Interesting. Although how much of this debacle can we attribute to conscious thinking along the lines of "we know this is high risk - high reward stuff, but let us do it to a point till we are too big to fail"?
I am more inclined to think this is a structural phenomenon - something that occurred because the incentives available at each step along the way were structured in a manner that allowed this to snowball.
I think Goldman ignored the counterparty risk they had with AIG because they knew it was systematic, and that the government would bail AIG out and protect them.
I think that the stage for this collapse was set with the collapse of Long Term Capital. That's when all the banks learned that if the bets were big enough, they couldn't lose.
Assumptions the article makes:
1. People are stupid, they cant and dont adapt.
2. The market system is rigid and exploitative.
Can we expect the three people who were hired instead of John Ulviden to make the same "mistake" he made? Probably not. If they were people looking out for their own self-interests, they would factor in the "mistake" John made and make sure they dont step over the "acceptable" amount of sales. What sort of an effect does this have for Adidias? They reach a high-point in sales due to the energy and creativity of John, but then because of what they did to him, their sales are no longer going up. They have just lost the opportunity to have John take their sales to the next level.
And what sort of an opportunity does this present to a competitor like Nike for example? They would probably want John for more than one reason: For his abilities and also for the relationships he has with the customers he won over for Adidas.
Heck, why ramble when there is such eloquent exposition at hand:
"In addition to these endless pleadings of self-interest, there is a second main factor that spawns new economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences." - Henry Hazlitt in "Economics in One Lesson"
But most people either are stupid and/or can't change because the system is setup to maintain the status quo. If you had any clue how money is introduced into the system, you'd be outraged that banks had the nerve to try to pull such a scam at the expense of the general population. Yet it's been going on since the Medicis and nothing much has changed, even to this modern day.
Meanwhile we've created unprecedented wealth over the last 50 years, and yet while being obsessed with money, every person and company, big or small owes the banking establishment tons of money which we either must pay off by assuming more debt - or by handing over the stuff of our production - as is happening now with the housing industry and foreclosures.
what's a better system then - more socialism and government control? imho that too will lead to maintaining a status quo.
The only things that change are the people at the top (gov officials and their families), a lot of resources will be wasted (compared to a more capitalist system), and that it's much much harder for people at the bottom to move up (not to mention less incentive). O yeah, since we're talking about government controlling most of the resources and distribution, you can probably kiss your rights goodbye too. It's not like this hasn't been done before with disasterous results... there's a reason China changed economic systems...
"most people either are stupid and/or can't change"
doesn't it make sense then for the system not to reward them for their behavior; and instead to reward people that can change and work both hard and smart?
I don't think you understand how the hidden side of "capitalism" works - as long as a few people continuously control how much money is in the money supply via banks, whether you realize/like it or not, the whole world is socialist in that respect.
>doesn't it make sense then for the system not to reward them for their behavior; and instead to reward people that can change and work both hard and smart?
I think you're a bit too optimistic about the nature of the system and the people who run it; it's not setup to "reward" anybody but the people who set it up to reap wealth at other's expense.
Do you think if you "do the right thing" and "work hard" and be really smart the bankers and billionaire's are secretly getting together going, "That guy's doing the right thing - let's reward him"
Please. First they'll see you as a threat and try to figure out how to get rid of you or control you. Last thing they want is to "reward" you for "smart behavior"
"as long as a few people continuously control how much money is in the money supply via banks, whether you realize/like it or not, the whole world is socialist in that respect."
I agree that is a problem with capitalism, specifically with fiat currency; but it can be corrected if we slowly move back to something akin to the gold standard. It's fixable. Not to mention this level of corruption pales in comparison to a non-capitalistic system. Capitalism isn't perfect, but it is the lesser evil.
"Do you think if you "do the right thing" and "work hard" [that you'll be rewarded]"
I live in silicon valley. I meet people all the time who have been rewarded for being clever (who come from lower class or middle class backgrounds). A lot of posts on YC have already disproven this point. You're ignoring a lot of data; not to mention you're just giving a lot of conjecture without hard facts.
