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Cake day: May 7th, 2024

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  • Also a good point. Personally, I’m not willing to extend the charity of Hanlon’s Razor to corporations well known to be malicious. In this event, I’d rather be wrong than off-guard, if that makes sense?

    The meta verse and apples AR flop cost them a lot of money as a result.

    I think this is more of a case where the mandate to always increase profits compelled them to take calculated financial risks and hope to be the vanguard of a new boom. Well, maybe the calculations were more estimates, but I assumed they figured out they could afford the loss if it flopped, but would make major gains by securing a foothold in a new digital space if it succeeded.

    Consider how occasionally niche technologies once mocked later turn out to be hits. I remember once reading somewhere that QR codes were a fad, had died out and were basically useless, for instance, and I bought it because I myself saw decreasing use of them. At the time, I think QR code scanners weren’t built into smartphone camera apps, and smartphones weren’t as ubiquitous either, so unless you downloaded dedicated (and in retrospect sketchy) apps for it, they remained useless.

    Now, I see QR codes everywhere. My company has them on meeting rooms to check their occupation and book them right from your phone without needing to remember or manually enter the room number. Our printers have QR codes for email templates to report errors to IT that include technical details for the printer. Restaurants have QR codes for digital ordering, invoices for automatically scanning the payment details from your banking app, the list goes on.

    Obviously, the financial scale is far different, but that’s the example that came to mind just now seeing a QR code in my train for digital schedules including current delay. I’m sure there are better examples I could think of, but it’s eight in the morning and my long-term memory won’t come online for another hour or so.

    My point is that it’s sometimes hard or impossible to predict whether something will succeed, but the nature of corporate economics in the tech sphere compells taking risks on new innovations because the potential payoff is immense. And if they can afford to take it - they’re not exactly short on money and not particularly worried about their users running away over it - I don’t know if they can afford not to. Who knows what new tech people might surprisingly latch on to?

    I do think you’re right, but I don’t think it’s the only reason for doing things we think are stupid. The tech sphere in particular has a lot of survivorship bias, but while small companies might disintegrate over a failure, a giant corporation can take the hit and keep trying for the next gold rush.