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Comment by lwhi | Hacker News Reader

I've been a victim of this in the past; it's very easy to excited about the flavour of your own Kool Aid.

Mark getting excited about using a message to book a restaurant seems like a prime example of this.

Many of the ideas he expressed (in terms of interacting with businesses) seem to be how WeChat runs, very successfully (never used it myself, just based on what I've heard).

Booking a restaurant is generally ok by phone but if you try to do it online you often get some crappy random website that’s different every time. I can imagine a world where you do it by some messenger interface which somehow Facebook make hard to fuck up for the business. I can imagine that being good, half good (I think there are roughly two kinds of booking. One starts with criteria about date/time/occasion/party/budget/location/cuisine and looks for available places and the other starts with a specific restaurant with other particulars relatively free. An experience might only work well for one), or bad. But it isn’t obviously bad.

Much as a decentralised Internet has good properties, having every small business outsource a nontrivial online presence to a bunch of crappy other companies that lack the scale or incentives to do well is not one of them.

>Mark getting excited about using a message to book a restaurant seems like a prime example of this.

He was basically explaining chat bot/s without knowing it.

If you read point (4) he clearly did know it, he just saw it as a more ambitious and challenging problem.

Chat bots usually are built by the end service, not acting as a meta agent.

The problem is it's never been his Kool Aid. He stole the Kool Aid from multiple other people and is pretending like he invented the concept (yes people will now argue you can't steal the 'concept' of Kool Aid, and it's about execution; but my point stands, other people can't borrow the concept if one person pulls the rug out from everyone else) of Kool Aid

Microsoft stole GUI concept from Apple and Apple stole it from Xerox. Good artists copy but great artists steal.

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