I discovered that my memory for numbers, dates, and equations was average at best, but my memory for images and stories was fantastic. If I found a way to represent something visually there was a pretty good chance I would remember it forever. If not, ?.
What started as a study hack quickly became my default way to absorb and retain knowledge. Whether it’s machine learning algorithms, statistical concepts, or organizational design, visualizations are a huge part of how I interpret and internalize the world.
For the past couple of years, I’ve been coaching product leaders and product teams trying to transform the way a giant organization works. We talk about things like communicating priorities, why iterative development is important, and how to balance tech debt versus refactoring. When those concepts come up, I draw out my mental model of that idea and it (almost) always helps us communicate much more effectively.
Here are a few of the drawings I make over and over again.
Small, frequent releases are safer than big, infrequent releases.
Most companies (particularly big established ones) operate a lot more like the red line than the blue. They let work build up over time and only release infrequently. Sometimes it’s because they have some technology that inhibits them from releasing more often. Sometimes it’s a cultural thing. But regardless of the cause, they don’t ship as often as they could.
Delaying releases increase risk. There’s the risk of bugs, the risk that priorities change and you have to throw the code out before it ships, and the risk of having built completely the wrong thing. Shipping early and often is an antidote to those risks.
With small releases, it can seem like you have problems more often. But those problems will be minor and manageable instead of big and ugly. If you let work build up before releasing, then you risk problems that are an order of magnitude worse.
Faster releases = lower risk.
Iterations
Iterative improvements beat big bets.
Big bets are exciting. They feel great to announce and watching people rally around an idea is super satisfying. But, as anyone who’s tried something new knows, it’s pretty hard to get it right on the first try. Big, inflexible bets often cause more problems than they solve.
To illustrate this idea, I like to use a golf metaphor. (The worst offenders of this fallacy tend to be big fancy executives so using golf makes the snarky party of my brain all warm and fuzzy.)
Imagine you’re playing golf on a dim, damp, foggy morning. You know the hole is somewhere to the east but you’re not sure exactly where. To complicate matters, your absentminded caddy forgot all but one of your clubs.
Would you rather have a driver (big, powerful, decisive, can cover lots of distance with ease) or a putter (puny, timid, can only hit the ball a few feet at a time)?
In this thinly veiled metaphor, most people pick the driver. They spend hours bashing the ball around a hundred yards per swing trying to get closer and closer to the hole. They overshoot it, turn around, redirect, and try again. After a few dozen swings most people give up, call the ball close enough, and retreat to the clubhouse for a consolation drink.
Meanwhile, the people who pick the putter are slowly chipping away at the distance to the hole, making constant small adjustments to direction. Once they get close enough to see the hole clearly it’s a simple matter of tapping it in. The putter may look inefficient in the short-term but long-term it’s much better.
In the long run, small, incremental improvements to a product are a much more efficient path to success.
Backlogs & Story Sizing
Well-sized stories mean less wasted work.
A lot of the teams I coach are used to working on gigantic hunks of work. For those teams, a single task might take weeks or months to accomplish. That’s fine if priorities never shift but in an agile environment, priorities tend to move around a lot (Responding to change over following a plan). And when priorities shift, work in progress gets paused or thrown out. That’s how it should work. Teams should always focus on the most important things. But all of that shelved and tossed work leads to a lot of waste.
One way to limit waste is controlling how quickly priorities can change. If you’ve ever heard “that’s not in scope for our next sprint” you’ve heard this approach in action. Locking scope does a good job of limiting waste but it comes at the cost of flexibility. For most teams, that cost is too high.
A five-minute copy change should never take four weeks and a formal prioritization process.
We can also approach waste from the other direction. Instead of trying to stop priorities from changing, we can focus on making priority shifts as painless as possible (Welcome changing requirements, even late in development). Appropriate story sizing is a fantastic way to do that.
Stories should be as small as possible while having some self-contained nugget of customer value.
If a story is too big when priorities shift you’ll have invested a bunch of time into work that can’t be put into production. If a story is too small, when priorities shift you’ll be left with a bunch of work fragments that are “done” but not useful without more time.
Well-sized stories keep your work in progress small, your level of risk low, and your teams nimble.
Are these visuals helpful?
If so, let me know in the comments below or on twitter. If the feedback is positive, I’ll write up a few of my other favorites.
There are
countless valuable skills that a marketer should have, but one that is
still slightly overlooked is the ability to code. I might be a little
biased — especially since the word developer
is in my job title — but coding and programming are only going to
increase in value as our world becomes more and more digital in nature.
Maybe
you are a little skeptical about whether or not you can do it or even
want to do it. Maybe you have a fear of being described as a “nerd” or
“geek.” No matter what, anyone can learn to code and gain the benefits
that come with it. Below I have listed several reasons why I think it
would be valuable for any marketer to learn how to code.
