Throwback Podcast: Is it Time to Update Your Software w/ Biz/Dev Podcast | Ep. 126

In this throwback episode we discuss the importance of knowing when to hold'em and knowing when to fold'em- ok not really- but we do discuss the importance of knowing when is the best time to update your tech stack and software suite and who to trust with your data.
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OR comment on our YouTube videos! - Big Pixel, LLC - YouTube


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David Baxter - CEO of Big Pixel

Gary Voigt - Creative Director at Big Pixel


The Podcast


David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.


In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.


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hello@thebigpixel.net

919-275-0646

www.thebigpixel.net

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Big Pixel

1772 Heritage Center Dr

Suite 201

Wake Forest, NC 27587

Music by: BLXRR

___________________________________

Submit Your Questions to:

hello@thebigpixel.net

OR comment on our YouTube videos! - Big Pixel, LLC - YouTube

Our Hosts

David Baxter - CEO of Big Pixel

Gary Voigt - Creative Director at Big Pixel

The Podcast

David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

Contact Us

hello@thebigpixel.net

919-275-0646

www.thebigpixel.net

FB | IG | LI | TW | TT : @bigpixelNC

Big Pixel

1772 Heritage Center Dr

Suite 201

Wake Forest, NC 27587

Music by: BLXRR

Transcript

David: [00:00:00] I understand custom software is expensive. So I'm not one of those guys who are like every two years, you gotta go.

No, if it's working fine. 



David: Hello everyone. And welcome to the biz dev podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I am David Baxter, your host, and I am joined as always by my co host, Gary Voigt, the amateur penguin 

Gary: wrangler. Penguin wrangler. Okay. What did I get? Cute little lassos. Yes. And they have to be black and white.

Across the ice. And they, here's the limousine. So. They'll be 

David: camouflaged. Penguins are my favorite animal. This is Jumanji. For those who can't see my camera, I am holding up a stuffed penguin. Jumanji has been with me. And every job I've had since I left school. So he says on my desk, I studied, uh, penguins in third grade and they have been my favorite animal ever since.

Strangely enough, I was going through some of my stuff at my parents house. I was [00:01:00] helping them clean things up. And, uh, I found my penguin project from third grade. Yeah. Like, wow. Crazy. Um, did you know, have you ever heard what the sound a penguin makes? Yeah, I've 

Gary: been 

David: inside blood curdling honk 

Gary: Penguin experience in Sea world the nice was it the Arctic adventure or Antarctic adventure?

Uh huh, whatever which one? Yeah, 

David: my wife knows that if there's a zoo that has a penguins, which is pretty rare because they take a lot of infrastructure But if there is one and we go to it I'll literally just sit in the penguin exhibit and watch them swim around for like 30 minutes. She knows I'm not leaving.

I'm just going to cop a squat and watch those little idiots fly around on the, in the water. All right. We have already gone off the rails. We haven't even started yet. You didn't even 

Gary: finish the intro yet, but that's okay. 

David: Everyone knows why we're here, [00:02:00] right? We're here to talk tech and startups and all the stuff in between.

Uh, right now, what I'm excited, my most excited about today is I get to hit Gary, get really, really upset about Adobe buying Figma. I'm not going 

Gary: to get too upset. I think my anger has waned a little bit. Well, I wouldn't even call it anger at first. Yeah, for those who don't know, uh, we are talking about Adobe's plan to acquire Figma after Figma Uh Was literally created to be the anti Adobe design product.

Figment is a design tool for product design. Adobe had their own version that stemmed from, you know, Photoshop and Illustrator, and even back in the days when they had acquired Mac media, they had fireworks and then. Basically it's, it's a digital design tool that isn't Photoshop, which is basically a photo manipulation app that people were using for UI design.

[00:03:00] It's not illustrator, which is a vector illustration program. It's not InDesign, which is a page layout program. It was its own different niche. Yeah. David's falling asleep, but anyways, so Figma just means get there, started out. Like the little punk rock company they were their DIY solution to make design in the browser accessible to everyone.

Just about anybody for free. And then also have collaboration within it started off kind of clunky, uh, Adobe made XD, which was, uh, kind of adopted a little bit quicker because everybody was familiar with the Adobe, you know, ethos and how to use those programs. So it fit along in that family, but pretty soon Figma just started getting more users.

They started getting the attention of better developers, better engineers, and the community just grew and grew. The product grew and they outpaced. Everybody in the space, even pro apps like Sketch, uh, Envision [00:04:00] had an app at one point. It put XD to shame. And Adobe was even offering updates to XD. You know, every month we're going to make new features and they were trying to keep pace with Figma and they just got blown away.

