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Bamafan

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My takeaway is that most people assume a university professor never "brushes up against the floor of society" (as you put it).

This article is good for enlightening people that this is far from the case.

Growing an already massive company company by 3x in revenue is the important thing, which is the 'bottom line' in which missteps have to be contextualized.

Yes, he managed to creatively squeeze revenue out of existing markets. This is what he was known for.

But as far as finding new markets or growing existing markets, he failed and that's all Wall Street cares about.

Surely MS could have done better, but I view it more as lost opportunity than failure.

Non other than Bill Gates himself refers to MS Mobile strategy as a failure: http://fortune.com/2013/02/19/today-in-tech-why-bill-gates-c...

Remember that 80% of acquisitions fail. Google spent $3B on Nest. Apple spent $3 Billion on Beats, it remains to be seen if they'll make that up in profit

Ballmer's failure rate on major acquisitions may have been 100%. (I'm not even kidding)

For whatever reason, the industry press never liked Ballmer, and I guess they like Satya

Ballmer made several missteps:

1. Fruitless foray into mobile with acquisition of Nokia and Windows Mobile and Windows Phone strategies.

2. Billion+ dollar acquisition of Skype that basically went no where.

3. Remember a company called aQuantive? Don't worry, neither does anyone else. Ballmer's MS purchased them for $6 billion.

That's off the top of my head, but I'm sure there are more examples.

It's not even really a city, but more just a place where exurbanites congregate from 9 to 5 to conduct commerce.

Definitely not the case. Lots of people live in the city of San Francisco, though it's also true a lot of people commute in from the South and East Bays.

There are good things about the city, but the homeless problem (and really, that's what I think this is about) is a very serious issue that makes the place much, much less desirable.

I think the part that you may be missing is that View 1 (embedded view) is hosted on DocuSign's domain.

So the view may be designed by the client, but it's not hosted by the client. It's hosted on DocuSign.

Then View 2, is the "dashboard" view which of course isn't designed by the client.

In an ideally designed embedded View 1, it should not be possible to get to DocuSign's "dashboard" (View 2). Sessions should be tracked in DocuSign's API and View 1 refreshes should return the user to hosted View 1 or should return an error.

Even if they added this feature, the API bug would still remain (it would just be covered up by the UI).

A sophisticated enough client user would still have access to the all data associated to the API user.

I'm curious as to how HelloSign guards against this. Do they have some sort of session token that sends you back to the signing page on refresh? (i.e. similar to guard to avoid submitting shopping cart purchases twice).

Whether an API is "good" or "bad" often is dependent on the requirements of the calling client. At the beginning of projects when client requirements are unclear, it is often hard to determine whether a supporting API/library truly meets your needs.

Was going to post roughly the same thing. All good suggestions in the article, but there are absolutely costs in the approaches she suggests (unless she's saying people's time has no value).

> "If she was in a committed relationship, had offspring, a home with equity, savings, and a career, there is no guarantee that would bring her fulfillment."

All of this. Also, I'd bet more than a few of her friends in relationships with homes are jealous of her! They probably have a false impression of how exciting her life is.

Also, I am happy you were able to get out of your DV situation and can see your kids. Can't imagine what that must have been like.

FB post is solely about "literal" vs "non-literal" code copying. These are words that the lawyers chose to use to communicate a complex (for non-programmers) idea to a bunch of non-programmers.

I think of "non-literal" code copying as R&D. I think the Zenimax lawyers were claiming that the R&D that Carmack did for the Occulus, while still an employee of Zenimax, was key to making Occulus valuable. And it seems like Carmack even used Zenimax IP (Doom) to develop a demo that was shown to investors, without Zenimax permission. Essentially Zenimax was used as an R&D arm of Occulus.

Pretty messy case and pretty different from Google vs Oracle IMO.

I believe the "non-literal copying" thing simply refers to the insight gained from the R&D time he spent on Occulus while still an employee of Zenimax. 90% of HN members know that this deep understanding is FAR, FAR, FAR more valuable than blindly copying over code.

It was this deep understanding that made Occulus valuable and it was seemingly funded on Zenimax's time and dime.

"While I personally believe they did break the NDA by showing the hardware with the demo Carmack cooked up, the amount of money awarded is beyond absurd."

That all depends on if the demo was the deciding factor in the multi-billion dollar buyout.

They also made a number of "free" games that were published by SoftDisk. This was all pre-modern software era though. If that happened today, it would end up very similarly to how the Occulus case ended up.

Now, let me just dispel a myth you stated. You believe that "Given two equally talented people, the one that pursues a goal obsessively, for well over 40 hours a week, is going to achieve more."

This works for people like Carmack because he's always gotten to choose precisely what he wants to do in each of those 40+ hours.

On some level, I hate articles like this because of all the unanswered questions:

[1] What did you spend that initial $100 on? (Even the cheapest overseas programmer can't do jack for $100)

[2]You mention $400 million in revenue, but how much of that is profit?

[3] What exactly does Trace3 do (if it was so great, I would have heard of it on my own, or you would have explained it in the article, without me having to Google research it)

[4] If things are going so great, why are you writing articles for websites like entrepreneur.com? (oh yeah, you have another thing called POP you're promoting)

[5] You mentioned a "bold" client's advice. How did yo know this was advice worth listening to vs advice to be ignored?

I'll probably get voted down into oblivion, but IMO these kinds of articles say a lot and nothing at all.

Thank you for answering. And wow, amazing results from using the default "marketing" you get with the Mac App Store (especially given the difficulties that so many others have reported).