I got around 10% of our Xen instances scheduled for reboot on Jan 4th, mostly long running instances. It's the first time I've seen that many instances scheduled at once.
571 karma · joined September 9, 2012
I think prices have stayed pretty much the same or become lower over the years. You can get a 64GB iPhone 8 this year for $699, vs $749 for the iPhone 6 in 2014. I think the iPhone 8 is still a pretty "premium" experience, even if Apple now has a more fancy and more expensive model.
I doubt there will be another big revolution in personal computing until you have direct brain communication (implants or sensors/transmitters that look unobtrusive).
A cell phone iWatch could change its usecase quite substantially, but whether it'll find new uses remains to be seen.
An excellent example is how many companies are in panic mode right now to get GDPR compliant before next year. There's a lot of security engineers and developers that finally get the budgets and time they've asked for to improve customer privacy, because the potential fallout of non-compliance is too big to ignore.
As the article mentions, SoundCloud eventually did reach an agreement with the music companies, showing that it didn't have to take 10 years, but took longer still than they expected.
So my theory is that the business model is not broken by design as you claim, but that SoundCloud got into the trouble it is now in by poor strategy and decision making.
Companies where employees actually keep secrets do so by earning the trust and respect of their employees, not by writing ironclad employee agreements.
In this particular case, for these employees, I think it boils down to whether they honor their loyalty to the company vision more than their employee agreement.
I know that it took a long time for YouTube to figure out the licensing stuff. As I said, tremendously difficult, yes, but not impossible.
- Presumably the people inside the company has tried for years to pressure for a change. When that doesn't work, and especially once a big layoff happens, it's understandable that employees vent their frustration in public. And that might be what it takes for outside people (investors etc) to make necessary changes at the top. It's not about backstabbing.
If these employees didn't care at all about the fate of the company, they would just take the severance package and move to other jobs without saying much. The complaining you hear is most likely from people that _care_ about SoundCloud.
- You're saying that the business model is broken, because you "can't do business with music labels". YouTube is evidence that it _is_ possible, it's just tremendously difficult.
You need advanced algorithms to detect copyright ownership, you need a system to do revenue sharing, you need people to handle complain cases etc etc.
The reason why they failed has to do with poor strategy and execution, and less to do with the business model.
(This reminds be of all the people that said Apple could never get into the cell phone business because dealing with the operators would be impossible. Or that web search was a broken business model back then Yahoo-like portals were all the rage and web search truly sucked.)
It's interesting to compare this to another article linked here about the downfall of the TI home computers. Apparently TI understood the value of software to the point where they threatened to sue unlicensed software vendors, which pretty much guaranteed that those vendors chose to write software for other platforms. Perhaps they would have had a better chance if they had opened up their platform?
The real lesson, I think, is that most people don't want to _manage_ devices. They don't want to deal with backups, they don't want to manage disks, filesystems and drivers, and if you can take all of that away they'll be happy to store all their documents in your cloud.
What I really don't understand is why they didn't foresee this, and just updated their cheese grater Macs. After all, it's way easier to simply update a motherboard to fit a faster CPU than it is to rearchitect the Garbage Can design every time there's a new CPU and GPU architecture out there.
The only thing I can think of is that they've either just downprioritized a lot to focus on $new_secret_product, or that they've developed a new Mac Pro that for some reason didn't pan out, so they needed to start over again.
When your life depends on it, you're more likely to choose the engine that has all of the kinks worked out, has proven reliability, and where the failure modes are pretty well known.
Another would be government funding. Many countries still do this for national broadcasters and to compensate music artists (a tax on owning TVs and a tax on recorded media). That option carries its own obvious problems, but it is an option. It's just not the option that would give IPO in the sky stock return opportunities.
I agree that it's not the ads themselves that are killing media. The problem is how ad revenue forces Facebook and newspapers to heavily optimize for time spent on site, and the end result is the "filter bubble" where you get more content you like, and less content you don't like.
The problem with cell towers is that the infrastructure is more brittle with more moving parts. There's been cases where fires, power outages etc in small towns have caused base stations to go offline, cutting whole towns off from communication.
Not to mention the recent case where penetration testing done by another operator in Europe accidentally caused the entire cell phone network of the largest operator in Norway to go offline for half a day.
I wonder if the radio stations will realize too late that they're throwing away their one advantage (ubiquity) and maybe the option some people will choose when the car radio stops working is to not listen to radio at all.