Square is now called Block

5 letter tickers are frowned upon generally unless its a different share class or if its in some kind of credit/corporate action I thought. Like .E means Ch11 (iirc)

jonny_eh3• 5 years ago

WTF is @TBD54566975?

wmf8• 5 years ago

It's a crypto incubator.

jonny_eh3• 5 years ago

Thanks, it's weird though that their twitter bio doesn't say that.

It's just a picture of a musician and #Bitcoin and a picture of a hat. https://twitter.com/TBD54566975

Is anyone in this space serious?

randomhodler847• 5 years ago

Their first product is a decentralized peer to peer Bitcoin exchange based on Decentralized Identity. They released their white paper recently.

conroy• 5 years ago

"If press releases are your thing, here’s ours: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/52543725/en"

- @blocks (https://twitter.com/blocks/status/1466159597194907649)

0xdeadb00f• 5 years ago

Since when has twitter not allowed me viewing individual accounts on mobile browser without signing in?

That's annoying.

chockablock• 5 years ago

You can hit reload then dismiss the modal. (works on iOS)

mediumdeviation• 5 years ago

https://nitter.42l.fr/blocks (the main nitter.net is down, this just the first mirror instance from https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/wiki/Instances)

cwkoss• 5 years ago

OMFG, they weren't even able to get @block username on twitter. This is so pitiful.

a_crowbar• 5 years ago

Interesting… thinly veiled play on blockchain? With Jack’s recent leave of twitter, I think it’s clear this is his new vision for the future.

With Facebook’s recent re-org to Meta, is this spurring a new wave of companies re-branding to be seen as relevant by associating with future technologies?

inerte• 5 years ago

Something interesting is happening in other industries, where large conglomerates are spinning off high-growth potential divisions, specially pharmaceuticals https://www.fiercepharma.com/topic/spinoff all for that sweet sweet stock growth

peanut_worm2• 5 years ago

Is this a blank page for anyone else?

mdoms• 5 years ago

It loads after a long, long time. It will transfer upwards of 10mb of who-knows-what before displaying a useless morphing cube and zero information.

peanut_worm2• 5 years ago

All I saw on mobile was a play button

slownews452• 5 years ago

Good lord.

Pity the poor person out there trying to understand what is going on / what is block.xyz.

At least we are told nothing will change with TBD54566975 (?).

https://twitter.com/tbd54566975?lang=en

The bitcoin world is crazy.

rezistik2• 5 years ago

It's only a 90 billion dollar company running a significant share of the POS market and peer to peer money market, why would they have a sensical, logical or straightforward parent site?

slownews452• 5 years ago

Exactly - and they are talking / working with at least some boring accountants in all of this who don't care if things are curated by Jay-Z in their point of sale and merchant clearing systems.

PragmaticPulp4• 5 years ago

It has been fascinating to watch the corporate cryptocurrency world try so hard to project the fringe, edgy, anti-corporate nature of cryptocurrencies that attracted so many in the first place.

All of these corporate cryptocurrency pushes have strong "How do you do, fellow children?" vibes.

But the funny part is a lot of the crypto people are eating it right up, mostly because they have to accept any and all big business investment in the crypto space to further pump their own assets.

babyshake• 5 years ago

"How do you do, fellow children?" vibes.

But it's curated by JAY-Z!

tdeck2• 5 years ago

the fringe, edgy, anti-corporate nature of cryptocurrencies that attracted so many in the first place.

That was the first wave. This much bigger wave is people like your uncle who's not tech savvy but bought $100 in Bitcoin because they heard you could get rich from it. The ideological component is just window dressing (eventually a lot of ideology becomes window dressing so that's not too unusual).

base6982• 5 years ago

It more mirrors the "FOQNEs" or "Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Entities" from Snow Crash. Sovereign individuals that hold massive bitcoin stores can transact to anyone because they can afford the fees. Normies that can't will be beholden to these large corporate interest. Transferring money to a business or person will happen in a database in Coinbase or other exchange, much like now with a bank. Settlement will happen between banks and organizations they've partnered with. For the common person the interface will be the same. Settlement between organizations will change.

keyle2• 5 years ago

I just looked through the specifications of that thing, it's mental, and still relies on "trusted third parties"(?)

wmf8• 5 years ago

KYC inherently requires trust.

chana_masala• 5 years ago

This looks really amateur and tacky. I can't believe this is real.

nikolay6• 5 years ago

This is stupid! I don't wanna be boosting crypto indirectly so our nonprofit is leaving Square now!

randomhodler847• 5 years ago

I am sorry to inform you that you may have trouble finding fintech outfits that are not playing with Bitcoin moving forward. Good luck with that fiat.

nikolay6• 5 years ago

You're wrong! We have both SumUp and Intuit! Both are cheaper and better than Square anyway!

yurishimo• 5 years ago

I think that's fine, but why create so much chaos with a rebrand on a product that currently has very little to do with blockchain tech? Why not spin off a separate entity, "Block (powered by Square)" to prove the idea and slowly migrate?

This name change is going to be extremely confusing to end users who are out of the loop given the current dominance of the Square brand.

nscalf• 5 years ago

Have you tried using cryptocurrencies? What made you so polarized on this topic?

nikolay6• 5 years ago

I used to mine Bitcoin before it was cool.

kccqzy• 5 years ago

The environmental impact.

mh-• 5 years ago

Some info here https://investors.block.xyz/overview/

rvz2• 5 years ago

A Block is a three dimensional Square. How is that confusing for most here?