No offense, but I can list a lot of examples: Paul Graham, Jerry Yang, Bill Gates, Sam Walton, the list goes on and I'm not even including foreign business men. Your argument is really weak.
Just look at China and the changes that occurred after they switched economic systems.
"First they'll see you as a threat and try to figure out how to get rid of you or control you. Last thing they want is to "reward" you for "smart behavior""
Yes, that called traditional communism, not capitalism. Again why do you think China switched? (even N. Korea is trying to switch) History has already disproven your argument.
O yeah if you actually believe in what you're writing WHY are you trying to do a startup?
>> I agree that is a problem with capitalism, specifically with fiat currency; but it can be corrected if we slowly move back to something akin to the gold standard. It's fixable.
Funny you say it's fixable when all my research over the last 10 years of the writings of BOTH conspiracy cranks AND people who have held positions at federal reserve banks indicate that (1) it's not fixable (2) it's going to break big-time, sooner than we expect and (3) the most important thing smart people should be doing right now is dropping everything and figuring out a new money system because the "old guard" can't come up with an answer and we're going to need one soon. For example, here's some "data" for you: I'm sure you're aware that Bush jacked up national debt to close to 10 trillion (from about 2 when he got here). But did you know state and municipal debt far exceeds that, and private debt exceeds even that?
Here's a sobering thought: when you compile the total debt in this country, private and public, and the amount of money needed to service that debt, and the cost of life (which will go up as we start experiencing inflation as the dollar is falling apart), SOME TIME between 2011 and 2013, it will be impossible to both continuously service that debt AND pay for the needs of life on an individual/corporate/government basis.
That means either banks get paid and we starve or there will be a civil war or something to suspend life as we know it.
What is your easy fixing solution to that (please don't say "gold" or "silver")?
Or perhaps you've looked at recent events over the last 8 years and have noticed ramp up in militarization, war for resources, and a huge spike in private prison construction and militarization of police forces in this country - almost like the establishment is getting ready for a big change.
Actually, we need fiat currency - we just need it distributed differently. Right now it's issued as debt-creation collateral, so debt always outpaces wealth creation on an exponential growth curve. Eventually you run out of possibilities of taking on new debt; for example, current value of "mega-derivatives" (institution-to-institution) is roughly now at about 11x total WORLD GDP. If you think the housing bubble is bad, wait until somebody figures out it's technically impossible for all derivative writers to give anywhere near the coverage they promise in case a worse-case scenario comes along.
Having said that, gold is useless because (1) it fails to account for population growth (2) it fails to account for real wealth creation and (3) the same people who control our fiat-based system currently control most of the existing gold supply in the world and have investments / buy options on most new discoveries of gold. So even if we switch ... what then? Do you think the "establishment" is going to help us setup a system to overthrow them by sharing the gold they own? Do you own gold? A lot? I don't and most people don't. And don't believe that B.S. about "gold call options" because most gold investment houses currently sell at about 10x ability to physically deliver, so unless you have it in your hand it counts for squat ...
>> I live in silicon valley.
Hence, you live in a fantasy la-la land where everything works in ways it doesn't anywhere else on the planet, so keep in mind your perception is warped and inapplicable elsewhere
>> I meet people all the time who have been rewarded for being clever (who come from lower class or middle class backgrounds). A lot of posts on YC have already disproven this point. You're ignoring a lot of data; not to mention you're just giving a lot of conjecture without hard facts.
Try that now as the reality sets in that most of the last 10 years (dot-com, expected oil bonanza in Iraq, housing bubble, etc.) was just one distraction after another to keep our minds off the fact that the underlying system is coming to the end of the track with no solution.
>> No offense, but I can list a lot of examples: Paul Graham, Jerry Yang, Bill Gates, Sam Walton, the list goes on and I'm not even including foreign business men. Your argument is really weak.