1. Greater Digital Literacy
When
you learn to code or program you gain knowledge about how things like
computers and the internet work. When you do not understand how to code
you can only scratch the surface of the tools around you. When you learn
to code you gain valuable answers to things like “how are websites
hosted?”, “what is an API?”, and “why does that image look funky on my
website?”.
2. More Fluid Collaboration
Tying closely to the first reason, greater digital literacy, when
you learn to code you decrease your friction when collaborating with
other technical parties. If you work directly with product developers,
data scientists, or web designers, learning to code can benefit your
collaboration. You will be able to communicate on a different level with
them and understand their concerns or point of view. You also will be
able to provide more in-depth feedback regarding development efforts,
and you will have a greater understanding of timelines and results.
3. Enhanced Decision Making
Coding
has helped my decision making in two aspects. First, because of
programming, I see problems and workflows more completely. Coding made
me practice the mental tactics of working through problems and finding
the quickest or the best way. It has also made me accustomed to
“If-else” logic that is prominent in CRM and marketing automation
systems.
The
second way that coding has helped with my decision making is in
selecting new software vendors or digital agencies. When you understand
how systems and programs work you are able to detect inflation in vendor
quotes. This knowledge can easily save your company thousands of
dollars.
4. Greater Understanding of Problem Solving
One of the greatest benefits of learning to code is the enhanced skills of problem-solving. Steve Jobs said, “Everybody in this country should learn to program a computer, because it teaches you how to think.” Instead
of just accepting problems as they come you learn to methodically
troubleshoot the issue. You learn to dissect the problem logically and
then work through it prior to moving forward in any particular
direction.
When
you learn to code your paradigm is expanded. You start to think beyond
standard functionality and start to realize the full potential of the
digital channels around you. Instead of a boring, old email, you can
have an email that is personalized and dynamic. Instead of accepting the
limits of basic lead attribution, you create your own rules — this is
all possible when you learn to think about problems as a coder.
5. Makes Your Life Easier
When
you learn to code, it is not about creating the next Facebook or
Airbnb, it is about understanding and solving problems in your own life.
Treehouse writes on their blog
about a video producer, who, after taking a quick course, was able to
write a script to help manage his folders for video organization. In my
own work, I just spent a few hours writing a small program that will, in
turn, save my fellow team members hours of work performing a menial
task. Whether it is just learning how to take Excel to the next level or
it is writing programs to run automations on your desktop, learning to
code will make life easier for you and your team.
6. Help with Data and Analytics
Data
and Analysis is arguably a technical role anyway, but even if you are
someone who does not work heavily with marketing analytics, learning key
aspects of coding will be extremely beneficial. The first and most
obvious benefit would be in learning languages that deal directly with
data and databases such as R, Python, or SQL. With knowledge of these
languages, you will be able to do things like manage databases or
determine statistical relevance. In addition, learning simple functions
and expressions (like DAX) will make working with tools like Excel or PowerBI vastly easier.
The
other basic skill you will learn is understanding the different types
of data such as booleans, integers, datetimes and strings. Understanding
these are very important when setting up new marketing systems or when
you are working with business intelligence tools.
7. Better the Experience for Your Customers
Paul Boag says in his blog post about User Interface Design,
“If we first help a user complete their task, we will find them much
more open to going on to complete our call to action.” When we make life
easier for our customers, we also make it more likely for them to
become our clients. As marketers, we set the initial opinion of our
customers to our brand. If our websites are challenging to navigate, or
our disconnected infrastructure makes our messaging awkward, our
customers are going to have a poor initial opinion of our company.
Connected experiences and refined digital interfaces are only possible because of coders.
Bonus Reason: Makes You More Self-Sufficient
Especially
if you work for a smaller company, being multifaceted in your skillset
is important. It helps keep you from relying on expensive agencies for
small adjustments you can make yourself with just a little training.
Final Thought:
The
nirvana of marketing is to obtain micro-segmentation with the economy
of scale. If you can obtain this you will be able to communicate to your
audience the right message at the right time. To accomplish this you
will need a team that is highly collaborative, a team that methodically
works through problems, a team that utilizes every piece of data, and a
team that can take advantage of modern technologies. I propose that this
idealistic state can only be achieved right now by writers that can
code, designers that can code, analysts that can code — a team of
marketers that know how to code.
Update (Dec 6, 2018): Microsoft has confirmed
the rumor to be true. We now have one less browser engine, and a last
man standing (Firefox) in deep trouble (reasons below). If you agree
that this sucks, install Firefox. Also on mobile. Here’s instructions on how to switch from Chrome.
Update (Dec 8, 2018):
The below article is a truthful but depressing read. I’ve published a
follow-up article that radiates hope for what is to come in 2019 here.
Introduction
Warning: this article contains several words.
Yesterday, Windows Central
published a rumour that Microsoft is ditching its Edge browser, or more
accurately put, to relaunch a new browser using the Chromium engine.
The rumour has been picked up by mainstream media and as far as I know,
not denied by Microsoft, therefore I assume it to be factual. A good
reason as any for me to share some thoughts on the current landscape of
web browsers.
