Buffett Says Social-Networking Sites Overpriced Ahead of Public Offerings - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-25/most-networking-site-companies-will-be-overpriced-buffett-says.html

<comment><USER2> I'm going to file this in the "no shit" drawer. Buffet is notoriously conservative and his shareholders (I'm one) understand that. I think the more people are talking about a given company, the less likely Buffet is to invest in it.

That's not to say that those companies will fail, he's just not going to be the one betting on it. Many highly risky bets will pay off but he will not be sad that he missed it.

<comment><USER3> The less like a insurance company or business model that's 200+ years old, the less likely buffet is to invest in it. He seems to specialize in troubled traditional businesses which are mainly missing capital investment and insurance

<comment><USER4> That's not really accurate. Warren just only invests in companies with strong (provable) profit models at cheap prices. It doesn't matter what it is, it matters whether he (or you, or I, or anyone) can look at the numbers without guessing and see profit.

Before the housing bubble burst, those mortgage-backed securities were being shopped to Buffet. Buffet said he wouldn't buy them because they were bundled millions of loans and he had no way of knowing what the health of those loans actually was. Not rocket science. Not new age, high tech or too young for him. Just no different than anyone should even be with their money.

Would you buy a car for $25K if you did not know what year the car was, what model, what it looked like or what condition? But that is essentially what they were asking Buffet to do. And he didn't...but several people did.

<comment><USER3> Passing on random financial instruments (which AIG _Was_ a counterparty to quite a few of) is not the same thing as commenting on a social networking site or choosing to not invest in something tech related.

Saying something is overvalued is buffet speak for saying "not cheap enough to be troubled" which is when he traditionally invests in things.

He buys lots of family businesses upon death events, and some heavy industry suffering capital issues. Generally speaking, this precludes young firms from crossing his radar even. "Suffering capital issues" is similarly something you will rarely see in todays tech environment.

Because a person is good at something doesn't mean he does everything perfectly. There are lots of great investments out there Buffet is not going to go anywhere near, that are conservative even. He definitely has a profile far more constrained than "proven business model"

He's a good businessmen, no doubt about it, but because he dislikes something does not mean it's not a good bet, it just means it doesn't clearly fit into his "Nothing a little money can't fix" investment profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's pretty clear Social Networking sites are overvalued. Facebook has a valuation of around 65 billion $ on revenues of around 2 billion $. Microsoft has less than 4 times the valuation of Facebook and more than 30 times the revenue.

I think he is stating the bleeding obvious!

<comment><USER6> Word on the street is it's 85 billion $ now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I actually agree that prices may be inflated/overhyped but the lack of specificity in Buffett's statement kind of irks me. He doesn't even define what a social network is (Facebook, Zynga, and Groupon are all remarkably different companies and not everyone would consider all of them to be social networks).

He's a brilliant investor but at the end of the day statements made without any indication of real analysis or research should be taken with a grain of salt...even from the Oracle of Omaha.

<comment><USER8> Buffett: "One of the things we try very hard to do at Berkshire, is to stay within what I call our circle of competence."[1] It would surprise me greatly if the social network sphere is within Buffett's circle of competence, and it would surprise me even more if he thought it was, and so I would interpret his comments about it accordingly.

[1] [http://seekingalpha.com/article/148662-circle-of- competence-...](http://seekingalpha.com/article/148662-circle-of-competence- what-buffett-really-meant)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Also, Buffet is not some old fashioned, technology ignorant day trader. He claims he doesn't know much about technology companies, but he was still the first one to predict the internet bubble and is well involved in the modern markets. I think he's just speaking relative to his knowledge of other industries. No one doing as much market research every day as he does "only knows about industries 100 years old."

</comment><comment><USER9> This makes some sense. We often rate social networking sites demand-side, by how much potential people see in them rather than how much they're actually worth. The fact that the still growing Groupon is worth over 6 times as much as the well established and influential Twitter is a perfect indication of this. Worth is still somewhat based on assets and popularity, and we shouldn't push the price of companies up by such huge factors simple because they ARE growing and haven't established a reliable estimation of worth yet. Startups are a venture market, where the real money is made before sudden explosions in popularity, but we shouldn't grossly over rate them just because they aren't already well established, and the explosion hasn't happened yet. Especially because if the explosion does happen, and the company is worth at or less than its estimated, demand-side, potential worth, nobody's making money anyway, because the stock price won't have increased much. In other industries its called poor evaluation to treat EVERY up and coming business like its going to explode, why should startups be so different? Because SOME people have made tons of money? If were all "chasing the american dream" in our investments and will settle for no less, than that's acceptable. But if were trying to invest intelligently, its unjustifiable that every up and coming startup is grossly over rated in price. Unless Groupon actually has around 22 billion dollars in assets, then they do not have a justifiable price. Otherwise, we need to listen to the Oracle of Omaha and wise up. Startups are still an industry, and we need to get used to that to avoid bubbles like this. Maybe venture capital is so hard to break into because you ACTUALLY need to look for companies that aren't popular yet, rather than just decide to invest in the companies you use every day. The strong investments are made before the company is well known, not before it has an accurate price.

<comment><USER10> Groupon is worth a whole lot more than Twitter because it has a realistic way to make boatloads of money. Twitter is influential, but that doesn't mean its stock is worth a lot of money. As far as I can tell, Twitter's business plan is something along the lines of, "advertising or something?". Groupon takes 50% of the money from each groupon sold.

Crocs, Inc., the company that makes those awful rubber shoes, has a higher market cap than The New York Times Company. That doesn't mean NYT is less important than Crocs, but it does mean that it is not as good at turning a profit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The main question is how will these companies grow?

When google went public everyone thought it was overvalued, because the perception at the time was they were top of their game, and had nowhere to go. Of course they proved everyone wrong and became so much more then they were. Google is a great example of a software company using a public offering to help expand the company.

So the the question is, which of these companies can become more than what they currently are. What does Facebook need cash to accomplish? Can Groupon push in to every continent? Can Twitter become more than a microblogging service?

<comment><USER4> Considering that Google doesn't pay a dividend and has only had around 25% revenue growth in comparison to Apple (71%). I would say they haven't proven anyone wrong yet. People have bought up Google and sent the stock price soaring, so it was a money maker for people who speculated on whether people would keep buying it. But stock market pricing and underlying stock value as it relates to the company are often wildly disconnected. There are companies which dwarf Google in profits, revenue and dividend whose stock price is in the 20s or 30s.

<comment><USER3> I honestly wish captial gains taxes were greatly raised and taxes on dividends greatly lowered.

Price speculation in the stock market feels to much like gambling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> More good fodder for bubble discussions. Assume for a moment that he's right, that "Most of them will be overpriced" and "Some will be huge winners, which will make up for the rest." This is also an accurate description of the dot- com and telecom bubbles. And this leaves the poster children like Facebook, Groupon, Quora, and now Color.xxx in a very vulnerable position: to sustain their mega-valuations they have to show that they can sustain being so so so much better than everybody else.

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm no expert on W.Buffet, but I've read a lot about his life and investment principles. He owns companies like Sees Candy, and although I love a good ol' box of Sees around the holidays (and I admire their company), I can't help but associate my Grandmother with their products!

What I'm trying to say is that Buffet is, for me, is a generational investor - the best of his generation or even (arguably) the 20th Century, but definitely of my Grandmother's generation. He's remained incredibly relevant to a large extent based on his investment principles, looking for value bets and investing (or rather, buying) for the long run.

