Navigating Software Ecosystems and AI Evolution: A Year of Innovations

Mark Smith: 0:31
Welcome to the Ecosystem Show. We're thrilled to have you with us here. We challenge traditional mindsets and explore innovative approaches to maximizing the value of your software estate. We don't expect you to agree with everything. Challenge us, share your thoughts and let's grow together. Now let's dive in it's showtime. Welcome back. It's Christmas week and we'll probably consider this our final episode for 2024. I was going to say 2025, and I didn't want to lose a whole year ahead. You've got three of us today. I'm always excited to be here. This is one of my favorite podcast experiences is just hanging out with friends and chatting. Andrew, what's top of mind for you at the moment?

Andrew Welch : 1:14
friends and chatting. Andrew, what's top of mind for you at the moment? Well, top of mind for me is that you told me in the before we hit hit record that you have only ever canceled a podcast recording once. And what are you now at 700 episodes lifetime.

Mark Smith: 1:29
I think 639 ish or something yeah.

Andrew Welch : 1:33
That's that. That's incredible's incredible. That that is an achievement. But in other achievements let's talk about, let's talk about the year behind us, and you know, I remember last year we did an episode. The Christmas episode was something like unboxing gifts from Microsoft, or which gifts from Microsoft we were most excited about in the year to come. I wish I had watched that episode, but I have a hard rule I don't watch episodes of our own show. Let's talk about where we've been over the last 12 months. I feel like it's been a long year.

Mark Smith: 2:12
Well, I mean you know we started a company this year, so that was yeah. A lot of people don't realize that Cloud Lighthouse was only started in January this year.

Andrew Welch : 2:19
Yeah, January 2024. Yeah, right.

Mark Smith: 2:23
The ground that's been covered in this past year. That's why I feel it's a long year. I'm like oh, last year I was at Dynamics Mines. No, I wasn't, I was there this year.

Andrew Welch : 2:37
It was just so long ago. Um, that event, you know, um, yeah, it's pretty phenomenal that dynamics minds. So, if we're talking about this one, this is a game I like to play, right like can you, how do you sort of bend? What kind of mind bending? Um revelations come from, either talking about how long something has been going on or how short something has been, and Dynamics Minds has become the go-to event worldwide in Microsoft land. In my opinion, you know, I wish that Dynamics Minds, I think, would expand more into the Azure and the Fabric space. It's still very BizApps focused, but I've compared it in the past to the combination of Davos and Burning man for the Microsoft community. But the first Dynamics Mines happened 18 months ago. Right, there's only been two. They're planning for the third one, so there's something from 2025. 2025 is the year that Dynamics Mines took over. The, you know, became the place to be all year long in Microsoft land.

Mark Smith: 3:44
Yeah, what I like about it it's technical through the day and it's full like carnival experience in the evenings.

Ana Welch : 3:55
Right, you're saying just in the evenings, but honestly that music is blasting 24 hours.

Mark Smith: 4:00
Bring your earplugs right. If you want to have an early night, you need to bring your earplugs.

Mark Smith: 4:06
You need to be very, very prepared to not be able to take a nap, unless you come with a sound machine with you, because there's music all the time and there's so much information that you you know you need a little rest if you're old andrew, you, you mentioned something there about you know pivoting to covering more or broader topic and audience, and you know we discussed this last time that I've rebranded the podcast because I've noticed this massive move that, although my career for the last 20-odd years has been very much in business applications, it's an internal phrase for Microsoft and they're even walking away from it themselves this year. They're not using that phrase. There's been name changes internally and Microsoft are really pivoting to becoming an AI company more than a software company and they're seeing that as a redefining of who they are as an organization. So that's pretty much what I'm seeing internally, seeing internally and and and, hence why I think a lot of these events you know are going to need to become much more focused.

Mark Smith: 5:23
Where the market is going, you know when, when I think of you know what we had with dynamics and the power platform and hey, I would still work on gigs et cetera related to those. It's not like that, I'm leaving it behind, but I feel that everything is really evolving around a data landscape, right, and that then goes okay. How do we extend it? From an agentic point of view, what does AI play in that data landscape? And using the full set of tools in the toolbox rather than just sticking with. Oh, I only use the hammer, I only do power apps, or I only use the drill, I only do power automate, and so I do think there's this much more holistic view we're starting to see across the market.