Sigh. I envy the gleam in your eyes. No offense to Paul Graham, but I'd like to see his effort duplicated now ... same with Yang. Doubt it would even be possible.
Bill Gates. Um ... Bill Gates is about as establishment as they come ... let's see ... his first customer was IBM, which fronted him money for a then non-existent product. But as everyone who know Phil Greenspan's writing knows, the CEO of IBM was friends with Bill's mommy. Gee ... wonder if that had anything to do with how a 21 year old got a face-to-face with the CEO of the biggest tech company of that time ...
Sam walton? Sam walton succeeded because of a one-time massive systematic non-repeatable even (globalization). You think anything that massive is just around the corner for you to exploit - any day now?
Not too familiar with China, so I'll pass comment, but it wreaks a lot of South Korea when it was being pegged as the "New Japan" and then it turned out to be a massive fraud.
>> Yes, that called traditional communism,
Wow. Read up on how standard oil got set up. Or even microsoft. If you think the "big business" aspect of capitalism is any different from what you imagine communism to be ... you need to read a lot more.
>> Again why do you think China switched
I don't know what you mean by "china switched" ... last time I checked China was a carefully micro-managed mixed economy, similar to Japan after WWII.
> History has already disproven your argument.
Really? How so? Last time I turned on my t.v. every presidential candidate was telling me that we're currently borrowing money from semi-communist china to finance oil from Sharia-law-based-commerce Saudi Arabia to go around playing make-pretend capitalism and the situation can't go on much longer.
If anything, recent analysis from many perspectives tell me that history has proven the exact opposite - that much of what we call the "capitalist success" story is a well-managed prop piece.
Tell me, have you ever travelled much across this country?
I have. Aside from a few pockets of development, most of this country is just one big poverty-inflicted, systematically busted wasteland.
If you live in the Valley and think that just because people there drive lots of Ferraris, that = America is one big happy successful place, you need to get some perspective.
Silicon Valley, like Hollywood, is amagical, artificial dream world that represents reality about as much as a commercial for a luxury resort.
> actually believe in what you're writing WHY are you trying to do a startup?
Because my startup is based on this reality and trying to find a solution to it, not trying to make a lot of money so I can afford to delude myself by surrounding myself with the trinkets of success that money can buy in this country.
I'm specifically trying to start a startup in preperation for a change in perception of reality, not because I want to have a quick IPO, cash in and move to Orange County ...
not every country with a capitalistic leaning economy has the debt our country has - many are in the black...
"sigh. I envy the gleam in your eyes. No offense to Paul Graham, but I'd like to see his effort duplicated now ... same with Yang"
they weren't the first and they probably won't be the last - history will repeat itself. that's like saying everything that's been invented has already been invented.
"Sam walton succeeded because of a one-time massive systematic non-repeatable even (globalization). You think anything that massive is just around the corner for you to exploit"
change is the only thing that's constant. if I don't take advantage of it, someone else will and the guard changes again...
"last time I checked China was a carefully micro-managed mixed economy"
yes but it's a big change from am almost pure centralized socialist leaning economy. a lot of individuals have already benefited from the change. u can't tell me it's not a big change from what they had in say the 60's
"Tell me, have you ever travelled much across this country?"
I have, and I beg to differ especially when I can compare with a lot of 3rd world countries I've been to. can you do the same?
"Because my startup is based on this reality and trying to find a solution to it"
based on everything you just wrote, the logical option would be to move to some EU nation with a more socialist leaning economic system and just relax. lookin at your arguments it doesn't make sense to stay and start a capitalistic venture within a capitalistic leaning economy since the Microsofts and Exxons of the world will just smash it. If you're just preparing "for a change in perception of reality" and u don't care about "surrounding yourself with lots of trinkets", u don't need a startup; a non-profit will do just fine.
