_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy (2016)
bitwize wrote 15 hours 20 min ago:
From The Tao of Programming, chapter 3.3:
There was once a programmer who was attached to the court of the
warlord of Wu. The warlord asked the programmer: "Which is easier to
design: an accounting package or an operating system?"
"An operating system," replied the programmer.
The warlord uttered an exclamation of disbelief. "Surely an accounting
package is trivial next to the complexity of an operating system," he
said.
"Not so," said the programmer, "When designing an accounting package,
the programmer operates as a mediator between people having different
ideas: how it must operate, how its reports must appear, and how it
must conform to the tax laws. By contrast, an operating system is not
limited by outside appearances. When designing an operating system, the
programmer seeks the simplest harmony between machine and ideas. This
is why an operating system is easier to design."
The warlord of Wu nodded and smiled. "That is all good and well, but
which is easier to debug?"
The programmer made no reply.
URI [1]: https://www.mit.edu/~xela/tao.html
anshublog wrote 19 hours 5 min ago:
Oh wow - interesting to see this up again. I am the author of The Stack
Fallacy. #AMA
I am now founder of Skyflow, we are runtime AI data security platform.
This is my third startup, and previously I ran strategy for Salesforce.
throwaway81523 wrote 20 hours 28 min ago:
This sounds like the Blub paradox in reverse ;).
danielmarkbruce wrote 21 hours 22 min ago:
This article misses the mark. It's not about knowledge, it's about
competition. One direction creates a monopoly, the other creates a
competitor in a competitive market.
dzonga wrote 22 hours 21 min ago:
this is very relevant in this era - where you people making noise
without results about they can build with a.i
and our technolords telling us plebs will be technoserfs to be replaced
by a.i or that everything will be built by a.i
laughing_man wrote 23 hours 1 min ago:
>History is full of such examples. IBM thought nothing much of the
software layer that ran their PC hardware layer and happily allowed
Microsoft to own the OS market.
IBM didn't "happily" do anything of the sort. The company was
undergoing multiple anti-trust investigations at the time and was
trying to avoid incurring a large fine or even a structural remedy for
creating a vertical monopoly.
The reason Microsoft went to the mat so hard when the government was
trying to separate IE from Windows was Gates' fear that the company
would end up being similarly crippled by the specter of anti-trust
action from the government.
bonesss wrote 13 hours 30 min ago:
However many years later: the broad sentiment that MS needed to be
broken up into separate Office, Windows, and Dev/Tools organizations
was pretty on the money.
Document exchange, formats, and user editing experience have suffered
due to their mixed goals and market control, this has real social
cost. And with the current âcopilot everywhereâ push weâre
seeing pretty disruptive tech being hammered down a lot of throats.
Mature Visual Studio features are being deprecated for subscription
based off-site code gen⦠(which at a distance sounds like MS is
struggling and needs extra development help to maintain its flagship
development software, if only they had some kind of AI that could
help them keep upâ¦)
I dare say weâd be oodles better off with similar crippling fears
in the board rooms of some media, energy, and tech conglomerates. The
judge was right, and we missed a key chance to set a guiding example.
roenxi wrote 23 hours 48 min ago:
Big companies also fail to keep their own markets with some regularity,
the tech companies are built over the ruins of industries that solved
the same problem in the days of yesteryear with different tools.
The view of the article seems to be that companies solve problems. The
way they solve problems is actually baked in to the structure of the
management rather than any individual (sometimes there is an individual
like a CEO with enough vision to reshape the management structure to
solve new problems, although that is rare). It is also why acquisitions
fail so easily - if you take an existing company and graft it under an
existing management structure geared to solve some other problem then
there is a lot of risk.
jkingsbery wrote 1 day ago:
This isn't really just a big company problem, lots of start-ups fail
too. It plays out a bit differently at big companies, as those failures
tend to be more public but also done in a way that lets the company
shuffle people around to the next project. There were lots of start-up
companies that tried to build social networks or ERP systems or map
applications that most people don't hear about.
adamc wrote 22 hours 56 min ago:
Sure, in all cases, acquiring knowledge of what the (potential)
customers want is difficult. The point of the article is that vendors
of layer N tend to think they know what it takes to succeed at layer
N+1, but they don't, because that customer base (N+2) is different.
The other (more important, maybe) thing the article points out is
that building layer N-1 turns out to be easier, because layer N is
the customer and understands those needs already.
toss1 wrote 1 day ago:
>>The bottleneck for success often is not knowledge of the tools, but
lack of understanding of the customer needs.
THIS!! A Thousand Times This!
I have had many successful projects putting the coders in direct
contact with the end users.
In contrast, every time a manager is inserted between the real user
requirements and the code, the project descends a lower ring of
endless-feature-creep hell, doubles in length, and doubles it's
likelihood of failure.
