I think for some segment of the population it will continue forever. But I think most people grow out of piracy eventually.
In my experience, adults generally don't steal things, even if no one is going to catch them and even if they really want it. And consequently most people grow out of piracy. Not everyone of course, but enough for me to believe there's still a future in selling IP.
I think stealing is only part of it. A lot of it is actually availability: the mainstream industry simply can't or won't compete on availability and convenience, which explains why piracy is rampant.
If you could pay a fee and get whatever show/movie you wanted, whenever you wanted, without region restrictions, and in the original language, I think we would see a drastic reduction of piracy. Some people will download pirated movies just because, of course, but I think we would see a drastic reduction of piracy if paid content was just more convenient.
In other word, distributors need to shape up. Of course, it's easier to blame consumers and try to enforce stricter DRM instead of improving the quality of service...
Unfortunately, this argument doesn't get the attention it deserves. A clickhoster account can cost more than a Netflix account, yet people are willing to pay for it, even though they might not end up using it to its extent. In Europe many people would gladly pay to watch GoT when it's released. Customers don't care for marketing rights, they just want to watch the show when it's released.
I don't disagree that a lot of people would stop pirating if there was a legal alternative. However, in my experience, most adults will simply chose an alternative rather than resort to piracy (which is probably watching a different show, but it could also be simply not watching TV).
I'm in that camp, now. I'll just pick another show which is available on Hulu/Netflix/Amazon, or I'll play my Xbox, or I'll take a walk. Not a big deal.
My company has a pretty impressive black "market" for US/UK TV Shows, Movies and selected software. We also have a party-disc where everybody can upload their mp3 collections. Especially TV Shows are a run pretty much everywhere. My girlfriend shares Shows with her yoga group. They just switch USB sticks.
We grew out of Game sharing and porn. But who downloads porn illegally these days anyway...
Joe Random Recruiter can decide one day that he is a recruiter for Google/Twitter/FB/anyone else. He doesn't need or obtain their permission - he just starts firing out emails to everyone he can find on i.e., LinkedIn.
The email says something like: "My client, {Google, Facebook, etc}, is looking for someone with {one of your skills}. Are you interested?"
If you reply yes, he then sends an email to {Google, Facebook, etc} and says:
"I'm representing an engineer with {your skills} at {outrageous price including fat commission}. Are you interested?"
Assuming they are in fact interested in you (which they likely are), Google/Facebook/etc is now in a tough position.
- Google/FB/etc can say YES, pay the fat commission to the recruiter, and give you the job. You think the recruiter is a gift from heaven.
- Google/FB/etc can say NO, and the recruiter will just tell you they flaked, the opportunity disappeared, or just never contact you again.
The twist is that if Google/FB/etc says NO, the you will end up with a bad impression of THEM, not Joe Random Recruiter. They don't even know your name, with which they could reach out and explain.
Google/FB/etc know this, and as an engineer you are (currently) so valuable that they are (currently) forced to play ball.
And unfortunately, since this method actually works, we see more "recruiters" popping up every day. Even worse, the bad ones are the most aggresive, and they drown out the honest players.
My advice to the Googles/FBs/Twitters of the world: make a page listing the firms you DO work with, just as you list the IP ranges of your crawlers. Not a great idea, but its all I've come up with.
My advice to the job seekers of this world: cut them some slack - you probably didn't ever actually talk to Google/Facebook/etc, or at least they were misinformed about you.
This is definitely a problem, and in the case of Amazon that's likely what happened, as the individual I dealt with is part of a third-party recruiting firm. In the case of Google, however, the recruiter has an @google.com email, so I'd say he's actually employed by them and it really does reflect poorly on them.
You seem to have a good grasp on this, so I'll ask you: why are things set up such that recruiters are "Joe Random Recruiter" to me, rather than "Joe, who I have met, worked with across multiple job switches, and who relies on my trust"?
There are recruiters out there that fall into the later category. lookahead.com.au is a great example of a company that doesn't spam, doesn't pressure and doesn't lie.
I've known the founder of the company for about 5 years now and he is well respected within the communities he operates in (Ruby on Rails, iOS, DevOps, etc)
One big reason: turnover rate. For recruiters it's about 70% first year, and ~90% by second year. Most jobs are contract and not many people survive agencies. Internal jobs are more stable so turnover rates are likely a lot lower.
