Imagine a timeline from left to right. On the left is where there's the least knowledge about the project, and on the right the most (when the project is done). Estimates are made at the far left, when the developers know the least.
So as you move along the timeline and more knowledge is discovered, you need to reset expectations frequently.
Ship of Theseus. I new a janitor who used the same broom for his entire 20 year career. All he had to do was replace the head when it wore out, and the handle when it broke.
How did Perl "lose"? It's such a great tool, super powerful and concise. One of the best languages out there, but doesn't seem to have much adoption these days.
"Audi car keeps nagging car owners who decided against premium features when they bought their car."
Would be appropriate too, I think. It is one thing to just not include a certain feature, but it is another thing to still include a button that only has the function to remind you of a possible paid upgrade.
People thought that they bought a car, but they also bought a relation with a company. Like people who buy a smart TV and think they bought just a TV set. Actually they bought a TV set and a relationship with a TV producer who now keeps sucking up their data and shows ads on top of the programs that they intended to watch. How should I call this? Smartphoneification of everything? Is this a good thing?
Even if features have zero marginal cost, they are important for market segmentation, which is important for reducing the cost for most people by allowing less price-discriminating purchasers to pay more.
Imagine instead this was a button that was labeled, "I'm rich" and pressing it echoed back "Yes you are".
That could be similarly paywalled and used for market segmentation.
Instead, they choose to paywall a feature that has minor benefit like "climate sync" (I'm not sure I even understand what that means, I live in temperate climate).
>This is induced scarcity and I hate everything about it.
I mean, I "hate" having to pay for stuff in stores too (markups and all). Like it or not those "zero marginal production cost" products don't have zero cost to develop, so "induced scarcity" (aka. charging the user) is basically the best way to recoup development costs.
IMO, this is an obvious weakness in the capitalist model. Money is supposed to be a social reward for solving problems for people. But they turn this on its head by inducing scarcity on something that is inherently NOT scarce. This is, IMO, anti-social and should not be rewarded by us as a society. We should reward things that create solutions, not things that create artificial scarcity. It's corrosive to capitalism itself.
I do not have a solution for this, but the fact that it's a problem is obvious to me, and the fact it will only get worse with time is also obvious.
> an obvious weakness in the capitalist model... by inducing scarcity on something that is inherently NOT scarce
Which is actually NOT part of the capitalist model at all, but rather social engineering (i.e. socialism) where the government circumvents capitalism for the sake of inducing a particular desired social outcome. In the capitalist model property rights only exist as a consequence of natural scarcity. Copyright does not exist in the capitalist model.
>Money is supposed to be a social reward for solving problems for people. But they turn this on its head by inducing scarcity on something that is inherently NOT scarce.
I don't see how the first sentence contradicts the second sentence. Audi is solving problems (a hot car) for people, by providing a product (an AC). The fact that they're "inducing scarcity" or whatever is orthogonal to this.
>I do not have a solution for this, but the fact that it's a problem is obvious to me, and the fact it will only get worse with time is also obvious.
The fact that you don't have a solution for this suggests that this is a necessary evil that has to exist for society/the economy to work properly. I find it pretty undemocratic and unjust that the government has forces me to make payments to it (ie. taxes). That doesn't mean it's "corrosive" to a democratic/free/just society.
In my view, it is not orthogonal to it at all, we should maximize utility for society instead Audi is incentivized by intentionally diminishing it.
> The fact that you don't have a solution for this suggests that this is a necessary evil that has to exist for society/the economy to work properly.
My, or your lack of imagination as to a solution for this does not prove a solution does not exist, nor does it prove we should not search for one. If everyone along history thought like that, we would still be living in caves.
> In my view, it is not orthogonal to it at all, we should maximize utility for society instead Audi is incentivized by intentionally diminishing it.
If you're talking about utility, the standard argument in support of it would be the same one used for copyright/patents, ie. "even though there's utility to be gained by prohibiting such restrictions and granting access to the product for everyone, the lack of scarcity will eliminate the profit motive from future endeavors, and will therefore eliminate future investment/research making us worse off in the future"
>My, or your lack of imagination as to a solution for this does not prove a solution does not exist, nor does it prove we should not search for one. If everyone along history thought like that, we would still be living in caves.
That's true, but at the same time it seems rather pointless to complain about how something is "corrosive to capitalism" when there isn't an obvious solution. Going back to my previous example, I'd love to live in a world where we can get public services (comparable to today's levels) and not pay any taxes. However, if there's no viable alternative in sight I'm not going to complain about it. I also recognize that even though there might some yet undiscovered funding model that doesn't involve compulsory payments, it realistically doesn't exist or is hundreds of years away, so searching for it seems like a fools errand.
Because that's how they decided to sell it. Why should you pay for a book, music, a movie, software? They're not selling these things out of the goodness of their heart, it's to make money.
You might be new around here, but there's this thing called Free Software where (although that isn't why the word "Free" is there) the marginal charge for more copies is indeed less than five cents and often effectively zero.
Of course modifying the software isn't cheap, unless you're going to learn how and do it on your own time, but that's not a marginal cost
Not so new, but if we price things soley on manufacturing costs Apple products should be a factor 2-3 cheaper while Windows and Office should cost, what, a Dollar max? Not to even think about luxury and brand name stuff. Manufacturing cost is only part of the price calculation, software just sits at one extreme end of the spectrum.
