitter's probably the best place at this point. Just @jasoncwarner on Twitter. I'm very unimaginative. My name is my GitHub handle. It's my Twitter username. And that's the best place that I, kind of, interact with folks these days. I do an AMA on GitHub. So, if you ever want to ask me anything, just kind of go to jasoncwarner/ama on GitHub and drop a question in one of the issues and I'll get to answering that. Yeah, those are the best spots.Corey: And we will, of course, include links to those things in the [show notes 00:33:52]. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.Jason: Thanks, Corey. It's been fun.Corey: Jason Warner, Chief Technology Officer at GitHub. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review in your podcast platform of choice anyway, along with a comment that includes a patch.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Topic Summary: Lotus Notes Debt Cards for Kids NASA Helicopter Formula E & Electric Car Stuff Quantum Stuff & China Jedi Contract Cancelled Multi-Cloud Yolo Right to repair

Show notes:Links:TwistHook RelayBen Orenstein TupleWrite for HoneybadgerFull transcript:Starr:So Ben is joining us today from his car. It's bringing back fun memories. I recorded, I think the voiceover for our very first demo video in my car.Ben:Oh yeah? Nice. So as you may recall, I have a two story building that I lease one of the rooms, and the downstairs is a wine tasting room. Well with the pandemic, the company that had the wine tasting room, they closed shop. They stopped leasing, because who's going to go to a wine tasting room during a pandemic, right? Well they're leasing the space to a new tenant that's going to take that space. Apparently hey, we're getting back, things are reopening, let's taste wine again, but the new tenant wants to have a new door put in. So I got to the office today and they're like, "Yeah, we're putting in a new door." And then I'm like, "Cool." Didn't even think much of it. But then a few minutes later, there's all this drilling going on. I'm like, "Oh, I think probably the car is a better place to record today."Josh:Well at least you'll have some new friends soon.Ben:True, true.Starr:Yeah. Well I'm glad you made it, at least. And so what's up? I missed a week of the podcast and you guys invested our entire Honeybadger savings account into Bitcoin.Josh:Yeah.Starr:And I'm not sure that was the most prudent investment decision, y'all. I just wanted to say that.Ben:Yeah, the timing could have been better.Josh:Yeah, we really pulled a Roam Research on that one.Starr:Oh yeah. What do you mean by that?Josh:They invest in Bitcoin, apparently.Starr:Oh, they do? Okay.Ben:Of course they do.Starr:Of course. It's just a dip. You're supposed to buy the dips, Josh. It's just what, like a 30% dip? 40% dip?Josh:I wasn't watching it, but I read that it had recovered pretty quickly too.Starr:Oh. I have no idea. I didn't even follow it.Josh:As it does.Starr:I don't even follow it.Josh:Yeah. I just read random people's opinions.Starr:There you go.Josh:I forget where we left it last week, but I just wanted to state for record that I think I mentioned I made some accidental money in Bitcoin back when I was learning about block chain technology, but I have not bought any Bitcoin since, nor do I intend to, and I do not really view it as an investment asset.Starr:This is not investment advice.Josh:I just need to state my opinions for the future so I can look back on them with regret. If I don't say what I actually think, I'm never going to have anything to regret.Starr:There you go.Josh:I'm just going to commit.Starr:So you've decided to die on this no intrinsic value hill.Josh:Right. I'll let you know if I change my mind.Starr:Okay, that's fine. That's fine. Yeah, I don't really check. Last week y'all did the interview with Mike, right?Josh:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Josh:Yeah, it was a good conversation.Starr:Yeah. I don't really pay attention to it, except occasionally I'll look at the chart. It's the same with GameStop. Occasionally I'll look at the GameStop chart and then just see what wild stuff people are saying about it. Yeah.Ben:Yeah, GameStop was hovering at about 150 for a while, but now it's up to like 170-ish, 180. Something like that. Yeah. I peek at it every now... it's on my watch list when I log into my brokerage account, so I just see it. I'm like, "Oh, okay. Cool." And then I move on and check out my real actual stock portfolio.Starr:Oh yeah, yeah. I'm not going to buy it. It's like a TV show for me.Ben:Yeah, totally.Josh:Yeah. To be fair, I really don't have much of an opinion either way. I still don't understand it, so I don't know. I just feel like I probably shouldn't be buying it.Starr:That's really good advice. I don't understand anything though, so what am I supposed to do, Josh? Huh? Huh?Josh:Yeah.Ben:Just buy the index fund.Starr:Yeah. I don't even understand that.Josh:I don't understand that either though, if you really think about it.Ben:That's actually, there was a good thread or so on Twitter. I don't know if it was this week or last week, but basically the idea was if you feel really confident in your own ability, in your own business, given that, you're probably spending most of your time in that business, right? We spend most of our creative time in Honeybadger because that's where we feel the most potential is. So you're investing basically all of your personal capital in this one business. How do you diversify that risk? Or do you diversify the risk? Do you double down? Maybe do you take investment to diversify, and so you buy out? Let someone do a secondary and so you take some cash off the table? If you did that, then where would you put the money? Do you just go, "Okay, I'm going to go buy Bitcoin. I'm going to go buy an index fund," or whatever. And if you do that, is that a better use of your money than having just kept the equity and just plowing more time into your business? Right?Josh:Yeah.Ben:It's an interesting thought exercise. It's like, "Hm." The whole investment mindset of your business is interesting to me.Josh:Yeah. Yeah, that was interesting. I think I saw that conversation, or maybe I saw a similar conversation where they were talking about even just 401Ks and for founders who are already fairly... have at least made it in whatever sense that means. Is it the best financial move to keep maxing out your 401K versus investing in your ability to generate revenue in your business?Starr:So a little bit of real talk here. If you are a founder who's made it, maxing out your 401K isn't really a blip on your financial radar.Josh:It's not a big... yeah. That was kind of the same thought I had. It's not like you're putting 50% of your income into it.Starr:Yeah. What is it, like 20 grand? Something like that?Josh:Yeah.Starr:It's a good chunk of change, but still. It's not like...Josh:Yeah. I don't know.Starr:Yeah, that's interesting. I think I'm just going to go all in on Pogs. I think they're due for a comeback. I think that's going to be how I diversify.Josh:But I think it's probably a good move to invest in yourself if you have the ability to build businesses. That definitely seems like a good investment, in any case. Probably still have a 401K. I tend to do everything, except Bitcoin.Ben:A 401K is a nice backstop. Just keep stocking money away, and later it will be there, hopefully. But in the meantime, really, really spend your time and your energy on making your business even more profitable. Speaking of making your business more profitable, so this past week or two weeks, I've been working on our SOC 2 type two audit, so I'm doing the evidence collection.Starr:Oh yeah?Ben:So that in this case means I take a bunch of screenshots of settings, like the AWS console and G-suite console to show yeah, we have users, and yes, we have login restrictions, et cetera. All the 150 different things that you're supposed to check off the list when you do the audit. And as I've been going through this process taking all these screenshots, honestly it's getting a bit tedious, and it's surprisingly time consuming. And so I'm like, "You know, there are services for this sort of thing. Let me check them out." And so in the past three days, I've had conversations with Vanta, Secureframe, and Drata. These are three providers that what they do is they provide almost SOC 2 in a box. Basically they help you connect all of your systems and get the evidence that you need for an auditor in a more automated fashion. So for example, they'll plug into your AWS account and they'll pull out information about your security groups, your application firewall, your AIM, all the access permissions, all that kind of stuff, and pack that up into a nice little format that the auditor can then look at and like, "Yeah, they're good on all these different requirements." So you don't have to take screenshots of security groups.Ben:And I hadn't really looked at them before because I was like, "I don't know if I just want to spend that kind of money," but actually sitting back and looking at it, looking at the time that I'm spending on this and the amount of time I'm paying our auditors to audit all these screenshots that I'm taking, actually I think it would be cheaper to go with one of these services, because your audit is a bit more streamlined because the auditor knows how that data is going to come in and it's an easy format to digest, et cetera. But the thing is that after having gone through some of the sales pitches from these vendors, I'm thinking I really wish I would have started with these back the first time, because I think it would have been much easier just from the get go. So I think I've been doing the SOC compliance on hard mode, unfortunately, but lessons learned.Starr:With my experience, that just seems to be how projects are. You do it one time and you don't really know what you're doing, and you just push your way through it, and then eventually you figure out how to do it better and easier and all that. Because when something is new to you, you don't know what you can safely ignore. You know?Josh:Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Well plus you're pumping up the value of FounderQuest.Starr:Oh, that's true. We got a lot of content out of that.Ben:That's true.Starr:At least $100 worth.Josh:That's useful knowledge. Yeah.Ben:Yeah, so I think the short version is if you are interested in doing SOC2 compliance and you have no idea what you're doing, talk to these vendors first and maybe just start with them. They will help you, because they have customer success people like SaaS does. They have people on staff who are there to help you have success with their product. And if you don't get compliant, then you're going to stop using their product, so they're going to help you try and get there. And it's still pricey. It's still going to be five figures a year, but it will definitely save you some time and maybe even save you some money.Josh:Nice.Ben:Yeah. So next year, our audit should just be smooth as silk.Starr:Just butter.Josh:Love it.Starr:So if we-Josh:What are you going to do with all that extra free time?Ben:I made an executive decision.Starr:Oh really? What's that?Ben:Yes. The executive decision is we're going to have more teamwork at Honeybadger.Starr:That's ironic.Josh:Instead of what? What we have now, which is anarchy?Ben:We pretty much do have anarchy, I think. We are coordinated, we do make our plans, and we do have things we want to get done, but yeah, we are very independent at Honeybadger. We work independently. You might even say we're kind of siloed. We go off in the corner and do our own thing for most of the time. And I was chatting with Kevin about this, and I think we're going to try an experiment. So I think we're going to try to actually work together.Starr:Kevin is our developer.Starr:Yeah, so you all are going to be developing features together. Are you going to pair program? Are you going to use Tuple?Ben:Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down there.Starr:Are you going to mob program?Ben:Pair programming, that's maybe too advanced for us, I think. Maybe actually we'll chat in Slack a little bit here and there and maybe have a Zoom call.Josh:Yeah, so you're talking about you're both going to work on the same project at the same time.Ben:Right. Right.Josh:Mostly independently, but coordinating.Ben:Right. Yeah.Josh:Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I think that still can fit into our anarchy model.Starr:Yeah. It still seems a little bit independent.Josh:It's more like mutual aid or something.Starr:There you go. We should make a conference talk about mutual aid development.Josh:Right.Starr:That would go over well.Ben:Using NATO as a model for your development process. Yeah, so we'll see how it goes. I'm looking forward to it. I think I've been feeling a little lonely. I don't know if it's the right word, but maybe just off doing my own thing. I was like, "Oh, I think it will be nice to have some collaboration, some coordination." Maybe we'll even get to a level of synergies.Starr:Synergies.Starr:That's a blast from the past.Josh:Yeah, I think it's a good idea.Ben:Yeah, so more to come on that. We'll keep you posted. It's a bigger project. May not have results for a couple months. Don't really want to spill the beans on what it is right now. Competitive information. Don't want to leak it to all of our competitors.Starr:I like that. I like that. It's going to keep people on the hook for the next episodes.Josh:Totally.Ben:But yeah. That was my week.Josh:Yeah. Well my week, I took some time off, had some family stuff going on, so I was not very productive this week, but what I did work on was I've been working on this little guide for Hook Relay. I'd love to get the marketing machine, the fly wheel going on that at least, so we can be moving that along with everything else. And so yeah, working on some content and such.Starr:What is Hook Relay?Josh:Well you tell us what Hook Relay is, Ben. It's your baby.Ben:It's my baby. Yeah. So Hook Relay is a tool for managing web hooks. So you can record web hooks as they go out. In our case, to Honeybadger, we send a lot of web hooks, and so we built Hook Relay to help track all that web hook action. So we logged as pay loads that can go and diagnose issues that are happening, or maybe replay them as necessary, and of course it also handles inbound web hooks. So if you were handling, let's say, a post pay load request from GitHub about some activity that happens in your GitHub account, you handle that web hook and we can give you a place to store that, and then you can replay that, send it, forward it onto somewhere if you want, or just store it.Josh:Yeah. I think one of my favorite things about Hook Relay is just the visibility that it gives us into what's happening with the hooks, because otherwise we never had a dashboard. I guess we could have built one internally to see what the activity was and what's failing, what's actually... what requests are... because you're connecting to thousands of different people's random domain URLs, basically. It's really nice even for debugging and things like troubleshooting to be able to see what's going on, in addition to all the other cool things that it gives you out of the box.Starr:So you might say it's even like turnkey reliability and visibility for web hooks. For all your web hook needs.Ben:Yeah. Yeah, we modeled it on Stripes web hooks because we loved-Starr:I'm holding up a box up. I'm holding the TurboLinks box up and gesturing at it with my hand.Ben:Vanna White style.Josh:We should do our own channel, do our own infomercials.Ben:Yeah, I really wanted experience of Stripe. If you set up web hooks in Stripe, you can go and you can see all the web hooks they've sent you. You can see the pay loads, you can see whether they were successfully delivered or not, and I wanted that experience for our own web hooks, and also I thought it would be cool if developers could just have that without having to build the infrastructure. And so if you're building an app that send a bunch of web hooks on behalf of your customers, well now you can give your customers visibility into that web hook activity without having to build that tracking yourself.Josh:Yeah. That's pretty cool. So basically this content guide I'm working on is how to build web hooks into your application, including all the reliability and stuff that Hook Relay gives you for free. And the idea is that if that's what you're doing and you just want to save some time, Hook Relay will be a large chunk of that. You've just got to sign up. So I think it will be useful to everyone, even if they don't become a customer. If you're going to build your own back end and handle all the retries, build dashboards, and all that. But if you want it all turnkey, then Hook Relay is a big chunk of that work just done of you.Starr:So is this live? So can people go and sign up now?Ben:Yeah.Josh:Hook Relay, yes. It is.Josh:Hookrelay.dev.Ben:Yeah. In fact, we have enough customers now that it's actually paying for itself.Starr:What?Ben:Yes. So sweet.Josh:It's wild. That's wild.Starr:That's amazing.Ben:So Josh, is your guide going to have... are you going to dive deep into the architecture of here's how you build a whole web hook system, and so we're going to show you all the stuff behind the curtain so you can build your own? And then, "Oh, by the way, if you want it just done for you, here it is." Or are you going to just keep it more high level?Josh:I'm starting more high level. Yeah, I was planning on it being more high level. More like a high level architecture thing, or specification. Like these are the parts that you'll need to build, but you're going to have to solve some things, because it's not going to be specific to one system. It's not going to be like, "This is how you build web hooks for Ruby and Sidekick, or if you're going serverless." It will have suggestions on stacks or technologies to use for the back end, for instance, but yeah. I was thinking of leaving that to the user to figure out, but just showing the things you need to think about that a lot of people don't think about until they encounter the problems that might arise, like retrying and all the error handling that you add later, and validation for security reasons and things.Ben:Yeah. Yeah.Starr:This is giving me flashbacks to a whole two or three year process after we first launched.Josh:Yeah.Starr:It was just like, "Oh, crap. There's an edge case here that we didn't think of because we're not used to doing web hooks at this scale." And that just went on for like three years.Josh:Yeah. And it's nice having the two products because Hook Relay came out of Honeybadger and it's basically part of our web hook system. This is basically just documenting Honeybadger's web hook system for other people who might want to replicate that or whatever.Ben:Totally. I think that will be cool. A great piece of content, a great piece of SEO juice. And if you did decide to go deep into the technical side, like if you explain the entire infrastructure that we're building, that would actually be kind of cool too because you could maintain your technical documentation for the system internally and use it as a piece of content for marketing.Josh:That could be cool. Yeah. That's not a bad idea. Yeah, I was thinking just because I want to get something out there. I'm thinking it will help with both, having a resource for people who are already on the site to see this is basically how you will implement this. It's kind of like an implementation guide, really. But then also SEO. It should help get us in more search results.Ben:Yeah.Josh:And I also want to credit Ben Orenstein and and Tuple. They have a great pair programming guide which was an inspiration for this idea. I just really liked the format that they used, and I just think it's a great idea if you have a product that's highly targeted or focused on one specific thing and doing it really well. I think it's maybe even a great alternative to a blog, for instance. You can get some of the same benefits of having a blog, but without actually having to create a blog with a lot of different variety of topics and things.Ben:Speaking of the blog, I was talking to Harris, our sales guru, about our blog strategy, and I said, "Yeah, it's basically like a flypaper strategy. We want it to attract developers that come and see the content and they love it and they're like, 'Oh, let me check out this Honeybadger thing.'" Not particularly novel, but I like the flypaper idea.Starr:That's a good metaphor. And also for a long time, I poo-pooed SEO because in my mind, SEO was very scammy. I don't know. I learned about SEO in the days of link farming and all that, and I just didn't want to be involved in that. So I'm just like, "We're just going to put out good content and that will be enough." And it is, yes, but also I've looked at some metrics since then that make it clear that the majority of good things that happen because of our blog actually are people entering through search queries. That really outweighs people sharing articles and doing stuff like that, which I guess is obvious that it would be that way, but my own bias against search just made me not see that for a while. So maybe trying to pick some possible low hanging fruit. We've tried to make our site search engine friendly, but we having really done any explicit SEO type activities.Josh:Yeah. I went through recently through our documentation and just tweaked just small things on a bunch of pages, like headlines and some of the meta tags and stuff, but mostly headlines and content on page was what I was focusing on. And I wasn't using any particular tool to measure before and after results, but it does seem like it bumped us up in some of the results for people searching for more general terms like Ruby error tracking, for example, which are typically pretty competitive terms. But I think we rank pretty well for some of those terms these days. I think we've been around enough and we're one of the options that come up. So it does seem like if you already target the terms, it actually does what they say it does, which is good to know. You've just got to pay attention to it.Ben:So the moral of story is there is some value in SEO.Starr:I guess so.Josh:Yeah. Well and I think documentation sites. Your documentation, I think it's a great place to optimize SEO because a lot of times, especially for those... maybe not for the long tail searches. A blog is great for that, like what you were talking about with the flypaper, Ben. But for people who are actually searching for what you do, I think a lot of times documentation pops up first in a lot of cases when I'm searching for things, so don't overlook it like we did.Starr:Yeah. Well this week, I guess the main thing I did was I got our authors lined up for the next quarter of intelligence briefings. So if you haven't been playing along at home, we're having some intelligence briefings created. Basically everything that's going on in a certain language community for the quarter, and this grew out of Josh's need because he's basically in charge of our client libraries. And we have libraries in a variety of languages, so keeping up with those languages and what's going on is a real pain in the ass, so we were going to make these guides originally for him, but then also we were like, "This would be really great content to publish."Starr:And I've already got this system with authors who want to write about programming languages, and so let's see if we can make some authors make these summaries. And so far, yeah, I'm pretty happy. We had four or five of them created, and we're not publishing them because they were for a previous quarter, and this is just a trial run to see if the results are okay, and I think they were. I think the results were pretty good. We go some feedback from you two, and I updated my process and updated the template that all the authors are using, and so we should be getting round two done. I'm setting the deadline a week after the end of the quarter. My hope is if they get them to me then, then I'll have a week to get them up on our blog or wherever, and then they won't be too out of date by the time people see them.Josh:Yeah. That's cool. I'm excited to see the next batch. My favorite thing from the reports were the ones where they wrote some original content summarizing things or sections or whatever. That was super useful because there's a little bit of a story element to it that's specific to the quarter or whatever that you don't really get from just... if you just aggregate everything, all the weekly newsletters and what happened on Reddit and what happened on Twitter. If you just dump that all in a document, it's a bit of overload, so it's nice to have the summary the story of what the community was interested in.Starr:Oh yeah. Definitely.Josh:Here are some articles that they talked about.Starr:That's the whole idea, is to have somebody who knows the community explain to you what's going on, as opposed to... if I wanted a bunch of links, I could just write a little script to scrape links from places.Josh:Yeah.Starr:And it wouldn't be very useful. What's useful is having people who know the environment being like, "Hey, this is what's going on. This is why it's important." And yeah, so that's going to be something I guess I need to look for explicitly when I get this round of things of reports back.Josh:Start calling them secret agents or something instead of authors.Starr:Oh yeah.Josh:Or detectives.Starr:Operatives. Yeah. Assets.Josh:As our detective service investigators.Ben:I think having that analysis of why this news is important or why these things are important that they've collected is really handy, because the links are great. Like you said, I could just write a script to collect them, but having someone with that context in the community saying, "Okay, and it's important because, and this is why you should pay attention," I think that's really helpful to someone who's maybe not as deep into that every day.Starr:Oh yeah.Josh:Yeah. And also knowing what to surface, because there was one report that it really seemed to just dump every single link or article that was discussed or was in a newsletter or whatever, and I think it's more helpful if it's on a quarterly level, if you know what is actually the important things that you really want to know about.Starr:Yeah, that's true. I just made a note for myself to go back and explicitly just mention that to people, because I realized I didn't put it in the instructions anywhere. I put like, "Here's where a description of the content goes," but I didn't really put what I want inside that description, I realized.Josh:Yeah.Starr:So I'm going to do that.Ben:We're iterating in real time here.Starr:Oh yeah, yeah. This is where the work gets done.Josh:Yeah. Well and pretty soon, we'll have hopefully some good examples that we can show future authors, or detectives, or whatever we're calling them.Starr:Oh, definitely. Definitely. I'm going to call them authors because they're already in the blog system as authors and it just seems like-Josh:Agents?Starr:I don't know. I've got to be able to talk to these people with a straight face.Ben:You could call them research specialists, but then you might have to pay them more.Starr:There you go.Josh:Research. Yeah. Yeah.Starr:I don't know. I think I'm paying pretty well. Honestly, I think I'm paying pretty well for looking at... I don't know. How many weeks is a quarter? 12? 12 weeks of newsletters and just telling me what's going on. I think I'm paying pretty well.Josh:Yeah. You don't need to talk to them with a straight face though. You need to talk to them with sunglasses on, smoking a cigarette in a diner.Starr:Oh that's right. Yeah.Josh:Or a dive bar somewhere.Starr:Those people aren't smiling. Those people aren't smiling. Oh, that's right. I can do that. I just realized that it's two weeks since my second vaccine, so I'm ready to go out and recruit secret agents.Josh:Ready to party.Starr:Yeah. I'm very anxious talking with people in public now, but that's not a topic for this conversation.Josh:Yeah. We'll ease back into it.Starr:Oh yeah. Yeah, we're going to have dinner with my sister in law on Saturday, and I'm just like, "Okay Starr, you can do this. You can do this."Josh:Cool.Starr:Yeah, and I guess the other thing that we did this week is we are doing a trial run of Twist as a replacement for Basecamp messages, the message board on Basecamp. And yeah, so basically the long and short of it is the whole Basecamp BS just left a bad taste in my mouth in particular. I think you all's a little bit, or maybe you're neutral. I don't care. That sounded really harsh.Ben:You can be honest with us. We can take it.Starr:No, I didn't mean to sound that harsh. I just mean I'm not trying to put my opinions onto you, is what I'm saying. I just felt gross using Basecamp. Also if I'm being honest, I never really enjoyed Basecamp as a product. It's got a couple things that just really rubbed me the wrong way.Josh:We were having some vague conversations in the past. We have posed do we really want to keep this part of what we're using Basecamp for? And we were already using a subset of it, so yeah. It wasn't totally out of the blue.Starr:Yeah. And we were using maybe 20% of Basecamp, just the message boards feature.Josh:And the check ins, which apparently we all disliked.Starr:And the check ins, which nobody liked but we all kept using for some reason. Ben is like, "Can I turn off the check ins?" And I'm like, "I thought you were the only reason we were doing the check ins, it's because I thought you liked them."Ben:I think I was the only reason we were doing the check ins.Josh:It's because... yeah.Ben:Yeah, because I remember when I started it I was like, "Yeah, I really don't know what's going on," because back to that siloed, independent, off in the corner thing, I was like, "It would be nice to know what people are doing." But yeah, lately I've been like, "This is just a drag." So I'm like, "Would anybody be upset if this went away?" And everyone is like, "Please take it away."Josh:Everyone is just passively aggressively answering them.Ben:Everyone hated it.Josh:It wasn't that bad, but-Ben:I get it.Josh:Kevin used them too, but yeah.Ben:So I finally gave everyone permission to tell me that it was not okay, and now we no longer do it.Starr:There you go. And we're just like, "While we're at it, just ditch Basecamp." So yeah, so we've been trying a new system called Twist. Twist is, essential it's... I don't know, it's like threaded discussions. I figured this out on my own. I'm very proud of myself. So you have lots of threads, and you twist them together to make yarn or something or some sort of textile, so I bet you that's why it's called Twist.Josh:Beautiful sweater.Starr:Yeah. A beautiful sweater. The tapestry that is Honeybadger. And so far, I've really been enjoying it. I find the UI to be a lot better. There was one bug that we found that I reported, so hopefully that will get fixed. It doesn't really bother me that much. Yeah, it's amazing sometimes how the UI of an application can just be like, "Oh, ah. I'm having to parse less information just to do my task."Josh:It's much nicer.Starr:Yeah.Ben:It does feel like a lot less friction for our use case.Josh:Yeah. Well we talked about that, just the structure. The way that you structure conversation and organization things in a management tool like that makes a big difference. In Basecamp, we would create Basecamps for whatever. They call them Basecamps, right? They're the projects.Starr:They're like projects. I don't know.Josh:We'd create different ones, different projects for each project, but then there's five of us, so we'd basically just add everyone to every single project that is in there. But all the conversation is siloed off in each project, and with Twist, it's just much more of a fluid... it uses what, like channels? But yeah, it just seems like it's all together. It's kind of like a combination of Slack and a threaded message board or something, to me.Starr:Yeah, or like Slack and email or something.Josh:Slack and email. Yeah. It's a nice combo.Starr:Yeah. It has inbox, which I like, where it shows you any unread messages, and so you can just easily just go and scan through them, and it's all in the same page. It's a single page application, so you don't have to click out to a completely new page and then come back to the inbox and do all that. Basecamp had a similar feature, but it's like a timeline and it had a line down the middle of the screen and then branches coming off of either side of it. And for some reason, I started using the inbox in Twist and it was just like, "Oh, this is so much better." For some reason I think having things on different sides of the screen just doubled the amount of background processing my brain had to do to put it all together. And yeah, so I don't know. I do like it. Also, it's got mark down. It's got mark down.Josh:The mark down editor is so nice. It reminds me a lot of just using GitHub, the editor on GitHub, with the mark down mode and preview. And you can drag and drop images into the... I don't know if you knew that, into the mark down editor, like you can on GitHub, and it automatically inserts the image tag and uploads it for you.Starr:Yeah, it's all really slick. So I don't know. I imagine in maybe another... I've got vacation next week, so maybe after that we'll get together and compare notes. But I don't know, it seems like people like it so far.Josh:Yeah.Ben:Yeah, it's been good. It's interesting-Josh:If I had to decide today, it's a keeper for me.Ben:Yeah, I would go ahead and switch.Starr:Oh yeah, me too.Ben:It's interesting to me, you alluded to this, Starr, as you were talking about comparing it to your products and how they approach... it's interesting to me the UI, even if it's the same kind of functionality, how much different takes on the user experience can make a different experience for the user. How it just feels different. Like, "Oh yeah, it's basically doing the same thing, but it just feels better for whatever. My mentality or our business." Fill in the blank there, but I thought about that many times. Honeybadger versus competitors. It's like, "Yeah, they're doing basically the same thing, but we do have differences in how we approach the UI and different use patterns that we think are more emphasized by our UI versus the others." And sometimes it's just a matter of personal preference. It's like, "Oh, this just feels better to me." One night I tried Python before I tried Ruby, and Python is like, "Oh, that's interesting," but then Ruby really clicked my brain. It's like, "Oh, it just feels better." And I'm sure other people have the opposite experience, but I don't know. It's weird to me and fun to think about the human part of these products. Josh:Yeah. And it's surprising, the strong opinions that people pick up just based on those experience things when they're basically the same, if they're doing the same thing. Some people, they either love it or hate it based on that.Starr:Yeah, that's true. Maybe it all goes back to whatever business apps you used in childhood. It's just whatever your mom made you for lunch, you're always going to love that.Josh:Yeah. It's like a nurture thing, nature versus nurture. You were exposed to these apps when you were young, and so it's just what you're drawn to.Starr:Yeah. I remember putting my little friend's contact details into Lotus Notes.Josh:Right. I had to program Lotus Notes.Ben:I got my first dev job because I knew Lotus Notes.Starr:Oh, nice.Josh:Lotus Notes was an important precedent at the time, I think.Starr:Yeah.Ben:Yeah. Yeah. It was the bomb. You could do some pretty serious stuff.Starr:Yeah. I kept having these jobs that weren't technically dev jobs, but ended up being dev jobs just because I knew how to write V basic macros for Excel. I'm sure a lot of people had that experience.Josh:The thing I remember doing in Lotus Notes was setting it up to ingest email from the outside world into whatever, the system. And thinking about it now, that project I've done over and over and over since then.Starr:It's Basecamp.Josh:And I'm still doing that project.Starr:It's Basecamp all over again. Oh no.Ben:If only there was a service that took in emails for you, and then you could just bring them into your app data.Josh:Yeah. I bet in 20 years, we'll be writing programs to accept email.Ben:Process emails, yeah.Josh:Yeah.Starr:Yeah. When is this stuff going away? Technology changes all the time. When is email going away? They've been killing it for years. It's like fricking Rasputin. When is it going away?Ben:It's the cockroach of protocols.Starr:There you go.Josh:After the singularity, they'll still have to have a way to import it directly into your consciousness, and yeah, I don't know.Starr:Yeah. I hope the spam filtering is really good then.Starr:All right, well it was great talking with y'all.Ben:Likewise.Starr:Yeah. So this has been FounderQuest. Go to the Apple podcast and review us if you want. If you're interested in writing for us, we are always looking for fresh, new talent. Young authors looking to make their mark on the world of technical blog posts for SAS companies. And yeah, just go to our blog and look for the write for us page. I don't currently have any openings, but who knows? People flake out. So if you're interested in writing these reports for us too, get in touch. These quarterly intelligence briefings, if you want to be an agent for our intelligence service. All right, so I'll see y'all later.

PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) was an educational computer system that began at the University of Illinois Champaign Urbana in 1960 and ran into the 2010s in various flavors.  Wait, that's an oversimplification. PLATO seemed to develop on an island in the corn fields of Champaign Illinois, and sometimes precedes, sometimes symbolizes, and sometimes fast-follows what was happening in computing around the world in those decades. To put this in perspective - PLATO began on ILLIAC in 1960 - a large classic vacuum tube mainframe. Short for the Illinois Automatic Computer, ILLIAC was built in 1952, around 7 years after ENIAC was first put into production. As with many early mainframe projects PLATO 1 began in response to a military need. We were looking for new ways to educate the masses of veterans using the GI Bill. We had to stretch the reach of college campuses beyond their existing infrastructures. Computerized testing started with mechanical computing, got digitized with the introduction of Scantron by IBM in 1935, and a number of researchers were looking to improve the consistency of education and bring in new technology to help with quality teaching at scale. The post-World War II boom did this for industry as well. Problem is, following the launch of Sputnik by the USSR in 1957, many felt the US began lagging behind in education. So grant money to explore solutions flowed and CERL was able to capitalize on grants from the US Army, Navy, and Air Force. By 1959, physicists at Illinois began thinking of using that big ILLIAC machine they had access to. Daniel Alpert recruited Don Bitzer to run a project, after false starts with educators around the campus. Bitzer shipped the first instance of PLATO 1 in 1960. They used a television to show images, stored images in Raytheon tubes, and a make-shift keyboard designed for PLATO so users could provide input in interactive menus and navigate. They experimented with slide projectors when they realized the tubes weren't all that reliable and figured out how to do rudimentary time sharing, expanding to a second concurrent terminal with the release of PLATO II in 1961. Bitzer was a classic Midwestern tinkerer. He solicited help from local clubs, faculty, high school students, and wherever he could cut a corner to build more cool stuff, he was happy to move money and resources to other important parts of the system. This was the age of hackers and they hacked away. He inspired but also allowed people to follow their own passions. Innovation must be decentralized to succeed. They created an organization to support PLATO in 1966 - as part of the Graduate College. CERL stands for the Computer-Based Education Research Laboratory (CERL). Based on early successes, they got more and more funding at CERL. Now that we were beyond a 1:1 ratio of users to computers and officially into Time Sharing - it was time for Plato III. There were a number of enhancements in PLATO III. For starters, the system was moved to a CDC 1604 that CEO of Control Data William Norris donated to the cause - and expanded to allow for 20 terminals. But it was complicated to create new content and the team realized that content would be what drove adoption. This was true with applications during the personal computer revolution and then apps in the era of the App Store as well. One of many lessons learned first on PLATO.  Content was in the form of applications that they referred to as lessons. It was a teaching environment, after all. They emulated the ILLIAC for existing content but needed more. People were compiling applications in a complicated language. Professors had day jobs and needed a simpler way to build content. So Paul Tenczar on the team came up with a language specifically tailored to creating lessons. Similar in some ways to BASIC, it was called TUTOR.  Tenczar released the manual for TUTOR in 1969 and with an easier way of getting content out, there was an explosion in new lessons, and new features and ideas would flourish. We would see simulations, games, and courseware that would lead to a revolution in ideas. In a revolutionary time. The number of hours logged by students and course authors steadily increased. The team became ever more ambitious. And they met that ambition with lots of impressive achievements. Now that they were comfortable with the CDC 1604 they new that the new content needed more firepower. CERL negotiated a contract with Control Data Corporation (CDC) in 1970 to provide equipment and financial support for PLATO. Here they ended up with a CDC Cyber 6400 mainframe, which became the foundation of the next iteration of PLATO, PLATO IV. PLATO IV  was a huge leap forward on many levels. They had TUTOR but with more resources could produce even more interactive content and capabilities. The terminals were expensive and not so scalable. So in preparation for potentially thousands of terminals in PLATO IV they decided to develop their own.  This might seem a bit space age for the early 1970s, but what they developed was a touch flat panel plasma display. It was 512x512 and rendered 60 lines per second at 1260 baud. The plasma had memory in it, which was made possible by the fact that they weren't converting digital signals to analog, as is done on CRTs. Instead, it was a fully digital experience. The flat panel used infrared to see where a user was touching, allowing users some of their first exposure to touch screens. This was a grid of 16 by 16 rather than 512 but that was more than enough to take them over the next decade. The system could render basic bitmaps but some lessons needed more rich, what we might call today, multimedia. The Raytheon tubes used in previous systems proved to be more of a CRT technology but also had plenty of drawbacks. So for newer machines they also included a microfiche machine that produced images onto the back of the screen.  The terminals were a leap forward. There were other programs going on at about the same time during the innovative bursts of PLATO, like the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, or DTSS, project that gave us BASIC instead of TUTOR. Some of these systems also had rudimentary forms of forums, such as EIES and the emerging BBS Usenet culture that began in 1973. But PLATO represented a unique look into the splintered networks of the Time Sharing age. Combined with the innovative lessons and newfound collaborative capabilities the PLATO team was about to bring about something special. Or lots of somethings that culminated in more. One of those was Notes. Talkomatic was created by Doug Brown and David R. Woolley in 1973. Tenczar asked the 17-year old Woolley to write a tool that would allow users to report bugs with the system. There was a notes file that people could just delete. So they added the ability for a user to automatically get tagged in another file when updating and store notes. He expanded it to allow for 63 responses per note and when opened, it showed the most recent notes. People came up with other features and so a menu was driven, providing access to System Announcements, Help Notes, and General Notes.  But the notes were just the start. In 1973, seeing the need for even more ways to communicate with other people using the system, Doug Brown wrote a prototype for Talkomatic. Talkomatic was a chat program that showed when people were typing. Woolley helped Brown and they added channels with up to five people per channel. Others could watch the chat as well. It would be expanded and officially supported as a tool called Term-Talk. That was entered by using the TERM key on a console, which allowed for a conversation between two people. You could TERM, or chat a person, and then they could respond or mark themselves as busy.  Because the people writing this stuff were also the ones supporting users, they added another feature, the ability to monitor another user, or view their screen. And so programmers, or consultants, could respond to help requests and help get even more lessons going. And some at PLATO were using ARPANET, so it was only a matter of time before word of Ray Tomlinson's work on electronic mail leaked over, leading to the 1974 addition of personal notes, a way to send private mail engineered by Kim Mast. As PLATO grew, the amount of content exploded. They added categories to Notes in 1975 which led to Group Notes in 1976, and comments and linked notes and the ability to control access. But one of the most important innovations PLATO will be remembered for is games. Anyone that has played an educational game will note that school lessons and games aren't always all that different. Since Rick Blomme had ported Spacewar! to PLATO in 1969 and added a two-player option, multi-player games had been on the rise. They made leader boards for games like Dogfight so players could get early forms of game rankings. Games like airtight and airace and Galactic Attack would follow those. MUDs were another form of games that came to PLATO. Collosal Cave Adventure had come in 1975 for the PDP, so again these things were happening in a vacuum but where there were influences and where innovations were deterministic and found in isolation is hard to say. But the crawlers exploded on PLATO. We got Moria, Oubliette by Jim Schwaiger, Pedit5, crypt, dungeon, avatar, and drygulch. We saw the rise of intense storytelling, different game mechanics that were mostly inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, As PLATO terminals found their way in high schools and other universities, the amount of games and amount of time spent on those games exploded, with estimates of 20% of time on PLATO being spent playing games.  PLATO IV would grow to support thousands of terminals around the world in the 1970s. It was a utility. Schools (and even some parents) leased lines back to Champagne Urbana and many in computing thought that these timesharing systems would become the basis for a utility model in computing, similar to the cloud model we have today. But we had to go into the era of the microcomputer to boomerang back to timesharing first.  That microcomputer revolution would catch many, who didn't see the correlation between Moore's Law and the growing number of factories and standardization that would lead to microcomputers, off guard. Control Data had bet big on the mainframe market - and PLATO. CDC would sell mainframes to other schools to host their own PLATO instance. This is where it went from a timesharing system to a network of computers that did timesharing. Like a star topology.  Control Data looked to PLATO as one form of what the future of the company would be. Here, he saw this mainframe with thousands of connections as a way to lease time on the computers. CDC took PLATO to market as CDC Plato. Here, schools and companies alike could benefit from distance education. And for awhile it seemed to be working. Financial companies and airlines bought systems and the commercialization was on the rise, with over a hundred PLATO systems in use as we made our way to the middle of the 1980s. Even government agencies like the Depart of Defense used them for training. But this just happened to coincide with the advent of the microcomputer. CDC made their own terminals that were often built with the same components that would be found in microcomputers but failed to capitalize on that market. Corporations didn't embrace the collaboration features and often had these turned off. Social computing would move to bulletin boards And CDC would release versions of PLATO as micro-PLATO for the TRS-80, Texas Instruments TI-99, and even Atari computers. But the bureaucracy at CDC had slowed things down to the point that they couldn't capitalize on the rapidly evolving PC industry. And prices were too high in a time when home computers were just moving from a hobbyist market to the mainstream.  The University of Illinois spun PLATO out into its own organization called University Communications, Inc (or UCI for short) and closed CERL in 1994. That was the same year Marc Andreessen co-founded Mosaic Communications Corporation, makers of Netscape -successor to NCSA Mosaic. Because NCSA, or The National Center for Supercomputing Applications, had also benefited from National Science Foundation grants when it was started in 1982. And all those students who flocked to the University of Illinois because of programs like PLATO had brought with them more expertise. UCI continued PLATO as NovaNet, which was acquired by National Computer Systems and then Pearson corporation, finally getting shut down in 2015 - 55 years after those original days on ILLIAC. It evolved from the vacuum tube-driven mainframe in a research institute with one terminal to two terminals, to a transistorized mainframe with hundreds and then over a thousand terminals connected from research and educational institutions around the world. It represented new ideas in programming and programming languages and inspired generations of innovations.  That aftermath includes: The ideas. PLATO developers met with people from Xerox PARC starting in the 70s and inspired some of the work done at Xerox. Yes, they seemed isolated at times but they were far from it. They also cross-pollinated ideas to Control Data. One way they did this was by trading some commercialization rights for more mainframe hardware.  One of the easiest connections to draw from PLATO to the modern era is how the notes files evolved. Ray Ozzie graduated from Illinois in 1979 and went to work for Data General and then Software Arts, makers of VisiCalc. The corporate world had nothing like the culture that had evolved out of the notes files in PLATO Notes. Today we take collaboration tools for granted but when Ozzie was recruited by Lotus, the makers of 1-2-3, he joined only if they agreed to him funding a project to take that collaborative spirit that still seemed stuck in the splintered PLATO network. The Internet and networked computing in companies was growing, and he knew he could improve on the notes files in a way that companies could take use of it. He started Iris Associates in 1984 and shipped a tool in 1989. That would evolve into what is would be called Lotus Notes when the company was acquired by Lotus in 1994 and then when Lotus was acquired by IBM, would evolve into Domino - surviving to today as HCL Domino. Ozzie would go on to become a CTO and then the Chief Software Architect at Microsoft, helping spearhead the Microsoft Azure project. Collaboration. Those notes files were also some of the earliest newsgroups. But they went further. Talkomatic introduced real time text chats. The very concept of a digital community and its norms and boundaries were being tested and challenges we still face like discrimination even manifesting themselves then. But it was inspiring and between stints at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie founded Talko in 2012 based on what he learned in the 70s, working with Talkomatic. That company was acquired by Microsoft and some of the features ported into Skype.  Another way Microsoft benefited from the work done on PLATO was with Microsoft Flight Simulator. That was originally written by Bruce Artwick after leaving the university based on the flight games he'd played on PLATO.  Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol was cloned from Avatar Silas Warner was connected to PLATO from terminals at the University of Indiana. During and after school, he wrote software for companies but wrote Robot War for PLATO and then co-founded Muse Software where he wrote Escape!, a precursor for lots of other maze runners, and then Castle Wolfenstein. The name would get bought for $5,000 after his company went bankrupt and one of the early block-buster first-person shooters when released as Wolfenstein 3D. Then John Carmack and John Romero created Doom. But Warner would go on to work with some of the best in gaming, including Sid Meier.   Paul Alfille built the game Freecell for PLATO and Control Data released it for all PLATO systems. Jim Horne played it from the PLATO terminals at the University of Alberta and eventually released it for DOS in 1988. Horn went to work for Microsoft who included it in the Microsoft Entertainment Pack, making it one of the most popular software titles played on early versions of Windows. He got 10 shares of Microsoft stock in return and it's still part of Windows 10 using the Microsoft Solitaire Collection.. Robert wood head and Andrew Greenberg got onto PLATO from their terminals at Cornell University where they were able to play games like Oubliette and Emprie. They would write a game called Wizardry that took some of the best that the dungeon crawl multi-players had to offer and bring them into a single player computer then console game. I spent countless hours playing Wizardry on the Nintendo NES and have played many of the spin-offs, which came as late as 2014. Not only did the game inspire generations of developers to write dungeon games, but some of the mechanics inspired features in the Ultima series, Dragon Quest, Might and Magic, The Bard's Tale, Dragon Warrior and countless Manga. Greenberg would go on to help with Q-Bert and other games before going on to work with the IEEE. Woodhead would go on to work on other games like Star Maze. I met Woodhead shortly after he wrote Virex, an early anti-virus program for the Mac that would later become McAfee VirusScan for the Mac. Paul Tenczar was in charge of the software developers for PLATO. After that he founded Computer Teaching Corporation and introduced EnCORE, which was changed to Tencore. They grew to 56 employees by 1990 and ran until 2000. He returned to the University of Illinois to put RFID tags on bees, contributing to computing for nearly 5 decades and counting.  Michael Allen used PLATO at Ohio State University before looking to create a new language. He was hired at CDC where he became a director in charge of Research and Development for education systems There, he developed the ideas for a new computer language authoring system, which became Authorware, one of the most popular authoring packages for the Mac. That would merge with Macro-Mind to become Macromedia, where bits and pieces got put into Dreamweaver and Shockwave as they released those. After Adobe acquired Macromedia, he would write a number of books and create even more e-learning software authoring tools.    So PLATO gave us multi-player games, new programming languages, instant messaging, online and multiple choice testing, collaboration forums, message boards, multiple person chat rooms, early rudimentary remote screen sharing, their own brand of plasma display and all the research behind printing circuits on glass for that, and early research into touch sensitive displays. And as we've shown in just a few of the many people that contributed to computing after, they helped inspire an early generation of programmers and innovators.  If you like this episode I strongly suggest checking out The Friendly Orange Glow from Brian Dear. It's a lovely work with just the right mix of dry history and flourishes of prose. A short history like this can't hold a candle to a detailed anthology like Dear's book.  Another well researched telling of the story can be found in a couple of chapters of A People's History Of Computing In The United States, from Joy Rankin. She does a great job drawing a parallel (and sometimes direct line from) the Dartmouth Time Sharing System and others as early networks. And yes, terminals dialing into a mainframe and using resources over telephone and leased lines was certainly a form of bridging infrastructures and seemed like a network at the time. But no mainframe could have scaled to the ability to become a utility in the sense that all of humanity could access what was hosted on it.  Instead, the ARPANET was put online and growing from 1969 to 1990 and working out the hard scientific and engineering principals behind networking protocols gave us TCP/IP. In her book, Rankin makes great points about the BASIC and TUTOR applications helping shape more of our modern world in how they inspired the future of how we used personal devices once connected to a network. The scientists behind ARPANET, then NSFnet and the Internet, did the work to connect us. You see, those dial-up connections were expensive over long distances. By 1974 there were 47 computers connected to the ARPANET and by 1983 we had TCP/IPv4.And much like Bitzer allowing games, they didn't seem to care too much how people would use the technology but wanted to build the foundation - a playground for whatever people wanted to build on top of it. So the administrative and programming team at CERL deserve a lot of credit. The people who wrote the system, the generations who built features and code only to see it become obsolete came and went - but the compounding impact of their contributions can be felt across the technology landscape today. Some of that is people rediscovering work done at CERL, some is directly inspired, and some has been lost only to probably be rediscovered in the future.  One thing is for certain, their contributions to e-learning are unparalleled with any other system out there. And their technical contributions, both in the form of those patented and those that were either unpatentable or where they didn't think of patenting, are immense.  Bitzer and the first high schoolers and then graduate students across the world helped to shape the digital world we live in today. More from an almost sociological aspect than technical. And the deep thought applied to the system lives on today in so many aspects of our modern world. Sometimes that's a straight line and others it's dotted or curved. Looking around, most universities have licensing offices now, to capitalize on the research done. Check out a university near you and see what they have available for license. You might be surprised. As I'm sure many in Champagne were after all those years. Just because CDC couldn't capitalize on some great research doesn't mean we can't. 

Coming up in this week's episode: Could COMB be the largest data breach ever? WordPress responsive menu plugin opens backdoor for data breaches, Competition and Markets Authority sees an increase in data breaches, Email breaches can be expensive, UK PNC Home Office data breach update, Experian denies data breach at Serasa, Brazil, Calendar booking app fined for GDPR breaches, GDPR Article 49 possible solution to Schrems II, PSD2 and GDPR interaction, University College Dublin fined 70,000 euros for GDPR breaches, Irish DPC criticised for use of outdated Lotus Notes, EU Privacy Directive steps forward towards Regulation

Announcer 0:00Welcome to the CXR channel, our premier podcast for talent acquisition and talent management. Listen in as the CXR community discusses a wide range of topics focused on attracting, engaging and retaining the best talent. We're glad you're here. Gerry Crispin 0:20So we're now recording, and I'm with Tara Amaral, from Marshall McLennan companies. And Tara and I go back, actually to just about the beginning of CareerXroads. Do you remember when we first we first got involved? Tara Amaral, Marshall McLennan 0:39I think it was before y2k Gerry Crispin 0:44I think it was two i think i think we met way back when I think there was some something you were doing with was a chase, I think you were were you at chase in that time Tara Amaral, Marshall McLennan 0:56I was at Chase, we were building our first internet site. And you and I are on a Sherm panel on workforce planning, Gerry Crispin 1:06oh, my God, boy, back to a long, long time ago, in the 1990s. And that was really before we pivoted, we were still doing consulting work. And I know Mark and I were primarily talking to people about their websites. And so we would, companies would have us come in, and we would have pretended that we were candidates. And so we would we would apply to jobs in those companies, and then compare them to similar companies, and talk to them about how screwed up their website was that sort of thing. Tara Amaral, Marshall McLennan 1:47And yeah, Gerry, I don't know if you remember, but two things. This is when we had to convince the firm at the time that everybody needed an email address. So that's how old I am. And I want to say it was like, Tony Bada Bing was who you introduced yourself as Gerry Crispin 2:05Yes. Yes. We then met Yes, we did mystery shopping for the hundred best companies in America to work for. And we did it under assumed names. And our first one was, what was it? I can't remember the guys name, but it was like that Bada Bing. And, and, and, and he got into the wall street journal. And we were accused by some president of the Association of Italian families of some kind of bias. And, you know, so we, we got it a little bit of trouble from that. And so after that, it was all cartoon characters, like Santa Claus, you know. So, so yeah, that was that was a lot of fun. And then I remember, when we pivoted, and we started the colloquium, you were one of the first members of the colloquium. And you were, you were with Chase, and you were working on either their first or their very first real website. Tara Amaral, Marshall McLennan 3:10Yeah, it was it was in concert with being building website and an internal job board, which they still actually called job Connect today. I heard the other day. And it was when we were replatformming from small Lotus Notes databases to the first enterprise wide applicant tracking system. And at the time, we, they were with delay. Oh, I don't know who they're with now. Gerry Crispin 3:35Yeah, that was, that was certainly a long time ago. And I remember, I remember how excited you were when you finally got this, this website together. And we're very proudly sharing that in in the cloak that people are going, oh, wow, look at that. I suspect that today, we probably look at it we go, Oh, my God, how primitive. But yeah, it was very cool. Tara Amaral, Marshall McLennan 4:01It was very cool. And I can't take credit for there's a young guy Ben Lavalick I think his name was he actually spearheaded it. And it was it was quite revolutionary for the time. But again, a lot of it had to do with, will people come? You know, getting rid of paper applications, a lot of things that were kind of tried and true. And, and, you know, they're still using a lot of that we're all using a lot of those same principles today. So it was a big shift for the industry. Gerry Crispin 4:30I think it was interesting. I think the one thing that reminds me I mean,

Our first ‘multi-part pod’! Xytech’s Gregg Sandheinrich and Greg Dolan talk a long nostalgic stroll through software’s evolution from 80’s, 90’s, and 2000’s and how it impacted the industry (and their lives). In today’s episode: why it’s easy to be nostalgic right now (8:40), the first PC’s (15:44), early programming languages (19:20), building biz systems in the 90’s (24:19), the ‘Y2k Bug’ (29:03), Lotus Notes & early email apps (36:07), pagers and cell phones (43:46), and early post-prod software (50:28). Stay tuned for Part 2 coming soon!

Daniel Porcaro has spent the past 33 years growing and developing four companies. Growing companies is his passion. Dan grew all the companies mostly through organic growth with very few acquisitions. He is passionate about long-term revenue and profit growth through the development and execution of a strategic plan and the development of a strong culture. Currently, Dan is the Managing Partner of Porcaro Stolarek Mete Partners LLC (known as PSM Partners). Founded in January of 2015, PSM offers IT consulting and talent acquisition services to small and mid-sized firms in the Chicago area. As of January 2020, PSM employed 73 consultants and 300 clients. Dan started the firm with his Partners and close friends Mike Mete and Dave Stolarek to grow PSM into the firm it is today. PSM certainly would not have been nearly as successful without them. From 1998 through 2012, Dan founded and ran Project Leadership Associates (PLA). PLA was a business and technology consulting firm headquartered in Chicago. With five practice areas -network integration, managed services, software development, business intelligence, and business strategy, PLA was unique for its size. Starting with one employee, Dan grew PLA to 265 people, 50 million in revenue, and 6 offices across the country. PLA was one of the most profitable, successful firms of its type in the country. PLA also had a ten-year period where voluntary turnover was less than 2%. Additionally, Dan is proud to say that PLA never lost money in any month of its existence under his tenure. Dan sold PLA in 2012 to a private equity firm. Prior to founding PLA, Dan was a partner in Workgroup Productivity Corporation (WPC). WPC was a Lotus Notes consulting firm. Dan was asked to join WPC as an equity partner to grow the firm, nationalize its services, and find a buyer. He accomplished the growth plan over a 3- year period (growing revenues by 65%) and found a buyer for the firm. After this transaction, Dan left to start PLA. Prior to WPC, Dan was an Executive Director and Partner at Lansystems. Headquartered out of NY, Lansystems was a nationwide network integration firm with an east and west coast presence. Dan started the central region for Lansystems and quickly grew it from 2 to 60 employees while becoming the most profitable region in the country for the firm. Lansystems was sold in 1994. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-porcaro-8540391/ Website: https://www.myefbc.com/board-staff/dan-porcaro/ 4:27 - What’s more important growing up: loving support or a strong entrepreneurial role model? 4:58 - Leadership: learned or innate? 11:47 - The importance of being well-rounded as a leader 17:21 - Learning from others’ mistakes 36:08 - What makes for a solid business strategy 45:03 - How to bake sales success into a company’s culture 49:16 - What really motivates employees (spoiler: it’s not the money) 1:02:55 The difference between growing a company you plan to sell vs. one you plan to keep 1:07:53 Can you pandemic-proof a business? 1:11:44 The positives of partnership 1:13:44 How culture interacts with earnings growth 1:15:36 Incubating new businesses 1:21:11 Rob’s take-aways Connect with Gary Rabine and DDCEO: Visit the DDCEO BLOG: http://ditchdiggerceo.com/ Like DDCEO on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DitchDiggerCEO Follow DDCEO on Twitter: https://twitter.com/DitchDiggerCEO Follow DDCEO on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/DitchDiggerCEO Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh03Px5ez_xe_oE_iJMMNIg/featured?view_as=subscriber

Subscribe to airhacks.fm podcast via: spotify| iTunes| RSS An airhacks.fm conversation with Niklas Heidloff (@nheidloff) about: Changing the font color with Basic on C64, playing Frogger, serious programming with Turbo Pascal on PC 80286, developing a shooter UFO game, writing a school magazine with MS Word, Graphical User Interfaces with Turbo Pascal, studying Computer Science in Paderborn, 25 years ago everything was already developed, Thomas J. Watson: 'I think there is a world market for about five computers', collaboration technologies at the university, IBM Notes, productive development with IBM Notes Domino, working with a startup and the Lotus Workflow product, the very first Java User Interface for the Workflow tool, startup was acquired by IBM, the 60% more paycheque, Lotus Notes was one of the first NoSQL databases, CouchDB is based on Lotus Notes ideas, the out-of-the-box experience of Lotus Domino was great, also OpenShift comes with great user experience, Lotus Notes had good replication capabilities, Java is is a lightweight and clean programming language, Applets were too buggy, ProcessWare became Lotus Workflow, growing without a reason, leading the frontend team for WebSphere Workflow, the interesting Visual Age for Java IDE, IBM Alphaworks and DeveloperWorks, Jikes - the fast Java Compiler, drawing boxes is not a exciting as developing software, growing the Lotus Notes community, openntf.org, learning from Eclipse and Apache, Lotus Notes business was sold to HCL, the RedHat opensource model, moving from Lotus Notes to Cloud Architectures, joining the IBM Emerging Technologies Organization and the Developer Outreach "Cloud Native" Team, building samples and traveling to international conferences, the Java Cloud Native Starter, the one end-to-end enterprise Java Cloud Native application, Kubernetes, OpenShift, Docker, Maven, MicroProfile, Kiali, Quarkus, installation scripts, vue.js and traffic routing with istio, the overlap between MicroProfile and Istio, the article by Emily Jiang, MicroProfile, NodeJS vs. MicroProfile, the NodeJS innovation, Niklas Heidloff on twitter: @nheidloff, Niklas' blog: heidloff.net, Niklas on github: https://github.com/nheidloff

In this episode, rachel, Kendall, and Linda talk about: * Not having a career plan at 17, starting with community college * The value of getting an MBA, broadening of perspective * Looking for more 'worthy' occupations as one's career winds up * Stints at Oscar Meyer and Jolly Rancher, bad jokes about each :) * Moving toward technology via technical indexing and writing gigs * Stepping up to own a Lotus Notes install when the IT director quit * Working at Home Depot during the first dot-com bust * Thinking she was not technical enough to be a CIO * A day in the life of the CIO at a large corporation * How many people want to feel their work drives something worthwhile * The tendency of leaders to overlook reward vs discipline * Decompression via travel and time off You can find Linda on LinkedIn as lindalannen :) Special thanks to Mel Stanley for our theme music

#3 – Mohamed Faizal – Singapore Airlines KrisPay and Cloud Custodian program window.playerConfiguration = { "episode": { "media": { "m4a": "https://csapodcast.azureedge.net/episodes/ep3MohammadFaizal.m4a" }, "title": "#3 – Mohamed Faizal – Singapore Airlines KrisPay and Cloud Custodian program", "description": "In this episode we talk to Mohamed Faizal, who was one of the first 100 MVPs of Azure who is currently working as a Cloud Solution Architect in Singapore. In this episode we talk about interesting projects like KrisPay for Singapore Airlines using blockchain as a service to the Cloud custodian program", "url": "/2019/10/14/ep3/", "coverUrl": "" } } In this episode we talk to Mohamed Faizal, who was one of the first 100 MVPs of Azure who is currently working as a Cloud Solution Architect in Singapore. In this episode we talk about interesting projects like KrisPay for Singapore Airlines using blockchain as a service to the Cloud custodian program Show notes 01:37 – Faizal talks about his background on how he started off as a DOS Developer, to Lotus Notes migration to PaaS SQL in Azure and being one of the first 100 Azure MVPs in 2011 06:47 – Faizal talks about the implementation of Loyalty Program (KrisPay) using Blockchain as a Service for Singapore Airlines. 11:00 – Faizal talks about Cloud Adoption Framework and how Cloud Adoption Framework helps with the compliance requirements for customers. 12:27 – How CAF is using cloud agnostic Infrastructure as a Code implementation using Terraform. 15:07 – We discuss the hub and spoke model for both networking as well as an overall subscription purpose. 20:50 – We discuss, how the detect and auto – remediation of subscription policies. 22:07 – Faizal talks about the open source solution – Cloud Custodian and how he leveraged this to solve the business problem. 26:00 – Faizal talks about the waste water management solution. He talks about they used 200000 IoT sensors to monitor water quality, collect data using stream analytics, and leverage Azure ML to predict the chemical usage to treatment. 29:12 – Faizal talks about his advice for new Azure Architects. Understanding customer needs and problem statement first before jumping to technical solutions is great advice. 31:08 – Advice to keep up with the latest updates on Azure – Run user groups. Commit to the user group which makes learning mandatory. Follow Azure Updates, and Product Management team on twitter, listening to podcasts like Azure Friday, Kubernetes podcast by google, AWS podcast. Faizal’s Linkedin in account – https://www.linkedin.com/in/kmdfaizal/ Faizal’s Twitter account – @kmdfaizal CAF using Terraform on github – https://github.com/aztfmod/blueprints Singapore airlines story – https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/singapore-airlines-travel-transportation-azure Azure Friday podcast – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/resources/videos/azure-friday/ Kubernetes podcast – https://kubernetespodcast.com/ AWS podcast – Azure Product Management Team twitter handle – https://twitter.com/AzureApp https://twitter.com/AzureDevOps https://twitter.com/jonfancey . Show Notes Available at https://azuremonk.com/2019/10/14/ep3/.

