Bracketology - Episode #130 of CloudFocus Weekly

Machine transcript generated in 2026 from the episode audio (Whisper speech-to-text with automatic speaker separation). Speaker labels are automatic and may be wrong in places. Timestamps shown every few minutes.

00:10 Jason Atwood: This is the 130th episode of CloudFocus Weekly for the third week of March 2013. This episode is titled Bracketology. CloudFocus Weekly is sponsored by Arkus. You can talk to me, you're experts. I'm your host, Jason Atwood, and joining me for the co-host for 130th time was... madly filling out his March Madness bracket. It's Justin Edelstein. Justin, how you doing today? Awesome.

Justin Edelstein: It's like one of my favorite times of the year. Why? My mood ebbs and of the year. Why? My mood ebbs and flows with sports and times of years. And this is one of the greatest. When it gets to the middle of March and you get the NCAA March Madness tournament going on. Then that leaks right into opening day for baseball and that leaks right into the NBA playoffs. It's a very nice Two to three months. Months stretch we got going on here. You get the Masters sprinkled in there for the golf fans It's going on. Yeah, no that matters at all Sports or cloud computing? It's 35 days until NFL Draft. That's all I care about. You got that going on too Yeah, got tons of stuff. Speaking of a ton of stuff We have an agenda today.

Jason Atwood: We have the blog post called Tune Up Your Salesforce Board with every release. We have some Google news, more Google offerings, offings and downages. I don't know if that's where it. made it up. And then we have a Microsoft purchase, a glared little competitor action going on. the will make our quad focus up pick of the week and we'll move on with life. So why donBn't we start off with...

Justin Edelstein: And and go into their Salesforce org or maybe their sandbox when it gets upgraded prior to the actual release being live and make sure that things actually work. There are. So you're saying I need to make things, I need to make sure things work. Yeah, I mean, Salesforce brags and boasts about upgrading everybody three times a year, five minute downtime, no breaking of anything, but the reality is there are things that could potentially break. And not necessarily break break, but just break models or security comes to mind or limits that get changed that you need to be aware of., That's breaking. That's more of... It's not breaking, but it could break process more than breaking technology.

Jason Atwood: I think I've seen two things in two different releases. One five years ago and recently that thing's actually broke in a new release.

03:12 Justin Edelstein: Like broke broke.. We have something a that we are dealing with now that is... broken and that came as part of a release and it's still broken.

Jason Atwood: Oh that's three things then. I mean I think the thing is it's not usually big things, it's small things, things that are so edge case, like the one that we're a doing with today is, was it accepting an invite? Well, nobody,

Justin Edelstein: So at Arkus, we... Yes. And we, the Salesforce calendars are gold calendars and it syncs to our Google calendars and we've written about that and talked about it many times. And one that we use the Salesforce calendar to do is, like most calendar applications, we send out invitations to our clients or prospects or internal meetings, whomever. We send out the calendar invite using the Salesforce calendar. And the Salesforce calendar, while it handles this, it's not necessarily what it was built for. It doesn't do some of the things that a Google Calendar invite does or... It basically doesn't attach. It basically sends you a link. A link to accept and then allows you from that screen to download................... I R, and, you know,

Jason Atwood: I, I don't need to go through it. Basically, if you're, if you're logged into a, a Salesforce org and you click on the link in the same browser window,

Justin Edelstein: Which also doesn't work that well. session, right, whatever few anymore, but these three I think are important.

06:16 Jason Atwood: ....... the, you know, once in a while. And so three R3 times a year, it's a good time to go through and test these things.

Justin Edelstein: Last week yep, and I could have predicted this one because I told you I We've been talking on this spot on this on this blog post Jason track 130 episode about how I used to be a very big Google Reader user when it came out and for years to follow and over the last year or two I I have not even clicked on reader and for such a heavy user like I completely abandon it. I imagine that there's lots and lots of people just like me who've done the same thing and you know what? I'm on Twitter. I'm on Facebook For me, it's it's it's kind of the same thing like if I like something on on Facebook I'm gonna get all their posts like why should I follow the Mashable feed if I like the Mashable page on Facebook and it's just getting posted there all the time.

Justin Edelstein: I can tell you why. There are many reasons why but I find that it doesn't matter to me. I haven't missed Google Reader at all.

