How Do You Sell A SaaS Swiss Army Knife?

Show Notes:
Links:
Snow Crash
Microsoft Flight Simulator glitch
Google deprecation article by Steve Yegge
Swiss Army
Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra
Heroku

Full Transcript:
Josh:
This is just why I know. I know that whatever happens in November, it's just going to get... It's going to get crazier. No matter what.

Starr:
I do feel like... More and more I feel like I'm inside of a cyber punk novel. Not really a William Gibson, Chiba City, going to get your bioware implanted or whatever but more of a Neil Stevenson Snow Crash type of situation where you have to... Everybody lives in gated communities, and the gated communities are owned by the different franchises. So, you live in the KFC gated community, and you worship the Colonel and all that.

Josh:
Or you live in a super PAC community.

Starr:
Yeah, exactly.

Josh:
Where they have your videos playing on billboards for everyone who drives by.

Starr:
Exactly. And the hero of the story is just this girl trying to deliver some pizzas through this wasteland of a country.

Josh:
Okay, this really is just Snow Crash, isn't it?

Starr:
Yeah. Pretty much. The only difference is the way the internet's played out is that we have a lot less sword fights.

Josh:
Right.

Starr:
I don't really just interact... I don't go online and just find myself in a seedy bar with my samurai sword.

Josh:
You got to give VR a chance to develop because you never... There might be more sword fights in the future.

Ben:
As long as you don't mind having a Facebook account since now, apparently that's a Facebook account for Oculus.

Josh:
Oh, Facebook sword?

Ben:
Well, you saw that news about Oculus. They're now-

Josh:
I did.

Ben:
Yeah. I had a friend of mine here in Seattle who said, "Okay. Well, I've got an Oculus for sale if anybody wants it."

Josh:
Really?

Ben:
Yep.

Josh:
Yeah. I never... I would not have bought an Oculus after Facebook acquired them. Maybe for that... Not necessarily for that specific reason but that's as good a reason as any.

Josh:
Obviously, they're going to do something with it in their interest.

Ben:
Obviously.

Starr:
Yeah, my house is too small too. I just break everything. It seems like you need a fair amount of free space to have some sort of VR set up.

Josh:
Yeah.

Starr:
Or you can gesticulate and not destroy priceless family artifacts.

Josh:
Yeah, I don't even know. I tried one of the very early ones and it was like that but I'm not sure how far they've come since then.

Starr:
I know. Eventually, they'll refine it to the point where instead of having to jester around, you just have this little device that you hold in your hand and you can just move your fingers small distances.

Josh:
Oh. Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. I see where you're going with that.

Starr:
Yeah.

Ben:
Well, in non-VR gaming news, Microsoft Flight Simulator was released this week.

Josh:
Is that what I... I saw something that looked a lot like that and then the page refreshed and it went away. For a split second, I was like, "Holy crap. Is that Flight Simulator?"

Ben:
It is. Yeah.

Starr:
Did y'all hear about the OpenStreetMap thing with that? Okay, this is great. I actually didn't realize that it was just released but I read about this glitch. So, somebody... So, there's an open street map, right? That's... I'm getting the name right, right?

Ben:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Starr:
Okay.

Josh:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Starr:
OpenStreetMap is people's open source version of Google Maps. So, you can go and get these maps and do whatever you want with them. So, it's maintained like Wikipedia by an army of volunteers. And I guess somebody in I think Melbourne, made a typo, and instead of... I don't know. Instead of listing a building as three stories, they listed as something like 3,000 stories. And so, Microsoft when they were developing the flight simulator, they went and got the OpenStreetMap data and they didn't scrub it or anything. And so, if you're flying in Melbourne, it's Melbourne and then this one really narrow building that goes up just like a giant monolith in the sky.

Josh:
That's amazing.

Starr:
And there's all these pictures on Twitter of people flying around it, going like, "What is this?"

Ben:
That's great.

Josh:
It's just a glitch in the data.

Starr:
Yeah.

Josh:
Wow. This is because Microsoft... I mean, this would never happen to Google Flight Simulator, I feel like. They don't use OpenStreetMap, do they? They've got their own... They've got Google cars.

Ben:
Yeah. But the problem with Google Flight Simulator would be that in three years, they would trash it. They would end it.

Josh:
Right. Because no one would play it. Or, not enough people would play it. Like 500,000 people would play but they'd be like, "We need 500,000,000 to play this."

Ben:
Exactly.

Josh:
"If it's going to be..."

Ben:
Exactly. Yeah, that's been in the news recently too. Google Cloud, and Steve... I don't know how you pronounce his last name. Yegge, maybe? Had this blog post about how Google deprecates so much all the time that... Why would you even build on it? And it's notable because Steve is an ex-Googler. And not just a luminary in the field in general but having worked there, he was pretty annoyed that he'd have to rebuild all of his stuff every few years just because Google likes to turn things off.

Josh:
Yeah. It's not a great policy.

Ben:
That's definitely a consideration that we had when we were shopping around for hosting, comparing AWS versus Google. That wasn't the primary consideration but that was an issue. My primary consideration was it's really easy apparently, to get your Google Cloud account shut off, and hard to get it returned back on.

Josh:
Wow.

Ben:
So, they made me pretty skittish.

Starr:
Based on complaints, or third parties, or what?

Ben:
No, based on automated algorithms at Google for detecting abuse.

Starr:
Oh.

Josh:
Nice.

Starr:
Oh, wow.

Ben:
Yeah, exactly.

Josh:
So, that's a good selling point.

Starr:
Great. Yeah.

Josh:
"Our platform is so free of abuse that you can't even use it."

Ben:
So, yeah, there have been a variety of Hacker News posts about people-

Starr:
Or it's, "Amazon just bills you for the abuse."

Ben:
Exactly. Amazon's just, "Oh, just pay us. We'll be fine."

Josh:
I guess with that Bitcoin money that you're mining.

Ben:
Exactly.

Josh:
Wow.

Ben:
Anyway, so yeah, so I think not a good idea to play Google Flight Simulator because halfway through your flight, they'll just turn it off.

Josh:
Just in the middle of the-

Starr:
Well, I don't know. They might keep it around because they got to train those self-flying planes.

Ben:
Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Josh:
Oh, yeah.

Ben:
That makes me think though, what would be really hard, so it'll be Google Airlines. Would you really want to fly in that air...