Steve Ballmer had another colourful analogy, he used it in response to companies claiming that a merger would create a powerhouse to challenge the market leader:
"It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster."
(Thanks to "raldi" for finding the quote on Daring Fireball, and identifying that Gruber was quoting Lyons, who said he heard it from Ballmer, although the words here are Lyons')
I used to joke that I was going to have "stty erase ^H" etched on my gravestone. It's probably been 25+ years since I've last needed to type that, but I can still hammer it out crazy fast. Sadly, that muscle memory is taking up neurons that'll never be used for anything else.
> "Asker-accepted answers cost $2 to $200. Google retained 25% of the researcher's reward and a 50 cent fee per question. In addition to the researcher's fees, a client who was satisfied with the answer could also leave a tip of up to $100." [0]
I'm quickly understanding why I've never heard of Google Answers.
I do not find it useful to say "If A is like B, then all the things about B must apply to A." This forces us to find perfect analogies, and encourages too much bickering over how well the analogy applies.
But I do find it useful to use an imperfect analogy to illustrate something that you have already established directly. So establish that mergers between #2 and #3 rarely end up beating #1 directly, and then say "It's like..."
Our minds are not cold calculating machines. Colourful, humorous, and/or emotionally laden analogies do help us learn things and remember things.
I have found a similar thing going on with illustrations in blog posts. If you have a section about cascading failures in a digital service, and you include an illustration of dominos falling down, it does help people grasp and remember your point.
Even though obviously, cascading service failures are entirely unlike dominos, and it would be quixotic to attempt to reason about services from the things we know about dominos.
Since I have drawn such unexpected interest in the subject and power of analogies (and the broader class of mappings they belong to, metaphors), might I suggest Surfaces & Essences by Douglas Hofstadter (of Godel, Escher, Bach fame) and Emmanuel Sander. It is a very insightful, powerful, and amusingly self-referential cinderblock-sized tome on how the ability to draw inferences, create and manipulate metaphors, and have a sense for where they do and don’t apply is a central issue for “general artificial intelligence” (you know, the MIT-cantered, Marvin Minsky-fuelled, LISP-encoded “symbolic AI” that eventually plunged into ‘winter’ only to emerge, phoenix-like but neutered, in our ‘modern’ statistics-based Machine/Deep Learning guises).
Analogies are certainly useful. I recall reading that Hawking first had the idea of his eponymous radiation ‘emanating’ from black holes by way of a calculation performed by a Russian physicist (whose name escapes me at the moment) that argued that a sphere of ferromagnetic material should ‘emit’ tiny but theoretically detectable amounts of electromagnetic radiation. I forget the details. But apparently Hawking’s brain drew the analogue between the inverse square laws at play, the virtual particles, and the non-permeability of the objects and set out on his quest for what eventually made him world-famous.
I myself am a prolific, if somewhat irreverent, manufacturer of analogies, metaphors, and euphemisms. I remember the general horror of my family members when I asked great-grandma why she had been moved to “the launch-pad ward”. In my defence, I was six.
A common antipattern here in HN comments is someone using an analogy (which is almost always bad), and then the responses devolving into arguing over how the analogy isn't correct.
I honestly think a "no analogies" rule for commenting would do more to facilitate good discussion than the existing "no jokes" rule. Analogies are almost never useful. Even the ancient Greeks realized this.
"You're painting analogies with an awfully broad brush."
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"Painting with a broad brush" probably began as an analogy, but once enough people use it, it becomes an idiom. If understanding is shared between speaker/writer and listener/reader, idioms are a useful shorthand for sharing some commonly understood argument.
So useful, in fact, that people often forget what the original analogy was. For example, the verb "rewind." How many people using it think of reel-to-reels, cassettes, or videotapes?
"Painting with a broad brush" is not an idiom, since it's meaning is deducible from its content, not only its contex. It's a metaphor (literally false as written, but calls to mind an analogy with truth -- both the comment and broad brushes apply the same thing to many targets without any careful differentiation)
Great link, thank you, I will use these words with more rigor in future. I think that “metaphor” is a much better word for the thing that is used to illustrate or add emotional oomph to an idea rather than to argue its merits.
Analogies can sometimes be a useful supplement to make an argument easier to digest, they just shouldn't be used as a substitute for a coherent argument. The latter tends to lead to what you're describing here:
>A common antipattern here in HN comments is someone using an analogy (which is almost always bad), and then the responses devolving into arguing over how the analogy isn't correct.
