Because otherwise, you end up like Dropbox. You may be the market leader right now, but competitors will catch up (Google Drive and OneDrive in this case), and your core business will be obsolete or less valuable. You would have wished you spent the resources expanding into other areas (which is what Google is doing right now by investing outside of search).
For example, Kodak already faced bankruptcy as a photographic film company. They smartly moved to pharmaceutical manufacturing.
If mobile gaming and/or AR/VR became so big by now that no one uses dedicated handhelds, Nintendo would have lost out on a lot of money. That didn't end up to be the case, but no one knew that at the time.
Yeah, well I wouldn't have canceled by Dropbox subscription if they hadn't been so eager to turn it into some broad all-encompassing enterprise app.
I get that they have an audience, and the stakeholders have every inventive to try to leverage that attention into perpetual growth to stroke their own egos (and satisfy Wall Street), but this is why we can't have nice things.
Dropbox was plenty big enough to just be really good at file syncing in a platform agnostic way, this was literally better than Apple (despite Steve Jobs arrogant prognostication about "that's not a company that's a feature"), Microsoft or Google can ever achieve, because they always have the VP over their head making sure it serves their larger world-dominance agenda. This is the same reason Twitter had to measure itself against Facebook instead of recognizing that it had unique value as a protocol which Facebook never could have achieved regardless of DAUs or ad revenue numbers. The fact that "market rate" for software engineers is established by advertising/big data monopolies and everything of slightly lesser scale is deemed a failure is one of the saddest realities of our modern economy. The wonders we could have if the Berkeley tech hippies vision has been 20% closer to reality are truly astounding. As software engineers we live with an embarrassment of financial opportunity, juxtaposed against a dearth of technological vision and value delivered to the people.
Look, it makes sense to diversify that's fine. That isn't what I'm poo-pooing at all. It's fine to spend some of your time and money on random side projects. The problem is priorities.
Anyhow, if it helps, the problem I'm really ranting about isn't the move to mobile but the latter part of the comment, which is the chasing of hype. People are so intoxicated with free market ideology that they really believe every move a company makes is really some invisible hand wisdom and they forget businesses are groups of people, that is human people. They underestimate how many moves are really just what I said, some people in management chasing hype. And chasing hype or better diversifying is fine and wise, it just needs to be done within scale to the threat currently faced and the resources at hand.
Dropbox is a one-trick pony so they are right to be worried. Sony is literally one of the biggest most diversified technology companies in the world. It probably is wise to have some presence in mobile if they really have none (although I doubt the article), but if you just read gaming media like the OP you think it some crime or deadly threat to Sony for it not to be a leading mobile IP owner yesterday. It's just the language is out of scale of the actual risk to Sony, and language of a media piece might not matter, you bet your socks some 24 year old fresh MBA somewhere in Sony USA is going to read this then start flinging slide decks to management about how they need to start dropping half a million on some mobile start up that is barely alive or something.
It makes me think that the r/cscareerquestions tack of forgetting everything else and focusing on just leetcode may actually have merit.
For what it's worth, I think Chris Marshall looks like a great developer and a professional I aspire to emulate. However, a lot of companies do make decisions based on metrics, keyword searches, and standardized tests like leetcode (aka stuff that misses out on the human element), so it makes sense to try and balance both if one hasn't done so already.
The reality requires balance. For example, in university courses, prerequisites are required and enforced for good reason.
People try all the time to learn calculus with a weak foundation in precalculus, and they really struggle unnecessary. People also try to learn physics with a weak foundation in mathematics, with similar results. I would argue that the same is true for software development. You can develop bad habits (e.g. not using a style guide at all) by not doing initial prep work first first.
I agree that some people put things off indefinitely and end up in "tutorial hell," and for them it's better to err to going right to doing. But it's not always the case, and sometimes educational opportunities (e.g. getting work experience before starting a company) can really increase your skills.
> I would argue that the same is true for software development.
One can learn best practices without having to work at a startup / tech shop / MANGA. Besides, software development isn't the only skill required, there's likely a lot to learn but not enough time. With most upstarts, timing is more crucial than most other learnable factors, because you can never rollback time.
Yes, exactly. I kept getting a "Sorry, something went wrong" with no error code when trying to give a third-party app permissions with my (paid!) Google account, and the most probably reason was that my accounts were locked temporarily due to suspicious activity.
There is no information on how long this will last, there is nothing I can do to fix this, and of course, there is no customer support available. I can't even confirm that waiting will actually fix this, as there is no error code. I thought the people at Google would know better.
> "Screaming at my friends and just constantly feeling angry and frustrated."
A former high school classmate was known to scream at other people during League matches, and I chalked it up to a personality issue and him lacking maturity (aka something highly abnormal).
This might still be true, but it actually sounds like competitive video games and the culture around them might really normalize this behavior as acceptable. It looks like I was too quick to judge him personally, instead of accounting for the context.
I agree that parents should have much more responsibility on these matters, but not in exchange for state influence, at least in the US. 40M+ adults lack basic literacy to inform themselves well enough to pass on to their kids. Another 65M only have enough literacy to make low-level inferences and compare/contrast [0].
I’d rather govt (which has many channels for advocacy even if flawed) influence choices than corporations completely control the panopticon of choices (where small time spenders have very little consumer power).
But we’re not far apart. As you mention schools (of the state) are a good place to start.
For example, Kodak already faced bankruptcy as a photographic film company. They smartly moved to pharmaceutical manufacturing.
If mobile gaming and/or AR/VR became so big by now that no one uses dedicated handhelds, Nintendo would have lost out on a lot of money. That didn't end up to be the case, but no one knew that at the time.