I think the point is that Bing is competition, but they are not as good as Google's product.
So i.e. it is not simply the fact that Google is #1 "just because" and they are sitting there milking an inferior product and forcing it on everyone through backroom deals to keep the monopoly, but they are top because they have a better product and keep winning competitive bids as a result.
I think the fact that these failed pitches even happened (and happened multiple times in the past decade or so) shows that there is quite strong competition. It's not like this was just some unheard of startup sending emails to apple and not getting a response, it sounds like proper high-level stuff between two behemoths of tech (apple and microsoft), so it was a serious thing from the sounds of it.
Personally I use duckduckgo which I think uses Bing, and I am comfortable with it, but there you go.
I don't know how it helps their case to show that their main competitor is weak and underinvested, wouldn't it be way better for them if they could portray Bing as formidable competition?
Wouldn’t index to much on Apple just meeting with Bing as a sign of Bing being a realistic solution. If I was apple I would off course try to create the sense Bing is viable alternative to extract as much value from Google in negotiations
Google does not have a better product. They used to, but not anymore. I usually use google but only out of habit and because it was the default. A lot of times I have trouble and end up on duckduckgo, which uses Bing. Now with GPT integration Bing is really useful.
Apple gets paid tens of billions of dollars per year by Google, which is over a third of the revenue Google brings in from Safari. They have an absolutely gigantic financial incentive to keep using Google. Even if they were to acquire Bing for free, they would still have to get its profits to over a third of Google’s Safari-attributed revenue just to break even on the switch.
If Apple were to acquire Bing, it would be about gaining control at a financial cost. Bing being as good as Google as a search engine doesn’t really come into it.
Apple probably agreed that acquiring Bing was worthwhile, as the discussions did happen, but they haven’t agreed that it was worth more than the amount Google pays to them to stay the default search engine.
If I had all the money in the world, I'd also buy the very same car seven times in a row, if it's simply the best car for me. That doesn't mean the car market is not competitive.
I'm not arguing that the search engine market is competitive, it is probably not, but deriving that conclusion from the fact that Apple did not choose Bing in favor of Google is... weak, in my opinion.
I have interviewed and hired a couple engineers from Invison over the years. Internally they saw Figma coming but they got stuck in legacy tech dept. They did the cardinal sine of trying to rewrite big parts of their tech from scratch instead of shipping quickly in the direction they needed to go. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
My current sass startup I bootstrap to 20 million arr in 4 years before raising money. This my third software company bootstrapping to millions in arr. Shoot me a message down to give you whatever advice I can and intro you to other people who have been on this journey. Gmail account is Oconnoroisin
You should be charging a % of revenue as people scale. That way you align with taking value as more value is driven. If you look at companies like Shopify over half of their revenue comes from processing fees. Maybe price is a good place to start to get people in but probably not best model long run.
There's a lot of justification for ethical percentage-based businesses. Particularly if the service provided is provided on each transaction.
It also means they don't make any money if their customers don't make any money. It's a good incentive for providing a quality product, over say, a single lump sum purchase price.
Variabilising all a company’s costs is every CFO’s dream: it makes all projections perfectly linear and totally eliminates any risk as zero revenue doesn’t create a loss because all costs also go to zero.
At least, in the start-up phase of operations.
Later, when economies of scale kick in and break-even has been far overcome, one seeks to negotiate smaller unit charges, primarily to capture more of the added value for oneself, and partially to reduce visibility of one’s revenue.
That's all definitely true. I think the cloud is a terrible value proposition for anything that's not a startup, for instance: You will safe a crud-ton of money paying your own IT staff instead of paying Amazon's IT staff, provided you have a stable business with relatively predictable needs.
Arguably, once you are a big player in a space, you should ideally have the clout to negotiate a better deal too.
Ethical companies don't exist. The only point of a company is to make money. If the company lets ethics get in the way of that it will be replaced by a more effective company.
