Podcasts about Sinofsky

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Best podcasts about Sinofsky

a16z

6 episodes with Sinofsky

Raw Data By P3

2 episodes with Sinofsky

Latest podcast episodes about Sinofsky

WW 917: There Is No 10 - DeepSeek AI, scareware blocker, Dev Home removal

Windows Weekly (MP3)

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 29, 2025 142:44

Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell go over the latest batch of preview updates for January 2025, including KB5050094! The big story of the week revolves around DeepSeek and its noticeable effects on the modern AI world. Sinofsky even wrote a big piece on the latest AI assistant! Windows 11 Preview updates for Windows 11, 10 arrive ahead of February Patch Tuesday Windows 11 - Taskbar preview improvements, Windows Studio Effects in the system tray, many File Explorer fixes, more Windows 10 - New Outlook replaces Mail, Calendar, People New Dev and Beta channel builds - Overdue battery icon updates in Dev, Snap Layout experiments in Beta New Canary build today with new File Explorer home view tab Microsoft to remove Dev Home from Windows - This never made sense, so that's fine, but its most important features will live on Microsoft Edge for Windows now has a Scareware blocker in preview AI DeepSeek explodes out of the gate, sends Big Tech/AI stock reeling and opening up questions about how much money these companies are spending on AI Nadella, Altman, Nvidia all react to this change in interesting ways Steve Sinofsky - This was inevitable, disruption always comes from outside Ahead of this blockbuster development, a look at how the Microsoft/OpenAI relationship is changing - and now we need another look OpenAI announces Operator agent for ChatGPT in preview Google is bringing new Gemini features to Android and Pixel Google is also bringing NotebookLM to almost every Workspace tier, including the cheap one I (Paul) use, NotebookLM Plus to WS Standard and better Microsoft Microsoft preps smaller Surface Pro and Laptop models with Snapdragon chips for some reason Microsoft is closing its UK-based "experience center" Xbox Thanks to Activision Blizzard, Microsoft is the biggest game publisher in the world Phil Spencer: Xbox Series S a "real advantage" for coming portable gaming product Phil Spencer says hardware still "critical" to Xbox. More like "critical condition," am I right? No surprises at Xbox Developer_Direct, but a solid collection of games, including the new DOOM Tips and Picks Tip of the week: It's time to start watching Dave's Garage App pick of the week: PowerToys, now with Zoomit RunAs Radio this week: Querying for Breaches with Mark Morowcyznski Brown liquor pick of the week: Blair Athol 12 Floral & Fauna Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free shows, a members-only Discord, and behind-the-scenes access. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsor: Melissa.com/twit

Windows Weekly 917: There Is No 10

All TWiT.tv Shows (MP3)

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 29, 2025 142:44 Transcription Available

Windows Weekly 917: There Is No 10

Radio Leo (Audio)

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 29, 2025 142:44 Transcription Available

WW 917: There Is No 10 - DeepSeek AI, scareware blocker, Dev Home removal

Windows Weekly (Video HI)

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 29, 2025 142:44

Windows Weekly 917: There Is No 10

All TWiT.tv Shows (Video LO)

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 29, 2025 142:44 Transcription Available

Windows Weekly 917: There Is No 10

Radio Leo (Video HD)

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 29, 2025 142:44 Transcription Available

Digitalia #709 - La latenza della spranga

Digitalia

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 5, 2024 89:31 Transcription Available

Il commento di Sinofsky su Apple e il DMA. Opera annuncia un browser per iOS europeo. Vision Pro arriva ai primi utenti. Fine delle esclusive su Spotify. Apple adotta i sottotitoli del podcasting 2.0 Queste e molte altre le notizie tech commentate nella puntata di questa settimana.Dallo studio distribuito di digitalia:Franco Solerio, Michele Di Maio, Francesco FacconiProduttori esecutivi:Giampaolo Frello, Manuel Zavatta, Davide Tinti, Giuliano Arcinotti, Nicola Gabriele Del Popolo, Alberto Fasoli, Andrea Draghetti, Andrea Scarpellini, Giuseppe Benedetti, Matteo Masconale, Danny Manzini, Riccardo Peruzzini, Paolo Boschetti, Roberto Esposito, Diego Venturin, Michele Olivieri, Matteo Faccio, Alex Ordiner, Antonio Turdo (Thingyy), Davide Fogliarini, Christian Fabiani, Federico Bruno, Simone Pignatti, Danilo Sia, Matteo Arrighi, Roberto Barison, Nicola Pedonese, Marcello Piliego, Maurizio Verrone, Roberto Tarzia, Stefano Augusto Innocenti, Matteo Molinari, Michele Coiro, Christian A Marca, Sandro Acinapura, Adriano Guarino, Flavio Castro, Zambianchi Marco Francesco Mauro, ---, Fabrizio Bianchi, Il Pirata Lechuck, michele_da_milano, Nicola Fort, Arzigogolo, Pavlo, Fiorenzo Pilla, juleeho, Idle Fellow, nick, Nicola Gabriele Del Popolo, Anonymous, akagrintaSponsor:Squarespace.com - utilizzate il codice coupon "DIGITALIA" per avere il 10% di sconto sul costo del primo acquisto.Links:Microsoft says new App Store rules are a step in the wrong directionSynofsky: Building Under RegulationOpera to launch new AI-powered browser for iOS in EuropeMeta says Apple has made it difficult to build rival app stores in the EUApple Has Sold Approximately 200000 Vision Pro HeadsetsApple Vision pro, this is the Silicon Valley future we don't needApple announces more than 600 new apps built for Apple Vision Proinessential: Why NetNewsWire Isnt Available for Vision ProGoogle will no longer back up the InternetMeta's Reality labs best quarter: still lost more than $4 billionEach Facebook User Is Monitored by Thousands of CompaniesMark Zuckerberg apologizes to parents at online child safety hearingElon Musks X comes out in favor of pro-censorship lawTaylor Swift Deepfakes Originated From AI Challenge, Report SaysCan This A.I.-Powered Search Engine Replace Google? It Has for Me.AI chatbots tend to choose violence and nuclear strikes in wargamesOpenAI: theres only a small chance ChatGPT will help create bioweaponsGoogle starts a limited test of generative AI tools in MapsShopify Magic and Sidekick: AI for CommerceWhat Is Nightshade?Japan will no longer require floppy disks for submitting some official documentsJoe Rogan Signs $250M Spotify Deal Allowing Podcasts on XCall Her Daddy Podcast Now Available on All Audio PlatformsSpotifys exclusivity era nears its endFull automatic podcast transcripts coming to iOS 17.4The Open RoadTranscripts on Apple Podcasts - Apple Podcasts for CreatorsLa piattaforma antipirateria è attiva da oggi.Il primo indirizzo IP bloccato dal "piracy shield" antipirateriaAmazon abandons plans to buy Roomba maker iRobotAmazon terminates $1.4 billion iRobot acquisition after EU veto threatNeuralinks brain chip has been implanted in a human Elon Musk saysGingilli del giorno:Paperless-ngxCorkVolumeeSupporta Digitalia, diventa produttore esecutivo.

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The Future According to Steven Sinofsky

Boz To The Future

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 5, 2024 58:26

In today's episode, our host, Meta CTO and Head of Reality Labs Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, is joined by technologist and author of Hardcore Software Steven Sinofsky to talk about the recurring lessons of standing up new platforms, as well as writing and how AI may benefit the craft. Together, Sinofsky and Bosworth cover a range of topics, from the massive effort needed to build a new computing platform to the difficulty of building novel technologies in an era where everything “just works.” They look at how we're once again at an exciting time in computing, where new form factors, like smart glasses with integrated AI features, begin to reveal technologies that could become increasingly ubiquitous in the near future.You can follow Bosworth on Instagram, Twitter/X, and Threads @boztank. Follow Steven Sinofsky on Twitter/X, and get the e-book of Hardcore Software here.

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WW 800: Goodbye Heart - Q1 FY23 Earnings, Q2 pessimism, Sinofsky reflects on Windows 8

Windows Weekly (MP3)

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 26, 2022 154:59

Q1 FY23 Earnings, Q2 pessimism, Sinofsky reflects on Windows 8 Hosts: Leo Laporte, Mary Jo Foley, and Paul Thurrott For full show notes, visit https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly/episodes/800 Sponsors: nordlayer.com/twit kolide.com/ww itpro.tv/windows use code WW30

spotify microsoft xbox windows reflects github earnings azure pessimism windows 11 surface duo microsoft 365 leo laporte windows 8 annual recurring revenue mary jo foley microsoft earnings paul thurrott sinofsky subsystem for android

Windows Weekly 800: Goodbye Heart

All TWiT.tv Shows (MP3)

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 26, 2022 154:59

spotify microsoft xbox windows github azure windows 11 surface duo microsoft 365 leo laporte annual recurring revenue mary jo foley microsoft earnings paul thurrott windows weekly sinofsky subsystem for android

Windows Weekly 800: Goodbye Heart

Radio Leo (Audio)

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 26, 2022 154:59

WW 800: Goodbye Heart - Q1 FY23 Earnings, Q2 pessimism, Sinofsky reflects on Windows 8

Windows Weekly (Video HI)

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 26, 2022 155:43

Windows Weekly 800: Goodbye Heart

All TWiT.tv Shows (Video LO)

