A significant number of people in the arts world decried the cleaning - some even petitioning the Pope to halt it.
Whilst skillful, part of the appeal was the passage of the centuries, like shoes or furniture acquiring a deep marbled appearance after decades of cleaning and waxing, or the statue on the Charles Bridge given a unique luster, like a spotlight on a few scenes, by millions of hands over the years. It would be almost criminal to either darken the spots or frequently clean the rest of the statue to the same brassy finish.
Having been their recently: god no. With the patina it would have been an unimpressive dark box. It’s not a very impressive space without the paintings so having them obscured by centuries of gunk is just silly.
Anecdotally, I know of a Singaporean whose brother charged for taking the daughter with his kids on holiday. He didn't outright make it a billable item but made it a markup on flights and hotels. Both are HNWIs for whom the amount is as trivial as a dollar menu item at McDonald's.
> Uber could operate at breakeven by raising prices slightly more than 10%. [...] Uber could be highly profitable by raising prices 20%.
No, because the demand would be different at those price points, and lower demand might not compensate for high fixed costs.
I got a timely reminder yesterday in (newly Grab-monopoly) Singapore, taking a Grab for $15 that used to cost me $3-6 on Uber.
I took public transport back. One ride was enough to shake me out of my years-trained habit of taking Uber/Grab everywhere when it cost only twice the MRT or bus ride, never really looking at the price.
Travis Kalanick's apparent vision was to create an enormous amount of demand for private drivers by dropping the price to the floor, thus creating the volume needed to make the numbers work, in the same way that Standard Oil's massive facilities dropped the price low enough for Rockefeller to bankrupt all his competitors.
"Travis Kalanick's apparent vision was to create an enormous amount of demand for private drivers by dropping the price to the floor, thus creating the volume needed to make the numbers work"
Difference was you were in Singapore, where they have clean and reliable public transit. Many people would definitely pay $10 to $15 more to take a private car rather than public transit in the US.
I can tell you right now that 10% wouldn't shift demand meaningfully in cities like San Francisco. I don't think most people would even notice a 10% increase to be honest.
Of course, they're probably already profitable in major cities like SF and pricing is probably already adjusted to reflect the maturity of the market.
People need to start talking about these companies on a per-market basis. The broad 10% number doesn't make sense since every market that these companies are in is at a different stage of adoption.
Google Maps has been a lifesaver in Sydney CBD for me as a driver unfamiliar with the Byzantine lane timing required, lack of signalling, and frequent undocumented works and blockages (I do wish they'd incorporate the random M5 closures though). It does get laggy and imprecise once you get in the area with tall buildings though.
It happened to me with several hundred PDFs of sheet music from IMSLP that I was storing on iBooks. I couldn't work out where they had gone or why they were wiped. I switched to GoodReader and painstakingly had to rebuild the entire collection.
OBikes are wrecks in Singapore, because, it seems, oBike does not care about having staff to actually repair or maintain the bikes. We have a slightly more respectful population, perhaps, but it does not stop bikes from rusting, missing pedals or brakes, and so on. The rapid increase in the number of bikes has, thankfully, put a stop to the previous habit of taking out a part of the bike (usually pedal or seat) to put it out of action and thus "reserve" it.
Fortunately there are now so many bike startups in Singapore that you have a wide choice to pick from, and all of them are currently free. I went to the market yesterday with my mother in law, her riding a Mobike and me an Ofo, both checked out with my account.
Mobike seems the best run although I agree with the low seat problem (which is less of an issue in Asia). However, there are 3-4 different models at any one time so I suspect the company will iterate towards different models for different markets, including in size. Some of the engineering on the newer prototypes is quite interesting, and copied a few months later by Ofo, which seems to be the other company with actually active management (after a disastrous start with non-GPS-tracked bikes which were routinely "retired" by users).
As for bad parking, it is a function of enforcement. In Singapore, the companies are fined a substantial amount per bike if the government has to come and clear them. So there is apparently a sub half hour pickup time for most if you report it parked incorrectly (e.g. in a bus lane). It sounds like Australian cities have not yet put their act together in that respect. Fine the companies $500 per bike dropped in a creek and watch the problem disappear...
A database would already provide a layer of security (most people, including many "professionals", would not know what to do with it).
Customer data is often stored in a large, denormalised table in an Excel file called "customers" which contains the entire set of customers past and present, including those who unsubscribed or have not ordered for years, with all attributes (phone, address, etc.).
There is also no oversight on who has access to this file, since "marketing needs it for Facebook" or "customer service needs it for returns" or whatever the excuse du jour is. Even the newly hired intern with a stronger than usual interest in every system's credentials gets a copy.