Andrew Welch : 6:10
I think that there's a lot of truth in that and for the second episode in a row, I will say good job on the name change for the podcast, For your other podcast.

Andrew Welch : 6:21
I should say so this is a topic that I've thought a lot about for several years. If you go back to my history, before we started Cloud Lighthouse, I was at two partners. Going back Well, I've been at other partners, but going back to 2017, I was at two partners between 2017 and early 2024. And at one of them, my job was to build a BizApps practice inside of an Azure partner, and at the other, my job was to build an Azure practice inside of a BizApps partner. Now we can dissect the ins and outs of that All we want, though I think I can sum it up and say that it's a lot easier to build a BizApps practice inside of an Azure partner than to go the other way and take a BizApps partner into Azure land.

Ana Welch : 7:14
I mean to be fair, you can even go more granular than that, and before having to build the whole Azure practice, you had to build a power platform practice within a Dynamics firm. That was super hard as well.

Andrew Welch : 7:31
Building a power platform practice inside of a dynamics firm is terrible. Like I'll go on record and say that is the most thankless job that anyone in Microsoft land can have. It's a terrible thing to do.

Ana Welch : 7:47
It's insane because it's hard to see the difference.

Mark Smith: 7:51
Yeah, right, so this brings to mind right some earlier this year, andrew, you said something about that partners, in a way, are set up all wrong and that they set their practices up around technology, and was there really a need to move to set your practices up around industries? I think did I get that right? Yeah, tell me if you, if you had a clean sheet and somebody came to you and said, listen, here's $20 million and we need you to start a practice today, knowing what you know now and knowing what your observations of the future are. It's going to be a Microsoft based technology. You know practice partner. How would you structure and would you use the word practice? How would you position yourself, knowing what you know, at this point in time, in december 2024, how would you do things differently? How would you structure that to really take advantage of where the world is going? And I'm talking about an implementation partner, something we don't do at Cloud Lighthouse but how do you think in that respect?

Andrew Welch : 9:00
This is such a fascinating question and, by the way, I have now remembered what it was that I wanted to do, what I want to do with the next episode of the ecosystem show when we're back from the Christmas break. But, yeah, this is so. Yeah, this, this is fascinating to me and you know, in general, I'll make one general statement. Then I've got you know sort of five things that that I would do and what I would focus on. First of all, I really I really don't like the model. It's a very old model and I know why we have it, but I do not like this model of having practices structured around technology areas. Right, and to connect this back to how we started the episode, what will we remember about 2024? One of the things that I will remember about 2024 is that I think, for the first time, I really started to see this idea that there is no such thing as biz apps and there's no such thing as data platform and there's no such thing as Azure, all sort of in isolation. I really started to see that catch on and gain traction amongst others, I think, who don't spend 90% of their working hours thinking about this. So that that, I think, I think was really positive and promising.

Andrew Welch : 10:21
So, first and foremost, if I were going to in your scenario, if I were in that situation you described, there would not, I would not have a power platform practice, I would not have a biz apps practice, I would not have a fabric practice and I would not have an M three, 65 or an Azure practice.

Andrew Welch : 10:37
I think I just named the big product buckets at Microsoft. I wouldn't do it, right, what I would do is I would focus on the whole of cloud, right, I would build um, I would I, you know, I I do think it's very important to give a home, sort of like a family at work, to, to your colleagues and to the people who work there. Right, I think that everyone needs to feel like they belong somewhere. But I would try to to build a structure of belonging that was less about discrete product areas and really build these intermingled teams right, where you're almost forcing the data platform guys and the dynamics guys to work together and to learn from one another. Listen, I think that the era of having a dynamics partner is long gone. Right, if you are still sitting out there leading a dynamics partner, you are screwed, you're just done. You may not realize it, but you are super done.

Mark Smith: 11:43
Yeah.

Andrew Welch : 11:44
So, first of all, focus on the whole of cloud.

