Lead Bullets
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
If you have a product that has traction in the market it's not necessary to try for silver bullet features. It's only necessary to get your ducks in a row and execute well. Execution tends to be multiplicative along every aspect. If you can deliver solid features AND solid usability AND solid performance AND solid reliability AND solid customer service then there's no reason why you shouldn't do well.
Ultimately I think the search for silver bullets comes out of a sense of denial. People like to think that the reason their restaurant is doing poorly is some external problem they have no control over, rather than because they. Don't clean their kitchen and their food is bland.
It's actually kind of sad that these biases towards easy thoughts exist, because often the fundamentals are more accessible than the silver bullet is to any given practitioner. In other words, almost anyone can execute on fundamentals with practice, but the grand silver bullet strategies are often beyond the capabilities of a typical person.
The thing that infuriates me about that particular example is it would take thirty seconds for someone at Blizzard to make that ability autocastable. But the analogous macro capabilities (Terran mules, Protoss chronoboost) are not so easily automated, and so everybody has to have this stupid timer in their heads. I like the Company of Heroes/Dawn of War 2 model better, where you can set something on "overwatch" which means the moment you have the resources, it will start building it. Not everything in DOW2 is overwatchable but a significant amount of the niggling details like troop reinforcement is, and it can really simplify things like "I want a Chimera ASAP". Even in DOW2 it isn't always appropriate--overwatch reinforcement can bleed resources you are banking to some higher tier unit dry--but it's nice to have the option.
but still i agree that it's going to be annoying because it has to keep ticking in your head regardless. in fact the annoying "economy" micro is the reason i got bored of the game and stopped playing. while i know i could get pretty darn good at the game if i practiced it with some seriousness, doing that was just more work than i would ever put into something that is supposed to be fun
- Make workers always. Corollary: when you are about to have too many workers for one base, build another base.
- Always be building out of production buildings. Corrolary: don't start new production buildings until you have too much money even maximally utilizing old buildings.
- Don't get supply blocked.
If you can consistently do those three things you will be able to attack-move into the enemy's base right up to the 95th percentile of Starcraft players. It has nothing to do with maxing out build orders or any of that complicated stuff. It's the barest, simplest fundamentals that most people have a very poor grasp of that are both the easiest and most necessary ways to improve their game.
It's like someone who is not very good at basketball. If you wanted to tell them how to get better would you say, "You should learn the full court press, zone defense, give and go." Or would you say, "Learn how to shoot a basket. Learn how to make a pass." I would argue the latter is going to contribute more to being a good basketball player.
E.g. make great hardware but don't document it well enough, you fail. DEC's forte at the time was CPUs, most of the rest wasn't so hot, but it was all good enough.
Alpha was (and possibly still is) one of the most elegant cpu architectures ever designed.
It just arrived too late to save DEC and that's a real pity.
DEC pretty much pioneered interactive computing and for that alone we all owe them a great deal.
It's weird how the DEC legacy got passed from company to company, now HP owns it, like an old cupboard passed on through inheritance.
Engineers went to both Intel and AMD.
Being able to engineer CPUs at that lefl is probably not the kind of skill that will see you without a job from time to time, those must be very desirable people.
From a page off of Bell's home page: Bell, C. G., C. Mudge, J. McNamara, COMPUTER ENGINEERING, Digital Press 1978
There are a couple of problem, though.
Silver bullets are often mutually exclusive. No-one wants to be the AirBnB for gay vegan business travellers in Ohio - there's nothing wrong with being a niche player but you still need a reasonable market.
Silver bullets can also be an sign laziness, as you say.
Ultimately, you have to see what the rest of the market is doing. Some people do well with low costs, a small team, and a cheap (but usable) alternative. Others do well with an interesting twist, and a good execution. Then there's the big companies, with boring but well polished products.
Ultimately, no-one here should be misled enough to get into a business without having an edge. Once you have the edge though, it's a matter of getting everything else right.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1NfWIaYed8
Cooking good food well, using simple ingredients, isn't something that anyone can do well.
Chris Zaharias · Having worked in sales at Netscape for four years (1995-99) I have to very respectfully disagree with Ben. Netscape did not recover from a better, faster, free IIS by building a better web server (called Netscape Enterprise Server, or NES). That helped to a small extent, but much more important were a) competitive advantages in email servers, proxy servers and directory servers; b) bundling of those solutions into a server suite (SuiteSpot); c) effective management of inbound lead flow (kudos to Todd Rulon-Miller & Bill Kellinger); and d) stellar, massive, but arguably long-term damaging OEM sell-thru by Ram Shriram's team that allowed Netscape to continue to grow overall server revenues.
