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My brain (a trivial organ that just lets my body parts talk to each other) weighs 5 times as much as my kidneys (organs that filter all the blood in my body and

My brain (a trivial organ that just lets my body parts talk to each other) weighs 5 times as much as my kidneys (organs that filter all the blood in my body and keep the whole thing alive). Ridiculous! (I appreciate that the reality is slightly more nuanced than that.)

Jedd 8y ago
> My brain (a trivial organ that just lets my body parts talk to each other) weighs 5 times as much as my kidneys (organs that filter all the blood in my body and keeps the whole thing alive). > Ridiculous! > (I appreciate that the reality is slightly more nuanced than that.) You are hilarious. Ignore the people that say poor analogies doused in sarcasm make for weak arguments. If you had literally dozens of dozens of paid-for, or hundreds of free, brains at your disposal, any of which could be dropped into place and be fit for the purpose of letting your body bits talk to each other, then that may be a slightly more appropriate analogy. Unless you're implying a chat app is analogous to the renal system? It's not really clear what point you were trying to make.
- tomhoward 8y ago
  The point is that it's meaningless to compare the valuation (or weight) of two companies (or organs) that serve very important but completely different functions. And as others have pointed out, there are most likely teams working on putting stuff in space who use Slack, and Slack or its employees couldn't function without the services like communications and weather data that satellites provide. So just like vital organs in a human body, one can't really function without the other. But their relative valuation or weight is unrelated to how important one is to the other or to the rest of the world or body. Each company or organ's valuation or weight is entirely determined by what it needs to be to carry out its function. > If you had literally dozens of dozens of paid-for, or hundreds of free, brains at your disposal, any of which could be dropped into place and be fit for the purpose of letting your body bits talk to each other It's a common trope to argue that Slack is easily replaceable by a competitive product or open-source protocol like IRC. When people say things like "any of which could be dropped into place" or "Slack could be meaningfully replaced at a company with a git repo checkout and some local hardware" [1], we're entitled to ask "so why don't they"? The reasons are to do with network effects, cost-of-ownership, security, scalability, easy-of-use, and countless other factors - but all those factors add up to the reason why Slack is valued at its current valuation. But a nature metaphor applies here too: the evolutionary forces of creation and destruction have meant that a player that may only have been slightly fitter than what was there before has become completely dominant, and made it extremely difficult for another player to challenge it. We can all sit back in our chairs and scoff at how easily another player could replace Slack's function in any individual context, but that tells us nothing about just how the alternatives will usurp Slack's present market dominance in reality. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19082841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19082841
  - tomhoward 8y ago
    By the way, in case you're wondering why I'd be so disparaging of a harmless-seeming comment like yours, it's because comment threads like this literally make HN a laughing stock: https://twitter.com/johnbarton/status/1092641187482095616 https://twitter.com/johnbarton/status/1092641187482095616 Many HN users go to great effort to contribute deeply-considered, carefully crafted, highly insightful comments based on a wealth of experience and expertise. Those are the comments that make HN great. It's a shame when middlebrow dismissals get all the attention.
  - Jedd 8y ago
    Thank you for a more thoughtful response. My original comment was intended to be a succinct yet expletive-free reflection of the despair engendered by this story. I disagree with a few of your claims - mostly some assumptions that I do not share. > .. it's meaningless to compare ... two companies that serve very important but completely different functions. This is the fundamental one. You think Slack serves a very important function, whereas I do not. I also have a different stand on 'cultural relativism'. I believe you can, and probably should, compare individuals and organisations doing wildly different things. > When people say things like "any of which could be dropped into place" or "Slack could be meaningfully replaced at a company with a git repo checkout and some local hardware" [1], we're entitled to ask "so why don't they"? This assumes two things: 1) That people don't replace Slack with better alternatives. This is clearly not true - there are myriad cases where people eschew it outright, or abandon it after some time, with regular posts on HN describing same. 2) That people not actively replacing Slack is proof positive that it's qualitatively a good thing. It should be obvious why this isn't compelling. > The reasons are to do with network effects, cost-of-ownership, security, scalability, easy-of-use, and countless other factors ... Perhaps. Though Network effect in a communication context makes me think a) vendor lock-in, b) proprietary protocols, c) designed difficulty in integrating with existing messaging systems, and d) middle-management FOMO. The rest are obviously contentious -- otherwise there'd only be one player in the market. Fitness in an evolutionary sense may not mean what you think it means. A Cronus related metaphor may be appropriate to locking your customers into a walled garden to discourage potential future competition.
    - 8y ago