Andrew Welch : 11:47
Another thing that I would do and I'm going to move away from technology here and I'm going to say I would create mechanisms to make it easier for colleagues to work across borders.

Andrew Welch : 11:59
Okay, if you look at any partner out there that has more than that does business in a significant way in more than two countries right, they're in more than one country. They start to build these business units right, and I get why the business unit is built, because oftentimes you need to incorporate in the country you're doing business units. Right, and I get why the business unit is built, because oftentimes you need to incorporate in the country you're doing business in, but then these companies make it impossible or very, very difficult to build teams and to hire across borders. Right, it's like the French business unit will serve the French customers and the Canadian business unit will serve the French customers and the Canadian business unit will serve the Canadian customers. And I think that not only are you doing a disservice to your customers, right, but you're really doing you're strangling yourself of talent that exists all around the world, and I think that that's really foolish. I have three more, but I've done a lot of talking, so I'll give you back the floor.

Mark Smith: 12:58
I saw that firsthand in my time at IBM is that they don't have an operating model that goes cross geos, no, and so what would happen is that there would be, let's say, a deal in Europe that I would have been the person that should have been put into play on the deal. Right, yeah, because I was most knowledgeable around what they were wanting to do. But they have no way of having a charging system or how they do pos internally and how your billing codes work that would allow it to work across borders. And so, although they have this overarching name of IBM and you could replace that with KPMG, ey, any of these big type partners they have these pockets of talent, but it's not available to their customer base as a whole. It's only available in the geos. And one thing I learned about eight years ago when I was involved in running a practice in Australia is that when I went into this organization and we were doing, as a company, around $800 million a year across a lot of different things, it wasn't just, you know, the Microsoft side of things. This company had been running around 30-odd years, but each state in Australia run their own business, independent of every other state, and so it got to the point of absolute frustration for me. And, and you know, because there would be talent in this state that were on the bench and you couldn't use them in this state because, no, we didn't do that right and so, or you had low cost resource, because the cost of living in an area was lower that could work on a remote project for a couple of months, you know would be you know the cost of transport, etc. Not a big issue. And so I resigned from the company.

Mark Smith: 14:40
It was actually the actually the point that Microsoft hired me as an FTE and I went to my boss and said you know, it was all done, the contracts are signed. I was going into Microsoft Australia to work at that time and he said one thing to me what would it take for you not to leave? And it was never a money issue, because I was fine from that perspective and I said, listen, I would want full autonomy across Australia to bring all the states under one practice. The thing is, we went from 5 million a year to 25 million a year by that simple one change, because we're able to scale and add the tech skill that we could bring to bear, the right people to the right projects, no matter the geography. It was just. I know it works when you can work on this kind of let's hire top talent around the globe, doesn't matter where they are, but we can bring them to bear on the projects where the customer needs it, rather than just because they live in that region we did this in the we.

Andrew Welch : 15:43
We touched on this in the work life, as we'll put it, the work life integration episode that we did a few weeks back. I I think that it bears repeating, though, that one of the I get why companies are, I get why companies and government agencies this has actually become big since Donald Trump's election because the thought is that they're going to call federal workers, call government workers, back into the office, right, and I just think that societies I get why organizations have this urge to call workers back into the office. I think you know there's a few reasons that we don't need to rehash that, but one of the big societal benefits that I think we're missing out on here is that it has not been good. It has not been good to concentrate. It's been good in some ways, but it has not been good, arguably, for broader society to concentrate wealth and economic influence and corporate power, and I'm not talking about this like an anti-corporate warrior, right? I'm just saying you know, corporations have power and they get concentrated in cities, and you know, you look at the United States, which I think is a good example, because the United States is not like the United Kingdom, where London dwarfs everything else In the US.

Andrew Welch : 17:11
You've got New York and you've got Boston, you've got DC and Seattle and San Francisco and Los Angeles and Chicago and Denver, so, but you, you still have this relatively small number of specific cities where a lot of wealth has become concentrated.