"Silicon Valley is amagical, artificial dream world that represents reality about as much as a commercial for a luxury resort."
that's a little strange to say considering in your past posts it seems like you lament not being in SV since "it's the startup hub". I guess you being here would do wonders for your startup "based on this reality"
"not every country with a capitalistic leaning economy has the debt our country has - many are in the black...
That's actually technically impossible by the very nature of interest-rate-based distribution of continous fiat currency, but that's a whole other topic.
"they weren't the first and they probably won't be the last - history will repeat itself. that's like saying everything that's been invented has already been invented.
Um, actually they were the first and I don't see any others so I assume they're the last. I don't recall a past instance where somebody sat a computer, put some letters and symbols together in a certain context, then either started a multi-billion dollar company or got bought out by one. I think you misunderestimate how much of a carefully-managed distraction the dot-com boom was from underlying systematic problems. It tooks a small army to set the way for an economic boom so that the rich can sell off their shares to a newly-developed "bigger fool" class ...
"change is the only thing that's constant. if I don't take advantage of it, someone else will and the guard changes again...
If you studied the history of currency management, you'd be surprised how little has changed in the 6,000 years or so when money as we think of it was created. Most of what we think of as "modern" aspects of money were created centuries-to-millenia ago.
Or here's another one for you: Obama is related to both Bush and Cheney who, according to a Vanity Fair-sponsored bit of research are distant relations with the British Royal Family, which is descendent from German Royalty which is related to the Austrian Hapsburg Dynasty. So, here we are, about 800 years after they got kicked out of the "power structure" and now they basically, via proxy, are back in control again, albeit less visibly. I'm sorry to point this out, but those in the seat of power have money and resources and time on their hands which they use to ensure their continuity in ways you can't begin to fathom while the rest of us are busy trying to make money to eat.
> I have, and I beg to differ especially when I can compare with a lot of 3rd world countries I've been to. can you do the same?
Yes. But here it's worse. In 3rd world countries, poor people have to endure a few well educated rich snobs. But mostly the stress is less because everyone realizes everyone else is poor. Over here, many poor people have to endure watching disproportionately rich 18 year old ditzes driving by in the new Mercedes convertible Bank of Daddy just financed. Not too easy when the discrepency is side by side ... at least if you're in most developing nations most people around you don't have it that much better.
"Silicon Valley is amagical, artificial dream world that represents reality about as much as a commercial for a luxury resort."
that's a little strange to say considering in your past posts it seems like you lament not being in SV since "it's the startup hub". I guess you being here would do wonders for your startup "based on this reality"
--- I think my point was not communicated well or misunderstood. Just because I wish I could duplicate some of the better aspects of S.V., but can't, and realize that it seems to only happen there, doesn't mean that I don't distinguish that as a unique reality. Just the opposite. You're the one who's there, and imagine that the whole world either does or is on the verge of working like it does there. I'm trying to tell you that "there" exists almost nowhere else on earth, so it's not indicative of reality because it's not a duplicatable formula. Hence it's a special situation.
"Um, actually they were the first and I don't see any others so I assume they're the last."
I'm speaking of successful entrepreneurs in general and not just of successful internet ones (even then there were a lot of successful internet entrepreneurs that came after them)
"if you studied the history of currency management"
that's currency, I'm speaking of the world and trends at large including technology
"Yes. But here it's worse. In 3rd world countries, poor people have to endure a few well educated rich snobs... many poor people have to endure watching disproportionately rich 18 year old ditzes driving by in the new Mercedes convertible"
doesn't sound like you have been to the 3rd world. over there people care about more important stuff like food and water and maybe even basic education; you call suffering watching some guy drive a car you can't afford? we live like kings over here
"Just because I wish I could duplicate some of the better aspects of S.V..."
so you really do believe in what you wrote? I thought you were just messing with me. ironic
>> I'm speaking of successful entrepreneurs in general and not just of successful internet ones (even then there were a lot of successful internet entrepreneurs that came after them)
The tech boom was setup over half a century ago with massive investment by the military serving as the basis of the beginning of most of what we use in consumer land today. Same with the auto industry - it was systematically planned on purpose, like the high construction, by the oil cos. QUESTION: what "big infrastructure" investment is paving the way for the entrepreneurs of the future? Please don't say "alternative bio energy" ...
