I hope you don't think I was ridiculing you. Believe it or not, I actually upmodded your original post because provided an alternative point of view. I may disagree with it, but it takes two sides to have a decent conversation.
I take exception to most of this statement. My story: At 25 years old, I took every penny I had in savings (about $300k) and started a company. I "created" 7 well-paying jobs. I put every single penny I had into my company. I had "major medical" insurance, which I paid about $600 a month for.
Two years later, we were doing about 2 million a year. Still, I poured every penny I had into the company "creating" additional good-paying jobs. Then I had a stroke. Yes, at 27. Because the doctors could not find a "reason" for my stroke, the insurance company paid a grand total of $2700, mostly for the ambulance and the care I received in said ambulance.
I was left with a bill of $67,000. Yes 3 zeros. Because of how long I was in the hospital and recovering, and because my business was based on relationships with my clients, the business faltered, and I eventually shut it down. I am now paying off every cent of what I owed on the business, as well as that $67k in medical bills.
Moral of the story: don't think you're invincible because you're young, or because you don't have a pre-existing condition. Also, I can absolutely assure you that medical debt DOES affect your credit.
Here's the crazy part. I'd do it all again in a heartbeat, and I will.
"Startup founders are mostly hackers, and hackers are much more constrained by gentlemen's agreements than regulations. If they shake your hand on a promise, they'll keep it. But show them a lock and their first thought is how to pick it."
I love this quote, and agree wholeheartedly. Hackers are typically some of the most honorable people I know, and when they say something, they mean it. Likewise, they're some of the most ingenious people I know. When it comes to taking something apart or putting it together, hackers can usually do it.
"i can understand her optimism, but how are they going to take market share away from google?"
That's what everyone said about Apple before Jobs came back too. It's amazing how an energized, focused leader with an "outside" perspective can make a world of difference. Look at Apple now.
I'd be curious to know if pg and gang do exit surveys to find out what founders thought was valuable and what they thought could be done different/better.
At my Japanese employer salary assignments are done by grade and there is essentially no deviation for individuals. The company does not have managers ask engineers whether they are getting paid enough, because engineers rush to say "I am thankful for the opportunity to work here and am glad to be paid the same as every other engineer in my grade." I have said it myself.
Then once a year when they recalculate grades, they tell the I-can't-believe-its-not-a-union "Do an anonymous survey and tell us what people actually think." They even follow the recommendations a portion of the time.
I love your stance on not doing anything formal. But if you took an anonymous survey of all the American engineers at my company, you'd probably hear "Do anonymous surveys or people will give you the answer they think you want to hear" from 100% of them. (Population size: 1)
Also, convenience samples have some well-known issues: if somebody was totally soured by their experience and cursed your name, would you still be talking to them on a regular basis? (My company has the same issue with its salary survey, incidentally: the people who are most dissatisfied with the amount of money offered no longer work here. Funny how that happens.)
"Twitter and Bell have agreed that Bell customers on the company's text messaging bundles will be able to receive unlimited incoming Twitter SMS messages at no extra charge."
Just wanted to throw something out there as food for thought/discussion starter.
In my opinion, the current argument that people demand free content and will not pay seems to me to be a lot like early Internet (even pre-internet BBS) users who said the Internet wasn't the place for business. That obviously has proven wrong. I think the "people will not pay when they can find it free" theory will prove to be wrong too.
I think there is plenty of proof that people will pay for things on the internet. However, micropayments, especially "1 cent to read a blog," etc, are worthless. Content is not worth a penny and the hassle of a microtransaction. Your content is either worth at least one or two hundred times as much (aka a buck or two), or it's worth nothing and should be posted for free. (Or you should be otherwise bundling your content up into large enough chunks or highlighted portions that the payment is worth your customer's time to make.)
