yggydrasily

Google wouldn't do anything interesting like that if they bought Pandora. The first thing they would do would be to require a Google+ account to use it, which everyone would hate. Then they would keep changing the UI and the name over and over until no one knew it even existed or what it was called anymore, and then finally they would shut it down.

The problem is that Steve Jobs isn't around any more to give the company the proper focus and hold everyone to a high quality standard.

The recent slippage in quality and focus mirrors what happened in the late 80s and early 90s after Steve was forced out. There was considerable leftover momentum in the short term which allowed the company to coast for while and keep up some semblance of health, but eventually the lack of focus caught up with them. They became "beleaguered" in the mid-90s and only recovered when Steve came back (and axed products that weren't working, focused resources on new problems, simplified the product line, etc). It took many years, but he eventually turned them into a powerhouse.

Now that he's been gone for a while, we are seeing a similar phenomenon. In the short term after he left, the company had considerable momentum (due mostly to the iPhone) which carried them along for a number of years, but without someone at the top who had his ability to maintain focus, the company is starting to slip again.

This time, there may be no coming back.

I draw the opposite conclusion, as all of your examples are from several years ago. Three of your four links are more than 1600 days old!

Ever since AirBnB became the most valuable company in YC's portfolio, there has been a remarkable groupthink on HN where everything they do is good and criticism basically vanishes. Yet criticism of a non-YC company like Uber gets upvoted and creates a big dogpile, even when it could be equally applied to both companies.

I wonder how much of their most recent round of funding went towards this.

The cracks in the facade of phony, good-for-bragging-rights-only "valuations" are really starting to show now. Hold on, this is going to be quite a ride!

The only reason humans have had nothing to fear from machines so far is because of their brains. What happens when those are no longer a differentiator?

But if we just keep interest rates low / near-zero forever, then we can keep inflating the debt bubble forever too! Problem solved!

Even though I really appreciate the idea behind it, I was never all that comfortable running f.lux on my Macbook. I never understood why it was free yet closed-source. It made me suspicious in a way, if that makes sense.

After a while I just gave up and uninstalled f.lux. Instead, I created a 4500K white point copy of the default color profile and manually switched to it at night, which seemed to have the same effect. It also prevented those big flashes whenever switching to and from full-screen apps.

I'm grateful that f.lux has pushed this issue to the point of getting traction as a built-in feature from Apple (and I do hope Apple brings it to OS X at some point), however unless f.lux becomes open-source, I don't plan to reinstall it.

Zuckerberg is the new Bill Gates. In the 90s, Gates was notorious in his ruthlessness to define personal computing as a 100% Microsoft-only experience. Today, as you pointed out, Zuckerberg is pushing equally hard at defining the internet and Facebook to be one and the same. In both cases, it doesn't really matter whether or not the efforts are sincere. The outcome is just as undesirable for the general public either way.

"What if text was actually text?"

Imagine if you traveled back in time to the 90s and showed this to someone and said this was coming from the CEO of two multi-billion dollar 21st century companies.