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00:00:00 - Speaker 1: So we think a lot about how do you give agency back to people, but we think about if this is your web browser, this is your operating system, this is your home on the internet, how do you feel agency over Hello and welcome to Meta Muse.

00:00:16 - Speaker 2: Muse is a tool for thought on the iPad. This isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name is Adam Wiggins, and I’m here today with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam, and a guest, Josh Miller. Hello. Thanks for being with us here today, Josh. You’re an accomplished entrepreneur and also have a background in both the startup world with Branch, which I think later became part of Facebook, but also you’ve done a stint in government with the White House, if I’m not mistaken, and nowadays you’re working Obama White House just want to clarify that.

00:00:51 - Speaker 2: Fair enough. And now you’re working on the browser company, which is super interesting. Why don’t you tell us what you’re doing there?

00:00:59 - Speaker 1: Sher, thank you so much for having me. Honestly, I feel like I’m at Whole Foods right now doing my grocery shopping routine, listening to this podcast. So, uh, really awesome to hear that intro live and grateful to be talking to you both.

My name is Josh, uh, working on the browser company.

As the name might imply, we’re oddly fascinated by web browsers. We feel like we spend a ton of time in web browsers in 2020, too much time, maybe, and as we were looking at the kind of arc of web browser technology, it felt like the interface of the web browser and the jobs it did for you. It was fairly stagnant and honestly was just curious about why and what else it may look like. So there’s a group of about 10 of us, uh, in a room together, well, I guess a metaphorical room together experimenting pretty widely about what a web browser reimagined for 2020 might look like. So figuring it out as we go along and really happy to be here. So thank you for having me.

00:01:54 - Speaker 2: We’ve had a lot of informal chats through Twitter and other kind of conversations, but where maybe I really felt like I got my head around what you were doing was when your colleague Nate Parrott came and did a little workshop for the ink and Switch crew to show us the experiments you’re working on, and that was very. Interesting partially, you know, just to see inside the machine and what you’re doing, but also because it seems to me like you’re really taking what I would call a research approach. I think you are a startup or a venture funded startup. Is that the correct characterization?

00:02:23 - Speaker 1: Yes, that’s a correct characterization. I agree with that statement.

00:02:28 - Speaker 2: But even so, it seems like this approach you’re taking these very throwaway experiments while you figure out what your initial product is going to be as opposed to the maybe the more classic mode that I’m used to, which is you start with an idea that you love, you build that until it’s clear that it’s totally unviable and then you pivot to something else when you’re forced to.

That’s a different approach.

So when Nate demoed to the switch crew and it was really interesting to see those experiments, but he said something. In particular, that gave me an idea for a topic here, which is, he said, OK, we’re not innovating on the browser engine. Things like JavaScript run times and how the HTML is rendered and all that sort of thing. There’s been incredible technology developed on that in recent years. You’re innovating on the interface, all the stuff that goes around that core engine. Can you expand on that for us a little bit?

00:03:17 - Speaker 1: Sure, of course. First, worth noting. I am one of many people on the team, so I appreciate being the representative, but you know, everything I say, I’m trying my best to speak for everyone else doing the real work back in the office.

In terms of innovating on the interface, I think the thing I want to touch on first was your comment about the R&D and experimental approach, because in some ways, that’s the core of our product philosophy.

Whether or not it’s correct or not for us or others. I think with our first company, Branch, we’re 20 years old. Didn’t know what we were doing. We still don’t quite know what we’re doing, but we know a little bit more. And in our first company much more focused on let’s whiteboard everything, and then let’s mock up three directions, and let’s narrow it down to the best answer, and that will be the best answer and let’s go build that. And I think from our experience and maybe just our dispositions as creative folks, very much believe in that no one has any idea of what they’re doing. And in many ways, some of the most interesting innovations may sound like a dramatic word, but the most interesting progressions of interfaces and software products we’ve loved and we’ve built have sort of been accidental or if not accidental, we never intended them to be that big of a deal or that part of the product or that part of an idea to be that interesting. So from a philosophical perspective, our view on product iteration is bias towards experiments, quick experiments, hacking. Experiments, be intentional about what you’re trying and why, but be open-minded and succumbed to the fact that you don’t really have any idea what’s going to be meaningful and what’s not. So I think that’s generally our orientation, which I should note, we think is great for our specific prompt and our specific team. I don’t think is the only way to do things. And so for I just want to represent that as one viewpoint and one lens which we take to the product problem.

