Longtime readers know I love USB-C and I love dongles. I also love standards that don’t really go anywhere.

So it was with a broad smile on my face when I saw that Microsoft was attempting to fix the chaotic situation around USB-C that the company played no small part in creating. Essentially, here’s the deal: USB-C has made it easy to get a port of a consistent shape, but the problem is that not all ports are created equal.

Some support displays. Some don’t. Some are fast! Some aren’t. Some let you plug in an external GPU. Some don’t. But good luck figuring out which is which.

So Microsoft is aiming to change that by creating a new certification. You know, on top of all the other certifications that USB-C already has. XKCD’s famed “Standards” comic strip was built for moments like these.

But there is a point to all of this. Essentially, Microsoft is saying that if you’re going to claim that your device meets this USB speed standard, every port on the device needs to meet a minimum requirement. No more being stuck with display-out on only one of your USB-C ports. No more asking which of my ports supports faster 40-gigabyte connections.

As the company’s Ugan-Sivagnanenthirarajah writes on the company’s presumably well-trafficked Microsoft USB Blog:

We think it’s important for this clear branding to carry through to the actual customer experience with USB-C ports on Windows 11 PCs. While the USB specifications give PC manufacturers the ability to choose which optional features the port supports, we set out to establish a minimum bar for USB-C port capabilities on PCs.

Essentially, Microsoft is hoping that, by attaching the USB standards to the existing Windows Hardware Compatibility Program, it can essentially shame hardware manufacturers into doing the right thing with their USB ports.

This is a big change for Microsoft, which once decided to not support Thunderbolt on its Surface devices because of the potential of an obscure hardware breach that required long-term physical access to a device. It’s actually closer to what Apple has been doing in recent years. While the Cupertino crew no longer guarantees Thunderbolt on every single port (the Apple Silicon chips don’t have the bandwidth), it does tend to make it consistent. On the back of your Mac Mini, you’ll get Thunderbolt; on the front, it might be a slower USB-C standard that can still technically drive a monitor.

Microsoft identified a problem. Does it have the solution?

XKCD jokes aside, there is a case for what Microsoft’s selling.

Recently, I got a hold of a refurbished Minisforum mini PC on a deep discount, and it’s mostly been pretty nice. I’ve been running it as a Steam machine. But I had some issues with the setup because of this port inconsistency. The device has multiple USB-C ports, but each of them does something different. One port is USB4-capable, and therefore can run my Thunderbolt dock, but the port only works with the dock after the machine has booted. If I need to make BIOS changes—which, given that I was setting up the machine, I was specifically trying to do—I have to unplug the keyboard to and plug in another one to get into the BIOS. Not exactly elegant.

But even older devices that do support Thunderbolt can have bizarre issues. My old HP Spectre has a Thunderbolt 3 port that, when plugged in, can run multiple monitors on that same Thunderbolt dock. However, it can’t power the input devices plugged into that dock. However, when I plug in the dock to a standard USB-C port, the input devices work—but the monitor doesn’t. And even stranger, when I plug it into another Thunderbolt dock, it doesn’t have any of these problems. (I run Linux on that machine, but I confirmed in my testing that this was also the case in Windows 11.)

All of this is more complicated than it sounds (there’s a reason, usually cost-based, why devices don’t have faster ports). But they’re right: It would just be better if every new device that comes out just supports a consistent version of USB-C by default. And yes, devices that support faster USB-C standards shouldn’t just limit it to a single port.

The first mainstream devices with USB-C ports—the Google Chromebook Pixel, the Nokia N1 tablet, and the Apple’s 12-inch MacBook, each announced in March 2015—are now a decade old. We can generally say that it’s nice that this port exists. It solved a lot of problems for regular consumers.

But it created some bugaboos. Many smartphones, for example, tend to only have USB-C ports that only support USB 2.0 speeds, and often don’t support video-out capabilities at a hardware level. You shouldn’t be forced to guess whether your device will just work if you want to plug it into your monitor.

Microsoft has a lot of clout. They could legitimately solve this problem. Or they could just become the next standard on the pile of failed standards. Ah well—at least we’re not stuck with Lightning anymore.

The elements that defined the ’90s story song

Story songs are nothing new, as anyone living in the ’60s and ’70s could tell you. Songs like Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s In The Cradle,” Don McLean’s “American Pie,” and Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” told winding, episodic, sometimes complex stories across numerous verses, and were often more about the plot than the chorus.

The ’90s had songs shaped like these, too. “Jeremy” by Pearl Jam is essentially that decade’s version of “Cat’s in the Cradle”—apologies to Ugly Kid Joe, whose own version of that song was charting around the same time as “Jeremy.” I’m sure you could go way back to the history of the ballad and find lots of examples of songs that fit this form.

But during the 1990s, an interesting variation of the song started to find its place on the pop charts: The tune that told multiple self-contained stories in the span of just a few minutes.

These stories largely don’t reference one another, and are mostly third-person in nature. They are episodic, and brought together not by a first-person protagonist, but by a single theme, often carried by the chorus.

The perfect example of this format came from Canadian folk-pop band Crash Test Dummies in 1993. In retrospect, “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” is not a well-loved song. But its simple, memorable structure proved catnip to mainstream radio. Beyond the wordless chorus, it was essentially a three-act play in song form—telling the stories of three different school outcasts.

The first two had physical ailments—a boy who had white hair after being in a car accident, and a girl covered in birthmarks. The ailment the third faced, described as “worse than that”? He grew up in a hyper-religious household and went to a weird church. While not stated in the song, the lyrics explicitly describe a Pentecostal church: ”And when they went to their church/They shook and lurched all over the church floor.”

And fittingly, these situations lent themselves perfectly to a music video.

The video adds subtext to these stories—a pair of parents clearly upset about getting called out for their hyper-religious parenting style is a specific standout—but essentially, we are watching the plot of the song portrayed literally.

This kicked off a subtle trend of pop songs seemingly built with visual imagery in mind—a trend immediately exploited by one of the biggest girl groups of all time.

In the summer of 1995, TLC dominated the airwaves with the self-contained cautionary tales that make up “Waterfalls.” The song borrowed a lyric from a Paul McCartney tune of the same name but quickly superseded it in influence.

It wasn’t all cautionary tales, however. In the bridge/third verse, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes uses the song’s subject as a way to address her personal problems at the time, which included an arson arrest after setting her boyfriend’s house on fire. She uses the moment to contextualize the song’s deeper message:

Who’s to blame for tooting ‘caine into your own vein?

What a shame, you shoot and aim for someone else’s brain

You claim the insane, and name this day in time

For falling prey to crime

I say the system got you victim to your own mind

Dreams are hopeless aspirations in hopes of coming true

Believe in yourself, the rest is up to me and you

Around the same time “Waterfalls” was blowing up, Live’s “Lightning Crashes” was having a moment of its own. A circle-of-life in which birth and death take place in different verses.

The song essentially deals with three generations of people—a mother giving birth, a new child, and an older woman dying in a nearby hospital bed. The third verse loops back to the first. It was easily the biggest hit of Live’s career, and helped cement the band as one of the era’s most popular—though singer Ed Kowalczyk often speaks of the song’s popular video creating misinterpretation around the song. (It probably doesn’t help that the video shows a young woman dying, when the song itself says old woman, as it makes it look like the woman died in childbirth.)

