mountainofdeath

5 dagen geledendiscuss

Raw cloud computing costs have a fairly small margin over what they could be. Nobody with real purchasing power is paying anywhere near the listed retail rates. It's part of the reason smaller providers e.g. OVH, can remain quite competitive.

The other items have very strong lock-in and capture ecosytems. Microsoft Office is the first and only office suite anyone uses and its cheap enough for nobody to consider a real alternative. Microsoft could attempt to charge $10,000 a seat and while some will certainly stay, others would look for an alternative. But for just $10 a month, its a fair price to pay.

mountainofdeath

5 dagen geledendiscuss

History is littered with the corpses of companies that had exceptional but expensive products that were replaced with cheap, good enough products.

mountainofdeath

2 maanden geledendiscuss

Of course they would. Private equity looks for the following things 1. Things with an inelastic market and fixed demand. 2. Many overlapping small time competitors. 3. Steady cash flow, preferably with low capital costs though not always

You can take the cash flow, take debt against the companies own cash flow to buy it, pay yourself back, consolidate, then raise the prices on a captive market.

mountainofdeath

3 maanden geledendiscuss

The same thing was said about the crazy build-out of fiber and telecommunications infrastructure. That infrastructure did prove useful but it took about 10-20 years before that was the case. It took 4G becoming broadly available and the ensuing increase of mobile devices to use at least of the overbuilt network capacity.

mountainofdeath

10 maanden geledendiscuss

The implicit assumption in libertarian perspectives is that all parties are rational and have similar levels of information. In healthcare, this is simply not true. The average person isn't capable to judge what is and isn't necessary for them (outside of the small amount of very routine and elective care).

Likewise, if a hospital hands you a bill for 30k and you need help, are you really going to be able to negotiate and find a better price?

Healthcare is fundamentally an in-elastic good.

mountainofdeath

3 jaar geledendiscuss

I agree that it isn't in the "everyone and their grandmother will have it" pricing territory. It will definitely sell well at least within a niche but won't have the deep penetration other products have.

If you recall, for many years, an iPhone was a luxury status symbol; the equivalent of a mid-range hand bag or a low-end luxury automobile. Expensive, but still within the reach of the an average person with at least some disposable income. It's why everyone seems to have an iPhone and EarPods.

The pro display, like many VR headsets before it, is really a niche product that will be limited to a standard deviation of what I would call "enthusiasts" or "power users".

(1). Even pre-iPhone, having an iPod, especially a premium one, was a status symbol. (2). Non-iPhone devices are generally scoffed at in many circles, green text message bubbles being associated with budget Android devices and not the expensive Android flagships.

mountainofdeath

3 jaar geledendiscuss

Yet another self-inflicted wound the Congress of old men do to make the US software industry even less competitive. I would argue this is political because the tech industry is a convenient target at the moment, full of young people who tend to vote against the ruling party. That, and legacy industries don't care too much about R&D anyway.

mountainofdeath

7 jaar geledendiscuss

Basically. It's a filter that proves someone who worked there is smart and hardworking. It also explains their virtually universal requirement for an Ivy league (or similar) background.

mountainofdeath

7 jaar geledendiscuss

Not a single one of those are H1-B. In the Sergey Brin and Max Levchin, and myself cases, our parents were under special refugee visas that literally took an act of congress to pas (thank you Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society).

mountainofdeath

8 jaar geledendiscuss

Running your own DB is a recipe for disaster UNLESS you know what you are doing and can invest resources continuously in keeping it up. If you have a good DBA, it probably isn't too much of hassle as long as you scale up with the number of DBs and you have automation to help along the way. However, at that point you are almost to a hosted solution anyway.

For hobby projects, a single self-managed instance is fine. For production in a business critical environment, much more thought needs to go in.

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