00:05:02 - Speaker 2: I was just gonna support your sort of we don’t know what we’re doing and that’s fundamental to innovation. I like the Einstein quote, which is, if we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t call it research. So I think of it as a discovery process that doing something new that no one has done before fundamentally means no one can know what they’re doing and you kind of have to embrace that a little bit, have this beginner’s mind, this humility, and just realize that it’s, it’s more of a treasure hunt than a Engineering project.

00:05:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I have one story on that note from a mentor of mine when I was 20 maybe. I really looked up to Evan Williams.

He was the co-creator of Blogger, you know, really the publishing platform that in many ways popularized what we know is the concept of blogging.

Then he went on to co-create Twitter. Obviously we know the impact that Twitter had on publishing in the world, and then went on to work on Medium, and I idolized him in a way when I was 19 or 20 because what passion for a single problem and what from afar looks like he had it all figured out. It was just over the arc of time, he was gonna come up with all the good ideas and just came out of him effortlessly and when we were 19 or 20, I had the lucky fortune of Getting a meeting with him and convinced him to kind of mentor us and invest in our first company branch and invited us to come work out of his office in San Francisco after he left Twitter and was sort of in R&D mode. And we viewed this as this aha moment. We were working on this new publishing platform. It was gonna be a different thing, and we had the Godfather, the genius, the expert that was just gonna tell us how to make it the next big thing, cause here’s the person that knew everything about publishing. And in our first meeting together after we moved to San Francisco, I laid out this 6 month plan with a bunch of questions for him of is it the right plan. And he stopped me, he said, Josh, I hope I didn’t get your hopes up. I have no idea what the right answer to these questions are. And actually, quite frankly, let me give you some advice. I’d be aware of anyone in Silicon Valley that purports to have the answers to questions like these, we’re all just making it up as we go along. We’re all just trying our best. So, let’s keep talking about this. I’m really excited. But I don’t have the answers and no one does. It’s obviously one worldview, but it was a very humbling, informative experience to hear the co-creator of blogger Twitter and Medium say, I’m just trying my best to making it up as I go along. And I’ve continued to subscribe to that worldview and philosophy as I’ve had a little more experience building software. It’s not the only one, but it’s definitely the one that I believe in.

00:07:31 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I can see why that would be really powerful, and there is clearly a skill, a talent, a whole world of capabilities for effectively searching for something new or a better way of doing things, improved technology and improved design, what we’re kind of broadly calling innovation here. So it can be tricky when I do describe this kind of process to others or you hear someone really successful like Kevin. Williams talk like in the story you just told that it seems like, well, we’re just making it up as we’re going along. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t a skill there and a structured way to go about this and discipline that’s needed and that there’s, you know, certain teams that can be really great at doing that and others that struggle more, but it’s a different mindset than this visionary top down. I just woke up one morning with the future in my mind and now I’ll spend the next 10 years building it according to that plan. It’s a very different mindset.

00:08:25 - Speaker 1: I think that’s totally right, and I think I describe it as a spectrum, and either end of the spectrum, in my opinion, is too far, and so one end of the spectrum, as you described, top down, we know the answer, we just have to build it. Other side is, we’re just aloof floating through the world, hoping to stumble across the next thing. I think every team that I’ve known that is extremely effective at interface innovation and Development has their own part of the spectrum, but I think in my experience, I’m curious to hear from you, Mark and Adam, is our teams that are very principled in what they are building for and why they’re building it and opinionated at that highest level motivating factor. So as an example of the browser company, I’ll share two hypotheses that end up becoming thematic buckets for experiment. One is our view is that if you look at the browser in 2020, it’s actually more like an operating system, not in the technical sense of the word operating system, but it’s no longer one of many applications on your computer that you go to momentarily to surf the World Wide Web and track down information. You’re doing all of your work in the browser, all of your apps, all of your documents. And so that’s a hypothesis and a principle, which suggests a certain type of opinionated experimentation and exploration, even if the exact implementation is something that we believe we don’t know and we’re gonna have to find out. I think another one is we think a lot about digital spaces as being analogous to physical spaces, and you think about a living room or a bedroom or an office, and those rooms are supposed to make you feel a certain way, and they may look different, even if they, from a utility or features perspective, all have chairs, you sit in them, you can exist in them. Generally speaking, they make you feel a certain way. That’s not as low level as we have a feature idea that we know is gonna work, but it’s not so vague that we could just build anything and count it as progress. How do you think about this Muse? I’m curious what your principles are. So I mean, first off, it’s worth stating, I know you invited me on this podcast. I’m on this podcast right now cause I am obsessed. With everything that you’re building at Muse, and ink and Switch as well. And I’m inspired by the way you do product development and interface innovation. It sounds like directionally, we’re pretty aligned in the way that we build things, but how do you think about somehow narrowing down the scope of what you experiment on while also leaving open the possibility that you actually have no idea what’s gonna work?