Name change makes sense, especially in cryptocurrency services.

imwillofficial• 5 years ago

I had no idea it was affiliated with square. Now it makes more sense

___q• 5 years ago

That makes sense in a Brand pitch meeting, but there are so many things called Block in this space I think they could have been more unique. I thought this was about The Block (the news site) at first glance.

acdha• 5 years ago

It looks like a turn of the century art project or album launch site at first: there's nothing on the page mentioning Square until you click on the arrow at the bottom which does some animation before showing the copyright notice and the pseudo-Python on their home page doesn't look like a $100 billion dollar company or a tech company (it'd be valid syntax).

bee_rider2• 5 years ago

No, we get it. It is just dumb.

flgr• 5 years ago

I really adore the demo scene vibes I'm getting from https://block.xyz/.

You can say what you want about megaholding corporate conglomerates, but this has so much more style than abc.xyz.

afandian2• 5 years ago

Okay I'll bite. I just see a flexing cube (agree it looks like a 90s demo). But is this site meant to do anything else? I tried scrolling or tapping and it didn't do anything.

MartinMcGirk• 5 years ago

There's an arrow button at the bottom right of the page, that if you click it reveals a navbar with some links to a careers page and so on.

You can also click and drag to rotate the cube. But yeah, it doesn't do anything particular spectacular.

mlindner• 5 years ago

You can click and drag the flexing cube and it moves the background in some way.

roywiggins• 5 years ago

Makes my integrated graphics chug pretty hard though :(

thesuperbigfrog• 5 years ago

"Cube" would have been better:

"Square" => "Cube"

but

"Square" => "Block" just seems mediocre by comparison.

Certainly they want "Block" to invoke blockchain, but it seems more gimmicky with just "Block".

cercatrova2• 5 years ago

Block is a reference to blockchain, ie Square is looking to move towards cryptocurrency more and more, so cube wouldn't have worked in this case.

fragmede• 5 years ago

Chain also has some weird connotations, but Coin might have worked.

keyle2• 5 years ago

Missed opportunity on cubechain right there!

anonporridge• 5 years ago

Jack has been pretty explicit that they're looking toward bitcoin only, not cryptocurrency generally.

newfonewhodis2• 5 years ago

Square Blockchain Corp maybe?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Blockchain_Corp

LanceJones• 5 years ago

If anyone should've rebranded as Block, it's H&R Block. "It's cleaner."

comeonseriously2• 5 years ago

I wonder if their lawyers are type type typing away at this moment...

nnf• 5 years ago

H&R Block is well known as Block in the Kansas City area, where they’re headquartered, though I don’t know if that’s only among tech people or the general public.

imgabe2• 5 years ago

And if they got then Jennifer Lopez as their spokesperson, they'd be a trillion dollar company right now.

paxys2• 5 years ago

Tech company -> holding company rebrand/restructure is so hot right now

evolve2k• 5 years ago

It’s interesting comparing Facebook to others; Facebook sought to leave their main brand behind while others generally seek to keep brand equity.

Google => Alphabet

Square => Block

Facebook => Meta ??

For Facebook they were dealing with the opposite, trying to shift past a torrent of negative press, the move to an Abstract name has been highly effective in turning down the (short term) negative press heat. Yes they announced new things but arguably it was critical timing from a PR perspective.

theduder99• 5 years ago

has it been highly effective? do new articles about meta not mention facebook?

wmf8• 5 years ago

You forgot We!

mivade• 5 years ago

Makes me think of Fakeblock.

throw_away• 5 years ago

For others as confused as I was: Square bought Tidal earlier this year. Spiral was Square Crypto. TBD54566975 appears to be some sort of decentralized exchange Jack Dorsey tweeted about at one point. & they're all being put under this Block banner, apparently.

rconti2• 5 years ago

Thank you. Completely missed the Tidal acquisition, will never care about TBDXYZ, but was curious, and clicking on the twitter link did nothing useful.

newfonewhodis2• 5 years ago

regular brain: company

galaxy brain: blockchain holding company

mindcrime• 5 years ago

Maybe next year they can rebrand as Hypercube.

purple_ferret• 5 years ago

Don't understand this trend. Apple has done just fine diversifying as Apple, Inc.

Square, as a name, is simple and well-known, and the logo is recognizable, inoffensive, and amenable for design updates.

Seems like a move to pander to Jack's new obsession (maybe he has no interest in running what Square actually works on now).

adamnemecek3• 5 years ago

Apple is more integrated.

kelp• 5 years ago

Seems like a move to pander to Jack's new obsession (maybe he has no interest in running what Square actually works on now).

I suspect this has something to do with it. I had a co-worker once describe Jack as a magpie. He's usually much more interested in the new shiny thing. That was Cash App for a while. Now the blockchain stuff I guess. I haven't worked there in many years so I don't know for sure.

Jack tends to hire good executives to run the boring parts of the business. Those are also the parts that tend to bankroll all the new and shiny stuff.

I had a big WTF with this move, and have a similar feeling about the blockchain efforts. But I also tend towards the new and shiny, so I have a harder time faulting that.

tdeck2• 5 years ago

Square had been trying to do Bitcoin stuff for years. When I left in 2016 they had built accepting Bitcoin into Square's Online Store product a few years ago, because it was shiny. I was told that they got about one Bitcoin payment a week and were thinking of turning it off. I guess the popularity of BTC speculation among retail investors brought the whole thing back.

manojlds• 5 years ago

Jack tends to hire good executives to run the boring parts of the business. Those are also the parts that tend to bankroll all the new and shiny stuff.

That sounds good, then? Hope you are not implying that it's a negative thing.

kyawzazaw• 5 years ago

Apple does use different names for things like Beats and is more integrated or has different names such as iCloud instead of Apple Cloud services

ctdonath• 5 years ago

Actually points the other way: Apple tends to preserve names, rather than obfuscating them with changes. Beats isn't now "AirPod Fast" after company acquisition, 'i'-prefix names haven't been switched to "Apple "-prefix, etc.

eli2• 5 years ago

The earned media from this announcement is worth an absolute fortune. Imagine you’re a marketer for a major tech company. How much would you pay to get an organic HN front page discussion of your company’s roadmap?