I, for one don't think that Facebook is overvalued at all, if you think about it's revenue potential, but Buffet invests in undervalued companies, not over- promised ones that have yet to reach their potential. Facebook's egg hasn't hatched yet in a way that justifies their evaluation, but it's easy to reconcile Buffet's investment principles with more speculative investors that see Facebook as a safe bet.

Finally - it's not hard to image a few different models that could outpace or even replace Facebook's main product proposition (providing a common, social "space"). So not many investments remain secure over a very long term. That's the brilliance of Buffet.

</comment><comment><USER9> Also, Buffet is not some old fashioned, technology ignorant day trader. He claims he doesn't know much about technology companies, but he was still the first one to predict the internet bubble and is well involved in the current markets. No one doing as much market research every day as he does "only knows about industries 100 years old."

</comment><comment><USER14> If I'm not wrong he had to get out of his Goldman preferred shares earlier than he wanted... wonder if his comments are a backhanded dig at Goldman.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think Groupon actually deserves high valuations. They actually have a clear and simple way to turn a profit. They also have a tremendous amount of business relationships that are hard to replace.

<comment><USER16> I like Groupon too, but the Burlington Northern is going to be a significant player in freight shipping 50 years from now with a high degree of certainty. How sure are you about Groupon?

<comment><USER15> I definitely don't think they deserve the valuations they are receiving. I just think that they are much more worthy of being a public company than either Facebook or LinkedIn are. People are always going to want to save money, that demand isn't going away. People change social networking services like shoes.

<comment><USER16> I felt the same way about Facebook until I read Spolsky's "every time they figure out how to make 10 cents from their customers they get to fill swimming pools with money" comment. Facebook has also become defensible, in a way that almost provides an argument against Buffett: it's not a question of "which social network will take all the chips" (let me answer that for you: Facebook), but whether the social space is going to have a large value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think social networking has a viable market waiting to be launched. Imagine Facebook being Web 1.0. I think Facebook 2.0 is out there waiting to be hatched.

<comment><USER18> I believe social networking is here to stay. Advertising dollars follow where the audience is. Off line advertising is losing ad dollars year over year to follow where the people are. Today, they're online. Imagine in 10 years...

Facebook in particular, the largest player in the social networking arena by far, has a huge opportunity before their eyes. Wait for them to start executing on them. I "only" see 2 big ones: advertising and search. Yeah, I know, many people are talking about it. But that's true. FB knows everything about most of their users (600mm people), so how long until they create a competing Adsense service? Not far I think. That's a $10bn a year, at least, for FB in the next 5 years or less. Search is another opportunity that's so huge I can't even think of the size of that market.

<comment><USER19> I remember reading they have an AdSense competitor in the works, but that initial tests showed it wasn't a good enough competitor yet to be released.

I don't know if it would be $10B though, even AdSense isn't quite there for Google yet. Assuming they could lure a big chunk of AdSense publishers away, I suppose it could be several billion though.

Maybe they'll release it just before IPO to show their true promise. Name predictions... FB AdConnect?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Looking at some of those valuations, all I can say is that it doesn't take a Warren Buffet to realize that they are overpriced.

</comment><comment><USER21> Duh</comment>


Ask HN: Are there any good alternatives to Mozilla Thunderbird? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Not being snarky here, but how about gmail? If you want pop3 or IMAP, you can do that in gmail. You can also tag/color e-mails based on which address they're coming from, set up reply-to, have a huge amount of space for archiving, Google searching for your e-mails...

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks.I am currently using gmail but I never set up my external accounts. The only limitation that I see on that is that at the moment we cannot use it offline. I am reading that this will be coming with HTML5. But I am not sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Postbox is a nice alternative, though it is made from Thunderbird code by many of the people from the Thunderbird team. Still, they made the user experience much better...

Check it out at <http://www.postbox-inc.com/>, and there's a free, Express version available too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks but it seems that it is available only for Windows and Mac.

<comment><USER3> Ah, true. Sorry ... I guess I just assumed you were using one of those two. But this is _Hacker_ News, after all ;)

So which is it: Linux, BSD, or your own hand coded OS?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You should mention your platform, but in general, no. Email clients are in a perfect storm of unsexy, mostly solved, and difficult to make money from.

<comment><AUTHOR> I am sorry for my brief post. I am talking from the perspective of the user. Of course hearing the view of the developers would be very interesting.

I am on ubuntu and I would like a lighter alternative to Thunderbird for my netbook.

I think that a google product along the lines of TB wold be interesting, but I am not sure if they see that as a competition to Gmail that is Ad-compatible.

<comment><USER4> You could check out KMail, it's fast and the most complete replacement.

Other options include Evolution (even slower than TBird), mutt, sup, claws, and alpine.

Or you could be like everyone else, and just use gmail.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your suggestions. Maybe the most common solution is the best in that case.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


'Warcraft' sets records in Chinese market while stumbling in the U.S - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-helps-ease-hollywoods-wounds-1465765019?mod=e2tweu <comment><USER2> I watched it and liked it. I'm an American living in Asia, and haven't played video games in 15 years. I thought I would hate this movie but I actually liked the mind games of a few parts, particularly near the end where one character tells another to "bring peace" to the two races. No spoiler there, but if you saw it you know what part I mean =). Anyway, to each his own. I'd recommend seeing it even if you're not into gaming.

I also liked the new Alice movie..

<comment><USER3> I went in with very low expectations (at the time it had a 22% RT score), so I kind of liked the movie too, since it wasn't that bad. Might even see the sequel, since warcraft starts slow but sets up some nice drama for the future.

<comment><USER4> It's absolutely ridiculous for the movie to have a 22% score. I'm not even into fantasy/role-playing or the warcraft series, and I thought it was done way better than Star Wars as a movie about conflicting sides and war. Really was an epic and finely done movie, I'd give it a 10/10\. There was very little "cheese" factor which is what you kind of cringe about when you think of fantasy movies. They really did the movie in a mature, adult way, with no cheese factor, and I respect Blizzard for that.

I think Blizzard isn't used to the movie scene so didn't pay off the critics like most movie studios probably do -- so they got blackmailed. Terrible how that works..

<comment><USER5> >the critics like most movie studios probably do -- so they got blackmailed. Terrible how that works..

I'd say it had more to do with Duncan Jones making a fun movie for the fans, rather than some edgy gritty crap for the critics to sniff their own farts to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The number of Western Films allowed in China is limited, and they all tend to do well. It's a soft power Beijing has learned to wield deftly that has led to some marked changes in the film industry.

<comment><USER7> I'm from China. What you said is partly true. But the reason why the success of Warcraft in China is that this film is produced by Legendary Pictures owned by Wanda, the one that owns the largest number of cinemas in China. And Wanda is very good at marketing.

<comment><USER8> Maybe the plot was sort of wuxia-ish? I haven't seen the movie so could be _compleeeetely_ off base here, I was just trying to imagine what about the trailer I saw could map onto something that worked surprisingly well in China.

<comment><USER3> Warcraft made more money in China than the most recent Star Wars movie. The reason I've read is that Star Wars came out back before China had big cinema attendance, while Warcraft (1994) came out when China was modernizing. It's a big cultural hit.

Edit: check out this video of chinese audiences cheering for the Blizzard logo: [https://youtu.be/l67mA7ah9qE?t=51s](https://youtu.be/l67mA7ah9qE?t=51s)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Young people in China has a special bond with the Warcraft franchise, which is absent almost everywhere else in the world.

