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But what if I want a faster horse?

rakhim.exotext.com

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Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#31

Post by Taek »

The root problem seems to be monopoly and fragmentation.

When Ford was working on a car, people who wanted a faster horse could go to the horse store. There were reasonable alternatives to Ford's new method of transportation.

But here, you can't recreate Spotify from 2015. You'll never get the rights to play the music for users. Same with Netflix, you'll never get the rights to show the movies.

Same thing with Twitter, Facebook, etc. Even if you know exactly what content your user wants, you can't fetch it for them because it was posted in some other walled garden, and that wall stops you from competing.

If you want a faster horse, change the laws so that people can build faster horses and compete.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#33

Post by jgilias »

yakkomajuri wrote: post #24

I feel like this with my (current) bank of choice here in Brazil. They were one of the first to focus on being digital-first and allowed opening an account without going to a branch etc. They grew fast and became one of the largest banks in the country and generally considered pretty solid. I've been banking there for like a decade. Now they've decided to be what they call a "SuperApp". This goddamn super app has a T…

That’s because WeChat has really taken off in China. So there are companies in different markets trying to replicate that. And, well, from business perspective it does make sense. If you manage to pull it off, the reward is massive.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#34

Post by hobs »

1dom wrote: post #27
hobs wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ... done enterprise sales? The idea that a group of people working for a multi-billion dollar business having no idea what they want and no understanding of capabilities of new technologies is ... standard? I have seen it personally ... dozens? of times? Its the reasons startups can even succeed at all given the enormous momentum and cash reserves of these bigger companies - their goals, management, approach…

Strong agree. I've also seen it a lot: sales person at a small tech startup convinces business person in large tech company to ignore their own engineers. I suspect most engineers at large firms have been on one side of this experience at somepoint, and most engineers at small but successful tech startups have been on the other side (lead engineer to sales: "You told them our our product could do _what?!_ That's fine…

Hell, small in this context can be Snowflake or Databricks, this is the concept of Shadow IT - a slick sales call can convince and move things in a business that an army of engineers will struggle to convince their bosses of.

External sales person says "oh you've been struggling with that for YEARS?!!?!?! We can get that done in 90 days if you can get that group of people on board" (3 years passes, everyone involved doesn't work there anymore, the project is a mess)

External sales person says "oh you've been struggling with that for YEARS?!!?!?! We can get that done in 90 days if you can get that group of people on board" (3 years passes, everyone involved doesn't work there anymore, the project is a mess)

You get the idea.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#35

Post by Freak_NL »

One upside: by degrading the experience¹ Netflix did make it a lot easier to simply stop your subscription and hop over to another streaming service for a few months.

A very interesting development: in the Netherlands KPN, one of the largest telcos, introduced a feature where any household with several of their products in use (e.g., two cellphones and fiber internet) could choose a free 'gift'². The gift is a choice from a bunch of subscriptions, including Netflix, Disney+, and HBO Max. And you get to switch monthly if you want to. So we ditched our own Netflix subscription and started watching Disney+ for now. Perhaps we'll switch in a few months.

These services probably realise that their customers are made up of 'hoppers', and 'stackers' (people who take out multiple subscriptions to streaming services at once). I wonder what the distribution for each service is.

1: In part forced upon them by the content owners waking up and wanting to set up their own exclusive shops of course, and in part because of, well, greed (the UI suckiness).

2: The trade-off is obviously that this stimulates consumers to consolidate their telco products with them. In my case this was already so, so for me this is just a small incentive to stay with them (i.e., it saves me €9 a month).

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#36

Post by sokoloff »

cjs_ac wrote: post #16

For any given thing or category of thing , a tiny minority of the human population will be enthusiasts of that thing , but those enthusiasts will have an outsize effect in determining everyone else's taste for that thing . For example, very few people have any real interest in driving a car at 200 MPH, but Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches are widely understood as desirable cars, because the people who are into car…

> Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches

For street usage, I think those cars are popular because they’re beautiful more than because they’re fast (or because enthusiasts like them).

My utterly soulless Lexus will drive more than fast enough to get me in serious trouble. No one will look at it and feel stirred by its beauty, whereas the typical Ferrari or Porsche coupe will look at least appealing to most and beautiful to many, even those who can’t tell the three marques apart or even unaided recall the name Lamborghini.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#38

Post by soco »

krige wrote: post #28
lotsofpulp wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix is winning, see net income trends: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NFLX/netflix/net-i... Maybe it is winning despite what Netflix leaders are choosing to do, and maybe their choices will cause them to falter soon. And maybe Netflix could be doing better than they are. But it is always easier to pontificate than execute. I don’t buy Netflix solely because they don’t integrate with the search in the i…

Netflix was changing a lot to drain more money out of users recently, which is why income rose recently. What I'd like to see is active / recurring users instead.

It's important to look at the competition as well for this. I think we can all agree that streaming is here to stay. But how are the others faring here? In a more and more fragmented landscape, Netflix still has the fattest offering. Also the quality of the service (aka, search, languages offered, subtitles, trailers, stream quality, own productions...) is way better than say Prime or Disney+. So why shouldn't they be leading the stats? Even if you think they suck, compared to the rest of the pack they suck the least.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#39

Post by JackMorgan »

furyg3 wrote: post #9

The TikTok-ification of advertising supported platforms is terrible, but makes sense to me. LinkedIn pivoted from making money on subscriptions and fees for job postings to ads, which mean the leading drivers are 'engagement' e.g. time you spend doom scrolling on their platform. This will end in disaster for the platform as a place to find jobs or employees. Netflix I understand much less. They make money from subscr…

You've got it backwards, Netflix doesn't want people to just doom-scroll, the users want to doom-scroll.

Attention destroying apps reduce the long term focus and reward centers such that doom-scrolling through the catalog probably feels better than just watching something. Most of the folks I know who start a movie or show immediately pull out their phones anyway to scroll elsewhere.

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