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S03.E09: Daily Active Users


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Upon discovering surprising stats, Richard attempts to bridge the gap between Pied Piper and its users, leading Jared to take drastic measures to hold everything together. Gavin learns secrets about the competition and decides to bring in a new face to reclaim his former glory.

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Am I to believe that the whole final sequence was actually filmed in India?  It surely looked like it.  You can only do so much with CGI --  Can you just pull that footage from some bank of random footage?  Whoa. 

Oh, and poor Richard. 

And heaven love you, Jared.  Jared reminds me of a friend of mine, who actually is that nice.  There are such people.

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Am I the only one who thought this whole thing was stupid?  How about an ad that says this: 'your smartphone should be as easy to use as, well, your phone.  Do you need to know how electricity works to charge it up?  No, it just works.  You just get on with sharing your stuff with your friends, we'll make it work'.  Bam, done.  

Or do what (I hear) folks do when people ask what the hell 'cloud storage' is.  The answer is 'cloudy cloud cloud cloudy cloud'.  After a while people just say 'oh, right - The Cloud.  Gotcha.' Conclusion: many people who profess interest in how things work will accept a bullshit answer.

Honest question here - how long does it usually take things like this to catch on?  Seems odd that Richard is ready to thrown in the towel because the platform isn't instantly successful.  

I also seem to recall that some apps and media sites actually did fake up users at the beginning just to drive up user numbers.  

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4 minutes ago, henripootel said:

Am I the only one who thought this whole thing was stupid?   

No.

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Or do what (I hear) folks do when people ask what the hell 'cloud storage' is.  The answer is 'cloudy cloud cloud cloudy cloud'.  After a while people just say 'oh, right - The Cloud.  Gotcha.' Conclusion: many people who profess interest in how things work will accept a bullshit answer.

 

die-cut-stickers.png

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I tell people it's just like 1960s time-sharing. :)

Lots of services and apps have bigged up their numbers at the beginning. I don't think CompuServe ever did, but I do recall an amusing conversation in about 1992 with the head of the UK subsidiary, which at the time was growing pretty fast. I suggested putting up the subscriber numbers every day so you'd see it at login, like those signs McDonalds had about how many served. "But what if the number ever starts going down?" he asked. It seemed a little far-fetched at the time. (At that point, everyone anywhere close to the tech industry had their CompuServe ID on their business cards...today it's Twitter...tomorrow...?)

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One thing I'm baffled by; just how much was that Maleant contract for?  Because two things: it'd have to be pretty huge to make $750M in R&D be ignored by the board, and second I don't know why Hooli would ever agree to those ridiculous contract terms.  They did agree to them, right?  Because the only reason PP didn't immediately have a solid, reliable B2B revenue stream was that single onerous contract requirement for exclusive rights to all proprietary software, of which "Action Jack" was unwilling to yield.  I'm just really, really surprised that a huge company like Hooli would agree to that.  Or... did the writers forget that part?  No, that couldn't have happened, not these writers.

Everyone laughed at Dinesh again, although the person complaining in last week's thread that he's just the whipping boy at this point is right: his video chat isn't just a good idea, it's... the basic platform as of last season.  How did they make a season-long big deal about simultaneous live video streaming, and yet no one has thought maybe that should be part in the platform?  It further reflects on how much these writers hate technology people that they really believe no one in any part of PP can see the unusable complexity of their current product.

It's almost disturbing how deeply Judge/Berg must hate all technology people; he must think about tech people what I think about his writing team, although in my defense: his writing team are real people in this, the real world, and not a bunch of straw men invented to be narrative punching bags.  From the obvious contempt for our alleged protagonists, to the implausible, 1980's era sitcom writing where the status quo must be maintained (and ever more absurd twists are needed to do so, such as people becoming braindead morons whenever convenient), to that uncomfortably long wordless ending shot.  We get it, guys: Silicon Valley has elements of people using up the third-world, it's all smoke and mirrors and tulip mania bubble bullshit, yada yada yada.  If this were a high school class production, I'd be impressed.  Less so from people with decades in the "business we call show", given Hollywood's past and current reputation as a town built on the twin and noble pillars of fraudulent accounting and the sexual exploitation- in many cases of minors- through lavish parties or the utilitarian casting couch.

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I think even Reddit has finally gone sour. Usually I'm disheartened to see a bunch of posts about how funny ____ was, to the point I assumed there were Bangladeshi click farms writing all those posts raving about the spot-on accuracy and knee-slapping hilarity.  They must be on vacation this week, because the SV subreddit after this episode mostly has posts with titles like these- and plenty of agreeing comments:

  • Season 3 is very average, not funny or outstanding like its previous seasons
  • Please, Silicon Valley, either give Monica something to do, or get rid of her entirely.
  • I don't understand what Pied Piper is anymore.
  • Why are they acting as if redesign of the GUI is some monumental task?
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.  They did agree to them, right?  Because the only reason PP didn't immediately have a solid, reliable B2B revenue stream was that single onerous contract requirement for exclusive rights to all proprietary software, of which "Action Jack" was unwilling to yield.

I doubt Houli agreed to the terms and the reason is they are Houli so they don't have to agree to those terms because they don't need the immediate funding to develop the box like PP did.