Consoles were banned in China for two decades--basically a whole generation had limited access to games except on PC. In addition to this, there was the censorship that excluded many other foreign games, further condensing audience population on games like Warcraft.

For Chinese young people born in the 80s and 90s, Warcraft is something like Star Wars, it's one of the things that gets to represent their childhood memory and teenage years.

The Red Alert series, also hugely popular for the same generation of people, despite being banned, would probably have enjoyed similar success in China.

<comment><USER10> Warcraft the game IS censored in China, Blizzard had to change all the skeletons into ghouls before being allowed to sell the game there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting. Just got back from watching this tonight and thought it was great. I think people watching this will certainly need to have a understanding of the lore, names, and landscapes presented to really enjoy the movie, however.

<comment><USER12> > I think people watching this will certainly need to have a understanding of > the lore, names, and landscapes presented to really enjoy the movie, > however.

That is an interesting remark. Usually film adaptions go the other way and frustrate those familiar with the books/games/whatever by spending a bunch of time explaining the setting, presumably on the assumption that most of the audience is coming in knowing nothing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> terrible movie, same old plot, bad guy, good guy, bad guy loses to good guy. i played warcraft and warcraft2, but not a lot of wow so perhaps i'm missing something.

i would say in china, the fascination was more about the hype, most people probably never played any of the blizzard games that went to see the movie

<comment><USER14> Warning: kinda of spoiler

At least there are some good guys among the bad and a bad guy among the good; so it adds some drama.

Tell me what action/fantasy/sci-fi movie is not good guy vs. bad guy ? More specifically, bad guys have an evil plan to do something destructive, and good guys somehow ruins it. Star War, X men, all the superheros ones, 007, and I can keep name more (at least that is the theme of the individual movies, if not the theme of the whole sequence).

The critique Warcraft received most is about the lack of character development; lack of a clear lead actor/actress. In some sense, it is not necessarily a bad thing because it breaks the old "one dude with protagonist aura that never dies" Holywood pattern.

<comment><USER15> An old and maybe not terribly popular one is _Enemy Mine_. There are bad guys, but they're humans, and they only play a role near the end. But they aren't primary to the story. It's mostly a story of two people thrown together in a shitty situation and learning to get along despite their initial hatred for each other.

There are lots of scifi movies where the story only barely, rather than primarily, deals with the idea of good guys versus bad guys, if it puts them together directly at all. Moon, The Martian, Gravity are recent ones. Interstellar, in its way.

Less true of fantasy which pulls its stories from the idea of grand epics with noble warriors fighting monsters and villains.

Action movies without an idea of good guy and bad guy is a challenge. Maybe I'll think of one while I lie in bed tonight but off the top of my head there aren't any occurring to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Just from watching the trailer I got the impression of this being another 'Dungeons and Dragons' disappointment (if you haven't watched that movie, you totally should. It's beyond of being horrible).

It's a pity if you have watched the CGI animations in Blizzard games. I think that was what most of the people were waiting but they decided to use real humans (which small bodies don't match at all with the overbuild bodies in CGI) with a terrible acting instead.

<comment><USER17> The movie was surprisingly good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It was a cool movie. But the direction and acting were both pretty terrible. You could tell that the humans were standing in front of green screens. It really failed at immersion.

</comment><comment><USER19> A factor is probably that Dota was originally a warcraft map, and it was/still is most popular in China, almost at the level of starcraft in Korea.

<comment><USER20> Not even Dota, but Warcraft 3 is still alive pretty much only in China.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Scripts enabled required article, not bothering to read.

Similarly, Hollywood in general has shown me every other time that I've given 'film adaptation of X' in my life that the original form was better. Were I interested in the story of WoW I suppose the best form to experience it in would be in the actual game (I've heard players of that game admit that parts of it are better left un-played and that they are this fine with the now more rapid ascent to newer content in the game).

<comment><USER22> It's a common refrain that films based on other stuff are always worse, but I think it's sampling bias. When a movie is based on a mediocre source, people often just don't realize that the movie isn't original. The fact that a movie is "based on" is more likely to be known if the source is good, and reversion to the mean means that these are likely to have movies that aren't as good.

For one example, Forrest Gump is based on a pretty crappy book. It's mildly entertaining but it's pretty wacky and definitely not the amazing classic that the movie was. For another one that turns up a lot, The Godfather is said to be a lot better than the book, although I haven't read it myself. One more, Pirates of the Caribbean, while not exactly deep and meaningful, is a pretty fun movie based on a pretty mediocre _amusement park ride_.

I will admit that I can't come up with any good movies based on a video game.

Another source of trouble, I think, is that a movie based on something well known can survive on name recognition, so it doesn't _have_ to be good. A Warcraft movie could be good in theory, but they probably haven't bothered.

<comment><USER23> Prince of Persia Sands of Time. I liked that movie quite a bit. :) Only video game based movie I've seen and liked. Granted, it's only related by name from what I understand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> At least there was a good trailer ;)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m59oTieJFF4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m59oTieJFF4)</comment>


Google+ Is Growing at Facebook Speed - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/business/2012/12/google-grows-like-facebook/

<comment><USER2> I wonder how much this is because Google is pulling some "hang on, didn't you guys used to be the 'don't be evil' company" shit like this: [http://sfappeal.com/news/2012/12/google-adds-bizarre- require...](http://sfappeal.com/news/2012/12/google-adds-bizarre-requirement- for-sfpds-bike-theft-workshop-attendees.php)

A community event organized by the city, with speakers from the local police department, "helpfully" hosted by Google, who then, without asking or even telling the organizers and promoters, append some self-serving bullshit attendance requirements:

"According to the RSVP page for the event, admission to the bicycle theft event is guaranteed only if community members include a link to their Google Plus Local profile with five or more reviews."

and:

'None of the San Francisco city officials who organized the event, it seems, knew about the marketing language Google inserted on the RSVP page.

"You know you try and do something good, you try and do something for the community and something like this happens," Officer Carlos Manfredi, an SFPD spokesperson told The Appeal in apparent frustration.'

The SFPD believed the workshop was open to members of the community, and everyone in the community was able to attend. "That's what the flyer said," Manfredi said."

Stay classy Google...

</comment><comment><USER3> For me, the thing keeping me off of Google+ is that it's linked to my other accounts. Violations (or even suspected violations) of copyright and a long list of other things could get the entire account in trouble. I say this as someone who has received copyright notices on content I produced entirely on my own.

I would never want to jeopardize my Gmail or Adsense. It's much better to get my social fix from any other company.

<comment><USER4> This is exactly how I feel.

And it's not just about email either. I also use my Google Drive account. I also have a couple of purchases on Google Play. I had photos in Picasa at some point too.

Google blocking your account means you lose access to all of this. Which is why using Blogger or Google+ is a liability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ridiculous to compare usage numbers between the two considering Facebook at that point (e.g. when they were at 100mil users) had no dominant products that its users were using _every day_. In other words when Facebook users went to Facebook, they really meant to.

With G+, the monthly stats are meaningless since they're probably representative of Gmail logins who accidentally click on +.

<comment><USER6> G+ has 135 million "stream active" users. Those are people who really meant to go to plus.google.com, not click something in Gmail.

<comment><USER7> > Those are people who really meant to go to plus.google.com

I actually did that at least a couple of times last month by mistake, the G+ link is very close to the Inbox/Home link in GMail's web app. I cursed and hit the back button in a matter of seconds each and every time.

<comment><USER8> Add me to the list of people who have indadvertedly engaged with Google+.

