Podcasts about microsoft office suite

Ransomware Record Highs, North Korean Exploits, Toyota Data Breach, and Mac Security Flaws - Aug 21, 2024 In this episode of Cybersecurity Today, host Jim Love discusses the latest cybersecurity threats and incidents making headlines. Topics include record-high ransomware payments in 2024, a sophisticated malware exploit by North Korean hackers, a significant data breach at Toyota, and newly uncovered vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Office Suite for Mac users. Stay informed on these critical issues and more. 00:00 Record-Breaking Ransomware Payments in 2024 02:38 North Korea's Advanced Malware Exploits Windows Zero Day 04:53 Toyota's Massive Data Breach Exposed 06:37 Mac Users Beware: Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office Suite 09:03 Show Wrap-Up and Listener Appreciation

In this episode, CJ is joined by Jason Kap, the founder and CEO of Blue Rocket, a world-renowned pricing consultancy for top enterprise tech companies like Salesforce, Cisco, PagerDuty, Brex, and GitLab. Jason discusses the invaluable experience he gained working at Microsoft under Bill Gates in the early 2000s, including his role in the canonical antitrust case. Then he takes a deep dive into all things pricing, covering where in the organization pricing should sit, how often companies should update their pricing models, his philosophy on discounting, how CFOs can better work with sales teams to determine pricing ranges, the role of framing and psychology in how a deal is presented in price to the end consumer, and how this all relates to corporate strategy.—SPONSORS:Maxio is the only billing and financial operations platform that was purpose built for B2B SaaS. They're helping SaaS finance teams automate billing and revenue recognition, manage collections and payments, and put together investor grade reporting packages.

Joining us on the program today is Fidelity Senior Manager of Fidelity Labs, Matt Twigg. Matt provides a look into the latest A-I and tech innovations making noise around the globe and what AI products Fidelity is currently involved with. Matt explains how Fidelity is in the middle of an “early access” program with Microsoft. It's a co-pilot 365, which has all the abilities of ChatGPT embedded into the Microsoft Office Suite. He says it is currently being tested by approximatively 300 people across the organization.  Recent reports say the number one industry that could be affected by Artificial intelligence is financial services. Impacts include augmentation, job offloading to AI, and helping us get better at our jobs, not necessarily replacing us. Research shows that people can be much more productive, much more effective, and produce less errors by working with AI.   Recorded on February 22, 2024.    At Fidelity, our mission is to build a better future for Canadian investors and help them stay ahead. We offer investors and institutions a range of innovative and trusted investment portfolios to help them reach their financial and life goals. Fidelity mutual funds and ETFs are available by working with a financial advisor or through an online brokerage account. Visit fidelity.ca/howtobuy for more information. For the third year in a row, FidelityConnects by Fidelity Investments Canada was ranked the #1 podcast by Canadian financial advisors in the 2023 Environics' Advisor Digital Experience Study.

Unless you've been living under rock, you've probably heard of ChatGPT - the AI chatbot taking the world by storm for its ability to create content for social media, your website, blog, videos... you name it! ChatGPT can generate virtually anything in a matter of seconds.In fact GPT is so valuable that Microsoft are investing 10 billion dollars into open.ai - the business behind ChatGPT - with plans to incorporate AI into their Microsoft Office Suite, Bing and other tools and platforms. But with great power comes great responsibility

In this episode, we'll be discussing some exciting news about ChatGPT 4, the latest iteration of OpenAI's popular natural language processing model. We'll dive into how Bing AI is already using it to improve their search engine, and what kind of impact this could have on the world of online search.But that's not all – we'll also be discussing Microsoft's recent announcement that they will be integrating ChatGPT into their Microsoft Office Suite. This move has the potential to revolutionize the way we work with documents, emails, and other types of digital content, as the AI-powered language model will be able to assist with tasks such as writing, editing, and even translation.And, as if that weren't enough, we'll also be talking about Google's recent introduction of their own AI in Google Workspace.Support the showLet's get into it!Follow us:FacebookInstagramYouTubeShopEmail us: TheCatchupCast@Gmail.com