Andrew Welch : 17:28
If we're not creating the conditions for people to disperse and to you know outdoorsy types to go live in the mountains and and city types to go live in the cities, and you know Folks like me who grew up by the sea to go live by the sea. Because when we do that, we as a society we release all of this brainpower and capital and we disperse it throughout the land and we create the conditions for people who do live in places without a corporate tech hub to become employed in some of these occupations and we also inject money into communities that need it. And so I think that that's at the societal level and then at the corporate level, right. This gets back to what I said. If I were starting an implementation partner from scratch work across borders, take the borders down, as I'm going to get quoted here in a soundbite for talking about like we should have open borders.

Mark Smith: 18:35
That is not what I'm saying.

Andrew Welch : 18:36
I'm saying like make it easy for people to work together from wherever they live, and at a personal level it creates so much freedom to go live the kind of life that you want. It seems like a no brainer to me all the way around.

Mark Smith: 18:51
What do you think, Anna?

Ana Welch : 18:52
I think that this is an important subject and a very complicated one, and I don't think that you can angle it from just one viewpoint.

Mark Smith: 19:01
Agreed.

Ana Welch : 19:02
Because some people do want to go and work from wherever and others simply want to just not work at home. Like, not everybody has a nice home with an office and quiet time and stuff so that you can actually focus, or not everybody like to give you my example. I'm not an extrovert. This means that when I have a problem I'm going to dig into that problem like crazy until I find a solution. And I find it much easier once I've met my colleagues and we've spent some time face-to-face, to actually reach out and ask for their help.

Ana Welch : 19:43
Now I'm not saying everybody should go back into the office and I'm totally supporting the idea that we should be able to work from everywhere and that definitely will nourish talent.

Ana Welch : 19:56
But I do believe that none of the extremes are necessarily good and I do believe that it's important to allow for some sort of middle ground. Allow for some sort of middle ground Like, for example, we are an association based in London, new York, hong Kong, singapore, I don't care right, everybody comes back to base or everybody meets at a conference or everybody does something every three months of the year. It's important, it's like time went spent, you know, for a lot of these things. And I do believe that, unless you have a little bit of a middle ground, you're gonna go back into creating practices for technology. Yeah, because people are going to start talking about what they have in common, and I will not have in common as much in common with the front-end person as I do with the architect person, or like the data integration folk and so on and so forth, so I'm missing out personally on an opportunity.

Andrew Welch : 21:51
I agree, I don't want. I'm not advocating for an extreme. I think that you're very correct there.

Mark Smith: 21:59
For a long time now, we've all known that the smartest person on this podcast is Anna, without a doubt at all, and just sharing here you can see that Anna has now decided to create her own little slice of digital world, and you can see AnnaWalshcom is the URL there. I highly recommend that you go and see her. 15 years of experience is really getting distilled into the posts and stuff that she's writing on, based on the Top of Mind projects, etc. I highly recommend you go check it out. It's great to see her got the site up and, as I say, she's the brightest mind amongst the five of us on the ecosystem show. So well done, anna.

Ana Welch : 22:46
Oh, thank you, you are super kind to say that and to bring up my website. It's you know, this year, because we're talking about this year, this year has been full of changes, you know, personally and professionally, and as we are talking about Microsoft's direction towards being an AI company and a much more technology integrating company and not wanting to talk about these apps as much and how that is changing everything, like, for me, it's just bring it at home, like, finally, I felt comfortable, listened and almost embraced. So I've created that website to kind of put into words what I do day to day. I think that in the past it wasn't maybe as listened to or as important, because everybody was focused on I'm going to build power apps. I want to know everything about responsive power apps. How can we create I don't know formulas, how can we integrate this power app with, like, a connector and the end? Or I'm going to, you know, do a bit of automation and I'm going to be a power automate expert, or I'm going to do dynamics, or I'm going to do Azure, I'm going to do data, et cetera, et cetera, and so nobody was really interested in this area of fusing our worlds. So my write-ups will be a lot about how do we integrate these things.