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because understanding the past prepares us for the innovations of the future! Todays episode is on former Social Networking pioneer, Friendster. Today when you go to friendster.com you get a page that the social network is taking a break. The post was put up in 2018. How long did Rip Van Winkle Sleep? But what led to the rise of the first big social network and well, what happened? The story begins in 1973. Talkomatic was a chat room and was a hit in the PLATO or Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations community at the University of Illinois, an educational learning system that had been running since 1960. Dave Woolley and Douglas Brows at the University of Illinois brought chat and then the staff built TERM-Talk the same year, adding screen sharing and PLATO Notes would be added where you could add notes to your profile. This was the inspiration for the name of Lotus Notes. Then in the 80s came Bulletin Board Systems, 84 brought FidoNet, 88 brought IRC, 96 brought ICQ, and in 96 we got Bolt.com, the first social networking and video website with SixDegrees coming in 1997 as the first real social media website. AOL Instant Messenger showed up the same year and AOL bought ICQ in 99. It was pretty sweet that I didn't have to remember all those ICQ numbers any more! 1999 - Yahoo! And Microsoft got in the game launching tools called Messenger at about the same time and LiveJournal came along, as well as Habbo, a social networking site for games. By 2001 Six Degrees shut down and Messenger was shipped with XP. But 2002. That was the year the Euro hit the street. Before England dissed it. That was the year Israeli and Palestinian conflicts escalated. Actually, that's a lot of years, regrettably. I remember scandals at Enron and Worldcom well that year, ultimate resulting in Sarbanes Oxley to counter the more than 5 trillion dollars in corporate scandals that sent the economy into a tailspin. My Georgia Bulldogs football team beat Arkansas to win the SEC title and then beat Florida State in the Sugar Bowl. Nelly released Hot In Here and Eminem released Lose Yourself and Without Me. If film, Harry Potter was searching for the Chamber of Secrets and Frodo was on a great trek to the Two Towers. Eminem was in the theaters as well with 8 Mile. And Friendster was launched by Jonathan Abrams in Mountain View California. They wanted to get people making new friends and meeting in person. It was an immediate hit and people flocked to the site. They grew to three million users in just a few months, catching the attention of investors. As a young consultant, I loved keeping track of my friends who I never got to see in person using Friendster. Napster was popular at the time and the name Friendster came from a mashup of friends and Napster. With this early success, Friendster took $12 million dollars in funding from VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark Capital the next year. That was the year a Harvard student named Mark Zuckerburg launched FaceMash with his roommate Eduardo Saverin for Harvard students in a kinda' “Hot or Not” game. They would later buy Instagram as a form of euphoric recall, looking back on those days. Google has long wanted a social media footprint and tried to buy Friendster in 2003, but when rejected launched Orkut in 2004 - which just ran in Brazil, tried Google Friend Connect in 2008, which lasted until 2012, Google Buzz, which launched in 2010 and only lasted a year, Google Wave, which launched in 2009 and also only lasted a year, and of course, Google + which ran from 2011 to 2019. Google is back at it again with a new social network called Shoelace out of their Area 120 incubator. The $30 million dollars in Google stock would be worth a billion dollars today. MySpace was also launched in 2003 by Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, growing to have more traffic than Google over time. But Facebook launched in 2004 and after having problems keeping the servers up and running, Friendster's board replaced Abrams as CEO and moved him to chairmen of the board. He was replaced by Scott Sassa. And then in 2005 Sassa was replaced by Taek Kwn and then he was replaced by Kent Lindstrom who was replaced by Richard Kimber. Such rapid churn in the top spot means problems. A rudderless ship. In 2006 they added widgets to keep up with MySpace. They didn't. They also opened up a developer program and opened up APIs. They still had 52 million unique visitors worldwide in June 2008. But by then, MySpace had grown to 7 times their size. MOL Global, an online payments processor from Malaysia bought the company in 2009 and relaunched the site. All user data was erased and Friendster provided an export tool to move data to other popular sites at the time, such as Flickr. In 2009 Friendster had 3 Million unique visitors per day. They relaunched But that dropped to less than a quarter million by the end of 2010. People abandoned the network. What happened? Facebook eclipsed the Friendster traffic in 2009. Friendster became something more used in Asia than the US. Really, though, I remember early technical problems. I remember not being able to log in, so moving over to MySpace. I remember slow loading times. And I remember more and more people spending time on MySpace, customizing their MySpace page. Facebook did something different. Sure, you couldn't customize the page, but the simple layout loaded fast and was always online. This reminds me of the scene in the show Silicon Valley, when they have to grab the fire extinguisher because they set the house on fire from having too much traffic! In 2010, Facebook acquired Friendster's portfolio of social networking patents for $40 million dollars. In 2011, Newscorp sold MySpace for $35 million dollars after it had been valued at it peak in 2008. After continuing its decline, Friendster was sold to a social gaming site in 2015, trying to capitalize on the success that Facebook had doing online gaming. But after an immediate burst of users, it too was not successful. In 2018 the site finally closed its doors. Today Friendster is the 651,465th ranked site in the world. There are a few thing to think about when you look at the Friendster story: 1. The Internet would not be what it is today without sites like Friendster to help people want to be on it. 2. The first company on a new thing isn't always the one that really breaks through 3. You have to, and I mean, have to keep your servers up. This is a critical aspect of maintaining you're momentum. I was involved with one of the first 5 facebook apps. And we had no idea 2 million people would use that app in the weekend it was launched. We moved mountains to get more servers and clusters brought online and refactored sql queries on the fly, working over 70 hours in a weekend. And within a week we hit 10 million users. That app paid for dozens of other projects and was online for years. 4. When investors move in, the founder usually gets fired at the first sign of trouble. Many organizations simply can't find their equilibrium after that and flounder. 5. Last but not least: Don't refactor every year, but if you can't keep your servers up, you might just have too much technical debt. I'm sure everyone involved with Friendster wishes they could go back and do many things differently. But hindsight is always 20/20. They played their part in the advent of the Internet. Without early pioneers like Friendster we wouldn't be where we are at today. As Heinlein said, “yet another crew of Rip Van Winkle's” But Buck Rogers eventually did actually wake back up, and maybe Friendster will as well. Thank you for tuning into another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We're lucky to have you. Have a great day!

An airhacks.fm conversation with Matthias Reining (@MatthiasReining) about: Power Basic is not QBasic and was comparable with Turbo Pascal, game high score manipulation as programming motivation, C 64 was the first computer encounter, writing a "Jump and Run" game in Power Basic, Power Basic IDE as Christmas present, the menu bar fascination, using GW-Basic at high school, call by value vs. call by reference in Power Basic and Turbo Pascal, the Comal programming language, learning C, the University of Wuerzburg, learning Visual C++ and object oriented programming at university, C over C++, learning Java during internship at Nobiscum, writing a Java frontend with AWT for CVS as proof of concept, renaming com.sun.swing to javax.swing, switching to Lotus Notes as consultant, improving Lotus Notes user interface with Java, accessing Lotus Notes with JDBC, CouchDB the Lotus Notes "successor" created by Damien Katz - a former Lotus Notes developer, Lotus Notes the NoSQL database before the popularity of NoSQL, Transact-SQL, PL/SQL and back to Java, JSPs, Servlets, Tomcat and Apache Struts, from Java back to Pearl, the strategy of spending as much time as possible in a single project, writing fronted code with "this and that" or ES 5-the ancient JavaScript, the Java EE 5 fascination, xdoclet code generation for early EJB versions was slow, annotation-based programming with Java EE 5 improved the productivity, building a freelancer portal with Java EE 5 as proof of concept, a Java EE workshop in 2011, learning politics in Java insurance projects with "C-structs" as design pattern, enjoying PowerPoint time, founding a startup with Java EE 8 / Jakarta EE 8 and MicroProfile as technology choice, WildFly and Keycloak are the perfect technologies for a startup, focus on the business and not the technology, considering OpenLiberty and Quarkus as migration target caused by slow support of MicroProfile APIs by WildFly, saving memory with Quarkus, making WARs thinner by moving to MicroProfile JWT from proprietary Keycloak libraries, building the heart of an insurance company - an insurance platform, cloud-ready and private clouds are a common deployment model, migration from COBOL systems to tech11 insurance platform, team of 8 people is incredibly productive, it is hard to find good developers in Germany, hiring pragmatic developers from Afrika with the "ThinWAR" mindset, the "airhacks stack", polyglot programming is chaos, using Java EE 8 as the baseline, all other dependencies require permission, an average tech11 ThinWAR is a few hundreds kB, code snippets from 2005 gave Java EE a bad name, implement whatever you can today and care about potential problems tomorrow, the time to first commit has to be as low as possible, projects and products require different approaches, the "getting things done" developer, long-term maintenance is key to product success, every company has the right technology at certain time, Java EE is not the only "right" technology, projects are also barely dependent on Java EE, tech11 does not sell technology, tech11 sells solutions, using plain WebStandards with WebComponents, ES 6 in the frontend, Custom Elements looks like ReactJS, lit-html is one of the few dependencies in frontend, tech11 started with hyperHTML, then migrated to lit-html, open-wc comes with lots of examples with LitElement what is not necessary, using Parcel for packaging without any transpiling, rollup.js is great for packaging, Jenkins transpiles for older browsers, on developer machines not even npm is necessary, airhacks.io workshop about WebComponents: webcomponents.training, tech11 uses a BPM engine to manage processes, tarifs claims, policies are the names of microservices (ThinWARs), the episode #36 with Markus Kett mentions the JCon keynote, Matthias Reining on twitter: @MatthiasReiningand his startup: https://tech11.com

#1 – Stanislav Novoseletskiy -modernizing and transforming one of the largest transportation systems in the world window.playerConfiguration = { "episode": { "media": { "m4a": "https://csapodcast.azureedge.net/episodes/1StanislavNovoseletsky.m4a" }, "title": "#1 – Stanislav Novoseletskiy -modernizing and transforming one of the largest transportation systems in the world", "description": "In this episode we go through an insightful conversation with Stanislav (Stan) who is currently an Azure Solution Specialist working for Microsoft serving the NYC region.He talks about how he used Azure to transform some of the worlds largest transit systems IT infrastructure and reporting. He also shares very useful advice for budding new Azure architects not just from a technical perspective but also from a business and impact perspective.", "url": "/2019/06/27/ep1/", "coverUrl": "" } } In this episode we talk to Mohamed Faizal, who was one of the first 100 MVPs of Azure who is currently working as a Cloud Solution Architect in Singapore. In this episode we talk about interesting projects like KrisPay for Singapore Airlines using blockchain as a service to the Cloud custodian program Show notes 01:37 – Faizal talks about his background on how he started off as a DOS Developer, to Lotus Notes migration to PaaS SQL in Azure and being one of the first 100 Azure MVPs in 2011 06:47 – Faizal talks about the implementation of Loyalty Program (KrisPay) using Blockchain as a Service for Singapore Airlines. 11:00 – Faizal talks about Cloud Adoption Framework and how Cloud Adoption Framework helps with the compliance requirements for customers. 12:27 – How CAF is using cloud agnostic Infrastructure as a Code implementation using Terraform. 15:07 – We discuss the hub and spoke model for both networking as well as an overall subscription purpose. 20:50 – We discuss, how the detect and auto – remediation of subscription policies. 22:07 – Faizal talks about the open source solution – Cloud Custodian and how he leveraged this to solve the business problem. 26:00 – Faizal talks about the waste water management solution. He talks about they used 200000 IoT sensors to monitor water quality, collect data using stream analytics, and leverage Azure ML to predict the chemical usage to treatment. 29:12 – Faizal talks about his advice for new Azure Architects. Understanding customer needs and problem statement first before jumping to technical solutions is great advice. 31:08 – Advice to keep up with the latest updates on Azure – Run user groups. Commit to the user group which makes learning mandatory. Follow Azure Updates, and Product Management team on twitter, listening to podcasts like Azure Friday, Kubernetes podcast by google, AWS podcast. Faizal’s Linkedin in account – https://www.linkedin.com/in/kmdfaizal/ Faizal’s Twitter account – @kmdfaizal CAF using Terraform on github – https://github.com/aztfmod/blueprints Singapore airlines story – https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/singapore-airlines-travel-transportation-azure Azure Friday podcast – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/resources/videos/azure-friday/ Kubernetes podcast – https://kubernetespodcast.com/ AWS podcast – Azure Product Management Team twitter handle – https://twitter.com/AzureApp https://twitter.com/AzureDevOps https://twitter.com/jonfancey . Show Notes Available at https://azuremonk.com/2019/06/27/ep1/.

Dave and Evan meet with Alan Lepofsky of Salesforce to discuss the object of his evangelism, Quip. With almost two decades of experience in the software industry, Alan helps companies understand how to develop and/or implement collaboration solutions that help employees get work done. He prefers to focus on how organizations can improve their existing business processes by providing access to the colleagues, content and communities that can help people get their work done more effectively.After over seven years as a collaboration software analyst, Alan became the newest VP Evangelism for Business Productivity at Salesforce last February. Specifically, he is working with the Quip division to showcase the benefits of uniting content, collaboration and business objects. Quip is a digital canvas that empowers people to bring context to their conversations.Learn more about Quip, collaboration, and how nothing has changed since Lotus Notes.

In episode 2 of the Stories of Modern Work Podcast, I spoke with Mr Mitul Rana on how a large telecom provider is embarking on their Office 365 User Adoption journey. Here are some key points we discussed in the episode. InfoPath to PowerApps - Don't migrate InfoPath forms, instead use the opportunity to rebuild the business process using latest technologies. Lotus Notes to SharePoint Applications - How change management is key to move users from Lotus Notes. Adoption of PowerApps is still in infancy and has a great potential. How marketing teams can use Microsoft Flow to track Social Sentiment of the brand and campaigns. How to sell external sharing features to end users and get them on-board? Drive the user adoption by showing the business value than the focusing on the technology. Use OneDrive links to document. Stop sending document attachments. - This is killer tip. Thanks for coming on the podcast and sharing your thoughts and experiences about Modern Work. If you want to come on the podcast to share your Modern Work Story, ping me on LinkedIn @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jagkakarlapudi/ Music Source: WOWA --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/modernwork/message