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 26, 2022 155:43

[Weekend Drop] Sunil Pai: React and the Meta of the Web

The Swyx Mixtape

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 19, 2021 80:04

A wideranging convo with Sunil covering the future of React, the Third Age of JavaScript, and the Meta of online discourse.Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3h1WICelqsFollow Sunil: https://twitter.com/threepointoneChapters: [00:01:40] React and Temporal, Declarative vs Imperative My Temporal Explainer: https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1417165270641045505 https://www.solidjs.com/ [00:12:57] State Charts and Lucylang https://lucylang.org/ XState and Stately https://stately.ai/viz [00:17:08] The Future of React [00:25:03] React Streaming Server Rendering vs SSR/JAMstack/DSG/DPR/ISR ReactDOMServer.renderToNodeStream() Sunil's Slides: https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0MyOJkDIOVfFit76PqJFLvPVg#react-advanced https://react-lazy.coolcomputerclub.com/ [00:33:13] Next.js and the Open Source Commons [00:38:46] The Third Age of JavaScript Third Age of JS Benedict Evans (not Sinofsky) on Word Processors: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2020/12/21/google-bundling-and-kill-zones [00:45:16] ESbuild vs SWC vs BunBun (Jarred Sumner) https://twitter.com/jarredsumner/status/1390084458724741121 [00:50:46] Let Non-X Do X: Figma vs Canva, Webflow vs Wix/Squarespace Canva vs Figma valuations https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1438102616156917767 [00:52:42] JavaScript Twitter and Notion's 9mb Marketing Site Notion 9mb JS Site Tweet mrmrs' Components.ai [01:06:33] React Server Components and Shopify Hydrogen/Oxygen https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1410103013885108229 [01:09:18] Categorical Imperatives of Web Platforms: Cloudflare vs AWS, MongoDB vs Auth0, Gatsby vs Netlify https://auth0.com/blog/introducing-auth0-actions/ [01:18:34] Wrap-up Transcript [00:01:40] React and Temporal, Declarative vs Imperative [00:01:40] swyx: Okay. So the first topic we want to talk about is React and Temporal, right? [00:01:43] Sunil Pai: I feel Temporal is introducing a shift into the workflow ecosystem, which is very similar to the one that React introduced to the JavaScript framework system. [00:01:54] swyx: That's the hope. I don't know if like my explanation of Temporal has reached everybody or has reached you. There are three core opinions, right? The first is that whenever you cross system boundaries, when you call it external API. So when you call internal microservices, there's a chance of failure and that multiplies, the more complex the system gets. [00:02:11] So you need a central orchestrator that holds all the retry states and logic, as well as timers And it tracks all the events and is able to resume from it from failure. [00:02:21] Second opinion that you should have is you should do event sourcing rather than try to just write your business logic and then instrument with observability logs after the fact you should have your logs as the source of truth. And if it's not in the log, it did not happen. [00:02:34] And then the final piece is the workflows as code, which is the one that you're focusing on, which is the programming model, in the sense that like all the other competitive workflow engines, like, Amazon step functions, Apache airflow, Dagster, like there's a bunch in this category. [00:02:48] They're all sort of JSON and YML DSLs, and the bind that you find yourself in is that basically you're reinventing a general purpose programming language inside of these JSON and YML DSLs because you find a need for loops, branching, variables functions, all the basic stuff. And, people find that like at the end of the day, all this tooling is available, you just have to make it run in inside of a general purpose programming language. So that's what Temporal offers. [00:03:12] But it's very interesting because it kind of straddles the imperative versus declarative debate, right? [00:03:17] React, people view as declarative. And I think it's mostly declarative, like there's imperative escape hatches, and because it's declarative, people can have a single sort of render model of their entire app for the entire tree. And I think it makes sense to them. [00:03:32] And you're saying that that's better, right? That's better than the imperative predecessor of like jQuery and randomly hooking up stuff and not having things tied up together. You sounded like you want it to [00:03:42] Sunil Pai: interrupt. So it's actually two things. One is the jQuery had an imperative API, and then they went way too hard into the declarative side with templating languages and then started reinventing stuff there. [00:03:54] So really react was like, no, you need access to an imperative language to create, you need a fully featured programming language to generate description trees like Dom trees or in this case, a workflow graphs. [00:04:10] swyx: Got it. So it's kind of like a halfway solution, maybe, maybe anyway. So the problem with us is that we're trying to say that imperative is better than declarative, for the purposes of expressing general purpose business logic, which is an interesting sell for me because in all other respects, I'm very used to arguing to declarative is better. [00:04:33] Then there's also an idea that people should build declarative layers on top of us. And I, it's just a very interesting, like back and forth between declarative and imperative that I don't know where I really stands apart from like, wherever we are is never good enough. So we need to add another layer to solve the current problems [00:04:51] Sunil Pai: there. [00:04:51] So there's a phrase for it and I forget what it's called the mechanism. It says that, uh, the system that allows you to execute stuff should not be the same system that prevents you from doing bad things. So there's a core, which is basically a fully featured API. And then you put guard rails around like the experiences. [00:05:12] For example, as an example, this is like adding TypeScript on top of JavaScript, let's say, unlike reason ML, let's say like, OCAML or a lot of very strongly type a language where if your code doesn't compile, you can't really run the code in TypeScript. There are times when you're like, you know what? [00:05:29] I need an escape hatch to actually like, do something like really funky here, X, Y, and Z, that that's not even well expressed in either the type system or sometimes even the language itself. You need to like hack it. And like, you might even email a couple of things. Uh, and in react, this was, I think when react came. [00:05:47] It wasn't just that it was a, oh, like there's JSX. It was very much, uh, okay. Uh, I have a lot of existing code, so I can add, React to one part of it and then hook onto the DOM, it renders and then have like this whole jQuery widget that I would like render onto the thing. Uh, so it gave you this whole incremental part to adopting the system, but then like after a point, like react consumes all of it. [00:06:11] And the fuck up with react is if you go too hard into react, doing stuff like animations is like impossible, which is why like we are at least a year or two away from a good animation API in React, or while you use, Framer or whatever Framer has become right now. Like frame of [00:06:27] swyx: motion. No. Um, [00:06:31] Sunil Pai: Yeah, but he's working. [00:06:32] I think Matt is now working on like a new, new thing. That's got a really funky name. Like, it sounds like a robot or something. All right. But it was curious to me that React's biggest deal was that, Hey, like, They talk about it being declarative, but a whole lot of things you wrote were like in regular-ass JavaScript, you would say on click and get an event and start doing things [00:06:53] swyx: beautiful. [00:06:54] It's a perfect blend. [00:06:56] Sunil Pai: Right. And you would suffer with this in. So there was the jQuery prototype phase, which was like directly imperative. And then they went hard in the other direction with type templating languages, like Jade and dust. And, uh, there were a number of popular ones at the time. And that's when like even Angular 1 became super popular because they're like, here's the whole kit and caboodle full whole framework. [00:07:18] And then React came and said, oh, well just the view. But that's because they didn't want to release like really yet. And they were like, yeah, this is all you need and the whole ecosystem. But anyway, so in temporal temporal for me is particularly interesting for that because it is now clearly making that. [00:07:35] I hate the phrase, but it's a good one. The paradigm shift of like how you start thinking about these systems and you just write some fucking code and then like you start adding on bits and guardrails for the things you want to do, which is on for the few hours I spent going through the docs and failing to get it running on my laptop. [00:07:53] That's my understanding of it. Feel free to correct me. [00:07:56] swyx: Okay. Yeah. And I think you're right, actually, I'll try this messaging on you because, it's something that we're consciously designing for. In fact, I have a, one of my API proposals was, reacts like API for tempo. And so essentially what we enable you to do is bundle up each individual service or job into a component that we happen to call workflow. [00:08:21] And my struggle here is that I currently tie component to workflow because what is the component like? It's, it's something that's self-contained that is a deterministic. Like it has a strict rule of execution from top to bottom, right. It just does the same thing every single time, uh, where we differ and why I struggle with this is because we put all the side effects into things that we call activities. [00:08:44] That's where all the non-deterministic stuff goes. And that one gets retried, basically at Temporal's will and essentially Temporal is serving as the central runtime or framework that has knowledge of all these workflows and activities. And can re-render them based on its internal rules, I retries timeouts, uh, heartbeats, all that good stuff. So I struggled with things like, which is the component and which is the hook or the effect. [00:09:08] And then there's other concepts. So, uh, we have ways to send signals into individual workflows, right? That's a very important property of the system that you can send data in while it's running and you can get data out while it's running. I'm not sure that's reflected in React at all. So maybe I'm stretching the analogy too much, [00:09:24] Sunil Pai: Solid, had an answer for that the word signal. So like solid JS. This is by Ryan Carniato the Marco folks, signals are a first-class concept in the framework. Again, I haven't dived into it in detail in a while, but it feels like an important thing. And I always wondered why React actually didn't have it because props are something that you just like pass. [00:09:46] Right. And it's just a value, like if you like plot it on a graph, for example, it's, let's say if you had to have like a graph of binary values, it would be either zero or like one, and that would be the shape of the graph, but signals are something that can be like something that happens and yeah, just pops up and goes down, like pressing a key on the keyboard. [00:10:06] And that's actually not so easy to define in a, in a react like system, like, uh, which is why it's kind of hard to build like audio processing graphs with like React or JSX. Um, I don't have like a good answer. I'd probably have to like hack on Temporal a little more, but the idea of like signals as a channel, through which you can like send information and having it as a first class part of the system is something that's not represented well in well, in React at least. [00:10:33] Yeah. Well, [00:10:34] swyx: isn't that in an action? For reducers [00:10:38] Sunil Pai: and event effectively. Yes. Like it's basically one of those actions. [00:10:42] swyx: The problem is that everything just ties right into the component tree instead of just having the component B and sort of isolated unit that can function independently. [00:10:50] Sunil Pai: That's the other thing, which is a workflow engine isn't a directed acyclic graph. In fact, it could have cycles, it could have cycles and it could have a number of other things, which is the [00:11:00] swyx: beautiful thing, by the way. [00:11:02] For us coding, a subscription platform literally is charged Stripe sleeps 30 days, charged Stripe again, and then infinite loop until you cancel and then you break out of the loop. [00:11:13] That's it. [00:11:13] Sunil Pai: That's awesome by the way. So I was actually thinking that someone's going to implement not someone's going to implement, uh, someone's going to use Redux saga on top of Temporal, that's what I was thinking, because then you will have generators that define like long running processes that are just talking to each other. [00:11:30] I think that would be good. CloudFlare also loved Temporal, by the way, like we were talking about it, like for awhile, they're like, oh, this is like fundamentally a new thing. And as you can imagine, some engineers were like, well, why isn't this running on workers? I'm like, I don't know why isn't it running on workers? [00:11:43] Like maybe we should get it there. [00:11:45] swyx: It is fairly heavy duty right now. We're trying to reduce that to a single binary, which could maybe run a workers. I'm not sure about the memory requirements that you guys have. It could, it's just not a priority for us based on our existing users. [00:12:00] Sunil Pai: Um, I was just, I was saying what they're saying. [00:12:04] They want everything to run on workers and I'm like, dude, it's just like one small, weird isolated like condo. [00:12:10] swyx: Ironically we also using V8 isolates for our TypeScript runtime. And that's just to make sure that people don't do non-deterministic stuff. So we did mock out everything, which is also pretty cool because whenever you use a library with, like setTimeout inside of that library, that persists to us as well. [00:12:25] So we set the durable timer. Your system can go down and we, we bring it back up and you're using our timer, not the JavaScript runtime timer, which is like just awesome. There's a trade off to that, which is, things don't work when you import them, like you would in a normal, Node.js project. [00:12:39] So most of, because you have to inject them into the environment of the V8 Isolate, you can't just randomly import stuff that as freely as you would in a normal node environment. So dependency injection and becomes a topic for us. [00:12:57] State Charts and Lucylang [00:12:57] swyx: Um, yeah. We actually clashed a little bit with David Khourshid because David is on this warpath of like everything in a state machine, right. Everything in the time-tested 40 year old JSON format that describes state machines. And we actually thought we were going to be competitive with him for a while because for him, the thing about writing imperative code is that it's prone to bugs, right? Like you can not really see the full, possibly the full span of like all the possible states that you're exposing, but in a state machine everything's explicit so he was butting heads with our founder for awhile. [00:13:31] But I think recently he decided that he is better at building on top of us than trying to compete with us on the reliability front. So that's, that's kind of an interesting evolution that has happened over the past year on this topic of declarative versus imperative. [00:13:44] I'm still like coming to terms with it. Like I'm not fully okay with it yet, but, it clearly is more expressive and that's something I am Very in favor of, and I have genuinely looked at like the workflow solution from Google, the workflow solution from Amazon, and they are literally have you write the abstract syntax tree by hand in JSON and that's just absolutely no way that that's going to work. So I'm pretty down with the imperative approach for now. [00:14:09] Sunil Pai: Well, that's, I figured at some point you will run XState on it and extent should work fairly well. I think contemporary, I don't see why it would. I think that that would actually, [00:14:19] swyx: Honestly, I'm not really sure what he's going to charge for. He's pushing the idea of state machines and making it more of a commonly accepted thing. [00:14:26] Sunil Pai: Well, his pitch isn't even state machines. It's very specifically state charts and I love state charts. I even bought the book by the way, the Ian Horrocks $700. So when I got it on Amazon, it was $180. I was like, cheap. Let's do it. I got really lucky at the time. It, it fluctuates like mad by the way that that value, well, you should expense it now is what it is. [00:14:46] Um, but, uh, what struck me about the thing? Here's what I tried. I really liked it. And I took a course, a couple of steps back and I was trying to understand, well, why isn't it like a success? Why don't people get into it? And the truth is that this falls not just into the intersection of this is the intersection of like computers and humans in the sense that sure. [00:15:07] There are things that can be correct, but there are things that can be expressible as well. Like I don't even know what code I want to write when I'm sitting down to write it. I love to like discover it while I'm writing it and really. All the syntax that we have created and abstractions, we have created around programming languages have been purely to express these things and have let's call it implicit state machines, even though that implies that it's bad. [00:15:32] Um, so for example, if you look at state charts, there's no real good way to compose two state charts together. You have to like manually start wiring them together. And like, there's, you know, like you've got in react, you say, oh, combo, if you have two components to put it together, you put like a little, uh, function around it. [00:15:49] And now it's two components in one component. So it's important not just to have a good unit of computation, but to have it like be composable with each other so that you can gather it and then make this whole nesting doll react, Dom tree of things. And I think. Until there's an actual language that supports that has state charts as a first class primitive, much like Lucy, I think that's what Matthew Phillips built. [00:16:15] He wrote a, he wrote an actual language that compares to state charts called Lucy Lang. That was very cool by the way. Like, I really like it. Uh, well, and it's fairly young, so it's too early to say whether people like love it or not. And other than, but people like you and me who look at something like, wow, this is awesome. [00:16:33] Let's all use it. No, like to take a while to grow. But I think that's the state charts has a bit of dissonance with the languages that it's written in right now, because it's not a first-class thing. I mean, it's adjacent object with keys and. Okay. Like we can do better maybe. Uh, but I would not bet against David and the people he's hiring. [00:16:53] Like he's hurting some smart people, you know, they're all like pretty intelligent. So I'm curious to see how that plays out. [00:17:00] swyx: I'm just glad that we're not competing. Uh, so that's, that's something that, that, that resolved itself without any intervention from me, which is very good. [00:17:08] The Future of React [00:17:08] swyx: Well, let's have this conversation since it's related, should React to be more of a DSL, [00:17:14] you know, this conversation that happened over this week, so I'll pull it up. [00:17:20] Sunil Pai: Uh, wait, so I've, I'm seeing, is this the whole Svelte versus React thing that's been happening over the last two, three days? [00:17:25] swyx: Yes. So basically it's saying React is already so far down almost like its own language. [00:17:30] They should just embrace it more. And instead of using linting to catch rule violations, just make a DSL, people are gonna use it. It's fine. And just like build things in so that it's impossible to make these errors that, that people commonly make. [00:17:47] Sunil Pai: So this is Mike Sherov, uh, he was smoking about it. [00:17:51] He mentioned how it shouldn't be a lint rule. And since we already have customs, insects and GSX, he should introduce a couple of other things. So as you can imagine, the react team has thought about this a lot. So the big problem with this all boils down to that fucking dependency area on use effect, by the way, that's the one that trips, everything else is fine. [00:18:09] Like you stayed all that is like fine. You can get. This is [00:18:13] swyx: what it was. Yeah. People want like state something memos and things like, you know, just build the reactor primitives into the language. [00:18:22] Sunil Pai: So yeah, I think this, this actually, isn't a bad idea and I think that was the whole deal with hooks. Whereas what's the phrase that they use in the docks. [00:18:30] A sufficiently advanced compiler might comply with these things at some point, and you're like, oh wow, great job. On pushing that responsibility onto the community, React team, well done. [00:18:41] swyx: My joke is like it's the react teams equivalent of a assume, a frictionless spherical cow from physics. [00:18:48] Sunil Pai: Exactly. [00:18:48] That's a perfectly spherical code. [00:18:54] swyx: It will exist. [00:18:57] Sunil Pai: And it's just the five of them or six of six of them hacking on this. And they have to make sure they don't break like facebook.com whenever they're working on these things. Imagine it's taken this long for Concurrent to show up and Concurrent is nice by the way. And we can talk about the server rendering API. [00:19:14] Okay. Uh, so react right now is, uh, yeah, that's the one like that. It shouldn't just be an intruder, but, uh, inside the inside Facebook only, well, not everybody can see it, but it's an in an internal, uh, uh, Facebook Wiki page, which is a list of potential F projects. You know, how the react team has fiber, whatever the hell. [00:19:47] Right? So there's a list of these projects that, or when we do this, uh, project F F I forget what the one for, uh, uh, animation that's called, is it called flat? Flat was the dumb one. And so there are lists of them and there are about 15, 20. I'm pretty sure my India has done. So Hey, so, uh, there's a list of them. [00:20:09] And if you look at them and you start assigning values in terms of work, oh, this is about six months of work. This is about, uh, another six months of work. It strikes you that there's a roadmap for about five to 10 years. At least if not more than that, I mean, look at how long it took to get like this. Of course this was very more foundational. [00:20:26] Those could probably happen a little quicker when it comes, which means the react team is like solely aware of what's missing in react right now. And to an extent that they can talk about it because if they do it becomes like a whole thing and like don't really engage in that conversation. They don't, I, I, and I don't blame them for it. [00:20:44] It's very hard to have this discourse without somebody coming in and saying, well, have you considered CSS transitions? I like that. Yes, we have. We have, we have considered CSS a lot. Uh, so, uh, so. There are all these projects like a sufficiently advanced compiler that compiles down to hooks. There's the animation API. [00:21:04] There's a welcome current, et cetera. This whole data fetching thing has been going on for years. And now it's finally starting to come to light, thankfully with collaboration, with the relay team and effectively all of the core when they built out facebook.com and, and that is the length that those are the time periods that Sebastian looks at and says, yeah, this is how we can execute on this because it can be prioritized. [00:21:33] It has to be prioritized by either Facebook wanting it or making Facebook wanted. So for example, the pitch was, Hey, let's rewrite facebook.com the desktop version because they haven't, it's a film mishmash of like hundreds of react routes on one page. It should be a single react route that does this thing. [00:21:52] Now that we have gotten management to agree to a rewrite, let us now attach it to the concurrent mode thing. And that was also part of it, which is in the older version, there was a lot of CPU fighting that used to happen between routes, which is why the whole work for the share dealers started and took like two years to like fix effectively. [00:22:08] They're doing cooperative, multitasking VM in JavaScript, which sure. When you're a Facebook, I guess you've got to like do these things. Uh, and how does that all, [00:22:18] swyx: was that ever offloaded to the browsers, by the way? Like I know there was an effort to split it out of react. [00:22:24] Sunil Pai: So I think last, I checked they were talking to Chrome literally every week. [00:22:29] Uh, but I think it's also been down to, uh, well, what Chrome wants to prioritize at the time. I think it is still going ahead again. It's the sort of work that takes years, so it's not going ahead. Nice and slowly, uh, which is why. Which is why it's architected inside react for the same reason as like it's attached to global and then read off the global. [00:22:52] I think it's also why you can't have two versions of React on the same page. There's the whole hooks thing. But also if you have two versions of React, and they'll just start fighting with each other on the scheduler, because the scheduler would yield to one than to the other than to the other one. [00:23:08] And there would be no like central thing that controls what is on the scheduling pipeline. That's from the last, again, this conversation is at least two years, or maybe they fixed that, but that's the goal of the dealer. There has to be one scheduler for the thread that everybody comes on to, and like tries to pull stuff, uh, with it. [00:23:26] I think it will become a browser API. It's just a question of like, when, like, yeah, I mean, the shared dealer in react itself has undergone so much change over the last three years. Uh, so maybe we should be glad that it isn't in the browser yet, because like, it's changed so much. It's coming there. It's I mean, the fact that they're releasing in November is a big deal. [00:23:45] swyx: You said there's so many projects that you want to ship, and the way to ship it in Facebook is to either convince them that this feature itself is worth it, or you tie it together with something else, like the Facebook, I think it's called FB5 rewrite. [00:24:00] Sunil Pai: Oh yeah. I think it's good for them. Like it worked because the Facebook, facebook.com is now more performant. Like it actually works well and they don't have CPU fighting. The fact that Facebook itself is becoming slightly irrelevant in the world is a whole other conversation. [00:24:17] swyx: Well, you know, I still use my billions, so, uh, it's it's, it improves the experience for them. [00:24:23] Sunil Pai: I'm only being snarky. [00:24:25] swyx: Uh, but I, you know, hopefully hopefully you're like, you know, there's other properties like Instagram and WhatsApp and what is, uh, which hopefully it will apply there. And then obviously like there there's the VR efforts as well. Absolutely. Yeah. [00:24:39] Sunil Pai: And that is the future. In fact, uh, several components also happened because they suddenly realized what they could do for how the deal with server components and server-side streaming rendering was never about an SSR story, or even a CEO. [00:24:54] Facebook doesn't give a fuck about SEO, right. It was about finally they figured out how to use concurrent mode to have a better UX altogether. [00:25:03] React Streaming Server Rendering vs SSR/JAMstack/DSG/DPR/ISR [00:25:03] Sunil Pai: So, okay. I should probably just keep Server components aside for right now. [00:25:06] And I'll just talk about the new streaming rendering API. Okay. [00:25:09] Okay. So I know there's like about three styles of rendering. [00:25:14] I say legacy, but legacy is such a dirty word. I don't mean it in the form that it's old it's in fact, [00:25:20] swyx: traditionally, like, sorry. [00:25:24] Sunil Pai: Uh, heritage Facebook would say heritage, it's a heritage style rendering, um, which is the, Hey, you use something like a rails or spring or some, it could be node as well. And you spit out a bunch of HTML and then you progressively enhance it with sprinkling JavaScript, pick your metaphor there like three or four metaphors that you could use. [00:25:44] Uh, uh, web components actually falls square into this, where it just comes to life only on the browser and then like make stuff interactive. Uh, then there's the whole client fully client side rendered one. So this is create react app or, well, a number of like smaller players then there's server side rendered. [00:26:04] And so as I rendered is actually like, it's not just next year. It's also your Gatsby. I feel like pretty much every, uh, react framework now has some kind of service side rendering story. Okay. So the next slide goes into what types of server-side rendering things happen. [00:26:20] swyx: there are a lot of subdivisions within here, right? [00:26:22] Like, uh, Gatsby is up here trying to reinvent like D S R D P R or something like that, which is like deferred, [00:26:29] Sunil Pai: static, [00:26:32] swyx: DSG, deferred static generation. That's the one. My former employer, Netlify also DPR, and is all, these is all like variations of this stuff with, [00:26:41] Sunil Pai: like, it's a question of where you put the cache is what it is. [00:26:46] It's a TLA three letter acronym to decide where you put the caching in. [00:26:49] Yeah, so there's the whole JAMstack and that's like the whole Netlify story, but also CloudFlare pages, or even GitHub pages. [00:26:56] There's no real runtime server rendering. You just generate a bunch of static assets and you Chuck it and it just works. Then there's fully dynamic, which would be next JS without any caching. Right? Like every request gets server-side rendered then like a bundle loads on top of it. And, um, like suddenly makes it alive, like sort of like it hydrates it. [00:27:16] And then after that it's effectively a fully clients rendered application then there's okay. So I just said ISR, but like you said, there are like three or four after this as well. There's this whole DSP. Yeah. Oh wait. So the new streaming API is actually fundamentally new because. I don't know if people even know this, but react already has a streaming rendering API. [00:27:37] It's called a render to node stream. I think that's the API for it. And the reason that that exists is so that, uh, only for a performance thing on the server where otherwise synchronous renders would block like other requests. And it would make like if for a server that was very, uh, uh, there was heavily trafficked. [00:27:57] It would become like really slow. So at least with the streaming API, yeah. That's the one learner to notice the stream, at least with this one, it wouldn't clash and you could interleave requests from there happening, but it didn't solve like anything else, like nothing, you couldn't actually do anything asynchronous on it, which is kind of that fucking sucks because like, it looks like it's an asynchronous API, but you can't do anything asynchronous through it. [00:28:18] It's the only thing that, okay, so vendor to readable stream is cool because I can, even if you go to the very last slide last bit, once. You know what this is, where the very first link open it up. Like it says react, lazy.cool computer club. So this is the demo that they have that exists with this new API. [00:28:36] This is what they link to. So if you refresh it a couple of times and I'll show you something that happens here, so you see the little spinner that shows up there and then the content loads. Yep. So, um, you know what, maybe I can share my screen because I want to show like a couple of things. Uh, [00:28:53] swyx: yeah. I'll fill in some context, like I knew that the renderToNodeStream API was not good enough, basically because everyone who is doing SSR was doing like a double pass render just to get the data in. Um, and I noticed a very big sticking