Short term this is good PR, long term it’s about positioning the brand. If blockchain hype continues to grow, it will be powerful to have a brand closely associated with it.

paulryanrogers• 5 years ago

There's a risk that blockchain and BTC in particular may taint the brand for many.

mike_d• 5 years ago

How much would you pay to get an organic HN front page discussion of your company’s roadmap?

Dozens of dollars! Seriously, that is the going rate for boosting an article to the HN front page (not to say it will stay on the front page, flagging and dang are quite effective).

anthonypasq• 5 years ago

im cracking up that you think a front page HN post is somehow worth anything substantial

mehrdada• 5 years ago

Apple Inc. used to be Apple Computer, Inc. You could argue they actually started the trend long ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3sg8b5iXO4

paxys2• 5 years ago

On the contrary, this move means that their core brand and cash cow (Square) can remain "safe" and only associated with secure payments and PoS sales rather than all their bets on crypto, blockchain, music and whatever else Jack Dorsey is cooking up.

freewilly1040• 5 years ago

The cash cow is actually increasingly Cash App

res0nat0r• 5 years ago

Sounds more like the parent holding company name change, Facebook.com is still Facebook and not changing, meta is just the parent company like Alphabet. I'm assuming the same for square.com.

outside1234• 5 years ago

Want to put all of the crypto BS under another brand name for when it blows up

gkop2• 5 years ago

A block could be a 3-D square, so at least there’s this cute connection in this case, unlike Meta.

enchiridion• 5 years ago

Facelibrary

bee_rider2• 5 years ago

They all did this for different reasons, right? Google, I'm not sure about. Block: because their other brands are really tied to particular things, like Square is super tied to payment processing, there's no upside to using it elsewhere. Facebook: trying to break into new markets as Facebook is hard, because everyone knows Facebook is fundamentally bad.

I guess every company that rebrands has a specific reason to do so. Apple hasn't done anything to soil their name too badly, so they don't have to.

imgabe2• 5 years ago

Block is adding a new dimension to Square.

kumarvvr• 5 years ago

I guess Cube would be a natural name progression. But there are manu cube companies.

deadbolt• 5 years ago

Lmao that can't be the real reason behind the change, right? Because that's fucking embarrassing.

stjohnswarts• 5 years ago

I think he wants to become the biggest bitcoin/blockchain/fintech company. Probably full service contract/exchange/hodler/wallet/all-the-things.

staticassertion2• 5 years ago

It's so strange. Square has good branding. Why would you just drop that completely? Crypto stuff aside, changing the name of your company like this just feels insane to me.

dannyw• 5 years ago

Crypto companies get a few orders of magnitude the market cap of traditional finance.

See Filecoin: approximately 1/100th data stored as Backblaze, approx 100x the fully diluted market cap of Backblaze, for a 10000x $ per byte stored.

fhd22• 5 years ago

I'd argue Apple started this loooong ago. Their first few products where literally named "Apple", but then they quickly moved towards establishing independent brands for all products, starting with the Macintosh, I believe.

That left their well known company name as an umbrella brand, whereas Google, Facebook et al came up with some obscure umbrella brand way late.

I'm not an Apple fanboy at all, but I think this shows they had more vision than most. Most tech giants had one very focused, ridiculously successful product and tried to find meaning beyond that later. From everything I've heard around the early Apple decades, they always had this mentality of focusing on new product (lines) as their way forward. Probably to some degree because their focus is/was hardware, not software, but I don't believe that's all there is to it. They literally create new products that have the potential of making their established, more expensive products obsolete: For example the iPad.

testmasterflex• 5 years ago

IIRC “Apple” was a provisional last minute decision

tempestn2• 5 years ago

Yep, a block is like a square, but brings to mind a blockchain. I wouldn't be at all surprised if someday soon we're reading about Block's new product, Chain.

pfranz2• 5 years ago

Apple stopped selling "Apple Computers" decades ago. They sell Macs. If someone is talking about Beats and Apple, it doesn't get confused with the computer. Apple is the parent company and Beats sells audio hardware. In 2007, they changed their name from "Apple Computer" to "Apple Inc." The same year AppleTV and the iPhone were announced.

That said, Apple has some terrible branding in some areas. Is AppleTV the hardware, the subscription service, or Apple's TV app?

chizhik-pyzhik• 5 years ago

This is what happens when you put the product designers in charge of the rebrand

adamnemecek3• 5 years ago

God Jack, I get that you and Jay-Z are besties but people don’t care about Jay-Z.

Infinitesimus• 5 years ago

Jay Z is a billionaire and one of the most influential musicians in recent history tho... it's safe to say a lot of people care about him.

rconti2• 5 years ago

I work in tech, I don't care about Jay-Z, and I still care about Jay-Z more than I care about Jack.

adamnemecek3• 5 years ago

Out of curiosity, are you over 40?

hnburnsy2• 5 years ago

Can someone explain the TBD54566975 moniker?

dilyevsky• 5 years ago

Hurr durr memes

guessmyname• 5 years ago

Can someone explain the TBD54566975 moniker?