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1 hour ago, hincandenza said:

I think even Reddit has finally gone sour. Usually I'm disheartened to see a bunch of posts about how funny ____ was, to the point I assumed there were Bangladeshi click farms writing all those posts raving about the spot-on accuracy and knee-slapping hilarity.

Right? I've been avoiding that sub because it makes me feel like I'm a humorless old timer, the only one not in on the joke. I'm sorry this show sucks, but I'm sort of happy for the validation that I'm not the only one who is unhappy with it.

I'm at the point where I want Pied Piper to fail, because Richard is so insufferable. You only have $650k, and you spend it on user groups that are nothing more than you pontificating your brilliance to the average joe? So arrogant, so ineffective. How did he think that was going to scale? But at least a roomful of 10 people got to hear how awesome and smart you think you are.

That "Tables" ad represented everything I hate in the tech world. I was stabby just watching it.

And finally, not related to this episode, but the show in general, I just can't with Gilfoyle. He is such a lazily written character and has no defining personality other than to be a crappy person. Dinesh, Jared, and even Erlich seem to have some depth to them, but Gilfoyle exists to be sarcastic and mean. He is currently my least favorite character on any show I watch.

  • Love 4
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6 hours ago, Chippings said:

Am I to believe that the whole final sequence was actually filmed in India?  It surely looked like it.  You can only do so much with CGI --  Can you just pull that footage from some bank of random footage?  Whoa. 

Oh, and poor Richard. 

And heaven love you, Jared.  Jared reminds me of a friend of mine, who actually is that nice.  There are such people.

I literally laughed out loud when Monica was like "well, Jared obviously knows" and they flashed to Jared anxiously pacing the floor and biting his nails.  Never change Jared....never change!

  • Love 10
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9 hours ago, henripootel said:

Am I the only one who thought this whole thing was stupid?  How about an ad that says this: 'your smartphone should be as easy to use as, well, your phone.  Do you need to know how electricity works to charge it up?  No, it just works.  You just get on with sharing your stuff with your friends, we'll make it work'.  Bam, done.  

Or do what (I hear) folks do when people ask what the hell 'cloud storage' is.  The answer is 'cloudy cloud cloud cloudy cloud'.  After a while people just say 'oh, right - The Cloud.  Gotcha.' Conclusion: many people who profess interest in how things work will accept a bullshit answer.

I was thinking along similar lines in that a lot of people have no idea how their cars actually work beyond "turn key and drive" but you don't see people at the dealership refusing to buy a car because they don't understand the mechanics of the carburetor. Even though Richard's approach to teaching the focus group (and later the help groups) exactly how the app works, he could have simplified the whole process. On the other hand, his insistence on teaching the entire process reminded me of my dad who was a software engineer so I guess they at least got the attitude right. 

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9 hours ago, henripootel said:

Am I the only one who thought this whole thing was stupid?  How about an ad that says this: 'your smartphone should be as easy to use as, well, your phone.  Do you need to know how electricity works to charge it up?  No, it just works.  You just get on with sharing your stuff with your friends, we'll make it work'.  Bam, done.  

Or do what (I hear) folks do when people ask what the hell 'cloud storage' is.  The answer is 'cloudy cloud cloud cloudy cloud'.  After a while people just say 'oh, right - The Cloud.  Gotcha.' Conclusion: many people who profess interest in how things work will accept a bullshit answer.

Honest question here - how long does it usually take things like this to catch on?  Seems odd that Richard is ready to thrown in the towel because the platform isn't instantly successful.  

I also seem to recall that some apps and media sites actually did fake up users at the beginning just to drive up user numbers.  

I guess I just don't understand why they can't change the user interface.  

It makes sense for users to want a button that says "download,"  I think I would be confused without it.  Or, if its going doing it automatically, just a box that says "download in progress," a status bar and then "complete" so that people know its happened.

I don't see why it would be taking the wings off an airplane to have those two things, which would help users understand whats going on.

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7 hours ago, biakbiak said:

 

I doubt Houli agreed to the terms and the reason is they are Houli so they don't have to agree to those terms because they don't need the immediate funding to develop the box like PP did.

...or, in a rush to stick it to the board Action Jack (who doesn't seem to really care about the contract term) and Gavin (desperate to get back into his company) didn't have the contract terms read closely enough and just signed on the dotted line when he heard about the money.

I think it could do either way.

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7 hours ago, hincandenza said:

One thing I'm baffled by; just how much was that Maleant contract for?  Because two things: it'd have to be pretty huge to make $750M in R&D be ignored by the board, and second I don't know why Hooli would ever agree to those ridiculous contract terms.  They did agree to them, right?  Because the only reason PP didn't immediately have a solid, reliable B2B revenue stream was that single onerous contract requirement for exclusive rights to all proprietary software, of which "Action Jack" was unwilling to yield.  I'm just really, really surprised that a huge company like Hooli would agree to that.  Or... did the writers forget that part?  No, that couldn't have happened, not these writers.

The $750 million is sunk costs at this point, they have the basics of middle out compression, enough to design and build the box for its high volume storage. They're not competing directly with Pied Piper, which was the Board's concern. They get a direct revenue stream added to a very diversified company. Hooli has time that Pied Piper doesn't to implement the box and learn from it. It also significantly greater negotiating power, so it's likely the terms of the Maleant contract wouldn't be as onerous.

