|
Klyith posted:I honestly think Uber's goal is to become too big to fail before ever turning a profit. Well their original goal (once they started seriously expanding through VC) was they thought they could replace every taxi service and then most limo and bus services first nationwide and then worldwide just by losing enough money on fares to start...
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2017 22:32
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 22, 2024 08:47 |
|
|
fishmech posted:Well their original goal (once they started seriously expanding through VC) was they thought they could replace every taxi service and then most limo and bus services first nationwide and then worldwide just by losing enough money on fares to start... If your plan can be summarised as "step 1: worldwide takeover, step 2: ???, step 3 PROFIT!!!" you should reconsider.
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2017 22:57
|
|
I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
|
blowfish posted:If your plan can be summarised as "step 1: worldwide takeover, step 2: ???, step 3 PROFIT!!!" you should reconsider. uber is disrupting business plans themselves. you can't handle how much disruption. time and space itself bends
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2017 22:58
|
|
|
blowfish posted:If your plan can be summarised as "step 1: worldwide takeover, step 2: ???, step 3 PROFIT!!!" you should reconsider.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 00:27
|
|
|
lol at Jeff Bezos becoming swole though 
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 00:47
|
|
|
Arsenic Lupin posted:The problem is that occasionally (Amazon) it works. They were losing money for years, IIRC. So everybody looks at that one perfect unicorn and assume their company will be just the same. Amazon is funny because they kept quietly not making money but they had measurably just more things to buy easily which is important for a retailer. It was not a good site, at first, but they kept plugging and somehow managed to survive the pop that ate up stuff like pets.com. It's also interesting/possibly meaningful that their overall sales really took off just a bit after they decided to launch the thing that gives valid .edu email addresses a free year of Prime (and the associated free 2-day shipping).
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 01:04
|
|
|
coding sucks
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 02:15
|
|
|
Arsenic Lupin posted:The problem is that occasionally (Amazon) it works. They were losing money for years, IIRC. So everybody looks at that one perfect unicorn and assume their company will be just the same. Amazon was always in the position that they could pull one or two of their expansion investments and be making a profit. That was like the whole reason they started with ONLY BOOKS and then it was ONLY BOOKS AND DVD/VHS and so on, they decided to optimize one category at a time and go relatively low risk and most importantly low shipping cost (for them).
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 02:21
|
|
|
Shugojin posted:Amazon is funny because they kept quietly not making money but they had measurably just more things to buy easily which is important for a retailer. It was not a good site, at first, but they kept plugging and somehow managed to survive the pop that ate up stuff like pets.com. It's also interesting/possibly meaningful that their overall sales really took off just a bit after they decided to launch the thing that gives valid .edu email addresses a free year of Prime (and the associated free 2-day shipping). The difference between them and pets.com is that they weren't selling at a loss. Amazon wasn't making money because as fishmech says, they were investing it all back into improving the company. Other startups tend to forget that part.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 03:01
|
|
|
feedmegin posted:I'm just saying this is nothing to raise an eyebrow at, and chances are Rogue Wave didn't actually write those tests themselves, they just used automake and friends like everyone else They probably didn't use GNU autotools due to the GPL, and the fact that they would've resulted in at least an LGPL requirement for Rogue Wave's main product. Back in the 1980s-1990s there were many packages that worked similarly to autotools for feature detection. It was a common need when there were a variety of UNIX (and non-UNIX) environments around with very different compiler different feature sets. (Is int 16 or 32 bits? Does register actually have any effect? Do pointers have extra constraints like being marked NEAR?)