EP158 - NYC Holiday Store Visits  We're in the peak of the holiday season, which means Jason is going to be visiting stores.  This year he went to NYC and visited 33 new or updated store concepts.  If you'd like to follow the tour yourself, here the Retailgeek NYC Retail Map. Some favorites this year included: Nike Dyson Allbirds Amazon 4 Star Casper Covergirl FAO Schwarz Glossier Google Hardware Macy’s (especially the B8ta shop-in-shop) Showfields Some disappointments included: Restoration Hardware Saks Apple Away Amazon News Bloomberg article had a great piece about the 1099 amazon delivery network Amazon extended delivery window Amazon new air hub in DFW WSJ article on CRAPfest Amazon Go in airports Small format Amazon Go Opening Amazon Go in UK Other News IBM sold its commerce platform (Websphere) to HCL Don't forget to like our facebook page, and if you enjoyed this episode please write us a review on itunes. Episode 158 of the Jason & Scot show was recorded on Monday, December 17th, 2018. Happy holidays everyone... talk to you in 2019! Transcript Jason: [0:25] Welcome to the Jason and Scott show this is episode 158 being recorded on Monday December 17th 2018 I'm your host Jason retailgeek Goldberg and as usual I'm here with your co-host. Scot Wingo. Scot: [0:42] Jason and welcome back Jason Scott show listeners Jason it's been like 10 days but your life has changed a whole lot since we last talked so you you had a birthday happy belated birthday. Jason: [0:55] Thank you much it's depressing the type that even bigger number into the the elliptical machine at the gym when I am frequent occasions when I use that. Scot: [1:05] WG&R on verify so go ahead and round down. Jason: [1:10] Yeah I don't want to only be cheating myself and I feel like my my I don't know if the math actually works out this way but in my mind I mean year older so it should be more impressed. Scot: [1:22] And then you have an exciting new gig or title something like SVP of digital Commerce retail payments and chief strategy officer. Jason: [1:37] I think that's exactly my title I've had to go to jumbo size business cards for the three people that still use business card. Scot: [1:44] Or hang out 3 like a like a tweet storm you have a business card storm. Jason: [1:48] 1 of 2 of 3 of I like that. Scot: [1:50] But in all seriousness you are now the chief Commerce strategy officer tell us what's this entail and the upwardly-mobile thing what's going on. Jason: [2:03] That was a lie the very least would like to think of others agree but yeah it innocence for the last six years have been working for a particular agency that was originally razorfish and then you know we merged with Sapient and became sapientrazorfish. But that agency is part of a much bigger a holding company called the pupusas group and so essentially, took a new role at the group level so you know hopefully I'll get to keep working with a lot of the. The colleagues and clients from from sapientrazorfish that I've always enjoyed but I'll have more responsibility and work opportunity to work with. A broader selection of group clients across a bigger geography and. Like most of these holding companies were a little more Silo then we should be done to best serve customers and so a big part of my job is to kind of. Pull together all the the capabilities within the group to better serve our Commerce clients and so. [3:15] That should be fun and you may know it was important that I get that promotion on my birthday because. When you have a birthday on LinkedIn you get a lot of well-intentioned well wishes. [3:34] And annoyingly LinkedIn won't actually send you emails with your mail from LinkedIn though just sending you an email each time you get something saying, go to LinkedIn to read this one sentence can the message and so basically on your birthday your email is is, put under a denial-of-service attack by LinkedIn and so that also happens when you change your your job and so I felt like, smart to do both on the same day so that like I might email would only be down for one day. Scot: [4:05] Cuz it's me you give me like a bull in a china shop in there tearing down silos and making people work together. Jason: [4:14] Hopefully it's a little more carrot than stick wouldn't be the first time I was inadvertently a little overly aggressive so I shall Endeavor to find the right balance there are a ton of of great capabilities and in groups in pupusas and it's it's, as far as I'm concerned I went from the the 32 pack of crayons to the hundred pack of crayons and so you know it's going to be fun to paint more colorful pictures. Scot: [4:47] I know it's hard to put a number on it but would you say over 80 to 90% of getting this new gig is related to the podcast should we thank listeners for their contributions. Jason: [4:59] Possibly that's slightly conservative. Scot: [5:02] We forget individual performance I think the the pr halo effect from, this kind of cited ever that we have this is probably responsible for most of your career trajectory hear the last at least 58 weeks. Jason: [5:19] I feel like that's absolutely true I feel like the listeners absolutely would have put me over the top but you alone are so influential with all the the leadership in Paris that I feel like just you putting in a good word, was was enough to drive the new promotion so thanks very much to Scott and thanks very much to all the listeners for supporting me. Scot: [5:40] I said you listen up French dude Jason needs promotion and he doesn't need one of these like. Everyday sea-level gigs he needs to be a double sea level and they came up the new tunnel ccso your CC level you like c-squared level. Jason: [5:58] Etsy I like that c-square that's how I'm that maybe it's cuz I'm more sort of exponential growth than I am linear growth I like that I like that alot. Scot: [6:08] I didn't go to the sea level meeting cuz I'm c-squared level. Jason: [6:13] Exactly I feel like the one negative ramification as we are now going to have to do a deep dive on the Peter Principle. Scot: [6:20] Well you hit the ground running and you have been in New York I've been watching your tweets my favorite is your Covergirl tweet that was a little. It's surprising and shocking to see on the cover of Covergirl so congratulations on that. Jason: [6:37] Yeah I feel like that would be more than any person needs to be thinking about but then I got in a Twitter conversation today with with some of our favorite journalist talking about the latest trends in women's fashion and now they're all super excited about seeing me where like flare denim at dinner cropped flare Denim and interrupt this year so so sorry for all the Twitter followers that had to read that. Scot: [7:07] Yeah that's going to be good with there will be pictures I will take them and post them. Jason: [7:12] But in all seriousness it is sort of a annual tradition than I have around my birthday is I pick a city that has a bunch of retail going on and I like to do a bunch of store visits around the holidays is is, people will know or might imagine. There's a lot of in addition to the sort of all the Evergreen retail there's a lot of popups that they Brands open around the holidays and if you're a retail and you're going to watch a big new flagship it wouldn't be uncommon that you try to get it launched. In time for Holiday Inn so usually it's a good time of year to see some new new retail Concepts or at least see the evolution of some. Some retail Concepts so this year I went to New York City for a couple days and I walked about 14 miles and visited 33 stores. Scot: [8:02] Give us give us the highs the lows The Good the Bad the Ugly how whatever kind of format you want to do. Jason: [8:10] So I mentioned 33 stores there were 11 that really jumped out at me as. As irrelevant and interesting for for one reason or another there were kind of for that I. I'm putting in the doghouse that were disappointing for one reason or another and then you know the rest I kind of characterizes middle of the road, the reason I pick New York this year was specifically was because Nike had just opened the new store on Fifth Avenue at flagship store called House of innovation 0:01. And now there's been a lot of buzz in our industry that this was a super Progressive omnichannel digital first retail store and so I had read a lot about it and I wanted to make sure I had a good. Good first-hand experience so that was kind of the anchor that pulled me to New York and then I put together a list if anyone is super masochistic. What I tend to do is put all these things in in Google Maps which little-known feature of Google Maps is great for custom maps. And it works on all that the apps on all the different mobile platform so I can actually put a link in the show notes to my Google Map and you can you can see why these doors are if you happen to be visiting New York and one. Want to check any of them out but so jumping into that Nike store I felt like it really lived up to the hype. [9:35] So this is a big store on Fifth Avenue you know some of the most expensive real estate in North America. It's a 6-story store and some of the Marquis experiences they talked about are these kind of. [9:51] Blend of digital and experiential. So for example they have a great Reserve online fry in-store experience you can if you live in New York you can shop on the mobile phone, I find some shoes in a size you want to try on and someone will pull those shoes and put them in a locker. Waiting for you and so when you get to the store you can use the mobile app to unlock the locker try on the shoes if you decide you want to buy them you can do at self-checkout on the mobile app and so essentially you can. [10:30] Get stuffed Asian in dressing room try it on. And buy it without ever having to have any interaction with an employee if you don't feel like you needed employee. [10:41] And said to me that was like an interesting sort of. Improvement in the frictionless reserve online try and store experience another Marquis Ranch they had is this mannequin shopping so you knows is a lot of folks might know. Apparel that you put on mannequins tends to sell dramatically better than the apparel that's just on the racks or on the Shelf. But it often can be tricky to shop the outfit on a mannequin cuz you see something on the mannequin and you don't necessarily know. What model that is or where you can go get that particular Peril in that you're the one thing the store can do is they can put the exact apparel on the mannequin on. On an end cap or display right next to the mannequin but then that creates all kinds of problems for the store where the inventory is fragmented some of its out on that is custom display and some of its in line in the rack and, when someone does a boat is order or something else now they can't find the apparel because it's floating all over the store. And so what Nike did is they actually put a QR code on every mannequin and you can scan this QR codes with the Nike app and it opens up. [11:52] At the digital experience with all the. The apparel that's rest on that mannequin and again you can click on any of those things to have them sent to a dressing room in your size you can self-checkout or you don't get help from a sales associate but it, it's kind of a cool digital way to shop the look on mannequins in the store. Scot: [12:16] I've seen some of the shoe stores are now doing some of the 3D printing word out of separate experience. Jason: [12:29] Yeah no no no Nike is all in on customized and custom products so. [12:36] Nike actually has a Big 5 store in Tribeca did the bottom floor is totally dedicated to customization and it supposed to custom shoes and custom jerseys so I can round the World Cup. [12:46] Like embroidering your name on on your team's Jersey and stuff like that in real time was huge and this. House of innovation takes that even a step further in this store you actually can have your your shoe models custom ink. I mean you literally wait for the ink to dry and then they give you. That the completely custom product in the store so the ground for the store is totally dedicated to custom. They have all these kind of experiential components to the floor where you can see like. The embroidery shop they have all the people like sewing on the machines and you can watch him making the custom product they have the die shop and you can you know these that you can look through the glass walls and watch all the people handcrafting. Your custom products and they have a bunch of digital stations where you can work with a sales associate and design your own shoe from scratch or. You can pick a custom-designed shoe that was designed by an influencer that you're aligned with so that could be a celebrity or it could be. You know some some talented independent designer that Nike had partnered with so if you don't want to just. Pick a random design from scratch you can you can rely on the talent of someone else to still make a shoe that's kind of unique in that everyone doesn't have and that isn't available at Foot Locker. [14:12] Yeah so they're definitely in on custom. They also at another store we've talked about it with Nike is this Nike at Melrose which is in Los Angeles, and it's big spin is it's localized so they pay close attention to what people shop for and that store and change the assortment really rapidly. In response to the the Nike Shoppers in in Los Angeles and so the bottom floor which is a sub-basement for and this this store is called Nike Speed Shop and it is essentially is dedicated to the best-selling. Products in New York City and again, yui you walk in on you see like that you know fastest selling items while the changes you know quite frequently depending on what the popular items are and you you can scan a QR code and how many of those items popped into a, a self-service Locker for you so again there they're kind of leveraging the the crowd generation and the the seamless. Self Service experience you can self checkout for anything in the store so you don't you don't have to get in line at a particular cashier they have self-checkout station throughout the store where you can like get bags and things like that. The. [15:27] So overall I'd say like this store does a better job of seamlessly integrating digital in a physical environment than almost any other store have been in and it's pretty exciting for that. The downside is. Most of these experiences are not ones that Shoppers are already used to and so the sales associates are having to do a heck of a lot of Education that teach people how to use all these amenities in the store. And it's kind of a cannon to when Banks first ride rolling out ATM machines you know they had to staff the self-service ATM machines with the last app to teach people how to use them or you know when the airlines you step to teach people how to use. That the digital boarding passes you know the Hope Is overtime everyone learns how to shop that store and use those amenities and they can cut back on the amount of staff that they need to train customers but then on the flip side. [16:18] Fifth Avenue is like one of the the highest tourist traffic shopping areas in the United States and so. You know the frequency of visit is probably a lot lower it's probably you know the one and only time a bunch of these people are going to shop that store so I think that the. [16:37] Education think could be an ongoing Challenge and one of the sort of pet peeve or suggestion I would have for Nike is the. All of these digital experiences are totally dependent on you having the Nike app which I. I hate having that app dependency because it's really hard to get users to download the app and to help users get their password and to get users to consistently use the app. And you know these days with Progressive web apps we could have all the same experience on a web experience. All these QR codes that are all over the store the the Apple phones now natively Sant scan QR phones in the app in the the camera app so you know you could have. Given the customer 90% of the same functionality with an iPhone with no app in it and Nike intentionally chose not to do that so when you scan any of those QR codes. That work in the Nike app with the the iPhone camera for example instead of giving you the the digital experience it takes you to the iTunes Store and tries to get you to download the Nike app so. You know they're there I can understand their goal to try to get good penetration of the app but I'd rather see him give him more seamless experience to the customers. Scot: [17:51] Yeah cuz the apps are pretty beefy and you know you're in the store on cell and is 4 Wi-Fi never really works it's always get glitchy and yeah. Talking to it and it just kind of creates a lot of friction. Jason: [18:07] Yeah I know and you know getting their stores that are worse like that Amazon go stores that you'll see a huge queue outside these doors that require an app to shopping. Yeah they they call him frictionless doors cuz it's just walk out technology and the irony is they just move the friction from the the cashier to the front door to the store. Scot: [18:26] Yeah it is one time that which is good. Jason: [18:28] No totally true. I mean I overall super favorable impression on the Nike store or I'll be excited to watch it continue to evolve as always anything new it's pretty easy to find a, a few refinements and and you know hopefully Nike works for those overtime if you go to that Nike store literally right next door to that Nike store is a Dyson Factory Store and I haven't seen this store talked about very much but this to me is a great store, in terms of experiential retail so like obviously Dyson is super premium product like that you know tend to be at at very premium price points to their competitors in the marketplace and so it requires it's already considered sale it requires a lot of explanation and demonstration about why the products are better and so this Dyson store does a really good job of, immersing you in all their products they show you exploded you know versions of all their product so you can see the inside and you can see all the craftsmanship and design in the products and Wyatt's. [19:32] Better and more expensive and then they do all kinds of clever things to let you experience the product so that the world's most expensive hair dryer as far as I know and so in the back of the store they have a Blow Bar where you know if you want you can go in and have your hair styled and they'll blow it out and dry it using that Dyson product info, you know you get this kind of great story that you you went shopping on your vacation on 5th Avenue when you got your hair done at Dice and then you got to experience this, this one-of-a-kind hair dryer and and hopefully it sold you the hair dryer if you want to buy a vacuum. [20:12] They next to all the vacuum displays they have like a complete assortment of. For treatment so they have carpet and tile and hardwood and they have a funny wall of. Different desserts that you can pick so you can you can like literally grab a beaker of dirt or a beaker of confetti or rubber balls or whatever you want to test and throw it on whatever kind of floor surfaces you want an, and literally vacuum up those those products and so I just to me it's a great example of experiential retail and really. Helping customers understand the value proposition in kicking in this, this a psychology we called the endowment effect where you feel like you already own the product in the store and and you feel like you have. Remorse if you walk to Home walked out of the store without taking the product. Scot: [21:06] Did you take advantage of the dry bar the blow dry bar. Jason: [21:09] I did not I do like sometimes it's funny I try to go in and test products that are maybe not, not targeted at me but I did not have time to get my my sending unit 3 centimeter hair. Can and I kind of think it would have dried in the time it took for my hair to get off the base into the chair so maybe when it worked anyway. Scot: [21:34] Yeah that have I think they're sold out of that hair dryer that I mean it is very expensive but it's quite popular it's kind of the the bee's knees. Jason: [21:43] Yeah I actually am thinking about getting hair extensions just so I have a reason to get one of those hair dryers. Scot: [21:49] I think you should definitely do that before then our attic so so we can all I'll see you with your I think I'm imagining a mullet I will look. Jason: [21:57] Not that hard to imagine there's probably some of your book somewhere. [22:03] Not not true so hit a couple other stores on 5th Avenue and maybe we'll talk about it later but then I shot down to Soho in Tribeca and Albert just had a pop up there for a while that do I frankly was not a very interesting store and they just open their first. Permanent store and I think they also did a terrific job I call Brazil courses a. A shoe brand that's that's doing particularly well but very similar to Dyson. They did a beautiful job I call the visual merchandising in this store is great but they really did this Rich storytelling about all of the materials that are used in all the Auburn products and they really kind of immerse you in the war of the products. And just you know much more so than like walking into a Footlocker and seeing a wall of sneakers you feel like you get an origin story for every material that then is used in every shoe. You know and you know they just made the product feel really aspirational and they try to use sustainable products in the shoe and they like you know really made you believe in the purpose and I just thought it was really, well design store from a visual merchandising standpoint like they're not relying on a lot of digital technology in that store but I felt like. [23:30] That's for combined with some of the other stores that I visited that are kind of newer I'll call them digitally native Brands although that's debatable in the case of all birds or Dyson, and I really felt like like some of the best retail we're seeing right now is from these new emerging brands. And an Auberge was another good example and a huge progression from their prop up to this permanent store so definitely congratulations to them on that. Scot: [23:55] They do a lot of really cool kind of seasonal exclusives in City exclusives like. Jason: [24:09] Yeah and exclusive that are the trigger scarcity is a huge play across a bunch of these brands in a bunch of these products and really really smart you know again in a world when you're a teenager that has to act cool amongst your thousand followers on Instagram you know. Getting the same product that's available in every mall in America you know does not fly very well but being able to get you know something that's exclusive or scares you know that's super well and we're seeing that and you know all of these these you know unique limited edition shoes from Adidas and supreme and g-star and all birds and all of those brands are seeing them in the super young kids toys all the laugh out loud surprise toys I know you buy a bunch of these Star Trek, Kinder surprise toy or Star Wars excuse me that was a horrible, not for a DM but a horrible swppp. The I don't know it maybe it's Friday and in some super weird creepy way that we don't want to get into. Scot: [25:15] Klingons. Jason: [25:17] Yeah but yeah scarcity I think is super smart are you are you a big all birds guy. Scot: [25:24] I think I have one pair but if I like him. Jason: [25:30] And that store is now like literally across the street from the Amazon forest our store we we've talked about that's or a lot in the past I did go back to that store I was interested to see how it involves since I was there on the grand opening and obviously that's a story that's. Allegedly completely curated by customers and so I walked in there in a very curious to see how much of the assortment had really changed since the last time I was in and I was pleasantly surprised that. A lot of it had changed like all the feature displays that you see when you walk in the front of the store were prominently featuring, different merchandise than they were at the Grand Opening and even a lot of the product categories. In the store had changed or evolved and so you know my my early indications are you no props. Amazon for living there promise on on sort of. Frequently and rapidly changing the mix in that store based on on customer curation. Scot: [26:31] I wonder if they do it or if they just kind of like close down and reshuffle for a day or if they're just kind of like nibble away at it, like you know 2% a day. Jason: [26:40] No it's a great question and I I don't know the answer. But yeah I would have to live there or visit a lot more frequently 10 notice that but I did I took a ton of pictures the first time I was there and I retook all those pictures and so on. I'm probably going to do a deeper dive in comparing the two sets of pictures but anecdotally it definitely felt like a lot of stuff at churned and obviously we're much closer to Holiday now and they're all these right. Seasonal products for holiday that are selling really well so not surprisingly those products all moved forward. You're secretly I feel like that store is first and foremost designed to sell Amazon branded products and those are kind of the Evergreen product that did not change. Oh, there's some new product since last time I was there so that the first time I got to see the microwave in person. Scot: [27:29] I'd like it. Jason: [27:30] I was surprised it's smaller than I was anticipating it does not feel like I feel like that was a load capacity microwave them then I have so I would have been a little scared to. Scot: [27:43] Talk out at the gym have Alexa make you some popcorn. Jason: [27:46] I did not I was pleased to see that it was plugged in so you could infect talk to it but you like they did not give you product and give you a chance to actually. Cook anything in it and I'm curious if the demo unit even had that hopefully it did not have them element in it but who knows. Scot: [28:03] The at this is a little bit off topic but the switching of the storm made me think of everyone's in retails favorite store in York stories did you get swing by there. Jason: [28:14] I did not swing my story I always love to go to this is story about the it just wasn't geographically convenient with all these other stores I did go to Macy's. Macy's is now a minority owner of story and I was curious to see if they had a disa story iteration in Macy's. And if they did I was not able to find it but the. Beta who's been on the store has has the shopping shops inside of Macy's and I went to that Macy's expecting. Then I go down to the basement where where they historically have put a lot of these Concepts and I was actually constantly surprised the beta store. Is like prominently featured at the front door in like one of the highest traffic entrances and so kind of smart around the holidays since a lot of the beta product is. Is very holiday gift friendly items but that all of the pods in the the beta display inside the Macy's were really hopping and it felt like. The exact same experience you'd get if you walked into a dedicated beta store and then. Scot: [29:22] Call Diem one of our interns just handed me a note make sure we reference episode 139 when we had beta founder the boo on telling us all about that. Jason: [29:33] Yeah absolutely and if you do remember that episode of Yuri wissen he'll tell you a story about how he called me early on in the evolution of that concept and I gave him some stupid advice, is his version and my version is I told him that in the long run, that he would be funded by a bunch of retailers and he would be shopping shops inside of a bunch of these stores, and your side note almost all the betas are now in Macy's and so I'm saying I'm right here saying I gave him bad advice you can judge for yourself. Scot: [30:06] He is not a c squared executive Teresa CEO. Jason: [30:12] He just has the one one see you in like Risk a bunch. Scot: [30:14] Yeah it's your on a whole nother like you're in another orbit like. Jason: [30:17] Yeah he would tell you this lame story about how he left his cushy job at Google to take this big entrepreneurial risk and worked really hard to build something and all that but you know as opposed to just like telling other people what to do and then running before they actually do it. Scot: [30:32] Helios One C drop the mic. Jason: [30:36] Potato potahto exactly. The also sort of in that that area I visited the Casper store you know again another great kind of showroom a store that has a bunch of experiential components like they have all these, design house vignettes where you can in fact, close the door and sweep on all these various mattresses but they even had they actually have and they have a cool branded term for it that I'm going to not remember unfortunately at the back of the store is is actually dedicated to a service where you essentially can rent a in isolation pod with a bed in it and take a nap, and if they've done like a really good job of creating this like super relaxing atmosphere and you know it. The hustle and bustle of a busy City you can come and take a timeout and catch up power nap and then kind of recharge I looked at that thing and said man like these guys up to be partnering with we work like you ought to have one of these. Nap stations in all the the work on demand. Scot: [31:50] If it's at Casper ride to go people are always surprised how many skus they have I think everyone kind of Associates in with kind of essentially once you a mattress live really expanded the offerings have got some pet stuff now right and they've got pillows and sheets. Jason: [32:09] Yeah betting and so that they have all that but also I thought you're going is they have a variety of different. Material treatments on the mattresses so there is a pretty good diversity of mattresses you can buy a different price points and so you can imagine, people wanting to to actually try those out in the United States they talk a lot about how you know retail and trying is an important part of their. Their growth strategy that that you know they like the pure digital experience and obviously they're kind of original Innovation was the ability to make a UPS shippable mattress and bypass the store but in the long run like you know the total addressable Market of people that are willing to buy a mattress sight unseen is much smaller than the, you know all the households in the US and so even these retail showrooms have been, become a big part of their growth strategy I can't remember if I threw it up on social media or not but they also have kind of a social photo booth in the store and that's why I took a picture in the Casper store and to me the, that these these instagrammable scenes inside of retail stores is another strong retail Trend like we talked on the show little bit in the past. There are these dedicated Concepts to instagrammable moments like the ice cream factory in in San Francisco and idea here is. [33:38] Pay a significant amount of money I 20 to 40 bucks to go into what amounts to a bunch of like unique photo sets to take your your selfies and all these you know unique and interesting ways. And there scarcity because that museum goes away after a couple of months and it creates a cool, sort of photo that you can share on on Instagram in a bunch of retailers have jumped in on this action and so the the Casper score was one, you mentioned earlier that cover girl had a pop up in Time Square and they had a great social photo booth so you got to go take, a glamour still Anna and impact video in the store and so I use that that glamour photo booth and put my shepherd girl picks her up, it's super smart as they capture your email address which you give them in order for them to send you the photos and you you share those photos on your social channels and amplify it and become an influencer for Casper CoverGirl, or a bunch of the other retail brand so I feel like that was a common trend. [34:46] Also up near 5th Avenue Rockefeller Center FAO Schwarz reopen. So that you know they were longtime icon on 5th Avenue their space is now being used for Apple. They went out of business but a new company bought the brand and they reopen the toy store in what used to be the NBC Experience Store in Rockefeller Center. And I. Scot: [35:13] Does it have the f e o clock in like that same kind of vibe that the old one. Jason: [35:17] Yeah it totally does it has all the iconic displays that the old store has it has the cost you and Toy Soldiers dancing outside the store and taking selfies with everyone and again another one of these instagrammable moments. And you know a round holiday in Rockefeller Center this was the busiest store in the area and had a shoe deal 9 to get into the store and so again like, you know creating scarcity just buy, you know you go to Rockefeller Center to check out what's going on and look at the ice rink and see the Christmas tree and blam there's a huge line of people waiting to get in somewhere and it instantly makes you want to get in there too and it it it. It seems like there's definite evidence that the debt brand still carry some weight with consumers and at least around holiday. Seems like it was doing terrific. Scot: [36:07] Did a baby geek get like a drivable little Rolls-Royce Wraith. Jason: [36:13] She did not I have as I think documented on some of these other shows already made the mistake of buying him some drivable Vehicles like only two. How to get home and come to my senses and realize that I'm now paying for a separate City parking space for my son's truck my three-year-old son's truck yes. Scot: [36:33] Five of them in one city park. Jason: [36:35] Yeah that's true I probably could fit more but we don't need to tell him that. So glossy are is another great digital brand is doing really well in the beauty and cosmetics base and they open the store in Tribeca again. These guys do a lot of custom assortments instead of the whole store is really a showroom and you shop the store you you, you know try Cosmetics you pick stuff that you want and then you go to a will call window and actually pick up your custom, serrated bag with your name on it of your Cosmetics you can do that online and they have a a pick up station at the very front of the store for for online orders or or you know they have an in-store pickup station, for folks that have shop the in-store experience and this door was hopping like there was a line at almost every display for people to check out, and again a big chunk of the store was dedicated to both them like doing your makeup and glamming you up and taking an Instagram photo in you know a bunch of staged. [37:42] Scents that they had and so you kind of Sharon amplify The Experience so another good example of that. Google has a pop-up store in Chicago and New York called Google Hardware I visited the one in in Chicago earlier and talked a little bit about it on the show The New York one is sort of a, bigger better laid out version of the exact same store again a great place to experience a lot of the Google hardware and get you know live demos and some real-world vignettes but the whole you know downstairs of the store again is dedicated to, taking cool photos of you in a unique environment and sharing those on all your social platforms with all your friends and so for Google it's a double win there they're getting you to take advantage of this social photo booth experience or catching an email all the same things as all the other retailers but they're also getting to demonstrate some of the unique features of the Google pixel camera and as a speaker called best shot so essentially they put you on this way cool interactive swing set and take a bunch of pictures of you and the AI in the Google Phone app, looks at all the photos they took of you and pics of the two or three best photos and shows you though so kind of a double win there. Scot: [39:01] Did you agree with the ones I picked. Jason: [39:03] Yeah it seems optimized for obvious thing so you know I picked the ones where you're smiling and looking directly at the camera and that are in good Focus I don't know that I took enough pictures to. To pick up beyond that what it's it's criteria were but definitely the the photos it recommended were keepers. And yet it just a cool well design kind of theatrical set like it's in there cases funny cuz you walk up and it looks like a really Bland background with a bunch of wood paneling and a swing and you sit on the swing in there I have this doesn't seem like all that interesting of a, have a background but then the guy triggers the display and as the swing starts moving, all of the wood panels drop down in there all these colorful animated things moving around and it becomes a Thun Thun set for a photo so it's just fun. Watch the surprise and Delight moment when. When that happened to other people as well. [39:58] And then the 11th of my my favorite retail stores is a new store. In kind of the upper end of Tribeca called show fields, and to me this is a similar concept 2 Beta so this is a a Marketplace store it's a permanent store that. Emerging Brands can rent a Pod in all of the pods have facilities for live demonstrations they all have digital signage, until you got a bunch of like digitally native products you know that each had their own kind of, shop and shop inside of this Schofield space then I guess the one thing that was different about Schofield from beta is, the beta store is staffed by Beta employees and all the displays are largely self-service except for the beta employees most of the Schofield vignettes were actually staffed with branded employ so when you went to each of India, you are likely to get a representative from the brand that was in that vignette talking to you. Yeah so it seems like the the. Marketplace at vacation of physical retail is continuing the happened so Scott. You may have been right that marketplaces are a thing. Scot: [41:23] Yeah the other they're catching on. Jason: [41:26] Yep. So we're super deep into the show project more time than we intended on the store visits super quick, for they were a little bit of a letdown for me Restoration Hardware has this great reputation they move their store to the Meatpacking District, is there a flagship store New York went to the store it's a beautiful piece of visual merchandising and has tons of their product in it, but I just really think that it's a hard store to shop there's no way finding others no way to know what inventory is in the store I could keep that a lot of folks have a Restoration Hardware is. You know you want to try this furniture before you buy it, they have a website with all these different formations of all their products but no one on the website can you find out which store has the products you want to try, and you just kind of have to pop into the store and you're going to see one sofa that represents a family of 10 and not get a very good story about the other nine so, I just feel like it was a lost opportunity for a Restoration Hardware to take their retailing a little further than they had in the past and it seems like they stuck with. [42:31] Beautiful visual merchandising and architecture but not really anything new or interesting and customer experience so that was a disappointment to me, on 5th Avenue there's a the original Saks Fifth Avenue they made a bunch of hay earlier this year about doing a huge remodel to their Beauty Department which of the second floor of the store are you walking the store on the ground floor and they're all these signed same check out Beauty 2.0 on the second floor and they really hype up this beauty 2.0 concept. Until you know it frankly raises your expectation that they are inventing a better way to shop for cosmetics and beauty and you know when I got up there and Shop did it felt like a very traditional department store Beauty experience to me like the. The again the fixtures in the visual merchandising might have been a little nicer but you know you work at like all the exponential stuff going on at Sephora or an Ulta or the ability to shop based on a use case or need instead of exclusively by brand you know they're all these opportunities to kind of reinvent Beauty and to me, like sacks raised expectation by calling Beauty 2.0 in it it to me it was Beauty 1.1 Maybe. [43:46] I hit up about for Apple stores in New York City and you know I continue to have this, this impression when I walk in Apple stores that they had become to me super boring and the problem I think is did they have curated down they dramatically diminished the amount of third-party product they offer in an Apple store and so, you know it's almost all first-party product you know most of us know all of Apple's product before we walk in the store so we're not going to see some new Apple branded product at school or that we want to see you except maybe once a year and you know that the stores always super busy but it's also always super busy because there's a bunch of people in line at the Genius Bar to get help getting their iTunes password so they can download the Nike app for the Amazon Go app it that stores really become a customer service door and they're just really isn't a lot of. Serendipitous Discovery or surprise and Delight like you know I just don't feel like I have a reason to go there and find anything that's going to be exciting for me I don't know, Scot do you still go to an Apple Store when you're in a a new shopping district. Scot: [44:54] But Jason it's a town hall don't you just go there to meet people diet ice cream I used to I used to get the most joy out of kind of a few know looking at they had a kind of robust drone section and all these wacky accessories like Golf Club thing you can play with and I save if they've taken that stuff away I do think it's Dimension a part of it is once they get into the headphones Beats that's a big section out. Jason: [45:23] Yeah they kicked over all the third party headphones out and yeah. Scot: [45:26] Yeah so so it is a bit of a bummer because like you I think I pretty much have every product covered so there's no new Apple product I really need to discover. Jason: [45:37] Same same deal so if I forget to pack a power supply I might pop pop in the Apple to get a replacement but yeah I miss the surprise and Delight moments I hope I hope they find a new way to bring those back and then last store in this is sadly for me cuz I really wanted to be excited. [45:57] My raspberry award is going to a digital native brand that folks on the show are probably familiar with all the way which is. Kind of a great digital suitcase that's doing really well. And the reason I'm disappointed is I had visited their pop-up store and thought it was fabulous right so, you listen to the founders talk about the away brand and they say like hey we recognized early on we do you want to be about selling suitcases we wanted to be around selling aspirational experiences and destinations and so you went to the pop-up store and it was, merchandise to be all these exotic locations that you wanted to go to and it just so happens that there was a luggage in each one of those locations that you could check out and it made you want to buy the luggage so that you could go to, to Milan and you know have the experience, and I thought that was really smart and it it you know the you know their presentations at Shopkin and shop at Oregon places like that you know they told the story that really kind of match the retail environment so, now they've opened a permanent store and I and you go me and I like the pup I'm expecting you know some big stuff out of the permanent store and I feel like the permanent away store took a giant step back and it's a bunch of shelves with suitcases and no storytelling and, and none of that destination merchandising or aspiration like it did have kind of a a like. [47:23] Unremarkable Cafe inside the store but mostly it was you know it it felt just like your typical Mall luggage store that just happen to have a bunch of away suitcases on. Scot: [47:33] I am a proud owner of a real of masochist. Jason: [47:37] Do you get yelled at every time you get on the plane that you have to take the battery out. Scot: [47:40] I know it pops I got the later generation that works pops right up. Jason: [47:44] Yet so I think that's most of the products but there is a slight slightly unfortunate thing that one of them are key features if they have a smart suitcase that has a big battery in it that you can use to charge a lot of your gadgets and there must have been some bad experience on the airline somewhere because like it's now built into the FAA announcements on a lot of planes but if you have an away branded suitcase you must take the battery out before you come on the plane and again away his design the suitcase to allow that so it's not a big deal but I'm online from a brand or erosion standpoint it's. Anime be favorable maybe negative that every single time you get on a plane they make an announcement saying like you have to do something with an away suitcase or you're not safe. Maybe it helps that they're reminding everyone that there's this new pool suitcase call the way. Scot: [48:31] Yeah it's not nearly as bad as when they said if you had a Samsung Note they would just like grab it. Off the plane. Jason: [48:38] Exactly incident I guess the last take what's a bunch of great retail I do feel like a bunch of the new emerging brands or are the ones that are really moving the ball forward a lot of the the start of. A long time retail Brands I feel like I'm seeing glass Innovation out of them even Nike you know I mean arguably they been in retail since 1990 but as a major retailer like they're moving the ball forward and and you know the Saks Fifth Avenue's of the world not as much. That one other kind of antidotal take away I have talked a bunch of times on the show about electronic shelf labels and you know I would point out of the 33rd three stores I visited four of them now I have 100% electronic shelf label so you know potentially we're starting to see the the slow Evolution to this more real-time updatable Dynamic pricing retail environment so I hope we see more of that. Scot: [49:37] Well we just give me the last show of the year so we want to give you guys kind of the double bang for your buck so in addition to Jason's detailed report we're going to do, quick 10-minute news run and it wouldn't be a Jason Scott show without. Jason: [50:01] The news your margin is there opportunity. Scot: [50:10] Cool so briefly the big news for Amazon right now here we are in the heat of pizza delivery time is not surprisingly deliver you were in it so there's been a bunch out around delivery. [50:23] I can see light interesting stuff on Amazon Jason by frequent Amazon order this time of year for estimator and it's really interesting they're kind of my Prime orders are defaulting to to de-flea a message in there that says choose one day and you'll get your item tomorrow and it's really it's a really weird user experience like why why are they making me choose it there's no extra cost I did notice a day I didn't order and it did that and I chose it and then it did this interesting math over on the side where it said your shipping charge is $20 and then Midas out the shipping charge almost to make me feel like you know I was getting 20 $20 worth of value it felt like some kind of an A B test there but that's just been pretty unusual one here in Chicago you've probably already always had kind of same-day delivery in and next day but that's pretty rare North Carolina so you know I'm definitely seeing that they're using language like. [51:27] Using our express shipping partners and stuff like that so and around this area I'm seeing a lot of the Prime vehicle so I will talk about that little bit so since it's been pretty interesting as a user the Bloomberg had a friend Spencer super over there I had a great peace out today about the Amazon delivery Network and you'll notice he's there around delivery. [51:55] Very intimately familiar with these various platforms most famous and well Love's truck platform is from Europe in is the Mercedes Sprinter and so Amazon in September a news article came out that they had ordered 10,000 of these thousand and what they've done very rapidly is they have out the field but it feels like a lot of them they have set up people in their own businesses these 1099 businesses I am they will guarantee your route though rent the truck to you very inexpensively and this article had some really interesting case studies profiled someone that had a 42 and 70 drivers they're doing 250 deliveries per day per driver I am making $1,000 a month in profit so if you're interested in that kind of thing will put in the show notes and I definitely recommend you read that and then you saw one to Jason. Jason: [52:53] Yep so inside notice there's a slight irony to me the same time you're seeing all these Amazon branded Sprinter Vehicles showing up it's also the time of year when UPS and FedEx don't have enough trucks until you start seeing a lot of Enterprise rental vans with with UPS drivers getting out of them in the course there's always the problem of, people thinking they're not not legitimate UPS drivers when they roll up in the in the unmarked white van. [53:21] So you like people going in different directions there is an interesting thing that Amazon did this year you know there's always this battle for free shipping amongst retailers and who's going to lower their, their threshold for free shipping and what they're going to charge and so you know Walmart does free 2-day shipping for any order over $35, Target came out for holiday and said hey free shipping on anything and you know it's always curious, Target made this better shipping offer than Walmart would Walmart match him in Walmart didn't, and I I kind of thought that was interesting and that would be the end of it but then Amazon surprised is all about coming out with a new offer for this holiday that they were offering free shipping, for the holiday even without a Prime Membership in this this is not their 2-day shipping but that it was interesting that Amazon was getting more promotional around holiday we've all been watching to see if that might Force Walmart. To react so far we haven't seen that but now they're extending this free shipping and they're starting to really promote their, they're cut off date so you know I think tomorrow is the last day to get free slow shipping from Amazon but as you pointed out they've beefed up there. Their same-day delivery options in a bunch of markets and so you'll be able to continue to Christmas shop up to the 24th in a lot of markets and still get them. [54:47] As you mentioned Chicago was one of the first so I for a long time I've had this experience where, you order something that's available with one day delivery and then in the cart it defaults to 2-day delivery and it goes you can get it's Tuesday you can get this on Thursday for free or you can cook this to get it Wednesday for free, cuz even though it says same day it usually is after the the early morning cut off so you get it the next day and so you know you constantly have this thing where of course why wouldn't I pick, to get it a day earlier for the same free price of a new thing I just saw this week on on my own Amazon experience in Chicago is there launching some new service called Amazon weekly delivery and it seems like they're trying to incentivize me to bundle more of my purchases and have them delivered one day a week instead of on an ad-hoc basis and so it almost feels like Prime Pantry for. Non-prime Prime Pantry items so I have to dive into that and get a little more details but that was a new GUI I had never seen before. Scot: [55:54] What's the incentive. Jason: [55:56] Yeah so that was part of the problem it did not like it was a new button I could put to put it on my weekly delivery which to my knowledge I didn't have a weekly delivery but it did not seem like there was any monetary benefit to do that so it was again it was weird it was like free same-day delivery get it on Monday standard 2-day delivery to get it on Tuesday or put it in your weekly delivery on Wednesday. Scot: [56:21] They will there be there always playing around with incentives for slow shipping so I've noticed now they seem to have detected on my pretty heavy Prime now users they're offering me kind of somewhere between 5 and $10 for slow shipping at all do in a prime now single use coupon, iPad audible coupons Whole Foods variety of different free song a free app to put around look like a thousand things on that side. Jason: [56:49] Yeah no for sure and I agree with you I think they they seem pretty smart about seeing which offers you're most likely to accept and then turning up the volume on those offers. I do an audible and I keep getting more and more audible offers on or better offers on that regard stuff definitely get that you link to an article this morning about Amazon's new air hub in the Fort Worth airport so that his listeners that will probably already know they have a big air Hub in Cincinnati now they're adding a second big Hub in Dallas and again you know these guys are getting more airport capacity and more planes and and it just seems totally obvious that they're their bulking up there their internal delivery capacity and you know it it's it's hard to imagine it's not a competitive threat to our friends at UPS. Scot: [57:48] Amazon names are fulfillment centers after the airport so for a long time there are us tracking this and Phoenix had the most so they would do like PHX and when they open the second one they Rebrand the first one to one and then they start new muriatic so Phoenix had like PHX 1 2 3 and 4 in the Dallas for long time didn't have anything there then suddenly when the span of like four or five years David have all the way from DFW 1 to 6 and then and then they expanded out the rest of the day of the Houston and Sentra so no it's it's a it's a huge state for Amazon so I imagine you know that that's going to be a busy Hub and then it's interesting cuz they diagrams for the kind of have a book helps Earth Day kind of building the supply chain that looks it's kind of a hybrid of like what Walmart Walmart does to get stuff to a store and what FedEx UPS do so they have this kind of benefit of Products near you and then if it goes out then it goes to this other level and another level up there it is really fascinating how they're the kind of layer to supply chain, elements on top of each other maybe we'll do a show where we get a supply chain Guru in to explain that privately digested. Jason: [59:05] Yeah and I would add just one thing like these are not just hubs where they're like shipping Goods to then drive them to your house this is mostly about moving Goods around between the various for filming Center. And there they're just getting crazy Advanced like I literally think we have a pop-up fulfillment center in Chicago right now so it appears Amazon his rented all the parking under Millennial Park and they like literally staged a temporary fulfillment center in downtown Chicago for holiday. Scot: [59:36] Brickell lots of machine learning lots of data. Longtime listeners will enjoy this article because it's pretty much a topic we spent a lot of time on a I didn't think there is much you in there but it is paid gated tarp a waltz and it really talks about introduces the concept of crap can't realize a profit and that you know it makes it sound like news that Amazon's pushing back on manufacturers to to change their packaging and figure out how you solve this problem of you know that these items that are too bulky you too heavy to low asp2 to make money who's a good read good summary of of kind of what Amazon's doing but, I kind of made it feel new and and we know that they've been doing this for years. Jason: [1:00:26] Yeah I didn't think I'd almost argue that there's a slight trim the other way there that I feel like Amazon's been progressively getting more and more aggressive about targeting crap and more recently liked in last few months and feels like they they may have loosened things likely in some category. Scot: [1:00:44] Yeah yeah and then there was a smattering of Amazon go you touched on it and your your trip reports what are. Jason: [1:00:54] Yeah so they're there is some rumors that one of the use cases for Amazon go could be airports and that is one of the categories where it seems like you could, Amazon go would be a really good fit so I really fast grab-and-go Self Service experience in an airport and as we talked about like a lot of the go merchandise is food and so you think about, man what happens a lot of airports you have a limited time to get something to eat before you get in the plane and you know you're not going to get served anything to eat on the plane now and so seems for a lot of reasons the Amazon goes strength online really well with that airport use queso that that made a lot of sense I won't be surprised to see that deploy and deploy fast they also open their first. [1:01:45] Small for my Amazon go store so this is like a hundred square foot store and it is kind of like a self-contained shop and Shop, where you know you can have a bunch of quick grab convenience items, in a you know Anna is self-contained pop up store format and you know from the first time I saw I go one of these cases I always thought of was like the hotel. Gift shop for the hotel snack shop kind of thing where it doesn't make sense to staff the store with the a person but you know you can sell a lot of snacks to the guess that just check in and they're going up to the room and so this the small-format store seems like a perfect fit for a potential Hotel use case for exam. [1:02:30] And then I think go is now going to the UK so we've seen like three new new retail for mastering Amazon open up in in London in recent times and now they're going to get their first ghost tour. Scot: [1:02:42] Cool it's everyone laughed when they said they weren't there could be thousands of these so you put 10 in each airport and 50 in each City and boom you're there. Jason: [1:02:52] Exactly so they are not sitting still there doing a lot of interesting stuff it's been fun to follow them. Scot: [1:02:59] Awesome so I know we're up against time but there is that concludes our Amazon news there was one big news item that I wanted to pick your brain on and is there she might this kind of slid under my radar I'm sure you were really you're attracting it but there was this announcement that IBM sold a bunch of software stuff to this company called HCL I don't know who that is and the ones that made the headlines I saw where I was he Lotus Notes and just some kind of, old stuff that seemed then I saw a kind of kerfuffle on LinkedIn where several of the smaller e-commerce platforms were really kind of riling up retailers and saying you know, where you going to do now that IBM no longer supports websphere which is there their kind of you know their e-commerce platform that a lot of the largest retailers are on and. Turns out that they have sold that whole platform to this company HCL what I'm sure a lot of our listeners out there I'm sure if they're on websphere they're they're painfully aware this but I was a little shocked about that what do you what do you make of it does this mean IBM just as getting out of the retail game or why would they sell it and then what do you think it means going for. Jason: [1:04:14] Yep it's even potentially more confusing than that so it's totally cut me out of left field the, you know if you'll get the last call at 5 to 8 years in retail there have been these three Enterprise platforms that have emerged as sort of the most competitive, platforms for launching your e-commerce site so you know IBM has had Webster Commerce which is one of the products they sold the ACL Oracle has that a product called atg was originally stand alone company Oracle bottom, there's originally a German stanaland company called hybris the sap bot and so you know if you were a big retailer or you wanted to you know be selling hundreds of millions of dollars online, you likely were going to pick one of these three platforms to launch your website and and you would likely have a shootout between two or three of them, and you know that pay a company like razorfish millions of dollars to to implement it for you and and pay the vendor, you know hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars a year in maintenance on that platform and so in some ways like totally shocking IBM which you know. [1:05:27] Arguably had the biggest retail market share of those three platforms. So the entire websphere business to HCL HCL is a very large integrator and so you know frankly from my standpoint, whatever traction IBM had in the marketplace that platform is totally going to lose now that a single integrator, because you know all the other integrators in the world are not very likely in to be promoting and implementing a platform, it's owned by one of their competitors so you know usually when an integrator buys a platform it's kind of the end of life for that platform and it just becomes, an in-house piece of Ip that that that integrator uses you don't becomes much harder to see other third parties. Integrate that's an IBM had this Rich echo system of integrators that were aggressively selling their stuff so there's a ton of customers that are on it it's but yours was super fragmented about this. [1:06:31] They sold the on-prem version of the software 2hcl at the moment IBM still owns, the cloud version of the software which is the newest version but the cloud version is based on the on Prim codebase so if you're one of the few customers that bought the, Cloud version of IBM or you were thinking about migrating now you have to ask yourself. Is HCl going to keep updating that code base so that IBM's Cloud version continues to stay. Competitive or contemporary or what's going to happen there IBM owns a bunch of other retail software that a lot of retailers still rely on most famously they own order management system called Sterling. It's still doing really well and they did not still sell sterling so in the old days. You know I didn't had a lot of success getting people to use their o&s and their web platform together because obviously most most businesses need order Management in and then you conversate. Now those things are getting split up so at the moment there's a lot more questions than answers. I probably already taking too much time but the one thing I will say is in my mind all of these Enterprise platforms are losing momentum and losing customers and so you know the likely reason I'm selling it is. They just feel like the super expensive enterprise software is kind of end-of-life because. [1:07:54] To me what's happening is the very largest e-commerce sites are are all largely on custom and house built stuff. And increasingly the biggest customers that were on these Enterprise platforms are. Writing more the software themselves and using less of the Enterprise platform and negotiating to Payless licenses for that software. Everyone wants to move to the cloud and none of these products are particularly graceful at offering a cloud version, and then every new business that's been born every new brand that's been born in the last eight years that was more likely to be digital natives, probably started doing e-commerce on something like Shopify or Bigcommerce and they're actually finding that those those platforms continue to meet all their needs even as they scale and so you know even if you outgrow Shopify once you're used to paying $10,000 a year for your eCommerce platform you know it becomes really hard to pay for a you know orders of magnitude more for that you know and then orders of magnitude more on top of that to implement it just became a tough value prop for these old Enterprise platform so a lot of us in the e-commerce software space have a lot of nostalgia for IBM at the you know they were definitely King Of The Hill in retail for a long time but you know I do probably selling them because you know it was becoming a financial loser for them and and it does not seem like that's where the growth is going to be in retail. Scot: [1:09:23] Feels like Financial. Kind of yeah she'll games though too. Maybe a negative phrase but maybe I'm just wanting to show Wall Street more SAS Revenue so that's probably why they kept that piece but you know you can't possibly do well if you're not enjoying the underline code and if I'm an integrator I don't want to make this a surgeon that are so seems like there's instant mi