Would be interesting to know how much people have accidentally done the same.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nothing quite underscores Google's desperation like the "you can't view Google+ content if you're a logged-out Google user"-trick they pull. What the hell is the deal with that? Are the little check marks they can put in the Active Users column really worth the bad experience they are giving those same users who just wanted to read the post?

Sure, it's a little niggle, nothing worth complaining about. The grating thing is that they went out of their way to create a roadblock, even casting aside the pretension that logged-out means something.

<comment><USER10> If someone posts a URL to a G+ post, you can most certainly view it without being logged-in. (Try it: go to your G+ stream, and then for a post, select "Link to this post" on the drop-down menu, then past that into a Incognito window --- you'll be able to view the post.) You can also view a user's G+ profile, and view all of their public posts, without being logged in.

Yes, you won't be able to create a stream and follow a set of users without creating a G+ account --- but without a G+ account, there's no place to actually store the set of users / G+ pages / G+ communities that you're interested in....

<comment><USER11> It's strange that I hear that from a lot of G+ users. I personally find that when I try to visit even links from HN pointing toward G+ posts, I am forced (well, prompted) to log in. For that reason alone I've never actually seen a post on google plus.

<comment><USER12> prompted and forced are two different things.

<comment><USER11> It still refused to show me any content until I logged in. I was trying to imply that I refused to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think this responds to Facebook's continuous decline in service. They have messed up the algorithms so bad that News Feeds tend to be more static than ever before, back in the good days, people checked Facebook a hundred times a day because there was something new all the time. Today, if you check your Facebook 5 times during the day and you will probably get the same news as before.

They also pissed all their page owners off with Edge Rank, which was rolled out too aggressively for my taste. Since not every facebook page owner is a facebook or SMM genius, a lot of small pages lost a lot of engagement, which turns into less engagement on the site overall (from users and page admins).

I started using G+ a couple of months ago because of their Hangouts, but am gradually becoming more engaged on the site. Facebook will fall, and pretty soon I think. Too much spam, horrible filters and crappy customization on your share settings make it a shitty service now. As G+ emphasizes share settings control, I can see why it will take over pretty fast, they just need to gain a little more momentum.

<comment><USER14> Plus, the only ads that seem to work for advertisers on Facebook are scams.

All the other revenue is coming from companies who aren't measuring. But soon, they'll realize what a waste it is, and once they pull out CPC is going to dive. And if Facebook decides to artificially inflate CPC, fewer people who aren't running scams won't pay.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Which would be great if checking a feed meant more than logging into your gmail. Also it would be super if it were still 2006 and the only way to sign up was a .edu account. Since it's 2012 and most of the activity is driven by Gmail I'd say it's a glacial pace.

When your marketing tools are the frontdoor of the internet as well as everyone's INBOX, and you're outdone by 11 guys with an iPhone only photosharing app, you know you're doing something wrong.

It's a service so bad you can't even be forced to use it. It's as pathetic as MSN.com not being the front page of the internet despite 90% of computers defaulting to it.

<comment><USER16> I guess. I check it every day. It's true that G+ is driven more by "interest communities" than by "friends and family links". Most of my activity there is reading and occasionally commenting on the posts of people more famous than I. So I think it's fair to say it hasn't achieved Facebook's level of success. Nor, perhaps, will it any time soon.

But again, I check it every day, which is the same thing I do with Facebook. If you want my eyeballs for an ad, either platform provides the same value. I'm probably not typical, but I'm not completely weird either.

I think you can only look at G+ as a success at this point. Just not a success on the scale of Google Search or Facebook.

<comment><USER17> Most people I see on G+ when I approach them and ask in person did not even know they had a G+ account... but guess what, they did have a Google Account for Youtube and Gmail.

You can see more and more G+ integration into Youtube, why not just turn Youtube into G+ altogether?

<comment> mkr-hn Have you seen the new version? It's practically a G+ skin for YouTube.

<comment><USER17> Yes. It sure looks like they are taking over YouTube and combining it into G+ as last ditch effort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Google+ has a very low engagement, even looking at Neilsen's 2012 data. I stopped using it a long ago, with the exception of the alerts I get on gmail which is probably the number google is using. I feel they should have stayed exclusive far longer, but that opportunity is long gone now.

<comment><USER19> Nope, sorry. 135 million active users cannot be considered "low engagement" by any metric out there, even by Neilsen.

<comment><USER18> Engagement is different than active users. I can click the red button on my gmail account once a month and be considered active. Engagement is how much time I spend on the site. I'm on HN everyday commenting and reading. That's engagement, but I'm never on G+

<comment><USER19> Sounds like classic extrapolating from personal use to me. "I'm never on G+" doesn't have anything to do with how many engaged, active users they have, and they have a lot.

<comment><USER18> Not really. I have like 8000 followers. I'm basing it on observing their activity as well as mine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The only problem with g+ is that none of my friends use it. Personally I'd choose g+ over facebook's shitty interface and quality any day.

<comment><USER21> I pop into Google+ occasionally, but I usually regret it. They always blast me with some "what's hot and popular" post by someone who I don't follow, and as often as not that post is just some fanboy bitching about how much iPhones suck and every time he is forced to use one for even a few seconds he has a sudden urge to physically vomit.

At my undergrad school we had some preacher who used to hang out at a certain spot in the middle of campus and yell at passing students to tell them what sinners they are. Google+'s "what's hot and popular" often feels like the Internet's version of that spot, except it's for those whose religion is based on smartphones.

I definitely agree about the interface. Google+ has a beautiful interface for viewing these types of posts. Facebook's interface seems to be a little too optimized for viewing George Takei posts for my taste.

<comment><USER22> > They always blast me with some "what's hot and popular" post by someone who > I don't follow, and as often as not that post is just some fanboy bitching > about how much iPhones suck and every time he is forced to use one for even > a few seconds he has a sudden urge to physically vomit.

At least for me, these posts have gradually changed into embarassing images with trifles about friendship and love, as well as images with pseudoscientific and borderline superstitious claims about health etc. This "facebookification" has lead me to believe that Google+ is now really taking off. Honestly I'd rather have the kneejerk tech rants back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder how they calculate active uses. I check Google+ maybe once a month...am I counted in there?

I wish these statistics were reported in user-hours/month or some other unit that provided real information. I suspect this wouldn't look good for Google though.

<comment><USER24> Yes, but Facebook counts it the same way. If you like something once a month, you're an active user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here's what Google should have done instead of Google+. (As for the OP, Google+ is a ghost town. It doesn't matter much how often people pass through and see the tumbleweed blowing around if they're not staying and contributing.)

First, they should not make people register for Google+. They shouldn't even call it Google+. It should just be a feature added to gmail: pages. You create gmail pages and you manage access to gmail pages. Access is not granted to other "Google+" accounts (there's no such thing), but to any set of email contacts. Access may also be made public, in which case a gmail page acts as a lightweight blog post (though you might require login to comment).

That's it. Rather than sending a friend an invitation to Google+, you'd send a link to an interesting gmail page. If it's access controlled (not public), then when they click to retrieve it, if they don't have the cookie yet, they'd need to check their email and click the Google just sent.

In many respects, it should function just like Google+ does now. Pages would have posts, pictures, comments, live chats, hang-outs, games, whatever. And once you're on a gmail page, you could browse up to the author's profile page and see whatever other pages they'd made visible to you. The major difference is that you could send content to anyone without the stupid "are you on Google+?" conversation that has to happen first now and thus can build pages without worrying too much about whether the ghost town will become a popular tourist destination.

