Best Productivity and Technology Stories 2020

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:00
Hello personal productivity enthusiasts and community Welcome to anything but idle the productivity news podcast. Today’s show is brought to you by W3C Web Services. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:10
And I’m Augusto Pinaud.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:11
And we’re your hosts for anything but idle. This is Episode 35. And we are going to be covering productivity and technology news and review 2020. We’re recording this on December 21 2020. And each week, we cover the productivity news headlines of the week. And to do that we usually bring on some panelists and today we have one panelist to help us talk about all things in the personal productivity and technology space. So today we’re bringing Jay Miller onto the show, Jay is a developer advocate at elastic based in San Diego, California, a multi potential potential light, I’m hoping I’m getting that right. Jay enjoys finding unique ways to merge his fascination with productivity, automation, and development to create tools and content to serve the tech community. Welcome to anything but idle Jay. Hey, glad

Unknown Speaker 1:02
to be here.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:03
Glad to have you glad to have you wonderful. And so with that this week’s theme, what I thought we would do this one I thought we would do is to walk us through the the stories of the year, as many can kind of figure out 2020 was a little bit unusual. It was a it was a challenging year for a lot of us. And it was unusual in many regards. But we’ve had a lot of productivity and technology news that’s happened a lot of things have have occurred this year. And so gousto you want to kick us off with what you believe is kind of the biggest story this year.

Augusto Pinaud 1:39
The virtual shows, you know, as as a person who started his life, doing sales, you know, I remember the big shows, and I remember the apple event and all these events being big deals, when the beginning of 2020 start and we got COVID and all this what is going to happen with this shows and we saw Apple we saw Google with Samsung, we saw Microsoft going into this virtual events from good to better, because really, there was just there was but but we are going to remember only the good ones that got to better. There was some that were not that great way what happened. But But even we were able to experience how Apple did the first one, you know, then he gets better and better even to the blunders, because and and Google did theirs and Samson did an incredible job was their events too. So that was something that I don’t think any of us will have considered before 2020, that it was going to be an option to watch this event live this way everybody live instead of having some people who was going to be here, and we were really jealous about it.

Unknown Speaker 2:49
I mean, as someone who like my job as a developer advocate is to go to shows like this, go to conferences, go to all the types of meetups and things like that. I think we look at the larger shows for inspiration on how we can do things. And this was like the hardest one, because at the end of the day, like no one’s got the production budget of Apple, Google and Samsung. So for us, it’s like, Okay, how can we take these massive productions that they’re doing and downscale them for the local, you know, meetup, or, you know, the online conference that, you know, for a lot of these companies, a lot of these foundations and organizations, they rely on these events to stay afloat, and so the next year, and so it’s like super important, but yet, we’re all like rolling with the punches and doing some crazy stuff. And honestly, that’s kind of been like, the coolest thing for me to notice is that presentations change, I saw developer conferences where people were doing like, scripted talks in almost like, full featured production sets. And I mean, they look like, you know, everyone’s favorite High School Musical play, but like, at the same time, it was it was causing us to think differently and to do things, completely unheard of, in terms of presenting, whether you were presenting, you know, for your favorite programming language, your favorite productivity tool at a meet up, or whether you’re introducing a brand new chip architecture, as in the case of apple.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 4:26
That’s certainly the case that COVID-19 and the the proliferation of the downstream, you know, consequences of that created all kinds of changes in the way in which we work, and how we manage our personal lives. And I think that ends up being kind of the story of the year, All told, I know that you know, gusto and I produced productivity summit in 2019. And my mission behind that whole concept was to have a live remote conference dedicated to personal growth. activity and to see us come into 2020. And we ended up having to just say, you know what, because of COVID we’re not going to do it this year, in and amongst all of the other events that were happening in various stages, right, they were there were people who are doing pre recorded things, small things, very big things. And I just don’t want to be in that space, it’s a very different environment to be in that wall, everything was kind of happening. And, and so we’re coming back next year, you know, in, in a different, you know, bigger way, hopefully with productivity summit 2021. And, and it’s been really good because a whole bunch of new technology came on board to be able to compensate for COVID-19. And so now all of a sudden, I have this like smorgasbord of opportunities in terms of technologies to use next year that I don’t think we would have had had this not happen. So like a little bit of silver lining there in that way. Okay. So let’s talk about some of the bigger ticket items that happened because of them. Let’s start really with you know, zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google meet Slack, you name it, the the proliferation of virtual meeting software.

Augusto Pinaud 6:14
And I think that’s a big, big thing that nobody can ignore. You know, I did begin, I said the same year ago, 12 months ago, if I wanted to talk to or a client wanted to talk to you or you wanted to talk to anybody, you were a text or a phone call away. Now, all these same five minute things. So yeah, let’s jump quickly on assume or meet or a team’s call quickly. Even. I’ve been impressed. Christmas coming and we are not traveling. So we’re not going to see family. And it’s been really interesting scene. Not the Junkers, but the older generation. Okay, my parents may be looking for, well, we can do the dinner over assuming you’re like, no, going to dinner, over soup. But for them. I mean, we have been doing some dinner with my father in law every Saturday since Father’s Day, because my father in law to tell the story. We have been he don’t use a computer, he don’t have a computer, he dictate to somebody that type an email to you. And when he discovered for Father’s Day, soom, he went and bought a computer, so just he can do so he has an iPad, so he can assume without every weekend and have dinner with us. But for him, it was my mother in law, my parents, they want to have Christmas together. So they are okay, passing that barrier. And it sounds like you know, okay, well, whatever, we do it over soon, but it is any gigantic leap that a lot of people did into being comfortable into this talk, you know, people who will have not, you will not have been able to convince him to do FaceTime, you know, before COVID now are talking to you about earlier, let’s do a zoom. And we were talking about this from anonymous. Oh, yeah, I read that Sue is going to have no time limit during Christmas. Wow.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:08
But that 40 that 40 minute time limit is a is a is a savior in many in many families.

Jay Miller 8:16
I refuse to do any zoom calls with family members at this point. It’s I think, you know, we talked about the idea of in new technology coming in and changing how we’ve worked, especially now that most of us have gone remote. And we’re having to do a lot of things differently. It’s interesting the number of meetings that have just crept into our overall like work ecosystem, to the point where now like, my team is actively trying to reduce the number of meetings that we’re having. It’s like, hold on pause. When’s the next meeting next week? Can we push it out another two weeks? Okay, great. And just just testing to see what we’re able to do. But one of the things that I noticed, as we were talking about all of these different technologies, there were two that I noticed were missing from our original notes. And I think it’s interesting that to me, one is an up and coming product. And one what happened the one that’s up and coming is Discord. Mini all is well and that’s the thing is a lot of us were saying all the kids. I sat in multiple conferences this year that chose to use discord as their unified collaborative tool. I’m in discord every single day for work, not for business. And it’s it’s interesting that even earlier this year, and I’ll put a link in our chat here. We saw like discord rebrand and reshift their focus to be one that was more towards community not towards gamers. And it was something that We like once you started seeing it, you started hearing other people that you would never think knew what discord was now saying like, Oh, yeah, hey, we have a discord channel where we can talk and share, you know, tropes and just funny stuff. And we can even talk business. And the other one that was in there that or that wasn’t in there was Skype. And I feel like beforehand, when people thought of calling via the internet, they thought of Skype, well just hit me up on Skype or something like that. I feel like Microsoft really missed the mark, when zoom came in. And as you mentioned, it goes to like, your, you know, you have family members that have never owned a computer, you have family members that intentionally do not use a computer that decided, you know, what, I’m going to go get a computer for video conferencing. And had this happen three years ago, had this happen four years ago, Skype would have been in position for this to be the only thing out there available. And now it feels like they’ve almost reached irrelevance. And now zoom has taken their place. So I just wonder, like, what are your thoughts on the idea of like, communities that weren’t focused on doing business or, you know, the community space now getting involved, but then also, the businesses that were available for them kind of bowing out, we just saw slack get acquired by Salesforce. So like, that’s a big name and a big company to put behind what we thought was going to be the darling child a collaborative talk. And now it seems like they’re going to be doing whatever Salesforce has intended for them. What are your thoughts on like, just the shifting shifting of the landscape?

Augusto Pinaud 11:55
Well, no, it is interesting. And as you were mentioned in Skype, you made me think when my first daughter was born, 2008, we got my father in law, a phone, a Skype phone that has the camera, okay, it was the first one. So we’re talking about Asian technology. But he was able to do that. And that one, he didn’t care. And what the difference was for him was the pandemic that he could not do a lot of the social life, I think that’s what that was, maybe the element that many of us didn’t consider, it was not necessarily the work part, the people who needed to work and communicate this way was going to do it, for good or for bad. I think what this video technologists turned into is into that socialization part that was the it turned into, you know, now you can play board games and things that it’s not, that you could not do before is that you did not thought the possibility to do them before. And, and as you said, is change the way we approach and the way we’re using the same tools for for much for better.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 13:11
You know, some of the things that happened this year, I think, precipitated the movement of a lot of these companies to make strategic choices because of political reasons. And so I feel like even withstanding the fact that Facebook is currently you know, basically getting the federal government and all of these state agencies coming down on them for purchasing WhatsApp and, and Instagram years ago, here goes another purchase of a fairly large organization with high valuation that is not Salesforce, necessarily buying a competitor but buying into a market. And the the Curiosity there is whether or not regulators are gonna start looking at these deals as to whether or not the purchase of these technologies are for users are for market share, and whether or not that actually has an impact on their on their ability to grow, going forward, which I would imagine that there’s some need, for us, at least in the United States to cap some of the growth on these very large technology firms so that we can have greater diversity, and really greater equity across the board, both in the startup founder space, but also in the development of productivity technologies, that provides all of the tools that we need in order to be productive. And like looking at it through that productivity and technology lens is the is the thing that I think is really most unique about all of these because the idea behind like Salesforce buying Slack, for example, really does provide greater productivity for Salesforce, you know, they’re gonna they’re gonna really be able to do more with with slack internally, but is are the organizations that are integrated with slack that are also CRMs Are they really truly going to be able to now into slack as an organization. And that’s a huge decision that a lot of them have to make that because they were like, Oh, this is so cool as the cool Silicon Valley Tech, you know, software that we all use for communication and project collaboration. Now it’s not, because people have to decide whether or not they’re going to be bought into Salesforce as a whole. From from an from like, a different kind of angle. My my thought is that Skype, Microsoft really put the nail in that coffin themselves, right, because they said they were going to be shutting down Skype in deference to Microsoft Teams. And that process seems to be still going forward. So as of, you know, July of next year, it seems like Skype is going to be gone. And all of the pieces of Skype will be inside of Microsoft Teams, unless I’m missing something. I think that’s probably why Skype wasn’t pushed stronger. Although, then Microsoft in a recent Windows Update pushed a Skype little toolbar icon. So I’m not quite sure why they why they keep like cropping up Skype in different places. But it seems as though to me that Microsoft wants teams to be that tool. And even with the effect that now you know, they’ve got these free tier, this free tier of Microsoft Teams for people to use in personal and family life. It’s starting to feel to me like Google and their communications technologies, where they feel a little bit scattershot, and not quite knowing where they’re going with. You know, it’s like, Yes, here it goes, dude. Oh, here it goes. Google Chat. Oh, wait here goes meet Oh, wait, here goes, you know, and they’re just keep throwing things at the fan and hoping something sticks. But it all just keeps getting sliced up and thrown around the room. And and so I’m curious what Microsoft’s ultimate end play here is, I think it’s still teams, I think it’s, you know, building that that technology out. But they probably have a strong enough brand with Skype that they want to continue to, like, pull some of that in, I thought they were actually going to maybe use the Xbox platforms for more video streaming stuff, because the kids already use it. And not just the kids, I mean, lots of adult gamers, so all of you who are adult gamers, they’re using it also, I know, my I have lots of siblings, and I know, several of my siblings who are, who are who are using those kinds of gaming platforms. So it has the technology, I think that’s why discord seems like a natural fit also, right? You know, if you’re, if you’re doing a lot of that kind of, of streaming work in the gaming space, it makes a lot of sense. So what are some of the other big stories of this year?