There are people that stay in contact throughout multiple switches, but it's pretty rare. Staying in touch after getting you multiple jobs presumes they are likely in agency and that they still work on the same type of roles. Agency turnover is high so they might not even be in recruiting after the first year. Then also take myself, I worked on varying roles from finance, healthcare, mech eng, swe, ml, pm, and more all in the last 2 years. Chances of me working the exact type of role I got you into a year later is unlikely.
Whenever you have a good interaction with a recruiter, tell them that, and tell them that you'd like to build a relationship and contact them every time you begin a job search. The good ones will be receptive.
I think it is common for agencies to have Non Compete clauses such that if your favorite recruiter goes someplace else, they aren't allowed to represent you for a certain period.
What if the recruiter tells you that Google/FB/etc reviewed your resume and you didn't make the cut? (When in actuality they just don't want to pay the commission)
You wouldn't dislike them, but you might then not apply for a job there (thinking you had already been turned down once), and then Google/FB/etc misses out on any chance to hire you.
Color 71%
Human 67%
Photo 65%
Dog 59%
Person 57%
Placental_Mammal 56%
Animal 50%
Long_Jump 50%
Huh?
This isn't me cherry picking bad results; aside from their demos I'm not finding any photos that are accurately classified. I even tried a headshot of a person isolated on a white background, and Watson told me I uploaded a photo of "shoes".
Seriously - how is this data useful? What could I build with this level of accuracy?
Watson team - do you agree? Is this product about to get a lot better, soon, or is this considered "pretty good"?
The top 3 classes in your example are actually correct - it is a color photo of a human. But we expect it to get much better over time. Only real world usage will allow us to make real improvement - and that's why we are eager to release early.
We are also believe that the first applications (e.g., classifying animals or plants or landmarks in dedicated apps) will have narrower use case that give better accuracy.
The top 3 may be correct, but they aren't very useful. What could I do with this information? What feature could I build?
Also, the other results are very wrong. (i.e., Watson is more confident that this is a dog than a person. And I have no idea where it got "Long Jump" from). This makes it hard for me to trust Watson.
Is the recommendation that I incorporate a "confidence in Watson" metric, and ignore most of the results?
What confidence from Watson would you say indicates an answer that is probably accurate? And how confident are you that Watson's self-reported confidence is accurate?
I tend to disagree. Assuming they are correct on a larger corpus you can start doing things like "only do face matching on pictures with people in them" and weed out photos in a batch that don't have those three properties.
Watson is a training API rather than say the more fanciful emergent AI type API. More data, the better it gets. It is like Google's voice recognition isn't good because someone coded the magic constants for various accents, rather it is good because Google fed it millions of samples of spoken words and corrects it when they get it wrong.
Thanks for your comment. This makes sense - I would use Watson to determine which photos have humans at all, and then run those through, e.g., my facial recognition software. But Watson would keep me from having to waste resources looking for faces in photos of trees, for example.
I'm not in this field, so I'm having trouble understanding what use cases / consumer facing features this API unlocks. Your comment is very helpful in that regard.
It's actually very useful if it can detect with reasonable confidence that there is a person in a picture.
One example of a use is at Kiva we require borrowers to have a picture of themselves posted for their loan. But sometimes we get pictures of things like goats or cows instead (those are kind of nice to but gotta follow policy). Currently this is something we have to manually review for, but if we could automate that review piece it would save a lot of time (especially if at some point it could also count the number of humans in a photo).
Why confidence that it is a human is higher than confidence that it is a placental mammal, and confidence that it is a placental mammal is higher than confidence that it is an animal? More specific descriptions must have less confidence.
Or Watson is not confident that humans are placental mammals and placental mammals are animals?
The problem with AI systems has almost always been that they tend to be both right and wrong in ways that humans would never be.
Watson gives high confidence to it being a color photo of a human (which is a Person, and an Animal). Which is right. But the only part that a human would ever really care about is that there's another human in the picture.
It gets things wrong with a reasonable confidence for Dog, Placental_Mammal and Long_Jump...importantly, these are wrong in ways that humans would never get wrong.
Just as important are the omissions. A human would probably describe this as a picture of a girl or young woman, laughing or smiling, with curly brown hair wearing a scarf -- and maybe some other incidental information.
