April 29, 2024

s18e08: I Don’t Know, A Skateboard Or Something

0.0 Context Setting

Monday, 29 April 2024 in Portland, Oregon, where it has gone cold and rainy again.

0.1 Events: Hallway Track, and Pulling the Cord

Hallway Track is still on hiatus.

Pulling the Cord, my plain-speaking guide to stopping traditional technology procurement is gearing up for its first non-test session, likely in May.

Next, on Very Little Gravitas, my general-purpose consulting vehicle: my calendar is opening up for late-June/early July, so get in touch if you have a problem you’d be exceedingly excited to have solved and off your plate. Here’s what I do.

0.2 More Events You Should Go To

You should go to Mike Monterio’s Presenting with Confidence workshop on May 9-10. I’m going to go.

Every so often Mike gives me advice about working with clients and he’s not wrong. I mean, he’s pretty direct about it which can sometimes make you feel weird, but he’s also not wrong. I’ve been presenting for a stupid long time, potentially distressingly even longer than some of you have been alive, and you can always get better. So you should go to this.

If you’re all “oh no will my work pay for this” and you have to give some horrific corporate justification as to why your extremely profitable and even moreso now they’re downsizing and you’re having to do more work in less time employers should pay for this, then you can always point out they’d be saving money by you doing this workshop, because your presentations will be better. Like, that’s a good thing. Really, not going on it has a high chance of destroying shareholder value. Going on it at least contributes to line going up and to the right.

And for you? Oh my gosh it’s transferrable skills or whatever. Also I bet it’s great for negotiating with your employer. Just go, okay?

In exchange for telling the truth about the utility of this workshop, I am receiving one (1) comp registration to the workshop, which means those of you attending the one I’m in will see how bad I am at presenting with confidence.

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1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

1.1 I Don’t Know, A Skateboard Or Something

A couple things here.

First! A 2023 report from the Mozilla Foundation, “Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy”¹.

Second! Kevin Fury on Threads, commenting on the news that Mercedes-Benz has bailed on next-generation CarPlay support²:

It does feel odd that a company whose core belief is that the best results come from controlling both the software and hardware design is pushing the ‘full-ui-takeover” model for CarPlay.³

“Next-generation CarPlay”⁴ was something Apple previewed at WWDC 2022 and the gist of it was “what if CarPlay, the thing that makes car systems significantly more usable, but on all the screens in your car”.

At the time, Apple was allegedly working on its Car project, which it’s allegedly also since canned. This strategy was always a bit confusing to me, but then I’m not on the inside and not privy to all the reasons why decisions were made. Anyway, what’s going on here?

Is it this?

As a Car Manufacturer, I Want Apple to take over all the screens in my car and own the digital user experience, So That... what? So That people will choose to buy my car over other manufacturers’ cars? So That I can concentrate on the car-ness of the car?

As a Car Buyer, I Want to buy a Car with CarPlay in it So That I can have a car experience that doesn’t suck?

Were Apple betting that people would really choose whether or not to buy a car based on its integration with Apple’s ecosystem?

I mean, it’s not a bad bet. Cars that don’t have CarPlay do suck. This doesn’t mean that CarPlay sucks, just that cars without CarPlay suck.

There was all this gnashing around “can Apple get better at cars before car manufacturers get better at software”, and the general position seems to be:

• making cars is hard
• making [good] software is hard

and that people who think that making good software is possible “if you do it like Apple or Google does” are discounting the decades-worth of institutional and cultural practice of building software in whatever way they chosen to use to make software.

(Also that “making hardware” is easy because Apple can do it is actually more like “making hardware that benefits from the changes in the hardware ecosystem wrought by the Apples of the world is easier and cheaper than it was before”)

These are not new positions, they’re the whole “can you even product, bro?” and the trite position of “if you could do it, you’d be doing it.”

Anyway. I am not surprised that Mercedes-Benz would change its decision here! There is a bit of a standoff here! Car makers are increasingly reluctant to cede or acknowledge that software-is-eating-the-world of “what’s a Car?”⁵ that’s increasingly being taken literally by the kind of people who go into rooms and say “no, you don’t go build a car first, you go build a skateboard because the job-to-be-done is getting from one place to another”⁶. I don’t blame them, for the entire car-ness issue above, plus the fact that Apple, a Very Big And Dominant Company In Some Markets, is able to dictate commercial terms if you want to deal with it.

(Unless you’re Netflix.)

I am burying the lede.

One way Apple could distinguish CarPlay and, well, put it in opposition with car manufacturers who are trying to computer their cars is on the privacy angle.

Apple loves Privacy⁷. They have a whole page about it! They’re not wrong about it being important! A lot of their really super funny sulkily-compliant implementation of meeting the requirements of the EU’s Digital Markets Act goes on about “well sure you can do this but then we can’t protect you from all the bad things, which include bad people who don’t respect your privacy like we do”, which sure, true, and is at the very least somewhat orthogonal to “but can I have some choice also please” in terms of editorial selection.

Cars, it turns out? Not so private.

CarPlay could totally be private. Maybe it already is!

Just saying.

Car manufacturers will hate this because data is the new whatever, and hey, if you’ve got data then it might be valuable or whatever, never mind if it is actually valuable or creates value, it sure is valuable to someone else who wants to play let’s-play-who’s-paying-to-hold-the-data-bag.

Legislation might be interesting though. Badly implemented legislation would be even better, would love cookie interstitials before I drive anywhere.

1.2 Something about Generative AI

This is just a placeholder. I have a whole thing about the times I try to use generative AI for writing and how each time it’s not quite useful for me. Not just not quite useful. Irritating and frustrating.

But it has been useful in writing some code!

I’m going to come back to this.

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That’s it. Buy some of my stickers! They’re great. You get a 10% discount and all of that.

How are you doing?

Best,

Dan

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