Price as barrier to entry is less of a concern than people think. The real issue for customers is the presence of a new container of content which must be paid for. It's getting over the barrier of actually paying that's an issue. If you have something of value, and make the barrier of entry to unlock the content via payment extremely low, people will pay for it.*
The "If your content isn't going to be free it had better be DAMN CHEAP!!!" mentality comes from the very loud, very wrong Slashdot-types who said the iPod would fail because it wasn't $89 and iTunes Music Store songs weren't gonna sell unless they were $0.15 each. They seemed to do fairly well. People are used to capitalism. A good price -- when paired with a good, desirable and confidently presented product -- indicates quality.+
If you tell your customer that you think your blog post is worth a penny, or that your newspaper is worth 5 cents, (plus the time it would take to actually pay for the product) why on earth is a customer going to think there is any merit to your content?
* Even a pre-signed in one-click "deduct a $0.05 from my microtransaction purse" is a barrier to entry. It's a small one, but you're still asking people to commit to buying something.
+ Obviously by "a good price" I mean a price which isn't so stupidly high that everyone has decided you're ripping them off, or a price so low that you are presenting your product as below-par, a knockoff, or otherwise worthless.
just asking out of curiosity: wouldn't $1 still qualify as a micropayment as well, i.e. a charge easily consumed by processing fees alone? as much as half of $1 easily goes to fees until you aggregate-charge the buyer (if that is even feasible).. and even amazon fps and paypal fee schedules are not that cheap.
I do remember someone bringing up how Apple does micropayments (a la iTunes Store) and Apple charges once or twice in the beginning and then aggregate-charges the rest anywhere from the same day to a few days later. Most places interested in micropayments don't have that kind of luxury of users who will store credit card numbers and buy things on a regular basis..
Would anyone but the sort of person who reads sites like HN go for that? It seems like you would need a lot of training and a lot of trust (or wait for a new generation of humans to grow up) for that to take any mainstream hold, without SOME initial gateway. I mean, even if there were some sort of central PayPal-type system, you'd have to login or click "enable" at least once on any new site. "Enable paying for stuff. [x]"
A truly gateless ("zero click?") system which would just start charging your card the moment you landed on a page would obviously alleviate that issue, but that would imply a (probably currently impossible) amount of trust in content providers.
All that aside, I'm still not wholly convinced the numbers will work out for microtransactions at that low a cost even if people would go for it. I'm glad people are having the discussions, because obviously people need to continue to crack how to make money off of content that isn't a commercial song, TV show, or piece of software, but I'm wary of this particular proposal.
I wouldn't mind enabling paying for sites I used a lot.
Providing people with a record of the charges and an easy dispute mechanism both sides could trust would alleviate some of the trust issues with the content providers. Content providers who got dinged too often could be banned from using the service.
This post was down-modded so far I shouldn't even respond, but I'm going to anyway. While you seem to blame Republicans for every thing that ails you, keep in mind that the "loosened regulations" on mortgage lending which is what caused this problem in the first place were initiated by a Democrat, Barney Frank, at the urging of a Democrat, Bill Clinton. Now go put your head back in the sand.
Both of those posts are being downmodded because this is not the place to have a "democrats versus republicans" debate. Keep that stuff on reddit, thank you.
IMHO, the best thing they could do was keep this thing secret while they figured out a way to solve the problem. Not that I think the whole problem was fixed, but this specific problem was fixed. Had the general public been aware, the problem would have been much worse, and John Q. Public would start pulling money out, and shoving it in his mattress, because he didn't understand what was happening.
That's why it's called a Panic.
Also IMHO, a lot of the current economic problems have to do with turning on the news every night and seeing "how bad" the economy is and "it's getting worse." Seems like a self-reinforcing problem to me. That's what happens when you make the public aware of the "problem," when they don't understand all the gory details.
As far as the Bush-bashing, and the information not being able to inform current decision making, that's crap. The people that need to know, do know.
Unfortunately, the panic was in large part caused by secrecy, as people realized that many "money good" assets had actually been losing value for over a year, and that the government had been colluding to try to keep anyone from ever finding out.
