Mission Motors didn't close because of Apple

http://www.asphaltandrubber.com/oped/mission-motors-apple-bullshit-story/

by jseliger • 11 years ago

38 27 11 years ago

Animats• 11 years ago

Imagine what Steve Jobs would have done if someone "poached" three key engineers from the iPhone team before it shipped.

ninv• 11 years ago

Thermonuclear War!!

archmikhail3• 11 years ago

This article is saying that was not the case. The company was failing already and so understandably the top talent went elsewhere, such as Apple.

cwyers• 11 years ago

Probably nothing nice. But I am not obligated to share Steve Jobs' ethics when judging Apple's actions here, and I really don't like the notion that an employee "belongs" to a company that isn't covered in that employee's contract (and even some contracts I think overstep what's legally permissable, not to mention "right.") If you want to keep an employee, you do it by valuing that employee properly, not by shaming competing offers for that employee.

GFK_of_xmaspast• 11 years ago

Wouldn't that have been in the days of the 'no-poaching' regime?

archmikhail3• 11 years ago

So now who do you trust? This guy (whom I know nothing about) or the several media articles (whose writers and sources I know nothing about)? This is the problem with how news is delivered in our age. Back in the day, you primarily just knew the news of your town, and to verify the claims you could walk over to the subjects and ask them.

kevinchen• 11 years ago

Now that the cost of publishing has gone to nothing, you trust that someone who knows what they're talking about (e.g. Asphalt & Rubber) will eventually see a popular but incorrect story and write a correction.

https://stratechery.com/2015/in-defense-of-the-new-york-time...

ksherlock• 11 years ago

You should do some critical thinking and trust yourself.

aresant• 11 years ago

The article author qualifies himself pretty well - he has broken multiple stories about Mission and was the first journalist to ever ride their prototype.

hartator• 11 years ago

I am pretty sure we have better access to information now than before.

jkestner• 11 years ago

More signal, more noise.

austenallred2• 11 years ago

The problem is this: The person who wrote that article for Reuters didn't know anything about Mission Motors. The reporter had to hit her quota by mostly packaging up and rewording Apple press releases because she has to pump out n articles per day. Otherwise Reuters starts to lose money on her and she gets fired.

Expertise and research take time, and therefore are expensive. Reuters can't afford to pay someone to have deep expertise. So she gets pitched on something and pushes it out without much thought, it gets some clicks, and no one cares.

Almost every time I read a piece in the mainstream media about something I understand really well I'm baffled at how badly the press machine we've set up (and inexplicably trust) can butcher it. Then I think about that experience the next time I read about something I don't know much about.

In the age of the Internet (with the monetization of the Internet) the structure of traditional news is fundamentally flawed.

archmikhail3• 11 years ago

This is exactly right. I had detailed knowledge of an acquisition and all media articles about it were so completely wrong that it was offensive.

snowwrestler• 11 years ago

In the good old days, there were just a few news operations. Each had the resources and time to do thorough vetting and deep reporting of each story.

Today, there has been an explosion of news outlets, but each one has little time or resources to do deep reporting. But because there are so many, they are highly incentivized to attack each other's stories, to gain traffic.

I'm not sure that one way is worse than the other, from the audience perspective. Today's news cycle is in some ways more transparent--the first take goes public, then the fact check goes public, then the second take goes public, then the second fact check, etc. And it's all discussed in detail between anyone who's interested--like here on HN, or on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc.

Let's call it a transition from a monolithic "wait until correct" model to a distributed "eventually correct" model.

That said, it may be corrosive to the reputation of news operations in general, because they are so frequently publicly challenged and wrong.

austenallred2• 11 years ago

I think reputation matters far less than people think it does in the news industry.

Buzzfeed consistently does as much traffic as all local newspapers combined.

Maybe in the longterm it all evens out, but right now traffic is traffic.

macintux• 11 years ago

I regret that "eventually" correct is far too optimistic.

2bluesc• 11 years ago

Almost every time I read a piece in the mainstream media about something I understand really well I'm baffled at how badly the press machine we've set up (and inexplicably trust) can butcher it. Then I think about that experience the next time I read about something I don't know much about.

This is how I feel about press, movies, TV, etc.

PopeOfNope2• 11 years ago

Ditto. I learned the media wasn't a reliable source of information when I was 10. What baffles me is so few people feel this way, even here on hacker news. A large percentage, if not most, of the submitted links on HN come from media outlets.

seivan2• 11 years ago

However only Fox News, Breitbart, Telegraph and especially Daily Mail with other news outlets I hate is guilty of this and their readers are idiots for reading that junk.

But it's pretty obvious what you brought up doesn't apply to Guardian, Huffington Post Arabic, Vox and Salon which is quality stuff that I like.

It's flawed because we let it be flawed from personal bias. I think it was Spiegler that has around 80 fact checkers all around. What's your take on that?

But yeah, boo Daily Mail, yay Salon because I am smart enough to tell quality from tabloids.

coke122• 11 years ago

Are you being serious here? I can't tell.

delish• 11 years ago

When I came across Gell-Mann Amnesia I thought, "Wow I needed that concept."

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gel...

yalogin• 11 years ago

Does it matter even if it closed down because of Apple? If a company is so weak that it cannot operate on losing a few employees, then isn't it the company's fault? It's even more a problem with the company given that it's a bull market for startups and funding.

ghshephard• 11 years ago

Almost every great company has been in a position where losing just a few key employees would have killed it before it became large enough to sustain itself.

I have a theory that a lot of companies become great because of the output of those absolutely superb (but not necessarily self-promoting) employees who create 95%+ of the intellectual output of the startup, while all the the credit goes to those who promote themselves.

Snag those great employees, kill the company.

Mission Motors didn't close because of Apple

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