About AndrewI create free cloud certification courses and somehow still make money.Links: ExamPro Training, Inc.: https://www.exampro.co/ PolyWork: https://www.polywork.com/andrewbrown LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-wc-brown Twitter: https://twitter.com/andrewbrown TranscriptAndrew: 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 our friends at Redis, the company behind the incredibly popular open source database that is not the bind DNS server. If you're tired of managing open source Redis on your own, or you're using one of the vanilla cloud caching services, these folks have you covered with the go to manage Redis service for global caching and primary database capabilities; Redis Enterprise. To learn more and deploy not only a cache but a single operational data platform for one Redis experience, visit redis.com/hero. Thats r-e-d-i-s.com/hero. And my thanks to my friends at Redis for sponsoring my ridiculous non-sense.  Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Rising Cloud, which I hadn't heard of before, but they're doing something vaguely interesting here. They are using AI, which is usually where my eyes glaze over and I lose attention, but they're using it to help developers be more efficient by reducing repetitive tasks. So, the idea being that you can run stateless things without having to worry about scaling, placement, et cetera, and the rest. They claim significant cost savings, and they're able to wind up taking what you're running as it is in AWS with no changes, and run it inside of their data centers that span multiple regions. I'm somewhat skeptical, but their customers seem to really like them, so that's one of those areas where I really have a hard time being too snarky about it because when you solve a customer's problem and they get out there in public and say, “We're solving a problem,” it's very hard to snark about that. Multus Medical, Construx.ai and Stax have seen significant results by using them. And it's worth exploring. So, if you're looking for a smarter, faster, cheaper alternative to EC2, Lambda, or batch, consider checking them out. Visit risingcloud.com/benefits. That's risingcloud.com/benefits, and be sure to tell them that I said you because watching people wince when you mention my name is one of the guilty pleasures of listening to this podcast.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. My guest today is… well, he's challenging to describe. He's the co-founder and cloud instructor at ExamPro Training, Inc. but everyone knows him better as Andrew Brown because he does so many different things in the AWS ecosystem that it's sometimes challenging—at least for me—to wind up keeping track of them all. Andrew, thanks for joining.Andrew: Hey, thanks for having me on the show, Corey.Corey: How do I even begin describing you? You're an AWS Community Hero and have been for almost two years, I believe; you've done a whole bunch of work as far as training videos; you're, I think, responsible for #100daysofcloud; you recently started showing up on my TikTok feed because I'm pretending that I am 20 years younger than I am and hanging out on TikTok with the kids, and now I feel extremely old. And obviously, you're popping up an awful lot of places.Andrew: Oh, yeah. A few other places like PolyWork, which is an alternative to LinkedIn, so that's a space that I'm starting to build up on there as well. Active in Discord, Slack channels. I'm just kind of everywhere. There's some kind of internet obsession here. My wife gets really mad and says, “Hey, maybe tone down the social media.” But I really enjoy it. So.Corey: You're one of those folks where I have this challenge of I wind up having a bunch of different AWS community Slacks and cloud community, Slacks and Discords and the past, and we DM on Twitter sometimes. And I'm constantly trying to figure out where was that conversational thread that I had with you? And tracking it down is an increasingly large search problem. I really wish that—forget the unified messaging platform. I want a unified search platform for all the different messaging channels that I'm using to talk to people.Andrew: Yeah, it's very hard to keep up with all the channels for myself there. But somehow I do seem to manage it, but just with a bit less sleep than most others.Corey: Oh, yeah. It's like trying to figure out, like, “All right, he said something really useful. What was that? Was that a Twitter DM? Was it on that Slack channel? Was it that Discord? No, it was on that brick that he threw through my window with a note tied to it. There we go.”That's always the baseline stuff of figuring out where things are. So, as I mentioned in the beginning, you are the co-founder and cloud instructor at ExamPro, which is interesting because unlike most of the community stuff that you do and are known for, you don't generally talk about that an awful lot. What's the deal there?Andrew: Yeah, I think a lot of people give me a hard time because they say, Andrew, you should really be promoting yourself more and trying to make more sales, but that's not why I'm out here doing what I'm doing. Of course, I do have a for-profit business called ExamPro, where we create cloud certification study courses for things like AWS, Azure, GCP, Terraform, Kubernetes, but you know, that money just goes to fuel what I really want to do, is just to do community activities to help people change their lives. And I just decided to do that via cloud because that's my domain expertise. At least that's what I say because I've learned up on in the last four or five years. I'm hoping that there's some kind of impact I can make doing that.Corey: I take a somewhat similar approach. I mean, at The Duckbill Group, we fixed the horrifying AWS bill, but I've always found that's not generally a problem that people tend to advertise having. On Twitter, like, “Oh, man, my AWS bill is killing me this month. I've got to do something about it,” and you check where they work, and it's like a Fortune 50. It's, yeah, that moves markets and no one talks about that.So, my approach was always, be out there, be present in the community, talk about this stuff, and the people who genuinely have billing problems will eventually find their way to me. That was always my approach because turning everything I do into a sales pitch doesn't work. It just erodes confidence, it reminds people of the used mattress salesman, and I just don't want to be that person in that community. My approach has always been if I can help someone with a 15-minute call or whatnot, yeah, let's jump on a phone call. I'm not interested in nickel-and-diming folks.Andrew: Yeah. I think that if you're out there doing a lot of hard work, and a lot of it, it becomes undeniable the value you're putting out there, and then people just will want to give you money, right? And for me, I just feel really bad about taking anybody's money, and so even when there's some kind of benefit—like my courses, I could charge for access for them, but I always feel I have to give something in terms of taking somebody's money, but I would never ask anyone to give me their money. So, it's bizarre. [laugh] so.Corey: I had a whole bunch of people a year or so after I started asking, like, “I really find your content helpful. Can I buy you a cup of coffee or something?” And it's, I don't know how to charge people a dollar figure that doesn't have a comma in it because it's easy for me to ask a company for money; that is the currency of effort, work, et cetera, that companies are accustomed to. People view money very differently, and if I ask you personally for money versus your company for money, it's a very different flow. So, my solution to it was to build the annual charity t-shirt drive, where it's, great, spend 35 bucks or whatever on a snarky t-shirt once a year for ten days and all proceeds go to benefit a nonprofit that is, sort of, assuaged that.But one of my business philosophies has always been, “Work for free before you work for cheap.” And dealing with individuals and whatnot, I do not charge them for things. It's, “Oh, can you—I need some advice in my career. Can I pay you to give me some advice?” “No, but you can jump on a Zoom call with me.” Please, the reason I exist at all is because people who didn't have any reason to did me favors, once upon a time, and I feel obligated to pay that forward.Andrew: And I appreciate, you know, there are people out there that you know, do need to charge for their time. Like—Corey: Oh. Oh, yes.Andrew: —I won't judge anybody that wants to. But you know, for me, it's just I can't do it because of the way I was raised. Like, my grandfather was very involved in the community. Like, he was recognized by the city for all of his volunteer work, and doing volunteer work was, like, mandatory for me as a kid. Like, every weekend, and so for me, it's just like, I can't imagine trying to take people's money.Which is not a great thing, but it turns out that the community is very supportive, and they will come beat you down with a stick, to give you money to make sure you keep doing what you're doing. But you know, I could be making lots of money, but it's just not my priority, so I've avoided any kind of funding so like, you know, I don't become a money-driven company, and I will see how long that lasts, but hopefully, a lot longer.Corey: I wish you well. And again, you're right; no shade to anyone who winds up charging for their time to individuals. I get it. I just always had challenges with it, so I decided not to do it. The only time I find myself begrudging people who do that are someone who picked something up six months ago and decided, oh, I'm going to build some video course on how to do this thing. The end. And charge a bunch of money for it and put myself out as an expert in that space.And you look at what the content they're putting out is, and one, it's inaccurate, which just drives me up a wall, and two, there's a lack of awareness that teaching is its own skill. In some areas, I know how to teach certain things, and in other areas, I'm a complete disaster at it. Public speaking is a great example. A lot of what I do on the public speaking stage is something that comes to me somewhat naturally. So, can you teach me to be a good public speaker? Not really, it's like, well, you gave that talk and it was bad. Could you try giving it only make it good? Like, that is not a helpful coaching statement, so I stay out of that mess.Andrew: Yeah, I mean, it's really challenging to know, if you feel like you're authority enough to put something out there. And there's been a few courses where I didn't feel like I was the most knowledgeable, but I produced those courses, and they had done extremely well. But as I was going through the course, I was just like, “Yeah, I don't know how any this stuff works, but this is my best guess translating from here.” And so you know, at least for my content, people have seen me as, like, the lens of AWS on top of other platforms, right? So, I might not know—I'm not an expert in Azure, but I've made a lot of Azure content, and I just translate that over and I talk about the frustrations around, like, using scale sets compared to AWS auto-scaling groups, and that seems to really help people get through the motions of it.I know if I pass, at least they'll pass, but by no means do I ever feel like an expert. Like, right now I'm doing, like, Kubernetes. Like, I have no idea how I'm doing it, but I have, like, help with three other people. And so I'll just be honest about it and say, “Hey, yeah, I'm learning this as well, but at least I know I passed, so you know, you can pass, too.” Whatever that's worth.Corey: Oh, yeah. Back when I was starting out, I felt like a bit of a fraud because I didn't know everything about the AWS billing system and how it worked and all the different things people can do with it, and things they can ask. And now, five years later, when the industry basically acknowledges I'm an expert, I feel like a fraud because I couldn't possibly understand everything about the AWS billing system and how it works. It's one of those things where the more you learn, the more you realize that there is yet to learn. I'm better equipped these days to find the answers to the things I need to know, but I'm still learning things every day. If I ever get to a point of complete and total understanding of a given topic, I'm wrong. You can always go deeper.Andrew: Yeah, I mean, by no means am I even an expert in AWS, though people seem to think that I am just because I have a lot of confidence in there and I produce a lot of content. But that's a lot different from making a course than implementing stuff. And I do implement stuff, but you know, it's just at the scale that I'm doing that. So, just food for thought for people there.Corey: Oh, yeah. Whatever, I implement something. It's great. In my previous engineering life, I would work on large-scale systems, so I know how a thing that works in your test environment is going to blow up in a production scale environment. And I bring those lessons, written on my bones the painful way, through outages, to the way that I build things now.But the stuff that I'm building is mostly to keep my head in the game, as opposed to solving an explicit business need. Could I theoretically build a podcast transcription system on top of Transcribe or something like that for these episodes? Yeah. But I've been paying a person to do this for many years to do it themselves; they know the terms of art, they know how this stuff works, and they're building a glossary as they go, and understanding the nuances of what I say and how I say it. And that is the better business outcome; that's the answer. And if it's production facing, I probably shouldn't be tinkering with it too much, just based upon where the—I don't want to be the bottleneck for the business functioning.Andrew: I've been spending so much time doing the same thing over and over again, but for different cloud providers, and the more I do, the less I want to go deep on these things because I just feel like I'm dumping all this information I'm going to forget, and that I have those broad strokes, and when I need to go deep dive, I have that confidence. So, I'd really prefer people were to build up confidence in saying, “Yes, I think I can do this.” As opposed to being like, “Oh, I have proof that I know every single feature in AWS Systems Manager.” Just because, like, our platform, ExamPro, like, I built it with my co-founder, and it's a quite a system. And so I'm going well, that's all I need to know.And I talk to other CTOs, and there's only so much you need to know. And so I don't know if there's, like, a shift between—or difference between, like, application development where, let's say you're doing React and using Vercel and stuff like that, where you have to have super deep knowledge for that technical stack, whereas cloud is so broad or diverse that maybe just having confidence and hypothesizing the work that you can do and seeing what the outcome is a bit different, right? Not having to prove one hundred percent that you know it inside and out on day one, but have the confidence.Corey: And there's a lot of validity to that and a lot of value to it. It's the magic word I always found in interviewing, on both sides of the interview table, has always been someone who's unsure about something start with, “I'm not sure, but if I had to guess,” and then say whatever it is you were going to say. Because if you get it right, wow, you're really good at figuring this out, and your understanding is pretty decent. If you're wrong, well, you've shown them how you think but you've also called them out because you're allowed to be wrong; you're not allowed to be authoritatively wrong. Because once that happens, I can't trust anything you say.Andrew: Yeah. In terms of, like, how do cloud certifications help you for your career path? I mean, I find that they're really well structured, and they give you a goal to work towards. So, like, passing that exam is your motivation to make sure that you complete it. Do employers care? It depends. I would say mostly no. I mean, for me, like, when I'm hiring, I actually do care about certifications because we make certification courses but—Corey: In your case, you're a very specific expression of this that is not typical.Andrew: Yeah. And there are some, like, cases where, like, if you work for a larger cloud consultancy, you're expected to have a professional certification so that customers feel secure in your ability to execute. But it's not like they were trying to hire you with that requirement, right? And so I hope that people realize that and that they look at showing that practical skills, by building up cloud projects. And so that's usually a strong pairing I'll have, which is like, “Great. Get the certifications to help you just have a structured journey, and then do a Cloud project to prove that you can do what you say you can do.”Corey: One area where I've seen certifications act as an interesting proxy for knowledge is when you have a company that has 5000 folks who work in IT in varying ways, and, “All right. We're doing a big old cloud migration.” The certification program, in many respects, seems to act as a bit of a proxy for gauging where people are on upskilling, how much they have to learn, where they are in that journey. And at that scale, it begins to make some sense to me. Where do you stand on that?Andrew: Yeah. I mean, it's hard because it really depends on how those paths are built. So, when you look at the AWS certification roadmap, they have the Certified Cloud Practitioner, they have three associates, two professionals, and a bunch of specialties. And I think that you might think, “Well, oh, solutions architect must be very popular.” But I think that's because AWS decided to make the most popular, the most generic one called that, and so you might think that's what's most popular.But what they probably should have done is renamed that Solution Architect to be a Cloud Engineer because very few people become Solutions Architect. Like that's more… if there's Junior Solutions Architect, I don't know where they are, but Solutions Architect is more of, like, a senior role where you have strong communications, pre-sales, obviously, the role is going to vary based on what companies decide a Solution Architect is—Corey: Oh, absolutely take a solutions architect, give him a crash course in finance, and we call them a cloud economist.Andrew: Sure. You just add modifiers there, and they're something else. And so I really think that they should have named that one as the cloud engineer, and they should have extracted it out as its own tier. So, you'd have the Fundamental, the Certified Cloud Practitioner, then the Cloud Engineer, and then you could say, “Look, now you could do developer or the sysops.” And so you're creating this path where you have a better trajectory to see where people really want to go.But the problem is, a lot of people come in and they just do the solutions architect, and then they don't even touch the other two because they say, well, I got an associate, so I'll move on the next one. So, I think there's some structuring there that comes into play. You look at Azure, they've really, really caught up to AWS, and may I might even say surpass them in terms of the quality and the way they market them and how they construct their certifications. There's things I don't like about them, but they have, like, all these fundamental certifications. Like, you have Azure Fundamentals, Data Fundamentals, AI Fundamentals, there's a Security Fundamentals.And to me, that's a lot more valuable than going over to an associate. And so I did all those, and you know, I still think, like, should I go translate those over for AWS because you have to wait for a specialty before you pick up security. And they say, like, it's intertwined with all the certifications, but, really isn't. Like—and I feel like that would be a lot better for AWS. But that's just my personal opinion. So.Corey: My experience with AWS certifications has been somewhat minimal. I got the Cloud Practitioner a few years ago, under the working theory of I wanted to get into the certified lounge at some of the events because sometimes I needed to charge things and grab a cup of coffee. I viewed it as a lounge pass with a really strange entrance questionnaire. And in my case, yeah, I passed it relatively easily; if not, I would have some questions about how much I actually know about these things. As I recall, I got one question wrong because I was honest, instead of going by the book answer for, “How long does it take to restore an RDS database from a snapshot?”I've had some edge cases there that give the wrong answer, except that's what happened. And then I wound up having that expire and lapse. And okay, now I'll do it—it was in beta at the time, but I got the sysops associate cert to go with it. And that had a whole bunch of trivia thrown into it, like, “Which of these is the proper syntax for this thing?” And that's the kind of question that's always bothered me because when I'm trying to figure things like that out, I have entire internet at my fingertips. Understanding the exact syntax, or command-line option, or flag that needs to do a thing is a five-second Google search away in most cases. But measuring for people's ability to memorize and retain that has always struck me as a relatively poor proxy for knowledge.Andrew: It's hard across the board. Like Azure, AWS, GCP, they all have different approaches—like, Terraform, all of them, they're all different. And you know, when you go to interview process, you have to kind of extract where the value is. And I would think that the majority of the industry, you know, don't have best practices when hiring, there's, like, a superficial—AWS is like, “Oh, if you