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 03:18
|
|
|
fishmech posted:Amazon was always in the position that they could pull one or two of their expansion investments and be making a profit. That was like the whole reason they started with ONLY BOOKS and then it was ONLY BOOKS AND DVD/VHS and so on, they decided to optimize one category at a time and go relatively low risk and most importantly low shipping cost (for them). They even did this one quarter when I was there - they slowed growth to shove EPS to $1.35+ when it normally was around $1 just to appease investors. Was pretty lovely to not have budget for a quarter just to make Wall Street happy.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 04:08
|
|
|
the old ceremony posted:coding sucks I'm not following you. Could you expand on this, maybe with an analogy to farming or goats? duz posted:The difference between them and pets.com is that they weren't selling at a loss. Amazon wasn't making money because as fishmech says, they were investing it all back into improving the company. Other startups tend to forget that part. Isn't Twitter in that situation? If they weren't trying to chase their insane valuation by dumping massive amounts into R&D, they could quietly make money now?
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 04:13
|
|
|
Harik posted:I'm not following you. Could you expand on this, maybe with an analogy to farming or goats?
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 04:31
|
|
|
the old ceremony posted:i'm not your circus pony bithc By far the worst C compiler.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 04:32
|
|
|
eschaton posted:They probably didn't use GNU autotools due to the GPL, and the fact that they would've resulted in at least an LGPL requirement for Rogue Wave's main product.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 05:50
|
|
|
Arsenic Lupin posted:There's something I've completely forgotten -- when approximately did the tipover start happening from companies saying "can't use anything open-source, the license has cooties" to open-source being routinely used in production software? When RMS went batshit, created GPLv3 and everyone switched to BSD-like licenses instead.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 05:54
|
|
|
No it was in 1998 when Marc Andreesen and Tim O'Reilly decided they could get rich off unpaid programmer labor.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 07:35
|
|
|
Arsenic Lupin posted:The problem is that occasionally (Amazon) it works. They were losing money for years, IIRC. So everybody looks at that one perfect unicorn and assume their company will be just the same. but amazon was "step 1: build solid basic business (books and things), step 2: all profits get used to grow the company (gently caress shareholders, as god intended), step 3: even more profits (have you seen my private spaceship?)"
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 09:00
|
|
|
Gazpacho posted:No it was in 1998 when Marc Andreesen and Tim O'Reilly decided they could get rich off unpaid programmer labor. a little earlier than that, 1994-1996, as large numbers of companies spun up using commodity hardware with Linux and httpd and Perl there was a previous wave in the 1980s as all the workstation vendors adopted the BSD additions to UNIX (primarily for TCP/IP & sockets), Sun RPC and NFS, and a little later X11, Perl, and Tcl/Tk & expect after the fact, around 1997-1998, Eric Raymond popularized the term "Open Source" to cover both reasonable licenses like MIT and BSD as well as restrictive licenses like GPL, intentionally moving the Overton window on GPL advocates who had been trying to frame anything non-GPL as "proprietary"
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 09:17
|
|
|
there's nothing magical or novel about Amazon going with a low-margin/high-volume or market share oriented strategy. what's unusual is that its shareholders (and more generally, tech investors) are willing to wait years to see even the faintest glimpse of profitability. we see something similar with Netflix where old school studios and media companies have groused that Netflix investors are giving it a pass on throwing tons of debt at new content, but old media would be punished by investors if they tried the same.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 09:26
|
|
|
eschaton posted:a little earlier than that, 1994-1996, as large numbers of companies spun up using commodity hardware with Linux and httpd and Perl please don't bring up esr ever
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 09:26
|
|
|
As the baffler article explains, all those precedents have only accidental relevance to open sores becoming an ideology that businesspeople were willing to actively promote.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 10:52
|
|
|
Lol open sores
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 10:55
|
|
|
quote:http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-41358640 
shrike82 fucked around with this message at 11:27 on Sep 22, 2017 |
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 11:22
|
|
|
the old ceremony posted:coding sucks
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 11:58
|
|
|
Cicero posted:but money doesn't But money is the devil!
