311–320 of 337 posts
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And yet college students make products like this in their spare time and Palmer Lucky created the Oculus Rift prototype in his garage. My lord. Always the HN expert to wag the finger. It is really not that hard. Not anywhere near as easy as software, but far easier than you describe. It doesn't take 20 people to slap a camera and a microcontroller on the same board. I could build Spectacles this weekend with 100x the…
Why don't you? Otherwise shut up.
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This, and related topics, always makes me laugh a bit. Mostly because people and companies will defend either move, with terms such as "focusing on the core business" or, opposite that statement, as "vertical integration". From my mostly uninformed POV, a company can do whatever they want with respect to this and be on good ground, making it an arbitrary decision with little basis in actual objectivity.
Things scale differently in different markets and products... It might be trivial to spin up extra cloud capacity within Google's system and benefit from all the robustness and redundancy they've already designed out. Meanwhile, Amazon is building their own UPS competitor because their infrastructure needs in the real world are specialized enough to be able to benefit. Each case is different and the details drive the…
This is vague.
Running on the cloud is always more expensive than running your own infrastructure past a certain size and always provides less predictable performance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Things scale differently in different markets and products... It might be trivial to spin up extra cloud capacity within Google's system and benefit from all the robustness and redundancy they've already designed out. Meanwhile, Amazon is building their own UPS competitor because their infrastructure needs in the real world are specialized enough to be able to benefit. Each case is different and the details drive the…
To clarify: is Amazon designing their own Uninterruptible Power Supply for AWS, or their own parcel shipping service?
My takeaway was that Snap has 1,859 employees... huh? Why does a company with a single product, which is a mobile app (so what is that these days, three platforms?) need almost two thousand employees - am I missing something? No wonder they lost $514mil in 2016, that's an absurd amount of overhead for a company with a single, not very cumbersome product.
What I'd like to see - is the employee breakdown. How many are working on the acutal product/engineering? I work for a startup (that was bootstrapped I believe) and our sales team is almost half the company (we are just under 100 people right now). Point being, at Snap's scale - I have a feeling they'll have a lot of Business Development Reps trying to bring in contracts for adverts.
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Is it not possible to build your own "alternative in the market" for $2 billion?
This, and related topics, always makes me laugh a bit. Mostly because people and companies will defend either move, with terms such as "focusing on the core business" or, opposite that statement, as "vertical integration". From my mostly uninformed POV, a company can do whatever they want with respect to this and be on good ground, making it an arbitrary decision with little basis in actual objectivity.
It's actually about whether or not it would cost more, over the long term, for a company to develop such capabilities themselves, or to outsource it.
Generally, due to economies of scale, a big, established provider will be able to provide such a service much cheaper than it would cost you to run an equivalent service.
However, it depends on how much that provider is charging you, on top of their cost of sales. It's pretty basic in that if it costs more to do it yourself, it's easier to let someone else do it. Especially when you take into account the considerable R&D costs that it would take to provide an equivalent service. Google's services would, I'm sure, be highly developed. This statement says as much, in that it claims Google has services offered by no other company.
So no, it's not arbitrary.
Is anyone else seeing these numbers? How are they pushing for such a high valuation with those kind of losses? I suspect that Snap is merely capitalizing on traditional advertising metrics (engagement, CTR) which don't translate over on their app, and the advertisers just haven't caught on yet. People play with filters because they're funny/amusing, but those impressions don't convert into purchases in the same way o…
As previously commented, their advertising, at least in some circumstances, is highly effective.
The growth rate of revenue, how much more advertisers can spend on the platform before it's saturated, and how much Snap can jack up the price per metric, would also play a big role.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Things scale differently in different markets and products... It might be trivial to spin up extra cloud capacity within Google's system and benefit from all the robustness and redundancy they've already designed out. Meanwhile, Amazon is building their own UPS competitor because their infrastructure needs in the real world are specialized enough to be able to benefit. Each case is different and the details drive the…
> Things scale differently in different markets and products. This is vague. Running on the cloud is always more expensive than running your own infrastructure past a certain size and always provides less predictable performance.
My takeaway was that Snap has 1,859 employees... huh? Why does a company with a single product, which is a mobile app (so what is that these days, three platforms?) need almost two thousand employees - am I missing something? No wonder they lost $514mil in 2016, that's an absurd amount of overhead for a company with a single, not very cumbersome product.
What I'd like to see - is the employee breakdown. How many are working on the acutal product/engineering? I work for a startup (that was bootstrapped I believe) and our sales team is almost half the company (we are just under 100 people right now). Point being, at Snap's scale - I have a feeling they'll have a lot of Business Development Reps trying to bring in contracts for adverts.
So about 61:39, eng:sales, if you were to assume wages were equal, on average.
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So Snapchat is basically ~80% (or more) of the entire Google's cloud business (if exclude G Suite from the Google's cloud).
Has Google published cloud revenue numbers? I haven't seen those, please link if so. Thanks