The answer is in the following links:

Square is creating a new business (joining Seller, Cash App, & Tidal) focused on building an open developer platform with the sole goal of making it easy to create non-custodial, permissionless, and decentralized financial services. Our primary focus is Bitcoin. Its name is TBD. — https://twitter.com/jack/status/1415765941904941061
We’ve decided to make our official name TBD54566975 based solely on this numerology report [picture]. — https://twitter.com/TBD54566975/status/1424818221652324355

tbDEX: A Liquidity Protocol [1][2][3][4]

[1] https://tbdex.io/whitepaper.pdf

[2] https://twitter.com/tbd54566975

[3] https://github.com/TBDev-54566975

[4] https://tbd54566975.ghost.io/introducing-tbdex/

hnburnsy2• 5 years ago

Thank you!

jacobmischka2• 5 years ago

I find it interesting that they're copying Alphabet with their TLD choice. It was clever with abc.xyz, but in this case it doesn't really mean much.

paulgb• 5 years ago

And in turn, copying Hooli: http://hooli.xyz/

(I was at google during the alphabet announcement and seem to remember a wink from management towards the connection being intentional, but I could be remembering speculation as fact.)

ttepasse• 5 years ago

The announcement letter on https://abc.xyz/ (still) has a hidden link to Hooli, in one of the full stops.

vermilingua• 5 years ago

I suspect the “meaning” is 3D. Square -> XY, Block -> XYZ.

jacobmischka2• 5 years ago

Ah, could be.

enos_feedler• 5 years ago

Why couldn't twitter be integrated into one of these blocks and have square run them all?

simonsarris• 5 years ago

An explanation of the name choice from Square's tweets:

Not to get all meta on you… but we’re going to! Block references the neighborhood blocks where we find our sellers, a blockchain, block parties full of music, obstacles to overcome, a section of code, building blocks, and of course, tungsten cubes.

https://twitter.com/Square/status/1466158911413760004

PragmaticPulp4• 5 years ago

Jack Dorsey, November 29th 2021 ( https://twitter.com/jack/status/1465347002426867720/photo/1 ):

There's a lot of talk about the importance of a company being "founder-led." Ultimately I believe that's severely limiting and a single point of failure. I've worked hard to ensure this company can break away from its founding and founders.
I believe it's critical a company can stand on its own, free of its founder's influence or direction

Ironic, given all his push toward making Square a Bitcoin company in line with his own Bitcoin whims.

leesec2• 5 years ago

Please don't make up quotes? Or provide a source.

holler• 5 years ago

https://twitter.com/jack/status/1465347002426867720

leesec2• 5 years ago

He removed his fake so I got downvoted haha.

moron4hire• 5 years ago

That's funny. He's naming the company he left Twitter for after the action you have to perform against promoted accounts on Twitter to make it at all bearable.

somewhereoutth• 5 years ago

Interesting trend from specialized names with large amount of semantic content, towards more generalized names with very little semantic content: Google->Alphabet, Facebook->Meta, Square->Block (ok a little tenuous). What's next? Apple->Fruit? Windows->Opening?

I guess it is so the owners can imagine the company to be whatever they want it to be, though typically they end up being nothing at all.

pyuser583• 5 years ago

Amazon -> Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn

TrispusAttucks• 5 years ago

Translation:

"In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."

ZephyrBlu• 5 years ago

The new names all sound minimalist and trendy.

smt88• 5 years ago

As companies trend toward being conglomerates of unrelated businesses, it makes sense for them to rebrand this way.

Google makes (a little) sense for just search, but it makes no sense as a self-driving taxi service.

jacobolus• 5 years ago

"Google" is a meaningless pair of semi-pronouncable nonsense syllables, inspired by the made up big number "googol" (which was named by a 9-year-old child whose uncle wrote a pop math book). It has no problem standing for self-driving taxis or whatever else.

If you want your own similar company name, visit an elementary school and ask the 3rd grade students for advice. You can make "bleeblax" or "squibjub" or "tibflee" or "shubzoo" into the next unicorn company.

forgotmyoldname• 5 years ago

Also a trend in making things increasingly less googleable.

iTunes->Music. Searching for issues with the application formerly known as iTunes is borderline impossible now.

Whoever approved that must’ve gotten an MBA from a top-ranked school, because any decent person would immediately recognize it as a bad idea.

mttjj• 5 years ago

Don’t ever try to search for Apple TV. Are you talking about the physical streaming device? The ‘TV’ app (iOS version? iPadOS version? tvOS version? macOS version? Or maybe the version on your LG TV?) Or maybe you’re even talking about the AppleTV+ streaming service.

Same searching issues with ‘Mail’, ‘Notes’, ‘Reminders’, ‘Calendar’, ‘Numbers’, etc. Impossible to troubleshoot.

I’m as much of an Apple fanboy as the next guy, but I totally agree that this naming is ridiculous.

At least Safari isn’t ‘Web’ (yet).

usrusr• 5 years ago

The Word text processor was already ungoogleable before there even was Google. This lexicographic landgrab not exactly a new phenomenon.

Within platforms like Apple OS it's a very powerful tool: if you give your app for doing something a brand it effectively admits that there could be other apps, but if you don't that is easy to forget.

thesuitonym• 5 years ago

Windows is already owned my a bigger company (Microsoft) and Apple is already a company that sells products (Mac, iPhone, allegedly some software)

cblconfederate2• 5 years ago

In japan the owners just put their family name there. I guess some of these tech owners dont want their family ethics being confused with what their business does

Jack should not have used Block, it should be either called "@jack" or the address of his bitcoin wallet

abledon2• 5 years ago

That makes me think most nouns should be protected in society for companies 'claiming' them.... They are basically putting a flag on the whatever word they rename to, and forcing the entire user base of the English language to reframe what that word means....

If you're company is "Apple", then you are rewriting the meaning of the actual physical apple object. An example alternative that protects the Nouns, would be to have to add a number on the end. Apple-1 could sell laptops, Apple-5 could sell apple peelers, Apple-2123 could make wool sweatshirts

webinvest• 5 years ago

I wonder why their crypto arm is called Spiral?