Jedd 8y ago

> My brain (a trivial organ that just lets my body parts talk to each other) weighs 5 times as much as my kidneys (organs that filter all the blood in my body and keeps the whole thing alive). > Ridiculous! > (I appreciate that the reality is slightly more nuanced than that.) You are hilarious. Ignore the people that say poor analogies doused in sarcasm make for weak arguments. If you had literally dozens of dozens of paid-for, or hundreds of free, brains at your disposal, any of which could be dropped into place and be fit for the purpose of letting your body bits talk to each other, then that may be a slightly more appropriate analogy. Unless you're implying a chat app is analogous to the renal system? It's not really clear what point you were trying to make.

tomhoward 8y ago
The point is that it's meaningless to compare the valuation (or weight) of two companies (or organs) that serve very important but completely different functions. And as others have pointed out, there are most likely teams working on putting stuff in space who use Slack, and Slack or its employees couldn't function without the services like communications and weather data that satellites provide. So just like vital organs in a human body, one can't really function without the other. But their relative valuation or weight is unrelated to how important one is to the other or to the rest of the world or body. Each company or organ's valuation or weight is entirely determined by what it needs to be to carry out its function. > If you had literally dozens of dozens of paid-for, or hundreds of free, brains at your disposal, any of which could be dropped into place and be fit for the purpose of letting your body bits talk to each other It's a common trope to argue that Slack is easily replaceable by a competitive product or open-source protocol like IRC. When people say things like "any of which could be dropped into place" or "Slack could be meaningfully replaced at a company with a git repo checkout and some local hardware" [1], we're entitled to ask "so why don't they"? The reasons are to do with network effects, cost-of-ownership, security, scalability, easy-of-use, and countless other factors - but all those factors add up to the reason why Slack is valued at its current valuation. But a nature metaphor applies here too: the evolutionary forces of creation and destruction have meant that a player that may only have been slightly fitter than what was there before has become completely dominant, and made it extremely difficult for another player to challenge it. We can all sit back in our chairs and scoff at how easily another player could replace Slack's function in any individual context, but that tells us nothing about just how the alternatives will usurp Slack's present market dominance in reality. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19082841 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19082841
- tomhoward 8y ago
  By the way, in case you're wondering why I'd be so disparaging of a harmless-seeming comment like yours, it's because comment threads like this literally make HN a laughing stock: https://twitter.com/johnbarton/status/1092641187482095616 https://twitter.com/johnbarton/status/1092641187482095616 Many HN users go to great effort to contribute deeply-considered, carefully crafted, highly insightful comments based on a wealth of experience and expertise. Those are the comments that make HN great. It's a shame when middlebrow dismissals get all the attention.
- Jedd 8y ago
  Thank you for a more thoughtful response. My original comment was intended to be a succinct yet expletive-free reflection of the despair engendered by this story. I disagree with a few of your claims - mostly some assumptions that I do not share. > .. it's meaningless to compare ... two companies that serve very important but completely different functions. This is the fundamental one. You think Slack serves a very important function, whereas I do not. I also have a different stand on 'cultural relativism'. I believe you can, and probably should, compare individuals and organisations doing wildly different things. > When people say things like "any of which could be dropped into place" or "Slack could be meaningfully replaced at a company with a git repo checkout and some local hardware" [1], we're entitled to ask "so why don't they"? This assumes two things: 1) That people don't replace Slack with better alternatives. This is clearly not true - there are myriad cases where people eschew it outright, or abandon it after some time, with regular posts on HN describing same. 2) That people not actively replacing Slack is proof positive that it's qualitatively a good thing. It should be obvious why this isn't compelling. > The reasons are to do with network effects, cost-of-ownership, security, scalability, easy-of-use, and countless other factors ... Perhaps. Though Network effect in a communication context makes me think a) vendor lock-in, b) proprietary protocols, c) designed difficulty in integrating with existing messaging systems, and d) middle-management FOMO. The rest are obviously contentious -- otherwise there'd only be one player in the market. Fitness in an evolutionary sense may not mean what you think it means. A Cronus related metaphor may be appropriate to locking your customers into a walled garden to discourage potential future competition.
  - 8y ago