While I agree that it would be ridiculous, in the real world, that the board would buy his "This was my plan all along story" and restore him as CEO, approving the building of "The Box" and it's contract makes sense.

7 hours ago, hincandenza said:
  • Why are they acting as if redesign of the GUI is some monumental task?

The issue didn't seem to be so much the GUI as people fundamentally understanding how it works. I see it as, "I know how my Drop Box/iCloud/Google Drive Work. My documents are stored online, and when I want it, I retrieve it on my device. But this new platform doesn't follow those rules I know and understand, so why bother."

This is of course with big retrospective, and wouldn't fit with the need for struggle in the plot, but what would have seemed like a good method for unveiling the platform would have been to partner with various media companies and pre-load the platform with content to show you its power. Say partner with Universal, and every month have one of their movies pre-loaded when you download the App, ad in an online streaming channel, a Nature Photographer's portfolio etc, with some simple instructions on how to access it on your various devices, and how to see that it's barely taking up any room on said device. Basically, limit the interaction to a few key things first, and see how it goes.

I'm still high on the show. I look forward to watching it every week, but I think it's hit a snag that a lot of "Big Plot" shows do. It's a lot easier, and more captivating to show the rise with a goal in mind. It's much harder to show maintaining that goal and building on it. It's why a show like House of Cards has become less captivating for me each season. There's nowhere left to climb. The writers of Silicon Valley keep moving the goal line further out, which is true of business, but typically you have some time to sit, enjoy, and better what you've already done. That wouldn't make for captivating story though. So instead we'll get the methods of having the company appear moments from death over and over.

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(edited)

My computer class in college taught Fortran and I walked around with stacks of punch cards.

Later, when I got my first Home! computer, I was so frustrated by my blinking C: prompt, I finally called a friend to come over and help me set my system up.  But he was one of those guys who dropped out of high school to start a computer company.  He didn't see why I should waste money paying monthly connection fees to a service when it was possible to sneak under the radar and create one of my own.

ARPANET? 

*******

So this long-winded post is just about my acid [stomach] flashback to that afternoon, when I hated myself for being stupid.  Fuck you, Pipey, with your neuralnet sharded data distribution system that's just six clicks away.

And same to Richard, who can take his supercilious attitude and shove it, right next to his idiot-savant vision.

Edited by candall
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(edited)

I also do not understand.  If the interface is supposed to be so dynamic and different...wouldn't Pied Piper realize that they might have to do a little bit of explaining to the average non tech savvy user?  Why did they not have focus groups, before they released the platform?  Has marketing any idea about the stats of their average user?

This is information most companies have.  Pied Piper definitely should of had this research before the "Tables " add went out.

Edited by qtpye
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One great sight gag as the camera pans up from all the shoes to the sign by the door of Laurie's home "Shoes will be removed" The vact that you can hear Laurie's voice rattling around in your head as you read that is fantastic. Also that they called back to her love of bizzare modern art. We can see why it's starting to pour over into Raviga's offices. Her home is too damn full of it.

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Lol, I liked the Tables ad.  My impression was: "Well, this really doesn't make any sense, but it's visually appealing, so I'm just going to go with it."  That's . . . art.  And arguably bears some connection to Richard's compression app, which is effective regardless of whether you understand it.

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13 hours ago, henripootel said:

Am I the only one who thought this whole thing was stupid?  How about an ad that says this: 'your smartphone should be as easy to use as, well, your phone.  Do you need to know how electricity works to charge it up?  No, it just works.  You just get on with sharing your stuff with your friends, we'll make it work'.  Bam, done.  

Or do what (I hear) folks do when people ask what the hell 'cloud storage' is.  The answer is 'cloudy cloud cloud cloudy cloud'.  After a while people just say 'oh, right - The Cloud.  Gotcha.' Conclusion: many people who profess interest in how things work will accept a bullshit answer.

Honest question here - how long does it usually take things like this to catch on?  Seems odd that Richard is ready to thrown in the towel because the platform isn't instantly successful.  

I also seem to recall that some apps and media sites actually did fake up users at the beginning just to drive up user numbers.  

The ad was a parody of facebook's first ad.

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(edited)
4 hours ago, Traveller519 said:

The issue didn't seem to be so much the GUI as people fundamentally understanding how it works. I see it as, "I know how my Drop Box/iCloud/Google Drive Work.

I agree, but that's the problem.  I thought after TechCrunch that the next season would have been a long montage of folks backing dump trucks of money up to Erlich's house - Netflix, porn guys, Amazon, youtube, Facebook, anybody who streams big data.  Woulda thought the plan was to seamlessly integrate middle-out into every app and computer on the planet, built-in with everyone playing a license fee to PP.  Nothing else makes sense, given that somebody somewhere would soon figure out middle-out and rip it off (which did happen) so best to be everywhere by the time they do.  PP'd be billionaires by now, and no one would be complaining that they didn't understand how it worked, they'd just be able to stream movies and video chat no matter how shitty their connection speed.  PP would be famous as the guys who brought 4k download to everyone on the planet.

Instead we got them struggling to build AN app, then A box, then an app again.  I'm sure the parade of luminaries who lined up to shake Richard's hand after TechCrunch are as mystified as we are.