Augusto Pinaud 17:38
Well, what continue is our dear friends of Google and couple of well, there are more than a couple of things on Google. But I think there is a couple that were really important to mention. One was how G Suite becomes workspace. And there has been a lot of love, and not love and many other kind of comments about this transformation. And they I can think they’re pretty or not prettier, or whatever. But I think regardless of this, it was a good change. I agree with what they did change in some of those icons and make it a little bit more consistent to, to a whole thing. And to make it even that they are technically product giving the impression to the people that they are now a one thing, I think with the way they were before. And G Suite was more like, okay, we throw all these things into a box. They’re all different, but you can work with them together. And now they’re trying to produce a product that is looked like this product has all these components. And I think that’s really, really positive. Yeah, well,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 18:45
they changed a lot of the interface in order to be able to bring the pieces together. And that’s that’s why it’s workspace now as opposed to just being a suite of products. I mean, the name change matched the new modality of working that we’re now seeing.

Unknown Speaker 19:02
I think there’s two things on here. I think that one, the fact that To be frank, I feel like Google in terms of office productivity, has been getting their lunch fed to them, like for the last few years. I think office 365 is just a more preferred method to larger enterprise companies, an area that Google really wants to get into. I think that in terms of the things that at least my generation, like the millennials out there that are now becoming into middle management, a little bit of senior management, they’re able to make a lot of these decisions. We all grew up having to use Microsoft Word. So for us to have that. That initial thought pattern we go there. In terms of the next generation. I think there is a lot of opportunity there. The Chromebook generation was a thing. I know a lot of students now are using a lot of the Google Productivity Suite as a whole. And I think that this is a play to set up for that generation entering the workforce. And when we think of tools like Gmail, Google Calendar, all of those things, I think of personal tools, even when you had G Suite, it was like, Well, I have a business license. So but it’s still kind of just me, maybe a few other people. Like, if they want to get out of that space and get deeper into companies that are that require their own special licensing, then they have to make these changes, they have to shift the conversation away from Gmail is my personal email. And, you know, outlook is where I go to do business. And it really does need to be this. I go to Google, you know, workspace, and I have my calendar, I have outlook in a browser, basically. And I’m able to do all of my things from there. I feel like that was the big thing that is pushing them in that direction. I feel like they lost the last generation. And they’re really trying to set up for a better battle on the next one.

Augusto Pinaud 21:16
That’s, that’s really interesting, because I agree with you. And I didn’t understood why they took so long into into constantly dated on those words that you’re describing. Because for a lot of people think a lot of generation A lot of people think, you know, oh, yeah, Google is my personal, but I go out, look for work. And it’s really amazing opportunity. But I hope now that more and more businesses are getting into that, and getting into Google as their platform of choice. I don’t know, if they, I think the line with Outlook was okay, you can use anything and use Outlook. And Microsoft has been making that line a little bit more bold. So I don’t know, if you’re coming here, we want you to leave in the Microsoft ecosystem, noting to your external things, yes, you can connect them, but really come and leave in our Microsoft ecosystem. And I think that’s going to start creating a little bit of a division that will produce in the middle opportunities for others.

Unknown Speaker 22:22
And to be clear last year, like, no one would have said, I want to use Outlook. Like that was never the conversation. It was always like, my business uses outlook, our company uses outlook, we have to use Outlook, like we don’t have a choice. Now, Outlook actually looks good, like office 365 is usable. Some might argue that, but it is a lot better than where it was when it was like, like, I could never imagine, you know, two years ago saying working for a company that’s like, Oh, yeah, no, we just use all Google products now. Like, if you weren’t in Silicon Valley, like that just wasn’t a thing. It was like you use Outlook, you have, you know, enterprise licenses. And you have to just figure out, like, how you’re going to deal with that and move on and have your Gmail accounts for all your personal stuff and your work account at you know, Jay Miller, whatever, whatever.com to handle all of your business stuff.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 23:22
And and now, I mean, the the thing that I think Microsoft did really well was they finally brought outlook on the Mac parity, more feature consistency. I mean, before, I would constantly have to say, yeah, I’m sorry, that feature is not quite available on the Mac to a lot of my higher end clients. And they are using MAC’s, you know, and they’re, they’re in a they’re in an exchange environment. They’re in a 365 environment, but they’re not able to use all of the features of their of their, their their tools, because they’re, they’re not on Windows. And finally, Microsoft heard the cry, and finally got that going. I think a little bit of it was also their mobile apps. I think their mobile apps have really risen to the level either. Yes, yes. So I think that’s all a positive across the board.

Augusto Pinaud 24:09
Yeah. And we need to remember again, now they’re finally getting there. But it took them a while to to really get those mobile apps to do that level at the beginning. They were not there.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 24:20
Yeah. And I’m in the in the state where I’m reviewing all of the various productivity apps for email, calendar, and otherwise in my system for the new year. And I always like to kind of kick the tires, but I’ve been I’ve had an ongoing concern about managing email and having an application for those that manages across and in years past I’ve used Newton mail, and you know, I was burned, you know, when they when they shut down? Yeah, exactly. They shut down. Right, exactly. So I you know, like, there’s still probably the best non, you know, Microsoft Apple Google product out there for this functionality. So if anybody watching or listening has suggestions, please send them my way. But I’m, I’m almost thinking that outlook ends up being the best tool for this. And since I have a 365 license, I can I can do that. But you know, it’s, it’s, it’s one of those things where I’m like, do I really want to restrict myself in the outlook space? And, you know, I train on Outlook. And, you know, I do all kinds of things with Outlook with my clients, but I don’t use it myself. And that’s a purposeful decision. And now I’m having to make that, you know, if really, if Google workspace had an email application for the desktop, I’d be there in a heartbeat. Right?

Unknown Speaker 25:40
Did you just willingly invite your audience to email you about why their favorite email application is the one you should go with?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 25:49
Yes, exactly.

Unknown Speaker 25:51
person.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 25:53
I get the emails. It’s okay. I I enjoy. I enjoy hearing from all of you. So so. So I think I think this is one of those things that where we we will see applications like woven that has, you know, created to be a layer on top of Google as well as the Microsoft 365 calendar, we’re going to see more of these applications coming into 2021. But I think in 2020, I think it was really good to see this crop of new applications. There are several I mean, from superhuman to there. What’s the other one that I that I recently came across? And then we have, hey, that launched in the process with the Basecamp, folks. And so we have a whole ecosystem of people trying to capitalize on email and managing email Well, in a, in a in a kind of virtual environment. Here. It looks like Jamie’s asking, have any of you tried, hey, mail from Basecamp? And as I just mentioned, Yes, I have. And it’s a you know, as it notes on its website is a highly opinionated platform. It’s its own email service, that by itself kind of removes it from my, you know, desired list of things to use. But I can see where a lot of people will want to use it. And what are others opinions of, hey,

Unknown Speaker 27:10
tried it? Man. I mean, this to me and I, hi, Jamie, I have feelings. Um, my biggest my biggest complaint with hay is not what it is trying to do. It is why it is trying to do it. I feel like it’s trying to solve a problem that ultimately just kind of hides a problem and doesn’t actually solve it. I think instead of teaching people good email practices, instead tries to force as you mentioned, opinionated practices. I tried it, I’ve learned that my systems for managing my email have kept me sane. So there was no reason to introduce a bunch of systems that completely changed how I had to do email into it. So if you’re not sure how to work your email, by all means, give it a shot. If you’ve already got an email system in place that seems to be working for you, if you try to change it, I think you’re going to find more problems than you’ll find solutions.

Augusto Pinaud 28:21
You know, I for one, try an app called spike, that it works on the Mac, it works on my iPad. And it basically tried to turn email into a more text based communication, you know, up and down, left and right, like a chat. I mean, like a chat, right. And it was fun, it is fantastic. It is the only missing link to that thing to turn into my main email address is the integration of their notes. And the task was my other, you know, was external, because the problem is, it’s a bucket, and it’s tied up in there, and you cannot get his stuff easily out of that. And I have learned enough years doing this game, that if you don’t let me get my info out, I don’t want to budge, buddy.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 29:05
Well, I will say this, if the spike folks are watching, please let me turn off all of the other rubbish in the interface. I mean, such a great application such a great opportunity with spike, and the fact that you can connect multiple email services to the to the platform, they’re pushing out new features, and they’re really doing a bang up job and you know, I give them great credit. And that’s one of the other tools in that ecosystem, you know, among superhuman and spike and Newton and so on, so forth. Great independent product. My biggest problem with it is that it’s got a lot of visual clutter, and and so I just really can’t deal with it. And when I’m dealing with email, I want to put the blinders on and deal with it. I’m a high email traffic environment. So I need to be able to pound through, you know, hundreds of emails a day. I cannot have you, you know, showing me files and bothering me about you know, these other little calendar doodads, and you know, All of that stuff in the environment really does. And they’ve done a pretty good job of, of giving you more ability to put things away. But I want nothing in my environment when I’m processing my email. And so, you know, if you guys are watching or listening, please just let me turn it all off. I don’t need I don’t need your opinionation in the software, I need just email reply, forward, delete. That’s what I need in my system. Not even new message because I don’t need to send emails in your program, I just need to reply forward and delete. And there was actually the beighton folks, they had the Gmail game, the boomerang folks at Baden, they created that email game. And that was one of the best tools ever. I really, really enjoyed. enjoyed it. Jamie’s asking, what is the the one killer feature which is missing from the majority of email service? In your opinion? Who wants to take that one first?