Jason Atwood: I miss it because it's just like chatter. It's like chatter. The difference between chatter and email. I'll make it a great analogy here. So, chat and email. Why do I have to have email if I got chatter? Things get posted in chatter and I can see them in my stream. It's the same thing. What's nice about Google Reader and RSS readers is it has a read state. So if I go away for 16 months or 10 days and I want to go catch up on Touch Arcade, which is a great iOS blog. If I follow them on Facebook, if I miss, or if I follow them on Twitter, they'll miss them. They'll go somewhere else. They'll just, you know, they don't go anywhere. If I go to the reader, there's still 20 of them sitting there and I can quickly scroll through all of them and catch up, because there's a read, there's a read on red states.

09:33 Jason Atwood: There's, as far as I know, there's no way in Twitter to say, just show me these tweets from this person and whether I've seen them or not. before and same thing with Facebook. It's not like I can't go to their timeline and say show me the the stuff I haven't seen that this person has posted since the last time I was here. Right. Not Google News. You do that and fine you can probably, probably get away with a lot of this. So yeah, they're a lot of people are killing off Google News. Or Google Reader. Sorry, Google Reader. Not Google News. Yeah, you wrote Google Reader News, right? They're killing off Google Reader because of Basically for the same reason they gave everything.

Justin Edelstein: They gave two simple reasons. Usage has declined and they are pouring energy into fewer products. Which is something that I think is a good thing for Google. Because Google is totally scatter brained. They're all over the map when it comes to product development. They're never in sync. I feel like this is a very good step back. and and you know this is this is a big ticket one right but there is always like a big splash like Oh Google killed off I'm was it like Google Health or whatever that was or Google killed off this or Google killed off that at the end of the day none of it has really impacted life as it is right life goes on without this Google product. This is one that a lot of people used. It was a very early like, you know, web 2.0 RSS feeds.

Justin Edelstein: Oh, Google reader, this is how to keep track of all this content. It was a very big deal, big product. A lot of people jumped on it very early and it maintained that. But I think like me, a lot of people have stopped using it and they, you know, they know better than anyone that their usage has declined. And I think that they've learned that more focused, more focused energy on very specific, fewer products with better, tighter integration, better consistency across the product of user interface, single sign-on with the Google account, all those things is more important than having just a ton of products out there.

Jason Atwood: I just think the problem is, it's sort of, to me, it's the death. of RSS. I know RSS has a lot of other features to it and it's actually used behind the scenes more than we know because a lot of these services these aggregation services that do things like Zite, all that come from RSS. And this podcast being published. And this podcast being published. It's an RSS feed. So I mean there's this backend thing that RSS but I feel like the front end of RSS, the user ability of RSS, I think is now sort of dead. And, you know, again, I'm not bummed about it, but again, so we talk about, so I'm gonna make the count argument. Please. Google kills off Google Reader. Right. Right. But then goes and does stuff that, you know, how much value is there?

Jason Atwood: So go to Google now. Go to Google. All right. I'm on Google. I'm always in Google. Okay. I'm on Google. In search and type in NCAA bracket.

12:36 Justin Edelstein: Oh. I'm going to type it in right now. Hey, search. Search.

Jason Atwood: Oh, that's so awesome. Yeah. So, there was a good article this morning that talked about this. I love this. Yeah. But think about this. Yeah. This is not search anymore. This is what we call one-boxing. Oh, we call it one-boxing. Yes, we call it one-boxing. But this is like... You know, like, they're willing to do this, which is, this actually takes away from other people. This actually steals traffic from, and I think actually the way it's been done is actually interesting but pretty poor. Like look, look at where, you can't even see any of the, if you really wanted to get to the NCAA March Madness website, I mean it's way down now because it like, they've, sort of taken over the whole thing. So again, today's been time on this. but a product that people, millions of people use, I don't know.

Jason Atwood: I just feel like Google sometimes, they use the excuse of, we don't want to do, we don't want to put too much effort into things, but we're going to build this big bracket technology that shows up the full bracket, round of 64, inside your Google search. Yeah, yeah, everybody wants that. Certainly, so I think you don't want to put too much time into other things, but that everybody needs. as opposed to the million other websites that do this. Trillion other websites. So you need to do it too. You need to become a portal. Eh, I think it's a little bit against what Google's supposed to be doing, which is search.

