fossuser

80 ms·

751.
by fossuser 6y ago
Arguably the stock price is a prediction of future success, not current revenue. The fact that it sagged under Ballmer and is now up under Nadella aligns with how I'm framing things. I suppose you could argue that's entirely PR, b
752.
by fossuser 6y ago
I'm open to being wrong here and I'd agree that my initial comment was stated in a provocative way, but let me clarify a bit. Revenue growth isn't the whole story. If you're extracting rents from legacy locked-in product
753.
by fossuser 6y ago
In my mind the company provides food as a perk in part so people hang around and chat without leaving the office, it also makes it more pleasant to work there. It’s not to feed you in your own home.
754.
by fossuser 6y ago
Arguably that focus on O365 and Azure - the strategy that enabled Teams success was due to Nadella. You're right though - 'irrelevant' is too provocative and strongly worded. I'm more focused on future bets and trends. I
755.
by fossuser 6y ago
See: https://stratechery.com/2018/the-end-of-windows/ I think that article gets most of it. There's some MSFT narrative that comes up here a lot where people say Ballmer was doing great and Nadella just conti
756.
by fossuser 6y ago
Profit is a lagging indicator that often leads companies astray with short-term decision making at the expense of long-term relevance. Look at Apple before the return of Jobs (though at that point, they were having profit issues too - but w
757.
by fossuser 6y ago
Microsoft became almost irrelevant under Ballmer or was at least trending that way. Nadella’s turn around is almost miraculous and is itself probably an interesting story. I wouldn’t bet on that as the norm. I’d expect the norm to be more l
758.
by fossuser 6y ago
My take would be Google can afford it for now because they have a web ad monopoly and don’t have to compete. If they ever lose that, the culture they’ve built will cause them to be destroyed and irrelevant in not that much time. For now, it
759.
by fossuser 6y ago
Going from Google maps reading you directions to seeing a heads up display with a big arrow pointing to your destination in your vision is a big leap. Similarly being able to pull up metadata on anything by looking at it and gesturing or tu
760.
by fossuser 6y ago
If it costs you one billion dollars to discover a drug and then that drug can be sold by others making generics immediately for five cents then the drug will not get created, the business model isn't viable. This kind of thing is what
761.
by fossuser 6y ago
It’s bad faith to pretend slavery is the same as a limited time monopoly to incentivize people to create things. Imagine you’re creating a new country and you want people to make things, how can you incentivize this? One way is to give peop
762.
by fossuser 6y ago
The beginning reminded me of a related essay by Eliezer Yudkowsky that lays out a similar argument for why old style AI was a hoax. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zY4pic7cwQpa9dnyk/detached-l... “Similarly, to th
763.
by fossuser 6y ago
Obviously you have no interest in good faith discussion so I’ll leave it here.
764.
by fossuser 6y ago
Copyright serves a useful purpose, even if it’s being abused here and the modern interpretation is a distortion of its original intent. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26028392 As a concept it exists to promote the pro
765.
by fossuser 6y ago
I don't agree, but I know this is a position a reasonable person could hold. I just don't think autopilot means autonomous driving and I think that's clear to people. If someone thinks cruise control means you can crawl into
766.
by fossuser 6y ago
I had the “no button” mouse where the entire top was the button - I thought it was pretty. Fair point that when this started the right click menu wasn’t super established. That said, at some point it was, probably more than 20 years ago. To
767.
by fossuser 6y ago
Yeah totally, I think those are all things to consider. I'd also guess a factor of young single people sharing households is due to limited supply and high cost. If it was affordable to have your own apartment, more people would do so.
768.
by fossuser 6y ago
"Farag recalls a prototype presentation meeting with Jobs where he and the design team presented possibilities for what would be the next Apple mouse. The team had several versions to show Steve, some of which "were fully done, wi
769.
by fossuser 6y ago
Jobs wasn't perfect - rumor was the one button mouse exists because he picked it from an unfinished mock. The magic mouse also sucks (though I do like the large trackpad). I think their argument for the charging port on the bottom is b
770.
by fossuser 6y ago
That's a cool site, I made a graph that I think illustrates my point more clearly: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=B6ZP It's the change in population vs. the change in new housing with a separate line fo
771.
by fossuser 6y ago
Not at all the same as Tesla. Tesla expects you to use its product on the road and expects it to work within the constraints they tell you with you also paying attention.
772.
by fossuser 6y ago
> "Tesla is a real example that passed this test. Their marketing language brands AP as "fully self driving, some features unavailable due to local laws"." This isn't true, FSD has always been a 'coming soon
773.
by fossuser 6y ago
Yeah - I don't think this would hold up, you can't really have it both ways. Either you're selling something and taking some responsibility for certain failures, or it's research that you don't want people to use on
774.
by fossuser 6y ago
A ratio of new housing vs. new population. You can expand sprawl via single family homes and still not build nearly enough housing to meet population growth requirements. You can have a lot more population and still build little. It just fo
775.
by fossuser 6y ago
> The fact that the population of greater Houston has more than doubled in 30 years tends to support the idea that they are building enough for growth. This isn't enough to support the idea unless prices have also not climbed. The B
776.
by fossuser 6y ago
Yeah - I generally agree with you. In the review business it's better to be playing the long-term game if you're building a real audience. In Wirecutter's case their long term advantage is to make good reviews without regard
777.
by fossuser 6y ago
See: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-air-purifier... They make nonsense claims about their technology - none of which empirically hold up. They lie about it and are just generally full of shit, quo
778.
by fossuser 6y ago
Nice - yeah that sounds like a great use case for it.
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by fossuser 6y ago
I have a bunch of air filters (I live in the bay area during fire season). Coway Air Mega Coway Mighty Blue Air Medify Air They're basically all equivalent and they all work. The reason I like the Medifyair is because it can move the l
780.
by fossuser 6y ago
The fan also sucks compared to something like a Vornado. "Buffeting" of air is not a practical issue when using a fan - you want a fan that can create a lot of air flow. The Dyson fan comes across form first then making up reason

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