If
you’re new to my blog, I’ll add the background that I’ve been in the
web game since 1996, and have seen every iteration of the browser wars
up close. In terms of mindset, I’m from the Zeldman school of thought: a
deep believer and proponent of the open web, web standards, a shared
web.
I’ll
also warn you that I am direct, frank, cynical, love dark humour, and
don’t take many things serious, including myself. With that in mind,
let’s go.
Microsoft Edge: doomed to fail
Let’s
first establish the market share failure that Edge is after 3 years of
existence. Depending on the source to use, it is listed at around 4–5%.
This is from a company still running a desktop semi-monopoly and having
the ability to push it down our throats in subtle, or not so subtle
ways. It is from the same company who once had a 80–90% market share, an
almost complete monopoly.
It
gets worse, combined with mobile, market share plummets to about 2%. In
the range of 2–5%, Edge joins a long list of browsers nobody really
cares about. Like Opera, or Vivaldi, or Samsung Internet. Sure, each may
have a loyal following and they may even be great browsers in their
niche, but they are not major players, nor would any developer care
explicitly about them.
The
situation for Edge is in fact worse compared to small browsers like
Opera. At least those browsers are compatible with the web. Websites
will work in them because websites are built to work in Chromium. Edge
doesn’t have that luxury, because they have their own engine to
maintain, playing constant catch up in an effort to get the modern web
to work in an engine of their own making.
Having
virtually no presence on mobile and failing to gain traction on a
market you control, desktop, can be considered a failure. Here’s some
thoughts on how Edge could have done better. These are mere opinions,
and we all know hindsight is 20/20:
Side
note: “Hindsight is 20/20” is a strange expression since 20/20 vision
really isn’t that good. It’s adequate vision. So it would translate as
“Hindsight is reasonable”. No it isn’t. Hindsight is perfect. The 20/20
part makes zero sense.
If
that side note tired you, imagine being me. This my brain every second
of the day, spending compute cycles on useless shit. Let’s move on, we
were talking about how Edge could have done better:
The
biggest opportunity for market share was missed during launch. No
matter how much you hate Internet Explorer, you have to acknowledge that
hundreds of millions of users have been trained to consider it “the
internet” out of sheer muscle memory. Some because they’re forced to use
it, some because they don’t know any better, and it works for them.
This large audience was not captured when Edge launched. There’s no
guidance from IE to Edge. Edge is as alien to an IE user as any other
new browser they have failed to switch to in all those years. Hell,
Microsoft could have even kept the icon the same, and switch rendering
engines behind the scenes to capture this audience. But they didn’t, so
nobody switched, not in great numbers. All of this happened during a
larger move, the deeply confusing Windows 8 era. Here finally the word
clusterfuck would be accurate, as it really was a cluster of several
failings at once.
To
those IE users who are aware of what a browser is, and that there are
competing browsers, it’s not clear how Edge is better compared to that
other new default, Chrome. It doesn’t seem to be better at anything, and
quite a lot worse in some things. And to alienate traditional desktop
users even further, Edge has a touch-first design. Everything is giant,
tucked away, flat. Basic expectations of desktop usability is broken
exactly for that audience most promising to Edge: IE users.
To
developers, Edge is just another IE. Another pain. It’s better than IE,
but it remains the browser lagging behind in features and web
standards, the browser in which things don’t work or render differently.
It’s not due to the Edge team itself. In my interactions with them, I
found them to be awesome. Great engineers, proponents of an open web. It
seems to me the team is rather small, and perhaps doesn’t have enough
resources. Also, Microsoft once again insisted on the fail strategy to
ship browser updates as part of OS updates, whilst the competition ships
every 6 weeks. A losing proposition. The best possible outcome in these
conditions is shipping a browser that is slightly worse than the
competition, so why bother at all.
A
lack of marketing. Sometimes Microsoft is stuck in its old ways. They
ship something and believe just shipping it triggers mass adoption. Like
it always did in their decades-long dominance. Those days are over, you
need to compete, market, win hearts and minds and do so aggressively
for a long time. Has this been done for Edge? I don’t think so. Years
after launch, still Edge has no significant mind share.
All
of the above said, I don’t think these reasons matter much at all. Had
all these things be handled better, perhaps 4% would be 6%. It most
certainly would not make Edge truly significant in terms of market
share, nor would there be any hope of ever achieving good old dominant
market share.
The
reasons for that, in short, are: mobile. If a typical website gets
50–60% mobile traffic these days, and if billions of people are joining
the web with mobile as their only device, it’s safe to say that you lost
the browser game if you have no (meaningful) presence there.
Desktop
still is a sizable and interesting market though, and here Microsoft
finds itself stacked up against Google. Who owns the world’s most
important web services and can easily push Chrome to its billions of
users. Users that Microsoft does not have, as it doesn’t operate a
single meaningful web service. Google will even go as far as making
their services only work in Chrome, or actively hamper the operation of a
service to users of other browsers (allegedly). They force Android
manufacturers to ship Chrome and countless other Google apps as defaults
towards billions of users.
