Hi, my name is Jerry Mikulski, and this is a love letter to the insurance industry and other industries But but as you'll see in a second the insurance industry is low-hanging fruit This all starts from an observation I had a couple years ago that most of the insurance industry operates below the joy line. So what do I mean? So picture a line I Pay you money. I don't really want to pay you for an event. I hope never materializes I actually sort of both hope it never materializes But I have in the back of my mind that you might find a little fine print that says that I don't qualify That there's a reason I can't be made whole and then I'm going to get something in return That's less than what I really originally had but but if we're all working earnestly toward the goal The goal of insurance is to make people whole So this functions as a bit of a an unspoken ceiling of our expectations We're all working below the joy line the joy line kind of limits our expectations of what might happen As we work together in the in sort of the the client and insurer relationship I don't mean that all insurance people are not joyous or that joy doesn't happen in the insurance industry This is me with a crew from Suncorp an Australian insurance company that I worked with in 2015 These were very happy people very smart people. So happiness and joy are happening in the insurance industry I'm really talking about a mental framing of the insurance industry and I'm trying to mess with that The idea came to me back around 2015 when my wife and I both became advisors to Trove Which is a startup in the Bay Area that helps you ensure valuable things and then do on-demand insurance Meaning you take a picture of your bicycle your expensive downhill bicycle And then you ensure it only during the weekend that you're out riding because when it's in the garage It's insured under your homeowners or your renters insurance for example You can also send them a picture of the barcodes on the bike or the receipt preferably on your bike in an emailed receipt And that will register it and then they know a lot about the bicycle And I suddenly got thinking well gosh now now they know an awful lot about the intimate things in your life And here comes a keyword which is everything else. I'm about to describe depends entirely on You the insurer having permission to do these things which then revolves around trust You have to have asked for permission But you really need to be a trusted party and this whole notion of operating from trust is a larger issue as you'll see as I Expand on these on these topics, but I'm in the middle of designing a process I call design from trust and this joy line idea is part of that project Joy master that everybody probably is familiar with is Zappos this funny shoe company that now sells lots more than shoes They sell wow, they empower their customer service reps Now customer service is typically the cost center that you bury in the basement and you time people to make sure that they get off The phone as quickly as possible because they are a cost to be minimized Zappos has entirely the opposite idea about the people in their call centers Those people are empowered to deliver wow to do really interesting things the story I heard Tony Shay the founder say years ago Was that he and some other executives were out of town at some conference and just for fun? They called into the call center he did not identify himself as the CEO of the company and he said you know I'd like a pizza and the rep instead of saying gosh We don't actually sell pizzas. Thanks for calling. Bye-bye said where are you and within seconds had googled The foreign googled and transmitted the information about the four nearest pizza parlors to where he was staying And he tells the story knowing that it will carry that I just told it to you and that other people will tell it because wow Is free advertising in one sense, but wow also makes people happy up and down all over the place So I'm interested in exploring that space above the joy line and to do so let's imagine that you have one of those fancy downhill expensive mountain bikes and Now let's imagine what I might help you do with that bike So you might use it more if I had a lot of permission I might notice that you haven't gone downhill biking in six months eight months And it's not just because it was winter, but you're actually not using the bike So I could with your permission Notify you that it's a great weekend for a mountain bike trip or Other provide some motivation for you in different ways that let you use it more That's kind of simple. I could also help you use that bike better. Maybe there's techniques You'd like to learn there's certainly a surfeit of videos on YouTube explaining everything including downhill biking I could hook you up with a local tutor I could connect you with other people who do mountain biking in your area a little bit of research would tell me that There's a group that meets regularly on Sundays Something like that and you could join them I could basically become a social connector for you using this object that you have that I know you have and some Permission to begin facilitating that I could help you use that bike differently You may not have heard of cycle cross yet, but cycle cross is sort of like an obstacle course while riding and carrying your bicycle across Bridges across fences and through muddy fields all sorts of things cycle crosses picking up It's an awful lot of fun, but maybe you've never heard of it So I could provide you that service and connect you up with the next cycle cross meet that's happening in your neighborhood. I Could notice that your bike is 10 15 years old and you might actually like to upgrade because you're using it a lot and I could help you then figure out what is the best path given who you are what you prefer And what I know and insurers know an awful lot about stuff. They know repair records. They know what gets stolen a lot They know a whole lot of things about stuff I could use my wisdom to help you upgrade to a better bike I could also help you put your bike in the sharing economy so that other people could benefit from the existence of your bike And maybe you're not riding it as much as you'd like because you're traveling a whole lot And you'd like to meet other people who borrow your bike and put it back So that could be pretty interesting. I could also help you sell it Let's say you haven't used it in a long time and it's sitting in your garage So in the back of your head, there's this constant loop of man somebody's just going to break in and steal it Stuff is beginning. We're beginning to realize as we're getting past the idea that we're mere consumers We're beginning to realize that stuff weighs us down and getting rid of stuff is good And again an insurance company knows a lot about The object I have so you might help me price it sell it put you could easily create a very beautiful post I could put on Craigslist or someplace else and we could sell it in a really nice way or I could gift it and by this I don't mean necessarily to donate it to some charity, which is a really great thing to do But also I mean when you die is your bike or whatever this thing is that that you value a lot Is it in your will and whom would you like to bequeath it to? So now we're opening up a whole different conversation, right? so All these things I just mentioned open up a ton of new opportunities for Conversations with your client and formerly your touch point was let's see. I'm shopping for insurance then At some point I decide to buy it and I buy from you and now I have an onboarding process Which is more or less complicated and then you talk to me once a year for the renewal Which I'm not that eager to pay and I've probably put on autopay anyway, so that conversation goes away I don't really want your newsletter your your normal every everybody newsletter and then Incidents show up and if you are a really great insurer Both of us leave that that incident smiling because it got handled very professionally very quickly and very fairly But that isn't always the case so we kind of rue the incidents now We have opportunities to be in front of you with reminders to help you improve your lifestyle To connect you with trainers and tutors or