Unknown Speaker 30:54
I mean, is there a feature that that’s missing? I think that the thing that we tend to forget is that email is one of the oldest internet technologies that is still around. And that is a good thing. It’s very robust. It’s very simple. And the things that we’ve noticed have been problems have been taken care of by individual systems. I think that there’s an attention issue, however, that that is a bigger problem. And that’s the thing that I think that companies like, hey, are trying to address, I use a tool called sanebox. for that very reason where not even for the fact of the things in my inbox being like, important or not important, but just having the ability to quickly triage the tool, the stuff that I’m getting in on a regular basis, I have it in folders so that I can go in once a day, only once a day, unless I’m actually going back and trying to find some information. And then which I think Google’s email system is fine for that. And then I just go through process my new email, deal with it once and once only. And then I’m done. I don’t think there needs to be a killer feature for essentially words that are going from one person to another, I would, I would counter that by saying what’s the one killer feature with sending a letter that needs to be added to the US postal system. Like when we finally hack that I think we can turn to email.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 32:27
I will say though, the US Postal Service adding the scanning feature, so you can see the mail before shows up. That was that was a killer feature.

Unknown Speaker 32:34
Moving and if they only had a spam filter, like it would be it’d be the

Augusto Pinaud 32:39
you know, it is if you watch this, he said if you now have the Mandalorian they talk about a certain figure in there. And they say I know this is the third generation and we figured it out we took the the human was the weakest link, you know this and I think the supply perfectly into their hands for Jamie’s looking for

Raymond Sidney-Smith 32:57
those are not no spoilers. I have not yet finished Mandalorian

Augusto Pinaud 33:03
spoiler, I’m just saying what we need for email is to remove the weakest link that is a human.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 33:08
Yeah, I think I think, again, going back to Jamie Jay’s point here, I think that the the, the kind of killer, well, if you want to call it killer feature, the best features of email is the ability to reduce garbage email, email you do not want. And I think that’s one of the features in Hey, that I actually really like the and there have been various services that have tried this over the years, in essence, a permission based a permission only based email system where email is not received unless it actually is something that you accept. And this is again, kind of the same as the US Postal Service. And that’s why I continue to talk about email as it is, like a piece of mail being received just faster, in the sense that I can send email to anyone. But that doesn’t mean I have to reply to all of them. You know, if I get a piece of mail, and I don’t like it, I could throw it in the trash. And no one cares. You know, like, it may be the person who sent it cares, but there’s not really an understanding in email that I don’t you don’t deserve a reply from me just because you sent me an email. And just like if you send me a letter, you don’t deserve a reply from me. It’s not, it’s not, it’s just not a reality. And that’s how I’ve always operated. And that’s how I always will operate because I get a lot of junk email, and I get a lot of junk mail, in the mail, you know, as well, and I’ve done as much as I can to get rid of those things. One of the other things that I think is is really powerful in email is the ability to create some level of, of templating of the of the email system. And most you know, of the major companies of Google and Microsoft, they have the ability for you have templates, whether that be email signatures or a full template system in there. It would be really nice if the the protocol itself allowed for that and it doesn’t and that’s fine. I think that otherwise email as an its own method as its own, you know, protocol, I think works. I mean, it’s worked since the 1960s. So, you know, I think that we’re, we don’t really need that many more features in email, I think the various applications that give us functionality, for example, it I would love for a feature within email client to surface tasks, so that it could understand that an email was an action based email, and then be able to grab that using either, you know, GPT, three, or some other function to be able to then write the task out in my mind that my task management system, that would be really cool, but that’s on the client side, that’s not necessarily in the email service itself, the service, I just want to deliver my emails, stapley consistently and reliably. So I think I hope that kind of answers the question in at least from from our opinions. Um, go ahead, get J.

Unknown Speaker 35:56
I was gonna say, last thing, if there was one feature that I would ask for, I think that granular notification on email replies, like, there are some emails, and I will say, full disclosure, I’m a super human user. So yes, they have kind of that one marketing tool that every marketing company is used from the dawn of time, which is a tracking pixel to tell whether or not you’ve opened an email or not. I think one thing that could be done to fix that, is to make it so that I could easily group kind of like how sanebox does with like, saying, no replies are saying CC, if I could just say, if I messaged this person, when they messaged me back, I want a notification within the certain timeframe, or I want a notification from all of this list of people, but not from this other list of people or people that are not on this list, it can go and it can wait for me to process it when I do my normal processing. I think that’s the one feature that I would really like from email that I haven’t really seen outside of like your traditional VIP list.

Augusto Pinaud 37:04
And you know, it’s interesting, because one of the things when I work with clients, that I tell again, going back to the human factor, one of the things that I work with my clients is, where did you check email and stop checking email everywhere else? Because one of the things I found is people open email and or phone, open email, under tablets, open email, on the laptop, open email on the deck stuff that I thought it was a discussion. I mean, I understand productivity experts were discussing this 2003 but but this is what mainstream is now. And he’s like, No, no, no, no, stop doing that. Open your VIP only on their phone, everything else open when you get to your laptop or your tablet, or whatever you use to process email. And it sound likes. But we that discussion is still real. And we we productivity into CS thinking about three step ahead. And a lot of people is finally getting to that issue that getting I understand. It was discussed on the productivity people 10 years ago, but that is the reality. So some of these features are awesome, but they are 2030, not 2021 2020. I’m already done with 2020. So we are already we’re just like

Unknown Speaker 38:27
this year, we’re moving.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 38:30
Alright, what are some of the other big stories that we have in the rundown? So we can move on? Talk about

Augusto Pinaud 38:40
No, I I want to talk about about the surface duo. Okay, because that was a surprise device for me. Okay, I live on an iPad, I live on a Mac, I considered that day that I bought that Mac a happy day. The first Mac I and I have zero interest on living my iOS ecosystem at this point. But I’m going to admit that that Microsoft duel really got my attention to the point that I was disclosed, to put my credit card and get one to play. So if it’s not because I picked the wrong theme for 2021. There was none buying unnecessary technology junk, I will have that. But let’s say something that we are recording this on December 21st. And there is only 10 days.

Unknown Speaker 39:31
I think you’re in the same position of so many other people though, where they said, oh, wow, that looks really interesting. not interesting enough for me to buy immediately, but I will keep an eye out. And I think that ultimately that’s I don’t want to say that Microsoft is okay, you know, I’ll say Microsoft is losing this battle. I’m in the foldable space, something that a lot of people thought was going to be the thing of two 2020 which, yeah, they were off a little bit, a lot of other things happened. But the foldable space, you had Samsung doing one thing you had all of these other companies Huawei Xiaomi, they all had these, these foldable phones and these foldable like archetypes. And then you had a big name, well, another big name like Microsoft, say, we’re going to do it differently, we’re going to give you two screens, we’re not going to give you like the one screen that’s folded, we’re going to really give you a tool that allows you to have a really thick iPad Mini in one hand, or a normal sized iPad Pro, if you opened it up. And at the end of the day, I don’t think it really did what Microsoft wanted it to. And they have swung and missed so many times with hardware in the mobile industry. I’m just glad they didn’t go with a with a Windows OS on it. And they just they said, Okay, we’re gonna just we’re gonna do like a, an Android thing. And, you know, slap windows all over it. But I don’t know, I think the surface laptop is probably their best hardware device. I used one for several years. But I think the more they’re trying to play off of that with gimmicks, they’re, they’re going to lose focus. Right now Microsoft is a services and surface product. And if they double down on that, and I guess, Xbox two, that’s a big thing. And GitHub, that’s another big thing. Here’s a problem, they have a lot of big things. And the more that they try to add to it with these little swings, the more it muddies up their reputation, they could have had a really good year this year, Microsoft Teams was great. Xbox series one, it seems to have missed a lot of the problems that the PlayStations had, and it’s been great. Their Xbox game pass apparently is a really good incentive for people to buy into that market. As your services are increasing. They’re winning on so many areas, the surface duo was a big loss. And I think that at the end of the day, they just need to stop trying and focus on the things that they’re already doing so well. and maintain that leadership position there,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 42:18
I’ll give the I’ll give the devil’s advocate perspective, which is that a lot of these companies have to put their, you know, dip their toe in these waters to see what will stick. And in this particular case, I think that the reality is is that for Microsoft to try and Android, you know, to screen, you know, foldable, it wasn’t a phone, but it had a SIM card device, let’s call it device is not particularly that far of a reach, it didn’t land in the market. And I don’t think it landed because of its price point, it’s just really overly priced 15 $100 for for a, you know, a two screen folding device, what I what I think is going to happen is akin to how, you know, Bill Gates walked out on stage with that touchscreen computer, you know, way back in the day, you know, I can’t like name a date here, but I’m thinking it was, you know, late 90s. And, you know, everybody laughed at him, you know, and this, this is now you know, a touchscreen laptop. And the idea of a foldable device that that is multi, you know, use is now quite common. You know, we have Chromebooks all over the place, we have laptops that do this. And so I really think that this, it’s really, it’s really important for us to remember that some of these, you know, plays in the market is just to kind of like, dip their toes in the water to kind of see whether or not things stick. And if they don’t, it’s really no harm no fail for Microsoft, I mean, really what you know, they’re gonna write that off on their on their balance sheet, who cares. But I think it gives the the Android Market actually a lift, in the sense that Microsoft had to do a lot of work with the Android project to make that work. And now those features have been shown to work out in the wild. And even with a small user base using those things, they’ve gotten a lot of data back. And I think, I think Microsoft is working really hard with their services to make 365 run really, really well across the Android ecosystem. And they want to make sure that continues to be the case, even to the effect that someday when you can, you know, when everybody has you know, in the high end market has two iPads and they want to turn their iPad into a keyboard. Now a two screen concept even on iPad iOS versus Android will then just be like kind of a natural like yeah, of course I would do that. I really see this having some bleed over effect into the into the market in those cases.

Unknown Speaker 44:46
I think the sadder story from Microsoft hear was that the Surface Studio three got delayed till 2021 to me if they want to focus on a hardware product, Apple literally like jump the ship With this, like, massive performance increase, and the thing that everyone was mad about was that you still couldn’t touch the screen, you can run iPad apps on it, but you can’t touch the screen. So Microsoft has solved this problem, they’ve given you this beautiful display on a clean interface, with a built in tablet support a funky little dial thing for accessory love. And on top of all of that, you can touch the screen, the thing that people have been asking for for so long digital creators want this so bad. We don’t want two screens that pulled up like a book, we want a really big surface that we can play on, and then take our surface pros and take them to the coffee shop once we’re allowed to go into coffee shops again.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 45:48
Yeah, so so Jamie’s noting here, that he’s a dotnet developer, and he doesn’t fully understand where Microsoft is going on with their hardware. And he’s a dotnet dev who runs Linux as his daily driver. And so clearly, you know, Microsoft isn’t doing a very good job of communicating where they’re going with their hardware. But I think that, you know, again, it ends up being if they’re, if their apps, and their services work really well, across the the current ecosystem, which is really, you know, Android windows 10. Seven, and then the iOS and Mac OS environment. No longer seven, they

Unknown Speaker 46:27
dropped support on that.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 46:29
Oh, well, no, they have they have a lot. Yeah, they have they have, they’re still doing patches of security patches. So I consider that. I mean, so windows 10 has now overtaken seven as the as the dominant OS right on in the windows space. But there’s still a lot of seven users out there surprising to me. Not, but there’s still a lot of them out there,

Augusto Pinaud 46:49
especially big corporations who have managed to get their own version of their intern one to leave.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 46:56
Well, they’ve paid for that extended support cycle. So

Unknown Speaker 46:59
as a veteran I’m sure there’s still Windows XP machines out there somewhere.

