Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which MS acquisition did make sense? Skype? Nokia? LI? Yammer?
Xamarin
I have literally had a mobile team threaten to quit if we adopted Xamarin after they built a small app in it lol.
The Cost of Developers
81–90 of 238 posts
Re: The Cost of Developers
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with one caveat, I don't think it's the amount of money. I think it's valuations, and methods of funding/valuing companies. Zuck still owns 30% of fb, after (I assume) cashing out some shares. Early execs/investors would probably own 75% or more of the company if you exclude shares sold/cashed out (as opposed to dilution). This is because that FB never had to raise serious^ money. Put another way, it does not…
The social media industry is still nascent, it takes a lot more time than Facebook and Myspace have had to grow an entire market segment. Eventually we'll see a plurality of options and the ability to move between them with relative ease. But it's already easy to ignore Facebook, I didn't think that would happen for at least another decade. In fact, the only reason I'm still on it is because it maintains a network of…
Relevance can mean different things. Maybe FB is not "relevant" in a specific cultural sense, the avante guard users don't care about it anymore. Maybe that says something about the future. But...
It is the only relevant social network if you want to sell concert tickets, soap or win an election. For hundreds of millions of people FB is the internet, because of "free data" plans in 3rd world countries. It is the only relevant social network in terms of revenue, market cap, M&A and a lot of other things that are unrelated to cultural relevance.
Re: The Cost of Developers
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, what? Windows still has > 90% market share on desktop. If that isn't "user-based leverage" I don't know what is. In the grand scheme of things. No one cares about desktop development. Walk into a VCs office and tell them that you have the next great idea for a Windows app and watch how fast you get laughed out of the office. How many developers are going to flock to writing Windows apps? As much as I hate it,…
> Walk into a VCs office and tell them that you have the next great idea for a Windows app and watch how fast you get laughed out of the office. In most of the world the "goal" isn't to go raise VC money. It's to develop a product and earn a living. Maybe people building Windows apps for the massive market are doing okay without the desire to raise billions and take over the world?
Yes. My goal is also to make money as well as most other developers. Would you suggest I turn the focus of my career back to writing Win32 API based apps or WPF or UWP apps?
Where are all of these companies that are making money selling Windows apps? Where all of the jobs for Windows desktop developers?
Re: The Cost of Developers
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
The social media industry is still nascent, it takes a lot more time than Facebook and Myspace have had to grow an entire market segment. Eventually we'll see a plurality of options and the ability to move between them with relative ease. But it's already easy to ignore Facebook, I didn't think that would happen for at least another decade. In fact, the only reason I'm still on it is because it maintains a network of…
Relevance can mean different things. Maybe FB is not "relevant" in a specific cultural sense, the avante guard users don't care about it anymore. Maybe that says something about the future. But... It is the only relevant social network if you want to sell concert tickets, soap or win an election. For hundreds of millions of people FB is the internet, because of "free data" plans in 3rd world countries. It is the only…
Sure. For now.
Re: The Cost of Developers
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with one caveat, I don't think it's the amount of money. I think it's valuations, and methods of funding/valuing companies. Zuck still owns 30% of fb, after (I assume) cashing out some shares. Early execs/investors would probably own 75% or more of the company if you exclude shares sold/cashed out (as opposed to dilution). This is because that FB never had to raise serious^ money. Put another way, it does not…
Zuck has a large stake because he got his seed funding from his parents and could negotiate their series A round from a position of strength.
Musk started with $100m of his own money and a 1-in-a-billion reputation. He had leverage of that kind too, I would say far more than zuck.
The real leverage was not needing money after that A round.
Re: The Cost of Developers
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before the App Store, you had to have relationships with each carrier to get on thier app stores or you could write independent apps but no one would find you. They also took a 70% cut - not a 30% cut.
It's worth bearing this in mind. Almost everyone expected the App Store fee to be 50%. Opening at 30% was considered stunningly low, to the point where it was almost considered unfair to other platform owners because it was felt Apple was subsidizing the system, taking profitability out of the App store business.