do well, in STAR program format, you must speak a communicator.” Like, well, I'm dyslexic, so that stuff is not easy for me, and I will never do well in that.So like, a lot of companies hinge on those kinds of components. And I mean, I'm sure it doesn't matter; if you have a certain scale, you're going to have attrition. There's no perfect system. But when you look at these certifications, and you say, “Well, how much do they match up with the job?” Well, they don't, right? It's just Jeopardy.But you know, I still think there's value for yourself in terms of being able to internalize it. I still think that does prove that you have done something. But taking the AWS certification is not the same as taking Andrew Brown's course. So, like, my certified cloud practitioner was built after I did GCP, Oracle Cloud, Azure Fundamentals, a bunch of other Azure fundamental certifications, cloud-native stuff, and then I brought it over because was missing, right? So like, if you went through my course, and that I had a qualifier, then I could attest to say, like, you are of this skill level, right?But it really depends on what that testament is and whether somebody even cares about what my opinion of, like, your skillset is. But I can't imagine like, when you have a security incident, there's going to be a pop-up that shows you multiple-choice answer to remediate the security incident. Now, we might get there at some point, right, with all the cloud automation, but we're not there yet.Corey: It's been sort of thing we've been chasing and never quite get there. I wish. I hope I live to see it truly I do. My belief is also that the value of a certification changes depending upon what career stage someone is at. Regardless of what level you are at, a hiring manager or a company is looking for more or less a piece of paper that attests that they're to solve the problem that they are hiring to solve.And entry-level, that is often a degree or a certification or something like that in the space that shows you have at least the baseline fundamentals slash know how to learn things. After a few years, I feel like that starts to shift into okay, you've worked in various places solving similar problems on your resume that the type that we have—because the most valuable thing you can hear when you ask someone, “How would we solve this problem?” Is, “Well, the last time I solved it, here's what we learned.” Great. That's experience. There's no compression algorithm for experience? Yes, there is: Hiring people with experience.Then, at some level, you wind up at the very far side of people who are late-career in many cases where the piece of paper that shows that they know what they're doing is have you tried googling their name and looking at the Wikipedia article that spits out, how they built fundamental parts of a system like that. I think that certifications are one of those things that bias for early-career folks. And of course, partners when there are other business reasons to get it. But as people grow in seniority, I feel like the need for those begins to fall off. Do you agree? Disagree? You're much closer to this industry in that aspect of it than I am.Andrew: The more senior you are, and if you have big names under your resume there, no one's going to care if you have certification, right? When I was looking to switch careers—I used to have a consultancy, and I was just tired of building another failed startup for somebody that was willing to pay me. And I'm like—I was not very nice about it. I was like, “Your startup's not going to work out. You really shouldn't be building this.” And they still give me the money and it would fail, and I'd move on to the next one. It was very frustrating.So, closed up shop on that. And I said, “Okay, I got to reenter the market.” I don't have a computer science degree, I don't have big names on my resume, and Toronto is a very competitive market. And so I was feeling friction because people were not valuing my projects. I had, like, full-stack projects, I would show them.And they said, “No, no. Just do these, like, CompSci algorithms and stuff like that.” And so I went, “Okay, well, I really don't want to be doing that. I don't want to spend all my time learning algorithms just so I can get a job to prove that I already have the knowledge I have.” And so I saw a big opportunity in cloud, and I thought certifications would be the proof to say, “I can do these things.”And when I actually ended up going for the interviews, I didn't even have certifications and I was getting those opportunities because the certifications helped me prove it, but nobody cared about the certifications, even then, and that was, like, 2017. But not to say, like, they didn't help me, but it wasn't the fact that people went, “Oh, you have a certification. We'll get you this job.”Corey: Yeah. When I'm talking to consulting clients, I've never once been asked, “Well, do you have the certifications?” Or, “Are you an AWS partner?” In my case, no, neither of those things. The reason that we know what we're doing is because we've done this before. It's the expertise approach.I question whether that would still be true if we were saying, “Oh, yeah, and we're going to drop a dozen engineers on who are going to build things out of your environment.” “Well, are they certified?” is a logical question to ask when you're bringing in an external service provider? Or is this just a bunch of people you found somewhere on Upwork or whatnot, and you're throwing them at it with no quality control? Like, what is the baseline level experience? That's a fair question. People are putting big levels of trust when they bring people in.Andrew: I mean, I could see that as a factor of some clients caring, just because like, when I used to work in startups, I knew customers where it's like their second startup, and they're flush with a lot of money, and they're deciding who they want to partner with, and they're literally looking at what level of SSL certificate they purchased, right? Like now, obviously, they're all free and they're very easy to get to get; there was one point where you had different tiers—as if you would know—and they would look and they would say—Corey: Extended validation certs attend your browser bar green. Remember those?Andrew: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was just like that, and they're like, “We should partner with them because they were able to afford that and we know, like…” whatever, whatever, right? So, you know, there is that kind of thought process for people at an executive level. I'm not saying it's widespread, but I've seen it.When you talk to people that are in cloud consultancy, like solutions architects, they always tell me they're driven to go get those professional certifications [unintelligible 00:22:19] their customers matter. I don't know if the customers care or not, but they seem to think so. So, I don't know if it's just more driven by those people because it's an expectation because everyone else has it, or it's like a package of things, like, you know, like the green bar in the certifications, SOC 2 compliance, things like that, that kind of wrap it up and say, “Okay, as a package, this looks really good.” So, more of an expectation, but not necessarily matters, it's just superficial; I'm not sure.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: You've been building out certifications for multiple cloud providers, so I'm curious to get your take on something that Forrest Brazeal, who's now head of content over at Google Cloud, has been talking about lately, the idea that as an engineer is advised to learn more than one cloud provider; even if you have one as a primary, learning how another one works makes you a better engineer. Now, setting aside entirely the idea that well, yeah, if I worked at Google, I probably be saying something fairly similar.Andrew: Yeah.Corey: Do you think there's validity to the idea that most people should be broad across multiple providers, or do you think specialization on one is the right path?Andrew: Sure. Just to contextualize for our listeners, Google Cloud is highly, highly promoting multi-cloud workloads, and one of their flagship products is—well, they say it's a flagship product—is Anthos. And they put a lot of money—I don't know that was subsidized, but they put a lot of money in it because they really want to push multi-cloud, right? And so when we say Forrest works in Google Cloud, it should be no surprise that he's promoting it.But I don't work for Google, and I can tell you, like, learning multi-cloud is, like, way more valuable than just staying in one vertical. It just opened my eyes. When I went from AWS to Azure, it was just like, “Oh, I'm missing out on so much in the industry.” And it really just made me such a more well-rounded person. And I went over to Google Cloud, and it was just like… because you're learning the same thing in different variations, and then you're also poly-filling for things that you will never touch.Or like, I shouldn't say you never touch, but you would never touch if you just stayed in that vertical when you're learning. So, in the industry, Azure Active Directory is, like, widespread, but if you just stayed in your little AWS box, you're not going to notice it on that learning path, right? And so a lot of times, I tell people, “Go get your CLF-C01 and then go get your AZ-900 or AZ-104.” Again, I don't care if people go and sit the exams. I want them to go learn the content because it is a large eye-opener.A lot of people are against multi-cloud from a learning perspective because say, it's too much to learn all at the same time. But a lot of people I don't think have actually gone across the cloud, right? So, they're sitting from their chair, only staying in one vertical saying, “Well, you can't learn them all at the same time.” And I'm going, “I see a way that you could teach them all at the same time.” And I might be the first person that will do it.Corey: And the principles do convey as well. It's, “Oh, well I know how SNS works on AWS, so I would never be able to understand how Google Pub/Sub works.” Those are functionally identical; I don't know that is actually true. It's just different to interface points and different guarantees, but fine. You at least understand the part that it plays.I've built things out on Google Cloud somewhat recently, and for me, every time I do, it's a refreshing eye-opener to oh, this is what developer experience in the cloud could be. And for a lot of customers, it is. But staying too far within the bounds of one ecosystem does lend itself to a loss of perspective, if you're not careful. I agree with that.Andrew: Yeah. Well, I mean, just the paint more of a picture of differences, like, Google Cloud has a lot about digital transformation. They just updated their—I'm not happy that they changed it, but I'm fine that they did that, but they updated their Google Digital Cloud Leader Exam Guide this month, and it like is one hundred percent all about digital transformation. So, they love talking about digital transformation, and those kind of concepts there. They are really good at defining migration strategies, like, at a high level.Over to Azure, they have their own cloud adoption framework, and it's so detailed, in terms of, like, execution, where you go over to AWS and they have, like, the worst cloud adoption framework. It's just the laziest thing I've ever seen produced in my life compared to out of all the providers in that space. I didn't know about zero-trust model until I start using Azure because Azure has Active Directory, and you can do risk-based policy procedures over there. So, you know, like, if you don't go over to these places, you're not going to get covered other places, so you're just going to be missing information till you get the job and, you know, that job has that information requiring you to know it.Corey: I would say that for someone early career—and I don't know where this falls on the list of career advice ranging from, “That is genius,” to, “Okay, Boomer,” but I would argue that figuring out what companies in your geographic area, or the companies that you have connections with what they're using for a cloud provider, I would bias for learning one enough to get hired there and from there, letting what you learn next be dictated by the environment you find yourself in. Because especially larger companies, there's always something that lives in a different provider. My default worst practice is multi-cloud. And I don't say that because multi-cloud doesn't exist, and I'm not saying it because it's a bad idea, but this idea of one workload—to me—that runs across multiple providers is generally a challenge. What I see a lot more, done intelligently, is, “Okay, we're going to use this provider for some things, this other provider for other things, and this third provider for yet more things.” And every company does that.If not, there's something very strange going on. Even Amazon uses—if not Office 365, at least exchange to run their email systems instead of Amazon WorkMail because—Andrew: Yeah.Corey: Let's be serious. That tells me a lot. But I don't generally find myself in a scenario where I want to build this application that is anything more than Hello World, where I want it to run seamlessly and flawlessly across two different cloud providers. That's an awful lot of work that I struggle to identify significant value for most workloads.Andrew: I don't want to think about securing, like, multiple workloads, and that's I think a lot of friction for a lot of companies are ingress-egress costs, which I'm sure you might have some knowledge on there about the ingress-egress costs across providers.Corey: Oh, a little bit, yeah.Andrew: A little bit, probably.Corey: Oh, throwing data between clouds is always expensive.Andrew: Sure. So, I mean, like, I call multi-cloud using multiple providers, but not in tandem. Cross-cloud is when you want to use something like Anthos or Azure Arc or something like that where you extend your data plane or control pla—whatever the plane is, whatever plane across all the providers. But you know, in practice, I don't think many people are doing cross-cloud; they're doing multi-cloud, like, “I use AWS to run my primary workloads, and then I use Microsoft Office Suite, and so we happen to use Azure Active Directory, or, you know, run particular VM machines, like Windows machines for our accounting.” You know?So, it's a mixed bag, but I do think that using more than one thing is becoming more popular just because you want to use the best in breed no matter where you are. So like, I love BigQuery. BigQuery is amazing. So, like, I ingest a lot of our data from, you know, third-party services right into that. I could be doing that in Redshift, which is expensive; I could be doing that in Azure Synapse, which is also expensive. I mean, there's a serverless thing. I don't really get serverless. So, I think that, you know, people are doing multi-cloud.Corey: Yeah. I would agree. I tend to do things like that myself, and whenever I see it generally makes sense. This is my general guidance. When I talk to individuals who say, “Well, we're running multi-cloud like this.” And my response is, “Great. You're probably right.”Because I'm talking in the general sense, someone building something out on day one where they don't know, like, “Everyone's saying multi-cloud. Should I do that?” No, I don't believe you should. Now, if your company has done that intentionally, rather than by accident, there's almost certainly a reason and context that I do not have. “Well, we have to run our SaaS application in multiple cloud providers because that's where our customers are.” “Yeah, you should probably do that.” But your marketing, your billing systems, your back-end reconciliation stuff generally does not live across all of those providers. It lives in one. That's the sort of thing I'm talking about. I think we're in violent agreement here.Andrew: Oh, sure, yeah. I mean, Kubernetes obviously is becoming very popular because people believe that they'll have a lot more mobility, Whereas when you use all the different managed—and I'm still learning Kubernetes myself from the next certification I have coming out, like, study course—but, you know, like, those managed services have all different kind of kinks that are completely different. And so, you know, it's not going to be a smooth process. And you're still leveraging, like, for key things like your database, you're not going to be running that in Kubernetes Cluster. You're going to be using a managed service.And so, those have their own kind of expectations in terms of configuration. So, I don't know, it's tricky to say what to do, but I think that, you know, if you have a need for it, and you don't have a security concern—like, usually it's security or cost, right, for multi-cloud.Corey: For me, at least, the lock-in has always been twofold that people don't talk about. More—less lock-in than buy-in. One is the security model where IAM is super fraught and challenging and tricky, and trying to map a security model to multiple providers is super hard. Then on top of that, you also have the buy-in story of a bunch of engineers who are very good at one cloud provider, and that skill set is not in less demand now than it was a year ago. So okay, you're going to start over and learn a new cloud provider is often something that a lot of engineers won't want to countenance.If your team is dead set against it, there's going to be some friction there and there's going to be a challenge. I mean, for me at least, to say that someone knows a cloud provider is not the naive approach of, “Oh yeah, they know how it works across the board.” They know how it breaks. For me, one of the most valuable reasons to run something on AWS is I know what a failure mode looks like, I know how it degrades, I know how to find out what's going on when I see that degradation. That to me is a very hard barrier to overcome. Alternately, it's entirely possible that I'm just old.Andrew: Oh, I think we're starting to see some wins all over the place in terms of being able to learn one thing and bring it other places, like OpenTelemetry, which I believe is a cloud-native Kubernetes… CNCF. I can't remember what it stands for. It's like Linux Foundation, but for cloud-native. And so OpenTelemetry is just a standardized way of handling your logs, metrics, and traces, right? And so maybe CloudWatch will be the 1.0 of observability in AWS, and then maybe OpenTelemetry will become more of the standard, right, and so maybe we might see more managed services like Prometheus and Grafa—well, obviously, AWS has a managed Prometheus, but other things like that. So, maybe some of those things will melt away. But yeah, it's hard to say what approach to take.Corey: Yeah, I'm wondering, on some level, whether what the things we're talking about today, how well that's going to map forward. Because the industry is constantly changing. The guidance I would give about should you be in cloud five years ago would have been a nuanced, “Mmm, depends. Maybe for yes, maybe for no. Here's the story.” It's a lot less hedge-y and a lot less edge case-y these days when I answer that question. So, I wonder in five years from now when we look back at this podcast episode, how well this discussion about what the future looks like, and certifications, and multi-cloud, how well that's going to reflect?Andrew: Well, when we look at, like, Kubernetes or Web3, we're just seeing kind of like the standardized boilerplate way of doing a bunch of things, right, all over the place. This distributed way of, like, having this generic API across the board. And how well that will take, I have no idea, but we do see a large split between, like, serverless and cloud-natives. So, it's like, what direction? Or we'll just have both? Probably just have both, right?Corey: [Like that 00:33:08]. I hope so. It's been a wild industry ride, and I'm really curious to see what changes as we wind up continuing to grow. But we'll see. That's the nice thing about this is, worst case, if oh, turns out that we were wrong on this whole cloud thing, and everyone starts exodusing back to data centers, well, okay. That's the nice thing about being a small company. It doesn't take either of us that long to address the reality we see in the industry.Andrew: Well, that or these cloud service providers are just going to get better at offering those services within carrier hotels, or data centers, or on your on-premise under your desk, right? So… I don't know, we'll see. It's hard to say what the future will be, but I do believe that cloud is sticking around in one form or another. And it basically is, like, an essential skill or table stakes for anybody that's in the industry. I mean, of course, not everywhere, but like, mostly, I would say. So.Corey: Andrew, I want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more about your opinions, how you view these things, et cetera. Where can they find you?Andrew: You know, I think the best place to find me right now is Twitter. So, if you go to twitter.com/andrewbrown—all lowercase, no spaces, no underscores, no hyphens—you'll find me there. I'm so surprised I was able to get that handle. It's like the only place where I have my handle.Corey: And we will of course put links to that in the [show notes 00:34:25]. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it.Andrew: Well, thanks for having me on the show.Corey: Andrew Brown, co-founder and cloud instructor at ExamPro Training and so much more. 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 on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment telling me that I do not understand certifications at all because you're an accountant, and certifications matter more in that industry.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.

