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Caffeine and hangover effects in conversion funnels
- Ozzie_osman 8y agoGenerally agree with the prevalence of short-termism in tech, and not to be pedantic, but a couple corrections: "Quarterly profit, for example, can be optimized by selling all your factory equipment at the end of the quarter." Not if you're accounting correctly. Your cash might increase but profit is designed to avoid these sorts of things. Selling equipment is typically exchanging one asset (the equipment) for another (cash), and so if you firesale your equipment, you'd probably record a loss (since you'd probably sell it below it's actual value). "Modern major-generals at successful shops like google want to have data underneath every button." Actually, of all the big tech companies, Google is probably the least obsessed with short-term metrics. They're not immune to short-term focus on metrics, but they still have a "focus on the user and all else will follow" attitude to product development, and when they do use metrics, they often try to figure out the long-term impact[1]. Compare that to a company like FB which has been much more obsessed with short-term metrics like engagement (though that has been changing recently, out of necessity). [1] https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/43887.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...
- awinter-py 8y agothis is a well-considered response -- I don't disagree with you, thanks for taking the time