If “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” is the purest expression of the three-act play in pop song form, the second-purest perhaps came from Everlast. In 1998, the onetime House of Pain rapper became something of a hip-hop troubadour, offering his own take on a “Waterfalls”-like song with his solo hit “What It’s Like.” That tune is a classic walk-a-mile-in-their-shoes song, to the point where it literally says that line in the chorus.

It tells the story of three protagonists—a homeless man, a pregnant woman who chooses to get an abortion, and a drug dealer who dies in a fight. The music video visually displays these stories, but at the end of the video, it shows a group of people looking, outside-in, at a storefront.

What’s on the other side of the glass? A normal family that doesn’t have any of these problems. Not exactly a subtle metaphor.

If you wanted to stretch the definition somewhat you could find more interesting examples that fit the mold. The Offspring had multiple singles off its 1998 album Americana that played with this basic model. “Why Don’t You Get A Job,” explicitly evoking The Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” told separate stories—one of a guy, and one of a girl—with deadbeat partners.

And elsewhere on the album, the more serious “The Kids Aren’t Alright” attached numerous negative outcomes to a single street with the use of multiple individual life stories told over the span of a single verse. (Word of warning: The visual effects in the video are super-dated.)

The Flaming Lips’ “She Don’t Use Jelly,” while clearly absurdist and not a message song, fits this format well. And The Pharcyde’s “Passin’ Me By,” which predates “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” by a few months, is essentially a series of anecdotes about failed school crushes, with a first-person take on this general lyrical structure. And while not exactly built around standalone verses, Eminem’s “Stan” clearly gets a lot out of its vignette-driven structure.

Why this specific form, and why is it largely contained to this specific era? My feeling is that they were, in one way or another, intentionally or not, built specifically with a music video in mind.

Does this format exist just because of music videos? That kind of the thought that was racking my brain.

Thinking bigger picture about story songs: The secretly weird state of the first-person tune

Obviously, this lyrical format was not exactly limited to the mid-1990s. If you squint enough you can arguably see it in unexpected places. The surrealism of The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm” could feel like it’s made up of standalone verses, for example, though I would argue it isn’t.

But during the ’90s, this verse structure felt kind of like a meme for whatever reason, sort of that decade’s version of the millennial whoop. By that time we were used to musicians talking about themselves in many songs, so it was interesting to hear a character portrait like Jewel’s “Who Will Save Your Soul” on the radio.

But I guess that my bigger question is really—why did this song type seem to blow up in the mid-1990s? I reached out to a pal of mine, Chris Dalla Riva of “The Death of the Key Change” fame, for his thoughts. He suggested thinking about this from a bigger picture—which is that songs based on the individual singing might be the cosmic aberration, not the other way around.

“For literally centuries, songs weren’t associated with specific people because they weren’t recorded,” he explained. “When a song would get popular in the 1700s, it was spread by multiple performers simultaneously. Because of that, many popular folk songs were story songs. The composer, if there were one, was very foreign to the listener.”

There are many examples of what Chris is talking about here—most notably the broadside ballad, a form of lyrical or poetic ballad, dating to the 16th century. These ballads were effectively shared widely on cheap paper and then performed by randos at any nearby pub. Not exactly a prime environment for the next Bruce Springsteen to appear.

There’s a whole history about it that I won’t dive into in too much depth here—Atlas Obscura has us covered—but the basic idea is that we couldn’t associate these songs with any one person. And that put the pressure on the song, not the singer, to sell the message.

But the rise of recorded music suddenly meant that we could make that association, and as music increasingly became an artistic form, the songwriting began to look inward. In the span of a decade, music went from highly polished to highly individualistic. It suddenly mattered who sang and performed the songs.

For whatever reason, we rolled back pretty heavily to story-driven songs in the 1990s, many driven by social commentary and vignettes. And probably music videos, too.

“These songs in the 1990s stand out because they seem to harken back to something much older, something not focused on the ‘I, me, mine’ of it all,” Dalla Riva says. “Because we love to interpret everything as being inspired by the artist’s life, these songs stand apart for the distance the artist seems to have from the narrative.”

To be clear, we didn’t entirely take the musical gaze off our navels during the ’90s, a period that gave us Midwest emo, perhaps the most navel-gazey music of all. But if all these pop stars or prospective pop stars were writing songs specifically knowing that the lyrics would make for a good music video, it’s a nice happy accident—one that we should do again.

A few years ago, I heard the hype around The Browser Company, the firm that created the Arc browser, and eventually couldn’t help but feel like it was just a bunch of noise.

The company had gotten a lot of goodwill out of its UX-minded discussions about reinventing the Web browser, and those discussions were interesting. But for one reason or another I just wasn’t sucked in—in part because I was already content with my browser of choice, Vivaldi.

But a lot of people I know got sold on the browser that The Browser Company came up with, Arc. That browser, which leaned heavily into design logic and experimental approaches, won a lot of plaudits in a short amount of time. In 2024, the browser’s offshoot mobile product, Arc Search, was a finalist for an Apple Design Award. Given how many iOS apps come out each year, that’s a big deal.

Arc was an influential browser, and likely led Google to add some fresh polish to Chrome. Browser extensions exist that make it possible to make Chrome work more like Arc. Hell, last night I came across an open-source project that allows users to reskin Vivaldi to work like Arc. (I tried it out; amusing, but I’m happy with what I have.)

People loved that browser. But apparently, it wasn’t enough of them, based on a recent post from The Browser Company. The company unusually suggested that it was putting Arc into maintenance mode last fall, in favor of an AI project called Dia; now it is going further, making it clear that it sees Arc as a significant tactical error. From the post, with added emphasis by me:

Switching browsers is a big ask. And the small things we loved about Arc—features you and other members appreciated—either weren’t enough on their own or were too hard for most people to pick up. By contrast, core features in Dia, like chatting with tabs and personalization features, are used by 40% and 37% of DAUs respectively. This is the kind of clarity and immediate value we’re working toward.

But these are the details. These are things you can toil over, measure, sculpt, remove.

The part that was hard to admit, is that Arc—and even Arc Search—were too incremental. They were meaningful, yes. But ultimately not at the scale of improvements that we aspired to. Or that could breakout as a mass-market product. If we were serious about our original mission, we needed a technological unlock to build something truly new.

Put another way: The Browser Company wants to build the next Chrome but instead built the next Vivaldi. It built a power user’s dream browser, but that wasn’t its goal. Its goal was to build a browser so mind-blowing that it would have an audience of hundreds of millions of people.

The problem with this, of course, is that what hundreds of millions of people use often isn’t loved by hundreds of millions of people. Largely, it is tolerated. When reinventing something, you want to create an audience of true believers. The Browser Company did that—then realized that wasn’t what it wanted. It had an audience and momentum and threw it away in a matter of months because it built a well-loved product instead of a mass-market one. And in the process, it threw away a lot of goodwill that will be difficult to get back.

To be clear, anytime you throw a product away, it causes a knock to your goodwill. Recently, Mozilla announced that it was ditching Pocket, the popular read-it-later tool that it had deeply integrated into its browser, Firefox. It was popular, but Mozilla’s reason for getting rid of it was even muddier than The Browser Company’s labored explanation:

Pocket has helped millions save articles and discover stories worth reading. But the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match browsing habits today.

The outcry was palpable—and Kevin Rose, currently in the midst of relaunching Digg, offered to buy Pocket from Mozilla. (Rose, a reformed internet legend and venture capitalist, knows a thing or two about forcing unwanted change onto a user base.)