It’s
hard to miss the historical karma game going on here. Microsoft had
previously acquired dominant browser market share using deeply unethical
and anti-competitive ways. Now their competitor is doing the exact same
thing, and they are at the losing end.
So
I conclude that Edge is doomed. It was doomed and its next version will
be equally doomed from the start. For the simple reason that Microsoft
has close to no say in how browsers get installed: on mobile as a
default app, and on desktop via web services under the control of
Google. Switching to Chromium makes no difference in market share, as
the only way to compete now is through the browser’s UI, not via the
engine. Which isn’t a competition at all, since browser UI is a
commodity.
Microsoft Edge on Chromium
Assuming the rumor to be true, what would it mean if Edge switched to Chromium as a render engine?
For
market share, not much, see the previous section. Potentially, it could
mean a tiny bump up, as Edge would become more compatible with the
Chromium-dominated web and therefore attract more users as a browser in
which the web “works”. I don’t think that would make a serious dent
though, because it’s not a unique capability.
For
developers, it’s one less browser engine to worry about, if they were
worrying about it in the first place (unlikely). Less testing effort,
less browser-specific bug fixing, a slight productivity boost.
For
the open web: it’s complicated. If I were to put on the hat of a
pragmatic developer, I fail to see the big gain in having competing
browser engines. Pragmatically speaking, if I enter code and run it, I
want the output to be the same, no matter the engine. Getting different
results or even bugs in this output is not a gain, it is a pain. Having
feature disparity between engines sucks, it means building multiple
versions of the same thing. You can give it nice names like “progressive
enhancement” but that doesn’t change the fact that it sucks, from a
purely pragmatic productivity point of view.
So
what is the whole point of having different engines? Speed could be an
argument, but I hardly consider it a strong point these days. The speed
of each engine currently out there seems superficially similar.
Which
leaves innovation coming from engines as the sole benefit of having
multiple engines. Whereas in practice different engines primarily create
lots of pain, they do at times provide benefits to the open web as a
whole. There are countless examples of browser vendors inventing new
features that ultimately become useful web standards. Yet even in that
case, a counterpoint is easy to make: that new feature could also have
been built into a shared, open source engine. Like Chromium. If that
engine is truly open source in the democratic sense, that is.
My
take on this is that when it comes to the open web, it’s not browser
engines being the driving force of keeping the web open. If that would
be true, the open web is already lost, given the Chromium dominance.
Instead, I opt for diversity, competition and collaboration in the
decision making process regarding web standards. Less engines could be
acceptable for as long as ownership and the standards process regarding
those fewer engines are diverse, and not controlled by one organization.
To
make that a whole lot more explicit: At a W3C meeting or standards
discussion, the room should not be 60–70% Googlers. Likewise, Google
should not have veto power over an “open source” project like Chromium.
Microsoft, Mozilla, Adobe and the like should get equal representation
there so that even with less engines, we have shared ownership and
decision making on what will be in that engine.
The
other aspect of browser innovation is outside the engine, it’s in the
UI itself. I can be rather quick about this one: I am totally
indifferent to it. They’re all the same to me.
As
for Microsoft’s perspective on the switch to Chromium, one can only
speculate, so let’s. I think they realize they can’t win significant
market share with Edge, and as such, find themselves having a money
drain with no light at the end of the tunnel. It’s costly and painful to
develop a browser engine and with zero business benefits, they might as
well adopt to the “standard”. An admission of defeat. Since they lost
mobile and are increasingly a service company, they’re forced to make
all their products 100% compatible with Chromium anyway, so why have a
home grown engine that is less capable? Even within Microsoft itself,
Chromium is the first-class citizen, not Edge.
One
could wonder why they would launch another browser at all. Surely the
new browser will not outperform Edge in market share, so why have one at
all? Practical reasons, I suppose. They can plug and integrate a few
features exclusive to some Windows devices into the browser, for example
drawing on a web page. Plus, it’s embarrassing to ship an OS without a first party browser. People would have no way to download Chrome.
Firefox: the long road to irrelevance
If
you think Edge’s situation was and is dire, things are about to get
even more grim. Let me first show my true colors: I root for Firefox’s
success. I have been doing so since they made the first crack in
Microsoft’s IE dominance and have been doing ever since. Not because I
think they have the best browser, instead because of sentimental
reasons: they are the only independent browser, guardians of an open,
shared web. They have superior, human values compared to the rest. I
want them to do well.
But
they’re not doing well. They’ve already lost, and keep losing some
more. First, their Firefox OS initiative failed and just like Microsoft,
they now find themselves without meaningful presence on mobile. Mobile
market share barely registers at around 1%, even worse than Edge.
We
can reiterate the simple conclusion here that without mobile presence,
you lost. The majority of web traffic is mobile, it’s that simple.