Augusto Pinaud 47:04
Not only that, I can guarantee you there any people not wanting to update No, no, I don’t want to update my You were great.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 47:11
You know what, what fits into this into this conversation is I recently bought one of the Raspberry Pi for hundreds. And we’re seeing more and more Linux devices coming into the market, even to the effect that we have Chromebooks. Now with with crostini now baked in, you’re capable of just turning on a Linux distro in your Chromebook, we’re gonna see more and more of that kind of change the market maybe a little bit

Unknown Speaker 47:37
was Raspberry Pi, not on our list of things of 2020? Because I mean, I feel like they’ve won I mean, they’ve won in my heart and in my wallet. I mean, I’ve got I’ve got gadgets and gizmos for days. Plenty. Yeah. 400. The 400 is the example of where, in my opinion, in terms of hardware, companies like Google and Microsoft, if they want to get into an area, they need to get into that area, there is a massive shift in focus in making compute cheaper, and cheaper and cheaper. It started with Amazon with AWS services. In most places, if you can afford an enterprise license from Microsoft, and you don’t have some type of crazy partnership with Google on the back end, you’re running some type of AWS service. So in my opinion, if they want to work in an area that’s getting cheaper and cheaper, they need to be looking at hardware that’s going to fit an industry where we have electric, you know, we have internet connectivity becoming more and more prevalent across these smaller areas that have traditionally been underserved with projects like Project Loon, and all of those things. We need to beginning not just Chromebooks, but like you said Raspberry Pi, four hundreds, some type of competing device, I think Nvidia launched their own like micro PC type competitive tool, it’s like 50 bucks. It’s amazing that all of these other companies are positioning for that. But then you have these other companies that are trying to compete in the, I guess, luxury compute area that Apple has had a foothold like a stronghold on. And in my opinion, I feel like that’s just not the place where they’re going to win. They’re going to win by saying, sure, if you have the money to buy this fancy, you know, iPad Pro, and you know, an iMac and a $10,000 computer, like go the apple route. But if you just need to get something done and you don’t care how much it costs, get a Raspberry Pi 400 get some type of surface book that caters to that audience get this, you know, small system on a chip device, where you can program and it’s not going to break the bank.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 49:57
Yeah, um, Jamie’s noting that he’s teaching I’m guessing brother or mother a little on a little Python Python three on a Raspberry Pi 400. And I’m guessing this really leads the the Raspberry Pi foundation to the next kind of next natural point, which is probably a laptop form factor and being able to put a screen on on it so that you can, you can bring that into kind of full scale use. We have also a whole bunch of E ink readers that are running Android, you know, I’ve seen some Android nine Android 10 e ink devices. And with just the implementation of a casing that includes a keyboard, you bring computing to a lot more people on a very, very low cost device. So I fully echo your sentiment, Jay, I think we have a lot of opportunity there. I will say though, that Microsoft, Google, they want a part of the luxury market, and they’re going to probably waste a lot of dollars trying to take a share of that even if it’s a small share, because then they get to they get to showcase some splashy products to the executives that they want to showcase in their press releases. So I think they’re going to probably continue to waste that money. Just for that purpose. There’s, there’s there’s a there’s a value to their shareholders in saying so and so uses our high end, you know, Surface Pro X,

Augusto Pinaud 51:18
but I think there is also a big difference if we go back, you know, with the stories because I don’t remember them, I did not buy any of those devices ever. You know, when we when we when those you know, when the for the love of God, the name is escaping me the cheap, the cheap laptops that were like the laptops attend each of these books. When the netbooks came out the Yeah, they were cheap. Yeah, they were, but they were not fully capable. I mean, they were slow. They were, yeah, some people can make it work. But they were not really a substitute for a computer. I mean, it was something you could use. One of the difference now is that any of these Chromebooks even if you go and get the Raspberry Pi, and you spend another 100 bucks in Amazon, you can now turn that thing into a touchscreen, you know, tablet style, yeah, maybe think it may not be as refined as an iPad is but he will be a tablet, touchscreen, you know, running on a on a Raspberry Pi. So you can now go for that little amount of money and really get something that is incredibly powerful. That’s one of the things that has been really interesting, even when we see mobile phones, you know, their mobile phones, most, a lot of people have more powerful mobile phones, that their laptops, they work all day. So that also I think it’s a big, big difference where I think, as Microsoft is doing certain things wrong. That’s where they’re doing right on making their things leveled to doesn’t matter which device you bring to the game, you are going to finally find the same level because that has been a complaint. Not that I have any interest on bringing product Microsoft against to my life. But that was always a complaint when I work with my clients. That’s a complaint that they can do certain things on our platform, but not do them in the other one.

Unknown Speaker 53:15
In terms of compute, it’s because it is getting so much cheaper and cheaper and cheaper, the services are getting better, you no longer need a $2,000 gaming, you know, rig, you can build one, I mean, for a long time, you could build one for sub $1,000 and have a really strong system. But now you can take advantage of things like Nvidia Shield there, I think Nvidia Shield is the right one or Nvidia some product that they’ll shutter in five years. But uh, sorry, that was a dig. But I think that as more as more and more compute goes online, we have apps and services that now it doesn’t matter what you’re running them on, like you said, electron is a thing, unfortunately, like you can build your code for any platform, Windows, Mac, the web, Linux, and it’s all on one code base. And again, unfortunately, because some of those products are very, very intensive on resources. But the promising thing behind that is you can offload a lot of that resource into Cloud compute. And now you’re just you’re just your computer is literally a screen that unlocks some other computer that’s much more powerful than the one year look you’re you’re sitting at. So if you can use that, to me, the hardware is going to not matter as much in the future as we continue to push more and more things to cloud environments with cloud compute, and with cloud servers. And we just saw that with Amazon announcing that you can get Mac Mini compute usage for AWS now. Like it’s insane Everything is moving to the cloud. Literally, the thing you’re holding in your hand is just a portal to all of that information as you need it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 55:09
Yeah. So Jamie’s noting that arm based SOC s are the future of low cost level computing environments, it’s he’s basically, you know, kind of noting what you’re saying, in relation to arm. And that’s why Apple is now going to the arm based Apple silicon. And you know, we’ve heard this now, Intel’s kind of having a bit of a bloodletting here, Microsoft is reportedly going to be moving to, you know, moving off of off of that and going to the arm, as well. So we’re going to see more and more of this happen. And my point here, from a productivity perspective, as we are building out new technologies and thinking about it from that perspective, how we’re going to use those technologies, if you’re, what you’re holding is, in essence, a thin client with which is accessing cloud computing, then form factor becomes the differentiator. And that becomes like the quality of what you’re holding is important still to the effect of the of the of the form factor because, for me, I’m thinking about it from the perspective that if I want to have a, a terminal, a client, that’s going to work well for me, I need it to be in such a form factor that allows me to be most productive. And that may be a smaller screen for me and a larger screen for a gousto. It may mean that I want my screen to be curved, and you know, ginormous. And that may mean for Agusta, he wants a tablet that’s flat. So in touchscreen, right. So like all of those pieces come into, like an interesting kind of opportunity, I think for a lot of people who want to get into the market and do different things in that space. Jamie’s noting here. It’s interesting to him that we’ve gone from, you know, from thin clients of the 60s and 70s, which required a server in order to run applications to smart desktops. And back again with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, you name it. I’m adding Google Cloud because, you know, I have my bias. So but but but yeah, so I think that’s really, really interesting. I want to move our conversation along lest we be here all evening to the productivity apps of 2020. And so I guess this is a good time for disclosures one, I am the Google Small Business advisor for productivity, hence my bias. I try not to bring too much of it to the table but but there is clearly a point of reference there. And I am an Evernote certified consultant as well as the Evernote regional leader, one of the Evernote regional leaders for North America and Evernote put out their new applications this year, the Evernote version 10. So you can continue to use Evernote legacy, which is their old, you know, desktop and both desktop applications Mac OS and Windows. But now they have the new Evernote 10s, out and on on Mac OS and Windows as well as on iPad OS, iOS, and Android, which is still seemingly scaling out. But that was a big, that was certainly a big story in the in the space this year, I feel like knowshon had a breakout year, they have done a lot to take up market share in that space. Although I don’t consider them the same product as as Evernote in the note taking space, they still do handle notetaking in that sense. And they are now in private beta with regard to their API, which I think is a which is another one of those big huge kind of monumental moments in the productivity space that we now have. Finally, right. Every every notion user says right. And but we’ve also had some breakouts from the space of roam research we’ve had obsidian, we’ve had, we’ve had a lot of people jump into the market to fill the gap that Evernote seemingly has left because of their having to step back and do development. So I feel like there have been a lot of really cool, interesting new entrants into the market. Because of that. And I’m really excited to see that I also see the the advance of electron, the electron framework becoming kind of like an across the board option for a lot of these tech companies. You know, if you think just from like slack to Spotify to now Evernote, everybody seems to be going forward using electron not everybody, but a lot are using that. And there’s some drawbacks, obviously to using an electron JS framework. But at the same time, it allows them to be able to iterate so much faster. There’s a balancing act there. And I and I just for all of us in the space, we’re using these technologies, you know, like I, I now have like six or seven electron apps sitting on my system, and they’re heavy. And they’re pretty, you know, big applications that are sitting both on the Mac OS and on Windows. They’re big packages to be running all the time. And so that’s something to just keep in mind that we have this kind of movement in the market. What do you say to that, Jay? You’re the developer. I’m not so

Unknown Speaker 59:58
that’s electronic. Absolutely.