You whanged my ship, you walnut-panelled idiot! Listen in as Luke and Gabe discuss Futurama Season 5, Episode 14: Obsoletely Fabulous. Follow us on Twitter @ALMPod. Check out our website at almpod.com. On this show: Gabe discusses how the value of fake satellite dishes have decreased over time Luke discusses how each of the island robots represents fundamental limitations of computing Gabe and Luke discuss why Bender’s “upgrade” is on an island Luke draws a parallel between a Killbot having Lotus Notes and Adobe Acrobat having a email server Gabe discusses how this episode relates to Neuromancer

Introduction Universal Windows Podcast – Episode 92 You can enjoy us on Spotify and iHeartRadio now – great for streaming! We are starting up our regular cadence – look for podcasts on a weekly basis (we mean it this time) Word of the Week Enjoy a sip of your favourite beverage each time either of us says "David". Feature of the Week OneNote Audio News of the Week  Microsoft's Q1 2019 earnings Windows Phone: Why Microsoft built this E Ink second screen for its Lumia 640 Is the October release of Windows 10 the "Worst Windows 10 version ever"? 1.5 billion Windows devices More than half of Windows devices in the enterprise are now on Windows 10 Microsoft is positioning Always-Connected PCs as the future of business devices Samsung's Galaxy Book2 with Snapdragon 850 IBM Buys RedHat $34 Billion Care of your new Surface Rant and Rave Microsoft should just stop adding features to Windows 10 Outro Call for your help with the podcast, please… Follow and Re-tweet @SurfaceSmiths Listen www.SurfaceSmiths.com Email Podcast@SurfaceSmiths.com Whisky of the Week The Macallan 18-year-old   Episode 092 - Just A Rounding Error - Transcription Courtesy of WIT.AI Windows Microsoft MVP Insider Surface Phone 2018, The Surface Smiths Podcast Universal Windows Podcast http://surfacesmiths.com David and Colin Do Stuff Transcript [0:00] Hello I'm Cortana welcome to the universal windows podcast the show about everything Windows such a surface Xbox phone and the windows Insider program, here are your host the surface Smith on Colin Smith & Smith welcome to episode 92. 34344 3 feet out the one that we were part of the quality was awful. I don't know either way we have one called Catch and Release catch-and-release no one would have been alright so this is the show all about Microsoft stuff and we got stuff to talk about 10:20 podcast in a year and more than that, dogs just look at the stats and we've done $0.20 about the September of last year. Hey guys what about the word of the week, chose the where the week last week i did and you know what that was a big room why what's the whole concept that would the week that we have a drink every time someone says the word that we cancelled and we chose, the word of the week last year as last week sorry as. [1:20] Hello. On the recording we want me to start that again I didn't need to clear what was the word of the week last week it was it was vote vote and we didn't use the word vote yet we're using the word vote this week so. People that were thirsty or left I'm right now it was holding day so you shouldn't drink before voting, old we're allowed to drink okay anyways i go pick a word that you do by gonna go with david for the week is david to make up for two well guess so every time you hear the word david, take a drink, okay alright to let's move on what else we got if you got a feature the week David I do I do and I had one but then I switch to the last minute so it's a. It's a one note feature, and in one doubt there's an audio button and you can easily record whatever you want in your notes, in there for the aunt that's terrible so that comes up to a little bit later are rant and rave for we talk about a new feature that you go while, that's there I'll start using that I've used that I taught people how to use that back in. [2:30] Biggerstaff classes I talk about you that no one no future okay so in OneNote, if you go to the where is it there's the web version there's the light version and then there's the Office 365 or office 2016 2019, okay built into what you ask maybe that's why you haven't seen it because in the version that's part of office it's been there forever for that version. [3:05] Maybe not everywhere in LED OneNote MVP can tell you when it was released okay OneNote audio alright anything else to move on. [3:15] Let's move on. New story of the week news David so first news story today is what's the date today it is in last week Microsoft among other. Tech Titans released earnings and their q1 earnings were 29.1 billion they beat the street. Amazon did not beat the street, I heard that potentially Microsoft was worth more than Amazon for a little. Of time but also Microsoft commercial cloud is far outstripping Amazon's commercial cloud in what measure, sales revenue okay but that's been going on all year, early in or q one and of continue to do so and base and have a gonna compensate, Microsoft they should be continuing to do that, yes yes of course so if you want to take a look at the Microsoft commercial Cloud I think it was what 76 or 76% growth wow, this quarter over la, set Lobster same quarter no no no no. [4:37] And your Enterprise Mobility which is in tune and things like that 88 million seats. Can you believe that I like the number two player nobody ever hears about Entune everyone knows mobileiron an air Watt, I literally never hear from it from the customers I work with which is hot right now this is sold seats right so anyways. And windows only am growing three percent so hundred and fifty five million commercial office get three hundred twenty five million subs. Tumors so roughly speaking let's just round that up to two hundred million. That is a lot. That's what 15% of no wait wait some weird math there a hundred fifty-five million hundred 55 + 32 is 887 if you want the exact number .5 but. That's almost 200 million subscribers that's that's awesome that is. And those are paid those are page and like things like Yahoo mail, I don't know I sure at some point in time was much higher surface Revenue grew 14%. [5:56] Valley last year they had this big Surface Pro for the North Avenue devices that quarter, are the surface go in the summer but then the laptop and the new, remember this artist porosis quarter ending end of September that's right so the goal was in there but that's not a big rubbing you think I don't like one or two rights August so this is based on previous there's a sleeper 33% not sure why. [6:26] I have a god damn connection learning and linda and i'm gonna have to break that down as a gender change from. A person's female name to, can learning and list better but anyhow alright so that's great for microsoft earnings those of us all microsoft's stock and you microsoft past the eight hundred billion dollar mark and pull back with the rest of the dow today and I'm not sure if they've surpassed out and check today whether there they surpassed Amazon or not, the heater on track for being actually another company of this system number though it is just a number alright. [7:08] So This is not really news but it was leaked and i kinda like that i want to cover it and bullshit perm the rumors but well that was real work microsoft was working on. Pink second screen and into first lumia the whole idea behind this was that the. And leap now microsoft was going to. [7:32] Release this could have gone with any of its Windows phones the idea being that people want some Dynamic content stuff at updating all the time and there's things that they want to keep just candy, you're getting on the plane and using any ticket if that's what you want available there but you don't want to have your phone on all the time it would be a great feature wouldn't that there's my ticket, set the. Wow that is fantastic four tickets but that was one of the things they're working on end. She's a few things that you might want to use eating for so that's a neat little new story there I wanted to include in today's news, we talk more about it it's kind of for quite some time so. Lots of rumors around dual-screen devices and it was talking about Andromeda and Samsung having a deals cream coming out so through old bendable all those exactly. And. [8:41] What's next on news leyva what is the worst Windows 10 version ever. [8:48] We don't know i would imagine that this the one that hasn't released in october, well you know they've always had the opportunity to being late and they've always messed up sorry nothing but, summit and eighteen tennis five don't think that the end product itself will be bad it's just that they kinda messed up a couple things about, deleting people's Files video drivers also Intel drivers can do all sorts of things so perfect storm of bad windows we'll come back and we'll talk about I don't think they taking this much advantage of the windows Insider to test if I think I take advantage while they're taking advantage of them I don't think they use them as best as they can all right so that's a little bit of a downer we can anything else you want to talk about that or two okay some other news I don't know if it's good news or bad news but Windows is now running on 1 and 1/2 billion devices what are they used to be. [9:52] Something less than that buu could be more notes and that's more than ios. So really yes. I don't think Apple's of has the ship to more than 1.5 billion iPhones and iOS devices iPods and iPads. The real key here is that, prom 2016 I have an article that says it was 1.0 billion right though it's growing so that meat thing is it's, the number to platform for modern devices definitely Android will be dying Android over 2 billion. [10:36] Yeah one of the issues with Windows phone and being with Windows as developers not what I develop for it because aren't they didn't have that Marketplace sure they didn't think they could get that that they couldn't monetize their called with 1.5 billion devices. The different story was 1.44 last year I mean nothing's really is really changed but it is it's big and as people move off of Windows 7 and we'll talk more about that later. [11:07] Others no opportunity there so. What are things we talked about last week was the EU, back in July but I know what that means for Google right, but maybe that's an opportunity for Microsoft as well now and we'll talk more about why a might be the perfect time Microsoft bring back, Windows 10 mobile I tweeted that today we got a lot of retweets alright next new story David more than half of the devices and prices on Windows 10 that's interesting commit last week were talking about how many were out there and we're wondering how that is it starting to tip i'm doing a lot of work around windows ten projects people have to get off its what four hundred days away now yeah, something like that to general fourteen twenty twenty and you know the last. Half hopefully she go quicker for some organization some organizations for example will start that will be a good stop getting in faith my customer struggling all. [12:02] Don't talk about that later okay they're struggling because some of the tooling for upgrading from Windows 7 is not working as expected, and they're having a goal with a wipe and reload when they have been killed piloting and testing for an In-Place upgrade which is the way of Microsoft really wanted people to do it but some of the cooling system, it has expected what a lot of the machines will fall off and be replaced church so they're certainly like a fifth via machines you can count on for that, so half of the machine so how many is that in percentage is David. [12:39] And half the machines developer how much more than fifty six fifty point one and it that you're quoting mary jo fully of the article there and so. Okay let's just go with it we're definitely crackerjack reporters 5 billion and 700 million machines it's almost the exact same number. When students i think. [13:06] .5 million Windows machine PS 100 million seven hundred million windows. Machine it was like a texts also have fifty percent no to hot slightly below fifty percent of that that's half it's the right its a fifty percent but if that is half of one point four billion. Yes it's a thousand hundred million it's not that much, it's almost half it had all the David I'm glad in your world a hundred millions of rounding error. Right so here's something i've been talking about for a long time, and the microsoft is positioning always think a pc is the future of business devices so you know for me, live in three big feet big things that hard drive me towards any machine that been waiting for the usb c for everything. I charging all of that. [14:16] LTE Lots the always-on and everything's liabilities I've got some strange, comic is shares a tooth all well there's lots of reasons we can talk about lap ability separately but for me that's that's an issue ninety touch and all that we think that we have a lot of those up ability is device by device, thing but LTE on there's a lot of advantages here one yo. You always let it we're not searching for you not using Starbucks hack Wi-Fi or airport hacked Wi-Fi or security. [14:53] Availability there's way more available than there is Wi-Fi. For the most part yep reduced-cost reduce class because organizations don't have to maintain their own Wi-Fi necessarily the people who are mostly out of the office when they come in the office there's no reason for them to be connecting to anything in particular. And then you could start moving to other other systems like Branch offices and continue and continue until, you really have only networks in your attitude Center carriers, probably start to offer some kind of a private network, on top of the lt or five g or whatever. Texas Method there they're providing that time but I think there's definitely going to be a push towards that. And it's going to come from the carriers as well not just Microsoft and then cuz they're not really a Sim provider Bugatti symbol that's about it. And device manufacturers of course have to get on board. [15:59] So here's the next news item that kind of ties into that okay because when we talk about arm chips, I'm chips of typically yo when they do the sock the the system-on-a-chip kind of thing is almost always had. [16:18] Lt motor built in fact write the kind of would have to order them without it for says yeah packs are to get it so one talk on another device, we talked about it very quickly last week but it's a Samsung Galaxy book to with guess what David. What. [16:46] It's there is now actually a Hands-On review from neowin and we can talk a little bit about that. The interesting thing is if you take a look at it it is almost the same as, surface keyboard with very similar Pro it's got the kickstand it's almost the same dimensions and their lost device didn't ever fix and that was just awful to keep writing so. [17:18] It Sucka gpus wall around Reno 6:30 Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 it's a 12in display 2160 X 1440 which is very similar to a Surface Pro 2, yes pc. I thought MicroSD and nano SIM how come Microsoft can't put 01 in butt out that's good and. Come to the pain that comes with keyboard. [17:49] And the thousand dollars us which is quite a bit less than yeah surface pro it is about the cheapest of pro. Expense in the chips from. [18:00] Yes I'm sure but not when you include the keyboard in the month and it comes with type S. [18:11] So Thai password Windows Windows SS home. This is a car and you can switch its regular Windows 10, for no charge last 10 home in S Mode yes it's not Windows RT that you can switch out it's when it's an s in it, alright well. They've got it thanks could work out really bad Okay so. [18:49] We've got more Microsoft news you got some other news you want to Microsoft news. [18:58] Color hair care feeney surface with but it what's i got this little article in my funeral newsfeed and was care free to service the house while this is going to be really la barba color bead where the kids happy to do dot drop my new surface. So they start off with. Basically gentle caring cleaning which is kind of a don't drop it say that the important do not apply liquids directly to your surface hey you know those who don't know that already are in trouble and no power cord you don't route the power cord up to tight you know, or I do next and Alcantara material if your keyboard don't let it dry before you clean it off yeah I think it's Rob silly little things that really but they mentioned battery health so don't don't, do them stop from with this crack and they also say you should at least once a month you should this charge it totally. Store in a cool dry rooney not using it is there like a white cell we're office for the air heating broken guess so anyhow so a lot of them are really simple things that you that. Right that you don't put liquid sunscreen fine we all know that but once a month drain it fully 50%. [20:16] Oh okay just half way okay let's is it true earths surface go and start the cold rush face i think they really mean is don't store in your car. Okay it's just charge the battery in the week we used to always do this back in the day with phones and all that other stuff and people stop doing that. And the Battery Technology really you would like to do. Okay so that's it for Microsoft news and we've got one last piece of music not if not directly related Microsoft, okay sure is more directly related to add say to other companies. [20:55] And i be am i bm bought red hat, 433 billion so first time I heard 34 billion it's only hundreds of millions different so I think it's the same number, okay that is a huge amount of money even for a large company like idea. A positive minus a hundred thoughts and it's still alive. [21:24] What do you think of it why did why did ibm do all that really why effects of the they both needed it and its a desperate measure so right now test for measured thirty three billion tell you what okay the IBM and redhead are not talked about in the big player face, you talk erratically google that but apple id but amazon but facebook it when occasionally microsoft and microsoft will my spouse of their items here here's the thing. [21:54] IBM has become non-relevant, devices perspective cuz they got out of the Lenovo unit right sure they still have them. Okay I saw the PC side Lenovo right and then they kept their server-side. Play in the club right so become less relevant there the still of them as the mainframe business but again known to maine for the month of the cloud weather not real writing a new mean for, hey because the team somewhere but maybe they still have their mid-range like they're a S400 and stuff like that but again whose, was last time you saw anybody working asked 400 right 2 weeks ago Wednesday night trying to do a refund it was a green screen I asked him what it was he said it was a S Finder i don't always have the answer right quick tips fingertips with the subject alright so alright so the hear my ibm's can less real than what does ibm have the whole Global Services large footprint of it professionals many many of them are Microsoft certified but that's beside the point what does redhead have. [23:07] They've got a decent OS that got a decent, virtualization stack some argue more performance than the and we're really okay they have this, openstack their their openstack player there they are peripherally a Cloud Player they like to think that they are but they're not but but IBM don't have a cloud doesn't really work Labs stock, they've had their data centers you could friend for ever yes, but they don't have a full stack no solution they have to park and have to partner if partner and red hat has a partial club stock they don't really have the data center, IBM does that why didn't have a footprint so together, they are three big players in Cloud are Microsoft and my number one that's enough in Revenue in Revenue Microsoft Amazon and Google, and help vmware's been cozy, IBM's blow Google oh well below well below. [24:11] And the support of us to work, like the both of us, he's becoming less and less relevant in the cloud space because the other day why do people want redhat versus any other product I thought the only reason was because you had support support, is there any other reason why I missing something. [24:38] They had better Cooling and things like that compared to other lennox's maybe better support for third-party tools and stuff like that right everybody supports redhat yeah but take a look at the. [24:52] Badger badger sound like 30% of all the VM thing running Asher are Linux VM and red Hat's a first-class citizen there. And so if you're running Red Hat what's the right why would you not maybe run Santa's. [25:14] Yes because you're not red hat if you're running your own data center because you want to make sure it works at your HP servers are your Dell servers or your was that other coming to make server so IBM, if you're running in the cloud somebody else's Hardware if they're going to support center state-supported for you that's part of it I sent Racino who makes sent us. It's community-based it's totally worth RedHawks is just an addition to the sentence I'm not a Linux guy so I'm going to make some things out of a shirt but work with me though. [25:50] Red Hat has the fully supported first class citizen red hat and red hat Enterprise Linux whatever works interrupt to then they have this other thing that's free called Fedora which Trails behind usually a few game free version and then there's a community in Denver that is Cintas which is community supported which is 50 binary code compatible, to Red Hat Enterprise Linux likes a bit but not as far back as Fedora and put or just have some things that are missing and then there was the selinux that was originally created by, oh I can't some US government organization maybe. That they that they created a secure secure version of Linux track that they gave to Red Hat as the custodian, those are the versions that are out there i'm on the server. Talk about red hat very very few people use read how does a desktop OS. You could but so that puts IBM, in a position that it's a bit of a desperate gamble but to stay relevant so if they're going to they went so high for price that really how much LinkedIn go 427. [27:13] True true and it's okay it went for. Hey Google I don't know what the financials were so I know that IBM stock dropped and red hat stock went out. Makes red had a little bit more credible basis um i think it might end up being a bit late oracle with the try to do everything on their own and no because he recently partnered up. But I think they have their own version of Linux they have the other bots on then they killed it so the crow, right who hasn't yeah so it happened sometime for Microsoft your son was oracle's Nokia. [27:56] Okay as if you were an Enterprise with lots of Red Hats would you see this is a positive thing, I don't know because I probably already had a strategy for either on pram or cloud already with a cloud provider I just got to make a compelling to me though so if you were already going with that you were seeing the advantage of with the free lennox vs having to pay for red hat you might only gonna wear like it's still my red hat workload stash or amazon yeah amazon's a little bit different but i lose their tools from right have to move to either them. So now it's going to have to be to potentially at IBM data center Mitchell for that we just don't know I would imagine there is yeah but. [28:40] We shall see is it too little too late that's what I'm worried about. The different Cloud providers already have staked out their markets Microsoft is the, S&P 500 crowd Amazon is the born in the cloud startups and those that want to build their own passport in the classroom, stop it look companies like Netflix and Facebook that are building huge application that are going to build their own fabric now they're on Amazon, yeah so that means companies that use both and that's going to be the case here what does that mean one-size-fits-all you pick the one that makes sense for you Microsoft is also got the pass massage market right with their Office 365 and other services or you're not going to go to IBM and get your Office 365, Android. And then Google is really staked out that way I know that. [29:42] Geography base types to give. It wouldn't global positioning system type enabled software that they all have that but can't get were google play ball things if when you go on integrated google maps and things like that applications like that sir ch. So what's what's your phone saying that David it's, it to start searching when you set okay if i have to wiggle. OK Google, yeah doesn't listen to me but listens to me so I don't know what we're going to stake out a different territory babe I got to go after Financial Services b****** with the IBM and so strong again or something like that. [30:25] Music. [30:33] What is Microsoft Microsoft stopped adding new features to Windows 10. [30:43] I don't know here's here's kind of what I was thinking when we talked about this. Customers or customers in general are struggling with the Cadence are Microsoft already went down so I can only do it twice a year so one time it was more than that, organ of two releases a year first one was about four months apart yeah yeah and, they tried to make it stable and then now their struggles with their October release around the quality what if they just press pause, and just fix stuff that wasn't working or made it better end when you think about it what new feature of Windows 10 matters to your customers. Set the consumers will my customers der all about. Creating more efficiencies right if so if they have less service desk calls less things break but they would like that easier to deploy and you can say easier to the play could be a feature. Are so will pick it the one picking last feature in windows ten that you really got excited about. [31:55] Was there one was hoping that I can finally get around and text messaging from my phone and my laptop okay but it doesn't seem to work yet in Canada. So then I'm okay with that cuz I have doesn't other ways to do it if I need you so most of the week you found today yeah it's been there forever so most people don't and it wasn't even windows and most people don't even notice new features so, I say your press pause are commode. Press possible i feed is a higher contracts easier to read the people dies but that's beside the point okay go lets go with windows as a service pack well. There's always the percentage of improvements to security perform since touch the driver in the cumulative updates or are in the semi annual releases. Make that a higher percentage for making the new features a lower percentage. How to speak baby every now and then you take a breather it's like every other could be every other was like Farmers that let their fields go follow just good for the Earth but they're going to need some feature sometimes like they bring out a new this and it needs to be out of this a feature, to support OEM server Denver. But maybe every now and then just press pause and you know what guys we're just fixing all this stuff. [33:21] We have to whisper because it's Alexis was born okay so yeah because it is because, sensor crazy so they could do it just the percentage thing or they could just to every other. You know in the fall they do features in the spring they do performance security and so from a consumer point if you I don't think it would really matter you would just update and it wouldn't really matter what about primacor 4.01 what they'd apply. So here's the thing Microsoft broken up their Windows 10 team into the, guys are building the future and the future and the team that's patching and fixing and I think these all need to get together, the best of helpers the ones building the new features and an increase volume is insulted alot of people yes but it. Oh that's why is whispering so i hope none of them wants to get to stab you what that be said. Let's get them all together what kind like what microsoft said you know what work were security first everybody just took that on that's consist of a bug bash party and get everybody on board you know it might be that they've other than the features for while. [34:51] If they told us this when windows ten first came up there's where whole bunch of user interface stuff things really have missing but now they've gotten so mature in that. Lotus Notes noticing what, catch up with everyone now it's not like someone else is gonna if they don't innovates somebody else is going to. Allows case on Windows phone for sure right they lost they lost. They're not really there way have feature wise and when they lose its because chrome os is user to administer. User whatever so if people are good by max because my max anyways ince, because a feature Windows 10 data that's not there no no it wouldn't say that you're wrong, they like the mac they wanna go to mac right so good then it's the hotel that if there was a feature with. What would feature really get you excited Windows 10. [36:10] Longer battery life faster gesture interface yeah but not every knows that. [36:17] There's nothing else I can do this this is all these silly things that people don't even use like was last time you did 3D paint. Set the. [36:33] Right so this is the stuff that you use like all the time you want to work customer struggle with things like hello and Biometrics and stuff like that they're there, struggling to get that implemented so what are they relying on an older version of Windows 10 and I never really, sometimes I noticed the occasional feature about being able to cast to display or something like that but so did they replace the built-in password manager with a real password manager, i use last pass regulators across the laces but no microsoft toasted that for me like the kind that do for your yeah they kinda do with your m sa with your microsoft account but the bill to windows ten built in password manager just is not I see you the password manager on the underneath the keyboard I see that also notes at the most people right so, do they orthopet OneNote whatever. Yeah and then regret it exactly what is Microsoft stopped adding feature to just fix things for a while I think that would be cool not sexy but cool. [37:51] Teachers are really sexy so some dollar. Number of sexy holmes was now was letting me sesame walking a hole in the wind but it wasn't a feature. What kind of Windows 10 supported hololens. I think we are good we are good so the show is over. Los amigos keep stick on the ice thanks for his here are some lazy support and interact with michelle like to show on facebook at surface. [38:29] Follow the show on twitter at surface minutes email dish of. [38:35] Check out the show notes and leave a comment on www. [38:42] Help others find out about the show by leaving a review on it. [38:46] Music. [38:55] Welcome to the rest of the week my fingerprints you was gonna be with the week but they still haven't delivered it really really from the surprise is canada post what they have one government institution working with the government institution why would I not expect it to be working official today get to regular mail there on time and they're in the right house or no but now there's two addresses are pretty similar anytime that there's any time they're doing an Amazon delivery date a celebrity has arrived yet so, how can you mark something delivered every having delivered it yet, boston market with or their little ppts social android devices and it has a gps and it's gonna record where it delivered it is in my amazon package tracking showed delivered and it doesn't show up for a day, well then that they're supposed to not do that. Bracket shouldn't do that okay okay I finally got your pasted into the show notes what I think this is a profile type picture for you it's a good one alright so, best part of this show the after party yeah is we drink whiskey now the fact that we switch to a new book gives us the opportunity to do some repeats. Okay this is something we had before but it's one of my favorites it is truly truly spectacular whiskey I don't think we've ever had a problem with. No because we don't repeat stuff we don't like. [40:21] And the one time repeat something that we weren't so sure about it takes a better second time that you sometimes could be a particular person rules yeah and this is clearly got a rule that you have of know about archer tv alright so. David it's the 12th or the 18th the 18th and 18th in the new book okay 12 Macallan 18. Matured select Sherry Oak casks from Juarez Spain. [40:52] Haha what do you fuck it is a very well area where it's color. [41:01] And it doesn't need water anybody gets dissed it's. Candy for me so I like it so what we can talk about we're going to talk about bringing back windows phone and I didn't write the article but it was just interesting, okay with the, the antitrust ruling against Google in the EU and all the fractured stuff around Android and people are now saying that no one's even here lots of people saying it's nothing like phones that excites them anymore, and also the Microsoft is sexy again they're almost a trillion-dollar true when you drop a phone, poet called they look at their services it's not broken are very excited about new phones sure but there's not sure of that now yeah exactly exactly so what years by the way here's. [42:03] Who were the mike. David beast but here's the thing. So maybe sister yep people are just going to want it because it's different. This packet switching off of iOS just because it's different so Microsoft, but we're different, but their profile also the company they're so is betamax it's different bombers gone so I just cleaned house a bit Microsoft her dog has been on a tear of their eating Android there you can Google Cloud business they're eating Amazon's Cloud business they're actually. Not an ulcer and they're they're actually leaders in a few questions so maybe they could do a limited release sir, either they would bring out some sort of you know for insiders only soda speakerphone. They should do they open source the bootloader. [43:16] Which bootloader the Windows 10 bootloader is an open-source okay suck it up okay. Cute weeks there and you can do a Homebrew cuz a Homebrew phone or just want to do is add the telephony pieces back into Windows 10 code they know we know to have them somewhere. Haven't left that's or something so I think they should open source. [43:40] But that's what I mean by insiders is that no no no no no no, so homework so he buy yourself an Android phone you use the window part XYZ they don't support Samsung but they support whatever you whatever, and you homebrew your ira android phone to use windows ten ml and becomes like sent us community supported, or like member xp mc or things like that number of use hack their x boxes to right next bmc yeah i did that, will it be. So what would Microsoft came from that. Point five years there's a one billion devices up closer my student id floral. But it keeps it cost nothing open source cuddling kind of. And unless the only unless they really want to do something with it may have a plan for it because I thought maybe open-sourcing that would open up a lot of their code. But lot of stuff that need in there. [45:00] But just maybe the telephony pieces people of the on the sort of thing with sheryl people shamed ec windows ten and other devices. And they shamed other things out of the Artis and things like that it looks like 5 or something like that somebody did. That was on the phone or something they did they can help with that they could make it so that some modules precompiled but you then could start a string it together and, esther shim windows ten on the new at the top left any pieces to make a phone yeah sure. If you think about the arm code but the arm code may require so it won't work, old Android phones, great for 2850 now there's different 850s though right some don't include x86 ability. [45:59] Hung up yeah but i think he a couple years america will have. And not all phones have any 50 in them, very few phone seven eight fifteen eight fifty is not really designed for phones is that most of the forty five ft same thing yeah the forty five is more phone base chipped the eight fifty was designed specifically for tablet and. [46:28] Are the visit Burien specifically for tablets anyways we're running x86 outside BND. [46:36] I think I'll pass but you'll do a Kickstarter on this no no it's totally a home brew beer kit. [46:45] Okay so I had to new internet put in my house today, no fiber you got the got the gigabit and. $300 in the next three months if I don't cancel. [47:09] What they pay you 300 cancel what do you mean they skipped credits. Okay so in outside that's fine it's whatever it's faster and it's lower latency I think so you know I don't have really any chances that's it yet but I'm sure it'll be fine it's less expensive than I was paying before cable. Faster but no big deal but I was decided that since it was less expensive I give them money and get some sports channels cuz I have a little sports fan at home right so they have this in a box that goes behind your TV. Don't have to put a wire between your tv and your and your access point they do this by giving you wife i'd, are these wife i access point so laughs what's so odd the on the access point in the basement there's one that cable comes out and goes into this to transmit up to the phone and then to the TV and then one in the TV that goes to the ethernet cable on the back. [48:09] And it's like you think they would buy their devices with built-in Wi-Fi instead having to buy the all these external devices. [48:17] It works so what are you paying for months now. Just for that just for the internet 7373 says 9:40 but I haven't got 9:40 yet what are you getting. Like 700 still more time Kenny Biggs and then they put it onto a whatever Channel or whatever they would call it. And he says laws of three people. But they just literally bury the cable and my and my neighborhood so i also ask them what are they gonna do with your old phone lines, hey cuz you think that will be a lot of work to maintain those when they put some new they try to push people over, it really that much to see if your with some of my tech savvy your these third of resellers they leave them for tactical reasons or maybe not protect the reasons on the copper. Eventually just going to get rid of one of these a minute seems like a lot of effort to maintain the old system. [49:22] On the making money thing sold it i guess i guess because it much most people bothered switch. And member it now this is it totally to built in throttle for their back will not work, cuz if everybody was on gigabit their back Burns their back bones than saturated sister the built-in filter for the backbone and then people who each of a gig, or do you have to get your ass off again today, set up, taking plugged into right its Upstream right. It's fast once you get to the backbone at things will slow down. Yeah so it's just a little office in my neighborhood and the Beast labs and then, but anyhow it's interesting that these list of the Surfside DSL access manager. They end up with 1:35 different devices they put in my house. [50:41] A lot of a lot of Hardware okay. [50:48] Teacher i never thought it have a peavey are waiting on pier cuz they include that that's your channel's because i got channel that's your cable so i can get a sports. You stream sports well i suppose i suppose but he can't expose you can do them some of the for twenty dollars a month. To get all this for my biggest and you can record that I'm happy to pay for it I just wish it were more convenient. [51:14] Suppose i get some sort of online service now they have a pal account i could probably just rim of many were now cant so i don't really need any of this she's come to my fire got the stick will not even that, what does what are using for display for your dumb TV a dumb TV okay that's, they put in three boxes. So there's a few want sports sports sports is the only thing I watch I watch live. [51:53] Super Bowl commercials I don't know why you would record it, but this ticket comes it's the way it is I don't really want to court a baby I want to pause it maybe want to start a little later when I get home and fast forward it through it or whatever but those are incredibly minor I want to watch sports live. Yeah I like the way we watch the hockey game last week better beer, fluid and mrs casey like at the rings got the arena that's just all old school techno stupid three extra boxes of my house and if they just give me an account that hurt that work to their app which they probably did yet then why would i, I'm commercial because I have business at home so it's it's the same price or less that they give different boxes so once I get back from Australia puppy switching. I'm on freenet I like freenet good service etcetera free that doesn't let you switch what do you mean. [52:50] They'll stay on your existing copper. Now you can become a free night member for free. That's what the whole concept was but back it up i expect at some point they will allow the. Resellers to sell fiber as well but I'm not the first one to ever get fiber so I assume they're just delaying it so they. Don't have to buy a buddy of mine office next door he got income fill for 5 months ago right so. [53:33] They're just delaying as long as possible I'm sure it's for technical reasons. Okay this is again from the hundred and one are you shouldn't track milly should fired one whiskeys to tie to tie before you tried okay a quick glance around the shells it any decent specialists retail were confirm. There are quite a few different mccallum's mcallen's is that the one and not the other mcallen's okay color. [54:13] Dramatic dark mahogany Richmond. The. [54:34] There's definitely a penis taste. Powerful Sherry yes absolutely why not some smoke very very little smoke chewy Vanilla Fudge shirt spicy glazed I mean definitely the Sherry really does come up, that'll just, but it comes up very well to me you can definitely tell this is Sherry cask, enjoy that okay you know we should have that kinda late now which is videotapes recording this show no one ever gets mission cappy more in two minutes so i pick two minutes of it and it, very round and consistent some smoke hints and classic take notes. [55:18] Trike fruitcake having that food taking us to it, this is an expensive bottle is now because they were victim around success so they ran out basically and they took all this is from not available in our Market. Play put it in New York L A Las Vegas few other markets London Tokyo where people will pay exorbitant price of quadruple the price because it is it is i could other than that there other whiskeys has good the coastline as it has good butter yeah so, it's not like 50 or shot in Vegas basically yeah. [56:09] Alright that's all I got that's all that's all that is an awesome Whiskey on the Rocks we will talk to you later by the way my name is Dave so drink. These are the days I know I know.

