The Software Hall of Fame, w/ Microsoft’s Conor Cunningham

Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello friends. Quite a departure from our normal format today. We're not doing any origin stories. We're not talking about how people discovered their way into data. Today we decide the momentous topic of what software products belong in the Software Hall of Fame.

Rob Collie (00:00:15): Yes. You've heard us talk about it many times. Product X is such a good product that if there were a Software Hall of Fame it would be in. And that just kind of raised the question, didn't it? Why isn't there a Software Hall of Fame? So we're going to create one. And because we're creating one, we get to decide who's in.

Rob Collie (00:00:31): The Software Hall of Fame council consists of myself, Tom LaRock, and we brought back my good friend, Conor Cunningham. I knew we had to have Connor for this episode. His personality is a perfect fit for it. When you have something as arbitrary as what belongs in the hall of fame of software and what doesn't. And you need to take a strong, principled stand. You need to make it sound a bit more serious than it actually is. Well, Connor and I have a lot of experience doing these sorts of things. Years ago, we arrived at the criteria for what determines whether something is a sport or not. And we have been using that conversation for decades to start fights. You're ever out amongst a bunch of strangers and things get boring? Just start explaining to them the rules of what constitutes a sport or not. It will not be boring thereafter.

Rob Collie (00:01:19): So I knew that we needed that same spirit here for the Software Hall of Fame podcast. By the way, I know you're familiar with the concept of podcasts having websites, but are you familiar with a single episode of a podcast having a website? Well, we created one for the Software Hall of Fame to go with this episode. It's going to be an ongoing project. We're going to keep it organically evolving and growing. It's not a fixed list. It can be expanded over time. It can be revised. So if you'd like to cheat before you listen to the episode, you can go to thesoftwarehof, thesoftwarehof.org. And there, you'll find the results of this conversation.

Rob Collie (00:01:57): And we're going to try to have comments enabled on this website by the time you're listening to this. We want you to be able to tell us how wrong we are. We want you to tell us what we missed. To tell us, oh, that product doesn't belong in the hall of fame. We want you to be able to tell us all those things. We can argue about it. That's what the whole point is, to have fun arguing about something arbitrary and completely subjective. How much more fun can you have?

Rob Collie (00:02:21): So listen to the podcast, go to the website. Also stay tuned at the very end of the podcast where we do actually briefly go through the rules of sport. But we put that at the end so that if you're not interested in sport, just listen to the software part, that's totally fine.

Rob Collie (00:02:35): We had just a ton of fun with this. We can't do it every week, but we will, I think, revisit it from time to time. If you enjoy even half as much as we enjoyed making it, this will be your favorite podcast ever. Over promise and under deliver, that's our motto here at Raw Data. And remember, creating some degree of friendly controversy is part of the plan. So let the beatings begin.

Announcer (00:03:00): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention, please?

Announcer (00:03:04): This is The Raw Data by P3 Adaptive podcast. With your host Rob Collie and your co-host Thomas LaRock. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business, just go to P3Adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element.

Rob Collie (00:03:30): All right, for a special edition of the show, welcome Connor Cunningham and our very own Tom LaRock. We've assembled the crew for a very, very important topic. We have been talking off and on over the history of this show about the Software Hall of Fame, and it doesn't exist. There is a software product line hall of fame. That is really, really, I mean, that is some cheesy shit. I mean that...

Conor Cunningham (00:03:57): It's yeah, they don't have Microsoft listed and it fits all of their criteria.

Rob Collie (00:04:02): Yeah. Boeing's in there, right? MCAS, right?

Conor Cunningham (00:04:09): That aged well.

Rob Collie (00:04:11): Oh, those flight control surfaces. They really revolutionize things. Conor and I have a history of creating standards out of thin air. Filling a gap, filling a void in nature like that Marines commercial. Some people run towards the sound of trouble. That's Connor and I. Into the breach we go.

Conor Cunningham (00:04:29): I would almost think of it as a little bit Rob-like, we're our own version of Clerks the movie.

Rob Collie (00:04:34): Sitting around talking about the morality of the Death Star being blown up with the contractors on board. The second one.

Conor Cunningham (00:04:40): For no good reason whatsoever, other than we should.

Rob Collie (00:04:42): That's right. Okay. So that's the spirit, okay? There's some history here.

Thomas LaRock (00:04:45): Just so I understand. In your experience, when you guys were working, teaming up at Microsoft a couple decades ago, you guys were just comfortable just making shit up as you went.

Rob Collie (00:04:54): This was before the era of instrumentation at Microsoft, before the era of telemetry. Here you go, Connor. We were talking about when an Irishman needs to speak to his equal, he is forced to talk to God. You had to go with your own instincts and thinking over and over and over again, just to make progress in the old, dark days, and so-

Thomas LaRock (00:05:17): That's fine. But that shows why you two are uniquely qualified to judge the Software Hall of Fame.

Rob Collie (00:05:22): Yeah, go into avoid and fill it.

Conor Cunningham (00:05:26): Confidently.

Thomas LaRock (00:05:27): Over confidently.

Rob Collie (00:05:30): Maybe a little, but here's the thing, I used to be really disappointed and hurt by my ex-wife's disapproval of things I do. But now I use it as an indicator that I'm in the lane. If you're doing this right, there's a little bit of pushback. If everyone's just agreeing, you have not displayed sufficient courage, you have not-

Thomas LaRock (00:05:49): You know you're over the target when you get a lot of flack.

Rob Collie (00:05:53): That's right, when you're taking fire, like Dave Gainer said. Yep, absolutely. Okay. So the one exercise that Connor and I have really been after over the years, dating back to in our 20s, was what constitutes a sport. Some things are, some things aren't. We were very upset about there being golf on our Sports Center all the time. That was really annoying and Sports Center was like the only entertainment we had back then, because it was the dark ages.

Conor Cunningham (00:06:20): I think we should also set up that when we watch the Olympics, there's a whole pile of events, which requires skill. Lots of talent and all that, but where you're like, you know what, I'm not sure that a ball and a ribbon on the gymnastics thing translates to be a sport. It just doesn't seem close enough to whatever it should be and there's a lot motivations that we kind of stepped on.

Thomas LaRock (00:06:39): So can I just disassociate myself from this part?

Rob Collie (00:06:44): Nope.

Conor Cunningham (00:06:44): You're in.

Rob Collie (00:06:47): You're in, you're tainted, you're tainted and smeared. Yeah. We're going to give you a little taste of that conversation at the end, but I'm sure that not everyone cares about that. So we're going to focus on the Software Hall of Fame, but just for the moment, one can be an athlete even if one is not participating in a sport. Is not meant to besmirch the individual.

Rob Collie (00:07:04): It's just a question of what qualifies as a sport, meaning the things that we would actually want to watch. That's what it was really all about. I think we can move on and then come back and piss everybody off with what defines a sport later.

Thomas LaRock (00:07:16): Yeah. Let's piss them off with software first.

Rob Collie (00:07:18): Let's start with software because we know that everybody's tuning in, to this show anyway, cares about software. We're coming into this hot, deliberately. I didn't want a lot of... Tom kept pestering me, " Hey, we need to do a pre-session on this." I'm like, no, no, that's not how it's going to work. We're going to roll in here, I prepared the criteria. Whether a product gets into the Software Hall of Fame, I will now present the rules.

Rob Collie (00:07:42): Then we will have the ritual argument as to whether or not those are a good rule. All right, so you ready for this? Here's what I believe to be the rules and the criteria for what determines whether something should be in the Software Hall of Fame or not.

Rob Collie (00:07:55): So first of all, it has to be a product. It can be free. Not all products are charged for, but it cannot be a protocol. Someone else can have the protocol hall of fame, like TCPIP, HTDP, all those sorts of things. Boring, don't care. Has to be a product, that's rule number one.

Rob Collie (00:08:18): Rule number two, has to be software. So for instance, you might want to say Pong or Space Invaders, but these were inherently tied up in hardware as well. I think we disqualified Pong and Space Invaders. Someone else can have the electronics hall of fame. With me so far? These are in increasingly controversial order.

Conor Cunningham (00:08:37): That's the right way to do it, Rob.

Rob Collie (00:08:39): So these two everybody's good with. All right.

Conor Cunningham (00:08:41): Oh, I didn't say that. I'm just letting you kind of dig your hole.

Rob Collie (00:08:45): All right, fine. Fine. Fine.

Thomas LaRock (00:08:45): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:08:46): Okay. So listen, by the way, my arguments over compact access on Twitter over the last 48 hours have been like-

Conor Cunningham (00:08:54): Oh God.

Rob Collie (00:08:54): ... A protracted warmup for this, right?

Conor Cunningham (00:08:57): Yeah. Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:08:58): I'm ready. Okay. So everything else is a set of three axes on which we will measure a product. The three axes are novelty, difficulty, and impact. Okay.

Rob Collie (00:09:12): Novelty. Was this an original idea that no one had thought of? It sort of came out of the blue. We'll get into it obviously, but I think that's a relatively clear one.

Rob Collie (00:09:21): Difficulty. This is an engineering challenge type of difficulty. Now it's both a quality of difficulty and a quantity. If it took a lot of work to build, even if it doesn't necessarily have a lot of inspirational algorithms underneath the hood or anything like that, it can still score high on difficulty, but it's a blend. If something was both inspired engineering and had a lot of perspiration in it, then it's going to score very high on the difficulty axis.

Conor Cunningham (00:09:51): So perhaps the Doom engine, when it first came out, would've met that bar.

Rob Collie (00:09:55): Ah, Doom. You are. Yes. Yes. Doom is on our list of candidates for sure. Yes. Okay. We'll come back to this. Third and the most difficult, Conor, it's just like the rules of sport. That third rule, that third rule is the one that really, really gets under people's skin. It requires a little judgment.

Rob Collie (00:10:15): Judgment is important in human affairs and so impact. We're talking about historical impact. Impact on the arc of human civilization. Now let's be clear, we're not talking about butterfly effect, chaos theory type of impact on... Because even this episode of the podcast would qualify under those rules. No, not that kind of altering the timeline back to the future type of thing. No, not that level. However, on the other side, we're not talking about this software product will be mentioned in history books. That's too high of a bar, but the stories told in history books would be different were this product to be removed and not replaced. We are allowed to extrapolate from today, historical impact. The history books don't need to be written already. That would be different, but we are not allowed to extrapolate the product continuing to grow. It's current form, the current form of that software product. We can extrapolate that it will have this kind of impact. We're not expecting it to get new features, but we don't have to wait for the history books to be written. This allows us to induct some newer stuff into the hall of fame based on our judgment. Otherwise, it'd be a really boring episode, it'd all be about 1970s stuff.

Thomas LaRock (00:11:37): Yeah, longevity shouldn't matter.

Rob Collie (00:11:40): Impact can be direct or it can be via having inspired others of the form to take it up. VisiCalc, for instance, wasn't around long enough to achieve direct impact on human history, you could argue, but it sure as hell launched the genre of spreadsheet and we can all agree. The spreadsheets meet the impact criteria. Now the last thing about all of this is that on these three criteria, we will give a product, a zero, a one or a two. That's it. That's the range. They either get zero points for one of these criteria, one point or two points. A product must achieve four points or higher for induction.

Thomas LaRock (00:12:24): Wow.

Rob Collie (00:12:25): Yeah and there will be some six pointers, but they will be rare.

Thomas LaRock (00:12:29): Okay. All right.

Rob Collie (00:12:30): They'll be rare. A lot of products are going to get in at four points and some very controversial ones people are going to be very, very upset about are going to get locked out at three and that's what we're looking for, isn't it?

Thomas LaRock (00:12:40): Okay. So hold on. I've got a bunch of questions.

Rob Collie (00:12:44): All right, fire away. Yeah.

Thomas LaRock (00:12:45): Okay. First of all, how do you define product?

Rob Collie (00:12:48): We use our judgment.

Thomas LaRock (00:12:49): Something that's commercially available?

Conor Cunningham (00:12:50): Is it... A cloud service? Would it count as a product for today's discussion?

Rob Collie (00:12:53): Yeah, I think so. I think so, yeah.

Thomas LaRock (00:12:54): So product or service.

Rob Collie (00:12:56): I would call a service a product, but okay. That's okay.

Thomas LaRock (00:12:58): So not a language either.

Rob Collie (00:13:00): No, no languages. We're not going to be debating-

Thomas LaRock (00:13:03): Right, so product would be made of one or more languages or protocols.

Rob Collie (00:13:05): Built via languages, built respecting protocols. Yes. But yeah, you're right. Now, if someone wanted to argue for visual studio or a development tool, I think we would entertain this.

Thomas LaRock (00:13:16): It's open for discussion. Absolutely.

Rob Collie (00:13:18): Yeah. If Borderland's compiler back in the nineties or something was considered to be revolutionary for some reason, I wouldn't know. That's not my jam, but we would hear this out.

Thomas LaRock (00:13:27): Yeah, because otherwise we devolve into just saying everything goes back to assembly and that's it. Hall of fame done. Okay.

Rob Collie (00:13:34): Yeah. We will try in the number one and the number zero and we will move on.

Thomas LaRock (00:13:38): Turing and Babbage and that's it. And we're done. Okay.

Rob Collie (00:13:40): No people, no people either. Yeah.

Thomas LaRock (00:13:42): So software, like you said, Space Invaders doesn't count because that's kind of tied to hardware, but I would say Space Invaders, the Atari cartridge is a product that you would buy.

Rob Collie (00:13:52): Was the cartridge hardware though?

Thomas LaRock (00:13:53): Yeah, probably, because I would consider that like an Apple thing as well these days. Similar.