Of those $400M server revenues, very little was NES, and as the graph at the below link shows, NES was always in decline relative competitors.
http://www.securityspace.com/de/s_survey/data/man.200909/htt...? mod=TmV0c2NhcGUtRW50ZXJwcmlzZQ%3D %3D
Fast forward some quarters later, after three rounds of layoffs, a refocusing of the product line on the core brands, and a general slow rebound of the market, and the company was back in the black... but: the blustery VP in question had nothing to do with any of this and had been shown the door (with a nice golden parachute).
Additionally, opportunities to take advantage of new market directions were missed. The company's strategy was to bundle sales around the best-selling products and continue incremental development around those. Ancillary, low-selling products were cut. Which is all well and good, but the company is now vulnerable to several new competitors who took advantage of new directions in client demand that the VP of War Metaphors missed... and now the company is finding itself making acquisitions of technology and (more importantly) cultures that are completely foreign and incompatible. (Windows-centric old-school company trying to absorb open-source Linux-based startups.) So far the solution has been to leave the acquired companies relatively intact... "synergy" is non-existent and culture clash is evident, with top brass from the acquired startups fleeing as soon as their contracts permit.
Additionally, the company is now facing the looming threat of cloud services and large-scale computing becoming cheaper and more commoditized. Unfortunately, nothing is being done to innovate or reinvent where reinvention is necessary; the current leadership does not perceive the threat (yet). (Disclaimer: I no longer work there, so they may have some stealth project to address this; but based on my contacts I doubt it.)
After reading the other recent HN post by the same author entitled "Nobody Cares" and now this latest little bit of bullet-based sophistry, I must say flatly that I do not find these observations helpful. First of all, the war metaphor and language is distracting and obfuscates issues. But if we must stick with this metaphor, there are times when what hulks in the door must be brought down in a hail of lead, and times when the monster in the door is wearing a bulletproof vest-- so you better hope you have a silver bullet and the ability to accurately aim between the eyes.
What strikes me most about the subtext of the OP's commentary is how lonely and unnecessarily self-limiting it is. I would not like to be running one of his portfolio companies and be faced with a challenge. It seems the likely response would be "you're on your own, nobody cares about your excuses, it's lead bullet time, not silver bullet time" etc. In other words, get me my return, I don't need to hear about anything else.
Real insight is knowing who cares and who doesn't, and maximizing your connections to the former, disconnecting from the latter. Real understanding of when to use lead and when to use silver and when not to fire bullets at all is what guides a company through tough times, but more importantly, allows it to seize opportunities for growth. Simply spouting "tough"-sounding platitudes and militaristic mantras about winning wars does nothing to help, and is distraction more than anything else.
It also starts near the end of the year "[ Apache ] became the first web server software to surpass the 100 million website milestone." (Wikipedia again and Apache was indeed what I was using in 1999.) That suggests both of those established a price of about $0 for a web server.
I'm not sure the two accounts are mutually exclusive, as the further reply by George Scott suggests. A competitve web server, even if it was no longer going to make much money, was I suspect necessary for Netscape to sell or at least get established a lot of the rest of its set of servers (by the time the graph starts I can only remember people talking about their LDAP server). I.e. it's quite possible that if they hadn't expended those lead bullets the silver ones would have been wasted.
Seriously? Public Enemy sampled it, they clearly didn't say it. Thomas N. Todd did. http://www.njcdlp.org/Thomas_N_Todd.html
In the article he mentions his employees wanting to avoid a direct fight, that is not the same as switching sides!
If you listen to the quote in context it's obvious Todd's main point is not not fighting but joining the other side (He stretches out "swwwwwiiiiiitch").
The author's not a journalist by trade so I'll cut him some slack, he's ignorant rather than lazy.
I wonder if the last point is why buyers tend to do worse than sellers in M&A. Of course buyers chasing silver bullets probably helps HN readers on the margin. :-)
"Confront reality and focus on execution of your product/sales plan to get competitive. No pie-in-the-sky strategizing would save your bacon if you fail to get stuff done."
This is simply known as "not resting on your laurels".
Or as Andy Grove would say "Only the paranoid survive," ... "Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction," ... "Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure."
(And all of the above also leads to missed opportunity.)
He did hold out hope that a bunch of silver bullets might do the trick. Read the article. Most of them seem quite quaint. Nonetheless, Brooks's writings saved me from a lot of self-inflicted grief.
Provisioning is also required 100% of the time to run unsigned apps in iOS. Many of those devices you mentioned let you run unsigned apps after a warning prompt, or at least on a developer device. This can avoid a lot of BS during development.
I've haven't worked with android, but from the lack of complaining by my android working coworkers, I'm guessing that it's much better or non existant on android, apple's main competition.