HN user

ryanvm

102 karma
Posts1
Comments21
View on HN

I have a neighbor trying to sell his Smart Car now.

$15K for a car that seats two, gets 38 MPG, and will vanish into a singularity in the event of a crash is anything but smart.

I like it. I think simplistic interfaces are the way to go for collaborative/social apps.

The downside of course is that it's dead easy to clone these simple apps (like Twitter, TinyURL, etc.), which means the barrier to entry for your competition is quite low. This effect has been recently amplified with the boom in quality frameworks and dirt cheap infrastructure (EC2, App Engine).

The end result is that making a killer web app is not enough and you instead have to make sure you nail the social marketing of it and build up a large enough userbase that the brand/userbase becomes the real value.

Bye-bye kindle 17 years ago

"Imagine" is right - that is quite a fantasy.

First, that Kindle killer isn't even close to existing.

Second, if you think $400 is steep for a device that has a 1 second refresh rate and a gray-scale screen, just wait until you see the price tag on 10" of full-color, touchscreen, iInk.

Third, and the real barrier to entry, Amazon has the bookstore to back it up. You can make the finest e-book reader in the world, but until you have "magic" wireless delivery and a limitless library to back it up, it's considerably more inconvenient to use than the Kindle.

Apple will not crack this space. It will have to be Google or Microsoft.

As recent switcher, I have to say I mostly agree. Macs still freeze and lock up and do weird shit, but at least you don't have to run on the antivirus/antispyware treadmill like you do with Windows. That alone makes a Mac worth it for me.

Of course, I scooped up mine when it was a deal on Amazon. I could never justify paying full sticker price...

[dead] 17 years ago

I think I'm going to sue Apple because the of the "I'm a Mac" ads. Do you know how difficult life has become for short, chubby people since that ad campaign came out? It's horrible.

[dead] 17 years ago

At what point do people realize that being a subscriber to someone with more than a few thousand followers basically just means you've put yourself on their "super short press release mailing list".

Twitter has got to be the wet dream of publicity agents and direct marketers alike...

I would say Firefox better watch it's back. Chrome, IE8, and Safari 4 are now all far more responsive browsers.

Savvy users may still avoid IE8 because of the mono-culture infection risk, but I think the only thing keeping people off of Chrome is the lack of a plug-in framework.