IAmGraydon• 5 years ago

Likely of the downward variety.

janandonly2• 5 years ago

Block (previously Square) Bitcoin Revenue By Year:

2018: $166 million

2019: $516 million

2020: $4.5 billion

2021: $8 billion+ in first three quarters

$SQ $BTC

comeonseriously2• 5 years ago

Is it a verb?

ramesh31• 5 years ago

I think it's awesome that Flash intros are back

echelon• 5 years ago

Except now it's a layercake of JavaScript / HTML / CSS salad that doesn't work in all devices.

Flash had a lot of faults, but they could have been fixed (and open sourced). The Flash editor was by far the best animation tool for the web and it got murdered by Apple to protect iOS from foreign runtimes.

novok• 5 years ago

What branding consultant has gotten into the ear of bigtech company CEO's in SF to do renames for their conglomerates that everyone will continue to ignore?

dang• 5 years ago

Ongoing related thread:

Block (aka Square, Tidal, CashApp etc) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29409630 - Dec 2021 (29 comments)

bitwize• 5 years ago

It's Square for the metaverse. (A block is a 3D square, you see...)

chupchap• 5 years ago

Does any company want (to) block payments? Terrible name!

d--b• 5 years ago

Block references the […] obstacles to overcome […]

Surely that’s the most problematic thing here… Block sounds to me like something that gets in the way. Like a blood clot or something… I guess they’ll be fine…

On a side note, the block.xyz website looks _amazing_

vmception• 5 years ago

Their rationale is good, local merchants use square.

they should use the party tld, for block.party

snickerbockers• 5 years ago

I always confuse them with Square Enix so I'm glad they're finally changing their name.

pkrotich• 5 years ago

Looks like corporate umbrellas [0] are making a come back.

I get the need to productize endlessly on sea of ideas and perhaps incubate spin-offs but even GE and J&J are running away from its conglomerate ways… I mean umbrella corporation [1] ways.

—-

I think the current trend is coming about because of SAAS - in the olden days, startup feared big companies because they could make your product / company a feature in their product - but we’re seeing the reverse- they’re now seeing that millions of customers are willing to pay $X dollars a month for what amount to a feature as a separate product instead of licensing SAP type product.

[0]https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/corporate-umbrella.asp

[1]https://residentevil.fandom.com/wiki/Umbrella_Corporation

zht• 5 years ago

Jack has always done this. Even though the bulk of revenues has come from POS subscription and payments revenue, Jack has only cared about it to the extent it allows him to try consumer facing things like Square Wallet, Caviar, Square Pickup, Square Cash, and then all the crypto stuff.

I just hope the sellers don’t suffer because of this

gadnuk• 5 years ago

Who thought designing this page and actually publishing it was a good idea?

https://investors.block.xyz/governance/leadership/default.as...

My eyes! My eyes!

arcticbull5• 5 years ago

Horrible design aside, there's some interesting politics represented on there.

1) Alyssa was given all of Square to run, making her the effective CEO of Square. Jack was never going to give up CEO of Square role in any other way than by taking over a top-level entity. I strongly suspect he hasn't had any interest in the core business in years, though. Given Alyssa's general background in AWS, this likely represents continued platformization of Square, and a continued de-emphasis on Square as a product. Instead an emphasis on Square as infrastructure. How this squares (hah) with their small business moat time will tell.

2) Jesse Dorogusker runs Tidal and crypto hardware, which is fascinating - he's ex-Apple, a solid hardware lead, but to my knowledge he has no music background or industry experience. I wonder how that happened?

3) Mike Brock in charge of whatever the fresh hell TBD54566975 is, is honestly the about 10x as puzzling as Jesse in charge of Tidal. I could not understand this less. The name, the design, the mission, the lead choice, the twitter page [1]. None of it. It's complete nonsense.

[1] https://twitter.com/TBD54566975

simonebrunozzi• 5 years ago

I worked at AWS at a time when Alyssa was there (running Amazon S3), and the few times I've met her, I can guarantee she was a formidable executive. No surprise she's in the top ranks at Square.

ryzvonusef• 5 years ago

their white paper is one of the most obtuse writing I've ever read:

https://tbd54566975.ghost.io/introducing-tbdex/

the best I can understand... you can use your identity as a token? or something?

dmitriid9• 5 years ago

The name, the design, the mission, the lead choice, the twitter page [1]. None of it. It's complete nonsense.

That's intentional. If you're peddling crypto, you're either a scammer, or a gullible fool. Those people are no fools.

soared• 5 years ago

TBD to me is pretty clearly just trying to capitalize on memecoins. That Twitter is exactly what a watered down corporate version of a shitcoin looks like. Some technical mumbo jumbo, a white paper, bs name, and what boomers think memes are (putting lowercase text on a hat, using a drake img as your Twitter profile, weird snarky responses).

Based on my knowledge of shitcoins, this will do extremely well.

easygenes• 5 years ago

Haha, now that’s good visual humor.

rackjack• 5 years ago

The cubes slowly popping into view as the page lags out is a special kind of unintentional modern humor.

odiroot• 5 years ago

I thought it's a joke. It's a like a bunch of 4chan teenagers designed it for shits and giggles.

0x0082• 5 years ago

You can make jokes but these people already are a large portion of the money spending people and they will only become more important when they get better jobs and opportunities as they move on in life.

0x0082• 5 years ago

It is obviously heavily inspired by web pages from the NFT/crypto space. Because it is trendy or because they want to go that route, who knows…

Edit: seems like they are already heavily invested in crypto. There you go.

initplus• 5 years ago

Honestly... I love it.

The whole website is just aggressively bad. The C suite cube faces, ugly color palette, spinny cube complete with a Jay-Z curated soundtrack, the misaligned text & links on the media kit page etc.