Yes, managers are needed to provide some insulation from very noisy and
chaotic feature requests from users, but insisting on at least some
frequent time with some actual coders in contact with actual users pays
massive dividends.
anshublog wrote 18 hours 54 min ago:
thanks. :) [og author here]
jackfranklyn wrote 1 day ago:
The sandwich fallacy comment nails it. The hard part isn't the building
- it's the understanding.
When you're at a particular layer of the stack, you understand your
immediate customer (the layer above you) reasonably well. But two
layers up? Three? You're basically guessing. And the higher you go, the
more the problems become messy human problems rather than clean
technical ones.
I build accounting tools. The technical work is manageable - parsing
bank statements, matching transactions, posting to ledgers. But
understanding why a bookkeeper categorises something a particular way,
or what makes a reconciliation workflow feel "right" vs frustrating -
that took years of sitting with actual users and watching them work. A
database company could technically build what I build in a few months.
They'd never ship something anyone actually wanted to use.
nonameiguess wrote 1 day ago:
It's pretty funny to see the 2016 date here. That's a few years after I
finished grad school having doubled up in computer science and finance.
It was nearly axiomatic at that point that small cap value funds were
the best way to go for long-term investing, having outperformed all
other broad options consistently for the past century over any time
horizon longer than a decade.
Except today. Even since this was written, large cap growth funds or
"blue chip" stocks have tremendously outperformed everything else, more
than doubling the return of small cap value. Big companies are
absolutely not failing. They're doing better than they ever have at any
other time in history, granting this is the admittedly short span of
human history in which we had public equity markets.
anshublog wrote 18 hours 51 min ago:
NVIDIA was a small cap in 2016. Netflix was a small cap in 2016.
Intel was the leader. Comcast was the leader.
Yes Google and Apple have done great but its because they have made
some good strategic decisions. And some (not all) of their failures
of last 10 years fall sqaurely in stack fallacy.
cliffaust wrote 1 day ago:
It's always better to just listen to your audience first before
building. Big companies have so many layers involved to actually make
sure that every engineer understands what the product they are building
is really about
dosinga wrote 1 day ago:
This doesnât sound very convincing, mostly because the examples
donât really line up with the claim. Apple supposedly struggles âup
the stack,â yet many of the best and most-used iPhone apps are built
by Apple itself. Google is held up as failing at social, but YouTube is
arguably the largest social network in the world. Oracle is described
as struggling in apps, yet itâs clearly doing just fine as a massive,
profitable enterprise software company. And the IBM example is
backwards: IBM didnât accidentally hand Microsoft the OS layer, it
already had its own operating systems. In fact, Microsoft is the
clearest counterexample here, it got big by owning the OS and then very
successfully moved up the stack to dominate applications with Office.
compiler-guy wrote 21 hours 47 min ago:
I don't think anyone at Google thought building a social network
would be easy, and Page knows Google planned and did spend a huge
amount of money on the failure.
Google just that it was necessary and possible, not that it would be
easy. I suspect that many other up-the-stack adventures by other
companies were similar.
trickypr wrote 23 hours 48 min ago:
I think a lot of your examples are flawed. Google didnât build the
initial version of YouTube, they bought it.
A lot of Appleâs apps predate the App Store. The apps that came
later had limited use until Apple spent a lot of time refining them.
Think Apple Maps.
Microsoft released Word for Mac a year before they released Windows
1.0, so Windows was âdown the stackâ for them.
dosinga wrote 2 hours 48 min ago:
eh, maybe. Sure Google bought Youtube, but the whole making it
social came later. Apple spending a lot of time refining them is
exactly the point. They did go up in the stack (given that they
started out as home computer builder quite a bit). Word first came
out for MS DOS, so definitely going up in the stack.
bee_rider wrote 1 day ago:
FWIW the article is from 2016 (although, if the article was
discovering some real underlying force it shouldnât be invalidated
by the passage of time). Apple Maps was quite bad when it was
released, I forget when that was exactly, but maybe it was recent
enough in 2016 to be top-of-mind?
anshublog wrote 18 hours 56 min ago:
exactly. it took longer for Apple to fix its Maps app - and to this
day their email app is nowhere as good as most third party apps.
Even iMessage is lacking features that WhatsApp and Signal built 5
years ago. (And iMessage is clearly their best app.)
hansvm wrote 22 hours 24 min ago:
IIRC it was released somewhere in the iPhone 4/5 transition
(2011ish?). It was so abysmal for a road trip I took that I went to
Android and haven't looked back (they also removed Google Maps for
a bit, and the web version wasn't suitable). It wouldn't have been
top of mind for me in 2016, but I wouldn't have been surprised at
somebody telling me Apple maps sucked.
seanhunter wrote 1 day ago:
This is a great example of persuasive, but superficial, analysis.