You get some measure of security when there are more than one million customers and they need to start partitioning.
The most secure setup I've seen was a company whose entire repairs department ran on paper slips. Since nobody had the time or inclination to enter the information somewhere digital, no internal staff knew how to find customer information, even if they walked to the shop floor. I think a couple of old timers knew how to navigate the pile of slips and were the de facto DBMS engine.
I'd frame 1) slightly differently, as there are many cases of bootstrapped unicorns.
Time is also a currency, so you make a trade-off between time (extra years of your life spent acquiring funds to scale, and delayed product launch) and control.
Time is also an issue when you have competition, in the sense that your competitors can get there first by raising money.
I agree with you. I tried to be deliberate about this by saying VC is a great option to consider for venture scale company -- but it's definitely not the only option.
My Kindle account (based in France) is the only reason I still have a French bank account. I am terrified of losing the account and therefore all my e-books as I reallocate a "foreign" card and my account switches to that country.
The greatest thing about buying music on Amazon is getting MP3s which I can keep for life. I downloaded them, they are synch'ed to my various backup solutions, and form part of my music library, even if Amazon goes bankrupt and I lose the original download link.
I advise installing Calibre and Apprentice Alf's DRM Removal plugin for it. Systematically preserve all your books by stripping the DRM and sleep more easily.
I periodically use Calibre to deDRM my bought books to keep a backup. Although Amazon has really started to fight against this with stronger lockdowns.
The fast way, if you can get and use Kindle for PC 1.17.1 (on filehippo, for instance), is to use that. It will download books in the traditional (usually encrypted) azw/mobi formats, which you can drag right into calibre (with the dedrm plugin). Newer KindlePC versions (1.19 and up) tend to download books in kfx format, which doesn't currently have a dedrm plugin. All kindle installers should be signed by Amazon Services, so it shouldn't be a problem getting them from a third party as long as you check the signature.
Alternatively, on the [kindle] "content and devices" webpage, if you click the three dots in the second column (I'm guessing the interface is the same for the french website), it gives you the option to individually download & transfer books via usb if you have a kindle registered to the account. If you have calibre and the apprenticealf dedrm plugin, I believe that process still works, though I haven't tried for a long time.
There is a wonderful opportunity for Microsoft right now.
Many managers have already switched to OSX for personal use and if they can (including at places like IBM) for work as well. The reliability is unbeatable especially as Windows becomes more and more unintuitive, unreliable and bloated.
The key factor to this switch was porting Excel, and to a lesser extent the rest of Office, to Mac. Even with the reduced feature set, it means non-technical and semi-technical people can now work from a mac. Excel probably runs in virtually all companies in the world today.
If Microsoft were to invest some time in porting Excel and the rest of Office to Linux/UNIX, which are today very user friendly to non-technical users (my mother uses Ubuntu on her desktop, for example), they will give people a way to avoid the high pricing and increasing unreliability of Apple. This should boost sales of non-macs which is good for Microsoft's competitive position, even if these devices are immediately wiped for a new OS.
I've been preaching this for years... if MS adopts Linux, ups their GUI effort to create something useful atop Wayland, while providing a seamless way to run Win32 apps until the world migrates to Linux on the desktop helmed by Microsoft, they will completely destroy Apple on short notice.
It would be a major, revolutionary move for Nadella to do this and I doubt he has the heft or charisma to sell this to the board/shareholders, but if Microsoft goes full steam ahead on Linux and dumps Windows, it's buh-bye Apple and everything they ever produced. They can probably even eat into Google's droid pie.
Ditch Win32/NT, port the cash cow called MS Office to Linux and polish a Windows-like GUI atop Linux/Wayland in the best way they can, be it via Qt, GTK, I don't care - just get it done... and set the world ablaze and free.
Bet you they could probably deliver something in under 3 years.
Microsoft is seizing on the opportunity. Windows 10 is a great platform for developers fleeing from Mac OS. With Powershell, HyperV, Bash + Ubuntu for Windows (with a 1-click install from the Windows store), on top of the existing best-in-class Visual Studio tools, Windows 10 is an awesome developer experience.
And considering the power and diversity of hardware to power your development workstation, there are few reasons to stick with OSX.
A significant number of people in the arts world decried the cleaning - some even petitioning the Pope to halt it.
Whilst skillful, part of the appeal was the passage of the centuries, like shoes or furniture acquiring a deep marbled appearance after decades of cleaning and waxing, or the statue on the Charles Bridge given a unique luster, like a spotlight on a few scenes, by millions of hands over the years. It would be almost criminal to either darken the spots or frequently clean the rest of the statue to the same brassy finish.