> Regrettably, this will have an intended impact This reads weird to me (non-native English speaker). How can you regrettably reach your intended impact? Is that some kind of an idiom?
I'm a native speaker and it is paradoxical to me, too.
TomTom to cut 10% of jobs due to improved automation
181–190 of 269 posts
Re: TomTom to cut 10% of jobs due to improved automation
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have no experience with tom tom but I was a garmin user, and I got the sense that tom toms were pretty much identical. IMO an integrated tom tom into the car, if it performs as well as the external unit, would be amazingly better than your cell phone. The biggest advantage imo is satellite coverage is much better than quality data network coverage. I'm not even talking about in the boonies. Plenty of times in the m…
I have an older in-car system and my experience is the opposite. First, the car doesn't download map data. I'm stuck with what was on the car when I bought it unless I want to pay an unreasonable amount to update it. Second, it does download traffic data, but it's so slow that it's useless. I took its advice once and it cost me over an hour, because the alternate route had already filled up and had the disadvantage o…
> Third, it can't navigate a path without connecting to the satellite (seemingly for traffic data, but possibly it isn't even calculating the path locally).
I’m confused by what you are saying here. In-car navigation use satelites to know where the car is. If it can’t path plan without satelite connection then that is most likely because it is waiting for a localisation fix.
Trafic information could be coming through satelite broadcast but I doubt that it does.
There is no way that a navigation tool would receive path planning through satelite. Two way communication is much more complicated than one-way reception, and there is no way it would be financially worth doing that.
Re: TomTom to cut 10% of jobs due to improved automation
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is an alternative to "wasting" money to give a second gold vein. You can just do the cash cow thing and then die. That's a totally reasonable. If TomTom don't think they can use the money better than other investment alternatives (that their investors have), then they shouldn't. Of course, politics and personal interests. But sometimes it's just better to allocate resources to something where they're better uti…
Has a CEO ever been hired to do this? I just don't see a business ever saying don't invest in us because there are better alternatives.
REITs are required by tax law to pay out 90%+ of their income, and everyone invests in them specifically for the dividend.
If the stock price gets too high, they always dilute it by issuing new shares to raise money for new projects. So you're never expecting lots of appreciation.
There's hundreds of them, and also many private REITs that are unlisted with the same fundamental idea.
Oil, utilities, REITs, small business lenders, etc. all have investors expecting management to just sit there, don't kill the golden goose, and pay regular dividends.
Re: TomTom to cut 10% of jobs due to improved automation
#184I used to work for TomTom maybe 10 years ago. I was there when Google started offering turn by turn navigation for free. Other issue was live traffic information. As you might imagine all this caused some concern among employees because that was, I think, the main source of revenue for the company. They were already doing some other stuff like fitness wearables but they didn't seem to be leaning into it. Main idea fo…
There is an alternative to "wasting" money to give a second gold vein. You can just do the cash cow thing and then die. That's a totally reasonable. If TomTom don't think they can use the money better than other investment alternatives (that their investors have), then they shouldn't. Of course, politics and personal interests. But sometimes it's just better to allocate resources to something where they're better uti…
When I was reading the comment, I thought the same: why don't companies just accept that they have one good project, focus on it 100%, stay good at it, and when the market dies, the company could die with it. There is no shame in milking one product for 20 years, providing a living to hundreds/thousands, then just scale back to maintenance and eventually close things down.
It doesn't really happen in practice, because no "visionary CEO" will say "we couldn't come up with a better idea than what we are doing now, so let's just call it a day in terms of exploring other ideas, and focus on this one product".
My current company is a retail company with both lots of physical locations and web shop/mobile app. We always try to come up with features that users can use in the physical stores, and those features get practically zero traction. Nobody is willing to say that the people who go to the stores, in a big percentage, won't use our apps, and the people who use the apps/web shop don't care about the physical stores. Every product person wants to combine these two, and I don't understand why.
(I guess, that's why I'm not in charge of business decisions :))
Re: TomTom to cut 10% of jobs due to improved automation
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
> since a large market I work in (insurance / life insurance) is dwindling Out of curiosity, why is the life insurance market dwindling??
Less people with dependents (partners, kids)? Less people care or put thought into what happens after they die? Also anecdotally many/most peers I talk to about this say their company provides life insurance, I then point out the difference between this and actual term life insurance for when/if they change companies: “oh huh…”
This sounds like pure speculation, which is fine, and I appreciate your comment, but would also like to hear from the poster who made the original comment since he works in that industry.
Re: TomTom to cut 10% of jobs due to improved automation
#186Re: TomTom to cut 10% of jobs due to improved automation
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm the total opposite. I love my in-car nav. I have a shortcut on the steering wheel that brings up a list of recent destinations, so starting it takes literally seconds. I don't have to plug in my phone, or even look at it. I get turn by turn in the binnacle AND the heads-up display. And on top of that, it _doesn't_ do all the silly stuff that Google does to make people think it's so great, like routing me through…
I was traveling with some friends through Los Gatos on the way to Monterrey and Google had me sit in a residential neighborhood traffic jam for over 45 minutes when I could've turned left and gotten to my destination much quicker. I did end up turning left, but the takeaway that I had is that Google isn't always doing the "right" thing.
There is a particular problem in Los Gatos on summer weekends when everyone wants to escape the Bay Area and go to the beaches around Santa Cruz. Southbound Highway 17 comes to standstill due to idiot timid drivers who slow down going uphill and constantly brake around curves. Then the navigation apps route drivers onto residential streets to try and save a few minutes. It gets so bad that local residents are literally trapped and even emergency vehicles can't get through.
Re: TomTom to cut 10% of jobs due to improved automation
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
They pretty much lost because free (subsidized) alternatives like Google Maps became available, pretty much the same story as Netscape. It probably didn't help that their maps were also incredibly expensive, €100-200 for western Europe in 2005 money.
Free mapping existed before Google Maps. Mapping isn't the hard part or the expensive part, the hardware is. Smartphones have GPS and when people started getting smartphones, the value of having a separate navigation devices went to zero-ish unless it's built in to your car or maybe some low power thing for wilderness exploration (or having a boat or a plane or that kind of thing)
Yeah: Microsoft Maps on PocketPC. Pffffft!
Re: TomTom to cut 10% of jobs due to improved automation
#189> Regrettably, this will have an intended impact This reads weird to me (non-native English speaker). How can you regrettably reach your intended impact? Is that some kind of an idiom?
Non-native speaker myself, I had to do a double take as well. I think 'to regret sth' can have two slightly different meanings: 1. If I could reverse time, I would decide differently getting a different outcome. 2. I am sad that this happens, but it is still the preferable outcome, compared to the alternative. I think I 'default' to the first meaning. But in this case the second is probably more fitting.
I think they are threading a fine line here. They regret that they had to make these plans. Or, note to investors: we are firing people but it was expected.
Re: TomTom to cut 10% of jobs due to improved automation
#190TomTom is such an interesting story in technology and finance. Went from zero to $ 10B+ between '05 - '07 [1]. Everyone you knew had one, used one, loved one. Then the sudden boom in mobile phones and mobile internet and the financial crisis. Total crash of the stock. Pretty much subsistence without any proper profits since '09-'10. Not enough IP to get bought, a few licensing deals here and there. Always falling rev…
Wow an unbroken 13 year stretch of ever decreasing revenue: https://companiesmarketcap.com/tomtom/revenue/
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