But
again, desktop is not totally irrelevant. Yet here too Firefox is
failing hard, and has been failing for a long time, in spectacular ways:
The
above desktop-only view of browser market share is telling. There’s
Chrome, and there’s everybody else. Everybody else can be split into two
groups: Firefox and the pit of despair: a larger group of small
browsers with no meaningful market share.
Firefox
stands above that lowest group by having more market share, which used
to be enough to be considered a major browser, a serious player. A
weighty means of resistance against one browser monopolizing the game.
Not as a dominant player, yet still as a major player.
Well,
no more. According to most sources, Firefox has dipped below 10% market
share. On desktop. Cross device it would be far lower still. And the
trend is negative. Hard to see in the above chart, but they lost a
whopping 3% in the last year. Despite their marketing efforts and
emphasis on making Firefox competitive again, it’s clearly not working.
Or not yet.
A cross device view on market share is even more shocking:
From
over a 30% market share as a peak to almost complete irrelevance, in 8
years. The chart is clear about the mobile revolution being a primary
reason, given the rise of both Chrome and mobile Safari. Yet as we saw
in the desktop chart too, there they are moving fast to join the gang of
irrelevant browsers.
Firefox
is now an irrelevant browser in total market share, and well on its way
to become irrelevant on desktop as well, if it isn’t already. The first
signs of it are already visible. In the past decade, no web developer
would ever launch anything that doesn’t work in Firefox. You’d be
ridiculed. It was a developer-default browser, a starting point.
Well,
no more. Increasingly I’m seeing sites, code experiments, all kinds of
things not working well or not working at all in Firefox. And nobody
cares. The behavior of seeing Firefox as an unimportant browser is
slowly normalized. The question of whether Firefox is relevant is
already answered: it isn’t. The only question is how irrelevant it will
become.
Mozilla
has two weapons to combat the decline, both of which will horribly
fail, I’m pained to say. Not because I want them to fail, or to be
overly negative or pessimistic. They will fail because both weapons do
not address the root cause of the decline.
Weapon
1 is technology. Mozilla is doing fantastic things in rewriting their
browser, from an engineering perspective that is. There’s Servo, Rust,
WebRenderer which all look highly innovative, and will ultimately
produce a better browser. They may soon have a little peak in delivering
the world’s best desktop browser, from a technical point of view.
Firefox
loyalists (like me) will love it, and 3 new people will agree it’s
awesome. And that’s the end of it. The enormous market shifts in browser
market share are not caused by browser features or performance. They
are caused by the mobile-first revolution and dominant parties being
able to ship default browsers to billions of users. Non-technical users
do not consciously pick a browser based on features or speed, and even
if they did, modern browsers are all fast. I honestly can’t tell the
difference between any of them, not even on mediocre hardware. Firefox’s
decline and the sharp rise of competitors is not due to engineering,
therefore the solution also does not lie in engineering. And even if you
did believe engineering is the solution, let’s establish that you can’t
out engineer Google. You can win a battle, but not the war.
Weapon
2 is mind share. Firefox as the good guy, guardian of your privacy, an
independent force for good. I care, and I’m on board with these
sentimental reasons, but we have to be honest that most people don’t
care. When choosing between convenience and principles, most people pick
convenience. Or, they don’t even spend a second thinking about it
because they don’t hear you preaching, or know you even exist (reach).
Most certainly there are people who do care, but there’s not enough of
us to save Firefox, I’m afraid. A telling example is when Facebook
acquired WhatsApp, triggering mainstream discussions on how vast groups
would ditch it because of privacy concerns. Nobody did. Whatsapp grew a
lot in users that year.
Ugh,
a bleak picture of Firefox’s state and its future. What is to become of
it? Not much. The best outcome would be that they stop the decline and
settle at the current level. Even if they did so, their market share
would still decline in total as mobile keeps growing and Firefox has
nothing significant there. Desktop market share could become a steady
line yet are unlikely to rise significantly because there’s not a single
reason I could think of why that would happen.
The
worst scenario is that on desktop they too keep declining into the
territory of 5% browsers or less. When this happens, they have become
totally irrelevant. And not just that: they would be an irrelevant
browser with a different browser engine. Like Edge.
Note
that when I say irrelevant, I don’t mean dead or meaningless or without
future. As a 5% browser, you can still provide meaning and relevance to
perhaps a 100 million users. That’s a lot of people. Most of us work on
products several scales below that. With irrelevant I mean irrelevant
to the browser wars at a worldwide scale.
Our
cup of poison isn’t empty yet. Microsoft, in their abandonment of Edge
and their own rendering engine, could have done the right thing. Which
is to collaborate with Mozilla. It would make for a powerful alliance
against Chromium/Chrome dominance. At least on desktop, it could have
made a meaningful difference.
But
they didn’t, they didn’t choose the right path, they chose the easy
short term path. Because doing right is for losers, like Firefox. Nice
guys finish last, at least in this round of the wars.
