What I’ve seen kill companies is the mismatch between those two curves: the time it takes to get real signal from the market vs the time a small group of humans can tolerate living in permanent crisis mode. In a ZIRP world you could paper over that with cheap capital; in 2025 you can’t. Calling that “suicide” makes it sound like a failure of grit, when it’s often just updating on new information about your life and the macro environment and deciding this particular lottery ticket isn’t worth any more years.
Warcraft 1 is maybe too slow paced and basic to be enjoyable, but Warcraft 2 remains very playable, as many of the usability of features core to modern RTS games developed here. There are a few things missing, but that just means you have to be more on the ball with the micro.
The map editor was revolutionary at the time, and it was trivially easy to be making usable maps within minutes.
One thing that was delightful about this game was how the community discovered that Farms made for better walls than the actual walls, and so an enormous variety of strategies developed around this. As players developed knowledge of how units were pushed out of buildings, walling off buildings to push units past forest was another strategy that developed from this, creating the potential for sneaky tricks.
One unfortunate thing about the game was that during the original battlenet edition they added a new extra fast speed, which everyone moved to, but that speed actually kinda broke the game in that it became entirely possible to accidentally put your townhall too close to the mine, and your peons would be impossible to remove from mining. So in actuality the second to fastest speed is the correct speed for this game.
I hope this got fixed in the remaster but I heard it was a pretty basic art refresh...
> Roughly 12 to 15 hours of recording. On average, I use it 10-20 times per day to record 3-6 second thoughts. That’s up to 2 years of usage.
I feel like I’m usually good about being able to imagine a market for different devices even when I’m not the target audience, but I’m having a hard time with this one.
Having 20 different 3-second thoughts transcribed to notes that I have to process every day sounds more like added complications than problem solving. If I stretch, I can think of a few things that flashed into my mind and then I forgot again for a couple days because I wasn’t in a location to immediately pull out my phone and put it on my todo list (which takes about 10 seconds because I put a shortcut in my lock screen). However, those locations weren’t something where I could be “whispering” to a ring, either.
So I don’t know. I hope repebble succeeds with everyone they’re doing, but this product feels like they went too far into the novelty end of the spectrum and neglected some of the actual usability that made the original Pebble popular.
EDIT: On second thought, maybe the lack of recharging is an acknowledgement that they don’t actually expect people to use this product a lot or for very long. Maybe the target audience is people who want to have something new and unique that they can also use as a conversation starter. Once the novelty wears off maybe it doesn’t get worn much. If it does become popular with a niche audience they can release a V2 with charging.
If it turns out that this was really just random bad luck, it shouldn't affect their reputation (if humans were rational, that is...)
But if it is what many people seem to imply, that this is the outcome of internal problems/cuttings/restructuring/profit-increase etc, then I truly very much hope it affects their reputation.
But I'm afraid it won't. Just like Microsoft continues to push out software, that, compared to competitors, is unstable, insecure, frustrating to use, lacks features, etc, without it harming their reputation or even bottomlines too much. I'm afraid Cloudflare has a de-facto monopoly (technically: big moat) and can get away with offering poorer quality, for increasing pricing by now.
“I’d be happy to answer your question… right after a word from our sponsor: Xyeniceli. Side effects may include ...”
OR
ChatGPT: “Why don't you let me fix you some of this Mococoa drink? All natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners.”
User: “What the hell are you talking about? Who are you talking to?”
ChatGPT: “I've tasted other cocoas. This is the best.”