<comment><USER26> That was Google Buzz, didn't work out to too well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The only reason I recently created the account on Google+ was to be able to 'author' my blog posts so that they appear nicely in Google search results (as described here, for example: [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/EmbraceAuthorshipTheImportance...](http://www.hanselman.com/blog/EmbraceAuthorshipTheImportanceOfRelmeAndRelauthorOnYourContentsSEOAndGoogle.aspx) )

But I'm sure they counted me ...

<comment><USER28> The only reason I created an account was because they kept spamming me with "People you may know," and the only way to opt out of the spam was to... create a Google+ account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> When you see that many conditionals, there's usually marketing bullshit going on.

</comment><comment><USER30> These are meaningless numbers, for reasons already given in this thread, but Google+ _is_ a good product. In fact, I remember in June 2011 how, after it launched, there was a lot of press about how great it was. That applause was well-earned, in my opinion. The engineers who built it did a very good job, and the problems that Google+ has faced have been strategic in nature.

On the other hand, Google+ needed, strategically, to get real use, and so far it hasn't been seeing much of that. Hangouts are useful, but the idea that people would use them as Google intended (as a "cool" emergent social behavior rather than something people would only do with people they know well) was hopeless without a context (such as a board game, a great tool for overcoming the initial social awkwardness that is common among interesting people) that could encourage the "hanging out". Without such a context squarely in the center, people won't use hangouts for more free-form purposes than "regular old" video chat. It's an admirable vision, though.

This is why, in my short time at Google, I was obsessed with raising the issue of game quality, even though I was nowhere near that team (there was zero G+ activity in New York). I realized that Games had the potential to be a critical battle for the product's ability to establish itself and get users _comfortable_ with product. With social network fatigue in an advanced state ca. 2011, the _only_ thing that could get people in a new general-purpose social network for long enough to get comfortable with the thing _was_ high- quality games (not Zynga shit). Google blew it on that one, resulting in a missed opportunity that can be measured in the tens to hundreds of millions, and possibly billions.

Incidentally, most of my notoriety at Google (if people still know of me, and I honestly have no clue) comes from the fact that I raised the game quality issue and drew negative attention from powerful people (contrary to Google's professed "we welcome disagreement" ethos). It was that, and the fact that, when the shit hit the fan, I did some white-hat trolling and outed unethical management (eng-misc) instead of just taking it.

<comment><USER31>
      > Incidentally, most of my notoriety at Google (if people
      > still know of me, and I honestly have no clue) comes
      > from the fact that I raised the game quality issue and
      > drew negative attention from powerful people (contrary
      > to Google's professed "we welcome disagreement" ethos).

It is unlikely that the Google engineers present during your employment will ever forget you. Indeed, the story of Michael Church continues to echo throughout mailing lists across all of engineering.

However, I doubt this is only because you irritated senior executives by sending them rambling manifestos about the inherent superiority of your self- designed card game. Although that may have been the origin of your legend, it was not truly cemented until you cross-posted them to a company-wide mailing list and then engaged in a flamewar against all comers.

After your resignation, some of us compared notes on who had received the most disproportionate response to criticism. I was sure that being called a child molester in reply to pointing out your lack of credible accomplishment would win me first, but sadly I did not even place in the top three.

<comment><USER32> OK, that's enough of that.

I was an intern during this bullshit. To anyone not "in the know" on this: there's nothing to know. There was a big pointless flame war on an internal listserv at Google over some objections that Michael had to how Google runs certain things. Googlers disagreed. I'll say that I disagreed with Michael, but the people on the other side are almost as responsible for letting themselves be sucked into such a stupid flame war.

There is nothing interesting here. This is a Google soap opera. The rest of HN can comfortably go on with their lives without worrying.

<comment><USER33> I think michaelochurch did have real points. For example, look up Google+ nymwars.

<comment><USER4> Facts have value irregardless of whom communicates them.

For opinions on the other hand reputation matters a lot. You can't seriously give credibility to somebody with an obvious ax to grind, with an agenda and with a certain history. Even if that opinion seems valid, you may just be suffering from confirmation bias and at the very least you should seek out that confirmation from people you can trust.

<comment><USER30> I don't think you can trust any of the vocal Googlers who come out on these threads. Nor do I think they should be considered representative of Google. There are a lot of good people at Google-- probably most of them-- but they aren't especially active on Google-centric threads. What you get on these are people who see any acknowledgment of Google's imperfections as a _personal_ attack on them.

There's a lot of good, and there's some bad, to Google. Whenever I post honestly about the place, there are 3 or 4 people who consistently come out for a fight. I don't mind that they exist and do what they do, because it's free entertainment for me, but regarding "people you can trust"... anyone who trusts them over me is too stupid to live. Trust me or trust none of us.

I am not claiming to be unbiased, and my experience at Google is rather limited. (I was there in what I've been told were the worst 6 months for the company's culture.) However, I learned an incredible amount in that time (more than most people learn in 10 years) about what happens to make good companies go bad.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I'd really like to know exactly how much time the average user spends on G+ per month in comparison to Facebook. The only reason I ever go on it is to see what Linus has posted.

</comment><comment><USER35> Facebook has a significant fraction of the world Internet population (about 41%). Google has far less (about 6%?). Growing as fast as Facebook is great (better than growing more slowly) but the marginal effort to acquire a user is much higher for Facebook than for Google. You can't compare the growth rate of Google+ to Facebook any more than you can compare Google's growth rate to Bing.

<comment><USER36> Read the article again. It's comparing Plus's growth rate to that of Facebook when Facebook had the same number of users (~100mil).

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I read a meme some time back which asked, what is something that everyone has but rarely use it?

Answer: google+

<comment><USER38> Lots of people use it a lot, here are 4 interesting streams, note the number of comments for posts: <https://plus.google.com/+nicolesy/posts> <https://plus.google.com/+GuyKawasaki/posts> <https://plus.google.com/117176908342196183611/posts> <https://plus.google.com/u/0/+MikeElgan/posts>

Lots of g+ is hidden of course because people don't post everything publicly. I like g+ much better than facebook and wish my non geeky friends and family would come over to it.

<comment><USER8> Firstly, I HATE that UI. It's slow, clunky and cluttered. Secondly, you have deliberately some of the most popular people on Google+. In particular Guy Kawasaki. It's not representative of a typical user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I see a lot of bashing in this thread, but those numbers might actually be true, because of the explosion of Android on mobile phones. There's high probability that lots of activity comes from mobile users.

</comment><comment><USER40> "Google today announced that it has 135 million active users checking their Google+ streams each month"

I usually check mine accidentally, one every few weeks. I have an account and lots of circles that are populated, but I don't post on it or look at others posts unless someone points me to something which happens once every month or two.

They should have stats on the number of hits G+ gets vs. FB. I know many of you use G+, but you are in a bubble. It isn't as big as FB and won't be anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER41> I wonder how many of those are, like me, people who accidentally switch to Google+ while trying to tap the tiny links atop other Google properties on their mobile phones.

</comment><comment><USER42> Interesting metric would be the number of people who posted at least one content item every month for past quarter. Here the content item = status/+1/like/comment/photo/URL.

Write metric is more robust than read metric, especially against users who are simply using FB or G just to login into other sites or apps.

</comment><comment><USER43> I wonder how, or if, these metrics will be affected by their recent change of free business accounts; It's a gamble for Google, as it may take a few years for numbers to de-stabilize.

</comment><comment><USER44> I wish we'd stop comparing Google+ to monolithic "social networks" as if it weren't exactly what the name implies, the next iteration on top of _all of Google._

</comment><comment><USER45> G+ is very pedestrian. There's no draw outside of Hangouts.