Of that description, Watson only got the superclass of one part correct (Human, Person) and didn't provide any of the other parts.
AI fundamentally "thinks" differently than a human, and that makes it hard for humans to use AI as a cognitive enhancement tool in the same way humans use calculators, books, writing, etc. We don't trust what an AI is doing or the answers it provides because for the information it provides, AIs tend to provide right-and-irrelevant, weirdly wrong, or omits obvious and necessary information that a human might use for informational purposes.
If humans ever encounter aliens, it's likely that their mode of thinking will be just as different. So bridging that gap, and figuring out how to make AI like this useful could be a useful endeavor.
One thing a machine learning system can do that any one human cannot do is ingest lots of data. For example, for some tasks in which I have tried to compare human vs machine speech recognition performance the machine actually does better because the machine may - for example - know a singer's name that an individual human may not recognize.
I'm an Exchange user with a Nexus 4, and the most recent Android update has really made my life tough.
First, they removed the normal email app, forcing me to use Gmail. I really dislike the Gmail app.
Next, they removed the normal calendar app, and replaced it with Google Calendar. I preferred the old one, and I don't use Google Calendar, I use Exchange.
And of course, I lost about 80% of my contacts (also stored on my Exchange account).
I've since switched to Nine[1] and turned off Sync on my exchange account (via Android settings), and that's fixed a lot of my problems. I can't recommend Nine enough.
Its frustrating. I liked the old "vanilla" Android. I just want an OS that stays the way I configured it, instead of changing its interface and removing applications at random.
Anyone else have this experience? What's the option? Cyanogen? I just want a phone that works; I don't want to spend my whole life on this.
I was in a similar boat, and switching to WP8 solved most of my calendar issues (and a lot of UI issues, as well). It also has very good support for multiple email accounts of different types. Not surprisingly, it has excellent Exchange support, but that's no guarantee it will be painless, due to the many bizarre configuration options offered to Exchange administrators:
1. There's no guarantee that autoconfiguration will work, especially if your address is user@example.edu but your server is exchange.example.edu.
2. You may be required to lock your screen with a password.
3. You may be required to allow remote wiping of your device (by your email provider, seriously?).
4. You may be required to enable ActiveSync in an out-of-band operation.
To make matters worse, error messages from any of the above tend to be completely meaningless.
But once you get past those hurdles, it's actually a pretty nice experience.
If you need to access calendars from other systems, you might be able to import or subscribe to them in your Microsoft account (live/outlook/onedrive/yahoo.com) online. I was able to integrate the school calendars of my children this way. It's not intuitive, but it's a set-and-forget task.
Exchange compatibility is a bit hit and miss right now though: the full suite of Activesync policies is not available, meaning that a lot of nifty functionality that I tended to rely on back in the day (SMS sync to email inbox is one...) don't work anymore. I'm hoping WP10 brings that stuff back.
As a sidenote, this is the first time I have ever seen the solution to anything be "switch to WP8". Neat!
If there's anything that still is a horrible UI on WP8 it's the email app. It's wretched folder interactions are useless. More than any other "base app", the email app needs updating. Of course the new email app MS pushed to Android/iOS is gorgeous, but not for us WP8 folks. We're not good enough.
I think that really depends on how you use email, and since original WP was all about simplicity, the app is tailored more for a simple use (I just read email, don't delete/sort or anything else)
There is deleting and sorting (moving to another folders) and is any more time-wasting than other apps I've used. I have no idea what is he talking about.
At the risk of being tarred and feathered. Did you consider a blackberry z30. I was given one through work and I wouldn't go back. Solid battery life, awesome inbox and phone capabilities. Browser is Essentially safari and the apps aren't too bad. You give up the App Store or google play but the upside is it just works.
I've never built them outside of a whole platform build so you might (read: probably) will hit issues. This could be a fun project for someone and it sounds like there is demand.
You can get them with cyanogenmod as well, but there's a deeper issue. There's been an outstanding series of bugs with 4.4.3 and 4.4.4 that have prevented exchange from actually connecting running. I haven't been able to even bring up the old email app since upgrading to 4.4.4.
I had the exact same situation after my Nexus 7 updated.
Bonus WTF: the old email app had a view that combined all your inboxes in one places; the Gmail app does not. So for me (who uses several email accounts, none of which are on Gmail) it was a pretty dramatic downgrade.
