Cafeteria Items After By Change: Fill & Download for Free

A2AGoogle is likely to be around until the heat death of the universe, still busily trying to organize and index all the entropy.The main thing to remember is that Google has more money than God.While most of that is beaming up into orbit with Alphabet these days, and beaming back down into other operating units, the Google operating unit is currently where all that money is flowing from.In science fiction terms, Alphabet is the universe, but Google is Arrakis, and money is Spice. If the money flow stops, all eyes turn to Google.What this means is that they start a lot of projects, they float for a while, and then most of them sink to the bottom of the Emerald Sea.Not to put too fine a point on it.They are also organizationally dysfunctional.Mostly, this is because they have the money to fuel the bonfires that the children from Lord of the Flies can dance around.Every Friday, usually, there’s something called a “TGIF”, which is pretty much a company town hall meeting, where the executive discuss company direction, employees can ask questions, and OCD Nooglers can literally come unglued because no one will point them at a permanent, paper copy of an employee handbook so that the rules have permanence for them.Another thing that they do at these meetings is they usually have one or two groups present on their “exciting new work”, and they end those presentations with “…and if you’re interested on maybe working on this contact me at <[email protected]>”.It’s an internal recruiting drive. Every Friday.This is massively disempowering for middle management. It means that you can’t play 800 pound gorilla.If you ask someone to do something “unfun”, they can vote with their feet to a new group that was advertising itself last Friday or the Friday before.It makes them organizationally incapable of completing most product projects.GMail was in Beta for 5 years.When I was there, Larry tried to fix this.It was a butterfly closure on a gaping head wound, but at least he tried.He reduced the number of projects, changed the 20% time rules to make it more difficult to establish new projects without assembling larger teams and mindshare (in theory, keeping them from wandering off and leaving an orphan like the Google Reader team did).The idea was focus. The result though was the same as before the changes. This is because the result is an emergent property of the environment:Lots of money to pursue lots of thingsLots of academics, each with their own idea for a pet project (and willing to figuratively cut your throat in your sleep to get theirs going instead of yours)No organizational pressure to stay put (in fact, the opposite)No incentive to work on anything but fun stuff (unless you’re borderline OCD, and have a problem not finishing what you started, like I do)It was herding cats before the patch attempt, and it was herding cats after the patch attempt, but there’s still plenty of money for cat food.I think they have a hard time actually productizing to save their lives.I think that’s why the Motorola acquisition kind of went absolutely nowhere, and why the Revolv acquisition went absolutely nowhere.No one wants to buy an incomplete product.The Android for the Motorola handsets play was using an incomplete product. Every Android handset vendor that’s at all successful, is successful because they take a snapshot of the Android tree, and they productize it. Often at substantial effort. Google end-to-end? That doesn’t happen.Likewise the Revolv acquisition. In theory, it’s easy:take the hubmake it workmake the Nest and other products talk to the hubsell the hubsell the Nest and other products into the halo around the hubProfit!But they failed at #2 and #3; #4 would have been really difficult (but doable), but they never even got there.Bridging that gap — what Geoffrey Moore would call Crossing the Chasm, and Clayton Christensen would call The Innovator's Dilemma — requires adoption of a whole product model.Google doesn’t do that. Google does beta, then iteration, on a drunkard’s walk from point A that will (hopefully, let’s cross our fingers!) eventually end up at biased endpoint B.Google isn’t going away because of the money; it may, however, never make it to point B.On to the Quora question!Google won’t buy Quora because (pick your cafeteria items):Quora isn’t for saleQuora has a lot of immature technologyWhile Quora has a lot of relevant content (something Google values in scoring), it’s not tied to something that can be monetizedQuora doesn’t have editors, apart from community process, so quality is hit or missQuora is largely editorial opinion and anecdotesQuora has a huge political bias that alienates the types of people most likely to be the market for online purchases (rural, not many stores around)But think about it… in fact, Google ads on Quora would pretty much be the anti-Google.You drive people to a location based on the quality metric you value in order to obtain search results.And yeah, there’s an ad there. And nothing to buy.There’s no there, there.Quora’s optimal monetization strategy would be to syndicate content — in Google visible terms: sell relevance — while not being visible in Google themselves.The anti-Google.Would you buy the anti-you?Maybe. If you lived in the universe where Spock had a beard.