I remember reading in Steve Jobs biography book that he had the rule of making a 30% of sales in deals with third parties. Sometimes this was not remotely possible so in those cases the numbers had to be massaged so that he could see his 30% and approve the deal.
Re: The Cost of Developers
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, what? Windows still has > 90% market share on desktop. If that isn't "user-based leverage" I don't know what is. In the grand scheme of things. No one cares about desktop development. Walk into a VCs office and tell them that you have the next great idea for a Windows app and watch how fast you get laughed out of the office. How many developers are going to flock to writing Windows apps? As much as I hate it,…
> Walk into a VCs office and tell them that you have the next great idea for a Windows app and watch how fast you get laughed out of the office. In most of the world the "goal" isn't to go raise VC money. It's to develop a product and earn a living. Maybe people building Windows apps for the massive market are doing okay without the desire to raise billions and take over the world?
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/09/05/desktop-aps-versus-web-...
This is an excellent overview from a developer point on why you don't want to develop desktop apps even if you don't want to depend on VC. This is 2009, mind you.
Re: The Cost of Developers
#88> the App Store dramatically lowered the barriers to entry for developers Is there any platform with higher barriers to entry than the App Store? iOS development requires a proprietary toolchain only available on Apple hardware, programming languages hardly used elsewhere, not to mention the $99/year developer fee and the litany of vague and arbitrarily enforced rules and content guidelines for App Store release.
I'd never made an app, never written C#, and i got an app on the appstore within a few weeks and being downloaded around the world soon after. And that was 7 years ago before they made dealing with all the certificates not insanely annoying. If that's not a low barrier to entry i don't know what is. In a way the barrier has increased recently with a lot of new requirements for apps (designing for the notch etc) and a…
I think 7 years ago it was a matter of luck.
Does your app look good? Yes? Ok-
Did your app overlap with Apple? No? Ok-
Release your app! And thanks for paying apple 2500 dollars in various unavoidable payments.
Hoping React Native Javascript saves me from apple.
Re: The Cost of Developers
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are those regular old desktop apps? Apps built by Microsoft, Adobe, and a few other large companies. The bespoke internal business apps have been moving to the web for decades.
In SV maybe. I have been developing mostly new WPF enterprise applications in the last 4 years and there is plenty of work across European business.
I've been on the opposite coast in a major metro system for the last 20 years. I've been an "Enterprise Developer" for the last 10. The number of companies that are wanting new programs that are not either web or mobile based is slim.
Re: The Cost of Developers
#90Great analysis, although I don't completely agree with this statement: "GitHub, a company that, having raised $350 million in venture capital, was not going to make it as an independent entity." If it is referring to the fact that, in the crazy VC spiral of the startups world, once you have received such a big investment, a sale to a big corp is the only choice, then I sadly agree. But GitHub could have been an indep…
I agree with one caveat, I don't think it's the amount of money. I think it's valuations, and methods of funding/valuing companies. Zuck still owns 30% of fb, after (I assume) cashing out some shares. Early execs/investors would probably own 75% or more of the company if you exclude shares sold/cashed out (as opposed to dilution). This is because that FB never had to raise serious^ money. Put another way, it does not…
>This is because that FB never had to raise serious^ money. Put another way, it does not cost money to make a FB.
Even considering your footnote about market cap, it was actually very expensive to run Facebook.
Facebook started in 2004 and didn't turn a profit until 2009. For more than 5 years, they were burning investors' cash on infrastructure. They quickly burned through the 2005 $12.5 million investment from Accel.
Probably the #1 stress on infrastructure costs was photos. In 2005, Facebook added a feature for people to upload unlimited photos. They soon had more photos than Flickr. As we've seen from other flavor-of-the-month photo bucket websites that crashed & burned by getting overloaded traffic from reddit users, hosting billions of images is not cheap.