FOMO is disastrous for company strategies

https://rubenugarte.com/fomo-is-disastrous-for-company-strategies/

by rubenugarte • 4 years ago

82 87 4 years ago

naavis2• 4 years ago

I assume FOMO means ”fear of missing out” in this context, but the article never actually spells it out.

echelon• 4 years ago

It's a very common acronym that I hear in ordinary daily conversation, and its usage has passed that of the original phrase. Easy to Google, too.

ziddoap5• 4 years ago

There is not much that is more annoying than an author assuming the reader knows the acronyms that they want to use.

This particular case isn't as bad as others, but especially when getting into any sort of technical conversation it's wildly frustrating to see multiple acronyms used with no indication of what they stand for. Then you go to look it up and there's like 29 results that fit the acronym, half of them being plausible.

I was always taught to use the full word/name/whatever the first time it occurs in writing and immediately provide the acronym in brackets (I've also seen vice-versa, which is fine), then feel free to acronym-soup the rest of the text. I sorely miss when that was the rule, now that it seems like it is the exception.

Swizec2• 4 years ago

There is not much that is more annoying than an author assuming the reader knows the acronyms that they want to use

Sometimes you're not the intended audience and that's okay too. Constantly explaining acronyms that everyone in the audience uses daily gets frustrating too.

Imagine if every article written for senior software engineers in VC-backed companies had to re-explain what PR, CI, VC and AWS stand for. Or if every article for American audiences re-explained LA, NYC, and EST.

Jargon is useful.

dan-robertson2• 4 years ago

My dictionary has a definition of FOMO which is more nuanced than just spelling out an acronym, and it has a pronunciation which is not just the letters said one at a time.

So in this case I think spelling out the acronym is neither necessary (as articles typically needn’t define moderately well known words) nor sufficient (as the term’s meaning is more than just the expansion of the acronym).

dangus4• 4 years ago

This isn't even a technical or business acronym, it's a common colloquial.

It's used in mainstream television advertisements like the FOMOH ads by the NHL (fear of missing out on hockey).

FOMO is probably as well-known as other acronyms that aren't explained every time they come up: IRS, LGBT, DMV, MLB, NYC, etc.

And, really, if you don't know it, you just do this:

CTRL+T define:FOMO ENTER

I mean, we're already in a web browser...

But here we go, now we're deep in an HN thread about something so incredibly trivial – it really is true that our day jobs are bullshit if we've got this much time to kill on this kind of discussion. (I'm unemployed, what's the rest of y'all's excuse?)

wincy• 4 years ago

I swear the acronym BOGO appeared ex nihilo three years ago. I’d literally never seen it before then and was very confused about what it meant, and still am convinced it’s an acronym that a marketing firm invented to sound hip. (buy one get one for anyone out of the loop)

aloisdg2• 4 years ago

I have a public collection on GitHub of "technical" acronyms with their definition for this reason: https://github.com/d-edge/foss-acronyms

munk-a2• 4 years ago

Unless this is a very recent edit the second paragraph starts with:

I was surprised to hear how much FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) my friends were experiencing.

I had also forgotten what FOMO stood for but thankfully the article defined it above the first page fold.

naavis2• 4 years ago

It was edited. Previously the article did not spell it out.

alttab2• 4 years ago

cough Meta cough

3a2d29• 4 years ago

Definitely a good example, although you can extend it to so many. In the US if you say "tech" people suddenly scramble to you because everyone is afraid of betting against you and becoming blockbuster.

Ex: Wework is another one. Many of the big rich real estate families in NYC all were heavily invested in it. None of them wanted to be the dinosaur left behind even with a company that was claiming to be "tech" without really being tech.

alttab2• 4 years ago

I'd argue that WeWork's strategy was a disaster itself. FOMO into disasters is one thing, FOMO - AFAIK, was not a WeWork strategy.

daenz• 4 years ago

The multi-armed bandit problem[0] is an interesting example of optimizing a reduction in FOMO. Basically you need an intelligent way to assess a good use of limited resources.

0. https://towardsdatascience.com/solving-the-multi-armed-bandi...

bragr• 4 years ago

Counterpoint: FOMO is great marketing strategy for companies

warpech• 4 years ago

Why?

throwaway_78742• 4 years ago

Because people buy more products and make company more profit in less time.

Mostly people buy product in hopes of flipping it for some quick bucks ( some try to become long term collectors ) and mostly people do this to "stay in loop" and "not fall behind the curve".

marcosdumay• 4 years ago

You mean inducing FOMO on others?

Quite a predatory kind of marketing, but I can believe it makes companies give you more money on the short term.

rgrieselhuber• 4 years ago

This is a difficult problem in many SaaS verticals, I call it the “Oooh problem” because your target audience on social media is always saying “Oooh” to every new product and feature they come across and it’s one of the reasons that software gets so bloated, full of checkbox features.

As an entrepreneur it takes an enormous amount of patience and discipline to not get sucked into building for Oooh People.

nimbius• 4 years ago

but the metaverse will surely prove otherwise, just wait!

lifeisstillgood• 4 years ago

It's a good lesson to learn for life - we have so many options these days that we can run round trying them all - a better more systematic approach would help

rvz• 4 years ago

I guess this is a lesson to Clubhouse that has built it's whole company around FOMO and its invite system. It turns out you weren't missing anything.