I'm using cyanogenmod 11 on my galaxy nexus, which still has the email and calendar applications with exchange sync. It looks like contacts sync should work too.
I'd go with windows phone or iphone potentially now they are getting more microsoft support. No chance of the mail app getting replaced on either of those.
I had and used the Nexus One, S and Galaxy Nexus before moving to the iPhone 5 (since it finally had LTE and turn by turn nav). I was tired of shitty hardware design and bad battery life. If you're looking for a pretty controlled vanilla experience where you don't have to do everything the iPhone works pretty well and they're basically the same in terms of features.
Touchdown will take care of Calendar, Email, and Contacts with exchange. It's not as pretty as some of the others, but it's the most feature rich by far. It's basically Outlook for Android.
I am on 4.4.4 (Samsung though). The default calendar and email apps are still on there. Doesn't Nexus remove the default Android browser and replace it with Chrome too?
What? The designers start making incredibly strategic decisions and start cutting out functionality that was used by a margin of the customers that only benefited the competition (and the user)?
My Uber driver on Wednesday flat out told me he won't pick up certain racial groups, because they tend to leave lower-than-five-star ratings. It was offensive, but I understand that his > 4.5 star rating is essential to his well-being.
(This is the modern day equivalent of not being able to hail a cab if you are a person of color.)
Uber & friends will need to fix that, or their drivers are going to keep cherry-picking riders to maintain their ratings and giving a lot of customers bad experiences.
Perhaps they could simply throw out the grumps' ratings (e.g., this rider rated the driver a 2, but that's normal for this rider, so just ignore it).
Or its because the advertisers want to get more than one use out of the ad?
The Super Bowl is not the only "big game". In fact its not usually even a particularly great game, and its never a rivalry. So saying "Big Game" instead of "Super Bowl" means they can use the ad again, and maybe even for another sport!
You're saying there is no other event that Dorito's could possibly use an ad about "The Big Game" for? That's incorrect, and that's my point.
Why make an ad you can only use once, when you could easily tweak it and be able to reuse it? Like you said, its not like anyone won't know you mean the Super Bowl, when you're talking about the big game on Super Bowl weekend.
Can you show me any ad, from any time, for any product, that refers to "the big game" meaning the superbowl and then, after tweaks, refers to some other big game?
From later in the post: "The key is nobody has to cool these devices, so it’s almost like free computing at the endpoint."
Also, you don't have to buy it! (the user bought their phone/computer and pays for the power)
I agree its a bit handwavy. I suppose the remaining cost is the cost of transmitting more data?
But regardless, it is a good point - we are absolutely crazy to not be taking advantage of all the free computing and power that our users have purchased for us to use (and are paying the costs up upgrades and maintenance). I've felt this way for a while (especially when OnLive came out), but it seems that servers have so far been cheap enough that its been cheaper to buy more servers than spend valuable engineering time making your app distributed.
Yes, but it needs to be done very carefully. As soon as your app is draining my battery or running my fans inappropriately, your app is gone. The key word, of course, is inappropriately. This puts caps on how much you can use, but it is still an essentially free resource.
I think that's a major issue. The best way we know how to save battery live on devices now is not all these fancy computing techniques or what have you, it is the finish a computation and shut the device off as quickly as possible. So this strategy seems to run counter to that basic idea of power saving.
This reminds me of The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing[1], in a funny way (bear with me).
In pricing, if you have features in common with other vendors then those features are commodities and basically valueless. But the features you have that no one else has - those make you priceless.
For example, S3's uptime record makes it a different product than e.g., DreamObjects, even though they are API compatible.
Similarly, while VCs are all providing the ultimate commodity product (dumb money), its the features which no one else has that make investors like Ron Conway priceless. There's plenty of other VCs, but they are not substitute products for Ronco.
Finally, the way to find these unique, priceless features is to look for extremes:
- Cloud hosting with not just 99.99% uptime, but 100% uptime
- Email inboxes with not just a lot of storage, but *unlimited* storage
- Photos developed not just faster, but *instantly*
- A VC with not just a great track record of doing the right thing, but a *perfect* record
And as a consumer, these are the companies you want to do business with: the Rackspaces, the Ron Conways, and the Stripes of this world.
[1] If you read one business book this year, make it The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing. If you don't think a book on pricing can change your life, you haven't read this book. Protip: get an older edition and save a ton of dough.
