11–20 of 34 posts
I was reading, nodding to myself and then I read about this fantastic new service called "PayMyBills.com which receive your bills for you, scan them in, and show them to you on the Internet"
I was very, very puzzled. THIS guy is tech savvy? And then I saw the date on the post.
Amazon burned through a lot of capital. B&J grew slowly during decades.
In real life, things are seldom so black and white. Every company has a unique story.
What about Facebook, that grew organically at first and then took on massive investment once it was clear that college kids loved it and they could benefit from outside investment to grow even faster.
Or what about DropBox that took a small seed funding round but then quickly exploded in popularity and then took more investment. Where do they fit on Spolsky's scale?
The truth is - they don't. Which makes the whole premise of the article wrong, you don't need to decide if you are Amazon or B&J. Just do what makes sense for the business you are in.
" If you want to chat with people, you have to go where they are, and ICQ and AOL have the most people by far. Chances are, your friends are using one of those services, not one of the smaller ones like MSN Instant Messenger. With all of Microsoft's muscle, money, and marketing skill, they are just not going to be able to break into auctions or instant messaging, because the network effects there are so strong. " Fun…
Care to elaborate? I still use ICQ and various xmpp accounts, plus skype. Had an MSN account a while back, but only for two friends who ended up switching away from it. Yes, Microsoft bought skype, but that's not really "breaking into", that's "buying". You wouldn't say that Microsoft "broke into the FPS market by making Halo".
The problem with this post, and other pieces by Spolsky is that he creates an example out of two extremes on what really is a sliding scale. Amazon burned through a lot of capital. B&J grew slowly during decades. In real life, things are seldom so black and white. Every company has a unique story. What about Facebook, that grew organically at first and then took on massive investment once it was clear that college ki…
To me, they are clearly go big or go home style companies regardless of what small investment they started with.
A lot of his charts to demonstrate this concept (that the more "optimized" something becomes, the more fragile it becomes) look like the ones from this article. For example: http://bit.ly/sKM7B0
I'll try to find more images. Taleb's writing looks at this general concept in great detail across almost everything; in the context of business, basically what Joel says is right on the money. Great article.
By the way, I think I'd prefer running a small biz to an Amazon or Wal Mart. You?
The problem with this post, and other pieces by Spolsky is that he creates an example out of two extremes on what really is a sliding scale. Amazon burned through a lot of capital. B&J grew slowly during decades. In real life, things are seldom so black and white. Every company has a unique story. What about Facebook, that grew organically at first and then took on massive investment once it was clear that college ki…
You offer many examples of companies that do not fit the two extremes of Spolsky's article. Where would you place them on the sliding scale you mention? Both have grown quickly and taken venture captial. I would place them more toward the Amazon side of the scale.
Very little in the world is black or white. Conflict and disagreement happens quite often. What you do about conflict and disagreement is the important part.
The problem with this post, and other pieces by Spolsky is that he creates an example out of two extremes on what really is a sliding scale. Amazon burned through a lot of capital. B&J grew slowly during decades. In real life, things are seldom so black and white. Every company has a unique story. What about Facebook, that grew organically at first and then took on massive investment once it was clear that college ki…
Maybe, but shades of gray are neither guiding principles nor reference points.
We measure shades of gray as 10% white or 20% black etc, i.e distances from the extreme, not with reference to other shades of gray or as an absolute gray value. (Even if we could enumerate enough sub-segments on the "sliding slice", we still intuitively understand segment 4/10 to mean something like: 4/10 close to white, 6/10 close to black).
"Every company has a unique story" is another way of saying: I cannot understand and generalize anything specific about how companies operate. Not very helpful. Science works with generalization and taxonomy.
"""What about Facebook, that grew organically at first and then took on massive investment once it was clear that college kids loved it and they could benefit from outside investment to grow even faster."""
Then they went towards the white end of the scale first, the black later.
" If you want to chat with people, you have to go where they are, and ICQ and AOL have the most people by far. Chances are, your friends are using one of those services, not one of the smaller ones like MSN Instant Messenger. With all of Microsoft's muscle, money, and marketing skill, they are just not going to be able to break into auctions or instant messaging, because the network effects there are so strong. " Fun…
Care to elaborate? I still use ICQ and various xmpp accounts, plus skype. Had an MSN account a while back, but only for two friends who ended up switching away from it. Yes, Microsoft bought skype, but that's not really "breaking into", that's "buying". You wouldn't say that Microsoft "broke into the FPS market by making Halo".
So you are that guy!
The parent meant that of course people have had since migrated off of AOL and ICQ.
ICQ is almost nothing today, and even yesterday, before Facebook took over, tons of people had switched to MSN.
Wikipedia gives: MSN 330 million active (June 2009), ICQ 50 million active (Feb 2010). You can do the math.
Ok, merits of the article aside: I was reading, nodding to myself and then I read about this fantastic new service called "PayMyBills.com which receive your bills for you, scan them in, and show them to you on the Internet" I was very, very puzzled. THIS guy is tech savvy? And then I saw the date on the post.
A person can be a technical wizard and/or programming god and still not know (nor care about) any of the latest web services/fads/etc...