We can leverage the element of luck and improve our odds against others by playing a smart numbers game. It's a fundamental of sales.
237 karma · joined August 20, 2017
These original web publishing systems used to have a complete separation of back office and front end. For large publishers back in the day, one of Drupal's major innovations was the concept of a single type of user who could publish using the web front end - that enabled content to be filed and updated from out of the office, covering court cases and music festivals for example. Before they adopted Drupal, I saw a case at a major US publisher where minor changes to a site layout had to have externally conducted pen tests booked in at great cost and then go to a signoff committee which met every 2 weeks - that's what applying strict backend and frontend separation entails.
Publishing to HTML isn't a new idea - it's how CMS's used to work and wasn't up to the task. Using HTML files as a caching layer as you propose is already available in Drupal but has terrible performance due to the number of variants that a modern site can generate (think about permutations of Drupal Views here) and how that hits filesystem limits and OS architecture. You also have the fun of cache invalidation and recompiling every HTML file which uses some upstream fragment you decide to edit - it's ultimately using the filesystem like a very inefficient version of what a relational database is designed for. Quite apart from the latency, that's why people use CDN's instead for caching static content.
Every piece of software we use has periodic bugs which are potentially catastrophic and need patching - yet nobody is saying we should switch to a pen and paper instead of OSX and Windows. I shudder to think what is going on in router firmware and yet somehow we are getting advice that a business shouldn't use a CMS - it's complete nonsense!
If maintenance is too much hassle, the model isn't to switch to static publishing, it's to switch to SaaS - which is exactly what we see. If your needs are too specific for SaaS, then by definition you are going to be creating a tailored solution and managing that in-house or outsourcing.
That's not only the same gnarly problem as cache invalidation but with a metric ton of filesystem writes on top of it.
Static site generators are simply a file-system caching layer. Drupal used to have one of those and it was a terrible idea as the number of page variants on a commercial site very quickly hits file-system limitations and performance is appalling. Better to use a proper CDN for a similar result but with massively reduced latency due to content being served from the edge.
But this sounds like the old proprietary vs open source arguments. 1. The biggest tech companies in the world have struggled to keep up with the pace of innovation in open source. 2. Scale of userbase counts but standards facilitate this by creating a network and market. 3. There is a compelling business case for having an ownership stake in your tech platform which revolves around roadmap, security, and longevity. Longevity is counterintuitive but FB can bite the dust like Myspace, and Google can go the way of Woolworths. Huge institutional brands can evaporate fast and barely leave a trace; many young people today have never heard of Madonna, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, unthinkable to older generations.
The way to differentiate on standards is via features and service, which gmail does well (spam was the killer feature which got most using it). But just lately Google has started looking at proprietary extensions to web and mail, and it's like Microsoft in the early web all over again. We saw how that turned out, even though it was unthinkable that MS wouldn't "win the web" at the time by their sheer scale, brand recognition, and a market share which amounted to a de facto monopoly.
(And funnily enough, Google seems to make the same product mistakes as MS, where it tries to boil the ocean in an orgy of featuritis. With a subset of the tech behind Wave they could have made a great competitor to Wechat/Line etc. Look at Slack - it costs around the same, possibly more than, Office 365 or Google Apps for Business, yet does a tiny fraction. Everybody knows Slack's only real differentiator is UX and service e.g. not having to run chat servers, bouncers, search etc. Again Google could have pieced a lot of Slack together from existing components in Wave. Feels like they are very shaky when it comes to executing product and it could be their undoing.)
What's far more compelling but challenging is open source federated social networking, which is a facebook on rocket fuel and overcomes the network effect as each provider implementing adds to a shared network. Even if it takes decades, this is going to be the inevitable model and fb will end up either joining in as a provider or do a myspace.
Higher earners tend to just upgrade and spend more (apartment, clothes, restaurants, hotels etc), and aren't really living that differently - that lifestyle can certainly soak up maximum income achievable in a salaried job.
I think this is what the article inadvertently pointed to, that the higher salaries could lead to a sense of frustration that nothing really changed.
The next level above financial independence is financial freedom (you can just get whatever you want, from shoes to houses) - off the top of my head I would guess this is probably around the 0.01%, which would be about 32k people in the USA. As an example of freedom, these people can buy nationality and avoid immigration limitations (going rate is ~$1-5m).
The article is way off just comparing salaries. There are 3 social classes in terms of having a meaningful lifestyle distinction - those who have to work for someone else, those who don't, and those who have full freedom to decide where they go and what they do each day. All they did was compare a bunch of people in the same social class (somewhat shockingly the Romans considered this equivalent to a slave class).
They made many of the components needed to create an open source federated social networking system where separate implementations could interact with each other. So for example your user on your company's twitter/fb hybrid could have threaded conversations with other users across other organisation's fb clones (obviously with access control).
This could have been exactly the killer functionality to topple centralised proprietary Twitter and Facebook. Google should have thrown everything into it, could have turned out as impactful as hypertext.
In any case, this sounds more like other people's distaste is slowly grinding Thiel down and he's just trying to rationalise it to himself with talk of echo chambers and whatnot. You'd think he'd have more sympathy for minorities who have had to put up with that from birth but he does come across as someone who is frustrated when others don't subscribe to his exceptionalist view of himself.
It's not SV, it's Coventry he doesn't like, and he'll be sent there wherever he goes.
That oddball dev who started hanging out with the sales and marketing people, forwards strategy and innovation articles to management, and started churning out powerpoints is the one who knows what's up. It's not just 'playing politics', it's developing deeper and wider situational awareness of the company and the market. It's stacking the odds in your favour and it's even more effective when so few do it.