So I came to accept that each of them (and there were quite a few!) left for the opportunity they saw at Oracle. As for why Oracle: at the time, they were building a de novo cloud, and they were doing it by hiring engineers away from other cloud providers, with a sharp focus on compensation. And in particular: for the ex-AWS'ers at Joyent, one of their former senior colleagues at AWS (Don Johnson) had gone to Oracle to take a leadership position[2]; I think it's fair to say that those who went to Oracle saw themselves as joining Don as much (if not more) than they were joining Oracle.
Of course, none of this made it any easier for me or for the team to swallow -- and it has been of little solace that those who left for Oracle have (of course!) discovered that Oracle is what it is, with several of them having now left Oracle for other opportunities[3]. They may have learned about themselves what Oracle taught me about myself: that in addition to the team I'm on and the problem I'm solving, the company's larger mission is, in fact, important to me -- and that Oracle's emptiness in this regard can be crushingly soul-depleting.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/31ny87/i_am_the_cto_o...
[2] https://www.geekwire.com/2014/oracle-hire-100-engineers-seat...
But quoting Bryan's dramatic speeches every time Oracle or Ellison are mentioned is adding next to nothing to the discussion at this point. It's a great way to incite anger though.
If a Tesla gets poor maintenance by an unskilled shop, when the vehicle crashes and kills the driver, Tesla gets the black eye and has to defend itself in the media and in front of the NHTSA. Tesla's stock takes the hit.
When a Mac crashes, it's because Apple's hardware or software has a bug (something in Apple's control). Apple doesn't have an open ecosystem like th.e PC world. When a PC crashes, you also have the hardware manufacturer to blame for faulty hardware. What about OS and other system customizations the manufacturer puts in there? Those coukd crash it too? All the public hears is "My Windows crashed." and Microsoft looks bad.
No fault is brought upon the consumer who thought a $220 PC was going to be a quality machine, not does it fall to the non-brand foreign bargain PC manufacturer for building a $220 that's doomed to provide an awful experience. Instead, the world hears that "Windows Sucks."
Given this, I appreciate why a company would opt to do the things Tesla has done in order to protect its brand. However, I try to avoid doing business with companies who do this, as I value consumer freedom.
Apple's Mac Pro (the big tower) had upgradeable RAM and video, and the newer versions (the little black shiny pretty cylinder) were soldered on.
That's less about lawsuits and support costs -- it's memory for God's sake and everyone else lets the consumer physically upgrade it, even many laptops. It's about going through the cartel to get the upgrade, which is marked up 3X, 4X. Apple is recent -- anyone remember Sun?
RAM is the #1 cause if computers crashes largely because people think cheap or overclocked RAM is fine. Windows would have a vastly better reputation if it was always paired up with good hardware.
But the real fight on stable RAM was over ECC, IBM is the only giant that took an actual stand on insisting on quality at a price. Apple realized they could keep the price.
Can you source this or is an opinion? I don't have facts by I think drivers are #1 issues for hard crashes.
No. This is the same Apple who one year ago was charging $1200 for 48GB of memory.
It's the laptops where everything is soldered on.
[citation needed].
As a consumer, I wasn't able to buy detailed service manuals for cars or TVs for long before I couldn't get one from Apple.
Is Tesla planing to open car services in all locations were regular services are or you will have to send the car back to the dealer so they send it back to Tesla and wait 3 weeks like you have to do with Apple.
About Apple,
-1 Apple sells expensive products and non-Apple PCs and phones come in different price ranges, so in average Apple products will be better quality.
- 2 Apple products break too, I have such a laptop and many other people can confirm that they have hardware issues and we also see that until justice is involved the issues are not acknowledged
- 3 Apple always had a good image in some demographics and it is not correlated with the fact they are trying to hide the hardware schematics, try to stop third party to repair the products, the good reputation was because of the software and hardware.
For the Apple fans that will downvote, also leave some factual reason why I am wrong, something like why do you think the new anti-repair movement is increasing Apple branding or what fact I got wrong.
If you're really "lucky" it will happen while you're traveling out of state, and Tesla will tow your vehicle to the nearest facility and give you one of their rentals or partnered rentals, some of whom have "no out of state" policies on the replacement vehicle (remember, you're already 'out of state' - how are you planning to get home?).