00:10:54 - Speaker 3: Yeah, well, first of all, thanks, Josh. I do think what you’ve described reflects the attitude that we have at Muse and ink and Switch.

This kind of goes back to the previous episode where we talked about principled products where I do think you can’t expect to get there with pure brownian motion, you know, just randomly bouncing around. You need some sort of principle, vision, direction, valence, something that kind of tends to pull you and the team together in a unified way in some direction. I think that can take different forms. It could be principles, it could be this kind of postulates, it could be hypotheses, it can be an end goal that’s important to everyone. You just need something that’s kind of pulling people together. Another comment I would make is this idea of balance between theory and practice is also reflected in the literature on technological development in general. If you look at how things have improved in our material world, this is a point that’s made on the Roots of Progress blog by Jason. I’m sorry, I forget his last name, but Jason Crawford. Jason Crawford, there you go. Thanks, Adam. He makes this point that if you look at an empirical matter, innovations that have happened, they tend to be from groups that have been kind of bouncing between the realm of theory and practice, and both of those inform each other. And so I think that is reflected in how we work on software at Mu and Inc and Switch where we have some theories that are developing over time, and we have some experiments, some tests, some engineering, you know, field work, and Those kind of go back and forth, and you can’t expect to get very far just on one of those two legs.

00:12:14 - Speaker 1: One thing I’m curious about that we’ve thought a lot about, and I’m not sure we have the right answer, is I’ve seen some teams where the principal or guiding light is a hypothesis about what’s possible with software, or what’s possible from a product.

Some people call it jobs to be done. I think other teams articulated in terms of a target demographic. Uh, elementary school teacher, a back end developer in Silicon Valley.

I’m curious as you think about Muse, what I find so inspiring about the product is the tool for thought aspect that can be melded to my own instantiation of tools for thought and what I want to think about. I can imagine that direction is also difficult at times to know who you’re building for. How do you think about that balance between what and why, who, and I’m, there are other vectors I’m not covering. How do you think about that?

00:13:07 - Speaker 3: So there are some direct answers I can get to that. Maybe I’ll actually give Adam the chance to kind of articulate the specific things that we think about there. But I would also point out that I don’t think we can actually always expect to be able to articulate what’s drawing us in a particular direction. This is a kind of Hayekian idea where you Yeah, the hunch thing is a big part of it.

00:13:26 - Speaker 3: Yeah, just because something can’t be written out in words or articulate doesn’t mean it’s not there in people’s implicit knowledge. And so that points to another. The thing we very often use to draw us in directions, which is the energy that an individual person has for some idea. And that often just ends up being a quite good predictor of promising areas.

00:13:43 - Speaker 1: I’m so happy to hear that because I wasn’t sure if I was going to share that part of our process, because it’s true to us, but I don’t know how quote unquote good it is, is we are so motivated by the energy and emotion of the team, maybe to a fault, but I think, you know, I previously worked at Facebook and I think that a lot of large organizations, they’ve codified their approach to product development.

This often may look like a design document that has a goal, problem statements, set of assumptions, input data, and you almost have to justify what you work on in a relatively formulaic way, which I think is extremely effective.

Again, I think there are many ways to build products.

We find ourselves a lot, oftentimes all of us are the plurality of us coalescing around a single idea or direction. And oftentimes, as you point out, it’s hard to justify it empirically, and it’s just something feels right, or we’re energized by it.

In the early days of the browser company, we’ve definitely been driven a lot by that.

It’s felt great so far, but it’s definitely a different posture that I’m sure has pros and cons, but I’m excited to hear that Muse works that way as well, because we found it to be really fun and fulfilling.

00:14:48 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and to be clear, you often have this raw data that’s influencing these opinions. So we have some use cases that we have in mind. We have some archetypal people that we’re working for, we have some technology theories, and those end up influencing the directions that we’re personally excited about pursuing. It’s just that you can’t always expect to be able to formulaically in close form, describe, given these inputs, here’s the function that determines where you should go next. Totally.