Thank you so much Brian! I'll start reading it right away.
The class sounds great as well, and I hope you enjoy it. If you find yourself compelled to share anything in particular, I'd be very interested to hear it. Maybe you could do a blog post?
For what it's worth, Seth Godin's book All Marketers Are Liars also covers the material in your specific example. It probably doesn't cover most of what's in the rest of The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing, though imho the idea of 'going to the extremes' is so important that it's really worth reading an entire book just on that idea.
That's a great book too - I like Seth's writing style. I believe he calls this "finding a edge".
TSATOP is different because teaches you to actually quantify the value delivered to the customers. i.e., how much, in real dollars, is 100% uptime going to save us over 99.99%?
It seems like a small difference, but its not: 100% uptime unlocks new business models that don't work with "only" 99.99% uptime (e.g., banking software or API companies). That's what TSATOP really explains - how to quantify the seemingly minute differences in your offering, and how to communicate that value to the customer so that you can charge accordingly.
To use an example actually from the book, how much money will a DNA testing kit that requires 10% less sample material be worth to a customer?
Well, first that depends on who the customer is - its a lot more valuable to a pharma company than a university, for example. But how much more? The book would do something like calculate the number of new drugs the pharma company can release each year based on having this better DNA testing kit, and calculate how that affects the customer's bottom line. Eventually this would result in something like: every time you use our product instead of our closest competitor, it puts $50 in your pocket.
Seth Godin's writing is awesome for motivation and to get your brain moving, but this book really drills down on the nuts and bolts of pricing, and provides templates and worksheets for performing your own Economic Value Estimation of your product. Both are really useful, but this one is more like a textbook, whereas Seth's is more like a (very) motivational speech.
Nice, I'll definitely go through this. For a typical freemium product, do you see it as being most useful when one is ready to start building out monetizable features, or do you see it as being essential for building an mvp and finding the most basic level of product-market fit? (Given that understanding the implications of pricing would probably be useful immediately, but learning it would also take time away from building the product.)
I think pricing is the very first thing you should think about, before features. Once you know what's actually valuable to your customers, it'll be easy to figure out what features to build to deliver it.
This book probably isn't an excellent fit for freemium pricing models. Its more about pricing B2B products, instead of consumer products. But you should still read the book anyway, because it teaches you to understand your customers' problems (and the value of solving those problems) at such a deep level that you would never be willing to part with that much value again for free.
Furthermore, and this is the big takeaway from the book, you're[1] looking at the problem backwards. The question is not, "can I find someone to whom my product is worth at least X" - that's flawed from the start.
The correct process is this:
1) Find a customer with a problem
2) Figure out how much its worth to the customer to have that problem solved ($X)
3) See if you can design and a product for less than $X
For example:
1) The local cab company wants to grow its business
2) It is currently making $300,000 per year. A 50% increase would be worth $150,000 (naively)
3) Could you create a white label Uber that would increase ridership by 50% for less than $150,000?
Thinking about it that way, there's no room for freemium. If you're thinking about freemium, you should find a new customer base or a new problem to solve.
(BTW, I love talking about pricing. Please shoot me an email any time if you'd like to talk more. I have a new SaaS that I would love feedback on, and I would be happy to offer my feedback on yours as well.)
It seems there are two books with the same title but different subtitles. Are you referring to "A Guide to Growing More Profitably" or " A Guide to Profitable Decision Making"?
But honestly any edition is great - its sold as a textbook[1], so they seem to make periodic, cursory updates, but the substance remains unchanged. I suspect the 1994 edition is fantastic as well, and perhaps available in your local library.
I hope you like it, and get as much out of it as I have! And thank you for taking my recommendation, that made my day. :)
[1] That its a textbook is perhaps my favorite meta-lesson of the book itself. How do you charge $100 for a book? Call it a text book!
Another way to read this is that every generation gets braver, and more willing to stand up for their privacy. (The proportion of people in the 'protection over privacy' camp consistently goes down with age).
I hope its a generational thing, and that these young folks won't change over to the "protection over privacy" camp as they age.
In my experience, adults generally don't steal things, even if no one is going to catch them and even if they really want it. And consequently most people grow out of piracy. Not everyone of course, but enough for me to believe there's still a future in selling IP.