Interesting. Although how much of this debacle can we attribute to conscious thinking along the lines of "we know this is high risk - high reward stuff, but let us do it to a point till we are too big to fail"?
I am more inclined to think this is a structural phenomenon - something that occurred because the incentives available at each step along the way were structured in a manner that allowed this to snowball.
Assumptions the article makes:
1. People are stupid, they cant and dont adapt.
2. The market system is rigid and exploitative.
Can we expect the three people who were hired instead of John Ulviden to make the same "mistake" he made? Probably not. If they were people looking out for their own self-interests, they would factor in the "mistake" John made and make sure they dont step over the "acceptable" amount of sales. What sort of an effect does this have for Adidias? They reach a high-point in sales due to the energy and creativity of John, but then because of what they did to him, their sales are no longer going up. They have just lost the opportunity to have John take their sales to the next level.
And what sort of an opportunity does this present to a competitor like Nike for example? They would probably want John for more than one reason: For his abilities and also for the relationships he has with the customers he won over for Adidas.
Heck, why ramble when there is such eloquent exposition at hand:
"In addition to these endless pleadings of self-interest, there is a second main factor that spawns new economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences." - Henry Hazlitt in "Economics in One Lesson"
You are right that this article talks of a "wider applicability" of the business model where services are cross-subsidized by advertising.
But, there's more:
The article emphasizes that the "costs" for an Internet Service, which hitherto have been cross-subsidized by advertising are, for all practical purposes, not relevant any more. It is true that this article talks only of the bandwidth, storage and computation costs and excludes the cost of labor. But much has been said before about the costs of labor decreasing via improved frameworks and tools.
The question then becomes, "What does it mean now, that the costs to be cross-subsidized are so low?" This goes back to what PG, Marc Andreessen and others have been claiming all along: we are going to see more startups, a LOT more startups. Also, according to Chris Anderson's Long Tail, LOTS of startups in niche domains. Startups operating in niches, might not make a whole lot of money through advertising. But, this is precisely the point of the article, given the cross-subsidization needs being so low, some startups would be happy making a couple of thousand or tens of thousands a month (instead of millions).
Excellent point. I guess the challenge is in first determining whether adopting the strategy to give pages with semantic info a higher rank, a good one. In other words, will this improve users' satisfaction with search?
I suppose it could start out in Google Labs as an experiment. Although I m quite convinced of the power of the semantic web, I would think Google would tread carefully before changing what's working for them, now.
I am not so sure this reasoning will hold given the highly price elastic nature of the demand for IT. In other words, will US companies look to spend as much on IT in a recession?
I agree. Striking the right balance between abstractions and low-level details, is the mark of a genius. Put differently, the size and nature of the building blocks a person uses, in order to tackle a problem or to communicate with others is, to me, a very good indicator of how smart that person is.
I have been in situations where the balance has tipped far too much in either directions. Far too much reliance on abstractions, without understanding the details and we get the stock, garden variety Business person. Far too many details used in thinking and communicating leads to tedium, and interestingly can come off as patronizing, if its done often enough.
To be honest, I somehow missed the possibility that it was a parody, as well. Which brings me to something a little 'meta' as far as this goes: What are some good heuristics / algorithms to determine if something is a parody? :)
I think I misunderstood you there. You are right, from a "User Experience" perspective dividing up the web application's pages into sections for viewing and other sections for printing is probably not very good.
For some reason I thought you were talking about "Reports" and "Reporting" in general, as offered by the Report Viewer Controls in ASP.NET (using rdlc / rdl).
I have used CSS in the past to allow users to print pages (as they see it on the page) and it has worked well for me. Although Report Viewer Controls in ASP.NET have their own magical hold on the business users (Probably because they are made to look and feel similar to other Reporting Packages, which Business Users are comfortable with). So, I still think thats a good way to go, if that is your audience. :)
But, I do understand what you are saying and agree that there is the possibility of people using this technology where it shouldnt be used.
Perhaps you are being a bit too strong here. I might hold an uncommon contrarian view for news.yc but, here goes nothing:
"It teaches its victims to use the excreable "viewstate" and POST when they mean to GET and pass volumes of unnecessary and poorly-encoded data back and forth between the server and client."
You are right here to the extent that "viewstate" is the default way of managing state, scalably, in ASP.NET. And this adds to the amount of data being streamed between the server and the client, and back. But, when performance is the "key" consideration, you can turn off viewstate for controls that dont rely on it, or for the page as a whole. If you are really hard-core about performance, you can write HTTP handlers that override parts or whole of the default handlers. Thus, you can maintain state on the server side completely if you wish to (dealing also with the concomitant issues to scale the site).
".Net programmers learn to drag and drop things onto forms which Visual Studio then clogs up with layers of absolute-positioning tags, ensuring that the resulting pages will only display correctly on certain browsers with certain window-sizes and absolutely will not print properly, even when the planets are properly aligned."