1) It may well be a dumb thing they do, but is this really "why big
companies keep failing?" There's no real examination of this causal
assertion which seems central.
2) Is it really the "stack"? That is to say, do people really assume
that just the layer above them is trivial? I see engineers all the
time assume that basically everything they don't understand is trivial.
For example Elon Musk's famous assertion that the hyperloop is
"Basically just like an air hockey table. It's not that hard". Well
in turns out air hockey pucks don't need to transport people, g-forces
aren't important for air hockey versus not murdering your passengers is
quite important for a public transport system. Air hockey pucks don't
need to breathe versus people do which makes the vacuum part quite
critical and challenging especially since you have to figure out how to
get people in and out without rupture. To think of it as like air
hockey you are assuming that all interesting/challenging parts of the
problem are trivial. To be clear: I think that this hubris is
basically essential for innovation. I really don't think people would
ever innovate if they worried too much about every small detail of
things, but this is why a large proportion of experiments by everyone
(big and small companies alike) fail. I don't think the layer above
you in the stack is the important part here and the article doesn't
examine whether that characteristic is important.
adamc wrote 22 hours 43 min ago:
I think you are criticizing an idea for not being a study. I think
it's a reasonable and interesting idea, but at most it is something
to consider, not some infallible axiom. More akin to "the Peter
Principle" than a theorem.
Point 2 is... neither important nor really germane. (I don't care
what engineers say, and Musk isn't an engineer anyway.) The point is
that people understand their customer bases, and sell to them, and
then imagine that means they understand how to succeed in the
business their customers are in, and... not so.
It's basically a reminder that understanding the customer is
everything. No matter how good the tech is, if you don't solve the
customer's problem... they aren't buying.
anshublog wrote 18 hours 54 min ago:
Yes, when I wrote this article - I was pointing out that we seem to
have missed this rather common pattern. And if you understand this
pattern you can avoid some strategy mistakes.
I didn't claim that this one pattern explains all of the failures.
seanhunter wrote 9 hours 58 min ago:
It's an interesting idea, but I don't think you explore it
adequately. Firstly you don't even establish it's a mistake in
the majority of cases - you just list some instances where it was
a mistake. So "understanding this pattern" and trying to avoid
strategy mistakes could be an even bigger mistake than not.
bee_rider wrote 1 day ago:
Your point 2 is interesting, but Musk isnât any type of engineer
really, just a money guy that uses engineer words. It seems more
likely that he assumes a Hyperloop would be trivial not because it is
a simple application of some lower framework that heâs got a deep
understanding of, but because he hasnât been given an itemized bill
for one.
prewett wrote 17 hours 43 min ago:
Musk used to be seen as an engineer. He co-founded a payments
company that merged with PayPal (not sure if he did engineering,
though). I believe he is widely seen as being a knowledgeable
rocketry engineer. I also think that he contributed to engineering
of early Teslas. Now he is completely over-committed, and seems to
me like he is burnt-out but does not realize it, and is doing all
sorts of crazy things which act to sort of paper that over. Twenty
years ago he was seen as a high-level engineer (I've heard that
Marvel's Tony Stark was based on Musk [I mean, obviously it was
based on the comic book character, but hopefully you know what I
mean]).
bee_rider wrote 17 hours 6 min ago:
I guess based on all the phrases like âused toâ and âseen
as,â youâd agree that these perceptions were never really all
that realistic, right? He had better PR in the past for sure, but
it was always just a PR thing. That makes his behavior a bad
example of something engineers do.
Weâve got plenty of smug actual engineers, we donât need to
take blame for some cosplayerâs bad behavior.
roncesvalles wrote 1 day ago:
Some of it could also be a plain Darwinian numbers game. Facebook was
neither the first nor the only social media of its kind. There were
hundreds of failed attempts at similar social media, counting those
that died in obscurity.
When Google attempted their Facebook clone, it was just one of the many
who took a spin at the wheel. It was always more likely to have failed
than succeeded.
Building a B2C with hysteric adoption is difficult because it's very
mysterious what elements of the product will actually lead to success,
because it's a psychological thing. E.g., if Facebook chose green
instead of blue as their theme color (all else equal), it might've died
in obscurity.
irishcoffee wrote 1 day ago:
Pretty sure Facebook took off because they required you to have a
.edu address, and even then, when it first launched it wasnât just
any .edu, the rolllout was slow. I remember people enrolling in
2-year schools when the regex matched on *.edu just so they could get
an account.
Facebook hit the seam of internet 2.0: after the .com crash with a
bunch of kids who grew up on AIM/ICQ/whatever and all these kids
wanted to keep up with their friends at various colleges.