Edited by henripootel
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What really annoys me about this whole usability thing is that usability was a HUGE issue in the technology industry...in 1990-1995. Donald Norman wrote The Psychology of Everyday Things (still in print, retitled The Design of Everyday Things), and people started setting up usability labs. And the engineers behaved exactly like Richard. I did an interview with the woman who ran Lotus's usability lab c. 1992, and she told me about getting the engineers in to watch people try to figure out their software. "That's a really stupid person. You must have found them in Harvard Yard." ... "That's a really stupid person, too.".... and then after three or four they'd get it that the software design was the problem.

What annoyed me even more was as soon as Monica said she had problems with the user interface, I thought, "They're not going to remake DWEEBS, are they?" That was the premise of that mid-1990s show - that a band of geeks (which included Steven Tobolowsky, by the way) needed to hire a total techno-ignoramus (female, of course, BECAUSE) because they didn't know anything about how ordinary people thought. And here we are.

The truth is, the thing I loved about the show was Christopher Evan Welch. Sigh...

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7 hours ago, Traveller519 said:

One great sight gag as the camera pans up from all the shoes to the sign by the door of Laurie's home "Shoes will be removed" The vact that you can hear Laurie's voice rattling around in your head as you read that is fantastic. Also that they called back to her love of bizzare modern art. We can see why it's starting to pour over into Raviga's offices. Her home is too damn full of it.

Lauri and Jared are the best characters on the show. 

  • Love 1
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9 hours ago, Traveller519 said:

One great sight gag as the camera pans up from all the shoes to the sign by the door of Laurie's home "Shoes will be removed" The vact that you can hear Laurie's voice rattling around in your head as you read that is fantastic. Also that they called back to her love of bizzare modern art. We can see why it's starting to pour over into Raviga's offices. Her home is too damn full of it.

What I especially loved is that most of the time when people put up those signs, they're much more politely worded ("Please remove your shoes") but Laurie's was just a straight up command.

I also loved that Monica has been to Laurie's house so many times that she knew to tell Richard that the chair was actually art that no one was supposed to sit on.

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18 hours ago, hkit said:

And finally, not related to this episode, but the show in general, I just can't with Gilfoyle. He is such a lazily written character and has no defining personality other than to be a crappy person. Dinesh, Jared, and even Erlich seem to have some depth to them, but Gilfoyle exists to be sarcastic and mean. He is currently my least favorite character on any show I watch.

I'm with you. It occurred to me this episode that I'm really over Gilfoyle. I don't find his nasty personality and monotone voice amusing at all; I hate him almost as much as I hate Richard.

And speaking of Richard - ffs, get the hell out of the tub. Jesus, but what a simpering, spoiled, self-important shit he is. I am far from tech-savvy, but I don't get how difficult it could be to do a slight re-design of the interface - a tweak or something - that can make the app a little more user-friendly. Richard seems like that guy that needs/wants to be the smartest person in the room and then gets pissed off that the rest of us aren't smart enough to understand that he's the smartest person in the room. I have a computer-nerd friend and he once told me that he stayed away from Apple products because they're too easy - that they've kind of dumbed stuff down. My response to him was that I like the fact that it's "dumbed down." My brain isn't wired for that kind of thinking and when it comes to technology interface, an intuitive approach works real well for me - the simpler the better. I don't care how my apps work or why they work; I just need to know they work. And if that means popping up a little "your file is downloading now!" to humor me, that's fine; I'm not offended. And that's the thing with Richard: he had valuable feedback that people didn't really understand what the app did or its value; they didn't really get how to use it. It seems to me that tweaking the app so that it could walk the user through in steps - perhaps as part of the install process - could basically accomplish that educational piece that was missing. But giving classes and literally taking the show on the road? Snooooooze. . . And forget about that animated pied piper - I disabled that annoying paper clip immediately!

The jokes with Gavin and animals as metaphors is old. The bulldog was funny, the tortoise and hare were cute. The elephant was trying too hard.

The less said about that Tables ad the better.

  • Love 5
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^^ and if you could add "pipey" to the interface, how hard was it to add "file downloading," "downloading complete?" to the interface???

but I love, love, love, love African Elephants....and as he was walking out I was just thinking about a giant pile of elephant dung for the board.  And there was the elephant.  So I was happy to see him/her.

And whoever wondered why the hell they didn't do market research BEFORE launching a user product....excellent question.

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First time poster here.  I'm a user experience designer so at first I was really excited that they would proceed with the super obvious choice of hiring a UX team to solve their problems and that I'd get to see some fun new characters with my same job on the show.

Of course that didn't happen so I was literally yelling at Richard through my TV to hire some damn UX designers!  It's definitely a stereotype that engineers think that UX/UI design is easy and all based on intuition and that they could do it themselves (and end up making completely unusable products), but the fact that NO ONE even considered hiring designers was way too far-fetched for me to believe.

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16 hours ago, Maysie said:

. And forget about that animated pied piper - I disabled that annoying paper clip immediately!

 

I replaced it with a kitty cat...at least it was kind of cute.

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13 minutes ago, qtpye said:

I replaced it with a kitty cat...at least it was kind of cute.

I confess, I did too. But it didn't last long either because it was too annoying. And this from someone who's often fighting the cat for the keyboard.