point for Airbnb so much that they were almost like forking react to something like that to, [00:29:11] Sunil Pai: they invented a caching API. [00:29:13] They did like a whole bunch of things. Okay. So if you have a look here, you'll see that there's a little bit of spinner and then the content comes in. But now what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you the actual HTML. So let's just go to prettier and just pretty far this, for that, we can see the content and I'll show you something that's very like fundament. [00:29:32] That's the playground playground paste, big HTML. All right. So are you looking at this HTML it's rendering rendering by the way, this, these are special comments that mark suspense boundaries. It's very cool. If you come down here, you'll see a dev, which is the spinner. So this is the spinner that you see when you refresh the page. [00:29:52] So this is. And then the rest of like then, like the, like the bits that are below that close and the HTML closes, but content still start stream is streaming in at that point. So like, this is the actual, like devs that are coming in with the content. And then a script tag gets injected that says, Hey, this thing that just came in, shove it into where the spinner was. [00:30:13] This template [00:30:14] swyx: tag is so small. I would, I would have imagined it was much bigger. [00:30:18] Sunil Pai: It's not. So by the way, at this point, the react has not loaded. This is happening without react. This is just a little DOM, much like swelled ha uh, just a little operation that does it. So you, you, you get this content. And, uh, so, so that's the first feature which is that suspense. [00:30:35] It not only works out of the box, but fallbacks and replacing or fallbacks with actual content also happened. Um, I want to pull this outside of this main window to show you something. Um, so you can see the content load in, but keep an eye on the loading spinner. Okay. Just to prove a point. So the content loads in, oh man. [00:30:56] Oh, is it cash just that way? Uh, the content loads in, but the spinner is still going on. That's because there's an artificial delay for the react bundle to show, to show up. That's the point of this demo, which is to show that it can do async. Now you can imagine that it's not just one part of the page. [00:31:13] There could be multiple suspense boundaries here, some with something heavy, something with something asynchronous and they're potentially streaming in effectively in parallel in the, like after the HTML tag closes and they load nicely the, the other cool feature, which is a feature, every framework should steal is if you do a second refresh and here, I think if the, if you do a second refresh and at this point, the react bundle, the JavaScript bundle is cached. [00:31:42] So it loads before the react, the server. Finish the streaming. So at that point, the react says, fuck you, I don't care about the streaming bit anymore. I'm taking over, it's now a client set up like just automatically out of the box, because now that would be faster. So it basically raises the client and suicide. [00:31:58] So suspends working out of the box itself is like a big deal first. So people will start using it like with react dot lazy, but then with data fetching and a bunch of slate styling solutions, which they're also working on. Um, but this is the new server entering API. The reason I was talking about this, I keep losing context about these things. [00:32:19] I should stop sharing, I guess. Um, the absolute best feature of this of course is the reason why is something that comes out of Facebook, which is it works with existing applications and you can incrementally add it. So the first thing you will do is you'll take your render to string that one line somewhere in your code base, which says rendered to. [00:32:39] And you'll replace it with vendor to notable readable string. I mean, [00:32:43] swyx: either way 99% of users have never used render to string. Right. That's what next year is for. [00:32:51] Sunil Pai: Well, that's the, that's all my God. That's part of a whole other conversation, right? [00:32:54] swyx: This is rendered a string as a service. [00:32:59] Sunil Pai: The moment you update next, year's your version of next year? So work on yes. [00:33:04] swyx: Which is good, which is good. Right? Because, uh, people won't even know and they will just benefit, but it's, it's a little bit bad. Okay. [00:33:13] Next.js and the Open Source Commons [00:33:13] swyx: And this is a little bit of my criticism, which is that your blessing, a meta framework, at the expense of all the others, right? Like which admittedly have not been as successful, but, uh, basically reacts Chrome, picked a winner and it was next year. [00:33:27] Sunil Pai: I've been thinking about this so much. Oh, look, it let's get into them at our conversation now. So let's standard disclaimers. I think Guillermo is a mench. [00:33:35] I think the people who work there are incredible. There are some people I'm close to. I'm so happy for them. I know people on the Chrome team who work with these folks. I love them as well. Nicole for me is, uh, is a hero. Uh, and of course the React team at all my buddies, I love them. Okay. That being said, the React team is six people and they don't have the time to build the meta framework and Guillermo, uh the one thing he's incredible at is he's great at building relationships. [00:34:03] He's just amazing at that. Like he, uh, in a very genuine way, like this, there's nothing like ulterior about it. Next JS is open-source and runs on any node runtime and it's designed to do so. There's nothing about it. That's become special on Vercel. Because of that the React team felt, feel like, okay, fine. [00:34:20] We can have a primitive and meta frameworks will solve it. And let's just make sure it works with next two years, because so many other people who are just reach out to them and say, Hey, this new API is showing up. Uh, this is not just with next.js. It's a similar thing is with like react testing library. [00:34:34] When the new activity I showed up, right. I made the PRS to react testing library. I was like, what you should do is have every function and react testing library be wrapped in back act. So nobody really has to like use the API by hand. I just, it's now it's the D and it's a very good testing framework, the Chrome team. [00:34:53] And this is my, I'm not saying this, like, it's a bad thing. I think they did the right thing. The Chrome team realized that if they provide performance enhancements to next years directly, they can have so much impact on the internet because so much of the react tool is running on next year. So fixing how the images are loaded in next year certainly makes the internet faster. [00:35:15] Yeah. And maybe that's what we should do also like for the accessibility, just ship acts in, uh, all the acts rules in development mode, either in like react Dom directly, or at least the next years. Oh yeah. The sweatshop, the axles. Yeah. [00:35:33] swyx: Oh, they're enabled by default. And, uh, your, your app one compile, uh, actually I think it would warn you won't fail by a worn. [00:35:40] Sunil Pai: Okay. So you should be making the swag folks should be making way more noise about that. That is such an incredible draw for accessibility. [00:35:48] swyx: The thing is like, uh, if you encourage, if you think that your, your problems are solved by X, then you're taking a very sort of paint by numbers approach to accessibility. [00:35:57] Right. Which is actually kind of against the spirits of, of, uh, what people really want, which is, um, real audits with like tap through everything. Like the stuff that machines could catch is so little, [00:36:08] Sunil Pai: I agree. The whole point of actual SIS to make sure that all the low hanging fruit is done by default. [00:36:15] It's like TypeScript, like I guess, which is a TypeScript. Doesn't solve all your bugs, but the stupid undefined is not a function once it does. Yeah, exactly. Make sure that your images have. Just by default, like we can have stronger conversations about tab order once you make sure all your images have all tags. [00:36:35] swyx: Uh, okay. Anyway, so, so yeah. So first of all, yeah, I agree with you on the, on this Chrome. And, uh, I think this is opensource winning, right? Like, uh, there's a, there's a commons. Vercel built the most successful react framework, Nate. They went the investor really hard at it. They had the right abstraction level, you know, not too much, not too little, just the right one. [00:36:55] Uh, and now everyone is finding them as like the Schelling point, which is a word I'm coming to use a lot, uh, because you know, that is the most impact that you reach. Uh, so no hate on any of them. It's just like it happens that a venture backed startup benefits from all of this. [00:37:11] Sunil Pai: Can you imagine how hard it makes my job? [00:37:13] We don't run, not on CloudFlare workers, which means Next.js doesn't run on it. It's annoying. [00:37:19] swyx: Oh, is there any attempt to make it run? [00:37:22] Sunil Pai: There are a couple of ways where we can get it to work, but it like, it's a lot of polyfill and, uh, we'll get that. Like, I expect it to be fixed within the next three to six months, but out of the box, it doesn't run on it. [00:37:35] And for me in my head, it doesn't, it's not even about CloudFlare workers. I'm like, oh shit. That's what makes Bezos like even richer because everyone's got, has, if you want to use Nadia using AWS or Lambda. And that just means more folks are using AWS. I'm just like, okay, I guess. Sure. I know you work there as well, but it's just very annoying to me where I'm like, shit. [00:37:56] What's even more interesting is that node is now moving to implementing web standard APIs inside of it. So they already have the streams implementations. They will have fetch fetch will be a node API. Like it will be implemented based on standards, which means the request response objects. And once that happens and people, if people build frameworks on that, then you can say that it will run on CloudFlare workers because the cloud fed worker's API is also like a standards based thing. [00:38:21] So it's an interesting shift of like what's happening in the, in the runtime world. Also conveniently the person who implemented the web stream implementation at node just started at CloudFlare like last month, like James. Oh, James [00:38:38] swyx: now. Okay. Yeah. I recognize [00:38:39] Sunil Pai: a great guy by the way. Uh, very, I just love these people who have like clarity of thought when they talk James as well. [00:38:46] The Third Age of JavaScript [00:38:46] swyx: We're kind of moving into the other topic of like JavaScript in 2021. Right. So first of all, I have a meta question of how do you keep informed of all this stuff? Like I ha I had no idea before you told me about this Node stuff. How do you know? [00:38:57] Sunil Pai: I have an internet information junkie problem. [00:39:00] I replaced the weed smoking habit with a Twitter habit. This is what it is. [00:39:05] swyx: You're not unlike some magic mailing lists that like tells you all this stuff. Okay. [00:39:09] Sunil Pai: Like reading the tea leaves is what it is. Like. I keep trying to find out what's going on. The problem [00:39:14] swyx: is I, I, I feel like I'm ready. I'm relatively plugged in, but you're like, you're way more plugged in than me. [00:39:22] and then this development with node adopting web standard APIs, um, is this a response to Deno? [00:39:28] Sunil Pai: I don't know if it's a response to Deno because I know Mikeal Rogers wrote about this. Like your. That we made a mistake by trying to polyfill note APS and browser code with like modules and stuff. [00:39:41] Right? Like that's what the whole browser, if I, during those days, when we started actually using the same module system and the word isomorphic came up, what ended up happening was naughty APIs were polyfill in web land, but what should have happened is we should have gone the other way. And it would have kept like bundle this bundle size problem would have been a web smaller pro problem right now, just because of that. [00:40:07] So I know that the folks at not have been thinking about it for awhile, maybe Deno finally pushed them to do it, but I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't think it's like that reductive. I don't think it's just, it's just dental. It's very much a, this is the right time to do it and we actually can do it now. [00:40:22] So let's like flesh it out and do it the right way. Uh, and it's hard to do it in, in no, right. It's not just that you can just implement this thing. Like, what does making an HTTP server mean now? Because the request response objects are slightly different in shape. So you have to make sure that you don't break existing code. [00:40:39] So it's not as simple as saying, oh, we're just implementing the APS. That being said, having fetch inside node proper is going to be great. I think. Excellent. [00:40:47] swyx: Yeah. Yeah, no more node fetch. Um, yeah. You know, my other thoughts on I've been, I've been doing this talk called the third age of JavaScript. Right. [00:40:55] Which is a blog post that I wrote last year that, um, honestly I feel quite a bit of imposter syndrome around it because all I did was name a thing and like it was already happening. It was, you already saw, like, I think basically when, when COVID hit, a lot of people were. I have a lot of time on my hands, I'm going to make new projects or something. [00:41:14] Um, uh, and then, yeah, so I just, I named it and I just called it a few trends. So the, the trends I I'm talking about are the rise of IES modules first, you know, in, in development and in production, uh, concurrently the death of 11, which I'm also tracking. [00:41:30] Sunil Pai: Yes, those are, those are both come to fruition. [00:41:34] swyx: Which, by the way, I think the us government will have to drop by 11, uh, sometime in the next six months or so because, uh, the, the use, the usage levels have plummeted. [00:41:43] 3.6% of all visits to the U S government website in November, 2020 was I 11 and now that has dropped to 1.6, um, all [00:41:51] Sunil Pai: accelerating the drop is actually accelerating. [00:41:53] swyx: Uh, I don't know if it's accelerated it's everything, but it's under the 2% mark that the us government sets for itself. [00:41:59] They have an opportunity to essentially say like once it's stable, you know, there's no chance that it'll ever go back up again. Uh, they could just deprecate 11 for all government websites and then that, that will be the signal for all enterprises. And that's it. Yeah. So, um, and then the second. [00:42:15] Oh, I was going to move on the second bit. But what was your calling? [00:42:19] Sunil Pai: Oh, just saying that this happened, like, while I was working in JP Morgan over the last year, they did the same shift, but they're like, yeah, we are now a Chrome company. Literally none of our clients are asking for this and you know, it, it was just in rules somewhere, or we need to target, I 11, some people looked at it and said, okay, fine. [00:42:35] What happened is people are spending money on something that wasn't giving them the returns. And that's when a bank is like, yeah, we don't need [00:42:41] swyx: to do this anymore. Like you, you can deprecate free support. Right. And, and just make, just charge for 11 support, stop spreading it out among all the other users who are bearing the cost of development and maintenance. [00:42:54] The other one was collapsing layers, which is the death of Unix philosophy. Like , we used to have one tool does one thing, but now we want to combine everything. So, uh, Deno and Rome both have ambitions of linter format or test runner, all of that into a single binary, because the idea of what we want out of a default runtime has changed, uh, from a, for a very minimalist thing. And I always made the comparison to what word processors used to be like. [00:43:18] So, are you aware of Benedict Evans? He has a blog post, which is amazing about what a job of a platform should be. And he talks about like in 1980s word processors used to only let you type words. And if you wanted a horizontal layout, if you wanted word counts, if you wanted footnotes, these are all plugins that you buy and install separately. [00:43:38] Right. Okay. So, but as we evolve, as we just use all these things, we realize that these are just like the same tool that we want out of a word processor. So then they absorb all these features instead of plugins. They're just part of the platform now. They're there now in the new table stakes. [00:43:53] So I make that analogy to the runtimes that already doing, right. Like, Node used to be this like much more minimal thing. And, uh, but now we are expecting more and more out of our default setup with all these tools . Um, it's also very wasteful because when each of these tools don't know each other, they're all parsing their own ASTs running, running their own code. And then yeah, that's the whole [00:44:12] Sunil Pai: proposition, but yeah. [00:44:14] swyx: Any, any tool that collapses layers will, we will meet this, like, ESBuild, um, collapsed. Like a standard web pack would do like five or six AST runs. ESBuild collapsed it to two to three. That's a source of its speed as well. [00:44:27] Sunil Pai: One of my favorite facts about ESBuild is that it is faster to minify the code than to not modify the code when you run. Yes. And the reason for that is because when you try, when it tries to do the full AST, keep comment notes, everything else, it has to do a lot more bookkeeping, but the moment it just ditches all those things, because ESBuild doesn't do like full magnification, like something like a torso, but it does do like a smaller symbol substitution, white space, uh, uh, removes all white spaces. [00:44:59] And it does like some dead code elimination. Uh, and it's a lot more work to keep the bookkeeping for everything and all the white space notes than to not do it. So he has built is actually faster when you have a modification turned on, love it. [00:45:14] swyx: It's amazing. It's amazing. [00:45:16] [00:45:16] ESbuild vs SWC vs Zig [00:45:16] swyx: Do you have opinions on ESBuild versus SWC? [00:45:18] Sunil Pai: Okay. So I like ESBuild. Uh, because I was very strongly looking for something a lot more opinionated. I've noticed that the reason that code basis Surat usually boiled down to the acute decisions that you make. Like in the very beginning of the project, you can do anything. I mean, whichever dumbass came up with the idea of baby plugin, macros has like ruined a lot of lives. [00:45:41] It was me. I came up today, but that is like, then you're like tight. So the thing that ESBuild does is very like its creator, Evan Wallace, which is that it's, it's one of a kind like, he's not really interested so much in having community, uh, uh, PRS or like having suggestions on how it should be built. He has a very strong vision of what it should be like, which is why there are no AST level plugins and all that jazz. [00:46:08] And because of that, because of, like I said, because he's collapsed the lyrics and collapse, the size of the development team to just himself, he has like such a clear vision on what it should be. So it w is good. It would be great for, I want to say 95% of projects that fall under the things he has designed at four. [00:46:28] Okay. Uh, and that's a lot of applications. That's a shit ton of applications. That's like everything, but your host, if you need anything, uh, unique, I'll give you one. That's like a very good use case that is bill will never use. Do you know what, um, uh, really has this idea of persistent queries. Okay. So like for whoever's hearing who doesn't know it, right? [00:46:52] Like you can write a query inside Java. And when it compiles it out, it takes out the query and replaces it just with an identifier, like, like a little eight character identifier. And it hosts that query instead of like on the service side. And it says, oh, that eight, eight character query, you can just hit it as a restaurant point now. [00:47:11] So you can write the code internally in JavaScript where it belongs, but it doesn't add like to your bundle or whatever it is. So ESBuild will never support this, which means if you want to do really optimizations on your react code base, you won't be able to do it all. You have to like add on to yours, which you could do. [00:47:29] I guess like you can still use Babel would, uh, SWC is meant to be a platform and which is why next years will use it because next gen is the meta framework, not just for react, but also for like some programming opinions, extracting get server props, get started, props, which one you want to be that this thing after server components comes into play, but a number of things like there will be people who always want to do. [00:47:54] The emotion macro now is like fairly, uh, popular that they will want to use it. So I assume they will implement it in, uh, interest. I know. Do you know what bun is by the way? Do you mean, do you know, how are you following Jared Sumner? Some [00:48:10] swyx: summers, no, wait, so [00:48:13] Sunil Pai: key is reimplementing ESB, but in a language called Zig it's another systems programming language. [00:48:20] And he's his claim is that it's about three times faster than you spell it right now, which is already some 200 times faster than Babel loader. It is just our web pack, but it's a language you said it? No. So the language is called Zig lines at AIG, but the thing he's building is called a, B U N. He hasn't shared it in public yet. [00:48:41] I think he's actually planning on sharing it like next week. Like I think it's that imminent. He's been sharing numbers right now. Yeah. That's the guy, Jared. Uh, I love, I should've followed him like a while ago, create great feed, uh, excellent content. And like, he's, he he's thinking that he's going to like implement. [00:48:57] He might actually implement an AST level, uh, uh, plugin, micro API, possibly just implement the emotion one. I think he was just, yeah. See, oh, that's like literally the tweet would write under the main one right there where he's like, Hey, what if we actually just did this in? Uh, oh, [00:49:14] swyx: he's right. He's he's right with you. [00:49:17] Yeah. Like he's [00:49:17] Sunil Pai: just talking about it, like right there. So, uh, so SWC versus ESBuild, I don't think is the conversation. I think ESBuild will have a rise. A bunch of people will use it. The nice thing, the best feature about ESBuild is because there are aren't any like cute decisions. You will be able to move away from it to whatever succeeds. [00:49:39] Th there's nothing customer [00:49:40] swyx: that I believe that was Evan's original idea. That IES build was a proof of existence that day there's a better way. And that he stuck to it for way longer than I thought he would. [00:49:51] Sunil Pai: People are using it in production and everything know everything about the designers that it's replaceable. [00:49:56] That it's just a, [00:49:59] swyx: that's wonderful. Isn't that amazing when people design their stuff? W. You know, it [00:50:04] Sunil Pai: isn't kind of pressure that he would have had the best. Thank goodness. It was the successful CTO of Figma with money in the bank who is implementing this and didn't have anyone to impress. You know what I mean? [00:50:16] It was like, yeah, let's put a macro API and what else do you want? Like, whatever. No, he doesn't [00:50:21] swyx: go. Yeah. But he just needs to police himself and no one else. Right. If you don't like it, [00:50:26] Sunil Pai: this is during his downtime from Figma that he's working on this. [00:50:30] swyx: Um, my, my secret theory is that he's doing this as an, as a Figma ad. [00:50:33] Like, you know, if he, if the CTO of Figma does this for fun, imagine what it's like to work inside of Figma, you know, like of, I've heard it's pretty great, [00:50:42] Sunil Pai: pretty great working inside of Figma too. Well, the code is like, it's really cool. [00:50:46] Let Non-X Do X: Figma vs Canva, Webflow vs Wix/Squarespace [00:50:46] Sunil Pai: Did you actually point out. Uh, Ken was like six times bigger than Figma. [00:50:51] Now [00:50:52] swyx: you wanna talk about that? [00:50:53] Sunil Pai: Oh God. That's. I didn't realize until you pointed it out. [00:50:58] swyx: Incredible. Imagine all the geniuses working in Figma and go looking at Canada and like, yo, like I, I have like a thousand times your features and your six times in my size as a business. [00:51:10] Sunil Pai: Uh, but I hope every one of those engineers understands the value of sales and like reaching out to your actual customers because [00:51:17] swyx: I don't think it's just sales. [00:51:18] It's more like, uh, they're always going to be more non, like, this is a category of software called let Nanex do X, right? Let non-designers do design. Whereas Figma is clearly for designers doing design. Um, and there's always going to be like a tool, three orders of magnitude more non-experts uh, who just want to do basic shit. [00:51:37] Sunil Pai: Oh man. I hope that flow has a multi-billion dollar buyout and at some point, [00:51:42] swyx: uh, I mean, I, yeah, I mean there's clearly something that w the problem with flow is that. They're too close to code. Right? You have to learn CSS the box model. [00:51:56] Sunil Pai: Yeah. I mean, they do say there's no code, but really they're a visual, [00:52:00] swyx: if you don't know CSS when using Webflow you're screwed. [00:52:03] Like [00:52:04] Sunil Pai: that's right. It's uh, they have, they have the best grid editor on the market too. I have to say that. I [00:52:10] swyx: mean, the UI is just amazing, right? It's just like, um, yeah, I mean, you know, there's a reason why like the Wix is, and the Squarespaces are actually worth more than the workflow and it's not just cause they were around earlier. [00:52:22] Like, um, they're, they're just easier to use for non-technical people. [00:52:26] Sunil Pai: That's a good, you you're talking about why did we even start talking about this? What did you want to talk about? Uh, we were talking [00:52:33] swyx: about like, uh, 32 JavaScript. Um, so I think we kind of like dealt with those, those, uh, those topics. [00:52:39] Was there anything else that you want to talk about? [00:52:40] Didn't JavaScript land, [00:52:42] JavaScript Twitter and Notion's 9mb Marketing Site [00:52:42] Sunil Pai: I don't know if you have noticed, but I've kind of actually stopped engaging in the JavaScript discourse on Twitter specifically, which actually hurts me like a little bit, because that's where all my jobs could friends are. And that's kind of like, I've seen it all. I've seen JavaScript router now for the last 11 years, I would think 10, 11 years that I've seen it. [00:53:02] And I used to like participate very heavily. And back to the thing that you, uh, that we were just discussing about the conversations that happened too, about like SBA versus MPA and about like the whole notion blow up about how they made them thing into like 800 KB. Yep. Uh, the easiest kind of discourse to have is to have like one absolutist opinion, uh, that I saw a number of people in like those threads and the surrounding threads have, which is a, well, this is bad or this is good. [00:53:35] And, uh, that's, that's all I got to say about it. Now give me like 40 likes on this reply industry. Uh, whereas like there's real opportunity here to understand how and yeah, that's the one, that's the one with treat by the way. Clearly it got like attention. No, [00:53:51] swyx: by the way I phrased it very neutrally. I actually was pretty careful. [00:53:54] Cause I knew that it's going to attract some buzz. I had no idea what's going to be this much, but [00:54:00] Sunil Pai: no, no, no. But like I'm so interested in talking about, uh, so this is what I was talking to you about, which is like, it's not just about a website at one point of time. It's about the system that generates these kinds of like artifacts, uh, of, so for example, with what, what did they say? [00:54:24] They're there 8 47 KB right now. They're not 8 47 KV today. They were 8 47 KB. When you, uh, Uh, tweeted this, uh, on the 11th, they are not in 47 KB. Now they might be 852, or they might be 841. Are you about to check? [00:54:43] swyx: No, no, no, no, I'm not. I'm not, it doesn't matter. The exact number. Doesn't matter. I'm going to give you another example, which also came up, which is Netflix. [00:54:49] Remember they ripped out react and he said they have react back [00:54:54] Sunil Pai: on Netflix. I use, are you serious on that? Wait, did they have like both Netflix, they have both react and jQuery, jQuery and react on that page right now. It's just, but like, for me, it's interesting that, which is like, I think the most insightful tweet in this was very pointed out that nobody noticed this until they told it to us. [00:55:16] Nobody saw it. It bothered. Yeah. That's the one, like nobody bothered about it. It was still making the money. They were happy about it. And they wanted to share that. And we need more of them. We need more people to be like sharing the process because if we react very badly to these things, then fewer people will want to actually share the numbers. [00:55:34] And you won't learn from the industry, but I don't know whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. It does mean that you can make a multi-billion dollar company with a marketing site. That's nine MB of Charles' script. And I think, I think people who have very strong opinions about how much jealous should be on a page to take a step back and wonder how do you make it? [00:55:55] So like, how do you, from the very beginning of like running your company, how do you make it so that it doesn't go up beyond that? Also, what opportunities are you abandoning by focusing on making sure your marketing page, uh, has like 100 KB of JavaScript instead of like nine MB [00:56:17] swyx: shipping velocity, right? [00:56:19] Sunil Pai: You are somewhere, you are spending effort on it somewhere. Just so we're clear because somebody will look at it and say, fuck you, are you suggesting that we all put in that's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying that the resources, that word, but resources at these companies are limited and they are, they they're prioritized and sequenced and you should ask yourself in what order you want to do it and who you're trying to please, are you trying to please your customers and your users or the peanut gallery on Twitter? [00:56:48] And I think that's something that like, I, it's why I don't engage so much anymore because it's so hard to communicate in once and somebody will come in with a, well, fuck you, you work for Facebook or used to work for Facebook. What would you know? I'm like, you got me that kind of ends the conversation that, right. [00:57:04] Like I'm studying contributed to babies being burned alive or whatever it is like, this is what it is. [00:57:12] swyx: Um, it's a nuanced debate, like, uh, because they also did some like notion clearly did some stupid stuff here. Right? Like it, it, they could have spent a day. Uh, so do you know why it was 9.9 megabytes? [00:57:25] Sunil Pai: If I understand it was the whole notion that that was being used, the [00:57:27] swyx: whole app. [00:57:28] Yeah. They were shipping the whole, there was actually someone from notion, uh, answering me. Uh, it's here. Yeah. This guy's, this guy works at notion before the marketing site was another route in our, at the time 9.1 NBME and app, we load the whole app just to show the sign up button. [00:57:44] So what, [00:57:45] Sunil Pai: what it's worth Facebook sign up page does start prefetching actual Facebook code so that once you log in it loads instantaneously. So there's a reason to do it. It's just that it shouldn't be nine and B of course. That's [00:58:00] swyx: yeah, they could have like took a day every, every six months or something like perfect day, you know, and do that. [00:58:06] So that's why I'm hesitant, uh, giving them a pass for like, okay, so what your multi-billion dollar company? This is embarrassing. This is just an unprofessional. Um, so yes,