Entrepreneurs are important players, no doubt. But the game needs to be setup properly first. Our game is falling apart and needs to be reset just like you used to restart your Win95 based PC mid-day when it clogged up.
>doesn't sound like you have been to the 3rd world. over there people care about more important stuff like food and water and maybe even basic education; you call suffering watching some guy drive a car you can't afford? we live like kings over here
No, that wasnt' my point. My point is that it's different being "there" where most people are suffering and in the same boat than it is here where people suffer right alongside ostentatious wealth aquired via sometimes legit, sometimes not so means.
> so you really do believe in what you wrote? I thought you were just messing with me. ironic
Let me say this as clearly as I know how. I ADMIRE some things about S.V. ... I WISH I could duplicate them. Many people do. But so far it has not proven possible. Having said that, as an "outsider" I recognize it's uniqueness. You, as an insider, seem, to me, to be saying, basically, "Why don't you folks just, you know, come together and innovate like we do and the market will reward you for it."
What I'm saying is the over there it's like a well-oiled machine that seems to have biased your impression of the challenges everyone outside of there experiences.
I wish I could experience "that" over "here", but recognize "that" is not reality most places. You experience "that" there and see the word through S.V.-colored glasses ...
Come on, I know I'm not always super clear but I can't be killing this point that bad.
Look at it this way - imagine an NBA player telling you, "What's the problem - just jump up and dunk it like I just did - what's so hard about that?"
Imagine you're 5'6". Just once you'd like to put that guy in your frame and say, "Okay - go ahead - jump up and slam dunk it now like you just advised me!"
It might be 100 years, but in the long term I think the wealth transfer mechanism will be in delivered energy. Barrels of oil work well for now, maybe we'll switch to Joules eventually.
Exactly. My point is that energy is the only thing we have that is scarce. There's water, perhaps, but we can convert salt water to potable water with enough energy. Why abstract away energy with bills or metals?
Energy isn't that scarce, actually. If we eliminated our military, for example, there would instantly be a 100% surplus as the military accounts for about 50% of the fuel this country uses. As for why we abstract energy with bills, it's because people are easier to control that way. Plus you need to account for the not to easy to calculate idea of "human energy" represented by money. If China's population doubles, bankers can increase the money supply to account for their economic activity - to a point. But how can we increase the energy "things" to do that? A bit harder.
Of course energy is scarce! We can't afford to send very heavy things into space. We can't send a radio signal into space that is so loud that you can be sure as hell everything within 100 light years is going to know we are here. We can't build superstructures, even if we got rid of the military. We could probably build a huge particle accelerator if we got rid of the military though...
Well, if we use energy for stupid, wasteful projects then of course energy is scarce; if we use it more effectively/efficiently, then less so. It's all based on how/what we use it for.
>We can't build superstructures, even if we got rid of the military.
Research Dubai. They're building the world's 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and fourth greatest structures at the same time. The #1 building is almost twice the height of those towers in malasia.
> We could probably build a huge particle accelerator if we got rid of the military though..
personally making scooters and small hatchbacks sexy like they do in Europe would be a good idea, as would coordinating flights better to not have half-full jets wasting fuel taking off ...
Energy is fundamentally scarce. I am thinking about much larger scale uses of energy than anything humans are doing right now. Check out the link to the Kardashev Scale posted above, we need orders of magnitude more energy to build something like a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere
What the hell is the basis of downgrading this post? Seriously I come across posts like, "It depends" that have like, 46 points next to them. I put up a post, short, long, on point, off point, boring, interesting, and there's like a 24-hour army of down-modding ninjas tracking my every keystroke just waiting to pounce on me and downgrade ... get a life you haters!
