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Be Good

paulgraham.com

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Re: Be Good

#131

Post by andres »

mhb wrote: post #89
pg wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me there is more to being good than having good customer service, which is the only evidence you mention here.

It didn't seem like all that much more evidence was required to refute your one piece of evidence that Digi-Key is evil because they don't want Octopart to list their prices. Even if I had no evidence, my default assumption would be that they were good until confronted with significant evidence that they were evil. And between good and evil there's a nice-sized neutral middle area which it appears you have transited…

The reason Paul is calling Digi-Key evil is because they are actively trying to kill Octopart in order to preserve their monopoly pricing, not because they won't cooperate. Octopart needs as much cooperation from Digi-Key as Google needs from Wikipedia.

Re: Be Good

#133

Post by menloparkbum »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #129
andres wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to listing parts from Digi-Key and Mouser we've also started indexing more consumer oriented sites like Newegg. Where there is overlap between Digi-Key and Newegg, we've found that the distributors are 10%-100% more expensive. For example, here are some search results for power strips ( http://octopart.com/category--Accessories--Surge+Protectors/... ). I agree with your point about prices. Most people usi…

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 inform…

I no longer have any sympathy for Digi-Key now that I know they are doing $1B+ a year in sales. However, your point was played out back when sites started aggregating prices from camera vendors. The cheapest vendors were the worst ones, with really shady practices, like taking apart kits, then trying to re-sell you the stuff like the wrist strap and battery that should have been in the kit in the first place. The camera shop aggregators now all have reputation rankings.

Re: Be Good

#134

Post by flipbrad »

jmzachary wrote: post #90
flipbrad wrote: post #76

"Fifty years ago it would have seemed shocking for a public company not to pay dividends. Now many tech companies don't. The markets seem to have figured out how to value potential dividends. Maybe that isn't the last step in this evolution. Maybe markets will eventually get comfortable with potential earnings. (VCs already are, and at least some of them consistently make money.)" Does this not worry anyone? It's bas…

All I have to add to this excellent post is "a fool and his/her money are soon parted". It wasn't different back in the 1990's and it's not different now.

have i not fucked up that comment - mistaking earnings and profits as two separate things?

Re: Be Good

#135

Post by mikhailian »

>The trouble with lying is that you have to >remember everything you've said in the >past to make sure you don't contradict yourself.

Il faut bonne mémoire après qu'on a menti (A good memory is needed after one has lied). [ Le Menteur, IV, 5, Cliton ] Pierre Corneille

Re: Be Good

#136

Post by marvin »

wumi wrote: post #122
maxwell wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nintendo had a great comeback with the Wii after the GameCube (and even the N64). Microsoft could do something similar, but I haven't seen any indication they will.

was there any indication from Nintendo that they would come out with a market-leading console (after the disaster that was the GameCube) ?

Yes, there was. Or rather, there were indications that the Wii would get very popular.

I was in the camp of "the Wii is definitely going to be successful", but the market at large obviously wasn't. From what I heard at the time, the Nintendo DS was very successful in "niche markets" (or "casual gamers", choose the label that suits you), which could be taken as an indication that the Wii, with its promised novel control scheme, would be very popular at least among non-gamers. For contrarian investing, there were a lot of things pointing towards Nintendo being undervalued in early 2005. The prevalent opinion of "graphics capabilities is the most important aspect of a computer game" and "gamers want predictability, not a novel control scheme" and "Nintendo sales have been falling since the NES" should have set off lots of red lights among people who actually play games.

Market-leading is actually an irrelevant label in this regard, the important thing is that Nintendo released a console that made them more profitable than they were. In sales, the GameCube did about as well as the XBOX..not the market leader by a factor of 6, but definitely not something that would kill the company by itself. Any console doing better than that would drive up the stock price of Nintendo ("break the negative trend canal in sales", as an annoying stock market analyst would say)

Re: Be Good

#137

Post by mhb »

pg wrote: post #108
mhb wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It didn't seem like all that much more evidence was required to refute your one piece of evidence that Digi-Key is evil because they don't want Octopart to list their prices. Even if I had no evidence, my default assumption would be that they were good until confronted with significant evidence that they were evil. And between good and evil there's a nice-sized neutral middle area which it appears you have transited…

The problem was not so much how little evidence you supplied as how irrelevant it was. I expect Philip Morris has good customer service too. When convenience stores order cigarettes from them, they probably deliver reliably. Would you argue that that makes Philip Morris a good company, ethically? Your theories about why Digi-Key wouldn't want their prices to be publicly known are very inventive, but Occam's razor sug…

No, but a priori I would assume Philip Morris is a good company. Knowing what their product is, I revise that opinion.

It looks like there is a larger back story to this than was originally obvious to me from your essay and that has loomed very large in your estimation of Digikey's character. Framing it as a David and Goliath morality play is good marketing but I think a more nuanced view is reasonable - they're somewhat less good than I originally believed.

Re: Be Good

#138

Post by bld »

allenbrunson wrote: post #43
wanorris wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly a valid point. And PG's criticisms were deserved as well. At the same time, I can't help but think some of this is an overreaction. Microsoft beat Apple as well as IBM in the market the first time by letting users pick their hardware vendor. And, even today, they still do that, and that's still Apple's achilles heel in gaining market share -- if someone wants more choice than a half a dozen or so models, th…

i think microsoft beat apple because apple was busy beating itself. apple had about a ten-year lead in gui operating systems, but couldn't keep up. steve jobs was immature, and engineered things such that he was made irrelevant in his own company. the dude's firing on all cylinders now, and is virtually unstoppable. it's very painful to switch operating systems, due to network effects. all your friends use windows, y…

And Apple beat Amiga, which was another 10 years ahead in the GUI, multimedia, multitasking, separate processors for audio & video, etc. Mac and Windows caught up some time in the mid 90's. Commodore was beating themselves too, with a dearth of marketing and slow development. I only saw one TV ad. I finally switched to Linux in college, when it was clear they weren't going any farther.

Re: Be Good

#139

Post by wensing »

pg wrote: post #109
mhb wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you consider Octopart evil if they deny my request for their code/data so I that I can duplicate their site in order to provide an improved customer/vendor experience?

That would be more like asking Digi-Key for the contents of their warehouses.

No. Digi-Key and certain other parts companies are suppliers, not manufacturers; hence they are in the information business. Octopart is really an aggregator of aggregators. Should we expect Orbitz to make their content available to MyNewTravelStartup.com?

Re: Be Good

#140

Post by wensing »

andres wrote: post #128
menloparkbum wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 j…

Digi-Key is the largest small-volume distributor of electronic parts in the US. They do $1.2Bn per year in revenue of which $700M is done online. Their gross margins are about 50% and their business is growing at 20% per year. When Microsoft accused Linux of violating 50 software patents, most people thought they were pretty evil. The claims were frivolous and their aim was to preserve their market share at the expen…

_by displaying their public information_

What is public about it?

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