[danielmarkbruce]

That's one example. Here are a few others...

Bezos wasn't in retail. He also wasn't in compute hardware.

Reed Hastings wasn't in entertainment and crushed it. Jeff Katzenberg was, and Quibi was a disaster.

Ken Griffin was a punk kid in harvard, never worked in finance. Jim Simmons was a math professor, didn't work in finance.

AirBnb guys weren't in real estate or tourism or whatever bucket you want that to be.

Larry & Sergey knew zero about advertising. Zuckerberg too.

The incumbents have been destroyed with some frequency by outsiders who take a different approach. It's almost impossible to tell in advance if understanding a domain is an asset or a liability.

[hnthrowaway6543]

Ok but you're listing people/businesses, not technologies, which is what I'm talking about. Or is this nonsensical LLM slop to prove a point?

[danielmarkbruce]

Nah, you were talking about tech people operating outside of their domain. You just don't like how easy it is to show counter examples so you pretend you had some other point.

But if you don't know the technology involved for each of the above, maybe stay out of a conversation involving technology.

[ofcourseyoudo]

Except every company you listed is a technology company. It's technologists doing technology. Katzenberg proves the point.

Amazon, Netflix, Quibi (a disaster run by a non-technologist), AirBnB, Google, Facebook. These are websites and apps.

I don't think Griffin is particularly illustrative of anything except it's nice to ask your grammy for $100K when you're a teenager.

Feel free to listen to a NotebookLM podcast of a PG post, but if you think any AI is going to create an original thought that catches fire like the MCU, Call Her Daddy, Succession, cumtown, Hamilton, Rogan, Inside Out, Serial, or Wicked, maybe it's you that should stay out of the conversation when it comes to creativity.

[danielmarkbruce]

Amazon is a retailer. AWS is compute(/etc) for rent. AirBnB is homes for short term rent. Quibi is/was short movies on mobile. Google and facebook are advertising. Netflix is movies/tv shows. There is no such thing as a pure technology company - the technology has to be used to do something people want.

The people closest to the thing which is about to be dominated by machines are often clueless about what is going on.

[ofcourseyoudo]

First, do all the techbro failures where they thought they were smarter than the industry.

Second, show the company where the technologists made the same thing the old school was making, and better. Amazon retail disrupted but didn't destroy physical retail, and certainly didn't replace it, and certainly isn't better at it. Same with AirBnB => hotels, Google/FB => advertising (disrupted with a new type of product... a tech product... but have no presence in literally every other form of the industry).

The closest thing you can get to dominance is Netflix making movies and television, and there's no evidence that they make better movies and television than the old school. Technologies can use money to leverage their position against slow-moving industry players, but in this specific discussion, we've seen nothing to suggest that eventually AI could make a better film than human beings.

If you were actually in the industry you'd know that the top decisionmakers at Netflix have decreasing respect from the creative community, increasing reputation for being a cheap and difficult company to work with, and are generally regarded as a mill that creates a lot of mediocre to slightly-above-average content that gets swept aside every 3-6 months for the next wave of grist. Profitable certainly but nowhere close to being a leader in quality, for as much money as they've thrown at trying to win that Best Picture trophy (and spoiler: Emilia Perez isn't gonna do it this year either).

If you don't know anything about Hollywood, maybe you should stay out of a discussion about Hollywood.

[danielmarkbruce]

Nope, you do the opposite. The list is long on both sides, displaying how difficult it is to know if industry knowledge is an asset or liability.

Of course they don't do the exact same thing. Only someone in industry would think to do the exact same thing. The value proposition is the same in each case, that's what matters.

The people who don't know Hollywood are the ones taking over the entertainment business. Customers of the entertainment business don't care about the "creative community" or "hollywood".