But I get downmodded no matter what. It seems like there's a conspiracy to make sure I never get above mid-50s. Heck, I think if I add all the 30-to-50 variances I'd be up to at least 500 by now. Okay. Fine. Um, "Me too. I agree. What that guy said reminds me of an article by Paul Graham ... BTW, I was using all these cool new startup apps, then I found out they were all started by this incubator, Y Combinator, which just happened to be run by the guy who wrote most of my favorite articles on the whole wide internet, Paul Graham. Did I mention I can't wait for someone to do a mashup of Xobni and RescueTime and Reddit? Also, a random thought occurred to me: without Viaweb, Yahoo would probably never have gotten off the ground. Also, last, I would upmod everybody if only I could, especially pg and rms. Have I mentioned how clean, fresh and well-thought out the design of Hacker News is? If only all forums were this elegant. There! Can I please have a few extra points now? My dream is to someday break the magical (for me) "60 barrier". I've heard tales. I believe it's possible, somehow, someway. I love all you guys, even the band of down-modding ninjas tracking my every move. May you all have many buyout offers from Google and Microsoft, but enough customers to be able to turn them down and go on to bigger, better things.
Obviously karma is very important to you, I gave you as many points as I could.
Just say what you want and don't worry about the karma. You've got something of a stream of consciousness style going on; your posts are longer than most here. My advice is to try and make your posts more concise. If they were shorter, people would be more likely to take the time to reply rather than just downmod you.
You are right that this article talks of a "wider applicability" of the business model where services are cross-subsidized by advertising.
But, there's more:
The article emphasizes that the "costs" for an Internet Service, which hitherto have been cross-subsidized by advertising are, for all practical purposes, not relevant any more. It is true that this article talks only of the bandwidth, storage and computation costs and excludes the cost of labor. But much has been said before about the costs of labor decreasing via improved frameworks and tools.
The question then becomes, "What does it mean now, that the costs to be cross-subsidized are so low?" This goes back to what PG, Marc Andreessen and others have been claiming all along: we are going to see more startups, a LOT more startups. Also, according to Chris Anderson's Long Tail, LOTS of startups in niche domains. Startups operating in niches, might not make a whole lot of money through advertising. But, this is precisely the point of the article, given the cross-subsidization needs being so low, some startups would be happy making a couple of thousand or tens of thousands a month (instead of millions).
Excellent point. I guess the challenge is in first determining whether adopting the strategy to give pages with semantic info a higher rank, a good one. In other words, will this improve users' satisfaction with search?
I suppose it could start out in Google Labs as an experiment. Although I m quite convinced of the power of the semantic web, I would think Google would tread carefully before changing what's working for them, now.
I am not so sure this reasoning will hold given the highly price elastic nature of the demand for IT. In other words, will US companies look to spend as much on IT in a recession?
Never saw that "The Other Road Ahead" essay before, thanks for the link. He proposed a web service quasi-operating system for people uncomfortable with normal computers in that essay and I applied to YC with that idea.
I agree. Striking the right balance between abstractions and low-level details, is the mark of a genius. Put differently, the size and nature of the building blocks a person uses, in order to tackle a problem or to communicate with others is, to me, a very good indicator of how smart that person is.
I have been in situations where the balance has tipped far too much in either directions. Far too much reliance on abstractions, without understanding the details and we get the stock, garden variety Business person. Far too many details used in thinking and communicating leads to tedium, and interestingly can come off as patronizing, if its done often enough.
To be honest, I somehow missed the possibility that it was a parody, as well. Which brings me to something a little 'meta' as far as this goes: What are some good heuristics / algorithms to determine if something is a parody? :)
It's more satire than parody. Some helpful heuristics:
(1) Is the author saying "things you can't say" in a place where normally the rules apply? (Bloomberg isn't an especially politically-incorrect news/opinion outlet.)