1950 was the year I moved to France with my parents. Previously I had known Budapest, Hungary and Florence, Italy and I was 14 at the time. I remember quite well the conditions prevailing in Paris at that time.Paris was dirty, squalid. Not only had there been no regulation about cleaning the buildings (Malraux’s law will come many years later) but many homes were heated with coal that the “bougnats” (coal merchants from Auvergne) were carrying on their backs up the stairs to the appartments. There was also a lot of industry active in the city, not only furniture in the Faubourg Saint Antoine, but all sorts of metal works in the Eastern half of the city.Supermarkets and self service were yet to come. In every street small retailers were active weighting most merchandise that was stored in sacks on the ground/.Canned food was also generally available, and food made up more than 50 % of people’s budget. While in Great Britain wartime ration books were still being used, in France food was abundant and the agricultural areas were in full upswing. There was even talk about the disadvantages of excessive wine drinking…in the school cafeterias the meals were served with a bottle of wine freely available on the table.INFLATION WAS THE ONLY PREOCCUPATION OF ALL. Official statistics revealed only a 10 % annual rate, but the perceived rythm of the inflation was a lot higher. Consequently people tried by all means to increase their nominal incomes : businesses by price increases, employees by changing jobs…unemployment was unheard of…France was busy repairing the damages of the war and lacked workers. The government tried to control the situation by price regulations and controls. Theoretically every item was supposed to maintain its price or increase only by an authorized amount…Repealing the natural law of offer and demand proved about as hopeless as it would have been to repeal the laws of gravity. For manufacturers the way to evade the controls was simply to introduce new products or varieties and let the old ones run out of stock. The one item that was subject to strict controls was the famous “baguette” bread : many inspectors were busy making sure that the rules about weight, composition and availalability were respected.RENT CONTROL was draconian. Still nowadays the expression the “laws of 1948” refer to a period when rents stayed practically unchanged. When our family arrived as refugees and managed to rent two hotel rooms …several years later our monthly bill covered only the price of a couple of cigarettes. This law is still theoretically applicable , except that it concerns only people who have been renting since the 1950’s and were not bought out by the owners of the premises…This rigid legislation had a foreseable consequence : nobody wanted to build or renovate any appartments. In Paris the situation was getting dire : the urban population was swelled by many Frenchmen who were keen to move to the capital - the main locus of all development. (A best-seller book described “Paris and the French desert”) Very little home improvement took place : in many buildings communal toilets were used either between two floors from the starecase or on the ground floor accessible from the courtyard (with long lines of people waiting in the mornings !) In most areas owing private a bathroom was quite exceptional : bathing-houses were available in every “arrondissement”.For would-be renters there was only one possibility : pay an( illegal) “key-money” both to the owner and to the previous tenant : the amount could correspond to what many years of rent would have amounted to. It was however a totally uneconomic approach that couldn’t possibly fight the logic of offer and demand, and it was progressively abolished over the following years. ( For commercial premises this logic is still applicable in 2019 !) Incidentally the ads in the papers offering rentable appartments always mentioned if a phone line was available : now phones lines could be obtained after only a three year waiting period.SOCIAL SECURITY was one of the most egregious innovations of the postwar period, offering total health coverage and there was also a program of generous aid to families who were willing to give birth to additonal children. The baby-boom of the year 1950 corresponded roughly to the highest historic level of birth rate in France : annually more than 800.000 new babies were brought up in the overcrowded appartments. No wonder it was very unusual that people should invite each other to their homes for a meal : meeting is restaurants or cafés was the usual behaviour.THE ECONOMY was going through what would be called later the “glorious thirty years” : practically every activity and primarily every industry was growing to the limit of the available resources. This boom was due to the steady flow of Marshall Plan aid, but also helped by the example of the USA which was there to be copied. The old materials, metal and wood, were being replaced by plastic wherever possible, for the consumers “modernity” and “American style” seemed identical. Although the French car industry couldn’t copy the sharkfin tailed Cadillacs and airplane shaped Studebakers, our Citroens were innovant with their front-wheel drives and our 2CV with its very sparing use of materials. Payments on loans were not inflation adjusted, so if a family managed to make a purchase paid by credit (cars, homes, vacation premises) the cost would steadily diminish and become painless.THE POLITICAL SITUATION was fragile : the war in Indochina did not concern the average youth called up for military service but only professional soldiers, however it would cost a steady burden of resources only partially taken in charge by the USA. The Communists represented an important minority of the population, not only in the working classes but also among intellectuals who were aware of the possibility that the USSR’s access to the atomic bomb could mean a terrible new war for all. Consequently there was a world- wide movement calling the prohibition of those weapons (called the Stockholm Call). Among the signatories one might mention Picasso, Duke Ellington, Maurice Chevallier but also two youths who became famous later : Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin. The Communists and their allies were called “fellow travellers” and they opposed France’s foreign policies, consequently a succession of centrist governments were able to govern only with a base of unstable alliances.NIGTH LIFE. No way to understand the mood of the youth if one ignores the Saint Germain des Près night scene. Jazz and be-bop was THE thing. (Of course I only discovered it a couple of years later.)The two celebrities that caracterized that scene were Juliette Greco and Jean Paul Sartre amongst many others. However sexual liberation was still in the distant future ; the birth control pill was yet to be invented, contraceptives were rudimentary and abortions very strictly punished. The wealthy pregnant girls could travel to Great Britain or Belgium, the poorer classes could suffer from many complications due to clandestine abortions…and for all couples forced weddings were by no means exceptional.

No. Golden Corral already worked out one way on how to do it, and it basically turns the whole atmosphere into a different system, where a server actually walks with you to get the food so you never actually touch the spoons. There’s reports of other Golden Corrals in the US that has switched to a cafeteria system where all the food is behind Plexiglas and a server is behind it to scoop out the slop… er… food… and plops it on your plate.(from YouTube - FOX News[1])The Wynn Buffet in Las Vegas has their own system, and it requires reservations. Basically you have 2 hours to order as much food as you want a la carte, and the same care and quality is still there.(from YouTube - All You Can Vegas[2])However it does change the whole restaurant dynamic, which is still being worked out. After all, any good buffet needs to be packed with people to usually make serious money.They’re going to find a balance somewhere, but I doubt that the prices are going to stay low. All this extra labor is going to have to be paid somehow.EDIT 2020–10–05: I only just found out that the Wynn buffet lasted about 3 months and then shut down indefinitely on September 7th, 2020. Apparently despite offering 90 items, it was also ridiculously expensive under the new format at $65 a person for dinner, and just wasn’t bringing in the numbers that was needed. That leaves the Wicked Spoon at the Cosmopolitan being the only one of the big casinos on the strip remaining open.Footnotes[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BsKwiubR7Y[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpvDO_LwEZo