They indeed just got lucky.
bjt wrote 19 hours 30 min ago:
The .edu constraint also played perfectly to the most important
requirement of a new social network: Your parents must not have
accounts there.
austin-cheney wrote 1 day ago:
This became the most toxic part of web development... the tech stack.
Its why I went to go do something else.
Holy fuck, all you need is a server application, a database, HTML,
JavaScript, and CSS to make a CRUD app. Seriously, that is really all
you need. The problem though is that nobody trains developers any more
and so you get a little bit of helpers to help the developers along,
which turns out to be a mountain of bullshit that developers use to
line their resumes like notes on toilet paper.
As a counter point I wrote a large single page app and then adapted it
into removable modules that can be turned off from a JSON file. So,
its modular, which then solves for the design goal of most modern
JavaScript browser frameworks. But, it's just vanilla TypeScript. It
is stupid simple to scale, extensions from one of two TypeScript
interfaces without tech debt. The best part is that its fast... like
completing all initial execution, rendering, and garbage collection in
less than 130ms. [1] So, in practice it seems you could easily replace
10 React/Angular developers with a single TypeScript developer and a
series of small TypeScript interfaces. The bonus is that you get
faster releases, 100% accessibility (because its mostly raw HTML
instead of compiled templates), and a substantially faster product.
URI [1]: https://github.com/prettydiff/aphorio/blob/screenshots/papers/...
gchamonlive wrote 1 day ago:
The article is, however, about a different kind of stack.
owebmaster wrote 17 hours 51 min ago:
OP has an obsession with how every web/JavaScript developer is
terrible besides him
austin-cheney wrote 12 hours 17 min ago:
How do you know when you donât suck?
gchamonlive wrote 6 hours 21 min ago:
I don't think you can. Success is circumstantial, failure is
personal. Sucking is the only way to know your limits.
austin-cheney wrote 5 hours 44 min ago:
The management answer is that you compare yourself against
your peers using qualified metrics. You stop sucking when
your numbers are high enough on your organization's bell
curve. Most developers can't measure things, and most
organizations won't train them, which limits them to forever
sucking at what they do.
gchamonlive wrote 5 hours 39 min ago:
But by then it becomes a number game and it stops being
about quality but about optimizing given metrics. If you
can you should always strive to suck less. If you can't
then it's time to maybe seek some other working environment
which will enable you to do so.
codyb wrote 1 day ago:
Nobody builds anything modularly.
It's very weird. I've come into codebases at my current big co where
15 tables that all looked and acted exactly as terribly as one
another (no sorting, no discernible sort, no filtering, limited page
sizes, no search beyond CMD/CTRL-F)
And they were all built out one by one, every time.
What a mess, why! I consolidated everything down and am now bringing
up both an App URL Param library other folks can use, a generic
resource engine other folks can use, and a table engine which
combines the two to give you most table functionality with a simple
config and passing in the resources (We're internal tooling for small
record sets so a lot can be handled on the front end since resource
baseline can be assumed and customer count is low).
Even when you build things modularly people will give you grief. It's
over engineered. Well, you say that, except it's testable at the unit
level, easy to slide in to other use cases (which the test cases help
ensure resiliancy for old and new), small, not nested, discoverable,
flat, easy to read, and easy to maintain.
So sure, took a couple of extra hours of legwork up front compared to
just dropping everything into a single React function as is the
standard round these parts, but the benefits are clear.
wrs wrote 1 day ago:
I call it the âsandwich fallacyâ.
A lot of good bakeries decide to start making sandwiches. Itâs an
obvious value-add and adds margin. But sandwich customers are different
from bakery customers, a sandwich shop has a different layout from a
bakery, and making a great sandwich is a very different skill set from
making great bread. So itâs not easy to stay a successful bakery and
add on a successful sandwich business.
On the other hand, a great sandwich shop can pretty easily hire a baker
and set up an oven to make exactly the bread that it needs to elevate
its sandwiches.
pjmlp wrote 7 hours 30 min ago:
In most European countries, it is a given that we can buy sandwiches
at any proper bakery.
Those that only sell bread and nothing else, are very few and slowly
going away.
Thus maybe the other way around, as sibling comments are pointing
out.
kunley wrote 6 hours 57 min ago:
Substitute "most European countries" with "most Bundes of
Bundesrepublik Deutschland" and you will be closer to the truth.
Otherwise, I'd rather doubt it. To say it bluntly, Europe !=
Germany
pjmlp wrote 6 hours 56 min ago:
Nope, because that is indeed what happens at least in plenty of
Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French and Greek bakeries that I
have bumped into across my European travels.
