[dextorious]

"""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."""

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.

[niklas_a]

"Science works with generalization and taxonomy."

You still need to do the science though. Taking two examples and drawing general conclusions from that is just wrong. It's a case study of how B&J and Amazon have operated, which in itself is interesting.

But it's wrong to state that you either are a B&J-type company or an Amazon-type company, nothing in the article supports the fact that those are the only possible types.