Unknown Speaker 1:00:02
The biggest thing that I’m seeing now that I wish would get resolved is we have some big companies that are trying to consolidate all of their products into one, and even create new products. Because of that, I’m looking at you Dropbox, no one wanted a password manager from you this year, what we wanted was a thinner application like that. It’s just that simple. I think companies are trying to inch their selves into whatever business is left in the space. And what’s happening, as you’ve mentioned, is it’s creating a vacuum that a lot of people can’t afford to live in. It’s like, Hey, I can’t afford, you know, $150, for all of the great things, Dropbox, you know, it’s just not going to happen. I’m not my business isn’t that big, my personal account isn’t that big. So what we choose to do then is we say, Okay, I’m going to spend a lot of money on one thing, I’m going to make that my big deal. And this is where I was, I was dreading this conversation, because I knew the words, research, I knew the phrases, you know, I knew that was going to come in. Let’s be clear, no one here is doing anything new. They’re just doing the same old thing in a different way. As they would even say Zettel caston. It is not a thing that came out in 2020. He came out in like, a long, long time ago, I want to say it actually was born out of the early like 1900s. Maybe even older than that. There are some bottom up like serve you as you need it. And as soon as you need it systems that came from the new Gucci filing system in like the early 1900s, as well. All of these tools are just re skinning old practices, and presenting them in a new format thanks to the ease of development, with things such as electron with things such as like a lot of the progressive web apps, the react, react, native frameworks that are out there, you’re now able to say let me apply this old system in a new way with a new UI, that’s easier to use. And then I can dump a ton of money into marketing. A lot of this is marketing money, a lot of marketing power, like it is not the best product that wins anymore. It is the product that can market themselves best wins. And I feel like this is what’s happening in the system to where notion was able to move into a vacuum that Evernote left, while they were cleaning house and doing things notion had the marketing power behind them. And as people asked for tools, like hey, we want to API Yeah, don’t worry, it’s coming yet. We really want to API, don’t worry, it’s coming. There were other companies out there that said we can do a notion is doing and provide an API, or we can give you the native first experience, like I think we have a link to the macstories like best apps to 2020, I forgot what the one they’re, they’re super fascinated about now is, but even that application is the same idea it is we’re gonna give you this block system crap. That’s what it’s called, oh, crap. We’re going to give you this block system, but we’re going to give you the advantage of it being a native application. So it’s going to run faster than all the electron apps. Take your poison, it’s all the same. It’s you’re doing the same thing no matter what. And I and don’t don’t ask me, I don’t care about your application. Um, for those that want to know what applications I’m using too bad, you can’t? Or can we just agree that we’re all doing the same thing now that we’re just we’re just putting a different name on it at this point.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:04:08
And so that everybody has an idea is that’ll caston is is a, you know, knowledge management methodology with some notetaking associated with it, which is 16th century, you know, technology. Right. So, so we’re not it’s right. To your point, Jay, it’s nothing. Nothing’s new there. But I think that what what we’re what we’re seeing though, is both a market that had an opportunity, and people aren’t trying to take market share in that in that space. And whether it’s marketing or truly good development, both or both are going to be challenged by the big tear tech, right? Microsoft OneNote is always going to be huge, and the behemoth in the market because they provide it mostly for free as a part of their ecosystem. It works well enough. And so you have to you have to not want one In order to then want any other product, same thing with Apple notes, or even, dare I say, a Google Keep, right these are these are products that are given to you basically for free if you have that ecosystem. And while it may not be the right tool for you, you’re likely to use it or, you know, baling wire and duct tape it together to make it work for you because it’s free. And it’s just a part of the system, Apple notes is very competent, as a note taking tool. So why do you need something else, a lot of people want the complexity to be able to procrastinate from doing what they should be doing, which is getting actual work done. So they go, Oh, yeah, I’ve got to get obsidian up and running, because my life is gonna be so much better when I, you know, jump into my system and develop it out, when in reality is is that, you know, if you had your system in Evernote, or OneNote, or otherwise, you’re literally wasting time to switch gears into another tool in order to do that. Now, for some people, that’s going to be a good things, some it’s not going to be so much Augusta.

Augusto Pinaud 1:05:57
And I agree it’s and and that’s, you know, from, from the productivity perspective, that is really, really important to understand that cost. fine if you want to fiddle and play. And that’s what you do great install one every other week, and that’s fine. But if what you’re really looking is that productive, productive component, I always tell people most the really productive people rarely change their their system rarely move out of the thing. Why? Because the act of moving, it’s ridiculously ineffective, you know, I sometime during 2020. Why? Because it’s 2020. Not really because I needed the collaboration component, I move out of OmniFocus to something else. And then the move is or was one of the most ineffective weeks that I have, because I needed to pull from a piece of software that I’ve been using since the inception of the piece of software to something new, that works in a different way, that Now there were people adding stuff in there that I didn’t know how to curl to a corner so I could process them. But they I needed that kind of interaction for because things have changed. So all these things on different ways to present the same tool are great if you’re really have a reason to move in that direction, if their reality has changed to the point that current reality was current tools will be significantly improved. With near reality with new tools. The problem is that most people change the tool hoping that that will change the reality. No, no, no. Let’s wait until the reality change and then try to play with those tools. Other than that, if they are whatever tool It is, yeah.

Unknown Speaker 1:07:55
One One of the things that I tell my coaching clients, like when they asked me about productivity stuff, I often tell them, an app is not stopping you. Like at this point, like if you if you’re coming to me, you understand that you have a problem. Let’s remove apps from the equation. And I mean, you mentioned earlier using bill wire and duct tape, I mean, notebooks do exist. It can we can move up the technological ladder just a little bit. But I do think that I’m happy to see that the productivity space is ever booming as it has been. But I have to be worried about the backlash there of that we’re gonna have a bunch of people that for the lack of a better phrase, are productivity professionals or in my, what I call them, productivity, pill pushers, basically like we’re going to we’re going to talk about this product because they have the marketing budget behind it to give us free accounts give us free credit. So we will try it because it’s going to garner clicks and views for us so that we can talk about it and once their funding runs out. We’re going to move on to the next service that will do the exact same thing and we will continue to rinse and repeat this process until the end of perpetuity I guess. Yeah,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:09:17
well we currently see that with regard to the movement around note taking space right. You know, a lot of people left Evernote, they went to Asana has their own program. So people some some of those Evernote certified consultants went to Asana they became Asana pros, they went to notion they became you know, notion ambassadors and excited about pushing notion. We’ll see we’ll see that market happen. I don’t believe that it’s a bad for the actually the productivity space. I think it’s actually really good. Because ultimately what it does is it teaches people in the productivity space to be skeptical of the tools they’re using, and we should have always been that way. You know, and and so I think we are continuing to see a little bit of this churn, hopefully VCs and and AC Start to fund things that actually have the capability of being successful in the market because it’s truly doing something new and innovative. And and that will help to kind of clean up some of that market, we keep seeing these, these boom bust cycles in, in productivity tech specifically, because there are people out there who are very passionate about their, what they believe they’re building, right. And that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s funding behind it, they’re just building it for the sake of it, and they’re hoping that people gather around them and fund them. And, and many times, that means they’re doing that enough on a freemium model, or otherwise. And I’m wondering if that will help us kind of clean some of these, these pieces in the market up, you know, saying like, Okay, well, if we, if we really focus on building a product that has a good business model, then no matter what it can survive for maybe the 15 1500 people who are going to use it, but they’re going to, they’re going to love using it, versus having 10 million users using it for some partial free freemium model. And then that collapsing and everybody being like, oh, gosh, now I got to go scramble to get to another tool, because this tool that was actually doing something really cool, didn’t have a strong business model or foundation underneath that.

Unknown Speaker 1:11:15
And we saw this happen a lot with the movement of more applications to the subscription model. And I think that kind of the news that Apple was creating this small business program, to the contrary of the millionaires that are very upset that they will not be included. I think that that is a good move for the productivity space as a whole, because it’s going to give more creators the ability to create without having to think as much about their bottom line 15% to a lot of people doesn’t seem like a lot, I think they said that the difference in how much you make is about a 20% difference. That’s a lot of money. That’s a lot of that difference. There is a few dollars on an annual subscription. I’ve seen more and more apps now. Instead of being $20 a year, dropping down to like 1011 $12 a year. And because they’re able to do so they’re they’re going in and doing more.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:12:19
Absolutely, yeah. So So Jamie’s noting here in the chat that the best he’s calling it the best productivity application is what makes you productive. But moving from one application to another as is the worst experience. As it gets pointed out, importing data from one app to another takes time, even though the data is stored in almost the same format usually marked down. I couldn’t disagree with that. And I think that makes a lot of sense. Because of time, we have a couple of Best of app articles that we’re going to put into the show notes. So if you guys want to check that check those out the the Fast Company article that will put a link to the 15 best productivity apps of 2020. There were apps on here that I had not heard of before, which was both useful and interesting to me, but also made me think, well, how is that one of the best productivity apps of 2020. I’ve never heard of it. And I pay attention to the market. So I was a little skeptical of the title. But I was also really intrigued by some of them that were on the list. So some of you may want to check those out. And if you are, if you’re into playing with tools, for leisure, not to change, but for just leisure like I do, I like to play with the tools and not actually use them, you can go ahead and check those out. But there’s some really interesting ones on there, hey, ends up being on there. Microsoft Edge, of course, moved to the to the chrome based chromium project. And and so now, you know, Chrome, or chromium now is this big chunk of the internet. Because you know, Chrome, Opera, Microsoft Edge, you name it all, you know, kind of running on chromium, with really Firefox and Safari being the only other two challengers in that market that I’m aware of. But brave is chromium based on you know, a lot of these are chromium based. So with that, we are going to take a quick break. And then we’re going to come back for our headlines of the week. And so Thank you, gentlemen, for this conversation on the best of 2020. This has been a lot of fun. But let’s move on through to the other side with our stories of the week. So let’s take a break and hear from our sponsor this week. Did you know half of small businesses don’t have websites in half don’t make it past one year in business. Are these stats correlated? We’re not sure but we think you should have a website w three see Web Services provides affordable manage WordPress website hosting, along with VPS domain name registration, and other small business focused services. For listeners of this podcast. You can book a free 30 minute Digital Marketing Strategy Session when you purchase a new hosting plan $150 value once you purchase your new hosting plan With the receipt to support at W three, see inc.com with the podcast title in the subject line of the email message, and we’ll get you scheduled for your digital marketing strategy session,

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Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:15:22
Welcome back everybody to anything but idle. And we are now beyond the discussion of the news and review 2020. And moving from that into our actual news of the week. Last week, we did our holiday gift guide 2020. So you can go out there, if you got some last minute holiday gifts to buy, you can go ahead and check that out. But the end, so we didn’t cover any stories last week. And so we’ve grouped them into this week, so we can cover those items for you. And so starting off the top, again, in a little bit of an interesting turn of of news. Google is doing something really interesting. But gousto, you want to explain to us what Google is doing? know

Augusto Pinaud 1:16:06
this? Yes, Google. So let me let me start saying Google, it’s also saying that they’re developing their own processors for smartphones and Chromebooks. And I don’t know if it make it to the list or not. But Microsoft also announced that they are doing that that to which AMD and Intel, the stock price are not doing really, really good. It’s kind of kind of suffering, let’s say but, but it is really interesting to see in you know, that Google is developing their own chipset that Microsoft may do the same based on the arm that Apple did. And what’s that the future, you know, after took so many years to consolidate everybody into basically a compatible version of Intel or AMD? chipset now we are all going to spread again, I’m going back to 1984, which is what’s unique. So but I guess, you know, as we were discussing earlier with the cloud and the 60. That’s, that’s what happened. But it’s still I think it’s a really exciting news. Because as much as the use of the computer, at least for the foreseeable future is not going to happen on that machine, having their own chips that will also allow them to do things that are going to be really interesting and powerful. So I for one, I am really excited about it.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:17:32
Yeah, so that everybody is aware will probably be mentioning this in future episodes. But in essence, they’re they’re trying to, you know, develop their own system on on the chip. The SOC is is codenamed Whitechapel. So if you hear us talking about white chapel in the future, I’ll try to remind us all what that means. But it is this new project that they’re working on. And we’ll see what happens. Next up, Gmail is going to allow you to edit Office documents directly from email attachments. Finally,

Augusto Pinaud 1:18:02
that’s all that I’m going to say about that news. Finally,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:18:06
this is this is really fascinating to me, though, because before you would open up an email, and it would launch in that preview pane that that you know, that overlay that would give you a view of the document, if it was whether it was Google, whether it was a Microsoft, you know, Word document or PDF, or otherwise, you’d kind of get that, that view. And then you could open it up into its own tab or window and then go into an editing mode. Now it’s allowing you to do that directly in the email itself. And that provides one less kind of step away from getting something done. I don’t see myself necessarily wanting to do that. But I can see how that’s useful for a lot of people. I get it. I just I’m not gonna I’m not going to end up using this feature a lot. But I I’m appreciative of them wanting to help those users.