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Brian Jones

Raw Data By P3

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 27, 2021 91:25

It's not every day that you can hear a great conversation with the Head of Product of Excel. Brian Jones sits down with us and talks about the past, present, and very promising future of Excel. Rob and Brian go way back, and the stories and laughs abound! Check out this cool World Orca Day Excel template for kids! Episode Timeline: 4:00 - Brian's lofty title is Head of Product at Excel, The importance and magic of Excel, and people's a-ha moments with Excel 20:25 - The difficulty of not seeing your projects' impact on the world and how the heck does Bluetooth fit into the story?!, Rob and Brian reminisce with some funny conference stories 32:00 - The XML file format and some very neat XML tricks that everyone should know about 51:25 - The birth of the Excel Web App and Rob can't believe some of the things that Brian's team has done with Excel 1:05:00 - How to onboard the Excel, VLOOKUP, and Pivot crowd into data modeling and Power BI, and the future of Excel most certainly includes the Lambda function (maybe!) Episode Transcript: Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello, friends. Today's guest, Brian Jones, head of product for this thing you might've heard of called Microsoft Excel. Brian and I go back a long way. We were both youngsters at Microsoft at the same time, and we both worked on some early features of Office apps, and we're friends. Really, really have sincerely warm feelings about this guy, as you often do with people that you essentially grew up with. And that's what we did. When Brian and I first worked together, he was working on Word and I was working on Excel. But even though Brian was on Word at the time, he was already working on what we would today call citizen developer type of functionality in the Word application. So even though we were essentially on different sides of the aisle within the Office organization, we were already finding ourselves able to connect over this affinity for the citizen developer. Rob Collie (00:00:55): Now we have some laughs during this conversation about how in hindsight, the things he and I were working on at the time didn't turn out to be as significant as we thought they were in the moment. But those experiences were very valuable in shaping both of us for the initiatives that came later. Rob Collie (00:01:11): Like almost everyone at Microsoft, Brian has moved around a bit. He's worked on file formats for the entire Office suite, which ended up enabling Power Pivot version one to actually function the way that it should. He's worked on Office-wide extensibility and programmability, back to that citizen developer thing again. And in that light, it's only natural that Excel's gravity reeled him in. And in that light, it's only natural that someone like that, someone like Brian, found his way to Excel, and it really is a match made in heaven. And if you permit me the Excel joke, that turned out to be a great match. Rob Collie (00:01:50): We took the obligatory and entertaining, I hope, walk down memory lane. We spent a lot more time than I expected talking about file format. And the reason why is that file formats are actually a fascinating topic when you really get into it. Lot of history there, a lot of very interesting history and challenges we walked through. And of course, we do get around to talking about Excel, its current state, where it's headed, and also the amazing revelation for me that monthly releases actually mean a longer attention span for a product and how we ended up getting functionality now as a result of the monthly release cycle that would have never fit into the old multi-year release cycle. We were super grateful to have him on the show. And as usual, we learned things. I learned things. I have a different view of the world after having this conversation than I did before it, which is a huge gift. And I hope that you get the same sort of thing out of it. So let's get into it. Announcer (00:02:56): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please? Announcer (00:03:03): This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive podcast, with your host Rob Collie and your cohost Thomas Larock. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element. Rob Collie (00:03:26): Welcome to the show. Brian Jones, how are you, sir? Brian Jones (00:03:30): I am fantastic. Thank you for having me, Rob. I'm excited. Rob Collie (00:03:33): So let's start here today. Well, you and I go way back, but today, what's your job title and what are your responsibilities? Brian Jones (00:03:42): So today, my job is I'm the head of product for the Excel team. So I lead the team of product managers that are tasked with or given the honor of deciding the future of Excel, where we go with Excel, what are the set of things that we go and build Rob Collie (00:03:59): Head of product. That's a title that we didn't have back when I was still at Microsoft. We did at one point have something called a product unit manager. Is it similar to that? How does that relate? Brian Jones (00:04:11): That's a good question. So we're continuing to evolve the way that we use titles internally. So internally, we have titles that still for most folks externally don't make any sense, like program manager, group program manager, program manager manager, director of program manager. And so for externally, whenever I'm on LinkedIn or if I do PR interviews, things like that, I use the term head of product. Internally, we don't have the term head of product. Rob Collie (00:04:37): Okay. All right. So that's a translation for us. Brian Jones (00:04:40): Yes, exactly. Trying to translate the Microsoft internal org chart to something that makes more sense to folks. Rob Collie (00:04:49): Yeah. So things like, if we use the word orthogonal, what we're really saying is that's not relevant. Brian Jones (00:04:53): Exactly. Rob Collie (00:04:54): That kind of decoder ring. Brian Jones (00:04:57): I didn't realize orthogonal [inaudible 00:04:59] until you said it and I'm like, " Oh yeah, no. Of course, that is completely a ridiculous term to use." Rob Collie (00:05:03): Or I don't know if they still do this, but an old joke that Dave [Gayner 00:05:07] and I used to have, it was all his joke at the time. It was big bet. Do we still talk about big bet? We're going to place a big bet. Brian Jones (00:05:14): Yep. Big bet or big rocks. Big rocks. You know the- Rob Collie (00:05:17): Big rocks. Whoa. Brian Jones (00:05:18): Yeah. It's kind of an analogy. You've got a jar and you want to fill it with the big rocks first, and then you let the sand fill in the rest of the space. So what are the big rocks? Rob Collie (00:05:26): Okay. Yeah. But big bet was one that we used to always make fun of. Brian Jones (00:05:31): Especially when there'd be, "Here are the big bets," and there's 20 of them. Rob Collie (00:05:34): Yeah. The joke I think we used to make was we would call something a big bet when we really didn't have any good reason for doing what we were doing. Anyway, all right. So you're head of product for Excel. That is a pretty heady job. That's pretty awesome. Brian Jones (00:05:52): It's a pretty fun job. Absolutely. Rob Collie (00:05:54): I mean, you're not lacking for eyeballs in that business, are you? We're all friends here. We're all on the same side of this story. I mean, it is the lingua franca of business, Excel. It is the business programming tool. People don't necessarily think of it as programming, but formulas are a programming language. To be head of product for the platform, you could call it an application, but really it's probably more accurate to call it a platform that is, I think, is the single most critical platform to business in the world. That's pretty amazing. Brian Jones (00:06:30): Absolutely. And that's usually the way that we talk about it internally. It depends on who your audience is externally when you're talking about it. But yeah, Excel is a programming language. I remember even before, back when I was on the Word team, but I would go and meet with PJ, who ran program manager for Office all up. And he'd always referred to Excel more as an IDE. And that didn't totally resonate with me at the time because to me, Excel was just a list app, an app for just tracking things. I didn't totally understand what he meant by that, but I'd nod cause he was super important and smart. And it wasn't really until I started working on the team that I was like, "Oh, I totally understand all these things that PJ used to reference." Rob Collie (00:07:06): This one of the things I had been dying to ask you is when you and I first met, I was working on the Excel team, but still had... Gosh, this was year 2000 maybe, maybe 2001. And even though I was nominally part of the Excel team at that point, I still didn't really know Excel, and you were working on Word. So the thing we both had in common at that point is that we didn't know Excel. So I wanted to get your perspective. I know that you've done some things other than Word, but we were already sort of teasing this. So let's just get into it. What's it like to come from "outside" Excel and how's that transition? How do you view Excel differently today versus what you did before? We already started talking about that. The list keeper. That's very common way for people to view it. Brian Jones (00:07:53): When I first started, yeah, I was on Word, although I was working on more kind of end user developer type of pieces of Word. That's how you and I first interacted because we were talking about XML. The first feature I owned was a feature called easy data binding to Excel. And the whole idea was when you could easily bring content from Excel into Word, but then create a link back so that the content in Word would stay live. And a lot of this stuff that I did while I was on Word was all about trying to make Word a little bit more of a structured tool so that people could actually program against it because Word is completely unstructured. It's just free-flowing text. So trying to write a solution against that is almost impossible because you can't predict anything. So we did a lot of work to add structure, whereas Excel out of the gate has all that structure. So it's just much easier to go and program. Brian Jones (00:08:39): If I had gone straight from Word to Excel, it would have been a little bit more of a shock, but I actually had about eight years in between where I was running our extensibility team. So a lot of the work we would do was revving the add-in model and extensibility for Excel. So I got some exposure there. When we did all of the file format stuff and the whole file format campaign, That was a couple of years where I was working really closely with a bunch of folks in Excel, like Dan [Badigan 00:09:06] and folks like that. So I had a bit of exposure, but I'll tell you when I first joined, I had a similar job, but it was for the Access team and we were building up some new tech. Brian Jones (00:09:17): Some of it still is there today. Office Forms came out of some of the investments that we were doing in Access. But when I showed up into Excel, I was very much in that mode of, "Why don't the Excel folks, get it? Everything should be a table with column headings." And like, "That's the model. And why do they stick with this grid? Clearly word of it is eventually going to go away from the printed page as the key medium. Excel's got to go away from the grid. And they've got to understand that this should just be all tables that can be related." And thankfully, I was responsible when I joined and didn't try and act like I knew everything. So I took some time to go and learn. Brian Jones (00:09:52): And it didn't take me long. We have some crazy financial modeling experts on the team and stuff like that, where I'd say it was maybe six months in that it clicked for me where I understood those two key pieces. The grid and formulas are really the soul and the IP of Excel. The fact that you can lay out information really easily on a grid, you have formulas that are your logic, and you can do this step-by-step set of processes where each cell is almost like another little debug point for you. [Cal captain sub 00:10:20] second, and it's the easiest way to go and learn logic and how to build logic. Brian Jones (00:10:25): I didn't get any of that at that time, but you pick it up pretty quickly when you start to look at all the solutions that people are building. And now, obviously, I've been on the team now for five years, so I'm super sold around it. But I'd say it took me a little while and I'm still learning. It takes a while to learn the whole thing. Rob Collie (00:10:41): Yeah. It's funny. Like you said, Word's completely unstructured. You're looking in from the outside and you're like, "Well, Excel is completely structured." Then you get close to it. You're like, "Oh no. And it's not, really." Brian Jones (00:10:52): No. Not at all. Rob Collie (00:10:53): I mean, it's got the cells. Rows and columns. You can't avoid those. But within that landscape, is it kind of deliberately wild west? You can do whatever you need to. You're right. Okay. So tables, yes. Tables are still very important. But you've got these parameters and assumptions and inputs. And what do you do with those? I mean, they're not make a table for those. Brian Jones (00:11:19): Yep. Absolutely. I think that the thing that I started to get really quickly was the beauty of that. Like you said, it's unstructured. You have nice reference points. So if you're trying to build logic, formulas, you can reference things. But there's no rule about whether or not things go horizontally, vertically, diagonally, whatever. You can take whatever's in your mind that you're trying to make a decision around and use that flexible grid to lay it out. It's like a mind map. If you think about the beauty, the flexibility of a mind map, that's what the grid is. You can go and lay out all the information however it makes the most sense to you. Brian Jones (00:11:53): Really, that's what makes Excel still so relevant today. If you think about the way business is evolving, people are getting more and more data, change is just more constant, business processes are changing all the time. So there are certain processes where people can say, "This thing is always going to work the same way." And so you can go and get a vertical railed solution. That's why we use the term rail. That's kind of like if I always know I'm going to take this cargo from LA to San Francisco, I can go and build some rails, and I got a train, it'll always go there and do the same thing. But if business is constantly changing, those rails are quickly going to break and you're going to have to go off the rails. Excel is more like a car than a train. You can go anywhere with it. And so as the business processes change, the people who are using Excel are the same people who are the ones changing those business processes. Those are the business folks. And so they can go and evolve and adapt it and they don't have to go and find another ISV to go and build them another solution based on that new process that's probably going to change again in six months. Thomas Larock (00:12:52): So Brian's been in charge for five years of Excel, and he's sitting there telling us how there's still more to learn. And two weeks ago, we all got renewed as MVPs. And so I was on the MVP website, and I'm going through all the DLs I can join because that's all a manual process these days. I'm like, "Oh, there's the Excel MVP DL. I don't know why I haven't joined this yet." So I click. I'm immediately flooded with 100 emails a day. 100 emails a day. Now, I don't believe I am a novice when it comes to Excel. I don't. I know I'm not on you all's level at all when it comes to it. You build and work and live the product. But I know my way around enough that I can explain things to others when they say, "I'm trying to do this thing." "Oh, I think it's possible." Thomas Larock (00:13:40): But I read these passionate MVPs that you have and the stuff that they highlight, and it's not complex stuff. It's like, "Hey, this title bar seems to be wider in this." And I'm like, I might not even notice this stuff. And I see these features that aren't a complex feature, but I'm like, "I didn't even know that was there. I didn't even know you could do that. Oh, you can do that too." There's so much. And like you said, it's a programming language. It's an IDE. It's all these things. As [Sinopski 00:14:10] said, "It's the killer app for Windows." To have the head of product say that, there's just so much. He really means it. There is a lot to it. And it is something that is malleable and usable by hundreds of millions of people a day. Brian Jones (00:14:25): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:14:26): My old joke is, if you want to know how good someone is at Excel, just ask them, "How good are you at Excel?" And then take their answer and invert it. Brian Jones (00:14:37): That's absolutely true. Rob Collie (00:14:38): If someone says, "Yeah, I'm really good at it," You know they don't have any clue because they haven't glimpsed the depth of that particular mine shaft. And once someone has been to the show, they know better than to oversell their knowledge because they know they can't know everything. Rob Collie (00:14:54): You say you're good at Excel. And then the very next question is one that you're not going to be able to answer. So you got to be careful. [inaudible 00:15:00] person views Excel as Word with a grid. And that's not obviously what it is, but that's the oversimplification for... I don't know... maybe 80% of humanity. Brian Jones (00:15:10): Yeah. And the thing is, there's a lot more that we're doing in the app now to try and make it, one, more approachable, because there's a set of folks that just find it really intimidating, for sure. You open it up and it's this huge, dense grid. Like, "Hey, where do I start? What should I go and do? I've never even heard of this thing before." In the past, a lot of stuff that we would do, we never really thought about those first steps of using the app because we were always like, "Well, everybody knows our app. We're going to go and do the things for everybody that knows our app." And I think we're doing a better job now trying to think, "Well, there's a bunch of people who don't know about our app. Let's go and figure out what the experience should be like for them." Brian Jones (00:15:43): But we've done a lot with AI where we're trying to get a little bit better about... We look at your data. Recommend things to you. So we'll say, "If you've got a table of data, hey, here's a pivot table." You may not have even heard of the pivot table before. So really more like, "Hey, here's a summary of your data." You want to go and insert that. Brian Jones (00:16:00): In fact, those tests are always fun because then we get to work with people who've really haven't ever used a pivot table. So it's always fun to hear the words that they use to describe what a pivot table is. It's like, "Oh wow, you grouped my data for me." Or stuff like that like, "Wow. That's a nice name for it too." So we're trying to do more of that to expose people to really those higher-end things. But those things where for those of us that use it, once you discover that stuff, you're even more hooked on the product. You're like, man, that first experience of somebody built a pivot table for you and you realize, "Oh my God, I didn't know I could do this with my data. Look how much easier it is for me to see what's going on," and trying to get more people to experience that kind of magical moment. Thomas Larock (00:16:39): Now imagine being me and only knowing pivot through T-SQL and that magical day when you meet Rob and he's like, "You just pivot table [inaudible 00:16:49]." And you're like, "How many hours have I wasted? Why didn't someone tell me?" Brian Jones (00:16:56): Yeah. We get that a lot when we'll go and show stuff. Oftentimes, the reaction is more frustration. "I can't believe I didn't know about this for the past five years." Rob Collie (00:17:05): We get that all the time now with Power Pivot and Power Query and Power BI in general. The target audience for that stuff hasn't been really effectively addressed by Microsoft marketing. But even back, just regular pivot tables, such a powerful tool, and so poorly named. You weren't around on the Excel team, Brian, when I waged a six-month campaign to try to rename pivot table to summary table. Brian Jones (00:17:31): Oh really? Rob Collie (00:17:31): Yeah. Brian Jones (00:17:31): How long ago was that? Rob Collie (00:17:33): Oh, well, it was a long time ago. I mean [crosstalk 00:17:35]- Brian Jones (00:17:36): Pivot tables had already been out for quite a while. Rob Collie (00:17:37): Oh God. Yeah. I mean, they were long established. They were in the product. I didn't even know what they did. Believe it or not, I worked on the Excel team for probably about a year before I actually figured what pivot tables could do. People would just throw it around all the time on the team like, "Well, once you have the data, then you can chart it. You can pivot it," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I would fit in- Brian Jones (00:17:58): You would nod? Rob Collie (00:17:59): I would fit in... I would also author sentences like that, that had the word pivot in it. It was a pretty safe thing to do. There was no downside to it. But believe it or not, the time that I discovered what pivot tables are for... you'll love this... I was trying to figure out how to skill balance the four different fantasy football leagues that I had organized within the Excel and Access team. I wanted to spread it out. Levels of experience. I've got this table of data with the person's name and their level of experience and my tentative league assignment. And just this light bulb went on. I'm like, "Oh my God, I bet this is what pivot tables are for." Total expertise by league. Like, "Oh, look at that. It's totally it." That was a big change for me. That was during the release, Brian, where you and I were working together. Brian Jones (00:18:54): I think I played on one of those fantasy football leagues. Rob Collie (00:18:56): You might have. Brian Jones (00:18:57): I was one of the people with zero experience. I remember going into the draft not knowing... I knew football, but I didn't know anything about fantasy football. Rob Collie (00:19:03): That's right. We did loop you in. So let's do that way back machine for a moment. That release when you and I met was the first release on Excel. I was the lead at that point. It was my first time being a lead. It was the first time I was in charge of a feature set, and it was really my baby, this XML thing we were doing. And the reason for that was because no one was paying any attention. That was this weird release. For a whole release, Office went and tried to do cloud services without having any idea what that really was going to mean. And so we stripped all of the applications down to skeleton crews. And this is really the only reason why on the Excel side, some youngster like me was allowed to be a lead and come up with a feature, because no one cared. No one was paying any attention. There was no one minding the store. Rob Collie (00:19:48): I remember being so wild-eyed enthusiastic about how much this was going to change the world, this XML import export future. And I mean, you might as well just take it out. I can't imagine it's being used hardly at all today. I bet Power View is used more often than the XML import export feature. You all have done a pretty good job of hiding it. So kudos. But it was a good thing to cut my teeth on. I learned a lot of valuable lessons on that release. Rob Collie (00:20:24): How do you feel about the XML structure document work that you were doing in Word at the time? Do you kind of have the same feeling looking back at it that I do? Brian Jones (00:20:33): It was a similar thing. In fact, we did rip it out a couple of years later. I think that when you and I would talk about it, we would talk about these scenarios that were super righteous and great. And then we just start geeking out on tech. And then we would get way too excited about the tech and we kind of forget about those initial scenarios. We wouldn't stop and think, "Wait a minute. These users we're talking about, are they actually going to go and create XML files?" Because you need one of those to start with before any of this stuff makes sense. And no, of course, they're not. But for me, a lot of it started from that. Like I said, one of my first features was that easy data binding to Excel feature. And we thought, "Hey, maybe XML would be a good tech for us to use as a way of having Word and Excel talk to each other," because clearly they have different views on what formatting is and how to present information, but the underlying semantic information, that could be shared. Brian Jones (00:21:20): And so I could have a set of products show up in Excel as a table. And when they come into Word, they look more like a catalog of products. That totally makes sense. And we just did a lot of assumptions that people would make, do all the glue that was really necessary. And of course, they didn't. So I had the exact same experience. The other big thing that was different back then for us was we would plan something, meet with customers for six months, but then it'd take three years to go and build it. We had no way of validating that stuff with customers because we couldn't get them any of the builds. And then even after we shipped it, they weren't actually going to deploy it for another three-plus years. And so the reality is from when you had the idea to where you actually can see that it's actually not working and people aren't using it is probably about six years. So you've probably moved on to something else by then. Brian Jones (00:22:04): The only way you really as a PM got validation that your feature was great was whether or not leadership and maybe press got excited about your thing, but you didn't get a whole lot of signal from actual customers whether or not the thing was working, which is obviously completely different now, thank goodness. Rob Collie (00:22:18): Yeah. That Is true. It took some of the fun out of being done too, now looking back at it, like the day of the ship party, when we were done with the three-year release. "Okay, fine." We'd dunk each other in fountains and there'd be hijinks and stuff. But the world did not experience us being done. That was purely just us feeling done. And then it was like you take a week off maybe, and then the next week, you're right back to the grind at the very beginning. You never got the payoff. Even if you built something really good, by the time the world discovered it and it was actually really helping people at any significant scale, you're no longer even working on that product. Brian Jones (00:22:57): Yeah. You're doing something completely different. Rob Collie (00:22:59): You might be in a different division, both finding out the things in real time that Rob Collie (00:23:03): [inaudible 00:23:00] Both finding out the things, sort of in real time, that aren't working. That's the obvious advantage, right? But there's also this other emotional thing. Like you never got the satisfaction when you actually did succeed. Brian Jones (00:23:11): Right. You didn't see it actually get picked up, adopted. Millions and millions of people using it, which is what the team gets now. We no longer pick a project and say, "Okay, how many people and how long is this going to take?" You really just try and figure out what's critical mass for that project. And then you just let them run. And you'd be really clear around what are the goals and outcomes they're trying to drive. And they just keep going until they actually achieve that. Or we realized that we were wrong, right? And we say, "Hey, we thought people are going to be excited about this. It's not even an implementation thing. We were just wrong. We misread what people really were trying to do. Let's stop. Let's kind of figure out a way of moving off of that and go and figure out what the next thing is we should go and do." Rob Collie (00:23:50): That era that we're talking about right now. The 2003 release of Office. I was still very much a computer science graduate and amateur human. That's exactly backwards, it turns out, if you're trying to design a tool that's going to be used by humanity. Brian Jones (00:24:08): Well, it's what leads you to get really Excited about XML? Rob Collie (00:24:12): That's right. Yeah. That's right. Tech used to have such a power in my life. I'm exactly the opposite now. Every time I hear about some new tech, I'm like, "Yeah, prove it." I am not going to believe in this new radical thing until it actually changes the world around me. I'm not going to be trying to catch that wave. But XML did that to me. It was almost a threat. If we don't take this seriously, we're going to get outflanked. It got really egregious. Rob Collie (00:24:42): I had a coworker one time in that same release in the middle of one of my presentations asked me. This guy wasn't particularly, in the final analysis, looking back, not one of the stronger members of the team, but he had a lot of sibling rivalry essentially in his DNA. And he'd asked me in front of his crowded room, "Well, what are you going to do about Bluetooth?" And, we didn't know what Bluetooth was yet, right? It was like, unless I had an answer for what we were going to do about Bluetooth and Excel, right? Then I was not up on things. You know, the thing that we use to connect our headphones. At the time, Bluetooth was one of those things that might just disrupt everything. Brian Jones (00:25:29): It was funny. It was at that same time, I was asked to give a presentation to the Word team about Bluetooth. We were all assigned things to go and research as part of planning and that was one of the ones I was asked. And I gave a presentation that was just very factual. Here's what it is. And I was given really bad feedback that like, "Hey, I wasn't actually talking about it strategically and how it was going to affect Word. I was just being very factual." And I was like, "I don't understand. I don't understand what success looks like in this task." Right. Rob Collie (00:25:59): I remember going, a couple of years later, going into an offsite, those offsite big, I don't know if you all still do those things, big offsite, blue sky brainstorming sessions. There was this really senior development lead that was there with me. And he and I were kind of buddies. At one point, halfway through the day, he just leans over to me and says, "Hey, I'm going to the restroom and I'm not coming back." And I looked at him in horror, almost like "Thou dost dishonor the offsite!?" And he's like, "Yeah, you know, I've never really believed that much in this particular phase of the product cycle. It's never really meant anything to me. It's all just BS." It was just devastating. I just knew it was right. He was... Brian Jones (00:26:46): But you didn't want to, you didn't want to believe that. Rob Collie (00:26:52): I mean, I felt so special. I was invited to the offsite, the big wigs and everything. Brian Jones (00:26:57): They have nice catering too, Rob Collie (00:26:59): Yeah and he was totally right to leave. Brian Jones (00:27:04): I always remember getting super nervous to present stuff for those. Once it was actually, it was one of our XML ones where I was trying to convince, it was my attempt to get us to create an XML file format, which actually ended up, obviously, happening. But I got an engineer to go to work with and we had Word through an add-in, start to write to XML. And it was just a basic XML format. And then I built all of these... it was like asp.net tools that would go and then create an HTML version of the Word doc that was editable. And it also even created, I think it was called WHAP, I don't remember, like a tech for phones. It was back when you didn't have the rich feature phones, but these basic ones. Brian Jones (00:27:41): And so I created this thing that was almost like a SharePoint site. So you could take all your Word docs, go through this add-in, and then you could actually get an HTML view of them to edit it and a phone view of them to go and edit it. Brian Jones (00:27:51): I think it was probably 2002 or 2001, but I was so excited to go and show that at the offsite because I was like, "Okay, this is where I make it, man. Everybody's going to be so excited about me." But I don't know. I think everybody was excited about Bluetooth at that point or something. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:28:05): Oh yeah Bluetooth, WHAP was so 15 minutes ago. So there's a few, irresistibly funny or interesting things I want to zero in on from that era before we come back to present, and we're definitely going to come back to present, for sure. Rob Collie (00:28:21): First of all, we went to a conference like some W3C sponsor. I don't think it was necessarily W3C affiliated, but it was the XML conference. Brian Jones (00:28:31): The one in Baltimore? Rob Collie (00:28:32): Yes. Rob Collie (00:28:33): Okay. Now two very, very, very memorable things happened at that conference. I bet you already know one of them. But the other one was, and we're just going to make this all this anonymous person's fault. Okay. We're not going to abdicate any responsibility. And we're just going to talk about our one coworker from Eastern Europe who brought his wife and they had vodka in their hotel fridge, or freezer, or something like that. And every day I would wake up and say, "I am not going to get suckered into that again." Rob Collie (00:29:12): And then the next day I would wake up and say the same thing. That was a tough trip. Brian Jones (00:29:16): I definitely remember that. Rob Collie (00:29:18): Even on my young, relatively young, body at the time that... Trying to keep up with that, that was difficult. But the single most outstanding memory from that conference, and we will also leave this person anonymous. But there was an executive at Microsoft who was hotter on XML than either you or I, which is hard to believe, right. And we ended up with the sponsored after hours session at this conference. You remember this? You see... Brian Jones (00:29:45): I do. Rob Collie (00:29:46): You know where we're going. Okay. So this was a 30 minute sponsored by Dell or something. Right. It was a 30 minute session, at 5:00 PM, at the end of a conference day where everyone's trying to go back and get to the bars or whatever, right.? But, it's a Microsoft executive, it's Dell sponsored, we'll show up. And the plan was at the end of this 30 minute talk given by this executive, he was going to bring all of us up on the stage to show everyone the team that had done all of this, right? Great plan. Except it was the worst presentation in history. I remember it running for two hours. It was so bad that we started off with 200 people in the room and at the end of it, and I'm just like an agony the whole time cause like I'm associated with this, right? Rob Collie (00:30:31): At the end of these two hours, or what felt like two hours anyway, it was easily 90 minutes. There's five people left in this room of 200 and it's not like the presentation is adapted to the fact that it's a smaller audience. It's just continued to drone on exactly as if everyone was there, right? And I'm sitting here thinking, "Okay, he's not going to call us all up on this stage. There's been more people on the stage than in the audience. If he does this, he's clearly not going to do that." And then he did and we all had to parade up there and stand there like the biggest dodos. I've never been more professionally embarrassed I don't think, than that moment. Rob Collie (00:31:14): And we're all looking at each other as we get up out of our seats like, "Oh my god." Brian Jones (00:31:19): I definitely remember this. Rob Collie (00:31:22): I don't see how you could have forgotten. Brian Jones (00:31:23): Well, yeah. And the person that we're talking about is actually one of my favorite people on the planet. I totally... I love this guy. I view him as like a mentor and everything, but... Which makes me remember it even more. Brian Jones (00:31:34): I think it was just, there was so much excitement. There'd been so much build up to this and this was like a kind of crescendo right? Of bringing this stuff. We probably should have had it a little bit shorter. Rob Collie (00:31:46): I mean when it reaches the point where clueless, mid twenties, Rob Collie is going, "Oh no, this is not the emotional, this not the move." You don't do it. Brian Jones (00:31:58): I'm no longer excited about being called up. Rob Collie (00:32:04): So from my perspective, you kind of parlayed that experience of the XML and all that kind of stuff. I think you did a really fantastic job of everything you guys did on that product. Again, it was the relevance that ultimately fell flat for both of us right. I guess in the end, the excitement with XML wasn't really all that appreciably different from the excitement about Bluetooth. I mean, it's everywhere, right? XML is everywhere. Bluetooth is everywhere and neither one of them really changed things in terms of what Excel or Word should be doing. It seemed like you played that into this file format second act. And I think very, very, very effectively, actually there was a little bit of controversy. Rob Collie (00:32:43): Let's set the stage for people. This was the 2007 release of Office where all the file formats got radically overhauled. This is when the extra X appeared on the end of all the file names, right? Brian Jones (00:32:58): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:32:58): There was a controversy internally. Kind of starting with Bill actually. That we shouldn't make well-documented transparent file format specs, right. There was this belief that the opaque file formats of the previous decades was in some sense, some big moat against competition. And of course, a lot of our competitors agreed. Tailor out in the public saying, "Yes, this is a barrier to competition. It's a monopolistic, blah, blah, blah." We, Microsoft had just gotten its ass kicked in the Anna Truss case. So it was really interesting. I credit Brian, your crew, with really advocating this very effectively. That's a difficult ship to turn. First of all, you got all these teams to buy into all this extra work, which no one wants to do. But when it's not even clear whether you have top level executive support, in fact, you might actually have C-suite antagonism towards an idea. To get it done. That's a career making achievement. I'm sure you remember all of that. Right. But what are your reactions to that controversy? Do you remember being in the midst of that? Brian Jones (00:34:12): I do. It was definitely a long running project. It evolved over quite a number of years. The beginning of it was, in that previous release, the XML stuff you and I were talking about was more about what we called "Custom XML". Right? So people would go and create for themselves. But in that same release, we had Word, we outputted an XML format that was our definition, which we called "Word ML" and Excel did a similar thing. Words' we try to make full fidelity. So you could save any word document in the XML format. Excel's was kind of a tailored down, it was less about formatting, it was more, "Hey, here's like..." It's almost like, "Here's a better version of CSV, right. But we're going to do it as XML." And so we already had a little bit of that. Brian Jones (00:34:53): And the whole reason we were looking at that was, on the Word side, for instance, a lot of the customer issues that we'd get where people would have corrupt files, they were corrupt because they there'd be some add-in that they had running or some third party app that was reading and writing word files. The files were fairly brittle and complex. The binary format... The binary format was written back in the days of floppy disks, right? So the top priority was how quickly can you write to a floppy disk and read from a floppy disc, right? It wasn't about, how easy is this for other people to go and read and write? Not because it was on purpose, make it hard. It was just the primary bid is let's get this thing so it's really easy to read and write from floppy, right? Brian Jones (00:35:31): And so in Word, we were like, "Wow, I think that there's a bigger opportunity here for an ecosystem around Word if we make it easy for people to read and write Word docs and build solutions around them." And so then the next release, the Excel team was looking at doing some big changes around a lot of the limitations, like how many rows you could have in columns, right. Lengths of like formulas and things like that. Right. And so there was this thing where the Excel team was like, "We are going to need to create a new file format." And on the word side, we thought this XML thing was great. We want to move to that as our new format. Brian Jones (00:36:01): And so everything kind of came together and it was clear. Hey, this is going to be the release that we are going to go and rev our file format, which we hadn't done in a while. This is also the release of the ribbon. So there were two really big major changes in that product, right? It was the new file format and the ribbon. It's funny. I still refer to it as the new file format, even though it's 15 years old. Rob Collie (00:36:23): Yeah. It's the new file format it's still new, yeah. Brian Jones (00:36:25): I still call it that, which is kind of nuts. But I think that the controversies you were talking about was really more of a... Boy, this is a really big deal for the product. We had changed file formats before in the past and not necessarily gotten it right. And there were a lot of challenges around compatibility and stuff. And so there was just a lot of worry of let's make sure you all have your stuff together here, right? Like let's make sure that this doesn't in any way break, stop people from wanting to upgrade to the new version. But it went really well. The whole goal of it was let's get something that we think third parties can go and read and write, and this is going to help build an ecosystem. And a new ecosystem run Office. Office already had big ecosystem with VBA and COMM add-ons and stuff like that, right.? But we won't have this new ecosystem around our file formats as a thing. That's why we chose... There's a packaging layer, which is all zip based. So if people haven't played around with it that XLSX, you can just put a .zip at the end and double click it. And it's just a zip file. And you can see a whole bunch of stuff inside of it. Right? Rob Collie (00:37:23): Yeah. If you're listening, you haven't done that go right now, run don't walk, grab an Excel file or a Word file, whatever. Go and rename the XLSX or BPTX, go ahead and rename it so that it ends in .zip and then open it up and you'll be blown away. Thomas Larock (00:37:38): PowerPoint is my favorite when I have to find some unknown setting that I need and I can just search through the whole thing. Yep. Rob Collie (00:37:45): Or all the images. You want to get all the images out of the PowerPoint file. It's just a zip file that has a bunch of images in it. Right. Brian Jones (00:37:50): So I also did this for backpack. It's the same thing. You can crack open the backpack by renaming a zip file... Thomas Larock (00:37:58): An actual physical backpack? What are we... what are we talking about here? Brian Jones (00:38:03): Ah yeah. Rob Collie (00:38:03): This is the digital acetate that is over the top of the entire physical world that you aren't aware of. Thomas Larock (00:38:08): Digital acetate, that's it? That's it. That's where the podcast peaks. Right? Those two words. We're all going home now. Brian Jones (00:38:19): Yeah. No. A SQL server, there's DAC pack, which is just the, say database schema. Then there's a backpack which has the data and the schema combined. But you can, if you rename them . zip, you can crack them open to see the XML that makes up those forms. So it's not just office products. Rob Collie (00:38:37): We ended up standardizing the entire thing, but that packaging format, it was called OPC, Open Packaging Convention, or something like that. It was something that we did in partnership with a Windows team. It's part of the final ISO standard for our file format. And then there were a lot of other folks that went and used that exact same standard. Because it's a really easy way of you have a zip package. You can have a whole bunch of pieces inside of it, which are XML. And then there's this convention for how you can do relationships between the different pieces. So I can have a slide. That's an XML and it can declare relationships to all the images that it uses. And that way it's really quick, easy to know, okay, here's all the content I need to grab if I want to move pieces of it outside of the file. Rob Collie (00:39:16): So the single coolest thing I've ever done with, we'll just call it your file format Brian. We'll just pretend that it was only you working on that. Brian Jones (00:39:23): Just me yeah, I was pretty busy, but yeah. Rob Collie (00:39:27): So the very, very first version of Power Pivot, first of all, your file format, the new file format made Power Pivot possible. We needed to go and add this gigantic binary stream of compressed data and everything, everything about Power Pivot needed to be saved in the file. At the beginning of the project, everyone was saying, "Oh, no, we're going to save it as two separate files." And I'm like, "Are you guys kidding?" The Pivot cache, for instance, is saved in the same file. You can't throw a multi file solution at people and expect it to... This was actually like Manhattan project, just to get that stream saved into the same file. It was pretty crazy. However, when it was done, there was something really awesome I wasn't aware of until the very end, which was, first of all, you could open up a zip file and just tunnel down and you would find a file in there called item one.data. Rob Collie (00:40:21): Okay. That was the Power Pivot blob. That was everything about the Power Pivot thing. And it was by far the biggest thing in the file, like it was like 99% of the file size was what was there. However, as this backup, someone had decided, I had nothing to do with this, to save all of the instructions. I think it's called XML for analysis XMLA. All of the instructions that would be required to rebuild exactly that file, but without any of the actual binary data in it. So it was a very, very small amount of XML. Okay. So here's what we would do because there were no good automation, no interfaces, no APIs. If we needed to add like 500 formulas to a Power Pivot file, you could go through the UI and write those 500 formulas, type, click, type, click, type, click. Rob Collie (00:41:08): Okay. So what we would do, and my first job outside of Microsoft, is we would go in there and we would edit that XML backup and add all the formulas we wanted in it. And by the way, I would use Excel to write these formulas. I would use string concatenation and all of that kind of stuff to write these things. It was very, very, very sensitive, one character out of place in the whole thing fails. So you make those changes. You save the file, reopen it, nothing happens because it's just the backup. Okay. So then you've got to go and you've got to create a zero byte item one.data file on your desktop and you copy it into the zip file and overwrite the real item one.data, therefore deliberately corrupting the primary copy. So when you reopen the file it triggers the backup process and it rehydrates with all of your stuff, it was awesome. Rob Collie (00:41:57): And then a couple of releases of Power Pivot later, suddenly that didn't work anymore and I was really pissed. But it just really shows you, it opens up so many opportunities that you never would have expected. And even a hack like that, that's not the kind that you'd be really looking for, but the fact that something like that even happens as a result of this is really indicative of what a success it was. Brian Jones (00:42:19): Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of those things where, I love building platforms, like that's my favorite part of the job. It's all those things that you see people do that you never would have predicted. Right? That's just so exciting. PowerPoint had this huge group of folks that would go and build things like doc assembly stuff, right. Where they go and automatically build PowerPoint decks on demand, right? Based on who you're going to go and present to cause they've just shredded the thing. In fact, when we did the ISO standardization, it was a 6,000 page doc that we had to go. And we built and reviewed with a standards body and we did it over about a year. Which sounds nuts, a 6,000 page doc in about a year. And the way that we were able to do that is there was never really a 6,000 page doc. There's a database where there's a row for every single element and attribute in this, in the whole schema, that would then have the column which is the description, which would just be the word XML. Brian Jones (00:43:09): And so we could, on demand, at any point, generate whatever view or part of the doc we wanted. So we'd say, "Hey, we're going to go in now, review everything that has to do with formatting across Word, Excel and PowerPoint." And so we just click a couple buttons and the database would spit out a Word doc that was just that part. Everybody could go and edit it cause we were using the structured elements we'd added to Word, which is called content controls, which was the next version of that XML stuff that we had to deprecate. And then the process, as soon as you'd finish editing that Word doc, we just submit it back. The process would go back and shred that Word doc again and put it all back in the database. And so we really used the file format to bootstrap documenting the file format. Rob Collie (00:43:48): And then when you dump a 6,000 page document on someone, they have no choice. But to just say, yep, it looks good to us. Brian Jones (00:43:55): Well, there was a pretty, incredibly thorough review still. It was just pretty impressive. The final vote that we had in Geneva, the process leading up to that, the amount of feedback that we got. Cause basically the ISO, you can kind of think of it like the UN, you go and show up and every country has a seat, right? I mean, not everybody participates, but anybody that wants to can. And so yeah, we had to respond to thousands of comments around different pieces, things that people wanted to see changed. Rob Collie (00:44:22): Yeah. I can imagine, right. Think about it. You just said at the final vote in Geneva. That's a heavy moment man. Thomas Larock (00:44:29): Yeah. That threw me off for a second. I thought, for sure, you were talking Switzerland, but now thinking that was just a code name. Rob Collie (00:44:38): No, I think, I think he was actually in Switzerland. Brian Jones (00:44:40): In Switzerland. Rob Collie (00:44:41): Have you seen the chamber where they do these votes? It looks just like the Senate from episode one of Star Wars. It's just like that. It's pretty heavy. Brian Jones (00:44:51): The little levitating... Rob Collie (00:44:53): The floating lift. Yeah. I think they call that digital acetate. I think that's what they call that. By the way on the Excel team, the way I came to look at the new file format and the open architecture of it, again, this this will show you how quickly I had turned into the more cynic side of things. Well, okay. We're going to be changing file formats. And we're doing that for our benefit because we didn't have enough bits allocated in the 1980s version of the file format that was saved to floppy disc, as you pointed out, right. Who could ever imagine having more than 64,000 rows, it's just inconceivable or 250 columns or whatever, right.? Because we hadn't allocated that. We'd made an engineering mistake, essentially, we hadn't future-proofed. So we need to make a file format change for our benefit, right. To undo one of our mistakes. And the way I looked at it was, "Ooh, all this open file format stuff, that'll be like the 'Look, squirrel!'" To distract people and to sort of justify, while we went and did this other thing, which, ultimately it actually went pretty well. The transition for the customers actually wasn't nearly as bad, because we actually Took it seriously. Rob Collie (00:46:03): The transition for the customers actually wasn't nearly as bad because we actually took it seriously. We didn't cut any corners. We did all the right things. Brian Jones (00:46:07): Well, there were several benefits too. We were talking about all the kind of ecosystem development benefits, but the fact that the file was zipped and compressed right, it meant that the thing was smaller. And that was all of a sudden, it was no longer about floppy discs. People are sharing files on networks. And so actually being able to go and have a file that's easier to share, send over network because it's smaller was a thing. Brian Jones (00:46:26): There were a couple of things that we were able to go and highlight. There's also a pretty nice thing where it was actually more robust because it was XML, and we split it into multiple pieces of XML. It meant that even if you had bit rot, you would only lose one little piece of the file, whereas with old the binary format, you had some bit rot and the whole thing is impossible to open up.There are a couple of things that were in user benefits too, which helped. Rob Collie (00:46:50): And ultimately, on the Excel side, the user got a million row spreadsheet format and the ability to use a hell of a lot more than like 14 colors that could be used in a single spreadsheet or something. It was .like a power of two minus two, so many bizarre things. Like Excel had more colors than that, but you couldn't use more than a certain subset in a- Brian Jones (00:47:10): At a time, yeah. Rob Collie (00:47:10): -In a single file. So yeah, there were a lot of benefits. They just weren't- Brian Jones (00:47:15): It's not like it's an explicit choice. It's just that at the time somebody is implementing something, you're right in a way, assuming, "Oh, this is fine. This is enough. I'll never have to worry with this issue." Rob Collie (00:47:25): Why waste the whole byte on that? When you can cram four different settings into a single byte. If you read the old stories about Gates and Allen programming up at Harvard, they had these vicious head-to-head competitions to see who could write the compiler or the section of basic in the fewest bytes possible. This was still very much hanging over Microsoft, even the vestiges of it were still kind of hanging over us even when I arrived. But certainly in the '80s when the Excel file format was being designed for that rev, it was still very much like, "Why waste all those bits in a byte?" "Let's cap it at four bits". Thomas Larock (00:48:05): In that blog series from Sinofsky, he talks a lot about that at the early start. And I'm at a point now where he's talking a lot about the code reuse because the Excel team, the Word team, I guess PowerPoint, but all these other teams, were all dealing with, say, text. And they were all doing their own code for how that text would be displayed and shown. And Bill would be the one being like, " This is ridiculous". "We should be able to reuse the code between these products". And to me, that would just be common sense. But these groups, Microsoft just grew so rapidly so quickly, they were off on their own, and they have to ship. I ain't got time to wait around for this, for somebody to build an API, things like that. I'll just write it myself. Brian Jones (00:48:50): It's a general thing that you get as you get larger where the person in charge that can oversee everything is like, "Well, these are all my resources", and, "Wow, I don't want three groups all building the same thing". But then when you get down, there's also a reality of we're just going to have a very different view on text and text layout than Excel. And Excel is not going to say, "I want all of that code that Word uses to lay out all of their content to be running for every single cell". Right? That's just suboptimal. And so it's always this fun conversation back and forth around where do you have shared code and reuse and where do you say it's okay for this specific app to have this more optimized thing that might look the same, but in reality, it's not really the same. Rob Collie (00:49:33): Brian, do you remember the ... I'm sure you do, but I don't remember what company they were from. But at one point in this file format effort, these really high priced consultants showed up and went around and interviewed us a couple of times. Do you remember that phase? It was like- Brian Jones (00:49:51): Was that towards the end? There was a couple summary stories that were pulled together just to talk about the overall processes. It was actually after the standardization. Rob Collie (00:49:58): I remember this being at the point in time where it was still kind of a question. whether we should do it. Brian Jones (00:50:02): I don't remember that. Rob Collie (00:50:04): The thing I remember really vividly is a statement that Chris Pratley would make over and over again, this encapsulated it for me. I came around to seeing it his way, which was the file format isn't the thing. That's not the moat. The thing that makes Office unique is the behaviors of the application. It's not the noun of the file format. It's the verb of what happens in the app. It's instructed to think that even if you took exactly the Excel team today, every single person that's already worked on it, and said, "Hey, you have to go rebuild Excel exactly". There's no way that version of Excel would be compatible with the one we have now. It would drift so much. Rob Collie (00:50:43): You could even have access to all the same specs. We would even cheat and say, "Look, you can have access to every single spec ever written". So? It was clearly someone had thought it was time to bring in like a McKinsey. They were all well dressed. They were all attractive. They were all a little too young to be the ones sort of making these decisions. It was just really weird to have them show up, three people in your office. Like, "Okay, I'll tell you what's going on". Brian Jones (00:51:11): I can totally imagine. It's funny I don't remember that. There were several rounds of analysis on how we were doing it, what we're doing and making sure we were doing it the right way. But yeah, Chris is spot on. I mean, your point about rebuilding it, that's essentially what we've been going through for the past five plus years around our web app. It's a lot of work. Unfortunately, we can't let it drift. The expectation from everybody is, "Hey, I learned the Wind 32 version. When I go to the web, I want it to feel the same. I don't want to feel like I'm now using some different app." Rob Collie (00:51:44): What an amazing, again, like a Manhattan project type of thing, this notion of rewriting Excel to run on the web and be compatible. Brian Jones (00:51:55): Yeah, with 30 years of innovation. Rob Collie (00:51:56): Yeah. That started in the 2007 release. Excel services, the first release of Excel services was 2007. And this whole thing about shared code, like what features, what functions of Excel, what pieces of it were going to be rewritten to be quote unquote "shared code"? And shared code meant it was actually server safe, which none of regular desktop Excel written in the early '80s, still carrying around assembly in certain places, assembly code of all things, right? Excel was not server safe. It was about as far from server safe as you could get. And so to rewrite this so ambitious without breaking anything. Oh my God. What a massive ... This dates back, gosh, more than 15 years. Brian Jones (00:52:45): Yeah. I'd say like the first goals around it were a bit different, right? It wasn't a web version of Excel. It was like BI scenarios and how can we have dashboards and Excel playing a role in dashboards. But yeah, I'd say since I joined, it was probably maybe a half a year or a year into when I joined, we just made the decision to shift a huge chunk of our funding to the web app. It was just clear that we need to make even more rapid progress. If you go, we have a site where you can go and see all the features that are rolling out there. It's incredible. And it's just because of the depth of the product. "Wow that's so many features you've done. You must be almost done". But then you look at everything else that's still isn't done yet. Brian Jones (00:53:23): Now thankfully, we're getting to the point where we can look at telemetry and say, "Hey, we've got most people covered." Most users, when we look at what they do in Windows, they could use the web app and shouldn't notice a difference. But there still is a set of things that we're going to keep churning through. So that'll continue to be a huge, huge investment for us. But yeah, the shared code strategy, we have an iPhone version, an iPad version an Android version. We've got Excel across all platforms. And because of the shared code, when we add new features, the feature crew that's working on that, they need to have a plan for how they're going to roll out across all those platforms, clearly levered shared code. But they also need to think through user experience and stuff like that too. Clearly a feature on a phone is going to behave differently than it's going to behave on a desktop. Rob Collie (00:54:05): Part of me, just like, kind of wants to just say, "I don't even believe that you've pulled that off, there's no way". It's kind of like, I've never looked at the Android version, and until I look at the Android version, I'm just going to assume it's not real. This is why it's one of the hardest things imaginable to have a single code base with all these different user experience, just fundamental paradigms of difference between these platforms. Like really? Come on. Brian Jones (00:54:34): It was a massively ambitious project. Mac shifted over maybe three years ago. And that's when, all of a sudden, in addition to a bunch of just features that people have been asking for that we'd never been able to get to, the massive one there was we were able to roll out the co-authoring multiplayer mode for Excel. Rob Collie (00:54:50): Multiplayer. Brian Jones (00:54:52): That's the term I like for co-authoring. It's more fun. Rob Collie (00:54:55): Yeah. It's like MMO for spreadsheets. Brian Jones (00:54:57): Yes. We were able to get that for the Mac. I mean, all of our platforms. One of us can be on an iPad, an iPhone, the web app, and we'll all see what we're doing in real time, making edits and all of that stuff. That alone, if you want to talk about massive projects, 30 years of features and innovation, basically that means we had to go and teach Excel how to communicate to another version of Excel and be very specific about, "This is what I did." "Here's the action I took." And that is massive. There are thousands and thousands of things you can do in the product. So getting it so that all of those versions are in sync the entire time, and so we're all seeing the exact same results of calc and all of that. That itself was a huge, massive project. Rob Collie (00:55:37): Take this as the highest form of praise when I say I don't buy it. I can't believe it. Brian Jones (00:55:44): I hope everybody's okay that we just talked for like an hour on just like listening to somebody at a high school reunion, I think, or something. Is this like me talking about how great I played in that one game? And you're like, "Yeah, that was a great basket". Rob Collie (00:55:54): Yeah. "Man, my jumper was on". the thing that's hard to appreciate, I think, is that you got to come back to the fact that we're talking about the tools that everyone in the world uses every day, that we rely on. And I think being gone from Microsoft for the last 12 years, I'm able to better appreciate that sense of wonder. This isn't just you and I catching up, I don't think. People enjoy, for good reason I think, hearing the stories of how these things came to be. People don't know by default how hard it was to get to a million rows in the file format. If you're like a robot, you're like, "I don't care how I got here. I just care what it is", then you're not listening to this show. We call it data with a human element. Robots can exit stage left. I think you should feel zero guilt. This isn't just self-indulgence. Brian Jones (00:56:55): Well, on the off chance everybody else ... I've listened to a lot of Rob's other podcasts, and they're awesome. So if you're bored with this one, it's okay. Go check out some of the other ones. They'r

