TodPunk

My local tech community has a slack where the grievance of low-effort sloppypasta was being discussed, and one of them made this and a whole bunch of feedback looping ensued. I was pleased enough with the result to share even though I didn't make it.

I'm local to the area of the company. Peeps in the community here have said they issue ridiculous old or underpowered laptops for many positions and that many if not all of those 30 employees are likely using their personal machines because they're more comfortable to the employee.

Yes, yes you should.

The vast majority of businesses are not going to fit any of this playbook. The problem is this playbook covers a niche. If you don't want to play that niche game, that's totally fine. However, like me, you will have to look elsewhere to decide what game you DO want to play, and what rules you'll have to live by. Sometimes that's customer focus, sometime's that is volume focus, or diversifying, or a 12 month profitability plan (sometimes longer, like maybe a restaurant).

There's no rules in business but the laws of the land. Pretending that there's one definition of success is very limiting to both focus and opportunity for all of us.

We started our company because I could fund it out of pocket for less than the cost of coffee or lunch for a week, and grow at whatever pace made sense. Even if we only occupy 0.1% of the market ever, we'll be able to pay the salaries of ourselves and our friends and have a lot of room to spare into other projects that we think should be made but probably need more development up front.

This isn't exactly an HN love story, but it's working out well for us so far, and we're learning a lot. I can't say I regret it, and at the moment I know that I would regret if I had gone after funding of some sort. Right now it's just me and the customer, working out who needs what. Third legs need not apply.

"People" in this instance is a handful of special edge cases compared to the majority of computer users, even if we're only looking at people that build their own computer, or hell, even just looking at only linux users. Dual booting is a minority. Yes, you CAN do it. Linux has made it easy. Great! But not many DO.

Nobody gives hell to every other OS manufacturer that will clobber our current bootloader configs. That means more than OSX, btw.

I don't buy it. The US is bringing their cases to protect their interests and the interests of their economies. It's not about territory control, it's about industry control. I don't agree with how they're going about it, but I'm not going to make up motivations that don't fit just because of my disdain for it.

Of course, this is one reason why I'm not in politics.

This opens up my mind to a lot of possibilities. Some poignant conversation starters for your local lunch group:

- What kind of investment returns did the stock of those bankrupted yellow pages make and at what cycles?

- What does it really take to kill an old technology?

- Is there a way to compete with established dying tech companies at their own game, or is it purely by trying to advance their users to your new tech?

- What does this say about transitional companies that possibly offer both the old AND the new techs, like the yellow pages that offer online versions? Are they going to move forward or are they just delaying their deaths a bit?

- What kind of talent is needed to sustain these kinds of businesses? It's going to look very different from the talent that grows new business, but I can't deny that they're both forms of talent.

Lots of food for thought.

You are describing turn-key solutions. They are services that provide complete end-to-end consumption methods, like Netflix. In the scenarios of content consumption (be it articles, movies/tv, or even games) even recent history has shown that it isn't the availability of content that is the limiting factor, it is the accessibility of content. What I mean by that is not that you have authorization to consume the content, but that you have the capability of enacting your end of the transaction (in this case, pressing play).

The reason VHS and DVD sales are better than digital is because it is still vastly easier to put a thing in a magic box hooked up to the TV and press play on the remote. Even this is frought with danger (How do I hook it up, how do I get to the right input, where exactly is the button to play the movie on this DVD menu?) This is also why you hear those complaints near constantly.

There's other factors as well (like people not feeling like they own a file, but a DVD is theirs), but again the barrier to entry for consumers on computers is getting past having to think of any of the moving parts. This is true in a lot of places, like automatic transmissions and ATMs (read up on the history of ATM interfaces, it's fascinating if you're into that).

Currently on a PC if you download a file that is a piece of media to consume, you have several important barriers for most people: - I have to put the file somewhere, and I don't understand filesystems - I have to have software that uses the file format, that works on my machine - I have to know how to use that software - I have to know how to purchase the file, whatever that is supposed to mean - I have to like how it's being displayed - I have to know how to get it from the machine I downloaded it on to my TV or whatever

There's probably others in some scenarios, but you probably see the point. A lot of things we tech users take for granted is that these things are very, very hard for most people, and they always have been (again, physical tech like cars or elevators follow this). Even giving someone a link is barely beginning to scratch the surface of this process. So this is, bar none, the reason digital is going to have problems until netflix or youtube or whatever can just play everything.

This is also, as a related aside, why a web browser and mobile apps win in breaking down those barriers. Everyone already has them and it's the "click icon to do thing" model, where icon might be a bookmark or typing a simple address, but the point is the same. No installs, no understanding of local mechanics and difference. It's also why Apple products are viewed by the consumers as more user friendly. There's very little to understand about your machine on a Macbook. You don't have to take my word for it here. Watch your average user use a mac. Or read their user interface guides.

Actually, the harsh reality is that we do not yet have a digital content ecosystem that makes consuming any digital media easy for the vast majority of the population (US or otherwise). This is why netflix can do what they do: they have a walled garden where the entire experience is driven purely by their interface and delivery mechanisms (see also: Steam in the PC games space).

I've written specs for studio approved DRM schemes and done pre-dvd content on in-flight entertainment systems. Please believe me when I say that it is a nightmare even if you DO know what you're doing with all the tech involved, but even if it weren't a legal problem there's a good example that is pretty damning as a foundational assumption: we still don't know how to share a file.

I mean that sincerely: try to get your average non-tech worker to send a file to your grandmother on their own. I can not overstate this enough. This does not work.

We have a lot of distance to cover before the digital content world cares about our niche whims.

The generalized popular programming industry, largely in web, desktop, or mobile high level programming. Not an entirely useful generalization, but one that is common enough to habitually pick up on when "we" is used in such a context.