provide some tutoring ourselves on some of the most used items use this the 80-20 rule here The Pareto principle To connect you with other people who care about the things you care about Maybe to be a very relevant news feed within particular bounds or to connect you up with somebody who is a terrific news feed about Cycle Cross for example To be your host and guide into the sharing economy to make product recommendations price evaluations Estate planning right this is all some of these things are in other forms of insurance some of these are other businesses altogether So all the benefits I just named are immediate benefits for clients And it turns out that you can make a little two by two and do immediate benefits also for the insurance company itself and Higher order benefits for clients and insurers which will become clear in a sec when I got there But first let's go to immediate benefits for insurers which include as I just described many new Touchpoints so all of a sudden you have all these new conversations that can lead to new business ideas for you things that your customers actually Would like to have that you can then deliver could lead to a whole series of new partnerships because you don't have to be all the Things that I just talked about there are entities out there that exist that are doing this the sharing economy that are doing Collective ride bicycle rides etc. Etc. You can be a bridge builder between these but you can make those bridges actually partnerships All of this creates new meaning purpose fun play Improves morale for your your particular your employees And I think this is really important is that is that making people whole is good You're always sort of breaking that you're fixing the thing that's broken, but actually rethinking it so that your role is to Suddenly is loaded with a lot more meaning and purpose is really inspiring and suddenly you get intrinsic motivation that you didn't have before So this kind of improves life for insurers as well as clients now Higher order. What do I mean? Well?  You're trying to improve my subjective well-being That's truly interesting and you haven't really been doing that before now You're helping me possibly find my tribe my group connect with others. You're helping me pass my things on well Which is a state planning you're helping me learn what enough might mean for me now? Everybody might not be into it Some people are more of the mode of he who dies with the most toys wins and that certainly makes for more insurable objects That's true, but a whole bunch of people are starting to figure out that stuff weighs us down That there's this sort of open loop in the back of your head about somebody's going to steal it Or I don't use it enough you feel either guilt or fear around it so What does it mean to have enough and I think pondering this word enough is really interesting because it involves lifestyle change It involves reevaluating the things you have. This is a very deep conversation. So Some of your clients are really going to enjoy this conversation about what does enough mean and that will let you enter other kinds of relationships with them For insurers the higher order benefits are really you're reframing the entire insurance industry Which formerly ended where the joy line is and now includes a lot of higher higher space space where you can invent new things You are now aligning yourself with your clients higher needs their higher order needs Like hacking their happiness you are now pulling on that rope in the same direction together. That's really interesting Your employees now hopefully have a new sense of agency They have a lot more authority to do things to bring wow to bring joy to the clients at the other end So here's the the quadrant here's all four of the sections that we've just gone through it's it's a lot of things, right? It's a lot of new territory. In fact, a lot of this isn't just about insurance I think that this is possibly about how to use stuff better in your life, and it's not just stuff So some important notes First you have to get permission permission is mandatory. Otherwise, this is stalking. You've heard of the stalker economy Well, we are nose-deep in the stalker economy already. Just look at the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica fiasco look at what China is doing With their social credit system. We are already well into the stalking economy Which is a pretty big breach of faith and trust so permission is really essential here That means also that you have to be quite trustworthy So you need to do an internal audit an internal inspection figure out where do you breach trust? What are the things that you might be doing that you don't even realize breach trust like Advertising and I've got some videos online to talk about that The things you've been doing below the joy line still really matter everybody sort of below decks in the engine room fulfilling claims Doing estimates of risk estimates to all those kinds of things. They really still matter. In fact, you need to execute better on those sorts of things and As you've probably already started pondering this isn't just about your downhill bike or the jewelry that you're ensuring or that hustle-blad camera or that That purse that said that's worth $30,000 This is really about everything including services and look at how the insurance industry is Increasingly covering more and more things all of those things could come under the purview of this idea of working above the joy line Finally and this is sort of a maybe a subtle note, but I think it's really an important note I'm not trying to recommend new forms of emotional labor or emotional work. I'm borrowing here I'm paraphrasing early Russell Hock child who's done a lot of work on this And I hope I get it right because I'm not quite sure that I that I'm striking the same tone She would strike but Emotional labor is what happens when you climb on the plane and the flight attendant says good day, sir How was your how was your afternoon? Welcome to our flight and like they've got a big smile on their face Much of the time their job is to be happy their job is to be upbeat and project some of that enthusiasm That is emotional labor where the presence of emotions is required as part of your work Emotional work is very different emotional work is the work of attending to emotions in a group or with another person that you work with So when the assistant says, you know now is not a really good time to visit Bob He had a terrible meeting an hour ago. He's really pissed off That's emotional work You've just provided a little bit of guidance to the person coming in that the emotions are kind of rocky right now when you're in a meeting And you say, you know Susan, I noticed you haven't I haven't had an opportunity to say what you think Would you like to jump into the conversation? That's emotional work Now unfortunately in our cultures Emotional work often gets picked up by women. They're the ones who notice it more. They're the ones who take care of it more It is an unpaid aspect of work. It doesn't show up in the job description It doesn't show up in the interview and yet we all know that it happens all the time Some of these issues are pretty deep. So look for a couple of videos I'm going to produce after this one one is called stock or serve Which is about this whole idea about not stocking But what does it mean to serve? Well, and the second one is called being a trusted ally, which is I think the high ground in in trust in a marketplace so Today the insurance industry Frames things like this that that the the ceiling of our on our expectations is that I'm going to make you whole I'm going to bring you back up to where you were before this whole conversation has been about expanding that frame and Opening up a series of new opportunities of new conversations of new business possibilities really rethinking how the industry even works If we looked at health care Mostly health care is a break fix kind of kind of problem, right? There's a little bit of preventative care happening much more in other countries, but in the US Mostly you show up with something and I try to fix it So what if we worked above the joy line in health care and you can start looking at other things the example I used with Zappos was in retail. So there's plenty of opportunities in other other kinds of domains This whole presentation has been part of a larger project call I call design from trust if you want to know more about it go to design from trust calm If you'd like to join the process of designing design from trust send me an email I'll put my email in the information box below this video And I will add you to a conversational mailing list where we're figuring out what on earth this thing is but for now thanks for watching and Good luck making this happen