10 years ago out of college I helped set up some microfinance banks in Coffee producing communities in Honduras. At first your taken aback that people are paying 40%+ annual interest rates on small loans for these banks. But when your in the communities talking to people you realize their opportunity costs are like 400%+. Example is in most coffee producing communities in Central America farmers have to sell their products before they even grow them for 4-10x bellow the market rates if they just waited and banded together as co-op. Their issue is no access to financial products and they are substance farmers with no option but sell to coyotes to get money for food. In this world micro finance is a game changer in their quality of lives for it creates options
- if the opportunity costs are high, would it nonetheless not be better to have fair rates?
- if you believe in the market, why are there not already offers with more acceptable rates? Is there just not enough capital (which seems wrong, if you believe in your own claim that it's so profitable to invest), or because the risk is so high?
- most importantly, even if 40% was in fact an acceptable rate, what happens to those that can't repay? Say your crop is eaten by a bug or the local militia steals your harvest or you get injured and can't do the work - what happens to a poor person with a 40% loan? The answer is eternal, ever growing, unrepayable debt and suffering.
No thanks. This is not a kind gesture, this is Russian roulette - two chambers: you get even, two chambers: you make an enormous and sustainable profit, two chambers: your family is in debt for generations.
Before figuring out what rates are fair you should take all the variables into account, the big one is probably the default rate. If enough of these small businesses go out of business the survivors will have a more difficult situation as well because their loans will have to make up the shortfall. A typical default rate for these kind of loans is 5 to 10%, that's a lot of principal losses.
Of course the default rate is artificially higher because only loans with high interest are available and a more widely available reasonable rates would likely lower those defaults.
In a way, the finance part is the easy part. The borrowers do the research for you, so all you need to do is gatekeep the applications and write cheques. More advanced change, like setting up co-ops, improving relationships with suppliers and buyers, or product diversification to tap into non-local demand, is likely to be much more abstract, require much more hands on intervention, and will by necessity look more like charity work or statecraft than a quantifiable business venture.
Not to mention C Market price of coffee per lb is $1 on average and selling below that means the basically work for free! The opportunity cost of some $$ to maintain or build up a farm and institute good farming practices for higher quality / yield coffee makes sense because benefits are realized YoY off the first loan !
Curious signaling as a VC to be involved in something so negatively publicly. The best companies/ entrepreneurs are super picky on who to raise money from and I have already heard a couple companies mention this as a reason they didn't talk to Khosla.
Public reputation is a funny thing its not binary and its lagging. By the time people tell you stuff to your face usually its way too late for they have been building their beliefs around who you are way before.
Talking to people behind self driving car companies the issue is not the self driving technology or laws it's more infrastructure around extremely low latency internet to make self driving cars work in the general wild. This article assumes mass adoption really quickly but who knows how quickly our general infrastructure will be updated to enable this especially in third world countries that are ramping up in traditional cars consumption but are notorious for bad mass scale infrastructure (Brazil/ India).
The fact that airbnb is negative for rental rates and hurts locals is Airbnb biggest existential threat. In reality renters outnumber home owners that do Airbnb thus when it comes to regulations people will vote for more regulation long term.
I run a mainly remote team with over 30 people that also has a small office in LA. I am blown away with the level of competition for remote roles we hire for vs a role in our LA office. On average job boards will drive 5x more candidates for the remote role and the overall level of candidates is way higher. My last remote dev job post had 300+ candidates and a customer success role has 700+ and this all from one post on Stackoverflow or WeWorkRemotely. That said we might be outlier for we pay really well and have a remote first culture. The overall lesson I got though is their a lot more qualified people are looking to work remotely than their is awesome remote jobs.
Personal referrals that this person was amazing. One huge challenge of remote team members is training is a lot harder. You end up hiring very experienced people due to this and not junior talent. Helpscout another remote team has a bunch of articles on how they have this issue also
