Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Whatever goes up, that’s what we do

dcurt.is

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 231 posts

Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do

#221

Post by 205guy »

mehwoot wrote: post #161
wisty wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies like Yahoo exist to make money - or, at least, they must continue to make money in order to continue existing. Hows that working for Yahoo now? Actually, that's kind of disingenuous. Google optimises for less clicks per user, because Google is a site for people who want to get stuff done. Yahoo and Facebook are time-wasters. And unlike Yahoo, I can't see it ever transitioning to anything other than a time…

Hows that working for Yahoo now? Pretty well, considering they are still around more than a decade after they stopped being "cool". They're not trendy in tech circles, they are just a business that makes money. Yahoo and Facebook are time-wasters... Time-wasters are basically unprofitable Yeah, unprofitable to the tune of $600 million a year. That's Yahoo's net profit last year. I swear to god, the blindness of peopl…

Nobody jumped on your "time-waster" comment. I think that's an interesting concept. Is your startup a "time-waster" or a "time-saver"?

2 things about Yahoo:

1) I'm still paying for their email service, and have been for 10 years. Their UI redesigns have been horrendous at times, but email lockin is powerful.

2) I really don't think dominance on the internet should be expected or desired, just because its possible. There's an example below about Yahoo Japan "owning" auctions in Japan. Sure, eBay has cornered peer-to-peer non-local vending in the US (let's not kid oursevelves what "auctions-buy-now" really are), but why should they be the preferred platform in Japan? Yes the internet allows it, but in the end, for a variety of historic and social reasons, different companies will fill different niches in different places, even if the internet looks like one gigantic niche and place. In other words, there is very little benefit seen from dominating auctions in US and Japan. Sure a few people would be able to order items more easily across the Pacific, but that effect pales in comparison to other internal factors. Maybe some local website had a marketing deal with a popular franchise in a certain country and got more popular initially, and then dominated that local market by network effect.

To summarize: I think it's normal to have local companies cornering local markets at the country/cultural level, even though the internet and e-commerce could theoretically be dominated globally. Google and search is a unique case, and expecting all companies to be like them in every market is misguided. I think that leaves a lot of space for Yahoo and many other similar companies to survive.

Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do

#223

Post by [deleted] »

pkamb wrote: post #184
aryastark wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no evidence that points to QWERTY being designed to be inefficient. http://www.economist.com/node/196071 http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/fact-of-fiction-t...

There is plenty of evidence that points to it being inefficient, however. Regardless of the various QWERTY origin stories, it's not a very good touch-typing layout compared to Dvorak or Colemak.

[deleted]

Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do

#224

Post by wtracy »

kybernetyk wrote: post #178

> This is truly a nightmare scenario for any CEO: do you take the risk and proceed with the better user experience/product at the expense of short term numbers–with no promise that the better design will actually lead to long-term benefits–or do you scrap the new design and start over? Doesn't this only apply to CEOs who run companies that give away their products to indirectly monetize it? If you had a product you s…

I can think of lots of counter-examples.

What if your product is licensed per-seat, and your change allows your customer to achieve their goals with fewer employees using your product, reducing the number of licenses purchased?

What if your change allows your customer to complete their task more quickly, and they stop paying for your SaaS product as soon as they complete said task?

What if your improvement improves interoperability, and your customer's partners decide not to purchase your product because they no longer need it to work together?

What if your change reduces the need for your customer to later purchase an upgrade?

Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do

#225

Post by polarix »

eevilspock wrote: post #176
steven2012 wrote: post #79

This is essentially what happened in my group when I was at Yahoo. Our group spent several months on a redesign that made it significantly more modern and easier to use. After it went live, though, this decreased the number of ad clicks by a significant number, and the people in charge hurriedly reverted all the changes back, since they needed to make their revenue numbers in order to make their bonus. When you are s…

Nearly everyone has bought into the utter bullshit that advertising makes the web free. This delusion buries not only the fact that we have made a deal with the devil, but also that the deal really sucks. What we traded our souls for we don’t even get. The web would be both cheaper and better if we just paid for what we use straight up. And more importantly, society would be better. I'll explain all of these. IT'S NO…

Macroeconomically, it is true that the resource, human, and energy costs of the internet sum to the integrated time discounted expectation of future returns for communication sources (advertisers).

This does not preclude the possibility of mutual growth, though. A system interested in long-term stability will optimize minimally for short-term advertiser revenue, and primarily for long-term attention provider satisfaction.