Rob Collie (00:13:58): I think Super Mario, for instance, fails the software test. Got to draw the line somewhere.

Conor Cunningham (00:14:02): So you're just excluding all the cartridge market up until downloads. It's an arbitrary choice, but I get.

Rob Collie (00:14:07): It is arbitrary. I completely agree. I could be knocked off of that particular hill, I suppose.

Thomas LaRock (00:14:11): No, I just want to be clear what we're defining software to be. Because I understand about the hardware aspect because, I mean, I have an iPhone and I know Apple's really a hardware company masquerading as a software company. So we're going to skip... This isn't about games or electronics. That's a different hall of fame for somebody else.

Rob Collie (00:14:28): Bubble hockey or whatever, that goes elsewhere. Yeah. Dragon's Lair.

Thomas LaRock (00:14:32): Right. Okay. Gotcha. So I think I understand the line, just so everybody else does. All right. So your three axes that we will vote on in order to determine membership. So the next question is, is it just us three that get to do this?

Conor Cunningham (00:14:45): This is basically a drinking game without the drinking in the middle of the day.

Rob Collie (00:14:48): That is exactly...

Thomas LaRock (00:14:50): Okay, so the three of us will decide a zero, one, or two.

Rob Collie (00:14:52): On the other side of this conversation, the list of Software Hall of Fame Products will be decided. In future episodes, maybe we'll take listener questions. What about this one? What about this one?

Thomas LaRock (00:15:01): So again, the three of us here will decide zero, one, or two in each of these axes?

Rob Collie (00:15:07): That's right.

Thomas LaRock (00:15:07): Okay. So it'll be a consensus for each one. Okay. Not a problem.

Rob Collie (00:15:11): These words, consensus and stuff. I don't know, Tom. I mean, we'll see.

Conor Cunningham (00:15:15): Very, very strong. Very, very strong.

Thomas LaRock (00:15:18): Okay. So last thing I have is the goal for this program, then, is the inaugural class.

Rob Collie (00:15:25): That's right.

Thomas LaRock (00:15:26): These are the ones that, even though other pieces of software are worthy, we will just turn our back for now because the ones that we are going to do at the end of this show are the most worthy.

Rob Collie (00:15:39): Yeah. I mean, let's be clear, even though we are the council of elders now that decide who gets in and who doesn't, it doesn't mean that we're aware of every possibility. Our list of candidates right now, we are imperfect, Tom. We will miss some candidates. However, our judgment on each candidate will be infallible. Like people infallible.

Thomas LaRock (00:15:59): Oh, absolutely. But again, the goal isn't to get every possible one today, the goal is what would be a good inaugural class?

Conor Cunningham (00:16:07): The 2022 Hall of Fame Class, sort of like you do for the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Rob Collie (00:16:13): This is the startup class, right? There's more get in this-

Thomas LaRock (00:16:16): Startup class.

Rob Collie (00:16:17): Yeah. More get in now than ever will in the future because we need to bootstrap it.

Thomas LaRock (00:16:21): Can we get started then?

Rob Collie (00:16:22): Let's get right after it.

Thomas LaRock (00:16:23): I want to get right after it because here's the thing, if you were going to make a list, if anybody out there was going to make a list of the criteria and the software, what would they use?

Conor Cunningham (00:16:34): You'd use Excel.

Thomas LaRock (00:16:35): Excel. So if Excel is going to be the tool of choice for the Software Hall of Fame, I think Excel is a lock for the Software Hall of Fame.

Rob Collie (00:16:45): And I might have already back-tested these criteria against some products to see what I think. So you should expect that Excel is going to get in based on these criteria. Now I'll pretend to be democratic for a moment and I'll ask you, on those three scores, novelty, difficulty, and impact. What do we give Excel?

Thomas LaRock (00:17:06): Six. Twos across the board.

Rob Collie (00:17:09): Really? I was actually going to be harder on Excel.

Thomas LaRock (00:17:12): To give it a five?

Rob Collie (00:17:13): I was going to give Excel like zero on novelty.

Conor Cunningham (00:17:16): That was my call as well. I think they get four on the other...

Thomas LaRock (00:17:18): No.

Rob Collie (00:17:19): I think it's a zero, two, two.

Conor Cunningham (00:17:21): Cause it's just a copy of Lotus 1-2-3 and VisiCalc. I mean, it's not that much different other than just the Windows part.

Rob Collie (00:17:27): I could see it being a one because Excel has brought a lot of novelty to the spreadsheet space over time. Can you imagine like, oh Lotus Macro, holy hell.

Thomas LaRock (00:17:41): I was going to say, I think you're overlooking the interoperability with the Office products and the work that went into just being able to cut and paste between all the products in Office. How much effort did that take.

Conor Cunningham (00:17:53): Fair.

Thomas LaRock (00:17:54): And the other products weren't doing that stuff.

Conor Cunningham (00:17:56): No, object linking and embedding was a massive, massive effort. And it did require, I'm not sure that I would uniquely sign that to Excel, but certainly they were part of it.

Thomas LaRock (00:18:05): Not uniquely, but yeah. Right.

Rob Collie (00:18:07): So many things they've come up with over time. Especially if you start giving it credit for some of its more recent inventions, dynamic arrays. Anyway, I would be okay with giving it a one, two, two.

Thomas LaRock (00:18:17): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:18:17): It's definitely not a two, two, two. It's not a six-pointer. I could come up to five.

Conor Cunningham (00:18:21): I would want to go and invent the space, if I was going to give it a two. Not that the iPhone is software, but the iPhone created a whole category.

Rob Collie (00:18:27): I agree. In the hardware hall of fame, iPhone is a two point novelty, for sure. Okay. So we've decided Excel is a five. VisiCalc, I think it's a six.

Thomas LaRock (00:18:37): I'm not even sure it belongs.

Rob Collie (00:18:39): What? All right.

Thomas LaRock (00:18:40): Is Luke writing this down or do you have a list somewhere?

Rob Collie (00:18:43): We have a transcript, man. If you ever came back and consumed some of the things that you built with us... If you've ever listened to, or... You would see that we have transcripts of everything.

Thomas LaRock (00:18:52): All right.

Rob Collie (00:18:52): How do you think the Wordagami model functions, Thomas?

Thomas LaRock (00:18:56): I thought Luke did it.

Rob Collie (00:18:58): Oh you kidding? I have to feed. We've got a million word corpus now that needs to be fed through power BI in order to determine word uniqueness.

Thomas LaRock (00:19:07): I think the word I'm looking for is interns.

Rob Collie (00:19:09): You kind of want interns to like your company and come back sometimes, I'm told.

Thomas LaRock (00:19:14): All right, so VisiCalc?

Rob Collie (00:19:15): All right. So two for novelty.

Thomas LaRock (00:19:17): Why?

Rob Collie (00:19:17): Non controversial, invented the whole spreadsheet.

Thomas LaRock (00:19:21): Really?

Rob Collie (00:19:22): Yeah.

Thomas LaRock (00:19:22): Spreadsheets didn't... So there wasn't some accountant somewhere else, years or decades ago, that had a ledger? Like Al Capone didn't get put away because a guy had a ledger of transactions that showed income. I mean, a spreadsheet existed before VisiCalc.

Rob Collie (00:19:38): Not one that recalculated without you having to-

Conor Cunningham (00:19:41): Redo it all. Yeah, yeah.

Rob Collie (00:19:42): ... Use an eraser and all that kind of stuff, right? It just, no.

Thomas LaRock (00:19:45): But they didn't invent the concept of a spreadsheet.

Rob Collie (00:19:48): They absolute... And in fact VisiCalc was the reason why PCs were popular in the original go.

Thomas LaRock (00:19:54): I get that, but that's a hardware thing that we don't care about.

Rob Collie (00:19:56): But no, no, no. I'm not talking about the PC here. I'm talking about VisiCalc. VisiCalc launched personal computing and personal computing is-

Thomas LaRock (00:20:03): I don't think the fact that they helped launch personal computing matters.

Rob Collie (00:20:06): That changed the course of history, Tom, big time.

Conor Cunningham (00:20:09): Find a piece of software that did dynamic accounting before. And I'll take the example.

Thomas LaRock (00:20:15): I get that.

Conor Cunningham (00:20:15): But I don't know of one.

Thomas LaRock (00:20:16): I give them a one. I don't give them a two for novelty. I give them a one.

Rob Collie (00:20:20): This account goes down as a two.

Thomas LaRock (00:20:21): Jesus.

Rob Collie (00:20:22): Moving on. All right.

Conor Cunningham (00:20:24): I believe Rob disagrees with you, Tom.

Rob Collie (00:20:26): Difficulty of engineering. I would say it's a two difficulty of engineering. Given the era.

Thomas LaRock (00:20:33): How do you even know how difficult it was to produce this? Man hours? What are you?

Rob Collie (00:20:36): I mean, they didn't even have C back then, right?

Thomas LaRock (00:20:38): So they had to invent a language?

Rob Collie (00:20:40): They'd use Basic? I have no idea. Did they do it in assembly?

Conor Cunningham (00:20:43): I don't know, I'm going to look it up.

Rob Collie (00:20:44): Good idea. Looking it up. Actual, factual injections into the conversation?

Conor Cunningham (00:20:49): At least what the internet tells me.

Thomas LaRock (00:20:50): Okay. So impact, while he looks that up, impact.

Rob Collie (00:20:54): Impact is a two.

Thomas LaRock (00:20:54): Why?

Rob Collie (00:20:54): Impact is a two. It launched a whole revolution.

Conor Cunningham (00:20:58): 6502 assembler.

Rob Collie (00:21:00): Holy shit. They wrote it in assembly.

Conor Cunningham (00:21:02): Yes.

Rob Collie (00:21:03): Yeah. I'm going to give it a two. VisiCalc is one of the only sixes I'm aware of. There aren't many sixes running around and VisiCalc is a six. We're going to continue the fight. Lotus 1-2-3, it's between VisiCalc and Excel.

Conor Cunningham (00:21:16): And they bought VisiCalc and closed it down.

Rob Collie (00:21:19): Did they really, what a Microsoft thing to do?

Conor Cunningham (00:21:21): Lotus was not in Microsoft.

Rob Collie (00:21:23): No no, I'm saying, but Microsoft likes to buy popular products and then absorb them and kill them and just completely shrink the market in the result. That's a joke, but it happens over and over again. Or at least it used to. I have a score in mind for Lotus. You want to hear it?

Conor Cunningham (00:21:40): I guess. Not really.

Rob Collie (00:21:41): I have Lotus as zero, two, one.

Conor Cunningham (00:21:43): Okay. It was a copycat and didn't really invent the space. It just sort of built another version and then they bought the company and destroyed the other one. So I get the zero part.

Rob Collie (00:21:53): I mean, I was going to give them credit for two.

Conor Cunningham (00:21:54): For impact?

Rob Collie (00:21:55): For difficulty.

Conor Cunningham (00:21:56): Difficulty.

Thomas LaRock (00:21:56): Difficulty.

Rob Collie (00:21:57): It was a far more advanced and sophisticated version. I mean, you could even maybe give them a one on novelty. I don't know. Zero, two, one, leaves Lotus outside of the hall of fame, right?

Rob Collie (00:22:07): I'm torn on this one. I'm uncharacteristically malleable in my opinion on Lotus. They didn't have as long to innovate compared to Excel, I mean, really. And the thing is I wasn't really around paying attention for the Lotus 1-2-3 era, so how many innovations did they come up with?

Conor Cunningham (00:22:24): I remember them being around at the time, but I was a teenager or whatever.

Rob Collie (00:22:29): Same. Yeah.

Conor Cunningham (00:22:29): It wasn't like I was using it professionally. I accepted the software was there, but it was a fancier, nicer version of VisiCalc that happened to be more successful. And the market was exploding in for terms of PCs at the time. So I think VisiCalc may have been visionary early, and on the Apple platform. Lotus 1-2-3 was on the IBM PC, so it just took off because that was the whole transition that was happening there.

Conor Cunningham (00:22:51): So if you want to give them a one, one, two or some form, I'm not morally opposed, but I think it's certainly iconic software at the time. I don't think that it's had any long term-

Conor Cunningham (00:23:03): ... iconic software at the time. I don't think that it's had any long-term impact. Excel stole all of that.

Rob Collie (00:23:06): Yeah. I think it's a one on impact. I don't think it gets a two on impact. I'm most confident in the impact score of one. The other two, it could get in on the strength of its novelty and engineering difficulty, or it could miss. It really comes down to... Let's go to engineering difficulty. Is it a one or a two?

Conor Cunningham (00:23:25): I mean, everything was hard back then, but I think given that it was already copying an existing thing, it wasn't as hard.

Rob Collie (00:23:31): See, I think that's letting too much novelty into the engineering difficulty category. I'm trying to keep the lanes clean as much as possible, which I know is not a hundred percent possible, but it was probably a two. Again, because we were willing to accept quantity of engineering difficulty as well as quality of it. And I'm assuming it was a pretty large software project.

Rob Collie (00:23:54): Let's call it a two on engineering. Then the really... The controversial one is the novelty one. If it's a zero on novelty, it's on the outside looking in. If it's a one on novelty, it sneaks in.

Thomas LaRock (00:24:05): You know what? Lotus 1-2-3 was on the IBM machine. So what was on Apple? VisiCalc?

Conor Cunningham (00:24:10): VisiCalc was originally on Apple, but I don't know if Lotus 1-2-3 was... I think it was on multiple platforms at the time. I don't remember off the top of my head though.

Thomas LaRock (00:24:20): But Lotus 1-2-3 was built for Windows machines, yes?

