Read Paypal Wars if you want to know how that's done. They spent their entire existence about a week ahead of being crushed by eBay. The trick is to start with brilliant people, hire more brilliant people, and give them all stock options. Or something. They might have just had a longer outlook: if competing with eBay was a zero-sum game and eBay was worried about a bad quarter, Paypal could come out ahead by accepting bad quarters in exchange for good years. I think that's essentially what they did: eBay could (for example) lose 10% of their customers by completely locking out Paypal, or they could try to winnow that down to 5% or 1% or so by coming up with Paypal-like features.
i think the idea is that they will innovate and add features much faster than e-bay or other competitors will.
from a user's perspective, i would much rather use the tools and software provided by a capable team that caters to my needs. that said, you don't really need a brilliant team, just one that does the job better than other current competitors. this is a great opportunity that aligns well with the strengths of the founders.
Of course always a possibility (myspace/photobucket), but I was just supporting Auctomatic's decision seeing as at every turn eBay seems to make their tools harder and harder to use.
There are a million reasons why Auctomatic shouldn't bother, but if they are a great team you'll never be able to convince them of that.
I have not seen this... Cool. Historically though eBay has never put any effort into creating a user friendly experience. "San Dimas" may be a sign that they are wising up and starting to realize that maybe they do have things to fear. It begs to ask, what took so long? Fear? A feeling that any change would detour users or add a new learning curve their users could not handle? Was making it a desktop version a compromise, fear that it would scare their online users? (I have no idea of course)
PayPal kicked ass, why not Auctomatic? May not be the best comparison, but one thing paypal taught us is that the idea of "ownership of users" is very blurred.
You make a very good point, Auctomatic may really have their work cut out for them. But that's what makes it fun, right?
Oh he actually wrote a "it's-not-you-it's-me essay", I actually didn't think he was arrogant, until you mentioned that. If that is true, then he really is arrogant.
As true as this account may be, It would have been in the author's interest to not reveal it at all online, Since after all he still has equity in the company.
As true as this account may be, It would have been in the author's interest to not reveal it at all online, Since after all he still has equity in the company.
Seriously: Because we don't want to be evil. We're willing to not have rounded corners in some browsers, or have menus that don't get animation, or whatever...but we're not willing to prevent anyone (even folks who are blind or otherwise have accessibility problems) from using our product.
Umm..do any of the people "in the know" as you say, have a technical background other than computer science? Ive heard plenty of people in CS refer to a cool programming language as a new "technology". That may be a technically correct use of the word. But when I hear the word technology I think of faster CPU, smaller ram, more powerful jet engines, a new way to design drugs, etc....
In this particular case of streaming video...i would think smaller more convinent cameras with better bandwidth and easier access to the internet.
I'm talking about PG etc saying that they have extra technology, and lookalikes are just fakers. In the know means in this context that people know the justin.tv'ers and know what's going on.
But from what I have read, they just hacked together off-the-shelves technologies. Making new technology in the semi-conductor industry is often very expensive. Besides the skill set required to hack-together off the shelve technology is not nearly as specialized and difficult as making new circuits/chips.
I just meant more that if someone was starting a streaming live video on the go startup. The technology I would be interested in seeing, is if they had developed a easily portable camera with persistant wireless connection.
I personally do not consider most software to be new technology, unless it has some especially innovative algorithm or something. But calling all software technology is just a matter of personal taste.
I would advocate removing all legal advantages unions have to level the market. If they want to exist, let it be a fair voluntary agreement between employees and management without the legal jeopardy that still exists for management during labor disputes.
This agreement could never be fair. Management has hordes of resources at its disposal that can be used to fight workers against improving their conditions. Workers cannot afford the type of representation a company has. Moreover, in an economy with a poor job market, you are bound to find someone to work a given job no matter how bad it is. This does not mean that the given wage is fair, you are simply taking advantage of a deficiency in the system.
You are also neglecting the fact that many of these manufacturing jobs pay a wage that is typically barely enough to support a family. What's to stop management from suddenly cutting workers' pay? Even in the presence of unions, many workers are forced to "grin and bear it" when certain changes are enacted, because they cannot afford to stop working there (their family would go without). In a market with no union protections, management would be free to jerk workers around at will... when the market goes a little sour, they could just lower pay, some workers would quit, others would stay and pick up the extra available hours so that they could still get by, and the company would do fine. When the market improves, management could advertise positions and temporarily raise pays in order to get more people working there. This may seem fair from a supply-demand economics perspective, but when you're talking about the lives of the workers who are not far from poverty, a slight change in pay leads to a dramatically different quality of life. Unions help to deaden this "yo-yo effect" and make the condition of the worker a little more livable and realistic.
