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What about profitability? R&D is fine if they're profitable, but they're not.
by quest88 6y ago
What about profitability? R&D is fine if they're profitable, but they're not.
- bhupy 6y agoUber doesn't need to be profitable yet, they have $10B in cash. While this doesn't mean that they can continue to be unprofitable forever, it means that they have latitude to engage in R&D (like this post) while also moving towards profitability, at the same time.
- lhorie 6y agoAdopting an open source build system doesn't exactly strike me as R&D
- bhupy 6y agoSure, I mean that Uber can engage in whatever cool tech projects that they want and publish whatever blog posts that they want. This documented project's usefulness to the tech community is totally independent from its balance sheet. It's not like NOT publishing this eng blog post makes some material difference in Uber's long run ability to turn a profit...
- lhorie 6y agoBy that logic, companies should never open source anything. Yet, they do. Typically, the reason is to attract talent. Not everything has to be focused on short-term ROI.
- bhupy 6y agoYes, we are in agreement. I'm attacking the notion that we ought to bring Uber's profitability into this, it seems totally irrelevant to the merits of using Bazel in a Go monorepo.