Okay, we're back with Brian Prophet. So what we were saying is, what? I think I was saying that I understand the idea is to make it compatible with a tablet and so forth, touch screens and all that. That's cool. But on my desktop, it seems very cumbersome, the great big giant icons and I couldn't get to where I wanted to go. I'm so used to all the menus and the functionality of the desktop. You've got iPhone and Android mobile operating systems and interfaces, but they don't actually try to put that on a desktop. Are the two things compatible or really should they have two different versions? Well, we'll have to see. If you really want to look at a real world example of how that's going to work, then probably the most current example that you would have would be looking at a Mac and looking at the current version of Mac OS X because there you're starting to see sort of a blend of the old interface and the new interface. So you have on one side the traditional windows and menus and toolbars and things like that. And then you're starting to see sort of what has the term has been coined as the appification interface where everything is a single icon app that fills up the screen. So you're starting to see a blend there and in Ubuntu land, I really think that Unity is starting to head in that direction. It's not remotely there yet, but I think it's coming to that point and we'll get there soon. When it first came out in this last version, which was roughly six months ago, when was it April, I guess? One of the first things when we finally did install it, we don't jump and install the new version right away anymore. We always wait a couple of months, we've learned it, but when we finally did install it, it was baffling because I still don't know how to do it. You start typing, you can start typing if you want Skype, SKY, P, boom, there it is, but there were things I wanted to find and I couldn't find them and I noticed that in the old interface, I can remember physically where the button is. I know it's under services administration and it's about this far down and I don't even have to remember the name of it, but I know where it is in my mind, but if I have to actually know the name and then type it into the keyboard, that doesn't seem like an advantage to me, it doesn't seem more efficient. To me, Mac OS X and iPhone is a great example, they started out completely different, one is optimized for the phone and one is optimized for the desktop and it makes sense to borrow from each other for things that make sense, of course, but only if it makes sense, but you don't try to put a car dashboard on a bicycle and vice versa, it seems like they're different and they should only borrow from each other when it really makes sense to do that. Right. Well, and I think what you've hit upon is one of the key points of debate because we have basically had a generation of users, you know, since the 90s basically, who have done nothing but use the quote traditional windows and menu oriented interface on their computers, but, well, I've got a side point to that, too.  So you're seeing that in the mobile world and now you're looking back at the desktop environment and I think this is where people tend to split because I look at this and I see the desktop environment as it stands, the traditional one that we see in Genome 2 and also, you know, over in KDE, those are not necessarily the most intuitive interfaces for people who have never worked in a business environment or never really been exposed to computers. I mean, the classic meme that we have for new people using Ubuntu or any other form of Linux is, you know, can my grandmother use it? Right. Well, not only do they have to get used to the typing and the mouse and everything like that, but even the basic core desktop interface itself is not necessarily intuitive to them. That comes from the business world, file cabinets and folders and things like that. You know, we get that, we see that in the business world every day. Not everybody's exposed to that. So that's even more of a hurdle. So there is something to be said, I think, for making the interface simpler. And I think that's what Ubuntu is trying to do. I think the problem is you have old hacks like me who are running around who remember when you could customize everything, you know, even almost down to the pixel level and now we can't do that anymore. And I think we're sort of chafing about that. I think that you're, yeah, I know. And this seems to be a real universal debate, I guess, or issue, because I can see the same thing happening with iPhone, the same thing happening for Android.   I don't know where it is. There's no file manager built in. I don't know where the file is. Something's taking up my whole SD card. And I don't know how I got to find some third party app to even be able to begin to find it. That's not user friendly, even for somebody technical. There's there's both angles of it. So, I mean, I, I understand the idea that, you know, sort of protecting the newbie user that, OK, the app has its own data and you don't need it. I downloaded this stuff and you don't need to know where it is. You just know when you go in the app that it's there. But sometimes it really is important to know where something is stored, especially when the apps are not full proof. So you uninstall the app, but it left all this file structure and data or something sometimes. Yeah. And really, you that is probably depending on who you got to the number one or number two problem with Unity as well, that whole fighting applications thing, we really did get used to things being hooked to expanding cascading menus. And now, as you say, you have to sort of type it. And, you know, if hopefully you've got the name right, and it comes up and then boom, there it is. And then unfortunately, it's not terribly easy to actually stick the app icon on the Unity toolbar. Yeah, that's another thing. It's very it used to be in the old Nome setup. See, this is the other thing, too. If I want to teach my my grandmother to use this, first, I need to know how to use it. And I didn't really invest enough time to figure it out. It's not it's not easy for me to figure out how to use it. I mean, to me, my test is if I can figure it out without looking it up, then you know, that's cool. But if I have to actually do some research and look it up, I really have to decide, is this worth my investment of time? And so the first thing we googled was how to turn that off. You know, so now we know there's a hidden setting, you just hit a check mark and boom, Unity is gone. And everybody's happy we're back to the old way and you can do that. So my thing, here's an idea, I'll just throw this out there. I think if they're going to stick with Unity, there should be a great big on off button like a toggle red, blue, or whatever blue, green, you click it and you've got Unity, you click it again and you've got the old style so that, you know, if for two different types of users or for two different types of platforms, like if I'm going to run this on a tablet, then maybe I want to always leave Unity on. If I'm going to use it on a desktop and I really like the other style, because obviously they're including both apparently right now they're including both because you can check mark, turn it off and you're back in classic Ubuntu. So they're delivering both anyway. Why not make it really easy to switch between one another? And they may keep doing that, but at some point Canonical may not want to throw the resources there and do that. And now, and that's really some, that's we're getting in the crystal ball territory at this point because it's difficult to say if or when they would actually split or I'm sorry, keep, you