00:15:13 - Speaker 2: Mark and I might have talked about this before, but I think of the active entrepreneurship and product creation, which to me the building the company that builds the thing and building the thing is one unified whole, but there to me it’s about half and half or for me to be satisfied with the result. I think it has to be this balance of practical business needs to have customers and solve a problem they have in a way that’s useful and fits into their life for.

Price that they find fair and that you have a reasonable distribution channel and all those business fundamentals, you have to have that, but then it’s also an act of expression, artistic expression. There’s something inside me that I want to express, something meaningful that I have to say, or me and my colleagues, part of the reason we’ve banded together is we think we have a thing to say together, we share some values or some sense, this hunch, this drive to make something that doesn’t exist in the. and I think that part of it, it really is like an art project, like painting a painting or writing a book or or something like that.

You just have a thing you want to express, but part of the fun, intellectual challenge, satisfaction, but also hard part is actually balancing those two things together.

And so it does mean on one hand, for example, following that energy that you’re both describing that feeling of like this seems right, there’s something here, let’s pursue this. That that building what’s in your heart is the way that my colleague Ryan sometimes put it. I think you have to do that, but you can’t do that at the expense of building a business that has those fundamentals, or you can, but you know, that works until the VC money is gone and then you won’t get more of it. So I think it’s that balance between the two that’s what makes this act such an interesting act of creation.

00:16:53 - Speaker 1: I think the discipline that balances this very well at their best are architects.

So for example, we’re working on collaborating with the architect David Adjay. He designed the Museum of African American History in Washington DC and if you look at the building, it is very much an artistic expression.

There’s a story behind it. You feel Adjay’s personality in the building, you feel his heritage and the heritage of. People he’s commemorating in the building.

And you better believe in Washington DC at a publicly funded museum, there are some budget constraints, and there are some ADA rules to comply with, and there are bathrooms to build, and so I don’t yet know, and I don’t know if I’ll ever know how they do it, but I think architecture, not only for the analogies between digital spaces and physical spaces, but I also think for the mixture of practical realities.

Jobs to be done, combined with artistic expression and emotion and personality.

I’ve always admired how the greatest architects seem to tread those very, very well.

00:17:55 - Speaker 2: I see a lot of parallel there as well. I’ve read a number of architecture books less because I want to ever design or build a building and more that I see these really strong parallels and on one hand, yeah, you’re trying to express something beautiful that is art or can be, but at the same time, your building has to stand up. It can’t go down when the earthquake hits. People need to move through it. People have physical dimensions that need to be accommodated. Air needs to flow through, light needs to come in. Right?

00:18:19 - Speaker 1: You need HVAC. HVAC’s not pretty.

00:18:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. That brings to mind.

I’m looking at some images here of the museum you mentioned of course I’ll link that in the show notes. It also brings to mind. I saw this fellow, Danish fellow Jark Ingalls, I think.

The name speaks some years ago and the Netflix show Abstract had featured him in an episode, and he’s a really good example of almost avant-garde, very kind of forward thinking to the point of being quite weird sometimes with his designs, but also really Sort of challenging the status quo and again, same thing listening to him talk about each building and sort of what he was trying to express through that and how that fit into the time and the cultural moments and whatever else felt very close to some of my motivations when I start companies and build software.

00:19:05 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and also to connect this architecture topic a bit to interfaces, it reminds me of the book A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. So this is a book that basically catalogs patterns and architecture from the very small to the very large that Alexander had observed as being successful over decades and hundreds of years of people interacting with buildings. So the very small scale it might be that people really like to have shelving at waist heights. That’s kind of where you conveniently put stuff. At the very large scale, it’s like your city should have greenery accessible to people within, I don’t know 10 minute drive or something.

And the patterns in the book are very interesting, but also the way that he arrived at these understandings, which are basically about interfaces between people and buildings, is observing, it’s kind of this like archaeology of what has actually worked over the many years that people have interacted with buildings.

And I think it’s interesting that with software, we’re now getting enough data where we can do that, and instead of having to invent things from first principles, we can say whenever people use software. They really want to like cut out stuff and like put it somewhere temporarily and hold it. And that’s something that it’s really important that software does. And you don’t need to invent that idea from first principles. You can just observe that people want to do that all the time. I think there’s a lot of opportunity in there that can draw on this kind of pattern language type thinking.