And demonstrably false: what are numbers and arithmetic if not metaphors for acts performed on actual objects? “Get three apples, give away two, share what’s left with your sister” is encoded in the arithmetic analogy (3-2)/2.
Analogies... are more pernicious than you think.
Indeed, if one wishes to be extremely extreme, one might go as far as to argue that all language is ‘analogy’, insofar as it assigns symbolic monikers to real-world objects. Furthermore, phonetic encodings (alphabets) are a further level of analogy, as they posit that (for example) the “in” in “indeed” is “similar enough” to the “in” in “insofar” to be denoted with identical symbols. Those symbols are, themselves... you guessed it... analogies, metaphors, and other various kinds of abstractions.
However, if the merging companies compete in the same market, it would be fairer to claim that "It's like taking the number two and number three sprinters in the world, and having them run IN SERIES against the number one sprinter." (emphasis mine).
Because number two and three companies merging to a new number one does in fact happen.
(Note that this is the case here, though. No idea where Google is going with this.)
I don't know that that analogy follows, because agglomerations of thousands of people doing a complex task really aren't that comparable to two people doing one simple task.
Taking one example I know of second-hand:
My brother worked for the #2 company in his industry at the time they acquired #3 in an effort to overtake the market leader. It worked out disastrously. It turns out that #3, despite being the less profitable (and therefore less valuable) company, was also physically larger. Internally it had a lot of inefficient ways of doing things that resulted in them needing a lot more people to accomplish the same volume of work.
You might think that #2 was then able to lean up #3 and make them more profitable, as part of the acquisition process. But it just isn't that simple - this was a large multinational with ossified internal procedures that were baked into the very infrastructure (both physical and IT) of the company. Things were never going to change overnight.
So, instead, what happened was that, over the next 1-2 years, #3's culture got imposed on the employees from #2, by simple virtue of the #3 camp being twice as many people. So, in the years since then, the #1 company's market lead has consolidated into outright market dominance, as a result of their #2 competitor suddenly becoming no more competitive than their #3 competitor.
Happened to a company I started working at. Long story short, I joined as an engineer when one 15 year old based company that was clearly still running like it was 1995 bought a lean tech startup with smart/focus people and proceeded to impose its really inefficient, old culture onto the newly acquired folk. Lots of clash, tons of shit talking, and people leaving left and right. The giant company ended up selling for basically nothing to another company because leadership had no direction and it was all a huge failure. A giant waste of a year of my life. Culture clash is very real, and it'd be interesting to study to figure out how potentially bad acquisitions/mergers can be predicted from other angles besides economic growth or "owning a larger portion of the market"
if it isn't too much effort, can you briefly jot down a few of your favorite ones? Just like, I bet, quite a few other people here, I am actually very curious to hear some of those.
we were a healthcare company so HIPAA was very prevalent, and so that entailed a locked office which further included either taking your laptop home, or locking it up in a drawer. there were plenty of people who would just leave the laptop on their desks when leaving to go home due to the fact that the office was locked; one day I come into the office and am met with a bunch of coworkers telling me that the CTO came in early today and found that the door was open and all of the laptops people had left lying around were outside in the hallway, stacked. nothing was stolen, but clearly someone had broken in. it made zero sense, and a different coworker said that she felt unsafe and that we should call the police. the CTO immediately said that that was unnecessary and that we should just be more cautious. a few hours later we found out that this was all a ploy/lesson to teach us to lock our laptops away, and that the CTO was the one that stacked them up outside. he was later asking whether he should resign because of this embarrassment. real michael scott shit.
a non comical one:
we needed to build a viable infrastructure and one of our smart engineers found that we could use a hipaa compliant service (aptible) as a fast way, and spend a bit more. however the ancient dudes wanted us to hire some third party consultancy to build out some crazy complicated AWS stack, and unfortunately that was what we ended up doing because hierarchy. the project was being led by a person who wasnt an engineer, and surprise surprise, we were also locked into some crazy contract where regardless of the work they did, we still had to pay them an insane amount of money per month. the project dragged and dragged, and ultimately didnt work out. we had some half assed/half done AWS stack that no one knew how to deal with so NOW we had to hire an infrastructure dude to finish/manage it inhouse. so we hire this "hotshot" who turned out to be literally a money dump as well, and would show up to work about 45% of the time. no one knew what he did. it took him like 7 months to get that other project to SOMEWHAT work. he was getting paid i think like 200k to sit around and really do absolutely nothing. i was also convinced he was addicted to drugs on the side based on his manners when he actually managed to show up to work. by the time i had left, that AWS project was still incomplete and im positive that anyone with half a brain/aws experience could have built that stack in a month and a half.
and then of course there was the day to day of trying to get information from the acquiring company's employees and trying to cut the red tape of actually getting shit done, but they were very clearly used to bureaucracy type of work environment where every decision took ages, and some people were offended by the most minor things when we attempted to speed things along.