know, supporting both because at the end of the day Canonical's commercial entity and they've got to make, you know, money and, and, you know, use their resources wisely. I would prefer they do it your the way you suggest the way that they're doing now. I hope they keep doing that. But then they also have to understand that a lot of the people who are using Ubuntu, the power users will probably vote with their feet and just either make those changes on their own, whether or not they, you know, Ubuntu officially supports it or not, or they'll vote with their feet and, you know, walk off and go to some other distribution. Right. So they have that too. Speaking of Canonical being a business, it is a business and its, you know, business model is providing support and services and training and all those kinds of things, especially to corporations that need their, you know, the need consulting and services and training and so on. So I wonder how their customers, how their corporate customers are receiving unity as a desktop interface. I'm not. Well, I don't know. I mean, I haven't talked to any corporate people who are using it on the desktop. I know that a lot of, I know that a lot of Ubuntu's business is, you know, any enterprise and it's, you know, really on the server level, there's been a lot, there's been a lot more movement in the cloud arena. But as far as their desktop, you know, a lot of them might be still using the LTS additions, you know, the corporate users. And the LTS, if I'm correct, has not shipped it over to Unity yet. No, because it only comes out. Well, LTS is only, what, like every five years. So it hasn't, it's not on the schedule for that yet. Yeah, the next one's coming up in April of 2012. That will be an LTS addition. Ubuntu 12.04. So that may be the first time we actually see real corporate uptake for the Unity interface. And I'm not saying there hasn't been a, you know, corporate uptake now. I just, I think that we'll see it in more numbers. But this sort of plays on my own background, because I used, once upon a time, it used to be a configuration manager working in a development shop. And I also got tasked with hardware and deployment configuration management. And one of the things that I've always appreciated about any form of Linux is the ability to lock things down and keep users from installing software that they really shouldn't be installing, that they bring in from home and keep interfaces relatively uniform. That seems like a very draconian thing to do from a creativity standpoint. I, you know, don't like it. But from a business standpoint, there's, there's, there's a lot to be said for that level of efficiency. Sometimes it's important, yeah. Right. So Unity may answer, you know, a lot of those questions if it can get some of these kinks worked out. Because I think some of the things that you pointed out earlier in this discussion about it's hard to find apps. It's hard, you know, there's, there just, there's some gaps there that need to be addressed. This is more than just, you know, we don't think this is pretty, or we don't like the color scheme. This is, these are actually real usability things that I believe they have to address. Yeah, really, like they're gonna have to train me on how to use it first before I can teach anybody. The, if you're, I tell you what, if you're in the audience and you're listening, if you're a corporate user, whether you've made use of canonicals, consulting services or not, send us an email to feedback at onlyonetv.com. It's all spelled out. Feedback at onlyonetv.com. Or you can also send an SMS text message if it's short enough to<PHONE_NUMBER> and let us know what is your take on this, on the corporate uptake of Unity. Is it gonna be, is it gonna fly on the corporate desktop? So, the, so how do you do that, by the way?  And I said, Mani, get this off of here. I want, I want my menus back. And what I used to do, by the way, all you used to do is on the launcher, you just right click and say, add the launcher panel. And see, I don't necessarily want Firefox there. I don't necessarily want the ones they have. You know, I might prefer Chromium. So I would put Chromium, whatever I wanted them to use, I'd put Chromium and then Chrome and then Firefox or whatever. And, and then Skype and things that are not necessarily installed, pre-installed and things. And I would customize that panel and sort of recreate their icons. Of course, they're smaller, but I cross the top of the panel. And I would do that custom configuration, which took two seconds, you know, and just this is what I want you to use. These buttons are right here at the top. And for a novice user, they just know they go to this button, this button, this button. It's really just as simple. But I still have my dropdown menus and I knew how to navigate. I hope and pray that Canonical, being in the support business, you almost have a natural incentive. And I hope this isn't the case. But like Microsoft in the old days, we used to say, the M-A-B-F-N-A-R, I forgot how you pronounce it, but an acronym that said the new version of Windows, again, moved all the buttons around for no apparent reason. It doesn't do anything more or better. They just moved all the buttons around and called them different things for no apparent reason, apparently because they were doing so much corporate training, that they would have to sell all this new corporate training on the new version of Windows. When nothing really changed, all they did was rename things and move the buttons around. You know what I mean? There's almost an incentive to make it more difficult if you're training people. Sure. And Canonical has their own training division as well, but I hesitate to put that on them. I mean, having met a lot of the people on the development team and even on the corporate side, I'm not really convinced that that's what they're doing, that they're changing things for changes sake. I think that there, you know, I think one of the things that we, a lot of pundits in the industry are slowly starting to clue in on and I have to admit it took me a lot of clue in on this, is that Mark Shuttleworth is playing a very long game here. And he, we did think that he was making these changes for no apparent reason.  And I think for a time we all initially thought that he was just changing things just to shake things up. But now I'm really more convinced that he had this in mind pretty much all along. He and this might have been the only direction he could have taken Canonical. You have red hat in the picture and red hat just completely dominates in the enterprise arena on the server side and quite a bit on the enterprise desktop side. Sousa was in there to until Novel basically, you know, blew up. And then we have attached mate, but Sousa's got some skills. Sousa is really good in the development and the appliance arena. Now that's going to be their niche. So Canonical had to find an edge. This may have been it and this may have been the direction that they were heading the entire time. So, you know, I kind of hesitate to put that on them that they were changing things. This is sort of shake things up. Yeah, people have enough trouble with adopting Linux anyway. I can't believe Canonical would shoot themselves in the foot and make it harder to adopt. Yeah, I agree with you. I don't think they would do that, at least not now. I mean, I don't I don't think they would do that until they get to be as big as Microsoft. Then there's an incentive and hopefully that doesn't happen. But they're truly evil. Then we'll be looking for another another distribution.  It seems like they've already got the GNOME interface down pad. It works great. And unity is there. So and if they're distributing both, then how much how much maintenance overhead, you know, would it take for them just to have a quick on off thing that you could just select, you could go back and forth, you can even set it in in one mode for your spouse and then the other mode for you. I think to me, it makes a lot of sense. And they may very well do that. It's really, I think that's a great idea. I just I always hesitate because I just don't know what the resources are going to be. You have to support two different methods. When you do notification, anything that's going to be different, you're going to have to support it both ways and stuff. Right.  