It reminds me a lot of aesthetic in the game Cruelty Squad - just an intentional rejection of design norms. Nothing worse than being boring right?

dmnd• 5 years ago

/default.aspx on every url

cblconfederate2• 5 years ago

and hijacked scrolling

madeofpalk• 5 years ago

Also on the whole, it's a very unimportant website. It's just some investor relation website. There's no signup conversions to optimise for.

squareup.com is still a normal "boring" website.

whywhywhywhy• 5 years ago

It reminds me a lot of aesthetic in the game Cruelty Squad

Would love to work for a company with full Cruelty Squad world branding, but I guess Consumer Softproducts isn't hiring.

abledon2• 5 years ago

it reminds me of the 'siren song' in Odyssey that would dash sailors across the rocks... except its ADHD Millenial/Zoomer developer/crypto enthusiasts

can16358p2• 5 years ago

I think it's intentional. I don't think anyone in the company said "this is great design let's do this" but more like "this is unconventional (in Apple words, "takes courage") and rad, we know people will call it ugly but let's be unique this way and do it". Which, in my opinion, works.

littlestymaar2• 5 years ago

You're being way too charitable here. It's a quick and dirty website built with a CMS[1] and no designer involved. There's tons of obvious design mistakes. Don't get me wrong, I'm a terrible designer myself but after spending a lot of time with great ones, I can tell the difference between an ugly website made by a designer with an aesthetic intent and one built by a front-end web developer without supervision, and using 5 different fonts on a single page is definitely a clue.

[1] https://www.q4inc.com/Powered-by-Q4/

davidgerard2• 5 years ago

Let's do financial crimes ... in Minecraft

davidgerard2• 5 years ago

(joke nicked from __femb0t on Twitter https://twitter.com/__femb0t/status/1466283819246538753 )

mackrevinack• 5 years ago

its the block logo meant to be flashing or is it just me?

Jordrok• 5 years ago

A company run by literal blockheads

dotancohen• 5 years ago

  > Who thought designing this page and actually publishing it was a good idea?

Somebody who read "I wish webpages today were as simple as they were in 1999" and then did their best to emulate the Geocities pages that they found from that era.

littlestymaar2• 5 years ago

But still managed to ship a 20MB webpage!

snemvalts• 5 years ago

If the design for this didn't create negative reactions like this they would have probably considered the design a failure.

hvgk• 5 years ago

That is surprisingly less bad than some of the stuff my company has pulled and thought it was excellent while patting themselves on the back.

Usually it is a sign that the greater spotted MBA is insufficient on its own to produce effective business strategy and marketing. It requires a combination of two other mysterious forces; talent and clue, which are unavailable at business school.

edflsafoiewq• 5 years ago

This page is 18 MB.

nradclif• 5 years ago

As someone who doesn’t design websites for a living, I’m always a little baffled by strong reactions to website designs, especially ones like this one that don’t look all that different from a million other websites to me. I have a suspicion that there’s a very wide gap between how website designers appraise a website, and how everyone else does. Just an observation.

teen• 5 years ago

Haha unreal, that is the worst design I've seen in a long time

Hoasi• 5 years ago

My guess is whoever that was decided to go full-on for the NFT aesthetic.

hayyyyydos• 5 years ago

A single >15MB page. Nice.

tx9984• 5 years ago

Clearly a bunch of blockheads!

nothis• 5 years ago

Upper left corner: "Block Vibes, Curated by Jay-Z" is probably the most silicon valley thing I've ever seen on a website.

It's all going to crash horribly, isn't it?

no_time• 5 years ago

Lol I love it. The music is not really my cup of tea but the whole site oozes S O U L. If it was a bit more optimized and wouldnt stutter on my iGPU equipped laptop id give it 8/10. It's just the right amount of wacky and tasteless that it wraps around and becomes enjoyable.

I would love it even more if it wasn't made for yet another rent seeking, blood sucking, middleman bullshit company that feasts on people being discouraged from using cash, yet having no privacy respecting alternative that is run for their benefit instead of getting rich off their situation.

rswskg• 5 years ago

It's the n64 tech demo all over again!

janandonly2• 5 years ago

Block (previously Square) Bitcoin Revenue By Year:

2018: $166 million

2019: $516 million

2020: $4.5 billion

2021: $8 billion+ in first three quarters

$SQ $BTC

dahak27• 5 years ago

How much of that is revenue from actual crypto-related business vs. just appreciation of crypto the company owns? Feels like the impressiveness of this trend really depends on that

adam_arthur• 5 years ago

Their Bitcoin "revenue" is simply the face value of the Bitcoin they sell.

It's like if Charles Schwab counted any stocks people bought as revenue.

I suspect the difference is that SQ may hold the Bitcoin and sell directly to the user rather than as a broker. But calling it "revenue" is still highly misleading, as margins will be razor thin, by definition (the transaction fee)

pwdisswordfish9• 5 years ago

WTF is with all the Twitter replies?

sam0x17• 5 years ago

This is definitely a prelude to some kind of blockchain thing they will attempt to undertake.

zwarag• 5 years ago

I'm going to predict that at some point in time, this company will name itself Tesseract.

auvi• 5 years ago

Before posting, I searched for "Tesseract" and here you go.

crazy5sheep• 5 years ago

A 2D to 3D migration?

mudlus• 5 years ago

Let the meme in, bad is good if it stays in people's head. Accepting the memeplex into a business is all here is really, that's marketing.

holoduke• 5 years ago

I somehow never understood what square/block is. Tried to understand it again, but still not able to find any grasp while browsing their site. What are they doing?

funcmasterc• 5 years ago

They are a payments processor, like Shopify. They make physical card readers, with a focus on small retailers, restaurants, nail salons, small time family businesses. Some up-market support. Also e-commerce products that compete more closely with Shopify.

