231–240 of 418 posts
At the time of acquisition:
Nuance: $20B, employee strength 6000. 3M/employee
LinkedIn: 26B, employee strength ~12000. 2M/employee
LinkedIn was much more larger, more 'visible' and perhaps better talent attractor than Nuance at the time of acquisition.
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I write apps for Android and design devices that run on Android for a living. A friend once asked why I have an iPhone, and my response was pretty simple: "I'll switch to Android when I can rotate my screen animate the rotation instead of blanking out" They got it immediately. - For those not familiar with Android, your app's UI is completely destroyed on every single configuration change. Rotation. Plugging in a key…
I didn't remember how android handles screen rotations so I went and checked, I looked on both my phone and my tablet on a plethora of apps: - YouTube - GMail - FireFox - Plex - RIF (Reddit app) - Material (HackerNews app) - Main home screen - Sudoku game All of them animated screen rotation just fine, with no blank screen or glitching. Just a smooth animation of the app screen rotating from portrait to landscape (an…
I have 5 of them sitting in this room!
You might not notice, but I assure you, they clear the screen then fade back in. The exceptions are apps that have to handle configuration changes anyways like games or full screen video.
It's not always a janky thing, phones have gotten fast enough that the screen redraw is easily hidden behind a half rotate followed by a fade in, but the point is that the hacks are even needed in the first place.
Their approach to configuration changes just adds a massive footgun that trips up plenty of developers. The number of high profile apps with semi-permanent bugs like "I got scrolled back to the wrong part of the page when I rotated my phone!" insane.
A future without that is only coming once we get a replacement for the current UI framework in the form of Flutter or Jetpack Compose (both of which handle configuration changes in new ways)
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This never seems to be a popular opinion on hn, but this is the ultimate Rube Goldberg machine: A complex ai built by a billion dollar company, an enormous amount of man hours, only so that switching a light switch because slower, and less deterministic. I'm certainly not suggesting that there are no valid uses for ML/AI, but digital assistants seem to be an enormous waste.
Ignoring the fact that the research isn't only used one for one purpose, a proper assistant is hugely valuable to me. Simple things like: "Remind me to X tomorrow at 9am" "Add Y to the shopping list" "Remind me to do Z when I get home" This is the only way I do reminders now and it's great. It's especially useful while driving, or when I'm in bed nearly asleep and remember something, I can just tell Siri without havi…
I'm believe the most valid use of AI/ML is to perform tasks that people either cannot currently do, or cannot easily do. For example, ai-based up-scaling of old video game pre-renders. It's not really feasible for a person to do this well, unless you simply rebuild everything with a team of artists. And you could argue that up-scaling images for a video game is trivial, since all video games are trivial. But, the point is that the task at hand requires the help of a computer, whereas a to-do list, or using a light switch does not.
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And what do you suggest is better? I've worked with nearly every tool (open source and closed) under the sun in medical, industrial, and personal settings and Dragon NaturallySpeaking/Professional was by far the best in terms of accuracy regardless of prosody, accent, background noise, technical terms used, etc. Personally I think they should've been acquired a decade ago.
That answer depends on the language and on your use case. It seems like you're asking about desktop apps, but my parent was not talking in that context. Indeed there's not a lot of choice there because there's no money in it.
Obviously Nuance is more than just speech recognition, but still not sure why people are downplaying how good they were at it.
EDIT: or maybe it's just too prohibitively expensive for people outside of medical/legal fields to know about? And don't get me wrong, I love that things like Talon Voice are widely available for hands free coding, I just hope this means NaturallySpeaking will supplant Windows Dictation.
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Its rarely the syngeries that make it work, instead its often they bought a business they leave alone that has much more room to grow.
IDK if it's rare that synergies work, so much that it's common for synergies to fail. Consider Google. They acquired Youtube, Android... Google's skillset was perfect for taking these proving concepts and making them 1080px, so to speak. Now, Youtube and android feed users & data to the adwords cash machine. Youtube and android defend the adwords castle, denying competitors. Fantastic synergy. OTOH, no company will e…
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/04/cheaper-bandwidth-or...