So at this point, what does a giant, you know, huge company who's charging way too much per month for mediocre software do? Yeah, just by the competition. Yeah. Well, 

David: I always consider Figma, I'm not a design guy. So I only use it when Gary tells me to use it. Uh, I equate it as Google Docs for design people.

Cause it's the, it's big thing is you can all be in the same gizmo. And stare at it like, and that was Google docs, big claim to famous. We could all edit the same doc together, even though I've never understood why anyone wanted to do that. We can't all write at the same time. That's just weird. But for design, it makes a lot more sense.

It's very cool. If you've ever, you can get a free account. It's very neat. Uh, I'm, I am all for it because as much as I love competition. And I love the fact that Adobe had to [00:05:00] raise their game. Cause they tried XD. It was an answer to a product and XD for a while was really great. Cause it was, it can do things that.

But Figma obviously whooped its booty, but I do love the idea of a startup guy and I don't know who they were specifically, but they got one heck of a payday. So 20 billion bucks. So were they, do you know the people who started where they like serial entrepreneurs and they were big rich guys themselves?

Or was this a scrappy startup team? 

Gary: No, it was a, it was a scrappy startup team. Um, Dylan field is the CEO of Figma. Um, and their roots were small. They got some, you know, investment money or whatever. They trying to figure out how to make money, you know, past subscriptions. Cause at first they didn't really have a subscription model.

It was all just kind of free and they were just getting investment money. And as their community was growing, I mean, Some people were a little upset with Figma [00:06:00] because as you became a member, some of your data and information was part of the product that they were then selling off, you know, just like any other free app does.

But then they started like. Different tiers of subscription for bigger groups of people using it, teams and stuff like that. And you had a little bit more advanced features, like you can create design systems and publish them as libraries across different teams and platforms and have collaboration between designer developer and like client all in the same, like set of design apps.

Yeah. And I mean, they had it down to where if. You had a design system library built and then you were making changes. You could branch that off into like your, I guess what we would call it, like your, uh, testing server or whatever, before it actually went live. And then you just push it through and then the developers would just have to make.

The specific changes that were made and you know what I mean? It was just a [00:07:00] very streamlined and I would say fast and common sense approach to uniting the creative design part of developing software to the development of the software and then the managing of both together. Like it just, it just seemed to be the answer for most teams.

David: I'm most nervous about, cause when Adobe, Adobe izes, I just made that up. When they do, do what they do to the products they buy, they often put everything, they, they sell a monthly subscription called creative suite. 

Gary: Um, yeah, the creative cloud, 

David: creative suite, creative cloud. I mean, they've changed it a few times, but I'm afraid that the free features, like the cool thing about Figma now is we have a paid account that we bought for Gary and Gary's our designer and he does this thing and us as the devs and the people looking at it, we don't have to pay for it and that seems so counter Adobe.[00:08:00] 

Like maybe they'll keep that. Maybe they'll say, okay, everybody has to at least have an Adobe ID and sign in so we can track you. But Gary's the only one who has to pay for it. Cause he has a creative suite account or whatever, but that's, I doubt that's what they're going to do. 

Gary: We'll see. Yeah. Well, I mean, they're basically trying to satiate everybody's concerns by Adobe saying that we promised to let Figma be Figma and we're not going to do anything except offer our, you know, immense.

Amount of resources and expertise and trying to make Figma the best Figma can be. And they're like, you know, we're not going to mess with the community. We're not going to mess with you. Yeah, but, you know, One or two years down the road, of course, it's just going to get folded into their suite and you're going to be paying a subscription, you know, right along the side of every other Adobe app.

I don't see it being 

David: stand alone. Microsoft has bought lots of companies and let them just be themselves. I will be shocked if Adobe's [00:09:00] never done that. So we will see. All right. That wasn't enough anger. I didn't get it. I didn't feel the passion from you. That was still very meh. This is Gary excited. This is Gary happy.

This is Gary Angry. This is all we got. We gotta get some passion in there, man. Come on 

Gary: now. Man, I just had a long day of wrangling penguins, man. 

David: There's this one scrappy one. He is just all over the place. He's making me tired. I can't keep up. All right. They kept flying out of the gate. Macaroni penguins are my favorite, by the way.

