Branson: Fortunes to be made in downturn | Hacker News Reader

Branson: Fortunes to be made in downturn

news.bbc.co.uk

27 pointspetercooper13 comments

This may seem like a trivial point, but if a link is going to run video or audio without warning, please can you put "(video)" in the title?

When I browse I open up to 30 or 40 tabs at a time, then go through them breadth first, opening more tabs, continuing in this vein for a while. There have been times when I've had 80 tabs open, moving through them systematically, letting the browser loads the next page while I'm reading this one.

Eventually the tree of pages/tabs closes down as links I opened speculatively have nothing of interest, and so I get my browsing donw efficiently and effectively.

Until some video starts up. Or worse, two. Now I have dozens of tabs to search through to find the one (or two) that are playing something at me without being asked, without giving me warning. It's really annoying.

I know I'm unusual in the way I browse, and maybe I just need to get used to it. But perhaps it would be useful to others as well.

Thanks for reading, sorry about the rant, I hope someone sympathises with me.

Oh, and I upmodded you. Just because the method of opening and lack of warning was irritating, that doesn't mean it was uninteresting. Thanks for the link.

I browse exactly in the same way as you do and have the same problem...

I do too, it's probably not as uncommon as you would think. I even have a theory that this is one of the major reasons firefox has managed to chip away at IE's market share since MS only recently implemented tabbed browsing.

I recently installed flashblock, which prevents flash from starting and puts a placeholder instead. You have to click the placeholder in order to start the flash file. This solved the auto-playing problem for me, and had the nice side effect of freeing up memory in firefox.

In IE, before firefox, I opened a new browser for each link, and used the taskbar as tabs (you can switch with alt-tab instead of ctrl-tab). Maybe firefox making it explicit increased awareness of this approach.

For me, the huge value for firefox is as a software platform: an incredible array of extensions, even including another platform: greasemonkey. I always preferred the bookmarking of NN to IE; but I think it was adblock that made me switch to firefox.

In Safari, videos don't start playing until you visit the tab. Good feature.

It's not so unusual, I do it too:

http://daniellefong.com/2008/08/24/enhancing-multitasking-to...

I'm a big fan of Richard Branson, and his books read fun with lots of insight. Losing My Virginity had lots of fun wisdom and anecdotes. One of his first rules of doing business is to make it fun, which works for obvious reasons.

He puts a lot of time into customer/client experience, and it really shows. I went to a Virgin Active gym in London for a month, and it's so exceptionally well built down to the little details. They have a sauna, steam room, swimming pool, and a more shallow pool of water that's a cross between Roman-style baths and a jacuzzi.

The detail that impressed me the most? In the shower by the sauna, there's a device that quickly fills a bucket with cold water, and then you can pull a rope for it to fall on your head to cool off. My friend was giddy to show me the pullrope cold water bucket, because it's very cool and you remember it, and want to show and tell other people. Also, a cafe with free wireless and lots of computers, with great quality food that's only about 10-20% more expensive than equivalent high end food outside the gym. Lots of people hang out in there after working out, and they eat food, and Virgin makes more money. Some people might even lean towards signing up for Virgin because of the computers, which means more membership fees.

Guy is brilliant, charismatic, and also seems a legitimately good dude. One of the few people that I never tire of reading or watching interviews with.

I agree. His books are a good read and very inspirational. When he started his business, all hippy-like with long hair you can imagine what the (at the time) stuffy establishment thought of him. If anyone on here wants an inspirational read, I'd recommend Losing My Virginity. Read some of the other books on him too to realise that whilst he is 'cool' he's also quite ruthless, which you probably need to be to get where he has

Agreed - one of the first businesses he started was effectively a pyramid scheme (he wrote a newspaper in college to sell to other students in bulk, who would then make money by selling the copies to individuals at a profit. Of course, the newspaper itself wasn't any good, and so it was hard to sell, which means that no-one but him made any money. I know of this story because one of my dad's college friends bought some of his newspapers, and predictably failed to sell any).

Also, his first 'real' business was Virgin Records, which made it big off the back of Mike Oldfield's 'Tubular Bells'. However, Branson made Oldfield sign an almost usurious contract (http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2008/03/03/tubular-bells/), and didn't pay him any of the royalties on the recording for several years as he built up the company (until Oldfield, who considered Branson a personal friend, sued).

A great business man he may be, but I don't think he's a genuinely nice guy.

Interesting - got a recommendation for a book that deals more with his tactics or the ruthless side? I admire people who are ruthless without hurting others, breaking the law, or otherwise being bad people. You can even learn from people who might go too far - I just ordered "Titan" about John Rockefeller from Amazon, along with "Taiko" about 1600's Sengoku Japan. Some ruthless men in those books - I try to understand and internalize the drive while spotting potential Tony Montana style pitfalls in advance.

From the 'Hacker News Guidelines':

"If you submit a link to a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

What a contrast between Branson's realistic-but-optimistic outlook and the dire tone of the interviewer. Many of the questions were focused on failure and pessimism:

  "How gloomy should British businesspeople be?"
  "How worried should the world's charities be..."
  "There is a tremendous amount of gloom here..."

I know they were good interview questions and the interviewer did his job well. Yet it's coming from a consciousness of scarcity and fear. I wanted to shake the fellow and say, "Hey, dummy! if you are always looking for bad things, that's what you're going to find! Your attitude in the present creates your future, so watch your thoughts carefully!"

It was not very long ago that my attitude would have been very similar. Now, when I look around, amid the carnage I see much opportunity and potential, especially for new businesses and startups - to create jobs, serve people and create wealth.

I take that attitude shift as a sign of personal progress.

What I admire about Branson is his ability to plow into saturated markets with a fresh sense of innovation about the product and/or service, and really understands where stagnant companies have lost touch with their consumers.

And to top it off, one of the most charismatic people to listen to. I'll admit to having a man-crush. :)

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