Fixed bugs, improved performance, took the afternoon off, ~project got cancelled~, ~team~ got restructured, the intern.
18 karma · joined February 27, 2013
It is known that buying and going through the 4 week anti-procrastination program from deprocrastination.co instead of doing real work for 4 weeks helps you not procrastinate. Dothraki choir: "it is known".
To better explain, with Netflix (any modern offering in fact) mentality one can't invent and market LEGO or even the PC or other general purpose toys. They want to capitalize on every bit of value from the product, and as a result, they can only give away "experiences" and not "platforms".
With a platform users generate extra value from which they can draw, with an experience it's just boxed, single-purpose consumer products.
But here's the deal, and this might be directly aimed at you, since you say you're in the field. As a home-user who works in the industry and with some interest for tech, I generally only get access to the free-tiers of services offered by players working at world-magnitude. Based on my experience with those services I may or may not advertise them to my friends, colleagues, employers. Especially to employers, because there's a good chance that if there's bad-blood between me and the service provider personally, I might be impaired in my professional activity.
This word-of-mouth type of adversiting is crucial to "2.0" companies, that function based on things such as scale, transparency, growth, reach, efficiency. There's also the different type of provider, the "old business" world, with more business-y and less tech-y practices, such as "call us for a quote" deals, "license per year per seat pe server core", etc. Dealing with them often times involves whole departments (legal + technical) with specific training and paid-for support channels.
If you release and roll perpetuum-beta services and software ("2.0" practice), build your brand on word-of-mouth advertising, on try-for-free honeypots for hobbyists (also "2.0"), don't act "old business" if it comes down to support for a puny user and don't push the "well, it was free, what would you expect?" button. The whole deal of your "we are awesome and scale as opposed to <brand that existed for more than 20 years and sucks just because of that>" is the fact that your machinery doesn't do politics and doesn't discriminate between your users based on estimated pocket girth. It's useless if your solution elegantly "scales" to billions of users, if your business can't secure and treat with dignity the first, lonely user.
But who is, John Doe who dies on a grenade?
Except for some corporate environment, I don't see how it's not their fault. It's easier than ever to make an informed decision before using one's wallet and it's every living, functioning human's duty to improve, grow and learn.
Totally tired of apps that are nothing else than options-less and incontrolable browsers.
- ability, willingness, etc to tweak and upgrade your infrastructure
- how competition-friendly and pro-consumer your market is - the type of grants, contracts and industry ties your environment has (think special, prototype, maybe even government subsidized hardware, for example)
- reflects the amount of mastery over geography or nature itself - this is what successful countries pull
- is the economy market-driven or just a pocket bubble?
There might be others, but this is already quite damning imo. Also I need gigabit because that determines the size of my erection and i'd go to lengths such as paying FAIR prices for it.