dlitwak

Congrats to Ali. Been very impressed with Chariot's mastery of nitty gritty business & logistics fundamentals. That sounds like it should be obvious, but Leap and other competitors couldn't so much as file the right permits, let alone start what amounted to their own public transit network and get regular ridership. This is a hard, low margin, business to get right in a crowded space, and Ali managed to scale it to 40k+ riders per month and that's awesome. Well deserved!

Obviously the analogy breaks down at some point . . . but yes, I will check out that book, thanks!

Candy Crush, we're holding that up as a development that Apple is responsible that we want to be proud of, seriously? Regardless, an app store wasn't groundbreaking. They executed much better on what Blackberry was already doing with smartphones.

The point isn't necessarily what has come to pass yet, it's the focus on things that don't necessarily have a path to revenue yet. Everything Apple does is product and revenue focused. That is not the case with Google.

You are right that 95% of their revenue comes from Adwords . . . but 95% of their efforts aren't on optimizing Adwords, and that right there is my point: Apple is focused on executing where their revenue is, Google is definitely MORE focused on finding new revenue opportunities, and is more willing to look into unorthodox industries and ideas.

I judge what I see . . . can't speculate about other companies. The robotics acquisitions were kept secret for a long time as well. As were autonomous cars. Eventually they came out. I don't think there is some super secret lab at apple that is working on groundbreaking inventions, and not one thing has come out of it yet, bit of a tall tale in my eyes. . .

Don't be silly, all research done by companies has an ROI counter tied to it . . . the point is that some do much more forward thinking research into technologies that might not yet have a specific application quite yet, and others are focused 2-3 years in advance and that's it.

I think credit is given . . . that's the past though, only so long you can rest on your laurels, and creating a snazzier phone and an app store doesn't really measure up to autonomous cars and robots in my opinion . . . its very nice don't get me wrong, but not in the same category of hard research into technologies where there isn't an obvious usecase yet, and thinking ahead 15 years.

True. I'll admit that there is probably a fair amount of bias because Google has a better PR department. But I doubt it's that much better than these other guys . . . I think much of the research being done is around incremental improvements, and the point is that Google seems to be dreaming much bigger and thinking much more long term.

Ok they have a computer and an operating system as well as a nice way to transfer files . . . big whoop. I think we can all agree that this isn't groundbreaking.

Totally agree. I've been at demo days and I just tune out the foreigners who I can't understand. It's hard enough having to listen to 40+ startups in a day, and try to understand what someone is doing, why they are doing it, and how it can make money, throw in a thick accent and you are likely to give your brain a rest and just tune out. I notice that these founders are the ones with no one visiting their demo table, etc.