Ask HN: Are you a fanboy of any company? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are you a fanboy of any company?

6 pointsashitvora19 comments

Let me start with myself.

I am of 37Signals, Zappos, Apple.

Looking through your comments it seems like you are mistaking Hacker News as some sort of forum where you post random questions as you like. Please do not do that.

You also like to submit content embedded to your blog. That is called blogspam and not nice. Always submit the direct url of the original.

This is primarily a news site. News that are of interest to hackers.

Please re-read http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and do not submit things like these in the future. Thanks!

I think you have to define your terms a bit more. I love many Apple products and have strong feelings of self-identification with the company. They've also made products I don't like, I've criticized some of their decisions, and I can nitpick their features like nobody's business. Whether the above makes me a fanboy or not is a question of semantics.

I'm probably going to take heat for some of my choices: The safe ones: Apple (for their hardware, Industrial Design, aesthetics) but really only for the iPhone. Lenovo/IBM for the thinkpads (bulletproof! and the tablets are better than anything out there), Wordpress (there's a plugin for that!).

The risky one (here): Microsoft (winge all you want but Windows7 is awesome, XBox is what Apple and Google hope to build beyond the games with all the video/media center/music stuff and Kinect adds a whole new level of communication and interaction, OfficeLive blows away Google Docs in many respects, the entertainment systems in the new Ford vehicles, Zune music subscription (wish it was on iPhone!) and Ballmer is far more fun to laugh at than Steve Jobs is to laugh with.

There are many others that I use but they aren't as well known, local, or very niche. Things that they all excel at are customer service, product updating and reliability, and the intagible "fun" factor. I'd include MyRealPage (real estate IDX and site host), Panago Pizza, Japadog (street vendor of hotdogs with a Japanese twist), and the Ninja Tunes crew celebrating their 20th anniversary this year (weekly solid steel show is excellent and never (almost) disappointing... wish I could have attended their recent tour).

Nope, can't think of one. Well, except my own, but we're not shipping a product yet, so that doesn't really count.

If I was a Fanboy of any company though, I think the best shots would be Red Hat, IBM and Sun (before the Oracle acquisition).

I like IBM Thinkpads. As I haven't had the chance to test the ones built by Lenovo I'm not sure I'm a fan of them yet.

Also, Cowon build's the best portable multimedia players, and I love my Garmin handheld GPS!

I don't consider myself a "fanboy" of any company, but companies that I admire greatly for the quality of their products and their passion include Apple, Oakley and Nau clothing.

I dislike the term fanboy, but I admire Google for their contributions to open source and for not being afraid to tackle hard challenges that might not pay off immediately.

I've found myself being the local Oracle advocate lately :)

Why? Since they've been getting chastised a lot on HN lately, I'm curious to hear what about Oracle you advocate.

Couple of comments. I've made these remarks repeatedly in many threads, but I'll include them here again

1. I do think the Google lawsuit is pretty stupid. They should have known when they acquired Sun how many problems they would have if they expected to close stuff that had previously been so open. I think they should stick to enterprise support for otherwise free products. So I'm not entirely an Oracle fanboy. But quite honestly, what laws are they breaking? I certainly think their actions makes some people mad for good reason, but it certainly doesn't justify some of the comments I've seen - and I've rarely gotten answers to some of the questions I've asked people about why the disagree with Oracle. A few people have explained, and I see their answer as valid - but I think a lot of people are joining their bandwagon.

2. I know several people who worked for Sun, and were very unhappy about how the company was being run into the ground. They love what Oracle has changed about the culture. My impression of Jonathan Schwarz from what I've seen was that his opinion of Sun's products was too high, and his desire to be open-source was such that it harmed the people working for him. I'm a big open-source guy, but you have to make a profit somehow, and he just seemed like he didn't see the direness of his company's financial situation.

3. Everyone was afraid of what would happen to MySQL, VirtualBox, etc... if Oracle bought them. I was afraid of what would happen if Sun just flat-out went bankrupt. So far it appears that everything is still free, but Oracle offers enterprise support and is continuing development with good financial backing. Yeah, they're trying to make a buck, but aren't we all? What's wrong with Oracle doing it? They're good at business - so if I wanted enterprise support for my database - I know who I'd choose. But if I just want to test how my app works with their database - there's a free copy I can test it with.

4. I really like their products. I've had very good experience with their database and their tools - I think their engineering prowess will benefit these products more than their big-business will harm them. In contrast, I've been disappointed by some of Sun's products. They're good, to be sure, but there's always something I like better, and I just never felt really "impressed" by them.

On your second point, how do you explain why a bunch of the big names stayed put when Sun was like that, but bailed shortly after the takeover?

Just a couple years ago Sun was just short of Google in terms of the big names that they had. (Google, of course, got all the Bell Labs folk.) Were all of these people looking through the Schwartz goggles?

I don't know a lot about all of the big names you're talking about, but I see a very similar "culture" in people like James Gosling. Don't get me wrong - I have a lot of respect for the guy, he's a million times smarter than me, but I can definitely see why he wouldn't have felt comfortable with Oracle's culture. You see a similar thing happen in any big change - the people at the top defined the culture, and if there's a change in culture, those people go one way or another.

I'm a fan boy of my own companies. :)

As I suspect many people here are. Oh, and the people who make the Das keyboard. ASUS is good too.

If We Ran the World, Coverity, Julep here in Seattle, Netflix

37signals, Balsamiq, netflix

Microsoft, Dell, Oracle :)

Apple, 37Signals, Amazon

Netflix and Zappos, definitely. Huge love for their customer-centric values and long-term perspective on making decisions.

I am a total Google fanboi. I love their motto "Don't be evil." I love that they release quality products for free. I work in Palo Alto and I love to flag down people sporting their Google windbreakers and tell them how much I use/value their products. The idea that you can build a website, get a free hosting plan, sign up for Adsense, and then start profiting the same day with 0$ down is extraordinary.

Even for non-developers their list of amazing products is endless. Froogle, Google Maps, Google Images, Google Finance, Google Docs. All of them are well-executed highly functional free applications. While apple and 37signals are fun, Google is useful and free.

Everyone wants to work at Google. But, so many people forget the hordes of people that work for themselves thanks to Google.

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