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Johnie

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I do like my tech device ecosystems working seamlessly.

What's nice about each of the Apple, Google, and Amazon ecosystems is that the devices all work seamlessly within the ecosystem. This is much harder to do across companies.

Take for example, Beats headphones integrate seamlessly with the iPhone, MacBook Pro, and AppleTV.

Or Nest integrating with Google Home

Or Ring integrating with Amazon Echo.

There are tradeoffs to be made that benefit the consumer.

Note: that was inaccurately reported in the TomsHardware article

The fact that it shows up as using iMessage is the part that I said may be inaccurately reported.

Even now, I am still seeing some suspicious data usage. I’ve started wiresharking it yesterday to track it down.

Right now it looks like it has stopped uploading data.

Looking at my router log, the only web history request is:

2024-1-08 19:44:10 LG_Smart_Laundry2_open aic-common.lgthinq.com

This was likely after I had removed it from my main wifi and reconnected it to a segregated wifi. I don't see any logs for prior to this point.

Because they have a pretty significant outstanding lending portfolio that they are on the hook for. See: https://twitter.com/adam_keesling/status/1715063558898364602...

Convoy effectively got into the factoring business and extended short term (30/60/90 days) loans to the trucking companies. Now, they don't hold these loans on their balance sheet but rather package them and sell them to lenders as asset-backed lending portfolio.

The thing with these is that typically the originator (in this case Convoy) will need to take the first tranche of losses. (This is where the $240M debt facility came in). As the freight market deteriorated, Convoy was effectively margin called by the lenders and could not come up with the money.

Any acquirer would then have to take up this debt. Even though Convoy may have a valuable asset, UPS is not in the business of managing a debt portfolio. Any acquirer would be dissuade by this baggage.

It's complete when you get to sufficient scale and end up directly integrating with Chase PaymenTech.

Then you realize how much overhead it is to do a direct integration and your CFO wonders why it's payment cost is rising with all your support engineers on staff and then revert back to third party processor.

I know some companies have tried this. It works at small scale and early on, however, over time, people want to see career progression.

Secondly, without levels, inefficiency creeps in at scale as it's not clear who the decision maker is.

Again, at small scale, this may work, but as companies grow, this becomes much harder.