Conor Cunningham (00:24:24): It was DOS.

Rob Collie (00:24:24): Yeah.

Thomas LaRock (00:24:25): I'm going to give it the one for novelty, because they had the foresight to being on both IBM and to be compatible with Windows. And by doing that, the Windows team then realized the market capacity for spreadsheets, which led to Excel. So yeah, that's what I would say. I'd give it a one.

Conor Cunningham (00:24:46): One judgment, Tom, is that Windows came later. But yes, I agree with you in long term impact.

Thomas LaRock (00:24:53): I'm looking at it, the novelty of the interoperability. VisiCalc was just Ray Ozzie was like, "Oh, this has to run on Windows machines as well."

Rob Collie (00:25:00): Eventually, yeah. Yeah.

Thomas LaRock (00:25:00): "Because we're going to piggyback on what Microsoft is doing by licensing their OS to all these IBM machines." Right? So I think I would give the novelty to the piggybacking of Lotus 1-2-3 into another operating system for market share, without the idea that you're actually slicing your own throat eventually.

Conor Cunningham (00:25:19): And I think we're being a little unfair at some level, because Lotus 1-2-3 actually was not just a spreadsheet, right? It had database stuff, it could graph some things. It had some of the early bits that you would now today pretty much say is Excel plus maybe an ISAM database.

Rob Collie (00:25:35): It's possible that Lotus 1-2-3 introduced charts. I don't know that VisiCalc had charts. I have no idea.

Conor Cunningham (00:25:40): One.

Rob Collie (00:25:40): We'll give it a one. 1, 2, 1. Lotus gets in. Lotus 1-2-3 gets in.

Thomas LaRock (00:25:43): Wow.

Conor Cunningham (00:25:43): First controversial choice.

Thomas LaRock (00:25:44): Ray Ozzie, if you're listening, if you were just sweating it out right now wondering if you were going to get in...

Rob Collie (00:25:51): Yeah, that's right.

Conor Cunningham (00:25:56): I don't think Groove's going to get in. But we'll go with 1-2-3.

Thomas LaRock (00:25:59): Is that on the list?

Rob Collie (00:26:01): Oh, end of podcast. That's it. Mic drop, we're out. All right, okay. So shall we go round robin and nominate now? We've gone through the three spreadsheets.

Thomas LaRock (00:26:12): Okay. And they're all in, amazingly.

Rob Collie (00:26:14): They are all in, yeah. And I feel like we can't lose on that one, because if we'd excluded Lotus, the controversy would've been delicious. But including them, we're not going to have to fight against all the old people that were using Lotus that would be like, "What about this? What about this?" They're just going to keep eroding our position, and they're going to be right. We're not going to want to change our minds and everything, so I think this is the right move. It feels right that Lotus is in. It also feels right that Excel is in with the five and Lotus 1-2-3 is in with the four. So there's some daylight between the two. That also feels good, doesn't it?

Rob Collie (00:26:47): All right, who wants to nominate? I've got a long list, but shall we round robin until you guys run out of ideas? Then we'll go to the list.

Conor Cunningham (00:26:54): Well, I did earlier go up and mention the Doom engine as a piece of software.

Rob Collie (00:26:58): Okay, Doom.

Thomas LaRock (00:26:58): Doom, okay.

Rob Collie (00:26:59): Doom is one of the ones that I back tested against, believe it or not. Okay, so want me to tell you my score or shall we...

Conor Cunningham (00:27:07): Well, let's discuss it.

Rob Collie (00:27:09): What should be the protocol?

Conor Cunningham (00:27:09): Let's discuss it first, right?

Rob Collie (00:27:09): Let's discuss it.

Conor Cunningham (00:27:09): So obviously there was Commander Keen, then there was the Wolfenstein 3D, which is probably the real kickoff to then what became the Doom engine. Then that was licensed, I believe, to be used by other engines. So eventually that grew into a platform for building three dimensional games. And I think if you were to look at the whole market since then, there's the Unreal Engine and a few others that have come along since then, but really this was the first and it required going well beyond what the hardware could easily do at the time.

Rob Collie (00:27:36): Yes, yes.

Conor Cunningham (00:27:37): So there was a massive amount of difficulty in building that thing to the boundary of what the hardware could do, and I think the impact of that is pretty substantial, right? The last Doom game, Doom Eternal, I was not personally a fan of. But it's not because the engine was bad, I think it was just they took it in a direction that was different than the other Doom games. But we're still talking about it, and there's definitely a whole set of these games, some of which have been truly spectacular. And I think you could look at the whole ecosystem to figure out the impact is broader than just that.

Rob Collie (00:28:07): I agree, I agree. So I think this is a great example of where novelty and difficulty do have an interplay. Because it went so far beyond what we all thought hardware could do at the time, it gets novelty for pressing through that boundary, right? It went somewhere that people didn't think was possible. In my mind, based on the fact that there had been 3D first person shooter games but they had all sucked until Doom came and just blew our minds, I would give Doom a one on the novelty scale and definitely a straight up two on the difficulty scale, on the engineering difficulty. I mean, it really did unbelievably push the envelope. None of us thought that our computers could do what they were suddenly doing at the time. That was the reaction over and over again. "These computers are doing this." My jaw was on the floor.

Rob Collie (00:28:56): So what do you think, guys? Is it a one on novelty? Does anyone want to make a case for two on novelty?

Conor Cunningham (00:29:01): What would be two on novelty for this space, right? If you go back and look, besides Wolfenstein 3D, was there another one that was close enough that you would feel... Space Quest and all of those things were all flat, two dimensional things at the time. It really wasn't even a great isomorphics. I mean, it was maybe some of the overhead ones, but there really wasn't anything close to this until maybe Descent later became in that space. But it came afterwards, right? It was a different kind of game. I don't know if there's a rough equivalent that would be earlier besides 3D Wolfenstein.

Thomas LaRock (00:29:34): Before you guys get any further, because we're talking about what is essentially a game, and we said we'd leave electronics out-

Conor Cunningham (00:29:39): I meant the engine.

Thomas LaRock (00:29:40): So we're making this about, say, the software, and I get that, but I just want you to understand that the way things are aligned right now, as you guys sit there and have that discussion, I'm just thinking about Leisure Suit Larry. Because that was certainly had the novelty, that was certainly difficult.

Rob Collie (00:29:58): Hey, let's-

Thomas LaRock (00:29:58): And that certainly had impact. And then fucking Leisure Suit Larry turns out to be a six and Excel is a five.

Rob Collie (00:30:05): Okay, I did not expect Leisure Suit Larry to be on the list, but we will give it its due.

Conor Cunningham (00:30:10): Everyone gets their day in court here.

Rob Collie (00:30:12): But for the moment... Yeah, that's right. That's right. For the moment, let's stick with Doom, right? So, Connor, my opinion would be that if Wolfenstein 3D hadn't existed, Doom would be a two on novelty.

Thomas LaRock (00:30:23): All right.

Rob Collie (00:30:24): But because Wolfenstein did exist, I'm going to give it a one on novelty.

Conor Cunningham (00:30:28): Okay. I mean, I think that we don't have to get every one of these things perfect. I think at the end of the day it's probably going to get to four either way. So I don't really want to split hairs too much.

Thomas LaRock (00:30:38): What game really started with the in depth storytelling?

Rob Collie (00:30:42): Why do you keep changing gears, man?

Conor Cunningham (00:30:45): It's not Doom.

Rob Collie (00:30:46): We're a function box. Name of software goes in and a score comes out. We don't talk about other things until-

Conor Cunningham (00:30:52): I mean, what kind of story do you want? Adventure Zork kind of story? Interactive fiction?

Thomas LaRock (00:30:56): No. When I think of Red Dead Redemption my kid is playing.

Conor Cunningham (00:31:01): I see.

Thomas LaRock (00:31:01): Those types of more elaborate storylines. Like Final Fantasy that goes... Which isn't final because there's 15 versions of it. So I was just curious if Doom had that element, because that might be novelty. But if it doesn't... One.

Rob Collie (00:31:14): As I have 22 products on my candidate list.

Conor Cunningham (00:31:19): Okay, Tom. Tom, I think we get the message. We'll come back to the philosophical discussion. I will just summarize that Doom wasn't really that kind of game. There was enough plot, there was hell demons and you kill them, and good luck with that.

Thomas LaRock (00:31:32): All right.

Rob Collie (00:31:33): All right. So one novelty, two engineering difficulty. And can a game ever have a two for impact on humanity? I think games cap out at one. I don't think a game can get a two.

Thomas LaRock (00:31:47): Not even Angry Birds?

Rob Collie (00:31:49): Not even Angry Birds.

Conor Cunningham (00:31:49): Flash in the pan.

Rob Collie (00:31:50): Maybe we'll discover a game that we want to give a two for impact. But I think Doom is a 1, 2, 1.

Conor Cunningham (00:31:55): Yeah, okay.

Thomas LaRock (00:31:56): How about Wordle? No?

Rob Collie (00:32:01): There's definitely some clever shit going on there, but I think a lot of the cleverness is accidental. There's a survivorship bias thing going on. Okay, so that's Doom.

Thomas LaRock (00:32:09): So Doom is in?

Rob Collie (00:32:11): Doom is in.

Thomas LaRock (00:32:11): Just like that.

Rob Collie (00:32:12): Just like that. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. All right, next nominee.

Conor Cunningham (00:32:15): Tom, your turn.

Thomas LaRock (00:32:16): Okay. How about Minitab?

Rob Collie (00:32:18): What is Minitab?

Thomas LaRock (00:32:21): Minitab was a tool used by mostly statisticians. So, basically, you could imagine it did a whole lot of things that you would be doing today in Excel and Power BI, but it was its own self-contained little unit. So you put in all the data, it give you back all the plots, charts that you needed, and help you figure out... It was like an actuarial, too. Is this statistically significant? How much should we charge for insurance rates? Things like that.

Conor Cunningham (00:32:50): Would it be the equivalent of R today?

Thomas LaRock (00:32:53): Yeah, in a way. R Studio is maybe a little more dev focused because of the language, but I can't remember Minitab having a language. But certainly an interface, yeah.

Rob Collie (00:33:03): Start the bidding at 1, 1, 1.

Thomas LaRock (00:33:06): All right.

Rob Collie (00:33:07): I have no-

Conor Cunningham (00:33:07): I never used it, so I don't have a-

Rob Collie (00:33:09): Yeah, same. Same. I really don't. But, I mean, there are other things on here that I haven't used that are going to get in. I just don't know. Tom, you're going to find yourself in the rare situation of you decide. Is it in or out?

Thomas LaRock (00:33:19): I'm not sure if it's in or out either. If we don't have enough information, we can just table it, come back to it at some point.

Rob Collie (00:33:26): Minitab is in purgatory.

Thomas LaRock (00:33:27): Yeah, one of the listeners might be able to make a better case for it than me.

Conor Cunningham (00:33:31): Yeah, I mean, would you just comparatively say versus SaaS or R Studio? Maybe they're later, but think about them in terms of that context. Is it bigger or smaller?

Thomas LaRock (00:33:41): It certainly costs less than Saas.

Conor Cunningham (00:33:43): Fair, fair, fair.

Rob Collie (00:33:44): We've gone purgatory.

Conor Cunningham (00:33:46): We don't have enough data to vote.

Rob Collie (00:33:48): On Minitab. I added one to the list in response to that. And this is another one that I don't really have an opinion on. MATLAB.

Thomas LaRock (00:33:54): Right.

Rob Collie (00:33:55): Science has run on MATLAB.

Thomas LaRock (00:33:57): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:33:58): Basically forever. I don't use it. I was forced to use it. Let's dispense with it quickly. Is it a 1, 1, 2? It's definitely made a big difference. It's made a big difference to science. I'm going to say it's a two for impact, even though none of us really used it or use it much. So much of what we've discovered as a species in the last three decades has been MATLAB powered. I don't know. 1, 1, 2? Purgatory. Purgatory for MATLAB. We'll put it in the same bucket as Minitab. We'll come back. All right. Back to you, Tom.

Thomas LaRock (00:34:29): Let's just do the obvious one, the elephant in the room. SQL Server.

Rob Collie (00:34:33): SQL Server. We have assembled the people here to decide on SQL Server and it is not me. So I'm going to abstain respectfully.

Conor Cunningham (00:34:41): You're putting me in a tough spot to have to vote on my own product.

Rob Collie (00:34:44): I know. I know, Connor, but sometimes you just have to rise. You have to rise above.

Thomas LaRock (00:34:47): Novelty. Can SQL Server get a one for novelty? It's definitely not a two, but can they even get a one? I think it can.

Conor Cunningham (00:34:54): What's your argument?

Thomas LaRock (00:34:55): It has grown from being just the database engine to being basically a multimodal engine at this point. When you started adding the stuff for OLAP and you started adding in just about everything else-

Rob Collie (00:35:06): Oh, hold on.

Thomas LaRock (00:35:07): You have support for Python.

Rob Collie (00:35:08): Yeah.

Thomas LaRock (00:35:08): I mean.

Rob Collie (00:35:09): So the OLAP product is a completely separate product.

Conor Cunningham (00:35:12): SQL Server, the license covers.

Rob Collie (00:35:13): Okay. No, no.

Thomas LaRock (00:35:14): It's software. We're talking software, Rob.

Rob Collie (00:35:16): No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We are not going to have the OLTP engine and the OLAP engine grouped together in this podcast. Not on my watch. So-

Conor Cunningham (00:35:26): All right.

