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John Gruber^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Dan Lyons^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Steve Ballmer had another colourful analogy, he used it in response to companies claiming that a

John Gruber^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Dan Lyons^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Steve Ballmer had another colourful analogy, he used it in response to companies claiming that a merger would create a powerhouse to challenge the market leader: "It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster." (Thanks to "raldi" for finding the quote on Daring Fireball, and identifying that Gruber was quoting Lyons, who said he heard it from Ballmer, although the words here are Lyons')

raldi 7y ago
I can't find this quote, or anything like it. Was it recent?
- braythwayt 7y ago
  Not an exact quote, I'm going from memory. I believe it was many years ago.
  - raldi 7y ago
    It was actually Dan Lyons, as quoted by Gruber: https://daringfireball.net/2008/02/devils_advocate https://daringfireball.net/2008/02/devils_advocate
    - braythwayt 7y ago
      Thanks, attribution fixed. Now that we've got that sorted, what do you think of the analogy with respect to this deal? Does it—cough—fit?
      - raldi 7y ago
        Oops, turns out Lyons was just quoting Steve Ballmer: http://web.archive.org/web/20080206081701/https://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2008/02/ballmer-im-completely-out-of-ideas.html http://web.archive.org/web/20080206081701/https://fakesteve....
        braythwayt 7y ago
        It's aphorisms all the way down! The usual algorithm is to follow the attributions until you reach Samuel Clemons, Benjamin Franklin, Confucius, or Laozi. They are said to have said everything.
        endtime 7y ago
        > They are said to have said everything. Which one of them said that?
        braythwayt 7y ago
        Raymond Smullyan. He established how they could say things about things they said.
        mikestew 7y ago
        Man, that whole article is worth a read ten years on, in light of the topic at hand. He quotes Ballmer, then shows how Ballmer considering turning around and doing just that for lack of better ideas, all the while (Lyons posits) knowing it won't work.
  - ronilan 7y ago
    “Two cripples do not an athlete make” — folklore
    - xingjiping 7y ago
      One jew does not a sailor Chinese proverb.
ckastner 7y ago
However, if the merging companies compete in the same market, it would be fairer to claim that "It's like taking the number two and number three sprinters in the world, and having them run IN SERIES against the number one sprinter." (emphasis mine). Because number two and three companies merging to a new number one does in fact happen. (Note that this is the case here, though. No idea where Google is going with this.)
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  I don't know that that analogy follows, because agglomerations of thousands of people doing a complex task really aren't that comparable to two people doing one simple task. Taking one example I know of second-hand: My brother worked for the #2 company in his industry at the time they acquired #3 in an effort to overtake the market leader. It worked out disastrously. It turns out that #3, despite being the less profitable (and therefore less valuable) company, was also physically larger. Internally it had a lot of inefficient ways of doing things that resulted in them needing a lot more people to accomplish the same volume of work. You might think that #2 was then able to lean up #3 and make them more profitable, as part of the acquisition process. But it just isn't that simple - this was a large multinational with ossified internal procedures that were baked into the very infrastructure (both physical and IT) of the company. Things were never going to change overnight. So, instead, what happened was that, over the next 1-2 years, #3's culture got imposed on the employees from #2, by simple virtue of the #3 camp being twice as many people. So, in the years since then, the #1 company's market lead has consolidated into outright market dominance, as a result of their #2 competitor suddenly becoming no more competitive than their #3 competitor.
  - derefr 7y ago
    > But it just isn't that simple - this was a large multinational with ossified internal procedures that were baked into the very infrastructure (both physical and IT) of the company. Things were never going to change overnight. I mean, it could have been that simple: #2 could have just entirely liquidated #3 and taken over their brands, marques, and physical assets like buildings, without retaining a single employee or officer of #3; or if they did keep the employees, it would just be by putting them into an "internal talent pool" where they're being paid to do nothing for a month or two, while they get filtered through #2's HR department as if they were new hires, either being placed in #2's structure or dropped. This would mean that #3 would be essentially erased from the marketplace at the moment of acquisition: no further revenues, but no costs either, all creditors paid off by #2, etc. #2, however, would also immediately be free of the effects of #3's competition on their bottom line, which might balance out that lack of #3-revenue for them quite well. Many customers previously using #3 would find that they had simply stopped communicating or delivering on their promises for a period—and if they were going to switch allegiances based on that, who better to switch to than their still-business-as-usual acquirer, #2? And, of course, presuming #2 already had logistics pipelines feeding the same markets as #3, and produced essentially-indistinguishable products from #3, it wouldn't take long to just start producing #2 products with #3 brands slapped on them and start sending them to their new base of #3 customers, to return things to normal. (But in the mean time, they'd have already received many of those customers as switchers to #2, without having to "fool" them with the #3 brand.) I believe this is the strategy employed by one of the big successful examples of M&A: Anheuser-Busch InBev. When the beer giant acquires another brewer, they don't keep them making beer; they just tear them apart, throw the acquired company away, and suddenly customers of MomNPop Beer Co. are drinking AB InBev beer in a MomNPop can. (They don't even keep the MomNPop brewery itself; there are economies of scale that make operating a bunch of small breweries silly compared to operating one huge megabrewery. They just strip it, sell the equipment for scrap—because otherwise they'd be encouraging someone to start another competitor!—and then sell or rent out the land, if owned.)