Yeah, 

Gary: they're called macaroni penguins, that's the 

David: imperial penguins. Oh, okay. No, imperial penguins are the really tall ones, that are huge, they're like three and a half feet tall. So the, so the 

Gary: ones with the yellow feathers that stick 

out 

David: are called macaroni. The little fuzzy feathers that stick, those are called macaroni penguins, or rockhoppers I think is also another name for them.

Um, anyway, I don't know all the penguins. I'm certainly not a super expert, but I was a fan and we'll still love it. [00:10:00] Anyway, we've gone again. Let's see, get me talking about penguins.

Gary: So a topic I wanted to bring up for this week was when is it time to update or evaluate your current software and see that you might need improvements? Since we were speaking of Adobe and Figma earlier, talking about Competition updating to stay relevant. Uh, a lot of times most businesses will have a software suite or a package, either something they bought or had made that works for them has been working for them.

So then they just continue to use it and work around it or any of its, you know, parts that are less capable than what they need. They'll find solutions outside of the app just to kind of keep business going. So if they might not necessarily be updating. Their custom software, like they would be updating just regular, you know, browsers or email platforms or, you know, operating systems.

So, in order to [00:11:00] keep up with the more modern pace of business in the digital world, where everything now can be bought and sold from, you You know, magical device that you keep in your pocket, um, things change things in the technology behind that change. Things like how you're paying for stuff. Um, things like where your products are going to be seen, how you're going to sell them, what kind of privacy and security you need in order to make sure all that stuff stays safe and you keep the customer's security at You know, in mind, I'm sure just through some of the strategies, strategy sessions that you've had, and you've talked to other businesses, what are three things you think any business owner, small business owner that has software either out of the box or custom software should kind of evaluate and look at to see if it's worth updating or adding new features to help their business processes.

Are there any common themes that you see? 

David: I think when it comes to [00:12:00] software, there's a couple of things that you have to do all the time or you're gonna run into problems, which as things update, you need to stay up with those updates. If you have a mobile app, iOS and Android, they update every year and your app has to at least go through some sort of curial.

Hmm, that's a new word. A, a, a check to see, do I still work? Because a lot of times they think, oh yeah, they have to still work. It just works. And, and when you're thinking about. Building a modern app, are you, I, I paid this much for it, that's all I should pay for it, that's, that's not how that works. Um, so that's, that's an easy one, but when it comes to internal software, if it's only your internal team using it, the question becomes, can you still develop on it?

A lot of times that software gets so old, we're talking six plus years. That's a long time in software land that it's the number of people you can find to support said [00:13:00] stack is going to get harder. If you are on a really old stack, I'd say every five years, you need to kind of really do a deep dive on what kind of upgrades is there probably going to be somewhat substantial, but if you don't do them, then you're going to.

He's stuck in a place where a developer could take advantage because they're the only ones who know the product and the only ones are going to learn it. Uh, that's a horrible place to be in. Um, or the proverbial bus happens and that developer is gone for some reason. And now you're really holding the bag of some ancient software and you're going to have to pay out the nose.

Cause not many people write that, 

Gary: uh, that I'm sure a common, a common solution. That some of these businesses find for that is just don't fix it. If it's not broken, just patch, patch, patch, get it working for a little while until we figure something else out just to keep business going. Oh, that is very, and I'm sure fixing the eventually.

Yeah, the leaks in the wall with duct tape eventually are just going to burst. So what are some like [00:14:00] common sense ways that they could assess what they need every five years? 

David: Eventually you build what I call the Frankenbeast, which is you built the core thing. And you bolt on all these other things and you end up with this wobbly contraption that eventually breaks under its own weight.

Uh, because multiple development teams or whatever have been in there and they don't have a cohesive things. And generally that's not, if you're doing a purely internal app, that's not that big of a deal. Um, as long as it's working, fine. You're, you know, you can stretch that, that a bit further if it's purely internal.

When you're a customer facing that customer is. Regularly seeing new apps and new websites, new this, that, and the other. And so if yours looks old, it's going to hurt you. Um, so when you are, I mean, the natural progression of people who. Like custom software. And that's a mindset, right? There's there's when it comes to business owners, there's really two types of people [00:15:00] that I find people who like out of the box software and can deal with the shortcomings of that.

And cause it's not, you know, molded to your business. Um, and that's fine. You know, that's just, that's a lot of people. And then the people who really like things to be their own and their custom software shop, and they love it. They want their software does what they do. Uh, some of our clients consider it a competitive advantage that my other, you know, I'm going to.