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 13:24
|
|
|
Arsenic Lupin posted:The problem is that occasionally (Amazon) it works. They were losing money for years, IIRC. So everybody looks at that one perfect unicorn and assume their company will be just the same. Anyone that could read a set of accounts could see that Amazon were never actually losing money as such - the book value of assets was always growing, they were cash flow positive outside of plowing the cash back into expansion and accquisitions, the business plan was solid and it has always been a company with an eye to the future. Amazon really was never a unicorn, it was a properly run business that understood how to make money and then take over the marketplace with that money - wether or not it did it in the Internet didnt matter, the foundations and fundamentals were always strong.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 13:34
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/qz/status/911199845360291842
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 13:38
|
|
|
quote:Coming from academia as a Stanford professor, Thrun sees people leave his research lab every year. He sees it as a good thing—a different model for employment where people aren’t expected to stay at a job long term. I feel sorry for this man and his case of Stockholm syndrome.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 13:46
|
|
|
blowfish posted:I feel sorry for this man and his case of Stockholm syndrome. Stanford is a dump for the most toxic of humans.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 13:47
|
|
|
Why is he grabbing that dog by the throat? Is the going to liberate it? 
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 13:53
|
|
|
Randler posted:Why is he grabbing that dog by the throat? Is the going to liberate it? He's going to liberate its soul from the profane flesh that has shackled it
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 14:00
|
|
|
Condiv posted:He's going to liberate its soul from the profane flesh that has shackled it You need a hammer for that.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 14:25
|
|
|
Is that the same guy who goes to his meetings in roller skates?
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 14:59
|
|
|
CAT INTERCEPTOR posted:Anyone that could read a set of accounts could see that Amazon were never actually losing money as such - the book value of assets was always growing, they were cash flow positive outside of plowing the cash back into expansion and accquisitions, the business plan was solid and it has always been a company with an eye to the future. Amazon really was never a unicorn, it was a properly run business that understood how to make money and then take over the marketplace with that money - wether or not it did it in the Internet didnt matter, the foundations and fundamentals were always strong. What about the early period when they were writing off free shipping as a marketing cost?
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 15:07
|
|
|
quote:“People come work with me and for me, and trust in me that I make the best use of their time. I’ve seen numerous occasions when it didn’t work, they’re unhappy, they feel micromanaged, and you can tell they’re not spending the time well,” Thrun said. “It’s my moral obligation in that situation, if it can’t be reversed and I can’t resolve it, to literally relieve this person of the burden of having to work for me, and help them find a better home.” ...at least he's honest?
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 15:11
|
|
|
Gazpacho posted:No it was in 1998 when Marc Andreesen and Tim O'Reilly decided they could get rich off unpaid programmer labor. That was very informative. Thank you.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 15:12
|
|
|
CAT INTERCEPTOR posted:Anyone that could read a set of accounts could see that Amazon were never actually losing money as such - the book value of assets was always growing, they were cash flow positive outside of plowing the cash back into expansion and accquisitions, the business plan was solid and it has always been a company with an eye to the future. That sounds great but you're using 20/20 hindsight to pick winners between Amazon and Uber. A lot of unicorns fit that pattern. Book value is particularly untrustworthy, Uber's book value is 5 billion or whatever insane number they claim these days. Even if you're not playing games with VC accounting, book value tends to assess intangibles that only hold up if your company is successful.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 15:42
|
|
|
Non Serviam posted:In the book Disrupted
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 15:54
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 22, 2024 08:47 |
|
|
Klyith posted:That sounds great but you're using 20/20 hindsight to pick winners between Amazon and Uber. A lot of unicorns fit that pattern. Book value is particularly untrustworthy, Uber's book value is 5 billion or whatever insane number they claim these days. Even if you're not playing games with VC accounting, book value tends to assess intangibles that only hold up if your company is successful. from what i've read it seems clear that amazon at least always had the possibility of being profitable even if they were borderline with their aggressive investments in infrastructure and shady startup accounting. uber hasn't ever been profitable and it can't be profitable unless it starts seriously raising its rates which would just accelerate the death spiral because uber has a kajillion competitors where amazon really only had a handful
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2017 16:07
|
|