Unknown Speaker 1:18:59
I mean, I’m just glad making mail merges will be easy.

Augusto Pinaud 1:19:05
I think it’s going to be I don’t think it’s going to be at your day to day email. But I think it is going to be really useful, especially on low power mobile devices.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:19:18
Yes, yes. And so this is this is going to be able to use the docs editor in email to open up Microsoft Office files, which are Word, PowerPoint and Excel. So again, matching up to Google Docs, Google Slides, and Google Sheets. So great. Continuing the Google News. We’ve got some big news out of Google, they acquired cloud ready OS, which is which is owned by was owned by Neverwhere Now Google owns them, and so a gousto.

Augusto Pinaud 1:19:48
So I’ve been jumping up and down all week with this news. I one of the devices I have is an old Surface Pro who die and the hard drive dies They not fixable. So I installed Neverwhere long time ago. And contrary to every prediction that all the people I discussed before I installed that had that that machine was going to die a week later, okay. He’s still running, in incredibly in micro SD is what runs everything. And you cannot know that that’s what it runs, and it works incredibly well. And I am so excited that Google acquired that and us plans to make this an officially offering to add the store to allow me to install software, another thing. So I have installed Neverwhere for clients in more machines that are what I want to admit. And I’m really, really excited for Google to do this.

Unknown Speaker 1:20:49
Yes, as we mentioned before, more and more computing, not on the device that you’re actually holding in your hand. I mean, this is it. And this, this is where I, I would not be surprised if Microsoft doesn’t make a similar move next year. That’s, luckily, you have to bring me on next year to confirm or deny that claim. Cuz I don’t talk about it on any other shows I do. So we’ll see what happens next year for Microsoft.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:21:17
Yeah, and I think that cloud ready OS, which allows you to, in essence, install a variant of Chrome OS onto any, almost any device, you know, that’s, that’s going to now give you before you could not use the Google Play Store. That was one of the limitations of cloud radios, because it wasn’t allowed on, you know, by Google. Now, because Google owns it, you’ll be now able to run Android applications on those devices, which just opens up the field, I think it’s a really great acquisition on Google’s part. And it helps to bring together a whole host of devices that are sitting around people’s homes, that can now be given new life. And I think this is really great for the environment. This is great for our productivity, because there are probably some devices out there that you actually liked using at some point. And the only thing limiting you was the fact that it wasn’t getting security updates are that the software itself, the OS itself, you know, was outpaced by the hardware. And now we can go ahead and bring those back into into use. And I know I have a lot of devices hanging around that I’d like to start toying with and bringing back to life. I haven’t I have a laptop, I called Bertha. And she is a wonderful, big old thing. And I’m wondering if cloud ready will will now install on her nicely.

Augusto Pinaud 1:22:34
Yeah, I’m curious is that tablet PC will run cloud OS, but I will be able to report back. Alright,

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:22:40
let’s let’s move on. Through. We have some news out of Cydia, which is talk to me about Cydia and what Cydia is for folks and what their conflict is with apples.

Augusto Pinaud 1:22:55
So CDN before you could install apps on the iPhone and people may not remember that the iPhone was not to be able to install apps on his initial version, you could jailbreak the phone install CDN applications and then Apple came with Apple Store and invented the concept. That’s what they do. And then now Celia is coming back and suing Apple for for their practices and bringing a lawsuit that asking Apple to allow them to install their store in a legal way that Apple obviously has not been friendly or for the last 13 years. So we will need to see what happening there I am in the particulars that in the same way that Microsoft has a store and Google has store Apple should have the same right to have their store and decide who plays and who doesn’t place

Unknown Speaker 1:23:56
I think well first of all I forgot city existed so I’m sorry Cydia for that I’m just burning all the bridges today. But the other side of this is on Trump on antitrust grounds is hilarious because what they’re saying is we can’t develop for the apple ecosystem when the argument is still the apple ecosystem isn’t the largest market profit wise it might be but ultimately it’s not I feel like this is Cydia finally got tired of being Sherlock to death. I will say Apple did the right thing by not buying Cydia for their app store and then eventually just turning it into this thing where they said okay Cydia you keep developing. And we’ll keep just taking the best and brightest apps that you have and turning them into system wide features. Sadly, that’s the nature of the beast on this one. I don’t think that city is going to win this fight, especially since they were violent. the terms of service from Apple in order to do what they were doing. So at that point, yeah, sorry, you’re just gonna have to create an Android store and hope that that works.

Augusto Pinaud 1:25:12
But not only that, it is you said, Yes, it’s true that that is happening. But that is happening with Apple that is happening with Microsoft, that has been the story of software for the year. So the years, I mean, there’s two story downs where we are going to mark Samson exactly for that that you described. But I’m happy to bring that coming back as soon as we get

Unknown Speaker 1:25:33
it. You’re right, you’re 100%. Right. I think that this is a timing issue. This is Apple’s in court over the epic issue. Facebook is dealing with antitrust stuff, Google’s dealing with antitrust stuff, if Cydia was going to ever win this lawsuit now would be when it happens, I think I would have waited to see what the results of those other lawsuits are. But maybe city doesn’t have that kind of time available to them. So they’re jumping on, maybe they get a win, just with all the other stuff happening. Maybe they settled out of court, I don’t know. But what I do know is the city of bringing this up is kind of interesting, but ultimately not something that anyone would expect to actually have success on.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:26:21
Yeah, I’m not I’m not an expert in Sherman anti trust law, and in really an anti trust law generally. But I find what is the likely outcome here is a settlement. And and city will have a pretty good pay day in that, in that case, the and that’s really their goal, right? It’s just like these patent trolls, you know, they’re out there to be able to make $1 off of off of a an opportunity. At the same time. All of the other app stores that are out there, whether that be Samsung, Android, Android, and Google’s Play Store, with Microsoft Store, you can still install applications outside of that system. It’s not easy on, say, Android, but you can do it. It’s not it’s trivial in terms of but the average person’s not necessarily going to know how to do those things. And but with Apple, it’s very, very difficult. And it is possible, it is possible, it is possible, but it’s very difficult. And with with getting getting that whole, like, you know, finding out what an IPA is right to getting it installed onto the apple system. And that’s a that’s a bit of a higher level, higher user level experience, type activity that is fairly easy and, you know, common with other users on other platforms. And I wonder if in this particular case, it’s going to force Apple’s hand to allow that to happen. And what’s going to happen in global courts, because remember that Apple’s arguments in the United States are very, very different than Apple’s arguments are going to be in Ireland, with GDPR. And with Australia and their new GDPR, like rules and regulations, and with, you know, other countries that are a little bit more authoritarian, like China, and Russia and otherwise. So I’m wondering whether this is going to push them a little bit in opening up this the system? I don’t think so. I’m curious if it? Well, I don’t think it will. And I think the reason for that is that they’ve been pushing this privacy and security brand for a long time. And there is actually a value to iOS users, or Apple users generally, in having their ecosystem locked down in the way that Apple does it. And so I’m really curious as to whether or not there is a value there that will will be retained in their arguments against this lawsuit. I think they’ll ultimately win the broader argument, but I think they’ll probably settle, and there’ll be some minor changes here that will be considered wins for the user who wants interoperability, and who wants their portability of data, because that’s the one thing I have a problem with is that once you put your data into the apple ecosystem, you’re it’s really difficult to get that data out in a seamless, you know, transferable way, you’ve got to really do that in a manual process. And like with Google Photos, you know, it’s it’s tough when you have terabytes and terabytes of of data in a system you’re trying to get that out and Gosh, I clouds photos system, like I don’t even understand how the database sees an album better yet how to get it out of the system. And so, you know, those are things that I think that I think it’d be a good conversation to be had on the user level that’ll push them in that in that regard. Okay. Moving right along to family sharing. In the apple ecosystem, a gusto

Augusto Pinaud 1:29:56
Ah, so person who have two kids on a watch And a bunch of devices, I’m so grateful for this. We can hear all this and the family sharing is working and in some of the apps is working great. And so I am really, really grateful that this feature is there. And it is going to, to make life easy for people who have all this and they make it right, we’re not every application need to apply to this. I think they make it right when they allow the developer to decide if if it’s fair for them or not to do it. And I know, respect each developer and that decision, but I have already applications that has come with the notification saying, now you have this available to you. And you can start using that.

Unknown Speaker 1:30:51
I definitely agree that too bad. I’m the only major tech nerd in my family. So most of the subscriptions that I have are just for me and me only. But I do agree that I think that this is going to be beneficial for some folks out there. And I look forward to seeing what comes out of this not just from the perspective of the apps now being able to make, you know, more decisions. But as you mentioned earlier, Ray, the idea of there being a wind behind the wind, it not being about Oh, now you can have an entire family locked into a platform into an idea. It is now Apple is saying we’re going to give a little bit more ability for the developer to make decisions. Instead of saying no, you have to do it this way. I think as long as they continue to do that, they’re going to continue to skate pass some of these antitrust issues that are popping up because at the end of the day, they can go. But the developer has a choice. We’re giving the developer options, we’re giving them more and more options every single year. It’s on the developer, it’s not necessarily on us as the platform.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:32:07
Yeah, I think they can make a strong argument that there’s less consumer harm, I suppose. And, and then and then greater marketplace innovation because of that, right? You know, if you give the developer more tools in their toolkit to be able to make those choices, or I mean, a

Unknown Speaker 1:32:22
good example of that was when my daughter was born, if I wanted to subscribe for all the baby health tracking stuff, I could, but at the time, you know, two years ago, if my wife wanted to as well, we had to pay double. So like now you can have these collaborative events around like native neonatal care and all those things. I’m just super excited for what technology will advance because of this

Augusto Pinaud 1:32:49
awesome person who have two kids that, you know, my youngest now is getting to the point that he wants to play the same thing. So it used to be exactly that you buy the game and buy the game again and buy the game again. Now. It’s a family game, is it? It’s awesome.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:33:03
Yeah, there are all kinds of use cases. For this, I see the fitness trainer who wants to be able to help their client with with that kind of circumstance. I see coaches and consultants who are helping in other regards being able to share those kinds of things.