One thing is right though, many Germans think they are unique on
this.
pier25 wrote 5 hours 20 min ago:
I'm from Spain. Yes you can find bakeries that sell sandwiches,
especially in areas for tourists, but I would argue this is not
the norm generally speaking. Bakeries for locals rarely sell
sandwiches.
anshublog wrote 18 hours 59 min ago:
Love the name. I wish I had called it Sandwich fallacy instead. (I am
the author.)
bigbuppo wrote 19 hours 5 min ago:
Back where I used to live there was a place called The Donut Shoppe
and Bakery, and quickly expanded to ...and Full Breakfast, and a
couple decades later ...Now Serving Hot Lunches, and then ...WE HAVE
KOLACHES!. At some point, though, they dropped the ...Still Steve and
Cindy's After All These Years because Steve and Cindy died.
nothercastle wrote 19 hours 26 min ago:
A sandwich shop canât be a bakery but a bakery can make sandwiches
itâs the other way around. A bakery needs scale, subway can reheat
ok bread but they will never have scale to make their own or make
great bread. Bread needs to be fresh for best results. Sandwich
ingredients are stable and easily procured. A sandwich shop Benifits
from a good layout but can do without. A bakery needs heavy
production equipment that is not easily replaced.
mrguyorama wrote 2 hours 15 min ago:
>subway can reheat ok bread but they will never have scale to make
their own or make great bread
They uh, literally did, 25 years ago. Breadmaking at Subway scale
requires a single large mixer, some countertop space, some proofing
racks, an oven, and a few hours at certain times.
Like, lmao bakeries are tiny! They have been premier examples of
small business for basically all of human history! It's something
you can just drop into the morning setup if your food business has
any interest at all in "fresh" ingredients or higher quality like
the vast majority of small businesses try to focus on. It scales
down extremely well, which is why Kitchenaide does great business
in their "Pro" series of mixers.
In fact, 25 years ago, the New England grocery store chain
Hannaford also had a fully functional and running in house bakery,
including in their small stores. Fresh baked bread and pastries and
cakes and baked goods every single day.
Both companies have switched out the process without actually
switching out or removing the required hardware (they both still
have the racks and ovens and still install them in new locations!)
to one where the bread is made in a distribution hub and sent out
frozen.
It was an easy service to offer when Americans could afford to pay
for that kind of thing because most Americans had fine jobs. But
Subway can't afford the labor rates for someone who genuinely knows
how to make fresh bread, because they have to/want to pay absolute
bargain basement labor rates. Their business cannot survive if they
priced their sandwiches in line with how much they were 25 years
ago, with the same quality of ingredients they had 25 years ago.
Americans can't afford to pay american labor, which means fewer
americans end up getting paid good labor rates, which means those
americans can afford less, which means etc etc etc.
Meanwhile executive compensation has only ballooned. Gee whiz.
potato3732842 wrote 7 hours 29 min ago:
> but they will never have scale to make their own or make great
bread
Every time someone figures out how to do something that's
subjectively graded at scale the definition of "great" changes
because a large part of it is partly based on exclusivity and a
smaller part is based on frequency/familiarity (i.e. people get
sick of or discount the subjective quality of things they encounter
with frequency).
nothercastle wrote 4 hours 27 min ago:
Bakers needs a minimum amount of Volume that is greater than 1
sandwich shop. So a chain sandwich place might be able to Support
a bakery but not just one.
The optimal quality model is for a sandwich place to contract out
with a bakery for perfect bread but barring that a bakery can
make great bread and ok fillings and still make decent
sandwiches.
Think apple silicon at TSMC model for optimal quality results,
intel model for good enough results.
The best sandwich shops will not make their own bread because
itâs a lot easier to iterate without a bakery and 100
sandwiches shops can fail at relatively low cost for the one
great one to shine. Capital costs on bakeries are much higher so
you canât just iterate in bulk. But you can get good enough at
the bakery.
prewett wrote 17 hours 53 min ago:
I think Jimmy John's does a good job making excellent bread. I'm
not sure that it is bakery quality, but it is definitely
noticeable. I've bought their day-old bread instead of grocery
store baked bread. I think Subway's bread is pretty good, too,
except they skimp on the flour.
stockresearcher wrote 7 hours 15 min ago:
The aroma of bread being baked is a glorious delight, yet somehow
whenever a Subway is baking the smell gives me nausea and I
canât even go near the shop. Yes, it is edible and inoffensive
once baked; I have no idea what they do to make the baking
process smell so badly.
somedudetbh wrote 21 hours 21 min ago:
I get the point you're making but this specific example strikes me as
so backwards that it's making me question the point being made in the
post.
In my experience, one of the most reliable heuristics for finding a
place that makes good sandwiches is "go to a place that's a good
bakery and see if they make sandwiches".
I can't think of a time I've gotten a sandwich from a (good) bakery
where the sandwich wasn't at least quite good, and frequently, very
very good. On the flip side, if you just buy a sandwich from a
dedicated sandwich shop? On average it will be bad. There are
excellent sandwich shops, for sure, that do not bake their own bread.