Disclaimer: My private daily driver runs Ubuntu and LibreOffice.
But it doesn't have 0 marginal cost - the R&D that went into developing the hardware needs to be recouped and a profit generated; just because the cost is virtual, in missed profit, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
> Why do you consider giving someone what they paid for 'abuse'?
I consider changing good products to use emotional and marketing manipulation to make customers feel bad about not paying enough "abusive". Just like every other action that prioritizes maximum money extraction over paying customer satisfaction. It doesn't make for a happy society.
>I consider changing good products to use emotional and marketing manipulation to make customers feel bad about not paying enough "abusive".
This entire statement seems like a stretch. Do you also find it "abusive" that freemium products try to upsell premium features, or that a cloud storage service prompts you to buy more storage after you ran out?
>Just like every other action that prioritizes maximum money extraction over paying customer satisfaction. It doesn't make for a happy society.
By the same token, as a paying netflix customer I'm pretty dissatisfied that I have to pay $15/month. I'd be much satisfied and happier if it only costs $0.01.
The option list of Audi os infamous for its complexity and length. It depends on the market so, the German beats the French one by a couple light years. At least last time I checked.
I think you have this backwards. Sure Audi has a lot of editions and packages, but no one else can double a cars MSRP by just adding options like Porsche can.
A couple of years ago I almostanaged to do that with an Audi A4. It's good to see best pratice sharing between brands, like they did with Diesel engines!
One shortcoming that I found recently as I was selling my car is we don’t seem to have a good system for instant payments for large amounts of money.
Having lived in the UK for a while I noticed how bank transfers there seemed to be instant regardless of the amount (just my experience, never did anything over a few thousand).
But I was stuck in the position of either asking for way to much cash that I would be comfortable having to then take into the bank (and probably hard to find a bank that even had that much to withdraw in the first place) or accept a bank cheque which while most people say it’s “as good as cash” I noticed certain banks like NAB have a disclaimer that they can cancel them if they are reported lost or stolen.
I ended up accepting the bank cheque on Friday afternoon, couldn’t deposit it till Monday and then had 3 nervous days of waiting for it to clear.
While PayID and Osko seem to be taking us in the right direction, the limits are still too restrictive for large in person transactions like this.
I sold a car through gumtree here in Aus a few years ago, the buyer sent a bank transfer, I received it, went about my day. Seems very similar to the UK (where I have spent most of my life and still have accounts/make transfers).
As far as I understand bank transfers here are only instant if you are both with the same bank or you use PayID/Osko, which seems to have the caveat of your bank can set their own limit as to maximum transfer size (A quick google shows anywhere from 5k to 30k) and not all banks support this (HSBC don’t).
Of course you could ask the buyer to transfer the money and wait for it to clear before handing over the keys, but that just moves the uncomfortable and stressful situation to the other party (I wouldn’t want to transfer someone money and then have to wait a few days for it to clear before they handed me the keys) and doesn’t actually solve the underlying issue.
Interesting. Looks like NPP was kicked off here a while ago, which seems to offer similar features to Faster Payments in the UK, though it looks like not all banks support it fully (including HSBC https://www.hsbc.com.au/ways-to-bank/online-banking/new-paym...)
Osko is instant but basically all banks will delay large transfers to new accounts. Some banks do this for amounts as low as $1000. Not for a technical reason. Just to give the owner enough time to notice the sms and email in case your account gets breached so you can call customer support to lock everything down.
I’d like to see the option to setup something like a pre-authorised payment. Ideally the same as doing an EFT/Osko/NPP transfer, but the funds are held in a escrow like situation by the bank for a period of time the bank deems “safe”.
Giving the account owners enough time to contact the bank if the payment is unauthorised, but when the waiting period is up you can then choose to release the funds at a time that suits you (eg. for a car sale, when you hand over the keys) or you can choose to can the transaction returning the funds to your account.
Wishful thinking I know, given how much of a mess the instant payment system is at the moment. I had an account that supported PayID with Macquarie and tried to transfer money to another PayID account with Up bank and found that because one of the banks (Macquarie iirc) didn’t support whatever underlying payment system Up used (Osko possibly) I wasn’t able to use PayID and had to use regular EFT instead.
The technical limit for the system is GBP 1,000,000, and the lower limit is up to the bank to determine.
If I were selling a car in the UK, I'd ask for a bank transfer (e.g. laptop/mobile) and wait for it to confirm. If I wished to be especially careful, I'd meet the other person at their bank, and provide the cashier my bank details.
Except when, you know, "the eftpos machine isn't working today".. for real though, "cash only" signs are a very common sight outside the Sydney CBD. (can't speak for other cities)
Absolutely! It just sort of seemed to 'happen' here in Australia over the past ~10 years. It's always a bit surprising when this comes up that this isn't the norm elsewhere.
I personally love the convenience, but admittedly I'm not the demographic that this article is talking about.
this is pretty typical stuff these days for a typical well to do SaaS org.
I've seen it work well. It can help facilitate the conversation between a manager and direct report when trying to understand what the gaps are between their current role, and where they want to go next. It also helps keep those discussions aligned across different managers/directs across the organisation.
It also has it's down sides. There's no perfect solution to soft skills.
