This is almost never true unless it's a life saving drug. Xerox literally had the keys to the kingdom for years before multiple people came along and figured out how to get the "tech" to mass market.
This is one of those rare occasions in my opinion. OpenAI trained truly ground breaking models that were miles ahead of anything the world had seen before. Everything else was really just a side show. Their marketing efforts were, at best, average. They chose to call their premier product "ChatGPT", a term that might resonate with AI scientists but appears as a random, forgettable string of letters to the average person. For a considerable period, there was no mobile app available. Their web app had its share of bugs, while third-party apps delivered a better UX. Maybe Sam Altman deserves credit for attracting talent and capital, I don't know. But it seems to me that OpenAI's success by far and large hinges on their game-changing models.
Newton, Power Mac Cube, iMac G4 "Sunflower", and solid gold first-gen Apple Watch come to mind as Apple hardware products that failed to live up to the hype.
On the software side there are more misses, but also the stakes are lower.
It's a great track record for thirty years, of course. All the other big tech companies have graveyards full of half-assed product launches.
Except for the Apple Watch I had all these products. They were some of the best of their time and even hold up today in terms of design and usability.
Your definition of success seems extraordinarily high, if these products were failures. Maybe measured by items sold. But then each of them stands in nearly every single design museum like MoMA, history books, and were clear stepping stones to the Mac mini (cube, sunflower without display), and ipod/phone (newton). So bottom line they were a clear success to Apple’s enormous brand value.
IIRC Jobs purchased NeXT when he took the Apple CEO job, to get a new OS base. As NeXT was his company, I'm pretty sure it was a decision based on bias and urgency and not because NextStep was the best there was. But yeah it's an interesting legacy for sure :)
> IIRC Jobs purchased NeXT when he took the Apple CEO job
No, Apple bought NeXT after the failure of Copland to birth a replacement for the creaky and leaky MacOS (BeOS was the big alternative, but Apple thought they were asking for too much).
And NeXT proceeded to take over: Apple bought NeXT in February 1997 keeping Jobs back as an advisor, Jobs staged a boardroom coup to remove Amelio in July, and was then named interim CEO.
Following that he started cutting into the existing product lines and placing NeXT people (Tevanian , Forstall), promoting people he was interested in (Ive), or hiring them from outside (Cook). Basically reshaping the company.
More specifically, Steve Jobs founded NeXT after Apple pushed him out in the late 80s.
A decade or so later, Apple was on the tail end of a long, slow, downward slide. The team wasn't happy with the current state of their Mac operating system, and bought out NeXT to use their software as the basis of its replacement (Mac OS X).
Jobs, as CEO of NeXT, came back to Apple as a consultant, but was CEO again in a matter of years.
NextStep was easily the best there was. Nothing else was remotely suitable. The only contender people like to fantasize about is BeOS, which was nice (I used it as a daily driver for a year), but a toy compared to NextStep and OSX.
Other than the watch, all the products you mentioned are before 2002. Anything in the past 20 years that have been huge misses in delivering up to expectation?
Also how is the 1st gen watch a failure? It sold millions immediately, and was a huge commercial success. It pretty much started a gold rush for digital watches again.
I think it's fair to say the new "Apple" (last 15 years or so), has been pretty good with exceeding expectations and breaking through barriers that other companies just couldn't.
In what sense did the iMac G4 fail to live up to the hype? That was my first Mac, I still have it. Thought it was an incredible computer for the time--the iMac + OS X 10.1 Puma was absolutely magical coming from Windows 98 on a beige Dell.
The design still looks incredible too, 20+ years later.
I will grant that the Newton failed. In the Apple hardware category, I'd also add the iPod Hi-Fi, the butterfly keyboard, and the touch bar.
That said, Apple's failures are rare and their multi-decade track record of delivering on hype is unsurpassed.
The sales of iMac G4 failed so badly that there was a three-month period in 2004 when it was simply unavailable. It was discontinued without a successor on store shelves.
It was too expensive to manufacture and Apple wasn't sure they could sell it, so they just didn't make any. Hard to believe that could happen to a Mac model today.
What was a failure about that? It looked good and worked well.
> solid gold first-gen Apple Watch
In what way did the gold watch fail? It was the first gen watch, the same hardware as the rest, just made of gold for rich people. It didn’t fail any more than any other color did.
Both failed badly to live up to Apple's sales expectations.
The Sunflower iMac was discontinued even before its successor shipped.