Justin Edelstein: I feel like this is right in line with organizing information and displaying it in a useful way. Yeah, it's becoming a portal though, and Google's always said I'm not gonna become a portal. It's not a portal. You can't click from somewhere to get to this. You type in a box, and it shows you this visualization.

Jason Atwood: It's not really a portal. Well, a portal is a place you don't leave for information. You sit in the place you don't go anywhere else. Google's always meant to be search for a thing and then go to wherever it is. Google reader can if you want to say well

Justin Edelstein: You know, they don't want to be a portal. Well, Google Reader is still sitting within the Google family and is Portal like if that's your definition.

Jason Atwood: Aggregate data Yep, and allow you to read it. Right, but that's it's the same But bringing me other sources of data. This is sort of making Google the endpoint for this Again, it's a light example I did more of a part of it as they say they don't want to put too much effort into certain things. This to me seems like an edge case of like really this needed to happen. There's a 500 million websites that do this. So anyway, let's move on. Let's move on.

Justin Edelstein: I like how you brought the brackets into it though. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, that was good. That was good.

Jason Atwood: So the other thing was that Google had a bit... Can you just go Canadian on me? Eh?. I think it might have, eh? So the other day Google Drive was down. Yes. And I thought, OK, now it's time to get it. Let's see the trust. I go to Google. I search for Google App status. Yeah, there's like an app dashboard or something. Boom, right there. Little orange, click on the orange. And there was little updates. It's been down. It's being restored. Whatever. I thought, OK, you did it right.

16:03 Justin Edelstein: It was weird, because the interface to get to Drive was down on the web. But you could still get to individual docs that were in the drive if you had them Linked or a link to something or something or history or in your history Something right you can you can you could totally get two things in the drive just the front end of it was Wonky was broken. Yeah, just wasn't loading wasn't loading at all And they just released for Drive fanatics.

Jason Atwood: They just released the new API's for Drive which allows application developers to use the APIs to show, I guess, real-time editing.

Justin Edelstein: Yeah, I guess this would be like you could develop maybe a plug-in in Word that would have a Word doc that was stored in Drive and real-time edit inside the Word doc.

Jason Atwood: I think it's more like I could build an iOS app. that read Google Docs and edited them real time and show that in a Google Doc. Not even necessarily Google Docs. It could be a Word Doc sitting in Drive. Yes. Right? Yes. Maybe? No, it's a Google Doc. Gotta be a Doc? Yeah. Anyway, that was kind of interesting. We'll see what people do with it. I tried to think I could do something in Salesforce, like you're editing something in Salesforce. Couldn't even think of what? It's real time editing something behind it. I don't know. Whatever. And then,..

Justin Edelstein: Last not least. You know what? While we're on the Google thing, I'll just, before we get to the last not least. Yes. Or least. And least. Google Nexus. No. not at all. Have you noticed that Chrome and Google Drive together are like the least stable marriage? of all browser and applications. What is up with that? Because we use Docs and Drive like crazy.

Jason Atwood: Right. I don't even know the difference between the two anymore. I think they're the same thing. What I mean is we're always in a Google Doc, right?

Justin Edelstein: Yep. And I cannot tell you how often the tab just dies. It dies a lot. A lot. Like the old Google Wave days where it'd be like, oh. Cappin everything shiny just refresh me, but I'm about to explode by the way Firefly reference watch the TV a Anyway, Google waves about to explode look out You'd have to refresh it, but like I why does chrome Break so much more often than any other browser with Google Docs. That's not true. With Safari, I can crash Safari.

Jason Atwood: There's one thing I can do in Safari that almost crashes every time, which is I switch between Google accounts. From like, if I'm on Reader, it won't matter anymore, but if I'm on Reader for one account and I switch to the other one, I mean, I have crashed Safari doing that couple hundred times.

Justin Edelstein: Oh really? It literally just crash, crash, crash. This doesn't like it. just something about it. I think that's... I just don't understand how... I think it's because Chrome's just releasing, releasing, releasing, releasing and they're just breaking stuff. I don't think it's that. I think it's that Google...

