"The number and power of a company's competitive rivals, potential new market entrants, suppliers, customers, and substitute products influence a company's profitability."
There are several hundreds of thousands of restaurants (maybe millions?). There are only 2-3 aggregators. Most of the restaurants are replaceable by a similar one. So aggregators have more bargaining power.
As long as there is a profitable business model for the aggregators, the restaurants will get pushed to their lowest common profits. Without resorting to collusion with other restaurants (or asking the govt. to intervene) the only way to compete is to differentiate significantly that makes the customer desire a specific restaurant.
In the US, this - "They made a pact to pull out of Gold and other discount programs for a few days." is collusion and is illegal.
If FTC allows restaurant owners (or any group of businesses) to create pacts like this against their suppliers or customers, next time, they will make similar pacts against you (the customer). "hey, what say, let's all make a pact together and increase the price of that dosa to $50?"
In reality, some industries (most famously airlines) do this kind of collusion through winks and nods anyway and is bad for consumers (very good for the industry as a whole though).
In an ideal world, we wouldn't care about which company is called a tech company and which isn't. This reminds me of that famous Bezos quote to the question of whether Amazon is an internet company or not.
He said "It doesn't matter whether we are a pure internet play or not. Internet, Schminternet, it doesn't matter. What matters is obsessing over providing customer value."
That said, it is altogether a different question whether WeWork provides value for customers in a fiscally responsible and sustainable manner, and whether Nuemann has the foresight and business acumen of Bezos.
It does matter because a company's valuation is driven by EBIDA and multiple, both of which depend on the type of business (e.g. SaaS, Cloud Services, Real Estate etc). In fact, Amazon's valuation jumped significantly starting 2015 primarily because of AWS, which is a pure tech play, not so much by its retail business. (In 2015 Amazon started reporting AWS revenue and margins)
Where baby steps according to her is removing Facebook and Instagram apps off the phone, and logging out on the web “without fully disabling or deleting them”).
Got distracted by statements like “But the belief that everyone coding would solve anyone’s problems has been shown up as completely ludicrous. If anything, computer literacy has declined over the generations as computers have got easier to use.”
Yes, you are right. But increasing adoption across different zipcodes won't help that much (although, yes, it’ll bring SG&A per order down). The adoption has to increase in the exact same area (your point #2 has to be true, i.e. stops should be so close, like an apartment building) for drivers to make more orders per hour, and for this service to be profitable in the long run.
Yes, agree that it could’ve been better. I think CS should always flag any conversation that involves the police and get supervisors and senior CS staff involved.
Unbelievable. When signing up for 2FA, FB never said what else it would be used for. From a legal standpoint, aren’t companies are supposed to say what the phone number will be used for when asking for phone number?
I think the real issue, is people think they are doing one thing, but doing another.
depending on the age of your account, you'll notice that the notifications for SMS maybe defaulted on, this didn't matter if you didn't have a phone number associated with your account. When you add a phone number to your account, its not "solely" 2FA, you add the number to your account, and 2Fa is enabled, just like all the other default setting that apply to phone numbers.
which is why when people are responding to the SMS its posting on their wall, its because what their settings are set to do.
> It's another case of people screaming to the heavens about evil megacorp. when in reality they can't be bothered to check their own settings.
Facebook's settings are often opaque and unintuitive, and some of the stuff around notifications qualifies as dark patterns. Also, as you mentioned, Facebook has a history of using selfishly-chosen defaults which are often not what a user would likely want or expect.
I'm not going to fault people for complaining about getting tricked into settings they didn't want.
I won't defend their practices in most cases, changing the news feed to recent for example is far more work than it should be, and reverts randomly.
but this setting is Settings>Notifications it's not really buried.
I suppose I'm not upset at people who discovered the issue, but I am annoyed at mashable.com for making it a specifical when it shouldn't be, quoting a "a self-described technosociologist, professor at UNC" and their uninformed statements.
Another Facebook dark pattern: they hid everybody's email addresses from their profile and showed a new @facebook.com email address. They claimed they had simply introduced a new setting letting you show or hide email addresses individually. However, it was already possible to set the privacy on an email address to "only me", effectively hiding it.
Judging by how the response has been to companies leaking and abusing our data, I don't know that it will make a difference if it's a bug or intentional.
"aren’t companies are supposed to say what the phone number will be used for when asking for phone number"
Not yet. Can't wait for the EU general data protection regulation (GDPR) to come in effect, which includes such a requirement - it won't affect USA users directly, but hopefully it will force some companies to change their behaviour worldwide.
Cynical? I'd call it realistic. If anyone wants to fight the problem, delete your account. That is the only value that you can take away from that company.
> If anyone wants to fight the problem, delete your account. That is the only value that you can take away from that company.
No, that's clearly false. You can use your account to spread an understanding that Facebook is bad (lots of stuff in the news to share, like this), or you could abandon your account but leave it up with a profile pic saying you don't use it anymore (sort of like a reverse take on broken-windows theory). Politics and lobbying representatives is slow, but does have results (all the lobbyists in the world can't counter steady constituent calls on a non-partisan issue). But you're a cynic, and probably gave up before giving much though about what could be done.
"The number and power of a company's competitive rivals, potential new market entrants, suppliers, customers, and substitute products influence a company's profitability."
There are several hundreds of thousands of restaurants (maybe millions?). There are only 2-3 aggregators. Most of the restaurants are replaceable by a similar one. So aggregators have more bargaining power.
As long as there is a profitable business model for the aggregators, the restaurants will get pushed to their lowest common profits. Without resorting to collusion with other restaurants (or asking the govt. to intervene) the only way to compete is to differentiate significantly that makes the customer desire a specific restaurant.