Unknown Speaker 1:33:17
And the gym memberships. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker 1:33:19
there you go.

Unknown Speaker 1:33:21
Especially now in which gym memberships are slowly evaporating. I think I think that this is a great time to launch something like this

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:33:30
now. Yeah, virtual virtual, you know, fitness programs, all those kinds of things are really I just really think that there’s a there’s a greater opportunity here now for developers in that space. Okay, we’ve reached the point where we now mock Samsung go for the gusto.

Augusto Pinaud 1:33:46
So, three months after Samsung make all this included with galaxy was a picture of the power supply. Samsung has plans now to ditch their adapter. And you know, not that he wasn’t as unexpected. Okay, as soon as they do the market say, oh, they’re going to trip into this faster than what you can say power supply. But it is really fun to see I’m remind some of my Galaxy honor friends who send me the messages about the image, and now reply back and say so what you were saying about your next Samsung so

Unknown Speaker 1:34:26
that there is there’s a great podcast or by the name of Justin Robert Young that talks about this a lot in the politics world where he says it doesn’t matter what you said, what matters is what you’re saying. And this is very much the case when Samsung was saying Oh, but we have a power brick included. That was because Apple had just said over getting rid of ours. I’m sure what happened was there was a conversation that was held between Samsung and Apple because they do talk to each other And they said, oh, by the way, how much money did you save getting rid of that power brick. And then afterwards, the conversation was now, hey, guess what we need to think about the environment too, we need to take care of the waste. And ultimately, we need to pad our bottom line by getting rid of all of these power adapters.

Augusto Pinaud 1:35:18
That is a 31. And I agree with you 32, is they are looking what is coming law wise in Europe and say, if we don’t get rid of this thing, we are going to be, you know, where in the future in the near future, because the Europe want to consolidate all these things, we are going to get in trouble, we need to get out of this as soon as possible. So

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:35:38
and it sounds like it’ll be on the new Galaxy S 21. Galaxy S 21 Plus, and the Galaxy S 21. Ultra. So those models are the ones that are currently being noted as missing the, the adapters in their in their pop boxes that will be going out. So it’ll be interesting, I think, you know, the the argument, that’s this is somehow environmental is is, is is nonsense, but the but I think ultimately the cost savings is probably made up for in new profit, because you have a whole lot of post purchase, you know, product market out there that are selling these aftermarket adapters, and so on and so forth. So I bet you that anchor, and many of these other companies had a conversation with Samsung, and Apple, about, you know, hey, we can create, you know, me or my certified adapters also. And, you know, people can pay a heck of a lot more for those because they’re fancier, and you don’t have to produce them, we’ll make money, you’ll make money. And you know, so I’d be curious to see what those back end back of the, you know, office agreements are between those companies in terms of their marketing connections,

Augusto Pinaud 1:36:53
I’m sure you’re all done in the name of the environment,

Unknown Speaker 1:36:57
it was a race to the bottom, I mean, the fact that you could go to a gas station and buy a charger for $2. Like, I think every company kind of saw the writing on the wall of like, okay, you can either get out and save money on production, or we can at least start kind of reducing the amount of population in this space. So that some of the areas where this is the main thing that we do, cannot continue to drive their prices lower and lower, and then thus the quality of the product lower.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:37:29
Yeah, plus, you know, Apple’s going to wireless charging with their with their devices. And I think that there’s probably an argument that the phone market can do without the without those cables, more and more where you can, yep, there you go, you know, you do you do a little, you know, charging pad, excuse me, and being able to, you know, throw your Apple EarPods onto your phone, and it charges from the phone, and so on and so forth, you get a lot more capability there that you need less adapters, hopefully. So I see there being an option opportunity there for them to be able to reduce the number of adapters. But I know for myself, I’ve tried to reduce the number of adapters I’ve had in my own world. But I’m not everybody, I’m probably in the minority. Were trying to have the fewest things to travel with. Because once upon a time I did travel for work. And I travel thing I know, I know, it seems so odd, it seems quaint. And so but we’ll go back to that in some way shape, or form, post COVID. And I want to be able to travel nimbly, and that requires me to have fewer devices. I think that a lot of people though, continue to want to have those things. And so Apple has, as my understanding is the apple sales, a lot of people actually did buy the additional adapter for the extra 30 $40 or whatever it costs. So it’s a it’s a it’s probably a win win for them, which is that they can now cost justify removing the adapters because they can make more money in people purchasing them. aftermarket. So okay, moving along to some Google News gousto since you’re the you’re the to do is to use their among us. What’s going on with to do list?

Augusto Pinaud 1:39:15
Well to do is to do is has been doing incredible amount of things this year. And I know we’ve run out of time, but actually for me is the productivity app on 2020 did an incredible development in all way shape or form some things but one of the things they did is they finally in their rate they integrated early with the lady was a big a and now they’re integrating with the big g so you can talk to these devices and told them to add and even if you do it properly, you can add due dates, priorities and contemporaries and everything else. So it is really a well done job that they are doing. Integrating devices that we all have around, it’s an IT is magical to really be walking to the house, when you think about the thing and say, Hey, big G, do this for me, and have it on your device when you get there. So I will celebrate each one of this integrations when they come.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:40:17
Yeah, earlier this year, we had more and more tools. I mean, prior to 2020, I’d used ifft, for connecting a lot of these device, a lot of these services to my Google Assistant. And, and that way, I could say, okay, big G, and execute. Now more and more of these tools are allowing us to be able to integrate directly remember the milk, added it earlier this year, and that’s my task manager of choice. And now we’re seeing these direct integrations. And I think that’s actually really, really both powerful. But also, it gives us greater control over our productivity systems, when we don’t have to depend upon a third party to trigger and create the thing for us, whether that’s checking an item off, adding a note to our system, creating a new task, those kinds of things. It’s really, really powerful when we have that kind of direct integration, because there’s just one less thing to fail, right? It’s just reducing the number of parts.

Unknown Speaker 1:41:18
Yeah, and I mean, once upon a time, I was a to do list Grandmaster, but nowadays, I don’t know, they might have taken that title away from me, honestly, to do is, I will definitely say in terms of bringing, bringing kind of their app to the next level, where a lot of apps we’re trying to, like catch up or like, include somehow wiki linking and backlinking. And the things like I feel like to do is has just kind of doubled down and said, we’re gonna continue to do our thing. And the other thing is, I guess, though, I I will buy a Google Home, if I can call it big G. Because I mean, that is, that is definitely like the coolest thing I’ve heard today is like, okay, big g let’s

Unknown Speaker 1:42:01
do this.

Unknown Speaker 1:42:03
Like, huh, I wonder if I knew that with my home pods.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:42:06
We’ve chosen we’ve chosen mme a big G. And, you know, just to be able to you know, not have it execute for folks. You know, last week I think one of our panelists I think Dr. bucket actually said the said the phrase and I had to mute it out in the in post production so that people don’t all over the world to get their devices triggered. You know,

Unknown Speaker 1:42:28
what, you can get the apple canisters to work? Because it’s always No, I didn’t call you Why are you at Stop it, stop it, stop it.

Augusto Pinaud 1:42:38
We do that to say nothing to that comment. But I’m going to say to the government prior that one of the things that I think is true, you could do it with F 10. And I have done it like that before. But for a lot of people the idea of getting to F to connect it to devices that now gets to the geeky side of the world where there may not even try it while they make these direct connections is something that more and more people is willing to try and more and more people that he’s able to integrate with their platforms.

Unknown Speaker 1:43:12
Let’s let’s give them credit because I mean, Apple launched their widget platform and I think a lot of people were not expecting all of the tech talkers out there including the widget Smith creator David underscore Smith himself of like, whoa, wait, what’s happening? Why is my app the number one app Oh, because you know, the tick tock generation is found this total nerd tool that I created just for the sake of being able to play with this new technology I believe there’s going to be some people that are like yeah I used to do is from my phone and then all of a sudden their kids gonna say Hey big g add the to do list or add this to grandpa’s to do this or add this to you know, moms to do this and they’re gonna be like wait you can do that? I would I would definitely give them credit just being able to do it in some cases is enough to get that when

Augusto Pinaud 1:44:05
I agree with you we install the Miami on on my parents and it is fun because my my mother have it in Spanish my father have it in English because he decided wasn’t going to talk to the lady in Spanish. And then please hysterical to see them fight with a device when the device decide not to understand. Okay, it is in his reading circle to see. All right, we’ve

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:44:30
got one more story in our stories of the week before we go into our new tools this week, because So what’s our final story? Oh,

Augusto Pinaud 1:44:37
Vic, acquires the rocket book. So we close to a notepad but the natto the leading brand of reusable notebooks, as you are short on the screen. Yeah, it’s going to be a brand in the US.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:44:53
Yes. So so the French based Bic has the one company, we know for pens, mostly, the ubiquitous Bic pens, has bought the EZ bought rocket book and as many of you who have listened to me pure on anything good idol or any of my other podcasts or otherwise know how much I love the rocket book line of smart notebooks. And so I think this is a really great choice for them to pick up a company that is a successful market product. I think they were they started on Kickstarter, I think there were a Kickstarter based you know, project and just to see a product in the, in the productivity space go from a little Kickstarter, that’s that was very successful, and then launched multiple new products, and ultimately get purchased by a major global mainstay, I think is just a really great success in our space. And I’m glad to see it happen. And I hope that the folks at rocket book are are pleased with it. The rocket book also produces what to buy other all time favorite products. I don’t have an arm’s reach, but they have the little rocket book. What are they called the little whiteboard stickers that you can you put them on the corners of the rocket of a whiteboard. And it allows you to be able to stream with your phone, real time whiteboard. And you can also take captures of those screen shares and share them the same way you do rocket book, dope book pages, and the beacon the rocket book beacon is what it is. The rocket book beacon is such a great product. 15 bucks, great stocking stuffer, if you can still get one in time for the holidays. But the rocket book beacon i think is one of the coolest freakin technologies, you just take the rocket book app, and you pointed at the at the screen where the four corners are. And now you have your entire team, your entire family for doing a family brainstorming now capable of seeing it wherever you are, from from a single link, very, very cool technology, kind of it kind of does what Google jam board does, and other tools like that, that allow you to whiteboard in real time, but you’re actually writing on a physical screen. For you know, I mean, the jam board in real life is like what 1500 $2,000 it’s a it’s an it’s a pricey piece of technology. And of course Google jam board has a has a a web application that’s free, but you know, the physical products pretty pricey.

