> One day I'll actually set aside a few hours to go through a list of all tech companies that IPO'd in the last 5 years, and see which ones have actually made a profit. Gut feeling is that the "flashy" ones are still burning through cash reserves (Asana/Slack/Uber), but the more boring ones (Rackspace/Pivotal/etc) are probably sitting pretty.
This is outdated a bit in terms of numbers (doesn’t include recent years and excludes many companies), but the broad point remains. You are right, there are ton of companies built around the idea of dumping it on someone else before turning a profit. This has become the ‘formula’ for building companies, unfortunately.
We have to ask the question...why do these vendors keep increasing prices? Shouldn’t the economies of scale reduce prices instead? AWS has the right attitude to keep reducing prices. We need this attitude in software.
Its either greed or market pressure to keep showing increasing profits/growth.
As a user of Zoho who switched from GSuite. I've been very happy with your service so far. Support got back to me quickly when I needed help and the documentation answered most of my questions. I find some of the plans a bit confusing, but I can do everything I need to do. I didn't even realize prices went down, but whatever I paid was a good deal for what I've gotten. Thanks!
Fundamental issue is the expectation that all public companies must keep growing and show profits quarter after quarter, year after year. This is obviously unsustainable.
It is like a treadmill that keeps increasing speed. If you slow down, you are thrown out.
If consecutive quarterly results are not good, CEO is typically thrown out. This pressure forces management to make unnatural decisions that might help short-term, but will hurt long-term. What we are seeing with Google with all of these recent events/decisions is a result of this, IMO.
Obviously, growing every quarter significantly is not sustainable. But growing profits every quarter is how stock price goes up, right? Assuming you don't pay dividends on your stock, if you don't grow profits every quarter then your stock price doesn't go up, and the shareholders (via the board of directors) will sack the CEO. The whole incentive structure for corporations seems to cause the short term thinking that you see in large companies. Can you keep the shareholders placated by paying dividends instead of growing stock value via growing profit?
You still need to grow by more than the dividend or you will erode share price over time. Nobody invests $100 into a company so that a year from now it is $100, even if they get a couple $2.50 checks throughout the year on top of that.
> You still need to grow by more than the dividend or you will erode share price over time
No you don't.
Imagine a company that has a share price of 100$. And this company makes 10$ in profit, per share, and returns that 10$ in profits to shareholders every year in perpetuity.
Thats a 10% rate of return that investors would be happy to accept in perpetuity.
People accept this deal all the time. Usually they are called "bonds" or "loans", and they act as merely an a perpetuity cash payout.
The critical flaw is that one of the stated goals of the FED is to manufacture inflation. You need to "grow" at at least the rate of FED-induced inflation, otherwise you are shrinking. Its how our debt-based, rent-seeking economy "functions".
It isn't, because it's not compound interest (exponential growth), which is what everyone is after--and needs, to beat inflation. It's a fixed revenue stream. To make it compound, one would have to reinvest the return in this stock or something else, and reinvesting in this stock would increase its demand, which pushes its price up, and then we're off to the races again.
The whole system is mathematically unstable. It's only survived this long due to slow(ish) growth, but it keeps experiencing repeated price shocks, crashes, currency rebases, debt defaults, and finally issuing new currencies (which, btw, is why everyone is going nuts over crypto currencies). It can last quite some time--perhaps a couple generations--when the exponents are very low (read: < 3%), but when the exponents are high (i.e. companies shooting for > 10% growth), this thing is going off the rails. Welcome to the show!
People accept that deal when they have a very strong guarantee that their $100 will still be worth $100 at the end of the term. Combining the low yields of bonds (let's be honest, your numbers are chosen for their roundness, not their realism) with the low safety of stocks is the worst of both worlds.
There's quite literally a word for low growth but reliable stocks that pay out decent dividends. "Value stocks", as opposed to "Growth stocks" where investors expect to see the returns directly in the stock price.
I think it is and should come down to either reinvestment of returns and growth, or dividends... both grow the economy, provide value and/or increase share value. What doesn't do that is parking capital in other countries as tax havens. I'm okay with the former two.
I do think shareholders are more than happy to see 10-20% in dividend returns annually. They're able to buy more stocks or diversify accordingly. I'm also okay with growth and reinvestment internally in a company (that tends to grow stock value). And it isn't an either/or issue.
What I don't think is reasonable is to see a given company try to get consistent growth in saturated markets they heavily control. It doesn't work, and trying to do so leads to horrible decision making in the longer term.
> Fundamental issue is the expectation that all public companies must keep growing and show profits quarter after quarter, year after year. This is obviously unsustainable.
Continuous growth is sustainable at or below world economic growth. It is obviously not sustainable above as eventually you would become the entire economy and thus you would equal world economic growth. However, economics is not zero sum as our economies have pretty continuously grown for centuries and there is no limit on economic growth.
> Fundamental issue is the expectation that all public companies must keep growing and show profits quarter after quarter, year after year.
This is not true at all.
There are lots of companies out there that make a profit, and return those profits to shareholders via dividends.
If google wants to just continue making profits, they can just do that, and send that money back to the shareholders/owners, just like most every other company out there.
> Fundamental issue is the expectation that all public companies must keep growing and show profits quarter after quarter, year after year. This is obviously unsustainable.