You know what I mean? Even Mac OS X doesn't support touchscreen interface, does it? Not yet. I think they're talking about it. Okay. So now the other thing is we're talking about it being ideal and optimized for tablets. What about smartphones? I've heard talk about an Ubuntu version for phones. Is unity that or is it something completely different? I think unity is a precursor for both. I think unity is going to be the prototype model for Ubuntu on a phone or an Ubuntu on a tablet and Ubuntu on wherever else they decide to put it. Maybe they'll get in good with, you know, a device manufacturer and have an interface that sits on like a set top box like the Roku box, not necessarily Roku, but, you know, something along those lines. I think I think that they would really appreciate having that kind of flexibility to put it, you know, on any one of those platforms. So the short answer to your question is, yeah, I can see unity being customized and, you know, tweaked up for a phone as well, because if they can keep it very pure and very, you know, a clean version of Linux, I think what we may end up seeing is a lot of sharing in between applications between the Android environment and then the Ubuntu and Ubuntu mobile environment. I think that is a possibility like an Android compatibility layer for Ubuntu or something. That would be cool. Exactly. So you can run Android apps on an Ubuntu smartphone. That would be so cool. Right. And if you want to get an idea of what that future might look at, keep an eye on the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet, which is Android, although a very heavily customized version of Android, and see if they can achieve real app compatibility from pure Android over to the Amazon Kindle Fire. If that happens, you may see a model for what canonical might be trying to do. Well, you're saying Amazon Kindle Fire is running, well, it's running a customized version of the pure Android. Exactly. So it's still Android, but it's very customized. So the apps, you know, I haven't read too much of the details. It's my understanding that porting from pure Android to the Amazon's version of Android is not very hard. I think, you know, but I think it would serve as a potential model or use case for, you know, a later sharing between Ubuntu and Android applications, because that is more than the interface itself. You can build the prettiest interface you want. If you don't have the applications, you're in trouble. That's what went wrong with WebOS, because WebOS is a great platform. Yeah. But there are no apps. Yeah. You know, the same thing with, oh, I'm completely blank now. I've got to pull a Rick Perry. But you're going to say really? But you know, if you don't have applications, then you've got a serious problem. Sure. You got a business with no customers. Exactly. That's no good. Yeah. Okay. I see. So but and it also, it seems like it's Amazon that has the Kindle Fire you're talking about. Amazon is going to have a very large incentive to make those compatible, to not give nightmare headaches to the app developers, because if the app developer has to do lots of customization to make it work, they might not do it, and then they're not going to have that app base and they're going to lose the value. Right. So, you know, they've got the they've got the Android kernel. So that's going to make things easy. And I think that, you know, yeah, you're right, they're going to make that really easy to pull applications from one environment over to the other, especially if the Kindle does take off as an entry level tablet in the market. It's coming in in a very low price point compared to, you know, all the other tablets that are out there or were out there as the case may be. So this has the potential of really selling a lot of units. And if that happens, developers will be very interested in it because they will want to get, you know, all those eyeballs and all that cash revenue coming in their way. And that Amazon fire is pretty cheap, isn't it? Is that that? Yeah, it's it's going for $199. Yeah. I saw an Android tablet at the drugstore the other day behind the counter. How much was it? $120 or $129 or something like that? Some generic Chinese brand I never heard of. Right. Behind the drugstore, like at CVS or one of these and I was like, what? Can I see that? She's like, what? And they never heard of it. You know, but I just wanted to read the box and I was like, wow, the specs were pretty impressive. And I was but anyway, I didn't buy it. But yeah, so Amazon sent me one of those fires so I can review it and play with it. And that actually is that's a completely different topic. But that's why devices like that are why Android would not open source version 3.0 honeycomb because the manufacturers like you were talking about were taking, you know, the two dot series from, you know, the gingerbread version of Android slapping it on tablets where it really had no business being and calling it done.  It was like giving Android a bad name. Exactly. Well, now, okay, speaking of that, because I'm glad you there's a perfect segue to my when I was going to ask you next and as is are the current versions of Android completely open source, are they completely licensed that Canonical could actually take it and include it in an Ubuntu? Well, yeah, but I don't know if that would that would have to be the case. I mean, the problems are going on with Android right now in terms of how does it fit in the open source arena is, you know, there are two types of licenses, really. There there are copy left licenses like the GPL, which basically say you're going to open source everything and you have to keep it open source if you make changes as opposed to licenses like BSD and Apache, which are not copy left and Android is licensed under the Apache software license. They say you don't have to open your code. If you do open your code, this is what you have to do. OK, but, you know, this is the way you're going to do it, but you don't have to open your code. This is one of those things that people really kind of, you know, got upset about with Android until, you know, you go back and read it and say, uh, no, they actually don't have to do that. So it's open. But not only a canonical could use it and canonical could, you know, do whatever they wanted to do with it. I don't really think that they need to do that because I think it would just be a straightforward port for Android developers and say, OK, all I have to do is recompile my application in a certain way, and it will be ready to run on an Ubuntu phone because the Ubuntu phone OS would be would just maintain compatibility is all basically. I mean, there's going to be differences, especially really down in the low system levels and I don't want to get very technical power management system calls things are going to be different. I mean, Android is not Linux. I mean, it used to be, but it's, you know, it's it's I wouldn't say fork, but it's kind of wide, wider than it should be. And that's OK. But, you know, it's close enough that I think you could kind of port apps from one environment to the other, at least that may be what canonical is thinking. OK, now, speaking of that, with Ubuntu, the phone OS, are there drivers that exist for all the new phone hardware? Like, it seems to me like you'd have to have a separate driver for every kind of, you know, circuitry and interface and microphone and speaker and camera. And I mean, is it going to be a driver issue, a shortage of drivers or would it be able to use Android's drivers for those? Actually, that's a really good question. And I'm not really 100% of the answer. However, I keep coming back to projects like Mego, which, by the way, was what I blanked on earlier when I have my Rick Perry moment. Oh, yeah, because it really is a pretty interface, too. And, you know, Mego and now Tizen, which is what it's called. Now, those are that's a pure rep. You know, Tizen is going to be a pure Linux-based mobile platform. It will be a reference platform, which means you may not actually see a device with Tizen running on it, but it will Tizen will be the prototype for devices to come. And Tizen and similar projects may actually be the bridge