These tools are not forgotten products that nobody cared about, or declining products. Pocket had 20 million users and was a fundamental part of Firefox. It also had a working business model. It was significantly more successful than Mozilla’s fediverse play, which ended life with fewer than 300 active users.

Pocket and Arc reflect a mindset that feels downright dangerous in context: We’re now at the point where we’re killing successful products because of the hope that we can build something better, not even because the products were failures. The next things are likely going to have more artificial intelligence and less distinct craft driving them.

And dropping popular products for vibes, even when they’re not declining, just feels like a self-inflicted wound that you’re not even bothering to address. It doesn’t matter how innovative you are, or how many good ideas you have. What actually matters at the end of the day is that you’re offering a consistent product that people can rely on.

No amount of word salad is going to hide the fact that you’re killing successful products for seemingly no good reason.

A few months ago, I wrote a post making the case that AI should be seen in terms of “bionic arms,” in terms of what it helps us lift.

I wanted to sort of explain what I’m talking about by way of example.

Recently, I’ve been trying to improve my workflow, because I often find myself getting bogged down in trying to manage the process of posting. It feels like I have one too many steps for whatever reason. I’m often copying and pasting back and forth through interfaces, which turns the process of uploading a post into something that can take upwards of an hour to do.

A big part of this is just age and complexity. Tedium is a decade-old site with a lot of elements under the hood that need to orchestrate together. But yet there is still too much in the process that is manual. Uploading images remains a huge pain in the butt, especially when I have a dozen of them in a single post.

I have coded various tools over the years to help improve my life. My most famous one was a backend interface that allowed me to copy and paste the full HTML of a newsletter directly into my email tool of choice, essentially neutralizing the most labor-heavy part of a newsletter distribution process.

But now I’m sort of feeling like I’m getting overwhelmed by the uploading part, and not in a good way. It’s an interface I built in Craft CMS, and after six years of using it, it’s finally bogging me down. (I think part of it is that the Markdown-based plugin I’ve been using, Doxter, hasn’t seen any real UX changes in quite some time, a side effect of its original author giving it up. Great tool—just a bit dated at this point.)

I came up with a solution, and yes, it involves a bionic arm. But I’ve specifically designed it to only really be useful for my own specific use case at this time.

How I turned my markdown editor into a CMS-posting tool

One way I’m approaching this is via Obsidian. I was very skeptical of Obsidian at first, because it was sold as a mind-mapping tool, which doesn’t feel like what I actually need from a writing standpoint. But what I have realized is that its actual magic is not in the mind-mapping but its extensibility. It is essentially a Chromium-based editing tool, similar to iA Writer, but it can be upgraded in a variety of creative ways.

I’ve recently been experimenting with it by testing a social thread uploading tool, inspired by an existing open-source plugin for Mastodon. After the creator rejected my idea to add Bluesky capabilities, I decided to experiment with that concept myself, along with some additional features like drip functionality, so you’re not posting the whole thread at once, but posting it gradually. It is not really in a releasable form at the moment (for one thing, it doesn’t currently save your tokens on reload), but it has been a fun experiment that I’ve been using for my commissioned searches.

That’s cool, but what if I could use Obsidian to solve my CMS workflow problems? And what using a bionic arm was the way?

I’m a member of the private content marketing community Superpath, which is run by Jimmy Daly, a friend of mine who was a coworker a solid 13 years ago, and he’s gotten really into vibe coding lately. He held a whole workshop for it, where many people decided to work on things like portfolio sites or internal tools.

My aspiration was different: I wanted to make it possible to post my content into Craft CMS from Obsidian, removing a step from my workflow. I would use vibe coding to plug into the existing GraphQL system that my platform already uses to post content to the static site generator Eleventy.

The thing about Craft CMS that makes it really valuable is not so much the posting interface, but its content schema, which can be modified at will and used to build any sort of content structure you can think of. It is solid enough that I plan to keep it around. But if I just want to put some content into it, why not just use the tool I already like for writing?

As for what I built: While a lot of purely vibe-coding tools exist out there, along with stuff that plugs directly into VS Code, I’ve found Anthropic’s Claude to strike the right balance. Beyond the model itself, it has added a lot of capabilities that make it a good option for amateur coders, including the ability to organize complicated ideas into projects. It even attaches to GitHub if you want it to have a lay of the land.

And with it, I built a tool that allows me to upload directly to my CMS, images and all. (It can even upload from a URL, rather than a file I downloaded, saving time.) It works, which I can prove by the fact that you’re reading this.

(That said, I can’t say everything was perfect. At one point, I mentioned Dashboard Confessional, which created a tendency by the various Claude LLMs to reference early 2000s emo bands and songs when working on various things. A funny bit, even for a chatbot, but at one point it tried to claim “How You Remind Me” was an emo song, which was nearly enough to make me give up on this entire project.)

This is a situation where LLMs helped me solve a “me” problem without getting in the way of anyone else. I’m not going to be using LLM-created copy or images. But I did just figure out a way to save myself a ton of time when uploading a post, which I hope will make it easier to do so over time.

Build your own guardrails

A pal of mine, Matt Lee, recently put this AI discussion into a great context that I find hard to disagree with: “AI should be a laserdisc you can buy, not a thing that drowns us all.”

The problem with AI, much like prior tech industry hype cycles like Web3 or blockchain, is that everyone is trying to figure out how to have another Web 2.0 with this trending technology. But what if its role is something that can be compartmentalized? What I would love to see is the rise of AI that stays in your house, maybe even on a dedicated LLM machine. It doesn’t go to the cloud or siphon off content, but it can load models that help you solve complicated problems.

The issue is that a lot of this technology is being built at scale, and it is being done thoughtlessly. If you’re going to use it, put some thought into it. Put barriers between what makes sense for your needs.

The nice thing about AI being a package you buy rather than a tool infused in literally everything is that it puts it into a context that makes sense. The problem is not that this technology exists. It’s that it gets used haphazardly and in inappropriate ways.

I encourage you to figure out the right approach for your needs.

Update 05/26/2025

For those curious about what I ended up with, check out the GitHub repository. I’m distributing the code under an MIT license.

Today’s GIF comes from a channel that reads through old Archie comics. Speaking of constant nudges, I discovered today’s piece via my commissioned search offering. Want to get a search of your own commissioned? Check the ad below:

The comic book sales clubs: A topic too obscure for the modern internet? Mayhaps

I’ve searched for countless things on the internet, and this may be one of the most obscure topics I’ve ever encountered, judging by its minimal modern digital footprint.

I’ve found precisely one mainstream article from the digital era that discusses this general idea (a Mental Floss piece), and it’s 11 years old. No Wikipedia articles. Very little in the way of corporate histories.

What we do have, however, is an abundance of ads in comic books. The Internet Archive is full of them—literally hundreds of ads in every comic book imaginable, along with publications popular with kids, like Boys’ Life.

Fittingly for ads common in comic books, the pitch leaned on unobtainium. The full-page ads displayed various items that might entice young children—toys, video game consoles, cassette players, musical instruments—and offer a way to acquire them.

These companies each had names suggesting that you were joining a larger organization:

• Youth Opportunity Sales Club
• Junior Sales Club of America
• The Sales Leadership Club
• Olympic Sales Club
• Cheerful House

Most of these “clubs,” based on the addresses listed in magazines and comic books, emerged from New England, primarily Connecticut or Massachusetts. Once you signed on for one of these programs, you were expected to go door-to-door, selling your wares.