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Shishir Mehrotra

Raw Data By P3

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 15, 2021 79:46

Shishir is as ahead of the technology curve as it gets, some of his ideas have revolutionized the way that tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and YouTube operate. Now, he's innovating again as the founder and CEO of Coda-an amazing integrated system that centers around creating Docs that are as powerful and actionable as Apps. He's also one of the most down to Earth human beings we've ever had the pleasure of sitting down with! References in this episode: Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer SNL Skit Steven Sinofsky's book-Hardcore Software: Inside the Rise and Fall of the PC Revolution Coda Doc-No Code, Just a Coda Doc: How Squared Away Saves a Thousand Hours and $100K a Year Coda Doc-Rituals for Hypergrowth: An Inside Look at How Youtube Scaled Episode Timeline: 2:20 - Shishir's data path intersects with Rob's and the stories abound, Shishir passes on working for Google before it was Google 15:25 - Shishir has a random idea about advertising that eventually forms into some common advertising practices, Google woos Shishir back, and he ends up running YouTube! 27:25 - The value of a Computer Science degree is....debatable, an interesting definition and example of AI, and Nouns VS Verbs in naming products and features 41:00 - How Coda was formed and the amazing innovation that Coda is-it makes a doc as powerful as an app, and the importance of integration Episode Transcript: Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello, friends. Today's guest is Shishir Mehrotra, and let me tell you, Shishir is a ringer of a guest. We met back at Microsoft in the 2000s where he was already entrusted with some pretty amazing responsibilities and was doing very, very well in those roles. About the same time that I left Microsoft to start P3, Shishir left Microsoft to go ... Oh, that's right ... Run YouTube. And he was at the helm of YouTube during what he calls the hyper-growth years where YouTube really exploded and became the thing that we know it is today. During this conversation, I discovered that it certainly sounds like he invented something about YouTube that we absolutely take for granted today and has been seen by billions, used probably billions of times per day. That wasn't enough for him, so he left YouTube after a number of years and started a new company called Coda. Rob Collie (00:00:55): And Coda is an incredibly ambitious product. You could say that in some sense, it's aimed at being a Microsoft Office replacement, but even that isn't quite right. It's in a little bit different niche than that. And, of course, we explored that in our conversation. We talk about his billion dollar mistake, quite possibly, literally, billion dollar mistake, not many people can make those. I was thrilled to discover that he and I have basically exactly the same philosophy about nouns and verbs in software. We talk about the antiquated notion that a computer science degree is somehow super important in product management roles, even at software companies. And just, in general, I couldn't get enough of it. He was super gracious to give us his time for this show, and I hope you enjoy it as much as we did. So, let's get into it. Announcer (00:01:42): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please. Announcer (00:01:48): This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive podcast with your host Rob Collie and your cohost Thomas Larock. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element. Rob Collie (00:02:11): Welcome to the show. Shishir Mehrotra, how are you today? Shishir Mehrotra (00:02:15): Oh, I'm great. Rob Collie (00:02:16): Are you coming to us from Silicon Valley? Shishir Mehrotra (00:02:17): I am. Well, south of California. Been in my house and in this spot for about the last year. Rob Collie (00:02:23): When did we meet? Shishir Mehrotra (00:02:24): You were working on Excel and I think at the time I was working on WinFS, the early days of Microsoft. Rob Collie (00:02:31): Oh, WinFS. Just completely unexpected sidelight. It was like 1998 or maybe 1999, we're in a review with Jim [Allchin 00:02:42] and all of his lieutenants. And the whole point of this meeting is to assassinate the technology I was working on. This was an arranged hit on MSI ... Shishir Mehrotra (00:02:54): [crosstalk 00:02:54]. On MSI. Rob Collie (00:02:55): ... On the Windows Installer, right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:02:56): Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:02:57): And there are factions in this room that have had their knives, they've been sharpening them and they've arranged this moment so they can kill us. And, at one point, one of the complaints about us was our heavy use of the registry. Just poisoning the registry. Do you remember a guy named Rob [Short 00:03:15]? Shishir Mehrotra (00:03:15): Yeah, of course. Rob Collie (00:03:16): I really liked Rob Short. I thought he was awesome. He was a tough guy, but also really fair and funny and friendly at the same time. And he's been sitting in this meeting for hours because he has to, and he's just totally tuned out. Of course he would be, right? It's not about him. And then, this mention of the registry as an attack on us comes up and Jim Allchin immediately whirls around to Rob and goes, "Now you see, this is what I'm talking about. Our storage system is such a piece of shit." And he starts ripping it to Rob and Rob's having to wake up from his trance. It's like suddenly the guns can swing so fast in those meetings. Shishir Mehrotra (00:03:55): I mean, that was a use case that Bill and Jim and so on all tried to push on WinFS, but it was one we actively resisted. It's a hard one. Rob Collie (00:04:02): It is. The worst thing in the world is to have state stored in multiple places that have to go together with each other. Right? That just turns out to be one of the hardest problems. Shishir Mehrotra (00:04:11): It's such a critical element of the operating system. And you end up with all sorts of other issues of what can run on what and ... Rob Collie (00:04:17): And it's funny. The registry was basically my introduction to the entire Win32 platform. When I was running the installer, that's all I knew about. I knew about the type library registrations and the registry. I knew it in class IDs. And I could follow those things. I could follow that rabbit's trail from one place to another without ever really understanding what a class ID was. Right? It was just the registration of an object, right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:04:40): Right. Rob Collie (00:04:40): I didn't learn that until years later. So funny. But then we crossed paths again. Right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:04:45): SQL. Rob Collie (00:04:46): I remember how it happened. Ariel [Nets 00:04:49] came into my office and said, "Hey, there's someone important who's going to need some information from you." And I go, "Okay." And he said something like, "He's a real rising star here, so make sure you give him everything he needs." And I'm like, "Okay." Shishir Mehrotra (00:05:05): I don't think I know this half of the story. Okay. Rob Collie (00:05:09): And I think you were somehow involved with the potential acquisition that was going on at the time. Is that true? Shishir Mehrotra (00:05:14): You talking about in-memory BI? Rob Collie (00:05:16): Yeah. Shishir Mehrotra (00:05:16): Yeah. I was at the time ... Maybe for your listeners. So, my history, after WinFS folded and collapsed, and you can talk about that if you'd like, I ended up being unexpectedly merged into the SQL Server division. I ended up running what Microsoft called the program management team or SQL Server. And it was super interesting for me because I was never really a database guy. Everything I had worked on to that point was fairly end user-centered, infrastructure in the background. And I was surrounded by these people that really love databases. Actually, as a side note, I fell in love with databases because of Paul Flessner. Paul was on his way out. He was retiring that year and he had one last ... At the time we used to call them strategy days so that Bill and Steve and so on would post this annual review. Shishir Mehrotra (00:06:01): And Paul Flessner, he decided this was going to be his last hurrah strategy, "I'm going to tell these people exactly what I think." He's in the middle of preparing for this and WinFS is folding up and he says, "While you're figuring out what you're going to do next, why don't you come help me write the strategy days presentation?" And he was really drawn to the idea of someone that actually wasn't in his organization doing it because I could speak my mind about whatever and I had no bias walking into it. And probably from his perspective, I would write whatever the hell he wanted and make it sound good. This guy, he's a database legend. He drove the Sybase acquisition that turned into SQL Server. And so, he had a list of ideas for how to think about the database market that many of which were pretty ascetical. Shishir Mehrotra (00:06:44): And he spoke in very plain language when he's ... Actually, interestingly, he's retired. [inaudible 00:06:48] his woodworking. That's his thing. He builds chairs and tables are amazing. You can go buy them. As opposed to many techie database guys, he speaks in very plain language. Rob Collie (00:06:55): I love that. Shishir Mehrotra (00:06:56): And you just walk through like, "Here's how to think about the different workloads and here's what's happening in the industry and here's what's happening in data warehousing." Which wasn't really a term at the time and data warehousing was just emerging. And then, at the end of that process, we had a pretty successful strategy days and he said, "Why don't you run the PM team and help my new guy?" Ted Kummert came in to go and run SQL Server after Paul. And that's how I ended up in that spot. And as part of that, I ended up covering a lot of ... One of Paul's last statement was, "Data warehousing is not the same thing. Go do something different." And that's where people like Ariel and Amir and so on, that whole division, Tom ... And there was a bunch of people running that at that time ... Came into play. Shishir Mehrotra (00:07:34): And then they had this idea that ... There's a lot of different things to know about SQL Server. SQL Server is not actually well-built for data warehouse and so most databases are not. And at the time, the raining wisdom was you needed a completely different architecture for business intelligence, which I guess we called OLAP back then. I don't know if that term is still used. Rob Collie (00:07:54): Yeah. Oh, we still do. We just hide it. It's a dirty word. Shishir Mehrotra (00:07:57): Yeah. For the geeky folks out there, and the key difference being that instead of storing things row by row, you store things column by column and you also precalculate aggregate. So, you have some sense of what, I guess, nowadays called the cube. These things are likely to be great for, "We're going to precalculate the sum of orders for customers by region or whatever it might be." And then, Ariel and his brother Amir had this idea and they said, "Hey, we've got this strategic advantage at Microsoft, which is we own the front end and the backend of this architecture. On the backend, we need to be able to scale better and we need to move to column storage and do all this fancy stuff with cubes. But if you ask anybody where all of their analysis actually gets done, what do they say? Shishir Mehrotra (00:08:38): There's 1,000 reporting tools out there but everybody lives in Excel. And so, they said, "What if we were to find a creative way to pull these together? And I think at the time you were running this part of the Excel platform. And so, I was sent in to go figure out how to make this pitch. I mean, these guys really wanted to do an acquisition space and so on. And I was sent in to try to make the pitch. And, actually, the insight there was interesting. Amir came up with this chart, which I'm not really sure where it came from but he basically went and looked at the size of cubes of OLAP instances across a wide set of customers, including all of Microsoft. He pulled all of these different ones and he figured out that the biggest cube at Microsoft was this thing called MS Sales. Shishir Mehrotra (00:09:20): It was all the customer data from Microsoft if you remember well. And he said, "If you compress this down with column storage, I'm going to get the numbers wrong." But it fit inside tens of megabytes of storage, which was previously much, much larger if you did as row storage. And he said, "This is so small that it can fit in memory on a client, which was unheard of. Usually, the whole idea behind these systems was you have to query a server. The server is really big. At that time, a lot of systems go up and scaled out. There's often very big hardware back there as well. And he said, "Hey, I bet we could move to a model where the primary way that people do this analysis actually happens in that place where they actually want to do their work in Excel. So, I think that's where the other half of that conversation from my side was coming from. Rob Collie (00:10:06): Yeah. So, like you said, with Paul Flessner bringing you into right part of the strategy days stuff, Amir was, at that point in time, still using me in the same way. I had come over from the Excel world and so he was trotting me out every time he wanted someone to talk about Excel in a way that he couldn't be criticized. I was just almost the unfrozen caveman lawyer from Saturday Night Live, this Forrest Gump figure, "Listen, I don't know much, but I do know Excel and I know the people." You know? Shishir Mehrotra (00:10:32): Yeah. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:10:33): Usually, because on the SQL side of the house, you couldn't argue with me about Excel. If I go back to the Excel world, they'd all argue with me but on the sequel side, I was unquestioned. So, Ariel was right, he said, "This guy is a mover and shaker. He's going places." And then, an eye blink later, you're at YouTube. When did you end up at YouTube? Shishir Mehrotra (00:10:53): So, there's a personal story arc that goes along with this. I started a company out of school called [Sintrata 00:10:58]. It was an early version of what became AWS, Azure, so on, to utility computing. There's a whole generation company that started back in that '99, 2000 period. All of us were seven to 10 years too early. There was no virtualization, no containers and none of the underlying technology that actually made the cloud take off existed yet. As that was wrapping up is how I got to Microsoft but in that period, Sintrata was funded by this famous venture firm called Kleiner Perkins. Shishir Mehrotra (00:11:23): My primary investor was a [inaudible 00:11:24]. [inaudible 00:11:25] as Sintrata was wrapping up, he had suggested, "Why don't you go join another client or company?" And I said, "Which one?" And he said, "Well, you can look at all of them but the one that's really hot right now is these two Stanford guys are creating this new search engines called Google. Might want to check it out." And so this is back in 2002. And so, went over and spent some time with Larry and Sergey. And at the time, they hadn't hired a single outside product manager. And so, they wanted me to come in and start the product management team there. And, interestingly, I turned them down. My wife likes to call my billion dollar mistake. And instead I got drawn to Microsoft. Shishir Mehrotra (00:12:01): As I got drawn to Microsoft, it's related to this story because I had an old boss of mine, I was an intern at Microsoft when I was in college, and he was starting this new thing called Gideon that was in the Office team actually. And the project would turn Office into a front end for business applications. So, it's had a lot of relevance to what ended up happening in that space. Rob Collie (00:12:18): Who was running Gideon? Who was that? Shishir Mehrotra (00:12:20): Satya was our skip-level boss and this was much, much earlier in his career. And the guy actually running the project was a guy named John [Lacada 00:12:27]. I think he's gone now. I don't know where he is. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:12:29): I worked with John quite a bit over the years [crosstalk 00:12:32]. And this is how you know Danny Simmons. Right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:12:34): That's right. Danny was part of that team. Rob Collie (00:12:36): Oh my gosh! Yeah. Shishir Mehrotra (00:12:36): Yeah. Danny was on that team. I ended up working with Danny multiple times. Mike Hewitt was the one who was my intern manager who pulled me over to the project. Actually, as a fun version of fate or whatever, Mike now works at Coda. [crosstalk 00:12:48]- Rob Collie (00:12:48): Does he really? Shishir Mehrotra (00:12:49): Yeah, he's an engineer here. He's great. He lives in Idaho. Once we really started hiring distributed, I finally managed to pull him into Coda. So, I turned on Google in that period and they didn't let up. Basically, every year they would call and say, "Hey, we got something down here for you." Gideon actually didn't have a very positive outcome. I showed up to work on this thing and nine months later, Sinofsky killed it. Given the priorities Office had at the time, it made reasonable sense, but it was my first education of big company politics and that's how I ended up working at WinFS. Rob Collie (00:13:20): Sinofsky has delivered many such educations of big company politics. Shishir Mehrotra (00:13:24): Yes. Yes. For sure. For sure. Rob Collie (00:13:26): One of his primary contributions. Yes. Shishir Mehrotra (00:13:27): So, are you reading his history of Microsoft [inaudible 00:13:30]? Rob Collie (00:13:30): I haven't been but now I will be. Shishir Mehrotra (00:13:32): Oh, you should. It's good. Steve and I didn't always see eye to eye on everything, but his sense of history is really good. I don't know how the hell he remembered so much stuff, but he's basically publishing a new thing every few days, I think, maybe every week, and it's really good. Rob Collie (00:13:44): I both loved Stephen and was terrified of him at the same time. Shishir Mehrotra (00:13:48): It's common. Rob Collie (00:13:49): Yeah. Shishir Mehrotra (00:13:50): So, I'm working on SQL Server, but the reason all that matters is I was committed to Seattle. I had convinced my, at the time, fiance now wife, to move up to Seattle. She's a physician. So, she was doing her residency at Children's Seattle. And I convinced her to stay and do her fellowship and that all ran out. So, my clock ran out on Seattle. Said, "All right, now we're ready to move." And we had presumed we were going to move to the Bay area. So, it was just implied at the time, if you're going to be a techie, you got to move down to the Bay Area at some point. And I thought I was going to start another company. I was ready to do it again but Jonathan Rosenberg, the guy at Google who ended up running product there, he called me, he said, "Oh, if you're thinking about coming back, why don't you just come meet a few people?" Shishir Mehrotra (00:14:28): And I said, "No, I've been doing the big company thing for a while. I don't think I want to do that anymore." And he said, "No, no, no, no. Google is not that big a company." This is 2007, 2008. And he said, "Google is not that big of a company. Come just meet a few people and nothing else and have some good conversations." And so, I went down, met a bunch of people and this was Larry and Sergey but also Vic Gundotra was there then and Andy Rubin had just joined. And there was a bunch of ... That era of Google was being formed. And I end up, at the end of the day, in Jonathan's office and I tell him, "That was really entertaining, but it feels like a big company. I don't think this is for me." Jonathan's a pretty crass person. I won't use the same language he used but he said, "Oh, that's really effing stupid." Shishir Mehrotra (00:15:06): And I said, "Why?" And he said, "Well, look, and I'll just give you a really simple reason. All those people, they probably talk to you about Android and Chrome and all this other stuff but what they forget is that, at the heart, Google sells advertising and all the money in advertising goes to television. And nobody even watches those stupid ads." This may sound dumb, but maybe not to this group. I didn't know that. For me, I'd never bought or sold an ad in my life. And the idea that all of the money and advertising goes to television was news to me. And I got on a plane after work back to Seattle. I do a lot of my thinking on planes for weird reasons. You may be the same. I don't know. Shishir Mehrotra (00:15:40): But I get on the plane, I take out this little sheet of paper and this was a week after the Super Bowl, February of 2008, the Giants had just beaten the Pats in this epic Super Bowl. And I take out the sheet of paper, I write at the top, how come advertising doesn't feel like a Super Bowl every day? And the basic thing I was thinking about was we had our friends over for Super Bowl and while we're watching the game, the ad would come on, if somebody missed it, I would have to rewind for people to watch the ad again. It's like, "Oh, people actually like the ads in this one day of the year. What's different?" And so, I take out this sheet of paper, I end up writing this little position paper on what I think is wrong with advertising, without knowing really anything about advertising. Get home, it's pretty late. My wife's not up to tell me it was all stupid. Shishir Mehrotra (00:16:19): And then I wake up the next morning and I write to Jonathan. I say, "Hey, look, I really enjoyed the time. I don't think Google's for me, but I had some thoughts on something you said that stuck with me about why advertising sucks. And I'm sure you guys are already thinking about it, but I'm happy to send it to you if you'd like." And he's pretty early morning guy and so he read it and said, "Actually, nobody's thinking about this. Maybe you should come and I'll give you a small team and you can start running this." There were three ideas in the paper but the most simple one was how come ads don't have a skip button on them? And then, if you skip the ad, why don't you make it so that if you skip the ad, the advertiser doesn't pay? Shishir Mehrotra (00:16:50): You change all the incentives of advertising so that if the ads aren't good, then nobody gets paid if the ads are going to get better. And we're going to reset the balance and that's why it's going to feel like Super Bowl every day. He was like, "There's a lot of reward and be creative on the Super Bowl." So, J.R. convinced me. He's like, "Come down. Run this project." When I tell the story, it sounds eerily similar to how I ended up at Microsoft, like, "Oh, come run this small project." And it was this group of people, again, that misunderstood what ... This project was at the time called Mosaic. Shishir Mehrotra (00:17:19): It became a product called Google TV. Chromecast, Google TV, Google Home, all comes out of that same group now. So, I showed up to work on that and very quickly in that process realized that this had actually very poor corporate sponsorship as well. In this case, Larry and Sergey thought this product was really, really dumb. I should have known as I was going through the interview process. And so, I told J.R. and I was excited about the project and I said, "Hey, maybe I should talk to Larry and Sergey about that, a bunch of ideas and other stuff if I met them." He's like, "Oh yeah, they're traveling this week." I was like, "Really? Okay." And every time I asked, he was avoiding me talking to them about the project. But, anyway, so I show up to work on that and it's very long story out, but this paper leads to me working on this project. Shishir Mehrotra (00:17:57): And then, just, basically, we decided to merge the project into YouTube. And back in 2008, to a very side door, end up initially running the monetization team and eventually running the rest of the team for YouTube and then spending six years there and growing that business, which was ... At the time, when I joined YouTube, it was the weird stepchild of Google. It was generally thought of as the first bad acquisition that Google made. Until then we had this string of amazing acquisitions led to Maps and Android and all this stuff. YouTube was a weird one, right? It was the, we lost hundreds of millions of dollars a year. It was dogs on skateboards. We had a billion dollar lawsuit from Viacom. Rob Collie (00:18:35): Mark Cuban famously said it's never going to go anywhere. Shishir Mehrotra (00:18:38): I have very fun stories with Mark Cuban. It was two years after I left YouTube where he finally wrote me and said, "Actually, I think you might've been right." He was quite convinced we were wrong about it. But, anyway, so I ended up working on YouTube. I'd never bought or sold an ad in my life, knew nothing about video and an infrastructure guy in the previous career, and ended up working on YouTube for six years. Rob Collie (00:19:02): It's a really interesting thing, right? Sometimes not knowing a lot about an industry or a topic is actually fantastic because you don't bring all the baggage and all the preconceptions. Of course, you can't just go all in on that. If you never know anything about anything, you're just someone wandering around the world with a loud voice. And so, getting the right balance between knowing what you should know and not knowing the things that will throw you off, if we could get that mix right at all times in our lives, we'd be in great shape, but it's tricky, isn't it? Shishir Mehrotra (00:19:32): You've roughly described my career. Almost every job I took was in a space I knew nothing about. And it's a very positive interpretation of this person who has to learn every piece of this. But yeah, I think a beginner's eye allows you to look at a space a little bit differently and it certainly worked out at YouTube. And we were walking the trends of the video industry in every way, how we thought about content, how we thought about monetization, and what is good content? What is not good content? Our views on these things were diametrically opposite of every assumption that had been made by every experienced person in that industry. I think we turned out to be more right than wrong. Rob Collie (00:20:07): Oh my gosh! Yeah. Now, a few things jumped out at me from that story. First of all, if we think about it with the perfection of hindsight, the clarity of hindsight, basically, Google ran this really sick reverse auction for your services where they like, "If you come here now we'll pay you a billion dollars." And you're like, "Hmm, no." Right? And then- Shishir Mehrotra (00:20:30): It wasn't obvious that it was going to be a billion dollars. Rob Collie (00:20:30): I know. Then they call you back a year later and they say, "Okay. Fine. How about 100 million?" And you're like, "Hmm, no." And they finally got it down low enough for you to take the job. I've never met anybody who has a story where you can even joke about a billion dollar mistake. So, I'll never have the opportunity to recruit you, but if I did, now I know how. Shishir Mehrotra (00:20:56): [crosstalk 00:20:56] blowing your offer. That's right. That's right. Rob Collie (00:20:59): And it's got to include the words, just come run this small, little team. Shishir Mehrotra (00:21:03): Yeah. Yeah. I get drawn to projects. I don't get drawn to the rest of it. So far it's worked out okay. But yeah, I get drawn to ideas. I mean, this is really only the fourth company I've ever worked for yet every transition was drawn by some idea that I couldn't stop thinking about. Rob Collie (00:21:17): That idea or position statement, is that in some way, at the beginning, the origin story of the skip button for ads? Shishir Mehrotra (00:21:27): Oh yeah. I mean, the skip button for ads it's now called TrueView. Back to your point on beginner's mind. So, I show up, I've got this idea around the skip button and actually it makes more sense for YouTube than it does for this Google TV thing that we were working on. So, there's totally reasonable outcome. I show up and my first meeting with the sales team, I'm maybe six weeks in, the head of sales, Susie, she says, "Can you come give a talk to sales team and just tell a little bit about your vision for YouTube." And we had a nice ... And I said, "Look, I don't think this is a good idea. I don't know anything about this part of the industry. So, I'm going to make a fool of myself." And she's, "No, no, no. You have got all these great ideas and they're fresh and different and why don't you come talk to them?" Shishir Mehrotra (00:22:04): And I go talk about a bunch of different ideas, and I talk about this one about skip buttons on ads. And one of the salespeople, who I've since become very good friends with, she raises her hand and she says, "Wait, I don't understand. Do you want none of us to make any money?" They thought this was the dumbest idea on the planet. You put a skip button on ads, people are going to hit the skip button. It's like that's what obviously is going to happen. And, basically, the entire sales force rejected this idea. And it took me three years to ship that feature because every person in the sales force thought it was such a dumb idea. I would get told, "You can come talk at the sales conference, but you're not allowed to talk about your stupid skip button idea. You have to talk about everything else." Shishir Mehrotra (00:22:43): And what turned out was ... This is actually another fun story in great product managers. I don't know if you still think of yourself as a PM, but I consider you to be a really strong product manager as well. But this is a story about a guy, Lane Shackleton, who actually now runs product at Coda. So, Lane was a sales guy. He was actually our primary sales guy at YouTube. And he really wanted to be a PM. And at the time, we had this really stupid policy where you weren't allowed to be a product manager at Google unless you had a CS degree. It was just part of the early, early viewpoint the founders had. Rob Collie (00:23:17): So relevant. Shishir Mehrotra (00:23:21): Right. So, you commiserate with this a lot. So, Lane comes to me and says, "I want to be a PM. How do I do it?" And I said, "Hey, look, I mean, I love you and I think you could do a great job but I've got this policy. And I got to make a really strong case if I'm going to get over the policy." And he said, "How about I just do it on the side? Do it as a trial run." He gave me an idea. I said, "Okay, I'll make a deal with you. I'll let you try to be a PM, but you have to do it in your 20% time. And not in your 80-20% time, but you got to do a great job of your sales job and then you do this part. And the second criteria is you take whatever project I give you." Shishir Mehrotra (00:23:52): And he said, "All right, deal. What's the project?" I said, "Okay, I want you to work on this thing called skippable ads." And I said, "Look, the sales team thinks it's really dumb because the way that the division work, the engineering leader was like, "I'm not allocating stuff that the sales team thinks is dumb. And so, I can give you one engineer who is a new grad and that's it." But I have a playbook for you. I think you need to go and you just go talk to the AdWords team and get this thing out of the buying experience and then work on this with the analytics and figure just these couple pieces out. And we'll be able to ship this thing and we'll slowly build up the business. It'll be fine." Shishir Mehrotra (00:24:23): And so, he goes away and he comes back a couple of weeks later for his update. And I said, "Oh, how's it going? Did you talk to the AdWords team?" And he said, "No, actually, I decided that's not the problem here." And I said, "What do you mean? That was your job. Go talk to those different people." And he says, "Well, I've been thinking about it and I think the real problem here is the name is wrong." I was like, "The name? What are you talking about? We'll name this thing later. This is not that important." And he says, "No, no, I think the problem is that skippable ad is a value proposition to an end user but who buys advertising? The advertiser buys advertising. Skippable is actually a really poor value proposition to the advertiser. Why would I want my ad to be skipped? Right? And so, the reason you're hearing so much negative reaction if people don't understand why it's helpful to the