The Apple Watch Edition was supposed to grow Apple into a luxury brand and expand its margins massively (you can find many interviews with Jony Ive from 2015 where he explains this thinking). This strategy was a dud.
You need to seriously read what you’re actually replying to instead of what you think you are because you keep bringing up that the AW is not a failure when nobody said it was.
> Newton, Power Mac Cube, iMac G4 "Sunflower", and solid gold first-gen Apple Watch come to mind as Apple hardware products that failed to live up to the hype.
No one seriously thought that the Apple Watch was going to be an iPhone size hit. It’s a complete straw man argument.
It was a pet project for Ives. Do you really think that Apple didn’t know their target market well enough to think that they wouldn’t be selling millions of $10K watches?
It’s a perfectly acceptable comment now. No one in their right mind thought there Apple had realistic expectations of selling 10 of millions of slow 1st generation $10K watches. It was a straw man argument that I really didn’t think that people took seriously
> No one in their right mind thought there Apple had realistic expectations of selling 10 of millions of slow 1st generation $10K watches
This is not and has never been the bar for "failure". Stop pretending it is just because it makes your argument easier.
The comment you replied to states:
> The Apple Watch Edition was supposed to grow Apple into a luxury brand and expand its margins massively (you can find many interviews with Jony Ive from 2015 where he explains this thinking). This strategy was a dud.
Show how this specific thing is untrue, not your own definition of failure. Was that not Apple's play with the AWE? Was it not a failure, almost immediately discontinued? What exact part of that statement is false?
This is the real strawman and your projection is plainly obvious.
There was no world where a few $10K Apple Watch was going to “expand Apple’s margins” meaningfully compared to the number of iPhones Apple sells. Apple knew this. Anyone who knows anything about finance or simple math knows this.
The AWE strategy failed, yet now the AW (like the iPad) define the category they are in. AV could be similar. Apple doesn't know which use case will take off, but it has to get it out there to find out. Leading with the best hardware they have right now lets developers go wild.
The Apple Watch is not a failure by any objective measure. It’s very profitable and by far the biggest in the industry. Everything else you name was pre-iPhone.
More recently, the TouchBar and 3D Touch are both pretty massive market failures for Apple despite being engineered to perfection.
I think the killer was that in the Platforms State of the Union, they didn't show anybody wearing the thing, even while saying "and I can send it to the device and look at it there". Almost like they were embarrassed by it, or something...
Thank you for saving me a few hours. Really appreciate it.
I'm starting to listen to fewer and fewer of his podcasts. For me the decline has been has been obvious with some of his recent guests. I thought the Aella one would be very interesting, but as another commenter mentioned, he had an "impress me" vibe the entire time and couldn't even connect a little bit with the guest. Then the Sam Harris one exposed his weaknesses very obviously. If you want to see him being defensive and not say any of substance, that's a good one to listen to. Sam makes a lot of great points and he just goes on and on about the "power of love" and how we are all "human beings" trying to be "understood". After a while it gets irritating because it's like hearing a broken record player. Him unable to either provide a coherent argument to why he aired the Kanye episode or admit it was a mistake was very telling. That episode has more Elon worshipping as well. He tried to get Sam to reconnect with Elon and become friends again. lol.
His postcasts are on average above Joe's quality (don't listen to anymore, but used to years ago), but I think it's primarily because of whom he selects as his guests. At least Joe was significantly more entertaining. Might try going back to that.
Joe is just more curious. He puts in more thought to his questions.
Lex's questions feel like a ChatGPT parody of himself. He doesn't push his guests, seek to be entertaining. He took the 'just let them talk' idea too literally I think. Its just a PR speak 4hr+ podcast for whoever his guests are.
I actually couldn't stand the Harris episode. It felt so meandering and had no real direction. No pushback from either side, almost a talking past each other but in a meta way. It felt like I was in a conversation where I talked way too much and should have listened more. The episode could have been 1hr.
Every time Sam asked Lex a question I was excited for some discussion and then disappointed when Lex started talking. He either goes off on random tangent or doesn't get to the heart of the question / debate. Just very shallow and vapid, which is disappointing given the guests and Lex supposedly being of a technical background. I'd rather Joe Rogan interview Lex's guest and that says a lot.
No, shouting whataboutism isn't actually some sort of universal gotcha even if it's the new overused internet buzzword. What you call whataboutism can be called precedent or market expectations. That's even how you usually do market research: you compare a company to its peers and determine the baseline (for revenue, financials and even the percentage of transactions that are fraudulent!)