From millionaire to decamillionaire to broke and back again in a whole new way and faster than ever - those are some of the credentials that may get you interested in listening to what our guest Marx Acosta-Rubio has to say. Today’s podcast was filled to the max by Marx. We’re not exaggerating when we say we could have gone on for at least twice as long in just this episode. Who doesn’t appreciate a story of a fall from grace to a stunning Phoenix-like rebirth?   With so much actionable mindset advice based on his own experience, it’s no wonder he’s got a bevy of GTD-ers lining up to take his 90-day challenge. As we listened to his business savvy around setting priorities, following the 80/20 principle and thriving in business, when Marx offered, we jumped at the chance to enroll in the challenge ourselves. We’re so busy these days getting out of our own way, we can’t imagine what’s next. This is a buckle down kind of episode. You may want to mark this one off in your schedule so you have enough time to take notes and develop a plan of action with all the takeaways hiding inside. If you like some of what Marx has to say, be sure to check out these past episodes with James Schramko and Christy Whitman that really hit home about gaining clarity, taking aligned action and abundance. You’re only one, two or three moves away from greatness or disaster.” - Marx Acosta-Rubio The reason I can have 14 clients and multiple companies...and still look like I’m doing nothing is because I know everything I’m not doing when I choose to do something...” - Marx Acosta-Rubio Some Topics We Discussed Include: How to get a Ph.D. in life Blue Eyes Ryan is a lurker. Who’d of guessed it? Ways to lose at life that begin with “b” and rhyme with “aim” How to go from being a name dropper to not even a cricket whisperer in 3 decisions Why you’ll never unhook the chains of self-sabotage unless you make this a regular practice Four un-delegatable tasks every entrepreneur who seeks success must acknowledge Two situations when your wife can call you a dumb-a@# and you’re happy about it (The name is D-u-m-a-s-s)! Anybody know what a GTD is? Riddle us this...What is it about your habits that’s holding you back? Is V2GP2 a new Star Wars character? The clearest path to twice the happiness and wealth in half the time Your secret weapon to make roadblocks negligible The true answer to the rarest commodity on the planet How to make a horse, water, and a 90-day challenge work in harmony Here’s why you’ve been doing the 80/20 principle all wrong Serving up, brain dump for one...Be sure to do this when two or more join forces You’ve got the what to do, now what about the how? Surrender or subconscious? Are you a kitty cat or the relentless guy trying to buy that “hot chick” drinks when it comes to setting business goals?   Matt gets his mind blown by the fluidity of a “context” The trick to taking action from all those books you read What is useless without emotion behind it? How “organic” and “natural” are keys to a better prioritization It’s not about ignoring the weeds but shifting how you let the presence of weeds affect you Why a “purposeful” morning self-care ritual may actually hamper your creativity and intuition What in the world is egoscue? Why you shouldn’t follow 80/20 all the time (Did you stop listening? We’ll tell you at the 80% done mark). What a Samurai and a successful entrepreneur have in common Three is the magic number How going fractal hits you in the wallet Avoid the, “You’re broken. It’s not your fault. Let me help you fix it.” book at all costs On becoming the protagonist in your own life story How following the GTD system can finally get clarity on your North Star Contact Marx Acosta-Rubio: Get in touch on Marx’s website Find Marx  on LinkedIn Follow Marx on Twitter References and Links Mentioned: Getting Things Done by David Allen Brain Chains by Dr. Theo Compernolle Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch The Breakthrough Principle of 16x-Richard Koch The Trick to Money is Having Some by Stuart Wilde The One Thing by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson Grant by Ron Chernow Jonathon Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson Steven Snyder’s speed reading method Motivational expert Tony Robbins W Clemen Stone the father of P.M.A. Brian Bradly’s Egoscue Method OmniFocus task management software Wunderlist task list software Lotus Notes software Evernote software Hustle & Flowchart Masterclass #72 with Christy Whitman Hustle & Flowchart Masterclass #49 with James Schramko Learn how to systemize, grow and scale your business and still have time to enjoy life when you apply to work with us

Andrew Burke has been a professional independent developer for over 20 years, working in everything from HyperCard and Lotus Notes to Ruby on Rails and iOS. Besides building software for various businesses, he teaches web development, speaks at conferences, and has several SaaS products and iOS apps on the side. In his spare time, he … Continue reading #002 – Weird Things About Time with Andrew Burke The post #002 – Weird Things About Time with Andrew Burke appeared first on Ardent Development Podcast.

“I won't live past 40” is something I said before I was 40. I meet a shocking number of guys who believe they aren't going to live past 40 (or some other arbitrary age). I don't know if this line of thinking is common with young women too, but for some reason men bring it up all the time. I used to think the same. I rarely worried about life after 40. It seemed too far in the future to worry. Even at 39, it seemed 40 wasn't likely to happen. My fear was more rational than most guys (though don't we all believe we're the rational one?). After all, I had a heart attack and quintuple bypass surgery at 37. I was already pushing the envelope. 40 would never happen. That may not be the way you think, or you may not realize you think it. But if you aren't planning for the future--well, that's a plan in and of itself. You're not going to die Good news/bad news: Odds are you're not going to die. I've looked up the statistics. If you survive your first year of life, you'll most likely make it past 40. Thinking you're going to die soon results in some crazy behavior. We fail to invest in long-term planning since we figure we won't be around. We focus on the present and leave the future to take care of itself. But that type of short-term thinking creates problems when we stumble past our target death date and we're still kicking. When I survived past 40, I was perplexed. I felt like a disappointed cult follower when the world doesn't end on the prophesied date. What's next? I hadn't prepared for the next phase. I regrouped, accepted the situation, and came up with a new target death date for my demise (also like the end-of-the-world fanatics). That was easy for me. My father died when he was 56. Certainly that would be the end of me as well. Time passed… And here we are again. Now, I'm 56. Things are going well. My health is good. But I'm only half-way through the year. Anything could happen. My wife is convinced a rickshaw will run me over here in New Delhi. She may be right, but at best it'll break my legs. Regardless, that type of short-term thinking isn't just ill-advised. It's dangerous. Here are some things we skimp on when we harbor the belief that we won't be around. 1. Vision Your vision guides your day-to-day decision making. If you can see it, you can build it. If your vision only encompasses a few years (like until age 40), it's not much help. The “dead at 40” crowd simply don't bother with vision. All they expect is a life doing the same thing others lawyers do, and a quick death at their desk at the predetermined time. Inspiring vision? I think not. Your vision is bigger than you. You need it for more than decision-making. Your vision inspires your team. They need to know where they're going and why they follow you. Your “imminent” death is an insufficient excuse for failing to exercise the primary responsibility of the business leader. Spend some time formulating a vision. 2. Team building Who needs a team if you're checking out soon? Yeah, you need a team. Investing in humans is important. Gallup surveys reveal that friendship at work is critical. Having a friend at work is one of the most important factors that determines whether your people will stick around and stay engaged. You need a strong connection to your people. Team building is more than ropes courses or Myers-Briggs tests. It's about knowing your people, caring about them, understanding them, and coming through when they need you. It's about setting expectations and then exceeding them. It's about building and maintaining trust by being consistent, predictable, and kind. Your team will only stick around if you invest in them like you're building something permanent and lasting. A big part of that, especially in the early years, is you. Lead people so they have something to believe and follow confidently. 3. Systems Your death makes building systems even more important. How will anyone wrap up your cases if you're dead and nothing is documented? The “dead at 40” crowd use their impending demise as an excuse to keep it all in their head. Why bother writing it down if you'll be gone anyway, right? I've said it before and I'll say it again: Systems are the business. I've even created a course on systems. That's how important they are. When you write things down, you free up space in your brain for higher-level work. You unburden yourself from trivia and use that bandwidth for growth. Systems enable you to delegate, outsource, and rely on others to handle things. Finding the energy and time to document systems requires a long-term focus. Investing in systems documentation is time-consuming and tedious. But it's the key to growing the business so you can take time off, invest in expansion, and eventually sell what you've created. 4. Networking Who needs a network if the central cog is checking out soon? That's an easy story to tell yourself as you cancel a lunch or coffee date. But you'll regret your lack of relationships when you're 41. Those twenty- and thirty-year relationships pay off later in life in a big way. The lawyer you befriended on the bar association softball team at age 30 becomes a key player in a big firm and your biggest referral source when she's 55. My approach to building your network is easier than you think, but it takes a long-term commitment. Relationships take time, and it's harder if you start later. Get to know people while everyone is looking to make new friends and build connections. Old people like me can't be bothered to meet someone new (we're tired, cranky, and busy watching TV). 5. Data management That data you pump into your practice management system will need to be extracted down the road. It's easy to ignore that concern if you plan to be dead. But if you're alive, you'll need a migration plan. My data has been stuck in three places over the years and getting it out each time was a nightmare. We got stuck in a product called Keyfile, then we had issues leaving Lotus Notes, and most recently we faced challenges leaving NetDocuments. It was all unpleasant, expensive, and painful. Assume that one day you'll need to migrate your data. Have an exit strategy before you enter. Push your vendor, before you give them your data, to have a pathway out. They won't make it easy (because they want you to stick around), but I'll never put my data somewhere again without the vendor's commitment to getting it out. 6. Succession planning You'd think that our focus on an early death would accelerate our succession plan. But that's not the way we roll. We think of death less as a succession opportunity and more as an escape plan. “Buh-bye and good luck,” we say as we imagine our ascent to heaven. Succession in a law firm takes time. Most law firm owners pass the baton to an associate or partner who has been with the firm for a long time. It takes years to build the relationship, and the buyer's financial position, so the new lawyer can take over. Those relationships need to start early. 7. Wealth building Basic financial sense shows us the power of compound interest. (Hint: It's our friend.) Investing early creates a dramatically bigger retirement fund. “But I'm going to die early,” we sometimes think. “I don't need a retirement account.” I've thought the same thing, but it's a terrible plan. It's hard to play catch-up later when we've lost all that time for asset growth. Sorry, but you won't die soon. It's math. So use that math to build wealth. Invest early. If you're dead, you won't care, but if you're alive, you'll be glad you set that money aside. You're going to see 41 Yep, you're going to live. I'm proof. Plus, there's all this data and science and stuff with statistics from experts. Don't plan on dying early, because it's not likely to happen. Live your life like you're going to keep living. Run your business the same way. Invest now, while you're energetic. Think long-term. Instead of shooting for low-value short-term wins, aim at the long-term, high-value target. Build, connect, systematize, manage and plan like there's a tomorrow. Because there is a tomorrow, so you might as well have a great business when you get there.