advertiser." Shishir Mehrotra (00:25:06): And so then he came up with this idea and said, "Why don't we name it TrueView?" And I'm skipping a whole bunch of parts in the story, but we call it TrueView. That's what the ad for one is actually called. You have no idea what ads are called, right? Oh, there's ads on Google. Nobody knows [crosstalk 00:25:18] from AdWord. Rob Collie (00:25:18): Yeah. It's not a feature. Yeah. Shishir Mehrotra (00:25:19): But what's a sponsored story? And you don't know any of that stuff. You just know it's an ad. And he said, "So, let's focus on the advertising." Came up with this name TrueView. And the idea is very simple is you only pay per true views. You don't pay for the junk, you only pay for the real ones. Right? And all of a sudden this thing went from being, I'm not allowed to talk about it at sales conferences to the number one thing on the entire sales force [inaudible 00:25:42] all of Google. Beyond anything the average team was working on. Shishir Mehrotra (00:25:45): And it was such a simple idea. And, by the way, the way the math works is very simple, it's most people do skip the ad. It's about 80% skip rates on those ads. So, four out of five times you see an ad, you probably have a skip button, but it turns out that the 20% of the time you don't is such high signal and so effective an ad that you can often charge something like 20 times as much for that view. And so, what you end up with is you end up with you just take that math and say, [inaudible 00:26:09] four times better monetization with a skippable ad than without a skippable ad. Shishir Mehrotra (00:26:13): It was not obvious that advertisers would be willing to pay that much more if they know you actually watched the ad but when you start ... But this is a good example, again, a beginner's mind and, Lane, I mean, this is one of his ... So, I've managed to convince the calibration committees and so on and turned to a product manager and turned into a great product manager. He joined me early on at Coda and now runs the product and design team here. Great example of coming fresh to a new problem. Rob Collie (00:26:36): Yeah. Well, if only he'd had a computer science degree, that idea would have been so much smarter. You know? Shishir Mehrotra (00:26:43): Yeah. The crazy part, this is one of the most technical guys I know and he's like, "I don't understand. I write this stuff on the side. Why do I need a stupid degree for that?" Right? Rob Collie (00:26:53): I know. There was one time in my first three years at Microsoft where I used one piece of my computer science education, one time. I used O notation to prove that we shouldn't do it a certain way. And when I got my way after using O notation, it's like, "This is an O of N squared algorithm." I got to run around the hallways chanting, like, "Whoa, look, my education, it worked. It worked. It worked." And that was the only time I ever used any of that. So, no, that's a silly policy. Shishir Mehrotra (00:27:25): Yeah. It was funny, when I was going to college, my parents were both computer scientists and I was one of those kids who grew up with a ... I never knew what I wanted to be. One week I was going to be a lawyer, then I was going to be a doctor, then I was going to be a scary period for my mom where I really wanted to be a taxi driver. I went through all the different periods. And then, I'm filling out my college applications and it says like, "What do you want to major in?" And I said, "Oh, I think I'll write down CS." I was into computers at the time and so I write down CS. And my dad says, "If you major in CS, I'm not paying for college." What are you talking about? I thought you'd be really excited. Shishir Mehrotra (00:27:57): That's what you guys do. My dad now runs supercomputing for NASA. I thought this would be pretty exciting for you. And he says, "No, no, no. This is a practitioner's degree. I'm not paying for college unless you major in something where the books are at least 50 years old." And that was the policy. And so, I ended up majoring in math and computer science. And from his perspective, he paid for a math degree and I happened to get the CS degree for free. But his view was that ... Which is true ... Computer science changes so fundamentally every 10 years. Shishir Mehrotra (00:28:22): And my classes the professors often taught out of the book that they're about to publish. The book wasn't even published yet and they're like, "Oh, here's the new way to think about operating systems." And it was totally different than what it was five years ago. I think there's a lot of knowledge in CS degrees but I actually think ... O notation is an example. I used to teach that class at school. That's math. That's not CS. Rob Collie (00:28:42): I know. Yeah. Yeah. Shishir Mehrotra (00:28:44): It's a very good way to think about isotonic functions but the actual CS knowledge is all but relevant by the time you graduate. Rob Collie (00:28:51): One thing that you said to me about your time at YouTube that stuck with me years, years, years, years later is that here we are at the tip of the spear, the head of this giant organization and YouTube eventually became giant, and with all this amazing machine learning and just so much algorithmic, not even complexity, but also just we don't even know what it's doing anymore. It's so sophisticated that we can't even explain why it's making these decisions but they're doing well, and yet every day we get together, we're looking at simple pivot tables and there's these knobs on the sides of these giant algorithmic machines that some human being has to set to, like, "Should we set it to six or seven?" And it's just this judgment call. And I just love that. That was, in a weird way, so reassuring to me that even at the absolute top of the pyramid of the algorithmic world, there's still a need for this other stuff. Shishir Mehrotra (00:29:43): The most fun example of this, backing for a moment, my dad, back to the story of me going into CS. At one point I had asked him, what is artificial intelligence? And he said, "Well, artificial intelligence is this really hard to describe field." I asked, "Why is that?" And he said, "Well, because it's got this characteristic that the moment something works, it's no longer AI." And so, AI is what's left is all the stuff that doesn't work. And so, you can use all these examples of when you have all regressions, it's like, "That's just math. That's not AI. We understand how it works." My favorite example with the kids is when you drive up to the traffic light, how does it know when to turn red and green and so on? Shishir Mehrotra (00:30:19): Oh, there's a sensor there. It just senses the cars there and so then it decides to turn red or green. That's not AI. I know how that works. I can describe it. It's a sensor. And so, we went through, I think, decades of time where the moment something worked, it stopped getting called AI. And then, some point, 10, 15 years ago, I'd say 10, we flipped it. And now, all of a sudden, anything that does math is AI. And it's amazing to me that we would look at some of these systems and it was literally a simple regression and we say, "Oh, that's machine learning." And it became very invoked. I think about it that way. Shishir Mehrotra (00:30:53): I mean, there are some really complicated machine learning techniques and the way our neural network works, which is the heart of how most of these machine learning techniques work is very complicated, but at the heart of what it's doing, it's approximation function for a multi-variable phenomenon. So, the most fun example I can tell you about your observation there is this project called DALS. DALS was an acronym for Dynamic Ad Load System where at the time, on YouTube, the rate at which we showed ads was contractually set. We would go negotiate with the creator and say, "Oh, ESPN, we want your content on YouTube." And we would say, "Look, our policy is we show ads every seven minutes." And they say, "No, our content is so good. We want it every two minutes." Shishir Mehrotra (00:31:32): And then, the Disney folks would have their own number. And so, there is this long line of contractual stuff baked into our ad serving logic that's like, "Oh, it's been two minutes. You have to show an ad." Because they all just thought they knew better of how good their content was. And so, one of the engineers had this idea and said, "This is dumb." We know our intentions are well aligned. Almost all our deals were rev share deals. We made money when the creator made money. And we know whether or not this is a good time to show an ad or not, why don't we turn this into a machine learning system and guess whether or not we should show an ad? So, it's called Dynamic Ad Load System. DALS was its acronym. So, the team goes off and this engineer goes off and builds this thing. Shishir Mehrotra (00:32:08): Lexi was his name. So, Lexi builds this thing and he brings it to one of our staff reviews. Every Friday, we had this meeting of IT staff. That's where we went through all the major stats for the business and including any major experiments that are running. If he brings something in and he says, "All right, before we launch this thing, I'd like to know what our trade-off function." The trade-off function in this case is, how much watch time are you willing to trade off for revenue? These are two primary metrics. At every moment we're going to decide, should we show an ad or not? And we have to make a guess at, "We think if we don't show an ad you'll watch for this much longer, if we do show an ad, there's a chance you'll leave but we'll make this much money. So, what's the number? How much should we trade off?" Shishir Mehrotra (00:32:45): This is a very typical question I would get in this forum. It's impossible to answer, how much would you trade off? Watch time, revenue. And so, I came up with a number and I put a slope on this chart and we decided two for one. I can't remember whether it was two points of watch time for one point of revenue. But whichever way it was, I do a slope and we got a lot of reaction. They're like, "Okay. Great." And they ran away from the room. "Okay. We have a number. We can go do our thing." And so, they come back a few weeks later and say that we're ready to launch. And I said, "Okay, so did you hit the number?" And they said, "Well, actually, we have some interesting news for you. Turns out in our first tuning of the system, we actually have a tuning that is positive on both watch time and revenue. And somehow by redeploying the system, we make more money and people watch longer." Shishir Mehrotra (00:33:25): And I said, "Really? How does that happen?" And they said, "Well, we don't really know yet, but can we ship because clearly better than your ratio?" And I said, "Well, okay, you can ship but next week I want you to come back and tell me why." And so, next week they come back and I said, "Do you know why?" And they said, "Well, we don't know why, but we have another tuning and it's even better on both watch time and revenue. I was thinking we ship this one." Shishir Mehrotra (00:33:47): I was like, "Okay, but please come back next week." This went on for four weeks. Right? So every week they would come back and they'd say, "Okay, we got this thing. It's even better on both. And we still have no idea why." And, finally, they figured out why. And it turns out that basically what was happening was the system was learning to push ads later in people's sessions. If you watch YouTube for a while, early on, you'll see very little advertising. But if you sit there and watch for hours and hours and hours, the ad frequency will gradually increase with a viewpoint of, this person's not going anywhere. They're committed, which makes intuitive sense, but it wasn't an input that we handed the system. Shishir Mehrotra (00:34:18): And how did we figure that out? The pivot table. I notice that the ... What did we do? We went and charted everything we could out of the experiment group and in our experiment group and we just guessed at what is the way to figure out why is this happening? Because it's not a signal that we were intentionally giving the system, it's just the system got every other signal it could. And we looked at everything. I mean, is it geography? Is it tied to content? Is it age? Is it ... How is it possible that we're showing more ads and people are watching for longer? That story is a lesson in a number of different things. I mean, I think it was a great lesson in how when people think about machine learning systems, they miss this element of ... Any machine learning system is just a function. Shishir Mehrotra (00:34:54): All the ML system does is take a very large set of inputs, apply a function to it and generate an output. Generally, that output is a decision, show an ad, don't show an ad. Self-driving car turn right or turn left. It's some decisions of, is this image a person or an animal? And that system is trained and is trained on a bunch of data. And at some point, somebody, usually fairly low in an organization, makes the tuning decision and says, "I'm willing to accept this much being wrong for this much being right." Generally called precision recall. More layman's term for it is you figured out your false positive rate versus your false negative rate for whatever system you're trying to figure out. But somebody has to make a decision. Shishir Mehrotra (00:35:30): It's usually three tunings, very deep in the system. And then, after that point, the system is unexplainable. You have no idea how this thing works. And so, what do you do then? You go look at a bunch of empirical data of what's happening and try to figure out, "What did I just do? I've got this thing and what's actually happening here?" And you try to figure out, is it doing what you actually want it to do? And all of that is done in fancy pivot tables. Rob Collie (00:35:53): Yeah. It's so funny, the AI, and you've said before, your dad, as soon as it reaches a equilibrium, it's not AI anymore. Shishir Mehrotra (00:36:00): Right. Not anymore. Rob Collie (00:36:02): Now though, it seems like it's a funny thing that you built these systems that then figure things out and they seem to be working great but then they can't turn around and explain to you what they're doing. It's not built to explain. It's just built to do. Shishir Mehrotra (00:36:15): It makes some sense how the human brain works. Why did you do that? I don't know. I just did it. And when you're running a business, that's not an acceptable answer. I need to know why did it go that way instead of ... Why did it turn right? I need to know why. So, you end up with this interesting tuning and then you're constantly looking at charts of output, what is going on here? To try to figure out whether it's working the way you want it. Rob Collie (00:36:34): So, while we're on pivot tables for a moment, go back to your story about skippable ads. This is TrueView. Imagine how much better off we would be as a society if pivot tables had originally been named summary tables. Shishir Mehrotra (00:36:50): Oh man. Rob Collie (00:36:51): You know? That one was blown. Shishir Mehrotra (00:36:53): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:36:54): I actually tried to rename it stupidly. I mean, it was too late. It was way too late. And I fought that battle for way too long. It was a fool's errand to try to rename something that had been in the world for that long but what does it mean to pivot data? No one knows. Shishir Mehrotra (00:37:08): It's now the insider's club handshake. Rob Collie (00:37:12): I know. I know. I think we probably lost half of the people who would have used them just in the name. Shishir Mehrotra (00:37:17): It's interesting you say that because the way we do the equivalence in Coda, we don't use the term pivot at all. We call it grouping. We don't even call it a thing. Right? We don't give it a noun name. We give it a verb name. And it just turns out that grouping a table is a very understandable phenomenon. In Coda, our model of grouping doesn't require aggregates also turns out ... And the reason I don't love the word summary is I actually think most commonly what you want to do is you take a set of records and you say, "I've got a bunch of tasks. Let me sort them by in progress and done." And I still want to be able to see the tasks. And one of the things pivot table, I think screwed up, is that you can't see the tasks anymore. The moment you're in that world ... Rob Collie (00:37:55): Yeah. I agree. But given what was built, the pivot table implementation, right? Summary would have been the killer name, right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:38:02): Would have been a much better name. What would you have named VLOOKUP to? Rob Collie (00:38:05): Oh, I don't know. Pivots is still relevant to me, VLOOKUP not as much. No. But like Bill Gates always pressing for the unification of grouping in Excel with pivots. And we were always like, "Hmm, no." And it became a running joke after a while, he'd be like, "To the extent that you guys on Excel ever do anything that I ask you." That would be his preamble to some of the things he would say to us. Shishir Mehrotra (00:38:33): I mean, I would say, nowadays, people use pivot for lots of things, but for our first year for the customer journey, our grouping feature was definitely the top of the list. And, honestly, there's a bunch of people who, like you said, never really understood pivot tables and could never compare the two, like, "Oh, that makes total sense to me. I drew up a table. That makes total sense." Then two, to show aggregates. Rob Collie (00:38:50): The way you zeroed in on noun versus verb, that actually has come up multiple, multiple times on this show. It's one of my things. My new hires, when they'd come to work for me on the Excel team, I would sit them down and say, "Listen, you are not allowed to introduce nouns into this product. If you want a new noun, you've got to come to me. You got to fight me for it. You can verb all you want." That was hard one knowledge. I was a noun guy coming out of computer science school. Computer science people love them some nouns. Entities. Just say the word entity and you get all gooey inside, but no, it's a verb world. Shishir Mehrotra (00:39:26): I make that specific statement, you can ask my team, all the time. You're going to add a new noun, you got to come through me. I mean, on YouTube, it was interesting because YouTube has three primary nouns, video, channel and playlist. And we spent forever ... For a long time video was the only noun that mattered. And it was a big debate over which one matters more, channel or playlist. And I made the team pick. You got to pick one. We picked channel, which is probably obvious. Playlists are these long forgotten feature of YouTube and channels are now a big deal. But that wasn't always true. Channels actually used to be a very small deal on YouTube. If you go back to what I do in 2008, yeah, you would publish a video, it's like, "A channel, whatever." Totally bit my fingers on this channel, but it has nothing else on it. Shishir Mehrotra (00:40:05): And, nowadays, all people care about on YouTube is like, "This is my channel. How many subscribers I have." And the same way with Coda, we've put a lot of energy into as few nouns as possible. We'd use common language for nouns, only brand the ones that you really, really, really want to brand. Because there are very few branded nouns in Coda. There's lots of incentives in product development that lead to it. In a lot of companies, you get promoted on it. Like, "I invented this thing. It's now Power BI. And it's now this pivot thing." And you get a lot of feedback loop because nouns are distinguishable but it doesn't help your customers. Rob Collie (00:40:37): Even the technology under the hood is screaming at you, "Noun me. Noun me." It's like, I've got this really cool data structure here. It's dying to be surfaced in the ... No, no, don't do that. That's not what we do. We do not surface the technology. That's not what we're here for, but it's a powerful instinct. Really powerful. Okay. So, Coda, that's the next chapter. And that's the next place where we crossed paths. So, I actually realized that it was six years ago. I visited you in the Valley six years ago. And the reason I know it was six years ago is because one of the people who was there in the early days with you, the very beginning. Shishir Mehrotra (00:41:18): They're all still here, but yeah. Rob Collie (00:41:19): Okay. Good. So, got the feel that they will be long-timers. Yeah. It was a tight bunch. It was a tight crew. The two of you were joking to them, "Maybe we should go to Burning Man this year." And I was sitting there thinking to myself, I had been invited that year to a friend's bachelor party. He was going to Burning Man. And I didn't even speak up because I was so terrified of going. I wasn't even sure if I was going to go. Shishir Mehrotra (00:41:42): Did you go? Rob Collie (00:41:42): I did. And that was 2015. So, that's how I know. It was also, I think, the first year that the Warriors had blown up down the NBA scene. So, we were sitting and watching the Warriors annihilate people after we talked. So, six years ago, you were pretty deep into this thing that's now called Coda. It was codename something else at the time that I kept getting wrong. Was it Krypton? Shishir Mehrotra (00:42:03): Krypton. That's right. Rob Collie (00:42:05): But I kept calling it Vulcan. Shishir Mehrotra (00:42:08): The team had such a laugh out of that. Rob Collie (00:42:12): I kept forgetting it was Krypton and calling it Vulcan. So, why don't you explain both to me and to our listeners what the original vision was and how and if that's evolved over time. Shishir Mehrotra (00:42:25): By the way that meeting was, hey, super entertaining. Rob came in and described this as Vulcan as been repeated many times in the story. But it also was super informative because you came and gave a bunch of perspective. I think probably one of the most relevant to our last discussion, one of your most interesting observations that stuck with the team was you described this person and you said, "Hey, I can walk into a room and if I ask them just a couple of questions I can split the room into two groups of people very quickly." You used to call it the data gene. And your questions were, do you know what a VLOOKUP is or do you know what a VLOOKUP is? What a pivot table is? Bad for many of the reasons we just talked about, but for the perspective of understanding how humans are evolving and so on, it was actually quite insightful that these people you just can't keep them away. They will eventually figure these things out. Shishir Mehrotra (00:43:11): And if you have that data gene, you will some point in your life intersect with these things and figure out what they are. The Coda founding story, so I was at YouTube and an old friend of mine, [inaudible 00:43:21] Alex DeNeui, now my co-founder at Coda, he and I have known each other for 20 plus years. We went to college together. And he's part of the founding team at Sintrata as well. Interestingly, we've worked every other job together, which is a fun pattern. So, he had started this company that got acquired by Google and he had just quit. And he was starting a new company and he'd come to me and he said, "Hey, my company's not doing that well. I'm thinking about pivoting to do something different. Can you help me brainstorm a new set of ideas?" So, we started brainstorming mostly about what he should do. Shishir Mehrotra (00:43:49): I was still relatively happy at Google, but I had told him, "If you pick something interesting, I'd be happy to invest or advise or help out in some way." Said this long list of ideas and we started brainstorming and at one point, one of us writes this sentence on the whiteboard, what if anyone can build a doc as powerful as an app? And that sentence ended up becoming the rallying cry for what became Krypton and then Coda. It's a very simple statement but it comes out of two primary observations. One is, I think the world runs on docs not apps. That if you go ask any team how they operate, any business, company person, so on, if you ask them how they operate, they'll immediately rattle off all the different packet software they use. "Oh, we use this thing for CRM and this thing for inventory. And we use this thing for pass tracking and so on." Shishir Mehrotra (00:44:32): And then, if you just sit behind them and watch them work for a day, what do they do all day? They're in documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and some communication tool. That's what they live in. And this first observation was one that was very deeply embedded in us because that's how we ran YouTube. I mean, YouTube, amongst other things was born right in the start of the Google Docs generation. I got the YouTube 2008, Google Docs is just coming out and, as I mentioned, we were the forgotten stepchild of Google, so we were allowed to do whatever we wanted but we could get no help in doing it. And so, we decided, for example, we would run our task management goal-setting process. We didn't like how OKRs worked. Shishir Mehrotra (00:45:09): I actually just published a whole paper on this last week. You can take a look. But we didn't like how OKRs worked. We wanted to do a different way. And so, how do we do it? We do in a big spreadsheet? I ran compensation differently at YouTube. I had this philosophy I call level independent compensation and the Google HR team allowed us to do it, but said, "We're building zero software for it." So, we did it in a network of documents and spreadsheets. One of the most fun example is if you hit flag on a YouTube video, for years, a flag on a YouTube video would show up as a row in a spreadsheet [inaudible 00:45:37] the person's desk. That's how we ran all these systems. We used to get made fun of. People are like, "Oh, look at these people. They're duct taping together documents and spreadsheets to run what became a multi-billion dollar division." I used to say like, "I actually think this is our strategic strength." Shishir Mehrotra (00:45:49): I mean, the reason we can plan so nimbly, the reason I can hire whoever I want, the reason we can adjust our flagging and approval system so quickly is because we didn't purchase some big bulky software to do it, we design it ourselves and turned it into something that then actually met our, at the time, current value system. So, this is observation number one, it's the world runs on docs not app, which is, by the way, not obvious to people but I feel fairly strongly about it. The second observation is that those documents surfaces haven't fundamentally changed in almost 50 years. The running joke at the company is that if Austin Powers popped out of his freezing chamber, he wouldn't know what clothes to wear or what music to listen to, but he could work a document, a spreadsheet, and a presentation just as well as anybody else could. Because everything we're looking at is metaphors that were created by the same people who created WordStar, Harvard Graphics and VisiCalc. Shishir Mehrotra (00:46:39): And we still have almost the exact same metaphor, which just seems crazy to me. In that same period of time, every other piece of software stack is totally different. An operating system from the '70s versus Android and iOS is unrecognizable. Databases, which we thought were pretty fundamental are completely different than they used to be. Things like search engine, social networks, none of these things even existed and yet the way that slide decks are put together, the way you navigate the spreadsheet grid and the way you think about pages and document is exactly the same as it was in the 1970s. Shishir Mehrotra (00:47:10): So, you take the two observations, you stick them together and you say, "Hey, we [inaudible 00:47:13] runs on these docs, not applications." And those surfaces haven't changed in almost 50 years. Something's broken. What if we started from scratch and built an entirely new type of doc based on this observation that what we are actually doing with our docs is a lot closer to what we're doing with applications than not? That was the thesis we started with. I got personally obsessed with it. I couldn't stop thinking about it. And this went from, hey, let me invest, let me help, to I quit Google and went and started but at the time with Krypton and then eventually became Coda. Rob Collie (00:47:44): I'm sure he recruited you at some point by saying, "How about you just come run this small team over here?" Shishir Mehrotra (00:47:48): Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. That's right. Rob Collie (00:47:51): Those are the magic words. Shishir Mehrotra (00:47:52): We won't pay you at all. That's the ... Rob Collie (00:47:54): Something silly that occurred to me is that your Austin Powers metaphor might even be more accurate than you realize. We are now farther away, in terms of time, from the premiere of that '70s show, than that '70s show was from the time it represented. Shishir Mehrotra (00:48:09): I like that. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:48:11): It's crazy. We passed that point six months ago. So, when did Austin Powers the first one come out? Sometime in the '90s? Shishir Mehrotra (00:48:17): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:48:18): Right? And it represented a time probably 35 years before it? Probably 1964, maybe 1999. Right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:48:25): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:48:25): So, we're almost reaching the point where we're close to the Austin Powers movie as Austin Powers was to the time. So, clearly, if we rewind 35 years, we are what? We're in the '80s, right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:48:35): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:48:36): You're right our documents basically look like that. Shishir Mehrotra (00:48:39): Yeah. You and I can probably geek out on this. And I get asked a lot about why did that happen? Lots of industries saw a change. And the database industry is a great example, you wouldn't expect the database industry to change that much. Codd wrote his book in the 1970s that's still the book that every database engineer you can find will have the book up on the shelf for Codd's relational databases, and yet things like OLAP came out and cubes and it turned into a Power BI. I think what happened in the document industry ... Well, two things. Shishir Mehrotra (00:49:05): One, every company that wanted to innovate in that space was a platform company whose primary interest was evangelizing a platform. Microsoft didn't really want to displace Lotus and so on with a new thing, they just wanted people to use Windows. It was very important that it actually be backwards compatible with everything at Soft. The other thing that happened is we live through what I think of as a period where we're beholden to file format. And so, one of my favorite examples is Steve Jobs and Apple. I've met a bunch of people that worked on the early iWork suite. And the iWork suite, Jobs came in with a bunch of new ideas. He's like, "This is dumb. We shouldn't have a spreadsheet that's one big universal grid. We should have a bunch of separate grids that are actually a little closer to tables." Shishir Mehrotra (00:49:45): And so, that's how numbers worked, actually, it's not actually one universal grid, it's a bunch of separate ones. And the way he did it with pages was a little bit different. And then, Keynote, which is probably the most popular of the three is actually different from PowerPoint in those really critical ways and none of the three took off. And why didn't they take off? I mean, Jobs was pretty smart and [inaudible 00:50:02] were pretty good. I think it was really simple reason. If I build something in numbers and then I want to send it to you, I have to assume that you have a copy of numbers and that you run on a Mac and that's not a safe assumption. It hasn't really been a safe assumption for a long time. And then, Google Docs came out. Rob Collie (00:50:16): Which, by the way, is fundamentally what YouTube did for video. Right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:50:19): That's right. Rob Collie (00:50:19): I had all these delivery ... Shishir Mehrotra (00:50:21): Plugin. Rob Collie (00:50:21): ... And Coda and pl ... I couldn't send you a video, trust that you'd be able to watch it. Shishir Mehrotra (00:50:27): And assume you could play. That's right. That's right. I mean, in that case, it was hard to send the videos because- Rob Collie (00:50:32): Yeah. There was a file size problem and there was also a software c