When these services started appearing in the 1950s and 1960s, this kind of person-to-person selling was growing quite popular. The sales club model started gaining traction during the same period that multi-level marketing firms like Amway, Avon, and Tupperware took off. One positive aspect: These sales clubs didn’t borrow too heavily from the Amway model—the multi-level-marketing aspect, to whatever degree it existed, was downplayed.

But the problematic nature of this model is obvious. One article from 1994 highlights a mom’s anger when Olympia Sales Club of Canada sent catalogs to her young children, unsolicited. She was so upset that she went to the media.

“I phoned them and told them ‘your sales tactics are disgusting,’” the mom, Marion Morgan, told the Vancouver Province.

The company attempted to defend its practices—which included mailing lists of families with children and sending out catalogs—but the piece noted that (at least in Canada) it operated in a legal gray area. Technically, it wasn’t employment, which meant it lacked employment protections. (Also: The company was American, placing it beyond the jurisdiction of Canadian regulators.)

And that’s before considering door-to-door stranger danger, which the model essentially required for making sales. After all, you couldn’t exactly use the internet to sell these greeting cards.

In many ways, many of the same complaints one could make about the creator economy also apply to these kinds of gigs. It was essentially offline affiliate marketing—you sold these goods by any means necessary to earn a commission. The cuts were too small for this to be viable for adults, especially in the pre-internet era. But for kids? It was a perfect way to learn something about the value of a dollar, or so the thinking went.

So, what about the companies that used this model?

One line of discussion I heard when I was researching this topic was that all the clubs were owned by the same company. That’s not totally true, but it definitely played into how these sales clubs marketed themselves.

Perhaps the largest one I found was called Bevis Industries. It was a conglomerate that touched a lot of mail order businesses during this period. It was not uncommon to pick up an issue of House & Garden in the early 1970s and see multiple ads from Bevis Industries, promoting unrelated products to the same customer. That was the company’s strategy—and it meant spending significant money on advertising. One of the things it advertised was the Youth Opportunity Sales Club.

Through my research, I found Bevis Industries ads dating to the early 1970s in numerous magazines, among them Sports Illustrated, Time, and The Ladies’ Home Journal. They weren’t alone, of course, but this was the game—you advertised goods heavily, and eventually someone would buy that knife set or porcelain coffee service. Or a sales club targeted at kids.

This meant that Bevis Industries—which, around this period, leased a historic Connecticut cotton mill and converted it into a giant mail-order warehouse—was effectively marketing to the public in six different ways under a variety of brand names.

Bevis eventually disappeared, but the Youth Opportunity Sales Club appears to have outlived it, at least for a time. (More on Bevis in a bit.)

Another major advertiser with a very similar strategy to Bevis was Sunshine Art Studios, based in Springfield, Massachusetts. Sunshine manufactured gift cards, wrapping paper, and other paper-based goods, which it sold via a network of kids, often in a fundraiser format.

It ran the Junior Sales Club of America, Sales Leadership Club, and several similar services. But as the Federal Trade Commission noted in a 1972 complaint against the company, it also ran a collection agency that was literally shaking down kids for $10 in unsold goods. A sample of one such letter, per the FTC complaint:

You have failed to settle your long-overdue account with our client, Junior Sales Club of America, Springfield, Massachusetts, although we previously wrote to you a detailed letter concerning this important obligation.

To avoid action by our attorney, we urge you to immediately send a $9.50 money order or check made payable to the Junior Sales Club of America. DO IT TODAY.

Imagine being a 10-year-old kid getting sued over some gift wrap you failed to sell—that was sent to you when you didn’t even ask for it. Some sales club.

The FTC ultimately decided that Sunshine Art Studios couldn’t require kids to pay them back for goods they didn’t request, or send them to collections for not sending money. (The model, in this light, was similar to Columbia House’s negative option billing model.)

Despite the harsh decision and the “deceptive” nature of its business, Sunshine Art actually managed to survive for few more decades, only disappearing with a bankruptcy auction around 2009. The sales clubs didn’t last quite so long—but that’s fine, it had the internet.

Finally, we get to the one people of my generation likely remember, Olympia Sales, which often sold its goods under the Olympic Sales Club brand. Founded in 1966 by Arthur O’Hara, it is the only one of these businesses that appears to still have a website, however bare bones.

This is the firm that upset Marion Morgan so much that she called a reporter. But looking online, you’ll see nostalgia for this firm and its memorable ads. Then, as now, the firm is based in Enfield, Connecticut—about 15 minutes from Springfield, Massachusetts, and an hour from Baltic, Connecticut. (These were separate companies, but they were a shout away from one another.)

Like Sunshine Art, Olympic Sales Club specialized in greeting cards, which kids then sold to their neighbors. Unlike its competitors, it had enough success with this model that it continued well into the 1990s, reflected by the improved print quality of its ads and circulars. As the internet age picked up, along with concerns about stranger danger, Olympia Sales moved into the wholesale market. Which is why they still exist today.

The company (along with Sunshine) had a relatively decent business track record, per assessments by the Better Business Bureau, but that did not stem complaints—I found several published in newspapers over the years, including from a kid who didn’t get their promised Donkey Kong game.

But by the late ’90s, their reputation had been set in stone. A 1997 article published by Consumers Union’s Zillions Magazine warned kids not to invest their money into firms like Olympic, because of the shaky track record of success:

Sarah reported that “not as many people buy as you think.” She sold just 15 items over the course of six months. Her experience was typical of about half our sales-clubbers. They put in between 5 and 10 hours drumming up business, filling out order forms, and distributing merchandise when it arrived (about a month after sending in the order). For all their effort, they earned about $3 an hour. A respectable wage—but plenty of kids made a lot less.

Klair, for example, put in more than 20 hours one month and sold a grand total of two items. She ended up returning her customers’ money. Why? She didn’t want to pay the $2 shipping-and-handling fee the Olympia Sales Club charges for sending out fewer than seven items per order. That fee would have eaten up half her profits! (Sales Leadership, the other club our testers tried, charges $2 for orders of fewer than five items.)

“Besides,” added Klair, “the paperwork is a hassle and hard to fill out. I didn’t want to waste a first-class stamp—or any more of my time.”

Put simply, kids had gotten too smart for this model, as attractive as the idea of getting a Game Boy from a catalog actually was. It only makes sense that the sales clubs petered out around this time. The shifting cultural ties, and stories not unlike Paul Buchheit’s encounter with a pit bull, certainly made the model a lot less attractive.

The cards were expensive, and the sales pitch was just like everything else—you didn’t buy the gift cards because you wanted them, you bought them because a kid gave you a good sales pitch. We had better sales models for such low-hanging fruit.

Two weeks ago, I found myself on an hour-long interview with a guy who I had kind of raked over the coals a few weeks prior. It was a good conversation, and he was remarkably candid.

From a business standpoint, Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia was honest with his desire to help reset the conversation that had broken out about the platform his company built.

Of course, that wasn’t the only thing we talked about—as a recent Fast Company piece I wrote highlighted, he found himself working at the Department of Veterans Affairs at the behest of DOGE. If you find that story interesting, I encourage you to read it there—thanks in part to the attention it got, it’s no longer paywalled.

But I wanted to take a step back and talk a little bit about the FOSS part of our conversation, which got a bit overshadowed by his unusual gig. Simply put, even with the attached baggage, I think the flexibility he showed regarding changing Gumroad’s licensing from source-available to plain-Jane FOSS is genuinely a good thing. It shows a willingness to listen to feedback even when that feedback isn’t always friendly.