Chrome, also called “the web”
A lot has been said about Chrome already, and my opinion on it is complex, you could say it has “layers”.
First,
strictly speaking regarding personal usage, I think Chrome is the best
browser out there. It’s fast, has a pretty good UI, extension support is
great, and the developer tools are out of this world. Which is not to
say other browsers are crap. They are good too, Chrome is just slightly
better.
From
a developer point of view, as said, best dev tools. More importantly,
Chrome is that browser typically first to ship new web features. As a
developer, I pretty much never face the situation where something
doesn’t work in Chrome, yet does work in competing browsers. The
opposite happens to me daily.
So
yes, Chrome makes me happy as a user and a developer. It’s a great
browser. And let’s continue the cheering: there is no organization in
the history of the web who has done more for the betterment of the web
platform than Google.
Yes
they have the resources to do so. So has Microsoft, who for the largest
part of their history, actively sabotaged the web. Big difference. Yes,
improving the web may serve Google’s own interests. But they’re doing
it. Without Google’s weight and pace in improving the web, we would be
in darker times, technically speaking.
If
you’ve never lived through those darker times yourself, I can sum it
up: browsers never ship anything, and it takes 5 years for even the
simplest new feature to become widely available. And then it still
wouldn’t work. Google made the web a first-class citizen and in recent
years is almost solely responsible for making it a sustainable app
platform, or at least is the biggest driver in doing so.
And
now the stabbing can begin. Sure enough, Chrome as a browser is good
and a good browser can grow market share organically, simply for being
good. Part of the rise of Chrome in market share can be explained by the
quality of the browser itself. For it being a user preferred browser.
It
would be naive to think though that out of the blue, billions of users
collectively decided to use Chrome as a default, out of pure
awesomeness. Word of mouth does not work that fast, nor do people select
browsers on rational and technical grounds.
Clearly, the drastic upward rise in market share is realized in other ways, by means of Google’s dominance in other markets:
If
you want to include the Playstore on your Android device, you’re forced
to put Google’s suite of apps on the device, which includes Chrome. If
you don’t want the Playstore, you might as well not launch the device at
all, so it’s not really an option. It comes down to this simple
equation: if you’re not Apple and launching a mobile device, you will
ship Chrome. You may now mention niches of Android where no Playstore
is used, it doesn’t change the overall point for the vast majority of
devices.
Besides
the ability to force-ship Chrome to billions of users, Google also owns
some of the world’s most widely used web services. Search, Maps, Gmail,
Youtube and the like. Which all work better on Chrome, or contains ads
to install Chrome. Another example of a method where their dominance in
one market, allows an advantage in another. Here the advantage is not a
brute force install as with Android, yet it’s still an aggressive push.
There
are various other ways in which Chrome is shipped to the user without
an actual user-triggered action. Shipping it as part of some other
bundle of software is an example.
I
believe capturing market B via your dominance in market A, is
anti-competitive behavior. “Dominance” is the keyword here. It’s
business as usual for a company to do this at small scale, and generally
allowed. Ford may ship a Ford car radio (I know, not the best example)
and nobody cares. Nor is it illegal, as it doesn’t really disturb a
secondary market.
At
a monopoly scale, it becomes a different matter. It’s the same behavior
Microsoft was convicted of (without any meaningful consequence).
You
can disagree and go all neoliberal to say that any company can do
whatever they want on their own OS or web service. It’s an opinion you
can have. I would disagree, for the record. In any case, it doesn’t
change the outcome. Google is the only entity in the world with the
power to ship a (default) browser to so many users, by means of their
mobile dominance, and their web service dominance.
Chrome,
once pushed to these billions of users, turns out to be quite a great
browser. It really is a good browser. And important Google services work
so well in it. So it sticks, and becomes the new default. Chrome being a
really good browser, combined with unique capabilities to push it to
billions of users is how we got to a market share of 60–70%. It then
becomes a developer default and all kinds of side projects (like
Electron and various Chromium clones) pop up to strengthen the dominance
even further.
Mozilla
nor Microsoft can win back lost market share for the obvious reasons
mentioned above. They are near-absent on mobile, and they don’t operate a
single meaningful web service. Microsoft kind of had the ability to
push a browser via Windows, but they screwed up. Now, it doesn’t matter
how good they make their browser. They can’t ship or push it at scale.
And
so we live in a Chromium/Chrome world now, or have been living in it
for some time. It seems a return to Microsoft’s past dominance with IE,
yet the situation is significantly different.
Microsoft
had a browser that sucked (IE6). Google does not. Chrome is great.
Microsoft’s browser was non-standard, intentionally and openly so.
Chrome is largely standards-based (even if Google has a large say in
those standards). Microsoft didn’t invest a penny in bettering the web,
and didn’t touch IE for years, sabotaging the web, bleeding it to death.
Google does the opposite, they aggressively invest in bettering the
web.