Most law firms pay lots of monthly fees for different services. The lines in our credit card statements flow over to the second page. And those fees add up. Some lawyers are enraged by those fees, but not me. I love them. I see those fees like I see the cost of groceries used to make dinner. They represent ingredients. Over the past several years, many of us have shifted from buying technology products to renting them. We pay monthly instead of making a one-time payment to own it. I pay monthly for our practice management system, document management system, phone system, legal research system, marketing products, and so on. The vendors love this model. In the old model, a server in our office (or in some data center) ran software we owned. Today, we "rent" the whole thing - hardware, software, development, and support. The vendor creates the software and runs it on their servers. We pay monthly for the use. Recurring monthly fees drive some people nuts. They can't stand all those small bills on their statement. There are actually services that analyze your credit card statements, identify the billers, and help you cancel the ones you're not using. Of course, those services bill monthly too. When a company can sell a monthly service designed to cancel other monthly services, you know people are agitated with recurring fees. Some lawyers get so upset by monthly subscriptions they find ways to return to buying instead of renting. Some go to extremes… I know a lawyer who bought and installed an internet server in his office to host his website because he was angry about paying his web host each month. Another lawyer has a hosted wiki for his office procedures because he doesn't want to pay a service specializing in checklists and systems documentation. Many lawyers still own practice management software running on their own server in an office. These lawyers can't stand paying monthly bills so they've found a way to get things done without paying a vendor on a monthly basis. They're buying software, building software, and hosting it themselves in an effort to cut some of those monthly recurring expenses from their budget. Unfortunately, they're being penny wise and pound foolish. They're sliding backward instead of plunging forward. I love the monthly bills I adore the recurring business model. I'll happily pay my monthly bills, month after month, forever. Those monthly bills are a big part of what has freed up my time, given me the opportunity to focus, and facilitated my full-time travel. These services let me work on the business instead of in the business. I can use my limited brain capacity where it has the biggest impact. These services are key to why I'm writing this article as I watch boats sailing by on the Adriatic (where the water, by the way, is incredibly clear.) I'm not bothered by the recurring billing model. I was annoyed at first. But over time, I adapted. Now I'm a fan. I love seeing these on our credit card bill… Salesforce - Our practice management system G Suite - Our email, calendar, contacts system Sharefile - Our document management system Vonage - Our voice system provider Zoom - Video conferencing and webinar provider Expensify - Expense reimbursement provider Front - Group email and customer support provider XpressDox - Document assembly provider SweetProcess - Systems document provider ManageWp - Web host CoSchedule - Marketing calendar Google Adwords, Facebook - Advertising And so much more Why do I love a monthly fee? It's variable, so it's affordable I like the variable expense aspect of it. I'm all about variable expenses. In fact, it's one of the key elements of the Rosen's Rules free course. Whether it's payroll, rent, or a software service, I always want my expenses to be variable. I don't mind paying more when we're booming. I love paying less when we're slow. Most of our monthly bills provide a fair amount of flexibility, either because (1) they charge more or less when we use more or less or (2) they're quick and easy to cancel when we aren't using them. We can ramp up when we're busy and cut back when we're slow. Avoiding fixed expenses has been an important element of remaining profitable during both up and down cycles. In the old days, we were committed to owning servers, meeting payroll for technicians, and making payments on leases and loans for hardware/software purchases. Now we're paying for what we need when we need it. We can walk away if we're not happy We live in a world where better products are just a click away. There's something newer and better coming out each week. When I buy something, I'm locked in. When I rent it without any long-term commitment, I can switch instantly. One day we were using GoToMeeting. The next day we were using Zoom. The switch was painless. We saved money and got more features. If GoToMeeting catches up, we can instantly switch back. It's awesome and puts us in the driver's seat. Rented products get better every month Cancellation is always just a click away. That kind of pressure forces vendors to improve their products. They've got to keep rolling out features, improving performance and optimizing the user experience. We get the benefit of their focus and expertise. I can see it happening right before my eyes. Salesforce rolls out significant improvements quarterly. Many of the products we use get better each month. It's not extraordinary for us to see weekly upgrades and enhancements. These products are built by experts focused solely on the product we're using. They're incorporating user suggestions, borrowing the best ideas from competitors, and dreaming up enhancements we would have never considered. The vendors feel the pressure of ensuring account renewals. That monthly billing cycle is constantly breathing down their necks. They keep rolling out the goodies so that we'll keep paying. There's someone to fix it Technology breaks. It's unavoidable. When that happens, we need someone to fix it - fast. Hosted technology is supported by layer upon layer of expertise, backups, and redundancy. When something breaks, you either never notice or it gets fixed almost immediately. A chill runs through me when I think back to the days of running our own servers. A midnight outage meant calling our guy at home and asking him to drive to the office so the machines would function at 8 AM for work. He'd be up all night tweaking, restarting and testing. Those days are long past. We've certainly bumped into problems over the years. Google has an outage from time to time and our email is down. Salesforce has a glitch and we can't get into our practice management system. Sharefile stumbles and we have to shoot them a message. But when something goes wrong with one of these vendors, they fix it. They've got a tight system and we're surprised if things aren't functioning normally within a moment or two. Those issues are few and far between. And they happen less and less frequently with each passing month. Our clients' data is safe Data security is complicated. Most of us don't even know what we don't know. It's way outside of our expertise. But security of our data and our clients' data is essential. It's not optional. In the old days, we worried whether our in-house IT guy really understood all those boxes he convinced us to buy for our server rack. We weren't certain that our consultants knew much more than the information found in the slick brochure. Now, paying our monthly fees, we're more comfortable. We know that our vendors can spread the cost of security over thousands of customers and afford the best and the brightest personnel. Of course, there is always the risk of a breach, but we're better protected than when we had to make our own security decisions and supervise the work. It's cheaper over time I've spent time supervising our computer guy. At one point we had two in-house computer guys. Truth be told, I had no idea what they did all day. I've spent time managing software projects. It was mostly trial and error. I knew when it worked and when it didn't, although even that was tricky because often I didn't realize it was broken until after we thought it was finished. I've requested changes, tweaks and improvements to our software. As often as not, my requests fixed one thing while breaking others. Every business should focus on what they're good at. We focus on legal work. The vendors should focus on their work. We make more money doing the things we know. So do they. When we're trying to fix a server, we're losing. When we're trying to build a wiki, we're losing. When we're developing a practice management system, we're losing. The first time we have to fix the broken software we own, we lose all of our savings. It's almost always better to rent than to buy when you consider lifetime costs. There is money to be made by law firms. Some of us are good at building relationships and marketing our services. Some are good at thinking through complex problems. And some are good at cranking out the work. That's where we win. If you're the exceptional lawyer who's great at technology, then maybe you should run a technology company. Those folks do pretty well from what I hear. Paying someone to do things for you makes sense when their work gives you time to maximize your value. Optimizing you law practice will make you more money than creating, supervising, managing and repairing technology. We are not alone I used to buy software and have it customized for our use. We had a pretty good system built on Lotus Notes and hosted on an internal server. But we were the only customer. New features only came when we requested customization. We could have anything we could imagine, but our imagination was limited. Basically, we only built solutions to the problems we encountered. We had no idea what might be possible. Now we benefit for everyone's imagination. When we buy a software service, we're part of a group of customers. They're speaking up, complaining, asking questions, making suggestions, and checking on things. The improvements are driven by the group. In total, the customer base drives the vendor at a pace we could never achieve on our own. The other users are demanding improvements that we never knew we needed. When those enhancements and fixes roll out, we benefit too. I like rented products even when the fees are high When we pay a lot, we get a lot. If we aren't satisfied, we leave. We spend a small fortune on Salesforce, but they've got 25,000+ folks working on the product we use 24/7/365. They hire the best and the brightest and deliver for us in every way possible. We're happy to pay when their focus is helping us serve our clients and grow our business. We've learned that they're excited to keep moving us forward by packing in new features, whether it's the latest in artificial intelligence, data security, or enhanced user experience. In the dynamic, fast-paced environment of technology, we nearly always get more when we pay more. It's awesome when great technology comes cheap. But ultimately, technology products are a relatively small expense for most law firms compared to the cost of our team. Having great technology enables us to produce a better product at a lower cost. Spending money on technology is nearly always a good investment. The challenge is finding new technology which improves your offering. The cost of that technology is easy to justify. I'd like more monthly bills Each bill represents one fewer headache, one less late night, one less phone call, and one less hour wasted by employees twirling their thumbs while waiting on slow, buggy software. I want more monthly bills. I used to think I wanted to own it, pay it off, and be done with it. Now I see the opposite. I want to borrow it, use it, and walk away when I'm finished. I love the variable cost of constantly improving products. I love the security of knowing we are grouped with other customers worried about the same issues. I love when vendors feel pressured to deliver because we can switch to something better in an instant. More great technology is exciting to me. I'm always on the lookout for the new thing that'll improve performance, lower costs, improve service, or grow our business. I welcome the opportunity to pay more monthly fees - I'm getting my money's worth. I used to believe that owning things had value. I thought we could build something and milk its value over the long haul. I imagined that technology products had equity I could exploit. Now I know that last cycle's technology is worth very little. Now I know that most tech services evolve at rapid speed. The value of yesterday's technology diminishes quickly. Owning the technology isn't how we increase equity. Building on top of someone else's technology is how we leverage ourselves to fulfill our potential. We need them to do what they do best so we can use their tools. That's how we create value for our clients. The equity we create comes from building our reputation, from optimizing a network of people using systems to satisfy clients, and from constantly incorporating expertise into those systems enabling us to stay at the top of the game. Paying those monthly bills represents an opportunity to create more value for clients, grow more equity in the business and do it in a way that makes your offering more appealing than that of the others in your marketplace. Don't shy away from recurring fees. They are the ingredients for the recipe that cooks up success.

Michael Coté: @cote | cote.io | Pivotal | Software Defined Talk Show Notes: 00:54 - Pivotal 04:39 - Being a Professional Muller aka Analyst 11:08 - Iterative Development 32:54 - Getting a Job as a Professional Muller aka Analyst Resources: Pivotal Cloud Foundry GemFire Greenplum Pivotal Labs Wardley Maps Software Defined Talk Episode #79: From a vegan, clothing optional co-op to working with banks and oil companies - Coté's professional life, part 1 Software Defined Talk Episode #85: Being an analyst without being an asshole - Coté's professional life, part 2 RedMonk Transcript: CHARLES: Hello everybody and welcome to The Frontside Podcast, Episode #66. I am a developer, Charles Lowell at The Frontside and also host-in-training for 65 episodes. This is my 66th and I'm flying alone this week but we do have on the show with us a very special guest. Actually, the person who taught me how to podcast, I think it was about 10 years ago and he was like, "Charles, we should do this podcasting thing." I started my very first podcast with him and I still haven't figured it out. But his name is Michael Coté and he's a fantastic guy and welcome to the show, Coté. MICHAEL: Thanks for having me, Charles. It's great to be here. CHARLES: Now, what are you up to these days? You're over at Pivotal. MICHAEL: That's right. I work at Pivotal and probably people who are in the developing world know them for Spring. We have most of the Spring people. Then we also have this thing Pivotal Cloud Foundry. We're not supposed to call it a platform as a service but for matters of concision, it's a platform as a service that's the runtime that you run your stuff in. Then we also have a bunch of data products like GemFire and Greenplum and things like that. Then, 'openymously', if that's a word, we have Pivotal Labs. Now -- CHARLES: I think, it's eponymously. MICHAEL: Eponymously, yes. Now, you might remember Pivotal Labs as the people who use Chef Scripts to configure their desktops. Remember that? CHARLES: Yeah, I remember that. I was into that. MICHAEL: Yeah, in coincidental kind of way, the inspiration for the project Sputnik thing, which is coincidentally because now Dell Technologies owns Pivotal so all of that stuff has come for a full circle. I guess also since I'm intro-ing myself, I work on what we call the Advocate Team because we don't call them evangelists. No one likes to be called that I guess. I guess there's 12 of us now. We just hired this person, also in Austin actually McNorma who's big in the Go community and apparently can make images of gophers really well. I'm sure she does many other extraordinary things, not just the illustrator master. Everyone else basically like codes or uses the terminal but I do slides. CHARLES: Well, that's your weapon of choice, right? It's a more elegant weapon for civilized time or something like that. I'm going to look it up on Wikia. MICHAEL: Yeah, basically what we do on our team is we just talk about all the stuff Pivotal does and problems that we solve in the way people in an organizations like would think to care about our stuff. Most of what I do is I guess you call it the management consultant type of stuff. Since I have a background as an analyst and I used to work on corporate strategy and M&A at Dell so I have a vantage point in addition to having programmed a long time ago. If you're changing your organization over to be more agile or trying to devops, we would say cloud-native with a hyphen. How do you change your organization over what works and doesn't work? Most people in large organizations, they sort of pat you on your head. I'm sure you encounter this. That sounds really nice that we would be doing all of the good, correct ways of using computers but we're basically terrible and we could never make that happen here. Thanks for talking with us, we're going to go back and stew in our own juices of awfulness. You've got to pluck them out of that self-imposed cannibal pot there in the jungle and show them that they actually can improve and do things well. CHARLES: Would you say you feel like your job is being that person who shakes them away and can be like, "Good God! Get a grip on yourself!" MICHAEL: Sure. That's a very popular second or third slide in a presentation -- the FUD slide, the Fear of Uncertainty and Doubt slide where you're basically like, "Uber!" and then everyone just like soils their pants because they're afraid that are like Airbnb and Uber and [inaudible] and Google is going to come in and, as they say, disrupt their state industry. I try not to use the slides anymore because they're obnoxious. Also, most people in large organizations nowadays, they know all of that and they've already moved to putting on a new pair of pants stage of their strategizing. CHARLES: You've got the kind of the corporate wakeup call aspect of it but then it's also seems like a huge component of your job which is when you were at RedMonk, when you were at 451 and even to a lesser extent, it was Dell who was paid well to just kind of mull it over, like just kind of sit there and asynchronously process the tech industry, kind of like organizational yeast and let it ferment, kind of trying to see where the connections lie and then once you've made that presented, do you think that's fair? That's what sprung to mind when I heard you say like, "Yeah, we just kind of sit around and think about what is Pivotal and what does it do and what's it going," but like how do you get that job of like, "I'm just kind of a professional muller." MICHAEL: That's right. First of all, I think professional muller is accurate, as long as, I guess mulling is also for -- what's that thing you drink at Christmas that you put the little -- CHARLES: Mulled wine. Like low wine. MICHAEL: I can feel like that sometimes late at night. But having a job as an analyst, I was an industry analyst at two places for a total of about eight years or so. Then as you're saying doing strategy at a company, now what I do here, essentially a lot of what you do is very difficult. I know it sounds to people. You just read a lot of the Internet. You just consume a lot of the commentary and the ideas of things that are going out there and you try to understand it and then synthesize to use that cheesy word. Synthesize it into a new form that explains what it is and then finally, the consultant part comes in where you go and meet with people or you proactively think about what people might be asking and they say something like, "What does this mean for me? And how would I apply it to solve my problems?" I guess as an example of that -- I apologize for being a little commercial but these are just the ideas I have in my head -- Ford is a customer of ours and they also have invested in us which is kind of novel. We have GE and Ford invested in Pivotal and Microsoft and Dell Technologies as an interesting mix but anyways, they have this application called the Ford Pass Application. I drive a Ford Focus -- CHARLES: Like Subaru? But you do drive a Ford. MICHAEL: Yeah, because I don't care about cars. It's a bunch of nonsense. I see this app and basically the app, if you have a more advanced one, it might tell you your mileage and even like remotely start your car. But it doesn't really do that much. You have the app and it will tell you information about your car and where to park and it even has this thing where it links to another site to book a dealership thing, which is annoying. CHARLES: Why would you want to book a dealership? To buy another car? MICHAEL: Well because the Ford Focus I have is notorious for having transmission problems so you're like, "I got to go and take it into the dealer to get all this recall stuff taken care of," so wouldn't it be nice... I don't know if you've ever worked with a car dealer but it's not desirable. CHARLES: Yeah, it would be nice if they didn't charge $6000 for everything. MICHAEL: Right. It's a classic system of having a closed market, therefore that jacks up prices and lowers customer service usually. What's the fancy word if there is a negative correlation, if you were to chart it out? Like price is negatively correlated to your satisfaction with it. Kind of like the airline industry, not to bring up a contemporary topic. You pay a lot of money to fly and you're like, "This is one of the worst experiences I've had in my life," whereas you go to the dentist and get a root canal and you're like $20 co-pay. Loving it. [Laughter] MICHAEL: Anyhow, this Ford Pass application doesn't really do very much so what does that mean for what I was explaining. If you go look up and read about it, starting back in the late-90s, your extreme programming and then your Agile Software Development and your devops nowadays, one of the major principles is what you should do is ship often. Maybe you should even ship every week or every day. Don't worry about this gigantic stack of requirements that you have and whatever you should be shipping all the time and then we've trained ourselves to no longer say failing fast. That was a fun cheeky thing back in the late-2000s. CHARLES: Did we trained ourselves not to say that anymore? MICHAEL: I don't hear it very often. CHARLES: Man, I got to go scrub my brain. MICHAEL: Yeah, well this is why you consult with me every 10 years as I tell you the new things. CHARLES: Okay, here we go. We're going to have you on the podcast again. MICHAEL: That's right. You have this idea of like, "We should be releasing weekly," but then if you go to Ford, you're like, "What does that mean?" To shave the shaggy dog here, essentially the idea that they're shipping this mobile application that doesn't really do very much is an embodiment of the idea that they should be shipping more frequently. This may be a stupid example. It's not that it's not going to do very much like permanently but as I have witnessed, very frequently they add new features so Ford is in this cadence but there's this app that instead of working on an application for two years and having everything in it, they're actually releasing it on, I don't know if it's weekly but they're releasing it on a very frequent basis, which allows them to add features. What that gets you is all the advantages of a fast iteration cycle small batch thing where they can study this actually a good feature. They can do all your Lean Startup nonsense. That's a very like weird, perhaps example of how you explain to someone like a large car manufacturer like Ford, this is what devops means for you. Therefore, why you should spend a lot of money on Pivotal? Now that's the part that lets me pay my mortgage every month, the last bit there. CHARLES: Right so Pivotal builds apps. MICHAEL: Well, the Labs people build apps for you. CHARLES: I'm kidding Coté. MICHAEL: Yeah, they actually do. The Labs people are like a boutique of another boutique like ThoughtWorks is kind of a boutique but they're kind of a boutique-y version of ThoughtWorks. That probably is terrible as someone who markets for Pivotal to do that. Do you ever notice how political candidates never really name their opposition? Like you never really want to name your competition but anyways... CHARLES: Pivotal marketing are going to come crashing through your window. Everybody, if we hear them in the next five seconds -- well, I guess you can't call 911 because this is not live. MICHAEL: Yeah, that's true. The Labs people build stuff for you and then the part that I work, in the Pivotal Cloud Foundry people, they have the actual runtime environment, the cloud platform that you would run all that stuff. Plus all the Spring nonsense for your microservices and your Spring Boot. I understand people like that. CHARLES: So good for Ford, for actually being able to experience, either in the development and the joys and the benefits that come with it. But this is actually something that I actually want to talk about independently was as I kind of advance in my career, I find myself pushing back a little bit against that incredibly tight, iterative schedule. Shipping things is fantastic and it's great but I find so much of my job these days is just trying to think out and chart a course for where those iterations will carry you and there is a huge amount of upfront design and upfront thought that it is speculatory but it's very necessary. You need to speculate about what needs to happen. Then you kind of measure against what's actually happening but I feel that kind of upfront design, upfront thought, we had this moment we're like, "We don't need that anymore. Let's throw it all in the garbage." In favor of doing things in these incredibly tight loops and finding where's the clutch point, that kind of long range thinking and long range planning comes and meets with the iterative development. I have no idea. What's the best way for those to match up those long cycles and those short cycles? Where is the clutch play? MICHAEL: I'll give you two and a half, so to speak trains of thoughts on that. One of them is I think -- CHARLES: Two and half trains of thought, I like that. Can we get straight to the half train of thought? MICHAEL: Yeah, I'm going to start with the half, which is just taking all of your questions and putting periods at the end of them before I round up to answering the question. I think a lot of the lore and the learnings you get from the Agile world is basically from consultants and teams of consultants. Necessarily, they are not domain experts in what they're doing so their notion is that we're going to learn about what it is we're doing and we don't actually know we can't predict ahead of time because we're not domain experts so they almost have this attitude of like, "We'll just figure it out on the job." Let's say The Frontside gets hired to go work on a system that allows the Forest Service to figure out which trees to go chop down or not -- CHARLES: If you're the Forest Service, we are available to do that. MICHAEL: I'm guessing you don't have a lot of arborists who have 10 or 20 years of experience working there. CHARLES: No, we don't. MICHAEL: And so you have no idea about that domain so in doing an iterative thing, you won't be able to sit down and predict like everyone knows that when you send the lumberjacks out, they're going to need these five things so we're going to have to put that that feature on there. They need to be able to call in flapjacks when they run out. That's just what's going to happen so you don't know all of these things they need to do so you just can't sit down and cogitate about it ahead of time. Also this comes in from the Lean Startup where there's a small percentage of software that's actually done globally and the notion of a Lean Startup is that when you're doing a startup, you're never going to be determined what your exit is, how you cash out, whether that's building a successful long term company while you get sold to someone or whether you IPO, you're not going to able to predict what that business model is so you just need to start churning and not think a lot ahead of time. Now, the problem becomes, I think that if you are a domain expert, as you can do the inverse of all the jokes I was just making there, you actually can sit down and start to predict things. You're like, "We know we're going to need a flapjack service," so we can predict that out and start to design around that and you can do some upfront thinking. Now similarly, developers often overlook the huge amount of governance and planning that they do for their own tools, which I know you're more cognizant of being older or more experienced, as they like to say. But basically, there's a bunch of, as we used to call it when I did real work and develop stuff, iteration zero work like we're going to need to build a build system, we're going to need a version control. You actually do know all these things you're going to need so there are all the things you can plan out and that's analogous to whatever domain you're working in. Sometimes, at least for your toolchain, it is worth sitting down and planning out what you want. Now, to hold back the people who are going to crash in my window, one of the things you should consider is using Pivotal Cloud Foundry. That's probably something you should cogitate on ahead of time. CHARLES: I think they're going to crash through your window and give you a Martini, if the marketing ninjas are going to do that and if you mention them in a positive light. MICHAEL: You know, it's 10:52 Central but if we were in London, it would probably be an appropriate time so we'll just think about that. Now, on the other hand, you don't want to go too overboard on this pre-planning. I'll give you an example from a large health insurance company that I was talking with recently. They had this mobile app -- it's always a mobile app -- that had been languishing for 15 months and it really wasn't doing anything very interesting. It was just not working well and they could never release it. This is a classic example of like, "We took a long time to release a mobile app and then we never released it again and then it blows." It's not achieving all of the business goals that we wanted. Mostly, what a health insurance company -- I've talked with a lot of the health insurance companies -- want with their mobile app is at least two things and probably many more but these would be the top of the list. One, they want their customers, their users to look up what their health insurance is, figure out doctors they can go to, the basic functioning that you expect from your health insurance company. And two, they want to encourage their customers to do healthy behaviors because if you think about it as a health insurance company, health insurance in my mind is basically like this weird gamble of like, "I'm gambling on the fact that you are going to be healthy," because then I pay out less to you and you just give me money so the healthier that your users can be, the more profit you're going to make. That's why they're always trying to encourage you to be healthy and stuff like that. The mobile app was not achieving, at least these two, if not other business goals they have. They basically were rebooting the effort. The way they started off is they had -- I don't know how many inches thick it was -- a big, old stack of requirements and the first few iterations, the product team was working on it and talking with the business analyst about this and going over it and what they sort of, as we were calling Pivotal Labs the product owner but the person who runs the team, realize is like -- to cut a long story short -- "This is kind of a waste of time. We shouldn't just prioritize these 300 features and put them in some back road and execute on them because these are the same features that we based the more abundant application on, we should probably just start releasing up the application," kind of like the FordPass app. That said, they did have a bunch of domain experience so they had a notion of basically what this app was going to do and they could start planning it out but they figured out a good balance of not paying attention to, as Martin Fowler used to call it the almighty thud, of all the requirements. What they ended up doing is they basically -- CHARLES: What's the almighty thud? MICHAEL: You know, he's got some bleaky or whatever. It's basically like we started a project and I think it's from 2004 and someone FedExed me about 600 pages of an MRD or whatever and I put it down on my table and it made a loud noise so he calls that the 'almighty thud', when you get this gigantic upfront requirement thing. What happened in this health insurance thing is they stopped listening and talking with those people and they kind of like chaff them out, not like when your rub your legs together but they kind of distracted them to that fact but eventually, they just got them out of the cycle and they started working on the app. Then lo and behold, they shipped it and things are working out better now. CHARLES: Hearing what you're saying and kind of thinking it over, I think if you're going to have an almighty thud, what you really want is you want all that upfront research and all that upfront requirements gathering or whatever, not necessarily to take the form of a set of features or some backlog of 300 things that the app 'needs' to do or 'should' do but just a catalogue of the problems, like a roadmap of the problems. MICHAEL: Exactly. CHARLES: You know, that actually is very valuable. If it's like, "These are things that are true about our users and these are the obstacles that they face. If we do choose that we want to go from Point A to Point B, where we are at Point A, then we actually have a map of what are the things that are sitting in front of that and what are the risks involved." It's like if you got -- you played, you're from my generation, you play the Oregon Trail, right? MICHAEL: Yeah. "You have dysentery." CHARLES: Right. I don't know where I'm going with this analogy but my point is developing that app is like going from Kansas City to Portland. But the thing about software is you don't necessarily have your corn meal. You don't need to say like, "We're going to need six pounds of cornmeal and we're going to need these wagons and we're going to need these mules," because this is software and you can just code a mule if you need it. But you might not need a mule, if the rivers are not in flood... I don't know. Like I said, I don't know where I'm going with this analogy. But do you see what I'm saying? The point I'm trying to make is that having the map of the Rockies and where the passes are is going to help you. MICHAEL: Yeah, this is probably where I'm supposed to expertly rattle off what Wardley maps are and how they help, which is fine. I think that's a great tool. There's this guy Simon Wardley and he's actually a great contemporary philosophizer on IT-led strategy. I think he works for CSC who no longer owns mercenaries but they used to -- Computer Science Corporations. I think they own a little bit of HP Services Division but he works for some think tank associated with CSC and he has got a couple of OSCON talks on it, where it's called a Wardley map and it's a way that you start figuring out what you're saying, which is to say your company's strategy. Using your front metaphor of the era of tall hats, if you remember that other movie, if you're on the Oregon Trail, broadly your strategy is -- and people get all up in your face about the difference between a plan and a strategy and we'll just put mute on them and edit them out of the audio because they're very annoying -- CHARLES: We'll call it an approach. MICHAEL: That's right. Your plan or your strategy -- and pardon me if I use these phrase free and loosely and everything -- is you would like to get to Oregon and you would like to live there and maybe grow apples or start a mustache wax company or some donuts, whatever it is you do out there once you get to Oregon and their strategy is -- what are the assets that I have. I have a family, I have some money and I also know some people who are going there so I'm going to buy a stagecoach and a mule, then I'm going to kind of wangle it out and we're going to go over there. Also, part of our strategy is we're going to go through the northern pass because we're used to winter versus the southern pass, which isn't the Oregon Trail because reasons. Maybe Texas isn't part of The Union yet so I don't want to deal with the transition between whatever that weird Texas thing down there -- CHARLES: The desert, there's the southwest and the desert. MICHAEL: I don't have the capabilities to survive in a desert so I need to go to the north and hopefully I won't be like that movie and have a grizzly bear rip up my backside and everything. You sort of put together this plan. Now going back to what you would do in IT world is to your point, someone does need to define what we would call the business value or the strategy, like what you want to do. Looking at the Ford thing, what Ford wants to do is they do cogitating thing ahead of time and they're like, "We manufacture cars," and you've got electric cars and Uber. That's where the scarce light comes in. In the future, who knows that people will still buy cars? It might be like that I-Robot movie where all the cars are automated and you just go into one. As a company, whose responsibility is to be as immortal as possible, we need to start making plans about how we can survive if individuals no longer buy cars. Let's do that. This is a huge upfront notion that you would have and then that does trickle down into things like my Ford thing -- I'm kind of speaking on their behalf -- if we have a direct connection with people, maybe eventually we introduce an Uber-like service. You can just check-out a Ford car. Then maybe this and maybe that. It's the strategy of how do we set ourselves up to do that. Now, I think the Agile people, what they would go for is it's really good to have that upfront strategy and you'll notice that in a lot of lean manufacturing in Agile talk, no one ever talks about this stuff, much to my extreme annoyance. They don't ever talk about who defines the strategy and who defines that you're working on this project. That's sort of left as an exercise to the reader. The Agile people would say like, "The implementation details of that are best left to the development team in an Agile model." Just like the developers are always arrogantly are like, "Hey, product manager. How about you f-off about how I should implement this? I am the expert here and let me decide how I'm going to implement the feature that you want for me." It's kind of like that rushing dolling down of things. To the development team, you worked on some, what was it? Band frame wire thing, a long time ago? It was basically like, "We don't know it. Maybe this is not the case. Let's pretend like it was." We don't know exactly how you're going to implement this stuff but our goal is that there's bands and they need sides and ways of interacting with their users so let's just figure out what that looks like but they had that upfront idea of ways that they were doing things. CHARLES: Let's start walking. MICHAEL: To add on some more. There's another edge case that you're making me think of, which is a good way of thinking through almighty thuds versus how much planning you have and that's government work. Government work that's done by contractors and especially, military contracting work. What you notice in government work is they have, seemingly way too much paperwork and process. They literally will have project managers for project managers and the project managers have to update how the project is going and they reports. If they don't do the reports correctly, their contract is penalize and you might even get fired for doing it. If anyone stops and says while the software is working, they were like, "No, no, no. don't be naive. It doesn't matter if the software is working or not, if we don't fill up the project report, we're fired." Until someone like yourself or me, it's just like your head explodes and you're like, "But working software, not a concern." In that case, it actually is part of the feature set, part of the deliverable is this nauseating amount of project reporting and upfront requirements, which has this trickle-down effect of annoyance but that's what you're getting paid for so that's what you do and if you want to make yourself feel better about it. I don't know how it is in the rest of the world but in the US, basically we think the only person worse than maybe, Lucifer is the government. I don't know why this comes about. We enjoy the fruits of the government all the time but for some reason, we just think they're awful. Whenever we give money over the government, we want to make sure that they're spending it well and if they're not corrupt and they don't hire their entire family to help them run the government and make sure that they're making extra money globally in their businesses, I wouldn't know anything about that. But essentially, you want to make sure there's no corruption so transparency is almost more important than working software. The way you achieve that transparency is with all this crazy documentation. CHARLES: Here's the thing. I agree the transparency is fantastic but nothing is more transparent than working software. Nothing is more transparent than monitored software. Nothing is more transparent than software whose, by its very nature is radiating information about itself. You can fudge a report but you can't fudge a million happy users. MICHAEL: Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that the way that things currently operate is the ideal state. I'm saying that that desire for transparency has to be addressed and for example, using your example, let's say you were delivering working software but you were also skimming 20% off the top into some Swiss bank account -- you're basically embezzling -- and then it turns out that you need 500 developers but you only actually had 30 developers. There was corruption. The means even though the ends, even though the outcome was awesome, the means was corrupt so that's the thing in a lot of government work that you want to protect against. I just bring that up as an edge case so a principle to draw from that, when it comes to almighty thudding is like sometimes, that is part of the deliverable. We would aspire in our fail, fast, Agile world to not have a bunch of gratuitous documentation as part of the deliverable because it seems like a waste. It would be like every morning when you battle with your kids to get their shoes on, you had to write a two-page report about how you're getting ready to go to school stuff with your kids was going. As a parent you would be like, "I don't need that." However, maybe if you were like an abusive parent and it was required for you to fill out a daily status report for you to retain the parentship of your kids, maybe it would be worth of your time to fill out your daily status report. That was an awfully depressing example there. CHARLES: Let's go back to the Oregon Trail. What I'm hearing is that -- and we will take it back to the Oregon Trail -- you also need to consider, as were saying, you have some sort of strategy which is we want to go sell apples and moustache wax. But what we're going to do is we're just going to start walking, even though we don't have a map. But obviously, if you send out scouting missions, like you know where you're going, you know the West Coast is out there somewhere, you start walking but the stakes determine how much of your resources you spend on scouting and map drawing -- MICHAEL: Yeah. My way of thinking about strategy and again, people strategy is this overloaded word. But my way of thinking about strategy is you establish a goal: I would like to go to the West Coast. Now, how you figure that out could be a strategy on its own, like how did you figure out you want to go to the West Coast. But somehow, you've got to get to a prime mover. Maybe those tall hat people keep beating me up so I want to go to the West Coast. I want to go the West Coast is the prime mover. There's nothing before that. Then you've got to deal in a series of constraints. What capabilities do I have, which is another way of saying, what do I not have? And what's my current situation and context? On the Oregon Trail thing, you might be like, "I have a family of seven. I can't just get a horse and go buy a pack of cigarettes and never show up again." I guess I could do that. That's probably popular but I, as an individual have to take this family of six other people. Do I have the capabilities to do that? How could I get the cash for it? Because I need to defend against all the madness out there, I'm going to need to find some people to meet with. You're thinking and scenario planning out all of this stuff and this gets to your point of like, "If you're going to Oregon, it probably is a good idea to plan things out." You don't want to just like the next day, just figure it out. [inaudible] tell a joke. It's like, "Why do they sell luggage at the airport? Is anyone is just like, 'Screw it. Pack a clothes and we'll sort it out at the airport.'" It's an odd thing to sell at the airport. But you do some planning and you figure out ahead of time. Now, to continue the sort of pedantry of this metaphor, the other characteristic of going to the Oregon Trail, unless you're the first 10 people to do it is hundreds, if not thousands of people have done it already so you kind of know what it's going to be like. It's the equivalent, in a piece of software, if they were like, "This application is written in COBOL. I want you to now write it in --" I don't know, what are the kids do nowadays? Something.io? I-want-you-to-write-this-in-a-hot-new-language.io and basically just duplicate it. You're going to still have to discover how to do things and solve problems but if the job is just one-to-one duplicate something, then you can do a lot more upfront planning for it. CHARLES: While you're doing it, making the Uber and Airbnb. MICHAEL: Yes. CHARLES: Then you're done. MICHAEL: I think that's the truth and I want to put it another way. We used to be down here in Texas, the way we run government here is just lovely but we used to have this notion of a zero-budget, which is basically like, "Assume I'm going to give you nothing and justify every penny that I'm going to give you." I think that's a good way to think about defaults. I mean, about requirements is default is you don't need any and only get as many requirements as you need. If you're building tanks or going to the Oregon Trail, you might need a lot of requirements upfront that are actually helpful. CHARLES: But like a suit, you're just going to just strike out naked walking with. MICHAEL: That's probably a bad idea unless you -- CHARLES: Yeah, that is a bad idea but that's the bar but what happened if I were to do that? I might make it for 20 miles. MICHAEL: And build up from there and then have all the requirements that you need. I'm sure when Lewis and Clark went they were like, "We're going to need a quill and some paper and maybe a canoe and probably some guns and then let's see what happens." But that was a whole different situation than going to establish Portland. CHARLES: That was an ultimate Agile move. That was a pretty Agile project. They needed boats, they built them but they didn't leave St Louis carrying boats. MICHAEL: Right and they also didn't have a family of six that they needed to support and all this kind of stuff, right? CHARLES: Uhm-mm. MICHAEL: There was a question you asked a long time ago, not to steal the emceeing for you -- CHARLES: I would say, we need to get onto our topic -- MICHAEL: Oh, yeah. Well, maybe this is a good saying, what you're asking is, "How do you get this job?" and I don't think we ever addressed that. CHARLES: Yeah, that's a great question. You said you had to consume a lot of stuff on the internet. MICHAEL: Right. That's definitely how I do the job but I think how I get the job, there's an extended two-part interview with me on my Software Defined Talk Podcast Episode, available at SoftwareDefinedTalk.com, where I talk about my history of becoming an analyst and things like that but the way it happened is I don't have any visible hobbies, as you know Charles except reading the stuff in the Techworld. I would read about what's happening in the Techworld and would blog about it back in 2004, 2005 and I was discovered as it were by the people at RedMonk. I remember for some reason, I wrote some lengthy opinion piece about a release of Lotus Notes. I don't know why but that was a good example. This is back when all of the programming job were going to be off shored and I thought it was imminent that I was going to lose my job. I was looking for a job and I shifted over to being an analyst. That like the way that you get into this kind of business is you establish, there's two ways -- CHARLES: You established expertise, right? MICHAEL: Yeah, which is like always an unhelpful answer because it's sort of like, I was joking about this in another podcast, it's like Seth Godin's advice about doing good marketing, which is the way you do good marketing is you have an excellent product. If you have an excellent product that everyone wants to buy, then your marketing will take care of itself. I think if I'm asking how to market, I'm trying to figure out how to market a bad product. That's really what people want. CHARLES: That's also just not true. That's just like flat ass not true. That's a lie. MICHAEL: I mean, people who want to know how to diet better are not already healthy and dieting successful. You can't start with the base assumption of things are going well. CHARLES: Well, it is true. I like to think that we have an excellent product. We sell an excellent product but the thing is you can just sit on your excellent product all day and you have to tell people about it. If you want them to come sample it and try, maybe eventually buy it like the advice that you just need an excellent product. I'm amazed at anyone who can actually can say that with a straight face. MICHAEL: Well, he only writes like 150-word blogpost. I think his point is that you should aspire to have a unique situation and then marketing is easier. Similar with everyone's favorite example like an Apple or like a Pivotal or a ThoughtWorks. We eat all three of us and yourself as well, once someone gives you the benefit of the doubt of listening, you can explain why what you have is not available anywhere else. CHARLES: What it boils down to is if you want to easily differentiate, allow people to differentiate your products from others, then be different. That's fair. I'll give -- MICHAEL: To summarize it, it begets more of the tactics of how one gets a job like I do. What's the name of the short guy in Game of Thrones? 'Tyrian'? 'Tyran'? 'Tyron'? CHARLES: Tyrion. MICHAEL: At one point, Tyrion is like, "I do two things. I know things and I drink," so that's how you get into this type of business as you establish yourself as an expert and you know things. Now, the third thing which I guess Tyrion was not always required to do is you have to be able to communicate in pretty much all forms. You need to be good at written communication, at verbal communication, at PowerPoint communication, whatever all the mediums are. Just knowing something is not very useful. You also have to tell people these things. CHARLES: I think Tyrion is pretty good at that. MICHAEL: Yeah, that's true but he doesn't ever write anything. There is no Twitter or things like that. CHARLES: I feel like [inaudible] been a pretty big deal in the blogosphere. MICHAEL: Sure, no doubt. The metaphor kind of breaks down because the lattice for the continuing counterarguments do not exist in the Game of Thrones universe but whatever. CHARLES: They've got the ravens. That's like Twitter and it's bird. MICHAEL: That is true. Knowing how to deploy a raven at the right time, with the right message is valuable. CHARLES: We buffer up our ravens so that they fly right at eleven o'clock. MICHAEL: That's true. I could be convinced otherwise. CHARLES: That's why they arrived both at 6PM in the Westeros -- MICHAEL: I guess true to the metaphor of a tweet, most of the communications in Game of Thrones is either, what are they called? Little Birds? That the [inaudible] always has and then the Big Birds. You've got to tweets and the blogs. CHARLES: This is like it's nothing but Twitter. MICHAEL: Exactly. You got to really communicate across mediums. Now that the other thing that's helpful and you don't necessarily have to do this but this is what I think gets you into the larger margin. The more profitable parts of the work that I do is you have to be able to consult with people and give them advice and consulting is largely about, first figuring out the right opportunity to tell them how they can improve, which usually is it's good if they ask you first. I don't know about you but I've found that if you just pro-offer advice, especially with your spouse, you're basically told that you're a jerk. CHARLES: Well, it'd be like a personal trainer and walking around me like, "Hey man. Your muscle tone is kind of flabby. You got to really work on that." MICHAEL: The line between a good consultant and being overly-explain-y is difficult to discern but it's something that you have to master. Now, the other way you consult with people is you study them and understand what their problems are and you're sympathetic to them and I guess you can be like a British nanny and just scold them. That's a certain subset of consulting. CHARLES: Don Rickles of consulting? MICHAEL: That's right. You just help them understand how all of this knowledge that you have applies to them and hope solve their problems like the FordPass thing. When I went from being a developer to an analyst, it was a big risk to take on. I think I probably took like a $30,000 pay cut and I went from a big company health insurance to being on a $10.99 and buying your own health insurance which a whole other conversation. We talked about that every now and then but like it's a risky affair. It's not a promotion or even a lateral move. It's just an entirely different career that you go into. Then you talk with people a lot. As an analyst, you're constantly having to sort out the biases that you have with vendors who want to pay you to save things versus end-users who want to hear the truth. You can't really see a lot of Gartner and Forrester work but the work that you can see publicly from people like RedMonk, it's pretty straightforward. CHARLES: Yeah it is and whatever they did, a piece that was for one of their clients, there was always a big fat disclaimer. MICHAEL: Now, the other thing I would say is what I've noticed -- not to be all navel-gazing -- about myself and other people who are successful at whatever it is I do is there's two things. One, they constantly are putting themselves out there. I remember and this is probably still the case. This is probably all in Medium. There's probably a Medium post every quarter that's like, "If you're a developer, how do you give more talks. What your first conference talk?" Basically, the chief advice in there, other than bring business cards and rehearse is essentially like you just got to get over that idea of self-promotion. You basically have to self-promote yourself incessantly and do all those things that you find nauseous and be like, "Me, me, me," which is true. You've got to get over that thing. If you're like me and you're an introvert who actually doesn't really like that many people, except a handful of people like yourself that I'm friends or family with, you have to put on the mask of an extrovert and go out there and do all this extrovert stuff or you'll fail. I shouldn't say you'll fail, you won't increase your overall comp and margin and everything. You'll basically bottom out at about $120,000 a year or so because that's about as much as anyone will pay for someone who just write stuff but doesn't actually engage in the world and consult. You've got to do that. Then the other consequence of that is you always have to be trying out new types of content and mediums like here we are in a podcast. Long ago, you and I, in 2005 or 2004 -- CHARLES: You got me to sign up for Twitter. MICHAEL: Yeah, like we started off a podcast because I remember hearing the IT conversation stuff and John [inaudible], who is a big inspiration for me, a role model, I remember he was just trying out podcast and I was like, "All right. I'll try that out. That looks like fun," and then here we are. CHARLES: I remember you tried out the podcast and you're like, "Let's go into your backyard or my backyard. Let's talk about software for 15 minutes." I remember that very clearly and that was 12 years ago. Then I remember also like with Twitter, you're like, "Now, you should sign up for this Twitter thing," and I remember I did and that's when it was still coming through SMS on your phone and like "I'm walking around Teatown Lake. I'm going to get tea." And I was like, "Oh, my God. This is so fucking stupid." But little did I know, you were actually signed me up to a service that changed my life. MICHAEL: Yeah, it was the stage direction era of Web 2.0 where you're just supposed to give people your status updates, instead of your searing insights. But yeah, you've tried it all these different mediums because again it goes back to your job is to communicate. You need to tell people things that you know. CHARLES: Coté, what is your strategy on virtual reality? MICHAEL: My strategy in virtual reality. Well, you've caught me, Charles because I'm not into that. You remember when Time Magazine had that Chinese lady who was like a... Not Frontside. What was the name of the big virtual reality thing that was big...? CHARLES: Second Life. MICHAEL: Second Life, who is a Second Life millionaire. CHARLES: Yeah, she had armies of people. She was mining some resource in Second Life and then reselling it and she made a lot of money. MICHAEL: I don't really like visual mediums so as Marshall McLuhan would say 'hot mediums'. I guess I like the cool mediums. That's not my thing. That's where my principle fails. Maybe I'll do that one day. CHARLES: This is pretty hot. This medium is pretty like -- MICHAEL: I think maybe audio broadcast is hot. I'm just pretending like I know. This is another trick that you can deploy that my wife has picked on is most of the time, 78% of the time, I actually have no idea what I'm talking about. I just know words. I don't actually know Marshall McLuhan theory. I read that one book a long time ago and I remember that scene in Annie Hall where he gives a little diatribe to whatever the Woody Allen character is. That's the extent of my Marshall McLuhan knowledge. CHARLES: Was Marshall McLuhan actually in Annie Hall? MICHAEL: He was. CHARLES: Don't sell yourself short, Coté. MICHAEL: Sure. CHARLES: You know things and you drink so let's talk about that second aspect because I know that you like me whole tearing up as a role model. MICHAEL: I should say since we're both happily married, except for the third thing that he does which he -- CHARLES: Oh, right. MICHAEL: Another unmentionable word. He too freely hangs out with the ladies. CHARLES: Right, anyway aside from that, throughout doing all this stuff, you keep a very, very chill perspective on things. I feel like the tech world gets so wound up around itself and it gets so tight and so stressed about its own problems. There's constantly wars in JavaScript and before we were in the JavaScript world, we were warring in Ruby. I remember when Twitter went over to using Scala instead of Ruby. Oh, my goodness, it was terrible times. I feel like there's a lot of stress and yes, you want to take it seriously but I feel like you've always been able to maintain an even-keeled perspective about technology which actually allows you to commentate on it effectively and intelligently because you're able to unwind yourself from the squabbles of the day and see maybe a bigger picture or something like that. MICHAEL: That's nice of you to characterize me to use a -- is that a hanging, dangling participle there, when you're in [inaudible]? CHARLES: Yeah, I don't know. MICHAEL: I think that's also just a function of being old. CHARLES: So are you actually not stressed or is it just part of your persona of being an extrovert or something like that? MICHAEL: About the tech world? No, I'm not stressed about that. As you kind of outlined, especially I was not sent the demographics for the show, which is fine. I'll overlook that but I'm guessing that that was a joke. CHARLES: Who got some designers, developers -- MICHAEL: I'm guessing there's a lot of people who actually are on the frontlines of working on software. I think this happens also in the white collar set. But essentially, it's really easy to slip into over allegiance to something and I don't know what rhetorical fallacy this is but it's the bias of over allegiance to something, you get all wrapped up in defending a tool over something and the virtue of it, whether it's Emacs and vi. I'm sure reactive people, whatever that is, have all sorts of debates. The thing is when you're heads down on this stuff, you don't realize how petty all those discussions are. It's not so much that it's a waste of your time but it's just one battle in an overall war that you have. It's good to have opinions and figure things out but you should just relax about it because the more angry and emotional you get, you're going to make a lot of mistakes and decision and problems. I wish I had an example of this but this is one of those things that intuitively as you ages as developer, it's not like your literal age. It's just the amount of time you've been developing software. You could be a 25-year old who's been developing software for 10 years and you would probably get this notion but you just realize that stuff changes and you just learn the new things. It's kind of not a big deal like one day, you're going on and on about how vi is great and the next day you're using that Atom editor and then whatever and you just use the tool that's appropriate and it's annoying when you're younger and people are applying Hacker News with like, "You should use the tool that is appropriate," which is a stupid reply. That's just kind of how it is. Also the other thing, in the more white collar world, as an analyst, especially doing strategy for a company, you can't be biased by things because then you'll make poor decisions as an analyst. Also when you're doing strategy in M&A that result in bad business outcomes so you actually be very unbiased about things. CHARLES: I think it applies in everything. If you get too emotionally invested in one particular approach in software, literally in anything you do, it does result in bad outcomes. The problem is you may not actually realize the consequences of those bad outcomes far down the road from the poor decision that you made that caused you that outcome so you might not necessarily connect it back. MICHAEL: Yeah, and I keep bringing this up but I think another effect of being calmer in your nerd life is having something that you do outside of your programming life, which is either having a family or having hobbies or something like that but you know -- CHARLES: Or having a wild turkey. MICHAEL: Yeah but you've got to have something, a reason to stop thinking about your tech stuff or it'll consume you. I suspect when you see the older graybeards who go on and on about open source and they're very like... I don't know. What's the word? They're very over the top and fervent about tech stuff. It's probably because like me, that's their only hobby and they haven't figured out how to how to control it. It becomes part of their identity and it defines them and then they're down this twisty, turny path of annoyance to the rest of us. CHARLES: Again, don't sell yourself short, Coté. You've got plenty: you love the cooking and eating and the drinking so close this. Do you have a favorite drink that you've been mixing lately? MICHAEL: No. CHARLES: Or any kind of favorite food because every time I go over to your house, even if we're having pizza, there's always a nice hors d'oeuvre or something to drink, something to tweak that appetite for something special. I kind of wondering if there's anything that you're into. MICHAEL: I have some very basics. One, I don't know if I drink a lot or drink a little. I think the science on this is very confusing, kind of like drinking coffee. I try to drink less. I basically go back to the basics of I want cheap wine that's not terrible. That's what I'm always trying to discover. I think I've also started to rediscover just straight vodka. That's pretty good. I think that fits into the grand scheme. CHARLES: I just can't do it. I can't follow you there. I need some, what do they call them? Gin florals? I can drink gin -- MICHAEL: Oh yeah, that's good too. CHARLES: That's about as close as I can get to straight vodka. MICHAEL: And then food-wise, I just wrapped up finally figuring out how to cook fish and chicken without it tasting terrible. CHARLES: Oh! What's the secret? MICHAEL: No, I want to put a disclaimer out. There's a EULA on this. I'm not responsible for anything bad that happens but what you want to do is cook at about 10 degrees less than you're supposed to. A chicken is supposed to be 165 degrees but you take it out of the pot when it's like 150 or 155 on another part of the pan. Fish is supposed to be 145 degrees but you take it off when it's about 130 or 135. It cooks a little bit more but these guidelines to cook your meat to that thing, it ruins it. Also you can brine a chicken and things like that. Also, what you want to get is an instant meat thermometer. One of those that you can just poke in your meat so you're always checking the temperature. That's what I've been working on. CHARLES: I have a theory about that. I will laid out really quickly, maybe it's just because the juices. It's the juice that so yummy there so you want those to be locked in and boiling but not boiled away. I'm going to give that a try on my -- MICHAEL: And fish is particularly tricky. CHARLES: Because all it takes is five minutes. Sometimes, it's two minutes and 30 seconds too long and you ruin the fish. MICHAEL: Then the next theory I want to try out is that you can actually fry fish in pure butter but you've got to paper towel it off afterwards because too much butter ruins it. But I think if your paper tower it off like you do grease off of bacon, then I think that's how you achieve -- not as good as a restaurant because in a restaurant, they have those butane torches and the crisp it up on the outside or reverse sear or whatever -- CHARLES: Is that what they do? Do they just run their torch right over the fish? MICHAEL: That's all I can figure. They might also be professional cooks who know how to cook things. CHARLES: They might have done it a lot of times. They might have had someone like Gordon Ramsay yelling at them constantly. "I can't believe this fish is so terrible. Waah!" All right. I'm going to give the fish a try. I'm going to give the chicken a try and I'm going to give everything that you just spent the last hour talking about, also a try. MICHAEL: Well, thanks for having me on. It's always fun to have a show with you. I just posted yesterday our second revival of the Drunken Retired Podcast, which is over at Cote.show. It's just '.show'. URLs are crazy nowadays. I guess the only self-promotional thing I have is I'm over in Twitter @Cote. It'd be nice if everyone should just go follow me there because I'm always very sad that I don't have enough followers and they'll never verify me. I don't understand what the problem is. I'm clearly me. Then I mentioned earlier, the main podcast that I do is Software Defined Talk, which is at SoftwareDefinedTalk.com and you should come spend a lot of money on Pivotal stuff. I'm happy to tell you all about that. Just go check out Pivotal at Pivotal.io CHARLES: I guess that is about it. We will talk to everybody later. Thank you for staying tuned and listening to this supersized episode. Come check us out sometime!