19:05 Jason Atwood: Google Docs, because of their collaborative nature, are pulling a lot. They're doing a lot in the background. They're like constantly pulling the web, you know, pulling between... the browser and the website and eventually it just gets caught into a cycle and either you don't pay attention to it or it goes in there. They all just crash.

Justin Edelstein: Right. Like every tab you have opens. It doesn't happen to me. No, not every tab. Every dock in a tab will just die. Like Salesforce will stay. It's all good. But the docks part will just be like, oh snap. We're broken.

Jason Atwood: You just refresh it. I think it really comes down to real time. I think that real time stuff. And maybe like, like Salesforce stays away from real time chatter. The real real time chatter is because doing it in the browser is just a hard presence thing to keep up on it. Again, we don't even use messages very well. I think they should do,

Justin Edelstein: Salesforce should just take the Twitter and Facebook model of like just saying. New stories and oh yeah, and just click the little thing that shows up and yep Boom the new ones pop but you don't have to have them like in you know in all the demos how they like really show up In real time you don't have to do that No one's asking for that. Well. We're asking, but you don't have to deliver all that You can deliver something a little less. Alright, last story and then we'll make our picks.

Jason Atwood: Microsoft Ready's next two CRM updates acquires Analytics vendor NetBreeze. So I had never heard of NetBreeze, gotta be honest.

Justin Edelstein: I saw this in the Twitterverse somewhere because it made mention of Salesforce and Radiance 6 and it was like, oh Microsoft, look at what they're doing for CRM. their purchase of NetBreeze, which apparently is a... aggregator much the way Radian 6 is for listening to social media and social web conversations and interactions. They're planning on, they being Microsoft, are planning on putting this into their CRM offering. So I guess they announced this. at their annual Convergence CRM ERP conference. The only reason to be there is because it's held in New Orleans. And this is basically a big marketing push. And they have something called marketing pilot, one word. Marketing pilot 15. Camo case though. Marketing pilot 15. in. Nice. So, you know, this is just a, you know, again, Salesforce with the vision sees things, does things a year and a half later.

Justin Edelstein: It's sort of, it's like a validation of a vision, right? When Microsoft sort of follows you and says, oh, I think we got to get in on that. It's sort of a validation of a vision of seeing that social media. monitoring is an important part of CRM.

Jason Atwood: Is it bad that I don't feel like Microsoft is is really a player anymore?

22:05 Justin Edelstein: Like I feel like in the CRM space I'm not sure if they were ever really a player. What space are they a player now? The same place where they've been a player on a desktop in a corporate environment.

Jason Atwood: Operating system, which is they're taking huge hits, and office productivity,

Justin Edelstein: Which they've taken a lot of hits to. Still, but in big organizations, no one's sitting there without PowerPoint on their computer. No one's sitting there without Microsoft Office Excel word outlook on their computer.

Jason Atwood: What product. product, besides two products that have been around for 25, what new product has taken hold that that. that Microsoft has done in the last 20 years and look back and go, just think.

Justin Edelstein: You know, I don't use Bing, but the commercials make it seem like it could be halfway decent. Bing it on, Bing it. You just got binged. The commercials make it seem like it could be halfway decent, I don't know. I'm sure that, you know, there are. When you search fancy a bracket on Bing. See what happens, you might get some crazy dancing bracket. it. I'm... Someone-upsmanship. So I you know, I'm sure there's more enterprise stuff, you know SQL Server is not going anywhere

Jason Atwood: The last 20 years, but okay

Justin Edelstein: But so, you know still you still run into you know, this is back-ended by SQL Server all the time We know that they have some enterprise stuff that they do with search They bought fast. Not sure what's going on there, but on the consumer side, I mean I don't know. I feel like they have floundered around for so many years now. I have not had a Microsoft consumer product in a long time and I've used Windows 7 because I've had to for certain applications. Windows 8 to me looks really scary. And it's funny because that's that that yeah that like dashboard looking thing as a Mac user. We've had dashboard for years Like maybe six seven years that dashboard. Yeah gadgets or the widgets whatever they're called and they were super cool like seven or six or seven years ago, you'd be like, ah, I got this live updating ESPN score center and I've got a notepad and I've got a calculator and I could get to it whenever I want.