It’s
a better kind of dominance. Like a friendlier dictator. But still a
dictator. The practical consequence for a developer in the short run is
likely to be received as a positive. A great browser, a great browser
engine, and most of the world making use of it. The day-to-day concern
of a developer is to ship things, which is easier in a monoculture, like
it or not.
The
longer term faith of the open web, it hangs in the balance. I don’t
believe implementers can break the dominance anytime soon via an actual
browser or browser engine, which is why I’ll reiterate what I already
said: there must be equal representation in the process where web
standards get created, as well as in the decision making process where
priorities for implementation get set. We’d then have less engines,
basically only one, yet what gets build for it in which order would be
shared. An open decision making process, followed by implementation in a
single engine. It would be a kind-of open web.
No,
not even that is ideal, I know. I’m keeping it real. A kind-of open web
is superior to the situation of having a single engine with a single
private organization calling the shots. The idealistic scenario of a
multi-engine open web is dead or dying, as discussed above.
Safari
I
believe we have now moved past the peak and essence of this article,
yet I’ll give some thoughts on browser players of lesser significance.
Furthermore, I have to finish my tour of bashing every single tech
giant, to ensure to never receive a job offer from any of them, ever. I
don’t like loose ends.
Safari,
of course, has reached significant market share thanks to Apple’s
mobile success, combined with a complete lock-down on which browsers
users can install (or more accurately said, which browser engine they
can use). Whilst not a force as dominant as Google, it’s a sizable
force.
We
can once again go back to the simple observation that Microsoft and
Mozilla can’t do such a push or lock-down, since they basically don’t
exist on mobile. And this proves that the quality or features of a web
browser hardly matter. Because if it did matter, Safari would be dead.
Mobile
Safari most certainly would not be a browser with 15% market share
(much higher if you include mobile only) because it is so awesome. It’s
not awesome. It’s a reasonably capable browser that lags behind Chrome,
Firefox, and even Edge in terms of features and web standards support.
Take any Chromium clone that has near zero market share and it is
functionally and technically better than mobile Safari.
Surely,
Safari lagging behind has to be intentional. If you want to have an
underwhelming experience, have a look at Safari’s release notes. Bugs
are open for years and when a new web feature is shipped, it’s often
incomplete, buggy, and unusable. If you’re in the game of trying to ship
web apps at the quality level of a native app, your number one enemy
will be mobile Safari.
Apple,
being a trillion dollar company, could out engineer Google just by
having even deeper pockets. Or at least try to. They could also apply
their much praised quality mindset to their browser. They don’t. They
seem fine in it slugging along, in it being buggy. To invest just enough
to not let it bleed to death, yet not enough to actually make it a
powerful app platform. Because any platform that is powerful that is not
owned by Apple itself, is not a priority, or even a threat.
Once
again I will say that the actual team behind the browser is not at
fault, it never is. They mean well. They do support an open web. They
are amazing engineers. It’s just that the mother ship holds them back,
because interests don’t align. It happens in big corporations. I know, I
work for one.
Internet Explorer
What
is left to be said about Internet Explorer? Not much, other than it
being the slowest death of a browser in history. Even Microsoft’s burial
of their own browser does not kill it. At this point in time, many
developers are in a position where they finally can ignore old IE as a
whole, or have been doing so for a few years.
But
don’t underestimate the rest of us. For example, I work for a
healthcare company, where customers seemingly love IE. I’m talking a 10%
market share, which is too big to ignore. And the number doesn’t seem
to be going down that much, which is highly depressing. Building a
modern web experience with old IE in mind is like adding a square wooden
wheel to a Tesla.
And
then there’s corporate internal. Which has shitty age-old IE-only
applications. That everybody hates yet somehow have to keep running. I
always wonder what the owners of these systems expect to happen exactly.
They want to keep the system up yet not invest a dime in it. As if
complete inaction will ultimately solve it. The system is dead. It has
no future. It has to be replaced, waiting does not solve the problem.
Everybody else
To
finish our round of browsers, there’s everybody else. Mostly
Chromium-based browsers. They compete via their UI, not their engine. I
don’t have much to say about these browsers. They can each attract their
niche audience, but they hardly matter in the bigger picture. They can
win or lose a percentage or two, yet never rise above the 10% threshold
that I’ve arbitrarily set as an important browser.
Wrapping up
I
had not expected to do such a long write-up, nor did I plan to make it
so sour and bitter. I’ve tried to call things for what they are even if
those things are ugly. And ugly things are:
The
web now runs on a single engine. There is not a single browser with a
non-Chromium engine on mobile of any significance other than Safari.
Which runs webkit, kind of the same engine as Chromium, which is based
on webkit.
On
desktop, Edge’s departure from running their own engine, means there’s
only one last man standing to counter the Chromium dominance: Firefox.
Which is falling from a cliff, on its way to join the “everybody else”
gang of insignificant browsers. With no serious way to truly counter it
due to their near-absence on mobile, and their lack of control in
pushing browser installs.