Ana Welch : 24:22
You know, when a person says, oh, I've been a developer for the past 20 years, you're not going to see me do Power Platform because that's just like drag and drop stuff and you cannot even like put proper governance on it, or you cannot even do, you know, proper ALM or proper testing, et cetera, et cetera, I'm here to kind of show them that you can actually do all of these things, you know. And vice versa, when a person's like, oh, I've been doing dynamics for the past, such and such time, I don't see why you would ever write a line of code. I'm here to kind of emphasize the fact that if you are creating a form that has 200 fields, maybe you should take a step back and ask yourself some questions Is there something that you should maybe be doing better? So this website is about technical assurance, technical excellence, making people talk to each other, because within projects, organizations and even geography wise, the biggest problem is not technology or even AI. The biggest problem is the fact that people don't communicate well.

Andrew Welch : 25:44
Interesting, that's very interesting, by the way, anna. It prefers drag and drop, prefers to go by its Christian name of clicky clicky, draggy droppy, I believe is.

Ana Welch : 25:57
Shout out to Keith. Walling on clicky clicky draggy droppy, To be fair, because I've met so many absolutely brilliant people on both sides and I just don't understand how they cannot see the brilliance in one another Like I don't know how you're not inspired.

Andrew Welch : 26:16
This gets to. So Anna and I were Anna and I were were in a meeting recently and I want to be clear if if the individual in question here is listening to this that the individual in question here is a very intelligent, accomplished data platform architect, right, and. But but once again, I'm in a I'm in a discussion where, you know, we're in a discussion where the technology's at play. There's a massive thing being built in this particular organization that is going to take a combination of Power Platform, fabric and Azure Integration Services. And once again, I'm sitting there, we're sitting there with a senior data platform.

Andrew Welch : 27:09
Think that the ignorance and when I say ignorance I mean simply like in its actual definition right, that it is a lack of knowledge about things that you are not, that are not your expertise, right, but that lack of knowledge does go both ways. It's not just a bunch of you know, an army of dynamics folk who don't know how Azure integration services work. It can also be a data platform architect that has never heard, or not never heard of, but doesn't know how Dataverse works. So I definitely think that this goes, that this goes both both ways, and this is these are important things that I started to see thaw a little bit in 2024.

Mark Smith: 27:54
So 2025, what's? What are we thinking? What, what, what are we hoping for? What? What do we think will come to pass? What will we? You know, as in the marketing is all around um, agents, the uis are all being updated to away from co-pilots, in many cases to the word agents, particularly on the co-pilot studio at the moment. Where do you reckon we'll be this time next year? Like, what would have changed? How do you think? Uh, even the way we work, do you think it's going to be a like it'll be unrecognizable in the next 12 months? What do you think?

Andrew Welch : 28:29
what do you think?

Ana Welch : 28:37
I think the main things that we are doing do think we may be able to do these things on steroids. Uh, like, I've started to look into agents and maybe I'm like late in the late to the party. I know there are already like a ton of training videos and a lot of things.

Mark Smith: 29:01
Agents are not that easy yeah, and remember, the agents we have at the moment are agents point zero zero one they're not real.

Andrew Welch : 29:09
They're not actual agents.

Mark Smith: 29:11
For the most part they're not no, no, they're a concept, they're a vision, they're a marketing, but I don't think it's their reality. That you go? You know what that thing's going to save me straight away two hours a day of something I do all the time and I'm not talking about prompting and stuff that have their own agency to go. Hey, that's made my life more efficient, right.

Ana Welch : 29:33
So I think that by the end of 2025, we will have real agents Interesting. That's what I think.

Mark Smith: 29:41
Yeah, I'm hoping for it.

Ana Welch : 29:45
What about you?

Andrew Welch : 29:46
I think that I want.

Andrew Welch : 29:48
One hope that I have is that by the end of 2025, we're talking less about AI, right, not that AI will go away, not that AI will become less important but my hope is that it becomes normalized in a way that it's not normalized today.

Andrew Welch : 30:14
And that's not to say that I think that people are using, many of us are using, and I might even go so far, and especially with you starting to see things like Apple intelligence arrive on you know people's phones right, that I would wager to say that even most of us are using AI at some point in a typical day, whether we know it or not, and I would like to see the normalization of all of this, of all of this progress a bit more, because I think that right now, the shiny object effect has some pretty adverse consequences, right.