Competitive industry and the other guys are buying off the shelf. And I know what those can do. And we're going to build something that's unique to us. And that's going to make us better. That's a common thing. Yeah. What you, what the, the, if you are that custom software kind of guy, which is generally who we're talking about, you will start, you'll come to a company like ours and you'll say, Hey, I want you to build an app or revamp this app or wherever you are in your life cycle, um, to, to make my company run.

I've got this, this custom software suite. I need that. And I want you to help me build it. Okay, great. We then modernize them. [00:16:00] That usually signs of that are data duplication. Your, your poor back office staff is typing the same thing three times. That's a very common way that you know, three 

Gary: different sections of the software and to, to just, or you're 

David: running reports.

Yeah. In five different places because only some of the data is shared with each other. That's another common one. Uh, but what you find is we'll, the cost, the company will come in, the development will happen. This, the, everything magically occurs and you have this great software suite that has made your life easier on the back office.

Your back office team is, is more efficient. They are happier generally. Because they're doing the stuff they love rather than the rigmarole of typing that same thing in six times. Um, but then once we've done that, then almost inevitably, the next phase is, well, the next pain in the butt is communicating and working with our clients.

Like right now, you know, I do X and we email when we're done with X, we email our clients and say, Hey, look, here's what we did. Here's, here's proof. Here's a PDF or whatever. [00:17:00] And out of a hundred clients, we'll get 20 calls in six months of, I lost my email. Can you resend me that? And those kinds of things just eat your back office And so then we build the customer portal.

And so now we're growing and that's, that's a very natural, I don't think what you can, you don't want to get stuck in latest and greatest. You don't want to get stuck in bleeding edge. That's a, that's an expensive hold. The bang for your buck is really small there. Um, right. It doesn't matter the stack as long as you can find developers.

It doesn't matter the, uh, it doesn't matter the language. It doesn't matter, The interface even I mean as a UX guy that pains me to say that But if your team is liking it, then it doesn't matter you Eventually, we have we're doing this on two clients right now. Um a year ago Microsoft azure, which is where a lot of our clients live have said hey this [00:18:00] kind of vm virtual machine Which is a type of server up in the cloud.

Um, we are deprecating it. It's going away. We're not supporting it anymore. So you get a year, they give you plenty of time to do this. You have a year to do something different because this is going away. If you don't have an ongoing relationship with a devs team, that is going to be, that's cold water right in your veins.

Cause I would imagine they're literally turning your server off. 

Gary: Yeah, I would imagine if, if you just had your standalone app working for you without an internal team and you're just using contractors here and there to find someone to be like, Hey, I need you to move everything off of this VM or server.

And. Find a better place to put it and do it without breaking anything. 

David: Yeah. And don't break it. Right. Cause this is my business. This is my entire life right here and please take care of it. So we're, we're doing that right now with two of our clients. Um, and it's not a big deal for us. We, we work in and we're in there with them all the time.

So it's, it's, it takes time. You have to test the crud out of it because this is prod [00:19:00] production. Um, but that happens. There's nothing you can do about AWS. Does it? Azure does it? They all do it because they're upgrading too. Right. They are changing their stuff. And the way that they do VMs now is very different than the way they did them six years ago.

When, in our case, the, the clients were stood up, um, by another team, 

Gary: not us, just some definitions. So Azure is a series of, it's like a hosting services for servers that your software would live on before it's actually sent to, like if you have a private server, but it's prod is a production and test is testing.

Right. Okay, 

David: correct. So when, no matter what app you build, if you have any sort of database, you have any sort of logic that has to be run, you're going to put your code up in the cloud. On some sort of server. And there's really two people who do that. Amazon and Microsoft 

Gary: Amazon's AWS. Yeah. Is 

David: Amazon's [00:20:00] web.

That's Amazon. That's they run. Amazon runs probably, uh, I don't know the exact, it's something like 50 percent of the web runs on Amazon servers. It, it, that's the thing. Total side thing, but Amazon, the big store that we all go to and buy all our stuff does not make any of their money. That's what people just don't know.

Gary: They make all those stories hosted on Amazon. Web servers makes their money. 

David: They're almost all of the profit that Amazon makes. And again, I don't know the breakdown right off the top of my head. But the majority of just cash that they just print every year, it comes from the services, the computers that they license out to everybody.

That's what Amazon, that's how they can charge so little is because they just print money. Anyway, Microsoft is now turning into the same 

Gary: thing. That's how they build failing rocket ships. 

David: What? Sorry, a little business chat. Fair enough, that's separate. Yeah, that's separate. But, um, but Microsoft is turning into the same thing.