00:20:15 - Speaker 1: I think that’s a great connection and making the connection back to interfaces again, a thing we and I have struggled with is When do you reinvent the wheel? When is it worth questioning the interface, given that there are these patterns in the physical and digital world that over some number of years, decades, we have proved work extremely well and evoke a certain type of feeling or action. When do you question them and when do you accept them? So in our first company Branch, you know, being 20 reinvent all the things. You have a follow button, we have a watch button. You have vertical comments, our comments branch to the side. And it felt like, because it can be so exciting and tempting to question and reimagine interfaces because they are spaces and touch points that we encounter so much in our day to day life. There is an excitement to the novel, and there’s an excitement to the new.

But as I learned, and you’ve probably learned, I think the more advanced or accomplished product designers are the ones that know what to focus on, and they know what are the highest points of leverage in the interface, or what are the parts of the interface that are. broken and deserve reinventing.

And so one thing common conversation we have at the browser company is, should we be reinventing the wheel here? Is this the right place to focus on pushing the boundaries? Again, I cannot purport that we have a good answer to those questions yet, or that we’re experts on this topic. But I do think it’s a temptation and a talent to know when do you rely on Christopher Alexander’s-esque observations about patterns that are wonderfully human, and when do you question whether or not we’re doing things the right way.

00:21:58 - Speaker 2: To even ask the question, when do we reinvent and when do we go with the known pattern is the right place to be.

I think there’s a natural tendency certainly goes with youth. I was there as well at age 20 which is you just want to blow up the status quo because that’s like in your spirit at the time. That’s what young people want to do.

And definitely entrepreneurs, I think, are by their nature, people that like change, novelty, new things, shake it up, try something new, blow it all up, and then you have others who Maybe you’re more stasis oriented, like to conserve, protect, go with what’s working, tradition, that sort of thing.

And I think the art is to learn to step back from either of those tendencies wherever you may naturally fall and instead try to analyze where is there opportunity, where is there something that society can really benefit or individuals could benefit from a reinvention and a rethinking versus we have a known pattern that works and, you know, stick with that.

00:22:55 - Speaker 1: On that note, earlier in my career personally, I think I fancied myself more of an artist. I’m giving myself a little hard time and being a little self-deprecating, but I think I viewed things like revenue strategy and business model and market structure as being things that corrupted the creative process and the innovation on interfaces process.

And I spent two years working at an investment fund. Observing the sort of startup technology landscape from a venture capital perspective. And one of the things that struck me is that some of my favorite products from uh innovation on interface’s perspective actually fundamentally took advantage of business model innovation and misplaced incentives in generating the product experiences that I, from an emotional perspective, fell in love with and changed my experience.

We’re actually driven from looking at where companies Incumbents were making money saying, wait, that seems a little flawed or perverse, and extrapolating from there. And so I think even that’s interesting to say, even if you care about feelings and emotion and the way buildings hit the street, sometimes to know where to focus can come from something that could be as boring to some as, well, how’s the incumbent making its money? What incentives does that cause? One example from Facebook, Snapchat, one of its core innovations, was opening to the camera. And, you know, it’s hard to imagine that. That was a huge deal. Talk about interface innovation. It broke every rule in the playbook of social networks.

00:24:27 - Speaker 2: I was actually going to cite that exact one, which is in the Snap S one, they actually articulate this pretty well, which is they consider the camera in the phone to be the most important interface, and they lead with that on absolutely everything from their little snap codes to the fact that the apps open straight into that. And it’s more obvious now we live in a world where smartphone cameras really are this cruel. crucial input device alongside touch screens and keyboards and whatever else, but probably at the time you’re talking about, that was quite a shocking idea.

00:24:58 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I don’t purport to suggest that Evan Spiegel was motivated to put the camera first from a business perspective, but if you have an incumbent like Facebook who monetizes through showing ad units in a news feed right when you open the screen, structurally, they are not incentivized and it will be difficult for them to compete on that vector.

We think about this at the browser company. As you mentioned earlier in the podcast, Chrome and the Chromium team specifically is responsible for insane technological progress on the browser front, and we’re building on the backs of that and grateful for that.

