I've heard this about both Valve and Palantir, but they also seem like extremely successful organizations. That's something I really want to understand, because my guess would have been that all the politicking would destroy productivity and hamper decisionmaking.
Many foods in the United States are sweetened with high fructose corn syrup (which is very cheap compared to cane sugar because growing corn is very cheap in the United States because of climate, infrastructure, and extensive government subsidies). In soft drinks, the syrup is roughly 55% fructose, 45% glucose.
Table sugar is usually sucrose, which is a compound sugar (disaccharide) comprised of one fructose and one glucose molecule. In many bottled soft drinks, the low pH of the beverage hydrolyzes the sucrose into its component sugars, resulting in a solution of 50% fructose and 50% glucose.
Chemically, we're comparing a 55/45 mixture of fructose and glucose to a 50/50 mixture of fructose and glucose. HFCS has become a bogeyman in American society, but evidence since the 1980s seems to show that, when it comes to soda, the excess fructose isn't nearly as bad as the whole "recreationally drinking 40g of instantly available sugar" part.
Mexican coke does taste different, but it may have more to do with the other flavorants and the bottling process than the source of the sugar.
Looks like some HFCS-sweetened soda pop has up to a 70/30 fructose/glucose ratio. It's also worth noting that corn syrup contains maltose and various polysaccharides not present in table sugar, but I think most of that is refined out in colas, since there only seems to be 1% maltose present in the colas analyzed by this paper.
My sister's cat will eat food until she vomits, and if my sister isn't quick enough with the clean up, the cat will try to eat her own vomit until she vomits again.
If you put me alone in a room with a pallet full of warm fresh Taco Bell fried cinnamon sugar frosting balls, I too will likely involuntarily perform the scarf and barf.
There is something deep in our mammalian systems that never quite shook off the food scarcity thing, I think.
> Companies that have disdain for their own customers will be reviled in return. Such companies may be able to thrive in the short term, but they do not endure in the limit.
Oracle has endured nearly 50 years. Sun did not endure.
I don't want to live in a world where one of the most successful and widespread corporate strategies is also disturbingly un-humanistic, but we're never going to find a better way unless our mental models for how customer relationships map to business success actually align with reality.
Appreciate the love, but I think you are drawing the wrong conclusion here: Sun failed to endure not because it loved its customers, but to the contrary because it lost track of them: the company was disinterested in the mechanics of running a business.[0]
As for Oracle and its putative endurance, I would liken it to the Berlin Wall: despite the seeming permanence, it is in fact an artifact that history will be eager to forget when given the opportunity.
Per above, it seems like Sun had a core architectural, technical, and engineering failure with SPARC failing to keep pace with x86, and a business failure dealing with the fallout:
> x86 boxes were starting to smoke the hell out of UltraSPARC.)
> we spent too much time trying to help save microprocessor management from an unmitigated disaster of their own creation (UltraSPARC-III, cruelly code named "Cheetah"
In contrast, HP mostly (though it eventually split into two companies) managed to survive Itanium and compete with Dell. IBM continued to evolve Power and its other architectures and still sells AIX as well as Linux systems. Cray still exists as part of HPE. Apple migrated from PowerPC to x86 before hitting a home run with their own version of ARM.
In an alternate timeline, I imagine Sun still existing as an independent company and being the leader in RISC-V systems. But I guess Oxide is something of a successor?
If Sun couldn't design a good SPARC processor then they couldn't design a good RISC-V processor either. x86 was really their only hope but they didn't succeed there either, maybe because of the same old over-engineering.
Well, RISC-V is likely easier to implement efficiently than SPARC (no register windows, etc.) and has many of the same RISC-derived advantages.
Sun had some very smart people (what is Marc Tremblay doing at Microsoft btw?), and they could also have acquired more of them, perhaps like Apple acquiring PA Semi or Qualcomm acquiring Nuvia.
Also I wonder what might have happened if OpenSPARC had happened earlier, been more open, etc. (Indeed, a main reason why RISC-V exists is that there were IP issues with other architectures.)
Given how Fujitsu was able to make competitive SPPARC64 models for Oracle, it was unlikely to be an ISA issue, and more a design and manufacturing issue....
> As for Oracle and its putative endurance, I would liken it to the Berlin Wall: despite the seeming permanence, it is in fact an artifact that history will be eager to forget when given the opportunity.
Sparkling wine bottles are sometimes popped when the last installation of Oracle gets retired in an organization.
No love for customers will compensate for a missing strategic moat. Sun placed its hopes on vertically integrated hardware + proprietary OS. Oracle bet on software, that once installed, had extremely high switching costs (similar to SAP). Strategy >> Love.
