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‘Your Map Is Wrong’

p2p.ai

81–90 of 101 posts

Re: ‘Your Map Is Wrong’

#81

> There is this beauty of economics – you don’t have to make anyone poorer in order for you to become richer. At any appreciable scale I disagree with this, or at least believe this ignores a whole lot of complexity. Like, it totally ignores how profits are allocated within a company, for instance. Jeff Bezos got richer by making his employees poorer, for instance. He could have chosen to make his employees richer at…

> Jeff Bezos got richer by making his employees poorer, for instance.

Poorer than what? Than being unemployed? I don't see how you can make someone poorer by employing them unless you forcefully ripped them out of a higher-paying job somehow.

Re: ‘Your Map Is Wrong’

#82
post #47

The product that lifted Apple out of mediocrity and into the public eye was the iPod. The iPod, especially in its initial release, had a feature list that was explicitly derived from the failings of competing products. The idea was to take and dominate the mobile music player market. All of the biggest power moves Steve Jobs made were about eating someone else's lunch.

The iPod's initial release did correct some misfeatures of competitors but it was not a mass market success. It took Apple until the third generation iPod to hit mass market success. The first two generations of iPod only had FireWire connectivity, available on every Mac but very few PCs. With the third generation iPod USB 2.0 capability was added giving it compatibility with a huge portion of PCs.

Sales skyrocketed after the addition of USB support. After the addition of USB when the iPod took off it didn't outright kill the competition. It just sold so well and expanded the market so much that the PMP market became the iPod market and also-rans.

The iPod had a lot of competitors but no real competition in terms of sales. The PMP that killed the iPod mini (that was selling like gangbusters) was the iPod nano. I'd argue that the iPod was the opposite of a zero sum product because it expanded the PMP market far beyond its size at the iPod's inception.

Re: ‘Your Map Is Wrong’

#83

> There is this beauty of economics – you don’t have to make anyone poorer in order for you to become richer. At any appreciable scale I disagree with this, or at least believe this ignores a whole lot of complexity. Like, it totally ignores how profits are allocated within a company, for instance. Jeff Bezos got richer by making his employees poorer, for instance. He could have chosen to make his employees richer at…

> Bezos got richer by making his employees poorer, for instance. He could have chosen to make his employees richer at the expense of making himself poorer. No, they both got richer. Maybe Bezos had a chance to make his employees slightly more rich and himself less so, but ultimately no-one got poorer here.

No one? What about the brick and mortar stores that lost volume? Or even the other budding online marketplaces that were choked out of existence?

Re: ‘Your Map Is Wrong’

#84
post #47

The product that lifted Apple out of mediocrity and into the public eye was the iPod. The iPod, especially in its initial release, had a feature list that was explicitly derived from the failings of competing products. The idea was to take and dominate the mobile music player market. All of the biggest power moves Steve Jobs made were about eating someone else's lunch.

[deleted]

Re: ‘Your Map Is Wrong’

#85
There's much confusion in this.

The map is about uncharted business opportunities, ie. introducing new competitors.

Yes, consumer products (in contrast to goods that enable buyers to generate income) are competing for buyers' budgets. This is actually quite literally a zero-sum game. (There's only a rather limited probability that your income will automatically increase as you buy a new TV set, in order to make up for it.) What these budgets are, is rather a matter of macroeconomics, which remain entirely untouched by the article.

Finally, Jobs' statement is about the validity of market research as the sole driving input for innovation and development. (Going back to the map, it's as if we would be mapping undiscovered species: gorilla – checked, found that, okapi – checked, tripedal swan – not found yet, monopod – not found yet, etc. This quite Borgesesque chart would be able to map any successes possible in advance. Therefor, we would know that it makes no sense to look into the seas, as there are no unchecked species left there. However, product development is neither a zero-sum game nor is there a finite pool of ideas, nor is it defined or limited by what we already know. Chances are, the optimum hasn't been reached yet, nor does everybody know what this may look like, otherwise, there'd be little incentive to innovate at all.)

I have a hard time even wondering how these things should be connected. At best, you could link the map to the "known unknowns", but, going with Jobs, you'd have to admit that this is not a map at all, but a rather weak metaphor. Meaning, as a map is all about navigating the known world, it is of little help for imagining what may be beyond it. (The known existence of uncharted territories is rather an invitation to go there and find what may be found there in order to increase that portion of the sum, which is accessible to me.) But, we'd have to admit also that this insight doesn't revolutionize macroeconomics, as these are on an entirely different level. In a sense, the map in the first example is more about a sweeping spotlight, highlighting those areas where budgets are momentarily spent.