(2) Is the author out of character? This could have been written under a haughty pseudonym ("Edgar Charles Hyannisport, III") -- but was under the name of author Michael Lewis instead, who's written popular books about finance, business, technology, and sports. If a professional writer offends, you can figure they calculated to offend in service of their real persuasive/entertainment goals.
(3) Does the presentation match the implied mindset? Even people with similar views don't present them in this way, if they want to be effective.
(4) Gradual progression of implausibility. Lewis starts merely speaking more crudely than typical of "the poor", but then goes to the absurd (the poor should have teams of lawyers) and proceeds to talk of debtor's prisons and requiring menial labor of the indebted. A slow build keeps readers guessing, for at least a little while, while eventually causing most/all to realize the author is being facetious.
Your last clue should've been the biggest. If you read the article through to the part about dressing poor people up as clowns and seeing how many you could shove into a Maybach as entertainment at rich kids' birthday parties and still thought the author was being serious, your satire detector really, really needs a tune-up.
"When Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, the distinguished musical satirist Tom Lehrer decided that he could no longer perform. "It was at that moment that satire died," says Lehrer, "There was nothing more to say after that.""
Perhaps you are being a bit too strong here. I might hold an uncommon contrarian view for news.yc but, here goes nothing:
"It teaches its victims to use the excreable "viewstate" and POST when they mean to GET and pass volumes of unnecessary and poorly-encoded data back and forth between the server and client."
You are right here to the extent that "viewstate" is the default way of managing state, scalably, in ASP.NET. And this adds to the amount of data being streamed between the server and the client, and back. But, when performance is the "key" consideration, you can turn off viewstate for controls that dont rely on it, or for the page as a whole. If you are really hard-core about performance, you can write HTTP handlers that override parts or whole of the default handlers. Thus, you can maintain state on the server side completely if you wish to (dealing also with the concomitant issues to scale the site).
".Net programmers learn to drag and drop things onto forms which Visual Studio then clogs up with layers of absolute-positioning tags, ensuring that the resulting pages will only display correctly on certain browsers with certain window-sizes and absolutely will not print properly, even when the planets are properly aligned."
If you look into the "flow" layout mode, you will see that "absolute-positioning" is only one of the options that the Visual Studio Designer presents to you. There are no browser compatibility issues per se with the "flow" layout mode for printing or otherwise.
Also, Drag and Drop is a _Good Thing_. I have been dabbling with RoR lately and am yet to find good tooling around it. But, Visual Studio .NET is definitely one of the most powerful IDEs I have worked in. Drag and Drop = Increase in productivity.
"But that's okay, with .Net you can use Reporting Services to design hundreds of divergent 'reports.'"
From what you say in your comment, you seem to have quite a bit of experience with developing web applications for businesses. Given that, I am quite surprised you havent encountered similar attitudes that I have, as far as "Reports" go. Business Users _LOVE_ reports. "Reports" have been given a substantial amount of attention in most projects I have been associated with. So they are not "divergent" by any means. Drag Drop Capability for Designing of Reports, with Design Time handles for all the entities that compose it, is again very powerful for a host of business scenarios.
".Net teaches programmers to code to Microsoft's api, not to web standards, fundamental principles of math and computer science or, frequently, to common sense."
"It isn't to Microsoft's advantage for developers to consider other options and thus they try with great success to prevent .Net developers from realizing those options even exist. Microsoft documentation almost never refers to RFCs, even when doing so would be helpful. They hide the browser object model as much as they can and instead present the .Net wrapper for the browser object model as the only truth, with a Microsoft registered-trademark character after every thought."
Tnese are very strong statements. :) I actually think that the Server Side abstraction that ASP.NET provides to developers is amazing. Why? Because being exposed to the "browser object model" for a number of browsers and their varying capabilities is not really meaningful when what I want to do is develop relativly straight-forward applications _fast_. You can also look into what ASP.NET calls "Adaptive Rendering". This also serves to abstract away the nitty-gritties of the browser making the HTTP requests.