By choosing to switch to an MIT license, Gumroad is now a much more useful product to a technically minded end user—and it sets up an end-user contract that lets people borrow what they like about the tool and separate out what they don’t.

Even if you disagree with him on how he approaches things like artificial intelligence and government contracting, he’s now given you the right to not necessarily worry about him if you really don’t want to—because you now have the keys to the kingdom, as long as you’re willing to figure out how they work. You can run it without giving him a cut—but you can also contribute back to the broader community, making it so that he is not the primary figure of influence in that community as more people contribute.

But the licensing decision, if nothing else, is significant. We don’t usually see platforms this mature getting a FOSS license this far along in their life.

It’s worth noting, though, that this cuts both ways.

Gumroad’s Self-Hosting Challenge? It’s Old

From a self-hosting standpoint, it’s not quite set up for an easy time at the moment, and will require a lot of command-line work to get it up to speed. Like most modern self-hosted applications, it uses Docker; unlike most of those, Docker is only a small part of the app stack—the current stack is really built to run the main application on bare metal with Dockerized components for the more modular things, like Redis and MySQL. At a time when a lot of self-hosted apps can be launched with a single Docker Compose file, that’s a lot less newbie-approachable than it could be, but they have pledged to make it more friendly over time—which will be a huge asset for end users in the months to come.

“A big investment we’re going to make in the next year is to make it easier to deploy, to open,” he told me. “There’s a lot of technical debt, being an old codebase.”

Ultimately, though, it’s possible, and that is the first step towards resetting something for a new type of audience—one that he didn’t necessarily see as being a purely commercial play, based on our conversation.

“It’s not like, ‘How do we make more money?’ It’s like, ‘How we can make it easier to deploy on AWS?’,” he said.

(He mentioned, as well, that by open-sourcing, he could make it more accessible in government contexts, relevant to DOGE’s mission.)

The Improving State Of Self-Hosting

Over the last couple of years, I’ve done a lot of personal self-hosting of apps. I run my business on tools like InvoiceNinja, which makes it possible for me to send a quick invoice in a matter of minutes. It’s not the most user-friendly thing in the world, but on the other hand, it offers the end user the ability to not be bogged down with aggressive cuts.

I have an app I rely on for time-tracking. For social media stuff. And even for syncing files. When redesigning Tedium a few months back, I replaced a commercial image hosting tool that cost me $300 a year with an open-source proxy tool that costs me nothing beyond of my standard hosting fees. And I see myself switching my email provider to something self-hosted within the next year as well. One look at selfh.st or the r/selfhosted Reddit community shows that it’s come a long way.

And other highly complex apps have improved their game significantly in recent years. Cal.com, which ticked me off so much two years ago that I warned an audience of Hacker News readers against using it after I tried and failed to get it to work over many hours of trial and error, is far more approachable than it once was. They seem to have gotten past the headaches with some improved Docker packaging, and now it’s a tool that’s strong enough that I use it on a daily basis.

And there are opportunities to vibe-code your way out of a paper bag if that’s your thing, too. (If it’s not your thing, that’s OK!) The ability to build custom apps for things only you might really need is one of the more potentially powerful aspects of AI, and it’s one road of many you can go down.

There’s also nothing wrong with spending some time learning how to program if you’re not quite there. Stuff like CodeAcademy and Scrimba can really take the edge off without requiring you to take night classes.

The onramp to this stuff is pretty simple these days: A mini PC, a good internet connection, a level of comfort with a terminal, and a few hours of time is all you need. It’s a way different paradigm from a high-flying consumer-level app, but I think this mindset is gradually inspiring those kinds of apps to be more approachable.

A company like Gumroad seeing this space and wanting to join it is notable—even if it’s not quite as approachable as downloading a single docker-compose file and hitting “run.”

Free Advice: When Offered, Take The Call

My interaction with Sahil was ultimately one where I felt like someone who didn’t have to give me the time to talk about this stuff did. (He literally just had a kid—he has more on his plate than reaching out to an old-school blogger with a taste for washed-out grayscale imagery.)

Recently, a lot has been said about the idea of actually talking to people who you have disagreements with. (If you’re very active on Bluesky you might have seen a debate about this very thing break out just yesterday.)

As a journalist, I talk to people all the time who I might not see eye to eye with on every issue. It comes with the territory. And while I can’t say that I was personally any more excited about DOGE after I talked to him, I did at least grasp to some degree where he was coming from—why someone like him would find this work of interest. It’s important in situations like these to both talk and to listen.

Recently, longtime Tedium contributor David Buck posted a piece where he wrote about his favorite homebrew NES games. It was essentially his personal opinion—but a manufacturer of these homebrew games was so upset that he did not link them that they posted a long rant about how it was a huge setback that they didn’t get a link. Didn’t reach out to us, just had this public reaction about it.

In response, I explained why David didn’t link their site (he didn’t want it to read like a giant sales pitch for games, and ultimately an article isn’t an ad) and gave them an opportunity to get on a Zoom call. They didn’t take it, and I thought that was unfortunate.

Text boxes only go so far when it comes to understanding the perspectives of others. Nothing wrong with getting on a phone sometime.

The roots of MapQuest go back to the history of commercial cartography

Today, the concept of combining global positioning systems with computer-based maps is so intertwined that it’s impossible to disconnect the two. But at first, loading a map on a computer wasn’t so instant and automatic, at least for the end user.

MapQuest did a lot of the work that got us there. It was the first mainstream service that allowed companies to easily display their location on a website without drawing it themselves. It was also a dead-simple way to create a shareable set of directions.

And it sold a lot of us on the idea of printing out a list of directions on our home printer, rather than buying a road map or atlas. Before the smartphone became the mapping tool du jour, it was the way to figure out where you needed to go if you were on a long journey.

But the roots of MapQuest appeared thanks to a company we actually mentioned fairly recently. R.R. Donnelley, the namesake company of 19th-century publishing entrepreneur Richard Robert Donnelley, successfully pivoted a legacy cartography business to the digital age.

(His son, Reuben H. Donnelley, helped popularize the commercial phone book under a separate namesake business. It’s sort of fitting that they each dominated a key legacy print medium.)

The roots of what became MapQuest came about in the late 1960s, when R.R. Donnelley decided to split off its mapmaking expertise, fostered to meet the needs of the oil industry, into its own subsidiary based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. At the time, Donnelley’s cartographic services arm was doing something unique in the mapping industry: It was a map-for-hire service. If you wanted a map of something—say, your business—it was positioned to do the work for you. As a 1974 profile on the company, featuring an interview with then-director Duncan M. Fitchet, put it:

Fitchet called the Lancaster mapmaking facility “unique.”

“There’s no other facility quite like ours in the country,” he added. “While other companies make maps to be published by themselves, we’re actively in the business of selling commercial cartography to publishers.”

He explained that companies like Rand McNally make maps to be printed in their own publications—atlases and textbooks. On the other hand, publishing companies or authors needing a map come to Donnelley and, for a fee, cartographic services makes it.

This actually dovetailed nicely into Donnelley’s business, which leaned hard into commercial printing at a time when it was largely an industrial concern.

By the late 1970s, the company was running quite the operation, despite utilizing a staff of just 25 people. The company had 75,000 maps in its archive and a significant library of reference books. The company was clearly well-positioned to digitize its library, which is exactly what it did, starting in the early ’80s.

The 1980s were an important time in the mapping industry, with innovations in digital mapping creating new frontiers in map development. And of course, global positioning systems were starting to emerge—further allowing new ways of generating maps based on global coordinates.