Unknown Speaker 1:47:14
You know, as the the notebook pen and paper nerd that I am, the thing that excites me about this is Bic is a mass production story. I mean, in general, the whole idea of Bic pens, Bic razors, Bic anything, is that they can take a technology that used to cost $100 and turn it down to five cents. And when you can do that, when you have the power to do that with a product that was so innovative, like the rocket notebook, obviously, they’re not going to come in, and all of a sudden rocket books are going to be $3 at Walmart, like that’s just not going to happen in a single day. But what we will start to see is certain production techniques being applied to smart analog technology, which is for an analog like, Ooh, that sounds kind of creepy. But that idea and being able to do that will be definitely reflect on the rest of the analog productivity space, I think we’re going to see a bunch of better design technologies coming into notebook spaces, and it’s going to cause a drop in some of the pricing or the prices will stay the same. And people’s margins will increase, which is always a good thing too. But what we will see is better manufacturing and mass production across the map. Because of this and because Bic is known for doing this in the industries that they’ve come into.

Augusto Pinaud 1:48:56
And they will be exactly interesting because they remember when I I’ve been a long time that I stopped using paper, but I remember the levenger notebooks was that circa then and when I think was officemax who got the cheaper version, I was hoping that was going to happen and was going to hit mass market because they were a really incredible customizable thing. So I really read the staples Ark, the ark, yes, yes, I need really what’s the difference between difference between the levander version and the Ark? So I really hope you’re right on that one. And now the rocket book turned into that commodity that everybody understand and everybody see because I agree with you. It’s an incredible technology, especially for the people who love paper.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:49:50
And just so anybody who doesn’t know the the the thing about the rocket book for me is that it ties to a bunch of services, whether that be Google Drive, Note one note, you name it. And maybe it’s one drive, it’s one drive instead of one note one of those. And and, and so it allows you to then tie the naming of the page that you’re scanning to automation services because of that, that tie into the integration with those other services. So for example, when I write a note, and I title it, x, I can now in Evernote, have that triggered and picked up by ifft or Zapier or any of the other automation tools to then do further things with that page, which really extends its capabilities. And that’s where I think some of this automation is is misunderstood or maybe not applied to really increase the the functionality of it. The other thing that I really love is you can you can scan a page and execute it to an email. So it can send a PDF, or JPEG to an email address. And in my case, I write notes in a weekly meeting. And that email then is executed to a group email address. And so everybody who’s a part of that group email address, gets that email, which is just a huge time saver for me, because I can outline all of the tasks and now everybody gets it. And I don’t have to think about who is going to get that, you know, that document because as soon as I scan it, it gets executed off to the to the right people. So there’s some some really, really great pieces in rocket book. And I’m, again, I guess I’m, I’m just wonderfully happy to see it land in a company where it makes sense, you know, like, different than slack and inside of Salesforce, I clearly understand where rocket book fits into the big ecosystem. And I’m really looking forward to them expanding their, their market by doing so, that brings us to the close out of our stories of the week, and on to our segment, which is the new tools of the week. And so, as you all know, Augusta and I come across plenty of new personal productivity tools and services, all kinds of apps and whatnot. And we play with those tools. And we enjoy learning about new tools. And so in new tools of the week, we each bring you a tool, we think you might like it doesn’t have to be a new tool, but it’s hopefully a new tool to you. And and sometimes they’re new tools to us. And we always invite our guests panelists to, to, you know, offer up a tool as well. And so let’s get started with our tools this week. And so my first new tool this week is a tool called gone. And this one actually happens to be an iOS application. And what I thought was really interesting about it, when I first came across it is that what God does is in 24 hours, whatever tasks you put on it, they disappear, they delete. And so this is really, really fascinating to me, that loss aversion can be used as a mechanism for you actually completing tasks in your system. And so if they call it the ephemeral to do list, appropriately titled, such, it is very minimalist. And I think it’s really interesting, you get to see how many tasks you tick off, how many were incomplete and therefore got deleted. And you can see this on a weekly schedule. So you got a little bit of data, you know, quantification there, there are some notifications like, hey, by the way, this task is going to be deleted. A lot of people keep daily task lists, and they rewrite those task lists every day. And so I think there’s an argument here that something like gone can actually be pretty useful for some people, maybe not for me, I like keeping my stuff around. But there is potentially a group of people where this would work. There’s dark mode for those folks who are dark mode ish. And and that’s it. It’s a very, very simple application, gone and it’s available on iOS and iPad as well as being on Mac OS. So that’s my new tool this week, the gousto. What’s your new tool this week? Well, I

Augusto Pinaud 1:53:54
tried gone put all my tasks in here and 24 hours later, I was so refreshed knowing having

Unknown Speaker 1:54:02
accomplished a few of them.

Augusto Pinaud 1:54:05
Well, no, not really. But well let’s talk about momentum dashboard and momentum is one application that you can integrate with twist and what momentum do is in the browser page, it will bring in the top corner and you can hide it your to do list and the information and you can select the different things. So if you are especially for the clients that have that work in Chrome that lieferung chrome the old works in Chromebook, it is a great place to have it there don’t need to open the application can go and focus and focus in what you are doing. You know I tend to recommend people create a category that you can you know like a tag that you can reuse is what I’m working right now. Because what happened to many of us as we get so many interruptions that we tend to forget what we were working five minutes ago and this is where momentum do an incredible thing because allows you to select That. And that is what he said, Every time you get distracted, you will come back to your browser and see this word, the one or the two things I was working on, and that bring an incredible amount of power.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:55:12
So it is a Chrome extension, it looks like it’s a free Chrome extension. And so it uses your new chrome tab in order to be able to create this dashboard. Is that my understanding of gusa? That’s correct. What’s the integration with to do list, the tasks that you create are synchronized into to do list or vice versa, what’s the

Augusto Pinaud 1:55:31
you can see them on the corner and you can select that particular task, or you can select a tag so that way you can do things like what I was describing.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:55:40
Fantastic, wonderful, all right. Great, great new tool. And with that, Jay, what’s your new tool this week.

Unknown Speaker 1:55:50
So Sadly, this isn’t a new tool to me, but I’m hoping that I can share it with all the listeners and watchers. It’s called hook. And you can find it hook productivity calm, it is a context sensitive window that allows you to link things together or hook them together. So here, here’s always the the example, suggestion here. If you have a Word document, that you’re you have a paper that you’re writing, and you want to connect all of your research materials to that paper, what you would do is that paper itself would have its own hook link that you would copy. And then as you go through those pages, you would also hook those research pages to that research paper. So that when you’re thinking back to yourself, what was that one thing I was talking about? In like paragraph three? Well, you just have to hit whatever your hook activator command is mine is shift command space. And I have a list of all of the documents that I’ve hooked to that paper. And this is a Mac only app, to my knowledge I I have heard some rumblings about some iOS integrations. But nothing, nothing concrete on that yet. But I have grown to require this and almost everything that I do now, mostly because I do a lot of things. And sometimes the things overlap. And when they do, I want to be able to figure it out. I’ve also been told there’s a lot of new features coming up. So keep an eye out for this hook at hook productivity.com.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:57:41
Fantastic, wonderful. And with that, that is our new tools of the week. That is a new tool to me, J and I’m looking forward to playing

Unknown Speaker 1:57:52
you will absolutely fall in love with this tool. It’s it’s one of those things that now I don’t it replaced a bookmarking like the entire bookmarking suite of my thing because I don’t think in terms of add this to my bookmark, it’s add this to the things that I was doing, as I was doing this thing so that when I try to remember in my goofy ADHD brain, I can go, oh, what was that one thing I was doing here, I went here, and then I have something else. So then I just go back to where I remember, hit the hook activator. And sure enough, there’s the link sitting there waiting for me. And the fact that it can expand beyond the browser, and it can hook files, it can hook directories, it can hook locations on your Mac. It’s so powerful and so wonderful. Especially once you get past the idea of how do I connect these things?

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:58:45
Fantastic.

Augusto Pinaud 1:58:47
Yeah, he was exactly there when you were you got me. So I’m going to put a look into that because that on my iPad will be fantastic.

Unknown Speaker 1:58:55
Like I said, right now it’s on Mac. It’s on Mac OS only. But I do. I’ve been told that there’s some some work on iOS companion.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:59:04
Fantastic. And with that, we just have an announcement and then we’re going to close out. The one announcement I wanted to make is folks have probably come into contact with Dr. Frank buck on the show in the past. And he’s been a panelist and he joins me on productivity Book Group, to review books and all kinds of other fun things. He is in the nomination running currently, for the third time in a row for the global gurus, top 30 time management professionals for I’m presuming 2021 because I think he was 19 and 20. And I think he’s going for 2021. So if you guys want to support Dr. Buck, go out there and find global gurus.org look for the time management category. And you can go ahead and vote for him. So it’s pretty easy to go ahead and log in and vote for him. And so go give some love to Dr. Buck and that. So with that, that brings us to the The end of the show. And with that, I just wanted to thank Jay Miller for joining us here today. Jay, how can folks stay in touch with you and keep up to date with regard to your work?

Unknown Speaker 2:00:14
So yeah, this has been a blast. I am super excited I got to wrap up the year with y’all. If you want to learn more about the stuff that I do the 5678 910 podcasts I’m running at any given time, Kj y miller.com. You can also reach me on social most of the socials except for all the ones that are owned by Facebook. At Kj, why Miller’s where you can find me there. And I yeah, anytime you want to talk productivity or anti productivity, give me a call. Wonderful.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:00:45
Thank you so much for joining us here on anything but idle j,

Augusto Pinaud 2:00:49
where we’ll

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:00:52
all right. So with that, just very, very quickly. If you noted a story that we missed this week, feel free to go ahead and let us know. You can find us at anything, but idle, on Twitter, our VMs are open, you can also find us at anything but idle.com and fill out the contact form there on the page. And you could just let us know you can subscribe to anything but idle at anything but idle.com forward slash subscribe and, and you’ll find our show notes links to all the stories that we had this week text transcript that we have for you to be able to both read on the page as well as download in PDF. If this is your first time watching the live stream, please feel free to click the thumbs up icon as well as subscribe to the channel that will notify you when we do future weekly live streams like this. If you’re listening to the podcast, feel free to keep listening to the podcast. If you are listening to the podcast and you’re not a subscriber, feel free to hit the subscribe tab at anything but idol.com and you can learn how to subscribe in your favorite podcast app. And there are also options for you to be able to leave reviews in both Apple podcasts as well as stitcher and those help us make new personal productivity friends and so thank you for leaving those reviews for us. And so with that thank you gousto pronoun for joining me here this every week for anything but idle.

Augusto Pinaud 2:02:14
Thank you I’m for people celebrating Kwanzaa celebrating Christmas and celebrating the holidays. This is obviously the show pre holiday. So Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa and happy holidays and looking forward to see you all or talk to you all or make you guys listen to us next week.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:02:35
With that, see you all next time on anything but idle. Here’s your productive life.