</comment><comment><USER46> This information could be nicely replaced by a comparison graph, similar to what you would expect when comparing the runs of two stocks over time.

<comment><USER47> Make that "comparison graphs". Show how many people use FB email, how many people use FB as a Web search engine, how many people use FB to edit office documents, how many people use the browser created by FB ; ) , etc.

Google+ seems to be, albeit slowly, achieving escape velocity. My G+ feed is definitely getting more and more interesting and I begin to see non-techies post there (people who previously only used FB).

135 millions active users vs 1 billion is _not_ something to dismiss, especially seen the rest of their entire stack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Nice try, Google.

</comment><comment><USER49> I've spent more time on G+ than FB for most of this year. I pretty much am once a week on FB and daily on G+.

</comment><comment><USER50> and this compares with ludicrous speed how?

</comment><comment><USER51> I have my feed open a lot, but not because I'm reading it. It's because I opened the tab, clicked "Start a Hangout", and that Hangout window opened in a new window. The feed window is now hidden by the Hangout window, so the analytics might be skewed.</comment>


The Majestic Monolith - <AUTHOR> https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-majestic-monolith-29166d022228 <comment><USER2> I think there's an important distinction to keep in mind between the "dependency monolith" versus the "change-control monolith". They're somewhat orthogonal.

For example, you can have a monolithic-repository (SVN, git, whatever) full of sub-directories housing mostly-independent projects. Conversely, you can have many repositories, with each containing a module that only works when present with all the rest in a monolithic-runtime.

Currently I'm working with some corporate internal systems that deploy new versions every couple weeks, I'm trying to work towards the former model: While we want to avoid a big-ball-of-mud, the overhead of wrangling a dozen repositories with different versions/histories/merge-operations seems wildly unnecessary.

<comment><USER3> Good point. Language-level modular dependencies are one way to divide an architecture. Networked services are another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Summary:

1\. The term "Monolith" has a bad rep.

2\. "Majestic Monolith" means eliminating needless abstraction and avoiding distributing your system (unless unavoidable)

3\. The term also means writing "beautiful, understandable, and succinct code ... that makes us smile when we write it ... and later have to extend or patch it".

4\. Everyone has to understand all parts in the "majestic monolith".

5\. The "Majestic Monolith" puts pressure on / incentivizes programmers to keep the code-base clean.

6\. Most programmers will rise to the occasion.

I think most programmers would agree with the meanings/goals ascribed in 2-3 (possibly also 4, if 4 is understood as deeply understanding the structure of your software product), as just generally good rules for building software in general.

1, 5, and 6 seem highly subjective to me. I tend to think if you're building anything stringently according to 2-3 you'd probably be fine and could call that method whatever you wanted to.

There were some interesting ideas in here, regardless of whether or not the argument for the majestic monolith succeeded.

<comment><USER5> I think he started with this (good) principle:

      >an integrated system that collapses as many unnecessary
      >conceptual models as possible. Eliminates as much
      >needless abstraction as you can swing a hammer at.

And then went on to conclude that the 'monolith' is the only way to do it.

There are ways to eliminate needless abstraction while still keeping proper _separation of concerns_

<comment><USER6> Separation of concerns is not dependent on having a network layers between your function calls though. You can have a well structured monolith with different inner well separated parts. It's just easier to cheat in code than over the network.

<comment><USER7> Ultimately separation of concerns is an organizational and social problem, not a technical problem.

<comment><USER8> Technical enforcement beats "best practices" every time.

(But you can enforce separation of concerns through a language that lets you do that rather than needing a network connection)

<comment><USER9> > _Technical enforcement beats "best practices" every time._

Not in my experience. People will find a way to beat even the best "technical enforcement" every time. Not necessarily hack it -- just work around it to move the problem elsewhere.

<comment><USER8> There's no way to stop people working around things. But an automated warning is far more reliable than constant vigilance on the part of the programmer.

<comment><USER6> Even more reliable is to keep your programs small :)

<comment><USER8> Not my experience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My concern with this is embedded right in the article:

        One of the benefits to the majestic monolith is
        that it basically presumes that the people who
        work on it also understand it.

I don't consider this a benefit, it is instead a substantial risk. And it is something that is almost impossible to maintain indefinitely as software teams grow, companies merge, new platforms or partners emerge, etc. The new developer tasked with understanding a monolith has a nearly insurmountable task compared to understanding a limited-scope service. Ultimately I think software architecture is more usefully approached as strategies to prevent disaster rather than creating the opportunity for majesty.

<comment><USER11> Well it is a giant risk. ButDHH's entire shtick is to sell well-known bad ideas as "good enough." Usually by a combination of straw-manning (e.g., splitting up your app) and semi-hokey common-sensism.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It feels to me like the argument of this article can be boiled down to: "The Majestic Monolith is a Good Thing, since when you know you're dealing with a monolithic system, you know you'll be hosed if you don't take extra special care." But I don't see anything here arguing that such care is inherent to the pattern--only that such care is needed when applying the pattern. I see that as a caveat, not as a built-in feature.

I agree that with a small team it's much more feasible to keep the monolith well-polished. But that polishing is more a product of professionalism and discipline than something that will come along naturally with applying the pattern--which is orthogonal to whether or not the code is monolithic. Good patterns are supposed to be non-orthogonal to good discipline--that is, they should bring along design benefits as an artifact of the pattern themselves.

<comment><USER13> non-orthogonal?

<comment><USER12> If you move in the direction of the pattern, its direction should carry you at least somewhat in the direction that a good design would, where 'orthogonal' would not carry you in that direction at all. So, not orthogonal, even if not strictly parallel. My metaphor and non-metaphor are unimpeachable :p

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> We use microservices at my workplace with a team of 5 and have since the beginning. From reading HN it seems like we may be the only small team to have benefitted from the approach?

Some advantages that this article seems to ignore:

\- Even with a small team, microservices allow us to make small iterative changes to services without touching other parts that are working as they should be.

\- It's easier to find and patch bugs when they can be pinned down to a smaller codebase and fixed in isolation (most can be).

\- Local development becomes easier - you can spin up just the services you need for the feature you're developing instead of the entire system.

\- It's easier to get "up to speed" when you need to add a feature when you're working with small codebases (and often only need to touch one or two at a time).

\- In our case we have three distinct sets of consumers: two fairly separate groups of end-users, and automated services (m2m). It's quite common for any issues we have to only affect one of those three sets of groups because they are largely isolated in different services.

That's not to say there haven't been some headaches, but I personally much prefer our service approach to a monolith. I really think the key is removing operational friction of working with services with tooling.

<comment><USER15> We've also benefitted from moving from a monolith to SOA-esque services. IMO, The thing that DHH is failing to mention is that Monoliths work great _when your application looks something like Basecamp_.

Basecamp, while a great tool, is a "simple application". I don't mean it's not well built, I don't mean it's easy to build, I don't mean it was fast to build, but if you look at what it does, it's all vanilla stuff.

Many other companies don't have the luxury of building apps that look like basecamp, and hence, our architectures are more complex.

When he writes these kinds of articles, they always feel somewhat strawman- ish.

At the end of the day, each software project has it's own unique requirements that will govern success. We got paid the nice salaries we do because it is up to our discretion to understand what is the most efficient architecture for what we are trying to solve.

<comment><USER16> > The thing that DHH is failing to mention is that Monoliths work great when > your application looks something like Basecamp.