Andrew Welch : 30:59
One of them is that and I see organizations doing this all the time right, they want to build the AI thing and sort of just skip ahead that you want to. They want to skip the data platform, they want to skip the data consolidation, they want to skip the modernization, like the good old fashioned stuff that makes their cloud ecosystem work, and get to the shiny thing, and I think that that's in some ways a factor of the fact that it's still a product, of the fact that this still is not normalized. That would. I think that's a that's a hope of mine for next year.

Mark Smith: 31:37
So, along those lines, tell me how you feel about this.

Andrew Welch : 31:45
I saw this and I loved it, but isn't it?

Mark Smith: 31:52
doesn't this absolutely capture it? It's like so much of what we've seen this year. You look at it and I'm going yeah, that's not AI. That's not AI Like that's not AI, that's not AI, Like yeah, that ain't AI, but so many companies you're like on this bandwagon of this is you know, our thing's got AI in it and I'm just like you know if in statements that's all I'm really seeing here?

Andrew Welch : 32:15
So, for those who are listening to this and not watching the show, what we're looking at is a bar of soap like a bar of hand soap sitting on what looks like a bathroom sink, with the plastic liquid soap pump stuck into the bar of hard soap. And it says the caption is legacy software companies adding an AI chat bot to their product. And I think, mark, you're right. This captures so much because we're still in this era and we've talked about this on the show before right, we're still in this era, right Like after the iPhone came out, and for a couple of years, what software developers tried to do is they tried to cram desktop apps into a smaller screen before they realized that the iPhone had altered the way that a human interacted with technology and interacted with information and functionality.

Andrew Welch : 33:10
You know, I think that the killer, the killer feature for the smartphone actually was, was location awareness. Right Like that. Once developers figured out how to work with that and how to build user experiences around that killer feature, everything changed. But right now, we're still very much with AI in this realm of like I'm using my app as normal, oh, and there's this drawer over here that I can slide out and chat with the app and that I can slide out and chat with the app and I think that's just. Yeah, listen, ai and developers society is going to figure out what the form factor for AI is, and it would be amazing if we got to this point in a year's time and felt like we had made some really significant progress beyond the chatbot.

Mark Smith: 34:00
Much more immersive, I feel. I feel like for AI to really serve me ultimately into where I'm thinking is it's got to have spatial awareness of my environment in real time and what I'm observing in my world, whether it's been multiple screens, et cetera.

Ana Welch : 34:19
And what's your preferences, what's your style. It needs to learn you.

Mark Smith: 34:24
Yes you know, everybody has a different way that they communicate more effectively. For me, when I'm receiving communication, auditory is the way that works best for me, but for somebody else, reading might be the way that works best for them, or, you know, or kinesthetic, there's different ways that people and I think that the ability for it to adapt to our style, one thing that I I kind of have, I'm frustrated, I suppose, with some limitations I'm seeing at the moment, which I hope go away next year, is the concept of memory with ai yeah especially memory about me, like the amount of times I've repeated that same stuff about.

Mark Smith: 35:02
I'd love it to remember that and I know there's probably a privacy implications and stuff that people are concerned around that. But I do really want an ai that the more I feed it about me, it has that context of that over time. And then I suppose the other part of it, which I mean somebody wrote a post the other day on LinkedIn just saying you know calling bullshit on Microsoft around Copilot and he's you know the dude's title was he's a guru in AI and he's doing speaking engagements and I looked two years back and he was. He was flipping properties. Right, doesn't have a university degree, doesn't show any long-term and technology is flipping properties. That was his full time for the last six years mark, don't be snotty about university degrees yeah, I.

Mark Smith: 35:49
But what I'm just like, no, I don't have one either, but what I'm saying is that I don't care. He made all these assertions against microsoft and, uh, in an implementation of co-pilot in the australian federal government and, like I, it's like heaps of people got on it right, like yeah, yeah, you're right, and I'm like there's no critical thinking being shown here as into what he's been said, like it was like oh, the context window is not big enough, and I'm like it's fine to say that, and like I'm a big proponent of having large context windows because of the size of my prompts. But 99 of people, the context window is absolutely fine because they're only doing like one sentence prompts, you know. But it's kind of like if you just take one thing out of context is, but people just buy into the stuff because he had a fancy title that he was given to himself can I and maybe this is, maybe this is a note to end on right, but here's a wish of mine for 2025, right Is that it is.

