netsp

An unregistered DBA wouldn't have a location.

I think the implication of 'fake business name' is business name that is not registered as your business. Otherwise, why have a qualifier?

Anyway, what I mean is that the OP messed up with registering his business.

Move to England?

Are you reading between the lines here? I didn't read fake business name. I read 1) business name 2) personal account.

Google's job is to help you search through the masses of uninteresting stuff and get to the stuff you care about.

I wish Google would just hurry up and buy or copy dropbox.

I don't want to make online backups of my offline data, offline backups of my online data & all that mess. I just want my docs in my dropbox folder, edited with Google docs, Zoho, Word, OO or a hammer n chisel and still available to any of the others when I'm done. No uploading/downloading a mess of files and recording them on tape. If I want another backup, I just want to plug in Time Machine. That's how I do backups. Other people like to do them differently (why? Time Machine works great), they should be able to do their thing.

I don't want to upload/download files via the browser. I don't want files called G.Docs-old-new-good-partial.zip sitting around everywhere. I don't want to think about my files. I especially don't want to think about my files if some of them or on my machine, some of them or on Google, some of them some startup's servers. That last one is a real problem because I need to read Techrunch to hear about them going under in advance and transfer all the files to whatever new startup they're covering.

The cloud isn't replacing the desktop today. No one uses only Google docs or stores documents only in the cloud. People do both. They might always do both. I want a bridge.

I didn't know it was possible to be a long time Google Docs user.

The point is still a good one though. The market was fractured when they entered. It is still fractured & it doesn't seem to need Google to stay that way.

I always wonder if MSFT FUD more than everyone else or if media just like to portray them like this.

I think this is just semantics, the definition of 'launch' for this purpose can be pretty flexible.

My Favourite soundbite"

"Over-engineering is poison. It's not like doing extra work for extra credit. It's more like telling a lie that you then have to remember so you don't contradict it."

That's a great way of figuring out how the law is broken."Un-willful" patent infringement shouldn't be stopped. If a patent is likely to be violated without intention, that really means that the (social good) justification for the patent isn't very strong. The only reason it is even illegal is to stop companies from being willfully ignorant but still take advantage of the idea's prior existence.

Irony

They seem to agree

I think this is a feature (or bug) of capitalism. Capitalism (or socialism for that matter) is a hard to use term. No one agrees on its real meaning. Free is definitely a premise. Honest, I'm not sure. I think many free marketers argue that honesty is one of the emergent qualities of markets.

There is a capitalist core though. I think that core says that the non-market system (governments, societies, etc.) need to make sure that things are free. Emergent order will take care of the rest. Incentives & feedbacks will make sure (via the mechanism described above) that transactions are profitable for all parties, that they are safe & that they are otherwise ethical. Honesty is usually included in this.

Again, when I say 'usually included,' it's hard to nail down what I mean. Most people have obviously never considered this particular aspect. They use think in more general terms. But the Capitalism-as-philosophy guys (Libertarians in the US, Austrian-schoolers or Liberals some other places), would consider honesty as something that emerges, part of capitalism.

Word is getting out. This forum, that blog. That is word getting out. I'm sure fewer startups are applying.

I mean Keiretsu has an incentive to listen to as many applications as possible. Your right about startups having incentives too. However, Keiretsu have all the information. hey have an incentive to keep it that way.

Investors, on the other hand, play the game more regularly. It's impossible to keep the information from them long term. If they had to pay to come, they would need to be finding good investments. Startups don't have this feedback, at least not without things like public complaints.

That is where the problem comes in. Something like that needs to surface. If it is a huge bank, people would know. If it a little 'broker' people might not. What Jason is trying to do is bring this to the surface. He attempts to be part of the process by which 'people realised that no more loans were being given out" so that they stop applying for loans, except with investment.

Other parties have more of an impact on your reputation either way.

I hope I am not being voted up because people think I'm saying nothing morally problematic is going on. I meant to offer support to the grandparent comment.

There is such a thing as an immoral yet free transaction.

they're charging for access to their call center basically. I don't really see anything wrong with that.

Rubbish. They are charging people to download Firefox. The reason they can do this is because people don't know it's free. If you approached these people & said, "do you want to buy access to our call center?" They would say no.

The premise of capitalism (especially capitalism as moral philosophy) is that if two parties come together & a transaction occurs, both walk away better off. Otherwise the transaction would not occur. Therefore, it cannot be considered immoral.

Protection against corruption/taking advantage is built in. Don't like it? Don't buy it.

Reputation is a lot harder to build then it is to kill.

The problem is that it creates a problematic incentive structure.

About a month ago, I filled out an application/request with an NGO (Acumen Fund) about opening a local chapter where I live (Melbourne). My understanding that if they get enough requests, they'll try to get a local chapter going.

Now I got a response that they want to extend a 'special invitation' to use their 'to register on our brand new community site' where I can get involved and maybe new chapters will materialise.

The timing seems pretty convenient. I suspect that the request/suggestion form was really a list building excercise for the community site. It's a Ning. Those things need to cross a substantial chicken-egg hurdle before they are any use to anyone.

I admit, there was no blatant lie. It isn't really exactly the same thing. But it is sending out feelers & building email lists. They could have also put up a big 'join our community' button on the site that led to an 'sorry, under construction' page after you "sign up." Maybe they did. It was a little bit sneaky. I still joined & even started a group. I'm not angry with them. I'll even mention it to others.

BTW: http://community.acumenfund.org/

Hve you observed engineering departments, research departments, IT, Accounting, HR, Comms, legal... doing a bad job? Usually, most of these are not critical enough to "poison" a business, crappy HR or IT is annoying, but usually doesn't kill a company. Anything bad enough can, but if a department is far away from how the company makes money, good enough is usually good enough. Sometimes Marketing isn't important enough to kill a company either. Often it is though.

The types of companies that get discussed on HN are usually the kind where both marketing & engineering are important enough to do a lot of damage and important enough for everyone to have an opinion about them.

You can top that up with the fact that the stuff that usually gets praise or abuse (eg product development) can often be claimed or pawned off by both engineering and marketing.

Who is responsible for the ipod nano video camera thing? Engineers?

Sometimes things are obvious. Google has awesome marketing, but the original dynamite was creating the awesome search engine and the momentum caused by gmail & maps & such. Facebook is, as far as I can tell, a marketing achievement. In both cases it was important that the non dominant factor didn't mess things, but it was a hurdle.

Apple or MSFT? You could argue both or neither. If you wanted to teach how to be like them, the classes would probably be called things like 'strategy' or 'leadership.' I'm not sure that any department has a monopoly here.

What would it take to make you feel comfortable about it?

A minimum viable product experiment is good at measuring whatever a minimum viable product experiment measures. You definitely can't make exact projections, but it is a piece of info that is useful. At the very least it can tell you not to build something.

It might also be good to test several ideas with this method to decide which one to pursue. Again, they shouldn't be the only factor but all else equal, better fake conversion is better.

It isn't an accurate projection, but it is info. It is also a chance to get an understanding of the adwords environment, click costs, etc.

Yeah, I agree.

A lot of the problems to do with digital content is because it is trying to behave like it isn't digital content. The "rules" of lending a book in physical format are determined by physics, psychology, & the like. People ahve learned to live with these. The "rules" of lending an ebook are going to be completely artificial, even if they mimic the dead tree rules.

It's like trying to enforce a complicated regime of minimum orders per table that depends on the number of people, the days of the week, what items are ordered etc. That just makes people angry.

Definitely. They have 10% of the OS market, 10% of the hardware market & good margins on both. Growing from 10 - 15% is admirable, but not as hard as growing from 70% to 105%.