My only consistent hardware error on a Mac was my 2005 iMac (the 42lb one) when I upgraded the RAM and chose the wrong speed/timing. Genius bar told me to replace it with the stock RAM and it worked fine.
So yeah, upgradability and easy-maintenance can easily lead to problems even with a reasonably knowledgeable consumer or repair shop.
Hardly. A fatality collision is rarely the subject of an NHTSA investigation, and "serviced by unqualified/unlicensed auto repair facility" is one, a big get out of jail card, and two, hands a whole world of liability... to said facility, not Tesla.
Wow I didn't know this. I have hard time believing this. Where can I find this for my subaru 2019.
I had no idea this existed. thanks.
Ugh.
No, but he might put some board level pressure to get more rigorous about profitability. I know that's a dirty word around here, but Tesla is not exactly well known for it's cashflow prowess. Those are the types of things board members do...not figure out whether service manuals come with the product.
It's meeting the letter of the law, not the spirit.
Just like how in those few states where access to service manuals is legislated, Tesla makes you 1) make an appointment, 2) pay a fee, 3) show up to a designated location, 4) not be allowed to take copies, or photographs, and only allow your own hand written notes (no computers allowed), and 5) sets a time limit.
Additionally, I can't imagine that a service manual would be valid for that long considering that a lot of the service on a Tesla is mostly on the software side. They'd have to offer a hardware manual for the extremely limited amount of hardware and then a separate software website/app/portal to handle the software side. You'd likely be paying a subscription and they'd need to separate off whatever platform they're currently using at the service centers. Again, doesn't seem very cost-effective for the tiny base that would benefit from it.
As for the parts, there's a parts catalog online: https://epc.teslamotors.com/#/catalogs
We're not talking about past Tesla. We're talking about Tesla that needs to improve cash flow with Larry Ellison on the board. Do you really think this is hard to imagine?
This is not a new problem, and consumers have been fighting to get quality documentation from auto manufacturers for decades now, but manufacturers don't want to give it voluntarily because it cuts off their dealerships from recurring repair revenue, where they make most of their profits.
I think the only reason Tesla doesn't comply yet is because they probably don't have any physical presence in Massachusetts, which passed the law in 2013.
We should all be ashamed that our government is so bought and paid for by the auto manufacturers and dealers that this information isn't mandatory to be made available online.
Top comment on every article about an advertising company -> "remember! you're not the customer! you're the product!" followed by a bunch of folks praising this profound insight.
(FWIW, it has worked for me, though yes it was annoying.)
Both are greed.
Where I work uses Oracle. And every dev and sysad wants away from it. And the answer every time is "we can't support forking our DB backend cause were too tied to oracle and its bugs".
And the prices go up and up. And everyone on it is effectively trapped. Even their competitor, Salesforce, is on oracle and wants off... And they can't.
Perhaps one option is to remove government protection from trade secrets and intellectual property. Were it not for the threat of government interference, a competitor could easily arrange to get Oracle's source code leaked, and then the two of them would actually compete on quality of their support/service contracts.
That isn’t necessarily “government” but a byproduct of a particular system that has spiralled into the bowl of capitalism upon capitalism; the lobbyists negotiated those laws on behalf of capitalism. Chicken egg issue that isn’t going away given how up to the neck capitalism is wired into government.
In Europe, some protections against that are enforced by government.
There’s an article from the Pinterest devs when they migrated from node.js to MySQL. They were thinking the conversion would cost too much and take too long. They already spent a lot of time and money to create Pinterest on node as well. Plus MySQL isn’t hot and sexy. But they knew a lot of the problems they were running into would disappear if they converted.
I think it took like a week of planning and like a weekend to accomplish. And the devs got to sleep at night after that. I’m missing details, you can google the article. It’s on their dev blog. Also I bring it up because it’s the only db conversion I can think of that is documented.
Thinking you have to stick with something because of investing so much time/money even though it’s not working, is a super dangerous thing in the long term. It’s a human problem more than a systems problem.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSB_Bank_(United_Kingdom)#Mi...
A more recent one, for future reference:
https://www.theguardian.com/info/2018/nov/30/bye-bye-mongo-h...
;)
In this particular case, while I'm always against Imaginary Property, I suspect it's more the government contracts part [1].
[1] https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/larry-ellisons-oracle-starte...