> But it just isn't that simple - this was a large multinational with ossified internal procedures that were baked into the very infrastructure (both physical and IT) of the company. Things were never going to change overnight.
I mean, it could have been that simple: #2 could have just entirely liquidated #3 and taken over their brands, marques, and physical assets like buildings, without retaining a single employee or officer of #3; or if they did keep the employees, it would just be by putting them into an "internal talent pool" where they're being paid to do nothing for a month or two, while they get filtered through #2's HR department as if they were new hires, either being placed in #2's structure or dropped.
This would mean that #3 would be essentially erased from the marketplace at the moment of acquisition: no further revenues, but no costs either, all creditors paid off by #2, etc. #2, however, would also immediately be free of the effects of #3's competition on their bottom line, which might balance out that lack of #3-revenue for them quite well. Many customers previously using #3 would find that they had simply stopped communicating or delivering on their promises for a period—and if they were going to switch allegiances based on that, who better to switch to than their still-business-as-usual acquirer, #2?
And, of course, presuming #2 already had logistics pipelines feeding the same markets as #3, and produced essentially-indistinguishable products from #3, it wouldn't take long to just start producing #2 products with #3 brands slapped on them and start sending them to their new base of #3 customers, to return things to normal. (But in the mean time, they'd have already received many of those customers as switchers to #2, without having to "fool" them with the #3 brand.)
I believe this is the strategy employed by one of the big successful examples of M&A: Anheuser-Busch InBev. When the beer giant acquires another brewer, they don't keep them making beer; they just tear them apart, throw the acquired company away, and suddenly customers of MomNPop Beer Co. are drinking AB InBev beer in a MomNPop can. (They don't even keep the MomNPop brewery itself; there are economies of scale that make operating a bunch of small breweries silly compared to operating one huge megabrewery. They just strip it, sell the equipment for scrap—because otherwise they'd be encouraging someone to start another competitor!—and then sell or rent out the land, if owned.)
> I mean, it could have been that simple: #2 could have just entirely liquidated #3 and taken over their brands, marques, and physical assets like buildings, without retaining a single employee or officer of #3
Oh my goodness.
So, they would have bought this existing large multinational, with a huge existing client list, base of installed product, all sorts of SLAs and support contracts, all sorts of infrastructure for supporting all of that, etc, and immediately fired everyone who knows how to manage it all!?!?!? And what, then just immediately hire several thousand people to replace them 24 hours later, and have every single one of them up and running and productive in a jiffy?
> This would mean that #3 would be essentially erased from the marketplace at the moment of acquisition
Yep. . . followed by #2 being erased from the marketplace by lawsuits within a year or two.
> all sorts of SLAs and support contracts, all sorts of infrastructure for supporting all of that, etc
We're talking about different verticals, here. Product businesses can get away with this. Service businesses probably can't.
Even in service industries, though, there's a simple hack: when #2 acquires #3, they keep #3 running for a few months, but they make #3 push a change to the SLA, where service provided by #2 in lieu of service provided by #3 will be considered an acceptable service-level. They only begin liquidation of #3 once all #3 customers have signed onto the new SLA. Then, when the lights are turned off on #3's infra, all #3 customers are temporarily just provided with #2 services.
Again, this is mostly a thing with product businesses, or, say, logistics providers, where the product/service is "pushed" to the customer by the provider, and the customer doesn't need to change how they do things, they just need to take receipt of the alternate product/service from the new provider for a while. "MomNPop beer is unavailable for a month, but here's a truckload of existing AB InBev 'indie-branded' stock to put in its place until we get our new marque spun up."