Guest Bio:My experience includes extensive engagement with Executives and business professionals within client organizations and I have successfully leveraged key talent and innovative marketing and sales strategies to expand the global footprint of numerous companies.In my most recent role, I was the Senior VP of Global Sales with Zija International, where I held positions of increasing complexity. Earlier experience includes a Vice President of Sales role with Nuspera International and a Client Relations Manager role with the Veritas Investment Group.Some of my qualities and achievements include:- Drove new business development and revenue growth in established and start-up environments.- Created the Zija International vision for new product launches and expanded the Company presence in Europeand North America.- Engaged across functions to develop effective strategies and drove collaboration at team and organizational level.- Managed Sales and Marketing Representatives in the Jalandhar India Office of Nuspera International, organizedseminars to educate Physicians, and built strategic relationships to facilitate distribution throughout IndiaI hold a Bachelor of Science in Business Management, which is supported by an excellent working knowledge of Salesforce and Microsoft Office Suite.

Julie talks about her first career aspiration to become a waitress to pay for college and how the lessons she learned at waiting tables taught her career-defining skills of empathy and creating a positive customer experience. Julie talks about her first job in tech--as a customer service rep--and learning to code so she could resolve user experience problems at the source and the product impact she had in that role. Julie the female mentors who helped her define herself as a woman in tech. Julie shares her career path from customer service at Aldus to managing UX for Office and running XBox at Microsoft and her eventual Chief Experience Officer roles at Microsoft and Qualtrics.Julie shares her insights on how team culture and employee experience impact the user experience and how she works to develop the right kind of culture. She shares her perspective on working toward great outcomes in the face of distrust and how to build high-performing product and customer teams.How do you build a team culture which creates world-class products? How do you overcome organizational and engineering barriers to create an incredible product experience? How do you look at the end-to-end user experience and build products that compete based on a powerful, productive user experience? Julie shares her stories and experiences about how to build a creative culture centered around the user's experience.Guest Bio:Julie is passionate about building technology that gets out of the way so users can focus on what matters most. Her mantra is “People first, technology second.” As a leader, she believes her door should always ber open to listen and embrace everyone's individual personality, perspective, style, and abilities--making teams stronger and more creative. Julie believes great ideas can come from anyone and anywhere.She has over 30 years of customer and product management experience. Her career focus has been re-imagining platforms for intelligent work. She has lead product management for SharePoint, the Microsoft Office Suite, Windows, and XBox. She oversaw the successful launch of Windows 7 and Office 365. She currently serves as the Chief Experience Officer for Qualtrics.LinkedinTwitter: @Julie_LGreenBuilding Blocks:Put yourself into the role of the Customer Experience Officer for any organization you're a part of. It can be your company, your neighborhood association, your church group, your school board, anything. Pick one organization you're a part of - and you're the CXO.Identify two specific experiences you would Build.#1, As the new CXO, what's the biggest “experience gap” you have to close? What's that part of the experience of the product your company sells, or the service your group provides, or the culture of the organization you're a part of, that just needs to be improved? And what specific steps, what specific actions, would you take, to improve it?#2, What's an experience your organization doesn't provide today that could be an incredible Breakthrough? Where you're missing a huge opportunity to do something great for customers, for employees, or an even broader group of people? And what specific steps would it take to pull that off?I think you'll find if you work on this Building Block, you'll get to some really pragmatic and doable things. Stuff you and the people around you can go pull off. And do YOUR part to make the world just a little bit of a better place by serving up THAT much better of an experience to people.If you'd like to share, get it out there on social with the Hashtag #BreakthroughBuilders. Or, if you'd prefer to not share it publicly, go ahead and email it to me at producer@breakthrough-builders.com. I'd love hearing from you and learning from what you built.Helpful Links:Harvard Business Review on Why Every Company Needs a Chief Experience OfficerForbes reporting on the Chief Experience Officer role Qualtrics thought leadership on the state of the Chief Experience Officer in high tech here.FastCompany's coverage of the reaction to Julie's promotion to Head of XBox hereThe Atlantic's perspective on Julie's promotion at Microsoft hereFortune's reporting on Julie's move from Microsoft to Qualtrics here Christine Thach's TED Talk on how businesses can learn how to build culture from refugee communitiesA deep dive into Tech Company Culture on Medium hereQualtrics's The Global State of XM 2020Julie at the Dublin Tech SummitWired Magazine spread on Julie Larson-Green as the new head of XBox

History of most famous family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft.

Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. I am interviewing a special guest from Amazon: Darrell Alfonso. Let’s get started! So Darrell, welcome. So happy to actually have you on the show. And I know that you actually have a very, very strong, marketing technology background. Sounds like are certified for Salesforce. And you know multiple different--Marketo, like for example--marketing automation tool, very well. And you are Marketo champions, and you advise multiple different Fortune 500 companies. That's a very impressive. Many marketers are not necessarily having that technical capability that you have. So welcome to the show. Do you want to spend a couple minutes and give us any additional information about you?   Darrell Alfonso: Yeah, sure. And I'm so happy to be here. I'm an avid listener of your show and I’m a reader of your content so honored to be here. So yeah, I've been in B2B marketing for about 10 years. Six years ago, I was introduced to Marketo and marketing automation, and that was really a turning point in my career. I found that people were having such a hard time with these complex marketing automation platforms.   Pam Didner: I can concur. I do have a problem with that. I mean, seriously, and I cannot do a lot of stuff on my own. I have to work with a business consultant.   Darrell Alfonso: Yeah. Yeah. And it's quite the same for a lot of marketers out there. So in addition to driving results at work, I also became a contributor to the community. So I wrote articles, I created how-to videos. I even ran the user group in Los Angeles when I was in Los Angeles. After that, I won a few industry awards for my work in that community. And so today, my team runs one of the largest marketing automation platforms in the world. And I work for Amazon Web Services.   Pam Didner: Yeah, no kidding.   Darrell Alfonso: And our goal is to really empower the hundreds on hundreds of marketers that work for AWS to give them the tools and processes they need to create exceptional experiences for our customers. Pam Didner: Got it. That makes a lot of sense. So speaking of marketing automation, Marketo Eloqua HubSpot, and that people tend to equate marketing automation with email marketing. So what is your definition of marketing automation? I'm curious. And then, what does that encompass?   Darrell Alfonso: I define marketing automation as the programmatic management of the customer lifecycle. And that encompasses automating and managing marketing activities throughout the awareness stage, the buying stage, and then even after they already become a customer.   Pam Didner: Got it.   Darrell Alfonso: Now, traditionally, this isn't really the industry-wide accepted definition of, of marketing automation. In a traditional sense for most companies, marketing automation includes things like lead management, lead scoring, nurturing, working with sales, and other advanced features like web personalization and marketing reporting. Those are the components that you typically make up marketing automation. But it is a lot more than email marketing,   Pam Didner: … email marketing. I 100% agree with that. The way I look at the marketing automation, you are totally right. You have to encompass and take into account the customer journey and that you are using customer life cycle, I like that. But I think it’s understand what are the different touch points that you are creating to reach out to your customer and to try to make it trackable and also make an effort to analyze it, to understand your customer a whole lot more. So with that being said, what are the top two challenges, from what you can see, either implementing marketing automation or maintaining it?   Darrell Alfonso: That's a good question. One of them is more strategic or high level, and that's the trap of being too feature-driven. So, what I mean by that is it's common to buy a marketing automation platform and then figure out, based on the features available, what's going to be your marketing strategy and how you're going to do your marketing. So you're basing it off of what technology is available to you, that determines what you're going to do. And that's very backwards. The better way to do it is to figure out what your goals and objectives are first, and then figure out what are the specific features and technologies that's going to help you get there. That's one of the big problems that I see in organizations today.   Pam Didner: So, when you are looking into a technology, it's important to understand why you want to accomplish and identify that first and then source the technology that will work with that.   Darrell Alfonso: Absolutely. And I think it's easy to fall into that trap, especially for marketers that have never done it before. So they're very tempted to say, “okay, what can the tool do? So that's what we're going to do.” But the same set of features is not right for every company. Customers are different depending on your industry and depending on your product and service, the way that you implement marketing automation must be very custom and tailored to your organization.   Pam Didner: You know, speaking of that, you say it has to be custom and tailored for your organization. So what is your take on make versus buy?   Darrell Alfonso: Yeah. If you're just starting out, I, I think the only way to, to get some of the marketing technology that you need is to buy it.   So if you really are in the situation of build versus buy, the way I think about it is to look down the road five or 10 years to see what that will look like and what the service or the activities that you're going to do will look like for both the vendor and then for you. And then you have to calculate all the costs.   Pam Didner: What do you mean? We need to spend money? (laughs)   Darrell Alfonso: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And it's such an important thing to, to think about, because if your business doubles or triples in size, you may need a lot more than what your platform provides today. And if you get to that stage, when you're five years into the future, the marketing technology roadmap will be heavily driven by the vendor and not you, right? And there's only a handful of customers that can really drive a vendor's roadmap.   Pam Didner: Right.   Darrell Alfonso: And it may not fall in your favor. So that, that's how I kind of think about it. It's tough to do all those calculations, but I think if you list out the, the key things that you need and look ahead and anticipate the amount of service you're going to need in the future, that can really help you make a good decision. Pam Didner: Yeah, I hear you. I mean, it's nice, especially on the enterprise side, you can think ahead in terms of what your Martech stack roadmap will look like. And obviously just like you said, it just needs to be driven from the objectives and also your business directions that you want to go.   Darrell Alfonso: Right.   Pam Didner: But for small businesses, obviously a lot of time, even though they want to look ahead, they probably can't. They can see probably like a product roadmap of growth for next five years. But in terms of what, how marketing will morph a lot of time, the mid-size companies, or even small businesses, they probably don't have that ability or even can afford to look that much ahead. And, um, I'm using myself as an example, Darrell, here. When I started just using data management as an example, I used Dropbox when I started. And I have everything in Dropbox and I have that for four years. And then last year during Christmastime, I basically said, guess what? “I want to structure my Dropbox. And I want to put that in G Suite.” So I put everything kind of like in G Suite. So I made that massive transition, literally killed my January, sorry, my Christmas holiday, because I was doing that. That was kind of like a little bit dumb ass on my part, if you will. I'm trying to do that during the holiday and then, I discovered Zoho. Zoho is kind of like an office platform that actually they have as CRM, they have Zoho Forms, they have Zoho Campaigns, which is an email marketing automation tool. All of a sudden, I don't have to use Drip for my marketing automation and then use Salesforce as my separate tool. Those tools are wonderful, but if I want those tools to talk to each other, I actually have to hire someone else to actually write a code to ensure they talk to each other, in addition to connecting just API, right? So then in June I make a massive transition from G Suite to Zoho. So I transfer over 14,000 files from Google Drive to actually to their Zoho work drive. That was huge amount of work. But again, as a small business, I probably can’t afford to have that kind of roadmap, but having everything under one umbrella. Oh my God. Darrell. I have to tell you. Talk about efficiency!   Darrell Alfonso: Yeah. I completely agree.   Pam Didner: It makes a huge difference. But it's a lot of work. Martech in general is just a lot of work. So I drink a lot. (laughs) Okay. I drink a lot. I drink a lot of... tea! Come on.   Darrell Alfonso: (laughs) There you go. There you go. Yeah. I mean, I totally agree with you. I think that that's one of the major problems today is the disparate systems that you have to work with. And having data in different areas. While I was running, I had this great sort of vision of what the future kind of would look like. I don't think it's going to be one platform to rule them all, but I do think it's going to be standardized. So you know how the Microsoft Office Suite of products, how you can just take a spreadsheet and then you can paste it into PowerPoint or paste it into Outlook and everything is always the same. And you can understand it and comprehend it. And it becomes more of like, just tools that you're familiar with using so you can get your work done. That's how I think the future is going to be when it comes to marketing technology. Like it's not going to be all in one place, but everything is going to be more standardized so that you can actually do stuff versus like what you said, like spending your entire Christmas holiday moving things around. (laughs) Yeah. So….   Pam Didner: Yeah, lot of the time, of course you can hire people to do that. But the reason I did that, I kind of want to be in the trenches that's because I kind of want to learn. I personally think Darrell, and I'm very jealous that you are the Marketo champions and you are certified Salesforce admin. I personally think that kind of skillset is important. I'm not saying that you must have, that's not my point. But it’s super critical to be a future or next generation of marketer.   Darrell Alfonso: Yeah, I think so. One thing that I saw early on and why I chose marketing automation was because of how in-demand it was and how critical it was to most of the things that marketing does.   Pam Didner: They touch everything because digital, because it's digital, you need to build a system that in the back end to talk to each other. Yes.   Darrell Alfonso: Yeah. And, and that's, that's how I advise people, especially when they're coming out of college, is to develop those niche or really in-demand skills because you can then work anywhere. People always need technical marketers that know how to get the job done. I've truly benefited from that in my career. Though I do-- I'm still hoping that the platforms will become easier and they'll more of become just a tool versus something that you have to study hours and hours for. But, I completely agree with you. The technical skills are today, especially, is really in demand.   Pam Didner: Yeah. There is another question I want to ask your opinion. When I talk to a lot of marketers and they focus on the front end, they focus on email marketing outreach. They focused on email marketing that's because, if you do email marketing that's very much tied with lead gen. You create leads for the sales team and you do email marketing, same thing. You capture the prospects and then you nurture them. Which is all good, right? It's much easier to quantify the marketing's contribution to, say, the sales and the business growth. And for marketing automation, a lot of them are really about the backend, is really about processes. And it's really about setting things up. So as a marketing automation manager, from your perspective, how do you quantify your impact to revenue?   Darrell Alfonso: Right. So the first thing, though, that I definitely want to say is that though, that job is typically backend, I think that good marketing automation managers will find more and more ways to contribute to a better customer experience. Because the platform itself has a lot of areas that are more front facing, like landing pages and emails and advertising is often managed in these systems. Right? If you can take the data behind that and advise on making more strategic marketing decisions, I think that that can get you out of the back office all the time, so to speak. That's one thing that I want to preface, what I want to say, say first.   Pam Didner: Okay.   Darrell Alfonso: The next thing that I like to recommend if you're having trouble proving your impact, is to really get involved with the critical business reports the marketing teams…   Pam Didner: Dashboards, building the dashboards.   Darrell Alfonso: Right. So, marketing automation people are really well positioned for that because much of the data is already there. So you're looking at activity, data engagement, data that's in the marketing automation platform or, or the CRM. So often you are building the connection between the tools and then some sort of dashboard. And if you're the owner of reports, you're often looked at as the strategic advisor. Because leadership will say, “Well, Darrell, you know, I know that you didn't create this campaign, but why…”   Pam Didner: “Why is the number down?”   Darrell Alfonso: Why is the number down? Right. So then I have now become more of a strategic advisor versus someone that's just handling the technical stuff. So, I think that that's going to be a really big, important part if you want to try to show your impact.   Pam Didner: I actually love your answer, not just focused on the process, but also getting involved on data analytics. Because you know, the data and the tools inside and out might as well just take it one step further. And another thing that you suggested--which is, I love it, I love it so much--is like, yeah, I'd be the owner of dashboard. Again, you know, the tools, you know, the processes. Why don't you just build a dashboard for everybody? I love these two! Excellent, excellent ideas. Before I was like, “I'm just doing the process. You are on the backend, you know, like you are invisible. How do you make yourself visible?”   Darrell Alfonso: Yeah.   Pam Didner: You know, so the last question I wanted to ask you, Is you touch a little bit on this and it's, what's ahead for the marketing automation, from your perspective. And you touch a little bit in terms of standardization and the pretty much all the big players need to have a come-to-Jesus meeting. Right?  (Darrell laughs) Some things like standardized to make the end-user's job a whole lot easier. I agree with that. And hopefully they will do that. What else? What else from your perspective that, using your crystal ball, that you can see ahead?   Darrell Alfonso: I mean, it's sort of aligned, but, one of the big problems today is within your marketing automation platform you usually have email marketing and maybe web personalization. But today, especially as the buyer journey changes, you need a lot more. So you need content discovery, you need advanced lead routing, which is a little bit in the weeds there…   Pam Didner: No it’s not! That’s the most important part-- high quality leads for your sales people.   Darrell Alfonso: Yeah. So you, you need that. And then, you need customizable reporting that works well for your organization. To get that, you need to build literally a stack of marketing technology and then weave it in, stitch it together. So, yeah, that's very limiting from a cost standpoint, from a resources standpoint. You have to learn all these different tools. So, so I do see the core marketing automation platforms either buying or building those new technologies or new services that really work with the way people buy today, you know? And then that’s through things like content and social media. That's a big thing that I can see is probably going to happen.   Pam Didner: Very, very good. So to wrap it up, why don't you tell our listeners how they can find you?   Darrell Alfonso: Yeah. So LinkedIn is my favorite Twitter, probably my second favorite and yeah, absolutely. They can reach out to me. I post a lot of my thoughts on how to do marketing automation and operations. So I do think that if they have questions on how I think about it and how I strategize it, you pretty much just have to look at my content. I don't mind people reaching out to me. I might be a little slow to respond,   Pam Didner: You work full-time, so totally understandable. It's all good. So very good. Excellent. So I have one silly question I want to ask you.   Darrell Alfonso: Yes   Pam Didner: So what is the most, I'm talking about the most useless talent you have?   Darrell Alfonso: Useless talent...   Pam Didner: Yeah. Useless (laughs)   Darrell Alfonso: Okay. So, actually I haven't told many people this, but I can do tarot card readings. (laughs)   Pam Didner: Really?   Darrell Alfonso: Yeah. So I have a deck and then maybe one day I'll have to go practice a little bit, but you know, I'd be happy to read your fortune (both laugh). And I'll tell you exactly what's going to happen to you (laugh).   Pam Didner: That's useless? I actually think that's very useful.   Darrell Alfonso: Yeah, well, I think my friends and family think it might be useless, but you know, it's definitely fun. (laughs)   Pam Didner: I love it. Did you learn that somewhere?   Darrell Alfonso: I actually did. Yeah. I have a book on how to do it. And then, I watched a lot of videos. You know, there's a lot of depth when it comes to it, and also it's a little bit personal with who you do the reading for, right? Because if I read your fortune versus my brother’s, you know, and a card like the tower comes up or something like that, I would read it differently because it depends on the person.   Pam Didner: It depends on who. I 100% agree with you. So a friend of mine now we got just dragging it a little bit. Just bear with us. And I have a very good friend, her name's Donna. And, she firmly believed she was a witch, like in her previous life. Right? And she can, she does, uh, the toro--, it's called tarot cards, right? I have to say there was a couple of times when she read my fortune, not necessarily like, Oh, like when you're going to die, but it's like, Oh, this is whatever she didn’t necessarily needs to be very specific, but like certain things is going to happen right, at a certain time. And she would call that out and, well, it actually happened!   Darrell Alfonso: Yeah.   Pam Didner: I actually think that's very useful.   Darrell Alfonso: Yeah. So anyway, I won't make your listeners listen to more of this tarot episode (laughs)   Pam Didner: (laughs) So if you are interested to have your fortune read, you can also reach out to Darrell through LinkedIn. Thank you so much for coming to my show. Really, really appreciate it, Darrell, and your insight about marketing automation is spot on and really, really appreciate that you can join us.   Darrell Alfonso: Thanks a lot for having me, Pam   Pam Didner: Again, thank you so much for listening to my podcast. And the podcasting is one-way communication, and I don't necessarily know who you are, but your support means a great deal to me. If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channel, you can also join my Facebook community. Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.  When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.   Love to hear from you. Take care. Bye-bye!

In this episode of Remote Work Radio, our host Marta Nielson interviews Becky Newman from Washington County. Becky is a graduate from the Master Remote Work Professional certificate course and became a remote worker soon after. She utilized her skills in the Microsoft Office Suite to become an instructor for Brigham Young University - Idaho where she teaches word processing to students from all over the globe.

