6 ms·
> But the marketing team quickly discovered that none of the people threatening a boycott had ever bought a Subaru. Some of them had even misspelled “Subaru.”
by chillacy 10y ago
> But the marketing team quickly discovered that none of the people threatening a boycott had ever bought a Subaru. Some of them had even misspelled “Subaru.”
I feel like this is such an important lesson in business. It's better to be loved by few and hated by many than to try to please everyone... because everyone has different needs and wants, conventional wisdom says that your target market can't just be "everyone". Even toothbrushes have different price points, colors, and positioning.
- colechristensen 10y agoIf there aren't people who hate what you're doing, you probably aren't doing anything worthwhile.
- endtime 10y agoDoes anyone hate SpaceX?
- williwu 10y agoJeff Bezos?
- withdavidli 10y agoother defense contractors
- bobsil1 10y agoMartians
- legulere 10y agoEnvironmentalists
- AlgorithmicTime 10y agoWhy?
- michaelbuckbee 10y agoThere was that 60 Minutes piece that had astronauts criticizing SpaceX harshly enough to make Elon Musk cry. https://youtu.be/8P8UKBAOfGo https://youtu.be/8P8UKBAOfGo
- oneloop 10y agoI had seen this, but I guess I was so taken aback at seeing Elon Musk's reaction that that I missed another interesting aspect. The American astronauts are calling out against the "commercialization of space". The same astronauts that were used as a propaganda tools against the communists.
- moomin 10y agoSo they're pro-imperialism but anti-capitalism. As far as I'm concerned, the Jury's still out on whether SpaceX is actually doing anything interesting. I mean, lifting things into orbit at cheaper rates is useful, but there's no evidence of anything game-changing yet.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoGetting first stages of rockets that completed actual missions both in LEO and GTO to land safely both on ground and on water doesn't count as game-changing?
- DasIch 10y agoLanding the first stage is impressive but actually useful only in so far as it allows you to reuse it. SpaceX has yet to show that they can actually reuse the first stage. It will take longer still to show that they can do it reliably. Let's skip a few steps and assume they've achieved that. That's an important innovation, it changes the economics, will allow SpaceX to drop prices and potentially grow the market substantially. All of that would be amazing and a huge achievement but it would not push the frontier, it only brings in money that can be used for projects that do that. I would argue that for this reason it's not game-changing, it's incremental progress that enables further innovation that could be game-changing.
- neuronexmachina 10y agoSen. Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) has been a vocal opponent of SpaceX in Congress for quite some time. Example from 2010: http://blog.al.com/breaking/2010/04/spacexs_elon_musk_sen_richard.html http://blog.al.com/breaking/2010/04/spacexs_elon_musk_sen_ri...
- noir_lord 10y agoWould be this the same Richard Shelby who has Boeing Co. as one of his top 5 contributors. Boeing of course been one of the partners in ULA a direct SpaceX competitor[0]. [0] https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N00009920 https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/summary.php?cid=N000... What's sad is that they don't even pretend anymore, it's absolutely and completely blatant and rigged.
- cpach 10y agoI don’t hate it, but it does actually rank pretty low amongst projects I care about. I just don’t find it that interesting.
- gear54rus 10y ago> It's better to be loved by few and hated by many than to try to please everyone... But that goes exactly against for example what ms is doing. It's making windows for 'everyone' while pissing-off privacy-conscious and freedom-conscious people in the process. Yet it's still at the 'top of the game'. What am I missing?
- mseebach 10y agoIt's still better, obviously, to suceed in pleasing (almost) everyone. It's just very very hard. Put differently, for any n, it's better that n% of people love you flat out, than everybody loves you n%. But for large enough ns, either is very lucrative. Subaru n=2, Microsoft n=40, or something like that.
- imtringued 10y agoThe only commercial alternative is OS X so you end up with vendor lock-in either way.
- l1n 10y agoReminder that there are commercial Linux distributions (RHEL, Oracle, etc).
- scholia 10y ago> What am I missing? You're probably over-estimating the number of privacy-conscious and freedom-conscious people in the general public, who mainly use Windows, Android and Facebook. Windows is arguably the least privacy-invasive of those. https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardening-android-security-and-privacy https://blog.torproject.org/blog/mission-impossible-hardenin... Further, in tables of probably dubious merit (but all we have), Microsoft generally comes out as one of the most admired and most ethical companies. http://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2015/03/09/microsoft-on-the-worlds-most-ethical-companies-list-5-years-in-a-row/ http://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2015/03/09/microsof... Windows is openly-licensed to OEMs (just sign up on the website) and available at retail. You are free to build your own Windows PC or even start your own PC manufacturing company. Windows source code is available on application ;-) https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/
- pjc50 10y agoBoycotts are generally tremendously ineffective because either people wouldn't buy the thing in the first place or care insufficiently to check the long list of things that should be boycotted for various reasons. The business of "coding" is primarily a defence against the haters. Being outed is now very rarely fatal in the West, but it used to be more dangerous (and is still far more dangerous for trans people). So the LGBT community had to live by an almost steganographic system of linguistic (qv Polari), sartorial and cultural markers.
- CaptainZapp 10y agoBoycotts are generally tremendously ineffective Usually: yes. But there are exceptions. Nestlé still feels the aftershocks of the boycott about its despicable marketing practices of hawking baby formula to mothers unfit to use it in a proper way instead of breastfeeding their kids. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestl%C3%A9_boycott https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestl%C3%A9_boycott The boycott started in 1977 and actually did have an effect on how baby formula is marketed nowadays after they initially didn't give much of a shit. Granted. When you as a company are directly responsible for the death of thousands of infants then a boycott is easier to pull off than when Walt Disney prohibits selfie sticks in its theme parks. Just one counter example that boycotts can be effective if the circumstances are right.