Microsoft actually laid off most of their IE developers after IE6 if I recall correctly, they had no vision for the future, it was finished, they'd won (for a while)
I'm pretty sure they just moved them to new teams, since it was understood they had put their best on making IE win it would be insane to lay them off afterwards.
Ya, if I was told correctly by management at the time, Microsoft’s first large scale layoff (that would layoff people without perf reasons) was in the 2008. They actually moved a bunch of IE KLTO to China by the mid 2000s, and then took it back to Redmond in 2009/2010 when they realized chrome and Firefox were kicking their butts.
All weaknesses or differences can be used against you. When you’re interviewing for a job you are presenting an idealised version of yourself that makes the decision to hire you easy from the interviewer’s perspective. That’s not the time to bring up flaws.
In general though this idea that people should talk openly about their mental health problems is good for society and terrible for the individuals concerned. People will absolutely change their opinion of you and treat you differently, and they will never disclose why.
Exactly. This is why the "tell me your weakness" question is a trap. It's deliberately selecting for people able to read the subtext and the situation and respond accordingly.
The interview, and to a lesser extent the workplace, is a hostile environment where you are in direct competition with peers and management who try to get the most out of you for the least compensation. Anything you say or do will be used against you the second it is useful to undercut you in favor of someone else's payday.
Moral ambiguity is a competitive advantage for the business too. Holding back "progress" turns you into a cost center in a real quick way and that's something the business wants to avoid.
Who do you think did better for Uber, the person who pointed out that it was technically illegal, or the person who pointed out that they could make a lot of money before the legal trouble materialized?
I've been at a company where that happened and the people who focused on data accuracy and brought that up in debates around prioritization got cut for not moving the business forward. As I got told, "if the customer is shown what they want to see (and they have no other source of information to compare), does it matter if it's accurate?"
This is the bait to make it sound reasonable. Of course this hold-back feature will be quietly disabled at some point in the future. The whole proposal is full of weaselly half truths and misrepresentation about their real plans
> this hold-back feature will be quietly disabled at some point in the future.
Will it though? Googles main reason for WEI I assume is to combat ad-fraud. Ie. to prevent someone making a bot farm to click ads to earn money from advertising or exhaust competitors ad budgets or manipulate search engine user ranking signals.
With WEI, all ad clicks without WEI could just be ignored (ie. not billed to advertisers, ignored when calculating statistics and signals). If 10% of clients have WEI 'cloaking', you just inflate the final advertising bill by 10% to account for those users - the end result is the same as billing for all real users and no bots.
WEI still achieves all of Googles goals even with cloaking.
As the middle man Google benefits from ad-fraud and has few incentives to really stop it. Ad-blocking is a real problem for them however, and they have huge incentives to prevent that. Ignore what they say - that's what WEI is actually about.
Googles main business is ads on google search. Here they aren't a middle man.
Companies give google $X, and hopefully sell Y extra products. X/Y is the cost per sale. Google competes with other advert forms (eg. TV/radio/newspaper ads) on that X/Y number.
If there is ad fraud, that Y number gets decreased (budget is used up on fraud that doesn't translate to sales), and their revenue decreases as advertisers spend their ad budget on other mediums.
>Will it though? Googles main reason for WEI I assume is to combat ad-fraud. Ie. to prevent someone making a bot farm to click ads to earn money from advertising or exhaust competitors ad budgets or manipulate search engine user ranking signals.
Right. And so I ask this question: Why should I be forced to donate my data, CPU cycles, network bandwidth and privacy to one of the largest corporations in the world so they can address an issue (ad fraud) between them and their customers?
I'd note that I am not a customer of Google or their advertisers. Because advertisers are the only real customers of Google.
Lots of people know what needs doing, but changing things up is tough when we're so used to doing things a certain way. Plus, it doesn't help that laws often slow down the changes we need. And let's be real, these changes might not be everyone's cup of tea, especially when there's so much distrust and confusion often spread by the media.
Our current problems:
- Climate Change (CC)
- Biodiversity Loss (BL)
- Deforestation (D)
- Water Scarcity (WS)
- Ocean Acidification (OA)
- Resource Depletion (RD)
- Pollution (P)
- Land Degradation (LD)
- Food Insecurity (FI)
- Social Inequity (SI)
We have to solve all those to have a chance to repair things. Repair too little and we'll end up as Rome did (they also tried to solve their problems when they realized they're facing the end, but did too little and paid the price). All those problems have their main culprits and plethora of solutions. It's not that we don't know what and how, but we don't have the will.
a] acknowledge that our problem is ecological overshoot, and climate change is just one of its symptoms
The underhanded way this is being proposed is really something else. It's hosted on a non-google github to provide distance, it's worded in a way that makes it seem like this is something that benefits users, when it's the absolute opposite of that. It subverts the whole concept of a user agent. This is a huge threat to our industry and we cannot allow this to happen.