that you're talking about in terms of making sure that, you know, the drivers and all the different hardware issues are settled. How do you spell Tizen? I'm sorry. How do you spell Tizen? T-I-Z-E-N. T-I-Z-E-N. I was Googling it while you were talking. OK. Yeah. OK. So this is a new project. It is. It's basically Mego was basically, you know, under the auspices of Nokia. It's still being stewarded by the Linux Foundation, who is actually my former employer. And so after Nokia made their deal with Microsoft, Mego sort of, you know, basically lost a lot of its corporate support within Nokia. But it has a huge amount of support within the community that the Linux Foundation was still, you know, working on it. And so they really had, you know, it's still going. So Mego sort of is transitioning now into Tizen. And Mego is a really sweet interface. But like WebOS, there aren't a lot of apps with it. So if we can solve that problem and maybe we may have to share with Android or maybe somehow we'll start developing apps on a, quote, pure Linux software platform. You know, you were talking about TV boxes earlier and one of my favorite our favorite one so far is Boxy, B-O-X-E-E box. The Boxy box actually is a device that D-Link made specifically for it. But Boxy has a version available for Ubuntu, which we played around with before. But we actually got ourselves a Boxy box that is, like I said, made by D-Link.  And it just turns on and has a really cool remote control. And literally you plug the internet into one port and you plug the HDTV into the other. And you can also plug in hard drives to it or whatever you want and just use this really cool remote control. Basically, the whole box is worth it just for the remote control. But you end up with the PC and the whole shebang. So we love that. And actually Boxy runs on Ubuntu already. And I believe it's completely open source. So it seems like maybe since all that development's already been done, Ubuntu could just, you know, incorporate Boxy in its features and call it Ubuntu for TV, you know? Something like that. I don't know if that's even necessary, but one of the reasons I like Boxy Box, I prefer it over Roku and all that is because to my knowledge, most of those others like Google TV, I'm not sure about Google TV, but Apple TV for sure, and in Roku last time I checked, you could not play local content. Like I want to plug in a terabyte hard drive and watch my own stuff that I have. And I couldn't even do that. I thought, well, what's the point of that? That's like 90% of what I would watch, you know, is my own content that I have, my own library of things, movies or whatever. And I know that you can do that on Boxy Box. That's what we do most of the time. I like it better because streaming is okay, but, you know, especially for a 30 minute show, but for something that's like a movie length, it's no good because if anything chokes up when you're like two thirds of the way through the movie, ah, and some of those apps, they don't let you scroll properly and it gets all messed up when you're streaming. I hate that. So I prefer just to download the content, put it on my hard drive and watch it when I have a chance and just basically watch it locally so that we can skip forward and backward just like it's a DVR. Right. So anyway, but the point of that was that Boxy, Boxy is, to my understanding, is open source software and I know for sure it runs on Ubuntu, so it's, and it's already done. It works really, really well. It seems like that would be a cool way to, if Canonical implemented that within Ubuntu. I don't know. But then again, they're back to supporting many different versions of their platform, but is Unity set up for touchscreen already? I believe they are incorporating that into the environment. I know that they've been working on it. I'm not sure how successful they've been. I've not really played with that on a touchscreen device, but I do remember reading about a year ago at least that they would be working on a touchscreen environment. So they're going in that direction and you're absolutely right about the set top situation. It's been done and that's certainly a path that Canonical could follow with Ubuntu, if they wanted to. It seems like, for me, Boxy owns that set top box area arena, or at least, and it's contenders, or competitors, and then for the tablets, I mean, does Ubuntu have a chance in competing against Android at this point? Now see, that is the $64,000 question, because will they really be able to do this? This is a thing that nobody's really sure about, because you're right, there are already good players in the set top field. There are already good players in the in-vehicle infotainment devices that I know ties and me go before it, we're trying to get into, so you have that. And then obviously we have really good performers in the mobile smartphone and tablet environments. So that is really going to be the question. And I really have no answer. I think that there's room, I think that you see the success, however marginally, of WebOS as an interface, because it got a lot of critical acclaim. I think you will look at that and I think you could actually say, yeah, there is room there, but for me, and I know I'm biased here, it's all going to come down to the apps. If there are no apps on any of these platforms, it's just not going to work.  Right, and nobody, and it's such a, I always call this the magical pixie dust formula because nobody really knows. Is it a certain number of applications? Is it the right kind of applications? I had before WebOS was shut down by HP and this was literally like three weeks before this and I was out at OSCON, I talked to some people from Hewlett Packard, they were showing me the WebOS, and they were great people, but one of them said to me something just scared the heck out of me, which was, they were like really excited that they had 60, that's six and a zero tablet ready applications, and they were excited about that. And I looked at them and I said, really, just 60? I mean, that wasn't really enough. But their argument was, well, this is quality over quantity because these are tablet ready, they're expandable, they fill the whole screen, they take advantage of the entire interface as opposed to Android, which really, you know, even with the Zoom doesn't really have tablet ready applications. So that was their marketing push. Well, there is a point, they have a point. I mean, how many apps did the iPad have on the first generation when it first launched? I wonder. A bazillion, I don't know. I mean, seriously, it had to be close to, right when it first came out, I think that there were probably at least a couple of hundred that were coded in the universal model, which is what they call applications that can sit on an iPhone and an iPad and actually look good on an iPad. So I know it was somewhere in the hundreds. And it's behind there too. But we'll have to see how Ubuntu plays this. I mean, they may be perfectly content with building really good interface devices. They could come in, Mark Shuttleworth is a very smart person and he's got a lot of smart people working for him. I really think that they could surprise us and start putting Linux on devices we haven't even thought of yet. Try corporate kiosks or something like that or, you know. It probably already is. I mean, Linux is on a lot of devices. People have no idea. Every time they use Google search, they're using Linux. I mean, everything at Google is pretty much run on Linux.  