Mr. Spiegel, you are no Steve Jobs.
Evan Spiegel’s Imperious Style Made Snapchat a Success Until Users Fled
61–70 of 79 posts
Re: Evan Spiegel’s Imperious Style Made Snapchat a Success Until Users Fled
#62This may be a good time to buy Snap. I remember FB being worth $33B some time after going public.
$294 million operating loss on $297 million in revenue for their latest quarter. Snap's operating picture is an accountant's nightmare. By the time Facebook was five years old, fiscal 2009, they generated a $229m profit on $777m in sales. They turned profitable in the second half of their fourth year. Why? Relative financial discipline. Snap has taken the opposite approach, wild financial irresponsibility (no doubt e…
Yeah I'm not sure it's an issue of 'discipline' rather than simple product fundamentals.
Re: Evan Spiegel’s Imperious Style Made Snapchat a Success Until Users Fled
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well it's almost certainly going to be faster (thumb to save latency) to run the camera in video mode and then snatch a frame when the user hits the button than the normal preview-stillshot way the phone takes pics natively. Cell phone OEMs differentiate with camera quality and so some run some pretty heavy post processing to make images come out okay. Snap probably cares more about quickly taking picture and the fil…
Why is the latency of concern in Snapchat but not anywhere else? The native camera app isn't slow on modern phones.
They started with the low-latency version, so if they switch to higher-latency code now it would feel like a huge performance degradation.
Re: Evan Spiegel’s Imperious Style Made Snapchat a Success Until Users Fled
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wasn't under the impression that the difference of 1s in latency was a major problem for the Snap userbase. Do I misunderstand the product?
Iirc the issue comes down to Android. Until very recently there was not real uniform api for accessing the camera between Android versions and the tweaks hardware vendors make. Basically it was much easier to screenshot the live preview then access the raw camera data. This changed a couple of versions a go and if you used SnapChat on the pixel 2 it used the new APIs instead of taking a screenshot. But I can’t commen…
Huh? There has been a camera API since the very first release of Android and it's been systematically updated for the entire history of the platform. What do you mean by "real uniform API for accessing the camera", exactly?
Re: Evan Spiegel’s Imperious Style Made Snapchat a Success Until Users Fled
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Iirc the issue comes down to Android. Until very recently there was not real uniform api for accessing the camera between Android versions and the tweaks hardware vendors make. Basically it was much easier to screenshot the live preview then access the raw camera data. This changed a couple of versions a go and if you used SnapChat on the pixel 2 it used the new APIs instead of taking a screenshot. But I can’t commen…
Huh? There has been a camera API since the very first release of Android and it's been systematically updated for the entire history of the platform. What do you mean by "real uniform API for accessing the camera", exactly?
What I mean is snapchat was having issues with using the camera API in android across the variety of devices when they first ported the app to Android (2012 iirc) so they took "the easy route" and captured the still from the live preview instead. The API would work for some devices but not others (I remember other camera app's having similar issues around the same time, mainly not being able to tweak the camera settings within 3rd part camera apps) so basically they said "fuck it" and took the easy path and it just stuck around.
I believe since Lollipop they have been using the new camera API for Android.
Re: Evan Spiegel’s Imperious Style Made Snapchat a Success Until Users Fled
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A company that lets its competitors come up with all the new ideas is probably not going to survive very long. They can just acquire those companies, which is the strategy used by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other giants that are moving faster than startups now by deploying capital faster and better than ever before.
They can't easily afford to splurge on the best acquisitions at this point. Instagram cost $1 billion. YouTube cost $1.65 billion. Snapchat is heading toward bankruptcy or a forced sale if they don't dramatically cut costs. They're down to $1.4b in cash (from $2b three quarters prior). They can't safely buy an Instagram at this point. Pretty soon they're going to be the $1-$2 billion acquisition. Twitter is in much b…
Might be in Google's best interests to keep Snapchat running, for the simple fact that Snapchat is Google's largest customer (>50% of App Engine annual revenue) of App Engine.
Re: Evan Spiegel’s Imperious Style Made Snapchat a Success Until Users Fled
#67Re: Evan Spiegel’s Imperious Style Made Snapchat a Success Until Users Fled
#68Here's the money quote: > Nearly all senior executives who worked with him before the IPO are gone, and more than 10 senior employees have departed in the past year. If you want to retain good people, you need to give them real input and control. Senior managers were trying to prevent a disaster and Spiegel did not listen to them -- but even if every decision he made had turned out to be correct, his leadership style…
I don’t think he wanted to retain them. Pretty sure his logic was that the company is grown up and it needs new leadership.
Re: Evan Spiegel’s Imperious Style Made Snapchat a Success Until Users Fled
#69Speigal is yet another disciple of the Steve Jobs school of management. The idea that if you are an asshole to everyone and care a lot about fonts, you’ll repeat the success of Apple. It’s a toxic notion of startup culture and it needs to die.
But on some level it worked for Steve Jobs, arguably it worked two times. What are the differences that made it work out for Jobs, but didn’t make it work out for Evan Spiegel to the same degree?
Re: Evan Spiegel’s Imperious Style Made Snapchat a Success Until Users Fled
#70This feels like what happened to digg. Reddit did their redesign right. Many people hated it and they gave the option to go to the old reddit immediately after the new version was released.
Honest question: what's so bad about the reddit redesign?
Mobile is nagware until I enable JS or use desktop mode. Blocked for being some goddamn frustrating now. I was formerly a heavy user, about fed up with the astroturfing, but this was the last straw. Life is noticably better now.