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Episode 285: "Work is Punishment"

Software Defined Talk

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 11, 2021 48:32

This week, we discuss Googler’s ideas for making open source more secure, obsessing over top of funnel influencer lifestyle management, and a bit of surfing. The power at Brandon’s house went out just as we were starting, so it’s mostly just Matt and Coté. Mood board: I have three screens. I have enough screen space. I don’t need my shit moved, I moved my own shit. This direct shit. Thank goodness for holidays in Singapore and Japan. I think about this every day “Work is punishment.” We’ll skip the Brandon things and get to the Cote’ things. It’s ready to be PowerPointed. Members Only Security Discussion. Hackin’ the mainframe. They love themselves the McGlauglin group. Back on the Funnel. “Work is Punishment.” Label maker go brrrr. Rundown Open source: Google wants new rules for developers working on 'critical' projects (https://www.zdnet.com/article/open-source-google-wants-new-rules-for-developers-working-on-critical-projects/) No unilateral changes to code. Changes would require code review and approval by two independent parties Authenticate participants. This means owners and maintainers cannot be anonymous; contributors are required to use strong authentication (eg 2FA) There need to be notifications for changes in risk to the software Enabling transparency for software artifacts Create ways to trust the build process Dependency Confusion: How I Hacked Into Apple, Microsoft and Dozens of Other Companies (https://medium.com/@alex.birsan/dependency-confusion-4a5d60fec610) Researcher hacks over 35 tech firms in novel supply chain attack (https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/researcher-hacks-over-35-tech-firms-in-novel-supply-chain-attack/) Steve(n) Sinofsky is serialising a book about h is time at Microsoft (https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/authors-note) a16z pushing product - “DIRECT” The Unauthorized Story of Andreessen Horowitz (https://www.newcomer.co/p/the-unauthorized-story-of-andreessen) Mark Zuckerberg made a surprise appearance on the world's buzziest social network to talk about the future (https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-on-clubhouse-2021-2) CartaX - Andreessen Horowitz (https://a16z.com/2021/02/04/cartax/) Security SolarWinds CEO Confirms Office 365 Email ‘Compromise’ Played Role In Broad-Based Attack (https://www.crn.com/news/security/solarwinds-ceo-confirms-office-365-email-compromise-played-role-in-broad-based-attack) Cyberpunk 2077 developer hit with ransomware attack (https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/02/cyberpunk-2007-developer-hit-with-ransomware-attack/) Apple Patches 10-Year-Old macOS SUDO Root Privilege Escalation Bug (https://thehackernews.com/2021/02/apple-patches-10-year-old-macos-sudo.html) Monitoring and Observability (https://twitter.com/rickdonohue/status/1357738745634541569?s=21) Announcing Change Intelligence (https://lightstep.com/blog/announcing-lightsteps-change-intelligence/) Anchor it around what’s changed. Go Serverless! (https://bweagle.medium.com/go-serverless-a5c2180408ef) Bitcoin HODL Chart (https://twitter.com/michaelbatnick/status/1357510579188084736?s=21) Migrate Everything to OpenBSD…? (https://www.unixsheikh.com/articles/why-you-should-migrate-everything-from-linux-to-bsd.html) Relevant to your interests SoftBank SoftBank: piecing the puzzle together (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdsCjokUGi0) SoftBank getting their slide of the year nominee early (https://group.softbank/system/files/pdf/ir/presentations/2020/earnings-presentation_q3fy2020_01_en.pdf) M&A, VC and Partners Palantir surges on partnership with IBM, COO says the tie-up is its largest (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/palantir-surges-on-partnership-with-ibm-131247025.html) Reddit raises $250 million at $6 billion valuation (https://www.axios.com/reddit-raises-250-million-at-6-billion-valuation-c2f8746d-21d9-49e8-a28e-edd69e296e66.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=onhrs) Kong Raises $100M Series D to Accelerate Cloud Connectivity (https://konghq.com/blog/announcing-100m-series-d-funding-to-accelerate-cloud-connectivity/) Box acquires e-signature startup SignRequest for new content workflows (https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/03/box-acquires-esignature-startup-signrequest-for-new-content-workflows/) It’s AWS not A.W.S. How Andy Jassy, Amazon’s Next C.E.O., Was a ‘Brain Double’ for Jeff Bezos (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/technology/andy-jassy-amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos.html?ck_subscriber_id=512840665) Amazon to buy half of the energy produced by huge offshore wind farm in the Netherlands (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/08/amazon-to-buy-50percent-of-energy-created-by-shell-wind-farm-in-netherlands.html) diimdeep/awesome-split-keyboards (https://github.com/diimdeep/awesome-split-keyboards) Apple and Hyundai-Kia pushing toward deal on Apple Car (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/03/apple-and-hyundai-kia-driving-towards-deal-on-apple-car.html) Facebook's not the only one worried about Apple's privacy change — Snap and Unity both just warned investors about it (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/04/snap-unity-warn-of-impact-from-apple-ios-14-idfa-privacy-changes.html) Tickets to Space (https://thehustle.co/02052021-tickets-to-space/) They Stormed the Capitol. Their Apps Tracked Them. (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/opinion/capitol-attack-cellphone-data.html) Clubhouse is now blocked in China after a brief uncensored period (https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/08/clubhouse-is-now-blocked-in-china-after-a-brief-uncensored-period) Sorry, small-phone lovers: The iPhone 12 mini was Apple’s 2020 sales flop (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/the-iphone-12-mini-hasnt-sold-well-according-to-multiple-estimates/). (https://group.softbank/system/files/pdf/ir/presentations/2020/earnings-presentation_q3fy2020_01_en.pdf) Salesforce to allow permanent remote work for most employees, with big implications for S.F. (https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Salesforce-to-allow-permanent-remote-work-for-15937086.php) Is This Beverly Hills Cop Playing Sublime’s ‘Santeria’ to Avoid Being Live-Streamed? (https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvxb94/is-this-beverly-hills-cop-playing-sublimes-santeria-to-avoid-being-livestreamed) Greater fool theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory) Nonsense Texas public-safety officials accidentally sent an Amber Alert warning that the killer doll Chucky was on the loose (https://www.insider.com/killer-doll-chucky-is-subject-of-texas-amber-alert-message-2021-2) MIT researchers devised a way to allow spinach plants to send emails (https://www.axios.com/mit-spinach-emails-pollution-04e21941-f692-477d-a5b4-894dabb4e894.html) Mass Over-The-Air Update Of Tesla Cars Captured On Video (https://insideevs.com/news/486637/mass-over-air-update-tesla-cars-video/amp/) Naming (https://twitter.com/nathangloverAUS/status/1359178660364750851?s=20) Facebook Is Said to Be Building a Product to Compete With Clubhouse (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/10/technology/facebook-building-product-clubhouse.html) Suspend his comments and figure out why he is upside down (https://twitter.com/jackfitzdc/status/1359591651396767749?) “I’m here live, I’m not a cat,” (https://twitter.com/lawrencehurley/status/1359207169091108864?s=21) Sponsors strongDM — Manage and audit remote access to infrastructure. Start your free 14-day trial today at: strongdm.com/SDT (http://strongdm.com/SDT) Listener Feedback the THREAD is now over 3k replies. Who knows where this ends? Conferences DevOpsDay Texas on March 2nd. (https://devopsdays.org/events/2021-texas/welcome/) SpringOne.io (https://springone.io) SDT news & hype Join us in Slack (http://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/slack). Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) and we will send you free laptop stickers! Follow us on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/sdtpodcast), Twitter (https://twitter.com/softwaredeftalk), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/softwaredefinedtalk/) and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/software-defined-talk/). Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quick-concall/id1399948033?mt=8) and he wants you to buy it for $0.99. Use the code SDT to get $20 off Coté’s book, (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt) Digital WTF (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt), so $5 total. Become a sponsor of Software Defined Talk (https://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/ads)! Recommendations Matt: Manly Surf School (https://manlysurfschool.com) Dymo Label Maker (https://amzn.to/3aaP6Te) Coté: The Paris Review (https://www.theparisreview.org). Sarah Manguso (https://www.theparisreview.org/letters-essays/7564/perfection-sarah-manguso). [Banner image from wikipedia/Junkyardsparkle](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dymoembossinglabelmakercirca1967.jpg)_