The thing that people fail to grasp is that (almost) _everything_ DHH writes is in the context of "when your application looks something like Basecamp" :-) I've been following 37signals/Basecamp since 2002, I think (long before Rails) and they've always made it clear that their opinions/advice are _not_ universal, because they only speak from experience - _their_ experience. So, if you're not in a similar situation as theirs, then of course their arguments are going to look strawman-ish to you.

<comment><USER17> And while he does that to excuse himself from having to reiterate that later, the fact that he doesn't anyways leaves a reader by the end thinking "Damn, maybe he's right. Maybe all software should be this way." even when it shouldn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Agree with this fully because had experienced this first-hand.

We had a working monoloth, it was not the best but it was stable and it did the job. Then new CTO comes in and spreads the microservice hype. We built everything in microservices in such hurry and didn't even implement the most important part - the orchestration.

Now system is doing pretty much the same thing, except it's way less stable. But hey, we're microservices! (Also went from PHP to Node, which also IMO is a huge mistake)

<comment><USER19> I totally agree with the article but your example seems a bit flawed.If you rebuild anything "in such hurry and dodn't even implement the most important part...". Regardless of architectural choices you will end up with something "way less stable".

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> You can scale a monolith way further than you initially think. We thought that GitLab CI was a logical separate application. Now that we integrated it into GitLab we see that this mostly brought advantages. Working with 18 developers and 1000+ contributors on the same application works well. Of course you need to keep your code clean and the models well separated. But it you ship early and often there is very little coordination overhead.

</comment><comment><USER21> I certainly agree to DHH's point. I did a talk at PHP World last year, with essentially the same message[1].

At VideoBlocks we're slowly starting to migrate our monolith into a service- oriented architecture where it makes sense. E.g. our new search service is now a standalone microservice. But I think that we're still very far off to an architecture that consists solely of microservices.

I'm a huge fan of the hybrid approach in the interim, it allows us to migrate slowly and only when it makes sense. This means that we've had plenty of time to establish orchestration and deal with all of the small infrastructure edge cases that other commenters in this thread has been struggling with.

[1] [https://speakerdeck.com/minicodemonkey/microservices-with- la...](https://speakerdeck.com/minicodemonkey/microservices-with-laravel- lumen?slide=23)

</comment><comment><USER22> I like the idea of SOA. The separation of concerns feels right to me on some level. But, every time I look at it being applied, it's clear to me how much more money and time is being spent implementing it. With SOA you incur the additional cost and headache of orchestration into your system. If you're big enough or complex enough, this may make sense. But, I feel like a lot of dev teams applying this approach don't have the specific problems of scale that SOA solves.

</comment><comment><USER23> Another good article on the Monolith

[http://martinfowler.com/bliki/MonolithFirst.html](http://martinfowler.com/bliki/MonolithFirst.html)

<comment><USER24> I too was thinking of this article as well. A team might not always know what the boundaries of their data & code classification will be ahead of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The "genesis" (perhaps) of the current rise of microservices might be the Yegge Platform rant and the 2 Pizza rule

[https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX](https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX)

[http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-two-pizza-rule- for...](http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-two-pizza-rule-for- productive-meetings-2013-10)

Wherein he describes Dread Pirate Bezos' edict:

      His Big Mandate went something along these lines:

      1) All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.

      2) Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.

      3) There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.

      4) It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.

      5) All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.

      6) Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.

and

      Amazon's Jeff Bezos has a solution for this problem. He calls it the "two pizza rule": Never have a meeting where two pizzas couldn't feed the entire group.

You'll note that nothing in there has to do with technical debt, or unmaintainability of apps, or test suite runtimes, or monoliths, or docker, or any sort of technical problems. Microservices are a technical solution to an organizational scalability / coupling problem.

All too often I see small, co-located teams (<10 people) adopting a microservice architecture because #reasons which are ill-defined.

Docker is awesome, microservices are awesome, but they come with a lot of taxes to pay, and tl;dr - until you know you need to pay those taxes, you should stick with a monolith.

</comment><comment><USER26> And the wheel goes round and round...

I look forward to breaking down these monoliths again in 5 years time, same as 10+ years ago. Not every business decision is best informed as an engineering one - and vice versa.

<comment><USER27> That's the point. The right approach is to get to a point where your monolith needs breaking down: congratulations, you've been successful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> FWIW, stackoverflow is also pretty hard-core pro-monolith: [http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/06/scaling-stack- overflow](http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/06/scaling-stack-overflow) [http://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the- arc...](http://nickcraver.com/blog/2016/02/17/stack-overflow-the- architecture-2016-edition/)

<comment><USER29> Interesting links, thanks for that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I talk about this frustration a little here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qHwL8C9UoA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qHwL8C9UoA)

and also (more pithily) here:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVUPmmUU3yY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVUPmmUU3yY)

There's nothing more frustrating than people telling you 'I wouldn't start from here' when you are the one that has written the productive software.

There are tremendous advantages to monolithic software architectures, but for some reason they are seen as impure. It reminds me of the Java/object orthodoxy of ca. 2000 when everything had to be a class.

Meanwhile procedural code came back with a vengeance, because it's advantages are those that can be used by people trying to write useful software on a budget.

</comment><comment><USER7> If you practice separation of concerns and design your interfaces well, I feel the debate is moot. Who cares if your authentication (micro)service is running locally or on it's own remote cluster as long as it implements the same interface? Clients to the authentication system don't need to know how it works, just the interface. The team responsible for the authentication system can work in parallel and publish new versions as a library that can be imported by clients.

I unfortunately don't have the need for a distributed system right now. Does anyone with more experience care to elaborate?

</comment><comment><USER30> People will defend and love Rails / Monolith a lot more if it was not the slowest framework out there.

And it is not that Rails don't scale, it is just very expensive scaling it.

José Valim [https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/704320020432723968](https://twitter.com/josevalim/status/704320020432723968)

<comment><USER31> I don't think that rails has anything to do with the architectural approach of M/SOA vs "monolith".

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Even in a "monolith" architecture, you usually have client side HTML/Javascript, a web server, business logic, and a database. Unless you have some huge traffic level, that scales. You can replicate the database, load balance the servers, add caches and a content delivery network if necessary. Those don't need much development; you buy those.

When the business logic is getting really complicated, and you're changing it rapidly, you may need to break it up into services. But are you really that big an operation?

Wikipedia, fifth busiest site on the web, is MySQL front-ended by ngnix with the business logic mostly in PHP.

</comment><comment><USER33> I understand where the post is coming from as some micro-services architectures are just a mess and I see startups trying to force it.

But the post misses a major point of why micro services architectures exist, to decouple dev efforts, I can hire someone off upwork or anywhere to write a small service in whatever framework is suitable for them, as long as the service connects to the message bus. I can scale services horizontally much easier when each uses it's own data model etc.

It's not just about the size of the company but also about scale, both of developers and servers.

</comment><comment><USER17> We use SOA. I see both sides of this issue.

SOA has given us the ability to send a single part of our architecture to other people to work on (contractors, etc.) and let them understand that one part well to get their job done without too much exposure to the rest of our system. It's allowed us to also bring on new hires and get them working on code quickly and letting them deploy without total fear of the system imploding. It's also allowed us to become specialists in a small team on a certain area of the architecture. While we all write similarly we can all approach the issues in our own ways without stepping on each other.

On the other hand many things have been done which shouldn't have been. Some areas are way TOO decoupled via SOA and need to be brought back together for better stability and speed. We're learned that afterwards and only is becoming required after lots of complexity has been added which we didn't foresee because no one (programming & business) thought we would need it to be that complicated.