But there are very few bakeries that make sandwiches that do not make
extremely good sandwiches. (Subway doesn't count: they are not a
bakery, in that they do not sell bread or other baked goods. They
only produce their disgusting "bread" to enable them to sell
sandwiches).
It also strikes me that this argument is essentially the inverse of
the Alan Kay line "People who are really serious about software
should make their own hardware" that Apple people are always quoting.
I think perhaps the Sandwich Fallacy lacks explanatory power, because
the Stack Fallacy does as well. I think if the reason why big
companies consistently fail to win markets in which their customers
compete was because of the points made in the post, then we would see
evidence that big companies are disproprotionately successful at
winning markets in which their suppliers compete, the layer _below_
them in the stack: "The bottleneck for success often is not knowledge
of the tools, but lack of understanding of the customer needs." the
companies that build these sandwich-filling layers are the customer,
they understand this quite well, but I don't think they generally
succeed at this. So there must be something else at play.
I also find the examples in the article unconvincing:
"Apple continues to successfully integrate vertically down â
building chips, programming languages, etc., but again has found it
very hard to go up the stack and build those simple apps â things
like photo sharing apps and maps."
Apple's photo app is extremely popular. Apple's messaging app,
Messages, is so compelling it continues to sell Apple's ludicrously
expensive devices. It's literally a Killer App for iOS, in the
Visicalc mode. Apple has been building top-tier first party
applications for it's platform since the 1980s. For iOS, it's Photos,
Messages, Notes, Music, and Safari (I'm not arguing that Safari isn't
terrible, or that Apple isn't holding back the progress of the entire
open web via failing to make progress on Mobile Safari (they are).
I'm simply arguing that it's undeniably successful.) Before the
mobile era it was the 'digital hub' apps like iPhoto, iMovie, Garage
Band. In the 'productivity' era it was ClarisWorks. In fact, it's so
common that there's a slang term for when Apple-the-platform-vendor
starts to compete with it's application developers and uses its
structural advantages to win the market: "Sherlocking".
"It is therefore no surprise that Apple had an easier time building
semiconductor chips than building Apple Maps."
Did they? They bought PA Semi a zillion years ago. Apple Maps had a
rocky launch but now it's quite good. I concede I have no evidence
that it's popular or successful in the market. It looks to me like
Apple was successful in both categories.
"In the 1990s, Larry Ellison saw SAP make gargantuan sums of money
selling process automation software (ERP) â to him, ERP was
nothing more than a bunch of tables and workflows â so he spent
hundreds of millions of dollars trying to own that market, with mixed
results. Eventually, Oracle bought its way into the apps market by
acquiring PeopleSoft and Siebel."
I mean, sort of? Oracle is an absolutely dominant player in this
market category now. They got their through the usual mix of Oracle
chicanery. You know where Oracle is struggling? All the layers
_below_ them.
So I think it's pretty safe to reject the Stack Fallacy and the
Sandwich Fallacy. There's clearly a pattern where big companies fail
to win markets of their customers as well as markets dominated by
their suppliers, which is confusing given the strategic advantages
they would have expanding in either direction, but I would argue that
if there are common structural explanations for this, the proposed
explanations are not correct.
I guess I just think it's funny that when I skimmed the initial post
I just thought "hmmm, maybe?" but when I read your sandwich analogy I
was like "oh, right..this doesn't make any sense. Bakeries make
awesome sandwiches, almost always!" and I started thinking about it
more. Whereas if you made the same point with almost any other
example I would have probably been like, "yeah! This guy's right!
None of the best ice cream shops are also dairies! None of the best
coffee shops are also coffee farms! I've never seen a successful
textile weaver start a line of pants! None of the best...tire
stores...also...produce industrial rubber compounds?" I don't know.
So it's a funny choice.
nhumrich wrote 17 hours 19 min ago:
Holy survivor bias batman!
A bakery that makes sandwiches is good because well... It's still
around and making sandwiches.
That's like saying "companies that become profitable are less
likely to fail". Bakeries only start to make sandwiches _after_
succeeding at being a good bakery.
On average a sandwich shop is bad for the same reason most startups
fail: there are a lot of them.
WheatMillington wrote 21 hours 50 min ago:
You think it's hard to make a sandwich but easy to bake bread?
Izikiel43 wrote 22 hours 25 min ago:
In europe is common for bakeries to sell sandwiches, and they are
quite good.
weaksauce wrote 23 hours 11 min ago:
Erick Schat's Bakkery in bishop is a counterpoint... great sandwiches
from what i remember and a great bakery. though they operate kinda
separate.
bell-cot wrote 1 day ago:
A good generality, but I'll disagree on the bakery/sandwich
specifics.