Re: ‘Your Map Is Wrong’

#86

> There is this beauty of economics – you don’t have to make anyone poorer in order for you to become richer. At any appreciable scale I disagree with this, or at least believe this ignores a whole lot of complexity. Like, it totally ignores how profits are allocated within a company, for instance. Jeff Bezos got richer by making his employees poorer, for instance. He could have chosen to make his employees richer at…

> Jeff Bezos got richer by making his employees poorer, for instance. Poorer than what? Than being unemployed? I don't see how you can make someone poorer by employing them unless you forcefully ripped them out of a higher-paying job somehow.

>> don't see how you can make someone poorer by employing them unless you forcefully ripped them out of a higher-paying job somehow.

How?

Destroy the companies that previously provided higher paying jobs and are one of the few remaining opportunities that are not the unemployment queue.

WalMart was astonishingly successful at this. Their strategy was to move into small towns, on the outskirts where land was cheap, and setup a superstore that competed with basically every small business in town. Within years, 'Main Street' was a row of empty storefronts. It becomes one of the only places in town to work. The jobs at WalMart consistently pay so little that WalMart holds seminars for it's employees on how to get government assistance to survive. You and I are literally subsidizing WalMart's profits by enabling them to pay a sub-living wage to so many people.

WalMart so consistently made poorer everyone in the targeted communities that organized opposition sprang up. I watched it happen when I lived in Vermont, and it delayed WalMart's entry into the state for many years; a quick look still shows only 7 stores in the state, and there's still not a single store in the southeast.

WalMart was easier to identify because it had such measurable local effects, and it still took decades for people to catch up to their strategy and start to oppose it. Amazon's effects are much more diffuse and will take longer to measure.

So, yes, scaled-up organizations can literally rip out the higher paying jobs from under people and leave them no options. They can literally make people poorer by employing them.

Re: ‘Your Map Is Wrong’

#87
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bezos got richer by making his employees poorer, for instance. He could have chosen to make his employees richer at the expense of making himself poorer. No, they both got richer. Maybe Bezos had a chance to make his employees slightly more rich and himself less so, but ultimately no-one got poorer here.

No one? What about the brick and mortar stores that lost volume? Or even the other budding online marketplaces that were choked out of existence?

They aren’t his employees?

Re: ‘Your Map Is Wrong’

#88
post #8

Full text: ‘Your Map Is Wrong’ – P2P.AI On stage with John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly at the 2010 Web2.0 Summit, Mark Zuckerberg stared at the Summit backdrop, that had a map with various consumer technology areas that have been ‘conquered’, charted out. “Your Map is Wrong,” Zuckerberg said. “The biggest part of the map has to be uncharted territory — this map makes it seem like it’s zero-sum, but it’s not. We’re buil…

> We’re building value, not just taking it away from someone else. Does Facebook still build anything? These days it seems like they mostly buy other companies that are still able to build and innovate.

Yes, they do, but they do it pretty quietly - think messenger, or their dating service, or their games section - these are all parts of Facebook, but they used to not be. Messenger and Games are the oldest ones. They're huge, they keep building stuff into what "Facebook" is, but it's really, *really* subtle.

Also, off topic, but I'm fairly certain you're a former co-worker of mine :)

Re: ‘Your Map Is Wrong’

#89
Let me repeat myself for the thousandth time, just because something is new it doesn't mean that it's useful or valuable. Charting new territories, experimenting inevitably gets you the wrong answer most of the time. Innovation implies both invention and commercialization.

Registering a domain called p2p.ai to lure venture capital trying to show up early for a new potentially lucrative Ponzi scheme is not innovation, unless pumping and dumping is a commercial activity.

Re: ‘Your Map Is Wrong’

#90
It's interesting to apply Zuckerberg's views to his company 12 years later.

Meta's actions towards social media make it seem like it's now a zero-sum game. They copy features from Snapchat and TikTok, or buy companies like WhatsApp and Instagram, precisely because those companies are taking value away from Facebook.

The whole metaverse thing is a touch different. It does look like they're trying to build new value there -- of course, who knows if they'll pull it off.

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