This is exactly correct. This is Salesforce's 3rd or 4th rebranding of Customer Data Platform, which has never taken off. This latest positioning is targeting Snowflake.
Lithium deposits are common -- Nevada has significant ones too. The question is if the lithium is concentrated enough to make extracting it financially viable.
That wasn't really my point though. The discovered deposits, well expected deposits since its based on modelling data, could easily lead to a massive mining operation to extract it. That will do damage very similar to the exact kind of fossil fuel extraction that is a main argument against fossil fuels and for alternative energy sources.
Support & maintenance have radically lower margins than software licenses. Without discounting rules, sales can craft deals that lose the company money.
More likely you got options, and they are taxed as income at a liquidity event (acquisition, IPO)... unless you were confident enough in the startup to execute those options & immediately pay the resulting taxes out of pocket. And you have to have that confidence before the valuation is too high & the taxes are unaffordable to absorb.
In California the seller discloses as much as possible to the buyer - i) house inspection and pest inspection, ii) disclosures from the county, state, utilities district, iii) advisories of risk of wildfire, lead paint, natural hazards, earthquake; and much more. This is so that the buyer has as little possible recourse to sue in the future for losses on the property. This behavior also enables faster real estate deals b/c the buyer is more willing to offer without contingencies.
I don't see how you figure. You get the disclosures long after you make your offer (although you do have a contingency if you don't like what you see, I think). And the mandatory disclosure system opens you up to more risk of lawsuit, since if you fail to disclose something you, in the view of the legal system, reasonably should have known, that's grounds for a suit (compared to MA, where I used to live, where you're free not to make a disclosure at all so you can't be said to have omitted anything). Also, dealing with the title company and all that definitely seemed slower than the system I previously experienced where both sides had lawyers to hash out small details.
If you are working with a real estate agent they can pull the disclosures before you make the offer. I am not sure how it works for no agent sales.
Also the disclosures have copious language to the effect of "To the best of sellers' knowledge" and "Buyer agrees to do their own research". I think this is supposed to indemnify the seller.
I was working with an agent and I barely was able to get those disclosures before closing because of the sluggishness of the seller's chosen title company. For the disclosures, you're clear if you didn't know about it, but the issue of whether you reasonably should have known about an issue remains. Just saying to the best of my knowledge doesn't clear you on that. And figuring out what you reasonably should have known can be a protracted legal argument.
Just as an example, imagine you buy a house from me that turns out to have foundation issues. Imagine I hadn't disclosed them, but I had actually filled in and painted over a number of cracks in the wall. That could possibly be construed as an effort to cover up the problem and deceive. But maybe I just thought I was making it look nice.
In short, mandatory disclosures protect the buyer, not the seller. The seller gains nothing.
Research in Motion thought the Blackberry keyboard was their killer feature for business professionals. They were wrong. The iPhone killed Blackberry, not Android.
The 3rd hand story I heard ~2011 from a former RIM executive who was there at the time of Steve Job's demo of the iPhone was that Mike Lazaridis' (co-founder of RIM) reaction to seeing the demo: "It's impossible! The whole thing would have to be a battery!"
He's right, it is impossible for the iPhone and clones to match the blackberry's batter life. It turns out any (certainly not all but few enough to keep blackberry in the market) prefer 60FPS scrolling to having the battery last a week.
In terms of marketshare, Blackberry's began to decline in late 2010, during the meteoric rise of Android. For context, Android eclipsed iOS just 6 months later.
But that's also my point - Blackberry killed Blackberry, not iOS or Android. Should Blackberry have been protected from it's competition?
I tend to think it was Blackberry killed Blackberry, not Android or iPhone. Not willing to change and adapt is the recipe for disaster in tech industry. I am not aware of any other industry that moves as fast and at such scale where the whole industry shift.
RIM definitely killed RIM. The sad result of decades of computer/phone market reports using "market share" leads to people misunderstanding "installed base". As the iPhone and Android took off BlackBerry's market share dropped. As in their share of the total smartphone market sales per quarter dropped. Their unit sales (at first) didn't drop much. The installed base of Blackberries also didn't drop (at first).
Android and iPhone initially ate into the unit sales of feature phones. RIM had pathetic consumer offerings. I replaced a Pearl (8100) with the first iPhone with iOS 1.0. For all the issues that combination had it was a far far better phone than my BlackBerry.
RIM didn't understand the consumer phone market at all, and frankly neither did other smartphone vendors outside Apple and Google. RIM assumed their Enterprise moat (Exchange integration, BES, etc) and a fucking hardware keyboard was enough to halt R&D and just sit on their hands. Meanwhile Apple and Google added Exchange support to their existing (ok but not great) POP/IMAP/CalDAV/CardDAV support, good app stores for third party software, and maintained their vastly superior web browsing capabilities. Their software keyboards also improved significantly with just better keypress accuracy and better predictive type.
So Apple and Google killed feature phones and then got the features people wanted/needed for Enterprise sales. They were already good enough for a majority of "business" uses since a lot of SMB users of Palms, WinMo, and BlackBerries used zero "Enterprise" features. They needed e-mail and SMS which feature phones didn't support and iPhone and Android had from the outset.
So Apple and Google crossed RIM's moat and RIM had nothing to offer as competition. Everything about BlackBerries was firmly fixed in 2005. This was 2010/11 and iPhones and Androids were the state of the art. Instead of trying to meaningfully compete RIM doubled down on the 2005 phones.
No one should feel any pity for them. Their management seemed trapped in some sort of "we'll just MBA our way out of this" fantasy land.
I remember back in the day, I saw what android was about to do to the market, the writing was on the wall for palm and blackberry. My only thought was that it would be nice if blackberry rebased itself as a business+security focused flavor of Android devices. Sad to say, I've almost never seen a blackberry since.
This is great advice for any SaaS company. We scaled to ~80 engineers and >1,000 customers on an almost entirely monolithic app running JARs on EC2 instances with a single Postgres database. Keep it simple & focus on delivering product features that create customer value.
> Cadillac Fairview said the images taken by camera were briefly analyzed then deleted — but investigators found that the sensitive biometric information generated from the images was being stored in a centralized database by a third party.
The images are not being persisted, just the metadata about the individual. Who is being harmed by this? If a person with a clipboard collecting this information without telling anyone, is there any outrage?