There's a lot of overhead in a sandwich shop hiring a baker, then
outfitting a kitchen to efficiently bake bread at scale. And how do
you handle his days off, with n=1 baker?
Vs. a bakery only needs 4' of counter space to do a modest volume of
basic (cold cuts & such) sandwiches. Unless it's a pretty upscale
bakery, the customers will be fine with less-than-fancy sandwiches at
less-than-fancy prices - those are mainly a "while I'm here"
convenience. Vs. a "great sandwich" shop has to qualify as a
destination.
pessimizer wrote 20 hours 26 min ago:
I think you're missing the point. The bakery would have to sell
"less-than-fancy" sandwiches, but the sandwich shop could sell
sandwiches with bread just as good as the bakery would use.
The bakery has to become a inferior sandwich shop to make
sandwiches. The sandwich shop doesn't have to become a bakery to
bake just the types of bread that they need to wrap their
sandwiches.
The bakery would be better off selling dough to the sandwich shop.
anshublog wrote 18 hours 58 min ago:
this whole thread is hilarious and yet quite insightful.
Yes, the core idea behind Stack Fallacy was that if you are Apple
you don't need to build a better CPU than Intel for all workloads
- you just need M3 for your Mac.
So yes - just one type of bread. Like Subway. Or Panera.
firstplacelast wrote 23 hours 58 min ago:
I agree here. I more often see bakeries selling sandwiches that
they make in house (although no clue as to the volume/financials of
it), but rarely (never?) see sandwich shops doing in-house baking.
The independent ones out-source to a bakery and if it's a well
known bakery, they will advertise where they get their bread.
SoftTalker wrote 23 hours 54 min ago:
> rarely (never?) see sandwich shops doing in-house baking
Subway?
bell-cot wrote 23 hours 42 min ago:
From a quick web search - Subway has an often-changing network
of contracted suppliers of frozen bread dough.
It's been a while since I ate there, but the bread quality was
for-sure not up to "we hired a baker to elevate our sandwiches"
standards.
estimator7292 wrote 23 hours 43 min ago:
Also Panera.
Though I should point out that this is not baking, but simply
putting premade delivered dough into an oven. The dough is
baked, yes, but this is not what people mean by baking.
A bakery generally is mixing flour themselves.
7thaccount wrote 23 hours 47 min ago:
Don't they just heat up frozen/pre-made bread? I don't
know...just I don't think they have enough room to be a real
bakery. Also, corporate financials would have centralized that
a long time ago.
potato3732842 wrote 7 hours 23 min ago:
Pretty much all these franchise chains operate on hub and
spoke for their fresh baked stuff.
The thing you buy at 6am (or 6pm, lol) was in an oven or a
mixer (depending on whether the chain in question is baking
on site or at the hub) at 12am that morning and on a truck at
3:30.
badc0ffee wrote 11 hours 8 min ago:
No, they bake pre-made dough. It's not the greatest, but it's
not reheated bread.
estimator7292 wrote 23 hours 40 min ago:
No, subway and panera do the same thing. Fresh premade dough
is delivered every night, refrigerated. At Panera, a baker
runs it through the oven overnight and finishes baking just
before open. Subway throws dough in the oven as needed
throughout the day, they have much higher volume.
Frozen dough doesn't come out the same, nor does reheated
pre-baked bread. It's fresh it just isn't made from scratch
there in the store.
There's a couple dozen fresh dough facilities scattered
throughout the US that serve all of these restaurants that
need fresh bread, but without the cost of paying someone to
mix flour locally.
SoftTalker wrote 2 hours 40 min ago:
Domino's does (or did) the same when I worked there.
Refrigerated dough delivered from regional commissaries
where they make it by the truckload. Some independent
pizzarias make their own in the store but I would guess
most franchises/chains get it delivered.
7thaccount wrote 22 hours 4 min ago:
Yeah that is basically what I meant, but I should've said
refrigerated and not frozen. It is still a far cry from
what I would call a bakery.
pessimizer wrote 20 hours 24 min ago:
It's not a bakery, it's a sandwich shop that bakes bread.
alanbernstein wrote 1 day ago:
After all, what is a sandwich but a stack of food?
dmoy wrote 1 day ago:
Hmm, but you don't eat a sandwich layer by layer like you do with a
stack.
antonvs wrote 6 hours 3 min ago:
Itâs vertically integrated.
callc wrote 20 hours 59 min ago:
Youâd be surprised in the variety in how people eat food.
