Be Good

The idea that a corporation should be managed for the benefit of its shareholders, also known as "fiduciary duty", arose as a reaction to snake-oil salesmen of the 19th century who would sell interests in phantom companies and run off with the money. The advantage of such a principle is that it tends to be fairly clean cut and easy to judge when someone has violated it. If we allow managers to work by some other standard, such as balancing the interests of all stakeholders, it becomes very easy for them to find some weak justification for any wrongdoing or defrauding of their shareholders.

"I don't see the point you're trying to make."

Might want to work on your reading comprehension then.

"We're talking about freedom in hacking abilities here."

We're talking about jobs, quite obviously, as a given from the PG quote that started off this thread.

Not ability -- of course if you have an ability for something you can work on that something on your own time, that's not remotely close to being under contention.

As for money, if you have money, you don't have to work anywhere you don't want to. Also not disputed.

PG's claim is the best hackers can work wherever they want. This claim is a fallacy. No amount of technical skill guarantees that you can get hired exactly where you want.

Instead, empirical evidence shows that knowing someone in the company is the most effective way to get a job.

I really don't want to make any more comments, because I'm sure they are equally irrelevant. However, since I grew up in the town where Digi-Key is located and once dated the daughter of a bodega owner, I must proceed.

First, bodega and convenience store owners don't order smokes from Philip Morris, they get all their stuff from various distributors. The stores themselves are usually locked into one distributor for junk food/smokes and another for liquor. Depending on how low you go on the convenience store food chain, often times the "distributor" is just a guy with a truck. Thus I'm not sure a good online business could be made aggregating the various prices of cigarette distributors. A useful startup idea would be a location-based mobile app that would tell you which bodega nearest you carries the cheapest cigarettes. You could make it non-evil by selling ads for nicotine replacement therapy that you would have to click through before getting the price for a hardpack.

As far as Digi-Key goes, they aren't the biggest distributor of electronic components... maybe in the top 20, or maybe top 10. However,they probably ARE the biggest distributor that will sell small lots to hobbyists. They are also one of the major employers in a small town in a rural area that has had a flat economy for decades. The only other employer of note is the snowmobile factory. Most of the money in the area is made by landowners who are paid your tax dollars to not farm their land, or else grow sugarbeets, one of the least efficient ways of obtaining sugar. Since they would have had to pay the most, those same farmers voted against school improvement bonds every year I lived there...so I'm going to have to go with "evil" on stupid farm subsidies but now I'm really digressing...

I'm going to have to vote "not evil" for Digi-Key. They know they are competing on price and are doing what they can to avoid losing business. If sales go south, they have to lay people off. Most of the employees don't have anywhere else to go find work. From my limited personal experience, there isn't a CEO caste at Digi-Key with golden parachutes who all stay rich whether or not the company does well. If they lose business, everyone gets fucked. I'm guessing they are cockblocking Octopart out of fear. This sucks for Octopart and is inconvenient for people prototyping electronics, but is it evil?

EDIT: what's really evil is that unknown or expired link error!

"PG's claim is the best hackers can work wherever they want. This claim is a fallacy. No amount of technical skill guarantees that you can get hired exactly where you want."

Again, you're taking the "wherever they want" thing much too literally. I don't know if you're actually trying to make a point or just trying get the last word in, but judging from your other posts, you're just being pedantic.

PG is not saying that a guy like Peter Norvig is going to land a job as a neurosurgeon. But if there's an opening anywhere for anything that's even remotely technical, the probability that they would hire Norvig must be near 100%.

I'm sure this is something that someone else has already thought about, but I haven't seen the point discussed anywhere else: in your goal of doing good by providing price information for parts from a wide variety of suppliers and distributors, you could end up harming some consumers as much as helping them.

It's the law of unintended consequences: by creating a directory of parts where the only organizational information is price, you indirectly encourage people to buy from the cheapest distributor. The cheapest distributor will tend to be the company with the deepest pockets, biggest warehouses, and crummiest customer service.

Let me give a real-world example: I've worked part-time for an internet service provider for a while. Our customers can call us up and (usually) reach a person right away. The tech support guys also happen to have sysadmin privileges, so if there's something wrong with their maildir, it can get fixed right away. We spend the rest of our remaining energy constantly working on new services and upgrading existing ones. So, we have decided to compete in the customer service and innovation arenas.

However, we can't compete on price. We've had several customers cancel service with us and move on to services like NetZero or PeoplePC. Sometimes we get a call back a few months later from the customer, all in a panic, because they can't get help with their computer anymore or the installware is behaving badly.

Nobody at the ISP is getting rich. We all work pretty hard to provide a service in the community. I think that given PG's definitions of "goodness", we'd mostly qualify.

Now let's say somebody comes up with a way to shop for internet service providers by going through a directory. The customer selects their region or city, and gets a list of possible internet service providers, along with the prices for service.

We'd stop getting phone calls from prospective customers, which costs us the opportunity to show prospective customers how easy we are to deal with. Customers would tend to buy the cheapest services, maybe without ever realizing that for just a couple dollars more a month they might have an option that's better for them.

We would be forced to either cut our prices, at the expense of our other services, or we'd be forced to scale back operations a lot (which would again cut into our ability to develop other services), or we'd go away altogether and customers really would lose an opportunity.

Without defending them, I can see that this might be where Digi-Key is coming from. If they're not interested in competing purely on price, they could see it as unfair to be forced to do so.

For your part, it sounded at the conference like your goal at first was just to make it easy to find parts. Then, you figured that having price information would be useful too. But, if your goal is to provide a "good" service for people, I don't think you can stop there. I think you're going to have to come up with a way to list customer service reputations for the various distributors, as well as their ability to have the parts on hand, ship them out quickly, handle returns or other problems, deal with hobbyists with smaller quantity orders, etc.