From a business perspective, Chrome is useful to Google because it’s lead generation for search ads. The more you use their web browser, the more you use the internet, the more you’re gonna do searches on Google. The more searches you do on Google, the more ads they can show you. And if you talk to their the Chrome team members, they’ll even explain the genesis of the Chrome team was not that they wanted to go into the browser market. They just thought Internet Explorer was so shitty with all of its IE toolbars, that it was making the internet experience poor. And if the internet experience was poor, you’re gonna do far less Google searches. And so that’s interesting and at the time that was novel. Flash forward to today, Google and Chrome are not incentivized to make a more feature rich. Powerful web browser that stretches the definition of what a web browser is, not because they’re not capable, not because they’re not creative, but their incentive structure from a business model perspective is one in which they just want you to type little searches in that URL bar as much as possible. So if you open 40 tabs, that’s 40 potential Google searches, and so it’s not that clean as anyone that’s listening to this podcast that has worked at a large organization like Google. I’m dramatizing a bit, but again coming back to interface innovation. And where do you know where to focus? I agree that often that comes from energy, often that comes from principle and product hypotheses, and oftentimes it might come from looking at the market structure you’re competing and say, where is everyone else weak, where are they incentivized, and what sort of perverse side effects does that lead to?

00:27:04 - Speaker 3: Yeah, this is actually a big part of the ink and switch and muse origin story where we had observed the economics of the industry were very heavily rotated towards a social slash advertising and be enterprise sass, and those were the most obvious things to make. economical and so the lion’s share of work in the industry was being put behind those to the exclusion to our mind of classic creative computing for individuals. And so we saw an opportunity product wise that was like you said, kind of created by the economic dynamics.

00:27:34 - Speaker 2: I think it’d be interesting to return to the item you brought up earlier there, Josh, about the kind of operating system, the web or the web browser is kind of a set of operating system primitives that sort of exists separately from the host computing operating system.

I strongly agree with your characterization there that the web is kind of its own OS and in fact OS. It has a really specific meaning in terms of kernels and. Vice drivers and things like that, but I think of it more as the operating environment or the way in which the mental models and the set of primitives that you interact with.

So on classic desktop computers, that’s things like copy paste, files, mouse cursor, maybe on Mac OS you have the menu bar at the top or on Windows, you have the start menu in the lower left, and then the web and the web browser has its own set of those core primitives that includes URL. includes something like the back and forward button, maybe something like tabs was a major interface innovation that came from the sort of Mozilla Firefox early days, and I see a similar thing for Muse as well, which is for Muse I see something similar, which is I in many ways envision Muse as kind of being a reinvention of the file browser, something like the Mac OSinder or even. stretching back to the DAS days, something like Norton Commander, the files, I think are this cornerstone primitive in how we interact with computers, particularly how professionals interact with computers, but in many ways they’ve kind of aged to the point and become very static in a way that they haven’t really made this jump to, for example, the mobile world very well. And a lot of the way we think about Muse, or at least I do, is as taking this set. Of things that typically are part of the operating system, essentially how you manage your digital stuff which is expressed as files on a file system, but bring that into a mobile touch, you know, more visual interface. What can we bring forward that works really well about files and then what are things that maybe we want to leave behind and embrace more modern elements that have been brought to us from, for example, the touch environment. So I’d love to hear what you see as being the areas your team is either currently working on or just most excited to innovate on in terms of the browser as a set of operating system primitives.

00:29:51 - Speaker 1: Sure. So we think about the answer to that question really is a series of observations, and really the observations that guided us wanting to start this company. Some of those observations include, if we looked at our Mac OS docs and we looked at the quote unquote local applications we use the most, obviously they were all internet-based, but they were also all built on Electron, which meant they were secretly just Chrome, which means we were running 7 versions of Chrome on our computer instead of just a single browser. So that was interesting.

00:30:20 - Speaker 2: And just for listeners that might not know it, Electron is kind of a container that lets you run a web application as if it was something native to Mac OS or Windows.

00:30:31 - Speaker 1: And it’s an incredible technology in the sense that as a budding group of developers, you get a ship a cross-platform application that feels native to the operating system without writing native code. And so grateful for Electron, we’ve prototyped an Electron. It’s a great technology.

But as you’re pointing out, we actually ran this early experiment where we launched the Notion app. We use Notion. I love Notion. The company runs on Notion, so this isn’t a criticism, but we launched the Notion Electron app, the local quote unquote Mac app, and then we built a prototype of our browser which was just the pure internet. There was zero browser Chrome, and we loaded Notion in that, and you put it side by side, and it’s almost indistinguishable which one is the Mac app and which one is the local app. That doesn’t suggest what we’re building, that doesn’t suggest how to make a better browser, but it just struck us as an observation as, huh, hmm, that doesn’t seem like it makes a ton of sense.

Another one is, if you think about Mac OS, you talk about the file system. A large reason operating systems exist is to help us manage our files, and that files mean more and more things, but all of our stuff.

