Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

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Still not the biggest such blunder, even in the late 20th century. That dubious honor must go to Xerox. They created a research org (Palo Alto Research Center or PARC) and tasked it with pushing the state of the art in the industry, which it did. Xerox PARC invented the GUI, ethernet, laser printing, WYSIWYG editors and desktop publishing, bitmapped graphics, the smalltalk language, the MVC design pattern, and more, all in the late 1970s. Xerox corporate leadership looked at this stuff (especially the ALTO computer which represented the culmination of most of these innovations) and couldn't see a future in it, so they shit-canned it. A few years later other companies (specifically Apple and Microsoft) toured Xerox PARC and learned a great deal about these things then repackaged it in their own forms (the Macintosh and Windows). Meanwhile, some PARC employees quit and spun out their own startups using the technology (3COM and Adobe).

Billions upon billions of dollars and entire industries (graphic arts and digital design, ethernet based networking, the home desktop computer, etc.) were built up out of the technologies that Xerox simply left abandoned on the roadside because they were too myopic.

And remember, of course, that those executives were being paid millions of dollar for their alleged "sharp business sense" and "superior decision-making" abilities. Goes to show. In my country the recipient of several international "CEO of the year" awards sunk the public telecom company in less than 2 years. And so on.

This point can't be stressed enough, for the benefit of those who still believe we left aristocracy behind. CEO pay is bound by the rules of neither a free market nor a meritocracy (except in the original sarcastic sense of that word). Ditto for the rentiers on Wall Street or Sand Hill Road. The fact that a few peasants get to join the aristocracy every year doesn't change what it is.

It still seems very hard to shake the myth of meritocracy when wealth and connections are shown to have greater impact than latent talent, but here's some more ammunition for that argument. It's not that graduating from a prestigious school is without merit, but simply even getting the chance to do so likely means, in most cases, that one's starting conditions were more favorable. At the very least, privilege means being allowed to make mistakes and recover from them that would end someone else's aspirations.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/09/its-bette...

It's a funnel. You can drop out along the way but if you're not in it from the start then it's close to impossible to enter into it.

One thing I've discovered as I've grown older is just how much the concept that business is about money is bullshit. That's a theory about business and it doesn't describe reality very well. Business is much more about power and ego than it is about money. You see this with small businesses most directly. Lots of small businesses fail because they don't do the obvious thing to maximize revenue and profits and to stay in business, instead they do things that only make sense in the context of the owner's ego and sense of power.

eh? CEO pay is bound by the same thing that everyone else pay is - the market rate. As are wall street salaries (which, again, are absolutely market based).

Now - you can argue much more effectively that CEO hiring is not very objective, that comp seems to be decoupled from long term performance, and I'll freely grant that Finance doesn't add the societal value equivalent to its slice of the pie. None of these things should be conflated with the continued existence of aristocracy

CEO pay is bound by the same thing that everyone else pay is - the market rate.

Okay, there's a market rate. Why is that rate so high? I'm sure we all thought "hell, I could have run HP into the ground for half what they paid Fiorina." Yeah, except you and I aren't in the "potential CEO" club. That club is determined by wealth, birth, and connections, not what the market will bear.

"Market rate" is not sacred. There's a ratchet effect here: the potential upside for both the CEO and the people who decide on CEO hiring is extremely large, while the downside for both parties is artificially limited by corporate structures and liability law. Worst case for them is that the CEO parachutes to another company, and the other rentiers take a slight loss quickly made up by their other bets. "Market rate" means nothing when the market is so severely distorted, and the viability of the free market itself depends on removing such distortions.

As for aristocracy, where else do you think this ratchet effect leads? It leads directly to a level of inter-generational wealth disparity that is functionally indistinguishable from explicit hereditary peerage.

Preposterous. There's no feedback from the bottom line to executive salaries. No 'market rate'.

Market rate, as in what people are willing to pay to have a CEO

Or, what the executive suite pay one another in a mutual-check-writing club

The presence of perverse incentives don't make it a non-market.

If by "people", you mean other CEOs, then yes.

I mean the people paying for CEOs, whoever they are, are the ones with a willingness to pay some amount, and that amount is the upper limit for CEO payment.

That's boards, which is other CEOs from other companies. The mutual-check-writing club.

IMHO, this shows why you cannot judge creativity only through the free market (i.e. measure the creative output).

Because at the time when new a thing is being created, only the creator (if even) understands the purpose of it. So any other external actor who is supposed to measure the output (be it company CEO, or grant commission, etc.) is not equipped to understand why. Were they equipped to understand, they would just commission the work in the first place.

IMHO it's possible they actually did realize how ground breaking it was, but it's an example of big companies being structurally incapable of investing in the technology that will ultimately disrupt their core business.