It's not a "threat to" the industry... It literally _comes from_ the industry... Unless the tech industry is willing to lose one of its biggest sources of revenue, this is exactly what the industry wants...
As long as they're approximately the only "enterprise" option, that's a moat all by itself. No comment on the valuation, but it makes for a very resilient business.
Well, they have the organizational maturity to accommodate enterprise customers, and in contrast to much of this subthread, they don't say things like "just use curl".
They're trying to get people to host/share their Postman data inside Postman's walled garden so that they're stickier.
And they're competing with free and good enough but they're making a suite out of the tools and slapping a GUI on it. They're owning making it all work similarly and owning the training for their tools and if you pick them for all they do, it will be consistent.
How many companies use Atlassian suite even though it really just bundles a bunch of functionality that was already free and good enough? (ROT13 spoiler: nyzbfg nyy bs gurz!)
I find this question really annoying. Almost all tech companies have no moat except for maybe brand and network moat which postman also kinda has. What's Apple's moat? Or Google's?
What is Apple’s moat? They have an integrated hardware and manufacturing supply chain with their own OS and a proprietary chip architecture that no other device manufacturer on earth competes with!
It's just because they have money. It will take billions of dollars and multiple years for other companies to reach that but I don't see any moat except if money is the moat.
Same with postman. Right now they are so much ahead in features that it would take multiple years for other company to match it.
Google has all the money and their phone and phoneOS are still second tier. It's not money. It's about picking a problem and focusing on it. Further, it's about picking the right problem.
Google picked "How do we save (an additional) 20B+ per year in cash payments to a competitor" and "how do we have a path to accessing the world's data ... that is on a phone." -- and then won at both.
I think its more than money and time. Getting supply chains right (both hardware and software) is really hard at scale. Additionally there’s network effects of their proprietary ecosystem that thousands of developers and millions of users have invested in. Thats very very sticky. Unless Apple fucks up majorly I don’t see that changing.
Google: chrome is free and makes up 62.85% of browsers and android makes up 70.89% of all mobile operating system. Both drive users to google. Google ads is still one of the easiest tools for monetizing websites and advertising with a large market. Even if Newcomers bridge the massive technical gap, they won't have the same size of market so they aren't going to be as attractive unless they niche down significantly.
Apple has a strong luxury brand, higher quality, a large valuable market with a strong app community. They have a similar insulation to external players. Macbooks also tend to be popular in development communities due to its unix based os and strong support, which can be a strong alternative to a linux os for companies, but has been watered down with Windows push to support WSL2.
Postman doesn't have a moat. They don't have a strong marketplace where they can profit of exchanges. They don't have a significantly more advanced tool. it can be easily replaced by any user with an equivalent product with no real loss.
How is search index a moat? It's hard to build, yes, but there is no moat here and anyone can build it as long as they have infra, talent and money.
Also for Apple while I am not sure, but looking at the Android phones there is hardly any feature of Apple which hasn't been covered by some Android phone, so I don't think IP is an issue. It's just that overall quality is much more consistent for Apple across generations that it has built a good brand.
I don’t think you understand how moat is used in this context. A moat isn’t impossible to cross, just harder to cross than a lawn. Also, I don’t think you can saw two features are the same unless the quality is the same. Two sms apps are not equal if one of them occasionally fails to send/receive messages.
I agree that postman has a moat. I think it’s important to say that every company has a moat in that they’re organized, located somewhere, and have customers. The size of the moat varies. We can treat a moat as a scalar value of dollars to cross.
Every company also has a valuation, either through public markets, private markets, or discounted cash flows.
A house cleaning company has a moat of trained cleaners, existing client generation process, goodwill of existing clients, etc. If the value of their discounted cash flows exceed the cost of crossing their moat, they are vulnerable.
The argument is that crossing postman’s moat would cost much less than their private valuation, and their future roadmap is unlikely to build a moat that is significantly harder to cross.
Maybe these companies having no moat is part of the problem, though I would argue "stickiness" or "inertia" props a lot of them up, Hotel California style.
Ads were of course common in 1995, but monetisation in general was rarer. A greater proportion of the web was hobbyists writing and collating information about subjects they were interested in, not because of financial incentives.