Rob Collie (00:35:28): SQL, not the family-

Thomas LaRock (00:35:29): That doesn't matter. SQL Server is multi model right now. It doesn't matter what you say. That's a fact.

Rob Collie (00:35:34): That's fine. I don't install SSAS, right? Or SSRS or SSIS, any of those sorts of things. Let's consider SQL Server in its purest form.

Thomas LaRock (00:35:41): Sure.

Conor Cunningham (00:35:41): I'll make the case for one since this is maybe somewhat related to my work. Before my time, SQL 7.0, it was one of the first database engines to do automatic statistics and try really hard to make it turnkey. You didn't have to go manage all the file systems and stuff, so it was a democratized database engine that was a whole lot easier to use. Did not require expert level DBA to be able to run it. That doesn't mean that at the top end you didn't need an expert level DBA, that doesn't mean they weren't valuable, but I think that it was easier to run. So I'll make that case.

Conor Cunningham (00:36:09): And then I'll say more recently, a pile of the stuff that they've been working on since we did the query store is all about feedback loops, automatic learning algorithms where you self tune inside the database engine instead of forcing customers to debug certain classes of scenarios. So there's my case for a one in novelty.

Thomas LaRock (00:36:26): Oh, yeah. It's at least a one in novelty. At least a one.

Rob Collie (00:36:29): Let me see if I can tempt you to two by saying, what if we expand the definition of SQL Server to include the Azure version of the product? Again, I wouldn't know, but how groundbreaking has it been in the world of Cloud SQL?

Thomas LaRock (00:36:42): They're essentially the same product.

Rob Collie (00:36:44): Well, I understand, but a lot of work had to go into it to make it work better. Because when it first went to Azure, it was a little chippy.

Thomas LaRock (00:36:51): But that wasn't a SQL Server issue as much as an Azure one.

Rob Collie (00:36:53): That's what I'm saying. I want to give the SQL Server product credit for having made that transition to the cloud and been successful.

Conor Cunningham (00:37:01): And it was an early adopter. I think in fairness, Rob, we were one of the first big ones to go. And I can tell you that building something to work at scale, to have millions of databases running on hundreds of thousands to millions of computers worldwide, with all the automatic patching and the monitoring to look for problems without having any DBAs, I think that also would be considered fairly novel. I mean, not that we're the only people that have done it, but it's one of the largest scale versions of that. And it's really hard to do that at scale.

Rob Collie (00:37:29): That's what I was expecting. So, to me, this solidifies the one. I don't think this takes it to two. It didn't invent any of this stuff from whole cloth, but I feel very, very, very confident in giving it a one for novelty.

Thomas LaRock (00:37:42): And then you should also feel confident for a two for difficulty.

Rob Collie (00:37:45): Oh, yeah. Yeah, no doubt. Yeah. And two for impact. I think it's a five pointer. Yeah, yeah.

Thomas LaRock (00:37:50): Slam dunk.

Rob Collie (00:37:51): That's right.

Conor Cunningham (00:37:52): Give him a little hug.

Rob Collie (00:37:55): Ba-boom. Connor's like, "Thank God. Thank God my product gets in on the podcast that I'm on." You sit on the standards board. Imagine what would happen if...

Conor Cunningham (00:38:04): I didn't want to go just sit here and vote myself in.

Rob Collie (00:38:07): Who's next?

Conor Cunningham (00:38:08): Okay, so this one, Rob, is close to your heart. I think that the whole space of MMOs needs a Hall of Fame consideration.

Rob Collie (00:38:16): Yep, yep, yep.

Conor Cunningham (00:38:17): And I think this is a space where you started off with the ultimate onlines, Microsoft's amazing entrant, Asheron's Call. And then, of course, World of Warcraft. And so I think that the World of Warcraft is the one that I'll put up there, because it's probably, maybe not the first, but they were the first to do it at the scale with all the factions, with the right formulas, and it has had decade long impact in terms of market share.

Rob Collie (00:38:43): I am back now playing World of Warcraft Classic.

Conor Cunningham (00:38:46): Oh, wow.

Rob Collie (00:38:47): With Jamie.

Conor Cunningham (00:38:48): Cool.

Rob Collie (00:38:49): Yeah. So, I mean, it's so good that we're back playing a 99% clone of what was out in the single digit 2000s. It's unbelievable. Yes, World of Warcraft was on my list of candidates as well. I think it's very similar to Doom. I put it in a similar category as Doom. It is so incredibly immersive. There was so much detail. Even their decision to render the art, not attempt the photorealistic thing, but to go with deliberately lean into this cartoon world... We didn't worry about the graphics quality as much. Suddenly it all seemed to just be like, "This is what it was meant to be." I described it at the time as someone having gone and built a 400 square mile fantasy playground for you to go run around and explore. And it wasn't randomly generated as you ran around, there were enclaves and all kinds of things.

Rob Collie (00:39:42): I put it at a one for novelty because it did not invent any genre, but it took that genre to a place that no one had anticipated at the time. I think it's a two for difficulty. Holy hell, it hits two for difficulty with no trouble. And maximum impact is one for a game. I think we've already at least penciled in that as a rule. I think it's a 1, 2, 1 just like Doom.

Conor Cunningham (00:40:04): I have one that I want to challenge later on that last point, but we'll get there.

Rob Collie (00:40:08): Okay, there's a-

Thomas LaRock (00:40:09): Wow.

Rob Collie (00:40:09): I like that there might be a game with a two.

Thomas LaRock (00:40:11): A teaser.

Rob Collie (00:40:12): I think that is a... Yes.

Conor Cunningham (00:40:14): I got a teaser. Look at that. I'm ready for a podcast of my own.

Rob Collie (00:40:18): And you've already got the opinionated nature.

Conor Cunningham (00:40:23): Oh, that comes for free. That comes for free.

Rob Collie (00:40:23): Yeah. All right.

Conor Cunningham (00:40:25): Just to make sure, I think that not everyone got a chance to play all of these games, right, when they first came out. So I just want to give a shout out to Tribes, even though I don't think it deserves to be straight considered for the Hall of Fame, because it was so awesome as a game and it had all sorts of problems that made it perfect. Because you could take these people and fire a grenade at the ground and use that to launch yourself to the enemy base and not kill yourself in the process somehow. And then you could ski down the hills using your feet jet packs. It was so insane that it just worked as a game. And the gameplay was awesome, but they completely weren't able to really figure out how to make sequels that had the same game play. But it had the nice multiplayer piece to it that not every game got. Asheron's Call was a hot mess every single day in terms of how that thing was put together.

Conor Cunningham (00:41:15): I don't know if this is broadly known or not, but inside of Microsoft, we had some people in the programming team that went and wrote a shim layer for winsock.dll and they called it linsock.dll. And then they built a JavaScript object model on top of the protocol to play Asheron's Call. And then they built messenger interfaces so that we could talk to the game while it's playing at home all day at work because the game mechanics were so bad that you'd have to play 12 hours just to get anything to happen usefully. And so you couldn't do it if you had a job unless you wrote a program to play the game for you. And so there were so many bad versions of these games out there at the time that I think it is a testament to what World of Warcraft ended up being even though I was never a big player of it.

Rob Collie (00:41:58): I seem to remember that I would see you or Scott online on messenger and I would message you and you weren't actually there.

Conor Cunningham (00:42:05): No.

Rob Collie (00:42:05): It was just that messenger was being used to send commands to your Asheron's Call instance at home.

Conor Cunningham (00:42:11): Yes, I was botting Asheron's Call, and I used that to control it just in case anyone tried to come and kill my character while I was in the game.

Rob Collie (00:42:18): I'd forgotten about linsock. I never played, but I remember you guys, quote-unquote, playing a lot. And that became... Actually, that became Scott's job. He was only writing scripts for Asheron's Call. He...

Conor Cunningham (00:42:31): Anyway, so they were so bad that I think since World of Warcraft hasn't had any of that type of discussion, I think it really highlights where things were at the time.

Rob Collie (00:42:39): Agreed. Okay, my turn. Linux, your first thought is, "Oh, is that a product?"

Thomas LaRock (00:42:45): Linux is certainly difficult.

Rob Collie (00:42:47): It is a product.

Conor Cunningham (00:42:48): It's difficult to use, difficult to write.

Thomas LaRock (00:42:48): Difficult to use.

Rob Collie (00:42:52): Everything about it is difficult.

Conor Cunningham (00:42:57): It's like a recipe for an operating system.

Rob Collie (00:42:59): Yeah, if you're not willing to compile your own operating system, you don't deserve Linux.

Conor Cunningham (00:43:03): I have done it. It's not like it can't be done, but yeah, you got to want it. It's a certain kind of difficult right there.

Thomas LaRock (00:43:12): When it comes to Linux, you got to want it.

Rob Collie (00:43:16): Our friend Scott that keeps coming up is still, I think, only running Linux on his home machines. It's just like, "Oh, God."

Thomas LaRock (00:43:21): Fair. Linux, all right. Novelty. Does it score a one? It's definitely not a two.

Rob Collie (00:43:25): It's definitely not a two.

Conor Cunningham (00:43:27): No, it's a copy of another Unix operating system. But in fairness, someone had the audacity to do that.

Rob Collie (00:43:32): And to open source it, which was also weird, right? It defines and creates the open source software movement. You could call it a two based on the fact that it launched the open source software movement.

Conor Cunningham (00:43:44): I would put that in impact, myself. But-

Rob Collie (00:43:46): Okay, okay. Fine. That's fair, that's fair. So it's a one on novelty. Okay.

Conor Cunningham (00:43:51): All right.

Rob Collie (00:43:51): It's a 1, 2, 2, isn't it?

Conor Cunningham (00:43:54): No.

Rob Collie (00:43:54): Oh, yeah. Yeah. Impact is through the freaking roof.

Conor Cunningham (00:43:57): Linux had a huge impact. Huge impact.

Rob Collie (00:43:59): The internet runs on Linux. Everything runs on Linux. And then the open source thing, it's just the chef's kiss on top.

Conor Cunningham (00:44:04): It wasn't the only one to have open source at the time, but I think it democratized the notion and really brought it to the mainstream in terms of the number of people doing it. Because before, you had to really want it, right? The people that were writing the GNU tools and stuff were the only ones doing this open source thing, and now it's everyone.

Thomas LaRock (00:44:20): I don't want to spend too much time on it, but I would debate the difficulty part because it's open source.

Conor Cunningham (00:44:26): When was the last time you wrote an operating system?

Thomas LaRock (00:44:28): I would have a discussion about that and maybe even impact. But the thing is, getting this from five to four, it's still in, so it's not going to be worth the time. So we can move on.

Rob Collie (00:44:36): All right, so next up.

Thomas LaRock (00:44:38): I got a bunch now. We've done things that are very, let's say, Microsoft-centric, so...

Conor Cunningham (00:44:44): Like Linux?

Thomas LaRock (00:44:45): Well, I mean, Microsoft is a huge adopter of Linux. We know Microsoft loves Linux.

Conor Cunningham (00:44:50): But that wasn't the reason it got in.

Thomas LaRock (00:44:51): No, but we should... I mean, VisiCalc isn't either, but I guess in my mind I was like, "We should at least discuss something like, say, Oracle."

Rob Collie (00:45:00): Okay.

Conor Cunningham (00:45:01): Yeah, fair.

Rob Collie (00:45:01): Let's do it. Were they the first OLTP?

Conor Cunningham (00:45:02): No. They were one of the early, very commercially successful ones, for sure. Absolutely.

Thomas LaRock (00:45:09): I think databases existed before. Oracle didn't exist when Cog was doing his work. So mainframe and databases and relations existed.

Conor Cunningham (00:45:17): There were a bunch of other VSAMs and basically mainframe and IMS kinds of systems. There was a pile of stuff that was there, but it was before the relational model there was a pile of darkness. And then we got the relational model, and I think Oracle is easily the most successful early entered in that world. And they-

Thomas LaRock (00:45:34): It's definitely a one. Novelty is definitely a one, we could argue about the two. But difficulty, I'm going to say just like Linux, everything about Oracle is difficult.

Rob Collie (00:45:44): I'm pretty confident that Oracle gets a two for difficulty.

Thomas LaRock (00:45:47): And now impact.

Rob Collie (00:45:49): Is it a two or a one?

Thomas LaRock (00:45:50): Either way, Oracle's getting in. Do we need official scores?

Rob Collie (00:45:54): I like scores, yes.

Thomas LaRock (00:45:55): Okay.

Rob Collie (00:45:56): We're not going to wimp out on these things.

Thomas LaRock (00:45:57): I think Oracle gets a two for impact, for a variety of reasons. Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:46:01): All right. 1, 2, 2 for Oracle. All right.

Conor Cunningham (00:46:03): Okay.

Rob Collie (00:46:03): Conner-

Thomas LaRock (00:46:03): ... for a variety of reasons, yeah.

Rob Collie (00:46:03): All right. One, two, two for Oracle. All right. Connor, you're up?

Conor Cunningham (00:46:05): Minecraft.

Rob Collie (00:46:05): Minecraft.

Thomas LaRock (00:46:08): Wow.

Rob Collie (00:46:10): Two for novelty.

Thomas LaRock (00:46:11): Really?

Rob Collie (00:46:12): Yeah.

Thomas LaRock (00:46:13): Like Legos didn't exist before Minecraft?

Conor Cunningham (00:46:16): Not on Java.

Rob Collie (00:46:19): Here's the thing. Imagine someone telling you that this is a game they're going to make before they made it, and you go...

Conor Cunningham (00:46:27): No one makes games in Java. Right?

Rob Collie (00:46:29): And what is the gameplay?

Thomas LaRock (00:46:31): Well, there are these cows.

