[HN Gopher] Tech's broken promises: Streaming = confusing Ubers ...
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Tech's broken promises: Streaming = confusing Ubers as much as
taxis Cloud costs
Author : hbcondo714
Score : 27 points
Date : 2023-08-21 18:54 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.businessinsider.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.businessinsider.com)
| woofcat wrote:
| Isn't this the natural order of how things go in tech? You burn
| millions or billions of dollars acquiring market share, then
| start pumping your customers for cash until they leave, or if
| you've done it right they can't leave.
|
| I'm still waiting for CloudFlare to become a $5/month
| subscription for my personal sites.
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| I think part of the reason Cloudflare is free for personal
| stuff is to harvest information. Information they otherwise
| wouldn't get.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Alternatively, the more sites use Cloudflare the less peering
| ISPs will have to non-Cloudflare destinations. Eventually it
| could be that you need to be behind Cloudflare if you want
| any chance for your website to be reachable with reasonable
| bandwidth.
| netfortius wrote:
| "Normal" cycle: change the business model to take out
| competition, then increase pricing.
| thefounder wrote:
| I couldn't care less if Uber costs as much as taxis or even a bit
| more. Uber was selling a better UX and that has always been its
| main selling point. Not the price.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Anyone familiar with pre-Uber taxicabs knows this.
|
| Uber broke all sorts of laws but the existing system was so
| broken society collectively didn't even care.
| vikramkr wrote:
| I don't buy this premise that the tech companies are just ending
| up leaving is exactly where we were before just because prices
| are going up - that's just one aspect of this. Uber and friends
| fueled the gig economy, changing how and when people use
| rideshare/taxis and delivery services. That's probably the weaker
| argument in this article - somehow it's trying to argue that the
| fact that their competitors are actively catching up and
| launching their own apps and stuff means that Uber is just like
| any other taxi? Cause and effect seem to be reversed there.
|
| Streaming has completely changed how we interact with TV. Sure it
| feels like cable all over again, but when was the last time you
| tuned in to a new non-sports tv show or the like at a specific
| time to make sure you didn't miss it, or worry about time
| shifting and recording and everything? Visual media went from
| entirely synchronous to mostly synchronous to pretending to be
| synchronous to now a fundamentally asynchronous activity that's
| fragmented across dozens of platforms. So much TV is serialized
| now. The nature of the art itself and how it impacts society has
| fundementally shifted. But I guess Netflix having competition
| means it's just like cable?
|
| And the cloud costs - what even is the argument here. Yes the
| cloud costs more money now. But like - it's in the cloud. I still
| don't have to buy my own hardware. I don't have to manage a
| server if I don't want to. I don't have to wake up at 2 am to
| plug back in a server's power cable that got tripped over. Like -
| a massive portion of tech startups and consumers just don't have
| to worry about it and hardware anymore, or even devops in a ton
| of cases. And this is all happening in the middle of this AI
| stuff where the hardware to run inference would be prohibitively
| expensive anyway driving even more folks to cloud/saas/apis etc.
|
| Idk, it's trying really hard to spin a story about market
| regression but like - the companies are still doing what they've
| always been doing, with all the crazy impacts they've always had,
| except it costs more now. Not exactly like being teleported back
| to the 90s
| gavman wrote:
| On the "glass half full" side, even if the price hasn't gone
| down, tech's managed to offer better products for the same price,
| which in itself is a positive.
|
| - Streaming is a much better experience than cable. I can watch
| anything I want whenever I want on whichever device I want. I
| don't need to rent a cable box. I don't need to schedule a
| technician to come to my house to start my service.
|
| - Uber / Lyft are a way better experience than taxis. I can call
| the device from my phone wherever I am. I get price certainty up
| front instead of the miserable experience of sitting anxiously
| watching the number on the meter go up. The app handles payment
| and I don't have to mess with the driver telling me the card
| reader is broken and he wants cash. The driver's GPS is
| integrated with my ride and I both don't have to tell the driver
| where to go and worry about them taking the scenic route to drive
| the fare up.
|
| Anyone who wants to go back to the world of cable / taxis is
| looking at the past with rose colored glasses. Tech has
| absolutely made both of those products better.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Uber / Lyft are a way better experience than taxis.
|
| I know this is _very_ dependent on where you are, but in my
| part of the US, this is not true.
| jiscariot wrote:
| Taxi roulette was not a fun game to play: a) will it show up?
| b) will someone else take my cab? c) will the driver get angry
| if I attempt to use a card? d) does the driver know where they
| are going?
| vikramkr wrote:
| Idk if pinging like this works but @dang the title seems mangled
| on this one
| mr_toad wrote:
| This headline makes me want to shout out one of Samuel L
| Jackson's lines from Pulp Fiction.
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(page generated 2023-08-21 23:02 UTC)