qubex 7y ago
“Argument by analogy is very powerful and utterly fallacious” — my high-school Theory Of Knowledge teacher (Mr Dawson you’re the best) That said, I’m really not enthused by this under either the business (relevant case history: Nest) or privacy perspective.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  A common antipattern here in HN comments is someone using an analogy (which is almost always bad), and then the responses devolving into arguing over how the analogy isn't correct. I honestly think a "no analogies" rule for commenting would do more to facilitate good discussion than the existing "no jokes" rule. Analogies are almost never useful. Even the ancient Greeks realized this.
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    > Analogies are almost never useful That statement is too broad to possibly be true.
    - qubex 7y ago
      And demonstrably false: what are numbers and arithmetic if not metaphors for acts performed on actual objects? “Get three apples, give away two, share what’s left with your sister” is encoded in the arithmetic analogy (3-2)/2. Analogies... are more pernicious than you think. Indeed, if one wishes to be extremely extreme, one might go as far as to argue that all language is ‘analogy’, insofar as it assigns symbolic monikers to real-world objects. Furthermore, phonetic encodings (alphabets) are a further level of analogy, as they posit that (for example) the “in” in “indeed” is “similar enough” to the “in” in “insofar” to be denoted with identical symbols. Those symbols are, themselves... you guessed it... analogies, metaphors, and other various kinds of abstractions.
  - longerthoughts 7y ago
    Analogies can sometimes be a useful supplement to make an argument easier to digest, they just shouldn't be used as a substitute for a coherent argument. The latter tends to lead to what you're describing here: >A common antipattern here in HN comments is someone using an analogy (which is almost always bad), and then the responses devolving into arguing over how the analogy isn't correct.
gniv 7y ago
I don't see how this analogy is apropos. Here's another analogy that works the other way: Adding an extra tube to a single-tube tunnel improves the efficiency of the tunnel greatly. Why is the runner analogy better than this one?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Rapzid 7y ago
  Because your tunnel is not competing against a superior, dominant tunnel. EDIT: Also, the runner and eagle analogy seam to criticize the line of thinking that would lead people to assume you can just smash together two companies and end up with a company that is better than the current market leaders. The tube analogy doesn't touch on that at all..
  - gniv 7y ago
    > assume you can just smash together two companies and end up with a company that is better than the current market leaders But you can. Think of regional phone companies (the baby bells), which merged and became dominant just by dent of natural monopoly. Anyway, my analogy is exactly the opposite of that critique. It's the optimist's view (which is also the view of the decision-makers at the companies, so it's not to be dismissed easily).
    - Rapzid 7y ago
      > you can just smash I think you may have glossed over the "just". Of course they "can" but it's not "ergo" in the sense that 1 + 1 = 2 ergo you are now better than the 1.5 company. I don't view the tunnel as being the optimistic antithesis of the turkey or runner analogy. The other two are not meant to be postulations pending mathematical proofs but critiques on simplistic thinking.
- sixstringtheory 7y ago
  Tunnels are passive, people are creative. Adding a second tunnel doesn’t require interplay from the first. Adding a company of people is subject to whatever the sociological equivalent is of Amdahl’s law, whereby there is extra overhead to coordinating their work with your current employees, and don’t forget cultural integration.
peonicles 7y ago
I had to google for what "^H" meant. Found an interesting answer and backstory: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/386870.html http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/386870.html
- braythwayt 7y ago
  Correct! ^G^G^G We have a winner, folks.
  - lostlogin 7y ago
    I’d prefer ^D^D^G.
- jszymborski 7y ago
  TIL Google had a Yahoo Answers clone...
  - praxulus 7y ago
    Not exactly a clone, you had to pay to get answers on Google Answers.
    - jszymborski 7y ago
      > "Asker-accepted answers cost $2 to $200. Google retained 25% of the researcher's reward and a 50 cent fee per question. In addition to the researcher's fees, a client who was satisfied with the answer could also leave a tip of up to $100." [0] I'm quickly understanding why I've never heard of Google Answers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Answers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Answers
      - chillacy 7y ago
        It turns out advertising is still more profitable than charging users.
- 7y ago
randomb_1979 7y ago
>> "It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster." Funny, that's exactly what it has looked like till now since the announcement about Microsoft and Facebook ML teams joining forces to go up against Tensorflow. :-)

raldi 7y ago

I can't find this quote, or anything like it. Was it recent?

