I think there's the potential for a renaissance of super-high-end gaming-class PCs for sure. As well as a reason to radically enhance the 3D graphics computational power of smartphones and tablets.
1,512 karma · joined June 19, 2007
I think this is the really surprising thing for people who haven't tried it before -- you think it will be like looking at a screen up close, since you've looked at screens your whole life, but it's nothing like that at all.
Adults with really, really long beards.
First mention of Snapchat in WSJ: August 2013
First negative mention of Snapchat in WSJ: October 2013
There has to be a name for this phenomenon.
"that being said, the market potential for a google is quite obviously higher than the potential for X i think. I can't imagine a future world where X is worth more than google, and if it is, it's almost certainly because they used that valuation to pivot and make something more worthwhile."
You can only say that with the benefit of hindsight. At the equivalent stage in Google's life, you might well have been equally skeptical of Google -- and a lot of people were, including at various times their founders and their VCs. It was widely known at that time that search was a bad business -- in fact, the assumption based on several years of prior data was that it was a loss leader for portals. Google itself didn't start with the keyword advertising model, they developed that along the way (in part based on work done earlier at Goto.com, which hadn't worked nearly as well for them).
Equally, at the equivalent stage in Microsoft's life, it was well known that PCs were a toy and that people wouldn't pay for software. At the equivalent stage in Oracle's life, it was well known that data belonged in hierarchical databases on mainframes, not in relational databases on Unix servers. At the equivalent stage in Cisco's life, it was well known that proprietary networks like SNA and DECnet were standard among people who paid for things and that the Internet was only a toy for academics. And so forth and so on.
You're sort of right. The other part that fills in the logic is "what is the value of business X to acquirer Y" -- seen through the eyes of acquirer Y -- business X when it becomes part of Y.
When Y buys X, X's opinion or the market's opinion of what X is worth is only one input. The more important input is usually what Y thinks X will be worth as part of Y. That is hard to understand from outside of Y. I am aware of deals where the purchase price was way more than X thought they were worth, but Y still got a bargain -- and every other permutation you can imagine.
For this reason it's very hard to have an objective view of what X is worth in the abstract -- the takeout price in an acquisition depends on who is buying it at least as much as any other factor.
[Yes, 20 years later from the point in time I'm talking about.]
Steve Case: sold AOL to Time Warner for $164bn
[$3 billion isn't cool. You know what's cool? $164 billion is cool.]
Ev Williams: sold Blogger to Google for an undisclosed sum
[Obviously I was referring to Twitter.]
John Sidgmore: sold UUNet to MFS Communications for $2bn
[Brainfart -- I meant John Morgridge.]
Ross Perot: sold EDS to General Motors for $2.5bn (in 1984 dollars!)
[Yeah, but that's when $2.5 billion was real money.]
This dovetails with another fact of corporate life: over time, the median performance of any level degrades to the worst performer at that level. "I deserve to be promoted to VP. Look at Joe the VP, I'm obviously better than he is."
Any company that isn't regularly clearing out the bottom 10% is fooling itself about both its hiring competence and its management skills.
Any employee who can't get judged to be in the upper 90% of any organization isn't nearly as good as he/she thinks.