Donnelley’s big pivot happened in the late 1980s, thanks to a guy named Barry J. Glick. An academic who spent years at schools like SUNY Buffalo and Cornell, he became an expert researcher on spatial systems, becoming an expert on the topic. By the late 1980s, he started a company called Spatial Data Sciences, which specialized in the gathering of digital road map data. This data obviously had significant commercial value, which SDS leaned into.

(Side note: Something highly ironic about the fact that one of the first for Spatial Data Sciences on Google was a MapQuest listing of its original headquarters. Just … chef’s kiss.)

Per Map Happenings, Glick reached out to the two major mapmakers of the era–R.R. Donnnelley and Rand McNally—to see if they might be interested in his technology. Rand McNally passed, though Glick made up for it decades later by joining its board. Donnnelley signed on, creating a joint partnership called GeoSystems.

Glick’s decision to work with Donnelley actually gave him a huge advantage for what MapQuest would become. See, Donnelley already had a business relationship with Apple, having produced maps for the company’s platforms. The firm also printed at least some of Apple’s catalogs. (The relationship was apparently long-lasting, given the unexpected revelation in 2018 that Donnelley had managed Apple’s custom photo-printing service behind the scenes.)

So it only makes sense, perhaps, that when Apple first attempted to make handheld computing useful, Donnelley’s GeoSystems was one of the first companies on the list. In a 1992 profile on GeoSystems in the Lancaster New Era, Glick made it clear that it saw the work with a strong partner that would help the company meet its goals as a mapping innovator.

“Our objective is to become a major player in the information industry,” Glick said. “And if we’re successful (with Apple), it’s going to lead to significant growth.”

As the piece noted, the company had started to grow so quickly that it needed a new office to hold all the people. The next step? A big hit to justify all the hiring.

The Apple Newton, of course, wasn’t the Apple device that would bring this idea to the masses—and GeoSystems wasn’t the company that would make the default app on the device that did.

But it wouldn’t stop GeoSystems from becoming a dominant player in mapping—under a different name, and with a different product.

How MapQuest made GIS accessible to the masses—and how AOL screwed it up

At the time MapQuest came out, there was a huge divide in what was accessible to the consumer and what one could access as a commercial customer. The growth of geographic information software—highly expensive, specialized software—had deeply changed the mapping industry throughout the 1980s, including at companies like R.R. Donnelley, which had evolved its mapping-for-hire business into GeoSystems Global.

While the Apple Newton didn’t exactly set the world ablaze, the fact that GeoSystems hopped onto it highlighted its broader vision, which it only expanded on after spinning off from Donnelley in 1994. It saw GIS software as something consumers should have access to—and the internet was its way of doing it.

The initial MapQuest, while primitive by today’s standards, allowed consumers to search for a location and pull up a map highlighting that location. Its TripQuest functionality allowed consumers to build directions for themselves that they could then print out. Launched in 1996, it became a household name in about a year—disrupting the print map and atlas industry in one fell swoop.

It was an excellent example of a company from a legacy industry successfully pivoting to a new era without losing its shirt. It even spawned close imitators. Vicinity’s MapBlast, launched around the same time, was later scooped up by Microsoft, launching what became MSN Maps and Bing Maps.

And in a way, GeoSystems had also managed to even maintain its legacy map-for-hire offering. A 1996 Computerworld profile on GeoSystems’ commercial offering, mentioned with a competitor named Vicinity, explained how the company was making it possible for brick-and-mortar retailers like The Sharper Image to list each of their retail locations with a map. The company charged between $6,000 and $20,000 for its various offerings.

It was a model that made sense for them. Within a decade, Google would offer this embedding function as a free basic feature of Google Maps.

This MapQuest commercial is 16 years old and has less than 500 views on YouTube. Presumably, until now.

It is shocking how quickly MapQuest became a household name in retrospect. By the fall of 1998, the site received 4.5 million visitors a month, and GeoSystems publicly considered the company’s name to MapQuest, which it eventually did.

The problem with most technology of that era, from a business standpoint, is pretty basic: Tech companies of that era did not know how to harness that success over the long haul. In that light, MapQuest’s path looks like an excellent cautionary tale. The downfall happened in four parts:

1. The stock market entrance. Mere months after GeoSystems changed its name to MapQuest, the company announced its plans to enter the stock market, with a goal of diversifying into business services. Its revenue was positive, but modest.
2. The AOL acquisition. At the end of 1999, AOL announced its plans to acquire MapQuest for an eye-watering $1.1 billion. It was a huge deal that would have been even better if the all-stock deal had not been announced right before the stock market crashed, tanking the deal’s value. (It was also less than MapQuest was worth based on then-current stock prices.)
3. The AOL-Time Warner merger. It was already disruptive enough for AOL to buy your company, but one does not expect AOL to merge with an even bigger company before your deal even closes. But a mere three weeks after the MapQuest deal was announced, AOL agreed to merge with Time Warner, an embarrassingly audacious merger that ended up harming both companies. Among other things, it discouraged innovation and misunderstood the value of subsidiaries like MapQuest and Netscape—and the merger was soon undone. (As Killick put it, AOL only seemed to care about ad views.)
4. Disruption sets in. On his blog Map Happenings, Killick noted that MapQuest’s reliance on third-party data left it vulnerable to companies that could innovate more effectively than them, and Google definitely fits the bill. When the company launched Google Maps in 2005, its big innovation was something that MapQuest was not designed to do—pan a map to whatever location you wanted without changing a page. Of course, it won—and that was far from the last feature it added. Less than two years after its release, the iPhone was announced—and it had Google Maps, not MapQuest.

MapQuest lost a lot of ground thanks to a cursed merger, one that sapped an innovative company of resources and motivation. It effectively dumbed down a disruption-proof model to its most basic parts. (That business services offering? Forget about it, we’re selling ad impressions now.)

When all was said and done, it wasn’t even a billion-dollar deal anymore!

Given MapQuest’s roots as a company borne from a major publisher, it had the business parts worked out in ways that actually made sense. If one company had to dominate the online mapping space, it should have been the one built by the company that effectively started as a cartography-for-hire business. But once AOL acquired them, it did not matter—to MapQuest’s eventual peril.

Surprisingly, given all that, MapQuest is still a going concern.

The world has a new desktop operating system, and our path to that new OS has a hell of a story. And if the global economy is about to become less globalized, it could be a harbinger of what’s to come.

To set the stage: Six years ago, the Chinese tech company Huawei found itself in an unusual position with U.S. tech consumers. It was seemingly about to be banned from the American market—but its Matebook X Pro laptop had found a cult following among tech enthusiasts.

For example, The Verge called it “the best laptop right now,” high praise coming from them. That review dropped in May of 2018, about three months after a group of top intelligence officials warned the public not to buy Huawei or ZTE phones, and two months after it lost its biggest commercial partner, Best Buy. It only went downhill from there, with the Chinese company—once one of the world’s largest smartphone makers—losing access to an essential market.

But, as the above review suggests, the Matebook X Pro was hard to deny. Thin, and sporting a quite-good screen, it was the full package. It was a MacBook without the compromises that MacBooks came with at the time. Its only real problem from a technical standpoint was bad webcam placement. But it wasn’t enough to stem the tide of the bad press sparked by a series of intelligence controversies that eventually led to the arrest of the company’s CFO. Despite the reviews, you had to be a little brave to rock a Matebook X Pro with that logo on the back.