Sigh. I guess that goes along with "government is evil in all sorts of ways".
Simply put, Oracle was the best product 20 years ago. Open Source DB projects were toys that would lose your data. So companies and orgs (and in our case, the govt) used what works.
We developed on that. That was what was available, and we used it and paid the licensing costs. Well, lockin is a thing; for us and our customers. If we were to spend the time making a branch to use $other_DB, we need to properly test that as well. Do stored procedures work? Is time/date working right? Is there a close mapping of privileges? Is the DB appropriately audited? Are there active devs on it?
All of those are YES for oracle. And its fuzzy about others. I'm sure we could defend using Postgres or other first tier open source DBs.... but how much work would it be to migrate? And for those customers who use Oracle elsewhere in their infra (multiple schemas for different webapps), they are unable to switch. They already have the DBAs in oracle. So, we'd have to support Oracle even after leaving.
It's a lose-lose. But I'm sure painting it in the libertarian "government interference with free trade" fits your worldview.
Because when I read
> "As a general rule, I have found out that every time there is something that doesn't make sense ("smart people who want to make money should have figured out a solution to this!")"
I see that the more likely solution is that I don't have enough information, and the surface answer is inadequate. There's a reason smarter people couldn't figure it out, and it's not because of pithy sayings. It's because the solution is a magnitude or 2 more complex than what it looks like.
As a concrete example, for the last few years I have been donating to several fanfiction authors through Patreon because I want to encourage them to write more.
No, the whole premise of capitalism is that people motivated by money will build things that make them money.
It's right there in the name - "capital"-ism. Capital is the means, motive and end.
It seems surprising that capitalism is so easy to argue against on moral grounds. Surely it has some benefit for the society that lives under it?
It does seem that societies with generally capitalist systems flourish to a much greater degree than societies that are organized under any other dominant economic system.
If you knew you'd be assigned at birth to a life of 10th to 90th percentile (by status/money/class) in a non-wartime country and it would be US, UK, USSR, or China and your birth year would be 1880, 1900, 1920, 1938, 1960, or 1980, how many would choose the USSR or China?
Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands. Five of the wealthiest countries on earth, and generally considered five of the best to live in. None of those are Socialist systems. They all use the free market as the basis of their economic systems. Some with more or less government regulation, and with varying degrees of a welfare state. The same is true of the US, Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, Japan, France, Switzerland, etc. All have private ownership based economies, allowing for the vast accumulation of private wealth via business and asset ownership. Germany for example ranks #3 in billionaires globally, and Sweden ranks near the top in billionaires per capita. That is impossible under any implementation of Socialism, which requires state ownership of the means of production and does not allow such accumulation of private wealth.
The existence of government regulation means these countries do not have free markets, and all welfare programs are socialist in that they involve the government taking wealth from the people through taxation and redistributing it to those who haven't earned it by trading their labor.
>That is impossible under any implementation of Socialism, which requires state ownership of the means of production and does not allow such accumulation of private wealth.
You seem to have communism and socialism confused here, and you seem to be failing to see that socialism and capitalism exist on a spectrum, and most countries don't practice one or the other, but a mix of both.
Capitalism can and does benefit society, but so can other economic systems. Nevertheless, the purpose of capitalism isn't to enrich society, it's to enrich the owners and shareholders by accumulating capital.
The correlation between the quality or morality of a good or service and its value in the market isn't a strong one, since there are forces other than supply and demand at work determining value, and markets don't often optimize for greater societal good. If they did, agriculture and electronics manufacturing wouldn't depend on immigrant and forced labor, blood mining, and other immoral practices. Consumers put up with those things because the end result is bananas year round and cheap consumer goods.
I think the mistake comes in demanding that societies prefer only one or another model, due to projecting moral dimensions onto them which may not apply, rather than accepting a balance between systems intended to benefit the few, and systems intended to benefit the many.
I hope not because that seems hopelessly naive.
Well it works like that for capitalism too. People optimize for the goal (money), not necessarily the hopeful outcome (useful things).
>There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than companies.
>And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense.
>Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money. Yeah... you talk to said company, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!'
>You need to think of companies the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about companies.
I don't see the problem here to be honest. If people want to continue giving money to Oracle for their mediocre products ... that's on them, not on Oracle really.