If you can share, what was the dishonesty you're writing about? I can't tell if you're saying it was fraudulent dishonesty or self-delusion (where you think you're in a better position than you really are).
And do you know if the self-sever market was drying up for Optimizely in 2015? I assume they wouldn't abandon it if it was growing at a decent rate.
In my experience, I agree the core functionality (variant management, remote config, etc.) is relatively small amount of effort compared to the interfaces to make it accessible to those non-technical orgs, like you mention.
However, we found that those interfaces only allow very limited, shallow tests and you very quickly outgrow them as an organization. In other words, once you reach diminishing returns on button color and header text optimizations, you start wanting to test deeper UI experiences and complicated user flows. At that point, you have to involve engineering anyway.
When an organization has engineers who are motivated by business metrics, they have no problem implementing shallow tests (like button colors) while working on tests of the deeper UI experiences as well. And at that point, the non-technical interfaces have little value.
They used to, but they ended it a few years ago. They consciously moved higher market, higher touch, higher cost.
Ultimately, i believe they got squeezed between smaller companies using free or cheaper offerings and larger companies probably building it themselves.
A few years ago, we were a monthly customer of Optimizely for a few hundred dollars a month. Reasonable for a startup.
Then they went to the annual cost of $30K+ upfront and ended all monthly options. They had to move to high cost, high touch to compete with the free/cheap offerings to stay in business. This acquisition suggests that didn't work.
We ended up building randomization, remote config, and logging ourselves, and did the analysis with our existing stuff.
The publisher Metropolitan Books looks like it's part of Macmillan so they're likely a traditional publisher, which suggests he got a pretty healthy advance on the book because of his fame.
I would also guess that even if he sold enough books to earn out the advance, his take on each incremental book is really small as the publisher took most of the financial risk with the advance itself.
Sometimes, my kids will say they're bored. My response to them is that my job is not to entertain them. They totally get it, though sometimes they're still bored...
My daughter invented one version with regenerating pawns. I play regular chess on my side, and on her side, she has the king, queen, and 8 pawns. On her turn, she can choose to move a piece as normal or put a pawn on any square on her half, but only if she's had a pawn captured (so off the board).
It creates a strange desire for her to get her pawns captured so she can plop it down somewhere else, and a strange desire for me not to capture any pawns.
This seems like a great area for disruption. You can imagine a property manager for a homeowner who you call for anything. They can charge a monthly fee plus a percentage on top of any (vetted) subs they use. A single person can probably juggle dozens to hundreds of homes; then scale that.
It's the services of a rental property manager without the rental part.
With adults these days (me included) being more technically savvy but less... handy, it seems perfect.
Wow, I don't know if the negativity is warranted here, but for me (and my kids walk to school), getting the kids ready involves making sure the young kids get properly dressed, breakfasted, lunch packed, etc... Transportation is not always the issue.
I'm sure it would cause outrage, but I can definitely imagine a negotiation happening. It's in both Apple and Netflix's best interest to stay together. The rest is just negotiating a percentage that works.
Of course, there is no way they would use that negotiated the percentage for the rest of us.
I think it would take an anti-trust action of some sort to cause a dent here, but I'm not holding my breath.
We have a couple apps and there really is no "discovery" through the App Store. You have to pay for ads, whether in the stores directly or in the many ad networks that put you in other apps or other advertising. Unless you're already at the top of the lists (because of your off-store brand), or you win the lottery in the game of getting featured, the App Store doesn't drive new users.
For the majority of apps, the App Store doesn't provide discovery. It provides a nearly frictionless delivery and purchase interface. That's worth something, but not 30% off the top. That's worth a premium on top of processing fees, like X cents per transaction and Y% of the transaction, where Y < 6, I think.
Edit: I should say, I don't think there's any way this is going to happen. It would take an anti-trust action to make any difference, but that's not likely to happen.
And do you know if the self-sever market was drying up for Optimizely in 2015? I assume they wouldn't abandon it if it was growing at a decent rate.