"As you may guess, it results from great frustration with well-funded idiocy in the wasteland of corporate American IT. Also I just tried to pay my property taxes online and the lovely .aspx page blew up with a CLIENT-SIDE VBSCRIPT error."
Sure there are idiots in IT. And sure there are idiotic ways to develop software. Microsoft's marketing department does a good job capturing market share in the corporate world. Once they do that enough, it moves into the realm of supply and demand. When we have enough money to pay, enough unqualified people move into all points in the software development cycle, and what we get is this.
"If you are really hard-core about performance, you can write HTTP handlers that override parts or whole of the default handlers. Thus, you can maintain state on the server side completely if you wish to (dealing also with the concomitant issues to scale the site)"
Why should a programmer have to write special handlers just to save session state on the server side? Other platforms (Java, PHP, etc.) does that stuff for you in the background.
Thanks - that was a very nice and thorough response. And I quite agree with much of what you said. You don't have to use "viewstate" and flow layout is the sensible thing to do. But in actual practice .Net projects often do use viewstate and POST even when GET is appropriate and .Net projects frequently use absolute positioning even when flow is clearly approprate. As I said, it IS possible to do good web projects with .Net but in practice it doesn't usually work out that way.
Orkut is a great example of this. In its earliest incarnations it used postbacks and viewstates rather wildly but I notice every so often they seem to have rewritten it to use less and less of that stuff.
One thing I will disagree with you on - dividing your system up into input .aspx pages and reporting pages using reporting services - isn't good design. You shouldn't force a user to go to some other page to print the same data he sees on the screen. The data IS the report - if you can see it on the screen you should be able to print it on the paper without having to navigate to some other page. Think of the URL as the Dewey Decimal number for a piece of information. If you want to see the sales data for June, for instance, you might find it at http://mycompany.com/sales?fromdate=2007-06-01&todate=20...
Why should you have to navigate to a different URL to print that? Tim Berners-Lee's original ideas of the URL as the starting point for the semantic web seem rather good to me but I don't think there are many implementations which come close to recognizing the potential of this idea. Breaking a system into separate sections for reporting and viewing just seems a bit daft. But again, that's the sort of behavior .Net encourages - not requires, but encourages.
I think I misunderstood you there. You are right, from a "User Experience" perspective dividing up the web application's pages into sections for viewing and other sections for printing is probably not very good.
For some reason I thought you were talking about "Reports" and "Reporting" in general, as offered by the Report Viewer Controls in ASP.NET (using rdlc / rdl).
I have used CSS in the past to allow users to print pages (as they see it on the page) and it has worked well for me. Although Report Viewer Controls in ASP.NET have their own magical hold on the business users (Probably because they are made to look and feel similar to other Reporting Packages, which Business Users are comfortable with). So, I still think thats a good way to go, if that is your audience. :)
But, I do understand what you are saying and agree that there is the possibility of people using this technology where it shouldnt be used.
"The odds of a hit versus a miss do not increase over time. The periods of one's career with the most hits will also have the most misses. So maximizing quantity -- taking more swings at the bat -- is much higher payoff than trying to improve one's batting average."
Of all the conclusions, this one threw me off quite a bit. I realize Marc is going to be following this article up with a part 2, but I d be interested to see just how a "swing at the bat" is defined in the start-up context. If a swing is defined as one iteration, then seeing no "systematic developmental trends" in the "quality ratio" goes very much against the grain. I would argue that every iteration teaches us something that is quite applicable in the "general" sense to future iterations (for different products/services and across markets).
In any case, even if this conclusion is considered in a non-startup context, its still very bothersome. For example, if a "swing at the bat" is defined as one complete work, such as a Book or a Musical Piece, why arent there developmental trends in the quality ratio?
I am more inclined to think this is a structural phenomenon - something that occurred because the incentives available at each step along the way were structured in a manner that allowed this to snowball.