Hacker News Reader

Comment by aresant | Hacker News Reader

Apple just jumped the shark if this is true.

Bill Nguyen is massively talented at making things work for Bill Nguyen - his prior business bought by Apple for ~$80m, Lala.com, was lackluster at best.

Under Jobs you could kind of, sort of get your head around $80m for essentially a talent acquisition in streaming / digital music which is/was an important revenue stream for AAPL.

But even under Jobs the supposed golden boy, Nguyen, bailed. Taking his vision and some of his best people with him.

So I see this as "Apple makes the same mistake twice" - and if Apple is going to jump into the "social around you, bullshit, blah blah blah" game through this acquisition I am truly sad.

View on HN

Last I checked iTunes Match, which is the child of the Lala team, is working pretty well.

Sarcasm? I’m an iTunes Match user, and while I love the dream, the reality isn’t quite there yet. The experience is pretty choppy, even confusing. (No, I’m not talking about buffering streams.)

Considering iTunes match is one of the best things I've ever used I'm going to say no sarcasm and that you're in the minority.

iTunes Match would have been the best thing I ever used had it come out one (or more) years earlier. Instead, it arrived after I had already tried Spotify, and by then I had tried something better.

Spotify bears no resemblance to iTunes Match so how can it be better?

Offline music. Duh.

Spotify is online music, what are you talking about?

http://www.spotify.com/us/about/features/offline-mode/

That link explains a mode by which Spotify's cloud based music can be available offline. iTunes Match gives access to YOUR OWN music via the cloud. Do you not see the difference?

I have 15,000 songs in my iTunes library, the vast majority of which are not on Spotify. My 16GB iPhone would normally only hold a fraction of my music but with an iTunes Match subscription I have access to it all.

Also, it gives an off-site back up of every matched song. So tell me, how is iTunes Match similar to Spotify?

Count one more person in that minority..my iTunes match experience has been pretty bad. My songs randomly get grayed out, and if a song has not already been downloaded to a device I own, I'm never sure if it will play or not.

Agreed, the quality of iTunes Match is subpar. The music is slow to load, doesn't sync correctly, is difficult to delete, and is really jittery. I've since tried Pandora One, Grooveshark Pro, and Spotify Premium. By far, I've had the best experience with Spotify. (iPhone 4)

I agree - the service is great, but the client apps are not. In particular, if you have a lot of songs, the iPod app can get really slow and confused (things have improved a bit in iOS 6, but it still crashes on me occasionally, especially when shifting between networks)

Jumping the shark means to have peaked and now being past ones former glory. But Apple never had any peak or glory as far as social apps go.

My bet is that upcoming Apple products will continue to break previous records; the supposed acquisition of Color notwithstanding. Would you seriously bet against the next Apple product selling like hot cakes, based on this?

This isn't just about social apps. If this story is true it really doesn't reflect well on Apple's senior management.

Apple will continue to print money in the immediate future, just as Microsoft did in the 00's, but buying a startup which never had a viable product, business plan or assets for an inflated valuation like this is a good sign that Apple has lost direction and focus. Social is not their core competence, and should not be, and even if it was color is the last company they should buy. If color is failing, they could easily poach the best staff after it implodes, rather than buying the shell.

Nothing Apple has ever done in the social context has ever reflected well on Apple's senior management. They survived Ping, they'll survive this. And it won't be a nailbiter. Wanna bet?

I'm sure they'll survive, and yes they don't have a good record on social and cloud stuff from mobile me to ping. But jumped the shark doesn't mean they'll go out of business this year or this decade, it just means they're at the start of a long slow decline in quality and are out of ideas - that won't stop them making lots of money though, in fact whether they make money and survive is not really related to whether they have 'jumped the shark'.

So, whether they continue to break sales records and revenue and profit, or not, you are right either way? It's just a matter if you are really right, or tremendously right?

I wasn't aware this was a points scoring exercise, frankly, who cares if I'm right? I was just pointing out that the original post was not related to Apple's financial performance, but was criticising their lack of direction and quality lately - those have a long lead time in relation to profits - they can coast for a very long time now on the reputation they have built up, and the loyal customers they have (just as MS has for the last decade).

You took jumped the shark to mean peaked in profits, I suspect the OP didn't mean it that way as it's normally used to refer to a decline in quality, that's all we disagree on.

The acquisition is worth ~0.015% of Apple's marketcap. Maybe Apple has some misguided strategy here - maybe; your argument for this is overly-simple - but the acquisition is so small analyzing the affect on Apple is difficult.

bonch your account has been hellbanned. Looking at your comment history it has been for a while.