[00:21:00] It used to be. Microsoft made all their money on Windows, right? We all, they, they dominated the world for 20 years. Windows every five years would come out with a new version. They'd make bazillions of dollars and we'd repeat, right? That's the windows 95 on that's what the world was in the last five or 10 years.

That's make less and less money. So now they. Make money the same way Amazon does anyway. So their thing is called Azure, which is where another thing, almost every server lives on one of those two things, Google has one too, but no one cares. Um, so when we, I mean, production is where you live and that's where everything goes.

So those things change constantly and they are like weird. This is timely, I guess. Recently, I don't know how recently, because I didn't, I don't look at the timelines, but Azure has created a serverless database. Which is the coolest thing. So normally when you turn on a database, you say hey, I want it to be this big, this much RAM, this much processor, etc.[00:22:00] 

And I'm going to pay you for holding and keeping that server for me, I'm going to pay you 200 a month. 

Gary: So it's almost like you're purchasing a hard drive, but it's just space. But like a hundred, you would pay a certain amount for a certain size and speed and how it's going 

David: to work. Yes. It's like you bought a new laptop and put it up in the cloud.

Right. So, and that's no matter if you're using all of that or none of that, you pay this certain amount. So nowadays they have serverless things. That literally you say how big it can get and how small it can get. And when it gets really busy, it spins up and it literally charges you by the second, meaning it will scale up and down every second if it has to.

And when it's two in the morning, it drops to almost nothing. And you don't pay for that. It's very, very cool. I don't know what ninjas and fairy dust live to make that happen. Cause I can't even reboot as fast as these guys spin up servers. I don't know how it works. I wish I [00:23:00] did, but it is wild stuff. But so that's, we are testing that out with our clients.

It's crazy. 

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David: If you don't have an active dev team thinking about this stuff, you, you could be left in the dust and that's. You should have someone on your side doing this kind of stuff, thinking about this stuff, trying to push these buttons and say, what does this do?

Right? As long as they're doing on 

Gary: test. Okay. That's so one more question. Um, say if you're a small business that has your custom software built for you, you have an internal like team of developers, but your whole system is [00:24:00] on a private server, just within your businesses network, like not up in the cloud anywhere.

Is that good or bad? 

David: Horrible. Don't ever do that. Horrible. Uh, that used to be the only way it was done. I mean, I'm old and that's how everything was done. And we've talked about that, like startups, how easy they are to set up. That's larger. Cause that's gone away. So that's 

Gary: one way, the reason that says right now is that's probably time to upgrade then.

David: Well, that's, that's beyond us. Generally speaking, that means you've got an it guy, right? Your it guy is the guy who manages the physical server. And if he hasn't told you, you should get up in the cloud. He's a bad it guy, fire him. Or fire them right now because anybody who tells you you need a server in your office does not have your best interest at heart.

Here's a hot take for you. I, there's just no way that they have your best interest at heart because that is, it used to be the only way. So we dealt with it, but now the amount of risk you have by doing [00:25:00] that and keeping that computer in your office, that server, like an exchange server or a file server or whatever in your PC.

Back room. Like you used to have most offices, new ones or old ones have a little closet somewhere where it used to have a bunch of computers in that should be empty. Now there should be no reason to have a computer. You should have a bunch of, I mean, if you're highly technical or something like that, I should never say never.

The average business should not have a computer in a backroom because it's just not worth it. Now, some people just don't, they don't trust the cloud and that's fair. That's your call as a business owner. I think it's a bad call, but of course I would. Um, but that's your call. But I'm saying if your IT guy is telling you, you should do this.

I don't think that because they're making more money than they have to. And that's why they're doing it. That's where I've known a lot of it guys and they're like, this cloud stuff kills me, but I'm doing it anyways. Cause it's the right thing to do. That's a good it guy. Um, okay. Uh, and that, [00:26:00] and that's not us.

I'm not selling us. We don't do it, but, but if you have a computer in the back office, there's so many risks there because if that got. If your power goes out, let's think of a simple power outage and that's your web host web server. Your server just went down. Literally your website just went down. That used to be common in the early aughts, right?

Where I have a server in the back room and my spectrum internet went down. And so my site went down. That's so in the past. Don't ever do that. 

Gary: So one more question to go back to if a small business was kind of assessing their own software, uh, I think if you can notice that, say you hire some new employees, which is hard to get right now, but they're probably going to be more adept to knowing software and how to use software than in the past.