Oh, absolutely, absolutely. So think about, and that actually may give us a clue of what's going on here because if you really look at that and see all the places where Linux is running now now some of that is gonna be really embedded Linux. And Ubuntu is not gonna fit in that. But by the same token, what if they could scale it down to where it could? What if you could see Ubuntu being sold to like the Otis elevator company and suddenly Ubuntu is the interface on those big fancy elevator screens that you have out there in the big city, you know? Or something like that. And suddenly canonical is making money hand over fist putting the Ubuntu operating system and based on a whatever interface they come up with in places that we couldn't even imagine that Windows is not going to go, that Mac will never go. So there's some a lot of room to play around there. I think there's a couple of several factors. One, when you talk about the number of applications I think that's probably at least half of it. If you're gonna only have 60 or 100 applications it does depend I think on which 60 apps. I mean if you had all the 60 most popular apps well it would be a good start. But the number of apps is essential. And the other thing is the distribution channel, the fact, the marketing and distribution. If you're spending $100 million a year on TV commercials or whatever Apple spends or Microsoft spends and there's a retail third party OEM manufacturers that are supplying that product already on it or in Apple's case it's completely tied to the hardware. You got a distribution channel. The other thing is that Canonical is not selling Ubuntu. Obviously it's open source. So they're not gonna make any money selling it to anybody because they're not charging anything. So their model is support. Also one other thing is that I think that any enterprise whatever it is they can be okay or passable in many things, many areas. They can be really good in a few or but they can only be great in one. You know what I mean? To be the best, I think that the company really has to focus on one thing and you can't really be the best on every platform. I'm not sure. I haven't seen that yet. Have we seen that yet? Apple's I guess closest with the iPhone and the, but now iPhone's losing sales to Android like crazy. Right. And so yeah, that division of resources, that division of labor is something that I've pointed out and a lot of my colleagues have pointed out as something that really could be a real problem for Canonical. They need to find one thing and do it very well. And they were at one point, the number one Linux desktop distribution. Now, depending on who you ask, that may not be the case. And, but then again, depending on who you ask, it may not even matter because they may be ready to move on to something else. I honestly don't know. I think that Ubuntu is a solid desktop platform. I would hate for it to lose a lot of the focus and a lot of the innovation. I don't think people give Canonical a lot of credit. They put in a lot of real work on these interfaces and the package delivery systems and whatnot. So they've really made it possible for a lot of people in the IT industry to consider any form of Linux as a real viable desktop alternative compared to Windows and Mac. So, I think that they really could keep doing what they're doing. I agree with you. It doesn't seem like they're gonna be able to keep this multi-focused thing going for very much longer. And we may actually see a decision somewhere. Or Mark Shuttleworth may just keep hitting every target he could possibly do until he's done. Well, Mark, since you're watching this, call me up or email me and we'll have you on the show and you can explain exactly what you're thinking. But I wanna ask you, we've talked about the desktop. We've talked about phones, TV boxes, tablets, all different form factors, even embedded in elevators and other things. Okay, one thing we haven't touched on is seems to be the hottest thing of all. And that's these apps in the cloud, cloud-based things. We've got Chrome, what is it called? Chromebook, the idea of, which is basically a version of Linux that's tied down to web apps. Are we losing, I read, I don't know if it was yours or somebody blogged recently, an article about, is Ubuntu losing development energy and resources on desktop apps as people are focusing more on web apps? Is that the direction we're headed for all this? But yeah, and actually that was me. Who are you, okay. And basically it was really not targeting Ubuntu as, although I think I threw them as an example, but yeah, desktop Linux in general. It's been a long time coming that, and no secret that Google and Amazon and a lot of the larger content players would really prefer that we all did our computing out in the cloud. There are real advantages to that. I mean, you can get a lot more work done. Your data is transportable. If I pull up my phone, I can pull my email up, the same email on my phone when I'm in, visiting my in-laws in Minnesota, versus right here on my Linux desktop. So, and it can be the exact same thing. So there's a lot of really good reasons why we should be using the cloud. And I'm beginning to think that with all the focus that we see in Ubuntu on the interface, and how does it look? And oh, by the way, Ubuntu is a really big player out in the Amazon web services. I mean, Amazon web services runs on Red Hat Linux, but customers, when they go out and they actually buy cloud instances of servers, the number one distribution that they're using is Ubuntu. Really? Yeah. On the servers? On the servers. I would thought you were gonna say Red Hat. I thought Red Hat dominated that area. No, the actual physical machines that Amazon uses runs Red Hat. They run Red Hat Enterprise Linux. But when you go out to, I look at the stats for what platforms are selling where Ubuntu is the one that pretty much is the one to beat. What do you mean? You're saying that Amazon, for its server side services, they're running Ubuntu server? No, they're running, well, no. For their servers, they're running Red Hat. So what I'm saying is, if you and I were to go to Amazon web services, and we wanna put our website, for instance, out on AWS, okay?  Do you want to run a Windows server? Do you want to run a Red Hat server? Do you want to run a Ubuntu server? And at that point, people are choosing Ubuntu more than any other option. Oh, so it's not necessarily Amazon, it's the users who are picking Ubuntu. Right, all Amazon's are. And I wonder if that has to do with their familiarity, they're already familiar with Ubuntu on the desktop, so maybe they're already familiar with Ubuntu server. Is it easier to use or something? I think so, I think Canonical's also done a pretty fair job marketing their presence in the cloud. I think that they, there are some, I think there are some things about Ubuntu server that makes it more friendly to work in a cloud environment. Certainly, I see Ubuntu being used in an appliance situation. I know I mentioned earlier that Sousa is very strong in the appliance space as far as that goes, but if you look at companies like Bitnami, where they basically, you can just get a fully configured stack that will run Ubuntu and then WordPress on top of that, and you can just have that ready to go in a virtual machine inside of 10 minutes. And again, Ubuntu is the platform of choice in situations like that. That's great. Yeah, I love, obviously I love Ubuntu, everybody. I mean, pretty much every machine here and our whole company is running Ubuntu except for two. We have one that we have absolutely machine critical software that was developed for Mac and we have to have a Mac Pro for that. And we have another one that is what you're using right now, Skype. Skype group calling pretty much requires us to use Windows for the way we have it set up. So we have one machine for Windows, one Mac, everything else is Ubuntu across the board. We have a dual boot so that they can come up into Windows, but we pretty much never use Windows around here or Mac except for that. So I love Ubuntu and I love the, you know, the software is obviously free open source and we're very happy with that and with our philosophy of open source, free culture and all that. And it's also once you know, it's like anything else, once you know it, once you learn how to customize it and set it up the way you want, it's really a no brainer to set it up. One, one, my guess, my two complaints would be, if they were complaints would be that sometimes you upgrade to a new version and it breaks things, which is really frustrating no matter what, I mean, commercial products do the same thing. You upgrade and now that video card doesn't work anymore and just the, you know, like one time I actually went back to the LTE version because I thought, well, that will work for sure. That one didn't either. So I had to go back because I went back to versions, back to the LTE to be safe, didn't work. I had to go back to one version behind, which was the one after the latest LTE, the video card worked, but then the current one, it didn't.   