One counterfactual of the current model that can be instructive is the following. Assume a system whereby all communication is happenstance -- there is no advertising or selective filtration (which is what advanced advertising becomes). Such a system degrades in much the way twitter does -- manual (attentive) classification and differentiation are not used universally enough, people don't sufficiently filter their own attention sinks, and the attention eventually dries up in the vacuum of entropy.

It would certainly be possible to move to such a manually filtered system, but it would require a massive reconstruction of social norms. The best system would be one that could passively or subconsciously negotiate filtration strategies in a decentralized runtime environment. It will need to be spatially collocated with the conscious being, eventually, or the latency will be unacceptable.

Eventually, then, we'll find that such filtration will actively seek out opportunities for novelty or for the satisfaction of latent (either unrecognized or frustrated) desires, and surface them to attention. This is precisely what advertising becomes.

Finally, you are right that we're approaching the equilibrium from an oblique angle, but it is a direction from which we can make progress at every step of the way, and the endpoint is ultimately a fairly ideal state.

Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do

#226

Post by joubert »

It seems to me that if the company's goals are the same as that of their users, then innovation will lead to profits.

But if your users are not also your customers, then you are likely to run into these counter-innnovation corners.

Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do

#227

Post by zimpenfish »

tanzam75 wrote: post #206
zimpenfish wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find any links ("Yahoo finance 2013" is exceedingly useless) but wasn't that $600M partially/mostly from them selling off stakes in things like AliBaba and not from the core business?

No. None of that $590 million came from the sale of Alibaba shares, as the Alibaba sale took place in 2012, not in 2013. In addition, $590 million is not Yahoo's net income, but their pretax income from operations . In other words, excluding Alibaba. Here's the breakdown for 2013, in thousands: Income from operations 589,926 Other income, net 43,357 ----------------------------------------- Provision for income taxes…

It appears that $80M of that $590M came from a one-off patent sale - which was the kind of thing I was talking about.

That's a ~14% (artificial) boost in profit that takes them from "$65M down on 2012" (bad) to "$23M up on 2012" (adequate).

Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do

#228

Post by happyscrappy »

jbigelow76 wrote: post #218
happyscrappy wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I donate to PBS. Their content is unrivaled and unimpeachable. What is the name of the app your friend's son was using, they deserve a special place in hell.

The sad truth is if the developer had priced the game at say five dollars they most likely never would have been discovered or if they had the user's conditioning would have kicked in: "Must find free alternative! Dumb greedy developers trying to rip me off, entertain and teach my child for free. FREE I SAY!" We (as app users) brought this on ourselves, or at the very least we're half culpable. The day the app store…

I stand by my original comment. Yes, developers deserve to make money, that doesn't mean you have to be an asshole, especially when they probably go around claiming to be "educators".

Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do

#229

Post by grey-area »

gfodor wrote: post #52
grey-area wrote: post #25

This really reminds me of the depressing way that Google optimised the blue colour of a button, while ignoring all other considerations: http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html If you trust your metrics and nothing else, you have to be very sure that your metrics encompass every aspect of the reality you are modelling. If they just tell you about clicks and sales, they might be missing longer-ter…

I've never worked at Google and I can respect the sentiment, but it seems to me that if you are a skilled designer that Google's massive audience and experimental capabilities can cut both ways. It means that you have to prove even the most minor design changes, but it also means that you have the ability to really prove your work is helpful and not fool yourself. If you make a few small wins you surely can build up…

I'd dispute that many design changes can be proven in any meaningful way. There are too many variables, and optimising for clicks on one button might affect all others on a page. It's very hard to measure everything at once, and it doesn't sound like Google tried in this instance.

Re: Whatever goes up, that’s what we do

#230

Post by icosahedronman »

happyscrappy wrote: post #214
steven777400 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesterday I was sitting with a friend's young boy who was showing me some math games on a tablet. These are games designed to teach simple addition, subtraction, etc to young children. What amazed me was how intense the push for in-app purchasing was! Every one of the several games had a popup after each level or activity that would offered some in-game "power-up" for just $0.99 or various amounts. It wasn't just tha…

This is why I donate to PBS. Their content is unrivaled and unimpeachable. What is the name of the app your friend's son was using, they deserve a special place in hell.

Yea. PBS's content is truly unrivalled and unimpeachable. Its a wonder they've maintained it for so long now.
Post reply on HN