They also build cash app, a competitor to Venmo. They have investment and banking and tax products.

They also have some crypto side projects and own tidal.

jillesvangurp• 5 years ago

Brand confusion is never a good plan. Block, Meta, alphabet, who cares? It's Square, Facebook, and Google that are the big brands these companies have and that they are known for with billions of people (well not Square probably). Only a fraction of those people would be able to name the parent companies.

Facebook owns Whatsapp, and Instagram and a bunch of smaller stuff as well. But Meta is just not a great brand. It's a vague ambition at best. That's the problem with this rebranding. Google did it because they had a bunch of aimless acquisitions/spinoffs, none of which since managed to rival it's money maker Google, which continues to be the place that is associated with their successful stuff (Android, Youtube, ads, etc.).

Facebook is doing it because their Facebook brand is imploding due to years of mismanagement. It's a dead zone at this pont. I check in once a month and then leave in disgust. Absolutely nothing going on there whatsoever.

Square on the other hand is a successful product. Nice growth. Nice brand. Worth going all in on. The stuff they acquired pales in comparison. Why mess with that brand, create confusion and awkwardness, etc.?

raverbashing• 5 years ago

I agree. Branding changes "for nothing" help nothing.

But the worse contender seems to be Transferwise who changed their name to Wise, losing the recognition and the brand specificity.

Oblig. "Yeah that wasn't a very wise choice."

lordnacho• 5 years ago

It's not just that it's confusing, it's misleading. Humans attach a lot of value to names of things. The whole history of a thing is keyed on its name, a fact that is especially pertinent in the internet era.

If some brand has built up a bad rep, they shouldn't be allowed to change it just by renaming themselves. Likewise a firm that's built a good rep and wants to try something new in order to protect the brand shouldn't be allowed to either. I don't know whether the law could ever protect us from this, I suppose it's more the job of the media to keep remind us who Altria are, and where Lexus came from.

A lot of brand shenanigans is basically abusing how humans associate history with names. Somehow it's never been an ethical issue to change brands, spawn a new brand, or buy another brand while hollowing out the product.

impulser_• 5 years ago

It doesn't matter if they can't name the parent company. Most people using Cash App probably don't even know Square is the parent company lol. They don't care. Same with Tidal now.

But Square is a branded platform by Square Inc.

So is Cash App apart of the Seller's platform, named Square, or is it apart of Square Inc?

This is why they separated. Square brand is now just the Square seller's platform.

tinyhouse2• 5 years ago

I think Meta was a good move. As you mentioned, Facebook brand has been taking a beating. But more importantly, I really believe that their focus in the next decade is going to be the metaverse and not Facebook. That's good for Facebook, no growth plans means they can focus on improving the experience rather than growth which often ruins the experience. Personally for me the only two Meta products I use are WhatsApp and Oculus Quest 2.

MrDresden2• 5 years ago

The only reason I can see for rebranding a known successful brand like Square into Block would be due to some hope of a perceived connection in consumers minds to crypto via the word blockchain.

Not being versed in branding strategy, I must say this just feels odd to me and somewhat lowers ny opinion of Square as a proper tech company (why, I can't fully articulate).

Edit; I now see that this was due to the fact that the square product is just going to be one of many of the parent corp (i.e Alphabet style). In that sense I guess this makes sense. Just hope that crypto connection was never a part of the discussion/decision for the name.

thelittleone• 5 years ago

A payment application called block? Some might infer the link to blockchain. While to me it has negative connotations such as payments being blocked due to falsely triggering AML etc. Block + payments = blocked payments. I just had a payment blocked temporarily for 48hrs sending on wise.com. First time ever. If it happens again I cancel my account.

pfranz2• 5 years ago

Who cares if the company is called Google or Alphabet? Consumers know the website is google.com. People they want to hire know enough that the company is Alphabet even if consumers don't.

I think these new names are silly (even after 6 years of hearing "Alphabet"). It's obvious Meta and Block chose these names to lean into where they want to go. A big reason I think a rename is a good thing is just talking about the company. Does "Facebook" refer to the app, the company, or something that affects Instagram, Oculus, WhatsApp? You can use internal code names, but that still is difficult for investors or new hires to discuss the company. I think this is more of the reason for the name changes instead of their brands imploding.

mountainb• 5 years ago

It's less driven by the marketing and more driven by the lawyers. It is confusing, it is stupid from the perspective of investors, customers, and users, but it is a defensive maneuver against both the government and potential civil plaintiffs complaining about mismanagement.

The government could also at any time revert to the much more stringent antitrust regime that was in place before the 1970s/80s, vestiges of which still impact other older industries, which sharply limit how many lines of business or modes of communication/transportation can be used, much less dominated, by a single firm. There are also of course movements towards more internet-specific regulation, although not much has been actually happening.

mbesto• 5 years ago

From the Wire on when to rebrand:

   Stringer Bell: "What are the options when you've got an inferior product in an aggressive marketplace?"

   Stringer's Community College Business Professor: "Well, if you have a large share of the market you buy up the competition."

   Stringer (shaking his head): "And if you don't?"

   Prof: "Reduce price and increase market share."

   Stringer: "That assumes low overhead."

   Prof: "Of course. Otherwise you operate at a loss. And worse, as your prices drop, your product loses consumer credibility. You know, the new CEO of World Com was faced with this very problem. The company was linked to one of the biggest fraud cases in history. So he proposed . . ."

   Stringer: "To change the name."