But, you know, that's true of anything in IT. But, so there's that. I hate it when things break with a new version. The other thing that is unity is really, it's gotta be, if they're gonna make it easy to use, it has to actually be easy to use. It has to be easy to decide what buttons are gonna show up there. And, you know, I would, even if they drop GNOME and they go to unity, there at least should be some sort of a button to give us a dropdown menu interface as well as an option. Doesn't seem like it's that complex to have a menu system, especially since they already have it now. You know, I don't know, but if they're not gonna, like if they're gonna drop one, they should at least merge some of the features of both so that we could have that, you know, familiar interface. I'm not sure that the tablet style interface is appropriate on a desktop and vice versa. Yeah. You know, have you ever been on a tablet or a phone and you try and actually use a dropdown menu?  And the opposite is true too.  Right. And I think that above all, above any other, you know, platform, certainly not Windows, certainly not Mac, Linux can afford companies like Canonical to really explore and try new things. Yeah. We have, it has a very highly technical data user base. For the most part, we are very informed about what's going on.  Right. Exactly. Something like that. I think that gives you a little bit more freedom to experiment. I think we saw the same thing a few years ago when the KDE project implemented KDE 4. And they said, you know, hey, KDE 4, guys, this is really a test version. And even though they warned everybody, people still complained about KDE 4.  Yeah. People are very vocal. They don't hide how they feel. And the other thing though that's good is that like you said, they're so technical that even if there were a quote unquote big blunder, if Canonical made a big blunder, within days the user community would be posting the work around. Here's how you fix that. Like for example, the how to turn off Unity thing. I mean, I had to Google it and I thought, oh, it's not cool that it's buried under two or three different menu levels and it's not something I could easily tell someone over the phone, well, depending on how technical they are. But I was so happy that I knew how to turn off that check mark or whatever, select classic Ubuntu or whatever, and boom, it's right back to where I want it to go. So they're able to come up with a work around themselves very quickly, which is very useful. Try calling Microsoft. One time I called Microsoft for support.  This was years ago, but I got somebody, I don't know whether it was Philippines or India probably and this guy, after being on hold for like 50 minutes, I finally got through and I was desperate. You have to be desperate to call them for support. But anyway, I actually got a hold of the guy and he's like, thank you, sir, thank you, sir, thank you very much, sir. Now, can you please spell this word Windows? And I'm like, is this Microsoft? He wanted me to spell the word Windows because he didn't know that word. That's the kind of support you can get from, I mean, but the point, I mean, even though canonical, and I mean Ubuntu is open source and there's no commercial support unless you buy it, of course, you still get better support because you go to the community forum and you ask a question and it's probably already been answered or people actually do answer it pretty well. I've had really good success, pretty much just Googling things. You can just Google. If you have, very, very, very unlikely that you're the first person who's had this problem. Well. Exactly, yeah, and that's one of the real benefits of working with the open source community. The trick is, and this is what I get concerned about with new users, is do they know the right question to ask? You know. Right, yeah, exactly. I know that's, I had a friend of mine called and said, my calendar's gone. It's just, it's just not there. I didn't delete it.  They may not use the right terminology and they won't even know what to Google. They don't even think to Google in the first place, but then if you put in the wrong search term, we all know you're not gonna get where you wanna go. So, yeah, I mean, it's great if you're technical but if you're supporting other people, then that's why they call you. Well, thank you so much, Brian. Really, we've gotta do this again on a regular basis so we can keep up with all the Ubuntu gossip and everything. And you guys, check out Brian's website. It's profit.com, right? No, profit.org. It's profit, by the way, with two Fs and two Ts, P-R-O-F-F-I-T-T.org, right? That's your main website. That's where you'll find pretty much information about anything that I'm writing. About you. And you're doing a lot of writing also for IT world, which is ITworld.com. Exactly. If you frequent ITworld.com, you'll see a lot of Brian's writings there too. Brian Prophet, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for, it was a pleasure to talk to you tonight. Let's do this again. All right. All right, buddy, take care. Thanks, everybody. That's the first edition of the Ubuntu show so hope you'll join us again. Click subscribe and all that jazz and check out OnlyOneTV.com. All spelled out O-N-L-Y-O-N-E-T-V.com. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.


Check it out. You know, one of the best things to do with a leftover filet, if you happen to have it, then sliced on cheese and cracker. Yum yum, get you some. Check it out. Well, hopefully you cooked it through a medium rare, so it looks like this when you cut into it. Look at that. You might be wondering, why is there any leftover filet mignon? Well, because there was not enough people. We made too many steaks, not enough people.  We're just going to cut it up in little pieces, just like so.  Put some Kobe cheese on there and a slice of that leftover Primo filet. We're even going to give it one more little sprinkle. There we go. As my buddy, the fireman would say, that dog will hunt. Give it a try. Let us know what you think.


Giving up the Ghost by Hilary Mantell, narrated by Jane Weimark. The author begins with the following extract from Shea Cropper's Grave by Judy Jordan. Small holes, secret graves, children scattered around the iron fence, not even a scratched stone. The wind rises, clouds cover the moon, a dog's bark, and those owls alone and no end.  And now, giving up the ghost. Part 1 A Second Home. It is a Saturday, late July 2000, we're in Reefam, Norfolk, at Owl Cottage. There's something we have to do today, but we are trying to postpone it. We need to go across the road to see Mr Ewing. We need to ask for evaluation and see what they think of our chances of selling. Ewing's are the local firm, and it was they who sold us the house seven years ago. As the morning wears on, we move around each other silently, avoiding conversation. The decisions made, there's no more to discuss. At eleven o'clock, I see a flickering on the staircase. The air is still. Then it moves. I raise my head. The air is still again. I know it is my stepfather's ghost coming down, or, to put it in a way acceptable to most people, I know it is my stepfather's ghost. I'm not perturbed. I am used to seeing things that aren't there, or to put it in a way more acceptable to me. I am used to seeing things that aren't there. It was in this house that I last saw my stepfather Jack in the early months of 1995, alive in his garments of human flesh. Many times since then I have acknowledged him on the stairs. It may be, of course, that the flicker against the banister was nothing more than the warning of a migraine attack. It's at the left-hand side of my body that visions manifest. It's my left eye that is peeled. I don't know whether, at such vulnerable times, I see more than is there, or if things are there, that normally I don't see. Over the years the premonitionary symptoms of migraine headaches have become more than the dangerous puzzle that they were earlier in my life, and more than a warning to take the drugs that might ward off a full-blown attack. They have become a psychic adornment or flourish, an art form, a secret talent I have never managed to make money from. Sample complete. Ready to continue?