I don't think it's a coincidence that pretty much the exact same thing happened to Kodak:

https://mashable.com/2012/01/20/kodak-digital-missteps/

This is also why I call bullshit on the concept that "good ideas don't matter" in business. Execution is important, but good ideas can be just as valuable. But the problem with innovative ideas is that they can be difficult to communicate. My favorite example of this is the adaptation of novels into feature films. It's usually the norm rather than the exception for a truly excellent novel to be adapted into a truly mediocre film which not only misses the mark of the book but also just doesn't seem to "get" the book at a fundamental level (e.g. themes, characters, etc.) And here you have a case where an "idea" (the entire novel itself) is fleshed out into a work containing tens of thousands of words, replete with scads of detail all over the place. And you also have proof that thousands if not millions of people are able to learn this "idea" and "get it". Yet that system of communicating an idea is still so fraught with the potential for error that it cannot reliably result in a feature film that even expresses the themes of the book with any semblance of authenticity. Because communication is hard, especially when innovative and novel ideas are involved.

And this is true in business just as it is in art. You can have a fantastic "good idea", one that is worth billions even if it is executed with only mediocre success. But that doesn't mean you could simply hand that good idea over to someone else and they would succeed with it to the same degree, because there is a very high chance that they just won't "get it". They'll hear the idea and think that you meant something else. Or they'll think some inconsequential aspect of it is the important part while ignoring the truly important part, and so on.

And we see many examples of this in history. We see XEROX looking at a nearly fully executed "good idea" in the form of the Alto and concentrating on temporary, less consequential aspects of it such as the high unit cost of the first generation computers and not seeing the enormous potential (a computer that was so easy to use anybody could use it, and a computer that was so useful that anybody could benefit from having one).

Good idea doesn't matter because good ideas are rarely exclusive. If one has a good idea, there is a good chance someone else has also came up the same idea. Thus how to execute that idea becomes critical, including access to capital, talent, market, etc. Amazon was certainly not the first to come up with e-commerce

There are always exception on both ends of the spectrum of course.

Your novel adaption analogy isn't exactly apt. You can't test a movie the way you can with business iteration. There are also no metrics to measure a movie's success the way you can measure revenue, customer retention, user usages, etc.

The contrast between what Xerox was doing at PARC versus what they sold to the public was astounding. While they were inventing the future at PARC, the system they were selling was the 820, a me-too Z80 CP/M system that was released just as the world was going to 16-bit systems.

It may be worth considering that Apple’s first take on the Xerox ideas was the Lisa, not exactly a big sales success. It took two rounds of refining the PARC ideas (Lisa, then Mac) to come to a somewhat-viable product. The Mac was still very expensive and didn’t sell that well for years.

Xerox could have tried to productize the Star for the mass market but it doesn’t seem like a wild claim to say they would have failed and we’d still have waited for the Amiga.

This reminds me that I've been meaning to read Fumbling the Future:

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B0791LWDG3/

$3.03 for the Kindle edition! How can I turn that down?

(And yes, I do note the irony of this being an Amazon link.)

FWIW, Dealers of Lightning (by Michael Hiltzik) is a much more engaging read that tells the same story.

10 minutes later, it's $5.77

Where are you shopping? That's 4.99euros, the price at Amazon .es and .fr, even though it's $3.03USD in USA

On amazon.it it is now EU 4.99, if I go (from Italy) to the original Amazoon.com page I see it as $5.77.

If I go to the same amazon.com page via a (USA based) proxy, I get the $3.03 allright.

So it must be some "regional pricing" of sorts.

IMHO sneaky and border line with dishonesty.

Regional pricing isn't new, nor introduced by Amazon - international companies have worked this way for ages: maximise profit by doing different pricing in different markets for the same product.

Or varying the product so that it is not exactly the same: https://www.euractiv.com/section/health-consumers/news/lower...

A prime example of regional pricing was, of course, the region code system for DVD movies. And the modern incarnation of this is regional pricing for streaming services such as Netflix, along with trying to stop people from accessing services via VPNs.

$5.77 from the UK, I wonder if it's a regional variation.

It probably is a regional variation as I was checking from Spain and it is $5.77 now.

BTW, I find it is a huge percent variation. Not sure if it is the outcome of some ML to optimize revenue or some other external (legal or author bound) reason.

That's odd, it still shows $3.03 for me, even in an incognito window on mobile and desktop, and on a machine that has never been signed into my Amazon account.

From what I gather, that's actually normal with Amazon. Prices vary.

Showing $3.03 here, desktop browser. Marked down from the digital list price of $3.99.

55 minutes later, back down to 3.03. Irony, thoust hastest met thin ematch:),

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