braythwayt 7y ago
Not an exact quote, I'm going from memory. I believe it was many years ago.
- raldi 7y ago
  It was actually Dan Lyons, as quoted by Gruber: https://daringfireball.net/2008/02/devils_advocate https://daringfireball.net/2008/02/devils_advocate
  - braythwayt 7y ago
    Thanks, attribution fixed. Now that we've got that sorted, what do you think of the analogy with respect to this deal? Does it—cough—fit?
    - raldi 7y ago
      Oops, turns out Lyons was just quoting Steve Ballmer: http://web.archive.org/web/20080206081701/https://fakesteve.blogspot.com/2008/02/ballmer-im-completely-out-of-ideas.html http://web.archive.org/web/20080206081701/https://fakesteve....
      - braythwayt 7y ago
        It's aphorisms all the way down! The usual algorithm is to follow the attributions until you reach Samuel Clemons, Benjamin Franklin, Confucius, or Laozi. They are said to have said everything.
        endtime 7y ago
        > They are said to have said everything. Which one of them said that?
        braythwayt 7y ago
        Raymond Smullyan. He established how they could say things about things they said.
      - mikestew 7y ago
        Man, that whole article is worth a read ten years on, in light of the topic at hand. He quotes Ballmer, then shows how Ballmer considering turning around and doing just that for lack of better ideas, all the while (Lyons posits) knowing it won't work.
- ronilan 7y ago
  “Two cripples do not an athlete make” — folklore
  - xingjiping 7y ago
    One jew does not a sailor Chinese proverb.

ckastner 7y ago

However, if the merging companies compete in the same market, it would be fairer to claim that "It's like taking the number two and number three sprinters in the world, and having them run IN SERIES against the number one sprinter." (emphasis mine). Because number two and three companies merging to a new number one does in fact happen. (Note that this is the case here, though. No idea where Google is going with this.)

mumblemumble 7y ago
I don't know that that analogy follows, because agglomerations of thousands of people doing a complex task really aren't that comparable to two people doing one simple task. Taking one example I know of second-hand: My brother worked for the #2 company in his industry at the time they acquired #3 in an effort to overtake the market leader. It worked out disastrously. It turns out that #3, despite being the less profitable (and therefore less valuable) company, was also physically larger. Internally it had a lot of inefficient ways of doing things that resulted in them needing a lot more people to accomplish the same volume of work. You might think that #2 was then able to lean up #3 and make them more profitable, as part of the acquisition process. But it just isn't that simple - this was a large multinational with ossified internal procedures that were baked into the very infrastructure (both physical and IT) of the company. Things were never going to change overnight. So, instead, what happened was that, over the next 1-2 years, #3's culture got imposed on the employees from #2, by simple virtue of the #3 camp being twice as many people. So, in the years since then, the #1 company's market lead has consolidated into outright market dominance, as a result of their #2 competitor suddenly becoming no more competitive than their #3 competitor.
- derefr 7y ago
  > But it just isn't that simple - this was a large multinational with ossified internal procedures that were baked into the very infrastructure (both physical and IT) of the company. Things were never going to change overnight. I mean, it could have been that simple: #2 could have just entirely liquidated #3 and taken over their brands, marques, and physical assets like buildings, without retaining a single employee or officer of #3; or if they did keep the employees, it would just be by putting them into an "internal talent pool" where they're being paid to do nothing for a month or two, while they get filtered through #2's HR department as if they were new hires, either being placed in #2's structure or dropped. This would mean that #3 would be essentially erased from the marketplace at the moment of acquisition: no further revenues, but no costs either, all creditors paid off by #2, etc. #2, however, would also immediately be free of the effects of #3's competition on their bottom line, which might balance out that lack of #3-revenue for them quite well. Many customers previously using #3 would find that they had simply stopped communicating or delivering on their promises for a period—and if they were going to switch allegiances based on that, who better to switch to than their still-business-as-usual acquirer, #2? And, of course, presuming #2 already had logistics pipelines feeding the same markets as #3, and produced essentially-indistinguishable products from #3, it wouldn't take long to just start producing #2 products with #3 brands slapped on them and start sending them to their new base of #3 customers, to return things to normal. (But in the mean time, they'd have already received many of those customers as switchers to #2, without having to "fool" them with the #3 brand.) I believe this is the strategy employed by one of the big successful examples of M&A: Anheuser-Busch InBev. When the beer giant acquires another brewer, they don't keep them making beer; they just tear them apart, throw the acquired company away, and suddenly customers of MomNPop Beer Co. are drinking AB InBev beer in a MomNPop can. (They don't even keep the MomNPop brewery itself; there are economies of scale that make operating a bunch of small breweries silly compared to operating one huge megabrewery. They just strip it, sell the equipment for scrap—because otherwise they'd be encouraging someone to start another competitor!—and then sell or rent out the land, if owned.)

qubex 7y ago

“Argument by analogy is very powerful and utterly fallacious” — my high-school Theory Of Knowledge teacher (Mr Dawson you’re the best) That said, I’m really not enthused by this under either the business (relevant case history: Nest) or privacy perspective.

CydeWeys 7y ago
A common antipattern here in HN comments is someone using an analogy (which is almost always bad), and then the responses devolving into arguing over how the analogy isn't correct. I honestly think a "no analogies" rule for commenting would do more to facilitate good discussion than the existing "no jokes" rule. Analogies are almost never useful. Even the ancient Greeks realized this.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  > Analogies are almost never useful That statement is too broad to possibly be true.
  - qubex 7y ago
    And demonstrably false: what are numbers and arithmetic if not metaphors for acts performed on actual objects? “Get three apples, give away two, share what’s left with your sister” is encoded in the arithmetic analogy (3-2)/2. Analogies... are more pernicious than you think. Indeed, if one wishes to be extremely extreme, one might go as far as to argue that all language is ‘analogy’, insofar as it assigns symbolic monikers to real-world objects. Furthermore, phonetic encodings (alphabets) are a further level of analogy, as they posit that (for example) the “in” in “indeed” is “similar enough” to the “in” in “insofar” to be denoted with identical symbols. Those symbols are, themselves... you guessed it... analogies, metaphors, and other various kinds of abstractions.
- longerthoughts 7y ago
  Analogies can sometimes be a useful supplement to make an argument easier to digest, they just shouldn't be used as a substitute for a coherent argument. The latter tends to lead to what you're describing here: >A common antipattern here in HN comments is someone using an analogy (which is almost always bad), and then the responses devolving into arguing over how the analogy isn't correct.

gniv 7y ago

I don't see how this analogy is apropos. Here's another analogy that works the other way: Adding an extra tube to a single-tube tunnel improves the efficiency of the tunnel greatly. Why is the runner analogy better than this one?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Rapzid 7y ago
Because your tunnel is not competing against a superior, dominant tunnel. EDIT: Also, the runner and eagle analogy seam to criticize the line of thinking that would lead people to assume you can just smash together two companies and end up with a company that is better than the current market leaders. The tube analogy doesn't touch on that at all..
- gniv 7y ago
  > assume you can just smash together two companies and end up with a company that is better than the current market leaders But you can. Think of regional phone companies (the baby bells), which merged and became dominant just by dent of natural monopoly. Anyway, my analogy is exactly the opposite of that critique. It's the optimist's view (which is also the view of the decision-makers at the companies, so it's not to be dismissed easily).
  - Rapzid 7y ago
    > you can just smash I think you may have glossed over the "just". Of course they "can" but it's not "ergo" in the sense that 1 + 1 = 2 ergo you are now better than the 1.5 company. I don't view the tunnel as being the optimistic antithesis of the turkey or runner analogy. The other two are not meant to be postulations pending mathematical proofs but critiques on simplistic thinking.
sixstringtheory 7y ago
Tunnels are passive, people are creative. Adding a second tunnel doesn’t require interplay from the first. Adding a company of people is subject to whatever the sociological equivalent is of Amdahl’s law, whereby there is extra overhead to coordinating their work with your current employees, and don’t forget cultural integration.

peonicles 7y ago

I had to google for what "^H" meant. Found an interesting answer and backstory: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/386870.html http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/386870.html

braythwayt 7y ago
Correct! ^G^G^G We have a winner, folks.
- lostlogin 7y ago
  I’d prefer ^D^D^G.
jszymborski 7y ago
TIL Google had a Yahoo Answers clone...
- praxulus 7y ago
  Not exactly a clone, you had to pay to get answers on Google Answers.
  - jszymborski 7y ago
    > "Asker-accepted answers cost $2 to $200. Google retained 25% of the researcher's reward and a 50 cent fee per question. In addition to the researcher's fees, a client who was satisfied with the answer could also leave a tip of up to $100." [0] I'm quickly understanding why I've never heard of Google Answers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Answers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Answers
    - chillacy 7y ago
      It turns out advertising is still more profitable than charging users.
7y ago

randomb_1979 7y ago

>> "It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster." Funny, that's exactly what it has looked like till now since the announcement about Microsoft and Facebook ML teams joining forces to go up against Tensorflow. :-)