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Quote

Clippit (Clippy) was the default Microsoft Assistant--while you were typing he would pop up and say "Hey, boss, it looks like you're trying to write a letter.  I've taken the liberty of opening the Microsoft Style Guide!"  At which point you'd stop, take 30 seconds to close the non-standard Style Guide, take another minute to get your flow back on, erase the last sentence Clippit snuck in there, and... "Hey, boss, it looks like you're trying to write a letter.  I've taken the liberty of opening the Microsoft Style Guide!"  At which point you'd stop, take 30 seconds to close the non-standard Style Guide, take another minute to get your flow back on, erase the last sentence Clippit snuck in there, and... "Hey, boss, it looks like you're trying to write a letter.  I've taken the liberty of opening the Microsoft Style Guide!"  At which point you'd stop, take 30 seconds to close the non-standard Style Guide, take another minute to get your flow back on, erase the last sentence Clippit snuck in there, and...

At which point he'd eventually give up.  Then you still couldn't write your letter, because you'd spend the next 30 minutes attempting to disable, and then completely uninstall, every incarnation of Microsoft Assistant.

This is an excerpt from a Quora response about why Clippy was disliked.

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Would PP be a consumer product?  Seems like it is an add-on/behind the wall of some OS or other major enterprise-wide application...  I was confused as soon as it went to the Hooli store...

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(edited)
On 6/20/2016 at 1:27 PM, henripootel said:

I agree, but that's the problem.  I thought after TechCrunch that the next season would have been a long montage of folks backing dump trucks of money up to Erlich's house - Netflix, porn guys, Amazon, youtube, Facebook, anybody who streams big data.  Woulda thought the plan was to seamlessly integrate middle-out into every app and computer on the planet, built-in with everyone playing a license fee to PP.  Nothing else makes sense, given that somebody somewhere would soon figure out middle-out and rip it off (which did happen) so best to be everywhere by the time they do.  PP'd be billionaires by now, and no one would be complaining that they didn't understand how it worked, they'd just be able to stream movies and video chat no matter how shitty their connection speed.  PP would be famous as the guys who brought 4k download to everyone on the planet.

It's truly stupendous how they've missed the boat on this.  I get not having that all happen in season 2, but via interviews we know that Judge & Co thought that even $10M was "way too high" for an offer, and when their consultants quietly pointed out how rich PP would be literally the day after TechCrunch, the show runners then decided they explicitly don't want PP to succeed because then "the show would end".  They are so out of touch, they can't separate their own MacGuffin of an algorithm for the usual Silicon Valley vaporware apps like "Bro".  It's not as if there isn't a mountain of comedy to mine when the core group is part of the suddenly nouveau riche, or trying to run an actual, real business.  

At this point, we've had two seasons of the writers fighting the obvious end result, and the only way to do that was to make everyone on the PP team suddenly and unbelievably stupid.  It's like bad sitcoms of the 80's and 90's; if the token goofball character has a sudden good fortune (hot girlfriend, influx of money) they'll it all in slapstick fashion by episode's end and voila, everyone is back in their expected place.  Thing is, TV viewers have moved on from that dreck, and we want serialized story arcs, not disposable episodic content.  Unfortunately for us viewers, Mike Judge is stuck in the 90's.

 

23 hours ago, wendyg said:

What really annoys me about this whole usability thing is that usability was a HUGE issue in the technology industry...in 1990-1995. Donald Norman wrote The Psychology of Everyday Things (still in print, retitled The Design of Everyday Things), and people started setting up usability labs. And the engineers behaved exactly like Richard. I did an interview with the woman who ran Lotus's usability lab c. 1992, and she told me about getting the engineers in to watch people try to figure out their software. "That's a really stupid person. You must have found them in Harvard Yard." ... "That's a really stupid person, too.".... and then after three or four they'd get it that the software design was the problem.

What annoyed me even more was as soon as Monica said she had problems with the user interface, I thought, "They're not going to remake DWEEBS, are they?" That was the premise of that mid-1990s show - that a band of geeks (which included Steven Tobolowsky, by the way) needed to hire a total techno-ignoramus (female, of course, BECAUSE) because they didn't know anything about how ordinary people thought. And here we are.

The truth is, the thing I loved about the show was Christopher Evan Welch. Sigh...

Losing Welch was, in retrospect, the creative end for this show; it would have been impossible to write all of PP's failures if Peter Gregory was still around, because he was demonstrably too smart to allow all this... bullshit.  It hasn't been the same since, and again it shows that despite the PR releases masquerading as news articles saying how this show "hires consultants from SV", it's not the case that they're listening to what they say.  I can't believe a single SV insider would agree that the last two seasons of plot lines are remotely based in reality.  I don't think Judge can listen though; Judge is stuck in the 90's.

 

2 hours ago, the-kellifer said:

First time poster here.  I'm a user experience designer so at first I was really excited that they would proceed with the super obvious choice of hiring a UX team to solve their problems and that I'd get to see some fun new characters with my same job on the show.

Of course that didn't happen so I was literally yelling at Richard through my TV to hire some damn UX designers!  It's definitely a stereotype that engineers think that UX/UI design is easy and all based on intuition and that they could do it themselves (and end up making completely unusable products), but the fact that NO ONE even considered hiring designers was way too far-fetched for me to believe.