Rob Collie (00:46:33): Punching trees and-

Conor Cunningham (00:46:35): You punch the trees to get the wood and...

Rob Collie (00:46:41): Yeah. I mean, it's like what kind of crazy hash smoking idea was this? I don't know.

Thomas LaRock (00:46:47): Wait, did Washington state legalize marijuana and then Minecraft was born? Because that would be crazy.

Rob Collie (00:46:52): No. No, no, no. Minecraft was long before.

Conor Cunningham (00:46:52): Microsoft bought Mojang.

Thomas LaRock (00:46:52): Okay.

Conor Cunningham (00:46:58): It was created elsewhere and then Microsoft bought them. Yeah.

Thomas LaRock (00:47:01): It was created in Colorado after they legalized pot.

Conor Cunningham (00:47:02): No, no, no, no. It was in Europe.

Rob Collie (00:47:04): It was in Amsterdam. Amsterdam. It was [inaudible 00:47:06].

Thomas LaRock (00:47:06): Amsterdam. There you go.

Conor Cunningham (00:47:07): [inaudible 00:47:07] Amsterdam.

Thomas LaRock (00:47:10): All right. So, you say it's a two for novelty. Okay.

Rob Collie (00:47:12): It was programmed on the ayahuasca in South America.

Thomas LaRock (00:47:17): It's definitely a one. I don't know about a two. Because I see elements of lots of other games in there, but I get it.

Rob Collie (00:47:23): I'm prepared to call it a two on novelty.

Thomas LaRock (00:47:25): I get it. And my vote has no bearing because you're a tyrant, like you said earlier.

Rob Collie (00:47:29): Oh, I mean, so far I've been more accommodating than I anticipated. Let's put it that way.

Conor Cunningham (00:47:34): My whole point of putting Minecraft forward, it was not whether I think won't get into the hall of fame. It was whether the last one was a two or not.

Rob Collie (00:47:41): No, it's a one on the end.

Thomas LaRock (00:47:42): Oh, we're getting to that. So, difficulty for Minecraft, I imagine it was difficult?

Rob Collie (00:47:47): I don't know it.

Conor Cunningham (00:47:48): They've reimplemented it. Now it has an extensibility in your face so you can build your own extensions. Have you guys gone and seen... People build all sorts of crazy extensions in Minecraft. People have implemented whole CPUs now in Minecraft because the modern world is there to be able to take that and actually, for whatever crazy reason, I'm going to go simulate an X86 inside of Minecraft using all of the stuff they did with the circuits and whatnot.

Rob Collie (00:48:10): Yeah. The fire wire or whatever. RJ was doing that to make a combination lock for people to get into his base. Right? And it's the same thing as a circuit board. The fire wire had to go underground to cross each other. I was like, "Oh my God."

Conor Cunningham (00:48:26): I would just say that it's got a degree of depth to it because it has no rules, that you can build anything you want, and it's not like Lego. It's really, they just created the physics behind it, and then people have now built programs to talk to Minecraft and then take real world things and start simulating. They've put a copy of the Library of Congress in there so that you can get all the banned books in the world for places that have banned books so you can work around all of those firewall restrictions. So, it has an impact beyond the game itself, which is kind of why I think it's got an impact that maybe is a bit different in how you evaluate it.

Rob Collie (00:49:02): Yeah. I just don't think that we can say that it has more impact than a World of Warcraft or a Doom. I just don't think it's changed.

Thomas LaRock (00:49:10): Really?

Rob Collie (00:49:10): Yeah. I really don't.

Thomas LaRock (00:49:11): You're aware that Minecraft is actually teaching children to code, right?

Rob Collie (00:49:15): They're teaching Connor's kids to code. It's not teaching-

Thomas LaRock (00:49:19): It taught my kids code.

Rob Collie (00:49:21): It's not like all of humanity is now being brought up by Minecraft. That's not what's happening. I appreciate the challenge to the two on impact, but I think the rule holds. I think it's still a one.

Conor Cunningham (00:49:31): All right. What about the difficulty?

Rob Collie (00:49:33): It's either a two, one, one or a two, two, one.

Thomas LaRock (00:49:35): Yeah. It's in. Minecraft is in.

Rob Collie (00:49:37): It's in, but we still have to score it, Tom. Connor-

Thomas LaRock (00:49:39): I think it's a six. So does Connor.

Rob Collie (00:49:42): It's a five.

Conor Cunningham (00:49:42): Whether I would argue it's a two, two, one or a one, two, two, probably still score at a five, but I think it has at least as much impact as pretty much any other game.

Rob Collie (00:49:53): I agree with that. I just don't think it gets into the two zone.

Conor Cunningham (00:49:57): This is why we have these discussions, to argue about it later.

Rob Collie (00:50:00): There you go. Two, two, one for Minecraft is what goes in the books and we move on.

Thomas LaRock (00:50:04): That's a horrible mistake.

Conor Cunningham (00:50:05): Travesty, Rob.

Rob Collie (00:50:07): Okay. It's a layup. Not a layup, but kind of the reason why we're here. SSAS Tabular. We could call it SSAS Tabular. We could call it Power BI. I don't care. I'm not going to give it multiple entrance.

Thomas LaRock (00:50:17): Let's call it Power BI then.

Rob Collie (00:50:19): Okay. We'll call it Power BI. Fine. I know what you're doing there, Tom. You're setting this up for Power Query not getting in. Okay. I know what you're thinking. See that? But I don't care. We'll call it SSI -- it's the VertiPaq Engine combined with DAX is just something else. This is where the idea for software hall of fame came from, is me saying if there was such a thing, this would be a first ballot hall of famer. Now, it did not invent the old app space. So, the easiest path to a two on novelty would be have invented the space.

Thomas LaRock (00:50:54): Yeah.

Rob Collie (00:50:55): However, I think it still has a case for two in novelty, and that... Kind of like Doom, in a way. It pushed the envelope so far so fast, both technically speaking in terms of data capacity and processing speed. That query speed is insane in this thing. Right. But also, at the same time, it pushed the envelope in terms of approachability, usability. This went from something that was arcane to something that Excel people could learn. Connor can attest to this, of Microsoft employees of the mid to late 1990s. I was not that into it, technically speaking. I didn't really care that much. Connor kept trying to get me to learn C++ by writing a database engine. I'm like, "Yeah, that sounds great in all, but nah, not going to do that. It's not going to happen." So, the fact that I learned this system, this platform, and loved it is also a testament to its approachability. I could based on that give it a two in novelty, but if we decide that that's not quite enough for two, it's just a one, I'll go quietly.

Conor Cunningham (00:51:55): Tom, you probably should go next. I have a small opinion to share, but I think yours probably matters more than mine.

Thomas LaRock (00:52:00): In terms of novelty, I can't imagine it getting to be a two. While I appreciate everything Rob has said and still understand what I say doesn't matter here, I just don't feel that in terms of novelty it's a two because I think... There's nothing about it that I look at and I just say amazingly original. When I look at it, I think of things like, yeah, it stole a bunch of market share from Tableau, which was overpriced and underperforming in a lot of ways. And I think it did a lot of the great things, but two?

Rob Collie (00:52:26): This has talked me into it two by arguing for one if I've ever heard it. I think almost everything you just said underscores how little you understand its actual impact.

Thomas LaRock (00:52:40): I was talking novelty. I was talking novelty, not impact.

Rob Collie (00:52:43): Novelty. Right. But it is so novel. For example, Tableau doesn't even have the thing I'm talking about. Tableau isn't even... It isn't prior art for SSAS Tabular. It's not. Connor. Take us home, man.

Conor Cunningham (00:52:58): Yeah. So, I'll look at this a slightly different way, and maybe this will help you resolve your internal demons. The VertiPaq Engine, I have the luxury of having studied it in depth, and it is hard like super technically challenging stuff. So, I think that I would describe it more in the one, two category as opposed to novelty being two because of the actual work required to make all the internals work. And I'm in a special spot as a... I can read the code. I'll make the additional statement that the VertiPaq Engine was put into SQL server and is the basis of the Columnstore index there, and so that also shows that it's had an impact already to one you've already loaded into the hall of fame.

Rob Collie (00:53:38): I think it's a two for difficulty, no doubt. But you also have to consider the implementation of DAX, the DAX language, everything.

Thomas LaRock (00:53:45): But that was Excel. Not Power BI.

Rob Collie (00:53:47): No. No, no, no. This is why I started off by calling it SSAS Tabular because it first appeared in Power Pivot.

Thomas LaRock (00:53:54): I gotcha. Yeah. All right.

Conor Cunningham (00:53:56): I don't speak DAX, man, so I don't really know. I've always looked at it and just said, " Nope, I'm going to go back to SQL," but I understand that the low code market or the not SQL people have found it to be quite useful. So, I don't wish to dis on it other than to say I've never been able to get my head wrapped around why I would need a different language, but that doesn't mean that I'm right.

Rob Collie (00:54:13): Yeah. Okay.

Thomas LaRock (00:54:14): No, I hear you Rob, now, on the novelty more for something like that, but I also look at VertiPaq as being something that Microsoft bought. It wasn't like-

Rob Collie (00:54:23): No, no. No, no, no. No, no. I was there when it was being written.

Thomas LaRock (00:54:28): Oh, I thought VertiPaq was an acquisition.

Rob Collie (00:54:29): Oh no, no it's-

Thomas LaRock (00:54:31): Okay. [inaudible 00:54:31]. All right.

Rob Collie (00:54:31): This is homegrown. And by the way, years later, they don't talk about this, but years later they run benchmarks against all the new Columnstores and everything and this thing is still faster.

Thomas LaRock (00:54:41): Okay. So, see, I didn't have that information. I had misinformation. Disinformation. But it's okay. So, I can stand behind a two for novel and difficulty.

Rob Collie (00:54:50): All right. So, we're going to go two, two. And then this is in one of those buckets where we have to extrapolate a bit because it is so new. It's making a huge difference. For example, my company exists, whereas it couldn't have before. The whole model of our company, the entire business model, who we hire, how fast we operate. Obviously our company isn't changing the course of human history. Not yet anyway. But this revolution's going on everywhere. We might someday call it a two on impact. We can call it a one for now.

Thomas LaRock (00:55:19): I agree. It's in with a five.

Rob Collie (00:55:21): All right. Five it is. All right, that was my nominee. Moving on.

Thomas LaRock (00:55:25): Could we say the Office Suite? We did Excel, so should we think about Word?

Rob Collie (00:55:30): Nah.

Thomas LaRock (00:55:31): All right. We going to focus on data?

Rob Collie (00:55:33): Word processors and PowerPoint. I mean, PowerPoint's pretty amazing, but maybe in a-

Thomas LaRock (00:55:37): Okay, that's fine. So, we're not going to talk about Access, but should we talk about SharePoint?

Rob Collie (00:55:42): Oh, SharePoint, for sure, is on the... I mean, honestly I think PowerPoint and Access are both worth discussing. Word is not.

Thomas LaRock (00:55:48): Oh.

Rob Collie (00:55:49): Word is not going to get in.

Thomas LaRock (00:55:51): Wow. Well, let's go SharePoint then.

Rob Collie (00:55:52): SharePoint. All right. Novelty.

Thomas LaRock (00:55:57): Novelty. No.

Rob Collie (00:55:57): God, it's a question of how you even look at it. Right?

Thomas LaRock (00:56:00): I can't even see it as a one. What's novel about SharePoint?

Rob Collie (00:56:03): Team-based websites that were a hybrid of document storage and properties and user definable lists like single table databases with the data validation rules and transactional processing and everything. I mean, in terms of human curated database tables, which is... I think it's a pretty big deal.

Thomas LaRock (00:56:21): So, I don't think SharePoint or the team before... Did Microsoft invent SharePoint or did they buy it?

Rob Collie (00:56:27): Yeah, invented it.

Thomas LaRock (00:56:28): Okay. I don't think it's original because I think there were competitors that Microsoft just copied.

Rob Collie (00:56:34): I don't know what they were, though.

Thomas LaRock (00:56:37): Stellent was definitely a content management system, so to speak. Stellent was definitely one competitor.

Rob Collie (00:56:44): So, here's the interesting thing. This whole thing grew out of office web server extensions as well as, believe it or not, it also grew out of an internal project by two people on the office program management team who built the specification server-

Thomas LaRock (00:57:03): All right.

Rob Collie (00:57:03): ... for Office. Our specs all went into this thing built by these two guys that were both PMs, by the way. And it was documents and properties. This was in 1998 they were working on this project.

Thomas LaRock (00:57:16): All right. So, I'll give you the one for novel. I can agree to at least a one.

Rob Collie (00:57:19): I think one is appropriate. There's probably someone out there who would argue for it two, but I don't think we disrespect it by giving it a zero.

Thomas LaRock (00:57:28): All right.

Rob Collie (00:57:28): This is one of those products that on difficulty it sort of resembles the Linux thing where... Especially if you considered the original version. We had a whole podcast, Connor, about how SharePoint avoided its own complexity implosion. The product had to be reinvented because it was about to collapse under its own weight. And they were moving to the cloud, which turned out to be a godsend because it allowed them to do some things that saved their bacon. Right? But it's a tremendous effort. In terms of difficulty, we've got to give SharePoint online some consideration. It's kind of like a sequel thing. Right? This is one of those things that was difficult to begin with and difficult to transition to the cloud, and to keep something like this lights up all the time, I think it's a two.

Thomas LaRock (00:58:10): Okay. So, impact.

Rob Collie (00:58:12): I mean, there's a whole building at Microsoft that's full of SharePoint people.