For some areas it'd a good idea if we merged together some repos and services in to a better single service with some stronger integration while maintaining the API's we built for other things.

</comment><comment><USER34> It comes down to Conway's Law [0]:

> organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs > which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations

If you are a single team producing it, then build a monolith. If it is a diverse set of teams collaborating, then build microservices.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law)

</comment><comment><USER35> I think this only applies to people implementing their apps using SOA as pat of cargo cult thinking like was mentioned in the article.

I ran a company with 4 employees. 3 developers and an idiot sales guy. SOA made perfect sense from the start. We had daemons running background tasks on our servers in Go (the best tool for that job), a separate data API we used for our main "monolithic" web app, and then our mobile and other clients all used the data API.

The developers working on the web app only had to know the API end points to get data into the "monolith" and the rest of us working on the API and daemons understood how all the other clients would use them. No issue.

I'm all about the idea that you shouldn't implement an SOA because successful companies do it but I feel like this article is recommending building a monolithic rails app or something as a reaction to how popular and talked about SOA architecture has been lately and doesn't really leave much room for the idea that small companies (even really really small ones) can use it and would it would make sense for them.

<comment><USER36> The article is simply reinforcing the idea that there is an alternative, and monolithic applications are not some kind of "outdated technology". Both SOA and monolithic applications are useful in different circumstances.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> In a monolith you can achieve code compression ratios (think DRY as a sort of entropy coding) not possible in micro-services.

Therefore, if you build it sensibly, you can achieve more with less resources. But this also requires you to do a time-memory trade-off in that it requires more effort for any individual programmer to learn all the abstractions to eventually become (surprisingly) productive.

</comment><comment><USER38> I actually just started working on a new Node.js project that could get very large, and the first question I asked myself was... Do I want each npm package to be in a separate repo or use a single repo with deeply nested but discrete npm packages?

I decided to go with a single repo with lots of discrete NPM packages using NPM private. This allows for things like:

        const logger = require('@org/utils.logger');

Which to me reads beautifully. The real only gotcha is remembering to run npm publish and npm install often. There is quite a bit of duplicate packages installed though. For example, almost all packages I write require lodash, so it is installed n number of times instead of just once globally at the root. But... I'm ok with that.

If each package was inside its own repo that increases complexity and costs (lots of private repos in GitHub) and I don't really see the benefit.

</comment><comment><USER39> This should be re-titled as "Majestic Monolith RENDERING"

Reason being, it's only the rendering engine that is a monolithic basecamp app that renders both web and mobile.

But a variety of 3rd party services are used to make basecamp work, such as

\- Queen Bee is an external rails app for billing

\- CloudFront for CDN

\- S3 for customer doc storage

Etc

All of which use services (micro services) stitched together to make basecamp work

</comment><comment><USER40> Team size isn't the only factor in breaking a monolith into services. In my experience it's been an effective strategy for removing bottlenecks in your application, as well as a way to isolate a piece of code that causes errors and causes the application to crash.

<comment><USER41> You can also introduce bottlenecks this way. The most obvious of which is now you've introduced a socket boundary and very likely at least one network roundtrip for a piece of functionality that used to be local.

That said, one of the reasons I like using Erlang for building services is the structural primitive of the OTP Application. It makes it pretty easy to build something self-contained that exposes a function API but can be deployed local to your other processes on the same VM or be trivially moved out to a dedicated machine/cluster as a remote service with almost no change to the programming model for interacting with it.

Deciding where a piece of functionality should live is almost purely a question of how much latency you're willing to tolerate. Though to be fair, this is because the OTP Application construct gives an incentive to not build a true monolith from the outset, despite the fact that everything that makes up your whole system might be in one big release tarball.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I have seen a number of failing microservices projects. I think that the key problem (for small teams) is that it makes it very difficult to test and onboard new devs. I've written about it recently on my blog as well: [https://lasernotes.com/blogs/better- code/2016/01/13/monolith...](https://lasernotes.com/blogs/better- code/2016/01/13/monolith-vs-microservices-which-one-should-you-cho/)

</comment><comment><USER43> A bit OT but if microservices communicate over http, doesn't that mean a lot of overhead due to handshakes etc? Compared to just calling another method in the same code base it seems really wasteful and slow.

<comment><USER44> HTTP can be fast-enough, but it is also a poor choice to communication between microservices. Many people learn about REST and just assume you must use HTTP. It's an awful protocol with 2 decades of technical debt.

<comment><USER43> So what is best practice?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> One interesting case for microservices: distributed teams. Less coupled systems are easier to develop in less coupled organizations.

</comment><comment><USER46> SOA is not the antonym of 'monolithic'. The author is tilting at a straw man of his own devising.

</comment><comment><USER47> This strikes me as false wisdom- in software it is a mistake to look at a large job that needs to be done, and insist that that job is only the purview of megacorps like Amazon or Google.

The company I work for has about 200 people and our system is at large scale, many thousands of events per second, so a microservice architecture is required. (It started out as a monolith actually, and grew out of that pattern when it didn't fit anymore.) But most people haven't heard of us.

I say you should be careful when you read stuff like this. It makes so much sense! Which is why you need to be careful of course.

<comment><USER19> "has about 200" that easily qualifies you as large org. if most of that 200 are working on the same product.

<comment><USER47> No, even a midsize company has a headcount of thousands. 200 headcount puts us solidly in small company territory.

<comment><USER48> For development purposes, it seems like head-count per-project is a more useful metric?

My impression from a past life was that even large companies didn't frequently staff hundreds of developers on the same project. Even if they might have thousands of developers overall.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How are you using React Native in your production app? - <AUTHOR> It's now 2018. Most hype and notable examples I saw with RN were around 2016 (https://facebook.github.io/react-native/showcase.html).
What is the state of React Native today? How are you using it successfully, and at what scale? Any large applications that have fully implemented it?
My success isn't beyond fast proofs-of-concepts or simple ux applications. Success for me is defined as a system engineered simply and effectively.
So my naive assumption is that it cannot reach much "success" beyond the hype it generates in the JS community. I work on production native iPad apps with iOS, and can not imagine that their development in RN would be "simple" like it is natively. Cross-platform is great & I can develop fast with RN-- But, I always feel like something is off, and that I'm engineering around leaky-abstractions and that "custom tweaks/hacks" occur more often than not (which rarely occur when working with native SDKs). <comment><USER2> I'm coming to the end of a build of an RN app for a startup with lots of custom mapping and graphing stuff. It leans heavily on MapboxGL and react- native-svg to do some cool stuff. Building the same thing natively would have taken at least 3* longer, and there haven't been any particularly bad hacks necessary. I've been impressed by the performance too. I have no regrets about using RN.</comment>


Gaining Perspective Through Untranslatable Words - <AUTHOR> https://blog.stephsmith.io/untranslatable-words/ <comment><AUTHOR> Do you think that the language you speak impacts the way you think?

<comment><USER2> apparently english language helps you think more creative??</comment></comment>


Creative and Rich UI interfaces and How to Create Them  - <AUTHOR> http://www.noupe.com/design/10-creative-rich-ui-interfaces-how-to-create-them.html

<comment><USER2> So much of this is eye candy rather than real enhancements to user experience.

Now that hammers are available there is more need for developing judgment and criteria regarding _whether_ hammering is what is needed... more than need for niftier hammers.

</comment><comment><USER3> Neat stuff in there, good finds.</comment>