Yeah, despite the mountains of alleged consultants, anyone involved with tech seems to grow angrily disenchanted with this show- so, welcome to the club. :) Like with the inability to hire lawyers when dealing with an existential legal issue, this show has people with millions of dollars of investment (where the fuck did they spend it all?) who don't even know how to hire people who are experts in those core areas, like UX.  It hinges on what WendyG said, that the 90's era thinking/joke about tech guys being clueless outside of their field isn't the way of the world anymore.  Further proof that Judge is stuck in the 90's.

32 minutes ago, ChipBach said:

Would PP be a consumer product?  Seems like it is an add-on/behind the wall of some OS or other major enterprise-wide application...  I was confused as soon as it went to the Hooli store...

We all are, man.  We all are.  The weird part is all the many avenues a world-changing compression avenue would benefit are not mutually exclusive; a first-year tech employee fresh out of school could see the many ways to make money hand over fist without sacrificing some big "vision".  My expectation after season 1 was that season 2 would have seen them as a new startup, well-funded and with the first real hints of success (signing their first big contract, and all that entails) but chaotic and scrambling to be 'real professionals', as well as the paper millionaires struggling in their own way to adapt to their new lives and lifestyles.  Season 3 would have been PP as a very wealthy company growing too fast, with Richard & Co. struggling not to turn into Gavin Belson et al, while fending off competitors and the complexity of being the world's most social awkward billionaire.  Each season, we'd sort of explore a different "strata" of SV life and money, from the garage startup to the over-priced offices and elite posturing, the change-the-world rhetoric and the social inequality truth underneath it, all centered on Richard not becoming the kind of person he thought he hated.  

But for someone who is used to making sitcoms from two decades ago, such changes in situation are not allowed in a "situation comedy", apparently.  My theory is, Judge is stuck in the 90's. :)

Edited by hincandenza
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13 minutes ago, hincandenza said:

But for someone who is used to making sitcoms from two decades ago, such changes in situation are not allowed in a "situation comedy", apparently.  My theory is, Judge is stuck in the 90's. :)

As always, I applaud the music of your outrage, hincandenza, but I might quibble with one thing.  The whole 'engineers don't know how to make things for non-engineers' is not totally dead.  My dear wife contends with this all the time, but she does software for the insular, backwater US government.  She hits the attitude all the time, with developers not listening to what the users are actually gonna use the software to do.  The engineers make it as they imagine the users should want, rather than what they do want.  

It's a vexing thing but I'd argue that it makes little sense to have it here, in this show.  For one, these guys live in the commercial world, and the lessons of hiring a proper UX team is (I would think) long since learned.  For another, I don't see why middle-out has to be its own product, just part of everyone else's product.  Sounds to me (although it's hard to tell) that PP just re-invented the file-sharing app, albeit a really great one.  

But as many have said, that one fucking app among the god-knows-how-many types of application that would benefit vastly from having middle-out under the hood.  Shit, I'd imagine that any app out there would soon have to make a deal with PP, else they'd be the moral equivalent of being dial-up speed in a T-1 world.  They'd be paying PP just to be near the top of the list of whom Richard or any of his team talks to next.  PP shouldn't be scrounging for money, they should be prioritizing who gets middle-out first, and turning that alone into huge fucking money.

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(edited)

Not exactly episode related but I work in a building next to a bunch of tech firms here in Seattle and just saw a guy walking around in a Pied Piper t-shirt. 

Edited by Subrookie
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I thought not hiring user experience designers was pretty spot on for Richard's cluelessness/arrogance and the rushed way the product was released. I live with an engineer who complains about UX people not getting it, so in my mind, a conflict still exists.

It seems a vastly unpopular opinion to state that I like Gilfoyle more than Dinesh! Then again, it seems vastly unpopular here to suggest I even enjoy the show!

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7 hours ago, LCanterbury said:

I thought not hiring user experience designers was pretty spot on for Richard's cluelessness/arrogance and the rushed way the product was released. I live with an engineer who complains about UX people not getting it, so in my mind, a conflict still exists.

It seems a vastly unpopular opinion to state that I like Gilfoyle more than Dinesh! Then again, it seems vastly unpopular here to suggest I even enjoy the show!

I actually think more people like Gilfoyle.  Not me, but I think I have the UO on the subject!

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16 hours ago, Subrookie said:

Not exactly episode related but I work in a building next to a bunch of tech firms here in Seattle and just saw a guy walking around in a Pied Piper t-shirt. 

They sell them at Hot Topic. 

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Everything everyone has said about all the tech stuff (over my head) is spot on. The thing that I couldn't get over was the state of that bathroom and Richard's head (or the actual actor) in that bathtub! Christ on a cracker, that was scarier than all the blunders on the tech side. I can't imagine anyone as anal as Richard (and Jared) would actually use a filthy bathroom like that. 

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On June 21, 2016 at 4:51 PM, hincandenza said:

Season 3 would have been PP as a very wealthy company growing too fast, with Richard & Co. struggling not to turn into Gavin Belson et al, while fending off competitors and the complexity of being the world's most social awkward billionaire.

The more I think about it, the more I think I'd like to watch this show rather than the real one. 

