I'd say _that_ is a hell of an assumption. The travel industry depends hugely on efficient PPC advertising with companies at any serious size.
This has been true of all three travel startups I've worked at. AirBnb may well have great brand recognition but I'd be amazed if they can acquire customers for zero.
I can definitely accept that Rails is now somewhat old hat.
And agreed that the Rails 2 to 3 jump was (and still is for many codebases) a tricky and difficult path.
However, I'd argue that doing your 'startup' in [Rails/COBOL/PHP/Logo/Java] is probably a decent idea if you have good engineers who can build something stable relatively quickly. Technology is _rarely_ the problem in any given startup.
If scalability and speed is a problem, congratulations, you're a success.
Rails is still good at giving you the tools to build decent CRUD-ish apps pretty fast and deployment is thankfully a solved problem.
Rails is not the new hotness, but it's still great at getting prototypes out the door and can scale you a long way. I think I'm cool with that.
> our front end has gone from Prototype to jQuery to Coffeescript to Angular to React with major productivity improvements each time
Also rewriting your front-end four times doesn't seem that productive.
Sure he didn't do an app for Android (until someone did for him) and is a bit snarky about it as a platform, but the web version of Instapaper existed before the app did and powered the whole thing.
Plus 'The Magazine' has a significant web component (albeit a weird log in).
His preference for iOS seems to be aesthetic and income related, but he's originally (and still) a PHP web guy.
I'm not going to say he isn't pro-Apple, but he does at least attempt to find the nuance in the story. I was merely saying I don't dismiss him out of hand as some do.
Regarding the trend, I concur and I somewhat covered the excellence of most of the handsets now in the market certainly means a much more competitive marketplace.
I don't necessarily think Apple have stopped growing (their last quarter would seem to refute that[1]) but it wouldn't be a surprise if they are peaking.
True, but there are equally large groups of people who 'hate' the 'opposition' blindly. The majority of the analysis seems to reflect this less enlightened viewpoint.
Sorkin's work does always tread a fine line into a slightly theatrical/stagey feel. Particularly the uber-dialogue he gets his characters to say... and I say that as a huge fan.
His TV stuff can get preachy (see Newsroom/Studio 60/West Wing) but it's never less than marvellous to watch even it is a bit of a heightened reality.