In 2022, the company’s devices were banned from sale in the U.S. entirely, and many other countries followed suit—and its sub-brand, Honor, had been sold. If you really want one, they’re on eBay, but you’re essentially going to be on your own if that device breaks.

Eventually, the company—which could no longer work with U.S.-based vendors—decided to focus on its biggest market, China. It built its own smartphone OS, HarmonyOS, which was initially based on Android.

Until recently, the company could still sell Windows, but a couple of months ago, that license ran out. The obvious play for a company like Huawei might be to go with Linux, but the company seems to have doubled down on HarmonyOS, an iOS-like play across multiple operating systems. The latest version, HarmonyOS NEXT, eschews its initial Android base entirely in favor of a homegrown micorkernel approach—and that new operating system is coming to the desktop.

The operating system’s design appears to be a combination of Windows and MacOS that at first glance looks not unlike Deepin, a homegrown Linux distro that I’ve tried in the past. (That distro has had some dramatic design shifts over the years; compare its design circa 2017 with its current design.)

While I don’t exactly have an ISO or VM image to test it out myself, there are a lot of examples of videos out there, largely in Chinese. While YouTube’s closed captioning failed me on most of the videos, this promotional video has an English translation included, which should give you an idea of its capabilities:

As you might imagine, there’s a lot of AI (thanks in part to DeepSeek), but there’s also a lot of document sharing capabilities—thanks to WPS Office, a widely used Microsoft Office alternative developed in China. It feels like a different take on a dynamic we’re already well familiar with.

(Honestly, it’s a good video and the presenter is entertaining. Apple should take notes.)

There’s no chance this will win the market outright. But Huawei is a big enough player that they have deals with most of the major Chinese app players. (Don’t expect a bunch of games, though.) It is not starting from scratch, and China is a big enough market that it will likely be fine if that’s the way it is.

Huawei’s new OS offers an example of tech as isolationism

With the company essentially untethered from Western computing concerns, it’s charting its own path. And while I have no doubt the security concerns raised by U.S. officials have a kernel of truth—given how hard they pressed them—Huawei’s announcement hits at an interesting time.

Given what’s happening in the world around tariffs, it’s intriguing to see what a company that was once a global powerhouse can do on its own. It’s not only relying on itself, it’s doing so in a vertically integrated way. It still faces an uphill battle—I mean, when was the last time we saw a large company launch a desktop OS from scratch, soup to nuts?—but the fact that they’re about to ship hardware shows it’s possible.

And it raises the question: If things get worse, could other companies follow suit? There are some large companies with Chinese ties that have not gotten a tenth of the scrutiny of Huawei. (TP-Link, the dominant router maker, is an example of one that is.)

For example, Lenovo, the largest computer manufacturer in the world, is Chinese, and three of the “big six” laptop manufacturers (Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, Acer, Asus) are based outside the U.S. All six of these companies have benefited greatly from our global economy. But what if any one of them had to lean in on their local market alone because of changing economic conditions? It might look something like what Huawei’s doing.

If Jerry Rig Everything is doing a video about your phone, odds are American audiences would be interested in using it.

The company is not only building its own ecosystem from scratch, it is still producing innovative products, including a triple-fold smartphone that drew a lot of attention from tech-heads outside of China.

To be clear, Huawei is trying to make the best of a bad situation, and if you think they’re bad or dangerous in some way, you can ignore them. But the dynamic they’ve created for themselves suggests that the current tech-industry dynamic we’re all used to isn’t necessarily the end of the road.

If the world becomes more isolated, our tech companies might just try to compete a little harder.

Today’s GIF is from a video showing how clover sprouts are grown; this process is also a great way to grow bacteria.

The challenges of creating sprouts that don’t make people sick

Sprouts are interesting-looking, they’re cheap, and they add texture.

But sprouts are extremely finicky, and a big part of the reason for this is that the very thing that helps them grow is the exact same thing that can foster a bacteria outbreak. As Jane Hart of the Michigan State University Extension program (go Spartans!) wrote for Food Safety News in 2017:

Any produce that is eaten raw or only lightly cooked carries with it a risk of foodborne illness. Sprouts especially seem to be vulnerable because they need warmth and humidity to sprout, which is exactly what bacteria like salmonella and E. coli need to grow. With enough time in the temperature “danger zone”—40 degrees to 140 degrees Fahrenheit—that the seeds need to sprout, they can become a petri dish of bacteria.

You can’t avoid diseases created from sprouts by simply washing the surface, as you can with many foods. Sprouts are young, and since they’re growing at the same time as the bacteria, it’s often the case that they end up directly inside the sprout, where they can’t be washed out.

(Irradiation is an effective option, but it’s worth keeping in mind that we have folks who drink raw milk because it’s more real, despite the fact that we’ve known pasteurization improves milk safety for more than a century.)

Mike Doyle, who spent years leading the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia before retiring in 2017, spent decades researching E. coli, one of the primary health risks created by contaminated produce. He recommends against pre-cut produce, and says it’s safer to cook it, but that obviously isn’t easy when produce is generally served raw.

But Doyle has special concerns about sprouts. In an interview with his former university, Doyle referred to raw sprouts as one of the most hazardous types of foods.

“The problem is contaminated seeds that are placed in warm water where the sprouts grow. But the conditions are ideal for the bacteria to grow, too,” Doyle said. “Often, only a few seeds are contaminated, so you can’t simply test a few to see if there is a contamination.”

Now, take something that’s already hard to sanitize and add the challenges of consistency created by the franchise-based food system, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Jimmy John’s was so desperate to keep sprouts that it switched its plant of choice

So, to be clear, it wasn’t exactly a surprise that sprouts were a major source of foodborne illnesses—it was a point of criticism among epidemiologists and food safety experts for years. (Of course, Doyle has said similar things about raw spinach, and it hasn’t stopped us from eating salad.)

But the problem was likely compounded by the fact that the sprouts weren’t a particularly mainstream food. For years, they were the domain of health food fanatics (and they still kind of are, for the reasons I listed above). But Jimmy John’s was having a moment around 2010, with more than 1,100 restaurants generating sales of $780 million that year. The company was partially owned by private equity, and it was in places well beyond the company’s college-town roots. As a chain, it had grown as large as some of the fast-food giants that towered over it decades prior.

But when you grow that large, things become harder to manage, especially in a chain where consistency means everything. Around this time, for example, some Minneapolis locations attempted to unionize, at a time when fast food unionization efforts were rare. And at the end of 2010, a major outbreak of salmonella hit Jimmy John’s home state of Illinois, sickening 140 people.

Quickly, it became clear the sprouts were the problem—and the company immediately responded by dropping alfalfa sprouts from its menu. Despite the health risks, this was an unpopular move, in part because of the popularity of the sprouts. It was that little extra thing at the top that made the sandwich chain unique. After all, it wasn’t like you could get sprouts from Subway. Or Jersey Mike’s. Or Quizno’s.

The chain had other things to make itself unique—including the limited delivery area, which makes it possible to get a sandwich delivered in five minutes or less—but the sprouts carried quite a hold on people.

Fittingly, the company’s first instinct was to try to find an alternative. In January of 2011, the company announced that it was replacing the alfalfa sprouts with clover sprouts, a completely different variety of plant that nonetheless offered a similar kind of crunch.

“I am excited about this win win,” Liautaud said in a statement amid this announcement. “Sprout lovers, come and get it. Your clover sprouts await.”

