Because they're a rag and if they're allowed to get a foothold here we'll get more of their sleazy summary spam too. If cloning Engadget's not enough for them tough shit.
The Verge does lots of summaries, but that doesn't make them sleazy. They would be sleazy if they failed to produce lots of good original content. They would be sleazy if their summaries weren't clearly marked as such. They would be sleazy if they didn't properly attribute & link their sources.
The Verge tries to be the best single source for gadget news, and they're succeeding, in my opinion.
Also, the creators of the Verge should be lauded for leaving AOL rather then being scorned for "cloning".
I don't see how "crowd computing" is fundamentally different from the crowd sourcing techniques already in use on the enterprise level, for example Facebooks translation.
Having been through one of the smaller accelerators named in this pier I just want to say, amen. Nobody talks about the stress of being picked over by investors like a piece of meat, and of falling out of favor with the program's organizers, because you're not showing the traction in the first ONE or TWO months they thought you would.
For those who can handle the pressure cooker, a big payoff is possible. But yes, buyer beware.
I'd agree the press release is vauge, but the OpenShift thing could be really exciting. If you could run a mongo cluster that presents single system image, that would make mongo a lot more appealing.
It was a poor decision, but I can see being furious/frustrated that the story of your company's success had mutated into one on how your new parent owner was evil.
True, but he shouldn't blame Shay Pierce. Porter's the one who decided to do a deal with Zynga. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.
Further, Porter's the one who set up the retention process in a way that forced somebody out the door over a perfectly reasonable issue. A manager who's first instinct for a problem is to blame others has a big problem. One who does it publicly is a fool.
From what I could gather there, it seems that, while they're signing up people, they need more investment to keep going, and no one believes that they'll be able to raise more investment any time soon. And it might be true. Signing up 200 free accounts per week may translate in to $0/month revenue (or -$x/month if you count expenses), so 'signups per week' isn't a great metric to judge on, although it's the only one we've been given.
Mint started out as not profitable in any way, and I believe at their IPO (which was ~18 months later) they had an ARPU of something like 35-40$ per annum.
You need to reach a critical mass in users before you can take action on certain potential profit centers. It's different for every industry and every business, but there's some things that would be more trouble than they're worth at 25k users but start making you a lot of money at 100k users.
Mint is pretty solidly B2C. B2C companies generally shoot for 3 orders of magnitude (if not more) users than B2B. I agree if revenue is mainly due to leadgen (say, a mortgage market), a B2C product ends up looking more like a B2B product (once leads are qualified) in terms of ARPU and sales strategy, but Mint was in the shallow end of that pool.
Also, Mint never IPO'd; they sold to Intuit (the "old" competitor in their field, with Quicken) for about $200mm. Nice money, but it was argued by a lot of people that they could have hit $1-2b in an IPO. We'll never know.
This goes a bit far. I am sure there are fine folks at Yahoo who have achieved seniority that they need to support their families. They may object to how the company does business, but can't just walk away job. Is the hiring situation in the Valley really so intense that anyone could find new work in 60 days?
This is patently untrue. I have a friend who graduated from UCLA with a computing minor who was working (unpaid) in a Stanford lab who couldn't find paying work for over 9 months. And no, he is not some kind of idiot, he got a 2390 on the new SAT and even showers regularly.
The hiring situation with no experience is a slightly different beast, particularly if you're not involved in open source or otherwise generating a lot of public code that people can look at.
People are rightly wary of hiring untested kids fresh out of college because so many of the just plain cannot program their way out of a paper bag. Not to accuse your friend of incompetence, it's just that until you have some kind of real portfolio, it's damn hard to sort the wheat from the chaff.
>> So either you're soulless and refuse to leave, or you're incompetent and you're scared to leave
So... in your world, everyone (not soulless and incompetent) is currently employed where they agree 100% with the direction and vision of the company as dictated by management. If, sometime in the future, they don't agree with management decisions, their only course of action is to give notice and leave. Pensions, security, and seniority be damned. Since they must also do this within 60 days (more than enough time according to Yammer), having another job lined up is not guaranteed either.
Maybe I missed the part where Yammer would automatically hire ex-Yahoo employees on the spot, at the same pay-rate and bonus structure, if they quit within 60 days?
I'll put my money where my mouth is. Know a talented engineer over the age of 30? Or 40? Or 50? I know several prestigious firms that would be eager to hire her. Contact me and I'll share my referral bounty with you.
Oh darn it, you said "her", which would be an EEOC win for said corporation (if they had been feeling legal pressure), although women in the profession suffer age discrimination as well - being less numerous, you don't hear about it nearly as much.
The CEO of Yammer is free to hire whomever he wants, but saying you're either soulless or incompetent is a false dichotomy. Just because your employer's use of patents isn't the most important factor in your life doesn't make you soulless. There are much more controversial topics on which reasonable people disagree.
There are few other topics which can threaten the very independence of our profession. That said, patent trolls don't really need engineers—any sociopath who can afford a patent agent can trick the beleaguered USPTO examiners into rubber-stamping an absurdly overbroad patent that claims an entire problem. I'm a little surprised Yahoo didn't assign their patents to some troll who can't be counter-sued.
Things are rarely that cut and dry. That "soulless" programmer could be locked into a contract from an acquisition, or have other reasons that I don't think warrant a presumptuous "soulless" label.
This is not practical advice. Not many people here are building the cure to cancer. The best defense is to build a self-sustaining business where you don't need to sell it.
This is true. The classic example IMO is Amazon: they didn't have "killer IP." Their "moat" was their mastery of fulfillment and distribution, and owning all the links in that chain.
"The best defense is to build a technology that isn't cheap to reproduce."
Actually that's the single worst defense. What can possibly be so expensive to produce that it can't be cloned, yet cheap enough to be possible to sell with profit? The fact of the matter is that most software is quite simple, and when it solves a particular problem in an innovative way, there is no way to capitalize on that because there's no way to enforce exclusive use (give or take a few counterexamples left or right, like a super special secret server-side recommendation algo or something like that, but those are outliers).
Conceptually, if very smart people did it, and other very smart people say it can't be done... that's what you're looking for for a deep moat. Usually that's going to be some sort of new mathematical principle in software.
It's excruciatingly hard to get funding if you do come up with that sort of idea, because the experts all say its impossible. ;)
"Conceptually, if very smart people did it, and other very smart people say it can't be done"
Don't forget the third part, which is what the author described, i.e. "not very smart people say they can easily do it themselves". They do not have to be able to do it, they just have to be able to convince the CEO to spend $1 million in salary on the internal delivery time to try to do it.
I can't really think of any recent companies that have killer IP. The difference might be an elegant solution vs someone from high school copying samples from codeproject/stackoverflow.