Justin Edelstein: And like, that's what these live tiles remind me of. Something that I haven't used that's been on my desktop for years. They're a little bit different, but yeah. I'm sure they're a little better, but not much. Well, this is all I'm trying to think. It's like,

Jason Atwood: I, again, I'm not. in the Microsoft business, we're not Microsoft trying to bash them. We're trying to figure out how to figure out. So that if they get into CRM with Dynamics, you gotta pay attention to them. They get into search with Bing, you gotta pay attention. They try to take over the tablet market, but Surface Sales have been horrible. And they're like, you know, so it's like, they just, I don't know, I'm almost like just wondering how can they keep fumbling around? They have this cash cow of a couple products, but it just feels like they have not been able to sort of. come up with anything new and buying things like Bing they bought Bing and they bought They bought fast for the search. I think even SQL Server was a purchase originally It's like it's it's internet and we talk about internet explorer 11 is like yeah, you gotta try internet explorer.

25:52 Jason Atwood: No So anyway, I just find it interesting, because they used to be, back in the day, used to be like, geez. Or even the mobile.

Justin Edelstein: Like Windows Mobile. Like, either lunch, seven, or mobile phones. I mean, it looks like they're converging with all the, like the new,, I haven't seen it, but the Windows 8 UI. Right, yeah, the tryouts, too. I mean, it looks a lot like a mobile. a mobile interface. So it looks like they're trying to bring them together, but knowing Microsoft, I'm sure they don't really talk at all to each other in SkyDrive. I don't know what you don't hear about. You don't hear about iCloud, just because everyone's got the phone, and then they sign up for the iCloud, and it's free, and then this and that. I don't know. I don't really t hear about them that much when they If you're talking about tablets and phones, it's Android.

Jason Atwood: If you're talking about browsers the browser, it's great. It's Google Google's making all the new plays in consumer electronics, in search. in document management and syncing. I just feel like they're just being left behind, way behind. But anyway, let's go on speaking of being left behind. Let's go on and make your... Leave... don't leave me behind. Go on and make your quad for me. Make your quad last year. Well, I think I'm gonna pick this every year. Pick it after, like you picked the Oscar app. That was the worst ever. Yeah. Well, I wanted to use it before I picked it. So this one I used. I'm gonna pick Spring 11.

Justin Edelstein: Because... You've done that. Three years ago. So this one I used, and I did it last night, and it's kind of funny because... I'm gonna shout out Missy Longshore at M... F Longshore said to me wait isn't it only Tuesday are you in the studio already recording cuz I tweeted from inside of the NCAA March Madness live application okay from NTA digital it is free

Jason Atwood: For I was playing with it on my iPad mini this isn't the CBS one, this is the NCAA one. This is from the NCAA okay I think CBS has one too.

Justin Edelstein: So this is it's really cool you can watch all the games you can participate in glared conversations around the games you can see scores from all the other games you can see your bracket, you can see all sorts of fun stuff And the quality is great. Like last night, you know, this is Wednesday, but You know yesterday the first round of sort of air quoting and rolling my eyes at the same time The first round started with some of those right, you know early games Where like two number 11 seeds had to play each other to be an 11 seed. Yeah, and I was watching Can't remember what it was I just sort of turned it on you know because it was on my TV in front of me I just wanted to turn it on the app to see the quality.

Justin Edelstein: It was fantastic. It was like HD quality You know and all the little extras around it make the experience like the tweeting, the conversations, the this, that, the other, make that live. I really feel like this is a... big thing. Like sports are the last thing that I watch live. I don't really watch anything live and if you can enhance that experience with these tablets by including conversations, including other information or separate highlights or scores from around the league or around whatever and allowing me to hop over there and watch that game even if it's not my local market. that's the kind of stuff that makes TV watching experience even better. And we talk a lot about this, like we're streaming and stuff. We're totally into it. We're totally geeky about it. And that's why I picked NCAA March Madness Live.

29:41 Justin Edelstein: I think it's a great app. You know, if you're at work, you prop your iPad up and, you know. Watch watch the tournament Productivity it's like a known fact productivity over the next two Thursdays and Fridays are like dip And the

Jason Atwood: Internet takes a big hit yeah All right, I mean I'm gonna turn and pull Syracuse Thursday night 957 to not care But in 2011 I came in second in my in my bracket with 104 That's because you didn't even know anything.

