Lead Bullets

Techcrunch looks terrible on my iPad. Divs on top of content and text that goes blurry when I use the iPad's zoom function.

Swimming probably will not help when trapped under ice.

God says... C:\TEXT\YANKEE.TXT

't any occasion for hurry."

We sat silent awhile, thinking. Then my mind was made up, and I said:

"Yes, everything is ready; everything is shipshape, no detail is wanting. I know what to do now."

"So do I; sit down and wait."

"No, _sir_! rise up and _strike_!"

"Do you mean it?"

"Yes, indeed! The _de_fensive isn't in my line, and the _of_fensive is. That is, when I hold a fair hand--two-thirds as good a hand as the enemy. Oh, yes, we'll rise up and strike; that's our game."

"A

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That's Yer job, God. I did my job.

God says, "thats_right rose_colored_glasses talk_to_my_lawyer nope quit why_do_I_put_up_with_this nerd how's_the_weather awful in_a_perfect_world The_good_stuff yikes because_I_said_so joke ba_ha taxes fer_sure yada_yada_yada horrendous astrophysics hang_in_there That's_my_favorite are_you_sure "

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=455-CIgc7co

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI8xrnOrftM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_z-hEyVQDRA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWlSw5Kb0dg

God says... C:\TEXT\WEALTH.TXT

aith, as well as all other spiritual matters, it is evident enough, are not within the proper department of a temporal sovereign, who, though he may be very well qualified for protecting, is seldom supposed to be so for instructing the people. With regard to such matters, therefore, his authority can seldom be sufficient to counterbalance the united authority of the clergy of the established church. The public tranquillity, however, and his own security, may frequently depend upon the doctrines whic

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"Less I have, the more I gain" is an interesting lyric.

God says, "Otherwise belly savage certainty promising too increased write kingdom implanting bond immense avenged disentangle loose fervent slackness refer measurable pole subverted later eternally blinded terms heart nourish relieve notes dispensest prison ranked pleasanter laboured Rebuke communicated charge discordant exaltedness whither repeat David's height boyhood outwardly unconscious Unity jest impure Date preserving shapes alas void God might Simple reason dates savour camp lords disquiet overturned dreaded "

Ask yourself why crazy homeless people talk to themselves. God hear and responds, obviously.

Comment pulled from techcrunch:

Chris Zaharias · Having worked in sales at Netscape for four years (1995-99) I have to very respectfully disagree with Ben. Netscape did not recover from a better, faster, free IIS by building a better web server (called Netscape Enterprise Server, or NES). That helped to a small extent, but much more important were a) competitive advantages in email servers, proxy servers and directory servers; b) bundling of those solutions into a server suite (SuiteSpot); c) effective management of inbound lead flow (kudos to Todd Rulon-Miller & Bill Kellinger); and d) stellar, massive, but arguably long-term damaging OEM sell-thru by Ram Shriram's team that allowed Netscape to continue to grow overall server revenues.

Of those $400M server revenues, very little was NES, and as the graph at the below link shows, NES was always in decline relative competitors.

http://www.securityspace.com/de/s_survey/data/man.200909/htt...? mod=TmV0c2NhcGUtRW50ZXJwcmlzZQ%3D %3D

I recall working at a growing company that suddenly stopped blowing its forecasts out of the water and sales began to tank (part of an overall market downturn). C-level executives were slaughtered and we were soon treated to a blustery, military-metaphor-laced "hardass" speech to rally the troops, courtesy of the new VP who was keen to let us know that business was war and we were in it to win it, etc. It was lead bullet time.

Fast forward some quarters later, after three rounds of layoffs, a refocusing of the product line on the core brands, and a general slow rebound of the market, and the company was back in the black... but: the blustery VP in question had nothing to do with any of this and had been shown the door (with a nice golden parachute).

Additionally, opportunities to take advantage of new market directions were missed. The company's strategy was to bundle sales around the best-selling products and continue incremental development around those. Ancillary, low-selling products were cut. Which is all well and good, but the company is now vulnerable to several new competitors who took advantage of new directions in client demand that the VP of War Metaphors missed... and now the company is finding itself making acquisitions of technology and (more importantly) cultures that are completely foreign and incompatible. (Windows-centric old-school company trying to absorb open-source Linux-based startups.) So far the solution has been to leave the acquired companies relatively intact... "synergy" is non-existent and culture clash is evident, with top brass from the acquired startups fleeing as soon as their contracts permit.

Additionally, the company is now facing the looming threat of cloud services and large-scale computing becoming cheaper and more commoditized. Unfortunately, nothing is being done to innovate or reinvent where reinvention is necessary; the current leadership does not perceive the threat (yet). (Disclaimer: I no longer work there, so they may have some stealth project to address this; but based on my contacts I doubt it.)

After reading the other recent HN post by the same author entitled "Nobody Cares" and now this latest little bit of bullet-based sophistry, I must say flatly that I do not find these observations helpful. First of all, the war metaphor and language is distracting and obfuscates issues. But if we must stick with this metaphor, there are times when what hulks in the door must be brought down in a hail of lead, and times when the monster in the door is wearing a bulletproof vest-- so you better hope you have a silver bullet and the ability to accurately aim between the eyes.

What strikes me most about the subtext of the OP's commentary is how lonely and unnecessarily self-limiting it is. I would not like to be running one of his portfolio companies and be faced with a challenge. It seems the likely response would be "you're on your own, nobody cares about your excuses, it's lead bullet time, not silver bullet time" etc. In other words, get me my return, I don't need to hear about anything else.

Real insight is knowing who cares and who doesn't, and maximizing your connections to the former, disconnecting from the latter. Real understanding of when to use lead and when to use silver and when not to fire bullets at all is what guides a company through tough times, but more importantly, allows it to seize opportunities for growth. Simply spouting "tough"-sounding platitudes and militaristic mantras about winning wars does nothing to help, and is distraction more than anything else.

I'm rather of the opinion they simply do not realize how important the fundamentals are. Fundamentals are not glamorous and easy to miss for the untrained eye, so when your enemy comes knocking with twice as many troops you are inclined to think they must be doing something special.