I know your comment is somewhat tongue in cheek, but I read Marco's main argument differently. Although he has ethical complaints about Amazon, he doesn't think it makes sense to boycott them because the other retailers he might use are just as bad or worse.
As he puts it: "Very few general-purpose retailers aren’t run by terrible people"
And "in a market where everyone’s terrible, or where the non-terrible alternatives are much worse for customers, pragmatism wins over minor ethical debates and personal preferences".
OP here. That was the Recurly pricing at the time. I have updated now to their latest pricing, and if you use their gateway they are indeed the lowest cost option of that bunch.
I haven't been following this closely, but this morning I spent a couple of hours reading everything. FWIW...
1. There is nothing inconsistent in either of EJ's posts. They are sometimes complicated (e.g. who contacted who when) and I can imagine HN readers imagining inconsistencies as they scan the posts, but there are none.
2. Either EJ is telling lies, or Brian Chesky's post on TC misrepresents/distorts the truth in several places. Indeed, setting the record straight seems to have at least in part motivated EJ's second post.
3. It is just weird for the "niceness" of the founders to be relevant to this situation, except as part of a cynical effort to turn this into an "nasty EJ versus the nice founders" narrative.
4. Attacking Arrington (who, like EJ, appears to be offering more solid information than PG or Airbnb) comes off as another attempt to turn the Airbnb founders into the victims of this story.
Unless EJ is a liar, focusing any attention at all on the "plight" of the founders (e.g PG's message here) demonstrates a detachment from reality. They are warm and cozy in their homes, while she is homeless and shattered.
They got some bad coverage on TC, their exit payday might be compromised and rich people will lose money because of it. But unless she is a bald faced liar, her home was violated, she lost all the precious items (photos!) she spent a lifetime accumulating and she will spend a long time recovering from this episode.
Seems like as good a time as any to focus on the end user. She's not a PR incident, she's a #$%@ human being.
Yes, you're right. My preceding comment ignores the shift from dumb to smartphones.
But seriously, read what I wrote in the post. This internal shift of mix between smartphones and dumbphones, or the rise of many Android manufacturers who aren't in the top 5 (e.g. HTC) is exactly the point. I wonder whether the intent of the "switchers" from dumbphone to smartphones all have the same intent to run apps.
I also noted and amplified the rapid Android share growth using the same "mathematical trick" you mention.
Yes, his link (me) realizes that. The point of the graphs is that Apple is the only manufacturer growing significantly relative to the market, so to call them dead in water is ridiculous.
Also, the share growth for all phones is relevant, because smartphones are almost certainly the largest component of that. Absent a breakdown of Samsung's growth by phone category, the most generous way to evaluate their smartphone share growth is to make the simplifying assumption that all of Samsung's growth comes from smartphones. Even then, their growth is a fraction of iPhone's growth and the point is made.
Agree that Google's action across Chrome/YouTube/Android is probably a little more coordinated than I suggested in the post. I read so many articles that anthropomorphize large companies and spin stories where they are hypocritical, vengeful, envious, etc. where the truth is that they are just loosely connected, somewhat coordinated networks of people like you and me that are making decisions and getting on with it. Pundits have always done this (makes for juicy stories and good traffic), but it seems to be getting worse than ever with the Google / Apple narrative. I guess I ended up swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction.
As he puts it: "Very few general-purpose retailers aren’t run by terrible people"
And "in a market where everyone’s terrible, or where the non-terrible alternatives are much worse for customers, pragmatism wins over minor ethical debates and personal preferences".