   Prof: "Exactly.

penjelly• 5 years ago

history erasure of the orwellian variety

SahAssar• 5 years ago

Every time emails leak from facebook/google/amazon showing unflattering things I think of the end of this scene:

"Is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy? What the fuck is you thinking!?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGo5bxWy21g

gandutraveler• 5 years ago

Say whatever was the motive but the meta branding change is the only one that has stuck for me. Of course I don't call Facebook as meta but I'm looking forward to what mark does or not on meta(verse).

bko• 5 years ago

Facebook is doing it because their Facebook brand is imploding due to years of mismanagement. It's a dead zone at this pont. I check in once a month and then leave in disgust. Absolutely nothing going on there whatsoever.

What do you base this on?

This is their revenue, operating profit and monthly active users.

I get it, facebook isn't your cup of tea but don't be delusional about them being on the brink of collapse. A lot of people use the product and they're still seeing double digit user growth after nearly 10 years of double digit user growth.

Year Revenue Operating profit MAU

2010 $1.97 billion $1.03 billion 482 million

2011 $3.71 billion $1.75 billion 739 million

2012 $5.08 billion $0.53 billion 955 million

2013 $7.87 billion $2.8 billion 1.15 billion

2014 $12.4 billion $4.99 billion 1.31 billion

2015 $17.9 billion $6.22 billion 1.49 billion

2016 $27.6 billion $12.4 billion 1.71 billion

2017 $40.6 billion $20.2 billion 2 billion

2018 $55.8 billion $24.9 billion 2.23 billion

2019 $70.6 billion $23.9 billion 2.41 billion

2020 $85.9 billion $32.6 billion 2.7 billion

duud• 5 years ago

This. People hate Meta/Zuck so much that they can't give credit for what was a brilliant rebrand.

Given that what makes a good brand is subjective perhaps a more objective measure is the value of the domains the companies rebranded to.

By this count Meta.com > ABC.xyz > Block.xyz. I'm basing this on data available via namebio.com, automated appraisal tools such as GoDaddy Appraisal and Estibot and thousands of hours of personal experience researching, buying and selling domains. Meta.com is worth six or more likely seven or even eight figures as a standalone domain. Block and ABC.xyz? Not so much.

krm01• 5 years ago

Since I'm reading a lot of angry comments here, let me add a bit of thinking behind how these things happen without taking a side. Been designing for companies (probably just 10% branding, mostly UI/UX) for more than a decade.

Rebrands always get a ton of negative press, but almost always the reason why companies try to do so is not what it seems from the outside.

For example, when Dropbox did their big rebranding (sure they kept the name, but I can remember reading the same comments when it happened) I happen to know that their reasoning is not what many people would think of.

Dropbox hit a growth plateau. The growth they had gotten from the engineering community where it started was slowing down.

They decided to reposition and rebrand their company to a new more creative community. This seems to have had some help in continuing the growth curve.

Many of these rebrands get a ton of negative comments, but you have to remember that the rebrand is not meant for you as an existing user/customer/fan/etc. it's meant to help reach a new audience. To push growth. Tap into new markets, please a board and show that you're moving forward to some exciting destination at the horizon.

When looking at rebrands, try to think of the business decision behind the scenes as to why these might have happened.

rgallagher27• 5 years ago

What's the business/design decision behind this: https://investors.block.xyz/governance/leadership/default.as...

adreamingsoul• 5 years ago

Is this real? This reads like spam or some other kind of nonsense...

duiker101• 5 years ago

It's interesting how their Block design is very similar to Gumroad's new design (which came out earlier this week), and yet they came out so close I doubt either copied or got inspiration by the other

hellopeep5• 5 years ago

Looks like a shitty crypto altcoin website.

tinyhouse2• 5 years ago

When you think it's April fools day but it's actually December.

coldtea• 5 years ago

I've had payments blocked with PayPal, why do I need Block for that?

resonious• 5 years ago

I remember when Transferwise changed their name to Wise.

I tried to humor them and use their new name when talking about the service to other people, but people had a hard time understanding what I was even saying. "I use this thing called Wise." "What?" - something about the word is actually hard to enunciate and people don't even comprehend the sentence. I think this is mainly a problem with using a pre-existing English word for your brand.

In the case of Square, their original name was already pretty non-specific/unrelated and they just moved laterally. I guess if they're getting into blockchain then maybe it really is more related now...

that_guy_iain• 5 years ago

That one is kinda different. They renamed everything. It's not like transferwise is a product of Wise. It's transferwise is now called wise. In 10 years or so people will look at you weird when you call it transferwise. Branding and naming takes a while to catch on.

WWF to WWE - It tooks years for it to fully take hold. Sure some people will automatically think of WWE when you say WWF but not all will. And at one point it was called WWWF.

Datsun to Nissan - Honestly, you say Datsun to anyone they'll have no idea what you're talking about.

Marathon to Snickers - Very few people even remember this.

auggierose• 5 years ago

That website looks like something Kendall Roy would have done.

louissan• 5 years ago

The company has acquired (more?) depth .. :o)

nothrowaways2• 5 years ago

Chain

nothrowaways2• 5 years ago

It shows that they aim to focus on Blockchain ;)

remorses• 5 years ago

I always associated .xyz domains with cheap and unprofessional stuff, really weird to use that domain

DrBazza• 5 years ago

PWC tried to become 'Monday', the worst day of the week, back in the original dotcom boom.

Didn't work out too well for them: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2163472.stm

tarkin2• 5 years ago

Signal’s gone blockchain crazy. Now Square’s gone the same way. It makes me a little less confident in Square. Hopefully this won’t affect their core products.

Did Jack jump from Twitter onto the end of the Blockchain train? So more money and employees are sacrificed onto the altar of blockchain hype.

Else they’re successfully trying to gain attention by pretending to move into blockchain.

blitzar2• 5 years ago

Is it April 1st again?

Square is now called Block

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