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Episode 390: A Festive Merry-Go-Round for the Very Lonely

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5by5

Business, Society & Culture, Barriers, Dan Benjamin, Careers, Communication, Merlin Mann, Creativity, Work, Productivity, Constraints, Technology

4.72.3K Ratings

🗓️ 4 September 2018

⏱️ 76 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Skype gets way too ambitious; sprinkling sauce on a service; a mandatory social network for doorbells; Dan acquires a new deity; some excellent listener follow-up on Computerized Adaptive Testing; Dan takes his boy to see a bona fide cinema classic; Dan has some great TV recommendations; Merlin reports in from the deep weeds of a fraught smart speaker ecosystem.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hi, Dan. Hey, how are you? I'm fine. Are you enjoying the new Skype? Maybe? I got distracted.

0:13.9

I am on an old Skype, but all of my friends telling me the new Skype is not good. I am 7.59

0:21.7

per-end 37. Mine forced me to update. I didn't want it to. I didn't do anything. I just

0:28.1

went up to version 8.28.0.41. There was nothing that I could do about that. It changed.

0:37.7

It looks horrible. Yeah, all the slacks on Monarch kind of blown up about this. Did they

0:45.9

backtrack publicly about how they're going to make it better again? Yeah, they said something

0:54.1

that they were going to do something to make it better. Yeah. It's how it looks, but it's

1:01.2

also how it works. I'll just on a podcast a minute ago that I want to tell you about. But the

1:06.5

guy was telling me that all the audio settings changed or something? Yes. Yeah. The audio

1:12.4

settings and the way that you configure the audio is different. I get the notion that if

1:19.6

you build a product that you want to add enhancements and you want to make things better.

1:23.7

There's nothing about this that seems better. I get the idea that I'm not the target market

1:31.4

for a Snapchat or something like that, but I use Skype all the time. I was under the impression

1:37.4

that I understood it. To me, it just looks like now they've made it into just everything

1:43.0

is sort of big and clumpy and everything is everything in the settings is bold. Everything

1:48.6

is bold. As they say in the Incredibles, when everything is bold, nothing is. Everything

1:56.4

is bold. Everything is, and there's no anything that they've done. It's not an improvement,

2:03.2

but under the audio settings, that's all changed. It's crappy. It's just crappy. It's

2:11.1

frustrating. I don't want to say I'm still lucky enough to have the old version. I don't

2:16.7

know why I've been spared so far. Something that we've been seeing for at least 10 years now

2:25.6

is it feels like when you're not sure what else to do to radically improve your app for the people

2:31.8

who use it or to attract new people, you just sprinkle on a little bit of social sauce. It feels

...

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