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0 pointsmbesto1y ago0 comments

There are endless amounts of stories and situations in which selling something before it really exists has helped businesses. It's totally plausible that a team working on video streaming at the scale of Netflix could figure out live streaming.

Pre-optimization is definitely a thing and it can massively hurt (i.e. startups go under) businesses. Let's stop pretending any businesses would say 'no' to extra revenue even before the engineering team had full assurance there was no latency drop.

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sfn421y ago

In my language we have a saying that roughly translates to "Don't sell the hide until you've shot the bear".

And sure, there have probably been lots of examples where a business made promises they weren't confident about and succeeded. But there are surely also lots of examples where they didn't succeed.

So what's the moral of the story? I don't know, maybe if you take a gamble you should be prepared to lose that gamble. Sounds to me like Netflix fucked up. They sold something they couldn't provide. What are the consequences of that? I don't know, not do I particularly care. Not my problem.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

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sfn421y ago

In my language we have a saying that roughly translates to "Don't sell the hide until you've shot the bear".

And sure, there have probably been lots of examples where a business made promises they weren't confident about and succeeded. But there are surely also lots of examples where they didn't succeed.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse