7 ms·

Is that similar to a video store masquerading as a tech company? Or a book store masquerading as a tech company? Or an apple masquerading ... Oh wait, that actu

Is that similar to a video store masquerading as a tech company? Or a book store masquerading as a tech company? Or an apple masquerading ... Oh wait, that actually IS a tech company.

jdrc 5y ago
I kind of agree it's time to depedestalize "tech"founders. Every company is a tech company and their bosses can be just as scumbags. The religion that worships infotech as inherently unevil and idealistic needs to die.
- olliej 5y ago
  The fawning over Steve Jobs (and I don't mean apple coolaid folk) is always bizarre, and I think really drove a lot of the "super star ceo" nonsense these days. I'm not saying he didn't save apple or whatever, I'm just unconvinced that being that particular model of arrogance was necessary part of said "saving". Obviously we can't roll back time and replace him with an identical clone with the only difference being that he didn't shout at people or have personal vendettas against other people. I don't recall similar stories about Bill Gates, and yet MS clearly did well.
  - indigochill 5y ago
    > I don't recall similar stories about Bill Gates I don't know about yelling and vendettas, but he has a checkered relationship with the open source/hobbyist community because he imposed proprietary licensing on his BASIC implementation despite the computer hobbyists of the time working more on a FOSS model. When hobbyists copied his software despite the license, he wrote an open letter claiming they were stealing from him. However, the rampant copying also meant Microsoft Basic became the most popular variant which solidified Microsoft's market lead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
    - TheRealWatson 5y ago
      I think the point is more about people who worked with Gates not having that many bad things to say about him. I used to follow MSFT news very closely during the Gates era and invariably you'd hear stories how people at the company genuinely liked him.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    Steve Jobs was, quite likely, one of the biggest jerks in Silicon Valley history. I've worked with two people, over the years, who worked closely with (or directly under) him, at one point or another, and they both loathed him. I mean serious hate. It was pretty shocking, as they were very calm, likable folks, otherwise. He was, unquestionably, a true visionary, though, and his obsessive, brutal management style, allowed him to implement his visions, with little interference. It reminds me of the "bad guy" in Braveheart, Edward "Longshanks" the First. He was a complete bastard, but he also unified a lot of what is now Britain. Steve Jobs was also an outstanding persuasive speaker. He could not only convince you that the world was flat, but sell you First Class tickets, on a boat to the edge. The "RDF" was real. But so many people think that dressing, and acting, like Steve Jobs will somehow allow them to channel him (see: "Cargo Cult"). They get the "asshole" part down, but can't quite synthesize the "visionary" part. It's a bit ironic that Tim Cook is sort of the polar opposite of Jobs. It seems to me, that he's actually a rather decent chap (as much as any CEO can be).
  - scarface74 5y ago
    You mean you shouldn’t admire a CEO who took a company from near bankruptcy in 1997 to the most valuable company in the US in 2011?
    - jdrc 5y ago
      You should also admire the boy who took his dorm-gossip php script and made it the world's biggest media empire
    - esics6A 5y ago
      Wall Street thought he was a loser too after we was fired as CEO of Apple and just another dumb founder and he should sell his company to IBM. This story repeats again and again. Steve Jobs proved them all wrong and now everything Apple does is brilliant and they should buy Peloton.
      - scarface74 5y ago
        Jobs was never CEO during his first tenure.
    - olliej 5y ago
      I said fawning. Business people, startup people, VC funders, etc all idolize a specific image of Jobs, which mostly appears to focus on how he dressed, and how he was an asshole to people. We will never know if being an asshole was needed to get Apple to where he got it, I'm inclined to think it isn't.
- FabHK 5y ago
  Beautiful word you coined there, btw: "depedestalize". Maybe "depedestal" is enough, but at any rate, one knows exactly what's meant.
olliej 5y ago
I know plenty of people who argue about whether Netflix is a tech company - certainly their infrastructure is non-trivial but are they meaningfully different from HBO? For Amazon though, it's incorrect to refer to them as a bookstore - AWS is a huge portion of their revenue. On the other hand you have Google and Facebook that people call technology companies, but their core business is advertising. I think at this point "tech" in "tech company" doesn't mean technology, because otherwise surely Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, etc would surely be tech companies?
- sksksk 5y ago
  I think of "tech" companies as companies where you've got large fixed costs to build out and maintain the product, but the marginal cost of your product is very close to zero. So Facebook and JCDecaux are both advertising companies, but only Facebook is a "tech" company. Lockheed Martin is a tech company, but Google is a "tech" company. I don't think it's a great term for that kind of company.
  - kristopolous 5y ago
    In spirit it's to take big bets on things that may not work; the transistor radio, the microprocessor. The eventual goal is to push forward something potentially for the social welfare such as say a logarithm table or star catalog in an earlier time. Companies like Uber or Netflix don't do this. They're platform for rent-seeking of services or durable goods (or perhaps call it "assisted living for people under 60") Tech investing (big bets in say, a new solar panel manufacturing technique) has really been replaced with very conventional investing that uses technology (a platform to say rent panels out and have the rental fees paid by the power sold back to the utility company). Sand Hill Road has lost its mojo. I'm part of the problem. The rentier multisource funding model sounds way more attractive to me then some technical way to reduce manufacturing costs by say 80%. Our minds have been polluted. We need to get back to the fundamentals and avoid the lemon squeezing extractive stuff. That's not how we move things forward and it's part of the reason many people have lost faith in capitalism; it's become too much a siphoning of the commons instead of a servicing to it. It needs a reorientation.
brailsafe 5y ago
Treadmills are a uniquely obtrusive, pointless, and expensive product
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  You've never owned, or likely even used, a really good one. I don't know if Peleton makes good ones, but Precor certainly does. That said, it was weird of Peleton to overpay for a company that makes expensive fitness equipment purchased largely by gyms, who probably aren't purchasing much of anything these days.
  - brailsafe 5y ago
    It's not a personally derived anecdote, just an observation. I just don't see people who aren't sufficiently motivated enough to go for a real bike or workout at a gym changing their mind because they consoomed a new $$ one. I do know some people who do, but they basically have no choice in the matter but to do something in winter. It's like buying an iPad pro and expecting yourself to find an interest in illustration.
    - dlp211 5y ago
      You aren't just buying an indoor "replacement" of an outdoor activity. You are also purchasing a coach/work out buddy. It's this latter part that is the differentiator between a normal indoor trainer/treadmill and what Peloton sells.
      - brailsafe 5y ago
        Right, because treadmills are exactly a boring replacement for an outdoor activity, and you need to augment that to convince people it's different and you should consoom their version.
        elzbardico 5y ago
        They may be boring for you, because you have your own experiences, your own inclinations, your own way of seeing stuff. It's perfectly reasonable to believe that there must be people for which treadmills are incredible. I like riding and running outside, sometimes really early in the morning when the sea is good for surfing. But I can understand people who would consider the few miles I have to run or ride to the beach utterly boring to ride or run a few days a week. Other than the different asshole drivers trying to kill me from time to time, there isn't much variety in my outside rides tbh. I can understand someone preferring riding a Peloton bike under nice air-conditioning, with their favorite music in the background, under the watchful eyes of their cat, while watching they kids playing outside.

Is that similar to a video store masquerading as a tech company? Or a book store masquerading as a tech company? Or an apple masquerading ... Oh wait, that actually IS a tech company.

jdrc 5y ago

I kind of agree it's time to depedestalize "tech"founders. Every company is a tech company and their bosses can be just as scumbags. The religion that worships infotech as inherently unevil and idealistic needs to die.

olliej 5y ago
The fawning over Steve Jobs (and I don't mean apple coolaid folk) is always bizarre, and I think really drove a lot of the "super star ceo" nonsense these days. I'm not saying he didn't save apple or whatever, I'm just unconvinced that being that particular model of arrogance was necessary part of said "saving". Obviously we can't roll back time and replace him with an identical clone with the only difference being that he didn't shout at people or have personal vendettas against other people. I don't recall similar stories about Bill Gates, and yet MS clearly did well.
- indigochill 5y ago
  > I don't recall similar stories about Bill Gates I don't know about yelling and vendettas, but he has a checkered relationship with the open source/hobbyist community because he imposed proprietary licensing on his BASIC implementation despite the computer hobbyists of the time working more on a FOSS model. When hobbyists copied his software despite the license, he wrote an open letter claiming they were stealing from him. However, the rampant copying also meant Microsoft Basic became the most popular variant which solidified Microsoft's market lead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
  - TheRealWatson 5y ago
    I think the point is more about people who worked with Gates not having that many bad things to say about him. I used to follow MSFT news very closely during the Gates era and invariably you'd hear stories how people at the company genuinely liked him.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  Steve Jobs was, quite likely, one of the biggest jerks in Silicon Valley history. I've worked with two people, over the years, who worked closely with (or directly under) him, at one point or another, and they both loathed him. I mean serious hate. It was pretty shocking, as they were very calm, likable folks, otherwise. He was, unquestionably, a true visionary, though, and his obsessive, brutal management style, allowed him to implement his visions, with little interference. It reminds me of the "bad guy" in Braveheart, Edward "Longshanks" the First. He was a complete bastard, but he also unified a lot of what is now Britain. Steve Jobs was also an outstanding persuasive speaker. He could not only convince you that the world was flat, but sell you First Class tickets, on a boat to the edge. The "RDF" was real. But so many people think that dressing, and acting, like Steve Jobs will somehow allow them to channel him (see: "Cargo Cult"). They get the "asshole" part down, but can't quite synthesize the "visionary" part. It's a bit ironic that Tim Cook is sort of the polar opposite of Jobs. It seems to me, that he's actually a rather decent chap (as much as any CEO can be).
- scarface74 5y ago
  You mean you shouldn’t admire a CEO who took a company from near bankruptcy in 1997 to the most valuable company in the US in 2011?
  - jdrc 5y ago
    You should also admire the boy who took his dorm-gossip php script and made it the world's biggest media empire
  - esics6A 5y ago
    Wall Street thought he was a loser too after we was fired as CEO of Apple and just another dumb founder and he should sell his company to IBM. This story repeats again and again. Steve Jobs proved them all wrong and now everything Apple does is brilliant and they should buy Peloton.
    - scarface74 5y ago
      Jobs was never CEO during his first tenure.
  - olliej 5y ago
    I said fawning. Business people, startup people, VC funders, etc all idolize a specific image of Jobs, which mostly appears to focus on how he dressed, and how he was an asshole to people. We will never know if being an asshole was needed to get Apple to where he got it, I'm inclined to think it isn't.
FabHK 5y ago
Beautiful word you coined there, btw: "depedestalize". Maybe "depedestal" is enough, but at any rate, one knows exactly what's meant.

olliej 5y ago

I know plenty of people who argue about whether Netflix is a tech company - certainly their infrastructure is non-trivial but are they meaningfully different from HBO? For Amazon though, it's incorrect to refer to them as a bookstore - AWS is a huge portion of their revenue. On the other hand you have Google and Facebook that people call technology companies, but their core business is advertising. I think at this point "tech" in "tech company" doesn't mean technology, because otherwise surely Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, etc would surely be tech companies?

sksksk 5y ago
I think of "tech" companies as companies where you've got large fixed costs to build out and maintain the product, but the marginal cost of your product is very close to zero. So Facebook and JCDecaux are both advertising companies, but only Facebook is a "tech" company. Lockheed Martin is a tech company, but Google is a "tech" company. I don't think it's a great term for that kind of company.
- kristopolous 5y ago
  In spirit it's to take big bets on things that may not work; the transistor radio, the microprocessor. The eventual goal is to push forward something potentially for the social welfare such as say a logarithm table or star catalog in an earlier time. Companies like Uber or Netflix don't do this. They're platform for rent-seeking of services or durable goods (or perhaps call it "assisted living for people under 60") Tech investing (big bets in say, a new solar panel manufacturing technique) has really been replaced with very conventional investing that uses technology (a platform to say rent panels out and have the rental fees paid by the power sold back to the utility company). Sand Hill Road has lost its mojo. I'm part of the problem. The rentier multisource funding model sounds way more attractive to me then some technical way to reduce manufacturing costs by say 80%. Our minds have been polluted. We need to get back to the fundamentals and avoid the lemon squeezing extractive stuff. That's not how we move things forward and it's part of the reason many people have lost faith in capitalism; it's become too much a siphoning of the commons instead of a servicing to it. It needs a reorientation.

brailsafe 5y ago

Treadmills are a uniquely obtrusive, pointless, and expensive product

CamperBob2 5y ago
You've never owned, or likely even used, a really good one. I don't know if Peleton makes good ones, but Precor certainly does. That said, it was weird of Peleton to overpay for a company that makes expensive fitness equipment purchased largely by gyms, who probably aren't purchasing much of anything these days.
- brailsafe 5y ago
  It's not a personally derived anecdote, just an observation. I just don't see people who aren't sufficiently motivated enough to go for a real bike or workout at a gym changing their mind because they consoomed a new $$ one. I do know some people who do, but they basically have no choice in the matter but to do something in winter. It's like buying an iPad pro and expecting yourself to find an interest in illustration.
  - dlp211 5y ago
    You aren't just buying an indoor "replacement" of an outdoor activity. You are also purchasing a coach/work out buddy. It's this latter part that is the differentiator between a normal indoor trainer/treadmill and what Peloton sells.
    - brailsafe 5y ago
      Right, because treadmills are exactly a boring replacement for an outdoor activity, and you need to augment that to convince people it's different and you should consoom their version.
      - elzbardico 5y ago
        They may be boring for you, because you have your own experiences, your own inclinations, your own way of seeing stuff. It's perfectly reasonable to believe that there must be people for which treadmills are incredible. I like riding and running outside, sometimes really early in the morning when the sea is good for surfing. But I can understand people who would consider the few miles I have to run or ride to the beach utterly boring to ride or run a few days a week. Other than the different asshole drivers trying to kill me from time to time, there isn't much variety in my outside rides tbh. I can understand someone preferring riding a Peloton bike under nice air-conditioning, with their favorite music in the background, under the watchful eyes of their cat, while watching they kids playing outside.