This is less of a thing if we're talking about a "demand"-driven business, like, say, a SaaS API provider, where the customer has to communicate to #2 or #3 through an API, and they have different APIs. This can still be made to work, but it's all about how long the transition period takes. Google's purchase of Nest looked like this, with a transition period of two years. But it wasn't temporary; with a transition period like that, you may as well just shutter the #3 "API" entirely.
(Example I can think of where this does happen in a service industry: cell-service MVNOs getting acquired by their own infrastructure provider. If ISP #3, an MVNO who uses ISP #2 as their network, gets bought by #2, there's nothing in #3 that #2 wants or needs, other than their customers, and maybe #3's brand value. So they just tell #3 customers that they're going to be #2 customers for a while (i.e. their phone will be "roaming" onto #2's network all the time, but they'll be charged regular #3 prices for it.) Either every customer from #3 is then pivoted into being a "real" #2 customer; or, if #2 keeps the #3 brand around, their #3 service starts working "normally" again a while later, as just a marque of #2 (if they stuck around with #3 instead of checking the box on their monthly bill that offers to switch them to #2.)
> and immediately fired everyone who knows how to manage it all!?!?!? And what, then just immediately hire several thousand people to replace them 24 hours later, and have every single one of them up and running and productive in a jiffy?
You don't hire the "new"-from-#3 employees to service the #3 accounts. #2 employees service the from-#3 accounts. #3 employees come in at the bottom, as if they were outreach hires.
> followed by #2 being erased from the marketplace by lawsuits within a year or two.
I mean, not if #2 doesn't own #3 when it liquidates, they don't. A company doesn't have to literally acquire another company; they can just pay it to commit suicide, and then pick up the pieces. Who do you sue, if your provider-of-choice #3 just decides to fold?
Or, even more sneaky, #2 can just figure out a way to enter into some kind of financial arrangement with #3, where it then slowly squeezes #3 to death... and then picks up the pieces. (Do you know what happened to Target in Canada? Do you know why? Hint: all the land the Targets operated on was leased to them... by Walmart! And now, after Target set them up nice and neat, and then got squeezed out of the market, they are Walmarts.)
I don't see how this analogy is apropos. Here's another analogy that works the other way: Adding an extra tube to a single-tube tunnel improves the efficiency of the tunnel greatly. Why is the runner analogy better than this one?
Tunnels are passive, people are creative. Adding a second tunnel doesn’t require interplay from the first. Adding a company of people is subject to whatever the sociological equivalent is of Amdahl’s law, whereby there is extra overhead to coordinating their work with your current employees, and don’t forget cultural integration.
Let me ask you this: why do we run 100 yard dashes? (If you'll allow, I'm going to ask you up to four more whys, maybe we'll find out something interesting!)
Because your tunnel is not competing against a superior, dominant tunnel.
EDIT: Also, the runner and eagle analogy seam to criticize the line of thinking that would lead people to assume you can just smash together two companies and end up with a company that is better than the current market leaders. The tube analogy doesn't touch on that at all..
> assume you can just smash together two companies and end up with a company that is better than the current market leaders
But you can. Think of regional phone companies (the baby bells), which merged and became dominant just by dent of natural monopoly.
Anyway, my analogy is exactly the opposite of that critique. It's the optimist's view (which is also the view of the decision-makers at the companies, so it's not to be dismissed easily).
I think you may have glossed over the "just". Of course they "can" but it's not "ergo" in the sense that 1 + 1 = 2 ergo you are now better than the 1.5 company.
I don't view the tunnel as being the optimistic antithesis of the turkey or runner analogy. The other two are not meant to be postulations pending mathematical proofs but critiques on simplistic thinking.
>> "It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster."
Funny, that's exactly what it has looked like till now since the announcement about Microsoft and Facebook ML teams joining forces to go up against Tensorflow. :-)
The usual algorithm is to follow the attributions until you reach Samuel Clemons, Benjamin Franklin, Confucius, or Laozi. They are said to have said everything.
Man, that whole article is worth a read ten years on, in light of the topic at hand. He quotes Ballmer, then shows how Ballmer considering turning around and doing just that for lack of better ideas, all the while (Lyons posits) knowing it won't work.
Dan Lyons^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
Steve Ballmer had another colourful analogy, he used it in response to companies claiming that a merger would create a powerhouse to challenge the market leader:
"It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster."
(Thanks to "raldi" for finding the quote on Daring Fireball, and identifying that Gruber was quoting Lyons, who said he heard it from Ballmer, although the words here are Lyons')