Marketing, running the service and data centers, office space, research and development, capex, etc, etc. Running companies is expensive beyond just the salaries.
No, there is absolutely no legal case here whatsoever. Apple's developer program terms grant them virtually unbridled power to do whatever they want with your developer account no matter how fair or how unfair. You have no legal right to have a developer account. Normal business contractual negotiations (as these are) are not blackmail.
I thought it's been proven that terms of service can't override or be a substitute for like... other laws. It's possible to find the terms of service invalid.
Apple's warranty policy that users 'agree with' has been over turned in many many countries.
The only way to really be sure is to only travel with carry on luggage and never let it out of your sight. Obviously this is not always feasible, but, I think people do a poor job of packing carry-on luggage and assume they need something huge. You can definitely make due with surprisingly little, and it's easier to get around the airport, etc. If you have something big to bring home, just have it mailed to you.
Until the past couple of years they were almost entirely dependent on government contracts from shady three-letter agencies, and most of the work required a security clearance (now it's a little closer to 50/50 government contracts and Fortune 100-type companies). Not to mention they were literally funded with millions of dollars from the CIA's venture capital arm. Suppose they had been shady - I'm not sure we'd know about it. You probably should have had an 'inconclusive' group somewhere in the middle and they would have at least fit there.
Tejada's experience seems to be all related to corporate management
She rocks at sales, and she knows how to push back corporate suits (keep them from interfering too much with engineering). She supports her employees over the shareholders. She's great.
No one said that professional CEOs always fail. I said it's a bad sign when one is hired. Are you arguing it's a good sign, or that tech companies do better with non-founder managers?
Yes, and I am telling you that is an ignorant stereotype.
Edit: You've edited your response so many times I can't keep up. I am not arguing any point of view. You unilaterally said that it is always a bad sign when a company brings in an experienced CEO. That is an ignorant stereotype. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail. Sometimes it's a smart hire, sometimes it's not. The late Dave Goldberg taking the reigns at SurveyMonkey was an incredible turning point for the company.
Also in this case the CEO is staying on as CTO which is a good sign that this is a strategic hire rather than some internal issues leading to ousting of the CEO.
Founder CEO staying on as quasi CTO while professional CEOs are brought in? Nobody tell OP about what Larry Ellison's done with Mark Hurd and Safra Catz.
The parent unilaterally said that it was a bad sign. That is an expression of certainty. Not 'it could be a bad sign,' or 'I believe it's a bad sign,' but 'it is a bad sign.' That is demonstrably and obviously false. I know what they said, and what they said is a ridiculous, stereotypical view of the value of professional managers who often lend far more value than technical people want to give them credit for.
If you want to point out the kind of value professional managers bring to the table, please do so. Such an approach, in my opinion, makes the debate productive and moves the discussion forward.
I feel "professional" managers are bad for tech companies. Here are two reasons :
1. A lot of management techniques that are taught in business schools apply to traditional manufacturing based businesses. A lot of these underlying assumptions are invalid in the tech businesses.
2. Tech businesses require a deep understanding of what is possible with the current state of the art. This is requires a deep understanding of technology so that when there are fundamental changes to the landscape (which happens more frequently in tech) the company can adapt and stay relevant.
There is no discussion. OP made an incorrect, absolutist statement that was ignorant and demonstrably false and I am pointing that out. Your view, frankly, is just as ignorant. You assume that world-class business schools like HBS only teach things that apply to traditional manufacturing businesses... Perhaps you ought to look at what a management student learns before asserting that. It's an incorrect viewpoint. The comment below this is literally an HBS article stating that professional managers are actually often better for the company than being founder-led. We cannot have a discussion that goes anywhere if one side of it is (1) anecdotal feelings that are not backed by research and (2) demonstrably false and ignorant statements.
There's actually a study ("Rich vs King", [1]) by HBS showing that, controlling for other factors, bringing in a professional CEO can actually maximize the value of the founders' equity.
I think in a way yes. Since Larry Page and Sergey Brin have left to do Alphabet, nothing of value has been released. Quality seems to be also down while ads are way more agressive. I wouldn't buy GOOGL.
> Nothing in this master plan explains why SolarCity was bought
Do note that it was only a proposal and nothing has been accepted yet with the deal, so it's an offer only - in fact, if you look at SolarCity's stock price, it's weighted toward investors believing that the deal does not happen.
The idea of the project is great. It can be difficult to get folks up to speed on various Node JS topics, and one of the big ones (like with any code deployed on a web framework, really) is getting people up to speed on deployment. Anything that is working on making that easier, especially for new/young developers, is great.
That being said, I really do not like the pricing strategy because I think it completely incentivizes bad behavior and optimizing your API/apps for weird things at anything past micro-project scale. Things like when database queries happen are also not entirely opaque to developers, especially new developers, which is going to lead to them not understanding charges (for instance, would a new developer understand that on a fairly basic installation of Passport and Express, every page request, logged in or not, would result in DB activity as Passport tries to figure out if the session is logged in or not? That's likely to far overshadow the single API credit needed for the API hit.) I think that Heroku's free tier would be much more attractive for small projects, and for anyone more advanced than that, a $5 Digital Ocean droplet is simple enough to learn very basic server administration and quickly deploy your application. There are a number of other Node platforms (Modulus) who will give you good service for < $15/month.
I think it would make a lot more sense to structure this more like EC2's burstable instances, which accrue CPU credits for times when they do not run at their allotted CPU, and then can expend those credits to burst above that CPU for smaller amounts of time. That achieves a lot of the good things you're working on, but doesn't push people toward minimizing trips to and from the DB or instance.
Thanks for the insight. :) I don't disagree. Database queries don't use credits right now. We're going to be playing around with what makes the most sense for our customers. Expect things to change as we grow!
Worth noting that Amazon recently discontinued its practice of supporting these refunds, which was a major use case of this app. If you're someone like me who primarily is buying from Amazon, this won't help you on that.