And I'm saying the last five, 10 years, you know, people's natural ability to just adjust and learn how to use different apps and programs, software between their phone and their [00:27:00] computer. It's just improved tremendously. So. Sure. If you hire a new employee that's looking at your internal program, even no matter it works for you, like you said earlier, if it's fine for everybody on your team, it's fine.

But so you get the new guy who's like looking around, it's kind of like trying to figure out the software you're training them on it. And immediately they're just like, well, why don't we just do this? Or why doesn't that do this? Or why doesn't that, why can't these work together and, you know, because you're just used to how.

More modern software works, that might be a flag for you to say, like, okay, well, maybe this time if we're going to evaluate how much time it takes to train newer people in this cycle and upgrade the system to be a little bit more modern versus trying to degrade everybody's knowledge back to using something that's getting out of date.

Anyway, if 

David: you where that becomes a problem, if you're losing people, because they just don't want to use your internal stuff. That's when it's time to upgrade. It should not be because the 20 year old thinks you're old and stupid. [00:28:00] That's, that's not what 

Gary: the 20 year old is going to think is harder to use your internal software and which eventually they might quit.

Yeah. Just like, if they feel like, I don't even know why I'm working here, their stuff doesn't even work. It's so 

David: old. Yeah. I mean, if it's that bad, it's time to upgrade. But I, I, I hesitate. I mean, 

I understand custom software is expensive. And so I'm not one of those guys who are like every two years, you gotta go.

No, if it's working fine. 

But if you're hiring younger people, like it's just, you know, if you're growing, you're getting younger and younger people, if you're growing and you're finding, you know, people who are 25 years old. Here's an extreme example. So we didn't actually, this was not a client. This was a potential client.

Um, but these guys came to us. This is a big company. I, uh, millions and millions and millions of dollars company somewhere in Florida. They, um, entire company ran off of a mainframe computer, old school IBM mainframe computer, green screen. And if what that [00:29:00] means is if you're old, like I am, I mean, this is predating me.

The whole screen is green. The text is green and you type and there's no mouse because they didn't support mice and everything was keyboard driven. And that's how you read this. That's how mainframes were for. From the sixties to the late eighties, um, and their whole company ran off of this. That is an extreme this.

And they came to us cause they were trying to modernize. They were, we were talking about us modernizing for them. And I was like, cause the, the business owner said, I don't trust the cloud. The mainframe, by the way, was in their office. So rewind what I just said about all that. And I mean, just, you have a 50 plus million dollar business that was literally dependent.

Yeah. I mean, it just was bad. That's extreme to the point where it's like, Whoa, but it proves the point, right? If those younger people are seeing things, they have to VPN and, or a lot of places you'll see, we're using Adobe [00:30:00] database to run their company. So very common thing, the access database, not Adobe, sorry, access database, um, to run their business.

And the weakness of access is one person can be on it at one time. And that was something you dealt with a while ago, but that's so unacceptable. Yeah. So if you're having a young person come in, they're like, Hey, John, are you done with that yet? I mean, that's, that's, you're hurting your business. And then it's probably worth the investment to, to upgrade that and redo that.

Um, but I put that off as long as you can, but at some point it will be a tipping point because if you're losing good, good employees, cause they're just, I'm so tired of doing this. This is so stupid. You know, he's used to being on his phone and everything's fast and slick. 

Gary: With the increase of remote work these days, which it's not going to go away anytime soon, so, I mean, it's probably just going to expand.

Uh, if you, if it, if it's difficult for a new employee or even a current employee to [00:31:00] work from home because they can't get into the system through, you know, their laptop or their computer or the phone or tablet or whatever they're using and actually do their job. That's going to be a problem moving forward as well.

So even something as simple as, is your software, you know, responsive enough to be like a progressive web app where it can scale to different devices if needed, or if even not down to a phone, but at least if it can be accessed and used properly, From outside of the actual business. Like as long as it is supported to have remote work.

David: There's a lot of older custom software that requires you to VPN before you're allowed to use it. That's generally not necessary anymore. Um, Again, there are extreme 

Gary: examples where you need virtual private network just for, 

David: yeah, in in business terms. You have to sign into this gizmo, which puts you onto the office network, which then will allow you to open said software because it's [00:32:00] internal to the network only, and so you basically have to build a connection from your house to that.