Justin Edelstein: That's right. Picked teams by numbers and colors.

Jason Atwood: No, I had a theory. I had a theory. I read up on a theory. But I won some money, so I was happy. Good for you, Jelly Beans.

Guest: Jelly Beans. Gambling is illegal outside of Las Vegas. I was in Vegas a month ago. And we'll be in two months.

Jason Atwood: All right, I'm going to make a strange pick, but I've... I've kind of never you might it bring 11. I don't make spring 11 pic spring 13 Oh thing because I've actually got I actually had to do a project with and I was comparing it to another product so I need to set up a nonprofit website and in the nonprofit world money matters and so paying for things is a tiny nonprofit, so I Need to set up a nonprofit website, and I went searching for places to set websites. And obviously I have my own technology. I was like, I want to have something that I don't have to maintain if it's me. So I went and looked at Squarespace.

Justin Edelstein: And I- Oh, that was what you compared it to? Yeah. I thought you were going to compare it to Plone. No. Plone is much more powerful. Kind of close. Well, when you are building a website- I would think that your first inclination was to build it in the inflow. But then it's mine forever.

Jason Atwood: Because then no one else can do that. Because no, other people I can't then hand it off to anybody else in the PTA and say you guys go for it. With the user manual? Yeah, no. I mean, again, the hosting of it then becomes a thing. And I guess there are free hosts. I just... So I went to Squarespace. I actually tried to find that non-profit pricing. They don't. They do not do anything. It's not very cool. Yes, I think it was very cool. So I went, I was then setting up their Google, the Google account for this, for the parent-teacher association for the school that my kid goes to. And I was setting up the Google account and I was like, you know what? I haven't used sites in a while. Like I wonder, does sites like...

Jason Atwood: Can I even do this in sites? I know you can publish sites, but can you make them as a website? Can you actually make them work? And lo and behold, with a little bit of tweaking and a little bit of, you know, pushing the edges around, you can take a Google site and turn it into a pretty good regular www.domainname.whatever.com pretty well. I mean, it's not perfect.

32:54 Justin Edelstein: I got errors. I got whatever while setting and you have a lot. Right? Don't you get 2,000 email accounts?

Guest: Oh no, you get 10 to start. I thought you got like 2,000 accounts. That's for a school.

Justin Edelstein: You didn't set it up as a school? No, I said it as an nonprofit.

Jason Atwood: Oh, you set it up as... Okay, got it. It's for education, but you get 10 accounts. You can ask for more, but you get 10 to start. Got it.

Guest: Really, it needs like one. No, I put everybody on it. Oh, you did. And it says, I have Docs, I have Drive.

Jason Atwood: And you know, but anyway, so Google Sites, not bad. Like I will say,

Guest: It's a little bit getting used to, and there's a little bit like you edit things here, and you set up the pages here, and you do,

Jason Atwood: There's like four different interfaces. cases.

Guest: But and there's templates and there's kind of like gadgets you can add in and but eventually I got up a pretty okay site you know I think it's easier for me or maybe harder because I know how to set up sites I feel like it might have been harder for you then it was stuff like that

Justin Edelstein: Just well it some things were probably easier for you because of your your you know

Jason Atwood: Sort of whole thing but you know the hosting and the thing anyway it works pretty well I'm pretty impressed how

Justin Edelstein: Does the SEO on it like if I go search for your school am I gonna find your site I'm hoping that Google sites has a good SEO am I gonna find your site should I look for it's been up for two days I would presume it's in there now I'm looking for it right now yeah you have search for it going yet And that's the websites school.

Guest: But now I don't think it's been indexed yet.

Jason Atwood: You know why? Because there's probably no links to it. Oh, so the link to it from somewhere. Anyway, oh no. the PTA, the calendar's up there, look, sites.google.com.

Guest: It's up there.

36:06 Justin Edelstein: I'm I We're going to do a short one.

Jason Atwood: At the end of the day, we glared at the Marcus Inc. We're on the Twitter, we're on the Google, Google+, we're in the Dreamforce portal. Remember to subscribe and iTunes, leave a nice review there.

Guest: We'll be back next week and as always, enjoy those that you guys.