Welcome to inaugural episode of Health Coach Conversations! This podcast will offer bite-sized specialized conversations for health coaches all around to the world - to help level up their businesses and attract more clients! In this episode Cathy talks about the following: Business tools needed for online businesses and startups. Expenses that go along with starting and running an online business. Saving money by not worrying about non-productive tools. The essentials tools and programs you need to begin with.   When starting a new business with a physical storefront, many expenses are budgeted into that initial startup - but I’ve found that not everybody realizes online businesses are the same. In this episode, I’ll break down what tools I think are most important for starting your online business and which tools are an unnecessary expense. My Tool Recommendations for Online Business Advertising (Either online or print).   Get organized with a CRM. Conference capability software. Appointment and calendar software. Having a website!  (And hosting it.) Online telephone services for your online business. Online storage and backup for your documents. Providing fantastic Customer Service to you and your clients. Product Management software for organization and efficiency. Accounting - tracking your incoming and outgoing flow of money.   Art / Creative program. Microsoft Office Suite    Things Mentioned In This Episode: Infusionsoft Go To Webinar Appointment Core Wordpress Site Ground Starter Sites Ring Central Dropbox Hubstaff Help Scout Basecamp Quickbooks Adobe Office 365 Office Suite Camtasia Video Editing MindMeister ShutterStock  Links to resources: Health Coach Group Website

Episode 139:  Freedom Makers was founded by Laura Renner who is passionate about people! Throughout her career in the U.S. Air Force and also in Human Resources, she has studied people: What drives us. What inspires us. And what scares us within our business. Freedom Makers came out of an extreme passion for helping small business owners and military families. Someone recently told Laura, "I can tell this is in alignment with your soul and the universe." Not only did it warm Laura's heart to hear this but she knew deep down they were right. It just fit. Laura graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy with a Bachelor's of Science in English and a minor in Chinese-Mandarin. She served as a Public Affairs officer before leaving the Air Force to earn an International MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She has worked for nearly fifteen years dealing directly with people in foreign and public relations, education and human resources. Laura very much enjoys traveling, running, and story-worthy adventures. http://traffic.libsyn.com/veteranonthemove/VOM20EP2013920-20Lauren.mp3 http://www.freedom-makers.com/ Our Top 5 Services: 1) Paper Cards 2) Microsoft Office Suite 3) Client Intake 4) Client Engagement Letters 5) Data Entry.   Want solutions for getting your time back? Schedule a no-obligation call today.   The Veteran On the Move podcast has published over 140 episodes giving listeners the opportunity to hear in-depth interviews conducted by host Joe Crane featuring the people, programs and resources to assist veterans in their transition to entrepreneurship:  Marine Corps, Army, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard veterans, DOD, entrepreneurship, business, success, military spouse, transition, education, programs and resources.  Veteran On the Move has garnered over 500,000 listens verified through Stitcher Radio, Sound Cloud, Itunes and RSS Feed Syndication making it one of the most popular Military Entrepreneur Shows on the Internet Today.  

Creating efficient, effective, and productive users of technology is what drives his passion for training, consulting, coaching and helping individuals overcome their fear and anxiety of technology and computers.  Learn more about Troy A. Burgher, a former resident of Edgemere Houses [of the New York City Housing Authority] located in Far Rockaway, Queens [New York City], and his entrepreneurial journey.  Ever since he stood in for a computer trainer back and “guru”, in the early 90’s, at the Rev. Mason Beacon Program within his neighborhood, he’s developed a passion for sharing his knowledge of computers and software applications with residents of inner-city communities; in particular desktop applications within the Microsoft Office Suite of applications.  Growing up in Edgemere Houses, there were no or very limited local technology and computer literacy resources, overshadowed by sports and craft-related activities, for Troy entertain his thirst for exploring computers.  This is what motivated him toward a life-long pursuit to bridging the technology literacy gap that exists in the inner-city community.  25+ years later of freelance training, facilitating technology literacy workshops, and developing training programs has given him solid practical experience in working with and motivating beginner and novice users; transforming them into more efficient, effective and productive users of technology and computers. 

Welcome to a new episode of Free Teacher PD:  Part 1 of Office 365 for Education, An Overview, with Letia Cooper Would you like to have access to your Microsoft Office programs and documents from anywhere and with any device? Office 365 for Education allows you to do just that – it gives teachers and students access to the Microsoft Office Suite of programs at any time and from anywhere. And perhaps most importantly, since it is available for Windows PCs and tablets, as well as for Mac, iOS, Android, and Blackberry devices - you can access it using almost any device. In this podcast episode, and Part 2 which follows, join Letia Cooper as she provides an overview of Office 365 for Education.  She will discuss some of the options and features it offers and provides, including free email, website building, online document editing, and cloud storage. In addition, Letia will share how you or your students can use the online calendar to keep track of assignments or appointments. She will also cover how you can use Office 365 to collaborate with colleagues and peers in real time. Please join Letia to learn about many of the great features and benefits that Office 365 for Education has to offer students and educators.   Let’s get learning!

Lawyers, even solos, are constantly working with experts, opposing counsel, court officials, and colleagues. Dennis and Tom like to keep an eye on new developments and the current state of collaboration tools and technologies, which they consider one of the most important, yet under-appreciated, areas of legal technology. In 2008, they wrote a book together called The Lawyer's Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies, which gives suggestions about the bigger collaboration platforms and smaller discrete tools that lawyers can use to work together. In the last seven years, many collaboration tools have changed but a lot of systems have stayed the same. What's happening in 2015 and what developments do you need to know about and incorporate into your work? In this episode of The Kennedy-Mighell Report, Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell survey the current landscape for collaboration tools, trends and best practices, and what lawyers should be doing to make better use of these tools. They begin by examining their book and the collaboration tools that have disappeared or morphed into different programs. Kennedy mentions that Sharepoint, Wikis, Instant Messaging, Adobe Acrobat, and Microsoft Office Suite can all be used by attorneys and staff to work together, although Mighell is skeptical that many law firms actually use any of these. Both hosts maintain that lawyers almost exclusively use email for collaboration, although they believe future generations of lawyers will introduce a new perspective on technology use. They finish the first section by mentioning social media and listing other underutilized tools for lawyers who work with others on many cases. In the second portion of the show, Kennedy and Mighell discuss the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The CES revealed the latest consumer technologies to expect throughout the year. They discuss the best and worst of drones, wearables, or new selfie technologies. As always, stay tuned for Parting Shots, that one tip, website, or observation that you can use the second the podcast ends. Special thanks to our sponsor, ServeNow

Please join me as I share the results of my professional quest to research the importance of technology and computer literacy for entrepreneurs and new small business owners.  As a solo-preneur myself I have truly benefited from maximizing the benefits of technology and computers when it comes to equalizing the playing field with my competition. As a result of this journey, I have re-focused my training & consulting efforts to educate entrepreneurs and small business owners on how to become more efficient, effective and productive users of technology with a strong focus on the Microsoft Office Suite of applications.  After-all, how can you ignore this statistic….according to Microsoft, 1.1 billion people (or 1 in 7 people on the planet) use Microsoft Office.  I am quite sure that a significant percentage of these users includes entrepreneurs & start-up small business owners.  If you currently use Microsoft Office or have been thinking about purchasing the suite of applications, then you don’t’ want to miss this broadcast on learning more about how Microsoft Office Suite applications can be applied to your business!

Since January of 2014, I have gone on a personal and professional quest to research the importance of technology literacy in the workplace...and it truly amazes me how individuals today still take for granted the importance and necessity of technology literacy skills in the workplace. I came across article after article about the importance of being computer literate in the workplace, the importance of basic computer skills and the importance of computers skills as an office professional.  Therefore I am re-focusing my training & consulting efforts to educate individuals on how to become more efficient, effective and productive users of technology with a strong focus on the Microsoft Office Suite applications.  After-all, how can you ignore this statistic….according to Microsoft, 1.1 billion people (or 1 in 7 people on the planet) use Microsoft Office.  Today’s broadcast will discuss how the very applications that sit on desktops at many places of work offer individuals more options and a greater ability to become successful employees in the workplace…the catch is enhance one’s technology skill sets, identify the issues and obstacles they face, and to begin integrating these new skills sets with the experience each individual possesses to minimize, if not, eliminate these obstacles. I am starting with the workplace during this broadcast and I will discuss how to achieve e-squared-p at home, professionally, and academically on future broadcasts.  So stop by my web site, www.tabtraining.com, or lookup TABRadio here on BlogTalkRadio.

Often times we take for granted just how important technology literacy is in our personal, professional and academic lives. For example, I am a diabetic and therefore it is very important for me to monitor my glucose levels; I use Microsoft Excel to track my glucose readings, the times at which I take my glucose readings, the food that I have eaten that day and I also track the highs, lows and averages for the week.  I even have charts and graphs to display trends in a pictorial way.  Tracking this information allows me to make any necessary changes to my diet, exercise routine and the occasional treat - a piece of "real" lemon cake (not sugar free). That is just one of many ways that I use technology to help me on a personal level.  It is only through knowing about Microsoft Excel and spreadsheets that I would have known to use this program to help me with my health. Listen in to learn more about the different Microsoft Office Suite applications (that you probably already have on your computer, laptop, tablet or smart phone) and some of the ways you can use them personally, professionally and academically.

#LondonMinute Patricia Rykiel remembers her past as a Microsoft Office Suite trainer in Washington, DC.

Improvements in Excel 2013, a part of the Microsoft Office Suite. Will your applications work with Windows 8? When things go wrong. In Short Circuits: The end of Newsweek and the beginning. Microsoft reports Windows 8 sales figures (Surprise!). Iran blamed for ongoing attacks on US banks. Google's Eric Schmidt calls for open Internet access in North Korea.

How well-versed should paralegals and and paralegal students be in Microsoft Office Suite? Paralegal Voice co-host Vicki Voisin welcomes Deborah Savadra who blogs at LegalOfficeGuru.com, to take a look at the skills most legal employers expect and how paralegals can master those skills, and the resources available for improving skills. Deborah also shares her top tips for Word and Outlook, as well as her favorite technology tools.

Learn the power of Microsoft Office Suite applications and other Microsoft applications that ALL business owners should use to promote business effectiveness, efficiency and productivity!

Gas prices are high…unemployment is high...companies only want to hire individuals that are working (huh?)…the outlook appears to be very grim…but this is the chance for individuals to use their ingenuity, creativity and “technology literacy” to overcome such obstacles! Listen in as I will share my personal story on how I plan to overcome these obstacles and succeed even though many people said I will not succeed in such an economic climate.  This personal story has been 20 years in the making and I strongly feel the time is right!  I will also share some “out-of-the-box” ways to incorporate technology as a tool for “solopreneurs”, like myself, to survive on a shoestring budget.  This broadcast will also cover ways to productively, effectively and efficiently use Microsoft Office Suite applications at home! So, plan this upcoming Sunday (6/12/11) to include spending 30-minutes listening and participating during our TABRadio broadcast.  I promise you that you will walk away with new ideas and information to consider implementing into your business or daily lives.

MBC stands for Microsoft Business Certification.  The Microsoft Business Certification is the only worldwide, performance-based certification program that validates the skills needed to get the most out of the Microsoft Office Suite applications.  Whether you are looking to re-enter the workforce, looking for career advancement, or seeking a job that requires strong computer skills the Microsoft Business Certification (MBC) program can help you attain the valuable expertise you need—and businesses rely on—to succeed. For more information about Microsoft Business Certification.  Listen in to learn how both the certifications and the process of acquiring the certification will significantly improve your "Human Capital!"

What are some ways to increase your employment opportunities, especially if you need to enhance your technology skills sets. We will discuss ways of using Microsoft Office Suite applications to accomplish a few of these concepts.

GSP Revisted, Profiles in IT (Charles Simonyi, architect of Microsoft Office Suite), Sarah Palin email hacked (password reset weaknesses, lessons learned), Dumb Idea of the Week (tracking doggy poop using DNA), NASA to explore sun (magnetic fields in transition region, Zeeman spectral splitting, solar interference prediction), and Food Science (sauces, Roman sauces, Medici culinary transition to France, five mother sauces). This show originally aired on Saturday, September 20, 2008, at 9:00 AM EST on WFED (1500 AM).

GSP Revisted, Profiles in IT (Charles Simonyi, architect of Microsoft Office Suite), Sarah Palin email hacked (password reset weaknesses, lessons learned), Dumb Idea of the Week (tracking doggy poop using DNA), NASA to explore sun (magnetic fields in transition region, Zeeman spectral splitting, solar interference prediction), and Food Science (sauces, Roman sauces, Medici culinary transition to France, five mother sauces). This show originally aired on Saturday, September 20, 2008, at 9:00 AM EST on WFED (1500 AM).

Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: So I do think it’s a really tough sell for classic native apps into the enterprise. Now there is another market which you might call independent creative professionals, and these buyers value different things and say what they want is powerful tools that are shaped to their needs and workflow that they can deploy on their platform of choice, and that give them a lot of abilities and that are kind of unique to them as a creator. 00:00:26 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for thought on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. I’m here today with my colleagues Mark McGranaghan. Hey Adam, and Leonard S Saberski. Hello. And I don’t know if you fellows noticed, but we changed the intro a little bit. I did. So this is a bit more aspirational than actual, but exciting news, Muse 2 is coming early next year, that will be in early 2022. I’ll link to our roadmap memo talking about that, and one of the top features there is a MacA. 00:01:07 - Speaker 1: Very exciting, the pieces are coming together. 00:01:09 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and certainly this has been part of our vision from the beginning, tying together all the devices where creative people do work. Clearly, the iPad, while we think it was sort of like an underserved device and has a lot of potential for creative uses, particularly this thinking work that Muse is all about, but having, I think, pretty well explored that, we also need to fill in these other pieces of the puzzle. And so, desktop is obviously the next step there. And of course, one answer on desktop is you make a web app, either something runs in a browser or something that runs in a, what’s called an electron app, which is basically just kind of a wrapper for a browser or a web technology app. But we’re opting to do something that is what I would call a native app, and I thought that would be a great opportunity to explore the topic of native apps generally and what those even are and and what they mean for users of the software. So maybe we can talk a bit about the technical side of that because it is fundamentally a technical thing, but then the design user experience, you know, what does it mean to design a native app and what’s the benefit to users or how should things look or feel different for them. And I’d also like to speak a little to the business side at the end because we’ve seen a big growth in a lot of interesting productivity tools, both kind of business team, enterprisey stuff, but also personal tools and see how the native app question fits in there. So Mark, you’re the most technical of this group, I think by a fair shot. So maybe you could briefly define for us what is a native app or what’s even the alternative to that and how do they differ. 00:02:48 - Speaker 1: Well, there are a lot of different axes here, but let me give you the classic native app and then the contrast with say the web app. So classically, a native app is something that you download as a binary artifact like a DMG versus a web app where you would go to a URL. It’s implemented in the native language and stack of the platform. So for an Apple products that would be Objective C or Swift. And it integrates closely with the platform features and libraries for things like UI systems access, input and output, and so forth. Contrast with web, it’s going to be implemented in the language of the web, you know, HTML and you might have more or less access to the underlying platform features you might not be able to read it and write the disk, for example. And then I think importantly, traditionally native apps store things locally. On the local disk and web app store things in the cloud. Now, as we’re going to discuss, I’m sure you can mix and match different axis here, but that’s the classic native app as I see it. 00:03:45 - Speaker 2: Right, so I think of the classic native productivity tools would be something like the Microsoft Office Suite. So if you were on a Windows computer in the 90s or early 2000s and you would download or even install it from a CD probably, so you’ve got the, as you said, the binary program, you copy that software onto your computer, you run it there, and then when you want to save something, a XLS. or a doc that goes onto your hard drive somewhere and you can transmit that to someone else, you can email it, put it on a floppy disk or a thumb drive, but everything is very on the local device and the software is there and downloaded and runs right there on your computer. And nowadays, both with things like Google Docs, actually, I think Microsoft has even transitioned to cloud kind of web apps with their stuff as well. That’s something where you’re really connecting to someone else’s computer or cluster of computers, AKA the cloud through your web browser and everything stored. Basically, most of the sort of software itself is run on their computer and sort of the results just transmitted to you and the data itself is also stored there. 00:04:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and just to give an example of mixing and matching these different aspects, you have electron apps which are distributed as binaries like DMGs on Mac, but under the hood they wrap what is basically a web browser, so you have a web implementation and then the resulting feel and storage characteristics is often in between that of a native app and web app. It feels kind of webby, but also kind of native, depends on the individual developer, but that’s an example of how you can mix and match some of these axes. 00:05:22 - Speaker 2: Electron has become incredibly pervasive. Slack’s desktop app is Electron, so it’s the Spotify app, so there’s the Notion app, so there’s the FIMA app, so this sort of, yeah, wraps up, would otherwise be a web app. Another piece on the technical side, I think is it’s not just this kind of web and cloud versus local program and local storage duality, but it’s also how you implement that interface. So there’s typically APIs that are customed to a platform, so Windows. has a set of APIs, Mac has a set of APIs, iOS has a set of APIs, there’s often widget toolkits that go with that, you know, on Linux, you have something like GTK, often there are different widget toolkits, and so the degree to which you use or don’t use those can make it feel native. Now, Leonard, maybe you can give us the user experience or the design side. What does native mean kind of within your discipline? 00:06:18 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there are a few different ways of looking at it. So one is to just take the technical definition and look at, OK, we have a native app. What does that mean for the design of the interface? And we have a non-native app, what does that mean for the design? And there are sort of implications on both sides that can make the user experience better or worse. But what I actually find more interesting is thinking about what makes an app feel native and look native, even completely separate from the technical implementation of it. So I think there are a lot of different factors to untangle that just from the user experience, make an app feel native. 00:06:55 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and we can enumerate a few aspects of this. So one that you’ve mentioned already is the look and feel based on the UI toolkit and how the controls look. Another, I think is how the app interacts with the underlying platform. So for example, different platforms expect applications to write user data in different locations on the disk, you know, like Unix has like the slash user or whatever, and Mac has the till the application support or whatever it is on Mac, right? And sometimes you get these apps that are multi-platform, they start writing data in really random places and it confuses you. And maybe a third example, the most subtle would be the mental models and metaphors that an application uses. So on Mac kind of uniquely there’s this idea of app that’s separate from Windows, like physical instantiations of the app, and so you can have an app open with no Windows. Or you can have an app open with multiple windows, and that’s quite different from how it works on Windows, where if you click the X, like the application exits, because the window is the app and vice versa. 00:07:50 - Speaker 2: Linux window managers typically work the same ways, and also that you can run the program twice, right? So that was something I has a Linux on the desktop user for many, many years, and I actually really liked that if I ran my Text editor, for example, a second time with my command pallet or from the command line or just by clicking the icon, I would get a second window, a second instance of that, and with Mac, when you click on it in the dock or you all tab to it, it brings whatever was already there to the front. So basically whether the program is running or not gives you different behavior when you go to launch it. 00:08:24 - Speaker 1: And maybe one more thing we could throw in there in terms of platform access is just the power of the features that you have access to. So a lot of audio and video things, for example, are hard to get at if you’re not a more native app on the iPad, for example, you can only get 120 hertz if you can’t do that as a web app and so forth. 00:08:40 - Speaker 3: And I think a lot of that is not just because you don’t have technical access to those features, but even just because these apps are designed for so many different platforms and so many different devices that basically every feature that isn’t available on all of these platforms just isn’t that important and isn’t that easy to build. 00:09:00 - Speaker 1: Yes, and this brings us to what you might call the implied aspects or dimensions of native versus non-native apps. So you mentioned one which is if you’re building a non-native app, it’s often because you’re building for multiple platforms and then you tend to get this least common denominator effect where you only use the features that are available on all platforms. Another one that we found is quite important is performance, where sometimes but not always, if you implement the app in a way that’s less native, you can suffer worse performance or perhaps have a lower performance ceiling. 00:09:30 - Speaker 2: One thing we learned working with web technologies and styluses was, for example, that the data you could get from the APIs was just less. Yes, you can get input, maybe you can even tell it’s a stylus, but you couldn’t get, for example, the asimuth of the pencil. And maybe that doesn’t matter for your particular application, but for example, for Muse where we wanted to do weird stuff with you hold the stylus in a different grip, and then you get a different tool, and we thought this would be a cool and interesting and powerful way to take advantage of that unique form factor, but it just wasn’t on the web at the time. And I think the web tends to catch up eventually, but that stuff always comes first to the native platform APIs. 00:10:08 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s a good point that there’s a time dimension here where, as you said, often web or multi-platform umbrellas will catch up over time, but you’re less able to change as the underlying platform makes changes, you need to basically wait for the change to propagate up through the various abstraction layers that you’re using, whereas if you’re native, as soon as the underlying API changes, you can adopt it. 00:10:32 - Speaker 2: Now another slice maybe of the kind of native versus not, again on the technical side here is the web I think of as being the sort of universal runtime that won the wars of the early 2000s, so for those graybeards like me who are around to experience that. Java and the JBM was a very big push in the industry to create this concept of right once run anywhere, that you have different computing platforms or different kinds of computers, different operating systems, different manufacturers, but in a way they were kind of especially pre-mobile, they were basically all pretty similar in terms of they have screens and keyboards and some kind of pointing device and seems silly that you have to rewrite your app to run it in. Different places and the JVM had this concept that it could make this universal run time, make it run anywhere and Flash had a version of that as well, but they both were basically pretty terrible experiences for anyone that ever remembered running Java Servlet applications or Flash had its uses, but in the end also it felt like this this very confined box that was just constrained. From interacting with your computer in all these useful ways, and I think the web eventually won that war where essentially everyone now has a web runtime environment. It’s called the browser. It’s become extremely powerful. It often can tap a lot of the operating system APIs for hard audio and video access and things like that. And of course we do love the web for a lot of reasons and that has unlocked a lot of things, but in the end it is this essentially kind of translation layer. Another type of translation layer that isn’t requiring the user to install a runtime, that is a browser or a JVM is something like React Native, or something like Cordova. It’s the right ones run anywhere concept, but rather than trying to give that sort of general bundle to someone on Windows and someone on Mac downloads the same program, the Java jar or the web HTML plus related assets bundle. Instead, you actually compile it, trans. You might even say to each of these platforms. So React Native, for example, is a mobile application platform. You write your app for a phone, but then it can compile to iOS and it can compile to Android, and these are true native apps in the sense that then you compile them and build them with the normal iOS and Android tool chain, they become a binary artifact that is probably hard to tell from casual inspection. That it wasn’t built kind of directly using Xcode or the Android equivalent workspace. And yet of course it has the downside that now as you said, lowest common denominator there is this translation layer, but it just kind of happens at a different time. It happens on sort of the developer’s computer when they do the build and through this toolchain rather than the end user’s computer. And so that probably gives you some performance benefits, but there is this thing where you’re kind of homogenizing between the platforms. 00:13:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and with React Native in particular, you seem to get the now you have N +1 problems issue, which we have to some extent with browsers, sort of famously web developers deal with browser quirks and every browser is a little bit different, although that seems to be less of an issue these days with auto updating browser. But with React Native, it seems to be a huge deal. Probably because of the surface area and complexity and dynamism of the underlying APIs, just trying to write something that compiles reasonably and runs reasonably on these two platforms which are very different and have very particular APIs just has proven to be quite hard, but we can talk more about how that’s played out. 00:14:07 - Speaker 2: But where I thought the technical side interleaves pretty well with the designer user experience side is I feel like this. I don’t know if it’s a siren song, or at least it is an appealing idea to developers and to certainly to businesses that don’t want to have to maintain code bases and multiple platforms that you write kind of one single code base and then you can deliver it to different platforms through some kind of minor effort, minor translation layer. And I feel like it’s so compelling to the creators of the software, but then as a user of the software, then there’s this thing where, yeah, it just seems like it’s never as good. It’s gone through this translation layer, it’s lowest common denominator, either it feels like the other platform. So, one example there might be something like, I sometimes use the Audacity audio editor, which I originally used on Linux back when I was in that world, it’s built using the GTK toolkit, so it was native to that environment. And they build what you would call native versions for Windows and Mac, but it looks like Linux, because it uses the GTK toolkit, it does not integrate at all well, and that matters a lot for audio stuff, so it’s a good example there with Audacity, it’s hard to switch between your audio sources, it basically gets really confused, it just doesn’t use the Mac audio APIs very well, so it ends up feeling very, very clunky and feeling like it’s been transplanted from this other place, even though it’s been compiled in this way. 00:15:34 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is an engineering problem. You’re not fated one way or another to have either a great uniform app or a terrible app that looks bad on all the different platforms. Another example would be Flutter. Flutter. Yeah, so they did the same thing. It’s right once run anywhere for I think primarily targeting mobile platforms, but they did the thing where they reimplemented all the iOS controls, Pixel for Pixel, and it basically looks pretty good, even though you’re not using the AS controls at all, so it can be done, just big engineering problem. 00:16:01 - Speaker 2: So Leonard, what for you is some examples of great native apps that showcase, it’s not necessarily about the technology, but it’s about being designed specifically for a particular form factor, or a particular platform. 00:16:14 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the most obvious example to look at is just the Apple apps, you know, that’s the sort of gold standard, of course, in terms of native apps that are adapted to each platform. There has been, at least in recent times, like some exceptions to that, where they are also trying to bring the iPhone or the iPad app to the Mac. And that can result in something similar to just bringing a web app to the Mac, where it’s not really optimized for the platform and it doesn’t quite feel right. But yeah, there are some great examples and I think especially for the pro apps, you know, Final Cut or something. This is a very native app that feels great in its design exactly for the platform. I think there are still a few third party apps that do a great job, like Things app. Which is a task manager. 00:17:01 - Speaker 2: Things was gonna come to mind for me, yeah. 00:17:03 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and things are surprisingly, I don’t think they actually use that many completely native UI elements like a lot of the UI is sort of custom, but all of it feels very native and it is still a native app and they just customize elements to sort of bring in their own brand and do things a little bit differently to fit their needs. 00:17:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for me, the feeling native thing is not about using system controls. I think it’s good when kind of principle at least surprise or you’re familiar with these controls, and so therefore, you know, if your share sheet just uses that standard share action icon and you tap on it and you get a pop up, whereas I think it’s quite common. I know a couple of apps do this quite annoyingly where you tap that share icon and you get something that is not the iOS default share thing, maybe Twitter does that. 00:17:55 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think YouTube does that and basically all the Google apps, like they first show a share sheet that highlights all the different Google ways to share and then like at the very bottom of the very right corner, you have to scroll to there’s like a tiny more button and then you get the actual share sheet. 00:18:09 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, there’s some more thing and that takes you to the system one. For me, it’s not necessarily about using the system widgets everywhere, it is about performance, it is about using the form factor to its best extent, and I think things is an example I like because they have apps for Mac, for iPad, for the phone, and they’re all very similar visually and they have a lot of the same controls, but they use the different screen size. And they use the different options that are available in each place. So, for example, they’ve got great keyboard shortcuts, which you can use on the iPad and you can use on the Mac, they’re not relevant on the phone for obvious reasons, and so, making use of what exists in each place, even if it’s just different screen sizes and orientations, is part of what it’s about, that it’s been thought about, how do we make this work well on this. Device and I think that’s where often either the translation layers or back to some of our very first episodes of the podcast, Mark and I spoke quite a bit about what he usually calls the transliteration of apps, rather you take a desktop app and you try to bring it to the iPad, or you bring an iPhone app and you bring it to the iPad, and either way, if you haven’t really thought about iPad’s unique capabilities, unique form factor, it just feels like a port, like a weird port. And sometimes I’ve even seen versions of these where people take iPhone apps and make it available on iPad, but it doesn’t even work in landscape mode. It’s got this weird letterboxing. I almost think, why does this even exist? It is so out of place on this platform that you might as well just not even have it. 00:19:50 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there’s another reason here why many larger companies prefer a non-native design for the apps. And I think often it basically comes down to their brand identity and they don’t want to give up their brand for feeling native. So in the end, it becomes a decision between being native to the system and native to the brand that you’ve established and the sort of visual system around that. And so for example, apps like Spotify, they basically look the same on every platform, on every device and they also behave and feel similar, right? And I think for them, that’s a very conscious decision not only because they don’t want to develop a native app for every single platform, but also because their brand is so important to them. And I think that’s especially true for industries like music streaming or even like car sharing food ordering where it’s very commoditized and you basically have to rely on your brand for people to use your service. And so if they all switch to like a generally more bland, less branded native experience where they can’t control every single aspect of the app, I think that’s just not worth it to them. 00:20:59 - Speaker 2: I think you also see the war between the tech giant empires play out there a little bit, right? Google wants to bring their material design stuff. It’s actually an interesting thing recently where maybe it’s the Google Maps team or one of the teams that takes some of the Google products and brings them to iOS, and they retired a bunch of their custom widgets, some really interesting Twitter thread there. I’ll see if I can find and link it, but They do have a kind of consistent, I mean, material design is great and it’s consistent across these different platforms they’re on, it’s tied to their brand, but there is also this element of Google and Apple are kind of warring empires in a way, and you probably get a similar thing with Microsoft as well. And so it’s weird to say that you know Microsoft Office doesn’t feel that native on Mac because they want to like. Use their unique brand identity when Microsoft’s office is pretty bland and vanilla, but there is this element of it’s their, they’re trying to bring some of their empire into this other company’s empire, and so sometimes you see these wars play out, maybe like the YouTube share sheet is an example of that. What you’re seeing is not kind of user-centric design, what you’re seeing is the warring tech giants trying to encroach on each other’s territory. 00:22:12 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think if you take it to the extreme, there can be cases where basically a third party creates a platform on top of your system that’s just completely takes over the design. Like a lot of people just spend a ton of time on Facebook and use Facebook apps and Facebook services and everything that’s created there will just look like Facebook and not support anything system related. And I think there’s a similar thing in many countries where you know in China you have WeChat and that is like the platform that everything runs on and it doesn’t matter at all if it’s running on an iPhone or an Android. It just becomes the system essentially. 00:22:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s a good example, and I’ll tell you another good example, almost the most impressive one of all time, which was in the 1990s, Microsoft had an absolute lock on the desktop operating system. To the point that they were, you know, being hauled in front of federal courts for essentially having a monopoly, and the thing that eventually broke that was not legal action, I don’t think, but was the web and the appearance of the web browser was essentially this insertion of a whole other platform, or other almost operating system. That you could run inside this existing platform, and I think ultimately the web was what broke the Microsoft monoculture and Microsoft computing monopoly a little bit. And so rightly so, I think companies are afraid of that. Apple probably works hard to defend against that, for example, not allowing other browser engines on iOS or letting you do anything that runs code or anything that looks vaguely platform like and for good or for ill, but you can see why from a business perspective and defending your empire perspective, that’s a wise decision. So Leonard, you’ve been spending a lot of time on the design of Muse for Mac recently, and without giving too much away there, I’d be curious to know how you went into approaching that or if you have this idea in your mind that it’s good to design something to feel native, it’s less about the technology and more about how it feels and what the end user experiences, what principles did you bring to bear, or how are you approaching the design of use for Mac with that in mind? 00:24:23 - Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s interesting because Muse is basically a native app both on the iPad and on the Mac, but it does still feel like a bit of a foreign entity when you use it since we are not using that many system components by default and we are doing things a lot differently than many other iOS apps. 00:24:42 - Speaker 2: One of the things I found really interesting reading some of your just internal memos as you were gearing up for this project was pointing out that basically Muse for Mac will use a lot more system widgets and a lot more common conventions around things like menus and shortcuts and Right, click context menus and things, and that’s basically because Mac is the world’s best, it’s just my personal opinion, but I think a lot of people share it, it is the world’s best platform for creativity and productivity. So on iPad, we came into it saying we think this device has huge potential for creative tools, but that potential is not being exercised, and that’s lack of the right kind of software and it’s also lack of the right kind of support from the operating system or the right kind of widgets or the right kind of system APIs. And so we kind of invented a lot of our own, and we started with a literal blank canvas and brought in a lot of our own controls and interactions and so on, taking advantage of a lot of the things that make iOS very powerful, including the high performance and the programming frameworks and so on, but really the system level widgets were of less use to us. But it seems like on Mac, that will be less the case because in fact there is a multi-decade history. In fact, I would argue that Mac traces its lineage back to Xerox PARC when Steve Jobs went in there and saw the future of computers in the form of the Alto and brought that to Lisa and then the original Macintosh. And so it’s steadily accumulating all our best practices about how to be productive on computers in that time. 00:26:19 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think iOS and iPads have something very special and unique there where every app really feels like its own world and it sort of lives on its own. And I think as a result of that, we have seen many native IOS apps looking very different from each other. And that’s not really as much the case on the Mac. Like the native apps on the Mac all look quite similar and feel quite similar. Like there are some that, you know, maybe trying things differently and either succeeding or failing, but in the end, like they are all trying to follow the same visual language. And that’s not really the case on iOS and I think that provides an interesting opportunity at least for designers to try new things. And I think you have to be a bit more careful with that on the Mac since yeah, there’s such a long tradition on the Mac and be right next to all kinds of other apps and people kind of have a different expectation of how an app fits into the system. And so I think a general rule for us, even though it doesn’t seem like it at first, is actually we deviate from sort of the native default design for a future, then like that has to be a very deliberate decision and like we have to have a reason for it. We have to understand why the system component or the system design pattern works differently and then we can sort of do our own thing with it. And I think that’s even more true on the Mac and there will also be less reasons basically to do our own thing. 