Conor Cunningham (00:58:15): They run SharePoint online on top of SQL Azure, and so we were there at... They were one of the best, I'll call it, software as a service ISVs, even though they're first-party Microsoft, they're operationally extremely, extremely good at how they run. Not every single SaaS ISV has a great DR story, for example, to do disaster recovery. SharePoint tests theirs every six months and they go through the playbook and they make sure it works. And all of that is because they have top notch engineers that are doing that for them. And it's amazing to see how they've made all that work. So, I would say that they were one of the best funded and most successful at devising what it means to run large scale internet-sized ISVs with a public-facing website.

Rob Collie (00:59:01): Yeah. They're are two with flying colors. Right? If we had a three, we would be talking about it, but we don't have a three. So, impact one or two?

Thomas LaRock (00:59:10): Why is zero not a part of this discussion?

Conor Cunningham (00:59:13): Well, I mean, it's a billion plus dollar product, right? I mean it has impact, right?

Rob Collie (00:59:17): It was the fastest product to a billion dollars in annual revenue in Microsoft history.

Thomas LaRock (00:59:21): Not because it was good.

Rob Collie (00:59:23): Hold on. But that meant that it was being bought and deployed and used as the information hub for teams. It's also used shockingly frequently as the basis for public-facing websites.

Thomas LaRock (00:59:36): So, is that billion dollars, is that taking inflation or anything like that? Are you comparing apples to oranges when you say a billion?

Rob Collie (00:59:43): No, yeah, it was a billion in the early 2000-

Conor Cunningham (00:59:46): Yeah, it was a long time ago. It was a billion dollar product. So, I would say at some level, if you look at how it's implemented as a database product, they basically are not a relational database product user. They just happen to use SQL as a transactional store that has backups, and then they hint every single query despite what SQL would do to try to optimize and help them. So, it's not using SQL as a regular database engine, it is just using it as a storage substrate at some more basic level. And despite that, they were able to make that product run on top of something that wasn't designed to run it and then make it a billion dollar product. So, I'd say that the number of people using it is the impact here, not the revenue, as such.

Thomas LaRock (01:00:28): So, the fact that many of SharePoint's customers are essentially hostages, because they're a Microsoft shop and this is what we're going to use and we're paying software assurance, so we pay 2,500 bucks an employee for the year and stuff like that, I get it. I get they contribute to the bottom line. I just don't know that that market for SharePoint, all of those people went there willingly. I can agree to a one just on SharePoint Saturdays.

Rob Collie (01:00:52): How many technologies, how many products have inspired Saturday conference circuits?

Thomas LaRock (01:00:57): You're right.

Rob Collie (01:00:57): It's unreal seeing people show up on a day off from work for a SQL Saturday or a SharePoint Saturday. And what else do we have that's like that? There's a whole category of professionals that were invented-

Thomas LaRock (01:01:08): At least.

Rob Collie (01:01:08): ... around this. So, we call it a one, two, one. All right. SharePoint. Yeah. I mean, at least. A case could be made for a two on impact there. So, SharePoint was on my list, so we're making progress. What else we got? Is it my turn? All right. Netscape. I accidentally did some research on this by listening to a podcast with Mark Andreessen within the last week.

Thomas LaRock (01:01:29): Yeah, yeah.

Rob Collie (01:01:30): Oh God yes. Oh yeah.

Conor Cunningham (01:01:32): It's not a protocol, but it's kind of close to a protocol.

Rob Collie (01:01:36): It drove the creation of protocols. Right?

Conor Cunningham (01:01:40): Fair.

Rob Collie (01:01:40): Which is something else, right? Like HTDPS. SSL didn't exist until Netscape made it happen. That's nutty, right.

Thomas LaRock (01:01:46): Well, Mosaic. What was first? Mosaic? Mosaic came before Netscape.

Conor Cunningham (01:01:49): I mean, there was one or two other things.

Rob Collie (01:01:51): Mosaic came before Netscape.

Thomas LaRock (01:01:53): True.

Rob Collie (01:01:54): So, I think it's a one, two arguable. Right? The way you can start thinking of it as a two is when you start thinking about how they introduced the concept of JavaScript and DOM and SSL. Right? You would never have been able to do credit card transactions over the internet. If it hadn't been for Netscape pioneering. And now again, I didn't realize all of that until I listened to the Andreessen podcast. They turned the internet into read/write in a way that it previously basically been read only. And then the other browsers followed suit. Internet Explorer and all that. They were just cloning the trail blazing that was being done by Netscape. It's at least fair to discuss a two for Netscape. And again, I probably wouldn't have been thinking two for Netscape. Again, knowing what I knew about Mosaic, if it hadn't been for just a little brief history lesson that I got just recently on accident. When you consider the invention of JavaScript and DOM and SSL, it's getting in that two range.

Thomas LaRock (01:02:51): Well, some of the things I'm thinking about, I think, fall into difficulty and impact, not just novelty. For example, Netscape and Mosaic and stuff, don't they lead to Berners-Lee inventing HTML. That came first.

Rob Collie (01:03:04): No, I think HTML preexisted.

Thomas LaRock (01:03:06): That has me rethinking the novelty of Netscape. I think it's a clear one, but I'm not sure about a two.

Rob Collie (01:03:13): Connor, bring us home here. Is it a one or a two?

Conor Cunningham (01:03:15): I think that the HTTPS part is extremely, extremely important. That part was novel. And to Rob's point, the whole internet boom thing took off right around then when that started to happen. Right? Everyone started to get their internetshopwhatever.com, and then you could buy stupid stuff and have it delivered to your house. And then we got pets.com.

Thomas LaRock (01:03:37): For like six months.

Rob Collie (01:03:40): Which is so funny because now we have Chewy. We still order all of our shit from a pets.com clone.

Thomas LaRock (01:03:47): They spent all their money on one Super Bowl ad.

Rob Collie (01:03:49): Is that what it is?

Conor Cunningham (01:03:50): Yeah, it was the whole crash. Afterwards, they tried to get the sock puppet to do other ads. I don't know if you guys remember that.

Rob Collie (01:03:57): That's right. Yeah. They brought him back. Yeah.

Conor Cunningham (01:03:58): And it didn't work. But I think they should try again. I think the time is right.

Rob Collie (01:04:03): [inaudible 01:04:03] anytime. So, we're going to go two. This is a six pointer.

Thomas LaRock (01:04:06): How difficult is it to write a web browser? Come on.

Rob Collie (01:04:09): Yeah. Again, though, they had to go and take the RSA algorithm and twist it and turn it into... They had so many things they had to do.

Thomas LaRock (01:04:16): So, wait a second. We did Netscape, but not Mosaic. Mosaic doesn't have the... Okay. All right. I'm with you. So, Netscape does.

Conor Cunningham (01:04:24): They didn't do the HTTPS part. I'm specifically saying that whole internet commerce part. Mosaic was the proof point that you could get pages rendered on the internet. The HTTPS part is the part that lets you do the transaction.

Thomas LaRock (01:04:36): Is Mosaic in the hall of fame?

Rob Collie (01:04:38): No, because even Mosaic came after Links. Even mosaic didn't invent the category. I think Mosaic's probably like a one, zero, one.

Thomas LaRock (01:04:47): Yeah. All right. No, just misses it.

Rob Collie (01:04:48): Or one, one, one.

Thomas LaRock (01:04:49): It set the table.

Rob Collie (01:04:51): All right. Yep. So, there we go. There's an Netscape. Next.

Conor Cunningham (01:04:54): We're allowed to do series? Series of software, series of games?

Thomas LaRock (01:04:59): Why not?

Rob Collie (01:04:59): No. I'm not calling Doom a series. I'm calling Doom Doom one.

Conor Cunningham (01:05:03): Okay. So, yeah. I was thinking Doom plus the engine, but fair. Doom one by itself was revolutionary, and I think if you pick a game, that's great. I was going to throw out the Ultima series.

Rob Collie (01:05:14): Yeah. Yeah. That's a hell of a series. And Final Fantasy, as well. Right? I mean, Final Fantasy people go to concerts just to listen to the music.

Conor Cunningham (01:05:23): Right. So my argument for Ultima is a little simpler. Right? It helped invent what a PC game is. Right? They didn't have a market, they didn't have stores for PC games. The guy was literally putting Ziploc bags together and selling stuff. That sort of created the market.

Rob Collie (01:05:38): So, a two on novelty, right?

Conor Cunningham (01:05:40): Yeah. And then the guy, I don't know if everyone's aware of this, but Lord British, he lives here in Austin, and he has a castle that he built. And it has an observatory. And he can press a button and his master bed can go up to the roof and sleep under the stars. It also has secret passage ways and all sorts of stuff. Just like the game.

Rob Collie (01:06:00): I think this guy is the basis for the... Who was it in Ready Player One? The-

Conor Cunningham (01:06:04): A little bit, a little bit. Yeah. All right. Eccentric. A little eccentric, but visionary. So, anyway, Richard Garriott is his name. He basically personified Lord British who led the whole series of the games. And then they had morality is the first ideas they started putting into some of these games where you had to make good choices versus bad choices and have consequences for that. So, it was just a thought.

Rob Collie (01:06:27): I think I'll allow it is what I'm leaning towards. And we give it credit for its evolution over time.

Thomas LaRock (01:06:34): Exactly. Excel. It's a series.

Rob Collie (01:06:36): Okay. All right. I take it back. We allow series because we already have. Doom is interesting and World of Warcraft is interesting in that one installment they did what they needed to do. They make it in based on a single instance. But SQL server, if we just had said one version of it-

Thomas LaRock (01:06:54): Well, we would be calling it Sybase.

Rob Collie (01:06:55): ... we wouldn't say the same things about it as we say about the series. Yeah. Okay. Maybe yes. All right. Moving on. Ultima. All right, I'm in. So, it's a two for novelty, sounds like a two for difficulty, and a one for impact. It's a two, two, oner.

Thomas LaRock (01:07:13): Done deal.

Rob Collie (01:07:14): I thought we were going to rule it out and then we end up-

Thomas LaRock (01:07:16): Yeah. I'm thinking that whoever set the bar just maybe didn't do it correctly, because this is just way too easy.

Conor Cunningham (01:07:23): I didn't even have to bribe him.

Rob Collie (01:07:25): Yeah.

Conor Cunningham (01:07:25): I mean, I think there's a case to be made. I wouldn't necessarily say that every entrance in the series was grand, but many of them were quite good. And there were a lot of things that were firsts at the time like it was one of the first games to have day and night in an adventure game where you had to think differently about that. So, I think there was some stuff there that was definitely part of my childhood, but that doesn't necessarily mean it goes in the hall of fame, but I remember it quite fondly.

Thomas LaRock (01:07:51): The same subject of games, what about flight simulator?

Conor Cunningham (01:07:55): Interesting. I'm not a long... historically not a flight simulator fan. The early ones in the '80s, I could never get off the ground, and if I did, I immediately crashed. I got the new one and I will say that it's accessible for a lot of different skill sets, and I think that what they've done with the latest one specifically is extremely pretty. They will take real weather from the world and then render it when you're flying around in whatever jet you have. So, that part is kind of cool.

Conor Cunningham (01:08:26): And then if you want to do something stupid like take off from Telluride, Colorado and go land at Area 51, or at least what looks like Area 51, you can do that. Have at it. They're not going to shoot you down. There's no military aircraft flying around doing that. But it is kind of an interesting game where during the early parts of the pandemic when we were all stuck at home, I got it and I would go fly around for a while because it was just that pretty. It was easy to travel without having to travel since you really couldn't. Now, as to whether that means it belongs in the hall of fame or not, I will reserve judgment.

Rob Collie (01:08:54): And we need to keep moving because we've got a lot of serious products on the list with not a lot of time left. However, so we could purgatory flight sim? All right.

Thomas LaRock (01:09:03): Okay.

Rob Collie (01:09:03): So we could purgatory flight SIM. All right.

Thomas LaRock (01:09:03): Okay.

Rob Collie (01:09:04): I'm going to pick up the pace. Google.

Conor Cunningham (01:09:06): You mean the search engine?

Rob Collie (01:09:07): Yeah.

Conor Cunningham (01:09:07): Not like Google Chat or Google Hangouts or any of that stuff?

Rob Collie (01:09:10): No, no, no.

Conor Cunningham (01:09:10): Just the search engine.

Rob Collie (01:09:11): Google search engine. Yeah. It's at least a one off novelty because they had a very audacious approach. This is another one of those products that if I was a venture capitalist at the time and they came to pitch it to me, I would've thrown them out of my office. You're going to index the whole internet GTFO. Right? It's jaw dropping how audacious it was.

Thomas LaRock (01:09:32): Oh, so novelty, maybe a one.

Rob Collie (01:09:34): Yahoo was like human curated, Yahoo sucked.

Thomas LaRock (01:09:37): That's not the point. There's no novelty about what they were doing because other people were doing it.

Rob Collie (01:09:43): Yeah. I know.

Thomas LaRock (01:09:43): The only novelty was that they were going to find the way to monetize it efficiently versus what the other people were trying to do.

Rob Collie (01:09:51): But first and foremost, they were going to find the way to make the search engine not suck. And so I put them in the same sort of category as Doom for novelty.

Thomas LaRock (01:09:59): I give them a one.

Rob Collie (01:10:01): Other people were making 3D shooters. Right. Doom was a different animal.

Conor Cunningham (01:10:05): I think that the challenge here is there were a lot of people manually curating whatever they were presenting. Google was the first to go straight algorithmic on a lot of that stuff.

Rob Collie (01:10:12): Yeah. Give them a one.

Conor Cunningham (01:10:13): Figure out how to scale at it.