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This never seems to be a popular opinion on hn, but this is the ultimate Rube Goldberg machine: A complex ai built by a billion dollar company, an enormous amount of man hours, only so that switching a light switch because slower, and less deterministic. I'm certainly not suggesting that there are no valid uses for ML/AI, but digital assistants seem to be an enormous waste.
Ignoring the fact that the research isn't only used one for one purpose, a proper assistant is hugely valuable to me. Simple things like: "Remind me to X tomorrow at 9am" "Add Y to the shopping list" "Remind me to do Z when I get home" This is the only way I do reminders now and it's great. It's especially useful while driving, or when I'm in bed nearly asleep and remember something, I can just tell Siri without havi…
Siri is unaware of so many things.
A simple command that would actually be useful (but fails totally):
« Siri, remind me to buy milk the next time I go get groceries. »
And even then... I should not have to mention the part about « groceries ». The request should be perfectly understood with a full stop after the word « milk » and a reminder should pop up automatically whenever I am in a grocery (any grocery).
An even better Siri would also be able to a categorize things properly. For example, if later in the day I say « Siri, I will need chicken, butter, salt and cardamom for my next recipe », Siri should automatically add those to the « milk » next time I go to the grocery.
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I was actually thinking " Satya, you know that Berkshire is you end game here... right? " I agree, but I think MSFT (and friends) are in this predicament no matter what. What's the alternative? That said, I don't really think BRK is the end game. For one thing, Berkshire is kind of an exception. There are plenty of smaller conglomerates that are actually like Berkshire, but most pretend not to be conglomerates. They…
> I agree, but I think MSFT (and friends) are in this predicament no matter what. What's the alternative? Returning money to shareholders is the common solution for when you don't know how to grow more and profitability in the businesses you're already in and don't have any particular advantage in entering new ones. I'm not saying that's what they should be doing but sitting on a pile of capital that you don't know w…
Also, IDK if it is a common solution. Nothing is really common at MSFT-scale. A free cash flow like Google, Alphabet, etc. is almost unprecedented.
Meanwhile, I do actually think that this is better for shareholders. IMO "Synergies" is a term somewhere between euphemism and a boomerism but for the purpose of "shareholder value" it doesn't matter. At Monopoly/Unicorn/FAANG scale, there are big opportunities for synergy. Think Google-Android.
Why is Nuance being owned by Alphabet less efficient than being traded independently or owned by private investors? Why is Alphabet owning vanguard more efficient than owning Nuance?
The answer to those question can have no actual impact on reality. If the acquired business is cash generative, they can left to their devices. If the parent company doesn't borrow, then "efficiency" never becomes explicit. Explicit efficiency is relative to cost of borrowing. Implicit efficiency is implied by share prices... and at this point things get foggy.
Several years ago I used a Nuance product named Dragon NaturallySpeaking that had speech-to-text capability and adds verbal accessibility features on Windows platforms (eg, say "Open Word", speak your document aloud, then "Close Word") I had no idea they had enough sales to justify a $20 billion valuation. Though to be fair, Microsoft tends to acquire companies at high price tags (eg, Skype, LinkedIn, Minecraft) comp…
Bear in mind, Nuance is often the voice technology behind other companies' speech-based products too. Nuance technology originally powered Siri, for example.
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> The European ones are vast communist machines that can't pay for themselves. Do you have any proof of that?
A family member is an expert in this area working for the government in a high position for a long time and they update quarterly the estimations on when the system will fall, not if. The current calculation is less than 15 years and it is fairly constant for the past 10-15 years. In the discussions they have between countries the situation varies a lot, from countries that are going from default to default like Gree…
Portugal(p in pigs) is such a country and this shunt law is a 2/3 law meaning if debt ceilings are overridden by government or parliament it will be struck down by the constitutional court. just recently there was such a law and it was promptly sent there. E
GitHub at 7.5 billion around 2019 looks like a steal.. weird other software giants didn't try for it..
A lot of the giant companies are really concerned about anti-trust. Microsoft is under pressure too, but there would be an uproar if Google or Apple bought given their pressure around the app store. Having access to the code that writes the apps would be tough to pull off...