> A cash horde isn't very helpful if your business is tanking. It prolongs the pain but doesn't fix anything. Ask Yahoo.
I was (in hindsight, correctly) skeptical of MM and her gang's effort to pull more eyeballs into Y! with things like Tumblr and in smaller extent bringing in people like Katie Couric and David Pogue. Personally, I don't know what Yahoo! is and that makes me hard to tell whether they're doing the right thing at all. As much as we love to hate MM, I don't know if any of us could do any better.
Apple, I sort of get what they are. They are a hardware company that (at least presently) sells phones for $800 that has a bill of materials of about $250. They can use the rest of the margin to make the phone as appealing to consumers as possible. Everything else is a side show. (sorry mac fans) Now where does Apple go from here?
I think about the narrative in the iPhone ten year anniversary podcast (listened to it because it was on the front page of HN so thanks to whoever submitted it) that Apple had to cannibalize its iPod business and started thinking about at least two years before the iPhone was released.
Unpopular opinion but I think it is unlikely that Apple will get the next big thing right. I don't think self-driving cars will not be a high margin business. Yes, I want electric cars and self-driving cars to become mainstream because I want one for myself. There's no way I will buy a $60k+ car in the next five years. But I digress.
Like what I read from what GP said, I think Apple will likely fail not once but multiple times. It is easy to forget the bad old days:
> Since then there has been a lot of noise and shouting, but little has changed. The smaller dealership continues to sell sleek Euro-styled sedans and to spend a lot of money on advertising campaigns. They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly. The big one keeps making bigger and bigger station wagons and ORVs.
Nor does investing pointlessly or burning the money.
Nothing is a sure fix for tanking businesses.
Yahoo didn't do anything to help themselves, there's nothing innovative or useful about them. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram is what is draining the life away from Yahoo.
I was (in hindsight, correctly) skeptical of MM and her gang's effort to pull more eyeballs into Y! with things like Tumblr and in smaller extent bringing in people like Katie Couric and David Pogue. Personally, I don't know what Yahoo! is and that makes me hard to tell whether they're doing the right thing at all. As much as we love to hate MM, I don't know if any of us could do any better.
Apple, I sort of get what they are. They are a hardware company that (at least presently) sells phones for $800 that has a bill of materials of about $250. They can use the rest of the margin to make the phone as appealing to consumers as possible. Everything else is a side show. (sorry mac fans) Now where does Apple go from here?
I think about the narrative in the iPhone ten year anniversary podcast (listened to it because it was on the front page of HN so thanks to whoever submitted it) that Apple had to cannibalize its iPod business and started thinking about at least two years before the iPhone was released.
Unpopular opinion but I think it is unlikely that Apple will get the next big thing right. I don't think self-driving cars will not be a high margin business. Yes, I want electric cars and self-driving cars to become mainstream because I want one for myself. There's no way I will buy a $60k+ car in the next five years. But I digress.
Like what I read from what GP said, I think Apple will likely fail not once but multiple times. It is easy to forget the bad old days:
> Since then there has been a lot of noise and shouting, but little has changed. The smaller dealership continues to sell sleek Euro-styled sedans and to spend a lot of money on advertising campaigns. They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly. The big one keeps making bigger and bigger station wagons and ORVs.
from in the beginning was the command line by neal stephenson http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/info/commandline.html