00:27:41 - Speaker 2: Yeah, to name one example that comes to mind as a pretty core design idea from Muse dating back to our research prototype days is that you should never have to wait for anything, no controls, no gestures, have some kind of built. In delay. So the standard drag and drop on iOS, and that includes iPad OS, is that you hold your finger down for some period of time. It’s usually about half a second and then the item kind of lifts up and then you can carry it someplace else. And the problem with that is if you want to move a bunch of items quickly while you’re constantly waiting. And we wanted to make something where you could not only never have to wait, but in fact, with the larger screen of the iPad, there’s this really neat effect where you can start moving your hand in the direction of where you want to move the card, bring the finger down and sort of catch it just like it’s an index card sliding across your desk, move it to where it’s gonna go and let go. So there’s no delay there, but that, you know, is our own custom gesture system because that’s quite an unusual way to do things as far as I know. I don’t know that I’ve seen any other app on iOS do that, whereas on Mac, yeah, guess what, when you click on an item and start dragging it, it goes right away. That’s, that’s how it works. That’s how basically all programs work. And so, great, so there we just do the standard thing that everyone else does. 00:29:03 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think you can really achieve a lot if you try to play to each system’s strength and not just, you know, try to adapt one element and like make it work. But really think about the different kinds of inputs and systems surrounding your app. Like at the very basic level on the iPad, of course, we have touch input and, you know, that feels great. You have like a very direct way to manipulate things, can your gestures and we use that a lot from use on the iPad. But then on the Mac, like if we just take all of that stuff and let you do the same stuff with the mouse, yeah, theoretically that would work, but it’s just not going to feel great. And so instead, the mouse has its own benefits, right? Like it’s much more precise. It can be used in tandem with the keyboard that’s also always there. And so I think there will be a lot of opportunities like that where if we really think about what the strength of each platform is, then we can do something that web apps which have to serve the lowest common denominator, can’t even do at all. 00:30:01 - Speaker 2: And I think it’s not just the capabilities of the platform, but the use cases you are going to use them for and even how you were sitting. So Mark, I think this was part of your kind of original vision for the multi-device use experience. I’ll see if I can paraphrase here, which is, you know, when you’re at the computer, you’re in this focus posture, you’re probably sitting upright, you’ve got the bigger screen, you’ve got the keyboard and mouse. You’re probably doing something like deep research on the web or maybe production work, like writing a long paper or designing an interface or something, whereas the tablet, maybe you’re sitting in a reading chair, you’re at a cafe, maybe you’re outside somewhere. You’re in this much more relaxed, or you have a lot more variety of positions you can have flat on the desk, sitting in your lap, that sort of thing. You might be holding it in different angles and you’re using it more for this thinking, arranging, pondering, you’re scratching your chin and sipping your coffee and maybe getting up and pacing around the room. You know, that’s more of the setting that you’re in. And so, of course, you have different capabilities on each device, but in many cases you actually have different uses, and so we should be as much as we can designing for those uses, I think, without also being too restrictive about we obviously don’t want to stop you from doing any one particular thing in any one particular environment, but knowing roughly what sort of environment and what sort of use you’re having seems like a thing to take into account with the design work. 00:31:24 - Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, and then by the way, the phone is going to be, you’re on the go, you have one hand and a few taps, and that’s it to either save something or look something up quickly. 00:31:32 - Speaker 2: Yeah, a good example on the phone is I think it’s considered best practice, and I think I probably agree with this to try to make everything doable essentially with one finger, basically one thumb, and also a thumb that you can reach, you know, maybe in the bottom half of the screen. So most of what you want to do when you’re hailing a ride. You’re messaging with a friend, you’re quickly looking something up on the map. You got to imagine that you’re juggling the phone in one hand, maybe you got a coffee or a baby or a dog’s leash or a bag in the other hand, it’s a noisy environment, maybe you’re outside. And so what the design should prepare for is I’m at my office, it’s quiet. I’m looking at a big screen, I’ve got my hands on a full-sized keyboard, and I can take my time and I have much more precision, and I want more control and power, but it’s also OK if the essentially things are a lot fussier. There’s more on screen at the time, and if I click on the wrong place, it’s OK, I’ll undo that sort of thing. 00:32:29 - Speaker 1: OK, so we’ve been talking a little bit abstractly here about use cases and postures and number of hands available and so forth. Leonard, to kind of bring it back to the concrete visuals, how do you see that being different across these different platforms and native versus non-native? 00:32:43 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel like there’s always a very interesting conflict between native and non-native apps where native apps always seem like sort of the dull ones and the ones that aren’t going to be visually unique or interesting. Like we talked about this earlier with the brand design and presumably if you do a native app, you know, your brand is not really going to shine through. And so I think the instinct is very often to just not follow the native design so that you can sort of do something unique and do something interesting and then your app will actually stand out from the crowd. 00:33:14 - Speaker 1: This is like moral hazard, visual designer edition. It reminds me in the world of engineering where sometimes companies make it a requirement to get promoted, they do something complicated, and then so engineers introduce a whole bunch of unnecessary complicated stuff into production because they want to get promoted. As a similar vibe to me. 00:33:30 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think there’s actually a management part to that where as a designer, if you, if you strictly try to follow the system components, like those are basically constraints, and if someone tells you and says, you know, we want to do a specific thing this way, then you might have to say that’s not compatible with the system way of doing it and we can’t do that since we are following the system guidelines. And so it’s very appealing in that way to just do your own thing and then you can always say, OK, yeah, let’s do what we want basically. I do think we kind of have a bit of a lost art idea of being able to get the most out of the native components and being able to bring your own design language into them. Like if you look a few decades back to something like Windows 95. Like there when you download like a media player from the internet, you would actually have skins that you can also download and then the app just looks completely different and completely wacky and basically by now modern interface standards usable, but it introduced a ton of personalization and sort of uniqueness to the whole platform, right? And I think it’s somewhat making a comeback that like some apps have options for themes or skins you can click through and those can still be native apps and they just sort of transform how things look a bit and introduce some personalization to it. 00:34:46 - Speaker 2: One interesting point there, I think we talked about with Weiweiu in our episode about expressive tools is there’s the designer or the company getting to express their unique brand, like you mentioned Spotify, and then there’s the individual getting to customize so that they can express their unique personality through their computing environment. So I think the Winna skins were great. Yeah, a lot of them were maybe not super usable, but maybe for a media player, that’s pretty simple anyways, it’s just like play pause, volume, jump track, you as a user are choosing, I want this wacky, brightly colored one, because I like what that expresses about myself and brings some customization to my computing environment. Which something about that feels more wholesome or maybe just comes back to this user-centric thing again compared to my company has a prerogative to use our brand styling system everywhere possible in order to maximize shareholder value or a designer wants to get promoted because they did something cool and unique that stood out to their team or to their boss. I don’t want to be too negative on that. I think there are a lot of good places for bringing unique style and character to an application that reflects your team or your product, but I think those are two really different categories. 00:36:05 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I guess what I would like to see more is just people trying to merge the two and trying to use native components and still infuse them with their own brand. Like one great example of that is a Wikipedia reading app called V for Wikipedia. And that basically uses like 90% system components, but if you just look at it, like it still exudes sort of its own style just by type of. colors, iconography, animations, good image views, and that sort of requires, I think, a pretty high craftsmanship to be able to really merge the two and you have to really know what each component is doing and what you’re trying to do with it. But yeah, I think if we could see more of that, that would elevate native apps to a level where non-native apps don’t have as much as an advantage at these foreign brands anymore. 00:36:56 - Speaker 2: Another example that comes to mind for me on that when you’re talking about typography is Twitter. I think they do pretty well with something that to me feels like a pretty fundamental app on the iPhone, browsing social media sort of like, for better or for worse, what our pocket communicators have largely become for. They have a new typeface that I think they had custom designed, but for the most part, they really give over the space to user content. You have avatars, you have the handles, you have the tweet. And you have, you know, an image or video, and you can scroll through that in a feed, and it mostly feels pretty kind of integrated to the operating system, and I think it works pretty well with the share actions and things like that, although they may have their own share button problems. But in general, it feels like there’s a Twitter brand, but it also doesn’t feel too overbearing or feeling like they’re forcing it on you, or either that that’s taking away from sort of the personal brands, you could say a person communicates through their Twitter bio or whatever, or that it feels out of place on the iPhone. I think it feels very good and natural on the phone. Multimemedia kind of audio and video stuff. There’s also another interesting one coming back to the WA thing, and you also mentioned Final Cut, uh, program I use, which is maybe in between those two is called Screen Flow, which is a really nice kind of classic screen recording software for Mac and been using it for many years, and it’s sort of not nearly as complex or sophisticated asinal Cut. But it does allow you to do quite a lot that’s very specific to screen recordings related to use and other software that I work with, and it feels very native, it’s certainly fast, it uses system widgets and that sort of thing, but it also does bring some of its own style to how the timeline is shown, how you interact with, you kind of slice and slice the video clips, and what happens, you know, they do a little icon of a rabbit when you are doing a sped up clip and a little icon of a turtle and it’s slowed down. So I think that’s kind of a nice example from an indie shop. 00:38:57 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that’s a good way to do it in general, to sort of infuse the uniqueness and branding into the components that make your app special anyway, like yeah, for a video editor, that’s like the timeline and specific settings for it, but then try to use system components whenever you have more standard options. 00:39:15 - Speaker 2: So two interesting apps I’d love to reflect on here are Sketch and Nova. So both of them have essentially worked native in the concept of being a native app into their marketing, which is unusual because I think that’s typically seen as more of a technology term or a kind of an insider jargon. That sketch, for example, has this beautiful article titled Part of Your World, Why We’re proud to have Built a truly native Mac app, and then Nova right on their homepage, they talk about a native Mac code editor and why that’s better, and basically all of their value proposition is around why being native is a better experience for the end user. I think your users of both of those pieces of software, Leonard, I’d be curious your take on those specifically and sort of presenting it as a user benefit in their marketing. 00:40:06 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel like for sketch, it’s certainly a unique selling point, especially since they are an app for designers, and I think a lot of designers still do care about that craftsmanship that is in the native app and like prefer using native apps. And so I feel like they specifically sort of have to lean on that. But then on the other end you have FIMA, which is not native and it’s still doing great, right? Like it’s a very fast app. The first time I heard of it was because Sketch was actually really slow and like crashing a lot with large files while on Figma, the same sort of designed files were just completely smooth. So they still managed to, in terms of performance be similar. In terms of the design of the interface, they are very similar to sketch, like you don’t have to adapt too much. And at least over the last few years, it feels like Figma just has gotten a lot better than Sketch at developing new features and basically making a better app faster than Sketch can make an app that supports collaboration and the web, basically. 00:41:08 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that brings us nicely into the business side of this, which is kind of the last piece I wanted to talk about which. Maybe the sketch figma thing is something we’re seeing play out throughout the industry, which is FIA can start with something that is maybe worse in some perspectives because it’s not native, but they’re able to reach a wider audience, they’re able to offer these sharing and collaboration features that in turn, and those things are both valuable enough, they can essentially earn more money or attract more investment dollars. They can use that to hire an unbelievably good engineering team that have done. Just really remarkable things with using the web platform through web assembly and other quite impressive tricks, and therefore more or less keep up with and maybe even in some cases beat sketch on some elements like performance, obviously things like integration the system APIs will just never be possible. But maybe those aren’t quite valuable enough to users, at least not in comparison to being available on every platform by default and the kind of sharing and collaboration features and so then that naturally creates a flywheel where they can earn more, they can get more investment and then they can make the product that much better. So to me, it comes to a tough question for us, the software makers and all software creators have to consider the same thing, which is we can sit here and say we love the crafts personship and the design work and the performance of native applications, but then if we look at the industry, I wonder, is that kind of a bad bet? Are we sort of picking the losing side? 00:42:38 - Speaker 1: OK, a few thoughts here. I do think that the center of gravity of how software is implemented in terms of the language, the platform, the deployment is going to be determined by the economics and right now the best economics in the industry are an enterprise software. There’s also a consumer software which we can talk about, but let. Focus on enterprise. One of the things that enterprise buyers care about, it’s uniformity and ease of distribution, control, security, ability to facilitate collaboration, which is almost a definition of an enterprise, right? And these are things that the web really excels at. So to my mind, Sigma was better than Sketch for enterprises because the things that enterprises value were just more aligned with how the web works, you know, that Sketch might have had better native API integration. It’s almost like not even wrong. It’s just not what the enterprises, I think we’re looking at when they were looking to buy software to support collaborative design, right? So I do think it’s a really tough sell for classic native apps into the enterprise. Now there is another market which you might call independent creative professionals, and these buyers value different things. They don’t necessarily care about uniformity of distribution and control by someone else in anti-fe and say what they want is. Powerful tools that are shaped to their needs and workflow that they can deploy on their platform of choice, and that give them a lot of abilities and that are kind of unique to them as a creator. And so I do think you see these tools succeed with this platform choice with things like sublime text or even something like Final Cut Pro. But there’s this asterisk of success is different because the market is much smaller. That’s just the way the market is right now. The ability to price these things is significantly lower than enterprise software, so that is what it is. So I think it’s not so much that one is better than the other is that they’re aligned with different markets and the markets are of different size, and I mentioned consumer briefly. Now consumer, I would actually say is better for natives, in particular, it’s better for iOS, which is the main platform in terms of money. And their consumers actually really value performance and integration with their phone with things like contacts and so forth, and so there you do see native apps winning. One other thing that I’ll say here is I do think that sounds maybe a little bit bleak for native apps. There is the consumer positive and of course there’s this independent creative professional positive that we’re targeting with Muse. I do think that there are a lot of sensibilities from native apps that you can pull into apps that are distributed over the web, because I mentioned that these axes are somewhat independent. So one of my favorite examples and sorry notion, I’m gonna pick on you again, we do it because we love you. Notion search is really slow. You type a sync, which is something that we’re working on now, and it takes like 5 seconds to show you a result. And that’s not because of native versus web, like whether it’s written in JavaScript or objective C. It’s slow because it’s going to a remote server and like scanning notions entire database for stuff. My sync, where if instead it worked like a local app where just loaded all the data in memory and scanned everything I’ve ever written, they could do that in 10 milliseconds, right? That’s an example where you could have something distributed over the web with something like an electron app, but they had more of this native slash local first sensibility and gave you some of those benefits. So it’s not all bleak. 00:45:38 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, as you said, that comes back to the data question and so it’s less about, you could have a native app that was mostly doing things through APIs to cloud backend, and yeah, every time you need to do a quick search, it has to go, you know, round trip to the cloud. But you would also have a web technologies app that has much more local stuff. I think it was something like Kevin Lynasiner is one good example where he wrote the thing in Rust. He had the goal of 60 frames per second. It’s a nice blog post about that, I’ll link, and it’s really all about looking stuff up on your local system, and he used web technologies because that’s what he’s good at using, and you can make them fast if you want to, but it really is about the data locality more than how the software is built, let’s say. I think another important question on the business side is the platform creator and what their incentives are. So, we’ve definitely seen this and talked about it a little bit with being a prosumer iPad app, means that you’ve got the App Store with the heavy-handed review. And the pretty limited things that you can do inside the application, and a lot of things you inherit from App Store economics, which are really all about consumer, but makes it harder to do a subscription prosumer piece of software, for example, and probably Apple’s incentives are such that that’s not super likely to change because the iPhone is their big product and the App Store is made to serve that, basically. And then similarly, you might have something like Google, which has platforms like Android or Chrome OS, but you know, when you look at their business empire, those are not primarily moneymakers for them, they’re primarily channels to get you into the places they actually make money, which is, for example, having you do searches and serving you ads. And even Microsoft famously in many ways the most successful platform maker of all time, as we talked about that 90s computing platform Monopoly, they, as of a few years back, basically deemphasized Windows that when Satya came on as CEO, basically said, look, Windows is Microsoft’s past, it’s still a piece of our business, we need to create it and make it good, but it’s not their big focus and it’s not their big moneymaker. So then the Individual platforms in terms of what they want to incentivize with developers, in terms of how they, how you distribute apps, how they allow or enable you to make money or not make money through the apps. Certainly things like app stores, what APIs are provided, all of that plays into dynamics about what kind of software can get created, and it really does feel to me like the web. Ends up being the best, not just for enterprise for the reasons you said, Mark, but even this more prosumer world of things, you know, I think we see this kind of tools for thought, space, you know, that includes the notions and figmas of the world, but also something like Rome or obsidian, for example. Yeah, it’s just the web is I don’t know, superhuman or linear. These apps by being on the web, they get maximum control, they get ease of distribution, and they get to charge money without an intermediary, and that’s just a very powerful thing for business. 00:48:46 - Speaker 1: Yeah, yet another important idea in this political economy of software that we’ve been talking about a few times on this podcast. I think that’s an important like. 00:48:55 - Speaker 3: And I think even if we assume naively that the goal of every company is just to create the best app possible, even then native apps become less and less a good choice, the more devices you want to support. And so as Mark said, enterprise companies just need to support many devices. And so if you try to do native apps for all of these, like that’s not gonna be possible. You won’t be able to really create a good experience across like 10 different platforms and device factors, right? And so I think that’s why we often see native apps more with smaller companies that may be focused on, yeah, either a single user environment where you don’t need to support many different platforms and ideally even an environment like Apple’s platforms where you have the Mac, the iPad, and the iPhone, or even the Apple Watch, all kinds. sharing some APIs and the code base and some design language so that a few people can reasonably keep it all in the head and sort of design and build a good product for all of these platforms, and that sort of approach doesn’t really work anymore for larger enterprise companies where you need to have apps on many different devices. 00:50:04 - Speaker 1: And now that we’re talking about this, I got another riff, so we talked about how perhaps enterprises tend to choose web because there’s all this collaboration amongst the members of the enterprise, which in fact is almost the definition of an enterprise, but increasingly you could say we’re all part of the enterprise of like the software community, and this is a little bit of a joke, but here’s what I mean. It used to be that you would like go to the software store and you would buy a box with Excel and you would install it and you would try to learn it yourself, and that was kind of that. But now we’re in a much more networked community. So for example, If you are doing design, you might want access to a plug-in that was authored by someone else on the internet and to be able to install it. Well, by the way, it’s a lot easier if you’re using FIMA, or it just might be that you want to look at a YouTube tutorial of how to do something. I said several times in this podcast that YouTube is very important, and if your product is available on essentially all devices, there’s more likely to be good YouTube content, so there’s this big positive externality that feeds back in. So this is kind of me partially trying to understand why it is that what Adam just said was true about the web also seems appealing for what looked like in one sense to be individuals, but even there there’s an element of community and participation. 00:51:10 - Speaker 2: One item might be remiss to leave out in the business discussion was there was a bit of a kerfuffle, I might say in the iOS slash Apple developer community when OnePassword, which is one of the more successful password managers, announced that they were switching from their native built password manager on the Mac to one built on what’s basically web technologies, it’s like Rust and Electron, I think. 00:51:34 - Speaker 1: I was going to give them as an example of a good native app earlier. 00:51:37 - Speaker 2: Exactly, so the Twitter discussions that followed were essentially, OK, you got this shining example of an indie software company that has created a lovingly crafted and well designed native app for many years, you know, there’s many password managers, but one password is successful largely on the strength of the look and feel and performance that feels very native and feels very integrated, particularly with Apple stuff. And then they essentially raised a big round of venture capital and immediately thereafter switched their previously native app to these web technologies and people felt betrayed, or that it was some kind of a harbinger for the future of native apps generally and maybe Mac specifically. And they ended up doing a follow-up blog post that I’ll link in the show notes that was interesting about essentially the engineering management and business decisions they made that led up to that, and some of them are just some specific things related to exactly where the platform APIs are in the moment. But maybe it does come back to that question of when you’re trying to serve the widest possible audience, and you’ve got an engineering team and it’s just a good business decision, even when you’ve got a pretty big engineering team, you think, can’t you afford folks to build native apps on all these platforms and actually just makes more sense to have this unified code base and less to support. So we’ve talked about the technology side and the cost of building the apps, we’ve talked about the design and user experience, we talked about the business. Are there any other aspects of native versus non-native that are notable to touch on here? 00:53:06 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel like one of overlooked aspect is accessibility. That’s kind of a big victim of non-native apps where accessibility really depends on system features, right? Like you wanna be able to set in the system settings what you need and rely on these features that providers like Apple built across the system and not, you can’t fine tune these settings for every single app and you can’t. Rely on every single developer building like a complete suite of accessibility features. That’s just not going to happen. And so for that system to work, you kind of need native apps that can support these native APIs and build with accessibility in mind and non-native apps just can’t really do that. And there isn’t usually time to build custom implementations for non-native apps for accessibility. 00:53:55 - Speaker 1: That is an interesting one. I’ve been thinking about this in the back of my mind because the type of non-native technology that I’m most excited about is the setup where you have a high performance language that you compile down to a very narrow runtime, like the rust slashwam style, for example, where you write the app in a high performance language, it compiles down to what is basically like a web native binary, and then you can run that wherever you want. But there’s only a very thin API between what becomes the application and the platform, in contrast to the usual thing where there’s like a whole windowing system and tool kit and widgets and everything that the platform provides. And yeah, in that world in particular, you implement your very high performance text editor, but then what people can’t, you know, highlight the text so they can’t have it spoken to them or whatever. It’s tough. One thing I wonder though is, can you separate a little bit the platform hooks for accessibility from the implementation. So to take the example of text size, one way to do that is there is a platform standard text implementation, which I’m sure there is on Mac and iOS, and if you use that, it automatically scales the text up and down according to whatever. The user has set in the universal text size settings, but it could also be that there’s a thing you can call which is like get current text size, and then in your own implementation of text you could scale the text accordingly and yes, it’s gonna be harder and less likely people do it, but it’s still potentially possible, especially if there are various other libraries and other library options for UI widgeting. So yeah, it’s tough. One other question I have is what do games do because games are typically implemented in this way where you have basically the game takes over the whole screen and does whatever it wants, including different ways of rendering texts and so forth. So I kind of wonder what they do. It’s probably a lot of just don’t support accessibility, but maybe there’s a fire right there. 00:55:40 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it just ends up being a custom implementation per game, so whether it’s color blind mode, or changing the text size or different kind of input controls, there’s a good game maker’s tool kit video, I’ll link to that. But yeah, essentially it’s all up to the developer, which often means that smaller indie games just can’t or don’t have the resources to support that, but of course the AAA games have these massive budgets and massive teams, is both possible and really in their business interests, because once you’re going to a wide enough audience, then even a small percentage of people that have a particular type of color blindness to pick one example of an accessibility area, that actually represents a pretty good number of customers for you. Well, maybe as a closing point, we’ve talked all about the pros and cons. I think it sounds like we come down personally pretty strongly in favor of native, but we also see where business wise that might be a more questionable thing as the world evolves. So I’d love to hear from each of you and maybe I have my own answer. Why are we making news for Mac and why not use for the web? 00:56:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I actually don’t have a very dogmatic answer to that. It’s that we had a few key desiderata for the Muse, let’s call it desktop app, you know, the thing that you’re going to run on your Mac, and the two main options for implementing that would be a maybe the three options would be a classic native app, an electron app, and a web app. And there’s things like performance, but a huge thing for us was access to the file system to be able to do a local first work, which basically eliminates the web option, really you’re left with electron and classic native and I do think the performance is quite a bit better for a classic native, and also we have this potential to share a lot of code between the iOS app and the desktop app, so there was a clear path to implementing it. So that’s why I would have thought about it. 00:57:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, for me, the answer is also all about performance and that also connects to the local first or local data storage. Again, you can do that with electronic web technologies, but I feel like it’s more of a reach. The electron app that uses local storage. It’