Rob Collie (01:10:15): They're one, two, two, right? Or are they a one, two, one?

Thomas LaRock (01:10:18): Okay. So we're talking about a series now, because we're open to series. Because if we're going to limit ourselves to just what they were in 1998...

Rob Collie (01:10:26): Google Docs is a separate product for example. Right?

Thomas LaRock (01:10:29): No, no.

Rob Collie (01:10:29): Just the search engine. Okay.

Thomas LaRock (01:10:29): I'm just talking about how Google Search has evolved over 20 years.

Conor Cunningham (01:10:32): Yeah, yeah. I think it's had two in the impact. And I think it's definitely two in the difficulty.

Rob Collie (01:10:36): All right, so it's a one, two, two.

Conor Cunningham (01:10:37): I'm fine with that.

Rob Collie (01:10:38): It's a one, two, two.

Conor Cunningham (01:10:39): All right.

Rob Collie (01:10:39): It walks in. Google Docs.

Thomas LaRock (01:10:42): Ooh.

Rob Collie (01:10:43): It's at least a one for novelty.

Thomas LaRock (01:10:45): Because it was online? Yeah

Rob Collie (01:10:47): Crazy online from the beginning.

Thomas LaRock (01:10:48): Yeah. Okay.

Rob Collie (01:10:49): Again, we didn't take it seriously at first.

Thomas LaRock (01:10:52): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:10:52): Are you kidding me? Come on. Right? This will never work.

Thomas LaRock (01:10:55): Yeah. And people sharing the same doc, editing in real time.

Rob Collie (01:10:59): Which by the way, I've now switched to, with the Office apps, with the OneDrive, save to OneDrive mode and it's just, oh my God, is it better. It's just so, so feel good. Like smiley happy. I still get happy feelings just from the fact that my doc is being saved and I can change computers and not worry about it.

Thomas LaRock (01:11:18): That's right. Yeah. Gotcha, one.

Rob Collie (01:11:20): It's amazing.

Thomas LaRock (01:11:21): So I'm sorry. Google Docs is for novelty, we said.

Rob Collie (01:11:25): I think it's a one. I mean it didn't invent the Office suite.

Thomas LaRock (01:11:27): No. Right. So we said it's a one? Definitely one. Yeah, okay.

Rob Collie (01:11:30): You could argue for two, I wouldn't look askance at someone arguing for two.

Thomas LaRock (01:11:33): So how difficult was this?

Rob Collie (01:11:35): Hell for difficulty.

Thomas LaRock (01:11:36): I don't know how difficult. A two, do you think?

Rob Collie (01:11:38): It's super, super difficult. Re-implementing the Office Suite, but also making it run a combination of on the server, but also in JavaScript locally so that you're not waiting on every round trip for everything. It's like the most audacious client server application of its time. When you think about impact, it's either a one or a two. It forced Microsoft to reinvent itself. Even in terms of the Office Suite. I mean Google docs is in whether it gets a one or a two at this point for impact.

Thomas LaRock (01:12:08): I think most classrooms use Google docs.

Rob Collie (01:12:11): Yeah.

Thomas LaRock (01:12:12): Or Blackboard, which I don't know...

Rob Collie (01:12:15): The feeble argument that was being made about Minecraft actually works for Google docs in terms of teaching all the kids.

Thomas LaRock (01:12:21): Wow.

Conor Cunningham (01:12:22): I could Will Smith you right now.

Thomas LaRock (01:12:28): I was going to say, he's cherry picking what parts of history he wants to pay attention to.

Conor Cunningham (01:12:30): You're lucky you're not in the same room.

Rob Collie (01:12:31): Keep your Minecraft out of your mouth.

Conor Cunningham (01:12:34): That's right.

Rob Collie (01:12:36): Keep my Minecraft out of your mouth. Right.

Conor Cunningham (01:12:38): You can say that.

Rob Collie (01:12:43): All right. So Google docs in at a 1, 2, 2.

Thomas LaRock (01:12:44): Yeah. All right. It's a five. Yeah. Wow.

Rob Collie (01:12:47): Napster.

Conor Cunningham (01:12:50): Pre or post bankruptcy?

Rob Collie (01:12:52): Well, I mean at its peak and remember it's historical impact,

Conor Cunningham (01:12:56): It created the genre by destroying the business model. So everything else there...

Rob Collie (01:13:01): It made Metallica look bad.

Thomas LaRock (01:13:03): That's not hard.

Conor Cunningham (01:13:07): It's basically software that was piracy, right?

Rob Collie (01:13:11): It got John Mellencamp to say that the Internet was the most evil invention in human history.

Thomas LaRock (01:13:15): He's not wrong.

Conor Cunningham (01:13:19): Had an impact. That's one way of having impact.

Thomas LaRock (01:13:25): Two on impact. Yes.

Rob Collie (01:13:26): Yeah. It's a two impact.

Thomas LaRock (01:13:26): I don't think it was that difficult to do file sharing.

Rob Collie (01:13:30): It probably outscores on novelty versus difficulty.

Thomas LaRock (01:13:33): Yeah. I think so. I think 2, 1, 2.

Rob Collie (01:13:37): It's a 2, 1, 2?

Thomas LaRock (01:13:37): I think so.

Rob Collie (01:13:37): I can get behind a 2, 1, 2 for Napster for sure. Yeah. All right. That was easy. So my wife suggested one that I wouldn't have thought of. It's either Avid or Avid, A V I D2, it's the first digital editing software in history. By the way, let's not even do this one first. YouTube is up for candidacy. We'll come back to Avid.

Thomas LaRock (01:13:58): Then we got to talk Photoshop if we're in this area.

Rob Collie (01:14:01): Sure. Fine. That's how she actually got to Avid was by thinking of Photoshop by the way.

Thomas LaRock (01:14:06): So YouTube.

Rob Collie (01:14:07): There's an outside chance this is a six.

Thomas LaRock (01:14:10): No. Why would it be a six? Why is it a two for novelty?

Rob Collie (01:14:12): Because video on the internet actually wasn't really a thing until YouTube.

Thomas LaRock (01:14:17): No, it was, it just wasn't...

Rob Collie (01:14:19): No, no, it just wasn't something you ever did.

Thomas LaRock (01:14:21): Okay. Yeah. As an individual person, me uploading a video, I get that YouTube made that possible at the time. But watching videos online was already a thing.

Rob Collie (01:14:31): No, no, no, not really. Because.

Thomas LaRock (01:14:33): Yes.

Rob Collie (01:14:33): If you had a video you wanted to share, you had to get the file to someone.

Thomas LaRock (01:14:37): No I'm talking like a news agency, or ESPN, or highlights. You can watch videos.

Rob Collie (01:14:44): So video sharing.

Thomas LaRock (01:14:45): Right. I get you.

Rob Collie (01:14:46): On the Internet, remember the "Spirit of Christmas", the original South Park thing? Connor that we...

Conor Cunningham (01:14:54): Yes. That was all then right around YouTube.

Rob Collie (01:14:54): That was difficult to even share that.

Conor Cunningham (01:14:56): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:14:56): But because we had the benefit of it. Once it got on the Microsoft network,

Conor Cunningham (01:14:59): We could get a copy.

Rob Collie (01:15:01): Even then you double click that thing sometimes and you didn't have the right codec. You didn't have the right player. You know, it just, yeah, awful.

Thomas LaRock (01:15:07): And let's not forget that it all started because they wanted to watch Jan Jackson's boob fall out at the Super Bowl halftime show.

Rob Collie (01:15:14): I've heard this rumor.

Thomas LaRock (01:15:14): That is the origin story. I should be able to watch naked women.

Rob Collie (01:15:18): The internet is for porn.

Conor Cunningham (01:15:19): I don't know if that's the reason that got created, but I do remember the sharing part was not easy before.

Thomas LaRock (01:15:26): That's right. So novelty fine is a two. Okay. Difficulty.

Rob Collie (01:15:28): Definitely a two. I mean, holy hell again, one of those just jaw dropping. You're going to do what? You're going to open this up. People can upload videos in a million different formats.

Thomas LaRock (01:15:39): Yeah but Rob.

Rob Collie (01:15:39): And then they're going to be able to play at different resolutions at different connection speeds and everything.

Thomas LaRock (01:15:44): Not just that, but didn't we have a guest that talked about the YouTube that invented the thing.

Rob Collie (01:15:48): Yeah. He invented skippable ads.

Thomas LaRock (01:15:49): Exactly. Like this is TrueView.

Rob Collie (01:15:51): AKA TrueView. Yeah. The TrueView advertising model.

Thomas LaRock (01:15:54): So impact.

Rob Collie (01:15:56): This is a six.

Thomas LaRock (01:15:57): Yeah. I think it's a six.

Rob Collie (01:16:01): YouTube's a walk in. All right. So then we go to Avid. So before Avid it was the very first digital editing software for video. The only alternative up until that point was splicing film. Physically splicing film.

Thomas LaRock (01:16:13): So Avid was the first digital editing.

Rob Collie (01:16:13): Yes.

Rob Collie (01:16:17): Of video of any sort.

Thomas LaRock (01:16:18): So just video?

Rob Collie (01:16:20): Video or movies or whatever, motion pictures. We actually have someone who was using the original Avid in our personal network. So maybe we purgatory this and we have a specific episode where we bring them on.

Thomas LaRock (01:16:31): Okay.

Conor Cunningham (01:16:32): Yeah. I've never used it, but I'm I'm open.

Thomas LaRock (01:16:34): So what about Photoshop then? Or, Ooh, don't forget. Macromedia Flash.

Rob Collie (01:16:41): So Flash was important to YouTube by the way. In the original YouTube, Flash was the common denominator that it used. You had to install Flash to run YouTube originally. That was how they converted every video format to Flash. I think that was genius. Especially at the time.

Conor Cunningham (01:16:55): I think for the Photoshop question, Tom, I mean, I view it kind of like Oracle. It's not trivial to use Photoshop for most people, but you can do some really amazing things with it. And it has just an astronomical capability behind both it's developed. It's complicated, but it also, if you have the skill set, it does amazing things. You can put Godzilla and any picture you want.

Rob Collie (01:17:17): Yeah. That's true.

Thomas LaRock (01:17:19): So I think the novelty is there.

Rob Collie (01:17:20): How novel?

Thomas LaRock (01:17:21): It's at least a one.

Rob Collie (01:17:22): Okay. I need to know more about it to give it a two for novelty.

Thomas LaRock (01:17:27): Yeah it's at least a one, but for difficulty.

Rob Collie (01:17:29): Okay. Two.

Thomas LaRock (01:17:31): I would think a two.

Conor Cunningham (01:17:32): Layers and that stuff.

Thomas LaRock (01:17:33): Impact is definitely a two. Cause I mean, Photoshop is now a verb. If that doesn't show you that impact.

Rob Collie (01:17:40): It's the Kleenex, the Q-tip of software. Yeah. I'm good with that. WordPress. I know, right?

Thomas LaRock (01:17:51): Yeah. I think we just haggle over the score. Novelty, I'm at least a one.

Rob Collie (01:17:56): What did we give SharePoint for novelty?

Thomas LaRock (01:17:58): It's at least a one but...

Rob Collie (01:17:59): Give it a one. I think we gave it a one. Yeah.

Conor Cunningham (01:18:01): I put this in the category. I mean it's oneish. Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:18:05): Yeah. It's a one for novelty. Okay. WordPress gets a one. Okay.

Thomas LaRock (01:18:08): Difficulty. Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:18:10): Connor says a UNO.

Thomas LaRock (01:18:13): I don't know enough to say that it's a two.

Rob Collie (01:18:15): I mean, it's interesting, right? It is an extensible platform. It has an add-on model that is incredibly successful.

Thomas LaRock (01:18:23): But the core of WordPress itself, it's pretty simplistic not to be dismissive. I just don't know what the difficulty was in making all that happen.

Rob Collie (01:18:33): I don't know. Should we purgatory WordPress and get someone on that knows what they're talking about? Or should we call it a one? One, one?

Thomas LaRock (01:18:39): I think the impact is a two though. I think it gets in.

Rob Collie (01:18:42): And it's certainly had, I mean, even my life without WordPress, I wouldn't have had the second act to my career. I mean, it's something else. I think it's beautiful. I think WordPress is just beautiful and emotionally I would like it to be in the hall.

Conor Cunningham (01:18:58): It took a very hard process of building a backend website and made it so that anyone could pretty much do it without too much effort. So I'm okay with two.

Rob Collie (01:19:07): 1, 1, 2, and it slips in. I like that.

Conor Cunningham (01:19:09): I will comment that we are running a little short on time.

Rob Collie (01:19:12): Yeah, we are. I agree. So we're not going to get to sports Connor. I'm sorry. Well, I mean we could switch to it right now.

Thomas LaRock (01:19:17): Switch to it right now. Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:19:18): Let me just give the rest of my list. Power Query, which Tom is opposed to.

Thomas LaRock (01:19:21): Yeah it's out.

Rob Collie (01:19:23): Cause it's not a standalone product. If it weren't for the product rule, I would say that power query gets in.

Thomas LaRock (01:19:28): I would allow Power Query to attend the inaugural ceremony and stand next to the people.

Rob Collie (01:19:33): You know what Tom, I've got you. If we talk about Data Flows, Data Flows is a product that is basically standalone Power Query in the cloud. There is a place.

Thomas LaRock (01:19:42): Table.

Rob Collie (01:19:42): We're going to purgatory Power Query.

Thomas LaRock (01:19:43): I want to see your list.