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On 6/21/2016 at 4:51 PM, hincandenza said:
On 6/20/2016 at 4:27 PM, henripootel said:

I agree, but that's the problem.  I thought after TechCrunch that the next season would have been a long montage of folks backing dump trucks of money up to Erlich's house - Netflix, porn guys, Amazon, youtube, Facebook, anybody who streams big data.  Woulda thought the plan was to seamlessly integrate middle-out into every app and computer on the planet, built-in with everyone playing a license fee to PP.  Nothing else makes sense, given that somebody somewhere would soon figure out middle-out and rip it off (which did happen) so best to be everywhere by the time they do.  PP'd be billionaires by now, and no one would be complaining that they didn't understand how it worked, they'd just be able to stream movies and video chat no matter how shitty their connection speed.  PP would be famous as the guys who brought 4k download to everyone on the planet.

It's truly stupendous how they've missed the boat on this.  I get not having that all happen in season 2, but via interviews we know that Judge & Co thought that even $10M was "way too high" for an offer, and when their consultants quietly pointed out how rich PP would be literally the day after TechCrunch, the show runners then decided they explicitly don't want PP to succeed because then "the show would end".  They are so out of touch, they can't separate their own MacGuffin of an algorithm for the usual Silicon Valley vaporware apps like "Bro".  It's not as if there isn't a mountain of comedy to mine when the core group is part of the suddenly nouveau riche, or trying to run an actual, real business.  

It weird that the show runner talks about how smart these guys are and how Richard's compression discovery was genius.  The reason non tech people do not realize this is because the show treats Pied Piper like a company that can barely function.  They have not gone with any of the obvious ways people with this type great system would go.  They might as well be putting out an app that gives everybody clown noses (or mustaches).

In this world it seems like the compression discovery is no big deal and no one really needs it that badly.

Being able to stream seamlessly from a shitty connection would change countless lives in itself.

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(edited)

They need a UI/UX guy. That's it. It's why the new technology is foreign to the public. Of course, I'm biased because that's what I am, but poo-pooing that design guy and that sort of input should have been the first sign to them. (It was the first clue to the audience for the season's plot, at least.) You need to convey and communicate between user and machine and do it in such a way that is automatically intuitive. The way we read a book, traditionally left-to-right, a screen, the top-left or top-right we're conditioned to look for close/min/maximize and menus, etc. I realize that I'm super-simplifying it. The microwave oven is my favorite metaphor. A bunch of engineers, with decades since its invention, no real industrial designer - and they come up with more and more and more buttons to interact with on the machine that NO ONE uses, though its inner workings and energy efficiency I'm sure have gotten better.

I've had constant battles with the back-end programmers for over a decade because of this exact thing. They get it because they're conditioned to already be familiar with all the prompts, fields, buttons. Even if they've never seen a program or app before they intuitively know how to find "the thing" they're looking for to do the thing they want. The most common example is when I do campaigns for a company - redoing a website/app. The engineers and sales will go out of the way to accommodate the client to bring the costs down by spending heavy on what the consumer/public sees but almost nothing for the intranet/what the content-creators see and use. Content-creators could be photographers, authors, bloggers/journalists, tax preparers, accountants...anybody not a programmer. Because the interface that they use isn't widely seen, it usually looks like shit and is overly complicated and unnecessarily intimidating. And so because zero or almost-zero budget went towards that, programmers basically duplicate the interface that they use to make this interface - one that they see every day. And then hours pass upon launch and the same thing happens: emails and phone calls from the clients that say "I don't get it. Everything." As early as that same day or within the week, suddenly people are pulled off other jobs to go train/teach clients for days. So dumb. Even afterwards, they only kinda-sorta get it and it has a domino effect onto the public widely used and seen website because they're only going to provide content that they're comfortable putting up. The public site suddenly looks crappier than in any alpha, beta or even the early pre-production meetings; it could be the best design and product ever on the public end, but it won't take long over time for it to break, feel lacking, be incomplete as in order to stay looking awesome and being an awesome experience, it becomes cumbersome, ignorable, and forgettable as the same negative experience is occurring behind the scenes.

Sorry to nerd out on the logistical side of a comedy, but this show does do an excellent job of fictional satire in that environment. Pied Piper's answer is an entirely new interface on mobile and web. That does require some $$$. They don't have front-end programmers at all that would have chimed in. Maybe that girl who uses spaces instead of tabs is one. PP needs a team of designers and developers that solely work on the front-end UI/UX, but with no money, it can be done with one person if they're good enough, willing enough, the unicorn of someone who can draw pretty pictures, be socially aware and is good at the maths.

 

On 6/21/2016 at 2:48 PM, the-kellifer said:

First time poster here.  I'm a user experience designer so at first I was really excited that they would proceed with the super obvious choice of hiring a UX team to solve their problems and that I'd get to see some fun new characters with my same job on the show.

Of course that didn't happen so I was literally yelling at Richard through my TV to hire some damn UX designers!  It's definitely a stereotype that engineers think that UX/UI design is easy and all based on intuition and that they could do it themselves (and end up making completely unusable products), but the fact that NO ONE even considered hiring designers was way too far-fetched for me to believe.