If you look into the "flow" layout mode, you will see that "absolute-positioning" is only one of the options that the Visual Studio Designer presents to you. There are no browser compatibility issues per se with the "flow" layout mode for printing or otherwise.
Also, Drag and Drop is a _Good Thing_. I have been dabbling with RoR lately and am yet to find good tooling around it. But, Visual Studio .NET is definitely one of the most powerful IDEs I have worked in. Drag and Drop = Increase in productivity.
"But that's okay, with .Net you can use Reporting Services to design hundreds of divergent 'reports.'"
From what you say in your comment, you seem to have quite a bit of experience with developing web applications for businesses. Given that, I am quite surprised you havent encountered similar attitudes that I have, as far as "Reports" go. Business Users _LOVE_ reports. "Reports" have been given a substantial amount of attention in most projects I have been associated with. So they are not "divergent" by any means. Drag Drop Capability for Designing of Reports, with Design Time handles for all the entities that compose it, is again very powerful for a host of business scenarios.
".Net teaches programmers to code to Microsoft's api, not to web standards, fundamental principles of math and computer science or, frequently, to common sense."
"It isn't to Microsoft's advantage for developers to consider other options and thus they try with great success to prevent .Net developers from realizing those options even exist. Microsoft documentation almost never refers to RFCs, even when doing so would be helpful. They hide the browser object model as much as they can and instead present the .Net wrapper for the browser object model as the only truth, with a Microsoft registered-trademark character after every thought."
Tnese are very strong statements. :) I actually think that the Server Side abstraction that ASP.NET provides to developers is amazing. Why? Because being exposed to the "browser object model" for a number of browsers and their varying capabilities is not really meaningful when what I want to do is develop relativly straight-forward applications _fast_. You can also look into what ASP.NET calls "Adaptive Rendering". This also serves to abstract away the nitty-gritties of the browser making the HTTP requests.
"As you may guess, it results from great frustration with well-funded idiocy in the wasteland of corporate American IT. Also I just tried to pay my property taxes online and the lovely .aspx page blew up with a CLIENT-SIDE VBSCRIPT error."
Sure there are idiots in IT. And sure there are idiotic ways to develop software. Microsoft's marketing department does a good job capturing market share in the corporate world. Once they do that enough, it moves into the realm of supply and demand. When we have enough money to pay, enough unqualified people move into all points in the software development cycle, and what we get is this.
"The odds of a hit versus a miss do not increase over time. The periods of one's career with the most hits will also have the most misses. So maximizing quantity -- taking more swings at the bat -- is much higher payoff than trying to improve one's batting average."
Of all the conclusions, this one threw me off quite a bit. I realize Marc is going to be following this article up with a part 2, but I d be interested to see just how a "swing at the bat" is defined in the start-up context. If a swing is defined as one iteration, then seeing no "systematic developmental trends" in the "quality ratio" goes very much against the grain. I would argue that every iteration teaches us something that is quite applicable in the "general" sense to future iterations (for different products/services and across markets).
In any case, even if this conclusion is considered in a non-startup context, its still very bothersome. For example, if a "swing at the bat" is defined as one complete work, such as a Book or a Musical Piece, why arent there developmental trends in the quality ratio?
What you say is true. However, my reference to Wikipedia's view on NLP by no means meant anything conclusive or dismissive. Given Wikipedia's social aspect, it was just another way of validating that others too shared my deep suspicion of and disillusionment with yet another self-help system.
Surely you have felt this frustration while having to deal with these books/systems yourself?
What do you guys think about NLP? Wikipedia says that it is still scientifically unvalidated.
I'm not so sure what to think of all these self-help bestseller books/systems that hit the market every so often. They seem to have really high ratings on Amazon. But it feels like these guys are gaming the Amazon rating system.
Which reminds me, we saw a post about the 4-Hour Workweek just a few days back.
How does all this compare to classics like Dale Carnegie's books or for that matter Benjamin Franklin's books?
I regret having waited until I m 26 before I took concrete/tangible steps towards my own start-up. A large part of the blame goes towards thinking that there will be a "right-time" for all this and a "right-idea". :)
But, now that I have taken the steps, I feel __liberated__. And I m not worried so much about failing. And that owes a great deal to the people behind this site, and the content posted here, and the interactions that happen here.
absolutely brian. :) "Atlanta could be primed to become the next hot spot..." - lets make that a self fulfilling prophecy ;) i have been lamenting over how there is not enough traction in atlanta on startups for a while now. i even found myself eagerly trying to find atlanta in most of the "top-ten cities for startups" lists, only to be continually disappointed. lets make all that change! :)
I am more inclined to think this is a structural phenomenon - something that occurred because the incentives available at each step along the way were structured in a manner that allowed this to snowball.