That used to be the only way to do business remotely back. 15, 20 years ago, but nowadays the web can be secure and you can protect your data and all of that, that, that should go away. It's that's getting less and less common, but it still happens. Uh, you 

Gary: shouldn't have to VPN stuff. Now, would you also like, let's say if you were a remote worker, would you have to download something onto your machine in order to access, or would you just be able to slide right in there and work through the browser?

Is that probably a. If you're VPN now that you would download, well, no, I mean not if you're vp, but if you're just, yeah, if there's a custom modern stuff you shouldn't have downloaded. Doesn't work in a browser. 

David: I haven't built a desktop app in 10 years like that's used, so everything basically works.

That's what you, in your browser, everything works in a browser. I mean, again, there are extreme examples. If you're. Building desktop apps. I mean, Adobe, like we were just talking about is build desktop [00:33:00] apps. It's not like they they're gone, but most business software lives in the web and should live in the web.

Yeah. 

Gary: Adobe, that's one of the things that some people were saying they were going to kind of take the cue from Figma because Figma has the working in the browser thing down, like it's extremely well, it's performing extremely well. There's not any lag or anything like that. Multiple people can work at the same time without lag.

So that's something that Adobe was going to take from Figma. You know, to go back to what we were talking about earlier, Figma and Adobe, it'll be acquiring Figma. They were going to take cues from Figma on how to update a lot of their design stuff to work in the browser a lot better. Cause right now it's only like pieces and parts will work in the browser.

And it's a really bad experience. None of it. Some things 

David: like XD could probably be purely on the web and it would work fine, but you're not going to put Photoshop up there. Well, I mean, but it could, 

Gary: right now they do. They're testing beta testing versions of like smaller, like Photoshop light or Photoshop express, [00:34:00] whatever they call it.

Like a lot of those 

David: need processor power that you can't now in theory. Now it is what you, what you're going to see in the future is we're going, if you're, if you're old, you might remember thin clients and stuff like that and fat clients and whatever. We're moving into a world where you could be on your phone.

I mean, this is a bad example, but you can remote into a very powerful, uh, Uh, digital version of a Windows machine, and it's real time. You're just working on it, and when you're done, it goes away, and it saves your state, and you come back. That is getting more and more real. And that's what's funny is, you're gonna have some really weak laptops connected to some very powerful servers.

I mean, gaming does this right now like crazy. You can now play a top tier Xbox game on your phone without melting your phone because it's basically playing a video. That's what, what's happening. And they have really high, uh, really low latency that allows you to play the game. They're doing the same [00:35:00] thing for computers.

So I could be on a very cheap laptop that the company, you know, buys a 500 windows laptop. And you just log in through the internet and, but you don't feel that it's slow. Does that make sense? Because it's somewhere else. 

Gary: Computer that's a lot faster and 

David: that's getting more and more common. Um, and so it's, we're, we're, we're going through a shift 5g plus stupid internet speeds equals new stuff.

This is coming the next few years is going to be very interesting in that regard. Well, then 

Gary: that's something we should probably look at too. I mean, if you, if you're running old software in your business, everything is going to start moving way more mobile and way more remote, so. Maybe you should kind of make sure that like you said, customer facing products are all accessible through mobile devices.

All the, any kind of sales and payments are all secured through reputable companies. Um, any kind of communication or interaction you have with your [00:36:00] clients are a lot more integrated than just an email. Back and forth, you know, they have a place to go to check on their own personal stuff. Yeah. Well, if you're using paper, but you're 

David: using paper, still common.

But yeah, that's 

Gary: usually the paper is also backed up. I mean, even now most stores will, if you set up a profile with the store, even if you're shopping in the brick and mortar and you just have that email receipt or just don't print the receipt. Most of them will store that like if they'll just store it to your profile or your, whatever you want to call it.

What's the word that I'm looking for? It's not profile, but your account. Sorry, your account with that store. 

David: You can get there. I get annoyed totally unrelated. I get annoyed when I'm buying something like my daughter's going for her homecoming dress. And so we've been shopping and when you buy something, you're at a department store and your only options are print, email, or both.

What about none? Can I just have none? I don't, uh, I don't want to give you my email [00:37:00] address and I don't want to waste the paper. So 

Gary: that's becoming super common to break a motor stores now too. It's also, it's like, okay, and coffee shop, your email and your phone number. And it's like, are those required for me to continue this purchase?

And no, but we really prefer to have you. And it's like, 

David: I feel like a rebel. So my office is right next to a Walgreens and I'll get little. Stuff. I feel like such a rebel. Do you have a Walgreens account? No, I'm standing up to the man in this day and age. You want 

Gary: to give me your phone number? 