Now, this logically seems like a good way to handle a problem like this—if one kind of sprout is a problem, go for a rough equivalent and keep customers happy. But there was just one problem—the issue of foodborne illnesses from sprouts is not unique to alfalfa. The issue rather, is the sprouts themselves … which again, are grown in an environment that is highly susceptible to fostering bacteria at the exact same time. FDA warnings about sprouts as a food category were already common, and grocery chains like Kroger had actually removed sprouts from its stores because of health risks during this period. In fact, the International Sprout Growers Association was trying to play defense around the time that Jimmy John’s launched its clover sprouts, the subject of an article titled, “Are Sprouts Safe?”

In the case of Jimmy John’s, the chain felt that because clover sprouts were easier to clean, they would be less likely to run into foodborne illness issues. Just one problem: Another outbreak happened in 2012, and it was directly blamed on said clover sprouts.

The reputation of Liautaud’s restaurant chain was on the line, and the company was facing lawsuits. Understandably, he made the call around this time to stop selling sprouts entirely.

“Jimmy decided he was tired of the negative press from it and he thinks sprouts aren’t necessary for Jimmy John’s to rock,” one franchise owner told his local newspaper.

But the lack of sprouts never sat well with some fans of the restaurant, and at one point, the company got sued over not having sprouts, likely the result of restaurants that were slow to replace menus.

So, stuck between a rock and a sprout place, the company brought back sprouts in 2014 … but made them optional, and required customers to acknowledge that they were doing so at their own risk. And as a part of the settlement, Jimmy John’s gave consumers disappointed about the prior loss of sprouts a $1.40 voucher as a result.

To paraphrase Ed Robertson, the lunch, it’s so dangerous, you’ll have to sign a waiver.

And despite the warnings and concerns about sprouts, they continued to be consumed by people who had to have been aware of the dangers of eating the sprouts, given the widespread attention the story had gotten, but chose to continue purchasing it on sandwiches anyway. And outbreaks, inevitably, kept happening.

But by 2020, the Food and Drug Administration had seen enough. In February of that year, just before COVID-19 quarantines began in earnest, the food regulators sent a strongly worded letter to the restaurant chain after yet another outbreak of E. coli. The company had worked with the FDA on an alternative to alfalfa sprouts, but the chain had failed to maintain its use of agreed-upon suppliers among franchisees.

“Although you stated that corrective actions were implemented following the 2019 and 2012 outbreaks, you have not provided FDA with any information demonstrating long-term, sustainable corrections have been implemented throughout your organization to prevent this violation from recurring in the future,” the FDA stated in its warning letter.

But by the time this warning letter came along, the environment that led to this situation had changed. (But not quickly enough, as another outbreak surfaced just after the letter was sent.) The year before, Jimmy John Liautaud had sold his shares of the company he started to Inspire Brands, a holding company that owns a lot of well-known restaurant chains, most famously Dunkin’ and Arby’s. The sale made Liautaud a billionaire. Fittingly for a restaurant chain that signs billion-dollar checks, the new owners did not mess around, taking sprouts off the menu entirely in 2020.

The case was made repeatedly that sprouts were an intrinsic part of the appeal of Jimmy John’s sandwiches, but when stress tested by multiple foodborne illness outbreaks, it was proven that it perhaps wasn’t the case.

Need a sign that this week’s Apple ruling was both necessary and absolutely overdue? Take one good look at Patreon.

Last summer, I wrote a piece suggested that Patreon needed to fight back against Apple’s attempt to strong-arm its creator-friendly business model. Patreon seemed quick to acquiesce to Apple’s demands that even individual creators were on the hook for a 30% fee.

It was, to me, a sign that Apple had gone too far and had honestly lost the plot when it came to its realistic role as a middleman. Patreon isn’t perfect, but if anyone gets a cut for facilitating a subscription that goes to a creator, it should be them.

Yesterday, Patreon announced that it was going to put out an update bypassing the Apple cut. Furthermore, it was pausing its unpopular decision to end per-creation memberships.

Patreon wasn’t alone in correcting its model in response to an Apple-shaped boulder getting pushed aside. So is Spotify. And Proton, which promised to pass the cost savings directly to consumers.

Worst of all for Apple, Stripe is now offering a direct integration with iOS apps, a move that effectively cuts a 30% markup to something closer to 4% if you decide to cut out the middleman and build your own checkout method.

Reminder that Apple used this imagery to highlight its benefits to consumers just a year ago.

The result feels like we’re watching an app industry finally get a breath in after 17 long years of holding it. Some argue that Apple deserves a cut from the apps that take part in its ecosystem. Yes, they probably do. But that cut is not 30%, a number that always felt arbitrary and now is subject to a legal decision that highlights just how arbitrary it actually is. As Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ court ruling puts it:

Apple’s lack of adequate justification, knowledge of the economic non-viability of its compliance program, motive to protect its illegal revenue stream and institute a new de facto anticompetitive structure, and then create a reverse-engineered justification to proffer to the Court cannot, in any universe, real or virtual, be viewed as product of good faith or a reasonable interpretation of the Court’s orders.

Rogers, a judge in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California who often finds herself knee-deep in cases similar to this, did not hold back. That stands out, given that her prior opinion was pretty much an Apple win.

The surprising part of this to me is that Phil Schiller, as strong an acolyte to the brand as Apple has, turns out to have been the voice of reason, arguing against putting a fee on links at all. Problem is, Tim Cook sided with the finance team, which was most concerned about its bottom line. It chose 27% seemingly to discourage linkouts entirely:

Despite Mr. Schiller’s concerns, the June 20, 2023 presentation forged ahead and identified benefits to several different commission/fee options, one of which was a 27% commission on transactions made within 24 hours of a customer’s link-out. For that option, the presentation identified that the proposal “[r]educes financial risk versus no-fee option,” which simply refers to the fact that Apple would generate more revenue under this option than a no-commission option.

In fact, documents revealed that not only would Apple generate more revenue, it would lose minimal to none: as Apple’s earlier financial modeling had indicated, because developers’ external costs will exceed 3% when utilizing linked-out transactions, Apple’s 27% commission on linked-out transactions renders every linked-out transaction more expensive to a developer than an IAP transaction at 30% commission.

The result is that Apple turned a case it basically won in most meaningful ways into perhaps the biggest legal loss in the company’s 49-year history.

There’s something about services revenue that can be deeply corrupting if you are not careful about it. The tendency to optimize for financial gain is very much there, and it’s something you can see from many of the services that offer these subscription services. Spotify, a direct beneficiary of this, is an excellent example: Last year, the company went through layoffs so significant that founder Daniel Ek said they harmed the company more than anticipated. As a Business Insider piece from this week highlights, the layoffs even affected the overall quality of the company’s playlists.

Apple is not the kind of company that will cost-optimize by cutting quality. But as a hardware manufacturer, it is known for its clockwork-like supply chain, which Tim Cook built. The best supply chains are optimized for minimizing costs and maximizing profit. No wonder he favored the structure that best protected the status quo.

Money is a corrupting force, and you have to work hard to not let it corrupt your thinking or your ideas. Apple is quite good at making money in relatively uncorrupted fashion. The iPod is an excellent example of this. But under the Tim Cook era, the company always finds ways to let the finance people win the discussion. Every single controversial decision the company has made in recent years—the company’s tendency to discourage upgradeability, its slow-rolling of USB-C on iPhones, the blue bubbles—seemingly has roots in the finance team winning the discussion.

It is notable that the finance team lost one. Perhaps if we want an Apple we like to thrive for generations to come, it needs to lose a few more.