S1E184 - Essential Apple Podcast 184: Goodbye OS X - Hello OS 11

The Essential Apple Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 2, 2020 91:42

Recorded 30th June 2020** Nick, Jim, Simon and Nick get together once more to talk about more WWDC stuff basically - there was so much news, so much stuff, and so many changes ahead that we are probably going to all be talking about it for months. Still better than having nothing to talk about. GIVEAWAYS & OFFERS Glenn Fleishman's Working From Home book is completely FREE and can be downloaded here and now he has also released Take Control of Zoom and Take Control of Slack too. Steve at Geeks Corner has restarted his podcast which is a 5-15 min show of his thoughts on tech. Also keep an eye on his site or follow him on Twitter @GeekCorner_uk to watch for regular giveaways. Why not come and join the Slack community? You can now just click on this Slackroom Link to sign up and join in the chatter! Slacker @MacJim has a family friendly Flickr group for listeners to share photos because the Darkroom channel in the Slack has become so popular - if you're interested head over to to the Essential Apple Flickr and request an invitation. On this week's show: MARK CHAPPELL @oceanspeed, @essentialapple and @essentialmac on Twitter Puts Essential Apple related stuff on YouTube Co-host of the The Watching Men Podcast with Karl Madden JAMES ORMISTON In charge of the Essential Apple Flickr Also on Flickr as thesrpspaintshop Has videos on Vimeo NICK RILEY @spligosh on Twitter very occasionally. Sometimes appears on Bart Busschots' Let's Talk Apple APPLE Big Sur is officially macOS 11 First Apple Silicon Macs this year, and a two year transition Here's the full list of macOS Big Sur compatible Macs – 9to5 Mac iOS 14 Supported Devices: A Wide Range Of Compatibility – iGeeks Blog One of the Best Features of iPadOS 14- It Runs On 6 Year Old Devices – iPad Insight BootCamp won't make it to Apple Silicon and at least for now virtualisation apps won't be able to run x86 Windows (no news yet regards Microsoft's ARM version) Say Goodbye to Boot Camp and Windows Virtualization on Apple's New ARM-Based Macs – iDrop News Steven Sinofsky full of praise for Apple Apple's Relentless Strategy, Execution, and Point of View – Medium And a piece from directly before WWDC Apple Macintosh and ARM Processors – Medium And a more recent one posted after we recorded Apple Drags The PC Into The 21st Century – Seeking Alpha - Another long article from Sinofsky but it's worth the effort as he lays out a lot of info here Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak talk with Gruber – The Talk Show Craig Federighi talks to Marques Brownlee – 9to5 Mac First Dev Kit Benchmarks appear – 9to5 Mac 13 years of iPhone: Fans line up to get their hands on the very first iPhones – Cult of Mac SECURITY & PRIVACY Apple Reveals Touch ID And Face ID Are Coming To Safari – Forbes WORTH A CHIRP / ESSENTIAL TIPS @Dougee says “If anyone is looking for services like 33mail, I have been using both Anonaddy and Simplelogin. Both are very good services and don't seem to get blocked as often on sites like 33mail.” AnonAddy Simple Login GhoSTORIES – a new podcast by Pete Knowlton of Ghostery – Anchor NEMO'S HARDWARE STORE (1:17:31) Freemove Collapsible Trekking Poles – Amazon $35 US / Not in the UK store. AirTurn Stands, Tablet Holders and more – Nemo says “they have a ton of useful and affordable products for every possible situation, and that the MANOS clamp works with all iPads and all iPhones!” Probably best to either buy direct or search Amazon as there is a wide selection of clamps, pedals etc. Essential Apple Recommended Services: Pixel Privacy – a fabulous resource full of excellent articles and advice on how to protect yourself online. Doug.ee Blog for Andy J's security tips. Ghostery – protect yourself from trackers, scripts and ads while browsing. 33mail.com – Never give out your real email address online again. AnonAddy – Disposable email addresses Simple Login – Another anonymisation service Sudo – get up to 9 “avatars” with email addresses, phone numbers and more to mask your online identity. Free for the first year and priced from $0.99 US / £2.50 UK per month thereafter... You get to keep 2 free avatars though. ProtonMail – end to end encrypted, open source, based in Switzerland. Prices start from FREE... what more can you ask? ProtonVPN – a VPN to go with it perhaps? Prices also starting from nothing! Comparitech DNS Leak Test – simple to use and understand VPN leak test. Fake Name Generator – so much more than names! Create whole identities (for free) with all the information you could ever need. Wire – free for personal use, open source and end to end encryted messenger and VoIP. Pinecast – a fabulous podcast hosting service with costs that start from nothing. Essential Apple is not affiliated with or paid to promote any of these services... We recommend services that we use ourselves and feel are either unique or outstanding in their field, or in some cases are just the best value for money in our opinion. Social Media and Slack You can follow us on: Twitter / Slack / EssentialApple.com / Spotify / Soundcloud / YouTube / Facebook / Pinecast Also a big SHOUT OUT to the members of the Slack room without whom we wouldn't have half the stories we actually do – we thank you all for your contributions and engagement. You can always help us out with a few pennies by using our Amazon Affiliate Link so we get a tiny kickback on anything you buy after using it. If you really like the show that much and would like to make a regular donation then please consider joining our Patreon or using the Pinecast Tips Jar (which accepts one off or regular donations) And a HUGE thank you to the patrons who already do. Support The Essential Apple Podcast by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/essential-apple-show This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

amazon social media uk apple zoom microsoft iphone blog security essential switzerland mac apple podcast ipads windows privacy giveaways offers prices wire slack execution arm bootcamp working from home take control say goodbye vimeo vpn wwdc manos nemo macs pinecast flickr big sur dark room ipados voip os x apple silicon protonmail macos big sur marques brownlee amazon affiliate link ghostery glenn fleishman talk apple greg joswiak bart busschots sinofsky us not mark chappell geeks corner karl madden

Paradise Lost (1996 Documentary)

Awesome Movie Year

Play Episode Listen Later May 20, 2020 53:08

The fifth episode of our season on the awesome movie year of 1996 features our pick for the year’s most notable documentary, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills. The second feature collaboration between directors Berlinger and Sinofsky, Paradise Lost premiered at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival before airing on HBO in June 1996. The post Paradise Lost (1996 Documentary) appeared first on Awesome Movie Year.

hbo documentary sundance film festival paradise lost joe berlinger robin hood hills berlinger bruce sinofsky sinofsky paradise lost the child murders awesome movie year

How to scale a startup - Aaron Levie, CEO Box

Startup Grind

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 23, 2019 25:54

A respected technologist and business leader, Steven Sinofsky is an investor, adviser, as well as a Board Partner at the Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm. He began his career at Microsoft in 1989. He started as a software design engineer in development tools. Working in product management, he grew to be one of the company's senior executives on Microsoft Office overseeing six major releases of the full range of Office apps and creation of Office servers. Most recently he served as President of the Windows division through 2012, delivering two major releases of Windows as well as the creation of Microsoft Surface, and Windows Services such as Outlook.com, OneDrive and Identity. Sinofsky frequently comments on products, development and management at his blog, https://medium.learningbyshipping.com, and on twitter, @stevesi. He earned a BA in both computer science and chemistry from Cornell and an MS from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Aaron Levie is the Co-founder of cloud-based content management and collaboration platform.

a16z Podcast: What to Know about GDPR

a16z

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 12, 2018 35:50

with Lisa Hawke (@ldhawke) and Steven Sinofsky (@stevesi) Given concern around data breaches, the EU Parliament finally passed GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) after four years of preparation and debate; it goes into enforcement on May 25, 2018. Though it originated in Europe, GDPR is a form of long-arm jurisdiction that affects many U.S. companies -- including most software startups, because data collection and user privacy touch so much of what they do. With EU regulators focusing most on transparency, GDPR affects everything from user interface design to engineering to legal contracts and more. That's why it's really about "privacy by design", argues former environmental scientist and lawyer Lisa Hawke, who spent most of her career in regulatory compliance in the oil industry and is now Vice President of Security and Compliance at a16z portfolio company Everlaw (she also serves as Vice Chair for Women in Security and Privacy). And it's also why, observes a16z board partner Steven Sinofsky, everyone -- from founders to product managers to engineers and others -- should think about privacy and data regulations (like GDPR, HIPAA, etc.) as a culture... not just as "compliance". The two break down the basics all about GDPR in this episode of the a16z Podcast -- the why, the what, the how, the who -- including the easy things startups can immediately do, and on their own. In fact, GDPR may give startups an edge over bigger companies and open up opportunities, argue Hawke and Sinofsky; even with fewer resources, startups have more organizational flexibility, if they're willing to put in the work. for links mentioned in this episode (and other resources), please go to: https://a16z.com/2018/04/12/gdpr-why-what-how-for-startups/

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80: Not Touching Directly

RGBA

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 25, 2018 37:49

This week we discuss the HomePod reviews, the leaked iPhone boot loader and the threat of non-native apps! Show Notes How a Low-Level Apple Employee Leaked Some of the iPhone's Most Sensitive Code - Motherboard (https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xw5yd7/how-iphone-iboot-source-code-leaked-on-github) Sinofsky on Apple Software - Twitter (https://mobile.twitter.com/stevesi/status/963142502604779520) Inside Apple’s HomePod Audio Lab (http://www.loopinsight.com/2018/02/06/inside-apples-homepod-audio-lab/) Apple HomePod - The Audiophile Perspective + Measurements! : audiophile (https://www.reddit.com/r/audiophile/comments/7wwtqy/apple_homepod_the_audiophile_perspective/) My first HomePod experience: bumpy, but this thing BUMPS - YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhErvE7bQ60&t=0s) Daring Fireball: The Threat to the Mac: The Growing Popularity of Non-Native Apps (https://daringfireball.net/2018/02/non_native_apps_threat_to_mac) Fiery Feeds: RSS Reader on the App Store (https://hipsterpixel.co/r/app/1158763303) Apple HomePod Review: It Only Sounds Great: Reviews by Wirecutter – A New York Times Company (https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/apple-homepod/) Awesome theme song by Jim Kulakowski (http://jimkulakowski.com/) | Photo by Felix Russell-Saw (https://unsplash.com/photos/KJRBI7ekUD8)

iphone touching homepod inside apple sinofsky

a16z Podcast: Beyond CES: Connected Home Devices, Voice, and More

a16z

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 22, 2018 33:02

In this hallway conversation of the a16z Podcast, Benedict Evans and Steven Sinofsky discuss CES 2018 and share insight on what they took from this year's show. How much can you discern each company's "big picture" strategy out of the slew of new products, press releases, and announcements that flood the floor? How do you sort the wheat from the chaff? And beyond the event of CES itself, Evans and Sinofsky analyze the experimentation we're beginning to see in connected consumer electronics for the home. When it comes to the smart home, it seems as though more is better -- more devices, more connectivity, and a single network to rule them all -- but that isn't the case. How (and when) will these devices and appliances -- some of which you only buy new every 10-20 years -- all connect into one system, and what will that platform look like? Which devices will we actually need to be "smart", and what will be today's equivalent of the electric carving knife? Where will new kinds of UI come in; when will a simple GO button be the better option? All this and more in this episode.

voice home connected ces evans devices internet of things ui a16z podcast beyond benedict evans connected home steven sinofsky sinofsky

a16z Podcast: The Strategies and Tactics of Big

a16z

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 7, 2017 29:41

What happens when companies grow exponentially in a short amount of time -- to their organization, their product planning, their behavior towards change itself? In this "hallway conversation", a16z partners Steven Sinofsky and Benedict Evans discuss the business tactics and strategies behind four of the largest tech companies -- Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon -- and how they work from an org perspective. From the outside, these giants can seem composed of disparate entities literally strewn around the globe; it can be hard (sometimes purposefully so) to understand or detect the strategy that knits them all together. But in fact each of these large companies have very specific approaches to organization and strategy, and what's good for Google isn't necessarily right for Amazon or Apple. Evans and Sinofsky discuss the rationale behind each company's org, looking at the tactics and strategies that are best for the underlying platform, how each thinks of its varied product entities, and how their organizations are all designed differently around their core capabilities and products. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

amazon google apple strategy tactics evans references charts andreessen horowitz a16z benedict evans steven sinofsky sinofsky

a16z Podcast: Apple Watch -- Looking for New Things Done in New Ways

a16z

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 5, 2015 22:05

Is the Apple Watch breaking new technological ground, or just another accessory for your iPhone? a16z's Benedict Evans and Board Partner Steven Sinofsky describe their experience with the Apple Watch one month after strapping the elegant piece of electronics to their wrists. So how is it? It's not the one thing you will own that will fill this void in your life like the iPhone did, Evans says. And working out what is useful and pleasurable about the Apple Watch takes time, he says. Even so, Evans finds himself getting there. For example, being prodded by the watch's map app to turn left or right while walking to your destination “is like a super-power,” he says. Sinofsky too is finding his Apple Watch more alluring than he had anticipated. What will really make the Apple Watch a piece of kit that people won't want to part with is the evolution of the apps -- building novel things just for the watch that don't mimic what we do on smartphones or any other existing piece of technology. “We're in the phase right now (with the Apple Watch) where people are trying to figure out how to do the old things in a new way,” Sinofsky says. “And really, you need to do new things in a new way.”

iphone apps evans apple watches new ways new things a16z podcast apple benedict evans sinofsky

a16z Podcast: Tools for How We Work Today

a16z

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 11, 2015 38:00

You've heard the story: Slack began as a game. But almost exactly 1 year ago today, the internal tool the team built for its own use became a team communication app that anyone (and especially enterprises) can use -- and is now one of the fastest growing ones at that. It seems like collaboration is "something software should be helping us with” Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield observes, yet it typically isn't. So what can an app like Slack tell us about how we work today, and how the nature of work will change (fewer meetings? less emails)? Butterfield is joined in this edition of the a16z podcast by a16z board partner Steven Sinofsky and a16z's Benedict Evans. The trio examines the origins of messaging and task management tools (many of which Sinofsky worked on at Microsoft) -- and how the advent of cloud-based services and mobile in particular have changed the requirements for modern workplace tools and information management. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

work microsoft tools workplace collaboration mobile slack references messaging charts andreessen horowitz butterfield a16z work today benedict evans stewart butterfield steven sinofsky sinofsky

a16z Podcast: The Promise (and Nightmare) of Cross-Platform Software

a16z

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 6, 2014 16:31

The announcement by Apple of its new programming language Swift is prompting developers to consider yet again how to tailor their efforts in the battle between iOS and Android. Benedict Evans and Steven Sinofsky discuss the questionable history of cross-platform software, and strategies for startups building apps today. How developers can build great apps on both of the largest mobile platforms. This platform question is one Sinofsky has been grappling with for a very long time, and which he also details in this post: http://blog.learningbyshipping.com/2013/07/08/juggling-multiple-platforms-and-the-bumpy-road-ahead/

apple software android nightmare ios swift wwdc a16z cross platform benedict evans steven sinofsky sinofsky

At The Nexus #55: Ebertz On The Line

At The Nexus

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 24, 2012 51:42

Right before Christmas, Matthew Petschl and Ryan Rampersad discuss the history of Window 8's UX, the first 1-billion view video, where Sinofsky wound up, the new Poke! app, Safari's historical origins, an update on Matt's NASA app and a special review of the feed reader app Press by Ryan, and more!

christmas press window ux safari nexus poke sinofsky ryan rampersad matthew petschl

257: Turn The Page

The Drill Down

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 30, 2012 83:19

This week we begin the slide into the Holidays with Black Friday & Cyber Monday, Microsoft & Apple drop key team members, Apple patents the page turn, Nintendo launches the Wii U, and real (and hoax) Facebook changes make users nervous. Headlines Thanksgiving breaks Instagram records: Over 10M photos shared at a rate of up to 226 per second Black Friday online sales up nearly 21% E-Commerce Spending On Black Friday Tops $1B For The First Time; Amazon Is The Most Visited Retailer Cyber Monday sales up 17% to nearly $2 billion, exceeding forecast Google expands max Gmail attachment size to 10GB, thanks to Google Drive Windows Head Steven Sinofsky to Leave Microsoft Who is Julie Larson-Green? Meet the new head of Windows Sinofsky speaks, denies he tried to take over Windows Phone division Microsoft: We've sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses to date Apple Said to Fire Maps Manager as Flaws Hurt IPhone 5 Audible Book of the Week SEAL Team 666 by Weston Ochse Musical Interlude: Turn The Page by Metallica More Headlines Google Preps Maps App for Apple iPhones Apple Patents the Virtual Page Turn Nintendo: 400K Wii U units sold, 1.2M devices total Nintendo's Wii U Takes Aim at a Changed Video Game World Grand Theft Auto V Trailer #2 Ubisoft's upcoming 'Watch Dogs' Facebook Asks Users If It Can Abolish Their Right To Vote On Future Site Governance snopes.com: Facebook Privacy Notice Fact Check - Facebook Newsroom Subscribe! The Drill Down on iTunes (Subscribe now!) Add us on Stitcher! The Drill Down on Facebook The Drill Down on Twitter Geeks Of Doom's The Drill Down is a roundtable-style audio podcast where we discuss the most important issues of the week, in tech and on the web and how they affect us all. Hosts are Geeks of Doom contributor Andrew Sorcini (Mr. BabyMan), VentureBeat editor Devindra Hardawar, marketing research analyst Dwayne De Freitas, and Startup Digest CTO Christopher Burnor. Occasionally joining them is Box tech consultant Tosin Onafowokan.

DigitalOutbox Episode 142

DigitalOutbox

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 16, 2012

DigitalOutbox Episode 142 DigitalOutbox Episode 142 - Sinofsky leaves Microsoft, Windows Adverts and Liveblog Wars. Playback Listen via iTunes Listen via M4A Listen via MP3 Shownotes 6:57 - Windows head Steven Sinofsky leaves Microsoft 10:47 - Windows 8 Hidden Feature 16:07 - Realtime War 18:06 - Government services go digital 21:53 - Queen chooses Samsung 23:39 - Judges tear into Apple 25:21 - Apple and HTC settle patents litigation 28:43 - UK 4G Auction Rules detailed Picks Ian Evernote - New updates for iOS and Mac - Easier to use - Nice looking Mac app now 100000 Stars - Nice app for Chrome browsers Chris Curiosity - what’s inside the box? - Intriguing game for mobile devices - Someone will eventually find whats inside the box - will it be you?

apple internet news tech government microsoft united kingdom gaming mac ios windows judges gadgets intriguing htc steven sinofsky sinofsky digitaloutbox

31: Chairman of the Beard

Amplified

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 14, 2012 85:30

Jim and Dan discuss Sinofsky's departure and it's effect on Microsoft, US iPhone sales by outlet and the success and importance of the Apple Store, the desperate future of RIM, allergic reactions to the Blackberry, the iPad mini and Apple's decline, the Zoom Multistomp, and the new USB Strat.

music apple microsoft iphone mac recording ios ipads guitar beard blackberry apple stores rim us iphone sinofsky

Heti meteor #70

Heti Meteor

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 14, 2012

GTA, Jawbone vs Nike Fuelband, kell-e ennyi adat. Android mozgások a piacon. Mi történtik Sinofsky és Forstall kapcsán? Apple Mail - toy alkalmazás? Be-TON. Shareware manapság. Nokia here. Video streaming. Tech bulvár.

video tech android gta nokia meteors jawbone heti apple mail shareware nike fuelband sinofsky

AppLoad 138 - Surface, finger in the nose

AppLoad

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 14, 2012 75:39

APPS: Angry Birds Star Wars (surface) (3,99€ / Multi) Send Anywhere (Gratuit & 2,49€ / Android) Google Search, reconnaissance vocale amélioré (Gratuit / iOS & Android) ZAPPS: Skitch (Gratuit / Win8) Park Me Right (Gratuit / Android) Reflection (11,99€ 1 poste / Mac & PC) NEWS: Une XBox Surface ? Documents iWork bientôt éditables en ligne ? Sinofsky quitte Microsoft Nexus 4 vente record ou stocks minuscule ? LIENS : Listes non officielle des apps d'AppLoad: texte (gérée par Tinus) et tableur (gérée par Diophantes). La Data Visualisation des 99 premiers AppLoads (tirée du passionnant et impressionnant sujet "dataviz" de l'excellente Mentine sur le forum. A consulter ! Le générique d'AppLoad a été créé par Daniel Beja. Et les animateurs : - Jérôme - Cédric - Korben Retrouvez cette émission et beaucoup d'autres sur le site NoWatch.net.

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The Future According to Steven Sinofsky

WW 800: Goodbye Heart - Q1 FY23 Earnings, Q2 pessimism, Sinofsky reflects on Windows 8

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[Weekend Drop] Sunil Pai: React and the Meta of the Web

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31: Chairman of the Beard

Heti meteor #70

AppLoad 138 - Surface, finger in the nose