David: What is your phone number?

No. Okay. I don't know. There's something very sad. You're not part of our 

Gary: rewards program. You're missing out on points. Yeah. 

David: Those points things. Anyway, that's a whole nother podcast. I could ramble on about it. 

Gary: All right. So to wrap it up today, we just wanted to kind of congratulate each other, I guess, since we don't have a huge crowd and audience to say thank you to, but, um, [00:38:00] thank you to anybody who's listened so far.

Yeah. Because it marks the one year anniversary of our first recording of a podcast. We started September 17th of 2021. So it's been one year. At first, which is crazy at first, when we started this, it was a way for me and David to kind of just talk to each other and, and get some ideas out. And immediately David went on Google and looked up best microphone for podcasting on a blue yet a couple of days later showed up at my doorstep.

He had one in his office. I'm a little farther away, so it had to be mailed. And we started recording and then. Got an editor for the podcast that told us those microphones were garbage. So now our first editor, my 

David: son, our first editor was my son. He did not say that once we got rid of my son, we didn't get rid of him.

We fired him, totally fired him with extreme prejudice. Once we, uh, got the marketing team, they [00:39:00] were like, what are you doing? These Macs are trash. 

Gary: Yeah. Well, your son wasn't too happy with having to take all the background noise out of the audio tracks either. 

David: So I like the blue Yeti. I still have it over there.

I use it 

Gary: for D and D. Yeah, mine's on the shelf back there too. It looks cool, but 

David: it's a very large pill. It's crazy to 

Gary: think we've been doing this a year. He's also the music producer who did the music for our intros and interludes and stuff 

David: like that. That is correct. He does all of our music. Uh, which we probably should get, we should probably get another song now that we're a year old.

We should spruce it up a bit. I'm sure we could get that happening. Yeah, 

Gary: or get a couple interludes. Put them to work. Let's get him to work. 

David: He just sits around all the time. Let's get him to do something productive for once. He actually works for our marketing company now. Um, I'm trying to think. We started this cause I got tired of writing blogs and I wanted to just talk more.

[00:40:00] And we got to, we started enjoying it. And here we are. 50, 51 episodes later we skipped one week. That's right, we skipped one week. 

Gary: You would write a blog and then send it to me. And then I would read it and then give you input and then write more. And then we'd have someone else edit it. And then over the course of that, like month, maybe we'd have one small article and then we were like, why don't we just.

Talk to each other. Then we started having like little Zoom meetings talking about it. Mm-Hmm. . And I think that was like, we should just record this. It's way easier than us record it. Us sending the document back and forth. And I was like, let's just turn into a podcast. And I kind of mentioned it as a joke, like, let's just make it a podcast.

And then everybody's like, everybody's podcast. That's, that's okay. Why not? Let's do this podcast. 

David: If you ever get bored and wanna see those articles that came out very rarely. You can look up Big Pixel and see, I think on, uh, medium, those are still out [00:41:00] there. Uh, I like them, but yeah, there's 

Gary: still a lot of the 

David: first episodes came from there actually, from my drivel on medium, I, you know, I'm still killing it.

I think I made 32 cents last month off of medium. 

Gary: So professional writer then. I sold the stock photo on Adobe stock for seven cents last year. So I'm a professional photographer. Bam. 

David: Awesome. Well, thank you all for those who have listened for an entire year. My wife included hygiene. Um, she has been a faithful listener, uh, since day one and I think it puts her to sleep every night.

It's beautiful. 

Gary: Yeah, because I'm sure that's what she wants to hear. More of your voice. 

David: More of my voice. These dulcet tones. She can't get enough of this lisp, man. I tell you, it is magic. Alrighty. Well, thank you all again for listening to us. And we will be back. I will not be here next week. Gary will be leading the show, so I'm sure it will go flawlessly.

Gary: We will have a special guest. [00:42:00] Special guests to replace you for next week. Nice. 

David: So, and so I'll be back in a couple 

Gary: of weeks. You can always reach us, hit us up with any questions, comments, or ideas at hello at the big pixel. net. That's our email, or you can reach us through any of our social media channels and leave comments on our YouTube videos.

So until then, we will see you next week. Later. Thank you all everybody.

OUTRO: Hi, I'm Christy Pronto, Content Marketing Director here at BigPixel. Thank you for listening to this episode of the BizDev Podcast. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email, hello at thebigpixel. net. The BizDev Podcast is produced and presented by BigPixel. See you next week. Until then, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Threads, YouTube, and LinkedIn.