Update: Just to be clear, I don't mind hellbanning spammers or obvious trolls, but looking at bonch's comment history he/she doesn't seem to be either.

It's sad; so many people waste their time commenting here on HN not knowing they're hellbanned: http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=hellba...

Easily detected:

1. Log off your HN account.

2. Browse, look for your own posts.

The only reason a hellbanned person can't tell he's been hellbanned is because he's logged on as himself. The reason others can tell is because they aren't logged on as him. The solution is obvious -- log off and visit HN anonymously.

Sorry if this is a newbie question, but can someone explain to me what being hellbanned is?

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h...

It's quite a brilliant thing. The problem is mods are really abusing it here on HN (you should hallban seasoned trolls. Not someone that trolls once or twice in a year, or worse, someone who isn't even trolling but just said something stupid or out-of-place).

Isn't the point of this type of ban to avoid alerting the presumed troll in question?

I read with showdead, and have noticed we seem to often tell auto dead users about it, which seems to defeat the point. Perhaps I've misunderstood the whole idea.

A lot of HN users find the whole concept of hell banning objectionable. Because for a large number of those affected, they're not spammers or trolls, they've just made one comment that has irked an admin. It is our duty as decent human beings to inform them.

Precisely my biggest problem with HN. There needs to be a way to repeal HellBanning, some sort of an appeal mechanism or a time-based auto-repeal that kicks in after say 4 weeks of good behavior such as 25 upvoted (albeit dead) comments from the HBanned user.

Or the admins could just reserve hellbanning for only the most persistent serious trolls. It is a useful tool but should only be used in extreme circumstances, not just for one bad comment. If it was used only once a month or every few months for persistent trolls it wouldn't be a problem.

Bad comments get voted down anyway, so there's already a mechanism for that, IMHO hellbanning should really only be used on people trying to post spam repeatedly or repetitively troll comment threads.

Yes, when I saw that I could still upvote dead comments, I just assumed this data would be used that way -- otherwise what's the point in being able to do it?

Agreed - I like the idea of purgatorybanning for borderline users.

that's by far worst case of that i've ever seen. is there some way we can report this and have it looked into? he shouldn't be banned, or should at least be given the respect of notification. it's been well over a year of constructive posts from that guy and nobody ever sees them. all from what looks like one snarky comment he made. that's not right.

Why was Lala lackluster? Lala was a fantastic alternative to iTunes--full song previewing, effortless syncing with iTunes tracks, and cheaper songs than iTunes.

Having more money than you know what to do with is a sign that you've pretty much exhausted your growth potential. That's not quite the same as jumping the shark, especially if at that point you're the most valuable company in the world.

The correct thing to do is to start paying out dividends, and Apple has done that. Making a relatively small wild-ass investment vaguely related to their core business is at least a better thing to do with the other surplus money than going into finance or real estate.

I still hate Apple for buying lala.com. "lala" was my generic google search when testing out working Internet connection. "Lala - where music plays" was something that I was used to see... until Apple shut it down.

I would say that the point is that there is a seed of tech which apple could acquire and put their army of eng on to make something along the same line of what color originally sought to do; Apple-instagram+facetime...

I would think that this is an exceptional acquisition that apple could make: no more color; a battle on instagram, facetime emulation and build upon the social image cloud idea that color started with...

and they wont be bogged down with colors staff - they will own all that color was, not what egos color is.

Why not an acquihire? Perhaps (pure speculation) Bill Nguyen is brilliant at hiring engineers, masterful at developing new technologies (and their associated patents), but utterly crap at productizing these technologies? Guess who is really good at productizing technologies? Seems like a perfect match, especially if Apple saw their previous acquisition of Lala as a success.

Then why not simply make him a job offer? Offer him a decent signing bonus to sell/hand over/wind down his current company plus a salary he can't refuse. Surely that must work out cheaper than buying a company you don't want.

And if he really doesn't want to work for Apple, trying to 'force' him by buying his company doesn't seem like a good long term strategy

Because of the points I made in my OP: engineers and patents. I'm not saying that Apple wants Bill Nguyen. Based on his leaving Apple last time his company was acquired, maybe they in fact don't want him. They want his engineers and patents, to get them, you have to buy the company. To get rid of him, you have to buy the company.

Came here to write exactly that

This is 'feeding the startup trolls'. Where's the value in Color? Nothing

Maybe that's what Apple can't do properly: acquisitions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com