So
Chromium it is. If you’re now waiting for a message of hope or a happy
ending, I have none. Just like the IE era, the new monopoly was not
created by means of a level playing field where the best browser has
won, the world is a lot messier than that. The new monopoly was created
by control over markets, and the ability to push a browser to billions
of users in ways subtle and not so subtle. In this round, it was done
via a capable browser (Chrome) unlike the previous round (IE6).
The
victor is clear, and balance will not be restored unless these market
dynamics change in radical ways. Until that day, enjoy Chromium.
Update:
To compensate for the depressing ending of the above story, I’ve
written a follow-up article aiming to give people caring about the web
some much needed reasons to be optimistic, despite all of the above.
Check it out here.
The Problem with Side Gigs as a Software Developer
Smokey night…too smokey for coding?
The problem with side gigs as a software developer is simply that it’s not as easy as it sounds. Some of us need or want more money from time to time, but acquiring those extra funds isn’t always as simple as clicking on a few forms and collecting some cash. It actually takes a lot of work.
For about two years — several years ago — I ran a one-man web development consulting business, which is what a lot of developers do as a side gig. I had one primary client and then a not-always-steady stream of small clients to pad the bank account. I learned some very important lessons during those two years.
I wasn’t just a developer…I was a business owner.
I couldn’t just click on a few freelance job ads and make money appear.
I learned that getting the work could be harder than doing the work, and that was the most eye opening lesson from the whole experience.
Side Gigs are A Lot More Work than You Think
When I was first getting started, I figured I could just put in some bids at the various freelance gig sites and the work would start rolling in. Boy, was I wrong. I started out getting nothing, so I had to figure out what to fix and do it fast.
I had to improve my portfolio, figure out how to market my skills, and learn how to write great bids. Once I got all that nailed down and started getting work, I noticed another trend — a race to the bottom.
Freelance sites have a global audience and a global workforce. Many developers I competed against lived in low cost of living countries. Therefore, they could bid less for the same work. It really didn’t matter who was better, because a lot of the business owners looking to hire freelance programmers were looking for the cheapest option.
I had to spend more time marketing, more time writing more in-depth bids, and further positioning myself as an expert who writes high quality code. These activities take a pretty good chunk of time…time that I wasn’t billing to anyone.
Once you get all the business and marketing side figured out, you end up with a highly specialized skillset and sales process serving a limited customer base. The end result of all this is that to make money, you’ve got to put in a lot of work.
Work on Getting Better at Your Job while at Your Job
The main reason for getting side gigs is to get some more income. Even though developers make good money, we could always use more. Some people have massive student loan debt, while others are saving up to buy a house. Side gigs are one way to pad your income, but have you thought about just increasing your income at your day job?
Say you wanted to make another $15,000 per year on top of your current salary. The first thing a lot of people I’ve talked to will think about is getting some type of side work going. Starting a side business and making a little extra cash works…but what’s the time frame?
How long will it take you to get up to that $15,000 per year? You might hit it out of the park on your first try, but usually it takes time to build up clients, processes, and your supplemental income. On a similar overall timeline, you can increase your value to your current employer and get a raise.
What if you could get the same result, but with less effort? You could be put in some work and get the same results in about the same amount of time over the course of a year or two, except you don’t have to give up your nights and weekends. To make side gigs work, you might have to put in 2–4 hours a night, every night, and work seven days per week for months before you see any real results. And those results might just be a trickle of money here and there.
By getting better at your job while you are at your job, you won’t feel like you’re working 24×7. Over time, you’ll provide more value to your employer and turn that value into real cash. As an added bonus, if you actively work to get better at your job, that job will become easier.
You’ll still have your nights and weekends for recreational activities, you’ll convert value into cash, and your job will become easier. This seems like a winning combo to me.
You’ll End Up as a More Marketable Developer
Most of us change jobs eventually. There’s just too much money to be made by getting a new job to stay at your current employer forever. Using the get-better-at-your-job tactic mentioned above can put you in a solid position when job hunting.
If you have a side gig on your resume (let’s say you want to highlight another set of skills or programming language), that could be a red flag to some managers. Our profession often requires us to fix production processes and clean up some code during our recreational time, and if you have a side business, how available will you be?
Instead, you could have a nice and clean resume highlighting the value you provide your current employer. That could really make your resume shine. You’ll have more skills and responsibilities, you can position yourself to step up into a larger role, and you’ll be in a better negotiating position for more money.
I know it sounds like I’m saying side gigs are a bad choice. I’m not saying that…exactly. What I am saying is that it’s hard work, and it takes a lot of time to get meaningful results. I don’t even know how many nights I spent tucked away from my family while I tried to build my side business. That life is not for everyone, and a viable alternative is to just use your day job to increase your income.
If you’re thinking about starting up a side gig to earn more money, try this other method for six months or a year instead. See how far it can get you.