I observed again. Just for me, I feel like I live in a post upload world. My files are all permalinks, random strings of characters that I enter in my web browser. I have Figma URLs, I’ve notion URLs, and so on and so forth. And so even from a file and folder perspective, I’m looking at my desktop right now. I got nothing but a conglomeration of screenshots that I wish would go away and I didn’t intend to be there. All of my files are in the browser. And so on and so forth. So I think, you know, I was a sociology major in college. I’m inspired to work on technology and software and interfaces, not because of the technology, but because of the people. And so I think as we just observed how people are already using their desktop computers and how they’re already using web browsers, it just invoked a series of questions and observations that, again, we’re trying to answer, we don’t have answers to yet. We may never answers to, but just struck us as almost cultural shifts in how we use technology that may just maybe may warrant a new browser interface that could look more like an operating system. But at the end of the day, my wife, my mom, my niece, I don’t think they care at all about the word operating system. And so we also think a lot about what are the metaphors or what’s the right way to talk about the scope of our work that is not just geared towards people on this podcast.

00:32:58 - Speaker 2: Could you give us a hint of some of the stuff you’re working on? I noted here on your recent tweet of comparing kind of a browser to a figma canvas. Obviously things of spatial zooming interfaces are of particular interest to me. I think again your colleague Nate there tweeted some short videos that he used at that. You want to speak to that or give us another example of what sort of things your team is doing to try to push the boundaries or to try to improve what a browser experiences for a power.

00:33:27 - Speaker 1: Sure, I think first and foremost, I’ll plug Nate Parrott, a designer on our team who, one of the things he does, which I love, is we share, I don’t want to call them failed experiments, but past experiments that we learned a lot from, but weren’t quite right.

00:33:42 - Speaker 2: The primary output was learning. Yes, exactly.

00:33:45 - Speaker 1: That’s what we talk about those. Exactly.

So if you’re curious, I think better than my terrible radio voice, I check out Nate’s Twitter account and he shared a series of these, and we’ll continue to share more.

I think that just building off of the canvas prototype that you reference, what Adam’s talking about is we prototyped a view of a web browser, which is, imagine all of your web pages or tabs, lay down, if you spread out a big white sheet of paper on the table or desk in front of you, and each 8.5 and 11 piece of paper that you plop down on it was a web page, what if that was your interface for navigating and interacting with the internet and your web browser? Because it was tweeted, it did not quite work, but I think, you know, one of the themes that that touches upon is an observation we made about the way we use web browsers is when the concept of a web browser was originally popularized 25 years ago. The internet was a document network. It primarily revolved around retrieving and finding and reading information.

00:34:45 - Speaker 2: Sure, well, I mean, it was invented by a physicist working at CERN that wanted a way to share his research with other researchers, right?

00:34:52 - Speaker 1: And it was wonderful.

And however, in 2020, I’m doing everything in my personal life in the web browser. I’m doing everything in my professional life in the web browser.

In my professional life, for example, that can mean focusing on a specific task and writing a long document and not wanting to be interrupted. It could be going on a rabbit hole late at night.

Probably some of the topics we’re talking about today. I’m gonna go Google them later, and 8 hours later, I’m gonna end up in some random Wikipedia link.

And given the breadth of parts of our Life we turned to the web browser for. And given even within those parts, the different modes or moments that we rely on the browser, it just seems silly that every incumbent browser was a one size fits all. The window never changes, the tab bar never changes. It’s all the same all the time, completely consistent and unchanging. Which could be correct, you know, the counterargument to this perspective is that there’s some solace or comfort in the fact that you know what it’s gonna look like.

Our view is, if you take the analogy to the real world, sometimes you want to read in your bedroom, sometimes you want to read in the living room, sometimes you wanna host a party in the dining room, depending on what You’re doing and what part of your life and the time of day and how you’re feeling, you might want different spaces.

And so what would that look like in the web browser if there was no Chrome whatsoever? What if there was nothing? It was just a pure web page.

What if you had 28 web pages tossed onto a table and you could move them around and see them spatially? What if there was a view to, you know, manipulate 13 at a time and take bulk actions and move things around and export them and I’m kind of making this up as I go along. I’m not suggesting that our final product or current product has all these things, but that’s an example of starting at the top level principle, how we end up going down, down, down to prototype that might be, what would FIMA look like if it was a web browser, for example.

But what about a use? I think you are tackling an equally broad and large surface area. So how are you? in recent days prioritizing what you work on.

