Re: Iterasi, a social bookmarking site that lets you save the contents of any page

Pete — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 04:23:49 -0000

Other than the option to save receipts, hasn't that already been implemented by diigo.com? What's the difference?

Re: The iPhone in Europe: A patchy success

Pete — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 12:38:33 -0000

I am under the impression that your simplifications about the German market distort the situation there.

T-Mobile offers the iPhone with a variety of different subscriptions. Your quoted price of $155 is only available if you choose the most expensive monthly subscription option (as you can see here http://www.t-mobile.de/iphone/addHandset.do). I believe that the vast majority of current customers will not pick this option but rather a much cheaper (e.g. $75/month) option at which the 8GB iPhone is slightly above $300. At this price you do not get a data flatrate and also only 100 minutes to talk.

Furthermore, I believe it is important to understand the European mindset in this issue rather than the technical differences.

It was not until recently that Europeans were actually made aware of all the costs associated with using cell phones at home and abroad. The EU parliament had to push the cell phone providers (most of which are operating across borders) very hard to create more transparency in the price structures. This alienated the consumers, especially the Germans. One of the outcomes of this disconnect can be found in the rise of prepaid cards (lowering the ARPU tremendously). Parents buy their children only prepaid cards in order to escape the potential huge costs at the end of the month. A lot of very competitive offers by very small retailers exist in Germany. By having a lot of people cancel their contracts upon expiration and switch to these cheaper pay-as-you-go options, people actually want to participate on the fast price movements which they did not get were they on a subscription contract. The operators did not pass on the price reductions and so it seems that they are now suffering from their very own mistakes to exploit the contractual limitations rather than striving for customer excellence. And I believe that if you ask an iPhone user on the street what she would have to pay for the data his iPhone would use abroad, she would not be able to answer that (keep in mind: Europeans travel a lot - for skiing, summer, Christmas, etc.).

And there is also a notion in the German public that the prices for cell phone service are kept very high artificially. For T-Mobile you will find a lot of comments on the internet (and in public newspapers) that the profits from Germany serve to expand their business in the US and their failure to monetize the huge investments in the 3G infrastructure.
With continuous announcements about the "great" 3G infrastructure in Germany, the operators have raised the bar for next generation phones and services, creating a promise they are due to deliver on.

Lastly, I agree with Mark on the issue of comparable devices. Europe has always been served by far better models than what was available in the US. The gap between the iPhone and comparable models is not as wide as in the US.

So, instead of committing to a somewhat first generation model of the iPhone which is not utilizing the technological capabilities (i.e. 3G) and offered at a quite expensive price (for the next two years), I would actually blame the operators rather than Jobs for any of this. The operators just seem to be so greedy to finally monetize any of their huge upfront investments in their "great" infrastructure that they are losing the connection to their customers.

Re: Twitter Faces Serious Problems

Pete — Fri, 23 May 2008 03:21:27 -0000

I believe Twitter is suffering from its all too much praised "fail fast and cheap" approach.

The application itself is actually not that complex (check the Slashdot threads on those issues). By applying a generative process (RoR and MySQL) the application was shifting too much of the load balancing and scalability issues away from the database to a higher, persistence level. This is simply engineering architecture malpractice at its best. I wish people would shift away from blaming RoR and actually identify the underlying problem.

I have seen similar things happen over and over again: the misperception that the LAMP stack is a sustainable platform and ready for abnormal growth rates is proven wrong by Facebook as well.

I simply believe that this is an architectural problem that roots in an excitement for a new technology. Don't get me wrong: it's great they tried, but at some point you should better stick with best practices or it will become very costly.

It would be sad to see a great idea like Twitter die because some people fell for some nice marketing speeches.

Here's my advice: get an architect who knows best practices inside out and implement the new system design instead of just fixing the symptoms.

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Re: Iterasi, a social bookmarking site that lets you save the contents of any page

Re: The iPhone in Europe: A patchy success

Re: Twitter Faces Serious Problems