2 ms·

> The cult of quarterly earnings may lose more of its following I'd love to see that. But still you need to make money in the near term and once you start mak

by kfk 11y ago

> The cult of quarterly earnings may lose more of its following I'd love to see that. But still you need to make money in the near term and once you start making money, you have to keep making money, that's where the quarterly earnings cult is coming from. If your topline falls for 3 quarters in a row and you have no incredible new strategies to make it grow again soon, of course investors get worried. Finally, it's not fair to compare corporations like GE, that makes most money producing stuff in plants ww, with Facebook, that makes money running a glorified web app. Those are 2 completely different worlds, even though some of the problems Corporate is facing are the same (capital allocation being the 1 concern of both type of companies).

PhilWright 11y ago
I love the characterization of Facebook as 'a glorified web app'. This is true, but only in the sense that a Ford motor car is a wheeled widget. Or maybe the Apollo capsule was just a flying tin box. I don't use Facebook myself but I can still appreciate that running a web application that scales to the level of Facebook is at least as hard as designing and building cars or other factory produced widgets. They handle over a billion different users in a month with a mind boggling scale of user graph interconnection. They handle the uploading of hundreds of millions of photos per day and manage to keep it all working when much of the site is written in PHP.
- kfk 11y ago
  Sure, but making stuff at the scale of GE or a big car maker is much more involved. First, if you make a mistake people can die, both due to faulty products or faulty plant processes. Second, you are dealing with thousands of stakeholders, including thousands of suppliers. Third you might be dealing with thousands of products, try keep that as efficient as possible is as hard as running a web service for 1 bl users. What I am trying to say is that big Corp are still very good at efficiently organizing certain type of processes, on which then companies like fb depend on (servers, etc.).

by kfk 11y ago

PhilWright 11y ago

I love the characterization of Facebook as 'a glorified web app'. This is true, but only in the sense that a Ford motor car is a wheeled widget. Or maybe the Apollo capsule was just a flying tin box. I don't use Facebook myself but I can still appreciate that running a web application that scales to the level of Facebook is at least as hard as designing and building cars or other factory produced widgets. They handle over a billion different users in a month with a mind boggling scale of user graph interconnection. They handle the uploading of hundreds of millions of photos per day and manage to keep it all working when much of the site is written in PHP.

kfk 11y ago
Sure, but making stuff at the scale of GE or a big car maker is much more involved. First, if you make a mistake people can die, both due to faulty products or faulty plant processes. Second, you are dealing with thousands of stakeholders, including thousands of suppliers. Third you might be dealing with thousands of products, try keep that as efficient as possible is as hard as running a web service for 1 bl users. What I am trying to say is that big Corp are still very good at efficiently organizing certain type of processes, on which then companies like fb depend on (servers, etc.).