I know some people that roll a pizza slice (from crust to center)
to eat it. Blasphemous, and inspiring.
tbrownaw wrote 23 hours 47 min ago:
> you don't eat a sandwich layer by layer
Some sandwiches naturally want to be eaten from the middle layer
out.
alanbernstein wrote 1 day ago:
I think they're the same? both are built layer by layer but
consumed in vertical chunks, right?
themafia wrote 1 day ago:
The sandwich shop should just open next to the baker. It's okay to
own and operate two businesses.
pooper wrote 23 hours 17 min ago:
This 'sandwich fallacy' perfectly illustrates why I think sports
should be removed from the university system.
Universities are great 'bakeries' (centers of learning), but
theyâve become bogged down trying to run massive 'sandwich shops'
(commercial sports).
Itâs okay for these to exist, but they should be independent
entities so the school can focus on being a school.
bluGill wrote 22 hours 17 min ago:
Spectator sports should be run by the marketing department at the
university and judged by their ability to bring in future
students and donations - both important things that sports do for
marketing. Justify your existence based on those two or get rid
of those sports. Since this is a marketing department thing
other departments should stay out.
There is a different class of sports though. Schools should have
sports as exercise for students, and classes on how to get better
at sports.
Terr_ wrote 22 hours 27 min ago:
Just musing on the flows between the Sports and Academics sides:
* Sports gives Academics some funds
* Sports gives Academics brand marketing/prestige
* Academics gives Sports a moral cover for exploiting young
athletes
* Academics gives Sports a pre-made core fanbase of students
taeric wrote 1 day ago:
I have grown to not agree with this idea. Sorta, at least.
It isn't so much that I think the criticism is wrong. Many people do
think they could more effectively do something in a different area.
But this isn't a stack thing. People are largely ignorant of a ton of
work happening everywhere.
You see that ignorance quite commonly in stuff like climate activism.
Young activists are convinced that nobody is working on the problem.
And to be clear, it would be nice if maybe more people were working on
some problems. But please don't ignore the progress made by a lot of
hard work, in the meantime.
But back to "why companies keep failing." I could as easily assert
that big companies fail when they stop pouring money into growing.
Wouldn't be hard to build an argument that the more "funny money" is at
play in a large company, the more they are stifling innovative ideas in
their walls. Of course, if you pour money through leveraged debt, some
day that comes due, as well.
r14c wrote 23 hours 52 min ago:
> You see that ignorance quite commonly in stuff like climate
activism. Young activists are convinced that nobody is working on the
problem.
IMO the complaints here are well-founded, but maybe some wires have
gotten crossed in communication. There are many climate related
companies out there (with varying levels of actual utility). People
are obviously working on the problem, but the policy side is largely
captured by big oil and other monied interests who would lose a lot
of money if any meaningful shift away from fossil fuels were to
happen.
Addressing the climate crisis using minimally subsidized market
forces is way too slow to be effective at reaching even the bare
minimum Paris Accords numbers. Even those policies at this point are
being dismantled and called a "climate hoax". The market side work is
laudable, but the climate crisis cannot be averted without a
supportive policy framework.
I do a lot of activism work and the critique is typically centered on
"nobody in the government is making progress on climate policy", not
"nobody is doing anything at all". Though maybe we're talking to
different groups of people lol
taeric wrote 15 hours 25 min ago:
I'm talking about people that literally think absolutely nobody is
working on things. There was a viral video not too long ago of a
young activist saying she got into this because she realized that
"literally nobody was working to make things better." I could
chalk that up to online viral nonsense, but I've talked to people
fresh out of college that legit think this sort of stuff.
This sort of thing is usually made worse by people that are not
willing to acknowledge that not all progress is definitionally
good. (As an easy example, the report a few years ago that raised
the idea that measurable increases in ocean temperature were from
cleaner shipping got annoyingly ignored.)
Again, though, in my theme of "this isn't really stack related."
This is also not activist related. People have a tendency to think
the problem they are working on is more important than every other
problem. Dentists tend to think oral health is the key to
understanding all health. Nutritionists, the same. Managers tend
to think things just need good management. It is a very common
pattern.
And it is enticing because it speaks to kernels of truth. It just
doesn't survive the "no panacea" test.
philipallstar wrote 20 hours 26 min ago:
> the policy side is largely captured by big oil and other monied
interests
Then the activists would do well to demand a better government that
isn't bribeable so easily.
immibis wrote 15 hours 26 min ago:
There's no such thing.
philipallstar wrote 7 hours 54 min ago:
Then we've still identified the problem.
grsmvg wrote 1 day ago:
So many examples mentioned can be explained by network effect, first
mover advantage, or an already saturated market, instead of
underestimating the making of a good product.
dang wrote 1 day ago:
Related:
The Stack Fallacy (2016) - [1] - Feb 2021 (28 comments)
Why Big Companies Keep Failing: The Stack Fallacy - [2] - Jan 2016 (169
comments)
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26177629
URI [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10927600
DIR <- back to front page