Andrew Welch : 36:47
There's been this little cottage industry that I see on LinkedIn, and there are a few prominent purveyors of this attitude right, where almost everything I see them post is negative and critical and complaining about whatever it is Right, like and I'm talking about. And I'm not talking about complaining about every which topic. I'm talking very specifically about technology, and technology broadly, ai broadly, maybe Microsoft in in particular, right, so I would love to see a little more. A little more. I love the thinking. I love not, you know, folks, not being sheep right to this technology, but I would like to see a little more offering up of ideas and a little less trying to, you know, tear down the latest product evolution or the latest thing that people are experimenting with. This is an era of experimentation. So a little more building and a little less complaining folks.

Ana Welch : 37:53
I mean, you see these things because people click on them. Because that's my news feed and that's your own news feed, because that's my news feed and that's your own news feed and it's your own news feed because people who you follow, they also read the same stuff, and et cetera, et cetera. I'm not an expert in social media, but I do know, by any means, but I do know that news and bad news attracts followers. It's so true.

Mark Smith: 38:22
Can I read you the comment of the week that I got on one of my videos on YouTube? Here's the comment have you found a solution to that bald-ass head? The only missing answer is yours. When I ask where are your two eyebrows went. I can see about 50 layers of wrinkles on your noggin. Can you pick them? Pick them back a bit as well. The only consultation it is hairline can get it to the time of death. From your local news nuance it's these run two words together. How can you talk about solutions that stick when you can't even make your hair stick?

Mark Smith: 39:02
oh my god, I'm like there's some people out there what they get their pleasure in, right, that was on an ai post video. That I did. You know, one of my short videos that was like that's a long written post right. That took its time to write that and I'm like I just went back and went. That is an outstanding comment.

Andrew Welch : 39:28
Was that, like one of Vladimir Putin's agentic chatbots got bored?

Mark Smith: 39:34
It was from the handle was SebraBafar8706 was the commenter.

Andrew Welch : 39:42
That sounds super legit, Mark.

Mark Smith: 39:44
Yeah, but how like to take the time to comment on my appearance and I'm happy he commented on my appearance in a way, because I know that a lot of females when they post online, they just people don't even talk about what they're talking about, they just attack them on their looks, so I'm kind of I feel like you know, You've aged badly like you don't look nice or like yeah well, it's a good

Andrew Welch : 40:06
thing that anna is not only that.

Mark Smith: 40:08
Anna is not only the smartest member of the podcast, but also the most beautiful exactly objective agreed, agreed, agreed I mean look at the competition at us, yeah exactly yeah, I saw an early video of yours this week, andrew, and wow yeah.

Andrew Welch : 40:33
And on that note, merry Christmas everyone.

Mark Smith: 40:35
Merry Christmas everybody. Thanks for joining us for another year. We'll be back in Januaryuary um with another crank at things. I've already booked my tickets to dynamics. Mines are going to be there, so I'm looking for that epic event. I saw two sessions of yours get approved today, so I know you guys will be speaking um at that that event. I'm not saying I was involved in the decision process, but I was involved. But anyhow, great to see you there and I look forward to it's probably next time we're going to connect in person in IRL it was one of the sessions, the one about the.

Andrew Welch : 41:08
Can we get a good? The Microsoft partner is dead.

Mark Smith: 41:11
The Microsoft partner is dead. It's funny because it'll be the year anniversary of that post.

Ana Welch : 41:16
It is the year anniversary. Yeah, that's right.

Mark Smith: 41:18
It'll be epic. It'll be epic Anyhow. Ciao guys, we'll see you around. Bye guys. Thanks for tuning into the Ecosystem Show. We hope you found today's discussion insightful and thought-provoking, and maybe you had a laugh or two. Remember your feedback and challenges help us all grow, so don't hesitate to share your perspective. Stay connected with us for more innovative ideas and strategies to enhance your software estate. Until next time, keep pushing the boundaries and creating value. See you on the next episode.