Hey, feel free to invest your retirement savings in a company that doesn't grow profits year after year, I'm sure you'll do great!
We would need to rework the whole system if we threw out the "constant growth" method of running a company. If we take care of the people so they don't have to worry about saving for retirement, it's possible to redesign the economy in this way and our goals as a society.
You obviously can't change one major axiom of the US economy without revisiting the remaining axioms!
They are literally government sanctioned investment vehicles. If they don't return profits to their owners, they are non-profits/charities, not corporations.
The value of a business is not, or should not entirely be, measured by its return on investment. You are making the GP's point for them. That some continue growth, and that's where we choose to invest, doesn't mean all should or that it is beneficial that all do.
> Fundamental issue is the expectation that all public companies must keep growing and show profits quarter after quarter, year after year. This is obviously unsustainable.
Not if such executives have controlling interest, which Google's execs do.
Zoho Mail is a strong option. Comes with mobile apps, supports all standard protocols (IMAP/POP/ActiveSync), includes Calendar and many other modules. Zero tracking. Zero ads.
Beyond Mail, Zoho offers several apps that can replace most of what Google offers. From Docs to office suite, note-taking to chat and many more.
I know a couple of friends who work there and they frequently mention having access to raw email contents with minimal supervision. That's now how I want my email to be treated by the company hosting my email services.
I am Radha Vembu, the product manager for Zoho Mail and would like to clarify the process we follow:
For troubleshooting issues, we generally refer to email delivery status and activity logs of the user to help us understand the sequence of steps involved for a reported issue.
There are special cases related to spam/abuse for which we request the user to share the email headers/content whichever is applicable to the issue.
There are even rare instances of issues with mail parsing and to debug those cases, we ask our users for the complete original content of the email to simulate the problem.
You can also see our support team asking the users to share the original content of the email for debugging some of the issues, as seen in the links below.
Most email providers have some sort of ability to seeing raw data. That's the problem with email protocols, not the company. When necessary it's largely used for legal purposes (i.e. think subpoenas or court evidence in general), virus tracking (finding who got the first one or first to open "that email"), technical issues, etc.
I can personally say I know how sift through probably 5 or 6 different email systems or providers for this kind of data. It may seem "creepy", it did to me at first, but after awhile you realize, in business at least, there's really nothing of interest. Probably only like 99.999% of emails exchanged will have nothing incriminating, embarrassing, or even worth reading. It's kind of like being the key holder for a safe. Someone's gotta be the keyholder and be able to access the data for when necessary. Sometimes there's an inherent level of trust required and usually they just dgaf what's there.
It's kind of like a virtual manifestation of the "IT Closet" that almost all companies have. A bunch of places I've worked there's a office or closet where all the old PCs, laptops, and hard drives get stashed away. All the IT staff get access, and yes the could go rummaging around looking for personal pics, old tax records, etc, most of the time it's just not a valid concern worth anyone's time to steal or protect.
I will add that we use Zoho at work and have issues with emails about weekly. Their web interfaces are not very well designed although they do work OK.
I use their completely free service for all my custom domains and I find the webmail pretty good. The web applications, in general, are pretty actively maintained, with new features every few months. Only had one bigger issue over the years and they resolved it within 24 hours.
They also have a native dark theme on webmail that is pretty decent.
Parent comment just states facts, why even bother suggesting they're affiliated somehow? Meanwhile I'm not affiliated with Zoho in any way, and can confirm their free service is awesome. I've got 2 custom domains on it and couldn't be happier
Does everyone who mentions iPhones work for Apple?
I'm not affiliated with Zoho in any way except being a customer. Yes, the topic of email hosting comes up from time to time and I mention the host I use.
This is the problem when a note-taking app tries to make it ‘big’. A good note-taking app can be a niche business. But when you raise hundreds of millions of dollars, there is pressure and you are forced to make unnatural decisions to show growth.
Also, note-taking apps are part of a suite. See Apple, Microsoft, Google, Zoho (disclosure: I am with Zoho and we compete in note-taking space with Zoho Notebook). It is a challenge for any independent app provider to compete with a single app against suites in the long run. It’s surprising Evernote didn’t expand to other productivity apps beyond note-taking.
I share your surprise. The magic of Evernote when i used it was tagging. It’s a concept that could have made office suites or other productivity use cases better.
Nothing was mentioned about multiple spleens at birth (Polysplenia). Yes, some people are born with multiple spleens. In such case, it has nothing to do with injury and there doesn't seem to be enough knowledge on why this occurs.
Multiple spleens often result in mis-diagnosis (during radiology) leading to wrong treatment. When you know you have accessory spleens, it is always good to give them a heads up.
Evernote let their CEO and some key people go, then we have seen significant price increases and now this privacy episode. 'creative ways to commit suicide' indeed.
Thanks. I have tried them all (except notebook) and didn't find one more convincing than evernote yet - at least for my purposes, mostly note taking, documentation. Guess I'm stuck.
You might find site helpful. https://postipononprofits.com/
This is outdated a bit in terms of numbers (doesn’t include recent years and excludes many companies), but the broad point remains. You are right, there are ton of companies built around the idea of dumping it on someone else before turning a profit. This has become the ‘formula’ for building companies, unfortunately.