Kindred spirit! Almost every engineer I know thinks this arrogantly. The CTOs and other ones I've worked with have softened over time after repeated exercises of why their shit isn't usable. They ALWAYS blame the client for not getting it, and they made no mistake. Then someone above them has to insist that they do "something" to make the client happy after launch, and besides going over and holding their hand they just insert some ugly, buggy shortcut modular thing that is kind-of familiar to the client because they are more or less familiar with commenting/posting on the web. But yeah, after some time you can kind-of get them to tone down their animosity towards the UI/UX side, even listen to it. But they still don't listen initially. It has to go wrong first before they're like "Okay, what I'm doing didn't work THIS time (I'm sure it will next time)."

Edited by Potanical Pardon
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I re-watched the episode, paying close attention to the scene where Richard breaks into the feedback group room and proceeds to explain, in very simple terms, just how PP instantaneously delivers videos, audios, and other compressed files to your device. You can watch a video from your iPhone, for example, and it appears to be fully installed there, running instantly and seamlessly. Yet the video file takes up no device memory and is in fact not installed on your device. Instead, the file has been broken down into encrypted shards that are distributed over a peer network of other people's devices (i.e., smartphones, etc.) and is only accessible from your device. Great, you get the performance of a fully downloaded video on your device without losing 4-6 GB in very precious memory.

But this process doesn't seem conducive to quick playback with respect to the way I understand TCP/IP to work. Instead of  storing and streaming the file to the user's device from a central web server, it gets distributed in small chunks (packets) to and and stored on a number of other users' devices (including smartphones), which PP does not own, then instantaneously reassembled and sent to the primary user's device on demand. I suppose that all of these peer devices are owned by PP users/customers. Did PP do it this way to save the expense of a maintaining a web server, but with no performance loss? Anyone know of any real software that operates in this fashion?

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But this process doesn't seem conducive to quick playback with respect to the way I understand TCP/IP to work. Instead of  storing and streaming the file to the user's device from a central web server, it gets distributed in small chunks (packets) to and and stored on a number of other users' devices (including smartphones), which PP does not own, then instantaneously reassembled and sent to the primary user's device on demand. I suppose that all of these peer devices are owned by PP users/customers. Did PP do it this way to save the expense of a maintaining a web server, but with no performance loss? Anyone know of any real software that operates in this fashion?

That's basically how BitTorrent works for thousands of people to rapidly download the latest Game of Thrones, and there are functional examples of real-time streaming of (nearly) live content such as TV or radio.  Also, there are a lot of software solutions out right now that do various distributed/sharded storage, such as IPFS etc.  The advantage is that the RTT to geographically close peers is much lower than some centralized datacenter on the other side of the country, and of course that it scales up- the more people use it, the faster it can be downloaded.  The disadvantage is that mobile phones aren't optimized for P2P sharing or always-on behavior, like a PC would be; you can't control the other users being online and available, and the more people pop on and off, the more "copies" of each shard would be needed.

Of course, BT is meant to solve the one-to-many problem where many people all want the same data, but a central repository can't handle that much simultaneous bandwidth: thus I can get piece 00001 from one person who's already downloaded it, while simultaneously getting piece 00002 from another, etc.  There's really no advantage- and many disadvantages- to P2P personal storage over mobile devices, since everyone's personal files are different... so why not store it all centrally?  Well, I guess the hand-waviness is that somehow by combining middle-out with sharding and neural networks, PP magically offers mathematically impossible storage compression that may outweigh the disadvantages of mobile P2P.

None of which explains why they wouldn't also offer a) a commercial box for high volume corporate customers, b) licensing deals with select high-volume streaming/storage providers like Google, Netflix, et al, and c) a customer-centric offering a la Dropbox etc.  Boy howdy, a fella could sure make a lot of money doing that!!! :) :| :( :'(

Edited by hincandenza
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Nor does it explain the 0K thing. Because if your stuff is being stored on everyone else's devices, then their stuff is being stored on yours. There are in fact a few things that work like that - Freenet, the first of what are now called "dark nets". If you're a Freenet node, the software takes some disk space and you have no control over or knowledge of what's stored in it. The purpose there is to be censorship-resistant. But the notion that such a design would be *faster* as in "instantaneous" is absurd: you need the processing power to smash all the pieces together and reassemble them into your photograph or music stream, and you need the bandwidth to retrieve them - and everybody holding a piece has to be online and not, say, mid-journey on an airplane with the device in safe mode. Realistically, if you had a better compression algorithm like Richard's you would indeed be worth a lot of money, but you wouldn't attempt a consumer product because it's expensive and time-consuming to market and hard to get right. Instead, you'd sell it to service providers - ISPs, mobile phone manufacturers, operating system software publishers, etc, and it would reach consumers by having it embedded in the devices they bought.

Really, they would have done better to explain it less.

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I did find parts of this episode amusing, like when Richard was trying to explain why scrambled eggs were a bunch of electrons. 

I don't understand why Monica didn't explain weeks ago the precise reason why she didn't like Pied Piper.  She should have said she didn't understand how it worked and the interface wasn't user-friendly.  She should have suggested focus groups, etc... I mean, this problem seems like it's fixable, but you have Richard lying in a bathtub.  

Does Action Jack have the algorithm for the super fast box?  Could Pied Piper sell the box idea to other firms?  Dinesh's idea to pivot and sell some alternate easier-to-access products that uses the platform/tech wasn't bad either.  And wasn't their compression technology supposed to be super attractive to businesses who need to compress files fast?  What happened to that avenue?  

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