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Slack has raised our charges by $195k per year

(skyfall.dev)
1806 points JustSkyfall | 2 comments | 18 Sep 25 01:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.587s | source
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rowanG077 ◴[18 Sep 25 01:54 UTC] No.45284045[source]▶
I love that large companies keep showing us more and more often why you really, really shouldn't rely on them.
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Waterluvian ◴[18 Sep 25 02:01 UTC] No.45284127[source]▶
I’m sure smarter people have better terms for this but it feels like a sort of late stage capitalism thing where there’s really no room for anyone who first and foremost wants to do good things, at scale.

I’m curious now, what’s the largest company that’s clearly passing up additional revenue because they prefer to say, “nah we’re good. The current business model makes us enough money.”

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1. mr_tristan ◴[18 Sep 25 03:09 UTC] No.45284790[source]▶
There are a lot of mid-sized companies identified in the book _Hidden Champions of the 21st Century_. I just started the book, but it's exactly the ethos you're talking about here: these companies just focus on a niche, tend to sell to other businesses, and just stay doing this thing profitably, absolutely dominating their niche with razor focus.

I'm reading this book because, well, that's the kind of place I'd like to work. I think it makes sense to get a feel for how these places think, in order to really identify job opportunities

Edit: here's a Wikipedia page on the topic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_champions

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2. Agraillo ◴[18 Sep 25 11:44 UTC] No.45288450[source]▶
Thanks for sharing. Two companies come to mind: Strix for kettle controllers and Shimano for bike gears. Maybe they don't fit exactly to the Hidden champions category because they’re not very hidden from the public (many manufacturers mention their names on final products, assuming consumers might take that into account). So the criteria for “hidden champions” could be more flexible imo

Strix became less hidden for me personally after listening to The Life Scientific interview with John Taylor [1]. There is plenty of fascinating information, probably because Jim Al-Khalili is a great scientific interviewer. Recently, I recalled it in the context of AI, self-driving, and safety. Strix controllers have a second level of protection if the main automatic shut-off circuit fails. That’s probably why we never hear of fires or other incidents due to a failed Strix controller.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b42z87