Have you ever lived in the area? I'm 100% sure you have't because of how you're framing this. Off campus housing is extremely expensive. Stanford doesn't really provide any affordable options off campus because they have all the housing they need in campus. The only students who live out of campus are local students and MBA students.
Do you expect undergrads who fly come from Missouri to start paying 2k/month for housing? I'm sorry but your solution is an imaginary one that doesn't apply to Stanford. NYC is completely different because you can practically live anywhere there and use the great public transportation network to get to where you want to go. If you live in East Palo Alto (cheapest area), good luck getting to class.
I think using word "misleading" is also "misleading".
Dragonfly hides complexity. Docker hid complexity of managing cgroups and deploying applications. S3 hid complexity of writing into separate disks. But you do not call S3 or minio misleading because they store stuff similarly to how disk stores files. Dragonfly hides complexity of managing bunch of processes on the same instance and the outcome of this is a cheaper production stack. What do you think has higher effective memory capacity on c6gn.16xlarge: a single process using all the memory or 40 processes which you need to provision independently?
It's misleading because, practically speaking, the type of people who are after the performance you advertise, are running clusters to begin with. So what you are selling is just a simplified stack that lets you not have to manage one more "system". That's fair but you could mention that? Or atleast acknowledge that if you repeat these tests with redis cluster the results will be wildly different and you wont have those crazy looking charts.
For example it's like me claiming that my new python web framework is X faster than Flask because it comes bundles with uwsgi. Yes, technically mine is faster, but its not a fair comparison.
Are you serious? How do you think companies that earn over 1M per month operate? Do you think they all receive the cash on the same day and make the payouts on that day itself?
> you should have had to accept the risk that you might lose anything above those $250k.
This laughably impractical. If you run any medium/large SaaS company you have payments continuously rolling in and you have to build up a balance to pay the salaries. The bank account is in a constant state of flux and a lot of times its at multiples of the insurance limit because a certain payment hasn't gone through yet, and a large advance just came in. Are you expecting every company to risk manage these large amounts in real time? Is that where companies should be spending their resources on? What's the point of having financial institutions and regulations when you're expected to micro manage basic aspects of the financial rails the whole economy runs on.
It sometimes feels people really like dunking on those impacted by this especially since there's a lot of schadenfreude about SV and especially the VCs that embarrassed themselves, but I feel like the correct answer isn't "hahahaha those idiot companies didn't make 100 bank accounts and perfectly shuffle everything in realtime", but "hm, isn't it a bit strange that we're incentivised to go to extremes with this relatively inefficient activity"
Or you could just insure your deposits like I am sure all big companies do.
Just like banks bigger than SVB remember to hedge their currency risks (Which one could argue that SVB with a 88b$ position probably should have considered also).
Actually, having started a company in Denmark, this was an offer the bank we got bank account with had.
It is actually laughable that you can assume that one can run a million dollar company without considering insuring your deposits.
IMO banks should be doing this anyway (insure deposits). I think most time founders are so engrossed in product-market fit and growth that finance is after thought. You're provided an "army" with VC cash and you are expected to be own an entire category with that army. It seems rational to me that most people would be thinking strategy and future attack plans rather than the extremely rare chance that the whole army itself gets kidnapped.
Ideally we as a society, should be able to offer people peace of mind to deposit large sums of money and not worry about it being lost. Expecting everyone to perform financial gymnastics just to keep their money feels like a complete waste of resources.
Maybe the solution is to create a tier A bank that gives you no returns, charges you a flat fee, and any amount of money deposited is guaranteed. I know people do that with treasuries, but thats a lot of extra steps to put money in and out.
Keep in mind, tiny teams with no "finance person" easily receive more than 1M as part of seed or series A. Very rarely is their first hire for managing that money. Should it be? Is it worth it? Or should you rely on the financial system and regulation protecting your own money.
I think you're strawmanning here. I'm not against deposit insurance. I merely suggested it should actually be part of the banking regulation.
Like maybe it's a default line item monthly fee to insure your deposits and you can choose to opt out of it. The default is to protect your funds. My guess is very few people will opt out, including me.
It is a part of the regulation, up to USD 250k, which appears to be a good limit for people who should be aware of doing stuff like this themselves (in EU it is EUR 100k, so the US more than doubles that amount).
I think this just shows the irresponsibleness of people with large deposits.