00:36:51 - Speaker 2: It’s hard. My experience has always been if you’re working in a company you’re on a product that has a lot of possibility, it’s very fertile territory, and the biggest problem you have is in fact being pulled so many directions because there’s so many great things you could make, or as I think there’s a quote somewhere that’s great startups die of indigestion, not starvation. We definitely feel that in MS, there’s so many directions we want to go from new kinds of content type, video and tweets and lots of other things we have on our list, but there’s a whole other track that has to do with kind of collaboration and sharing, whole other track that maybe has to do with kind of programmability, whole other track that has to do with much more powerful kind of spatial manipulation and non-spatial manipulation, and it’s all really good and all potentially really valuable and You know, that’s even combined with the small things that users are asking for, at least once you, you know, are to the stage that we’ve been at for a little while now, if you have a pretty solid user base and they’re using it for real things in their daily life and there’s a steady stream of bug reports and small feature requests and things like that. So it’s tough to find the right thing and keep your focus, but you really do, especially with a small team, you know, we’re 5 people and don’t really plan to expand beyond that foreseeable future. It’s so critical.

To come together, consider all the options, but then pick a thing and say, we’re gonna do this for a little while because we think this is a really compelling space. We like to kind of time box that. We’re gonna spend 2 months going really deep on one theme, see how far we can get on that, and then step back and, and see what we’ve learned.

00:38:20 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and it’s worth noting for us at least, as much as it’s fun to talk about these heady directions and observations, and it’s earnest and genuine.

At the same time, if my team was here, they would point out that some of our favorite features and honestly favorite themes of directions have come from very quote unquote uninspiring simple couple hour feature development that actually turned out to feel a lot better than we thought.

I’ll give you one tangible example. We multitask a lot in our browser, as I’m sure everyone on this podcast does, and we prototype the ability to click a tab and drag it and drop it on another tab and automatically create a split screen mode that you can move the dividing bar left and right and kind of adjust the view of the split screen. Drag and drop for split screen, not inspiring, no one’s gonna come work for us because of that. And it was fucking fantastic, and one of our most used features, cause guess what? What do people do today or some people do? They open a second window, they resize both windows and do this dance where you pull that corner up and that corner up and so it may not be part of a connection to architecture or anything that gets us really excited, but turns out it’s damn useful and the fact that it was that useful, even if it was that small, suggested a kind of direction to keep exploring. So I think it, it would be honest, most honest to also mention that it doesn’t always come top down from themes. Actually, I found more successfully it comes from tiny little features and extrapolating, like, why did that feel as good as it did? What does it suggest and you go that way?

00:39:57 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I think the bottom up extraction of the pattern and that there is a bigger theme there that points to an underlying need that maybe you could double down on.

It’s not, hey, we just made a small random thing and it happened to work, maybe sometimes that’s it, but probably someone on the team followed a hunch or did something according to what they saw from user behavior. It worked out way better than expected, and then you can stop and reflect on why.

Why did this work so well? Why is a side by side of two tabs? Why is that? Key to how people use the web and what can we learn from that and maybe there is a bigger theme we can work up to from there.

00:40:30 - Speaker 3: It’s funny that you mentioned fluid multitasking. This is something that we’ve studied a lot in ink and Switch and Muse because our user research has shown that’s very important for the creative process.

It is an overwhelmingly common thing that you do. You have a few documents open, you want to read them and put them at the same time.

But notably, it’s still an unsolved problem on iOS.

You basically can’t really do good multitasking on the platform, even on the big i. Ads. You can sort of get these sort of split screens, but they’re not fluid and they’re really hard to bring in, and they kind of go away when you’re changing them and they come back. That’s also interesting because it, uh, it’s, it’s very much dictated by the platform. So on the web, or web-based platforms, it’s quite straightforward to add a horizontal split and to fluidly move it. It’s kind of built into the engine, whereas an iOS, as it is kind of a platform thing, and if you want to do it in a way that would incorporate multiple apps you need, basically the platform’s help. So it’s a different beasts.

00:41:16 - Speaker 1: Operating systems rearing in their head.

Yeah. One thing I’d love to get your guys’ advice on, uh, since I have you here, is we had an experience recently where we prototyped direction that we were super excited about, didn’t work, clearly didn’t work. There’s some things about it that we liked, but all in all, considered it uh let’s move on.

Couple months later came back and had this inkling that maybe some things had changed in our product that might suggest this feature would work again.

Tried it again, and I think specifically took it to a much hig