I'm hoping they're building a commodity AR/VR operating system -- essentially spatial Android. They've already announced a partnership with Samsung and Qualcomm so I've got to imagine some interesting hardware is coming soon.
Considering they just gutted their AR team I wouldn’t hold my breath on this one. Too bad they couldn’t wait for Apple to launch the Vision Pro, because I bet they’d get a lot more excitement now that the press is out.
It's an interesting test for them. Essentially, it's a free hit - low expectations, few constraints, lots of latitude to throw out prior work, open ended opportunity to be creative and innovate, a clear baseline provided by Apple for them to benchmark success against and little to no regulatory scrutiny. Basically, one of the few opportunities they will ever got for a zero baggage, green field project where, if they actually have the talent and the will power, they could hit something out of the park. Will they do it? Will they not?
Hopefully, they won’t give up and toss it in less than 3 years. The Samsung brand should also be front and center, or consumers won’t have the confidence to buy it.
Meh, I hope they don't chase the VR train and instead focus on making Search actually usable again. It's soooo bad these days and actively getting worse, with ever more ads and SEO crap.
I’ll believe that when they stop destroying search.
Google Cache’s death has been widely reported but the custom date filter just plain stopped rendering on my iPhone and iPad last week. There are some kinds of queries which really only function on Google with that in working order.
Nope, just broke for no apparent reason after working perfectly fine for years and continues to work on the desktop. By this point in time, I've been cynical of Google for longer than I was a fan, but every nail that strikes at the heart of the Google that was cool still hurts to see.
In contrast, buying my Tesla new was about as easy as any Amazon order. I don't know why other car manufacturers don't make D2C a bigger focus for their business.
IIRC dealerships were required because manufacturers were screwing over customers before. So much of modern society is ultimately due to path dependence
Dealerships were required because the carmakers started consolidating and dealing with incumbents in a consolidated market is terrible. But it doesn't actually work because you're still ultimately dealing with them indirectly. The actual solution should have been to break up the Big Three, though of course that happened anyway as foreign competitors came into the market and the argument for continued bans on direct sales has essentially evaporated.
The exception is service, because that's actually a separate market and not just a middle man on sales in the original market. Prohibiting manufacturers from operating service centers and leaving it to independent mechanics is essentially a ban on vertical integration and still makes a lot of sense. Because service for a particular model of car is in many ways back to being a consolidated market, since that model may need specific parts or tools and you still want to maintain a competitive market for service for customers with that model of car. You also want to make sure mechanics can service cars of multiple makes, since that fosters competition too.
Tesla sells cars to most states D2C so while I agree it is unfortunately illegal in some places, it doesn't seem to be omnipresent. I think mainstream vendors are just slow to sacrifice their relationships with dealers, who are currently 100% of their sales.
This is why it's important to note that the group arguing against the FTC is not the automakers, it's auto dealers. the NADA is the associate of auto dealers, not manufacturers
I agree, though I think in order to be fair, we need to do an apples-to-apples comparison.
Most people go into a car dealer expecting to haggle. For better or worse, we know they're going to screw around and so we're prepared to do battle. If you go into it with a different mindset, it can be pretty painless most of the time.
Walk in the door and offer them MSRP. Then fill out the DMV registration paperwork, give them your payment, and leave with the car. It won't be quite as smooth as Tesla because you're not pre-filling this out online, but it is still pretty painless.
During the pandemic this wouldn't work because the market was commanding premiums on available stock. That means mark-ups from dealers, but Tesla is hardly immune -- go look at what a Model 3 was priced at later in 2022. The difference is that dealers at least have -some- competition. Tesla just tells you what you must pay.
Because avocado farmers don't want to set up a retail store selling exclusively avocados in each and every little town, they want to sell them in bulk to grocery store chains.
Manufacturer-to-consumer sales make the most sense for big ticket items and things that can be easily sold over the internet. Retail stores can make more sense for perishable goods and things you might want to inspect before purchasing and convenience purchases and things with a high ratio of shipping cost to price etc.
My Polestar purchase was essentially the same way. PS put restrictions on what the dealership could actually offer as addons (tow-hook, overhead rais for skis, and all weather door mats; all official addons), which meant that I walked in, signed the deal, and was out in about 30 minutes.
Still not as ideal as other countries, but cest la vie.
One of my all-time favorite records is entitled Crown Shyness. The eponymous track [1] uses this phenomenon as a metaphor for feeling alone while depressed. The branches are so close, but just out of reach. I always thought it was a beautiful analogy.
I suspect for people like Sam who are compulsively ambitious and competitive, it's not about the dollars. It's about winning.
Further, based on anecdotes from friends and Twitter who know Sam personally, I'm inclined to believe he's genuinely motivated by building something that "alters the timeline", so to speak.
AGI is decades if not centuries away. Cranking a plausible sentence generator to be even more plausible will not get there. I do not understand how people suddenly completely lost their minds.
The hype wave really is something else, eh? People are suddenly talking as if these advanced chatbots are on the precipice of genuine AGI that can run any system you throw at it, it's absolute lunacy
I have heard Facebook can differ pretty wildly depending on team. 2/3 of the people I know who have worked there hated it and consider it a toxic company, but one had a pretty good time.
All 3 of them would have been ok with a place/team that some people might describe as "tech bro" though--we are talking much worse than whatever you mean by that lol
Technical teams: There are some pressure-cooker teams where there are micromangers obsessed with counting diff revisions and maximum project impact, a smattering of individuals who are overconfident big fish in small ponds. Most technical teams are normal and helpful. Some are even loosey-goosey and casual. There are a few teams who have no customer service skills or professionalism at all, but those aren't many.
Nontechnical teams: I've observed multiple IRL collections of people who literally go to work to socialize... and do so loudly and not in a conference room. Maybe they do work, but I didn't see any sign of it. Slacking-tolerant areas must have a reporting structure that doesn't have a lot of hard accountability, may not have to produce quantitive impact, and are able to hide in a megacorp when there is sufficient complexity and opacity.
One other thing that ticked me off about IRL Metamates: most volunteers for a home building nonprofit left without coordinating with the site manager, leaving them understaffed for the work and cleanup tasks. It really shows the personal ethics of people who pose for photos for their personal brand but then don't care enough to actually do the work.
I live fairly frugally compared to other people in the Bay Area whose actual yearly expenses might be $150k+ (did I say financial independence is my obsession? :-)), so I don’t mind accumulating more, it will give me more flexibility.
But I am fairly burned out so it’s likely I will permanently quit within the next couple years or so. In a weird way, I would welcome a layoff as forcing function to move on from corporate.
I hope you're correct, but empirically this appears to be wishful thinking, at least among larger organizations. How many tech big-cos have implemented a mandatory return to office policy in some capacity? Some big ones off the top of my head: Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Snap. It's my observation that smaller companies tend to follow larger companies culturally, especially as they scale.