Rob Collie (01:19:44): Rest of my list, One Note, Lotus Notes, Exchange, Active Directory, and a real dark course that none of you would expect, Click-to-Run. The thing that Office uses to install 365 on your computer. Knowing what I know about that morass, Click-to-Run is something else.

Thomas LaRock (01:20:04): Click-to-Run is a product?

Rob Collie (01:20:06): Yeah. I'm going to call it a product.

Conor Cunningham (01:20:10): I'm not sure that active directory...

Thomas LaRock (01:20:11): Yeah. I don't know about that either.

Rob Collie (01:20:14): But it's not a protocol and it's not a language. There is software that's been implemented.

Thomas LaRock (01:20:18): Yeah it's part of Windows Server.

Conor Cunningham (01:20:23): It's part of windows server.

Rob Collie (01:20:24): Yeah. Okay. You guys are no fun.

Thomas LaRock (01:20:25): Cross that off.

Rob Collie (01:20:25): OK. Reporting services.

Thomas LaRock (01:20:29): Oh fine. You mean the Microsoft Crystal Reports? Yeah. That's cool.

Rob Collie (01:20:32): I would enjoy the controversy of reporting services not getting in.

Thomas LaRock (01:20:36): We can vote them out right now. So they're not novel.

Rob Collie (01:20:43): No, zero novelty.

Thomas LaRock (01:20:46): I don't know how difficult it was. And what's the impact? I think they get a three.

Rob Collie (01:20:49): Impact is a two. I mean basically every number you ever see in business, even to this day, most of the numbers that you can find in a business are SSRS. I mean, it's just, it's insane. And when IT organizations adopt Power BI, they immediately start trying to pigeonhole it into the SSRS niche.

Thomas LaRock (01:21:04): All right. So the impact is a two, but it's not novel.

Rob Collie (01:21:08): Is this one of James Bond's fellow agents, 002?

Thomas LaRock (01:21:13): 002, I think so.

Rob Collie (01:21:15): I think it's a one, at least for difficulty. It's a 0 1, 2.

Thomas LaRock (01:21:17): You're right. Report services is out.

Rob Collie (01:21:20): And is not in. Suck it Chris Finland.

Thomas LaRock (01:21:25): All right, let's talk sports.

Rob Collie (01:21:26): Connor is not allowed to talk. Okay. All right. So let's talk sports. All right. So here are the rules of sport and they're all disqualifying. To describe the positive nature of sport, we merely try to describe what sport is not.

Thomas LaRock (01:21:37): Okay.

Rob Collie (01:21:39): Okay? So first of all, all sports involve defense. The opposition can directly interfere with your actions.

Thomas LaRock (01:21:48): False.

Conor Cunningham (01:21:49): I believe we use the term appreciable defense.

Rob Collie (01:21:52): Appreciable defense. Okay. All right.

Thomas LaRock (01:21:54): No, I don't agree.

Conor Cunningham (01:21:55): You're still wrong, Tom. That's okay.

Rob Collie (01:21:57): All running, marathons are not a sport.

Thomas LaRock (01:21:59): No they are. Running is a sport.

Rob Collie (01:22:01): Golf. Golf is not a sport because there is no goalie on the cup. There's no goalie guarding the cup.

Thomas LaRock (01:22:06): You don't need a goalie. You just need somebody else to whack you in the back of the head while you're swinging.

Rob Collie (01:22:11): Right. But this rule straight up eliminates golf.

Thomas LaRock (01:22:15): Exactly.

Rob Collie (01:22:15): Golf might be a game.

Thomas LaRock (01:22:16): And golf is a sport.

Rob Collie (01:22:17): No, see, this is what I'm talking about, Tom. Not a sport.

Thomas LaRock (01:22:20): I think swimming is a sport. There's no defense in swimming.

Rob Collie (01:22:24): Nope. It's not a sport. This is what I'm talking about.

Conor Cunningham (01:22:26): Water polo.

Rob Collie (01:22:27): Water polo is a sport.

Conor Cunningham (01:22:28): Yeah.

Rob Collie (01:22:29): Swimming is not.

Thomas LaRock (01:22:29): No.

Rob Collie (01:22:31): I can't cross over in your lane, Tom, and drag you under. I don't get to directly impede your progress towards your...

Thomas LaRock (01:22:40): What are the other criteria. Let's set this aside for now.

Rob Collie (01:22:42): All right.

Thomas LaRock (01:22:43): Cause I don't agree with that.

Rob Collie (01:22:44): Rule number two is, must involve physical exertion at or near your limits. Human limits. Chess is not a sport, right?

Thomas LaRock (01:22:53): You go play chess for 36 hours.

Rob Collie (01:22:56): Chess is not a sport. And you know what? Those chess masters, they burn something ridiculous, something like 5,000 calories an hour while they're thinking and everything. And I totally respect that. It's just not a sport.

Thomas LaRock (01:23:08): It's not sport you want to watch.

Rob Collie (01:23:10): Some sports are more boring than others, but it's not a sport. All right. And the third and final rule, the third rule, as I said before, the last rule is always, the most controversial. It's always the most vague. Must simulate warfare. Has to have a concept of my territory and your territory.

Thomas LaRock (01:23:32): That's ridiculous. No. So baseball's not a sport?

Rob Collie (01:23:34): Exactly.

Thomas LaRock (01:23:35): Wow.

Rob Collie (01:23:35): Exactly. You make zero net progress in baseball.

Thomas LaRock (01:23:41): So wait, what were the three rules again?

Rob Collie (01:23:43): You come back home.

Thomas LaRock (01:23:44): The threes are defense?

Rob Collie (01:23:46): Defense, physical exertion, and simulate warfare. Also known as the golf is not a sport. Chess is not a sport. Baseball's not a sport.

Thomas LaRock (01:23:56): Well, basketball's not a sport then either. So basketball's not a sport?

Rob Collie (01:24:02): Oh, basketball is totally a sport.

Thomas LaRock (01:24:03): Why? It doesn't have a concept of side.

Rob Collie (01:24:04): Basketball is a sport.

Thomas LaRock (01:24:05): You play in the entire court. Just like you do baseball.

Rob Collie (01:24:07): If I put the ball in either basket, it's, the same?

Thomas LaRock (01:24:09): Points are scored.

Conor Cunningham (01:24:10): You take sides in soccer and hockey and basketball. So, you have one side that you defend. One side you don't.

Thomas LaRock (01:24:16): You take the field.

Rob Collie (01:24:18): No.

Thomas LaRock (01:24:19): You're arguing against your own exclusion of baseball right now.

Rob Collie (01:24:22): No.

Conor Cunningham (01:24:23): No. It loses on the physical exertion side as well.

Thomas LaRock (01:24:26): The hell you say!

Conor Cunningham (01:24:29): You spend most of the time standing around.

Rob Collie (01:24:31): I think it passes the physical exertion.

Conor Cunningham (01:24:33): Near your physical limit, I will quote you.

Rob Collie (01:24:37): Hitting a baseball famously one of the hardest things to ever do.

Conor Cunningham (01:24:40): Oh no, no, definitely. I would suck at it if a professional pitcher through a ball, I would be completely useless.

Thomas LaRock (01:24:45): Okay.

Conor Cunningham (01:24:46): Tom, if you let in baseball, you let in cricket.

Thomas LaRock (01:24:48): Yep.

Conor Cunningham (01:24:49): And they have tea in the middle of that.

Thomas LaRock (01:24:50): Yep. So?

Rob Collie (01:24:51): Connor repeatedly argued for, "cannot be played at a country club". I opposed this and this did not make it in. This did not get codified.

Thomas LaRock (01:24:58): So curling is a sport. There's defense.

Rob Collie (01:25:02): No.

Thomas LaRock (01:25:02): Yeah. You can hit the other rocks. There's exertion.

Rob Collie (01:25:05): It fails physical exertion.

Thomas LaRock (01:25:07): You try sweeping that stone. You try going on the ice.

Rob Collie (01:25:12): No, no, it is not. No, it is not. It is not.

Thomas LaRock (01:25:15): You keep contradicting yourself.

Rob Collie (01:25:16): There's no explosive movement. There's just nothing. Right? It's no.

Conor Cunningham (01:25:20): Darts is roughly the same and Dart's is not a sport.

Rob Collie (01:25:23): In terms of physical. Yeah. I agree. In terms of physical darts doesn't have defense. In terms of the physical skill darts is like curling.

Conor Cunningham (01:25:31): Curling does have some level of defense.

Rob Collie (01:25:33): Dexterity is not what we mean by exertion at or near limit. Right? You can get sweaty. You've got to at least be able to break a sweat. Here's the thing that really pisses people off. And not that any of this didn't is that ping pong is a sport. It's just a straight up sport.

Thomas LaRock (01:25:48): Well yeah. Tennis would be too.

Rob Collie (01:25:50): Tennis is. Ping pong really chaps people's ass, right? I mean ping pong being a sport and baseball not, I mean, oh man.

Conor Cunningham (01:25:57): I'll go one step further. How about you consider pickleball has to be a sport.

Thomas LaRock (01:26:01): Yeah it has to be.

Rob Collie (01:26:02): Yeah pickleball is a sport.

Thomas LaRock (01:26:02): But so is baseball.

Rob Collie (01:26:04): No. But this just shows you, that it's okay to not be a sport.

Conor Cunningham (01:26:10): Tom. Baseball's a beautiful pastime. Just dig the hole a little deeper with you, Tom. So what would it take, Rob, to make baseball a sport? Because we've had this conversation.

Rob Collie (01:26:21): Yes we have.

Conor Cunningham (01:26:21): Maybe slightly inebriated in the past. So I will you just tee it up for you.

Rob Collie (01:26:25): Connor. I've missed out on the era when you actually drank. Right?

Conor Cunningham (01:26:28): Right.

Rob Collie (01:26:29): If there was drinking going on, it was only me.

Conor Cunningham (01:26:31): Fair, fair. I was ornery before.

Rob Collie (01:26:37): So for example, Tom. In baseball, the defense puts the ball in play.

Thomas LaRock (01:26:41): That's right. Yes.

Rob Collie (01:26:43): The offense is sitting there with a weapon.

Thomas LaRock (01:26:45): That's right.

Rob Collie (01:26:45): The bat, right?

Thomas LaRock (01:26:46): That's warfare baby.

Rob Collie (01:26:48): No. It would be if the defense was not compelled to put the ball in play. The defense is like, you got the bat, come get the ball, come get it.

Thomas LaRock (01:26:56): The defense has the ball. That's not.

Rob Collie (01:26:57): Come and take it. Come and take it.

Thomas LaRock (01:27:00): Your rule is it has to have defense.

Rob Collie (01:27:00): Pry it from my cold dead fingers.

Thomas LaRock (01:27:02): And there is defense.

Rob Collie (01:27:04): There's defense. It's the warfare rule. So it gets through on one and two. In my opinion, then it fails on three.

Thomas LaRock (01:27:09): No.

Conor Cunningham (01:27:10): So let me give you a few ideas, Tom, just to wet the appetite of commerce here. So one idea that we considered for baseball was you get a 10th player that can sit in the stands with a paintball sniper rifle. Three bullets, three bullets. And at any point during the running of the bases or whatever, or someone trying to catch the ball, the sniper guy can shoot you and take him out. So if you're running the base, you're out. If you're trying to catch the ball, you can't catch the ball dead for the sake of the play. And then of course the first thing you have to do is figure out where in the stands the other sniper is sitting.

Thomas LaRock (01:27:50): Can I take out the other sniper?

Conor Cunningham (01:27:52): Yeah. Absolutely. Sure.

Thomas LaRock (01:27:54): So if I get the other sniper first, they can never get to us at all.

Conor Cunningham (01:27:57): Exactly.

Rob Collie (01:28:00): It's like the spy versus the one in Stratego, right? You got to sneak up on him.

Conor Cunningham (01:28:03): So this definitely changes what baseball would be in terms of how you would play the game.

Rob Collie (01:28:09): I would tune in, I would tune in for this.

Conor Cunningham (01:28:12): I would only forward it to you because I think that this changes the dynamic quite a bit. There's definitely elements of individual games that are sport like, but not sport, in the, I'll call it somewhat extreme definition that Rob and I and others came up with, but it's kind of fun when you kind of go to the next level and go, okay, what would it take to make marathon running a sport? And the answer is, I'm allowed to punch the other people. And at that point it becomes a free for all right, who gets to the finish line first? Cannonball run style. Have at it. And I think that becomes a lot more interesting to watch as well personally.

Rob Collie (01:28:42): Agreed. And Conor, in hindsight, looking back, there were multiple of us involved in this conversation, these formative conversations. But really it was really just you and I that took it seriously.

Conor Cunningham (01:28:51): We were the most serious.

Thomas LaRock (01:28:53): We should have started with this sport thing because now knowing how you guys think it actually makes me rethink how I should have gone on software.

Rob Collie (01:29:01): Oh, maybe there's a sequel. We have some things in purgatory. We have some unfinished business we might have to reconvene and we have future classes to induct. So I think we have to do this again at some point. All right. Hey, thank you so much, gentlemen. This was a real change from our usual. I enjoyed the hell out of it and hopefully if anyone out there is actually upset, this is entertainment. I mean we are a little bit serious. It's just what makes it entertaining.

Thomas LaRock (01:29:23): I'm definitely serious, Report Services is not in. Out.

Rob Collie (01:29:28): I agree.

Conor Cunningham (01:29:29): Okay guys. Thank you very much.

Announcer (01:29:31): Thanks for listening to the Raw Data by P3Adaptive podcast. Let the experts at P3Adaptive help your business. Just go to P3adaptive.com. Have a data day.