Just another hype train that got overheated by a16z and the other smaller VCs that tried boosting the platform and it ran out of steam after it was copied to death and the poor delays and the disastrous release of the Android app.

Now not even the VCs want to use it anymore and have instead moved to YouTube.

MisterBastahrd• 4 years ago

FOMO explains 95% of Web 3 / NFT strategies had by companies that should really know better.

throwaway_78742• 4 years ago

I was going to say this.

TameAntelope• 4 years ago

I would love to have whatever problems Google has, and if FOMO is how Google got to be/remain Google, please yes give me lots and lots of FOMO...

My point is that maybe one of the most successful companies on the planet might not be a good example for illustrating "disastrous company strategies".

I do agree, generally, with the article FWIW.

aloisdg2• 4 years ago

What is `FWIW`? For What It's Worth I guess?

SimDeBeau• 4 years ago

Yes

peteradio• 4 years ago

Google did not get to be where it is via FOMO.

Animats4• 4 years ago

Definitely not. They started with a good idea for search, and then they acquired a really good approach to selling ads. Everything else is a sideline, and most of those sidelines have lost money.

WJW• 4 years ago

FOMO is often disastrous for personal strategies as well, career strategies or otherwise.

Animats4• 4 years ago

The other side of FOMO is appearing as the US transitions to a shortage economy, like the former Soviet Union. It used to be that if something was popular, more of it would be made, and then the price would go down. Now, if something is popular, the seller is likely to restrict the supply to push the price and margins up. Buy now, while you still can.

Cars. Houses. AWS S3 space. Meta's VR headgear. Meat. Most of the toiletries and drugs CVS and Walgreens sell.

jmalicki2• 4 years ago

Meat is interesting... when I read this at first I was taken aback, thinking that while there might be 1-3 years lag in producers responding to demand, surely meat is nearly a pure commodity without market power being involved?

Then I remembered slaughterhouses:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/blog/2021/12/10/rec...

Animats4• 4 years ago

"Comparing the fourth quarter of 2021 to the same quarter in 2020, that same firm increased the price of beef so much—by more than 35%—that they made record profits while actually selling less beef than before."

gmmeyer2• 4 years ago

I can just go buy a meta headset on their store, it's been that way a while I dunno if I would say there's a shortage there lol

Other headsets are more difficult to buy yea but the meta one is very much available

Linosaurus• 4 years ago

Meta recently announced a $100 price increase. So they are able to increase prices without lowered supply. It's not entirely clear why but fits the pattern of popular -> price goes up.

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh• 4 years ago

Things like cars -- and especially houses -- are in a different category than some random piece of hardware or a bit of server space, though.

With limited exceptions, no one is making more land. So there's a hard limit on the supply of cars and houses, at least until we manage to cover Mars in shopping malls and billboards.

thereisnospork• 4 years ago

a hard limit on the supply of cars and houses

There is a regulatory limit, sure, but the literal parking lots - not garages, lots - visible from my downtown apartment begs to differ that we are anywhere close to a hard limit on the supply of houses.

KerrAvon• 4 years ago

The United States has a nearly infinite amount of unoccupied land. What's required is the political and social will to incentivize people to build.

throwoutway• 4 years ago

Your examples do not match what you said. The sellers aren’t restricting the supply of several of these items. Externalities are

bennysomething• 4 years ago

Where is the evidence that suppliers are purposely restricting supply? This would only work if there was zero competition for a product.

refurb3• 4 years ago

That's actually not happening at all and seems to completely ignore the volume aspect of profit.

aryaman_kha• 4 years ago

It seems as though larger companies are typically those who fall prey to FOMO strategies, but many of them do successfully usurp smaller companies' markets simply by copying features. Sure, some of those features flop, but that doesn't make FOMO disastrous. Ex - after Snapchat launched stories, every tech company tested a copy. For Instagram, the copy was wildly successful, even if it was a relative failure for FB, LinkedIn, etc.

Bubble_Pop_223• 4 years ago

I think FOMO is a great strategy instead.

The point is FOMO-ing first, that is not in envy or in fear of missing out what other people are doing, but FOMO-ing because you see something in Nature or the structure of the marketplace (or both) which is an untapped opportunity.

Big tech is not FOMO-ing enough against Nature nor the Market. Each of the big tech companies have lost the willingness to put distance between themsevles and other big tech companies, maybe they are afraid of D.C. the DOJ and the whole Sherman Anti trust but at some point you have to be willing to go Super Nova just to experience what it feels like.

Google and Meta could be the ones to actually go and decide to go Super Nova, that's because of the double class shares which enables Page , Brin and Zuckerberg to call the shots without having to answer to investors who are clearly opposed to the concept of going Super Nova because it throws instability in their portfolios.

refurb3• 4 years ago

Why do you spell Nature with a capital "N"?

Bubble_Pop_223• 4 years ago

Why do people spell God with a capital G? Or Universe with the capital U?

The entity or thing that holds up all the secrets deserves respect. Whether you think it's a guy dressed in white with a long white beard or an ethereal entity like Nature.

FOMO is disastrous for company strategies

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