> Companies that have disdain for their own customers ... do not endure in the limit.
This is a very common sort of wishful thinking that lets people bypass hard decisions. You create a company that loves its customers and employees and vice versa because you want to run a company that way. There are plenty of examples showing it's possible to run a sustainable business that way, and also plenty of counter-examples. There's no guarantee that it leads to business success or maximizes profits, it's just a choice you make.
>> Certainly, these companies not endure as innovators: when coercion is your business model, innovation is not merely unnecessary but actively antithetical.
Oracle and VMware do seem like just rent seekers. I'm sure those rents do pay for plenty of nice things, but it's really hard for me to ever understand Oracle or VMware as an "innovator", beyond their initial innovations (their flagship DB, x86 virtualization).
> Oracle has endured nearly 50 years. Sun did not endure.
IMHO it's perfectly fine for companies to live well, and then be sold. AFAIAC persistence is only proof of persistence. Sun created plenty of wealth/millionaires too. And, by Bryan's lights, it did so mostly ethically. That's a good life.
I think that companies like Oracle and Broadcom begin to resemble specialized private equity firms: they acquire innovative companies that have scaled to a level that they're familiar with. The acquirer then enforces "business discipline" and unlocks efficiencies (mainly this means leveraging the acquirer's existing connections with their customer base to cross-sell licenses, raising prices to the highest possible level their customers can sustain, and laying off/transferring redundant positions or positions not directly tied to revenue generation). This lasts 3-10 years until the market develops a lower-cost enterprise-ready alternative that starts to erode the captive customer base, but in that time these companies have collected enough rents to acquire another set of smaller companies and repeat the process.
> I think that companies like Oracle, SAP, and Broadcom begin to resemble specialized private equity firms
This is an entirely fair/accurate. I suppose what I am getting at is that these are just 2 different business models, and, the world can sustain a multitude of business models. There need not be only one (har har).
It's also fair to believe there is a moral dimension to one's own model which doesn't extract maximum value from the customer. Because IMHO "let's kick them in the dicks again" isn't an especially likable model, even if it is successful, and it's fair to avoid doing business with such people.
Imagine trying to sell your partners on doing business with Broadcom. If your core principle is "Broadcom needs to be around in 10 years", maybe the persistence/"kick them in the dicks" model is appealing, but otherwise, its fair for their competitors/Oxide to point out how awful dealing with a corporate sociopath might be.
Yeah, I agree with all of that. Extractive behemoths like Oracle couldn't exist without innovators like Oxide (well, not exactly Oxide since I doubt they'd sell to an Oracle, but you know what I mean).
There are plenty of customers that jump into deals with e.g. Oracle for a variety of reasons, and it's definitely worthwhile to spread the news far and wide about how difficult it is to work with these companies, doubly so if you're ideologically and economically competing with them.
I guess my point is that it's worthwhile to spend time understanding why this business model works in spite of all the shittiness, since the "hoping their poor treatment of customers will blow back on them" approach hasn't worked yet. I'm also fixating on the bad here, because I look at "both kind and nasty business models can succeed" and reflexively respond with "but why do the nasty ones succeed?"
Literally clicked to the comments to say exactly this. While I agree with the overall sentiment of the piece, this statement destroys the author's credibility.
Our infrastructure runs on freedom and good ol' American grit! Take for example our beautiful highways. They were built after the war (which, by the way, America WON), by the US Army (the greatest fighting force on Earth), using $100B of 1950s taxpayer money (mostly gasoline taxes). Just plain ol' simple taxation of the public to support social programs built and maintained by the government. Now if that's socialism, call me a socialist, but dang if it didn't work. Not sure why we can't do that anymore, but I try not to think about it too hard. Yeehaw!
I did the same mod on my 2019 MBP 16, and I got two more years of useful life out of it in exchange for nearly burning myself a few times when watching a movie or running some kind of CPU-intensive task with the laptop touching my body (even through a t-shirt or jeans!). Eventually, the airflow from the cooling fans started to weaken and the display flex cable started to get a bit squirrely on me. I'm on a 14" M-series MBP now, and it's freakishly quiet and efficient.
This article showcases multiple causes for why seniors are coming off of these drugs: drug shortages, changing insurance coverage, muscle loss, and other side effects are all included. Let's not be too hasty when attributing cause to this trend.
Why highlight seniors then? The same factors apply to younger patients. The only explanation that makes sense is that "seniors" is a valuable ad word for the market this clickbait gibberish (or rather, "tossed factoid salad") targets.
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