I think that's a bad idea. I'm sure there are laws that need reconsideration, there always are. But fundamentally, collective bargaining is an important right because individual workers are worth so little all by themselves. In order for the dynamic you mention in your post to work employees have to be able to organize. They cannot do this if all the legal aspects (aka threats of force) favor the employers. Employers will use Divide and Conquer to win every time.
I guess I don't quite see your point. What stops employees from organizing themselves (say using the web etc), electing someone to represent the group, and negotiating with the company. Lets say the group demands more pay, and the company says no. The employees go on strike, and the company is able to hire all new people. This means that the pay demand was beyond market levels and not an appropriate request. The flip side is the company is unable to find replacements, which would mean that the staff is underpaid, so they grant the raise. Going on strike at a company is an extremely damaging method of contract negotiation putting into jeopardy both the company and the jobs they provide. It is very risky and should only be done as a last resort. Either way, why would you need laws for this (other than current contract law, etc.)
Can you give an example of where the free market and current laws prevent voluntary group negotiation?
"What stops employees from organizing themselves?"
The companies themselves are one thing. I mentioned the practice called blacklisting above. If employees attempt to organize, the company fires the leaders and prevent them from being employed anywhere else in the industry. This, so far as I know, is currently very illegal because of the laws protecting Unions.
Once the workers are disorganized, they're at a big disadvantage. If we assume that individuals are unable to organize because employers use unethical tactics to keep them that way, knowledge and input on company policies becomes much harder to fight for.
Suppose top executives want to "cash out," and pursue a deal that is bad for the long term health and stability of the company but good for short term revenues and stock price. Normal workers are generally too busy with their jobs and families to spend time investigating that sort of thing. By the time the peons find out that a deal has been made, it's way too late to do anything. One of the things Unions theoretically do is ensure the workers have a voice. A Union leader would be involved somehow in the writing of the contract, and when they started talking about sending valuable training personel to a direct competitor he'd be able to fight it with the leverage of the entire Union.
But I am not a lawyer and not an expert on Union law, so I cannot give a complete example.
We're no longer in the old days - organizing is very easy today with all the technological tools available. Doing it in a way that prevents management from knowing who is leading the push is also quite doable. In fact, a group of employees could negotiate in unison by every one of them sending emails to management with the same content at the same time - making it impossible to single out anyone for firing. So again, I don't see your point.
The issue about executives destroying a company is an issue for the board of directors, who fire and hire the executives. If the board agrees to sell their company and the shareholders agree, etc, that is their prerogative as they own the company, not management or the employees. Unions are powerless in this context, which is a good thing.
But I guess the reality is that unions in the US are shrinking fast as they are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
You may be right, but either way anti-union sentiment isn't particularly useful. It's not a good idea to recklessly jettison union protections without understanding what they're really doing in the first place.
You say organizing is easy with the internet, but sites like overhear.us only just launched, and we really have no data about how effective they will be. Secret organization is not effective either, because in order to actually negotiate anything serious they would have to come out, at which point they'd be vulnerable.
And my example is about arriving at the best possible economic solution for everyone, not simply assuming that the way company ownership works is perfect and therefore any consequences of that are Good Things. My example is about making sure the workers can excercise their economic power. I am most definitely not saying that a Union should be able to prevent a Board from selling the company, nor even entering into a bad deal. I'm saying that a company should not be allowed to use threats of force to influence the labor market (eg keep it disorganized by blacklisting leaders).
The simplest answer is that many people believe the "free market wage" is not always the apropriate wage.
Anyhow your defining the free market wage, as the wage the get paid if the have no legal help in there negotations. And then your defining the appropriate wage as the free market wage.
So you are basically stating that by definition the appropriate wage for people to be paid is the wage they could negotiate if they have no laws to help them negotitate.
Basically your conclusion is the axiom you start with.
As PG said in "How to Create Wealth" the contributions of individual workers can not be measured individually. They have to be measured as a whole. That's why the negotiations often need to be done at the organizational level, rather than on an individual basis.
The problem there, of course, is that it becomes harder to hire and fire, thus it becomes harder to maximize the skill of your workforce. Which is why employers really need to think about the consequences of being evil.
The free market wage is the amount that an employer is voluntarily willing to pay, and an employee is voluntarily willing to be paid. To say that this is "inappropriate" is to argue for the introduction of force into one or the other side of this equation which would definitely be inappropriate.