In meinem neuen Podcast ist es mir gelungen, mich mit Project Legende Renke Holert zu unterhalten. Renke ist Microsoft Project Server Berater, Trainer und Entwickler. Er ist diplomierter Wirtschaftsingenieur und leitet ein Unternehmen in München, das auf die Implementierung von Microsoft Project Server sowie der Integration mit Microsoft Outlook und Lotus Notes spezialisiert ist. Er ist zudem Autor des Buches "Microsoft Project 2013 ‑ Das Profibuch" von Microsoft Press. Wie es zu alldem kam könnt Ihr in dem Podcast erfahren.

Chad talks with Irene Ros, data visualization practice lead at Bocoup, about her pursuit of making data visualization function in a social context. What is Lotus Notes? Many Eyes Mant Bills Bocoup Roosters Stickers Around the World Popcorn.js AngelList OpenVis Conf Science Club for Girls BostonJS Meetup Boston Data Visualization Meetup Miso d3.Chart Irene on Twitter

De verkiezingen zijn achter de rug. De ‘stemfies’ zijn gemaakt. Maar vooral: Davy is terug… Met een boel voorkeurstemmen!

Thank you for an amazing 2011, this week I look back at 2011, some thoughts on 2012, plus I discuss Harvey Norman's new Direct Import model and take calls on Networking, Internet Choices, Photo Printing, Lotus Notes and Web blocking

Thank you for an amazing 2011, this week I look back at 2011, some thoughts on 2012, plus I discuss Harvey Norman's new Direct Import model and take calls on Networking, Internet Choices, Photo Printing, Lotus Notes and Web blocking

BioPharma EH&S Podcast Episode #11 Discuss: The Evolution of Environmental, Health and Safety Compliance and Operational Risk Management Software Upcoming Events and Happenings of Importance to Environmental, Health and Safety professionals in the BioPharma industry. Hello everybody and welcome back to the Biopharma EH&S Podcast, Episode #11, it's Saturday, February 26th, 2011.  And this is the podcast helping you take your environmental, health and safety program to the next level. This next week, on Tuesday, I will be heading to San Antonio, Texas for the National Association for Environmental Management (NAEM) Management Information Systems conference which will be happening on Wednesday and Thursday, and then on Thursday of the following week I will be heading to Austin, Texas for South by Southwest. So the first thing that we always go over is to review what we talked about in the last episode, then we will cover our main topic for today, which is "The Evolution of Environmental, Health and Safety Compliance and Operational Risk Management Software".  Then after that we will discuss important events and happenings of importance to EH&S professionals in the biotechnology, pharmaceutical, and medical device industry. As a podcaster, having listener questions and feedback is extremely important and it would me a lot to me. So, please call our listener voicemail feedback line at 206-337-4769 with your questions regardingenvironmental health and safety software, potent compound safety, industrial hygiene, and anything else related to EH&S in the Biopharma Industry. In Episode #10 we discussed "Industrial Hygiene in the Pharmaceutical Industry." In that discussion we talked about the strategies for managing a potent compound safety program in the pharmaceutical industry is actually similar to managing a traditional industrial hygiene program, however, the big difference is that many of the compounds have occupational exposure limits that are significantly lower than those of traditional industrial chemicals, and that you will have to place an emphasis on engineering controls in order to achieve acceptable airborne concentrations. So, let's go ahead and move into our main topic for today, which is: The Evolution of EH&S Compliance and Operational Risk Management Software So what exactly is EH&S Compliance and Operational Risk Management Software?  Well that can mean many things to many different people and companies.  For some companies that are somewhat in the reactive mode - it may mean just tracking occupational injuries, accidents, and claims.  For others, for those companies that are slightly more proactice - it may mean audit finding tracking, corrective action tracking, and leading indicator tracking.  And for the more advance companies it can mean tracking sustainability efforts, and greenhouse gas reduction efforts.  It also can mean authoring and managing material safety data sheets, air emissions reporting, hazardous wastes management generation tracking, industrial hygiene data management, and many, many other environmental, health and safety program elements. So, let's step back for a moment and talk a little about the history of environmental, health and safety compliance software, and operational risk management software.  Back in the mid-1980's when I started in the environmental, health and safety field I was working for Waste Management of North America as an Environmental Coordinator.  Back in those days I remember that the majority of EH&S tasks were done by paper, and completion of paper-based forms. I also recall that EHS professionals were largely the people with the big binders on their bookshelves containing all the company EH&S rules and programs.  At that time, at least at the entry level, personal computers in the workplace were rare.  Then as we approached the 1990's a few computers starting appearing around the office, but were pretty much exclusively limited to divisional presidents, directors, and an administrative assistant or two.  I still recall, looking out my office door, and seeing our library of federal and local regulations that covered the entire wall in one of our common areas.  Then in the late 1980's, our first safety management software system appear.  It was a DOS based system used for reporting occupational injuries, accidents, and other claims. It was basically, a workers' compensation and liability claims management system.  So, it was really an operational risk management software tool.  Still at that point, data entry into the system was primarily done by the admins, and the EH&S management would receive a printed report once per month.  As more and more people in the office begin to have dedicated computers, everyone started  to get creative in using them to manage various issues, including environmental, health and safety.  I believe the first EH&S software tool that I every developed was a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet used to track employee training. Then in 1990, the next environmental, health and safety management software tool that I recall using was a system called CMS, which stood for Compliance Management System, and as the name refers to, it was primarily a PC-based system to manage EH&S compliance tasks and requirements.  It was ugly, but it actually worked quite well.  The one challenge however, was in those days, implementation was a pain.  A team of people would come out for a week or more, review every permit, every requirement and input them by hand into the environmental, health and safety software system. Then around 1993, I recall my first experience with the world wide web - I clearly remember that I was in the office of the IT manager who's office was next to mine, and using Mosaic we pulled up the Center for Disease Controls' website. After that event, I remember that information technology just exploded, and in March of 1993, I attended the Global Environmental Management Initiative meeting in Pentagon City.  During that meeting, there was a presentation about integrating right-to-know information at Dupont.  It was basically centered around managing material safety data sheets.  During that same time frame, I recall seeing a presentation by Bill Sugar on Anheuser-Busch's Environmental Management System, which was originally written in Lotus Notes.  It had it's shortcomings, but with the leadership of Bill Sugar and his team of environmental, health and safety professionals they took EH&S management to a whole new level.  We then began to see environmental, health and safety software move from compliance-focused, and regulatory reporting focused to more of a total quality management approach.  With the emergence of ISO14001 and OHSAS 18001 managing data began more important.  In addition, with increase demand for corporate transparency, the need for rapid access to environmental, health and safety data became even more important. So, that's some of the early history of environmental, health and safety software.  And were do we stand today?  Well, that vast majority of environmental, health and safety management systems are web-based.  Everyone has an email, everyone has access to a computer. Our cell phone's have more computing power than my first computer.  Most major corporations collect and report all kinds of environmental, health and safety data.  The majority of this data is readily available to anyone with a computer. So what challenges do we face today?  First off, reducing complexity.  As a provider of environmental health and safety software, we have to realize that not every company is going to have a full-time administrator to run these complicated systems.  More features, doesn't necessarily mean better.  If you think about it, the one reason text messaging and twitter is so popular is that if you can't say it in 140 characters then you're saying too much.  Second, there's too many companies offering EHS software solutions out there, there has to be, and will be some industry consolidation. So, what's in store for the future of environmental, health and safety software?  Well,EH&S mobile apps, like Affytrac mobile will become more important.  I also have addditional thoughts, but prefer to keep those to myself for now. Alright, so that does it for our discussion on "The Evolution of Environmental, Health and Safety Compliance and Operational Risk Management Software" So here's events and happening for environmental, health and safety professionals. Next week, as previously mentioned, in San Antonio, Texas - the National Association for Environmental Management will be having its Management Information System conference.  I'll be there and would love to meet you.  Please call me at 303-884-3028 or email me at dcalhoun@affygility.com Next on March 6-10, it's the Society of Toxicology's annual conference in Washington, DC.  I won't be there, but Joe Nieusma, Senior Occupational Toxicologist with Affygility Solutions will.  If you would like to talk to Joe, please give me a call and I can arrange it. Then in April, Affygility Solutions has a whole bunch of environmental, health and safety webinars starting.  These include, our every popular Advanced Topics in Potent Compound Safety, our Dermal Exposure and Absorption of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients, Isoflurane Safety, and much more.  Go to Affygility.com and check out our schedule.